7 ms·

I don't trust this article. The phrase "Losing viewpoint diversity" is of course crafted to make it sound like a chilling trend. Pretty clear what they want you

by ajkjk 6y ago

I don't trust this article. The phrase "Losing viewpoint diversity" is of course crafted to make it sound like a chilling trend. Pretty clear what they want you to think about it. But if you drill into what that's referring to, whether you think it's a bad thing is entirely up to what you think of how the viewpoints are changing. "Fewer racists than ever" also maps to "less viewpoint diversity" but is totally a good thing.

marricks 6y ago
Reminds me of conservatives arguing for diversity of views at US colleges because so many professors lean left/liberal. Even more horrifying than this really, if knowledge of a field informs your view mandating equal weight to ridiculous notions (i.e climate change denial) is would be seriously damaging to whatever scientific integrity existed.
jeffbee 6y ago
For the same reason I always look skeptically on other research about "polarization". The trend tends to be that in the past it was common for otherwise-sane people to advocate crazy stuff like bans on interracial marriage. Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization" but I can't find the negative in it, because there is a wrong side of those issues.
- guythedudebro 6y ago
  Replace interracial marriage with something like abolish the police. Is the ethical/sane choice still clear cut?
  - KMag 6y ago
    More importantly, most of us hold moral judgements that our grandchildren will find horrifying, and it's a tautology that we're unable to see our moral blind spots (or have a good guess where they are). I'm happily in an interracial marriage, but I'm not sure that I would have been in favor of (or even neutral toward) interracial marriage had I been a product of the culture a century earlier. I'm very glad we've made moral progress as a culture, and that progress has required some voices in the wilderness speaking out. History has shown that these moral errors aren't all attributable to one side of the political isle, either. We should have some humility in our policies. Almost all of us are on the wrong side of history in ways we are blind to. An absolute belief of being on the right side of history has lead to most of the major disasters of the last century.
    - raffraffraff 6y ago
      I fheyly agree that we should have humility in our policies, but should also be aware that all "progress" is not positive. In fact, how is progress even defined in this case? Is all change progressive? Or is change that younger people agree with automatically positive? At some point before the Spanish Inquisition, one could have argued that this new idea of burning witches was "progress" because it reduced the evil in the world. Back in 1970s Iran, one could have argued that a law that forced women to cover their bodies from head to toe to stop tempting men into sin, as "progressive". In my own view, which I'm always willing to debate (and lose), a change isn't progressive if it cannot argue it's point using logic. If it silences dissent using threats of ostracism, job loss or ban from some ubiquitous online platform, it's not progress. If it presumes itself to be morally right without arguing it's case, and is happy to shut down any disagreement as (some)phobia, then it's not progress. If it denies science, it's not progress. And if it goes further than demand silence from dissenters, and actually demand that everyone agree (wear the colours, add the right signals to the Twitter bio, "you're with us or against us"), then it's not just "not progressive", it's regressive. It's dogmatic. It's a church full of people all changing a creed whether or not try believe.
      - raffraffraff 6y ago
        I love spotting predictive text mistakes after the edit timeout expires :/ WTF is "fheyly"?
        KMag 6y ago
        > WTF is "fheyly"? It's the secret love child of "fully" and "covfefe".
        gedy 6y ago
        Maybe it's someone's "personal pronoun"? /s
  - MisterBastahrd 6y ago
    Abolish the police? No. Abolish the police as they currently exist? Absolutely. Nobody deserves to die because they were shot by a cop because they missed a payment on a fine.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Reminder that the UK did have to abolish (and reconstitute) a police force in order to end its civil war in 2001, and still has ongoing litigation about the legality of troops shooting civilians in the streets.
    - yerwhat01010 6y ago
      That has absolutely nothing to do with modern "abolish the police" rhetoric. "Abolish the police" is a utopian Marxist fantasy that holds that in some hypothetical perfected society we won't need police because everyone will just get along, and that the only reason we currently "need" police is because capitalism/patriarchy/white supremacy/imperialism drive people to commit crime and violence, therefore all we have to is burn the existing system to the ground (no need to specify its replacement it in any detail) and utopia will emerge from the rubble. (Nevermind that the politicians who advocate this nonsense spend tens of thousands of dollars on private security while pretending that police are unnecessary.) It's no exaggeration to say that this is the same ideology ("society is imperfect, therefore burn everything to the ground with no plan to rebuild other than my being in charge") that got tens of millions of people killed in the twentieth century. It's insane, dangerous garbage and it should not be tolerated. None of the orchestrators of the Northern Ireland peace process held political views that are remotely similar to this.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        Upthread: "why won't people treat each other's political reviews with respect in the workplace" This comment: "insane, dangerous garbage and it should not be tolerated"
        yerwhat01010 6y ago
        HN isn't the workplace.
        krageon 6y ago
        No, but what was described is ironic.
  - M2Ys4U 6y ago
    > Replace interracial marriage with something like abolish the police. Is the ethical/sane choice still clear cut? That's easy, if you don't elide meanings: Abolish marriage (as an institution that is only between two people of the same race) (and replace it with one that is between any two consenting people) Abolish the police (as an institution that is corrupt and excessively violent) (and replace it with an institution that is accountable and reduces crime with the minimum amount of force)
- KMag 6y ago
  > Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization" I'm not sure which metric of polarization is typically used in studies, but the situation you describe (vast majority agreeing, with a tiny minority in an extreme position) intuitively sounds like approaching consensus. Intuitively, with some survey measure of 0 to 10, maximum polarization would be 50% of respondents responding 0 and 50% of respondents responding 10. Minimum polarization would be 100% of respondents giving the same answer (regardless of what that answer is). I would hope that any polarization metric being used in a serous study would give its maximum value in the former case and its minimum value in the second case. Variance of survey responses is one statistical measure meeting these criteria, but there might be better measures. Minimum Kullback-Leibler divergence, or earth-mover's distance, from any consensus distribution might also make sense, or a fractional statistical moment less than 2 about the mean. In any case, tons of people believing one thing and a tiny fraction of people believing something radically different doesn't fit my intuitive notion of polarization. My intuitive notion is closer to variance of survey responses, or earth-mover's distance from any consensus.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    > "Intuitively, with some survey measure of 0 to 10, maximum polarization would be 50% of respondents responding 0 and 50% of respondents responding 10. Minimum polarization would be 100% of respondents giving the same answer (regardless of what that answer is)." A world where 50% of people live at the North Pole, 50% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator, is polarized. So is a world where 90% of people live at the North Pole, 10% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator. Seems like "polarization" is about how many people live somewhere in between, rather than whether the groups at the poles are balanced or not. Or even, that there exist places between the poles where people could be, even if they aren't. A world where 100% are at the North Pole, the South Pole exists but nobody is there, and between them is only water, is still polarized. The only place you can be, or go, is the two extreme positions. If the survey says "do you LOVE Politician X or HATE them?" and I can't be indifferent to them or mildly in favour or slightly against, it's a polarizing survey, isn't it?
- shkkmo 6y ago
  Polarization has nothing to do with the craziness of ideas, but the lack of a middle ground. Polarization has to do with the clustering of beliefs. If attending BLM protests makes you less likely to attend pro-life protests, that is polarization. The strength of that correlation is the amount of polarization. Acceptance of Inter-racial marriage is a topic that was once far more polarized. That depolarization is exactly allowed us to make progress on the topic as a society. Thus polarization inhibits cultural growth and change.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Interracial marriage did not just slowly creep in until it was considered acceptable. It had to fight its way into the conversation, then have champions who were willing to take great risks and accept painful consequences for promoting these polarizing beliefs. 'Depolarization' on this subject is not something that just happened, nor it an effective strategy for change. What happened is that one side LOST and their viewpoint was forcibly removed from the conversation. Within a generation this viewpoint was considered completely unacceptable and those who held this belief learned to shut up unless they were prepared to become the office racist. Voila, depolarization. Polarization is the only means by which change will be accomplished and there is a growing majority that desires change so your options are to either pick a side or accept the fact that this conflict is happening and keep your head down while you focus on the rest of your job. There are not other options and we passed the tipping point for this conflict quite a while ago.
    - shkkmo 6y ago
      You seem to mean something entirely different by polarization and depolarization. As long as the issue is polarized, then it gains network support from the issues with which it is polarized. That process of standardization that you describe as "winning" happened because the issue became decoupled from stances on other issues and was no longer predictive of other views. To put this in more concrete terms, I am not saying that you should not challenge racism and racists. I am saying that in pursuit of that goal you should actively push back on assuming someone is racist because of their political views.
axguscbklp 6y ago
We are now at the point that any further attempt to eliminate racism by force comes at the cost of suppressing accurate perceptions of reality. At what point would it stop being worth it to you to get rid of some small additional number of racists if the cost is massive damage to free speech and rational investigation of reality? Also, are there really "fewer racists than ever" now? Anti-white racism has been on the rise the last few years. I think that progressive dogma now fuels racism more than it suppresses it, not just directly - by supporting anti-white racism - but also indirectly, by motivating a reactionary rise in white nationalism. The growth of white nationalism in the last few years has largely been driven by demographic shifts, but it has also been significantly fueled by progressive anti-white racism.
- Causality1 6y ago
  I believe that in the US, racism itself is highly segregated and compartmentalized. You have academia where Asian people are discriminated against, law enforcement where black people are discriminated against. You have the ultra-woke collective culture that drives tech companies that are 80% white/Asian male to have all-hands meetings where they jerk themselves off about how great they think women and minorities are. It creates an atmosphere where absolutely everybody feels like they're discriminated against.
- ajkjk 6y ago
  > are there really "fewer racists than ever" now? Yeah, probably. If you don't believe this you are probably not as aware as you could be of just how incredibly racist the world was a single generation ago. (Some would say it's still racist, sure, not the point here). > Anti-white racism has been on the rise the last few years. a little bit of it, but not really a fair comparison given the many-orders-of-magnitudes of difference. if it seems like it is comparable you are dealing with a very skewed version of reality. > that progressive dogma now fuels racism more than it suppresses it agree that the reactionary movements are in response to progressivism and so could sort have been said to have been 'caused' by it. But I think it's important to keep in mind that big, vocal 'thought movements' are exactly what changes in acceptability look like on the inside. I imagine that it's not really possible to go from (a very racist state) to (a less racist state) without a big reactionary clash in the middle. Better to let it get worse for a while so everything can play out, than not have the fight at all and let things stay bad.
anonytrary 6y ago
I don't really care about the article, but I've noticed a very real trend of "unconditionally believe in the product, don't second-guess or ask why we're building what we're building". To me, that's what viewpoint diversity should be about. Businesses always suffer from "but we're already profitable" bias. I'm sure there's a Wikipedia article for this phenomenon -- where you are making profit and therefore lose the desire to question the product or improve it significantly because you want to continue on your current trajectory. It's possible to simultaneously be profitable and be doing bad work. The problem is that it is very hard to convince people that they're doing bad work when they are profitable, especially considering that most people are slaves to their equity and salary. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales said this very elegantly[0] "it's very hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it". This to me, is the enemy of viewpoint diversity. Success is a double-edged sword and makes people dumber than they actually are. [0] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/
- ajkjk 6y ago
  (fyi! that quote is actually attributed to Upton Sinclair)
  - anonytrary 6y ago
    You're right! That jogs my memory -- I think Wales himself mentioned in the podcast that "someone else said it" but he couldn't remember either.
strken 6y ago
I don't know anything about politics in the UK, but in Australia one of the big things correlated with conservative politics is growing up outside a big city. Rural and regional communities are under-served in everything from healthcare to transport to job growth. Coming from a working class background can also make it hard to keep up with the euphemism treadmill and know what's politically correct, even if you're on the left. I also don't think outright racism is the only taboo viewpoint. Example contributions could be "I think male and female should be the most prominent gender options because my grandma wouldn't know how to use this device if she had to scroll through our current alphabetised list", or "do we really want to stick a gigantic Black Lives Matter banner on our website when 37% of our customer base supports Blue Lives Matter and will hate us, and 40% have no strong opinion"? If someone is skeptical about a political message, they'll be able to notice problems that the less skeptical don't.
jollybean 6y ago
Well yes, it's obviously a 'bad thing' but to everyone but the 13% with the least life experience, and who are most likely to arbitrarily reject the views of the other 87%. It's also keenly hypocritical because it's the same group for whom 'diversity' is a ostensibly an important, defining element. For most people, losing viewpoint diversity would not be a good thing. Also - I don't think there ever was a time to 'talk politics' at work, but certainly holding 'commonplace views' was ok, historically.
romwell 6y ago
Agreed, even the title seemed like a dog whistle to me. Their subsequent bashing of The Progressive Activist confirmed it. Then when they compared discrimination based on political views (which you pick) with discrimination on race (which you don't get to pick), I wasn't even surprised. Who the hell are these "Ethical Systems", and why the hell should anyone listen to them? (I guess we could believe them because an unethical person would never call their org Ethical Systems /s)
Neil44 6y ago
You’ve gone straight to the implication that everyone who doesn’t want to hear politics from the noisy few is racist, despite the article not mentioning specifics. This is exactly the kind of chilling effect it’s about. I.e. “You’re not shouting as loud as us, you must be one of THEM”
- frereubu 6y ago
  I think that's an unfair characterisation. I read it as the commenter using racism purely as an example where reduced diversity of opinion towards no racism is a good thing, not saying that all opponents of diversity are racist.
  - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
    The commenter picked racism as an example, because they think viewpoint diversity is bad, and racism is a good example of a "bad" viewpoint.
    - cycomanic 6y ago
      No the commenter picked racism as an example, because they think viewpoint diversity is not necessarily good. Big difference to your statement.
      - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
        I'd say that's a rather charitable interpretation. "Not necessarily good"? Come on, this is the comment we are talking about: > I don't trust this article. The phrase "Losing viewpoint diversity" is of course crafted to make it sound like a chilling trend. Pretty clear what they want you to think about it. But if you drill into what that's referring to, whether you think it's a bad thing is entirely up to what you think of how the viewpoints are changing. "Fewer racists than ever" also maps to "less viewpoint diversity" but is totally a good thing.
        6y ago
briefcomment 6y ago
If someone thinks unchecked immigration makes neighborhoods less safe, do you consider them racist?

by ajkjk 6y ago

marricks 6y ago

Reminds me of conservatives arguing for diversity of views at US colleges because so many professors lean left/liberal. Even more horrifying than this really, if knowledge of a field informs your view mandating equal weight to ridiculous notions (i.e climate change denial) is would be seriously damaging to whatever scientific integrity existed.

jeffbee 6y ago

For the same reason I always look skeptically on other research about "polarization". The trend tends to be that in the past it was common for otherwise-sane people to advocate crazy stuff like bans on interracial marriage. Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization" but I can't find the negative in it, because there is a wrong side of those issues.

guythedudebro 6y ago
Replace interracial marriage with something like abolish the police. Is the ethical/sane choice still clear cut?
- KMag 6y ago
  More importantly, most of us hold moral judgements that our grandchildren will find horrifying, and it's a tautology that we're unable to see our moral blind spots (or have a good guess where they are). I'm happily in an interracial marriage, but I'm not sure that I would have been in favor of (or even neutral toward) interracial marriage had I been a product of the culture a century earlier. I'm very glad we've made moral progress as a culture, and that progress has required some voices in the wilderness speaking out. History has shown that these moral errors aren't all attributable to one side of the political isle, either. We should have some humility in our policies. Almost all of us are on the wrong side of history in ways we are blind to. An absolute belief of being on the right side of history has lead to most of the major disasters of the last century.
  - raffraffraff 6y ago
    I fheyly agree that we should have humility in our policies, but should also be aware that all "progress" is not positive. In fact, how is progress even defined in this case? Is all change progressive? Or is change that younger people agree with automatically positive? At some point before the Spanish Inquisition, one could have argued that this new idea of burning witches was "progress" because it reduced the evil in the world. Back in 1970s Iran, one could have argued that a law that forced women to cover their bodies from head to toe to stop tempting men into sin, as "progressive". In my own view, which I'm always willing to debate (and lose), a change isn't progressive if it cannot argue it's point using logic. If it silences dissent using threats of ostracism, job loss or ban from some ubiquitous online platform, it's not progress. If it presumes itself to be morally right without arguing it's case, and is happy to shut down any disagreement as (some)phobia, then it's not progress. If it denies science, it's not progress. And if it goes further than demand silence from dissenters, and actually demand that everyone agree (wear the colours, add the right signals to the Twitter bio, "you're with us or against us"), then it's not just "not progressive", it's regressive. It's dogmatic. It's a church full of people all changing a creed whether or not try believe.
    - raffraffraff 6y ago
      I love spotting predictive text mistakes after the edit timeout expires :/ WTF is "fheyly"?
      - KMag 6y ago
        > WTF is "fheyly"? It's the secret love child of "fully" and "covfefe".
      - gedy 6y ago
        Maybe it's someone's "personal pronoun"? /s
- MisterBastahrd 6y ago
  Abolish the police? No. Abolish the police as they currently exist? Absolutely. Nobody deserves to die because they were shot by a cop because they missed a payment on a fine.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Reminder that the UK did have to abolish (and reconstitute) a police force in order to end its civil war in 2001, and still has ongoing litigation about the legality of troops shooting civilians in the streets.
  - yerwhat01010 6y ago
    That has absolutely nothing to do with modern "abolish the police" rhetoric. "Abolish the police" is a utopian Marxist fantasy that holds that in some hypothetical perfected society we won't need police because everyone will just get along, and that the only reason we currently "need" police is because capitalism/patriarchy/white supremacy/imperialism drive people to commit crime and violence, therefore all we have to is burn the existing system to the ground (no need to specify its replacement it in any detail) and utopia will emerge from the rubble. (Nevermind that the politicians who advocate this nonsense spend tens of thousands of dollars on private security while pretending that police are unnecessary.) It's no exaggeration to say that this is the same ideology ("society is imperfect, therefore burn everything to the ground with no plan to rebuild other than my being in charge") that got tens of millions of people killed in the twentieth century. It's insane, dangerous garbage and it should not be tolerated. None of the orchestrators of the Northern Ireland peace process held political views that are remotely similar to this.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Upthread: "why won't people treat each other's political reviews with respect in the workplace" This comment: "insane, dangerous garbage and it should not be tolerated"
      - yerwhat01010 6y ago
        HN isn't the workplace.
        krageon 6y ago
        No, but what was described is ironic.
- M2Ys4U 6y ago
  > Replace interracial marriage with something like abolish the police. Is the ethical/sane choice still clear cut? That's easy, if you don't elide meanings: Abolish marriage (as an institution that is only between two people of the same race) (and replace it with one that is between any two consenting people) Abolish the police (as an institution that is corrupt and excessively violent) (and replace it with an institution that is accountable and reduces crime with the minimum amount of force)
KMag 6y ago
> Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization" I'm not sure which metric of polarization is typically used in studies, but the situation you describe (vast majority agreeing, with a tiny minority in an extreme position) intuitively sounds like approaching consensus. Intuitively, with some survey measure of 0 to 10, maximum polarization would be 50% of respondents responding 0 and 50% of respondents responding 10. Minimum polarization would be 100% of respondents giving the same answer (regardless of what that answer is). I would hope that any polarization metric being used in a serous study would give its maximum value in the former case and its minimum value in the second case. Variance of survey responses is one statistical measure meeting these criteria, but there might be better measures. Minimum Kullback-Leibler divergence, or earth-mover's distance, from any consensus distribution might also make sense, or a fractional statistical moment less than 2 about the mean. In any case, tons of people believing one thing and a tiny fraction of people believing something radically different doesn't fit my intuitive notion of polarization. My intuitive notion is closer to variance of survey responses, or earth-mover's distance from any consensus.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  > "Intuitively, with some survey measure of 0 to 10, maximum polarization would be 50% of respondents responding 0 and 50% of respondents responding 10. Minimum polarization would be 100% of respondents giving the same answer (regardless of what that answer is)." A world where 50% of people live at the North Pole, 50% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator, is polarized. So is a world where 90% of people live at the North Pole, 10% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator. Seems like "polarization" is about how many people live somewhere in between, rather than whether the groups at the poles are balanced or not. Or even, that there exist places between the poles where people could be, even if they aren't. A world where 100% are at the North Pole, the South Pole exists but nobody is there, and between them is only water, is still polarized. The only place you can be, or go, is the two extreme positions. If the survey says "do you LOVE Politician X or HATE them?" and I can't be indifferent to them or mildly in favour or slightly against, it's a polarizing survey, isn't it?
shkkmo 6y ago
Polarization has nothing to do with the craziness of ideas, but the lack of a middle ground. Polarization has to do with the clustering of beliefs. If attending BLM protests makes you less likely to attend pro-life protests, that is polarization. The strength of that correlation is the amount of polarization. Acceptance of Inter-racial marriage is a topic that was once far more polarized. That depolarization is exactly allowed us to make progress on the topic as a society. Thus polarization inhibits cultural growth and change.
- evgen 6y ago
  Interracial marriage did not just slowly creep in until it was considered acceptable. It had to fight its way into the conversation, then have champions who were willing to take great risks and accept painful consequences for promoting these polarizing beliefs. 'Depolarization' on this subject is not something that just happened, nor it an effective strategy for change. What happened is that one side LOST and their viewpoint was forcibly removed from the conversation. Within a generation this viewpoint was considered completely unacceptable and those who held this belief learned to shut up unless they were prepared to become the office racist. Voila, depolarization. Polarization is the only means by which change will be accomplished and there is a growing majority that desires change so your options are to either pick a side or accept the fact that this conflict is happening and keep your head down while you focus on the rest of your job. There are not other options and we passed the tipping point for this conflict quite a while ago.
  - shkkmo 6y ago
    You seem to mean something entirely different by polarization and depolarization. As long as the issue is polarized, then it gains network support from the issues with which it is polarized. That process of standardization that you describe as "winning" happened because the issue became decoupled from stances on other issues and was no longer predictive of other views. To put this in more concrete terms, I am not saying that you should not challenge racism and racists. I am saying that in pursuit of that goal you should actively push back on assuming someone is racist because of their political views.

axguscbklp 6y ago

We are now at the point that any further attempt to eliminate racism by force comes at the cost of suppressing accurate perceptions of reality. At what point would it stop being worth it to you to get rid of some small additional number of racists if the cost is massive damage to free speech and rational investigation of reality? Also, are there really "fewer racists than ever" now? Anti-white racism has been on the rise the last few years. I think that progressive dogma now fuels racism more than it suppresses it, not just directly - by supporting anti-white racism - but also indirectly, by motivating a reactionary rise in white nationalism. The growth of white nationalism in the last few years has largely been driven by demographic shifts, but it has also been significantly fueled by progressive anti-white racism.

Causality1 6y ago
I believe that in the US, racism itself is highly segregated and compartmentalized. You have academia where Asian people are discriminated against, law enforcement where black people are discriminated against. You have the ultra-woke collective culture that drives tech companies that are 80% white/Asian male to have all-hands meetings where they jerk themselves off about how great they think women and minorities are. It creates an atmosphere where absolutely everybody feels like they're discriminated against.
ajkjk 6y ago
> are there really "fewer racists than ever" now? Yeah, probably. If you don't believe this you are probably not as aware as you could be of just how incredibly racist the world was a single generation ago. (Some would say it's still racist, sure, not the point here). > Anti-white racism has been on the rise the last few years. a little bit of it, but not really a fair comparison given the many-orders-of-magnitudes of difference. if it seems like it is comparable you are dealing with a very skewed version of reality. > that progressive dogma now fuels racism more than it suppresses it agree that the reactionary movements are in response to progressivism and so could sort have been said to have been 'caused' by it. But I think it's important to keep in mind that big, vocal 'thought movements' are exactly what changes in acceptability look like on the inside. I imagine that it's not really possible to go from (a very racist state) to (a less racist state) without a big reactionary clash in the middle. Better to let it get worse for a while so everything can play out, than not have the fight at all and let things stay bad.

anonytrary 6y ago

I don't really care about the article, but I've noticed a very real trend of "unconditionally believe in the product, don't second-guess or ask why we're building what we're building". To me, that's what viewpoint diversity should be about. Businesses always suffer from "but we're already profitable" bias. I'm sure there's a Wikipedia article for this phenomenon -- where you are making profit and therefore lose the desire to question the product or improve it significantly because you want to continue on your current trajectory. It's possible to simultaneously be profitable and be doing bad work. The problem is that it is very hard to convince people that they're doing bad work when they are profitable, especially considering that most people are slaves to their equity and salary. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales said this very elegantly[0] "it's very hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it". This to me, is the enemy of viewpoint diversity. Success is a double-edged sword and makes people dumber than they actually are. [0] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/

ajkjk 6y ago
(fyi! that quote is actually attributed to Upton Sinclair)
- anonytrary 6y ago
  You're right! That jogs my memory -- I think Wales himself mentioned in the podcast that "someone else said it" but he couldn't remember either.

strken 6y ago

I don't know anything about politics in the UK, but in Australia one of the big things correlated with conservative politics is growing up outside a big city. Rural and regional communities are under-served in everything from healthcare to transport to job growth. Coming from a working class background can also make it hard to keep up with the euphemism treadmill and know what's politically correct, even if you're on the left. I also don't think outright racism is the only taboo viewpoint. Example contributions could be "I think male and female should be the most prominent gender options because my grandma wouldn't know how to use this device if she had to scroll through our current alphabetised list", or "do we really want to stick a gigantic Black Lives Matter banner on our website when 37% of our customer base supports Blue Lives Matter and will hate us, and 40% have no strong opinion"? If someone is skeptical about a political message, they'll be able to notice problems that the less skeptical don't.

jollybean 6y ago

Well yes, it's obviously a 'bad thing' but to everyone but the 13% with the least life experience, and who are most likely to arbitrarily reject the views of the other 87%. It's also keenly hypocritical because it's the same group for whom 'diversity' is a ostensibly an important, defining element. For most people, losing viewpoint diversity would not be a good thing. Also - I don't think there ever was a time to 'talk politics' at work, but certainly holding 'commonplace views' was ok, historically.

romwell 6y ago

Agreed, even the title seemed like a dog whistle to me. Their subsequent bashing of The Progressive Activist confirmed it. Then when they compared discrimination based on political views (which you pick) with discrimination on race (which you don't get to pick), I wasn't even surprised. Who the hell are these "Ethical Systems", and why the hell should anyone listen to them? (I guess we could believe them because an unethical person would never call their org Ethical Systems /s)

Neil44 6y ago

You’ve gone straight to the implication that everyone who doesn’t want to hear politics from the noisy few is racist, despite the article not mentioning specifics. This is exactly the kind of chilling effect it’s about. I.e. “You’re not shouting as loud as us, you must be one of THEM”

frereubu 6y ago
I think that's an unfair characterisation. I read it as the commenter using racism purely as an example where reduced diversity of opinion towards no racism is a good thing, not saying that all opponents of diversity are racist.
- baobabKoodaa 6y ago
  The commenter picked racism as an example, because they think viewpoint diversity is bad, and racism is a good example of a "bad" viewpoint.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    No the commenter picked racism as an example, because they think viewpoint diversity is not necessarily good. Big difference to your statement.
    - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
      I'd say that's a rather charitable interpretation. "Not necessarily good"? Come on, this is the comment we are talking about: > I don't trust this article. The phrase "Losing viewpoint diversity" is of course crafted to make it sound like a chilling trend. Pretty clear what they want you to think about it. But if you drill into what that's referring to, whether you think it's a bad thing is entirely up to what you think of how the viewpoints are changing. "Fewer racists than ever" also maps to "less viewpoint diversity" but is totally a good thing.
      - 6y ago

briefcomment 6y ago

If someone thinks unchecked immigration makes neighborhoods less safe, do you consider them racist?