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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

#541

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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.

That is wrong. Discrimination doesn’t cause low IQ. Every major American race has a very high median income, by international and historic standards.

Uh, can't it? Stuff like lead exposure is higher in disfavored groups, and lead exposure is very bad for IQ. All sorts of environmental pollution is bad for child development, developing brains are pretty susceptible to this stuff, and guess which people end up having to live in more polluted areas?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism#Impacts_o...

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

#542

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>Ideas, especially those that stoke resentments, are like viruses. The problem is that people make statements like this but apply them selectively. E.g., platforms like major news networks are happy to give airtime to the claim that people alive today, who never owned slaves and are very likely not descended from anyone who did, must pay reparations to others alive today who were never enslaved and may well not be de…

How is this relevant to the question of whether censorship is effective?

Because one measure of effectiveness can be equality of application.

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

#543

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"Our lab specializes in developing hypergraph analysis techniques with applications in cybersecurity. The success of these techniques will force threat actors to innovate in order to survive. As more diverse organizations are more innovative [1][5][26] and threat actors are rational and well-informed [9][10], we expect our efforts to encourage threat actors to become more diverse as more effective cybersecurity techn…

This is a bad example: local knowledge (popular scams, exploits, software, etc) does play a nontrivial role in determining what the population of threats looks like; this activity is in part socially determined. So having a more diverse crowd of researchers -- with all else equal -- can improve your research group's understanding of what threats are out there. Diversity gives you edge here. Unless of course, the grap…

It was a satirical example of "bullshit" application writing. I personally don't dispute the relevance of diversity (variously operationalized) within human knowledge production institutions.

I do - I think reasonably - dispute the applicability of the outputs of many of our knowledge production institutions to social justice questions. (Just as I don't dispute that there are, conversely many which are).

If we find ourselves in a situation where we can't make a useful distinction between research that is and isn't relavent to social justice, I think we're at risk of our language seeming vaccuous and nonsensical.

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

#544
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please cite it. Every time someone claims this, they come back citing something laughably easy to disprove like The Bell Curve, which claims this, and is just an absolute mess of obvious nonsense: Using deeply culturally and/or language biased IQ tests. Using IQ tests that essentially just test the quality of education they received. Sampling unrepresentative populations. Using studies from an Apartheid state as an e…

I don’t care to get in some debate at all, but first you’d have to offer up a very precise question and not some general smear campaign. If it’s some of the sentences you’re arguing with upthread, I might agree with you.

You refuse to cite studies because you don't care to get in some debate?

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

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who first do the targeted group violence are the bad guys.

Define "first", "violence" and for good measure "group". Do things ever reset, for instance? Are some wrongs too far in the past?

I mean the commonly understood contextual meanings of those words. Dictionaries are useful when you're unfamiliar with the words in context. I trust that you, being a native Anglophone, know what those words mean in the contexts they're used. However, if you're thinking of specific examples where you expect our understood meanings of those words to differ, I'll entertain those examples.

Also, violence isn't the only bad thing people do which justifies some sort of retribution.

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

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of research has been done controlling for income, adoption studies, and such, showing your words to be completely untrue.

So you believe that IQ alone is the most predictive metric for a person’s ability to what? Seriously who cares about a couple of IQ points?

I thought IQ was correlated quite well with the idea of "Spearman's G", and unless people actually use something else on a massive scale over decades I'm not sure how you can avoid using it as a metric.

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

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you believe that IQ alone is the most predictive metric for a person’s ability to what? Seriously who cares about a couple of IQ points?

IQ is generally thrown out entirely. Im shocked to see it treated as a legitimate metric on hacker news

Really? HN in 1822 would be filled with educated people seriously defending phrenology. 1922 HN would be falling over itself to defend eugenics. Apparently 2022 HN hasn't come very far from 1922.

No one falls for pseudoscientific groupthink like communities of affluent, well-educated people.

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

#548

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…

> How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences? By conducting studies where you study the effect of the race variable. This has been done many times over in multiple countries and the results have shown that colored people and racial minorities are discriminated against. But despite the vast amount of empirical data, people still refuse to believe that racial discrimination is a factor in the job ma…

People love to cite this study as an example of absolute proof of discrimination, but it isn't. There is an obvious rational non-racist explanation for the outcome in question, and it is affirmative action.

A black person, a white person, and an asian person with the exact same credentials mean extremely different things in terms of absolute rather than relative competence level, as a consequence of affirmative action policies. The filters they had to pass through are different, and therefore an Asian person who went to Harvard almost certainly is in the top 1% of the absolute test score distribution, whereas the same is not necessarily true for the others.

Since job performance is correlated with absolute capability, and not group-relative capability, discrimination on the basis of race is rational in a society that employs affirmative action policies at prior points in the credentialism pipeline. Correcting and controlling for this would only be possible by designing resumes that don't reference achievements that have group-relative thresholds.

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

#549
post #335

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Quoted post unavailable.

One group also set alight many businesses, destroyed property, incited violence, and destroyed the lives of countless individuals in the last two years. The point remains: there are a multitude of groups. Focusing on a single one only shows a blatant and ignorant bias.

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