161–170 of 807 posts
DEI is a strange issue in that nearly everybody agrees that it's a good target to aim for yet any action taken to get there is discrimination. I frankly see it as a cheap shortcut that some very privileged people want to take to try to wash away the sins of our racist past, not to help people, but to make ourselves feel better- or attempt to.
DEI is a strange issue in that nearly everybody agrees that it's a good target to aim for yet any action taken to get there is discrimination. I frankly see it as a cheap shortcut that some very privileged people want to take to try to wash away the sins of our racist past, not to help people, but to make ourselves feel better- or attempt to.
Diversity, the platonic form, is about diversity of thought, opinion, and experience. It is about improving our ability as a group to solve the problems we face by introducing alternative perspectives and viewpoints. It has nothing to do with race or gender necessarily but demand for diversity greatly outweighs the supply and as with all measured things, measuring the number of “diverse” hires has ceased to be a meaningful metric. Granted, it never was a meaningful metric as such, but it has become actively harmful in modern day.
One thing I've found useful in parsing modern news is to remember: A pile of extreme occurrences does not an argument make. Because there's insane stuff happening somewhere, to someone, all the time. With the benefit of digitized news we've enabled lazy trawls to create a pile of "Look at how extreme and crazy ____ is!" to support any viewpoint on any topic. Anti-gun? Here's some insane gun owners. Pro-gun? Here's so…
It isn't just modern news, people tend to be intellectually lazy on any topic they are emotionally invested in. Just look at the fallout from Harvard professor Roland Fryer publishing a study (after hiring a second set of grad students to review the data because he was himself surprised by the results). People didn't react logically, with proportionate arguments, reasoning or counter data. They reacted emotionally, f…
On the question of non-lethal uses of force, the study found “sometimes quite large” racial differences in police use of force, even after accounting for “a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioural factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction”.
In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, however, the study observed that when it came to the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – there were no racial differences “in either the raw data or when accounting for controls”. According to one case study of the Houston police department, black people were actually 23.5% less likely to be shot by police, relative to white people, in an interaction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certain people, discovered how easy it is, to change entire institutions, by applying targeted pressure towards individual managers of those institutions. No manager dares to refuse these initiatives because they'll be instantly named by the activist, with the help of journalist friends, and ensure they lose their job. Hence by going one at a time, a small group of activists can change far larger organisations. Of co…
> No manager dares to refuse these initiatives because they'll be instantly named by the activist, with the help of journalist friends, and ensure they lose their job. Doesn't this feel very authoritarian ? Just replace manager with citizen and you have USSR.
No. People do whatever they can throughout history, and end up having to participate to larger changes. The only remedy we’ve found was Humanism, l’esprit critique, education for everyone, and raising awareness and allergy to all authoritarian acts, but see, in the last 50 years, I’ve seen younger people who aren’t even aware who Diderot is, let alone had enough literacy to read or write those books fluently if they spent the time, even in $130k jobs. Then we flooded each country with about 12% people who haven’t had those Humanism tenants taughts at school.
I’ll from using a stronger metaphor because it will sound cheesy, but by losing the teachings of logic, rhetoric and history, our civilization is not able to hold the pillars of democracy anymore.
In the spirit of trying to learn something from the community: while I can certainly understand the rationale and goals behind DEI programs (many of which I agree with, others not), I honestly can't understand these "DEI statements" at all. They always seemed very "1984" to me, and almost designed to engender resentment in a way that would ultimately backfire. So perhaps I'm in a like-minded echo chamber, but is ther…
DEI statements are culty. I see it no different than a religious fundamentalist college asking faculty to sign an oath of allegiance. At least in such a case, you can always know beforehand the BS you'll put up with, unlike secular universities that are adopting DEI statements.
There is a huge difference between trying to counter institutional prejudice in order to improve the quality of the student body and work being done, and whatever you think a religious “pledge of allegiance” is. A pledge to God? The mishandling of DEI doesn’t invalidate the need to fix broken systems which fail to select the best people instead of those who score highest in easily gamed and inherently biased metrics.
In the eyes of the advocates for each, I actually don't know that there is.
Religious pledges likely are intended to say "we want faculty who will teach and represent the values this school holds and that students expect out of this institution", which feels pretty much exactly like the rationale for DEI pledges.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No manager dares to refuse these initiatives because they'll be instantly named by the activist, with the help of journalist friends, and ensure they lose their job. Doesn't this feel very authoritarian ? Just replace manager with citizen and you have USSR.
Authoritarianism would be if it was top down. This is more a leftist version of McCarthyism. Aka intellectual purity testing and purges.
In the spirit of trying to learn something from the community: while I can certainly understand the rationale and goals behind DEI programs (many of which I agree with, others not), I honestly can't understand these "DEI statements" at all. They always seemed very "1984" to me, and almost designed to engender resentment in a way that would ultimately backfire. So perhaps I'm in a like-minded echo chamber, but is ther…
When Richard Dawkins spoke at UC Berkeley in 2008, he argued that "raising awareness" about feminism by changing how we speak and think has changed society for the better. (In the same discussion, he seeks to do the same for children's freedom from their parents' religion.) There is no doubt that Western society has changed how it treats and speaks about women.
That said, Dawkins has in more recent years found himself opposing identity politics as they seek to change language usage and perceptions of gender.
Although the intentions behind DEI are good such a top down approach doesn't seem to get the desired results (i.e optimal use of everyone's talent, irrespective of their colour, sex and/or identify). Unfortunately the name (and perhaps ideas?) are now tainted and I hope this doesn't impact the bottom up approaches (i.e support kids and young adults with extra classes, trainings, and in general just being chill and ac…
By using DEI as a metric you end up doing the complete opposite of “optimal use of everyone's talent, irrespective of their colour, sex and/or identify…”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the premise: There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society. The threat these represent to our long term survival and prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge and mark our and our prospective collaborators’ efforts to improve the status quo. Maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe it’s asking for a virtue signal in service of performative posturing. Maybe this requ…
Your statement (which I happen to agree with) supports DEI policies but not the specific practice of requiring a written DEI statement , which is the important distinction OP made. I think you can be for DEI as a concept and as a corporate or school policy, but against the performative act of writing it out as some kind of weird "pledge of allegiance" in a job application.
I hasten to restate that is my understanding of the premise, in the spirit of collectively untangling the causal chain here. This is incendiary stuff on HN!