I way almost shocked when I first saw it, all democracies of the world, and human rights, forbid discriminating people by their political views, and some of those companies, if not all, are even public. I do not think such level of bias can be achieved by any kind of casualty, there must be some kind of selection or purge of employed people, which makes it a discrimination as wrong as racial or gender discrimination.
Hope to know your thought, as the weight of those companies in society is undeniable high, some of them impact directly society's culture.
[You asked the question, and I'm answering as impartially as I can. If this runs contrary to dang's policy, I apologize.]
There's a joke that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
At least, it used to be a joke. As with Poe's Law, it has become increasingly difficult to tell.
As one Republican political commentator put it this year, "Democrats have lost their way, but Republicans have lost their minds." There are many Republican policies that are simply delusional. Not merely differences of opinion, but clearly at odds with reality. And not merely crank extremists, but leadership at the very highest levels.
Furthermore, these policies often manifest in very hostile ways. The only way to support them is to believe the Democrats are actively engaged in attempting to destroy the United States. As you can see on HN and elsewhere, they express this in uncivil ways.
Because of this, it's not surprising that companies would tend to hire people who don't reject basic science and basic human rights. And further, that they won't hire people who disrespect the rest of their staff.
This is difficult, because we want to believe that the parties simply represent different value systems. There may even have been a time that it was true. But today, that assumption leads to false equivalences. Well-educated, more-intelligent-than-average techies will not be evenly distributed among political parties when one party is explicitly rejecting the intellectual tools that smart people use to distinguish truth from falsehood.
I believe Musk's tweet is an exaggeration -- another example of his party's willingness to reject reality and substitute their own when it suits them. But I don't doubt that Democrats are massively overrepresented. And that's not a bad thing if smart people prefer their policies.
There's this natural starting point that politics are created equal and so it's unusual that people with more brainpower would skew more toward one politics than the other. But it's simply that neither of those are true.
Almost every right-wing position I can think of is like the knee-jerk reaction a child would have toward that given issue. "Trans SCARY and WEIRD and BAD. God REAL. Taxes BAD; GTFO and let me build a private castle around myself with my money cuz there's no point in giving back to society. Hustle harder, ignoring that it's 99% luck and a byproduct of the system. Gays ICKY. Treehugging is LAME. Guns are COOL. Isolationism on the world stage is BASED who cares about that shit over there lmao." It's no surprise that people with more education go the other way.
If you rely on caricature to assess social reality, you will find ample confirmation for your beliefs.
Upon reflection, you might possibly wonder, though, why many Chinese, including a number of my friends and colleagues in Beijing, Hangzhou, Kunming, and Hong Kong deeply envy Americans for the 2nd amendment and wish they had access to firearms to address issues in their lives.
As a antidote to parochialism, consider living abroad for decades and reading news outside the English-language bubble.
I am sorry to be the one telling you that, but apparently you are believing parody as reality. It does happen in all countries that some media only show the dumbest people and opinions and a complete group as if these would be a representing majority of that group.
> The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.
I think Poe's law becoming overwhelmingly real sumarizes the whole thing perfectly. It's been a long while since most of news are nearly indistinguishable from parodies, and also from what used to be humour. Not pointing to any particular side but everyone will recall quite some of those.
maybe tech companies have a left-wing bias because any right-wing employees that happened to get hired immediately say something like this when they meet a transgender employee, and as a result get fired for sexual harassment.
I'm left-wing and know to keep this to myself at work. I just internally roll my eyes a bit when I see yet another misogynistic male calling himself a woman. It's sadly quite common at tech companies. No respect for actual women.
the rich already have lower taxes. if your talking upper middle class maybe but that would probably just shift the taxes on to the lower middle class and poor. which would lower their spending power. so you'd drive up asset prices and lower consumer spending.
I'm not advocating for the strategy, I'm suggesting a possible reason why a tech worker would vote or support a US Republican. They probably make more than your average American, and therefore have a financial incentive to support a political party promising lower taxes.
many rich people at bigtech got there through national funding in science and engineering. They conclude that taxes, which helped fund their education, could actually be a good thing as it helps us grow the next generation of geniuses.
I also met many people who had fled the midwest because they found it intolerant- gay people, democrats, etc. They like the Bay Area (home to many of the bigtechs) because it's much more liberal.
- You mean the wars started by Bush?
- Both parties have zero credibility in that respect, republicans stance on free speech is as much perfomative bs as woke posturing is on the left. There is plenty of cancel culture and attempts to suppress dissenting speech on the right, just listen to the average fox news outrage rant.
- There is absolutely no country that is envious of our gun problem, quite the contrary. Also always good to remember a large majority of Americans are in favor of reasonable gun controls, so was the NRA at one time, yet Republicans continue using the 2nd amendment as wedge issue to get people to vote for them. There are other rights in the constitution you know.
The list does include Tesla. Additionally, discussing the political alignment of employees at Tesla and SpaceX is not relevant to the topic that, if you've been paying attention to the current events, is about content moderation on social networks.
In the US, tech companies tend to support Democratic policies and candidates. This probably has to do with their focus on issues like net neutrality and immigration reform, which align more with the Democratic party. Also, I don't think that political donations necessarily reflect a company or its employees' political beliefs, because generally a small group of employees at a company are responsible for a high percentage of donations. To the Democratic party, in this case. Which means that the frequency distribution for employee donations probably are long-tailed, with a relatively small number of employees making a large proportion of the donations, where the majority of employees make no political donations, and a small number of employees make a disproportionate number of donations.
Thanks for pointing that out, percentage and amount of donations are probably not a good metric to determine the amount of employees of each political opinions.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] threadHope to know your thought, as the weight of those companies in society is undeniable high, some of them impact directly society's culture.
There's a joke that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
At least, it used to be a joke. As with Poe's Law, it has become increasingly difficult to tell.
As one Republican political commentator put it this year, "Democrats have lost their way, but Republicans have lost their minds." There are many Republican policies that are simply delusional. Not merely differences of opinion, but clearly at odds with reality. And not merely crank extremists, but leadership at the very highest levels.
Furthermore, these policies often manifest in very hostile ways. The only way to support them is to believe the Democrats are actively engaged in attempting to destroy the United States. As you can see on HN and elsewhere, they express this in uncivil ways.
Because of this, it's not surprising that companies would tend to hire people who don't reject basic science and basic human rights. And further, that they won't hire people who disrespect the rest of their staff.
This is difficult, because we want to believe that the parties simply represent different value systems. There may even have been a time that it was true. But today, that assumption leads to false equivalences. Well-educated, more-intelligent-than-average techies will not be evenly distributed among political parties when one party is explicitly rejecting the intellectual tools that smart people use to distinguish truth from falsehood.
I believe Musk's tweet is an exaggeration -- another example of his party's willingness to reject reality and substitute their own when it suits them. But I don't doubt that Democrats are massively overrepresented. And that's not a bad thing if smart people prefer their policies.
Almost every right-wing position I can think of is like the knee-jerk reaction a child would have toward that given issue. "Trans SCARY and WEIRD and BAD. God REAL. Taxes BAD; GTFO and let me build a private castle around myself with my money cuz there's no point in giving back to society. Hustle harder, ignoring that it's 99% luck and a byproduct of the system. Gays ICKY. Treehugging is LAME. Guns are COOL. Isolationism on the world stage is BASED who cares about that shit over there lmao." It's no surprise that people with more education go the other way.
Upon reflection, you might possibly wonder, though, why many Chinese, including a number of my friends and colleagues in Beijing, Hangzhou, Kunming, and Hong Kong deeply envy Americans for the 2nd amendment and wish they had access to firearms to address issues in their lives.
As a antidote to parochialism, consider living abroad for decades and reading news outside the English-language bubble.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...
Especially the republicans that ran in the midterms(with an actual plan besides let's troll the dems)
I also met many people who had fled the midwest because they found it intolerant- gay people, democrats, etc. They like the Bay Area (home to many of the bigtechs) because it's much more liberal.
- personal freedoms, including the rights of free speech, free assembly, and freedom from unreasonable electronic search and seizure
- protection of 2nd amendment rights, admired and envied by many around the world