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Comment by rednerrus | Hacker News Reader

Isn't working with people you disagree with part of corporate life? Do you think there are no conservative people at your company who have to deal with the incessant anti-conservative tech culture? I assume that occasionally they want to punch us in our faces. They show up for work and get their jobs done.

The problem with enforcing these policies when we agree with them is we have to enforce them when we don't agree with them.

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Equal employment laws and anti-discrimination statutes are real things, and they spell out which groups are protected classes - those based on race, sex, religion, disability, etc. Your workplace is not your living room, and not all ideas and behaviors are equally acceptable. I don't believe conservatives should be discriminated against, but when "conservative" becomes a euphemism for pro-white/anti-semitic/misogynistic beliefs, then you may find yourself running afoul of laws or corporate guidelines because those things are not on the same level as "should taxes be higher or lower" or "what's the right level of environmental regulation."

The reaction to this memo shows how the definition of misogyny can be spread very thin.

> Isn't working with people you disagree with part of corporate life?

But working with people who say you don't deserve to be there is not.

James explicitly complained about "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate". Decreasing the false negative rate categorically does not lower the bar, it just makes the bar more accurate.

In making that statement however, James told everyone hired through that program that he thinks they're not good enough to work at Google.

His argument was the program was flawed by bad metrics and wouldn't accomplish its goals, not directed at an individual.

I quoted him directly. He said the program lowered the bar by decreasing false negatives. Having a hard time squaring that with what you're saying his intention was.

> ...incessant anti-conservative tech culture

Not sure I'd silo this as a tech culture thing. Education has been shown to negatively correlate with conservatism so it'd be reasonable to expect to see low numbers of conservatives in any field with higher educational barriers.

http://www.people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-g...

I can't tell if you are ironically making my point or not.

except in UK, where the poor and uneducated are stereotypically labour/democrat supporters, wealthy educated types are tory/conservative.

That use to be true in the US too and in some ways still is...but the US also has the race issue which tends to further complicate everything. Working class whites use to be democrats for economic reasons (labor) while still being socially conservative, now they're almost entirely republican and mostly it seems for social (really, ethnic) reasons.

In the US republican affiliation is (or used to be) actually more closely tied with college education and higher income and that is the "fiscal conservatism" (basically lower taxes). Of course higher education levels and income also correlate quite closely with ethnicity and whites are mostly republicans....

Basically the political divisions have become quite ethnically polarized so the usual correlation between actual socio-economic interest and party affiliation don't hold the way one would expect.

Not sure what data you're looking at but Yougov says the exact opposite.

https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/04/25/demographics-dividing-b...

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