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I agree with the commenters saying that this post violates the HN guidelines. Here's the tell:

> I inherited a culture [that] has produced pretty much every technology of note

> cultural backwardness

In other words, your group ("culture") is advanced while others are backward. That's profoundly uncivil. Civility is impossible without respect for others.

Your comment is a slur—just one that is encoded in abstraction. We can't allow that trick here; if we did, people could get around whatever rule they wanted simply by adding layers of indirection. Because you've done this more than once before in a similarly insidious way, and because (as I read the data) you ignored our previous request not to do this, we've banned your account. Please don't create more accounts to break the HN guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I get that HN isn't a platform for political battling

He says after a lot of political battling.

What you conveniently ignore is the centuries of energetic anti-diversity work that you are alsoheir to. The culture you energetically defend treated women as something approaching property for millennia. America was founded by and for white men, many of whom owned black people as actual property. And not just the adults, but their children and their children's children, a situation maintained through pervasive brutality. We have slowly reduced these differentials, but there have been many ups and downs. (E.g., the Nadir, which erased many of the post-Civil-War gains for decades and which most Americans today were never told about. [1]) But we nave not yet even reached a level playing field.

You play a variety of tricks above. One is to confuse "normal" with "neutral" or "fair". Another is not to name the culture you mean, which people you mean; if you did, you'd sound like a Stormfront post. A third is to pretend that out groups are defined by out groups. Which is wrong; the racial boundaries in the US have always been drawn by white people, have varied greatly over time [2], and are mostly used as a means of control and exclusion [3]. And of course you construct a variety of straw men as you dance around racist slander, what with those unnamed people and their "cultural backwardness".

I doubt there's hope for you, of course. You're too busy doubling down on the darker parts of your cultural inheritance. But for those who are more open-minded, do me a favor and take the Implicit Association Test on race. (And a few more if you like while you're there.)

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

It made me realize that although I was consciously opposed to racism, I harbored unconscious racial bias. I've spent the last decade accepting and uprooting that, and studying the history and cultural effects of this pervasive cognitive bias. I don't feel particularly guilty about it; our brains develop all sorts of biases, and this one has been part of our culture for centuries. But I do feel responsible for erasing it in myself, and aim to help end it as a force in American history. Maybe others will feel that way too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...

[2] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/multiracial-time...

[3] See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...

I absolutely agree with you. The culture of society at the hands of "the diversity police" has become one that strips the individual of any power or responsibility. We've gone too far off the deep end.

I think Milton Friedman put it best: If discrimination exists, then it presents an arbitrage opportunity -- because people that are "discriminated against" are cheaper than those that are not... there is no need for societal policing:

"The man who exercises discrimination pays a price for doing so. He is, as it were, "buying" what he regards as a "product." It is hard to see that discrimination can have any meaning other than a "taste" of others that one does not share. We do not regard it as "discrimination" -- or at least not in the same invidious sense -- if an individual is willing to pay a higher price to listen to one singer than to another, although we do if he is willing to pay a higher price to have services rendered to him by a person of one color than by a person of another. The difference between the two cases is that in the one case we share the taste, and in the other we do not. (110)"

Seems to me this method will not solve the big, though not sole, problem we have now: getting along together as rhe one intelligent species on this planet. Perhaps you don't see this as your problem, but had we been acting better the past one hundred years we would probably not have such a high population and have such fear of one another and such a wide spectrum of economic power; I believe a world with people cooperating more on these human problems would allow our technical solutions to be more useful. I don't like us wasting so much effort on problems created by fear, violence and inequality. I would rather we be more educated and launching star ships. To do that the human problem must be addressed, if not by you then at least by the group as a while.

>>People should hire the people they are most comfortable with, and when they succeed (or fail), they can be examples to their communities.

Shouldn't it be people should hire people who are most qualified for the position? Ofcourse diversity police came around because people started hiring people they are most comfortable with (i.e people who like and talk like them) rather than hiring most qualified people.

Most companies are taking easy path while hiring by interviewing mostly people who came through internal reference . This is going to result in toxic cultures and very like minded people on longer run.

> Shouldn't it be people should hire people who are most qualified for the position?

If you take that literally (and we are on HN so I will), the most qualified person for any given position probably costs far too much money.

Rather, companies want to hire an arbitrary person from the set of competent people. Hiring someone's friend is arbitrary, but not uniformly random (i.e. diverse). Hence the problem.

Your view is not radical at all. I haven't looked at the Bloomberg numbers or the sources they cite, but it's not like manipulating data and misinterpreting statistics is something that never happened, especially by news organizations reporting causality of parameters when no statistical significance is to be found, or when the "study" was done on 30 persons.

What irks me is presenting something, anything, as a panacea and thinking in magic bullet terms. My comment isn't just about this.. This thinking would be shot down in a technical conversation, but make it about gender, race, or wealth, and everyone tie their tongue and short their brain for fear of being labeled racist, misogynist, or elitist.

Innovations where made in countries where a 100% of workers where of one ethnicity. They were made when a 100% of workers where of one gender. They are also made in companies that are ethnically diverse and employing people of different genders and sexual orientations..

What does this tell us? It tells us that what's important is to hire people who can get the job done and be trained to deliver. That's what this tells you to optimize for.

Looking at this:

>For every 10 percent increase in racial and ethnic diversity on the senior executive team at a U.S. company, earnings before interest and taxes rise 0.8 percent, the report found.

0.8% increase in EBIT for every 10% increase in racial and ethnic diversity in the C-suite? I'm willing to bet that changing the carpet or putting flowers in the patio has a bigger effect than that.

What is a 100% ethnically diverse group anyway? Is that one in which each ethnicity is only represented by one person? A company's goal is to make a profit, not to play race-Lego.

This is usually the part where I have to put the disclaimer: I am African and live in a third world country.

Though I'm from the same country and ethnicity of Saint Augustine, if that could serve as a referral to get hired..

EDIT: originally intended as a reply to fatdog's comment which was flagged before I could reply, so I replied to first child. fatdog's comment was back (unflagged?), so I deleted the reply to first child and re-replied to fatdog's comment.

This is what very polite racism sounds like.

And this is what dismissing diverse/alternative opinions sounds like.

Could you elaborate on how this is racist?

Basically it was a long-winded and self-flattering defense of exclusion.

Exclusion based on cultural, not racial grounds.

So Im failing to see how it's racist, rather than merely an unpopular view with which you disagree.

And if it's not racist, it's extremely inappropriate for you to label it so. That tactic is meant to silence legitimate disagreement with hyperbole.

Well fine, bigotry if you're being pedantic.

No, I still don't agree.

> bigotry: intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself

It sounds like the OP is perfectly tolerant of them existing and doing whatever it is they do, but thinks there are cultural factors that make some people more productive or better to work with than others.

This is obviously true -- education, shared language, a certain amount of tolerance from them -- are all things we expect to be cultural factors in employment.

The OPs point is about what cultural factors and values are most important for and best at jobs.

How is that being a bigot?

Bias regarding skin color and genetics is greatly different than bias regarding chosen behavior.

Sure. It's just xenophobic.

And since the OP's culture was clearly a white man's culture - a culture that has been relatively slow to accommodate others, in many ways its still a racist, sexist vision - granted one with unusual bluriness at the edges.

You've got to be kidding. The only white people in my CS classes were immigrants from Israel and the Soviet bloc.

White people (in Canada, at least) flock to management consulting, investment banking, law, and medicine and look down on software developers.

Racism is cultural, not just phenotype. For example, you'll find plenty of English racism against the French, Germans, Welsh, Scots, and Irish, even though all of those groups are white.

You're putting too much emphasis on the race part of the word, and not its meaning of exclusion using factors beyond an individual's control. You are the one being hyperbolic.

Cultural discrimination isn't the same as racial discrimination, and I think it's very dishonest of people to pretend they're the same problem.

Also, culture is something you control: even by your definition, it's not racist. (Though, really, you want a term like 'discriminatory' when talking about all factors, because racism is about race.)

What is the functional difference between "No Blacks" and "No Irish"?

As chrismealy says, swap in 'bigoted' for 'racist' if you want to be pedantic; his point still stands. It's not "extremely inappropriate" at all - the OP still a polite form of excluding people wholesale on factors that they can't control. And no, culture is not something people can "just choose" when you're working at demographic scales.

And 'white culture' does not exist. It's not a thing unto itself. Spanish vs Irish vs Russian vs Slovak are all significantly different. White greeks have more in common with the brown people of the eastern medditeranean than they do with the redheads in the celtic lands. You can't just say "MY culture" and take everything that Europeans and North Americans have done.

I personally interpret this post as a reaction to the gross disrespect some Islamic factions have for Western culture, women and human lives, and to issues such as German politicians unilaterally deciding to accept large amounts of immigrants against the will of most citizens, without a good plan to integrate those immigrants culturally while they come from a culture that is very bigoted and known for violence against their women.

Edit: I do think the heritage thing was unnecessary, unless used in a context of cultural differences and the therewith coming need for integration.

I don't think it's fair or useful to demand each culture to build their own technology from scratch, I think that's crap. I do think it's fair to ask immigrants to adapt to the local culture to the point of tolerating it.

Can you clarify what your culture is? And who specifically these out-groups that you worry about are?

I'm not trying to bait you - you're essentially making an argument that relativism in some forms runs into problems when pressed to limits. It's difficult to discuss this without understanding whereabouts you think these limits lie. I don't think anyone can really make an argument about the logical structure of your argument per se, but most will have issues with how you connect various "real world entities" to components of your argument.

In another post I just made an assumption about your beliefs - maybe I was wrong.

I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws too. They were originally designed for manual labor jobs and the like. I would be willing to compromise by limiting them to these kinds of jobs.

> It is a radical view,

It really isn't. Pretty much like clockwork, anytime anyone says anything about diversity in HN, the top comment is about how everything is fine, we don't need diversity, best person for the job, meritocracy, yadda yadda.

You're not very radical. Whether you're correct or not is a different matter, but please don't feel alone with your opinion. It seems to be the majority opinion at least in HN.

Please don't draw conclusions about 'majority opinion' on HN unless you have actual data. Such perceptions are notoriously prone to bias, because the comments people notice most are the ones they most object to. I believe that's why the most adamant people on either side of a political divide tend to experience this place (and no doubt not only this place) as dominated by their opponents.

I wish I could give your post more votes.

I don't believe your view is radical amongst those that build and create. I believe your view is only radical to those that don't.

People who do not have 'skin in the game' often lament that those who do are exclusive and divisive. That's only because they've no concept of what it takes to create and maintain a thriving community of like-minded individuals.