[FD3SA]

I have a policy to return hostility in kind. The commenter DanBC was being vulgar without making any points, so I decided to respond in a manner befitting his tone.

But since you seem to be a levelheaded individual, I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly.

Let's start with the parent comment:

>When those gender roles are all but constant across countless independently developed cultures existent over tens of thousands of years, with distribution of visible physical traits to match them, it's pretty safe to assume that they're baked into our DNA and not some random whim of western culture. Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers. There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.

There is absolutely nothing controversial about this statement to a trained biologist. In fact, you could not get through an undergraduate degree in biology if you did not understand sexual dimorphism, r/K selection theory, and the sexual specialization that results. As such, there is nothing political about the statement. It is merely a statement of the current scientific understanding of the evolutionary history of homo sapiens.

Now let's look at your response:

>This turn into generic gender-war predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat. Perhaps elsewhere on the Internet there is a spot where people haven't had enough of these yet, but HN isn't one. Note the guidelines: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

So, the statement of scientific consensus stated by the original comment is labelled by a moderator as "gender-war" which "predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat." And you summarise with saying HN has had enough, and the debate is to be ended.

So I just want to be clear, which branches of evolutionary biology, and science in general, are off limits to discuss on HN? And how does censoring known science help critical thought and discussions regarding the current entrepreneurial markets in tech?

Thank you for your time.

EDIT: to address your final statement:

>It takes a lot of energy to post these responses, and it's hard to justify the investment when you're not making any effort to be civil, and when instead of open-mindedness you display only a desire to score ideological points.

It is a bold assertion that stating known science is "a desire to score ideological points." This line of thinking demonstrates more about the reader, and less about the material. Evolutionary biology is not an ideology, it is a science. Stating it does not make one an ideologue, but an empiricist.

[dang]

> I have a policy to return hostility in kind.

In that case you can't comment here. "But he started it" is an acceptable excuse neither from 5-year-olds nor from HN commenters. It always feels like the other person started it and did worse.

> I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly

This is obviously just polemic, and boilerplate at that. We might as well "discuss" whether I've stopped beating my wife.

Ideological harangues have no place on this site, so please don't post any more of them.

[FD3SA]

You've confirmed all my suspicions regarding HN and YC's ideological positions.

Thank you, I will not be posting further on this site or directing any business your way.

[tomhoward]

As I pointed out in another comment in this thread, in this past 24 hours Dang has been attacked in a similar way from someone on the opposite side of this debate to you.

And as I also said in that comment, if you knew what a decent and thoughtful person Dang is, and how deeply emotionally invested he is in making HN a place of civility and intellectually stimulating discussion, you'd be appalled at how cruel you and others have been to him in this thread.

[ryanx435]

To be fair to the person you are responding too, he is right: your totalitarian censorship was the primary reason I did not apply to Y combinator with my startup and refuse to comment on new threads, except on special circumstances such as this.

You are a petty tyrant, dang, working for an organization actively trying to push an agenda by suppressing reason and free speech.

I hope you rot in hell.

[tomhoward]

I hope you rot in hell.

Holy shit.

So this is considered a proportionate response to a person's efforts to cultivate civil discussion and hold firm in the face of escalating incivility.

You may not be aware that HN is an independent arm of YC.

Yes Dang is a salaried employee of YC, but he's a talented programmer who could probably earn a much better living doing something else.

He does this job because he loves HN and is emotionally invested in making it a safe place for intellectually stimulating discussions.

You should consider that Dang gets comments that are equally vitriolic from people on the opposite side of this debate to you. He did in another thread in the past 24 hours. So this is nothing about pushing some YC-driven PC agenda.

This is simply about avoiding topics that give people license to co-opt science or any other justification to be mean to one another and degenerating out of control, just as this one has.

If you knew Dang and knew how burdened he was by the sense of obligation to this community (not to YC) to keep it a civil and intellectually stimulating place, you'd be devastated at what a cruel comment it is that you've made here.

[DanBC]

It's amazing, disappointing, to see that comment not heavily downvoted or flagged.

[tomhoward]

I think (and hope) that's more to do with it being late in the thread and flying under the radar than any kind of endorsement from any significant portion of the community.

Skirmishes like this aside, on the whole I find things good and continually getting better here in terms of civility and interesting content.

But my God, what it must be like for Dan to have to go to sleep with the thought "today a person told me that he hopes I rot in hell because he disagreed with the way I went about trying to hose down a flame war".