> Why are companies promoting "pride"...telling workers to attend 'lgbt tolerance' meetings,etc... Wth!!!!
You ask this question, then answer it in your very next line. People don't respect everyone. They are intolerant.
You ask this question, then answer it in your very next line. People don't respect everyone. They are intolerant.
Ideological flamewars are stupid, even if the people contributing to them are smart. They're also repetitive, which makes them off topic here. So could you please not post like this again to HN?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17864365 and marked it off-topic.
You cannot hide a violent philosophy behind a shield of "it is my beliefs". None of us shall ever accept it. If it becomes the law that I must accept neo nazis, I still will not.
Asking people to be tolerant of ideologies that pose an existential threat is contradictory at best.
These things are fraught with complication.
However, that just isn't the same as what I'm describing. There is nothing analytical about communism that poses an existential threat to me. Neo-Nazism, on other other hand, is a priori incompatible with my existence.
But no, there is no equivocation here. One of these things (Neo-Nazism) is fundamentally incompatible, even just on the linguistic level, with my existence. The other (Communism) is undesirable and even reprehensible, but doesn't threaten the mode of discourse itself.
Put another way: proposing tolerance towards analytically intolerant ideas amounts to an "disagreement" between a linguistic claim and a claim about the language itself. I wrote about the danger of viewing these as normal "disagreements" about a week ago[1].
[1]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2018/08/20/Disagreement-Language-...
But more to the point: the contradiction isn't economic, it's linguistic. See the comment thread below.
Sorry I don't want to work for or live in that kind of setting. I wouldn't want anyone to be forced to do so.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when posting here.
There are lots of other places on the web where you can practice this craft, but on HN we're trying to avoid the systemic effects it produces.
Racists aren't (usually) racists for the fun of it. Racists are racists because they feel threatened by or lack sufficient exposure to / understanding of other races. If your goal is to cure racism, then making racists feel even more threatened is probably the least productive way of going about it.
Instead, the trick is to befriend them. Show them that there's nothing to fear. These people are more often than not just scared and confused; they're usually otherwise-decent people, and putting them at ease goes a long way toward letting them realize on their own that "hey, maybe my Jewish neighbors ain't so bad after all".
I know full well that the above is a lot easier said than done, but if you want a growling dog to stop growling at you, giving it treats is at least slightly more effective than yelling at it. On the former path, you might eventually tame the dog and get a friend out of the deal. On the latter path, it'll just growl louder and louder until it bites you.
This doesn’t work[1]. Allowing parasitical ideology the space to express itself only emboldens it.
[1] All of recorded history
Except it does: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
The answer isn't to spew hate back at them, but it certainly isn't to make friends.
I never said it was innocent misunderstanding, but it is still misunderstanding nonetheless, and it is still possible to at least start to correct this misunderstanding by alleviating the fear underlying it, thus making it easier for a racist individual to expose oneself to those "inferior" races and realize that they're just fellow human beings and not scary job-stealing world-order-establishing criminal boogeymen.
How nice it must be to be in a group with power, where even if you are an unrepentant asshole and deny the humanity of others, those other people are obligated to be nice to you.
Re: whether or not it works at scale, it seems to have worked for Irish-Americans. It took awhile between the height of Irish immigration and the present day, but unlike in the 19th Century you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone unironically demanding Irish people to be deported or claiming Irish immigrants are stealing jobs. Similar deal for other previously-persecuted European immigrants and their descendants (Italians and Germans both come to mind). Asians are getting to that point, too; not really free of discrimination/prejudice, but even my most hatefully-racist acquaintances seem to at least tolerate their existence.
None of the above groups (to my knowledge) were all that socially disruptive (at least not intentionally); instead, they gradually integrated and blended with the existing demographics. Instead of Irish or German or Italian or English or French or Polish or Russian or what have you, we ended up with kind of a blended European demographic. I have a feeling Asians are on track to be part of that, too, and end up in a sort of blended "Eurasian" demographic. We ain't quite there yet, but I'd give it a couple decades before we are.
In other words, my grandfather already paid the price for this peace in WWII, I’ll do my best to uphold it even in the face of the ideology which started that war.
But people can accidentally disrespect LGBT people eg. calling trans people by the incorrect gender.
And so to foster this workplace that you want as well it’s important for people to do things like tolerance training.
No, that would be inappropriate. It would be equally inappropriate for someone to call a person who called out your inappropriate behavior disrespectful or intolerant. Similarly for your concern regarding neo-nazis.
"Results from our experiment involving 118 undergraduate students showed that taking the perspective of LGBT individuals or racial minorities — by writing a few sentences imagining the distinct challenges a marginalized minority might face — can improve pro-diversity attitudes and behavioral intentions toward these groups."
https://hbr.org/2017/07/two-types-of-diversity-training-that...
But 118 students isn't that small of a sample (if I'm picking a methodological criticism, it'd be that it's a sample of college students rather than the general population).
And the exercise seems reasonably likely to provide some of the reported effect, and those effects fit with other studies that hold reading/writing fiction improves people's ability to model others better and some degree of empathy.
But just for fun, here's another HBR article that shows that "the three most popular interventions make firms less diverse."
I've read a good amount of the literature on this subject, and haven't found any compelling evidence that diversity training does anything but shield companies from lawsuits to some extent.
you really don't see how this is circular? how do you feel about this paraphrasing of climate change denial?
"I've read a good amount of the literature on this subject, and haven't found any compelling evidence that climate change is an anthropogenically driven process."
or this one of heliocentrism
"I've read a good amount of the literature on this subject, and haven't found any compelling evidence that the sun is at the center of the solar system."
or this one of
"I've read a good amount of the literature on this subject, and haven't found any compelling evidence that the earth is round."
you get my point? "compelling" is personal.
But you compare those to diversity training efficacy, which has no empirical evidence, and the controlled studies examining effects have conflicting results. This is just not an honest comparison at all. I dismissed your study because it literally doesn't tell me anything about the real world, not because I hand-waive anything that I don't agree with.
Would you change any of your own life habits based on how 100 college kids subjectively reported on their feelings? It's ridiculous to compare the amount of information that kind of study tells us to the astounding accuracy of how our heliocentric model of the solar system can and has predicted where and when solar eclipses will happen down to the minute.
What does beliefs mean to you? Beliefs cast a very wide net. Is there no point at which a coworker should be cast out? Perhaps it is their religious belief that women should not be allowed to work. May such a person remain? Are we not to push back?
If he does, anyway, does it matter what he believes if he treats his coworkers (male and female) with respect anyway? If the belief doesn't manifest itself in negative actions, I don't really care what's going on in his head.
To think of it another way - you'll get fired for sexual harassment, but companies still give mandatory training about what exactly sexual harassment is and how to avoid it. Why should this be any different?