I recently watched an interesting discussion on the legality of diversity statement requirements. [1] There's a lot of nuance here, and the two speakers have different opinions on the matter.
One believes that diversity statement requirements can be done properly and we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater by banning diversity statement requirements.
The other speaker suggests these are analogous to requirements that a candidate talk about how they support the government's ongoing war effort, and catalog all they have done in furtherance of it.
I'm surprised and pleased to see that this link is the top comment. The original article was a bit dismissive/presumptive, and the submission rode the flagging/vouching rollercoaster as a result. Not a great start!
But it's a testament to the HN community that the most-upvoted comment on this thread is one with a link to a video that is long form (over an hour!) and truly presents both sides. It is also legally sophisticated — not something that most HNers can digest at 3x. Yet enough folks engaged with it that this rose up slowly to be the top comment.
Most communities aren't able to perform conversational alchemy — starting out with bronze and ending up with gold. HN doesn't always do this, but the fact that it can is much of the reason why I'm here.
I'd love to see incentives to help level the playing field for people who come from impoverished backgrounds. But instead, what we get, and what people seem to clamor most loudly for, is what a former employer of mine had: "hiring bonus if the candidate isn't white or male" (and at one point, all I could hire was non-white or non-male, and the way it was spun was "we are in a hiring freeze, except for diversity hires").
Some of us would like to solve the ills of the world without resorting to racism/sexism.
Is it legal to have hiring bonuses for candidates (or for hiring them), where the bonus is based on attributes of the candidate on the basis of which it is normally not permissible to discriminate?
I've seen it for a university position in Sweden. It has a self-criticism and cult like feel that I really don't like. Position in universities should be considered on scientific and educational grounds, not political.
Seems to be fairly widespread and growing rapidly.[1] "68 percent of job ads in the fall of 2020 mentioned diversity, and 19 percent required a separate diversity statement. That number requiring diversity statements is even higher for elite schools and tenure-track jobs. Certain fields are more likely to require diversity statements than others, with political science being the most likely among fields included in the survey."
> Candidates must be from one or more of the following equity-seeking groups to apply: women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and racialized groups.
Yes. A previous boss of mine that I liked once asked me to just add some boilerplate phrases to my performance review to make sure he and I were both aligned with the corporate diversity mandates. Did I change the way I acted simply by adding this text? Nope!
The original lawsuit the author cites happened more almost 50 years ago.
Taking into account that similarly incompetent practices persisted for half a decade, there should now be a line where incompetence becomes malice. It's easy to hide behind apologia and recognition of past wrongdoing.
The problem with the system isn't the oppressive results it might produce, the problem lies within the system itself and its innate bias to create oppression. Complacency isn't an excuse, it's an aggravating circumstance. Academia especially should try to get as close as possibe to a merit-based system, where acception and further progression are determined on past grades, not on skin color, gender, religion and economic status.
Another problem that noone seems to be worried about is the mass collection of personal data and the processing thereof. How can I trust discussing my faith, ethnicity and finances with a for-profit institution, when (especially under US jurisdiction) I have little to no control of how that data gets processed, sorted and monetized?
I think these institutions believe that more diversity ----> more inclusivity and less racism. How would a racist indian national deeply entrenched in caste culture help my company be less racist? How would an asian supremacist laotian increase the workplace's acceptance?
If you want a place of tolerance then it should be populated by tolerant people. Throwing together males and females with a random sample of skin colors and passports is not going to make your university a more inclusive place by default.
> How would a racist indian national deeply entrenched in caste culture help my company be less racist?
To be fair, there are many people from traditionally chauvinistic groups who despise the very chauvinism they live in. Many of them may be intelligent and productive people. Dismissing each and every individual because of the group is the root of discrimination.
Some attempts at diversity may go too far - tolerating intolerant people just because "they grew up in different environment" - leading to the paradox of tolerance [0]. I've read news [1] about the very phenomenon.
The fact is - tolerance, diversity, open-mindedness - those are all values, and they need to be enforced. In order to keep a tolerant society, you must show the door to anyone who disagrees with that philosophy. The same way you need to lock up criminals to keep an ordered society from devolving into chaos.
But ultimately, in order to have a truly tolerant society, each and every member of it must be evaluated as an individual.
You can't meaningfully enforce open-mindedness or tolerance. The very idea is an oxymoron. The whole notion of tolerance is based on the idea that we might sometimes find it expedient to work alongside people we don't agree with about everything.
Every single person I've met in my life that was racist or sexist or whatever-ist (including myself) has only become a better person and more open-minded when they were forced to work in close proximity to people of other races and cultures. As to myself, I was raised in a pretty racist place in the USA, and via the military I met so many other people that I finally realized that the stereotypes I was taught about others were incorrect, or at least if they were correct there was some cultural context to why that stereotype had been warped from the original context. I think it's better to randomly throw people of different races, sexes, and cultures together than not, personally, even if it makes business a bit less productive or the person hired is slightly less optimal for that position. We're not machines, after all, and shouldn't be treated like only our output matters.
> ... We're not machines, after all, and shouldn't be treated like only our output matters.
Sure, but that's not enforcing open-mindedness or tolerance. It's just creating the kind of setting where the benefits of a more tolerant stance are easiest to get.
Yea, and I guess I agree we can't enforce it, we can just do things to make it easier to become open minded. One way to do that is to force people to interact in close proximity to cultures and individuals who are different than what they have experienced to date. Mostly, today, that involves putting people of different skin colors and sexes together. Tomorrow, perhaps we'll have to make sure humans and intelligent cows work closely together, I don't know (I'm serious! perhaps if humans and cows spent more time together we'd eat less of them?).
Sure, but now we're just discussing the meaning of the word "enforce". Perhaps I've just chosen an inappropriate word for the meaning I wanted to convey.
> Every single person I've met in my life that was racist or sexist or whatever-ist (including myself) has only become a better person and more open-minded when they were forced to work in close proximity to people of other races and cultures.
Apart from this being anecdotal evidence, were they not forced to act as a better person and more open-minded in that environment ?
> The whole notion of tolerance is based on the idea that we might sometimes find it expedient to work alongside people we don't agree with about everything.
There's a difference between disagreeing about something in theory, and acting maliciously in order to exclude someone from your group because they disagree with you. As you said, the whole idea of tolerance boils down to tolerating disagreements. Someone who doesn't tolerate disagreements cannot work with others who do.
It's not agreement that must be enforced in order to have a tolerant society, it's tolerance to disagreement.
> There's a difference between disagreeing about something in theory, and acting maliciously in order to exclude someone from your group
The main difference is that preventing malicious actions is generally feasible, via tweaking institutional rules (such as by outright forbidding tests of religious/ideological conformity like the ones OP discusses). That's still not enforcing anything in any substantial sense; it's just a direct tweak to the "rules of the game", meant to drive improved outcomes.
No, but you can foster and protect a culture of open minded people by pushing back against people who are actively being divisive and promoting intolerance of some groups in the name of diversity and equity.
Most of the metrics that I have been judged by over the course of my career (e.g. lines of code, story point velocity, etc) are absolute bullshit, and easily manipulated. And yet... I continue to build "dashboards" for VP's to stare at, and continue to be measured by deeply flawed metrics.
I believe that every rational thinking person would agree that tracking racial and ethnic and sexual headcount percentages doesn't necessarily mean what they purport to mean. But... what are you gonna do? We just need metrics, any metrics. Bad metrics are better than no metrics, or at least this seems to be the deeply entrenched mindset of business.
I find it so eerie that institutions are trying to design their work force's distribution of skin color. Unless your work force is make-up models or something.
With some exception (specifically our industry), all the privilige of a high caste indian or Laotian supremacy goes away when you move to a Western/White dominated culture.
They are much more likely to encounter racism against THEIR race, than have the opportunity to promote their own racism.
We also need DEI at the border in addition to the colleges and for job opportunities. The way LatinX people are oppressed at the border is inhumane. Not to mention the trauma inflicted on LatinX people during last administration.
For an example of this, see this story about Canadian professor and laser scientist Patanjali Kambhampati who was denied for grants because his avowed commitment to mere non-discrimination and merit-based hiring was deemed insufficient.
Is that a numbers game?
How many people don't get jobs because of the "wrong" skin color?
They don't get famous too, that's why no news site brings an article about them.
I'd agree that those sorts of outcomes are just as bad as ignoring the problems of internalised systemic biases towards particular sexes, age groups, racial backgrounds or lack of obvious but irrelevant physical disabilities.
We may not have found the best way to ensure that a 60yo black, wheelchair-bound woman is just as likely to be chosen on merit as a 30yo white able-bodied man yet but it doesn't seem we shouldn't keep trying.
I don't see a problem with this, especially if part of the mission of the folks giving the grant is to create opportunities for under-represented people.
"If I want to focus on merit, fairness and equality, then you get called out as racist or sexist."
I'm still waiting for an example where someone can actually vet people based on merit, fairness and equality without any of their own unconscious biases being a factor. Humans are most comfortable with people that think, look, and act like them. No matter how hard they try, it skews their thinking at times.
>I'm still waiting for an example where someone can actually vet people based on merit, fairness and equality without any of their own unconscious biases being a factor
And the pendulum has swung so far back I can recall reading "diversity" advocates trying to remove them in the last few years for being insufficiently equitable.
Yep. Toronto eliminated all skill-based admission requirements for specialized arts, athletics, science and math programs and turned them into a lottery process for admission because it's more equitable.
> A typical orchestral audition might end up attracting dozens of people who are essentially indistinguishable in their musicianship and technique.
Then raise the bar. Why are we content that more people can achieve the top tier of any field? If leaders of a field cannot find ways to evaluate newcomers, then replace them with new leaders and techniques that can. What a lazy excuse.
I am absolutely all in for equality, but definitely strongly against equity.
When I get HR try to shove a resume down my throat because it ticks all of their boxes despite having none of the boxes to be succesful on the job, that is when I draw the line.
I don't care if you're white, black, purple or green, and whether you fuck men, women, all of them or none of them is none of my business. At the end of the day I want the most qualified to get the position when I interview, you either know your stuff or you don't.
(Speaking of the US) Our society has historically created great differences in opportunity. It is unarguable that white males have disproportionately benefited[1][2][3].
Affirmative action / Diversity Initiatives are a blunt instrument that attempts to address these historical inequities. If e.g., a student from a school in a poor area had the same quality of a K-12 education, did not have to worry about tuition (I.e., make university free again) / living expenses to be able to continue at university as the wealthy kid, affirmative action could have been phased out from higher ed.
The problem is that the inequities continue, so what should have been a short-term policy to address historical inequities has become a long-term papering over of deep issues in our society.
Policies to allow affirmative action to be phased out in higher ed might include, funding K-12 schools equitably instead of based on local property tax revenue + parental donations. Changing college entrance policies to accept only the top n students from any school, to create an incentive for wealthy to place their children in "worse" schools which would incentivize those same wealthy to properly fund all schools. Paying the parents of the children in the "bad" schools a wage that allows them a life with dignity and time to spend with their children. Mandatory paid time off so sick children are not just left on their own at home (possibly getting into trouble). Policing that doesn't target certain demographics foreclosing future opportunities-- e.g., a kid with an arrest record is barred from attending paramedic classes at the local community college. Etc.
We need to make fundamental changes in all areas of society to address inequities in opportunity just in college / university admissions. A great side effect is poor rural whites would benefit just as much as other marginalized groups by systemically addressing the issues (one fewer way for the wealthy elite to divide us). But, our society has collectively decided it is easier just to keep affirmative action / diversity programs around.
Workplaces are downstream from schools, so everything that needs to be solved around equitable access to education needs to occur before the "temporary" policies to address the fallout of not addressing our societal issues systemically can be phased out at the workplace.
> If e.g., a student from a school in a poor area had the same quality of a K-12 education, did not have to worry about tuition (I.e., make university free again) / living expenses to be able to continue at university as the wealthy kid, affirmative action could have been phased out from higher ed.
Wouldn't AA on social-economical status work, which can be more inclusive? Even you only mentioned "poor" and "wealthy", instead of some neighborhood of particular identity group.
I mostly agree with you. I think the concept of race is one of the tools, wielded by the wealthy, to keep the rest of us divided. But, ignoring that we have hundreds of years of government policies that favored whites over non-whites isn't addressing the past wrongs that got us here.
One pretty stark reminder of this is how one's race is an indicator of standardized test scores in the US.
> ...selective institutions require high SAT scores for entry—and there are even bigger race gaps at the top of the score distribution. [In 2020,] of those scoring above 700, 43% are Asian and 45% are white, compared to 6% Hispanic or Latino and 1% Black
We would need an entirely different way of funding schools to make that happen. In the US school funding is more tied to local taxes, so wealthier areas get more money. There are other programs to give additional funds to poor areas, but it's not usually enough to level the playing field.
I'm not getting that implication. They are saying that, on occasion, HR tries to shove a resume down his throat on the basis of race/sexuality when the applicant is lacking experience. That, in no way, leads me to extrapolate any kind of volume one way or another.
HR is literally not allowed, legally, to do that. Given that their entire existence is predicated on not getting the company sued I’m sure they’re well aware of that.
So either OP should file a lawsuit or they’re imagining things.
Well that's sort of their own doing. When you formalize the process of prioritizing individuals based solely on their attributes that have no relation to merit (skin color) then you must necessarily accept that people will presume that skin-color alone played a role in their hiring.
HN is always complaining that tech hiring is broken and that whiteboard/leetcode is a waste of time. So it’s not like the current interview process has relation to merit either. Just filtering for people who have time and resources for dealing with bullshit, which given the demographics of the US serves as a nice racial filter as well.
Hiring for social diversity (e.g race, ethnicity, gender, age) when the benefits of diversity come from cognitive diversity (micro vs macro pov, engineer working with computer scientist) is a very inefficient way of doing things. Yes it may be that someone of a different gender/race/ethnicity may have a different way of thinking, but it may also not be the case
As an Hispanic Engineer I would hate to be hired to fill up a diversity quota... I am better than that.
And as a Software Engineering hiring manager, when hiring I always strive to to be statistically unbiased in the diversity distribution in my team. My base distribution is the population of Software Engineering University graduates.
As long as that base population has 1/10 women and 1/20 "non majority population" (in our case is average Mexican) my team should be expected to follow the same diversity distribution.
The problem with a lot of "diversity" pushes is that they treat use the full country population distribution as a base, which is unreal for ALL labours, Hospitality may be skewed to females, Basketball may be skewed to Blacks, mechanics may be skewed to males, etc. Unless the distribution in the upper part of the funnels do not change, it will be unfair to attempt to force a change in the distribution in the lower stages of the funnel.
Isn't the real issue behind all the names (diversity, inclusion, etc) about the equalizing of opportunity or at the very least, bringing certain oppressed groups (and, if you don't think certain groups are or have been oppressed or discriminated against, educate yourself) up the opportunity curve? Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?
Well, the OP is describing a case where you might meaningfully have more or less opportunity depending on your expressed stance in matters unrelated to actual job duties - viz., your expressing support for diversity ideology, as evidenced in a "diversity impact statement". So this is basically compelled speech and/or discrimination based on ideology, which is a very real kind of oppression.
Oh, maybe I misinterpreted. I have much less interest in that argument given that there are tons of pre-existing ideologies that could be discriminated against for a job. Right? If your ideology is "I think it's important to work as little as possible to maintain a job." I'd assume many employers would discriminate against hiring someone with that ideology, no? Apologies if I'm missing the key point again.
No worries. It's easy to misinterpret these things because there are facets of job performance in this area that wouldn't be out of place at all in a "diversity impact statement" (such as a proven, developed ability to teach and work with people from a high variety of backgrounds - which doesn't even correlate all that much with political stance per se). Nevertheless, the very notion of requiring that kind of statement is sure to introduce a sort of very real bias in hiring.
> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?
As a white man who grew up with a single mother, this is exactly what affirmative action appears to be. Why? Because I already had a rough start, and saw opportunities broadcast and given out to others that I didn't qualify for simply because I wasn't non-white.
I understand the on-paper intents and purposes perfectly well, but the reality is these programs are racist to the core.
I get your point and maybe the solution to fixing historic oppression against race is hard to get perfect. And your financial problem or lack of opportunity sucks but but isn’t it a little silly to say that a program is racist when it’s trying to help a certain race who was oppressed because of their skin color.
If we stole 100 dollars from all black people and then 20 years later decided to give black people their money back, you’d say that repayment program is racist against non-blacks?
What do you tell an Indian or Lebanese immigrant who arrived 5 years ago and whose taxes are going to be increased to finance this?
Also, what if the benefit goes mostly to recent immigrants, not descendants of slaves? This is the case for affirmative action at elite schools:
> the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. [1]
> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with
Yes. I do not want to live in a world where genetic editing is used to give everyone equal opportunity. I am ok with not having the genetics to play in the NBA while others do.
Diversity should not be the end goal. A healthy society that provides basic needs for all should be. If that means we have mostly people that share X characteristics in Y field that’s fine as long as they’re the best people for the job.
That's not what parent said.
Do you want to live in a world where you could be the best basketball player in the world but you are don't get drafted because your eyes are blue?
Some people don't get opportunities because of their skin color, their name or their religion.
It's about becoming a NBA player if you can't play basketball
I would generally agree that any instance of discrimination by characteristics orthogonal to the performance of a given task is undesirable (if we're striving to optimize total societal benefit / output / productivity).
Attractiveness is another axis of discrimination which is frequently orthogonal to job performance (unless we're talking about jobs as a model, etc).
I never understand this argument. Wouldn't market forces, i.e. capitalism, gekko's greed-is-good argument fix this?
If there were a group of basketball players with blue eyes (that were the best in the world), wouldn't someone see the huge money potential and create a team full of blue-eyes and win the title/cup/trophy?
Maybe in many decades after the anti-blue-eye bias had been successfully mitigated such a team would be formed. But until then, money and winning is not enough.
Bias is stronger than capitalism. Some people willingly give up money to not serve gay people, for example.
Sure, if a minority is a small percentage and it wont hurt you financially (much), plus you can milk it to get press (and most likely increase your profit), then I can understand that. (I think you're referring to the cake shop if I remember correctly).
However setting up shop and not serving cakes to a vast majority of your customers who are a minority is just asking for bankruptcy.
I also find it really hard to believe that there isn't one greedy capitalist that will take advantage of this situation.
e.g. Huge talent shortage of tech workers. Assume that there is a cohort minority who are probably price themselves cheaper (becz they are having it harder to find a job), then there's not one person who will seize this opportunity in America?
> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?
Stop for a second and think about what this question implies. First, there are genetic characteristics which affect opportunity and can't be smoothed out. But even environmental characteristics are intractable. Factors like whether your parents read to you, make you do your homework, or make you go to school can't be corrected by social policy. Equal opportunity isn't a realizable goal.
The focus should be on preventing discrimination. But, while there is plenty of discrimination, discrimination explains a smaller share of unequal outcomes than unequal opportunity, which can't be fixed.
Short of genetic modification, we are always going to live in a world where your opportunities depend on the characteristics you were born with. We can smooth it out somewhat, but not remove it completely.
Look at discrimination against unattractive people for one - it is actually more pronounced (although less overtly visible) than discrimination by race, but gets significantly less media coverage. There are also many other axes - height, intelligence, character - most of which are heavily influenced by genetics; we simply consider it acceptable to discriminate based on these attributes.
The rhetoric has shifted in recent years from “equality of opportunity” to “equity”, which is more about equality of outcome.
> Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Do any companies subscribe to equity of outcome? I didn't think that was the intent of the word "equity". If that were the case, we wouldn't get promoted or bonuses based on our work, it would just be a timed schedule. I don't think that is what's going on.
I've been under extreme pressure to get my team up to 40% women/nonbinary/lgbt even if their skills are subpar. It's coming from the top down.
However, I do get some leeway from HR on their paper education profile and paper experience. I say "paper", because we already fired several people for basically lying on their resume.
How do the HR people even know that if some team members are LGBT? I am a gay and I think it is my private matter and not something I would be interested sharing with for example my employer. I prefer to separate work and my private life in many other issues as well.
It sounds very odd to ask about these kind of things during employment. How often do for example LGBT persons provide this kind information in their job application and is it even legal to ask it?
And on the other hand, is there anything that prevents you pretending to be a member of some minority? For example, if you can get more easily employed by saying that you are bisexual, is there anything that would prevent you lying? If there isn't, why even bother asking about these kind of things.
That's true. It's hard to admit that, though. The current monied class can easily blame previous, (mostly dead) generations for racism and misogyny and say "we didn't create this problem, but this is what we're trying to do to fix this". Of course, they're benefitting from the situation and remain in control per the status quo.
If we admit to the classism that currently exists, that in the US the zip code you were born in says so much about what your opportunities will be, it's going to take a lot more social reform to address it than applying pressure around university admissions or job offers. The monied class may actually have to give up some power in that situation...
It's darkly amusing to me how many well off leftie progressive types are on board when I talk about difficulties that revolve around being a lesbian or disabled but look horrified when I drop into working class speech patterns or refuse to deny the class aspect of my upbringing.
> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?
How do we know that those fewer opportunities are necessarily linked to the characteristics you were born with? For example: in Britain, white working class kids are the least likely of any major racial group to go to university. But that is evidently not because they're white. Poor parenting and low levels of expectation in some schools have been cited as some of the reasons for this.
For the record, in 2021 in terms of State school students getting into universities the rates were as follows: Chinese/72%, Asian/54.9%, Mixed/48%, Black/46.8% and White (of any class)/33.3%
Making the world fair would be equal opportunity. Equity is the hot topic nowadays, which is explicitly ignoring more qualified applicants for less qualified applicants because of their race, and that's what people are upset about.
Equal opportunity won't create fairness, as we're not all clones.
What equal opportunity can do is provide those who have been systematically discriminated against (as well as everyone else) a fair shake. What they then do with that 'fair shake' is up to them.
This is a complex topic that reaches into many areas of life, including (but not limited to) home environment, quality of schooling, societal advantages/disadvantages, economic advantages/disadvantages, stratification by class/ethnicity/melanin content and a raft of other issues.
I agree that just focusing on melanin content is a poor way to address the issues seen.
That said, claiming that failure to solve all of a society's problems via melanin content awareness in hiring decisions means that the concept of equal opportunity is a failure is supremely unconvincing IMHO.
Finding a more commensurate representation of underrepresented groups is a laudable goal, but if it means systemically discriminating against Asians or Hispanics then it's really a tongue in cheek effort
If we assume (rightly) that american society is inherently and irredeemably racist, how exactly can we trust admissions officers or people involved in employee recruitment to make decisions that aren't racist?
Racism runs to the core of how people see each other in america, so much so that race data shouldn't be allowed into any decisions period. Or at least, people should feed inaccurate data into the system in order to subvert the white privilege that it rests apon
So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc.
But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.
So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the job you are hiring for are straight white men, because they are the only ones who had the opportunity to get the training, should we fix that at the hiring level?
The initial reaction is probably no, we should push that fix further down to make sure those people get the same chances as everyone else. But that will take decades. What do we do until then?
And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
I mainly agree with the OP. While they don't come out and say it, most on the DEI frontlines execute on the idea that the fix to the fact that "those people have been discriminated against, well, forever" is not to do away with discrimination completely, but rather to discriminate actively against races/genders/orientations that haven't been discriminated against in the same way.
This strikes me as faulty thinking. Revenge-driven justice fails; two wrongs don't make a right. Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator.
Anyone who followed that "Activism as a Vocation" link here a few days ago can probably agree that the fix to the current cancel-culture chaos of academia isn't going to happen within academia. It's about mass media dollars. School administrators, like the rest of us, are just manipulated "useful idiots."
> Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator.
"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"
Moreover, I strongly suspect this kind of "reverse discrimination" (and general conditioning to identify racially) is driving a lot of right-wing radicalization. Even if you don't think "reverse racism" qualifies as "racism", surely you should be concerned if it is indeed driving more ole-fashioned, anti-minority racism, right?
Hold on, that's a misquote. "revenge driven justice" does quote me. "Against the rich" doesn't; you added it. That's a pretty big leap away from my point. Do you believe that <protected class X> is "anybody who isn't rich?"
It's an analogy: you said that DEI supporters want to "discriminate actively against races/genders/orientations that haven't been discriminated against in the same way." (Let's call this "reverse discrimination" just for brevity)
I figured if you can understand that "alms for the poor" isn't an example of "reverse discrimination", then you can also understand that there are also ways to support historically-discriminated-against groups without reverse discrimination.
If you can make that leap, there's a whole dialog on whether current methods are reverse-discrimination or something else. If you can't make that leap, then there's not really a conversation to be had - our perspectives diverge too much to be mutually comprehensible.
>I figured if you can understand that "alms for the poor" isn't an example of "reverse discrimination"
This is comparing apples to oranges. Alms for the poor is a personal choice: I decide to give some of my own money to someone who I think needs it more than I do.
"Reverse discrimination" in the sense you're using it refers (within this analogy) to somebody else taking your money away from you, because they believe that somebody needs it more than you do. I could write a book (others already have) about how many things can and always do go wrong with this approach.
> Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me.
In what way is this obviously fallacious? Alms have to come from somewhere, and if you take them from the rich then it is clearly discrimination against the rich. You could very well make the argument that this is justified, but fallacious it is not.
That aside, it doesn't take a lot of scanning through those who purportedly wish to give alms to the poor before you find some outright revenge-driven rhetoric.
It’s also a broken analogy because “the rich” are always more privileged than “the poor”, but a given white person may be less privileged than a given nonwhite person.
> You could very well make the argument that this is justified
Discrimination isn't just "we treat people differently" - we put prisoners in jail, we don't trust liars, we try to keep abusers away from positions of power.
Discrimination is when it crosses the line into injustice - when you're acting solely off hatred and stereotypes.
Since you're conceding that it's justified, it seems that no actual injustice is occurring here.
Funnily enough, the poor having some more money often makes the rich wealthier in absolute terms just not in relative terms. The poor having money juices the economy a lot more than the rich having yet more money. Similarly with more diversity everyone is better off.
I agree with your train of thought, but I disagree with the specifics.
Though, that's in part due to my own definition of discrimination in this context to be "placing a label to tell 2+ groups apart and taking action using that label".
Taking money from the rich and giving to the poor is inherently discriminating between the rich and the poor with a follow-up action to remove resources from one group (the rich) and give to the other (the poor). The action is there regardless of the reason or ethics of the context (i.e. why someone is rich or poor).
If someone really doesn't want to discriminate, sure. But I think the argument of "labelling it discrimination is wrong" is wrong in the sense of my own definition of discrimination. For me, a more useful argument would be "well, let's figure out the metrics we're optimizing when we discriminate like this".
I think that definition is going to cause some very confusing conversations. We don't generally talk about it being "discrimination" to put criminals in jail, keep abusers away from positions of power, or distrust liars. Generally speaking, when people talk about discrimination, it's because there's an injustice - the difference in treatment is based on stereotypes and hatred rather than any truth about that individual.
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
Doesn't this seem like a weird thing to say? How do you know that? Isn't this the definition of stereotyping? Is every question going to be of the form "as a black woman, what do you think about X?" And why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say?
> why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say?
I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.
> How do you know that?
I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people".
There's obviously some very low-hanging fruit in terms of having even one voice who will look at the situation and notice stuff like that.
All that said: Obviously a white person can notice that, and a black person can miss it. It's just statistics. And a white person can still be diverse along a dozen other axes! If you want to sell your product to conservatives, you probably want at least one conservative on your team for the same reason!
It's more possible than you think for people who share the same ethnic background to have had radically different experiences from each other, and people who look very different from each other to have gone through very similar life stories.
I'm not just saying this in theory (which is trivially true) -- I lived in a stereotypically liberal cosmopolitan city where most people I encountered, despite the visible diversity in their ethnic backgrounds, all had four-year degrees, worked in high-paying knowledge-based jobs, and had no experience in military service or single motherhood; then in a much smaller city in a stereotypically conservative rural state where most people were of the same ethnic background, but had more variety in what they went through in life. My own habits did not change between the two cities as to put me in touch with such a different group of people between them.
This is just anecdata, but I question the premise you appear to take for granted.
> I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.
“All else being equal” doesn’t make sense. All else is never equal here and that’s the point yet we pretend everything swivels on skin color.
But all else is not equal. People are more than just their skin color. Ignoring all other diversity and focusing only on race (or a few other arbitrary factors like sexual orientation of all things) is exactly the problem here.
> I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.
The problem is the assumption th
at all else is equal.
> I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people".
Face recognition is one of the few areas where skin color matters. Most of the time it doesn’t.
Using basic statistics in order to determine behavior from people based on race is called racial profiling. It is why the police assume, all else being equal, that a black man is more likely to be involved in crime than a white man.
Alone, "It's just statistics." should never be the justification if the outcome has a strong negative for an individual.
Carl Sagan describe such profiling in his book The Demon-Haunted World. He calls it lazy thinking. People take in a complex person and reduces them down to single bits of information, man or woman, black or white.
> But that will take decades. What do we do until then?
We wait.
I don't understand why people want these issues to be resolved here and now. Society and culture take decades to change, that's natural, and shortcuts—however tempting they might be—often come at a cost of something else.
The conditions of these oppressed groups are not terribly bad, compared to what was going on with people in general throughout history. An average man who lived in Europe 100 years ago would gladly change places with an average black woman living in Europe nowadays. And even lots of white people from poorer countries nowadays have a lower standard of living than black people in developed countries. I speak from my own experience, as a person who grew up in a countryside where people don't have running water in their homes and toilet is just a hole in the ground; then I come to Northern Europe for work and hear how hard it is to be a black person here and that I'm apparently privileged because I'm white.
My point is, current conditions of people in developed countries are not so bad that it requires urgent measures to improve. If solving it takes 2-4 generations of people living in these conditions, it's not that much of a tragedy, and I don't think we must urgently start dumping resources to speed it up.
At least in the US, things don't tend to simply improve with time. It's a decades- or centuries-long fight, tooth and nail.
And things are much better now in terms of university diversity than they were even 30 years ago. But people have been fighting that fight this entire time.
This right here is the level of urgency that will reach its goal in 2-4 generations, if we're lucky.
I didn't mean we shouldn't be doing anything. I said that we need to accept that it's going to take those centuries and plan accordingly. The "here and now" people are the ones who need to realize this the most.
> This right here is the level of urgency that will reach its goal in 2-4 generations
"2-4 generations from now" is the exact level of urgency to reach the goal in 2-4 generations. Inflating the urgency of things spends the precious trust people have in you, and harms our decisions by making us miss some things that actually are more urgent. To list a few global things that are more urgent than this discrimination issue of rich Western countries: global warming, sustainability, poverty in other countries, war in Ukraine and other military conflicts, poor education (yes, I'm looking at you, US), autocratic dictatorships all over the world.
We already know this isn't going to work. Culture is the driving force that elevates people. If you didn't grow up in a broken home, were encouraged and supported in your education and pushed to make the rights choices in life, you grew up in a winning culture.
Agree; it IS decades later right now. Thank you Sesame Street, thank you counter-culture alum that went on to dominate our media and children's programming (pun intended).
The diversity initiatives are misguided attempts by those raised to care about it to fast-track the process. Now they are adults and impatient to see more change that really only occurs generationally.
Not everyone came along for the ride though and they absolutely know what Sesame Street and friends did. Hence the attacks on PBS, schools, and etc.
People act like these are the worst times but great progress had been made.
Piers was on Real Time a few weeks back with his sky is falling schtick about free speech in the US. He is not dumb, but is he really not aware of how burning a flag would have gone over 60 years ago? A white man would have gotten his ass beat and a black man hung(maybe by the police in either case!). What about Elvis and rock-and-roll "smut"? Anyone remember X-rated films? We are relatively unbounded in 2022 lol.
A bonified Indian immigrant runs Microsoft.
I get it though. Was hoodwinked myself. Raised on Sesame Street and Fern Gully. Shocked that so many people were not on board with the social progress I took for granted. Parents who seemed progressive aged and now parrot Moon hoax and anti-vax talking points..
I'm impatient too. What can we change what can I do?! How can we see this promise fulfilled in my lifetime?!
Maybe we can't though. Bad policy is bad policy. Bottom-up has been the real progress. Starts with the children. Gay marriage? The children. People coming out; don't talk about my child/nephew/niece/sister/brother/friends child like that!
It's a journey like security and performance. You don't just "solve" security at a company; "Whelp we finished those tickets and now we have achieved security; our work here is done!".
MAGA? We are greater now than ever before. Ask a 70 year old black man from the south how great America was..
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
I'm trying to imagine how this would work in practice but products aren't usually designed by committee in giant brainstorming sessions where everyone gets to provide their opinion from their little expert/experience positions.
That usually happens through research and feedback loops. Being flexible and adapting. It doesn't require having to hire from every demographic and expert group, and putting them directly on your product/engineering teams.
If you're targeting a specific demographic or niche market is typically helps to be from that group or at a minimum be constantly talking to them (ala what Steve Blank talks about endlessly). It also helps with sales/marketing when communicating, etc.
But this stuff doesn't seem like a rule you can apply generally when composing a team or building a company like choosing the right Lego blocks by demographic profile.
It's not like building a team in an RPG video game where you're trying to find the right balance of race/gender/religion/culture.
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
From the post:
> If people of different races think differently, presumably that’s because of their different experiences (rather than, say, because different beliefs and attitudes are genetically programmed into different races). In that case, the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries. They’ve not just grown up in a different part of our society; they’ve grown up in a completely different society. So affirmative action proponents would greatly favor affirmative action for, say, African immigrants over affirmative action for blacks born in America.
> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
I mean, you give a very cliche example. Consider an alternative situation where you need to decide between the same black woman or a Latino man. Or the same black woman and an Asian woman. Should you be permitted to make the same racially motivated decision in this context?
And also: if you're provided race data in the hiring process, you're essentially put in a position to not only make decisions like the one you listed, but also ones regarding other races. You're in a position to establish which races are "above" one another in the hiring process. How can your employer guarantee that you don't do this, even if you say that you don't?
We know of the disgusting things white people have historically done. We also know that white people are over represented in hiring and admissions decisions. I ask: should white people, given their track record, be allowed to make this call?
> you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man
No. But two white men could also have vastly different life experiences, possibly even more different than between one white man and a black woman, depending on who they are.
If your primary goal is to increase intellectual diversity than you need to look at more than just race, gender, and sexual identity. And I don't think that would be a bad thing. But that's not to say that there aren't other goals of DEI, such as trying to offset the disadvantages faced by certain groups of people.
I know for Taiwanese it is/was not uncommon for the rich to fly to the US for the birth to get dual cititizenship for their children. In general, US immigration has sufficient hurdles that any group that is actively migrating there will skew towards those already well off.
Of course that's not an argument for discrimination based on race - if anything, cements that race is a poor proxy for "priviledge".
> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man
I think this argument always fails to realize that even in a group of white dudes, probably all of them have had a vastly different life experience and can bring those perspectives too.
>you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man
Of all the people at my company, black and white, male and female, I am the only one from a poor background. My life experience is vastly different from all of them.
This is the issue with defining life experience or diversity purely in terms of race and sex.
I think the demand for a simple and easy answer to diversity (we have x% from group y!) Is well intentioned but very counterproductive.
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied?
I'd posit that there is no good answer to this question, and that attempting to find or optimize one is a distraction. In very broad strokes, if you try to fix a problem too slowly, bad things keep happening; if you try to fix it too fast, you're liable to upset other things around you (e.g. the economy, delicate sensibilities, your short-term profitability, etc.). And the problem is too grossly high-dimensional to hope for any kind of consensus (or often, any analysis) at any level of detail beyond simply "yup, that's a problem".
With no hope of finding an ideal solution, the pragmatic response is to just address the problems you can see with the resources you can afford. Trust in being directionally correct.
> But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.
The solution is not to systematically discriminate in another direction, forever.
In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy, and you have abandoned the high moral ground that racial discrimination is always a bad thing, and you end up in a worse situation than you started.
> In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy
Something related that tends to be forgotten, the temporal aspect: People just entering the workforce who have only ever been on the wrong end of affirmative action. For them, there is no "balance" or "correction" going on, they're just plain being discriminated against.
I think this is exactly what is happening with the rise of right-wing groups. We tried fighting racism with racism and now we’re surprised that there is more racism than when we started. Sadly the “fight racism
with racism” people interpret the increase in racism as a need to double down.
> So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.
I think we get into trouble when we start treating individuals as mere tokens of their groups. To pick on your comment for example, "those people have been systematically discriminated against forever" is true at the collective level, but is very likely not true at the individual level. There's no justice in choosing a well-off black candidate on the basis that other black people disproportionately experienced slavery slavery, poverty, Jim Crow, etc, especially when it comes at the expense of a white person who had a very hard life.
Moreover, even if we insist on tokenizing people, we rarely treat people as the median of their group, and instead we treat whites, men, etc as though they have the privilege of board room executives, politicians, kings, etc (e.g., arguments that a given male has privilege based on the observation, "men have ruled for millennia").
> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
I emphatically deny this, especially the idea that a black woman is going to have interesting things to say, but a white man won't. There is far more diversity within a race than between them, including diversities of experience and how we process those experiences (for example, even if you have two people of the same race with similar adverse experiences, one could come out of those experiences with additional resilience and another with a trauma response). If you want interesting/different experiences, there are much better proxies (e.g., if your team is coastal and well-educated, a well-educated rural candidate is probably going to offer a lot more diversity than a black woman who came from the same pipeline as the rest of the company). What does a white man from rural Appalachia have in common with a white man from the Bay Area that you can conclude that neither will have interesting thoughts?
Moreover, if your company is super ideological about diversity, people who don't want to be regarded as tokens probably opt out, and you end up with a bunch of people with different skin color but similar viewpoints (and anyone with a unique viewpoint is probably afraid to speak it). Not exactly a way to optimize for "interesting thoughts".
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied?
I think the only way to solve it would be - Randomized child dna assignment, ie, every child is adopted or the dna material is swapped.
I think people would like to solve historical unfairness problem - but I believe it would require abandoning the very foundation of our biologically influenced culture. Ie- nobody is willing to give up the possibility of having mini-me.
>you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man
So, where i get stuck, is that you can't actually make this statement about any individual black woman or white man.
The one common theme across all of social justice is that stereotyping is bad. Erasing individuality and forcing people to live in the shadow of their stereotypes is bad.
Yet its apparently allowed here? Because it mostly benefits minorities?
This is the unspoken line the separates identity politics and equality. A focus on minorities vs a focus on ending discrimination and stereotyping, which under equality would include AA.
When (most) people say they are against "woke" culture or "sjws" they generally mean they are against the identity politics flavor of ""equality"". Because identity politics is just a racist sexist dog whistle for discrimination against majorities.
I'd previously bought into the meritocracy argument, but was eventually convinced to update those beliefs when presented with a new perspective. If you only look at the end-result, then meritocracy makes sense. But the trajectory which each person takes in order to arrive at that destination can vary wildly depending on how priviledged of a lifestyle you were born into.
It's entirely possible to pick up and develop the required skills while on the job in many cases. Companies ultimately end up benefiting from this by spreading out the responsibility of training people, which results in a stronger more robust workforce.
If you want to account for privilege, that's fine. But there are much better proxies than "skin color". For example, if you want to reduce poverty, why write a check to people of a certain race (on the basis that people of that race are more likely to be poor) rather than just writing a check to poor people directly?
The problem is that people are obsessed with the median person of a given race (and how these "median people" compare with each other) that they project these median personas onto individuals. In other words, they treat individuals as fungible tokens of their race. It doesn't matter if a black candidate has had an easy suburban life and a white candidate grew up in poverty, the DEI lens just sees a black candidate and a white candidate, and the perennial social imperative to bring the median black person and the median white person closer to parity.
You're not wrong but really the whole problem is cyclical. It has to be broken down everywhere. Diversity and anti racism in education is getting raked over the coals right now. Housing discrimination is still pretty rampant. Racists are winning elections. There's an unfortunate tendency to force compliance on those who can best accommodate it rather than who is more in need of regulating.
I posit that "racists are winning elections" precisely because of the broken race ideology that was meant to combat racism in the first place (not just in admissions and hiring, but all over our discourse). The stuff we do in the name of fighting racism looks like exactly the sort of thing one would do if they wanted to create a thoroughly racist society--get everyone to hyper-identify with their race and create separate and mete out rewards and consequences on the basis of race. Imply that fault and victimhood are racial (rather than individual) attributes. Deal only in abstractions and ignore intra-racial variance. Police people to make sure they don't explore ("appropriate") cultures outside of their own. Use "nazi" and "white supremacy" as liberally as possible--make sure those words have no power to censure actual, bonafide racists. Stuff like this.
I think that's a completely specious perspective and one that is peddled by conservative politicians as propaganda. Being antiracist is not about assigning blame or curing racism with HR policy and certainly not about curing all societal ills. It's about taking small steps to counteract injustice instead of just saying "I'm not racist" and washing your hands. Trying to teach kids accurate history of deplorable things done by some people's ancestors is just teaching accurate history. Out of control name-calling is happening in all quarters but all I'm saying that we are electing racists and we definitely are. The past president's response to the Charlottesville car attack was incredibly ambivalent and the perpetrator could be accurately described as a nazi.
> I think that's a completely specious perspective and one that is peddled by conservative politicians as propaganda.
Liberals have been talking about this long before the words “woke” or “CRT” fell upon conservative ears. “Conservatives say this” is merely the latest way to dismiss criticism.
> It's about taking small steps to counteract injustice instead of just saying "I'm not racist" and washing your hands.
The problem is that “counteracting injustice” is naively formulated. Specifically, it often means “reducing disparities between the median people of each race” which practically demands injustice: to make the average white person closer to the average black person, we have to push white people down. And which white people are going to get pushed down? The poorest (which is why we vilify poor, rural whites more so than wealthy coastal elites). Similarly, which black folks are going to get lifted up in order to raise the median? The poor or the rich (whose communities have experienced the largest post-BLM crime surges?)? Moreover, a whole shitton of violence was perpetrated (and rationalized, justified, and excused) in the name of “antiracism”, which is not what I expect from a movement about “counteracting injustice”.
Moreover, “colorblind antiracism” doesn’t imply shrugging—you can advocate for others to be more colorblind. There are approaches that don’t require tokenizing people, and I posit they’ve worked far, far better.
> Trying to teach kids accurate history of deplorable things done by some people's ancestors is just teaching accurate history.
I’m not opposed to teaching accurate history (we covered lots of civil rights stuff when I was in school, but critically I wasn’t taught to feel guilty for having white skin), but (1) that’s not what is happening (lots of historians have significant issues with the 1619 series for example) and (2) the wrongdoers weren’t the ancestors of a lot of people (e.g., lots of white people’s ancestors didn’t immigrate until after the civil war and they didn’t have any major hand in Jim Crow, etc anyway) and (3) there shouldn’t be an implication of guilt based on something your ancestors did anyway and (4) the “antiracist” perspective also seems to take issue with any non-racialized historical lens (or even one in which the US isn’t the absolute worst).
> Out of control name-calling is happening in all quarters but all I'm saying that we are electing racists and we definitely are.
I agree, I just think that’s an effect of so-called antiracism. I don’t think doubling down is going to solve the problem.
> The past president's response to the Charlottesville car attack was incredibly ambivalent and the perpetrator could be accurately described as a nazi.
I won’t argue with you here. This all seems agreeable to me. Let’s make fewer Nazis.
I'm pretty sure that everyone now living has ancestors who have done deplorable things at some time in the past. Refraining from all sorts of deplorable things, by and large, is a very recent social innovation. (Steven Pinker is especially clear on this.)
Agreed. Not only that, but there’s also a debate among historians about “presentism”—judging the past by present standards rather than by the standards of the time. For example, most (so-called) antiracists are presentists, which is why they advocate for tearing down statues of Lincoln and the like—people who were very progressive for their day, but who fell short of the standards of today (as though the people who are antiracist today would be as strident as they are if they grew up in the culture of Lincoln’s time).
I don't follow. We live in the present so presentism seems pretty practical. Besides, this isn't ancient history. Civil Rights was only like 60 years ago. Strom Thurmond served in Congress this century. Is there any point in history that it would be acceptable to have a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on public land?
> We live in the present so presentism seems pretty practical.
Well, I live now. I’m very liberal, but am I more noble for doing fuck-all about civil rights (apart from voting) than the abolitionists who literally died to end slavery? Does the woke college student really deserve a statue more than MLK?
> Besides, this isn't ancient history.
Granted, but I don’t see the relevance. You should still judge people of the civil rights era according to the standards of their time.
> Is there any point in history that it would be acceptable to have a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on public land?
I’m not very well-versed in Forrest, but he seems like he wasn’t progressive for his time, so the answer would be “no” irrespective of presentism.
I mean you are moving the goal posts into the parking lot right now. The initial question was whether or not there was value in taking incremental steps to combat racism and you're saying we shouldn't build statues to the keyboard warriors of Twitter. Nobody ever suggested that. And while we can absolutely evaluate historical figures on their cultural context that doesn't mean we should lionize them on public property. Forrest was the Confederate general who founded the KKK and was honored with a ridiculous statue on public property in Nashville.
I'm not moving goalposts, I think you've completely misunderstood the argument. Specifically, my point isn't that we shouldn't build statues for keyboard warriors, it's that the logic of presentism defies sensibility--presentists would say that woke college students are more moral because they adhere to the moral standards of the present than the imperfect-by-present-standards abolitionists of yesteryear.
> Nobody ever suggested that.
This is exactly what presentists believe.
> And while we can absolutely evaluate historical figures on their cultural context that doesn't mean we should lionize them on public property.
Well, if you believe that admirable people should be lionized on public property (about which presentism doesn't have an opinion), and if you believe that history has admirable figures (which presentism effectively denies), then it makes sense that you would lionize those figures on public property.
> Forrest was the Confederate general who founded the KKK and was honored with a ridiculous statue on public property in Nashville.
Right, but as he fails the moral standards of his own day as well as the present, he oughtn't be venerated either way.
"presentists would say that woke college students are more moral because they adhere to the moral standards of the present than the imperfect-by-present-standards abolitionists of yesteryear."
No they don't. Idk who even talks about this kind of thing. Certainly nobody in office that I've ever seen. I'm sure you could find a few people who think this, but it's nowhere near the state of the actual public debate.
"Right, but as he fails the moral standards of his own day as well as the present, he oughtn't be venerated either way."
Right, this is currently a position held by liberals and strongly opposed by a lot of conservatives who want to preserve monuments to things that were despicable even 150 years ago. Mind you, the infamous Forrest statue was erected in 1998, not 1870! It's not just a matter of reevaluating in present day, there are people evaluating the Confederacy in present day terms and still calling it great and getting support from elected officials. Those are the people in in power who are sending the signal that explicit racism is still very much prevalent in the halls of power and require explicit counteractions like DEI.
> No they don't. Idk who even talks about this kind of thing.
It's pretty commonly talked about whenever woke people want to tear down statues of historical progressives or when they want classrooms to stop teaching "dead white men" and so on. The whole claim is that these historical progressives fail to live up to today's rapidly-changing left-wing morals and thus they oughtn't be celebrated or taught (e.g., tearing down a Lincoln statue because Lincoln didn't accomplish more than abolition).
> Right, this is currently a position held by liberals and strongly opposed by a lot of conservatives who want to preserve monuments to things that were despicable even 150 years ago.
Yes (for some value of "a lot of conservatives"), but again I don't know why you keep bringing conservatives up when we're talking about woke progressives and liberals. Similarly, I don't know why you're bringing Forrest up when we're talking about presentism.
> Those are the people in in power who are sending the signal that explicit racism is still very much prevalent in the halls of power and require explicit counteractions like DEI.
DEI doesn't actually work though[0][1][2][3][4], and woke progressive politics are driving the resurgence in right-wing identity politics, as liberals predicted roughly a decade ago ("fixating incessantly on everyone's racial identity is going to strengthen right-wing white racial identity", "left wing illiberalism is going to legitimize right wing illiberalism", etc). In addition to increasing the amount and intensity of anti-minority racists, woke progressive politics on things like policing have driven crime rates (especially violent crime rates) through the roof disproportionately affecting minority communities.
If you want to minimize right-wing racism, you have to minimize all racism--in other words, you want liberalism, not left-wing illiberalism.
Completely irrelevant. The point is to improve the world we live in. To redress mistakes we're presently feeling the effects of. Not to punish every historical error.
Steven Pinker makes a way better argument in his latest two books than I could in a HN comment about why this stuff is nowhere near "completely irrelevant" if you genuinely care about bettering the world and resolving secular wrongs. By and large, squabbling about what this or that minority ethnicity might have suffered at some time in the past is very much part of the problem, not the solution.
The parent is responding to context that you set yourself:
> Trying to teach kids accurate history of deplorable things done by some people's ancestors is just teaching accurate history.
Specifically, the parent is noting that “the DEI folks” (or whatever descriptor you might prefer) are only interested in teaching about the dark history of “some people”, but there are atrocities committed among every sufficiently large people group.
That's not true and and it's not relevant. Teaching history is teaching history. The DEI camp want to improve the world in which we currently live. That it's due to historical injustice is beside the point. The two things are unrelated.
Feel free to support your claim. In the meanwhile, it's both true and relevant.
> Teaching history is teaching history
Yes, but 1619 != history.
> The DEI camp want to improve the world in which we currently live.
Perhaps their intent is noble, but they seem to have been counterproductive. First of all, DEI programs don't actually work, and this is pretty widely accepted[0][1][2][3][4]. Secondly, broader woke identity politics are not merely ineffective at reducing right-wing identity politics, they are driving them. Since left-wing identity politics became mainstream, right-wing identity politics moved from the fringe to a mainstream position. Right-wing identity politics moved from the margins in 2010 to a pretty popular position among Republicans. Right-wing hate groups have increased in number and brazenness. And by the way, liberals were sounding the alarm that this would be the consequence of going all-in on left-wing illiberalism--there was obviously no way that reducing everyone to their skin color was ever going to do anything other than increasing a right-wing white identity.
I said "conservative politicians" not "conservatives". The loudest crazies on both side don't generally represent the mainstream, but conservative politicians are actively appealing to the crazies. Absolutely nobody is being taught in schools to feel guilty for being white. That's an outright lie concocted by conservative politicians. Your perspectives of the liberal view is based on the worst caricature of liberal views you might find in the depths of Twitter while your perspective on the conservative view is based on the narrowest reading of stated policy. The 1619 Project was immaculately researched whole mainstream conservatives can't even figure out what happened in 2020.
> I said "conservative politicians" not "conservatives". The loudest crazies on both side don't generally represent the mainstream, but conservative politicians are actively appealing to the crazies.
Fair enough, but my point stands. Conservative politicians merely adopted criticizing CRT. Liberals were born in it. ;)
> Absolutely nobody is being taught in schools to feel guilty for being white. That's an outright lie concocted by conservative politicians
Again, this gets the timeline wrong because conservative politicians weren’t even aware of this stuff at the time. Moreover, I’ve heard from parents first-hand, including photos of children’s homework. One high school student was given an assignment to reflect on ways “white people can cultivate a positive racial identity” or some such.
> Your perspectives of the liberal view is based on the worst caricature of liberal views you might find in the depths of Twitter while your perspective on the conservative view is based on the narrowest reading of stated policy.
I am a liberal, “antiracists” are deeply (and often proudly) illiberal. I also engage regularly with these identity progressives precisely because I wanted to understand their point of view.
> The 1619 Project was immaculately researched whole mainstream conservatives can't even figure out what happened in 2020.
For fuck’s sake, even the socialists think it was shoddy. Are they actually conservatives too? https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/21/bynu-d22.html Moreover, I’ll never understand why identity progressives always clap back to liberals with some variation of “oh yeah? conservatives are dumb [mic drop]”.
"Fair enough, but my point stands. Conservative politicians merely adopted criticizing CRT. Liberals were born in it. ;)"
No, that point doesn't stand. I'm not sure where you even argued this. CRT is not taught in any public schools. It's grad school level. CRT mania is, again, conservative propaganda. If you want anecdote, I have two kids in big city public schools and they have read Stamped and done anti-racist lessons and Ibram Kendi did a talk for us. Believe it or not, they learned the right lessons. No one was insulted or made to feel bad about themselves at all. Conservatives are framing this kind of education not just as ineffective, but a grave and dire threat to America. Most liberals had never even heard of this kind of thing until conservatives started screaming about it.
WSWS is also just not credible. I doubt any policy makers of any stripe trust what they print.
First sentence of my earlier post: 'Liberals have been talking about this long before the words “woke” or “CRT” fell upon conservative ears.'
> CRT is not taught in any public schools. It's grad school level. CRT mania is, again, conservative propaganda.
CRT inspires a lot of public school education. There's clearly a lot of ideas that orbit CRT, and people use "CRT" as a shorthand to talk about them even though they aren't exactly part of the narrowest-definition of CRT. Conservatives often badly articulate and misunderstand these ideas and the ways they're problematic, and they pick problematic solutions for countering them (speech codes); however, criticizing CRT and related ideas isn't "conservative propaganda". For the third time now, liberals were criticizing this stuff long before conservatives knew what was happening.
> If you want anecdote, I have two kids in big city public schools and they have read Stamped and done anti-racist lessons and Ibram Kendi did a talk for us. Believe it or not, they learned the right lessons. No one was insulted or made to feel bad about themselves at all.
You claimed that no schools are teaching white guilt. You can't support that with an anecdote about a school that didn't teach white guilt. To be perfectly clear, I'm not arguing that every single school teaches white guilt all the time (not even the zaniest conservatives are making this argument).
> Conservatives are framing this kind of education not just as ineffective, but a grave and dire threat to America.
Why are you fixating on conservatives when neither of us are conservatives?
> Most liberals had never even heard of this kind of thing until conservatives started screaming about it.
Of course. Most liberals are normies who aren't paying close attention (same with most conservatives). But among the folks who were paying attention, loads of liberals were talking about this long before it entered the conservative mainstream. Folks like Jonathan Haidt have been examining this stuff since at least 2011.
> WSWS is also just not credible. I doubt any policy makers of any stripe trust what they print.
How can I take you seriously when you say that a professional historian, author, and emerita professor of history at Texas State University is "not credible" and when you refer to her as "a policy maker"? Come on. Moreover, I offered the WSWS version because your entire argument hinges on "only conservatives criticize 1619" and this is an example of socialists (pretty far removed from conservatives) objecting to 1619's pseudo-history.
> Absolutely nobody is being taught in schools to feel guilty for being white.
Now, that's a rather strong statement. I think quite a few moderate liberals would agree that there are real concerns with this kind of teaching, and that we should not turn history or social studies class into an occasion for grievance mongering and 'two minutes hate' of the supposedly dominating groups.
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied?
We could start by not forcing them into a school system that is highly correlated with outcomes of criminality[1]. Then we could stop subsidizing dependency and instead ease the paths work, education, and entrepreneurship, e.g. by reducing the cost of compliance by e.g. reducing scope and burdens of licensure requirements, instituting opportunity zones.
I leave as an exercise to the reader considering why the Democrat party does not support the above policies, while the Republican party does.
[1] "Overall, I find that winning the lottery to attend a first-choice school has a large impact on crime for high-risk youth. High-risk lottery winners experienced roughly a 50 percent reduction in the measures of criminal activity that weight crimes by their severity."
https://www.educationnext.org/does-school-choice-reduce-crim...
Genuinely inquiring here, on the study you linked: The study is that high-risk youth are less likely to engage in criminal activity if they attend a first-choice school. Why not inquire why those schools are first choice & if those factors can be deployed to every other school?
Similarly, what do you mean stop subsidizing dependency? What specific dependencies are being subsidized and what are the outcomes of no longer subsidizing them?
> Why not inquire why those schools are first choice & if those factors can be deployed to every other school?
That's not an easy question to answer, but have you asked it yourself? Why don't public schools adopt the successful practices of charter schools that have the prospect of saving their youth from a life of crime? My explanation is that teacher's unions fight against the practices proven successful in other context, such as merit-based hiring and compensation.
If we're going to ascribe success to a factor like school choice, we should also rule out other factors such as what those schools are being chosen for. [For example, if it turns out that there are no academic differences in chosen vs non-chosen schools, and its simply that the mere ability to choose a school causes benefits, that's really important to know!]
Part of affirmative action (AA) involves addressing some of the issues specific to american society, I have no clue how diversity is handled outside the US but would love to hear someone else's experience
To a certain degree prejudice is ingrained in the US. Not officially in laws, but in attitudes that some (not all) people hold. Not any one specific group of people either, but prejudice across different ethnic groups. AA isn't independent of this prejudice, just a more recent and politicized form of it
I think the way that it has been discussed in recent years isn't going to sustain itself long term. The way that higher education discriminates against Asians is especially egregious
(source: "The reason that it is harder for Asian Americans to get into Harvard is that their “personal ratings” (a subjective evaluation of personal qualities) are, on average, significantly lower than for white applicants." (https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2019/10/01/why-th...))
The same "personal rating" bs was historically used to limit the number of Jewish applicants. At the end of the day, the Asian applicants would likely benefit from just not providing race or selecting the "other" category.
The only way that the current system can sustain itself is by having people honestly self identify, yet there's no legal ramifications for not doing this. If people genuinely want to end this system, all they have to do is stop giving it real data to work with
part of the problem with Asian Americans in the application process is that they are treated just as Asians. My Computer Science Program at University of Pennsylvania was about 74% Asian, 20% Indian, and 5% European. There was <1% you can attribute to anyone else.
Problem is, the 74% Asian was almost entirely Chinese born Chinese, and I do feel it hurt the program. They did not want to join groups with non-Chinese people because they preferred speaking Chinese in group projects. They didn't want to talk to you before or after class if you were not speaking Mandarin. The chit chat and sharing of ideas is the whole point of higher education IMO. There were other problems not related to the fact they only wanted to speak Chinese their whole duration of their time in the program (such as talking during class, cheating, etc.) but I wont go into that. The point is, having nearly 70% of the program being Chinese born Chinese made the education experience worse. Unfortunately, American born Chinese (or even Korean) gets lumped into the Asian group and they have to compete against 1 billion Chinese applicants taking paper GRE tests (cheating on these paper tests is common, as you can buy the answers ahead of the test ).
Shouldn't the 26% learned Mandarin and thus integrated with this group? I think that would have solved the problem. It is unreasonable for minority to expect the majority to follow their whims.
The US lacking an "official" language is too often treated as some kind of gotcha, but to answer your question it would be to avoid the very scenario described by OP. The lingua franca of that University is English.
I know you want to use AA as a weapon, to drive out these Chinese students you don't like out of school. Beware, someday, AA can also be weaponized against you. This was exactly what Nazi was using.
No. I am suggesting that races shouldn't be lumped together, such as Asian Americans should be in a different 'bucket' than people from China. For what its worth, I don't believe in race based diversity at all; I believe in geographic diversity.
In 2018 The Atlantic explained this phenomenon, what the utility is, and correctly posited that it would not likely go away. TLDR; Status games and intra-elite jockeying among the overproduced elite.
"Think about what it takes to claw your way into America’s elite strata. Unless you were born into the upper-middle class, your surest route is to pursue an elite education. To do that, it pays to be exquisitely sensitive to the beliefs and prejudices of the people who hold the power to grant you access to the social and cultural capital you badly want. By setting the standards for what counts as praiseworthy, elite universities have a powerful effect on youthful go-getters."
"As the senior assistant director of admissions at Yale recently observed, “for those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world.” Picture yourself as an eager high schooler reading these words, and then jotting down notes. You absorb, assuming you hadn’t already, what it takes to make your way in contemporary elite America. And as you grow older, you lean into the rhetorical gambits that served you so well in the past. You might even build a worldview out of them."
This suggests that if we got rid of this rhetoric something else would take its place as it fills a kind of market niche. There's a limited amount of space in elite institutions and thus fierce competition over the right to obtain these degrees, which have become (in some circles) the modern equivalent of writs of noble title. This creates demand for mechanisms that can be used to signal and play status games.
Also suggests why it shows up in high-status highly paid jobs like engineering, finance, executive suites, law, etc.
What was it a few generations ago? Patriotism? Being the correct race or religion instead of posturing about diversity?
It could be that the people do care about the values listed, but don't know an effective way to guarantee them, and that existing diversity statements are a stopgap measure until something better is figured out.
But no, let's jump directly to "Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy."
Or... perhaps don't ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by incompetence.
He argued that if universities cared about diversity their positions on affirmative action would be more dynamic than is commonly accepted. e.g.:
> Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society.
The examples he uses demonstrate that, in his mind, caring about diversity requires measuring circumstance. You might argue that universities are not so shallow as he's claiming, but I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.
> their positions on affirmative action would be more dynamic than is commonly accepted
People are already trying to get affirmative action programs dismantled. Making them more complicated would lead to larger surface area, and be easier to attack.
> I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.
The entire argument of the article is that they don't measure diversity the same way he wants them to measure diversity, and therefore they don't care about it. It never considers that schools consider it differently, or whether his method is consistent, or whether what he proposes has been considered and dismissed.
I agree, the idea that they don't care and go to all this work seems absurd.
Seems more likely they're just bad advocates / come up with bad policies for ideas they like. THAT does not surprise me the least. The amount of "If you get what you want here, I don't think that gets you any closer to your goal, in fact it might do the opposite." situations is pretty high out there.
> Or... perhaps don't ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by incompetence.
Hanlon's razor is a heuristic which doesn't work very well in this case. Clearly, there is a lot of social pressure to at least pretend to care about diversity, so by default you'd expect at least some people to lie about it.
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by apathy.
I’ve seen it in myself and can only speculate about others, but sometimes I’ll leave a meeting completely unconvinced by an argument and come in the next day singing a different tune.
People like the echo chamber because it’s comfortable. But comfortable doesn’t lead to growth.
An in depth analysis can still miss possible logical conclusions. I don't think the GP is saying they skipped possible analysis, just that they fail to consider alternatives.
I vouched for this because I think it's fairly reasonable.
I think american and european universities were at the forefront of all the diversity and "woke", a decade earlier.
It's been falling steadily over time. Left wing bias in universities was far less extreme in the 60s. Given the prevalence of articles by conservatives saying they were kicked out for ideological reasons, and that this article is about the practice of forcing applicants to write a loyalty pledge to leftist dogma, it is safe to assume that this decline was largely a deliberate takeover by people who devoted themselves to excluding others over a long period of many decades.
When I took ecology in college, to calculate diversity of an ecosystem, we used Shannon's formula from a mathmatical theory of communications. iirc we did it with base e vs base 2 so the units for ecological diversity were in nits.
I think people are confusing corporations vs people.
People want diversity and care about diversity, who optionally wants to exclude someone that has merit to participate in the work/activity. Of course bigots exist, but largely people try to respect people.
Corporations, care as much as it is profitable that is the purpose of the organization is to generate wealth for stakeholders.
The issue in my opinion is how subjective 'merit' is, where studies show two resumes with equal qualifications a name implying a race or gender alone is enough to change the results of which resume was chosen subconsciously.
People see this problem as how do you measure someone without bias? How do you measure the cultural impact one can bring? How do you measure <something we suck a measuring currently>
Corporations see this problem as, how do we stay diverse enough to not look evil? How do we make measure our diversity to prove that? THEN they approach the people's point of view on the issue, because above everything is shareholders earnings and therefore the optics. It's not even intentional to a degree, stop gap solutions to make corporation happy and people tolerant of the corporation
Calling it Orwellian is crazy though, it's just capitalism and governments trying to find a way to keep it fair for non-capital owners.
It's been very, uh, interesting (perhaps in the "may you live in interesting times" fashion) watching the Diversity concept leap toward an unquestioned, uncritically accepted value in and of itself.
Take The Parable of the Polygons, from 2014 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19714441) ... it is hard to come away from this with anything other than "choice of neighborhood leads to segregation and lack of diversity, and that's bad." But what of Robert Putnam's widely critiqued 2007 study? Imagine, just for a bit, where diversity causes a loss of a sense of community, and therefore diversity would not be an uncritical good. What if humans like to be around other humans superficially like them, not unlike other social mammals?
Step back and look at the various "spaces" striven for on behalf of some minorities (and women, who are not a minority but get that badge), both in Universities, in women-only workspaces featured here, and in places like Curves. Good, apparently for the goose, but not so much for that troublesome gander. These are simply non-diverse spaces when close up, pixelated. Only by putting a bunch of them together and pulling back do they look diverse.
Certainly, some of the methods used to achieve diversity are questionable, and we have various people, from Elizabeth Warren to Rachel Dolezal, masquerading as minorities to acquire ... well, people seek to acquire power and status, so it is hard to argue against that people like Dolezal and Warren didn't want some additional blessing by identifying as groups they do not belong to, and also therefore hard to argue against that those group identifications aren't in some areas (especially academia) positive status and power. We've watched colleges and some corporations come under fire for enrollment and hiring practices which select strongly against (we used to call that "discrimation") certain groups, like the unruly Asians, who are square pegs, refusing to fit into the minority/poverty hole.
A serious re-evaluation is due, one where people's careers aren't threatened by doing so.
I've been watching Peter Boghossian's YT channel since I found it a few weeks ago, it has some great intellectually stimulating discussions around DEI and other hot-button topics that are extremely interesting, such as "Should the consideration of race be removed from the college admissions process?" [0].
He goes around to different colleges and asks the students on their beliefs in a reverse QA style, facilitating the conversation. The best discussions are when there are students who disagree and are on opposite ends of the spectrum on a topic.
> Of course, none of the above predictions are borne out: the current practice of affirmative action has none of these features that you would expect if its proponents actually valued diversity. Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity.
Another variation of this that I always hear is "everyone wants diversity but sucks at inclusion", which is slightly different (main article says they don't actually want diversity).
Need to give this a closer re-read but my instinct is that people do actually want diversity and aren't good at making it happen; but it could be a mix of everything where they use it for the social karma and secretly don't
I certainly don't, at least not in the way that modern society seems to be pushing for it.
A year or two ago a high school was putting on a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and there was a loud minority of students complaining because a white girl was cast as Esmeralda. In the original book, Esmeralda is ethnically French, but Gypsies steal her as an infant and replace her with Quasimodo. Many years later, Esmeralda's mother sees her and rants at her, thinking she is one of the gypsies she hates for stealing her daughter. She hates her own daughter, her own flesh and blood, because of interethnic hatred. The implication of this, and the impact of people like the students complaining because a white girl was cast in the role, are left as an exercise to the reader.
> In the original book, Esmeralda is ethnically French
I mean, I just think that no one seems to be aware of this. She's not French in the movie adaptation, which is what most of those kids would be familiar with. (And the musical does heavily draw from the movie – including leaving out her meeting her mother).
Without the added context of the original book's description, since it seems no one was aware of it, do you think the uproar was justified?
I think it's just plain old fashioned ignorance, right?
Dunno, to me this just looks like kids who were excited to see a musical starring someone who looked like them for once, and were understandably upset when that didn't happen.
>I think it's just plain old fashioned ignorance, right?
Pushing to get a play cancelled (and succeeding!) over a misunderstanding that can be resolved by a 30 second googling is in fact willful ignorance.
>Dunno, to me this just looks like kids who were excited to see a musical starring someone who looked like them, and were understandably upset when that didn't happen.
They started a months-long letter writing and protesting campaign, according to your own NYT link. And the person who started the campaign was African American, not Gypsy. And while most of the Gypsies I met while living in Eastern Europe looked vaguely Middle Eastern or Indian (I realize their actual ancestry is more complicated), there are white Gypsies as well. I have never, however, heard of black Gypsies. I'm sure with immigration to Europe combined with intermarriage there are some now, but the typical Gypsy in France a few centuries ago is not going to be black. So I have no idea what your "someone who looked like them" comment is supposed to mean.
>Looks like the students were targeted by alt-right publications for that, too
Oh no, shitheads on the internet said mean things and a tiny number even made threats! I'm sure you can find examples of that for any controversial news story that makes national headlines, I don't see your point here.
Given that roma people stealing children is an age old stereotype (think of it as similar to jewish people and blood libel) I don't think the books comes out ahead in its portrayal of racism/xenophobia. The decision to change Esmeralda's race in the later adaptations was not made on a whim, it was made to remove the confused messaging/racist stereotyping.
Diversity, like wealth, is the result of a long running healthy society. Now instead, it is used as a measure, to bend the society. It is like turning the needle of a barometer by finger, and claiming the pressure is increasing.
The whole blog is like this; it's all sort of comically smug "everybody else in the entire world is wrong, and here is a 7-point axiomatic derivation proving it"†, much of it depending on specific definitions of specific words. Check-mate, atheists!
There are lots of good, sharp, critical things to say about the DEI movement, most especially "institutional" DEI, but you can't meaningfully say them when you write with this tone, can you? Who's going to take you seriously? Like, at a bare minimum, you have to acknowledge (or take the trouble to refute) the concerns that animate your opposition.
The author isn't a rando! This is a tenured professor of philosophy at a major university. You know, writing like a high school sophomore on a message board.
† I highly recommend his carefully reasoned, inescapable argument that everyone has the right to own a gun for a perfect example of the form.
I genuinely find this criticism of yours to be almost-inexcusably vapid in its own right. You're criticizing tone, not content. And your bolded, italicized dagger-marked point doesn't make sense to me without context.
Other than style and tone, what is your issue with the content of this writer's position? What are your suggestions for how it could be amended?
The whole article can be summed up as: "Colleges claim they care about Diversity, but one definition of Diversity is X, and we can trivially prove colleges don't care about X. QED colleges don't care about Diversity."
It should not take a particularly sharp mind to identify the fallacy here: There are definitions other than X. Therefore the conclusion of the article is completely fallacious: we've only established that people aren't using definition X, not that they don't care about Diversity.
From any sort of intellectually engaged opponent, I would expect some attempt to try and work out "therefore, colleges must have some definition Y that they actually care about" and an understanding that words can have multiple definitions.
---
In places, the article doesn't even bother to check if it's debunking of X is actually accurate, either: it should be obvious to anyone who looks that quite a few colleges actually do care about socio-economic diversity (Point 2.5 in the article), and make a point of extending extra support to ensure at least a few poor students can attend. We have visa programs specifically designed to allow students from other countries (Point 2.3).
Maybe it's not an explicit "Affirmative Action" program, but it should be obvious that colleges do care about these things. Yet the author insists "Of course, none of the above predictions are borne out" and "Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying"
No, I'm criticizing tone and content. And I don't think "vapid" is a word you get to use here: I probably read this person's blog more carefully than most of his supporters on the thread did.
> everybody else in the entire world is wrong, and here is a 7-point axiomatic derivation proving it
What argument doesn't take this form? If you're making an argument you yourself agree with, then yeah, the implication is that you disagree with people who disagree with it. Axiomatic derivations will be involved, because... why wouldn't they be?
> much of it depending on specific definitions of specific words
I think what you must mean here is surprising definitions of certain words (otherwise, again, what argument doesn't have this characteristic?). I personally was not surprised by the usage of any of the major words in the article. Certainly some of the words are really "improper nouns", like "diversity", but it's clear from context what the different sorts of diversity being discussed are.
It sounds like your problem with my argument about the poor reasoning here is that I made it in too few words? I'll say it again: he hasn't actually managed to engage with the argument for DEI, even institutionalized DEI; he thinks instead that he's checkmated it by attempting to reconcile a dictionary definition with the rationale the Supreme Court used in the 1970s to defend Affirmative Action.
> I'll say it again: he hasn't actually managed to engage with the argument for DEI, even institutionalized DEI
The use of the definite article here is surprising. I get the impression you have an argument for DEI in mind that you think everybody has in mind. Which one is it?
Can you highlight where you made that argument the first time? I read your first comment as entirely concerned with tone and don't see where you are discussing lack of engagement with an argument.
It's a 127 word comment (not counting the snarky aside at the bottom), of which approximately 40% of the words make the points you're looking for directly, in a pair of sentences, one in the first paragraph and one in the second. I think you might have to not want to see them not to see them.
I'm an unrelated person driving by, and I actually scrolled up to try to find the sentences (i.e., the ones about an argument), and I'm not seeing them, either. I have a PhD in English, so I'm not totally terrible at reading carefully.
> he hasn't actually managed to engage with the argument for DEI
Sure, it would have been a better article if they had done that. What are some good books covering that? I haven't really heard much of an argument for it, merely brow-beating and social pressure. Ibram X. Kendi doesn't count, his arguments are ridiculously facile.
I didn't see a single line arguing how the content of this blog post was wrong also. If you think there are gross inaccuracies then please do write a better focused critique.
This tone is very common in academic philosophy. I would characterize it as being low in rhetoric and extremely blunt. I don't really see how it sounds like "a high school sophomore".
He starts with a "Webster's dictionary defines" kind of premise and most of the rest is rhetoric. Not one single "woke social justice warrior" values philosophy? That's not blunt, it's extremely lazy thinking expressed with name calling. I had no idea reading this that the author was nominally an intellectual and a philosopher.
>He starts with a "Webster's dictionary defines" kind of premise
We are talking about diversity in academia, so it's helpful to have some history of the word and how it started becoming used the way it's used today. Do you disagree with the history?
>Not one single "woke social justice warrior" values philosophy?
He didn't say this. He said that not one "woke social justice warrior" (this should have been expressed differently) values philosophical diversity within academia. That said, citing himself on this was a bit ridiculous.
>I had no idea reading this that the author was nominally an intellectual and a philosopher.
Yes, it's easy to dispute the history he's trying to establish here, because he's fixated on one particular legal aspect of it which happens to support his (much broader) argument.
Well, academic philosophy is a rather sophomoric discipline. The non-sophomoric parts of it have long since moved to other departments - PG even has an essay about this http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
> Well, academic philosophy is a rather sophomoric discipline. The non-sophomoric parts of it have long since moved to other departments - PG even has an essay about this http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
Why would the opinion of a VC who dropped out of an undergrad philosophy program be an especially authoritative or notable on this topic? Some tech people have an annoying habit of shitting on anything that isn't tech or tech-adjacent, and if anything, that essay seems to play into those biases.
In general the argument template is "If you're not 100% committed to realizing a more extreme version of your mission statement than the status quo, then you're being hypocritical and cannot be taken seriously." We see the same thing pop up in, "You don't like capitalism, yet you still participate in it," and "You don't like cars, yet you still drive places." It's the sort of tired teenager type argument that doesn't seek to advance the discourse. It does nothing to convince anyone of anything and instead it exacerbates division. There's plenty of other better arguments to make and for some reason the author goes for this one.
Sweden had an election yesterday, and I can't think of a single political subject where political opponents do not accuse the other side of being insincere. Environment, taxes, law and order, immigration, education, healthcare, elder care... "You say you want X, yet you still say/do/vote Y" would match the intended message in about 95% of every statement being made when a politician is describing an other politician politics.
Political debates would be much more interesting if they weren't allowed to do this. It would be a bit like the rule that one should never discuss the speaker, only the content. It would really help against polarization.
At the very least giving a name to the phenomena (and logical fallacy experts, please chime in) gives people the power to identify and categorize such arguments as not being worthwhile pursuits and can castrate their power.
A more productive way for political discourse would be to analyze the expected result of different political strategies, especially when mirror opposite strategies has the same intended end goal.
Of course, when people are pulling and advocating for one direction, doing the opposite seems like an contradiction. Thus the political debates becomes about trust and sincerity. No longer is the discussion about the effectiveness of the strategy but rather about how trustworthy the strategy is.
One very common way polls measure political strategies is thus in voter trust. Do voters trust that party X has a good strategy to solve problem Y. It generally only experts and researchers that attempt to measure the actually effectiveness of a political strategy.
Hey, I tried replying yesterday but I hit some kind of posting limit.
My bad! I think I had hit reply to the wrong comment. I could have sworn there was something written about tone, but it must have been someone else. Sorry about that.
> The author isn't a rando! This is a tenured professor of philosophy at a major university. You know, writing like a high school sophomore on a message board.
Man, that's disappointing. I like Prof. Huemer's writings on free will and philosophy of mind [1] a lot ("Existence Is Evidence of Immortality" is a fun one). I was unaware of his blog up until now—reading it makes me think significantly less of him.
The bar for publishing in a blog is much lower than an academic paper.
I don't know much about this particular professor, but part of converging towards the truth is to start somewhere which might be incorrect, then debate the flaws of that and come up with a better reasoning. Avoiding discussing or publishing thoughts that are not fully baked would be detrimental to that process, I believe.
If you knew someone who didn't like mushrooms, and you saw them enjoy a dish with mushrooms in it without knowing, and then after you told them they said they didn't like it at all actually, wouldn't that seem silly?
No? Sewer rat might, after all, taste like pumpkin pie. In Tokyo, my wife once very much enjoyed a piece of sushi that turned out to be whale. She's not all like, "I guess we eat whale now".
Saying you won't eat more because you disapprove of its origin is fundamentally different from changing you assessment after the fact of whether you "liked" it.
I can rattle some off, I guess? Institutional DEI can be elitist, furthering the interests of well-off credentialed people at the expense of those it claims to help; performative; a way of short-circuiting real debates about values that are uncomfortable or that cut against elite interests; largely defined in terms relevant to competing groups of rich white people; a surreptitious way of laundering policy arguments that have nothing to do with righting past injustices ("equity-washing"); counterproductive, in the sense of organizing and motivating opposition to social justice by adopting the language least persuasive to those who need to be persuaded, and, further, by reducing the effectiveness of organizations that would otherwise naturally work to reduce inequality. I'm sure there's a bunch more.
You're asking that question, I assume, as a bid for a show of good faith that I'm not just knee-jerking anything that opposes "diversity" efforts. That's fair enough! I don't know that we want to litigate the whole concept, though; I'm just here to point out a really bad argument.
I've read and understood this response. I've re-read and tried to understand your original comment criticizing the article. I do not understand it, though (except that it highlights the article's tone—critically).
Who is the opposition to Huemer (the author of this article)? What does animate their opposition to his case?
You asked me upthread to come up with some strong arguments (to contrast with the really weak ones in the post) for the article's position. I'm asking you to do the same in the other direction.
You said you knew of lots of good criticisms against a position, and I asked you what they were.
I'm saying that I can't make out what it is about article's position that you're saying is bad. Since you mentioned opposition who are animated by the author's position, I'm asking: "Who are the opposition? What does animate them?"[1] The fact that I don't know and couldn't figure out what you're referring to is the premise of the subthread. (And not false premise—like a contrived exercise.) Asking me to "come up" with arguments is different from asking you to say what you already have on your mind. Asking for me to come up with them when premise is that I've already articulated an inability to make sense of what's presented so far is another level removed from that, still.
1. It's actually not even different from the first question—just two different sets, and me asking, what are the sets' members? since you alluded to knowledge of them.
That makes it sound like the failure of productive discussion in this instance is a blameless, emergent phenomenon. If you don't want to discuss it productively...? Okay. "Nothing for us to productively discuss" isn't the best description for what comes down to someone being coy (and then, eventually, evasive), though.
I don't believe any of us disagree that such programs are ineffective under optimal conditions. Aside from that, what are the "lots of" other sharp, critical comments to be made?
I would think, given the over the top snark you had in your previous comments, you would have more to say on about on the topic. Right?
No, my goal here is just to point out how bad this blog post is, not to solve diversity. Unlike the author of the blog post, I don't think I'm capable of single-handedly solving diversity.
Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier, I hit a posting limit yesterday.
Thanks for the response. Honestly, I probably would have deleted the comment I had made, but you responded to it before I could remove it. Sorry about that.
I was annoyed because the topic is something I take very personally. I was being crappy and shouldn't have commented the way I did. Generally, I'm trying to get better about not leaving crappy comments when I'm in a bad mood, but I screwed up. I hope my comments didn't bum you out or anything.
Critiquing the style of a persuasive essay makes a lot of sense to me, however, because it accurately points out a flaw that will make it less successful according to this specific reader.
I'd suggest that if a reader is less successful at grasping the crux of an essay due solely to the writing style, that merely points out a failing of the reader. Digesting essays of varying styles is an important skill that one needs as an academic. That skill needs to be fostered.
But this isn't an academic context; this is a substack essay published on the internet for some internet denizens to read. In this case it makes a lot of sense to ask whether or not the essay succeeds at being persuasive, in the way it makes sense to critique whether or not a speech is delivered well. A public speaker can make a great point, but if they vomit on themselves halfway through the point, it makes sense to go "well, maybe we should address to vomiting thing" instead of "disgust in someone's vomiting on themselves is a failure of the audience".
I mean I think the point is that the top comment for this article is now about the tone of the article rather than the contents. You yourself say there are valid criticisms to be made, so why not do that and compare them to the article instead?
I read the full piece and didn't encounter any phrasing like that. A few things were pushing the envelope, maybe? Haven't been at Uni for a long time, but after reading about the Oberlin case my eyes/ears are open.
Suppose it is problematic if the author does indulge in that, but am not going searching for it. Found this piece reasonable on the whole. It does have an opinion on intolerance, and not everyone is going to like it.
It's not hard to come up with valid critiques of institutional DEI. But the blog post we're reading here is conclusory and derives almost entirely from a tendentious definition of a single word.
I don't believe any phrase has become its opposite here. Language is complicated, and some words have multiple meanings, and some of those meanings are subtle; the idea that every term should be crystalized down to a single unambiguous meaning is, ironically, quintessentially Orwellian.
(I'm not saying Orwell would approve of institutional DEI, which suffers from many similar rhetorical flaws).
> the idea that every term should be crystalized down to a single unambiguous meaning is, ironically, quintessentially Orwellian.
Sure, but no one is advocating for a single unambiguous meaning of the term, the parent seems to be noting that concern should be paid when a word/phrase develops an opposite (or at least very contradictory) meaning, presumably in the context of a charged political environment. You may not believe that's what's happening here, which is fine, but that doesn't imply an argument in favor of singular meanings.
Oh, this blog post is sure advocating for a single unambiguous meaning of the term "diversity"; the whole argument falls apart without that definition.
Do you disagree that many advocates for institutionalized DEI have a shallow definition of diversity? That is my experience.
You are correct that if the author's definition does not match the one in the wild, their argument falls apart, but by and large, I don't think that's going on here.
For what its worth, though I think we might disagree at some core level about this topic, I do appreciate your way of reasoning through your criticism. It's amazing how many disagreements start at the level of definitions without the disagreeing parties ever reconciling, or even acknowledging, the problem of messy definitions.
I think the post boils down to him not wanting to spend any effort accommodating diversity. It's a valid opinion but I don't see how anything he wrote would sway anyone one way or the other.
I think he's also wrong in the factual sense about what diversity initiatives are for. It's not actually that diversity is an automatic net win for companies because diverse workers are better. It exists specifically to combat bias and discrimination. Both conscious and unconscious. It's literally anti racism (or anti misogyny or anti homophobia etc). I support DEI programs because that's a laudable goal unto itself. Even if it makes a company less profitable. I think the goal of any human endeavor should be to make the world a marginally better place. Not just to maximize profit.
He's hung up on the Supreme Court's rationalization of Affirmative Action, which is why he's wedged in this one embarrassingly narrow notion of what "diversity" is for. Even within that notion, he hasn't actually made a valid argument; by the logic he's using, you could evaluate a diversity program based on how many flat-earthers it admits.
> Even within that notion, he hasn't actually made a valid argument; by the logic he's using, you could evaluate a diversity program based on how many flat-earthers it admits.
This single sentence is a far better rebuttal of the post than your initial one which generated a lot of heat :)
The implication is that somehow being correct in an argument matters more than tone, which is... childish.
If you want to have a productive argument (as opposed to just being an asshole screaming at passerby) you need to convince people that you are worth engaging.
This means showing good faith and not being overly dismissive (i.e. tone).
If you're talking about purely conveying information, tone is largely immaterial.
If you're talking about convincing people, proper tone is a prerequisite to conveying information.
For most communication, tone starts out being infinitely more important that anything you're saying. Once you reach an inflection point, tone is sufficient and correctness can take priority. The inflection point varies based on your audience.
If my tone is such that no one engages constructively, then it's not going to be useful whether or not I'm correct.
If my tone is such that many people engage constructively, then it may well be useful whether or not I'm correct, as either people learn from my contribution or people (including me) learn from corrections to my contribution.
It's more than a little context dependent and YMMV, of course.
No, it doesn't! It famously doesn't! There's a whole discipline of creating arguments that are deliberately difficult to engage with or respond to: it's called "college debate".
Did this feel like a compelling argument when you wrote it? You thought to yourself, huh, maybe this person can't possibly come up with an argument for diversity that doesn't run aground of an appeal for "viewpoint diversity"?
I'm trying to actually figure out what his points are. None of it is making much sense because he just seems so far off in his own thinking that it's not connected to DEI at all. Still trying to untangle it, but here's my lol as I work through what he's saying.
1.1 When did we start pretending to care about diversity?
He says 1978. What? He's fabricating a story to prop up his flawed belief system.
1.2 Diversity is intellectual?
It's good because it promotes a good education. What? It's far more about that: representation, opportunities for historically marginalized groups, challenging the status quo with ideas of how things should be done, etc.
2.1 The argument for affirmative action
How did we get to affirmative action? Are we back in the 1980's view of how we are supposed to level the playing field?
> by diversifying the racial composition of the student body, we will be indirectly producing intellectual diversity.
Yikes. He's totally missing the point around opportunities, exposure to diverse backgrounds that force you break out of your own stereotypical thinking...
2.2 Idealogy
> The most “woke” people are the ones who aggressively try to silence all dissent and to exclude conservatives, libertarians, etc., from the Academy.
This is a myth. Conservatives tend to get excluded because their whole goal is to exclude others based on their religion, their desire to prevent others from being able to become self actualized (ex against same sex marriage), their support for laws and institutions that maintain the status quo...
2.3 Other countries
> the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries.
Yikes. He's totally gone off the rails now. Completely misses the point of what DEI is about.
2.4 Other races
> Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society.
face palm that is just so painful to read. Yes, on the surface it's true, but not what DEI is actually trying to address in the US.
2.5 social class
> rural white people would get more affirmative action points than middle class suburban blacks.
lol this guy doesn't understand racism very well.
2.6 Proportionality
His point: you don't need a proportional representation for diversity.
And...? Not sure why this is even here. Seems pretty obvious.
2.7. Non of this is happening
> Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy.
lol my god how did we land here?
3. Conclusion
> “Diversity, inclusion, and equity” refers to ideological uniformity, exclusion, and discrimination.
Sigh. He really has no clue what he's writing about or how this works outside of his world view. I can't shake the feeling how sad I from having slogged through this. I'll chalk this up to being useless noise that's out of touch on what's going on in the larger world.
Seriously. His initial premise is so far off base that the whole article reads like some sort of conservative straw man pretending to be intellectual discourse.
Are there issue with some DEI initiatives? Yes, but they are often minor, and usually due to bureaucratic laziness, not malice against conservatives or white people.
He is butt hurt that reality has a liberal bias, and wants academia to subscribe to his knee-jerk conservative fantasies instead.
He essentially trying to argue that a completely straight, cis, white, male faculty and student body would still be "diverse" because some were poor/rich, some were rural/urban, and some were old/young. Sorry, that's not diversity, it's simply variations on a theme.
If ensuring that people from marginalized backgrounds get good treatment is important in third level education, would the same arguments not apply in a much stronger fashion to first and second level?
I always (not an American) thought it was weird that all the focus was on university while the research would suggest that interventions at primary school level (and before) would be wildly more effective.
> If ensuring that people from marginalized backgrounds get good treatment is important in third level education, would the same arguments not apply in a much stronger fashion to first and second level?
They do, which is why [primary] school desegregation was (and remains) an important policy goal for various progressive and racial justice movements during the previous century.
edit: It may not be clear to folks who don't live in the US, but the focus on affirmative action is generally driven by the people who oppose such initiatives. The people in favor of them, as far as I can tell, largely view them as a single piece of a larger project for justice.
> They do, which is why [primary] school desegregation was (and remains) an important policy goal for various progressive and racial justice movements during the previous century.
Sure, but that doesn't really solve the problem. Given that the funding of primary schools is predominantly driven by property taxes, one could argue that this is actually been made worse (assuming lower prop taxes => less weathly parents => structurally disadvantaged races).
“The most “woke” people are the ones who aggressively try to silence all dissent (https://fakenous.net/?p=2932) and to exclude conservatives, libertarians, etc., from the Academy. So they not only fail to value intellectual diversity; they are just about the most stridently anti-diversity people in the entire country.”
I don't even think ideological / philosophical / political diversity is that good a thing. If you are the college admissions person, are you more likely to admit a eugenicist who thinks their ethnic group is best? I mean, that's a really unusual opinion for a prospective student to express! Wouldn't that increase diversity? You work in a media company and someone who wants to bring their niche fundamentalist religious perspective to your content - whoa, super diverse, right? Hospital hiring a witch doctor? Don't have too many of those on staff!
I think for the vast majority of positions what you want is someone who can do the job well and their ability will naturally constrain their opinions and experience and, in some cases, their demographic characteristics as well. For students you want smart people who have a documented history of being able to learn. Intellectual diversity should arrive naturally from a population of smart people trying to learn. Intellectual diversity should not be a goal itself.
I do a lot of hiring, and co-hired a lot of my colleagues. I would never hire for diversity, and would explicitly refuse to do so.
Why? Everyone in my team is hired for 1 thing: excellent developers.
Nobody is questioning why they are there, and I would never put those people in a position where project managers have to question why anyone in my team is there, because of being a good developer or to fill up some statistics.
Hiring for diversity has the opposite effect: it puts doubt why a person of a certain minority is there.
But hey, once the world starts doing that bullshit, it's excellent for me. I'm a hetro white male, so there can be ony 1 reason why I was hired.
I was at a a highprofile tech company that everyone on HN knows about. Since I highly dislike bullshit, I straightup asked the hiring manager "does this mean the technical bar is lower for diversity?" Answer: "Yes."
Now, there is some possible justification, in the sense that diversity may bring value to the team. After all, hires are holistic (communication skills, etc.). Especially if diversity of {race, sexuality, gender, etc} meant a diversity of ideas. But without evidence for this (please correct me as needed), and with seemingly less-than-well-justified reasons, it was quite upsetting to me. Something to think about: if we value diversity of ideas, why not value diversity of religion? Beyond the fact that it's a legally protected class, of course (i.e. ethics/value prop, not legality). Or would that somehow be less than ideal?
As an Asian, I feel the issue of "reverse" affirmative action well.
I'm a hetro white male, so there can be ony 1 reason why I was hired
This is constraining the definition of protected class.
For example, if you're over 40 or a veteran, there could be the same doubt regardless if you are hetero and white. And that says nothing of non-visible disability status. The list is surprising long of protected classes so we'd probably do our organizations a service to not presume we know if someone belongs to one.
Given eight person teams, one in ten will have no women on it purely by chance, given that only a quarter of software engineers in the US are women. Questions may be asked, but I hope the questioners listen to reason.
That is true. Surprisingly we have a pretty diverse team, so no questions there :).
But let's assume that wasn't the case and questions are asked. I think I would move a big part of the interview process to a standardised written test, so you have the results on paper of everyone that was screened.
Diversity is not important in and of itself, but it has been shown again and again that people will discriminate against it over of just selecting for quality. And it doesn't seem to be the case that having to overcome their aversion to diversity then negatively affects long term outcome. Since it is hard to measure and affect what people actually think, it's easier to measure and make policy based on outcomes, and in that sense, businesses should care about diversity as a metric. And perhaps as therapy, to cure their company culture of systemic discrimination - through exposure and by taking away the power of the drivers of discrimination to affect hiring.
> Most fundamentally, in this context, diversity would be variety of ideas, experiences, and attitudes, especially those relevant to the things that people are learning about in school.
In the context the author wants us to assume, sure. But that is not what big-D Diversity is.
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." - Humpty Dumpty
In this case, of course, this is very intentional on behalf of the author, to argue a very specific agenda. Which I guess is fair enough, except that it is quite provocative in a generally bad way for society, IMHO. The author knows better and shouldn't depend on this ... diversion (heh) to promote his point.
Some data to back any of these feelings up would be helpful. Academics are well aware of the difficulties associated with wokeism and are actively working on finding practical solutions. This post feels very 2018.
Going on a tangent I am tired of diversity theater at most companies. You know how I know you don't really care? I look at your C level (excluding Chief Diversity Officer) and you board.
Years and breadth/depth of experience is far from everything, but it's also far from nothing.
I'd sort of expect the CxOs at most major companies to be ~25-40 years into their career. I'd therefore expect them to look a lot like the white collar workforce new entrants looked in 1982-1997.
Pick an Indian CEO of a major American company. When did they start their career? How many of their fellow Indians started in the same timeframe? (I think "a lot!")
Some major tech company Indian CEOs:
Sundhar Pichai (Alphabet) ~1993
Satya Nadella (Microsoft) ~1990
Parag Agrawal (Twitter) ~2011 (with PhD, but still an outlier even discounting that)
Shantanu Narayen (Adobe) ~1986
Arvind Krishna (IBM) ~1990
Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron) ~1979
Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto) ~1992
My comment was in reference to yours and the parent combined.
It should be easy to look at the C-board and find diversity because in a global economy there are tons of people with the experience as you've proved with your great example.
Are you for real largest SV companies can't find a single "diverse" board member or C level but spend 100s of millions evangelizing how they care about diversity and on employee diversity training?
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Candidates WHERE DIVERSE = 1 ORDER BY Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered DESC
or
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Candidates ORDER BY Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered DESC
There could be valid reasons to employ either strategy, but I suspect most firms are trying to apply the second and your disbelief that the first query returns zero rows is more a mismatch with the firms' hiring strategy than anything else.
I am not suggesting they have to employee 1st or 2nd strategy. But if you do go with the 2nd don't go down the path of by-weekly employee diversity trainings and diversity being the corner stone of your "values" and communication strategy.
They can hire the way they want to hire but should stop the diversity training theater and fill good posting on twitter if they have 0 diversity on the C team they directly hired.
This is an extremely shallow and dismissive take, IMO. As someone who has recruited engineers, I can tell you there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. At the C-level, it only gets worse. It takes years to even get to the C-suite, which means that white men inherently have a head start, and that it's one of the last places you'd expect to see the effects of diversity initiatives.
That isn't to say there aren't companies that have Chief Diversity Officers who aren't taken seriously, but that's a completely different story.
> there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself.
So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to check some boxes and be able to say "we've got X% of engineers who aren't white men, look at how diverse we are!"
It's not possible to measure a counterfactual where teams at a given company just suddenly become diverse. But, it is pretty well known that there are some advantages to diversity in the workplace. Take, for instance, this reasonably well source article which lists 10 advantages: https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefi...
Oh, and it's not just white men. East Asians and those from the Indian subcontinent are also well represented in tech (perhaps over represented -- I'm not sure).
I didn't go through and click all the links in the article, I was mainly interested in the problem-solving section. However, that one links to a Harvard Business Review study that drops this quote:
> Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance.
They go on to say that when they say "diverse teams solve problems faster", they mean cognitive diversity:
> Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age.
Intuitively this makes much more sense than the race-based stuff I've been hearing about. You want people who can look at a problem from a different angle from you. It's sort of like having a team of specialists (one guy is good at UI, one at performance, one at tooling, etc.) except on the level of cognitive processes and not specific skills.
I believe that maybe these studies arose saying "diverse teams are better" and people misunderstood it to mean "racial diversity" and ran with it (kind of like the Hungarian notation fiasco).
+1 here, and yeah it's definitely not just white men. Where I work, it's ALL Indian or Asian, you'd be hard pressed to even find white people where I work that are actually in engineering.
They dont want diversity in its true meaning.
They just want to hire whoever they want, from wherever they want.
And "diversity" is the camouflage they hide behind.
People shouldnt be forced to accept diversity. It should be opt-in. Forcing anything on a person against their will does not work and leads to radicalization. The harder they push, the more radicalized people become. This is what leads to attacks like Christchurch.
Are you implying that people in favor of and/or implementing affirmative action members share some culpability in far-right terrorist acts? Huh. In my book, deciding to leave civil society for untargeted violence against innocent people of some other group immediately puts all the responsibility for your actions into your lap. You don't get to say it was because of some vague ideological pressure at that point.
I'm not arguing who's responsibility it is. I'm just pointing out that in practice, when you force an ideology on people + take away any outlet for them to express dissent(through deplatforming/censorship etc) then this is the kind of thing that ends up happening. That being said, whenever someone enacts a policy that affects others it is important that they consider the effects of externalities. While they may not be directly responsible for those externalities, it's irresponsible not to take them into consideration. Pointing fingers after the fact doesn't bring people back to life.
I care about diversity because different cultures bring different ideas and skills to the situation. When I get in a jam, I don't want just one idea for getting out of it, I want many.
Can you give an example on how a white male software developer would develop something differently than for example an asian woman, and how the cultural difference would translate into a different approach of writing code?
You made a generic claim that different cultures bring different ideas and skills. I have a hard time understanding what that means in practice at the workplace. That's why I'm asking for an example.
I still don't see how it would work in practice, and you fail to give an example.
In the academy, left-wing beliefs dominate; therefore, the affirmative action supporters would be first and foremost demanding preferences for conservatives, libertarians, moderates, fascists, monarchists, and other people who do not accept the current progressive orthodoxy.
Everyone knows that isn’t happening. Virtually none (maybe actually zero) of the woke, social-justice-warrior people support philosophical diversity. The most “woke” people are the ones who aggressively try to silence all dissent (https://fakenous.net/?p=2932) and to exclude conservatives, libertarians, etc., from the Academy. So they not only fail to value intellectual diversity; they are just about the most stridently anti-diversity people in the entire country.
ideology is not just your political views or opinions, it is fundamentally how you interact with and view others. If your ideology is that "I am right and everyone else is wrong" or "women should be subservient to men" or "the scientific method is a tool of Satan", you are obviously a bad fit for university and a learning environment. I think it should be obvious that some ideologies are fundamentally a bad fit for a cooperative and tolerant environment.
I get really frustrated with moralistic arguments that treat "ideology" as a value-neutral thing. like this:
> In the academy, left-wing beliefs dominate; therefore, the affirmative action supporters would be first and foremost demanding preferences for conservatives, libertarians, moderates, fascists, monarchists, and other people who do not accept the current progressive orthodoxy.
Some of those people don't want to be tolerant or cooperative. In order to have a conversation we have to want the same thing and to agree to the same rules and operate in good faith.
If your opinion of "diversity" is that its pointless and hurts white men, and your peers at the university believe that cultural diversity is an important part of ideological diversity, and they AGREE that diversity statements help achieve that, then maybe you will also be a bad fit. Thats ok. Work at a different institution.
Wow, flagged, killed, resurrected in a VERY short amount of time. This is spicy.
Diversity is a trope that I've yet to see any evidence for other than using it as a kudgel to force a single viewpoint on a bunch of people by threatening their salary.
To be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't hire other races, or prefer one race above the other. But having been both in tech and university I can tell you by and large these programs are feel good and do almost nothing to forward their goal.
If the goal is to improve racial diversity, then you can do it trivially by simply selecting non-white races. This is, by definition, racist, but for some reason we've retermed this form of racism as "affirmative action". In a lot of sectors this ends up becoming a racial quota. Some tech companies even seem to gleefully promote it as such. These quotas do nothing to improve the bottom line or improve diversity. It feels more like revenge than progress and I don't think that's effective or sustainable.
If the goal is to improve ideological diversity then race shouldn't be controlled for. As the author rightly points out, a white person from a poor neighborhood will have a "more diverse" viewpoint than a black person from a middle class neighborhood. However, one may wonder how increased ideological diversity would help solve a problem in software that doesn't directly lean on one of those ideologies. There has never been a point in my decades long career as a backend engineer where my political/racial/religious identity ever influenced my code. I can say this with absolute certainty.
It feels like a sham to me. Suddenly in the last decade we've seen the marked rise of "diversity consultants" who by and large are simply diversity hustlers. This includes the new title "chief diversity officer" who, to this day, I am unsure what they even contribute in terms of driving profitability. Of course, these diversity hustlers will promote direct-action diversity efforts as the panacea to all of our sins because it's profitable to them. I have yet to see data that implies when controlling for education, race is a determining factor in ability. The idea itself seems false on its face but this is the exact idea they are promoting.
A business seeks first to optimize profit. Meritocracy is the single best way to insure this. If you wish to reduce hiring bias develop systems for double-blind reviews of candidates and compare results. These problems can be at least partially ameliorated with statistics. But instead, it seems we choose the most inefficient and outright questionably legal method instead. Promoting these ephemeral hard to measure metrics like "X <trait> has a more diverse opinion and is therefore better than Y <trait>" is just an end-around to bigotry at the corporate and university level. We can do better to fix hiring pipeline biases, etc, but this is not the way.
>In the academy, left-wing beliefs dominate; therefore, the affirmative action supporters would be first and foremost demanding preferences for conservatives, libertarians, moderates, fascists, monarchists, and other people who do not accept the current progressive orthodoxy.
This is simply being obtuse for the sake of flame-bating, caring about diversity is simply a shorthand for the inclusion of sectors that were and are (actually) prejudiced against. The actual "practical" usefulness of diversity is more "perhaps we should try this facial recognition software with black skin", not the PR-esque "being different is superpower".
And no, you aren't a prejudiced because you are conservative, not even when people disagree with you on Twitter. Yes, Twitter mobs are actually a thing, yes they are dangerous, no they aren't that common. It's true that American liberals are overly interested in racial injustice to the detriment of class injustice, and affirmative action could be better based on socio-economic status.
I care about diversity.
I've been a women in stem nearly my entire life (thanks dad!).
However diversity quotas, esg scores, and all the manipulation in "diversity" and "woke" today is more about incompetent children of the rich who need fake jobs that make a lot of money. I've refused to hire an english major young woman on my development team even under extreme pressure from management because she's a women, but also because she's the CTO's wife's niece.
It's just an unbelievable amount of pressure, now all resumes are pre-screened before they even get to me by a third party hiring group so corporate has plausible deniability about their schemes.
It's become far more about "elite" signalling and nepotism these days.
> I've refused to hire an english major young woman on my development team even under extreme pressure from management because she's a women, but also because she's the CTO's wife's niece
That's not "woke", that's just garden variety nepotism.
"Woke" is very different that other types of cover.
"Woke" gets celebrated and praised, and people have to pretend that hire wasn't hired due to nepotism.
As a manager whose been thru this rodeo, let me tell you what happens.
1. We have to have a mini celebration for "woke but really nepotistic" hire at big corporation.
2. We can never mention that persons skill or the "real" reason they got hired.
3. It gives the "elites" far more power to harass people via HR if they don't like the nepotism
4. The non-nepotism hires can become bitter and resentful, even more so when they have to pickup extra work for no department praise or celebrations if the "woke" hire is bad. I also have to give cover for the "woke" hire.
5. My team starts to collapse, and I have to negotiate all sorts of shit to keep my talented hires.
It's just an absolute nightmare when managing a high performance results required teams.
I agree with everything stuckinhell said as she seems to have some first hand experience with this, but I'd like to add that frankly it's just disgusting to use things like civil rights as a corporate HR move. People marched and risked a lot of real things to achieve the rights that we all have today. Now "wokeness" (which used to be cool btw) has been co-opted by corporations and we all have to pretend that a company hiring an unqualified woman who happens to be related to someone on the C-suite is progress just because she's a woman.
It makes me sick, and I don't understand how anyone can defend this bullshit.
It is garden variety nepotism. If it was the CTO's wife's nephew, the CTO's allies wouldn't have argued for a "woker" candidate instead, they'd have pushed very hard on some other basis like the "intellectual diversity" of his different experience or his solid-but-irrelevant academic track record or his supposed credentials as a self-taught programmer or his "leadership potential" or his "strong recommendation from a colleague".
The difference is that if the under qualified relative was justified for one of those reasons people would be less likely to insist the solution to this very obvious nepotism was not to broaden the hiring pool beyond the CTO's relatives, but to chuck all the company's initiatives aimed at attracting career changers, academic-high achievers, autodidacts, leaders or referrals in the bin...
If it was his nephew, then he'd put down nonbinary or some LGBTQ2S flavor.
It's not garden variety nepotism because the executives CAN and DO use HR to attack critics of his relatives or allies.
Another reason people don't like diversity initiatives is that whenever you try to have an honest conversation about its problems, you get accused of ridiculous things, like being racist/sexist/etc or thinking nepotism is good.
I don't understand what your point is. A company hiring a woman with no relevant experience because she's the niece of the CTO is bad. A company hiring a woman with no relevant experience because she's the niece of the CTO but it's ok this time because she's a woman also seems bad. The former is "garden variety" nepotism, and we all agree it's bad. The latter is the new "woke" nepotism, but it's really the same as the former, with the "woke" part being used as an excuse.
How does that benefit anyone other than the people doing the nepotism?
I don't think anyone is contesting that, but the point seems to be that the people who push these initiatives undeniably think nepotism is, in fact, good because that's what their actions tell us.
I've seen commentary that links the idea of elite overproduction to the rise of preoccupation with diversity within business and more generally within the culture.
That's how I took the parent's comment, anyway, and that nepotism was additionally involved in the anecdote just substantiates the elite overproduction argument.
As an example of the shoe being on the other foot, institutionalized nepotism in university is called legacy admissions and overwhelmingly benefits white applicants.
I care about diversity, as I care in equality for all, I'm an egalitarian. However, I think perhaps we should make it more of a blind thing, where you don't get to see or know the person's race/gender etc. All applications come with a # and are essentially jane or john Doe's.
Then the only diversity they need worry about is income diversity, where they need to have equal #'s from extreme poverty as they have from extreme wealthy. Income does trend some in more diverse communities anyways, so it'll happen naturally that this will create more diversity, but it takes away some of the stigmas and angst around it because everyone being accepted is more of a number and acceptance is more based on their achievements etc..
My problem with so-called diversity efforts is that they wildly overemphasize a really superficial attribute: skin color. That is, at best, a tenuous proxy for actual diversity and goes against decades of work of the U.S. civil rights movement.
There are real benefits to having a diverse group of people in just about every setting, but assessing the level of diversity by noting the range of skin tones present is ineffective (and should be deeply offensive to everyone involved).
True diversity of thought, perspective, and experience - i.e. the things that make diversity desirable - come first from things like socioeconomic differences (that one alone may outweigh all others combined), your family experience growing up (including the nuclear family culture but broader culture in which you lived), etc.
Any sort of correlation to skin color is not necessarily causal, especially when considering individual people, and yet using skin color as your diversity metric not-so-subtly suggests it /is/ causal, which, ironically, is on some level racist.
> they wildly overemphasize a really superficial attribute
That may be true in your party of the world but at least in the IT industry in mine, diversity in skin colour (*) isn't really an issue. Diversity in sex, age and physical ability levels definitely are though, and I'd like to see a much stronger push to ensure an older disabled or blind woman is given the same consideration as a younger able-bodied/sighted man, given the there's no reason the former should be any less capable of fulfilling the job requirements, but examples of are vastly underrepresented, meaning we're almost certainly missing out on hiring the most talented engineers that we can find.
(*) admittedly I'm treating skin colour as just a proxy for ethnic/racial background. There's not a marked difference in skin colour between most East Asian backgrounds for instance, but within the Indian subcontinent there's a decent range. There probably still is something of an implicit bias towards lighter skin tones even given a wide range of backgrounds, and certainly those from an indigenous background are underrepresented. But that problem starts much earlier than at the point of being hired professionally as an adult.
The only policy that is actually right is not to discriminate against colors, ethnicities, political views, etc..
but putting pressure to try to hire african/asian/latinos/women/whatever is like putting pressure on people to buy products from someone just to proof they don't discriminate against, which is extremely absurd and against the purpose.
DEI measures from companies I have been with have been unironically fighting the woes of systemic racism with a new form of systemic racism. IMO it leads to resentment even from minority employees and is poison to morale in a meritocratic performance based organizations.
Yep. The worries over "Am I just a diversity hire?" are a real concern. :(
I really wish that applicants were required to give less information, not more. I don't want to know your name, or how old you are, or where you're from. I just want to know what your credentials are.
Personally, I feel like criminal records, outside of specific work like working with weapons, children/elderly, or law enforcement, should not be asked on applications. If they served their time, let them live their lives.
It's incredibly frustrating that there's all of these extraneous attributes we're supposed to hem and haw over, like we're choosing the best fruit in the market. It's human beings, and they should be treated in as fair and neutral manner as feasibly possible. Best man wins.
I've found that the only controllable practices are to force our hr to send anonimized resumes to my interview team and to zealously challenge bias through panel review questions to interviewers. Our reviews can't detail things like "not a culture fit" or "is unqualified." there has to be a specific quantifiable reason for decline or hire. We've never had anyone openly discriminate because I don't sincerely believe people do (intentionally) , but I'm willing to put faith into the concept of unconscious bias and take action to challenge it with methods that do not hypocritcally embrace discrimation of protected class/features/etc. However, I strongly believe dei equity creates more racism rather than remove it.
All opinions here subjective, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like it's best for both candidate and company.
Man, that sounds like an incredible system! The company that I am working for currently is, frankly, desperate to keep people on staff and struggling to hire competent people to fill the roles we have open. I really can't see them going for anything of that caliber of hiring process any time soon, but I will absolutely keep that in mind.
And, yep, even though it's only your and my own opinion, it certainly seems like some form of mandated quota, initiative, etc. does seem to cause some level of damage, whether it be as bad, or worse, than the thing it's trying to defeat. It's not so much an outer thing, but an inner thing that gnaws at your confidence and ability.
I find the idea of offering some kind of special leverage to be demeaning in a way I can't quite express. To my ears, it comes off as, "We know that you can't win without our help, so we'll throw you a bone. Be grateful to us now." I get that's not the intention, but man, it's hard to even see how the outcome is all that different. I just want to see myself, and others succeed purely based on merit. On doing a good job. And if that means that a manager, "See's a lot of white faces in the office" then it ought not be seen as a problem, but instead - shocker - the companies workforce. To not see those workers as some metric. The idea of being counted out like grapes for some fruit salad...it's just crushing.
equity is a word that has replaced equality or equal opportunity because it in used to mean "equivalent outcome". It doesn't matter what your process is, if it doesn't produce the "desired" diverse outcome, it is not equitable.
the dei crowd would not accept your formulation because it doesn't guarantee equitable outcomes.
pointing it out because when we don't use words the same way, we're not really communicating.
I agree that unintended consequences (a subset of which are the Cobra effect) are bad. Can you explain further what type of unintended consequences you are thinking of in the AA context? The main one that springs to mind is that some people will assume that employees were hired/promoted based on race/gender/etc. Are there other unintended consequences in this context?
I don't know what's actually happening, but my interpretation of the cobra effect reference is that people are inventing new identities/affinities in order to be able to benefit from the systems which reward them.
Again, I said I don't know what's actually happening. I'm just providing my interpretation of what I thought the grandparent comment was trying to say.
Not the OP, but one example is that it may benefit the well-connected minorities rather than those with less opportunities.
If the goal is to raise opportunity for a historically disenfranchised group, this may not meet the end goal. For example, imagine a hiring goal is to increase the number of minority X. This may give additional leverage to someone of that group who already comes from a well-connected family and already has the opportunity to obtain the necessary credentials. It does nothing to give the opportunity to those in a less privileged group obtain those credentials in the first place. It doesn't mean it's wholly bad policy, but it can lead to the pattern of pointing to those successful outcomes as evidence that we're in a post-racial era. And so even less focus is paid to those who actually need more opportunity.
Basically, hiring someone because they're from minority/vulnerable race/gender/etc.. to diversify instead of hiring the one that has the best skillset for the job
If we put the idea of Cobra effect aside, these companies are also trying to bargain because vulnerables and minorities would prefer to work for them than for other companies that don't express their preference of minorities, so eventually many of them will accept less pay to feel more welcomed, which is - in my opinion - pure emotional exploitation, they claim they have ethical reasons but actual many of them has only unethical reasons
Ehh I would attribute this to general ignorance of the country's history caused directly by the states are very loudly outlawing the teaching of it now and the states more quietly censoring it in the mere 2 generations since the civil rights act, 5 generations since slavery was outlawed.
This diversity stuff comes from the very top, when I was doing my PhD the three most productive (and published) grad students and post docs were a few white and chinese guys. But every grant I proofread from my advisor extolled the "diverse" make up of the lab and the contributions from underrepresented minorities therein (women of various backgrounds) who largely did not contribute to any of the prior work on which the grant was premised. This is universities taking their cues from their funding agencies, the government, and expounding on them.
As someone currently helping my son fill out college applications, I find this article 100% on point. For one public college, there are only two essay questions and they both deal with diversity. How does a white middle class male answer? He has an incredible fascination with weather and wants to pursue that as a major. Does he emphasize this aspect since it sets him apart from other applicants. Logically, that would be the right choice. But we know the university really is filtering out people like my son, so we will probably talk about his ancestor's immigration story and how that has affected his worldview, blah, blah blah.
Someone close to me hired a writer to pen a woke entrance essay for their son. This was after a guidance counselor warned that "people like him" are having a hard time getting into medical school right now. We can't say if it worked or not, but he did get in.
• were you asked to write an essay that took an aspect of his life and portrayed it from a woke perspective, or were you asked to fabricate an essay from whole cloth?
• why do you think your friend asked you to write the essay? Was it based on your race/sex/etc., or are you an expert in the field based on your occupation?
• have you given any thought to the consequences of writing essays like this for applicants? Do you think the ethics of writing these essays differs from the ethics of writing entrance essays in general (where this essay signals ideological alignment in addition to competence, if well-written)?
Diversity doesn't only mean race. It can mean cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints. It can mean creative vs. analytic thinkers, artistic vs. not, leadership, extroversion, unusual contributions to society, and so on. If you're a physics expert in a team of math experts, you add diversity.
Take University of Washington for example. They ask for a "diversity essay". They define diversity as "diverse in cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints." [1]
Yep they do. Wonder what the chances are for someone writing about their conservative viewpoint as opposed to the applicant writing about their struggles growing up in a racially segregated neighborhood?
> Wonder what the chances are for someone writing about their conservative viewpoint...
I'd imagine it is about the same! Why? Because they don't really care about the essays.
Applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc) to review applications, and give them 8min per application. And that's for the whole application, and they have barely any time to read your essay. See story about UW, which I am referencing here [1].
The reason for making you write essays is just to obfuscate the reason you were denied admission.
Yes it does. It's an imperialist code-word for state sanctioned racism against the majority population of the proletariat in order to pit the proletariat against itself. Absolutely no one is fooled.
I don't think that's the case. Name a university where they ask for diversity essays in order to reduce the percentage of whites. The reverse is often true. For example, many universities use it to control asian population.
Ah, so it's not racist because it only discriminates against the non-majority portion of the proletariat. How very bougie of you. The fact that you don't see that as a problem tells me all I need to know.
I didn't say it is not racist, and I didn't say it is not a problem.
Public universities, especially, must use objective criteria. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That's a basic principle of fairness that should apply in this land of opportunity. No "shaping" of the student body by universities that receive funding from taxpayers, because that is unfair to students. Imagine being denied admission by the only good public university in your state, not because your grades or test scores are not good enough, but because you didn't fit in whatever "shape" the university decided is appropriate for that year!
The elite does. They want a race war instead of class war because they know they would lose the latter. Divide et impera has been used for more than 2000 years and it will never go away.
True, but a race war is us against us, a class war is 90% vs 10%... the 10% currently in power.
The southern strategy was to literally go against anything that would benefit black people, EVEN if it benefited poor white people too, because it's better to be miserable and white than to let a black person get ahead of you from government handouts. This was the entire strategy of the GOP(still is) since the 1950s.
I think the centrists (which may even just be a 'role' they play) goal is to keep both parties fighting on fringe issues like abortion and guns so we don't stop to reevaluate how much we're being fleeced by the govt to create $$ for their buddies in the oil and defense industries. Their purpose is to appear w/ the others, but only slightly and to ensure that the status quo remains intact.
Lee atwater said in 1981:
“As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*er, n*er, n*er’. By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*er’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N*r, n*r.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”
When I read this a few years back, it totally just clicked - that this is the entire economic platform of the right. Working class republicans support things that go against their own best interest (medicare for all for example), simply because they damn well don't want non-whites to have nice things, even if it means they don't get to either. Asinine as hell, but generations of racism and bigotry don't generally create tolerant people wanting to switch things up.
"Diverse" doesn't mean "diverse", it just means "left constituencies". Thus certain races are "racially diverse" (blacks most, whites of course least), certain income strata are "economically diverse", etc. You really can't assume words have their conventional meaning when used in a political context.
They do it to all low-effort political posts, not just the right-leaning ones. It is an explicit goal of the site management to not let this place turn into a forum where people come to argue divisive political topics.
The companies are the wrong place to address it, though. You need to fix the pipeline, probably starting w/ bringing K-12 education up to developed-world standards.
> The article is an essay that starts by citing Supreme Court case law
Wrong. First 3 sentences:
> All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires. Everyone has to submit a statement explaining how they are going to contribute to “diversity”. What you’re supposed to do in these, and what everyone damn well knows you’re supposed to do, is (i) talk about your race, gender, and other “identity group” traits that it would be illegal for the university to explicitly ask you about, and (ii) talk about your activism on behalf of left-wing identity politics.
It primes the reader with subjective and emotionally driven flamebait.
So you stopped reading after three sentences, right.
And no, the section you quoted is not "subjective and emotionally driven flamebait", that's the exact sort of tactics I'm talking about. The existence of this practice is widely reported - objective - and if you are really willing to argue that the suggested responses are not what you're meant to write about then go ahead and argue that.
You can't because the true situation is plain to see, so instead throw tantrums to try and stop other people discussing the extremely important debasement of universities. There is nothing "flamebait" about raising the alarm about real problems in the world.
Alternate perspective: it will be flagged down because HN's community has continually proven incapable of having discussions like this without it turning into a shouting match. It's already happening.
I don't think that should be as big of a deal as it is. I'm guessing it's because it's bad for publicity/ads but the whole "people are mad at each other in the comments! Shut it down!" thing that has taken over is dumb.
Have you ever seen how mad people get at each other on the road? Yeah, people suck when they don't have a face in front of them to remind them its a person on the other side. It's disingenuous to pretend that side of people doesn't exist though.
It's worse when you have a person to attribute it to. A bad driver could be a senile old man. A dumb comment could be from some edgy teenager or $0.50 shill. A functional adult who should know better behaving that way is hard to have sympathy for.
> because HN's community has continually proven incapable of having discussions like this without it turning into a shouting match
Maybe, but that itself (just like downvote brigading) is a technique used to suppress discussion. Become so "outraged" when others simply state their opinion to make normal discussion impossible.
That is an area in which I don't think HN moderation does a good job. They blame people who merely state a controversial opinion for "initiating a flamewar" instead of standing firm against the angry mob and putting emphasis on the importance of keeping a high standard for discussion. Simply being outraged is quite diagonal to curiosity, the core value of HN.
I don't doubt that your prediction is entirely true, but I'd say a more likely cause is that the majority of people realise (correctly) that this sort of article will result in absolutely no useful or edifying discussion whatsoever. We'll be treated to a thread of absolutely valueless commentary that achieves nothing apart from angering a lot of people, and I'd imagine that articles like this will continue to flagged to death until such time as HN demonstrates that it's able to sustain adult conversations about controversial issues, particularly where they touch on topics like DEI.
Huh? Access to flagging is not given to a "small fraction" of users. You only need to make a few good submissions or comments to get it. Frustratingly I can't get a definitive answer, but its on the order of few hundred karma points at most.
I see articles like this in my RSS reader, which is immune to flagging, and I play a little game where I guess whether or not it will be flagged by the time I read it.
Of all the things to worry about I don't think "diversity" and all the song and dance is really enjoyed by the typical large corporation folks who are actually in charge enough to make this some kind of conspiracy. That's too uncharacteristic and too many steps to make sense to me.
Let alone the fact that these diversity panels / oversight has caused plenty an issue at large corporations and PR messes. I don't think anyone at big corp wants any part of that just to in theory put pressure on someone else.
Actual regulations and laws are plenty effective on keeping down competition in some situations. Smaller corporations rarely see any real pressure diversity wise. There might be some examples but generally smaller orgs fly under the radar of just about everything.
No, but by having even-handed and rational conversations we can find the best outcome and hopefully have small influence in making society incrementally better.
Society is responsible for itself. There are no written rules you inherit when you are a born. You only inherit whatever was passed down to you through your family lineage. And if that happens to be unsavory, then you as a person have to resolve that.
I am talking high-level self-development and conscious awareness not some crap imposed onto people who think they know better.
The purpose of universities is to support state power. A multiethnic state must keep its minorities pacified. The tragedy is international institutions copying USA policies without understanding the core reasons and thus undermining the governments they are meant to support.
True diversity would mean having to accept, even welcome, a MAGA wearing redneck onto the board of a black university. Therefore diversity discussions (almost always) are not about "diversity for everyone", but instead it's social cudgel for one side to use against another.
Sorry, no it doesn't. The point under discussion is affirmative action, that is, specifically targeting and aiding underrepresented groups, so you're just misunderstanding the premise in the first place - but also, to say 'a MAGA wearing redneck' and 'black university' specifically, you clearly get that it's a racist in a race-specific context.
The thing nearly everyone tries to gloss over when they pull this "Well why don't you let more conservatives in then" is that many front-and-center conservative platforms these days are explicitly intolerant. Why should you be surprised or upset when tolerant institutions seek to reject those? It's a feature of modern civil society, not a liberal conspiracy.
That is exactly my point, "diversity" by its very definition can't also mean exclusion. If it does, who's rules for exclusion are you using? (a diverse set of rules?)
This is the problem with this discussion, I can't stand MAGA ideals, I think they are ridiculous, but you assumed I support it because I used it to point out a flaw in a popular (but flawed) idea.
It's a very real example to show true diversity can't exist in our society across diverse groups.
“a statement of your experience with or knowledge of inclusion, diversity, equity, and belonging efforts and your plans for incorporating them into your teaching, research, mentoring, and service.”
it doesn't seem outrageous- it does force the writer to think about their past experiences and observations in regards to inclusion, diversity, and equity... which makes the author of this opinion piece feel this way, and this seems the reaction has more to do with their perception and personal view of (and disagreement with) the prioritization of these concepts than it has to do with the requirement itself.
That's a good insight, and I think being asked to think deeply about these things is also good, but I'm skeptical that this activity in this specific context really leads to any sort of honest introspection.
To me at least, it feels loaded with expectations that you answer a certain way. I mean, you are almost certainly going to be judged (or at least feel judged) based on what you write, so that undermines the incentive to be truly honest with yourself.
Given the stark racial inequality we have today due to compounding wealth from centuries of colonialism and slavery, it seems diversity is the bare minimum we could do to address such a burden, and it's a shame that is even considered controversial. Is there an "unoffensive" solution to address this history or should we all just get along and pretend it didn't happen?
Nope! The bare minimum we could do is start getting mad about how rich the rich are, and stop fighting among ourselves. Diversity is a tool used by the rich to keep us from uniting against them, and sadly it is really effective.
How come every time systemic or structural racism is brought up, the discussion instantly pivots to it being "divisive" and the real battle being class consciousness or something.
There is truth to the matter, but it's also because class conscious groups fail to recognize that they perpetuate the same racism, sexism, etc... that the elites do.
Coincidentally, ignoring race as an issue is the one issue many people on both sides of the political spectrum can get down with even though economic equality does not guarantee racial equality.
Because I don't think the corporations and institutions that made society the way it is can buy their way out of it by claiming to be "diverse". If we want change, we have to demand it from the people who control society, and guess what? That is not you or me, it's the people with all of the money and all of the land.
One believes that diversity statement requirements can be done properly and we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater by banning diversity statement requirements.
The other speaker suggests these are analogous to requirements that a candidate talk about how they support the government's ongoing war effort, and catalog all they have done in furtherance of it.
1: https://reason.com/volokh/2022/08/30/do-university-diversity...