This is backwards. We need do this type of investment at the pre-K, elementary, and middle school levels. We need to provide funding to local communities. If all these top tier colleges (I'm looking at squarely my alma mater--Duke--as an example) invested directly in their local communities instead of affirmative action we'd have made far more progress as a nation.
Meanwhile, big tech is gentrifying Durham, people of color are being pushed out, and these companies keep plastering signs everywhere about how they stand for diversity and inclusion.
Science is science. Leave it the fuck alone. Give everyone equal opportunity, and train them to become the best damn scientists they can be. Then give out grants.
Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech?
I remember about 5 years ago, Facebook issued a report about its diversity numbers, and it put partial blame on the pipeline problem, saying they basically couldn't hire enough qualified people of certain demographics, and the entire DEI community blew up with how incorrect that was. I specifically remember some ridiculous outrage over "How can you compare people to oil?!"
However, I've never really found any compelling arguments that the entire situation isn't a pipeline problem, and my own anecdotal experience is that there is definitely something amiss in the pipeline - in my "Intro to Programming" middle school class in the mid 90s, purely elective(you just check a box on a mail in form over the summer), the students were 24 white boys and 1 white girl, despite the school being 50/50 by sex, ~20% black and 15% latino.
It is a pipeline problem, but there are very strong social and political vested interests that really don't want to admit it. The whole DEI industry leeches off productive companies by setting impossible standards of 50% female software engineers or perfect racial representation. If we admit that this is unrealistic, many DEI departments will no longer have a reason to exist. To tweak the popular Upton Sinclair quote, it's difficult to get an industry to admit that a problem is solved, when their salary depends on not solving it.
>The whole DEI industry leeches off productive companies
I actually think it's a little more insidious than that. Large companies, already established in their respective industries, build what are competitive moats by employing the DEI industry. Scrappy start-up that has something intriguing to offer? Oh but you don't have a VP of Diversity and Inclusion (that you can't afford) and you don't have a plan for ... I don't know what, exactly. Well you're not part of the team then. Companies like Google, Amazon, and so on actually want this to continue because it stifles competition.
> I actually think it's a little more insidious than that.
It's worse than that.
FB sent me and my cofounder a C&D for our side project, then wanted to hire me for their "black clique" in NYC to work on react ~2015 when i was working on brain computer interfaces at the time at a lab.
You know you are gonna get the "easy lay up", everyone there will know it too (I'm not the type to put much effort into studying for tech interviews and I have cheme background not compsi so i find the questions dull many times). And all of the "of color" people who play into it for their personal benefit just make it worse... (not to mention, even for a lot of these kinds of software jobs i had that weren't very interesting intellectually but paid alot, I pretty much vaped as much weed as I could just to make to lunch, and I would have played into all those sterotypes about black men as well...)
Ha, I have no idea what goes on in their minds. But it took a lot of energy to pretend to care all the time when i'm around those types (because they see that I have the same skin color, and immediately their expectations are primed).
The pipeline is leaky, with different leak rates for different groups. But it is leaky over the whole length. This tries to get people to think about the leaks in the second half. This doesn't invalidate that we also should fix the other leaks, but the existence of leaks not addressed doesn't invalidate this attempt either.
I mean, what other explanation do you think there is? Isn't the alternative that for one biological reason or another, white men, asians, and jews are winning the meritocracy of tech?
What bothers me about this sort of idea is more the follow-up. Let's imagine for the sake of discussion that we prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that some groups are, on average, less intelligent than others. What then would the people advancing this argument suggest we do as a society? My gut feeling tells me they won't stop at just removing some current measures in the name of meritocracy, but will also gradually impose restrictions and it'll get real somber real fast.
I'll put on my elite conservative hat to answer your question.
Is concern for the consequences worth it to suppress the truth - being that some races are simply less intelligent than others (on average). If that is true, then there is no need to make any changes - each race has already assumed their proper place in our meritocratic society.
And taking off that hat, I agree with your thoughts and concerns. I will say that it's uncontroversial that there are IQ differences in race, but it's far from proven that those differences are purely genetic and can't be attributed to societal differences.
I'm not entirely sure what elite conservatism is or whether you endorse this view or not, but there's no civilizational context where meritocracy can exist given first mover advantages, resource accumulation, and institutional capture. What meritocracy usually ends up meaning in a practical sense is a deeply hierarchical society that happens to be pleasing in a certain way to the groups defining what meritocracy is in the local context.
The search for objective truth isn't the main concern but rather the premise from which we jump to justifying prescriptive claims, which are by definition outside of the purview of the scientific method. In this case, using the idea that certain groups are more intelligent than average than others to push forward highly culturally specific modes of societal organization.
> Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech?
Yes and no - this explanation is partially correct, in that the impossibility of hiring the kind of demographic distribution DEI advocates want causally precedes any decision made by tech companies.
However, "pipeline problem" incorrectly implies that the reality of hiring demography is the result of some kind of process failure (e.g. in early schooling) rather than a natural outcome of culture, biology, etc. (which high-quality research is fairly unequivocal about, although most people would never know this as it violates core dogma of the American state-secular belief system).
Why do you feel like neighborhoods need to be static in terms of racial composition, forever?
Science is science? Okay then. Is tech tech? It seems that there are more white and Asian people in tech, and Apple is hiring in RDU. Should they not hire the best technologists? Should those technologists not have homes in the area?
By “gentrifying”, it seems you just mean white people moving for their jobs. Why isn’t that allowed in your book? Have black people claimed the Durham area as theirs forever? What nonsense.
Let’s just speak openly: you’re part of the problem. Neighborhoods can’t get claimed by any given race. People can move where they want. Successful businesses adding jobs to a historically poorer area is a good thing, and you shouldn’t use silly code words like “gentrification” to signal that you don’t want whites moving into your town.
I do worry about the long-term consequences of removing the "natural selection" factor. My best friend growing up was Korean. His parents were dirt-poor but he was still more academically successful than me and got a better job out of university than me. Because he worked the absolute shit out of himself. The idea someone would deny him an opportunity in order to give it to someone else because of their ethnicity who didn't work as hard nauseates me.
By “gentrifying”, it seems you just mean white people moving for their jobs. Why isn’t that allowed in your book? Have black people claimed the Durham area as theirs forever? What nonsense.
White people move in, it's gentrification. White people move out, it's white flight. Some arguments are doomed to intractability from the start.
I have no issue with racial composition. I have no issue with Apple hiring the best technologist independent of race. To me, gentrification is a symptom that the people being "displaced" did not have *equal opportunity* to become the best technologists.
This is because funding for upstream programs are ignored in these discussions about student loans, affirmative action, and now DOE grants.
K-12 public schools and literacy rates are shit in the US compared to much of the developed world, and we're sitting here yapping about diversity in applied physics research.
Ultimately a job at Apple is the pinnacle for most engineers. You aren’t doing anyone any favors by kicking this racial bias / affirmative action anywhere else down the chain, or onto a different ladder, whether it be in tech, physics, education, research, sports, or whatever.
Equal standards for every one. Every adult, child, race, and creed. Every ladder at every rung. Not all outcomes will be equal and any sort of do-gooder (and often do-badder) effort to “correct” for disparities will be worse than doing nothing at all.
How is making sure kids are well educated everywhere "affirmative action"? Surely everyone has the right to a good basic education regardless of where they come from?
> How is making sure kids are well educated everywhere "affirmative action"?
Because the admission programs to the desirable schools at all levels utilize affirmative action to try to reach this end.
Source: went to private schools my entire life. Saw affirmative action at every admission level (1st grade, 6th, 9th, undergrad, and grad school). Have plenty of friends today working in some prestigious jobs/industries who were basically pushed to the next level undeservingly for the final ~6-8 years of their education. And even when they weren’t reaching the next rung undeservingly, they were attending a school that they didn’t have the test scores to get into on pure merit alone. And you better believe they displaced more deserving kids from the area.
>Surely everyone has the right to a good basic education regardless of where they come from?
The poster that I was replying to never made this claim, and I never rebuked it.
>Because the admission programs to the desirable schools at all levels utilize affirmative action to try to reach this end.
I don't think you're addressing what the OP was suggesting. We should be making public schools desirable to go to. If everyone can get a decent education, you might have a chance of not having an affirmative action problem.
For example in Australia, wealthy private schools over funded. But the parents are already well off, they can fund themselves. Meanwhile there are public schools that are under funded. All that money should be going to public schools and building a great public schools system. The US probably has problems with the public school system too.
Let's leave aside the American-style debate around ethnicity for a moment. We know what happens when high-income workers move en masse to a neighborhood. Things get more expensive, and the quality of life decreases for people who did absolutely nothing wrong except live in a place that eventually got settled by some adtech company. The character of the neighborhood changes, and is destroyed in favor of a copy-pasted hipster area with expensive coffee shops. The previous locals do not get the new jobs because the highly-educated workers are imported from other places or work remotely. They do not have the capacity to move easily unlike the new workers.
Yes, you could say tough luck, kids: that's just life and people can move in and out. However, we can clearly see that gentrification is a real concept that people will fight to prevent with some justification and not just some social justice dog-whistle.
There is actually a one to one mapping between anti immigrant rhetoric and this gentrification nonsense.
If people wish to maintain the racial makeup of their neighborhood then they should at least be honest about it. Don't use dogwhisles like neighborhood character when everyone knows it means race
I live in one such neighborhood. The ethnic mix has not changed, at least not in a noticeable way. The cool people are gone, and were replaced by tech workers. The old locals are struggling. A new coffee shop with high-priced drinks and a co-working space literally just opened a few weeks ago.
Don't assume your own North American perspective maps to everything.
There are two problems, the first is acheiving a good meritocratic system and to that end I agree with your sentiment.
The second problem is intentional and unintentional prejudice and biases people have, there is no way around combating that actively. I don't mean giving someone an upper hand because of their color but focusing on schools and companies that admit and hire applicants in a way that deviates from meritocracy. What prevents someone from thinking "asians are smart" or the unconsciously think "asian CEOs aren't a thing"? (Just an example.)
There will always be a need to enforce meritocracy, use whateber name you like. If all this affirmatice action b.s. is to end the you better also support very agressive meritocracy enforcement and paying taxes to support communities you don't live in that were affected by historical racism and prejudice. If you live in a nice suburb and you don't want to pay taxes for inner city schools, parks,etc... (or rural) then you don't get to complain about bullshit affirmative action. Something gotta give.
So big tech is disproportionately screwing over black people in Durham, but it would be terrible and hypocritical to make it easier for a few black people in Durham to get a piece of the pie?
I can’t help but notice that this is a bit self serving.
While I agree that more must be done so that good basic education is available to everyone, you do realize that this aims at schools? Grants go to researchers at universities. A part of the change is that you need to explain how your university actually tries to recruit an appropriate share of underrepresented groups. If your school doesn't, the researchers will pressure the school until it does, because they want grants.
For example, I just prepared a grant application, and doing so I realized that the web pages for the offices that deal with DEI are terribly outdated. I will certainly raise that topic with the administration here.
> Researchers seeking funding from the United States’s single biggest funder of the physical sciences will now have to think about how they can structure their own efforts to promote greater participation by researchers and students of color and from other underrepresented groups.
ie. If a well endowned university that was recieving DoE grants were to underwrite the expansion of education and scholarships programs at pre-K, elementary, and middle schools within their intake catchment areas to be more inclusive of people diverse in background,
then they can submit that activity as evidence of their efforts to expand the divisity of the researcher pool.
Granted it's an approach that takes years to bear fruit .. but it's the kind of approach that actually works and happens within the education sector of other countries that seek to lift all citizens access to education that matches their ability.
Of course, this smacks of five year (and ten year (and fifteen year)) planning .. so, communism | socialism. etc.
Hmm... so we're going to give money to wealthy universities so they can in turn give it to local communities instead of trying to develop good K-12 schools directly?
I am astonished. I thought we had this conversation 30 years ago, and the consensus was affirmative action of this sort is a terrible idea. It is particularly bad for minorities, since ALL of them will be suspected of having their position/funding/etc because of their identity instead of merit, even if they are legitimately qualified.
Talent capable of pushing the boundaries of science is extremely scarce in humans, and it makes no sense to make it artificially scarcer.
It's funny, I almost ended there but realized: I didn't even make the point that it demeans the work itself, and the people who actually can do it. And that's tantamount to acknowledging non-minority people's rights, and that is socially very dangerous thing to do right now.
> It is particularly bad for minorities, since ALL of them will be suspected of having their position/funding/etc because of their identity instead of merit
It's bad for the ones who would have achieved these things on merit, but it's evidently good enough for the rest of them that (as a voting bloc) they will reliably support people who push these kinds of policies.
I think it's hard to understand when you're not part of a group that interacts this way with the political system. There's no Asian Jim Clyburn.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a job and have people talk shit about me being a diversity hire, then not have a job and people just talk shit for a different reason.
That’s not true one won’t be negatively affected. If somebody is being given an opportunity because of their skin color, that means another person is having an opportunity taken away or delayed. That’s just how quotas work.
It’s frustrating to see, especially when somebody is discriminated against for e.g. being white, but fills “other” URM boxes that aren’t visible such as sexuality or gender identity. A well-off cis-het person with worse qualifications will be given higher priority at resume review stage than a destitute queer person just because they have the ethnicity the company is looking for.
The government is a democratic institution, it’s fairly reasonable in principle for them to try and ensure all their citizens and not some overrepresented group get the benefits of public funding. It is after all PUBLIC funding, every citizen should have equal influence on where it goes, which would predict it being distributed fairly equitably.
> I believe that the vast majority of physicists—even the vast majority of white male physicists—want a more diverse and representative community
I think the trick with this statement is the white people who get screwed by the policy won’t be employable as physicists anymore due to lack of funding so they don’t count as not wanting this since they’re won’t ever become physicists. But sure the elite white physicists will talk about how fantastic this is so they can get invited to parties, it’s not like they will ever become victims of their own rhetoric. It’s obviously the people who will be most adversely affected whose opinions who matter most, and those are the B students, not the established physicists.
The other trick of course is that Asians are going to take the hit far more than Whites are but this isn’t talked about because Asians have more public sympathy. They aren’t thought of as a group with collective racial guilt to the same degree.
I just wish they would stop talking about fighting systemic racism while literally being the greatest institution of systemic racism in the world. I can kind of see where they’re coming from and the benefits they have in some ways, but it’s incredible the same people who enforce racial quotas for a living give condescending seminars on how to be anti racist which people are mandated to sit though and be educated on.
When the DEI people say “hey hire out of this HBCU, not out of this elite college with tons of legacy admissions which there is almost no pathway to from a school in a poor neighbourhood” that’s not all evil and terror.
>When the DEI people say “hey hire out of this HBCU, not out of this elite college with tons of legacy admissions which there is almost no pathway to from a school in a poor neighbourhood” that’s not all evil and terror.
But the DEI people went to the elite college with legacy admissions, and work there now. "DEI" is "more BIPOCs at elite colleges to which there's no pathway from a poor neighborhood."
Most DEI people I see in real life are ghost white HR ladies who had mediocre grades in school and work for a mediocre company and send out regular company emails about how it’s Polynesian history month, asexual pride week, and progressiveness day. I would say most of them are not “true believers” but may generally agree that DEI is noble.
Yeah. Power corrupts. Some noble intentions got twisted into a quest for revenge. Wake me up when humanity at large becomes better than this (they won't).
I just wish they would stop talking about fighting systemic racism while literally being the greatest institution of systemic racism in the world. I can kind of see where they’re coming from and the benefits they have in some ways, but it’s incredible the same people who enforce racial quotas for a living give condescending seminars on how to be anti-racist.
I think there is some social good in equity at any cost just so society doesn’t devolve into race riots because of rightfully pissed off people whose families never got a fair shot to ever do things like grow generational wealth.
> I just wish they would stop talking about fighting systemic racism while literally being the greatest institution of systemic racism in the world. I can kind of see where they’re coming from and the benefits they have in some ways, but it’s incredible the same people who enforce racial quotas for a living give condescending seminars on how to be anti-racist.
They fixed that inconsistency by redefining racism in terms of power/oppression rather than "discrimination based on skin color".
Seems like a trivial bit of oppression to be forced to sit through a trite racist lecture honestly.
The racist stuff that matters is more how HR engages in ways to implement racial discrimination of questionable legality if it ever hit the highest court in the land but which has never been specifically tried against before and which is so unfamiliar that people don’t fully understand the implications. They engineer novel and creative means of racial discrimination in hiring to meet their quotas, things that would make any Hollywood accountant jealous. Since the law is practically internally contradictory (you can’t hire too many Whites and Asians but you can’t have a literal White and Asian quota) it leads to all manner of imagineering.
For those who aren't in academia, this is every governmental science agency now. For example just 9 minutes ago (midnight ET) a funding announcement from the NIH just hit my inbox for "a mission to serve historically underrepresented populations in biomedical research that award doctorate degrees in the health professions or the sciences related to health."
This could be a somewhat ironic example considering the likelihood that many people who could have contributed to the Manhattan Project were unable to do so due to institutional barriers relating to their ethnicity.
Even some talented people who did work for the Project got life-altering roadblocks later on such as Qian Xuesen.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here is an article about a scientist being stripped of his position for "lying to government officials about his contact with a Chinese government agency": https://apnews.com/article/235705c7507a46188fc26a663d96b014
Relevant quote:
As part of a new science and technology “risk matrix,” which has not been made public, the Department of Energy also said it would not fund joint research or support “sensitive country foreign nationals.”
Sure, there were a bunch of genius-level physicists capable of building an atom bomb and the US Government didn't use them because it wanted to be mean to people. That's believable.
No, the idea is that in that era an untold number of talented people were barred from contributing to the US due to discriminatory roadblocks at every level in terms of access to education and so on.
Your sarcasm is hilariously misplaced because the person I cited was driven away by stubborn US officials only to become the leading light behind the Chinese nuclear program. All they had to do was leave him alone. So yes, what you are describing literally happened...
A major challenge will be keeping researchers from simply treating the requirement as another box to tick or fobbing the work off on minority scientists, Hodari says. “That’s often people’s first ask,” she says, “to find anyone they think can help them and ask, ‘Do this for us.’” Hodari, who is Black, says she experienced such treatment when she was a postdoc. Much has been written about what actually succeeds in promoting diversity, she says, but it’s the researcher’s responsibility to read the material and take it seriously. “You just got to do your homework,” she says. “I don’t expect someone in middle school to walk into a quantum field theory class and understand tensor math, right?”
How do we end up with someone who was subject to the behaviour we want to avoid, coming up with a set of policies that can be gamed in the way we want to avoid?
For if the bomb that drops on you
Gets your friends and neighbors too
There'll be nobody left behind to grieve
And we will all go together when we go
What a comforting fact that is to know
Universal bereavement -
An inspiring achievement!
Yes, we all will go together when we go
Skin color, the link is an article you know, not just a headline. It's requiring grant recipients to have a plan on how they will include more people of color in their research. It has to be real and specific as well, otherwise it would just be "bullshit" as one of the articles quoted advocates terms anything less serious.
Personally I think it's strange to force a rather arbitrary inclusivity metric into scientific research.
Let’s not forget IQ, people with low IQ are very marginalized in the field of physics and mathematics.
Seriously diversity is a mind virus at this point. North america is one the the most diverse, just equitable place that ever existed in the history of humanity.
Hey, I like diversity of thought. Wild ideas? Fuck yes. I don't really care about people's backgrounds that much. What good is diversity when everyone looks different but thinks alike?
When I redo the kitchen we’re going to put the cabinets higher because screw having some default countertop heigh when we could have something designed for us.
The house I'm looking at buying has a deck, and I want to redo the stairs such that the steps are calibrated to the gait for people greater than 6' tall. You know what I mean ... steps that are "too short" can be literally painful to walk up.
You won't be able to make that argument. It is pretty clear from the article which way the wind is blowing:
Still, Mason says, she’s encouraged by the initiative. “I’m an optimist,” she says. “I believe that the vast majority of physicists—even the vast majority of white male physicists—want a more diverse and representative community.”
How is any of that even helping groups being boosted? If you come from an underprivileged background, why would you want to try to survive on government grants? Pick up whatever pays well with fastest/cheapest education, maybe become an electrician if you are starting out poor, software engineer if you are middle class. Or if women value family and social life over work, why would we want to take that away from them? Whoever wished they worked more on their death bed?
I get it that some people's personal sacrifices can benefit humanity at large, but why are those who are supposedly most downtrodden have to sacrifice more? Helping people pick up a marketable skill is a good thing, and can be done on need and motivation bases rather than scrutinizing one's melanin levels. But pushing people into lower pay jobs than they could do just to feel enlightened is just cruel.
I don't think you quite understand what is done here. It's not grants for underprivileged. Let me explain (I'll start from the basics of the situation, please don't interpret this as I am assuming you wouldn't know at least some of this.). In the US, most research funding at universities and national labs for basic sciences comes from DOE or NSF. From these grants, we pay students (phd students get paid, and don't pay tuition), postdocs, equipment etc. The NSF typically wants a broader impact statement: How does the funding of the grant affect the society in general. Stuff like: I train the next generation of scientists. Outreach to the general population (who pays it in the end via taxes after all). Maybe school programs etc. DOE traditionally was focused only on the research aspect. Now, DOE has a new requirement that one writes about DEI efforts. This doesn't mean quotas (but could, it's up to the applicant), but it requires you to reflect on and engage in programs at the university which tries to help the problem. This also includes that all students are safe. First and foremost, it forces the grantee to at least inform themselves what programs exist already.
One example: The percentage of women in physics is abysmal low, but it's still large enough that I can make some statistical observations. In my experience, female students outperform their male peers on average. This is a strong indication that the women cohort has a higher effective qualification cut-off. There are many possible reasons for that, but I want to make sure it's not for stupid/bad reasons. Because we clearly missing out on some excellent researchers there.
I am member of an admission committee. Judging the qualification of students is a very hard task, most signals are very noisy. So people build heuristics. It's absolutely possible, even likely, that these heuristics are not fair and select indirectly on race or gender.
In any case, depending how you see it, /all/ phd students survive on government grants. Because that's how the work is funded. It's not hand outs.
Whenever you find someone in an unusual field for their demographics, chances are they are pretty good. People tend to go with the flow and those who don't tend to have particularly strong motivation. But my point is PhD is not the most obvious choice for someone with disadvantaged background. You will not be earning much and will be on the hook for tuition for a long time and even afterwards your salary in research is likely to be much lower than what you could earn in industry with same talent and similar amount of training. Obviously research has benefits to society and individuals may have dreams for things other than money. But I don't think they should be pushed in the direction that may not be best for them personally otherwise.
There's nothing in the article about what might qualify as a diversity plan besides a vague mention of "We've got a plan to give 5% of the funds to mentoring" people of diverseness.
So are they saying they need to spend some of their grant money on extra tutoring for whatever few black students they manage to find?
I couldn't bring myself to lie, honestly, but I feel that there's no ethical problem in lying to those sorts of questions. The ethical problem is solely in the wheelhouse of the people asking.
among my generation this has already caught on among some groups of young white women for "diversity clout" if that's a thing. they are all suddenly "bi" and put pride flags in their insta and tiktok bios. prove them wrong.
p.s. there are doubtless plenty who are fr but there's a lot of bs too.
i don't much honestly. a few bi friends have complained but i don't much agree with the whole "appropriation" angle.
it does matter if people start getting advantages from it, though, and that's literally the subject of this thread. hell if it meant the difference between grant and no grant i'd claim it, what can they do?
I'm not sure this is relevant to the article. It's saying that grant proposals must include plans to promote diversity, not that grant proposals must come from people of any particular race/gender/sexuality.
I believe they already address diversity though in their regulations, so I have a feeling this is indicative that they plan implement quotas which is ultimately discriminatory.
I'm not sure I see how that's connected to the article or the linked DOE policy - can you expand on what gets you that feeling? It seems to be saying the precise opposite of that, in my reading.
See Hopwood v. Texas and Fisher v. University of Texas for examples of affirmative action causing schools to deny applicants based on race. Based on the new requirements, it appears to indicate that it will encourage grant applicants to do just that and implement quota-based programs.
I joke but it's serious, governments or other offices wanting into your bedroom to verify if you qualify as regards occupational opportunities/requirements to prove it is a thing historically. Literally, give them enough rope and they'll try pushing it.
"
If the psychological diagnosis confirms the individual’s homosexuality, an official, permanent exemption is issued for him. More often than not, a thorough rectal exam follows the mental evaluation. The physician’s observations providing proof of occurred same-sex intercourse is then written formally and submitted to the military. In some cases, further detail-oriented exams come into play, so the decision-makers can be certain of the applicant’s “queerness," making sure they are genuine, not a false pretense to escape the service.
"
It's honestly a disgusting overreach whether you're trying to include or exclude people of whatever sexual proclivity. We can become like Iran, but for any ideology, given enough time and institutionalized dogmatism.
The weird thing about this is that you're relying on a clear sense of your own identity (that you are not gay, because if you were you wouldn't challenge someone to prove you wrong, you'd just say it) to deny the value of other people doing the same thing, but with a different answer.
To wit: you're yelling about your own sexuality in an argument about how we shouldn't have to hear about someone else's. You know how all those woke folk talk about "privilege"? That's what privilege is. Trans kids don't get to say stuff like that on the internet, only straight guys.
That's what you said the first time, and I get the irony. I'm just struck that you're taking such care in your phrasing to clarify to the folks here how you're not actually gay. That doesn't seem to you to cut against your point? You think your identity is important enough not to be ambiguous about it[1], but not important enough to maybe be worth checking to see if people are being fair about it? (Which at the end of the day is all this policy means.)
[1] I mean, why not just say "I'm gay, and I this helps me even though it shouldn't"? It's because you don't want people to think you're actually gay, right? I find that really interesting.
I don't think they care about what people think with regard to their sexuality on an anonymous website. The point is you can't hand check diversity when it applies to a matter of personal preference. That makes any forced diversity of that preference pointless.
He literally suggested saying something not true to make people think he's gay. That's... literally the idea! Make the DOE think he's gay, so he gets the perceived benefits. If that was snide, it wasn't me being snide, it was the upthread commenter.
And that's exactly my point: you KNOW he's not gay (because of his careful phrasing), and you find it "snide" to suggest that anyone think he is, when he's not. You agree with him (and me!) that his identity is important and worth respecting. And... isn't that exactly what diversity policies are intended to encourage?
The psychological profiling you are attempting here is, in addition to being clunkily shoehorned into fitting the OP's wording, somewhat irritating because it's conceptually equivalent to the idea that homophobic people must be secretly gay, which is detrimental to LGBT people for all sorts of reasons.
For clarity: I don't think the upthread poster is gay. At all. He made it very clear he is not.
I'm drawing attention to that fact, and the fact that the other upthread commenter and you seem to be likening the possibility that someone might think he was[1] as some kind of insult. And that's exactly why identity matters, even among people who claim it doesn't. It matters to you that people not confuse someone for being gay.
And I'm hoping maybe you take that to heart and realize that other people think the same way about their own identities. This seemed like a learning opportunity to me.
[1] Which, again, was the whole idea! He was going to claim he was gay to the DOE!
You are assigning these ideas to people but that's not at all the takeaway I got from the conversation myself. I won't presume to speak for the other people involved but I'm not getting the vibe there either. I understand the draw of wanting to challenge social norms and make us think about identity and whatnot; it's something I encourage in other contexts and have done myself. The specific argument would in fact work in other contexts. But it does not fit the present situation and the condescension about 'learning opportunities' is not warranted.
You're still arguing against a point I said explicitly was not mine. I won't presume to speak for you or why you're "not getting the vibe", but I can say with authority that it is the wrong vibe and that you have misunderstood.
I understand the argument, I just disagree with the premise that the OP was specifically anxious about not being seen as gay (though maybe they are in other contexts, I don't know) or that in context being gay is presented as an insult. The premise is projection and/or mind reading in this particular case.
More generally, cynicism about diversity points doesn't automatically mean disagreeing with the validity of LGBT or non-LGBT identity, just the validity of the corporate approach to that identity.
And I think the fact that "prove me wrong" was included the first time, that Velc (making the same misinterpretation you did) thought it was "snide" to insinuate that the OP was gay, and that you jumped in to a thread seven comments down to tell me that you were "irritated" that I was calling the OP "homophobic" puts the lie to that.
No, all three of you are clearly bothered by the idea that someone would be incorrectly identified. Identity matters to all three of you. All I'm asking is that you recognize that it matters to other people too, like for example the DOE grant reviewers.
There’s no way your being sincere. Genuine question, are you being inflammatory online for attention?
At no point have any of us indicated that we care about misidentification. The original comment had to imply he was straight in order for his point to make sense. His point being anyone can lie about their identity for personal gain if that opportunity presents itself. That is the only point that was being made.
I can obviously only speak for myself, but identity doesn’t matter to me one bit. If I need to lie and say I’m gay on a form to achieve something I otherwise wouldn’t, I will do so. I also don’t care if that means people actually think I’m gay. They might be shocked when they see me with my wife though.
he has to make it clear he's not actually gay because that's core to his point, which is anybody can claim it. obviously irl he's not gonna fill out the diversity section with "i'm gay (not actually lmaoo)".
Requiring diversity doesn't really solve the problem. Now instead of a small group of rich white people living in the same neighborhoods and going to the same parties and keeping the funding and opportunities away from the rest of the unwashed masses it will be a small group of mixed races of people doing the same.
The ultimate issue is the cronyism of Science.
This reminds me of the fact that 80% of new hire professorships already come from only 20% of schools.
Anything that is regulated by the government tends towards cronyism instead of competence over time because they have an endless flow of taxpayer money so no competence is needed to keep the money flowing.
Remember another fact: if you cannot get a job or go to the university, that's an opportunity to start a business or go on a B2B/freelancing contract. And smart people are the ones who should do it.
Easier said than done but pressure and needs lead to innovation.
Well, it definitely makes sense to hire more Chinese speakers in science because Xi Jinping is not hiring scientists based on their woke intersectional categories and before long Mandarin will replace English as the language of opportunity.
I would like to share how I've seen those policies impact people working in the DOE complex. Those policies are referred to as DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) usually, because we love our three letter acronyms. Anyway, here my experience:
- I have seen the same woman get invited to countless hiring panels, as hiring panels need to be "diverse". Hiring panels are multi-hour endeavors and take away from her productive time, but she is afraid to say no as she feels she'd be contributing to an inequitable workplace otherwise.
- I have seen a black woman invited to a hiring panel and when it came to ask the "DEI question" (to check for a commitment to DEI in an applicant), all of the eyes in the room were on her, her being the only "diverse" person in a room with people of four ethnicities.
- I have seen a white man close to retirement afraid to ask questions about the diversity initiatives as he was afraid to be labelled a certain way and was "not willing to take the risk of repercussion".
- I have seen DEI informally used to justify hires, as the hires had the right gender and/or skin color and supervisors get evaluated on their commitment to DEI on the yearly performance review.
- I have been asked to acknowledge my "white privilege" in a DEI seminar. Attendance to those seminars is not required. At the same time there is a minimum threshold for hours spent on DEI activities on the yearly performance review.
- I have heard of a case at another national lab where white male employees were asked to "[...] recite a series of "white privilege statements" and "male privilege statements." It concluded with its white male participants writing letters of apology to marginalized people whom they may have harmed" . After an employee protested, his protest was taken as a lack of commitment to DEI. This got picked up by right wing media and the Trump white house and was used to justify a, since retracted, executive order banning such trainings [1] [2].
- I personally have been asked to acknowledge that "Being antiracist is different for white people than it is for people of color. For white people, being antiracist evolves with their racial identity development. They must acknowledge and understand their privilege, work to change their internalized racism, and interrupt racism when they see it. For people of color, it means recognizing how race and racism have been internalized, and whether it has been applied to other people of color." [3]
- I have been called a "plantation owner" by a colleague because I did not support the DEI initiatives in the form that they were being taught.
- I have seen people victimizing themselves and ascribing behavior of colleagues towards them to their own gender or skin color. I had experienced similar behavior in my career as a white male and now attribute it to things I needed to learn when dealing with people.
What I am trying to say is that whatever the intent of those policies is, this is not how they are being used in practice. They are used as a tool to exert power over people that do not share the same worldview, which in my humble opinion goes against the spirit of inclusion. For me the point of diversity and inclusion is to foster a workplace in which people feel included in conversations and their diverse opinions are being heard, with the goal to get better results out of people and not leave untapped potential on the table. I object to being ascribed attributes to based on the color of my skin. This is not how I treat people and I would prefer to not be treated that way.
I also believe that teaching people that how they are being treated is solely because of their skin color or gender leads to self-victimization, which takes away their power and agenda and leads to suboptimal outcomes for the individual.
There are a lot of assumptions being made about my person at my workplace. It is important for me to mention that I am an immigrant. I am white and I am male, but I did not grow up in this country. I constantly and repeatedly feel my lived experience being discredited. I am being shoved into a category based on my skin color by people that can not imagine that there might be differences in culture and worldview despite me being white, just so that they can feel morally superior. Please do apologize this emotional outburst after an overly long rant, but I an assure you that this is not some academic exercise to me.
At least half of your bulleted list is actionable. Your lab should have an employee concerns program that accepts anonymous input, but if they don't the DOE certainly does: https://www.energy.gov/ehss/doe-employee-concerns-program
Specifically it should not be possible to 'informally justify' a hire; at the very least this is a contract violation.
Well written. You're not alone. There seems to be no good platform upon which to fight back. Trumpism has taken the other side of this issue, but that side is poisoned by fascism, (real) racism, ignorance and the malignance that is Trump himself. The left has potent messaging and branding power - what are you going to say, that you're against diversity? The phrase "men's rights advocate" has been coopted to mean antifeminist. The actual words men and whites can use to fight for our rights are literally taken from us, even as they redefine the conflict as being about gender and race. It's an extraordinary level of dehumanization, and I fear that many moderates are either unaware or if they are aware, rationally afraid to speak out.
Our laws, public and private, should make no reference to gender, race, religion, or sexual preference. Hiring should be done on merit. And this is now the "racist" position!
The DEI narrative is angry, retributive. It says some groups have victimized others (especially whites enslaving blacks and men controlling women) for so long that mere equality under the law isn't enough. This seems taken as axiomatic, obvious, and just. But this is the outcome of a court case against white people, held in someone else's mind and the defendants had no say. This court's ruling is tantamount to a religious belief, because it cannot be challenged or appealed on any basis, and in fact all challenges are treated as further evidence in favor of the ruling, and evidence that the challenger deserves extra punishment, up to and including ostracism.
This trend must be fought by anyone who cares about justice and liberty. Musk called it a "woke mind virus" and he's right, and we need some antivirals, stat.
Thank you, those things have been weighing on me, mostly because I feel powerless to a degree. When I can keep my spirits up, I try approach the things by asking questions in small groups and see change bit by bit. Which seems like an uphill battle, pitted against the mindless wheels of bureaucracy, as someone else here put it, but from time to time and with compassion people (me included) can see the standpoint of others better. It takes time. But much like the "solution" to racism can't be anti-racism, the "solution" to woke can't be anti-woke. We probably all just need a hug.
We definitely all need a hug! The left is driven by anger over the past; the right is driven by fear over the future. And humans are always at their worst when they are angry and afraid. A little faith, a little hope, would go a long way right now.
Nice of you to notice that Trump is not a bigot. Unlike the other side. An ass. Yes. But he did more for lifting up all ethnic groups then any government mandated racism / sexism has ever done.
Did he though? I mean, I get that he called COVID-19 the kung fu flu... but that was more directed towards China and suggesting that they were responsible, meaning their government. I guess he could have consistently clarified that it was directed towards the Chinese government, but I don't know if he bears the brunt of responsibility of dumb people that think China meant all Asians and to not be able to understand the distinction between their government and people.
I don't think the Democrats get the same kind of flack from criticizing China without spelling out that they are referring to the government and policies.
The kind of people who are swayed by racist rhetoric don't care about the difference. They get a notion to go out and attack the target ethnicity and find the nearest brown person.
Meanwhile, big tech is gentrifying Durham, people of color are being pushed out, and these companies keep plastering signs everywhere about how they stand for diversity and inclusion.
Science is science. Leave it the fuck alone. Give everyone equal opportunity, and train them to become the best damn scientists they can be. Then give out grants.