Here’s about a week’s worth of notes which I found particularly interesting.
Have a great weekend!
Mar. 27…
Comment Reply from Matt Taibbi
Paul, I’m not unsympathetic to protesters and don’t love a lot of these laws - the amount of bullying influence oil and gas companies throw around at the state level is the bailiwick of a few colleagues of mine - but these sorts of statutes are minuscule in scale compared to the “anti-disinformation” bureaucracies being built. The latter are surveillance mechanisms that algorithmically dispense punishment or deamplification based on crimes of the mind. The potential penalties may not be as severe in the US (yet; there are other countries already incarcerating for things like jokes or satire), but “anti-disinformation” isn’t bothering with concepts as quaint as physical protests or library books. Their most dangerous ideas, like “building resilience,” are designed to condition people from a young age to mistrust their own instinct to question authority. Others, like “pre-bunking,” involve pumping the news landscape full of false information, to inoculate populations against future revelations of corruption. If you have the wrong opinion about, say, war in Ukraine, you’ll be deranked, removed, find yourself unable to sell ads or distribute, and swarmed by AI bots publishing defamatory posts about you. This is all aimed at the idea of protest, not the physical act.
Also, you’re at least talking about laws. The other thing is just a network of bureaucratic procedures within which you generally have no rights. It’s just much more advanced than what you’re talking about. But I appreciate the comment.
[I]f you want another example of Bay Area “progressives” behaving badly, look no further than the case of Jo Boaler, a British author currently teaching at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. As Armand Domalewski noted in a guest post last year, Boaler is the key important figure in the push to water down public-school math education in the name of “equity”:
Boaler’s ideas are bad, but she also has a history of questionable behavior. She once threatened to call the police on Jelani Nelson, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley, after he criticized her publicly for charging $5000 per hour as a consultant (Nelson is Black, by the way). She also declared herself a “maths prof at Stanford” in her Twitter bio until recently, when a bunch of Twitter users pointed out that she has no affiliation with the Stanford mathematics department.
Boaler’s research has also been dogged with accusations of dishonesty. Sanjana Friedman reports:
[L]ast week [California Math Framework] got hit with what might be its most damning blow yet: a 100-page, well-sourced document published by an anonymous complainant alleging that many of the misrepresented citations throughout the CMF can be traced directly back to Boaler…
Other academics began ringing alarm bells about her dishonesty back in 2006, when a team of mathematicians accused Boaler of “grossly exaggerat[ing]” research she claimed supported heterogeneous classes…[W]hen three math professors (including James Milgram, a fellow Stanford faculty member) analyzed the larger dataset Boaler had selectively cited, they found the data actually supported the opposite of Boaler’s conclusion…
More recently, Brian Conrad, a professor of mathematics at Stanford, extensively documented misrepresented citations in the CMF, many of which have now been directly linked to Boaler’s research, thanks to the anonymous complaint published last week.
Friedman also drily notes that even as she fights to remove algebra education from middle schools, Boaler sends her own children to an incredibly expensive private school that offers middle-school algebra to all its students.
So anyway, this is what the Bay Area has to deal with — landlords who protect parking lots in order to keep poor people out of their neighborhoods, and education researchers who try to prevent public school kids from getting the same math education they buy for their own kids. With “progressives” like this, who needs reactionaries?
Apr. 2, 2024
It is not the working class that sees the police as an unnecessary evil and opposes rigorous enforcement of the law for public safety and public order.
It is not the working class that believes public consumption of hard drugs should be tolerated, with intervention limited to reviving addicts when they overdose.
It is not the working class that believes many crimes like shoplifting should be decriminalized because punishing the perpetrators would have “disparate impact”.
It is not the working class that believes you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal” and that border security is somehow a racist idea.
It is not the working class that believes an overwhelming surge of migrants at the southern border should be accommodated with asylum claims, parole arrangements, and release into urban areas around the country.
It is not the working class that believes competitive admissions and job placements should be allocated on the basis of race (“equity”) not merit.
It is not the working class that views objective tests as fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.
It is not the working class that believes America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society.
It is not the working class that sees patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression.
It is not the working class that thinks sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective, biological reality.
It is not the working class that thinks it’s a great idea to police the language people use for hidden “microaggressions” and bias against the “marginalized”.
And it is definitely not the working class that believes in “decolonize everything” and manages to see murderous thugs like Hamas as righteous liberators of a subaltern people.
Apr. 5, 2024
Status games rule every boardroom in the country. The DEI narrative is a very real thing, and, at Boeing, DEI got tied to the status game. It is the thing you embrace if you want to get ahead. It became a means to power.
DEI is like the drop you put in the bucket and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, became part of the culture, and became tied to compensation. Every HR email contains: “Inclusion makes us better.” We all know they don’t mean including the guy who brings his Bible to work. And this kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.
If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it is a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.
The radicalization of HR does not hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses. At Google, they are making a large profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring policies. And because they are paying 30 or 40 percent more in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the DEI tax and still find top people.
But this can be catastrophic in lower margin, or legacy, companies. You are playing musical chairs at the end of the dance. And if you try to do the same things that Google is doing, you are going to end up with the bottom 20 percent of the preferred population.
-Anonymous Boeing Executive