3 Black Teenage Scientists Had a Breakthrough, Then Came the Trolls
npr.org
npr.org
How would a bunch of random strangers know which science project was good? And more importantly, why do we care what everyman Joe/Jolie has to say about anything? We’ve always had village idiots or people who stood on cardboard boxes and yelled about our impending doom, but when did we decide that it was a good idea to give these people a megaphone?
Personally I think it’s rude as well. If I entered something cool into a science competition I’d appreachiate it if it was evaluated by people who actually knew something about science instead of entering some popularity contest.
Why do you think shows like American Idol or weekly music countdowns were so popular? The feeling of participating and having an impact generates interest. Similar to the rise in Video Game streaming and Youtube(comments).
I think it provides a way to organise good content or likely to be liked content as we can't load entire database to the user and ask them to sort through it themselves. On the other hand it would be nice if votes were never shown to people and just used in the back end to sort the good stuff.
Lots of varying levels of "wrong" to go around IMO.
It's not a pattern exclusive to one political side and their media outlets either; if a story sounds like it can be used to rally the troops and support a message, it won't be investigated too thoroughly regardless of whether it supports the left or right or centre or whoever else.
On-topic: In any case, prevalence of occurrences like the reported trolls are why I no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who claim "there's no racism". For a while you had the excuse of not being aware, but now you're just intentionally adding noise to the conversation.
Almost all affirmative action is designed to help pushing inclusion and participation, not just pushing the end goal. You set a target for numbers of candidates you interview to be minorities, which helps you get more opportunity to find capable people who happen to be minorities. They still have to be the best candidate at the end of the day.
People acting without any discrimination doesn't magically fix the world - look at Chess. Sure, women could play in tournaments, but they largely didn't. It took the creation of women's only tournaments to grow a community and give role models, and now we have women who are grandmasters and play in normal tournaments very successfully.
Even something as simple as your subconscious bias while hiring, if you see more minority candidates, your mental model of what someone who can do that job looks like will change, and maybe when it's borderline you don't instinctively just go with the white guy because that's what's familiar.
Trying to make a world where all people have equal opportunity is important. Right now, too much of the time the opportunities just aren't there because of history. It's not as easy as saying "you can't discriminate" to someone overtly racist, it's having a classroom and getting one of the girls to try programming - something she might never try (because it's not a "girl thing"), even if it's something she might love doing, if she did.
The defaults and patterns of our society are built on our history, and our history was racist and sexist. Changing that requires active thought and effort, and painting that as just trying to bring the straight white man down is the aim of these kinds of people.
I didn't say that affirmative action comes at the expense of white people, I said (implicitly, by presenting an example) that it comes at the expense of the people it tries to help.
We can't just ignore the imbalance that exists due to past inequality, act equally now and pretend there are no problems any more. Fixing that imbalance doesn't have to mean pulling anyone down, and that response ("it must be because they are taking the opportunity from someone else who is more capable") needs to be fixed, not the act of trying to pull people up to fix past wrongs.
Even if it was a case of affirmative action, their work still gets the chance to get criticized and touch people’s eyes. Arguably with no action it could have rotten in some binder in a desk, so isn’t “something” still better than nothing ?
To be clear: I'm NOT saying this was a case of affirmative action.
You pointed a positive consequence of affirmative action. I agree it exists and that it's positive.
My observation was just that in my opinion it has a much much larger negative consequence. It gets neutral people like me, for whom race has always been a non-issue, to now wonder "is this a real achievement, or is it just affirmative action?" This is a real effect, I just caught myself doing it.
The odd thing about racism is that we typically see it in the US as a asian/black/white/hispanic issue where historically race was finer grained, especially when talking about a much more homogeneous population.
Historically Brits would consider the French, Irish, or Italians as a different race, and, yes, have racist views about those people.
What I learn from that is, even if the US was 100% “white”, racism would still exist as we would find increasingly small differences to categorize people into races and then discriminate.
The problem is that discrimination based on categorization is how the human brain works.
The anti-affirmative action argument doesn't say that racism doesn't exist. The argument against affirmative action is that society should aim for equal opportunity rather than equal outcome.
One could argue about the intention of affirmative action, but I don’t think one could argue that it’s not racist, using the dictionary’s definition of racism.
As is often the case, the dictionary gives multiple definitions.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/racism
You're using definition number 2, the person you were responding to was maybe using definition number 3.
(Although we get it, your point still stands.)
What I was trying to say, without saying it, is that rasism is not what the cultural Marxist are trying to sell - “power + privilege”.
Such racism is mostly dead now, because generations of generic-white intermarriage would make it hopelessly confusing. My suspicion is that as long as distinct races are perceived, racism will continue, and the absence of that intermarriage is simultaneously evidence of that racism and a cause of it.
I think you haven't met the right troll.
If you ask "are you saying that racism doesn't exist?", the sophisticated troll will not give you a yes or no answer. If he said yes he would lose because there are so many examples that it exists and he would be unmasked as an obvious troll, if he said no he would lose because then you would have some justification in whatever your claim was.
> The problem is that discrimination based on categorization is how the human brain works.
Yes, I think that is right.
On topic: As long as it's not considered racist just because they are African American. It's like where I live a woman at a sports match threw a banana at an indigenous person, completely ignorant to any race issue. Yet the media ran it way out of proportion, I would say it was the media that were racist, they set a narrative which followed which was deeply saddening to me.
Unfortunately, that's one of those symbols that people recognize as being a racist attack. I may get mad at my local church, but where I live I can't burn a cross in my yard to show that anger.
I once picked up my child from a new day care. We are white and the woman in charge is black. I picked up my son and said to him, "there's my little monkey" (he was my "boat monkey") and the woman was taken aback. A moment later she realized what I had said, but just using the term "monkey" in front of her set off some sort of warning apparently.
There will be no way human reeducation will ever work. There will no new - more human humanity appear by enough reeducation. So just make it one huge peer reviewed anonymized contest, even distribute some slang into other papers/ works and lets leave this all behind.
Yes, it would likely be really difficult to do, and not work too well with eyewitness evidence or what not, but it may make prison sentences and punishments consistent between different social groups and demographics again.
The headline is effectively: "[thing happpend], [trolls trolled the thing]."
I don't like trolls either, but as best we can tell, they're an emergent phenomenon of the system. Either NPR doesn't understand the internet, or is trying to change the internet.
People seem to get confused though and expect that repugnant speech won't have any consequences.
And for folks who scream "Free Speech doesn't mean Free of Consequence" and engage in harassment campaigns causing targets to lose jobs, homes, and everything else, I hope you're fine with the same thing happening to you when someone finds your views repugnant.
We're trying to push the societal ball forward, not revert to a state of digital Weimar-era street fighters engaging in mob justice.
This doesn't randomly happen to everyone.
Every possible alternative relies on whoever is in power exercising condescending 'parent knows best' authority. And the rest of us just have to hope the whims of whoever is in power happen to align with ours. That's a bad way to run anything from the get-go, doubly so when the next generation takes over and is expected to know what the hell they're doing.
Regardless, vigilantism isn't going to help and will only further worsen.
Care to give some examples?
I.e., that person said something incredibly repugnant and clearly meant it, I'm not going to have lunch with them anymore.
And so on.
I only ever see this as justification for vigilante justice. Is this what you're referring to?
How?
In school districts that don't have the money to do much about it
And the "clock kid" incident wasn't a stunt. The child was actually accused of being a terrorist, handcuffed and detailed by police. And then when the news spread he was subjected to continued racial and xenophobic taunts.
Well, I thought journalists were supposed to do investigative work and not just publish a PR statement, but so is today's media.
> And the "clock kid" incident wasn't a stunt.
There sure were a lot of folks there saying he was pretending it was, and jokingly or not that's going to get you a real bad response in this day and age.
But since it "validates" a lot of folks' views on how the world is, of course they want to believe and parade it around.