You’re thinking at the wrong level of abstraction. There is no economic incentive for wokism at the corporate level. But look one level below. The question isn’t what causes “corporations” to act in woke ways. The question is, what persuades employees of corporations to act in woke ways?
My hypothesis is that anti-discrimination legislation has, due to court precedents, developed an inverted burden of proof. If a corporation fires or disciplines someone who is non-white, female, disabled, or belongs to a number of other protected categories, it is now up to the corporation to prove that the firing or discipline was done for non-discriminatory reasons. This, combined with the ideological leanings of most people in HR departments, is sufficient to ensure that every corporation has, within it, the equivalent of an ideological cell, whose job it is solely to push the corporation to act in a more woke manner. This ideological cell has both public opinion and federal law on its side; well meaning individuals who push back end up like James Damore.
But unless this had profit appeal I would expect the market to just… eat pure but incomplete ideological capture after a while
The market is part of society. There was a similar argument made against anti-segregation legislation in the 1960s. After all, given that it’s more profitable to sell to both black people and white people than it is to sell to white people only, wouldn’t it be in business owners’ rational self-interest to desegregate their properties?
The answer, in both instances, is the same: if there is a sufficiently high cultural barrier, then it will be more profitable to go with the culture than against it. Most reasonable people can at least nod along to the woke slogans. After all, it is quite reasonable to suggest that women ought to be treated equally to men, that blacks should be treated equally to whites, and people shouldn’t be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. It’s only when those reasonable propositions are taken to extremes that they result in wokism.
Because of this motte-and-bailey aspect to wokism, it’s easy for wokism to permeate the culture, and for advocates of wokism to tar those who oppose them as racists and bigots.
But there’s a counter-push of “Lots of people don’t like being lectured about politics when they’re seeking entertainment” (for instance).
It’s not at all clear to me that the first effect is so utterly hugely enormously larger than the second that the profit incentive would cause so many companies to swing hard woke.
Lots of people also threatened to move to Canada if Trump was elected President. How many of them actually chose to do so? A Republican in the United States will shout vociferously about Coca Cola or Nike engaging in woke behavior, but will he or she choose Pepsi when he or she next shops for groceries? Will he or she buy some other brand of shoes? And if he or she does, will it make a difference? After all, Pepsi and Reebok are hardly less woke than Coca Cola and Nike.
Their complaint cites calculations provided by Mark Killingsworth, an economics professor at Rutgers University, to allege that, overall, “57 percent of female employees were laid off on November 4, 2022, while 47 percent of male employees were laid off.”
This lawsuit is not alleging that any specific discriminatory behavior took place, or that discriminatory reasoning was used by managers in choosing who got the pink-slips and who got to stay on. Rather, the brute fact that more women than men were laid off is used as evidence to assert that Twitter was targeting women. Now, it’s up to Twitter to show that it was not behaving in a discriminatory manner in conducting its layoffs.
Lots of people also threatened to move to Canada if Trump was elected President. How many of them actually chose to do so?
I don’t think this is the right analogy. Listening to more moderate and right-leaning folk, one gets the impression that viewership of shows and movie franchises that are going woke has been dropping like a rock. Like apparently there was an analysis of when people turned off the Captain America streaming show on Disney+ (I forget its name — the one where Falcon becomes the new Captain), and the moment it plunged was the scene where police were harassing Falcon due to racial profiling.
Maybe the most befuddling part of the culture wars is the way, on every front, soldiers on both sides muddle the facts. It’s hard for me to tell what’s even true. Daniel Schmachtenberger describes this as “polluting the information commons”. There’s a Molochian dynamic where the facts of the matter are part of what’s being fought over.
That’s why I’ve been looking at places that have a profit incentive that are also catering specifically to wokism, noticing I don’t see a corresponding shift in the other direction at the same scale, and kind of scratching my head. Wokism doesn’t look as obviously profitable a thing to align with as their behavior seems. Even if it is, that seems like it’d be hard to determine.
The possibility that it’s actually more like legally imposed internal friction makes some good sense. I doubt that’s the full picture but it’s a plausible major component.
I believe you where I did not before, since I trust explicit statement from you in particular quite a bit. Thank you for the clarification; I can participate on that level. In response, I’ve removed all my heavy downvotes that had been motivated by detected agency.
Ah, so being woke increases your job safety, if you are a member of one of the protected groups. It makes your membership in that group more salient; if you ever get fired, it makes it easier to argue that you were fired because you belonged to that group.
And there is no obvious counter-strategy, because telling them “stop talking about your membership in a protected group all the time” can itself be interpreted as attacking the group.
It sounds to me like the core thing to take away from this is that Union works. can anyone explain to me a reason to see this as bad? It seems to me that Valentine could only reasonably want to ask this if he wants to intervene on it in some way. So I’d like to hear more about what intervention he’d like to attempt and what his intended target of agency is. he says he is “not available for that social move”, which I take to be him attempting to avoid being pressured to be reasonable; I’d like to hear more about that.
edit: after a surprisingly direct “okay, but I’m not out to get you” from him, which unlike most internet interlocutors I actually trust from having known him a few years ago, I now expect that I will not object to his attempted interventions. I do still think that this post is strong evidence he intends to intervene, but I now expect he’s likely to intervene in ways that attempt to bridge conflicted agency between interhuman agentic networking patterns. Which is the essence of what solving safety problems is about, so, thumbs up.
It seems to me that Valentine could only reasonably want to ask this if he wants to intervene on it in some way.
Nope. I wanted to ask this question because it’s about a part of the world that didn’t move like I would have expected, which meant I wasn’t perceiving the world clearly. I care about clear sight. I didn’t have a conclusion in mind about what should happen instead, let alone a scheme to intervene somehow.
[Valentine] says he is “not available for that social move”, which I take to be him attempting to avoid being pressured to be reasonable
Nope. But this line of yours right here is an example. I’m not okay with being strawmanned like this. If you insist on doing so or cannot summon the capacity to stop, I won’t engage, regardless of how valid or valuable your content might otherwise be.
I believe you now when you say you don’t have the intention I’d assumed; I trust you plenty well enough to believe such a sentence. I had detected significant intentionality towards attempting to destroy, and your resistance to clarifying what metanetwork you’d be participating in set off my alarm bells. I now recognize that what you appear to me to have read as my intentionality, and what I read as yours, was probably both of us recognizing each others’ behavior as executing network code (egregore fragments, if you like the woo phrasing rather than the distributed systems phrasing) that would attempt to demand each other participate in the same network.
I’m cool with it if you’re not in the network that has been repeatedly insulted as “woke” lately. I don’t need you to agree. I don’t intend to make any demand of you besides to recognize that I’m not actually intending to make demands or attack when I misread your intention—please understand that the reason my mental netcode detected your behavior as agentic still seems to have been justified at the time. My read that you were guarding against pressure from my netcode still seems right, but since I already have a model of your base-level trustworthiness, and your now having directly asserted no agency towards destruction, I’m more willing to believe you’re not intending to destroy the good part of what you label “woke”.
So with that in mind—I do think that the network behavior seen as woke in disney (for example) is very unhealthy and worthy of analysis to repair. I might term it, to make up a name on the fly, “getting high on the woke”, to contrast with actually trying to improve the world in the direction that subtlety-awareness that got labeled “woke” can provide.
If we’re going to get anywhere, I expect we need to apply a “no command validity” filter to each other’s posts. I won’t accept your commands and you won’t accept mine, and then we can get somewhere. But I’m not able to remove everything you see as a command, apparently, because statements about how I read your interactions appear to me to be reading as commands to you. That’s not my intention; my intention was to express annoyance, not to assert my annoyance is necessarily and unavoidably valid, and your comments asserting that you’re not being agentic to attack sneakily reassure me a lot because I trust you to be honest about an explicit statement like that.
I expect my comment will take several hours or maybe a day+ to process into a form that can generate a response that you trust to not be attacked. No worries if so. Or if you feel you can respond with only fast inference mode, that’s fine too, I don’t need you to take forever to respond, I only offer it in case it clarifies friendliness that you need not rush for me.
I still do feel that the core intention of this post was rather a disaster and that we can’t reasonably establish which answers are accurate without a lot more on-the-ground data collection.
I like the spirit with which you’re meeting me here.
In all honesty I’m probably not going to respond in detail. That’s just a matter of respecting my time & energy.
But thank you for this. This feels quite good to me. And I’m grateful for you meeting me this way.
RE “no command validity”: Basically just… yes? I totally agree with where I think you’re pointing there as a guideline. I’m gonna post something soon that’ll add the detail that I’d otherwise add here. (Not in response to you. It just so happens to be related and relevant.)
In all honesty I’m probably not going to respond in detail. That’s just a matter of respecting my time & energy.
Understandable! No worries at all. I’ll take your message as a fin, and this message as a fin-ack; before, I thought we were headed towards connection timeout, so it’s very pleasing to have a mutually acknowledged friendly interaction ending. Glad we had this talk, sorry to have amplified the fight.
FWIW, for your thinking, if it’s useful—I think the very problem we ran into here is inherently the biggest issue in distributed systems safety for humans itself: how do you explain yourself to a group that is severely divided, to the point that the fight has started leading to beings choosing to disconnect their meanings.
Would love to talk through distributed systems safety with you at some point, though probably not now in this thread, for various reasons; but I’m hopeful that my ideas are shortly obvious enough that I simply won’t even have to, it seems like deepmind may yet again scoop me, and if deepmind can scoop me on how ai can help solve social issues, I don’t think there’s any way I’d be happier to be disappointed; I claim you may be surprised by being scooped on your human friendliness work by ai friendliness researchers shortly too. The general gist of my hunch is, agentic coprotection is reachable, and consent-to-have-shared-meaning may itself be a fundamental component of ai safety—that is, something along the lines of consent to establish mutual information. Or something. it’s a research project because I’m pretty sure that’s not enough to specify it.
You’re thinking at the wrong level of abstraction. There is no economic incentive for wokism at the corporate level. But look one level below. The question isn’t what causes “corporations” to act in woke ways. The question is, what persuades employees of corporations to act in woke ways?
My hypothesis is that anti-discrimination legislation has, due to court precedents, developed an inverted burden of proof. If a corporation fires or disciplines someone who is non-white, female, disabled, or belongs to a number of other protected categories, it is now up to the corporation to prove that the firing or discipline was done for non-discriminatory reasons. This, combined with the ideological leanings of most people in HR departments, is sufficient to ensure that every corporation has, within it, the equivalent of an ideological cell, whose job it is solely to push the corporation to act in a more woke manner. This ideological cell has both public opinion and federal law on its side; well meaning individuals who push back end up like James Damore.
The market is part of society. There was a similar argument made against anti-segregation legislation in the 1960s. After all, given that it’s more profitable to sell to both black people and white people than it is to sell to white people only, wouldn’t it be in business owners’ rational self-interest to desegregate their properties?
The answer, in both instances, is the same: if there is a sufficiently high cultural barrier, then it will be more profitable to go with the culture than against it. Most reasonable people can at least nod along to the woke slogans. After all, it is quite reasonable to suggest that women ought to be treated equally to men, that blacks should be treated equally to whites, and people shouldn’t be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. It’s only when those reasonable propositions are taken to extremes that they result in wokism.
Because of this motte-and-bailey aspect to wokism, it’s easy for wokism to permeate the culture, and for advocates of wokism to tar those who oppose them as racists and bigots.
Lots of people also threatened to move to Canada if Trump was elected President. How many of them actually chose to do so? A Republican in the United States will shout vociferously about Coca Cola or Nike engaging in woke behavior, but will he or she choose Pepsi when he or she next shops for groceries? Will he or she buy some other brand of shoes? And if he or she does, will it make a difference? After all, Pepsi and Reebok are hardly less woke than Coca Cola and Nike.
A concrete example of this inversion of the burden of proof arose just today, with regards to the Twitter layoffs:
This lawsuit is not alleging that any specific discriminatory behavior took place, or that discriminatory reasoning was used by managers in choosing who got the pink-slips and who got to stay on. Rather, the brute fact that more women than men were laid off is used as evidence to assert that Twitter was targeting women. Now, it’s up to Twitter to show that it was not behaving in a discriminatory manner in conducting its layoffs.
That IS evidence.
Thank you, this was helpful.
I don’t think this is the right analogy. Listening to more moderate and right-leaning folk, one gets the impression that viewership of shows and movie franchises that are going woke has been dropping like a rock. Like apparently there was an analysis of when people turned off the Captain America streaming show on Disney+ (I forget its name — the one where Falcon becomes the new Captain), and the moment it plunged was the scene where police were harassing Falcon due to racial profiling.
Maybe the most befuddling part of the culture wars is the way, on every front, soldiers on both sides muddle the facts. It’s hard for me to tell what’s even true. Daniel Schmachtenberger describes this as “polluting the information commons”. There’s a Molochian dynamic where the facts of the matter are part of what’s being fought over.
That’s why I’ve been looking at places that have a profit incentive that are also catering specifically to wokism, noticing I don’t see a corresponding shift in the other direction at the same scale, and kind of scratching my head. Wokism doesn’t look as obviously profitable a thing to align with as their behavior seems. Even if it is, that seems like it’d be hard to determine.
The possibility that it’s actually more like legally imposed internal friction makes some good sense. I doubt that’s the full picture but it’s a plausible major component.
In what way do you intend to intervene on this knowledge?
I don’t have such an intention. I’m just trying to understand how the world works in this spot.
I believe you where I did not before, since I trust explicit statement from you in particular quite a bit. Thank you for the clarification; I can participate on that level. In response, I’ve removed all my heavy downvotes that had been motivated by detected agency.
Ah, so being woke increases your job safety, if you are a member of one of the protected groups. It makes your membership in that group more salient; if you ever get fired, it makes it easier to argue that you were fired because you belonged to that group.
And there is no obvious counter-strategy, because telling them “stop talking about your membership in a protected group all the time” can itself be interpreted as attacking the group.
It sounds to me like the core thing to take away from this is that Union works. can anyone explain to me a reason to see this as bad? It seems to me that Valentine could only reasonably want to ask this if he wants to intervene on it in some way. So I’d like to hear more about what intervention he’d like to attempt and what his intended target of agency is. he says he is “not available for that social move”, which I take to be him attempting to avoid being pressured to be reasonable; I’d like to hear more about that.
edit: after a surprisingly direct “okay, but I’m not out to get you” from him, which unlike most internet interlocutors I actually trust from having known him a few years ago, I now expect that I will not object to his attempted interventions. I do still think that this post is strong evidence he intends to intervene, but I now expect he’s likely to intervene in ways that attempt to bridge conflicted agency between interhuman agentic networking patterns. Which is the essence of what solving safety problems is about, so, thumbs up.
Nope. I wanted to ask this question because it’s about a part of the world that didn’t move like I would have expected, which meant I wasn’t perceiving the world clearly. I care about clear sight. I didn’t have a conclusion in mind about what should happen instead, let alone a scheme to intervene somehow.
Nope. But this line of yours right here is an example. I’m not okay with being strawmanned like this. If you insist on doing so or cannot summon the capacity to stop, I won’t engage, regardless of how valid or valuable your content might otherwise be.
I believe you now when you say you don’t have the intention I’d assumed; I trust you plenty well enough to believe such a sentence. I had detected significant intentionality towards attempting to destroy, and your resistance to clarifying what metanetwork you’d be participating in set off my alarm bells. I now recognize that what you appear to me to have read as my intentionality, and what I read as yours, was probably both of us recognizing each others’ behavior as executing network code (egregore fragments, if you like the woo phrasing rather than the distributed systems phrasing) that would attempt to demand each other participate in the same network.
I’m cool with it if you’re not in the network that has been repeatedly insulted as “woke” lately. I don’t need you to agree. I don’t intend to make any demand of you besides to recognize that I’m not actually intending to make demands or attack when I misread your intention—please understand that the reason my mental netcode detected your behavior as agentic still seems to have been justified at the time. My read that you were guarding against pressure from my netcode still seems right, but since I already have a model of your base-level trustworthiness, and your now having directly asserted no agency towards destruction, I’m more willing to believe you’re not intending to destroy the good part of what you label “woke”.
So with that in mind—I do think that the network behavior seen as woke in disney (for example) is very unhealthy and worthy of analysis to repair. I might term it, to make up a name on the fly, “getting high on the woke”, to contrast with actually trying to improve the world in the direction that subtlety-awareness that got labeled “woke” can provide.
If we’re going to get anywhere, I expect we need to apply a “no command validity” filter to each other’s posts. I won’t accept your commands and you won’t accept mine, and then we can get somewhere. But I’m not able to remove everything you see as a command, apparently, because statements about how I read your interactions appear to me to be reading as commands to you. That’s not my intention; my intention was to express annoyance, not to assert my annoyance is necessarily and unavoidably valid, and your comments asserting that you’re not being agentic to attack sneakily reassure me a lot because I trust you to be honest about an explicit statement like that.
I expect my comment will take several hours or maybe a day+ to process into a form that can generate a response that you trust to not be attacked. No worries if so. Or if you feel you can respond with only fast inference mode, that’s fine too, I don’t need you to take forever to respond, I only offer it in case it clarifies friendliness that you need not rush for me.
I still do feel that the core intention of this post was rather a disaster and that we can’t reasonably establish which answers are accurate without a lot more on-the-ground data collection.
I like the spirit with which you’re meeting me here.
In all honesty I’m probably not going to respond in detail. That’s just a matter of respecting my time & energy.
But thank you for this. This feels quite good to me. And I’m grateful for you meeting me this way.
RE “no command validity”: Basically just… yes? I totally agree with where I think you’re pointing there as a guideline. I’m gonna post something soon that’ll add the detail that I’d otherwise add here. (Not in response to you. It just so happens to be related and relevant.)
Understandable! No worries at all. I’ll take your message as a fin, and this message as a fin-ack; before, I thought we were headed towards connection timeout, so it’s very pleasing to have a mutually acknowledged friendly interaction ending. Glad we had this talk, sorry to have amplified the fight.
FWIW, for your thinking, if it’s useful—I think the very problem we ran into here is inherently the biggest issue in distributed systems safety for humans itself: how do you explain yourself to a group that is severely divided, to the point that the fight has started leading to beings choosing to disconnect their meanings.
Would love to talk through distributed systems safety with you at some point, though probably not now in this thread, for various reasons; but I’m hopeful that my ideas are shortly obvious enough that I simply won’t even have to, it seems like deepmind may yet again scoop me, and if deepmind can scoop me on how ai can help solve social issues, I don’t think there’s any way I’d be happier to be disappointed; I claim you may be surprised by being scooped on your human friendliness work by ai friendliness researchers shortly too. The general gist of my hunch is, agentic coprotection is reachable, and consent-to-have-shared-meaning may itself be a fundamental component of ai safety—that is, something along the lines of consent to establish mutual information. Or something. it’s a research project because I’m pretty sure that’s not enough to specify it.
Anyway, have a good one!
What is this “Union” you’re referring to?
People working together in synchronized groups; the generalization away from formalized Unions. See, eg, wildcat strikes.