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Who cares about diversity?

fakenous.substack.com

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Re: Who cares about diversity?

#351

Post by lazyeye »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #214
lazyeye wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think tone matters more then being correct?

If you're talking about purely conveying information, tone is largely immaterial. If you're talking about convincing people, proper tone is a prerequisite to conveying information. For most communication, tone starts out being infinitely more important that anything you're saying. Once you reach an inflection point, tone is sufficient and correctness can take priority. The inflection point varies based on your audien…

I take your point. And I guess tone becomes particularly important when you're trying to communicate an unpalatable truth.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#352

Post by koonsolo »

michaelwww wrote: post #325

I care about diversity because different cultures bring different ideas and skills to the situation. When I get in a jam, I don't want just one idea for getting out of it, I want many.

Can you give an example on how a white male software developer would develop something differently than for example an asian woman, and how the cultural difference would translate into a different approach of writing code?

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#353

Post by tptacek »

tootie wrote: post #343
tptacek wrote: post #89

The whole blog is like this; it's all sort of comically smug "everybody else in the entire world is wrong, and here is a 7-point axiomatic derivation proving it"†, much of it depending on specific definitions of specific words. Check-mate, atheists! There are lots of good, sharp, critical things to say about the DEI movement, most especially "institutional" DEI, but you can't meaningfully say them when you write with…

I think the post boils down to him not wanting to spend any effort accommodating diversity. It's a valid opinion but I don't see how anything he wrote would sway anyone one way or the other. I think he's also wrong in the factual sense about what diversity initiatives are for. It's not actually that diversity is an automatic net win for companies because diverse workers are better. It exists specifically to combat bi…

He's hung up on the Supreme Court's rationalization of Affirmative Action, which is why he's wedged in this one embarrassingly narrow notion of what "diversity" is for. Even within that notion, he hasn't actually made a valid argument; by the logic he's using, you could evaluate a diversity program based on how many flat-earthers it admits.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#356

Post by tootie »

jedberg wrote: post #180

So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the…

You're not wrong but really the whole problem is cyclical. It has to be broken down everywhere. Diversity and anti racism in education is getting raked over the coals right now. Housing discrimination is still pretty rampant. Racists are winning elections. There's an unfortunate tendency to force compliance on those who can best accommodate it rather than who is more in need of regulating.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#357

Post by tehwebguy »

psyfi wrote: post #137

All diversity policies and measures are leading to Cobra effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina... The only policy that is actually right is not to discriminate against colors, ethnicities, political views, etc.. but putting pressure to try to hire african/asian/latinos/women/whatever is like putting pressure on people to buy products from someone just to proof they don't discriminate ag…

Ehh I would attribute this to general ignorance of the country's history caused directly by the states are very loudly outlawing the teaching of it now and the states more quietly censoring it in the mere 2 generations since the civil rights act, 5 generations since slavery was outlawed.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#358

Post by endtime »

pseudalopex wrote: post #286
endtime wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what's actually happening, but my interpretation of the cobra effect reference is that people are inventing new identities/affinities in order to be able to benefit from the systems which reward them.

What identities/affinities were invented in order to be able to benefit from the systems which reward them?

Again, I said I don't know what's actually happening. I'm just providing my interpretation of what I thought the grandparent comment was trying to say.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#359

Post by sakras »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #27
jaywalk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to check some boxes and be able to say "we've got X% of engineers who aren't white men, look at how diverse we are!"

It's not possible to measure a counterfactual where teams at a given company just suddenly become diverse. But, it is pretty well known that there are some advantages to diversity in the workplace. Take, for instance, this reasonably well source article which lists 10 advantages: https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefi... Oh, and it's not just white men. East Asians and those from the Indian subc…

I didn't go through and click all the links in the article, I was mainly interested in the problem-solving section. However, that one links to a Harvard Business Review study that drops this quote:

> Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance.

They go on to say that when they say "diverse teams solve problems faster", they mean cognitive diversity:

> Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age.

Intuitively this makes much more sense than the race-based stuff I've been hearing about. You want people who can look at a problem from a different angle from you. It's sort of like having a team of specialists (one guy is good at UI, one at performance, one at tooling, etc.) except on the level of cognitive processes and not specific skills.

I believe that maybe these studies arose saying "diverse teams are better" and people misunderstood it to mean "racial diversity" and ran with it (kind of like the Hungarian notation fiasco).

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#360

Post by ricardoplouis »

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.

There is truth to the matter, but it's also because class conscious groups fail to recognize that they perpetuate the same racism, sexism, etc... that the elites do.

Coincidentally, ignoring race as an issue is the one issue many people on both sides of the political spectrum can get down with even though economic equality does not guarantee racial equality.

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