Every time I tune in, I measure the time-to-race, which is the amount of time that passes before race becomes the main topic of discussion. Usually it’s less than 15 minutes.
20 year listener here. I now listen until they force identity politics in to the subject at hand, then change the channel. In my experience it's much less than 10m, but could be my market too.
I play this game with my XM radio. On First Wave, I listen until they play The Police, then I switch to Lithium and listen until they play Foo Fighters. I cycle back and forth constantly.
Nothing directly, in fact I want to like them so much. But I was there since the 90s and the stations just over-played them to the point that I began to dislike them.
I think some of the flagship programs talk nonstop about LGBT and minority issues, but this has been a thing for some years. I remember pre COVID driving to work chuckling at how every time I turned on the radio, it was a story on those topics.
There is a lot more going on in the world that can also be discussed.
I like Weekend edition and All Things Considered, and their hourly news updates.
Finally: there is a distinction between a faux "both sides" centrism and constant focus on identity. Having a liberal bias can exist while providing a wide range of coverage and de-emphasizing identity politics.
"Do you ever buy eggs at the super market? Well, here's how eggs are secretly racist, and the facts of egg economics disproportionally affects minorities."
Virtually every person I talk to who remembers will tell you that the 90s were the peak of just about everybody in the country getting along and feeling good about the future.
Then widespread internet and social media happened, which shortly led people into echo chambers while simultaneously gutting the institution of journalism.
>90s were the peak of just about everybody in the country getting along and feeling good about the future.
What? All joking aside, what the Fuck?
Rodney King. LA riots. NAFTA protests. Branch Davidians. Presidential sex scandals. First desert storm. Political correctness. Women's movements. Bosnia et.al. Rwanda. HIV/AIDS epidemic. Ruby Ridge. Wage stagnation. The final death of small town commerce due to Wal-Marts.
And these are just the things I thought of in the last minute. I'm sure there are a ton more issues I'm missing.
The people you talk to are doing what people have done since the beginning of time. They're remembering the past fondly while forgetting the bad.
I’m white, but I often notice all white panels discussing how awful white people are, but somehow neglected to invite a non-white person to participate in the discussion.
And when they do, it’s someone they hand-picked to say the things they want to hear.
I’ll note this though: I think the people who do this don’t really identify as “white.” It’s become a class marker. Your plumber is “white.” NPR listeners aren’t “white.”
“White” is a socially and culturally constructed label, not an ethnic group. For example, Germans and French people in those countries don’t identify as “white”—they identify as German and French. It’s a label created in the context of racial politics.
My theory is that NPR listeners no longer really identify with the label “white.” They might acknowledge the label applies to them. But when they complain about “white people” they are referring to other white people.
When progressive "solutions" are implemented, if their success is measured empirically at all, they usually just make things worse. See e.g. the outcome of most educational reforms of the past 20 years, or the attempts in America's most progressive cities to solve homelessness by incentivizing and rewarding homelessness.
Not surprising, a lot of profitable rackets depend on those issues remaining unsolved. What would e.g. all the homelessness experts do, who collect billions annually to hold conferences where they agree with each other on settler-colonialism and the newest genders, if they were to actually solve homelessness?
Climate change is being solved, but it's being solved through technological innovation, not masturbatory discourse.
Sprinkle in climate change, and you'll be down to 5! I may be grading them too critically at this point, but in recent years, it feels like that XKCD about Wikipedia and how all roads lead to "Philosophy." Sometimes, I'll sit there wondering how the leap will be made from some benign story to these anchor topics, but they usually manage. I don't like that predictability at all.
I once tuned in to NPR when they were talking about artificial intelligence, and they were talking about how the seminal figures in the field (e.g. McCarthy) were white men. I reflected that if I had to pick the least interesting possible topic on AI, it would probably be how white the AI researchers were in the 1950s.
> The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth... Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure... We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.
(later, same show):
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
It’s just odd that they feel the need to explain to their audience most professors, and especially mathematics and computer science professors, in the 1950s were white men. Or that a lot of the funds for the research came from industry or the military.
> Or that a lot of the funds for the research came from industry or the military.
I think that's interesting and newsworthy. Maybe because we know it already it seems obvious, but a younger generation might not understand how deeply enmeshed the military-industrial complex was (and to some extent still is) in academia.
It's something you are supposed to learn in history class and there are many, many topics that you should learn from history at some point in your life. A news publication is not a replacement for history class and is probably one of the worst places to get a complete view of history.
To be clear, I have no problem with history podcasts (especially episodes about computing history), I just think they chose a poor lens for the subject matter. The military-industrial complex's influence on computing? Incredibly germane. But, and this is just how I heard it:
> You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot mainframe computers and saw themselves in it. They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
> I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.
> And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.
> ...And in effect, replace God with science?
To me, it felt as if the piece was dripping with contempt for people that actually started the work on the basis that they were nerds with the wrong identity.
Yeah, I wasn't really endorsing the program, just pointing out that "history doesn't belong in news" is a weird critique (not yours) of a history program.
Highschool history class taught me that America won the Vietnam War, because the teacher was a Nam vet and refused to believe otherwise. You can't count on schools to teach anything more than the biases of the teachers. Some of them are great but many are not.
To every extent, I would counter. It's incredibly rare that a person is currently involved in STEM research at a university and some sort of US Military grant isn't providing at least some amount of funding to it/them.
My university for one allowed students to view comprehensive data about grants provided to research groups (after much internal campaigning), but absolutely refused allowing that data to be accessed by the general public. The reason was obvious when you looked at the data: 70%+ of the bucks came directly from various militaries.
> The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth... Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure... We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.
It would be nice if instead of harping on this point they actually told what they think the missing story is.
If they think that AI is missing certain kinds of thinking - by all means tell me what they are concretely. Like i don't know if i buy that lack of diversity in earlier AI research meant that the AI research only allowed certain kind of "thinking" (AI doesn't really match anybody's thinking regardless of race), but i would be interested in a well researched argument that it did and what those other kinds of thinking are.
I think the problem fundamentally is that these stories tend to be platitudes (lack of diversity = bad) but don't actually go deep into what that concretely means. Ultimately i want something that makes me think about the topic in new ways; you need to dig beyond the surface to do that.
>Ultimately i want something that makes me think about the topic in new ways; you need to dig beyond the surface to do that.
You, a person that already knows about this, will never get that from a short segment on a public radio show intended for a general audience that knows next to nothing about it.
It is intended to make that audience think about it differently, because they have not even bothered to think critically about this at a surface level.
The fact that these models (along with every structure in any society) embeds the biases of those that designed them seems to continue to elude so many commenters here though, so it seems they really need to keep hearing this too.
It’s NPR, all their listeners think about these topics obsessively.
Also, the models embeds the biases of all the people who create content on the Internet. The designers biases come in to l look at with the prompt hacks put in place later to prevent the AI from expressing bad thoughts.
None of these data sets are based on "the Internet". They are a specific subset of the internet, and the training and reinforcements are in no way neutral (because that's not a thing).
They embed biases from the training data, which is taken from the internet at large. The models themselves aren't inherently biased. They're just trying to generate the next token or scene. And these models aren't from the 50s, or made by researchers in the 1950s. The models have guardrails added to try and prevent bias (and other deemed harmful content) being generated.
None of these data sets are based on "the Internet". They are a specific subset of the internet, and the training, reinforcements, and guardrails are in no way neutral (because that's not a thing).
>We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.
It must be exhausting thinking like this all the time.
Studies consistently show that liberals are unhappier and more mentally ill than conservatives. There was even a big Gallup poll about it this month. One of the floated reasons is that liberals tend to think negative thoughts, as you say.
Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race?
I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by trying to hide from it. The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off.
And my guess here is that the proportion of news about this relative to proportion of people affected by that news is way off.
It completely, utterly, baffles me how other people live in such a different interpretation of reality than me. For myself, the last decade of media has been completely dominated by race-based and identity-based ideology and discussion. I've given up all mainstream media and I still cannot escape it. The fact that someone exists where they can with a straight face say that they think race is an under-discussed topic just blows my mind. To the point where I seriously have to consider whether I'm even replying to a real human being and not a shill / LLM.
I’m pretty sure more recent polls show the same thing is true now but I can’t find something more recent so take that with a grain of salt.
Think of one of the 17% of people polled who think 50% of America is black. First, it’s baffling to me to understand how that’s even possible. They must be living in an extreme bubble where they seldom interact with other races. Likely this isn’t even their fault, so how would they ever know to correct it?
Second, if I was one of those people, I would probably think the US is hopelessly racist seeing white people “over-represented” in basically every area of life.
I don't know what that guy is smoking. It is objectively the case that the topics of race, identity politics, etc have skyrocketed since the mid-2010s [1].
I'm not sure if any studies accurately measure the subject content, and it also seems like it'd be easy to get any result you want by tweaking the experiment parameters.
I can tell you that from my own life experience and what I can recall, it has certainly felt like a shift in content. All the anti-white stuff, the social justice stuff, the pro-censorship stuff, etc. It existed before in tiny bubbles like Tumblr, but it was during the mid 2010s that the major news sources started adopting those viewpoints too.
They don't even show it as a percentage of articles.
It's suspicious to me that they went for the hockey stick curve to demonstrate their complaint rather than adjusted for the number of articles that they are sampling from.
Yeah... I don't know what you think I was saying. But I'm making the case that the news should cover issues that people actually face... And that an uptick in representation of different people's viewpoints and experiences is actually a positive and reasonable thing. It would be more informative if your data had that as a percentage of total articles. Because the case I'm making is that we went up from like <1% of articles talking about race to closer to 20-30% of articles talking about it. The other thing to consider is what qualifies as an "article" in there with the advent of the internet.
It's actually making my exact point that "diversity and inclusion" were mentioned in 0 articles in the 1990s. I'm saying that this is a relevant thing to more than 0% of the population, so there should be representation of that accordingly. And now that we have more articles talking about it, it seems reasonable that some percentage of news articles (above 0) would be discuss these topics.
Coleman Hughes shares a good perspective on this in his new book. He cites surveys showing that people changed their opinions for the worse regarding racism in america around 2010. This could be explained by an increase in racism or by increased awareness of racism. But he shows it is not based on these things because surveys also show that people significantly overestimate the number of black people killed by police. The rise in media coverage has led them to think that certain events are much more common than they are.
> But he shows it is not based on these things because surveys also show that people significantly overestimate the number of black people killed by police.
What is the proper number of people to be killed by the police that we shouldn't worry about it? (hint: don't answer this question)
The fact that people think the number is more than it actually is feels pretty moot when the number is more than zero. It's also more as a percentage of police killings than one would expect if we were just talking about police incompetence. If this has improved in the years since, then I think that's probably a good thing? Hot take, In general I think the police killing fewer people is a good thing.
Agreed. I’ve stopped watching anything recent. Theres a few Apple TV shows that I’ve enjoyed but it’s always so predictable that an engineered and coerced social justice issue is forced in. This is what the theory of equity is about, it goes over and beyond equality and actively helps by increasing exposure, opportunities, resources for historically disadvantaged people communities groups.
I wish we could stop making everything into a war and fight and just let things speak for themselves. Show don’t tell.
Lately I have been working in DEI committees to better understand. I believe in helping the poor and marginalized but having officially reviewed equity theory I feel a bit disgusted with myself.
My perception is the opposite of yours so I guess we can be as equally confused as each other. Every time I tune into the news it's usually dominated by foreign policy, domestic horserace politics coverage and soft human interest stories. There was definitely an uptick in racial discussions during all the BLM stuff but "completely dominated" is very, very far from my lived experience.
But I guess that's exactly what an LLM would say, isn't it?
> I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country.
The parts of it that are under-discussed are the parts they're still not discussing. The unsolved parts are unsolved as a result of bipartisan unwillingness to solve them.
Example: Historical racism caused black people to lack the generational wealth to own a home. The solution to this is to make home ownership more affordable, i.e. to build more housing and bring down the market price of buying a home. But many of the existing homeowners, who don't want home prices to become more affordable, are Democrats, so this problem is unsolved even in areas like San Francisco under 100% Democratic control.
Example: Parents want their kids to attend schools with smart kids so the other students aren't disruptive and don't require the teacher to slow the pace of the class. The solution to this is to put kids of similar intelligence in the same class, which also helps smart minority students who can get in based on test scores rather than money. But then affluent parents with disruptive or less intelligent kids don't get into the smart class, so they prefer solutions where the metric is parental income (e.g. ability to afford a home in the "good" school district) rather than test scores, and then get to feel good about themselves because even though this result is even worse for poor minority students, they can point to the statistics that minority students from poor backgrounds have lower test scores as a reason to refuse to use test scores and wrap their self-interest in the flag of anti-racism. Then many of those parents are Democrats, and moreover the alternate solution where you break up the "income buys a good school district" system would be things like school vouchers, which are opposed by public school teachers unions because they allow non-affluent parents to choose a private school if it's better, and those unions are a Democratic constituency. So again the problem goes unsolved, even in areas controlled by the people who claim to want to solve it.
So these aren't the problems they spend most of their time talking about, because that would be goring the wrong ox. Instead they talk about identity politics and historical circumstance which cannot be solved because they are just abstract ideas and empty rhetoric instead of anything attached to a reasonable policy proposal that might actually do some good.
The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met. Things have gotten substantially worse in the last 16 years, not better, and that's because we've been using a spotlight to point out how different everyone is from each other. It's literally counterintuitive.
> The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met.
Maybe the "statute of limitations" for these things should be long - not to mention the idea that racism wasn't magically fixed by ending slavery and the "owning" you mention. You don't think anyone was actively racist and causing harm 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 50? So if person Y's grandparent was harmed by, say, person X's racist grandparent in the 1950s, and that caused person Y's family to suffer for generations compared to what likely would've happened otherwise, and that's leading to ongoing societal harms, it could be legitimate public policy interest to try to even out opportunity.
Of course, this hasn't actually changed in the last few decades - terms like "equal opportunity" and "affirimative action" have those words in their very name.
But certain interests have made very successful pushes in the past few decades to brand policies under those umbrellas as "actually the real racism", or paint everyone supporting them as "actually trying to guarantee equality of outcome," while continuing to beat the very-old drum of "people being worse off implies worse ability, it's just science" which couples oh-so-very-nicely with the more active forms of denying people opportunity that hardly ended in the 1960s.
The last time slaves were held in the US was by Native Americans in 1865. The country was founded in 1776. That means in a country that is nearly 250 years old, we haven't owned slaves for more than 160 years, well over half the nation's entire existence. No, we do not need a statute of limitations that encompasses generations for the sins of their fathers.
In fact, how far back do you even take this? Should we also hold the people of the modern-day Republic of Benin responsible for what their ancestors, the Kingdom of Dahomey, did, which was abducting and selling their African brothers for a bit of cash?
To address your other point, if my grandfather did something to hurt your grandfather in the 1950s, and it's been 70+ years and the only thing your family has figured out how to do since then is complain about how some guy was mean to your ancestor that one time, and that life is so unfair and you're so oppressed because of it, the issue may not be my grandfather, it may just be your family and their victimhood mindset. It feels good to "be oppressed" and have personal responsibility taken away, because when it's always someone else's fault, it can never be yours.
> I was giving a lecture on genealogy and reparations in Amite, Louisiana, when I met Mae Louise Walls Miller. Mae walked in after the lecture was over, demanding to speak with me. She walked up, looked me in the eye, and stated, “I didn’t get my freedom until 1963.”
That's awful that happened to those people, but this doesn't really serve the point imo, as this was already illegal by then. They even said that people hearing their story suggested they should've gone to the police for help, but the land was too large for them to escape.
Even today, there's plenty of forced labor and sex slaves that exist in the USA. That doesn't mean it's an active systemic issue of oppression, it just means that bad people do bad things when they can get away with it, in spite of a system to stop it.
We shouldn't hold people who didn't do bad things accountable for the actions of people who have done bad things. I don't think that's a radical idea.
The problem comes when it’s the ONLY topic of discussion. Inflation is only relevant in how it impacts minorities. COVID is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Climate change is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Quality of schools is only relevant as it impacts minorities.
When it’s your only lens, it can distort your views, and in the case of NPR, caused them to get some stories wrong. Which then destroys your credibility which is really the only currency a journalist has.
On one of my other comment threads someone told me how the world is "so much better then any point in history" :). I'm not sure I believe that.
I think in general being able to have these conversations means that we can progress slowly. It's tough recently, cause we've definitely regressed a lot. It would definitely help if the internet weren't effective at telling us only what we want to hear. I guess, in general I think the problem is we aren't actually able to progress discussions.
So my original wording "pick up where we left off" was wrong. We can already do that, we just can't move on from there. I think if we can figure out how to do that without hitting each other then maybe the problems would get fixed.
By focusing less on race and other identity issues, and working to remove racist policies across the board regardless of which group they benefit or harm. The 20th century saw immense improvements for almost all underserved groups, without any talking heads bickering about intersectionality or identity. Now that kind of coverage is everywhere and progress has stalled or even reversed in many areas.
My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.
Maybe. Despite the number of times I've heard about CRT and how bad it is, and how good it is, I still don't have the foggiest idea what it is. One time, I tried to look it up on the internet. Signal to noise was so bad, I still don't know. I've written off the possibility of ever knowing what it is or understanding anyone who's talking about it.
As with any field, there's a number of detractors and charlatans. With CRT in the political spotlight, I completely understand how it becomes a mess to make heads-or-tails of.
Broadly speaking, it's the study of how law and media impacts society's view and treatment of others through the lens of race.
As for my opinion on it:
I generally support it because it advocates for another mechanism to study the impact of law.
I think most legislation should be regularly studied for impact, effectiveness, and fairness. For example, stimulus bills ought to be reviewed for economic impact, regulation ought to be reviewed for effectiveness/relevance, laws with social impact ought to be reviewed to ensure it doesn't harm the people.
A number of scholars seem to adopt a blameless mentality to figure out how laws (even unintentionally) have negative impact, and use that to propose solutions. I admire this approach to legislative critique.
While I think a few ideas some scholars advocate for are infeasible to implement, the broader field has a lot of merit.
I think it's a question of measure. When things are talked about fairly and equally then progress is made - there are serious pressing issues right not and they're not only about identity/race/gender, that these things are ignored is a big problem. When things turn full on on one direction they don't accelerate any progress, it may actually do more harm than good.
Converse hot take, the shallow "race lens" that is all too often used is not helping anyone. Quite the contrary, it is growing counterproductive. Especially with stories like this where they are working backwards from the framing, not using it to learn something.
The New York Times, which is the other bastion of the liberal establishment, also covers race a lot (in regular news journalism, opinion, and topical articles). . It's gotten to the point where lots of comments on articles (many articles have active comments sections) ask "why are you making this about race?". I think NYTimes swung heavily progressive a few years ago, and it was very unpopular, and they're recalibrating to be more relevant to centrists.
This take appears to have been "too hot for HN to handle"
For everyone downvoting, I'd be interested in the proportion of articles that discuss race as a percentage of total articles. If the number is more than the number of black people in America, I'd be willing to consider that we've "overcorrected". But a quick search around the web isn't yielding any clear results on this to me.
>> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race?
Almost all the conservative media outlets and all their pundits do simply because the whole topic has been an arms race for years. Conservatives are finally attempting to sway the popular narrative that race and identity politics are the only thing that determines your future.
They often discuss race within the context of identity politics and the far-left idea that "all white people are racist" versus their notion that race doesn't determine who you are, how smart you are and how successful you can become.
Its the age old philosophical idea of determinism vs. free will
NPR, being the whitest place on Earth, is a bad place to discuss race. And the only reason they discuss it constantly is because they think that Democrats own any issue relating to it. Actual interest in issues around America's race problems would result in knowing a single person with two black parents, who is not an immigrant or the child of immigrants, and who is not wealthier and more privileged than you are.
This probably describes a single-digit percentage of the people who produce content on NPR. They know the two or three black people who hung out in their circles in the elite colleges they went to, and only stay in contact with zero to one of them. They pretend to know every famous black person they met at a dinner party, or a conference; there are probably 100 black professors, writers, and entertainers that a million or two white NPR-Americans are pretending to be friends with.
Black wealth peaked in 1997. NPR supplies itself from the most elite circles in American society, who largely control its wealth. They're not actually concerned, they're consistently using race as a cudgel to attack other white people for their own purposes.
In fact, Black people are proportionally overrepresented relative to the U.S. population at NPR, while Hispanics are underrepresented.
Sunday morning's Weekend Edition host, Ayesha Rascoe, is a Black woman. Unfortunately they lost Audie Cornish, also a Black woman, from All Things Considered. She was great.
I do think it's fair to argue that NPR is far more liberal than it ever was, and Uri Beliner's inside story provides some credence to that. But that's different from being "white." (Keep in mind that the vast majority of Trump voters are white and would bristle at NPR's news programming; support by non-whites is relatively low.)
