It’s generally a small but vocal group. And I wouldn’t call it politics so much as activism. A sort of religious zeal has made its way into our institutions like schools and universities. Some people have taken to it like a missionary would religion and believe it’s their duty to spread the word everywhere at all times. The Inquisition was no different in this regard.
You just have to read what the activism says. It says everything is racist, sexist, etc and that in every situation you must try and identify not if things were problematic but how they were. And then “do better”, etc. so it’s impossible for these people to separate their beliefs from their jobs.
It’s far beyond politics and more a religion than anything. It would be as if a very Christian employee made it their goal to point out everything that isn’t within Christian morality and protesting the company to comply with the word of god.
> It’s far beyond politics and more a religion than anything.
I believe this is a result of the fact that Americans have turned away from organized religion in recent years (note: I'm not religious myself). There seems to be something deep inside of most people that requires a shared spiritual experience. Wokism has emerged to fill that need.
>Finally, our parasite will employ a strategy of politicization, insisting that everyone in a society be involved in the contest for political power. Since our memetic parasite is already bound to one or more political factions, politicization leaves no one with the option to ignore it, and simply live their lives. Neutrality is not acceptable. All those who are not actively infected, and who do not openly endorse the parasite, are by definition its enemies. And they will be crushed. The safest thing is to play along, and raise your children in the faith - even if you don't really believe, they will.
>At this point we've established, at least to my satisfaction, that
>(a) there is such a thing as Universalism;
>(b) Universalism is an educationally-transmitted tradition that works just like any theistic religion, and is best understood as a descendant of Christianity;
>Universalism, again, is a mystery cult of power. Its supreme being is the State. And all of the Universalist mysteries - humanity, democracy, equality, and so on - cluster around the philosophy of collective action. Christianity has been a state religion since Constantine, of course, but it always also included magical and metaphysical mysteries, which the advance of science has rendered superfluous at best, embarrassing at worst. So Universalism, unlike its ancestors, is not concerned with the Trinity or transubstantiation or predestination.
Obviously the solution to workplace politicization is...dissolving the federal government and appointing Eric Schmidt the CEO of a newly founded business-state?
> One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:
1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.
TBH, that article doesn't really make any sense. Saying "because ideology A shares a few attributes with my favorite ideology, it's really just a subset of my ideology" doesn't really make sense. Also, I don't understand how he thinks that pacifism or communalism are unique to christianity. That's just a bizarre claim.
It's also weird how he's aware of the oversimplification involved in classifying birds and bats in the same category, and then he immediately goes off and says the equivalent of "both a birds and planes have wings and a tail, therefore planes are a subset of birds". While that statement can be true from a certain point of view for certain uses ("can this thing fly?"), in the end it's just a bad analogy and bad reasoning.
Which is all not to say that the point I think you're driving at from your selection in that article can't be correct. I would agree that post-religion, people will pick up causes to fight for and act in ways that are reminiscent of fundamentalist religions, but that doesn't mean the fundamental truth is that they're all variations of religion. The fundamental truth is some people just enjoy picking up causes that let them justify bad behavior. This used to include religion a lot more in the past, and now that humanity is moving beyond it, we're discovering new ways to justify the same old behavior that we've always had.
I came to this realization when someone at a job was waving and thumping Cracking the Coding Interview like I remember people doing with the bible when I was growing up. I was a missionary in a "past life", non-religious non-believer now, and I know religion when I see it.
There seems to be an obvious counterexample in the rest of the Western nations (ie Canada, Australia, most of western Europe) that have experienced a similar reduction in organized religion but have not seen a corresponding rise to political division. Certainly not to the degree that the USA has.
Good point. My explanation for the discrepancy is that Canada, Australia and western Europe are more homogenous racially and ethnically than the US is, which makes them less vulnerable to the excesses of an ideology or religion-substitute that revolves around race and ethnicity.
On some of the troop carriers going to Vietnam, soldiers starting fighting each other along racial lines; in response, the US military started a major initiative to promote racial tolerance in their training of soldiers and in their personnel policies. Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.
Also, starting with the Puritans of England, the western Europeans that chose to emigrate to the US were on average more religious than those who chose to remain in western Europe.
Your assumption would be wrong. Australia is highly diverse.
One in four of Australia’s 22 million people were born overseas; 46 per cent have at least one parent who was born overseas; and nearly 20 per cent of Australians speak a language other than English at home[1]
I think the key differentiator, is Australia, Canada and Britain have parliamentary democracies.
"Overseas" is kind of useless as a descriptor. When I was living in Melbourne, I knew a lot of kids with German, Italian, Macedonian, and Serbian backgrounds, most spoke their respective languages.
But on the street they were just generic white christian Aussies who were out to slam a few beers and grab a chick parm. Not generic Anglo, but still very white and very western.
> Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.
Unless said leaders have an interest in curtailing the institution's function or scope, in which case causing the institution to perform worse, or even fail in their mission entirely may be their intent.
For example, they might subscribe to an ideology that questions the legitimacy of the institution, or they may have previously been a leader in an industry the institution is supposed to regulate.
I disagree. I'm in the UK and it's every bit as bad if not worse than the US in all cultural spheres and academia. The difference is that there has been much less pushback, if someone like Trump managed to be elected - which is highly unlikely as the gatekeeping is much worse than in the US - you'd see similar.
The atmosphere during the Brexit debate is/was absolutely fierce. The remain side has fundamentally a cosmopolitan-utopian worldview and the brexit side a nationalistic one (radically so compared to the orthodoxy in London and metro areas).
In other parts of Europe they're experiencing a severe decadence in culture and media because of the creeping monoculture of wokeism. They're having existential debates about their very national ideas, people don't want to have families anymore, nobody wants to defend their country and so they outsource this work to the US, while Russia and especially Asian powers have nothing of this whatsoever. Eastern Europe is caught in-between because they don't believe any of this but they don't have the size or clout to stand up to the soft economic power of Western Europe and the real power blocs elsewhere.
Out of the so-called West, the USA strikes me as by far the least decadent, and I'm not American. This feels to me like end-of-civilisation times as described for ancient empires. America pushing back presents some hope.
Funny. As someone from "the continent" I see this quite different.
The UK presents us with a good example what happens when you spread enough fear, nationalism and protectionism. From here it seems like "end-of-civilisation times" for a once great nation that has lost its power and importance and is failing to find a new way for itself, while it tries to clinge on the status quo that is running through his hands. I think the (probable) hard Brexit will tell us quite quickly who's right on all of this.
The rest of Western Europe seems to understand that the times are changing and our cultures are getting more diverse and that this will lead to conflicts which have to be solved.
Eastern Europe, joining the EU with a strong background from its UDSSR times, wars and whatnot else, has problems adapting to "the Western Europe way". You see this especially with Poland or Hungary which have strong nationalistic, traditionalistic tendencies with "strong leader persons" at their top. But I think they'll also fail once people from the newer generations are getting more and more in charge.
edit: And the US... Well... The jokes are writing themselves.
The denial is strong in the continent. I know this very well because that's where most of my family lives and where I spent nearly half of my life.
The EU gamble is going nowhere and this is a crisis that will affect us all, regardless of Brexit. It is what it is. Europe is decrepit and best case scenario is managed decadence into a third rate bloc. Russia and EE are screwed too, of course, but not because of self-doubt. Asia and the US will shoot ahead. But that's not really a prediction, it's been happening for a while.
> They're having existential debates about their very national ideas, people don't want to have families anymore, nobody wants to defend their country and so they outsource this work to the US, while Russia and especially Asian powers have nothing of this whatsoever.
Russia's fertility rate is pretty much on par with rest of Europe if not lower.
Same goes for Eastern Europe. Not to mention many Eastern European countries are no strangers to overtly left wing leadership.
It feels like Western Europe very much did experience political divisions in that time period, looking at how various populist parties (that thrive on that) are faring now compared to, say, 30 years ago, and the kind of rhetoric they're generating.
I think it has more cult dynamics than a church per-se. Seeing people end friendships and relationships with family members. “Unlearning” things, otherwise known as reprogramming. Seminars (that are expensive) and “required reading”. Obsessive recruitment of new people to initiate. And then of course if you question things you’ll be ostracized and exiled.
I think this is painting a rather stereotyped view of people on the left. I share most of the views of the left, however don't end relationships with people over it, preach, or attend any seminars. I think you're seeing the vocal minority here, which is of course more outspoken as they care enough to talk about it. Apart from the most extreme people, I have had many productive conversations with people whose views were more left than mine and haven't been ostracised once.
You are of course right that most people aren't like this. This thread is about those few who are, and how they can end up dividing everyone else, unwillingly, into accolytes versus enemies. It's not safe to say "I am left/center/right/whatever but I don't think this is the way to go about it" around this type. It is a separate axis from left-right, and is maybe correlated with the authoritarian-libertarian axis.
One of the guys that article cites clearly has some less savory beliefs about race (that I disagree with, people are mostly the same the world over) but man did he do a good job predicting the ideological battles lines of 2020 for someone writing in 2012.
Read "Kindly Inquisitors" if you'd like a very thoughtful defense of Enlightenment ideas as it pertains to knowledge and speech. If you're impressed with someones prediction from 2012 then you'll be more amazed with someones analysis from 1995. This book is a classic and the author, Jonathan Rausch is highly respected.
It wasn't so much a prediction as an observation of an incipient trend that went dormant and re-emerged. Post-modern attacks on Enlightenment ideals such as free thought and free speech were common on campuses in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then went dormant in the mid-90s, then re-emerged in the early 2010s.
Soviet Union collapsed and China started retooling for capitalism. Foreign propaganda dropped off.
Meanwhile in the US the 90s boom was kicking off and the US was exploding into global hegemony. Why protest and fight the man when communism was collapsing and there was more to gain from getting on board the winning team.
In other words, the trend dropped off externally and internally there were a lot of reasons to assume that history was in fact ending and to jump on board with MURICA and FREEDOM.
The book Sapiens talks about this well. People have a limited number of relationships they can maintain in their head. The only way societies can form to be larger than that number is shared myth between people. University graduates are in large part taking on the role of clergy in this wokist cult.
The cynical side of me sees it as America being transformed into an economic zone instead of a country. This is just what a religion looks like when you're binding people together in one large brutalistic finance zone.
I'm curious, in the various responses to this comment people are really getting into this interesting concept of certain political ideologies replacing the church, and resembling a religious fanaticism in their application of these ideologies.
My understanding is that we have had secular societies before, eg. the Soviet Union, China, which explicitly try to reduce practicing religion. Did this same kind of "new semi-religion appears to fill the void" event occur in those societies? Is it the particular "holy sacrements" that the west has adopted that is unique? Or are we unique in even having something arise the "fills the religious void"?
Read up on the Reign of Terror during the French revolution.
They were very secular and extremely violent and even evil (making shows out of drowning believers etc).
As much as the Catholic Church has something to answer for with the witch processes around here etc, they are small guys compared to the secular/atheists of the French Revolution.
Same goes to some degree for USSR and to a large degree for Khmer Rouge.
Reign of Terror during the French revolution was neither secular nor atheistic. They have state religion 'Cult of the Supreme Being', which was deistic. Robespierre himself was deist and opposed to atheism.
Ok, I'll not argue about that even if I still think the topic is arguable.
Anyways in case you are right it probably makes GPs point even stronger: when established religions are chased away quasi-religions - and often extremely dangerous ones - take their place.
Here in Czechia power of established religions went away (~ less than 1/3 population is religious). They were partially replaced with folk esoterism (astrology and so), which is much better alternative, as folk esoterism does not have concentrated power of e.g. Catholic Church.
This might come as a shock to you, but a large majority dislike political correctness no matter what group they belong to. They just go through the motions because they are attacked if they don't.
> While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.
Can you explain to me what constitutes "political correctness"?
From where I stand, it just means treating people equally and not being an asshole.
ETA: In considering all the worries of modern living, I have never once been concerned with using the wrong words for a group of people. Am I really the exception? It seems easy to call people by the terms they prefer. Not sure about which terms to use? Then I just ask.
Change of innocuous and unrelated terminology in source code and documentation without any technical justification. No shortage of those examples throughout the industry and open source.
So you are saying people have a problem with the term "blacklisting" ? I guess I live a sheltered life then. Nothing like this has remotely ever come up and I live in a major metro.
I've seen the discussion come up about changing these terms and whether it was worth doing. Not once have I seen it turn into an "accusation" of racism against a person, much less hate crimes, so I don't think that paints an accurate picture.
The poll didn't define it, so not all respondents necessarily understood it the same way, but in my experience it's generally used to refer to speech codes requiring people to take great care in how they speak and write to avoid accidentally giving offense. The recent controversy about the USC professor who said 那个 in class, for example, would be a typical example.
Which makes all of the claims you and the others have made as to what that data actually means basically useless. All we know is that a lot of people think some definition of political correctness is some definition of problem. That's barely information.
As far as speech codes, they seem very mild. I would not even call it an inconvenience. Are people mad that certain phrases are now considered slurs and not welcome in polite society?
Ex. it is no longer appropriate to call someone a "retard," even in jest. Is this a problem?
I'm still not understanding the meat of the objection to "PC".
Most people are against it. Around 80% for each racial group. A bit less for blacks at around 75%. It’s like the 1 thing a super majority of us agree on.
However, slice it up by income and education. Middle and especially upper-middle class people are generally for it much more than everyone “below” them but even they don’t like it.
From politics, republicans hate it a lot and democrats mainly hate. Except 1 group. Progressives love it with about 30% of them against it. They are the only group that likes it.
It is elitist and no one likes it. Except the far left. Yet we are all forced to live with it.
> It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.
I'm still struggling with the objection here, but this is ridiculous.
It's ok to say "black". Is that hard to figure out? Ask a black person and they will say it's fine. The term "african-american" seems more nonsensical than anything -- not all black people identify with Africa.
As to the rest, I don't care about popular opinion, that doesn't inform my world view. Still waiting to hear about the burden of "PC" because I have yet to hear a compelling case.
And I have never once wondered whether or not I should call someone a "jew".
Political correctness doesn't appeared to be defined. I assume if you asked people their opinions on concrete events versus a nebulous concept the results would be quite different.
Actually as far as I'm aware, the current politically correct term is "person of color" specifically so "person" is first instead of "black", and "color" instead of "black" so middle-eastern/etc aren't excluded.
No you’re totally wrong here. From Kimberle Crenshaw herself (Pioneer of critical race theory) there is a difference between a “Black person” and a “person who happens to be black”. It’s important to understand what this means and how it guides this philosophy and the activism we now see in the workplace.
This is all intentional. “People/Person of color“ is an entirely different thing. You need to understand the hierarchy here and why it’s important to concepts like intersectionality and thus social justice.
You should read the actual work and come to understand they mean what they say and the “language game” being played isn’t really a game as critical theory understands the power of language quite well and is ready, willing, and able to indoctrinate useful idiots to propagate it.
When people say they're concerned about political correctness, they're generally disputing your assessment that modern speech codes are very mild. Many people feel that modern speech codes are quite intense - that it requires significant study to identify all the terms and phrases that currently aren't welcome in polite society, and that complying with the list once you've studied it severely restricts the ideas you can express.
Retarded was invented to be a “kind word”. It’s humorous looking at records from Ellis island and seeing records describing people as “idiots” “imbecile”, and “morons” as actual terms to describe different levels of intelligence. We use these words outside that context now. But they were actual classifications. Words like “retard” came into being to cover those terms which became derisive slang that is today considered harmless. But retard isn’t.
Obviously teasing an actual mentally retarded person by calling them a “retard” or the above terms is cruel and in poor taste, and worse. I don’t believe almost anyone would though.
Sure. One example would be that many companies (including my own) are now instructing engineers to avoid any public usages of the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist". Obviously this isn't the most important thing in the world, but it requires pretty significant mental effort on my part, since the terms had no racial connotations at all until a couple months ago.
It's telling that the only concrete example in english, though only from two of you, is the same one.
It seems like there aren't a lot of examples to choose from.
I have personally never heard of this concern, and as you mention it doesn't seem particularly taxing. I would like to understand better the consequence of misusing (or using) blacklist/whitelist. I very much doubt the fallout would be severe.
- "master"/"slave" terminology in databases and such; most recently, even the "master" branch in source trees was deemed impious, and GitHub will be renaming it by default to "main" on new repos starting tomorrow
- adding codes of conduct to all public-facing projects, most of which are taken directly from the Contributor Covenant (a safely orthodox choice); this isn't a naming thing, but is pushed for in a similar way by similar people
For the people who have not watched the movie, the hilarious thing is that RoboCop is anti-police, anti-corporate, anti-autoritarian and anti-dystopian.
But since woke people are corporate, authoritarian and dystopian, I can see why they would object to the name.
It's the most recent and thus the most salient one for a lot of people in software. There are many other examples of neutral terminology that's become politically charged: "all lives matter", "color-blind", the OK hand gesture...
I completely agree that none of these rules are individually taxing and that the consequences of breaking them are unlikely to be severe. But when taking everything in aggregate - the sum of all the rules I know about, the concern that there could be new rules I don't know about, the tiny but not unprecedented chance that I could face severe fallout - the net effect is stifling. Again, not the most important problem in the world or even the most important problem I personally face, but still a problem.
"All lives matter" is a natural English sentence expressing the idea that every person's life matters. This is not a particularly controversial idea.
I recognize that it's also a non-neutral political slogan, and that modern speech conventions require people to avoid saying things that sound like controversial political slogans. But that's precisely the problem! I have to keep up to date with all major partisan controversies, a task I generally find quite miserable and pointless, in order to know which new phrases I should avoid!
You just don’t ever know how it will interpreted against you forcing an apology or more recently a written declaration that you are sexist/racist/etc and that you will “do better”.
Do a search for USC communications professor to understand the previous example.
It's hard to defend insulting a person's intelligence, regardless of the word used. A better example would be referring to something inanimate like a company policy as "retarded". Even better is the purging of words like "master" from software. Or actors having to apologize for their Halloween costumes. It seems like every major comedian is complaining bitterly about political correctness lately, save perhaps for certain partisan ones.
That's because "political correctness" is a somewhat vague term with intensely negative connotations. It's like asking if people are in favor of "government overreach" - people may have very different ideas about what that specifically constitutes but saying you oppose it is an easy nonspecific way to connect.
It just filled the gap of religion disappearing, people want to belong in groups. Maybe broad categorization but this religious activism seems to be more of an American thing, Europe is definetly more diverse when it comes to different issues.
It's easiest just to go along with the popular opinion so you don't stick out. Given that all the most valuable companies are taking stances about social issues, I'd wager that it's profitable to do so. I think it's admirable for being honest with his apolitical stance as opposed to just going along with the flow.
Probably because the work these companies do is frequently political.
Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends.
But the staff? Sorry, you have no voice.
Maybe that's fine. The clear message to staff is: you are either onboard with our mission, or you can leave.
But let's not pretend companies and workplaces are apolitical. That's, at best, deeply naive.
Frankly, I wonder how much of what we're seeing now is due to the destruction of unionized labour, which were organizations explicitly designed to channel the political views of employees into collective action. Absent those structures, a) you get this bizarre perception that the workplace is apolitical (it's not), and b) staff no longer have a path whereby their views and values can be channeled and expressed.
You're absolutely right, and I'm disappointed that you've been voted down to negative. At the very least this is a well worded argument worth looking at.
Politics, as much as we all hate it, is engaged with everywhere in business.
Choosing to be apolitical is effectively a form of political engagement, usually resulting in a vote for the status quo and/or the pursuit of money eschewing engagement in difficult questions in society.
This can be argued about whether it is moral or not, or even if a company has much of a choice in the matter (There are many entrenched companies that do "immoral" political things that are near impossible not to engage with as a business), and this is not unique to coinbase, but it's not somehow withdrawing from judgement on morality when you say you are "apolitical", and you still should be judged on your politics and lack of engagement in society.
Let's not be naive here, any larger company, even the most "apolitical" company still has large influence, uses services, and makes decisions that are politically charged.
That said, it's not all one direction where all political activism within a company is great, but eschewing all politics is not doing so at all.
The employees have a voice: as private citizens. The workplace is not a democratic community, and the employees are not its constituency. It a place where employer-employee come together to complete a mission that both sides consent to, otherwise they separate. Of course, mission is a negotiable term just like compensation and benefits, an employee is free to ask "in addition to pay you must also dedicate the company's resources and attention to my preferred causes", and the employer is free to decline. Coinbase is simply make it clear that changing their mission is not a price they are willing to pay, so please look elsewhere.
I think this brings clarity to the work relationship, as "the power to direct the political mission of the company" had been previously an unstated, unnegotiated axis of the terms of employment. People are now learning that this need to be crystal clear upfront.
Certainly true, though to me that only reinforces my point.
Investors invest in companies based on their perception of the value of a company, and that perception is of course coloured by political views.
Heck, we have an entire financial movement called Socially Responsible Investing, something which is nakedly political and a clear acknowledgement that politics cannot be, and has never been, divorced from business.
I find it infinitely more strange to think that workplaces can be apolitical at all. Choosing to work for Palantir or Coinbase or The Gates Foundation or Amazon is (in part) a political decision. It may not be a conscious or intentional political decision, but it's a political decision nonetheless.
> Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends.
One hundred percent this. There is a reason Coinbase is one of the few companies to take a stance like this.
The company's foundational value is literally based on the notion of state-free finance. They have no incentive to do anything to allow their company to be steered into engaging with conventional politics. In fact, they benefit from taking strong stances that maintain the status quo if the status quo furthers their own mission.
So, yeah, Coinbase is indeed very mission oriented.
I’ve never worked in the Bay Area, so could just be OOL but I’m genuinely surprised that this is such a big deal, or that this blog post got so much praise.
Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
Coming from the east coast (and maybe a little from an earlier era) I also find the attitude on this stuff a little mystifying.
"In my day" -- it was just poor form to bring up that kind of stuff at work. If you did so at all, you usually tried to avoid being "that person". You don't get to choose each person you work with, so it pays if everyone puts in a bit of extra effort to not give anyone else a hard time.
I think some of these work politics issues--in particular around the bay area-- is partially a product of extremely homogeneous work forces (at least politically), partially poor work-life balance cultures (no life outside work), partially social networking (massively increasing the visibility of your co-workers out of work activities), and <???>-- I don't feel I really have a complete understanding of what is going on.
Maybe a factor is a breakdown in our wider culture's ability to see people who disagree as being people who are still good people with reasonable points but just have different understandings or priorities (or even just to patronize them as stupid or uninformed). But instead perhaps there is a trend to rapidly decide people we disagree with are irredeemably evil just based on a soundbitized version of some insanely complicated political trade-off (or maybe even just by association)... But I'm not really sure how much that breakdown is actually happening compared to the appearance of it happening in the reporting funhouse mirror ("Reasonable people do a reasonable thing" said no headline ever).
Some of it might also be due to a transition from products to services-- people seem a lot more willing to view product sales as anonymous and totally transactional, while they seem to view a service as something more akin to a marriage.
A big downside of reactions like coinbases' might be that in what I would consider the traditional regime there was still an opportunity for employees to bring a little bit of their politics to work-- so long as they were professional and not obnoxious about it, or in places where there were genuine interactions with work ("How about lets not buy the toner cartages made from clubbed baby seals?") ... but if you can't count on people to control themselves and you're forced to set bright line policies then there is probably a lot less room for people to be reasonable.
I worked for companies on the east coast, then moved to SF and now work at a big tech company. The companies I worked for on the east coast were mostly B2B, so we were focused on making a good product for businesses so they’d pay us more money. Big tech companies recruited for a long time with the pitch that we’re changing the world. That has brought in a bunch of employees who joined bc they want their employment to make a positive change in the world. Companies are now realizing the conflict being a neutral platform poses to these people - if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
I wonder what % of SV employees actually did move there for "making a better place blabla". It always souded as a pure marketing signal , like those old Benneton ads. I can understand that people who work for wikipedia do it, but not the big tech sector. It's particularly hard to believe it considering the cynicism of the current "total compensation"-oriented generation of tech crowd.
A large group of people, maybe even a majority, believe in the general idea that technology can help solve social problems. Then you have a company that says they make the world a better place. Of course you're going to get some people who legit want to do that, and believe the scale and scope of the operation allows this to actually happen! Then they're very upset when, for instance, their spreadsheet software is used to track how to steal refugee children from their parents and sell them to adoption services. It's going to take some adjustment to convince these people that the company that says they're making the world a better place is simply constantly lying, and only exists for profit.
When you recruit starry-eyed kids out of college telling them that they’ll change the world at your company, well, some of those kids never grow up and realize that it’s just marketing.
I've worked on the east coast for the early half of my career, and no company has ever mentioned "making a positive change in the world" as a pitch for the job. I was hired to fix bugs and connect two API layers to each other so that a set top box could ship or so we could release the next version of a display driver. There was plenty of political diversity in the office: people from all across the political spectrum. Yet, we all worked together fine, and you almost never heard an actual political argument. Occasionally it would come up as a polite conversation at lunchtime. The rare minute it got heated, someone would maturely step in and say, hey, guys, let's get back to work and put it aside, and that was that. This is in stark contrast to the stories you hear out of west coast tech companies today! How have we managed to screw this up so badly?
I also worked for an east coast company like that for several years, and I went to grad school because I couldn’t take it anymore. This wasn’t because of the politics, it was more because life should be better than plugging together two API layers so that a display driver can ship.
I yearn for the return of that attitude, polite conversation of differences and the tolerance and rational discussion of nuanced issues which makes it possible.
> if I have a belief that my employment should make a positive change in societal issues, how could I work somewhere that I believe contributes to making things worse?
Why the binary presentation, though?
You can make the world better by doing a single thing well and respecting your customers (and their all-kinds-diversity) while doing it. Even if you're not directly contributing to BigIssue by doing it, the people who are presumably need to be able to count on a reliable supply chain that gives them the tools/services/resources they need.
Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse -- it make fail to do the absolute maximum it could possibly to to make one specific thing better, but if that's your focus you should be working on that thing directly. In a reasonable organization there should be a lot of opportunity to put your thumb on a scale towards continually improving all sorts of things-- without inviting disruption and discord --by threading the needle and nudging all the free choices in the right direction and respecting that other reasonable people can have different priorities.
There are an neigh uncountable number of travesties and injustices in the world and finite time and resources to fight for them... but as a society we can't stand strong to face any of the big issues if the water taps aren't flowing, the power isn't on, the communications lines aren't communicating, the spread-sheets aren't spreading, the trash (literal and figurative) isn't getting collected, and whatnot. We have to prioritize, triage, and focus on what we can accomplish.
And someone-- many many someones, in fact-- has to be the shoulders we stand on as our tallest reach for the stars.
Besides, if advocacy was really what people were sold on in large numbers how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits? :) I think that asks me to believe that there were many people who's next alternative to a google role was taking a $40k/yr 501c3 job and google was foolish enough to offer that person a mid-six-figure compensation package.
> Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse
Most of the big tech companies are all encompassing enough that they all have serious externalities.
- Amazon and Microsoft face protests that they enable ICE
- FB faces protests that they enable Trump to promote hate speech
- Google faced protests over a possible Pentagon contract
> how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits
Keep in mind that a decent percentage of employees of big tech companies are non-eng. The comp is still better than outside, but not the order of magnitude you see for eng.
In general, are you surprised that people want to have their cake and eat it too? :P There is a group for whom changing a specific issue is their top priority and they'll accept below-market comp to work at a nonprofit. There's a much larger group, especially among younger generations, who want both top of market comp and to feel like they're changing the world, and the tech companies promised they could have it all.
A number of people in big tech are facing the decision of: should I keep working at a company whose values I may no longer agree with? Or should I quit (possibly taking a cut in pay, perks, scope, caliber of eng, etc), since I may not find a big tech company whose values I completely agree with? I haven't seen a trend towards leaving yet, but the fact that the stock of big tech has been going through the roof has made it sting even harder to leave now, so I'll be curious when the market run ends how this ends up.
I suspect that when the market takes a turn for the worse we'll see a lot of attrition from the big companies to startups. When the golden handcuffs become bronze, many employees will be free to seek self actualization elsewhere.
I often wonder about the other side: Why do people who work in SV seem so militant on political issues? After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble") which is severely disconnected from the reality of most of the Earth, and even nearby american cities. I don't know enough about the demographics of the region and what can drive this behaviour but it is full of contradictions. For example, while they all seem invested in political causes, and seem to be using donations as a way to show virtual support to causes, I notice that they rarely venture into actual politics themselves.
>After all they live in a very privileged space (or "bubble")
It's my personal view that so much of the current political vitriol is because as a society, we've run out of things to worry about. We've reached critical mass of people solving Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and therefore, we are dwelving in to other arenas where we are feeling neglected.
I have a much more benigh benign theory: The end of mass entertainment. When we no longer listen to the same music/watch the same movies/ same tv, it's hard for people to come up common themes in discussions. Politics doesnt fit in that because usually countries have one government, and everyone has an opinion on politics, it's too easy
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
because they are over educated and wealthy and it lends itself to the thought of "if i'm this smart and this successful how could i be wrong and why don't you want this life?"
>Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
Same, and that's the conundrum.
"Activist" employees put others on the spot by querying coworkers' political views and expecting discussion. And for those who have had their head in the sand for the past few years, things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics.
My take: he’s generally opposed to this kind of laborious activism and tedious “political correctness” (broadly defined). He’s had some folks on his podcast who are very outspoken on certain things (trans issues, politics, etc) that people find offensive, and they claim he’s a “gateway to the alt right” as a result. Despite Rogan self-identifying as a progressive, the label has pretty much stuck and even though he has an extremely wide variety of guests - from cutting edge technologists to comedians to Snowden - on the show, he’s forever tainted by not aligning to the activists’ goals.
My personal opinion is that they don’t like him because his platform is massive and threatens other traditional means of informing people about what to think on certain topics.
> liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.
I'd argue this is more about the political climate in the US (and many other places) than about liberals specifically. Arguably for "true liberals" this shouldn't be a consideration at all but might be for conservatives.
Virtually every meaningful task humans have accomplished has been a result of groups of us putting aside our differences to unite and focus on solving the problem at hand.
??? Nice way to rewrite history. Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences? Or because they fought for their rights, their difference, and the privileged majority had to make concessions?
Yes very much so. They found the moral high ground and were able to persuade people on our shared humanity. No one “had” to do anything. People were compelled to as they were persuaded that we had immoral systems in terms of individuals civil rights.
A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.
For some historical context, contemporaneously, the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular; it's exactly the kind of thing that would have been described as politics best left out of the workplace.
"In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers."
I think we're conflating certain actions with certain messages. The words of that speech struck a nerve with people because of its universal appeal to humanity. It's oft quoted line of "...judged by content of their character, not the color of their skin" is still universally praised because of that.
Compare this to today's thoughtless and abrasive slogans or the writings of today's favored thought leaders on this and how divisive now only are the ideas but the tactics being used to coerce people into compliance.
So yeah, people at the time may have had a distaste for some of the tactics but the messaging was very popular. The riots that took place later on in the decade were a disaster and led to a new, mainstream form of conservatism led by Nixon.
I don't know if I understand your point. Are you saying that the 74% unfavorable view of civil rights demonstrations suggests that Americans disfavored demonstrations but nonetheless were strongly supportive of MLK's speech at such a demonstration?
That strikes me as a level of nuance that is frankly unlikely.
Within a year of that speech the 24th Amendment was ratified to the constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. He won the Noble Prize a little over a year later. I'd say people agreed with the message above all else because he truly appealed to a shared, universal humanity. This couldn't be done, especially in that era, without a large amount of people supporting this. An Amendment - think about that and what it takes! It almost has to be universal for that to happen. People supported these ideas. It is a myth they didn't and the evidence is the product of them.
I don't think these landmark legal events occurred because people demonstrated so much what the man and his supporters were saying. I believe people miss the forest for the trees and think if they just get a group of people together they're somehow right or will get their way. But it's about what you have to say and how you say it that matters. Peacefully organizing is a great vehicle for that but you still need the goods.
The violence that happened in the later 1960's set so much of it back IMO.
Hmm, to your first part: maybe. Adam Serwer (in that same article) argues that exposure to tales of southern violence, after the Civil War, was instrumental in changing northern Republicans' willingness to push civil rights legislation. So, similarly, in the 1960s.
Yet your conclusion is far too final: it's not a "myth" that people didn't support these changes; some people did and some didn't, as with anything. At one point in the end of 1964, a majority of people oppose the protests that led to these changes.
And in fact, the 24th Amendment faced substantial opposition from southern states; I'm not able to find contemporaneous opinion polls (and I'd be interested if you have any), but it's far from the case that it was without controversy!
I strongly disagree with your last line, however—not because violence is acceptable or productive, necessarily, but because your interpretation exculpates reactionaries who regrouped and pushed back against such changes, which I think is a highly relevant lesson for the Trump era:
Race is such a good predictor of a vote for Trump. The simplest explanation for Trump's rise is that he is a counterreaction to the election of the first Black President.
So too with the success of a cynical Southern Strategy following on the heels of the Civil Rights Era.
Why? If you asked the same question today about BLM you would also see a divergence between the two. Almost certainly not to the degree to which a strong majority favor the notion but disapprove of the demonstrations, but there's going to be a difference.
I don't know offhand of any high quality opinion surveys asking about approval of _demonstrations_ vs _BLM_ in general, so I don't know if your hypothesis is born out.
I don't see how your statement "the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular" has anything to do with your reference.
You could still support the Civil Rights movement, but believe that mass demonstrations harm it.
That’s not true. The CRM was deeply unpopular to the general population. King was seen as a rowdy agitator. The CRA was passed despite public opinion, not because the activists managed to convince the population that they were human beings. The CRA was so deeply unpopular that it caused a fundamental change in the structure of our political boundaries that has lasted for 60 years. King himself explicitly shamed the “white moderate” rather than courting them.
It's actually a perfect example. It's hard to imagine everyone fighting for civil rights was previously aligned on all fronts or agreed with everything that was done along the way.
In MLK's book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" he talks about some of the internal battles within the civil rights community and how they explicitly tried to forge alliances with other groups. That's when I learned just how brilliant MLK was in this political / social sense.
"Structural racism" is a coded term. We have laws against discrimination and HR departments across the country bending over backwards to avoid lawsuits... but you're not asking about the problems those are intended to solve.
When you ask a question like that, what you're really asking is, "why don't workplaces have the outcomes I expect along racial lines when it comes to hiring, compensation, promotion, and more?" And implicitly, "why can't workplaces be forced (or force themselves) toward meeting the outcomes I expect?"
Those are different questions, but they're encoded in yours. And they don't really apply to the topic at hand.
Avoiding lawsuits is not at all the same as attempting to deal with the issue honestly as opposed to framing it in the same light as some new kind of competitive marketplace.
I think that's one side effect of having these gargantuan, hugely profitable tech companies. They can essentially have a huge portion of their workforce be unproductive if the essential "money machine" at each company (e.g. AdWords at Google) is running smoothly.
Other, smaller companies can't afford to have as much fat in their workforce, so their workers need to be actually focused on, you know, work, and if they're not, their lack of productivity is much more visible.
SV companies sell candidates on changing the world and disrupting the status quo. They literally target and recruit the type of people who would want to discuss politics at work.
If you instrumentalize music to maximise your influencer career with the content of the music as an afterthought what you get isn't art but a mediocre commodity.
It's like Ricky Gervais remark at the Globes, the actors aren't actually actors any more, it's a competition for the best looking, most ripped steroid junkie.
Yes it is, or even if you're just a classical music fan who likes to listen while following along with the score.
I contribute $2 USD a month to Petrucci/IMSLP for the same reason I contribute $3 a month to Wikipedia and $11 a month to WNYC: for the greater good of human civilization.
I too contribute monthly to Petrucci. Apart from downloading the scores of piano pieces I want to play (they offer a wide set of arrangements for all but the most obscure pieces), I have discovered several hidden gem in their library, which grows more and more every time I check!
Before Petrucci, I used to be a regular user/contributor of the Mutopia project [1]. Its purpose is to provide Lilypond [2] source files for scores: this allows users to create MIDI files or re-create PDF files using custom page layouts/line breaks/etc. These features are handy, but creating a Lilypond file from a score is much more time-consuming than simply scanning it and uploading to Petrucci. (Each of Mozart's and Haydn's string quartet I uploaded took me ~2 weeks of work.)
Trails will help highway traffic between major cities, but it doesn't address how spread out suburbs are from people's jobs and support infra (grocery stores, doctors, restaurants, etc). It's a chicken-and-egg problem, now:
- people are spread out because they've owned cars, so the distance doesn't bother them
- If you take their cars away, they're too spread out to support themselves, because of how the towns were built.
Totally. American cities we're built with cars in mind, and it's really crippled their potential. Densely packed cities with subways and a lot of vertical freedom are the best way to build. They prevent deforestation because you don't need to expand outward, and they help with pollution because you can have maybe a couple hundred metro cars instead of millions of individual cars. I'm not sure how this would be implemented now though, because like I said, American cities have been crippled by their car infrastructure.
Not necessarily: a self driving car takes you to a self driving coach for the long distance, then back to sdc for the last miles. All electric. Very efficient.
'Getting around the city' culture is just different here in LA. There's folks in NYC who make half million a year and take the subway several times a day.
In LA, someone making 35K a year is thinking no way I'm not taking public transport, I'm driving!
You're going for the wrong side of the chicken/egg.
People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.
The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.
Most people I know would rather ride the train. Sit down and browse your phone / read / watch videos rather than sit in traffic irritated. The inconvenience factor of planning around it and the time added just leaves the desperate to utilize it (or the lucky few with commute coverage).
> The transit system is unreliable, slow and has low coverage. The only way to fix that is more dedicated Point-to-Point (the orange line)/more rapid lines + higher light rail coverage.
And the fix will have to be done in a very forward thinking way without the pre-existing usage to easily justify it. If buses or mass transit in general have a bad reputation, it's going to take a long period of sustained good & convenient service for people to start to change their attitudes and habits.
> Most people I know would rather ride the train.
One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.
> One of the nice things about trains is that they're more regular and predictable than many other forms of mass transit. The large, fixed infrastructure investment discourages too much disruptive change once it's built.
Plus they don't get stuck in car traffic like buses do.
Caltrain has a lot of trouble because people are constantly driving or walking onto the tracks. BART is either subway or elevated or fenced off between stations.
>People don't use buses because they're seen as for they poor. They're seen that way because you'd have to be desperate to use them. You'd have to be desperate because they don't get anywhere or, if they do, never in a timely manner.
Very true. There was an aphorism from (I think) the Mayor of Bogota who said something like "I'll consider the city prosperous not when everyone has their own car, but one where even the rich will happily take the train."
only better bus routes, preferential treatment for buses, and more routes, will alleviate the issue. light rail is a boondoggle for every city that has it with a combined near hundred billion dollar deferred maintenance tab across the US.
Light rail goes where it is politically beneficial and that rarely aligns where people need it. it the becomes such a money sink that other parts of the mass transit system are short changed to prop it up and in some cases bus routes are made worse in order to cajole people onto rail they don't want to use. then throw in the whole land cost and it just becomes silly, you could always raise the cost ten fold and go underground /s
Light rail is the right investment when the existing buses running every 5 minutes typically have > 80 people on them. Most US routes didn't prove it with the bus first though which means they have no idea if it is true.
There is only other reason to run light rail: you are doing bridge over a route that doesn't have any road bridges and want to ensure drivers won't take the bridge over.
Getting around the city is a totally different problem in LA than NYC. Wikipedia says NYC is 303 square miles (784 square km), and just the city of LA is 469 square miles (1214 square km); but getting around LA doesn't usually mean getting around the incorporated city of LA, it means getting around the whole greater Los Angeles area, which is 33,954 square miles (87,940 square km). That's immense and fixed route transit is just not going to cover very many trips.
That said, the LA MTA trains do seem to get pretty significant ridership, and voter support, so it makes sense to me to keep building them. Some people are able to make it work for them, and I'd guess more people over time will be able to find housing and jobs near enough to the lines that it makes a difference for them.
I doubt it's going to make a significant dent in congestion, but it might bend the curve a bit. If you increase transit capacity, and you don't limit population growth, congestion is going to get worse over time. The LA area in general doesn't have the same general resistance to high density residential as the bay area, and there's also always a lot of single family housing going up on the edges, and of course, nothing stopping people from having more people in a single unit, so population growth seems to be a given.
That is one benefit. People who can't drive are stuck with whatever you give them, and will figure out whatever convoluted system required. They all dream of the time/day they can drive. This one is also mandated by law (US ADA) - if you provide any form of public transit you must provide for the disabled. If we ignore the legally required para transit (most expensive) service for those who cannot drive is the cheapest you can get.
There are other benefits that transit can buy. However they are less certain. When you try to attract someone who could drive you have the hard problem of providing service where and when people are to where and when they want to be.
It doesn't pay to speak up. We glorify those who made a change but truth is that 99% of those who speak up even with small things quickly learn to shut up or leave for greener pastures. Remaining in the company are the YES-men and outside of regular employment those who speak just to breathe. Still, we encourage everyone to speak up to be able to weed out the black sheep before they cause too much damage.
