Sure. I'm queer and have never personally dealt with violence because of who I am. But my community is definitely stressed by politics. You are saying that politics has no major impact on the broader Latinx community that could cause stress?
As a Latino I can say that you should not speak for me or others. I in no way feel “hunted” and neither do any of my friends or relatives. Please do not politicize my race.
That was me speaking for Latino friends and what they have expressed to me. I realize that is not everyone maybe, but I am sharing what I have been told and how the stress is impacting them.
I am happy to share a little more nuance on the subject with this community to further understanding and the conversation. Thank you for sharing your point of view on it too.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
The OP was using Latino as an example, whether they are actually being targeted or not requires another discussion.
That being said, I think certain minorities are unfortunately always politicized
Also that time O'Keefe and co edited a speech about racial tolerance and solidarity among impoverished farmers to make it seem like the speaker was advocating racism.
Veritas has been caught doing this exact type of numerous times, and why anyone would consider them to be a credible source of information beggers belief. Hell they even refer to themselves as an intelligence agency.
I’ve watched the video where she expressed “solidarity with impoverished farmers” in explicitly racial terms. Maybe her intent was simply solidarity, but race-based solidarity is frowned upon... and racist!
To those in disbelief, watch it yourself and see if it’s “deceptive editing” (a dog whistle)
Also, the "Google Insider" talked about secret meetings at a Masonic Temple. This almost made me think that Veritas got punked by a fake Google employee trying to feed them made up nonsense.
You call that a "hatchet job" after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, through an independent forensics review, found[0] the videos to be "authentic and not deceptively edited?"
The case involved the Texas Health and Human Services Commission decision to terminate the state’s Medicaid provider agreements with PP affiliates across the state, based in large part on those very videos.
The Fifth Circuit affirmed that decision in January of this year, which directly refutes your "hatchet job" claim against the video footage in which Planned Parenthood executives admitted to illegally altering abortion procedures to obtain intact fetuses whose organs could be sold to medical research firms for greater profit, and how they found ways to circumvent the federal ban on partial-birth abortion?
This ruling by the 5th Circuit, which is controversial itself, has nothing to do with James O’Keefe or Project Veritas. O’Keefe’s attempt at smearing Planned Parenthood took place much earlier and was thoroughly discredited. The videos referenced in this case, by the “Center for Medical Progress”, have also been called into question, and a single victory in a circuit court appeal does not make them factual.
It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs...
Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to that.
What you see is the clickbait. What you don't see are the structural changes to the media landscape over the past 20 years that led to this.
Newspapers per 100 million people fell from 1200 (in 1945) to 400 (in 2014). This is from a Brookings study cited in a Wikipedia article on the topic [0]. In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its photographers and tasked journalists to take photos as well as provide the research and writing [1]. How would the quality of your work be affected if you had to do the job of 2 people?
The classifieds ads business is dead, and subscriptions have been declining for years because "news on the Internet is free". The only "media" that makes serious money is talk radio, which isn't journalism so much as diatribes of political invective.
As it turns out, that's what people are willing to pay for, or at least sit through ads for. If anything, "the media" is giving the people what they want.
The idea that the internet transmorphed media from oracles of truth to professional manipulators is taking the whole situation inside out. The fact that people used to trust media more is not an indicator that media used to say more truth in the past. Journalists lived in a high tower pretty much unreachable by an average reader, so producing rubbish, or being manipulative was billion times easier. In the past only an important journalist was able to stand against another important journalist, and even that was a slow inconclusive pushing. Nowadays, bullshit, and incompetence can be revealed in hours, and even small mistakes are publicly noted. Everybody can be media now. Naturally journalists has lost their semigod status. But it's important to understand that they weren't semigods before, it's just that you looked at them down up. And now you don't.
Obviously rchaud is referring to people that create media, or in this case, the journalists. I don't see what relevance Google's revenue is to this conversation. They found a way to make money by directing people to other people's work.
While those "other people" were doing unpaid internships, freelancing, and filing for unemployment insurance. Something seems very profoundly wrong with this picture.
Google made $4.7B off of the news industry, by aggregating other people's stories and advertising on them. None of that money actually went to writers or publishers.
Which is the entire point of the article you linked. If you're gonna be snarky, you should really check to make sure your information is accurate.
Has the news industry's economics ever been truly separate from entertainment industry economics? Is the only reason news ever made money was because it offered people a novel form of entertainment?
Did people ever buy news because it was news? Or was this decline inevitable as actual entertainment was always going to eventually be able to offer a better match for what people actually buy?
It's not just media, but the education system as well. More educated people are significantly more, not less likely to fail Intellectual-Turing-Tests about people with opposing views. i.e. far from increasing openness to experience, education itself is functioning much like indoctrination into a fundamentalist religion! The effect starts already at a High-School level and becomes worse and worse as educational attainment rises:
What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to, and that very few people actually do. Seems to me to be a problem with the teams.
> What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to
I'm not sure that's consistent with the evidence. People are actively getting worse and worse at modeling the other "team", which strongly suggests that polarization is quite real indeed and not just a matter of different labels.
Democrats with higher education are getting worse and worse at modeling Republicans. I think that means that, in higher education, Republicans get exposed to real Democrats, and Democrats get exposed to a caricature of Republicans.
If true, that seems odd. There was an awful lot of very public searching for "what are Republicans, and how can we understand and empathize with them more?" after the last election. Tons. It's ongoing, in fact. It's mostly been—to an almost absurd degree—very gentle and good-hearted. If there's ever been anything like this sort of massive effort by Republican media figures and public intellectuals, I'd love to know about it, because their findings would surely be fascinating. I doubt there has been, at least in the last 30 years or so.
I would say there was some people trying to understand. It just gets lost in all the people saying "Trump is evil! How could you be so stupid? You're all such idiots!" Those people are both more numerous (in my opinion) and closer to the microphones.
And of those trying to understand, some were trying to understand, and some were trying to understand how to get votes better.
I'd like to see a comparison between a survey of espoused party values and the oppositions understanding - I wonder if someone was to look at the values that the political leaders are saying and voting for would there be as wide a gap, or would it fall more in line with what people believe of a party and it's members?
On a person per person basis there's dehumanizing caricature, but I wonder if you compare it to the party to which the person claims to belong, if it would be as out to lunch.
Perhaps it's more a reflection of the incentives at work? How do you drive engagement with your content? Clearly 'clickbait' is (was?) successful at driving traffic, otherwise it wouldn't be called clickbait. Polarization is used successfully by other 'non-political' sites such as YouTube to drive engagement statistics (and hence ad impressions), and so forth. If you're trying to stay afloat in a competitive media environment, what would you do?
There is no mass incentive for thought-out, contemplative, long-form journalism. In my opinion, we have dug our own grave - the truth is that the primitive, animal parts of our brain vastly overpower the analytical parts of our brain, and so your 'outrage bait' is a news (or tech) executive's bonus for the year. If the only metric by which we measure anything is $$$, then, well...
Do you think a group of journalists selling verified, accurate, non clickbait articles based on data and first hand accounts would be able to generate enough revenue to feed the journalist’s children and send them to college?
That's part of the issue; there is no need for commercial first-hand accounts anymore. If someone on social media is talking about a news event and provides a video documenting their presence, that is about as verified and accurate as you can hope for.
Which is incredibly susceptible to someone with an agenda who wants to spin an narrative and knows how to leverage social media.
It's tailor made for propaganda. Joe Schmoe who is actually there doesn't know how to inflate his likes and SEO his account. His voice gets drowned out by the people who are getting paid to push a particular viewpoint. There is no editor providing oversight. No ethics board. No neutral point of view. It's just whomever shouts the loudest and gets there first.
You're being downvoted, but to a large extent, you're probably right here. For many topics journalists used to cover, you genuinely don't need them any more, since enthusiasts posting Patreon/donation funded content is at least as good in terms of quality. Tech, games, TV, music, sports, celebrity gossip, all of them can be covered just as well or better by some random guy on YouTube or some online blog site.
And that in fact be another reason why the media as a whole is doing so poorly. In the old days, a fair few people read the papers for this stuff. Nowadays they can get the same information elsewhere, without the stories they're less interested in taking up space.
There absolutely is a need for multiple, verified, consistency and fact checked first hand accounts. One person on social media does not provide an objective and difficult to falsify viewpoint.
Maybe not, but it's still a problem. It's the same in Spain, most media is hard to trust on basically anything. They even adhere to stupid projects like "The Trust Project" and spin off factcheking brands, but none of that solved the problem. It's still the same people claiming that, oh no, this time you can trust us!
I even experienced being the target of a report (well, the company I work for), and they did an awful job. I felt that the story they made up was only tangentially related to reality.
The purpose of my comment is to illustrate that the collective "we" as a society are to blame for the lack of good journalism in the market. "We" don't demand it (i.e. pay for it), and so we get what we (don't) pay for. The person I was responding to claimed the media self inflicted it upon itself (I presume based on the prose of their comment), my claim is society self inflicted it upon itself.
Ultimately, both views are true. We do not "demand" it with regular market means, but it's important to remember that free markets tend to structurally favor incrementally cutting corners. Even assuming we've demanded good journalism in the past (which is doubtful), we'd still end up where we are. As for media self-inflicting it upon itself, well, they shouldn't have started cutting corners. But since "media" is really a lot of competing actors, "not cutting corners for short-term gain" was an impossible outcome anyway - the whole thing has dynamics of a Prisoner's dilemma.
My conclusion is that it's less about demanding - the way we fund news, i.e. open and competitive market, is structurally unable to support good journalism. Usually problems like these are solved by governments setting standards and giving funding, but journalism is a special case (it's perceived by many as protection against government overreach), so with that option out, I have no idea how to even begin solving it.
Of course it's still a problem. The point is that it's actually a much bigger problem than you implied. People blame the media like it's all just down to some greedy jerks making malicious decisions, and if only we could replace them with someone with integrity, everything would be okay.
The fact is that we've created an environment where it's nearly impossible for honest, non-sensationalized news to exist. Putting all the blame on the media is like blaming a starving man for stealing bread. They're culpable, certainly, but you're missing the root cause.
> It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs...
The media isn't one unified conglomerate. It's like equating the entire tech industry to just SV gig economy startups.
Ideas follow from reality. Supply and demand would dictate that infinite supply should drive prices to zero. Isn't that what we're seeing?
The other problem is that most people can't tell good writing apart from bad, but that problem is far older than all technology (apart from writing itself, of course).
That's a two-way street. Reality also follows from ideas.
Perhaps most people can't tell good writing from bad, but the HN crowd is more able than average to distinguish the two. Yet the attitude here boils down to "writing isn't a real job -- if you don't like working for peanuts, then STFU and get a real job!" HN members actively find ways around pay walls, more aggressively than most use ad blockers etc. Most people here are well heeled and can afford to pay for subscriptions, but the dominant attitude is "fuck no to that -- writing should be free!"
Not so much "writing should be free", but "I dont trust and consume a specific source enough to justify subscription" with the adendum that "ads are evil". At least for me.
Edit: having read the "hand licking incident" I believe it did give me value and I would be willing to pay 1 dollar or so as thanks (not implying that I got only 1 dollar value, or even that I got as much as 1 dollar value. Just a number that seems reasonable).
There is the matter of how: to do it I would probably have to spend much more than 1 dollar in effort.
And there is the matter of scale: I want to pay you for your work in giving me an interesting insight. But if we started to do that massively, people would optimize for "things that seems insights" not for insights... (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)
I primarily try to monetize my blog writing with tips and Patreon. Someone who doesn't want a recurring monthly charge can leave a one time tip.
Even though I removed ads from most of my sites in part to respect the boundaries of people who hate ads, I mostly get endless excuses rather than funds.
When I ask "How can I monetize my work?" people don't actually have a solution. They seem to think if you get enough traffic, that automagically leads to money, overlooking the fact that this concept only really works for an ad-based model and widespread use of adblockers kills it.
I sometimes get told "Product sales of some kind." Nevermind that this is another form of whoring out my writing to the need to sell something other than the value of the writing per se and also people on HN equally bitch about the evils of content marketing and how it is one of the things ruining the internet.
I've heard these arguments for years. I've tried to find a means to make money without being evil in some manner. The result for many years now is virtuous and intractable poverty.
When push comes to shove, the real answer boils down to: We expect large quantities of quality writing on a regular basis and we refuse to pay for most of it. We also will get up on our high horses and get all offended if you dare to use expressions like _slave labor_ to describe our entrenched expectations and the de facto outcome. Don't confuse me with the facts. My mind is made up!
It's quite tiresome to keep hearing the same BS over and over while I continue to live in poverty and yadda.
Edit in response to your edit: I call bullshit. If you honest to God want to give me a single dollar, you can do so via either PayPal or Venmo right now without further hypothesizing about how giving me a single Goddamned dollar is some new means to ruin the internet, along with every other means to pay for writing. Because beneath all the hot air is the fact that most people simply expect slave labor to create good writing. If this weren't true, I could pay cash for a cheap house in my small town and quit whining on HN about being poor.
fyi: paypal refused to allow me to change my password, venmo refused to accept my non-US account and patreon(1) refused my non-US credit card. As expected, I did spend much more than one dollar in time trying to send you money. What I did not expect was to fail.
(1) I meant to be a one month only patron.
Also, take my data point and do with it as you will. Call me evil/slaver/bullshiter/whatever. I was trying to help and also to discuss, but I no longer feel inclined to do either.
Thank you for trying and for following up with this detailed reply.
I was trying to help and also to discuss, but I no longer feel inclined to do either.
Yes, this is par for the course: People get mad at me for effectively communicating that there are no good solutions here, no matter how hard I try. And it becomes a new excuse to blame me for my financial problems and declare "Not my problem! I'm done here!"
I genuinely bear you no ill will, but you and I are posting on a very public forum, so I think there are larger things at stake than your feelings. Other people need to genuinely understand how this works if it is ever going to change and being too polite about this fails to get it through to people.
They just keep arguing that I must be wrong, there must be some means for someone to make money as a writer that doesn't violate any of their constraints for how to make money as a writer without being evil. And, besides, their desire to have an ad-free, whatever whatever internet is far more important than my financial difficulties.
I got these kinds of arguments even when I was literally homeless and going hungry, which I found completely mind boggling. But, to their minds, my homelessness was merely evidence that I was incompetent and there was no reason to take me seriously, not evidence that, no, seriously, most writers really just can't make the money they need in the current climate.
You have a good day. I know I can be hard to take.
It isn't just a dichotomy that bad writers produce bad writing and good writers produce good writing. Good writers are even better at producing bad writing, because they produce bad writing that masquerades as good. We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.
We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.
That's a reasonable point, but people mostly don't tell me "It's a trust issue. I would pay if I believed I could trust the motives of the author/source."
The overall attitude expressed is consistently "I'm simply not going to pay for writing. If writers want a middle class income, they should get a real job."
Once in a great while someone will agree with the general point that if you want to be able to trust what an author is saying, you need to pay them for their writing and not expect them to monetize with ads or sponsors because that introduces a conflict of interest. One person cited Consumer Reports as an example of this model and why they pay for a subscription.
But that's the exception, not the rule. Most comments here consistently express the attitude that they simply will not pay for writing and writing is not a real job.
At the same time, journalists get attacked for not doing their job adequately well, etc. It mostly falls on deaf ears to point out that journalism simply doesn't pay what it used to and there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the lack of adequate pay and the lack of quality writing.
The overall attitude expressed is consistently "I'm simply not going to pay for writing. If writers want a middle class income, they should get a real job."
There's more to trust than belief in the veracity (or lack thereof) of a statement. When you trust a writer, you not only trust their claims, you trust that the substance of their writing is worth your time. The attitude you highlight suggests to me that many people do not see a lot of writing as being worth their time.
Unfortunately, people's judgements of value can be strongly influenced by price. When the quantity of readily available, free writing increases dramatically, people's judgement of its value goes down. Simply put, they no longer trust in the institution of writers as a medium.
It also got copied and reblogged, sometimes legitimately with my permission and sometimes not. For me, it is the first hit if you google the expression "the hand licking incident." It seems plenty of people found the piece worth reading.
It made not one thin dime.
I spent around two weeks on that piece. It's at least my third attempt at a parenting blog. I get paid for freelance writing, have years of experience blogging, about six years of college and if karma count is anything to judge by I'm a "respected member of the community." (My old account has 25k karma and this one currently has 19k karma. If it was all under one account, I would be decently high on the leader board.)
It has no ads on it in part because I would rather not be a shill for god-knows-what. I would rather be paid for my writing. But it also has no ads in part because I know how much the internet in general and HN in specific hate ads these days. It is supported via tips and Patreon.
I'm quite open about how much I struggle financially and that I make my living as a writer in part because I'm medically handicapped and can't do a lot of so-called "real jobs." Given that we have worse economic inequality than in The Gilded Age, "get a real job" is a specious argument anyway.
The reality is that the current attitude is that writing simply should be slave labor. Period. If you don't like it, go do something else. Not our problem that you are literally homeless and going hungry, bitch.
Meanwhile, five million monthly visitors to HN expect the front page to be filled daily with good writing and they bitch and moan about how there isn't enough good stuff on HN and the front page moves too slow and on and on.
I don't particularly care to continue this discussion further. It's not likely worth my time.
(Edit: Not currently homeless, but I was for nearly six years. I still struggle with food insecurity and general poverty.)
The rot had set in long before they were giving away free content on the web. Before then people were paying for the distribution and not the content, the web destroyed the ability to profit off the distribution.
It's unfortunate, because while there are many bad actors, there are some outlets that don't employ these tactics that get painted with the same brush. I'm not sure how to make that better.
My Mexican family loves Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (for real) and hates the term “latinx”. Just fyi but it’s considered racist in a lot of Mexican communities.
why is it considered racist? I can think of some arguments against the term but am having a hard time figuring that one out. Maybe because they perceive it as having been coined by people from outside their group and/or changing the topic to focus on gender > racial justice?
Yes, that’s why they consider it racist. For the most part it’s a term from white academia. I don’t think anyone really wants to be told that the words they’ve used to describe themselves for generations must be changed, especially by people from another ethnicity all together.
Thanks for this interesting data point. Would you/they prefer to just be called latino? Is this common sentiment among Mexicans outside of your family?
I can see latinx only being preferred by non-gender-conforming individuals to whom it applies, as opposed to when referring to individuals rather than to communities (families, neighborhoods, food, etc).
I think more specific is always better. I’m of Mexican descent, I prefer to keep that identity. I’ve actually noticed people in the US sometimes struggle to say that as if being “Mexican” is a bad thing; it’s not, don’t be afraid of the term.
Latino and Latina are also fine. Hispanic as well although that has a slightly different meaning.
I think it’s best to call people by the terms that they use themselves. Foisting a new term on someone to describe their ethnicity doesn’t seem like it would ever be a good idea.
It's funny because I have been ridiculed for calling myself Swedish or Swedish-American instead of white. Somehow some people have even thought that's racist.
But it is a strong identity in my family, and, for example, I really don't want to be lumped in with the people of Bavarian descent who made up about half of the town I grew up in. I'm nothing like them culturally.
Honestly, "white" isn't an ethnicity and it is borderline insulting to think others can know all about me by my skin color, but I've given up on the idea that my opinion on this will make a difference. It is nice to say it out loud for the first time in years, though.
With all due respect, if you were born in the US and grew up speaking English, you have a lot more common with those "Bavarians" than you do with Swedish people in Sweden.
I was going to leave a similar comment, but decided not to. Anyway, I mostly agree with you -- I never refer to myself as "X-American" where X is some European country, because first of all I don't care much about it, and second I know how ridiculous it sounds to people who were born and raised in country X.
On the other hand, I also think the Swedish-American OP has an understandable point. Cultural group identification is a natural, strong human urge, and it can be a bit arbitrary and not objectively correspond to actual observable culture or to ancestry.
I wouldn't tell someone living in Serbia who identifies as a Croat that that's nonsense because from an outsider's perspective their culture is 99% indistinguishable from that of a Serb. They have their own reasons for identifying as part of that group, and it's important to them. And similarly I don't really think it's illegitimate for Nth generation white Americans to feel that they are "Swedish" or "Irish" in some way that means something to them. (With the understanding that, yes, they are culturally quite different from someone actually raised in Stockholm or Cork).
I get a kick out of people asking me what I am. Umm, American?
But what is you’re ancestry, they will persist. “From America”.
Honestly my parents have told me X generations ago where someone immigrated from, but I can never remember? For some reason the factoid just won’t stay in my brain, and it has zero relevance to me.
For some people the roots of their identity is intensely personal. For others mostly irrelevant. My inclination is that it’s a place of privilege to not know (or particularly care) where your ancestors came from, and perhaps some people would even find that offensive, I’m not really sure. I certainly don’t fault someone for identifying strongly with their own heritage or being proud or even protective of it.
Probably true in some ways, yes, though I grew up with relatives who came here from Sweden. And I definitely identify more as American than Swedish.
At the same time, though, should we then say that all English-speaking Americans have more in common than whatever ethnic stock they came from in another country, whether Mexicans or Asians or whatever group? Or do you say that just because the Bavarians are "white"?
Broadly speaking, yes. Social class is probably more relevant than race: my own kids are mixed-race, with parents from different cultures who are both first-gen immigrants, and they identify much more with the country they were born in and have lived all their life than either of us.
> should we then say that all English-speaking Americans have more in common than whatever ethnic stock they came from in another country, whether Mexicans or Asians or whatever group?
I’d say it depends on the extent to which they have maintained a meaningfully separate culture within the US, but largely, yes. I think in most cases, a kid born in the US to Chinese parents has more in common with white American kids than they do with kids brought up in Shanghai.
Just my opinion; I don’t have any quantitative way to back this up.
> I’ve actually noticed people in the US sometimes struggle to say that as if being “Mexican” is a bad thing; it’s not, don’t be afraid of the term.
It's more that people likely don't know for sure that you're actually of Mexican descent. You could've descended from any number of Central or South American nationalities, so going with something properly broad like "Latino" is going to be much more reasonable than running the risk of labeling someone as "Mexican" when one actually descends from, say, Colombia.
This is similar to the reason why most people just stick to calling white people "white" or black people "black" instead of trying to guess something more specific.
It's taking the identify of Hispanic culture, and redefining it to fit into the political ideals of the liberal American culture. Essentially, it's usurping the identity of minorities groups.
If you don't like using Latino, there's already a gender-neutral English word works just fine: Latin. Alternatively, Hispanic works just fine too.
'Latin' in America has a subtly different meaning, in that it includes Italians, the French, etc. It's a distinct concept from 'Latin American' which by convention refers to people from Latin America only and excludes other Latin people, particularly those from Europe. One might logically think that an Italian immigrant who came in through Ellis Island would be a 'Latin American', but by convention he isn't because he didn't come from a Latin American country.
'Latin' is more inclusive than 'Latin American' but by the numbers both are more inclusive than 'Hispanic' which generally excludes Brazilians, and other Latin American speakers of minority languages.
Incidentally, the whole "Latin" thing was invented by the French for geopolitical reasons. Recognition of a "latin race" common among the French, Spanish, Italians, and Mexicans, as a means of balancing the scales in what these Frenchmen perceived as their struggle against the Anglo-Saxon and Slavic races.
“Latinx” (except in the narrow use referring to enby persons of the referenced ethnicity, where it is perhaps appropriate) ignores the reason why “Latino” and “Latina”, with the former used when the referrents are of mixed genders, were preferred over Hispanic (the already gender-neutral term English already had.)
Latino (or Latina) is fine. The parent poster is talking specifically about the unpronounceable abomination "latinx" with an X ending. I'm Latino and my family hates it, too (but mostly because it's very woke liberal coded, not because they find it racist, as was asserted). But there are plenty of Latinxes who use it, so... shrug.
It’s hard to believe an actual citizen of Mexico would be offended by you referring to their nationality. “Latino” is a term primarily used by people in the US of Latin American ancestry. “Latinx” even more so.
I would recommend simply ignoring anyone who gets offended about how a group they’re not even part of refers to itself.
Yes -- and what ethnic terminology such a person would prefer to use is a complicated and delicate issue, and I think you should call them whatever they want to be called (within reason).
But I certainly wouldn't suggest listening to the opinions of random Anglos who aren't affected by the issue at all claiming that "calling someone Mexican is offensive"
Thats an impossible way to live and get things done. Better to express yourself earnastly, and accept critisim. There is always an opprotunity to learn.
It's mainly used by nonbinary (enby) people of Latin descent in the US who feel like both Latino and Latina are a poor fit.
These threads always have the same look as the ones where people complained about singular they. Latinx doesn't have centuries of use the way singular they does, but it doesn't really matter. It costs you nothing to respect another person's self-identification.
Whether people should use it as a group term beyond enby Latin American descendants is another matter.
So I'll preface this by saying, I agree with the "It cost [me] nothing to respect someone's self-identification". I'm fully ok, and actively use gender pronouns as people wish. I respect self identification.
But, as a hispanic, there was already a gender neutral term for this in english. ( hint, i already used it, there's also Latin ). LatinX unfortunately is a bastardization of grammar for a language that has pretty strongly enforced grammar ( hey, we have a "royal academy of language"). It's the introduction of a foreign language construct into Spanish, which is going to have a pretty strong negative reaction by, well, those who speak it. ( and they also have a right to self identify ) Others make better points than I ever will[0][1]
The term "Latino" was a borrowing of a Spanish word into english, that already had a similar enough meaning in Spanish ( aside from gendering )
The use of it that spawned this thread had nothing to do with gender identity and is clearly not talking about “nonbinary people”.
And if we want to respect self-identification, we should reserve “Latinx” for the people who actually want to be called that way, not for whole communities 99% of whose members have never even heard the term.
I agree. I’m talking about applying the term to people who don’t identify as non-binary. They are the people I know (myself included) who don’t like the term. I could see how it would be much more acceptable to non-binary people if they came up with the term to describe themselves.
Not sure if this is serious, but if it is, I assume it's because the -o suffix has a masculine connotation in Spanish but not Latin/English (where Afro comes from).
Because nobody calls people from Mexico "Latin". If someone walked up to me and said "Hey I'm Latin" I'd be really confused. You're... a dead language?
> Because nobody calls people from Mexico "Latin".
Yes, they do, “Latin” and “Hispanic” were the dominant terms in English before “Latino” and “Latina” took over and are still current though less common; the main reason Latino/Latina took over is because they respect terminology used in the described community, in a way Latinx (used generically, use as a label for enby members of the ethnicity may be different) does not.
> It's mainly used by nonbinary (enby) people of Latin descent in the US who feel like both Latino and Latina are a poor fit.
It may be used that way, and that may be it's original use, but I don't think that's it's main use: AFAICT, the main use is as as a general gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” or “Latina” (i.e., basically equivalent to “Hispanic” or “Latin”, but awkward to pronounce either as an English or a Spanish word), often by people who are neither enby nor of Hispanic/Latino/Latina/Latinx ethnicity.
>> "It was historically used to either refer to a person of unknown gender, or to optionally refer to a person of a known gender. so your options for singular pronouns might be either he or they, or she or they."
That's the thing though. Enbies don't generally know their gender. If you would use they without anger for an unknown person of unknown gender, it makes no sense to be mad about using it for a known person of unknown gender. You still don't know their gender. Neither of you do. He/him, she/her, man and woman, and sir and ma'am can cause tremendous dysphoria. That's often part of how they know they're not binary.
Ah, the classic “think of the children!” argument. It is no one’s responsibility other than the parent to ensure their child isn’t watching inappropriate content (which will be different for every family and individual).
This article suggests that machine learning and collaborative filtering are incapable of producing healthy recommendations. I beg to differ, the New York Times may not like the result but they work for the vast majority of users on any service with too much content to manually curate.
I don't think that's the point. It is false advertising for YouTube to create YouTube Kids for kids, and then not have content that is appropriate for kids on it.
> This article suggests that machine learning and collaborative filtering are incapable of producing healthy recommendations. I beg to differ,
The article cites actual instances and recurring problems showing that "machine learning and collaborative filtering are incapable of producing healthy recommendations.": Even when YouTube tried to produce child friendly content, they failed. You can't just say "it's fine" after the article shows it not being fine.
Setting aside the personal responsibility angle for the moment (which I agree with you on!) don't you think that negative externalities should generally be managed?
YouTube is a paperclip maximizer (where paperclips correspond to eyeball-hours spent watching YouTube) and at some point optimizing paperclips becomes orthogonal to human existence, and then anticorrelated with it.
I think it's a perfectly fair thing to say that maybe the negatives outweigh the positives at the present.
(This argument doesn't apply solely to YouTube, of course)
I generally agree with you, but I think YouTube being safe for kids became their problem when they launched a version specifically for kids and marketed it as safe.
What law is there to prevent a kid from going on the internet and going to “inappropriate” sites? Watching video on cable? Finding their Dad’s Playboy magazine back in the day?
On cable there are ways to lock out channels, setting ratings on the TV and all that. If dad doesn't hide his Playboy well enough, it's obviously on him to fix it.
On the internet it is much more difficult, of course, and we can't realistically expect some shady offshore site from implementing age checks, let alone recommendation algorithms. But Google is a public, respected company from a first world country that claims to be promoting social good (which, of course, is marketing BS, and even if it weren't I would not want their idea of social good, but still). You'd think that they would invest some effort into not showing inappropriate content to kids at least. But no, they throw up their hands and go on ideological witch hunts instead.
I’ve got an idea - don’t let your kids get on YouTube and only allow them to get on curated sites. You can easily lock down a mobile device to only allow certain apps/curated websites.
I don't let mine anywhere near a TV or computer. Of course that might be a bit more difficult once tghey get old enough to actually reach the keyboard...
But then I try to not let my mom on YouTube either. Or myself, for that matter.
lol, do you even children. They will always find a way. You can restrict apps and services all you want. How about their friends at school? Are you going to restrict their phones as well? The only thing that works is actually talking to the kids about things they've seen/experienced. Not saying that is easy of course.
No we don't - not in the US. Short of literal pornography that could fall afoul of corruption of a minor the state isn't involved. That is just from ratings cartels and pressure groups.
If nobody gives a fuck enough to affect business you can give the complete SAW series to 3 year olds and all the offended can do is yelp indignantly.
Nope. This only applies to pornography if I recall correctly. There's not laws against showing R rates movies to kids, it's just the theaters that refuse to admit them. In 2011 the courts struck down a California law prohibiting selling I'd M rates games to minors, too.
Spotify's recommendation system is dealing mostly with artists that have recording contracts and professional production- their problem shouldn't be compared to YouTube's which has to deal with a mix of professional, semi-pro, and amateur created content. Also there's more of a "freshness" aspect to a lot of YT videos that isn't quite the same as what Spotify has to deal with (pop songs are usually good for a few months, but many vlogs can be stale after a week). Not only that, but many channels have a mix of content, some that goes stale quickly and some that is still relevant after many months- how does a recommendation engine figure that out?
It's better to compare Spotify's recommendations to Netflix's recommendations, which also deals with mostly professional content. Those two systems have comparable performance in my opinion.
Why the content exists is also important. People create video specifically for Youtube. Very few people create music just to host it on Spotify. This results in the the recommendation algorithm and all its quirks have a much bigger impact on the content of Youtube than Spotify. Also having that many people actively trying to game the recommendation algorithm can pervert that algorithm. That simply isn't a problem for sites like Spotify or Netflix.
>YouTube is a _disastrously_ unhealthy recommender system,
Can you explain with more details?
I use Youtube as a crowdsourced "MOOC"[0] and the algorithms usually recommended excellent followup videos for most topics.
(On the other hand, their attempt at matching "relevant" advertising to the video is often terrible. (E.g. Sephora makeup videos for women shown to male-dominated audience of audiophile gear.) Leaving aside the weird ads, the algorithm works very well for educational vids that interests me.)
Yes. Elsagate is an example - the creepy computer-generated violent and disturbing videos that eventually follow children's content - or the fact that just about every gaming-related video has a recommendation for an far-right rant against feminism or a Ben Shapiro screaming segment. There's also the Amazon problem - where everything related to the thing you watched once out of curiosity follows you everywhere around the site.
Yes, I was aware of Elsagate.[0] I don't play games so didn't realize every gaming video ends up with unwanted far-right and Ben Shapiro videos.
I guess I should have clarified my question. I thought gp's "unhealthy" meant Youtube's algorithm was bad for somebody like me that views mainstream non-controversial videos. (Analogy might be gp (rspeer) warning me that abestos and lead paint is actually cancerous but public doesn't know it.)
It's not 100%, but I'd consider "video games" => "Ben Shapiro" to be a pretty awful recommendation system, regardless of the reasoning behind it. As far as I know, the group "video gamers" doesn't have a political lean in either direction.
I've definitely seen this with comics. I watched a few videos criticizing Avengers: Infinity War, and now I see mostly Ben Shapiro recs. It makes no sense. I never have (and never plan to) seek out political content on YouTube.
I watch a number of gaming videos and have never had a far-right video recommended. Don't know who Ben Shapiro is.
It could be the type of games involved, since I usually watch strategy, 4x, city-building, and military sims. I usually get history-channel documentaries or "here's how urban planning works in the real world" videos recommended, which suits me fine. Somebody whose gaming preferences involve killing Nazis in a WW2-era FPS might be more likely to get videos that have neo-Nazis suggesting we kill people.
But that child comment didn't link Nazis to normal "video games". I assumed he just meant some folks (e.g. "1.8%" of web surfers) with the predilection for far-right videos would get more Nazi recommendations. Well yes, I would have expected the algorithm to feed more of what they seemed to like.
I do not see any Nazi far-right videos in 1.8% of my recommendations ever.
Isn't that an inevitable side effect of collaborative filtering? If companies could do content based-recommendation, wouldn't they? Until purely content based recommendations are possible, wisdom of the crowds via collaborative filtering will lump together videos that are about different things but watched by similar viewers.
I don't know what the comment you are replying to meant, I interpreted it to mean the algo takes you down a rabbit hole to darker content, however for me I miss the days when it actually recommended relevant videos, similar to the one I was watching.
My entire sidebar is now just a random assortment of irrelevant interests. For instance I wanted to learn to play a denser piano chord, I learned it ages ago but I still get like 20 videos that explain how to add extensions to a 7 chord, even if I'm watching a video on the F-35 fighter pilot.
I completely disagree, my children have a wonderful time following the recommended videos that youtube provides. I'm interested to hear your reasoning on why it is "disastrous".
I'm pretty sure all content on Spotify gets manually curated first, so abusive tagging doesn't happen, and some of the worst content simply doesn't get uploaded at all. Spotify also doesn't try to be a news site, so they can afford to have a couple week's lag between uploading a song and having it show up in people's recommendation feed.
I disagree in some sense. I personally have found the recommending system on YouTube pretty good for the main page of the site. The thing that bugs me is the recommended bar right (or bottom right) of the videos, which can be really annoying and infested with clickbait etc.
>It is no one’s responsibility other than the parent
Yes, but you _must_ understand that most (no, ALL) of the millennial generation grew up with public content over the airwaves that was curated and had to pass certain guidelines. So many parents think that the YouTube Kids app is the same thing. it's not!
If YouTube want to be the next Television, they're going to have to assume the responsibilities and expectations surrounding the appliances they intend to replace. Pulling a Pontius Pilate and tossing the issue to another algorithm to fail at figuring out is not going to fix the problem.
Thankfully, there's much more out there than YouTube when it comes to children's entertainment, actually curated by human beings with eyeballs and brains, and not algorithms. The problem is that parents don't know these apps even exist, because YouTube has that much of a foothold as "place to see things that shut my kid up, so I can see straight."
They make extremely illegitimate claims about "needing" to collect your personal information to provide their "services". Which is absolutely untrue since they're a newspaper you could read completely anonymously with zero degradation to experience (except where they've deliberately hobbled that option).
> The New York Times is as bad at privacy as anyone
...and its dot in the charts in the article reflects that. Go diagonally up to the right from the Facebook dot until you are just about to leave the "college" reading level region, and you'll find the dot for the Times.
Do you suppose the author of this opinion piece wrote the New York Times' privacy policy?
Edit: some fair counterpoints to me, below. But publishing an opinion piece does not necessarily imply endorsement, and nor does it diminish the author's point(s) one iota.
I keep hearing this. Every time the NYT writes an article on X, while being a hypocrite on X, "Do you think the guy who wrote this was also in charge of X at the NYT?"
It's a valid counterpoint. The guy who wrote about X is not, usually, in charge of X. Agreed. The criticism, however, is not about the author - it's about the organization that endorses both the action X, and the criticism of X.
The NYT is an opinionated organization, not a public wall open to whoever wants to throw things at it. They have an editorial stance. When they write criticisms of X, they are implicitly - as an organization - criticizing X. When they do X themselves, they are - as an organization - implicitly endorsing X. When they wish to distance themselves from a criticism in an article, they explicitly point out - hey, this is an Op-Ed from such-and-such author, and doesn't represent the views of the NYT. When it's not an Op-Ed, and/or when it's not disavowed, they are saying: this article represents the views of the NYT.
The writer is not a hypocrite. The organization, however, is.
There's nothing illogical or invalid about holding the organization accountable for doing bad things, and for pointing out that the organization is trying to earn goodwill from the public by being "against X" while perpetrating the act themselves.
The linked article is in the Opinion section, so no, it does not necessarily reflect the stance of the NYT and accusations of hypocrisy are therefore unfounded in this case.
> The writer is not a hypocrite. The organization, however, is.
This is not how how a functioning news room works. That's not how any of this works. You don't check your individuality at the door. A good publication can and should promote well reasoned work, especially if it conflicts with the status quo or view points of other writes in the org.
Even assuming the New York Times or the author are hypocrites, that does not diminish their point.
I follow the news to get informed, not to measure the moral virtue of the media (except as it relates to the accuracy and representativeness of their reporting).
I think accusations of hypocrisy usually map to an insightful argument: "Hey, there's a reason people do that thing you object to, and it's usually a good reason, as demonstrated by the fact that, given all the options, you find yourself resorting to it. So, maybe instead of shaming people, you should be helping to isolate the reason and find a way to obviate it instead of just throwing stones."
To be fair, the New York Times' privacy policy actually is represented as one of those dots in the image (and it's not in a particularly good spot ... it's pretty close to the top):
I think this piece is about making people aware of privacy and pointing out that the platform you’re reading it on is one of the worst offenders is worth doing. As another commenter pointed out that the New York Times policy contains the entire Google privacy policy within it:
I don't suppose the author of this opinion piece wrote or controls any of the privacy policies they reported on. But they chose which privacy policies they were going to report on, and which ones they were willing to highlight in their article. Is it really an unreasonable ask of a reporter who is focused on privacy to also be willing to research the practices of the website that hosts them?
To be fair, of all the news organizations I have beefs with on privacy, the NYT has been doing a lot better in their reporting than their competition:
- They have a disclaimer at the bottom of this article linking to their own policy. They also include several news organizations (including themselves) in this dataset.
- Reporters have been willing to publish articles that talk about and link to (good) ad blockers like Ublock Origin, and acknowledge that they're an effective way to increase privacy.
- Their editorial staff has been (relatively) self aware about the NYT's privacy practices and appears to be talking about it internally.
Could they be better? Yes. Is it a weird omission that in an article that specifically calls out Google, the reporter doesn't mention that the current NYT privacy policy is both more complicated and longer than Google's current version? Yes. But comparatively, if I was going to call out any set of reporters on this, I wouldn't start with anyone working for the NYT. I think they're moving in the right direction here. This is a well written article.
In general though, it's not unreasonable to call out reporters for failing to look at or refusing to talk about the privacy policies of their employers in their articles. I don't expect them to force their tech teams to change things, I don't expect them to walk away from their jobs, and I don't expect them to lobby their bosses on my behalf. I just expect them not to ignore important, relevant parts of the stories they report on -- because shifts in privacy regulation are going to have huge impacts on things like news funding, and we need to talk about that.
> Is it really an unreasonable ask of a reporter who is focused on privacy to also be willing to research the practices of the website that hosts them?
And the article ends with the NYT's own message: "Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of The Times's practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections."
Yep, I mention that - of the reporters/organizations that need to be called out on this, the NYT is low on my list.
In general though, I disagree that reporters lacking control over the platforms they use means that they're immune from this type of criticism. News organizations are a part of this conversation whether they like it or not, and there are no resolutions (legal or technical) that won't affect news sites. It's irresponsible for a reporter to ignore that.
When people call out the hypocrisy in articles like this, they're not blaming the reporter for their employer's data policies, they're blaming them for ignoring that those data policies exist.
It doesn't mean the reporter's points aren't valid, it does mean there's a dimension of the story they're ignoring, either through ignorance or through choice.
This wasn't published on Kevinlitmannavarro.com, and it's not his name on the big top-of-the-page header: it's an opinion column written by him but published by the New York Times under their banner. It's a pretty basic expectation for journalistic entities to address potential conflicts or hypocrisy. It's not a requirement, but is a reasonable complaint, and dismissals like asking if the opinion author wrote the privacy policy are beyond nonsensical.
Apart from that, addressing seeming hypocrisies in things that newspapers complain about but engage in is often illuminating: I recall an Atlantic(?) article complaining about deceptive ads that went out of their way to talk about their own likely serving of deceptive ads, describing the difficulty in knowing which ads you'll be serving given the byzantine web of sellers, resellers, exchanges, etc etc that Web publishers deal with.
They're a newspaper that charges customers to read it, which means they need to limit access to their services for people who haven't paid. Which means they need a way to distinguish paying users from non-paying ones. Which means that they have to have some idea who you are when you access their services, so they can tell which services you should have access to and which you shouldn't.
It's funny, you never see anyone arguing that Netflix is under some kind of obligation to let everyone watch their programming anonymously for free.
When they claimed it was necessary to support the service. It’s absolutely not. Newspaper ads are not targeted.
Anyway ads in any form still produce perverse incentives for a supposedly journalistic entity—I don’t know how anyone can read a newspaper that takes ad money and consider it unbiased.
>It's funny, you never see anyone arguing that Netflix is under some kind of obligation to let everyone watch their programming anonymously for free.
That's because we don't bother talking about it, it just gets done. Why waste time on a trivial situation? Instead, talk about the NYT which is an important cultural institution. Plus I can read a free copy at my local library, or at NYPL, anonymously.
> Plus I can read a free copy at my local library, or at NYPL, anonymously.
Now that would be an innovation: libraries providing access to commercial streaming-media services, through your library membership. Much like they provide access to scientific-journal subscriptions, or e-book services.
With the proliferation of different streaming services, it almost seems like an inevitability.
> Collection of personal information is necessary to delivering you the NYT Services or to enhance your customer experience.
I'll grant them delivery in some cases. They have to collect IP addresses, some browser details, info from HTTP headers etc. but they don't have to keep any of it for any longer than it takes to serve pages (although there are good and sane reasons for keeping some of that stuff for a while at least). What kills me every time is "enhance your customer experience" which I assume means present you with ads, track your usage to help us increase the number of clicks/page views/ad impressions, and sell your data to our "partners" who will spam/advertise to you relentlessly.
New York Times also abuses advertising, paywalls and page size. But the fact that they write about issues should signal that they still have some journalism integrity.
No, that's not what that means. An ad hominem attack is invalid because the target is simply being insulted or called evil in some way. "You can't believe Bill Smith: all the Smiths are no-good iron-pounding dummkopfs."
If the NYT calls other organizations out on their privacy policies without pointing out that their own is terrible, the term for that is a hypocritical omission.
That’s not true. Arguably all professional athletics require a very large genetic component. Good luck in the NBA if you’re 5’1” tall.
I think the ability to accurately identify tones is also largely genetic, so professional musicians are probably on the list as well.
My guess is that software development also has genetic mental requirements but there’s no definitive answer for that.
Probably a lot of jobs have genetic components whether that’s cognitive speed, athletic ability, ability to focus, fine motor control, a particular enhanced sense...
Sure, you're not wrong, but you've just stated an individual trait, not a population one. Try now to make the argument that someone is more "likely" to be pro NBA if they're of some arbitrarily chosen genetic background. You will run into the fact that 1. You will be totally unable to create rigid constraints for your genetic background, and 2. Statistical variance will be so high that you won't actually be generating useful information anyway (i.e. an effective predictor).
So yea, maybe one couple of tall people could have a tall kid and of course the kid has a better chance at the NBA than a short kid (sort of maybe. He could end up a footsie god, it's happened before and we have no way of predicting when it will happen next), but they might have had a short kid despite their genetic factors so the point is moot.
>My guess is that software development also has genetic mental requirements but there’s no definitive answer for that
You may guess all you want but I carefully avoid any feelings that are not fact based and don't generate any useful planning or information for me so I disagree with this point. There's simply no evidence of this and I don't see how this information could be significant enough to have an effect on any decisions I make in life (for example, hiring decisions).
> No, I’ve stated a population trait. The population of professional athletes
Ok... but we've now left the field of genetics. Professional athletes are determined by whether they get hired to play sports professionally, not by genetic birthright.
> Not all tall people can be NBA stars but all NBA stars are tall.
Again, unsure the relation to genetics here, but this also isn't true. Muggsy was a god and is 5'3". Curry is 6'3" which is definitely tall, but among NBA players, not that tall... but his skill level is far, far, far higher than his height would indicate. The statistical variation between height and skill, even in the highly-artificially-selected-for population of NBA players, doesn't correlate perfectly enough to derive a good predictor. You just can't say "the taller the player, the better the player." Not even on average! So, it's not useful information.
AND! This doesn't even get into the sociological aspect of NBA - how many young Muggsys are out there not getting put in (or accepted) to basketball camps/programs because they're "too short?" How many 7 year old future Currys are too hungry to train?
> You’ve been advocating strongly for your position so I’m not sure it makes sense to just discount the opposition as useless.
I certainly don't intend to imply your position is useless, I'm trying to demonstrate that correlative "evidence" (i.e. that a certain population is better at xyz) is unable to overcome sociological noise, and therefore the information is useless.
> Again, unsure the relation to genetics here, but this also isn't true. Muggsy was a god and is 5'3". Curry is 6'3" which is definitely tall, but among NBA players, not that tall... but his skill level is far, far, far higher than his height would indicate. The statistical variation between height and skill, even in the highly-artificially-selected-for population of NBA players, doesn't correlate perfectly enough to derive a good predictor. You just can't say "the taller the player, the better the player." Not even on average! So, it's not useful information.
This is actually a common fallacy - height is a fantastic predictor of NBA skill, that's why something like 15% of everyone in the US over 7' tall will play in the NBA at some point in their life. But once you've limited the question to the set of people who play in the NBA, it won't be nearly as good of a predictor of skill - because you're measuring after a selection effect.
I admit I’m using height as a shorthand here. I’ll put it more simply: Do you think anyone can become a professional athlete with the right training?
I don’t. I think it’s a field where genetics determine who can succeed and who can’t. That isn’t to say that everyone who can become a professional athlete becomes one though.
> Sure, you're not wrong, but you've just stated an individual trait, not a population one.
No, I’ve stated a population trait. The population of professional athletes. Not all tall people can be NBA stars but all NBA stars are tall. Being genetically athletic is a prerequisite to professional sports not a guarantee that one can become a professional athlete. Being genetically unathletic does disqualify you from the profession though.
> I don't see how this information could be significant enough to have an effect on any decisions I make in life (for example, hiring decisions).
You’ve been advocating strongly for your position so I’m not sure it makes sense to just discount the opposition as useless. At the very least this seems like a great field for further study.
I recently completed a very difficult job search where I unfortunately had to lean on my ethnicity (I’m Mexican) to pass through very overt screening against white men. I was shocked to hear from multiple companies, large and small, that they did not want men and white men in particular.
Now we see a YC co-founder giving 40 women $9000 to learn to program.
Where does it end? I was really sad that while I personally can survive in this environment (if I abandon my ideals of not being judged by my genetics), many good men who are passionate about their work are being pressured from all sides.
I honestly don’t see how any of this is legal but it’s such a taboo to talk about that fixing the problem seems impossible without a major shift back to valuing skills above demographics.
I can confirm your observations. At my company we have a couple policies.
1. We only accept applicstions from candidate from non-traditional backgrounds if they're diverse. Diverse is defined as any of the following: women, black, Hispanic, or native American - maybe also veterans but I'm not sure. Non-traditional background means coming from a coding boot camp, or majoring in a non-computing related field. I think after 3 years industry experience candidates are considered traditional even if they came from one of those two.*
2. Diverse candidates get two attempts to pass the technical phone interview, non diverse get one.*
That said, when it comes to the hiring decision we don't discriminate. No disrespect for those candidates considered diverse, just take what you get. And I'm Cuban myself (but not visibly Latino) so I may have benefitted from that part of my identity myself.
Untimely I think the lower representation of Black and Hispanic people in tech roles is reflective of education rates. I suspect that were incomes and education more equal that would make representation in tech more equal. There also geography. Not many tech companies in the south where most black people live.
As for women thats a more difficult situation. I think that there's strong evidence to back up the claim that women may not choose to enter tech on their own volition. I think the solution to that is to emphasize the value of fields other than tech. Being coder at Google doesn't make a person any more valuable than a lawyer, marketer, salesperson, etc. Sure they may make more money, but that's the product of the labor market. And not to mention the average lawyer probably makes more than the average coder.
I've anecdotally seen a growing portion of coding boot camp that are exclusive to certain demographics. I wonder how much of that is due to policies like these. Especially for boot camps that only charge if the graduates get jobs in tech, I can see how it would be disadvantageous to admit white and Asian men.
* Edit: I just checked and these policies also apply to people with referrals. So one could justify this by saying we treat diverse candidates as though they have a referral.
> Diverse candidates get two attempts to pass the technical phone interview, non diverse get one.
These rhyme with soviet era policies circa 1950-1960 in Eastern Europe. At universities, there was an admission exam for 'healthy origin' people for the majority of the spots, and then another exam where everybody, including those failing the first time, could compete for the scraps. We all know how that turned out economically speaking.
Seeing the same policies in XXI century USA is surreal.
To be fair, the tech companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The media has been heavily pushing the narrative that women are underrepresented at these tech companies - and they are compared to the general population. But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with the percentages of tech workers that are women. Same sort of deal with URM.
Ironically, the concern over discrimination in tech is itself the cause of a significant amount of explicit discrimination.
> But I've seen plenty of stories, even from reputable sources like the NYT, criticizing tech companies for only hiring 20-25% women while failing to mention that this is exactly in line with the percentages of tech workers that are women.
If the industry is systematically unfavorable to women, hiring at the same percentage as the industry as a whole (which is what matching the “percentage of tech workers that are women” is) is indicative of being fully on-line with the average degree to which the industry is systematically unfavorable to women.
It would be inconsistent to criticize the industry but not firms that were dead in the middle of the pack.
If the industry were either actually or even merely perceived as systematically unfavorable to women, a natural consequence would be women being less likely to pursue education focussed on the field in preference to other fields that were less unfavorable.
There are many other factors that can come into play. It is simply incorrect to draw the conclusions you do.
One example is earning prospects, which might matter more for men than for women. Personally, I was torn between studying maths and film making, for example. I decided to go for maths because of the better money making prospects (I thought), thinking I could still go into film making later.
If you don't worry about income prospects, maybe you are more likely to choose English literature of the 16th century over engineering.
Sure, but everyone seems to be assuming that it's systematically unfavorable towards women solely based on the fact that women make up less than parity.
That claim only works if one assumes that any disparity is the result of systematic bias.
I don't think the person you're replying to is criticizing the industry though. From what I can tell, they're saying it's not the industry's fault that it lacks women.
That's how I see it anyway: mainly based on the fact that women make up only around 20% of CS majors, I don't think the issue lies in the hiring practices of most tech companies.
> I don't think the person you're replying to is criticizing the industry though.
No, but the people they are criticizing for criticizing firms hiring at industrt-average proprotions are also criticizing the industry, which is the issue.
So 40-45% of the population gets the shaft is what you're saying. While I understand a desire to have a more diverse company in general.. the overall population is definitely not 1:1:1:1 for each ethnic/gender group... And every tech hiring study I've seen seems to indicate a bias in favor of women, meaning the issue is either self-selective or generally in education circles, which is driving the issue.
That's so strange to me, how do you define equal opportunity when you directly affect that opportunity based on third party factors out of someones control.
If it's any consolation about how we underrepresented but unqualified idiots are getting hired everywhere, I've interviewed with Mozilla a couple of times now, selecting the "yep, I'm Mexican" tickbox, and this hasn't gotten me any more hired there either of the times I've interviewed.
I must be really awful if I can't get hired as a Mexican, eh?
This misrepresentating my company's approach. We don't hire underqualified applicants if they're diverse. Rather we deliberately make it harder for white and Asian men to get to the on-site.
Openly... I'm not so sure. In our all hands meeting our head of HR consistently denies that diverse candidates are treated differently. When the Damore memo was sent out one of our senior VPs of engineering explicitly denied preference for diverse candidates.
But we do have tools for recruiters to cross reference applicant names with the US census bureau's data to infer race and gender. We give recruiter bigger bonuses for diverse hires and we set specific % targets for them in their OKRs (basically quarterly goals. They don't get fired if they go under this, so I hesitate to call it a quota). That, and the aforementioned practices surrounding interviews and non traditional backgrounds.
Looking deeper at the documentation, I think the company maintains plausible deniability by giving recruiters discretionary authority over things like number of phone interviews and initial resume review coupled with hiring targets well above the industry average (current target for women is 33%). So the company does openly discriminate, but it gives recruiters the tools and discretion to discriminate as well as goals that essentially require discrimination to achieve - after that it's "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".
My previous statements about non traditional backgrounds and 2nd phone interviews came from recruiters themselves. I can also confirm that, absent a referral, I've done 2nd phone screens for diverse candidates and have never interviewed a non-diverse candidate from a non-traditional background.
It's like we have given HR an a goal, namely diversity, that's easier to measure and doesn't require the technical knowledge of measuring skill, I can see how that gets very popular, very fast.
I have sadly witnessed a lot of discrimination against white men recently as well. God forbid you happen to be a white man from a third-world country, you'll literally never get a single interview anywhere no matter how good you happen to be.
I've seen even more against Asian men (not that it makes discrimination again white men any more okay). After all, if we are going to strive for for equal representation - which seems to be the goal - Asian are going to have to go down from 30-40% of many large companies down to a fraction of that. Asians are 14% of California and 5.2% of the US population.
This is the currently acceptable form of prejudice in this country, yes. It is totally fine to enact policies or make statements that hurt Asian-American men (and women, I don't think gender is much of a factor here).
They were getting lynched up into the 1900s by whites and Hispanics, put in camps in the mid 1900s, and discriminated against up until just a few generations ago, and now they're expected to lay down and be trodden upon, or else. Very cool, very progressive.
Third world country is bad (although maybe the positive racial discrimination will count them in, I don't know) but the people who get screwed by this sort of thing are also the white working class. Most employers have some (fairly rational as well as irrational) desire to screen by class, alongside the people of the upper classes knowing how to game the system of education/etc. So when you push women and ethnicities in, you push white men out, and the ones who feel the pinch are the ones already onto a loser.
I thought Visa sponsorship was the issue for third-world countries,I and many of my friends (local code meetup) share the same story ; apply to 150+ companies and not a single response.
We are white from North-Africa.
I stopped applying abroad because these kind of "diversity" policies scare me because they're mostly ethnic based I believe it should be idea based otherwise you end up with a group that all think alike.
> We use inclusive definitions of “women” and “female” and welcome trans women, genderqueer women, and non-binary people who are female-identified.
If you are interested in the program, it seems like you could identify yourself as female and apply. Especially if there's no in-person interview.
Cynically, if enough [biological males who identify as] men elect to identify as women for this application, the selection team will have some very difficult decisions to make.
This is a great way to get a company to instantly reject you at the interview step if they have one or fired shortly after being hired.
Because, you know, most companies look up the profile of candidates on LinkedIn, social media etc. Unless you actually consider yourself transgender, you would quickly be caught and removed just as quickly.
>Unless you actually consider yourself transgender, you would quickly be caught and removed just as quickly.
In the current cultural zeitgeist it'd be unimaginable to see someone get fired because they didn't conform to someone's rules of "transgender enough" based on their social media profile.
This is both the beauty and the irony of said zeitgeist; make all the rules you want, can't stop someone from playing.
And let's not forget the very real cases where someone may be more comfortable telling a bootcamp something about themselves than _the entire world_ on social media
Yes, you can actually. These sort of arguments remind me of the transgender bathroom fears: What's stopping a man from pretending to be transgender in order to enter the woman's bathroom?
Well, the answer is that people that are transgender will have a history of being transgender or acting in such a way that confirms they consider themselves that gender. So any lawsuit as a result of this would look into your past, see that you lied about being transgender and make it an open and shut case. If that case became public then you could say goodbye to your job prospects.
You either accept that people can choose their own gender or you don't. People don't get to police the reason someone may identify as female or male. History on social media should have nothing to do with it. Do you think everyone makes this choice at an early age and broadcasts it publicly?
As I understand it, you sort of get to choose your gender, but society has to accept your choice.
If I declare myself a woman but make no attempt to "live as a woman" as society sees it, I'll appear to be taking advantage of the system, and my choice will be rejected and there will be social consequences.
Conversely, if I do appear to be making an honest attempt to be a woman, and you don't accept it because of your conservative values, then you cannot reject my choice, because that's bigoted.
Yes, you can change your mind about your gender, but you really need to do it in a life-upending way that feels risky and permanent and committed, then you'll be celebrated. If you phone it in, people are going to be offended and you'll be rejected.
How would you define "live as a woman" in a way that would be acceptable to all women?
It would be both sexist and transphobic to expect trans-women to "appear to be making an honest attempt to be a woman" by conforming to some outdated view of womanhood.
Cis-women can do anything (including any traditionally male activity like date other women, wear jeans, like football and monster trucks, like anime and video games, and in some cases, even grow beards) so why can't trans-women?
Trans women can do whatever they want, all I meant is that if people are only changing their gender on paper to have more opportunities, that's considered dishonest and unacceptable... At least, I thought that's how it worked.
As I mention in my other comments on this thread, it's not right to judge people on why they identify with a particular gender. Whether it's economically motivated or not, if you accept that people can choose their own gender, the reason for the choice doesn't matter.
It's weird that you bring this up in a comment thread about someone literally advocating for lying about their gender for the sake of some perceived competitive advantage.
Do you believe this to be ethical? Because to me I find it rather offensive considering it harms actual transgender candidates.
I wouldn’t judge someone for changing their gender for economic purposes. It’s a personal decision and a slippery slope to decide when it’s ok and when it’s not ok.
There is a level of salary discrepancy where I would transition and start living as a woman, probably somewhere around the point of women earning 50 to 60% more. I'm not even sure it would be a lie; gender is pretty unimportant to me, and at some point the potential gains overcome inertia and habit.
I don't live in USA but a couple of years back I was working for a large financial organization in my country and was flat out told don't even think you are getting promoted because we need to lift our diversity so no white men will be promoted.
I have applied for women's scholarships but not without feeling guilty. Why do I get a chance at something while as many eager men in need of financial assistance or technical mentorship do not?
I am appreciative of every opportunity I have been given and will continue to take advantage of any opportunity afforded to me, even if it is on the base of my gender. If an investor wants to help a certain group of people, I will value that they are providing opportunities even though I may disagree with the idea of providing opportunities based on immutable characteristics.
My plan would be to send my kids to dual language programs. If you're a somewhat native Spanish speaker, you can claim to be Hispanic with a clear conscience. "Hispanic" is, legally speaking (for now), an "ethnicity", not a race, which means it is independent of blood (but apparently race is a "socio-political construct" according to the US Census). People are already doing this, plus the people with one Mexican grandparent or something.
This farcical system can't go on forever as is. Either racial preferences in hiring will be banned under the 14th amendment, or the US will adopt a Brazil-style racial preference system, where they will actually test your blood and have technicians measure the tone of your skin and the shape of your face in order to fit you into a category.
I've already resigned myself that I must tell him to always check those minority boxes and he may want to consider only using his mother's surname on his resume, instead of the traditional dual surname he legally has (Example: Lopez, instead of Smith Lopez).
It is illegal to discriminate for jobs on the basis of sex in the US (as per the Civil Rights Act of 1964). If you believe yourself to be the victim of discrimination, then submit a complaint the the EEOC [1] who will investigate.
That being said, a large gap between the number men and women (or whites and blacks, etc) working at companies exist can be considered evidence of systematic discrimination. Increasing the pool of unrepresented applicants is a great way to ensure that a diverse pool of qualified candidates get interviews, thus reduce the likelihood that a company appears to be practicing discrimination during hiring.
Statistically speaking, an equal opportunity workforce should be comprised of some demographic makeup. If a company deviates dramatically from that target makeup, the implication is that hiring practices are unfair. Addressing the unfairness will cause the issue to naturally correct itself.
This is a sound strategy that's commonly applied to other areas of engineering. If a company produces bearings and their QA department measures bearing tolerances from a shipment sample to deviate wildly from what is expected, then the implication is their is an issue with the manufacturing process that needs to be addressed. They don't just toss a handful of under-tolerant bearing in the shipment to bring the median value inline.
In other words:
> By not discriminating based on sex to fix a ratio/percent
...Is where your misunderstanding is. This idea is not over-correction -- you do no need to discriminate to achieve a specific makeup. You explicitly need to NOT discriminate and the problem will be correct itself.
ELI5: If a company was found to have a workforce that was too short. An appropriate response is to notice the problem an conduct an investigation, which determines tall people were put off from applying because the doors were too short. They correct the doors and the average height of employees naturally correct.
A wrong approach is to explicitly weight taller people more favorable in interviews.
>working at companies exist can be considered evidence of systematic discrimination.
No it can't unless you show that there are an equal number of qualified candidates, which there aren't in tech. CS grad rates for women are much lower.
Except it's not your children, it's your arbitrary fashion-based tribal identity. (Gender isn't a fashion choice, no, but the choice to focus on gender over height, good looks, class, race, etc is very much a fashion that quickly shifts).
I'm sympathetic to anyone who's had a challenging job search, and am glad that you found something.
Society is worse off for having barriers that prevent anyone who wants to code from being able to do so. That includes the inefficiencies of the job industry not placing you into a productive coding role faster. But it also includes the lower salaries, lack of support/representation, belittling, and near-universal campaign of horrible harassment that every woman I've talked to in the field has experienced.
Everyone in the field of software development struggles, and I don't want to take away from that. We should be making life easier for everyone. But doing so involves recognizing problems specifically and succinctly, and building solutions that fit those problems. One of society's many problems is that women in tech have to contend with a nightmarish swirl of negative distractions that I've never had to think about as a white man. In the face of such a problem, giving resources to the effected population makes total sense, and it's a good thing that more organizations/companies are doing so. Even more than that, it brings us closer to meritocratic equality.
Women are in extremely high demand in the tech industry. This post is just another example of a benefit women get but men don't. As a hiring manager I can say I've definitely been encouraged to pay women more than equally equipped men because their presence on the team is deemed so valuable.
It’s not apparently obvious what ethnicity I am based on looks. I had already been told there was a focus on diversity at the company I ended up getting an offer at and they “really want to build a diverse team from the ground up”. The conversation had been dragging for months and I resisted bringing up my background out of principle. I saw the hiring manager tweeting about a Latinx conference (I hate that term) and bit the bullet and told them I’m Latinx. I had an offer by the end of the week. This was after months of similar discussions with other companies where I stuck to my ideal of being hired for what I’ve accomplished and the skills I can prove I have. Ultimately I was running out of money and got desperate. I still feel terrible and angry but I have to put food on the table.
Thanks for being honest about your experience. Though I wouldn't be surprised if you get downvoted for your unencumbered authenticity because it doesn't match the narrative du jour.
Edit: it does seem like you're being downvoted. I predict manfredo's response will be next[1]. Sigh.
I've been in the same situation and I cringe about it. I am a Latino but white because I am from Argentina where people are mostly from European backgrounds. It seems that "Latino" is meant to mean a specific group of Latinos actually and not the whites ones but technically with the word "Latino" I also qualify. But I would like to hear them tell me to my face why I am not a Latino.
Asquerosa la situacion, pero entiendo porque lo hiciste. Latinx es un termino gringo que me hace cagar de riza lol. Por el culo, somos Latinos y Latinas. No LaTiNX.
I'm not surprised nonbinary Latinx people hear the same talk about the terms they ask people to use for them. I wasn't sure about Latinx, but now I'm firmly for it.
This can only end when customers - from individuals to corporations - finally get fed up with the identity politics employed by these 'diversity' advocates and start shunning companies which profess adherence to this mantra. If this does not happen it will end when diversity has run its course and the population has been balkanised into nothing but oppressors and oppressed with the average size of the oppressed community being a single individual. Since by that time the economy will have ground to a halt they'll be fighting each other with sticks and stones.
A legal justification doesn't make something right.
It's also worth mentioning why the term "underrepresented minority" or "underrepresented group" is need in the first place. Considering how sexist and racist people claim tech is Asians seem to be doing perfectly fine which is exactly why the term URM is needed in the first place.
Similar scenario that was sadly disturbing. It is quite advantageous to have an ethnic origin as a Pacific Islander.
However some people I have met from southern Asia coming from a farming family background likely have had much worse conditions growing up. But they get lumped into the Asian mass where you must truly excel to get noticed.
Yeah this stuff is getting pretty absurd. Someday in the future we’ll have grants for ugly people or short people because every little inequality must be erased in the human collective.
We never really valued skills over demographics — it's just much less visible where it benefits a dominant group. Consider that the percentage of VC deals with female-founded companies is 5.4% and yet they receive only 2.2% of VC dollars [1]. This has held true for over a decade: the average female founders have received less than their average male counterparts. But for some reason, there aren't many people complaining that VCs are giving men money just because they're men!
Never heard of an open and blatant 'women need not apply' in the 20 years I've been in the US. Not in the universities, not in the workplace, not anywhere. Not sure about NFL policies, though there aren't that many 6 foot 250 pounds fit women out there. Pretty sure there is no VC advertising 'we will fund no women' out there, if it were there would be a huge press coverage.
And yet, the OP is openly and blatant 'men need not apply'. How is that ever OK?
The NFL does allow women to apply, and one has tried, though that appeared to be just a publicity stunt.
There are a few women who play college football, and they are eligible to apply in the more traditional manner. With college experience and professional coaching it's not completely impossible that they could make it, probably as kickers or punters, who don't need as much upper body strength as other positions.
My point is, blatantly saying "X need not apply" isn't any worse than saying "this opportunity is open to both X and Y" and then only accepting Y. Implicit discrimination isn't somehow better than explicit.
* Implicit discrimination is bad. I'm saying: To use that as a guide for your actions you need to have an implicit discrimination detector able to account for all the confounding variables.
* Explicit discrimination is also bad. I'm saying: As a corollary, there should not be explicit 'X need not apply' policies.
Because men have many other options. If it was just 1 or 2 places saying 'we won't fund women', then those places don't substantially affect womens' ability to get funded. But that isn't the case.
> Consider that the percentage of VC deals with female-founded companies is 5.4% and yet they receive only 2.2% of VC dollars
Stats like this are so useless. Obviously if males make up 95% of the pool they're more likely to have founded some of the unicorns, therefore skewing the average. If one of the 5% of females founded a unicorn I bet they'd have a greater share of VC dollars.
The reason that companies become unicorns is that VCs invest in them at a certain valuation. You have cause and effect reversed. If VCs are underinvesting in female-founded companies, it's entirely expected that fewer of those companies will become unicorns.
