TL;DR: People tend to refer buddies from the same gender/race. To alleviate this problem instead of ditching referrals altogether add a referral cash bonus (only?) for diversity referrals.
If you're someone of a less represented class, and you tend to refer your buddies from the same gender/race, you're going to get better bonuses than your overly represented peers. Does this constitute reverse discrimination?
Depends on who you ask. Some won't acknowledge that such a thing as "reverse racism" even exists. If you ask me, any sort of policy based on race is racist. Whether it's reverse, corrective, affirmative, or otherwise, is irrelevant. And that is a liberating definition without ifs, buts and grey areas.
"any sort of policy based on race is racist." So you cannot identify racism without being a racist. And is the no race policy then racist itself, by being about race? No, this does not work as a blanket statement. Btw, this kind of message of "don't talk about it" has a long history of being pushed by racist people. Perhaps we should focus on race less, but that is different.
Legal risk sounds like a bad thing. That being said, it doesn't put discrimination in the hiring process per se, only the referral process, which may not be protected by federal law. I am not a lawyer.
Unless you subscribe to recent attempt at redefining the word to "racism|sexism = prejudice + power", which is coming from the... I'm not sure, I guess the identity politics/radfem corner.
Whenever I try to really understand that culture or their opponents (MRA, r/KotakuInAcion etc.) I just end up feeling like both their sides are completely worthless endless rabbit holes and time sinks. Perhaps I just need a minor in Gender Studies to understand.
It's possibly legal under English law. If you have two candidates who are equally suitable you're allowed to employ the one with a protected characteristic because of that protected characteristic.
I feel like it could be a slightly higher amount for every class that the referrer and referee are different, but scrapping the bonus entirely if the the hire isn't 'diverse' (which would vary over time and by company anyway) seems like overkill since the original system is working in other ways
The problem with that strategy is that some will continue referring good/great people they've worked with.. and some will stop or hesitate. Since - as noted in the article - referrals tend to move faster, be more likely hires, and stick around longer, this seems like a bad strategy.
Is it possible that successful companies devote more resources to increase diversity? Implying that companies are more diverse because they are successful. What tests have been done to tease out which is the causal factor?
I think ou are onto something - business is difficult and even simply surviving is a challenge facing most enterprises. Thinking about diversity seems like a first-world problem and only really on the radar of companies who have a strong foothols in the market already.
That is exactly the case. Look at the companies that scream the loudest about diversity and have diversity internship programs(FB, MSFT, Google). Smaller companies do not have the budget to hire "diversity officers". They spend their budget hiring the best people they can find.
I thought I remembered a similar phenomenon where you tend to hire or refer people that don't represent a strong competitive threat to your career. That is, hiring people that you think are smart, but not quite as smart as yourself. Can't find a good reference to any actual study or data though.
That's the "A's hire A's, B's hire C's" concept. A sign of a bad manager is that they never recruit people that they feel are equal to or greater than themselves in any way. The outcome is that that manager holds back the entire organization to secure their own power, and dilutes the talent of the group for personal gain.
Sadly, the President-Elect appears to share this philosophy:
People should hire the people they are most comfortable with, and when they succeed (or fail), they can be examples to their communities.
I inherited a culture with the expectation that I would be a steward of it. That culture has produced pretty much every technology of note in the last 100 years. Those technologies were so pervasive that they transcended culture and did not even require someone speak my language for them to use it to start a company, get a job, or feed their families. To continue that culture, I will share opportunities with people I trust because they have demonstrated their commitment to shared values and interests. I will not share those opportunities with people who self-identify as an out group, or openly identify me as an enemy to be conquered, or my inheritance as a treasure to be confiscated and "redistributed" amongst themselves.
It is a radical view, but I think the legitimacy of the "lack" of diversity needs to be challenged more openly. The framing of public debate with the assumption that negatively defined concepts like "inequality" or "lack of diversity" are a) problems at all, and b) that everyone is somehow accountable to solve them, limits the scope discussion and potential "solutions" only to redistributive methods, instead of evaluating real problems like crappy education, and cultural backwardness.
These diversity police are largely not makers and builders. Why innovate, invent, create, or take risk when you can wait for someone else to do it and use political maneuvering to take control of it once it is profitable?
I get that HN isn't a platform for political battling, but when virtue signalling by mainstream institutions gets posted here, it seems reasonable to provide an an equal and opposite response.
> bigotry: intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself
It sounds like the OP is perfectly tolerant of them existing and doing whatever it is they do, but thinks there are cultural factors that make some people more productive or better to work with than others.
This is obviously true -- education, shared language, a certain amount of tolerance from them -- are all things we expect to be cultural factors in employment.
The OPs point is about what cultural factors and values are most important for and best at jobs.
And since the OP's culture was clearly a white man's culture - a culture that has been relatively slow to accommodate others, in many ways its still a racist, sexist vision - granted one with unusual bluriness at the edges.
Racism is cultural, not just phenotype. For example, you'll find plenty of English racism against the French, Germans, Welsh, Scots, and Irish, even though all of those groups are white.
You're putting too much emphasis on the race part of the word, and not its meaning of exclusion using factors beyond an individual's control. You are the one being hyperbolic.
Cultural discrimination isn't the same as racial discrimination, and I think it's very dishonest of people to pretend they're the same problem.
Also, culture is something you control: even by your definition, it's not racist. (Though, really, you want a term like 'discriminatory' when talking about all factors, because racism is about race.)
What is the functional difference between "No Blacks" and "No Irish"?
As chrismealy says, swap in 'bigoted' for 'racist' if you want to be pedantic; his point still stands. It's not "extremely inappropriate" at all - the OP still a polite form of excluding people wholesale on factors that they can't control. And no, culture is not something people can "just choose" when you're working at demographic scales.
And 'white culture' does not exist. It's not a thing unto itself. Spanish vs Irish vs Russian vs Slovak are all significantly different. White greeks have more in common with the brown people of the eastern medditeranean than they do with the redheads in the celtic lands. You can't just say "MY culture" and take everything that Europeans and North Americans have done.
I personally interpret this post as a reaction to the gross disrespect some Islamic factions have for Western culture, women and human lives, and to issues such as German politicians unilaterally deciding to accept large amounts of immigrants against the will of most citizens, without a good plan to integrate those immigrants culturally while they come from a culture that is very bigoted and known for violence against their women.
Edit: I do think the heritage thing was unnecessary, unless used in a context of cultural differences and the therewith coming need for integration.
I don't think it's fair or useful to demand each culture to build their own technology from scratch, I think that's crap. I do think it's fair to ask immigrants to adapt to the local culture to the point of tolerating it.
Can you clarify what your culture is? And who specifically these out-groups that you worry about are?
I'm not trying to bait you - you're essentially making an argument that relativism in some forms runs into problems when pressed to limits. It's difficult to discuss this without understanding whereabouts you think these limits lie. I don't think anyone can really make an argument about the logical structure of your argument per se, but most will have issues with how you connect various "real world entities" to components of your argument.
In another post I just made an assumption about your beliefs - maybe I was wrong.
Your view is not radical at all. I haven't looked at the Bloomberg numbers or the sources they cite, but it's not like manipulating data and misinterpreting statistics is something that never happened, especially by news organizations reporting causality of parameters when no statistical significance is to be found, or when the "study" was done on 30 persons.
What irks me is presenting something, anything, as a panacea and thinking in magic bullet terms. My comment isn't just about this.. This thinking would be shot down in a technical conversation, but make it about gender, race, or wealth, and everyone tie their tongue and short their brain for fear of being labeled racist, misogynist, or elitist.
Innovations where made in countries where a 100% of workers where of one ethnicity. They were made when a 100% of workers where of one gender. They are also made in companies that are ethnically diverse and employing people of different genders and sexual orientations..
What does this tell us? It tells us that what's important is to hire people who can get the job done and be trained to deliver. That's what this tells you to optimize for.
Looking at this:
>For every 10 percent increase in racial and ethnic diversity on the senior executive team at a U.S. company, earnings before interest and taxes rise 0.8 percent, the report found.
0.8% increase in EBIT for every 10% increase in racial and ethnic diversity in the C-suite? I'm willing to bet that changing the carpet or putting flowers in the patio has a bigger effect than that.
What is a 100% ethnically diverse group anyway? Is that one in which each ethnicity is only represented by one person? A company's goal is to make a profit, not to play race-Lego.
This is usually the part where I have to put the disclaimer: I am African and live in a third world country.
Though I'm from the same country and ethnicity of Saint Augustine, if that could serve as a referral to get hired..
EDIT: originally intended as a reply to fatdog's comment which was flagged before I could reply, so I replied to first child. fatdog's comment was back (unflagged?), so I deleted the reply to first child and re-replied to fatdog's comment.
I absolutely agree with you. The culture of society at the hands of "the diversity police" has become one that strips the individual of any power or responsibility. We've gone too far off the deep end.
I think Milton Friedman put it best: If discrimination exists, then it presents an arbitrage opportunity -- because people that are "discriminated against" are cheaper than those that are not... there is no need for societal policing:
"The man who exercises discrimination pays a price for doing so. He is, as it were, "buying" what he regards as a "product." It is hard to see that discrimination can have any meaning other than a "taste" of others that one does not share. We do not regard it as "discrimination" -- or at least not in the same invidious sense -- if an individual is willing to pay a higher price to listen to one singer than to another, although we do if he is willing to pay a higher price to have services rendered to him by a person of one color than by a person of another. The difference between the two cases is that in the one case we share the taste, and in the other we do not. (110)"
I don't believe your view is radical amongst those that build and create. I believe your view is only radical to those that don't.
People who do not have 'skin in the game' often lament that those who do are exclusive and divisive. That's only because they've no concept of what it takes to create and maintain a thriving community of like-minded individuals.
>>People should hire the people they are most comfortable with, and when they succeed (or fail), they can be examples to their communities.
Shouldn't it be people should hire people who are most qualified for the position?
Ofcourse diversity police came around because people started hiring people they are most comfortable with (i.e people who like and talk like them) rather than hiring most qualified people.
Most companies are taking easy path while hiring by interviewing mostly people who came through internal reference . This is going to result in toxic cultures and very like minded people on longer run.
> Shouldn't it be people should hire people who are most qualified for the position?
If you take that literally (and we are on HN so I will), the most qualified person for any given position probably costs far too much money.
Rather, companies want to hire an arbitrary person from the set of competent people. Hiring someone's friend is arbitrary, but not uniformly random (i.e. diverse). Hence the problem.
I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws too. They were originally designed for manual labor jobs and the like. I would be willing to compromise by limiting them to these kinds of jobs.
Seems to me this method will not solve the big, though not sole, problem we have now: getting along together as rhe one intelligent species on this planet. Perhaps you don't see this as your problem, but had we been acting better the past one hundred years we would probably not have such a high population and have such fear of one another and such a wide spectrum of economic power; I believe a world with people cooperating more on these human problems would allow our technical solutions to be more useful. I don't like us wasting so much effort on problems created by fear, violence and inequality. I would rather we be more educated and launching star ships. To do that the human problem must be addressed, if not by you then at least by the group as a while.
It really isn't. Pretty much like clockwork, anytime anyone says anything about diversity in HN, the top comment is about how everything is fine, we don't need diversity, best person for the job, meritocracy, yadda yadda.
You're not very radical. Whether you're correct or not is a different matter, but please don't feel alone with your opinion. It seems to be the majority opinion at least in HN.
Please don't draw conclusions about 'majority opinion' on HN unless you have actual data. Such perceptions are notoriously prone to bias, because the comments people notice most are the ones they most object to. I believe that's why the most adamant people on either side of a political divide tend to experience this place (and no doubt not only this place) as dominated by their opponents.
> I get that HN isn't a platform for political battling
He says after a lot of political battling.
What you conveniently ignore is the centuries of energetic anti-diversity work that you are alsoheir to. The culture you energetically defend treated women as something approaching property for millennia. America was founded by and for white men, many of whom owned black people as actual property. And not just the adults, but their children and their children's children, a situation maintained through pervasive brutality. We have slowly reduced these differentials, but there have been many ups and downs. (E.g., the Nadir, which erased many of the post-Civil-War gains for decades and which most Americans today were never told about. [1]) But we nave not yet even reached a level playing field.
You play a variety of tricks above. One is to confuse "normal" with "neutral" or "fair". Another is not to name the culture you mean, which people you mean; if you did, you'd sound like a Stormfront post. A third is to pretend that out groups are defined by out groups. Which is wrong; the racial boundaries in the US have always been drawn by white people, have varied greatly over time [2], and are mostly used as a means of control and exclusion [3]. And of course you construct a variety of straw men as you dance around racist slander, what with those unnamed people and their "cultural backwardness".
I doubt there's hope for you, of course. You're too busy doubling down on the darker parts of your cultural inheritance. But for those who are more open-minded, do me a favor and take the Implicit Association Test on race. (And a few more if you like while you're there.)
It made me realize that although I was consciously opposed to racism, I harbored unconscious racial bias. I've spent the last decade accepting and uprooting that, and studying the history and cultural effects of this pervasive cognitive bias. I don't feel particularly guilty about it; our brains develop all sorts of biases, and this one has been part of our culture for centuries. But I do feel responsible for erasing it in myself, and aim to help end it as a force in American history. Maybe others will feel that way too.
I agree with the commenters saying that this post violates the HN guidelines. Here's the tell:
> I inherited a culture [that] has produced pretty much every technology of note
> cultural backwardness
In other words, your group ("culture") is advanced while others are backward. That's profoundly uncivil. Civility is impossible without respect for others.
Your comment is a slur—just one that is encoded in abstraction. We can't allow that trick here; if we did, people could get around whatever rule they wanted simply by adding layers of indirection. Because you've done this more than once before in a similarly insidious way, and because (as I read the data) you ignored our previous request not to do this, we've banned your account. Please don't create more accounts to break the HN guidelines with.
Your forum, your rules, but setting it up as principled seems a bit much. A slur requires a specific target, where I made an oblique statement about culture being a cause of less success.
Punk is a culture that glorifies failure, more than one religion exalts poverty, and some value quality of life over material success, still others reject social acceptance by criteria set by their perceived former oppressors, and even others rejected basic education and english literacy in America because it was perceived as destructive to their family hierarchy and cultural identity.
Just because this line of reasoning does not explicitly exclude some bugbears on your team, does not mean that it is advocating a minority interest on mine.
HN keeps within the boundaries of certain values because it is used as the source of record by political players who really, really want our money and political control of the technologies we create. Quite reasonably, HN's owners don't want to provide them ammunition. Imagining YC principals called in front of congress and being asked to defend the most extreme statements published on HN or submit to regulation sounds almost plausible.
However, by tolerating heterodox views, does this forum perpetuate them? Or, does suppressing heterodox views reduce their spread? In both cases, probably not. In fact, I would argue that a decade of suppressing them resulted in the extreme over correction that was your election result.
I would take sound reasoning over cherry picked data any day of the week. You are welcome to call me a racist, apostate, a whateverphobe, or out of bounds of the overton window, as that is the convention these days, but given the quality of these epithets, I am not convinced anyone at HN is qualified to make determinations of my civility.
wait, so reading this over, there has not been a previous warning, and the implication is that this person is pretending to be a moderator, which would be totally nuts.
A McKinsey report from 2015 found that among 366 companies, those with gender diversity outperform those without it by 15 percent; those with ethnic diversity outperform those without it by 35 percent.
The problem with analyses like this is that they're observational studies rather than interventional studies. Knowing that successful companies are more likely to have gender and ethnic diversity does not necessarily indicate that increasing gender and ethnic diversity will make companies more successful.
There are many things which we consider to be inherently Good Things but are completely disregarded by most of the world's population, simply because they can't afford to be concerned about such things; in a sense, being concerned with diversity is a sign of privilege, and in some cases is a even used as a economic signalling mechanism. If your company is only barely staying afloat, you're far less likely to spend time and money promoting diversity.
Differences in priorities extend all the way down the socioeconomic ladder. In many of the world's slums, an asbestos roof is a sign of success and something which people work hard towards obtaining. Don't they know that asbestos can kill them? Of course they do -- but having an asbestos roof makes their home quieter when it rains, cooler when it's sunny, and they'd have to be extremely lucky to live long enough to get lung cancer from it anyway. In the Western world of course the notion of people willingly exposing themselves to asbestos is horrifying; but it makes sense in their context.
I hope we can all strive to remember that people may have different priorities based on their backgrounds, and especially their socioeconomic backgrounds. Coming from my privileged position, I think diversity is great; but if a small business in rural Wyoming ends up hiring 100% white heterosexual males because those are the people the business owner knows and he can't afford to spend time looking beyond his circle of acquaintances... well, it's unfortunate, but it doesn't make him racist, sexist, or homophobic.
Whenever I am involved in hiring, I look at boring stuff, such as ability to do the job at hand, team fit, alignment of ideas, etc. I look for the best possible person for the job and enterprise at that specific moment in time. I don't look at or consider gender, race, religion, or anything else.
Diversity in the workplace is not my problem. Finding the right person for the job is. I have hired people of all genders, sexualities, races, as well as physical abilities. These things just shouldn't feature in a hiring process either way. I will hire the best candidate for the job, every time.
54 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadIf you're someone of a less represented class, and you tend to refer your buddies from the same gender/race, you're going to get better bonuses than your overly represented peers. Does this constitute reverse discrimination?
Depends on who you ask. Some won't acknowledge that such a thing as "reverse racism" even exists. If you ask me, any sort of policy based on race is racist. Whether it's reverse, corrective, affirmative, or otherwise, is irrelevant. And that is a liberating definition without ifs, buts and grey areas.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...
Whenever I try to really understand that culture or their opponents (MRA, r/KotakuInAcion etc.) I just end up feeling like both their sides are completely worthless endless rabbit holes and time sinks. Perhaps I just need a minor in Gender Studies to understand.
I wish both sides could just cease to exist.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power
It's possibly legal under English law. If you have two candidates who are equally suitable you're allowed to employ the one with a protected characteristic because of that protected characteristic.
Sadly, the President-Elect appears to share this philosophy:
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2016/04/21/life-lesso...
I inherited a culture with the expectation that I would be a steward of it. That culture has produced pretty much every technology of note in the last 100 years. Those technologies were so pervasive that they transcended culture and did not even require someone speak my language for them to use it to start a company, get a job, or feed their families. To continue that culture, I will share opportunities with people I trust because they have demonstrated their commitment to shared values and interests. I will not share those opportunities with people who self-identify as an out group, or openly identify me as an enemy to be conquered, or my inheritance as a treasure to be confiscated and "redistributed" amongst themselves.
It is a radical view, but I think the legitimacy of the "lack" of diversity needs to be challenged more openly. The framing of public debate with the assumption that negatively defined concepts like "inequality" or "lack of diversity" are a) problems at all, and b) that everyone is somehow accountable to solve them, limits the scope discussion and potential "solutions" only to redistributive methods, instead of evaluating real problems like crappy education, and cultural backwardness.
These diversity police are largely not makers and builders. Why innovate, invent, create, or take risk when you can wait for someone else to do it and use political maneuvering to take control of it once it is profitable?
I get that HN isn't a platform for political battling, but when virtue signalling by mainstream institutions gets posted here, it seems reasonable to provide an an equal and opposite response.
So Im failing to see how it's racist, rather than merely an unpopular view with which you disagree.
And if it's not racist, it's extremely inappropriate for you to label it so. That tactic is meant to silence legitimate disagreement with hyperbole.
> bigotry: intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself
It sounds like the OP is perfectly tolerant of them existing and doing whatever it is they do, but thinks there are cultural factors that make some people more productive or better to work with than others.
This is obviously true -- education, shared language, a certain amount of tolerance from them -- are all things we expect to be cultural factors in employment.
The OPs point is about what cultural factors and values are most important for and best at jobs.
How is that being a bigot?
And since the OP's culture was clearly a white man's culture - a culture that has been relatively slow to accommodate others, in many ways its still a racist, sexist vision - granted one with unusual bluriness at the edges.
White people (in Canada, at least) flock to management consulting, investment banking, law, and medicine and look down on software developers.
You're putting too much emphasis on the race part of the word, and not its meaning of exclusion using factors beyond an individual's control. You are the one being hyperbolic.
Also, culture is something you control: even by your definition, it's not racist. (Though, really, you want a term like 'discriminatory' when talking about all factors, because racism is about race.)
As chrismealy says, swap in 'bigoted' for 'racist' if you want to be pedantic; his point still stands. It's not "extremely inappropriate" at all - the OP still a polite form of excluding people wholesale on factors that they can't control. And no, culture is not something people can "just choose" when you're working at demographic scales.
And 'white culture' does not exist. It's not a thing unto itself. Spanish vs Irish vs Russian vs Slovak are all significantly different. White greeks have more in common with the brown people of the eastern medditeranean than they do with the redheads in the celtic lands. You can't just say "MY culture" and take everything that Europeans and North Americans have done.
Edit: I do think the heritage thing was unnecessary, unless used in a context of cultural differences and the therewith coming need for integration.
I don't think it's fair or useful to demand each culture to build their own technology from scratch, I think that's crap. I do think it's fair to ask immigrants to adapt to the local culture to the point of tolerating it.
I'm not trying to bait you - you're essentially making an argument that relativism in some forms runs into problems when pressed to limits. It's difficult to discuss this without understanding whereabouts you think these limits lie. I don't think anyone can really make an argument about the logical structure of your argument per se, but most will have issues with how you connect various "real world entities" to components of your argument.
In another post I just made an assumption about your beliefs - maybe I was wrong.
What irks me is presenting something, anything, as a panacea and thinking in magic bullet terms. My comment isn't just about this.. This thinking would be shot down in a technical conversation, but make it about gender, race, or wealth, and everyone tie their tongue and short their brain for fear of being labeled racist, misogynist, or elitist.
Innovations where made in countries where a 100% of workers where of one ethnicity. They were made when a 100% of workers where of one gender. They are also made in companies that are ethnically diverse and employing people of different genders and sexual orientations..
What does this tell us? It tells us that what's important is to hire people who can get the job done and be trained to deliver. That's what this tells you to optimize for.
Looking at this:
>For every 10 percent increase in racial and ethnic diversity on the senior executive team at a U.S. company, earnings before interest and taxes rise 0.8 percent, the report found.
0.8% increase in EBIT for every 10% increase in racial and ethnic diversity in the C-suite? I'm willing to bet that changing the carpet or putting flowers in the patio has a bigger effect than that.
What is a 100% ethnically diverse group anyway? Is that one in which each ethnicity is only represented by one person? A company's goal is to make a profit, not to play race-Lego.
This is usually the part where I have to put the disclaimer: I am African and live in a third world country.
Though I'm from the same country and ethnicity of Saint Augustine, if that could serve as a referral to get hired..
EDIT: originally intended as a reply to fatdog's comment which was flagged before I could reply, so I replied to first child. fatdog's comment was back (unflagged?), so I deleted the reply to first child and re-replied to fatdog's comment.
I think Milton Friedman put it best: If discrimination exists, then it presents an arbitrage opportunity -- because people that are "discriminated against" are cheaper than those that are not... there is no need for societal policing:
"The man who exercises discrimination pays a price for doing so. He is, as it were, "buying" what he regards as a "product." It is hard to see that discrimination can have any meaning other than a "taste" of others that one does not share. We do not regard it as "discrimination" -- or at least not in the same invidious sense -- if an individual is willing to pay a higher price to listen to one singer than to another, although we do if he is willing to pay a higher price to have services rendered to him by a person of one color than by a person of another. The difference between the two cases is that in the one case we share the taste, and in the other we do not. (110)"
I don't believe your view is radical amongst those that build and create. I believe your view is only radical to those that don't.
People who do not have 'skin in the game' often lament that those who do are exclusive and divisive. That's only because they've no concept of what it takes to create and maintain a thriving community of like-minded individuals.
Shouldn't it be people should hire people who are most qualified for the position? Ofcourse diversity police came around because people started hiring people they are most comfortable with (i.e people who like and talk like them) rather than hiring most qualified people.
Most companies are taking easy path while hiring by interviewing mostly people who came through internal reference . This is going to result in toxic cultures and very like minded people on longer run.
If you take that literally (and we are on HN so I will), the most qualified person for any given position probably costs far too much money.
Rather, companies want to hire an arbitrary person from the set of competent people. Hiring someone's friend is arbitrary, but not uniformly random (i.e. diverse). Hence the problem.
It really isn't. Pretty much like clockwork, anytime anyone says anything about diversity in HN, the top comment is about how everything is fine, we don't need diversity, best person for the job, meritocracy, yadda yadda.
You're not very radical. Whether you're correct or not is a different matter, but please don't feel alone with your opinion. It seems to be the majority opinion at least in HN.
He says after a lot of political battling.
What you conveniently ignore is the centuries of energetic anti-diversity work that you are alsoheir to. The culture you energetically defend treated women as something approaching property for millennia. America was founded by and for white men, many of whom owned black people as actual property. And not just the adults, but their children and their children's children, a situation maintained through pervasive brutality. We have slowly reduced these differentials, but there have been many ups and downs. (E.g., the Nadir, which erased many of the post-Civil-War gains for decades and which most Americans today were never told about. [1]) But we nave not yet even reached a level playing field.
You play a variety of tricks above. One is to confuse "normal" with "neutral" or "fair". Another is not to name the culture you mean, which people you mean; if you did, you'd sound like a Stormfront post. A third is to pretend that out groups are defined by out groups. Which is wrong; the racial boundaries in the US have always been drawn by white people, have varied greatly over time [2], and are mostly used as a means of control and exclusion [3]. And of course you construct a variety of straw men as you dance around racist slander, what with those unnamed people and their "cultural backwardness".
I doubt there's hope for you, of course. You're too busy doubling down on the darker parts of your cultural inheritance. But for those who are more open-minded, do me a favor and take the Implicit Association Test on race. (And a few more if you like while you're there.)
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
It made me realize that although I was consciously opposed to racism, I harbored unconscious racial bias. I've spent the last decade accepting and uprooting that, and studying the history and cultural effects of this pervasive cognitive bias. I don't feel particularly guilty about it; our brains develop all sorts of biases, and this one has been part of our culture for centuries. But I do feel responsible for erasing it in myself, and aim to help end it as a force in American history. Maybe others will feel that way too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
[2] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/multiracial-time...
[3] See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
> I inherited a culture [that] has produced pretty much every technology of note
> cultural backwardness
In other words, your group ("culture") is advanced while others are backward. That's profoundly uncivil. Civility is impossible without respect for others.
Your comment is a slur—just one that is encoded in abstraction. We can't allow that trick here; if we did, people could get around whatever rule they wanted simply by adding layers of indirection. Because you've done this more than once before in a similarly insidious way, and because (as I read the data) you ignored our previous request not to do this, we've banned your account. Please don't create more accounts to break the HN guidelines with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Punk is a culture that glorifies failure, more than one religion exalts poverty, and some value quality of life over material success, still others reject social acceptance by criteria set by their perceived former oppressors, and even others rejected basic education and english literacy in America because it was perceived as destructive to their family hierarchy and cultural identity.
Just because this line of reasoning does not explicitly exclude some bugbears on your team, does not mean that it is advocating a minority interest on mine.
HN keeps within the boundaries of certain values because it is used as the source of record by political players who really, really want our money and political control of the technologies we create. Quite reasonably, HN's owners don't want to provide them ammunition. Imagining YC principals called in front of congress and being asked to defend the most extreme statements published on HN or submit to regulation sounds almost plausible.
However, by tolerating heterodox views, does this forum perpetuate them? Or, does suppressing heterodox views reduce their spread? In both cases, probably not. In fact, I would argue that a decade of suppressing them resulted in the extreme over correction that was your election result.
I would take sound reasoning over cherry picked data any day of the week. You are welcome to call me a racist, apostate, a whateverphobe, or out of bounds of the overton window, as that is the convention these days, but given the quality of these epithets, I am not convinced anyone at HN is qualified to make determinations of my civility.
The problem with analyses like this is that they're observational studies rather than interventional studies. Knowing that successful companies are more likely to have gender and ethnic diversity does not necessarily indicate that increasing gender and ethnic diversity will make companies more successful.
There are many things which we consider to be inherently Good Things but are completely disregarded by most of the world's population, simply because they can't afford to be concerned about such things; in a sense, being concerned with diversity is a sign of privilege, and in some cases is a even used as a economic signalling mechanism. If your company is only barely staying afloat, you're far less likely to spend time and money promoting diversity.
Differences in priorities extend all the way down the socioeconomic ladder. In many of the world's slums, an asbestos roof is a sign of success and something which people work hard towards obtaining. Don't they know that asbestos can kill them? Of course they do -- but having an asbestos roof makes their home quieter when it rains, cooler when it's sunny, and they'd have to be extremely lucky to live long enough to get lung cancer from it anyway. In the Western world of course the notion of people willingly exposing themselves to asbestos is horrifying; but it makes sense in their context.
I hope we can all strive to remember that people may have different priorities based on their backgrounds, and especially their socioeconomic backgrounds. Coming from my privileged position, I think diversity is great; but if a small business in rural Wyoming ends up hiring 100% white heterosexual males because those are the people the business owner knows and he can't afford to spend time looking beyond his circle of acquaintances... well, it's unfortunate, but it doesn't make him racist, sexist, or homophobic.
Diversity in the workplace is not my problem. Finding the right person for the job is. I have hired people of all genders, sexualities, races, as well as physical abilities. These things just shouldn't feature in a hiring process either way. I will hire the best candidate for the job, every time.