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‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

theguardian.com

261–270 of 674 posts

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#261
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know those diversity sessions... They claim everyone who is white or passing as white is racist. I had to "confess" that i'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career. Sidenote: I volunteer at a refugee center and took in a syrian family. Literally hitler, i know. A colleague got fired because he wouldn't confess and left the session. So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's…

Is there any real proof that these diversity sessions actually help people work in diverse environments? The way you describe this, it reads like a really, really weird cargo cult where just confessing to one's supposed racism will somehow make you more open to people of differing backgrounds. How exactly does this help?

Yes I suspect some one suggesting to HR that one of the ways to increase diversity and combat institutionalised racism would to be a transparent pay survey might be in trouble.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#262
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know those diversity sessions... They claim everyone who is white or passing as white is racist. I had to "confess" that i'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career. Sidenote: I volunteer at a refugee center and took in a syrian family. Literally hitler, i know. A colleague got fired because he wouldn't confess and left the session. So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's…

Well that's the thing. These diversity training people do use a different definition of racism then what you are thinking of. The diversity training definition of racism doesn't simply mean prejudiced, it means a part of a system of power that benefits people considered "white" at the expense of others. By that definition, most white people are probably "racist". If you understand the context used when they call them…

Even on its own terms, the "white privilege" theory is deficient. In terms of structural aspects of society that perpetuate race-based disadvantages, the main difference isn't between white people and everyone else, it's between Black and Native American people and everyone else: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353

> White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations.... Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run.

> In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children.... If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions that would prevail if differences in mobility rates remained constant across generations.

In terms of rhetoric, moreover, it's deliberately inflammatory. Critical theorist academics appropriated existing terms with weight connotations, like "racist" and "white supremacy," to mean more abstract, systemic things that don't necessarily imply prejudicial intent.

People should be wary of adopting this rhetoric even if well-intentioned. Just because some academics thought this rhetoric was clever doesn't mean that people of color generally want race-relations to be defined by such inflammatory rhetoric. As a purely practical matter, there is a ceiling on the fraction of white people who will actually respond in a productive way to being called a "racist" and a "white supremacist" (even if you explain to them the academic twist on the words). There is a reason we do things the way we do them. There is a reason civil rights movements have been built on appeals to universal values and the goal of color-blind equality as the ultimate ideal.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#263

Reminds me of the research NPR did before closing their comments section. >In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/4895169...

That pretty well matches the 90-9-1 rule: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/

Re-reading that article makes me realize I've been using that rule a bit differently (wrongly?) over the last 10 or so years.

I always assumed it meant 90% only read, 9% interact/comment and 1% create.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#264
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying talk Radio and Fox News aren’t part of the problem, but blaming that alone for the polarization is short-sighted. A huge part of our polarization is due to our Supreme Court resolving social disputes before society has reached a consensus. Folks in Europe often don’t appreciate how different American constitutional law is on social issues compared to European norms: The UK makes teaching religion manda…

"The UK makes teaching religion mandatory in public schools" The UK does no such thing - education is handled completely separately by the different parts of the UK. There certainly weren't "daily acts of collective worship" when I was at school in Scotland 40+ years ago and there aren't now when my kids went to school.

Also went to school in Scotland. We'd sing a hymn at morning assembly. I wonder if this was done to satisfy the requirement.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That pretty well matches the 90-9-1 rule: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/

I wonder if dang or others could comment on whether this is true of HN too.

Dang comment about the 1% rule from 7 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983

> The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' ratio depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.

> Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:

> So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#268
From my perspective, it doesn't really matter to me what percentage of the population holds what beliefs, or how many different political stances they're balancing. What matters is the beliefs they have and the outcomes of these beliefs.

For example, if you think about support gay marriage and LGBT nondiscrimination protections, these are things that would have been framed as fringe progressive ideas a few decades ago, and in the US it's still framed as a "culture war" issue. However, if you are in the LGBT community, these things DO have an impact and will affect your life. It doesn't really matter whether 30% of the population supports these things or 60%.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That pretty well matches the 90-9-1 rule: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/

I wonder if dang or others could comment on whether this is true of HN too.

I think dang has commented in a number of other threads basically saying that HN pretty much follows this rule as well.

Hopefully someone will be able to find an example because my Googlefoo is failing me.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#270
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say everyone is racist, by that definition. If you want to and are working to change or get rid of these systems, then you are not racist.

I think it’s more complicated than that based on some of the diversity books I’ve read. For example I wasn’t even “white” until I moved to USA a few years ago. Took me 6+ years to even grok how “white” works and what it means but I’m told I was racist all along. And yeah sure I want the system to change, but honestly I have enough work with being an immigrant without inherent rights. Hell I’m technically a visitor so…

I wasn't a "person of color" until 2009! (I distinctly remembered when it happened. I was reading ad copy about my law school, and saw that our incoming class was 30% "people of color." I had never seen the term before, and was confused by what it could mean, until I realized they were grouping all non-white people together.)
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