julianmarq's comments

I saw some people saying that this makes them want to switch towards iphones next.

I'm not gonna lie, I considered it for a moment too, like a year ago... But apple is now engaging in its own share of dark patterns and is now collecting data too. There have been multiple articles on the matter shared here even.

Thinking that apple is better than google for privacy (or, even if it is right now, that it will remain so for any reasonable amount of time) is... overly optimistic, at best.

Unless it chances paths, of course, which I don't see likely.

Assuming this is true, all this tells me that this is a great time to apply at Basecamp. Not only they promise a politics-free environment—a huge bonus by itself for me—but they're likely to be laxer than usual in their standards, for a while anyhow.

I'll give it a try.

It's pretty worrying how large companies use social media and its excesses (among other things) to divert focus away from their more suspect practices, so it can be pointed at other specific people. Regardless of whatever one thinks of Stallman, more should be talked about these corporations strong arming foundations and other organizations.

The problem here lies in the word "sexism" and that, I think, you believe a solution should be to remove its baggage. The replies you get are, I think, because many people, with good reason, believe that such a goal isn't feasible. In fact, the baggage itself is probably why you perceive the replies to be "emotional".

So I go back to my first reply: to stop casting people into a binary like I think we both want, better not to throw such loaded words at people and instead analyze their behavior on a case by case basis. Fighting the word itself is prescriptive at best, and language tends to be descriptive, AFAIK.

> There is a nonzero risk in any social interaction that involves giving critical feedback.

Which leads me back to GP's point: there are only two choices. I take it that you're saying that the risk of the second choice can be ignored if taking some steps, but the consequences remain the same, and GP didn't speak about the thresholds or ways to improve the odds. He only mentioned that the risk exists and isn't worth it for him, and you disagree, but that's not much to go on.

> I’m not quite sure what to say to you. Living life involves risks. It sure seems like one of those risks is being deliberately amplified to be used as an excuse to “not even bother” with female founders.

Conversely, I'm not sure what's being implied here so I don't know how to reply.

For what it's worth, TFA isn't saying that investors aren't bothering with female founders. They are, but are being careful with the feedback they give.

ETA: Forgot to mention, the way you're suggesting investors to "manage" the risk not only doesn't remove the risk for investors, but it also leaves female founders at a disadvantage anyway: male founders can get critical feedback right away, female founders have to wait until a rapport is built.

> They know when what they’re seeing is sexism vs critical feedback.

One can't possibly guarantee that every founder (female or not) knows that, and in fact, TFA implies that many don't. So the possibility that at least one of them will think the investor sexist for giving feedback is unfortunately not zero. And, of course, this option doesn't seem to consider the possibility that even if the founder takes the criticism at face value, someone else might not.

In light of that, the third choice you present seems to be GP's second choice after all.

> It appeared to me as a low quality response that did not actually have anything to do with my comment.

I didn't think it was; it seemed to me a succinct summation of what calling the behavior in TFA "sexism" leads to: Ultimately, regardless of what he does, a man will be considered sexist by someone.

Or, to put it another way, calling the cautiousness we're discussing here "sexist" can itself be considered a bad faith position.

> But I honestly believe people making such claims are a minority, albeit with high visibility because of the sensational nature of their bad faith responses.

I'm not sure what to say to this: I agree, of course, but I don't think that's the point. That minority can and has killed people's careers and thus, we have the cautious behavior mentioned in TFA.

> in a way that can't be reasonably construed as sexist

"Reasonable" is the key word there. I think that one of the points in TFA is that the misconstruction doesn't need to reasonable to kill someone's career.

> if you’re actually kind, fair and decent to women [...] A tweet against you isn’t an inevitable destruction of your career.

I think we're never going to reach an agreement so I'm cutting out.

The last thing I'll say is that there's a difference between this particular situation and historical resistances to oppression: If you were to even call this situation "oppression", it would only lead to further ridicule and ostracism, perhaps would even get most of the few people who might have sided with you to turn on you as well.

Like I said earlier; jumping on a grenade gets you a medal, the people who protested during rights movements are heroes. The ones you're calling now to self-sacrifice would very likely be considered "some more toxic males who finally got their just desserts".

Of course, I hope I'm wrong. In fact, I hope a better solution is found.

I don't think GP is saying that your comment by itself can be reduced to "damned if you do, damned if you don't". I think the point is that your position might lead to a Morton's fork in general.

I interpret it like this: On the one hand, there are people (many of whom with good intentions) instantly assuming that any criticism a man might give to a woman is rooted in sexism, to wit, what TFA mentions that investors are cautious about. On the other hand, there are people, also with good intentions, saying that "men being cautious in what they say to women" is also sexism.

Now, I don't know the solution either, but I do believe that a good first step would be not saying that people who are merely cautious (precisely not to come across as sexist) are sexist anyway.

> If everyone is giving honest, straightforward feedback, then everyone has a rumor about them and it becomes powerless.

But this leads me back to my previous comment: this isn't a feasible solution because it means basically asking people to self-sacrifice until the "rumors" lose power.

> try harder? have more tact? [...] have a little more awareness?

But isn't the cautious behavior mentioned already an example of this?

> People can spread any rumors they want.

And those rumors kill careers, as TFA mentions.

> The risk is still there from the first contact to the last.

This is correct, and that's why this problem is very likely only going to get worse... And the people being cautious still won't be the ones to blame.

> But in any legal setting this will get shut down immediately

Outrage mobs don't need a legal setting to ruin someone's life (or livelihood).

I feel like we're probably not talking about the same thing.

> we won’t fix it by giving into the fear of being labeled.

But we can't fix it by doing otherwise—asking people to stop being "overly" cautious—either. Another comment put it best: that solution is akin to asking people to self-sacrifice, except that at the very least jumping on a grenade gets you a medal; in this case, it gets you vilification.

I don't know the solution to this problem, but I do think that turning it into a Morton's fork ("men are sexist regardless of whether they speak or not") is not it.

Instead of playing semantics by saying that "it is technically sexism" (and I'm not saying I agree with whether it actually is or not), we could choose to at least stop phrasing the situation like that.

The problem with this "solution" is that the risk is still too high to bother risking it. Even if the woman is unlikely to assume bad faith (and the likelihood is such, outrage mobs are a minority, even if one with too much weight for its size), nothing guarantees she won't change her mind later and assume that the criticism was because of sexism after all.

And even if one were to believe that that is unlikely too, nothing guarantees that someone else won't think it sexist. For example, I remember some panel with four scientists (three men and one woman) that was discussed in HN a while ago; at some point, someone in the audience (I think she was a journalist) yelled at the moderator to "let her speak"... Even though the scientist herself didn't think the moderator was doing anything wrong.

Agreed, I'm definitely not comfortable with her phrasing in several sections of the article, and it clearly has an impact since some people are saying that this behavior is also male sexism.

The author is, perhaps inadvertently, contributing to the problem.

BTW, yeah, this is one of my alt accounts.

> It is plainly a hit piece devoid of any substantive reporting or analysis.

This is a great summation.

To me it reads like the best attempt the journalist could pull off at writing a hit piece against some guy who just started a low cost medical practice, and has never actually done anything bad in his life. A whole lot of vague insinuations and guilt by association.

If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this was Metz's way to tell himself that he is a better person than this guy trying to make psychiatric care more accessible, just because he might disagree on some political issues.

Even if one thought that this would help the people that need help on this matter, you can't really fork signal as it is today, I think. Or at least whatever it is that signal is using on its servers because that is very unlikely to be the software in its public repo, which hasn't been updated in almost a year. And even for a while before then, most of the commits were version bumps with no visible changes on the code.

If anything, that's another problem with signal that's not getting enough attention (that I've seen): It claims to be open source, but as of now, it doesn't seem to be. At least not in the servers.

I must have missed the statement in parentheses the first time I read it (I honestly don't remember it being there before, apologies), so I retract the part on what GP said about "should". However, I maintain that the comment doesn't say anything about whether women shouldn't do the things the other person said; there's no implication one way or the other in the original comment and most people do both.

On the matter of kids and "high quality", I made no comment on that earlier, and I make no comment now.