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MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

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

#611

Post by kortilla »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #203
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…

There's a pattern that I see come up quite often, and it's really common with any discussion about things that involve diversity and inclusion efforts. I don't know if there's a specific term for it, but it happens roughly like this: First, someone identifies an opportunity to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion in some way. DEI statements in academia, codes of conduct in open source projects, some rules around t…

> Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it.

When you assume it’s bigots who are the ones who show up with concerns, do you see how fucked up that is?

“Whenever we propose X, the bigots get wind of it and spread FUD. All of their arguments sound fine, but I know they are in bad faith because they are exhausting.”

Have you ever considered that maybe they aren’t bigots and ironically you’re the bigot here just calling everyone who disagrees with respectability and plausibility a bigot?

(P.S. I tried to not be respectable so I don’t get lumped in with “the bigots” and have my ideas rejected out of hand.)

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

#612

Post by kristopolous »

jltsiren wrote: post #226
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> support kids and young adults with extra classes, trainings If that support is available to those who need it irrespective of race, sex, et cetera , sure. Targeting underserved populations is one thing. Restricting access based on protected characteristics is illegal under any commonsense interpretation of the law.

There is no such thing as a fully inclusive community. A community is defined as much by the people it excludes as the people it includes. If you try to ensure that everyone is welcome, someone else will make the decisions who to exclude. Typically by making things too uncomfortable for some groups. If you genuinely want to target underserved populations, you must be prepared to exclude those who are not in the targe…

It's about casting a net as wide as possible because for the one Srinivasa Ramanujan we know about, there's countless others who never got the right circumstances.

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

#614

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

sensanaty wrote: post #415

The western idea of DEI has always puzzled me ever since I first came across it (or at least the D portion of DEI, which in my mind is the most important one). I'm a Serb by blood and grew up in and have lived in Indonesia for the majority of my life, and I went to an international school with kids from quite literally every single corner of the earth, many of them being some exotic mix of various ethnicities. Despit…

It's amazing how shallow is the "Americanized" DEI perspective when you look at your country of origin and its neighbors. Former Yugoslavia is, comparatively, not very large, but it contains a whole lot of very diverse groups, sometimes so that the "melting pot" occasionally starts throwing angry sparks around. But to them, you're all just... "white". And thus your life experience must be also "white" and "privileged", right? Right?

Sometimes I really want to take all those privileged campus kids and their little twitter accounts and throw them into a Total Perspective Vortex.

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

#615

Post by davidgerard »

dang wrote: post #399
davidgerard wrote: post #249

This looks very badly sourced.

I agree. I'm assuming that https://unherd.com/newsroom/mit-becomes-first-elite-universi... is true because otherwise they'd be fabricating quotes and that seems unlikely, although the site does have an ideological slant. It's a little surprising that more publications haven't reported on it yet though.

I am assuming that there is vastly less to this than this particular cluster of publications, and too many of the commenters here, are getting themselves worked up about.

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

#616

Post by skissane »

kanbara wrote: post #505
rayiner wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there evidence that Americans of different ethnicities interpret user interface features differently? If not, isn’t it concerning that in the year 2024 we casually assume that these sorts of differences exist? Isn’t that an example of DEI thinking accentuating the notion of differences? It seems like a new take on this: https://youtu.be/E8PBrhFN35c?si=90DSnwgHubAvJwr8

japanese ui is often more dense and information rich. there are left to right and right to left cultures. tonnes of difference between cultures and understand of the world.

Does hiring someone whose native script is “right-to-left” make a difference to the product though?

On the one hand, there are people who deeply understand the technical intricacies of Unicode BiDi yet can’t actually read Arabic or Hebrew

On the other hand, if the business doesn’t view Arabic markets (or Israel) as viable to pursue, it doesn’t matter how much you are aware of those languages, it is irrelevant to the product

And what about backend developer roles, where UI concerns like BiDi are largely a non-issue?

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

#617

Post by hackerlight »

sensanaty wrote: post #415

The western idea of DEI has always puzzled me ever since I first came across it (or at least the D portion of DEI, which in my mind is the most important one). I'm a Serb by blood and grew up in and have lived in Indonesia for the majority of my life, and I went to an international school with kids from quite literally every single corner of the earth, many of them being some exotic mix of various ethnicities. Despit…

> I guess what I'm trying to get at in this strange ramble is that ultimately DEI should be focused on diversity of thought, and not just superficial characteristics, yet it never works out that way.

I think you're missing the point of DEI. The advertised purpose of DEI is to counteract racism. It's easy to be sympathetic to that objective if you look at recent history. For example, watch a movie made in the US as recently as the year 1990, and you'll see a stark under-representation of anyone Black. It's hard to chalk that up to different education levels, because it's not like acting requires formal education. Let's face it, it was racism. And this racism pervaded every industry, having inter-generational effects that compounded over time. The idea of DEI therefore is to act as an opposing force.

My main problem with DEI is it's corrosive to the social fabric. To constantly remind people of ethnicity is not a good idea. It should not be front of mind all the time. A shared civic identity should be front and center. There's also an anti-egalitarian anti-individual aspect to DEI thinking that I dislike. And the third thing that puts me off about DEI is the people who run these programs seem to be over-represented by ideological extremists and racists. Black supremacism type ideas are tolerated in these circles when they should be resolutely discarded as ethnonationalist nonsense. It is hard to fully support it until they purge themselves of such personalities.

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

#618

Post by smolder »

skellington wrote: post #102
6312783123 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

You can go pretty deep if you try to discover the fundamental belief systems or reasoning behind the 'core' DEI people. A lot of people just casually agree that "being fair" and "not being racist" is good. And it certainly is. And like many movements that involve propaganda/control/power, the key to enlisting large support is to hide the real motivations and goals within a cozy shell of easily consumable "moral" nice…

I don't think your post here is substantive. You are only vaguely complaining about an ill-defined group of people, as is customary in political speech.

If you wanted to discredit "numerous books" you should have named at least one. Do you have an example?

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

#619

Post by mtlguitarist »

WalterBright wrote: post #528
kelipso wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe decades ago when college students based their choice of majors on feelings or whatever that might have been true. Nowadays college students are much more practical. An obvious example is the rise in CS majors in the last decade. The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

> The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous. Pretty much all the ones I know that are good at it love it. Just like musicians and athletes. Sure, there are those in it for the money. They're usually the tweeners. > Nowadays college students are much more practical. I'm not so sure about that. There's a large number of math avoiders in college, and when they graduate discov…

Okay but the difference is that being a mediocre athlete or musician means that you're unemployed, whereas you can be a totally mediocre programmer and make well into the 6 figures. My friends who are professional musicians know far more about their craft than even the most motivated engineers I've worked with, and they make less money than the worst paid engineers I've met. I've casually played guitar for almost 20 years and been programming less than half that time ane I can't even think about going pro without a massive dedicated effort.

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

#620

Post by ImHereToVote »

jacklbk wrote: post #518
sensanaty wrote: post #415

The western idea of DEI has always puzzled me ever since I first came across it (or at least the D portion of DEI, which in my mind is the most important one). I'm a Serb by blood and grew up in and have lived in Indonesia for the majority of my life, and I went to an international school with kids from quite literally every single corner of the earth, many of them being some exotic mix of various ethnicities. Despit…

As an Asian, the DEI idea and how it was executed puzzled me as well. Apple's first VP of diversity said [1]: > “Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.” > “there can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life e…

I think the goals of a sufficiently complex and large system is what the results are.
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