It's really contradictory that the party of less regulation are introducing more friction and bureaucracy in scientific research process. But then it's also the party of anti-science so I can see why.
It is counter-contradictor measures. It is against nay-sayer people who research and find out stuff. Being smart will cost you, because it's not the goal. Less research, and lower levels of education equals more people to fall for simplistic solutions and promisses. The definition of truth is being redefined, and open-minded research and education is in the way of that.
It's not a contradiction: wanting a small state implies both wanting a low burden of regulation on the private sector specifically, and also wanting a great deal of care to be taken with how money is spent by the government. It isn't a general argument for allowing arbitrary levels of public sector fraud or waste, and it feels bad faith to conflate these two things as if one implies the other. Nobody in the history of politics has argued on principle for a state that has high taxes yet doesn't enforce any rules on how the money is spent.
In this case, the administration believes a lot of the work the NSF funds isn't actually scientific. In that they are correct. The replication crisis has been rolling for 15 years now with no real improvements, largely because the people who distribute the money don't care if it gets used for things that are genuinely scientific or if it gets used for things that merely have the surface level appearance of being scientific. The NSF funds vast amounts of pseudo-science that can be trivially identified and people have been talking about these problems for years with no resolution. Apparently, they need some friction and bureaucracy as otherwise they won't do their jobs correctly. In a free market government intervention isn't required to solve this problem because free actors will just stop funding pseudo-scientific work after a while, but the NSF isn't running a free market, and so the problem just never gets solved.
This article focuses on social science but talks a bit about the general problems at the NSF at the end, and although it was written in 2020 thus at the start of the Biden administration the proposals the author makes for fixes are basically what's happening right now:
Nobody actually benefits from the present state of affairs, but you can't ask isolated individuals to sacrifice their careers for the "greater good": the only viable solutions are top-down, which means either the granting agencies or Congress (or, as Scott Alexander has suggested, a Science Czar). You need a power that sits above the system and has its own incentives in order: this approach has already had success with requirements for pre-registration and publication of clinical trials. Right now I believe the most valuable activity in metascience is not replication or open science initiatives but political lobbying
...
An NSF/NIH inquisition that makes sure the published studies match the pre-registration (there's so much """"""""""QRP"""""""""" in this area you wouldn't believe). The SEC has the power to ban people from the financial industry—let's extend that model to academia.21
...
It is difficult to convey just how low the standards are. The marginal researcher is a hack and the marginal paper should not exist. There's a general lack of seriousness hanging over everything—if an undergrad cites a retracted paper in an essay, whatever; but if this is your life's work, surely you ought to treat the matter with some care and respect.
Why is the Replication Markets project funded by the Department of Defense? If you look at the NSF's 2019 Performance Highlights, you'll find items such as "Foster a culture of inclusion through change management efforts" (Status: "Achieved") and "Inform applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding in a timely manner" (Status: "Not Achieved"). Pusillanimous reports repeat tired clichés about "training", "transparency", and a "culture of openness" while downplaying the scale of the problem and ignoring ...
>> For academic scientists, the list of banned activities could include efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, collaborations with foreign scientists, and research on more environmentally friendly technologies.
These are not the "vast amounts of pseudo-science" that your comment refers to.
I have nothing against the ideas suggested in the 2020 blog post that you cite... it's just that is not what is happening because of the executive order.
The executive orders do not address bad science.
So overall, I agree with most ideas in your comment but I do not think it is relevant to the current situation. The administration is not trying to fix bad science.
How about this move that we're discussing? Getting rid of openly ideological research grants will help the replication rate quite a bit, as that stuff is riddled with basic replication problems, much worse than the median paper. It's just too easy to take some grant money then publish something pseudo-scientific which sounds good to left wing ears, knowing that nobody will double check because they want it to be true.
As an example, a lot of research into "misinformation" is like that. It's not replicable out of the gate because the papers don't describe their procedure for deciding whether a claim is true or false. They just present random lists of things that conservatives tend to believe, assert that none of them are true / they're conspiracy theories, then do a survey and use the results to conclude that conservatives are dumb / Russian bots. That's it, that's the entire field. There's no methodology, no theories, nothing to be refined or refuted. There are thousands of papers like this, it's astonishing to witness.
I've been writing for years on the topic of bad science, and the fact that universities/granting bodies claim to care about science whilst simultaneously funding and celebrating this stuff is why their reputation has gone down the drain. The consequences were absolutely predictable. Nobody can claim they didn't see it coming.
Right now, there's just a grant freeze combined with a review to find the really nakedly partisan DEI stuff. That's nothing. Much more intense stuff is well within the Overton Window of possibilities by this point, like ramped up prosecutions or large scale defunding.
I've been on HN for a decade and worked (tangentially) with the individual you're responding to- I don't think you should take the effort to respond at all. He's made up his mind that the current approach will improve things, and believes he has "data" to support it, but also seems absolutely naive about the intent and effects of the current administration's approaches.
Agreed. I myself was involved in academia close to a decade as well and participated in studies funded by NIH and NSF during Obama, Trump#1 and Biden era. This person has no clue how rigorous and competitive the grant review process is. If appealing to DEI was so successful in getting your study funded, everyone would do it. But it was never the case at least in my experience.
Great job on making a sub-thread that says nothing. If the process is so rigorous, why is it so easy to find non rigorous outputs? I'm hardly unique in pointing this out: if the best you can do is say everything is fine, despite clear evidence it's not, you can't be surprised at the consequences. If you don't like the current approach that's fine, but where's the alternative? There was a Trump free four years, but nothing was done.
It really shouldn't be easy for ideologues to spend other peoples money. There are entire parallel structures in government, academia and now in business not contributing one iota of effort towards whatever the directed goal of their organisations are principally for.
If you couldn't see the anti-China rhetoric was a smoke screen, now it should be pretty obvious, with the US going down a similar road (eg. vetting projects that goes against the government's ideology... which is ironically what most far right politicians say they are against: ideology).
This should make it clear. There is no such thing as being for or against ideology. If you exist, there are things you weakly believe in, and things you strongly believe in. The thing someone else strongly believes in, that we weakly believe in, we call ideology. So it's always been about fighting "their" ideology, not ideology.
Always be skeptical when someone defends only the things they strongly believe in. That goes both ways, for the left and right.
Before the rise of Trump I might have agreed with you but now I think it's true for trumpers. Look at Musk, Mr. Free Speech until he doesn't like it. The quote above describes him exactly.
On what basis do you declare Elon Musk "conservative"? (No less, the one man whose actions define conservatism!) Are you perhaps confusing conservatism with "current support of a Republican politician"?
I agree with you regarding Musk's hypocrisy around free speech.
Oh, and if you're looking for someone who believes the law protects him but does not bind him, you might like to read the news on the current (Democratic) mayor of Chicago.
Musk is a major component of the administration that currently represents conservatives. He is/was the biggest donor to that administration. That makes him a conservative for now.
I live in Massachusetts where three straight Speakers were convicted of various crimes so I'm well aware of Democratic malfeasance. Right now Trump and his enablers are so much worse.
The problem is that the word "conservative" has become so overloaded as to become useless, both as a punching bag (the above quote, which would be better stated as authoritarian or even more appropriately crypto-fascist), and as a fig-leaf for the radical reactionary agenda that has taken over the Republican party. The actual straightforward definition of wishing to slow change, supporting American institutions, the rule of law, fiscal responsibility, etc, actually applies more to the current Democratic party.
Musk's hypocrisy regarding "free speech" is more around him claiming to be libertarian, but that type of hypocrisy runs deep in the Libertarian party, as the attraction of freedom for me but not for thee is too strong and the party has been pwnt by moneyed sponsors the same as the two main parties.
If this were the case then they would be replacing the ideological conformity sections with different ideological conformity requirements. Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
Whatever a scientist happens to believe in, these changes would not imperil his ability to receive government funding. But in the previous system, if one felt that unconditional merit was the most fundamental factor in science (and refused to simply lie) he would have been found it much more difficult to secure funding.
>Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
This is the significant part.
Woke ideology was always unpopular when put to the test in the court of public opinion and sometimes even law. Whether it's entertainment products that got reviewbombed for incorporating "diversity", illegal hiring/enrollment quotas that once existed to enforce "inclusion", or the replacing of the word "equality" with "equity" because people started catching on that what was touted as equality actually wasn't.
Now that we have a President (and by extension a party) who was elected to get rid of all that, promises to do so are being kept.
As a Japanese-American, I 300% voted for and support this. Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
The problem with this idea is that "woke" is a moving target that its enemies are defining. Will they change the definition to include things you don't want? Moreover, does it currently actually have the goal to make meritocracy? For example, they've allowed discrimination based on race in government hiring, for example, so that does not bode well for the idea of being judged on merit alone. Explicitly, they are now allowed to judge on race where they were not before. Read through project 2025 - is that what you actually want, because that's what he's gonna implement.
>For example, they've allowed discrimination based on race in government hiring ... Read through project 2025
I advise you read through the actual Executive Orders than some false propaganda material of at best questionable value.
What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Here are the EOs with regards to the subject matter at hand:
>Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.
>Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.
----
>This Federal Hiring Plan shall: ... prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals who are unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch;
> What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Trump has outright been banning transgender individuals from enlisting in the military and serving. Presumably in a merit-based society you would judge them on the basis of merit, not on a secondary characteristic.
> It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that people who are internally confused about themselves and require/demand extensive specialized medical treatments and care are most likely not suited to serve in the military.
Trans people I know are very sure about themselves. More than some cis people in fact. I will let RAND Corporation rebut the rest of your speculation.[1]
The effect on force readiness is an important consideration in any military
policy change. Many types of medical treatments can lead to lost labor and leave
personnel temporarily unable to deploy. Given the small estimated number of
transgender personnel and the even smaller number who would seek gender
transition–related treatment in a given year, the study found that the readiness
impact of transition-related treatment would lead to a loss of less than
0.0015 percent of total available labor-years in the active component. Even
using the highest estimates, less than 0.1 percent of the force would seek gender
transition–related treatment that would affect their ability to deploy. As a point
of comparison, in the Army alone, approximately 50,000 active-component
personnel were ineligible to deploy in 2015 for various legal, medical, or
administrative reasons—a number amounting to around 14 percent of the
active component.
A key concern in allowing transgender personnel to serve openly is how this
may affect unit cohesion. The underlying assumption is that if service members
discover that a member of their unit is transgender, this could inhibit bonding
within the unit, which, in turn, would reduce operational readiness. Similar
concerns were raised in debates over whether to allow gay and lesbian personnel to
serve openly, as well as over whether to allow women to serve in ground combat
positions. However, evidence from foreign militaries and the U.S. military has
indicated no significant impact on unit cohesion or operational readiness as a
result of allowing transgender and gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly or
allowing women to serve in ground combat positions.
There's a more sensible middle-ground here, in that the military should have no problem enlisting people with gender identity beliefs - just as it's fine for military personnel to hold varying religious beliefs - but that no-one else should be obliged to accept these beliefs as true, and that the military should not have to fund any cosmetic procedures to make an individual appear to be of the opposite sex. While also not discriminating against anyone for having these beliefs.
This is a sensible middle-ground approach for the rest of society too. Just treat it like a minority religious belief, then the issue is solved fairly without stepping on anyone's rights.
If both Republicans and Democrats agreed to this approach and put this issue to bed, they could get on with wrangling over much more important problems of governance.
We allow people to self-identify their religious beliefs. The government doesn't declare you to be a Catholic or a Buddhist and force your driver's license to say such.
Unless you're proposing making the military- and the rest of society- radically gender neutral, than as soon as a person interacts with a driver's license, passport, social media account, or bathroom, they will have to adopt a gender identity . Why should a third party's "gender beliefs" about a person be elevated above their own?
(I also can't see a justification for denying hormone replacement therapy treatment- it's cheap and ridiculously beneficial for mental health. But, for the same reasons, I advocate its availability over-the-counter.)
The architectural solution to gender neutral bathrooms is floor to ceiling panels and doors that actually close. It's quite simple and extremely common in newer buildings in Europe.
Driver's license and passport record sex, and bathrooms and other spaces that are separated for women and men are done so on the basis of sex.
Being an objective measurement of material biological state, sex isn't the same type of thing as a gender identity belief, which is indeed self-declared like a religion is.
> should not have to fund any cosmetic procedures to make an individual appear to be of the opposite sex
Why is this a talking point? Gender affirming surgeries are extremely rare. Very few trans people go through with them. And even when they do, recovery times are in the order of days or weeks which has little to no impact on the efficacy of the fighting force.
The main things trans people want are:
1. That people treat them with basic human dignity and respect.
2. Access to gender affirming medications. It ultimately doesn't really matter who pays for them because they cost nothing. They are quite literally some of the cheapest medications on the market. Estradiol without insurance costs like 10-20USD for a 3 month supply. Testosterone about the same or less. Androgen blockers cost like 1-5USD for a 3 month supply. You could not find cheaper medications and most pharmacies won't even run insurance for them because they are so cheap. The reason the military "needs" to pay for them is because they need to run the medication through their logistics network so that it is accessible where it is needed.
The cost is irrelevant. What matters is that the medication can get delivered to ships and bases in a timely manner. And that is why the military pays for it.
Why should cosmetic interventions, whether pharmaceutical or surgical, to give an individual the appearance of secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex, be something the military should have any interest in doing? It doesn't help its mission does it.
They aren't cosmetic. Hormone replacement therapy has more mental impact than anything else.
And the reason they should have interest in doing it is because the overwhelming majority of trans people in the military are people who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria while in the military. The military treats that gender dysphoria so that they can continue to be effective members of the fighting force.
These are people who are already in the military and want to continue to be in the military and do their jobs effectively. A few pills a day or an injection every few days or weeks is generally effective at treating gender dysphoria with accommodations such as social transition further treating it while doing nothing to diminish the efficacy of the fighting force.
Not treating or accommodating them means they either leave the military (which is a problem because the military has a critical shortage of senior personnel due to horrific retention issues) or they perform their duties in a diminished capacity. There's no reason to harm the fighting force's efficacy and/or retention over a treatment that has essentially zero cost and no impact on operational readiness (compared to all the other long term treatments they allow which do impact operational readiness).
>Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
But now you are taking your preconceived notion of what every trans person must think and disqualifying the entire group from the military before they have an opportunity to prove whether or not they meet the requirements.
>What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character.
Conservatives are OK with rolling everything back and hiding behind words, since right now, most people at the highest levels of power - that do the judging - are white men.
How else do you explain such "merit" based nominations like Hegseth for SecDef, Gaetz for Attorney General, etc. (Gaetz withdrew but getting nominated at all was ridiculous). And if Hegseth is qualified to lead the DoD, then so is anybody who ever served in the military at the rank of Major or higher.
MLK explicitly supported reparations for black people. He did not support a system of institutional colorblindness. You can only get this from his writing if you take one famous line from one famous speech and ignore the rest of what he wrote.
I've been called several dozen kinds of labels to try and get me to be a nice and cooperative victim. I've also found myself labeled as the oppressor, as Asians are(were) often found too successful unlike other minorities.
Sincerely screw all that racist noise with extreme prejudice. In this regard, the Left did more work than anyone to get me to vote Trump.
Absolutely; that's one of the reasons why I applaud this. Those internments were based on race, including to the exclusion of considering American citizenship as you've mentioned. That's not how things should operate, and Trump's EOs legally mandate that people be judged equally and fairly without regard to things like race.
If you've faced discrimination from DEI then I regret to inform you that you are being judged on merit and talent, relative to a sample of your ethnic cohorts. You might qualify for the job, but you still have to compete for it.
You should talk to more Americans that were involved in the corporate structure of the 1950-1990s. Old money ruled the place and white, protestant men filled every seat in the office. It was a caste system, and worst of all it was protected by the Civil Rights Act which did not demand equal opportunity when hiring. This was destructive to talented minorities, protective of untalented executives and ultimately wasteful to everyone that wasn't on "the inside" of the administrative structure. Something had to be done, these businesses weren't going to stop themselves from becoming insular and hostile boy's clubs.
Regan had the right idea; keep affirmative action, but axe or soften the numerical requirements. Trump had the wrong idea, but went with it anyways because he knows that today's neocons are hungry for some good, old-fashioned, government-sanctioned racism. You should be careful to not let your insecurities choose who you think is right, especially in pissing contests where you're liable to get wet.
>If you've faced discrimination from DEI then I regret to inform you that you are being judged on merit and talent,
Perhaps fortunately, I personally (second generation Japanese-American) was not directly affected by DEI. Maybe I should have experienced it somehow so I could give an even more damning opinion.
However, I was witness to family members (Japanese-Americans, Asians) who were discriminated against both positively and negatively citing DEI. Not to mention all those "minority owned" and "women owned" business categories that were prominent if you did any amount of officework. Just how widespread and deep this nouveau resurgence of racism and sexism were was and arguably still is both astonishing and terrifying.
I want everyone to be judged for their merit and character. I have absolutely no problem if "white protestant men" dominate a given sector if that is simply the result of judgments passed strictly on merit and character. People who can do <X> the best should be the people who get to do <X> without any regard to skin color or religion.
Giving me special treatment one way or another just because I'm Asian is fucking racist and I will neither accept nor tolerate it. I want to be seen and treated as an American like any other, it's right there in the Declaration of Independence: "All Men Are Created Equal."
Trump reiterating with a mandate that the government can not and will not judge people based on race, sex, religion, or any other DEI reasoning is something I unequivocally support and will support to my dying breath. This is equality in its most raw and sincere form: It does not and should not matter what you are born as, you will be judged for who you become.
What is most astonishing to me in all this is just how much we've reversed course on equality, considering one another as simply men among mankind, over the past two to three decades. You're literally trying to tell me that refusing to judge people based on their race is racism. Do you not understand how nonsensical that is? Do you understand how patently stupid that is from the perspective of a minority, or at least this particular Japanese-American man? What the sincere fuck.
"Diversity" in DEI is Discrimination. Equity in DEI is a violation of every man's right to pursuit of happiness. "Inclusion" is an affront to the sharing of diverse ideas and beliefs among mankind. I applaud and cheer for the resounding rejection of DEI, this is a step in the right direction both for the United States of America and for mankind. I voted for this in 2024 and I will vote likewise again Every. Single. Time.
Im sure guys that think foreigners are dog eating criminals judge everyone based on merit now.
We have a doctor with asian sounding name and people at work were wondering if they need translator when they visit.
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
It does not sound like that. At least, not at the NSF, which is freezing funds until it's had an ideologically-driven purge.
The Office of Science seems to have a better approach, removing the need for the previous administration's PIER plan and ignoring any already submitted
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period
This is not true. If I submit a project to study the large-scale effect of DEI policies in institutions, that will get rejected because "anti-DEI" is in the current government's idelogy, as written down in presidential orders.
They are not simply removing the previous ideology and leaving a void in place. There are no voids in power structures.
> Instead they are simply stripping ideological requirements, period.
That is literally the opposite of what the linked article claims. They aren't "stripping requirements" placed on funding, they're stripping the actual funds from existing grants, based on new requirements that just happen to be phrased along the lines of the ruling regime's political rhetoric.
Your Orwellian version only makes sense if you assume a priori that the funds were granted incorrectly, which again is sort of the opposite of what science is.
I don't understand why you are calling it a religion.
What has been your personal experience with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in employment?
Mine has been that I watched a few videos that basically said: don't hit on people at work, don't mock people for disabilities, and don't treat people as lesser based on physical attributes.
In other words, don't be an asshole to people at work.
The only people I've seen given preferential treatment at work have been those who suck up to the leadership to get promoted.
I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information.
For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation.
The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.
> The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires".
Why do you say it is a fallacy when the E in DEI stands for the so called equity, which means exactly that. You seem to be describing equality, which is something that DEI was intended to supersede.
When you look at pre-Trump guidelines for FAA job applications, for example, there is an explicitly described preferential process for hiring from the favored groups.
Equity doesn't mean that though. There are people (like the current president) who certainly have something to gain from selling you that bridge, but no one I know who works in or advocates for "equity" initiatives considers them to advocate for token or diversity hires.
Have you considered that your sources of data may be biased?
Consider, for example that need-based scholarships are perhaps one of the clearest examples of a equitable, but explicitly unequal program. Should they be removed, or perhaps is there some legitimacy to this "equity" thing?
> Consider, for example that need-based scholarships are perhaps one of the clearest examples of a equitable, but explicitly unequal program. Should they be removed, or perhaps is there some legitimacy to this "equity" thing?
That's discrimination on the basis of income, which is legal. Discrimination on the basis of race and gender is not. All of the DEI programs I've seen have focused on equity with respect to race and gender. And 3 out of 4 companies I've worked at employed discrimination to that end.
Plenty of people have seen their employers adopt discriminatory practices in pursuit of equity. Condescending towards people and insisting that they're being misled about DEI is not a good way to defend it when loads of people have witnessed discrimination carried out under DEI programs firsthand. While I respect that none of your experiences with DEI involved discrimination, I urge you to meet other people who've had different experiences with the same respect.
I want to break down this post a bit, because this topic is often divisive and I'm aiming to be constructive. So, the question I asked, "Is there some legitimacy to this equity thing", and the question you chose to answer, which as best as I can tell is "Is racial discrimination legal?".
Those aren't the same question and I don't think conflating them is constructive. I'm not arguing that companies can do harmful things in the name of diversity. But the goal of equitable outcomes being worthwhile is independent from anyone's feelings about the legitimacy of any particular approach to meeting that goal, and that's what I asked about, and what you didn't reply to. I'd ask you to consider why.
Reading some of your other posts on the topic, you keep quoting a "3/4" statistic, and you've described different practices when asked to describe what they were you've described:
- Explicit racial and gender quotas in headcount (which are flatly illegal and so I doubt)
- Hiring goals in OKRS (which aren't inherently discriminatory, and probably weren't achieved!)
- Giving candidates multiple attempts on interviews in certain cases
- Requiring a certain number of underrepresented candidates to be offered interviews before the candidate can be picked
I want to dig into this last one, because in my experience, this is somewhat common, but only with executive hiring, where often roles aren't open for public application, and this forces executive search companies to make a modicum of additional effort to source and provide diverse candidates to the hiring company. This has, in some cases I've seen, also resulted in executive level positions having open public job postings.
I also want to dig in to something you said in another comment, because I think you're using discrimination in a particular way that's not how most people think of it. Phrased more forcefully, the definition of "racial discrimination" you appear to be using and considering harmful includes practices that are both generally considered legal and generally considered moral.
> Not every form of discrimination involves lowering hiring standards. For instance, imagine I flip a coin whenever a Catholic candidate applies. Tails, their resume goes into the garbage bin, heads and their application process as normal. Does this lower lower hiring standards for non Catholics? No. Does this advantage non-Catholics over Catholic candidates? Yes. It would halve the hiring rate of Catholics, though it doesn't result in any "lowering the bar".
So, I agree that this would lower the hiring rate of Catholics, but under this definition, ending this (clearly) discriminatory practice would lower the hiring rate of non-catholics. If your metric is "it is discriminatory if it harms the hiring rate of some group", then you've created an explicitly zero-sum definition of discrimination, and anything that reduces discrimination against some group causes discrimination against another. In doing so you've baked in an assumption about the correctness of the methodology at some particular time and place that you're measuring against.
You can call that discrimination, and I actually do in a lot of circumstances, but it isn't bad. It's actually a good thing, and we recognize that in a lot of circumstances that discrimination in pursuit of equity is moral and legal and even necessary!
Outside the US, for example, there are explicit racial quotas in a lot of situations, for example in New Zealand[0] there are explicit quotas in parliament to ensure continued native representation, and India has quota systems to help support lower caste individuals in opposition to active discrimination in society by upper-caste folks.
Even in the US, Due to the 1965 Voting Rights Act [1], ensuring representation of minority groups and actively "discriminating" in district drawing to en...
There is no zero sum of discrimination. In the above example, removing the coin-toss for Catholics removes the discrimination against Catholics, but does not add any discrimination against other groups.
Your example of India's caste based affirmative action is a good one. In fact, one of my past employers replicated it: we reserved a segment of engineering headcount for women, much in the same vein as India's reservation system with respect to caste. However, this is illegal in the US, but the company was confident that non-discrimination laws wouldn't be enforced when the victims were men. Though as of the last election, companies seem to recognize that this non-enforcement is a thing of the past.
The 3 out of 4 data point is my firsthand experience with my previous employer's DEI practices. Out of the 4 companies I've worked at, 3 employed DEI practices that are overtly discriminatory. So understand that when you write about how discriminatory DEI practices are myth, people such as myself have firsthand experience to the contrary. You're asking people to disbelieve their own lying eyes, when you insist that the notion that DEI involves discrimination is misinformation.
Equity requires discrimination, since almost no outcomes are perfectly equal across demographics. Achieving an equitable gender representation of pediatricians requires discriminating against female pediatricians. Achieving an equitable gender representation of software developers requires discrimination against male developers.
My use of the word "discrimination" is squarely in line with common use: does a policy discriminate on the basis of protected class? If so it's discrimination. Reserving headcount for one gender, even if it's done to push gender representation closer to 50/50, is discrimination. The notion that discrimination isn't discrimination when it's perpetrated against "non-diverse" groups is not in line with the common use of the term.
> There is no zero sum of discrimination. In the above example, removing the coin-toss for Catholics removes the discrimination against Catholics, but does not add any discrimination against other groups.
I want to clarify, because I see an inconsistency here. You say that preventing Catholic resumes from getting thrown out solely on the basis of race, is not discrimination and a good thing, and I agree. But elsewhere, you've said that changing hiring processes to ensure that URM and women are searched out and interviewed, is bad discrimination.
The same action, ensuring fair access to the pipeline, is in your opinion non-discriminatory (and legal) when it helps theoretical Catholic people, but is discriminatory and illegal when it benefits women and racial minorities.
I'm calling this out for two reasons, one because I want you to consider and reflect on this inconsistency, and two, to point this out to others reading and engaging, because insisting that we're asking you to disbelieve your own eyes does feel compelling, but less so when it appears very apparent that objectively, you're perception is colored by bias.
> So understand that when you write about how discriminatory DEI practices are myth, people such as myself have firsthand experience to the contrary.
I want to clarify, I've never said anything like this. My comments are pointing out an objection to your understanding of the word equity and how you interpret it. I've been fairly consistent about this, and you continue to avoid that and make more sweeping objections and statements about programs and your experiences, which may or may not be true but aren't actually relevant to the central question I'm asking, which is "Can equitable programs be good?"
> Equity requires discrimination, since almost no outcomes are perfectly equal across demographics.
I'm also going to call this out yet again, because it's the objection I made at the beginning of this thread. So I'll outline it yet again because you avoided it twice now:
I consider need based financial aid to be an equitable program, specifically because it takes into account the circumstances of the individuals. It does not require or make any assumptions about outcomes being equivalent. What it avoids doing is making the assumption that giving all people the same treatment (the same price) is the best approach. Do you disagree, and if so where?
Now I could agree that it requires discrimination based on financial status, but that is an input to the system, not an output (both in individual cases, and in aggregate). Where I disagree is that equity requires some assumption that outcomes are perfectly equal across demographics. I think that if you believe that, it makes perfect sense to oppose such programs, but I also believe that the people doing most equity work don't believe that, and it is primarily opponents of the programs that push such narratives.
> My use of the word "discrimination" is squarely in line with common use: does a policy discriminate on the basis of protected class?
You're using the word in its definition. And much like in this case, you've conflated what I'd describe as "unlawful discrimination" that violates the Civil Rights Act and "immoral discrimination" that may or may not break laws but is a bad thing, and "discrimination" that may in fact be a good thing but is predicated on recognizing differences between groups elsewhere in your responses, and it muddles the points that I think you're trying to make.
I'd agree that equitable programs require discrimination in that third sense, but I disagree that such discrimination is necessarily unlawful or immoral, and I'll yet again point to the example of need based financial aid as an explicitly legal, moral, equitable category of program.
There is no inconsistency at all. A policy that uses protected class as a factor, in any way, is discriminatory.
> But elsewhere, you've said that changing hiring processes to ensure that URM and women are searched out and interviewed, is bad discrimination.
"changing hiring processes to ensure that URM and women are searched out and interviewed" is a vague statement that encompasses both discriminatory and non-discriminatory practices.
Examples of non-discriminatory hiring practices that could boost women and URM participation include: anonymizing hiring processes to prevent bias or recruiting at events like Grace Hopper or at HBCUs. Examples of discriminatory practices include: Quotas (whether they're quotas on hiring or interviewing), reservation systems that prohibit non-diverse candidates from segments of headcount, or bonuses paid out to managers when they hire candidates of a particular race or gender. All of these practices serve to increase diverse turnout, but the former do so in a non discriminatory manner and the latter do so in a discriminatory manner. The problem is, only the latter can guarantee equitable outcomes.
You're using financial aid as a motte-and-baily here. Financial aid and preferences for low-income applicants in university are legal. Preferences for race and gender in hiring is not. Both are discrimination, yes. But the former is legal, and the latter is not. There's no inconsistency in supporting the former, and opposing the latter. And the conversation is about racial and gender equity.
> What it avoids doing is making the assumption that giving all people the same treatment (the same price) is the best approach
When it comes to race and gender in hiring, it is mandated by law that you give applicants of all races and all gender identities the same treatment. Anything less is illegal. I guess it's possible to think that the best approach is to flout the law and carry out illegal hiring practices to push towards equity. And at 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at that's what they did, so you'd be hardly alone in that position.
> I'd agree that equitable programs require discrimination in that third sense, but I disagree that such discrimination is necessarily unlawful or immoral
Again, the conversation is about racial and gender equity in hiring. I don't care about your opinion on financial aid about preferences for low income college students. When you wrote this statement, "I disagree that such discrimination is necessarily unlawful or immoral", are you referring to discrimination on the basis of race and gender in hiring?
I highly suggest you read up on employment laws, especially since you're putting your employer's name in your profile.
> There is no inconsistency at all. A policy that uses protected class as a factor, in any way, is discriminatory.
But the policy you describe uses protected class as a factor, and results in, for example, atheist applicants being less likely to be hired than before.
> And the conversation is about racial and gender equity.
No, the conversation is about equity, and my belief that you misunderstood the term. All I've claimed is that equity is a worthwhile goal. You seem deeply unwilling to engage with that claim, instead distracting with questions about legality which, even if your understanding were correct, wouldn't be relevant to my question.
> Quotas (whether they're quotas on hiring or interviewing)
So would a policy that says that for any given position, you must interview at least one candidate from say 4 distinct declared racial backgrounds be legal in your view? It treats every race equally and doesn't favor or disfavor any particular race.
> I highly suggest you read up on employment laws, especially since you're putting your employer's name in your profile.
While the relevant executive order was repealed, making it no longer required, I think referencing the department of labor's own info on hiring law is worthwhile: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs and https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/placement-goals#Q3 The crux being that while explicit hiring quotas are illegal, which is what I said, goals to measure against are not illegal. There's nothing I can find to suggest that quotas in application pool size are unlawful, and they're every common. I appreciate your concern, but perhaps read up yourself.
> But the policy you describe uses protected class as a factor, and results in, for example, atheist applicants being less likely to be hired than before.
No it does not. When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators and women's representation subsequently increased, that wasn't discrimination against men. That was discrimination against women being removed.
A policy of rejecting 50% of Catholics discriminates on the basis of religion. Removing this policy and adopting a non-discriminatory hiring practices may result in lower proportional representation of non-Catholics. That doesn't make it discriminatory, it just meant that the representation of non-Catholics was previously inflated by the discriminatory suppression of 50% of Catholic applicants. I'm not sure why this is hard to comprehend.
> So would a policy that says that for any given position, you must interview at least one candidate from say 4 distinct declared racial backgrounds be legal in your view?
Nope, this is still using protected class as a factor in hiring. You cannot deny, nor delay, the hiring process on the basis protected class. Meta used this policy, they called it "Diverse Slate Approach". I explain how it discriminates on the basis of protected class here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753672
> While the relevant executive order was repealed, making it no longer required,
It was never even allowed by law. The executive order doesn't actually do anything except restating the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: discrimination on the basis of protected class is illegal in hiring. What it really did was signal that non-enforcement of antidiscrimination laws against "non-diverse" groups is no longer going to continue. This is why Meta ended the DSA, and why many institutions are rolling back their DEI programs.
> The crux being that while explicit hiring quotas are illegal, which is what I said, goals to measure against are not illegal.
Imagine one company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% quota for women in engineering roles.
Another company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% goal for women in engineering roles.
Whether you call them "goals" or "representation targets" or "diversity milestones", whenever you define success and failure in terms of numerical thresholds on the basis of protected class, it's almost certainly going to incentivize discrimination.
And again, in my experience companies are simply ignoring these laws and adopting quotas or other discriminatory practices anyway. Or at least they were during the previous administration, when they were confident enforcement would be lax.
> That doesn't make it discriminatory, it just meant that the representation of non-Catholics was previously inflated by the discriminatory suppression of 50% of Catholic applicants. I'm not sure why this is hard to comprehend.
No no, I fully agree with you here. I just also continue this train of thought to say that doing the same thing by removing discriminatory hiring practices that were suppressing the hiring of women and URM applicants is also reducing discrimination. But somehow you seem to consistently disagree at that point.
To build on your example, imagine that the company doesn't immediately realize that their hiring process is tossing out resumes. They think it's working fine. Someone comes along and says "hey, your hiring of Catholics is surprisingly low compared to what we would expect." The company investigates and agrees. They realize it's not actually due to the system throwing out 50% of Catholic's resumes, but instead some automated screening software that misinterprets language that Catholics use and throws out a disproportionate number of their applications. Unfortunately, this system is extremely effective in other cases, so the company can't actually just entirely stop using it, or they'd be unable to effectively screen candidates at all.
The company devises a plan, with a measurable goal to increase employment among Catholics by 10% by the end of the year. They re-review some Catholic resumes resumes, and proactively reach out to some applicants who had been denied and re-interview them. They put some additional systems in place to manually review new incoming resumes by Catholic applicants. They work with the automated resume screening software provider to improve the software and stop rejecting the applicants. They reach out to Loyola and Georgetown and ensure that the students at these traditionally Catholic universities have some additional training on how to write their resumes in a way that gets past the screening software.
This all seems fine and good, both morally and legally, to me. Where do you land?
> You cannot deny, nor delay,
> I explain how it discriminates on the basis of protected class here:
I don't actually see any justification for saying a delayed hiring process would be discriminatory. Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool, there are pretty reasonable business justifications, such as "any hiring process that is unable to find even a single potentially qualified minority applicant is probably irrevocably flawed."
To zero in on your Meta example, unless you can show that the hiring process was noticeable longer for some candidates than others, which I find deeply unlikely, the more reasonable explanation than your handwavy suggestion that
> But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.
is that it improved demographics by exposing decision makers (Hiring Managers) to more qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds. To phrase this differently: if we return to our Catholic example, if you implement a requirement that all roles must consider a Catholic, and this encourages recruiters to actively reach out to catholic hires, some of the folks who were autorejected by the screening process will be found despite being missed the first time.
> It was never even allowed by law.
I want to clarify, you are saying that the Department of Labor guidance as defined under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246, which has been the Department of Labor policy for 60 years now, is unlawful, and has been for 60 years, through multiple administrations on both sides of the aisle? Because that seems like it is beyond the pale of a reasonable understanding of the law. Of cour...
> I don't actually see any justification for saying a delayed hiring process would be discriminatory.
So I can institute a policy of delaying offers to pregnant women for 9 months?
> Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool,
Yes, that is the intent. The longer candidates have to wait for an offer, the more likely they are to accept a competing offer or drop out of the hiring process. The way the DSA increased the representation of "diverse" demographics is by making "non-diverse" candidates wait a potentially long time for the DSA to be fulfilled, while diverse candidates never had to wait because their inclusion immediately fulfilled the DSA.
You realize that "increasing diversity" is identical to "reduce the representation of non-diverse demographics"? It's a discriminatory policy that examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender.
> You seem to claim, however, that a number of commonly accepted, widely adopted, standard policies that companies have used for decades are actually illegal and have been the entire time.
These policies haven't been used for decades. Google only recently including representation quotas - oh, sorry, goals - in performance reviews in 2021. Meta didn't employ the DSA until 2018. These are have not been employed for decades.
> Quota has a specific meaning in these contexts, that among other things includes the concept of including objectively less qualified folks on the basis of the discriminated attribute. So a gendered quota would mean something like hiring the top N applicants from each group, even if for example, there were more qualified men being passed over, and this was actively acknowledged. If it's not doing that, legally speaking, it isn't a quota.
>> Another company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% goal for women in engineering roles.
>This requires deeper analysis: are they hiring only qualified applicants, but making new efforts to appeal and access previously untapped groups of qualified women? Great!
You realize these are the exact same policy? If I penalize my employees if they don't meet a minimum percentage of a protected class, it's the same policy regardless of the specific word uses for the minimum percentage.
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
The incentive structure this puts on employees is exactly the same. At this point you're defending quotas, as long as companies use a euphemism for them.
I do agree that these quotas are in common use. But you're wrong that using a euphemism for quotas makes them any different in function.
Throughout your replies, you repeatedly defend the use of non-discriminatory policies that don't treat applicants differently on th basis of protected class, and only involve soliciting more applications from diverse candidates. That's all fine and dandy. But then you turn around and try to defend policies that do discriminate on the basis of race and gender. This doesn't follow. The fact that a quota could theoretically be fulfilled by more aggressively soliciting applicants from the target demographic doesn't change the fact that it's a discriminatory policy. Especially when the quota calls for levels of representation well above the demographics's representation in the field, it's certain to result in biased hiring. And no, simply calling a quota something else doesn't change that fact.
The motte and bailey you've constructed is clear:
The motte: companies should analyze their hiring policies and make sure that candidates are treated no different on the basis of protected class. ...
> So I can institute a policy of delaying offers to pregnant women for 9 months?
Then I think my caveat ("Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool") applies.
> Yes, that is the intent. The longer candidates have to wait for an offer, the more likely they are to accept a competing offer or drop out of the hiring process. The way the DSA increased the representation of "diverse" demographics is by making "non-diverse" candidates wait a potentially long time for the DSA to be fulfilled, while diverse candidates never had to wait because their inclusion immediately fulfilled the DSA.
You can justify this numerically, right? Like, You have some data to back this up, right? Like you aren't just entirely making up a boogeyman, right? You have some evidence beyond your personal dissatisfaction and disapproval that the process actually results in significantly different processing times for diverse vs. non-diverse applicants, right? Because without such evidence, you're making a pretty conspiratorial claim.
> You realize that "increasing diversity" is identical to "reduce the representation of non-diverse demographics"? It's a discriminatory policy that examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender.
Yes, I agree with you. But now when you said
> That doesn't make it discriminatory, it just meant that the representation of non-Catholics was previously inflated by the discriminatory suppression of 50% of Catholic applicants. I'm not sure why this is hard to comprehend.
You see how this is a contradiction. The policy to "increase diversity" and improve retention of Catholics isn't discriminatory, when you described it, but it is discriminatory now when it suits you since it "reduces the representation of <non-catholic> applicants".
You can't have it both ways, this is why the language you use is important, because while it is true that many of these policies do take into account applicant race and gender, they do so in ways that are explicitly legal, and often explicitly required. So when you say any policy which "examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender" is illegal, you're wrong. That's not what the law says, that's not what the law thinks, that's not what the courts have held for 60 years.
If a company institutes a policy to reduce discrimination against a particular class, that policy must, necessarily recognize that class and consider it differently to ensure that it is treated fairly. The law recognizes this, you appear not to.
This is why I keep asking you to use more precise language, you're saying things are discriminatory, but you use that sometimes to mean in the illegal sense, and sometimes you mean in the practical sense of recognizing differences.
> You realize these are the exact same policy? If I penalize my employees if they don't meet a minimum percentage of a protected class, it's the same policy regardless of the specific word uses for the minimum percentage.
You continue to not understand what a quota is, and how the law considers them different than other policies. If you maintain the same hiring bar, it isn't a quota. A quota functionally requires using a lower quality bar for such applicants, and using class, not qualification, as the deciding factor.
> These policies haven't been used for decades. Google only recently including representation quotas - oh, sorry, goals - in performance reviews in 2021. Meta didn't employ the DSA until 2018. These are have not been employed for decades.
The policies I'm describing, that the EEOC has forced companies to follow as part of consent decrees, and that the federal government has required of contractors, have in fact been required for decad...
> You can justify this numerically, right? Like, You have some data to back this up, right? Like you aren't just entirely making up a boogeyman, right? You have some evidence beyond your personal dissatisfaction and disapproval that the process actually results in significantly different processing times for diverse vs. non-diverse applicants, right? Because without such evidence, you're making a pretty conspiratorial claim.
Yes, if you compile statistics on how long candidates have to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled, you'll see that diverse candidates don't have to wait at all because the DSA is fulfilled the moment that a diverse candidate is interviewed but the non-diverse candidates are stuck waiting until a diverse candidate is interviewed.
This is explicitly documented in Meta's hiring policies, both the mechanisms by which offers for non-diverse candidates are delayed and the goals of reducing non-diverse representation.
> You see how this is a contradiction. The policy to "increase diversity" and improve retention of Catholics isn't discriminatory, when you described it, but it is discriminatory now when it suits you since it "reduces the representation of <non-catholic> applicants".
The "The policy to 'increase diversity' and improve retention of Catholics" in the example above is to stop rejecting 50% of Catholic applicants.
If a company anonymizes its hiring and the hiring rate of women subsequently increases, then that is increasing the representation of women through non-discriminatory means.
If a company institutes a policy where managers' performance reviews are penalized unless they hire a certain percentage of women, then that is increasing representation through discriminatory means. The performance reviewed were changed to use the protected class of hires as a factor.
I'm not sure why you think this is a contradiction. If a policy uses the protected class of applicants or hires as a factor, it's discriminatory. Things like anonymizing interviews are not discriminatory. Do you really not understand why anonymizing hiring is non-discriminatory, but setting thresholds on the hiring outcomes and penalizing employees if those thresholds are not met is discrimination?
> You continue to not understand what a quota is, and how the law considers them different than other policies. If you maintain the same hiring bar, it isn't a quota. A quota functionally requires using a lower quality bar for such applicants, and using class, not qualification, as the deciding factor.
A quota does not require setting a different hiring bar. Imagine I have a diversity goal of 40% women hires in software development. Only 20% of software developers are women, so in order to meet this quota, I flip a coin whenever a male developer applies and reject 50% of male applicants. The rest of the interview process proceeds as normal. This doesn't lower the bar for women. They still need to pass the same set of skills based interviews as men. But it's absolutely discrimination on the basis of gender to reject 50% of male applicants to pursue a diversity goal.
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
Why does one require lowering the bar, but the other does not, when the policies are functionally identical? Your performance review score is reduced if you hire less than X% women in both cases. Is your line of argument really that the mere substitution of one word determines how employees will respond to the threat of lower performance reviews if a threshold isn't met? That's ridiculous, both policies exert the exact same amount of pressure to meet the X% threshold. If penalizing people for failing to meet an X% quota will lead them to lower hiring standards or engage in discrimination, then there's no reason to think that the exact...
> That was done as part of a settlement for a discrimination lawsuit. The exceptions to the prohibition on using race and gender as a factor in hiring are narrow. Bona fide occupational qualifications are one. You can specifically hire a Back actor to portray, say, Frederick Douglass in a movie. Consent decrees as part of a discrimination lawsuit are another.
So your contention is that the government regularly requires companies to undertake otherwise illegal activities, and that it would be illegal for the company to voluntarily follow a similar set of policies? Can you point to a statutory basis for this claim? I don't think I've ever seen the concept that a consent decree can require otherwise illegal actions.
> Why does one require lowering the bar, but the other does not, when the policies are functionally identical?
My contention is that it does not require illegal activities to meet reasonably set hiring goals.
> If a company institutes a policy where managers' performance reviews are penalized unless they hire a certain percentage of women, then that is increasing representation through discriminatory means. The performance reviewed were changed to use the protected class of hires as a factor.
In your Catholic example, is saying "we have a goal to stop flipping the coin" illegal? It is otherwise identical to a goal of increasing representation of a certain group by a certain percentage by changing some aspects of the hiring process that unfairly impacts a particular class.
Why is that policy acceptable, but real world policies are, seemingly in every case, supposedly illegal?
> This is explicitly documented in Meta's hiring policies, both the mechanisms by which offers for non-diverse candidates are delayed and the goals of reducing non-diverse representation.
Why haven't you sued them, if this was documented to the degree you describe, it was on its face illegal. And meta was actively admitting to illegal discrimination. I've been awarded money in a similar suit, so it's certainly possible for white men to win in discrimination cases.
> So your contention is that the government regularly requires companies to undertake otherwise illegal activities, and that it would be illegal for the company to voluntarily follow a similar set of policies?
Not regularly, only when companies are successfully sued for discriminating.
> Can you point to a statutory basis for this claim?
United Steelworkers vs. Weber established that use of protected class as a factor in employment is allowed only in narrow circumstances. In that instance, a company only hired steelworkers from a whites-only union, and were compelled by the government to give preferences to nonwhite employees for some period of time afterward.
In normal circumstances, a company cannot give racial preferences.
> My contention is that it does not require illegal activities to meet reasonably set hiring goals.
You still haven't answered the question:
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
Why does one require illegal activities to meet, but not the latter? This remains unanswered.
> In your Catholic example, is saying "we have a goal to stop flipping the coin" illegal?
It's not.
> It is otherwise identical to a goal of increasing representation of a certain group by a certain percentage by changing some aspects of the hiring process that unfairly impacts a particular class.
Because it's using protected class as a factor in hiring.
Say an orchestra adopts anonymous auditions, and the representation of women rises from 33% to 50%. That's a non-discriminatory hiring policy.
Another orchestra issues a "goal" or "representation target" or "diversity milestone" or some other euphemism that allocates 50% of the orchestra seats to women. That's a discriminatory hiring policy.
This is fourth time I've explained this, it seems like you're being willfully ignorant here.
> Why is that policy acceptable, but real world policies are, seemingly in every case, supposedly illegal?
They're not illegal in every case. Anonymizing interviews is legal, for example. The problem is that the legal ways of reducing discrimination don't lead to equitable results. Thus pushes towards equity require illegal discrimination, like setting thresholds and penalizing employees when those thresholds aren't met.
> Why haven't you sued them, if this was documented to the degree you describe, it was on its face illegal.
Because I'm not a victim of its policies. I'm Cuban so I'm one of the "diverse" candidates that fulfills the DSA. I have no basis to sue.
As phrased, I don't think the first would be illegal. It probably doesn't actually meet the definition of a quota, although use of the word "quota" is likely to receive stricter scrutiny.
If it can be met without illegal practices, it's perfectly fine, and if you don't actually institute a quota, even if you call it a quota, it's fine.
If the goal can be met by expanding the talent pool or by reducing discrimination, it doesn't matter what you call it.
> Say an orchestra adopts anonymous auditions, and the representation of women rises from 33% to 50%. That's a non-discriminatory hiring policy.
> Another orchestra issues a "goal" or "representation target" or "diversity milestone" or some other euphemism that allocates 50% of the orchestra seats to women. That's a discriminatory hiring policy.
Now what if they are the same orchestra, that is, they set a goal of hiring 50% women, and meet it by blinding auditions? Again, my contention is that it is not necessary to undertake illegal activities to achieve a diverse hiring goal.
You seem to agree with this in theory, but when given any concrete policy proposal, even ones that are widely accepted and have been adopted by wide swaths of the US for the better part of a century, you claim that they are illegal. You're simply incorrect.
> Not regularly, only when companies are successfully sued for discriminating.
This is approximately a weekly occurrence (they settle about 2 cases per week), I'd say that's fairly regular.
Further, such goals were required by all federal contractors from 1965 to Jan 20 of this year (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246), its kind of silly to continue to claim that diversity goals are illegal when they've been required by every federal contractor for longer than any of the companies you've mentioned have existed.
> As phrased, I don't think the first would be illegal
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women" You think this is legal?
> Now what if they are the same orchestra, that is, they set a goal of hiring 50% women, and meet it by blinding auditions?
And what happens if they blind the auditions, but the share of women still falls short of 50%? Well, then they have to adjust the results of the blind auditions to match the quota.
You've repeatedly done this sneaky rhetorical slight of hand, where you endorse explicitly discriminatory policies and justify it with the claim that it could be achieved through non-discriminatory means. But that doesn't change the fact that the policy is discriminatory, and almost certainly would result in discrimination.
If I tell my employers that I don't want to hire any pregnant women - say, we institute a "diversity goal" of 100% non-pregnant employees - they could achieve this goal without actually discriminating against any pregnant women. That doesn't change the fact that such a goal is discriminatory.
> Again, my contention is that it is not necessary to undertake illegal activities to achieve a diverse hiring goal.
I've witnessed firsthand companies setting diversity "goals" of 40% women electrical engineers. 10% of electrical engineers are women. There's no way this can be feasibly achieved without resorting to gender discrimination.
> You seem to agree with this in theory, but when given any concrete policy proposal, even ones that are widely accepted and have been adopted by wide swaths of the US for the better part of a century, you claim that they are illegal. You're simply incorrect.
I've listed numerous hiring policies that I explain are not illegal:
* Anonymous resume review
* Adopting objective evaluation criteria
* Create and send resumes to your recruiters, identical save for identifying information like names, and follow up on any discrepancies on call-backs.
> This is approximately a weekly occurrence (they settle about 2 cases per week), I'd say that's fairly regular.
~100 cases a year nation wide makes it an extremely rare occurrence.
> Well, then they have to adjust the results of the blind auditions to match the quota.
No they don't, they can (and in cases I've seen!) fail to reach the goals! Or they can adopt other legal policies such as additional ones I've suggested, or they can change the goal. But in any case the mere presence of a goal is not evidence of illegal activity, even here you yourself show that the actual illegal activity wouldn't be having the goal, but doing some illegal activity to meet the goal if the legal methods weren't enough.
Which is to say, we agree: a diversity goal itself is not illegal. You should instead say that you believe that the diversity goals you are criticizing are too high to be met by legal means. That's potentially an interesting conversation, but its much less punchy than what you're saying now, which is functionally that "the mere act of committing to diversity in a quantifiable way is criminal".
> Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women" You think this is legal?
As long as the methods of increasing representation are legal, yes. You yourself have said as much. Consider a sufficiently low X, such as 1%. I don't think it would be illegal for a company to punish managers who hire > 50 employees per year for failing to hire even a single woman over the course of a year. I think that would be strong evidence of discrimination on the part of those managers, and the companies would be right to discipline or fire employees who engaged in such discrimination.
> You've repeatedly done this sneaky rhetorical slight of hand, where you endorse explicitly discriminatory policies and justify it with the claim that it could be achieved through non-discriminatory means.
No, I've been consistent that it is not illegal to have a hiring goal. Such a goal can be met in legal or illegal ways. You appear to consistently claim that even stating a goal and holding people accountable to it is illegal. I disagree. It depends entirely on what methods are chosen. The pursuit of diversity is not inherently illegal.
> I've listed numerous hiring policies that I explain are not illegal
And you've additionally claimed that a number of perfectly legal policies which are unlawfully discriminatory. Pipeline expansion policies with the aim of creating diverse candidate pool are perfectly legal, especially when they aim to account for flaws in existing talent pipelines that may be biased by missing underrepresented candidates.
Your objection to to these programs is that you claim meta announced that the goal of one of their programs was to delay giving interviews and offers to certain candidates with the intent of having those candidates drop out, so they could instead extend more offers to diverse candidates, and that you saw numerical documentation of these delays and their impact. And all I'm going to say so that's the most bullshit thing I've ever heard, because of it were in fact that well documented, it would be a slam dunk case and have been front page news.
The fact that no one else I've ever spoken to about such pipeline expansion and slate diversity programs has ever mentioned such a concern suggests that this "fact" you have is not as well documented or as clearly intentioned as you make it seem.
I'm going to disengage after this post, because we aren't getting anywhere, you're accusing me of various bits of rhetorical sleight of hand that I'm not doing, and you appear to be inventing more and more elaborate lies to prop up your objection to these programs. That's your right, but it's not something I want to entertain further.
> ~100 cases a year nation wide makes it an extremely rare occurrence.
But I'll note you ignored the part where I mentioned every federal contractor has done things you claim are unlawful for 60 years.
Unfortunately, the incorrect implementations are much more common in my experience. Out of the 4 companies I've worked at 3 carried out explicit discrimination under the banner of DEI.
> For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation
It didn't matter if he was wrong or right, his mistake was entertaining the notion that people would entertain an earnest (if misguided) discussion when in fact that whole topic was taboo.
Questioning the status quo is very different from drawing conclusions the way he did. It should never be taboo to question whether DEI practices are fulfilling their goals or harming other metrics.
The topic is not "taboo". In an organization where compensation is based on non-anonymous peer review, you cannot have a person going around with their thesis that women are objectively inferior engineers. That person has to be fired (directly into the sun, when practical).
> you cannot have a person going around with their thesis that women are objectively inferior engineers
Did you read his memo[1]? That's not really what he's saying. He's ham-handedly trying to look for reasons that explain the gender gap in engineering. His thesis is that fewer women want to do that kind of work than men, not that those who do take the job are worse at it.
> That person has to be fired (directly into the sun, when practical).
His "memo" is a self-serving retcon of real events, which conveniently (for him) elides most of the insane things he said internally on mailing lists, Google+ posts, and in person.
Damore was very clear that he did not believe women are objectively inferior engineers. What should we take away from the fact that so many repeat something he did not say and did not mean, and what should we do with people who misrepresent someone's easily accessible views? In fact, he thought it was so important that people understood that he was not saying this that near the beginning of his memo, he posted an image of two overlapping normal distributions that makes his point (wrong or right) very clear.
I think the fact that people have to resort to misunderstanding and misleading about what people like him say is very telling about the "religious" status of these beliefs. You see the same type of apologetics when Christians try to attack atheism.
NB: This post is not an endorsement of anything Damore said.
> their thesis that women are objectively inferior engineers
This is not even remotely what the memo said. The thesis of the memo is that not every gender disparity is due to bias or discrimination, and that directives to achieve equitable outcomes run a real risk of causing discrimination.
If someone said that men make up 90% of murder convictions not because the courts and police are biased against men, but because men commit 90% of murders, is that sexist against men?
He posited that women might be less inclined towards programming due to inherent traits, such as being more people-oriented, suggesting that biological and psychological differences between men and women might explain the underrepresentation of women in tech.
So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.
Arguing about the meaning of what Damore wrote, and what he thought/intended, is a huge waste of time. Just about everybody who read it comes to a different interpretation of what he meant to imply. Then folks argue endlessly (on forums like this, memegen, elsewhere) about their different interpretations.
A better writer with more experience could have written a doc that was basically "some aspects of the training in our DEI classes is not scientifically supported, but is being used as a cudgel to change people's behavior" with a few examples.
I've read the document (before it was widely published- it was posted internally at the time) several times and I don't think I said anything at all that wasn't technically correct.
>Arguing about the meaning of what Damore wrote, and what he thought/intended, is a huge waste of time. Just about everybody who read it comes to a different interpretation of what he meant to imply.
Studying the literal fundamental nature of reality doesn't seem like a waste of time to me.
Damore said that women tend to choose to work with people rather than things. He said that, therefore, a way to increase women in the workforce is to enhance the peopleness of it, by incorporating more pair programming and collaboration.
He did not say that women were a poor fit for software engineering, nor that they were hired over more fitting men. Those words are from a bogeyman of your own imagination.
> So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.
Closer, but still wrong. His point is that women are less likely to enter the field of software or engineering. Not that the subset of women who do enter those fields are less capable than men.
Imagine someone demands that we address the inequitable murder convictions with outcome based goals on the gender distribution of murder convictions. If I say that I believe that the disparity in murder convictions stems from the fact that men commit more murder, not bias in police or courts, does that make me a misandrist?
If women make up ~18% of software developers, why would we expect a non discriminatory hiring process to hire more than 18% women in software development roles?
I have written what you would likely call "DEI" statements for grants and job applications, and I have reviewed them as well.
The absolutely worst statements are the people who believe that the statement is an ideological litmus test. It never was, and it isn't.
These statements, to a one, are basic HR stuff: discuss your strategies and experiences to not be an asshole and ensure that the diverse people you manage (and they almost certainly are diverse) will be able to get along and work effectively under your management. Boring stuff.
People think its some sort of ideological purity test, write it as such, and get surprised when the statement is evaluated poorly.
The requests are worded in a way that makes people think they're ideological because (as far as I can tell) the people who added it to the requirements were heavily influenced by their ideological commitments. The statements are then reviewed by volunteers taken from the broader community, who aren't going to rate "contributions to diversity" too highly if they're described with an extreme degree of force.
If the people writing the calls wanted the same things as the people reviewing the submissions, they would say, "tell us about your experiences with normal HR tasks."
In almost every case I've seen, the statements are in fact worded in terms of specific contributions. The most general terminology I've seen is requesting the candidate to explain their role "advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion"—to which the best statements respond with (1) their experiences with diverse classrooms/staff, and (2) their specific strategies for approaching these issues.
I have not really encountered instructions that I would misconstrue to be an ideological litmus test, and the majority of submissions that I have reviewed do not in fact talk about the candidate's ideological priors.
Calling it diversity is a huge ideological presupposition. Two white guys can create a hostile work environment for a third, there's nothing diversity specific about it. This is reflected in the way everyone thinks about it - you're not checking to see whether the experiences they're describing crossed the right identity boundaries, you're judging it according to the wrongs dealt and the submitter's sense of balance.
Institutions tend to define diversity broadly, including diversity in terms of race, nationality, gender, socioeconomic status, and so on. I don't talk much about race or gender in my own statements, instead focusing on first-generation students and socio-economic status. This seems not to have hurt me.
I get that the way people think about these statements is different than the way they actually are; I just think people are wrong and that their impression is informed by social media. If it helps, I would be happy to rebrand "DEI Statement" to "Don't be an asshole and also try to keep the peace with everyone Statement".
I think we agree although there's a slight miscommunication, you're not actually including socioeconomic status in your rephrased statement. Like we would both say, if there were three identical twins and two of them were picking on the other, that would merit the exact same intervention as if they weren't identical twins.
So you defend it on the grounds, specifically, correct me if I am misinterpreting, that it is nothong beyond a rebranding of typical HR legal speak? You either think it is important and meaningful or you don't-- ie it is a litmus test. I think it is useful as such frankly, but could be minimized. I am totally happy to pledge allegiance to non-racism or something like that. Some arcane limus test where only people like you can evaluate the true merit of a DEI statement is likely to be unfair, widely abused and ironically probably reinforces institutional racism more than it ameliotates it. Not calling you a hard racist, just saying you are contributing to it and sustaining it rather than reducing it.
I defend it on the grounds that it is basic human management. The scientific workforce is diverse, and this diversity introduces potential conflicts. Money spent on researchers who cannot effectively keep the peace among their students and staff—whether through negligence, naiveté, or outright malice—is likely to go to waste. It is not entirely a re-tooling of HR legal speak, but rather an extension given what we know about how to manage a diverse workforce.
The rubric I use to judge diversity statements, and which is often formalized in rubrics, is: "has the applicant thought about this at all to the point that they have specific experiences and strategies that lead us to trust that they could effectively manage a diverse population of students and staff".
There is nothing arcane about this. To the extent that diversity statements even factor in review, this is the same criteria that everyone I know follows.
In my own applications, I, as a white guy, have been very successful in getting jobs and funding. This is despite never making ideological commitments and barely talking about gender or race, and instead focusing on first-generation students. Just showing that I have put in a minimal amount of thought into working with diverse students and colleagues seems to be enough.
Having been on a few hiring committees, both in academia, industry, and state: no, it is not arcane; scoring people fairly and literally against interview questions, that form a fraction of the whole candidate ranking process, are literally exactly what “DEI initiatives” in HR were meant to do.
I have had mandatory trainings about this ad nauseam before I have been allowed to sit on hiring committees. One of the biases “DEI initiatives” warn against is being impressed by people who spew jargon without having done the work, and supporting people who have done the work (and give examples) without spewing jargon.
If the interpretation is “arcane”, that’s an institutional problem that goes far beyond interpreting an interview question that forms a fraction of the interview process. But claiming that’s inherent to organizations that mention diversity in an interview question is setting up a strawman, and HR will have it ground into your head that it is “inequitable”.
> scoring people fairly and literally against interview questions, that form a fraction of the whole candidate ranking process, are literally exactly what “DEI initiatives” in HR were meant to do.
I don't doubt your lived experience, but in 3 out of 4 companies DEI initiatives took the form of explicitly discriminating on the basis of candidates' protected class. Practices like giving "diverse" candidates multiple chances go pass interviews where white and Asian men got one. Another straight up created a reservation system for diverse candidates.
I acknowledge that some people have had better experience DEI, but I'd encourage you to consider the possibility that many have witnessed explicit discrimination under the banner of DEI.
Can you say more about where the "3 out of 4" comes from? I'll admit that I've worked on hiring committees in exactly four places, so it's been a straight 0 out of 4 for me. (One at a small liberal arts college; one at a tech consultancy; one at a state agency; another one at at govtech consultancy.)
We can haggle over how many is enough to make a sweeping generalization, if you'd like. But I don't think that's productive for any of us if we want to debate whether loyalty tests actually existed, or whether "DEI" reduces to religion, as the parents have claimed.
One company outright designated a segment of engineering headcount as exclusive to women and URM candidates. Managers were prohibited from fulfilling this headcount with Asian and white men. This was done despite having an overrepresentation of women in engineering roles relative to their representation in the field. Another allowed diverse candidates multiple attempts to pass technical interviews where white and Asian men got one chance. A third company set a quota of 40% women in engineering hires in OKRs (contrast this with ~20% of software developers and ~10% of electrical engineers that are women, those two fields made up almost all engineering roles at the company).
It's an objective fact that DEI is neither an ideology nor a religion. And in the mouths of those on the right, "DEI" means anyone who isn't a cishet white male.
I suspect that projects are always vetted against ideology, because everyone has one and everyone believes that his own is correct. I doubt that one could get NSF funding for a study of racial differences in IQ. I am certain that one could not get it for any ‘research’ based on the idea that the Earth is 7,000 years old. That seems like a really good thing!
I think the news is less that a branch of the executive is complying with executive branch policy, and more that it’s surprising how much of the federal government’s actions are based not in the law and the Constitution, but rather in policy. One man almost sixty years ago creates a policy with a stroke of a pen, and it effectively becomes law; another now removes it with a stroke of a different pen. If the latter is a problem, surely the former was too; if the former was not a problem, then why is the latter?
Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
> Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
This is like saying I read the first sentence of the wikipedia article and it doesn't mention something so it must not exist.
Congress authorized it in 1950; it's extremely visible. [1]
> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is authorized and governed by the "National Science Foundation Act of 1950," as amended, as well as other statutes authorizing NSF activities and making appropriations to the agency.
Yes, 42 U.S.C. 1861, et seq is the legal basis for the NSF. What’s the Constitutional basis for that law? The Congress only has the powers granted in Article I and further amendments. For example, the Congress does not have the power to regulate rents outside of federal territories. Which enumerated power enables 42 U.S.C 1861?
The Tenth Amendment clearly states, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ If the Constitution does not grant a power to the Congress, it does not have it and it has no more legislative authority in that regard than you or I do.
Yes, and then Article I, Section 8 goes on to explain what counts as the ‘common Defence and general Welfare’ when it enumerates the Congress’s powers.
That’s not Sovereign Citizen nonsense — it’s very basic constitutional law. Congress doesn’t have the ability to pass national rent control, for example.
The Supreme Court has decided what ‘the general welfare’ means, and it is not limited to the listed powers. This information is not difficult to find, as would be expected given the last 90ish years of spending that is obviously not limited to the list of powers.
Congress not only _could_ control rents nationally, congress _has_ controlled rents nationally [1] and those controls survived the review of the court.
It's a reading of constitutional law that insists that the only thing that matters is what they can shallowly read in their pocket constitution, while totally ignoring most of the constitution itself and any of the surrounding court precedent. :)
Eadmund incorrectly notes "The Congress only has the powers granted in Article I and further amendments", and cites the tenth amendment while asking "What’s the Constitutional basis for that law?"
Duh, the appointments clause in conjunction with the necessary and proper clause. :3
> Article I bestows on Congress certain specified, or enumerated, powers. The Court has recognized that these powers are supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause, which provides Congress with "broad power to enact laws that are ‘convenient, or useful’ or ‘conducive’ to [the] beneficial exercise" of its more specific authorities. The Supreme Court has observed that the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to establish federal offices. Congress accordingly enjoys broad authority to create government offices to carry out various statutory functions and directives. The legislature may establish government offices not expressly mentioned in the Constitution in order to carry out its enumerated powers.
Uh, Congress absolutely does how the power to charge money outside of federal territories [1] and it's a long standing complaint of ex-pats that they have to pay federal taxes.
Section 7 [2] lets them write laws as well as Section 8 [4] . Section 8 aslo lets them pay for it [3].
> Congress absolutely does how the power to charge money outside of federal territories
Of course it does. It has no power to regulate rents outside of federal territories, which is what I wrote. It cannot pass national rent control, for example.
> Section 7 lets them write laws as well as Section 8
Section 7 describes how bills are passed; Section 8 describes what those bills may do. Congress has no Constitutional power to require that every home in the United States have yellow shutters. I feel like this should be uncontroversial! I’m genuinely surprised anyone thinks otherwise.
“While, therefore, the power to tax is not unlimited, its confines are set in the clause which confers it, and not in those of section 8 which bestow and define the legislative powers of the Congress. It results that the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution.“
Oh boy, wait until you read [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn], where the Supreme Court ruled that growing food for your own use, on your own land falls within the boundaries of the interstate commerce clause, and hence can be regulated by the Federal gov’t.
Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
The Constitution is a collection of statements and they collectively have implications. All of Euclidean geometry is based off of 5 statements. That the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say you can have a Department of the Air Force does not imply having one is unconstitutional.
Many Christians believe in the holy trinity despite that phrase appearing nowhere in the Bible.
So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era? And that wasn't a merit policy, that was an explicitly discriminatory policy against women long after the Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova into space.
(at time of writing, she is still alive and the only woman ever to have had a solo spaceflight!)
> In the UK I had a grant application denied based only on DEI
Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
Now: in what way will you avoid addressing the point (if you do reply)....will it be in the heart of the distribution as usual, or can you generate an anomaly....
> So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era?
We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse. It's the same as wanting the best doctor, or the best pilot.
The UK team for Olympic 100m is majority non-white. I have no doubt that these are amongst the fastest people in the world. Based on DEI standards, should we pick people who are shown slower just to make a more colourful team?
> Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
You can call BS all you like, the application literally stated it so. The threshold for funding was met, but was rejected on the basis.
> We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse
Considering color or religion doesn't have any impact on the ability of someone to be a "best astronaut", if your groups isn't diverse, it's most likely there is a bias in action.
No, that isn't true at all. Employers can only hire from the pool that exists. If the applicant pool is 90% white dudes, then an unbiased hiring process will result in a very skewed employee demographic. Assuming bias based on differences in statistics is motivated reasoning and should not be entertained.
Nobody really knows. A mixture of their environment, parenting, and genetics probably. I don't know what extent of which and I don't think anyone does.
One would wonder what could be behind that... Also, poorer schools in poor neighborhoods because they receive less funding, lowering the value or real estate in the neighborhood, attracting poor people to it.
Oh wow, if nobody really knows that sounds like a big problem we should solve! Maybe we should fund research into that. And maybe fund programs to alleviate the environments that were created. I'm sure anyone who wants America to be a true meritocracy wouldn't be rooting out this big unsolved problem.
There are some positions that you don't want low IQ (low intelligence) people doing them.
If a group of 'X' people (based on any factor you like, be it race, gender, ideology, protected characteristics, etc) are statistically lower IQ, you would expect this to be reflected in selection over a large enough sample.
Equally, I would expect that when you're fighting for people who are in high demand, that the wage reflects it. Merit is a "positive discrimination" for people who do the job better.
> Considering color or religion doesn't have any impact on the ability of someone to be a "best astronaut", if your groups isn't diverse, it's most likely there is a bias in action.
You have 8 blue people and 2 purple people. The blue people and purple people have different colour, different ideology, but are the same in all ways that count.
The astronaut programme opens up and needs 5 people. From 10 people, choose 5. It turns out that there are 252 ways of doing this [1]. At most you could only have 2 purple people selected, when 1 purple person is selected it looks unbiased, but actually the vast majority of cases are when only blue people are represented.
Another way to think about it is this: 8 blue people, 2 purple people. You pick one at random, there is an 8/10 chance you pick blue, 2/10 purple. If you select a purple, for the next pick there is now just a 1/9 chance of picking purple, but an 8/9 chance of picking blue.
Funny you'd use "best actor" as an example. What makes the best actor? For a long time there were no leading Asian male actors for example, is that because Asians can't act or because of cultural bias?
Just because something is Science, does not make it above being ideological. There is tonnes of evidence for this collected [0]:
> The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed ... and put social grievances ahead of objective truth".
They proved their point. When only papers of a certain conclusion are accepted which further an ideological belief, Science is dead.
People may say that, although it isn't exactly hard to differentiate them. All scientific propositions/hypotheses/findings are "is" statements. Ideologies are made up of "ought" statements. There is no Venn diagram overlap
This is wrong, and based on a (largely deliberate) misunderstanding of what DEI is. DEI is not a push to have quotas. Rather it is based on the assumption that if you see one group being overrepresented then there is probably a bias in favor of that group.
If you look at CEOs you will see that white men are very overrepresented. I (as a white man) don't for a moment believe that that is because white men are better at being CEOs (achieve better outcomes). Rather I believe it is because the selection process has long been biased in favor of white men (both in the last steps, and the path to get there). And this is not just my biases at play, many studies have been done, and none show that white men generically achieve better outcomes.
So DEI is the idea that we need to make the selection process better account for people's biases (largely unconscious) that have been driving this outcome (white men preferentially being selected). It is not about quotas or giving people points for being a woman/black person/disabled/etc. It is all about making sure that those characteristics do not subtract points.
And I have used white men as an example here, as that has been where the largest biases have been (both white, and men), and also because I am currently a beneficiary of those biases, making it hard to argue that I am only arguing this to get an advantage for myself. But you could just as easily point to the current over-representation of women in colleges and universities and worry about an anti-man bias there.
Affirmative action literally requires quotas to implement.
In India they’re more explicitly called out as ‘reservations’, in the US they are based on statistical models of the population.
Once your company gets above a certain size, or if it does business with the gov’t it is required to comply or you’ll get the Department of Labor on your butt and get sued using the evidence that the composition of your employees doesn’t match the model - so you are defacto illegally discriminating. It hit Google pretty hard.
> This is wrong, and based on a (largely deliberate) misunderstanding of what DEI is. DEI is not a push to have quotas
You do not get to unilaterally decide what DEI is and is not.
At 3 out of the four companies I've worked at DEI came in the form of explicit discrimination on the basis of race and gender. Including quotas and prohibiting non-diverse candidates from segments of our headcount.
I won't doubt your lived experience with DEI, and I believe you if you say you've never encountered discriminatory DEI practices. But plenty of people have, and this attempt to deny that DEI is carried out through discriminatory practices at least part of the time is not productive.
> DEI is not a push to have quotas. Rather it is based on the assumption that if you see one group being overrepresented then there is probably a bias in favor of that group.
It literally is a push for quotas. Their ideology dictates that there is not enough X's, therefore bias. It's not necessarily true either, please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907690
Annec data is that the UK police force would be harassed by head office for not having a diverse enough team. A friend spent a while breaking down the local makeup of ethnicity and proving that the one black colleague they had was actually an over-representation for the local area. It was not easy to convince them either, as they had a literal quota for each area.
> I (as a white man) don't for a moment believe that that is because white men are better at being CEOs (achieve better outcomes). Rather I believe it is because the selection process has long been biased in favor of white men (both in the last steps, and the path to get there).
It's not particularly cut and dry. There is a class bias towards being promoted to CEO, and the pool of black people in upper class society is smaller [1].
> And this is not just my biases at play, many studies have been done, and none show that white men generically achieve better outcomes.
Would be interested to read if you have them.
> It is not about quotas or giving people points for being a woman/black person/disabled/etc. It is all about making sure that those characteristics do not subtract points.
It is no different from a quota. You believe that some end ratio must result i.e. B% black people, there are N positions, therefore there should be a minimum of N x B black people in those positions. Then everything is done to meet that quota, otherwise there is still bias based on this quota.
> But you could just as easily point to the current over-representation of women in colleges and universities and worry about an anti-man bias there.
But nobody does make that case. Women are under-represented in dirty jobs, dangerous jobs, gruelling jobs, but there are no advocates to put more women in those positions. DEI itself is only fighting over the cream. They want more diversity in STEM, but I see zero fighting to get diversity into the arts, languages, etc.
What's worse is that we literally have to lower standards to make it DEI possible. The military lower fitness requirements to help more women get in, colleges lower entrance exam thresholds to increase diversity, the list goes on. DEI has made us a society of lowering standards.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issue at all with women CEOs if they cut mustard. But if you lower your expectations too much, you get the likes of Elizabeth Holmes, where there was near zero scrutiny by anybody [2]. Or a black CEO such as Kanye West, who clearly has large mental instability (which backfired on Adidas) [3].
This type of political movement always claims to be against the exact things they’re for. They claim to be against censorship while using their actual influence to do things like forcing TikTok to change their moderation policy. They claim to want to protect children while putting child abusers in positions of power. It gives members of the movement an easy way to deflect criticism and express their feelings of grievance—don’t you know we hate censorship, and anyway it’s you who was censoring us! It’s only fair for you to feel a little of that pain that we feel!
It's not that hard to understand. Their view point is that there must be a class of citizens that the laws protect, but do not bind, and a class of citizens that the laws bind but do not protect.
Nobody says they are against ideology. Everyone is pro-their own ideology and anti-everyone else's.
Additionally, I don't think there was an anti-China "smokescreen" used here. Anti-DEI was a central pillar of the Trump campaign, so this purge seems to be fully in line with what was stated explicitly for months in 2024.
The abortive OPM memo attempting to suspend all payments by the government claimed it was necessary to root out all DEI and "transgender ideology". If you substitute "communism" it is straight up the language of the Red Scare.
They need arbitrary criteria on which to assess that money goes to the “right” group of people. Competitive awards already had a lot of arbitrary factors, this is yet another person to add to this, with a uniquely political perspective. Also if they don’t have to award the money it is likely they don’t.
I was not thinking about immigrating to the US, but this is making me reconsider. EU is circling the drain and the writing is on the wall. The project failed.
As context, the NSF requires grant writers to include a “broader impacts” section [1] in every grant proposal. This includes things like improving education, national security, economic competitiveness, and also inclusion - for example, ideas to attract more talent from underrepresented groups. So every NSF proposer works hard to satisfy the NSF on this requirement. I happen to think that these are worthwhile goals (we shouldn’t be wasting our limited talent due to historical crankiness) and simultaneously I believe the sections ends up being a bit performative. If the NSF were to change its criteria for grants going forward I might disagree with that approach but it would be consistent with what I’ve heard from these folks, ie they think “DEI” is getting in the way of science. However: the current approach is just destructive: if involves asking researchers to augment their proposals with these goals, and then retroactively refuses to pay already-awarded grant recipients who did what they were asked to.
I will leave the question of whether this is constitutional to other folks. I will even leave aside the question of whether we can afford to defund science in our current crazy geopolitical environment. The real point here is that this is just plain wrong.
I think broader impact section is good. Whether it should be weighted as high as it was is up to debate. I personally think it was becoming too important for the success of the proposal.
But obviously the new administration is not interested in any sort of nuanced debate, but rather ideological purge.
I agree that the goals are worthwhile, and also feel that requiring every proposal to include this is not efficient and/or very effective. They should take all the funds and time spent on this every year as part of every award, and just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.
I would be happy to spend time mentoring URM, etc. But it'd work a lot better if others managed such a program, thought about how to attract them, etc. Specialization is good.
That seems like a reasonable middle ground to me. But I didn't have any problem with DEI. If you have inner-city kids underrepresented by 50% then fund according to %population * %underrepresnted -- if 25% population then 12.5% of funding for programs to increase participation (don't think it would be that high). Maybe divide that by N if you have N different groups you would like to be more represented (eg rural kids). Performance is just that. Funding would be more effective. I expect anti-DEI folks would like the funding effort even less than the performance effort. It's obvious they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).
> they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).
they admit it. President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably
heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.
> Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: "Because I have common sense."
I listen because he controls the most powerful army in history and can crush my country's economy if we don't allow his gang of oligarchs to mess with our democracy.
When the US sneezes, the whole world catches a cold.
Sure, you listen in the same way that you listen to the demands of an armed gunman in a store.
But you can't engage with trying to find any sense in it. His administration does not live in the same reality that anyone else does. Repeating the lies only gives them undeserved legitimacy.
I rather thought my original post was dripping with sarcasm, but I understand that it doesn't translate as well in text. I quote the orangeführer and his sidekick to bury them (in ridicule), not to praise them.
The way Trump works is that he's careless with details, entirely on purpose. Because it causes opponents to dispute the details he gets wrong, which in turn allows him to frame the debate. Compare this to someone who says something indisputably true, which no one can counter, and so then opponents ignore it and talk about something else instead.
It also allows him to exaggerate, because if you say "we got the best numbers ever achieved in history" but it's actually "just" the best numbers in a century, opponents who point out that was actually done by Teddy Roosevelt 120 years ago and not since are only underlining that it hasn't been done in a long time, while making themselves look like pedants.
But that doesn't mean that "Trump said it, therefore it's wrong" gets you out of the debate. For example:
> President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.
A plausible explanation for this is that because they were already all white men, new hires weren't allowed to be, so viable candidates were turned away, leading to under-staffing.
Is that what actually happened? Someone would have to investigate it, but until they do, you can't be sure that Trump is even wrong, or that he's necessarily wrong on the logic of it as might apply to other cases in general regardless of what turns out to be the case here in particular. And in the meantime he's got people talking about the possible dangers of doing the thing he doesn't like.
He could be right, but so could a stopped clock. You don't look at one to check the time, and you don't listen to a word said by someone whose favorite dish is the Gish Gallop.
If anything they are saying is right, someone who hasn't completely blown their credibility will eventually think of it. Or, they won't, and that's fine too, you're still better off on the net not trying to sift for candy in a large pile of shit.
Likewise, sometimes wearing a seatbelt does more harm than good, but you can't actually predict before-the-fact when that's going to happen, and you shouldn't use that as a reason to not wear one. Attention is limited, and you can't waste it on serial frauds.
The only thing he says that's often honest is what he intends to do. His words can teach you about him, but they won't teach you anything about the world.
> He could be right, but so could a stopped clock.
A stopped clock is right for two seconds a day out of 86400, i.e. 0.002% of the time. The problem with Trump is it's more like 30-50% of the time.
And then there are three things you can do when he says something.
You can ignore it, but that's not a great option when he's the President of the United States.
You can dispute the narrow ways he gets the details wrong, but that's just pedantry and you'll spend all day doing it to no avail because he can say stuff like that faster than you can fact check the details.
Or you can engage with the general shape of the argument he's trying to make and see if this is one of the times that there's actually something there. Which doesn't happen all the time, or even necessarily most of the time, but it's still often enough that universally assuming the opposite of anything he says isn't a valid heuristic.
As stopped clock is mostly right - within less than an hour of the truth - ~17% of the time.
If you're requiring five nines-level precision, he is right precisely zero percent of the time.
> but it's still often enough that universally assuming the opposite of anything he says isn't a valid heuristic.
He doesn't have the magic power where the truth is always the opposite of what he says. It's just that what he says is white noise. Its Shannon entropy is near-zero.
The response to that isn't to assume the opposite is correct. It's to just assume it's hallucinatory bullshit that's not worth listening to, or repeating, except to inform yourself on what he is going to do. His speech teaches us a lot about him, and nothing about anyone else.
Stopped clocks have more problems than precision. Their Shannon entropy is literally zero, because when you already know what time they say it is, the result will never change.
Whereas if Trump is talking about DEI stuff, regardless of the details, you can deduce that he's soliciting support for a policy change there, which means it's time to have the debate about that policy and see if we should support it or not.
You can't distinguish the things he says he's going to do from the things he says are happening, because the reason he says the latter is in support of the former.
> Whereas if Trump is talking about DEI stuff, regardless of the details, you can deduce that ...
... it's consistent with his lifelong racism, as well as the racism that permeates Project 2025. On day one he rescinded LBJ's executive order from 1964 barring federal contractors from discriminating.
Accusations of racism have been bandied about with such reckless abandon that they've lost all meaning without specifics and hard evidence of context.
Employers are prohibited from discriminating by statute which can't be amended by executive order. The executive order in question was regarding the use of affirmative action.
If a little Sieg Heil at the inauguration didn't convince you that this administration is pretty down with racism, I don't believe there's any evidence on Earth that will.
Specific, hard evidence, all in context, the man who gave it got an ovation and an office built in the White House, and a free hand in the agencies that are supposed to be regulating him.
You're referring to the thing the Anti-Defamation League called "not a Nazi salute" and the prime minister of Israel said he "is being falsely smeared". It's exactly what I mean by reckless abandon. It's a desperation to find something regardless of whether it's actually there.
It seems like we've gotten to the point that actual racists are so uncommon that people have forgotten what they look like:
> "We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator" -Jefferson Davis (referring to black people)
> "Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results." -FDR
> "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race." -Strom Thurmond
These quotes are not ambiguous or taken out of context. If you had asked these people if they were being misconstrued, they would have reiterated their positions, because they were actually racists who thought that other races were inferior and openly favored slavery or internment or segregation.
And it's sad that we're losing the ability to distinguish these things because of all the crying wolf.
I'm referring to the thing that anyone with eyes can see is a Nazi salute.
There's a beautiful side by side video clip of Elon actually throwing his heart out to the audience, and you'd have to be blind to think it's the same thing.
Who should I believe? My lying eyes? Or what the prime minister of a country that's courting US support in an internationally unpopular war says to curry favor?
The man's grandparents were registered Nazis, the man's rubbing elbows with the AFD, he's throwing out the 'roman salute' to thunderous applause at a political rally, and you're twisting yourself into a pretzel to explain how no, no, this is all a smear job against an innocent man.
How can you not see it? It's hard to tell if you're cynically taking the piss out of me, or if you can actually look at clip, and see something else.
There is a reason that doesn't make any sense: He did it in public, but then denies that's what it was.
If he was trying to be open about it then there would be no reason to deny it. If he wasn't trying to be open about it there would be no reason to purposely do it to begin with.
> There is a reason that doesn't make any sense: He did it in public, but then denies that's what it was.
Doing it then pretending that he doesn't do it carries two messages. For actual fascists, it's an indication that he's will support them, and that they should support him.
For people apologizing for fascists, the denial provides them the chance to spill gallons on ink on speculating about his state of mind and other plausible deniability for their insistence that he's not really courting fascists.
When someone does one thing, but says another, believe what they do, not what they say. Doubly so in politics.
There's no ambiguity in this symbol, or what it represents. Believe your eyes.
> For actual fascists, it's an indication that he's will support them, and that they should support him.
What actual fascists? That is not a large population segment in modern day. And support for what? He's not running for anything.
> the denial provides them the chance to spill gallons on ink on speculating about his state of mind
The theory is then that he made that hand gesture on purpose, intending to deny it.
Opponents would (as you do) disbelieve any denial and then try to use it against him, which is a significant cost. In exchange for this he would be trying to shore up support among the a) far smaller group of actual fascists who b) were previously on the fence and c) would not remain on the fence even though denying the gesture would be sending mixed signals.
There is no gain from doing that. It's why opponents are the ones talking about it. If doing that was actually to his benefit then opponents would want to be silent about it because publicizing it would be helping him to court the hypothetical large group of fascists who would look favorably on it.
> When someone does one thing, but says another, believe what they do, not what they say.
That's kind of the point. Hand gestures are in the category of saying something rather than doing something.
> There's no ambiguity in this symbol, or what it represents.
The obvious problem here is that the Nazis used "raising your hand" as a symbol.
The most plausible argument that he did it on purpose would be as a troll. Which isn't completely out of character for him, but it still has all of the same negative consequences above with the unambiguous implication of "not worth it".
What I have yet to see whatsoever is any evidence that he supports genocide, internment camps, incarceration without due process or the like. These are the things that make the bad guys the bad guys, not some kind of 5-D chess dog whistle rubbish.
has he actually denied it? or did he deflect with more Nazi "jokes"?
his neo Nazi supporters have enthusiastically welcomed the success of getting a fellow Nazi in the white house and he has continued to work with Nazi organisations across Europe.
> his neo Nazi supporters have enthusiastically welcomed the success of getting a fellow Nazi in the white house and he has continued to work with Nazi organisations across Europe.
Asking questions to neo Nazis is like asking questions to asylum inmates. Their brains are known to be broken so anything they say is presumed nonsense, and they're also very easy to manipulate into saying whatever you want to put into a story.
These right wing talking points have been repeatedly refuted. ADL contradicted their own definition of the salute. Both they and Bibi have vested political interests and citing them is grossly dishonest cherry picking.
> because they were already all white men, new hires weren't allowed to be, so viable candidates were turned away, leading to under-staffing
Is there any evidence that this has ever happened in the history of the US? Not in this particular case as we wait for the details to emerge, but for any documented case?
> Is there any evidence that this has ever happened in the history of the US?
How would you even have a DEI program that didn't work this way?
You're currently understaffed and make efforts to hire someone to fill the position. The first qualified applicant you find doesn't meet the DEI goals. Your options are now a) hire them, stop being understaffed, but don't meet the DEI goals, or b) don't hire them and hold out for a candidate that can meet the DEI goals, but in the meantime you remain understaffed.
You don't always have the luxury of choosing between two concurrent applicants and this is a pretty unambiguous trade off whenever that doesn't happen.
In every place I worked in, qualifications are a show-stopper hard goal, DEI is a soft goal.
When someone doesn't have the qualifications you don't hire them on a micro level. When you don't meet the soft goal you look at your approach on a macro level. Is your pipeline bad? Are you missing qualified candidates? Are you biased?
You can work to improve all those things without any compromise on quality. And sometimes the soft goal is not reachable, or it's not reachable industry-wide, due to the pigeonhole principle. But that's doesn't feed into anecdotes and fairy tales about the boogieman.
What's actively repulsive and illogical is what he's doing - one or a group of people made a mistake, nobody yet knows what the mistake is, what contributed to it, and how it should be prevented in the future, but he spins a fairy tale that rests on assuming that they are unqualified. The only verifiably unqualified person in this story at the moment is him. Don't give that nonsense the time of day.
And look, here I am, not taking my own advice and engaging with that crap.
> In every place I worked in, qualifications are a show-stopper hard goal, DEI is a soft goal.
In this case the issue isn't qualifications, it's mean time to fill the position when you're understaffed.
Suppose you could find a qualified non-DEI candidate in one month and a qualified DEI candidate in six months. If you take the time to find the DEI candidate, the position is left unfilled for five months longer than it would have been. That's pretty bad if the result is a higher probability of a plane crash in the meantime, or any other important thing.
You don't seem to understand how these programs actually work in practice (One might even snark and say that you aren't sufficiently qualified.) DEI is measured as a statistical, after-the-fact, population-level macro mandate.
Any particular hiring decision is made on qualifications. It's illegal to not hire someone because their protected characteristics, and if you see someone doing it, you should whistleblow.
It's not illegal to look at your hiring efforts and decide to cast your hiring net in a different demographical area. But at the end of the day, you hire the candidate that meets the bar.
If you can't fill headcount, either your bar is too high, your firm sucks to work for, you aren't paying enough, or you need to work harder on hiring.
I have been involved in a lot of hiring over the years. I've never, ever been pressured, or even implied at that I should base any of my micro decisions (whether in rating or hiring) on someone's protected characteristics. I've likewise never seen them being used as justifications for my peers' decision-making. Oh, and everyone always bitches that hiring is too slow and it's too hard to find people. That's a universal constant, just like the universal constant of 'there's always more work to do than there is time to do it in'.
I have, however seen demographic-level statistics to be used as justification for "Maybe we should have a career booth at a work fair in the University of St. Louis. Does anyone want to go do that?"
> DEI is measured as a statistical, after-the-fact, population-level macro mandate.
For this to mean anything it has to be not just a metric but a target, and as soon as it's a target, you're not just measuring something after-the-fact.
> It's not illegal to look at your hiring efforts and decide to cast your hiring net in a different demographical area.
"Not illegal" isn't the issue when the debate is about what the law should be.
Suppose that you want to hit your numbers and that you further know that you can find more qualified candidates in a specific area which is predominantly white. If you advertise in the predominantly white area, you find a candidate in a month. If you advertise in that area and other areas, you find a candidate in a month, but it's the same candidate. Neither of these allow you to meet your numbers. Whereas if you advertise only in predominantly black areas, you eventually find a qualified candidate, and you meet your numbers, but it takes six months and in the meantime you're understaffed.
> If you can't fill headcount, either your bar is too high, your firm sucks to work for, you aren't paying enough, or you need to work harder on hiring.
Or you're hiring for a job with a limited number of qualified applicants while purposely reducing the number of applicants from a particular demographic because they would be qualified but mess up your numbers.
Why do you a-priori bias yourself to assume that looking somewhere else will reduce the number of qualified candidates that will make it through your pipeline?
How are you so confident that it won't increase it?
If it would increase it then you wouldn't need any DEI requirements to get the employer to do it because that would be their pre-existing incentive.
Also, sometimes the data is actually available. Demographic data is generally public. If you need to hire 100 people and you start off with broad-based advertising and then after a week have filled a quarter the positions from disproportionately one area, the normal incentive is not to stop advertising in that area, but if more candidates from that area are going to mess up your numbers, now that is your incentive even if it reduces the rate at which you fill the positions.
By that same logic, nobody should ever change anything about how they do business. We were doing it, clearly it was the thing that the business chose to do, if it weren't the best thing we ever did, we wouldn't have been doing it, ergo, we should not stop doing it.
Employers make mistakes all the time. But if they're doing something against their own self-interest by mistake, you could just show them the data demonstrating their error and they would have the incentive to change it of their own volition without forcing them to under penalty of law.
The situation in question is with respect to the government, which under the previous administration was imposing these requirements on government departments and contractors by executive order.
But there have also been attempts to interpret parts of the Civil Rights Act to prohibit "disparate impact" which would effectively require DEI because neutral hiring practices could otherwise result in disparities in outcome as a result of external factors.
> A plausible explanation for this is that because they were already all white men, new hires weren't allowed to be, so viable candidates were turned away, leading to under-staffing.
No, that's not even remotely plausible. Trump said it to deflect from having fired the head of the FAA because Musk didn't like him, among other things.
>They should take all the funds and time spent on this every year as part of every award, and just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.
Or just have pay for decent, functional K-12 schools in non-rich districts without housing bubbles?
>just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.
And how do you find out which programs successfully do that without studying them?
Do you have any thoughts (which you feel comfortable sharing) on the actual effectiveness or otherwise of these initiatives? Setting aside the dogma on both sides, do they achieve their stated aims?
It's difficult to isolate the effects of DEI - there are far too many confounding factors interfering. You might use effective masking when analyzing a submission that removes your own personal biases, but, after the hire, there is no way to hide the difference that could have impacted your assessment.
Keeping biases in check is a daily exercise. I am aware of many of my own biases and I have to continuously fight back. There are people whose company I enjoy more than others, but I can't let that interfere with my professional judgment.
I agree that there's not much information to be gathered from a small sample, but there ought to be some tangible effects at the macro level. Is academia actually becoming more equal due to these initiatives? Are researchers who are hired as a result of inclusivity programmes as effective as researchers who are hired outside those programmes? These are things we ought to be able to measure.
Brazil has some long running DEI programs for public colleges and universities and the general conclusion is that minority students who performed worse in admission tests but were enrolled based on quotas show very similar academic performance to the students who came from wealthier backgrounds. Some data hints that they perform better than their non DEI colleagues.
I work for a university. I know that for several undergraduate degree programmes (not by any means all of them, but several) we've measured and there's no evidence of any correlation between the academic achievements in related subjects prior to study and the eventual degree classification.
Since apparently there's no point in testing them for "aptitude" or we don't know how to do so, it makes sense to have other criteria such as broadening participation.
Or, you know, enrol the ones who'd be better on your sports teams, or who look prettier for prospectus photos, or something - just don't fool yourself that you care about some sort of pre-existing "talent".
SAT/ACT scores are the best predictors of undergrad GPA as well as probability to have high income in the future, largely independent on the socio-economic background [1].
I'm a bit confused, or maybe I've been doing it wrong. DEI-related things don't usually go in Broader Impacts, do they? When I've written grants, Broader Impacts was just generally for "how is your research going to help society?"; it was the Broadening Participation in Computing section that was oriented toward DEI.
You're right, and also it's both. Broader Impacts covers "increasing and including the participation of women, persons with disabilities and underrepresented minorities in STEM" as an option, but BPC covers this more explicitly. I really doubt that the people implementing this policy care that much.
For the project managers, it's probably wrong both ways (in wasted time, efficiency, competence) plus wrong some more at every change. Don't throw away your paperwork: much of the current change will be challenged in court so proposals might need changing a couple times. And then again in 4 years.
This seems great. It's increasingly apparent that the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology in plainly weird ways. Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
> It's increasingly apparent that the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology in plainly weird ways.
Did you miss the last 80 years of anti-communist, pro-capitalist, free-market propaganda? The american government has been the most powerful ideological force in the world for basically all of living memory.
You're definitely right and I also do not agree with that stuff either, but it was mostly done "appropriately" in that it was through avenues, like the State Department or CIA, who have propaganda as part of their mission.
In this case you had things like the Department of Energy requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans to even apply for funding.
The two big differences I see is that that is a wholly inappropriate avenue for ideological enforcement, and that it's also exceptionally divisive.
Things are changing in modern times but historically free markets, capitalism, and so on were very widely shared values. The contemporary equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive. The government pushing it, and frequently in very inappropriate ways (the military also comes to mind) is just very weird.
> requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans
> equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive
Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1]. Typically, a plan would reference existing enrollment/acceptance policies of the company/university/department making an application, which are designed to make sure employees/students are not advantaged or disadvantaged by immutable or protected characteristics. Common examples would be:
- Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse to avoid bias towards whatever groups are over-represented at your company already. It's a well-studied phenomena that people are inclined to like others who are similar to themselves. Without any other factors in play (skill is randomly distributed in applicants, all of your employees are free of sexual/racial bias), if your company consists of, say, 80% men and 20% women, and you pick your interviewers totally at random, you will continue to hire more men than women. If you use a 50/50 split on your interview panel then your hiring becomes more meritocratic by virtue of factoring out self-similarity biases.
- Implement structured interviews and standardized qualifications-based hiring, rather than relying on interviewer preference.
- Learning about potential subconscious biases helps people account for them. Incorporating bias training can mitigate (though not eliminate) hiring biases. Of course, as you have no doubt experienced, these training courses tend to be pretty boring and patronizing, but that's true of most employee training, so /shrug.
- Diversifying applicant sourcing. If you only look for applicants via one platform, adding some more that tend to be used by different groups to your sourcing strategy.
You have bought into the oft-repeated lie that DEI is some Harrison Bergeron-esque attempt to cripple institutions. You were probably pointed to one or two extremely poor implementations of such policies that were genuinely unfair. The broader movement, and most implementations of it, are about equality of opportunity. The intentional destruction of public perception of these policies and subsequent removal only guarantees that existing self-perpetuating gaps in opportunity will persist.
You have to be proactive, but the specifics will vary depending on how you do your hiring. That may look like specifically requesting that employees belonging to underrepresented groups volunteer for recruitment, or best-effort selecting each candidate's panel to represent as many groups as possible. You could do quotas for the panelists, but only if participation wasn't important for career progress. To be clear: these quotas would only apply to members of the panel selected from the pool of eligible employees. Hiring quotas are unfair and harmful.
> Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1].
I understand that many people say this, but academics routinely understand government DEI initiatives to be racial quotas. See for example https://archive.is/So06G about the NIH FIRST program. I don't think that DEI is secretly aiming to cripple institutions, but I do think that its advocates genuinely feel racial balancing is a good idea and dissemble about this in contexts where it would be illegal.
Please understand that if this administration had equality of opportunity as a goal it would not scrap and ban these programs, it would go after those abusing them. Make DEI Great Again. But no, the general belief of those opposed to DEI initiatives appears to be that we were a meritocracy already, and the way forward is to cease and stifle anyone that points out this is not the case, and stifle anyone attempts to establish equality of opportunity.
Racist hiring practices are illegal, and should remain so. If Trump has issued an EO to clarify this point, and language to this effect were added to DEI policies, it would be utterly uncontroversial. I would welcome a case being brought against a professor who actively avoided hiring white people under the guise of DEI to really drive home that such behavior is unlawful and unacceptable.
You do realize that the EO this replaced has almost the exact verbiage about discrimination, right? We should be focusing on what is different between the two instead of being sidetracked by that argument.
> this replaced has almost the exact verbiage about discrimination, right?
It would be useful to show the comparison, rather than claim it. Could you be more specific about this, by at least providing the section that you read, or the EO references?
This is the EO that was repealed. I didn’t originally include it because it was already mentioned in this thread. Both claim to ban discrimination based on race, gender, or religion.
> Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
To try to ensure that the people working on the project are selected fairly and on merit, rather than unfairly and on personal prejudice.
The US Constitution protects the people from excessive acts of government, not the other way around. It says nothing about "enforcement mechanisms" which, should any actually be enacted by the legislature or ordered by the executive, are subject to constitutional challenge by the people before the judiciary (unless rendered moot by a superseding legislative act or executive order).
Our constitutional republic is not merely "just blots of ink on paper" but rather alive and well.
A PIER plan is not Equal Protection. For the last few years, a PIER plan is explicitly about Un-equal Protection in the service of achieving "equitable" outcomes.
How do you explain the un-equitable outcomes that we have been getting? The whole point of DEI is that there are (largely unconscious) biases that have been producing these un-equitable outcomes, and we need some conscious effort to get rid of them.
If truly being race-blind (or any other way of dividing people that is not strictly merit) is really your goal, and you are aware of unconscious bias, then what are people really objecting to?
Exactly. This [1] headline from the NYT pretty much sums up the issue: "To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions."
Different groups of peoples have different strengths and different weaknesses. This isn't some sort of a problem that needs fixing.
And if one does want to 'fix' it you need to start way earlier than at the e.g. hiring point. Want to beat that kid who's been playing violin for hours a day since he was 6? Ok, then your target demographic is 6 year olds, not professional orchestras.
I can't read the article, so I don't really know what they are arguing for there. The headline sounds a bit click-baity, so I don't want to guess what the content is.
But looking from a sex standpoint blind auditions are responsible for a sweeping change in the ratio of men and women in professional orchestras (though men still outnumber women %60 to %40, but that is from a near %100 a while ago). This is absolutely a case to look at to demonstrate what unconscious biases are, and a wonderfully effective way of fighting it in one specific place.
The article is what you'd expect from the headline.
The change in gender differences is easily explained by more girls pursuing music from an earlier age. More people (as a ratio) from a group competently doing something means you end up with more highly successful outliers from that group.
Unconscious biases are well studied, and a good presenter can show it live on stage.
Please explain to me how %85 of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men. I don't believe for a moment that white men (myself included) are generically better at being CEOs, or at performing any of the roles that lead up to those positions.
The unconscious biases that the people in those positions choosing their successors to look like them selves is a strong explanation of this, and studies have been show that in controlled situations this sort of things happens all the time. Even by those who want things to be color-blind.
You can create toy experiments to 'prove' just about anything - this is why social psychology has a replication rate in the 20% range. Though it's really much worse since that's only independently repeating the same experiments, not adversarially challenging hypotheses, at which point the entire field looks about as reliable as astrology. Quite appropriately since astrology, which was also studied as a 'science' for centuries, was highly influential on the founding fathers of modern psychology - Jung in particular.
And group differences are not only genetic. Why do you think that, for instance, 70% of American football or NBA players are black, while only 8% of baseball players are?
Go look at an average MBA classroom and know what you'll overwhelmingly see? Pretty much what a sampling of CEOs looks like, especially once accounting for performance.
An inequitable outcome is not proof of bias or discrimination. Ask a group of high school kids to solve a quadratic equation, and there won't be an equitable distribution of correct answers.
Unconscious biases can be eliminated through anonymization or adopting objective evaluation criteria. E.g. having an orchestra audition behind a veil is a way to eliminate bias. By contrast, setting quotas on the number of each gender or race achieves equity, but it does so through explicit discrimination.
Some DEI policies act like a veil. Others work like the latter. The recent executive orders ban the latter, not the former.
You can read about PIER plan requirements here. [1] Archive since the page is already dead. Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated. It was nothing but an unrelated ideological conformity test added as a requirement.
Great resource. imo Trump is jerking the wheel too hard in the other direction but some of this stuff was legitimately crazy. FAQ:
Q: I am only requesting support for one graduate student; do I still need to submit a PIER Plan?
A: Yes, all applications for funding to the Office of Science, with the exception of supplemental proposals, conference proposals, and proposals to the SBIR/STTR Programs (at this time), require a PIER Plan. All applicants are encouraged to consider what contributions they can make to creating more equitable and inclusive research environments. It is expected that the complexity and detail of a PIER Plan for a smaller research project and fewer project personnel would be less than that for a larger research project. [and no we won't provide you an example, it needs to be from your heart]
When you're requiring the greengrocer to submit a personalized statement justifying how each single apple he sells contributes to the project of worldwide socialism you might be risking provoking a reactionary counterrevolution. Americans need to just chill with trying to enforce micromanaged ideological conformity on a continent-sized country of 350 million people. And avoid winding up in a place "eroded by the ideological rituals that the entire power structure depend on, 'that are ever less credible, exactly because they are untested by public discussion and controversy'".
I applied for and won a small NASA ROSES citizen science seed funding grant ($80K). The call focused on outreach and equity in a way that encouraged me come up with a plan to get underprivileged high school students involved. This improved my results and made a difference in their lives.
The pendulum went from "DEI totally just means learning about slavery in school, everything else you're noticing is just in your head" to "everything bad is caused by DEI". I hope once this runs its course we can find a middleground between the extremes.
I'm sorry, but this hope needs to be put to rest. This political reality has been under construction since Watergate.
The winner take all, take no prisoners approach worked. Its counteracted evolution, climate science, even reality. Creating your own media outlet, ditching bi-partishanship, has only helped the Republicans.
People here are talking about how MAGA is not the conservative voter. This is a distinction without a purpose, because Maga and the Tea Party movements won elections.
The left and dems must and will follow suit.
You will only see more extreme points, and frankly outright violence. This is only the first 11 days. The impacts of removing fact checkers and the new free speech moderation stance is going to result in a direct uptick of hate speech.
As things get worse, theres going to be even more incitement with utterly fabricated content. This is going to only further entrench the dominance of the media powerhouse that exists.
The greater the animosity, the easier people are going to respond to the perceived threats - and since being disconnected from reality works, it will not matter if its true or not.
Hmm. Dunno, I can't really answer that without sounding like I am tooting my own horn.
Would it help further if I said that my day job is about disinfo/ fraudulent content, and that I make these statements based on work experience?
I could add that I've made these calls, since 2008, and they've been predictable.
Thing is, any rando online can claim these things, so I don't know how to answer your comment.
So what would you look for to differentiate between prediction and simulation?
Ah yes asking people to consider how they can be inclusive. Such unabashed hate for merit. Literally 1984. Definitely deserves all the vitriole and backlash we're seeing. /s
You are interpreting this through a really uncharitable lens. That statement is not about ideology, the whole premise is stewardship of taxpayer funds.
If a grad student is funded on the project but gets pushed out because of toxic culture, discrimination, or some other kind of marginalization, then that is a waste of research funds and slows down research. Successful teams need to be able to work together effectively and mitigate conflicts. People are diverse, and conflicts are likely to arise because of this: anyone running a research team needs a plan to manage their team, just as they need a plan to manage their data. Its boring HR stuff that is necessary in a diverse society.
And of course writing such a statement will prevent any of that from happening…
When these things are performative they’re worthless. People who are going to do those things are going to write the statement just the same. Even easier now with ChatGPT.
It's worse than "micromanaged" for that matter. PIER plans (nominally) required the applicant to do the work to become competent at this themselves, to develop and present a creative plan themselves, to implement that plan and conduct their entire project according to that plan. All this INSTEAD of doing their science job. All the while hoping that some perfect candidate will show up that will fit all the crazy requirements. Meanwhile remaining aware of illegal HR practices even when they could have sped up the process. So they had to become amateur sociologists and HR specialists.
At least in a micromanagement situation, the PI might have submitted 3 candidates to a reviewer who would have picked one for them. But no.
Now to be fair, the project leads - I expect - usually have no appetite for all this nonsense and try to cut corners everywhere possible (most likely copy/pasting generic stuff for a start and justifying decisions rather then making the "wrong" ones since they still had an interest in the project achieving its goals) but this was still a waste of time and energy from a point of view of science achieved.
When I say "was", it probably still is because most of this current emergency change will be challenged in court and will need to be redone a couple times. So for now, this is MORE waste of time rather than less.
> Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
No, Trump brought in a bunch of veterans of Elon’s takeover of Twitter to do the same thing to the federal government. The people at the top have been replaced, and the new agency leaders are focusing on implementing this anti-DEI agenda at the expense of pretty much everything else right now.
The sense I get from friends who work for the federal government is that this really feels like a hostile takeover. These are not changes that people welcome but have been too scared to ask for.
> Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated
Oh thats an interesting point to make. Were you part of these things? I really like unbiased merit based societies, so I was wondering what your experience was.
Just thought I would recommend some reading about this: "The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?" by Michael Sandel.
Basically, think about what the longer-term, overarching effects on society would be in a perfectly-meritocratic society. It likely wouldn't be all unicorns and rainbows.
Merit is somewhat paradoxically only partially about ability. If it turns out the most testably intelligent person chooses to spend his life flipping burgers and smoking weed then he has no more merit than the most testably dumb person who chose similarly.
In other words a perfect meritocracy isn't Gattaca. It's just a place where your rise isn't going to be directly constrained by things outside of your control, like in Gattaca - being directly rejected because of one's DNA.
In a meritocracy a fool who finds and excels at a niche can thrive, while a genius who doesn't exert himself can languish.
Here's a take that I came across which I'd like your views on if possible:
When the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act were created, people asked the government to enforces these acts. Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.
The problem is because they decided that DEI would be the mechanism to do this with, once DEI is rescinded the question is: If you're not going to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act through DEI, which mechanism do you plan to use to enforce them? According to this take, once DEI is rescinded there is no mechanism to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act anymore.
I'm pretty sure that most leftwing and rightwing people will agree that out of 3 millions government workers it's not entirely unlikely that there would be some some valid cases of discrimination against minorities and those with disabilities. The claim is that, whether DEI sucks or not, there is no avenue to contest racism and discrimination in government hiring anymore.
> Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.
This part is foundational to the rest, and it's straightforwardly untrue. The government agency which most often enforces these two laws is called the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which remains active under the new administration; the new acting chair has given no indication that she intends to stop enforcing the Civil Rights Act or the ADA.
The "Equal Employment Opportunity executive order" predates the EEOC and doesn't affect its responsibilities.
The EEOC doesn't depend on a quorum for routine enforcement actions. As the last article describes, what it can't do without a quorum is make new rules or issue new guidance, but the new administration will most likely reestablish a quorum soon because there's some existing guidance they'd like to revoke.
The Civil Rights Act and related topics are part of the US Code (laws) [1] and are completely unrelated to DEI. The legal redresses available for discrimination have not changed whatsoever.
The Civil Rights Act is exclusively about equality of opportunity and requires affected employers hire without regard to race, religion, and other protected classes. So for instance universities using racial quotas was deemed unlawful precisely because of the Civil Rights Act.
DEI stuff was in a very different spirit that really ran against the ideals of the Civil Rights Act. For instance it compelled affected organizations to specifically endeavour to hire based on the race and other characteristics of applicants. It's not entirely clear to me why it wasn't tossed immediately as being in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
DEI is a way to avoid disparate impact liability. Such laws / precedent is derived from the Civil Rights Act (VII). So it is quite the opposite. It also means that disparate impact liability will return without DEI / race quotas so unless the new administration also gets rid of disparate impact and the civil rights act this whole thing will end up right back where it started.
This is why disparate impact tends to cause institutions to drop skills based testing entirely. In theory, proof that the test is relevant to the job is supposed to be a defense against allegations of disparate impact. But in practice the courts have rarely accepted that line of defense.
I know that but there is the law and then there is the law in practice. Legal council at companies have been telling them that DEI race quotas was the safe option.
> Things are moving ridiculously fast for government to the point I suspect there was alot of desire to get rid of all this stuff before, but people were unable to do so.
Assuming "was alot of desire" is meant as "widespread support," not just "the President really desired it," that is an absolutely ridiculous interpretation. Fast does not mean strong consensus.
The government has also moved _ridiculously fast_ to
- pardon/commute the vast majority of J6 defendants including those convicted of violence towards law enforcement
- freeze federal aid across the board
- blame the recent aviation crash on DEI
- rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America
- revoke birthright citizenship
Does that mean that there "was alot of desire" to do those things? Absolutely not. It just means that those are things that the President has done unilaterally via executive orders or press release.
To be clear I'm not advocating for or against the govt.
But the idea that the government moving "ridiculously fast" is because there "was alot of desire" is a massive stretch. They are moving fast because they are steamrolling everyone in their path (allies included), and in their desire to "get shit done" they are implementing changes that are riddled with errors, and in some cases, even flat out illegal.
Really? We're rational here, which is pretty much meant to be the hallmark of techies.
> The whole concept of 'got noticed' runs entirely contrary to the notion of merit, to an absurd degree in tech.
>Your merit is not what you might achieve, but what you do achieve.
Taking it seriously, I can see several situations where these rules do not hold true.
However, that may be me reading in factors you exclude for the purposes of your point.
So let me turn it to you - can you consider circumstances where these statements wouldn't hold true? Or are they absolute in your eyes?
If they are absolute, I would definitely want to understand your defintions, since I can conceive of many obvious cases where these points are violated.
But since they are obvious, I am assuming you haven't overlooked them in the way you envision things.
You haven't addressed what I said. You've identified a problem (let's just assume you are correct about the problem for arguments sake). I've pointed out the problem with current "solution": making decisions about individuals based on their race, sexual orientation or gender seems far from good, but you haven't addressed that.
I guess this derives from what you think the most common form of skill assessment error we are meant to deal with.
Let me ask you this, what is the principle or goal you want to achieve? is it more fairness, or more effective systems, or maybe even better conditions for white american men (and to me, this is ok. Its just what you want to optimize for)
> Considering a candidates suitability for a role based on their race, gender, or sexual orientation is the opposite merit based selection.
> You haven't addressed what I said. You've identified a problem (let's just assume you are correct about the problem for arguments sake). I've pointed out the problem with current "solution": making decisions about individuals based on their race, sexual orientation or gender seems far from good, but you haven't addressed that.
I didn’t think there was anything to address. I think you defined the ideal we are meant to achieve.
If this is a question on whether things should be fair - yes we are in agreement on principles.
Because DEI audience leaned Democrats and everyone here is trying the hide the sun with a transparent glass. This is backfiring in a big way and the only hope is that it sets strict rules to who gets the money (ie: rather than going the other way, where the incumbent disburse the money to his audience).
>Why should somebody researching e.g. fusion for the Department of Energy also need to create a Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) plan, to even apply?
Why?
Because a homogenous culture of researchers is less effective.
Because you are not just doing research on a topic, you are also training the next generation of scientists and field experts.
And the implication that the old boys club of white dudes is intrinsically the best "meritocratic" outcome is ridiculous. The history of science is full of people who had to fight that norm and succeed despite it.
> This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
Sure, sure. Except for the part where they're also censoring any science topics deemed "woke", where all funding now has to meet the president's ideological conformity test on subject and staff as well.
Your stereotypes belie a lack of familiarity with researchers. Here [1] are the demographics of PhD researchers.
White individuals are significantly under represented (and even more so in STEM) though it's not for any nefarious reason. Science has traditionally been merit > all. And lots of highly skilled individuals from China, India, and so on are pursuing education and work in the US, which makes the competition for these spots very different than a random sampling of Americans.
> Your stereotypes belie a lack of familiarity with researchers
I was referencing what the current Trump administration deems "meritocratic" and seeks to "return" to, their policy changes are in direct response and opposition to the demographics you describe.
You either don't know what you're a talking about or a in bad faith.
The demographic or PhD researchers is, in fact, the problem because the ration of women to men is very high at the beginning of the career but declines as the career progresses and becomes embarrassing at the professorial stage. This is the whole reason why DEI became essential because it aimed at removing those anti-meritocratic barriers that promoted male career at the expenses of females.
Men raise children too. And parental leave exists to make having kids compatible with having a career. Not clear to me why we should just accept women dropping out after becoming parents as a given.
I think if/when you have children you'll see that these sort of statements are not really realistic.
In a sustainable society every single woman needs to have a bit more than 2 children on average. The 9 months are not so bad though so come with a significant number of side effects and a substantial number of hospital visits, both planned and unplanned.
After birth the real fun begins. At first you'll be nursing every 2 hours, constantly. Over time that changes to every 3-4 hours but that is now the new normal, 8 hours of sleep is a thing of the past. And nursing isn't just whip out a boob and a few minutes later you're done, depending on your baby, his mood, teething, growth spurts and a zillion other factors it could last an hour all the while his hunger for the next window also grows!
And, probably as an evolutionary warning mechanism, the mother will frequently experience vivid nightmare playing out every horrific scenario that could happen, experience anxiety (probably as a result of the former) and so on. That fades over time but never really goes away.
And back to breastfeeding, if a mother doesn't constantly drain her breasts it can lead to infection/mastitis/blocked ducts and all other sorts of fun stuff.
And that's just a sampling of some of the issues (completely ignoring baby himself here) for one child, at which point it's time to get ready for number 2, let alone 3.
This is a multiple years long process that completely consumes your life. Now imagine pairing all this with a 9-5 which in reality is rarely just a 9-5.
There's a reason the West's fertility has fallen well below replacement. This fantasy of doing a great job both as a mother and as a corporate drone, just isn't realistic at all.
I think that researchers from China, India, and so one should also have plans to effectively manage the diverse set of students and staff they are likely to work with while in the U.S.
Funny how they replaced one performative mantra with another, which is just the same as the one they wanted to get rid of: you have to recite the $SYMBOL_OF_FAITH before you can have a job or apply for a grant.
In fairness, that's what all political types do. It's all just quasi-religion all the way down. Anyone who thought any different was fooling themselves. It's unfortunate that it comes at the expense of scientific research, but hey, that's what people voted for.
Everyone in the US is getting exactly the government we deserve. That's the beauty of democracy! You get government that's precisely as good, or as bad, as you deserve. And you deserve government no better, or worse, than what you get.
Witches don't exist. The Communist Party USA wanted to violently overthrow democracy and replace it with a dictatorship headed by Stalin, and Communists in the US government who were working towards that goal by committing treason against the US did exist in the 1950's.
So no, it was not a witch hunt. Looking back, the "witch hunt" slur seems like gaslighting. "Communists, what communists? You're paranoid and crazy!". The release of the Venona documents is severely damning to the "witch hunt" accusers and vindicating to McCarthy's goals, if not his tactics.
You're aware that dozens of women were hanged in Salem Massachusetts because people believed they were witches? So you're very glibly implying "witch hunts" are not a thing when not only are they a thing, but people in this country, have died due to them.
> vindicating to McCarthy's goals, if not his tactics.
The question was a litmus test for whether you are a person that subscribes to an orthodox perspective of history or heterodox - it is pointless to argue with someone that does not participate in a shared reality.
I wonder what could go wrong with constraining federal funding to political ideas the current president personally approves of?
"Great" isn't how anyone will describe it once the second-order consequences land. (There won't be many who like it once the first-order consequences land.)
You may agree with the incoming anti-DEI policies, but don't let that obscure what's happening here.
Previously, federal funding was controlled by congress, and subject to its collective politics, via long-playing out machinations/compromises/horse-trading, etc, and then to the collective politics of the various enforcement bodies.
It now appears that federal funding is generally subject to the personal politics of the current president. That may seem nice for the specific policies you agree with. But... there are likely to be many policies you don't agree with. Especially since there will be a new president after not too long.
Also, since political purity tests have to be subjectively enforced, they are inevitably subverted to corruption. You can pass the test with the right amount of money delivered to the right people in the right way. That's nice for the people receiving the money, but the corruption quickly becomes horrifically inefficient and costly.
The question isn't whether the previous system was perfect -- it wasn't. The question is whether the new system is worse, and how much worse.
I'm pretty surprised how unaware people seem to be about the power/money grab that is happening. People never seem to learn that you have to look at what people do, not what they say.
I do agree that this is a totally new paradigm, but I would call it more of a popular revolution than a "power/money grab".
I'd also characterize the last system (which you described perfectly btw) as corrupt and ineffective. The most non-political evidence I can offer is the observation that spending decisions only ever went one direction: more spending. This probably seems fair at the "dem vs gop" level but too the taxpayer it was more theft every year.
So this newly emerging system does appear more susceptible to corruption, so I totally agree with you there, but as a taxpayer I am very happy that someone is slowing down spending.
Like I said, watch what they do. The narratives people promote are self-serving and often counter-factual.
Federal spending went up during our current president's last administration (and down the following administration). It's almost certainly going up again this time. The deficit doubly so.
100% agree. We'll see if this is yet another plutocratic shakedown of the American people or is possibly the start of something new (good bad or otherwise).
> the government was spending countless billions of dollars to push ideology
We can count the billions that the government spends on science, period, through the NSF, DOE, DARPA, and NIH. Thus, the fraction spent on pushing ideology is certainly not "countless billions".
The evil genius of this move is that it gets everybody arguing about DEI, and we’re letting the continued expansion of absolute executive power centered in the president go unchecked. It’s not even about party; this started with FDR or even earlier, massively expanded under LBJ and again under W and Obama, and now here we are. The president feels no obligation at all to execute what the Congress authorized him to. Instead the limits of power are whatever the president can get away with. We have a constitutional problem where the Congress is unwilling or unable to legislate effectively and the executive gets to make policy unilaterally. This is not the balance of powers from the U.S. constitution. This is something else.
> We have a constitutional problem where the Congress is unwilling or unable to legislate effectively and the executive gets to make policy unilaterally. This is not the balance of powers from the U.S. constitution
The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.
Inevitable consequence of a two-party system with first past the post voting.
All Republicans and all Democrats don’t act and think as one. Take any collection of humans, of any size, and their opinions will be spread across a spectrum.
There are, and always will be, some members in either house and of any party that find it’s in their political interest to debate and pull new laws left or right.
This is especially true under FPTP because each member has to answer to an area, and different areas of a country have baked-in differences in their ideal political outcomes and points of view.
This is a naive, context-free misunderstanding of the present moment based on supposedly intuitive truisms. The Republican party is Trump's party and has been for years now. Pretending there is that much variation that matters is ridiculous and can be remedied by reading any piece of news from the last few years.
The US is now a formal democracy, but it doesn't work as one. There is one guy making decisions, the remaining are either too feeble to do anything about or just fine with the status quo. Yes, there are formal avenues for responses, like the judiciary system, but they've been made toothless. The very fact that Trump is back in the WH is proof of this.
Balance of powers has nothing to do with party; it’s about the ability of one branch of government to operate without constraint by the other branches of government. It was instituted in the US by people who were trying to take lessons from history; both recent (the Intolerable Acts) and ancient (Appius Claudius, Octavian, Alexander, the Thirty), and it’s been forgotten by generations who’ve come to take its protections for granted.
Trump has definitely purged the Republican party of its most moderate members, leaving him surrounded by only the most radical of sycophants. Why do you put so much trust into your institutions? Trump has promised that "we won't ever have to vote ever again", he has been made untouchable by the supreme court, and is now passing budgetary laws without congress.
The opposition is powerless, his own party has become an echo chamber for fascist talking points.
Your definition of fascism is deeply flawed, it would include kingdoms which are not automatically fascists, for example.
I go by this [1] definition of fascism, which the current republican party fits almost perfectly.
Trump rules almost unopposed, and is further consolidating his power with each passing day. Neither court nor congress can harm him anymore. That you may still believe he is fighting for freedom, peace and democracy is baffling, with everthing that's been happening in the past 2 weeks.
> The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.
- No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.
- No, members of congress don't always vote the party line (although this has consistently gotten worse over time)
> - No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.
Stacked in the sense that more members were appointed by one party vs the other (including one by dubious means), and those people apparently are quite partisan.
The point is that the current party in power has had multiple opportunities to reign in the current lawlessness and the current minority party has attempted to do so, to no result.
Stacking here is about the make up of the benchm not size. I don't understand this link, its seems like an obvious point.
Partisanship works in the current political environment. Cutting off your own projects in case the other party follows your lead, has paid off more than bipartisanship. Voting across aisles is strictly controlled.
Trump was voted in precisely because The R base was tired of people talking about identity issues, getting to power, and then doing nothing about it.
Trump is giving people exactly what they were told would solve their problems, for decades.
The balance of powers has been broken, for good reason. It ensures political goals - see Bi-partisanship doesn't pay.
FPTP is a superior option to proportional representation. Belgium still lacks a federal government despite voting 5 months before the Americans and being just some 10 million people and we aren't going to get one either before they get their whole cabinet (minister equivalents) confirmed and installed. This is because there are 5 parties trying form a coalition raging from nationalist-separatist to socialist-rebranded-to-progressive across 2 languages. Brussels lacks its regional government too and is even further away from resolving the impasse.
America would be well advised to avoid this. They'd immediately get a language divide between English and Spanish. The alleged "grand coalitions" of the Democrat and Republican parties would crumble. There might be some consensus in the center which might be large enough but then policies would never change regardless of who you vote for, just like in the times before Trump.
Conservatives realized that they could effectively lock down Congress, take over the Supreme Court and then vest all power in the executive. The whole arguments against DEI, smaller governments etc are all a smoke screen because they have zero issues with nepotism and favoritism as long as it benefits them. And no issue with government overreach as long as they control it.
Unfortunately I think the only direction is balkanization of the states. And I don't think that is going to end well.
It may be easy to get mad as the Republicans for this, but there’s a clear bipartisan precedent here. Remember DACA? Might have been a good policy if Congress had enacted it. Bad precedent as an executive action though, because it establishes that the president’s ability to make immigration policy is effectively unlimited. Today’s ICE raids are made possible by DACA.
I'm not particularly going to disagree that the Dems are useless or not part of the problem, because they absolutely are. A lot of the issues we have is because of continued attempts at bipartisanship watering down bills into oblivion, means-testing and obsession with locking out people further left.
But ultimately a lot of our core foundational agencies have been functioning well regardless. And it's only the right that's intent on tearing them down no matter the consequences. So while the Dems enable this, the Republicans enact it.
What the Democratic party did to Sanders was a disgrace. The people wanted him, the powers-that-be (donors?) didn't. He'd probably have won against Trump, according to surveys.
The Republicans did go with the (sadly) popular guy. I guess he was palatable (by the definition that matters) because there was no talk of increasing taxes on high incomes.
> What the Democratic party did to Sanders was a disgrace. The people wanted him, the powers-that-be (donors?) didn't.
More people who voted wanted Clinton and Biden. Sanders himself admitted not enough young people voted and his platform was less popular in more conservative states.
Very very minor party shenanigans. Serious enough that they should be called out and punished, but not serious enough to effect the voting.
"She was given the questions tonthe debate," is the most serious accusation. But anyone with a dozen brain cells knows whats going to be asked during the debates.
I wouldn't count the Executive Orders related to ICE in the "nepotism and favoritism" group fzeroracer referred to. Those might be more of the "smokescreen." The orders for mass layoffs or encouraging quitting of civil service seen more like the ulterior motive. Allowing the president to remove "disloyal" civil servants would take us back to the spoils system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
Then, either they use existing executive power to ensure Republicans have an insurmountable advantage in national elections, or they haven't thought things through and we'll see even larger shifts in federal regulations after each administration change.
DACA certainly pushed the limits of executive authority, but...
Immigration raids are pretty clearly an executive function, and they happened prior to DACA and prior to ICE. Executive prioritization of federal law enforcement is normal and expected.
I agree with your broader point, but I really wish people wouldn't refer to MAGA Republicans as "conservative." Right-wing, or reactionary, certainly. But there's nothing "conservative" about undermining the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution.
By the same logic, I don't like calling far-left cancel culture "liberal." I'm afraid our partisanship has blinded us to genuine liberal and conservative virtues.
I also wouldn't label cancel culture as "far-left" because just as it isn't in any way "liberal", it isn't limited to those on the proverbial left of the spectrum. The mainstream language used to discuss politics simply lacks the ability to reflect the nuance needed in the 21st century. And that's not even getting into the discussion on what we call "cancel culture" because there is a big gulf between "that person said a thing that was a bit off" and "that person is a literal criminal/fascist" in my opinion.
We have pretty fixed red/blue blocks of states and Trump/MAGA has made the gap much wider.
In earlier years I would have been okay living in a red state - not my pref but no big deal. Now I’m no more willing to raise my kids in a deep red state than I am in Russia or China.
Yea, looks like the US is going full on Russian mode here. I'm not all that disappointed in Trump himself, this was no surprise. I'm disappointed at the lack of meaningful opposition. Most of the republican part have fallen in line and the Dems aren't doing much.
Question here for this group. In this day of technology, information is power seems much more relevant. I don't have clear data, but it seems from observation and analysis by others social media played a pretty key role: "fake news", info bubbles, biasing your feeds etc. What are some ideas on reliable ways to provide access to accurate information?
Somehow "number of EOs" doesn't sound like the right metric to use when determining whether executive power is growing. Surely it's the content that matters.
Especially when there are EOs for naming post offices and other boring mechanical work of the executive.
It would take some serious effort (and there’d be disagreement) but maybe you could classify “important” government changes and if they were enacted by congress, EO, courts, etc.
Also, that link stops with Obama and that leaves out two whole administrations that would be pretty pertinent data in this discussion. Nearly a decade of data. It looks like Trump's first term had 220 and Biden had 162. It would be interesting to see the data classified the way you described and then broken down by party over time. The actual policymaking via EO by each party over the last 50 years would be more elucidating than the straight numbers for sure.
FDR forced people to give up all their gold assets at a fixed rate, under threat of imprisonment for a decade. He then proceeded to nearly double the declared exhange rate up once the government had confiscated everybody's gold.
All done by executive order. Makes basically all modern EOs look pretty innocuous by comparison.
That said I actually agree and would love to see a sharp reduction in executive power, especially as it comes to using the military. If we're going to go bombing places, that should require a declaration of war from Congress. And 'emergency' powers should not be enabled for decades on end.
The number of EOs is a poor measure of the extent of executive power. There are many other ways to concentrate executive power; for example OMB (part of the Executive Office of the President) issues “M-memos” (“M” for “management”) to the heads of all departments, instructing them on how to implement EOs, laws, and White House priorities.
There is a consensus among researchers of the workings of the US government and the legal context thereof that, since FDR and especially since Reagan, that the “imperial presidency” has been gaining ground.
Pretty sure it’s the work of Stephen Miller - who is now his senior policy advisor.
8 years ago the Trump admin had no idea what to do. Now they’re prepared and much more dangerous.
Some things will be reversed in 4 years time and we can ride out the storm. but others - like renewed emphasis on fossil fuels to reward the big donors and have energy for AI - will have lasting effects on my children and their children — those make me truly furious.
The word evil is a bit overused, but in the case of Stephen Miller it fits like a glove.
I’ve said since the beginning that that saving grace (if there is one) of Trump’s first term was that he was disorganized, and he surrounded himself with people who kept him in check to some degree. People who were willing to tell him that he couldn’t do certain things (prime example: White House legal counsel kept Trump from doing the crazy things that people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell suggested after he lost the 2020 election).
He’s not going to make that mistake this time, and he’s putting people in power who will do what he wants without question. That’s the scary part of the next four years.
I mean you just hunker down, stop reading the news, go about your life, and hope that the “storm” doesn’t do too much damage, and then work like hell in 4 years time to avoid a repeat (won’t be Trump but to prevent another fascist president, also you can bet that Trump will try for a 3 rd term on the basis that he didn’t serve 2 consecutive terms).
I think there are some active things you can do to help. Give money to legal groups challenging unconstitutional actions. Write to your various federal reps to let them know how you feel. Be kind and supportive to those being targeted by hate and bigotry.
We won't be riding out this storm if we all hunker down.
The campaign for the next presidential election started the day after the last. The far-right got this and are actively working to discredit any possible competing candidate.
Right now is a great time for Dems to start working hard on taking back both houses. Start mapping districts that can be flipped, districts with low voter registration, and which messages they will bombard these people with.
Or never. We should be prepared for Term 3 (which is already being floated) or a landslide GOP win in 2026, 2028, and beyond. Expect future Presidential elections to look like '86.
You all are openly admitting that these people are evil geniuses. Keep that in mind when thinking to the future. They are going to continue their evil genius behavior and it's going to keep working.
Thankfully most are not evil geniuses (though there may be a few), and Trump is so drunk on his own ego that he can't govern well. So I don't share the same degree of pessimism.
And thanks to Biden's final decisions, presidents and their entourage are effectively immune to prosecution. They just need to "pardon" their friends at the end of the administration. So there is really no limit to what Trump can do.
Yes, I know it existed. But democrats acted previously as this was a problem. Now they normalized it and both parties cannot complain anymore. The judiciary system was made completely toothless against a president and anyone he dims a friend.
I think it’s a little early to call the end of the U.S. Constitution. There is a time component to the rule of law that can be frustrating in the moment but has always been true.
The President is free to assert his desires. Other parts of the country are free to push back if they choose. This takes filing lawsuits, lobbying Congress, pursuing prosecutions, etc. all of which take time, money, and effort. Which in turn allows short-term disruption to happen as the legal process plays out. Which again, is frustrating.
Political mood is also more fickle than people usually believe at the beginning of a new administration. FDR, LBJ, W, Obama, and many other presidents passed through a time in which conventional wisdom held that they had changed the game and amassed too much power. In every case we can look back and see that while they each have left a legacy that endures, it’s smaller than expected at the time. The pendulum swung the other way later on.
My own opinion on this is that “don’t tell me what to do” is among the most popular political positions among Americans. So for example, to the extent DEI felt like being told what to do, it became unpopular. But now that anti-DEI is in power, I expect the bloom will come off pretty quickly. In part because of overreach by a new administration overestimating their mandate. (As most new administrations do.)
I don't. This has been a long, gradual erosion of constitutional rights, and now the system has crumbled. It may appear to stand, but it's merely resting on the rubble.
SCOTUS is going to rule with GOP doctrine, regardless of what the constitution says. The GOP may pursue legal avenues for their actions in an attempt to not make it so apparent that the country is now under single party, totalitarian rule. But they don't have to (see: news).
It started with minor constitutional violations, like emoluments, and has ended with blatant ones, such as attacking birthright citizenship.
the overton window has a new view. According to the old direction, these subjects are 'not to be discussed in professional society', i.e. they are to be decided by government and are considered intellectually dirty. Under the new rules, anything goes and needs to be publicly debated in order to remove the previous biases.
Curious to see whether HN is also following suit in changing its window, like every other online medium seems to be doing.
I hope not; you can often see rightwing nonsense in threads, and lord knows I argue with them often enough, but it's not reached the Twitter point of total unusability yet and still manages to have interesting discussions sometimes.
I hope we can still hold discussions on "dirty" subjects in a dispassionate and objective way. Sadly, I see a lot of those typical short snarky comments now common in other online spaces.
Also, this IS an important discussion, for it's creating social transformation that might hinder our species' ability to solve the difficult challenges ahead.
Lots of politically charged comments on this discussion. If you disagree with NSF’s merit and broader impact review criteria, that’s fine and it’s important to have a healthy conversation about it, but I think it’s important to take a step back and thoughtfully address concrete ideas that are actually contained in the proposal review criteria.
These are the kinds of issues at stake in terms of the broader impacts criteria:
- Is it good that NSF promotes applications that include historically minority-serving institutions (as opposed to just the same few R1 universities)?
- should NSF prioritize proposals with strong scientific outreach activities aimed at boosting engagement and opportunities in under-represented demographics?
Keep in mind that NSF funding is extremely competitive. It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores. Successful proposals excel on both fronts.
1. There are thousands of universities in the US that are neither R1/R2 nor "historically minority serving". What about those universities?
2. Where did you get the idea that outreach is not still an important priority? The issue is what is euphemistically called "under-represented demographics" which we understand excludes many Americans on the basis of their race.
> It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores.
Yeah I don't buy that.
I've seen equity directives in universities explicitly asking to hire only underrepresented minorities, or give one third of a candidate's score based on race and gender characteristics (the other two thirds were resume and interview).
I've heard equity hiring quotas given to execs in tech industry. I've heard of pressure to hire/promote minorities.
I've seen what affirmative action did to University admissions. The admissions office reduced Asian Americans score on "likeability". As a result they needed a higher sat score than any other group for admissions. The hiring office essentially said that they did not like Asians.
So sorry, I do not buy the argument that equity initiatives just choose a minority representation from equally qualified samples. Because from what you say, Asian americans wouldn't have been discriminated against.
I'm genuinely puzzled by people's reaction to DEI measures. In my experience, they have in many cases been explicitly exclusionary (e.g. a conference only for certain minorities, specific support preferences). I have never heard anyone criticize "outreach" in general. The problem starts when outreach means only targeting specific minorities.
It's the first time I'm seeing accessibility put under the same umbrella as DEI. Is "DEIA" in the executive order, or is NSF overreacting, or... is being disabled and wanting to have some quality of life "woke" now?
Accessibility has always been part of DEI. (Certainly it's been a repeated topic of conversation in my campus's Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board.) And yes, any effort that involves spending time or money to make sure that every person gets to "have some quality of life" falls under this same umbrella. That is literally what people are referring to when they call things "woke".
There is still a difference between actually doing hard work to help disadvantaged and marginalized folks and thinking that “being annoying about one’s pronouns” or “making lists of coworkers who are not woke enough” (both examples are quotes from self-proclaimed social justice activists) solves any problems.
However, thinking that this crop of politicians would take a nuanced stance on anything at all is idiocy at its purest.
Sure! There are always people out there who obsess over linguistic and behavioral purity, and they tend to be very loud. I'm not certain that I've ever met one of them in person. (I've certainly met people who might say (e.g.) "Here's why I've started including pronouns in my email sig," but I think that's not what you're talking about.)
If the current "anti-woke" movement were just about shutting down those obnoxious purists, I think it would be a lot less controversial. But from what I've seen, the political rhetoric (and the associated policy positions now being implemented) strikes just as hard or harder at the folks actually trying to do the hard work.
"DEIA" has picked up steam in government circles over the past few years, and made it into the executive order because of that. I don't think I'd ever seen it used by a non-governmental organization.
Just a note, this isn't just about DEI, it's about all things trump doesn't like it looks like. May be even solar power and windmills (that cause cancer, according to him).
Last week we have seen ai CEOs calling for sanctions because the Chinese publish open weights models and research, while the American companies don't. Then this naked politicization of science (which is also done pretty incompetently). This really feels like a paradigm shift.
I'm confused - was the decision to "shut everything down" made by the Trump admin, or by NSF on their own? If it's the latter, is it actually necessary or are they overreacting on purpose?
It is wild to pull already granted money. I meet so many scientists who just need $X to continue pursuing their research and it’s generally not a large sum. So this is incredibly disappointing for the research ecosystem which feeds the startup ecosystem. This hurts our competitiveness on the global stage and decreases our future quality of life.
another great reminder that if the money isn't in an account in your name that you fully control, you shouldn't count on it. have had to learn this the hard way myself.
Without going into the discussion about polarized points. I have some observations
1- NSF budget is about 10 billions, I always had in mind that it is much more. That's about 0.17% of the total federal budget. If we include DOE R&D funding and NIH we will get to 1%. This is the funding for most of research in science in the US. Seems like not a great area to achieve huge reduction in deficit.
2- Even if we ignore the whole point of DEI and say that we need to end support for some of the projects. You do take your time and evaluate projects that needs to take action. You don't stop all the funding and pause critical support for projects and cause huge problems on medium and long term. And it also hurt the reputation of the country and its competitiveness.
3- The current NSF director was actually appointed by the current setting president in his first term.
Europe is circling the drain, Taiwan is inconsequential and becoming less so by the day, and China does not respects it's citizens, they treat them like cattle. But okay sure, India's opinion is super important, especially as they are profiting off the Ukraine war.
I think it's pretty telling that you listed 3 countries you are absolutely not friendly with, and so whose opinion of America's reputation is not really relevant.
I fail to see why a scientist won’t be interested in the grant now. Maybe if you’re talking about some areas like social sciences, yes, but for everything else not much seems to have changed.
It's all about stability and predictability. Science, like other forms of business, favors an environment without sudden regulatory changes. Sudden changes make the government an unreliable partner incapable of committing to anything beyond the next elections.
If the dominant ideology changes, it should only affect future grants, not current grants. Ideally, grants that have already been submitted or are close to submission should be evaluated according to the old rules. Otherwise a lot of time and effort will go to waste.
I have not been paid because my salary is funded by an NSF grant and they've shut down the payment system and cancelled payments. (It is still down.) I'm not in the social sciences, I'm in mathematics.
The instability this has created has me looking to leave academia as quickly as possible; I'm sure others in similar situations are having the same thoughts. This has wreaked havoc on all of academia.
Thank you for providing extra context! I can see why the unpredictability of the entire system could make people not even consider applying in the future.
Sorry to hear that this happened to you. I hope they will provide some way to sort this out soon.
I can’t sort of understand an EO stopping grants with “gender ideology” or “woke ideology (whatever that means, still unclear), but “green new deal”?!? So we a halt all research into clean energy or climate change and just hope co2 emissions drop by themselves? Fing idiots who are sacrificing our children’s future for the oil and gas lobbyists. This makes me very angry.
This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an authoritarian regime. Hysterical rhetoric doesn't help anything, it simply inflames tensions and perpetuates the cycle of politicians trying to hurt each other. We should all attempt to avoid it as much as possible.
The whole "loyalty purge" is very much a hallmark of an authoritarian regime, and Congress is just standing by.
Sure, it's not Russia or China, but it's certainly no model democracy. We're definitely heading down the path of authoritarianism / fascism.
Don't forget that 4 years ago there was an armed attempt to overturn the results of an election, spurred on by the losing president who also pressured officials to overturn the results. And then the same politician was given immunity by the justices who he appointed (if it had been any other court they would have been forced to recuse themselves from the case), leading to him being re-elected and then promptly pardoning those who attempted a coup. That's arguably the most anti-democracy event in the history of the US (or at least the last 100 years).
Then when that politician gets in power he starts an loyalty and ideological purge. That's exactly what authoritarian leaders do (and Xi in China did). So yes, we still have checks and balances and our system is not authoritarian, but Trump certainly is and is trying his hardest to centralize as much power and authority as possible in himself, which is again exactly what authoritarian leaders do. Lets call a spade a spade.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadAnd it is always the same pattern.
In this case, the administration believes a lot of the work the NSF funds isn't actually scientific. In that they are correct. The replication crisis has been rolling for 15 years now with no real improvements, largely because the people who distribute the money don't care if it gets used for things that are genuinely scientific or if it gets used for things that merely have the surface level appearance of being scientific. The NSF funds vast amounts of pseudo-science that can be trivially identified and people have been talking about these problems for years with no resolution. Apparently, they need some friction and bureaucracy as otherwise they won't do their jobs correctly. In a free market government intervention isn't required to solve this problem because free actors will just stop funding pseudo-scientific work after a while, but the NSF isn't running a free market, and so the problem just never gets solved.
This article focuses on social science but talks a bit about the general problems at the NSF at the end, and although it was written in 2020 thus at the start of the Biden administration the proposals the author makes for fixes are basically what's happening right now:
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
Nobody actually benefits from the present state of affairs, but you can't ask isolated individuals to sacrifice their careers for the "greater good": the only viable solutions are top-down, which means either the granting agencies or Congress (or, as Scott Alexander has suggested, a Science Czar). You need a power that sits above the system and has its own incentives in order: this approach has already had success with requirements for pre-registration and publication of clinical trials. Right now I believe the most valuable activity in metascience is not replication or open science initiatives but political lobbying
...
An NSF/NIH inquisition that makes sure the published studies match the pre-registration (there's so much """"""""""QRP"""""""""" in this area you wouldn't believe). The SEC has the power to ban people from the financial industry—let's extend that model to academia.21
...
It is difficult to convey just how low the standards are. The marginal researcher is a hack and the marginal paper should not exist. There's a general lack of seriousness hanging over everything—if an undergrad cites a retracted paper in an essay, whatever; but if this is your life's work, surely you ought to treat the matter with some care and respect.
Why is the Replication Markets project funded by the Department of Defense? If you look at the NSF's 2019 Performance Highlights, you'll find items such as "Foster a culture of inclusion through change management efforts" (Status: "Achieved") and "Inform applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding in a timely manner" (Status: "Not Achieved"). Pusillanimous reports repeat tired clichés about "training", "transparency", and a "culture of openness" while downplaying the scale of the problem and ignoring ...
>> For academic scientists, the list of banned activities could include efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, collaborations with foreign scientists, and research on more environmentally friendly technologies.
These are not the "vast amounts of pseudo-science" that your comment refers to.
I have nothing against the ideas suggested in the 2020 blog post that you cite... it's just that is not what is happening because of the executive order.
The executive orders do not address bad science.
So overall, I agree with most ideas in your comment but I do not think it is relevant to the current situation. The administration is not trying to fix bad science.
As an example, a lot of research into "misinformation" is like that. It's not replicable out of the gate because the papers don't describe their procedure for deciding whether a claim is true or false. They just present random lists of things that conservatives tend to believe, assert that none of them are true / they're conspiracy theories, then do a survey and use the results to conclude that conservatives are dumb / Russian bots. That's it, that's the entire field. There's no methodology, no theories, nothing to be refined or refuted. There are thousands of papers like this, it's astonishing to witness.
I've been writing for years on the topic of bad science, and the fact that universities/granting bodies claim to care about science whilst simultaneously funding and celebrating this stuff is why their reputation has gone down the drain. The consequences were absolutely predictable. Nobody can claim they didn't see it coming.
Right now, there's just a grant freeze combined with a review to find the really nakedly partisan DEI stuff. That's nothing. Much more intense stuff is well within the Overton Window of possibilities by this point, like ramped up prosecutions or large scale defunding.
https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/dcl-social-behavio...
Always be skeptical when someone defends only the things they strongly believe in. That goes both ways, for the left and right.
> > There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
But this is completely false. The credulousness with which it gets repeated is telling.
I agree with you regarding Musk's hypocrisy around free speech.
Oh, and if you're looking for someone who believes the law protects him but does not bind him, you might like to read the news on the current (Democratic) mayor of Chicago.
I live in Massachusetts where three straight Speakers were convicted of various crimes so I'm well aware of Democratic malfeasance. Right now Trump and his enablers are so much worse.
Musk's hypocrisy regarding "free speech" is more around him claiming to be libertarian, but that type of hypocrisy runs deep in the Libertarian party, as the attraction of freedom for me but not for thee is too strong and the party has been pwnt by moneyed sponsors the same as the two main parties.
Whatever a scientist happens to believe in, these changes would not imperil his ability to receive government funding. But in the previous system, if one felt that unconditional merit was the most fundamental factor in science (and refused to simply lie) he would have been found it much more difficult to secure funding.
This is the significant part.
Woke ideology was always unpopular when put to the test in the court of public opinion and sometimes even law. Whether it's entertainment products that got reviewbombed for incorporating "diversity", illegal hiring/enrollment quotas that once existed to enforce "inclusion", or the replacing of the word "equality" with "equity" because people started catching on that what was touted as equality actually wasn't.
Now that we have a President (and by extension a party) who was elected to get rid of all that, promises to do so are being kept.
As a Japanese-American, I 300% voted for and support this. Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
I advise you read through the actual Executive Orders than some false propaganda material of at best questionable value.
What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Here are the EOs with regards to the subject matter at hand:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/refo...
>Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.
>Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.
----
>This Federal Hiring Plan shall: ... prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals who are unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch;
Did you know the EO that was rescinded had similar verbiage too?[1]
[1] https://archives.federalregister.gov/issue_slice/1965/9/28/1...
Trump has outright been banning transgender individuals from enlisting in the military and serving. Presumably in a merit-based society you would judge them on the basis of merit, not on a secondary characteristic.
Trans people I know are very sure about themselves. More than some cis people in fact. I will let RAND Corporation rebut the rest of your speculation.[1]
The effect on force readiness is an important consideration in any military policy change. Many types of medical treatments can lead to lost labor and leave personnel temporarily unable to deploy. Given the small estimated number of transgender personnel and the even smaller number who would seek gender transition–related treatment in a given year, the study found that the readiness impact of transition-related treatment would lead to a loss of less than 0.0015 percent of total available labor-years in the active component. Even using the highest estimates, less than 0.1 percent of the force would seek gender transition–related treatment that would affect their ability to deploy. As a point of comparison, in the Army alone, approximately 50,000 active-component personnel were ineligible to deploy in 2015 for various legal, medical, or administrative reasons—a number amounting to around 14 percent of the active component.
A key concern in allowing transgender personnel to serve openly is how this may affect unit cohesion. The underlying assumption is that if service members discover that a member of their unit is transgender, this could inhibit bonding within the unit, which, in turn, would reduce operational readiness. Similar concerns were raised in debates over whether to allow gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly, as well as over whether to allow women to serve in ground combat positions. However, evidence from foreign militaries and the U.S. military has indicated no significant impact on unit cohesion or operational readiness as a result of allowing transgender and gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly or allowing women to serve in ground combat positions.
[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R...
This is a sensible middle-ground approach for the rest of society too. Just treat it like a minority religious belief, then the issue is solved fairly without stepping on anyone's rights.
If both Republicans and Democrats agreed to this approach and put this issue to bed, they could get on with wrangling over much more important problems of governance.
Unless you're proposing making the military- and the rest of society- radically gender neutral, than as soon as a person interacts with a driver's license, passport, social media account, or bathroom, they will have to adopt a gender identity . Why should a third party's "gender beliefs" about a person be elevated above their own?
(I also can't see a justification for denying hormone replacement therapy treatment- it's cheap and ridiculously beneficial for mental health. But, for the same reasons, I advocate its availability over-the-counter.)
Being an objective measurement of material biological state, sex isn't the same type of thing as a gender identity belief, which is indeed self-declared like a religion is.
Why is this a talking point? Gender affirming surgeries are extremely rare. Very few trans people go through with them. And even when they do, recovery times are in the order of days or weeks which has little to no impact on the efficacy of the fighting force.
The main things trans people want are:
1. That people treat them with basic human dignity and respect.
2. Access to gender affirming medications. It ultimately doesn't really matter who pays for them because they cost nothing. They are quite literally some of the cheapest medications on the market. Estradiol without insurance costs like 10-20USD for a 3 month supply. Testosterone about the same or less. Androgen blockers cost like 1-5USD for a 3 month supply. You could not find cheaper medications and most pharmacies won't even run insurance for them because they are so cheap. The reason the military "needs" to pay for them is because they need to run the medication through their logistics network so that it is accessible where it is needed.
The cost is irrelevant. What matters is that the medication can get delivered to ships and bases in a timely manner. And that is why the military pays for it.
And the reason they should have interest in doing it is because the overwhelming majority of trans people in the military are people who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria while in the military. The military treats that gender dysphoria so that they can continue to be effective members of the fighting force.
These are people who are already in the military and want to continue to be in the military and do their jobs effectively. A few pills a day or an injection every few days or weeks is generally effective at treating gender dysphoria with accommodations such as social transition further treating it while doing nothing to diminish the efficacy of the fighting force.
Not treating or accommodating them means they either leave the military (which is a problem because the military has a critical shortage of senior personnel due to horrific retention issues) or they perform their duties in a diminished capacity. There's no reason to harm the fighting force's efficacy and/or retention over a treatment that has essentially zero cost and no impact on operational readiness (compared to all the other long term treatments they allow which do impact operational readiness).
>Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
But now you are taking your preconceived notion of what every trans person must think and disqualifying the entire group from the military before they have an opportunity to prove whether or not they meet the requirements.
Not very merit-based of you.
Conservatives are OK with rolling everything back and hiding behind words, since right now, most people at the highest levels of power - that do the judging - are white men.
How else do you explain such "merit" based nominations like Hegseth for SecDef, Gaetz for Attorney General, etc. (Gaetz withdrew but getting nominated at all was ridiculous). And if Hegseth is qualified to lead the DoD, then so is anybody who ever served in the military at the rank of Major or higher.
Sincerely screw all that racist noise with extreme prejudice. In this regard, the Left did more work than anyone to get me to vote Trump.
Well, racism is fixed. Finally!
You should talk to more Americans that were involved in the corporate structure of the 1950-1990s. Old money ruled the place and white, protestant men filled every seat in the office. It was a caste system, and worst of all it was protected by the Civil Rights Act which did not demand equal opportunity when hiring. This was destructive to talented minorities, protective of untalented executives and ultimately wasteful to everyone that wasn't on "the inside" of the administrative structure. Something had to be done, these businesses weren't going to stop themselves from becoming insular and hostile boy's clubs.
Regan had the right idea; keep affirmative action, but axe or soften the numerical requirements. Trump had the wrong idea, but went with it anyways because he knows that today's neocons are hungry for some good, old-fashioned, government-sanctioned racism. You should be careful to not let your insecurities choose who you think is right, especially in pissing contests where you're liable to get wet.
Perhaps fortunately, I personally (second generation Japanese-American) was not directly affected by DEI. Maybe I should have experienced it somehow so I could give an even more damning opinion.
However, I was witness to family members (Japanese-Americans, Asians) who were discriminated against both positively and negatively citing DEI. Not to mention all those "minority owned" and "women owned" business categories that were prominent if you did any amount of officework. Just how widespread and deep this nouveau resurgence of racism and sexism were was and arguably still is both astonishing and terrifying.
I want everyone to be judged for their merit and character. I have absolutely no problem if "white protestant men" dominate a given sector if that is simply the result of judgments passed strictly on merit and character. People who can do <X> the best should be the people who get to do <X> without any regard to skin color or religion.
Giving me special treatment one way or another just because I'm Asian is fucking racist and I will neither accept nor tolerate it. I want to be seen and treated as an American like any other, it's right there in the Declaration of Independence: "All Men Are Created Equal."
Trump reiterating with a mandate that the government can not and will not judge people based on race, sex, religion, or any other DEI reasoning is something I unequivocally support and will support to my dying breath. This is equality in its most raw and sincere form: It does not and should not matter what you are born as, you will be judged for who you become.
What is most astonishing to me in all this is just how much we've reversed course on equality, considering one another as simply men among mankind, over the past two to three decades. You're literally trying to tell me that refusing to judge people based on their race is racism. Do you not understand how nonsensical that is? Do you understand how patently stupid that is from the perspective of a minority, or at least this particular Japanese-American man? What the sincere fuck.
"Diversity" in DEI is Discrimination. Equity in DEI is a violation of every man's right to pursuit of happiness. "Inclusion" is an affront to the sharing of diverse ideas and beliefs among mankind. I applaud and cheer for the resounding rejection of DEI, this is a step in the right direction both for the United States of America and for mankind. I voted for this in 2024 and I will vote likewise again Every. Single. Time.
It does not sound like that. At least, not at the NSF, which is freezing funds until it's had an ideologically-driven purge.
The Office of Science seems to have a better approach, removing the need for the previous administration's PIER plan and ignoring any already submitted
This is not true. If I submit a project to study the large-scale effect of DEI policies in institutions, that will get rejected because "anti-DEI" is in the current government's idelogy, as written down in presidential orders.
They are not simply removing the previous ideology and leaving a void in place. There are no voids in power structures.
That is literally the opposite of what the linked article claims. They aren't "stripping requirements" placed on funding, they're stripping the actual funds from existing grants, based on new requirements that just happen to be phrased along the lines of the ruling regime's political rhetoric.
Your Orwellian version only makes sense if you assume a priori that the funds were granted incorrectly, which again is sort of the opposite of what science is.
This is with the previous administration was also doing. You were required to buy into the DEI ideology, prove your loyalty to the new religion.
What has been your personal experience with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in employment?
Mine has been that I watched a few videos that basically said: don't hit on people at work, don't mock people for disabilities, and don't treat people as lesser based on physical attributes.
In other words, don't be an asshole to people at work.
The only people I've seen given preferential treatment at work have been those who suck up to the leadership to get promoted.
I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information.
For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation.
The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.
Why do you say it is a fallacy when the E in DEI stands for the so called equity, which means exactly that. You seem to be describing equality, which is something that DEI was intended to supersede.
When you look at pre-Trump guidelines for FAA job applications, for example, there is an explicitly described preferential process for hiring from the favored groups.
Have you considered that your sources of data may be biased?
Consider, for example that need-based scholarships are perhaps one of the clearest examples of a equitable, but explicitly unequal program. Should they be removed, or perhaps is there some legitimacy to this "equity" thing?
That's discrimination on the basis of income, which is legal. Discrimination on the basis of race and gender is not. All of the DEI programs I've seen have focused on equity with respect to race and gender. And 3 out of 4 companies I've worked at employed discrimination to that end.
Plenty of people have seen their employers adopt discriminatory practices in pursuit of equity. Condescending towards people and insisting that they're being misled about DEI is not a good way to defend it when loads of people have witnessed discrimination carried out under DEI programs firsthand. While I respect that none of your experiences with DEI involved discrimination, I urge you to meet other people who've had different experiences with the same respect.
Those aren't the same question and I don't think conflating them is constructive. I'm not arguing that companies can do harmful things in the name of diversity. But the goal of equitable outcomes being worthwhile is independent from anyone's feelings about the legitimacy of any particular approach to meeting that goal, and that's what I asked about, and what you didn't reply to. I'd ask you to consider why.
Reading some of your other posts on the topic, you keep quoting a "3/4" statistic, and you've described different practices when asked to describe what they were you've described:
- Explicit racial and gender quotas in headcount (which are flatly illegal and so I doubt) - Hiring goals in OKRS (which aren't inherently discriminatory, and probably weren't achieved!) - Giving candidates multiple attempts on interviews in certain cases - Requiring a certain number of underrepresented candidates to be offered interviews before the candidate can be picked
I want to dig into this last one, because in my experience, this is somewhat common, but only with executive hiring, where often roles aren't open for public application, and this forces executive search companies to make a modicum of additional effort to source and provide diverse candidates to the hiring company. This has, in some cases I've seen, also resulted in executive level positions having open public job postings.
I also want to dig in to something you said in another comment, because I think you're using discrimination in a particular way that's not how most people think of it. Phrased more forcefully, the definition of "racial discrimination" you appear to be using and considering harmful includes practices that are both generally considered legal and generally considered moral.
> Not every form of discrimination involves lowering hiring standards. For instance, imagine I flip a coin whenever a Catholic candidate applies. Tails, their resume goes into the garbage bin, heads and their application process as normal. Does this lower lower hiring standards for non Catholics? No. Does this advantage non-Catholics over Catholic candidates? Yes. It would halve the hiring rate of Catholics, though it doesn't result in any "lowering the bar".
So, I agree that this would lower the hiring rate of Catholics, but under this definition, ending this (clearly) discriminatory practice would lower the hiring rate of non-catholics. If your metric is "it is discriminatory if it harms the hiring rate of some group", then you've created an explicitly zero-sum definition of discrimination, and anything that reduces discrimination against some group causes discrimination against another. In doing so you've baked in an assumption about the correctness of the methodology at some particular time and place that you're measuring against.
You can call that discrimination, and I actually do in a lot of circumstances, but it isn't bad. It's actually a good thing, and we recognize that in a lot of circumstances that discrimination in pursuit of equity is moral and legal and even necessary!
Outside the US, for example, there are explicit racial quotas in a lot of situations, for example in New Zealand[0] there are explicit quotas in parliament to ensure continued native representation, and India has quota systems to help support lower caste individuals in opposition to active discrimination in society by upper-caste folks.
Even in the US, Due to the 1965 Voting Rights Act [1], ensuring representation of minority groups and actively "discriminating" in district drawing to en...
Your example of India's caste based affirmative action is a good one. In fact, one of my past employers replicated it: we reserved a segment of engineering headcount for women, much in the same vein as India's reservation system with respect to caste. However, this is illegal in the US, but the company was confident that non-discrimination laws wouldn't be enforced when the victims were men. Though as of the last election, companies seem to recognize that this non-enforcement is a thing of the past.
The 3 out of 4 data point is my firsthand experience with my previous employer's DEI practices. Out of the 4 companies I've worked at, 3 employed DEI practices that are overtly discriminatory. So understand that when you write about how discriminatory DEI practices are myth, people such as myself have firsthand experience to the contrary. You're asking people to disbelieve their own lying eyes, when you insist that the notion that DEI involves discrimination is misinformation.
Equity requires discrimination, since almost no outcomes are perfectly equal across demographics. Achieving an equitable gender representation of pediatricians requires discriminating against female pediatricians. Achieving an equitable gender representation of software developers requires discrimination against male developers.
My use of the word "discrimination" is squarely in line with common use: does a policy discriminate on the basis of protected class? If so it's discrimination. Reserving headcount for one gender, even if it's done to push gender representation closer to 50/50, is discrimination. The notion that discrimination isn't discrimination when it's perpetrated against "non-diverse" groups is not in line with the common use of the term.
I want to clarify, because I see an inconsistency here. You say that preventing Catholic resumes from getting thrown out solely on the basis of race, is not discrimination and a good thing, and I agree. But elsewhere, you've said that changing hiring processes to ensure that URM and women are searched out and interviewed, is bad discrimination.
The same action, ensuring fair access to the pipeline, is in your opinion non-discriminatory (and legal) when it helps theoretical Catholic people, but is discriminatory and illegal when it benefits women and racial minorities.
I'm calling this out for two reasons, one because I want you to consider and reflect on this inconsistency, and two, to point this out to others reading and engaging, because insisting that we're asking you to disbelieve your own eyes does feel compelling, but less so when it appears very apparent that objectively, you're perception is colored by bias.
> So understand that when you write about how discriminatory DEI practices are myth, people such as myself have firsthand experience to the contrary.
I want to clarify, I've never said anything like this. My comments are pointing out an objection to your understanding of the word equity and how you interpret it. I've been fairly consistent about this, and you continue to avoid that and make more sweeping objections and statements about programs and your experiences, which may or may not be true but aren't actually relevant to the central question I'm asking, which is "Can equitable programs be good?"
> Equity requires discrimination, since almost no outcomes are perfectly equal across demographics.
I'm also going to call this out yet again, because it's the objection I made at the beginning of this thread. So I'll outline it yet again because you avoided it twice now:
I consider need based financial aid to be an equitable program, specifically because it takes into account the circumstances of the individuals. It does not require or make any assumptions about outcomes being equivalent. What it avoids doing is making the assumption that giving all people the same treatment (the same price) is the best approach. Do you disagree, and if so where?
Now I could agree that it requires discrimination based on financial status, but that is an input to the system, not an output (both in individual cases, and in aggregate). Where I disagree is that equity requires some assumption that outcomes are perfectly equal across demographics. I think that if you believe that, it makes perfect sense to oppose such programs, but I also believe that the people doing most equity work don't believe that, and it is primarily opponents of the programs that push such narratives.
> My use of the word "discrimination" is squarely in line with common use: does a policy discriminate on the basis of protected class?
You're using the word in its definition. And much like in this case, you've conflated what I'd describe as "unlawful discrimination" that violates the Civil Rights Act and "immoral discrimination" that may or may not break laws but is a bad thing, and "discrimination" that may in fact be a good thing but is predicated on recognizing differences between groups elsewhere in your responses, and it muddles the points that I think you're trying to make.
I'd agree that equitable programs require discrimination in that third sense, but I disagree that such discrimination is necessarily unlawful or immoral, and I'll yet again point to the example of need based financial aid as an explicitly legal, moral, equitable category of program.
> But elsewhere, you've said that changing hiring processes to ensure that URM and women are searched out and interviewed, is bad discrimination.
"changing hiring processes to ensure that URM and women are searched out and interviewed" is a vague statement that encompasses both discriminatory and non-discriminatory practices.
Examples of non-discriminatory hiring practices that could boost women and URM participation include: anonymizing hiring processes to prevent bias or recruiting at events like Grace Hopper or at HBCUs. Examples of discriminatory practices include: Quotas (whether they're quotas on hiring or interviewing), reservation systems that prohibit non-diverse candidates from segments of headcount, or bonuses paid out to managers when they hire candidates of a particular race or gender. All of these practices serve to increase diverse turnout, but the former do so in a non discriminatory manner and the latter do so in a discriminatory manner. The problem is, only the latter can guarantee equitable outcomes.
You're using financial aid as a motte-and-baily here. Financial aid and preferences for low-income applicants in university are legal. Preferences for race and gender in hiring is not. Both are discrimination, yes. But the former is legal, and the latter is not. There's no inconsistency in supporting the former, and opposing the latter. And the conversation is about racial and gender equity.
> What it avoids doing is making the assumption that giving all people the same treatment (the same price) is the best approach
When it comes to race and gender in hiring, it is mandated by law that you give applicants of all races and all gender identities the same treatment. Anything less is illegal. I guess it's possible to think that the best approach is to flout the law and carry out illegal hiring practices to push towards equity. And at 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at that's what they did, so you'd be hardly alone in that position.
> I'd agree that equitable programs require discrimination in that third sense, but I disagree that such discrimination is necessarily unlawful or immoral
Again, the conversation is about racial and gender equity in hiring. I don't care about your opinion on financial aid about preferences for low income college students. When you wrote this statement, "I disagree that such discrimination is necessarily unlawful or immoral", are you referring to discrimination on the basis of race and gender in hiring?
I highly suggest you read up on employment laws, especially since you're putting your employer's name in your profile.
But the policy you describe uses protected class as a factor, and results in, for example, atheist applicants being less likely to be hired than before.
> And the conversation is about racial and gender equity.
No, the conversation is about equity, and my belief that you misunderstood the term. All I've claimed is that equity is a worthwhile goal. You seem deeply unwilling to engage with that claim, instead distracting with questions about legality which, even if your understanding were correct, wouldn't be relevant to my question.
> Quotas (whether they're quotas on hiring or interviewing)
So would a policy that says that for any given position, you must interview at least one candidate from say 4 distinct declared racial backgrounds be legal in your view? It treats every race equally and doesn't favor or disfavor any particular race.
> I highly suggest you read up on employment laws, especially since you're putting your employer's name in your profile.
While the relevant executive order was repealed, making it no longer required, I think referencing the department of labor's own info on hiring law is worthwhile: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs and https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/placement-goals#Q3 The crux being that while explicit hiring quotas are illegal, which is what I said, goals to measure against are not illegal. There's nothing I can find to suggest that quotas in application pool size are unlawful, and they're every common. I appreciate your concern, but perhaps read up yourself.
No it does not. When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators and women's representation subsequently increased, that wasn't discrimination against men. That was discrimination against women being removed.
A policy of rejecting 50% of Catholics discriminates on the basis of religion. Removing this policy and adopting a non-discriminatory hiring practices may result in lower proportional representation of non-Catholics. That doesn't make it discriminatory, it just meant that the representation of non-Catholics was previously inflated by the discriminatory suppression of 50% of Catholic applicants. I'm not sure why this is hard to comprehend.
> So would a policy that says that for any given position, you must interview at least one candidate from say 4 distinct declared racial backgrounds be legal in your view?
Nope, this is still using protected class as a factor in hiring. You cannot deny, nor delay, the hiring process on the basis protected class. Meta used this policy, they called it "Diverse Slate Approach". I explain how it discriminates on the basis of protected class here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753672
> While the relevant executive order was repealed, making it no longer required,
It was never even allowed by law. The executive order doesn't actually do anything except restating the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: discrimination on the basis of protected class is illegal in hiring. What it really did was signal that non-enforcement of antidiscrimination laws against "non-diverse" groups is no longer going to continue. This is why Meta ended the DSA, and why many institutions are rolling back their DEI programs.
> The crux being that while explicit hiring quotas are illegal, which is what I said, goals to measure against are not illegal.
Imagine one company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% quota for women in engineering roles.
Another company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% goal for women in engineering roles.
What's the difference between these two policies?
This isn't a hypothetical example. Your own company created such a policy: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-evaluate-executive... I wouldn't be surprised if Google does away with these totally-not-quotas the same way Meta ditched the DSA.
Whether you call them "goals" or "representation targets" or "diversity milestones", whenever you define success and failure in terms of numerical thresholds on the basis of protected class, it's almost certainly going to incentivize discrimination.
And again, in my experience companies are simply ignoring these laws and adopting quotas or other discriminatory practices anyway. Or at least they were during the previous administration, when they were confident enforcement would be lax.
No no, I fully agree with you here. I just also continue this train of thought to say that doing the same thing by removing discriminatory hiring practices that were suppressing the hiring of women and URM applicants is also reducing discrimination. But somehow you seem to consistently disagree at that point.
To build on your example, imagine that the company doesn't immediately realize that their hiring process is tossing out resumes. They think it's working fine. Someone comes along and says "hey, your hiring of Catholics is surprisingly low compared to what we would expect." The company investigates and agrees. They realize it's not actually due to the system throwing out 50% of Catholic's resumes, but instead some automated screening software that misinterprets language that Catholics use and throws out a disproportionate number of their applications. Unfortunately, this system is extremely effective in other cases, so the company can't actually just entirely stop using it, or they'd be unable to effectively screen candidates at all.
The company devises a plan, with a measurable goal to increase employment among Catholics by 10% by the end of the year. They re-review some Catholic resumes resumes, and proactively reach out to some applicants who had been denied and re-interview them. They put some additional systems in place to manually review new incoming resumes by Catholic applicants. They work with the automated resume screening software provider to improve the software and stop rejecting the applicants. They reach out to Loyola and Georgetown and ensure that the students at these traditionally Catholic universities have some additional training on how to write their resumes in a way that gets past the screening software.
This all seems fine and good, both morally and legally, to me. Where do you land?
> You cannot deny, nor delay,
> I explain how it discriminates on the basis of protected class here:
I don't actually see any justification for saying a delayed hiring process would be discriminatory. Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool, there are pretty reasonable business justifications, such as "any hiring process that is unable to find even a single potentially qualified minority applicant is probably irrevocably flawed."
To zero in on your Meta example, unless you can show that the hiring process was noticeable longer for some candidates than others, which I find deeply unlikely, the more reasonable explanation than your handwavy suggestion that
> But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.
is that it improved demographics by exposing decision makers (Hiring Managers) to more qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds. To phrase this differently: if we return to our Catholic example, if you implement a requirement that all roles must consider a Catholic, and this encourages recruiters to actively reach out to catholic hires, some of the folks who were autorejected by the screening process will be found despite being missed the first time.
> It was never even allowed by law.
I want to clarify, you are saying that the Department of Labor guidance as defined under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246, which has been the Department of Labor policy for 60 years now, is unlawful, and has been for 60 years, through multiple administrations on both sides of the aisle? Because that seems like it is beyond the pale of a reasonable understanding of the law. Of cour...
So I can institute a policy of delaying offers to pregnant women for 9 months?
> Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool,
Yes, that is the intent. The longer candidates have to wait for an offer, the more likely they are to accept a competing offer or drop out of the hiring process. The way the DSA increased the representation of "diverse" demographics is by making "non-diverse" candidates wait a potentially long time for the DSA to be fulfilled, while diverse candidates never had to wait because their inclusion immediately fulfilled the DSA.
You realize that "increasing diversity" is identical to "reduce the representation of non-diverse demographics"? It's a discriminatory policy that examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender.
> You seem to claim, however, that a number of commonly accepted, widely adopted, standard policies that companies have used for decades are actually illegal and have been the entire time.
These policies haven't been used for decades. Google only recently including representation quotas - oh, sorry, goals - in performance reviews in 2021. Meta didn't employ the DSA until 2018. These are have not been employed for decades.
> Quota has a specific meaning in these contexts, that among other things includes the concept of including objectively less qualified folks on the basis of the discriminated attribute. So a gendered quota would mean something like hiring the top N applicants from each group, even if for example, there were more qualified men being passed over, and this was actively acknowledged. If it's not doing that, legally speaking, it isn't a quota.
>> Another company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% goal for women in engineering roles.
>This requires deeper analysis: are they hiring only qualified applicants, but making new efforts to appeal and access previously untapped groups of qualified women? Great!
You realize these are the exact same policy? If I penalize my employees if they don't meet a minimum percentage of a protected class, it's the same policy regardless of the specific word uses for the minimum percentage.
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
The incentive structure this puts on employees is exactly the same. At this point you're defending quotas, as long as companies use a euphemism for them.
I do agree that these quotas are in common use. But you're wrong that using a euphemism for quotas makes them any different in function.
Throughout your replies, you repeatedly defend the use of non-discriminatory policies that don't treat applicants differently on th basis of protected class, and only involve soliciting more applications from diverse candidates. That's all fine and dandy. But then you turn around and try to defend policies that do discriminate on the basis of race and gender. This doesn't follow. The fact that a quota could theoretically be fulfilled by more aggressively soliciting applicants from the target demographic doesn't change the fact that it's a discriminatory policy. Especially when the quota calls for levels of representation well above the demographics's representation in the field, it's certain to result in biased hiring. And no, simply calling a quota something else doesn't change that fact.
The motte and bailey you've constructed is clear:
The motte: companies should analyze their hiring policies and make sure that candidates are treated no different on the basis of protected class. ...
Then I think my caveat ("Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool") applies.
> Yes, that is the intent. The longer candidates have to wait for an offer, the more likely they are to accept a competing offer or drop out of the hiring process. The way the DSA increased the representation of "diverse" demographics is by making "non-diverse" candidates wait a potentially long time for the DSA to be fulfilled, while diverse candidates never had to wait because their inclusion immediately fulfilled the DSA.
You can justify this numerically, right? Like, You have some data to back this up, right? Like you aren't just entirely making up a boogeyman, right? You have some evidence beyond your personal dissatisfaction and disapproval that the process actually results in significantly different processing times for diverse vs. non-diverse applicants, right? Because without such evidence, you're making a pretty conspiratorial claim.
> You realize that "increasing diversity" is identical to "reduce the representation of non-diverse demographics"? It's a discriminatory policy that examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender.
Yes, I agree with you. But now when you said
> That doesn't make it discriminatory, it just meant that the representation of non-Catholics was previously inflated by the discriminatory suppression of 50% of Catholic applicants. I'm not sure why this is hard to comprehend.
You see how this is a contradiction. The policy to "increase diversity" and improve retention of Catholics isn't discriminatory, when you described it, but it is discriminatory now when it suits you since it "reduces the representation of <non-catholic> applicants".
You can't have it both ways, this is why the language you use is important, because while it is true that many of these policies do take into account applicant race and gender, they do so in ways that are explicitly legal, and often explicitly required. So when you say any policy which "examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender" is illegal, you're wrong. That's not what the law says, that's not what the law thinks, that's not what the courts have held for 60 years.
If a company institutes a policy to reduce discrimination against a particular class, that policy must, necessarily recognize that class and consider it differently to ensure that it is treated fairly. The law recognizes this, you appear not to.
This is why I keep asking you to use more precise language, you're saying things are discriminatory, but you use that sometimes to mean in the illegal sense, and sometimes you mean in the practical sense of recognizing differences.
> You realize these are the exact same policy? If I penalize my employees if they don't meet a minimum percentage of a protected class, it's the same policy regardless of the specific word uses for the minimum percentage.
You continue to not understand what a quota is, and how the law considers them different than other policies. If you maintain the same hiring bar, it isn't a quota. A quota functionally requires using a lower quality bar for such applicants, and using class, not qualification, as the deciding factor.
> These policies haven't been used for decades. Google only recently including representation quotas - oh, sorry, goals - in performance reviews in 2021. Meta didn't employ the DSA until 2018. These are have not been employed for decades.
The policies I'm describing, that the EEOC has forced companies to follow as part of consent decrees, and that the federal government has required of contractors, have in fact been required for decad...
Yes, if you compile statistics on how long candidates have to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled, you'll see that diverse candidates don't have to wait at all because the DSA is fulfilled the moment that a diverse candidate is interviewed but the non-diverse candidates are stuck waiting until a diverse candidate is interviewed.
This is explicitly documented in Meta's hiring policies, both the mechanisms by which offers for non-diverse candidates are delayed and the goals of reducing non-diverse representation.
> You see how this is a contradiction. The policy to "increase diversity" and improve retention of Catholics isn't discriminatory, when you described it, but it is discriminatory now when it suits you since it "reduces the representation of <non-catholic> applicants".
The "The policy to 'increase diversity' and improve retention of Catholics" in the example above is to stop rejecting 50% of Catholic applicants.
If a company anonymizes its hiring and the hiring rate of women subsequently increases, then that is increasing the representation of women through non-discriminatory means.
If a company institutes a policy where managers' performance reviews are penalized unless they hire a certain percentage of women, then that is increasing representation through discriminatory means. The performance reviewed were changed to use the protected class of hires as a factor.
I'm not sure why you think this is a contradiction. If a policy uses the protected class of applicants or hires as a factor, it's discriminatory. Things like anonymizing interviews are not discriminatory. Do you really not understand why anonymizing hiring is non-discriminatory, but setting thresholds on the hiring outcomes and penalizing employees if those thresholds are not met is discrimination?
> You continue to not understand what a quota is, and how the law considers them different than other policies. If you maintain the same hiring bar, it isn't a quota. A quota functionally requires using a lower quality bar for such applicants, and using class, not qualification, as the deciding factor.
A quota does not require setting a different hiring bar. Imagine I have a diversity goal of 40% women hires in software development. Only 20% of software developers are women, so in order to meet this quota, I flip a coin whenever a male developer applies and reject 50% of male applicants. The rest of the interview process proceeds as normal. This doesn't lower the bar for women. They still need to pass the same set of skills based interviews as men. But it's absolutely discrimination on the basis of gender to reject 50% of male applicants to pursue a diversity goal.
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
Why does one require lowering the bar, but the other does not, when the policies are functionally identical? Your performance review score is reduced if you hire less than X% women in both cases. Is your line of argument really that the mere substitution of one word determines how employees will respond to the threat of lower performance reviews if a threshold isn't met? That's ridiculous, both policies exert the exact same amount of pressure to meet the X% threshold. If penalizing people for failing to meet an X% quota will lead them to lower hiring standards or engage in discrimination, then there's no reason to think that the exact...
So your contention is that the government regularly requires companies to undertake otherwise illegal activities, and that it would be illegal for the company to voluntarily follow a similar set of policies? Can you point to a statutory basis for this claim? I don't think I've ever seen the concept that a consent decree can require otherwise illegal actions.
> Why does one require lowering the bar, but the other does not, when the policies are functionally identical?
My contention is that it does not require illegal activities to meet reasonably set hiring goals.
> If a company institutes a policy where managers' performance reviews are penalized unless they hire a certain percentage of women, then that is increasing representation through discriminatory means. The performance reviewed were changed to use the protected class of hires as a factor.
In your Catholic example, is saying "we have a goal to stop flipping the coin" illegal? It is otherwise identical to a goal of increasing representation of a certain group by a certain percentage by changing some aspects of the hiring process that unfairly impacts a particular class.
Why is that policy acceptable, but real world policies are, seemingly in every case, supposedly illegal?
> This is explicitly documented in Meta's hiring policies, both the mechanisms by which offers for non-diverse candidates are delayed and the goals of reducing non-diverse representation.
Why haven't you sued them, if this was documented to the degree you describe, it was on its face illegal. And meta was actively admitting to illegal discrimination. I've been awarded money in a similar suit, so it's certainly possible for white men to win in discrimination cases.
Not regularly, only when companies are successfully sued for discriminating.
> Can you point to a statutory basis for this claim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Title...
United Steelworkers vs. Weber established that use of protected class as a factor in employment is allowed only in narrow circumstances. In that instance, a company only hired steelworkers from a whites-only union, and were compelled by the government to give preferences to nonwhite employees for some period of time afterward.
In normal circumstances, a company cannot give racial preferences.
> My contention is that it does not require illegal activities to meet reasonably set hiring goals.
You still haven't answered the question:
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
Why does one require illegal activities to meet, but not the latter? This remains unanswered.
> In your Catholic example, is saying "we have a goal to stop flipping the coin" illegal?
It's not.
> It is otherwise identical to a goal of increasing representation of a certain group by a certain percentage by changing some aspects of the hiring process that unfairly impacts a particular class.
Because it's using protected class as a factor in hiring.
Say an orchestra adopts anonymous auditions, and the representation of women rises from 33% to 50%. That's a non-discriminatory hiring policy.
Another orchestra issues a "goal" or "representation target" or "diversity milestone" or some other euphemism that allocates 50% of the orchestra seats to women. That's a discriminatory hiring policy.
This is fourth time I've explained this, it seems like you're being willfully ignorant here.
> Why is that policy acceptable, but real world policies are, seemingly in every case, supposedly illegal?
They're not illegal in every case. Anonymizing interviews is legal, for example. The problem is that the legal ways of reducing discrimination don't lead to equitable results. Thus pushes towards equity require illegal discrimination, like setting thresholds and penalizing employees when those thresholds aren't met.
> Why haven't you sued them, if this was documented to the degree you describe, it was on its face illegal.
Because I'm not a victim of its policies. I'm Cuban so I'm one of the "diverse" candidates that fulfills the DSA. I have no basis to sue.
As phrased, I don't think the first would be illegal. It probably doesn't actually meet the definition of a quota, although use of the word "quota" is likely to receive stricter scrutiny.
If it can be met without illegal practices, it's perfectly fine, and if you don't actually institute a quota, even if you call it a quota, it's fine.
If the goal can be met by expanding the talent pool or by reducing discrimination, it doesn't matter what you call it.
> Say an orchestra adopts anonymous auditions, and the representation of women rises from 33% to 50%. That's a non-discriminatory hiring policy.
> Another orchestra issues a "goal" or "representation target" or "diversity milestone" or some other euphemism that allocates 50% of the orchestra seats to women. That's a discriminatory hiring policy.
Now what if they are the same orchestra, that is, they set a goal of hiring 50% women, and meet it by blinding auditions? Again, my contention is that it is not necessary to undertake illegal activities to achieve a diverse hiring goal.
You seem to agree with this in theory, but when given any concrete policy proposal, even ones that are widely accepted and have been adopted by wide swaths of the US for the better part of a century, you claim that they are illegal. You're simply incorrect.
> Not regularly, only when companies are successfully sued for discriminating.
This is approximately a weekly occurrence (they settle about 2 cases per week), I'd say that's fairly regular.
Further, such goals were required by all federal contractors from 1965 to Jan 20 of this year (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246), its kind of silly to continue to claim that diversity goals are illegal when they've been required by every federal contractor for longer than any of the companies you've mentioned have existed.
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women" You think this is legal?
> Now what if they are the same orchestra, that is, they set a goal of hiring 50% women, and meet it by blinding auditions?
And what happens if they blind the auditions, but the share of women still falls short of 50%? Well, then they have to adjust the results of the blind auditions to match the quota.
You've repeatedly done this sneaky rhetorical slight of hand, where you endorse explicitly discriminatory policies and justify it with the claim that it could be achieved through non-discriminatory means. But that doesn't change the fact that the policy is discriminatory, and almost certainly would result in discrimination.
If I tell my employers that I don't want to hire any pregnant women - say, we institute a "diversity goal" of 100% non-pregnant employees - they could achieve this goal without actually discriminating against any pregnant women. That doesn't change the fact that such a goal is discriminatory.
> Again, my contention is that it is not necessary to undertake illegal activities to achieve a diverse hiring goal.
I've witnessed firsthand companies setting diversity "goals" of 40% women electrical engineers. 10% of electrical engineers are women. There's no way this can be feasibly achieved without resorting to gender discrimination.
> You seem to agree with this in theory, but when given any concrete policy proposal, even ones that are widely accepted and have been adopted by wide swaths of the US for the better part of a century, you claim that they are illegal. You're simply incorrect.
I've listed numerous hiring policies that I explain are not illegal:
* Anonymous resume review
* Adopting objective evaluation criteria
* Create and send resumes to your recruiters, identical save for identifying information like names, and follow up on any discrepancies on call-backs.
> This is approximately a weekly occurrence (they settle about 2 cases per week), I'd say that's fairly regular.
~100 cases a year nation wide makes it an extremely rare occurrence.
No they don't, they can (and in cases I've seen!) fail to reach the goals! Or they can adopt other legal policies such as additional ones I've suggested, or they can change the goal. But in any case the mere presence of a goal is not evidence of illegal activity, even here you yourself show that the actual illegal activity wouldn't be having the goal, but doing some illegal activity to meet the goal if the legal methods weren't enough.
Which is to say, we agree: a diversity goal itself is not illegal. You should instead say that you believe that the diversity goals you are criticizing are too high to be met by legal means. That's potentially an interesting conversation, but its much less punchy than what you're saying now, which is functionally that "the mere act of committing to diversity in a quantifiable way is criminal".
> Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women" You think this is legal?
As long as the methods of increasing representation are legal, yes. You yourself have said as much. Consider a sufficiently low X, such as 1%. I don't think it would be illegal for a company to punish managers who hire > 50 employees per year for failing to hire even a single woman over the course of a year. I think that would be strong evidence of discrimination on the part of those managers, and the companies would be right to discipline or fire employees who engaged in such discrimination.
> You've repeatedly done this sneaky rhetorical slight of hand, where you endorse explicitly discriminatory policies and justify it with the claim that it could be achieved through non-discriminatory means.
No, I've been consistent that it is not illegal to have a hiring goal. Such a goal can be met in legal or illegal ways. You appear to consistently claim that even stating a goal and holding people accountable to it is illegal. I disagree. It depends entirely on what methods are chosen. The pursuit of diversity is not inherently illegal.
> I've listed numerous hiring policies that I explain are not illegal
And you've additionally claimed that a number of perfectly legal policies which are unlawfully discriminatory. Pipeline expansion policies with the aim of creating diverse candidate pool are perfectly legal, especially when they aim to account for flaws in existing talent pipelines that may be biased by missing underrepresented candidates.
Your objection to to these programs is that you claim meta announced that the goal of one of their programs was to delay giving interviews and offers to certain candidates with the intent of having those candidates drop out, so they could instead extend more offers to diverse candidates, and that you saw numerical documentation of these delays and their impact. And all I'm going to say so that's the most bullshit thing I've ever heard, because of it were in fact that well documented, it would be a slam dunk case and have been front page news.
The fact that no one else I've ever spoken to about such pipeline expansion and slate diversity programs has ever mentioned such a concern suggests that this "fact" you have is not as well documented or as clearly intentioned as you make it seem.
I'm going to disengage after this post, because we aren't getting anywhere, you're accusing me of various bits of rhetorical sleight of hand that I'm not doing, and you appear to be inventing more and more elaborate lies to prop up your objection to these programs. That's your right, but it's not something I want to entertain further.
> ~100 cases a year nation wide makes it an extremely rare occurrence.
But I'll note you ignored the part where I mentioned every federal contractor has done things you claim are unlawful for 60 years.
> For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation
And as a counterexample, STEM hiring experiments showed a 2:1 bias in favor women: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
There's a book on the topic: "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" by John McWhorter
...which shows a specific instance of the religion take hold at Evergreen State.
Did he fail a critical vibe check / badly fail to read the room? Sure. Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired.
But is everyone already forgetting what things were like?
He was fired because he placed himself in a position where at least half the company would refuse to work with him.
It didn't matter if he was wrong or right, his mistake was entertaining the notion that people would entertain an earnest (if misguided) discussion when in fact that whole topic was taboo.
Did you read his memo[1]? That's not really what he's saying. He's ham-handedly trying to look for reasons that explain the gender gap in engineering. His thesis is that fewer women want to do that kind of work than men, not that those who do take the job are worse at it.
> That person has to be fired (directly into the sun, when practical).
Meow!
[1] https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
I think the fact that people have to resort to misunderstanding and misleading about what people like him say is very telling about the "religious" status of these beliefs. You see the same type of apologetics when Christians try to attack atheism.
NB: This post is not an endorsement of anything Damore said.
This is not even remotely what the memo said. The thesis of the memo is that not every gender disparity is due to bias or discrimination, and that directives to achieve equitable outcomes run a real risk of causing discrimination.
If someone said that men make up 90% of murder convictions not because the courts and police are biased against men, but because men commit 90% of murders, is that sexist against men?
How did they measure who didn't want to work with him, did they survey the entire company?
So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.
A better writer with more experience could have written a doc that was basically "some aspects of the training in our DEI classes is not scientifically supported, but is being used as a cudgel to change people's behavior" with a few examples.
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
His writing is very clear. He is talking about the Ideological Echo Chamber at Google. He is not railing against women.
Studying the literal fundamental nature of reality doesn't seem like a waste of time to me.
Damore said that women tend to choose to work with people rather than things. He said that, therefore, a way to increase women in the workforce is to enhance the peopleness of it, by incorporating more pair programming and collaboration.
He did not say that women were a poor fit for software engineering, nor that they were hired over more fitting men. Those words are from a bogeyman of your own imagination.
Closer, but still wrong. His point is that women are less likely to enter the field of software or engineering. Not that the subset of women who do enter those fields are less capable than men.
Imagine someone demands that we address the inequitable murder convictions with outcome based goals on the gender distribution of murder convictions. If I say that I believe that the disparity in murder convictions stems from the fact that men commit more murder, not bias in police or courts, does that make me a misandrist?
If women make up ~18% of software developers, why would we expect a non discriminatory hiring process to hire more than 18% women in software development roles?
Because it is using racism to try to cure racism and if you point out that this is wrong you will be called racist.
The absolutely worst statements are the people who believe that the statement is an ideological litmus test. It never was, and it isn't.
These statements, to a one, are basic HR stuff: discuss your strategies and experiences to not be an asshole and ensure that the diverse people you manage (and they almost certainly are diverse) will be able to get along and work effectively under your management. Boring stuff.
People think its some sort of ideological purity test, write it as such, and get surprised when the statement is evaluated poorly.
If the people writing the calls wanted the same things as the people reviewing the submissions, they would say, "tell us about your experiences with normal HR tasks."
I have not really encountered instructions that I would misconstrue to be an ideological litmus test, and the majority of submissions that I have reviewed do not in fact talk about the candidate's ideological priors.
I get that the way people think about these statements is different than the way they actually are; I just think people are wrong and that their impression is informed by social media. If it helps, I would be happy to rebrand "DEI Statement" to "Don't be an asshole and also try to keep the peace with everyone Statement".
The rubric I use to judge diversity statements, and which is often formalized in rubrics, is: "has the applicant thought about this at all to the point that they have specific experiences and strategies that lead us to trust that they could effectively manage a diverse population of students and staff".
There is nothing arcane about this. To the extent that diversity statements even factor in review, this is the same criteria that everyone I know follows.
In my own applications, I, as a white guy, have been very successful in getting jobs and funding. This is despite never making ideological commitments and barely talking about gender or race, and instead focusing on first-generation students. Just showing that I have put in a minimal amount of thought into working with diverse students and colleagues seems to be enough.
I have had mandatory trainings about this ad nauseam before I have been allowed to sit on hiring committees. One of the biases “DEI initiatives” warn against is being impressed by people who spew jargon without having done the work, and supporting people who have done the work (and give examples) without spewing jargon.
If the interpretation is “arcane”, that’s an institutional problem that goes far beyond interpreting an interview question that forms a fraction of the interview process. But claiming that’s inherent to organizations that mention diversity in an interview question is setting up a strawman, and HR will have it ground into your head that it is “inequitable”.
I don't doubt your lived experience, but in 3 out of 4 companies DEI initiatives took the form of explicitly discriminating on the basis of candidates' protected class. Practices like giving "diverse" candidates multiple chances go pass interviews where white and Asian men got one. Another straight up created a reservation system for diverse candidates.
I acknowledge that some people have had better experience DEI, but I'd encourage you to consider the possibility that many have witnessed explicit discrimination under the banner of DEI.
We can haggle over how many is enough to make a sweeping generalization, if you'd like. But I don't think that's productive for any of us if we want to debate whether loyalty tests actually existed, or whether "DEI" reduces to religion, as the parents have claimed.
I think the news is less that a branch of the executive is complying with executive branch policy, and more that it’s surprising how much of the federal government’s actions are based not in the law and the Constitution, but rather in policy. One man almost sixty years ago creates a policy with a stroke of a pen, and it effectively becomes law; another now removes it with a stroke of a different pen. If the latter is a problem, surely the former was too; if the former was not a problem, then why is the latter?
Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
This is like saying I read the first sentence of the wikipedia article and it doesn't mention something so it must not exist.
Congress authorized it in 1950; it's extremely visible. [1]
> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is authorized and governed by the "National Science Foundation Act of 1950," as amended, as well as other statutes authorizing NSF activities and making appropriations to the agency.
[1]: https://new.nsf.gov/about/authorizing-legislation
The Tenth Amendment clearly states, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ If the Constitution does not grant a power to the Congress, it does not have it and it has no more legislative authority in that regard than you or I do.
That’s not Sovereign Citizen nonsense — it’s very basic constitutional law. Congress doesn’t have the ability to pass national rent control, for example.
Rent control should be easy to fit within "general welfare".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Price_Control_Act_of...
It's a reading of constitutional law that insists that the only thing that matters is what they can shallowly read in their pocket constitution, while totally ignoring most of the constitution itself and any of the surrounding court precedent. :)
Eadmund incorrectly notes "The Congress only has the powers granted in Article I and further amendments", and cites the tenth amendment while asking "What’s the Constitutional basis for that law?"
Duh, the appointments clause in conjunction with the necessary and proper clause. :3
> Article I bestows on Congress certain specified, or enumerated, powers. The Court has recognized that these powers are supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause, which provides Congress with "broad power to enact laws that are ‘convenient, or useful’ or ‘conducive’ to [the] beneficial exercise" of its more specific authorities. The Supreme Court has observed that the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to establish federal offices. Congress accordingly enjoys broad authority to create government offices to carry out various statutory functions and directives. The legislature may establish government offices not expressly mentioned in the Constitution in order to carry out its enumerated powers.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C2-3...
Section 7 [2] lets them write laws as well as Section 8 [4] . Section 8 aslo lets them pay for it [3].
[1]: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/us-c...
[2]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
[3]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
[4]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
Of course it does. It has no power to regulate rents outside of federal territories, which is what I wrote. It cannot pass national rent control, for example.
> Section 7 lets them write laws as well as Section 8
Section 7 describes how bills are passed; Section 8 describes what those bills may do. Congress has no Constitutional power to require that every home in the United States have yellow shutters. I feel like this should be uncontroversial! I’m genuinely surprised anyone thinks otherwise.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
The Constitution is a collection of statements and they collectively have implications. All of Euclidean geometry is based off of 5 statements. That the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say you can have a Department of the Air Force does not imply having one is unconstitutional.
Many Christians believe in the holy trinity despite that phrase appearing nowhere in the Bible.
So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era? And that wasn't a merit policy, that was an explicitly discriminatory policy against women long after the Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova into space.
(at time of writing, she is still alive and the only woman ever to have had a solo spaceflight!)
> In the UK I had a grant application denied based only on DEI
Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
Do you have any control over this?
Now: in what way will you avoid addressing the point (if you do reply)....will it be in the heart of the distribution as usual, or can you generate an anomaly....
We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse. It's the same as wanting the best doctor, or the best pilot.
The UK team for Olympic 100m is majority non-white. I have no doubt that these are amongst the fastest people in the world. Based on DEI standards, should we pick people who are shown slower just to make a more colourful team?
> Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
You can call BS all you like, the application literally stated it so. The threshold for funding was met, but was rejected on the basis.
Considering color or religion doesn't have any impact on the ability of someone to be a "best astronaut", if your groups isn't diverse, it's most likely there is a bias in action.
That's not quite true.
> A mixture of their environment, parenting
One would wonder what could be behind that... Also, poorer schools in poor neighborhoods because they receive less funding, lowering the value or real estate in the neighborhood, attracting poor people to it.
> and genetics probably
Funny how this always comes up.
If a group of 'X' people (based on any factor you like, be it race, gender, ideology, protected characteristics, etc) are statistically lower IQ, you would expect this to be reflected in selection over a large enough sample.
Equally, I would expect that when you're fighting for people who are in high demand, that the wage reflects it. Merit is a "positive discrimination" for people who do the job better.
You have 8 blue people and 2 purple people. The blue people and purple people have different colour, different ideology, but are the same in all ways that count.
The astronaut programme opens up and needs 5 people. From 10 people, choose 5. It turns out that there are 252 ways of doing this [1]. At most you could only have 2 purple people selected, when 1 purple person is selected it looks unbiased, but actually the vast majority of cases are when only blue people are represented.
Another way to think about it is this: 8 blue people, 2 purple people. You pick one at random, there is an 8/10 chance you pick blue, 2/10 purple. If you select a purple, for the next pick there is now just a 1/9 chance of picking purple, but an 8/9 chance of picking blue.
[1] https://www.hackmath.net/en/calculator/n-choose-k?n=10&k=5&o...
"(Climate Change|Evolution|The concept of a flat earth) is like an ideology to some people — they get angry the minute you start to question it".
> The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed ... and put social grievances ahead of objective truth".
They proved their point. When only papers of a certain conclusion are accepted which further an ideological belief, Science is dead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
If you look at CEOs you will see that white men are very overrepresented. I (as a white man) don't for a moment believe that that is because white men are better at being CEOs (achieve better outcomes). Rather I believe it is because the selection process has long been biased in favor of white men (both in the last steps, and the path to get there). And this is not just my biases at play, many studies have been done, and none show that white men generically achieve better outcomes.
So DEI is the idea that we need to make the selection process better account for people's biases (largely unconscious) that have been driving this outcome (white men preferentially being selected). It is not about quotas or giving people points for being a woman/black person/disabled/etc. It is all about making sure that those characteristics do not subtract points.
And I have used white men as an example here, as that has been where the largest biases have been (both white, and men), and also because I am currently a beneficiary of those biases, making it hard to argue that I am only arguing this to get an advantage for myself. But you could just as easily point to the current over-representation of women in colleges and universities and worry about an anti-man bias there.
In India they’re more explicitly called out as ‘reservations’, in the US they are based on statistical models of the population.
Once your company gets above a certain size, or if it does business with the gov’t it is required to comply or you’ll get the Department of Labor on your butt and get sued using the evidence that the composition of your employees doesn’t match the model - so you are defacto illegally discriminating. It hit Google pretty hard.
You do not get to unilaterally decide what DEI is and is not.
At 3 out of the four companies I've worked at DEI came in the form of explicit discrimination on the basis of race and gender. Including quotas and prohibiting non-diverse candidates from segments of our headcount.
I won't doubt your lived experience with DEI, and I believe you if you say you've never encountered discriminatory DEI practices. But plenty of people have, and this attempt to deny that DEI is carried out through discriminatory practices at least part of the time is not productive.
It literally is a push for quotas. Their ideology dictates that there is not enough X's, therefore bias. It's not necessarily true either, please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907690
Annec data is that the UK police force would be harassed by head office for not having a diverse enough team. A friend spent a while breaking down the local makeup of ethnicity and proving that the one black colleague they had was actually an over-representation for the local area. It was not easy to convince them either, as they had a literal quota for each area.
> I (as a white man) don't for a moment believe that that is because white men are better at being CEOs (achieve better outcomes). Rather I believe it is because the selection process has long been biased in favor of white men (both in the last steps, and the path to get there).
It's not particularly cut and dry. There is a class bias towards being promoted to CEO, and the pool of black people in upper class society is smaller [1].
> And this is not just my biases at play, many studies have been done, and none show that white men generically achieve better outcomes.
Would be interested to read if you have them.
> It is not about quotas or giving people points for being a woman/black person/disabled/etc. It is all about making sure that those characteristics do not subtract points.
It is no different from a quota. You believe that some end ratio must result i.e. B% black people, there are N positions, therefore there should be a minimum of N x B black people in those positions. Then everything is done to meet that quota, otherwise there is still bias based on this quota.
> But you could just as easily point to the current over-representation of women in colleges and universities and worry about an anti-man bias there.
But nobody does make that case. Women are under-represented in dirty jobs, dangerous jobs, gruelling jobs, but there are no advocates to put more women in those positions. DEI itself is only fighting over the cream. They want more diversity in STEM, but I see zero fighting to get diversity into the arts, languages, etc.
What's worse is that we literally have to lower standards to make it DEI possible. The military lower fitness requirements to help more women get in, colleges lower entrance exam thresholds to increase diversity, the list goes on. DEI has made us a society of lowering standards.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issue at all with women CEOs if they cut mustard. But if you lower your expectations too much, you get the likes of Elizabeth Holmes, where there was near zero scrutiny by anybody [2]. Or a black CEO such as Kanye West, who clearly has large mental instability (which backfired on Adidas) [3].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-wealth-is-increasin...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/11620036/theranos-ceo-elizabe...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/01/08/kanye-we...
Free speech if you're a billionaire.
Nothing more than feudalism 2.0
Additionally, I don't think there was an anti-China "smokescreen" used here. Anti-DEI was a central pillar of the Trump campaign, so this purge seems to be fully in line with what was stated explicitly for months in 2024.
I will leave the question of whether this is constitutional to other folks. I will even leave aside the question of whether we can afford to defund science in our current crazy geopolitical environment. The real point here is that this is just plain wrong.
[1] https://new.nsf.gov/funding/learn/broader-impacts
But obviously the new administration is not interested in any sort of nuanced debate, but rather ideological purge.
I would be happy to spend time mentoring URM, etc. But it'd work a lot better if others managed such a program, thought about how to attract them, etc. Specialization is good.
they admit it. President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvmdm1m7m9o
> Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: "Because I have common sense."
When the US sneezes, the whole world catches a cold.
But you can't engage with trying to find any sense in it. His administration does not live in the same reality that anyone else does. Repeating the lies only gives them undeserved legitimacy.
It also allows him to exaggerate, because if you say "we got the best numbers ever achieved in history" but it's actually "just" the best numbers in a century, opponents who point out that was actually done by Teddy Roosevelt 120 years ago and not since are only underlining that it hasn't been done in a long time, while making themselves look like pedants.
But that doesn't mean that "Trump said it, therefore it's wrong" gets you out of the debate. For example:
> President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.
A plausible explanation for this is that because they were already all white men, new hires weren't allowed to be, so viable candidates were turned away, leading to under-staffing.
Is that what actually happened? Someone would have to investigate it, but until they do, you can't be sure that Trump is even wrong, or that he's necessarily wrong on the logic of it as might apply to other cases in general regardless of what turns out to be the case here in particular. And in the meantime he's got people talking about the possible dangers of doing the thing he doesn't like.
If anything they are saying is right, someone who hasn't completely blown their credibility will eventually think of it. Or, they won't, and that's fine too, you're still better off on the net not trying to sift for candy in a large pile of shit.
Likewise, sometimes wearing a seatbelt does more harm than good, but you can't actually predict before-the-fact when that's going to happen, and you shouldn't use that as a reason to not wear one. Attention is limited, and you can't waste it on serial frauds.
The only thing he says that's often honest is what he intends to do. His words can teach you about him, but they won't teach you anything about the world.
A stopped clock is right for two seconds a day out of 86400, i.e. 0.002% of the time. The problem with Trump is it's more like 30-50% of the time.
And then there are three things you can do when he says something.
You can ignore it, but that's not a great option when he's the President of the United States.
You can dispute the narrow ways he gets the details wrong, but that's just pedantry and you'll spend all day doing it to no avail because he can say stuff like that faster than you can fact check the details.
Or you can engage with the general shape of the argument he's trying to make and see if this is one of the times that there's actually something there. Which doesn't happen all the time, or even necessarily most of the time, but it's still often enough that universally assuming the opposite of anything he says isn't a valid heuristic.
If you're requiring five nines-level precision, he is right precisely zero percent of the time.
> but it's still often enough that universally assuming the opposite of anything he says isn't a valid heuristic.
He doesn't have the magic power where the truth is always the opposite of what he says. It's just that what he says is white noise. Its Shannon entropy is near-zero.
The response to that isn't to assume the opposite is correct. It's to just assume it's hallucinatory bullshit that's not worth listening to, or repeating, except to inform yourself on what he is going to do. His speech teaches us a lot about him, and nothing about anyone else.
Whereas if Trump is talking about DEI stuff, regardless of the details, you can deduce that he's soliciting support for a policy change there, which means it's time to have the debate about that policy and see if we should support it or not.
You can't distinguish the things he says he's going to do from the things he says are happening, because the reason he says the latter is in support of the former.
... it's consistent with his lifelong racism, as well as the racism that permeates Project 2025. On day one he rescinded LBJ's executive order from 1964 barring federal contractors from discriminating.
Employers are prohibited from discriminating by statute which can't be amended by executive order. The executive order in question was regarding the use of affirmative action.
Specific, hard evidence, all in context, the man who gave it got an ovation and an office built in the White House, and a free hand in the agencies that are supposed to be regulating him.
It seems like we've gotten to the point that actual racists are so uncommon that people have forgotten what they look like:
> "We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator" -Jefferson Davis (referring to black people)
> "Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results." -FDR
> "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race." -Strom Thurmond
These quotes are not ambiguous or taken out of context. If you had asked these people if they were being misconstrued, they would have reiterated their positions, because they were actually racists who thought that other races were inferior and openly favored slavery or internment or segregation.
And it's sad that we're losing the ability to distinguish these things because of all the crying wolf.
There's a beautiful side by side video clip of Elon actually throwing his heart out to the audience, and you'd have to be blind to think it's the same thing.
Who should I believe? My lying eyes? Or what the prime minister of a country that's courting US support in an internationally unpopular war says to curry favor?
https://www.reddit.com/r/centrist/comments/1i8ajx0/video_of_...
https://video.ploud.fr/w/9mao3sy1hTRcmionRpryX8
The man's grandparents were registered Nazis, the man's rubbing elbows with the AFD, he's throwing out the 'roman salute' to thunderous applause at a political rally, and you're twisting yourself into a pretzel to explain how no, no, this is all a smear job against an innocent man.
How can you not see it? It's hard to tell if you're cynically taking the piss out of me, or if you can actually look at clip, and see something else.
If he was trying to be open about it then there would be no reason to deny it. If he wasn't trying to be open about it there would be no reason to purposely do it to begin with.
Doing it then pretending that he doesn't do it carries two messages. For actual fascists, it's an indication that he's will support them, and that they should support him.
For people apologizing for fascists, the denial provides them the chance to spill gallons on ink on speculating about his state of mind and other plausible deniability for their insistence that he's not really courting fascists.
When someone does one thing, but says another, believe what they do, not what they say. Doubly so in politics.
There's no ambiguity in this symbol, or what it represents. Believe your eyes.
What actual fascists? That is not a large population segment in modern day. And support for what? He's not running for anything.
> the denial provides them the chance to spill gallons on ink on speculating about his state of mind
The theory is then that he made that hand gesture on purpose, intending to deny it.
Opponents would (as you do) disbelieve any denial and then try to use it against him, which is a significant cost. In exchange for this he would be trying to shore up support among the a) far smaller group of actual fascists who b) were previously on the fence and c) would not remain on the fence even though denying the gesture would be sending mixed signals.
There is no gain from doing that. It's why opponents are the ones talking about it. If doing that was actually to his benefit then opponents would want to be silent about it because publicizing it would be helping him to court the hypothetical large group of fascists who would look favorably on it.
> When someone does one thing, but says another, believe what they do, not what they say.
That's kind of the point. Hand gestures are in the category of saying something rather than doing something.
> There's no ambiguity in this symbol, or what it represents.
The obvious problem here is that the Nazis used "raising your hand" as a symbol.
The most plausible argument that he did it on purpose would be as a troll. Which isn't completely out of character for him, but it still has all of the same negative consequences above with the unambiguous implication of "not worth it".
What I have yet to see whatsoever is any evidence that he supports genocide, internment camps, incarceration without due process or the like. These are the things that make the bad guys the bad guys, not some kind of 5-D chess dog whistle rubbish.
his neo Nazi supporters have enthusiastically welcomed the success of getting a fellow Nazi in the white house and he has continued to work with Nazi organisations across Europe.
Calling the accusation a dirty trick is a denial of the accusation.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881536518206218445
> his neo Nazi supporters have enthusiastically welcomed the success of getting a fellow Nazi in the white house and he has continued to work with Nazi organisations across Europe.
Asking questions to neo Nazis is like asking questions to asylum inmates. Their brains are known to be broken so anything they say is presumed nonsense, and they're also very easy to manipulate into saying whatever you want to put into a story.
Aren't Nazi organizations banned in Europe?
Is there any evidence that this has ever happened in the history of the US? Not in this particular case as we wait for the details to emerge, but for any documented case?
How would you even have a DEI program that didn't work this way?
You're currently understaffed and make efforts to hire someone to fill the position. The first qualified applicant you find doesn't meet the DEI goals. Your options are now a) hire them, stop being understaffed, but don't meet the DEI goals, or b) don't hire them and hold out for a candidate that can meet the DEI goals, but in the meantime you remain understaffed.
You don't always have the luxury of choosing between two concurrent applicants and this is a pretty unambiguous trade off whenever that doesn't happen.
When someone doesn't have the qualifications you don't hire them on a micro level. When you don't meet the soft goal you look at your approach on a macro level. Is your pipeline bad? Are you missing qualified candidates? Are you biased?
You can work to improve all those things without any compromise on quality. And sometimes the soft goal is not reachable, or it's not reachable industry-wide, due to the pigeonhole principle. But that's doesn't feed into anecdotes and fairy tales about the boogieman.
What's actively repulsive and illogical is what he's doing - one or a group of people made a mistake, nobody yet knows what the mistake is, what contributed to it, and how it should be prevented in the future, but he spins a fairy tale that rests on assuming that they are unqualified. The only verifiably unqualified person in this story at the moment is him. Don't give that nonsense the time of day.
And look, here I am, not taking my own advice and engaging with that crap.
In this case the issue isn't qualifications, it's mean time to fill the position when you're understaffed.
Suppose you could find a qualified non-DEI candidate in one month and a qualified DEI candidate in six months. If you take the time to find the DEI candidate, the position is left unfilled for five months longer than it would have been. That's pretty bad if the result is a higher probability of a plane crash in the meantime, or any other important thing.
Any particular hiring decision is made on qualifications. It's illegal to not hire someone because their protected characteristics, and if you see someone doing it, you should whistleblow.
It's not illegal to look at your hiring efforts and decide to cast your hiring net in a different demographical area. But at the end of the day, you hire the candidate that meets the bar.
If you can't fill headcount, either your bar is too high, your firm sucks to work for, you aren't paying enough, or you need to work harder on hiring.
I have been involved in a lot of hiring over the years. I've never, ever been pressured, or even implied at that I should base any of my micro decisions (whether in rating or hiring) on someone's protected characteristics. I've likewise never seen them being used as justifications for my peers' decision-making. Oh, and everyone always bitches that hiring is too slow and it's too hard to find people. That's a universal constant, just like the universal constant of 'there's always more work to do than there is time to do it in'.
I have, however seen demographic-level statistics to be used as justification for "Maybe we should have a career booth at a work fair in the University of St. Louis. Does anyone want to go do that?"
For this to mean anything it has to be not just a metric but a target, and as soon as it's a target, you're not just measuring something after-the-fact.
> It's not illegal to look at your hiring efforts and decide to cast your hiring net in a different demographical area.
"Not illegal" isn't the issue when the debate is about what the law should be.
Suppose that you want to hit your numbers and that you further know that you can find more qualified candidates in a specific area which is predominantly white. If you advertise in the predominantly white area, you find a candidate in a month. If you advertise in that area and other areas, you find a candidate in a month, but it's the same candidate. Neither of these allow you to meet your numbers. Whereas if you advertise only in predominantly black areas, you eventually find a qualified candidate, and you meet your numbers, but it takes six months and in the meantime you're understaffed.
> If you can't fill headcount, either your bar is too high, your firm sucks to work for, you aren't paying enough, or you need to work harder on hiring.
Or you're hiring for a job with a limited number of qualified applicants while purposely reducing the number of applicants from a particular demographic because they would be qualified but mess up your numbers.
How are you so confident that it won't increase it?
Also, sometimes the data is actually available. Demographic data is generally public. If you need to hire 100 people and you start off with broad-based advertising and then after a week have filled a quarter the positions from disproportionately one area, the normal incentive is not to stop advertising in that area, but if more candidates from that area are going to mess up your numbers, now that is your incentive even if it reduces the rate at which you fill the positions.
Here I thought that employers created them of their own volition. Could you perhaps cite the law that forced them into existence?
But there have also been attempts to interpret parts of the Civil Rights Act to prohibit "disparate impact" which would effectively require DEI because neutral hiring practices could otherwise result in disparities in outcome as a result of external factors.
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471
No, that's not even remotely plausible. Trump said it to deflect from having fired the head of the FAA because Musk didn't like him, among other things.
There is another comment in this thread linking to some evidence that it appears to be what actually happened.
Or just have pay for decent, functional K-12 schools in non-rich districts without housing bubbles?
And how do you find out which programs successfully do that without studying them?
The magic of "just" in a suggestion I guess.
Keeping biases in check is a daily exercise. I am aware of many of my own biases and I have to continuously fight back. There are people whose company I enjoy more than others, but I can't let that interfere with my professional judgment.
Since apparently there's no point in testing them for "aptitude" or we don't know how to do so, it makes sense to have other criteria such as broadening participation.
Or, you know, enrol the ones who'd be better on your sports teams, or who look prettier for prospectus photos, or something - just don't fool yourself that you care about some sort of pre-existing "talent".
[1] https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/S...
That's a weird conclusion, but I don't have the data you're looking at. What out-of-the-box testing have you tried?
This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
Did you miss the last 80 years of anti-communist, pro-capitalist, free-market propaganda? The american government has been the most powerful ideological force in the world for basically all of living memory.
In this case you had things like the Department of Energy requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans to even apply for funding.
The two big differences I see is that that is a wholly inappropriate avenue for ideological enforcement, and that it's also exceptionally divisive.
Things are changing in modern times but historically free markets, capitalism, and so on were very widely shared values. The contemporary equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive. The government pushing it, and frequently in very inappropriate ways (the military also comes to mind) is just very weird.
> equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive
Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1]. Typically, a plan would reference existing enrollment/acceptance policies of the company/university/department making an application, which are designed to make sure employees/students are not advantaged or disadvantaged by immutable or protected characteristics. Common examples would be:
- Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse to avoid bias towards whatever groups are over-represented at your company already. It's a well-studied phenomena that people are inclined to like others who are similar to themselves. Without any other factors in play (skill is randomly distributed in applicants, all of your employees are free of sexual/racial bias), if your company consists of, say, 80% men and 20% women, and you pick your interviewers totally at random, you will continue to hire more men than women. If you use a 50/50 split on your interview panel then your hiring becomes more meritocratic by virtue of factoring out self-similarity biases.
- Implement structured interviews and standardized qualifications-based hiring, rather than relying on interviewer preference.
- Learning about potential subconscious biases helps people account for them. Incorporating bias training can mitigate (though not eliminate) hiring biases. Of course, as you have no doubt experienced, these training courses tend to be pretty boring and patronizing, but that's true of most employee training, so /shrug.
- Diversifying applicant sourcing. If you only look for applicants via one platform, adding some more that tend to be used by different groups to your sourcing strategy.
You have bought into the oft-repeated lie that DEI is some Harrison Bergeron-esque attempt to cripple institutions. You were probably pointed to one or two extremely poor implementations of such policies that were genuinely unfair. The broader movement, and most implementations of it, are about equality of opportunity. The intentional destruction of public perception of these policies and subsequent removal only guarantees that existing self-perpetuating gaps in opportunity will persist.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222222206/https://science.o...
Archive link, because of course the new admin took down the page.
> Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse
How do you make sure your hiring panel is diverse without having diversity quotas for it?
I understand that many people say this, but academics routinely understand government DEI initiatives to be racial quotas. See for example https://archive.is/So06G about the NIH FIRST program. I don't think that DEI is secretly aiming to cripple institutions, but I do think that its advocates genuinely feel racial balancing is a good idea and dissemble about this in contexts where it would be illegal.
Racist hiring practices are illegal, and should remain so. If Trump has issued an EO to clarify this point, and language to this effect were added to DEI policies, it would be utterly uncontroversial. I would welcome a case being brought against a professor who actively avoided hiring white people under the guise of DEI to really drive home that such behavior is unlawful and unacceptable.
They’ve literally banned efforts to ensure research is free of discrimination. We’re in opposite world, or at least pretending to be.
It would be useful to show the comparison, rather than claim it. Could you be more specific about this, by at least providing the section that you read, or the EO references?
https://archives.federalregister.gov/issue_slice/1965/9/28/1...
To try to ensure that the people working on the project are selected fairly and on merit, rather than unfairly and on personal prejudice.
Our constitutional republic is not merely "just blots of ink on paper" but rather alive and well.
If truly being race-blind (or any other way of dividing people that is not strictly merit) is really your goal, and you are aware of unconscious bias, then what are people really objecting to?
"Unconscious bias" is sociological dark matter. It is a kludge used to prop up otherwise ineffective social theories.
Different groups of peoples have different strengths and different weaknesses. This isn't some sort of a problem that needs fixing.
And if one does want to 'fix' it you need to start way earlier than at the e.g. hiring point. Want to beat that kid who's been playing violin for hours a day since he was 6? Ok, then your target demographic is 6 year olds, not professional orchestras.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
But looking from a sex standpoint blind auditions are responsible for a sweeping change in the ratio of men and women in professional orchestras (though men still outnumber women %60 to %40, but that is from a near %100 a while ago). This is absolutely a case to look at to demonstrate what unconscious biases are, and a wonderfully effective way of fighting it in one specific place.
The change in gender differences is easily explained by more girls pursuing music from an earlier age. More people (as a ratio) from a group competently doing something means you end up with more highly successful outliers from that group.
Blind screening started in the 50s.
Please explain to me how %85 of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men. I don't believe for a moment that white men (myself included) are generically better at being CEOs, or at performing any of the roles that lead up to those positions.
The unconscious biases that the people in those positions choosing their successors to look like them selves is a strong explanation of this, and studies have been show that in controlled situations this sort of things happens all the time. Even by those who want things to be color-blind.
And group differences are not only genetic. Why do you think that, for instance, 70% of American football or NBA players are black, while only 8% of baseball players are?
Go look at an average MBA classroom and know what you'll overwhelmingly see? Pretty much what a sampling of CEOs looks like, especially once accounting for performance.
Unconscious biases can be eliminated through anonymization or adopting objective evaluation criteria. E.g. having an orchestra audition behind a veil is a way to eliminate bias. By contrast, setting quotas on the number of each gender or race achieves equity, but it does so through explicit discrimination.
Some DEI policies act like a veil. Others work like the latter. The recent executive orders ban the latter, not the former.
Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated. It was nothing but an unrelated ideological conformity test added as a requirement.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20230104150813/https://science.o...
Q: I am only requesting support for one graduate student; do I still need to submit a PIER Plan?
A: Yes, all applications for funding to the Office of Science, with the exception of supplemental proposals, conference proposals, and proposals to the SBIR/STTR Programs (at this time), require a PIER Plan. All applicants are encouraged to consider what contributions they can make to creating more equitable and inclusive research environments. It is expected that the complexity and detail of a PIER Plan for a smaller research project and fewer project personnel would be less than that for a larger research project. [and no we won't provide you an example, it needs to be from your heart]
When you're requiring the greengrocer to submit a personalized statement justifying how each single apple he sells contributes to the project of worldwide socialism you might be risking provoking a reactionary counterrevolution. Americans need to just chill with trying to enforce micromanaged ideological conformity on a continent-sized country of 350 million people. And avoid winding up in a place "eroded by the ideological rituals that the entire power structure depend on, 'that are ever less credible, exactly because they are untested by public discussion and controversy'".
The winner take all, take no prisoners approach worked. Its counteracted evolution, climate science, even reality. Creating your own media outlet, ditching bi-partishanship, has only helped the Republicans.
People here are talking about how MAGA is not the conservative voter. This is a distinction without a purpose, because Maga and the Tea Party movements won elections.
The left and dems must and will follow suit.
You will only see more extreme points, and frankly outright violence. This is only the first 11 days. The impacts of removing fact checkers and the new free speech moderation stance is going to result in a direct uptick of hate speech.
As things get worse, theres going to be even more incitement with utterly fabricated content. This is going to only further entrench the dominance of the media powerhouse that exists.
The greater the animosity, the easier people are going to respond to the perceived threats - and since being disconnected from reality works, it will not matter if its true or not.
All that matters now is winning elections.
Speaking of fabricated content, are you describing the actual future or a simulation of it?
I could add that I've made these calls, since 2008, and they've been predictable.
Thing is, any rando online can claim these things, so I don't know how to answer your comment.
So what would you look for to differentiate between prediction and simulation?
However, that one has the capability sometimes is no guarantee that they can do it at all times, or even on demand.
Consciousness is generally not considered to be a part of the stack, despite it being the majority of it.
Policy, actions, results... that's just a snoozefest for us unfortunately.
If a grad student is funded on the project but gets pushed out because of toxic culture, discrimination, or some other kind of marginalization, then that is a waste of research funds and slows down research. Successful teams need to be able to work together effectively and mitigate conflicts. People are diverse, and conflicts are likely to arise because of this: anyone running a research team needs a plan to manage their team, just as they need a plan to manage their data. Its boring HR stuff that is necessary in a diverse society.
When these things are performative they’re worthless. People who are going to do those things are going to write the statement just the same. Even easier now with ChatGPT.
At least in a micromanagement situation, the PI might have submitted 3 candidates to a reviewer who would have picked one for them. But no.
Now to be fair, the project leads - I expect - usually have no appetite for all this nonsense and try to cut corners everywhere possible (most likely copy/pasting generic stuff for a start and justifying decisions rather then making the "wrong" ones since they still had an interest in the project achieving its goals) but this was still a waste of time and energy from a point of view of science achieved.
When I say "was", it probably still is because most of this current emergency change will be challenged in court and will need to be redone a couple times. So for now, this is MORE waste of time rather than less.
No, Trump brought in a bunch of veterans of Elon’s takeover of Twitter to do the same thing to the federal government. The people at the top have been replaced, and the new agency leaders are focusing on implementing this anti-DEI agenda at the expense of pretty much everything else right now.
The sense I get from friends who work for the federal government is that this really feels like a hostile takeover. These are not changes that people welcome but have been too scared to ask for.
Oh thats an interesting point to make. Were you part of these things? I really like unbiased merit based societies, so I was wondering what your experience was.
Just thought I would recommend some reading about this: "The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?" by Michael Sandel.
Basically, think about what the longer-term, overarching effects on society would be in a perfectly-meritocratic society. It likely wouldn't be all unicorns and rainbows.
Here's a review about it: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/montage-michael-sand...
May not change your mind, but we should always try to expand it :)
In other words a perfect meritocracy isn't Gattaca. It's just a place where your rise isn't going to be directly constrained by things outside of your control, like in Gattaca - being directly rejected because of one's DNA.
In a meritocracy a fool who finds and excels at a niche can thrive, while a genius who doesn't exert himself can languish.
The point of my question to the poster was whether they had been part of any such processes.
I do appreciate the point on merit, and have a richer view of it than I may have let on.
When the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act were created, people asked the government to enforces these acts. Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.
The problem is because they decided that DEI would be the mechanism to do this with, once DEI is rescinded the question is: If you're not going to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act through DEI, which mechanism do you plan to use to enforce them? According to this take, once DEI is rescinded there is no mechanism to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act anymore.
I'm pretty sure that most leftwing and rightwing people will agree that out of 3 millions government workers it's not entirely unlikely that there would be some some valid cases of discrimination against minorities and those with disabilities. The claim is that, whether DEI sucks or not, there is no avenue to contest racism and discrimination in government hiring anymore.
This part is foundational to the rest, and it's straightforwardly untrue. The government agency which most often enforces these two laws is called the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which remains active under the new administration; the new acting chair has given no indication that she intends to stop enforcing the Civil Rights Act or the ADA.
Doesn't "revoking the Equal Employment Opportunity executive order" entail that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will be affected? [0]
EDIT:
Trump also fired the EEOC chair it seems. Can the commision work with just two commisioners if he doesn't hire a replacement?
“These removals leave the E.E.O.C. without a quorum, which hobbles the agency’s ability to protect workers from unlawful discrimination,” [1][2]
[0] https://archive.is/QHQJD
[1] https://archive.is/C1voe
[2] https://www.lawandtheworkplace.com/2025/01/eeoc-like-nlrb-la...
The EEOC doesn't depend on a quorum for routine enforcement actions. As the last article describes, what it can't do without a quorum is make new rules or issue new guidance, but the new administration will most likely reestablish a quorum soon because there's some existing guidance they'd like to revoke.
The Civil Rights Act is exclusively about equality of opportunity and requires affected employers hire without regard to race, religion, and other protected classes. So for instance universities using racial quotas was deemed unlawful precisely because of the Civil Rights Act.
DEI stuff was in a very different spirit that really ran against the ideals of the Civil Rights Act. For instance it compelled affected organizations to specifically endeavour to hire based on the race and other characteristics of applicants. It's not entirely clear to me why it wasn't tossed immediately as being in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/chapter-21
This is why disparate impact tends to cause institutions to drop skills based testing entirely. In theory, proof that the test is relevant to the job is supposed to be a defense against allegations of disparate impact. But in practice the courts have rarely accepted that line of defense.
Assuming "was alot of desire" is meant as "widespread support," not just "the President really desired it," that is an absolutely ridiculous interpretation. Fast does not mean strong consensus.
The government has also moved _ridiculously fast_ to
- pardon/commute the vast majority of J6 defendants including those convicted of violence towards law enforcement
- freeze federal aid across the board
- blame the recent aviation crash on DEI
- rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America
- revoke birthright citizenship
Does that mean that there "was alot of desire" to do those things? Absolutely not. It just means that those are things that the President has done unilaterally via executive orders or press release.
To be clear I'm not advocating for or against the govt.
But the idea that the government moving "ridiculously fast" is because there "was alot of desire" is a massive stretch. They are moving fast because they are steamrolling everyone in their path (allies included), and in their desire to "get shit done" they are implementing changes that are riddled with errors, and in some cases, even flat out illegal.
Don't we make movies of the times someone actually got noticed and was able to enrich our society through their merit?
Perhaps I am wrong.
One does not hope to get noticed - they strive to excel on their own or by bringing others in to help them.
Your merit is not what you might achieve, but what you do achieve.
> The whole concept of 'got noticed' runs entirely contrary to the notion of merit, to an absurd degree in tech. >Your merit is not what you might achieve, but what you do achieve.
Taking it seriously, I can see several situations where these rules do not hold true.
However, that may be me reading in factors you exclude for the purposes of your point.
So let me turn it to you - can you consider circumstances where these statements wouldn't hold true? Or are they absolute in your eyes?
If they are absolute, I would definitely want to understand your defintions, since I can conceive of many obvious cases where these points are violated.
But since they are obvious, I am assuming you haven't overlooked them in the way you envision things.
Let me ask you this, what is the principle or goal you want to achieve? is it more fairness, or more effective systems, or maybe even better conditions for white american men (and to me, this is ok. Its just what you want to optimize for)
Well here’s what you said:
> Considering a candidates suitability for a role based on their race, gender, or sexual orientation is the opposite merit based selection.
> You haven't addressed what I said. You've identified a problem (let's just assume you are correct about the problem for arguments sake). I've pointed out the problem with current "solution": making decisions about individuals based on their race, sexual orientation or gender seems far from good, but you haven't addressed that.
I didn’t think there was anything to address. I think you defined the ideal we are meant to achieve.
If this is a question on whether things should be fair - yes we are in agreement on principles.
I want a fair system, for everyone.
I wonder how his approval will compare with his first term. His final approval rating is the lowest of any president ever: https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ra...
Movies tend to exaggerate for a dramatic effect.
Yes, racism existed, segregation existed. The situation you described didn't happen. Katherine G Johnson simply used the bathroom for whites.
Why?
Because a homogenous culture of researchers is less effective.
Because you are not just doing research on a topic, you are also training the next generation of scientists and field experts.
And the implication that the old boys club of white dudes is intrinsically the best "meritocratic" outcome is ridiculous. The history of science is full of people who had to fight that norm and succeed despite it.
> This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
Sure, sure. Except for the part where they're also censoring any science topics deemed "woke", where all funding now has to meet the president's ideological conformity test on subject and staff as well.
White individuals are significantly under represented (and even more so in STEM) though it's not for any nefarious reason. Science has traditionally been merit > all. And lots of highly skilled individuals from China, India, and so on are pursuing education and work in the US, which makes the competition for these spots very different than a random sampling of Americans.
[1] - https://www.zippia.com/phd-researcher-jobs/demographics/
I was referencing what the current Trump administration deems "meritocratic" and seeks to "return" to, their policy changes are in direct response and opposition to the demographics you describe.
This is the case in biological sciences, for instance, the field I am in: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scissors-Diagram-Showing...
In a sustainable society every single woman needs to have a bit more than 2 children on average. The 9 months are not so bad though so come with a significant number of side effects and a substantial number of hospital visits, both planned and unplanned.
After birth the real fun begins. At first you'll be nursing every 2 hours, constantly. Over time that changes to every 3-4 hours but that is now the new normal, 8 hours of sleep is a thing of the past. And nursing isn't just whip out a boob and a few minutes later you're done, depending on your baby, his mood, teething, growth spurts and a zillion other factors it could last an hour all the while his hunger for the next window also grows!
And, probably as an evolutionary warning mechanism, the mother will frequently experience vivid nightmare playing out every horrific scenario that could happen, experience anxiety (probably as a result of the former) and so on. That fades over time but never really goes away.
And back to breastfeeding, if a mother doesn't constantly drain her breasts it can lead to infection/mastitis/blocked ducts and all other sorts of fun stuff.
And that's just a sampling of some of the issues (completely ignoring baby himself here) for one child, at which point it's time to get ready for number 2, let alone 3.
This is a multiple years long process that completely consumes your life. Now imagine pairing all this with a 9-5 which in reality is rarely just a 9-5.
There's a reason the West's fertility has fallen well below replacement. This fantasy of doing a great job both as a mother and as a corporate drone, just isn't realistic at all.
Everyone in the US is getting exactly the government we deserve. That's the beauty of democracy! You get government that's precisely as good, or as bad, as you deserve. And you deserve government no better, or worse, than what you get.
Basically, we deserve it.
So no, it was not a witch hunt. Looking back, the "witch hunt" slur seems like gaslighting. "Communists, what communists? You're paranoid and crazy!". The release of the Venona documents is severely damning to the "witch hunt" accusers and vindicating to McCarthy's goals, if not his tactics.
You're aware that dozens of women were hanged in Salem Massachusetts because people believed they were witches? So you're very glibly implying "witch hunts" are not a thing when not only are they a thing, but people in this country, have died due to them.
> vindicating to McCarthy's goals, if not his tactics.
The question was a litmus test for whether you are a person that subscribes to an orthodox perspective of history or heterodox - it is pointless to argue with someone that does not participate in a shared reality.
"Great" isn't how anyone will describe it once the second-order consequences land. (There won't be many who like it once the first-order consequences land.)
Previously, federal funding was controlled by congress, and subject to its collective politics, via long-playing out machinations/compromises/horse-trading, etc, and then to the collective politics of the various enforcement bodies.
It now appears that federal funding is generally subject to the personal politics of the current president. That may seem nice for the specific policies you agree with. But... there are likely to be many policies you don't agree with. Especially since there will be a new president after not too long.
Also, since political purity tests have to be subjectively enforced, they are inevitably subverted to corruption. You can pass the test with the right amount of money delivered to the right people in the right way. That's nice for the people receiving the money, but the corruption quickly becomes horrifically inefficient and costly.
The question isn't whether the previous system was perfect -- it wasn't. The question is whether the new system is worse, and how much worse.
I'm pretty surprised how unaware people seem to be about the power/money grab that is happening. People never seem to learn that you have to look at what people do, not what they say.
I do agree that this is a totally new paradigm, but I would call it more of a popular revolution than a "power/money grab".
I'd also characterize the last system (which you described perfectly btw) as corrupt and ineffective. The most non-political evidence I can offer is the observation that spending decisions only ever went one direction: more spending. This probably seems fair at the "dem vs gop" level but too the taxpayer it was more theft every year.
So this newly emerging system does appear more susceptible to corruption, so I totally agree with you there, but as a taxpayer I am very happy that someone is slowing down spending.
Federal spending went up during our current president's last administration (and down the following administration). It's almost certainly going up again this time. The deficit doubly so.
We can count the billions that the government spends on science, period, through the NSF, DOE, DARPA, and NIH. Thus, the fraction spent on pushing ideology is certainly not "countless billions".
The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.
Inevitable consequence of a two-party system with first past the post voting.
All Republicans and all Democrats don’t act and think as one. Take any collection of humans, of any size, and their opinions will be spread across a spectrum.
There are, and always will be, some members in either house and of any party that find it’s in their political interest to debate and pull new laws left or right.
This is especially true under FPTP because each member has to answer to an area, and different areas of a country have baked-in differences in their ideal political outcomes and points of view.
The opposition is powerless, his own party has become an echo chamber for fascist talking points.
Seems like cutting taxes and bureacracy does the opposite.
Unless “fascist” and “nazi” means “people I don’t like”.
I go by this [1] definition of fascism, which the current republican party fits almost perfectly.
Trump rules almost unopposed, and is further consolidating his power with each passing day. Neither court nor congress can harm him anymore. That you may still believe he is fighting for freedom, peace and democracy is baffling, with everthing that's been happening in the past 2 weeks.
Indeed, I don't like fascists and nazis, sue me.
[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
- No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.
- No, members of congress don't always vote the party line (although this has consistently gotten worse over time)
- No, that's not what "balance of powers" means.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx#:~:text=...
Stacked in the sense that more members were appointed by one party vs the other (including one by dubious means), and those people apparently are quite partisan.
2.) missing the point
3.) pedantic
The point is that the current party in power has had multiple opportunities to reign in the current lawlessness and the current minority party has attempted to do so, to no result.
“The number of Justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling at the present total of nine in 1869”
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx
Partisanship works in the current political environment. Cutting off your own projects in case the other party follows your lead, has paid off more than bipartisanship. Voting across aisles is strictly controlled.
Trump was voted in precisely because The R base was tired of people talking about identity issues, getting to power, and then doing nothing about it.
Trump is giving people exactly what they were told would solve their problems, for decades.
The balance of powers has been broken, for good reason. It ensures political goals - see Bi-partisanship doesn't pay.
America would be well advised to avoid this. They'd immediately get a language divide between English and Spanish. The alleged "grand coalitions" of the Democrat and Republican parties would crumble. There might be some consensus in the center which might be large enough but then policies would never change regardless of who you vote for, just like in the times before Trump.
Unfortunately I think the only direction is balkanization of the states. And I don't think that is going to end well.
But ultimately a lot of our core foundational agencies have been functioning well regardless. And it's only the right that's intent on tearing them down no matter the consequences. So while the Dems enable this, the Republicans enact it.
The Republicans did go with the (sadly) popular guy. I guess he was palatable (by the definition that matters) because there was no talk of increasing taxes on high incomes.
More people who voted wanted Clinton and Biden. Sanders himself admitted not enough young people voted and his platform was less popular in more conservative states.
"She was given the questions tonthe debate," is the most serious accusation. But anyone with a dozen brain cells knows whats going to be asked during the debates.
Then, either they use existing executive power to ensure Republicans have an insurmountable advantage in national elections, or they haven't thought things through and we'll see even larger shifts in federal regulations after each administration change.
Immigration raids are pretty clearly an executive function, and they happened prior to DACA and prior to ICE. Executive prioritization of federal law enforcement is normal and expected.
By the same logic, I don't like calling far-left cancel culture "liberal." I'm afraid our partisanship has blinded us to genuine liberal and conservative virtues.
In earlier years I would have been okay living in a red state - not my pref but no big deal. Now I’m no more willing to raise my kids in a deep red state than I am in Russia or China.
Question here for this group. In this day of technology, information is power seems much more relevant. I don't have clear data, but it seems from observation and analysis by others social media played a pretty key role: "fake news", info bubbles, biasing your feeds etc. What are some ideas on reliable ways to provide access to accurate information?
https://www.statista.com/chart/7658/number-of-executive-orde...
It would take some serious effort (and there’d be disagreement) but maybe you could classify “important” government changes and if they were enacted by congress, EO, courts, etc.
All done by executive order. Makes basically all modern EOs look pretty innocuous by comparison.
That said I actually agree and would love to see a sharp reduction in executive power, especially as it comes to using the military. If we're going to go bombing places, that should require a declaration of war from Congress. And 'emergency' powers should not be enabled for decades on end.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
Tump did 20% of his total, from the first term, in the first 100 days. Biden did just under 1/3 of his total in the first 100 days.
There is a consensus among researchers of the workings of the US government and the legal context thereof that, since FDR and especially since Reagan, that the “imperial presidency” has been gaining ground.
I'm old enough to remember when it was the right wing complaining about "political correctness gone mad".
8 years ago the Trump admin had no idea what to do. Now they’re prepared and much more dangerous.
Some things will be reversed in 4 years time and we can ride out the storm. but others - like renewed emphasis on fossil fuels to reward the big donors and have energy for AI - will have lasting effects on my children and their children — those make me truly furious.
I’ve said since the beginning that that saving grace (if there is one) of Trump’s first term was that he was disorganized, and he surrounded himself with people who kept him in check to some degree. People who were willing to tell him that he couldn’t do certain things (prime example: White House legal counsel kept Trump from doing the crazy things that people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell suggested after he lost the 2020 election).
He’s not going to make that mistake this time, and he’s putting people in power who will do what he wants without question. That’s the scary part of the next four years.
We won't be riding out this storm if we all hunker down.
Maybe work with possible candidates to flippable seats in state and federal levels.
Also, work on the politician acquisition pipeline - guiding promising ones to school boards, city council, and upwards.
Right now is a great time for Dems to start working hard on taking back both houses. Start mapping districts that can be flipped, districts with low voter registration, and which messages they will bombard these people with.
Or never. We should be prepared for Term 3 (which is already being floated) or a landslide GOP win in 2026, 2028, and beyond. Expect future Presidential elections to look like '86.
You all are openly admitting that these people are evil geniuses. Keep that in mind when thinking to the future. They are going to continue their evil genius behavior and it's going to keep working.
Biden just acted on it.
He could have done a lot better with that legal blanket.
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby_clemency_controv... for example.
Hell, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon
Still, it doesn't matter. Telling you, this is the one truth of our reality - the dems are always wrong.
The President is free to assert his desires. Other parts of the country are free to push back if they choose. This takes filing lawsuits, lobbying Congress, pursuing prosecutions, etc. all of which take time, money, and effort. Which in turn allows short-term disruption to happen as the legal process plays out. Which again, is frustrating.
Political mood is also more fickle than people usually believe at the beginning of a new administration. FDR, LBJ, W, Obama, and many other presidents passed through a time in which conventional wisdom held that they had changed the game and amassed too much power. In every case we can look back and see that while they each have left a legacy that endures, it’s smaller than expected at the time. The pendulum swung the other way later on.
My own opinion on this is that “don’t tell me what to do” is among the most popular political positions among Americans. So for example, to the extent DEI felt like being told what to do, it became unpopular. But now that anti-DEI is in power, I expect the bloom will come off pretty quickly. In part because of overreach by a new administration overestimating their mandate. (As most new administrations do.)
I don't. This has been a long, gradual erosion of constitutional rights, and now the system has crumbled. It may appear to stand, but it's merely resting on the rubble.
SCOTUS is going to rule with GOP doctrine, regardless of what the constitution says. The GOP may pursue legal avenues for their actions in an attempt to not make it so apparent that the country is now under single party, totalitarian rule. But they don't have to (see: news).
It started with minor constitutional violations, like emoluments, and has ended with blatant ones, such as attacking birthright citizenship.
>I think it’s a little early to call the end of the U.S. Constitution.
I totally disagree with this though. It is several generations late to start crying about the end of the US Constitution.
I basically agree with the rest of your comment though, especially the "don't tell me what to do" and the Presidential "honeymoon period".
We have been beyond US Constitutional limitations for many lifetimes.
Curious to see whether HN is also following suit in changing its window, like every other online medium seems to be doing.
Also, this IS an important discussion, for it's creating social transformation that might hinder our species' ability to solve the difficult challenges ahead.
These are the kinds of issues at stake in terms of the broader impacts criteria:
- Is it good that NSF promotes applications that include historically minority-serving institutions (as opposed to just the same few R1 universities)?
- should NSF prioritize proposals with strong scientific outreach activities aimed at boosting engagement and opportunities in under-represented demographics?
Keep in mind that NSF funding is extremely competitive. It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores. Successful proposals excel on both fronts.
2. Where did you get the idea that outreach is not still an important priority? The issue is what is euphemistically called "under-represented demographics" which we understand excludes many Americans on the basis of their race.
Yeah I don't buy that.
I've seen equity directives in universities explicitly asking to hire only underrepresented minorities, or give one third of a candidate's score based on race and gender characteristics (the other two thirds were resume and interview).
I've heard equity hiring quotas given to execs in tech industry. I've heard of pressure to hire/promote minorities.
I've seen what affirmative action did to University admissions. The admissions office reduced Asian Americans score on "likeability". As a result they needed a higher sat score than any other group for admissions. The hiring office essentially said that they did not like Asians.
So sorry, I do not buy the argument that equity initiatives just choose a minority representation from equally qualified samples. Because from what you say, Asian americans wouldn't have been discriminated against.
However, thinking that this crop of politicians would take a nuanced stance on anything at all is idiocy at its purest.
If the current "anti-woke" movement were just about shutting down those obnoxious purists, I think it would be a lot less controversial. But from what I've seen, the political rhetoric (and the associated policy positions now being implemented) strikes just as hard or harder at the folks actually trying to do the hard work.
Think Boxer in the Animal Farm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_48_(Weimar_Constitutio...
1- NSF budget is about 10 billions, I always had in mind that it is much more. That's about 0.17% of the total federal budget. If we include DOE R&D funding and NIH we will get to 1%. This is the funding for most of research in science in the US. Seems like not a great area to achieve huge reduction in deficit.
2- Even if we ignore the whole point of DEI and say that we need to end support for some of the projects. You do take your time and evaluate projects that needs to take action. You don't stop all the funding and pause critical support for projects and cause huge problems on medium and long term. And it also hurt the reputation of the country and its competitiveness.
3- The current NSF director was actually appointed by the current setting president in his first term.
China looks at America and shows its citizens what an alternative fate could be, and it works.
the US is trying to catch up in that race now. see how they treat their women wrt reproductive health.
> China looks at America and shows its citizens what an alternative fate could be, and it works.
Not really though. Still, around ~10k PhDs from China get green cards.
I am not sure if it can be quantified.
What about your allies?
If the dominant ideology changes, it should only affect future grants, not current grants. Ideally, grants that have already been submitted or are close to submission should be evaluated according to the old rules. Otherwise a lot of time and effort will go to waste.
The instability this has created has me looking to leave academia as quickly as possible; I'm sure others in similar situations are having the same thoughts. This has wreaked havoc on all of academia.
Sorry to hear that this happened to you. I hope they will provide some way to sort this out soon.
Sure, it's not Russia or China, but it's certainly no model democracy. We're definitely heading down the path of authoritarianism / fascism.
Don't forget that 4 years ago there was an armed attempt to overturn the results of an election, spurred on by the losing president who also pressured officials to overturn the results. And then the same politician was given immunity by the justices who he appointed (if it had been any other court they would have been forced to recuse themselves from the case), leading to him being re-elected and then promptly pardoning those who attempted a coup. That's arguably the most anti-democracy event in the history of the US (or at least the last 100 years).
Then when that politician gets in power he starts an loyalty and ideological purge. That's exactly what authoritarian leaders do (and Xi in China did). So yes, we still have checks and balances and our system is not authoritarian, but Trump certainly is and is trying his hardest to centralize as much power and authority as possible in himself, which is again exactly what authoritarian leaders do. Lets call a spade a spade.