It is kinda clownish to note that the coworkers are white males when it's followed by the fact that they're all room mates. What is the comment trying to draw attention to? Are they trying to highlight the fact that hiring is biased toward recommendations from employees? Then why mention the sex/race? Is it evidence of "structural imbalances as they exist in society right now" that three white males live in the same apartment in bay area?
> There is a lot of favoritism that goes on in industry as well.
There sure is, but I don't think your example is evidence for that. People just like to hire based on recommendations and through friends. Several times now I've been interested in some startup, and when I looked at their team page, they were all from the same group: either all Indian, or all russian speakers, or something else. I bet most startups are like this, just that some cases are more apparent than others.
> I find my struggle with chess is that I want to act intuitively, something that has served me well all my life in other avenues. But the board doesn't lie and if you don't think thoroughly you will get punished.
I believe strong players do act intuitively when playing chess (especially fast chess), it's just that they've developed their intuition through lots of practice and thorough thinking in the past.
For some reason our intuition about life seems to be more developed, or perhaps the game of life is incredibly complex and most people are roughly at the same skill level.