That's the No True Scotsman fallacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

> The majority of the real, actual suffering going on right now has little to do with tech.

> It’s the people turned into refugees thanks to geopolitics, it’s the DACA kids afraid ICE is just around the corner to break up their family, it’s the women being systemically assaulted, it’s the malnourished and maleducated kids among America’s poor

Tech has non-trivially contributed or stood idly by while all these happened.

Everyone has stood by while this has happened, more so than Tech in many cases, for example, with respect to immigration, the major tech companies have filed amicus briefs with courts, lobbied politicians, and pleaded with the Trump administration to stop what they're doing.

And while tech companies have been accused at various rates of sexual harassment, do we really think the big tech companies aren't trying to mitigate these issues to a greater degree than say, Hollywood or Wall Street Investment Banks (or the VC industry)? Are tech companies destroying the environment as fast as Koch Industries, or are they actually trying to be carbon neutral? Are they at least trying to cleanup their supply chain's bloody parts, or are they lobbying politicians to legalize pollution and bloody exploitation. (e.g. Apple and blood minerals vs Union Carbide/Dow)

Your usage of the fallacy is incorrect BTW, this isn't a No True Scotsman fallacy, no where did I assert that tech companies don't do things which could harm society. My point is, the focus of HN is to obsess about tech companies behavior and avoid the far greater harm that non-tech (i.e. non-software) have done, principally because their interests are primarily talking about tech and how it relates to everything, and it is a myopic view of tech as the center of the universe: it either is the center of great harm, or the utopian solution to everything.

The real problems of the world require messy, political problems that don't include the skills of geeks or silicon valley, they include things you can't calculate, engineer, or apply rigid principles to.

So at worst, you can say my fallacy is "whataboutism", but in this case, the "whataboutism" is real. Lots of people crying about AI Skynets and full spectrum surveillance, and none about basic inequality. Why? Because a tech geek can imagine a way to filter cookies, or implement Asimov laws, but they can't imagine how to convince millions of people to stop voting for candidates who promise not to raise their taxes and stop giving money to "freeloaders" The real squishy, soft problems can't be solved with code on GitHub.

Yes, we can tackle both issues, both what tech companies are doing wrong and what non-tech companies are doing, but it is a false equivalence to say they're causing equal levels of damage, right now we haven't even cleaned up the historical legacy damage caused by the old economy, and we're talking about paying large amount of attention hypothetical threats and damages?

> Everyone has stood by while this has happened, more so than Tech in many cases, for example, with respect to immigration

First, I don't think that's the case, because it's impossible to open any media website, tv channel, or newspaper without being inundated with a very uniform opinion with regards to what Trump is doing. The folks who do not like what is being done are doing anything but idly standing by. Whether their protestations will or should be heard is a different question.

Second, what Trump is doing - or at least, what it can be proven that he is doing - is so far entirely within the scope of the powers of the office and is within law. What sort of things can be done about the actions of the President as long as he's acting within the law?

Let's not forget that roughly half the country wanted this - what of them? It's easy to act as though the opposing side's argument has no merit, but what if you actually consider their idealized motivation, from at least a sympathetic-for-argument's-sake mindset? These are not fools and monsters, and they do have their reasons for feeling and thinking the way they do. Discounting that from the outset leads only to enmity.

> Lots of people crying about AI Skynets and full spectrum surveillance, and none about basic inequality. Why? Because a tech geek can imagine a way to filter cookies, or implement Asimov laws, but they can't imagine how to convince millions of people to stop voting for candidates who promise not to raise their taxes and stop giving money to "freeloaders"

What if the geeks themselves see inequality as a natural outcome of any possible system that enables people to advance themselves? What if there do exist freeloaders, in an innumerable multitude of forms? What if someone doesn't believe that a government that we can all agree is incapable of handling infrastructure maintenance or any meaningful reorganization of itself shouldn't be trusted to take even more money and "redistribute" it to whomever it deems most worthy at any given moment?

I don't think that folks with these ideas necessarily want the worst for anyone. I think they just have very different ideas about what is needed and what is feasible in terms of improving quality of life for everyone.

If you want to play at whataboutism, you must know that it can be fired back just as easily. It's not entirely useless or without merit as a discussion method but it doesn't really lead us to answers.

> what Trump is doing - or at least, what it can be proven that he is doing - is so far entirely within the scope of the powers of the office and is within law. What sort of things can be done about the actions of the President as long as he's acting within the law?

What can be done is exactly what's being done: Challenge him in the courts, lobby congress to make changes, vote in the midterms to change congress.

>What if the geeks themselves see inequality as a natural outcome...

What if the geeks themselves are people who read Atlas Shrugged as teenagers, fantasized about revenge for years of bullying in school, and now feel justified in their new status as meritocratically earned and confirmation of their inherent worth.

In other words, people with a false theory of meritocracy, that justifies their own serendipitous gains in life, grants little weight to those unlucky enough to be born in unfortunate situations (e.g oh, you were born to bad parents in a crack infested neighborhood? The fact that you're not rich is obviously your fault for not studying in school hard enough, and your claims that I need to pay more taxes so your family can freeload for generations is unfair to me)

What if people who believe in libertarianism have no scientific data to back up their claims of efficacy? That there's no correlation between say, marginal tax rates and economic growth? That views on government incompetence are self fulfilling? What if they're completely wrong about the ability of the market to account for negative externalities and self correct before irreparable damage in rendered to the environmental or society?

What if meritocracy is bullshit, and that the people who ride at the top of the pyramid get there based on who they know, and not what they personally achieve? What if two people who work equally hard and are equally smart, results in one being in abject poverty and the other being fantastically rich because the latter had met a wealthy and connected family friend when they attended Stanford?

What if claiming that opposition to laissez-faire capitalism doesn't mean you're a Marxist and doesn't mean you want to punish success? What if you see a crisis in capitalism coming from automation that will cause vast swaths of humanity to be structurally unemployed and that Universal Basic Income (the dreaded "redistribution" word) might be necessary in the end?

What if the predictable consequence of Trump's tax cuts is a $2 trillion deficit, and the vast majority of the corporate profits plowed into stock buybacks and executive compensation, and the bottom 10% ends up worse?

What if either-or is a logical fallacy, and that a system can enable and incentivize advancement without being winner-take-all? What if people won't stop trying to be entrepreneurs and get rich, even if you raise their taxes by 10% to pay for universal health care, or college? What if a vibrant social safety net encourages more people to take entrepreneurial risks because failure doesn't mean destitution?

What if Silicon Valley Techno-Libertarians, especially of the Peter Thiel type, have a dogmatic, unsupported view of success and failure, ascribe too much of their own situation only to their own volition and actions they're taken, and then go on echo chamber sites arguing against redistribution, affirmative action, and other attempts to limit the most damaging negative externalities of a winner-take-all system?