631–640 of 807 posts
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DEI statements are so Soviet-like that even very mild centrism is far to the right from them. So, shift to the right ... very relative to the starting point, right?
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You actually explained the need for DEI. >Yet if some HR person would interview me, a white-skinned guy, and then my best friend, a black-skinned guy who has African/Japanese ancestry, I'd definitely be placed in the same "bucket" as the white Dutchies around me and my friend with the black Dutchies, despite him and I actually having identical experiences and mindsets and not really having anything in common with the…
Why not measure on diversity of thought then?
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Congratulations, the small-time local farmer with 10 acres, two quality high tunnels, a mid-sized tractor, and a couple of trucks and trailers is now wealthy. Assets are not necessarily liquid.
Edge cases do not negate the whole point. For example, I'm pretty sure you can find a billionaire who's very cash-poor, i.e., wealth is locked up in the value of a private company. Does not change the fact that anyone with $1 billion+ of net worth is ultra-rich. Whatever the edge case may be, anyone with $1 million+ annual income and $10 million+ in assets is undeniably upper-class, including your hypothetical farmer…
Donald Trump comes to mind, struggling to pay $464M bond set by New York judge.
> Land acknowledgement statements are creeping into the US these days. What are the odds they make it to Israel?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40270596 .
I’m glad that MIT is standing up for an evidence based approach to all this, as they did with reinstating the SAT. Skin color differences don’t make organizations or schools better or worse: https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p... . (Lack of diversity, of course, may be evidence of underlying race-based discrimination.) It was an idea that was developed in response to Supreme Court cases that…
Its easy to follow the crowd when popular opinion swings in a crazy direction. Its even easier to see the writing on the wall and be one of the first to swing back, claiming some kind of honor or bravery in doing so.
Its a win-win. Up front you don't get blasted for being racist because you don't fall in line, and on the back end you're held up as a hero when you respond to what everyone has already realized but few have adjusted to yet.
>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, Gypsie…
Because the Holocaust can refer to either the Nazi's genocide of Jews or all the genocides carried out by Nazi Germany. Most often it is the former. So to reframe this, if you ask people how many people died in the Jewish genocide they'll probably give you the figure of how many Jews died, yes. They aren't ignoring all of the other victims, they're giving you the statistic of what they thought you asked for. This is…
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DEI is prejudice squared. Individuals are stuffed into tight racial and gender boxes in a big bout of social engineering. It is better than stuffing them into boxcars and deporting them, but ultimately the logic behind those treatments is the same. You are not John Doe, you are White or Black or whatever, a Lego brick that can be replaced by another Lego brick of the same color and the bureaucratic system will be hap…
> I can't think of a better way to deepen and perpetuate absurd divisions among people than the identity obsession and pseudo-quotas that the modern American progressive movement is pushing. I can: going back to ignoring the division that was already being perpetuated.
There is, though, some space to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, where white male is the universally undesirable employee/student, and East Asian male meets the same fate because he is "white-adjacent".
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…
I’m still looking for the single person who was offended by the use of master as the default git branch name. I never found them but everyone got to pretend like they were making a difference for a little bit. These statements are the exact same thing to me.
Keyword: virtue signalling
> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling
(in Germany, it is common to use a much more derogatory term for a related concept: "[der] Tugendterror" [virtue terror]).
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I don’t subscribe to that view of nationhood. It’s a constant source of discomfort (not just at the office, but visiting people’s houses or visiting my in laws) but it’s not my place to impose on the people whose ancestors built this country. I feel bad enough that I won’t let my wife have a dog, but I have to draw the line somewhere.
If it’s just cultural have you thought of “getting the fuck over it” and letting your wife get a dog? You seem like a logical person, unless you specifically have an issue with them that isn’t cultural baggage, just embrace the ability to have dogs.
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> 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…
Because most people in technology have end users. Quite often those end users come from many different backgrounds. Having more people in the room who can think in terms of a larger subset of the user base will always produce a better product. I work in the post secondary education sector. I am the only person on my team who doesn’t have a college degree. I often have to help them see our software through that lense…