Mark Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg for Meta 'inclusivity' push: report | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg for Meta 'inclusivity' push: report

msn.com

51 pointsimpish920890 comments

This level of political engagement seems kind of out of character for him

Is he just kissing ass, or is there genuine frustration on decaying business culture? It feels like both he and Musk are idealizing some kind of past version of SV where WLB was less of a concern

I think there's a few possibilities:

Maybe he has some political ambitions.

Maybe he's trying to get cred with trump so that he can try to have influence over the tik-tok ban (a huge competitor).

Text-only:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1xolsJ

Is this pure JSON for anyone else? (Which admittedly, is in-fact text-only).

   curl https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1xolsJ \
   |sed 's/.*body":"//;s/","readTimeMin.*//' \
   |tr -d '\n\134\xa0\xc2\xe2\x80\x93' > 1.htm

   firefox ./1.htm

i imagine they are still close enough, and perhaps she still has enough stock, that she understands he's willing to compromise his own morals for the financial benefit of the company

on a personal level, it is demoralizing to read though

[flagged]

Probably super easy to launch a Facebook or Instagram competitor app right now. All you have to be is the anti-Zuck and you get free marketing.

It's the perfect window of opportunity. Launch, get traction, get funding, scale. It's all teed up.

Literally every social network launched in the last decade was outspokenly anti-Zuck, all of them failed or are struggling. People don't care.

My read is less that anti-Zuck is the new Kryptonite than that that Kryptonite may be more effective than before.

Even with that read, I have my doubts. Very few if any successful (that is, eventually dominant) social networks positioned themselves as anti-something. Rather, most were based on either an available and generally high-appeal founding cohort, in a largely unregulated space. Facebook was once Literally Harvard (<https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/1058991>), Usenet similarly began at selective research universities, Slashdot with the early Internet / Free Software tech community, HN with the start-up space.

Regulated spaces are far more difficult to grow: banking, finance, the military, and healthcare are cohesive and high-appeal cohorts, but each space has tight regulatory requirements which restrict both what may be discussed and who may join the networks. Bloomberg Terminal, health information systems, and internal communications amongst the banking and government sectors are strong markets of themselves but impose limits to potential expansion and entry by new competitors.

Returning to his value roots I see.

To be clear, Meta's "Diverse Slate Approach" was explicitly discriminatory with regards to protected class. It prohibited hiring managers from proceeding with an offer until at least one of the on-site interviews contained an "underrepresented group", meaning women and URM males. In practice this meant that white and Asian men had to wait a long time to get an offer even after they passed the interview rounds. But women and URM never had to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled because their presence caused it to be fulfilled.

To see how this is discrimination, consider a company that decides to wait 90 days before proceeding with any offer to a Catholic candidate, but no such delay if the candidate is not Catholic. Surely we see that this is discrimination. Even if we argue that the Catholic candidates are still getting their offer eventually it's still plainly discrimination. What if instead we rolled a dice and added 0 to 90 days of delay? Some Catholics have zero delay, just like non-Catholics. Is that still discrimination? Of course.

Now considering how the DSA works. Most candidates are not "diverse". If you look at the sequence of candidates with non-diverse (N) or diverse (D) candidates the sequence looks something like this:

NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND

So if we introduce the requirement that at least one interviewed candidate must be diverse, a non-diverse candidate may get lucky and the next candidate is diverse. Or maybe they'll be waiting a long time until a diverse candidate is interviewed and fulfills the DSA. But a diverse candidate never has to wait for th DSA to be fulfilled. Sounds like a familiar situation where an offer is randomly delayed on the basis of protected class, right?

It's true that the DSA never lowered standards for diverse candidates. But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.

> NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND

If the pattern resembles this for a group that represents over 50% of the broader population (women and some subset of males), I'd argue that it's highly possible there are other, possibly discriminatory, factors at play.

So we should expect 50% men in elementary schools? How about lumberjacks? Should those be 50% women too?

A non discriminatory hiring process should reflect the demographics of the workers in the given field (other factors like geography matter too). Why would we expect, say, pediatricians (80% female) to have 50% men?

Achieving a 50/50 split between men and women in a field that's 80% one gender requires hiring one gender at 4x the rate of the other. This line of thinking is what leads companies to set up discriminatory hiring practices in pursuit of DEI goals.

The even government office of non discrimination compliance agrees: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs

> The purpose of affirmative action is to ensure equal employment opportunities for applicants and employees. It is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market.

One question we should ask ourselves is why a field would be dominated by men and not evenly split, or mostly women, etc. Does one feel as if they would face an uphill battle trying to get hired in a field that is 80% their other?

Because men and women have different interests. Even if you think that socialization is the cause, the law mandates that all applicants are treated equally with respect to gender. If gender discrimination is carried out in pursuit of a 50/50 gender split, that does not make it legal.

> Does one feel as if they would face an uphill battle trying to get hired in a field that is 80% their other?

What people feel is hard to quantify. But what we can quantify is the call back rates of male and female applicants. Tech companies are more likely to call back women: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484

HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644

The point of all of this stuff is to find a balance between evaluating applicants independently and objectively according to a well-defined set of critera -- equality of opportunity -- and producing an end result that is representational and fair in the societal sense -- equality of outcome.

A good illustration of this concept is the "equality vs. equity" cartoon, with people of different heights trying to look over a fence. https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...

I understand why a lot of folks, especially technically-minded folks, bias for equality of opportunity exclusively. This is essentially what a meritocracy is. There's lots of good things about equality of opportunity and meritocracies, but they also have problems, and one of those problems is that, generalizing, they both tend to reflect and reinforce pre-existing biases, and in particular implicit biases. This is exactly the kind of problem that DEI initiatives are trying to address.

I don't really want to litigate the pros and cons of these two concepts, I just want to point out that they both exist, and that initiatives like DEI can have as goals improving one or the other or both.

It's fine if you say, when doing hiring, you're only interested in equality of opportunity. That's probably the position that most people who are anti-DEI would take. But I think it's also fine if you say, when doing hiring, you're interested in both equality of opportunity and outcome. Both are valid.

Using protected class as a factor in employment is prohibited nation-wide under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There is no "balance" between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The former is required by law. Using protected class as a factor in hiring doesn't become legal just because it's done in pursuit of equality of outcome. They are not both valid concepts, at least not unless you're willing to violate people's civil rights. One is what employers are legally required to do. The other is illegal discrimination.

Also, think through the implications of this photo in the context of hiring: https://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/...

What's really the difference between having a group of candidates standing on a box, and lowering the bar for those candidates? At the end of the day, whether it's standing on a box or lowering the bar the end result is the same: some candidates are considered to have met expectations despite not reaching the same heights as others.

I highly encourage you to think through whether this is a good metaphor to use to justify DEI in a workplace setting.

You are focusing on the specific details of the hiring process, and evaluating stuff like DEI in terms of a single hiring outcome. I'm trying to clarify that the relevant scope is actually much broader, for example it might be the demographics of the entire engineering org within that company, measured after this updated hiring process has been in place for a year or more.

Again, deliberately engineering equitable demographics of the entire engineering org is illegal discrimination. Scope is irrelevant. You cannot use protected class as a factor in hiring, not in a single hiring decision nor in the broader scope of an entire org. Lets say you measure the hiring demographics over the span of a year. What then ? Directing your recruiters to prioritize underrepresented candidates is still illegal. It doesn't matter whether the scope is a single hire or an entire org: equality in hiring is mandatory.

It's not a question of scope. Equality and equity are not equally valid concepts in hiring. The former is required by law, even if it produces an inequitable outcome. There is no "balance" between respecting candidates civil liberties and achieving your preferred demographic distribution.

This question only ever seems to be asked about "desirable" fields. There doesn't seem to be as much of a push to achieve gender parity in sanitation work[1], for example.

The whole exercise feels like an effort to take attention off of the problem of income inequality by instead framing it as an issue of identity. Under this framing, "fair" means we have parity in male and female CEOs - never mind that those CEOs are still making 300x or more of what "frontline" workers make. Why not focus on pushing for higher wages in female dominated fields like teaching or nursing?

[1] https://www.zippia.com/sanitation-worker-jobs/demographics/

On Hacker news I see this question mostly asked about desirable fields. In education, there is a huge push to recruit more men. I can't speak for sanitation specifically, but I have seen efforts to get more women into stable, well paying blue collar professions.

Rather than "desirable" I would maybe say something like "economically dominant". If the highest-paying and most-powerful careers in a society don't at least somewhat meaningfully reflect the demographics of that society, then, well, what does that demonstrate, and is that something we want to try to fix? Hopefully you can at least see the position where the answer to that last question is yes, even if you don't agree with it.

It may be that hire paying fields attract men who want to be able to attract mates. That women prefer men who make more than them is pretty established in research, as is is the lack of interest in what a woman makes as income. (On average in psych studies). Why wouldn’t we expect results and society to reflect this?

It's not -- "why wouldn't we expect important career X to have way more men than women, given <whatever>"

It's -- "if important career X has way more men than women, is this a good thing, at a net societal level, regardless of <whatever> that can explain why this is the case?"

Nobody is looking for complete and perfect parity in all influential careers. The intent is just to make sure that, for the highest-impact careers, we should work towards making them representative of our society, as much as possible

Do you believe some better out come for society as a whole, or some individuals in society will benefit from this intervention? Why? And at what cost?

Your question implies serval beliefs, which may or may not be true. And that others may, or may not share.

For one, I don’t think the average developer has a ton of say on how products get made. So that’s not likely the power you’re seeking to ensure changes hands? Market forces and legal structure pretty much ensure enshitification and other outcomes which many would likely consider sub optimal.

It is well established that teams with more representation make better decisions, likely because of their diversity of viewpoints. It is worthwhile both to companies and to society to have higher quality decision-making in fields like finance and in roles like chief executives.

citation(s) for this well established claim?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/56/%22The_Terrib...

The most commonly cited study is the McKinsey survey. But they didn't release their actual data set until years after publication, and when they did their analysis was thoroughly criticized: https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p...

It doesn't matter if the average developer has any say on how products get made. What matters is the salary that developers earn, in general, at a demographic level, is generally among the highest. And it's important that the highest-salary occupations in a society, are equally available to everyone in that society, invariant to class or race or gender or creed or anything else -- measured by outcome, not by opportunity.

What should the split be?

Take a step back on the supply side. CS education isn't a requirement, though only 20% of CS undergrads are female.[0]

I'm curious what your stance is on the swathe of asians who got negatively handicapped for checking "asian" on their college applications.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-are-too-few...

Women didn't become the majority of pediatricians until the 2000s, so up until quite recently yes we did expect pediatricians to be 50% or more men.

I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!

For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.

One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.

In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.

I'd be more than happy to have an anonymized hiring process. If you're right that in-group preference is what drives the gender disparity, we should expect an anonymized hiring process to produce an employee base that's closer to gender parity. Some companies have experimented with this [1]. But interesting no tech DEI advocate I've met in real life has been supportive of anonymized hiring. More than a few have actively disapproved, saying that anonymization tends to make the representation worse.

1. https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...

Of course, because the problem that's trying to be solved is that the tech industry has default, implicit biases in its hiring processes, which tend to favor the majority. Anonymization acts as a force multiplier for those defaults/biases.

I don't understand. If gender discrimination is the cause of the disparity, anonymization should eliminate the disparity. Under an anonymous hiring process, you can't know the gender of the applicants and so you can't discriminate on the basis of gender.

If coding interviews were done with cameras off, and voice masked so gender can't be known, how would that be more subject to bias than with the camera on and the gender known to the interviewer?

When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators, that made the process more biased? That's new to me.

I think we're talking past each other. Tech hiring biases, implicitly, for stuff that's considered to be culturally normative. That's not just about gender labels or how someone looks. It's also about stuff like how the applicant phrases and delivers answers to questions. The high-confidence and authoritative tone used by many western white male engineers tends to be -- again, implicitly -- preferred, over, for example, a more nuanced and lower-confidence response that might be delivered by a non-western woman engineer.

Every company I worked at grades interviews based once correctness and performance. A candidate that fails to produce a working solution at all receives a worse score than one that produces a working, but inefficient solution, which get a worse score than one that has a working and optimal solution.

And again, if the bias comes from people's tone then the interview can be conducted over text. Or have a transcript of the interview that is used by the hiring committee, to ensure that a "high confidence and authoritative tone" doesn't introduce bias. Bias can be eliminated. And if the disparity remains the same, the disparity is not due to bias.

You continue to focus very narrowly on the specific details of the hiring process. I'm trying to make points about higher-level stuff, related to the intent and scope of DEI-type initiatives. From these few comments, I gather that you're not really interested in talking about any of those higher-level things, so I'll stop trying to explain them.

You’ve explained your position and OP exposed the holes in your logic. Please don’t pretend to take the high road when someone has engaged with good faith discussion that didn’t end the way you hoped.

That's a pretty bizarre take on this dialog. But, you do you.

The specific details of the hiring process are in question. You are running away from grappling with the (increasingly likely) possibility that bias wasn't the (only) driver in hiring disparity.

The point I'm trying to make is that the details of any specific hiring process aren't really germane to the overall discussion. Hiring disparity is a metric that's measured at a much higher level than any individual organization.

> Hiring disparity is a metric that's measured at a much higher level than any individual organization.

And how do we know if the hiring disparity is due to bias? The details of the hiring process are absolutely relevant, because the notion that the hiring disparity is due to bias is a claim about the details of the hiring process.

My main issue with a lot of DEI programs is that they don't try to eliminate bias. They just assume disparities are due to bias and work towards "fixing" those assumed biases with explicit discrimination. The problem is that when you actually try to measure and quantify bias in tech, the results often aren't what DEI advocates assume. E.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112

This is why there's such a a strong pushback against anonymizing interviews and other bias mitigation measures. What happens if your interviews and applications are all anonymized and the hiring disparity remains? The justification for "fixing" the representation is now a lot weaker since it's harder to claim it's due to bias. "Let's address bias in our hiring process" is a lot more popular than "let's set quotas". So the people who want quotas try to claim that they're just fixing bias by setting quotas.

You don't eliminate biases by focusing on the gender ratio of the orchestra. You eliminate biases by putting a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators. We all know this, but some people feel compelled to pretend that they're working towards eliminating biases when in reality they're working towards achieving certain demographics outcomes.

Anonymization wouldn’t work. Turns out people are very very good at picking up subtle signals that might hint at the anonymized identity likely is. What ends up happening is more discrimination rather than less. If you don’t anonymize, people will still discriminate, but they are always aware their decisions may be illegal or unacceptable. But when you anonymize, they just discriminate against anyone that has any hint of belonging to the discriminated class. And now you have given them an out plausible deniability by anonymizing. This has been demonstrably shown to be true over and over again. Anonymizing is an elementary school student solution to a complex phD level type problem

Some interviews I've encountered consisted of uploading code that gets executed on a remote server. Grading is exclusively done on the correct output, runtime, and memory usage. This is a truly anonymous interview that cannot be biased with regards to protected class. How does such an interview pick up on the protected classes of the candidate?

The hostility to anonymized interviews stems from the fact that one cannot discriminate in favor of particular demographics. This is the goal of the above commenter, as stated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42830509

This silly solution is often suggested by tech bros who have a really rudimentary understanding of social problems. I guess it makes sense to someone who doesn’t fully understand social issues and thinks of how they would solve it if it was a technical problem. It’s not. Anonymizing does not reduce discrimination. It demonstrably makes it worse. The only things that do reduce discrimination in the short term is rules that deliberately relatively advantages the discriminated class and in the long term, socio-cultural shift.

It's not that the "tech bros" don't understand the problem. It's that DEI advocates tend to misstate the problem they're trying to solve.

> The only things that do reduce discrimination in the short term is rules that deliberately relatively advantages the discriminated class and in the long term, socio-cultural shift.

This isn't reducing discrimination. This is deliberately engaging in discrimination to change demographic outcomes.

We could have avoided a lot of confusion if DEI advocates were honest that their goals are not to eliminate discrimination but rather to employ employ affirmative action to achieve more equitable outcomes. If that's your goal, then of course anonymized hiring doesn't work: if you can't tell which candidate belongs to which demographic, then you don't know who to give advantage to.

Over 60% of the U.S. population don't have college degrees, but you obviously wouldn't expect Facebook's hiring to be proportional to that. The demographics of CS graduates is much closer to what you'd expect the hiring percentages to reflect (and they do)

Had to look up URM

https://diversity.ucsf.edu/programs-resources/urm-definition

Thanks for the link. A bit of clarification: in this context Asian was not in the category of URM since Asians are overrepresented in tech roles at Meta. So URM meant Black, Latin, and American native.

Can’t wait for other physical characteristics like height and weight to join the fray, or other markers of attractiveness/power.

What you're describing is not how it works. Chiefly, the hiring pipelines are not set up for a single role, but a whole family of them. They are filled ahead of need. (Or were, at a time when this would've been taking place.)

There are other inaccuracies, but suffice it to say, this comment section is full of comments by people who have never been hiring managers talking about how hiring works.

The phrase "confidently incorrect" comes to mind

I re-read the wiki page on the DSA multiple times. It does explicitly spell out that at least one "diverse" candidate must be on the slate for each role. Yes, candidates are considered for multiple roles as they go through the hiring pipeline, but that doesn't change the fact that it prohibits moving forward with a hire if the candidate pool for the role does not include a diverse candidate.

If this is wrong, but all means explain how the DSA actually works.

Nothing you just said contradicts the OP in any way, as those details don't change any aspect of the argument.

Fingered again

Wow. Who was the boss? This is contemptible stuff.

He always has been (literally, due to the share structure of Meta and how much Zuckerberg owns), he is just trying to throw someone under the bus for the change in political winds.

The buck stops somewhere else

People for some reason have an inability to separate the goals of DEI/EDI from the practice. It's possible that the goals are important and correct, but the implementation sucks. I am of this belief for many DEI programs I've seen. But I'm still pro-DEI. It just gets implemented often too simplistically and naively, enabling the creation of more controversy and also likely many poor outcomes in organizations. As for what percentage of DEI programs result in such poor outcomes, I dare not guess, I have too little data.

However, the comments that Zuckerberg is making makes me think he really thinks that the goals of DEI are themselves intrinsically bad. He seems to be leaning into the stereotypical type of thinking that causes the issues that DEI is trying to address in the first place.

I'm disappointed. I would have hoped that he'd be capable of diving into more nuance.

furthermore, he is blaming the company's decision on his COO and not on himself as CEO. more than almost any other founder, he maintained control over his company and for better or worse it is clear that he alone bears the responsibility for what the company does as a result of that control. blaming one of his most trusted, respected, and successful deputies for what he now describes as a failure does not reflect well on him as a leader in my esteem.

I think he did her dirty. Don't think he is where he is today without her being by his side back then. She was and remains a fantastic operator.

The goals of most DEI programs can't be achieved without discrimination on the basis of protected class. If software developers are 18% women how can a company achieve 40% women software developers without discrimination? And that was a DEI goal a previous employer used. In fact they had the same goal for electrical engineer too despite being 10% women.

Ambiguous goals like "make people feel welcome" doesn't require discrimination. But those are not the DEI goals people object to. 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at implemented DEI goals in the form of numeric thresholds, and used discrimination to achieve them. Only one carried out DEI in the innocuous manner.

I'd argue if you're looking to achieve DEI goals in the short-term rather than over decades, you're going to fail because the backlash and other consequences will destroy any progress you think you made. And I think that's what we're seeing. You can work towards DEI goals without achieving them in the short-term and still look to make good changes over the long run. But it requires a systems view of everything, including helping kids from various backgrounds to get access to the education they need and then helping them to be in an environment where they can actually successfully learn stuff. That's a multi-generational multi-decade problem, not a corporate fiscal year problem.

This is sort of no-true-scotsman argument. Sure, there is "DEI" that doesn't amount to a dog whistle for discrimination. That was the case at 1 out of the 4 companies I've worked at. But it's the exception to the norm in my experience, and in that of my peers. It sounds like Meta has reached the same conclusion.

Fallacy aside, nobody has successfully proven that holding a few spots at Harvard each year is enough to bring the likes of American Blacks back to socioeconomic parity.

It's a flawed means to an end.

You seem to be an example of what I'm saying. There are very few people that are able to separate the goals of DEI from the practice when doing their analysis. If we're able to do that, we'll be able to find better solutions. And the solutions can't be found by or within individual corporations IMHO. It's much more complicated than that.

It's also possible that you and I have a different idea of what the goals of DEI are and should be.

You say that 3/4 of companies you are familiar with used discrimination to achieve numeric thresholds of 40% women software developers. I can't name a single medium or large tech company that is 40% women software developers. Can you?

Only one company had 40% threshold, the others had 33% and 30% respectively. They also didn't always hit those thresholds. But yes, the recruiters explicitly had 40% women in tech roles as one of their OKRs at one of my previous employers.

The only company I know of that has over 40% women software developers is ThoughtWorks. But they are an Australian company and it is legal for them to discriminate against men in that country. They are transparent about their use of a strict 1:1 gender quota: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-es/insights/blog/beyond-quot...

Yes he's a chameleon and yes he's a turncoat and so on, but it's interesting that he's gone all in on this. There's some debate whether wokism is finished for good or if it's merely gone dormant. He seems to be betting that it's gone for good.

School integration was woke. Women voting was woke. Interracial marriage was woke. Gay marriage was woke. Over the long run, progress only goes in the right direction. There's no debate, just noise. The year to year skirmishes aren't terribly important in the big picture.

Do you really want to get into this?

Moving away from color and race blind hiring to discriminatory hiring was not woke, by your definition.

You think hiring was previously not discriminatory? Wanna explain this one: https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...

That's exactly what confuses me. Yes, I would expect some easing on that, but it's so 180° that I find myself wondering, what exactly is that force that defines the direction. Like, who dictates the agenda. I mean, I would always assume that any 4chan-level explanations that have an actual person making the order of how this will go are not exactly true and things must be a little more complicated than that. But how something "a little more complicated" can lead to this? Why yesterday Zuckerberg felt that he must, and today he is totally convinced he must not? Surely he has a better grasp of that than me, but how the fuck does it work? Who decides that one day we are woke, and the next day we aren't?

After all, nobody assumed that wokism is dead the last time Trump was elected. If anything, it was harsher than ever. Why today major supporters of it suddenly say "fuck that"? Please don't tell me that it has anything with Zuckerberg becoming BJJ aficionado, because I won't buy that shit.

Intellectual fads—memeplexes, if you will—burn through populations. There’s a whole lifecycle to a memeplex taking up residence in a host, then eventually getting ejected. Once you’ve ejected a particular memeplex from your mind, it’ll probably never make it back in. You have antibodies. Repeat that for enough people and the tide can permanently turn on a memeplex. Or at least for several decades, until there is a whole new generation of hosts who don’t have immunity.

It’s seemed pretty clear to me that this would eventually happen for wokism (or whatever you want to call it). It’s simply not sustainable to tell the majority of your potential hosts that, because of their inborn, unchangeable attributes (being white and/or male), they are the problem. And people really do not like feeling physically unsafe, which they do in most coastal blue cities, and which almost all women do when there is a man in the bathroom with them.

So the difference between 2024 and 2016 is that the memeplex was just getting rolling in 2016, but today enough people have antibodies that, to any keen observer, it’s days are clearly numbered.

It would take a LOT of explaining about the context and political climate as to why this is the case. Im on mobile so I'll give a very reductive take, the political guard rails have been removed. Billionaire after billionaire, politician after politician has gone to Maralago to meet with Trump and kiss the ring, they've been making donations of millions to his inauguration fund. Trump specifically threatened Zuckerberg with prison, so he fell in line, and that is the "right" thing to do in his eyes because he stands to gain a lot by getting on his good side, he could even get tiktok. On the other hand, his other option is prison or endless harassment from the government. This is the same deal with Bill Gates and many others. It's all performative bs and these corporations have never had any convictions other than to make the most money possible and to accrue power by taking the path of least resistance.

yet another story pushed down the pipeline to push a culture war and divide us.

An MSN repost of a Fox Business article, that lifted a specific sentence from a NYTimes article, where the source was "people familiar with the meeting".

This is likely as accurate as the game of broken telephone that kids play.

More than once it has happened where some NYT article will discuss some private meeting at the White House and attribute it to someone like, "According to a credible source at that meeting, blah blah". Later it is confirmed that that well placed source was the President, or the secretary of state, etc. Credible news organizations don't just repeat whatever some random guy claims to have heard.

The NYTimes has a history of fabricating and outright lying to serve their own corporate or affiliated agendas. See for eg:

https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Misreporting-Fabrica...

The New York Times is probably the most trusted, and trustable, publication in all of journalism.

"Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low"

https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...

And from the NYTimes themselves:

"‘Trust’ in the News Media Has Come to Mean Affirmation"

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/11/why-has-tru...

So it is two articles that both ultimately source from NYT? They are not commonly flat out incorrect, and when they are tend to correct the record. So I would say your statement is hyperbole and wrong. NYT sources are likely quite a bit more trustworthy than eight year olds whispering to each other for fun.