591–600 of 621 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we're just talking around each other here. Anyway, I've said all I have to say about this for now. People can take from it what they will.
> I think we're just talking around each other here. No, we aren't talking around each other at all, but I can understand why you might feel uncomfortable discussing your motivations so by all means let's stop.
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If you look up the word ostracize in the dictionary, you'll find no association with severity of injury. > It's hard to 'impersonate' on a forum where every post has my username on it. Are you new to the internet or something? I might ask you the same, answering a question that was asked specifically to another person isn't how you "internet".
He answered with a useful, relevant comment that provided the data point you were asking for. I'll back his experience up with another source: https://thegavoice.com/atlanta-police-release-details-12-rec... The point you were trying to make was that these were isolated incidents, that these people could live their lives around them. Reading that list, it's clear that isn't true - people threatening to kill you, beati…
Pardon me for nitpicking, but I can't help it. :)
Here is the original post to which I replied: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704091
>> True, but socially, we've moved past that. There might be the rare individual baker who would not want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, because he's a devout Christian or Muslim or whatever and thinks homosexuality is a sin. But 98% of businesses won't care, as long as you can pay the bill.
> Untrue. There are still many communities where you can be totally ostracized for those things.
The point of contention is not whether some (and sometimes very severe) discrimination exists, it is whether as he claims that there are places where it is so common/frequent that you could be considered ostracized. I was looking for proof of the latter (his original assertion), not proof of the former (that which was provided, and now provided by you).
> The point you were trying to make was that these were isolated incidents
I'm not asserting anything, I am simply being skeptical and asking for proof of an extraordinary claim.
If my "stance" pisses you off, I beg that you reconsider. To win over those who are still not "on your side" (and I'm not one of them, by the way), using exaggerations and half-truths is most definitely not the way to go about it, especially in this modern day "everyone's-a-victim" culture we live in. I am not your enemy, I'm just offering some well-intentioned advice on how to talk to your enemies in order to persuade them.
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Which is why mindcrime feels you two are talking past one another; because you were. You're arguing statistics and the three of us (Caveman_Coder, mindcrime, and myself) are arguing that using that statistic to be dismissive is not acceptable. Which may not be what you're trying to argue, but is something it seems you are defending. It is used to dismiss any experiences of discrimination faced by white men because "s…
Thanks for explaining; very helpful. The point that failed to land was first thing I said, i.e. that we are poor judges of our own informed-ness. Assuming discrimination were uniformly distributed it might be a reasonable position to suggest to people that they hold firmly to their own opinion (i.e. telling others to "piss off"). However discrimination is not evenly distributed, which means white men as a population…
You would have to show that the individual is not "well informed" about discrimination in order to make that argument. Which is not an easy task and is also not what is commonly done. The common thing to do is to claim that they can't possibly be informed, because, for example "they are a cis, white male". It's just stereotyping using a statistic and is no less wrong than other forms of stereotyping based on statistics.
I'm not saying you do that, just that it's common and is where the "Oh, piss off" mentality comes into play.
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He answered with a useful, relevant comment that provided the data point you were asking for. I'll back his experience up with another source: https://thegavoice.com/atlanta-police-release-details-12-rec... The point you were trying to make was that these were isolated incidents, that these people could live their lives around them. Reading that list, it's clear that isn't true - people threatening to kill you, beati…
> He answered with a useful, relevant comment that provided the data point you were asking for. Pardon me for nitpicking, but I can't help it. :) Here is the original post to which I replied: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704091 >> True, but socially, we've moved past that. There might be the rare individual baker who would not want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, because he's a devout Christian or Muslim…
I just don't understand how "some severe discrimination exists" but that doesn't ostracise people? You don't need everyone to hate you to be ostracised - just enough people to stop you living your life. If there are three local venues suitable for a wedding and those three people are anti-gay, good luck getting married locally.
It's not exaggerations or half-truths - being gay, black or of a given religion (or lack thereof) can mean your life is basically unlivable in some communities. If you need more concrete examples, go read the ex-mormon subreddit, for example. People who, because they are atheists, are disowned by their family and lose every friend they ever had, and have to leave the only place they ever lived.
It's easy to not see it outselves and say "it's all stuff of the past", but it isn't. Even if your life isn't completely unlivable, quality of life can be severly reduced. I was talking about the extremes that triggered the laws, not trying to say that's the only thing that's an issue.
More importantly, the point of my first post (the root of the chain) was that minority groups that are designed to provide a path into a field aren't the same as segregation.
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> He answered with a useful, relevant comment that provided the data point you were asking for. Pardon me for nitpicking, but I can't help it. :) Here is the original post to which I replied: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704091 >> True, but socially, we've moved past that. There might be the rare individual baker who would not want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, because he's a devout Christian or Muslim…
I was the one who wrote that original post. I just don't understand how "some severe discrimination exists" but that doesn't ostracise people? You don't need everyone to hate you to be ostracised - just enough people to stop you living your life. If there are three local venues suitable for a wedding and those three people are anti-gay, good luck getting married locally. It's not exaggerations or half-truths - being…
verb (used with object), ostracized, ostracizing. 1. to exclude, by general consent, from society, friendship, conversation, privileges, etc.: His friends ostracized him after his father's arrest. 2. to banish (a person) from his or her native country; expatriate. 3. (in ancient Greece) to banish (a citizen) temporarily by popular vote.
> If there are three local venues suitable for a wedding and those three people are anti-gay, good luck getting married locally.
Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Are there a significant number of such places? (There very well may be, if there is it causes me no mental anguish whatsoever to acknowledge this, it was merely a simple honest question from the very start of this absurd thread.)
> Even if your life isn't completely unlivable, quality of life can be severly reduced.
Now this sounds like a more honest description of objective reality.
Liberals often accuse those who are opposed to their ideas that they are small minded. Well, is it completely false that there is a relatively new movement that has taken hold on college campuses, where a significant number of students suddenly (as in, there was almost no incidences of this 2 to 5 years ago) need "safe spaces", and simply hearing ideas that they philosophically disagree with causes them to "literally shake", and people of color are now self-segregating themselves into their own events because suddenly mainstream society is so racist it is literally unbearable (despite the reality being continued improvement, if anything, in mainstream "acceptance" of people of color)?
It is my belief that the well-intentioned (actually, I'm not even sure) actions of some people on the left is significantly setting back the true progress of their stated intentions, and in many cases are causing genuinely serious mental illness in impressionable teens. I am not joking in the slightest when I say that these people (not you necessarily, but based on your faux incredulity I'm suspicious) are FAR more damaging to society than the "evils" they claim to be fighting.
And if your response to this is the typical smug liberal, deliberate misinterpretation of what I've said, that will be just yet another confirmation that your "movement" is insincere, whose goal is not to genuinely move society to a more accepting-of-diversity place as you claim, but instead that you are in fact an architect of hate, but just with a different target in mind. Some people are indeed just like that, some of my very best friends in fact.
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>They revolted Hardly[0]. Don't believe the hype. The GOP won using gerrymandering, voter-suppression tactics and clever electoral positioning. Its tools: Voter ID laws and propaganda that deactivated potential voters. 0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
The VAST majority of voters have ID, and it's relatively easy to get one. Most people need one to function in society, and in many states you register to vote in the same place you get an ID anyhow. Perhaps you can point to a few examples where more than one or two people were singled out who wanted to vote but were unable to because of the requirement for ID. It's been shown that voter fraud in several districts was…
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-black-man-brought-3-form...
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24490932/ns/politics-decision_08/t...
When you can vote with a gun license and not with a student ID, you know exactly what they're doing.
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>They revolted Hardly[0]. Don't believe the hype. The GOP won using gerrymandering, voter-suppression tactics and clever electoral positioning. Its tools: Voter ID laws and propaganda that deactivated potential voters. 0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
Trump won because he ran a better campaign. It's that simple. And people voted for him because they liked what he had to say. Not sure why you're looking for some magical reason why he was elected.
It's never that simple :)
What does "better campaign" mean exactly?
"You’re victimising me when you do that. You’re indicating that it’s most likely I need special, extra support. Just because I’m female." This is exactly how I felt during my Microsoft internship in 1998 when the internal women's organization, HOPPERS, decided to change their successful "intern buddy" program from opt-in to opt-out. (Well, not really opt-out, because until I got upset with them about it they clearly…
I don't quite understand how a corporate policy like an "intern buddy" can be compared to a ghetto or even how it remotely hurts you in the same way that an unspoken "boys club" office setting would. A corporate policy like that is pretty clearly an impersonal management-type fluff program that does not solve every problem that could possibly arise from sexism, but that serves a resource for a few people desperately…
Have you ever heard the argument that donating free clothing to Africa is actually bad for Africans? The idea is that by providing free clothing, you destroy the local industries which allow Africans to create clothing for themselves, eliminating jobs, introducing dependency, and eliminating the possibility of a native African-style clothing industry flourishing and eventually exporting products and enriching the community. [1]
Charity comes with a counterintuitive hazard: any time you do something for someone that they could do for themselves, you make them weaker. You deprive them of the independence and control that doing it themselves would offer them, and you reduce the development of their own infrastructure for doing the task the next time.
Charity must attempt to make people stronger. Reduce the impact of a crisis while people recover. Give otherwise unattainable support while the person develops in ways they couldn't without it. Philosophically, funding startups, not donating products.
I'm not saying donating things is always bad . . . it depends on the effects. Charity is hard, I think more because it's hard to figure out how to help people, than because it's hard to be unselfish. I think there are a lot of cases where it's hard to anticipate what the effects will be, which is why it's so important to study what you're doing and see if you're actually helping. It's very easy to do harm while intending to do good. But the rough criterion I use comes from an old song about charity in Africa, and argues that the right attitude to have is, "I want to see you shine / See your light not mine." In a charitable effort -- is the focus on the generosity of the giver? Or is it about what the recipient can achieve and become, with the giver's help being a footnote?
A formalized mentorship seems like a marginal case, one you could argue worked either way. It's giving the new employee knowledge and extra help about the firm, a running start, if you will. Where's the harm in that?
The harm is that the new employee would normally acquire these things herself by asking coworkers, and in the process would learn who she could ask about what, and would begin establishing peer relationships that she will use throughout her career. The implication that she cannot do this for some reason isolates her, and giving her an artificial source of support weakens her ability to find her own support. This would be a bad thing if that artificial support ever went away, but in a way, it's almost a worse thing if it sticks around, because the result is the new employee relying on an inferior network to the one she would have developed herself.
The term ghetto to me implies that all the capable and competent people moved away, leaving the poorest ones stuck with just each other. A targeted system which isolates and coddles new employees will have just that effect -- they'll have the impression that it's the system and each other they can talk to, leaving them with a much, much poorer network than if they had just been introduced to the veteran coworkers as if that were perfectly normal which it is.
I'm right there with you in that this sort of thing shouldn't be taken personally. People intend it helpfully, and that charitable impulse should be honored (if perhaps gently educated, too). But I myself have always been very suspicious of programs targeting women, because there are a lot of people in the world who want to Help Women and I always suspect those programs are about their glory and pro-womanness or whatever, and more likely to harm me than do me any good, even if I can't see right away why that might be. I think my chances are better on my own, and anyway -- I'd prefer to have a similar experience to others in my field in the ways I can, to help me integrate into the new group.
Helping people develop and become stronger is difficult, even in the most concrete cases. It's not dissimilar to raising a child -- you argue one minute that relieving their frustration by making a task easier will give them the boost they need to do something even greater, and argue the next that letting them fail will make them stronger and they will eventually succeed on their own. It's an art more than it is a science, but I think as long as you are teaching something you understand and guiding someone toward mastery, you are pretty safe. But I definitely think it is much safer to devise solutions to help concrete cases than to help statistics. If I see you need help finding the break room, it is easy to conclude that giving you directions will be helpful. Providing you a buddy preemptively because certain classes of employee are less likely to ask for directions easily . . . seems more dubious in its effect. I understand the impulse, but I really think it is safest to stick to the concrete, and to help the people around you and solve the problems you can clearly identify directly.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mariah-griffinangus/africa-char...
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Thanks for explaining; very helpful. The point that failed to land was first thing I said, i.e. that we are poor judges of our own informed-ness. Assuming discrimination were uniformly distributed it might be a reasonable position to suggest to people that they hold firmly to their own opinion (i.e. telling others to "piss off"). However discrimination is not evenly distributed, which means white men as a population…
I can agree insofar as that. Although I don't think Dunning-Kruger applies, I do understand what you're trying to convey. But I don't feel it is a strong argument. You would have to show that the individual is not "well informed" about discrimination in order to make that argument. Which is not an easy task and is also not what is commonly done. The common thing to do is to claim that they can't possibly be informed,…
Based on your extensive qualifications in behavioural science I assume? ;)
Sorry, that was a cheap laugh... but you don't get to brush it off without reasoning though, and Dunning-Kruger isn't the only confidence bias on the table. For example; system justification bias, state and national-scale in-group bias, and the ubiguitous availability of white male role models in almost any profession.
Confidence comes from many places. For example many police forces have trouble recruiting minority officers, even in areas where those minorities are majorities. This is usually not for want of trying, and neither is it because of qualifications. A complex web of motivating and demotivating factors affects conversion rates throughout the recruitment process that often results in unintentional systematic bias.
> You would have to show that the individual is not "well informed" about discrimination...
Not at all.
Caveman_Coder took it upon himself to issue advice to an entire demographic. I argued that demographic will be affected by disproportionate confidence bias. Caveman_Coder's advice specifically hinged on a self-assessment of informed-ness, which will be strongly influenced by confidence bias... making this advice likely to persist ignorance in a proportion of those people.
There's no reasonable obligation for me to look at individual cases of informed-ness.
Happy to discuss yours though.
I'm sympathetic to your story about your own experiences growing up, but I'm skeptical about your claims that you suffered equivalent discrimination to a minority in a white neighbourhood.
On a national level all of the following indicators show bias against minorities. To argue that discrimination against whites in your area is equivalent (in an informed way) you ought to be able to show that a good portion of these indicators are reversed in your neighbourhood... with data, or anecdotally if you that's all you have.
- What proportion of white men are shot by the police in your childhood neighbourhood, vs black or latino men? What are the stop-and-search statistics, and for death in police custody? What do the comparative conviction rates, sentencing, or parole rates look like?
- What's the data on employment by race? What do callback rates for black/white/latino résumés look like? Salaries, promotion, etc.
- What's the data on punishments issued to white/black/latino kids in school for comparable offences? Suspection & expulsion rates? Data on amount of help offered when kids struggle?
- To what comparative extent are white/latino/black votes devalued by gerrymandering in the area? What voter registration laws are in force, and what voter de-registration policies are in place?
What data/analysis do you have? Or if you tell me the name of the neighbourhood I'm happy to have a poke around.
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The VAST majority of voters have ID, and it's relatively easy to get one. Most people need one to function in society, and in many states you register to vote in the same place you get an ID anyhow. Perhaps you can point to a few examples where more than one or two people were singled out who wanted to vote but were unable to because of the requirement for ID. It's been shown that voter fraud in several districts was…
Vastly more people "live in society" then what you apparently see in your bubble. The right to vote is guaranteed to every citizen in this country. EVERY citizen. Even the old, the infirm, the disabled, the slave-descended, and the naturalized. https://www.thenation.com/article/a-black-man-brought-3-form... http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24490932/ns/politics-decision_08/t... When you can vote with a gun license and not wi…
Regarding gun license vs. student id, student ids don't indicate nation of birth, or non-citizenship. Though, I don't think a gun license should either. But I'm not in favor of gun licensing as a general rule.
I'm not trying to belittle anyone's struggle here, but I wouldn't expect to put off getting my ID renewed for however long, then take care of it right before voting. Depending on residence, it might be easier to get an absentee ballot. Beyond this, not every state has enacted voter laws the same, or made it nearly as difficult to get a state issued ID.