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PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program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Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#851

Post by rayiner »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #838
rayiner wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These studies are misleading, because they try to create race signals by using names that are also class signals: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-study-suggests-resea... . Also, the study suggests that, even with this flawed methodology, a bulk of industries are in the least discrimination category with only a 3% lower callback rate for “black sounding names.”

Do you have any numbers for trying to correct for that factor? And the bulk are not at 3%, the bulk are between 5 and 10. 3 was the absolute lowest. Also you didn't mention the CEO thing, does that mean my numbers were sufficient to address that worry?

As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%. Those are all the industries in green. These are small differences in a study that’s not well designed to begin with.

The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... A black applicant to Harvard with an academic index in the 5th decile had an 800-900% higher chance of admission than a white or asian candidate with the same qualifications. This isn’t just CEOs. The pattern was similar at UNC, a state school.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#852

Post by davorak »

hitekker wrote: post #850
davorak wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

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

Link's? Timestamps? I skimmed the much of the podcast now and I did not hear anything like this from Jessica.

> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms

Quota is specifically a fixed share of something. "prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals" is not a quota, but an approach like that could be motivated by a quota.

I think quota has specific legal ramifications too so when the term was used in the comment but not used in the link I thought it was important to point it out.

> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals;

I have only fully watched the video you linked to as of yet, not the full podcast. The companies Harj talked about wanted diversity in that top TripleByte metric pool, something that Harj said they were not able to supply. To me it sounds like the companies are clearly saying what they want but Harj/TripleByte was not able to supply.

Harj's says the companies would not explicitly ask for lowering the metric cut off for diversity. My attempt to transcribe what he said "noone would actually want to explicitly say that".

> 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.

Most clients in my experience are annoyed when they want something, want to pay you for it, and you can not provide it. The details and complexities often do not factor in, they want a black box they stick money in and get a solution out so they can focus on their companies core competences.

> IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie ...

You seem to making a big claim, but it is not detailed in a way that I can respond to. I do not see TripleByte or Harj claiming they are doing science or demographic research about the world populations I do not think an large or sweeping claims can be built off what they are saying.

> 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...

The article you link to here is a particular persons opinion and advocates for change that person wants, it does not document anything more general than that like your statement implied. It does not document a trend in the field of moving away from blind auditions, I don't follow the field closely so I would know if there is one, but this article does not document it.

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

#853

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

gcanyon wrote: post #828
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking too much of society with such vague complaints. We should focus on getting basics right: prosperity, jobs, reduce crime, reduce road death, and so forth before navel-gazing about "abuse by society". In any case, even if society does somehow "address the abuse", it shouldn't come in the form of randomly abusing other people. But that's what you appear to be advocating for: Because some people were discri…

You complain of vague complaints, then propose vague solutions. Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me: it's not a zero-sum game, and white people in general seem to have done fine over the past fifty years of "abuse".

>You complain of vague complaints, then propose vague solutions.

???

>Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me

It was an analogy.

>white people in general seem to have done fine

Black people in the US are also doing far better than Black people in Africa or frankly pretty much any other country with a large Black population.

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

#854

Post by devmor »

philipallstar wrote: post #633
devmor wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve? A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating thos…

Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.

What? Customers do not do hiring and hiring is not done to benefit customers. That is a nonsense viewpoint.

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

#855

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

rayiner wrote: post #817
Dylan16807 wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's enough to show that something isn't ultra rare, but it's not enough to show whether it's happening at 0.1% of companies or 90% of companies or where in between. If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.

There is very little evidence of those “opposite racist practices” that are supposedly 10 times more common, at least in large corporations and universities. Microsoft was out there promising to double the percentage of black executives. Where is the big corporations promising to double the number of white executives?

What do you think happens when one level of leadership sets a metric as a goal, and likely ties someone's bonus to that goal?

The metric-goal gets pushed down to lower hierarchy levels, and from then on, all it takes is turning a blind eye and you get the results we've seen in the court case I cited above. The smart ones just don't put it in writing.

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

#856

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

cycomanic wrote: post #674
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it was technically illegal (but IMO very common) back then, it's hard to quantify. Usually, they were smart enough to not put the most blatant parts in writing, and of course the same HR departments pushing this were also doing outreach. All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in…

If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly. I mean if you listen to people here it sounds like companies were absolutely flooded by DEI hires. It is also quite telling how everyone is up in arms about these discriminatory hiring practices, but the same people don't bat an eyelash about the fact that discrimination happens mostly the othe…

> Have you read the actual article?

The PSF grant one or a different one? In the PSF one, nobody is getting ostracized and fired for daring to suggest DEI, in fact, they are turning down a grant for a more pro-DEI stance.

You might be in trouble for actually implementing DEI programs, but it's not a taboo topic that can't even safely be talked about. Criticism of any DEI-related practice, whether it's illegal hiring discrimination or presubmits that yell at you for using an ever-expanding list of now-verboten words, was taboo in many places.

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

#857

Post by gip »

akimbostrawman wrote: post #654
gip wrote: post #242

DEI has become such a contentious term that we should consider retiring it, in my opinion.

Renaming your ideological movement because most people don't like what it stands for won't change peoples opinion.

Most Americans are growing skeptical of DEI as an ideological framework and that helped Trump.

This suggests two possible paths forward: either we move beyond the theoretical underpinnings and focus on practical inclusion — supporting people from diverse backgrounds through approaches with broad consensus.

Or DEI becomes increasingly marginalized, championed primarily by masked activists who struggle to maintain relevance.

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

#858

Post by JuniperMesos »

roenxi wrote: post #643
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…

I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% mal…

I assume that many of those female speakers are transwomen, and transwomen are not underrepresented in the Python or similar programming communities (in some of them, they're conspicuously overrepresented).

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

#859

Post by JuniperMesos »

kelnos wrote: post #634
MoltenMan wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden…

> that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls ar…

> We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.

I don't believe this is true. I think the gendered difference in interest in the cluster of topics we label "STEM" is mostly biological and deeply-seated - one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).

I also don't think that boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls. I think that girls are explicitly encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in much greater numbers than boys - this is exactly a consequence of the above-noted social fact that "Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly". And as you say, this is because males are much more likely to be intrinsically interested in pursuing STEM education and careers, whereas females are more likely to require explicit societal encouragement to do so. I've read more than one account of a woman who had worked in some kind of software-related field admitting that she wasn't intrinsically excited about the work, but felt like she would be a bad feminist if she left a STEM track to do something more traditionally female-coded instead.

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

#860

Post by JuniperMesos »

cycomanic wrote: post #671
renlo wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering…

It's funny how everyone brings up all these anecdotes, but then the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that if your name is associated with being black you have much lower chances to be invited to an interview. So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is h…

A lot of the contemporary formal scientific process is done incredibly badly, for a variety of reasons including overt political bias on the part of individual scientists working in the academic system, pressure to publish any results including poor ones, and outright laziness and fraud. In general we shouldn't assume that if a bunch of public scientific studies purport to show that some phenomenon is happening, that that phenomenon is actually happening. It takes substantial time, effort, and experience to evaluate whether a claimed scientific result is valid; and all the moreso when that result has immediate political policy implications.
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