Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

This seemingly small insight goes miles toward explaining the current American obsession with racial and gender identity. Gender/racial/age discrimination are not surface-level obvious in America these days, which is why once people are told they're being victimized and discriminated against for X reason, everything starts to look to them like a microaggression against their identity group. They're essentially told you have no choice, you are this. This in turn creates an artificial political base where you're supposed to put your X identity ahead of all other considerations and fight for X people, and since X people only vote for Party A or Party B, you're supposed to vote that way.

I can tell you why it's utter nonsense. Because these groupings are engineered, as you said, to make people identify a difference that they wouldn't have noticed before. The same people who claim racial identity is so central to one's "lived experience" and such a huge basis for discrimination are quick to tell me "well, you can choose not to be Jewish if you want."

Caste is like a whole new frontier. Surely, they'll say, you've been subjected to terrible treatment and it's changed you... you just don't realize how unfair it's been, but we can show you!

It is of course possible that other Indian-Americans can identify your caste, and have discriminated against you, without you realizing it. But if that's the case, you're lucky not to know, because the worst thing you can do is let a sense of victimization become a central part of your identity.

This is not true, because caste is an (evil) artificial construct which only has ever had one purpose to begin with: To discriminate against people of a lower caste.

Caste is not an ethnic/cultural/biological difference, and it explicitly is about saying some people are better than others. You can't celebrate the differences between castes any more than you can between jailers and prisoners, or masters and slaves. Caste is codified generational inequality.

When you have an a-priori assumption that every difference in outcome is due to oppression of some sort, the argument is over -- you've already allowed that discrimination on any basis is OK, as long as it's against whoever you've labeled the "oppressor" group.

As a final coup de grace, you can label anyone who disagrees as an "oppressor" (or at least "fragile") without engaging their argument -- it's all circular reasoning supported by an ad-hominem fallacy.

That is a (very) thinly veiled version of exactly the tactic we're talking about, and I probably shouldn't engage with it, but ... who says something doesn't affect whether it's true. Why is the demand for perfection - dare I say purity? - so one sided, and limited to certain topics? If a racist says that it's wrong to assault peaceful pall-bearers at a funeral for a journalist who was already a victim of a highly questionable military action ... well, they're right. One should of course be careful not to validate anything else the racist might say, or to let them shift focus/proportion beyond where it belongs, but rejecting truth because it was stated by The Wrong People is exactly what the racists themselves like to do (not to mention every authoritarian of every stripe). It's not reasoned ethical debate. It's pure blind partisanship, which is not healthy even in an otherwise good cause. Set aside the ad hominem and guilt by association. Consider whether something is true no matter who says it, and whether its truth suggests change.

Because gender disparities are changing every year (very quickly in historical terms), and because they are different from country to country, that rules out the possibility that the cause has anything to do with intrinsic differences between men and women, it disproves the idea that there’s a “natural disposition” that is purely based on sex, at least as the primary reason for the distribution today. There might be some natural disposition, but you can’t know what it is until the known, demonstrated cultural biases have been eliminated, and the ratios of men and women settle and stop changing, and women agree that things are fair. Moreover, there is a long history of people claiming “natural dispositions” based on sex that have been subsequently proven false, which means you have the burden to demonstrate why your idea of a natural disposition is somehow different from the previous claims. To date there is no evidence to back up the idea that men & women have any differences in their interest & ability to write software based on sex. There are differences in attitudes, and differences in how many people study and seek such jobs, but those differences are linked primarily to changing social norms, i.e. cultural bias, and have never been shown to be sex based.

> It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields

It could also be, and happens to be more likely, that cultural biases cause sex or gender preferences. If that’s case, then the problem is that insisting there could be sex based differences, when in reality sex based differences may be too small to even measure, may be a self-reinforcing cultural bias. Instead of assuming that bias doesn’t exist and demanding someone prove that it does first, we need to be assuming it exists and actively asking the question how can we get rid of it and then prove that we got rid of it. After all, we know for a fact it used to exist in the US, we know for a fact that it exists today in certain countries, and we can’t show that it ever got completely solved, because it never did yet.

> I also don’t understand why we should strive for balance? What is wrong with each group, whether grouped by sex or race or age or whatever else being specialised in different fields on average?

You might be making assumptions here about what the goal is. The goal is to eliminate prejudices that are actively harmful. The World Health Organization, for example, talks about why it’s important to eliminate these prejudices. https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender