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Comment by fortituded0002 | Hacker News Reader

1. Everyone is the main character in their own story.

This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing.

2. Representation matters.

I knew this for a long time, but it didn't fully click until years had gone by and I realized I had unconsciously held myself back from pursuing a wide range of things because I just didn't see anyone like me there.

3. Rules in life are just constructs that we as humans have created.

Starting a business helped the most on this one. That's when I started to see that "rules" or "procedure" are all made up and exceptions can always be made.

(Edit: typos)

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> Everyone is the main character in their own story

For those with anxiety, one of the best pieces of advice I ever received (that also took me years to internalize!) was the corollary to this: nobody is thinking about you in a critical way, at the level that you are criticizing yourself, because they are their own main character. Which is incredibly freeing, because the anxious person’s assumption that one embarrassing moment will turn into them obsessing about your failure… is absolutely nonsensical, because the only person they are obsessing about is the main character to them, themself.

Thanks a lot for your comment! This part in particular

> the only person they are obsessing about is the main character to them, themself

seems obvious in retrospect.

>nobody is thinking about you in a critical way, at the level that you are criticizing yourself

I think there are shades of this, which is to say the level of judgement can vary.

I feel that in a smaller city my social anxiety is not as strong as when I’m in a larger city.

In larger cities, I feel much more evaluated and judged ie eyes on me looking at my clothes, checking me out, etc despite being a much more detached and impersonal environment than smaller cities where I just feel ignored. Maybe it’s just more people around putting me more on edge.

They might not judge you more in a large city, or be any more interested in you per see - they might just be a little bit more eager to check if you might be dangerous. As in places with many encounters with many people, the risk is higher.

Have you ever come across someone who you thought was dressed or acted strange while riding public transports or walking in the streets? Found one of your fellow traveler extremely attractive? I would assume most of us would answer yes.

Do you remember the face of these persons? I can tell you that I don't.

Nobody really cares about strangers in big cities. They are part of the background. Sometimes you are struck by something then you move along. Even people who might actually be judging you will have forgotten you exist minutes later. That's the beauty of cities.

I find it's the opposite for me. I'm basically anonymous in big cities, whereas smaller cities and towns can be, uh, incestuous when you start getting to know people. They can also be visciously judgmental, but that goes for people anywhere.

This is the classic platitude. I don't buy it - I do judge other people like that.

In aggregate, I have no doubt! But for a person suffering from social anxiety acute enough to affect their performance, the length of time that you are judging specifically them for a specific thing that they did is almost certainly orders of magnitude less than that person with anxiety fears - because, unless you've developed unheard-of levels of thought parallelism, you will almost certainly have moved on to judging someone else!

You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

Regarding #3, the following David Graeber quote always stuck with me:

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Sapiens by Harari covers this extensively. So much of human development is our ability to ascribe fictive boundaries and definitions to things. Rules, authorities, myths, money, culture, countries, companies. What are any of them? They're all made up. We could just stop believing in all of them tomorrow.

That is on my shelf ready to read. Just got to finish a couple more currently in the queue.

A convenient stance, I suppose, when discussing what to do with “useless eaters.”

> “useless eaters.”

Unfamiliar term. Turns out it is Nazi political slang.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useless_eater

Yes, Harari echoes this term in some of his speeches, asking what to do with the “useless class of people” that emerge in the wake of the AI Revolution. Instead of asking whether we should be evaluating the materialistic “usefulness” of human beings in terms of the purely economic value they generate, or even whether we should be pursuing technologies that will create these conditions, he satisfies himself with questions about how to keep the “useless people” out of the way with drugs and the Metaverse.

That, and the idea that humans are now programmable and the concept of free will is over. He and his son-of-a-Nazi mentor, Klaus Schwab, want to turn you into the Borg. Literally.

Harrari is a class A megalomaniac and psychopath. Study him if you like, but never let that fact slip your mind as you read his psychotic musings.

Convenience isn't the point. The rules of society, laws, morality, ethics, compassion as a virtue ... they don't exist as physical laws. They're human constructs, and humans can (and do) choose to ignore them.

It's an important growth moment to realise that the consequences of violating those "laws" are not delivered by the laws of nature but instead by the behaviour of humans. So you can be rude or arrogant, and the only punishment for that comes from people choosing not to work with you or similarly being unpleasant back to you.

Nazis had a lack of compassion and denied some people the (man-made!) rights of humanity based on race, ability, sexual orientation, and other categories. The consequences for that behaviour had to come from other people standing up to them.

I've met people who think that "the universe" will deliver just punishment for violating an ethical or moral code. In reality, every society and set of values is held together by people defending them and meting out punishing to violators. Sometimes formally (police, courts, armies, declarations of war) and sometimes personally.

I understand the argument you’re putting forth, I just view it as the equivalent of the argument made by the Nihilist Germans in The Big Lebowski. It ends in will to power.

Within the constraints of the materialistic assumptions underlying it, I do agree that the ideals of compassion and empathy are examples of best-case behavior but the humans who rise to the top in such systems are usually not encumbered with the capacity for either. They would push back on the constraints of such “objective ideals” anyway because they see no coherent place for them in will to power systems.

At macroscopic level ,human construct is as valid as nature's

What are useless eaters? You’ve put it in quotes, but I don’t see it elsewhere.

I often see Harari and Graeber's being discussed at the same time, and I am always surprised.

Harari write pop sci, a grand narrative with many liberties with both history and science.

Graeber's books are heavily referenced pieces of work. Debt: The first 5000 years ends at 73% on my Kindle, because the remaining 27% of the book (144/534 pages) is references and footnotes.

Their books are not in the same intellectual category.

The number of references are not an indication of the quality of a work. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments but in Debt, Graeber invents Adam Smith's morality whole cloth.

I have no intention of reading Dawn of Everything but reviewers have noticed references that say the opposite of what the authors claim they say.

I am aware that there are problems with the books, even some serious ones. But I find that hardly surprising from a book that references a 1000 other scholarly works. But the reason you can critique the book effectively is because he references where his claims originate from.

In the language of this essay [1], Graeber's work is legible, Harari's not at all.

[1] https://acesounderglass.com/2022/02/07/epistemic-legibility/

I find this interesting. I've read Graeber essays, but the only book I tried is "Utopia of Rules" and I found that it read as if he did exactly what you describe Harrari as doing.

It felt like he set up a windmill separate from reality to tilt at.

I do agree that Harari is great for thought piece stuff, I put him in the same category as Gladwell. Entertaining to read, but not to be trusted as a singular source.

Our models and explanations of the world are dependent on our belief system and the framework through which we look at. For example, a marxist's explanation of the economic system is very different from that of a neo-liberal. The two would not even agree on an ontology, yet alone the mechanism.

Graeber was a self-proclaimed anarachist. His books indeed have a different description of reality than the orthodox description of reality. If you don't agree with his description, then it will indeed look outlandish - the same way an atheist's and religious person's descriptions sound outlandish to each other. If you do agree with his descriptions, or at least that there are many different conceptions of the world, then his views are more reasonable.

Harari is not making scholarly arguments at all, so we cant even say much about his books.

But it’s all fictive boundaries. Don’t stop at countries and companies -nothing exists until it’s named.

This was my personal big breakthrough. I realized that humans deal with abstractions of things and not things themselves. Accordingly, most of what humans argue about isn’t even real, but rather only what is perceived through layer upon layer of abstraction.

I've had this revelation too but wouldn't describe it as a big breakthrough though sometimes it feels like it should matter more. Can I ask how you feel like this affects your day to day life?

It allows me to turn the volume down on things. So many things actually matter very little. Also, it allowed me to see things a bit more clearly. For example, all forms of categorization and measurement are somewhat arbitrary (no matter how useful). Another one I got from this is that meaning is assigned and not found as it exists only in the mind. Or, another favorite of mine, concepts don’t really exist. Like meaning or measurement, they are useful but not real.

For me the most concrete practical use of this kind of thinking is achieving "mind over matter" when dealing with physical pain. It seems to ease the emotional impact if you focus on the physical sensation of pain itself rather than the idea of pain, which carries so much more baggage that adds an extra dimension to the suffering that becomes counterproductive in non-survival scenarios like lifting heavy weight at the gym.

Indeed, except conceptually, there is no actual separation between "things."

See: quantum mechanics.

Most of those things are backed up with guns though. Which for me, makes them as real as they need to be.

All values ,social construct and structure we create as human maybe just as part of our human existence (essence ) ,same a wildlife photographer watches wild animals ,like a passive observer ,without any moral judgement and prejudice .We can watch humans with same lens ,all our man made problem ,may it be ecological disasters or economic system ,it maybe just side effect of our existence as a species.

+1 for the Graeber quote. I wasn't familiar with it but makes sense he would have originated it. Dovetailing that with this Ask HN theme: When you realize that bog-standard consumer loan amortization formulae are arbitrary and not grounded in any fundamental reality more detailed than "the lender gets something in addition to the amount lent", it's eye-opening. I didn't really recognize that until after reading his Debt: The First 5000 Years (yes, I'm familiar with the statement flaws that others have commented before about his works), but set against alternatives I learned about in business school, like zero-coupon bonds (special to corporates, bondholders, and banks) it put the standard loan amortization schedule into context.

#3 really hits home when you realize we have rules for killing each other (war). And we have separate legal trials to determine if someone broke those rules while trying to kill someone else. The penalty for breaking the rules about killing someone often is to be killed.

Probably most rules that we have are there to prevent us (admittedly this applies mostly to men) from killing each other.

That's why "rules are just constructs we humans created" rings stupid/horrifying. Obviously they were created by humans but that is also why they matter. I prefer "rules were written by humans, mostly in blood". It took years for OP to get the first part, here's to them getting the second part faster.

One doing something wrong to another would get families into an infinite loop of mutual revenge--until we got around precisely to create rules and put up a trusted authority to ensure justice without the need for vengeance. Rules is how our civilization functions and its only hope.

Honar killing

> 3 really hits home when you realize we have rules for killing each other (war

Those are some of the oldest and most important ones

2. Hits home for me as I’ve begun to realize the same thing. Not seeing any person of color in an activity makes it’s so I don’t want to be the first.

Similarly this gives me pause about Ivy League MBA programs.

Although a small sample size, despite their ambitions the BIPOC people I know haven’t been able to reap any professional benefits from it. Whether from access to executive roles, getting taken seriously by venture capital firms, or in their attempts to join venture capital firms. There is a level of discretion in these team forming situations that is not extended to them whether it has anything to do with their race or not, its pretty clear the upwards mobility is not coming from this credential.

For people with their own capital and leverage, it amplifies their ambition if they want. BIPOC don't really have this.

The “average salary” of MBA alumnis is not what is interesting about getting one, for me or them.

Some, or more, examples to the contrary would make it seem less like a total waste of time.

I am not an ivy league MBA person but my understanding of these sorts of things is that it's not the credential itself that's useful, but the connections you make in the process.

yes, all participants were aware of this, and yet the connections resulted in no improved professional access or ability to exchange time for food and shelter.

> the BIPOC people I know haven’t been able to reap any professional benefits from it

Probably because there's almost always an Asian who's more qualified or a white with better connections. The problem is the key insight you get from a BIPOC is BIPOC tend to not have much money (set aside equity and vicious cycles for another day), so unless they're your market, you're not interested in marketing to people who can't afford your products.

but this isn't about marketing or needing a BIPOC to point out BIPOC markets?

thats a really odd take, how did you start with connections and end up with consumer marketing?

is this a personal experience or is this non-sequitur is a common sentiment because we need to address that as ignorance

I'm looking how diverse candidates from Ivies meaningfully differentiate themselves. Ivies admit to discriminating against Asians, so on average, a BIPOC from an Ivy will be less qualified than an Asian. Why would you hire them, then? The pitch for diversity is always that diverse teams make better decisions, but it's not racial diversity that does it, it's different lived experiences. Companies exist to make money, so how can they turn someone's insight from an underprivileged background into sales when poor people buy less? This was also in the context of an MBA program where the whole purpose is making money. It'd be different for a PM of an app where 100% reach is the goal.

thanks for explaining that, I think there are some assumptions that are flawed in this decision tree.

1) the admissions into the Ivy would be biased, the education should be the same as before, as admissions into Ivy were always biased in some way. So whatever their alumni (and dropouts) were known for in that brand would still be the same.

2) aggregate better decisions due to different lived experiences doesn't mean just selling consumer products to underprivileged people. you're really going to have to work on what people mean by that, "sales to poor people" isn't the whole universe of different lived experiences, there can be other market inefficiencies with a good TAM. very similar to non-revenue based reach.

So even with all the BLM advocacy, there is no pipeline for Black people with MBAs from Ivy League schools? That doesn't fit with what I've seen in other industries. Companies fell all over themselves to hire Black people. Is this not happening in MBA-land?

read it again, its not about getting hired, its about getting capital and decision making roles that skip the corporate ladder.

these have an overrepresentation of Ivy League MBAs in them with a pedigree that has nothing to do with promotions. People see the Ivy League MBA as key to this and aren’t interested in the other things an MBA can do. The jobs these disillusioned alumni have were attainable without the MBA.

Your original claim was much broader:

> despite their ambitions the BIPOC people I know haven’t been able to reap any professional benefits from it

because they didn't need the MBA for the roles they did land

its all part of one contiguous complete thought

You also say:

> the connections resulted in no improved professional access or ability to exchange time for food and shelter.

When you make such broad statements, then walk them back in comments downstream, it makes conversation unfruitful.

you’re unwilling to view it as a coherent and related thought

“improved” is the operative word that you seem to ignore or view as contradictory

the MBA did not improve their work prospects, they already had work prospects. you asked for a clarification, you call the clarification backtracking

do you have an actual opinion on the topic now that its more clear for you

When you ignore such large chunks of context, it makes conversation unfruitful

There are very typical archetypes that benefit from top MBAs and if your background isn’t one of those, then it won’t help. For example I doubt an associate (who is black) at a major IB firm gets much worse outcomes from an Ivy League MBA than their white peers. If black people are over represented in the people who are admitted but not from those backgrounds that stand to most benefit, it would stand to reason their outcomes would be on average worse. But that doesn’t mean taking an arbitrary white MBA grad and making them black would make their outcomes much worse

my first post covered all of this rehash posted as a rebuttal

"despite the small sample size"

"despite their ambitions"

for people with the typical archetype "it amplifies their ambition if they want"

"whether it has anything to do with their race or not"

"the “average salary” of MBA alumnis is not what is interesting about getting one"

the point is for more examples that show its not a waste of time for ambitious BIPOC, and what archetype would help integrate them into the archetype that often happens to also have an MBA. is it possible to obtain this archetype or are we really in a caste system.

As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the psychology of this.

I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in California, people talked about race way less than they do today. When ethnic representation became a common topic of conversation, I had a hard time believing it at first, because it seemed so self-evidently obvious to me that race wasn't a particularly important characteristic of a person. I actually had the experience of thinking back to my time in jr high/high school and thinking "wow, that friend of mine had dark skin, and they weren't from India... I guess they were Black, huh".

I'm not trying to claim that I didn't have subconscious biases related to race as a kid. I'm sure I did. But I do suspect they have become a lot more severe as a result of people talking about race so much -- it has become a much more salient characteristic. (I'm also more aware of trying to mitigate my biases and avoid microaggressions and so on, of course.)

So yeah, I'm curious to compare notes with other 90s kids in this regard. I'm white, but if I was Black, I imagine that I'd be way more self-conscious about it now than I was when I was growing up. (Like, if I'm the only white person in a group, I feel self-conscious about it now in a way that I didn't feel when I was a kid.)

I’m not sure > As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them.

Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming, the commentator will still be the first/only person of color in the group and there is a discomfort inherent to that even if everyone is trying to be welcoming.

Also re “colorblind” policies of the 90a versus the explicitness of today, I think it’s similar to the current reckoning in journalism. We all have biases and pretending we don’t/acting like we are capable of pure objectivity simply hides them and makes them more difficult to combat. On the other hand explicitly acknowledging them allows you to consider how they might be influencing your decisions.

I certainly didn't mean to invalidate their discomfort -- as I mentioned at the end, I feel the same way sometimes. I apologize if people found it invalidating.

I actually wrote the initial draft of my comment with welcomingness as sort of a background assumption in my mind, and then I thought "wait a minute, even if I'm assuming that people would be welcoming, the person reading my comment might not. and given how hostile online discussions can get, it seems safer to err on the side of emphasizing welcomingness." That still seems roughly correct to me -- I think some topics have so much hostility associated with them that whatever you're going to say about the topic, it probably makes sense to also add in a bunch of welcomingness too, just so the discussion goes well.

For the colorblindness part, I think my core objection to the cultural changes which have occurred since I was a kid is not to increased awareness of biases per se, but rather this phenomenon: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb

My feeling is that the best way to reduce subconscious bias is to have good race relations. And the best way to have good race relations is to have more positive interactions than negative interactions.

A thought experiment: Imagine a non-Mexican person says "I love celebrating Cinco de Mayo. It's an excellent excuse to drink tequila!"

As a culture, we can decide whether that's a positive interaction or a negative interaction.

We can make it a positive interaction by laughing and clinking glasses.

We can make it a negative interaction by calling the person out for cultural appropriation or trivializing an important Mexican holiday.

My intuition is that making it a negative interaction is a big mistake, because it worsens subconscious racial biases and generally makes the world a less pleasant place. I recommend playing this game https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb to better understand my intuition here. (Based on what I've read about Israel/Palestine, the game is an excellent description of why things have been getting so bad there lately.)

I know this just your example but I think it demonstrates the larger issue with victim culture. Cinco de Mayo is not actually a very important holiday in Mexico. I agree that it’s not good to turn everything into a negative interaction but it’s not clear to me that having “cultural appropriation” as a top of mind issue is a very healthy thing either.

Cultural appropriation is nonsense. Probably most of what we are is a result of cross-pollination of cultures. Who gets to decide who belongs to one group or another?

I think they are called Progressives.

Irony is heavy there, unintentional double entendre of sorts. Mexicans barely recognize or care about the 5th of May. That’s an American Chicano celebration for the most part. Mexicans kind of laugh about its importance in the US.

I say this from Mexico, sitting next to my Mexican wife and her mother.

To loop this back to OP, "US Mexicans" are different from "Mexico Mexicans" is something I didn't realize until my adult life. They have their own way of speaking, their own foods, and a more recent immigrant background as a minority, which has a huge affect sociologically. That doesn't make their particular cultural enclave less important, but it is an interesting observation. American Italians are another great example of this, though their immigration ended much longer ago.

I find the unatonable original sin spin placed on white people these days in the USA to be a tad bit repulsive personally.

And that’s why the Proud Boys say they’re not apologizing for creating the modern world. And the idea is popular.

To be clear, many Hispanics agree. Many of their ancestors played a role alongside the rest of their fellow whites. Whites are still admired by Asians as well.

This anti-white thing is largely an American phenomenon and other far left folks around the world that are resentful and cannot accept responsibility for their own condition. The rest of them deal with the hand they’re dealt, and go to work. As no one has more influence over their lives than them. We just accept it rather than adopt victimhood as a way of life. That’s how you create losers.

Not sure what fantasy you’re living in where a terrorist group (aside from perhaps the U.S. government) is “creating the modern world” lmao

I presume whatever fantasy it is might be a fairly common “master race” one

The "they" when they say "they" created the modern world is not the membership of the organisation, but rather western civilisation/culture.

If it is silly to feel responsible for bad things that other people did, just because they happened to have the same color of skin, it is also silly to take credit for the good things other people did.

Exactly. We can only be proud of what we personally accomplish.

I wasn’t endorsing the Proud Boys, but they aren’t completely without a point either. I’m more concerned victimhood culture is destroying more lives than racism is at this point.

My wife is not a white woman. No one’s going to tell our kids that they’re doomed. I want them to flourish. regardless of circumstances, through grit, persistence, determination, and resilience.

At a certain point, we all need to deal with the hand we’re dealt in life. I certainly was not on the fortunate side of the fence myself.

There’s a reason why a lot of families no longer exist. Tough times came and they put a bullet in their head. We’re heading for tough times again and outcomes will be delineated by who has taught their children strong values.

Well strictly speaking a) they don't say they're proud of it, they say the "refuse to apologise for it" and b) they have ethnic minority members and their leader was afro-cuban (Enrique Tarrio).

This is true. I am not a Proud Boy expert. I don't support the movement. I just know of them and referenced a line of theirs. But their stance is better nuanced than my recollection was.

I do like the minority inclusion because you don't have to be white to be Christian, support a modern law-abiding civilization, or generally do "what works". I'm white but my wife is Mexican. We're both very conservative in most ways. Her family is proud of the Christian conquest of Latin America and don't think they went far enough in the conquest. Far beyond the typical liberal American view of boo hoo for the "natives". Americans are not aware that many hispanics are more conservative than they think. The racial purity thing is not going to be very productive going forward. The Proud Boys were a model for the future in that regard.

What the boat is sailing on now though are Greco-Roman values, which is the basis of western civilization. Which is kind of important since the east tends to rely on oppression. Look at Russia and China today.

To be clear, are you saying that white people are supposed to feel bad for being white because of "bad things" done by white people?

That is the underlying tone that comes across to me whenever these subjects come up. Effectively pushing against the idea makes one a "racist" or a "white supremacist" as far as I can tell. I don't know how to respond to that kind of labeling because I don't find myself disliking people because of something as superficial as their skin color.

> Effectively pushing against the idea makes one a "racist" or a "white supremacist" as far as I can tell.

Your wording is a wee bit vague. There's nothing wrong about pushing back on the notion that if one is white than one is guilty of crimes committed in the name of white superiority (because that's actually racist too).

But it also doesn't discount the fact that racism is still very much a problem.

I am not vague. What is vague is the shadowy threat of being called a racist for stating ones opinion while having the wrong color of skin. It is a problem. Just a wee bit.

I'm sorry -- that wasn't intended as an insult, more of an issue on me being able to ascertain exactly what you were saying. Comprehending other people's writing can be challenging at times even if you think you know what they're saying.

One's opinion should stand on the words/ideas behind them, not what one looks like. Getting called out for that is bullshit and should be disregarded.

Part of my confusion is also that I don't feel the threat that you mention. I'm also okay with being challenged and with being wrong. I think the key is to try to engage with respect and be prepared to listen to what the other party is trying to say -- and assume best intentions.

I fully agree with you about ideas standing on their merits. I hope we continue to move in that direction as a species.

The better question to ask yourself (you the white guy), is would you join a group [insert som hobby like hiking] composed 100% of Cholitas. If yes, are you sure? if not, why not?

*Not singling out Cholitas, but it's a group that may feel "other" to you.

As I stated, I've had the experience of feeling self-conscious in a group where I was the only white person (or one of just a few). That never happened when I was a kid, but it has happened a few times as an adult.

With regard to the Cholitas thought experiment, I think my major source of discomfort is that at least one of them would look at me and think to herself "he's a patriarchical colonizer" and feel hostility from that. I'd feel more comfortable if I had a friend in the group who could vouch for me. Otherwise I'd worry the Cholitas didn't want me to be there.

I suppose that works in reverse as well -- an ethnic person might look at a group of white people and worry that one of them was present at Jan 6 or what have you.

What I miss from my childhood was the feeling that we're all in this together as human beings and race just isn't important. In the time & place I grew up, if someone was to start denigrating others on the basis of race, everyone would consider them to be an unimportant wacko. In that cultural context I wouldn't feel as much apprehension joining a group of Cholitas.

I strongly agree. Trading in the "shared humanity" approach for one where we self segregate and pre-emptively expect and search for discrimination at all moments seems like the opposite of progress.

The better question is would that group let a lone white guy join?

In my experience of being that 'lone white guy' more often than not, the amount of general acceptance I get in any group where I've been the odd man out has been great. Life is very different offline.

If I lived in a majority-Cholita area, I would not give it a second thought. If I lived in an area with not many Cholitas, I would wonder if there was a reason the group had only Cholitas.

Really? I live in Japan but am not Japanese. I speak Japanese and have many Japanese friends. I’d feel quite different about joining a hiking group that was 100% Japanese as opposed to one that had a mix of Japanese and non-Japanese people.

Seems likely there's a Japan/US difference here

I don't have experience with Japan. But if I were in an English-speaking country I'd not give it a second thought.

An English speaking country like Ireland? Or an English speaking country like Jamaica, Nigeria or Pakistan?

Yep!

I regularly attend yoga classes where I am the only man. It doesn’t bother me.

Heck yes. But I'm weird that way. It took me until I was in my 40s to realize the majority of women I had dated would be defined as black in most people's eyes. I hadn't even thought about race or defining anyone. I'm super white with blue eyes but my dad has what my mom termed a 'Mediterranean complexion' and my grandma was even 'more Mediterranean' with 'kinky' hair (she wasn't being racist just trying to point something out to me that I failed to understand, even after her pointing them out). My poor mom. She tried to explain my grandparents didn't approve of my dad because he was different. I was like 'oh, because of his long hair'. My mom gave up at that point.

I feel bad for the woman who kept pointing out she was from Oakland and I kept just treating her like the Santa Cruz surf betties I had dated before not realizing what she was hinting at or that I might be taking her out of her comfort zone. I like to think the date we boogie boarded all day then ate pizza in the back of my truck while the porpoises swam by (learn their schedule Las Selva/Aptos peeps, 'running into' porpoises at the beach adds a little extra magic to a date for valleys not used to it) was good and not too uncomfortable.

I’m a fellow white man, currently surrounded by Mexicans in Mexico. The only white here. No problems at all. I’m treated as an individual and treat others the same.

It’s very refreshing. It’s like the USA in my youth. Back in Chicago the racial tensions with blacks is far more. But still not as bad as one would assume. There’s a few that think their purpose in life is to scold you. A lot of that is just culture though, victimhood culture is permeating all racial groups in the US.

I have spent large parts of my life living with and interacting with people who are not my "skin color" so, yes, not a problem at all.

> As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them.

I've heard similar things, but as a non-minority, you don't see what happens when you aren't looking or when people think they can get away with something without consequences, including social or professional consequences. Someone who is a minority has to live it 24/7, so they get a bigger picture that you don't.

You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention.

With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.

>You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention.

Yeah I totally buy that.

>With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.

If we believe racial discrimination is the root cause of racial inequality, then "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. So the thing about people patting themselves on the back seems perhaps overly cynical?

I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. For example, this Gallup poll indicates that Black adults believe race relations with white people have gotten much worse since 2013: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx

And I've seen research indicating that corporate bias reduction trainings typically backfire. Apparently if you want your company to have more diverse leadership, one of the most effective ways to do that is to create an official mentorship program which randomly pairs off junior people and senior people without regard to race. It seems that a junior employee of color gets better mentorship if they are regarded as a "junior employee at our company" as opposed to "junior employee of color". The mentorship program just works to overcome activation energy and create relationships between junior and senior people which might otherwise not exist due to awkwardness. (This is all from Chapter 8 of the book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It)

The output of the 90s and 00s era was Obama getting elected president in 2008 and serving two terms. By contrast, I do think you can make the argument that Trump is in some sense a product of the woke era.

Trump's popularity exploded around July 2015: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2...

But e.g. the number of NY Times articles on "whiteness" were on an exploding trend by 2014: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

(The number of articles with those terms grows even faster after Trump becomes popular. I would postulate that the mechanism is something like this game I linked elsewhere in the thread https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb )

Anyway, my impression from reading right-wing Twitter feeds is that supposed woke overreach is a major motivation for Trump supporters, playing into the backfire point I mentioned previously.

I'm sure there is room to improve on the 90s and 00s. But I remain skeptical of the politician's syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."

> "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test.

This was the status quo for a very long time. Mentioning people's race was like mentioning people's weight. It didn't work.

> I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s.

The 2005 study "Are Greg and Emily More Employable Than Jamal and Lakisha" applied to jobs 5000 times with a stack of carefully crafted fake resumes that were randomly assigned names that were either stereotypically white (e.g. Greg, Emily) or black (e.g. Jamal, Lakisha.) The same resumes with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks. Over 5000 job applications. What we were doing in the 90s/2000s was not working and the fact that many white people find the polite approach more comfortable is not a good reason to stick to it. This isn't a social problem-- we're talking about people's basic chance of success in life. This idea that we can have equal opportunity by deliberately avoiding intervention is a proven fallacy. Pushing through the discomfort to find what actually works is a worthwhile undertaking. If another race with a far larger population was 50% more likely to get job callbacks than you were, I guarantee you'd agree.

The increase in political tension our culture has seen in the past decade plus is vastly more complex than the most visible catalyst of any given moment. Blaming social progress for the increasing resistance to social progress doesn't make sense. You could just as easily blame fascism or any other activist end of a political blob. As flawed and overly bandwagoned as it may be, "wokeness" is addressing real problems that oppress people in measurable ways every day. "Anti-Wokeness" is just another value signalling position to have that highlights political fault lines far older than any living American.

I'm not sure the 2005 study tells us much. Our question is which strategy works best for reducing discrimination. To answer that, we'd want to measure the level of discrimination over time to estimate the trend.

Imagine we found an identical study from 1995 that showed that white people received 100% more callbacks at that time, and a study from 1985 that found that white people received 200% more callbacks at that time. And then imagine that when subgroup analysis was done on the 2005 study, it was determined that most of the effect was from older hiring managers who were about to age out of the population. In this hypothetical, the study would strongly validate the strategy being used in the 90s and the 00s.

>This idea that we can have equal opportunity by deliberately avoiding intervention is a proven fallacy.

I didn't claim that. I just want interventions that don't backfire.

For example, how about removing the name from the resume?

With modern technology, it would be easy to conduct interviews remotely over screenshare with a voice changer.

80/20 rule, 20% of the discrimination probably causes 80% of the harm. As you imply, hiring discrimination is one of the most harmful types of discrimination. So anonymized interviews could put a serious dent in racial inequality. As the technology matured, we could hit firms which didn't anonymize interviewees with a punitive tax.

Would certainly be an interesting study, at least. Run it every few years to measure the trend in discrimination, as discussed previously.

>The increase in political tension our culture has seen in the past decade plus is vastly more complex than the most visible catalyst of any given moment.

If political tension is a complex phenomenon, isn't it possible that racial discrimination is also a complex phenomenon, which won't be solved effectively using the social equivalent of a sledgehammer?

>Blaming social progress for the increasing resistance to social progress doesn't make sense.

Imagine a cop responded to criticism by saying: "Blaming crime fighting for the increasing resistance to crime fighting doesn't make sense." Would you find that persuasive?

It's possible to "solve" a problem in a way that superficially looks like progress, but actually makes the underlying issue worse. And if you can find a way to get paid money to do that, you'll never be out of a job. (Trump may not be good for America, but he's good for CBS. NY Times subscriptions exploded in the wake of Trump's election, IIRC.)

>You could just as easily blame fascism or any other activist end of a political blob.

I do in fact blame fascism. Historically speaking, it seems fairly normal for right-wing extremism and left-wing extremism to arise at the same time in the same society. The left-wing extremism is strengthened by the right-wing extremism, and vice versa.

That's a pretty glib dismissal of a peer-reviewed and heavily cited study with a ton of data. Calling any of these interventions a social sledgehammer is laughably hyperbolic. How does any of what I said really on racism being simple? The name on the resume is obviously a symptom of a larger problem and only one of many ways someone's race shows up in any number of consequential situations far more difficult to spot, like in neural network derived decisions. No I don't blame crime fighting for the increased resistance to crime fighting because the actions taken by cops that people are actually mad about are crimes and opposing them is crime fighting. That you consider interrogating our culture to highlight racism to be political extremism says a lot. I'm all done here.

>That's a pretty glib dismissal of a peer-reviewed and heavily cited study with a ton of data.

I explained why regardless of study quality, the study can't support the point you want it to. You're not addressing my point, just making a vague appeal to authority.

>Calling any of these interventions a social sledgehammer is laughably hyperbolic.

What interventions are you referring to? You yourself referred to wokeness as "flawed and overly bandwagoned".

>How does any of what I said really on racism being simple?

You argued, without any supporting evidence, that it couldn't be the case that efforts to reduce racism could make it worse. If racism is complex then we shouldn't be surprised by counterintuitive results like that.

>The name on the resume is obviously a symptom of a larger problem and only one of many ways someone's race shows up in any number of consequential situations far more difficult to spot, like in neural network derived decisions.

I didn't claim that removing names from resumes was a complete solution, but it's suspicious that there seems to be so little interest in it, given that it could be very impactful.

Additionally, reducing hiring discrimination should have positive downstream effects: As Black people get better jobs, they move up in social class and that reduces stereotyping.

I think the fact that you aren't interested in an incremental solution should make you wonder if you're part of the flawed woke bandwagon you referred to. Remember, lots of incremental solutions can add up to a complete solution.

>No I don't blame crime fighting for the increased resistance to crime fighting because the actions taken by cops that people are actually mad about are crimes and opposing them is crime fighting.

By the same token, many people who claim to advance social progress may actually be advancing social regress.

>That you consider interrogating our culture to highlight racism to be political extremism says a lot.

I consider abolishing the police to be political extremism. See this article: "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

>I'm all done here.

I don't mind, it's tiresome to debate people who argue in bad faith.

I don't see how you've rebutted the study at all; you've argued that it would be possible to offset the racism in job applications by scrubbing names from resumes and using voice changers on interview calls (come on). But both of those interventions just mitigate the racism, they don't directly reduce it.

Mewanwhile, you've just cited a totally unrelated (and widely dunked-upon) NYT op-ed as evidence for your position, and then accused the person you're arguing with of bad faith. Physician, heal thyself.

>I don't see how you've rebutted the study at all

You're correct, I haven't rebutted the study. Again, I explained that it doesn't make the point he wants it to make. See first 2 paragraphs here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214917

>using voice changers on interview calls (come on)

What I describe has already been done for gender: https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...

And if researchers can change the name on an applicant's resume to do a study, why can't HR departments do the same thing?

"Come on" is not a good faith counterargument.

>But both of those interventions just mitigate the racism, they don't directly reduce it.

I'm not sure that is true. Imagine someone had the experience of interviewing a Black developer using a voice changer, giving them a thumbs up, meeting them in person for the first time, and learning that they were Black -- counter to the stereotype they held. You don't think that experience could be a powerful demonstration of a person's racial bias which could cause them to rethink some stuff?

Past that, I don't see why the distinction between mitigating and reducing is so important. Racism is bad because it causes bad effects. (CF argument earlier in the thread: "If another race with a far larger population was 50% more likely to get job callbacks than you were, I guarantee you'd agree.") If the easiest way to reduce the bad effects doesn't involve reducing racism, we should do it anyway. The point is to help people, not ideologically purify people.

>Mewanwhile, you've just cited a totally unrelated (and widely dunked-upon) NYT op-ed as evidence for your position

I cited it as evidence for the position that some extremists want to abolish the police. It's right there in the title of the op-ed. I don't see what dunking has to do with it.

Here's a woman with almost half a million Twitter followers saying the same thing in 2022: https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1547223384643231744 She tweets something like this every few months. Here's one of her tweets where she explains what she means in more detail: https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1267138648174137345

Interviewing.io ran an experiment with voice changes, in part for the publicity value (that's not a criticism). Can you cite a tech company with more than 20 employees that uses voice changers in interviews?

There's a bunch of other problems with what you're saying here (for instance, the idea that you can correct for ethnicity with a voice changer), but they're not interesting compared to this question.

>Can you cite a tech company with more than 20 employees that uses voice changers in interviews?

No, I cannot. It seems that despite the big conversation about diversity in tech, people aren't very interested in practical solutions to reducing discrimination.

It comes down to the point I made about helping people vs ideological purification. Many people prefer the latter. This is the sort of left-wing extremism I referred to earlier.

To be honest, I think the main reason companies don't use voice changers is if they do, the ideological purifier types will go after them. Just in this thread you can see how upset you and DrewADesign got, after I suggested the idea.

>the idea that you can correct for ethnicity with a voice changer

If it can work for gender, why can't it work for race?

> If it can work for gender, why can't it work for race?

Because pitch/tone is different than ethnolect, and voice changers can obscure differences of the first but not the second.

Women and men also use language differently. I doubt this is a big issue in practice -- you could mask the ethnolect using AI.

> Women and men also use language differently

Not as significantly.

> I doubt this is a big issue in practice

It absolutely is.

> you could mask the ethnolect using AI.

That’s not just a “voice changer”, and if you are going beyond pronunciation to alter grammar and vocabulary that is ethnically identifying, with even modern AI, you have a non-negligible chance of occasionally whiffing and radically altering semantics.

Also worth pointing out that this ethno-masking AI is a service that, so far as I know, does not currently exist. Which makes citing it a particularly weak response to the studies that show candidates with identifiably Black ethnicity do poorly compared to white-coded candidates with identical backgrounds.

There does seem to be a bit of conflating “this is an idea which might have potential and be worth investment in researching and developing” with “this is an alternative which actually exists, and if there was any concern people would just use it”.

I only meant to make the first claim, FWIW.

The idea was suggested in response to someone who implied I favored "deliberately avoiding intervention". I mentioned the idea to clarify my position, and give an example of the sort of intervention I'd be in favor of.

If someone turns it into a product, they deserve mega kudos as far as I'm concerned.

Lets not forget that you changed the framing on this discussion, from (paraphrased) "there is evidence that race-based preferences are widespread in hiring, suggesting that we should take seriously the idea of race-specific privileges and disadvantages among candidates", to your preferred discussion of "is it possible to engineer a system that would prevent hiring managers from knowing the race of applicants".

How "upset" I got?

Here's a user telling me I'm "desperate to assuage and protect racist beliefs" because (a) I said we should avoid methods that backfire, and (b) I suggested a practical idea for reduction of racial discrimination in hiring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34226817

What does that have to do with the question I just asked you? Can you just answer it directly?

You're confusing me with the poster you're responding to.

The best way to put out a fire is to ensure that it doesn't start in the first place.

Racism stems from racist beliefs, and your approach to putting out spot fires ignores the raging wildfire that's spitting them out. Confronting the source of racist behavior, racist beliefs, is confronting the root cause of discrimination.

In the 90s and 00s, much of the anti-racism education consisted of the same things you'd cry "woke" about, but were instead called "politically correct". The education confronted racist beliefs, and engaged the how and why those beliefs were wrong, and gave students and intuition about why those beliefs were wrong when they encounter them in their lives.

CRT, for example, is nothing new. Anti-racism education in the 90s and 00s was direct implementations of the CRT school of thought that existed in the decades prior. At the time, the right-wing was losing their minds over how "PC" it was to say "African American", or to teach that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and not the fig leaf of "states' rights", or that they shouldn't say the n-word but black people can.

"Woke" is the new "PC", and the CRT that gets derided as "woke" is the same CRT that was derided as "PC" in the past, and it is the same CRT that influenced anti-racism education during your halcyon days of the 90s and 00s. That same anti-racism education addressed those very same racist beliefs you're desperate to assuage and protect.

Dancing around the problem and pretending racism and racist beliefs don't exist, because pointing that out makes some people uncomfortable, is something we've tried for decades, and it doesn't work, as MLK has pointed out:

> First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."

Right-wing resistance to the results of liberal democracy is as old as time, and not anything new that suddenly appeared in 2015 like you seem to beleive. All of the rhetoric you hear now is the same rhetoric espoused by the right in the decades prior. The right has spent decades getting triggered over direct action and society acknowledging racism, and "woke" is just what they're calling it instead of "PC".

These beliefs existed before 2015, but they were mostly only expressed in "good company" between like-minded individuals, because blatant racism became a social faux pas. They were allowed to fester and go unaddressed because addressing them made people uncomfortable. But then Trump comes in and welcomes the far right renaissance that was happening around the world, a world-wide renaissance that had nothing to do with the NY Times posting articles that upset you, to the US. Trump showed them that no, they don't have to speak about those beliefs in hushed tones, you can wear bigotry on your sleeve and millions of people will celebrate it. Since you seem to take their rhetoric seriously, you can find plenty of far right leaders and ideologues saying just that, that Trump is "their guy" and that he opened the door to mainstream their far right ideas and rhetoric.

I object to "anti-racist" advocacy which has been shown to be actively counterproductive. It's not a firefighting method if it makes the fire worse.

I don't claim we should never confront racism. I claim we should do it in an evidence-based way.

I went through the public education system in the 90s and 00s, in California's Bay Area of all places, and the discussion around race was very different than the discussion today. The idea that we should treat people the same regardless of race has switched from being a liberal position to being a conservative position. It seems to me that whatever was being done in the 90s and 00s "worked" in a way that what we're doing today does not. Probably because what we're doing today is very different, and is the product of an ideological conversation on social media rather than a conversation informed by data or reasoned discussion.

>But then Trump comes in and welcomes the far right renaissance that was happening around the world, a world-wide renaissance that had nothing to do with the NY Times posting articles that upset you, to the US.

Generally speaking the rest of the world takes their cultural cues from the US much more than the US takes their cultural cues from the rest of the world. Hollywood movies are viewed globally. The entire world follows news from the United States closely. Much of the rest of the world uses American social media websites. Etc.

It's a common observation that the current rise of wokism started in the US and then spread elsewhere in the world, which fits the general pattern. So the overall hypothesis that NY Times left-wing extremism is the root cause of the current worldwide far-right renaissance is pretty plausible to me. As you said -- treat the root cause.

>Since you seem to take their rhetoric seriously, you can find plenty of far right leaders and ideologues saying just that, that Trump is "their guy" and that he opened the door to mainstream their far right ideas and rhetoric.

I don't claim otherwise.

You were just confronted with evidence, and invented an AI ethnic voice masker on the spot to dismiss it. Your evidence, meanwhile, is an NYT op-ed about police abolition. I don't necessarily endorse anything this person wrote (I didn't read it that carefully), but in this thread you've been deploying a number of really weak arguments.

I don't think you've been reading my comments very carefully either -- it seems like you are generally missing the structure of my reasoning, and reinterpreting it as a sort of collage of bits of pieces of what I'm saying. (I'm going to stop responding to you in this thread, because I have a feeling neither of us is getting much out of this discussion -- but if you're interested in understanding my position better, I encourage you to read what I've already written more carefully. Please don't attribute positions to me that I don't hold, and keep in mind that I'm a human who makes mistakes.)

What makes you think talking more about race works any better or should be considered to be "social progress" rather than the opposite? Would that study have better results if done today? I'm not American, but I don't see why you are so sure today's America is not closer to the Jim Crow Era than 2005 was.

I'm a black person who grew up in Sweden in the 00s and early 10s, and I'm very glad race was never relevant or talked about outside of social science class. Almost everyone at my school was white, and I never felt like I was different because of my skin color. The first person who ever told me that my race or skin color was relevant to anything was an American. The worst thing about American culture (and what keeps me from moving to the US even though I could make much more money there) is that so many Americans are insisting on considering race (and other arbitrary categorizations like ethnicity, sex and gender) to be such a large part of what makes a person, overshadowing that person's unique attributes and identity.

You didn't grow up in America, you grew up in Sweden. I don't think any further explanation is required.

You should read about the experiences of African Americans. Many cultural facets and political tensions held over from slavery are alive and well.

Financially, income inequality in Sweden is vastly lower than in the United States as it is, and in the United States much of the inequality falls on racial boundaries. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study found that local white household’s median net worth was $247,000 while for African American households it was $8. Yes, eight single dollars. The Black population in Boston has been well established for well over a century, and much of its white population came in waves of western European immigration in the early to mid 20th century.

Not talking about this problem hasn't solved it so far because systemic self-perpetuating inequality doesn't just go away if you ignore it.

I'm not objecting to talking about racism. I'm objecting to seeing race as a significant part of what makes a person. It's possible to do one without the other.

I don't see how it's useful to note that something didn't work when there is no evidence to suggest that the alternative works any better. I don't understand how talking more about race as a characteristic could possibly help to reduce racism or racial inequality. It seems to me much more likely to do the opposite.

That the social construct of race shouldn't contribute significantly to a person's identity is irrelevant. Vast troves of empirical evidence show how dramatically being born on one side or another of a racial boundary in the United States changes your life experience. See the study I cited in another comment "Are Greg and Emily more employable than Jamal and Lakisha." researchers sent 5000 job applications to jobs pairing a handful of fake, equally weighted resumes with stereotypically white or black sounding names. White sounding names got FIFTY PERCENT more callbacks... This is the United States where no job among already disadvantaged prime likely means no home, no food, no health care, no nothing. This isn't an affect people adopt as part of some fanciful cultural identity. Disrupting it isn't about pride or hurt feelings. It is a bin that our society forces people into and it will not go away by pretending it doesn't exist. Talking about it or not taking about it is the wrong dichotomy. It's directly addressing it VS not addressing it.

"As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them."

This isn't an attack and your sentiment seems genuine but obviously this person knows his fears are not logical. I doubt most people can will themselves into feeling accepted even if others, like yourself, do your best to them feel accepted.

That's why representation matters

Although I appreciate the intentions of such people, as a non-white guy this always made me feel uncomfortable. That I'm not being welcomed for being a new member but rather a new member who's somewhat different (in color in this case). Whether this is at work, sports groups etc. I guess you call that a token?

Yeah that's definitely an understandable feeling. But on the other hand, if representation matters (as others in this thread claim), it seems hard to please everyone? Supposing you had a group that's 100% white by accident, and they know representation matters. Because they're 100% white, they're starting from a disadvantage: If you want representation, it helps to have representation already! So from this perspective, being 10% nicer to non-whites who join the group seems like a natural solution, to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem.

Maybe the right compromise is to just be especially careful not to be rude to people who are underrepresented in the group, and not worry about it beyond that?

But why does representation of different skin colors matter or ethnicity matters? There are very very few occasions where it does, but in most everyday situations like work, sports etc it really doesn't. I'd rather be classified by an attribute that's relevant to the situation such as skill level or expertise rather than arbitrary attribute like my skin color, why not my height or color of my teeth instead?

Didn't we already establish upthread why it matters? Why are we backtracking 5 comments deep?

Where was that? I must have missed it.

> Not seeing any person of color in an activity makes it’s so I don’t want to be the first.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34210289

Growing up this was a big realization for me the other way. I was raised by evangelicals in Kansas, including going to a mennonite school for most of my education. As a teenager I realized how at my school, at my church, at basically everything in my family's shared life, there was not a single person with brown skin. Not even one. And worse, no one had real awareness of this, and would not understand how it could be any sort of problem if you brought it up. To them it was just the natural order of the universe that their world was purely white people.

There's plenty of evangelicals of every race, but overall the communities are very segregated. It was clear no matter their professed faith, in practice the community I grew up in was hostile to PoC.

> makes it’s so I don’t want to be the first.

This makes me curious. Would you mind answering, from your point of view, why do you think that is? Is it a specific scenario or type of scenario you wish to avoid or is there a generalized concern that comes with it? Is that due to uncertainty or past experience?

Frankly; if the group is large enough, homogeny likely means that you the minority weren’t the first… the first(s) got pushed out.

There's probably many reasons but one that comes to mind is, if I'm first am I an ambassador for my race now? Probably. The people here might be self selecting in other aspects of their life so they may not actually be around PoC anywhere else.

Another aspect is that I don't have that shared connection or ease of relating to people in the group. The activity has obviously selected for a specific group and there are probably other aspects of their lives that are also different from my own.

Past experience mostly. Trying to make friends where the majority is white was difficult though I was in university and far more awkward then. One on one or in smaller settings, its easier and at work it's relatively straightforward to become friendly with anyone.

Are you willing to give some examples? I’m curious in what contexts people feel this way.

A specific example is if you look at popular sailing channels on youtube. I got into sailing last year and I didn't notice it at first but every popular channel is white. They have events where they meet fans and it's crazy the lack of colour in the group shots. I really wish I hadn't noticed it because it's a bit off putting. It's also surprising that I've only begun to care now that I'm much older.

Sounds like a good enough reason to mandate quotas for everything everywhere. Anything else on your wish list?

I've noticed #2 with my 4 year old. She won't do anything unless there's a girl doing it. My other kids don't seem to care though.

There are some interesting studies about girls and women playing chess. When blind, the two sexes perform on average about the same, but when they know the gender of their opponent, girls and women underperform.

It is hypothesised that the reason behind this is because chess is a boys’ club, so to speak, and thus there is not a lot of representation.

Absence of representation means that it may seem that you are the only one doing XYZ, which in and of its own can be terrifying because we often feel that the odds are stacked against us (which is a self-fulfilling prophecy), or that we are held to much higher standards than others.

Personally, I enjoy seeing diverse representation even if I am not represented. I want people to not be afraid to pursue their dreams and goals, I don’t want implicit prejudices due to lack of representation either.

I’ll bet this does not replicate, the effect of stereotype threat is notoriously overvalued. Don’t fall for junk science.

Women that dedicate their careers to chess still dramatically underperform men at the professional level. There is even a different rating level and title system for women: women earning the "women grandmaster" title need 200 fewer ELO points than the grandmaster title for men. No woman has ever won the World Chess Championship, and there are far fewer female GMs than male GMs.

How do women and men do versus AI opponents, i.e. without any gender? Wonder if chess.com has the data?

Badly? AI is vastly superior to human capability, no human wins

We all get slaughtered. It's possible Magnus could make one draw with white against a not-current Stockfish on limited depth out of a hundred games, but that would be about the best any of us could do.

Chess engines support the concept of skill level. Pretty much any chess program or app supports this out of the box, such as the aforementioned chess.com. The only times they are run unhindered are for analysis, engine testing, or fun.

There's a very interesting point in the thread below which would resolve the question - we could use chess puzzles! If there is a mismatch between performance on puzzles with live results, it would be pretty solid proof that the effect is real. It doesn't have to be full on AI.

Some women (Polgar for example) have argued the separate womens' titles significantly contribute to the gap in skill.

I've always wondered about this, actually.

With almost all sports males have a dramatic physical advantage[1] so it's not really fair to have males compete with females.

With chess there is no physical advantage, so why keep separate tournaments for males and females? What is the reasoning for preventing males and females competing in chess?

[1] In the 90s, ISTR reading about a tennis match between a #3-rank female player against a #5000-something-ranked male, and the male player simply dominated. I wish I could find that article now, but it was a print mag and I don't remember which one it was.

While we shouldn’t fall for junk science, we also shouldn’t fall for cynicism as an excuse to stick to our priors. It might not replicate if you try to do so, but until someone does, we shouldn’t write it off.

Surely the burden of proof should be on the side making the claim?

I’ve in general grown somewhat averse to the “burden of proof points in some direction” line of thinking.

They are both making claims. (And I think usually most people are making some sort of claim, unless they are just nitpicking). One is claiming that they remember a study — pretty vague, and easily proven (as far as we can tell at least) by just showing us any study. The other is claiming that that study doesn’t replicate… without having seen it, which seems like a pretty high bar to clear.

Most studies in this reference class (social science) don't replicate, so I'm fine with that being the default assumption.

It is hard to speculate without knowing much about the original poster or the types of studies they read. Maybe they prefer “Nature Human Behavior,” who knows?

I can offer [1-3] in support of my position.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.440

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620924051

[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617736887

One sort of annoying thing about this site is that it seems to be convention to ask for sources, but conversations quickly fall off the front page and so when you come back with the sources, nobody is left to respond! But this looks at least to me to be some good stuff, the second link appears to be at least somewhat of a replication.

And the claim in this case is "it does not replicate".

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.440

The study. Note that this is about taking equally matched players, and having them compete via the Internet without knowing the gender of their partner, then again knowing the gender.

This reads needlessly aggressive, and the accompanied downvotes seem unjustified.

In addition to the other studies published by Wiley, I have two more:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620924051

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617736887

@dang

Why is GP flagged but parent isn’t?

Parent adds nothing to the conversation, but apparently GP was worth removing even though it is now supported by 3 different sources.

> There are some interesting studies about girls and women playing chess. When blind, the two sexes perform on average about the same, but when they know the gender of their opponent, girls and women underperform.

My guess is that it's due to how expectations affect how likely we are to enter flow state. If we subconsciously expect ourselves to enter a challenge in less than good/fair/even conditions we might be less likely to engage fully because we're using our attention for questioning ourselves/the situation.

At least that's how I feel I myself work.

I think I found the study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.440

And a related meta study that looks at sports in general: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146902921...

> 3. Rules in life are just constructs that we as humans have created.

> Starting a business helped the most on this one. That's when I started to see that "rules" or "procedure" are all made up and exceptions can always be made.

This is a big one that I learned through the same experience. Everything is arbitrary, the rules are made up and the points don't matter.

It made me appreciate those who recognize this, and in turn treat others well, even when shit hits the fan metaphorically, and I have absolutely zero tolerance for bullshit hoop jumping and assholes. I know you don't have to play by that book, so I won't, and I'm happier for it.

Interesting interplay between 2 and 3. Why does representation matter so much if these are just human-created constructs? Genuinely interested to know how the same person had both of these epiphanies.

Ha, interesting observation. They didn't happen at the same time. #2 followed by #3 much later.

The most popular humanly constructed narrative these days in the US is that representation is everything so I tend to agree with your point. There is an interesting immediate clash between the two.

A construct being human-created doesn't mean it isn't important, or that we can simply ignore it. Just means it can be changed, unlike a law of nature, for instance.

why does debt matter so much? human-created construct

Point 3 also hit me a few months ago during a Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast about Rome. Caesar got back from his conquests and half the senate wanted to punish him for crimes against humanity that he conducted during his wars. However, he also claimed massive amounts of land for Rome. Long story short: he wasn’t punished. And this happened 2000 years ago.

Napoleon wasn't roman. Do you mean a caesar?

Yes. Well spotted. Thanks.

Did they actually care about crimes against humanity? I thought they were worried about the amount of power he had?

> 1. Everyone is the main character in their own story.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

David Foster Wallace

> 3. Rules in life are just constructs that we as humans have created.

Corollary to this is that human rules aren't like programming rules and that the words that make up the rules get interpreted by a human.

One thing that this means is that you can't "hack" a human rule by picking the semantic meaning of a word which works best for you. You have to actually convince the arbiter of that rule that they agree with your meaning. If they don't, and they have a hundred years of legal ruling behind them that they've read and you haven't, then you're screwed.

And good human rules usually do have exceptions to them ("yelling fire in a crowded theater" being the most well understood). This is also why "the exception that proves the rule" is not a stupid saying.

And this is a feature and not a bug. The worst rules we generate are usually the ones that require the human arbiter to be rigid and mechanical. That tends to produce injustices like "three strikes you're out" and "mandatory minimum sentencing" (or any attempt to make the handball rule in soccer/football be objective and just winds up making it worse).

To further your point 1, I think also “Everyone sees things through their perspective”.

So when you explain something, 10 people hear 10 slightly different things as their own experiences and biases, and even hopes, interpret your statement.

That’s why being able to communicate accurately, clearly, and concisely is a very difficult and important thing. If you can do it tailored to specific groups and with humour, bonus points.

While I do see merit in the idea that representation matters, to me, it all depends on what representation in particular. Racial representation gets all the attention.

But for example, seeing that a philosophy major can have a successful computer science experience

I don't want to downplay the importance of diverse academic backgrounds, but representation of immutable characteristics (gender identity, race, disability, etc) usually get the most attention because they are essentially always the things that have impact on kids. Your little girl or your autistic child is going to pursue paths they maybe wouldn't otherwise take because of representation. The earlier you get a child to engage with something, the better their outcomes with pursuing it.

Representation is literally about people seeing themselves. If you can't nail down what "people like me" look like when it comes to representation, it might be that representation isn't quite the right way to frame the problem. It's only one aspect of diversity.

Any suggested reading for #1 ("learn how to navigate \$THIS.")?

It’s old and perhaps a little controversial, but “ NLP: The New Technology of Achievement” has good examples and abstractions that could help you with #1

Controversial in that it's generally considered a pseudoscience. I'd advise against anyone looking to figure out how to navigate this wasting their time with pseudosciences.

> it's generally considered a pseudoscience.

Only by people who have no experience with it.

NLP ("Neurolinguistic Programming", not Natural Language Processing) is pre-scientific, yes, but that's not the same as being a pseudoscience, and calling it such is a disservice.

We have pretty much discovered the operating system of the human mind. applying the principles and techniques discovered and systematized under the rubric of NLP one can do amazing things.

- - - -

It is strange that academic research psychologists seem to have trouble with it. But that's their problem, it doesn't change the fact that people all over the world are learning and using this stuff every day. If academic psychologists can't understand it that just makes them irrelevant, it doesn't change the facts.

Plenty of people all over the world are learning and using the teachings of Scientology. That doesn't make them right or even useful

I don’t really care about this one or the other but you’re taking about this thing exactly the way cultists do. It doesn’t lend it any credence. Why would the “evil scientists” be so against your ideology, specifically? Academics publish papers on all kinds of things. This is the same type of stuff of Gene Ray or flat-Earthers etc.

For someone who doesn't care one way or the other you're being a just a little insulting.

> It doesn’t lend it any credence.

NLP doesn't need "credence". It works. Believe or not, it's no skin off my teeth.

Here's the thing: I pretend to be a crass cranky curmudgeon but I'm actually a bleedin' heart soft-touch kind of a fellow. I care about my fellow humans beings and I wish them well, more-or-less. I know NLP works, because I've worked with it myself, and because I was cured of serious clinical depression by Richard Bandler himself. This stuff really is a turning point in human history.

So, on the one hand, I got my cure and went on with a new normal life, so it doesn't matter to me personally what you or anybody in particular thinks of NLP.

On the other hand, what kind of monster would I be if I kept my mouth shut when some ignorant person calls it "pseudoscience" and warns people away from it? To me it's like I'm one of the first people to hear about and benefit from penicillin, yeah? And some dude is like "penicillin is generally considered a pseudoscience". I'm going to speak up, ya feel me? There's a feeling of obligation, to truth and to the other people out there who are suffering like I was, and who may well find relief in this new not-yet-science of human psychology.

> Why would the “evil scientists” be so against your ideology, specifically?

I never said "evil scientists", and NLP is not an ideology. (Nor a cult for that matter.)

As for why NLP is shunned by researchers, who have a hard time replicating even the simplest discoveries, even though normal everyday people learn and use this stuff successfully every day all over the world, like I said, it's strange.

I have no answer for you.

The obvious answer: "NLP is BS", is a non-starter for the reasons outlined above. (To reiterate: it does work.)

In any event, although it's a puzzle, it's not my problem. My depression was cured.

In sum, check out NLP. Or not, what do I care? (But really, do. It's the real deal.)

Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling.

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

What name-calling did I do? I said it is how cultists behave.

FWIW I wasn't offended.

"Cultists" is the name-calling.

> pre-scientific

What does that mean?

The NLP people have developed a body of models and techniques for rapid and durable psychological changes. This body of work is systematic and repeatable, but the NLP folks haven't (yet!) "done science to it" to try to figure out why these techniques work.

Nothing. Either something follows the scientific method, or it does not. Pre-scientific is a fancy way of saying "we have no evidence for this". Bear in mind, this field is decades old, and has been subjected already to scientific study. All of which have debunked it.

In the typical style of SCAMS (supplemental, complementary, and alternative medicines), this line really just means they're waiting for the one study to validate them in the face of countless studies that have not.

You don't have any actual experience with NLP do you?

No, but I'm trained as a scientist, so I know how to read research, data, and scientific studies. I don't need to have experience with Scientology to tell you that, based on the available evidence, it's bunk. Nor do I need experience with homeopathy to tell you that water-memory is unscientific and nonsense. Direct, personal experience, isn't how the scientific community collects data, and converts that data into knowledge. It's rigorous study, and testing. NLP has been subjected to that, and it has failed to stand up.

>> You don't have any actual experience with NLP do you?

> No

Thank you. That's really the best I can hope for in conversations about NLP with skeptical people. I'm not going to convince you, you're not going to convince me. But I appreciate your honesty in admitting you do not have first hand experience with NLP.

I am not a scientist myself, and I'm not quite comfortable calling myself an "amateur scientist". However, I am very very pro-science. I consider science to be one of the most important human activities. I also value skepticism. (E.g. IMO James Randi is a hero in the intellectual life of humanity.) However, that said, this is an area where science is out of the loop. This stuff works. It's rigorous and repeatable. It's not even hard to do.

> NLP has been subjected to [rigorous study, and testing], and it has failed to stand up.

That can't be true.

I don't know what the boffins did, but if they can't replicate these simple patterns and techniques they just make themselves look foolish.

You've skipped pretty much most of my argument, but I'll humour you nonetheless. There's no such thing as science being out of the loop. Read my other comment, if you're pushing this unverified "technology" as a cure for depression, you're doing something dangerous and immoral. Just because you found value in this, does not mean it's an alternative to evidence-based, and tested methods. I also solved my depression by very alternative methods, but I also strongly advise people against the methods I used, since they're very much so a "your mileage will very" methods.

>If they can't replicate these simple patterns and techniques they just make themselves look foolish

Consider if the scientific community; a group who has studied everything from astral projection, to the reaction that created the atom bomb; has been unable to replicate the anecdotal results, that it's possible the anecdotal results are caused by confounding factors.

The power of "I want to believe" is very strong.

> That can't be true.

But it is. From a 2010 meta-analysis:

The huge popularity of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) therapies and training has not been accompanied by knowledge of the empirical underpinnings of the concept. The article presents the concept of NLP in the light of empirical research in the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Research Data Base. From among 315 articles the author selected 63 studies published in journals from the Master Journal List of ISI. Out of 33 studies, 18.2% show results supporting the tenets of NLP, 54.5% - results non-supportive of the NLP tenets and 27.3% brings uncertain results. The qualitative analysis indicates the greater weight of the non-supportive studies and their greater methodological worth against the ones supporting the tenets. Results contradict the claim of an empirical basis of NLP.

18% is statistically insignificant.

Frankly, I'm glad you were able to overcome your depression. Really, the fact that you did this speaks more to your strength as a person than the strength of NLP. Overcoming depression isn't easy -- it's something I have also struggled with. Rather than credit this, I think you should be crediting yourself.

> You've skipped pretty much most of my argument,

Well, it wasn't very good...

Frankly, comparing NLP to Scientology or homeopathy is silly.

> but I'll humour you nonetheless.

I appreciate it.

This isn't my first rodeo talking to scientific skeptics about NLP. Like I said, usually the best I can hope for it that the person I'm talking to is willing to admit they don't have any first-person experience with NLP. (They never do.)

It's not like I'm going to start a formal research program myself, eh?

Nor is reading a science paper purporting to debunk NLP going to cause a relapse of my old depression, eh? (God I hope not! Now that would be some foul magic, eh?)

> There's no such thing as science being out of the loop.

I don't understand what you mean. You're obviously not trying to say that science knows everything already, yeah?

Consider the evolution of the field of Chemistry: it started as the pre-scientific investigation of the properties of matter we call Alchemy (which was shunned and even illegal in many places and times) and gradually became systematized into Chemistry, a proper science. Psychology is in the middle of this transition from an alchemical body of knowledge into a systematic science. NLP is the forefront of that process, the cutting edge. It's the first systematic, rigourous, repeatable school of psychology in human history. It's kind of a big deal.

> if you're pushing this unverified "technology" as a cure for depression, you're doing something dangerous and immoral.

Ah! Let me be clear: I am not "pushing [NLP] as a cure for depression" and if it seemed that way I misspoke.

One of the primary inventors of this "technology" did cure me of depression in a single session of hypnosis lasting no more than ten minutes. I am aware of how outlandish that sounds. Nevertheless, it's true. (And I'm sure my "miraculous" cure is not even in the top 100 of his most amazing interventions.)

I don't see the danger or immorality of sharing my story.

> ... does not mean it's an alternative to evidence-based, and tested methods.

Sure it is! It works. There's lots of evidence and it's been tested over and over again all over the world.

The problem here isn't that NLP is unverified. I verify it. The problem is that the folks who call themselves scientific psychologists evidently can't even begin to understand it well enough to study it!

>> If they can't replicate these simple patterns and techniques they just make themselves look foolish

> Consider if the scientific community; a group who has studied everything from astral projection, to the reaction that created the atom bomb;

It's not one group, eh? To be clear, I trust physicists (in re: physics) more than I trust my mother.

> has been unable to replicate the anecdotal results, that it's possible the anecdotal results are caused by confounding factors.

Sure it's possible. But it's wildly unlikely.

At this point (2023) we're talking about millions of people using this stuff everyday vs. a handful of "scientists" who somehow can't replicate these simple techniques and patterns that (again!) millions of normal everyday people can! It's very weird.

> The power of "I want to believe" is very strong.

Er, kind of a tangent but one of the discoveries of NLP is the formal subjective structure of belief. The upshot of that is that you can literally rewrite your beliefs as you see fit. So yeah, I don't "want to believe", I believe what I want. Part of the reason I am so committed to empiricism is that I can't rely on belief.

> > That can't be true.

> But it is.

Let's not descend to "yeah huh" and "nah uh", eh? I know that some scientific psychologists have published some papers, but there has to be some error or incompetence. That's the only possibility (in my world view.)

> From a 2010 meta-analysis:

Got a link?

I'm going to tear though the abstract you quoted, and then go look for this paper. (I can do this all day. I am right, and this is important. I have infinite time and patience for this discussion.)

> The huge popularity of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) therapies and training has not been accompanied by knowledge of the empirical underpinnings of the concept.

Right! That's the problem!

> The article presents the concept of NLP

First error: "NLP" is not a single concept. "Neurolinguistic Programming" is a catch-all term for a whole constellation of models and techniques, as well as the attitude and methods that evolved the models and techniques.

> in the light of empirical research in the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Research Data Base.

I've never heard of "the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Research Data Base". I'll look it up, or do you have a link or more context?

> From among 315 articles

On NLP?

> the author selected 63 studies

By what criteria?

> published in journals from the Master Journal List of ISI.

What's the ISI?

> Out of 33 studies,

Are there links to these individual studies? I don't have access to science journals.

> 18.2% show results supporting the tenets of NLP, 54.5% - results non-supportive of the NLP tenets and 27.3% brings uncertain results.

I'd really like to see the individual papers. Without looking at them there's nothing constructive I can say.

> The qualitative analysis indicates the greater weight of the non-supportive studies and their greater methodological worth against the ones supporting the tenets. Results contradict the claim of an empirical basis of NLP.

Right, so to me that just means that the science was done poorly. That's all. I know NLP works, so from my POV the problem must be with the methods of investigation.

> 18% is statistically insignificant.

I'm not a statistician, but it's not important. If you're willing to stick around and talk about it I'm more than willing to go through each and every one of those 33 or 63 or 315 studies and give my considered opinion of what they might have been doing wrong. Like I said in the other comment, I'm not a scientist nor an NLP expert, but for what it's worth (which might not be much) I'm willing to read the studies and tell you what I think.

> Frankly, I'm glad you were able to overcome your depression.

Cheers! It's hard to overstate how badly off I was. As you no doubt know, it can be hard for people who don't suffer from something like that to understand what you're going through. I remember one point in high school my mom turned to me and said, "I know you're not faking this because no one would ever deliberately be this miserable." (It was more comforting than it sounds.)

> Really, the fact that you did this speaks more to your strength as a person than the strength of NLP.

No. It doesn't. The fact that I was never suicidal speaks to my strength as a person.

The fact that Dr. Bandler cured me of depression in ten minutes speaks to the strength of his invention NLP.

> Overcoming depression isn't easy

Except it was. It took less than ten minutes. I didn't even have to do anything, I was in trance, just sitting there. Subjectively the process took only moments. It was only afterward that someone told that it had been about ten minutes. I've had farts that were more difficult!

It behooves us to pay attention to this fellow, eh?

> it's something I have also struggled with.

I'm so sorry. It's not something I would wish on anyone.

> Rather than credit this, I think you should be crediting yourself.

I know, but that's because you're wrong about NLP being bunk. It really was the world-class hypnotherapist who cured me.

I do credit myself with going to see Dr. Bandler!

Seriously, I had to do a lot of work on myself (using NLP) before I could even go to a therapist at all, and then I went to several in a row, who each helped but not enough. Eventually a relative died and I inherited enough money to afford to go see Bandler. If I hadn't, who knows... It's not worth thinking about.

Well met!

I just found the paper:

https://doi.org/10.2478/V10059-010-0008-0

"Thirty-Five Years of Research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP Research Data Base. State of the Art or Pseudoscientific Decoration?"

Polish Psychological Bulletin, 2010, vol 41 (2), 58-66

Oh, but I saw that on the paper itself the author's name has an asterix:

Tomasz Witkowski*

This leads to a footnote at the bottom of the first page that says:

*Klub Sceptyków Polskich [Polish Sceptics Club]

(Followed by a physical address and an email address.)

So he's a Skeptic. In other words, he's probably strongly biased against NLP from the outset, eh? I'm no longer sure that reading this wouldn't be a big waste of my time.

When someone presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary further entrenches themselves in a belief, we're no longer dealing with a matter of knowledge, but of belief. Reading your response, you're just trying to debunk overwhelming evidence, and rejecting most of it out of hand. Or rejecting it in a way that indicates you don't understand how to interpret it. There's no real point in carrying on.

It is also worth noting that Richard Bandler's claims to hold a PhD are highly dubious. There's no record for a dissertation submitted to University of San Francisco under his name (see link below). It should go without saying, but my scepticism of someone who's PhD can't be verified to even exist, is immense. Again, being called "Doctor" without credentials is common in the S.C.A.Ms world.

https://dissexpress.proquest.com/dxweb/results.html?QryTxt=S...

But you haven't presented "overwhelming evidence". You cited a meta-study paper that was prepared by a member of a Skeptics club. It's like you're not even trying.

(Look, from Shannon's Information Theory we have the result that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content. Knowing only one piece of information about that paper: that the author is a Skeptic, I can already predict that that paper will have a negative result. There's really no information there, eh?)

Like I said, if you're willing to pick some actual scientific studies I'm willing to read them with an open mind. I'd like to get to the bottom of this little mystery. In fact, I'm going to read a bunch of these (studies that are referenced from the paper you gave, and others I can find) anyway.

> if you're willing to pick some actual scientific studies

And I have. Meta-reviews are considered important, effective, and valuable ways of probing the state of the literature. Dismissing it out of hand because you dislike who prepared it is fallacious.

> Dismissing it out of hand because you dislike who prepared it is fallacious.

Please, it's like you cited a paper called "Do Ghosts Exist?" prepared by a member of the There's No Such Thing as Ghosts club. You don't feel at least a little bit silly?

- - - -

Anyway, I'm reading the paper now.

He starts out well, with a DB of 315 articles, but then discards all but 63 of them "based on the criterion of whether the journal in which the given articles were publisher was recorded on on the Master Journal List of the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. This operation does not require justification in more detail."

Okay...

That's about 20%. Didn't you just say that "18% is statistically insignificant"?

But for the sake of discussion, let it pass: we will assume that these 63 papers are a good sample of the available information.

He goes on to select "Thirty-three empirical articles, which tested the tenets of the concept and/or the tenets-derived hypotheses."

He breaks them down into three subcategories:

> 1. Nine works supporting the NLP tenets and the tenets-derived hypotheses (27.3%).

> 2. Eighteen works non-supportive of the NLP tenets and the tenets-derived hypotheses (54.5%).

> 3. Six works with uncertain outcomes (18.2%).

Note that in the abstract the numbers for "supporting" and "uncertain" have been exchanged:

> Out of 33 studies, 18.2% show results supporting the tenets of NLP, 54.5% - results non-supportive of the NLP tenets and 27.3% brings uncertain results.

Is 27.3% statistically insignificant?

Anyway, I'll dig through these papers but I doubt I'm going to find a "smoking gun" that invalidates NLP.

As for this meta-study, it's really just Skeptic propaganda:

> My analysis leads undeniably to the statement that NLP represents pseudoscientific rubbish, which should be mothballed forever.

That doesn't really sound like an objective scientific statement does it?

What I find extremely weird and a bit concerning is where he writes:

> Here I would like to refer to the statement expressed by O’Donohue and Ferguson (2006), who propose that each type of therapy that does not have empirical supportive evidence of its effectiveness should be called experimental. They also put forward a suggestion that each case of performing such therapies without informing the clients about its experimental status should be referred to and treated as criminal activity. I fully agree with this view.

I mean, talk about gatekeeping, eh?

He wants people to be charged with a crime for not prefacing their work with his disclaimer.

He believes that NLP is nothing, yet it's somehow so dangerous that it needs a warning label? That seems irrational.

Anyway, I'm going to look through the referenced papers and see if I can figure out what's going wrong...

Cheers!

I've looked over the "works non-supportive of the NLP tenets and the tenets-derived hypotheses" and, well, in the words of Inigo Montoya, "I do not think it means what you think it means."

Basically, in the mid-80's some researchers badly misunderstood a facet of NLP, researched it badly, and then declared the whole thing to be baloney. Here's a good (brief) paper describing some of the problems with the "research":

Einspruch, E. L., & Forman, B. D. (1985). Observations concerning research literature on Neurolinguistic Programming. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 32, 589-596.

Since then, as far as I can tell, almost no one has done anything like proper science to NLP at all, at all. The NLP people are merrily doing their thing, the research psychologists are doing their thing, and "never the twain shall meet", eh?

It's a sad state of affairs really.

I see you edited your comment to take a swipe at Bandler, eh?

Why are you carrying on if there's no real point? (Sorry. I shouldn't tease you. I do appreciate the opportunity to hash this out in a public forum.)

AFAIK people call him "Dr." out of respect for his genius and contributions to humanity, it's never occurred to me before to wonder whether he actually had a PhD. I mean, it's not really relevant? He doesn't need a piece of paper to do what he does.

(BTW I think he was at UC Santa Cruz, not SF.)

Except that's not at all what Doctor means, not even remotely. Doctor has a specific meaning, and it's understood to mean a set of credentials. If you don't have it, but say you do, you're lying. It's absolutely relevant. If someone is claiming to have credentials they don't have, then they're untrustworthy.

If I promise never to call him "Doctor" again will you look through the referenced papers with me?

I just woke up, I've got my coffee, and I'm ready to go...

- - - -

Gatekeeping the term "Doctor" is uninteresting, and it doesn't make your side of the argument look good. You have nothing stronger to dun him on?

If you really want to focus on character assassination rather than truth and science, well here you go: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-01-29-mn-26470-... Have fun.

I'll be busy reading papers. You know where to find me if you change your mind.

> Gatekeeping the term "Doctor" is uninteresting, and it doesn't make your side of the argument look good. You have nothing stronger to dun him on?

I think the fact that he's claiming to have credentials that he does not is pretty damning. You have this utterly backwards. If I claim to have founded something groundbreaking, and it turns out I lied about my credentials, that casts doubt on everything I've done.

So he calls himself "Dr." but he doesn't have a PhD. I get it. So terrible. Much deceptive. Wow.

Do you want to discuss some scientific studies or not?

Not if you're going to sarcastically dismiss valid points that discredit what you're talking about like this.

So if I'm not completely respectful and I don't admit defeat before even we begin you're unwilling to examine the scientific evidence?

Given the continued sarcasm, I'll take that as a no. I'll also point you over to these: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.

I'm sorry. I had no idea Doge Meme would offend you so much. Please accept my apology.

- - - -

I've had a chance to look over the papers discussed in the meta-study you cited.

I think you should look them over too, you might want to "adjust your priors" as they say in Bayesian modelling. The evidence really doesn't support your position.

Like I said above, Skeptics perform an important and valuable function in the intellectual life of man. James Randi has done a lot of good and important work, for example. However, in this case, it's clear to me that the Skeptics have erroneously identified NLP et. al. as "woo-woo". It's truly unfortunate.

In any event, thank you for prompting me to actually go look at the papers. It was kind of a waste of time (for me at least) but at least now I know (to my own satisfaction) what went wrong in the scientific study of NLP. One day we'll do proper science to it. I look forward to that day.

- - - -

"See ya space cowboy."

> learning and using this stuff every day

Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence, it's anecdote. You're basing this all off what people are saying works for them. There's a strong possibility that having learned this gives them extra confidence/trying harder, which in tern leads them to improvements. It's like taking sugar pills telling someone it's amphetamine.

I wasn't cured of clinical depression by "extra confidence" or "trying harder".

This is a case of correlation, plus (again) totally unsubstantiated anecdotal claims. Suggesting people use unproven, non-evidence based approaches, to an illness that leads almost a million people a year to take their own lives, is reckless and potentially harmful. You believe NLP "technology" worked for you -- cool. Some people believe taking LSD worked for them -- cool. Some people say L. Ron Hubbard's "technology" has helped them. I won't take that away from them, but if they start pushing it on other, that's deeply wrong.

There's plenty of evidence-based methodologies that work for statistically significant portions of the population; and those are administered by doctors, and professionals.

But where you cross the line is when you start telling other people to do this too, and that it will work. I won't take the fact that you found something helpful in this. People find all sorts of different things helpful. But I firmly believe that you trying to make this sound like a sure thing is immoral and dangerous.

> This is a case of correlation, plus (again) totally unsubstantiated anecdotal claims.

I went to a one of the greatest hypnotherapists in the world for help with depression, he put me in a trance and did something, and when I came out of the trance my depression was gone.

Dismissing that as mere "correlation" seems illogical to me.

In re: "unsubstantiated anecdotal claim" well, you got me there. I'm just some rando on the internet, eh? Nevertheless, it's true. (I've detailed the experience before on HN, use algolia if you're curious, eh?)

> Suggesting people use unproven, non-evidence based approaches,

Ah, but I am the living proof. My life is the evidence. This is primary data.

> [Suggesting NLP] is reckless and potentially harmful.

I don't see that at all. In fact, to me this situations seems exactly the opposite. This NLP is a profound breakthrough in human psychology. I feel you're being "potentially harmful" to call it pseudoscience and warn people away from it.

I don't doubt that your motives are good and that you're sincere, it's just that you're on the wrong side of history on this one. NLP will eventually have a scientific grounding, perhaps after today's scientific community ages out, but it's inevitable.

(As an aside, when you say it's "reckless" to talk about how NLP cured my depression, what exactly are you getting at? It's not like NLP is a drug with dangerous side effects, eh? It's just talking, after all.)

> You believe NLP "technology" worked for you -- cool.

No dude, not cool. I want to know what happened to me. I want us to "do science" to NLP! I want to know how and why it works.

This "science has debunked NLP" line of nonsense is not helpful.

> There's plenty of evidence-based methodologies that work for statistically significant portions of the population; and those are administered by doctors, and professionals.

For depression? Really? That's terrific! Still doesn't change the fact that NLP works. Again, like I said, if scientists can't figure out how and why the models and techniques of NLP work that just makes them look incompetent.

> But where you cross the line is when you start telling other people to do this too, and that it will work.

Well, at risk of sounding snarky, I must say it's a good thing you aren't the one who gets to decide whether I can recommend NLP to people or not!

> I firmly believe that you trying to make this sound like a sure thing is immoral and dangerous.

I apologize for that. NLP is not a panacea. There is a wide variance in NLP therapists, and results. It's not a "sure thing".

(That said, for e.g. phobias there is a concrete repeatable algorithm that alleviates them, and my understandingh is that it's pretty much 100% effecitive.)

- - - -

I tell you what, it really is puzzling to me why academics have a hard time with NLP. You sound like you have read some of these scientific papers that supposedly "debunk" NLP. If you'll cite some I'll look them over and see if I can detect how or why they failed. I mean, I'm not an expert in NLP nor psychology, but perhaps we can salvage something constructive out of this exchange?

- - - -

edit: I saw when I posted this comment that you have replied to the other sub-thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34226389 ) meanwhile.

I've got to do some other things for a bit but I'll reply in a few hours.

In any event, well met! :)

What does representation mean in this context?

For #2, I would alter this to say: connections matter.

We are more likely to pursue careers or interests if we know someone (and are friends with them or related to them) that is interested in the same thing or has had experience in the same thing.

That doesn't ring true for me. I was already pursuing careers and interests that my friends were pursuing. That didn't change anything for me mostly because my friends came from a very different background than me. It also doesn't solve issues like my old boss who opted not to have children because she wanted to move up the corporate ladder at a FAANG company. She said that there was no mental model on how to navigate having kids at the company. All of the ones that did were men whose wives stayed home and took care of everything. She (and I) question if it's even possible to do it.

Your comment reminds me a bit of something I heard years ago from a manager at Facebook claiming that the way to solve imposter syndrome was to have people select which teams and projects they worked on because they would be more motivated to work at it. Totally off from what my experience had been, but likely applicable to some people.

However, I'm not saying you are wrong and I'm right. I think what's surfacing here is that what I posted doesn't apply to everyone and what you are saying doesn't apply to everyone either. It likely helps different types of people in different situations.

For me, I didn't become a software developer until my late 20s, because I was largely intimidated by it, despite being relatively geeky and tech oriented as a teen. There was no one in my small town I knew that went on to become a software dev. And I tended to place devs on a pedestal in my own head, about how smart they were or whatever. I definitely had the imposter syndrome in the first few years of my career. Working my way through community college then onto a top tier computer science university, and then participating in a startup where I got to live in Silicon Valley for a while, I learned that a lot of people in the industry aren't exceptional geniuses. Having access to that network of people in Silicon Valley though, especially at the time (less important nowadays I would argue), was crucial to so many people's success at getting good advice, using the right technologies and business tactics, getting positions and raising capital.

There's an old piece of advice I remember hearing once that for almost any intractable problem or area of concern in your life, the answer can usually be found by meeting more people. If you actively work towards meeting people that know the thing you want to know or have experience in the thing you want to learn or be better at, you'll eventually meet them and unlock that piece of wisdom or personal connection that can get you where you need to go.

That it 'doesn't apply to you' or 'everyone' really isn't the point here.

Obviously it doesn't apply to everyone.

Have you seen how many people in Hollywood have famous relatives in the industry?

It's the same for any industry.

It's very common.

Growing up, I wouldn't have fathomed what it meant to be a screen writer. I literally did not know what the job entailed, other than 'writing'. Nothing.

My Uncle was an Engineer, hanging out with him I saw how that worked, became interested a bit, ended up recognizing how important 'Math' etc. was, worked on a couple of related projects etc.. Eventually getting an internship because of a family member. It was a small favour but a big deal.

And even aside from opportunities, all of the small things, habits, perspective and behaviours of a class of people expected to perform certain functions.

Anyone can be whatever but it's far more likely that those who are exposed, who have role models, behind the scenes access, internships etc are going to get opportunities.

Representation does matter I think, that said it depends a lot on context. For politics, judicial system it matters existentially. In pop culture, especially for kids I think it's important that they 'see themselves' in roles. For a lot of things however I don't think it matters at all.

Please excuse the poor grammar, English isn't my first language. For #3, this rule always fascinated/confused me the most. How did us humans (animals formed from evolution/survival of the fittest) create these abstract 'rules' or fictions we all just collectively follow. Was there some sort of cumulation of ideas of the past woven into novel ones to make an archetypal epoch? Any insight/book recommendation to bridge this knowledge gap is much appreciated.

> because I just didn't see anyone like me there

To me, that would be the other way around: a chance to stand out and be one of a kind, act in a way nobody else had acted before, and reap the benefits of being unique, or the first at least.

(Seeing this as exciting or frightening probably depends on your level of sociopathy.)

> To me, that would be the other way around: a chance to stand out and be one of a kind, act in a way nobody else had acted before, and reap the benefits of being unique, or the first at least

This is a great attitude to have. I know that not everyone has this ability (yet) to function this way, but it really should be the goal of how to operate.

For me, it took me years to get there. Variety of reasons, but I realized much later in life that I was still carrying around traumas of being targeted in public by random strangers at a young age just by being out in public (yes, just walking down the street). That sort of stuff can erode psychological safety that we bring with us and unknown situations can cause us to react rather than respond. This is one of the reasons I think representation matters. Not just that it creates a mental model of what's possible, but proof (hopefully) that it's also safe and allowed.

> 2. Representation matters.

Strange, I had the opposite encounter. I realized the only thing keeping me from doing things was myself. There are definitely real barriers (hiring quotas, affirmative action, etc.) but without artificial constraints the only thing stopping you is you. You might feel a little uncomfortable but that's something easily overcome - and almost like a superpower when you realize you can overcome an external locus of control.

most of us here have our own drive, but I’ve come to appreciate that other people are inspired by seemingly superficial things

It clicked for me when I let my publicist go wild and she got me on listicles of BIPOC founders, before, we just had lots of quotes and interviews. Only people already interested in the project on its own merits were following along. After, there were lots of people that are interested in the representation in that kind of niche who otherwise just wouldn't know how to find that representation. Or just wouldn't be able to tell by founder names alone.

and of course we got the amplified engagement from people arguing about “why does race matter” in the LinkedIn comments. so shoutout to the useful idiots, publicists expect that to exist and calculate it.

> inspired by seemingly superficial things

This seems similar to adding an addictive drug to food. It will certainly appeal to a lot of people, but does it add value? Getting more consumers of your product should not be the end goal if we want a healthy, high trust society. Developing a good product should be.

> Only people already interested in the project on its own merits were following along

Isn't this what we want as a society?

save these goals for your non-profit

the rest of us want revenue. there is no build it and they will come, its appealing to people's sentiments, and the people have to know its there at all.

Ah, questioning the morality of exploiting human nature is for non profits. Got it.

There is a right way and a wrong way to achieve success.

Profit is not the only thing that matters in life.

how did you get that interpretation from any of this?

regardless, a for-profit company should not use its runway on ideals as it won't last very long, it has to build and find ways to be known about beyond its small community. that's what this is about.

I disagree entirely. Ethics in business is the foundation of being civically responsible.

If the business suffers in the short term, so be it.

I do understand this is not a popular view in todays business world however, and it shows.

Its more than a view, its survivorship bias

That doesnt mean be unethical, it means dont try to move the overton window or “use your platform”, other organizations exist specifically to do this and they are not called for profits

That reads like a very condescending and cynical response.

People enjoy representation, imho, because it helps them see that they are not alone, that the deck isn’t stacked against them, and so on. It also helps in removing prejudice against certain groups of people.

>it helps them see that they are not alone //

Do they have to consider separation of humans by characteristics to be important in order to get you that position where they feel alone with other humans? Bluntly, if a male says I can't be inspired by females isn't that because they're sexist?

It seems extraordinarily damaging to society to say to people, as many seem to 'here are the people you're allowed to be inspired by: they're superficially similar to you', at opposed to saying 'Payne-Gaposhkin asked the same question as you, see you're alike as people' (despite maybe being of different sex, race, nationality, era, class, wealth, etc.).

> Bluntly, if a male says I can't be inspired by females isn't that because they're sexist?

Not necessarily. It could be, but I wouldn't attribute it to malice as much as I'd attribute it to difficulty in relating to the person.

> Do they have to consider separation of humans by characteristics to be important in order to get you that position where they feel alone with other humans?

Your error in this is that you assume the behaviour is conscious and deliberate. Our brains do many calculations before we are even aware of them. I recommend Gladwell's book "Blink" on the topic [1].

Humans are by all means social beings, and we use heuristics and mental shortcuts to simplify our world, leading to fast and unconscious decisions often to our own detriment. We construct in and out groups before we are aware them, and said groups affect our decisions. This is why people growing in mixed communities are far less likely to be or exhibit racist behaviour.

I am expressing this only as a testament to our innate fallibility, this isn't targeted towards any specific group of people because there are all sorts of communities that are isolated and have very few interactions with others.

I experienced awe and inspiration when I realized that I was sitting at the same benches, and studying at the same place as Heisenberg when he came up with QM. But it was only when I stopped and thought about it, when I thought about the place I was sitting and the history behind it.

Sometimes all we have is superficial information, and our brains try to make the most of it. It's in our nature after all, we are all fallible humans, so why not help alleviate it and enable people to become their best selves?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/03160...

It sounds like you agree that it's racism, or whatever, when we demand that inspirational figures have a specific characteristic but feel lack of acceptance of people as people is initially subconscious and so is excusable even when being consciously acted on?

I'm thinking

I don't think it's racism or any -ism of that kind any more than it is difficulty relating automatically.

I am fairly certain that this is something that can be trained, but the degree to which I can relate with a man with ABC properties (except gender) will almost always be less than the degree I relate to a woman with ABC properties as gender is also included.

These decisions are always made rapidly, unconsciously, and when we have very little information about a person other than what we can immediately observe.

Changing the image that we have about people with other properties alleviates this.

Since you are referring to affirmative action and hiring quotas as “real barriers” I would guess that you haven’t really been in a situation where you the first/only person of your gender or race (etc) to do something. In that case (since you haven’t lacked representation) I’m not sure how well you can speak to its importance. But please correct me if im wrong.

This is actually how it played out for me once I recognized it. I'm of the mindset now that I can jump in and do things. And I think you hit on one of the most important lessons that came out of it for me - the only thing stopping you is you.

With that said, some form of representation helped me greatly with it. It doesn't need to be an exact match, but for me it needed to be enough to make me break my assumptions and see whatever weird walls I had put up in my thinking.

I would tread carefully when saying any kind of discomfort is “easily overcome”. We are human beings after all and it’s a pretty generalized statement.

Being a white male but simply being unique in coming from a poor community in a poor city was enough for me to inflict a lot of unnecessary pain on myself through undergrad by seeing myself as different from the majority of elites in my program.

Feeling uncomfortable is not what is a barrier. A barrier is an executive sexually harassing you to the point of suicide with no recourse. See: the blizzard fiasco. The riot fiasco. The Google fiasco. The Uber fiasco. Etc…

"without artificial constraints the only thing stopping you is you."

To be a plumber, yes.

To be a Doctor, kind of.

To be anything really competitive, not really, no.

There is a reason startup and regular CEO's are way over-represented from upper middle class families, and not ultra poor classes.

If you don't grow up playing Golf (expensive), it's highly unlikely you're going to the PGA.

For the poor kids to even fathom they could do something, they need to be exposed to the concept in a material way, on the whole. Obviously it's not always the case but representation 'is a thing'. And of course it can be way overstated in importance in many cases.

While I do see merit in the idea that representation matters, to me, it all depends on what representation in particular. Racial representation gets all the attention but I find that one less compelling.

But for example, seeing that a philosophy major can have a successful programming career, can encourage others in the humanities to see themselves do it too.

Or seeing someone with ADHD run a business successfully and overcome executive function challenges, can also help others with ADHD.

> Seeing that a philosophy major can have a successful programming career, can encourage others in the humanities to see themselves do it too. Or seeing someone with ADHD run a business successfully and overcome executive function challenges, can also help others with ADHD.

These are great call outs. The definition for representation can be highly nuanced and very personal. This is not to say that issues like race and gender aren't important and don't need support. Just that there are so many things that people bring to the table that can make them feel like "the other" which holds them back. It's surprising how lack of role models can lead some people to think it's not feasible or not even possible.

#1 is a fallacy called main character syndrome

> 2. Representation matters.

As a well represented person I can tell you this has nothing to do with representation, its just that the vast majority of humans in the modern world have close to zero agency and/or don't think they can actually change things.

> As a well represented person I can tell you this has nothing to do with representation, its just that the vast majority of humans in the modern world have close to zero agency and/or don't think they can actually change things.

As a well-represented person, you're probably making assumptions about the effects of representation that are less informed than you realize.

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