21–30 of 341 posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility != https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
I feel programmers have made it econimically. I know a large number of devs in their 30s who make over 200k a year. But we haven't climbed the social ladder as well. Maybe that follows the money.
It's a bit disturbing to me how enthusiastically the SlaterStarCodex crowd latches onto this "fuck you, got mine" essay, gushing with praise and admiration about telling it like it is. The entire thing is a rationalization for the thinking illustrated in these quotes: > I feel the need for a disclaimer of sorts. I am writing about class and some of the injustices of classism, but I do not particularly pretend to posi…
And then when you get absurd results, it proves your originality and willingness to look past conventional wisdom.
Because of where I grew up (rural South and Appalachia), my native accent is something that I've learned to mask in all professional settings. It doesn't matter how immaculate my grammar is: in the profession of software engineering, southern accent = ignorant bigot who can't be trusted. People's biases, conscious or otherwise, are noticeable. The irony is that I practice "code switching", so basically my coworkers h…
You shouldn't have to be ashamed of how you sound or where you're from. I do massively agree with you regarding people thinking southerners are stupid bigots. The way to fix that is to show them you're not, and make a strong point of showing it.
It reminds me of a trip I recently took to Belfast. The day I was there, a car bomb from the IRA killed a police officer. A cabbie asked me if I supported Donald Trump and told he we was surprised I didn't. He told me all Americans supported Trump. So I asked him if he was an IRA thug/terrorist, to which he naturally said no. So rhetorically, I asked how he was from northern ireland and not IRA. When he explained what was obvious, I said EXACTLY, this is much like people who support trump in America. The vocal minority often drown out the majority. Blindly categorizing someone in $group is bigotry plain and simple. Just because it comes from an educated person in tech doesn't make it any less so. Perhaps point out this hypocrisy.
This is a very good article. In America, there is also an example where we "build up" the social class of some segment to compensate for our self-centered guilt. Take the example of the military service. The vast majority of people would rather be at the mall and let someone else fight and die for the country. But the "I support our troops" bumper sticker is everywhere, or maybe they sent ten bucks to Fisher House or…
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...
59% of the money goes to actually helping vets, which is pretty crap. Here are a few more credible alternatives:
http://bearingarms.com/four-charities-better-than-wounded-wa...
I entirely agree with your observation however.
Disclaimer: I'm a combat vet of OIF II from 03-04
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the Left engages in Orwellian doublethink, insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of. > Politically, the left pretends class doesn’t exist ...what?
One of OP's early theses is that the left is all about economic class, but can't admit social classes exist, so conflates them with economic class in order to talk about them.
Max Weber, another leftist considered one of the fathers of sociology, named the "Status Class", related to prestige, one of the three main ones along economic and political allegiance ones.
Modern intersectionalists routinely bring up how arbitrary many of our social predilections seem to be, such as "tan white > white > black", or "pink is for girls", and look at these chicken-and-egg situations trying to figure out where they started. Where does the impetus for this bloggers' parents verbally check[ing] us in a heartbeat if the vowel in our "to" started getting too schwa-like come from?
The big mistake made by the author of that piece is the idea that they can isolate class and talk about it as its own thing. It's a very scientist-like analytic-approach (kinda like Marx isolating economic factors in spite of the others), but seeing as the author is openly against abolishing classes, it seems to be in service of discrediting the efforts of the economically-conscious-left ("even if you abolish economic classes social classes will prevail, so don't bother") rather than as an honest intellectual inquiry.
With this line:
> Please note: for purposes of this discussion, the topics of race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, and native language are all derails of the topic, which is class.
The author seems more concerned with prevailing than with being correct.
Social class is astonishingly multidimensional as pointed out in the works of C. Wright Mills (Power Elite), Paul Fussel (Class), Tom Wolfe (The Pump House Gang), etc. In my extended family there are no college professors, but a lot of cops, even a lot of women that are cops. (There are some accountants, but they are forensic accountants ;-) When I get stopped by the cops I don't worry, they like my attitude, they wi…
Think it's very possible that you believe law enforcement thinks about the world differently than someone trying to avoid law enforcement. My understanding is that they share the same mental model of the world on average; which is not a critical view of either, just what I've heard from people that know much, much more about how different types of people think than me. To be clear, it would be foolish to say all peop…
To be clear, it would be foolish to say all people, even of a given type, think the same.
One of the main purposes of training for many jobs (lawyers, physicists, police, etc.) is explicitly to modify the mental model you apply to the world.
Because of where I grew up (rural South and Appalachia), my native accent is something that I've learned to mask in all professional settings. It doesn't matter how immaculate my grammar is: in the profession of software engineering, southern accent = ignorant bigot who can't be trusted. People's biases, conscious or otherwise, are noticeable. The irony is that I practice "code switching", so basically my coworkers h…
In my limited experience working with others, southern accent = ignorant bigot has not been something I have seen with my co workers. People usually just shrug it off but I can see why a country accent may be looked down upon by ignorant people.
What part of the country do you work in?
It's a bit disturbing to me how enthusiastically the SlaterStarCodex crowd latches onto this "fuck you, got mine" essay, gushing with praise and admiration about telling it like it is. The entire thing is a rationalization for the thinking illustrated in these quotes: > I feel the need for a disclaimer of sorts. I am writing about class and some of the injustices of classism, but I do not particularly pretend to posi…
It's a common attitude in a lot of LessWrong-adjacent blogs: analyze some complex phenomenon that the social sciences have studied in depth, but act as if no one has ever thought of it before. So when class comes up, it's better to think of in the terms of some rando blogger, not (for instance) Bourdieu or Weber. And then when you get absurd results, it proves your originality and willingness to look past conventiona…
For my own curiosity, what tension do you see between Bordieu's or Weber's work and this rando blogger's perspective?
Next interesting point, I think a lot of the outrage with Donald Trump from within the republican party is he is projecting 'lower' class based signifiers and in effect turning power from the 'upper' class republicans to the 'lower' class republicans.
Because of where I grew up (rural South and Appalachia), my native accent is something that I've learned to mask in all professional settings. It doesn't matter how immaculate my grammar is: in the profession of software engineering, southern accent = ignorant bigot who can't be trusted. People's biases, conscious or otherwise, are noticeable. The irony is that I practice "code switching", so basically my coworkers h…
Pretty much everyone in or from Scotland (true or not) does this to some degree.
English and Scottish sayings/slang are my favorite. Southerns have some good sayings but they are not as enjoyable for me to hear, maybe because I used to them.