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Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

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Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#501
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DEI folks are getting exactly what they want in the end anyway. serious question: what do they want exactly? give money to disadvantaged folks? give them training? check quota boxes? do they personally care?

A staff that is both dependent on and united by having the same, consistent politics throughout the company (and all companies). More eloquently put by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33053801

So these individuals are like potential spies inside the organization? To whom would they report?

I've seen a considerable number of people hired who seemed to have no productivity but the idea that they might have a reporting function outside the usual "chain-of-command" (e.g., like communist party political officers in the military) never occurred to me.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, they also need a platform to make people aware of their existence, their views, and to recast their censorship to be in their favour. The whole point of no-platforming individuals is to make a statement that their views are seen as reprehensible and to stop them from being able to air those views to an audience. The only way that this works is to exert total control of the content of all communications. Otherwi…

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> I'm not saying that censorship is just or desirable. Just that it works.

But it doesn't, unless it is extensive/complete. It just seems like it does because censored media is constantly reassuring us that the censorship is working, and that all reasonable people enjoy it.

You can't destroy ideas by censoring them from the largest outlets, you have to perpetually search out the smallest outlets (e.g. open everyone's mail) to make sure that these ideas aren't still infecting people, multiplying exponentially. You can't relax anywhere, for a moment. The only surefire way to kill or silence ideas is to kill or silence the people who hold them. That means you have to have systems in place to detect stray ideas, and processes in place to eliminate them.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#503
post #500

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IQ is a deeply questionable metric to start with (I have yet to see good evidence IQ tests measure anything more than "how good at IQ tests you are", and as a child I obsessed over them and got very good at them by learning how to approach them, which means it very much isn't measuring something innate), tests are often (and in the case of the historic ones actually cited in the "evidence", all) culturally biased, an…

Innate was too strong a word. I meant to say that it was pre-existing. Any discrimination in a job application is not the discrimination that causes low IQ, if any. That occurs in early childhood.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Christian right could make identical arguments, and a few decades ago had the political power to deplatform” those who disagreed with them. Why is your argument different?

> Why is your argument different? Because in a liberal democracy - or anywhere for that matter - not all ideas are of equal value. The same goes for Putin's Russia as it does for, say, Finland. You have to decide what you stand for, a culture has to decide what it wants to value. Some ideas and actions are quite obviously, objectively anti-life, pro-misery. Two people saying the same thing or doing the same thing are…

“I’m right and they’re wrong” is a unpersuasive argument, and doesn’t provide a foundation for deciding the rules in a pluralistic democracy. What best serves “human well being” is highly disputed. How do you create a framework for groups to cooperate democratically without agreeing in advance who is right?

The problem is that you’re begging the question. You’re assuming that maximizing individual freedom is what serves well being. Most humans disagree with that premise. Studies show, for example, that Christian conservatives are both happier and have more children than other Americans. Those are “objective” measures of “human well being.” Indeed, zooming out, nearly every highly individualistic, secular western society is in decline—to the point where they can’t even take care of their elderly population without importing religious Catholics from Latin America (in the US) or Muslims (Europe). “Ability to propagate one’s culture sustainably” certainly seems like at least one measure of success at serving human well being, no? And on that measure, modern "liberal democracies" are failing.

Now of course there are other ways to measure human well being, and liberal democracies do quite well on those measures. My point is that by 2022, it should be clear that people disagree on what constitutes a good life, and societal progress. In the last two decades, we've seen country after country reject secular liberal democracy. And even in the west, reaction is on the rise. A majority of Hindus, Afghans, and Iowans agree that San Francisco isn't their dream for the future of their own society. And if you want to dismiss that as "they're wrong and we're right," what you're advocating for looks more like a holy war than "liberal democracy."

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#505
> In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining 'whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'"

What are the consequences of saying "This research does not have any DEI implications."?

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a multitude of groups doing that, but they're not equally dangerous now. The problem is that the hard right has control of the Republican Party. The hard left does not have control of the Democratic Party. If US democracy falls in the next few years, it's almost guaranteed to be because of the hard right.

I'm not surprised, but continually amazed that people actually and truly think this way; that there's only one insidious group that are the problem, and only they will be the cause of disaster. Take the blinders off, there's more at work here that petty tribalism.

Can you pleas explain how that bothersiderism logic would not be equally valid for defending the Nazi party in the 30s? You must believe it’s not valid because it being valid means the comment is gas lighting.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#507

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does it rly change anything? like, take sports. asians have some structural advantages (endomorphism and limb to body ratio) for lifting, west africans at mnay explosive/power sports (fast twitch muscle concentration, arms/legs to body), east africans at long-distance running etc. (lighter structure, efficient muscles over long term), whites at swimming (shoulder structure & torso length). should we stop large swathe…

Studies that show the genetic diversity of the continent of Africa are in fact "anti-racist". They truthfully reveal that the psuedoscientific 19th century ideas we refer to as race had no scientific basis. Some people really haven't taken this "truth" well though. They still try to fit every new fact into their old model. Like "West African Scorpios" are much more open to emotion, while "East African Scorpios" are o…

I don't understand the argument that genetics isn't correlated with race. I would imagine a better argument is that it's a spectrum - but the fact is that when plotting the principle components of any large scale set of human genetic data from around the world, self reported race actually clusters (PC isn't even a clustering technique) quite well. So the fact that the axes of tbe largest explained variance of the data (PC_0 and PC_1) correlates with self reported race is hard to mend with the idea that is loudly exclaimed in academia that race isn't genetic. Am I missing some important subtlety here? While I agree that we need to do as much as possible to eradicate the awful racism we see in far too many places today, this idea to turn a blind eye to the largest explained variance in large scale genetic studies by saying it doesn't exist is perplexing.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#508
post #424

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>I'm not saying that censorship is just or desirable. Just that it works. Does it though? Ideas are hard to kill. Just because you stop people from saying something in public, does not mean they aren't talking about it in private. In fact, oftentimes people even assume the thing you can't talk about must be really important or else they'd let you talk about it. And in turn, it holds more powerful and spreads further.…

The only time stopping viruses has ever worked is via vaccines. Exposing people to it and letting them build immunity to it.

One common characteristic amongst the people involved in today's standard angry mobs is a total inability to defend their opinion, and a total unwillingness to engage. Instead, they snipe by repeating things they sort of remember someone else saying and post memes, then disappear when engaged. A kind of personal deplatforming, where they don't allow contrary opinions to have access to their ears.

The way you learn how to defend your opinion is to engage with people who have different opinions, not having affirmation parties with people who are predisposed to agree with you about everything.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#509

My understand for how we measure systemic racism issues seems to typically be predicated on assumed outcomes. For example that if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this. What I don’t understand is why that is assumed true. If we want to encourage many different cultures to live together wouldn’t it naturally make sense that different cultu…

The only issue with this is we can and have isolated clear mechanisms in which certain races are treated differently as compared to others (for example, names on resumes and interview rates, property assessments given a white looking household vs black looking household, pain management in hospitals for women of various races during childbirth, etc), and do I think it is fair to say that the expectation would be if t…

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Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments are judged by what is written in them, not what’s intended.

Quoted post unavailable.

You're getting downvoted and flagged because you're breaking the site guidelines by going on about getting downvoted and flagged. It's tedious and off topic. Please stop now.
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