441–450 of 656 posts
Out of curiosity, where is the traditional upper/lower caste line?
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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?
Who's going to be more successful: someone tutored, mentored, and cajoled to a 1500 SAT or someone who never had sh*t and got a 1450 cold?
I'm not sure if this will be seen but I'm very curious to hear from Indian folk: I am the hiring manager at a well known software company that employs a lot of Indians on H1B visas. A while back I brought in an Indian person for a full round interview. This person happen to have pretty dark skin. On the interview team was a light skinned Indian person with a very Brahmin last name that I'd say is pretty average techn…
I wonder if a blind interview would help. Could you guess a person's caste through his accent?
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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?
The relatively large number of tech billionaires – people with tens of thousands of times the median wealth – is a strange thing to use as an indicator of “meritocracy.”
ITT: (Possibly) "Upper caste" Indians claiming: 1. This is due to a few bad apples 2. Reservation is the real problem (no it's not) 3. I don't do it therefore it doesn't exist I can tell you by experience the amount of concious and unconcious bias regarding caste amongst Indians both in India and abroad is ridiculous! I'm light skinned so people assume I'm "upper caste" and speak with me as such. My last name doesn't…
I am not from an upper caste either, but my experience doesn't match with yours at all. My peer group is less culturally Indian than others, but I wonder if experiences such as yours are more pronounced in certain regions or groups, more than others. I have never once been asked my caste, and I have never once seen my friends be asked their castes. But, I realize that being middle class in an Indian metro city alread…
In my University (IIT-D), I believe certain scholarship announcements revealed details about students' categories, ie whether they were SC/ST/OBC/General. Especially if it were a means scholarship.
Worse case, professors in India have zero personality training, and will casually ask such questions of their students.
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This is a fairly terrible take for a number of reasons, but let's assume good faith and indulge this. * What makes you think that, at any point, lower caste people had an on-average lower IQ? The same has been said for plenty of minorities that have been historically discriminated against, such as people of color and women, because opressors are in control of the narrative and see themselves as superior * What does "…
It is possible that higher casts selected for intelligence over the years. Since in India arranged marriage is the norm, parents can select for intelligence if that is a trait they care about. If there is a genetic portion of intelligence that can be selected for. Note the above uses words like "possible" and "if". I find it unlikely this is what was done. More likely - like every other society - they selected for po…
Your final point about selection via coercion holds more water, but one has to believe that the subjects would be explicitly chosen for their intelligence, rather than for any other features, which seems difficult to support.
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…
> the priests -- or the "Brahman" class -- were at the top, the warriors or "Kshatriyas" came next, the merchants or "Vaishyas" formed the third tier, while labourers, artisans, and servants, known as "Shudras", came last and essentially served the other three castes. Out of curiosity, where is the traditional upper/lower caste line?
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“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…
I don't understand how a person could manage to only care about "caste" when getting married and never care about it any other time. Maybe I just don't understand what you were trying to get at with your original comment, because the statement doesn't really make any sense to me either.
As an example, what if they decided against the marriage not because they cared personally but because their family did, and satisfying their family’s preferences was important to them? What’s the harm? Nobody has an obligation to marry you.
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> "Affirmative action is always bad. Because the people getting benefit of it are likely to be privileged." But this is not what affirmative action is. The purpose of affirmative action is to help under-privileged people. If the help is going to privileged people instead, it's not affirmative action, it's corruption. If it's really true, as you suggest, that some Dalit are rich and some Brahmin are poor, that some Da…
Consider the case of race in the US. Some of the benefit of affirmative action goes to children from well off black families. That doesn't mean it's corrupt, it just means that if you are doing something on the basis of race and not wealth then you're sometimes going to give a benefit to people who are rich. If you took your last paragraph, and substituted racial groups for castes, I think it would be clear that it d…
There's different kinds of privilege of course. You can be rich but still discriminated, you can be white but poor. And the way you need to help people who are poor is different from the way you help people who suffer from discrimination.
If poor people have a hard time getting access to something because it's too expensive, and you want to help them, then that money shouldn't end up with rich people. If a demographic group is kept out of universities or other opportunities because of their caste or the colour of their skin, then you correct that by giving them better access, maybe through a quota or some other form of preferential treatment that compensates for the effects of discrimination. And that shouldn't apply to people who don't suffer from that discrimination.
You need to address the thing that's going wrong, and not something completely different. Rich black people don't need money, they need to not get arrested over nothing by the police.