Silicon Valley’s Safe Space
Having followed SSC for a number of years in the mid-2010s, I eventually just started drifting away. The so-called Grey Tribe is really just toxicity that&#x27;s managed to talk itself into self-unawareness. Case in point, quoted from the article:<p>&gt; The main reason computer scientists, mathematicians and other groups were predominantly male was not that the industries were sexist, he argued, but that women were simply less interested in joining.<p>This is exactly the sort of thing you manage to convince yourself of when you don&#x27;t want to be a part of the people calling themselves the good guys, but also don&#x27;t want to throw in with the sorts of people comfortable with being called the bad guys. Everybody in the Blue Tribe is going to precisely see the toxic nature of this statement. Women aren&#x27;t interested in joining because of the sexist nature of the industries. Reversing the order of the causation is making excuses for sexism and is itself sexist.<p>The New York Times <i>does not have to explain this to its audience</i>. They already know. All they really have to do is list the cavalcade of toxicity that the community produced and everybody who has been in the Blue Tribe for years will know the score, and people like me who were actually a part of it and drifted away from the Grey Tribe to join the Blue Tribe are nodding their heads.<p>Now, this is Hacker News, this community is very close to the SSC one, so I know a lot of people aren&#x27;t going to take this well.  But the Grey Tribe really isn&#x27;t a nice place to be, and the sooner you can realize this, the sooner you can find actual political heft in the world.<p>Contrarian logic <i>sucks</i>. Rationalism isn&#x27;t all it&#x27;s cracked up to be. It sucks all the life out of the air for minorities. When you state a contrarian opinion like it&#x27;s fact, like it should be considered <i>because you&#x27;re the one saying it</i>, and the reason you&#x27;re stating it is none other than you don&#x27;t like all those nasty SJWs, you&#x27;re denying the lived experience of all the people out there who spent their lives being one of those oppressed minorities. All of those girls who hide their gender from their gaming pals. All those Black Americans who discover that the tech landscape doesn&#x27;t reward knowledge and talent as much as it does the right race and skin color.<p>It may be a little better in the tech industry than it might be, say, in the construction industry, but to pretend these things don&#x27;t exist or aren&#x27;t as important as what your mind sees as bigger is, well, toxic. And it&#x27;s the cornerstone of the Grey Tribe mindset.