John mcwhorter has been calling the whole woke left a religion for years now. He’s not the only one.
The fun part about it is that it always seemed like we were all just being metaphorical to the outside. “Oh they mean it’s like a religion not that it’s an actual religion.”
Well to those people I can now offer the woman shaming chimes and screaming “repent motherfucker” as my strongest evidence yet that this entire mentality is identical. IDENTICAL. To Puritanism.
I'm on the McWhorter "it's a religion" side. I'm not sure how literally I believe that, but it seems like a belief system that people use to understand the world. Which, I guess, is pretty close to the definition of "religion".
"The fun part about it is that it always seemed like we were all just being metaphorical to the outside". I can explain that! It's because the claim that "the whole woke left [is] a religion" is a deepity.
That is, it's a claim that seems true and insightful only because it's ambiguous whether it's true (but trivial) or insightful (but false/meaningless).
The claim's obviously false if one understands "religion" in its conventional, informal sense (a deistic/theistic system of beliefs that addresses fundamental questions of life: the meaning of life; death and whatever comes after death; the fate of humanity; that sort of thing), which is why some people who don't already agree with the idea presume it must be meant as a metaphor.
If one instead interprets "religion" more broadly and widens its definition enough, then it becomes true that "the whole woke left [is] a religion"...but it's true only for the trivial reason that one has a wide-open definition of "religion".
For instance, if we take the definition Jeff effectively suggests ("a belief system that people use to understand the world") in his sibling comment, "religion" is basically synonymous with "ideology", so "the whole woke left" is indeed a religion. But then so are conservatism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, capitalism, and indeed opposition to "the whole woke left".
You know, this is interesting. I left an office environment to stay home with my kids a little over 10 years ago. At that time I worked in an office that was quite diverse actually, but there were more women than men. Several of the women I worked with were quite open and explicit about their bisexuality. At the time I certainly could have contacted HR and said I was Uncomfortable. But it didn’t even really occur to me to do so. The only time I ever talked to HR it was about how I felt my supervisor was unfairly treating me as responsible for a project issue.
Weirdly, it seems like NOW the people who would say that something makes them uncomfortable would actually be told to shut up, if what makes them uncomfortable is talking politics at work or being pressured to support social issues they disagree with or simply don’t care about.
Should those women have been in the closet about their bisexuality then? Because that's what you seem to suggest.
After all, people do bring up their partners in completely normal, everyday work conversations. I am bisexual, so if I am to do the same as my straight coworkers — who I am guessing wouldn't make you uncomfortable by referring to their straight relationships — I have to be open and explicit that I'm in a queer relationship. Or should people like me not be part of the conversation?
I think you and I have commented elsewhere on the inadvisability of bringing your "whole self" to work. I don't mean that anyone should hide having a same-sex partner, or multiple partners if polyamorous. I mean work conversations should be along the lines of "How's your family?" "Fine." After that, get back to work.
And actually to amend my first reply, that doesn't mean I think all workplaces should be sanitized, desensitized places. People should feel free to offer support ("I heard your wife is ill. I'm so sorry. If you'd like to talk about it, I'm here." etc.) Or friends at work could confine their personal sex life discussions to lunch out or whatever. There's a faction of people right now who are controlling the conversation about what's appropriate and what isn't. Not to say that that faction of people have historically been treated fairly or equally. But there we end up at the equity piece: if you've been treated unfairly in the past, you have license to extend your current purview of your rights, even if doing so infringes the rights or comforts of others.
I consciously amend my personality and speech patterns for work. Why the fuck would I bring my "whole self" or "true self" to SQL queries and PowerPoint presentations.
Interesting theory and good read, but I have to nitpick the Berkley article you linked. You specifically cited it as evidence on how social media's interactive functions turbocharge groupthink. You then contextualized it as "like the "like" button". However the study the article was based on did not study the interactive functions at all, or at least nothing like any kind of like button.
Furthermore the article itself mischaracterized the scholarly article by saying things like "Once more than a third (37%) of participants advocated..." but that was never an axis of the test. They tested 37% of the participants being bots, but they never tested any other percentage (according to their documentation, also this wasn't a preregistered study so who knows how many times they tweaked their study design to get their result). Also, since the study with the bots (confederates) wasn't the main thrust of the study, they only did 6 iterations of it with a grouping of 24 people, never at any of the other group sizes.
I did think it was an interesting study that showed that *even though the participants didn't know they were paired with different people or how large their grouping was* a larger group of people produced more CONSISTANT results over a small group of people. It really makes me sit down and ponder how that functionally works given the constraints of the experiment, but it doesn't really speak to social media in particular except insomuch as social media allows for a greater grouping to participate than normal dinner parties.
(Also, this study only drew on US, English-as-a-first-language, participants)
(Note, this isn't actually Tabarrok as the guest in spite of what the URL implies, for some reason the normal URL for 236 points to episode 237, and the actual 236 episode has a suffix appended)
Hrm, after looking at that chart longer, I'm wondering if the issue isn't because a population of a 2-person cohort after 100 rounds has 100 interactions, but a population with a 50-person cohort after 100 rounds has 2500 interactions, and in any iterated game you should expect more iterations to evolve strategies that are more successful. It looks like they shared their data, but I've already gone sufficiently deep down that rabbit hole. So I'm going to leave my interpretation at more iterations = more evolution, and possibly more people = more chance that the most common initial strategies stick the longest.
If this was slack I'd respond with a bunch of emojis and maybe even a gif!
Navigating one of these companies as a fairly conservative person was a trip. There was lots of encouragement for me to bring my political beliefs to work, yet the idea of a fellow employee being, for example, pro-life, just never occurred to them. And it's not like I was alone. The engineering departments of these places are probably 50/50. But hey, they pay you more than enough to just smile and nod.
But seriously, it's interesting to reflect on how structural factors might drive innovations in worker organization. Just to debate some points of fact first...
• The time window of interest should go beyond 16 months ago. 3 of The Guardian's journalists published an open letter calling out the editorial desk as transphobic back in November 2018, and Google's internal uproar about James Damore's "Ideological Echo Chamber" memo was in summer 2017.
...and back to the structural factors. I notice every case is from a media publication or a software company: enterprises that select for educated employees, and where most employees probably spend all day in front of a computer (especially during the pandemic).
To me that fingers easy inter-employee communication and education polarization as causes. Especially since Trump's campaign, having a degree correlates pretty well with being socially liberal, so I'd expect these mutinies to be more and more concentrated in high-education companies.
Slack itself is likely just a marker for high-education enterprises where everyone's at a computer. And maybe a marker for youth, as well: instant messaging's familiar to lots of people under 40, less so to the middle-aged. (So age polarization may be another factor. Social liberalism's concentrated in younger Americans too.)
After all, Slack's main role in these mutinies is making semi-private group chats easy, and Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp/email ought to work about as well. And I can think of a case when WhatsApp and email, not Slack, were key: Britain's Labour Party in 2017.
Great take! More remote work will likely continue make companies a microcosm of our larger society of atomized individuals mediating their communication through these Satanic platforms. 😂
I've had four normal, for-profit jobs in my professional career thus far but never with a company that uses Slack. We've similar functionalities though - gchat and whatever Microsoft decided was best at any given time. I do use Slack for (very limited) personal purposes though, so I'm kinda familiar with it. But why is Slack so different in the workplace than those generic IM platforms?
We have Microsoft Teams. All of my channels are just groups that work together on projects, ranging from about 3 to 20 people. There are no channels for chatting with the entire organization, no channels based on demographics or anything social. You might chat with a couple of friends, but there are no opportunities to rally the masses. It’s glorified email, basically, with file storage. Not sure if Slack’s software encourages that stuff or if my org just has a different culture.
I think basically any similar instant messaging software could accelerate group dynamics; that doesn't mean that they necessarily will. Slack is just the one people know best.
John mcwhorter has been calling the whole woke left a religion for years now. He’s not the only one.
The fun part about it is that it always seemed like we were all just being metaphorical to the outside. “Oh they mean it’s like a religion not that it’s an actual religion.”
Well to those people I can now offer the woman shaming chimes and screaming “repent motherfucker” as my strongest evidence yet that this entire mentality is identical. IDENTICAL. To Puritanism.
I'm on the McWhorter "it's a religion" side. I'm not sure how literally I believe that, but it seems like a belief system that people use to understand the world. Which, I guess, is pretty close to the definition of "religion".
It’s religion without a god.
"The fun part about it is that it always seemed like we were all just being metaphorical to the outside". I can explain that! It's because the claim that "the whole woke left [is] a religion" is a deepity.
That is, it's a claim that seems true and insightful only because it's ambiguous whether it's true (but trivial) or insightful (but false/meaningless).
The claim's obviously false if one understands "religion" in its conventional, informal sense (a deistic/theistic system of beliefs that addresses fundamental questions of life: the meaning of life; death and whatever comes after death; the fate of humanity; that sort of thing), which is why some people who don't already agree with the idea presume it must be meant as a metaphor.
If one instead interprets "religion" more broadly and widens its definition enough, then it becomes true that "the whole woke left [is] a religion"...but it's true only for the trivial reason that one has a wide-open definition of "religion".
For instance, if we take the definition Jeff effectively suggests ("a belief system that people use to understand the world") in his sibling comment, "religion" is basically synonymous with "ideology", so "the whole woke left" is indeed a religion. But then so are conservatism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, capitalism, and indeed opposition to "the whole woke left".
You know, this is interesting. I left an office environment to stay home with my kids a little over 10 years ago. At that time I worked in an office that was quite diverse actually, but there were more women than men. Several of the women I worked with were quite open and explicit about their bisexuality. At the time I certainly could have contacted HR and said I was Uncomfortable. But it didn’t even really occur to me to do so. The only time I ever talked to HR it was about how I felt my supervisor was unfairly treating me as responsible for a project issue.
Weirdly, it seems like NOW the people who would say that something makes them uncomfortable would actually be told to shut up, if what makes them uncomfortable is talking politics at work or being pressured to support social issues they disagree with or simply don’t care about.
Should those women have been in the closet about their bisexuality then? Because that's what you seem to suggest.
After all, people do bring up their partners in completely normal, everyday work conversations. I am bisexual, so if I am to do the same as my straight coworkers — who I am guessing wouldn't make you uncomfortable by referring to their straight relationships — I have to be open and explicit that I'm in a queer relationship. Or should people like me not be part of the conversation?
Oh, that’s not what I said. Their bisexuality didn’t make me uncomfortable. Their open discussion of sexual acts and exploits made me uncomfortable.
I think you and I have commented elsewhere on the inadvisability of bringing your "whole self" to work. I don't mean that anyone should hide having a same-sex partner, or multiple partners if polyamorous. I mean work conversations should be along the lines of "How's your family?" "Fine." After that, get back to work.
And actually to amend my first reply, that doesn't mean I think all workplaces should be sanitized, desensitized places. People should feel free to offer support ("I heard your wife is ill. I'm so sorry. If you'd like to talk about it, I'm here." etc.) Or friends at work could confine their personal sex life discussions to lunch out or whatever. There's a faction of people right now who are controlling the conversation about what's appropriate and what isn't. Not to say that that faction of people have historically been treated fairly or equally. But there we end up at the equity piece: if you've been treated unfairly in the past, you have license to extend your current purview of your rights, even if doing so infringes the rights or comforts of others.
I consciously amend my personality and speech patterns for work. Why the fuck would I bring my "whole self" or "true self" to SQL queries and PowerPoint presentations.
Right. That is, I think, one of the consequences of current social justice politics: all boundaries are blurred.
Interesting theory and good read, but I have to nitpick the Berkley article you linked. You specifically cited it as evidence on how social media's interactive functions turbocharge groupthink. You then contextualized it as "like the "like" button". However the study the article was based on did not study the interactive functions at all, or at least nothing like any kind of like button.
Furthermore the article itself mischaracterized the scholarly article by saying things like "Once more than a third (37%) of participants advocated..." but that was never an axis of the test. They tested 37% of the participants being bots, but they never tested any other percentage (according to their documentation, also this wasn't a preregistered study so who knows how many times they tweaked their study design to get their result). Also, since the study with the bots (confederates) wasn't the main thrust of the study, they only did 6 iterations of it with a grouping of 24 people, never at any of the other group sizes.
I did think it was an interesting study that showed that *even though the participants didn't know they were paired with different people or how large their grouping was* a larger group of people produced more CONSISTANT results over a small group of people. It really makes me sit down and ponder how that functionally works given the constraints of the experiment, but it doesn't really speak to social media in particular except insomuch as social media allows for a greater grouping to participate than normal dinner parties.
(Also, this study only drew on US, English-as-a-first-language, participants)
Here's a recent podcast from another Heaton-guest with a social media researcher that was quite good: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/236-why-are-the-prices-so-dmn-high-alex-tabarrok/
(Note, this isn't actually Tabarrok as the guest in spite of what the URL implies, for some reason the normal URL for 236 points to episode 237, and the actual 236 episode has a suffix appended)
Hrm, after looking at that chart longer, I'm wondering if the issue isn't because a population of a 2-person cohort after 100 rounds has 100 interactions, but a population with a 50-person cohort after 100 rounds has 2500 interactions, and in any iterated game you should expect more iterations to evolve strategies that are more successful. It looks like they shared their data, but I've already gone sufficiently deep down that rabbit hole. So I'm going to leave my interpretation at more iterations = more evolution, and possibly more people = more chance that the most common initial strategies stick the longest.
If this was slack I'd respond with a bunch of emojis and maybe even a gif!
Navigating one of these companies as a fairly conservative person was a trip. There was lots of encouragement for me to bring my political beliefs to work, yet the idea of a fellow employee being, for example, pro-life, just never occurred to them. And it's not like I was alone. The engineering departments of these places are probably 50/50. But hey, they pay you more than enough to just smile and nod.
[ 🤔 1 ]
But seriously, it's interesting to reflect on how structural factors might drive innovations in worker organization. Just to debate some points of fact first...
• Are these employee mutinies simply "non-labor-issue" mutinies? The Netflix walkout includes demands about working conditions as well as demands about Netflix's output (https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/18/22733098/netflix-trans-employees-demands-dave-chappelle-walkout).
• The time window of interest should go beyond 16 months ago. 3 of The Guardian's journalists published an open letter calling out the editorial desk as transphobic back in November 2018, and Google's internal uproar about James Damore's "Ideological Echo Chamber" memo was in summer 2017.
...and back to the structural factors. I notice every case is from a media publication or a software company: enterprises that select for educated employees, and where most employees probably spend all day in front of a computer (especially during the pandemic).
To me that fingers easy inter-employee communication and education polarization as causes. Especially since Trump's campaign, having a degree correlates pretty well with being socially liberal, so I'd expect these mutinies to be more and more concentrated in high-education companies.
Slack itself is likely just a marker for high-education enterprises where everyone's at a computer. And maybe a marker for youth, as well: instant messaging's familiar to lots of people under 40, less so to the middle-aged. (So age polarization may be another factor. Social liberalism's concentrated in younger Americans too.)
After all, Slack's main role in these mutinies is making semi-private group chats easy, and Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp/email ought to work about as well. And I can think of a case when WhatsApp and email, not Slack, were key: Britain's Labour Party in 2017.
Curiously, in that case it wasn't non-white or trans or pro-BLM activists rebelling: it was the party's anti-left bureaucracy sabotaging an election campaign led by socialist Jeremy "my pronouns are he/him" Corbyn (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-report-corbyn-election-whatsapp-antisemitism-tories-yougov-poll-a9462456.html) and trashing female and black Labour lawmakers (https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/h-long-250-spiteful-misogynistic-bullying-diane-abbott-and-left-wing-staff-laid-out-internal).
It may not be a coincidence that the anti-left case is one where Slack wasn't used!
Great take! More remote work will likely continue make companies a microcosm of our larger society of atomized individuals mediating their communication through these Satanic platforms. 😂
I've had four normal, for-profit jobs in my professional career thus far but never with a company that uses Slack. We've similar functionalities though - gchat and whatever Microsoft decided was best at any given time. I do use Slack for (very limited) personal purposes though, so I'm kinda familiar with it. But why is Slack so different in the workplace than those generic IM platforms?
We have Microsoft Teams. All of my channels are just groups that work together on projects, ranging from about 3 to 20 people. There are no channels for chatting with the entire organization, no channels based on demographics or anything social. You might chat with a couple of friends, but there are no opportunities to rally the masses. It’s glorified email, basically, with file storage. Not sure if Slack’s software encourages that stuff or if my org just has a different culture.
I think basically any similar instant messaging software could accelerate group dynamics; that doesn't mean that they necessarily will. Slack is just the one people know best.
Yeah, that's probably true. My intent was to suggest Slack as A possible factor, not THE factor.