Why I Support the Haskell Foundation • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Support the Haskell Foundation

#41

Post by cdsmith » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #40

4bpp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent poster, but I do think it's worth putting a finger on what might simply be a cultural gap between modern (and especially fairly plugged-in) Americans and others who either genuinely have not been socialised into the present-day US discourse about race or are deliberately acting defiant about it due to how it conflicts with the framework that they grew up with. It seems to me that according to present-d…

I think of it as a four-step process. Take Sonia Sotomayor, for a not-currently-controversial example. Step one is that she can't be a Supreme Court justice because she's hispanic. Step 2 is, she's hispanic, but she can be a Supreme Court justice anyway. Step 3 is that she's nominated to be a Supreme Court justice, and nobody mentions that she's hispanic. Step 4 is that, when she's nominated for the Supreme Court, pe…

Fair enough. For my part, I didn't include that comment as just an obligatory remark, though. I did so because it occurs to me that, for instance, the only tech community I'm involved in where I have regularly met people who identify as non-binary gender is Haskell. I don't think that's entirely a coincidence, and I do think it's related to the strong role played by non-industry Haskell programmers in the community. So I said so.

Re: Why I Support the Haskell Foundation

#42

Post by jfengel » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 8:34 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #31

4bpp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent poster, but I do think it's worth putting a finger on what might simply be a cultural gap between modern (and especially fairly plugged-in) Americans and others who either genuinely have not been socialised into the present-day US discourse about race or are deliberately acting defiant about it due to how it conflicts with the framework that they grew up with. It seems to me that according to present-d…

You're of course correct that mentioning so-called "race" as a legitimate category at all is extremely divisive outside of a very U.S.-centric and very intellectually-niche discourse, but there's also a sensible norm against injecting any kind of politics in quasi-professional contexts where people should be able to cooperate seamlessly across political, cultural, and intellectual divides. These tiresome and unintere…

Eminently avoidable as long as you're not wearing the color of your skin out in public.

That's really the crux of all of this. There are people for whom racism is an unavoidable, daily issue. Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable. After being told, "You can't talk about it here; you can't talk about it there", people will eventually say, "Fine, I'm going to talk about it everywhere, because no place seems to be any worse than any other."

I personally am very conflict-averse, and much prefer it when people remain very polite. But reading HN in particular, I've come to realize that a lot of people are still going to insist that racism isn't a problem in the US and demand that others not talk about it. They assume that if they're not seeing it then it's not a problem for anybody -- or worse, they're deliberately inflicting it and hiding among those who are merely obtuse.

I find that so offensive that it overrides even my conflict aversion.

Re: Why I Support the Haskell Foundation

#43

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, Jun 17, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #42

zozbot234 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're of course correct that mentioning so-called "race" as a legitimate category at all is extremely divisive outside of a very U.S.-centric and very intellectually-niche discourse, but there's also a sensible norm against injecting any kind of politics in quasi-professional contexts where people should be able to cooperate seamlessly across political, cultural, and intellectual divides. These tiresome and unintere…

Eminently avoidable as long as you're not wearing the color of your skin out in public. That's really the crux of all of this. There are people for whom racism is an unavoidable, daily issue. Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable. After being told, "You can't talk about it here; you can't talk about it there", people will eventually say, "Fine, I'm going to talk about it everywhere,…

> Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable.

I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of ways to do that. What turns people off to the real, actual problems is casual and unhelpful claims like "the U.S. is an inherently racist/white supremacist country" or the like. What that looks like to outsiders is folks who want to seem like they're meaningfully talking about real issues that some might face, but all they manage to do is to be divisive and stir up pointless conflict for the heck of it. At that point, tuning out is a sensible response.

Re: Why I Support the Haskell Foundation

#44

Post by lambdaphagy » Fri, Jun 18, 2021, 6:38 AM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #42

zozbot234 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're of course correct that mentioning so-called "race" as a legitimate category at all is extremely divisive outside of a very U.S.-centric and very intellectually-niche discourse, but there's also a sensible norm against injecting any kind of politics in quasi-professional contexts where people should be able to cooperate seamlessly across political, cultural, and intellectual divides. These tiresome and unintere…

Eminently avoidable as long as you're not wearing the color of your skin out in public. That's really the crux of all of this. There are people for whom racism is an unavoidable, daily issue. Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable. After being told, "You can't talk about it here; you can't talk about it there", people will eventually say, "Fine, I'm going to talk about it everywhere,…

> There are people for whom racism is an unavoidable, daily issue.

This seems question-begging, because there are structurally equivalent scenarios where I expect that almost everyone would reject raising the issue as inappropriate.

For example, I am a Gentile, a goy if you will, working in financial machine learning. One cannot help but notice that Ashkenazi Jews are over-represented in my company by a factor of 5-10x. If we adopt the principle that differences in outcomes between groups can only be attributable to oppression of the disadvantaged group by the advantaged one, then we would be forced to arrive at some rather 1930's-Germany-tier conclusions.

I don't think there's anything particularly nefarious about Jewish over-representation in tech, or that I haven't been given a fair shake by fundamentally decent people. But if I were primed to look for it, I could scrape together enough incidents over the years where my Jewish colleagues had acted in some kind of socially ambiguous way towards me (as could anyone about any of their colleagues they've known for long enough). When two of my colleagues lapse into Hebrew in the middle of a conversation I'm a part of, I don't think it reflects anything worse than very mild gracelessness. But if I began from the assumption that history was, say, fundamentally a struggle between secretive, scheming Jews and their oppressed goyische marks, I would probably come to a different conclusion.

Yet if I paused in the middle of my software newsletter to reflect upon the question of Jewish advantage in tech and highlighted the under-representation of Gentiles, musing about what is to be done, I expect that pretty much everyone would find that off-putting at the least.

Is there a relevant difference between these two cases?

Re: Why I Support the Haskell Foundation

#45

Post by jfengel » Fri, Jun 18, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #43

jfengel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eminently avoidable as long as you're not wearing the color of your skin out in public. That's really the crux of all of this. There are people for whom racism is an unavoidable, daily issue. Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable. After being told, "You can't talk about it here; you can't talk about it there", people will eventually say, "Fine, I'm going to talk about it everywhere,…

> Yet there's no way to bring that up without making people uncomfortable. I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of ways to do that. What turns people off to the real, actual problems is casual and unhelpful claims like "the U.S. is an inherently racist/white supremacist country" or the like. What that looks like to outsiders is folks who want to seem like they're meaningfully talking about real issues that some might…

That sounds to me like an excuse to not engage.

We all watched a man be murdered last year, and HN was filled with people making excuses for the murderer. He was convicted only because every single person watched it; others whose murders weren't caught on film escaped punishment. Much less the numerous others that are less than murder.

When people can't even agree that a murder in front of their eyes was a bad thing, I'm going to say out loud that something is deeply wrong. If that seems like a pointless conflict to you, then it's going to keep happening and I'm going to be shocked that I have to say to your face that it's bad.

If your aggravation about their time offends you more than the injustice done to them, then you know why the tone will keep getting more aggravating.