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Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

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Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#51

Post by whimsicalism »

twofornone wrote: post #49
whimsicalism wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on? Nobody with as close of ties to white supremacy has ever gotten as near to the presidency in the US as Marine Lepen. US nightclubs do not routinely filter based on race, unlike a sizeable percentage of Paris nightclubs from past investigative reporting. Is it possible that maybe you just don't notice the brunt of it because there are fewer people of African descent in both of these countries?

Maybe people like LePen are growing in popularity because people like you absolutely refuse to acknowledge the social, cultural, and financial costs of importing millions of, as you put it, "brown people"? Maybe these people are tired of being dehumanized as nazis for attempting to voice legitimate grievances?

[flagged]

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#52

Post by whimsicalism »

furgooswft13 wrote: post #47
whimsicalism wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on? Nobody with as close of ties to white supremacy has ever gotten as near to the presidency in the US as Marine Lepen. US nightclubs do not routinely filter based on race, unlike a sizeable percentage of Paris nightclubs from past investigative reporting. Is it possible that maybe you just don't notice the brunt of it because there are fewer people of African descent in both of these countries?

[flagged]

My accusations against Le Pen are equally as absurd as some other accusations that you brought up that I never made?

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#53

Post by whimsicalism »

dayvid wrote: post #46
quadrifoliate wrote: post #10

Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity. I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "E…

People hate on tech interviews, but it's honestly a lot more fair than traditional interviewing if done properly. You only gauge the candidate on their ability to solve and think through a problem. I also follow a trainer's pattern who doesn't read the candidate's resume before a technical screen to further reduce bias.

In the actual tech world, my view is that these critics are a loud minority who forget what the alternatives look like.

As an awkward autistic guy who often gets mistaken for hispanic, the tech interviews are a god-send.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#55

Post by twofornone »

whimsicalism wrote: post #51
twofornone wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people like LePen are growing in popularity because people like you absolutely refuse to acknowledge the social, cultural, and financial costs of importing millions of, as you put it, "brown people"? Maybe these people are tired of being dehumanized as nazis for attempting to voice legitimate grievances?

[flagged]

You've reinforced both of my points without contributing anything more than a false dichotomy.

That the cost of immigration is negligible to you does not mean that it is negligible to the Frenchmen voting for LePen - and one does not need to invoke racism/nazism to explain this.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#56

Post by Traster »

noslenwerdna wrote: post #42
Traster wrote: post #24

Some of this looks quite.... questionable, and ironically for people that spend so much of their time attacking "the media", this authors would do well to learn something about journalism, and some of it seems downright disingenous. For example, the author talks about representation and talks about that in terms of percentage of white people hired in big tech, but if you dig in to those numbers you find out that basi…

The author calls for tech journals to release their race data. This is why the author has to resort to the approximations you take issue with. "Big Tech Media corporations should do the right thing and release the demographic breakdown of their employee base. There is even a federal requirement to file the form EEO-1 Survey which breaks this data down."

My issue isn't that he comes up with an approximation. My issue is he comes up with a bad approximation. Are you really telling me all 13 news organisations declined to comment to him? Or did he not even ask. And at least justify your arbitrary 13 organisations. It's just really damn lazy. I mean, at the very least they could have just pinged each of the people they found a DM saying "Hey I'm doing a survey would you be willing to share your self-identified race" - a level of fact checking that the actual media would go through before publication.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#57

Post by whimsicalism »

mjburgess wrote: post #44
adwn wrote: post #13

Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a couple of fields: 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors" 2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" 3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories 4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why

It's better to read this as just a form of "genuine politics" in the sense that it's one group saying they want more resources than they have. Here, the message is basically: our people want more of what your people have. ("Proper ratios" arent the point). This is what most of these movements are about, a certain type of economic-political warefare most accute when high-status positions are rare and there's a lot of…

HN is such an idiosyncratic place. You could frame any number of struggles this way and feel smug about being "above it all."

"our people want more of what your people have." -> What "your people have" could be freedom from slavery in 1864, ability to attend the same schools, etc. etc.

Framing it in this way does not make the argument less compelling and I have no idea why you think that race-based discrimination is a "theology" in a country that had explicit legal discrimination against black people up until the 70s and plenty of informal discrimination afterwards.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#58

Post by beaconstudios »

adwn wrote: post #13

Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a couple of fields: 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors" 2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" 3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories 4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why

> fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race"

what does this mean? I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure the Third Reich was focused on the "German race", to the exclusion of all others.

As for ratios, the ratio indicates an uneven pipeline. If idk, programmers were all white and highly rewarded, you might ask why that is. The reason can be one of two things: white people are culturally/systemically advantaged in getting those jobs (for example, those jobs are only available in predominantly-white areas or the education to do the job is more accessible to white people), or white people are more fundamentally capable of programming than others. The former is a social critique, the latter is white supremacy.

If you reject the white supremacist position (as you should), then the question becomes whether you can make the system provide more of an equal opportunity.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#59

Post by rajin444 »

adwn wrote: post #13

Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a couple of fields: 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors" 2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" 3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories 4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why

I would desperately love for somebody to tell me #4 and how they got there. Most modern (western) social narratives hinge on looking at high level distribution by sex/race/etc and declaring there’s an issue. Nobody is verifying the correctness of these distributions because there are so many confounds it’s nearly impossible, but they move forward anyways.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#60

Post by rayiner »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #10

Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity. I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "E…

> Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity.

This is one of my concerns about the recent antipathy toward standardized testing. My family came over from Bangladesh, at a time when there were less than 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. Didn't have much cultural knowledge, didn't know anybody important, and it didn't matter. Did well on the SATs, did well on the LSATs--in either engineering or law, being a foreigner didn't hold me back. Not sure what would've happened if those objective measures hadn't existed. (I mean I guess I do know what happened--family connections mattered a lot more in e.g. the legal field back in the day.)

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