Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

whyevolutionistrue.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 807 posts

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#191

Post by over_bridge »

bozhark wrote: post #65

Recently wrote a corporate DEI policy. Our policy is to not regard DEI as a metric of value. It’s absurd.

A profitable company that lacks DEI is still a success

A company that loses money but has plenty of DEI is a failure.

DEI is not the factor that determines success or failure.

It is a tool that you can use but it makes no sense as a goal or target in itself. If your customer base has some attributes that aren't reflected in the staff, maybe hiring some will help you relate. The idea that your company must match the 'diversity' of the general public (in one country) is all backward.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#193

Post by jltsiren »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #75

How would academics react to mandates requiring them to declare their support for: - Ensuring open access to research - Committing to long-term, foundational research - Prioritizing high-quality teaching and mentorship - Embracing diverse viewpoints - Questioning established academic orthodoxy - Focusing research on public rather than personal gain - Openly sharing data and methodologies - Upholding research neutrali…

Most of those have been around for decades. Some of them are legal requirements, at least in some contexts. Some are required by research funders and similar organizations. Some must be included in a teaching statement, which became a popular requirement a decade or two before DEI statements. And all contribute to the administrative bloat everyone likes to complain about.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#194

Post by shadowgovt »

zarathustreal wrote: post #183
userbinator wrote: post #127

The sooner we realise that DEI is making us head towards a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron situation, the better off everyone will be.

The notion that any of us could ever *be equal* has always annoyed me at how obviously absurd it is but I’m glad to see this has been written about before. It’s like we’ve already descended into 1984 territory and we’re all spouting about “equality” because it’s the “right thing to do” even though we all know it’s not physically possible. Equal opportunities are not enough, or so it would be said, because history! We…

The Declaration declares people were "created equal," and even that phrase has historical context to answer "in what sense?"

Nobody is born with divine right of kings. That's the point. Other senses of equality come later and with good reason.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#195

Post by jmyeet »

yarg wrote: post #126
jmyeet wrote: post #111

So DEI is an obvious political hot-potato but that the idea that the group with all the money and power are somehow being discriminated against is just silly. Why? Because none of these discussions deals with the real bias in university admissions: legacy admissions. Harvard's undergraduate class hovers around 35% who are legacies. This is the very essence of anti-diversity and entrenching generational wealth and pow…

Intelligence is largely hereditary (people's intelligence is generally unlikely to be significantly higher or lower than that of their parents). So if the parents were high quality academic students, there's a far higher than average likelihood that the same will be true of their children. (The same is true for athleticism, and no-one would be surprised or think it was unreasonable that LeBron's son was offered schol…

An inbuilt assumption of what you say is that you believe in meritocracy, specifically that the powerful and wealthy are that way at least part by merit. The flipside of this assumption is that poverty is a personal moral failure.

Personally i reject both of these assertions. So much of wealth can be attributed to imperialism, war, slavery, segregation, instituational discrimination and so on.

But let's assume what you say is true: if the wealthy are that way out of merit and they have more ability, intelligence or whatever, why do they need an davantage in college admissions at all? Wouldn't their own merit shine through?

Wealth already gives a host of advantages: opportunities, tutoring, access to people and not having to, say, work jobs to just survive. On top of all those advantages, why do they also need systemic bias in admissions?

The system is unfair by design because it needs to be for those who benefit from it.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#196

Post by llm_trw »

>DEI statements are important because they show individual awareness of historical inequities and current biases that form modern society.

Only the currently approved ones.

The perfect example: holocaust denial. Ask anyone in the US how many people died in the holocaust. The answer is 6 million and they are all Jews.

The real number is 14 million with 8 million Slavs, 6 million Jews and 2 million misc of gays, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, the work shy, etc..

The double think is so strong that you can have two people from the same village, in the same camp, dead on the same day and have one be a victim of the holocaust, and the other not just because one was a Jew and the other a Communist.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#197

Post by kolinko »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #29
pelorat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm European too and I can assure you that non-white people are discriminated at the admission stage to top European universities. Not via race, but via name. It's well known that universities and landlords reject people because they have a Muslim sounding name. We have DEI in Europe too, but here it's increasingly codified into law.

I can guarantee you this is not the case, at least at the uni where I‘m doing my PhD. There is no name in the admission system, it‘s done automatically by grades or tests most of the time.

+1 - University of Warsaw and other universities I know - admission is automatic based on grades only

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#198

Post by rayiner »

zarathustreal wrote: post #162
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #130

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.

I think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical notion of diversity with “diversity of skin color” / “racial diversity” is actually harmful. When we speak of diversity today we often imply a sort of supposed-deserved reparations toward the “minorities.” Obviously there are so many incorrect aspects of these assumptions, but many people in power, perhaps all, have accumulated guilt that needs an outlet. Diversi…

> think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical notion of diversity with “diversity of skin color” / “racial diversity” is actually harmful.

I absolutely agree with this. To use myself as an example: as a Bangladeshi who grew up in the American south, I bring a super diverse viewpoint to a group of say white new englanders.

But why does that matter in a professional setting? I’d love to hear someone precisely articulate how they think I’d behave differently from a white new englander in the same position, and why that “diversity” would make the team “stronger.”

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#199

Post by marcosdumay »

lazide wrote: post #122
leosanchez wrote: post #31

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.

> Authoritarianism would be if it was top down.

If a minority can impose their will into institutions, destroying the life of anybody that opposes them, you need a quite messed-up conception of power structures to place that minority "down".

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#200

Post by comeonbro »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #187
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #81

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 we have all the infrastructure for an even more oppressive and intrusive total information awareness regime, DEIs are so far from 1984. DEIs are just dumb paperwork and formal procedure on top of the usual facade of hiring and promotion rigamarole

Havel's Greengrocer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...

Post reply on HN