Hacker News Reader

Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

You haven't had enough jobs to make a statement like that, no one has.

Your effortless translation of "90% white" to "assholes" is a bit of a tell. For instance, you're white, and used to thinking this kind of trashing a group of people is ok because of your socially dominant position. Because these whites resemble you physically right? But of course you mean the bad whites; you're one of the good whites!

It isn't ok, and let me remind you, you have no basis whatsoever to believe that teams which are 90% white are made up of assholes. It's something you made up and it's racially obnoxious behavior which you should stop immediately.

View on HN

I think the point was that diversity is often lacking in situations with bad people, because those bad people behave in ways that undermine heterogeneity...especially by mistreating the people who are different.

Since racial heterogeneity is a more easily observable situation than, say, diversity of opinion, it's a healthy sign of a tolerant culture. That doesn't mean that a workplace lacking racial heterogeneity is bad. It simply lacks the canary. (If I'm interpreting GP properly.)

> diversity is often lacking in situations with bad people

Do you mean, like, ethnic crime gangs? Those come in white flavors too.

You, and GP, are just making stuff up that confirms your prejudices. You have no evidence of what you're saying whatsoever! All you're doing is stringing sentences together. What if I find one team of ten whites who are great to work with (say you're, I dunno Tongan?) and a team with every Benneton stripe who suck?

The kind of thinking you two are promoting here just throws that information right out the window, in favor of, what? Bad heuristics?

What should we call that? Stereotyping, right?

This is people's livelihood you're messing with here.

I completely agree with you. Where is the proof?

Proof of what? Racism in the workplace? Or bawolff's "in my experience" anecdote?

In this thread I think almost all of the non-fact-based commentary came from Sam, lol. I guess he feels strongly about the topic, but I think bawolff's argument isn't so easily disposable as Sam asserts. And telling someone that their experience is not valid is kind of strange on the internet because there's no easy way to know what bawolff's set of work experiences includes.

You can just divide the number of possible jobs for one human by the number of teams.

It's, wait for it, just like the realization that you can't know "black people", only some finite number of them.

You're showing motivated reasoning, because you're smart enough to follow that argument and chose not to. Not my problem, I'll never see your name on this site again.

This is pretty much nonsensical, but I appreciate you calling me smart.

You're not following my argument and you're expecting me to defend a straw man that you're trying to project onto me.

Huh? I'm not stating any personal opinions about race in the workplace here, and I don't appreciate you casting me as having done so. I was saying that you seem to have misinterpreted other guy's post as a false contrapositive.

Note the "I think the point was," and also the "If I'm interpreting GP properly."

Let me make it clearer for you:

"If the canary is alive, there's oxygen."

That was the GP argument. It's not the same logical proposition as,

"If there's no canary, there's no oxygen."

Please drop the flagrant language. You're way off base.

>I'm not stating any personal opinions about race in the workplace here, and I don't appreciate you casting me as having done so.

I, too, interpreted your original comment as "agreeing with" the original poster.

Your line about "If I'm interpreting GP properly." Came at the very end - after I (incorrectly) assumed you were aligned with GP

My conclusion is that this format isn't very good at difficult conversations

> My conclusion is that this format isn't very good at difficult conversations

I can agree with that.

I’ve generally enjoyed working with diverse teams. But the people who push DEI really hard tend to be insufferable.

Agreed on both points.

Regarding the latter, I feel that people in tech or finance who design their work personality to carry a sociopolitical banner are allocating brainpower away from the core business. At the very least, that can be annoying to colleagues who have to pick up the slack.

But to be circumspect about ethics in general...it's nice to work with good people, and good people often find it difficult to divorce their ethics from their actions because the alignment between the two things is part of what makes them good.

It's not a tell, I just used an example. Put any colors or genders in the example, the specifics don't matter for what I'm trying to say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com