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PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program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Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a white male, there is zero chance DEI benefits me directly. But I think we all benefit from a diverse society, with female plumbers and electricians, minority software developers, etc. etc.

Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI. As an able-bodied individual, you may not feel you would benefit from those today; but if you are blessed enough to grow old, one day you will likely be disabled in one way or another. When that day comes, you'll be asking for accommodations to get into public areas, and if those accommodations are not available to you, you will likely find how that limits your abil…

>Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI.

You missed the memo, they're not pushing this narrative any longer. The poor attempt to launder DEI via the disabled is twisted and transparent. The ADA predates DEI by decades, and has broad support from both sides of the aisle.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My contention is that the evidence of discrimination against (non-asian) minorities in universities is non-existent. I don’t have an opinion to what’s causing admissions rates to be different than population averages. If someone proves that it’s caused by discrimination against minorities, then we have laws to address that and I’d support enforcing those laws.

If we have the fact of lower admission rates, it is incumbent on us as a society that cares about all our members to figure out what's going on. You've refused to express an opinion. Of course, others have proposed rationales, and the solution proposed is unacceptable to you. So what are we to do with that?

By this logic we should stop giving college scholarships to women. They are over represented in enrollment compared to men, so that can only be sexism right?

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we have the fact of lower admission rates, it is incumbent on us as a society that cares about all our members to figure out what's going on. You've refused to express an opinion. Of course, others have proposed rationales, and the solution proposed is unacceptable to you. So what are we to do with that?

Society faces many problems—individuals don’t need to have an opinion as to the causes of all of them. I’m not an education expert, so I can’t tell you what causes lower admissions rates. If you think the reason is universities are discriminating, then it’s incumbent on you to build a case for that. I’m sure I’d support enforcing the laws against discriminatory conduct that you can show is happening. But I’m not goin…

I'm not an education expert either, and I'm happy to let universities decide. It's your lot who won't let them.

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

#844
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…

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

#845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

At least in the US, it seems to be the lower-educated, rabidly anti-DEI faction that seems to be dragging everyone else down with them. > DEI has given the unintelligent a platform on which they can attack the intelligent. The effects of diversity quotas on code quality are horrifying. Very, very curious on what basis these claims are being made. Empirical studies would be ideal, but even some anecdotes would be illu…

Look at what happened to software in the early 2010s.

There are already plenty of anecdotes by others here where sub-par work was given a blind eye because of its creator's identity.

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

#846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is another great point. I do see a lot of companies trying to cut corners and make things as cheap as possible but I fundamentally believe that this ends up increasing costs in the long run. Which is a bit weird since I know a lot of business people and most seem to be familiar with Boot Theory[0] and even agree with it. But maybe it is one of those things that is just not realized in practice. Yet I constantly…

> Maybe in the quarter, but not long term. It's a sustainable strategy if you've monopolized the market though... It's also a sustainable strategy if the market has become so distorted that it's difficult for consumers to distinguish the good products from the bad. This is a pervasive problem these days. It may still be the case that a good pair of boots will last you 10 years, but how can you tell which pair is the…

  > if the market has become so distorted that it's difficult for consumers to distinguish the good products from the bad
If you didn't know, there's a formal name for this: Lemon Markets[0]. Which yes, I agree. I think it is an accurate description of tech. Even among techies now. Hell, in that other thread[1] we seem to be talking to programmers who think we're omniscient and can generate bug free code (I'm still absolutely baffled by this). So tech literacy seems to be low even among the "techies".

  > I'm not so sure about this. 
I actually agree with you. I probably didn't phrase it well enough. That's a bit what I was trying to say when saying you want to prevent them from going down too may rabbit holes. But I did also want to subtly reference to Mervin Kelly, former director of Bell Labs. When asked "how do you manage genius?" his answer was "you don't"[2].

So I do agree that we need managers. Their job is to validate direction, ensure people are able to do their specialized job with minimal interruptions, and all that jazz. I think we often confuse "speed" with "velocity." The experts know the direction things need to go, but a manager's job is to ensure that those vectors are aligned across teams and aligned with the company goal. But we also get confused with thinking the goal is "to make money" and not differentiate it from "to make money by producing a useful product.". It's easy to drop that part off, but doing so shifts your customers from those that purchase your product to "shareholders". Even if shareholder price is based on people buying your product...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742272

[2] https://westviewnews.org/2019/11/01/bell-labs-second-best-ke...

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

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI. As an able-bodied individual, you may not feel you would benefit from those today; but if you are blessed enough to grow old, one day you will likely be disabled in one way or another. When that day comes, you'll be asking for accommodations to get into public areas, and if those accommodations are not available to you, you will likely find how that limits your abil…

>Disability accommodations are a cornerstone of DEI. You missed the memo, they're not pushing this narrative any longer. The poor attempt to launder DEI via the disabled is twisted and transparent. The ADA predates DEI by decades, and has broad support from both sides of the aisle.

I am not saying disability law originated in the DEI movement of today, I'm pointing at the through line between the passage of the ADA and the modern DEI movement. From the civil rights era in the 60s, to women's rights in the 70s, to the ADA in the 90s, to gay rights in the 00s, to DEI today. The principles behind disability accommodations -- access, fairness, inclusion -- are foundational to DEI as a broader movement. The ADA was an early expression of those principles in law; DEI later extended them into other social and organizational contexts.

And yeah, the ADA has received broad bipartisan support in passage because it's well understood even by partisans that disabilities affect everyone, so it's important to have protections in place.

What's not so understood by partisans is how those disabilities manifest, so since the passage of the ADA there has also been widespread pushback on what qualifies as a disability, and what accommodations are reasonable. THAT is a whole different conversation which, as someone who is disabled and covered under the ADA, I will say can be like pulling teeth to get protections guaranteed under the law. For example, businesses are often loathe to make physical accommodations like ramps and elevators, and there is often resistance to providing accommodations for mental health conditions or neurodiversity.

But DEI itself is about creating equitable access and participation for everyone. This includes people who are disabled, and at no point in time has DEI not included disabled people. Maybe for the terminally online right, who only focus on gender and race, but that's not what it's all about in the real world. Notably, DEI also has been a driving force for veteran employment (having dedicated veteran hiring pipelines is absolutely DEI). It's very common for people to do what you're doing now -- "All the accommodations I like and/or benefit me are sound law and not DEI; all the accommodations I don't like are DEI and must be outlawed"

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

#848
post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree it’s a problem. I haven’t seen any evidence supporting the idea that it’s innate rather than social in origin. Human neuroplasticity is our species’ big defining trait so it seems far more likely that we have a complex mix of feedback loops based on socialization.

I'm not sure its really a "problem". Why does everything have to be 50/50 ?

Exactly 50:50 doesn’t need to be the target but when you’re talking 80:20 on a large, lucrative field it’s more likely that there are interested people being deterred rather than just lack of interest. There certainly are many reports of social pressure supporting that conclusion as well, which is why many people want to make it more welcoming.

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

#849
post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of politicized agendas, I note that you are asserting without evidence that they have a secret motive other than the one states while also assuming that the administration’s interpretation of the relevant contract language will be fair and aboveboard despite the observed evidence.

Their position is logically inconsistent. If they are worried about being eventually targeted by the Trump administration, they have done more to paint a target on their back now then they ever could've done by quietly accepting the money. I don't believe they intended for their motive to be secret at all. This was an opportunity to bring attention to their political position.

> If they are worried about being eventually targeted by the Trump administration, they have done more to paint a target on their back now then they ever could've done by quietly accepting the money.

That's probably not true given their prominence and the conservative people who've grumbled about them for years, but let's assume that it is the case. Think about what happens next:

If they took the money, they have a substantially non-zero risk that they would be asked to return _all_ of it based on politically-motivated enforcement triggered by anything the PSF does and would face the prospect of spending at least that much money defending themselves in court if they disagreed. You can't rule out that being as simple as someone at PyCon does something which a conservative influencer dislikes.

If they don't take the money, they don't have to estimate the likelihood of the clawback provision being exercised or spend any time trying to protect themselves in that event.

If you're a small non-profit, recognizing when you don't have the resources to fight a particular battle is a very useful skill. It seems very consistent to say that in the choice between a potential trap and no trap they had to avoid a small but non-zero risk of something which could bankrupt the organization.

> I don't believe they intended for their motive to be secret at all. This was an opportunity to bring attention to their political position.

Their motives were never secret – it's literally in the mission statement on their website! – so it's a bit unclear what the point of this paragraph was. Reporting political interference in technical organizations seems like something which is pretty broadly of interest to the community and the amount of positive attention it's getting seems to support that.

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

#850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte I listened to video and I did not see anywhere where Jessica made an observation along those lines. I did not hear quotas talked about explicitly either, though companies wanting more diverse candidates from TripleByte, which might have been caused by quotes in the company but Harj does not indicate any companies came out and said that.

The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.

I'll summarize: TripleByte guy describes how companies prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms. He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.

IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie that diversity and merit can be found at scale, even when the world market only has so many "diverse" and "meritorious" candidates available for a given position. This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

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