I can believe caste discrimination is a serious problem. Though not in anything tech related yet, I've had Indian bosses and colleagues, and among them were some of the most spiteful and vitriolic people I've ever known in my life, especially to people from the 'wrong' parts of the Indian subcontinent. I dread to think how they'd abuse others if they got into higher management.
Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
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Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#422The talk should have allowed to go through. The post I think said it right, people wanted to shut it down and the only way to do it is to discredit the speaker because they know there is truth to the arguments. However we should step back and think about how important it in the American context. What purpose is that talk going to serve? I don’t know if it does anything other than satisfying esoteric learning needs of…
~70% of eng is Asian within SV. About half are Indian. Other half is Chinese.
It’s a very prevalent problem. A lot of people come from India and keep their cultural values - including caste discrimination.
It’s a small issue in the general US but a huge issue within SV. Same as any Asian topic tbh. Most Asians don’t exist outside the coasts - yet we talk about their issues cause they’re in important cities in significant numbers.
Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#423Google’s culture is dominated by arrogance. Management repeatedly tells employees they work on the world’s hardest problems using the world’s biggest computers and the world’s smartest people. Doing anything less is “ungoogley”. It doesn’t necessarily follow that this would encourage racism. But it sure isn’t surprising.
Why would you assume "best" = "racist"? Also - which companies are saying they hire the worst people? I've worked at several companies - every single one of them claimed to hire the best. It's just corporate psychobabble at this point.
I once saw a job posting that claimed to only want world class developers. The pay? 40k.
Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comment is only at zero, it means nothing. I made no qualitative statement about QA being beneath anything. Most developers equate QA is beneath them. I also think QA is just as valid and not beneath dev, but I have also held nearly every roll in modern software companies. How we view QA doesn't mean that is how the tech job market sees it. Pay is lower, qual is lower and at companies that have a sizeable Indian…
> equate QA is beneath them I think the status quality of jobs is an interesting aspect of discrimination. Why do certain jobs have higher or lower status? If the perceived status of various jobs was flatter, would various discriminatory schemes (intentional or not) continue to operate? Would differences in income persist? My hypothesis is that demographic clusters of people within certain occupations are in part aff…
My hypothesis has always been that job status is largely driven by compensation and difficulty obtaining the position. If these are the drivers, I don't know how you would equalize status without overturning the job market at Large
Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists…
I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation Ah, I see how it could cause problems with that type of "equality lab". The equality, discrimination, etc training I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of t…
> I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of them your ass is fired."
Yeah this is good in general but needs tempering through a bit of conflict resolution/appeal process built in. Discrimination issues can often just be the result of misinterpretations and blind spots people have, especially when bridging cultural divides. There's some stuff that crosses a clear red line, but most behaviors are subtle and often unintentional and the approach to dealing with them productively should more closely resemble relationship/marriage counseling or the sorts of reconciliation processes they do in post-conflict zones.
The ones I went to involved being told I needed to make "anti-casteism" part of my identity and pick arguments with my aunts and uncles when they make 'problematic' statements. And it then came with a side of misquotes of The Bhagavad Gita and selective quotations out of the Manusmriti to argue that simply identifying yourself as a Hindu is inherently discriminatory and violent towards lower castes. As a history major and religious studies minor in college I took issue with just about every historical and theological "fact" they brought up but didn't think it was worth arguing. But there was nothing particular to the organization we were in and no specific instances of issues reported internally by anyone so I had a hard time understanding why this was happening.
There's a particular historical narrative among certain political movements in India that depict Brahmins as basically collaborating to institute a conspiracy to to impose a caste hierarchy across all of Indian society for millennia. It's a very simplistic and one-sided reading of Indian history and Hindu philosophy, but it has gained a lot of traction within social justice/DEI spaces and particularly with groups that are more focused on pushing an ideological project.
It would be analogous to having a Louis Farrakhan disciple on to talk about being Muslim in the workplace. There are many better people to raise those issues who will bring them without the side of eliminationist rhetoric. It's one thing to meme about people with privilege or be dismissive in a casual context, but at the workplace (or really any public venue) that sort of talk is just mean. It's especially frustrating because this discrimination actually is a blight on Indian society (though most of the issues in the US are in the realm of microaggressions rather than structural or overt discrimination). But that doesn't excuse just peddling nonsense in response.
Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#426No post body was provided.
Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the OP, but I think the same principle applies. Whenever you accuse an entire race of something (as opposed to isolating your criticism to individuals or even systems), you’re engaging in racism, and this is unfortunately common in DEI trainings and among “race activists”. I don’t think strict moderation is necessary in the general case (especially since a lot of the most credentialed people who would moderate ar…
After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news, and a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo, I agree we've been set back decades. But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists. Woke activists might make some white people more uncomfortable than tiki torch-wielding Caucasians chanting "Jew…
> After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news
The media coverage of police brutality against black men predated Trump's candidacy and it was entirely falsely predicated: the media cherry-picked instances in which black people were killed by police (or rather, those instances were plastered on the front page of national outlets for weeks while egregious killings of white people would rarely break into national news at all where they would be footnotes), which gave the impression that only black people were being killed by police or that police killings of black people were more egregious--neither of which are true.
> a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo
Yeah, this is precisely why we shouldn't legitimize extreme, racial politics or political violence. Every thinking person saw this coming and warned about it (e.g., "we shouldn't engage in racial politics because it's going to embolden and swell the ranks of white-supremacist types").
> But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists
Of course, but woke activism is the only kind of racism that is still regarded as legitimate (i.e., we even allow our most influential institutions to preach it), and by tolerating it we (1) legitimize racism generally (2) allow it to drive a right-wing reaction. The most effective way to treat right-wing racism is by dismantling left-wing racism and re-establishing a liberalist orthodoxy.
Racists on both sides like to frame this as a dichotomy between left-wing racism and right-wing racism, but the only dichotomy is racism vs egalitarianism. Left- and right-wing racism are just two sides of the same coin.
Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of had had a higher ratio of females Positive discrimination is also discrimination, why not look for the same ratio as the job market has? Over hiring from an underepresented group necessarily means lowering the competence, unless you purposely interview a disproportionate number of individuals from the underepresented group, is this what you have done? Edit: needin…
This ignores the possibility of an unbalanced applicant pool.
True, although this is similar to what I described, I guess the distinction is purposely imbalanced and accidentally imbalanced. However I think the latter is less likely, the post I replied to originally mentioned doing this consistently across teams. Maybe the pool in QA is imbalanced? In that case we should compare to other QA teams to see if avensec is indeed an outlier. avensec made it seem like they was an outlier, and everybody in these comments is acting like this is the case. So I lean on the side of the pool being balanced.
I'm trying to understand how this is achieved in practice, however I haven't got a good answer yet.
Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes. The roots of this behavior as well as the fear of this behavior lie in a logical fallacy called composition, which is spelled out at the Nizkor Project (a site on the history of the Holocaust): > The f…
“Only the Jews in country behave like ” isn’t the racially tolerant statement you think it is…
Clearly not all Jews in Israel believe that Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians etc. should be treated as second-class citizens. I'm also not sure that religious identity is to be viewed as 'racial identity' unless you want to revive the definition found in the German Race Laws of the 1930s.
Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Israel (and Saudi Arabia) were to adopt American democratic norms than all members of their population (by which I mean, populations under their military control) would have a right to vote in national elections, yes? So everyone in the West Bank and Gaza would get one vote, same as everyone in Israel proper, for electing members to the national legislative body. Perhaps some degree of federation (as with American…
> American democratic norms [meaning] all members of their population (by which I mean, populations under their military control) would have a right to vote in national elections Since when can non-citizens vote in US national elections? Let alone people living in Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever else is/was under US military control.
I think you'd want to look at the definition of who is and who isn't a citizen, and what constitutes a nation-state. Clearly everyone in the West Bank is under the control of the Israeli state, and the same is more-or-less true of Gaza. Palestinians in these regions are not immigrants, they're citizens under any rational view of what a citizen is, and hence deserve the right to vote in Israeli national elections.
A valid comparison would be claiming that Native Americans were not citizens of the US government and hence had no right to vote for members of Congress, wouldn't it?