I've observed orgs go from diverse to turn largely Indian or Chinese based upon who does the hiring, the only group that doesn't seem to do this is Americans of all ethnicities (Chinese american, indian american, white american etc). White americans seem like the ones having the least legal recourse. When these leaders move they pull these buddies into their new companies, and they often form cliques that operate using their groups culture and protect each other over company interests.
If you are high skill enough to do a PhD in anything meaningful, why enter into an open-ended low-paid work contract with a professor with no definite end-date on when the PhD is granted? An american has even less incentive, as the reward of a work permit is not on the other side.
Only reason should be that you want to be a professor, research can be done in private companies without this license. 95% of a PhD is worth as much as 0%.
> why enter into an open-ended low-paid work contract with a professor with no definite end-date on when the PhD is granted?
This is less of a problem than you might imagine. While no school will guarantee to give you a degree regardless of your performance, it's pretty close. They don't offer the limited funded spots to anyone they don't think can make it.
The real compromises are that people go into their PhD thinking they're going to cure cancer and become a professor at Harvard, and come out of it having made a 5% improvement to a model for predicting the risk of one particular complication following treatment for one particular type of cancer, knowing that becoming a professor at Podunk College would take another decade of work. Or the decide to quit once they discover the reality of it.
The under-paid indefinite purgatory period is called the postdoc.
There are very few of such roles. Of course PhD is often an advantage when it comes to job application and promotion, but outside very specific roles (think about OpenAI looking for a PhD in LLMs, or Intel looking for a PhD in certain engineering fields), it's more often a nice-to-have.
maybe in CS, but if you have a PhD in a STEM field, you're not going to be looking at a wasteland in private industry for jobs that demand a PhD. Good luck getting a job running a big firm's private research lab without a PhD, and tens of thousands of companies demand that PhD. Chemistry PhD? what company doesn't need one of them, if not dozens. Materials science? yeah, you are going to be finding lots of companies that want their product development team run by someone holding a PhD at least. BioTech and Pharma aren't being run by people who just have a bachelor's, and there are over 10,000 private pharmaceutical research labs. Even your Wonder Bread has more than one food science PhD behind the scenes working on it. Any random big agribusiness alone is going to expect you have a PhD in crop science to conduct trials for pesticide development, and they're going to want a chemistry PhD to help develop the formulation, and an entomology PhD to investigate the effect their product has on insect biology, a soil science PhD to study the effect on soil, biochem PhD, biotech PhD, all sorts of engineering PhDs, probably some statistics/math PhDs...
Now, if your PhD is in the humanities, you're not looking at the same situation. It's almost bizarre they call the degree the same name, since a PhD in the humanities takes you on a completely different path. I don't think many companies are demanding a History or English or German literature PhD. Sometimes this can make you a competitive candidate for a job in a completely unrelated field, but those jobs have no need for a PhD, it's just something that makes you stand out when 100 overqualified people are applying for the same job. So will a candidate working in the Peace Corps. Or volunteering hundreds of hours a year. Those getting a history PhD are competing for the...what, 60? 90? jobs in the entire nation that require a history PhD, which is being a professor that gives other people history PhDs. So of course, you will only get such a job if you go to a top 10 school, and the chances of this are basically less than becoming a professional athlete. So the vast disparity between a humanities PhD which has no sustainable aspirational track, vs. a STEM PhD where you become a qualified candidate for both academia/the government which hires many PhDs, and industry, which also has a demand for PhD-trained candidates. Probably 3/4 of STEM PhDs don't work for a school or the government.
In my rather limited experience, private research was way more productive and enjoyable and I was able to do it and get things working without a PhD. In fact, during my short stay a iRobot I was quite surprised to find that none of the PhD's there could help me with what I was doing or provide guidance.
Later I worked with PhDs and PhD candidates in a university setting. What shocked me the most was the narrowness of their knowledge and their lack of consideration for practical matters.
I'd rather let the market judge my work than an academic committee.
There are two key aspects here: the nature of work and a critique of woke narratives, which some argue deny recent developments by framing them as a simple desire for acceptance. Specifically, transgender individuals are seen as being elevated through diversity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, with accusations that these efforts sometimes prioritize activism over qualifications and invade female only spaces that are there for a reason.
While I understand the personal challenges you’re navigating regarding identity and humanity, it’s important to maintain boundaries between personal matters and professional life. In Silicon Valley, the focus is on achieving ambitious goals that deliver exceptional results, similar to the performance expected in professional sports. Success depends on everyone concentrating on their work, regardless of personal beliefs or identities. Therefore, keeping personal issues like sexuality and the woke religion separate from the workplace ensures a productive and diverse viewpoint inclusive environment where all qualified individuals can contribute effectively and help companies thrive against odds.
The former Twitter head of trust and safety Elon called pedo in his PhD thesis argued grindr should accommodate underage queer youth on their platform.
Arguably, that’s creepy. Also, he did not act upon child porn on Twitter while as the Twitter files show he was perfectly capable of acting upon legal speech.
The Twitter files did not expose child porn acccounts that should have been banned, at least as far as I am aware, it’s the ease with which Elon has banned child porn accounts afterwards that showed how easy this was to do.
Twitter former head of Trust and Safety seems like a queer theorist. Queer theory, in direct opposition to the gay civil rights movement, from the first 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” by Gayle Rubin argued for normalizing “man boy love” as in pedophilia [1].
How queer activism build upon queer theory intersect with antifa activism may be why so much of Twitter antifa was involved in child porn and was banned for it.
> I would even be ok with 50%-100% tax rate above 100 million dollars net worth.
What is the rationale behind you think the bureaucrats with no skin-in-the-game would apply the money better than an entrepreneur and with more balance for society?
Well for one, with an entrenched bureaucracy you don’t have to worry about how one man’s emotional state might affect your country’s space programs or satellite internet network.
Those buerocrats weren’t able to construct either on their own, and already ran one space program into the ground. Why do you think they will do better this this time?
Also, what makes you think the buerocrats making up the buericracies are any less emotional when given vast resources? Government is known for wasteful and irrational spending on things such as roads to nowhere
> What exactly does posting race and gender data accomplish exactly, specifically?
It enables third parties to calculate ESG scores more easily using data that would otherwise have to be voluntarily relinquished. The S in ESG stands for compliance with the woke social justice agenda. ESG essentially means compliance with the agenda of the powers creating the score, so coal and weapons manufactorers have a high score.
The companies can be financially pressured by pension and index funds that illegally use cartel behavior to push the incredibly unpopular ESG. Expect those pension funds assets to trend towards negative real returns as companies start prioritizing politics over sensible business decisions. E.g. blackrock, vanguard, most state and federal pension funds.
Do you think this remains true with DIE and affirmative action being implemented in all major employers, universities and institutions? It is not fashionable to point to the unmeritocratic treatment of Asians and white males, so I guess I will point out the emperors nakedness.
Hiring people of all backgrounds that agree with a forced marxist outcome (diversity), firing people dissenting to Marxist forced outcome or shutting them up (inclusion), and a forced marxist outcome (equity) never lead to meritocracy in other places. Why would it here?
Likewise, affirmative action in hiring and research grants favor a less productive woman or a less competent person with the right identity category. Affirmative action categories are from the 60s when the US had a very different demographic, and whom held high status office jobs looked very different.
Your comment is unpopular, judging from the downvotes, but it is still thoughtful and should be debated, not simply downvoted. But you are touching topics that come close to religious faith for some folks, and in an irreverent way.
I wish more people in the tech spoke up against DIE. Corporations are acting as a proxy of Government policies that do not pass the muster of legislative process. It is seems like either 1) Everyone is brainwashed by the woke religion or 2) People know it is malicious but don't have the courage to speak up.
Of all the people, I would expect technologists to have a very straight forward, rational and objectivist perspective, but I am realizing that it might not be the case.
It's the ESG framework that force companies to adopt DIE, kill it and you kill DIE. The marxists are using the large pension funds they manage (blackrock, vanguard, state and federal pension funds etc) to force companies to either seek a high ESG score or see these funds money used as leverage to tank their stock. This is actually illegal, as it's both racketeering and corporations&funds are required to seek profit.
Every wondered how oil, coal and weapons companies could have a high ESG score? It's because it's a scam to benefit the cartels controlling the scores.
In practice ESG stands for sustainability of the political regime (Environmental), compliance with marxist values and social justice programs (Social) and compliance with the desired principles of the ruling government (Government). DIE is part of the S and G.
> Do you think this remains true with DIE and affirmative action being implemented in all major employers, universities and institutions?
Meritocracy is about how government employees (or those who aren't legally "employees" per se, but who still have the political power) are chosen, not about how students or private employees are chosen. (c.f. how the existence of religious schools doesn't imply the country is a theocracy, the existence of CEOs doesn't imply the country is an autocracy, etc.)
Meritocracy actually is about how students or private employees are chosen, since the word is typically used to apply to the entire society of the USA, not just its government.
So yeah, if all schools were suddenly uber-Catholic and dissuaded non-Catholics for example, then that would mean the society has become less meritocratic. Or if companies had racial preferences in hiring instead of hiring based on merit and achievement, and this was widespread, then the US could not be said to be a meritocracy.
This is not a legal or governmental discussion, this is about sociology, anthropology, and culture.
Good points. Also, constitutional constraints apply to public schools and universities so they are not supposed to push a state religion such as marxist theology. It is also illegal to fire someone or discriminate against them for not adopting a faith.
Right now the job is to make more aware that marxism and by proxy wokism doesn't just look like a religion, it is a religion and has a clear theology, so constitutional protections against state religions apply and this should stop the woke abuse of political power for religious aims.
Right. Constitutional protections are the bare minimum for government to follow. There exist configurations of current society with all constitutional protections in place that still leave a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, modern political discourse is obsessed with government and less obsessed with polities, which is really sad, because government is actually a small part of society.
Absolutely. Marxism is an odd cult that slipped past a lot of protections that should have applied to it.
Persons from any faith that worships the state becoming a manifestation of its perfect idol and does the work (praxis) to make it so, should not be allowed any role in it as they would not adhere to the separation of church&state.
DIE is also implemented all over the government, and public schools and universities also apply it. Are you saying you are concerned about this affecting meritocracy, but not in private schools and companies?
Your definition of meritocracy to be related only to those that have political power is not a universal definition. Merriam Webster defines it as "a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated".
But let's go with just political power. Are you saying that getting a high-status private education, eg. harvard or yale, or a high power private company role has no influence on you wielding political power?
No, I haven't said anything about my concerns nor did I intend to.
> DIE is also implemented all over the government
That would make for a better argument with some examples, instead of pointing to universities and private institutions etc.
> Are you saying that getting a high-status private education, eg. harvard or yale, or a high power private company role has no influence on you wielding political power?
No. But "influence > 0" is not the correct criterion.
I think I am a bit confused then. We were discussing meritocracy. Are you claiming affirmative action or DEI has no effect on meritocracy? Or that meritocracy in your opinion shouldn't be a consideration?
> That would make for a better argument with some examples, instead of pointing to universities and private institutions etc.
Why do you think public universities and schools are not government? They are under political founding, oversight, funding, and control so that doesn't make sense to me.
>No. But "influence > 0" is not the correct criterion.
> Are you saying that you think DIE is justified in government, universities and private institutions? Trying to understand your position here
Sorry, as I mentioned, it's not my intention to state my position on DIE here.
> Why do you think public universities and schools are not government? They are under political founding, oversight, funding, and control so that doesn't make sense to me.
You're binarizing things that aren't binary. It depends a lot on what you're talking about. e.g., K-12 and graduate school are not the same in this regard, and different universities/states are different. Public universities have quite a bit of independence from the government and politics; sometimes this is even literally written in the state constitutions. Moreover, institutions have lots of different funding sources. You can't just point at "the government is funding this therefore this is the government". The actual influence the government exerts on an entity compared to all the other influences on that entity is a huge factor here.
> What is the correct criterion in your opinion?
The influence has to be "large", for some sensible definition of large. That definition should probably compare the influence with other sources of influence somehow.
And if you're making a sweeping statement about the whole country, the criterion should probably include something that applies to a large chunk of the relevant institutions in the country.
> You can't just point at "the government is funding this therefore this is the government". The actual influence the government exerts on an entity compared to all the other influences on that entity is a huge factor here.
Public universities and K-12 are actually owned by state governments, and they are subject to FOIA and constitutional constraints like all government institutions. For instance, they are not supposed to push a state religion.
> The influence has to be "large", for some sensible definition of large. That definition should probably compare the influence with other sources of influence somehow.
So are you arguing that meritocratic considerations should be secondary to other considerations decided with political power?
I'm not a huge fan of the form DIE practices take almost every time I've run into them, and I'm often even appalled it's gotten to this point, but I also don't think it is an all-or-nothing proposition.
A metric of diversity being applied to selection really doesn't mean it's the sole criterion. The effect isn't negligible, but neither is it fully-like wannabe egalitarian marxist systems where your parent's job or political affiliations forever determined your future status without negotiation.
There's definitely a scale between a meritocratic and egalitarian society.
How do you think about DEI and affirmative action systematically discriminating against poor people from poor families with unfavored identities?
The problem is that although there is for instance merit to helping the poor, that is in direct conflict with DIE that will choose Colin Powell’s son over a multi-generation poor white son of a black father any day.
Likewise, affirmative action will choose to give Hillary Clinton’s daughter research funding over an Asian male from a poor railroad worker family.
If one really cared about class or generational injustice, then the poor white male and Asian male in the examples above would have not been systematically discriminated against using DIE&affirmative action
There also doesn't seem to be wide awareness that the degrowth people are currently intentionally sabotaging farming output. Sri Lankas food crisis is due to a forced stop in artificial fertilizer use and growth of only organic crops, and there are likewise farmer protests in the Netherlands (5th largest food producer), Belgium, Germany etc due to the governments pushing this.
Closer to home the "inflation reduction act" spends $20 billion to put farmland out of farm use, and also implement incentives to force farmers to significantly reduce production.
This will cause food shortages like it already has in Sri Lanka. Expect huge spikes in food prices like we've seen for gas.
Sri Lanka's various crises are not a result of degrowth policies, but because the country simply has no money to pay for imports. Including of fertilisers. The arrow of causality is fiscal collapse -> agricultural collapse.
It's possible to look at historical crop yields worldwide, including in advanced / wealthy nations, and see where economic recession or high energy (especially natural gas, the primary feedstock in nitrogen fertiliser) results in lower applications of fertiliser as well as of reduced cultivation, and consequent reduced crop yields.
Again, that's a simple market mechanisms and response to costs, not an ideologically-driven policy of degrowth, deindustrialised ag, or natural / sustainable / organic ag.
Though it is a portent of what might face us would such choices be forced upon the world more generally. This is the notion of a technology trap (also "innovation trap" or "progress trap"). See James Burke's Connections, particularly episode 1, Ronald Wright's Massey Lecture series and books, Joseph Tainter, and many others.
One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses.
The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold.
While there are just 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 15 million of the country’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.
This article should give you the context and data points showing you do not have all the information
After the fertilizer ban was implemented, then "Production of tea — Sri Lanka’s main cash crop — fell by 18% in a year. Production of rice — the main food crop — fell by even more" [1]
So you're saying this did not contribute to the food shortage (a drop in domestic production of rice)?
Or you're saying this drop in production would've happened irrespective of the fertilizer ban?
asabjorn's claim was that ag productivity was directly sabotaged.
That is a highly unlikely reading of a situation I see as:
1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.
2. Amongst other measures taken, fertiliser and pesticide imports were reduced. Because of financial necessity, not as some "degrowth is good" initiative.
3. Resulting ground truth was that ag productivity collapsed, as you note.
Again, the driver was not "let's de-grow the economy", but "we can't afford what we had". In the context of other comments I've made on this thread, what Sri Lanka are experiencing might better be interpreted as an unplanned collapse rather than a longer-term, planned, and engineered de-growth. Sri Lanka's fertiliser ban itself was a consequence, not a driver, of unplanned collapse.
The usual poster-child of the alternative viewpoint might be Cuba. That country also saw a dramatic reduction in foreign support when its patron state the Soviet Union itself collapsed. There was a dramatic and difficult period of adjustment, but the result has been a stable and sufficient existence, if not one at notional OECD / major industrialised nation levels of wealth and income.
> 2. Amongst other measures taken, fertiliser and pesticide imports were reduced. Because of financial necessity, not as some "degrowth is good" initiative.
In your reuters link seem to contradict your claim: "The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilisers in Sri Lanka". It was officially rolled back after protests, but "only a trickle of chemical fertilisers made it to farms" so it sounds like supply lines acted as if they were still in place.
> 1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.
That doesn't seem like a great excuse for banning fertilizer, or an explanation for why after rollback of ban only a "only a trickle" of fertilizer was available. The claims in my source and reuters seems to be that the supply was not there, not that fertilizer prices were high. Do you have any source saying fertilizer was available at much higher cost?
Regardless of competency in Sri Lankas governments execution they have been working with WEF on their sustainable farming goals for a while. This agenda seek to ban fertilizer, make us all eat bugs instead of meat and move to organic farming.
Getting a high ESG score due to meeting sustainability goals grants benefits when getting loans, Sri Lankas is 98, so I share your intuition that a huge contributing factor is that they really need those loans due to long term mismanagement.
As I've pointed out elsewhere other WEF sustainable farming aligned governments such as the Dutch have implemented very similar policies and as abruptly, triggering the same kind of large scale protests and dire outcomes:
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/07/ministry-figures-sugge...
I am at this point taking WEF seriously, as real-world negative outcomes does not seem to stop implementation of their catastrophic tyrannical policies.
According to one estimate, the president’s agrochemical ban was poised to save Sri Lanka the $400 million it was spending yearly on synthetic fertilizer, money it could use toward increasing imports of other goods. But Rajapaksa also argued that chemical fertilizers and pesticides were leading to “adverse health and environmental impacts” and that such industrial farming methods went against the country’s heritage of “sustainable food systems.”
And:
“Sri Lanka started subsidizing fertilizers in the 1960s and we saw that rice yields tripled,” says Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a US-based environmental nonprofit that advocates for technological solutions.
You’ve already lived through artificial gas shortages since February 2021 after fracking and gas pipelines were shut down, so that’s demonstrably incorrect. Less easy to spot you’ve seen policy of not building new refineries and oil fields.
Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.
The february 2021 had causes that are well researched. It's not indicative of anything.
> Less easy to spot you’ve seen policy of not building new refineries and oil fields.
The US has barely built refineries over the last 3 decades. This is not a new phenomenon.
> Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.
Can you point this out in the bill so I can read it?
Let me look for a good source for the inflation reduction bill.
In the meantime here you can see the catastrophic effect of Sri Lankan style ESG policies in the Netherlands, as projected by their finance ministry. Netherlands is the 5th largest food exporter in the world.
That narrative (affiliating the collapse of Sri Lanka with ESG, Degrowth) has been getting pushed primarily by people on the other side of the planet with their own political biases (libertarians, preppers, bitcoin maximalists, etc.).
Yes it was a terrible policy to issue an immediate ban on fertilizers, and don't think organizations/ngos associated with the policy should be absolved, but there also has to be a look into where we are in terms of 'planetary boundaries' (Google it) and what it means.
I agree that there are other issues such as huge loans from China ( belt&road is a economic catastrophe where deployed), tourism drop due to covid and a 2019 bombing etc
That said the ESG actions is clearly correlated in the data with 1/3 of farmland laying dormant in 2021, crop losses and yield issues. Many of us won’t forget Sri Lanka was touted by WEF as a ESG poster child before it went south.
Fair point, I'm not trying to defend ESG (there's all sorts of issues with it), but authors from abroad (like Michael Shellenberger who you link to) are seemingly caricaturizing the Sri Lanka situation (a mix of economic loan entanglement and bad policy) to argue for their narrative.
Shellenberger who you link to is "A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them.[2][3] Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, calling them "bad science" and "inaccurate"." (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger )
There are data points in reality supporting the outcome of ESG policies such as 1) 1/3 of Sri Lankan farmland lay dormant after fertilizer ban & forced organic farming 2) 85% of farmers have crop issues 3) yield issues causing food shortages.
Since he describes a catastrophic reality caused directly by very real government policies, this can't just be discounted as a fabricated narrative.
De-growth people will cause mass worldwide starvation in the next 6 months, and the policies are implemented in tyrannical ways so these are tyrants and will soon be murderous tyrants.
If you have leverage by being hard to replace with clear high $ impact and you ask your skip-level manager to make you whole, then you can negotiate a rise. For instance, I received a 45% increase this year upon an already good pay.
Tried that. I kept getting the 'we don't have the budget right now, but we'll make it up to you soon, promise'. Two years later I still didn't get more than 1.5% increases in salary, despite increases in responsibility and managing multiple offshore developers with a higher title than I had.
Put in my notice, got a call from the skip-level manager expressing surprise and how I meant so much to them, they need me, and what would it take to keep me. I said I got a significant raise in my offer (and I did, was about 60%), and asked for 30% on top of that to stay, and he just said "Wow. Well I can't do that. I was was thinking more like 20%."
And if they had given me the 20% earlier, maybe I wouldn't have gone job searching in the first place to get that 60% increase. So I guess in a perverse way I should thank them for being so stingy?
In effect this is indentured servitude. Most people are not aware how common paying to be allowed to start a business is in Europe. For instance, I was told by a restaurant owner in Rome that you have to pay 500,000 euros to the landowning catholic church to open a tiny restaurant storefront there. This is structured as a loan.
