Comment by YorkshireSeason
7 years ago
The salient difference is that outages are measurable.
In contrast, "harassment" is an extremely controversial subject that nobody agrees upon, for example, in some legislations, calling a person with XY chromosomes "him" rather than "her" is considered a hate crime, a dramatic change from labelling conventions of just a few years ago. Indeed what constitutes harassment is a major point of contention between different parts of the political spectrum, and a core part of the culture wars.
In addition, harassment is easily lied about. Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
If I was a Google competitor, and Machiavellian in moral outlook, I'd feed those flames to weaken Google, and hope that nobody did it to my organisation.
Divide et Impera!
And only a few short decades ago I could fire someone for being gay, or forbid my wife from opening a bank account. And it was a mere century ago that women literally couldn't vote.
I don't see why the fact that social mores change invalidates the social standard we have today.
Furthermore, why do you folk always jump straight to the "b..b..but false harassment!" argument? All it does is demonstrate that you actually don't care at all about the original problem.
Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
So why are you willing to throw 90-98% of harassed women to the sharks, in order to protect 2-10% of accused men? Plus there's the whole strawman that allegations are always believed. Of course there should be fact checking. In fact, even in the #metoo era, men almost never face repercussions for false allegations (and often not for real ones.)
Your statement that unfounded harassment claims do not lead to repercussions is flat out false. There is no company that would not discipline someone for bringing a harassment claim that was demonstrated to be false.
In short: this argument demonstrates that what you really want to do is only to preserve the status quo and do in fact not give a shit about a major problem in our culture.
The social standards we have today include that false accusations of harassment largely have no repercussions, and amount to a destruction of standards of justice. I don't want to live in a totalitarian society where hate-mobs replace argument, why do you promote one?
I care about the original problem, but believe it to be marginal in comparison with the false accusation problem, and the decline of standards of justice.
The article you cite does not provide any evidence of this claim whatsoever, did you even read it?
You seem to think that marginal inconveniences of women (let's not forget that the Google mob was protesting because some guy hit on some woman at a party!), is more important that human rights of men?
> Experts place false sexual misconduct allegations at 2-10% (https://qz.com/980766/the-truth-about-false-rape-accusations...), and estimate that that number would be even lower if you include all the women who were harassed and never report to start with.
Those numbers are specifically for rape, not sexual misconduct. I would hope that the false accusation rate for violent felonies is pretty low. Assuming this is still the case with lesser charges or non-criminal behavior is disingenuous.
> what downsides are there for false harassment claims
There are major downsides to making true harassment claims: you get denounced as a liar and a slut. This is the main reason why so many claims went unreported, and the #metoo movement is one of solidarity which makes it possible for people to actually report true claims without ruining their career. Actually deliberately making a false harassment claim is potentially career suicide.
(Jacob Wohl thought it would be easy to bribe people into making false harassment claims, and this blew up in his face: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/robert-mue... )
How is that a "major downside"? I've been called both, and I can't say I care. I can imagine that loosing a job to a false accusation is a "major downside".
Isn't that the movement whose leader Asia Argento has been has been accused by the New York Times as a sexual harasser [1, 2]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Argento#Alleged_sexual_as...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/us/asia-argento-assault-j...
So because Asia Argento has sexually harassed someone, the MeToo movement is discredited? Some of the comments in this thread are unbelievable
You know, just because you don't empathize with how in our culture and society a woman being called a "liar and a slut" can be both career and social suicide, doesn't mean that it isn't a major downside for other people...
Does the actions of a leader discredit a movement? Can one even say that #MeToo has a single leader? Do you know anything about the #MeToo movement?
> Indeed, what downsides are there for false harassment claims?
Many people who get harassed opt to change teams, companies, or professions rather than actually pursue a formal complaint against their harasser. Perhaps they are mistaken (I don't think so), but they seem to believe that there are real downsides to filing even true harassment claims, to the extent that the aforementioned career upheavals seem easier.
> Perhaps they are mistaken, but they seem to believe that there are real downsides to filing even true harassment claims
Why can’t both be true?
For what you are implying to make any sense you have to assume some sort of equivalence:
1) Between the kind of woman who makes a false claim and the kind of woman who makes a true one.
AND
2) Between the kind of man who is guilty and the kind of man who is falsely accused.
I don’t think either of these two claims holds any water.
Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims? You think all harassment claims should be automatically dismissed as false instead?
No, of course not. Symmetrically, the should also not automatically accepted as true.
There should be an objective, measurable process. Given the cul-de-sac that organisations like Google have been strong-armed into, I think the obvious next step is
(1) to record all work-time interaction of all employees and store them for a long time, e.g. at least 10 years.
(2) Give a absolutely clear-cut criteria as to what counts as acceptable behaviour and what doesn't.
>No, of course not. Symmetrically, the should also not automatically accepted as true.
This. I imagine most are absolutely true, but there are some that absolutely are not. I've personally been accused by rape, online, of someone in another state that I've never even been to. Fortunately, no one took the claim serious but I imagine there are many innocent people that have been wrongly accused for whatever reason.
I also had a friend, that was using OkCupid, reject a girl very politely in the first message or two. She then went on 'cheaterville' and posted that he gave her sexual transmitted diseases/infections and made multiple accounts alleging the same, one even as him with his name. He's an actor, he was up for a role and they retracted their offer when googling his name brought the cheaterville page up on the first page. Now if these two instances have happened to 2 guys from the midwest that have no power or money, I can only imagine there are quite a few false accusations regularly. I also imagine there are many many more TRUE accusations.
We need to protect individuals regardless of race, gender and sexual orientation but at the same time we need to avoid workplace harassment turning into McCarthyism.
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> store them for a long time, e.g. at least 10 years.
Not sufficient. Should store them for at least 36 years.
> Even if you believe that, why shouldn’t there be a process to investigate the claims?
Because it quickly becomes a witch-hunt.
It is hard enough to have a fair investigation within a proper court system and legal framework - it’s far more likely any Google process will end up as a kangaroo court than the process leading to any justice.
So you think all claims should be dismissed as false and people who are actually subjected to sexual harassment and coercion at work should have no recourse.
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You do a chromosomal analysis on everyone before you use a gendered pronoun to describe them? Because you can't tell what their chromosomes are just by appearance.
I can have an educated guess from just a brief glance -- especially if the other person doesn't actively tries to mislead me on such an important issue.
And why the fuck do you care about other people's chromosomes?
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