431–440 of 656 posts
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How is growing up with extreme discrimination not relevant?
Depends. So who should win the 100 m olympics? someone who is fastest or someone who was discriminated against? Which team should win the football match? the team that scores the most points or should the background of the players be a criteria?
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/science-and-technology/st...
I learned about the caste system in school. And realistically, outside of a book or two, I haven't heard a thing about it until this article. I appreciate that my news sources have no generally been focused on India, but this really rather surprising. I frankly didn't even know the caste system in India was still practiced.
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> For people who discuss this with Indian co-workers - don't be surprised if they find this bizarre or far fetched. For most upper caste folks, it appears as if the caste system doesn't exist because they've never been at the receiving end of it. A little bit like the class system in the United States (or France) eh :-)
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted - maybe it's the flippant response? The message is correct, though. The caste system in India sounds exactly like the class system in the US, only more formalized. In my area, there absolutely are surnames that you can associate with 'those' people, and who are, in my experience, passed over for jobs. Maybe it's my ignorance, but doesn't a caste system whereby you are exposed t…
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Who's talking about intervening? If someone was interested in marrying me until they found out I was Jewish (the closest analogy to my own experience), I would not think that was "fine". Even if I don't know any way to "intervene" in it, certainly not if you mean legally, governments should not be in the business of telling people who to marry. But if you told me that there aren't power imbalances in marriage decisio…
“Caste is a huge problem. To substantiate this, let me tell you about the story of a person who didn’t seem to care about caste at all, but later decided to not marry someone over it.” That is not a story which substantiates the claim that caste is a huge problem. I agree that someone who made a marriage decision based on caste isn’t someone I’d want to marry in the first place. My comment about power imbalances can…
For people who discuss this with Indian co-workers - don't be surprised if they find this bizarre or far fetched. For most upper caste folks, it appears as if the caste system doesn't exist because they've never been at the receiving end of it. Most people (me included) would be tempted to say - I've never discriminated, I've never seen it happen in front of me, I'm confident none of my friends would do it so therefo…
I'm Norwegian, living there. A very good friend is Indian, her parents moved here while she was just a few years old. I never heard her talk about her caste, or the system in general really. That is, until one day, out of the blue, she said she was getting married. Her parents had found a boy who also grew up here in Norway that she was to marry the following year. After a bit of talking it was clear she was not very…
I don't know if their expectation turned out to be true, and obviously there are a lot of people who don't share their thinking, but I found it striking that they would even expect people feel differently based on where their daughter was living. In the U.S. we learn that caste rules are "religious," and our idea of religion is like Christianity, something that is either true everywhere or true nowhere. The idea that your judgmental neighbors would say "oh, it's fine because they're living in a country where nobody believes in that stuff" was a new one for me.
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This is why I scoff and roll my eyes at individuals who argue that tech is a meritocracy when discrimination between countrymen is happening even in companies like Google.
Nobody argues that tech is a meritocracy. Meritocracy is just an ideal, just like freedom, equality and defensive driving; it’s worth striving towards but you cannot ever reach it (and if you think you’ve reached it, you’ll inevitably start falling behind). Having said that, it’s one of the most meritocratic industries; do you know any billionaire doctors or lawyers that are college dropouts?
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Nobody argues that tech is a meritocracy. Meritocracy is just an ideal, just like freedom, equality and defensive driving; it’s worth striving towards but you cannot ever reach it (and if you think you’ve reached it, you’ll inevitably start falling behind). Having said that, it’s one of the most meritocratic industries; do you know any billionaire doctors or lawyers that are college dropouts?
> Nobody argues that tech is a meritocracy. That's not true even in the trivial "well I mean that most people don't argue that". I think people in tech are a lot more self-aware then they were 10-15 years ago (when most people in tech I knew would assert that tech is a meritocracy), but I still hear plenty of aspirational rhetoric that either assumes or explicitly asserts this "fact".
The turning point in this industry was recorded in popular culture in 1995:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_49
Look at all those beautiful people! /g
The influx of "new blood" into the field -- people who would otherwise never ever would have considered living the geek life -- in the new gold rush of post-WWW software world fundamentally changed the character of the field. Far more politically and socially savvy personality types were now competing for position.
And oh yes. One of my esteemed coworkers when I was all of 25 was this wizzard looking man. I mean he had the beard, the hair, and a program of his hanging on the wall (hardwired, you see), and hailed from Bell Labs.
I wonder how he would do these days in the market. Obviously, (software) tech can not possibly be a meritocracy when the most experienced workers are routinely discriminated against.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For people who discuss this with Indian co-workers - don't be surprised if they find this bizarre or far fetched. For most upper caste folks, it appears as if the caste system doesn't exist because they've never been at the receiving end of it. A little bit like the class system in the United States (or France) eh :-)
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted - maybe it's the flippant response? The message is correct, though. The caste system in India sounds exactly like the class system in the US, only more formalized. In my area, there absolutely are surnames that you can associate with 'those' people, and who are, in my experience, passed over for jobs. Maybe it's my ignorance, but doesn't a caste system whereby you are exposed t…