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New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
561–570 of 734 posts
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
Take any marginalized group. Call it group A. It is almost always the case that there are prominent advocates for group A, who profess (at least at first) to be pushing for equality for group A, but what they really want is special pleading for group A. The libertarian position is that equality is desirable; special pleading is not. The people who advocate for special pleading, once having dropped the pretense of bei…
I see your viewpoint - but I also think that you're confusing equality for moving the goalposts in some cases. Take racial disparity in the US for instance, and the history of racial segregation and racist policies in government institutions. How do we address the inequality present in the current system without first addressing the root causes of that inequality; some of which stem from hundreds of years ago? By you…
Racial segregation and racist policies exist today; consider the state of policing and the criminal justice system in the U.S. as it affects minority communities. It's silly, wasteful and divisive to focus on speculative "root causes which stem from hundreds of years ago" when activists have barely even gotten started on addressing the actual, plainly visible causes and dynamics perpetuating current inequality. Clean your room before you think about changing the world.
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Another is that women and men in the aggregate don’t choose the same careers in exactly even proportions. That's not a theory, that's just restating the question! Why is the distribution the way it is, and should we make efforts to change it?
Maybe, but I still think there's an important point in there. We (society) do a lot of handwringing about CEO and engineering jobs, but these aren't even remotely the most gender-asymmetric careers out there. According to [1], "Locomotive engineers and operators" are 92.3 percent male. I'm willing to bet that if you can "fix" that problem - or even conclusively identify the cause - gender imbalance issues in other fi…
“fixing” that “problem” would involve somehow convincing many women to enter a career field in which they have no interest. How do you propose to force them to change their desires?
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there not many potential explanations other than a nebulous concept of "racism" for these statistics?
Are there many potential explanations as to why our justice system has racist outcomes? Absolutely. Does that change whether the outcomes are racist or not? Absolutely not. There seems to be a lot of confusion over racism where one group seems to think racism only exists when it involves white hoods and hurling racial epitaphs and the other group is more concerned about large societal trends and documented evidence o…
The term "racist outcomes" is an example of the problem we're talking about. A racial disparity is not racist. Correlation is not the same thing as causation.
Racism could very much be one of the factors, but painting the entire disparity as racism pretty much guarantees we will make no progress on zeroing in on, and ultimately eliminating, the actual racism.
Conflating racial disparities with racism is really harmful and counterproductive.
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
Applying those labels to people who are objectively and overtly acting that way is not the problem. The problem is that way too often people are assuming it's there. It's a presumption of intent, "racism is one possible explanation for your viewpoint, therefore I somehow /just know/ that you are a racist person". Example: every recent white-cop-shot-a-black-person incident in the U.S. Not only is there widespread ass…
Data on lifetime likelihood of death by cop in the US by ethnicity. https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793 It's very evident the US has strong implicit biases just from the Justice system. We could also look at incarceration rates, or sentencing disparities by ethnicity. At some point saying "hey, we can't just _assume_ this is racist" _appears_ less like good faith debate and more like bad faith denialism.
Statistics do not prove intent, unless you want us to use the same data to prove that the Justice system is an order of magnitude more sexist than racist because 2000% more men are killed then women. The numbers for incarceration rates and sentencing disparities are similar damning.
If we go by the data in the study, the likelihood of death by cop in the US is determined by age first, gender second, race third. If we look at other studies we can add social economical factors, geographic location, geopolitical and cultural factors, all which has correlation impact with age, gender and race.
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
people have been programmed, on a massive scale, to react emotionally to certain learned key phrases and terms. when this automatic emotional reaction occurs, all logical processing ceases immediately, and the person you're talking to either immediately leaves the conversation (if you're lucky) or starts emotionally, verbally attacking you as though your non-conforming line of thought is a pathogen and their overreac…
Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. But also decades of materialism and "me me me" culture: I think people learn to follow their desires no-matter-what when buying goods or services and the same emotional mechanism is transferred into "buying in" an idea. Modern advertising and branding is based on emotion and vague ideas. The same algorithms to target online ads have been used to i…
> Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking.
Way before social media, there was short wave radio, then cable news which introduced the 24-hour news cycle, and entertainment-shows-disguised-as-news with their permanently outraged talking heads (think Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson).
Political polarization is older than social media, and it wasn't emergent - it was a deliberate political tactic and it worked well enough until the other side adopted it too. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma and both sides are now locked into a cycle of defecting - doing otherwise makes no sense, and there aren't many deescalation off-ramps.
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently had a Zoom call with a prospective enterprise software vendor, a small but very successful business. They trotted out quite a few senior people to make their pitch. In our internal chat room one of my colleagues noted the lack of diversity in their line-up as a red flag (those on the call were all white male boomers). Ironically, the company has a female founder/CEO. I’m not saying this comment led to anythi…
One of the purposes of meetings (in person or remote) is to get a sense of the other group's values, and how they will treat the least of your staff. As a vendor, it's critically important to listen carefully and not interrupt. Conversely, I've rejected vendors when they've talked over one of my colleagues. I don't care how good the product is... if they are not going to be good collaborators. Edit: This is related t…
How does this relate to the comment that you're replying to?
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#568Funny that they don't mention what "certain, commonplace views" people "stay silent" about. That might put a different spin on things. As I mentioned [1] about the Basecamp debacle, you can't get full "viewpoint diversity" and full "identity diversity" because some viewpoints are hostile to some identities. Given our society's long history of those viewpoints being endemic, and given the slow movement away from ident…
In your tweet, you immediately go to "well off white guys".
The fact that you feel comfortable and proud to write like this in public, under your real name, perfectly encapsulates how far off the reservation you are.
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
To some extent I think these are things that should be discussed and addressed internally rather than externally so I'll try to be generic. Key things are (1) I'm a strong believer that anyone with a job should be easily able to get health insurance and be able to send their children to university (i.e. even if law doesn't enforce it I think a decent minimum wage for all employees is appropriate) (2) people doing wor…
FWIW your views are not what I think of when I hear the phrase 'progressive activist'. I tend to think of someone who is concerned almost exclusively with race, gender and sexuality.
> FWIW your views are not what I think of when I hear the phrase 'progressive activist'.
They are... you might just be confusing an actual progressive activist with someone whose sociology degree comes from Twitter.
Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> join the conversation, bring your whole self to work, etc. This is a classic honeypot. They want to weed out people who have views that do not align with current PC status quo. One of the reasons is that no company wants to be associates with an employee who has views that could damage company image and lose money. They want your whole self, so they can discard you if they think you are a liability.
There is no social setting besides close friends and family(and therapy I suppose) where you should ever "be yourself." I never caught on to the trend that started with social media of blurting or tweeting out whatever you're thinking and for good reason. Now people are going back years scrubbing candid thoughts they had when they were teenagers while the naturally reticent have nothing to worry about.
> Now people are going back years scrubbing candid thoughts they had when they were teenagers while the naturally reticent have nothing to worry about.
Not only that, but do you know for certain which of the views you have today that are benign and unoffensive, will be considered taboo and hateful in 20 years? I don't know which ones, nobody does! But in 20 years someone is going to trawl through the archives and measure your views today with tomorrow's moral measuring stick.