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Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

tarahenley.substack.com

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Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#171

Post by beaconstudios »

yet another instance of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Measuring diversity of organisations is a good way to know if people are being excluded from opportunities based on immutable factors. It's not something you should be actively boosting by refusing to hire cis/het/white/male people and calling that equality.

A much better approach would be to say something like "oh, our company hires less black people than you'd expect based on demographic data. Where's the bottleneck? Are we discriminating in hiring, either intentionally or unintentionally? Is our industry insulated from black employees by geography, culture, perception?" Then when you know (or at least have a good idea) where the bottleneck is, you know where to intervene if it's something you're able to do. It's basically just the institutional equivalent of investigating problems based on dashboard metrics. If you have a dashboard of t1 vs t2 subscriptions and you think the ratio's wrong, you don't just start banning t1 subs to fix the metric, that's moronic.

Good "wokeness" is just egalitarianism with a systemic/holistic perspective. Bad "wokeness" is just more racism a la "two wrongs make a right".

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#172

Post by YZF »

paganel wrote: post #89

> It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like Very glad this got mentioned, in all of this people have forgotten who their enemies really are: the government for some, the big corporations for other, sure as hell the real enemy is not Sam from around the block who doesn't believe in LGTBQ rights. Sam doesn't have an ounce of…

Enemies?

Sam has a lot of power. We've seen over the last few decades how speech influences a lot of Sams and completely changes society. Society is the sum of all Sams and Sams have a lot of power. Sam from around the block is the Sam that used to report or burn the witches in the 1500's.

Now LGBTQ isn't necessarily the dearest topic to my heart, but freedom is and this is just one aspect of it.

Racism and bigotry are all over the place. What do we do about it? I would argue that those mindsets are not that dissimilar then those causing issues with governments and corporations.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#173

Post by pyuser583 »

cuspycode wrote: post #54
epivosism wrote: post #17

What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is heard based on those irrelevant traits (irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc.) My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" co…

Obligatory story beginning in 1963, where computer scientist Les Earnest explains why he always entered "mongrel" when questioned about his race: http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm

Lol … I like the part about the Caucuses being in the USSR, so being Caucasian meant being Soviet.

I once told a friend from west India to put “Aryan” down for race, but then stopped him and apologized after I realized that was mean-funny, not funny-funny.

I was really an asshole in my 20s.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#174

Post by laszlojamf »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #94
wussboy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you’re right. My personal solution to this problem, having once run a left-leaning organization that was taken over by all the things you mention, is to learn more towards the centre. I’m curious if you’ve considered the same, especially because you describe yourself as “the left-most person in the room”?

In the United States the Overton Window is so far right even the Democratic Party is center-right. In a Scandinavian Country I'd be a fairly moderate, conservative social democrat. Here, if people knew my thoughts, I'd be seen as a Wild-Eyed Radical. But given the politics in my country, I've given up compromise and actually moved further Left. And more militant, less quiet. Luckily, the organization I'm currently in…

I don't mean this as any kind kind of criticism, but being a swede with an American friend who was partially brought up in Sweden during the good ol days of Swedish social democracy I wonder if Americans really know what they mean when they talk about Scandinavian social democracy. These days they're a lot more conservative than they used to be. Mostly I imagine their stance on immigration control, and crime wouldn't be what Americans have in mind. Or maybe you do! All I'm saying is that it's interesting hearing it come up a lot in American discussions as if it's its own thing when really they're quite the moving target.

EDIT: but i guess for you guys it might be more single-payor healthcare and reasonable taxation in which case, yeah, some things haven't changed :)

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#175

Post by pessimizer »

commandlinefan wrote: post #101
badRNG wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I didn't word it well enough, but I intend to comment on a broad category of discussion that I don't think is necessarily inappropriate according to the guidelines, but tends to produce unproductive, hostile conversations. I understand that anti-diversity blogs often gain a lot of traction with a particular subset of HN readers, but it consistently winds up producing flame wars and can make HN a less friendly p…

It seems to me that HN is the last place you can discuss this topic - it's just preemptively deleted on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

There used to be more discussion about the topic from the pro-diversity, anti-racist perspective until it was temporarily banned under the euphemism of "politics."

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#176

Post by donohoe »

epivosism wrote: post #17

What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is heard based on those irrelevant traits (irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc.) My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" co…

Yes, but there is a reason. Typically all the race and gender of people being interviews was usually "white" and "male" to the exclusion of other voices with a different perspective.

The push to equality (and we are not there yet) requires change and that change can be ignored unless you track it.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#177

Post by celtain »

monkeybutton wrote: post #122
mikepurvis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't preferred pronouns kind of orthogonal to the rest of the stuff? It has nothing to do with attempting to ensure representation and is instead about addressing a person in the manner of their choosing, akin to asking a woman if she prefers Ms, Miss, Mme, Mrs, etc. I expect it's probably way more appropriate in most contexts to directly ask a person what their preferred pronouns are than to ask what their gender i…

>asking a woman if she prefers Ms, Miss, Mme, Mrs This was at one point a controversial topic. Conservatives objected to the new construct of neutral meaning "Ms" and feminists objected to "Miss" and "Mrs" because they indicated marital status. The argument being that viewing a woman's name with those titles was reducing her to an object who's worth was determined by if she was available or not to men.

There was a controversy, but the controversy was never over whether it was appropriate to ask for your honorific on a form, just what the options should be. E.g. nobody thought it was weird to ask if you went by Dr.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#178

Post by wslack »

john_moscow wrote: post #80
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a previous job HR directly contacted me and told me to put my pronouns on my profile. I said sure and proceeded to ignore it. Fuck that shit

When someone asks me about preferred pronouns, my answer is "I prefer a raise over pronouns and thank you letters". I wish more people would do the same.

I'd politely push back a bit. It makes sense that trans people don't want someone else assuming their pronouns - I wouldn't like it if someone called me something besides "he" - so the question in good faith is reasonable, unless someone is offended to be treated in a trans-friendly way.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#179

Post by ithkuil »

snarf21 wrote: post #140
badRNG wrote: post #22

I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN. By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far this time ." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.

One thing I learned in my many years in this life: you can't fix inequity by inching slowly in the "right" direction. However, the "right" stopping point is too often controlled by the same oppressors. You have to be like a pendulum and swing waaayyy too far past "equity". Then the pendulum will eventually energy out at a more reasonable equitable point. This is a lot of anchoring point bias built in. This overcomes…

What would be in your opinion the best historical example of a inequity that wasn't righted by moving slowly and one of an inequity that was righted by overshooting the target?

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#180

Post by bequanna »

ninkendo wrote: post #146
elevenoh wrote: post #46

Quoted post unavailable.

"Wokeism" is a pejorative catch-all term for all the negative aspects of trying to be against racism, so it's kind of true by definition, isn't it? Literally no one is defending "wokeism" any more than people are defending "racism", because the terms themselves are intended to convey something negative. It makes the term kind of useless, wouldn't you think? It's a placeholder term for whatever you don't like.

The precise definition of the pejorative 'woke' can be debated, but I think we all can agree that "we know it when we see it".

And it is far from useless. IMO it accurately labels people who are either: 1. Taking liberal talking points to extremes for the sole purpose of attention seeking or 2. Naive, coming of age youth bumping against reality for the first time in their lives and use the distraction of politics and remote injustices to avoid confronting the "hard work" which will be required to thrive in the adult world.

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