I really like the "What You Can't Say" essay. Interestingly, what it says is not that speaking out is bad. It says that you must weight the benefit of speaking out to society, to the cost to yourself. It says you know what, sometimes it's ok to pick your fights, to be a coward, or to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the good in society. I agree that sometimes it's important to be selfish.

This means that I can avoid the short term cost to me, but what about the long term cost?

Every time you stay silent, you are complicit in the foolishness and irrationality in society. Every time a mob silences an individual and you ignore it, you lend power to the mob, and power to the idea of a mob in the mind of society.

You lend power to the idea that the louder you shout, the more correct your idea is.

And it's the ideas that make our society.

Here's an example of where this is going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-nvNAcvUPE . The rabbit hole goes deep.

I am worried that even HN, a crowd that prizes itself on being intellectual, is so easily swayed by virtue signalling and shouting loudly (see comments here and on other similar threads). If these rational minds are so easily swayed, what about the larger crowd that thinks even less for itself? These centres must be held to a higher standard or we risk corruption of everything.

Your choices make a difference, choose wisely.

SV/YC culture is extremely toxic, and people hate having that pointed out to their faces.

edit: sv/yc are toxic for how they actively shame outsider opinions, then headhunt the individuals who put said opinions forward. from sama's what i heard from trump supporters, "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter."

like for instance on this website, where flagged & downvoted comments lead to rate limiting. sorry guy i can't respond to, it's the mods' fault. minority opinions get to say 1, maybe 2 things, before being silenced. controversial threads are flagged or removed by dang and co from the front page within an hour. ever have a convo with a conservative on here, where they just stopped responding to you? was probably silenced by the moderation team.

this discussion is flagged to obscurity, while the stupid circle jerk post about "google engineer breaking his bubble through global travel!" is on the front still.

http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-supporters

It is interesting how the grandchild responses to the responses to this post have been flag killed...

I don't think it's fair to lump YC culture in with SV culture. YC is based in SV, but it seems to be an island of reasonableness.

While I think that YC tends to be a bit more reasonable on some topics, it can be pretty reactionary on others. For example, if anything to do with Facebook or Zuckerberg is posted, the level of discourse drops to the typical reddit outrage machine.

Similarly, I think that when it comes to talking about sexism in tech, the community as a whole can be pretty toxic. As someone who was annoyed by both the original manifesto, and the response to the original manifesto, it's a bit frustrating to see the conversation here take shape the way it has.

Toxic how?

Neither YC (you probably meant HN) nor SV are toxic.