151–160 of 536 posts
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"This argument is written and reasoned like that of a high school sophomore" is, believe it or not, not an ad-hominem argument.
"sort of comically smug"
I think for the vast majority of positions what you want is someone who can do the job well and their ability will naturally constrain their opinions and experience and, in some cases, their demographic characteristics as well. For students you want smart people who have a documented history of being able to learn. Intellectual diversity should arrive naturally from a population of smart people trying to learn. Intellectual diversity should not be a goal itself.
For an example of this, see this story about Canadian professor and laser scientist Patanjali Kambhampati who was denied for grants because his avowed commitment to mere non-discrimination and merit-based hiring was deemed insufficient. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/minority-professor-deni...
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This sounds like the kind of thing you say when you are annoyed but cant find a good argument against the points being made.
It’s level 3 on pg’s hierarchy of disagreement - the whole concept of which I find interesting: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
If you want to have a productive argument (as opposed to just being an asshole screaming at passerby) you need to convince people that you are worth engaging.
This means showing good faith and not being overly dismissive (i.e. tone).
I certainly don't, at least not in the way that modern society seems to be pushing for it. A year or two ago a high school was putting on a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame , and there was a loud minority of students complaining because a white girl was cast as Esmeralda. In the original book, Esmeralda is ethnically French, but Gypsies steal her as an infant and replace her with Quasimodo. Many years later,…
> In the original book, Esmeralda is ethnically French I mean, I just think that no one seems to be aware of this. She's not French in the movie adaptation, which is what most of those kids would be familiar with. (And the musical does heavily draw from the movie – including leaving out her meeting her mother). Without the added context of the original book's description, since it seems no one was aware of it, do you…
No, I don't think willful ignorance justifies cancel culture.
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I read the full piece and didn't encounter any phrasing like that. A few things were pushing the envelope, maybe? Haven't been at Uni for a long time, but after reading about the Oberlin case my eyes/ears are open. Suppose it is problematic if the author does indulge in that, but am not going searching for it. Found this piece reasonable on the whole. It does have an opinion on intolerance, and not everyone is going…
It's not hard to come up with valid critiques of institutional DEI. But the blog post we're reading here is conclusory and derives almost entirely from a tendentious definition of a single word.
I care about diversity. I've been a women in stem nearly my entire life (thanks dad!). However diversity quotas, esg scores, and all the manipulation in "diversity" and "woke" today is more about incompetent children of the rich who need fake jobs that make a lot of money. I've refused to hire an english major young woman on my development team even under extreme pressure from management because she's a women, but al…
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Another reason people don't like diversity initiatives is that whenever you try to have an honest conversation about its problems, you get accused of ridiculous things, like being racist/sexist/etc or thinking nepotism is good.
Nobody thinks nepotism is good (or at least, nobody on this thread does). But there are more- and less- threatening versions of it.
My problem with so-called diversity efforts is that they wildly overemphasize a really superficial attribute: skin color. That is, at best, a tenuous proxy for actual diversity and goes against decades of work of the U.S. civil rights movement. There are real benefits to having a diverse group of people in just about every setting, but assessing the level of diversity by noting the range of skin tones present is inef…
"Diverse" doesn't mean "diverse", it just means "left constituencies". Thus certain races are "racially diverse" (blacks most, whites of course least), certain income strata are "economically diverse", etc. You really can't assume words have their conventional meaning when used in a political context.