This comment breaks the HN guidelines in a bunch of ways, starting from the "I'm going to get downvoted" cliché.
The rules here don't require you to agree with anyone, but they do require you to be civil, not call names, and avoid gratuitous negativity. The things you're saying about others here ("engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people", "Sand Hill Road Gordon Gecko wannabes", and so on) not only break those rules, they're pretty vicious. That's emphatically not what this site is for! If you can't restrain yourself from doing that, please don't comment here until you can.
Please (re)-read the descriptions of what we are looking for on this site:
As it happens, we've been working on the largest changes to the HN guidelines since taking over from pg in 2014, and nearly all the coming changes have to do with reducing further the kind of comment you posted here.
Please note that none of this has to do with the particular view of cities, technology (or whatever the substantive topic at issue is) that you favor. On the contrary, when you express your views this way, you discredit them in the mind the neutral reader. So following the HN rules will not only help the community, it will help your argument as well.
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity."
I would absolutely say these things face to face, because I believe them to be true. I'm happy to go into detail on the first comment, and the second is hyperbolic metaphor. You've seen "Wall Street"? I don't think it's so far off from the truth here.
Also, the "downvoted" comment was less a cliche, but more an acknowledgement based on previous experience. I'm happy to engage in deeply rational discussion around issues like basic income, the automation problem, and the issues specific to the Bay Area, but my comments keep getting downvoted far below the fold.
You broke the rules badly and it would be better to simply take responsibility for that.
> I would absolutely say these things face to face
There's no reading of the HN guidelines by which the claim 'no really, I would be that rude to someone's face' makes it ok to post what you posted. I often hear this from people who think they've found a loophole in the civility rule. But obviously there's no such loophole. 'Don't say things you wouldn't say in person' is there as an example of incivility, not as a limit outside which hey it's ok.
Besides, I believe better of you than that you'd really tell someone to their face that they're an "engineer detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people" or the other horrible things you said. Keep in mind that you're talking about real humans here. The anonymous internet makes it easy to feel like you're simply slamming the Man in the service of righteousness. But that's what everyone who's being uncivil always feels, and none of us has the right to indulge it here.
In terms of the empathy and lack of spirit to the community, a cursory search through HN archives for the word "deserve" can summon a mountain of comments by people demanding to know why someone who grew up in neighborhoods like the Mission and has been priced out deserves to live there.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that last link seems like something Robert Moses would have done (and did, many times).
Regarding the Gordon Gecko comment: there seems to be a growing sentiment that greed is good, and making profit at the expense of all else is paramount. I'm speaking of the attitude that lead Mark Pincus to threaten his employees with firing at the expense of their own stock options: http://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-st...
Or the fact that Zuckerberg seems to think giving a controlled version of what the rest of the world calls the Internet to developing countries, maintaining control of what they see, while parading around as if he's the savior of the little guy.
On the note about "anonymity": it seems Facebook did not learn anything from the Google nymwars, a topic I could give you hours worth of evidence on. In terms of "real humans", I have no doubt that the people I am criticizing are human and not gods, but I wonder if they remember that. They certainly don't act as if all the people they are displacing are.
I'm not about "slamming the Man" or righteousness, whatever that is. But I do believe the social balance has shifted too far in one direction, and needs brutal, honest, discussion about why that is and whether it can be returned.
If you do not believe this is the correct forum for such a discussion, I'm happy to re-engage with you elsewhere, the more public the better :)
I just wanted to say I liked your comment, in particular the criticism about "blank slate" redesign being historically difficult, the need for study of problems and solutions in existing cities (and study of existing studies of cities), and the dangers of "success", especially given the pernicious reliance on metrics in the tech world today. That said, I can see why it was flagged: the jabs at YC and the tech industry in general are basically flame bait and aren't necessary to make your argument.
That's reasonable. I was pretty upset when I started writing the piece, and feel more rational now.
However, by "aspie" I specifically mean someone detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people. Is there a better word you would suggest I could use?
People with Aspergers often have to turn off emotions because they are too intense, the rationality is a coping mechanism. People perceive a lack of emotion, but really it is just that it is easier to view the world as rational than it is to cope with accepting the irrationality. I say this with three psychiatrist-diagnosed (pre DSM revision) "Aspies" in my immediate family.
Feeling emotions, feeling empathy and having a sense of duty towards others are three different things. Lacking emotions would probably be considered an affective disorder or unipolar depression. Lacking empathy can be antisocial personality disorder or other personality disorders at the most extreme end. And lacking a sense of duty towards others could be anything really.
I have found that Aspies actually want to help the world, and that the hard part is actually doing the interfacing with the world. Phone calls with neutrotypical people, pretending to be extroverted enough to keep a job, trying to explain things and take people's fear response into consideration without just reducing it to a question of binaries and logic. That is the hard part.
> However, by "aspie" I specifically mean someone detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people. Is there a better word you would suggest I could use?
"People detached from emotion and any sense of duty toward other people" -- not every idea has a good single-word term.
Of course, that would still be an improper mass insult in the context in which it was used, but at least it wouldn't be using a slur for people with a particular mental health diagnosis.
