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Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

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Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#621

Post by maldev »

samhuk wrote: post #601

The concern I have with DEI is that it's the manipulation of the natural function of a market - the jobs market. Just like others in this space such as quantitative easing, printing money, and "stimmy cheques", this often comes with positive and negative effects. Personally, I have a few thouhts: * If we didn't have DEI (which in practice is really just the new AA (Affirmative Action)), would hetero-ethnic areas like…

The curse of low expectations is real. I recently moved out of Baltimore because of the long term implications of DEI in education. There's schools where a gpa of 0.13 puts you in the top half of your class (https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/calls-to-shu...). You also have 77 % of seniors being illiterate (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/77-of-students-at-...). I also dated a teacher for a bit, they can't even teach, it's daycare and the bar for a highschool senior to pass is literally being able to write their name. Teachers can't fail or require more.

This is going to lead to decades of crime, most major cities in America are like this. And it's going to get worse and worse. The future is scary, and I wonder what the outcome will be. These are also largely black schools, what happens when these communities can't read and stay illiterate due to DEI in the school system?

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#622

Post by gfodor »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #584
gfodor wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you have pointed out is the exact opposite of a falsifiable condition. If we can’t disprove the possibility of a regression back to the past, then this is not meeting the test, and we should expect the results I mentioned. You actually could and should abolish the police in certain kinds of terminal states where crime was eradicated - the eradication may be due to a genuine shift in the way people behave (due to…

> the eradication may be due to a genuine shift in the way people behave (due to some other underlying reason.) For a generation or two, sure, but eventually it will come back unless the cultural training continues. I mean, there's a reason for historic cultural universals such as racism, dueling between men, and talking down to lessers. I think the best case scenario is that DEI eventually gets rolled up into regula…

Tribalism is pretty innate but the tribes change. I’d argue if DEI programs had an analog during the reformation era we would be more likely to see Protestant vs Catholic discrimination persist as those programs inflamed it for their own self preservation.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#623

Post by shadowgovt »

slavik81 wrote: post #559
shadowgovt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The old saying was "The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog." ... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.

> The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog That comic meant a lot to me. When I was growing up, I found that most adults would treat me with condescension. On the internet, I could engage in conversation as an equal. Anonymity didn't change the prejudices that people held, but it did change my experience.

I agree, and I had a similar formative experience. There's a great quote about being alive during the era of the moon landing that also resonates with me on this topic: "It was as if all of us, all over the world, had been given permission to dream big dreams."

I think it was a strict step forward over the previous status quo but (not unlike the changes to American culture after military necessity broke racial segregation barriers in the military during World War II) it's not the final step.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#624

Post by kodah »

Manuel_D wrote: post #520
Firmwarrior wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Hispanic man, I can say that I don't care about whether I earned my spot or lucked into it through my ancestry. Life isn't fair, and I'll gladly take whatever advantages I can scrounge up. The software interview process in particular is already so capricious that I feel absolutely no shame in tilting it in my favor in any way that I can.

Would you be okay with white and Asian people similarly applying in-group advantage towards their own races to the detriment of ours? The software interview process is capricious, but this doesn't justify racial discrimination. If we're so nonchalant about racism favoring us, we're hypocrites for criticizing racism favoring other groups over us. I am deeply troubled by racial discrimination favoring Latin people, des…

There's different reasons we design different systems to combat discrimination or lop-sided outcomes. White and Asian people, if that is their only identifying class characteristic, are not discriminated against generally. An argument could be made that white and Asian people from poor backgrounds don't make it into programming as much, but again - class lines. We probably should compensate for class more in discrimination laws.

Black and Hispanic people do face more active discrimination. That has to do more with outward appearance and last names.

Vets on the other hand are an example of a lop-sided outcome. It was discovered a while back that most vets often went into blue collar professions and didn't really climb that many ladders. They instituted a rule where campaign badge holders and disabled vets must have their resumes reviewed first. Working on the west coast I can attest it's rare to see vets at all. I've met more vets from non-US military in the tech world than I have from my own country (not complaining, but worth noting). There's definitely a small contingent of people who would put their political disposition into hiring if they saw a candidate was a vet, but military are coached to chop their military experience from their resume once they have a stack of experience to avoid this.

All that to say, if I were OP I would not be okay with what you proposed just on a facade basis. If it incorporated class distinctions I might agree.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#625

Post by anonymouskimmer »

gfodor wrote: post #622
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the eradication may be due to a genuine shift in the way people behave (due to some other underlying reason.) For a generation or two, sure, but eventually it will come back unless the cultural training continues. I mean, there's a reason for historic cultural universals such as racism, dueling between men, and talking down to lessers. I think the best case scenario is that DEI eventually gets rolled up into regula…

Tribalism is pretty innate but the tribes change. I’d argue if DEI programs had an analog during the reformation era we would be more likely to see Protestant vs Catholic discrimination persist as those programs inflamed it for their own self preservation.

Why do you assume any particular DEI goalpost will persist for years or decades or centuries? It's not as if generalized racism has persisted against the same categories since the late 1500s.

And why do you assume the generalized tribalism will persist based on particular initiatives? The old initiatives used to be hire from the gentry. Attitudes amongst the many do change. It doesn't matter if some vocal minorities keep the same attitudes going.

DEI initiatives and targets are measured periodically: https://hbr.org/2021/02/research-how-companies-committed-to-...

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#626

Post by caeril »

John23832 wrote: post #121
aliqot wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing up on IRC, I have very much the same experience as you but quite opposite as I experienced hardly any racism, and nobody knew my identity either. Nobody wanted to involve their personal lives or details until recently when identity and identifying became the thing.

It's not about telling people your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, it's about WHAT IS SAID about your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. The beauty of the internet is anonymity (to a certain extent), but that doesn't mean that you can't see or hear things that exclude you.

[dead]

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#628

Post by Manuel_D »

kodah wrote: post #624
Manuel_D wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be okay with white and Asian people similarly applying in-group advantage towards their own races to the detriment of ours? The software interview process is capricious, but this doesn't justify racial discrimination. If we're so nonchalant about racism favoring us, we're hypocrites for criticizing racism favoring other groups over us. I am deeply troubled by racial discrimination favoring Latin people, des…

There's different reasons we design different systems to combat discrimination or lop-sided outcomes. White and Asian people, if that is their only identifying class characteristic, are not discriminated against generally. An argument could be made that white and Asian people from poor backgrounds don't make it into programming as much, but again - class lines. We probably should compensate for class more in discrimi…

I don't think I've ever been discriminated against for being Latin. Quite the contrary, I likely had significant advantages on account of my race in university admissions. I'm not sure if I've had such advantages in tech hiring, as I don't outwardly advertise my Latin identity precisely because I don't want progressive race-realists to use it as a factor in hiring, but if they did find it it probably did help.

Unlike military service which has a discrete set of experiences and criteria, race is just something you're born with.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#629

Post by throw_m239339 »

tootie wrote: post #218
tastyfreeze wrote: post #132

Hiring preferences for PoC is discriminating against all not PoC. It is in practice exactly what these initiatives claim to be fighting, bigotry.

That infers the baseline is equality. The reality is that hiring without explicit guidelines will bias against POC. DEI is about counteracting unconscious (or conscious) bias.

> That infers the baseline is equality. The reality is that hiring without explicit guidelines will bias against POC. DEI is about counteracting unconscious (or conscious) bias.

No, DEI is about replacing one bias with another in order to make a bunch of white people feel better about themselves. DEI doesn't consider Indians or South Asian looking people "People of color", because there are "too many of them in tech already". DEI is just institutionalize racism. So much that some Indians have to fake being black to get jobs in DEI corporations, cause white people can't always tell the difference.

The baseline was never equality, however DEI is blatantly racist against people who objectively suffer from racial discrimination themselves.

Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

#630

Post by tastyfreeze »

barry-cotter wrote: post #237
jimbokun wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and they still try to use as money proxies for race But that's completely legitimate. If black people (for example) are systemically poorer than white people as a group, it makes sense to give them more help. It's favoring a wealthy black person over a poor white person, that's arguably problematic.

But that's completely legitimate. If [Asian|Jewish] people (for example) are systemically [better at university] than white people as a group, it makes sense to [hold them to much higher standards than white people in university admissions].

No, it doesn't. Your statement assumes that a university population should have a certain makeup of races. Let in the best of the lot regardless of color. If that makes the university population mostly Asian or Jewish so be it. That means that everybody else is resting on their laurels and not actually competitive in the market for university positions.

Every color of person is capable of performing at the same level as any other. However, not every person is capable of performing at the level some universities require. There are dummies and geniuses in every color/racial group. There are high achievers and low achievers in every group. Every single human attribute is a bell curve in the general population. By not picking the best of the lot regardless of how the result looks we are damaging the ability of the nation to compete.

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