It's unfortunately tough to have a discussion about this too. Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person. Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it. I was attending a JEDI workshop as a grad student to get a diversity certificate at the time, and the facilitator only reacted with disgust, and we never honestly discussed it.
The suspicion is that inclusion of these diversity statements in the hiring process is a way to stealthily discriminate on the basis of race when it is ostensibly illegal to do so.
I'm unfamiliar with US colleges, but could this just be a scheme to allow wealthy or well connected people to get into positions without the grades part? It would otherwise be pretty easy to show unjust discrimination if it were only grades being considered, but an applicant's 'diversity score' could mean anything, and is arbitrary on purpose to justify approving just about anybody.
Agreed, much like the "personality score" that Harvard notoriously used to the detriment of Asian applicants. It could very well also be that the children of wealthy donors just happen to have good personalities.
Prop 209 bans racial discrimination, but UC does it in hiring anyway through a number of means. For example, although Prop 209 bans taking race into account in the hiring decision, it doesn't ban taking it into account in earlier phases, like preparation of shortlists. If a department's shortlist for hiring a professor is found to have a bad proportion of under-represented minorities, the department can be punished by informal means such as being denied future hires. There are several other tricks that the administration does to promote race-based hiring and admissions, with the overall effect that Prop 209 is nullified through policies that are never put into writing.
Because it was used to achieve diversity goals, and 209 prevents that. Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies). Whether or not this is the right way to go about it is indeed a split issue evidenced by the 57/43 2020 vote and 55/45 vote that passed the original 96 proposition.
> Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies).
Reparations would at least be a coherent policy. But Prop 16 proponents also want the policies to favor Latinos, who given the demographics of California would by far be the primary beneficiary of such policies. But Latinos enjoy similar income mobility to whites. Favoring Latinos over whites isn’t “reparations” but just straight up racial discrimination. Ironically, Prop 16 was voted down in every single Latino-majority county in the state.
Ya, this is why I gave myself the out by saying it’s a divisive topic- a lot would be solved by having specifics for reparation laid out and a deadline for when such would end, but such a policy is likely to have so much against it (too much v not enough, general dissident for giving away money, whether or not it would even be legal on the basis of discrimination) that proxy bills that move the needle (somewhat) with (somewhat) negative side-effects are what we end up with.
If you’re going to discriminate based on skin color, it seems to me that a narrower policy that applies to the 6% of California that’s black would be an easier sell than a broader policy that ropes in the additional 40% that are Latino.
I think there’s a simpler explanation: most of the people behind Prop 16 are racist. Their only knowledge of race is the black-white dichotomy and they categorize Latinos as black for political purposes because that's the only framework they have for thinking about people with dark skin.
> Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies).
Does anyone actually check whether recipients of these de facto reparation actually have been affected by any of that? As far as I can tell, nobody does, because nobody cares, it’s literally just based on the skin color.
The loss in generational wealth is effectively based on skin color. For example, in the 1930's, the Home Owner's Loan Corp. mapped out and literally redlined black areas, making it harder for homes to be bought and sold without paying extra in interest[0]. From Wikipedia[1]:
> The effects of redlining, as noted in HOLC maps, endures to the present time. A study released in 2018 found that 74 percent of neighborhoods that HOLC graded as high-risk or "hazardous" are low-to-moderate income neighborhoods today, while 64 percent of the neighborhoods graded "hazardous" are minority neighborhoods today. “It’s as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty,” said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.
The linked page[0] goes into more detail about how disastrous this was and the impact on wealth it has to this day. Considering how neighborhoods were even less integrated then than they are now, it's safe to say the correlation of redlining to skin color was very high.
> The loss in generational wealth is effectively based on skin color.
For many black skinned people in America, sure. For all? Certainly not. There are millions of African immigrants and their descendants in America, who have not experienced any of this. Does anyone bother to differentiate them from the American descendants of slaves? No, it really is all about skin color.
Except that some of the ethnic groups (Asian Americans) that are being discriminated against by this policy were also discriminated against by redlining back then.
>I'm unfamiliar with US colleges, but could this just be a scheme to allow wealthy or well connected people to get into positions without the grades part?
The "grades part"?
We are talking about academic positions here, not student applications.
It is not a suspicion, as suspicion would indicate there is a chance discrimination might not be happening; when d&i literally is discrimination, by definition.
It seems like you are expected, as a staff member in a position to influence the diversity of your workplace and of the students whose educational experience you exercise power over, to do so in a manner consciences of issues of diversity, not even just in general, but in the specific context of your job.
I mean, just for instance, a low '1' rank is described as, among other things: (*my emphasis*)
> Defines diversity only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities, but doesn’t discuss gender or ethnicity/race. Discusses diversity in vague terms or platitudes. Does not provide any evidence of having informed themselves about diversity. *May discount the importance of diversity.*
I mean - yeah, I wouldn't want someone who fits that description being in charge of my education, or my kid's education - I wouldn't even want to be around a coworker who fits that description. I'm not even sure how well it would work trying to be friends with someone like that - I mean, in this day and age? How could you possibly excuse being so irresponsibly underinformed of such an important issue?
Compare that to a high '5' rank: (again *my emphasis*)
> Clear knowledge of experience with, and interest in dimensions of diversity that result from having URM identities. This understanding can result from personal experiences *as well as an investment in learning about the URM experiences of those with identities different from their own* ... Comfort discussing diversity-related issues (including distinctions and connections between diversity, equity, and inclusion), both in writing, and in a job talk session and one-on-one meetings with students, staff, and faculty.
I mean - that sounds really good doesn't it? Why shouldn't that skill set make someone a more attractive candidate to hire? Isn't that all good stuff that we would all benefit from more people being well-versed in? Doesn't demonstrating that well-versedness indicate a willingness to put the work in, as required to help actively oppose systemic oppression and bigotry? (as opposed to merely paying lip service to an ideal?)
I don't know a single person who has anything genuinely thoughtful or insightful to say on these topics that I would describe as "comfortable" discussing them in the current environment.
You'd have to be exceedingly naive to feel like you can include any amount of nuance into the prevailing narrative, let alone push back against it, without opening yourself up to a slew of mendacious attacks on your character. In many places you can, but within academia or certain corners of the media it's downright risky. There seems to be a rotating example of the day of poorly informed and hyper-reactive school administrators coming down hard on faculty based on nothing at all. Like most recently, the thing with the images of Muhammad being shown in an Islamic history seminar with warnings included in the syllabus and before the lecture being attacked as "Islamophobic."
Nobody is ever comfortable talking about this stuff unless they're up on the current jargon and issues and willing to parrot whatever the approved dogmas and shibboleths of the moment happen to be.
And yet plenty of people ranked high enough that they were hired. Just because you and the people you know wouldn’t have qualified, doesn’t meant that the qualification is unworthy.
I don’t personally know a single union master craftsman carpenter, but I have no problem acknowledging their existence, or their market value to employers. Why should this skill set be any different?
Yes all of the problems you mention are real - so why should an employer not specifically look to hire individuals who are equipped to face them? Like seriously, in what other industry would you protest the necessity of being conversant in applicable jargon? If I walk into a technical interview, and they ask me to use a ternary statement to assign an enum value to a constant based on whether the result of performing a spread operation on a collection of tuples yadda yadda yadda… do you really think my smug “I don’t keep up on shibboleths and dogma” is going to make me look like an appealing candidate?
They’re asking that applicants demonstrate their awareness of the current lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression. Why should lack of awareness and lack of ability or willingness to engage with these issues be attractive when hiring? these are important issues, the handling of which are essential to the continued effort to reverse the effects of bigotry in our country. You might not want to do the work yourself, but that doesn’t mean the work doesn’t need to be done, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who are much better qualified than you and I to do it.
> They’re asking that applicants demonstrate their awareness of the current lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression.
Because it's not the lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression. It's the lay of the land as perceived by a clade of under-qualified and unaware administrative functionaries. These people are operating off vibes and public outcry, not any research or evidence backed understanding of history or sociology or policy analysis. The images of Muhammad example is a perfect case because that's exactly what happened. The DEI initiatives were used as a cudgel by the most extreme elements of Islamic movements to impinge on the academic freedom of the professor, and they just dressed up their highly conservative point of view in DEI jargon to manipulate the administration into taking action against her. But all the Muslims who did not agree with that perspective, as well as most scholars of Islamic history, had way more nuanced perspectives on the issue that agreed with the professor. This is basically just an instrument for the administration to erode worker power among an already beleaguered and exploited labor force.
It's also not really germane to most of their disciplines. It would be like asking a mathematician about their knowledge of epidemiology during the COVID pandemic. Why would I expect that of a mathematician? I expect them to do math and to follow whatever directives the public health experts tell them to.
I don't actually think conscripting random people whose core expertise is not policy or equity into doing bootleg equity initiatives are actually going to result in very good policies or a very accurate understanding of equity or diversity issues. I think what it actually ends up getting you is more people who operate off vibes and truthiness they picked up from social media instead.
The issue isn't that people care about diversity or equity, the issue is that this is done in such ham-fisted, lazy, and counterproductive ways. This all suggests they don't care enough about the thing in itself, they care about showing off that they're doing something so everything just revolves around optics instead of outcomes.
I've got opinions about the Muhamad picture incident, but just to check, we're talking about the one at Hamline University, right?
As to whether it's germane to their disciplines - my understanding is that it's germane because of the position they are in as educators, as employees of educational institutions, not because of their particular discipline. Of course you don't need to need to know anything about the modern concept of diversity to be a mathematician - you need that concept to be an effective teacher. Every one of those people in that class room is a whole person, with an entire life leading up to that day of attendance - "Why would I expect that of a mathematician?" - because you should expect that of everyone, but especially of people in positions of power, who have the ability to either reinforce or disrupt systems of oppression. That's the angle.
Me too - but crucially, that isn’t the way the world is right now. That’s what this criteria is about - not just viewing race as irrelevant, but being aware of all the unjust ways in which race has been made to be relevant, specifically so you know how to work to reverse that racist element. The thing about systemic racism is that it persists even after the founding racists are long gone - it’s self-perpetuating. It requires hard work and determination to dismantle.
It’s essentially the argument against “I don’t see colour” - the problem is that modern racists and the legacy of racism persists whether you see colour or not, and the targets of systemic oppression continue to experience repercussions whether you personally target them or not.
In other words, they don’t want employees to simply opt out of racism - that’s comparatively easy. They want employees to actively work against racism. That’s harder, and more worthy, and in my opinion worth actively seeking in new hires, especially in areas like education, politics, health and social services, and real estate that have an outsized impact on the accessibility of the American dream.
It’s not asking employees to pass a test to prove they’re not racist - it’s asking employees to be actively equipped to fight racism as part of their job description. Think of it like being hired for a UX/UI position - are you educated on Dark Patterns in user flows, and can you show experience in identifying and reversing them?
My feeling is the diversity statement would not be a good place to state your position on the controversy, so much as it would be a good place to demonstrate your understanding of the controversy itself. Your comment comes off as flippant dismissal, which I think we both know would not be received well.
I’m willing to bet 99% of the people commenting on this thread have never read a single diversity statement, let alone dozens. I’ve read many, and showing a basic understanding of the controversies and struggles is a good example of what you should do in a diversity statement. The high rate of rejections here come from people who don’t want to even think about diversity, and just want to do their research project. They write sarcastic, flippant, unserious and uninformed essays.
Unfortunately for them, the job includes teaching a diverse classroom, so applicants who don’t give serious consideration on how they will do a critical aspect of the job, or even what are the salient issues, are rejected. This is true of any job.
The opinion piece you cited made the mistake of citing its source.
It misrepresents what happened at Cal. Candidates were not rejected on the basis of their statement, which was merely one factor in scoring the 800+ candidates they interviewed.
> A total of 993 applications were received, of which 893 met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a first review and evaluated candidates based solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only candidates that met a high standard in this area were advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to 214 for serious consideration.
What was misrepresented? "Evaluated solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion [sic]" is not quite the same as evaluated solely on their diversity statement, but it doesn't seem too far off the mark. Aside from the candidates' diversity statement, how would the bureaucrats evaluate their "contribution to diversity, equity, and inclusion"?
As far as the effect on applicant demographics, here's the stats before the diversity evaluation / After diversity evaluation:
I note nothing in there about Rich / Poor or anything similar.
It's interesting (by which I mean utterly unsurprising and completely typical but in a revealing way) that social class and money are not considered for "diversity" and are, in fact, rather pointedly ignored. This debunks the whole thing, but I'm sure the proponents will be incapable of understanding why.
> The candidates were reviewed based on their "contributions to diversity, equity, etc." They were not reviewed based on their DEI statements.
And what does this mean, besides reviewing their DEI statements? We know that review of diversity statements are one component of this - you keep alluding to the notion that there's more to it than that, but neglect to actually provide any such example of how the universities measured this contribution besides their diversity statement.
> This is a fancy way of saying that they used affirmative action to advanced African American, Hispanic, and Native American candidates.
This is illegal in California. This is why people speculate that the review of diversity statements is a smokescreen for universities to illegally discriminate on the basis of protected classes.
> you keep alluding to the notion that there's more to it than that, but neglect to actually provide any such example of how the universities measured this contribution besides their diversity statement.
Many ways. For one there’s an interview where such topics can be probed. For another there are various talks given, where candidates can expand on their DEI activities. Finally there are grant applications and grant activities which relate to DEI that can be evaluated.
Considering affirmative action is explicitly illegal in California, I would hope that it wouldn't be the case of candidates being advanced solely by race, and that the diversity statements are what is being considered the 'contribution' here, unless there are some loopholes in the law that I'm not aware of.
In California, affirmative action is only illegal with respect to university admissions (meaning students), not with respect to hiring.
Race-conscious hiring is allowed if it would increase under-represented minorities. Whether you agree, or disagree with this policy (which I think most of us do), it is nonetheless legal in California, and it is what happened at the UC schools mentioned in the opinion piece you cited.
Fun fact: Berkeley and UCLA each employ more conservative professors than most "conservative" schools do. But they employ real conservatives, not the modern snowflake conservatives that constantly portrays themselves as victims.
Not good. For one, it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race and gender. And second, contrary to what seems to men common belief, Asian and white people don't just have opportunities served up to them on a silver platter (in fact on the axis of gender, job opportunities have not only reached disparity but inverted: millennial and Gen Z women outperform their male counterparts). The academic job market could not be further from "innumerable additional opportunities."
This kind of comment serves as incredibly good ammunition for people looking to stir up racial resentment.
> in fact on the axis of gender, job opportunities have not only reached disparity but inverted: millennial and Gen Z women outperform their male counterparts
This is likely due to age. Things shift when women start having kids. What you observe is also true of childless women versus childless men of certain ages. It does not hold as broadly for women and men with children, in the same age range.
What you're referring to is the ongoing wage gap (women paid less than men) due to having time out to have kids.
The point being, women aren't paid less than men for no reason, just that they take time out to have children, that interruption is what leads to the pay gap.
> white and asian folks absolutely do have more opportunities than other racial groups, and that’s borne out over and over again, whenever people look into these kinds of things. If you look at academic outcomes, black, hispanic, native american groups are still substantially further behind than white and asian groups.
You haven't proven differential opportunity. You've only proven that some groups outperform other groups. You have not proven whether this is due to opportunities, discrimination, or hard work. Asian students, for example, spend more than 3x as much time studying as Black students.[1] Do you think there's a chance that this contributes to their higher representation at Caltech?
If your cultural group is substantially underrepresented in academia, why would you participate in academics? If you know the game is rigged against you, it’s perfectly reasonable not to play.
I wonder what black study rates would be if they were given the same chances as white and asian people are. Hopefully we’ll get there, but we’re still a long way off.
Indeed, Black Americans have suffered slavery and discrimination after emancipation. But is that the primary cause of the continued underperformance of African Americans into the 21st century? Plenty of peoples have come to America dispossessed, only to thrive and even exceed the average fortunes of white Americans - such as Cuban Americans like myself, Jewish people, and Asian Americans. African immigrants similarly excel, despite outwardly appearing the same as American born Black people. The difference is that we don't disempower these cultures by giving them lowered expectations: my parents never told me I should expect unequal treatment on account of my Latin heritage and I'd be insulted by anyone who would.
At this point, I doubt we'll make much progress toward resolving disparities in Black achievement without fostering equal investment in education in those communities. So long as Black students spend on average about half and one third as much time on homework as compared to white and Asian students respectively [1] the gaps academic performance aren't going anywhere. We can try to paper these over with more permissive expectations for admitting underrepresented students, but that has knock on effects: chiefly students admitted on account of affirmative action are less likely to major in STEM and more likely to drop out [2]. In this regard, affirmative action exacerbates underrepresentation in employment sectors as students that want to major in STEM are mismatched and change majors to graduate.
I'm honestly struggling to figure out how you think anyone who disapproves of racial discrimination is ignorant of slavery and the struggle for civil rights. Is your worldview really so narrow that you assume anyone who disapproves of racial discrimination is ignorant of slavery and anti-Black discrimination?
You keep citing this "hours of study" idea like I haven't already addressed it; when you see academic effort squashed by racism, it's no wonder at all that you stop studying. Fix racism in academia, fix the study gap, it's that simple.
Affirmative action does not exacerbate underrepresentation in employment sectors at all; if anything it improves representation, as more minority students are given a chance at completing college, which changes the makeup of eligible employees towards a more equitable mixture.
And I feel the need to remind you of slavery as you do seem wholly ignorant of its existence and further relevance to this topic. My citations are not generic "Slavery existed" citations, they're "slavery existed and to this very day has a gigantic impact on black people in academia. citations.
You are wrong, and harmfully so. You can continue to be wrong, but as long as you are, you also continue to be harmful.
> Fix racism in academia, fix the study gap, it's that simple.
If this were the case, the study gap would have disappeared decades ago. But it persists nonetheless. On second thought, you're probably right but not in the way you think: racial discrimination creates a lowered expectations for underrepresented groups and they put in effort accordingly.
> Affirmative action does not exacerbate underrepresentation in employment sectors at all; if anything it improves representation, as more minority students are given a chance at completing college, which changes the makeup of eligible employees towards a more equitable mixture.
Did you read the paper I linked? Probably not given that you responded 6 minutes after I posted the comment. Racial discrimination does increase representation, but it shifts the concentration of affected groups out of STEM and into less demanding majors. Before you try to blame this on racism inside the university, understand that the likelihood for students to graduate in STEM is the same across all races for the same level of academic preparedness. An Asian, white, Black, etc. student with 700s on their SAT are equally likely to graduate in STEM, as are students with 600s and 500s. An Asian student and a Black student with 700s on their SAT are just as likely to graduate in STEM. A white and Black student with 500s are less likely to graduate than the former two, but equally likely relative to each other. But due to affirmative action, there's a considerably greater share of black students in the latter situation. Worse yet, since these students often try and fail to graduate in their preferred field they take longer to graduate and come away with more student debt.
> You are wrong, and harmfully so. You can continue to be wrong, but as long as you are, you also continue to be harmful.
And I would say the exact same thing to you. You're wrong and harmfully so. The soft bigotry of low expectations is more subtle, but more insidious. Instead of pushing underrepresented students to invest more time into a academics and compete with their peers as equals, you're advocating that we simply lower standards. You can continue to be wrong, but as long as you are, you also continue to be harmful.
> Not only are you wrong, you're alone. Nearly nobody agrees with you who has worked in this space, the consensus is not on your side. Which is good for me and the push for equity, but is tiresome, cumbersome, and harmful in the meantime.
I find it odd that you don't even know the views of the people you're supposedly supporting. Nearly two thirds of Black people disagree with you. Yet you claim I'm alone in my views despite being in agreement with the majority of Black Americans.
> I always find it funny when people talk about "lowered expectations" Do you realize what you reveal about your own views when you say that? You're telling the world how you see minority groups as "lesser";
I agree: that's exactly why racial discrimination is counterproductive. Do you not see the message you're sending when you expect an Asian student to be in the top 5% and a Black student to be in the top 50% for the same role? Do proponents of affirmative action realize what this says about their views on Black people? And yes, discrimination of this magnitude are what universities are applying: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
> Affirmative action does not exacerbate underrepresentation in employment sectors at all; if anything it improves representation, as more minority students are given a chance at completing college, which changes the makeup of eligible employees towards a more equitable mixture.
It creates mismatch. The result is predictable. The "beneficiaries" of affirmative action have lower GPAs and are less likely to complete STEM majors because they are outmatched by students for whom the admissions bar was not bent.
Does it increase representation? At a point in time, yes. But if the goal is to get folks into the executive suite, affirmative action may actually be a step backward.
No one denies that bad things were done to African Americans. We're trying to figure out what slavery or Jim Crow has to do with whether a Black student in 2023 decides to study or not.
My people have been oppressed for centuries. Most people come from people that have been oppressed for centuries. It doesn't factor into how much I study.
You should check out John McWhorter, who has a very different take on what it is to grow up Black these days. I have no idea whether you're Black, or how old you are. But the characterization you give is out of step with what a lot of people perceive. Folks like John find these sort of descriptions borderline offensive. Also demoralizing to Black kids, who shouldn't be told that the world is more awful than it actually is.
Except hard work will help you succeed academically if you're black. In fact, it'll help you a lot more than if you're Asian or white. A Black applicant in the top 9th decile academically has over 50% chance of being admitted to Harvard, as compared to under 10% for an Asian student with the same academic achievement: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
If what you are saying were true we should be seeing Asians spending the least time studying and Black students studying hard. But your hypothesis is not only untrue, it's the opposite of what we actually observe.
Yeah but getting to that level despite all of the shit holding black people (and other minority groups) back is insanely hard. So yeah, once you're there it probably gets a bit easier, but getting there is nearly impossible.
What we do see are the systemic effects of an entire society normalizing a whole host of racist behaviors, including trying to play the struggle Olympics by comparing one racial group (who have a whole different set of issues) to another.
Comparing racial groups' admissions prospects isn't racist. It's just inconvenient to your narrative that Black students aren't rewarded by academic success because it so starkly demonstrates that it's not only untrue, but the opposite of true. A Black student needs to be squarely in the middle of the pack to have the same admissions chances as an Asian student in the top 10%. I'm baffled as to how you can convince yourself that Black students aren't rewarded for academic success - it's greater reward for the same level of academic success.
Your who premise that Black students are not rewarded for academic success - which other commenters asked you to substantiate and you refused [1] - is untrue, and you've resorted to accusations of racism instead of trying to argue your point.
I didn't say it was racism, I said it was bad logic. If there is an issue giving black people opportunities, it makes no sense to only measure the black people who already find their way into success despite the hurdles.
That literally does not make sense logically.
And I didn't refuse to do shit, I literally gave a dozen sources that all support my claim that black people have a whole host of things working against them when it comes to performing well academically. I disagreed that I haven't "proven" what I claimed when I very clearly and undeniably did exactly that.
What evidence do you have that hard work won't help you succeed academically today? Plenty of minority students have succeeded in academics through hard work. And how is that Asians managed to avoid this problem as a group? They didn't face any discriminitation?
And my grandparents either didn't live within 1,000 miles of me or died before the 3rd grade. Yet I learned algebra all the same.
Your links don't actually substantiate the claim that you're making. That's why people keep asking you to substantiate the claims that you're making about lower reward for the same level of academic success, and why your continuous referral back to these links is pointless. And now you're resorting to flagging comments because you can't refute them.
If my comments are so toxic, the correct course of action as per the HN guidelines is to not respond - which you have evidently not done.
> I didn't once call anyone here a racist person.
Yes, you did, here [1]
> What we do see are the systemic effects of an entire society normalizing a whole host of racist behaviors, including trying to play the struggle Olympics by comparing one racial group (who have a whole different set of issues) to another.
You wrote this in response to my comparison of Asian and Black admission rates, in response to your claim that Black people are not rewarded for academic success. In your response explicitly called the comparison of racial groups racist. Sure, you didn't call me racist. You just called what I did in the previous comment racist - as though I can't connect the dots.
The whole point of this thread is that black kids don't try to study because of past racism.
You now want to tell black kids that everything's shit so there's no point trying, then point to the inevitable result of that lack of effort as racism? Are you not the racist?
Society? You tell me. They aren't getting the grades because they aren't studying. They aren't studying because.....?
You atleast appear to support this 'truth' telling, regardless of the self fulfilling outcome.
Sorry what? That's not how affirmative action works at all, you have to be qualified for a given spot, the whole point is that there are way too many qualified candidates as it is.
Go commented:
> Asian students, for example, spend more than 3x as much time studying as Black students.[1] Do you think there's a chance that this contributes to their higher representation at Caltech?
To which you replied:
>If your cultural group is substantially underrepresented in academia, why would you participate in academics? If you know the game is rigged against you, it’s perfectly reasonable not to play...
So are they expected to 'play the game' or not?
Define qualified? If a get an E (technically a pass) am I 'qualified' to the same extent as someone with an A?
If I get my basic baseball proficiency badge does that allow me to play against the best baseballers the world has to offer? Just because of my race?
Further. You do understand the future danger of all this? If I'm looking to hire graduates and I know the black kids had an easier time getting in. If I want the best im better off not looking at the black kids. Their piece of paper is worth less.
Plus you're infantalising them. They should be getting there on their own merits. If they aren't doing the work to get the grades, that issue should be addressed, not papered over.
Black kids didn't have an easier time getting in, it's a lot harder for a black person to get to the place where they're even being considered for a prestigious college than it is for you to get to that place.
If you see a black person with an education from an institute like Harvard, you should think about the additional work they had to do to get there.
And by the way, those kids get the grades necessary to attend these schools. Why would you presume they don't?
But the whole point is that others have been putting in more effort thus the better outcomes.
Your position is/was that black kids put in less effort because racism.
So if black kids are putting in less effort because racism how can you then say they're putting in more work.
If they're trying and not getting in then that's something universities should be doing something about. If they aren't putting in the work universities shouldn't just be expected to accept lower grades. And the solution lies elsewhere.
You can't have it both ways. Either theres no point trying because the game is rigged. Or they're putting in more effort to get to the same position. If the latter then challenge the GPs assertion, instead of tacitly accepting it by saying that black kids aren't trying.
If you actually read the thread we are in, the reply this is under, which I have requoted, you will see this is on relation to education and study time.
Are you claiming revising for an exam doesn't lead to better outcomes?
> Yes good, because white and asian folks absolutely do have more opportunities than other racial groups, and that’s borne out over and over again, whenever people look into these kinds of things. If you look at academic outcomes, black, hispanic, native american groups are still substantially further behind than white and asian groups.
Group A outperforming Group B does not mean that Group A is being given unfair opportunities. It certainly doesn't justify intentionally, and illegally, giving Group B undeserved opportunities to the detriment of Group A.
It absolutely does mean that group A is being given more opportunities than group B when you realize there is no difference biologically between group A and group B.
Yes, in a world where those two groups have the exact same make up, it would mean that. That's not true at all in this context. There are differences between racial groups. No one is shocked and appalled that Jewish people are hugely over represented as Nobel prize winners, or that black people are wildly over represented in professional sports. It's difficult to disentangle what is just cultural impact, but they're patterns that a child could identify.
If you work from a false premise, you end up with false results. The motivation behind the desire to believe that everyone is equally capable at everything is a good one, and individuals should be treated as if they have equal potential regardless of their immutable characteristics. It would be great if all groups were great at everything. If it were possible, I would make it so. However, falling prey to treating "ought" as "is" leads to pathological behaviors, which is exactly what is happening to the well-intentioned members of this movement.
This is not true, genetically, and if you believe there is, that's a real problem for you.
As for the differences in these communities as a result of differing treatment by others, you're damn right there are differences, and to the degree that those differences are caused by discrimination and hatred (and it's a high degree), that's exactly what we're trying to slowly improve.
The problem with your egalitarian vision is that not everyone starts out on the same level, and if you ignore the systemic ways people are held back, you ruin any shot you might have at getting the end goal you seem to want, which seems to be "may the best person win".
We all want that end result, but until you deal with reality, that's never going to happen.
And why do those cultural differences exist? What bonds "black people" together in American culture, despite coming from a whole host of diverse places that otherwise share little to no culture amongst one another?
>...ways of using the statements by reading them _prior_ to any other components of the application, scoring them using a rubric of their choice, and deciding which applicants to consider further using the entirety of the application. Exercising their discretion, faculty on some committees elected to move most applicants forward, while others (especially from the large colleges) preferred to continue with less than 50% of the original applicant pool.
So based solely on the DEI statement, some have rejected over 50% of applicants without taking the rest of the application into consideration.
In other words, UC Berkeley rejected 76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence or their ability to contribute to their field. As far as the university knew, these applicants could well have been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.
Welcome to the historical experience of numerous underprivileged people who were excluded through no fault of their own. But since DEI statements can be rewritten at any time, applicants are not stuck with the prospect of permanent exclusion.
I am not a fan of college administrators in general, nor of the heavy-handed bureaucratic approach described here. But administrators are looking for faculty who can produce more distinguished grads in the future, who might be 'the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk'. You could be an outstanding brain in your field, but if you're not interested in maximizing the search for undiscovered talent, are you likely to attract it to your school?
> Welcome to the historical experience of numerous underprivileged people who were excluded through no fault of their own.
Emphasis on historical. You have to make sure not to swing the pendulum too far, otherwise you'll just end up creating a new generation of aggrieved people. Especially if your actions are themselves illegal.
I think framing DEI policies and initiatives as unassailable is what scares people more than the policies and initiatives themselves.
Of course, many people would react negatively to someone saying flat-out “diversity is bad”, especially because people with those opinions tend to be coming from a place where that’s a toned-down version of more abhorrent views.
But, people with more measured criticisms of specific policies get lumped in with the first set. So because it’s very hard to say “there is a better way to do this” or “this may not have positive systemic effects” or “this does not seem relevant in the context it appears in”, there are few checks and balances, and you get these instances where it’s clumsily shoehorned into things because nobody dared disagree.
I think for many people, this bothers them more than any specific thing.
The way diversity is implemented is bad. It gives power to people on the basis that they are aggrieved and have a higher moral status than others in the same position. So why should we assume that once those people are in, they would voluntarily choose to surrender their own power and status which comes from allegedly being aggrieved?
The whole point of DEI was supposedly to "equalize" things so once you are a beneficiary of a DEI policy, you should no longer be able to claim victim status. In fact, once they get in, they argue for even more grievance policies, power, and special treatment. Often that is specifically what the job is meant to do. What is the real end result of this in particular for universities which are gateways to power? It's not surprising that universities are where this battle is being fought and not fast food or retail jobs.
I expect your diversity and their diversity are intrinsically different concepts. And I think it's a really important distinction to be made. You calling it artificial isn't adequate because what you deem artificial and what they have classified as diversity are more equivocal. And they have the framework to do the mental gymnastics to argue they're right until you're blue in the face, if any definition is concrete it must be theirs.
A lot of these "forward" ideas are undergirded by postmodernist ideology. I think this is interesting on two points, one being that class is almost unanimously ignored, and this was criticised by the communists of the era as being liable to divide the proletariat - and so it is. But also the deconstructivism and conception of language furnishes jointly a strange shibboleth and doublespeak which further promulgates this... Invisible enemy. Unironically, though, most of the social ills which are lambasted as systemic failures are products of class, itself a function of race but only coincidentally - the reality is these things are mostly independent in the US. But when you divide the the poor and the poor and the middle class and the middle class and the poor and the middle class, you get a rapidly deteriorating status quo for everyone.
But it also creates a disruptive interface: When you hear equity as someone who is not strictly apprised of the meaning it sounds good, as does diversity, but their definition lies outside the canon of the English language.
Equity, equ- equal... The implicit connotation of that word, even the definition equality of rights sounds noble to anyone that hears it. But that isn't what they're saying, what they're saying is give someone with an unquantifiable disadvantage (which may not exist at all), based singularly on outward identity, a step up. Nothing to do with legitimacy of hardship or their class, just blatant and racist, sexist, and sexual assumptions. Literally doling out extra credit for being a trans Asian.
And it's all really patronizing, it's all really racist and sexist. Most of all it's performative, and falls hard into Goodhart's Law. Protectionism is paternalistic, but patronizing people is just wanton disrespect towards someone's individual potential. I'm all for helping hands, but now when it isn't inclusive (another term they misuse) and fair.
> But that isn't what they're saying, what they're saying is give someone with an unquantifiable disadvantage (which may not exist at all), based singularly on outward identity, a step up.
That’s not what we are saying.
The DEI efforts at my university at least aren’t about giving disadvantaged people a step up, they’re about raising the bar for everyone, and making sure it’s not lowered for anyone.
In practice, what this means is expanding the applicant pool and not just considering applicants from the ivies. It turns out there are just as good candidates elsewhere, and they will apply to your program or job if you market it to them.
The end result is that you can have a diverse faculty and student body without compromising on quality at all.
Nothing about this process is patronizing, racist, or sexist. The main tool we use is to just not be lazy and out in the extra work to find good candidates. Because they are there. I’m guessing the “performative” aspect you are noticing would be places who don’t want to do the extra work but don’t want to seem like they’re doing nothing. But you can’t conclude that’s what everyone is doing based on your limited experience.
It’s just a new old boys network, except you get different types of infighting. Movements like this aren’t new and always burn out. Once the tribe in charge gets in trouble, it will move on to the next fad. 1990s diversity gave way to late 90s run everything like a business.
If you work in a huge bureaucracy like the University of California, if leaving isn’t practical, you just need to behave and hunker down and focus on what’s productive to you.
I'm not nearly as optmistic. This is bureaucratic entrenchment across many systems and will take a 'movement' to unseat.
The populist paradox is that most people probably disagree with this, but are not willing to stick their necks out, leaving it to those who have nothing left to loose aka the crazies who have populist leaders few of us want to support.
It's a bit like border policy, the vast majority of Americans don't want willy nilly open borders, and recognize that 'it's complicated' but it seems 'one side' doesn't have the tenacity to do much about it and their more radical elements kind of want 'de facto' open borders, but the people screaming about the problem and wanting to 'build a wall' are themselves to angry and radical, not a movement regular people want to be supportive of.
We need calmer heads to prevail.
It may be more possible now that Trump is gone, whatever you think of him he was a least 'polarizing' and put people in a tizzy.
Bureaucracy does whatever it's master wants. I've been acquainted with organizations where these sorts of bureaucracies get usurped by changes at the top. You'll get some variant of crazy, just with different target. It's sad and silly, but what can you do?
The border policy stuff is different. "No" is very simple and easy to understand. You can say "Hey Farmhand Bob, illegal aliens are taking good american jobs" and there's a visceral reaction to it. Never mind that Farmhand Bob's job depends on his boss hiring migrants to get the harvest in. Anything other than "no" is nuanced, and is easily shot down by reactionaries.
Identity bureaucracy is just tribal/sectarian politics.
I'm asking from a sincere position here, so I don't wish to come off sounding antagonistic, but could you explain why the statement "diversity is bad" is wrong?
From my own perspective, the idea of encouraging or endorsing something that hurts unity, cohesion, and understanding. I cannot think of a way in which diversity would not be a bad and damaging thing.
I have, of course, heard comparisons to things like species of dogs, "Mutts are healthier than purebreds", but people aren't dogs. Or the human immune system being able to fight of disease, "Being exposed to different diseases makes your immune system stronger", but people aren't diseases, either. It disturbs me when people are boiled down to those types of inhuman terms. Those types of analogies never really address the issue without comparing it to something that isn't the issue itself. It always seems to fall short. I've never heard of someone explain why encouraging intrinsic division wouldn't be a destructive thing.
I've heard some vague phrases like, "It's good to have different perspectives to appeal to different groups of people", but that seems to be a criticism against diversity, not encouragement for it. It seems to say that diversity is disunity; chaos. That it is a kind of confirmation that different groups do not understand each other at all, and can only communicate through some kind of manufactured means. It just seems like a position that isn't very well thought out.
Again, I hope it doesn't come off sounding some specific way. It seems like it's a topic that's easy to sound hateful on. I don't wish to seem such a way; I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at. It's like there's some core concept that's never been said out loud, and there's just been a lot of assumptions built off of that thing that was left unaddressed. I'd really like to understand what that inner thing is.
You are thinking very, very shallowly about this. Diversity has become a goal in many organisations because primarily (1) too much cohesion entails out-groups and that often means racism or other illegal and immoral attitudes and practices thrive, and that is a huge problem both for legal reasons and generally; and secondarily (2) too much cohesion means you aren’t exposed to enough different opinions.
You have apparently only considered reason (2). Your comment then runs the gauntlet of extreme reactions to the idea of diversity. It seems to be because you don’t understand that both cohesion and diversity sit somewhere in the middle of a priority order for most organisations. The only people who agree with where you appear to have placed cohesion in the priority order are the architects of 1930s fascism. The reason saying “diversity is bad” and all the other things you said (“Diversity is disunity. Chaos”) is wrong is because you sound like a fascist. I am not exaggerating. You absolutely do sound like one. That is a prime example of “bad systemic effects” as the comment above said; if you say stuff like this, your organisation will no longer be conducive to anything except violent political movements. You should, in swift order, reconsider how important cohesion is to you and any organisations you’re a part of.
Addendum: you did say you didn’t know how to ask this without sounding hateful. Fair. Pointing out the connection to hateful groups is still appropriate and necessary because the devotion to absolute cohesion was a huge part of what made fascism successful. Saying stuff like you did is a bad way for society to go, good people recognise it and rightly reject it vehemently. So your ideas about cohesion being always preferable to diversity are always going to get this reaction from most, and eventually your organisations will be filled with the remaining people who do agree with your comments, and those people are amenable to hate even if you were originally just trying to get some team spirit going. It is a bad path. So is making your university staff swear allegiance to ideology. The only way forward is a balance of cohesion and diversity.
I’m not sure it’s a smiley face moment for all of us, more just another day on the internet, but thinking about this on your own is good.
One more point to consider is that you might have a mistaken impression of how important idea (2) is in organisations’ views of diversity. Despite the primacy of idea (2) in framing the issue (as in, “diversity is strength” etc), organisations often care about (1) more because the harms from not enough diversity are so stark and obvious and measurable. The benefits of diversity are real, but the toxicity you get from too much cohesion is really dangerous, unproductive, damaging to a company’s hiring and retention ability, and makes your product unattractive if consumers hear about it. (I would cite Travis Kalanick’s tenure at Uber, where “cohesion” seems to have meant “being male”.) But you won’t hear companies talk about that danger, because it would sound like they already have a problem or that they are thinking about this purely in a liability sense or that they feel like they’re being forced to do it which seems like they don’t care. So everyone talks about the potential upside instead, which needs not be measurable in dollars or dramatic, but is regardless a good excuse to take action to avoid the dangers that do have a very concrete cost that these places have learned primarily through the real pain of having done it wrong and run into trouble.
It’s easy to lose sight of that when everyone talks about diversity in flowery terms, but remember this is the marketing-department-approved translation of a century of learnings through civil rights movements, political movements, legal reforms, huge lawsuits, spiralling company failures, and wars over this stuff, and it is all still lurking right there behind the flowery language.
It does not follow. Race itself (since you're using 20th century fascism, read: Nazi) is a singular aspect of diversity. Organization is a poor selection of term, too. Institution is better suited.
It doesn't matter how you mince it the only truly homogeneous populations are at-risk marginalized nomads. With that framed: you can find greedy, lecherous, exploitative, amoral or immoral slouches in every corner of the Earth regardless of race, you can equally find people that you'd invariably frame as noble, selfless, vulnerable understanding humanitarians... and we can fairly posit then, from every race, creed, region and religion you can pull from these pools any imaginable quantity of the human spectra - and I expect anyone else would, and they would elect people deliberately close to their own beliefs and goals because it's necessary to have some alignment within any large organization and especially a society. In fact there's something to be said for religion to affect this conversation, and it's that it permeated every early civilization - and one would rightly point out that's because values were made concrete and "objective".
Now I expect you didn't consider it, but there are a lot of groups that don't share your values. They feel very strongly, to the extent they would kill you and dismember you over it, some would just kill you, maybe torture you beforehand. I mean, that's really diverse is are those individuals you'd want in your institutions? I expect no. Likewise there is not necessarily some imminent moral concern that doesn't at least parallel that: some people don't want to be around other people - values collide because ultimately we live in a relativistic world.
The real problems you described can be chalked up to a few things:
The state: Monopoly on power, disempowers individuals, individuals relinquish their moral obligations including refusal to participate
Nucleated power: Institutions are supposed to act exemplars of behavior, instead they simply are exemplars and people follow, and then more follow suit. Suddenly the Third Reich is marching on Poland. Purpose and moral delegation is performed by institutions that are, due to human limitations, intrinsically unsuitable for the task. Obviously there is the element of controlling incalculable resources like every competing power in WWII had which emerges from this...
Limited options: Individuals and communities are unable to disband from their respective state apparatus e.g. secession due to the imminent threat of violence, retaliation and/or a complete lack of peaceable legislative or political option.
Scale: Dunbar's number, hypothetical maximum of about 150 people for functional human communities. When a neighborhood school in rural America doubles that easily, one is left to wonder how an institution deals with that, it's by mishandling every human it deals with. Catch-22's and C.S. Lewis's hell. People are abstracted into cattle (see Eichmann) or mechanisms in a greater machine, expected to go flawlessly whirring away without question or complaint at the throw of a lever.
It doesn't matter if my friend group is a contractile 10-man squad because we all came from different backgrounds and currently live entirely disparate lives. And we're from one of the most demographically and politically homogeneous states in the US and not one of us has similar views. We're irrelevant because everyone defers to the clueless state, for one, for two we're 10 out of a denominator of millions of hundreds of millions.
The problem is with institutions, and hierarchy, and bona fide power, and the concepts of property on which they're founded which again, circularly is a reference to the deference individuals must grant the state which makes it all fall into disproportion. Nazis couldn't work to found a kingdom without people to participate in their game.
I elected "institution" because there are a lot of voluntary organizations, but an institution is fundamental and intersections with them are inevitable. My friends, my [hypothetical] church, the workout classes organized by some nice lady, the food bank, salvation army... Individuals have mobility and they're able to reject or accept. Institutions your workplace and government - by dint of being necessitous - drastically reduces one's degrees of freedom, limits their mobility, and entraps them to varying extents. That's a real problem. If I don't like Nicaragua they can arbitrarily refuse me a Passport so I can't leave, forcing me to work at a sweatshop, and then the government can hold me at gunpoint to take some fraction of my infinitesimal income.
Anyways, there's different strokes for different folks and there's just as big of a proportion of any "minority group" in every corner of the world that would just as soon self-segregate so they can attend to their communities as there are people who want to live in "diverse" communities in accord with their values. And there's also a lot of performative white guilt bullshit from people who won't bend their ear to a black man, but will naively attempt to run to his "defense" at every opportunity. It's disrespectful.
I think you have failed spectacularly at understanding fascism. It was not only racial purity that they went for. That wasn’t even a thing in Italian fascism, it simply did conformity and allegiance to the state and took that to an extreme. Nazism used racial purity to exclude people from its cohesive in-group and enhance the cohesion that in-group had. It built an extremely cohesive structure that worked at every level to enforce itself. No aspect of life was not subject to this enforcement. You had to demonstrate cohesion everywhere you went. The power to control this was necessarily centralised; there had to be some figure outside the cohesive mass who was not subject to the cohesion enforcement regime, who could interpret the rest of the world and then direct the mass to respond etc. The same can be said of Stalin, and these ideas are all laid out explicitly in the communist “vanguard” doctrine too. The results are not only bad because of the racism, they are also bad because of the day-to-day experience of living under such a regime, the weakness that comes from relying on a single fallible leader to direct the cohesive mass, the waste in rejecting independent minds, the brain drain from smart people leaving, the brutality required to hold all of this together, and finally the destruction it enabled. All of that is true of organisations and “institutions” (a term that excludes companies, by the way!) but with all of the sliders scaled down and the potential harms a little lower because companies don’t have armies.
So yeah, mate, I am very aware that there are groups who would murder me for expressing the views I have on cohesion and diversity. Was that meant to be a threat or just an appeal to tribalism as a natural thing? Everything else you said is… You seem to be grappling with the idea that there are a lot of people in the world. I don’t really see a point emerging from it.
Fascism has been a catch all for "other" forever. Orwell, an expert wordsmith who was present at the time actually described this phenomena not only in terms of the fascist movements but also the Communist movements, crucially, if you read An Homage to Catalonia this actually caused a considerable deal of internal manipulation which was coordinated in such a way that foreign press promulgated [by Orwell's account] false stories.
It was really an economic classification wherein business was subordinated to an authoritarian government. And again to my point, hierarchy, institutions, power, and scale are what lead to the immense destructive forces witnessed in the early 20th century.
And by that logic I don't see a whole lot of distinction between the Axis and Allies - there was a difference in values but hardly one in architecture at the time. There was also the point of aggressors and aggressed which paints moral connotations.
And companies do have armies, really it's private property, but... Companies own all of the property that's valuable. Corporations in particular, which mind you do have a history of directly or indirectly leveraging government power, in some cases military or "intelligence". You don't need an army when you can threaten someone with global sanctions for attempting something like a sovereign default or violation of international IP law. There is no distinction between starving someone out and killing them in war, in fact, that's what war used to consist of. Siege the city and hold the walls, wait and watch as they starve to death and wallow in their own filth as disease creeps in.
Your last point is grasping at straws. You know as well as I do I wasn't specifying you, or your particular values. Stop parading legitimate diversity around as tribalism and painting it, self-righteously, as some inexorably evil idea. I can do the same with your naive globalist cosmopolitanism: whatever intrinsic real diversity does emerge, it's amalgamated into a uniform homogeneity because the elements within are pigeonholed, and expected to behave in a narrow band of "cosmopolitan acceptability". Isn't that what you don't want? One totally uniform population and a flat earth? Politically, nationally, racially, philosophicallt identical, because to me that is the logical conclusion.
Schismogenesis is a self-limiting principal and had ought to be embraced. It would be hard for a continuously dividing society to accrete enough power to do what the West did to the Americas, or colonialism or Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler or the Russian revolution... The scale is the important factor. And those dividing lines that we create in these nuanced differences in value are important by that nature. Some will fail, some will succeed. It's hardly any different than mitosis. Forbidding that from occuring is holding back evolution, isn't it? That was the whole proposition democracy was suppose to solve in the US - it was a laboratory for experimenting with... Everything, and yet the accretion, centralization, scale, and institutionalization has all but defeated that.
I think it would help if you visited a museum instead of reading Orwell dissecting wartime hysteria. That was written in 1944. All people had to go on was propaganda and tiny snippets of reporting on atrocities, of course people in the survey had no idea what the word meant. It serves as nothing more than a caution about words losing their power through overuse, not evidence that the word fascism is actually meaningless. There is actual content in the word and you can use it to refer to its particular brand of totalitarianism and set of methods for imposing and sustaining it. It is worth doing that in order to avoid it happening again because it is a successful formula and there is a danger of that. Maybe it bewilders you, but it seems everything bewilders you. Everything would be easier for you if we all lived in communities of no more than 150 people. You’re free to go and do that up in the hills and leave the rest of us down here.
Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, he had a direct view of the interior workings of the politics of these ferments because of that. He was also apprised of the disparate reporting by foreign journals as he made it a point to read them, this is something he writes at length about in Homage.
I would expect that very few people of today would be able to define it accurately. And because of that, yes, it remains a catch-all for "enemy" and lacks meaning aside. Nobody else abides by your methods, just as every "Classical Liberal" fails to label themselves strictly as a "Liberal" as prescribed by Mises (or was it Hayek?). Thus there is a stunning failure to identify internal mechanisms as, at an elementary level, fascistic in both organizations and institutions. It's a pretty considerable failure.
It's a wildly successful formula because we're all doing it and we're ignorant of it because it's a word without meaning and that makes it a contagion of stupidity.
But of course I'm bewildered. Watching people naively building cities housing tens of millions of people, driving millions of cars, rampantly reproducing so that millions more people and millions more cars might grace the congested arteries. Then being so audacious as to complain about pollution and urban sprawl in the same breath as they have their prepared tangerines in light syrup canned in a plastic cup shipped from some developing nation 4000 miles away, but damn that smog! And it's all enabled by what had ought only be described as a fascistic imperialist regime.
Nobody is free to do that, by the way. It's a forced participation scheme. Pay taxes or it's taken, if it's not given violence is deployed. To pay taxes you need money, to get money you must work and make yourself culpable. These are the things that Ghandi railed against and pointed to as agents of moral decay, and likewise Tolstoy - perfect heteronomy by which we can lease all our deference to the state and institutions that make up "civilization" - another ill defined word.
As a simple example: I wouldn't want to work with ten copies of myself. It would magnify my strengths but also my weaknesses. It's much better if a team is comprised by people with different backgrounds, different strengths, different weaknesses. Of course, it is helpful if everyone has some common ground, to facilitate better communication. Diversity in college admissions is one way to create an environment where these sorts of teams can form organically.
Of course, the devil is in the details. I tend not to agree with how most diversity programs are implemented, despite agreeing with the mission.
This always assumes that the primary way people are different is race. A liberal white and a black business major from Princeton who both grew up upper class in the north going to private school probably have much more in common than a poor conservative white guy from a Alabama and a rich liberal one from New York.
That’s one of the reasons why in some circles the “1620 project” and similar interpretations of history are so threatening to some people.
The biggest fear of reactionary types who control resources is that rural poor that trends white and urban poor that trends minority will figure out that they share more common interests and challenges.
The whole schtick is to keep people angry at their neighbor so they don’t notice what they don’t have.
I don’t think we should be down voting this comment even if you disagree. I don’t think we are approaching diversity and inclusion in the right way, but this comment also sounds very wrong to me.
Thank you for the kind words! I do think it's unfortunate that you seem to disagree severely, but I certainly appreciate the concern and thoughtfulness. If you have anything you'd like to add, I'm happy to hear you out, even if we might not agree on it. :)
Honestly, I'm just glad that I haven't received any death threats, so far.
I grew up in a multicultural place. Your comments sound very incorrect to me, diversity is a good thing.
However getting a multicultural society to function is indeed very hard, and many places that aren’t so diverse definitely operate with less conflict.
What I don’t have a good answer for at the moment is if we should be purposely building diverse societies or if we are just trying to make what we have work better.
Some things seem obviously true e.g people should have equal rights and women should participate in the work force.
When we travel we often talk of broadening our horizons. So incorporating new ideas also seems obviously true.
But this mandated bureaucracy seems wrong and unhelpful when you have teaching staff limiting contact with students to minimise the possibility of perceived slights.
> I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at.
Active inclusion of members of currently or formerly marginalized peoples. The "inclusion" term of DEI I think more speaks to once the person is inside the group, or sometimes in reaching out to particular outsiders (such as a local community) for input into decisions, because they are also stakeholders.
Anything from pitchforks at the gate, to sympathy for the unfulfilled struggles of other people, to we're leaving talent and opportunities on the table and if we pick it up we'll win over our competitors.
I think the idea is that when you have people from diverse backgrounds they bring unique perspectives to problems to help break out of rigid mindsets that can result from inculturation/monocultures. Take a look at the male model of medicine for an example of this. An eyebrow raising example of this is the "treatment" for "female hysteria" in the 1800s [1].
On the surface it seems reasonable that adding diverse viewpoints to a problem set would result in a higher likelihood of locating an optimal solution, though I haven't seen any real science to support this.
I also haven't seen any studies that have attempted to measure this effect and balance it against the cost of DEI initiatives, all of which are difficult to quantify.
I guess it depends on the context - both the immediate context like whether it’s a university/employer/neighborhood/group of friends, and the cultural context. There are differing views on this but here are mine (wanted to keep it short, but also wanted to keep it comprehensive for those who don’t understand the reasoning):
Speaking as someone in the US, where many disadvantaged groups for a long time were systematically prevented from doing things (like living in a certain area or having a certain kind of job) and represent sizable parts of the population, a lack of diversity often suggests that there is still some kind of inequality causing it. If your institution is big or important enough, people will wonder why those benefitting from it aren’t representative of society as a whole.
A cause that unfortunately still exists, and any respectable person wants to avoid associating themselves with, is when you are just outright excluding or hostile to a particular group. This could vary from outright discrimination to a historical association with discrimination that nobody is actively trying to reverse (such as with country clubs, Greek life). The second one that is much harder to deal with and more pervasive, is when there are not explicit barriers preventing diversity, but rather lingering systemic problems stemming from things like historical discrimination - for example, segregation and redlining created black ghettoes with cyclic poverty and poor educational outcomes that still exist today. Another big one is unconscious bias, like how if you modify the same resume to have a “black sounding” name it may get fewer interviews.
I’m not saying some group of tabletop gamers in rural Minnesota need to go out of their way to find a non-white person to not be racist. I think a lot of people not from the US or from monocultural parts of the US think that’s what being “pro-diversity” means. I don’t think hiring someone with different color skin magically means your team will be more effective either.
In essence it boils down to:
1. Discrimination still exists. Effects from discrimination from the past remain into the present day. Fundamentally nobody should be barred from a job/college because of something like race. And considering the historical injustices that occurred, along with many people harboring those views to the present day or very recently, it’s not enough to not-exclude people - you need to make efforts to actively include people, since they may otherwise think that they “don’t belong” somewhere because of their race.
2. When an institution operates across a broad population, it should try to represent that population. If it doesn’t even come close, this may suggest they are discriminating. Let’s say for instance I start a tech company in the bay area and I only hire white people - with more than a handful of employees that starts becoming astronomically improbable if I’m fairly considering the entire pool of eligible hires.
Also, I think some level of representation is helpful from a simple effectiveness standpoint. Maybe some product doesn’t perform as well on darker skin, or maybe it doesn’t address the needs of a bilingual sub population, or unknowingly commits some cultural faux pas.
3. The huge problem is what to do when outcomes are still very far off from being representative even without any kind of active discrimination. Sometimes this leads to controversial policies. But IMO we shouldn’t let those bad implementations detract from the problem or make us think diversity is bad.
Funny how the largest western nation has made it abundantly clear they have little respect for women and lgbtq rights. Yet, it is the developing countries that are held up as being backwards.
> The problem is that an African cannot replace a European any more than a European could replace an African, for example.
Not entirely understanding what you are attempting to assert with this sentence. What can’t Africans do that only Europeans can?
He means exactly what it is on the surface. An African is not a European in that life in Africa is not the same as life in Europe, thus a person born and raised in Africa is not the same as if the same person had been born and raised in Europe. Thus the difference in values he cites after that.
This seems like a very European perspective and not even responding to the OP’s question about why diversity helps.
Here in the US most of my friends are second generation immigrants - many not white - who are fully assimilated and just as capable as any one else. Diversity is, in my opinion, entirely about making sure those individuals are fairly considered and welcome, even if racist and edgelords think they must be incapable of fitting in because other people of their ethnicity haven’t integrated.
I think you are confusing a rejection of prejudice (treating like people as different based on superficial factors) with desire for diversity (favoring people because of differences).
Many groups have arrived poor to the US and worked themselves up to over-representation in academia and the professions, without intervention. They were not white and not always native English speakers.
To further diversity should their numbers not be limited, to make space for other groups that have not exceled in the same way? If racism is such an endemic problem in the US why have these non-white immigrant groups been able to achieve over-representation in academia, government, and the professions? Why would racists allow a system that harmed rather than benefited themselves.
A lot of stuff around DEI doesn't add up. It feels more like a power grab hiding behind virtue signaling.
Same thing with covid. People with good questions that went against the narrative were lumped up with people spouting the most stupid and awful things. That's a propaganda technique.
There was also a seemingly endless supply of "good questions" where the answers were never deemed acceptable for some long list of reasons, a new reason added to the list every week.
I think at some point a lot of people got fed up trying to give answers to those "good questions" and just settled on "eat shit" and "get the fuck out of my store!" and "I am tired of your shit and I quit!" (or something along those lines lol)
They used to have debates about controversial subjects where the two sides would face-off in front of a crowd.
I think if Fauci and someone really smart like Peter Hotesz would have beat anyone the covid skeptics could have put up and established their credibility and authority in the eyes of the general public by not appearing to run.
One thing Steve Jobs did well was take hard questions in public venues. He didn't always make everyone happy but his willingness to stand for his ideas inspired confidence in the Apple community.
Fauci's lack of willingness to face a respectfully adversarial audience or interview really hurt his perception as a leader. It almost certainly cost many lives.
Jobs was a misanthropist who regularly made coworkers cry, stole their ideas (e.g. Woz and an arcade competition), and was often the target of shareholder revolts or lawsuits (that he usually won).
Fauci attempting that tack would have been disasterous, esp. in the midst of an unknown and (for a while) scary pandemic.
Hell, "be like Jobs" is terrible advice for most businesses, too. Final nail in that coffin was Holmes and Theranos.
Jobs was no saint for sure, but he did build one of the most distinctive brands of all time and rallied a strong development community. Oftentimes that sort of visionary person can be an a-hole. Linus is known to be somewhat ornery too.
Talented debaters are not necessarily honest or knowledgable in their fields.
In fact, being too honest or too nerdy is often a disadvantage. There’s a reason cases on technical matters in courts still get argued my litigators with subject-matter experts as witnesses, not by the SMEs themselves.
JAQing off is a strategy for discrediting expertise by inundating with nonsense questions and accusations disguised as questions. There's no good solution for dealing with bad faith shit-stirring, but dignifying every bit of nonsense with a response isn't going to work.
There were people asking questions who were MDs and PhDs with good records that could have been used.
Refusing to take any adversarial questions also leads to discrediting by the public. The refusal by Fauci and Birx to do so almost definitely caused a needless loss of life. Leaders show competence and rise to challenges. When people see that they're willing to follow.
> Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it.
They are. And for the “diverse” people themselves they are a sort of minstrel show. The goal is to show off a superficial version of diversity in a way that’s pleasing to white people. For example if you’re Muslim, they want you to one of those Ilhan Omar intersectional Muslims, not one of those billion other Muslims who believes what Islam teaches to be true. Or if you’re Indian immigrant you’ll get a lot further writing about the need for “solidarity between black and brown people” than anything that maps onto how typical Indian immigrants view their experience as a minority.
The irony is that most of Pressley’s “brown voices” sound exactly like white people. It’s a bizarre sort of identity politics where the people who are selected to “represent” different groups don’t advance the views or positions of those groups, but instead lend their identity to advance the views and positions of white allies.
The very question of "are we taking some DEI ideas too far?" is now censored in well known university systems. You cannot even ask questions without persecution, you are treated as a threat to humanity.
This is how I know this is about politics, power, and paychecks.
> Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person.
Labelled as "A Witch" [1]
> .. and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it.
And what do you do with witches? BURN THEM!
These D.I.E. apparatchiks are no better than the witch-hunters of yore. No better than those in the Monty Python clip [1] linked to here and a lot less entertaining at that.
Those appratchicks are no better than Soviet appratchicks who had their own litmus tests of what was and was not acceptable. I'm not from Russia or the ex Soviet sphere but I did spend a large portion of childhood in a communist system in Eastern Europe and am still horrified that people don't seem to understand that this is exactly the kind of bullshit you had to deal with in that system.
No, you didn't get shot for dissent. No you didn't disappear. It was all much more bland and insidious than that, you were accused of a thought crime and that might kill your career. Conformity was the name of the game and I see increasing evidence that we're very much following this trajectory in North America. And it has that insidious quality too that you can't speak out against it because if you do you're clearly a racist/misogynist/homophobe/insert-bad-thing-hereist.
They are probably hoping to become a new Nomenklatura [1], a category of people ... who h[o]ld various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions [a]re granted only with approval by the [modern equivalent of the communist party].
The nomenklatura formed a de facto elite of public powers in the former Eastern Bloc [comparable to] the Western establishment holding or controlling both private and public powers (for example, in media, finance, trade, industry, the state and institutions).
That is what they seem to be aiming for: cushy jobs for them and ideological purity for their organisations.
DEI bureaucrats are good at defending their turf. They've internalized the Lenin's playbook: never debate your opponents on public, as that may reveal flaws in your position and undermine your authority, instead silence your opponents, ridicule them and get rid of them later, when out of public sight.
If you were a medieval knight, you wouldn't say "it's unfortunate that our opponents, occupying that castle, shout us down whenever we attempt to discuss their position." Of course they shout you down: they compete with you for authority.
The situation makes sense once you start viewing DEI as a religious orthodoxy and its enforcers as the priestly class.
Heresy and heretics are usually extirpated with extreme prejudice, at least if they threaten the interests of the establishment. Fortunately the DEI bureaucrats at the universities cannot condemn people to death, but the big question is if the Western civilization can survive if its own sources of knowledge and truth are slowly converted into a secular equivalent of Pakistani madrasas, where articles of faith are mindlessly chanted.
Theocracies tend to become very ossified and ossified academy is worse than useless.
I like your formulation of this as a "distributed measurement problem", but I'm not sure I follow. Could you elaborate? Specifically, I'm not sure if you agree or disagree with the post you are replying to. Thanks in advance.
Big money was "smart" to divert the focus away from them after Occupy Wallstreet. Roll out all the DEI initiatives, ads, etc. and by extension shame those who didn't.
And making big orgs go from being the villain to the hero.
It's more complicated than you describe. Like, these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place, they just lack focus, and are ineffective and solving the problems that they see. They see large-scale social problems of inequity, but are trying to solve it with equity-focused policy at universities, which most folks would already consider "the top."
They aren't just for show, but the optics of a well-funded diversity departments is irresistably good.
> these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place
I don't think they are, in most instances. I try never to attribute to malice, but it has been years of giving them undue, novel power. This is corruptive and they demonstrate this corruption in every case.
Any normal person would be corrupted given the same power, all of a sudden, and a mandate to use it.
To a diversity hammer everything looks like a seminar / written statement / fired for cause nail.
> Like, these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place
That makes them even worse, even more dangerous.
“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.”
Off-topic, but I found this quote hilarious specifically because it's author is C. S. Lewis since apparently he didn't realise this quote applies to the Christian God too.
Well I'm certainly not a christian but I find the quote poignant. If the man who said it had a blind-spot for his own ideology, that doesn't refute the sentiment. If anything, that reinforces his point.
Except the Christian God ostensibly does allow for people to make their own choices, rather than be micromanaged for their own good? Jehovah apparently guides with such a gentle hand there is debate about whether he even exists.
Epidemies, lightning strikes, floods, crop failures, sudden demolitions, unexpected illnesses — all that stuff has been described as "wrath of god/god's punishments" until very, very recent times. So yeah, he does allow people make their own choice but he also punishes wrong choices amply, not to mention putting people into all kinds of "trials and tribulations".
And I am not making any of that stuff up, that used to be (and "the god tries you" still is) part of generally accepted theology; C. S. Lewis definitely subscribed to "the god sends you trials" part of it which does make that quote hilariously blind-spotted.
Equity is not a social problem. Do you think African women with five children would rather work 60 hrs a week in a cubicle and have .8 kids like Korean women?
> these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place
I disagree. While there are certainly some people with honestly good intentions in these departments, they are also lairs of Marxist-types that would gladly march others into death camps if given the chance to do so.
We cannot be naive about this. For every social justice movement with good intentions, there are evil people willing to use it as a trojan horse to carry out an awful agenda.
DEI is all the rage right now. My company's last big survey had some question which stated "I feel like I can be myself at work." The score wasn't as nice as folks would have liked, and apparently what HR took from that is "we're not doing DEI hard enough." Which is a pretty unfortunate set of blinders to have on. DEI is probably one of the more narrow reasons these days that someone might not feel that they can be themselves at work.
I was recently sent a survey whose questions all presupposed that DEI should be critical organizational goal. The questions only let you say that the organization was accomplishing its DEI goals, or was not doing enough. There was no way to suggest that the organization was spending too much time on DEI. I learned that the survey was created by an equity consulting company. They were paid tens of thousands of dollars for their bogus survey and equity audit.
I always say they're doing a really good job so someone can argue that they don't need to keep pushing it more.
They are doing a good job. Why create a good product? That's difficult and failure is possible. Much more fun to work on the diversity stats, because quota hiring is an easy win at review time. Who cares if strategic hiring is bad? Big companies have enough process inertia that no one will know if the new hires are working out for years.
I recently received a survey from my local public library that was the same: are we doing enough diversity, or should we work even harder? No option for "too much emphasis on."
Most likely, the reason you were sent this survey is because the organization has already decided on its priorities, and was looking to evaluate its success at acheiving them, not questioning them.
^ That, also this is an extremely effective way at identifying problematic individuals whose values don't align with the organisation's objectives.
The HR department at my previous employment sent out a similar survey last year, with the intention to identify, and remove troublesome individuals during a period of downsizing.
Yes, that's why it was no surprise when I heard that this was driven by an equity consulting firm. They have no interest in finding out if respondents think that too much time is being spent on equity.
I don't think HR reading the answer they want to take away from the survey is necessarily limited to DEI either. My previous company had been formed by the merger of many acquisitions, and had a big company wide strategy around a product that only really mattered to the biggest unit. Imagine being at Beats' hardware division and being told that the important strategy for Apple is app store installation counts. (The example company wasn't Apple, but it was a similar example for the company). Sure, you could focus the entire business unit's work on an app to control the headphones and everyone could say they were focused on the company's primary objective, but it hardly seems the most important thing for Beats to do with their products.
They then included in their quarterly survey questions how connected people feel with that strategy. When the unrelated units scored quite poorly on this subject, they decided the reason was that the line managers had failed to educate their reports on the importance of this strategy enough, so started marking them all on how connected their reports felt and giving out educational material so people could understand the strategy, missing that people understood the strategy well enough, it just there was no meaningful connection to their business unit to understand.
Agree. As a white male, I have a very hard time being honest on these questionnaires because I know full well that giving good responses means they will lean in further to DEI, and giving bad responses they will lean in further on DEI...
In 2021 they had a slide on the town hall for 'Whiteness down 13%' and the black host said 'we can do better'...
20+ years in the same company, never heard this phrase spoken by HR until the DEI craze.
Now 'we can do better' is Newspeak for more surveys, townhalls, implicit bias training, more 'education' that cuts out working time in the limited hours.
> In 2021 they had a slide on the town hall for 'Whiteness down 13%' and the black host said 'we can do better'...
Reminds me of the controversy at Pinterest a year or two ago when an Asian engineering manager asked how we could reduce the % of Asians in the engineering org (which was 68%).
> Reminds me of the controversy at Pinterest a year or two ago when an Asian engineering manager asked how we could reduce the % of Asians in the engineering org (which was 68%).
I remember this. Even on Blind today he's referred to as "Mr. 68".
It was an interesting exchange because it revealed to many of the company's Asian engineers that they were overrepresented (which could be visually confirmed at any meeting) and that their overrepresentation was something being thought about behind the scenes by the DEI folks at the company.
The axiom "when the future arrives it's not the future we want" or "when change happens it's not the change we asked for" seems to hold true here. I think most Asians supported these diversity initiatives at first, but now they're getting "Harvard-ed" or "Ive Leagued" and are losing out due to their ? over-performance ? in the tech space.
There was also discussion of over-representation relative to the population around them. In the case of Pinterest they are in the SF Bay Area, which has a lot of Asians but is not made up of 68% Asians leading to the status as over-represented at PINS.
> I think most Asians supported these diversity initiatives at first, but now they're getting "Harvard-ed" or "Ive Leagued" and are losing out due to their ? over-performance ? in the tech space.
Most people who support "diversity" unsurprisingly withhold support when the numbers are against their particular demographic.
For out-groups looking at the movement, the movement makes you think it's one large movement consisting of women, oppressed, and other minorities - i.e. everyone not including heterosexual white males.
From the inside of that large movement it looks a lot different.
Homosexual males will resent being sidelined in favour of a white heterosexual women while homosexual females will label being passed over in favour of a homosexual man as "sexism".
Almost all heterosexual, and many homosexual, women don't want to share the public bathrooms with any males, even if those males identify as women.
A heterosexual male supports the movement, until he finds out he just slept with a woman who is male.
All the women (homo and hetero) support the movement, until it becomes clear that they need not bother attempting to win any prizes or break any records in sports anymore, because those are all held by women who were boys throughout puberty (and got irreversible physical advantages due to male puberty).
It is quite a fractured movement, and any time dissent is raised it is attributed to the out-group - like the fracas over transgender people in public bathrooms.
"Prevent males going into females bathrooms" is something almost every women agrees with, but the opposition was "those old white men over there!".
"Let female athletes compete amongst themselves because they have less physical strength than men" is an argument from females. Men aren't throwing their toys over women competing with them on the field; women are, and men support them.
In short, you see this large movement as one large movement, but all the participants clearly have goals that are contradictory to other participants' goals.
The largest subgroup within that movement is also the one that is most likely to have members who distance themselves from the movement - as far as who gets best treated by society, it's white heterosexual women, so they have the most to lose if the movement succeeds for any of the other subgroups.
Another odd position was the removal of the "urban" award categories from the Grammys (a worthwhile change) followed by complaints that a certain race was represented by less than 50% of the nominees in the remaining categories.
> "My company's last big survey had some question which stated "I feel like I can be myself at work." The score wasn't as nice as folks would have liked, and apparently what HR took from that is "we're not doing DEI hard enough.""
Mine had a comment box for each question and for this one I just stated that it's wildly inappropriate to be your home self at work. You should be your work self at work.
If I applied for some kind of corporate dispensation to openly pray the rosary at regular intervals and have a little shrine on my desk, would I be treated equally to an employee with a little trans flag display on their desk? Surely one is more socially acceptable than the other, but couldn't the simultaneous observance of both accommodations create an uncomfortable workplace environment for both of them?
If I were a Muslim with one legally recognized wife and two common law wives, could I bring all three of them to a corporate event and introduce them as my wives? Surely such an employee is also entitled to five prayer breaks, with facilities adequate to support the correct movements (this type of fact pattern has lead to much recent litigation and multiple 8-9 figure settlements).
If I were a practitioner of some version reconstructed Roman paganism, would I be permitted to perform the sacrificial augury ritual during a quarterly budget meeting? If not, why not?
Should Scientologists be permitted to administer e-meters to co-workers on company property during mealtimes and other breaks?
Should a Jewish employee be permitted to wear a Star of David flag pin to work if it causes offense to Palestinian employees working at the same facility? If not, why not?
Should a Black Hebrew Israelite be permitted to discuss popular documentary films produced by their co-religionists on religious topics with co-workers on company property, given that such beliefs are intrinsic to their religious identities, or should they be terminated for even mentioning content from such films because it can cause offense to others?
In practice our corporations require a sort of rainbow-neutered-prozac-addicted-egalitarian-Protestant-tinged secularism, but the expansive rhetoric invites a lot of limit-pushing behavior. It cannot possibly be stable, but I think all those fascinating contradictions help to explain why so many corporate employees eat so many pills every single day.
Your presentation is extreme, but it does highlight the fact that the race/gender definition of diversity is not particularly diverse.
For one thing it ignores religion and class.
But it also ignores a good few decades of research into personality disorders, which suggests that the people you absolutely do not want to hire are the Cluster B types.
A "diverse" workplace run by narcissists and sociopaths is going to be toxic and anti-productive no matter what the gender/race balance is.
Not that comment, the one above it that I can't delete or edit anymore. Oh well, it was nice being at 300 points for a while. I'll eventually get back there.
> If I applied for some kind of corporate dispensation to openly pray the rosary at regular intervals and have a little shrine on my desk, would I be treated equally to an employee with a little trans flag display on their desk? Surely one is more socially acceptable than the other, but couldn't the simultaneous observance of both accommodations create an uncomfortable workplace environment for both of them?
Yes it would probably be permitted, but I think most people would know you are trolling, and I also doubt this hypothetical trans employee would really care much
> If I were a Muslim with one legally recognized wife and two common law wives, could I bring all three of them to a corporate event and introduce them as my wives? Surely such an employee is also entitled to five prayer breaks, with facilities adequate to support the correct movements (this type of fact pattern has lead to much recent litigation and multiple 8-9 figure settlements).
Many corporate campuses have facilities available for use as prayer rooms, this isn’t that unusual. As for “this fact pattern has led to “multiple 8-9 figure settlements,” going to need a citation on that one
> If I were a practitioner of some version reconstructed Roman paganism, would I be permitted to perform the sacrificial augury ritual during a quarterly budget meeting? If not, why not?
This is trolling, not going to bother to respond to this one
> Should Scientologists be permitted to administer e-meters to co-workers on company property during mealtimes and other breaks?
Non-solicitation policies prohibit this sort of thing, which is one reason why most employers have them
> Should a Jewish employee be permitted to wear a Star of David flag pin to work if it causes offense to Palestinian employees working at the same facility? If not, why not?
Permitted? Probably yes, if it follows the corporate dress code, but expressing opinions on controversial political topics at work often has informal implications for one career
> Should a Black Hebrew Israelite be permitted to discuss popular documentary films produced by their co-religionists on religious topics with co-workers on company property, given that such beliefs are intrinsic to their religious identities, or should they be terminated for even mentioning content from such films because it can cause offense to others?
Non-solicitation would prohibit this (also again trolling)
Let me get this straight: according to you,devout Catholicism could only be trolling, never genuine. A Jew mildly expressing their faith should be punished in their career, and "expressing opinions on controversial political topics at work" is career limiting.. but a trans flag is fine, because even though that's a controversial political topic, it's the correct opinion, right? One might even say that political opinions that are "correct" are fine, like the trans flag, but ones that aren't are obviously trolling.. like wearing a star of David?
> devout Catholicism could only be trolling, never genuine
I’ve known many devout Catholics, not one of them ever constructed a devotional shrine at their place of work; it’s not really a part of modern Catholic religious practice, even among more traditional Catholics.
> A Jew mildly expressing their faith should be punished in their career, and "expressing opinions on controversial political topics at work" is career limiting.. but a trans flag is fine, because even though that's a controversial political topic, it's the correct opinion, right?
If you think people who display the trans flag at work don’t experience career limiting consequences informally, even at allegedly inclusive companies, you are very naive. I mean, how many openly LGBTQ tech industry leaders can you name who were out before being at the pinnacle of the industry?
> One might even say that political opinions that are "correct" are fine, like the trans flag, but ones that aren't are obviously trolling.. like wearing a star of David?
OP did not say “Star of David,” they said a “Star of David flag,” ie the flag of the State of Israel, a nation-state. They are not the same thing. People wear religious symbols like the Christian cross, the Star of David, etc all the time at work and it’s not really an issue.
> Yes it would probably be permitted, but I think most people would know you are trolling, and I also doubt this hypothetical trans employee would really care much
I really don't think praying and having some religious items on your desk is trolling...
It's striking how much tech workers decry DEI on anonymous forums like Blind compared to the complete lack of dissent on workplace communications channels like Slack.
It's a prisoner's dilemma situation. Most people think it's BS, but the incentive to push back on it individually is almost nonexistent (because of the big downside) and so collectively we reach a shitty local minimum that could be overcome if everybody acted together.
At Dropbox in 2015 we had a diversity all hands in the fall or winter (November IIRC). Arden (head of HR at the time) flipped out when someone posted the question about more permissive hiring standards for women and URM. Then we conducted and anonymous survey asking people if our hiring process favored women and URM candidate and 83% said yes. Very awkward for leadership.
This is kinda silly and should be obvious:
I don't believe this myself as I'm not religious, but if someone is a conservative religious person and believes that homosexuality is "evil" and such people should be forcibly "converted" or whatever, voicing that opinion at work to actual LGBT people is not going to go over well. Of course, that opinion is anti-diversity and anti-inclusion, but threatening to fire people with these opinions is itself anti-diversity and anti-inclusion, because it's excluding conservative religious people.
To go full Godwin, firing people for expressing outright fascist viewpoints is also anti-diversity: it's excluding fascists.
Basically, there's no way to have true diversity and inclusion for all viewpoints, because so many viewpoints are mutually incompatible. There's simply no way to reconcile the viewpoints of two people, one of whom is LGBT (or at least pro-LGBT rights) and one of whom thinks such people should be marched into death camps. This really goes for any kind of viewpoints; you can only accept so much diversity of opinion before you get into an irreconcilable conflict.
In normal polite society, we avoid this problem by simply forbidding discussion of certain topics in certain places. But that means people cannot feel safe expressing themselves fully in those places; there's simply no way to allow that as long as diversity is allowed.
there's no rule saying that anyone needs to cater to fascists. in fact, they should not be allowed in civil society and should be ostracised, for their views are against human rights.
who cares about their viewpoints? it's not even a slippery slope because it's just so absurd that people should be polite and respectful of genocidal ethno-nationalists. /shrug
Several billion people on the planet believe in religions that promote anti-human-rights viewpoints. Should all of them be thrown out of civil society then? That means that a large majority of Americans, for instance, should be rounded up and put into death camps, right? (Because how else are you going to exclude them from civil society? Move them to northern Alaska or Antarctica?) And how exactly do we exclude entire nations from "civil society" anyway?
A few jobs ago, as a hiring manager I was "invited" to always move female applicants to the phone screen stage. Regardless of the content of the resume. I would have liked to be brave enough to refuse and say that it was stupid. Instead I just wasted 30minutes of my time once in a while.
> What specifically is "the existence of those DEI programs" preventing you from saying or doing at work?
If the program merely existed, that would be one thing. But if the company is spending millions and talking about their dedication to increasing URM representation, that makes it clear that dissent is not welcome.
Openly telling or discussing-with a black person that they probably got hired because of their skin color instead of their value as a human with knowledge and capability that is valuable to the company.
You'll very quickly be sent for "re-education" if not downright fired.
Don't believe I'm the one who insinuated that the existence of DEI policies or administration at work meant that grown adults needed to adjust their behavior.
Universities are projecting a ~20% decline in their total addressable market [1] starting about 10 years from now. Talk with any decision maker at a tuition-dependent institution for more than 10 minutes and they'll bring up this topic.
Many of the USA's colleges and universities cannot afford a 20% decline in tuition dollars. They will collapse under the weight of fixed costs and higher unit costs, even with substantial cuts to faculty and staff. The only path toward survival for many of these institutions is to increase the size of the pie, and the WASP demographic is saturated.
In Tech, DEI is an HR and Recruiting department. In Higher Ed, DEI is also -- primarily, even -- a sales and marketing department. An existentially important one. I've heard a few different college presidents discuss it very explicitly in those terms.
DEI is a juice box for handing out cushy jobs to political hacks. Any organization that puts DEI as its core mission is headed for mediocrity.
Protecting people who can do the job but need a little help for whatever reason is one thing. Forcing companies to hire a bunch of people who will not contribute to satisfy DEI quotas so they can meet ESG goals and qualify for discount financing is a whole other thing. The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people.
>The government is basically outsourcing social programs by forcing businesses to hire people.
It is absolutely not, the entire scheme is zero-sum, so it can't replace social programs. What is given to one is taken from another, and even if this has some mild redistributive effect which could potentially lessen the need for social programs, it's never going to have much of once because the vast majority of money is held by people who will never be impacted by DEI by design.
DEI is just classic rent seeking and political influence of private business. The character assassinations of its critics are again, a function of furthering rent seeking. It's a very old story.
"Department of Defense requires approval of a formal justification if the 8(a) sole-source contract exceeds $100 million; all other federal agencies require approval for sole-source 8(a) contract actions that exceed $25 million." That is, you can help the government launder up to $100M per contract and no one even has to write down a justification. Buy whatever the government asks you to, resell it to them for a 10% mark-up, and you can get up to $10M. And if you think people aren't playing that game, I have a bridge to sell you, but actually to this other person, who will get 10% for just existing.
If you take government money as a contract or a grant you must comply with their rules. These rules include diversity targets for race, gender, and disability.
Yep. Worst part is there's people pushing hard for the Fed to be an arbiter on DEI and climate. They've resisted for now, but it's not long until a power-hungry governor figures it out.
"Robert Martin of Centre College in Kentucky, a co-author of the study, says the real reason for the growth in spending is that administrators want to hire subordinates, thereby boosting their own authority and often pay."
That line was a flag for me. I doubt it's that simple, that admins are that corrupt. I think they're just basic: "Hire a new person to promote equity and inclusivity? That sounds great!" The good optics are irresistible.
This is a common argument for why many projects get bloated, not just JEDI. It has been mentioned as a contributing factor behind tech “over-hiring” in the past few years too.
I think that in large bureaucracies this will always happen. As a manager looking for career growth, the more headcount you get and the more scope you “manage”, the easier it is to make the argument you should be a Director/VP/whatever - or to get hired in your next job as such. Managing 10 people is being a line manager. Managing 50 people is being a director. If you can make the case for hiring more people to support all the initiatives you are working on, you may have just doubled your income.
In a smaller organization, people are usually more directly involved in the organization’s efforts and there is a more limited amount of funding for new things, so the only way you can empire build is by doing something that is very organizationally valuable (like making more money).
In government, academia, and huge corporations, you have massive amounts of money coming in, and most people’s work is far removed from why that money is coming in. Advancement and growth is mostly about being able to secure as much of that money for your department as possible.
I suspect this is part of the reason that dual ic/manager ladder shops outperform management only shops. An IC can grow by delivering impact, over time you can move them around to reshape the org to deliver more impact. A manager is relatively fixed unless you decide to eliminate the department. Likewise, having everyone compete for more headcount doesn't bode well for the future.
And the fuel behind administrative bloat is the inflationary effect of federally guaranteed student loans compounded over decades. Why not increase tuition by a thousand dollars if the loan will cover it regardless?
This post will start off sounding like I am not very liberal, but I am very liberal.
There is one question a diversity authority needs to answer:
"If you want a larger amount of people from a small pool of viable candidates, how do you do that without lowering the bar?"
Stated differently, if 1 in 100 university graduates earning a software engineering degree are black, but you want your company's demographics to match the population demographics which is 15 in 100, how do you get closer to 15 in 100 without accepting unqualified candidates or without having the average black employee under perform the average employee as a whole?
Any diversity bureaucrat that fails to answer that question is absolutely unqualified and is a detriment to the institution they are a part of.
There is one harsh reality that needs to be understood: Affirmative action and diversity initiatives ("C" level diversity focused staff) are functionally reparations.
The American public has robbed entire classes of people of wealth, and therefore their ability to pay for competitive advantages, like private school, which other people can afford. This results in not just systemic disadvantage, but generational disadvantage.
I don't think generational disadvantage can be solved without efforts like affirmative action, but the packaging that diversity bureaucrats are selling is one that requires proportional response, and therefore foments backlash.
Diversity bureaucrats try to use power, rather than justice, to achieve their goals. "We will fire you if you disagree" is using power. "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice. The difference is subtle, but important.
Actually, affirmative action likely suppresses the rates of Black students majoring in CS because it increases the rates at which they drop out of the major. Universities have good data on how likely a student is to graduate in their chosen field, and they know that the bulk of the Black student they admit who flag STEM fields as their preferred majors will not succeed but they admit them anyway to achieve the desired demographics. Absent affirmative action, these students would be attending less prestigious universities, but they would be graduating in STEM at higher rates. This is the research that explores the effect of affirmative action on majors: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6675032/
Some claim that racism inside the university is why Black students drop out of STEM. However, the rates of persistence in STEM for the same level of academic performance is the same for all races: a Black student with 700s on their SAT is as likely to succeed as a white or Asian student with 700s. A student with 600s or 500s is less likely to succeed, and equally so regardless of their race. But if you admit a lot more Black students with the latter scores, you can see how this will affect persistence rates.
I think you're largely dead on. "DEI" programs are affirmative action dressed, along with an authoritarian undertone.
> "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice.
Couching reparations as inherently being just, which perhaps you didn't intend, is where I disagree with you. The idea of reparations is pretty contentious[1]. I think that very fact is exactly why these affirmative action programs have to be dressed up, and faux-support has to be forced, as much as it is.
The is actually a clique in leftist thought that bemoans the "diversity" framing for reparations. Because with diversity you have to advantage people who were never entitled to any kind of reparations. For example there is no reason for Latinos to recieve reparations (most of them are white after all). So these people would rather that only ADOS and NA people recieve any benefit from these schemes
>For example there is no reason for Latinos to recieve reparations
Wasn't Cortez a big meanie or something? You might point out he had little to do with the USG, but the core DEI crowd doesn't care about that, just European colonizers.
The history of Latin America is complicated and it may be difficult to cleanly separate colonist vs colonized in today's world. But at the same time most Latinos self ID as white and as such are simply white people who were born in another country
I get a lot of surveys these days where the first questions are about identity. This sends the message that the thing they care about most is your racial and gender identity. But it may also bias the rest of the survey outcome. This possibility is why surveys used to only ask these questions at the end. But now it's more important to virtue signal up front, even if it means introducing bias.
Incomplete demographic info deprives surveyors of information about who said what. It doesn't affect the answers given to the substantive questions. Asking for demographic info up front can affect the answers people give to the rest of the questions.
And in answer to your question, I assume it's virtue signaling because it is all the rage these days. Did you miss all the black squares on Instagram?
the black squares if I remember correctly were a way to signal that you are a good person who supports people who have been oppressed. maybe I am misremembering what the black squares were for - was it supporting World Government? which we also need
Does the SO survey ask for demo info before asking substantive questions? This is a well-known no-no.
I can't tell if you actually missed the black squares or are just trolling. This was very, very hard to miss. Even if you're not on Instagram, it was widely covered in the news. [1]
> I can't tell if you actually missed the black squares or are just trolling. This was very, very hard to miss.
I (not the person you're replying to) have no idea what you're talking about. Not on Instagram, and didn't read whatever news-bubble you read. I think you're making unwarranted assumptions about the universality of your personal bubble.
Supposing that every "result" represented a person who knows what you're talking about, that's still less than 0.1% of the English-speaking world. That would suggest that it's a bubble.
(on the one hand, of course most people don't create web pages, so perhaps this heuristic undercounts how many people would know. on the other hand, one person who knows creates many many web pages, and of course instagram people are disproportionately likely to have web presence, so this heuristic overcounts how many people would know. or perhaps your whole comment is silly. I don't know!)
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it.
Bureaucrats outnumber faculty 2:1 at public universities and 2.5:1 at private colleges, double the ratio in the 1970s.
It has to be asked though, did student:teacher ratio stay constant during this time? Because if it's risen (i.e. professors about the same, but more students,) then a case could be made that the bureaucrat increase corresponds to more students. Why should bureaucrat count correlate to professor count?
If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years. The number of faculty has only risen slightly while administrators hired because of new government regulations has exploded.
It's at least as much related to government subsidies and financial programs that exist as band-aids over the accreditation crises in the American labor market, a result of elite overproduction.
> If you wonder why the cost of college has exploded you just have to look at the meteoric rise in administrators in the past thirty years.
A rise in administrators can't explain the rise in tuition. If you spike your manufacturing costs for a product, it's true that you won't be able to turn a profit without charging a lot more for it.
But it doesn't follow at all that you'll be able to turn a profit by charging a lot more for your product.
We see college tuition going up at the same time that college enrollment goes up. That is not a result of increases in the cost of providing college. Increases in the cost of provision would increase tuition and decrease enrollment.
The conclusion to draw here is that colleges have raised tuition prices because they can and the extra administrators are an effect of that (the money has to go somewhere), not a cause.
If the money was to go somewhere, any sane institution would be pouring it into either facilities or the school's endowment. Putting the money into administrators so it goes "somewhere" is the same as flushing it away. Trustees need to put their foot on the neck of this beast before it grows even more.
> Putting the money into administrators so it goes "somewhere" is the same as flushing it away.
True, but this is also mostly true of the facilities and the endowment.
Don't imagine the dean thinking "I need to spend all my revenue or something terrible will happen" and choosing compliance officers as the right way to accomplish that goal.
Imagine the dean thinking "hey, revenue is higher than ever" and a bunch of people asking him for funding and mostly getting it because the money was there. Growth in compliance officers occurred because the funding was available, not because anyone other than the compliance officers thought it was a good idea.
If you leave food around in your kitchen, you will get insects. If you leave sugar water or bread around, you'll get mold. And if you leave money around an organization, you'll get administrators. You'll get those things regardless of whether you want them.
> Putting the money into administrators so it goes "somewhere" is the same as flushing it away.
Aa member of a university faculty, this line is something routinely parroted here on HN that I must disagree with.
Yes there are many layers to the bureaucracy at any University. But in many cases those layers are vital to the functioning of the system and make my function as a professor easier.
For example, we run a tutoring office, which requires administrators. But this office reduces the need for TAs and office hours, which means more students get competent help, and I have more time for research. Far from saving anything, getting rid of this office would be an act of flushing money away.
Other examples abound. The research office helps me write grants which bring in money. They cost dollars to run but also bring in a lot of money.
The IT office is a huge bureaucracy, but I doubt anyone here on HN would be advocating the elimination of IT on campus, because everyone here understands why they are there and how they help the community. Yes they cost money, but getting rid of them would make everything way worse.
Unfortunately, because HN isn’t an education forum, not many here have experience with academia beyond being a student at some point. Therefore, the utility and efficacy of an office like Student Support Services is discounted if the individual never had to rely on the office. The critical role they play on campus isn’t recognized, and their elimination is advocated in the name of cost savings.
Sometimes these offices exist to fortify failing city infrastructure. My university runs a bus service, a police department, and a health clinic. These things cost a lot of money, but they exist to keep students safe and healthy. Parents send their students to us with the expectation that we can do this, and so relying on city services that are underfunded and oversubscribed doesn’t work. They won’t appreciate a reduction in tuition if we tell them the savings came from eliminating EMS services.
All this is to say that “it’s the administrative bureaucracy!” is not the end of the story. It’s far more complex, and the discussion here on HN is typically very shallow and mostly wrong on this front.
It is entirely possible that these two things are not related at all, and it is also possible that admins realized they could raise prices when they were forced to by increased budgets and were pleasantly surprised with the result so no, that isn't the conclusion to draw.
> It is entirely possible that these two things are not related at all
Well, no, it actually isn't possible that revenue and expenditures aren't related at all.
> and it is also possible that admins realized they could raise prices when they were forced to by increased budgets and were pleasantly surprised with the result
Sure, but that would be a coincidence with no explanatory power, and prices would have risen by the same amount anyway. You should always assume that prices are in equilibrium unless you can explain why, in the immediate term, they are out of it.
> The number of faculty has only risen slightly while administrators hired because of new government regulations has exploded.
The fine article directly refutes this assertion: "Universities say that a boom in regulations under Barack Obama’s administration increased the need to hire more bureaucrats of every kind. But one study found that for every dollar spent to comply with government rules, voluntary spending on bureaucracy totalled $2 at public universities and $3 at private ones."
I don't really see why schools should need most of their bureaucrats personally. I know a few people who work in admin at schools and it seems their jobs mostly revolve around writing a few emails a day. A school need some groundskeepers sure, a small IT department, a secretary for a department probably, and a small general admissions / bursars / financial aid department. I would warrant all other departments could be cut as they are not within the primary scope of teaching.
They need more bureaucrats because they’ve grown dramatically in scope. Schools used to be primarily about education. Now they’ve become Club Ed. A 4-year vacation paid for with unsecured loans. Full of gyms and climbing walls and aquatics complexes, libraries and recreation centers and football stadiums.
Where did all these buildings come from? Wealthy donors and government grants. What do all the bureaucrats do? They run all of these facilities, their maintenance staffs and kitchen staffs and counselling staffs.
This is the reason all these costs have gone up: nobody donates money to pay for bureaucrats. They donate the building and saddle the school with the maintenance bill. These are white elephants that do nothing for education. Schools like them though because they increase their marketability. Taken as a whole, these things are a huge liability for society because schools are in a zero sum game when it comes to competing for students.
But Universities have always had that kind of stuff. At the uni I went to, the sports facilities, fields, pools, gyms, tennis courts etc. are all run by a non-profit society that had been operating for more than a century. All the food outlets were owned and run by the Union (although more are being outsourced with chain franchises appearing now), not the University itself.
The corporate bureaucracy was growing, but it didn’t have much to do with those student services or facilities because that was all separate.
This depends a lot on the school. A research university is going to have a lot of people that students never meet: accountants and lawyers to ensure compliance with federal regulation on grants, for example. The phrase "administrator" also gets thrown around a lot in these discussions without much attention to more nuanced differences, i.e., a VP or vice provost is a very different thing than staff who are not paid all that much. And some people classified as staff do teach -- boundaries aren't always that sharp.
This is not to say university bureaucracies are not bloated, but the bloat is multi-faceted and often grows in different directions for very different reasons.
I think the point is that it's not simply the case that universities have lost sight of their purpose of teaching people, but have broadened the scope of their mission beyond teaching … or broadened the definition of teaching? Broadened their mission? Certainly made their mission less focused/clear. And this leads to bureaucracy. See Harvard's Mission Statement.
I was surprised to learn that, at the university I went to, each department paid the administration to use its own classrooms, and if some other party (say, a research lab) needed the room, they could just pay more. It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. They have a lot of revenue sources these days, and tuition is just one of them: research, athletics, and investments to name a few. Even considering only tuition, the quality of teaching is only one reason students pay to go to a brand name school: the logo on the diploma, the social connections, the job pipeline, the location, and so on also count. For me, it was an unintuitive and disheartening realization.
> It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more.
Astronaut 1: You mean, the purpose of the university isn't to teach?
Astronaut 2: Never has been.
Even in the 90s, when I was going to a second- or third-tier name brand university, the emphasis clearly wasn't on teaching but on snagging grant money and cranking out papers. Even the professors seemed to consider teaching an annoying distraction from their real jobs.
This is the kind of rigid formalism that obscures accurate analysis of universities as economic entities responding rationally to the infinite money spigot that the government has inserted into them. Just because their formal tax status says one thing does not mean that it's not better to analyze them as businesses just like any other.
This is the real question. The sources that I dug up from a casual search seem to suggest this is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to administrators specifically.
Still a shame - universities need to treat their research and teaching staff better. But it’s not as simplistic as the picture being painted in a lot of places.
(And I wonder what the student-faculty and student-administrator ratios were and now are, too.)
So the more income, from student tuition and higher enrollment numbers, that a university has then it just hires more bureaucrats instead of... more faculty to teach more students?
> Diversity officials promote the hiring of ethnic minorities and women
I'm genuinely curious if ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among university faculty/staff. I would have guessed "no", but this statement implies otherwise.
>I'm genuinely curious if ethnic minorities and women are underrepresented among university faculty/staff. I would have guessed "no", but this statement implies otherwise.
Why would that matter? Did you think the goal was "equal" (what does that eve mean?) representation?
The goal is more of some people and less of others.
Yeah, they are. Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments. But the reason is that much of the white male faculty were hired decades ago, when white men still dominated academia. Change is slow.
There is no "over-representation" of protected categories, only of oppressor categories. A standing joke about the Swedish equivalent of the D.I.E. drive - here it is called "Jämställdhetsmyndigheten" [1] (literally "The Equality Authority") - is that "100% equality is achieved when all departments have 100% women". They are totally blind to the fact that e.g. veterinary sciences and social "sciences" are ~95% women while being laser-focused on some areas where women are (still?) in the minority. This attitude gives lie to their claim of striving for equality and shows it to be nothing more than an ideologically driven activist organisation.
> A standing joke about the Swedish equivalent of the D.I.E. drive - here it is called "Jämställdhetsmyndigheten" [1] (literally "The Equality Authority") - is that "100% equality is achieved when all departments have 100% women".
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was once asked how many female justices sitting on the Supreme Court would be enough. Her answer was nine. (N.b. the U.S. Supreme Court traditionally has nine justices.)
It's not really a joke. In any instant, equal proportions of men and women would represent equality (by sex). But taking the long view, 100% of the positions in those fields were held by men, so 100% would have to be held by women for a while in order to redress the historical injustice. This is "equity", a step beyond mere equality, and it's the E in DEI/JEDI.
The only way to redress historical injustices is to invent a time machine to go back and prevent them. Otherwise, you're just creating new ones to reperate old ones.
> It's not really a joke. In any instant, equal proportions of men and women would represent equality (by sex). But taking the long view, 100% of the positions in those fields were held by men, so 100% would have to be held by women for a while in order to redress the historical injustice. This is "equity", a step beyond mere equality, and it's the E in DEI/JEDI.
I think this statement is going past equity straight into reparations.
Equality: Men and Women should have equal criteria for getting the job.
Equity: Women should have an easier time to counter an unbalanced gender representation
This statement: Women should have an easier time because men in the past had an easier time, even if the pendulum shifts.
I believe this is a misinterpretation of what RBG said. Here's her full quote:
“WHEN I’M SOMETIMES ASKED ‘WHEN WILL THERE BE ENOUGH [WOMEN ON THE SUPREME COURT]?’ AND I SAY ‘WHEN THERE ARE NINE,’ PEOPLE ARE SHOCKED. BUT THERE’D BEEN NINE MEN, AND NOBODY’S EVER RAISED A QUESTION ABOUT THAT.”
My reading of the quote is that is she's saying that a female justice should be not be any more surprising than a male justice, and thus that an all-female court should be no more surprising than an all-male court.
Just working out the probabilities, if women and men were selected as justices with equal probability, single-gendered courts should occur about 0.2% of the time for each gender.
That's a small number, but not a vanishingly small number. While I don't think we can say much about courts prior to ~1975 (equal gender opportunity to the court not yet being an objective), it seems reasonable to say going forward that IF we are achieving the stated goal of equal gender opportunity, we should expect that an all-female court will eventually occur.
Yes you have the interpretation right. She wasn't making a mission-statement, she was illustrating the faulty premise embedded in the question that there is some required count of women in the court that must be met in order to satisfy the feminists, as if the underrepresentation was something to ameliorate by imposing a quota rather than being indicative of a deeper general problem with how people think about equality.
Among new hires, typically not. The gender balance is close to 50/50, and hiring committees bend over backwards to find qualified URM candidates. The key word being "qualified".
As a fraction of the overall department, yes, because anybody who hired in before ca. 2000 is basically a white or Asian male with almost no exceptions. So the demographics on paper still look pretty skewed, but it gets better with each passing year.
I actually can envision, new universitys being founded on purely meritocratic and scientific basis, having only "hard" research based topics and succesfully distance themselves from the "relgious" education base.
This topic is covered on this weeks episode of the Economist's Checks and Balance podcast, which covers US politics. https://www.economist.com/checkspod
Education and resources for things to that end are potentially being directed and filtered by and through a self-perpetuating "bureaucracy of thought" product and marketers, which, allegedly, demands strict adherence and conformity with their dogma, beliefs, and potentially facts if some topics are taboo.
The article & discussion is relevant to hackernews in many respects: subversion is often construed with hacking. education and hacking.
If you believe the topic taboo, then your taboo is being 'hacked'.
I concede that the primary goal is likely to foster discussion of individuals found on hackernews opposed to inform the hackernews audience, though it's not without merit either way.
It directly relates to many of the institutions that employ and educate those in our profession, which directly effects the experience of individuals in these institutions.
> The era of Donald Trump seems to have strengthened the diversity bureaucracy’s belief that students’ feelings must be protected.
This article is very weird. I realise that The Economist isn't just journalism, but also editorials and that every article is very open about its slant. The constant use of the deragotory "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrat" plus the use of a pseudonym of the author indicates that whoever wrote this has an axe to grind and is afraid to publicly grind it. It's obvious what the author thinks: diversity is bullshit, white male professors should be able to speak without fear, too much money is being used to scare white male professors.
Don't get me wrong, though. Unlike B. S., I am not telling you what to think. I am just remarking how odd it is to see such a slanted article.
Are you kidding me? Mainland China has the worst virtue-signaling bureaucracy that I’ve seen anywhere by far (and the corruption that came with it).
Administrative bloat (and the tyranny of corporations) is a problem, but don’t presume they (or DEI initiatives) weren’t invented to solve a problem, even if it’s just as a band-aid. Some kind of baby and bathwater thing seems to be going on here.
And, in any case, every extant country, every political faction, every institution is likely going to have some weakness at some point in time, because we are human beings and we fuck up a lot of things constantly. Something something iron law of oligarchy.
What we've discovered is that authoritarian countries frequently machismo virtue signal, and when the rubber hits the road they don't know how to fight.
I imagine that the real harm will be like in most of Southern Europe where once mighty nations languish as their economies labour under the weight of regulation and the population is mostly poor outside a few cities.
Their generals will fall to femboys and furries. But their businessmen can still win.
“The population is mostly poor outside a few cities” seems to have been a historical norm in most of the world, for one reason or another (regulatory capture / colonialism / decline of key industries / etc).
(And I wish we had more concrete data to critique instead of vague, monolithic enemies like “administrators” or “regulations” (typo), where each side simply fills in the blanks according to their own biases.)
> (And I wish we had more concrete data to critique instead of vague, monolithic enemies like “administrators” or “regulations” (typo), where each side simply fills in the blanks according to their own biases.)
But yes. I would further suggest that sometimes people get too invested in online spaces and calibrate their worldview based on it perhaps a bit too much. (And prior to this it was traditional mass media, or their IRL local community echo chambers, etc.) It takes effort to find and evaluate truly original research.
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf