Thanks for your reply! I'm intrigued by this point, "HN is as unhealthy and flawed as its members, which is something to be proud of", could you say more? also, what do you mean by the part about 'healthy' at a global scale only being a 'sterile echo chamber'?
zaptheimpaler|6 years ago
I happened to agree with what he said at the time (scares me to type this), because he talked about AVERAGE differences between genders as group, and i thought it was ridiculous to assert that men & women are identical in all ways from a biological perspective.
But i'm definitely kind of aspergersy/autistic, and after a LOT of reading and some private discussion with friends, i came to understand why everyone was so pissed at him. My friends know me, and they didn't stop being my friends the second I said that. This is what his girlfriend had to say:
"But after reading it a few times, and discussing it with him, her position mellowed; she even came to agree with one or two of his points. She maintains Damore was, for the most part, naive and wrong,"
So in happy offline world, a naive guy said a dumb thing, people got mad at him, but they forgave. If the memo had been only between him and his girlfriend, he would have learnt from that experience and come out a slightly better person.
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But what happened in the online sphere, orchestrated by people who did not know him? He lost his job and any prospect of ever being hired again for years at least.
Consequences in the online world are FUCKED. There is no safe way to engage with controversy when the stakes are that high. Everything you said will be accessible to all people, for all time. And remember, everything from the heliocentric universe to the idea that gay people deserve equal treatment was controversial at one time.
Hence, online forums with real names attached become "sterile echo chambers" as I said.
HN is able to engage in some amount of controversial discussion without devolving into a lynch mob. Its a very rare thing. The whole idea of calling online forums "communities" at all grates at me because people forget how truly different these artificial spaces where we engage with context-less pieces of other people are to the real world.
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I think healthy at a truly global scale can only be either communities that completely stamp out controversial thought but end up saying nothing interesting , or those that don't but involve mob mentality and lynching. Those are the only 2 global level endgames for online networks, and they both suck in their own ways, but fundamentally because of human reasons. Only networks that aren't used by everyone have any shot of being in the healthy middle.