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.
A concrete example of this inversion of the burden of proof arose just today, with regards to the Twitter layoffs:
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.
Thank you, this was helpful.
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 plu...
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,...
That you think they're going super hard woke (especially Disney) is perhaps telling of your own biases.
Lets look at Disney and Hollywood (universities are their own weird thing). The reality is that in the Anglosphere there are lots of progressive people with money to spend on media. You can sell "woke" media to those people, and lots of it. Even more so when there's controversy and you can get naive lefties to believe paying money to the megacorp to watch a mainstream show is a way to somehow strike back against the mean right-wingers. And to progressive people it doesn't feel like "being lectured to about politics", because that's not what media with a political/values message you agree with feels like. So going woke is 100% a profit-motivated decision. The leadership at big media companies didn't change much over the last decade or two, nor likely did their opinions (whatever those actually are). But after gay marriage gained significantly above 50% approval rate in the US and the Obergefell decision happened it became clear to them that it was safe to be at least somewhat socially progressive on issues like that, and would be profitable.
But equally, almost every single "woke" Disney movie has the "woke" components carefully contained such that they can easily be excised for markets where they are a problem. You see a gay kiss in the background of a scene in Star Wars, it gets cut for the Chinese and Middle East markets. Disney has many very progressive employees who are responsible for making the actual art they produce; artists lean pretty strongly progressive in my experience, so of course the employees' values come out in the art they make. But the management puts very strict limits on what they can do precisely because anything less milquetoast is believed to be less profitable.
That you think they're going super hard woke (especially Disney) is perhaps telling of your own biases.
…and then you go on to describe how Disney is in fact selling movies with woke components to the West, which is exactly what I was talking about.
Just… don't do this. I'm not available for this kind of psychoanalysis. I find it extremely difficult to engage in good faith when people make moves like this one. My biases are my business. If you think I'm missing something, just point it out. Don't try to diagnose my failures of rationality.
I'm cool with your assessment. Just to be clear, I'm not refusing to introspect. I'm not available for the kind of social move issued. That's a separate question from willingness to introspect. My introspection is based on my judgment, not directly from social pressure. In fact I try to make whether I introspect and make adjustments immune to direct social pressure. To do otherwise strikes me as opening a port that's really epistemically hazardous to open.
You are making the mistake of assuming that because the median Chinese citizen is ideologically opposed to the American left in a technical sense, Disney's localizing movies for China means that Disney isn't a captured institution. But in fact the American left cares very little about the beliefs and attitudes of the average Chinese person, as they compete in an almost entirely distinct political arena. So major movie companies being willing to sell movies there is not much evidence of anything.
More telling than Disney's localizing for China at all is the ...
More telling than Disney’s localizing for China at all is the fact that they refuse to make high budget, well marketed movies catering to (for example) the Christian right, even though such a niche has proven to be very profitable for independent filmmakers [...]
What's profitable for an independent filmmaker isn't necessarily a market opportunity worth pursuing for Disney. Disney, Paramount, and the other major studios operate on an entirely different scale than independent filmmakers. Given the amount of corporate overhead that they have, a film that returns less than several hundred million dollars in profit, mostly due to merchandising and theme park tie-ins, in some ways, just isn't worth it.
It's not just the Christian right who are being neglected by this reality. Pretty much every film genre other than action/adventure and superhero has suffered. When was the last time we saw a major studio fund a small-to-medium budget comedy? Or romance? Drama still gets funding because those films win awards, but it's unclear even how long that will last.
Okay, fine, maybe not Disney specifically, but Hollywood is perfectly capable of making explicitly political movies like Knives Out iff they are explicitly politically leftist. Chris Evans and Ana de Armas are not getting paid to act in analogous movies for other political factions in American politics, and right wing themes, undertones, or acknowledgements are not getting inserted into mainstream high budget action/adventure movies even to a token degree like left-wing ones do.
From my experiences at a very woke company, I tend to agree with the top comments here that it's mostly a bottom-up phenomenon. There is a segment of the employees who are fanatically woke, and they have a few advantages that make it hard for anyone to oppose them. Basically:
Then we get a feedback loop where victories for wokism strengthen these advantages, leading to more victories.
The deeper question is whether there is also a system of organized top-down pressure running in parallel to this. Elon's purchase of Twitter presents an interesting case study. It seemed to trigger an immune response from several external sources. Nonprofit organizations emerged from the woodwork to pressure advertisers to leave the platform, and revenue fell sharply. Apparently this happened before Elon even adjusted any policies, on the mere suspicion that he would fail to meet woke standards.
At the same time, there was a barrage of negative media coverage of Elon, uncovering sexual assault scandals and bad business practices from throughout his life. Perhaps a similar fate awaits any top-level executive who does not steer his company in a woke direction?
I'll end with an excerpt from an old podcast that has stuck with me:
It is impossible to defend the idea that the invisible hand of the market would guide them [corporations] to this course of action. I’ve been inside a large company when it was adjacent to this kind of voluntary action — where corporations all act in lock step — you’ll just have to trust me here — and I’ve seen the way it’s coordinated.
What will happen is a prominent journalist or several will reach out to the company’s leadership team and ask them for a comment on the current thing. Especially they do this if that company has any history of dealings with the object of the cancellation or the scandal.
The influence of these kinds of journalists, from publications such as the New York Times or the Atlantic, is such that even their most innocuous question is a threat; no threat is ever stated, but all parties involved understand the discussion. Once a few highly visible players perform the designated action, all the smaller players get in line.
They have the nerve to call this a preference cascade, when in reality it’s an obedience cascade.
If you think of "wokeism" as a luxury belief - something that many people like to use to show themselves as virtuous, but don't really do a cost/benefit of any component of behavior or signalling, this makes more sense. Also, don't confuse yourself into thinking systems or corporations have beliefs or intents. They are merely aggregates of diverse actors who happen to be near each other and have intertwined behaviors.
Signaling of wokeism is pretty rampant in today's youth, who are the biggest customers and large part of the workforce for the things you mention. It's probably not ideologically attractive to the elites or leaders, but it's not obviously harmful, so they're better off supporting (or at least accepting) it than dealing with massive conflict within their orgs and among their customers.
Random theory I heard: When Disney releases a new black princess, the fact that toxoplasma of rage forms around it provides them a lot of free advertising. Most people are like 'shrug' and don't care that much, but the fact that everyone's complaining and/or hyping it gets it onto most people's radar.
One possible incentive for corporations to promote wokism is that it's a distraction from other forms of activism which might their hurt bottom lines more.
Also as Bryan Caplan and other comments pointed out, regulations may also drive this shift: the regulations leave companies vulnerable to lawsuits with vague criteria and a defense strategy is to 1. not be the slowest target (this results in a race/escalation) and 2. prepare a vague signaling defense (look at all these employee training programs we do, surely that proves your vague and non-falsifiable accusations of discrimination must be wrong).
A large part of it is the US legal system and anti-discrimination law playing out in counterintuitive ways. The key thing is that where corporations are concerned, US law runs on counterfactual court cases; the actual text of legislation matters only insofar as it affects those court cases. Combine this with management having imperfect control over employees within a corporation, imperfect resolution of facts, and a system for assigning damages that's highly subjective, and executives are left in an odd position.
Every company which does a significant amount of hiring and firing, ie every company above a certain size, will fire and reject some number of people in protected groups. Some of those people will claim that it was because of their group membership, and sue. As a distant corporate executive, you can't prevent this, and can't tell whether the accusation is true.
But you can put everyone through some corporate training. And it seems that the empirical result, discovered by legal departments that have been through this many times, is that you get the best outcomes in the court cases if you go over the top and do reverse-discrimination that the letter of the law says should be illegal.
Off the top of my head (and slightly worried that this will become a major culture war thing, but I will answer the question that was asked):
Aren't CEOs mostly Republicans? And what's stopping the shareholders from insisting on prioritizing profit?
Money is an inventive, not the only one. People also want to be seen as socially acceptable. not reviled Pariahs.
The simplest explanation to me is that most of the things one would call "woke" in media are actually pretty popular and accepted in the culture. I suspect most people don't care, and of the few who do more like it than dislike it.
It seems strange to me to be confused by a company's behavior since you'd normally expect them to follow the profit motive, without even mentioning the possibility that the profit motive is, indeed, exactly what is motivating the behavior.
What tendencies specifically would you classify as "woke"? Having an intentionally diverse cast? Progressive messaging? Other things? And which of these tendencies do you think would alienate a significant portion of the consumer base, and why?
Edit: I've changed my mind a bit on this on reflection. I don't think the purpose is appealing to the few people who care, I think it's about stirring up controversy.
What tendencies specifically would you classify as "woke"? Having an intentionally diverse cast? Progressive messaging? Other things? And which of these tendencies do you think would alienate a significant portion of the consumer base, and why?
By "woke" I'm referring to a pretty specific memeplex. I don't know how to name memeplexes with precision, but I can gesture at some of its key features:
You're right, I could have been clearer about what structure was confusing me.
I keep encountering these detailed claims & explanations about how the movement toward "woke" (for lack of a better word — apparently the left has tagged what was once their word as now strongly right-coded) is having negative effects on viewership and profit. Not overwhelmingly like a lot of the right insists ("Get woke, go broke"), but still pretty significantly.
Like apparently in the Disney+ show where the Falcon became the new Captain America, there was a pretty dramatic ...
As far as running a media company goes, fandom is extremely profitable, increasingly so in an age where enormous sci-fi/fantasy franchises drive everything. And there's been huge overlap between fandom communities and social justice politics for a long time.
It's definitely in Disney's interest to appeal to Marvel superfans who write fanfiction and cosplay and buy tons of merchandise, and those people tend to also be supporters of social justice politics.
Like, nothing is being forced on this audience -- there are large numbers of people who get sincerely excited when a new character is introduced that gives representation for the first time to a new minority group, or something like that.
As with so many businesses, the superfans are worth quite a few normies who might be put off by this. I think this is the main explanation.
…and those people tend to also be supporters of social justice politics.
I guess this is the part that's not so clear to me. I see lots of people like this. I also see lots of people who are groaning about being repeatedly lectured and about their characters and franchises getting deconstructed. It's hard for me to find a vantage point that doesn't bubble me in one sphere or the other in a way that makes one side look overwhelmingly larger than the other. So I just can't tell what the actual demographics are here. But the revealed behavior of these companies gives me the impression that they do find it crystal clear. That's what I find a bit bewildering.
deleted due to excessive downvotes.
Heavily downvoted for (a) not answering the question and (b) instead using this space as an opportunity to repeater signal boost the left's narrative in this particular corner of the culture wars.
[Edited to correct an inappropriate blindness on my part.]
"Woke" is a pejorative neologism for "rights-and-equality-respecting" coined by the anti-equality/human-rights/anti-LGBT/racist crowd. (Edit: Sorry, actually not coined by them.) What is called "woke" is actually normal, and what they'd call "normal" would have to be sanitized to avoid offending their sensibilities (white main characters, non-LGBT couples, etc.).
My guess as to why "woke" (actually normal) culture is marketable is that the anti-rights-crowd is both getting smaller and losing its marketing power.
(In the future, when not wanting to signal the allegiance to the Bad Guys crowd (to both them and normal people), avoid using the word "woke" and find some other way of expressing the same sentiment. Example: "I can't understand why is there a gay couple in a new movie. Any idea why they put such a bizarre, not-related-to-reality and not-appealing-to-viewers thing there?")
The system wouldn't let me delete your reply here. The button simply wouldn't respond.
The problem in short is that you're actively summoning the mind-killing aspects of politics by forcefully asserting one side of a culture war debate as fact, in content and in frame.
This is epistemically toxic and absolutely does not belong in the context of a discussion space for rationality.
Since the tech won't let me delete your comment, I've heavily downvoted it, and I'll leave this comment here.
coined by the anti-equality/human-rights/anti-LGBT/racist crowd
This is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
What is called "woke" is actually normal...
In the future, when not wanting to signal the allegiance to the Bad Guys crowd...
If you find yourself uttering statements like this, consider that you may have been mind-killed by politics. (EDIT: To clarify, I'm from Europe, not the US, and am thus pretty far removed from US politics.)
Though to add a bit of substance to this comment, consider this: How would you expect a poll on the question "To the extent that you understand the term, do you consider yourself to be 'woke'?" to break down by party? For instance, ...
I think the question would be significantly improved by adding some specific examples of what Valentine considers to be "leaning hard woke". A couple of people have responded along the lines of "what you call hard woke is just being decent / being inclusive / not trying to hide the existence of people who are gay or black or whatever", which might be a highly informative response if what Valentine is referring to is (say) the existence of gay couples in Disney movies or an entirely unhelpful one if it's something very different.
Terminology in this area is a terrible mess, because the same thing can look like obvious common sense and decency to one person and like extremism to another. There probably isn't any nice concise term Valentine could have used in place of "wokism" that wouldn't have annoyed someone, but by giving concrete examples it's at least possible to enable people to tell what sort of things are being asked about.
Relatedly, in view of Valentine's complaint that one answerer is "forcefully asserting one side of a culture war debate as fact, in content and in frame", I think it's worth pointing out that the question is doing a fair bit of that itself. Leaving aside the fact that these days "woke" is a pejorative term that signals a particular tribal affiliation, which Valentine says he didn't know, note that "hard" as a modifier is also a pejorative in this sort of context (if someone calls someone else "hard right" or "hard left" you can make a pretty reliable guess at their own leanings) and that the term "ideological capture" also assumes the wrongness of the ideology in question and so far as I can tell is in fact used exclusively to refer to the specific case of social-justice ideas taking root in institutions.
I don't mean that it isn't possible in principle for someone to use the term "hard X" or "ideological capture" about something they don't disapprove of. But in practice it's very rare, and using those terms as Valentine has used them is in effect a framing/slanting of the question, and will tend to make anyone who isn't on the same side of the culture war as (I take it) Valentine is on feel like they're not supposed to belong in this discussion.
I mostly just agree. I definitely thumbs-up the spirit you're bringing in this comment. I really like your contribution here. Thank you.
I did in fact mean "hard" and "ideological capture" as handles for a process, not as embedded insults or dismissals. Some group being ideologically captured doesn't mean the ideology is wrong. It's a hint of the mechanism of spreading. And I'd picked up "hard" as something like "far, but with intent to go far". Like the difference between "far left" and "hard left" (or "far right" vs. "hard right") lands for me as a matter of how much fight energy there is in going that direction. And the thing I'm looking at is definitely a matter of something that looks to me like fight energy pushing far left.
But I hear you, apparently these descriptors are signals about the speaker's position on the ideology spectrum. I didn't intend that. Alas. Language itself has been more attacked than I'd been aware of.
But to your main point: I agree, concrete examples would have been more helpful as a way of pointing at the thing I was trying to ask about. I'd hoped that there was enough grounding in rationality here, and enough anti dark arts collective skill, that the communal behavioral prior was exactly on looking for and naming Gears instead of resorting to memetic slap-fighting. That was in fact why I asked here instead of somewhere else! But it seems I missed in my guess. Not totally. But enough to be noteworthy. [See reply thread with gjm below for scratch context.]
For what it's worth, I wouldn't describe myself as leaning right. I think the right makes an analogous error. It just sounds different. So I don't think this is me slipping in hidden rightist bias. I'm just honestly trying to look at how the world works.
I don't claim to know what your political position is, but as regards the last paragraph I think it's worth remarking that it is not at all uncommon that two people both think their own political position is kinda in the middle, but A thinks B is way over on the left and B thinks A is way over on the right.
(Also, I wish people didn't write things like your fourth paragraph. "I'm sorry you took offence at what I said." "This is all my fault: I should never have thought I could trust you." "I handled this badly -- I hadn't appreciated how limited your understanding is." Bleh.)
(Also, I wish people didn't write things like your fourth paragraph. "I'm sorry you took offence at what I said." "This is all my fault: I should never have thought I could trust you." "I handled this badly -- I hadn't appreciated how limited your understanding is." Bleh.)
Uh, yeah. Oops. I didn't mean it to come out that way, but rereading it it really does. Sorry about that.
I meant it honestly as "I misread the context. Mea culpa."
I also feel some snark toward rationalist culture that slips in sideways. It's obvious that's what happened here. That's an unkindness that really doesn't belong there.
Thanks for naming it.
(I feel like I should mention that none of the downvotes on the comment I'm replying to is from me.)
The fact that you didn't actually add the examples is one of the key factors in how I detected agency here; see my recent comments, I do believe you now that you've directly asserted non-agency, since I've known you long enough to trust you wouldn't lie about that level of direct statement. I'd still love to see examples of the behaviors that characterize patterns you want to understand, if you're willing to add them. I don't think any label will fully substitute for examples, because we all have such different reads as to what examples might be referenced, especially since you've used the word "woke" which is in fact generally a pejorative in current usage as far as I'm aware.
Yeah, this was a meaningful update for me in this area. The importance of concrete examples in areas where the info commons have become a memetic battleground. It seems kind of obvious once said but I'd never thought about it this way before. I just wanted to point and ask "Why does that thing move the way it's moving?"
…especially since you've used the word "woke" which is in fact generally a pejorative in current usage as far as I'm aware.
I think I said this somewhere else, but you might find it a helpful aside anyway:
I originally learned the term "woke" from skater kids who would probably have identified with the left. I watched as the term morphed from a "awaken from the Matrix" kind of thing to "seeing the racial inequality that's baked into culture" and then into a more general intersectionalist framing — all from people who stood out clearly to me as being on the political left.
I'd known the right sometimes used "woke" mockingly, but they also use "pro-choice" mockingly at times too.
So the main surprise for me here was in discovering that the left has apparently started interpreting anyone using "woke" as being on the right and meaning it mockingly.
It's an odd level of memetic forgetfulness, resulting in an actual change in what the term means and signals, that I hadn't expected. It's weird to me on the level of if "Black lives matter!" were to evolve to be a KKK slogan. Not impossible but definitely not what I'd expect by default.
What I'm saying here doesn't detract at all from what you're saying. I just thought you'd find that snapshot into why I'd used "woke" interesting and possibly helpful to know.
Huh! I had heard it in passing before the past 6 years, but over the past 6 years is when I started hearing it enough to get a binding for "wokism", which I think is a keyword that had a strong binding for me. My intuition wants to round it off to "I hadn't heard it until the recent definition", which I think is technically wrong, but still matches my perceptual data fairly well. Shrug, it's not actually that important; one could add some connecting words that would make it clearly a description of something bad, even as someone who strongly approves of large swaths of what the right would label "woke" I do think that there's a kind of performative wokeness that fails to be actually awake in the ways I care about and thereby fails to implement the coprotection of beings that I'd want people to wake up to in the first place.
Any competent economist will say "yes, universities behave exactly as if profit-focused". Recent economist blog on the topic: https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/price-discrimination-explains-college
Universities are profit-focused?
Yes. (Edit: Also prestige-focused, although one could say prestige is a means to long-term profit; more in below comments.) Take a look at university endowments...
How do they get there? It's not through lack of trying, and the majority of it is not tuition. Rather:
Agree that those are large amounts of money you just listed; think it's highly dubious that prestigious universities having lots of money shows that universities are profit focused, rather than say 'prestige' or 'status' focused. Getting lots of donations makes your university prestigious; so does producing lots of socially respected research for free, charging your poor students less, and having a faculty that promotes whatever political beliefs are most popular among academics. Only one of those things actually generates large endowments, though, and even if universities were good at producing those that certainly doesn't imply any kind of selection mechanism whereby Harvard can actually be replaced by another university that does less unpopularly "woke" stuff.
They are obviously very good at getting money, consistently so, but yes, it's possible to do that as a side effect of focusing on something else. I would say it's at least Bayesian evidence in favor of that being their focus. And they do have people whose job is 100% getting money from alumni and investments and stuff, but yes, that doesn't mean it's the central focus of the organization, any more than employing janitors means they're focused on cleanliness. We'll have to get into what it means for a large organization to be focused on something.
I agree that universities are very focused on prestige. And you make a good point that focusing on prestige can be hard to distinguish from focusing on profit. (Though that goes the other way too: prestige can be seen as a means to money. The more prestigious your university, the more likely the next generation's Bill Gates is to attend your university, and then you have X% chance of persuading them to donate $Y00 million dollars (in exchange for naming a building after them), the expected value of which might well exceed the tuition from all your other students. Prestige also probably increases the donations you get ceteris paribus, and grants, and also the base tuition you can charge; also the degree to which you can persuade rich parents to donate in exchange for accepting their kids.)
I would correct myself that it seems clear that universities are not very focused on cutting costs (such as administrative overhead), and in that sense they're focused on making revenue rather than making net profit. Well, there are probably mid-level administrators who pinch pennies, and on general principle I expect some of them do so to unwise extremes. (It happens in companies too: some genius will decide that they could save $X per year by cutting some corner, which creates inconvenience for everyone else, costing $Y > $X in employee time alone, and probably $Z > $Y in morale and goodwill.)
Which brings us to the professors. Googling for actual data, this 2011 post cites a Scientific American article and a concurring anecdote from a Harvard CS professor, which says:
Most scientists finance their laboratories (and often even their own salaries) by applying to government agencies and private foundations for grants. The process has become a major time sink. In 2007 a U.S. government study found that university faculty members spend about 40 percent of their research time navigating the bureaucratic labyrinth, and the situation is no better in Europe.
The cited SciAm article also says:
Between 1997 and 2006 the National Science Foundation found that the average applicant had to submit 30 percent more proposals to garner the same number of awards.
I'm sure there's plenty of variance, but my vague impression is that things have generally become worse rather than better in this regard. And if a Harvard professor has to spend 40% of his time on getting money, that indicates that his administrators are making him prioritize money over research to a decent extent. Maybe they think CS research is low-prestige? (Though that 40% figure is an average, I assume across all scientific fields—the SciAm article doesn't specify the study.) Maybe they are in fact penny-pinching to the detriment of the organization.
Overall, universities are huge bureaucratic monsters, with a bunch of sub-units that act with somewhat different objectives, and if you imagined it was guided by one plan, the plan would be insane, self-contradictory, etc. Things I would say:
Incidentally:
charging your poor students less
My economics teacher said this is:
Mod note: I've moved this back to personal blog. Another mod had frontpaged it.
Whether posts like this should be on personal blog is a subject of debate on the LessWrong team right now. Our last published post says we tend to put "highly divisive topics" on personal blog, and our tooltip still says "avoid political topics" which IMO this post clearly qualifies as.
My understanding Habryka and Ruby have lately shifted their conception of what they want frontpage to mean, which is to focus on timelessness rather than "is it political". (I think Habryka says this is what he always intended, and it was a bit of a weird game-of-telephone that resulted in the current language). I personally think there is something good/pure about having the rule be about timelessness rather than politics, but I personally think in practice the "avoid politics" rule is just too important as a special case.
Sorry for that being a bit of a confusing message, but seemed good to communicate the true fact that the moderators are a bit internally divided and/or confused about posts like this.
Thanks Raemon. Two questions for admins on this:
It's definitely fine to post something like this on personal blog. (and, note that currently I'm in the minority opinion on the mod team that this should remain a rule. Oli and Ruby both currently lean "we should allow political topics on frontpage as long as they're timeless." Though I think Oli commented that this particular post didn't feel very timeless so still wouldn't have frontpaged it.)
I argued that we haven't actually changed or frontpage guidelines so if we want to switch to primarily rely on timeless rather than "otherwise politicized/conflict-y", we should wait till we've actually made an announcement about that.
From the "timeless" perspective, the question of "how to make it frontpage worthy" would be "explain why this question is still going to be relevant in a decade, when the current media trends have moved on." From a political/conflict perspective, the question would be to put in some extra effort to focus the readers' attention/frame outside of the conflict.
I think this was a reasonable question to ask, I think my own preference is "just leave this sort of thing on personal blog." The people that I'd actually want to comment on this sort of post, if I were making it, would be people who've internalized a bunch of our how-to-do-politics norms. Looking at the comments here, I do indeed feel like many of them are failing to see the frame-that-they're-swimming in, and making the discussion worse, which is a predictable result of it newcomers seeing it on frontpage.
Perfectly clear, including your caveats about moderator conversations being ongoing in the background. Thank you!
This post was a disaster. The only thing I think we can all agree on is that there's a lot of propaganda here and we didn't do a great job distilling each other's propaganda-framed views, especially given that presumably some of the propaganda must be true. Everyone seems to think that others posted propaganda. Without clear grounding in data that can't be easily obtained, and whose measurement methods are themselves in question, I don't think we're going to be able to resolve this.
What this post has done is inspire me to think about how to express the philosophies underlying my political views in ways that can be discussed on lesswrong more directly. One of them is that I appreciate a "friendly thunderdome", as inspired by, eg, braver angels, street epistemology, changing the conversation, etc - if we're all going to post what we believe in contexts where we worry each others' views are propaganda, then we'll need to use the very best tools and be frequently reminding each other what they are, as well as offering guarded understanding. Valentine's frequent responses that he's not willing to accept others' framing, especially given that his responses were in response to their attempts to criticize his framing, could be acceptable, but I suspect everyone needs to be willing to update their framings with more precise description as needed.
He said he expected more rationality and "defense against the dark arts".
I can't help but wonder how much the phrase "dark arts" is an accidental euphemism for something; I'm sure that people who see such concerns as invalid would think me criticizing their reasoning unreasonably. But phrasings don't merely matter, they also reveal hidden connection. What makes the arts dark? What about darkness makes an art bad? In what way is the word vector for "dark" connected to the word vector for "evil"? I do not accept the claim that multiword names do not contain echoes of their components; I know there are those here who do. The fact that this very analysis may be seen as "wokeness" and thereby dismissed is of concern to me - I think there's an ELK problem in our own brains here.
If anything, I think the key insight here is that we need to be able to translate between each others' frames on the fly. If someone comes in with a frame you dislike, it needs to come with a promise that a conflicting frame is welcome.
Solidarity forever.
Your characterization of universities as "profit focused" seems odd. In what sense is Harvard motivated by increased revenues as opposed to being mostly insulated from those concerns as a talent-certifier with name recognition?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AajbPPe4EomHcszkb/where-s-the-economic-incentive-for-wokism-coming-from?commentId=6FibkaQNxqN2zAjwy
RE moderation guidelines:
Apologies, I didn't realize those even existed for questions, and apparently my profile default is set to "Reign of Terror". That wasn't intentional. I've fixed that now.
The question "why do companies do something seemingly unprofitable" is in my opinion worth asking.
The answers seem to be one of:
Both seem likely, I wish I could figure out which one is true (possibly both).
Is it on the AI safety forum, though? Turns out it is, though downvoted...
This is an interesting question, whatever your political bend - there is a noticeable uptick in representation etc. in new media. It's worth understanding the underlying mechanisms at work, seeing as whatever the reason for the changes, they happened quite fast. Both if you're for such changes or against them.
It's an old holdover where any LW url can be turned into an AF URL (because AF is just a subset of LW content). None of it appears on the Alignment Forum frontpage, and it won't show up in search on the AF site, but still, it's been on my mind as worth getting rid of for a while...
Hmm. That link goes to LessWrong for me - this is the AI forum one: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/AajbPPe4EomHcszkb/where-s-the-economic-incentive-for-wokism-coming-from
Intereesting
Looks like the forum software has edited your alignmentforum link to point to lesswrong.com. The text of your link says "alignmentforum", and you can copy-paste it into the URL bar to get there, but if you mouse over the link or click it, it takes you to the lesswrong.com post. Fascinating.
What leads you to bring that here
Happy to answer.
I noticed I was confused. The world didn't make sense to me at this spot. I could guess at some pieces, like "Okay, maybe wokism is actually just really super popular", but that didn't account for all the pieces I was observing.
I imagined that Less Wrong would be a good place to ask people about this in a way relatively unlikely to swing into culture war baloney. I just want to understand how the world is shaped.
why is it worth a frontpage on the ai safety forum?
I… have no idea. I didn't do that. Or if I did it was purely by accident. I wouldn't have guessed this belonged at all in anything having to do with AI risk, other than it being about modeling the world, which is generically connected to AI risk in an overall kind of way.
"Culture war baloney"
The modern history of the term "culture war" is interesting. I suspect it might make enlightening reading.
I'm trying to understand why several systems (Hollywood, Disney, universities, probably others) that are normally quite profit-focused are leaning so hard woke.
I get the thing about how, if you don't go woke hard enough, you could get canceled, which is bad for business. That's some push.
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.
Likewise, I could understand some ideological capture. But unless this had profit appeal I would expect the market to just… eat pure but incomplete ideological capture after a while (as per the right's chant of "get woke, go broke").
So… what gives? What am I missing here?