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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

For better or worse, popular society has become a lot better at detecting dog whistles. "Diversity of thought is more important than diversity of skin color" is one of those dog whistles.

I don't find the discussion itself objectionable, but I also don't want to grant intellectual capital to anybody who is going to use a controversial topic in bad faith to control the discussion. I don't want to be used to legitimize more extreme views. Sometimes people don't bring these topics up in bad faith, but it's been my experience that they're the minority.

FWIW, I don't live in Silicon Valley or in CA.

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You think this is a dog whistle?

> “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.

> ”Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”

This is what Denise Young Smith, 20 year HR veteran at Apple said. She 'resigned' and was replaced after the ensuing outrage.

See my response to 'fmihaila below.

I want to be clear: it's bad to fire people just for expressing a different opinion. But that's not what my comment was about -- it was about how, as a society, we've learned to detect and avoid conversations that are probably faithless.

Where "probably" is a subjective sense being carried forward by a mob who presume to have an infallible sense of truth and have no qualms with applying their certainty toward shutting down anyone who Bad Speaks.

I'm not a mob. This is just me.

I don't shut anybody down. My time and attention are limited resources, and I don't like wasting them in a discussion that the other party is using in bad faith. To that end, I avoid starting questions that (through experience) tend to go down that path.

Like I said in the GP, I don't find the discussion itself objectionable. I've just applied a heuristic to determine who I have the discussion with.

In my experience, most accusations of dog whistling on the internet range from misguided to incoherent. It's worth remembering what a dog whistle is, in the first place. It's a tactic used by politicians to assure a certain set of voters that you're on their side while maintaining public deniability of unpopular beliefs. It's a way of talking to the public that guarantees that each constituency hears what they want to hear.

How does any of that apply to what some dude says on the internet? It doesn't. Who would they even be dog whistling for or to? Nobody. It's nonsensical. It's really just a way to say, "I think you believe something other than what you're actually saying."

In other words, it's a polite way to call somebody a liar. Which is fine, I guess, but if you want to call somebody a liar, just call them a liar. We don't need a new term for that, especially one that already has a perfectly good meaning in another context.

Nit-picking about the definition of words is another form of "dog whistling" that popular society has learned to detect.

I'm not nit-picking. I'm arguing that most uses of the phrase are incoherent, yours included.

Well, that depends on what the goal is.

If you want to have a workforce representative of a given community, and the characteristics of that community are evaluated along ethnic or skin color, then diversity thereof is key.

If you want a workforce representative of people's economic status, then you evaluate on economic characteristics of the community.

IF you're looking for creativity then diversity in thought is paramount [however, that does not imply not guarantee diversity in any other human feature.]

The issue can become muddled due to a couple of reasons. Companies while looking to address ethnic diversity imbalance will imply that increasing ethnic diversity will coincidentally result in creative diversity [with the implication that greater creative diversity results in company success]. Their confounding of these things make things muddled.

If diversity of culture were necessary to succeed, then relative monocultures like China and Japan would never succeed.

> "Diversity of thought is more important than diversity of skin color" is one of those dog whistles.

I find it highly unlikely that a black woman in charge of Inclusion and Diversity at a most socially progressive company would blow into that particular dog whistle.

> a black woman in charge of Inclusion and Diversity at a most socially progressive company would blow into that dog whistle.

So she is Uncle Tom's wife and is secretly dog whistling to the white supremacists.

That's part of the reason people are not speaking what they think -- because they end up getting responses like that, which are completely indistinguishable from a comedy skit or an article from The Onion.

It's like talking to someone and hearing them try to convince you about contrails or lizard people. You can't argue at that point, because you realize it's way beyond that, so you just kind of keep quiet an nod. Especially if that person is your boss or coworker.

The point of a dog whistle is to say something with a secondary meaning that escapes some part of the audience.

When that part of the audience starts using the dog whistle, the goal has been met: they're using it in good faith, while the original user is still signalling the secondary message.

That's why "family values" works so well as a political slogan -- nobody is against "family values" in a superficial sense, and half of the population understands that "family values" is really code for "christian values."

> is to say something with a secondary meaning that escapes some part of the audience.

> nobody is against "family values" in a superficial sense, and half of the population understands that "family values" is really code for "christian values."

If half the population is christian the other half is probably also not completely oblivious to what that other half understands by family values.

I think the best way to overcome this "dog whistle" problem is to appropriate it and steal it. "Family values" -- "good, we want to have gay, transgender, happy and safe families and we love our family values".

"Diversity of thought is more important?" - "Yes it is, and we find that people of different ages, races, genders, nationalities, educational, social and economic background end up with the best diversity of thoughts and ideas so we go out and actively recruit accordingly". What I see tech companies doing is being very vocal about diversity then turning around and recruiting young white men from a few top universities. Or saying women should be equal but then paying them less. Or covering up harassment and abuse (thinking of Uber here).

I see your point, but somebody losing their job in the blink of an eye for expressing their thoughts on a sensitive subject in good faith just because other people are trying to hijack the English language seems like an overreaction, no? That's what the OP, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, Tim Ferriss, and many HN posters here are pointing out.

I agree. I also don't have a good solution, unfortunately.

it sounds like calling things 'dogwhistles' is a very convenient way for you to absolve yourself of having to think critically

And if someone were to say the reverse, that diversity of skin color is more important than diversity of thought, what would you call that? Virtue signal?

This post is a dog whistle.

The whole "dog whistle" thing is a part of the problem.

I'd argue that popular society has an increasing false positive rate when detecting dogwhistles, and that the problem is exacerbated by increasingly partisan politics.

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