November 13, 2014 by henrydampier 9 Comments
Kill Whitey: Silicon Valley Edition
From the propaganda offices at Bloomberg News:
That can be part of the bargain for high-tech minorities, the female, black and Hispanic engineers in a business that's been one of the greatest wealth-creation machines ever for white and Asian males. Medina got the advice Lloyd Carney always gives to newcomers. "I tell women and people of color directly, 'Don't you dare advocate for diversity," says Carney, who's 52, black and chief executive officer of Brocade Communications Systems Inc. "'Your career would be over.'"
The diversity issue is being dissected and debated as never before, and industry leaders have been broadcasting their dedication to making pluralism a priority. Tim Cook was Apple Inc. (AAPL)'s CEO for three years before coming out as gay two weeks ago. Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella fanned the discussion last month when he suggested women not ask for raises.
The men and women solving the problem — by getting hired and promoted — can be the least comfortable talking about it.
Problem? What problem?
If Silicon Valley is seen as a suddenly new center of nasty science-based racism, this view is incorrect. HBD was widely promoted and discussed by Silicon Valley's founders.
For the last few years, the unprincipled exceptions granted to Silicon Valley to practice illegal meritocratic hiring procedures have begun to be rolled back.
Meritocracy is actually illegal. Although social justice warriors advocating for equality in hiring may seem to be attacking a plutocratic power center from a position of weakness, they're actually just agitating for the enforcement of laws that have been on the books and tested by ample precedent in other industries.
We can say that part of the reason why Silicon Valley has succeeded so much relative to the rest of the country is because of this set of unprincipled exceptions, particularly that of using proxy tests for IQ as hiring filters. The rest of the country has to deal with highly regulated hiring procedures that require an enormous HR bureaucracy, and prizes official educational certifications over more direct measures of general intelligence.
As you'll commonly hear said by executives, Silicon Valley is a big vacuum for all the smart people in the United States and around the world. One of the reasons why it has such strong pull is because of the various exceptions previously granted to it from on high in the Federal government.
When SJWs succeed in cracking the "greatest wealth-creation machines ever for white and Asian males," it will cease to be a wealth-creation machine. It will become a broken ex-machine; a pile of semi-functioning parts that may blink and whirr, but which no longer generate surplus.
With those legal exceptions revoked, Silicon Valley has no future in California. But something like it might emerge in another place, unlikely within the United States.
Filed Under: Economics Tagged With: Silicon Valley
disenchantedscholar says
Reblogged this on Philosophies of a Disenchanted Scholar and commented:
SJWs are the kiss of death to any intelligent, functioning people.
They have the reverse Midas' touch.
London is trying to replace it, the most multicultural city in the world, or so it boasts….
Thanks for reblogging this. "Most multicultural" is not what I think of when I think about what I enjoyed about living in London.
You're welcome, I enjoy your work.
Boris Johnson as Mayor has been the nail in the coffin.
He even looks like Rob Ford.
Sanelity says
You had me worried there for a moment. Meritocracy is not illegal, it just requires good record keeping. From the Equal Pay Act:
"Pay differentials are permitted when they are based on seniority, merit, quantity or quality of production, or a factor other than sex. These are known as "affirmative defenses" and it is the employer's burden to prove that they apply."
Google "disparate impact."
William Newman says
side point: It is a little odd how hard it is for other countries to get things right to e.g. compete with SV. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to set up institutions more effective than 2014 US: somewhat hard, sure, but not hard enough to explain why not even 5% of countries seem to making a credible stab at it.
main point: Newsflash: easily foreseeable perverse consequences are too hard for Bloomberg writers and editors.
There are various real issues there, but some of the real ones are being pointedly ignored, and the real ones that they want us to think about are not very informative or convincing because they are being reported in such a spacy way.
I am vaguely aware that there are some legal restrictions on employers in their interactions with employees who are in the US military reserves, things like having to take them back after they disappear unexpected in a callup IIRC. I have never heard of a situation where that mattered; given that I know of hundreds of situations where the special employment status of women and other powerful Democratic blocs mattered, and I estimate that I know of at least a hundred where it actually progressed to actual legal proceedings, the special legal status of military reservists is probably not all that special compared to Democratic groups.
Imagine, though, if history had proceeded differently so that specialness of military reservist employment legal status was dialed way, way up. E.g., there are heavy monetary penalties on companies who allow an employee to say something which might make a reservist feel disrespected. In that case, how many of the wary-tension factoids from the article might be reported by reservists? In answer to this question, many normal people would say "duh", but Bloombergers evidently can't get their mind around it. "Because so many in the industry just 'aren't used to having black people around.'" Oh, yes, if you find you have an awkward conversation, that certainly must be it; the mandatory race relations training must continue until the awkwardness improves!
Also, some of the other reports which can't be ordinary direct consequences of employment law are strange in their own way. E.g., you work for Apple in SV and you aren't sufficiently social-media-literate enough to find a lead on the kind of barber you like in a few minutes? It wouldn't surprise me if the modern US produces more personal-grooming-related text in a single day than the entire annual text output of classical Athens, and while our search engines are imperfect, they are better than theirs. I am very very out of place as a Go player in the US, but I know how to find Go clubs…
Being different can of course be quite surprising or disturbing in various ways. I have only small experience, admittedly. (E.g., entering a Korean "Go"/"Baduk" club as a Westerner, and seemingly blowing some of the Korean players' minds when I turn out not to be a hopelessly weak opponent, maybe 30th or 40th percentile by their standards. Also merely being solidly nerd/geek/scholar through my teens and twenties accidentally dropped me into a few surprisingly-out-of-place situations, like when I was stopped on a lonely rural road by a Texas cop and he took offense (?) somehow at me answering his question about where I was going by telling him I was moving from CA college to NY grad school.) But I have read lots of people who have written about much wider experience, especially expats. And I know lots of foreigners in the US who sometimes say something about it. Seldom do those reports give me any of the impression of strange spaciness that I get from some of the points in that article.
Kill Whitey: Silicon Valley Edition | Reaction Times says:
This Week in Reaction | The Reactivity Place says:
[…] Also from Dampier: That Farting Sound of Technological Stagnation, how Techno-Utopianism Can't Deliver Techno-Utopia, and how advocates for "social justice" are licking their chops over the tender, delicious meat of the golden egg-laying goose known as Silicon Valley. […]