It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.

With regards to your statement "I would have an incredibly hard time believing that that person was taking me seriously, really wanted to work with me, wasn't going to undercut me, or trusted me.", in many ways I totally respect that concern.

But I also think it may be symptomatic of how our approach to these topics has become non-constructive. We've too closely tied support for a person with support for everything they do/believe. To my thinking, whether I take you seriously or want to work with you has nothing to do with the aforementioned topics, and entirely with how you behave/execute at work. And if I'm going to undercut you at work because I disagree with your beliefs, the issue isn't that I disagree with you, it's that I'd be willing to undercut anyone I work with.

Your last point is well-taken. It may even be the case these days that the majority of people who hold views similar to yours think the way you do. But I think we need to take into account the uncertainty that people in these situations face. It's hard to know what the other person is thinking -- and if all you know is that person's opinion, it's hard to know what's going on when you're not looking. Bigotry is often dressed up in talk and behavior that seems polite, even respectful at first glance, but that is ultimately materially harmful.

For example, I think a lot of LGBTQ people from religious backgrounds have had an experience of being told that their family or community will "love the sinner, but hate the sin" -- and then subsequently being subjected to unfair and harmful treatment (bullying, psychological abuse, ostracism, being disowned).

This is a really good reminder that there is indeed a tragic past of marginalized groups being treated poorly and receiving harm/violence. And there still is in certain areas, meaning that even though my standpoint may be that "of course I value them as a person", from the recipient's standpoint that cannot be assumed, and indeed it may be safer not to. This is super important to keep in mind, and at times may be worth stating explicitly (if the topic comes up/is appropriate) when talking about this with folks. I can't assume they know I believe this.

Isn't that a restriction you are putting on yourself? As I see it, it is your requirement that someone has to share your point of view, and to get it to be so has to be your cost, not theirs.

Everyone things something someone else is doing or thinking is immoral all the time. It even has the composition problem: I think its immoral to sabotage people because you think its immoral! Thus who is the immoral!

> It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.

I agree. There is a price you pay when you have a contrarian view point. You must. However today that is not vocal disagreement, its firing people and exile. Some twitter mob victims have become unemployable. Thats not reasonable to me.

Well my answer is no. See, I'm secure of my ideas, and respect people's ideas, and am not reluctant to hear criticism about the way I live my life or what ethical values or philosophical stances I have. And I prefer living among everyone no matter what they think of the way I live. Otherwise it's living in herds. But I should respect that the US society is transforming and maybe it's expectable that these particularly fragile topics like gender issues or racial issues are very hard to discuss. But if people like you are going to avoid anti-marriage-equality people, what you'll end up is going to be segregation and polarisation, which will only alienate you among them and them among you, undermining society and progress. The fact is no matter how logical or correct your opinion is, one has to convince others if the question regards them. Otherwise all the glory, should you win at your cause, is going to be temporary---until the opposers are going to be strong enough to undo what you did. And you end up with a bipartisan vicious cycle.

[1] Actually I beleive that all the marraiges should count as civil unions for the state, and that the persons themselves should define what it means and how it is lived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LG...

Would you also be scared of working with men because they typically commit homicides more than women?

I think being afraid of your life simply because someone is a bigot who hasn’t exhibited any violent behavior is on you, not the bigot. A small number of bigots are violent and dangerous, that doesn’t mean all are.

When your life is on the line, it is generally wise to err on the side of caution. If you assume someone openly transphobic is a threat to your life and you are wrong, you are at worst being rude to them. If you assume they aren't a threat to you and are wrong, you may end up dead (or maimed or otherwise egregiously harmed).

With those stakes on the table, the only logical thing to do is to vet people you can trust, not give assholes the benefit of the doubt that maybe they are merely assholes and won't violently assault and/or murder you.

The odds of a trans person being murdered by a transphobic person are phenomenally low. I think you need to balance risk vs return. Just like driving a car has costs and risks it may be worth it to get to the grocery store.

Without answering these two questions it is rather illogical to have your behavior change at all to someone who engages in open verbal hostility.

But you also need to distinguish between verbal hostility that is threatening vs non-threatening (ie, “I really don’t like people of class X.” Vs “I am going to punch people of class X in the face.”)

This also doesn’t account for the people are aren’t gay or trans yet are also targeted by irrational people (eg, Las Vegas victims).

It is very grounded in data.

I have had college classes on Intro to Psychology, Social Psychology and Negotiation and Conflict Management. I spent a lot of time in therapy and have done a lot of reading on social subjects and so forth. I was a military wife and history major and I have an AA in Humanities. The one urban planning conference I managed to attend, I went to all the social lectures rather than, say, design stuff.

I probably can't readily produce the kind of data you would like to see and I am sure I don't want to bother. Your remarks make it pretty clear to me that it would be a waste of my time. There would be no convincing you of anything.

I am leaving this remark here primarily for the benefit of other people, plus to give notice that if I don't reply further, it isn't some tacit acknowledgement that you are right. I just don't really want to play this game. That's all.

I will add for clarity's sake that the phrase willing to harm you in some way was carefully chosen. It doesn't assert violent intent. People can do you enormous harm without being violent and it is shockingly common for people to be willing to do some kind of material harm, even if they are disinclined to be violent. Marginalized peoples very much need to be leery of that fact.

Through your studies have you been able to identify evidence for a range or risk / odds ratio difference of haters to commit violence vs the standard population?

This is certainly hard to quantify, but seems important if it’s going to impact how you interact with people and how you recommend others interact with people.

I’m a bit disturbed that you seem unwilling (or unable) to discuss this and end the thread with “just trust me.” I certainly would like to trust you, but I try to shape my worldview through evidence and defendable evidence.

As I already stated as clearly as I know how, violence is not required to do serious harm to a person. To try to elucidate:

I have a life threatening medical condition and was also homeless for nearly six years. I was quite open about that on HN and other forums. My only goal was to find a means to earn money online as a solution to my situation.

I got a lot of flak from people in forums who wanted me to shut up about my problems because they liked wearing their goodness on their sleeve, we're unwilling to help me in any way and my presence made them uncomfortable. I often could not even get answers to my questions. I was accused of panhandling the internet and my goal of learning to make money online was completely dismissed by many people, making it that much harder to accomplish.

Treating a seriously ill homeless person like their desire to earn a living is not valid is not far from allowing someone to die by standing by and doing for them. You could compare it to denying blacks treatment at a white hospital, which is exactly how the black inventor of blood transfusions died following an accident where he couldn't get the blood he needed because he was the wrong color.

People who are in certain categories can be at significant risk if being egregiously harmed by the actions or inactions of other people, without violence being any part of it. People are shockingly comfortable with such things, which is an underlying principle that keeps things like racism alive.

We can, for example, measure harm to African Americans in terms of both trillions of dollars and in terms of disease and death. Most people don't really want to hear it. Recent articles calling for reparations to Blacks get routinely dismissed as "meh, everyone has been taken advantage of at some point." The idea of reparations has no traction, though the ongoing death toll for African Americans is routinely in the news.

The more eye catching incidents where Blacks get shot and killed by cops is really a very minor portion of the death toll. A much larger portion comes from historical redlining and White NIMBYism, which has forced people of color into neighborhoods with terrible air quality and substandard housing. Respiratory problems have gone up dramatically and the effect of living in neighborhoods with terrible air quality can be measured in dollars, incidence of disease and mortality.

A study in India found that male children receive slightly better care than female children. For example, a sick boy was more likely to be taken to a doctor the same day. A sick girl was more likely to be sent to bed with plans to see a doctor in the morning if she did not improve.

Girls in this study were absolutely not being abused. In most cases, they weren't even really neglected. They just weren't doted on like boys.

The consequences of these small differences in treatment could be measured in terms of mortality. Girls had a measurably higher death rate.

Marginalized people with any kind of survival instinct are wise to give a wide berth to anyone giving voice to open hostility to their kind. Such people can have a great deal of power to help them into the grave without ever lifting a finger to commit violence, sometimes simply by not lifting a finger to help when they need it. Often, the rest of the world will look on and see no wrong doing.

Having been subjected to such treatment as a homeless person, it us both horrifying and deeply psychologically scarring. My fundamental trust in humans has been irreparably harmed. And homelessness is curable. You get off the street, you aren't homeless anymore. But you don't stop being gay, trans, Black etc.

The most charitable interpretation I can find for how others behaved towards me is that they are incredibly ignorant of some things and blind to the serious consequences of their actions and inaction. That was not much comfort at the time it was happening and has done little to help me make my peace with it.

This makes no sense. Avoiding people whom you perceive as having hostility in their words is not a good strategy for finding a support network. A good strategy to is find people who have demonstrated that they are willing to 'raise a finger' and including them in your life. While there is a negative correlation between those two groups, excluding the former group from your search for the latter will limit your ability to build a strong support network.

So let me ask: are you a member of a marginalized group? Because I can't help but wonder at the reasons behind our very different point of views.

If someone is angry about something all the time that really (from my POV) shouldn't concern them, it doesn't make them a murderer that should be locked up right now, no, but it could nevertheless reasonably make me wonder if they are dangerous or will "go postal" at some point.

Do you think religious people are irrational? Are you one those people who freak out when a Muslim steps onto the subway? It seems like your line of reasoning would mean you don’t want any Muslims working at your company. That’s pretty messed up.

Comically, thinking that bigots or Muslims might go postal at some point is highly irrational. It’s like worrying about meteor strikes. So since you’re irrational, you might snap. Therefore people with your mindset should avoid working with you?

Instead, I'll just say neither schizophrenics nor Muslims are necessarily bigots.

Also, you're assuming I'm neither schizophrenic nor Muslim, which is funny. How do you know?

Now, this is quite different if someone is expressing or advocating violence. But some old catholic lady being against gay marriage represents zero threat of violence. Especially if she isn’t vocally expressing the hatred at work, but does something outside of work.

The issue I have is that simply expressing disagreement “I hate class X” is not a threat compared to “I want to cause grevious harm to class X.”

I think I can change two works of your statement and make it a criticism of the Bay Area.

From my perspective, I don't want to work in an environment where people are voicing their opinion that (e.g.) supporting Trump is illegitimate or wrong. How am I supposed to work with someone who thinks a huge part of my life is immoral? I would have an incredibly hard time believing that that person was taking me seriously, really wanted to work with me, wasn't going to undercut me, or trusted me.

It's not that you can't have these opinions or voice them -- but it's also not the case that the people who are most affected by those opinions are going to feel OK about it.

The issue I have with this perspective is that it is not applied equally. I do think you should get protection but I think that same protection should be applied to all groups. Next week I could say in front of my team "All Trump supporters are deranged psychopaths." I would get a few odd looks, my manager might tell my privately to tone it down. If I said the same thing about LQBT folk I would guess I have a 50% chance of being fired.

This feels like a double standard to me and makes me question if the people who support diversity and inclusion really mean it or if they only want what they approve.

The victimization complex Trump supporters seem to have internalized is such a bizarre thing.

So everyone needs to ensure they hold no oppinions you might find offensive or be homeless? It goes both ways: how am I supposed to work with someone who thinks it's ok to ostracize people for personal beliefs?

No. Just be polite and respectful to your colleagues. Not every stone needs to be turned.

Have you never worked with people with different religious beliefs?

The situation isn't great right now, I agree. But wild exaggeration doesn't help. It just makes people that you might be able to convince that the situation isn't great dismiss everything you are saying because of that wild exaggeration. Or at least some of those people, there may be an age divide here. But the point is if you want to be maximally persuasive you should avoid wild exaggeration.

I live in a major city in the US. I know two or three quite vocal Trump supporters. Yes, they face social sanctions. Yes, it might affect their career on the margin when it comes time to look at e.g. who to promote or who to lay off. No they aren't unemployed, much less unemployable.

The problem rather is that your particular political belief is viewed as being actively hostile towards people themselves or towards their friends or family or others. Voicing opposition towards gay marriage comes across as an attack on all gay people. That's where the reaction comes from.

A political belief that's not treated as openly hostile towards others (for example, supporting charter schools or something) doesn't get this reaction, of course. It's not merely that "you just can't say that you believe certain things are right/wrong if it goes against norms"; you're missing the nuance here.

If we accept this argument that some opinions or positions are unconscionable because they are fundamentally "against" other people, we end up on a slippery slope, and the situation in SF is somewhere on that slope (in my opinion, nowhere near the bottom).

Everyone wants in on the sympathy train and everyone loves shaming and silencing their opponents. We have to be careful to actively protect civil dialogue from such encroachments, because while they may feel sympathetic and nice at the time, that self-righteous reward system gets put on a feedback loop and drowns out everything else.

If we've already seen people getting agitated into conflating arguments over the semantics and technicalities of a dry legal instrument like marriage with their individual right to self-existence and safety, that's proof of this phenomenon in itself.

I am of course, not trying to start a flame war either, but my take on it is that those sorts of issues would be inappropriate to bring up at work or in a job interview in the first place, regardless of your position.

Based on your description, I believe I probably espouse the opposite position on those issues, and even though I work at a large tech company in NYC I still don't bring them up at work.

That said, I can totally see where you're coming from. I have a friend who ended up being a pretty staunch Donald Trump supporter, and I watched as a lot of colleagues ostracized him (even though he never really brought it up at work).

It takes hard work to see past issues that divide us. In the case of my friend, I always just try to focus on our shared interests. It's what has kept us friends.

In closing...there are of course different degrees of ideas that people will tolerate, and it may just be that large cities have spoken, and they don't want intolerant people in their ranks.

shrugs, walks away

It also gets murkier nowadays because companies are expected to take stances on social issues, and with certain ones are criticized when they don't.

The main difference I see is that the expected stances are more liberal than they used to be, and the penalties for failing to conform tend to be much less severe.

What I'm not OK with, however, is people not respecting other people's rights to have their own views. And that goes from calling them names to refusing to serve them in their business to refusing to offer them the health insurance they want.

Edit: Just to be clear, I agree that merely expressing views should not result in an online inquisition. That people whose views I generally agree with do makes me very uncomfortable, and I agree with Sam Altman that this makes it difficult to have serious discussions.

This terrifies me.

Personally I think leftists, rightists and centrists are terrible at grokking stats because the human brain can't handle multifaceted realities very well.

It is possible for instance that all political positions are correct, even the apparently contradictory ones because they are part of the Elephant (the one with the blind men).