Chaos

This is exactly what I meant in regards to that example. Thanks! Regarding your last paragraph, certainly in regards to diversity that is our primary goal. But there's of course an aspect of just, hey, we need more hands on deck for the absurd 2023 that is coming toward us, with Year of Sanderson as well as this adaptation stuff.

Cool! It will probably fall flat on its face, but it is fun. Hard work though. Could I ask what you mean by this? Math is a thing where there's not like... a math industry, per se, right? That makes it hard to give general advice. I'd say make sure you take applied math classes, and if there are things that have technology components, do them. Take some programming classes too. If you want to go into industry, those skills will be good. If you're doing a stats route, do data analysis classes. If you want to do pure math research in academia, then this is less applicable, but if you aren't sure, I'd do those classes. I found coding and the formal logic in proofs to be very transferable skills of thinking extremely logically and carefully. You will have an easier time marketing your skills to employers. As I said above, I think the skills are very transferable. For types of math, make sure you do linear algebra. But that's not really advice, as any math major or minor will require it. It's hard to overstate how ridiculously useful that is. If you do a math major, things will progress where eventually you will not be calculating things, but proving things, and that will be what you will exclusively do. It's less crazy/hard than that sounds. Programming will teach you a lot on how to go slowly, step-by-step through things to accomplish a goal, and that's what proofs are like. Main difference is that you can't compile a proof to see if it worked

I'm referring to this statement: I do not think this is relevant. Now, I would say if you took that statement as true and you really went down that path and its implications, I think that can lead to some dark stuff. But let's not get into that. Let's assume that's true for the sake of argument. So what? Let's say hypothetically 95% of Brandon fans are male (this is of course not true, but roll with me). Does that mean we should not actively search out female fans for potential staff positions? Of course not. That's why your point is irrelevant. Regardless of how things are proportioned, intentionally looking for skilled people of various backgrounds to join us is good. Women exist and they should feel welcome here. Let's have gender diversity. Let's have racial diversity. Let's have religious diversity, etc. We need people from a variety of backgrounds so we as a staff can make good judgments and decisions. It's easy to see examples of this being the case, so let's talk about religious diversity. Would people want every staff member to be religious? Every staff member to be LDS? Every staff member to be an atheist? Of course not. You certainly want a mix of that to make sure our decisions respect religious people and nonreligious people together, because they both groups that matter. You can easily imagine this same logic applying to many other qualities that we list. Having diversity means we have less bias on staff. This is good! We would be doing a huge disservice to everyone here if we didn't try to address biases. It's impossible for us to not have biases and distinct perspectives, but we can make sure we have a team where we can balance these things and make effective, fair calls that live up to our ideals in our Code of Conduct. I want to back up a second and talk about skill, as you keep mentioning it. You say "skill" should be the only factor that should be relevant. Argent, LewsTherinTelescope, and I have explained faults in this, but okay, let's assume that is also true. What does it mean to be skilled, particularly in a staff/moderation standpoint? Imagine a programming job. You want to hire the best programmer. Say you create a test to evaluate the skills you want this person to have, and you give it to your candidates. You score it traditionally, from 0 to 100. Let's say one is at the top at a 95/100, and others are in a band in the high-80s. Okay, so we have someone who definitely scored in a class of their own. (We don't need to get into the details of creating the test fairly and grading, but that is a whole thing.) So you maybe say, cool, let's get that person. They are the best, they have the most technical skill. But then you call their references and you learn that though they are indeed very skilled, there was some conflict at their previous work that involved them, and they don't have the best team dynamic. That may not necessarily be a problem, but this position is in a team of ten people. This could lead to problems. Maybe the person who placed second in the test had effusive references and showed good team leadership. Now the choice is not as obvious as to which is the "best" candidate. It could be the person who had the most technical ability, but not necessarily, and maybe the slight difference in technical ability between the two candidates is not a sufficient difference to appreciably matter. That's just two competing things, and it's already kind of complicated to determine who the "best" person is. There's probably a threshold where the delta in technical skill matters enough that the first place person is best, but that's probably fuzzy. (Though I imagine tech companies probably use a lot of analytics to quantify and evaluate these.) In reality, it's not just two qualities that are being balanced, it's tons. Instead of a 0 to 100 scale, it's maybe twenty 0 to 100 scales, and almost assuredly no one is to score the best in every conceivable desirable quality. It gets messy and nonobvious who the best is. For moderation, I think it's harder than a position that has some objective, demonstrable technical skill. We want people who are passionate about Brandon's works, who work well in a team, who have good judgment. These are hard to evaluate and not clear-cut. For passion about Brandon's works, that can manifest in very different ways. A person who read every book 20x times is not necessarily "better" than someone who read them twice. Do you need to read every book? Not necessarily. Is a candidate worse for not reading, say, Snapshot or Sixth of the Dusk? Not necessarily. They could be awesome in other ways. What about working in a team? That could be demonstrated in many ways, but again, I don't think it's clear-cut. You don't need to have worked on a team like this to do well here (in fact, many of our staff had not done something like this before). Certainly if someone did have a lot of experience working in a team, that can be nice, but that isn't the only way to do things. And those are just two things. There are many, many other qualities that could lead to a person being a great staff member. It's actually really complicated to determine what is "best". So I find this notion that you keep referring to about skill being the only thing that matters seems... Simplistic. You always need to balance the qualities you want. There won't necessarily be a clear best, most skillful. There could be, but certainly not necessarily. Much more likely there are people coming in with different backgrounds, skills, and passions that are not directly comparable and we would need to make difficult choices from there. So I'm just saying, "pick the most skilled" is easy to say, but super complicated in practice. Perhaps your meaning is going as follows: if more people are from one group then, by absolute numbers, there are more good candidates from that group. Which, sure, but that doesn't invalidate that there are surely other candidates from other groups who are also great, which we can now capture much better due to random chance with this questionnaire. But more importantly, this does not mean we aren't going avoid staffing, say, a white cishet males anymore. So if anyone is reading this, that's you, and you're wondering if you can still apply, of course! We are not going to be avoiding amazing candidates here. All we are doing is intentionally thinking about our practices and identifying barriers to diversity, so that people of any group--who are qualified and awesome, as that must exist--can be found and included. That's what diversity, equity, and inclusion is about. There is no way there are not people of most any group you can think of who can be passionate about Brandon's works and have qualities we are looking for, and we'd like to find them. And for anyone worried that this is a big change, it really isn't. We have long done things like this in many respects, such as gender, time zone, and race/ethnicity, and more. It has always been a factor. Now we can just more intentionally do the same thing with this questionnaire. I realize I wrote way too much here, and you stated you wanted to bow out, so my sincere apologies on that. You are always welcome to message me or PM any of us staff if you wish if you'd like to discuss further. No worries if not. I hope I explained our perspective effectively so that you can understand where we are coming from.

This is explained in Comatose's initial post very clearly, which is why we are trying to intentionally resolve this discovery aspect. Diversity matters for the reasons we are explaining. We should find them because we are stronger with them and we will be more inclusive to all people. Saying the Brandon fandom is pretty white is not an excuse to do nothing. This question is not relevant, as you readily say that we are not in this hypothetical you state. But for another example, it has long been falsely said that women are not interested in STEM fields as an explanation for why they aren't in STEM professional positions. Research has shown this is totally incorrect. It is important those fields very actively combat these cultural biases so that women feel they can be in these fields. Things are improving, but it's hard. Why am I bringing this up? Because I don't really think there's anything truly inherent going on here. Women can be awesome programmers and scientists! There's nothing inherent about being female that means you're less interested, but culture can sure try and beat it out of you. Don't fall into the trap that there's something inherent going on in this situation. Everyone of background can love these books. I think having more people at the top who are of diverse backgrounds not only makes our policies strictly better, but can expand our fandom so more people feel like they can belong here. Seeing people who are like yourself will only help lead to more people of that background feeling welcome. The only possible downside is if we recruit people who are not qualified, which is not what we are going to do. We are simply intentionally trying to seek out diversity here, as we stated here. It's going to take time to institute change, but we are here to do the work.

So I did want to comment on this. Long ago, when the community was much smaller, we did have different staff roles, but that didn't work for a variety of reasons. Maybe in the future. There have been a lot of advantages to having staff be on basically equal footing and can choose what to do. Please note that you do not need to satisfy the entire list of things we are looking for! Most of our staff aren't coders, for example. Some should apply, though. I do see what you're saying. One pitfall is we don't want to get people from underrepresented groups to feel like they are second class, which would be totally antithetical to our goals here. There's probably a way to navigate that, but I'm just saying that equal footing of staff is very useful. In addition, many policy things come up in the course of moderating as well, or being present in discussions on what moderation to do. (There are many staff who don't like, get in the direct moderation or disciplining aspects.) I see these as pretty connected, but perhaps I am not creative enough to imagine how this workflow works in practice. It's something to think about. I don't think more granular staff roles will happen soon, though, but perhaps eventually. Argent had great comments to say here, and I agree with everything he said. I wanted to quickly chime in and say that it seems impossible to imagine that people of one distinct background (racial or otherwise) are the only ones who could be good staff. That just seems like that cannot possibly be true. Also I wanted to mention that even in the technology industry, where you might think only skill matters and diversity doesn't, there have been real, tangible examples where programmers create an algorithm that just doesn't work as well for people of color. The example comes to mind is facial recognition, and that got some serious (justifiably so) blowback for there being an algorithm that couldn't recognize Black faces as well. That's really bad! That's a situation where you need both skill and diversity, so your blind spots don't lead to unintended consequences. It's a very real issue in many areas.

We are looking into this. I think it's more that the paraphrased version of the spoiler Q&A got removed when we got the actual audio of it.

App discussion is not relevant for this topic; let's keep this relevant to the recruitment topic.

1. Dr Pepper, but my favorite alcoholic drink is amaretto and ginger ale. 2. Kelsier and Adolin, I think? Oh, and Ba-Ado-Mishram, obviously. 3. Oh man, that's tricky. Before 2011 gets tricky, I'm not sure if I went to a signing before then, but I did meet Brandon before then. I went to Alloy's release, Words of Radiance release, and Shadows of Self's release. I drove at least twice from Montana to SLC for Brandon signings. I remember one in December Brandon was surprised to see me that I drove all the way down there. Hilarious. There was SpoCon 2013 and MisCon 2018, and then the Skyward San Francisco signing in 2018. So a lot! I probably forgot some. 2018 was my last one though. 4. I can't say I have one. I usually don't have favorites quite in this way like most people have. 5. Similar to the last one, but in a pinch, I say Inception. I do love that movie. The Dark Knight is also incredible. 6. Wrote half of a big epic fantasy before but ran out of steam in undergrad. I'm writing an even more ambitious epic fantasy book right now.

1. Hmmmmm I don't know, tough competition. I can't say I've met you before so I don't think you could be my favorite bird 2. I'm basic. Cheddar and Swiss are useful for different things so I'd say those equally. 3. Oh yeah of course. Who doesn't? 4. No. 5. I mean, this depends on what context you're referring to. Different fonts are appropriate in different situations! I typically write in Arial now in google docs. 6. Usually I'd say a shark, because sharks are sweet. But ever since getting cats, I'd totally do a day as a cat. 7. Cheeseburgers, easily. Not even close. I honestly could not name a single rabbit breed, sorry.

Note this is super early; the beta hasn't happened at all where a lot of this continuity stuff gets caught. It'll all be caught before the book has been released. This is super rough draft. So don't worry, it will be okay! EDIT: I can make sure these things are noted in the beta.

Hello, I am bored and would love some questions! (Yes yes, double posting, I know.)

Yeah, I've moved it to a more appropriate board.

Yeah, to me Rogue One is easily the best post-Disney Star Wars. The characters were a bit undercooked and it isn't perfect, but it is genuinely solid, in my opinion.

Short answer, no, it's an audio drama and designed for that medium: Peter's comments on the subject (click to see full context).

In general, I wouldn't recommend following entire forums. I think that'd realistically be the only thing you could do.

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I don't understand what you're getting at. You did not address the fact that I think you're taking things too far by thinking that Brandon doesn't enjoy Stormlight. I think that is patently false. Yes, Brandon has discussed a White Sand prose for a while now actually. Regardless, he always has some extra projects rolling around. We will see what come to fruition. I don't think a 2031 release for Stormlight 6 is out of the question when you think of the timeline of writing Era 3 back to back and Stormlight production time. That seems pretty reasonable. It was always going to be at least five years of a break. The cosmere is tricky. It's always going to be more than just Stormlight, even if it is a big portion of the cosmere. But he has to juggle multiple things, and I think the design was always to give him space to do Era 3 in between Stormlight 5 and 6, and maybe still Elantris sequels (though who knows how important that is now in his plans).