I don't trust this article. The phrase "Losing viewpoint diversity" is of course crafted to make it sound like a chilling trend. Pretty clear what they want you to think about it. But if you drill into what that's referring to, whether you think it's a bad thing is entirely up to what you think of how the viewpoints are changing. "Fewer racists than ever" also maps to "less viewpoint diversity" but is totally a good thing.
I don't know anything about politics in the UK, but in Australia one of the big things correlated with conservative politics is growing up outside a big city. Rural and regional communities are under-served in everything from healthcare to transport to job growth. Coming from a working class background can also make it hard to keep up with the euphemism treadmill and know what's politically correct, even if you're on the left.
I also don't think outright racism is the only taboo viewpoint. Example contributions could be "I think male and female should be the most prominent gender options because my grandma wouldn't know how to use this device if she had to scroll through our current alphabetised list", or "do we really want to stick a gigantic Black Lives Matter banner on our website when 37% of our customer base supports Blue Lives Matter and will hate us, and 40% have no strong opinion"? If someone is skeptical about a political message, they'll be able to notice problems that the less skeptical don't.
You’ve gone straight to the implication that everyone who doesn’t want to hear politics from the noisy few is racist, despite the article not mentioning specifics. This is exactly the kind of chilling effect it’s about. I.e. “You’re not shouting as loud as us, you must be one of THEM”
I think that's an unfair characterisation. I read it as the commenter using racism purely as an example where reduced diversity of opinion towards no racism is a good thing, not saying that all opponents of diversity are racist.
I interpreted it as them picking an example that most people would agree is bad. Taking something to its logical extremes is a natural part of exploring its consequences.
Fewer people thinking that the Earth is flat would also be a reduction in viewpoint diversity.
OP has tried to make one point about the poor logic of the headline & you shut them down & refused to deal with the argument because you inferred the posit that racism is bad as them calling people who disagree with them racist. That's not you engaging with diverse viewpoints.
> OP has tried to make one point about the poor logic of the headline & you shut them down & refused to deal with the argument because you inferred the posit that racism is bad as them calling people who disagree with them racist. That's not you engaging with diverse viewpoints.
First of all, you are confusing me with Neil44. I did not say "You’ve gone straight to the implication that everyone who doesn’t want to hear politics from the noisy few is racist". Neil44 said that. Not me. At no point did I infer that OP would be calling people who disagree with them as racist.
Secondly, how am I "not engaging with diverse viewpoints"? I'm literally on the internet right now engaging with people who express viewpoints that I disagree with. Like, what is your expectation of what "engaging with diverse viewpoints" is supposed to look like? If I'm fawning over an internet comment like "yes, well said, comrade, I agree 100%", then I'm not engaging with diverse viewpoints, am I? If everybody in the conversation agrees with each other, where is the diversity in their views? It's only when people _disagree_ with each other, and still engage one another, that you might say people are "engaging with diverse viewpoints".
Thirdly, I didn't even "shut down" their arguments. I simply acknowledged that this person thinks negatively of viewpoint diversity, and that they provided an example of a viewpoint where diversity is indeed bad (racism). That's me acknowledging their argument (in a snarky way, but still).
I don't agree. I think they were pointing out that the issue is more complex than "viewpoint diversity is good per se". Although these discussions are almost invariably terrible in comment sections because they lack the nuance of spoken discussion, so either of us could be right. I just chose to assume good faith and the strongest plausible interpretation of what they said.
I'd say that's a rather charitable interpretation. "Not necessarily good"? Come on, this is the comment we are talking about:
> I don't trust this article. The phrase "Losing viewpoint diversity" is of course crafted to make it sound like a chilling trend. Pretty clear what they want you to think about it. But if you drill into what that's referring to, whether you think it's a bad thing is entirely up to what you think of how the viewpoints are changing. "Fewer racists than ever" also maps to "less viewpoint diversity" but is totally a good thing.
I’ll also note that anytime I see the phrase “come on” in debate I perceived that the person that said it has lost, knows they lost (usually subconsciously) and are literally begging for leeway.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> I’ll also note that anytime I see the phrase “come on” in debate I perceived that the person that said it has lost, knows they lost (usually subconsciously) and are literally begging for leeway
Oh, the irony. After you scold me on the need to assume "the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says", you immediately proceed to interpret my comment as "literally begging for leeway". I guess my comment was not deserving of "strongest plausible interpretation", or even interpreting it at face value? No, you'll go as far as psychoanalyzing my subconscious where I "know I lost". Wow.
um, I was the commenter, and I clearly just picked racism as an example of the sort of viewpoint that you would be glad to see less of, to show that viewpoint diversity is not necessarily good depending on the viewpoint. You are really misreading it to make some weird point that no one is buying.
> um, I was the commenter, and I clearly just picked racism as an example of the sort of viewpoint that you would be glad to see less of to show that viewpoint diversity is not necessarily good depending on the viewpoint. You are really misreading it to make some weird point that no one is buying.
Ok. Let's see if I understood your point correctly this time: you are saying that sometimes viewpoint diversity is good, and sometimes viewpoint diversity is bad. For example, viewpoint diversity is bad in the subject of racism, but viewpoint diversity might be good in some other subject. Overall, you expressed a sentiment that you are not worried about "decreasing viewpoint diversity". Would you agree with this characterization?
I apologise if I read more into your initial post than was there. However I think the whole discussion thread 100% proves the point that politics should be kept out of the workplace.
I don't really care about the article, but I've noticed a very real trend of "unconditionally believe in the product, don't second-guess or ask why we're building what we're building". To me, that's what viewpoint diversity should be about. Businesses always suffer from "but we're already profitable" bias.
I'm sure there's a Wikipedia article for this phenomenon -- where you are making profit and therefore lose the desire to question the product or improve it significantly because you want to continue on your current trajectory.
It's possible to simultaneously be profitable and be doing bad work. The problem is that it is very hard to convince people that they're doing bad work when they are profitable, especially considering that most people are slaves to their equity and salary.
The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales said this very elegantly[0] "it's very hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it". This to me, is the enemy of viewpoint diversity. Success is a double-edged sword and makes people dumber than they actually are.
Edit: we've warned you about exactly this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23453371. Needing two warnings about something like that is an extremely bad sign. Please don't do this on HN again.
I believe that in the US, racism itself is highly segregated and compartmentalized. You have academia where Asian people are discriminated against, law enforcement where black people are discriminated against. You have the ultra-woke collective culture that drives tech companies that are 80% white/Asian male to have all-hands meetings where they jerk themselves off about how great they think women and minorities are. It creates an atmosphere where absolutely everybody feels like they're discriminated against.
Yeah, probably. If you don't believe this you are probably not as aware as you could be of just how incredibly racist the world was a single generation ago. (Some would say it's still racist, sure, not the point here).
> Anti-white racism has been on the rise the last few years.
a little bit of it, but not really a fair comparison given the many-orders-of-magnitudes of difference. if it seems like it is comparable you are dealing with a very skewed version of reality.
> that progressive dogma now fuels racism more than it suppresses it
agree that the reactionary movements are in response to progressivism and so could sort have been said to have been 'caused' by it. But I think it's important to keep in mind that big, vocal 'thought movements' are exactly what changes in acceptability look like on the inside. I imagine that it's not really possible to go from (a very racist state) to (a less racist state) without a big reactionary clash in the middle. Better to let it get worse for a while so everything can play out, than not have the fight at all and let things stay bad.
Single generation? Sure. But do you think there are fewer racists now than there were 10-20 years ago? I doubt it. I have the sense that we passed a low point in racism a few years ago and it has been increasing since then.
>not really a fair comparison given the many-orders-of-magnitudes of difference
As far as I can tell, anti-nonwhite racism in the United States has very little power. Orders-of-magnitudes of difference? I do not see it.
Agreed, even the title seemed like a dog whistle to me.
Their subsequent bashing of The Progressive Activist confirmed it.
Then when they compared discrimination based on political views (which you pick) with discrimination on race (which you don't get to pick), I wasn't even surprised.
Who the hell are these "Ethical Systems", and why the hell should anyone listen to them?
(I guess we could believe them because an unethical person would never call their org Ethical Systems /s)
Well yes, it's obviously a 'bad thing' but to everyone but the 13% with the least life experience, and who are most likely to arbitrarily reject the views of the other 87%.
It's also keenly hypocritical because it's the same group for whom 'diversity' is a ostensibly an important, defining element.
For most people, losing viewpoint diversity would not be a good thing.
Also - I don't think there ever was a time to 'talk politics' at work, but certainly holding 'commonplace views' was ok, historically.
For the same reason I always look skeptically on other research about "polarization". The trend tends to be that in the past it was common for otherwise-sane people to advocate crazy stuff like bans on interracial marriage. Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization" but I can't find the negative in it, because there is a wrong side of those issues.
> Now the only people who are against interracial marriage are straight-ticket crazy people, and this sorting of society is superficially "polarization"
I'm not sure which metric of polarization is typically used in studies, but the situation you describe (vast majority agreeing, with a tiny minority in an extreme position) intuitively sounds like approaching consensus.
Intuitively, with some survey measure of 0 to 10, maximum polarization would be 50% of respondents responding 0 and 50% of respondents responding 10. Minimum polarization would be 100% of respondents giving the same answer (regardless of what that answer is). I would hope that any polarization metric being used in a serous study would give its maximum value in the former case and its minimum value in the second case.
Variance of survey responses is one statistical measure meeting these criteria, but there might be better measures. Minimum Kullback-Leibler divergence, or earth-mover's distance, from any consensus distribution might also make sense, or a fractional statistical moment less than 2 about the mean.
In any case, tons of people believing one thing and a tiny fraction of people believing something radically different doesn't fit my intuitive notion of polarization. My intuitive notion is closer to variance of survey responses, or earth-mover's distance from any consensus.
> "Intuitively, with some survey measure of 0 to 10, maximum polarization would be 50% of respondents responding 0 and 50% of respondents responding 10. Minimum polarization would be 100% of respondents giving the same answer (regardless of what that answer is)."
A world where 50% of people live at the North Pole, 50% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator, is polarized. So is a world where 90% of people live at the North Pole, 10% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator. Seems like "polarization" is about how many people live somewhere in between, rather than whether the groups at the poles are balanced or not.
Or even, that there exist places between the poles where people could be, even if they aren't. A world where 100% are at the North Pole, the South Pole exists but nobody is there, and between them is only water, is still polarized. The only place you can be, or go, is the two extreme positions. If the survey says "do you LOVE Politician X or HATE them?" and I can't be indifferent to them or mildly in favour or slightly against, it's a polarizing survey, isn't it?
> A world where 50% of people live at the North Pole, 50% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator, is polarized. So is a world where 90% of people live at the North Pole, 10% at the South Pole and nobody at the equator.
First, in order to make sense, it should be "would like to live" not "live", with some context that a new city needs to be built, or something. Polarization is about opinions and attitudes.
Secondly, a world where 90% of people would like everyone to live at the North Pole and 10% would like everyone to live at the South Pole is less polarized. Society is able to make a compromise that is acceptable to more people.
If 8 billion people think soap tastes terrible, 1 person thinks soap tastes delicious, and nobody thinks soap tastes meh, we've reached consensus as a society. There will always be some issues where there is a strong consensus at one extreme or another, but that doesn't hamper society's ability to agree on decisions.
Indeed, and the discourse around American political polarization is centered around the Pew poll which poses binary choices like the one between "homosexuality should be accepted by society" or "homosexuality should be discouraged by society", not questions that have scales of agreement from 0-10.
Polarization has nothing to do with the craziness of ideas, but the lack of a middle ground.
Polarization has to do with the clustering of beliefs. If attending BLM protests makes you less likely to attend pro-life protests, that is polarization. The strength of that correlation is the amount of polarization.
Acceptance of Inter-racial marriage is a topic that was once far more polarized. That depolarization is exactly allowed us to make progress on the topic as a society.
Thus polarization inhibits cultural growth and change.
Interracial marriage did not just slowly creep in until it was considered acceptable. It had to fight its way into the conversation, then have champions who were willing to take great risks and accept painful consequences for promoting these polarizing beliefs.
'Depolarization' on this subject is not something that just happened, nor it an effective strategy for change. What happened is that one side LOST and their viewpoint was forcibly removed from the conversation. Within a generation this viewpoint was considered completely unacceptable and those who held this belief learned to shut up unless they were prepared to become the office racist. Voila, depolarization.
Polarization is the only means by which change will be accomplished and there is a growing majority that desires change so your options are to either pick a side or accept the fact that this conflict is happening and keep your head down while you focus on the rest of your job. There are not other options and we passed the tipping point for this conflict quite a while ago.
You seem to mean something entirely different by polarization and depolarization.
As long as the issue is polarized, then it gains network support from the issues with which it is polarized. That process of standardization that you describe as "winning" happened because the issue became decoupled from stances on other issues and was no longer predictive of other views.
To put this in more concrete terms, I am not saying that you should not challenge racism and racists. I am saying that in pursuit of that goal you should actively push back on assuming someone is racist because of their political views.
More importantly, most of us hold moral judgements that our grandchildren will find horrifying, and it's a tautology that we're unable to see our moral blind spots (or have a good guess where they are). I'm happily in an interracial marriage, but I'm not sure that I would have been in favor of (or even neutral toward) interracial marriage had I been a product of the culture a century earlier.
I'm very glad we've made moral progress as a culture, and that progress has required some voices in the wilderness speaking out. History has shown that these moral errors aren't all attributable to one side of the political isle, either.
We should have some humility in our policies. Almost all of us are on the wrong side of history in ways we are blind to. An absolute belief of being on the right side of history has lead to most of the major disasters of the last century.
I fheyly agree that we should have humility in our policies, but should also be aware that all "progress" is not positive. In fact, how is progress even defined in this case? Is all change progressive? Or is change that younger people agree with automatically positive? At some point before the Spanish Inquisition, one could have argued that this new idea of burning witches was "progress" because it reduced the evil in the world. Back in 1970s Iran, one could have argued that a law that forced women to cover their bodies from head to toe to stop tempting men into sin, as "progressive".
In my own view, which I'm always willing to debate (and lose), a change isn't progressive if it cannot argue it's point using logic. If it silences dissent using threats of ostracism, job loss or ban from some ubiquitous online platform, it's not progress. If it presumes itself to be morally right without arguing it's case, and is happy to shut down any disagreement as (some)phobia, then it's not progress. If it denies science, it's not progress. And if it goes further than demand silence from dissenters, and actually demand that everyone agree (wear the colours, add the right signals to the Twitter bio, "you're with us or against us"), then it's not just "not progressive", it's regressive. It's dogmatic. It's a church full of people all changing a creed whether or not try believe.
Reminder that the UK did have to abolish (and reconstitute) a police force in order to end its civil war in 2001, and still has ongoing litigation about the legality of troops shooting civilians in the streets.
That has absolutely nothing to do with modern "abolish the police" rhetoric.
"Abolish the police" is a utopian Marxist fantasy that holds that in some hypothetical perfected society we won't need police because everyone will just get along, and that the only reason we currently "need" police is because capitalism/patriarchy/white supremacy/imperialism drive people to commit crime and violence, therefore all we have to is burn the existing system to the ground (no need to specify its replacement it in any detail) and utopia will emerge from the rubble. (Nevermind that the politicians who advocate this nonsense spend tens of thousands of dollars on private security while pretending that police are unnecessary.)
It's no exaggeration to say that this is the same ideology ("society is imperfect, therefore burn everything to the ground with no plan to rebuild other than my being in charge") that got tens of millions of people killed in the twentieth century. It's insane, dangerous garbage and it should not be tolerated.
None of the orchestrators of the Northern Ireland peace process held political views that are remotely similar to this.
> Replace interracial marriage with something like abolish the police. Is the ethical/sane choice still clear cut?
That's easy, if you don't elide meanings:
Abolish marriage (as an institution that is only between two people of the same race) (and replace it with one that is between any two consenting people)
Abolish the police (as an institution that is corrupt and excessively violent) (and replace it with an institution that is accountable and reduces crime with the minimum amount of force)
