Improving MIT’s written commitment to freedom of expression

This is exactly what we mean by an ideological test. Ideological tests are useful in certain circumstances, but dangerous in others. Churches want to hire people with faith, especially in leadership positions, and they certainly should ask their applicants about their faith. Should a non–religious public institution such as the University of California be using them to exclude all candidates that don’t follow a particular political movement?

It is especially ironic that they are using an ideological test that claims to test for belief in diversity in order to weed out all non–conforming beliefs, because it ensures that the University of California will never be a truly diverse place.

At some point PhDs issued after certain years are going to start being negatively attractive to employers, as they're going to be basically some sort of ideological purity awards rather than anything to do with merit. And you don't want people like that in an otherwise healthy organization, and more than you want to hire someone who has "20 years membership of the Lenin Appreciation Society" on their CV.

As somebody who recently had to go back and reread a lot of rms related discourse after several years not thinking about him, I think it's also worth pointing out that he was, in fact, echoing what precocious post-pubescent teenagers were saying and that those are both a.) the only children rms is likely to have encountered routinely and b.) they are edge cases that rms is (due to his own history) likely to over-identify with.

I was one of those kids, and it was actually highly uncomfortable to read his words years later and recognize arguments I made online as a child/teenager.

I will also say that, from my end, most of those conversations were less about my wanting to engage in sexual activity with adults as a teenager (or vice versa), and it was more about sex being the default example of why it was okay to shut children out of certain activities. As the web became monetized + part of the legal world (COPPA), people and projects were less willing to work with minors/allow minors to contribute. This produced tension with some of the minors who had been around for a while, and one of the groups that was the kindest to the kids (in the sense of letting us stick around in chats/etc. and contribute as long as we comported ourselves appropriately) were the FOSS/libre software + piracy communities since they already had a 'eh, whatever' attitude towards the law.

When we would argue that we had the knowledge, history, and agency to participate, forbidding sex was often the go-to counter-example of preventing children from doing what they wanted to do with adults for their own good. So being motivated, spiteful, intelligent children, we argued back and some adults (like apparently rms) agreed with us.

I only mention it because there is a difference between bringing up those arguments/statements unprompted and weighing in on an already on-going argument.

(I appreciate you taking the time for this discussion.)

Yes, I fully agree that this is an ideology. This is where the problem is.

You presented (elsewhere) several examples of bad behavior that happens in a student body (racial slurs, sexual harassment, etc.) I think everybody agrees that this behavior needs to be "managed" and the professor needs to at the very least be prepared when this happens. One way to handle this situation is to offer incoming professors a pamphlet describing various situations likely to happen and suggestions on how to deal with them.

You cross the ideological boundary when you start labeling these issues as DEI, and this is where the animosity starts, including animosity from me.

What's so bad with using the DEI label? It's just a name, right? What's in a name? Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus, and all that.

The problem is that by now DEI is an industry that has convinced half the American public that the other half is racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. Under the name of DEI, I have been subject to all sort of indoctrination claiming that I am inherently racist, that I am unconsciously believing that women suck at math and I need to do something to fix this problem, etc.

The effect of this nonsense on workplaces is disastrous. You have black people here on HN saying, "I was getting along with everybody and now everybody thinks I am a diversity hire". I have been called a racist for suggesting that we (a cloud provider) have no right to know what customers are doing with the services we sell them. (I am racist because customers may use such services for "racist" causes.) Companies have explicit DEI goals, and I have seen at least one VP committing to meet with two "minoritized" employees per quarter in order to meet his bar for support for DEI. I can hardly think of anything more offensive than effectively saying "you are a black woman, I don't give a crap about you, but I need to spend 30m with you to get my bonus". And don't get me started with the impact of all this nonsense on hiring.

The bullshit level around women in tech is particularly ridiculous. Everybody believes that "science" proves that there is a bias against hiring women, and the DEI training provided this paper by Zingales et al. as a proof: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/12/4403.full.pdf From a bullshit toy example where a bunch of students are asked to simulate hiring women for a simple math task, everybody is now inferring nefarious behavior in the real world. What's really funny about this paper is how they choose the specific task: "Although there is some evidence of a sex difference in mathematics performance (5, 6), which is shrinking over time (7), there is no sex disparity in performance on an arithmetic task such as ours (8)." [See Discussion section] So what these guys are really saying is: women can't do complicated math [5, 6], so we pick the trivial task of adding a bunch of numbers, which [8] proves that even women can do. The very article that complains about bias is predicated upon the fact that the bias is, in fact, justified and grounded in science.

I don't think I have to say that I regard all of the above as complete bullshit, both the paper and all its references. In my professional experience, the women I have interacted with were on average better than the dudes. But this is the nonsense that is sold as DEI these days. It doesn't solve any problems, and it creates needless tensions.

You seem to be under the impression that DEI is just a way to learn to deal with difficult situations. If you really believe this, maybe look outside your department?