> How has progress been stopped dead in its tracks by wokeism?
It hasn’t taken full effect yet but it has definitely bent the arc of progress toward a lower angle. The extremely harsh imposition of woke views has impacted my own enjoyment of the tech industry, my ability to raise money (I stopped attending a popular Bay Area seed capital meet up because several people repeatedly commented about my white skin color and other details of my background, and due to the terms and conditions of another I never bothered to attend.). I had to leave one company because of its extreme discriminatory positions, and I’ve repeatedly heard moderate amounts of discrimination at several other companies.
There are plenty of doctors and scientists who have given up on or reduced their activity in their field due to similar issues, unfortunately I don’t have time to link all this at the moment.
Also all the ideological statements people need to make to become professors etc I suspect are influencing people away from academia and so academia becomes more about advocacy than research.
It’s a miracle that we’re continuing to progress, but it would’ve been even better I suspect if we hadn’t had all these hindrances.
Also think about all the men who are crushed in biased divorce outcomes, which is tangentially related to the woke issue, and influences their productive activities. It’s all sort of related to the oppressor oppressed narrative.
There's a fundamental problem, that we're all having a tough time navigating. That is-- various subgroups have a much lower rate of participation in advanced sectors of the economy. Some of this is almost certainly related to discrimination and lingering aftereffects of past discrimination.
* Naively picking who appears most capable, especially based on metrics that are strongly influenced by class, may instead just be perpetuating these biases. Further, people who have had fewer resources dedicated to their development may have more opportunity for growth.
* Conversely, trying to spread things out for equality-of-outcome and completely ignoring many measurements of ability is likely to be problematic, too, by not getting the strongest people in seats.
In the end, allowing the entire pool of the population meaningful economic and cultural participation can be expected to bend up the arc of progress, but it is hard to figure out how to get there.
> Some of this is almost certainly related to discrimination and lingering aftereffects of past discrimination.
Certainly possible. I think the divide between right and left on this issue is in their perception of how much this is the case. I’d be in favor of rigorous research on this topic.
My own experience in the tech industry at many companies leads me to believe that if there is discrimination, it must be either historical or occurring earlier in the pipeline than tech company hiring. It’s been fairly consistent in my experience for thumbs to be put on the scales rather heavily to hire from historically disadvantaged groups, and clear bold statements have been made to exclude majority populations from interview pipelines that would be recognized as howling racism and sexism if applied to any other group.
> Naively picking who appears most capable, especially based on metrics that are strongly influenced by class, may instead just be perpetuating these biases.
It seems to me that we’re currently getting the worst of all possible worlds. The way we’re influencing the interview pipeline excludes low income people from the majority demographics and assists high income people from non majority demographics, with the overall effect of selecting for class above all else.
I say all this as a kind person who wishes well for everyone and wants everyone to have the opportunity to self actualize to the best of their ability.
> I’d be in favor of rigorous research on this topic.
There's a lot of pretty high quality research. Unfortunately, it can only tell you about things that are correlated, but it can't establish causation. You can only run observational trials of various kinds-- case control studies, looking at time series data, etc.
> My own experience in the tech industry at many companies leads me to believe that if there is discrimination, it must be either historical or occurring earlier in the pipeline than tech company hiring.
OK-- and if there's some 25 year old who has faced discrimination "earlier in the pipeline"-- what is the proper redress? If candidate A measures 90% as good as candidate B, but candidate B had a much easier road to get to this point, which candidate has more potential?
I'm a teacher and I see it "earlier in the pipeline". By middle school, a whole bunch of kids have figured out that typical engineers don't look like them, and they should maybe consider doing something else-- irrespective of class. Some of my highest performers have been in these groups.
> with the overall effect of selecting for class above all else.
I don't think this is very true of most interventions. But it's true that it's true to some extent for some.
These last few years have been the easiest times to get a job, or get funding, in the tech industry, in 20 years.
And white and Asian males remain significantly advantaged over any other group, although the other groups don't seem to be as disadvantaged as they were 20 years ago.
If that is not your experience, we must live in different worlds. Mine is SF/SV, with offices in other large cities in the US.
If you submit identical software engineer resumes, one with a typically white male name and one with a typically white female name, do you think one will get more interview opportunities?
That seems like something that could be experimentally tested.
My guess is the women's resume will get more interviews because tech companies really want to hire women software engineers.
The study you're mentioning has been done many times. The studies do tend to find that females do slightly better, but trivially so compared to the difference between typically white and black names.
The thing that this study found was that not only do blacks receive many fewer callbacks at baseline... they found that blacks' prospects improved less than whites' do when additional qualifications are added. That is, if you're black, you start as a disadvantage and you benefit less from efforts to improve your employability.
> Or, that the best thing to improve your employability is adopting a typically white female name?
- I don't think that would actually work that well.
- Suggesting people should reasonably pretend to be white to get employment basically concedes that the game is broken, and it's kind of offensive to boot.
- While women may get (barely) more callbacks, I think we have filters earlier in life that make them less likely to end up with tech work; and we have filters later in life that tend to lower their economic compensation.
Duh? Why do you think immigrants to Anglo countries named Giovanni or Juan or Janek, have, since forever, changed their names to John?
> While women may get (barely) more callbacks, I think we have filters earlier in life that make them less likely to end up with tech work
Which suggests the optimal strategy is to either be a girl with a very enthusiastic tech parent who helps you overpower those toxic feminine norms. Or to be raised as a boy and then transition to a woman when you start working?
I want an egalitarian society. Because it opens opportunity to everyone, it should be the way to make the most value for the world. But it is hard for everyone to simultaneously agree not to profit and exploit based on superficial genetic and life histories that are clearly outside of individual control.
Can we wake up enough to see each other as equals?
I know what you are saying. Can it be expressed in an inclusive way? I mean that whatever woke you're talking about is still sleepwalking. And you want to explain this to others without sounding like you also are asleep or fixated on your own immutable personal situation. Perhaps I'm not making sense, but it's a try.
What happens when party A wants this, and plays the game accordingly, while parties B, C, D, E, and F say they want it but don’t follow the same rules?
To be honest, it takes a lot of effort. It’s a daily struggle. I have people who depend on me so I do my best to keep going, but I would rather do something else. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to keep working in this industry under these conditions.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but I’m a real person too, with my own wish to live a happy life.
I have a hard time understanding how some people care so deeply for certain groups but then seem to have no empathy at all for others. I would’ve thought kindness would apply universally, but I suppose there are plenty of examples in history that show that isn’t necessarily the case.
I don't know your situation. I personally feel I've been given a lot of advantages that other people didn't get. And yet, I'm not a billionaire. It's easy for me to set unreachable standards for myself, and feel ashamed about not meeting them. A book called "Daring Greatly" by Brene Brown helped me understand some of this. I was pretty pissed off and generally drinking too much. Anyway, It sounds like you're having a hard time continuing. I'd encourage you to give the book a read if my situation feels anything like your own.
You can earn a lot of respect by accepting people on their terms. People get defensive when you start attacking the words they use and disputing the life they’re telling you that they lived. It cuts both ways at that point and people quickly retreat to their corners.
You don’t have to treat them as anything other than fellow human beings and ends unto themselves. Every person out there has always used language a little differently from you, has grown up in a different place and circumstance, and generally arrived at the shared present a different way than you. The trick is to agree to treat people like people and that you’re there to be an additive good and not a detractor.
I am a white male in the tech industry and this is ridiculous. We have every advantage. And you're out here complaining about the tiny advantage we are giving to the disadvantaged, like you should also take that from them to get that advantage for yourself on top of everything else.
People of other races often are not believed to be competent. I have personally been in situations where I got contracts because the employer did not believe the other person could do it based on race.
This is not even talking about the generational stolen wealth gap. Right now there are many, many racist people in positions of power that make investing and hiring decisions based on race. You have to bury your head in the sand to not see how many racists have come out of the shadows in the last 6 years. They were there the whole time, making decisions based on race.
Update: This seems limited to the idea that some female founders are sexually harassed when fundraising. That’s terrible, but I don’t think this article alone is sufficient to justify saying that “we have all the advantages”. That’s one issue out of potentially many factors of advantage and disadvantage that might each lean in the direction of a different group on average.
> You have to bury your head in the sand to not see how many racists have come out of the shadows in the last 6 years. They were there the whole time, making decisions based on race.
If you’re willing to provide another link, I am unfortunately not aware of this either, not even rumors of it, so I don’t know where to begin to look. Unless you’re talking about anti-majority racism, in which case I’ve seen tons of it firsthand.
When sheriff arpaio outright refused to stop using his police department to racially profile, to the point he was convicted in court, Trump pardoned him. It goes all the way to the top.
It hasn’t taken full effect yet but it has definitely bent the arc of progress toward a lower angle. The extremely harsh imposition of woke views has impacted my own enjoyment of the tech industry, my ability to raise money (I stopped attending a popular Bay Area seed capital meet up because several people repeatedly commented about my white skin color and other details of my background, and due to the terms and conditions of another I never bothered to attend.). I had to leave one company because of its extreme discriminatory positions, and I’ve repeatedly heard moderate amounts of discrimination at several other companies.
There are plenty of doctors and scientists who have given up on or reduced their activity in their field due to similar issues, unfortunately I don’t have time to link all this at the moment.
Also all the ideological statements people need to make to become professors etc I suspect are influencing people away from academia and so academia becomes more about advocacy than research.
It’s a miracle that we’re continuing to progress, but it would’ve been even better I suspect if we hadn’t had all these hindrances.
Also think about all the men who are crushed in biased divorce outcomes, which is tangentially related to the woke issue, and influences their productive activities. It’s all sort of related to the oppressor oppressed narrative.