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0 pointsacituan5y ago0 comments

> The article says "roughly three-quarters of the Black employees" left the company over a 6 month span due to feelings of being discriminated against. That isn't an accusation. It is a fact.

I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact. The only solid fact here is people leaving and the inferred reason is racial discrimination. I am not saying this inference is likely to be wrong or not, but that it is nonetheless an inference and not a fact. The article also doesn't let the reader know how those numbers compare to the baseline attrition of the company, i.e. what percentage of the other demographic groups have left in the same time period, which tends to be pretty high in the startup scene. Racial discrimination at workplace being pretty seriously illegal in the US these employees would have a strong recourse against it and NYT can not possibly provide a superior standard of factuality for those accusations.

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asdfasgasdgasdg5y ago

> I am not comfortable with promoting the framing of the article to an automatically established fact.

It is a fact claim that has yet to be disputed on the record by anyone who is in position to dispute it. All media outlets have their biases, but the most prominent ones tend not to make up easily refuted lies. In the claim you are referencing, they say three quarters of the black employees left over a six month period. If that's a lie, Coinbase can simply say so. But they probably won't because it is probably true.

The reasons why are more up to interpretation. Probably no way to get a firm answer on this since many of these people have signed NDAs or otherwise won't talk on the record. But I don't think it's reasonable to claim, without evidence, that the NYT is lying about the proportion of black employees that left over the given time period.

acituanOP5y ago

No one is disputing the act of people departing. OP tries to smuggle in the reason of departing together with the act of it as a fact and that is a problem.

Fact space is infinite, which ones we choose to surface and which ones we leave behind is called framing. Technical name for making the audience believe that relevant facts are not relevant and saliencing irrelevant ones as relevant is called bullshitting (For further reading see the essay “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt) and bullshits are much harder to weed out than factual inaccuracies in themselves.

NYT, like any major publication, is not leveling outright falsehoods, but they are finessing around bullshitting. We don’t know, because we depend on them or likes of them to make sense of the events and surface the most relevant information in the first place. Like I said, I personally find it concerning that there is no mention of the baseline attrition rate in a high churn SF labor market, that there is no mention of the lack of serious legal action despite serious discrimination allegations, that there is no distinguishing between discrimination, feelings of discrimination and the types of discrimination; we don’t know if propensity for political activism is confounding the reason for those employee’s departures. Coinbase is explicitly discriminating against political activisim that they don’t deem relevant to their mission, rightly or wrongly not only it is not illegal, it is their right to exercise if they believe it would serve their company or customers better. It feels like NYT wants to penalize this act of “rebellion” by clumping all of these together, emphasize the racial angle and produce an aura of wrongdoing by that adjacency. There might as well be wrongdoing, but in that case courts are the machinery equipped to extract the relevant facts and bring justice to it. Not for-profit publications with very complex power relations and a core competency of shaping narratives. To give an obvious example, NYT the prominent media outlet once also played a role in manufacturing the public consent for Iraq invasion by surfacing such “questions”, “suspicions” while burying relevant facts. It would be naive to buy their narrative wholesale (or any single outlets narrative for that matter).

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