I think its hard to make the argument that technical progress has stopped, but to some extent the woke ideologues do introduce friction to technical progress.
Here’s one simple example: before wokeism took root in corporations, the ideal that most wanted to strive towards was something like a color-blind meritocracy. Today, the prevailing idea in hiring/promoting in many corporations isn’t “is this person the absolute best scientist/engineer/inventor that we can get” it’s “does this person have the right identity?”. It’s not hard to imagine that some technical progress is being left on the table by the focus on identity and not on merit.
> If anything one could make an argument that the current anti-vax/anti-science elements pervading society would fit the description should their views gain more traction.
Deciding whether to take a medication is not the domain of science: that’s a risk-management decision. The well of discourse has been poisoned by the repeated false claim that not finding enough benefit in a particular medication is anti-science. Science can’t and doesn’t command anybody to take any medication, it just gives you tools to understand the possible risks and benefits. People can reasonably disagree that the risks aren’t worth the benefits, even if you personally disagree.
It hasn’t taken full effect yet but it has definitely bent the arc of progress toward a lower angle. The extremely harsh imposition of woke views has impacted my own enjoyment of the tech industry, my ability to raise money (I stopped attending a popular Bay Area seed capital meet up because several people repeatedly commented about my white skin color and other details of my background, and due to the terms and conditions of another I never bothered to attend.). I had to leave one company because of its extreme discriminatory positions, and I’ve repeatedly heard moderate amounts of discrimination at several other companies.
There are plenty of doctors and scientists who have given up on or reduced their activity in their field due to similar issues, unfortunately I don’t have time to link all this at the moment.
Also all the ideological statements people need to make to become professors etc I suspect are influencing people away from academia and so academia becomes more about advocacy than research.
It’s a miracle that we’re continuing to progress, but it would’ve been even better I suspect if we hadn’t had all these hindrances.
Also think about all the men who are crushed in biased divorce outcomes, which is tangentially related to the woke issue, and influences their productive activities. It’s all sort of related to the oppressor oppressed narrative.
* Naively picking who appears most capable, especially based on metrics that are strongly influenced by class, may instead just be perpetuating these biases. Further, people who have had fewer resources dedicated to their development may have more opportunity for growth.
* Conversely, trying to spread things out for equality-of-outcome and completely ignoring many measurements of ability is likely to be problematic, too, by not getting the strongest people in seats.
In the end, allowing the entire pool of the population meaningful economic and cultural participation can be expected to bend up the arc of progress, but it is hard to figure out how to get there.
Certainly possible. I think the divide between right and left on this issue is in their perception of how much this is the case. I’d be in favor of rigorous research on this topic.
My own experience in the tech industry at many companies leads me to believe that if there is discrimination, it must be either historical or occurring earlier in the pipeline than tech company hiring. It’s been fairly consistent in my experience for thumbs to be put on the scales rather heavily to hire from historically disadvantaged groups, and clear bold statements have been made to exclude majority populations from interview pipelines that would be recognized as howling racism and sexism if applied to any other group.
> Naively picking who appears most capable, especially based on metrics that are strongly influenced by class, may instead just be perpetuating these biases.
It seems to me that we’re currently getting the worst of all possible worlds. The way we’re influencing the interview pipeline excludes low income people from the majority demographics and assists high income people from non majority demographics, with the overall effect of selecting for class above all else.
I say all this as a kind person who wishes well for everyone and wants everyone to have the opportunity to self actualize to the best of their ability.
There's a lot of pretty high quality research. Unfortunately, it can only tell you about things that are correlated, but it can't establish causation. You can only run observational trials of various kinds-- case control studies, looking at time series data, etc.
> My own experience in the tech industry at many companies leads me to believe that if there is discrimination, it must be either historical or occurring earlier in the pipeline than tech company hiring.
OK-- and if there's some 25 year old who has faced discrimination "earlier in the pipeline"-- what is the proper redress? If candidate A measures 90% as good as candidate B, but candidate B had a much easier road to get to this point, which candidate has more potential?
I'm a teacher and I see it "earlier in the pipeline". By middle school, a whole bunch of kids have figured out that typical engineers don't look like them, and they should maybe consider doing something else-- irrespective of class. Some of my highest performers have been in these groups.
> with the overall effect of selecting for class above all else.
I don't think this is very true of most interventions. But it's true that it's true to some extent for some.
And white and Asian males remain significantly advantaged over any other group, although the other groups don't seem to be as disadvantaged as they were 20 years ago.
If that is not your experience, we must live in different worlds. Mine is SF/SV, with offices in other large cities in the US.
That seems like something that could be experimentally tested.
My guess is the women's resume will get more interviews because tech companies really want to hire women software engineers.
The study you're mentioning has been done many times. The studies do tend to find that females do slightly better, but trivially so compared to the difference between typically white and black names.
e.g. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873...
The thing that this study found was that not only do blacks receive many fewer callbacks at baseline... they found that blacks' prospects improved less than whites' do when additional qualifications are added. That is, if you're black, you start as a disadvantage and you benefit less from efforts to improve your employability.
Or, that the best thing to improve your employability is adopting a typically white female name?
- I don't think that would actually work that well.
- Suggesting people should reasonably pretend to be white to get employment basically concedes that the game is broken, and it's kind of offensive to boot.
- While women may get (barely) more callbacks, I think we have filters earlier in life that make them less likely to end up with tech work; and we have filters later in life that tend to lower their economic compensation.
Duh? Why do you think immigrants to Anglo countries named Giovanni or Juan or Janek, have, since forever, changed their names to John?
> While women may get (barely) more callbacks, I think we have filters earlier in life that make them less likely to end up with tech work
Which suggests the optimal strategy is to either be a girl with a very enthusiastic tech parent who helps you overpower those toxic feminine norms. Or to be raised as a boy and then transition to a woman when you start working?
Can we wake up enough to see each other as equals?
I know what you are saying. Can it be expressed in an inclusive way? I mean that whatever woke you're talking about is still sleepwalking. And you want to explain this to others without sounding like you also are asleep or fixated on your own immutable personal situation. Perhaps I'm not making sense, but it's a try.
What happens when party A wants this, and plays the game accordingly, while parties B, C, D, E, and F say they want it but don’t follow the same rules?
However do you manage to put up with all the discrimination you face every day?
I know you’re being sarcastic, but I’m a real person too, with my own wish to live a happy life.
I have a hard time understanding how some people care so deeply for certain groups but then seem to have no empathy at all for others. I would’ve thought kindness would apply universally, but I suppose there are plenty of examples in history that show that isn’t necessarily the case.
You don’t have to treat them as anything other than fellow human beings and ends unto themselves. Every person out there has always used language a little differently from you, has grown up in a different place and circumstance, and generally arrived at the shared present a different way than you. The trick is to agree to treat people like people and that you’re there to be an additive good and not a detractor.
Could you please enumerate those? I am not aware of them.
People of other races often are not believed to be competent. I have personally been in situations where I got contracts because the employer did not believe the other person could do it based on race.
This is not even talking about the generational stolen wealth gap. Right now there are many, many racist people in positions of power that make investing and hiring decisions based on race. You have to bury your head in the sand to not see how many racists have come out of the shadows in the last 6 years. They were there the whole time, making decisions based on race.
Update: This seems limited to the idea that some female founders are sexually harassed when fundraising. That’s terrible, but I don’t think this article alone is sufficient to justify saying that “we have all the advantages”. That’s one issue out of potentially many factors of advantage and disadvantage that might each lean in the direction of a different group on average.
> You have to bury your head in the sand to not see how many racists have come out of the shadows in the last 6 years. They were there the whole time, making decisions based on race.
If you’re willing to provide another link, I am unfortunately not aware of this either, not even rumors of it, so I don’t know where to begin to look. Unless you’re talking about anti-majority racism, in which case I’ve seen tons of it firsthand.
https://www.eeoc.gov/initiatives/e-race/significant-eeoc-rac...
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/31/joe-arpaio-c...
When sheriff arpaio outright refused to stop using his police department to racially profile, to the point he was convicted in court, Trump pardoned him. It goes all the way to the top.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Joe_Arpaio
There are racists in positions of power throughout the us.
This is the inevitable result of viewing society as a collection of arbitrarily-created groups instead of individuals.
Projecting this forward 25 years, and knowing that WIRED is a progressive publication itself, I was seeing this as a prediction that wokeism itself would be stopped in its tracks by cultural backlash. So far as I can tell, that has not yet happened.
I didn't expect the moral scolds to be on the side of progress - usually there on the side of the status quo. My only gripe with the woke-scolds is their concern seems to be about the appearance of progress rather than material measurable progress.
I agree with most of their stated aims, but not their methods, the way they communicate them, or their seeming lack of care about meaningful progress.
I've been caught in the crossfire and had various distant parts of my social network try to vote me off the island at some point for one reason or another, they usually come back when the moment moves on - but not always.
Political correctness didn't get much traction outside of universities. "Woke" has.
Has it ever occurred to you that the certainty with which you express your views actually comes across as very arrogant and plainly racist, and turns people against your way of thinking?
Try debating with rational arguments, not by calling those who disagree with you racists.
So probably to be meaningful this would look like all the technological advancements society could make but don’t. Like if the highway systems had been proposed and gone unfunded-as an easier hypothetical to illustrate the point.
But they were labled as crazy moralists whatever their opinion was. Arguing with the pace and direction of progress is not the same as being anti progress, but for some parties it pays that it's perceived as such....
Really, the comment is underwhelming. Seems silly to hide it after it's grey already and annotated with all kinds of warnings.