Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

ethicalsystems.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 734 posts

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#621

Post by stickfigure »

rovolo wrote: post #588
stickfigure wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are: 55k "Locomotive engineers and operators" (90% male) 1.7m "Chief executives" (70% male) 1.9m "Software developers" (80% male) 3.2m "Architecture and engineering occupations" (85% male) Maybe there is a lot of handwringing within the locomotive industry, but it really doesn't seem important enough for the rest of us to care about.

Sure. And there are fewer full-blown autistic people than there are people "on the spectrum". But it's a lot easier to study autism by looking at severe cases than it is to try to figure out what's biologically different about people who are "a little aspy".

92% of veterinarians are female

98.8% (!) of preschool and kindergarten teachers are female

If you want to understand gender imbalance in employment, these are the obvious places to start.

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#622

Post by intergalplan »

blueflow wrote: post #316
Tycho wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lot of advice floating about the workplace these days along the lines of be candid, join the conversation, bring your whole self to work, etc. The people giving this advice seem to have no conception that not everyone actively engaged in these topics is acting in 100% good faith. Being too open could so easily backfire. Encouraging this is borderline negligent. Indeed there’s entire branches of activism that rest on…

I never got what people mean with "bad faith" stuff. Like its some inherently bad kind of behaviors and ideas? Can you explain it to me like im 5? The worst that i can think of is that people are hiding their true interests and thus lying to you.

Actual intent differs from presented intent. As in "not negotiating in good faith"—carrying on negotiations only to extract information, with no intention of making a deal, might be an example of this.

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#623

Post by BlueTemplar »

dbrueck wrote: post #413
tstrimple wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why everyone keeps scoffing at the idea of calling some of these folks Nazis or racists. It's not hyperbole or an exaggeration. We did have a rally with a bunch of white nationalists exercising their "free speech" to chant "The Jews will not replace us" and they ended up murdering someone there. We had a National Security Advisor to the President of the United States promoting replacement theory. There a…

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…

The worst part is how this kind of "anti-racism" is itself promoting racism by focusing way too much on skin color.

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#624

Post by [deleted] »

zuminator wrote: post #437
yerwhat01010 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even correcting people who are clearly misinformed on clear matters of fact can cause offense. This is so true. I've seen polling showing that large numbers of people believe that the number of unarmed black men fatally shot by American police every year is in the "thousands" or even "tens of thousands". And the further to the left the media people consume, the higher they're likely to believe the number is. The ac…

"The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen." I think you mean, the reported number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen. (But surely we've learned that police reports are not necessarily completely accurate.) And I think that some people believe that a suspect's being armed is not justification for summary execution, barring extraordinary…

[deleted]

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#625

Post by BlueTemplar »

dbrueck wrote: post #564
tstrimple wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 harmfu…

The problem is that at least at some point it was racist, and a bunch of feedbacks keep it that way, with machine learning potentially another one.

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#626

Post by M2Ys4U »

guythedudebro wrote: post #45
jeffbee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason I always look skeptically on other research about "polarization". The trend tends to be that in the past it was common for otherwise-sane people to advocate crazy stuff like bans on interracial marriage. Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization" but I can't find the negative in it, because…

Replace interracial marriage with something like abolish the police. Is the ethical/sane choice still clear cut?

> Replace interracial marriage with something like abolish the police. Is the ethical/sane choice still clear cut?

That's easy, if you don't elide meanings:

Abolish marriage (as an institution that is only between two people of the same race) (and replace it with one that is between any two consenting people)

Abolish the police (as an institution that is corrupt and excessively violent) (and replace it with an institution that is accountable and reduces crime with the minimum amount of force)

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#627

Post by jb775 »

Loughla wrote: post #434
jb775 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how willingly other people bring up politically sensitive issues in the workplace I'd say I'm a mix of conservative/Libertarian and this kind of blows my mind over the past few years. It seems like I constantly hear people on the left openly voicing their political opinions around crowds of people, and always speak in a way that they genuinely believe everyone around them agrees....and often have a condescending wa…

Honestly, and this is a real question, do you not see how you are literally doing exactly what you're calling out 'the other side' for doing?

How so? I'm primarily calling them out for spewing their political beliefs in public and I described the lack of awareness they have as they do it (and I touched on the underpinnings as to why I think that lack of awareness exists). How am I doing the "exact" same thing here?

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#628

Post by ttt0 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #625
dbrueck wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 harmfu…

The problem is that at least at some point it was racist, and a bunch of feedbacks keep it that way, with machine learning potentially another one.

It wasn't racist in my country at any point, as we never had any slavery (we did enslave and genocide each other, but we're all white so no one cares) or racial minorities even, besides maybe some Turks or whatever. And I was still told by some people that I benefit from white privilege.

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#629

Post by AnimalMuppet »

clarkevans wrote: post #547

For many progressives, workplaces are inherently political by their very structure and processes. In this perspective, to ask a progressive to "not bring politics to work" is telling them that the established political norms shall be victorious (without debate). It's not like conservatives don't do virtue signaling: there are catch phrases like "respect for capital" and "work hard" that are just as prevalent in the w…

> For many progressives, workplaces are inherently political by their very structure and processes.

If so, then I wouldn't want them in my company. If I'm hiring, I'm (almost always) hiring someone to do some work, not to try to destroy my company's structure and processes.

Re: New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity

#630

Post by krapp »

twic wrote: post #360
krapp wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Freedom from speech can only mean freedom from consequences, but virtually nobody thinks all speech should be free from all consequences. Then people should stop stating the former as an argument, because "all speech should be free from all consequences" is what it means.

That's not what they mean by it. It might be what you understand by it. It's not meaningful (!) to talk about what it means in an absolute sense.

So the strong form of the phrase "free speech must mean freedom from consequences" implies all speech must mean freedom from all consequences, whereas the weak form would mean all speech must be free from a certain undefined subset of consequences?

That phrase is always proposed as a rebuttal to "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences," and always in the context that any consequences given will lead to a slippery slope. It doesn't contradict that premise at all if interpreted in the weak form, it only makes sense as a rebuttal in the strong form.

So either the so-called "free speech maximalist" side actually believes that people who argue free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences are referring to all consequences rather than any consequences, or else we're all just in violent agreement with one another, and really just haggling over what those consequences should be.

Post reply on HN