Hard to sue publications.

Not sure Gawker would agree with you.

Relitigating this in a Hacker News sub-thread seems like a bad way to spend time.

Gawker wasn't sued for libel.

Next time someone complains about me "jumping the gun" for talking about brigading on posts regarding Damore, I'll point them to this comment, where I state a 100% correct, non-controversial, non-offensive fact and I still get downvoted. Hard to explain, huh?

This is a highly contentious thread with a lot of participants and over 740 comments at this point. I don't think you can reach any meaningful conclusion other than HN members are human and behave in all variety of ways, rational, and otherwise.

Of course Hacker News participants are just human. That said, automatic downvoting of non-controversial, easily-proven statements, while comments with highly subjective and inflammatory takes get upvoted show the worst this community has to offer.

I used to think HN provided a good balance of open-mindedness and tech topics. It was a nice refuge from places like reddit and Twitter that had become overly politicized. In the last year - in particular since Damore's little lesson about shitting where you eat - the same kind of smarmy calls for "tolerance of different opinions" mixed with constant brigading of people (talk abut "tolerance") have taken over HN.

I really hope for our community's sake that it's just a small number of users ruining it for everyone.

I very much understand and appreciate the frustration. I think you should cut your fellow members a bit of slack. There are assumptions in your comment here that may not be entirely accurate or at least aren't representing the whole picture. I'm going to attempt to provide alternative perspectives here: I'm not claiming they're correct, but are an attempt to broaden what other's may be perceiving. That doesn't mean their perceptions are correct or even fair.

> "automatic downvoting"

Let's set aside the idea that they're automatic for a moment. Unless your mind reading skills are better than mine, it's hard to know the intent from a downvote alone. You can't even know who did it, other than it's not the person you responded to.

> "of non-controversial, easily-proven statements"

Even these may not be constructive to the conversation. They may be tangential, irrelevant, or intentionally misleading. Members may downvote for any of these reasons.

> "comments with highly subjective and inflammatory takes get upvoted show the worst this community has to offer."

Yeah, highly charged comments can get upvoted: emotions are a powerful thing, and there's a lot of evidence (is it even controversial at this point?) that emotions fire before rational thought. And there's increasing evidence that our rationality actual does more to rationalize our emotions than work as some sort of logic engine. People have to work against this, and that, indeed, is effort. Frustrating? Incredibly so. Human? Very.

That's not to say we shouldn't work against this, at least some of the time. Internet fora make this all the more difficult because we're engaging with such limited bandwidth. We don't get to hear tone, or see facial expressions. We only have this limited text stream, and so we're likely bringing a lot more of ourselves to fill in the gaps than we often realize.

There's a lot of charged language in your comment here. That's just an observation, not a judgement. How should I respond to that? Should I attempt to put it to the side and respond in a way I think is most effective? Or should I write you off as some hot head that can't control their commenting, going against site guidelines by complaining about voting? Or just silently downvote you for doing so? I often get the impression that that's how some members perceive others as behaving. I don't think that's a useful starting point from which to improve HN, so it's one I consciously choose not to take.

> "a small number of users"

I think it's a combination of a small number of users and the fact that each of us—just because we're human—can sometimes slip. What we can do the rest of the time is not let the slip-ups of others make us respond in kind. It takes more than one person to spread the flames.

Help make HN the place you want it to be. Submit good articles. Write good comments. Upvote good articles and comments. Downvote and flag those you don't think are appropriate for HN. It sounds like you follow HN, so you know how threads on contentious articles go. Do what you can to make it better. (And make a conscious effort to not make it worse.) That includes commenting within the guidelines, such as not commenting on downvotes or mentioning you're flagging articles or complaining that a submission is inappropriate for HN. If you really think there's abuse going on, do contact the mods via the contact link in the footer: they want members to bring things like that to their attention so they can address it.

Honestly, there's really little else you can do, but I think it's enough. Which is why I'm taking the time for this comment. Anyway, best wishes.

Is it libelous to interpret someones words in a way they don't like?

It is libelous to say that someone said something that they did not say (assuming, as in all cases, that what you say could hurt their reputation in the community). There a spectrum of behavior: one the one hand, there are straight up misquotes—where you attribute a direct quote improperly. On the other hand, there are synthetic statements, where you 'sum up' what someone has said in a distilled way.

In this case, TC would argue that they are distilling his memo by using the phrase "biologically less capable of engineering". Personally (and as a former lawyer, but not a libel lawyer), I think this position is not especially strong, since he focused mostly, if not exclusively, on inclination-type evidence. If you're going to give a one-sentence summary of the memo, you probably shouldn't refer to ability instead of inclination.

And given that the person they're talking about just sued Google, I'd say it's unwise to use a characterization like this—even if it is ultimately legally justifiable. Why not say "biologically less suited for engineering", which would encompass the possibility of both ability and desire?

> you probably shouldn't refer to ability instead of inclination.

Maybe you shouldn't, but it ain't libel.

IANAL, but I think so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation

> I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

Not if it is anything resembling a reasonable interpretation of the text.

I was curious about this statement also, because he doesn't present any evidence of different abilites in the memo. On a reddit AMA, he explained that he had actually removed the ability-related evidence, which isn't what you'd expect: instead of showing that women have less of an ability to code, the evidence suggests that women who have high math ability are more likely to have high verbal ability also, vis a vis men with high math ability. So women with high math ability have more options than men, on average, because they're likely to have more verbal ability as well. These women can then pursue jobs in other areas, whereas the men with high math ability don't have those options and therefore pursue things like coding.

I'm not weighing in on whether this evidence (which was based on SAT, IIRC) is correct or has been interpreted validly. I'm just pointing out that this was what Damore claimed (after the snafu arose—so take with at least a grain of salt) this statement was in reference to. I'd love to know if others have different information, especially if it was in earlier drafts of the doc.