Every time I tune in, I measure the time-to-race, which is the amount of time that passes before race becomes the main topic of discussion. Usually it’s less than 15 minutes.
I think some of the flagship programs talk nonstop about LGBT and minority issues, but this has been a thing for some years. I remember pre COVID driving to work chuckling at how every time I turned on the radio, it was a story on those topics.
There is a lot more going on in the world that can also be discussed.
I like Weekend edition and All Things Considered, and their hourly news updates.
Finally: there is a distinction between a faux "both sides" centrism and constant focus on identity. Having a liberal bias can exist while providing a wide range of coverage and de-emphasizing identity politics.
I’ll note this though: I think the people who do this don’t really identify as “white.” It’s become a class marker. Your plumber is “white.” NPR listeners aren’t “white.”
NPR listeners aren't white? What are you trying to say here?
My theory is that NPR listeners no longer really identify with the label “white.” They might acknowledge the label applies to them. But when they complain about “white people” they are referring to other white people.
Not surprising, a lot of profitable rackets depend on those issues remaining unsolved. What would e.g. all the homelessness experts do, who collect billions annually to hold conferences where they agree with each other on settler-colonialism and the newest genders, if they were to actually solve homelessness?
Climate change is being solved, but it's being solved through technological innovation, not masturbatory discourse.
Then widespread internet and social media happened, which shortly led people into echo chambers while simultaneously gutting the institution of journalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots
“the most destructive period of local unrest in U.S. history”
What? All joking aside, what the Fuck?
Rodney King. LA riots. NAFTA protests. Branch Davidians. Presidential sex scandals. First desert storm. Political correctness. Women's movements. Bosnia et.al. Rwanda. HIV/AIDS epidemic. Ruby Ridge. Wage stagnation. The final death of small town commerce due to Wal-Marts.
And these are just the things I thought of in the last minute. I'm sure there are a ton more issues I'm missing.
The people you talk to are doing what people have done since the beginning of time. They're remembering the past fondly while forgetting the bad.
I think this is the transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1161883646.
> The Dartmouth conference has become an origin myth... Of course, the origin myth served to empower these men to tell their own story. And it's a story full of erasure... We hear nothing in that origin myth about the relationship that AI has to industrialization or to capitalism or to these colonial legacies of reserving reason for only certain kinds of people and certain kinds of thinking.
(later, same show):
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
I mean, seriously?
It’s just not interesting or newsworthy.
I think that's interesting and newsworthy. Maybe because we know it already it seems obvious, but a younger generation might not understand how deeply enmeshed the military-industrial complex was (and to some extent still is) in academia.
To every extent, I would counter. It's incredibly rare that a person is currently involved in STEM research at a university and some sort of US Military grant isn't providing at least some amount of funding to it/them.
My university for one allowed students to view comprehensive data about grants provided to research groups (after much internal campaigning), but absolutely refused allowing that data to be accessed by the general public. The reason was obvious when you looked at the data: 70%+ of the bucks came directly from various militaries.
Okay, but is it an okay topic for a history podcast like the one sobellian was apparently listening to?
> You know, the most disturbing part of the history of AI for me comes from the fact that these men who were working in artificial intelligence looked at those massive, noisy, hot mainframe computers and saw themselves in it. They looked at them and identified a deep affinity that there was something fundamentally shared between their minds and these machines.
> White men wanted to call themselves universal and produce themselves in the machine.
> I think underneath all of that arrogance and hubris is a real lack of faith in people.
> And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.
> ...And in effect, replace God with science?
To me, it felt as if the piece was dripping with contempt for people that actually started the work on the basis that they were nerds with the wrong identity.
It must be exhausting thinking like this all the time.
It would be nice if instead of harping on this point they actually told what they think the missing story is.
If they think that AI is missing certain kinds of thinking - by all means tell me what they are concretely. Like i don't know if i buy that lack of diversity in earlier AI research meant that the AI research only allowed certain kind of "thinking" (AI doesn't really match anybody's thinking regardless of race), but i would be interested in a well researched argument that it did and what those other kinds of thinking are.
I think the problem fundamentally is that these stories tend to be platitudes (lack of diversity = bad) but don't actually go deep into what that concretely means. Ultimately i want something that makes me think about the topic in new ways; you need to dig beyond the surface to do that.
You, a person that already knows about this, will never get that from a short segment on a public radio show intended for a general audience that knows next to nothing about it.
It is intended to make that audience think about it differently, because they have not even bothered to think critically about this at a surface level.
The fact that these models (along with every structure in any society) embeds the biases of those that designed them seems to continue to elude so many commenters here though, so it seems they really need to keep hearing this too.
Also, the models embeds the biases of all the people who create content on the Internet. The designers biases come in to l look at with the prompt hacks put in place later to prevent the AI from expressing bad thoughts.
In 2024, they are simply a reflection of what modern liberalism has become.
The 2005 version of David Sedaris would practically be considered "right wing" in 2024.
Critical theory and intersectionality have come to dominate all liberal discourse to the level of farce. NPR is just a mirror.
I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by trying to hide from it. The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off.
And my guess here is that the proportion of news about this relative to proportion of people affected by that news is way off.
compare to Car Talk - a show that entertains you and teaches you about engineering. different value propositions of these two things
Sure.. but.. does it lead to problems actually being fixed?
My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.
Broadly speaking, it's the study of how law and media impacts society's view and treatment of others through the lens of race.
As for my opinion on it:
I generally support it because it advocates for another mechanism to study the impact of law.
I think most legislation should be regularly studied for impact, effectiveness, and fairness. For example, stimulus bills ought to be reviewed for economic impact, regulation ought to be reviewed for effectiveness/relevance, laws with social impact ought to be reviewed to ensure it doesn't harm the people.
A number of scholars seem to adopt a blameless mentality to figure out how laws (even unintentionally) have negative impact, and use that to propose solutions. I admire this approach to legislative critique.
While I think a few ideas some scholars advocate for are infeasible to implement, the broader field has a lot of merit.
Maybe the "statute of limitations" for these things should be long - not to mention the idea that racism wasn't magically fixed by ending slavery and the "owning" you mention. You don't think anyone was actively racist and causing harm 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 50? So if person Y's grandparent was harmed by, say, person X's racist grandparent in the 1950s, and that caused person Y's family to suffer for generations compared to what likely would've happened otherwise, and that's leading to ongoing societal harms, it could be legitimate public policy interest to try to even out opportunity.
Of course, this hasn't actually changed in the last few decades - terms like "equal opportunity" and "affirimative action" have those words in their very name.
But certain interests have made very successful pushes in the past few decades to brand policies under those umbrellas as "actually the real racism", or paint everyone supporting them as "actually trying to guarantee equality of outcome," while continuing to beat the very-old drum of "people being worse off implies worse ability, it's just science" which couples oh-so-very-nicely with the more active forms of denying people opportunity that hardly ended in the 1960s.
The problem comes when it’s the ONLY topic of discussion. Inflation is only relevant in how it impacts minorities. COVID is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Climate change is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Quality of schools is only relevant as it impacts minorities.
When it’s your only lens, it can distort your views, and in the case of NPR, caused them to get some stories wrong. Which then destroys your credibility which is really the only currency a journalist has.
In fact, how far back do you even take this? Should we also hold the people of the modern-day Republic of Benin responsible for what their ancestors, the Kingdom of Dahomey, did, which was abducting and selling their African brothers for a bit of cash?
To address your other point, if my grandfather did something to hurt your grandfather in the 1950s, and it's been 70+ years and the only thing your family has figured out how to do since then is complain about how some guy was mean to your ancestor that one time, and that life is so unfair and you're so oppressed because of it, the issue may not be my grandfather, it may just be your family and their victimhood mindset. It feels good to "be oppressed" and have personal responsibility taken away, because when it's always someone else's fault, it can never be yours.
> I was giving a lecture on genealogy and reparations in Amite, Louisiana, when I met Mae Louise Walls Miller. Mae walked in after the lecture was over, demanding to speak with me. She walked up, looked me in the eye, and stated, “I didn’t get my freedom until 1963.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/437573/blacks-were-enslaved-...
It's an unspeakable evil. The "statute of limitations" on sins of the fathers is "until atonement".
Even today, there's plenty of forced labor and sex slaves that exist in the USA. That doesn't mean it's an active systemic issue of oppression, it just means that bad people do bad things when they can get away with it, in spite of a system to stop it.
We shouldn't hold people who didn't do bad things accountable for the actions of people who have done bad things. I don't think that's a radical idea.
I think in general being able to have these conversations means that we can progress slowly. It's tough recently, cause we've definitely regressed a lot. It would definitely help if the internet weren't effective at telling us only what we want to hear. I guess, in general I think the problem is we aren't actually able to progress discussions.
So my original wording "pick up where we left off" was wrong. We can already do that, we just can't move on from there. I think if we can figure out how to do that without hitting each other then maybe the problems would get fixed.
This probably describes a single-digit percentage of the people who produce content on NPR. They know the two or three black people who hung out in their circles in the elite colleges they went to, and only stay in contact with zero to one of them. They pretend to know every famous black person they met at a dinner party, or a conference; there are probably 100 black professors, writers, and entertainers that a million or two white NPR-Americans are pretending to be friends with.
Black wealth peaked in 1997. NPR supplies itself from the most elite circles in American society, who largely control its wealth. They're not actually concerned, they're consistently using race as a cudgel to attack other white people for their own purposes.
Come on, they're about as diverse as America itself is: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179803822/people-at-npr
In fact, Black people are proportionally overrepresented relative to the U.S. population at NPR, while Hispanics are underrepresented.
Sunday morning's Weekend Edition host, Ayesha Rascoe, is a Black woman. Unfortunately they lost Audie Cornish, also a Black woman, from All Things Considered. She was great.
I do think it's fair to argue that NPR is far more liberal than it ever was, and Uri Beliner's inside story provides some credence to that. But that's different from being "white." (Keep in mind that the vast majority of Trump voters are white and would bristle at NPR's news programming; support by non-whites is relatively low.)
But I guess that's exactly what an LLM would say, isn't it?
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
I can tell you that from my own life experience and what I can recall, it has certainly felt like a shift in content. All the anti-white stuff, the social justice stuff, the pro-censorship stuff, etc. It existed before in tiny bubbles like Tumblr, but it was during the mid 2010s that the major news sources started adopting those viewpoints too.
It's suspicious to me that they went for the hockey stick curve to demonstrate their complaint rather than adjusted for the number of articles that they are sampling from.
It's actually making my exact point that "diversity and inclusion" were mentioned in 0 articles in the 1990s. I'm saying that this is a relevant thing to more than 0% of the population, so there should be representation of that accordingly. And now that we have more articles talking about it, it seems reasonable that some percentage of news articles (above 0) would be discuss these topics.
I’m pretty sure more recent polls show the same thing is true now but I can’t find something more recent so take that with a grain of salt.
Think of one of the 17% of people polled who think 50% of America is black. First, it’s baffling to me to understand how that’s even possible. They must be living in an extreme bubble where they seldom interact with other races. Likely this isn’t even their fault, so how would they ever know to correct it?
Second, if I was one of those people, I would probably think the US is hopelessly racist seeing white people “over-represented” in basically every area of life.
What is the proper number of people to be killed by the police that we shouldn't worry about it? (hint: don't answer this question) The fact that people think the number is more than it actually is feels pretty moot when the number is more than zero. It's also more as a percentage of police killings than one would expect if we were just talking about police incompetence. If this has improved in the years since, then I think that's probably a good thing? Hot take, In general I think the police killing fewer people is a good thing.
I wish we could stop making everything into a war and fight and just let things speak for themselves. Show don’t tell.
Lately I have been working in DEI committees to better understand. I believe in helping the poor and marginalized but having officially reviewed equity theory I feel a bit disgusted with myself.
Heh. If you tune into the AM band you'll hear plenty of guys "discuss race." It'll make you fear for the species, but still.
Almost all the conservative media outlets and all their pundits do simply because the whole topic has been an arms race for years. Conservatives are finally attempting to sway the popular narrative that race and identity politics are the only thing that determines your future.
They often discuss race within the context of identity politics and the far-left idea that "all white people are racist" versus their notion that race doesn't determine who you are, how smart you are and how successful you can become.
Its the age old philosophical idea of determinism vs. free will
The parts of it that are under-discussed are the parts they're still not discussing. The unsolved parts are unsolved as a result of bipartisan unwillingness to solve them.
Example: Historical racism caused black people to lack the generational wealth to own a home. The solution to this is to make home ownership more affordable, i.e. to build more housing and bring down the market price of buying a home. But many of the existing homeowners, who don't want home prices to become more affordable, are Democrats, so this problem is unsolved even in areas like San Francisco under 100% Democratic control.
Example: Parents want their kids to attend schools with smart kids so the other students aren't disruptive and don't require the teacher to slow the pace of the class. The solution to this is to put kids of similar intelligence in the same class, which also helps smart minority students who can get in based on test scores rather than money. But then affluent parents with disruptive or less intelligent kids don't get into the smart class, so they prefer solutions where the metric is parental income (e.g. ability to afford a home in the "good" school district) rather than test scores, and then get to feel good about themselves because even though this result is even worse for poor minority students, they can point to the statistics that minority students from poor backgrounds have lower test scores as a reason to refuse to use test scores and wrap their self-interest in the flag of anti-racism. Then many of those parents are Democrats, and moreover the alternate solution where you break up the "income buys a good school district" system would be things like school vouchers, which are opposed by public school teachers unions because they allow non-affluent parents to choose a private school if it's better, and those unions are a Democratic constituency. So again the problem goes unsolved, even in areas controlled by the people who claim to want to solve it.
So these aren't the problems they spend most of their time talking about, because that would be goring the wrong ox. Instead they talk about identity politics and historical circumstance which cannot be solved because they are just abstract ideas and empty rhetoric instead of anything attached to a reasonable policy proposal that might actually do some good.
For everyone downvoting, I'd be interested in the proportion of articles that discuss race as a percentage of total articles. If the number is more than the number of black people in America, I'd be willing to consider that we've "overcorrected". But a quick search around the web isn't yielding any clear results on this to me.