4 ms·

Monoculture basically just means upper middle class men in tech coupled with the argument of implicit negation that less diverse == bad. This self flagellation

Monoculture basically just means upper middle class men in tech coupled with the argument of implicit negation that less diverse == bad. This self flagellation from the PMC and tech is just really... I don't know what to make of it, but I would say is harmful. If you really want to break out of your professional cohort, pick up a hobby which requires other people like sports/music/civic activities/religion/car meets/quilting/neighborhood gardening/whatever. You'll find most of those folk tend to be somewhat like minded as well, but how we spend our free time basically boils down "doing what I enjoy doing around others that respect me on some level". You do you, and let's not get too caught up with having the correct friends.

landryraccoon 6y ago
I didn’t read it as a moral argument. It’s simply that if you only hang out with people that are very similar to you, you are very unlikely to encounter a diverse set of viewpoints and are more vulnerable to group think. This isn’t isolated to tech, it would apply to any insular community. To use a tech analogy, if you trained a machine learning model based on the preferences and viewpoints of only people who worked in tech, you’d end up with an overfitted and not very general model. Your brain is trained on viewpoints you are exposed to as well, and you risk over fitting your brain to a narrow set of viewpoints if you never leave an insular community.
selestify 6y ago
Isn’t the author’s point that the hobbies he picks are also filled with people from the same profession? He could pick a hobby he doesn’t enjoy, but that would defeat the point of a hobby...
- selfinvariant 6y ago
  I'm wondering how much of it is a form of filtering based on a social bias. There are a lot of hobbies in the world (that the author would potentially enjoy), but the ones that first come to mind are ones that have an examples nearby (e.g. my teammate Dan mentioned he went rock climbing on Sunday)
hprotagonist 6y ago
for me it’s far more an argument against tedium than any highfalutin moral scolding. i spend all week dicking around with my fellow pedants solving fiddly problems. I don’t want to play board games or factorio all weekend because i want to have a weekend that feels like not-work.
plorkyeran 6y ago
I don't want to befriend people who are different from me for some weird moral reason or because I want the "correct" friends. I just think it's boring to be surrounded entirely by people who are too much like me.
scsilver 6y ago
I hold this view from a selfish place, programmers and other technical people can get really tiring to hang out with, especially after being steeped in technical bs all day. Alternative worldviews are refreshing and rejuvinating. I dont even care about the hive mind aspect, its the relentless tedium of 'rationality' that thrives amongst the type, its just not human to try to be "right" all the time.

landryraccoon 6y ago

I didn’t read it as a moral argument. It’s simply that if you only hang out with people that are very similar to you, you are very unlikely to encounter a diverse set of viewpoints and are more vulnerable to group think. This isn’t isolated to tech, it would apply to any insular community. To use a tech analogy, if you trained a machine learning model based on the preferences and viewpoints of only people who worked in tech, you’d end up with an overfitted and not very general model. Your brain is trained on viewpoints you are exposed to as well, and you risk over fitting your brain to a narrow set of viewpoints if you never leave an insular community.

selestify 6y ago

Isn’t the author’s point that the hobbies he picks are also filled with people from the same profession? He could pick a hobby he doesn’t enjoy, but that would defeat the point of a hobby...

selfinvariant 6y ago
I'm wondering how much of it is a form of filtering based on a social bias. There are a lot of hobbies in the world (that the author would potentially enjoy), but the ones that first come to mind are ones that have an examples nearby (e.g. my teammate Dan mentioned he went rock climbing on Sunday)

hprotagonist 6y ago

for me it’s far more an argument against tedium than any highfalutin moral scolding. i spend all week dicking around with my fellow pedants solving fiddly problems. I don’t want to play board games or factorio all weekend because i want to have a weekend that feels like not-work.

plorkyeran 6y ago

I don't want to befriend people who are different from me for some weird moral reason or because I want the "correct" friends. I just think it's boring to be surrounded entirely by people who are too much like me.

scsilver 6y ago

I hold this view from a selfish place, programmers and other technical people can get really tiring to hang out with, especially after being steeped in technical bs all day. Alternative worldviews are refreshing and rejuvinating. I dont even care about the hive mind aspect, its the relentless tedium of 'rationality' that thrives amongst the type, its just not human to try to be "right" all the time.