odd_primes
4d ago
Yeah, that was definitely a weak point in the piece. Minorities and women clearly benefit from these discriminatory hiring practices and are often fervent advocates for their continuation and expansion, they share at least some responsibility for this situation. Old white men didn't just suddenly wake up one day and decide to throw young white men under the bus for no reason at all.
odd_primes
4d ago
Of course the author will focus on the institutions with the most cultural prestige and influence - they are the tastemakers that set the bounds of appropriate conduct for everyone else. If Ivy League colleges are discriminating against white men, guess where administrations at less prestigious colleges will take their cues from? And guess who built the ideological framework that the HR lady at that forklift company will use to implement a DEI policy to discriminate against white men? Like with the Harvard racial bias in admissions case, tactically it makes the most sense to try to make an example out of the most prominent offender.
Also when writing for a national audience, you need a topic and subjects of national relevance. Ivy League colleges and the media conglomerates that decide what you see on TV are household names across the country, random small businesses are not.
odd_primes
4d ago
Its frustrating when older white men in powerful positions in institutions enthusiastically support policies that would have prevented themselves from being successful, had the policies been in place when they were younger…
It really grinds my gears as well. I had a conversation with an older white male physics prof at a social event a while ago, and he was giving this rather sanctimonious monologue about all the work they were doing to make the field more "diverse", and how they were rectifying the issues that led to women being excluded from the field. Of course he isn't giving up his job to a 60 year old women who was passed over for tenure in the '80s - but he apparently thought it was perfectly reasonable to have a lab with exactly one token white guy. It's just perpetuating the same problem on another generation, with different victims.
Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.
A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:
But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.
And solve it they did.
Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.
Edit: typo
odd_primes
9d ago
Here's a compendium of a bunch of different articles and papers about HBD: https://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/
Richard Lynn's work is one good starting point. It has been quite a while since I have gone down the HBD rabbit hole though, it's one of those topics that eventually got tiresome to argue about. Talking to some blank slate proponents feels like arguing with a young earth creationist, no matter how good the evidence is, they will find a way to make a "god of the gaps" style argument for nurture, education, or whatever.
I think the Indian discourse has really taken off due to increasing exposure to Indians in the workplace for white-collar workers (both through H1-Bs and outsourced teams), combined with increased abuse of visa systems that allows for lower-quality migrants to enter western countries. There is an entire industry built around facilitating Indian access to Western labor markets, often through dubious or outright fraudulent means. For example Canada rejected 74% of Indian student visa applicants in a recent crackdown on rampant visa fraud, and significantly reduced its student visa caps, particularly for low-quality degree mills that were being used as a backdoor immigration route.
The main issue I have seen in the workplace and academia is a high-trust vs. low-trust culture clash, combined with pretty blatant ethnic nepotism. To be clear, this problem is most acute among those born and educated in India. Second-generation Indian immigrants tend to have fewer of these issues, in my experience.
Grad school was an eye-opening experience. I flagged a number of cases of pretty blatant plagiarism while marking computer science work, which disproportionately involved Indian students. Most of those cases just resulted in a warning or a slap on the wrist, despite the academic integrity code proscribing significantly harsher penalties. We also had a case where an Indian student in my department likely faked a result for a paper in a pretty blatant way (his code could not reproduce the results he put in his draft) and another where an Indian student working on a textbook chapter plagiarized large sections of material from existing published resources. Both were caught before publication and handled in-house, the first guy was just told that he could not publish the paper without reproducible results, and the second was sent on remedial academic integrity training after he used the "cultural differences" defense. Sure, it's a low sample size, but the number of issues from the relatively small Indian student population was pretty jarring.
This trend continued in the workforce. One of my first jobs during college was working for an IT consultancy owned by an Indian immigrant, and it was a complete shitshow of wage violations, borderline fraud, and ethical violations that made me quit after a couple of weeks. Later in my career, I briefly had the misfortune of working for a company in the process of being hollowed out by Indian outsourcing. We would send the offshore teams requirements, and they would either send back garbage that didn't work or nothing at all. The most frustrating part was that they would often not even admit it - they would just say "yes we did the needful, the code is done" and sometimes it wouldn't even compile, or it was missing half the features required. It was legitimately maddening and I found a new job as soon as possible. Of course management declared the offshoring a huge success, gave themselves all bonuses, and presumably hopped to new jobs while the company crashed and burned in the background. I have also been in the industry long enough at this point to know that an Indian management chain is a big red flag - a few Indian employees is no big deal, but if it's 100% Indian.... I have seen some absolutely comical listings for jobs that I'd be overqualified for, but they are very clearly written with the intention of excluding everyone except the visa applicant they want to hire. The "Indian exec hiring co-ethnics" bit mentioned below is absolutely true in my experience as well, that's the one thing from the "izzat" post that really matched my experience - I have seen the demographics of entire departments change with astonishing speed with just one or two Indians inserting themselves into the hiring process.
Honestly Indians in the US should be on the front lines of demanding an immigration moratorium from India and the termination of the H1-B program. The level of annoyance and exhaustion has hit critical mass and has now entered the cultural consciousness, and I doubt it's going away anytime soon unless some significant policy changes happen.
A woman was sentenced to 31 months imprisonment for making the following tweet in the aftermath of the Southport mass stabbing, where three children were murdered:
"Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care... if that makes me racist so be it."
She regretted it and deleted it four hours later, but that didn't stop the UK bobbies from scooping her up to meet their quota for the month. While distasteful and based on erroneous information (the perpetrator was in fact a second-generation African migrant, not a recent arrival residing in a migrant hotel), this tweet would be perfectly legal in the US. Throwing housewives in prison for years, for getting a bit heated online after a terrorist attack, is absolutely insane. It's even more ludicrous when considering how the UK police claim they don't have the resources to investigate rapes, burglaries, and other actual crimes that actually impact citizens' day-to-day lives.
odd_primes
12d ago
France and Germany have crushing social welfare ponzi schemes that require an ever increasing number of young people. They need immigrants.
Denmark has pretty conclusively proven that MENA migrants are a net drain on the state, not a benefit. Sure there are a few winners: slumlords, the migrant industrial complex, and people who own shares in the discount retail sector.
odd_primes
13d ago
From the press release, it sounds like the cash back on each purchase is dynamically determined by some sort of mini-game. Normally credit cards have fixed rewards - eg. 3% back on groceries, 2% on gas, 1% on everything else. I think the idea here is that instead you'd have a small chance of getting a large discount by playing a digital slot machine or something, averaging out to the industry standard of 1-2% cash back over the long term. But gamified in a way designed to be addictive.
The other issue is whether this is the thin edge of the wedge - once you've normalized your customers gambling for discounts, why not integrate it with an actual online gambling platform?
It makes more sense when you realize that many master's programs are just busywork to justify a student visa and a follow-on graduate STEM OPT work permit (two years that can be converted to a green card or H1).
They are optimizing for the user experience of someone who wants the fastest, lowest effort way to get entry into the US white collar labor market, not actual learning.
odd_primes
19d ago
This post on "izzat" an Indian cultural honor system, went viral recently. I know we have at least a few Indian users here - how accurate is this characterization? Of course it's probably hard to generalize too much given the fragmented nature of India along cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines.
Here is the text in a non-image format from /r/askindia - the wide range of responses is interesting.
odd_primes
20d ago
What I'm surprised by is why nobody has so far mentioned what, to me, seems the obvious compromise - we just shorten the work week! As our forefathers did forcing a 5 day, 8 hour work week, why don't we continue there? Go down to a 4 day work week, and/or shorten standard working hours to 6 per day?
Because it's significantly less effective for knowledge workers. As an analogy, consider Amdahl's Law for parallel computing. The amount by which you can parallize a task is limited by the non-parallizable component. Except it's even worse for team projects, where the non-parallizable component is the meetings and coordination between teams, and that is a function of the number of people added to a project. The more people working on a project, the more overhead you have in coordinating their work, and the lower the marginal value of each additional IC. Often one talented guy working twelve hour days can outperform a team of 5-10 people, just because he has a compete mental model for the state of the project, and can just do things without spending hours in discussions and consultations.
odd_primes
22d ago
So your claim is that the Taliban regime ca. 2004 was the obvious Schelling point for Afghans interested in the long-term thriving of their country, and those who did not support the Taliban were clearly defecting from the common good of the country?
No. I just don't think they are demonstrating qualities that would make them uniquely valuable citizens, worthy of being fast-tracked through a special process. We have plenty of carrots and sticks for dealing with collaborators: money, status, security... And if we want our local collaborators to be effective, they should be invested in the success of our effort for the long haul. If their plan is to be on an evacuation flight out, why not staff the army with soldiers who only exist on paper, and rob the treasury blind?
odd_primes
23d ago
There is a line in the sand for collaborating with a foreign invader to depose your government and occupy your country, which comes with unavoidable mass murder and atrocities. For Afghanistan, the death toll is estimated at around 200,000, along with the displacement of millions. The government actively trying to genocide you certainly crosses that line. The government enforcing a strict interpretation of Islamic law? That's a lot more questionable. Even a shitty government is often better than a foreign occupation and a low-intensity insurgency. Collaborating means obtaining a personal benefit from and enabling a process that imposes mass suffering on one's countrymen. I think the willingness to do so should be considered an anti-signal when it comes to citizenship, and certainly not an automatic qualification.
odd_primes
23d ago
The incentives seem misaligned when we reward our collaborators for failure. We spent decades and tens of billions of dollars training the ANA only for them to surrender practically without a fight. Giving them the prospect of an escape route to the US likely weakened their resolve rather than strengthening it. It also doesn't seem like the sort of behavior you'd expect from people who genuinely believe they will be executed or harshly persecuted by the new government.
I can see making an exception for rare cases that demonstrate remarkable courage or character as a PR strategy, but extending it to just about any collaborator is completely misguided.
odd_primes
23d ago
The program was not limited to translators, and Scott acknowledges that with "eg as translators". Anyone who worked for the American or coalition forces for at least 12 months can get a special immigrant visa.
Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck? When they swear their oath of citizenship to the United States, promising to bear arms on behalf of the US when required by law, and support and defend the Constitution, why would we believe them?
odd_primes
24d ago
The ones I know seem pretty normal. But they spend the vast majority of their time on site with clients, so that likely insulates them from the corporate culture.
odd_primes
30d ago
Often creditors won't even bother to show up for the bankruptcy hearing and it just gets rubber-stamped. Eg. if someone has $50k in debt split across five different credit cards, it's just not worth a lawyer's time to try to squeeze a few thousand dollars out of the person of which the creditor would only get a fifth.
Depending on the state there are also a bunch of exemptions. For example Alex Jones got to keep his multi-million dollar house under the Texas exemption for a primary residence, despite having an outstanding judgement of over a billion dollars.
odd_primes
1mo ago
I have been getting 5-10 second page loads and intermittent 504s as well. It isn't completely broken, but it's definitely annoying and I could see it impacting site usage.
odd_primes
1mo ago
odd_primes
1mo ago
The real-life version of James Bond would be a bunch of British bureaucrats sitting in meetings for months, punting a decision down the road until a disaster strikes and they are forced to announce that the perpetrator was on their radar the whole time. Meanwhile James Bond becomes a depressed alcoholic doing a desk job and waiting for retirement. High-agency people working in a gay and retarded bureaucracy ruins suspension of disbelief. They either find a new job, or stop being high-agency.
odd_primes
1mo ago
Isn't the point of the telepresence operators to help generate training data for complex tasks? Like it's the same idea as autonomous vehicles: first have the human operator in control and record data with sensors, then progressively shift tasks over to an automated system with a human overseeing the task, with the human only intervening where necessary. This works even better with telepresence since the human can just remote into a robot that gets stuck, fix it, and move on to another robot with a different edge case.
This model sounds plausible to me, but I'm not involved in the robotics space, so I'd be curious to know what you think.
In terms of the safety aspect, I'd be much more concerned about the customers than the operators. The human operator can always just take off their headset if they are being harassed, while the customer cannot. And there are pretty obvious issues with having a roving camera controlled by a human operator in someone's home, like the scandal where gig workers for Irobot posted pictures online of customers on the toilet. It turns out that they were shipping images back to a contractor for data labelling. That seems like the much more obvious failure mode for the Neo.
odd_primes
1mo ago
One of the key figures behind O9A, 764, Atomwaffen, and other offshoots is a FBI informant who runs an extremist literature publishing company. You have to wonder how many people he radicalized over the years, and what percentage of them the FBI managed to apprehend before they committed a serious crime.
The key evangelical for O9A, the figure who facilitated this macabre wedding of apocalyptic death cults, is Joshua Caleb Sutter, a 41-year-old ex-convict, prolific satanist, publisher of manuscripts advocating murder, torture, rape, and child abuse — and a paid FBI informant since 2004.
Sutter’s influence on 764 is readily apparent in the facts surrounding some of the group’s most violent participants, particularly the possession of O9A texts published by Sutter’s Martinet Press imprint, tattoos and flags of the Tempel ov Blood’s insignia, and his consistent promotion of it on social media and in newer publications. Alleged members of the exploitation network include Angel Almeida, who is currently facing a maximum penalty of life on federal charges of coercing a minor to commit sexual acts and possession of CSAM and a firearm, and a Romanian national convicted of possessing and distributing CSAM and had Tempel ov Blood indicia or tattoos of the group's trident emblem.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dangerous-exploits-of-an-extremist-fbi-informant/
odd_primes
1mo ago
I mean it's definitely not high art, but it's pretty cool that a single amateur animator can crank out five minutes of animated content about a niche internet microcelebrity in a couple days. For comparison South Park apparently costs something like $500k per episode, and The Simpsons is in the millions.
The piece addressed this point as well. Based on the stats white men did not migrate into other high-status fields like medicine, law, and tech, likely because of the same discriminatory hiring practices.
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