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Who cares about diversity?

fakenous.substack.com

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Re: Who cares about diversity?

#201
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with Yes. I do not want to live in a world where genetic editing is used to give everyone equal opportunity. I am ok with not having the genetics to play in the NBA while others do. Diversity should not be the end goal. A healthy society that provides basic needs for all should be. If that means we have mostly peo…

That's not what parent said. Do you want to live in a world where you could be the best basketball player in the world but you are don't get drafted because your eyes are blue? Some people don't get opportunities because of their skin color, their name or their religion. It's about becoming a NBA player if you can't play basketball

I would generally agree that any instance of discrimination by characteristics orthogonal to the performance of a given task is undesirable (if we're striving to optimize total societal benefit / output / productivity).

Attractiveness is another axis of discrimination which is frequently orthogonal to job performance (unless we're talking about jobs as a model, etc).

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#202
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skin color and gender are terrible measures of "opportunities you have". Money is much more indicative

That's true. It's hard to admit that, though. The current monied class can easily blame previous, (mostly dead) generations for racism and misogyny and say "we didn't create this problem, but this is what we're trying to do to fix this". Of course, they're benefitting from the situation and remain in control per the status quo. If we admit to the classism that currently exists, that in the US the zip code you were bo…

It's darkly amusing to me how many well off leftie progressive types are on board when I talk about difficulties that revolve around being a lesbian or disabled but look horrified when I drop into working class speech patterns or refuse to deny the class aspect of my upbringing.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#203

I am absolutely all in for equality, but definitely strongly against equity. When I get HR try to shove a resume down my throat because it ticks all of their boxes despite having none of the boxes to be succesful on the job, that is when I draw the line. I don't care if you're white, black, purple or green, and whether you fuck men, women, all of them or none of them is none of my business. At the end of the day I wa…

This comment just implies that you assume any minority candidate that HR failed to screen is a diversity hire. And of course now every minority employee at your company has to excel or else they might torpedo the entire diversity hiring initiative.

No, that’s your assumption. The parent comment didn’t say it happens all the time, only that it does happen.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#204

So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the…

> But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.

The solution is not to systematically discriminate in another direction, forever.

In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy, and you have abandoned the high moral ground that racial discrimination is always a bad thing, and you end up in a worse situation than you started.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#205

I am absolutely all in for equality, but definitely strongly against equity. When I get HR try to shove a resume down my throat because it ticks all of their boxes despite having none of the boxes to be succesful on the job, that is when I draw the line. I don't care if you're white, black, purple or green, and whether you fuck men, women, all of them or none of them is none of my business. At the end of the day I wa…

Your statement (maybe because of a massive pendulum swing in society) in some circles is considered racist, regardless of your motivations.

This is a major difficulty we face today, mass irrationality in society.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like the kind of thing you say when you are annoyed but cant find a good argument against the points being made.

I'm trying to actually figure out what his points are. None of it is making much sense because he just seems so far off in his own thinking that it's not connected to DEI at all. Still trying to untangle it, but here's my lol as I work through what he's saying. 1.1 When did we start pretending to care about diversity? He says 1978. What? He's fabricating a story to prop up his flawed belief system. 1.2 Diversity is i…

Seriously. His initial premise is so far off base that the whole article reads like some sort of conservative straw man pretending to be intellectual discourse.

Are there issue with some DEI initiatives? Yes, but they are often minor, and usually due to bureaucratic laziness, not malice against conservatives or white people.

He is butt hurt that reality has a liberal bias, and wants academia to subscribe to his knee-jerk conservative fantasies instead.

He essentially trying to argue that a completely straight, cis, white, male faculty and student body would still be "diverse" because some were poor/rich, some were rural/urban, and some were old/young. Sorry, that's not diversity, it's simply variations on a theme.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#207

So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the…

> So the question is, where should the fix be applied?

We could start by not forcing them into a school system that is highly correlated with outcomes of criminality[1]. Then we could stop subsidizing dependency and instead ease the paths work, education, and entrepreneurship, e.g. by reducing the cost of compliance by e.g. reducing scope and burdens of licensure requirements, instituting opportunity zones.

I leave as an exercise to the reader considering why the Democrat party does not support the above policies, while the Republican party does.

[1] "Overall, I find that winning the lottery to attend a first-choice school has a large impact on crime for high-risk youth. High-risk lottery winners experienced roughly a 50 percent reduction in the measures of criminal activity that weight crimes by their severity." https://www.educationnext.org/does-school-choice-reduce-crim...

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#208
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't the 26% learned Mandarin and thus integrated with this group? I think that would have solved the problem. It is unreasonable for minority to expect the majority to follow their whims.

It's an American University. They can learn English.

Last time I heard USA doesn't have official language... So why should they?

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe any phrase has become its opposite here. Language is complicated, and some words have multiple meanings, and some of those meanings are subtle; the idea that every term should be crystalized down to a single unambiguous meaning is, ironically, quintessentially Orwellian. (I'm not saying Orwell would approve of institutional DEI, which suffers from many similar rhetorical flaws).

Quoted post unavailable.

The more important an argument is, the less tolerant you should be of that argument being made badly.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#210
post #89

The whole blog is like this; it's all sort of comically smug "everybody else in the entire world is wrong, and here is a 7-point axiomatic derivation proving it"†, much of it depending on specific definitions of specific words. Check-mate, atheists! There are lots of good, sharp, critical things to say about the DEI movement, most especially "institutional" DEI, but you can't meaningfully say them when you write with…

This sounds like the kind of thing you say when you are annoyed but cant find a good argument against the points being made.

I agree, but it can also be true that there are so many things wrong with the points being made that it's hard to construct a response.
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