101–110 of 267 posts
Currently, the USA population is 60.4% white [1]. So, whites are under-represented in big tech (50.1% white according to this post) while over-represented significantly in tech journalism (80% white). That's difficult to understand: why is there such a bias in favour of white people in tech jornalism, but not in tech in general?? [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-po...
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Yes. I'm convinced the most racist people are those who can't stop talking about race, and that would include a fair amount of self-proclaimed and vocal "anti-racists".
This seems extremely premature given the massive disparities that still exist today racially. The average wealth of a black family in Boston is $8 whereas the average wealth of a white family is about $200,000. How do we talk about these disparities if we throw away the language to talk about race? Or is your argument that these disparities are innate? Or that they are not at all due to the legacy of explicitly race…
I'm merely denouncing those who try to shoehorn the subject of race in every discussion.
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…
This may be an unpopular opinion: > 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. Is tech really that different? * When evaluating senior candidates one of the criteria that candidates are selected on is the prestige of their previou…
On the other hand, these people were still negatively impacted by their backgrounds: they hadn't had the chance to join fancy tech companies out of college, which meant they missed out on several years of career opportunities. They were more likely to be hired at a Senior Software Engineer level, for example, when someone similar from a big tech company might be hired at Staff+.
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This may be an unpopular opinion: > 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. Is tech really that different? * When evaluating senior candidates one of the criteria that candidates are selected on is the prestige of their previou…
I agree with you that it's definitely about who you know - if you go to Stanford, you can get better jobs out of college compared to someone with similar skills who didn't. But I worked at a FAANG (or whatever it's called now) company and many of the senior engineers we hired were from small/less prestigious companies. These were people with ~10 years of experience who had become great software engineers but had neve…
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Chinese Gao Kao tests are similarly much harder than American tests; but at the end of the day I don’t think absolute difficulty matters too much as it’s a comparative test. As long as there is differentiation it does it’s job. If the test taking population is very large the tests might need to be more difficult to make finer distinction
Not surprisingly, the population of STEM graduate programs is vastly dominated by foreign students. "81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical and petroleum engineering programs at U.S. universities are international students, and 79 percent in computer science are." https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
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Much, much smaller population. From OP: " So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications." It's that, vs. the millions of employees in big tech. So first you're dealing with the fact that smaller samples are going to have higher variance. Beyond that, though, since diversity has become important to businesses, tech employment has grown much faster than tech journalism. If you're a…
I think it is more that industries that rely heavily on actual productivity/measurable competency are going to lean more heavily on the immigrant population because domestic STEM education largely seems to suck. It's been my experience in every high-stakes knowledge work job (not journalism) that many of the people I work with are immigrants from the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.
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This seems extremely premature given the massive disparities that still exist today racially. The average wealth of a black family in Boston is $8 whereas the average wealth of a white family is about $200,000. How do we talk about these disparities if we throw away the language to talk about race? Or is your argument that these disparities are innate? Or that they are not at all due to the legacy of explicitly race…
I don't know where in my comment you read that race issues should not be discussed anymore. I'm merely denouncing those who try to shoehorn the subject of race in every discussion.
I think I took your agreement that anyone identifying as "anti-racist" is a professional victim as suggesting that we should refrain from discussing race.
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…
> I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor". It's easy: they want to protect their field. This is basically a "not in my backyard" movement. "X industry should be more diverse. Not mine, because that would…
Naval hit the nail on the head here: `The whole Social Justice Warrior-ing trend seems like a case of white-on-white violence.`
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…
This may be an unpopular opinion: > 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. Is tech really that different? * When evaluating senior candidates one of the criteria that candidates are selected on is the prestige of their previou…
If you tried to get into journalism instead chances are you would be flipping burgers at McDonalds right now. Sure tech isn't perfect, but it is much better than almost any other field. The fact that you could work your way up that quickly is just proof how well we have it in this field.
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> 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. In France, we don't consider that people have a different race. We may talk about ethnicity, culture, but not race. Asking what race someone belongs to is something that would be seen as very offensive. Part of it would be because of the racists undertones (we don't make much…
> In France, we don't consider that people have a different race. Ah I thought the parent was saying that the Third Reich was into the "human race" in the "there is no race but the human race" colourblindness way, which threw me off. Yeah I agree, race is a social construct and ethnicity/culture are historical products. I'm British, I don't think we're quite as post-racial but the idea of black and white people being…
I don't agree with that. Black people are heavily overrepresented in sports in the USA. I personally believe that this is partially due to some physical differences that makes them better at sports, and that even if the cultures were exactly the same, they would still be overrepresented (relative to their proportion in the total population). I don't think that makes them superior to other people. I also don't think that means there is something discriminatory at play other than biology. As soon as something involves skill, people will have different levels of success at it.
> Well, if you essentialise superiority ie say that a racial group is objectively better at intellectual pursuits regardless of culture or resources, then yeah that's a racial supremacist argument.
No, this is not. You are making a jump between "a racial group is better at one field" to "a racial group is better than all the other groups", and again to "a racial group is better than all the other groups and should dominate them". Those are three very different things. Even if the second one was true, which I don't think it is, that wouldn't mean that the third one would be true. A group of people being superior doesn't automatically gives them a right to decide for others. Again I reject that ideology.
> You can reasonably say that, idk, white American culture incentivises nerd stuff more than black American culture, but that's an example of the former classification ("systemic/cultural reason") that I gave - it's not an essentialist argument because culture is mutable.
So for you any mention of actual biological differences that leads to better performance in one domain would be supremacism? That's a really weird way of looking at things. I'm not sure how you would envision a working society considering that even if people were all equal at birth, there are quickly differences between everyone. I'm good at programming, better than most people that I've met, but I don't derive any sentiment of superiority from that, and even less of supremacism. I feel good when I can help them, and I'm glad to be able to rely on people better at other stuff than me.
Even if deep racial differences existed, I think we could still build a society where people are judged as individuals on what they accomplish, perhaps taking into account what they have in some cases, where everyone respects each other.