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Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#881

Post by hitekker »

djohnston wrote: post #845
rramadass wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything in life is simple and in particular; nuances matter very much when it comes to understanding other Cultures/Social Structures. Anecdotes like yours really bother me because they sound so outlandish that their veracity cannot be taken on faith. Having spent a considerable part of my working life in the US, i can state that never once has the subject of Caste ever been a topic of relevance with my Indian…

So you have no evidence, he has evidence, and your argument is simply "I don't believe you." These are the same forum discussion strategies of white nationalists, and this has been a fascinating thread to read!

The GP's profile indicates he's comfortably upper caste.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#882

Post by namecheapTA »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #760
namecheapTA wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is I feel the same way about your side, and even worse really. You're trying to take away my guns while leaving it for people that can afford security. You're trying to talk to my kids about sensitive sexual issues at crazy young ages. You're trying to make it harder for my kids to get jobs or go to college because they were born a certain color. You're trying to make it harder to lock people away for maj…

> You're trying to take away my guns while leaving it for people that can afford security. I mean this with a surprised but real sincerity. I’m a former gun rights advocate and this notion was a big reason why I was. Don’t get me wrong, I do want to selectively restrict gun access. I want to preserve it for hunters, and potentially for severe cases where individuals are acutely threatened. I don’t otherwise want priv…

Anecdotes about bad things that happen to some people aren't going to phase me and change my mind out about large scale systematic damage the left wants to do.

Regardless though, my point is that there are 'sides' and 'groups' and thinking poorly about the other side isn't going to go away when someone running for president of the United States calls people basically evil.

People on the right think that people on the left are naiive and foolish. People on the left think people on the right are evil. So if anything, the left is doing what this entire thread is about.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#883

Post by code_biologist »

dahart wrote: post #609
golemiprague wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it is "cultural bias" and even if it is why do you think it is a problem? It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields, it might be that even in fields where it is balanced it is the "cultural bias" that make it balanced rather than the natural disposition. I don't understand how something like that can even be proved, how do you control for all the param…

> How do you know it is “cultural bias” 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…

> 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 is a broad trend that as women are more empowered, they are less likely to go into STEM: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#884

Post by ThinkingAgain »

rramadass wrote: post #768
quadrifoliate wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear a lot of instances of favoritism or nepotism in what you describe, possibly even corruption, but not much sounds like caste-based discrimination. "Incompetent person hires a lot of people they know instead of qualified candidates" is not really what's being discussed here, and I think Ms. Soundararajan would agree. As a side note, this illustrates quite neatly why most of us who come from India are somewhat re…

Well said. Americans have no idea of what caste-based discrimination looks like and hence merely use it to foist their own prejudices (i.e. "they terk err jerbs") onto the Indian community. Indians have such diversity amongst themselves (North vs. South, State vs. State, Linguistic, Religious etc.) that anything can be used as a bone of contention (real or imagined). The first thing to realize is that people with gri…

I was also initially surprised when I heard about caste based discrimination in USA. There are few points which helped me in understanding: 1) Personally a person may not have seen or heard of sexual harassment incidents. It doesn't mean "sexual harassment" doesn't exist. 2) Even if a lower caste person is not being discriminated, but if the person is feeling "uncomfortable" about revealing his/her caste it means that there is something wrong in the society which needs to be fixed. (very much like racism)

As such USA does much better job of telling about racism, then India does about casteism.

However India did a superb job of asking Dr.Ambedkar to write the constitution, by which the upper caste will abide. I am not aware of any other society which has said, "we believe in equality and will allow someone who was discriminated to make the rules by which we all will live".

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#885

Post by hristov »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #858
hristov wrote: post #800

Did hackernews just delete this story?

I found it just now by browsing the front 2 pages of HN. What makes you think it was deleted?

Yesterday, I found it on the top of my front page. Then barely an hour later it disappeared from the front page and I could not even find it when I searched for it. Very suspicious.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#886

Post by imbnwa »

Levitz wrote: post #658
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caste is a great illustration of how arbitrary racial identities are.

At which point is this about race? Isn't this more like knighthood in the olden times?

If we're being strictly anthropological Western 'racism' is a type of caste system but all caste systems have the trait of assigning better or worse outcomes to disparate breeding pools, however defined, and re-enforcing breeding rights on some level. Almost all human societies are caste systems of some sort since the introduction of farming at least, and from a more modern perspective is a composite of multiple, simultaneous caste systems (usually referred derisively as 'isms').

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#887

Post by imbnwa »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #857
istjohn wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're blaming left-wing rhetoric for right-wing violence. That doesn't compute. The voices shaping the narrative on the right have agency. They are not puppets of the left, and they don't get to simply point at woke Twitter and say, "They made me do it." There is a rot in American culture that is giving rise to anti-democratic and racist violence, it needs to be rooted out, and it has found shelter and succor not in…

It’s not “blame”, it’s looking at causality to try to understand how to get us out of this mess. I’m looking at why race ideologies (and violence) have exploded over the last decade in the same way we would look at the causes of a crime surge. It doesn’t absolve individuals, but it gives the rest of us an idea about where to focus our efforts: on the influential institutions who are driving race ideology on the left…

>It’s not “blame”, it’s looking at causality to try to understand how to get us out of this mess. I’m looking at why race ideologies (and violence) have exploded over the last decade in the same way we would look at the causes of a crime surge.

If that's the time frame you're predicating your analysis of race politics in America on, you're not the non-partisan analyst you think you are. Racist mobilization of white Americans started well before Obama's 2nd term, well before Ferguson, MI and Baltimore, ML.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#888

Post by jeffrallen »

roflyear wrote: post #712
qorrect wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you witness?

Personally, I've witnessed issues with the Indian caste system in many large corporations. From Johnson & Johnson - where there is actually a development team - where they hired other Indians who were horribly unqualified (multiple times they were poached from IT support - I enjoy seeing people move up in tech, but they were entry level techs with no programming experience) and almost exclusively hired other Indians…

I have seen bad hiring in Cisco, which seemed to be based on membership in some sort of clique centered on Pune. I don't know if it was normal "friends hiring friends" or something else.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#889

Post by HelloMcFly »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #293
HelloMcFly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is likely an example why it may not always be a great idea to discuss politics at work. If you're seeing discrimination in the workplace then it's no longer about politics, it's about the workplace and professionalism among staff.

No. Everything is politics. You just happen to be too close and emotionally invested to see it as such. It is fine to hold strong opinions and consider some items 'obvious' or even 'inalienable', but pretending those are all not just a temporary set of values we agreed on as a society is silly. edit: Even saying 'I am apolitical' is a political statement.

Everything may have a political lens with which it can be viewed, but that doesn't make literally everything "political" in the typical usage of the word. Are all workplace conflicts political? Is all unethical workplace behavior political? Is failure to follow IT security guidelines in the workplace political? It's possible to confidently answer "yes" to all of these questions with the right logical contortions, but at that point we'll have reached reductio ad absurdum.

When you manage a group of people that have to work together while trying to maximize workplace outcomes within existing legal framework, organizations have a professional motivation to cover topics like workplace fairness, bias, respectful behavior, etc.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#890

Post by michaelmrose »

skyde wrote: post #772
michaelmrose wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attend more carefully to what I'm saying please. I said that discrimination is just discrimination. The term "reverse discrimination" is semantically nonsense. Selecting people based on skin color is always discrimination. That said the situation as it stands is so tilted against minorities in favor of white dudes that this injustice rarely leaves a white guy in the red on net and fixing what pitifully little prefere…

About education, it’s a hard choice. option 1:No affirmative action: 50% of white are legacy and all other student art there on merits option 2: affirmative action: 100% of white students are legacy 0% are on merits and 50% of all other race are accepted because of merit I picked some random number for option 2 but i assume you see the problem.

The problem here is that you think you can come to a reasonable conclusion without actual numbers AFTER actual numbers were given clearly. The current situation is that we have massive affirmative action for white people and no plans on getting rid of it.
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