> But what if your coworker likes attending KKK rallies and you're African-American? Or your co-worker is out there on the weekend holding signs that say "Death to Gays" and you just happen to be gay?
What's the solution for the people in your country who are attending these rallies and holding up these signs?
This boycott model of employment will eventually have them fired from minimum wage jobs too. So where would these people work? They have a responsibility to contribute to society, make money, support themselves, pay taxes.
I would not like to see such people as my coworkers but I'm at a loss as to what should be done with them. As the years go by, robots will do more repetitive and manual jobs. Where would such people be exiled to work?
To a large extent, if we both showed up to work, accepted each other's pull requests, acted professionally and respectfully and went home, I'd be ok with it as a compromise.
Broadly though I'm finding it difficult to reconcile the prospect of someone exceptional who is working at a top tech company, with someone whose intelligence is low enough to advocate outright racism or bigotry. It seems like the example is very far fetched, and doesn't do much to advance whatever point you're trying to make.
I think it's probably best to use a more realistic example, wherein the prospect of working side by side with someone would honestly not be so daunting.
It's not that hard for me to reconcile those things, for two reasons:
1) We have plenty of examples from the not-too-distant past of people who were very intelligent and yet definitely racists or bigots by anything resembling modern standards. I'm 99% sure Woodrow Wilson would do fine at a top tech company in terms of carrying out his work duties if he decided to work at one, for example. And he was racist by the standards of his own time, not just ours.
2) The boundaries of what constitutes "outright racism or bigotry" are not fixed, and have been changing quite rapidly in some demographics. My general impression is that 20-something graduates of the top 50 schools in the US have, on average, a very different definition of those boundaries from most 45-year-olds, or from 20-something non-college-graduates.
> Broadly though I'm finding it difficult to reconcile the prospect of someone exceptional who is working at a top tech company, with someone whose intelligence is low enough to advocate outright racism or bigotry.
It's simple if the threshold for racism and bigotry is driven low enough that it ends up including the private beliefs of most of the country and even more of the world.
Right, which is why I was curious to know if there was a better example than KKK member, because we have seen this kind of inquisition approach to politics before.
If you go back to 9/11 we saw this same type of reasoning where instead of "KKK", "terrorist" was used as a fringe stand-in to justify the draconian structure where crazy things like spying, witch-hunting / denial of due process etc. became the norm.
I remember watching Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in which they interview these sweet old people running a book club where they eat cookies and discuss books. A few weeks into it, the club members read an article in the paper that showed that one of their book club members was there under a fake name and was actually an undercover anti-terrorism police detective, which was confirmed by his department. Thereafter he explores the case of a retired old man who said critical things about President Bush at the gym and the FBI showed up to ask questions about him. (Around this timestamp: https://youtu.be/Q6lcP2f6Nvs?t=3515)
What's the solution for the people in your country who are attending these rallies and holding up these signs?
This boycott model of employment will eventually have them fired from minimum wage jobs too. So where would these people work? They have a responsibility to contribute to society, make money, support themselves, pay taxes.
I would not like to see such people as my coworkers but I'm at a loss as to what should be done with them. As the years go by, robots will do more repetitive and manual jobs. Where would such people be exiled to work?
To a large extent, if we both showed up to work, accepted each other's pull requests, acted professionally and respectfully and went home, I'd be ok with it as a compromise.
Broadly though I'm finding it difficult to reconcile the prospect of someone exceptional who is working at a top tech company, with someone whose intelligence is low enough to advocate outright racism or bigotry. It seems like the example is very far fetched, and doesn't do much to advance whatever point you're trying to make.
I think it's probably best to use a more realistic example, wherein the prospect of working side by side with someone would honestly not be so daunting.