"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not."
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked.
These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.
There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving.
What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again.
Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes.
Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative.
And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.
People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute force, which is the problem with DEI thinking. That is also why so many companies are silently ditching those policies.
DEI is not about brute forcing an environment for success, at all. That's not the goal even a little bit.
DEI is about recognizing that our culture has placed some people at a disadvantage by virtue of properties they have no control over and attempting to remedy that imbalance.
Based on the theory that gaps between groups are caused by systemic factors. The gaps exist, so an explanation and fix is needed, which is morally commendable. The problem is that the theory is far too overconfident and completely ignores the fact that the gaps also show up in cognitive testing.
The foundational document of our nation's government literally treats Native Americans as non-people and slaves (who were overwhelmingly of African descent) as 3/5 of a person.
The majority of Black people in the US are literally descended from people who were brought here as slaves. Half of the country was so attached to the idea of being able to own Black people and treat them as property that they started a civil war to hold onto it.
This is the country that was founded on enslaved Black people, created the Trail of Tears, and placed Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
It shouldn't be very hard to figure out an explanation for why certain races in the US have historically been at a disadvantage.
Both things can be true. That fact is that some groups that were discriminated against now thrive, and some don't (even after trillions of dollars in public spending). That is why cognitive testing is helpful at figuring out what is going on.
New ideas, such as the US was "founded on enslaved Black people" really only gained attention the last few years because of our inability to solve the gaps. People wanted an explanation, so the past had to be retconned. The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.
Perhaps the fact that the US was founded on enslaved Black people is considered a "new idea" is why we have failed to address cultural roots of that systemic problem.
> The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.
How well off are First Nations people in Canada and Aboriginal people in Australia and New Zealand?
How would you know when the problem is solved though? If you look at average earnings of groups and correct for IQ, the gap disappears. If you want all groups to score the same on tests of cognitive ability, we've been trying to do that for decades with no success. Every attempt to create a test where all groups get the same average have failed. Sorry, it sucks, but it's the truth.
I don't know what you're trying to say here, but the evidence for malleability of IQ and for SES influence on IQ --- IQ itself being a diagnostic output and not a latitudinal ranking of people by capability --- is pretty strong. It's important when having serious conversations about this to structure the causality correctly: "correct for IQ" sounds at first blush like you've established a causal role for IQ, but really you might be (and probably are) just manipulating whatever X variables are causally linked both to IQ and to other outcomes.
But we currently have a President who described participants in a white supremacist rally as "a lot of good people on both sides" so I think we are very far away from needing a precise definition of "done".
Consider what else you have been misinformed about. Honest question - were you aware of the IQ gaps between groups? Most people I've talked to have no idea.
Perhaps instead of fact checking, we could compare the previous narratives with known public knowledge of the events, to determine if the narratives provided an accurate view of reality. It is easy to distort the truth and still tell no lies.
Wouldn't the ability to "ask the right questions" require that AI could update its own weights, as those weights determine which questions can be asked?
Public trust in the media is at an all time low along with other institutions. People are turning to social media because the press is unreliable. Reform that institution and fix many of our problems.
Maybe AI agents will be able to help identity bad reporting in the press and hold them more accountable. A sort of epistemic anti-virus.
There are a lot of arsonists complaining about fires on this particular point. The mainstream press is mostly decent.
American right-wing propaganda personalities and media outlets drive the negative sentiment to a large degree. They radicalize their audiences against traditional media institutions, and they do it very, very well. Sometimes there are kernels of truth to their criticisms. Mostly they are wildly exaggerated, or even totally fabricated. It sucks we can't have nice things, but it is what it is. Free speech is free speech.
But it won't really get better unless all that propaganda is successfully countered, even if you magically figured out how to build a perfect mainstream media.
Where things get really dangerous is when demagogues come along and join in, like Trump.
On the list of things to look for to tell if you're dealing with a rising authoritarian movement, near the top are sustained attacks on the press. Enemy of the people, Trump calls them. Zuckerberg gets threatened with life in prison. He encourages supporters to menace and attack reporters at rallies. The list goes on.
These all become the pretext for drastic anti-constitutional attacks on the free press, and we're seeing that take shape already in Trump 2.0.
We really have no way of knowing that. It's not like there is any organization that analyzes and critiques the mainstream press in any regular fashion. For instance, the press clearly knew that Biden had major cognitive impairments but they misreported it to the public. There was no accountability at all when the truth was discovered. Same with the story of Trump colluding with Russia, or the many, many different racial hate crime hoaxes. There is ZERO accountability for misleading the public.
I'm skeptical of all the talk about "authoritarianism." All those ideas seem be based on shoddy social science theorizing after WW2 - e.g. "The Authoritarian Personality." I don't think you can accurately predict the rise of a totalitarian leader based on what happened in Germany.
the press brought this up! Dont mistake the no true scotsman fallacy here.
It was openly discussed that Biden was not looking sharp (even though Trump couldn't hold a debate with a mirror).
Biden Stepped down, mid cycle - this was something unthinkable to election strategists and pundits.
It remains one of the most amazing things I've seen, because I understand what it takes to do that, and what many others did in a similar position.
If you want to talk about how perceptions are made - consider that less is made of Biden's actions here, and more is made of the fact that he ran at all.
Did you know that the Russia case resulted in 8 guilty please and 1 conviction? Trump didn't get touched because they knew of the Russian interference, but didnt expect it to harm them.
A sitting president cant be indicted on federal crimes, so the obstruction of justice case was dropped.
This is unfortunate, since it gives ammunition to everyone, at which point it just becomes a team sport.
However, having seen authoritarian states, this is 100% from that play book. And yes, it feels insane and high strung to write that, but what can one do?
It looks like a wolf, it bites like a wolf, but maybe its just a massive dog.
> We really have no way of knowing that. It's not like there is any organization that analyzes and critiques the mainstream press in any regular fashion
The "mainstream press" is actually hundreds or thousands of individual institutions, some big, small, and each have their own flaws, strengths, biases, audiences, cultures and incentives. They compete with and often criticize/check one another. It's not even all that unusual for an editorial columnists to lambast their own publications.
I don't want to idealize it too much, but feedback loops for self-correction are baked into the pie, and they do actually work from time to time.
There's a completely different physics in the right-wing media world though, best illustrated by the aftermath of the 2020 election. Fox had to pivot hard to election denialism because they were getting killed in the ratings by upstarts like Newsmax and OANN who went all in on the election lies. The right-wing media feedback loops don't self-correct, they incentivize extremism, grievance and conspiracy theory.
> For instance, the press clearly knew that Biden had major cognitive impairments but they misreported it to the public. There was no accountability at all when the truth was discovered.
This is mostly right-wing media fiction. Stories and commentary on Biden's age were quite frequent in my experience.
(There's basically a whole genre of faux right-wing media criticism in the style of: "The mainstream media won't talk about X...", even while headlines about X all over the place in on "mainstream" media outlets)
> Same with the story of Trump colluding with Russia
It's not quite that simple. That's not a single story, it's was an ongoing series of stories and investigations that developed over time.
There was plenty of measured, careful reporting around all of that stuff. There was plenty of irresponsible reporting too. There was also plenty of self-flagellation afterwards over a lot of it.
(The Trump campaign, along with folks in it's orbit, did collude with Russia. People went to jail. Paul Manafort literally met a Russian spy on a park bench, kind of like you see in the spy movies, to covertly hand over proprietary voter data. Roger Stone was coordinating with Russian hackers and wikileaks to leak hacked DNC data, etc.)
> I'm skeptical of all the talk about "authoritarianism."
If you can't recognize it as a sign of authoritarianism when a sitting president nearly murdered an entire building full of cops, legislators, staff and his own vice president in a mad, desperate bid to nullify an election and seize power, I'm not sure what can break through.
But we are backsliding, there's no doubt about that. How far we fallback will depend on how effectively we oppose... well.. the current ruling party as it currently exists.
"There has been a government-wide purge going on of references to any sorts of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) criteria, and indeed, various elected and unelected officials have for some time now been using "DEI" as a scapegoat term and apparently a shorter way of casting suspicion on anything that is not being run by some white guy. As a white guy myself, I find this phenomenally offensive, and I can't even imagine how I'd be feeling about it as a direct target of this garbage"
This is the kind of comment that caused all the public backlash against DEI. Completely out of touch. If you talk this way, don't expect the public to believe your claims about defunding.
The majority of the public is fed up with DEI programs. Cherry picking a single appointment because the guy is unqualified but White doesn't really mean anything compared to the programs that caused thousands of people lost job and educational opportunities.
I think they should have been more specific with their wording of the order. It does not specifically say studies or datasets, but it doesn't make it clear that they should be excluded. The actual order:
- Take down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology.
- Withdraw any final or pending documents, directives, orders, regulations,
materials, forms, communications, statements, and plans that inculcate or promote gender ideology.
The order itself is poorly written, and was clearly drafted by someone who understands neither government process or the confusing reality of biological sex. For example, it seems not to acknowledge the factual biological reality of intersex people at all.
Worse, It provides no clear definitions, funding, or means to enforce compliance. Just an unreasonable and vague demand, especially when applied to the work of scientists.
It belies a middle school level understanding of the world we live in, and it's ridiculous demands should be met with only scorn and derision. This is not how functional grown ups behave, it's how angry children who believe that all complex problems have simple answers behave.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked.
These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.
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