[HN Gopher] MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hirin...
___________________________________________________________________
MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and
promotions
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 396 points
Date : 2024-05-05 07:14 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (whyevolutionistrue.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (whyevolutionistrue.com)
| ssijak wrote:
| Clicked through some links in the article. Really mind boggling
| material. How did such garbage end up in top universities is
| really weird.
| leosanchez wrote:
| I don't understand how this crap got into America of all
| countries
| 6312783123 wrote:
| Supposedly it's decades long work by the Chinese Communist
| Party that started in the 1960s and led up to where we are
| now. I wonder if the Soviet Union was also involved?
|
| Here's an article, from what appears to be a reliable source:
| https://www.hoover.org/research/beijings-woke-propaganda-
| war...
|
| "The effects of this brainwashing are shown in the American
| Left's adoption of the CCP's key concepts and nomenclature."
|
| "Today's common use of the word "progressive" by the radical
| Left traces its intellectual origin straight to the Marxist-
| Leninist "dialectical" categorization of people into
| reactionaries and progressives. It is not from the modern
| legacy of the American Progressive Movement represented by
| William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La
| Follette, and Henry A. Wallace."
|
| "The primary method of Mao's brainwashing in Yenan was
| "consciousness raising," which has become since the 1960s the
| main strategy of the American Left, especially the radical
| American feminist movement."
|
| "This was the first time I heard that phrase, which, over the
| years, moved out of China and on to the streets and fashions
| of America in the 1960s."
|
| By the way I'm getting a lot of upvotes, and downvotes too
| for this post. So it's a mixed reaction from the readers of
| this site.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Certain people, discovered how easy it is, to change entire
| institutions, by applying targeted pressure towards
| individual managers of those institutions.
|
| No manager dares to refuse these initiatives because they'll
| be instantly named by the activist, with the help of
| journalist friends, and ensure they lose their job.
|
| Hence by going one at a time, a small group of activists can
| change far larger organisations.
|
| Of course, every action has a reaction. Enough resentment has
| built up, that made anti-woke a legitimate position to take
| in the public eye, with no longer much risk of losing the
| job. This makes all the previous tactics lose their power.
|
| Also, the 'anti-woke' crowd is learning these tactics too.
| From congressional grilling of university presidents, to
| gamers explicitly documenting the DEI consultancy
| involvements, its all targeting and absolutely destroying
| individuals to cause a chilling effect on the populace at
| large.
| leosanchez wrote:
| > No manager dares to refuse these initiatives because
| they'll be instantly named by the activist, with the help
| of journalist friends, and ensure they lose their job.
|
| Doesn't this feel very authoritarian ? Just replace manager
| with citizen and you have USSR.
| lazide wrote:
| Authoritarianism would be if it was top down.
|
| This is more a leftist version of McCarthyism. Aka
| intellectual purity testing and purges.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| I don't know why you're getting down voted for this. It's
| a very precise description of what has been happening the
| last decade. Conform and declare your support or be
| ruined, even if you have valid criticisms and
| disagreements with the doctrine.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Authoritarianism would be if it was top down.
|
| If a minority can impose their will into institutions,
| destroying the life of anybody that opposes them, you
| need a quite messed-up conception of power structures to
| place that minority "down".
| hotdogscout wrote:
| Because you can't put the power to influence behavior on
| a straight line.
|
| Each clique has it's own power structure.
|
| Charisma, rule of law, pity, revenge, resentment,
| morality, resources, it's all a part of it.
| eastbound wrote:
| Do you think every participant to Mao's cultural
| revolution was consenting?
|
| No. People do whatever they can throughout history, and
| end up having to participate to larger changes. The only
| remedy we've found was Humanism, l'esprit critique,
| education for everyone, and raising awareness and allergy
| to all authoritarian acts, but see, in the last 50 years,
| I've seen younger people who aren't even aware who
| Diderot is, let alone had enough literacy to read or
| write those books fluently if they spent the time, even
| in $130k jobs. Then we flooded each country with about
| 12% people who haven't had those Humanism tenants taughts
| at school.
|
| I'll from using a stronger metaphor because it will sound
| cheesy, but by losing the teachings of logic, rhetoric
| and history, our civilization is not able to hold the
| pillars of democracy anymore.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I've been here. "We can't hire any more white men" is
| probably an illegal stance, but what do I gain from
| fighting that? Nothing, and I suspect I'd be fired.
|
| I'm a tadpole in a huge lake. I have no influence over
| these likely illegal hiring decisions. And unless I'm just
| incredibly unlucky, these same conversations are happening
| everywhere at big companies.
| fullshark wrote:
| Cause few are brave enough to stick their neck out and stand
| up to it. Those who do are called nasty names and are forced
| to withstand a ideological purity trial that carries some
| potential of being fired.
|
| There is a lot risk for a minor reward, especially if you
| don't actually care about the institution you are defending.
| YZF wrote:
| American society is a bit messed up going back to slavery
| (and maybe the treatment of the indigenous people). That part
| (America of all countries) is not a surprise. It's also not
| new, random e.g.:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
|
| Maybe this also has to do with the general idea that it's not
| up to a government to do things, it's up to individuals,
| which to me is how Americans think. I would think that
| dealing with inequalities in society, ensuring everyone has
| equal opportunity and has their basic needs provided for
| (health, education etc.) would be the function of a
| government. If the government isn't addressing that then you
| have a vacuum. To me it's obvious that e.g. hiring policies
| or university acceptance criteria are not the right place to
| fix society but rather issues should be addressed upstream
| from those. By the government. But having government do
| things seem to be something Americans dislike.
| primax wrote:
| America is the most likely country for this to happen to, due
| to the unresolved issues surrounding slavery and the
| abandonment of reconstruction after the civil war. This is
| compounded when viewed through the USAs founding mythology.
|
| Other countries have done worse, but they haven't done so as
| hypocritically as the United States.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| If you see yourself (or your group) as a victim it's easy to
| rationalize rather extreme measures to "fix" the world.
|
| The intentions behind a lot of these things are good but the
| sensitivity of the subject has made it hard(er) to have a
| healthy discussion about these issues.
| drewcoo wrote:
| But we're not talking about protected classes. They did not
| take "extreme measures."
|
| We're talking about large institutions adopting policies to
| shield themselves from potential lawsuits from protected
| classes.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| > "extreme measures."
|
| What is this [0] then?
|
| [0] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/can-job-postings-
| in-can...
| eastbound wrote:
| They do censor research on the opposite of their viewpoint,
| though. Which further reinforces their impression that they
| are right. We're back to 1590 in terms of civilizational
| evolution.
| germinator wrote:
| I don't think that's a good explanation. The vast majority of
| people behind such initiatives don't come from
| underprivileged or victimized backgrounds.
|
| It's more about this idea of being an advocate for the
| downtrodden - a good person fighting the racists on behalf of
| those without a voice. And because you're fighting the good
| fight, it's of course OK to make the oppressors uncomfortable
| or to bully them into submission.
|
| Depending on your priors, this is either messed up, or it's
| messed up _not_ to act and accept the status quo. Pick your
| poison, I guess.
| whythre wrote:
| I mean, that sword cuts both ways. If you just decide that
| the other side of the aisle is comprised of monsters, why
| stop at making them uncomfortable or bullying them? Why not
| persecute them further? And why would they not do the same
| to you, if given the opportunity? It all just seems so
| vicious and wrong headed. We conceived of tolerance in
| order to allow for discourse and the above perspective
| seems so stupid regressive.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| The anti-racist's burden, so to speak
| jorvi wrote:
| C.S. Lewis wrote it sharper than I ever could:
|
| "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the
| good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be
| better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent
| moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes
| sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but
| those who torment us for our own good will torment us
| without end for they do so with the approval of their own
| conscience."
| bmitc wrote:
| People might be surprised how dumb top universities can be.
| When everyone is biased to thinking they're the best, it pretty
| easily creates tunnel vision.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Tenure is also a blessing and a curse.
|
| It ensures academic freedom.
|
| But it also ensures someone has limited checks on their
| bullshit, until they retire.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Isn't mortality supposed to be check-and-balance on the
| bullshit in science?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This came more from administrators in universities and
| funding agencies than the professors themselves, who are
| mostly dragged along for the ride, or go through whatever
| motions it takes to get promoted or obtain an administrator
| position. Tenure would actually work more against
| administrative abuse than for it.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| Although the intentions behind DEI are good such a top down
| approach doesn't seem to get the desired results (i.e optimal use
| of everyone's talent, irrespective of their colour, sex and/or
| identify).
|
| Unfortunately the name (and perhaps ideas?) are now tainted and I
| hope this doesn't impact the bottom up approaches (i.e support
| kids and young adults with extra classes, trainings, and in
| general just being chill and accepting about people) which
| probably should have been the focus from the start.
| nsajko wrote:
| Were the intentions behind colonialism good, too, in your
| opinion?
| concordDance wrote:
| Probably depends on the colonialist. I expect many were in it
| for money at the expense of the colonised population, but I
| expect just as many did it to "civilize and raise up the
| barbarians as good christians".
| kanapala wrote:
| Other thought "And clean our cities of the crooked nose
| vermin" so it's all good?
| defrost wrote:
| In practice both paths were bad in varying ways, it's
| just that one was paved with a disregard for others, the
| second paved with good _intentions_.
|
| eg: Daisy Bates oozed good intentions
|
| https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bates-daisy-may-83
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Bates_(author)
|
| and strongly put the case that: "As to
| the half-castes, however early they may be taken and
| trained, with very few exceptions, the only good half-
| caste is a dead one."
|
| and a number of other firm opinions that spawned a regime
| of hugging "the good ones" to death while abusing the "in
| betweens".
|
| But yeah, good _intentions_.
| leosanchez wrote:
| > but I expect just as many did it to "civilize and raise
| up the barbarians as good christians".
|
| Do you have any examples for this ?
| concordDance wrote:
| This poem captures some of the spirit:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell. It's not
| what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| crooked-v wrote:
| I think the more important question is: are the intentions to
| get actual results, or just to sidetrack anything that would
| take actual effort with 'but we have DEI statements'?
| langsoul-com wrote:
| "The path to hell is paved with good intentions"
| bozhark wrote:
| By using DEI as a metric you end up doing the complete opposite
| of "optimal use of everyone's talent, irrespective of their
| colour, sex and/or identify..."
| worik wrote:
| > By using DEI as a metric you end up doing the complete
| opposite of "optimal use of everyone's talent, irrespective
| of their colour, sex and/or identify..."
|
| That is a puzzling statement. Why is it true?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Let's say you're trying to hire programmers. DEI _could_
| mean going to historically black colleges and women 's
| colleges, and encouraging people there to apply for jobs at
| your company. This gets you more diverse applicants, from
| which you pick the best available, because your goal is to
| hire good programmers.
|
| But what DEI actually means in practice is someone in HR
| keeping statistics on how many non-white-male programmers
| you have, and scolding you because you haven't hired enough
| non-white-males. _That_ kind of DEI leads to non-optimal
| use of everyone 's talent, because you hire non-optimal
| people for the job openings you have.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No, the complete opposite of that is when you only allow
| white men to do things - not when you attempt to give
| everyone the opportunity and don't have a good way to choose
| the optimal one amongst them. And _that_ opposite setup is,
| I'm sure you know, exactly how things worked in most of the
| west until relatively recently. The overwhelming impression
| is that because the current setup is closer to overall
| optimum and further from an optimum for white men, people see
| it as a net loss.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _support kids and young adults with extra classes, trainings_
|
| If that support is available to those who need it irrespective
| of race, sex, _et cetera_ , sure.
|
| Targeting underserved populations is one thing. Restricting
| access based on protected characteristics is illegal under any
| commonsense interpretation of the law.
| worik wrote:
| > Restricting access based on protected characteristics
|
| What about when you turn that on its head?
|
| "Promoting access based on ..."
|
| If you assume a finite set of places to access then the
| approaches are equivalent, but for the the emphasis
|
| I think it matters (I am unsure DEI is the solution) that
| people can access professional services supplied by
| professionals from a similar cultural background to
| themselves
|
| In Aotearoa we have mechanisms to encourage Maori applicants
| to law and medical school for exactly this reason, and it
| seems to have been both hugely successful and extremely
| triggering.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we have mechanisms to encourage Maori applicants to law
| and medical school_
|
| I see the argument for setting aside seats for people who
| fluently speak the language. I do not based on race. "Black
| patients hav[ing] better interactions, on average, with
| physicians of their own race" is a problem, but segregating
| medical care on the basis of race isn't the solution [1].
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7174451/
| worik wrote:
| > see the argument for setting aside seats for people who
| fluently speak the language. I do not based on race.
|
| It is based on culture
|
| It is not enough to have genes.
|
| And since most Maori people speak English it would simply
| be stupid to base it on language as that language would
| be English not Te Reo Maori
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It is based on culture_
|
| If one can define culture without relying on biological
| heredity, sure again. It would be better, however, to
| address the underlying issue: lack of cross-cultural
| knowledge that causes the reduced outcomes. (And why
| Maori students aren't getting into those programmes in a
| race-neutral process.)
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| I feel that deconstructing the entire culture of race is
| not really a practical suggestion for solving the issue.
| This outcome is not uncommon when you ask those against
| DEI how they would solve it. Often they recommend
| systematic solutions that they would in the end also be
| against because those solutions would surely use race as
| a targeting mechanism.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _deconstructing the entire culture of race is not
| really a practical suggestion for solving the issue_
|
| Sure. But normalising discrimination based on race
| entrenches it.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Aside: calling the Maori language "Te Reo Maori" in
| English is unhelpful performative posturing. Yes, that's
| what the language is called in Maori, but we don't call
| Chinese "Zhongwen" or Zhong Wen .
| worik wrote:
| Untrue
|
| It is what it's called, here, in NZ English
| lazide wrote:
| If everyone is well fed and feeling secure, it feels good
| to be generous.
|
| When folks are hungry and/or insecure, it feels like taking
| from their and their children's mouths and giving to their
| competition.
|
| And there are essentially fractal levels of division
| possible.
|
| And so the wheel turns.
| lazide wrote:
| 'Positive discrimination' - aka excluding someone based on
| these attributes - is always required to make the numbers
| look good when slots/resources are limited - either in
| applicants of a given attribute or in overall resources.
|
| So someone who would have gotten a slot based on - say - pure
| technical performance - won't if these criteria are taken
| into account.
|
| It's fundamental and 'working as intended'.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| If you find your school has a racial distribution different
| from the population, targeting means making an extra effort
| to go to those communities. Increasing the number of
| applications from them. The actual filtering of the
| applications, however, should be neutral.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There is no such thing as a fully inclusive community. A
| community is defined as much by the people it excludes as the
| people it includes. If you try to ensure that everyone is
| welcome, someone else will make the decisions who to exclude.
| Typically by making things too uncomfortable for some groups.
|
| If you genuinely want to target underserved populations, you
| must be prepared to exclude those who are not in the target
| audience.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _no such thing as a fully inclusive community_
|
| We have agreed as a society on a set of protected classes.
| Not being allowed to discriminate based on race or sex
| doesn't mean not being able to discriminate at all.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am almost certain that by 2100, the current worship of skin-
| deep diversity will be relegated to the cabinet of ancient
| curiosities, along with lobotomy, bell-bottom jeans and
| haruspicy [0], and people will worship something equally weird,
| but momentarily fashionable.
|
| Diversity is not really a value. If it were, it would have been
| recognized as such millennia ago, because already the Egyptians
| and the Babylonians knew what mixed societies looked like. It
| is not as if American diversity is a new phenomenon, never seen
| before. Rome or Alexandria in 1 AD was very diverse, and so was
| India when Buddha was still a young and naive prince.
|
| Real human values, virtues and vices _don 't_ change that much
| across centuries. You can still discern courage, truthfulness,
| sloth or compassion in stories written three thousand years ago
| and half a world away. Diversity as a pseudovalue is a modern
| fad of American origin, partly conjured into being by ancient
| American racial problems.
|
| Even many American allies (Japan, Taiwan, Poland, Finland,
| Denmark, Turkey, Argentina, Israel etc.) don't bother to even
| _pretend_ to worship at that DEI-emblazoned altar, so dear to
| the good professors of Berkeley. Countries with more distant
| political systems like the Arab sheikhdoms or China probably
| don 't even understand what the word is supposed to mean.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex
| worik wrote:
| I am unsure about most of those countries but Japan and
| Israel have a reputation for being extremely racist
|
| Prejudice of any form is unhelpful. Racism is particularly
| nasty
| inglor_cz wrote:
| DEI is prejudice squared. Individuals are stuffed into
| tight racial and gender boxes in a big bout of social
| engineering. It is better than stuffing them into boxcars
| and deporting them, but ultimately the logic behind those
| treatments is the same. You are not John Doe, you are White
| or Black or whatever, a Lego brick that can be replaced by
| another Lego brick of the same color and the bureaucratic
| system will be happy.
|
| If you want to address racism, throw away the entire neo-
| racist stuff that now passes for enlightened and start
| again. "Whiteness" et al. belong to the same heap of
| historical refuse as "Judeobolshevism" or "degenerate art".
|
| I can't think of a better way to deepen and perpetuate
| absurd divisions among people than the identity obsession
| and pseudo-quotas that the modern American progressive
| movement is pushing.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Thank you. In the immortal words of Aenea, "choose
| again".
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I think Japan is not racist, but xenofobe (they dislike and
| avoid other cultures, not races) and Israel is very non-
| racist as they are are united by the religion regardless
| the race. Also racism is not particularly worse than other
| similar forms of prejudice - if you look at the German
| concentration camps, race was one of the factors but not
| the top.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Rest assured, woke politics in the form of support
| for/opposition to immigration of people with the wrong skin
| color is a _major_ issue in all Scandinavian countries.
| willis936 wrote:
| I had a dinner with someone directly affected by MIT's recent
| slashing of DEI. At one point they mentioned that they made
| sure a venue had chairless locations and shuttles with lifts
| for baby strollers. Someone else at the dinner said "for
| disabled people too, right?" The person who worked at MIT
| organizing events reacted like they had never once considered
| disability access. The term "inclusion" should not be co-opted
| to mean "exclusion".
| j-krieger wrote:
| The American focus on race is a bit insane to outsiders. Putting
| such a big focus on race in university applications is just
| weird. Even worse, having top universities _openly_ discriminate
| against people based on their race or heritage with affirmative
| action or similar policies, all in the name of equality, is
| unbelievable to Europeans like me. What the hell is wrong with
| the US if a person has a worse chance to be accepted into uni
| just because they happen to be born Asian? How is no one in DEI
| committees seeing the utter hypocrisy here?
|
| I firmly believe that the US is your best chance when you look
| for a country with equality and acceptance regarding race,
| religion, and culture. A lot of my US friends experienced a dire
| wake-up call when visiting and finding their belief that Europe
| is more accepting and less conservative than the US to be dead
| wrong.
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| Race is a distraction from the ultimate divide: _class_. IMO,
| every policy that wants to promote equality should revolve
| solely around class.
|
| In every place on earth, richer upper-class people are more
| advantaged than those from the lower classes. Every social
| policy should focus on lessening that gap (I recognize that the
| gap can't be closed entirely).
| nojvek wrote:
| 100% ^.
|
| But then it ends up being tied to race since black folks are
| on average coming from a less wealthier class than white
| people.
|
| And class is hard to judge objectively. If you go by income
| tax, many wealthy people show very little income since they
| live on their family wealth. E.g a house fully paid off and
| only earning meager income from a side business, while their
| stocks they inherited are climbing millions in valuation.
|
| The rich are really good at hiding they are rich.
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| > And class is hard to judge objectively.
|
| Very simple, actually. $1 million+ in annual income or $10
| million+ in assets is an objective starting point, all the
| way to mega billionaires like Musk and Bloomberg.
| svieira wrote:
| Congratulations, the small-time local farmer with 10
| acres, two quality high tunnels, a mid-sized tractor, and
| a couple of trucks and trailers is now wealthy. Assets
| are not necessarily liquid.
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| Edge cases do not negate the whole point. For example,
| I'm pretty sure you can find a billionaire who's very
| cash-poor, i.e., wealth is locked up in the value of a
| private company. Does not change the fact that anyone
| with $1 billion+ of net worth is ultra-rich.
|
| Whatever the edge case may be, anyone with $1 million+
| annual income and $10 million+ in assets is undeniably
| upper-class, including your hypothetical farmer. Note
| that I never claimed their assets should be taken...just
| stating an objective definition for upper class.
| bawolff wrote:
| Most of those situations the student wouldn't own those
| assets. If you go by how much money relatives have, then
| you end up being unfair to kids who have been disowned or
| if the kid has a rich uncle that has never given anyone a
| penny, etc.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> But then it ends up being tied to race since black folks
| are on average coming from a less wealthier class than
| white people._
|
| Yes, addressing class inequality will also help to address
| racial inequality.
|
| Seems like a strength, not a weakness.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Even lebron james gets the n word spray painted on his house.
| Class may be the main divide, but race is still an absolutely
| huge one that transcends class.
| twotwotwo2 wrote:
| How?
| acdha wrote:
| What evidence is there that it's not what it seems? Its
| not like there's a shortage of people who'd try something
| like that in this country.
| dang wrote:
| > _How can you even remotely believe that wasn 't a false
| flag?_
|
| Please don't edit your comments to deprive replies of
| context. That's unfair to both repliers and readers.
|
| Edit: It's always fine to _add_ an edit, as I did here.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Nit: it was spray-painted on his gate, not his house
| (mansion).
| sobriquet9 wrote:
| > every policy that wants to promote equality should revolve
| solely around class.
|
| That was the case in USSR. There were university admission
| quotas for workers, peasants, etc. In practice, they resulted
| in discrimination agains Jewish applicants.
|
| To fulfill the class quotas, the examiners had to fail a
| disproportionate number of some of the strongest applicants.
| A whole set of "Jewish problems", colloquially known as "
| coffins", was developed. At MIT, Tanya Khovanova has written
| on this subject.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Not sure exactly how this relates, but you're still saying
| with people being failed that the class representation was
| more equitable? Not sure what them being jewish has
| anything to do with it?
| jimbokun wrote:
| A brutal truth is that wealthy, upper class people have
| resources for training their kids that legitimately
| better prepare them for academic success than poorer
| kids.
|
| The rich, smart kids in this example were Jews.
| sobriquet9 wrote:
| In USSR, nobody was rich.
| sobriquet9 wrote:
| Class based admission meant discrimination against Jews.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Friend of mine's boyfriend was born in the USSR and was
| Jewish. To get into college he had to pass a mathematics
| test that anyone who learned math in high school wouldn't
| be able to pass. He got in. Then his dad applied for a visa
| to move to Israel and they kicked him out.
|
| Guy hates communists, leftists, f*scists, Putin, and
| anything like DEI. Basically anyone that seems to have a
| habit of doing to people what the communists did to him.
|
| I think it's a good point to be really suspicious of
| systems that categorize people into convenient boxes based
| on things that have no control over. That then determines
| what happens to them.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Class is a distraction from the ultimate divide: _Hogwarts
| house sortation_.
| bozhark wrote:
| It's by design
| pelorat wrote:
| I'm European too and I can assure you that non-white people are
| discriminated at the admission stage to top European
| universities. Not via race, but via name. It's well known that
| universities and landlords reject people because they have a
| Muslim sounding name.
|
| We have DEI in Europe too, but here it's increasingly codified
| into law.
| j-krieger wrote:
| I can guarantee you this is not the case, at least at the uni
| where I'm doing my PhD. There is no name in the admission
| system, it's done automatically by grades or tests most of
| the time.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Same, and even in the ones that have interview. I would
| guess outside very bad language skills it might even give
| boost...
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I don't see how you could possibly hire graduate students
| into a lab without knowing their research and publishing
| history (impossible to anonymize).
| kolinko wrote:
| +1 - University of Warsaw and other universities I know -
| admission is automatic based on grades only
| mbroncano wrote:
| Any reference or link to those policies? I have never seen
| such a thing.
| mk89 wrote:
| Could you please name one or two of such universities? I am a
| EU citizen and I literally never heard of this. I am aware
| that in some regions in some of our countries you might end
| up with a racist professor etc., but never heard you can be
| excluded based on name.
|
| That's simply illegal.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Yes, the US is obsessed over race. That's because Americans are
| traumatized. I agree it's not a good thing. However, diversity
| in university admission is a good thing. There are many
| different ways to have diversity. Diversity is not easy to
| achieve and since it's sensitive topic it's often not done
| right.
| crooked-v wrote:
| So what are the actual statements being banned? The article gives
| zero useful details.
| Leynos wrote:
| Seconded.
|
| Futhermore, the counterexample cited, teaching adult literacy,
| seems like a good way of furthering equity and inclusion to me.
| This sounded like the author contradicting themselves.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| The author agrees with you. The point is that teaching adult
| literacy is out of scope for DEI statements. You can't
| mention it in a DEI statement.
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| Unless I'm misunderstanding your question, the very start of
| the article seems to cover it:
|
| >DEI statements are affirmations made when you're applying for
| college admission, university jobs, or even science-society
| grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of
| "diversity, equity, and inclusion," your history of DEI
| activities, and how you will implement DEI initiatives if you
| get the admission/job/grant.
| geor9e wrote:
| The specific way you phrased that question makes me suspect you
| misinterpreted this as a banning of speech. Not at all. They're
| removing a class of required question from application forms.
| "The MIT administration has advised the departments that were
| requiring DEI statements to stop requiring them and to stop
| using this kind of information. This has just recently been
| disclosed to the faculty, but a general announcement to the
| students is not planned."
|
| Or are you asking what a DEI statement is in academia?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity,_equity,_and_inclusi...
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| DEI statements are culty. I see it no different than a religious
| fundamentalist college asking faculty to sign an oath of
| allegiance. At least in such a case, you can always know
| beforehand the BS you'll put up with, unlike secular universities
| that are adopting DEI statements.
| MrSkelter wrote:
| There is a huge difference between trying to counter
| institutional prejudice in order to improve the quality of the
| student body and work being done, and whatever you think a
| religious "pledge of allegiance" is.
|
| A pledge to God?
|
| The mishandling of DEI doesn't invalidate the need to fix
| broken systems which fail to select the best people instead of
| those who score highest in easily gamed and inherently biased
| metrics.
| 6312783123 wrote:
| This Woke stuff apparently has its roots in communist party
| propaganda https://www.hoover.org/research/beijings-woke-
| propaganda-war...
|
| I've submitted that link to the HN front page by the way.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263411
| MissTake wrote:
| The article actually doesn't say any such thing. It simply
| assumes that a Chinese propaganda machine is focused only
| on "wokeism". Dog forbid that they should seek to use
| propaganda to attack both sides - which is far more
| effective at spreading division.
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| > There is a huge difference between trying to counter
| institutional prejudice in order to improve the quality of
| the student body and work being done.
|
| This is the Trojan Horse, just like the fundamentalists
| coming to spread peace and love in society of course.
|
| Fortunately, people are judged by outcome and action, not
| stated intention, and we can see DEI has failed in this
| regard.
| simonsarris wrote:
| > easily gamed and inherently biased metrics
|
| IQ tests are not easily gamed and suggesting otherwise is
| mostly lying. They might be too easy, or have too low a
| ceiling (SAT), or might have some mild response to coaching.
| But a very stupid person cannot come out the other side with
| the very high score, and a very smart person should be able
| to figure them out sufficiently that they prove their
| utility.
| 6312783123 wrote:
| I think the authoritarian Woke subtype are against
| meritocracy as a concept. https://postmeritocracy.org/
|
| By the way, the author of the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto is
| known as "Bantik" on 1990s Usenet, there is high quality
| evidence on the Web that that's correct, some of it has
| been removed from Google. That just shows the background
| behind some of the most prominent people in DEI programs,
| at least in open-source.
|
| https://archive.ph/P258A https://archive.ph/NsPmk
| https://archive.ph/EkJzO https://web.archive.org/web/201807
| 17044421/http://s35819.gri... Bantik writes, in 2000: https
| ://everything2.com/title/How+to+Be+a+Charismatic+Cult+L...
| - "How to Be a Charismatic Cult Leader"
| skellington wrote:
| You can go pretty deep if you try to discover the
| fundamental belief systems or reasoning behind the 'core'
| DEI people. A lot of people just casually agree that
| "being fair" and "not being racist" is good. And it
| certainly is. And like many movements that involve
| propaganda/control/power, the key to enlisting large
| support is to hide the real motivations and goals within
| a cozy shell of easily consumable "moral" niceties.
|
| Ironically, the methods that the DEI types use are not
| even hidden. There are numerous books and "scholarly"
| articles that discuss their methods in detail and also
| their true purpose.
|
| At it's root DEI is one of the byproducts of Critical
| Race Theory which is derived from Critical Theory which
| is (arguably) the root of Marxism and a bunch of other
| -isms. You can think of Critical Theory as the most
| abstract form of that particular tree of political theory
| and Marxism applies it to class inequality and CRT
| applies it to race/gender inequality. This is a
| simplification, but it's good enough for now.
|
| The CRT leader types are without a doubt anti-
| meritocracy, anti-science, anti-civilization, anti-
| family, etc.. They have said so directly and emphatically
| in books, papers, talks, etc..
| cauch wrote:
| I don't think the person you are answering to is referring
| to IQ tests.
|
| Do you often have proper IQ tests when navigating in the
| academic sector? I personally never have one.
|
| On top of that, I'm not sure IQ tests themselves are really
| relevant to select people in the academic sector. They
| already have demonstrated they master their subject with
| their grades, so we already know they are smart enough, and
| it is not because someone score higher in an IQ test that
| this person will be more valuable for the academic sector,
| where collaboration and mentoring are as valuable as the
| holywood cliche of the genius solving all the problems. IQ
| does not tell much about laziness or motivation or
| willingness to follow the good scientific process, ...
|
| Also, at this level, you are selecting people amongst a set
| of candidates that are all already very very close in IQ,
| to the point that choosing on IQ alone is not making
| scientific sense: if the IQ questions would have been
| randomly different, or if they would have passed the test a
| different day, the scores would have been slightly
| different and the selection would have been different. The
| scores would not have been totally different, of course,
| but slightly different, and because the candidates are all
| very close, it would have changed the winner.
|
| For having been part of it, the selection process in the
| academic sector is very very very difficult and is very
| very prone to unconscious bias. When you have 5 very good
| candidates and you need to pick one, how do you decide? At
| the end, it is very often "on feeling": "for this person, I
| feel they will be a good match". It's a fair way of
| choosing, because choosing someone that you "don't feel it"
| over someone that you "feel it" is just very counter-
| intuitive. But it means that between two persons, it is
| often the one that "looks superficially the best for the
| job" that gets it, which is easily affected by unconscious
| bias (for example, you will "feel it" more easily with
| someone of your own culture), or can easily be gamed (for
| example, to progress, you need to build a professional
| network and manage your reputation, and some very good
| candidates are just not interested to play these silly
| games).
| Kamq wrote:
| > There is a huge difference between trying to counter
| institutional prejudice in order to improve the quality of
| the student body and work being done, and whatever you think
| a religious "pledge of allegiance" is.
|
| There is, but there's definitely some similarities too.
| Specifically that if you happen to believe in these things,
| advancement of their goals is one of the most important
| things you can do, which causes a big temptation to
| misappropriate institutional power to further the cause.
|
| Regarding the pledges specifically, both require employees to
| take personal positions to advance at work, which I think is
| the part blackhawkC17 finds "culty".
| bozhark wrote:
| What other metric is so valuable then?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think the OP doesn't either _trust_ the declared goals of
| "countering institutional prejudice" and "improving the
| quality of the student body", or doesn't believe that DEI
| actually does anything relevant in this sense.
|
| Even for banal acne treatments, proof of safety and
| efficiency through several stages of trials is required
| before people are actually subject to it.
|
| With DEI, we are just expected to believe that it actually
| works and should be applied across the country because some
| smart people say so.
| gameman144 wrote:
| > There is a huge difference between trying to counter
| institutional prejudice in order to improve the quality of
| the student body and work being done, and whatever you think
| a religious "pledge of allegiance" is.
|
| In the eyes of the advocates for each, I actually don't know
| that there is.
|
| Religious pledges likely are intended to say "we want faculty
| who will teach and represent the values this school holds and
| that students expect out of this institution", which feels
| pretty much exactly like the rationale for DEI pledges.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| If students uttered a DEI statement every morning in their
| homeroom classes over the Pledge of Allegiance to a flag, we'd
| all be in a much better place culturally.
| bitwize wrote:
| DEI policies are useful only inasmuch as they mask, rather than
| expose, the inequities of the system. Once people start taking it
| seriously and understanding the exploitative nature of
| capitalism, DEI gets dropped like a hot potato.
| dang wrote:
| All: Please don't use HN for ideological battle. There are too
| many low-quality/predictable comments here. We want curious
| conversation, not sharp recitals.
|
| I know it's hard when the topic is itself an ideological battle,
| but that's a good time to review the site guidelines, including
| this one: " _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive,
| not less, as a topic gets more divisive._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| yareal wrote:
| I value DEI as a critical part of addressing systemic injustice
| and building a strong, multifaceted organization.
|
| However, these statement requirements look like absolute trash.
| The sort of thing that is wholly performative. Frankly, it's good
| they are being dropped in my view.
|
| An intervention is only as good as the work needed to intervene.
| Saying, "spend ten minutes writing up a statement that no one
| will ever read and then discard" does zero actual lifting towards
| enabling inclusion.
| bozhark wrote:
| Recently wrote a corporate DEI policy. Our policy is to not
| regard DEI as a metric of value. It's absurd.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| We need you at every fortune 500 company.
|
| Our company for a while would recap promotions every quarter
| and breakdown promation rates by race... it was awakward and
| antithetical to what they were trying to accompish. Had a weird
| undertone of calling out races for underachieving lmao
|
| "Blacks are being promoted 20% less than whites. We are getting
| better but can do even more to promote the interests of blacks
| at the company"
| nolongerthere wrote:
| > _Our policy is to not regard DEI as a metric of value_
|
| can you expand on what this means practically and how it
| differs from others?
| over_bridge wrote:
| A profitable company that lacks DEI is still a success
|
| A company that loses money but has plenty of DEI is a failure.
|
| DEI is not the factor that determines success or failure.
|
| It is a tool that you can use but it makes no sense as a goal
| or target in itself. If your customer base has some attributes
| that aren't reflected in the staff, maybe hiring some will help
| you relate. The idea that your company must match the
| 'diversity' of the general public (in one country) is all
| backward.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| > If your customer base has some attributes that aren't
| reflected in the staff, maybe hiring some will help you
| relate.
|
| How does it work? If you hire them in customer research or
| marketing teams, yes, it brings value in understanding the
| customer. If you just hire them across all departments, like
| IT or facilities management, what do you get?
| wumeow wrote:
| Hopefully this is the beginning of a trend.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| How would academics react to mandates requiring them to declare
| their support for:
|
| - Ensuring open access to research
|
| - Committing to long-term, foundational research
|
| - Prioritizing high-quality teaching and mentorship
|
| - Embracing diverse viewpoints
|
| - Questioning established academic orthodoxy
|
| - Focusing research on public rather than personal gain
|
| - Openly sharing data and methodologies
|
| - Upholding research neutrality and objectivity against external
| influences
| itronitron wrote:
| A declaration of support for those line items would be more
| impactful if it came from the university administration.
| lazide wrote:
| If everything is a priority/mandate than nothing is.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| They don't do this already? Who would possibly object? Why
| would any student attend an institution that didn't require it?
|
| Obviously I'm not in academia, but to most outsiders this is
| really obvious stuff.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Obviously I'm not in academia, but to most outsiders this is
| really obvious stuff.
|
| That's my point. To outsiders like you and me, these things
| may seem obviously desirable.
|
| But academics respond to incentives. Imagine you've spent 10
| years pushing some set of conclusions based on some shaky
| studies you did early in your career. Do you really want
| people to dig deep and challenge the validity of your
| research?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Isn't that just part of the job? If you're not wrong
| sometimes you're not trying hard enough. To avoid this
| situation you should invite others to challenge your work
| more quickly.
| snek_case wrote:
| > Committing to long-term, foundational research
|
| Here I would respond that academics are prone to looking down
| on applied research, but it's also incredibly important. Think
| of new programming languages, new types of chips that will
| enable future computational workloads. New ways of using or
| optimizing existing technology... Or even empirical research to
| validate the effectiveness of current industrial practices
| (something people often don't do, or don't do rigorously
| enough).
|
| Not all research needs to be "foundational". Not all applied
| research needs to happen in industry. Many academics would
| actually benefit from climbing down from their ivory tower more
| often.
|
| As it is, a huge percentage of research happening in academic
| CS circles would probably call itself "foundational" but is
| actually very much divorced from reality and useless. Just
| people trying to increase their citation count with an
| incremental extension to some widely-accepted idea.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Most of those have been around for decades. Some of them are
| legal requirements, at least in some contexts. Some are
| required by research funders and similar organizations. Some
| must be included in a teaching statement, which became a
| popular requirement a decade or two before DEI statements. And
| all contribute to the administrative bloat everyone likes to
| complain about.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| > - Embracing diverse viewpoints
|
| If you read this as having some academics embracing Flat Earth
| viewpoints, it is obvious this will not happen. The devil is in
| the details, what does "Embracing diverse viewpoints" even
| mean? Science usually drives to unique conclusions, not diverse
| interpretations. How many correct and diverse viewpoints exist
| about E=m*c^2 ?
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Does "external influences" include the American Communist
| Party? How about the Chinese Communist Party?
| 0xWTF wrote:
| Pretty sure I didn't get a Stanford job in part because I didn't
| submit a DEI statement. It was optional, but clearly sort of like
| breathing is optional. I actually wrote one, had it reviewed,
| rewrote. As someone in federal government who made the mistake of
| being born white and male, but has worked their whole life on
| these issues (among many others) and made what I think are very
| defensibly equitable hiring and selection decisions that reflect
| the US in gender, race, and creed, the whole thing felt very ...
| icky.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| In the spirit of trying to learn something from the community:
| while I can certainly understand the rationale and goals behind
| DEI programs (many of which I agree with, others not), I honestly
| can't understand these "DEI statements" at all. They always
| seemed very "1984" to me, and almost designed to engender
| resentment in a way that would ultimately backfire. So perhaps
| I'm in a like-minded echo chamber, but is there _anyone_ that
| actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument,
| or can you point me to one online? If so, I 'd honestly love to
| hear it, and I mean this quite genuinely. I did some googling
| beforehand and found loads of "how to write a good DEI statement"
| articles, but literally every single one of them just took it at
| face value that these were a good thing to begin with (or,
| perhaps in their defense, that "academic jobs require it", so you
| better learn how to write one in any case).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'll take a shot at a strongperson argument...
|
| _DEI statements are important because they show individual
| awareness of historical inequities and current biases that form
| modern society.
|
| In an organization that wishes to promote more equitable
| outcomes for society and its employees, ensuring that
| existing/prospective employees are aware of biases that might
| color their own judgement is useful in counterbalancing them.
|
| As a consequence, a DEI statement at the time of hiring or
| promotion is useful in encouraging self-reflection and
| promoting DEI._
|
| ... that said, from a personal perspective (and with apologies
| to anyone working in HR), they seem like the typical
| "moderately good idea that's run through the HR cost center
| grist mill and comes out as the most unimaginative, milquetoast
| check box possible" implementation.
| rayiner wrote:
| > DEI statements are important because they show individual
| awareness of historical inequities and current biases that
| form modern society.
|
| Even assuming that's true, what is the rationale for plucking
| that issue out of the various ones facing society and
| demanding that professors express concern about it? Forcing
| people to characterize something as a priority is itself
| quite an ideological imposition.
| lazide wrote:
| It's just being conspicuous that they're doing the
| performatively 'right thing', something academia is quite
| familiar with.
|
| That way they can point to their statement anytime grant
| writers/sponsors need to show their respective stakeholders
| that they're 'good folks'.
|
| Don't worry, regardless they'll still treat their grad students
| as terribly as the law allows (and a bit worse).
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| Not really the same thing but I worked for an organisation
| which had as a policy that every single team meeting had to
| have diversity & equality as a recurring item for discussion.
| 95% of the time this just meant the meeting lead saying
| "So...diversity - anyone got anything to say?" and then we
| moved onto the next item after a short silence. But every once
| in a while someone would raise something that might not have
| otherwise been brought up. It's a very crude instrument but it
| probably did get people to think a little more in that
| direction and maybe led to a little more awareness overall. The
| other standing item was health and safety which had a similar
| outcome.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It likely wasn't General Motors you worked at... but every GM
| meeting must start with a safety tip - or some DEI claim.
|
| In the engineering meetings I can tell you which one happens.
| And in the executive meetings that certain people can't wait
| to spend 5-10 min of probably $20,000 worth of a dozen
| executives time with their feelings on the matter.
|
| I fondly remember a heated discussion about chainsaw safety
| techniques.
| gedy wrote:
| I don't know if it's just DEI, or other types of politics, but
| there seems to be a recent trend towards "you must say you
| agree with us, otherwise you are ostracized".
|
| My personal opinion/observation is that as corporate and
| academic has trended towards less direct
| confrontation/arguments, this has resulted in a lot more
| passive aggressive behavior such as statements like these, some
| debatable "codes of conduct", etc.
|
| I mean no harm when I say that it has always felt like a more
| "feminine" way of fighting and arguing vs "masculine" like
| physical or verbal arguing. Perhaps it's a result of more women
| in the workforce and leadership.
| whoza wrote:
| I was on the academic job market recently. I was pleasantly
| surprised to find that the process of writing my DEI statement
| was a valuable learning experience. For example, I read several
| interesting papers about randomized controlled trials testing
| the effects of various classroom interventions. I also have
| some more clarity about the relevant philosophical questions,
| both due to reading others' thoughts and due to being forced to
| articulate my own thoughts.
|
| For those reasons, my feelings toward DEI statements are more
| positive now than they were before. Still, on balance, I think
| I'm inclined to favor removing DEI statements from faculty
| applications.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Yeah, this is what I am also thinking of. It makes sense for
| people in a position to create a culture or hire a team to
| know, it's a science you probably weren't exposed to in
| school and knowing the real effects that are known and
| studied is a darn good start to implementing DEI well. Doing
| it based on guesswork is probably worse than useless. So
| that's the non-ideological part.
|
| If you actually care enough to study it and propose hiring
| processes that encourage it then that's an actual worthwhile
| education process. It can be little stuff... like I hide
| names on resumes and obscure gender to avoid that very well
| known bias. It's not perfect, but it's actually a net win all
| around to do that kind of thing, and you wouldn't know how
| big a deal it is and how much benefit it is for your team
| without reading. It's a complicated topic, and I think many
| of the concepts applied earnestly but scientifically testing
| them is a good idea. To be ideological.
|
| This requirement wouldn't stop that, necessarily, but it
| means that such learning occurs after hiring rather than
| before. And after hiring there's a lot less incentive, and a
| lot to do.
| zlefgram wrote:
| https://twitter.com/Rule3O3/status/1705282969584140749
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > it's a science you probably weren't exposed to in school
|
| Interesting take, why do you think it is you likely weren't
| expose to DEI in school?
|
| While I'm thinking about it, didn't we just used to call it
| "affirmative action"?
| blueboo wrote:
| This is the premise:
|
| There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of
| American society. The threat these represent to our long term
| survival and prosperity are such that we are keen to at least
| acknowledge and mark our and our prospective collaborators'
| efforts to improve the status quo.
|
| Maybe you don't accept that. Maybe it's asking for a virtue
| signal in service of performative posturing. Maybe this
| requirement had adverse effects (evidently it has.)
|
| But there is a through-line of coherent logic, and the total
| failure here may be cause for alarm.
| eastbound wrote:
| This is an ideological statement which brings no fact, no new
| perspective, is not substantial and does not refute the
| opponent's argument (which is that unfair DEI creates
| resentment that you later pay).
|
| As per Dang's guidelines above (specifically for this
| thread), this should not have been allowed on HN.
|
| Now I wonder: Why is it here?
| dang wrote:
| > _Now I wonder: Why is it here?_
|
| The internet gods bestowed two* of these on us today. The
| other one is _Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267639. I posted an
| answer there to someone who asked more or less the same
| question, just about the other topic:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267862. But the
| principles are the same. If you're willing to read it
| mutatis mutandis and maybe take a look at some of the other
| posts I linked to, you should find what you're looking for.
|
| * (No, that's not a trend--just random fluctuation)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Your statement (which I happen to agree with) supports DEI
| _policies_ but not the specific practice of requiring a
| written DEI _statement_ , which is the important distinction
| OP made.
|
| I think you can be for DEI as a concept and as a corporate or
| school policy, but against the performative act of writing it
| out as some kind of weird "pledge of allegiance" in a job
| application.
| blueboo wrote:
| Well, the "acknowledge and mark" phrase gets at the
| statement--That if the org thought objective X was
| authentic existential goal, it behooves them to understand
| how an applicant understands and would configure into that
| plan. (I have no claim about its efficacy. The highly-
| structured nature of the statement is a head-scratcher. I'm
| here watching the fallout with everyone else.)
|
| I hasten to restate that is my understanding of the
| premise, in the spirit of collectively untangling the
| causal chain here. This is incendiary stuff on HN!
| shkkmo wrote:
| > it behooves them to understand how an applicant
| understands and would configure into that plan.
|
| I (and a lot of us I think) follow you up to this point,
| but then you lose us here.
|
| How does a written statement, the expected content of
| which is clearly known, give any understanding of the
| individual's position? This type of approach to education
| seems to me that it actively harms the ability to sway
| people's opinions.
|
| I have this issue with a lot of discussions of DEI, there
| are a lot of arguments that support the DEI goal and a
| dearth of arguments that support the methods being used
| to achieve that goal.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > How does a written statement, the expected content of
| which is clearly known, give any understanding of the
| individual's position?
|
| ChatGPT, please write me a DEI statement for this job
| interview.
| naasking wrote:
| > The threat these represent to our long term survival and
| prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge
| and mark our and our prospective collaborators' efforts to
| improve the status quo.
|
| I'm very skeptical that there is any threat to our survival
| here, or that DEI is any kind of response capable of
| resolving it. DEI is about "justice", a set of ethical
| principles, not about some utilitarian calculation about
| social survival or prosperity.
| rayiner wrote:
| I understand you're trying to strong man this. But I think we
| need to interrogate the premise here. How does "inequity"
| represent a "threat" to our "long term survival and
| prosperity?" What is the specific causal mechanism by which
| we expect that to happen?
|
| It seems facially implausible to me, given that America
| became prosperous when these inequalities were much worse.
| Why do we accept this premise as a given?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > The threat these represent to our long term survival and
| prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge
| and mark our and our prospective collaborators' efforts to
| improve the status quo
|
| As someone who is pro DEI and participated in DEI related
| activities and brainstorms during hiring: I very much doubt
| that.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm getting the impression a lot of Americans are now not
| just comfortable with systemic inequality, but are
| gravitating toward a position that it's actually desirable.
| In this environment, DEI bafflegab just pushes them in that
| direction.
| slenocchio wrote:
| That's a mischaracterization. No one is _for_ inequality.
| The opposition you speak of is _for_ race/gender blind
| meritocracy. Anyone with a little knowledge of economics
| understands that groups of people cut across any dimension
| will always have different outcomes; Russian Americans earn
| more than French Americans, Japanese Americans earn more
| than Fillipino Americans, taller people earn more than
| shorter people, etc.
|
| No one thinks inequality is desirable. The opposition you
| speak of think it's unavoidable. And bad public policy will
| have effects that make the situation worse for everyone.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > No one is _for_ inequality.
|
| I suggest that's an extraordinarily naive statement.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| DEI is a strange issue in that nearly everybody agrees that
| it's a good target to aim for yet any action taken to get there
| is discrimination.
|
| I frankly see it as a cheap shortcut that some very privileged
| people want to take to try to wash away the sins of our racist
| past, not to help people, but to make ourselves feel better- or
| attempt to.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > DEI is a strange issue in that nearly everybody agrees that
| it's a good target to aim for yet any action taken to get
| there is discrimination.
|
| I don't think that's true.
|
| Suppose you find a bona fide instance of ongoing
| discrimination. Let's pick an egregious example. Karen, the
| HR manager, is an avowed white supremacist and automatically
| rejects all black applicants. Then you could improve DEI by
| removing her. Clearly not an act of discrimination.
|
| The problem comes when Karen doesn't work for your company,
| instead she's the superintendent of the local school system
| and screws the underprivileged black kids out of the chance
| to go to college. Then twenty years later you're trying to
| hire college graduates from the local candidate pool and
| they're disproportionately white. You can't fix this through
| candidate selection because the damage is already done and
| any attempt to fudge your own numbers is not going to save
| the kids from twenty years ago who have already been screwed
| out of an education. Attempting to is unable to reverse its
| effects, all you're doing is hiring the few upper class black
| kids who made it because their parents had money for private
| school, or the ones from a different locality with no Karen
| and thereby no corresponding disadvantage, at the expense not
| of privileged upper class white kids who get in by a wide
| surplus, but instead the white kids from poor families at the
| margin. Meanwhile you're doing nothing for the poor black
| kids who are Karen's actual victims.
|
| You have to root out the Karens where they are because you
| can't fix it years later when their statistical consequences
| show up somewhere else. By then the missing victims are
| already out of the pool.
| zarathustreal wrote:
| I think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical notion
| of diversity with "diversity of skin color" / "racial
| diversity" is actually harmful. When we speak of diversity
| today we often imply a sort of supposed-deserved reparations
| toward the "minorities." Obviously there are so many
| incorrect aspects of these assumptions, but many people in
| power, perhaps all, have accumulated guilt that needs an
| outlet.
|
| Diversity, the platonic form, is about diversity of thought,
| opinion, and experience. It is about improving our ability as
| a group to solve the problems we face by introducing
| alternative perspectives and viewpoints. It has nothing to do
| with race or gender necessarily but demand for diversity
| greatly outweighs the supply and as with all measured things,
| measuring the number of "diverse" hires has ceased to be a
| meaningful metric. Granted, it never was a meaningful metric
| as such, but it has become actively harmful in modern day.
| rayiner wrote:
| > think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical
| notion of diversity with "diversity of skin color" /
| "racial diversity" is actually harmful.
|
| I absolutely agree with this. To use myself as an example:
| as a Bangladeshi who grew up in the American south, I bring
| a super diverse viewpoint to a group of say white new
| englanders.
|
| But why does that matter in a professional setting? I'd
| love to hear someone precisely articulate how they think
| I'd behave differently from a white new englander in the
| same position, and why that "diversity" would make the team
| "stronger."
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| When it comes to optimizing a sorting algorithm for some
| hardware, it probably doesn't matter. Now suppose you're
| making a user interface design choice. It would be good
| to have someone who knows how users from a different
| subculture would interpret it.
|
| But things like that often have more to do with
| culture/geography than race. Someone from Mississippi
| will have a much different perspective than someone from
| Massachusetts, even if they're the same race. And a
| larger difference in perspective than two people who grew
| up across the street from each other, even if they're
| different races. But that doesn't show up in the group
| photo for the brochure.
| rayiner wrote:
| Is there evidence that Americans of different ethnicities
| interpret user interface features differently?
|
| If not, isn't it concerning that in the year 2024 we
| casually assume that these sorts of differences exist?
| Isn't that an example of DEI thinking accentuating the
| notion of differences? It seems like a new take on this:
| https://youtu.be/E8PBrhFN35c?si=90DSnwgHubAvJwr8
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| _Cultural_ differences exist. For example, colors have
| different meanings in different cultures:
|
| https://blog.grio.com/2020/06/uxui-design-across-
| cultures-us...
|
| Ethnicity is then being used as a proxy for culture, even
| though it's a bad one, because it's a _visible_ one.
|
| It's basically starting from the premise that cultural
| diversity is valuable and then applying Goodhart's Law to
| the thing most easily measured. Whereas traditional
| racism is more like starting from the premise that
| cultural homogeneity is valuable and then applying
| Goodhart's Law to the thing most easily measured. It's
| applying the same fallacy to the opposite premise, which
| is an error regardless of which premise is correct.
| quandrum wrote:
| I think DEI as implemented is worse than this. It's a
| calculated, prepared defense against the possibility of
| future bigoted behavior.
|
| Corporate America (which increasingly includes universities
| whose primary business is endowment investment) don't just
| want to wash away our past, they want to ensure they can keep
| operating business as usual.
|
| DEI is insurance. Yeah the bad thing may happen but we paid
| for it before hand so we are insulated against further
| repercussions.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| DEI exists in countries with no racist past. Does it make it
| aby better? Also DEI exists in places that were historically
| very diverse, like the Balkans (a mix of ethnic, culture and
| religions) and it did not help, actually, because it is
| highlighting the differences that we worked for hundreds of
| years to integrate. Fortunately there was no significant
| impact around here as people were wise enough.
| gruez wrote:
| >but is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements
| with a coherent argument, or can you point me to one online
|
| There was a recent debate on this[1] and even the debater for
| the pro DEI statement side (that they could find) admitted that
| DEI statements that were just ideological pledges were wrong,
| and he was only in favor of statements about concrete things
| you did to advance the DEI agenda (eg. "I did a, b, and c in my
| previous position to enhance DEI in my department"). He argued
| that was justified because DEI (at least the principles, not
| necessarily the specific policies like affirmative action or
| whatever) were ostensibly things that the university cares
| about, and therefore they were fair game to ask for.
|
| [1] https://opentodebate.org/debate/are-dei-mandates-for-
| univers... (it's a podcast but there's a transcript tab on the
| page)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks very much! I haven't watched this yet, but this was
| exactly the kind of honest discussion I was looking for that
| I didn't previously find, so much appreciated.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I've heard this same argument for DEI statements every time
| the topic has been debated: They sidestep arguments about DEI
| statements and instead retreat to safer arguments about how
| advancing DEI is a good thing.
|
| On one hand, I get it. Arguing for DEI in an abstract sense
| is much easier than arguing for specific interventions.
|
| On the other hand, this is the textbook example of a Motte-
| and-bailey fallacy, where the debater conflates two topics
| and then retreats to the safer position while hoping that the
| audience will accept it as an argument for the more difficult
| position.
|
| DEI statements have been quite unpopular as specific
| interventions, as noted in the article by the way that the
| majority of staff disagreed with them when polled privately.
| However, speaking out against them publicly was viewed as a
| very risky move and serious career mistake, so they slowly
| slipped into mainstream acceptance.
|
| It's interesting to see how they're now quietly being removed
| from processes with as little attention as possible. Nobody
| wants to be known as the person who campaigned against them
| publicly, but I suspect there are a lot of people feeling
| relief in this case as they're being quietly removed from the
| process.
| porknubbins wrote:
| The question is not WHO defends DEI statements but when were
| they defended. HN is middle of the road politically on average,
| but in 2020 I would get quickly downvoted for saying things
| like BLM has aspects of cultural Marxism.
|
| The large crowd was easily swayed into going along with stuff
| like this and its just taken a while to get rolled back because
| we realized it went too far.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| I don't think that HN is middle of the road politically, I
| think it is mostly apolitical; the average has no
| significance. Some people on HN are of all political
| opinions, this is great, but voting seems sometimes skewed in
| some direction - it does not even indicate where the average
| is. Being very little political is one of the things I like
| most about HN.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that "cultural Marxism" is a conspiracy
| theory, so I'd probably downvote you for that still.
| Seriously, what is your definition of cultural Marxism? I'm
| not gonna respond by picking it apart or whatever, I'll just
| read it and write "thank you" as a response after you've
| posted it.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| The culture of class revenge/justice that fuels Marxism.
|
| "The tradition of Marxist cultural analysis has also been
| referred to as "cultural Marxism", and "Marxist cultural
| theory", in reference to Marxist ideas about culture."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_cultural_analysis
|
| It is >also< a name used by people who believe in a
| conspiracy theory about egalitarian politics.
| gverrilla wrote:
| There is no such a thing as cultural Marxism. That's a
| conspiracy theory the nazis first created.
| skissane wrote:
| > There is no such a thing as cultural Marxism. That's a
| conspiracy theory the nazis first created.
|
| There is such a thing as "cultural Marxism", and it is not
| a conspiracy theory invented by the Nazis or anyone else.
|
| Consider for example the 1981 book by academic Richard
| Weiner, "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" [0] - it
| discusses "cultural Marxism" as a real thing, in a positive
| light, and it is a real academic book, not some conspiracy
| theory hoax. Or similarly consider Dennis L. Dworkin's 1997
| book "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New
| Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies" [1] - not some
| conspiratorial tome, it was published by Duke University
| Press. Or American philosopher Frederic Jameson's 2007 book
| "Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism" [2]
| - also published by Duke University Press, and not a
| conspiratorial work either
|
| Cultural Marxism is a real movement in post-war Marxism and
| academia. To what extent it influenced movements such as
| BLM is a question about which reasonable people can
| disagree. But its existence is not a conspiracy theory.
|
| No doubt some of the more extreme claims uninformed people
| have made about it do venture into the realms of conspiracy
| theory. But it would be wrong to assume that everyone who
| makes a claim like "cultural Marxism influenced BLM" is
| using the phrase "cultural Marxism" in such a sense. You'd
| have to investigate what they actually mean by it.
|
| [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=4G0XAAAAIAAJ
|
| [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=dY1Cgg8NV64C
|
| [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=pY69yJnmEAYC
| gverrilla wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy
| _th...
| skissane wrote:
| The Nazi concept of "Cultural Bolshevism" has nothing to
| do with Cultural Marxism the post-war academic movement
|
| "Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory" is about claiming
| that said post-war academic movement is a "Jewish plot".
| Yes, that's an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But stating
| that it exists, and discussing to what degree its ideas
| influenced contemporary social movements such as BLM, is
| not a conspiracy theory, and not _per se_ antisemitic.
|
| I think what is happening here, is some people are
| motivated to ignore the difference between what is a
| reasonable argument ("to what degree was a contemporary
| social movement influenced by a contemporary academic
| theory") and what is an unreasonable one ("it's a Jewish
| plot"), because they want to shut down that reasonable
| argument
| userbinator wrote:
| HN tends to avoid politics, but when it does show up, there
| is a definite bias if you look at the pattern of up and down
| votes. What's more interesting is seeing how that bias has
| changed over time.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements
| with a coherent argument
|
| When Richard Dawkins spoke at UC Berkeley in 2008, he argued
| that "raising awareness" about feminism by changing how we
| speak and think has changed society for the better. (In the
| same discussion, he seeks to do the same for children's freedom
| from their parents' religion.) There is no doubt that Western
| society has changed how it treats and speaks about women.
|
| That said, Dawkins has in more recent years found himself
| opposing identity politics as they seek to change language
| usage and perceptions of gender.
| naasking wrote:
| > That said, Dawkins has in more recent years found himself
| opposing identity politics as they seek to change language
| usage and perceptions of gender.
|
| Correction: Dawkins doesn't care one whit about gender, and
| he has literally said so. He only cares when people cross
| into talking about sex, make incorrect claims about the
| nature of sex (spectrums and such), conflate sex with gender,
| and make unscientific claims about being able to change one's
| sex. Basically, when they enter his wheelhouse and start
| making a confusing mess of things.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Remember the phrase "HR is not your friend?"
|
| HR is also a hilariously complex set of rules and bullshit that
| isn't that easy to manage in large organizations. Separating
| out DEI specifically from HR allows companies and organizations
| the ability to have employees ensure that the obligations of
| companies regarding their legal obligation towards
| discrimination laws are met without interfering with core HR
| functions. Companies haven't been adopting DEI out of the
| goodness of their hearts. There's a direct financial advantage
| when you can prove to a court that you have provided direction
| on issues regarding diversity. It's just a collection of CYA,
| and their DEI statements are an extension of that.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| When we have all the infrastructure for an even more oppressive
| and intrusive total information awareness regime, DEIs are so
| far from 1984. DEIs are just dumb paperwork and formal
| procedure on top of the usual facade of hiring and promotion
| rigamarole
| comeonbro wrote:
| Havel's Greengrocer:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav.
| ..
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Ya, I would put DEI up there with leetcode interview
| questions: not very good filters, but filters nonetheless
| that you have to navigate.
| neltnerb wrote:
| There are a handful of contexts where it makes more sense, like
| for a HR person potentially, without trying to bring ideology
| into it that's the place it makes sense since that's the place
| where you can actually implement the concepts.
|
| There are contexts where it is mandatory but makes no sense,
| like NSF Fellowship Applications where they're asking someone
| who is just finishing an undergraduate degree and is proposing
| a research project that ends in a PhD -- who has effectively no
| influence on hiring or even culture really, and is supposed to
| focus on the technical aspects and personal aspects of who they
| are. There are things you can fit in there, but let's say the
| mandatory question is worded so confusingly that it is hard to
| even guess what to write about. What, you're going to hire
| people to assist you in your research under DEI principles when
| you have no control over the budget? It's just confusing for
| someone in that position.
|
| Staff hiring? That kind of makes more sense honestly, trying to
| be non-ideological here. Those people can actually hire people
| and create a culture that is either DEI positive or not,
| whatever you believe about whether they should.
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| There's a pattern that I see come up quite often, and it's
| really common with any discussion about things that involve
| diversity and inclusion efforts. I don't know if there's a
| specific term for it, but it happens roughly like this:
|
| First, someone identifies an opportunity to improve diversity,
| equity, or inclusion in some way. DEI statements in academia,
| codes of conduct in open source projects, some rules around
| topics or specific language on a social media site, I'm sure
| you can name some other examples.
|
| Now, this new thing may be a way to address the problem, or
| not. The problem it's trying to address might have been well
| understood or not. One way or another the idea gets some
| momentum.
|
| Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling
| and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is carefully
| crafted with a veneer of respectability and plausibility. Any
| accusations are re-directed. There are people who are motivated
| and very skilled at making plausible sounding bad-faith
| arguments. The plausibility of course also convinces people
| might not intend to be making a bad faith argument, and so are
| authentic in their indignant responses to accusations of acting
| in bad faith. Still, the entire point of the arguments was
| ultimately to disrupt efforts to improve diversity, equity, and
| inclusion, and to uphold inequality. In some cases these bad
| faith arguments can end up being a vast majority of the
| discussion. They make up maybe 80% (not an exact figure) of the
| comments in any given HN thread about anything tangentially
| related to DEI for example.
|
| The people trying to make a positive change who have been at it
| for a while are generally exhausted with trying to deal with
| the torrent of bad faith arguments, quickly recognize the
| pattern of them, and ultimately often end up serving as fuel
| for further bad-faith arguments.
|
| In the end, it becomes nearly impossible to have a productive
| good faith discussion about whether the original idea is good
| or not, or how to improve it, because nobody can disentangle
| legitimate contributors and arguments from the torrent of bad
| faith actors who are ultimately just trying to disrupt the
| process. Meanwhile, communities that ought to be served by the
| initiative are often left standing around watching their value
| as people or rights to participate equally being thrown around
| as an abstract subject of ideological argument.
|
| Without any better options, people double down on the original
| idea because it was at least made in good faith.
|
| It might sound like all of that is an argument against DEI
| statements- after all, I just spent several paragraphs talking
| about why it would be hard to have a reasonable good faith
| debate about it. Still, I think that in this situation they
| serve a couple of useful purposes. First, I think that it moves
| discussions around concrete improvements away from a forum
| where they can be undermined by bad faith arguments and toward
| a form where individual authors of DEI statements can focus on
| concrete actions. It incentivizes action over getting mired in
| these bad faith arguments. If one is to write specifically
| about how they have or will work to improve DEI, then they
| necessarily must move past the bad faith and concern trolling
| arguments and pick some specific actions. Second, I think that
| it acts as a useful honeypot for people who simply can't act in
| good faith. If you can't identify any dimension at all along
| which you will work to improve DEI for any group, then it's
| hard to see how you can further that part of the mission of an
| organization. Finally, while it is virtue signaling, that
| doesn't necessarily need to be bad.
| collingreen wrote:
| I am very interested in increasing diversity but I don't like
| the idea that anyone disagreeing with any dei suggestion
| should be labeled as intentionally disruptive and bad faith.
|
| Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding
| particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be
| thrown around lightly in a good faith post.
| rayiner wrote:
| > am very interested in increasing diversity
|
| Why? As a non-white immigrant, I'm deeply suspicious of the
| notion that a team with me on it is in any way different
| than a team without me on it based on my skin color or
| ethnicity. I think that line of thinking doesn't go
| anywhere good, especially for me, but for everyone else
| too.
|
| As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people are
| different based on group membership, they will start to
| notice those differences and categorize them as good and
| bad. DEI is based on the premise that people will recognize
| all of those differences as good but that's completely
| delusional. You are socializing people to identify other
| people with their group membership and they're going to
| take those observations in directions you don't expect.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _As a non-white immigrant, I'm deeply suspicious of the
| notion that a team with me on it is in any way different
| than a team without me on it based on my skin color or
| ethnicity. I think that line of thinking doesn't go
| anywhere good, especially for me, but for everyone else
| too._
|
| In various threads you've repeatedly argued (paraphrasing
| here) that you have a different set of values -- e.g.,
| giving higher priority to the family and community, vice
| individual choice, than in contemporary American mass
| culture. You've correlated this with your Bangladeshi
| heritage and upbringing, and you've said (again
| paraphrasing) that you adamantly seek to instill the same
| values in your own kids.
|
| Perhaps some teams would find your values a useful
| addition to their mix. For those teams, your Bangladeshi
| name, skin tone, etc., could be instances of what the
| late (Black) free-market economist Walter Williams [0]
| referred to as "cheap-to-observe information."[1]
|
| A related anecdote about cheap-to-observe information and
| its _possible_ correlations: Years ago at my then-law
| firm, I was called into the office of the chair of the
| recruiting committee. The chair wanted me to meet a
| third-year law student who was at the firm for
| interviews. The recruiting chair said that the law
| student, like me, was a former Navy "nuke" officer. We
| shook hands; I asked, " _[chief]_ engineer-qualified? "
| He smiled and nodded. "Surface-warfare qualified?" The
| same. I turned to the recruiting chair and said "that's
| all I need to know; I'm good." I had both quals myself,
| so I immediately correlated the student's quals with
| characteristics that I knew law firms found to be
| valuable. (I did stick around to chat for a while
| longer.) We hired the student, who turned out to be a
| fine lawyer.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Williams
|
| [1] https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/opinion/walter-
| williams-our...
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Anyone with a brain and sense of dignity will feel like
| racism is bad and unfair. Experiencing negative racism is
| enraging and depressing. Experiencing positive racism
| instantly gives you impostor syndrome and a sense of
| dehumanization.
|
| The only systems that aren't racist are those that strive
| to be colorblind (in the sense that we're colorblind to
| eye or hair color).
| naniwaduni wrote:
| > The only systems that aren't racist are those that
| strive to be colorblind (in the sense that we're
| colorblind to eye or hair color).
|
| Eye/hair color being a distinguishing feature is mostly a
| white people thing in its own right...
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| > Why? As a non-white immigrant, I'm deeply suspicious of
| the notion that a team with me on it is in any way
| different than a team without me on it based on my skin
| color or ethnicity.
|
| Perhaps, but a team that would not have hired you because
| of your skin color or ethnicity would also be a worse
| team since they would not be willing or able to hire the
| best candidates.
|
| > As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people
| are different based on group membership, they will start
| to notice those differences and categorize them as good
| and bad. DEI is based on the premise that people will
| recognize all of those differences as good but that's
| completely delusional.
|
| I don't think this is the right angle to look at it.
| Everyone has a unique combination of experiences that
| they bring, and what groups someone belongs to are one
| part of the set of experiences that make up how they
| experience the world. DEI programs aren't inventing this,
| it's just a part of the human condition that we're shaped
| by the unique combination of our experiences.
|
| Focusing on specific unique aspects of individual
| people's backgrounds isn't the only shape DEI can take
| though. Done well, I think they instead look at the shape
| of systems and processes in place and try broadly to
| consider how to remove artificial barriers so that people
| have an equal chance to contribute.
|
| > You are socializing people to identify other people
| with their group membership and they're going to take
| those observations in directions you don't expect.
|
| I think this does happen a lot. Tokenism and only being
| seen as a particular part of your identity are problems.
| I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white
| immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience.
| It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great
| skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant
| experience, but it's clear that the only thing the
| recruiter cares about is that you could add gender
| diversity to a team. It sucks to be told that I'm wrong
| to suggest take-home exercises in interviews are a good
| option because women have caregiver duties and can't make
| time for them when I, a woman, prefer them because I feel
| like they offer a better opportunity for me to think
| deeply about a problem.
|
| I don't think this is a reason to ignore DEI programs
| though, it's simply a failure case to be aware of.
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| > I don't like the idea that anyone disagreeing with any
| dei suggestion should be labeled as intentionally
| disruptive and bad faith.
|
| My point isn't that anyone disagreeing with a particular
| suggestion is arguing in bad faith, it's that there are
| enough bad faith arguments that it becomes effectively
| impossible to have a productive discussion.
|
| > Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding
| particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be
| thrown around lightly in a good faith post.
|
| And therein lies the crux of the problem. Are 80% of the
| comments I see on DEI related threads actually acting in
| bad faith, or am I simply so exhausted by the constant
| stream of bad faith arguments that I lack the ability to
| discern between people acting in bad faith, uninformed
| people acting in good faith parroting bad-faith actors
| arguments, and people who are legitimately trying to
| engage. For that matter, am I an exhausted person who is
| simply tired of accusations of "wokeism" being thrown at me
| when I advocate for basic respect and decency, or am I a
| bad faith actor who tried to sneak an outrageous claim into
| a reasonable sounding post in order to undermine people who
| are in favor of DEI programs by making them all sound
| unreasonable? I may know that I'm simply exhausted,
| cynical, and seeing a steadily increasing amount of anti-
| DEI rhetoric here, but such is the state of discourse that
| there's no way for you to know for sure one way or another.
| Izkata wrote:
| > when I advocate for basic respect and decency
|
| Try using those words instead of the woke buzzwords.
| Everyone else is having the same reaction to "DEI"/etc
| that you're having to their common arguments.
| samastur wrote:
| Personally I'd focus on arguments instead of motivations
| and skip arguing with those were it seems it will be or
| when it becomes unproductive.
| skissane wrote:
| > Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern
| trolling and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is
| carefully crafted with a veneer of respectability and
| plausibility. Any accusations are re-directed. There are
| people who are motivated and very skilled at making plausible
| sounding bad-faith arguments. The plausibility of course also
| convinces people might not intend to be making a bad faith
| argument, and so are authentic in their indignant responses
| to accusations of acting in bad faith.
|
| How can you possibly have a good faith argument if you've
| already made your mind up that most or everyone who disagrees
| with you is arguing in bad faith? That in itself is not a
| good faith position.
|
| You sound like you've basically constructed a closed system
| of thought for yourself, in which anyone who disagrees with
| you is arguing in bad faith.
|
| I know one person here who frequently posts in disagreement
| to DEI initiatives is rayiner. He might be wrong, but I don't
| believe for a minute he is a bigot or acting in bad faith.
| akomtu wrote:
| DEI is a lot like a headless religion that nobody's asked
| for. It's headless because instead of talking about spirit or
| similar high matters, it says "you are your body" and
| proceeds to divide people based on a few visible traits such
| as skin color. This quasi-religion doesn't talk about what we
| have in common. Instead it's fixated on superficial traits
| that make us different. When DEI got support among the rich
| and they pushed it down to the people, it obviously created
| resentment. Nobody likes when you're forced to say things you
| don't believe in and find disgusting.
|
| I do admit that DEI has some goodwill in it, in particular
| the idea that our society doesn't have to be a wolf-eats-wolf
| "meritocracy", but I'm afraid that the goodwill has been
| skillfully perverted.
| GIFtheory wrote:
| My first reaction to this news was, "fine, sounds like a silly
| requirement." However, being a PhD graduate from a minority
| background, I really have to thank my advisor for the
| undergraduate outreach work he did, without which there is
| realistically a negligible chance I would have ended up with a
| PhD and a great research career. I don't know what motivated
| him to do this work, but from a purely pragmatic perspective,
| if professors know that performing such duties helps them get
| promoted, perhaps it's not a bad policy, as long as inequities
| exist in academia. There are so many other pressures on young
| faculty, outreach may be something that is hard to justify
| spending time on unless you have to do it in some sense.
| pradn wrote:
| It's also a way to compel action across all professors, not
| just professors from historically-underrepresented groups,
| who would likely be bearing the brunt of the work.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Perhaps you were simply evaluated against your noggin and not
| your skin?
|
| Edit: what are the arguments against this?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Let's say I replaced DEI with SOC2.
|
| I tried making the same searches to find evidence that SOC2
| works. I couldn't find any. There are no studies, there's no
| evidence. But I did find loads of "how to pass SOC2" articles,
| and they did indeed all take it at face value, and that vendors
| require it, or whatever.
|
| > and almost designed to engender resentment in a way that
| would ultimately backfire.
|
| This is pretty vague. It would be as vague as saying "SOC2
| seems almost designed to engender security theater that would
| ultimately backfire." What does that mean? It means something
| very specific in my head, and I can have a vivid imagination
| about other people agreeing with me. But to someone who has
| never read the SOC2 template docs, it's meaningless.
|
| This is DEI in a nutshell. It's a set of values that the act of
| reading/writing them achieves its goals, which is basically
| expositional and social. Exactly like SOC2!
|
| It is not surprising to me that 2/3rds of faculty dislike them.
| They dislike training modules too, I've never heard someone
| say, "man I love these modules." It would be surprising if the
| faculty disagreed with the _content_ of their own DEI
| statements, but I don 't think that's the case, and I think
| it's legit if administrators were concerned if faculty _did_
| disagree. They should reconsider teaching at MIT if they are
| anti-DEI, and it is totally intellectually dishonest to say
| that admitting the students with the most merits is
| incompatible with the content of the statements. It might be
| incompatible with a specific admissions policy, but that 's not
| what the statements are!
|
| > I can certainly understand the rationale and goals behind DEI
| programs (many of which I agree with...
|
| Okay, I mean, how can you write this and not see their value?
| Are statements of values worthless? You don't think it's
| important to write down stuff you agree with?
|
| Maybe you are seeking treatments, not exposition. If a whole
| community agrees on a social belief, that is just as real as
| something like a successful Phase III trial of a drug. Nobody
| is claiming a DEI statement is a treatment with so-and-so
| impacts on some metric. DEI statements are not a treatment
| program, their purpose is not to increase URM enrollment.
|
| I completely disagree with a comment on this thread about
| "[some Substack-adjacent character is] only in favor of
| statements about concrete things you did to advance the DEI
| agenda," because that isn't the point of the statements, it
| misses the point. The point is to force you to write down your
| opinions, and get you to agree with them. Why is this so
| controversial, I don't know.
|
| However MIT does give associate professors bonus points for
| improving URM enrollment in their groups, which is not the same
| as DEI statements. The two can coexist, and as far as I know,
| MIT is not abandoning URM bonus points.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of mandatory DEI statements, but if I were
| trying to make a positive case for them, it might go something
| like this:
|
| We're a big university that is trying to serve the general
| public, reach students across all demographics, and produce
| research that is broadly applicable, not narrowly relevant to
| one segment of the population. We need to hire academic staff
| who can leverage their own personal, intellectual and cultural
| background to help us become a "bigger tent", but also put
| themselves in the shoes of others unlike themselves in the
| course of their teaching and research.
|
| To that end, part of our hiring criteria are based around
| evaluating your ability and willingness to help us fulfil that
| part of our academic mission. Please provide a statement
| explaining how you have demonstrated this in your career to
| date and how you'd continue to do so at the University of
| Utopia.
| alpinisme wrote:
| Yes this is definitely a part of it. And another part is the
| usual underlying question about how well the candidate
| understands and is prepared for the specific job they are
| entering. Different universities have different kinds of
| diversity challenges: some have a lot of working students who
| aren't in the traditional student age range, some have a
| disproportionately large number of deaf students due to the
| presence of a good program there, some have large numbers of
| students for whom English is a second language, etc. Each of
| these requires different skill sets and interests on the part
| of the teacher. And a DEI statement can be a way to
| show/evaluate how seriously the candidate is considering the
| actual on-the-ground demographics of the institution and the
| challenges it poses, as well as how the institution is trying
| the change demographics (whether for reasons of market
| demands or principle).
| lettergram wrote:
| My wife enjoys going to these struggle sessions on DEI for
| academics (she has a PhD in neuroscience). She's of the opinion
| she hasn't been oppressed and in fact has regularly given
| opportunity because of her sec, so when lecturers try to reason
| with her or she has to write these letters they don't know how
| to respond. I've attended a few where they try to convince her
| she's repressed and the entire room just starts arguing she is.
| Weirdest discussion to witness, especially when the real
| repressed folks are probably the janitors and security. They
| never even get the opportunity to go to school
| ethbr1 wrote:
| One thing I've found useful in parsing modern news is to
| remember:
|
| A pile of extreme occurrences does not an argument make.
|
| Because there's insane stuff happening somewhere, to someone, all
| the time.
|
| With the benefit of digitized news we've enabled lazy trawls to
| create a pile of "Look at how extreme and crazy ____ is!" to
| support _any_ viewpoint on _any_ topic.
|
| Anti-gun? Here's some insane gun owners. Pro-gun? Here's some
| horrific crimes.
|
| That's modern opinionated news in a nutshell -- here's a pile of
| extreme occurrences, look at how extreme they are, so you should
| agree that the other side is crazy.
|
| An actual argument involves more annoying to fudge (and
| admittedly, harder to compile) data like frequency, normalization
| against population or historical averages, geographic
| localization, etc.
|
| I've found arguing from questions rather than statements helps.
| What's the root question? And then what data would answer that
| question?
| zdragnar wrote:
| It isn't just modern news, people tend to be intellectually
| lazy on any topic they are emotionally invested in.
|
| Just look at the fallout from Harvard professor Roland Fryer
| publishing a study (after hiring a second set of grad students
| to review the data because he was himself surprised by the
| results).
|
| People didn't react logically, with proportionate arguments,
| reasoning or counter data. They reacted emotionally, forcing
| him to get police protection, suffering calls for his
| resignation, and worse.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Context for others who missed this particular storm in a
| teacup: https://freespeechunion.org/harvard-professor-needed-
| armed-p...
|
| _On the question of non-lethal uses of force, the study
| found "sometimes quite large" racial differences in police
| use of force, even after accounting for "a large set of
| controls designed to account for important contextual and
| behavioural factors at the time of the police-civilian
| interaction"._
|
| _In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, however, the
| study observed that when it came to the most extreme use of
| force - officer-involved shootings - there were no racial
| differences "in either the raw data or when accounting for
| controls". According to one case study of the Houston police
| department, black people were actually 23.5% less likely to
| be shot by police, relative to white people, in an
| interaction._
| arp242 wrote:
| In [1] there's:
|
| _> Like other recent live-action remakes--such as The Little
| Mermaid and the upcoming Snow White--some users accused the
| studio of "going woke" by modernizing the original story._
|
| _> They 'll make the hunter an evil White man, Bambi's mom
| will be a message about incel rage and Bambi will also be
| black," wrote @NintendoFan729._
|
| That's this Tweet:
| https://twitter.com/NintendoFan729/status/170756134256606837...
| - 5 likes, 641 views. From some random anonymous account with
| 322 followers and an average of about 5 tweets per day.
|
| Yet here it is, cited in a major magazine, as evidence of ...
| something or the other.
|
| [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/disney-modernized-bambi-remake-
| spar...
| eastbound wrote:
| I do not find the argument that "newspapers be newspapers"
| excuses this, when it clearly only goes one way, and very
| forcefully at that.
|
| And therefore it would be extremely interesting to find the
| origin of this push. Is it systemic, i.e. always present in
| some form due to humans's generous nature? Is it due to more
| people living in cities that we have to organize in such a way
| (DEI-Covid-Feminism-GW or ostracization)? Is it, as the
| conspiracy theorists say, a small group of influential people?
| Is it the Russians who sponsor those groupes to divide us?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It doesn't go only one way though.
|
| I can count 6+ instances on both the Fox News and MSNBC front
| pages right now.
| kristianp wrote:
| DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion
| jmyeet wrote:
| So DEI is an obvious political hot-potato but that the idea that
| the group with all the money and power are somehow being
| discriminated against is just silly.
|
| Why? Because none of these discussions deals with the real bias
| in university admissions: legacy admissions. Harvard's
| undergraduate class hovers around 35% who are legacies. This is
| the very essence of anti-diversity and entrenching generational
| wealth and power. It should be front and center in any college
| DEI discussions.
|
| The problem is it doesn't end there. Having a Harvard
| undergraduate degree opens up so many doors for graduate school,
| residencies for doctors, academia, etc.
|
| So before you get worked up on the topic of DEI (on either side),
| please give a thought to legacy admissions.
| yarg wrote:
| Intelligence is largely hereditary (people's intelligence is
| generally unlikely to be significantly higher or lower than
| that of their parents).
|
| So if the parents were high quality academic students, there's
| a far higher than average likelihood that the same will be true
| of their children.
|
| (The same is true for athleticism, and no-one would be
| surprised or think it was unreasonable that LeBron's son was
| offered scholarships just for who his father is.)
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's not the point. In addition to any inherent advantages
| for children of graduates from elite universities, there is
| an explicit bias in their favor for admissions decisions.
| yarg wrote:
| Yes, an explicit bias in favour of students more likely to
| be useful to the university.
| jmyeet wrote:
| An inbuilt assumption of what you say is that you believe in
| meritocracy, specifically that the powerful and wealthy are
| that way at least part by merit. The flipside of this
| assumption is that poverty is a personal moral failure.
|
| Personally i reject both of these assertions. So much of
| wealth can be attributed to imperialism, war, slavery,
| segregation, instituational discrimination and so on.
|
| But let's assume what you say is true: if the wealthy are
| that way out of merit and they have more ability,
| intelligence or whatever, why do they need an davantage in
| college admissions at all? Wouldn't their own merit shine
| through?
|
| Wealth already gives a host of advantages: opportunities,
| tutoring, access to people and not having to, say, work jobs
| to just survive. On top of all those advantages, why do they
| also need systemic bias in admissions?
|
| The system is unfair by design because it needs to be for
| those who benefit from it.
| jorvi wrote:
| > An inbuilt assumption of what you say is that you believe
| in meritocracy, specifically that the powerful and wealthy
| are that way at least part by merit.
|
| That is not what a meritocracy is. Meritocracy means our
| brightest and most capable lead us, instead of democracy
| where it is basically whoever can play the political game
| the best.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Legacy makes a lot of sense from an admissions standpoint.
| Having rich/connected peers is the main point of harvard for
| everyone else applying. I think what people have a problem with
| with DEI is that it largely seems counter to their goals of
| maximizing prestige and career success of graduates.
| johnneville wrote:
| i would guess that the biggest incentive for legacy
| admissions is related to maximizing donations from the alumni
| parents but i'm just speculating
| jimbokun wrote:
| Why can't we be against both legacy admissions and DEI
| admissions?
|
| Let's eliminate all the forms of unfair bias.
| ilc wrote:
| There is always a hint.
|
| Let's say I am an Eagle Scout. I want to write about
| something I did as an Eagle.
|
| Well, guess, what. I've told you a metric F-ton about myself.
| userbinator wrote:
| The sooner we realise that DEI is making us head towards a
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron situation, the
| better off everyone will be.
| zarathustreal wrote:
| The notion that any of us could ever *be equal* has always
| annoyed me at how obviously absurd it is but I'm glad to see
| this has been written about before. It's like we've already
| descended into 1984 territory and we're all spouting about
| "equality" because it's the "right thing to do" even though we
| all know it's not physically possible. Equal opportunities are
| not enough, or so it would be said, because history! Well.. the
| historical period I care about!
|
| And then we all act shocked when someone turns to violence to
| force people to grapple with reality
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The Declaration declares people were "created equal," and
| even that phrase has historical context to answer "in what
| sense?"
|
| Nobody is born with divine right of kings. That's the point.
| Other senses of equality come later and with good reason.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Jesus Christ. What a dark story.
| rayiner wrote:
| I'm glad that MIT is standing up for an evidence based approach
| to all this, as they did with reinstating the SAT. Skin color
| differences don't make organizations or schools better or worse:
| https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p....
| (Lack of diversity, of course, may be evidence of underlying
| race-based discrimination.) It was an idea that was developed in
| response to Supreme Court cases that prohibited using express
| racial quotas to eliminate the effects of past discrimination. So
| there was a need to come up with a different rationale for racial
| rebalancing.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >DEI statements are important because they show individual
| awareness of historical inequities and current biases that form
| modern society.
|
| Only the currently approved ones.
|
| The perfect example: holocaust denial. Ask anyone in the US how
| many people died in the holocaust. The answer is 6 million and
| they are all Jews.
|
| The real number is 14 million with 8 million Slavs, 6 million
| Jews and 2 million misc of gays, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses,
| the work shy, etc..
|
| The double think is so strong that you can have two people from
| the same village, in the same camp, dead on the same day and have
| one be a victim of the holocaust, and the other not just because
| one was a Jew and the other a Communist.
| macintux wrote:
| Germany and Russia both committed daunting atrocities during
| the war, killed millions of people, but it's unsurprising that
| people associate "Holocaust" with 6 million Jewish dead,
| _because the Jewish genocide is where the label originated_.
| vladgur wrote:
| Wait so your definition of Holocaust denier is not the person
| that denies that 6 million Jews were systematically killed by
| the Nazi Germany machine, but the person who believes in the
| Holocaust of the Jews, but does not include other atrocities
| perpetrated by Nazis on the European population?
|
| Can you clarify?
|
| And in your opinion, did these DEI statements ever have Jews in
| mind?
| Reasoning wrote:
| Because the Holocaust can refer to either the Nazi's genocide
| of Jews or all the genocides carried out by Nazi Germany. Most
| often it is the former.
|
| So to reframe this, if you ask people how many people died in
| the Jewish genocide they'll probably give you the figure of how
| many Jews died, yes. They aren't ignoring all of the other
| victims, they're giving you the statistic of what they thought
| you asked for.
|
| This is no different than separating out the genocide of
| Armenians by the Ottoman Empire and the genocide of Greeks by
| the same regime.
| llm_trw wrote:
| > Because the Holocaust can refer to either the Nazi's
| genocide of Jews or all the genocides carried out by Nazi
| Germany. Most often it is the former.
|
| This is not counting all the genocides by the Nazis. This is
| just counting the people murdered in the extermination camps
| and on their way there.
|
| If you count all the other Nazi genocides gets you tens of
| millions, e.g. targeting of civilians during the Siege of
| Lenin Grad, the Dutch Famine, etc.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I was taught in high school that it was 6 million Jews.
|
| Standard American public high school. Teacher was left-wing. We
| read Diary of Anne Frank, Night by Elie Weisel, Number the
| Stars, etc.
|
| No holocaust denial going on.
|
| Yes, the Soviets were excluded. So were the Prussians, who were
| the victims of both Nazi and Soviet genocides.
|
| Nobody calls this holocaust denial.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >Yes, the Soviets were excluded.
|
| >>The double think is so strong that you can have two people
| from the same village, in the same camp, dead on the same day
| and have one be a victim of the holocaust, and the other not
| just because one was a Jew and the other a Communist.
|
| Or to put it another way. If Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
| were both captured by time traveling Nazis and sent to
| Treblinka Marx would count towards the holocaust and Engels
| would not in the Wests version of holocaust denial.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267725.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| When recruiting students into science/technology-centric paths
| (which is what MIT is looking for), it's important to accept that
| the required mix of interest in the subject and a strong work
| ethic is just not all that common. It's also difficult to predict
| which students are going to have those characteristics based
| solely on high school grades, SAT scores, etc.
|
| Thus excluding anyone from the pool of applicants on the basis of
| things like gender, ethnicity, etc. means you end up with fewer
| students going into challenging math and science programs, which
| is really not a good outcome in terms of remaining competitive
| with China and other booming technological sectors. For example,
| Caltech used to be all-male until c.1970 and is now about 45%
| female at the undergraduate level - but the curriculum is still
| as rigorous as ever.
|
| P.S. STEAM is better than STEM; the arts these days have many
| tie-ins with technology and STEM students with no experience of
| any of the arts are missing out on many economic and personal
| growth opportunities.
| theoldlove wrote:
| Not a lot of actual details in the piece. Anyone have links to
| academic job ads before and after this alleged change in policy?
| smashah wrote:
| Great, hopefully they also end affirmative action for zionists.
| That is the biggest yet least spoken about DEI initiative in the
| whole tech scene.
| davidgerard wrote:
| This looks very badly sourced.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| My approach whenever DEI comes up now is to not express a
| position or opinion supporting or opposing DEI itself but to
| simply cite statute and recent case law.
|
| Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Section 703):
|
| >"It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
| (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or
| otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to
| his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,
| because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or
| national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or
| classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way
| which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of
| employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status
| as an employee, because of such individual's race, color,
| religion, sex, or national origin."
|
| Duvall v. Novant Health, Inc.
|
| >"To be clear, employers may, if they so choose, utilize D&I-type
| programs. What they cannot do is take adverse employment actions
| against employees based on their race or gender to implement such
| a program."
|
| Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which applied
| specifically to higher educational institutions, gives a very
| good indication as to how SCOTUS is likely to rule when a case
| involving private employment inevitably lands on its docket in
| the near future. Taking race into account when making employment
| decisions will be prohibited. Full stop. That includes setting
| race based targets/quotas, tying bonuses to their achievement,
| and establishing set aside jobs. What will likely be permissible
| will be efforts to expand candidate pools and training
| initiatives that focus on eliminating biases.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Well now that that's sorted, maybe we can start fixing real
| problems with higher Ed.
| londons_explore wrote:
| And will we, in about 50 years after emails get released, find a
| sizable donation from Elon Musk a few days before this
| announcement?
| acheong08 wrote:
| Beyond the culture war, I find DEI uncomfortable. I'm not the
| most articulate and don't keep up with modern trends. Ask me
| about computers or tell me to code, but writing about social
| subjects when I barely leave my room and even then only to
| exercise feels like a nightmare. I've been asked to optionally
| write something similar during university applications in the
| past but along with ethnicity and other private information, N/A
| is the best I can think of.
| devaiops9001 wrote:
| Technology institute doesn't find value in anti-white racism and
| goofy marxist quackery. Who'd a thunk it?
| lazyeye wrote:
| This is fantastic news. Requiring faculty staff to write what is
| essentially a short ideological treatise to be considered for
| employment is more in line with something I'd expect in Mao's
| China.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I never understood the american obsession with race (well, and
| sexuality).
|
| I live in a small EU country on the edge of the balkans... what
| the hell should I write if I wanted to get hired? I'm white...
| everyone here is white... but just by living here, I might have a
| more "diverse" worldview (compared to a white american is
| massachussets, with enouh knowledge and money to attend MIT) than
| someone of a different race (also living in massachussets, with
| enough money and kowledge to attend MIT). But as to "what i've
| done", I can only put "saw two black people this year, both were
| tourists, saw a couple of buses of chinese tourists, or maybe
| japanese, I don't know".
|
| Engineering schools should keep to engineering, killer robots
| won't care about your race, no matter if you're the one building
| them or the one making the weapons to fight against them.
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