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As an old, I don't really play video games. But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.
Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?
As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios.
There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs? Conservative men tend to work in the field that pays them the best, allowing them to support their family. They aren't out there making children's toys.
Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?
I mean, it's the political orientation of devs.
From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals. It's an unfortunate truth, but conservatives have to face reality here -- there is no hidden trove of right-leaning engineers waiting in the wings to take over.
I thought that the Grey Tribe also had its share of good programmers. But perhaps I am typical-minding here.
Personally, I see modern progressivism as largely performative, you keep your pride flag up to date, do land acknowledgements or whatever is en wogue right now to signal tribe membership.
A few of the great coders I know are conservative at least in their choice of tools. Rather than eagerly awaiting the next release of their IDE, you would have to pry their vim from their cold dead hands and like to compile their code in hand-crafted makefiles using gcc -std=c89 or some such.
While the one behavior does not necessarily preclude the other, a combination of both would nevertheless feel a bit incongruent.
But perhaps this is my own perception, or my own bubble.
There is an old saw that says that a man is often most conservative about what he knows best.
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It does, but it's not the majority. Brendan Eich was clearly brilliant as was Bill Gates, but there's a lot more Gates' just due to programmers largely being the kids of the PMC and inheriting their political affiliations along with the high IQ.
Also, I don't think political/social conservatism and appetite for change are all that correlated. I knew a cracked engineer that was extremely right wing but was always eager to try and asses new technologies and trends. Of course, if it was shit, he would say so, but if it was good he would be the first adopter and bring everyone along as well. YMMV, anecdote != data.
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By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.
I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.
Turbo-lib here meaning the PMC version of limousine liberal -- performative and extra.
The libertarian streak is definitely present -- although it took a bit of a backseat during COVID -- but it's not as defining of a feature as liberalism. Moreover the rise of FAANG has lead a lot of those with libertarianish sentiments to think of government as the agent for vindicating liberty against the excesses of private power. I tend to think that's rather a silly view, but here we are.
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By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?
I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe
Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.
I agree that the further backend/lower-level you go, the more systematizing, as opposed to empathizing, engineering becomes.
However, I think this maps to the greater autistic-ness (in the colloquial sense) of backend/low-level devs (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this held true even for the strict medical definition of autism). It’s not obvious to me that greater autistic-ness maps cleanly to more right-wing political views; for example, anecdatally, transwomen represent greater percentages of engineers as you go deeper into backend/low-level infra work, but I’d be shocked if any of them identified as Red Tribe in any way.
Perhaps there is a case to be made that autistics tend towards individualist rather than collectivist views. But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.
I would argue that they are both quite individualist, but don't get marked as individualist because invididualism is so baked into American society that it's invisible to Americans. Both Republicans and Democrats discuss their ideas in terms of individual rights ("2A! Religious freedom! Freedom of speech! Right to life! My body, my choice! Constitutional right to an abortion, that SCOTUS took away! Trans people's right to exist! Civil rights!") and while there are grumblings of genuine collectivism in both parties, such views don't have much power.
Collectivism believes that rights come with duties -- and even the French Revolution's great document included disussion of "the rights and duties of man and the citizen." When's the last time American discourse had a real discussion of "the duties of man and the citizen?"
I mean, read some of the stuff even the French Revolutionaries wrote:
And my favorite two:
But of course American discourse involves no discussion of such things; they're anathema. Even the farthest of the far right would shudder at saying such things out loud! Even our legal system involves many complex financial instruments designed "by stratagem or ingenuity" to avoid taxation, and a major theory of American legal thought argues that there is nothing immoral about breaching a solemn contract!
Pure libertarians are definitely individualist, but also marginal, because most Americans have some level of collectivist ideals even if they fall well short of the global and historical norm.
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Yeah, the defenestration of Brendan Eich was one of the first big moves of the Awokening. High level devs just tend to be lefties, it doesn't have to be all of them just enough to make it SEEM like its all of them and keep righties in the closet (and Damore the ones who don't), and the unaligned will mostly go along with whichever group seems to be in the majority.
At the time of
EichgateEichpot DomeEich MobilierLet's go Brendanwhatever we're calling the matter, I was just beginning to follow the rationalist sphere; the wokists, then called 'social justice warriors' or 'SJWs', had not yet burned all their credibility, and I still looked with favour on the movement, despite dis-agreeing with it when I felt it was wrong.I thus held the following Views on their actions:
Proposal: Had Brandon Eich been CTO, CFO, EIEIO, etc when he got the boot, and been just as famous, the content of your comment above would be basically identical except the substitution of his counterfactural position for "CEO" and some slightly different rationalization in item 2.
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You made a version of this argument when we were discussing immigration. It seems that you have a strong belief that there is no acceptable reason (without animus) to treat one group of people separately from another. Is this correct?
Heterosexual and homosexual people cannot be regarded as literally exactly the same. There is a clear characteristic that distinguishes them: having intercourse with members of the same sex vs the opposite sex. Likewise, a heterosexual marriage is not literally exactly the same as a homosexual marriage: in one, two people of the same sex are marrying, in the other, two members of the opposite sex.
Anyone can regard this distinction as being relevant or as being irrelevant. Someone who believes that marriage is primarily about financial cooperation, or about publicly celebrating subjective affection, may regard the distinction as irrelevant. Equally, someone who regards marriage as being the joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole, or as the basis for the creation and nurturing of genetic offspring, will see the homosexual / heterosexual distinction as highly relevant. No animus is required, though of course it may be present.
And this applies in all sorts of cases. Consider paraplegic sports. There is a distinction between an able-bodied person pedalling a bicycle, and a paraplegic operating an electrically powered bicycle. Depending on what you think sports are for, one might regard this difference as important, and split these cases into separate leagues, or one might not. Discrimination between them would not necessarily indicate animus against the disabled, but instead, say, a belief in the importance of fair competition as opposed to the importance of building community spirit.
In short, I do not believe it is sensible to maintain a moral system that regards evidence of discrimination as evidence of animus or unfairness, because people differ on so many axes that a reasonable person may find relevant.
I believe that right and wrong consist in how one treats individual human beings; 'committing a wrong against a group' is an abstraction of wrongs committed against individual members of that group. Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."
The distinction is irrelevant with regard to the State. For legitimate government purposes, 'same/different genital configuration' of the persons marrying is approximately as relevant as 'same/different astrological sign', or 'same/different final digit in Social Security Number'.
The government's interests in marriage largely involve 'financial cooperation', along with things like 'this person is in hospital, unconscious; whom do we ask about their wishes: the person with whom they have lived for two decades, or their parents who kicked them out when they were 16?'.
'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy. 'Nurturing of genetic offspring' is also, while easily pattern-matched to the legitimate government interest in ensuring that children are cared for by someone, not a valid argument against same-sex marriage, as a same-sex couple can adopt children or conceive via surrogacy or gamete donation, and opposite-sex couples in which one or both members are infertile are not excluded from government marriage.
This applies to civil marriage; a church which teaches the doctrine of 'complementary sexes forming a well-rounded whole' and thus only solemnising opposite-sex marriages is a different matter. There were proposals made that the State withdraw from the business of marriage entirely, issue 'civil unions' to couples without regard to gender, and leave 'marriage' to religious organisations, which could set whatever criteria they darn well pleased.
If such a proposal had been on the ballot, support thereof would not constitute animus against gay people.
Everything about this is wrong by the standards of any civilization in western history. The government has always had a sacral function and the sacred rites aren’t always theological in nature but always have a foundation in ideas of right ordering. Every western government has been very concerned with the legitimate propagation of citizen children. Etc, etc.
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I don't believe "group membership" was ever a significant factor of the issue. It was always the characteristics of the specific individuals involved. E.g., nobody ever campaigned against allowing a gay man to get married to a woman.
This is only true if you take for granted a very modern libertine view of the role of government. In reality, "religion-adjacent" concepts like morality, justice, and the promotion of human flourishing have more or less always been the proper aim of law, since prehistory. The movement for gay marriage won not by persuading some people that these are illegitimate ends but by persuading them that gay marriage does not in fact have any negative consequences along those lines. However, not everyone was persuaded by that judgment, and it is not an act of hatred to be skeptical, a mere handful of years hence, that that foretold negative consequences will never manifest.
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That's simply not the case. The state has a vested interest in stable family configurations that produce children that grow up to be healthy citizens, and that's exactly why marriage is a recognized concept in the first place.
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But worse ceteris paribus, yes? I’m saying that the ceteris are not necessarily paribus, and which ceteris you consider relevant is a matter of judgement and of individual conscience.
From where I am standing, you have asserted a set of conditions for what the government’s legitimate interests are, and what information it may or may not consider when dealing with people. On what basis do you make these assertions, and why should I consider them compelling? Do you truly believe that nobody could disagree with you on any of them them except through hatred of those involved?
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Accepting (2) here is really wild. For one, it's quite hypothetical -- perhaps such discrimination never even occurs. Or perhaps it occurs and some lower-level management handles it appropriately. Or perhaps it occurs and Mr Eich recuses himself from the response and delegates it to his COO or other suitable entity. There are a half dozen ways that any putative animus need not have any impact on gay employees at all.
And even if it does come to Mr Eich to decide on the response (for whatever reason the CEO really handling such mundane personnel decisions), it's hypothetical that he would not conclude that he had to set his animus aside and decide on the merits. Either for his own ethical sense or at the advice of counsel.
Many bad things are hypothetical, but we guard against them anyway. It's quite hypothetical that Mozilla headquarters catches on fire, but we still insist that they have fire-alarms, sprinklers, and stairwells with doors and walls that won't burn through in less than two hours.
Furthermore, the CEO having given support to government discrimination against gay people signals to gay employees 'You Are Not Welcome Here', to homophobic employees that they are more likely to get away with mis-conduct aimed at gay people, and to managers dealing with said mis-conduct by sub-ordinates that a vigorous response to said mis-conduct might not be appreciated.
Yes, but fire safety equipment doesn't require excluding anyone for their political views, which is itself its own negative.
Anyway, you could run the entire argument in reverse except signaling that folks can get away with discrimination based on anti-marriage-equality views. Or anything. At this level of hypothetical one could justify excluding anyone.
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Affirmative Action is discrimination against jews, asians, and whites (in that order). Should someone who has contributed a few hundred bucks to the democratic party which works in favor of that ALSO not be allowed to be a CEO? Or does this just apply to causes lefties care about?
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This seems like the kind of thing that one would actually need to prove with empirical evidence. As best as I can tell, there's no evidence that someone donating to a mainstream cause against gay marriage would lead to any such downstream effects in their professional conduct in their workplace, or that gay employees in general (versus gay employees of a certain ideological stripe) tend to interpret their boss's political views against gay marriage as being a signal about how welcome they are in the workplace.
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