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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

#721

Post by akavi »

KorematsuFredt wrote: post #708
akavi wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Indian-American, "South Asian" is a perfectly reasonable ethnic grouping in the United States. Collectively, that represents ~1% of the US population, too small a grouping to reasonably split out when talking about ethnicity in general terms. All cultures are fractal. For my own ethnic heritage, for example, I could insist on splitting out: * South Indian Dravidians from North Indian Arynans * Kannadigas from o…

South Asian is not "reasonable" it is pretty much racist. We white people could not be bothered with actually noticing the difference between Pakistan and India is the reason. > Lingayats from Vaishnavites This tells me you are probably some kind of humanities graduate from some murican university ?

I'm Indian-American, as I stated above, and the list of subcategories are my own ethnic taxonomy.

I'm not sure what part of the Lingayat distinction bothers you. My grandparents would characterize it as "Lingayat" vs "Brahmina"; would you have preferred that framing?

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

#722

Post by selfmodruntime »

tinyhouse wrote: post #155
selfmodruntime wrote: post #8

The American focus on race is a bit insane to outsiders. Putting such a big focus on race in university applications is just weird. Even worse, having top universities openly discriminate against people based on their race or heritage with affirmative action or similar policies, all in the name of equality, is unbelievable to Europeans like me. What the hell is wrong with the US if a person has a worse chance to be a…

Yes, the US is obsessed over race. That's because Americans are traumatized. I agree it's not a good thing. However, diversity in university admission is a good thing. There are many different ways to have diversity. Diversity is not easy to achieve and since it's sensitive topic it's often not done right.

Diversity in university admissions is a good thing. But US universities guarantee equality of outcome. This is wrong, it should be merit based. If you argue that there is a clear ethnicity correlated class divide, you can achieve more fair diversity by giving more chances to student's from poor backgrounds, instead of focusing on their ethnicity.

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

#723

Post by WalterBright »

saagarjha wrote: post #603
WalterBright wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's because those don't pay you money. I know plenty of excellent engineers who couldn't care less about computer science.

I'm an engineer, and I'm not much into the academic side of computer science. But I enjoy engineering very much.

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

#724

Post by WalterBright »

kelipso wrote: post #655
bitcharmer wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous. You clearly don't have much exposure to the stem bubble. Overwhelming majority are passionate geeks.

Ha ha ha. I have a CS PhD and am friends with grad students in many other STEM fields. There are just as many who are "passionate", or whatever geeky losers who waste their life obsessing over minutiae want to be called, as there are people who are working on their degree for the sake of practicality. I would say the latter are in fact generally more successful.

> losers who waste their life obsessing over minutiae want to be called

Enjoying your work is not the same thing as obsessing over irrelevant minutia.

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

#725

Post by WalterBright »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #548
WalterBright wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

STEM is something you gotta have some substantial internal motivation to do, such as doing it for a hobby. The kind of work I enjoy, you gotta really like it or it isn't going to work out for you. For example, I was taking machines apart when I was 7 trying to figure out how they worked. I'd break open resistors to see what was inside - just baffling grey dust. Eventually I took bicycles apart, then engines, then who…

As a society we have purposely shaped the way we do STEM so that it can be carried out by an army of employees trained to do relatively simple tasks. It is much better for a company to hire 15 people to do one thing, than to hire one brilliant person to do the same. The extra cost is just passed on to the consumer, and you gain predictability and managerial prestige. As an example, Amazon had twice as many people wor…

> As a society we have purposely shaped the way we do STEM so that it can be carried out by an army of employees trained to do relatively simple tasks.

I see no purposeful force "shaping" this.

> It is much better for a company to hire 15 people to do one thing, than to hire one brilliant person to do the same.

They would hire the one brilliant person if they could. The trouble is finding them.

Also, brilliant is not the same thing as enjoying the work.

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

#726

Post by commandlinefan »

_heimdall wrote: post #632
afro88 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not measure on diversity of thought then?

Because measuring diversity of thought is much more difficult, and thought isn't a legally protected class.

> thought isn't a legally protected

So the law justifies the law?

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

#727

Post by dctoedt »

rayiner wrote: post #639
kortilla wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Culture includes some of our most deep-down disgust responses. I have trouble even being at people’s houses if there’s dog hair on the couch or I can smell them. It’s coded to me as a dirty environment.

I agree with Thomas (see his response to your comment, "below").

Are you making a category mistake here?

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

#728

Post by mistermann »

KorematsuFredt wrote: post #719
mistermann wrote: post #672

Earlier 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. 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…

Ya, these are certainly valid points....once Humans get into groups, all sorts of bizarre dynamics kick into gear.

Affairs on this planet always remind me of this movie clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmHy34EWlpw

....except, it's hard to figure out who is chasing who!! lol

The line at 2:40 gets me every time.

Maybe us folks should get together and decide if our Dear Leaders and Experts might need a bit of a time out to consider how they've been behaving.

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

#729

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ethbr1 wrote: post #647
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody is always quick to blame the internet for everything, but I think we can actually pin this one on housing scarcity. Journalism was funded by advertising because ad space was rare and journalistic outlets got a big chunk of it. Then the internet made ad space common -- it's on every web page full of lolcats -- and it was this reality rather than anything specific done by Facebook or Google that took the ad m…

I lay it at Google and Facebook's feet by the property of 'To whom the wealth is redistributed, also inherits the responsibility.' They've raked in a huge percentage of the ad spend that moved digital (from print). And they've done what with it? They fundamentally don't want to be in the business of journalism, because it's a terrible business . So they don't create content, which now means no one does. (And that's n…

Most of the revenue from AdSense etc. goes to the site, i.e. if there are Google ads on a newspaper's website, the newspaper is getting more of the advertiser's money than Google. The problem is this is less money than they used to get, and a lot of the sites aren't journalistic outlets, so the money gets spread pretty thin.

In theory Google and Facebook could use their cut to fund journalism, but is that really what we want? The vast majority of journalism funded (and therefore controlled) by a small handful of megacorps?

Far better to make it sustainable for individual independent journalists to make living.

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

#730

Post by _heimdall »

commandlinefan wrote: post #726
_heimdall wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because measuring diversity of thought is much more difficult, and thought isn't a legally protected class.

> thought isn't a legally protected So the law justifies the law?

All I meant was that all companies ultimately care about is what is legally required, everything else ends up just being lip service and PR.

To your question though, the law justifies the law unfortunately. That's one big reason I'm opposed to laws and government in general. Something is legal because we said its legal, or more often its legal because a prior generation said it was legal. Put worse, something is punishable because we once wrote down that you would be punished for a specific act.

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