Being unaware of something is orthogonal to being affected by it. I was similar to you - mostly non-defaults, which made me miss how bad the larger site had become over time. It’s easy to overlook.

I don't think that's correct. Certainly you're less likely to be aware of something if you aren't affected by it. I think maybe we programmers just overuse the word orthogonal.

But regardless, as concerning as these policing decisions are, it's not clear how any of this stuff affects a reader of only apolitical, non-default subreddits.

I’m not a programmer. I’m a statistician. I think your observation about orthogonality is correct from your industry’s perspective, though I’ve used it correctly from the context of mine (meaning statistically independent, or uncorrelated, variables). And I disagree that awareness is correlated to personal impact when it comes to sociocultural concepts like racism, or sexism, or the dynamics and behavior of an online community.

I appreciate the attempted correction despite it being wrong.

Edit: Sigh, HN being HN. I’m rate limited and can’t respond to persistent, sustained miscorrection over a single word choice in a much broader point, because I spent all my thought tokens defending the word choice, which matters approximately zero, instead of the point.

You said:

  Being unaware of something is orthogonal to being affected by it.

You truly believe that being aware of something and being affected my that same thing are independent and uncorrelated? So if a bomb goes off, my awareness of it is not at all dependent on, or correlated with, whether or not I was in the blast zone (and thus affected by it)?

Edit: The parent has edited their comment since my reply to be more specific. I'm not sure I agree, but it's now not as obviously wrong as I outlined here.

The parent is not a very good statistician, is what I got from this exchange.