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Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

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Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#451

Post by seoaeu »

photochemsyn wrote: post #430
seoaeu wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 v…

Notice that you completely dodged my question. There are lots of non-citizens living in the US who cannot vote. And during the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan none of the people living there were granted voting rights. Hell, look at how many senators Puerto Rico and Guam get

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#452

Post by Dracophoenix »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #33
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #12

Quoted post unavailable.

> importing ethnicities means importing their ethnic conflicts too, always Is there evidence for this? Couldn't null be valid: those choosing to emigrate are most likely to be willing or wanting to leave that nonsense behind? Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values. Plenty of Indians emigrate while leaving their caste identity, and any will to act on it, behind. There may remain implic…

That's might have been true of the more "enlightened" Indian engineers who immigrated to Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s. There were also ambitious Indians who liked the old ways but lacked the opportunity to engage in such discrimination until they adapted or the opportunity eventually arose.

Either way, as more and more of a certain ethnicity/race enter a country for the purposes of bettering their financial prospects, many of these immigrants reinvent the social dynamics of their origin country. This is how enclaves are created. And while many of the "enlightened" Indians have left behind explicit caste discrimination, they didn't leave other practices behind either ( e.g. parental authoritarianism, arranged marriages, etc.).

A different geography doesn't necessarily produce a different worldview. Every immigrant arrives with his own family values, religious dogmas (or lack thereof), and modes of thought that lead to these aforementioned conflicts.

> Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values

If we're excluding slavery as a de facto caste system, then sure. However certain behaviors being antithetical to our founding values doesn't make them easily solvable problems.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#453

Post by selimthegrim »

rayiner wrote: post #266
kbelder wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caste is inherited and runs in bloodlines. Why wouldn't it be considered racism?

Being hereditary is necessary but not sufficient for a grouping to constitute a race. Blond hair and blue eyes are hereditary, but blue eyed people aren’t a different race. “Race” is a fuzzy concept but generally distinguishes people of different ethnic origins. Indian castes aren’t different races—low caste and high caste Indians can come from the same ethnic group. It’s more like the European distinction between no…

Proportion of steppe/Aryan origin varies among caste groups (some places as you go farther from cow belt that were subject to Brahminization or like Kashmir are exceptions to this, however this doesn’t mean all Hindus in Kashmir were Brahmins regardless of what certain recent films might claim on the subject) Physiognomy as some of the British attempted is not a golf way to go about studying it (see Native American skulls as to why, brachycephaly etc can be influenced by environment over generations) Markers like sickle cell trait (which I possess incidentally) are almost always found among aboriginal/tribal lower castes . It seems that story of “dasas” and Nishadas largely matches up with being forced into lower caste hood or untouchability as a result of losing wars.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#454

Post by selimthegrim »

photochemsyn wrote: post #430
seoaeu wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 v…

For many years they were not (see the Constitution on “Indians not taxed”)

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#455

Post by bena »

walkhour wrote: post #428
s1artibartfast wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outl…

Ever noticed how among professional bowlers, there are fewer conventionally fit guys?

Why is that? You'd think they'd have the same ratio of fit guys as the rest of professional sports by your logic.

Or.

Is it because the current highest earning professional bowler has a lifetime career winnings of $5 million by 2019? Since he turned pro in 1980. So if you can, you play something else.

Similar thing is going on here. There aren't people gunning for QA jobs specifically, there are people gunning for software related jobs in certain companies. People will get various offers from various companies for various positions. And the position you get is a reflection, in part, of the best offer for the best position the best company gave you.

So while the entire pool may have applied for the QA job, some of the people who were given offers got better offers from better companies and/or for better positions.

And let's not forget there could also be a variation of the Dead Sea effect going on. Where those who aren't Indian women get promoted or transferred out of QA at a higher rate, leaving more Indian women in QA. So you have twin effects going on. Where Indian women are getting accepted into QA positions more than other positions and Indian women being passed over for promotions and transfers keeping them in QA positions.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#456

Post by kergonath »

HKH2 wrote: post #172
kergonath wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> list of obscure 'race'-isms The word you need is “xenophobia” (hate of the others, of those who are different). Race is a limited, artificial concept and by focusing on it we miss the forest for the trees. Xenophobia is as old as humanity and can be based on anything: physical features; ideas, religions, languages, family ties, etc.

Since when does '-phobia' mean 'hatred'? If I suffer from arachnophobia, do I hate spiders?

Yeah, it's mostly fear. I blame my lack of coffee at the time and my non-English mother tongue :)

Though the line between fear and hate is quite thin and blurry in human psychology. The arachnophobes I know do, in fact, hate spiders with a passion.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#457

Post by api »

floraandfauna wrote: post #303
api wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regional elitism in the USA is definitely a form of soft caste system. If you are from the upper East coast or the West coast you are a member of a higher caste than if you are from the interior, and inside the US there are definitely smaller caste differences. The South gets it the worst. When I was in college (University of Cincinnati) engineering students from the South were sometimes encouraged to lose their Sout…

As someone who grew up in the Deep South but studied and worked on the east coast for many years, I can confirm this to be 100% true. At a past job, I worked for a company headquartered on the upper east coast, but which had opened a "tech hub" in the mid-sized Southern city where I lived at the time. Some of my co-workers had fairly pronounced Southern accents and people in the home office would regularly laugh and…

> The level of cognitive dissonance required to maintain that kind of mindset must be intense.

Holding and advancing multiple deeply contradictory ideas is something humans are very good at.

I've come to believe that most people spend very little time asking if their ideas are reasonable. They just believe what they need to believe to fit into a group. It's more about group membership signaling than anything else.

Primates will choose social connection over food, so it's not surprising that we'll also choose social connection over rationality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrNBEhzjg8I

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#458

Post by ChoGGi »

deelly wrote: post #410
zajio1am wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why people (specifically immigrants in other countries) just do not change their last name to ones associated with higher caste?

As far as I know (from some coworkers) they do. But last name is only the first step/flag in identifying to which caste person belongs. Sorry, I don't remember exact details, but there some additional steps like special clothes I think?

Yeah, I think the Brahmins have a vest you can feel on the shoulder, so they do a shoulder grab to act close.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#459

Post by burrows »

dahart wrote: post #447
burrows wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since there’s nothing gender or sex related to doing the job of QA, How do you know this to be true? > cultural bias What definition are you using for this term?

The question you need to be asking is the opposite: how can you demonstrate that bias has been eliminated? Sex bias was absolute and baked into law 100 years ago, and it has been slowly getting eliminated, but there has not been any point in time where we can demonstrate it’s gone, precisely because we have evidence it’s not gone yet. (Pay gap still exists, gender disparities between schooling and employment still ex…

> The question you need to be asking is the opposite: how can you demonstrate that bias has been eliminated? Sex bias was absolute and baked into law 100 years ago, and it has been slowly getting eliminated, but there has not been any point in time where we can demonstrate it’s gone, precisely because we have evidence it’s not gone yet. (Pay gap still exists, gender disparities between schooling and employment still exist, etc.)

I don’t understand the meaning of the term “sex bias”. So it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.

> We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.

Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards? What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times?

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#460

Post by swayvil »

thelit wrote: post #312
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #5

A good read for some additional context on caste discrimination in the American tech industry: https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...

As a Dalit myself, I wrote a Dalit 101 for non Indian audience. https://thelit.substack.com/p/dalit-101

What if you just lie and tell everybody that you're brahmin (or whatever the alpha caste is)?

Do you need identifying papers?

Is there a big market for forgeries?

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