Anyone who thinks we should just live in a “pure meritocracy” is a little bit delusional. Maybe they’ve played too many RPG’s where players have stats and you can sort by attribute and pick the best. If that was the case in the real world there would no job interview, just sharing statistics and picking the candidates with the highest numbers. Employers have to evaluate people on how they will perform BEFORE they perform, on subjective grounds. So for any number of reasons, probably subconsciously, people who are more unattractive, short, or possibly of a different race than the hirer can be perceived to be qualified but ‘not a good fit’. There are always ways around excluding people without it seeming discriminatory. That’s not to say there should be quotas, but to think there’s no issue because we should just pick the best candidate never stop to ask “how? How do you know they are the best?”.
The answer is you don't. But just because the system isn't perfect doesn't mean we should just throw it in the blender. By that logic we should get rid of "free" health care / safety nets in Western European countries. It mostly works but it also gets exploited. How can you know people aren't exploiting the system? You can't know for sure, but we can do our best to find out.
Your comparison is inane. What’s the connection between dei and getting rid of safety nets? Not to mention that dei is not inherently unmeritocratic to begin with
You misunderstand what DEI is. It means diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s not incompatible with meritocracy. For example you have similar candidates, take the one who’s least represented in your org.
Or you have a “pure” meritocracy, but you spend more energy and money sending your recruiters to areas and schools whose students are more likely to not be represented at your company.
If you can’t understand that you shouldn’t be commenting on DEI stuff.
> For example you have similar candidates, take the one who’s least represented in your org.
This would be the only edge case in which it would "work". And even then you're still systematically rejecting someone based on who they are rather than what they can do. I'd rather lose to a coin flip.
> Or you have a “pure” meritocracy, but you spend more energy and money sending your recruiters to areas and schools whose students are more likely to not be represented at your company.
Then it's not pure, because you're actively avoiding people.
> If you can’t understand that you shouldn’t be commenting on DEI stuff.
Regardless if your statement is true or not, you believe we should exclude people from discussions because they might not have enough knowledge on the subject? (Ironic for a topic on inclusion)
Your other two points are trivially handled by the history of race and hiring practices in the United States. I recommend beginning your education with the “New Jim Crow”.
Truly fascinating there are some who believe the hiring process is meritocratic to begin with. It’s not. This notion you have that hiring is solely about what you can do is just so naive. It never has been and never will be. Working is a collaborative effort and inherently will include nebulous traits, I.e. “who you are”.
> Regardless if your statement is true or not, you believe we should exclude people from discussions because they might not have enough knowledge on the subject? (Ironic for a topic on inclusion)
If you do not support dei, which you appear not to, then yes. Ironic indeed. Perhaps now you will understand the need for diversity (in opinions such as yours) and inclusion (in conversations such as these).
Ive seen lesser qualified people get hired because of this. Ie multiple people get inverviewed, but even the the "least represented" is far less qualified they got hired entirely because of DEI. This was clearly stated as the reason why too. Happens more often than you'd think.
I agree that we need to take seriously the history of racism in the US and try to mitigate its impacts. From what I have seen, the consideration of race in admissions and hiring doesn't remove bias, but adds a bias in an opposite direction. I have talked to people who have been involved in hiring processes, and many can cite examples where candidates from URM groups have been given a great deal more credit than non-URM candidates were given for a similar or higher level of achievement/qualification. It's hardly a secret that in job markets with a high emphasis on racial diversity, the highly underrepresented minority is often a hot commodity who is judged by a different standard.
I think it's valid to argue that this bias is worth it. But we should not pretend that we are simply remedying bias or pushing people towards a more fair evaluation of each candidate for their individual qualities. What we're doing is adding an opposite bias in an attempt to approach closer to proportional racial representation.
There's also reasonable room to question if we should essentially equate diversity to population-proportional racial representation, as we do today. This is also a bias which may take away from seeking diversity along other lines, such as class/upbringing, age, and being outside traditional recruiting networks for the job.
> This is also a bias which may take away from seeking diversity along other lines, such as class/upbringing, age, and being outside traditional recruiting networks for the job.
I'm glad you mentioned age. Age discrimination and lack of age diversity is a big problem in tech.
Whenever there's a discussion about underrepresented groups in tech, isn't it funny how older people are rarely considered?
> Whenever there's a discussion about underrepresented groups in tech, isn't it funny how older people are rarely considered?
IMHO, it's because organizations don't really value diversity in the ordinary sense of the term. They value proportional representation of all demographic groups that have legal standing to sue them for civil rights violations, and who have organized interest groups who stand ready to do so. DEI exists to align the organization towards this objective.
> IMHO, it's because organizations don't really value diversity in the ordinary sense of the term.
It's not just about organizations though. Whenever I hear ordinary tech workers, non-managers, just talking informally about underrepresented groups, they rarely mention older people. It's a forgotten group (kind of like GenX in general LOL).
I should say, I don't want to pit underrepresented groups against each other. As far as I've seen, various forms of discrimination go hand-in-hand. I once heard a prominent businesswomen say that the most sexist workplaces she's seen were also the most ageist.
This “pure meritocracy” argument simply boils down to the fact that it’s not possible to build a system that perfectly measures how prospective candidates will perform in the future. Really, all businesses and institutions should be free to innovate their own methodologies for doing that, and live with whatever consequences they produce, with the governments role being to regulate the limits of permissible discrimination. Race has been a class legally protected from discrimination for quite some time now, and it’s honestly pretty sad that it’s taken this long to get a ruling on this open and unapologetic racial discrimination.
Well I don’t think that’s true. You should be allowed to racially discriminate about who’s allowed to come into your home. Employers and universities should not be allowed to racially discriminate about who they employ/admit.
My point is simply that the “perfect meritocracy doesn’t exist” argument is pointless. Screening candidates is a problem for businesses to solve, and the only metric they should be incentivised to optimise for is the outcomes produced for the institution/business.
The difference is that employers at least *try* to pick the best candidate by ignoring characteristics such as attractiveness and height. For race and gender, it's the opposite: employers actively give preference to certain races and to women.
I can't read the text of the article due to paywall. But the headline seems a bit on the nose. I'm personally happy about diversity efforts at work -- it's helped my software development and interactions by introducing the ideas, best practices, and pitfalls related to accessibility, localization, and messaging.
I remember a new girl freshly out of college, got an award for something, she was among some people who filed patents, developed new technologies, worked insane hours for free, etc...
When she got called to the stage, she was embarrassed. Our group had people working 10 hour days to fix some stuff, yet this person who had been at the company for 6 months and barely finished training, was recognized as award worthy.
Whoever made that decision didn't realize that she shined a spotlight on how dumb it all was. I'm not sure if the 1000 people in the room realized how merit-less it was, but our group of ~30 people all knew.
I'm sure the girl went on to do great things, she was bright, friendly, and a hard worker. It made me realize that merit is not what the company was necessarily looking for.
>I'm sure the girl went on to do great things, she was bright, friendly, and a hard worker.
You made your own counter-point here.
Many entrenched systems would never have given her a chance to begin with. Maybe she got some advantages early on here career, we can take the tally of them if you're willing to quantify all of the explicit and implicit advantages that her straight white male counterparts got along the way as well (including not having coworkers project "embarrassment" onto them when they receive an accolade).
Sounds like the system elevated a bright young talent, recognized her, and by your assumption, she went on to be well-deserving of the opportunity.
To fix representation of minorities in fields where they are currently under represented, we need to start by fixing our school system.
You cannot fix discrimination of one kind by applying discrimination of another kind.
The role of the supreme court is not to fix the inequalities of our society, it is to uphold the law and constitution of the US.
This is my favorite quote from the opinion on this case from Justice Thomas's concurring opinion:
"Both experience and logic have vindicated the Constitution’s colorblind rule and confirmed that the universities’ new narrative cannot stand.
Despite the Court’s hope in Grutter (previous case) that universities would voluntarily end their race-conscious programs and further the goal of racial equality, the opposite appears increasingly true.
Harvard and UNC now forthrightly state that they racially discriminate when it comes to admitting students, arguing that such discrimination is consistent with this Court’s precedents.
And they,along with today’s dissenters, defend that discrimination as good. More broadly, it is becoming increasingly clear that discrimination on the basis of race—often packaged as “affirmative action” or “equity” programs—are based on the benighted notion “that it is possible to tell when discrimination helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities.”
[...]
“Purchased at the price of immeasurable human
suffering,” the Fourteenth Amendment recognizes that
classifications based on race lead to ruinous consequences for individuals and the Nation."
This is indeed the case. As a European it's very clear to me what the real cause of your problem is: property taxes. In Europe, schools are funded nationally, which means there isn't much difference between one school or the other. 'private schools' are not really a thing here because all of our public schools are good enough.
In US, your property taxes decide what kind of neighbourhood you grow up in. Good neighbourhood, good schools, bad neighbourhood, bad schools. This is huge.
Darn, the person who commented that non-logical people get to make political decisions deleted their post.
I wanted to comment that I think leadership and management are pretty good overall. There is some minimum standard of merit that needs to be achieved, so these aren't the people that are illogical.
I sat next to HR at 2 jobs. At one they were behind a locked door, so I only met HR people. The other I was on the other side of the cubicle. Yikes, HR is the illogical part of the chain. Not that they always do a bad job, but you hear some of the things they say, and you can clearly tell they have no problem using bias against people.
This is true, it all feels so artificial and forced.
But the sleight-of-hand trick WSJ and others are trying to pull here as part of their strategy now that they got rid of college affirmative action is that while nobody likes DEI b.s., it goes beyond not liking into actually harmed territory for anyone that's a minority at the work place.
And companies do get sued a lot over this stuff. Maybe you don't see this in office environments these days but I had worked in places where the DEI people told us stories of nooses being left at someones locker, watemelons, racial epithets,etc... Elon is infamous at his companies for being "anti-woke" and getting sued and losing like 5 times over overt racism at his companies.
So, while I look forward to less bullshitty ways of educating people and making everyone feel welcome and get a fair shot at promotions, much of the US still has a LOT of people who are esentially insecure jerks that are more or less racist.
Only slighty related: if I hear someone say "woke" or "anti-woke" these days, by default I assume they are racists with a foot out of the closet.
I didn't care much about college affirmative action but this tells me along with book banning there is some fascist conspiracy about. And in my book the only good fascist/nazi is a dead one so I hope I am wrong about this because it means the future bleak in the US, just look at the upvotes to this post.
In my observation, the problem is C-level execs and lawyers whose goal is to improve reputation and avoid lawsuit or chances of winning lawsuits. These people are making DEI shitty. I have even seen people get downsized but a new role with the same responsibility get created to avoid lawsuit because the person is a minority. I have seen people of the same exact demographic get interviewed along with a token person of the exact opposite demographic to avoid a suit. I have heard manangers ask "I only want recruiters to send me <insert minority> female for this role" and then they hire the worst candidates possible. It's not HR but litigation centric culuture that's the problem.
You know what's bad? Racism. Those people should be cancelled!
You know what's great? Tribalism. How about them $SportsTeam! Let's have more multibillion dollar businesses to encourage people to hate anyone who doesn't agree $SportsTeam is the greatest! We should have rich old white men own them and give them a pass on DEI. It might hit their bottom line if they were not allowed to hire the best players in the market. Can you imagine a world where ROWM are not allowed their god-given right to exploit our quirks of evolutionary development? We could not enrich them further by gathering in large groups to celebrate our $SportsTeam tribe and spew hate on the $OtherTeam tribe. Maybe even beat them up in the parking lot after the game if we lost.
You lost me after the first sentence. I don't follow sports enough, maybe that's why. I don't do social media outside HN and don't get people who use their real names on the public internet so the idea of being cancelled is not one I have strong opinions on.
But if you just meant racist people suck then I must agree.
Maybe the USA should pass some civil rights legislation and enforce desegregation by bussing black children to white schools and white children to black schools. What measures would you suggest?
I can’t see past the paywall but it brings up the Supreme Court case. Two of the things that confused me about that case and how it would apply to the workplace:
- it only excluded race as a consideration for admissions. Why race only? You can argue someone who is disabled who gets in might have “taken” a slot from a more qualified able-bodied person. Similarly, you can argue women athlete scholars of sufficiently unsupported sports are “taking” a slot from a more qualified man somewhere. It’s weird to make race the sole exception when the general argument applies. I wouldn’t even know how to apply this to work!
- why did the Supreme Court make an exception for military school? All the logic applies except it’s okay if black/Hispanic people edge out white peoples to go to war? Does this mean also the diversity initiatives in government contractors/department of defense funded research is ok?
The SC was only asked to consider race. It isnt writing legislation, it's asked a very specific question: is race-based admissions policy consistent with the existing body of interpretations of the constitution. It's answer: No.
Because it was only asked to consider race and only for admission to academic institutions. So that's what it did.
> why did the Supreme Court make an exception for military school?
Because the Solicitor General argued that the military could have considerations different to civilian academic institutions such as national security. And the Supreme Court agreed that they might so included the exception.
If racial diversity is a national security implication why shouldn’t all educational facilities foster this? many labs take national defense money. It makes no sense to me to claim ensuring a diverse population is a matter of national security therefore we should make sure civilians don’t do it.
I still despise the evolution of the terminology in this area. A workforce can be diverse, an individual cannot. Diversity is a measure of the differences across a group of people, not whether or not one person belongs to a special category. It is a comparison of two groups, not an individual to the group.
Statistics "memes" along the lines of "people from X and Y are Z likely to go on to do A" are probably the most misleading and tiring factoids out there.
All that they are useful for is for whiners to complain that they weren't blessed with being 6ft6 or beautiful or a certain skin colour or whatever else.
In the real world people who actually achieve things just go out and do it. They're not sitting about wondering whether middle management at XYZ prefers working class kids or black supermodels.
It’s not that people don’t want diversity, it’s that the pendulum of inclusiveness has swung to the opposite end; where it can only be recognized as exclusiveness. Diversity of skin color has been achieved for the most part, but now it’s extended to exclusive thought patterns which is not what diversity should be about. Diversity of thought should be embraced but that seems to be the exact opposite of what’s happening in these corporate “diversity” programs and people recognize that as a farce.
> Diversity of skin color has been achieved for the most part
Source? In tech at least this is very much untrue. Black and Hispanic people in my experience don’t appear in tech as often as their population in general might indicate.
You aren't talking about skin color then. There are plenty of Asians of various colors of brown that could pass as Hispanic. My Indian boss used to have Mexicans come up to him speaking Spanish. You are talking about Race.
Anyway, with each round of layoffs, I've seen companies get more diverse in race. It could be HR being racist... or HR paying African Americans and Hispanic people less and they didn't get cut first. Yikes yikes yikes.
LMAO, this is where HN really loses me. I'm unable to understand how anyone could possibly think where anywhere close to achieving diversity of skin color. This is absolute insanity, and I'm expected to pretend this is a reasonable idea and debate against it.
Looking at this from across the ocean this whole thing looks like it could be an onion article.
The society shouldn't be racist. The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction. Those things don't cancel out
When I heard "US's supreme court decides race can't be taken into account for accepting university applicants" I thought good for them. And then comes the "onion" part. A president coming from a party that has been trying to champion equality for decades goes in front of the mic and says the most bizzare thing. That he is opposed to equality, he is for race metrics to remain and he even entertained a thought to undermine the authority of one of the most important bodies in the democratic system by saying " this is not a normal court".
Up until now I lived under a mistaken assumption a constitutional body is legal when it rules in our favor and lacks "the rule of law" when it rules against was a uniquely European thing. It would be funny if it wasn't sad.
I can’t help but think that Americans are so deeply and inherently racists that they are only capable of fighting racism by building another racist framework to do it (and, of course, fail).
A symptom is that the most visible so-called anti-racist people just won’t shut up about the very concept of race, as if they are okay with it, they just want their particular flavor of people to be up top and oppress the living shit out of their former oppressors, that should show ‘em.
Eh, I visited Europe and the first question everyone asked me:
"Where are you from?"
It was unanimous.
In the US, I usually hear "Where do you work?" or lesser: "What are your Hobbies?"
The US judges people on how much money they make, primarily. I've heard in Europe you are judged based on your position. In Japan, based on where you are on the ladder.
When I went to Mexico, I stuck out like a sore thumb. There was no hiding I was an outsider. In the US, you could not figure out if someone has lived next to you for 10 years based on their ability to speak english, let alone skin color.
I wouldn't confuse people with good intentions with racism. I think in the future, we will have something like this, but more income oriented.
I don’t think that “Where are you from?” has anything more in it than a conversation piece. Some people like traveling, you know, and share experiences. But I’m European myself, so dunno.
But the megaphones of anti-racism keep wielding the concept of race itself as a sword, they just think that since they are the good guys, nothing could possibly go wrong.
I don’t think there’s good physiognomics or bad physiognomics, is all. The whole thing is flawed. If you keep sitting on “race, race, race” all the time, no matter the intentions, instead of canning the whole concept as a harmful curiosity from the past which we don’t use anymore, you’re just going to promote it and get people to stay in the same freaking framework that enabled all sorts of crimes against humanity.
Americans are racist - all of them - in my opinion...
Their enthusiasm for tracing their own ethnicity 3-4-5 generations back will put German Nazis to shame... And US diversity craze is just Nuremberg laws in reverse.
Burning books, censorship and self-censorship, thought control, creation of new language, new human and new society. Questioning the verdicts of Supreme Court if it does not adhere to ideological agenda...
This is well known in Asia and Europe from XX century...
Nine times out of ten, genealogical research often reveals that (distant) family of, or location of, origin are not what you thought they would be. It is both humbling and gratifying to find that connectedness with others-quite different in outcome than a racist eugenics exercise.
Do feel free to paint all Americans with the same ratty brush at your own peril.
For Americans, who, dwindling Native Americans population excepted, are all immigrants' descendants, curiosity about where their families actually come from is only natural.
I was a big fan of him in 2021, ended the Afgan war(he followed through with the contract signed with the Taliban) + gave daycare deductions. Sure his free money was unnecessary as the economy had already bounced back, but Trump had given away free money and it would have been a bad look for a democrat to not do similar.
Then 2022, yikes. Student Loan Forgiveness is straight buying votes, terrible policy, and generally agreed upon by anyone who knows. CHIPS/Zombification of tech companies was a yikes move as well.
2023, seems to be phoning it in and doing PR. With basic GOP control of congress, Biden has to use mostly soft power and is mostly campaigning for 2024. These kind of things are supposed to be pandering to donors, dem loyalists, and minority voters. He has almost 0 power here, so these are cheap words that pay well.
There is cause to say that affirmative action is still very much in place at universities in the form of legacy admissions and those enabled by donors, they just eliminated affirmative action for people who aren't rich and white
Not in most universities, especially public ones. You don't get admitted to University of Texas or Texas A&M because your dad went there, that's against state law! You don't see the legacy nonsense much outside of private universities that cater to the 1%. I'm for abolishing legacy admissions, but really it affects only a tiny fraction of people.
The low tier public university I went to explicitly stated that if you were a member of certain races the SAT requirements were reduced by ~200 points. They may be less blatant about it now, but from what I've heard affirmative action is still widely practiced. That's why you hear about white kids pretending to be other races(see Elizabeth Warren), but never the other way around.
I have a good mechanic. A bunch of locals discovered we have a good mechanic in the neighborhood, and the guy got too much work and had to stop taking new customers. As an old customer he still works on my vehicles, after a month or so on his schedule. So for this one small business I'm a legacy admission.
So say I call him up as a new customer. Scenario 1: Sorry, we can't take new customers, we're full up. Scenario 2: Sorry, we don't accept customers of your race/ethnicity/religion/sexual-orientation.
If you're going to construct a weird strawman argument you have to at least attempt to reflect what is actually happening. It's easier to knock over when you conveniently fail to mention you and your neighbors are majority white and the mechanic still fits your family members into his schedule. And that most good mechanics in the city have the same situation.
> Up until now I lived under a mistaken assumption a constitutional body is legal when it rules in our favor and lacks "the rule of law" when it rules against was a uniquely European thing. It would be funny if it wasn't sad.
Huh? This is how it works everywhere. Do you think Americans are somehow different from our other humans. The court is "activist" or "partisan", until it makes decisions you agree with, even if this is a huge departure from president.
You're acting like it's absurd to question the legitimacy of a court that had the majority stolen using underhanded political tricks. This is not a constitutional body. In a way it never was, but it hasn't operated on sane or fair rules for some time.
The fact is that the authority of the court has been undermined by power hungry, treasonous republicans. It's fair to question the legitimacy of the illegitimate.
Do you take issue with the legal reasoning delivered by the court?
The facts of the case are pretty damning anyway.
Harvard comes up with a tentative list of admitted students, then cuts based on just four factors: legacy, recruited athlete, financial aid status, and race.
Some people can't seem to come to grips that trying to counter injustice with injustice only compounds injustice rather than cancelling each other out. Enforcing racial diversity for the sake of racial diversity is equally as racist as enforcing racial segregation for the sake of racial segregation. Changing the ends does not necessarily justify the means.
"For sake of diversity." If you take a slice of the smartest and most capable Americans, do you expect to see that it roughly matches American demographics? If college acceptance doesn't look like that, is there a problem?
The law of large numbers would indicate that yes, a cross section of the 'smartest' should have the same racial make-up as the population. If it doesn't, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak.
This is absolutely false. Cultural upbringing isn’t uniform across all cultures. This has more to do with higher education than anything else. Look at the percentage of Nobel prize winners who are Jewish. Look at the Jewish population.
I don't think that is what anyone could call sufficient evidence.
But even if the reason is economic disparities, which might be a consequence of past discrimination, it is still questionable if that alone can justify discrimination today. You are in any case discriminating innocents in that case and you just found another reason to discriminate on the basis on skin color.
I heard arguments that the absence of women in computer science would be an indication of discrimination and the prevalence of sexism. A similar case of insufficient evidence and one that lead to false accusations. Accusations that could have convinced a few women to look into other industries for that matter.
I believe the case for racism is much stronger, but I still disagree with the means if it could be proven without any doubt.
If the applicant pipeline does not match such an idealized distribution and you attempt to fix it at this stage, would "the smartest and most capable Americans" still apply to the admitted cohort?
And yet never the same energy and ire toward legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, Dean's choice carve outs, and donors buying their kids in who couldn't get in on their own academic merits.
Somehow legacies "belong" at Harvard but the black girl who is obviously brilliant at a chronically neglected public school instead of Exeter getting recruited by Harvard is obviously wrong.
What does performance at lacrosse have to do with math and communication ability? Why does someone who worked really hard on their math homework every night have to be excluded from the finest academic institutions in favor of someone who can pull a canoe oar really hard?
How is any of that more fair when the exclusion basically targets black and brown folks?
> Some people can't seem to come to grips that trying to counter injustice with injustice only compounds injustice rather than cancelling each other out
It's always fascinating to me how the definition of "injustice" is so flexible to those espousing this view.
Do you also believe in eliminating, say, food stamps, which exclude people based on their income? After all, it's a program that doles out an economic benefit to some people but not others which seems like "injustice", yeah?
How about the ADA? Seems unfair that disabled people would get special accommodations over everyone else, right? Is that an injustice?
Food stamps are an injustice, however, the ends there justify the means, food stamps are so people don't starve. They aren't "luxury dinner at fancy restaurant stamps" in the same way admission to famous(ly expensive) universities is.
ADA measures (that affect individuals) are also very different in that existing and proven disabilities are the reason to alleviate problems from those exact disabilities. They aren't blanket bonuses for some races in the way university admissions were before the most recent supreme court decision.
> Food stamps are an injustice, however, the ends there justify the means
Thank you for so perfectly and succinctly illustrating my point for me.
You've apparently decided one "injustice" is okay and another one isn't, for reasons that are entirely arbitrary and based purely on your own personal value system.
But then, like the person I originally responded to, you dress it up like some kind of logical, philosophical argument, as though your personal opinion carries with it some kind of inherent truth.
Justice and injustice are entirely subjective, there can be no objective measure of those. Why? Because they stem from an individual's value system. Which is the subjective measures (good, bad, nice, rude, just, unjust, ...) that the individual applies to objective facts (Jimmy getting a birthday gift, somebody starving, lion eating a zebra, drinking a glass of water...). A value system can try to be logical, consistent, aligned with certain goals, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, it can't be. Society and especially "the law" try to institute common majority value system that is intended to be consistent, logical and aligned with certain goals, rooted in a few assumptions like self-preservation, equality, preservation of humanity, human-centricity, and others. Not all of those goals and assumptions are necessarily equally firm, established, or unchanging.
Now in the foodstamps example, the two goals of self-preservation of an individual and the preservation of humanity are valued higher than the more abstract goal of equality. Which is why I, in my value system, see the choice as an obvious one. Of course others might disagree, but I've assumed this (without pointing it out) to be the majority consensus. Sorry. There are even societies where the majority value system is different in that one need not or should not help a starving individual. Because they do deserve their suffering as (carmic, divine) punishment, or that society is made stronger by culling the weak.
>The society shouldn't be racist. The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction. Those things don't cancel out
The problem is, of course, that society still is racist.
Multiple states currently have lawsuits in process against them alleging that they created voting district maps specifically to devalue the vote of black people. Another state just had the Supreme Court rule against them for the same thing.
I don't think the system of affirmative action was well designed or worked particularly well, but it's not true that in the US just saying 'everything is equal now' is going to be enough.
> Multiple states currently have lawsuits in process against them alleging that they created voting district maps specifically to devalue the vote of black people. Another state just had the Supreme Court rule against them for the same thing.
I don't think that's actually true, at least not in the current century. What happened is they created maps to advantage Party A, and black people tend to vote as a near-monolith for Party B, which had the side-effect of electing fewer of black people's preferred Party B candidates.
I'm pretty certain that there would be no gerrymandering with racial side-effects today if different races had roughly similar partisan makeups.
>I don't think that's actually true, at least not in the current century. What happened is they created maps to advantage Party A, and black people tend to vote as a near-monolith for Party B, which had the side-effect of electing fewer of black people's preferred Party B candidates.
You are free to think that. You need to remember, though - Alabama only had its first black representative in 1992, and that only happened because of a lawsuit reorganizing districts. In a non-racist system this would be a surprise because the black population is over 1/4th of the state and is geographically compact.
Either way, the effect of the districting is to dilute the voting power of the black population in favor of the white population. That's not legal to do, for good reason; states in the 20th century masked racial gerrymandering to hide their intent. See City of Mobile.
Alabama is particularly egregious, and we, as a society, should keep trying to fix that, but does that mean California and New York should try to do the opposite to cancel it out? No, that would be wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say...
I think systems that fix racial inequality and lack of opportunity are generally good but agree that where they verge into potentially discriminatory themselves we need to be very careful with them and design them in a manner that prevents them from deviating from their purpose and allows us to remove them when that purpose is accomplished.
Affirmative action, as it was, deviated from the original purpose into discrimination against Asian students.
There are a few other ways in which it failed, but a lot of it was because it was a general principle rather than a narrowly tailored, well structured initiative.
I'd like to see that kind of carefully built system proposed to fix issues more, but with the political system we have I do not believe it will happen publicly.
Ah, yes, now that racism is gone all the people whose ancestors were enslaved, then segregated, then bombed, then redlined will magically be able to achieve the same results as families who have been collecting money for decades to centuries without significant opposition. The country is a pure meritocracy so only the smartest children will receive our precious and (not artificially) scarce tertiary education, everything is as it should be.
Big lol at "undermining authority." It's not a normal court. They've been accepting massive gifts without recusing themselves for quite some time. 1/3 was appointed by a traitor who attempted to extort a foreign government, committed an insurrection, then stole classified information. People are saying he sold nuclear secrets to the Saudis.
American society aspires to be classless. Harvard wants its mini society to be classless, too. If it uses strictly objective, quantitative standards like SAT and GPA in its admissions process (in addition to legacy admissions), then it will have a mini-society that consists almost entirely of rich white and Asian kids. Since this looks like racism, they take the easy way out and use racial quotas to nudge the admission demographics in the right direction. Since this is literal racism, we find ourselves in today's situation: how do you untangle the societal damage done by enslaving a single race for hundreds of years?
The answer is that admission standards need to be changed to focus on the human qualities that schools are seeking in a way that is race-blind and does not give rich families a way to game the system. Doing so will be difficult, and there may be a few years of adjustment before they get it right, but it will get sorted out.
Not sure there is a way out through admissions policies alone. Those with more resources are always going to be better able to game the metrics.
It seems like the way to solve it is at the societal level, by policies that favor those with fewer resources (e.g. progressive taxation, social safety net programs, etc.).
I bet that if they really wanted to try to maintain what they have while not basing it on race specifically they could just base it on zip code or poverty metrics and still predict race correctly about 80-90% of the time.
I'm not sure places like harvard want rich families to not be able to game the system, in some ways I think that's why they exist. I think rather it's closer to how pay-to-win mechanics work in games, if people can realistically earn what was paid for many will confuse their spending for skill, if it can only realistically be achieved via payment then it becomes a thing to mock because the only way it translates to success was by opening the wallet and there is no skill to be praised. By making an ambigious merit based system that can also be gamed by the wealthy it makes the wealthy seem they are entering due to merit rather than wealth, thus making it praisworthy while also meeting the needs of the wealthy, and in many ways I think that's the real point of most colleges.
The problem for Harvard, and the reason this case [1] was brought in the first place is that the admissions staff were singling out Asian American students for exclusion. Despite having the highest test scores and extracurricular activities, Asian American students were given the lowest “personality” scores, making them the least likely to get in. This despite the fact “alumni interviewers (who, unlike admissions officers within Harvard, actually met individual applicants) gave Asian Americans personal ratings comparable to white applicants.”
I don’t know how to characterize this as anything other than a racial bias against Asian American applicants [2]. This is old hat for Harvard, which previously used antisemitic quotas to keep Jewish students out of the school [3]. This gives a lot of weight to the argument that you can’t solve racism by putting your thumb on the other side of the scales. That all discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, regardless of who you’re trying to help.
>The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction. Those things don't cancel out.
What if being amoral now causes a more moral society in the future? What if unfairly forcing equality now creates actual unforced equality in the future?
> he even entertained a thought to undermine the authority of one of the most important bodies in the democratic system by saying " this is not a normal court".
If you think that is bad, wait until you find out what the previous guy did.
Here is the problem we are in.
We are playing a game of Monopoly (or some other game, like Ticket to Ride). I go first. I get 100 turns, free. You get to sit there and wait. Finally, you say, hey, that's not fair, and I go okay, and now I let you go. But when I do, you play by different rules, and it takes another 100 turns for you to finally convince me to let you play by the same rules.
Now, we go to turn 201, and you look at a board that I control and I say to you "you can't complain, it's equal now".
So, the point of all this is: how do we move past that? How do we improve the situation for you? How do we make it equitable? That's the question, and the answer for some was affirmative action.
And to be clear, nowhere did I ever see a case where a white person was denied a college because their spot was taken up by a minority. Every one of those schools had other ways of letting students in that ignored academic merit (such as Legacies).
The flip side of the coin is believing our country should not fix the mistakes of its past. Bad things happened, and we should not strive to repair the damage.
Of course, the final belief is that our country didn't do anything wrong, but then at that point, our conversation is over as I have no desire to engage with things that believe that.
It is truly bizarre to me that anyone could watch the machinations of the last decade (the Federalist Society has been at it much longer, but it has certainly been ratcheted up recently) to engineer the Supreme Court to make certain decisions and then pretend that the court just naturally emerged as a far-right ideological body. That the court is at a low point in public trust suggests that I'm not the only one who understood that though.
People are fine with it because 1) they benefit from it and 2) have no empathy or 3) are ignorant of the realities. Equality sounds good on paper when you ignore history.
"Everyone has the same opportunity" can be technically true but still practically false. e.g., If you want to disagree with me, you can, but you have to reply 1 minute after I post this comment. But a reply any time other than exactly 1 minute after supports me.
Everyone has the same opportunity here: to express their support or disagreement.
>That's the question, and the answer for some was affirmative action.
Affirmative action on very superficial traits. White man A is not the same as white man B. Of course you're going to get backlash from 'whitey' who came from the boonies, had to work their way up and is potentially losing his chance over affirmative action against some vague 'beneficial treatment' they haven't experienced their entire life. Nor does that 'whitey' feel like they have anything in common with the rich kid who got to breeze through life into those privileged circles, regardless they share the same skin color or not.
The most astoundingly racist thing is how everyone is so eager to reduce individuals to their race, no matter their background, whether it be to victimize or villainize them. Meanwhile the corporate fatcats are chilling on the side while the next generation gets to carry the burden of their shenanigans along with the losers of their own generation. Sure they are okay with it, they are nigh-on untouchable anyway.
3) Help Group D by removing the help provided to Group A.
We went with 3.
> The most astoundingly racist thing is how everyone is so eager to reduce individuals to their race, no matter their background, whether it be to victimize or villainize them.
I don't see this happening, at least not in my bubble, which is admittedly on the left.
It could be happening with centrists or people on the right, but I'd be an outsider looking in, which makes my pov biased and unreliable, so I can't say.
Disadvantaging Asian Americans to provide restitution to African Americans for the past sins of white Americans is plainly unjust. No amount of rhetoric can cover that up.
Ever notice how the same folks who loudly claim race-based affirmative action is obviously wrong never have the same energy for legacy or athletic scholarships?
Take Harvard. A large chunk of Harvard's white admissions are based on legacy (my dad went there, so I get to go), athletics (I can lacrosse like nobody's business!), donor (my grandfather paid for this building, so you gotta let me in!), and Dean's choice (my family knows the right people). Of the (overwhelmingly) white folks listed above, 75% of them would not have been accepted to Harvard based on their academic performance. 75%!
But whenever conservatives talk about unearned access to higher education, they ALWAYS mean black and brown folks. It's a curious thing, isn't it? I mean, it's not like Harvard is mostly black and brown. Not even close. What could the motivation be, I wonder?
Truth is, one party talks about equality and currently has SCOTUS backing them up, but really doesn't care about it. Just that white folks remain in a position of privilege.
> "Ever notice how the same folks who loudly claim race-based affirmative action is obviously wrong never have the same energy for legacy or athletic scholarships?"
Legacy or athletic admissions are not against the law or violations of civil rights. Displaying bias against Asian-Americans in college admissions is a violation of civil rights law and reprehensibly racist on top of that. One doesn't have to be a conservative to see that that's true.
The real question one should ask is why so many progressives are speaking out in support of Harvard policies that were naked racism against Asian-Americans? They're making it pretty clear that they're no allies of ours.
Legacy and dean admissions heavily bias toward white students as well, which disadvantages Asian applicants to a greater extent than affirmative action policies. If taking away race-based bias is your goal, you're focused on the wrong parts.
> The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction.
i think this is where the base assumptions diverge.
affirmative action is not meant to address individual person-to-person acts of racism, but the systemic institution-against-class racism that is still rooted in society; the cumulative effect of lots of little factors, where each individual factor is seemingly harmless, difficult to even pinpoint, perpetuated largely unnoticed, but the cumulative effect creates more or fewer opportunities for success in life depending on the color of your skin.
i know very few people who i would accuse of being racist. yet, everybody i know (of all races) participate in institutions that perpetuate systemic racism because it is impossible not to. affirmative action is an acknowledgement of, and attempt to balance, very real data-backed disparities in privilege.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. You managed to combine nationalistic flamewar with race war here. That's a big step in exactly the wrong direction.
I realize the topic is provocative but that's why the site guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
They also say: "Don't be snarky." and "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - so you broke a lot of them here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We want curious conversation here, not indignant rhetoric, which is its polar opposite.
Who is "we"? Do you represent the site? It seems most of the readers of my comment took it as it was intended. Thought provoking, not flamewar inducing.
Would I say the same thing on YouTube or reddit? Of course not. That would end in a flamewar in milliseconds, but this is HN. I expect (and I wasn't disappointed) than HN readers can discuss divisive topics without any flames.
That's like saying it's ok to start a fire because the firefighters do such a good job around here.
HN is constantly at risk of going up in flames—it's a large, open internet forum! If that doesn't happen, it's because the mods and most of the community are working hard to prevent it. We need you to help with that, not take advantage of it—and in any case the rules are supposed to apply to everybody (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
You can't judge these things by whether a particular case turned into a flamewar. Not every fire burns the house down. It's a question of effects in the long run, and your post was way on the wrong side of that line; which is why the guidelines ask you not to post like that. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of it, so this should be easy to fix.
Most studies have shown that diversity training either does nothing to decrease racial bias, or is actively harmful[0]; The only intervention proven to decrease racial bias is union membership[1], which unsurprisingly executives don't like to promote.
I figured something was weird because we shared a parking lot with another IT firm and I noticed their staff looked different.
Later I established a relationship with HR and found out that the recruiters actively tossed any resumes with Indian looking names in the trash because they assumed they’d have need a visa and had problems with English.
Needless to say as a senior engineer, I confronted HR and offered to help with recruiting. We went from 1 to 5 highly qualified Indian engineers that same year.
What am I saying? Diversity is your fault.
Senior engineers and EMs are directly responsible for not advocating for others!
Things you can do:
- Actually meet new people who don’t look like you
- Help a junior find their next company
- Join forces with other seniors and tell management and HR to be better about hiring
You were able to find a team blatantly discriminating against demographics that have not had any trouble making it into tech. Indian engineers are great, but there's really not much of a shortage of them in tech, at least not exceeding the overall shortage.
We may not have enough visas, but we have plenty of Indian people that our great engineers. While it's painful to talk about, this simply isn't true for black people and women. I feel uncomfortable talking like this, but I think it's in the best interest of getting it right. It may be bad for all POC, but specifically it looks like blacks have faired poorly, as well as native americans. We know there's gender issues.
I digress, but the point is that this is simple a much larger problem than what you presented. In a way there similar. It's always hard to go against racist management. The point is this is a fixable problem. Get rid of the overt racism, and just start accepting resumes from the zillion of qualified people.
It's hard to talk about, but I don't think anyone familiar with the issue will disagree. There is a horrible supply problem caused by a couple centuries of horrid racism. This doesn't go away by flipping a single overt racism switch, like yours did.
Are we producing enough young black, POC, and women engineers? I think the obvious answer is no. Fight the fight against racism internally, and your efforts will help, but you're never going to be able to fix it under these conditions.
Does population size need to be taken into consideration as well?
Meaning should Chinese and Indian foreign students dominate US/EU engineering due to their sheer numbers to the exclusion of local minorities and underrepresented populations?
Sure, lots of people who are white and deny systemic racism or the effects of it exist. That’s literally the problem we’re fighting and why we need diversity efforts.
Lets say what it is, there aren't enough African Americans in the white collar workplace.
Its not that we don't have Asians, Mexicans, or Indians. At least half the companies I worked for, white people were less than 50% of the workers.
Its not a current racism issue, its likely a relic of racism issue. A large number of African Americans grow up in poor areas, get terrible education, are among a non-work-ethic driven culture, and never make it to the American Dream. Repeat generation after generation. Sure there are racists from the south, but talk to an African American of privilege(middle/upper middle class) living in a city. They have little bad things to say, and mostly blame it on the individual.
The issue is the zip code. You can see it in how white people living in these same areas perform.
you make good points but i'd argue it's both. i'm talking about the subconscious bias aspect of racism (to your point it's a relic of racism, but it's an active relic) as well - this is the very reason we need DE&I. we're 3 to 4 years into it and still non-marginalized folks don't seem to fully understand the problem.
i feel like "talk to an African American of privilege" and what follows is incorrect. i know and have known a lot of well off Black friends and associates and they all have stories - there are a lot of racists in the north too, they just act a little different.
My issue isn't with the ostensible spirit or intent of DEI programs. The concept sounds great. The problem is the corporate implementations are transparently inauthentic and insincere. It's abundantly clear that the real intent is PR and compliance, not some altruistic desire for fairness.
Admittedly didn't read the thin article. I do think there's something to the premise that people from diverse backgrounds end up unhappy.
Poorly run diversity efforts are upsetting to POC. In a way they all tend to be poorly run. It can be infantilizing and condescending.
Ultimately, we end up falling short of the numbers, so the people behind the programs are unhappy. POC are unhappy because of the quality of how the programs tend to be run. Obviously the fascists/republicans aren't happy. The centerist people tend to fall between the people running the program and the right.
So who's supposed to be happy. I will say that in my experience, these diversity programs don't exist. That is to say the really overbearing ones people complain about. I imagine it's a bigger thing for SV and some big companies (although, I have worked for big companies).
In my experience, programs are nearly non-existent and the minorities they hire are at least "pretty competent", which is hard to find in software. If anything, it looks like they're still being pretty choosy. So people like OP get their wish, and the programs are pretty laid back.
Something I've recognized as I grew up and had kids especially, is that your real outcomes in life are often the product of the expectations placed on you.
Eg - I grew up in a poor, 50% immigrant area in Brooklyn. The Russian and Asian immigrant kids had better outcomes than their American peers despite fewer resources because their parents kicked their ass and failure / slacking wasn't an option.
Whether perfect meritocracy exists or not isn't the point, the point is to maximize your own input to increase your own chances.
In contrast I see a lot of modern approach to problem solving is to lower expectations to make things more equal for some. But I expect that this lowering (eg: no need for SATs, no more selective magnet schools, easier admissions by race, etc) will have a negative effect, the opposite of the immigrant mentality described above.
I see a similar trend with lowering enforcement of some laws because the enforcement appears racist based on who's doing the crime. By making it "okay" you are perversely worsening those people's lives in the long run.
It's a little sad because I am sure all of this comes from a good place but it doesn't truly elevate people.
One thing I can articulate - I want my children to have high expectations for themselves and be "ambitious" about persuing hard opportunities in front of them. Versus having victim mentality.
One thing that's obvious is my wife and I both exemplify this attitude, as do our immigrant parents (eg her dad went from broke immigrant to international biz owner).
I also think raising your kid on a religious context (religion is at its base the idea that your choices matter a lot) is a positive. I say this as someone who grew up an atheist, but that's another thing we are doing.
> real outcomes in life are often the product of the expectations placed on you
Quote from the following article:
“But the gap between optimism and reality is far greater for white teachers and white students than for other teachers and black students, meaning white teachers' high expectations of white students could be giving them an edge.
Finally, the study looked at whether teacher expectations matter. And the study found that they do. White or black, students with similar preparation are more likely to graduate from college if their high school teachers believe that they will. This is why teacher expectations, and any racial bias, matter so much, the authors say.”
Unquestionably but imagine one of the Irish / Italian kids from my neighborhood was adopted by an Asian family at birth.
And the family always said "there's the harder math class? You take that one". "there's a test for the magnet school? You study for that one". "you got accepted to a more party college and a more engineering college? You go to the 2nd one"
You don't think the kid would be more likely to be a success than at baseline?
Except that studies of twins raised apart[1] calculate statistical IQ heritability in the range of 70% or more. Perhaps even more surprising, for the field of Psychology at least[2], these findings appear to be replicated across studies. Even if you're not a full-on IQ apologetic, IQ is at least deeply correlated with success in professional fields, like engineering from your example.
As a parent myself, I wish the scenario you described was true! That guardians had the capacity to simply nurture into reality an Al Einstein or Mikey Phelps, if they just Tiger Mom push their way through the young person's early years. But the data do not indicate that; to the contrary, most of that future person is already defined in their nature/genes at conception, and good parenting, at its best, will simply avoid catastrophe while nudging towards good goals.
All the rest is just to make the guardian feel better about themself.
It’s called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. I’ve come to believe that although progressives mean well, they end up hurting things more than helping. They’re blinded by what “ought to be” that they don’t consider the consequences of what “actually is”. You can’t deny reality in the end.
That's a great term for what I am describing thank you.
Basically - high expectations drive you to exercise whatever is in your power, which is often a lot (eg as exemplified by the asian American experience)
The progressive focus on the "systemic" takes away an individual's power because "hey the world is against you and unless we can change the world nothing will be good for you". I agree with you this ignores a lot of "what actually is"
If your interest is only skin deep they work great. I once worked at a place which might well be considered a poster child for racial diversity. Didn't matter that practically everyone came from a wealthy background and had everything in life served to them on a silver platter. I even mentored a "racially diverse" new grad whose father knew the CEO from Harvard.
Some would ask questions about what we were doing to aid social mobility but it tended to fall on deaf ears.
This is from the WSJ, a right-wing publication pushing a political agenda rather than real, prevailing sentiment.
There are companies who proscribed "We will hire from demographic A to reach B% in C years." who put too much weight on identity attributes during economic boom hire-fests, but those days won't return at least until 2030 as competency and need are now central.
You can tell when some teams haven't de-biased their hiring processes when they are and remain too homologous in either thought, values, or possibly appearance.
The goal of hiring shouldn't be to appease today's fashionable virtues of other people, but to hire the best who are cooperative enough to get along, regardless of what they look like or where they came from. Unless you're going to reinterview everyone, reducing bias uniformly and fairly in the now and forward must be more important than putting a thumb on the scale for the past while ignoring merit because there is no solution to bias of the past except to see if it's really happening and find ways to stop it from happening, i.e., resume contact detail blinding, normalize or drop regional writing signals, reformat resumes with the same font, ask everyone the same questions, standardizing peer interviewing format down to a grid layout with scoring, and so on.
The fact that this and another article about Harvard race-based admissions yesterday were both insta-flagged suggest that many don’t even want us to have the conversation.
160 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadThe answer is you don't. But just because the system isn't perfect doesn't mean we should just throw it in the blender. By that logic we should get rid of "free" health care / safety nets in Western European countries. It mostly works but it also gets exploited. How can you know people aren't exploiting the system? You can't know for sure, but we can do our best to find out.
There is none, nowhere in my comment did I say that.
> Not to mention that dei is not inherently unmeritocratic to begin with
It literally is. Meritocracy, people are hired by their merit. DEI, people are hired by representation. Equality versus Equity, polar opposites.
Or you have a “pure” meritocracy, but you spend more energy and money sending your recruiters to areas and schools whose students are more likely to not be represented at your company.
If you can’t understand that you shouldn’t be commenting on DEI stuff.
This would be the only edge case in which it would "work". And even then you're still systematically rejecting someone based on who they are rather than what they can do. I'd rather lose to a coin flip.
> Or you have a “pure” meritocracy, but you spend more energy and money sending your recruiters to areas and schools whose students are more likely to not be represented at your company.
Then it's not pure, because you're actively avoiding people.
> If you can’t understand that you shouldn’t be commenting on DEI stuff.
Regardless if your statement is true or not, you believe we should exclude people from discussions because they might not have enough knowledge on the subject? (Ironic for a topic on inclusion)
Truly fascinating there are some who believe the hiring process is meritocratic to begin with. It’s not. This notion you have that hiring is solely about what you can do is just so naive. It never has been and never will be. Working is a collaborative effort and inherently will include nebulous traits, I.e. “who you are”.
> Regardless if your statement is true or not, you believe we should exclude people from discussions because they might not have enough knowledge on the subject? (Ironic for a topic on inclusion)
If you do not support dei, which you appear not to, then yes. Ironic indeed. Perhaps now you will understand the need for diversity (in opinions such as yours) and inclusion (in conversations such as these).
how do do know it was dei specifically anyway? Was it explicitly said they were hired because of their gender or nationality?
I think it's valid to argue that this bias is worth it. But we should not pretend that we are simply remedying bias or pushing people towards a more fair evaluation of each candidate for their individual qualities. What we're doing is adding an opposite bias in an attempt to approach closer to proportional racial representation.
There's also reasonable room to question if we should essentially equate diversity to population-proportional racial representation, as we do today. This is also a bias which may take away from seeking diversity along other lines, such as class/upbringing, age, and being outside traditional recruiting networks for the job.
I'm glad you mentioned age. Age discrimination and lack of age diversity is a big problem in tech.
Whenever there's a discussion about underrepresented groups in tech, isn't it funny how older people are rarely considered?
IMHO, it's because organizations don't really value diversity in the ordinary sense of the term. They value proportional representation of all demographic groups that have legal standing to sue them for civil rights violations, and who have organized interest groups who stand ready to do so. DEI exists to align the organization towards this objective.
It's not just about organizations though. Whenever I hear ordinary tech workers, non-managers, just talking informally about underrepresented groups, they rarely mention older people. It's a forgotten group (kind of like GenX in general LOL).
I should say, I don't want to pit underrepresented groups against each other. As far as I've seen, various forms of discrimination go hand-in-hand. I once heard a prominent businesswomen say that the most sexist workplaces she's seen were also the most ageist.
My point is simply that the “perfect meritocracy doesn’t exist” argument is pointless. Screening candidates is a problem for businesses to solve, and the only metric they should be incentivised to optimise for is the outcomes produced for the institution/business.
When she got called to the stage, she was embarrassed. Our group had people working 10 hour days to fix some stuff, yet this person who had been at the company for 6 months and barely finished training, was recognized as award worthy.
Whoever made that decision didn't realize that she shined a spotlight on how dumb it all was. I'm not sure if the 1000 people in the room realized how merit-less it was, but our group of ~30 people all knew.
I'm sure the girl went on to do great things, she was bright, friendly, and a hard worker. It made me realize that merit is not what the company was necessarily looking for.
You made your own counter-point here.
Many entrenched systems would never have given her a chance to begin with. Maybe she got some advantages early on here career, we can take the tally of them if you're willing to quantify all of the explicit and implicit advantages that her straight white male counterparts got along the way as well (including not having coworkers project "embarrassment" onto them when they receive an accolade).
Sounds like the system elevated a bright young talent, recognized her, and by your assumption, she went on to be well-deserving of the opportunity.
You cannot fix discrimination of one kind by applying discrimination of another kind.
The role of the supreme court is not to fix the inequalities of our society, it is to uphold the law and constitution of the US.
This is my favorite quote from the opinion on this case from Justice Thomas's concurring opinion:
"Both experience and logic have vindicated the Constitution’s colorblind rule and confirmed that the universities’ new narrative cannot stand.
Despite the Court’s hope in Grutter (previous case) that universities would voluntarily end their race-conscious programs and further the goal of racial equality, the opposite appears increasingly true.
Harvard and UNC now forthrightly state that they racially discriminate when it comes to admitting students, arguing that such discrimination is consistent with this Court’s precedents.
And they,along with today’s dissenters, defend that discrimination as good. More broadly, it is becoming increasingly clear that discrimination on the basis of race—often packaged as “affirmative action” or “equity” programs—are based on the benighted notion “that it is possible to tell when discrimination helps, rather than hurts, racial minorities.”
[...]
“Purchased at the price of immeasurable human suffering,” the Fourteenth Amendment recognizes that classifications based on race lead to ruinous consequences for individuals and the Nation."
This is indeed the case. As a European it's very clear to me what the real cause of your problem is: property taxes. In Europe, schools are funded nationally, which means there isn't much difference between one school or the other. 'private schools' are not really a thing here because all of our public schools are good enough.
In US, your property taxes decide what kind of neighbourhood you grow up in. Good neighbourhood, good schools, bad neighbourhood, bad schools. This is huge.
The social mobility index is not lying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
I wanted to comment that I think leadership and management are pretty good overall. There is some minimum standard of merit that needs to be achieved, so these aren't the people that are illogical.
I sat next to HR at 2 jobs. At one they were behind a locked door, so I only met HR people. The other I was on the other side of the cubicle. Yikes, HR is the illogical part of the chain. Not that they always do a bad job, but you hear some of the things they say, and you can clearly tell they have no problem using bias against people.
But the sleight-of-hand trick WSJ and others are trying to pull here as part of their strategy now that they got rid of college affirmative action is that while nobody likes DEI b.s., it goes beyond not liking into actually harmed territory for anyone that's a minority at the work place.
And companies do get sued a lot over this stuff. Maybe you don't see this in office environments these days but I had worked in places where the DEI people told us stories of nooses being left at someones locker, watemelons, racial epithets,etc... Elon is infamous at his companies for being "anti-woke" and getting sued and losing like 5 times over overt racism at his companies.
So, while I look forward to less bullshitty ways of educating people and making everyone feel welcome and get a fair shot at promotions, much of the US still has a LOT of people who are esentially insecure jerks that are more or less racist.
Only slighty related: if I hear someone say "woke" or "anti-woke" these days, by default I assume they are racists with a foot out of the closet.
I didn't care much about college affirmative action but this tells me along with book banning there is some fascist conspiracy about. And in my book the only good fascist/nazi is a dead one so I hope I am wrong about this because it means the future bleak in the US, just look at the upvotes to this post.
In my observation, the problem is C-level execs and lawyers whose goal is to improve reputation and avoid lawsuit or chances of winning lawsuits. These people are making DEI shitty. I have even seen people get downsized but a new role with the same responsibility get created to avoid lawsuit because the person is a minority. I have seen people of the same exact demographic get interviewed along with a token person of the exact opposite demographic to avoid a suit. I have heard manangers ask "I only want recruiters to send me <insert minority> female for this role" and then they hire the worst candidates possible. It's not HR but litigation centric culuture that's the problem.
You know what's great? Tribalism. How about them $SportsTeam! Let's have more multibillion dollar businesses to encourage people to hate anyone who doesn't agree $SportsTeam is the greatest! We should have rich old white men own them and give them a pass on DEI. It might hit their bottom line if they were not allowed to hire the best players in the market. Can you imagine a world where ROWM are not allowed their god-given right to exploit our quirks of evolutionary development? We could not enrich them further by gathering in large groups to celebrate our $SportsTeam tribe and spew hate on the $OtherTeam tribe. Maybe even beat them up in the parking lot after the game if we lost.
Go tribalism!
But if you just meant racist people suck then I must agree.
- it only excluded race as a consideration for admissions. Why race only? You can argue someone who is disabled who gets in might have “taken” a slot from a more qualified able-bodied person. Similarly, you can argue women athlete scholars of sufficiently unsupported sports are “taking” a slot from a more qualified man somewhere. It’s weird to make race the sole exception when the general argument applies. I wouldn’t even know how to apply this to work!
- why did the Supreme Court make an exception for military school? All the logic applies except it’s okay if black/Hispanic people edge out white peoples to go to war? Does this mean also the diversity initiatives in government contractors/department of defense funded research is ok?
Because it was only asked to consider race and only for admission to academic institutions. So that's what it did.
> why did the Supreme Court make an exception for military school?
Because the Solicitor General argued that the military could have considerations different to civilian academic institutions such as national security. And the Supreme Court agreed that they might so included the exception.
All that they are useful for is for whiners to complain that they weren't blessed with being 6ft6 or beautiful or a certain skin colour or whatever else.
In the real world people who actually achieve things just go out and do it. They're not sitting about wondering whether middle management at XYZ prefers working class kids or black supermodels.
Source? In tech at least this is very much untrue. Black and Hispanic people in my experience don’t appear in tech as often as their population in general might indicate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Anyway, with each round of layoffs, I've seen companies get more diverse in race. It could be HR being racist... or HR paying African Americans and Hispanic people less and they didn't get cut first. Yikes yikes yikes.
Also TFA: "the amount of attention their companies pay to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is ... about right ... 44%"
The society shouldn't be racist. The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction. Those things don't cancel out
When I heard "US's supreme court decides race can't be taken into account for accepting university applicants" I thought good for them. And then comes the "onion" part. A president coming from a party that has been trying to champion equality for decades goes in front of the mic and says the most bizzare thing. That he is opposed to equality, he is for race metrics to remain and he even entertained a thought to undermine the authority of one of the most important bodies in the democratic system by saying " this is not a normal court".
Up until now I lived under a mistaken assumption a constitutional body is legal when it rules in our favor and lacks "the rule of law" when it rules against was a uniquely European thing. It would be funny if it wasn't sad.
A symptom is that the most visible so-called anti-racist people just won’t shut up about the very concept of race, as if they are okay with it, they just want their particular flavor of people to be up top and oppress the living shit out of their former oppressors, that should show ‘em.
"Where are you from?"
It was unanimous.
In the US, I usually hear "Where do you work?" or lesser: "What are your Hobbies?"
The US judges people on how much money they make, primarily. I've heard in Europe you are judged based on your position. In Japan, based on where you are on the ladder.
When I went to Mexico, I stuck out like a sore thumb. There was no hiding I was an outsider. In the US, you could not figure out if someone has lived next to you for 10 years based on their ability to speak english, let alone skin color.
I wouldn't confuse people with good intentions with racism. I think in the future, we will have something like this, but more income oriented.
But the megaphones of anti-racism keep wielding the concept of race itself as a sword, they just think that since they are the good guys, nothing could possibly go wrong.
I don’t think there’s good physiognomics or bad physiognomics, is all. The whole thing is flawed. If you keep sitting on “race, race, race” all the time, no matter the intentions, instead of canning the whole concept as a harmful curiosity from the past which we don’t use anymore, you’re just going to promote it and get people to stay in the same freaking framework that enabled all sorts of crimes against humanity.
Their enthusiasm for tracing their own ethnicity 3-4-5 generations back will put German Nazis to shame... And US diversity craze is just Nuremberg laws in reverse.
Burning books, censorship and self-censorship, thought control, creation of new language, new human and new society. Questioning the verdicts of Supreme Court if it does not adhere to ideological agenda...
This is well known in Asia and Europe from XX century...
Do feel free to paint all Americans with the same ratty brush at your own peril.
I was a big fan of him in 2021, ended the Afgan war(he followed through with the contract signed with the Taliban) + gave daycare deductions. Sure his free money was unnecessary as the economy had already bounced back, but Trump had given away free money and it would have been a bad look for a democrat to not do similar.
Then 2022, yikes. Student Loan Forgiveness is straight buying votes, terrible policy, and generally agreed upon by anyone who knows. CHIPS/Zombification of tech companies was a yikes move as well.
2023, seems to be phoning it in and doing PR. With basic GOP control of congress, Biden has to use mostly soft power and is mostly campaigning for 2024. These kind of things are supposed to be pandering to donors, dem loyalists, and minority voters. He has almost 0 power here, so these are cheap words that pay well.
For Elizabeth Warren, she didn't get into school on the back of that claim, I think it was more a social kudos thing.
When you see the test results needed by Asians vs other races it’s jaw dropping.
So say I call him up as a new customer. Scenario 1: Sorry, we can't take new customers, we're full up. Scenario 2: Sorry, we don't accept customers of your race/ethnicity/religion/sexual-orientation.
These scenarios feel very different to me.
Huh? This is how it works everywhere. Do you think Americans are somehow different from our other humans. The court is "activist" or "partisan", until it makes decisions you agree with, even if this is a huge departure from president.
You're acting like it's absurd to question the legitimacy of a court that had the majority stolen using underhanded political tricks. This is not a constitutional body. In a way it never was, but it hasn't operated on sane or fair rules for some time.
The fact is that the authority of the court has been undermined by power hungry, treasonous republicans. It's fair to question the legitimacy of the illegitimate.
The facts of the case are pretty damning anyway.
Harvard comes up with a tentative list of admitted students, then cuts based on just four factors: legacy, recruited athlete, financial aid status, and race.
So no, I wouldn't expect it to match American demographics.
But even if the reason is economic disparities, which might be a consequence of past discrimination, it is still questionable if that alone can justify discrimination today. You are in any case discriminating innocents in that case and you just found another reason to discriminate on the basis on skin color.
I heard arguments that the absence of women in computer science would be an indication of discrimination and the prevalence of sexism. A similar case of insufficient evidence and one that lead to false accusations. Accusations that could have convinced a few women to look into other industries for that matter.
I believe the case for racism is much stronger, but I still disagree with the means if it could be proven without any doubt.
Sometimes, yes. Too many times? Show me. "Only"? Cannot be true.
Somehow legacies "belong" at Harvard but the black girl who is obviously brilliant at a chronically neglected public school instead of Exeter getting recruited by Harvard is obviously wrong.
What does performance at lacrosse have to do with math and communication ability? Why does someone who worked really hard on their math homework every night have to be excluded from the finest academic institutions in favor of someone who can pull a canoe oar really hard?
How is any of that more fair when the exclusion basically targets black and brown folks?
It's always fascinating to me how the definition of "injustice" is so flexible to those espousing this view.
Do you also believe in eliminating, say, food stamps, which exclude people based on their income? After all, it's a program that doles out an economic benefit to some people but not others which seems like "injustice", yeah?
How about the ADA? Seems unfair that disabled people would get special accommodations over everyone else, right? Is that an injustice?
ADA measures (that affect individuals) are also very different in that existing and proven disabilities are the reason to alleviate problems from those exact disabilities. They aren't blanket bonuses for some races in the way university admissions were before the most recent supreme court decision.
Thank you for so perfectly and succinctly illustrating my point for me.
You've apparently decided one "injustice" is okay and another one isn't, for reasons that are entirely arbitrary and based purely on your own personal value system.
But then, like the person I originally responded to, you dress it up like some kind of logical, philosophical argument, as though your personal opinion carries with it some kind of inherent truth.
Justice and injustice are entirely subjective, there can be no objective measure of those. Why? Because they stem from an individual's value system. Which is the subjective measures (good, bad, nice, rude, just, unjust, ...) that the individual applies to objective facts (Jimmy getting a birthday gift, somebody starving, lion eating a zebra, drinking a glass of water...). A value system can try to be logical, consistent, aligned with certain goals, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, it can't be. Society and especially "the law" try to institute common majority value system that is intended to be consistent, logical and aligned with certain goals, rooted in a few assumptions like self-preservation, equality, preservation of humanity, human-centricity, and others. Not all of those goals and assumptions are necessarily equally firm, established, or unchanging.
Now in the foodstamps example, the two goals of self-preservation of an individual and the preservation of humanity are valued higher than the more abstract goal of equality. Which is why I, in my value system, see the choice as an obvious one. Of course others might disagree, but I've assumed this (without pointing it out) to be the majority consensus. Sorry. There are even societies where the majority value system is different in that one need not or should not help a starving individual. Because they do deserve their suffering as (carmic, divine) punishment, or that society is made stronger by culling the weak.
The problem is, of course, that society still is racist.
Multiple states currently have lawsuits in process against them alleging that they created voting district maps specifically to devalue the vote of black people. Another state just had the Supreme Court rule against them for the same thing.
I don't think the system of affirmative action was well designed or worked particularly well, but it's not true that in the US just saying 'everything is equal now' is going to be enough.
I don't think that's actually true, at least not in the current century. What happened is they created maps to advantage Party A, and black people tend to vote as a near-monolith for Party B, which had the side-effect of electing fewer of black people's preferred Party B candidates.
I'm pretty certain that there would be no gerrymandering with racial side-effects today if different races had roughly similar partisan makeups.
You are free to think that. You need to remember, though - Alabama only had its first black representative in 1992, and that only happened because of a lawsuit reorganizing districts. In a non-racist system this would be a surprise because the black population is over 1/4th of the state and is geographically compact.
Either way, the effect of the districting is to dilute the voting power of the black population in favor of the white population. That's not legal to do, for good reason; states in the 20th century masked racial gerrymandering to hide their intent. See City of Mobile.
Affirmative action, as it was, deviated from the original purpose into discrimination against Asian students.
There are a few other ways in which it failed, but a lot of it was because it was a general principle rather than a narrowly tailored, well structured initiative.
I'd like to see that kind of carefully built system proposed to fix issues more, but with the political system we have I do not believe it will happen publicly.
Big lol at "undermining authority." It's not a normal court. They've been accepting massive gifts without recusing themselves for quite some time. 1/3 was appointed by a traitor who attempted to extort a foreign government, committed an insurrection, then stole classified information. People are saying he sold nuclear secrets to the Saudis.
The answer is that admission standards need to be changed to focus on the human qualities that schools are seeking in a way that is race-blind and does not give rich families a way to game the system. Doing so will be difficult, and there may be a few years of adjustment before they get it right, but it will get sorted out.
It seems like the way to solve it is at the societal level, by policies that favor those with fewer resources (e.g. progressive taxation, social safety net programs, etc.).
I'm not sure places like harvard want rich families to not be able to game the system, in some ways I think that's why they exist. I think rather it's closer to how pay-to-win mechanics work in games, if people can realistically earn what was paid for many will confuse their spending for skill, if it can only realistically be achieved via payment then it becomes a thing to mock because the only way it translates to success was by opening the wallet and there is no skill to be praised. By making an ambigious merit based system that can also be gamed by the wealthy it makes the wealthy seem they are entering due to merit rather than wealth, thus making it praisworthy while also meeting the needs of the wealthy, and in many ways I think that's the real point of most colleges.
I don’t know how to characterize this as anything other than a racial bias against Asian American applicants [2]. This is old hat for Harvard, which previously used antisemitic quotas to keep Jewish students out of the school [3]. This gives a lot of weight to the argument that you can’t solve racism by putting your thumb on the other side of the scales. That all discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, regardless of who you’re trying to help.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
[2] https://archive.is/2023.06.29-203214/https://www.nytimes.com...
[3] https://www.timesofisrael.com/harvards-jewish-quotas-cited-i...
What if being amoral now causes a more moral society in the future? What if unfairly forcing equality now creates actual unforced equality in the future?
If you think that is bad, wait until you find out what the previous guy did.
Here is the problem we are in.
We are playing a game of Monopoly (or some other game, like Ticket to Ride). I go first. I get 100 turns, free. You get to sit there and wait. Finally, you say, hey, that's not fair, and I go okay, and now I let you go. But when I do, you play by different rules, and it takes another 100 turns for you to finally convince me to let you play by the same rules.
Now, we go to turn 201, and you look at a board that I control and I say to you "you can't complain, it's equal now".
So, the point of all this is: how do we move past that? How do we improve the situation for you? How do we make it equitable? That's the question, and the answer for some was affirmative action.
And to be clear, nowhere did I ever see a case where a white person was denied a college because their spot was taken up by a minority. Every one of those schools had other ways of letting students in that ignored academic merit (such as Legacies).
The flip side of the coin is believing our country should not fix the mistakes of its past. Bad things happened, and we should not strive to repair the damage.
Of course, the final belief is that our country didn't do anything wrong, but then at that point, our conversation is over as I have no desire to engage with things that believe that.
"Everyone has the same opportunity" can be technically true but still practically false. e.g., If you want to disagree with me, you can, but you have to reply 1 minute after I post this comment. But a reply any time other than exactly 1 minute after supports me.
Everyone has the same opportunity here: to express their support or disagreement.
Affirmative action on very superficial traits. White man A is not the same as white man B. Of course you're going to get backlash from 'whitey' who came from the boonies, had to work their way up and is potentially losing his chance over affirmative action against some vague 'beneficial treatment' they haven't experienced their entire life. Nor does that 'whitey' feel like they have anything in common with the rich kid who got to breeze through life into those privileged circles, regardless they share the same skin color or not.
The most astoundingly racist thing is how everyone is so eager to reduce individuals to their race, no matter their background, whether it be to victimize or villainize them. Meanwhile the corporate fatcats are chilling on the side while the next generation gets to carry the burden of their shenanigans along with the losers of their own generation. Sure they are okay with it, they are nigh-on untouchable anyway.
Group A, B, and C are being targeted by Group D.
We have a solution that helps Group A.
Group B and C are still suffering.
You can:
1) Help Group B.
2) Help Group C.
3) Help Group D by removing the help provided to Group A.
We went with 3.
> The most astoundingly racist thing is how everyone is so eager to reduce individuals to their race, no matter their background, whether it be to victimize or villainize them.
I don't see this happening, at least not in my bubble, which is admittedly on the left.
It could be happening with centrists or people on the right, but I'd be an outsider looking in, which makes my pov biased and unreliable, so I can't say.
Take Harvard. A large chunk of Harvard's white admissions are based on legacy (my dad went there, so I get to go), athletics (I can lacrosse like nobody's business!), donor (my grandfather paid for this building, so you gotta let me in!), and Dean's choice (my family knows the right people). Of the (overwhelmingly) white folks listed above, 75% of them would not have been accepted to Harvard based on their academic performance. 75%!
But whenever conservatives talk about unearned access to higher education, they ALWAYS mean black and brown folks. It's a curious thing, isn't it? I mean, it's not like Harvard is mostly black and brown. Not even close. What could the motivation be, I wonder?
Truth is, one party talks about equality and currently has SCOTUS backing them up, but really doesn't care about it. Just that white folks remain in a position of privilege.
Legacy or athletic admissions are not against the law or violations of civil rights. Displaying bias against Asian-Americans in college admissions is a violation of civil rights law and reprehensibly racist on top of that. One doesn't have to be a conservative to see that that's true.
The real question one should ask is why so many progressives are speaking out in support of Harvard policies that were naked racism against Asian-Americans? They're making it pretty clear that they're no allies of ours.
i think this is where the base assumptions diverge.
affirmative action is not meant to address individual person-to-person acts of racism, but the systemic institution-against-class racism that is still rooted in society; the cumulative effect of lots of little factors, where each individual factor is seemingly harmless, difficult to even pinpoint, perpetuated largely unnoticed, but the cumulative effect creates more or fewer opportunities for success in life depending on the color of your skin.
i know very few people who i would accuse of being racist. yet, everybody i know (of all races) participate in institutions that perpetuate systemic racism because it is impossible not to. affirmative action is an acknowledgement of, and attempt to balance, very real data-backed disparities in privilege.
I realize the topic is provocative but that's why the site guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
They also say: "Don't be snarky." and "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - so you broke a lot of them here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We want curious conversation here, not indignant rhetoric, which is its polar opposite.
Would I say the same thing on YouTube or reddit? Of course not. That would end in a flamewar in milliseconds, but this is HN. I expect (and I wasn't disappointed) than HN readers can discuss divisive topics without any flames.
HN is constantly at risk of going up in flames—it's a large, open internet forum! If that doesn't happen, it's because the mods and most of the community are working hard to prevent it. We need you to help with that, not take advantage of it—and in any case the rules are supposed to apply to everybody (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
You can't judge these things by whether a particular case turned into a flamewar. Not every fire burns the house down. It's a question of effects in the long run, and your post was way on the wrong side of that line; which is why the guidelines ask you not to post like that. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of it, so this should be easy to fix.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/opinion/dei-trainings-eff...
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12537
I figured something was weird because we shared a parking lot with another IT firm and I noticed their staff looked different.
Later I established a relationship with HR and found out that the recruiters actively tossed any resumes with Indian looking names in the trash because they assumed they’d have need a visa and had problems with English.
Needless to say as a senior engineer, I confronted HR and offered to help with recruiting. We went from 1 to 5 highly qualified Indian engineers that same year.
What am I saying? Diversity is your fault.
Senior engineers and EMs are directly responsible for not advocating for others!
Things you can do:
- Actually meet new people who don’t look like you
- Help a junior find their next company
- Join forces with other seniors and tell management and HR to be better about hiring
We may not have enough visas, but we have plenty of Indian people that our great engineers. While it's painful to talk about, this simply isn't true for black people and women. I feel uncomfortable talking like this, but I think it's in the best interest of getting it right. It may be bad for all POC, but specifically it looks like blacks have faired poorly, as well as native americans. We know there's gender issues.
I digress, but the point is that this is simple a much larger problem than what you presented. In a way there similar. It's always hard to go against racist management. The point is this is a fixable problem. Get rid of the overt racism, and just start accepting resumes from the zillion of qualified people.
It's hard to talk about, but I don't think anyone familiar with the issue will disagree. There is a horrible supply problem caused by a couple centuries of horrid racism. This doesn't go away by flipping a single overt racism switch, like yours did.
Are we producing enough young black, POC, and women engineers? I think the obvious answer is no. Fight the fight against racism internally, and your efforts will help, but you're never going to be able to fix it under these conditions.
Meaning should Chinese and Indian foreign students dominate US/EU engineering due to their sheer numbers to the exclusion of local minorities and underrepresented populations?
Poorly written headline for a very thin article.
Sure, lots of people who are white and deny systemic racism or the effects of it exist. That’s literally the problem we’re fighting and why we need diversity efforts.
Its not that we don't have Asians, Mexicans, or Indians. At least half the companies I worked for, white people were less than 50% of the workers.
Its not a current racism issue, its likely a relic of racism issue. A large number of African Americans grow up in poor areas, get terrible education, are among a non-work-ethic driven culture, and never make it to the American Dream. Repeat generation after generation. Sure there are racists from the south, but talk to an African American of privilege(middle/upper middle class) living in a city. They have little bad things to say, and mostly blame it on the individual.
The issue is the zip code. You can see it in how white people living in these same areas perform.
i feel like "talk to an African American of privilege" and what follows is incorrect. i know and have known a lot of well off Black friends and associates and they all have stories - there are a lot of racists in the north too, they just act a little different.
In white-collar positions? I call BS. Cite the companies and we can look up their employment stats.
Poorly run diversity efforts are upsetting to POC. In a way they all tend to be poorly run. It can be infantilizing and condescending.
Ultimately, we end up falling short of the numbers, so the people behind the programs are unhappy. POC are unhappy because of the quality of how the programs tend to be run. Obviously the fascists/republicans aren't happy. The centerist people tend to fall between the people running the program and the right.
So who's supposed to be happy. I will say that in my experience, these diversity programs don't exist. That is to say the really overbearing ones people complain about. I imagine it's a bigger thing for SV and some big companies (although, I have worked for big companies).
In my experience, programs are nearly non-existent and the minorities they hire are at least "pretty competent", which is hard to find in software. If anything, it looks like they're still being pretty choosy. So people like OP get their wish, and the programs are pretty laid back.
from the article, only around 14% think DE&I efforts are "too much", while 54% say "about right", 17% "not sure", 15% "too little".
for thinking increasing DE&I at work is a good thing, only 47% of white people agreed while 78%, 72%, 65% (Black, Asian, Hispanic) thought so.
Why do people even proceed to put in comments after admitting this kind of ignorance on HN
Eg - I grew up in a poor, 50% immigrant area in Brooklyn. The Russian and Asian immigrant kids had better outcomes than their American peers despite fewer resources because their parents kicked their ass and failure / slacking wasn't an option.
Whether perfect meritocracy exists or not isn't the point, the point is to maximize your own input to increase your own chances.
In contrast I see a lot of modern approach to problem solving is to lower expectations to make things more equal for some. But I expect that this lowering (eg: no need for SATs, no more selective magnet schools, easier admissions by race, etc) will have a negative effect, the opposite of the immigrant mentality described above.
I see a similar trend with lowering enforcement of some laws because the enforcement appears racist based on who's doing the crime. By making it "okay" you are perversely worsening those people's lives in the long run.
It's a little sad because I am sure all of this comes from a good place but it doesn't truly elevate people.
One thing that's obvious is my wife and I both exemplify this attitude, as do our immigrant parents (eg her dad went from broke immigrant to international biz owner).
I also think raising your kid on a religious context (religion is at its base the idea that your choices matter a lot) is a positive. I say this as someone who grew up an atheist, but that's another thing we are doing.
Quote from the following article:
“But the gap between optimism and reality is far greater for white teachers and white students than for other teachers and black students, meaning white teachers' high expectations of white students could be giving them an edge.
Finally, the study looked at whether teacher expectations matter. And the study found that they do. White or black, students with similar preparation are more likely to graduate from college if their high school teachers believe that they will. This is why teacher expectations, and any racial bias, matter so much, the authors say.”
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/24/study-finds-h...
And the family always said "there's the harder math class? You take that one". "there's a test for the magnet school? You study for that one". "you got accepted to a more party college and a more engineering college? You go to the 2nd one"
You don't think the kid would be more likely to be a success than at baseline?
As a parent myself, I wish the scenario you described was true! That guardians had the capacity to simply nurture into reality an Al Einstein or Mikey Phelps, if they just Tiger Mom push their way through the young person's early years. But the data do not indicate that; to the contrary, most of that future person is already defined in their nature/genes at conception, and good parenting, at its best, will simply avoid catastrophe while nudging towards good goals.
All the rest is just to make the guardian feel better about themself.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.2218526 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Basically - high expectations drive you to exercise whatever is in your power, which is often a lot (eg as exemplified by the asian American experience)
The progressive focus on the "systemic" takes away an individual's power because "hey the world is against you and unless we can change the world nothing will be good for you". I agree with you this ignores a lot of "what actually is"
Some would ask questions about what we were doing to aid social mobility but it tended to fall on deaf ears.
There are companies who proscribed "We will hire from demographic A to reach B% in C years." who put too much weight on identity attributes during economic boom hire-fests, but those days won't return at least until 2030 as competency and need are now central.
You can tell when some teams haven't de-biased their hiring processes when they are and remain too homologous in either thought, values, or possibly appearance.
The goal of hiring shouldn't be to appease today's fashionable virtues of other people, but to hire the best who are cooperative enough to get along, regardless of what they look like or where they came from. Unless you're going to reinterview everyone, reducing bias uniformly and fairly in the now and forward must be more important than putting a thumb on the scale for the past while ignoring merit because there is no solution to bias of the past except to see if it's really happening and find ways to stop it from happening, i.e., resume contact detail blinding, normalize or drop regional writing signals, reformat resumes with the same font, ask everyone the same questions, standardizing peer interviewing format down to a grid layout with scoring, and so on.
The fact that this and another article about Harvard race-based admissions yesterday were both insta-flagged suggest that many don’t even want us to have the conversation.