9 ms·

These social justice warriors may seem well-meaning, but ultimately they are parasites. Their mission is never-ending and ultimately they overreach and this is

These social justice warriors may seem well-meaning, but ultimately they are parasites. Their mission is never-ending and ultimately they overreach and this is the result. I just want to work with smart people. I don't care what gender they associate themselves with, what color they are, whether there's an equal distribution of any of these characteristics in my department. I just want to do my job and learn from smart people. Why can't it be as simple as that?

morvita 9y ago
I, too, dream of a world where I can work with smart people without regard to their race, sexuality, gender, whatever, but it is naive to think that we are already living in that world. Like it or not, the entire system is stacked against minorities in ways that aren't even obvious or noticeable from a position of privilege. I work as an engineer in an office of 120 people in the East Bay. There are three black people working in the office. One of them is the receptionist. If we assume that there are no racial differences in technical ability, then the demographics of my office should roughly mirror the demographics of the surrounding community. Oakland is 28% black (according to the 2010 census), meaning in a fair, unbiased system we should have roughly 30-35 black people working in the office. I am sure that no hiring manager has set out to exclude black people from their postings, but there are centuries of history and deeply ingrained biases that have led to a severe under-representation of African-Americans in this industry, same with every other minority. Until we are truly operating on a level playing field, I am 100% in favour of scholarships based on giving under-represented minorities more opportunities. It is not discrimination to exclude white men from these scholarships. It is recognizing the centuries of privilege we have had and saying that we want give other people the opportunities we have be given simply by existing.
- jochung 9y ago
  "Centuries of privilege" is the kind of idiocy only a sheltered American suburbanite could come up with. A century ago millions of young white men were too busy dying in trenches and being gassed to death with mustard gas in a war none of them could vote on. Children worked on the field, in factories, and in coal mines, like their fathers were expected to. And yes, women stayed home and took care of the kids because without electricity, plumbing, appliances, refrigeration and cheap groceries, that was actually a laborious full time job, and people were poor. Not to mention that getting through child birth and infant mortality was a blessing for both mother and child. None of them were given opportunities simply by existing. On the other hand, providing scholarships to specific ethnicities, or creating special women-only pathways to entry, that is exactly that. What people like Damore have tried to point out is that expecting demographics and sentiment within a field to match the general population, or else the "playing field" is not level, is an unwarranted assumption. It also puts the blame for actually society wide issues on a small group of people who had nothing to do with it. If you want more black people in tech, start by addressing the way the US school system is stratified entirely by social class. Maybe you'll see a difference, and maybe that IQ gap will shrink. Maybe it won't, and what new "leveling" policies will you want to introduce then? Don't push out or disadvantage others out of misplaced revenge, and don't cite your American tunnel vision as justification.
  - dang 9y ago
    > the kind of idiocy only a sheltered American suburbanite Regardless of your view on a divisive issue, you can't break the HN guidelines like this when commenting here. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it again.
- minitel 9y ago
  There is no evidence that anything is stacked against anyone. Only a varying level of representation by people from different identity groups. It is much more likely that different identifiable groups have, on average, different proclivities. If you attempt to force or overly entice people into a field, who would usually not have sought it out you're doing a disservice to everyone. The worst part is. You do this disservice as a way of padding your own ego and sense of moral superiority. The "oppressed" groups are just mascots for your self indulgence.
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  > If we assume that there are no racial differences in technical ability, then the demographics of my office should roughly mirror the demographics of the surrounding community. This is a big assumption. It may be true, but you are asserting it without evidence. Demographics of NBA do not mirror demographics of USA.
  - sgift 9y ago
    It's the reasonable default assumption as long as you have no evidence for the opposite (i.e. that white people have racial attributes making them better at tech / non-white people have racial attributes making them worse). Can you provide evidence for the opposite?
    - kgabis 9y ago
      You're the one making the assumption so you should back it up with some evidence (burden of proof).
- ftarlao 9y ago
  I got your point, but I think that the problem is not "helping" (with scholarships) based on membership with minorities, but helping when there are bad economic or social conditions. This may be correlated with other attributes yes but I think that we must write rules for persons by only considering the factors that effectively prevent them from studying and not the skin color.
  - jgtrosh 8y ago
    If you agree that there are hidden mechanisms that shape the inequality, then claiming that “only considering the factors that effectively prevent studying” is fair would require a great deal of certainty in knowing these factors. I don't know how effective “positive-discrimination” is in practice but to me it seems that its principle is to do what you say but with discriminatory features as a proxy heuristic for these “effective features” (this makes sense if you believe they are sufficiently immesurable IRL).
- zeth___ 8y ago
  You are also assuming that the 4% of the worlds population in the US is representative of the world. Or imperial privilege as those of us who suffer from empire like to call it. That you push your social issues on us as well as your armies adds insult to injury. I dream of a day when there are no US troops on non-US soil. A day that I can advocate wealth redistribution without fear of a CIA funded coup. A day where the internet represents all of humanity.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  Also not obvious or noticeable from a position of privilege: many, many white men have no opportunities or privilege and thus are discriminated against for simply being the same race and gender as a very thin slice of upperclass society.
  - morvita 9y ago
    While it is true that many white men come from a background where, for any number of reasons, they are not afforded the same opportunities as, say, a white boy from Cupertino, they are still given opportunities and privilege because they were lucky enough to be born a white man. I know this first-hand because I grew up in a rural farming community in Vermont that was more than 95% white and poverty-stricken. Of course, not everyone in my community went to university, but when I did, no one questioned whether I belonged there because I was still a white man. Now that I have a doctorate and work at a big tech company, no one questions whether I belong here either. The same can not be said for a Hispanic or African American man (or even a white woman) who is in my position.
    - modbait 9y ago
      Unfortunately, an inevitable result of AA-type hiring is that everyone--including the candidates themselves--will wonder whether people hired this way are really up to snuff. You can censor, but you can't stop people from reasoning internally.
    - malvosenior 9y ago
      Were you part of the poverty stricken population? My experience has been poor white people are not accepted by our professional community.
      - morvita 9y ago
        No, my mother was a teacher and my father a manager at the local hospital. So while we weren't rich, we were definitely not poverty stricken either. I cannot speak much to the experience of poor white people in the tech community, but, at least anecdotally, I know of two other people I went to high school with who also went into tech. One is still in the industry as far as I know and the other left it a few years ago. (For reference, I am in my early 30s)
- felipellrocha 9y ago
  This. The point of these policies is that we might be missing some fucking amazing talent and not know just because of historical reasons.
  - cucumberferity 9y ago
    Is something that happened in 1864 or 1964 going to prevent you from identifying a good engineer in front of you?
    - Larrikin 9y ago
      Laws were passed then, that doesn't mean culture changed over night. Someone born around 1964 is right around the age of parents in their prime development years. Did your parents have no effect on your ability to become educated that put you on track to become a developer?
    - felipellrocha 9y ago
      Do events that happened in 1864 or 1964 have no impact on anything today opportunity-wise?
    - monocasa 9y ago
      I mean, when an otherwise identical resume with the first name changed from Brad to Tyrone cuts the interview callbacks by 3x, it's hard to argue that these problems have been solved. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 I've also had a boss in tech that refused to hire women engineers. And another boss that lied to the state department to get someone here on asylum (who coincidentally was the hardest worker I've met) sent back, because "Mexicans should go back to where they came from". Spoiler, the guy wasn't even Mexican, just brown.
    - morvita 9y ago
      It does when those events and the decades that followed have prevented minorities from having the opportunities to become a good engineer. This isn't about you and I not recognizing talent in front of us, it's about giving that talent a chance to stand in front of, and ideally next to, us.
jlebar 9y ago
It sounds like you're angry because you want the autonomy to choose not to think about social justice issues (at least at work), and you feel like that choice is being taken away from you by people who enact things like codes of conduct. Now it's institutionally everyone's responsibility to think about these things, so if I want to be part of this institution, I no longer have this choice. Is that right? What do you think about people who say, I'm a woman, and/or I'm black, and/or I'm gay, and/or I'm trans, and/or I'm disabled, and/or I have a mental illness. I also just want to sit heads-down and code next to you and not think about what I "am", but unfortunately -- perhaps, invisibly to you -- people are doing things which prevent me from being able to do that. A code of conduct moves us a bit closer towards "equality of having to think about social justice", in that I have to think about it a bit less, in exchange for your thinking about it a bit more.
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  >What do you think about people who say, I'm a woman, and/or I'm black, and/or I'm gay, and/or I'm trans, and/or I'm disabled, and/or I have a mental illness. I also just want to sit heads-down and code next to you and not think about what I "am", but unfortunately -- perhaps, invisibly to you -- people are doing things which prevent me from being able to do that. A code of conduct moves us a bit closer towards "equality of having to think about social justice", in that I have to think about it a bit less, in exchange for your thinking about it a bit more. What do I think about those people? I think they're insufferably bossy people who insult me by telling me what I need to think about more.
  - peterashford 9y ago
    So, you're happy if people get discriminated against but not for those people to ask you to think about it?
    - rhapsodic 9y ago
      > So, you're happy if people get discriminated against but not for those people to ask you to think about it? This is a typical SJW non-argument, built atop a non-sequitur. Implying that I'm happy that people get discriminated against, while offering no logic to back it up. I disagree with you, therefore I am a bad person with bad motives. And that's what's driving this whole SJW-CoC movement.
Yetanfou 9y ago
While I don't care about people's race, skin colour, sexual orientation, 'gender', religion, political affiliation, book preference or shoe size... ...I most emphatically do care about them not bringing up any of these characteristics in any context where they see fit. Just like a country with freedom of religion should support freedom from religion the same goes for freedom from politics, 'gender' issues, race discussions, political diatribe et al. There are laws against discrimination on many - but not all - of these issues which can be used to get those who insist on breaking them back in line or out of the context. If these laws are insufficient there are channels to discuss these issues and ways to get them amended. In simple terms I think we - as in the society which I was born and raised in (in the Netherlands) and currently live in (Sweden) - have gone a long way in eradicating discrimination on many of the mentioned grounds and marginalising those who insist on violating relevant laws. Both Sweden and the Netherlands belong to the most egalitarian and open societies in the world where 'diversity' has been a mantra for many decades. Things were starting to look good, hardly anyone cared about whether the teacher at school had a different skin colour or shared her bed with a same-sex partner or prayed to whatever deity of choice. And then... ...and then... And then identity politics suddenly raised its ugly head, driven by people who insist they 'represent' 'marginalised minorities' - without asking those supposedly marginalised minorities whether they felt the need to be represented in any way - and starting calling anyone who did not abide by their 'demands' all sorts of things - racist, xenophobe, misogynist, white cis-gender male expletive_deleted, etcetera. What the said they wanted to do was 'end discrimination and further diversity'. What they are doing is building enclaves and segregating the population among all those characteristics which our societies previously tried to make irrelevant. All those labels they try to stick on their opponents reflect back on what they themselves are: they are the racists by trying to split the population along (real or imaginary) 'racial' lines. They are the xenophobes by loudly denouncing anyone who does not kowtow to their all demands. They are the enemies of diversity by inciting strive between 'racialised' groups.
- peterashford 9y ago
  This wasn't about anyone being asked to do anything at all, it was about an organisation supporting minorities

morvita 9y ago

I, too, dream of a world where I can work with smart people without regard to their race, sexuality, gender, whatever, but it is naive to think that we are already living in that world. Like it or not, the entire system is stacked against minorities in ways that aren't even obvious or noticeable from a position of privilege. I work as an engineer in an office of 120 people in the East Bay. There are three black people working in the office. One of them is the receptionist. If we assume that there are no racial differences in technical ability, then the demographics of my office should roughly mirror the demographics of the surrounding community. Oakland is 28% black (according to the 2010 census), meaning in a fair, unbiased system we should have roughly 30-35 black people working in the office. I am sure that no hiring manager has set out to exclude black people from their postings, but there are centuries of history and deeply ingrained biases that have led to a severe under-representation of African-Americans in this industry, same with every other minority. Until we are truly operating on a level playing field, I am 100% in favour of scholarships based on giving under-represented minorities more opportunities. It is not discrimination to exclude white men from these scholarships. It is recognizing the centuries of privilege we have had and saying that we want give other people the opportunities we have be given simply by existing.

jochung 9y ago
"Centuries of privilege" is the kind of idiocy only a sheltered American suburbanite could come up with. A century ago millions of young white men were too busy dying in trenches and being gassed to death with mustard gas in a war none of them could vote on. Children worked on the field, in factories, and in coal mines, like their fathers were expected to. And yes, women stayed home and took care of the kids because without electricity, plumbing, appliances, refrigeration and cheap groceries, that was actually a laborious full time job, and people were poor. Not to mention that getting through child birth and infant mortality was a blessing for both mother and child. None of them were given opportunities simply by existing. On the other hand, providing scholarships to specific ethnicities, or creating special women-only pathways to entry, that is exactly that. What people like Damore have tried to point out is that expecting demographics and sentiment within a field to match the general population, or else the "playing field" is not level, is an unwarranted assumption. It also puts the blame for actually society wide issues on a small group of people who had nothing to do with it. If you want more black people in tech, start by addressing the way the US school system is stratified entirely by social class. Maybe you'll see a difference, and maybe that IQ gap will shrink. Maybe it won't, and what new "leveling" policies will you want to introduce then? Don't push out or disadvantage others out of misplaced revenge, and don't cite your American tunnel vision as justification.
- dang 9y ago
  > the kind of idiocy only a sheltered American suburbanite Regardless of your view on a divisive issue, you can't break the HN guidelines like this when commenting here. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do it again.
minitel 9y ago
There is no evidence that anything is stacked against anyone. Only a varying level of representation by people from different identity groups. It is much more likely that different identifiable groups have, on average, different proclivities. If you attempt to force or overly entice people into a field, who would usually not have sought it out you're doing a disservice to everyone. The worst part is. You do this disservice as a way of padding your own ego and sense of moral superiority. The "oppressed" groups are just mascots for your self indulgence.
sanxiyn 9y ago
> If we assume that there are no racial differences in technical ability, then the demographics of my office should roughly mirror the demographics of the surrounding community. This is a big assumption. It may be true, but you are asserting it without evidence. Demographics of NBA do not mirror demographics of USA.
- sgift 9y ago
  It's the reasonable default assumption as long as you have no evidence for the opposite (i.e. that white people have racial attributes making them better at tech / non-white people have racial attributes making them worse). Can you provide evidence for the opposite?
  - kgabis 9y ago
    You're the one making the assumption so you should back it up with some evidence (burden of proof).
ftarlao 9y ago
I got your point, but I think that the problem is not "helping" (with scholarships) based on membership with minorities, but helping when there are bad economic or social conditions. This may be correlated with other attributes yes but I think that we must write rules for persons by only considering the factors that effectively prevent them from studying and not the skin color.
- jgtrosh 8y ago
  If you agree that there are hidden mechanisms that shape the inequality, then claiming that “only considering the factors that effectively prevent studying” is fair would require a great deal of certainty in knowing these factors. I don't know how effective “positive-discrimination” is in practice but to me it seems that its principle is to do what you say but with discriminatory features as a proxy heuristic for these “effective features” (this makes sense if you believe they are sufficiently immesurable IRL).
zeth___ 8y ago
You are also assuming that the 4% of the worlds population in the US is representative of the world. Or imperial privilege as those of us who suffer from empire like to call it. That you push your social issues on us as well as your armies adds insult to injury. I dream of a day when there are no US troops on non-US soil. A day that I can advocate wealth redistribution without fear of a CIA funded coup. A day where the internet represents all of humanity.
malvosenior 9y ago
Also not obvious or noticeable from a position of privilege: many, many white men have no opportunities or privilege and thus are discriminated against for simply being the same race and gender as a very thin slice of upperclass society.
- morvita 9y ago
  While it is true that many white men come from a background where, for any number of reasons, they are not afforded the same opportunities as, say, a white boy from Cupertino, they are still given opportunities and privilege because they were lucky enough to be born a white man. I know this first-hand because I grew up in a rural farming community in Vermont that was more than 95% white and poverty-stricken. Of course, not everyone in my community went to university, but when I did, no one questioned whether I belonged there because I was still a white man. Now that I have a doctorate and work at a big tech company, no one questions whether I belong here either. The same can not be said for a Hispanic or African American man (or even a white woman) who is in my position.
  - modbait 9y ago
    Unfortunately, an inevitable result of AA-type hiring is that everyone--including the candidates themselves--will wonder whether people hired this way are really up to snuff. You can censor, but you can't stop people from reasoning internally.
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    Were you part of the poverty stricken population? My experience has been poor white people are not accepted by our professional community.
    - morvita 9y ago
      No, my mother was a teacher and my father a manager at the local hospital. So while we weren't rich, we were definitely not poverty stricken either. I cannot speak much to the experience of poor white people in the tech community, but, at least anecdotally, I know of two other people I went to high school with who also went into tech. One is still in the industry as far as I know and the other left it a few years ago. (For reference, I am in my early 30s)
felipellrocha 9y ago
This. The point of these policies is that we might be missing some fucking amazing talent and not know just because of historical reasons.
- cucumberferity 9y ago
  Is something that happened in 1864 or 1964 going to prevent you from identifying a good engineer in front of you?
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Laws were passed then, that doesn't mean culture changed over night. Someone born around 1964 is right around the age of parents in their prime development years. Did your parents have no effect on your ability to become educated that put you on track to become a developer?
  - felipellrocha 9y ago
    Do events that happened in 1864 or 1964 have no impact on anything today opportunity-wise?
  - monocasa 9y ago
    I mean, when an otherwise identical resume with the first name changed from Brad to Tyrone cuts the interview callbacks by 3x, it's hard to argue that these problems have been solved. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 I've also had a boss in tech that refused to hire women engineers. And another boss that lied to the state department to get someone here on asylum (who coincidentally was the hardest worker I've met) sent back, because "Mexicans should go back to where they came from". Spoiler, the guy wasn't even Mexican, just brown.
  - morvita 9y ago
    It does when those events and the decades that followed have prevented minorities from having the opportunities to become a good engineer. This isn't about you and I not recognizing talent in front of us, it's about giving that talent a chance to stand in front of, and ideally next to, us.

jlebar 9y ago

It sounds like you're angry because you want the autonomy to choose not to think about social justice issues (at least at work), and you feel like that choice is being taken away from you by people who enact things like codes of conduct. Now it's institutionally everyone's responsibility to think about these things, so if I want to be part of this institution, I no longer have this choice. Is that right? What do you think about people who say, I'm a woman, and/or I'm black, and/or I'm gay, and/or I'm trans, and/or I'm disabled, and/or I have a mental illness. I also just want to sit heads-down and code next to you and not think about what I "am", but unfortunately -- perhaps, invisibly to you -- people are doing things which prevent me from being able to do that. A code of conduct moves us a bit closer towards "equality of having to think about social justice", in that I have to think about it a bit less, in exchange for your thinking about it a bit more.

rhapsodic 9y ago
>What do you think about people who say, I'm a woman, and/or I'm black, and/or I'm gay, and/or I'm trans, and/or I'm disabled, and/or I have a mental illness. I also just want to sit heads-down and code next to you and not think about what I "am", but unfortunately -- perhaps, invisibly to you -- people are doing things which prevent me from being able to do that. A code of conduct moves us a bit closer towards "equality of having to think about social justice", in that I have to think about it a bit less, in exchange for your thinking about it a bit more. What do I think about those people? I think they're insufferably bossy people who insult me by telling me what I need to think about more.
- peterashford 9y ago
  So, you're happy if people get discriminated against but not for those people to ask you to think about it?
  - rhapsodic 9y ago
    > So, you're happy if people get discriminated against but not for those people to ask you to think about it? This is a typical SJW non-argument, built atop a non-sequitur. Implying that I'm happy that people get discriminated against, while offering no logic to back it up. I disagree with you, therefore I am a bad person with bad motives. And that's what's driving this whole SJW-CoC movement.

Yetanfou 9y ago

While I don't care about people's race, skin colour, sexual orientation, 'gender', religion, political affiliation, book preference or shoe size... ...I most emphatically do care about them not bringing up any of these characteristics in any context where they see fit. Just like a country with freedom of religion should support freedom from religion the same goes for freedom from politics, 'gender' issues, race discussions, political diatribe et al. There are laws against discrimination on many - but not all - of these issues which can be used to get those who insist on breaking them back in line or out of the context. If these laws are insufficient there are channels to discuss these issues and ways to get them amended. In simple terms I think we - as in the society which I was born and raised in (in the Netherlands) and currently live in (Sweden) - have gone a long way in eradicating discrimination on many of the mentioned grounds and marginalising those who insist on violating relevant laws. Both Sweden and the Netherlands belong to the most egalitarian and open societies in the world where 'diversity' has been a mantra for many decades. Things were starting to look good, hardly anyone cared about whether the teacher at school had a different skin colour or shared her bed with a same-sex partner or prayed to whatever deity of choice. And then... ...and then... And then identity politics suddenly raised its ugly head, driven by people who insist they 'represent' 'marginalised minorities' - without asking those supposedly marginalised minorities whether they felt the need to be represented in any way - and starting calling anyone who did not abide by their 'demands' all sorts of things - racist, xenophobe, misogynist, white cis-gender male expletive_deleted, etcetera. What the said they wanted to do was 'end discrimination and further diversity'. What they are doing is building enclaves and segregating the population among all those characteristics which our societies previously tried to make irrelevant. All those labels they try to stick on their opponents reflect back on what they themselves are: they are the racists by trying to split the population along (real or imaginary) 'racial' lines. They are the xenophobes by loudly denouncing anyone who does not kowtow to their all demands. They are the enemies of diversity by inciting strive between 'racialised' groups.

peterashford 9y ago
This wasn't about anyone being asked to do anything at all, it was about an organisation supporting minorities