These social justice warriors may seem well-meaning, but ultimately they are parasites. Their mission is never-ending and ultimately they overreach and this is the result.
I just want to work with smart people. I don't care what gender they associate themselves with, what color they are, whether there's an equal distribution of any of these characteristics in my department. I just want to do my job and learn from smart people. Why can't it be as simple as that?
I, too, dream of a world where I can work with smart people without regard to their race, sexuality, gender, whatever, but it is naive to think that we are already living in that world.
Like it or not, the entire system is stacked against minorities in ways that aren't even obvious or noticeable from a position of privilege. I work as an engineer in an office of 120 people in the East Bay. There are three black people working in the office. One of them is the receptionist. If we assume that there are no racial differences in technical ability, then the demographics of my office should roughly mirror the demographics of the surrounding community. Oakland is 28% black (according to the 2010 census), meaning in a fair, unbiased system we should have roughly 30-35 black people working in the office. I am sure that no hiring manager has set out to exclude black people from their postings, but there are centuries of history and deeply ingrained biases that have led to a severe under-representation of African-Americans in this industry, same with every other minority.
Until we are truly operating on a level playing field, I am 100% in favour of scholarships based on giving under-represented minorities more opportunities. It is not discrimination to exclude white men from these scholarships. It is recognizing the centuries of privilege we have had and saying that we want give other people the opportunities we have be given simply by existing.
Also not obvious or noticeable from a position of privilege: many, many white men have no opportunities or privilege and thus are discriminated against for simply being the same race and gender as a very thin slice of upperclass society.
While it is true that many white men come from a background where, for any number of reasons, they are not afforded the same opportunities as, say, a white boy from Cupertino, they are still given opportunities and privilege because they were lucky enough to be born a white man. I know this first-hand because I grew up in a rural farming community in Vermont that was more than 95% white and poverty-stricken. Of course, not everyone in my community went to university, but when I did, no one questioned whether I belonged there because I was still a white man. Now that I have a doctorate and work at a big tech company, no one questions whether I belong here either. The same can not be said for a Hispanic or African American man (or even a white woman) who is in my position.
Unfortunately, an inevitable result of AA-type hiring is that everyone--including the candidates themselves--will wonder whether people hired this way are really up to snuff. You can censor, but you can't stop people from reasoning internally.
No, my mother was a teacher and my father a manager at the local hospital. So while we weren't rich, we were definitely not poverty stricken either.
I cannot speak much to the experience of poor white people in the tech community, but, at least anecdotally, I know of two other people I went to high school with who also went into tech. One is still in the industry as far as I know and the other left it a few years ago. (For reference, I am in my early 30s)
Edit: and I can totally affirm that being a white man from a poor family absolutely afforded me more privilege than being a woman or a minority. I can pass as middle class by losing my accent and picking up a nice suit on the cheap.
I'm a white guy who was born into a poor, solo parent family situation. I still had privilege due to my colour. Example: no-one ever looked at me and wondered whether I was going to steal something from their shop just on the basis of my skin colour. When I went to school, no-one discouraged me from high-level achievement or assumed that I should do sports based on my colour (and where I come from, this definitely happens to people)
I'm a little peeved at people dismissing their privilege just because their life wasn't perfect. That's not what privilege means.
I mean, when an otherwise identical resume with the first name changed from Brad to Tyrone cuts the interview callbacks by 3x, it's hard to argue that these problems have been solved.
I've also had a boss in tech that refused to hire women engineers. And another boss that lied to the state department to get someone here on asylum (who coincidentally was the hardest worker I've met) sent back, because "Mexicans should go back to where they came from". Spoiler, the guy wasn't even Mexican, just brown.
It does when those events and the decades that followed have prevented minorities from having the opportunities to become a good engineer. This isn't about you and I not recognizing talent in front of us, it's about giving that talent a chance to stand in front of, and ideally next to, us.
>It does when those events and the decades that followed have prevented minorities from having the opportunities to become a good engineer. This isn't about you and I not recognizing talent in front of us, it's about giving that talent a chance to stand in front of, and ideally next to, us.
Oh please. For decades, in the US, there have been programs designed to attract women and minorities to engineering and tech careers. I am of the opinion* that in 2018, women or minorities who are are not in tech, are not in tech because of choices they freely made. Any remnants of discrimination are negligible compared to the advantages that have been heaped upon them.
*I'm sure many disagree with the opinion expressed above, and that's OK. I'm sure many also agree with it. But I would bet that holy hell would break loose if I were to express that opinion in a discussion forum of a FOSS project that has been co-opted by the SJW scolds. And your opinion, which I was responding to, would be permitted.
It's an opinion that makes it very hard to work with you, if I were a woman or minority. I wouldn't want you to review my code, wondering if you think I'm competent or if I'm an entitled person benefiting from unfair "advantages that have been heaped upon" me.
>It's an opinion that makes it very hard to work with you, if I were a woman or minority. I wouldn't want you to review my code, wondering if you think I'm competent or if I'm an entitled person benefiting from unfair "advantages that have been heaped upon" me.
So you're assuming because of my opinion, I would not treat you fairly?
Of course! Anyone who deviates from the SJW line is de facto a bad person! There's no need for logic and reasoning when you deal with people like me! Just cast aspersions on my character and signal your virtue to the rest of your tribe!
You've broken the HN guidelines several times in this thread, but egregiously here. You're not assuming good faith, are name-calling, and are not responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what the other person said. Could you please read https://hackertimes.com/newsguidelines.html and abide by them?
It's bad enough that the community is as divided as it is around these issues. Users need to respect the rules for HN to survive as a place for thoughtful discussion.
I regret answering. If you're not going to engage in good faith, but instead go on some tired diatribe about tribalism, then what hope do we have for understanding each other? You claim that you want to have a discussion, but then you strawman me like that. The irony of you complaining about "tribes" while you label everyone who disagrees with you an SJW...
EDIT:
> So you're assuming because of my opinion, I would not treat you fairly?
I'm assuming because of your opinion that you might misjudge me as a token minority, underserving of my position, perhaps because you catch me on an off day, or because you judge me to be an SJW because of the way I act. You're only human, and we all are susceptible to misjudgment, stereotyping, etc. It's just the human condition.
> Anyone who deviates from the SJW line is de facto a bad person!
To be clear, I didn't respond to you because I think you're a bad person, because I don't, and I don't know you. I responded because I have some vague hope that mutual understanding can be had on the internet through discussion. But responses like this make me feel like a fool for having hope.
Special treatment of some group always (almost always, children and some other groups are treated differently and it feels OK) triggers the feeling of unfairness and raises concerns about objectivity of testing process.
> You're only human, and we all are susceptible to misjudgment, stereotyping, etc.
Yes, double-blind trials were invented to prevent an experimenter from nudging results in a desired direction. In the case of increasing diversity, the desired direction is explicitly specified and encouraged.
Someone, on their personal twitter account, made a remark that Coraline Ada Ehmke found offensive. Coraline noticed that he was a contributor to the Opal project. So Coraline opened an issue on the project, called him an ugly name, and petitioned to have him removed from the project.
I will not quietly submit to bossy bullies like Coraline Ada Ehmke, and I will defend the victims of Coraline Ada Ehmke.
You seem incapable of discussing the issues without trying to hold me accountable for people that I have nothing to do with. You talk about disliking tribalism, but you can’t discuss with me without going off topic and trying to make me accountable for people I haven’t mentioned. Do you not see how you’re behaving in a tribalistic way now?
>You seem incapable of discussing the issues without trying to hold me accountable for people that I have nothing to do with.
Hold you accountable... how? I asked if you agree or not with those actions. Or, like me, do you find them reprehensible? It's very relevant to FOSS project CoCs, which is what this post is mainly about.
>You talk about disliking tribalism,
Uh, I made reference to you signalling to your tribe, but you should not assume from that that I dislike tribalism.
>Do you not see how you’re behaving in a tribalistic way now?
Not really, but if I am, I'm not embarrassed by it.
Do you think the referenced actions of Coraline Ada Ehmke were proper in the context of an open source project? If you do, I won't "hold you accountable" for those actions, whatever that means. My purpose in bringing it into the discussion is to illustrate what these CoCs are really about. They're about defining which political opinions will be permitted to be expressed, and which ones will bring wrath down on the heads of those expressing them.
Laws were passed then, that doesn't mean culture changed over night. Someone born around 1964 is right around the age of parents in their prime development years. Did your parents have no effect on your ability to become educated that put you on track to become a developer?
Whatever the root cause, the predominance of white males (of which I am one) in tech shows that there is a lack of representation of various groups. This ought to be blindingly obvious
> Whatever the root cause, the predominance of white males (of which I am one) in tech shows that there is a lack of representation of various groups. This ought to be blindingly obvious
What I am well and truly fed up with is the implication that it is pernicious behavior on the part of white males that is responsible for this state of affairs. And that's not necessarily relevant to this particular SJW dustup, but in general it is what's implied, when it's not stated explicitly (as it often is).
I agree that that sometimes happens, and I agree that it is not okay when that happens. However, I really think we need to guard against reasoning along the lines of "sometimes people are overzealous with identity politics therefore lets oppose all attempts at dealing with injustice".
The problem with a lot of these debates is the extreme polarisation that often occurs. We need to keep minds open and not stop thinking just because some actors in the debates are jerks
> the implication that it is pernicious behavior on the part of white males that is responsible for this state of affairs.
Historically, it has been, yes. Even today, there are pockets of white males who are virulently against anyone but them having access to their little clubhouses (cf GG for one prime example.)
Not in the decades I have been observing this industry through my participation in it. In my observation, these past few decades the efforts to increase female and minority employment have far outweighed the rare instances of discrimination I've seen.
> Even today, there are pockets of white males who are virulently against anyone but them having access to their little clubhouses (cf GG for one prime example.)
If they're a "prime example", then why do I have no clue who you're talking about?
It sounds like he's talking about GamerGate. Which, since they followed the old tech idea of race and gender not even being brought up in their ranks, indicates his opinion on most matters social justice.
What's not so obvious is why that's a bad thing. Considering the fact that millions (possibly billions at this point) have been spent recruiting non-whites and non-males in tech, there's no lack of equality of opportunity here.
Monoculture doesn't foster a range of ideas. I work in games where having more women is great - we produce products that work better for more people and I find it balances out company culture
I've worked in companies where that have been predominantly white males and companies that are not - I've noticed ZERO difference in outcomes between the two.
The fact of the matter is there are more white males that pursue computer science than women, minorities, etc. That doesn't make all of us professional white males raging racists/sexists.
90% of nurses are women. Why don't these social justice warriors blow up the social web with that "injustice"?
Hell, where are the social justice warriors trying to get more women to work as plumbers, construction workers, or garbage collectors? Let's see more women working in mines, while we're at it!
This breaks the site guidelines. Could you please do a better job of following them? "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive," and this is a divisive topic.
> If we assume that there are no racial differences in technical ability, then the demographics of my office should roughly mirror the demographics of the surrounding community.
This is a big assumption. It may be true, but you are asserting it without evidence. Demographics of NBA do not mirror demographics of USA.
It's the reasonable default assumption as long as you have no evidence for the opposite (i.e. that white people have racial attributes making them better at tech / non-white people have racial attributes making them worse). Can you provide evidence for the opposite?
I got your point, but I think that the problem is not "helping" (with scholarships) based on membership with minorities, but helping when there are bad economic or social conditions. This may be correlated with other attributes yes but I think that we must write rules for persons by only considering the factors that effectively prevent them from studying and not the skin color.
If you agree that there are hidden mechanisms that shape the inequality, then claiming that “only considering the factors that effectively prevent studying” is fair would require a great deal of certainty in knowing these factors. I don't know how effective “positive-discrimination” is in practice but to me it seems that its principle is to do what you say but with discriminatory features as a proxy heuristic for these “effective features” (this makes sense if you believe they are sufficiently immesurable IRL).
You are also assuming that the 4% of the worlds population in the US is representative of the world. Or imperial privilege as those of us who suffer from empire like to call it.
That you push your social issues on us as well as your armies adds insult to injury.
I dream of a day when there are no US troops on non-US soil. A day that I can advocate wealth redistribution without fear of a CIA funded coup. A day where the internet represents all of humanity.
"Centuries of privilege" is the kind of idiocy only a sheltered American suburbanite could come up with.
A century ago millions of young white men were too busy dying in trenches and being gassed to death with mustard gas in a war none of them could vote on.
Children worked on the field, in factories, and in coal mines, like their fathers were expected to.
And yes, women stayed home and took care of the kids because without electricity, plumbing, appliances, refrigeration and cheap groceries, that was actually a laborious full time job, and people were poor. Not to mention that getting through child birth and infant mortality was a blessing for both mother and child.
None of them were given opportunities simply by existing. On the other hand, providing scholarships to specific ethnicities, or creating special women-only pathways to entry, that is exactly that.
What people like Damore have tried to point out is that expecting demographics and sentiment within a field to match the general population, or else the "playing field" is not level, is an unwarranted assumption. It also puts the blame for actually society wide issues on a small group of people who had nothing to do with it.
If you want more black people in tech, start by addressing the way the US school system is stratified entirely by social class. Maybe you'll see a difference, and maybe that IQ gap will shrink. Maybe it won't, and what new "leveling" policies will you want to introduce then? Don't push out or disadvantage others out of misplaced revenge, and don't cite your American tunnel vision as justification.
> the kind of idiocy only a sheltered American suburbanite
Regardless of your view on a divisive issue, you can't break the HN guidelines like this when commenting here. Please read
https://hackertimes.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it again.
While I don't care about people's race, skin colour, sexual orientation, 'gender', religion, political affiliation, book preference or shoe size...
...I most emphatically do care about them not bringing up any of these characteristics in any context where they see fit. Just like a country with freedom of religion should support freedom from religion the same goes for freedom from politics, 'gender' issues, race discussions, political diatribe et al. There are laws against discrimination on many - but not all - of these issues which can be used to get those who insist on breaking them back in line or out of the context. If these laws are insufficient there are channels to discuss these issues and ways to get them amended.
In simple terms I think we - as in the society which I was born and raised in (in the Netherlands) and currently live in (Sweden) - have gone a long way in eradicating discrimination on many of the mentioned grounds and marginalising those who insist on violating relevant laws. Both Sweden and the Netherlands belong to the most egalitarian and open societies in the world where 'diversity' has been a mantra for many decades. Things were starting to look good, hardly anyone cared about whether the teacher at school had a different skin colour or shared her bed with a same-sex partner or prayed to whatever deity of choice. And then...
...and then...
And then identity politics suddenly raised its ugly head, driven by people who insist they 'represent' 'marginalised minorities' - without asking those supposedly marginalised minorities whether they felt the need to be represented in any way - and starting calling anyone who did not abide by their 'demands' all sorts of things - racist, xenophobe, misogynist, white cis-gender male expletive_deleted, etcetera.
What the said they wanted to do was 'end discrimination and further diversity'. What they are doing is building enclaves and segregating the population among all those characteristics which our societies previously tried to make irrelevant.
All those labels they try to stick on their opponents reflect back on what they themselves are: they are the racists by trying to split the population along (real or imaginary) 'racial' lines. They are the xenophobes by loudly denouncing anyone who does not kowtow to their all demands. They are the enemies of diversity by inciting strive between 'racialised' groups.
It sounds like you're angry because you want the autonomy to choose not to think about social justice issues (at least at work), and you feel like that choice is being taken away from you by people who enact things like codes of conduct. Now it's institutionally everyone's responsibility to think about these things, so if I want to be part of this institution, I no longer have this choice.
Is that right?
What do you think about people who say, I'm a woman, and/or I'm black, and/or I'm gay, and/or I'm trans, and/or I'm disabled, and/or I have a mental illness. I also just want to sit heads-down and code next to you and not think about what I "am", but unfortunately -- perhaps, invisibly to you -- people are doing things which prevent me from being able to do that. A code of conduct moves us a bit closer towards "equality of having to think about social justice", in that I have to think about it a bit less, in exchange for your thinking about it a bit more.
>What do you think about people who say, I'm a woman, and/or I'm black, and/or I'm gay, and/or I'm trans, and/or I'm disabled, and/or I have a mental illness. I also just want to sit heads-down and code next to you and not think about what I "am", but unfortunately -- perhaps, invisibly to you -- people are doing things which prevent me from being able to do that. A code of conduct moves us a bit closer towards "equality of having to think about social justice", in that I have to think about it a bit less, in exchange for your thinking about it a bit more.
What do I think about those people? I think they're insufferably bossy people who insult me by telling me what I need to think about more.
> So, you're happy if people get discriminated against but not for those people to ask you to think about it?
This is a typical SJW non-argument, built atop a non-sequitur. Implying that I'm happy that people get discriminated against, while offering no logic to back it up. I disagree with you, therefore I am a bad person with bad motives. And that's what's driving this whole SJW-CoC movement.
The post you were responding to asked "what if I am being discriminated against? what do you say to me?"
You respond that you find them bossy and insufferable.
Unless those observations are inaccurate I struggle to see how you take issue with the question I asked. It certainly sounds from your own words that you do not care about people being discriminated against.
>The post you were responding to asked "what if I am being discriminated against? what do you say to me?" You respond that you find them bossy and insufferable. Unless those observations are inaccurate I struggle to see how you take issue with the question I asked.
I don't take issue with it. I responded with the answer it merited.
>It certainly sounds from your own words that you do not care about people being discriminated against.
Uh, no. I have not seen any evidence to support that discrimination against women or minorities in tech is pervasive. Quite the opposite, in fact. People keep making that claim, however, expecting it to be uncritically accepted at face value. And those who don't, well, they must just be one of those bad people who are happy to see people get discriminated against.
I just want to work with smart people. I don't care what gender they associate themselves with, what color they are, whether there's an equal distribution of any of these characteristics in my department. I just want to do my job and learn from smart people. Why can't it be as simple as that?