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PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program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Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#721

Post by thunderfork »

klipt wrote: post #496
adriand wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination. The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started…

> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375863746_Men_Now_F... So shouldn't there be more DEI rectifying anti-male discrimination now?

The article you linked is not the "randomized study" you mentioned. Your argument would be more solid if you linked to a source that backs it up.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#722

Post by tremon »

Thorrez wrote: post #693
throwawaykf10 wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have cited a lawsuit (of which there is no recorded outcome, so probably an out-of-court settlement) against the same company that has had to pay millions for discriminating AGAINST women and minorities. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-settles-28... So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough! On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What…

Check out Google's diversity report[1], pages 63-110. It contains a lot of data. E.g. for US tech hiring, in 2015 2.2% of hires were Black+, in 2024, it was 10.0%. For global tech hiring, in 2015 19.6% of hires were women, in 2024, it was 30.2%. Disclosure: I work at Google. [1] https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/819bcce604bf5ff7...

Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool. For example, page 64 shows that Google's APAC offices have 90.7% Asian workers, up from 90.4% a year earlier -- at the expense of all other ethnicities. Is Google doing a bad job there, or is this an accurate reflection of the available workforce?

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

#723

Post by rjaT25hja »

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…

DEI in practice works like this: You have a ruling class of affluent white males and a Harvard educated Executive Director. None of these have ever been suppressed in their lives.

If anyone points out that fact on PSF infrastructure, you ban them (yes, this has happened).

You create a couple of programs that are mostly ineffective but good for PR.

You never mention any economic or other injustices that could upset the corporate sponsors.

You support and promote job replacement by AI while blogging about redistributing jobs via DEI.

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

#724

Post by chownie »

lan321 wrote: post #686
cycomanic wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events. You obviously don't believe we should forget everything in the past, otherwise what does prevent me from taking your stuff today and tomorrow when you come back with the police I'd argue it's in the past "and everyone fucked over everyone at some point". So the question the…

One is a crime though. For 'daily' crimes I believe essentially every country has some form of Statute of Limitations. If I decide to pursue a theft 20 years after it happened the courts will tell me to fuck off because it's no longer relevant.. The issue with reparations or w/e though is that it's punishing people who committed no crime for something that's now a crime but back in the day, wasn't, done by their ance…

Does it become ok if we redefine wronging you so it's no longer a crime? This is what the people looking for reparations are arguing, no wrongs were ever righted because the responsible at no point considered it their duty to do so.

This means they have been generationally disadvantaged compared to you. It means they have had worse social mobility. By the time Obama rolled around there had only been four black US senators in its history.

The US's historic (and ongoing!) poor treatment of its people based on skin colour is so obvious from the outside that I struggle to understand how you don't see it. The government can snap into action for Florida but cannot find its energy for New Orleans, and many other such interesting coincedences.

> done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.

The last US school to desegregated did it in the 1990s, it very much is within memory.

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

#725

Post by nxobject »

qcnguy wrote: post #661
convolvatron wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone whose grant was cancelled for studying genetic diversity in animal populations.

And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over. Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresent…

I'd love to know what those stories are.

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

#727

Post by chownie »

lmm wrote: post #549
adriand wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination. The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started…

> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due…

This only holds if you assume that the hiring process is already fully meritocratic (which it very clearly isn't) and that it isn't missing talented women already (which it very clearly is).

If hiring managers are, subconsciously or not, more likely to pick the male candidate when faced with a choice for equally capable male/female candidates then there is inherent discrimination in the process and the DEI approach balances the scale.

This means more women working these roles with the same capability as men, it doesn't mean replacing men with women who are worse at the job, which ironically is an attitude making up part of the reason efforts like this have to be made.

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

#728

Post by TimorousBestie »

rayiner wrote: post #705
gcanyon wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad metaphor.

It’s a good metaphor. You can’t undo racial discrimination against someone who is now dead by discriminating against someone else who is now alive.

No, it’s a bad metaphor.

The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”

You and 0xDEAFBEAD answer that question no, because that benefit discriminates in your mind against all non-abused children. And against all adults, probably. I don’t know how deep the grievance mobilization goes.

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

#729

Post by punchfunk4lyte »

klipt wrote: post #612
punchfunk4lyte wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coll…

I actually don't care what the makeup of college students is. It's useful to encourage women to pursue education in order to promote equity. But there isn't some magic proportion of men to women graduates that I think we should be pursuing.

I don't want everything dominated by women, I just recognize that the work of undoing their marginalization is not complete.

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

#730

Post by runako »

bmelton wrote: post #528
rs186 wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are always allowed to create a club "boys who code" if that's something you are interested in.

If you want to use any public spaces (libraries, community centers, parks) then no, you can't. Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who…

> Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender

This ties into a very specific confusion about affinity groups. Specifically, they generally are not exclusionary (in part because it's largely illegal). The only thing preventing boys from participating in a "girls who code" type of event is the boys don't want to go to something with "girls" in the name.

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