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PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

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Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#611

Post by throwaway48476 »

epistasis wrote: post #484
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases. In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups". I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote sh…

> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment. Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a…

Whether something is illegal is only loosely correlated with whether it is common. Eg the war on drugs.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#612

Post by klipt »

punchfunk4lyte wrote: post #530
klipt wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting and law schools are also graduating majority women these days. Have you not been paying attention? DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.

Women were marginalized for millenia. Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974. It will take a long time to correct for that. It's a ratchet from the perspective of our very brief lives. What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?

> Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974.

And your father/grandfather was enslaved by the government to fight in the Vietnam war until 1975.

> What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?

Blatant hypocrisy, you think 60% of college students being women is good, but consider it horrible sexism that at one time 60% of college students were men.

You don't want equality, you just want everything to be female dominated.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#613

Post by hitekker »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #423
th wrote: post #341

It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works. A relevant tweet from 2016 ( https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595 ): > Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016 Increased diversity in communities usually comes from ac…

This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases. In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups". I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote sh…

YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte observed the similar racial and sex quotas from the inside: https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560

IBM's CEO infamously championed DEI-as-quota which led to wave of lawsuits that IBM was forced to settle.

The memory holing on this topic is concerning.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#614

Post by BrenBarn »

godelski wrote: post #252

> The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14. This might be the bigger story. How many trillions of dollars depend on Python? Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python laye…

Yes, it's crazy. I think a lot of people see it as a question of "how can we give the PSF (or orgs like it) more money" but I see it a bit differently. Basically if something like Python can arise and become so effective and useful in so many ways with so little funding (and even less in earlier stages), it suggests that money isn't really the bottleneck here. What we need are people doing good work with good motives and not chasing dollars.

That in turn suggests that a lot of money currently being spent is wasted, or worse, used for ill. We would be better served by taking all the assets of the Fortune 500 and distributing them widely to tons of little groups. Some of those groups may turn out to be the next Python, and for the ones that don't, well, we didn't waste much money on them. Right now what we get instead is hundreds of billions of dollars going to advertising algorithms.

The reason it's crazy that the PSF survives on $5 million isn't that $5 million is crazy little, it's that too many other entities are crazy big.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#615

Post by Galanwe »

What is most scary to me, is that these grants are not opportunistic (money is raised when needed), they are on an enveloppe basis (the amount to be distributed is fixed).

Essentially that means for every dollar not spent on, say, the PSF; then an other organization willing to denounce DEI is going to get these $1.5M.

I fear less for the opportunity loss to _proper_ organizations, and worry that activist anti-DEI/partisan organizations are artificially going to get a massive funding increase.

In that setup, it may be the lesser of two evils for the PSF to accept that grant, if only to deny a more partisan organization to get this funding.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#616

Post by roumenguha »

eadmund wrote: post #498
th wrote: post #341

It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works. A relevant tweet from 2016 ( https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595 ): > Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016 Increased diversity in communities usually comes from ac…

Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.

Not that this is a wholesale defense of DEI initiatives, but what you're describing was exactly the state of affairs before DEI policies.

If I misunderstood your comment as being critical of DEI policies on the basis of being discriminatory along protected characteristics, I apologize in advance.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#618

Post by kelnos »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #423
th wrote: post #341

It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works. A relevant tweet from 2016 ( https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595 ): > Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016 Increased diversity in communities usually comes from ac…

This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases. In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups". I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote sh…

> This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.

It's hard to take these sorts of complaints seriously unless you can quantify in what percentage of cases we get the bad kind of DEI you describe.

Sure, if 90% of DEI is discriminatory hiring practices, then sure, that's a problem. But if it's 10% instead, then we should certainly call it out, but we should accept that, in any kind of initiative, there's going to be some bad behavior.

(Instead, of course, the right turns it into a culture war topic.)

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#619

Post by kelnos »

gcanyon wrote: post #566
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sat in an all hands where the vice president of HR proudly crowed to the company that they had hired 75% non-whites that quarter.

In your mind, if the company had researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for the previous history of the company, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?

This isn't a thread about what's reasonable, it's a thread about what's legal.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#620

Post by kelnos »

klipt wrote: post #602
davorak wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Randomized studies show I opened the link and searched for "random" and id not find anything. I thought there was going to be something like a randomized controlled trial or similar from what you said but if random does not show up on the search I am not sure what to look for or what you are referring to when you say "Randomized studies". I skimmed the article and did not spot anything that matched, but I may be mi…

https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759 > Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on…

None of the bits you copy-pasted include the word "random" either.
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