I mean, if you think you can get max diversity of ideas without also pulling people from different cultures, you’ve been around way too many white men.
The crux is that a different color of skin doesn't mean different culture. Esp. those companies hiring from a selected set of universities will often come to realise that most employees think alike, independent of where their parents or grandparents were from.
I'd go as far and say that you can get more diversity with an all-white/all-black (or any other color of skin) workforce that come from very different backgrounds and went to a wide set of universities than having a perfectly mixed (as in skin color) set of employees that all grew up in the Bay Area and went to Stanford.
That’s true. Skin color is especially meaningful in the US, where privilege, opportunity, education, and many other aspects of life fall mainly along racial lines. In america, race is inextricably tied to skin color. I’m a little disappointed people have such issue acknowledging this. Once you do, you will acknowledge that the success criteria is a defacto racial criteria. Does this mean anyone is trying to be racist? Not necessarily. Is it racist? Yes. Should you care about it? Well, I suppose it’s a little antiquated to care about your country these days. But you should probably give a fuck about why there aren’t a lot of black people at google, because it says a lot about the US and about google—basically, corporations have no qualms about moving into an area, forcing people from their homes, and then not sharing in the profits.
And it says a hell of a lot about Thiel—there’s basically no evidence he isn’t a complete psychopath.
You can. But this line of argumentation is usually used as an excuse to justify a total lack of diversity. If we lived in a world where people didn't routinely abuse these kinds of arguments that way, then it'd be a fair argument to make, but as it stands odds are firmly in favor of assuming that people using this argument probably has an agenda that has nothing to do with wanting diversity of thought.
Diversity of ideas (and good ideas specifically) comes from education, reading a lot, listening to smart people, thinking, and maybe a bit from genetics.
You're concentrating too much on the skin color. We should push smart people, we should create the culture of smart, so people want to become smart.
It also comes from different life experiences. If I’d made a period product based soley on what I’d been taught at school about women, it would definitely have been a business failure (as I found out by talking to a woman about my idea). You don’t have any way to know how different somebody’s life experiences have been until you ask them, but they’re more likely to be different if the sample set includes more gender, ethnic, nationality, sexuality, and religious diversity.
Concrete example, the number of times Americans assume I have a SSN. Or, on a trip to Kenya, my host assumed I’d know how to say grace before a meal. Or how I came to Berlin and assumed that finding a flat would be as easy as it was in the UK.
Edit: Just realised one obvious group I blindly forgot — poor people have very different experiences than rich people. $2/day absolute poverty, $10/day “you’re doing well by Kenyan standards”, $100/day Harlem average (chosen because it’s what non-Americans think of as a poor bit of America). All different from each other, all different lives from us, even if we don’t call ourselves rich.
Yes but you can hire a lot of people with different skin color that all went to the same university, grew up in the same rich neighbourhood and will have no diversity of ideas.
A group of people with one gender and color of skin from the same country (to be less US centric) will often have little diversity in their ideas. But just by making sure to have x% of non-white employees you won't necessarily reach that either.
You can still end up with a single way of thinking, but it’s less likely. Think of it as rolling D20s instead of D6s, where each number represents a given mode of thought.
Honestly, I'm not sure. I've worked in companies where diversity was seen as important but where people also liked hiring from the Universities they went to. You really don't get any diversity of thoughts with that. But those experiences are from the UK, maybe in the US color of skin says more about your character than the university you went to.
That certainly happens, but you will also find that companies - in the UK too - that insists on e.g. hiring from a select set of universities will tend to also have problems ensuring racial diversity for example. Because it's exceedingly rare that they'll have a representative distribution when hiring from a selective set of universities.
E.g. my ex works in HR for a bank that has a diversity board tasked with improving diversity. Problem: The bank prefers to hire from a certain set of universities that is dominated by students from private education backgrounds, which are predominantly upper middle class and above, which means they're predominantly white.
The numbers are such that with the universities in question they can not match the overall ethnic mix of the UK while recruiting staff with the degrees they want from those universities.
Yet suggesting that one hires by merit rather than by which university they're educated at is totally taboo to even suggest, though it'd almost certainly instantly improve their diversity and raise overall skill levels.
Companies where diversity is actually seen as important will quickly realize that they need to revise hiring policies. And one of the ways to revise it in most areas is to actually hire by merit, rather than by university "brand".
Multiculturalism should be the means, but not the ends. The goal is to find max diversity of ideas, if you can achieve that by pulling in people from different cultures, fine, just don't make it your goal. After all, people from different cultures can think the same.
True enough, but all too often "diversity" is implemented as hiring people exclusively from the international middle-class culture, which is in many respects a far more homogeneous group than "white men".
You can't get the max diversity of ideas while only pulling people from a small number of cultures, however cultures and viewpoints aren't merely an effect of race and so you also cannot achieve diversity of ideas by just diversifying race.
This is all smoke-and-mirrors though. In 2017 when people argue for or against idea diversity, they're almost always just fighting a trojan war for or against redistribution of resources from 'privileged' to 'oppressed' (or if you're right-wing: from 'deserving' to 'undeserving'.)
The point is to remember that we should ultimately be caring about diversity of ideas instead of diversity of inconsequential artefacts of human beings. Focussing solely on the latter without the former is not any better than racism, and ultimately a negative sum game for everyone involved.
Hmm, I’m not so sure we should allow people to sell fentanyl pops or cocaine to kids without going to prison. Not arguing against your point broadly, but that’s exactly the type of response that would sink an effort to remove imprisonment for non violent drug crimes.
As I see it, we need both a propaganda campaign pointing out how nuts the drug laws are in addition to some recognizable way of incrementally easing the laws and adjusting to it. That’s the rational thing an individual would do anyway; i am more aware than ever you need to parcel these things into 2 year steps for american power transfers between parties.
To the person who downvoted me, this is distinctly less useful than contributing the conversation in a meaningul manner.
One of the big problems in America is simply not effectively treating drug use and addiction. Putting people in jail doesn't stop drug use.
You're talking about big distributors, not individual users. Portugal has probably had the best response to drug use, evaluation each case individually and helping people quit drugs when it interferes with their lives.
Well, I thought we were discussing “any non-violent drug crime”. Obviously i’m for rehabilitaion for users; what would the downside be? Could you educate me?
> The only useful feature in Python 3 to me is more liberal use of unpacking.
Unfortunately, this ignores composing software. Your user may use things you don’t. The result: your software won’t get used as a library. That may be fine! More power to you. Just don’t drag anyone else down to 2 with you. :)
Personally, python 2’s print keyword/statement is infuriatingly inconsistent with the rest of the language; the network modules are a mess, organizationally; there’s no async support; the unicode support makes me want to stab my eyes out. I don’t mean to convince you (I’m not very convincing...) just to give an opportunity to hedge your statement with empathy for everyone who did decide to move on. Surely you must have any commentary that doesn’t reduce to “I don’t like change”, right?
Python without py3k is just old software that is end of lifing soon, after all :)
It’s an improvement ideologically, I suppose, but not a practical reduction in economic damage potential. In a very real sense it doesn’t matter it you have quit making something seriously damaging if you need to disable millions or hundreds of millions of devices—ie some automatic update functionality is in itself hugely more helpful than just opening it.
Ideally we would have this suggestion in addition to a stick to ensure people have an incentive to sell relatively secure hardware.
This isn’t necessarily hard or bad, though. If I take $100 and loan it to my neigbor, the debt appears from nowhere. Heck, theoretically, he could loan it right back under different terms and create more debt. Debt isn’t necessarily bad—the fear is you’re builidng on jenga blocks, not that some guy is going to show up with a wrench.
A) this doesn’t require a rogue agent, just an insecure one.
B) you just need the same attack to work twice; less extraordinary than an uncorrelated coincidence
C) possibly some might have access to both. I think this is unlikely, but again, less unlikely than an uncorrelated coincidence.
