[Millennium]

What is discrimination? We don't even have a consensus answer to that question yet, except in terms so broad and vague that they cease to be useful. So we break down into factions that attempt to define it unilaterally, which never ends well.

"Just stop discriminating" sounds like such a simple phrase, but the truth is that it's loaded with very complex and personal issues and meanings. The biggest blowups we've seen recently ultimately reduce to very passionate disagreements about the particulars of what it means to discriminate. Until that gets resolved, we're not going to be able to go very much further.

[papsosouid]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination

Why is feigned ignorance of a basic, well-understood word such a common approach to argument on HN? I've seen this many times now, where people seem to want to insist "problem X is unsolvable because you can't even define Y".

[Millennium]

The word itself is neither as basic nor well-understood as you claim. Even the very Wikipedia definition you link is too vague to be useful. To give a pertinent example, what does it mean to be treated "in a way that is worse than the way people are usually treated"? Is it necessary for someone to be treated differently from others to be treated worse, or is it possible for identical actions to be "worse" for one person than for another? If the latter case is true, then who ought to decide what constitutes "worse," and on what grounds? Is it possible for this arbiter to come to an unreasonable conclusion, and what happens then?

The questions I asked in that last paragraph are not empty rhetoric. Their answers have major ramifications for current debates: I chose these particular questions because they basically define the different sides of the Adria Richards case. Yet each side treats its answers as self-evident and takes that self-evidence as entitlement to act unilaterally, pushing their definitions onto others rather than attempting to achieve consensus. Is it any wonder that things get so heated in such an environment? I'm no more immune to it than anyone else.