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This is the most ridiculous take I've seen all year. South Asia is an established geographical-cultural term that includes the two largest countries in Southern Asia - India and Pakistan.
MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
681–690 of 807 posts
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand how this crap got into America of all countries
America is the most likely country for this to happen to, due to the unresolved issues surrounding slavery and the abandonment of reconstruction after the civil war. This is compounded when viewed through the USAs founding mythology. Other countries have done worse, but they haven't done so as hypocritically as the United States.
>unresolved issues surrounding slavery
>country was founded 248 years ago
>the "issue" stopped happening 159 years ago
I don't think an issue that lasted for barely 1/3 of our country's history and hasn't been legal for the entirety of this century, last century, or much of the century before that is the problem. I think people's addiction to being full-time victims is the issue, because if you're always a victim, you never have to be responsbile for anything in your life, you can always blame your imagined "oppressor". People do this, teach their children that they are also victims regardless of their actions, and maintain a long line of familial victimhood. DEI is a direct symptom of that.
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#683In 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…
A lot of things have "said purpose" and the "real purpose" because of which such absolutely kafkaesque things survive in organizations. The said purpose of-course is to make sure that the candidate is "committed to diversity". We can argue all day on whether a statement is in any way good measure of it. It really isn't. I have helped people write such statements and we have always written it with cynicism and great c…
> A lot of things have "said purpose" and the "real purpose" because of which such absolutely kafkaesque things survive in organizations.
I remember sitting in conference room once and between meetings we started discussing the MBA degree and how you often needed one to move up at big companies. I mused that I didn't understand why this was so important since an MBA program didn't teach you much that you couldn't learn on the job or by reading a few books.
A colleague of mine, who'd recently gotten his MBA, started laughing out loud. He said, "You're missing the whole point. Nobody cares about the course content or what you learn. The value of the MBA is that it's proof you can spend a lot of time and effort completing bullshit assignments on time without too much heel-dragging or back talk. It tells the world you'll keep your head down and not cause too much trouble for the organization".
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
they very well might have been evaluated based entirely on their abilities alone. A toxic element of DEI is that now they have to always wonder (as does everyone else) if it was done because of their skin color/gender/race, regardless of what their mentor says. Because it very well may be true as well.
Just like the justice system. People should be assumed innocent until proven guilty. DEI and more broadly CRT are toxic because minorities, like all humans have faults and these ideas promote minorities to assume discrimination instead of faults. Therefore not helping these individuals improve their faults. This also promotes division and hatred in society. Overall net negative.
to be fair, I don't think yelling at someone for their flaws is very effective at fixing them.
My reasoning can be summed up as "look at prison recidivism vs Skinner's work on positive reinforcement".
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree. "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men. Female or non-white are "diversity." A great example are the statements and articles from 2020 when Biden announced the most diverse ever White House Communications Team which was 100% female. Biden talked about how critical diversity was and bragged about this 100% female communications team. All t…
> "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men. Unfortunately this is common, because they do bad things with "diversity", even though diversity itself isn't bad. This isn't a very good defintion of what "diversity" should be, of course. There are many kind of diversity, and which are more important depends on the situation. But, regardless of it, diversity i…
> none of this should mean that you should deny application
Is there any evidence that anybody was _ever_ doing this after about 1950 or so?
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#686Pretty sure I didn't get a Stanford job in part because I didn't submit a DEI statement. It was optional, but clearly sort of like breathing is optional. I actually wrote one, had it reviewed, rewrote. As someone in federal government who made the mistake of being born white and male, but has worked their whole life on these issues (among many others) and made what I think are very defensibly equitable hiring and sel…
The problem is making the mistake of being born white and male! The best thing I've learned from all of this is that it's literally free to identify as whatever you'd like, whenever you'd like, so if opportunities are being taken from you on the basis of race or gender, you should take advantage of that. No one can deny that you identify as that thing, since identifying as something is the literal exact same thing as being that thing. That's how I became a non-binary black lesbian woman!
Like when they opened up the "Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing" for non-binary and trans people... So men showed up and claimed to be non-binary to get access to something that was available to any other person except them. We need to continue seeing stuff like this until we fully choke out the idea of admittance based on anything other than "Is this person the best for the role?".
https://www.wired.com/story/grace-hopper-celebration-career-...
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The point is that when you control for these factors, a woman with the same title and responsibilities as a man will earn less for the same work. That can't possibly be true, because in a market economy, the more-expensive workers (men) would be laid off and replaced by less-expensive, equally-capable "same title and responsibilities" workers (women). This doesn't seem to be the case on a grand scale, which means i…
Are you arguing that society operates from a position of optimal market theory, and that cultural norms, prejudices, and biases play no role in salary or pay rates for anyone It's not particularly hard to find examples of disparity or exploitation.
Disparity and exploitation are not the same thing as ignoring an obvious way to reduce labor costs. Why would companies be smart enough to outsource labor overseas, but somehow lack the know-how to simply hire women and save 23% of labor costs? Because the "women make 77 cents on the dollar" meme is just looking at raw incomes, and not adjusting for type of job and experience.
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#688Earlier 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…
I understand you’re trying to strong man this. But I think we need to interrogate the premise here. How does “inequity” represent a “threat” to our “long term survival and prosperity?” What is the specific causal mechanism by which we expect that to happen? It seems facially implausible to me, given that America became prosperous when these inequalities were much worse. Why do we accept this premise as a given?
> Research has generally linked economic inequality to political and social instability, including revolution, democratic breakdown and civil conflict.
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
What claims is he making specifically? > the nature of sex (spectrums and such) Sex shows itself to be a spectrum pretty often. > unscientific claims about being able to change one's sex Phenotype or genotype? They don't always match even without any medical intervention, and a change in hormones can drastically change phenotype.
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/175240399517425272... https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/178678872412412757... You can debate him there if this is your hobby horse.
A huge fraction of humans don't have gametes. That definition only works for describing a species, not individuals. That doesn't need debating, he's off in his own corner talking about a completely different metric.
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#690What the hell is a “DEI” statement anyways? The site is a bit light on what this means, only a bunch of satirical and sarcastic posts. Almost feels like it was generated by LLM. Is it something like this? “I helped a group of first generation, low income students apply to college and obtain $50,000 in grants” Not sure what’s wrong with this…
No, it’s a profession of ideological commitment. What you suggest would get a low to middling score. Here’s a rubric that’s representative of others I’ve seen: https://www.nas.org/storage/app/media/New%20Documents/Rubric... Note how saying you’ll “treat everyone the same” will get you penalized. How doing the things they want isn’t enough to demonstrate your commitment to their cause. They want true believers, but wi…
As an Asian, this is really scary, and reminds me of Communist times where people are often asked to write "self reflections".