4 ms·

> There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing

> There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries! I don't know if there's a name for this, but as a Russian immigrant this sentence reminds me of how in Russia, because everyone is generally white, people are stereotyped by region. E.g. there are specific stereotypes for Muscovites, people from Siberia, Ukrainians (it was the USSR at the time), etc. The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again on various criteria until you come up with a small group of people you can call a minority. But doing so says nothing about why a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech. There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry?

tomp 5y ago
> There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry? There are, they’re called “Nigerians”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans > In 2018, Nigerian-Americans had a median household income of $68,658 - higher than $61,937 for all overall U.S. households. https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3460 https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3... > Similar Nigerian success is reflected in the UK, where many in a highly-educated diaspora work in financial services, IT, and the legal and medical professions. Admittedly I couldn’t find information about their representation specifically in the US tech industry, so if you do, that would be a strong indicator that the tech industry is racist (which would go against my priors and therefore change my mind), but they’re overrepresented e.g. in medicine, so ... well... for the time being, I’ll keep my prior.
rufus_foreman 5y ago
> The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again Or, zooming out, "me against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins. Me and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger".
wutbrodo 5y ago
> a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech Is this true? My understanding is that PoC overall are overrepresented in tech, and certainly so in individual companies like Google. The attempt to elide minorities from a vast swathe of Asia containing a massive chunk of the world's population seems to fit your description of motivated-reasoning slicing-and-dicing description much more than the example you used. Hence the promotion of the term BIPOC, so that square achievement gap pegs can be forced into the round hole of "white supremacy" by brazenly ignoring immigrants from half the world's population to make due to their inconvenient success.

tomp 5y ago

> There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry? There are, they’re called “Nigerians”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans > In 2018, Nigerian-Americans had a median household income of $68,658 - higher than $61,937 for all overall U.S. households. https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3460 https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3... > Similar Nigerian success is reflected in the UK, where many in a highly-educated diaspora work in financial services, IT, and the legal and medical professions. Admittedly I couldn’t find information about their representation specifically in the US tech industry, so if you do, that would be a strong indicator that the tech industry is racist (which would go against my priors and therefore change my mind), but they’re overrepresented e.g. in medicine, so ... well... for the time being, I’ll keep my prior.

rufus_foreman 5y ago

> The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again Or, zooming out, "me against my brothers. Me and my brothers against my cousins. Me and my brothers and my cousins against the stranger".

wutbrodo 5y ago

> a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech Is this true? My understanding is that PoC overall are overrepresented in tech, and certainly so in individual companies like Google. The attempt to elide minorities from a vast swathe of Asia containing a massive chunk of the world's population seems to fit your description of motivated-reasoning slicing-and-dicing description much more than the example you used. Hence the promotion of the term BIPOC, so that square achievement gap pegs can be forced into the round hole of "white supremacy" by brazenly ignoring immigrants from half the world's population to make due to their inconvenient success.