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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#301

Post by origin_path »

weakfish wrote: post #216
kardianos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reactionary, anti-intellectual. "The Cultural Revolution: A people's history" is a good read. Lot's of people got called reactionary and anti- then too. Yes, you can measure merit. But then, I'm not a Communist.

This seems like a very large leap in logic, if I follow… are you saying the parent is communist for using the term reactionary?

They are. kardianos is observing that the situation is very similar, that history is rhyming if not repeating.

Woke racism/sexism (DEI) is frequently referred to as neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism because when examined it turns out to be closely related to Marxist thought, with race/gender/sexual attributes substituted for class. Beyond this somewhat trivial difference there are many clear similarities:

1. The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.

2. The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.

3. The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead they were men of words, with their primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.

4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies. See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary#:~:text=In%20the%2....

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#302

Post by Manuel_D »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #290
Manuel_D wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely engages with the parent comment. The parent comment is trying to argue that discrimination in selecting which candidates to interview isn't a form of bias. This is incorrect as I explain in my comment.

The apparent Microsoft policy is that every interview pool “must include at least one external African-American, Black, Hispanic, or Latina/o and one external female candidate”. Your counterexample is “every interview pool has to be entirely white.” I was originally going to write that you’re playing the “I’m technically correct” trick here, but I don’t think your argument actually rises to the level of technical cor…

How big is said interview pool? With a pool of four people, which isn't uncommon in my experience, that means that 50% of the interviews are locked behind racial and gender requirements.

My example just made it bluntly obvious that discrimination in the interview stage is still discrimination, there's no "technically correct trick here". Mandating that X% of your interviews be of a particular race or gender is discrimination, no matter the value of X. Setting X to 100 just makes it very clear.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#303

Post by rcoveson »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #230
bioemerl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get rid of private schools There are good steps that can be taken, but objectively harming some students is not the way forward. Improve public schools and try to get more money into the poor regions. Do not erase private ones.

Nope. Get rid of all of them. Private schools are just legal segregation. Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will give their parents a huge incentive to lobby for the increased quality of public schools. Lottery systems would make it even better. Education and healthcare being made available to everybody at the exact same availability and quality level would majorly improve both sys…

What policy do you have in mind? Would it be illegal to pay for tutoring of any kind, or would it just be illegal to not send your kid to the local public school (illegalizing homeschooling as well)? And what about just moving to an area close to better schools, would you write laws to address that?

As long as parents raise their own children, you're going to have crazy levels of inequality. If you also continue to respect personal autonomy and private property, you'll have ever crazier levels.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#304

Post by kardianos »

weakfish wrote: post #216
kardianos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reactionary, anti-intellectual. "The Cultural Revolution: A people's history" is a good read. Lot's of people got called reactionary and anti- then too. Yes, you can measure merit. But then, I'm not a Communist.

This seems like a very large leap in logic, if I follow… are you saying the parent is communist for using the term reactionary?

If you do not believe someone can demonstrate merit, you cannot believe in equality of opportunity.

If you do not have Equality of Opportunity all you have left are power structures, usually attached to some degree of structural determinism.

At that moment, you have the same logic as the Communist/Marxian/Dialectic revolutionaries we have seen time and time again. Once they gain power they label everyone else a reactionary.

Saying they don't believe in being able to demonstrate merit is why I suggest they are a Communist/Marxian/Dialectic. Because not only is that stupid in the real world, it is literally a defining feature of the base ideology.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#305

Post by Analemma_ »

AngeloR wrote: post #268

What always bothered me about DE&I initiatives is that they are trying to wring diversity out of their existing hiring pool. If your indeed job posts didn't bring diverse candidates then, why do you think it would now? Because you added a "Please apply if you're DiVeRsE" line to it? Don't be ridiculous. If you want diversity of candidates you can't keep going back to the same talent pools. You have to diversify where…

A big part of the issue here is that, even though the predomaninance of white and Asian men in CS is very obviously a pipeline problem, for whatever reason Twitter has decided that nobody is allowed to say it's a pipeline problem, and they'll excoriate you if you try. So since most of these initiatives have the primary aim of "keep Twitter happy", they have to undergo these absurd contortions to try and have a DEI program that can't say where the lack of DEI is coming from.

Naturally it ends up being a mess of contradictions and confused thinking, because everyone has to pretend to ignore the obvious root cause.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#306

Post by fzeroracer »

fallingknife wrote: post #90
mikkergp wrote: post #18

Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diver…

When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question. If you want to argue that it is impossible to judge merit, it is you who needs to provide proof. And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.

Unless you're hiring someone for a speed coding competition, I don't see what speed has to do with it. Especially since it seems like you would be biasing for younger candidates and committing ageism in the process.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#307

Post by yamtaddle »

bioemerl wrote: post #297
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Get rid of all of them. Private schools are just legal segregation. Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will give their parents a huge incentive to lobby for the increased quality of public schools. Lottery systems would make it even better. Education and healthcare being made available to everybody at the exact same availability and quality level would majorly improve both sys…

> Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will ... Cause rich families to blanket refuse to live anywhere near neighborhoods with poor kids and contribute massively to the segregation between well off and impoverished neighborhoods. Just live in a place where every home in a 45 minute radius is over a million dollars to purchase.

Right—in my city all the rich people neighborhoods in the city proper only exist because of private schools. If you have some money, but not enough for an expensive in-the-city house in a non-terrible neighborhood plus private school, you do not live there—you live in the 'burbs. All the urban- and close-old-suburb dwelling rich people would pack up and leave within a year if they were forced to send their kids to public school. Or find some way to get themselves a weird-bordered carved-out new district all to themselves. That's the only possible way they'd stay.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#308

Post by gnull »

winternett wrote: post #154
systemvoltage wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're going to see a rise of new companies formed, perhaps not from Silicon Valley, that will reject the whole D&I concept and move forward with complete blindness to race, culture, or gender. They will excel, outperform and form a new age of englightenment. I don't think this will happen because I want it to, it will happen because incentives and fundamentals of operations of a company – i.e., just focus on…

What kind of statement is this? D&I is supposed to be comparatively balanced to the society is serves. Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success. D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled just because some companies take it to far, it's no different than accounting or other functional considerations withi…

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success.

This is far-fetched and based mostly on ideology rather than evidence, not much different from a Soviet socialist explaining why planned economies are essential to the country's success (100 years ago it didn't sounds as absurd as now). It's your right to believe this sort of things, I don't deny you this, but don't insist that this is an objective truth that every reasonable person should believe in. As it goes with this kind of questionable ideas, it should be ok to choose not to believe in them, as I think the parent comment does.

And I agree with the parent comment's view here. Whatever advantage the woke-culture companies may have is easily explained by their increased visibility among woke audience, not by some deep insights. It's just a marketing trick, just like putting AI/Blockchain on your ad increases your visibility among some of tech enthusiasts.

> What's next?

Slippery slope is a fallacy.

> white nationalist groups are growing in numbers […] prior US president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly expressing race based hate

How does any of this back up the impossibility of blindness to race? (Remember that most of the world is outside of US.)

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#309

Post by BlargMcLarg »

fzeroracer wrote: post #284
badpun wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in tech (and often in business or managerial positions, directing those white and asian programmers), they just don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And men care about both money and t…

> And men care about both money and technical things much more than women Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive assumptions but they are historically and factually wrong. In the history of computing and computer science women formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the culture and advertising shifted to market computers and such as being f…

>they are historically and factually wrong

No, the money part is pretty accurate historically. Almost every field with high income historically attracted far more men than women once it became public knowledge. Job status and money are very disproportionately more important to men.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#310

Post by thaumasiotes »

Analemma_ wrote: post #305
AngeloR wrote: post #268

What always bothered me about DE&I initiatives is that they are trying to wring diversity out of their existing hiring pool. If your indeed job posts didn't bring diverse candidates then, why do you think it would now? Because you added a "Please apply if you're DiVeRsE" line to it? Don't be ridiculous. If you want diversity of candidates you can't keep going back to the same talent pools. You have to diversify where…

A big part of the issue here is that, even though the predomaninance of white and Asian men in CS is very obviously a pipeline problem, for whatever reason Twitter has decided that nobody is allowed to say it's a pipeline problem, and they'll excoriate you if you try. So since most of these initiatives have the primary aim of "keep Twitter happy", they have to undergo these absurd contortions to try and have a DEI pr…

> for whatever reason Twitter has decided that nobody is allowed to say it's a pipeline problem, and they'll excoriate you if you try. So since most of these initiatives have the primary aim of "keep Twitter happy"

Given that Twitter takes an active role in censoring particular ideas, I think it's worth being careful to distinguish "Twitter has decided this isn't allowed" from "a lot of Twitter users have decided this isn't allowed".

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