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Comment by sanp | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have sources to cite on the negative impact of “wokeness”? Hard numbers. Could find any quantifiable impact. Perhaps I am not looking properly.

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Also you could argue a lot of the problem with wokeness is putting on the focus on less important things (empty displays of virtue about things that happened a century ago etc) whilst more important things get overlooked.

For example, big tech is very happy to posture endlessly over fashionable issues that cost nothing (put up a few posters, have a hashtag) but not so much on something like wage inequality (where they import people from OS and pay x times the national average).

My assumption is that your comment about things that happened a century ago is referring to slavery. This is something that has impacted numerous generations of people and the racist ideology that sprung from that period has put into place numerous legislative systems to prevent people in poverty from gaining ground. We exist as part of a system, so yes it absolutely is relevant.

Mobility is at an all time low, so examples of "but I made it" are irrelevant

Soft mental concepts such as wokeness are hard to study and quantify. That does not necessarily mean that they are meaningless. It is equally hard to study and quantify effects of societal trust, religiousness or nationalism, but most people would agree that all of those tend to shape societies quite radically.

I would think "wokeness" is too vague to study scientifically. That term has been used as a catch-all for many different things.

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