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Who cares about diversity?

fakenous.substack.com

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Re: Who cares about diversity?

#331

Post by ectopod »

duxup wrote: post #42
pwinnski wrote: post #2

It could be that the people do care about the values listed, but don't know an effective way to guarantee them, and that existing diversity statements are a stopgap measure until something better is figured out. But no, let's jump directly to "Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy." Or..…

I agree, the idea that they don't care and go to all this work seems absurd. Seems more likely they're just bad advocates / come up with bad policies for ideas they like. THAT does not surprise me the least. The amount of "If you get what you want here, I don't think that gets you any closer to your goal, in fact it might do the opposite." situations is pretty high out there.

University bureaucrats have spent decades creating new kinds of work for themselves. It is an end in itself. They don't need to care.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#332

Post by tptacek »

matthewrobertso wrote: post #328
tptacek wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your problem with my argument about the poor reasoning here is that I made it in too few words? I'll say it again: he hasn't actually managed to engage with the argument for DEI, even institutionalized DEI; he thinks instead that he's checkmated it by attempting to reconcile a dictionary definition with the rationale the Supreme Court used in the 1970s to defend Affirmative Action.

Can you highlight where you made that argument the first time? I read your first comment as entirely concerned with tone and don't see where you are discussing lack of engagement with an argument.

It's a 127 word comment (not counting the snarky aside at the bottom), of which approximately 40% of the words make the points you're looking for directly, in a pair of sentences, one in the first paragraph and one in the second. I think you might have to not want to see them not to see them.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#333

Post by tptacek »

registeredcorn wrote: post #300
tptacek wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty comfortable with my points as they stand right now.

Point, not points. I don't believe any of us disagree that such programs are ineffective under optimal conditions. Aside from that, what are the "lots of" other sharp, critical comments to be made? I would think, given the over the top snark you had in your previous comments, you would have more to say on about on the topic. Right?

No, my goal here is just to point out how bad this blog post is, not to solve diversity. Unlike the author of the blog post, I don't think I'm capable of single-handedly solving diversity.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#334

Post by tptacek »

pseudalopex wrote: post #281
matt-attack wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonetheless, critiquing the writing style rather than the substance makes it seem like you've lost the argument from the start.

They called the substance axiomatic and much of it depending on specific definitions of specific words.

Well... they sure think their argument is axiomatic.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#335

Post by imapeopleperson »

geekbird wrote: post #206
opmelogy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to actually figure out what his points are. None of it is making much sense because he just seems so far off in his own thinking that it's not connected to DEI at all. Still trying to untangle it, but here's my lol as I work through what he's saying. 1.1 When did we start pretending to care about diversity? He says 1978. What? He's fabricating a story to prop up his flawed belief system. 1.2 Diversity is i…

Seriously. His initial premise is so far off base that the whole article reads like some sort of conservative straw man pretending to be intellectual discourse. Are there issue with some DEI initiatives? Yes, but they are often minor, and usually due to bureaucratic laziness, not malice against conservatives or white people. He is butt hurt that reality has a liberal bias, and wants academia to subscribe to his knee-…

This seems prescient:

“The most “woke” people are the ones who aggressively try to silence all dissent (https://fakenous.net/?p=2932) and to exclude conservatives, libertarians, etc., from the Academy. So they not only fail to value intellectual diversity; they are just about the most stridently anti-diversity people in the entire country.”

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#336

Post by vlod »

croes wrote: post #100
rajin444 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we want to live in a world where you have less opportunity because of characteristics you were born with Yes. I do not want to live in a world where genetic editing is used to give everyone equal opportunity. I am ok with not having the genetics to play in the NBA while others do. Diversity should not be the end goal. A healthy society that provides basic needs for all should be. If that means we have mostly peo…

That's not what parent said. Do you want to live in a world where you could be the best basketball player in the world but you are don't get drafted because your eyes are blue? Some people don't get opportunities because of their skin color, their name or their religion. It's about becoming a NBA player if you can't play basketball

I never understand this argument. Wouldn't market forces, i.e. capitalism, gekko's greed-is-good argument fix this?

If there were a group of basketball players with blue eyes (that were the best in the world), wouldn't someone see the huge money potential and create a team full of blue-eyes and win the title/cup/trophy?

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#337

Post by _312m »

sillystuff wrote: post #298
littlelamb wrote: post #88

I am absolutely all in for equality, but definitely strongly against equity. When I get HR try to shove a resume down my throat because it ticks all of their boxes despite having none of the boxes to be succesful on the job, that is when I draw the line. I don't care if you're white, black, purple or green, and whether you fuck men, women, all of them or none of them is none of my business. At the end of the day I wa…

(Speaking of the US) Our society has historically created great differences in opportunity. It is unarguable that white males have disproportionately benefited[1][2][3]. Affirmative action / Diversity Initiatives are a blunt instrument that attempts to address these historical inequities. If e.g., a student from a school in a poor area had the same quality of a K-12 education, did not have to worry about tuition (I.e…

One pretty stark reminder of this is how one's race is an indicator of standardized test scores in the US.

> ...selective institutions require high SAT scores for entry—and there are even bigger race gaps at the top of the score distribution. [In 2020,] of those scoring above 700, 43% are Asian and 45% are white, compared to 6% Hispanic or Latino and 1% Black

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/01/sat-math-...

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#338

Post by stuckinhell »

notahacker wrote: post #320
colpabar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "garden variety" nepotism, it's woke nepotism, and it's why so many people have issues with diversity initiatives.

It is garden variety nepotism. If it was the CTO's wife's nephew , the CTO's allies wouldn't have argued for a "woker" candidate instead, they'd have pushed very hard on some other basis like the "intellectual diversity" of his different experience or his solid-but-irrelevant academic track record or his supposed credentials as a self-taught programmer or his "leadership potential" or his "strong recommendation from…

If it was his nephew, then he'd put down nonbinary or some LGBTQ2S flavor. It's not garden variety nepotism because the executives CAN and DO use HR to attack critics of his relatives or allies.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#339

Post by koonsolo »

I do a lot of hiring, and co-hired a lot of my colleagues. I would never hire for diversity, and would explicitly refuse to do so.

Why? Everyone in my team is hired for 1 thing: excellent developers.

Nobody is questioning why they are there, and I would never put those people in a position where project managers have to question why anyone in my team is there, because of being a good developer or to fill up some statistics.

Hiring for diversity has the opposite effect: it puts doubt why a person of a certain minority is there.

But hey, once the world starts doing that bullshit, it's excellent for me. I'm a hetro white male, so there can be ony 1 reason why I was hired.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#340

Post by Sir_Liigmaz »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #322
colpabar wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope! The bare minimum we could do is start getting mad about how rich the rich are, and stop fighting among ourselves . Diversity is a tool used by the rich to keep us from uniting against them, and sadly it is really effective.

How come every time systemic or structural racism is brought up, the discussion instantly pivots to it being "divisive" and the real battle being class consciousness or something.

Because race is a tool of the elites. Most structural racism is a side-effect of the rich exploiting the poor.
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