Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting

> The problem is that "let's not apply the correction" is also just another justification for discrimination.

No, that is not true, you have changed the statement. The statement was "let's not apply discrimination". You just reframe your discrimination as something different, in this case a "correction".

> In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.

Wrong, you do not "correct" discrimination and instead argue to implement it.

> You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think.

I did no such thing. You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that. You are free to take a step back and give your advantages up for others. That is very commendable and perhaps your deeds bring about the corrected world in your example.

> Your position is not better than mine.

I don't argue anything like that. I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.

Even with applying groups in your hypothetical example you apply discrimination, a group as an abstract representation of the individual. Your whole argument cannot stand on its own without discrimination and the reasoning is inherently circular.

> if you think there is something unfair, it does not count

Again, I am saying nothing like that. I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies. But I don't argue about fairness or what someone deserves and I cannot judge who is up for a bigger part of the pie in the contrast to someone other. And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".

Is it an accident that your example consists of three Jewish people and would you argue that they did receive less discrimination compared to other demographics regarding access to education?

> To help people in need, you do not have to put them in groups first.

I don't "put" them in groups. I recognise that we are all put into groups by the systemic nature of society. I also recognise the active grouping of others who feel that they are disadvantaged and try to listen to various advocacy groups who again and again ask for me to "use my privilege" to help. The idea of choosing not to do that but rather to respond with "your sense of Otherness is constructed, just let it go and don't worry about this group or that group" would feel both cruel and absurd.

> Any argument for social security policies and everything that remotely fits under that umbrella does not need discrimination.

Again you're the one framing this as discrimination. Something I would advocate for in my workplace is bias training, where people can learn to spot unconscious biases in themselves and can learn about the effects of systemic inequality on the individual and societal levels. I think it would be difficult to argue that such actions are "discriminatory."

I understand that the conversation is about specific DEI legislation and I have to admit that I am not American and am not familiar with the minutia of what was enacted there. But I am specifically responding to the idea that any action taken to combat implicit discrimination will lead to explicit discrimination.

There's the example of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra which I always think back on. They opened up to allow women to join but after some years no woman had managed to get a position on merit. Eventually a blind audition was introduced and the split quickly became reflective of broader societal demographics. To my mind it feels like many people here are jumping to say that blind auditions are discriminatory because they im some way disadvantaged the white men who "looked like" professional musicians. In some way that is true but it feels like such a warped reading of reality to me that I struggle to advocate for my own views in the face of it.

One simple thing we do at my company is to scrub things like names from applications, so that John Smith doesn't get preference to Aphiwe Mvala because of the ease/familiarity of the name. Would I advocate for mandating that practice in public jobs? Most certainly, I don't see why not, especially if I see the outright discrimination scandals such as [0] that can result from overly homogeneous institutions. Is the argument really that John is discriminated against with this policy?

0: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/O-9-2022-00002...

The Nazis, who were white supremacists, persecuted Einstein and dismissed his theory of relativity as "Jewish science". Einstein fled to the US, which was a much less racist environment compared to Nazi Germany, and Einstein's theory helped the US create the atomic bomb that defeated the Nazis.

The US had a "Jewish quota" to limit the number of Jews allowed in universities, so "white" Jews experienced more discrimination than white Christians. However, racial segregation between white and black people was legal until 1954-1964, so white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.

If Germany and the US wasn't so racist, science would have advanced further than it is today. Famous Jewish scientists (and science communicators) proved that white supremacy was wrong, not right.

> white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.

Perhaps. And yet your initial statement would assume that you would want to discriminate against them.

This is more or less exactly what I believe DEI policies would lead to. There are enough people that believe Jews are advantaged but the opposite is mostly true. Still under the metrics DEI generally proposes they would need to be discriminated against.

This is why having the premise to treat everyone equally is the better solution than what DEI proposes. And criticism of DEI is not white supremacy.