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MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

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Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#361
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the premise: There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society. The threat these represent to our long term survival and prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge and mark our and our prospective collaborators’ efforts to improve the status quo. Maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe it’s asking for a virtue signal in service of performative posturing. Maybe this requ…

> There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society. I think this needs to be backed up with evidence rather than merely asserted. I've been reading through a number of books by Thomas Sowell lately and he presents enough statistical evidence to explain disparities without any hint of racism, sexism, etc. Regardless of if you agree with him or not, the mere fact that alternate theories exis…

> many women voluntarily take time off of their career to raise children

Expect there is evidence to suggest that women that earn a higher income are less likely to leave the workforce, which is further influenced by access to affordable childcare and dual incomes.

The point is that when you control for these factors, a woman with the same title and responsibilities as a man will earn less for the same work.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#362

I never understood the american obsession with race (well, and sexuality). I live in a small EU country on the edge of the balkans... what the hell should I write if I wanted to get hired? I'm white... everyone here is white... but just by living here, I might have a more "diverse" worldview (compared to a white american is massachussets, with enouh knowledge and money to attend MIT) than someone of a different race…

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I have no idea what this has to do with socialism.... I was born in a socialist state, and we were very friendly with huge parts of africa and asia (we were even "the leaders" of the third world (by the proper definition of the third world)).

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#363

In the spirit of trying to learn something from the community: while I can certainly understand the rationale and goals behind DEI programs (many of which I agree with, others not), I honestly can't understand these "DEI statements" at all. They always seemed very "1984" to me, and almost designed to engender resentment in a way that would ultimately backfire. So perhaps I'm in a like-minded echo chamber, but is ther…

I'm not a big fan of mandatory DEI statements, but if I were trying to make a positive case for them, it might go something like this: We're a big university that is trying to serve the general public, reach students across all demographics, and produce research that is broadly applicable, not narrowly relevant to one segment of the population. We need to hire academic staff who can leverage their own personal, intel…

> We're a big university that is trying to serve the general public, reach students across all demographics, and produce research that is broadly applicable, not narrowly relevant to one segment of the population.

A problem I've seen with this is the assumption that subjects like Physics or Chemistry or Mathematics are not broadly applicable, if it was a discovery or research by a white man.

> We need to hire academic staff who can leverage their own personal, intellectual and cultural background to help us become a "bigger tent", but also put themselves in the shoes of others unlike themselves in the course of their teaching and research.

This last part is just wrong.

You should not assume on your own what the experience of minorities unlike yourself must be like, and then treat them according to whatever you imagined in your mind.

You need to talk to people, of whatever back ground, and find out how they, as individuals, would like to be treated, what their needs are, what they are experiencing, etc.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#364
post #347

Note that this ban appears to be only for faculty hiring. Most MIT employees are staff. I don't know if MIT requires DEI statements from staff hires, but I know other universities do, e.g. UC Berkeley, where I used to work. And yet, (as one example of many) check out the 7/7 white faces in leadership at executive.berkeley.edu/our-team

You really took a turn there by calling attention to their skin color. The interesting thing here isn’t that they look the same, but that they think the same.

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Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#365
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And class is hard to judge objectively. Very simple, actually. $1 million+ in annual income or $10 million+ in assets is an objective starting point, all the way to mega billionaires like Musk and Bloomberg.

Congratulations, the small-time local farmer with 10 acres, two quality high tunnels, a mid-sized tractor, and a couple of trucks and trailers is now wealthy. Assets are not necessarily liquid.

10 acres of farmland is worth around $30,000 its also 200 meters by 200 meters they probably don't need much of a tractor and can probably do with one truck for what amounts to a hobby nobody could live on.

The USDA says a small family farm averages around 231 acres or about $693,000 in land. Even adding the equipment its a long way from 10M in assets and that isn't even accounting for the elephant in the room DEBT.

Any sole proprietorship which is net positive to the tune of 10M is in fact by any reasonable measure wealthy.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no such a thing as cultural Marxism. That's a conspiracy theory the nazis first created. There is such a thing as "cultural Marxism", and it is not a conspiracy theory invented by the Nazis or anyone else. Consider for example the 1981 book by academic Richard Weiner, "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" [0] – it discusses "cultural Marxism" as a real thing, in a positive light, and it is a real acad…

I learned something today, I had no idea there was a coherent ideology of cultural Marxism. I had always assumed it was just a term made up on the spot in the spirit of “Marxism=bad leftie thing” (don’t you know how many died under Mao/Stalin?!), therefore lumping all of progressive politics in with it. This might be contrasted with “postmodern Marxism” or “postmodern neo-Marxism” which is some kind of pseudointellec…

> This might be contrasted with “postmodern Marxism” or “postmodern neo-Marxism” which is some kind of pseudointellectual epithet but is seems fundamentally incoherent. Postmodernism rejects grand narratives about society, but Marxism itself is a grand narrative (namely, that capitalist society should be framed as a class struggle between workers and capitalists).

Postmodern Marxism is a real thing too. See for example yet another Duke University Press book (Duke University is really into this kind of stuff for some reason) from 2001, "Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism" [0]. Another more recent book is "The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life" (University of Westminster Press, 2020) [1]

Are postmodernism and Marxism inherently contradictory? Well, "postmodernism" is a very broad and amorphous school of thought. The idea of postmodernism as opposition to "grand narratives" is due to Lyotard, and yes that idea seems rather incompatible with Marxism, at least in its classic form; but other postmodernist thinkers emphasised different ideas, whose incompatibility with Marxism is less obvious.

I also am picking up on the fact that you are obliquely referring to Jordan Peterson, who is known to use the phrases “postmodern Marxism” and “postmodern neo-Marxism”. Honestly, I've never paid him a great deal of attention – I'm neither one of his fans nor one of his haters, I'm just not that interested in him. So, I can't say whether he is using the phrase "postmodern Marxism" in the same sense as those academic books I cite do, or in a different sense.

> The cultural Marxism discussed in 60s and 70s academia is not the same thing as what the Norway terrorist was referring to in his manifesto.

I don’t know about that. Let me put it this way: the World Zionist Congress (WZC) is a real thing, an international conference that was first held in Switzerland in 1897, and it was held for the 38th time in Jerusalem in 2020. So the conference is not a conspiracy theory. But, if you go looking for them, you will find antisemites who will tell you that the WZC secretly controls the world’s banks and governments-that is a baseless conspiracy theory. However, even though we have both a real world factual discourse about the WZC and an unhinged antisemitic conspiracy theory about it, that doesn’t mean that the two discourses are using the term “World Zionist Congress” to mean fundamentally different things-no, they are both talking about the same thing. In the same way, just because Breivik talked about “Cultural Marxism”, doesn’t in itself prove he was talking about something different - he could be talking about the same thing, but making baseless/unhinged claims about it, and wrongly using those claims to justify his senseless mass murder of innocents

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=0PdqvSOo-rgC

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=qSkNEAAAQBAJ

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> am very interested in increasing diversity Why? As a non-white immigrant, I’m deeply suspicious of the notion that a team with me on it is in any way different than a team without me on it based on my skin color or ethnicity. I think that line of thinking doesn’t go anywhere good, especially for me, but for everyone else too. As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people are different based on group membersh…

> Why? As a non-white immigrant, I’m deeply suspicious of the notion that a team with me on it is in any way different than a team without me on it based on my skin color or ethnicity. Perhaps, but a team that would not have hired you because of your skin color or ethnicity would also be a worse team since they would not be willing or able to hire the best candidates. > As soon as you make it acceptable to say that p…

> I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience. It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant experience, but it's clear that the only thing the recruiter cares about is that you could add gender diversity to a team.

But this is the dominant strain of DEI thinking today, and why it's seeing such a backlash.

The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.

A moment's thought reveals why this is impractical to impossible, especially in the short to medium term. But this is how everything is evaluated through a DEI lens. Every discussion devolves just to counting how many people of each kind of group are represented in whichever topic is under discussion.

All the stuff about eliminating barriers is just the motte for this Bailey.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a mischaracterization. No one is _for_ inequality. The opposition you speak of is _for_ race/gender blind meritocracy. Anyone with a little knowledge of economics understands that groups of people cut across any dimension will always have different outcomes; Russian Americans earn more than French Americans, Japanese Americans earn more than Fillipino Americans, taller people earn more than shorter people, etc…

> No one is _for_ inequality. I suggest that's an extraordinarily naive statement.

Can you send me writing or video of any serious thinker advocating for this? The OP is a common straw-man characterization of the position I described.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical notion of diversity with “diversity of skin color” / “racial diversity” is actually harmful. When we speak of diversity today we often imply a sort of supposed-deserved reparations toward the “minorities.” Obviously there are so many incorrect aspects of these assumptions, but many people in power, perhaps all, have accumulated guilt that needs an outlet. Diversi…

> think the modern-day conflation of the philosophical notion of diversity with “diversity of skin color” / “racial diversity” is actually harmful. I absolutely agree with this. To use myself as an example: as a Bangladeshi who grew up in the American south, I bring a super diverse viewpoint to a group of say white new englanders. But why does that matter in a professional setting? I’d love to hear someone precisely…

Because most people in technology have end users. Quite often those end users come from many different backgrounds. Having more people in the room who can think in terms of a larger subset of the user base will always produce a better product.

I work in the post secondary education sector. I am the only person on my team who doesn’t have a college degree. I often have to help them see our software through that lense so that we don’t make assumptions that all of our users are college educated or even know what their post-high school options are.

Re: MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is _for_ inequality. I suggest that's an extraordinarily naive statement.

Can you send me writing or video of any serious thinker advocating for this? The OP is a common straw-man characterization of the position I described.

> serious thinker

No True Scotsman detected.

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