Slashdot Mirror
VR Tested by NFL To Confront Sexism and Racism (usatoday.com)
More than $8 billion a year is spent on diversity training which a Harvard professor believes is largely ineffective. So later this year the NFL will also try using new VR scenarios from Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. "We want to be known as the best place to work," says NFL vice president Troy Vincent," while Dropbox's head of diversity says she's also had conversations about eliminating bias in job interviews by conducting "blind" interviews using avatars. The Stanford lab's scenarios place users in unsettling situations -- for example, angry harassment by white avatars while the user's avatar is black. "I'm not saying, 'Put on a VR goggle and you've solved racism'," says the Stanford lab's director. "But I'm optimistic it can help."
Calling an opponent a sexist or a racist are sure fire ways to ostracize them and shut them up. Ironic the left is so opposed to bullying then bullies people it disagrees with and calls them names. We're not all the same but deserve the same opportunities, nothing more, nothing less. Stop with the name-calling.
As a clear example of the OP's point, one need only look to how the media covers the Trump campaign.
Trump notes that a portion (a subset) of illegal (intersect another subset) immigrants (intersect yet another subset) as rapists and murderers, and this is somehow interpreted to mean that he's a racist.
He fails to remember who David Duke is (temporarily, I might add), and suddenly he's a KKK member.
He insults a man and a woman in one breath, and since one of them was a woman, he's suddenly got a "war on women".
He insults individuals he doesn't like. The women insults are selected, distilled, and made into a campaign ad.
A quick google of "Donald Trump's war on *" shows he has a:
. war on women
. war on Megyn Kelley
. war on the media
. war on Chivalry (wtf?)
. war on people with disabilities
. war on comedy (wtf?)
. war on Muslims
. war on anchor babies
And these are only the first 2 pages! The list is endless!
Googling "Donald Trump is *" shows that he is:
. Satan
. Hitler
. crazier than April Fools' Day
. the most dangerous man in the world
. the next Barack Obama (wtf?)
. Stalin
. Mussolini
All this completely ridiculous rhetoric, people are falling over themselves to paint Trump in the most possible bad way.
(After writing that last line, I had a thought and... yep, Cthulhu supports Donald Trump. And this came from the Washington Post! WTF?)
And the worst part of all is this: I don't have the first idea how well Trumps position stacks up against those of Cruz, Clinton, or Sanders.
In fact, I don't know even *what* the other candidates even stand for.
Trump: We'll bomb the shit out of ISIS and torture their families
Clinton: "Today’s attacks will only strengthen our resolve to stand together as allies and defeat terrorism and radical jihadism around the world"
What will Clinton do if elected? I haven't the first idea. ...all I know is that she doesn't have a war on women.
I think that the problem isn't that people are trying to do something to fix the issue, it's that what they're trying to do is ineffective or counter-productive (PDF warning). Alternatively here's an article that reports on the main findings of that study or incorporates data from a few others if you don't want to read ~30 pages of journal article yourself.
Basically the people who constantly push these programs don't tend to follow the science to find the most effective ways to go about doing it so they just end up failing, wasting time and money, and alienating the people they're trying to connect with and it seems like with many they refuse to try to do anything different. It's just another case of trying to be tough on crime or ratchet up the drug laws even more because it's about appearing to do something or people simply feeding their own egotistical desire to feel like they're changing the world rather than doing something that's actually good.
Of course, some people are just not ever going to get the message. Not everyone has empathy, even when beaten with it.
It's not just about empty or "getting the message". Where I live, people generally don't want to hire Moroccans, but would be happy to hire a Korean. And it has nothing to do with skin color, but everything with past experiences with Moroccans. They generally show up late, use sick leave as vacation, have little respect for customers or superiors, have poorer education and sometimes even steal stuff from the company. Of course, these are generalizations, but they don't come from a vacuum, they are based on day to day experiences. On the other hand, in the Moroccans stores, you don't find any non-Moroccans working there, and very rarely do you see a woman.
Kind of like how people assume anyone who is black is poor, helpless, and too lacking in education and intelligence to even figure out how to get an ID to vote.