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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I love how everyone uses throwaways in these comments because they know any deviation from the progressive-left line will get them cancelled!

I’ll say it under my name - I’m completely old fashioned and probably racist / sexist / *-phobic whatever because I still agree with Martin Luther King that it is morally correct to judge someone by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. I’m so totally backwards! I meet someone new and have a blank slate no matter what color they are or what they look like! I do this intensely regressive thing where I listen to what they have to say and judge them by their words and actions. I know, very evil and wrong of me, but I can’t help it - I still like Martin Luther King!

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MLK explicitly advocated for policies that gave preferential treatment to Black people, so it's a bit surprising to see such a fan of his taking this stance by invoking King. For example, here's a quote from his book "Why We Can't Wait":

> Whenever the issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred hears after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up.

The Internet Archive has this book available for free to check out, you can read more on his argument around page 134 right here: https://archive.org/details/whywecantwait00king/page/134/mod...

Essentially King is arguing that the government should promote the same kind of preferential hiring and other benefits that veterans get, but for members of other disadvantaged groups.

My father in law is a Vietnamese immigrant, came here after communists destroyed his country on a fishing boat. He’s now a retired millionaire!

My neighbor is black, and she drives a $100k+ Mercedes! Country club golfing and sailing type.

My point is, arbitrary assumptions based on race are totally meaningless in 2020. There are people in all social strata of every race. Giving a leg up to someone for being XYZ is dumb - it reduces complex people to simple labels that define how victimized the woke left says they should be.

If we want to talk about giving government assistance to people in poverty regardless of race, I’d be much more amenable. There will be correlations to poverty and race but I think we all agree Oprah and Michael Jordan should not be getting handouts.

As it stands the identity politics movement is ideologically inconsistent and is focused on driving people apart and re-segregating us. This is a movement doomed for failure. We should instead be eliminating our superficial differences and moving beyond bankrupt social justice theories that reduce individuals to mere labels rather than intelligent, thinking independent people with their own agency.

"My point is, arbitrary assumptions based on race are totally meaningless in 2020."

Well, unfortunately race and gender are still important in 2020, and in the VC world there are still important negative discrimination against woman, against black people... and positive discrimination for White and Asian men... [1] [2] and that is a serious problem.

(This comes on the top of existing other problems linked eg. to poverty, that is touching disproportionately the people negatively discriminated by VC and investors)

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnonprofitcouncil/2018/02/... [2] https://hbr.org/2017/05/we-recorded-vcs-conversations-and-an...

I still hire the best person for the job, which over the years has included men, women, and people of many races. Like I said in the original post, I am an old fashioned type that believes we are not restricted by superficial and unimportant details like our race - all people can succeed and thrive based on their character. It’s crazy that this is now old school, but this is 2020 and I don’t read any critical race theory pseudoscience.

My view is a much more optimistic, forward-looking attitude than one that constantly analyzes how hard society has screwed each person based on their labels. Rather than see ourselves as victims who can’t succeed because of XYZ, we should encourage people to thrive despite XYZ. If you wait your entire life for society / the government / other people to save you, you’ll never be happy and you will never be saved.

You think you hire the best person for the job... Just like the Swedish in the HBR article I quoted were sure they invest in the best project/person while they were discriminating negatively women (the discriminating positively men).

We all carry biases, including towards/against groups we wouldn't expect to be biased towards/against. We probably all start with blank slates, but, unless you've had zero interactions with the outside world, you'd have to work actively to retain that blank-slate outlook.

In aggregate, we run the risk of collectively creating various forms of systemic bias. We can test for these systemic biases (we have) and prove the existence/non-existence of said biases (we have).

> prove the existence/non-existence of said biases

No, you have not.

> We can test for these systemic biases (we have)

How do you propose testing this? Typically, a difference in outcomes is taken as evidence of systemic bias, but it isn't the same thing. For example, if one cohort commits more crimes, they are going to have more police interactions, more arrests, and so forth. But that's not a systemic bias. Unfortunately the recent "anti-racist" authors like Ibram Kendi have been pushing a false and expansive definition, where they term any difference in outcomes (or as they put it, any racial inequity), as "racist". That's not what most people would call "racist".

> prove the existence/non-existence of said biases (we have)

As for the existence of biases, I assume you are referring to the 'implicit association test', which is commonly used as a tool to identify unconscious biases. The IAP methodology has been challenged and debunked many times. Studies have also found that measures of implicit bias do not predict how people act in real life. See https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/flaws-white-fragility-theo... for more.

There are many ways to conduct studies on bias. As a simple example, they can do things like send out identical resumes with different genders/races and see who gets called back. You can find a ton of these; here is a meta-analysis which looks at many such studies: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/09/11/1706255114

Example of bias from some VC against woman (was done is Sweden, know for its gender equality): https://hbr.org/2017/05/we-recorded-vcs-conversations-and-an...

Not a throwaway here either, just felt strongly enough to make an account and add my $0.02 when I might otherwise lurk.

I believe as you do, that we should explore viewpoints counter to the mainstream and break the echo chamber to expose poor and Illogical thinking wherever it presents.

I imagine MLK would be appalled by the weak, hollow, pandering which is outlined here.

If you're going to try to be contrarian, at least do the research to do it well. You think you're being clever but you're showing no understanding of the positions you're trying to make fun of. As a result, you come across like a moron.

You should have used a throwaway, not because you have non-politically-correct views, but rather because you hold extremely strong opinions about something you can't even articulate credibly.

I looked up your twitter and saw this from March:

> Despite everything happening I’m still not worried. Corona is a bad flu and the markets will recover. I’m choosing to relax #CoronaOutbreak #relax

Similar confidence, similar ignorance.

Personal attacks are not ok on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

Digging up details from someone's history and bringing them in here as ammunition in an argument is particularly not ok. That's a practice of the online callout/shaming culture, and we're trying to avoid that on HN. Not that the callouts are always wrong, but callout/shaming culture has toxic systemic effects that are incompatible with the intended spirit of this site.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang&s...

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

Hey Dan, didn't mean to violate the rules. To be clear, my comment was intended to be about his argument and it's lack of rigour. Also, his bio links his twitter, so I thought that made it within bounds. But yeah, that was a bit harsh, sorry.

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