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Quasar

GitHub now run by Maoists

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fraggle said:

I'd recommend trying the Harvard unconscious bias tests, which for me really brought it down to earth and helped make a strong case for me that these things are real and really do affect the way we behave.


I took some of those tests and got "your data shows little to no association" on all of those because I hate people not for what they look like but for who they are. With one exception, on Arab Americans I got "Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Arab Muslims compared to Other People.". So I guess that makes me a cuck or whatever the cool new internet insult is.

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fraggle said:

It's a good question. I'll answer it in a couple of ways.

Firstly it's not about "shoeing people in" but really about giving people an equal chance when hiring, etc. As a society we're at a point where the majority of us agree that we shouldn't be discriminating based on race, gender, etc. The few people still advocating for that kind of thing are usually obvious wackadoodles.

The problems that remain now are subtler and more insidious, and require some careful thought to pick apart. A lot of the effort at (tech company where I work) has been focused around examining unconscious biases - for example, even if you consider the idea of sexism to be abhorrent, you can still harbour unconscious sexism which affects the way you act (and potentially influence things like hiring if you're involved in doing interviews). Maybe this all sounds fluffy and far-fetched; if so then I'd recommend trying the Harvard unconscious bias tests, which for me really brought it down to earth and helped make a strong case for me that these things are real and really do affect the way we behave.

Another way of answering your question is to interpret it as "why is diversity a good thing?". One answer is that from a simple economic point of view, more diverse companies tend to perform better. If you take it as a given that diversity of gender, race, etc. equate to different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, it's not hard to see how a variety of perspectives can lead to a better product. Monocultures in general don't tend to be a good thing since they tend to lock you into a particular way of thinking.


I guess? I think I was more trying to say something like, if there's people who don't exist for those positions, then is it right to try and put people into those positions regardless of their qualifications just because they'd make things more diverse. Maybe I'm confusing myself or I'm still confused by the whole thing, or I'm just dumb. I mean, it could go any way.

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I suppose this means Godwin's law is in effect?

Show's over kids, it was interesting while it lasted.

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Linguica said:

Wonderful images


And here is Ling once again refusing to let Hitler rest in peace.

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Clonehunter said:

I guess? I think I was more trying to say something like, if there's people who don't exist for those positions, then is it right to try and put people into those positions regardless of their qualifications just because they'd make things more diverse.

Sure, I understand - but what you've articulated is a common misconception / oversimplification. Nobody is arguing for hiring a bunch of unqualified people. Rather, the reasons why women and racial minorities are underrepresented in tech companies are more deeply rooted and it's a problem that requires more careful thought in order to solve.

Or, to refer to your previous comment, you said:

Aren't we all just Humans and nothing more?

It's a lovely sentiment that I'd love to agree with, but racism and sexism didn't just vanish because we collectively decided "let's not be racist or sexist any more". It's a goal that needs to be actively worked towards in order to achieve it.

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Fraggle addressed the issue far better than I'll be able to I'm sure, but what the hell, I may as well get in on it.

Tarnsman said:

Because bias can get in the way of meritocracy and viewing something as a "X person's club" can discourage people from entering that field.

That makes sense to me, the only issue that I see is when they hire incompetent staff just to meet their ethnic diversity quota. Fraggle mentioned that there's no one out there arguing to put incompetent people in just because it makes the company more ethnically diverse, yet on the consumer side, I always find myself dealing with staff that frankly aren't at all able to do what it is they're paid to do. Let me be clear - I'm sure the vast majority of the time this has nothing to do person's gender, ethnicity, native speaking language, etc.

I have to give the example that every knows about though, that everyone has had the unfortunate headache of dealing with: People who's job it is it serve English speaking customers who are not able to speak English. Again, let me be clear as possible, I'm not placing any blame on the employee themselves, but I feel it's worth discussing - The only two conceivable reasons for this phenomenon are: 1) These employees are cheaper to hire, which in itself is a huge beast of a problem - The fact that wage still hinges on race to any degree is fucking archaic. With Call Centers, they're outsourced 99% of the time for the same reason, it's far cheaper. Outsourcing everything is going to fuck the west so hard..

Anyway, there's another reason: 2) They were hired just to meet the diversity quota, and the person hiring them is a moron so they put them in the one position they won't be able to perform well at, one that relies on an intimate knowledge of the English language. Seriously, half the time I'm on the customer side of dealing with any company in any means - In person, on the phone, etc - The issue I'm always dealing with initially is overcoming the language barrier to get my otherwise simple issue resolved. Based purely on my own anecdotal evidence, I'd come to the conclusion that 75% of the people in Australia who are in charge of allocating what positions their employees will fill are fucking braindead.

Hell, I'll bring it down a notch - On those occasions where I decide to torture myself with takeout food, I just wish I had a dollar for every time I've been served by someone who has quite clearly not been here very long at all and has only the most rudimentary understanding of the English language, while the guy behind him putting the cups and dishes away has clearly lived here his whole life and could probably take my order in about 1/6th the time it takes when trying to overcome a language barrier. I'm not one of those short-sighted racist dumbfucks who gets angry at the poor guy serving me, rather, I want to take the manager and smack him - The guy serving me can't speak English and the guy stacking the cups and dishes is a clumsy fucker who's always breaking shit, yet if you switched the two around, customers would be served exponentially faster AND you'd have your plates stacked much faster with no breakages. It's a win-win for both employees and the employer. Rather than having mandated ethnicity quotas, we should instead have mandated "monthly manager smackers" who come in to see what an incompetent fool the manager is and fix their staff allocation accordingly! (I'm not being serious.. Or am I?)

There's a flaw in a species system where any of this shit has to be mandated, and yet if it isn't, we end up with an even larger divide between various ethnicities living under the same flag. It's quite a huge problem to tackle and I understand I'm greatly oversimplifying with various elements of my post, but I thought it was a relevant ramble, so I rambled.

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Is it just me or do you see this stupid racist bullshit bled out on each corner of the internet. It infects everything now, even the material of the news itself.

I don't know if it's just trolls, teens, or millions of bored people with no jobs who just happen to post this crap everywhere, on all newspaper 'comment zones', ie. "DARN IMGRANTS! GERT RID OF THEM ALL. HITLER WAS RITE!!" (+315 votes for, -1 votes against)

Even now the newsreaders like to get involved and try to 'call out' the trolls, but they are always three steps behind.

define shitlord(racist.shitlord)
if shitlord(racist);
privilege(check)
else
end(all.life)

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and, bang on schedule, the walking silage heaps from tumbler begin to traipse their shite all over the forums.

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED QUASAR?

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deadwolves said:

Is it just me or do you see this stupid racist bullshit bled out on each corner of the internet. It infects everything now, even the material of the news itself.

I don't know if it's just trolls, teens, or millions of bored people with no jobs who just happen to post this crap everywhere, on all newspaper 'comment zones', ie. "DARN IMGRANTS! GERT RID OF THEM ALL. HITLER WAS RITE!!" (+315 votes for, -1 votes against)

Yeah, it is unfortunately common. Because it's something that interests me, I actually browse a lot of internet discussions to try and get a scope of the online world's views on major topics, and the amount of people who legitimately believe in flat out hateful, ignorant things is pretty astonishing. There's no excuse for that kind of stupidity in the information age. It could be a genetic predisposition for some people I guess. With that said, compared to reasonably rational people, they still do stick out as a vocal minority.

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Linguica said:

So what I get out of this article is:

* Github has grown a lot and has implemented a normal big-company hierarchy rather than a loosey-goosey flat structure
* They've hired people to help focus on diversity, and these people concerned with diversity have made shocking claims like "the biggest roadblock to increasing diversity is white people opposed to diversity-increasing efforts"
* An anonymous person claims that due to this reign of terror, white people are now the real oppressed group

Where does the Maoism come in again? I missed that part?


Basically everything Linguica said. This thread is a trainwreck and white people are not being oppressed by focus on cultural diversity.

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GitHub started deleting repos for ideological reasons for more than a year now. There's no reason to expect neutrality from them.

One answer is that from a simple economic point of view, more diverse companies tend to perform better.


An interesting article to be sure. Not only raw data supporting the stated numbers isn't expressed anywhere, even in the linked PDF all you find are mere allusions to "proprietary data". Verbiage and conclusions galore, hard stats nowhere to be seen.

For all the talk about educating people about bias expressed in this "study", one has to wonder how objective can be a report calling itself Diversity Matters as opposed to a neutral enquiry into *whether* it matters or not - then again, this latter way of doing science is likely a remnant of an outdated patriarchal society. Best to define the desired conclusions before starting the study, and if we're using a black box as our data set, all the better. Peer reviewing is oppression.

Anyway, in light of this rock-solid study, it's hard not to find immense respect for Google or Apple, or even Silicon Valley in general. All those places being whiter than a KKK rally, their ability to thrive in a market economy despite the obvious competitive disadvantage a lack of diversity entails is a testament to the strength of their products.

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If IT industry doesn't have enough women then why we don't have more men in healthcare

Jimmy said:

IMMIGRANTS ARE GENOCIDE

Wasn't this more about women than immigrants? :P

darknation said:

and, bang on schedule, the walking silage heaps from tumbler begin to traipse their shite all over the forums.

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED QUASAR?

Don't worry, Tumblr found reality and decided to move there. Everything on the internet is now irrelevant.

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fraggle said:

It's a lovely sentiment that I'd love to agree with, but racism and sexism didn't just vanish because we collectively decided "let's not be racist or sexist any more". It's a goal that needs to be actively worked towards in order to achieve it.

Yes - like feminism, civil rights is just something we needed to do once and then it's fixed forever. Incidentally, I'd like to know where this idea came from the racism will go away if we stop talking about it. Did racism not exist until people started talking about it? Though I suppose it's a half-truth; what we see as discrimination today was perfectly reasonable treatment for those classified as subhuman then.

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Bucket said:

Yes - like feminism, civil rights is just something we needed to do once and then it's fixed forever. Incidentally, I'd like to know where this idea came from the racism will go away if we stop talking about it. Did racism not exist until people started talking about it? Though I suppose it's a half-truth; what we see as discrimination today was perfectly reasonable treatment for those classified as subhuman then.

Racism will NEVER go away.

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Github is run by dicks.
Github is full of dicks.
This thread is about Github owners being dicks.
This thread has people being dicks.
This thread is full of dicks.
This thread is in Doomworld.
Doomworld is full of dicks.
I am on Doomworld.
I am a dick.

Woah, thats a lot of dick.

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Ashstrodamus said:

Racism will NEVER go away.

We were all certain Earth was flat hundreds of years ago - I've learned to never dismiss possibilities because as a species we're constantly turning over new stones.

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Racism will go away when there stops being a correlation between human aspect and culture.

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Racism will go away when people no longer need to feel superior to others, scapegoat groups, and rationalize their hatred.
So...

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Jaxxoon R said:

Kill all humans?


Cyberdyne Systems would have to advance the policies laid out by Github. Skynet will determine that all humans could have racist tendencies (even unknowingly), and kill them accordingly.

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