It could be that the people do care about the values listed, but don't know an effective way to guarantee them, and that existing diversity statements are a stopgap measure until something better is figured out.
But no, let's jump directly to "Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy."
Or... perhaps don't ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by incompetence.
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by apathy.
I’ve seen it in myself and can only speculate about others, but sometimes I’ll leave a meeting completely unconvinced by an argument and come in the next day singing a different tune.
People like the echo chamber because it’s comfortable. But comfortable doesn’t lead to growth.
An in depth analysis can still miss possible logical conclusions. I don't think the GP is saying they skipped possible analysis, just that they fail to consider alternatives.
> Or... perhaps don't ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by incompetence.
Hanlon's razor is a heuristic which doesn't work very well in this case. Clearly, there is a lot of social pressure to at least pretend to care about diversity, so by default you'd expect at least some people to lie about it.
I agree, the idea that they don't care and go to all this work seems absurd.
Seems more likely they're just bad advocates / come up with bad policies for ideas they like. THAT does not surprise me the least. The amount of "If you get what you want here, I don't think that gets you any closer to your goal, in fact it might do the opposite." situations is pretty high out there.
It's been falling steadily over time. Left wing bias in universities was far less extreme in the 60s. Given the prevalence of articles by conservatives saying they were kicked out for ideological reasons, and that this article is about the practice of forcing applicants to write a loyalty pledge to leftist dogma, it is safe to assume that this decline was largely a deliberate takeover by people who devoted themselves to excluding others over a long period of many decades.
I vouched for this because I think it's fairly reasonable.
I think american and european universities were at the forefront of all the diversity and "woke", a decade earlier.
He argued that if universities cared about diversity their positions on affirmative action would be more dynamic than is commonly accepted. e.g.:
> Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society.
The examples he uses demonstrate that, in his mind, caring about diversity requires measuring circumstance. You might argue that universities are not so shallow as he's claiming, but I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.
> their positions on affirmative action would be more dynamic than is commonly accepted
People are already trying to get affirmative action programs dismantled. Making them more complicated would lead to larger surface area, and be easier to attack.
> I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.
The entire argument of the article is that they don't measure diversity the same way he wants them to measure diversity, and therefore they don't care about it. It never considers that schools consider it differently, or whether his method is consistent, or whether what he proposes has been considered and dismissed.
I've seen it for a university position in Sweden. It has a self-criticism and cult like feel that I really don't like. Position in universities should be considered on scientific and educational grounds, not political.
> Candidates must be from one or more of the following equity-seeking groups to apply: women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and racialized groups.
Yes. A previous boss of mine that I liked once asked me to just add some boilerplate phrases to my performance review to make sure he and I were both aligned with the corporate diversity mandates. Did I change the way I acted simply by adding this text? Nope!
Seems to be fairly widespread and growing rapidly.[1] "68 percent of job ads in the fall of 2020 mentioned diversity, and 19 percent required a separate diversity statement. That number requiring diversity statements is even higher for elite schools and tenure-track jobs. Certain fields are more likely to require diversity statements than others, with political science being the most likely among fields included in the survey."
I certainly don't, at least not in the way that modern society seems to be pushing for it.
A year or two ago a high school was putting on a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and there was a loud minority of students complaining because a white girl was cast as Esmeralda. In the original book, Esmeralda is ethnically French, but Gypsies steal her as an infant and replace her with Quasimodo. Many years later, Esmeralda's mother sees her and rants at her, thinking she is one of the gypsies she hates for stealing her daughter. She hates her own daughter, her own flesh and blood, because of interethnic hatred. The implication of this, and the impact of people like the students complaining because a white girl was cast in the role, are left as an exercise to the reader.
> In the original book, Esmeralda is ethnically French
I mean, I just think that no one seems to be aware of this. She's not French in the movie adaptation, which is what most of those kids would be familiar with. (And the musical does heavily draw from the movie – including leaving out her meeting her mother).
Without the added context of the original book's description, since it seems no one was aware of it, do you think the uproar was justified?
I think it's just plain old fashioned ignorance, right?
Dunno, to me this just looks like kids who were excited to see a musical starring someone who looked like them for once, and were understandably upset when that didn't happen.
>I think it's just plain old fashioned ignorance, right?
Pushing to get a play cancelled (and succeeding!) over a misunderstanding that can be resolved by a 30 second googling is in fact willful ignorance.
>Dunno, to me this just looks like kids who were excited to see a musical starring someone who looked like them, and were understandably upset when that didn't happen.
They started a months-long letter writing and protesting campaign, according to your own NYT link. And the person who started the campaign was African American, not Gypsy. And while most of the Gypsies I met while living in Eastern Europe looked vaguely Middle Eastern or Indian (I realize their actual ancestry is more complicated), there are white Gypsies as well. I have never, however, heard of black Gypsies. I'm sure with immigration to Europe combined with intermarriage there are some now, but the typical Gypsy in France a few centuries ago is not going to be black. So I have no idea what your "someone who looked like them" comment is supposed to mean.
>Looks like the students were targeted by alt-right publications for that, too
Oh no, shitheads on the internet said mean things and a tiny number even made threats! I'm sure you can find examples of that for any controversial news story that makes national headlines, I don't see your point here.
Given that roma people stealing children is an age old stereotype (think of it as similar to jewish people and blood libel) I don't think the books comes out ahead in its portrayal of racism/xenophobia. The decision to change Esmeralda's race in the later adaptations was not made on a whim, it was made to remove the confused messaging/racist stereotyping.
Alternate perspective: it will be flagged down because HN's community has continually proven incapable of having discussions like this without it turning into a shouting match. It's already happening.
I don't think that should be as big of a deal as it is. I'm guessing it's because it's bad for publicity/ads but the whole "people are mad at each other in the comments! Shut it down!" thing that has taken over is dumb.
Have you ever seen how mad people get at each other on the road? Yeah, people suck when they don't have a face in front of them to remind them its a person on the other side. It's disingenuous to pretend that side of people doesn't exist though.
It's worse when you have a person to attribute it to. A bad driver could be a senile old man. A dumb comment could be from some edgy teenager or $0.50 shill. A functional adult who should know better behaving that way is hard to have sympathy for.
> because HN's community has continually proven incapable of having discussions like this without it turning into a shouting match
Maybe, but that itself (just like downvote brigading) is a technique used to suppress discussion. Become so "outraged" when others simply state their opinion to make normal discussion impossible.
That is an area in which I don't think HN moderation does a good job. They blame people who merely state a controversial opinion for "initiating a flamewar" instead of standing firm against the angry mob and putting emphasis on the importance of keeping a high standard for discussion. Simply being outraged is quite diagonal to curiosity, the core value of HN.
I don't doubt that your prediction is entirely true, but I'd say a more likely cause is that the majority of people realise (correctly) that this sort of article will result in absolutely no useful or edifying discussion whatsoever. We'll be treated to a thread of absolutely valueless commentary that achieves nothing apart from angering a lot of people, and I'd imagine that articles like this will continue to flagged to death until such time as HN demonstrates that it's able to sustain adult conversations about controversial issues, particularly where they touch on topics like DEI.
> The article is an essay that starts by citing Supreme Court case law
Wrong. First 3 sentences:
> All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires. Everyone has to submit a statement explaining how they are going to contribute to “diversity”. What you’re supposed to do in these, and what everyone damn well knows you’re supposed to do, is (i) talk about your race, gender, and other “identity group” traits that it would be illegal for the university to explicitly ask you about, and (ii) talk about your activism on behalf of left-wing identity politics.
It primes the reader with subjective and emotionally driven flamebait.
So you stopped reading after three sentences, right.
And no, the section you quoted is not "subjective and emotionally driven flamebait", that's the exact sort of tactics I'm talking about. The existence of this practice is widely reported - objective - and if you are really willing to argue that the suggested responses are not what you're meant to write about then go ahead and argue that.
You can't because the true situation is plain to see, so instead throw tantrums to try and stop other people discussing the extremely important debasement of universities. There is nothing "flamebait" about raising the alarm about real problems in the world.
I see articles like this in my RSS reader, which is immune to flagging, and I play a little game where I guess whether or not it will be flagged by the time I read it.
Huh? Access to flagging is not given to a "small fraction" of users. You only need to make a few good submissions or comments to get it. Frustratingly I can't get a definitive answer, but its on the order of few hundred karma points at most.
They do it to all low-effort political posts, not just the right-leaning ones. It is an explicit goal of the site management to not let this place turn into a forum where people come to argue divisive political topics.
The companies are the wrong place to address it, though. You need to fix the pipeline, probably starting w/ bringing K-12 education up to developed-world standards.
Going on a tangent I am tired of diversity theater at most companies. You know how I know you don't really care? I look at your C level (excluding Chief Diversity Officer) and you board.
Years and breadth/depth of experience is far from everything, but it's also far from nothing.
I'd sort of expect the CxOs at most major companies to be ~25-40 years into their career. I'd therefore expect them to look a lot like the white collar workforce new entrants looked in 1982-1997.
Are you for real largest SV companies can't find a single "diverse" board member or C level but spend 100s of millions evangelizing how they care about diversity and on employee diversity training?
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Candidates WHERE DIVERSE = 1 ORDER BY Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered DESC
or
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Candidates ORDER BY Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered DESC
There could be valid reasons to employ either strategy, but I suspect most firms are trying to apply the second and your disbelief that the first query returns zero rows is more a mismatch with the firms' hiring strategy than anything else.
I am not suggesting they have to employee 1st or 2nd strategy. But if you do go with the 2nd don't go down the path of by-weekly employee diversity trainings and diversity being the corner stone of your "values" and communication strategy.
Pick an Indian CEO of a major American company. When did they start their career? How many of their fellow Indians started in the same timeframe? (I think "a lot!")
Some major tech company Indian CEOs:
Sundhar Pichai (Alphabet) ~1993
Satya Nadella (Microsoft) ~1990
Parag Agrawal (Twitter) ~2011 (with PhD, but still an outlier even discounting that)
Shantanu Narayen (Adobe) ~1986
Arvind Krishna (IBM) ~1990
Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron) ~1979
Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto) ~1992
My comment was in reference to yours and the parent combined.
It should be easy to look at the C-board and find diversity because in a global economy there are tons of people with the experience as you've proved with your great example.
This is an extremely shallow and dismissive take, IMO. As someone who has recruited engineers, I can tell you there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. At the C-level, it only gets worse. It takes years to even get to the C-suite, which means that white men inherently have a head start, and that it's one of the last places you'd expect to see the effects of diversity initiatives.
That isn't to say there aren't companies that have Chief Diversity Officers who aren't taken seriously, but that's a completely different story.
> there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself.
So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to check some boxes and be able to say "we've got X% of engineers who aren't white men, look at how diverse we are!"
It's not possible to measure a counterfactual where teams at a given company just suddenly become diverse. But, it is pretty well known that there are some advantages to diversity in the workplace. Take, for instance, this reasonably well source article which lists 10 advantages: https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefi...
Oh, and it's not just white men. East Asians and those from the Indian subcontinent are also well represented in tech (perhaps over represented -- I'm not sure).
+1 here, and yeah it's definitely not just white men. Where I work, it's ALL Indian or Asian, you'd be hard pressed to even find white people where I work that are actually in engineering.
They dont want diversity in its true meaning.
They just want to hire whoever they want, from wherever they want.
And "diversity" is the camouflage they hide behind.
I didn't go through and click all the links in the article, I was mainly interested in the problem-solving section. However, that one links to a Harvard Business Review study that drops this quote:
> Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance.
They go on to say that when they say "diverse teams solve problems faster", they mean cognitive diversity:
> Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age.
Intuitively this makes much more sense than the race-based stuff I've been hearing about. You want people who can look at a problem from a different angle from you. It's sort of like having a team of specialists (one guy is good at UI, one at performance, one at tooling, etc.) except on the level of cognitive processes and not specific skills.
I believe that maybe these studies arose saying "diverse teams are better" and people misunderstood it to mean "racial diversity" and ran with it (kind of like the Hungarian notation fiasco).
They can hire the way they want to hire but should stop the diversity training theater and fill good posting on twitter if they have 0 diversity on the C team they directly hired.
I think these institutions believe that more diversity ----> more inclusivity and less racism. How would a racist indian national deeply entrenched in caste culture help my company be less racist? How would an asian supremacist laotian increase the workplace's acceptance?
If you want a place of tolerance then it should be populated by tolerant people. Throwing together males and females with a random sample of skin colors and passports is not going to make your university a more inclusive place by default.
> How would a racist indian national deeply entrenched in caste culture help my company be less racist?
To be fair, there are many people from traditionally chauvinistic groups who despise the very chauvinism they live in. Many of them may be intelligent and productive people. Dismissing each and every individual because of the group is the root of discrimination.
Some attempts at diversity may go too far - tolerating intolerant people just because "they grew up in different environment" - leading to the paradox of tolerance [0]. I've read news [1] about the very phenomenon.
The fact is - tolerance, diversity, open-mindedness - those are all values, and they need to be enforced. In order to keep a tolerant society, you must show the door to anyone who disagrees with that philosophy. The same way you need to lock up criminals to keep an ordered society from devolving into chaos.
But ultimately, in order to have a truly tolerant society, each and every member of it must be evaluated as an individual.
You can't meaningfully enforce open-mindedness or tolerance. The very idea is an oxymoron. The whole notion of tolerance is based on the idea that we might sometimes find it expedient to work alongside people we don't agree with about everything.
Every single person I've met in my life that was racist or sexist or whatever-ist (including myself) has only become a better person and more open-minded when they were forced to work in close proximity to people of other races and cultures. As to myself, I was raised in a pretty racist place in the USA, and via the military I met so many other people that I finally realized that the stereotypes I was taught about others were incorrect, or at least if they were correct there was some cultural context to why that stereotype had been warped from the original context. I think it's better to randomly throw people of different races, sexes, and cultures together than not, personally, even if it makes business a bit less productive or the person hired is slightly less optimal for that position. We're not machines, after all, and shouldn't be treated like only our output matters.
> ... We're not machines, after all, and shouldn't be treated like only our output matters.
Sure, but that's not enforcing open-mindedness or tolerance. It's just creating the kind of setting where the benefits of a more tolerant stance are easiest to get.
Sure, but now we're just discussing the meaning of the word "enforce". Perhaps I've just chosen an inappropriate word for the meaning I wanted to convey.
Yea, and I guess I agree we can't enforce it, we can just do things to make it easier to become open minded. One way to do that is to force people to interact in close proximity to cultures and individuals who are different than what they have experienced to date. Mostly, today, that involves putting people of different skin colors and sexes together. Tomorrow, perhaps we'll have to make sure humans and intelligent cows work closely together, I don't know (I'm serious! perhaps if humans and cows spent more time together we'd eat less of them?).
> Every single person I've met in my life that was racist or sexist or whatever-ist (including myself) has only become a better person and more open-minded when they were forced to work in close proximity to people of other races and cultures.
Apart from this being anecdotal evidence, were they not forced to act as a better person and more open-minded in that environment ?
> The whole notion of tolerance is based on the idea that we might sometimes find it expedient to work alongside people we don't agree with about everything.
There's a difference between disagreeing about something in theory, and acting maliciously in order to exclude someone from your group because they disagree with you. As you said, the whole idea of tolerance boils down to tolerating disagreements. Someone who doesn't tolerate disagreements cannot work with others who do.
It's not agreement that must be enforced in order to have a tolerant society, it's tolerance to disagreement.
> There's a difference between disagreeing about something in theory, and acting maliciously in order to exclude someone from your group
The main difference is that preventing malicious actions is generally feasible, via tweaking institutional rules (such as by outright forbidding tests of religious/ideological conformity like the ones OP discusses). That's still not enforcing anything in any substantial sense; it's just a direct tweak to the "rules of the game", meant to drive improved outcomes.
No, but you can foster and protect a culture of open minded people by pushing back against people who are actively being divisive and promoting intolerance of some groups in the name of diversity and equity.
Most of the metrics that I have been judged by over the course of my career (e.g. lines of code, story point velocity, etc) are absolute bullshit, and easily manipulated. And yet... I continue to build "dashboards" for VP's to stare at, and continue to be measured by deeply flawed metrics.
I believe that every rational thinking person would agree that tracking racial and ethnic and sexual headcount percentages doesn't necessarily mean what they purport to mean. But... what are you gonna do? We just need metrics, any metrics. Bad metrics are better than no metrics, or at least this seems to be the deeply entrenched mindset of business.
We also need DEI at the border in addition to the colleges and for job opportunities. The way LatinX people are oppressed at the border is inhumane. Not to mention the trauma inflicted on LatinX people during last administration.
I find it so eerie that institutions are trying to design their work force's distribution of skin color. Unless your work force is make-up models or something.
With some exception (specifically our industry), all the privilige of a high caste indian or Laotian supremacy goes away when you move to a Western/White dominated culture.
They are much more likely to encounter racism against THEIR race, than have the opportunity to promote their own racism.
I think people are confusing corporations vs people.
People want diversity and care about diversity, who optionally wants to exclude someone that has merit to participate in the work/activity. Of course bigots exist, but largely people try to respect people.
Corporations, care as much as it is profitable that is the purpose of the organization is to generate wealth for stakeholders.
The issue in my opinion is how subjective 'merit' is, where studies show two resumes with equal qualifications a name implying a race or gender alone is enough to change the results of which resume was chosen subconsciously.
People see this problem as how do you measure someone without bias? How do you measure the cultural impact one can bring? How do you measure <something we suck a measuring currently>
Corporations see this problem as, how do we stay diverse enough to not look evil? How do we make measure our diversity to prove that? THEN they approach the people's point of view on the issue, because above everything is shareholders earnings and therefore the optics. It's not even intentional to a degree, stop gap solutions to make corporation happy and people tolerant of the corporation
Calling it Orwellian is crazy though, it's just capitalism and governments trying to find a way to keep it fair for non-capital owners.
No, but by having even-handed and rational conversations we can find the best outcome and hopefully have small influence in making society incrementally better.
Society is responsible for itself. There are no written rules you inherit when you are a born. You only inherit whatever was passed down to you through your family lineage. And if that happens to be unsavory, then you as a person have to resolve that.
I am talking high-level self-development and conscious awareness not some crap imposed onto people who think they know better.
When I took ecology in college, to calculate diversity of an ecosystem, we used Shannon's formula from a mathmatical theory of communications. iirc we did it with base e vs base 2 so the units for ecological diversity were in nits.
The purpose of universities is to support state power. A multiethnic state must keep its minorities pacified. The tragedy is international institutions copying USA policies without understanding the core reasons and thus undermining the governments they are meant to support.
Of all the things to worry about I don't think "diversity" and all the song and dance is really enjoyed by the typical large corporation folks who are actually in charge enough to make this some kind of conspiracy. That's too uncharacteristic and too many steps to make sense to me.
Let alone the fact that these diversity panels / oversight has caused plenty an issue at large corporations and PR messes. I don't think anyone at big corp wants any part of that just to in theory put pressure on someone else.
Actual regulations and laws are plenty effective on keeping down competition in some situations. Smaller corporations rarely see any real pressure diversity wise. There might be some examples but generally smaller orgs fly under the radar of just about everything.
The original lawsuit the author cites happened more almost 50 years ago.
Taking into account that similarly incompetent practices persisted for half a decade, there should now be a line where incompetence becomes malice. It's easy to hide behind apologia and recognition of past wrongdoing.
The problem with the system isn't the oppressive results it might produce, the problem lies within the system itself and its innate bias to create oppression. Complacency isn't an excuse, it's an aggravating circumstance. Academia especially should try to get as close as possibe to a merit-based system, where acception and further progression are determined on past grades, not on skin color, gender, religion and economic status.
Another problem that noone seems to be worried about is the mass collection of personal data and the processing thereof. How can I trust discussing my faith, ethnicity and finances with a for-profit institution, when (especially under US jurisdiction) I have little to no control of how that data gets processed, sorted and monetized?
Isn't the real issue behind all the names (diversity, inclusion, etc) about the equalizing of opportunity or at the very least, bringing certain oppressed groups (and, if you don't think certain groups are or have been oppressed or discriminated against, educate yourself) up the opportunity curve? Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?
Well, the OP is describing a case where you might meaningfully have more or less opportunity depending on your expressed stance in matters unrelated to actual job duties - viz., your expressing support for diversity ideology, as evidenced in a "diversity impact statement". So this is basically compelled speech and/or discrimination based on ideology, which is a very real kind of oppression.
Oh, maybe I misinterpreted. I have much less interest in that argument given that there are tons of pre-existing ideologies that could be discriminated against for a job. Right? If your ideology is "I think it's important to work as little as possible to maintain a job." I'd assume many employers would discriminate against hiring someone with that ideology, no? Apologies if I'm missing the key point again.
No worries. It's easy to misinterpret these things because there are facets of job performance in this area that wouldn't be out of place at all in a "diversity impact statement" (such as a proven, developed ability to teach and work with people from a high variety of backgrounds - which doesn't even correlate all that much with political stance per se). Nevertheless, the very notion of requiring that kind of statement is sure to introduce a sort of very real bias in hiring.
The rhetoric has shifted in recent years from “equality of opportunity” to “equity”, which is more about equality of outcome.
> Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Do any companies subscribe to equity of outcome? I didn't think that was the intent of the word "equity". If that were the case, we wouldn't get promoted or bonuses based on our work, it would just be a timed schedule. I don't think that is what's going on.
I've been under extreme pressure to get my team up to 40% women/nonbinary/lgbt even if their skills are subpar. It's coming from the top down.
However, I do get some leeway from HR on their paper education profile and paper experience. I say "paper", because we already fired several people for basically lying on their resume.
How do the HR people even know that if some team members are LGBT? I am a gay and I think it is my private matter and not something I would be interested sharing with for example my employer. I prefer to separate work and my private life in many other issues as well.
It sounds very odd to ask about these kind of things during employment. How often do for example LGBT persons provide this kind information in their job application and is it even legal to ask it?
And on the other hand, is there anything that prevents you pretending to be a member of some minority? For example, if you can get more easily employed by saying that you are bisexual, is there anything that would prevent you lying? If there isn't, why even bother asking about these kind of things.
That's true. It's hard to admit that, though. The current monied class can easily blame previous, (mostly dead) generations for racism and misogyny and say "we didn't create this problem, but this is what we're trying to do to fix this". Of course, they're benefitting from the situation and remain in control per the status quo.
If we admit to the classism that currently exists, that in the US the zip code you were born in says so much about what your opportunities will be, it's going to take a lot more social reform to address it than applying pressure around university admissions or job offers. The monied class may actually have to give up some power in that situation...
It's darkly amusing to me how many well off leftie progressive types are on board when I talk about difficulties that revolve around being a lesbian or disabled but look horrified when I drop into working class speech patterns or refuse to deny the class aspect of my upbringing.
> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with
Yes. I do not want to live in a world where genetic editing is used to give everyone equal opportunity. I am ok with not having the genetics to play in the NBA while others do.
Diversity should not be the end goal. A healthy society that provides basic needs for all should be. If that means we have mostly people that share X characteristics in Y field that’s fine as long as they’re the best people for the job.
That's not what parent said.
Do you want to live in a world where you could be the best basketball player in the world but you are don't get drafted because your eyes are blue?
Some people don't get opportunities because of their skin color, their name or their religion.
It's about becoming a NBA player if you can't play basketball
I would generally agree that any instance of discrimination by characteristics orthogonal to the performance of a given task is undesirable (if we're striving to optimize total societal benefit / output / productivity).
Attractiveness is another axis of discrimination which is frequently orthogonal to job performance (unless we're talking about jobs as a model, etc).
I never understand this argument. Wouldn't market forces, i.e. capitalism, gekko's greed-is-good argument fix this?
If there were a group of basketball players with blue eyes (that were the best in the world), wouldn't someone see the huge money potential and create a team full of blue-eyes and win the title/cup/trophy?
Maybe in many decades after the anti-blue-eye bias had been successfully mitigated such a team would be formed. But until then, money and winning is not enough.
Bias is stronger than capitalism. Some people willingly give up money to not serve gay people, for example.
Sure, if a minority is a small percentage and it wont hurt you financially (much), plus you can milk it to get press (and most likely increase your profit), then I can understand that. (I think you're referring to the cake shop if I remember correctly).
However setting up shop and not serving cakes to a vast majority of your customers who are a minority is just asking for bankruptcy.
I also find it really hard to believe that there isn't one greedy capitalist that will take advantage of this situation.
e.g. Huge talent shortage of tech workers. Assume that there is a cohort minority who are probably price themselves cheaper (becz they are having it harder to find a job), then there's not one person who will seize this opportunity in America?
Making the world fair would be equal opportunity. Equity is the hot topic nowadays, which is explicitly ignoring more qualified applicants for less qualified applicants because of their race, and that's what people are upset about.
Equal opportunity won't create fairness, as we're not all clones.
What equal opportunity can do is provide those who have been systematically discriminated against (as well as everyone else) a fair shake. What they then do with that 'fair shake' is up to them.
This is a complex topic that reaches into many areas of life, including (but not limited to) home environment, quality of schooling, societal advantages/disadvantages, economic advantages/disadvantages, stratification by class/ethnicity/melanin content and a raft of other issues.
I agree that just focusing on melanin content is a poor way to address the issues seen.
That said, claiming that failure to solve all of a society's problems via melanin content awareness in hiring decisions means that the concept of equal opportunity is a failure is supremely unconvincing IMHO.
Finding a more commensurate representation of underrepresented groups is a laudable goal, but if it means systemically discriminating against Asians or Hispanics then it's really a tongue in cheek effort
If we assume (rightly) that american society is inherently and irredeemably racist, how exactly can we trust admissions officers or people involved in employee recruitment to make decisions that aren't racist?
Racism runs to the core of how people see each other in america, so much so that race data shouldn't be allowed into any decisions period. Or at least, people should feed inaccurate data into the system in order to subvert the white privilege that it rests apon
> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?
Stop for a second and think about what this question implies. First, there are genetic characteristics which affect opportunity and can't be smoothed out. But even environmental characteristics are intractable. Factors like whether your parents read to you, make you do your homework, or make you go to school can't be corrected by social policy. Equal opportunity isn't a realizable goal.
The focus should be on preventing discrimination. But, while there is plenty of discrimination, discrimination explains a smaller share of unequal outcomes than unequal opportunity, which can't be fixed.
> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?
As a white man who grew up with a single mother, this is exactly what affirmative action appears to be. Why? Because I already had a rough start, and saw opportunities broadcast and given out to others that I didn't qualify for simply because I wasn't non-white.
I understand the on-paper intents and purposes perfectly well, but the reality is these programs are racist to the core.
I get your point and maybe the solution to fixing historic oppression against race is hard to get perfect. And your financial problem or lack of opportunity sucks but but isn’t it a little silly to say that a program is racist when it’s trying to help a certain race who was oppressed because of their skin color.
If we stole 100 dollars from all black people and then 20 years later decided to give black people their money back, you’d say that repayment program is racist against non-blacks?
What do you tell an Indian or Lebanese immigrant who arrived 5 years ago and whose taxes are going to be increased to finance this?
Also, what if the benefit goes mostly to recent immigrants, not descendants of slaves? This is the case for affirmative action at elite schools:
> the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. [1]
Short of genetic modification, we are always going to live in a world where your opportunities depend on the characteristics you were born with. We can smooth it out somewhat, but not remove it completely.
Look at discrimination against unattractive people for one - it is actually more pronounced (although less overtly visible) than discrimination by race, but gets significantly less media coverage. There are also many other axes - height, intelligence, character - most of which are heavily influenced by genetics; we simply consider it acceptable to discriminate based on these attributes.
> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with?
How do we know that those fewer opportunities are necessarily linked to the characteristics you were born with? For example: in Britain, white working class kids are the least likely of any major racial group to go to university. But that is evidently not because they're white. Poor parenting and low levels of expectation in some schools have been cited as some of the reasons for this.
For the record, in 2021 in terms of State school students getting into universities the rates were as follows: Chinese/72%, Asian/54.9%, Mixed/48%, Black/46.8% and White (of any class)/33.3%
> Of course, none of the above predictions are borne out: the current practice of affirmative action has none of these features that you would expect if its proponents actually valued diversity. Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity.
Another variation of this that I always hear is "everyone wants diversity but sucks at inclusion", which is slightly different (main article says they don't actually want diversity).
Need to give this a closer re-read but my instinct is that people do actually want diversity and aren't good at making it happen; but it could be a mix of everything where they use it for the social karma and secretly don't
For an example of this, see this story about Canadian professor and laser scientist Patanjali Kambhampati who was denied for grants because his avowed commitment to mere non-discrimination and merit-based hiring was deemed insufficient.
Is that a numbers game?
How many people don't get jobs because of the "wrong" skin color?
They don't get famous too, that's why no news site brings an article about them.
I don't see a problem with this, especially if part of the mission of the folks giving the grant is to create opportunities for under-represented people.
"If I want to focus on merit, fairness and equality, then you get called out as racist or sexist."
I'm still waiting for an example where someone can actually vet people based on merit, fairness and equality without any of their own unconscious biases being a factor. Humans are most comfortable with people that think, look, and act like them. No matter how hard they try, it skews their thinking at times.
>I'm still waiting for an example where someone can actually vet people based on merit, fairness and equality without any of their own unconscious biases being a factor
And the pendulum has swung so far back I can recall reading "diversity" advocates trying to remove them in the last few years for being insufficiently equitable.
> A typical orchestral audition might end up attracting dozens of people who are essentially indistinguishable in their musicianship and technique.
Then raise the bar. Why are we content that more people can achieve the top tier of any field? If leaders of a field cannot find ways to evaluate newcomers, then replace them with new leaders and techniques that can. What a lazy excuse.
Yep. Toronto eliminated all skill-based admission requirements for specialized arts, athletics, science and math programs and turned them into a lottery process for admission because it's more equitable.
I'd agree that those sorts of outcomes are just as bad as ignoring the problems of internalised systemic biases towards particular sexes, age groups, racial backgrounds or lack of obvious but irrelevant physical disabilities.
We may not have found the best way to ensure that a 60yo black, wheelchair-bound woman is just as likely to be chosen on merit as a 30yo white able-bodied man yet but it doesn't seem we shouldn't keep trying.
Wow, flagged, killed, resurrected in a VERY short amount of time. This is spicy.
Diversity is a trope that I've yet to see any evidence for other than using it as a kudgel to force a single viewpoint on a bunch of people by threatening their salary.
To be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't hire other races, or prefer one race above the other. But having been both in tech and university I can tell you by and large these programs are feel good and do almost nothing to forward their goal.
If the goal is to improve racial diversity, then you can do it trivially by simply selecting non-white races. This is, by definition, racist, but for some reason we've retermed this form of racism as "affirmative action". In a lot of sectors this ends up becoming a racial quota. Some tech companies even seem to gleefully promote it as such. These quotas do nothing to improve the bottom line or improve diversity. It feels more like revenge than progress and I don't think that's effective or sustainable.
If the goal is to improve ideological diversity then race shouldn't be controlled for. As the author rightly points out, a white person from a poor neighborhood will have a "more diverse" viewpoint than a black person from a middle class neighborhood. However, one may wonder how increased ideological diversity would help solve a problem in software that doesn't directly lean on one of those ideologies. There has never been a point in my decades long career as a backend engineer where my political/racial/religious identity ever influenced my code. I can say this with absolute certainty.
It feels like a sham to me. Suddenly in the last decade we've seen the marked rise of "diversity consultants" who by and large are simply diversity hustlers. This includes the new title "chief diversity officer" who, to this day, I am unsure what they even contribute in terms of driving profitability. Of course, these diversity hustlers will promote direct-action diversity efforts as the panacea to all of our sins because it's profitable to them. I have yet to see data that implies when controlling for education, race is a determining factor in ability. The idea itself seems false on its face but this is the exact idea they are promoting.
A business seeks first to optimize profit. Meritocracy is the single best way to insure this. If you wish to reduce hiring bias develop systems for double-blind reviews of candidates and compare results. These problems can be at least partially ameliorated with statistics. But instead, it seems we choose the most inefficient and outright questionably legal method instead. Promoting these ephemeral hard to measure metrics like "X <trait> has a more diverse opinion and is therefore better than Y <trait>" is just an end-around to bigotry at the corporate and university level. We can do better to fix hiring pipeline biases, etc, but this is not the way.
I care about diversity.
I've been a women in stem nearly my entire life (thanks dad!).
However diversity quotas, esg scores, and all the manipulation in "diversity" and "woke" today is more about incompetent children of the rich who need fake jobs that make a lot of money. I've refused to hire an english major young woman on my development team even under extreme pressure from management because she's a women, but also because she's the CTO's wife's niece.
It's just an unbelievable amount of pressure, now all resumes are pre-screened before they even get to me by a third party hiring group so corporate has plausible deniability about their schemes.
It's become far more about "elite" signalling and nepotism these days.
> I've refused to hire an english major young woman on my development team even under extreme pressure from management because she's a women, but also because she's the CTO's wife's niece
That's not "woke", that's just garden variety nepotism.
"Woke" is very different that other types of cover.
"Woke" gets celebrated and praised, and people have to pretend that hire wasn't hired due to nepotism.
As a manager whose been thru this rodeo, let me tell you what happens.
1. We have to have a mini celebration for "woke but really nepotistic" hire at big corporation.
2. We can never mention that persons skill or the "real" reason they got hired.
3. It gives the "elites" far more power to harass people via HR if they don't like the nepotism
4. The non-nepotism hires can become bitter and resentful, even more so when they have to pickup extra work for no department praise or celebrations if the "woke" hire is bad. I also have to give cover for the "woke" hire.
5. My team starts to collapse, and I have to negotiate all sorts of shit to keep my talented hires.
It's just an absolute nightmare when managing a high performance results required teams.
I agree with everything stuckinhell said as she seems to have some first hand experience with this, but I'd like to add that frankly it's just disgusting to use things like civil rights as a corporate HR move. People marched and risked a lot of real things to achieve the rights that we all have today. Now "wokeness" (which used to be cool btw) has been co-opted by corporations and we all have to pretend that a company hiring an unqualified woman who happens to be related to someone on the C-suite is progress just because she's a woman.
It makes me sick, and I don't understand how anyone can defend this bullshit.
Another reason people don't like diversity initiatives is that whenever you try to have an honest conversation about its problems, you get accused of ridiculous things, like being racist/sexist/etc or thinking nepotism is good.
I don't understand what your point is. A company hiring a woman with no relevant experience because she's the niece of the CTO is bad. A company hiring a woman with no relevant experience because she's the niece of the CTO but it's ok this time because she's a woman also seems bad. The former is "garden variety" nepotism, and we all agree it's bad. The latter is the new "woke" nepotism, but it's really the same as the former, with the "woke" part being used as an excuse.
How does that benefit anyone other than the people doing the nepotism?
I don't think anyone is contesting that, but the point seems to be that the people who push these initiatives undeniably think nepotism is, in fact, good because that's what their actions tell us.
It is garden variety nepotism. If it was the CTO's wife's nephew, the CTO's allies wouldn't have argued for a "woker" candidate instead, they'd have pushed very hard on some other basis like the "intellectual diversity" of his different experience or his solid-but-irrelevant academic track record or his supposed credentials as a self-taught programmer or his "leadership potential" or his "strong recommendation from a colleague".
The difference is that if the under qualified relative was justified for one of those reasons people would be less likely to insist the solution to this very obvious nepotism was not to broaden the hiring pool beyond the CTO's relatives, but to chuck all the company's initiatives aimed at attracting career changers, academic-high achievers, autodidacts, leaders or referrals in the bin...
If it was his nephew, then he'd put down nonbinary or some LGBTQ2S flavor.
It's not garden variety nepotism because the executives CAN and DO use HR to attack critics of his relatives or allies.
I've seen commentary that links the idea of elite overproduction to the rise of preoccupation with diversity within business and more generally within the culture.
That's how I took the parent's comment, anyway, and that nepotism was additionally involved in the anecdote just substantiates the elite overproduction argument.
As an example of the shoe being on the other foot, institutionalized nepotism in university is called legacy admissions and overwhelmingly benefits white applicants.
I care about diversity, as I care in equality for all, I'm an egalitarian. However, I think perhaps we should make it more of a blind thing, where you don't get to see or know the person's race/gender etc. All applications come with a # and are essentially jane or john Doe's.
Then the only diversity they need worry about is income diversity, where they need to have equal #'s from extreme poverty as they have from extreme wealthy. Income does trend some in more diverse communities anyways, so it'll happen naturally that this will create more diversity, but it takes away some of the stigmas and angst around it because everyone being accepted is more of a number and acceptance is more based on their achievements etc..
It's been very, uh, interesting (perhaps in the "may you live in interesting times" fashion) watching the Diversity concept leap toward an unquestioned, uncritically accepted value in and of itself.
Take The Parable of the Polygons, from 2014 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19714441) ... it is hard to come away from this with anything other than "choice of neighborhood leads to segregation and lack of diversity, and that's bad." But what of Robert Putnam's widely critiqued 2007 study? Imagine, just for a bit, where diversity causes a loss of a sense of community, and therefore diversity would not be an uncritical good. What if humans like to be around other humans superficially like them, not unlike other social mammals?
Step back and look at the various "spaces" striven for on behalf of some minorities (and women, who are not a minority but get that badge), both in Universities, in women-only workspaces featured here, and in places like Curves. Good, apparently for the goose, but not so much for that troublesome gander. These are simply non-diverse spaces when close up, pixelated. Only by putting a bunch of them together and pulling back do they look diverse.
Certainly, some of the methods used to achieve diversity are questionable, and we have various people, from Elizabeth Warren to Rachel Dolezal, masquerading as minorities to acquire ... well, people seek to acquire power and status, so it is hard to argue against that people like Dolezal and Warren didn't want some additional blessing by identifying as groups they do not belong to, and also therefore hard to argue against that those group identifications aren't in some areas (especially academia) positive status and power. We've watched colleges and some corporations come under fire for enrollment and hiring practices which select strongly against (we used to call that "discrimation") certain groups, like the unruly Asians, who are square pegs, refusing to fit into the minority/poverty hole.
A serious re-evaluation is due, one where people's careers aren't threatened by doing so.
535 comments
[ 1012 ms ] story [ 1388 ms ] threadBut no, let's jump directly to "Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy."
Or... perhaps don't ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by incompetence.
I’ve seen it in myself and can only speculate about others, but sometimes I’ll leave a meeting completely unconvinced by an argument and come in the next day singing a different tune.
People like the echo chamber because it’s comfortable. But comfortable doesn’t lead to growth.
Hanlon's razor is a heuristic which doesn't work very well in this case. Clearly, there is a lot of social pressure to at least pretend to care about diversity, so by default you'd expect at least some people to lie about it.
Seems more likely they're just bad advocates / come up with bad policies for ideas they like. THAT does not surprise me the least. The amount of "If you get what you want here, I don't think that gets you any closer to your goal, in fact it might do the opposite." situations is pretty high out there.
You're confusing being educated with being elitist. Being elitist is what the right thinks is bad, not education.
> Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society.
The examples he uses demonstrate that, in his mind, caring about diversity requires measuring circumstance. You might argue that universities are not so shallow as he's claiming, but I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.
People are already trying to get affirmative action programs dismantled. Making them more complicated would lead to larger surface area, and be easier to attack.
> I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.
The entire argument of the article is that they don't measure diversity the same way he wants them to measure diversity, and therefore they don't care about it. It never considers that schools consider it differently, or whether his method is consistent, or whether what he proposes has been considered and dismissed.
I've never heard about it before.
>schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires
Is this like when you do a self performance review and you just throw in a bunch of common phrases / text?
Also below is a particularly egregious example from Canada, where it explicitly states white straight men need not apply.
https://www.universityaffairs.ca/search-job/?job_id=58317
Is such discrimination therefore legal in Canada? I don't think it's legal in the US (https://www.eeoc.gov/racecolor-discrimination).
edit: It looks like it might be legal in Canada: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-5.401/page-1.html
Seems to be fairly widespread and growing rapidly.[1] "68 percent of job ads in the fall of 2020 mentioned diversity, and 19 percent required a separate diversity statement. That number requiring diversity statements is even higher for elite schools and tenure-track jobs. Certain fields are more likely to require diversity statements than others, with political science being the most likely among fields included in the survey."
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/05/23/diversity-st....
A year or two ago a high school was putting on a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and there was a loud minority of students complaining because a white girl was cast as Esmeralda. In the original book, Esmeralda is ethnically French, but Gypsies steal her as an infant and replace her with Quasimodo. Many years later, Esmeralda's mother sees her and rants at her, thinking she is one of the gypsies she hates for stealing her daughter. She hates her own daughter, her own flesh and blood, because of interethnic hatred. The implication of this, and the impact of people like the students complaining because a white girl was cast in the role, are left as an exercise to the reader.
Edit: News article about the high school production https://www.bet.com/article/mq8775/school-cancels-musical-af...
I mean, I just think that no one seems to be aware of this. She's not French in the movie adaptation, which is what most of those kids would be familiar with. (And the musical does heavily draw from the movie – including leaving out her meeting her mother).
Without the added context of the original book's description, since it seems no one was aware of it, do you think the uproar was justified?
On the other hand, there are examples of the musical performed with a caucasian lead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5wNynK1tHg
No, I don't think willful ignorance justifies cancel culture.
I think it's just plain old fashioned ignorance, right?
Dunno, to me this just looks like kids who were excited to see a musical starring someone who looked like them for once, and were understandably upset when that didn't happen.
Looks like the students were targeted by alt-right publications for that, too: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/theater/hunchback-of-notr...
Pushing to get a play cancelled (and succeeding!) over a misunderstanding that can be resolved by a 30 second googling is in fact willful ignorance.
>Dunno, to me this just looks like kids who were excited to see a musical starring someone who looked like them, and were understandably upset when that didn't happen.
They started a months-long letter writing and protesting campaign, according to your own NYT link. And the person who started the campaign was African American, not Gypsy. And while most of the Gypsies I met while living in Eastern Europe looked vaguely Middle Eastern or Indian (I realize their actual ancestry is more complicated), there are white Gypsies as well. I have never, however, heard of black Gypsies. I'm sure with immigration to Europe combined with intermarriage there are some now, but the typical Gypsy in France a few centuries ago is not going to be black. So I have no idea what your "someone who looked like them" comment is supposed to mean.
>Looks like the students were targeted by alt-right publications for that, too
Oh no, shitheads on the internet said mean things and a tiny number even made threats! I'm sure you can find examples of that for any controversial news story that makes national headlines, I don't see your point here.
Have you ever seen how mad people get at each other on the road? Yeah, people suck when they don't have a face in front of them to remind them its a person on the other side. It's disingenuous to pretend that side of people doesn't exist though.
Maybe, but that itself (just like downvote brigading) is a technique used to suppress discussion. Become so "outraged" when others simply state their opinion to make normal discussion impossible.
That is an area in which I don't think HN moderation does a good job. They blame people who merely state a controversial opinion for "initiating a flamewar" instead of standing firm against the angry mob and putting emphasis on the importance of keeping a high standard for discussion. Simply being outraged is quite diagonal to curiosity, the core value of HN.
Wrong. First 3 sentences:
> All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires. Everyone has to submit a statement explaining how they are going to contribute to “diversity”. What you’re supposed to do in these, and what everyone damn well knows you’re supposed to do, is (i) talk about your race, gender, and other “identity group” traits that it would be illegal for the university to explicitly ask you about, and (ii) talk about your activism on behalf of left-wing identity politics.
It primes the reader with subjective and emotionally driven flamebait.
And no, the section you quoted is not "subjective and emotionally driven flamebait", that's the exact sort of tactics I'm talking about. The existence of this practice is widely reported - objective - and if you are really willing to argue that the suggested responses are not what you're meant to write about then go ahead and argue that.
You can't because the true situation is plain to see, so instead throw tantrums to try and stop other people discussing the extremely important debasement of universities. There is nothing "flamebait" about raising the alarm about real problems in the world.
I'd sort of expect the CxOs at most major companies to be ~25-40 years into their career. I'd therefore expect them to look a lot like the white collar workforce new entrants looked in 1982-1997.
Some major tech company Indian CEOs:
It should be easy to look at the C-board and find diversity because in a global economy there are tons of people with the experience as you've proved with your great example.
That isn't to say there aren't companies that have Chief Diversity Officers who aren't taken seriously, but that's a completely different story.
So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to check some boxes and be able to say "we've got X% of engineers who aren't white men, look at how diverse we are!"
Oh, and it's not just white men. East Asians and those from the Indian subcontinent are also well represented in tech (perhaps over represented -- I'm not sure).
https://web.archive.org/web/20220218114915/https://quillette...
> Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance.
They go on to say that when they say "diverse teams solve problems faster", they mean cognitive diversity:
> Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age.
Intuitively this makes much more sense than the race-based stuff I've been hearing about. You want people who can look at a problem from a different angle from you. It's sort of like having a team of specialists (one guy is good at UI, one at performance, one at tooling, etc.) except on the level of cognitive processes and not specific skills.
I believe that maybe these studies arose saying "diverse teams are better" and people misunderstood it to mean "racial diversity" and ran with it (kind of like the Hungarian notation fiasco).
Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want a place of tolerance then it should be populated by tolerant people. Throwing together males and females with a random sample of skin colors and passports is not going to make your university a more inclusive place by default.
To be fair, there are many people from traditionally chauvinistic groups who despise the very chauvinism they live in. Many of them may be intelligent and productive people. Dismissing each and every individual because of the group is the root of discrimination.
Some attempts at diversity may go too far - tolerating intolerant people just because "they grew up in different environment" - leading to the paradox of tolerance [0]. I've read news [1] about the very phenomenon.
The fact is - tolerance, diversity, open-mindedness - those are all values, and they need to be enforced. In order to keep a tolerant society, you must show the door to anyone who disagrees with that philosophy. The same way you need to lock up criminals to keep an ordered society from devolving into chaos.
But ultimately, in order to have a truly tolerant society, each and every member of it must be evaluated as an individual.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
[1] https://restofworld.org/2022/tech-india-caste-divides/
Sure, but that's not enforcing open-mindedness or tolerance. It's just creating the kind of setting where the benefits of a more tolerant stance are easiest to get.
Apart from this being anecdotal evidence, were they not forced to act as a better person and more open-minded in that environment ?
There's a difference between disagreeing about something in theory, and acting maliciously in order to exclude someone from your group because they disagree with you. As you said, the whole idea of tolerance boils down to tolerating disagreements. Someone who doesn't tolerate disagreements cannot work with others who do.
It's not agreement that must be enforced in order to have a tolerant society, it's tolerance to disagreement.
The main difference is that preventing malicious actions is generally feasible, via tweaking institutional rules (such as by outright forbidding tests of religious/ideological conformity like the ones OP discusses). That's still not enforcing anything in any substantial sense; it's just a direct tweak to the "rules of the game", meant to drive improved outcomes.
I believe that every rational thinking person would agree that tracking racial and ethnic and sexual headcount percentages doesn't necessarily mean what they purport to mean. But... what are you gonna do? We just need metrics, any metrics. Bad metrics are better than no metrics, or at least this seems to be the deeply entrenched mindset of business.
Polls consistently show less than 5% of hispanic and latin american people want to be called latinx. Lets respect their wishes.
With some exception (specifically our industry), all the privilige of a high caste indian or Laotian supremacy goes away when you move to a Western/White dominated culture.
They are much more likely to encounter racism against THEIR race, than have the opportunity to promote their own racism.
https://qz.com/apple-meta-and-google-must-fight-caste-discri...
https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...
People want diversity and care about diversity, who optionally wants to exclude someone that has merit to participate in the work/activity. Of course bigots exist, but largely people try to respect people.
Corporations, care as much as it is profitable that is the purpose of the organization is to generate wealth for stakeholders.
The issue in my opinion is how subjective 'merit' is, where studies show two resumes with equal qualifications a name implying a race or gender alone is enough to change the results of which resume was chosen subconsciously.
People see this problem as how do you measure someone without bias? How do you measure the cultural impact one can bring? How do you measure <something we suck a measuring currently>
Corporations see this problem as, how do we stay diverse enough to not look evil? How do we make measure our diversity to prove that? THEN they approach the people's point of view on the issue, because above everything is shareholders earnings and therefore the optics. It's not even intentional to a degree, stop gap solutions to make corporation happy and people tolerant of the corporation
Calling it Orwellian is crazy though, it's just capitalism and governments trying to find a way to keep it fair for non-capital owners.
And then there are people who just downvote and flag everything they disagree with.
I am talking high-level self-development and conscious awareness not some crap imposed onto people who think they know better.
Let alone the fact that these diversity panels / oversight has caused plenty an issue at large corporations and PR messes. I don't think anyone at big corp wants any part of that just to in theory put pressure on someone else.
Actual regulations and laws are plenty effective on keeping down competition in some situations. Smaller corporations rarely see any real pressure diversity wise. There might be some examples but generally smaller orgs fly under the radar of just about everything.
The problem with the system isn't the oppressive results it might produce, the problem lies within the system itself and its innate bias to create oppression. Complacency isn't an excuse, it's an aggravating circumstance. Academia especially should try to get as close as possibe to a merit-based system, where acception and further progression are determined on past grades, not on skin color, gender, religion and economic status.
Another problem that noone seems to be worried about is the mass collection of personal data and the processing thereof. How can I trust discussing my faith, ethnicity and finances with a for-profit institution, when (especially under US jurisdiction) I have little to no control of how that data gets processed, sorted and monetized?
No worries. It's easy to misinterpret these things because there are facets of job performance in this area that wouldn't be out of place at all in a "diversity impact statement" (such as a proven, developed ability to teach and work with people from a high variety of backgrounds - which doesn't even correlate all that much with political stance per se). Nevertheless, the very notion of requiring that kind of statement is sure to introduce a sort of very real bias in hiring.
> Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/equity-vs-equal...
I've been under extreme pressure to get my team up to 40% women/nonbinary/lgbt even if their skills are subpar. It's coming from the top down. However, I do get some leeway from HR on their paper education profile and paper experience. I say "paper", because we already fired several people for basically lying on their resume.
And on the other hand, is there anything that prevents you pretending to be a member of some minority? For example, if you can get more easily employed by saying that you are bisexual, is there anything that would prevent you lying? If there isn't, why even bother asking about these kind of things.
If we admit to the classism that currently exists, that in the US the zip code you were born in says so much about what your opportunities will be, it's going to take a lot more social reform to address it than applying pressure around university admissions or job offers. The monied class may actually have to give up some power in that situation...
Yes. I do not want to live in a world where genetic editing is used to give everyone equal opportunity. I am ok with not having the genetics to play in the NBA while others do.
Diversity should not be the end goal. A healthy society that provides basic needs for all should be. If that means we have mostly people that share X characteristics in Y field that’s fine as long as they’re the best people for the job.
Some people don't get opportunities because of their skin color, their name or their religion.
It's about becoming a NBA player if you can't play basketball
Attractiveness is another axis of discrimination which is frequently orthogonal to job performance (unless we're talking about jobs as a model, etc).
If there were a group of basketball players with blue eyes (that were the best in the world), wouldn't someone see the huge money potential and create a team full of blue-eyes and win the title/cup/trophy?
Bias is stronger than capitalism. Some people willingly give up money to not serve gay people, for example.
Homo oeconomicus is a myth.
However setting up shop and not serving cakes to a vast majority of your customers who are a minority is just asking for bankruptcy.
I also find it really hard to believe that there isn't one greedy capitalist that will take advantage of this situation. e.g. Huge talent shortage of tech workers. Assume that there is a cohort minority who are probably price themselves cheaper (becz they are having it harder to find a job), then there's not one person who will seize this opportunity in America?
Equal opportunity won't create fairness, as we're not all clones.
What equal opportunity can do is provide those who have been systematically discriminated against (as well as everyone else) a fair shake. What they then do with that 'fair shake' is up to them.
This is a complex topic that reaches into many areas of life, including (but not limited to) home environment, quality of schooling, societal advantages/disadvantages, economic advantages/disadvantages, stratification by class/ethnicity/melanin content and a raft of other issues.
I agree that just focusing on melanin content is a poor way to address the issues seen.
That said, claiming that failure to solve all of a society's problems via melanin content awareness in hiring decisions means that the concept of equal opportunity is a failure is supremely unconvincing IMHO.
Edit: Fixed typo (unconvicing --> unconvincing).
If we assume (rightly) that american society is inherently and irredeemably racist, how exactly can we trust admissions officers or people involved in employee recruitment to make decisions that aren't racist?
Racism runs to the core of how people see each other in america, so much so that race data shouldn't be allowed into any decisions period. Or at least, people should feed inaccurate data into the system in order to subvert the white privilege that it rests apon
Stop for a second and think about what this question implies. First, there are genetic characteristics which affect opportunity and can't be smoothed out. But even environmental characteristics are intractable. Factors like whether your parents read to you, make you do your homework, or make you go to school can't be corrected by social policy. Equal opportunity isn't a realizable goal.
The focus should be on preventing discrimination. But, while there is plenty of discrimination, discrimination explains a smaller share of unequal outcomes than unequal opportunity, which can't be fixed.
As a white man who grew up with a single mother, this is exactly what affirmative action appears to be. Why? Because I already had a rough start, and saw opportunities broadcast and given out to others that I didn't qualify for simply because I wasn't non-white.
I understand the on-paper intents and purposes perfectly well, but the reality is these programs are racist to the core.
If we stole 100 dollars from all black people and then 20 years later decided to give black people their money back, you’d say that repayment program is racist against non-blacks?
Also, what if the benefit goes mostly to recent immigrants, not descendants of slaves? This is the case for affirmative action at elite schools:
> the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. [1]
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
You mean like making it harder to get into limited college slots (requiring higher scores, etc) based on your race? You're right, that seems awful.
Look at discrimination against unattractive people for one - it is actually more pronounced (although less overtly visible) than discrimination by race, but gets significantly less media coverage. There are also many other axes - height, intelligence, character - most of which are heavily influenced by genetics; we simply consider it acceptable to discriminate based on these attributes.
How do we know that those fewer opportunities are necessarily linked to the characteristics you were born with? For example: in Britain, white working class kids are the least likely of any major racial group to go to university. But that is evidently not because they're white. Poor parenting and low levels of expectation in some schools have been cited as some of the reasons for this.
For the record, in 2021 in terms of State school students getting into universities the rates were as follows: Chinese/72%, Asian/54.9%, Mixed/48%, Black/46.8% and White (of any class)/33.3%
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education...
Another variation of this that I always hear is "everyone wants diversity but sucks at inclusion", which is slightly different (main article says they don't actually want diversity).
Need to give this a closer re-read but my instinct is that people do actually want diversity and aren't good at making it happen; but it could be a mix of everything where they use it for the social karma and secretly don't
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/minority-professor-deni...
https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/harrison_matthew_s_200512_ms....
"If I want to focus on merit, fairness and equality, then you get called out as racist or sexist."
I'm still waiting for an example where someone can actually vet people based on merit, fairness and equality without any of their own unconscious biases being a factor. Humans are most comfortable with people that think, look, and act like them. No matter how hard they try, it skews their thinking at times.
Blind auditions for orchestras.
nytimes [0]: "To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions"
[0]: https://archive.ph/kCb9N
> A typical orchestral audition might end up attracting dozens of people who are essentially indistinguishable in their musicianship and technique.
Then raise the bar. Why are we content that more people can achieve the top tier of any field? If leaders of a field cannot find ways to evaluate newcomers, then replace them with new leaders and techniques that can. What a lazy excuse.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/05/24/tdsb-votes-to-re...
But, well, we've seen what happened when ElectronConf tried that.
Diversity is a trope that I've yet to see any evidence for other than using it as a kudgel to force a single viewpoint on a bunch of people by threatening their salary.
To be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't hire other races, or prefer one race above the other. But having been both in tech and university I can tell you by and large these programs are feel good and do almost nothing to forward their goal.
If the goal is to improve racial diversity, then you can do it trivially by simply selecting non-white races. This is, by definition, racist, but for some reason we've retermed this form of racism as "affirmative action". In a lot of sectors this ends up becoming a racial quota. Some tech companies even seem to gleefully promote it as such. These quotas do nothing to improve the bottom line or improve diversity. It feels more like revenge than progress and I don't think that's effective or sustainable.
If the goal is to improve ideological diversity then race shouldn't be controlled for. As the author rightly points out, a white person from a poor neighborhood will have a "more diverse" viewpoint than a black person from a middle class neighborhood. However, one may wonder how increased ideological diversity would help solve a problem in software that doesn't directly lean on one of those ideologies. There has never been a point in my decades long career as a backend engineer where my political/racial/religious identity ever influenced my code. I can say this with absolute certainty.
It feels like a sham to me. Suddenly in the last decade we've seen the marked rise of "diversity consultants" who by and large are simply diversity hustlers. This includes the new title "chief diversity officer" who, to this day, I am unsure what they even contribute in terms of driving profitability. Of course, these diversity hustlers will promote direct-action diversity efforts as the panacea to all of our sins because it's profitable to them. I have yet to see data that implies when controlling for education, race is a determining factor in ability. The idea itself seems false on its face but this is the exact idea they are promoting.
A business seeks first to optimize profit. Meritocracy is the single best way to insure this. If you wish to reduce hiring bias develop systems for double-blind reviews of candidates and compare results. These problems can be at least partially ameliorated with statistics. But instead, it seems we choose the most inefficient and outright questionably legal method instead. Promoting these ephemeral hard to measure metrics like "X <trait> has a more diverse opinion and is therefore better than Y <trait>" is just an end-around to bigotry at the corporate and university level. We can do better to fix hiring pipeline biases, etc, but this is not the way.
However diversity quotas, esg scores, and all the manipulation in "diversity" and "woke" today is more about incompetent children of the rich who need fake jobs that make a lot of money. I've refused to hire an english major young woman on my development team even under extreme pressure from management because she's a women, but also because she's the CTO's wife's niece.
It's just an unbelievable amount of pressure, now all resumes are pre-screened before they even get to me by a third party hiring group so corporate has plausible deniability about their schemes.
It's become far more about "elite" signalling and nepotism these days.
That's not "woke", that's just garden variety nepotism.
As a manager whose been thru this rodeo, let me tell you what happens.
1. We have to have a mini celebration for "woke but really nepotistic" hire at big corporation.
2. We can never mention that persons skill or the "real" reason they got hired.
3. It gives the "elites" far more power to harass people via HR if they don't like the nepotism
4. The non-nepotism hires can become bitter and resentful, even more so when they have to pickup extra work for no department praise or celebrations if the "woke" hire is bad. I also have to give cover for the "woke" hire.
5. My team starts to collapse, and I have to negotiate all sorts of shit to keep my talented hires.
It's just an absolute nightmare when managing a high performance results required teams.
It makes me sick, and I don't understand how anyone can defend this bullshit.
Like yay progress, I guess..?
Later
(The score on this is absolutely my fault for being much too casual about the point I was trying to make.)
How does that benefit anyone other than the people doing the nepotism?
The difference is that if the under qualified relative was justified for one of those reasons people would be less likely to insist the solution to this very obvious nepotism was not to broaden the hiring pool beyond the CTO's relatives, but to chuck all the company's initiatives aimed at attracting career changers, academic-high achievers, autodidacts, leaders or referrals in the bin...
That's how I took the parent's comment, anyway, and that nepotism was additionally involved in the anecdote just substantiates the elite overproduction argument.
Then the only diversity they need worry about is income diversity, where they need to have equal #'s from extreme poverty as they have from extreme wealthy. Income does trend some in more diverse communities anyways, so it'll happen naturally that this will create more diversity, but it takes away some of the stigmas and angst around it because everyone being accepted is more of a number and acceptance is more based on their achievements etc..
Take The Parable of the Polygons, from 2014 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19714441) ... it is hard to come away from this with anything other than "choice of neighborhood leads to segregation and lack of diversity, and that's bad." But what of Robert Putnam's widely critiqued 2007 study? Imagine, just for a bit, where diversity causes a loss of a sense of community, and therefore diversity would not be an uncritical good. What if humans like to be around other humans superficially like them, not unlike other social mammals?
Step back and look at the various "spaces" striven for on behalf of some minorities (and women, who are not a minority but get that badge), both in Universities, in women-only workspaces featured here, and in places like Curves. Good, apparently for the goose, but not so much for that troublesome gander. These are simply non-diverse spaces when close up, pixelated. Only by putting a bunch of them together and pulling back do they look diverse.
Certainly, some of the methods used to achieve diversity are questionable, and we have various people, from Elizabeth Warren to Rachel Dolezal, masquerading as minorities to acquire ... well, people seek to acquire power and status, so it is hard to argue against that people like Dolezal and Warren didn't want some additional blessing by identifying as groups they do not belong to, and also therefore hard to argue against that those group identifications aren't in some areas (especially academia) positive status and power. We've watched colleges and some corporations come under fire for enrollment and hiring practices which select strongly against (we used to call that "discrimation") certain groups, like the unruly Asians, who are square pegs, refusing to fit into the minority/poverty hole.
A serious re-evaluation is due, one where people's careers aren't threatened by doing so.