otde

Why does the consequence have to be deportation? Can we imagine a form of deterrence that doesn’t necessitate the cruelty of familial separation? Do we at least agree that what is happening right now, to this family and to others, is deeply unjust?

Why is a) bad? Have you considered d) pass a different law? Why are you pretending the law is some immutable thing that we always need to follow, regardless of the situations an unjust law might place someone in if followed?

The point OP is making (and it ‘s one that I agree with) is that Graham’s particular usage of the word “woke” as written in his essay functions as a shibboleth for a collection of reactionary beliefs and impulses — not merely that he uses the word, but that he does so in a poorly-defined and pejorative way that is characteristic of the word’s usage in various right-leaning circles.

If someone hates trans people, they can, and you can't stop them. The whole "war on hate" thing was a bad idea; you can't forbid hatred. It predictably didn't work, and it's good that we're turning away from it.

It is disingenuous to suggest that anti-discrimination laws for trans people are attempting to legislate away the hatred held in people’s hearts, instead of access to healthcare, public facilities, protections against workplace discrimination — things you describe as having “real questions,” but which are, in fact, the parts of a full and dignified life that bigots would deny to trans people in particular. If you pretend like it’s trying to legislate “thoughtcrime,” it’s much easier to distinguish anti-discrimination laws for trans people from rulings like Obergefell or Brown v. Board — far easier to say “look, those were good, but this particular civil rights legislation is simply unreasonable.”

To platform these beliefs is to afford them a legitimacy they do not deserve. To suggest that bigotry, when amplified, will be in some way countered or reduced is naïve beyond belief. Instead, it becomes easier for bigotry to find an audience of receptive listeners and willing conduits for further transmission.

which begs the question: why spend any time at all including an ai image as part of the cover if it’s a negative signal for some people?

I don't think the issue is whether GP lives next to neighbors with these kind of lawns, but more that the relative proportion of bird-hostile yards is outpacing any individual attempt to counterbalance. Moving only solves the problem if the only thing you care about is the extent to which you, personally, are forced to see one of the causes of this population drop in your daily life. It doesn't address the problem itself, which is kind of also GP's point.

Very smart people usually take the time to understand the historical context behind the problems they're attempting to solve, IMO. (Especially if solving that problem requires proof that P=NP.) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The creation of new ideas being restricted to only experts, those who "actually know stuff" shrinks the pool of creators of new knowledge.

Abstractly, I agree with what you've said here, but I don't think the part of Gerard's post that you quoted is making the point that you're countering.

Broadly speaking, a lot of discovery work comes from domain experts precisely because of the work it takes to become such an expert. My read on the phrase "actually knowing stuff" is that it refers not just to a solid understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of your field, but also a more general grasp of the field's history. This kind of contextual knowledge is extremely helpful when attempting new or experimental research because it gives you an idea of which areas of knowledge might contain some novel insight while also cluing you in to which approaches might help you arrive at that insight. I interpreted Gerard's critique of Buterin here not as one of insufficient academic clout, but of arrogance, a reification of great man theory [1] through a techno-libertarian lens that positions himself among a host of other so-called "great men" and frames every societal problem as solvable through whatever lens the Great Man might think is particularly interesting.

Gerard's critique of Buterin's approach to sharding (which goes into further detail here [2]) seems to back this interpretation up:

Buterin blogs extensive essays full of great thoughts on how to reorganise the world, and how Ethereum will be the basis for this once they add amazing new functionalities that will only require solving P=NP.

Remember that Buterin spent years working on a sharding plan for Ethereum that, had he done Intro to Theory of Computation, he might have realised was probably impossible.

Seems less like "Buterin is a fool for not Being An Academic" and more like "Buterin is arrogant enough to assume he can solve a really difficult problem without understanding why nobody's solved it yet."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory [2] https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/04/04/if-you-want-...

It's pretty complicated! I'd say it's a little bit of a lot of things, and the amounts of those things depends on the person. There's some people who feel like they wish they could have transitioned but didn't, and direct a pretty intense resentment towards people they see as having undeserved happiness (the "rotten egg" theory). Some people believe in a strict natural "order" in the world that they see trans people as subverting in ways they see as disgusting. Some people are scared parents who believe trans people will indoctrinate their children and turn them into unrecognizable, traumatized, uncontrollable shells of their former selves through surgeries and hormone treatments.

Shared amongst all these lines of thinking is an intense belief that the world would be a better place if the idea of being trans (and trans people in general) simply didn't exist, and that to move to that world, we should be detransitioned first, invisible second, and dead otherwise.

Nope, you're asking for a special treatment in an environment where 99.9% of people don't care how you want to be called. Not because they hate you -- it's because they're not there to fight for your rights.

You are framing this as "special treatment" precisely because of your ideas of what gender means to you. Honestly, I empathize hard with what you describe as "pissing into the wind." I'm misgendered on a daily basis -- if I spent every ounce of energy I had correcting people, I'd end each day exhausted. More often than not, I don't push back, usually because it's a service worker who's forced to be deferential as part of their job ("sir"/"ma'am"/etc). I don't begrudge that kind of attempt at politeness. Even outside that, it's never a huge deal in isolation, but it adds up, because I have to do a little bit of mental calculus each time: is this person going to make a whole thing about it or go "my bad" and move on? do I have the energy to bring it up? are they trying to be rude or is it an honest mistake? etc. In professional and personal circles, I'm generally more likely to correct people, because I'm signalling a way to be polite to me, and I've been polite to them, and it's how we establish mutual respect, not "special treatment."

Usually, when people get frustrated at misgendering, it's because a person is ignoring really obvious tells about how a person wants to be addressed (clothing, etc.) in favor of their own personal philosophy about what being "right" means. In the exact same way, for example, you might feel frustrated if someone intentionally decided to use a semi-mocking pronunciation of your name. In both cases, it signals that a person has decided to be cruel to you for petty and unknowable reasons.

I guess my big takeaway is that you deserve as much dignity and respect in the way people pronounce your name as I do for my pronouns, and I hope you can find some understanding/empathy in the parallels between our experiences.

The sibling comment actually does a pretty good job articulating why we as trans people (surprise! I’m one of them) receive the reactions we do. It’s a fundamental disgust at the concept of a trans person existing, full stop. In an ideal world for these people, we simply would not exist. We challenge their expectations by asking to be addressed in a way that goes against their ideas of what gender, at its core, means to them. It’s a belief that the world works in a specific and rigid way, and that respecting the way another person chooses to be addressed is “feeding into a delusion.” This also feeds into a larger bit of discourse around trans kids that is tinged with the usual “think of the children” moral panics that show up whenever a kid is some flavor of LGBTQ+. It does not make for a great time on the internet (or on Hacker News, specifically).

I guess I just can’t think of a better way to describe some of the stuff people say about trans people. It’s rooted in a deep hatred that warrants the suffix, IMO. I don’t think “disagreement” adequately describes the severity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can’t help but wonder if reducing the possibility space of opinions one might have about Star Citizen’s development process to “sweaty misogynist nerd (the bad kind of nerd)” and “magnanimous rich nerd (the good kind of nerd)” is maybe showing your hand a bit here. This isn’t to say I don’t believe you with respect to the employee death threats, nor do I think they’re a good thing — internet hate machines formed out of the froth of fermented gamer rage are unambiguously bad and steps should always be taken to reduce or eliminate the damage they cause. I also think there’s a pretty wide array of acceptably minimal and non-bigoted ways to express curiosity, scrutiny, or even displeasure with Star Citizen’s development process. Your lumping of that spectrum of thought into a single uncharitable bucket is probably why you’re being read as combative here.

I’m not sure I like the implicit association here between a job’s income level and some vague metric of “usefulness to society,” to say nothing of the dismissiveness that comes with the “barista science” label.

Speaking as someone who started in Java and moved to Julia, my experience has been that a lack of concrete subtyping has generally not made an impact on difficulty with respect to problem modeling (at least, not relative to Java or other languages with concrete subtyping). Moreover, some of the emergent properties of Julia’s type system (the “Tim Holy Trait Trick,” etc) enable problem modeling in different — and perhaps more “Julian” — ways, modeling by behavior rather than structure.

That said, if you absolutely need concrete subtyping in Julia, you can emulate it for structure with the tricks described in this (old but gold) Chris Rackauckas blog post: https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/type-dispatch-design-pos...

This is quite the paternalist view of working class people — is this not a concerted effort by working class professionals, asking for more? Considering the frequent remoteness of factory locations and the costs (monetary, social, etc) of moving elsewhere, striking for better conditions seems like a pretty educated decision, one which reflects an intimate understanding of the multiplicative effects of collective bargaining.

W/R/T the top-level comment: to frame coercive forces (isolation, geography, exploitation, and so on) as matters purely of individual choices speaks to a deep rejection of systems thinking that’s both

a. unproductive in a conversation about labor practices resulting from intricate and brutal edifices of human suffering, and

b. misses the point of collective action, which has over the course of multiple centuries chipped away at the brutality of said edifices, strike by strike.

This is the “have you tried yoga” of labor discourse — shallow, unhelpful, and really dismissive, especially when factory workers are not given the choice to work additional hours, working conditions are challenging at best, and management seems (putting it charitably) negligent.

I have conflicted feelings about this. Is it really a "mistake" if you don't understand some subtle context about artwork that would not be clear to the casual reader either? Or, as an art critic, is it your responsibility to be aware of all these subtexts, so you can educate your readers about them?

I think this broadly depends on what role you view art critique as having. In the opening paragraph, the author does a great job (IMO) of outlining his perspective:

"As a critic, I’ll suggest that I can sensitize my readers and listeners to what they didn’t see or grasp or apprehend when they witnessed the same art or performance."

If you view critique as a way of exploring new perspectives, subtle context can be one of the ways in which a critic can help add to the conversation surrounding a work. While it's not necessarily a critic's responsibility to understand every piece of background info at every moment, it's also understandable that a critic might view their own omission of a particular piece of context as a failure to provide additional insight that they believe they might have been able to contribute in a review, especially they view the goal of their critique to be that act of "sensitizing."

More broadly, does great art have to be immediately striking and accessible?

Part of what Rodney might argue here is that it's not necessary for art itself to be striking/accessible, but a good critic can make such art accessible by virtue of dedicating themselves to the understanding of "subtle contexts."

If a piece of art resonates only with people who share the artist's context (like the mentioned punning pronunciation of "boy" in a given dialect), can a critic lacking that context review it, or a viewer appreciate it?

I'd argue that context isn't a strict requirement for appreciation, but that it can often be a useful way to construct additional meaning, to find additional appreciation for a work beyond the initial appraisal. It's different for everyone, but I love art and art critique, and these are the ways of thinking that I've personally found bring me the most joy/fulfillment when thinking about art.

Being trans is one of many possible attributes a person can possess (tall, short, skinny, fat, and so on)! There are lots of ways a person's body can be built that may give them an advantage or disadvantage over another person.

Strength and speed are not the sole metrics by which Olympic medals are awarded, either. Some people are taller than other people, some people are shorter, some are trans and some aren't. None of that categorically excludes trans women from womanhood, so I don't see why that would preclude them from entering into women's events. It comes back to a fundamental distrust of trans women as containing some vaguely cited percentage of lying cisgender men.

For a bad-faith actor to take advantage of the current system, they'd have to transition medically and socially, wait for years (in Laurel Hubbard, the potential first trans Olympian's case, at least five -- she quit in 2001, transitioned in 2012, then began competing in 2017), and then stay that way for as long as it would require to convince people that you've fully transitioned (could be decades or the rest of their life, depending on how they'd want their legacy to live on). The incentive structure is just completely out of whack. You'd have to fight tooth and nail for something you don't actually identify with, and live with the physical and psychological effects for years or possibly decades, plus living with the general harassment people would give you for perceiving you as trans and for trying to compete in the Olympics, and then what? You think with how stringent the IOC tries to be with doping that they wouldn't figure that one out? You think the backlash wouldn't be absolutely enormous?

What about this is "worst" case, anyway? We might get our first trans person who's even allowed to compete this year. It's a totally disproportionate response.

I’m glad you’re able to see it as an edge case, but part of the reason we get so defensive is precisely because people who typically cite the story don’t want to see it as an edge case.

I used “secret” with a clear intention here, because on the gender-critical side, categorical rejection of trans women from womanhood is a core belief. It follows that if you don’t believe any trans woman is “actually” a woman, that every trans woman is just a man trying to be sneaky, then every trans woman in prison, regardless of existing convictions, is a potential Karen White.

White’s rape conviction is probably the more germane data point in that particular edge case. From there the question might be: how do women’s prisons handle cisgender women with rape convictions against other women right now? What potential problems, if any, would arise if we implemented similar procedures for trans women? How might those procedures help or hurt trans people?

(This might also lead to higher level questions about the efficacy of prisons in a broader sense, but that’s outside our scope here.)

When, as trans people, we see edge cases brought up like this, they’re so often used as a means of depicting us as potential Karen Whites that, to the extent that we even bother engaging, it comes from a defensive place. I hope you can understand that I’m choosing to engage here both because I do see well-meaning people like you on this site and because I think the site needs a counterpoint to the FUD about trans people, even if I dread some of the nastier responses.

Here’s what I mean when I asked us to consider perspectives of trans people —- I want you to understand us not just as potential perpetrators of violence here, but also as recipients. Trans women are subject to prison rape at apparently disproportionate levels [1][2] when housed in men’s prisons. Instead of framing this as “is it ethical to move a woman to a women’s prison on the off chance she’s a man gaming the system,” I would consider asking “is it an acceptable tradeoff to keep a woman in men’s prison on the off chance she’s a secret rapist, even if her chances of being raped herself are increased as a result?”

It’s worthwhile to interrogate some of the ways we frame these kinds of discussions, implicitly or otherwise, myself included!

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/transgender-women-ar...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_rape_in_the_United_St...

On other subjects on HN (software, mostly), I find curious, questioning people, who will, for the most part, engage very seriously with the subject matter. I think this is because users here engage with software -- the creation, maintenance, collaboration, the joy and misery of it all -- frequently and with a passion for nuance.

When high-visibility articles on trans people show up, it's almost inevitably when our transness -- our ability to move through the world, to exist in certain spaces, or even if we exist at all -- is the subject of debate. I don't know how many cisgender folks here really get how fundamentally exhausting it is to have some part of your identity always be part of a debate, to be talked about or on rare occasions talked to, but almost never engaged with in a substantive way.

It's just fear fear fear, 24/7 -- simulating hypothetical nightmare worlds where trans rapists lurk in bathrooms and prisons, where every Olympic gold medal is taken by a man masquerading as a woman, roving hordes of red-faced trans activists screaming incoherently online at nice, well-meaning, harmless people who just want to learn.

I just wanted to put out there that the flattened, simplified perspectives trans people are portrayed with may not give you the whole picture, and I'd encourage people here to give perspectives from trans people the same (well, more, preferably) curiosity and interest that you might give to scare quotes and soundbites about prisons, bathrooms, and sports.

It’s more that “teach critical thinking” often just means “condescend to an internet stranger about how flawed their thought process is” which, even if their thinking is flawed, isn’t exactly a winning strategy for helping people See The Light and whatnot.

Younger millennial/Z-adjacent here. I don’t claim to speak for everyone younger than me, but I am continually impressed by the level of genre awareness today’s youngsters have.

Genres like synth/vapor wave are very conscious remixes of periods of time many of us were barely alive during, and their popularity comes in part, I think, from the tenuousness of their connection to the time period from which those genres draw their audiovisual cues. For me, at least, my earliest memories are a dream half-remembered, and music that draws from but does not emulate music from that time period can be a way for my imagination to fill in the blanks.

People on HN usually aren’t fans of FLoC precisely because it doesn’t solve that problem, in addition to creating new ones (see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...).

I don’t see irony there!

On what planet does “I may need to put on a dress” not read as “if I pretend to be trans, I’ll have an easier time getting a job?”

“Pretending to be trans for (reason)” is a really really common way to mock trans people and I think you know that.

I’m lucky to work for a small company where I am treated with respect by every one of my coworkers and my bosses. They are curious, thoughtful, and kind people, and I don’t need a window into their minds to know they’re not thinking “I could find a better job if I pretended to be trans.” Believe it or not, people are sometimes just kind because it’s the right thing to do.

Bit of a fool’s errand to try and avoid politics at work — like a fish trying to avoid water in the ocean. The ways companies are built and maintained, the relationship between employers and employees, workplace requirements and benefits — all of these are shaped by and and built from political systems, to say nothing of how politics surrounding a person’s identity might affect their worldview. You’re never going to shut all of that out of your company.

Lots of fearmongering in the comments about “woke mobs” here, and I want to offer a counterpoint to the characterization of the Basecamp employees who left as some kind of shrill hypersensitive scolds. Put yourself in their shoes.

You notice the company you work at has a circulated list of customer’s names, some of which make fun of your race — have been used to make fun of you since you were young. You go “hey this sucks” and it gets taken down. You point out that this is part of a pattern of societal behavior you’ve known your whole life, and that pattern has affected your life negatively and materially. This is not received well — combating a single incident is easy, but unraveling a pattern of behavior is an arduous, years-long, and sometimes unprofitable path. At an all-hands meeting, a higher-up not only denies this pattern exists, but any action taken to unravel it would instead target him instead. The Big Bosses do not refute this until much later, and only partially. Would you feel respected? How would you react if someone said you were acting like a child and demanding something unreasonable? How would you feel if someone told you that you’re only doing this to perform “wokeness?”

I really tried not to take the bait here, but come on, dude, that last bit was especially rancid. You do get that we’re real human beings with rich internal lives like everyone else and not shallow, opportunistic crossdressers, yeah?

I’d be mortified if I worked with someone who thought like this, and I’m glad I don’t.

Is running an organization the only way to have expertise on subjects like “how decisions made by organizations affect their members?” I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a person can collect a fair bit of policy-specific knowledge from being directly affected by said policy.

This is not a defense of punditry — I feel pretty icky anytime I see a climate denialist like Bret Stephens opining on climate change in The Paper of Record, for example — but I also don’t think we should necessarily conclude that a person’s relationship to power connotes an inherent level of expertise.