Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not it's not lmao
[flagged]
Dude, insulting people is really not on. :(
MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
711–720 of 807 posts
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really DEI. That's just targeting schools with skills gaps, and it might have turned out to be mostly white. To be DEI, they'd have to be chosen because of ethnicity, gender, etc.
DEI is applied broadly, for example here's a list of demographics targeted for DEI from one of Biden's executive orders [1]: The initiative will advance opportunity for communities that have historically faced employment discrimination and professional barriers, including: people of color; women; first-generation professionals and immigrants; individuals with disabilities; LGBTQ+ individuals; Americans who live in ru…
Unsurprisingly, "poor people" are not targeted for help.
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
He addresses that in one of the links.
Now you're cursing me to read entire twitter threads? This isn't in fact my hobby horse so without more specifics I'll just treat him as talking past people and move on. Looking at the video in the second link, it looks like he only spent three minutes talking about trans people and I don't see any explanation there about how you're supposed to apply his universal biological definition to individual people.
It's in the second paragraph of one of the links I posted:
"It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish."
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#714The 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…
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Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#715The 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…
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Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#716The 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 r…
In 1990, 12% of the population was Black. [1] In California, they were 6-8% of the population. Today those numbers aren't very different. And in fact, Americans have consistently overestimated the percentage of Black people in the US, in part due to media representations. [2]
None of this means that Hollywood is/was not racist, but the problem of media representation is different from how it is usually presented. For example, Black actors have difficulty being cast as villains, because there's a longstanding fear in Hollywood about how that would look. [3]
[1] https://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1991-02.pdf
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4435/public-overestimates-us-bl...
[3] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/kumail-n...
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now you're cursing me to read entire twitter threads? This isn't in fact my hobby horse so without more specifics I'll just treat him as talking past people and move on. Looking at the video in the second link, it looks like he only spent three minutes talking about trans people and I don't see any explanation there about how you're supposed to apply his universal biological definition to individual people.
It's in the second paragraph of one of the links I posted: "It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish."
Most of the time!
Sometimes you don't get gametes. At that point, you either need to exclude those people from your classification system because it's ill-suited for this task, or you need to make your classification system significantly more complicated because there's a lot of edge cases.
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The fact that you’re casually comparing differences between users of different races to the different between people with different education levels is remarkable. You think that race is so meaningful?
I think your background and experience is meaningful. And, like it or not, people of different races frequently have differing backgrounds and experiences.
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#719Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pinned comment at the top of this thread requests that "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". Bravo to you for providing exactly that. Too much of the discourse around this insists that these statements are useless and counterproductive. But as you've explained, they do pretty well in staffing the leadership of these orgs with people who believe in this phi…
> The pinned comment at the top of this thread requests that "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". Bravo to you for providing exactly that. Consider the fine grained details of the logic involved in combining "more" with " exactly (!) that". The above commenter framed the situation as the DEI folks being necessarily strategically dishonest and malicious, as op…
> The above commenter framed the situation as the DEI folks being necessarily strategically dishonest and malicious.
I think the question of whether DEI folks are dishonest is entirely irrelevant (but important). You have to put yourself in the shoes of some diversity officer and think of what you will do to feel important, save your job and get promotion.
You will obviously have to come up with idea like "diversity statements", "diversity OKR" for your engineering managers. Most engineering managers are busy building products, they might think it is stupid but still would play along since the cost of compliance is very low.
When someone stands up to this, diversity officials get the villains that further help them justify their role and existence. "Look this person is creating unsafe work environment, he needs to go". All this results into an organizations which loses its ability to question DEI initiatives even more.
It is not my claim that DEI folks are all vile, they get into a conference room and make these grand plans. It is just that the moment you create positions like "DEI officials" the incentives are aligned to set the ball rolling.
Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's telling that dei in latin means gods and I always found it weird that people rarely point this out.
Well, at one point the academia did think about it and then tried using IED instead but then they thought it might blow up in their face :)