Jumping in on a bandwagon to signal group membership in an in group can help brand-building. Going against the in group is potentially fatal to your brand. The risk/reward balance does not favor genuine discussion of a controversial topic.

On HN most comments are up/down voted based on their content. The post authorship usually matters little. There is little benefit for the author to announce support of a popular position and little risk for the author to express an unpopular one. So discussion here can be more about substance and less about signaling.

What a fucked up world we live in.

Also accounts here are not like on reddit. You gain power with accepted comments. That's the most echo'y power dynamic imaginable. If you don't play the old boy's game, you can't participate and shape the conversation.

So, HN, are you gonna give me voting rights or will you kill me, too?

Another obvious problem: she keeps being described as a highly respected AI researcher, a leader of the field etc. Er, no. I read a lot of AI papers. I don't respect Gebru or the sub-field of AI ethnics much at all. What's happening here is simple: criticising a black woman in tech is impossible to do under your own name in corporate America, as radical leftists will immediately set out as a group to destroy you. The only acceptable position is to praise her and claim she's a genius. On HN and Reddit you can see what people really think and it's very far from that.

This is one of the reasons I prefer HN to just about any other online forum.

On Twitter I can choose to follow POC, women, experts inside/outside this field and hear their opinion—-which I’d argue provides a more diverse representation than anonymous posts by a largely white male message board.

I also trust the opinion of someone willing to share their identity, it forces you to think more carefully about the stand you’re taking when your reputation is on the line.

The opinion of someone anonymous is probably very close to their true opinion. The opinion of non-anonymous users on Twitter is almost certainly censored.

(Are you confusing this with her email that said that participating in Google's feel-good diversity and inclusion work, specifically, was pointless and should stop, so that people could focus on their real jobs - such as research - instead of wasting time placating unknown managers?)

Anyway, my theory re your question is that Reddit and HN are usually pseudonymous, and so you have no idea whether the person saying something actually knows anything about Google or actually participates in the industry. The norm on Twitter is to use your real identity, and so comments from Googlers and ex-Googlers are boosted there. On Reddit and HN, good-sounding first-principles arguments are boosted. The two models are better at different kinds of discussions.

> What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. [...]

> So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen.

(It seems to consistently use the word "paper" instead of "document" for research.)

And Jeff Dean's reply identifies that she was asking to stop the DEI work, not to stop research:

> I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t.

The James Damore episode is another example. It is essentially 100% equivalent to what Timnit has done in this chain of events, but in that case the “wokeness” bloc on Twitter called for Damore’s firing and railed against his perspective - virtually a complete double standard compared to how they view Timnit’s behavior.

By the mostly anonymous nature of Hacker News, and the removal of any type of social credit for patronage of different ideologues, the commentary here is able to be much more nuanced and try to really account for a much greater variety of facts or perspectives.

She made her managers mad while he made half the company mad.

Why do you and other keep propagating this myth?

If anything I think you are making it harder for women in IT:

You are building a narrative that many respected people doesn't respect girls in IT which probably makes it even harder for them to choose IT.

Also I think you are building up under the idea that men and women are enemies in the workplace.

At this point I think it is well established for anyone that cared to read what he actually wrote that he was trying to help bring more women into Google, not saying that those who were there were somehow unworthy.

The claims themselves, that innate biological differences between men and women can partly account for their different representation in hiring in certain professions, is pretty much beyond dispute and has so much academic research supporting it that it’s pure gaslighting to treat someone like they are sexist or discriminating or biased for saying so. Note this has to do with factors that lead to representation in certain fields, and is not a statement about whether people of a given gender actually perform jobs in that field in any better or worse way.

Both Gebru and Damore are pushing agenda-based interpretations of existing facts, and both are doing so in ways that are not appropriate for a professional workplace.

I am glad at least to see that Google handled both situations relatively consistently, given how extremely similar in scope and impact Gebru’s comments are to Damore’s.

Damore said more than just that there might be reasons for the lack of women in tech. He also said that we should stop trying to increase their representation. Among a bunch of other things.

Re: Damore, I agree. He was pushing a bad agenda that tried to draw more than is reasonable from some academic research on gender disparity.

Very, very similar to what Gebru did as well. First by pushing agendas in a publication leading to its disapproval, then in her follow up email.

The direct quote (which can be read in the link [0]) is:

> “What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference.”

This is a direct, explicit, unequivocal reference to researchers and ethicists employed by Google to write research and policy documents on fairness, DE&I, and bias, within machine learning, staffing and hiring, and other areas.

The phrase, “stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference,” cannot be falsely made to apply to any context other than actively encouraging coworkers to specifically stop performing their direct job responsibilities.

My suspicion is that you would try to falsely misrepresent Timnit’s imploring to stop work as instead being about some type of non-work related activities or optional / extra-curricular activities that Google wouldn’t have a formal labor productivity stake in - and if that is in fact what your response would be, it is completely and wholly false and wrong.

[0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...

In poker terms: one party bluffed and the other party called the bluff.

Now whether the clauses were abusive and the company was compelled to satisfy these conditions is left to lawyers, I suppose. I'm not privy to more details to have an opinion one way or the other.

The job is to increase diversity and inclusion, not to write documents. Programmers get this in other domains (the job isn’t to write lines of code, but to provide value to customers), but suddenly become naive when it comes to things like this.

I heard buying Twitter bots is cheap.

Because there are lots of FAANG engineers in here (i.e. working at Google, or with friends working at Google, or working at companies who do the same nasty AI stuff as Google) so them unconditionally supporting Gebru on this would be against their direct financial interests. It's as simple as that.

There's significant overlap between FAANG employees (and SV tech employees in general) and Woke Twitter.