Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society • Hacker News Board

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#781

Post by MisterBastahrd » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 7:35 AM UTC

hbrn wrote: post #762

eyelidlessness wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cure for discrimination is forgiveness. The cure for violence is forgiveness. The cure for hatred is forgiveness. > The only way anything stops is for people to have the humility and wisdom to say “this will stop with me.” This is how I used to think. It’s reminiscent of the thinking of the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, John Lennon, and countless others who have had noble idealism which sadly isn’t congruous with reality…

I don't mean to pick on your personal story, but it would only be relevant if you found your bullies 60 years later, punched them in the face, and that somehow fixed your broken character. In the real world, your bullies are no longer the same people, and punching them 60 years later won't address your past or future problems.

That's adorable.

When white people have kids, they have to give their children the birds and the bees talk when they reach an appropriate age.

When black people have kids, they have to give them the same talk, and also the one where you need to be really careful about acting a specific way around cops lest they unalive you because police officers view blacks as more aggressive than whites because of prejudice.

As long as my kids have to live in a world where they need to be given that second talk? I don't care about how put-upon you are by people actively reacting against racism.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#782

Post by wizofaus » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 7:36 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #713

deepl_derber wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcomes have been underwhelming because we (at least, the US) haven't actually been doing this, and we've just found new and arguably worse ways to maintain deeply racist policies.

If what you say is true, books like “how to be an antiracist” would include examples of these “arguably worse” mechanisms to maintain inequality. They don’t contain such examples. Indeed, a central premise of Kendi’s book is that affirmative measures are required because simply “not being racist” doesn’t work.

But how convincingly does he make that case? It seems to be that while we're obviously a long way from a truly race-blind world, someone belonging to a minority ethnic grouping has a much better chance of succeeding in most careers in the average Western country today than they would have 50 years ago. I struggle to believe that's largely due to the weird sort of "anti-racism" Kendi promotes.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#783

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 7:36 AM UTC

mhuffman wrote: post #517

bjourne wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences? By conducting studies where you study the effect of the race variable. This has been done many times over in multiple countries and the results have shown that colored people and racial minorities are discriminated against. But despite the vast amount of empirical data, people still refuse to believe that racial discrimination is a factor in the job ma…

>despite the vast amount of empirical data Well, your examples seem pretty cherry-picked and not necessarily generally empirical (ie. lots of embedded subjectivity). Now your first link is more interesting and is usually the one that everyone pulls out as "absolute proof" that discrimination is live and well in modern hiring against Black people. I wonder, though, how much of this is in the bias of the experimenters…

[deleted]

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#784

Post by ETH_start » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 7:47 AM UTC

OOPMan wrote: post #709

brightball wrote: post #572

He’s right to do so. Statements that your research must be presented with a filter based on how it will advance political goals calls into question the integrity of all research. When people don’t “trust the science” this will be why. But further, I’d never seen the statement from antiracist before…wow. The idea that the only cure for discrimination is discrimination is akin to saying the only cure for violence is vi…

As a South African it's wild to me that just over 30 years ago Mandela warned of the dangers of this way of thinking and yet here we are...

Thomas Sowell explains how insurgent movements generally have a more just vision for the world in their early stages, and become tyrannical after they seize power.

He gives the example of the vision laid out by MLK in the 1960s ("judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin"), and contrasts it with that of modern social justice types, and also compares Christianity when it was persecuted in the Roman Empire, to when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#785

Post by noobermin » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 7:53 AM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #322

socialismisok wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I... This seems pretty different than what Haidt is painting it as. This is saying sociology research should communicate if it engaged with communities that haven't been a part of this sort of research in the past.

Well, it's explicitly giving an advantage to submissions that engage with these diversity goals. Favoring research of understudied populations makes a lot of sense and is necessary. Favoring researchers based on their own personal diversity metrics is controversial. Favoring research whose findings support specific diversity-related desired outcomes is dangerous (and the policy may do this in practice).

What is your argument for the last point because that isn't clear at all.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#786

Post by mpweiher » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 7:58 AM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #344

mpweiher wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Evolution is not "a truth", as in a revealed truth that is true just by uttering it. Evolution is a well-supported and falsifiable scientific theory. 2) Evolution was not blindly accepted as "truth" the way you seem to expect this so-called "principle" to be accepted simply on your say-so (or prophet Kendi's?). Quite the contrary, it was not accepted at all and evidence had to provided. Lots and lots of evidence.…

For 1-4, we will mostly set that aside for now. But I do think that most people find it obviously true -- it just may or may not be to their benefit to say so. Identity politics does lead to bad outcomes, yet here we are. Unfortunately we've gotten ourselves to the point that now acting like there are no identities is just another form of identity politics. E.g., saying "lets stop talking about gender -- we have male…

> For 1-4, we will mostly set that aside for now.

Hmm...

> most people find it obviously true

Reminds me of the rental manager at my London flat justifying a raise in my rent with "well, rents are rising". When I confronted him with his own organisation's web site, which unambiguously said that rents were flat or falling, he countered with "Statistics aside, rents are rising".

But I see the problem. Previously you claimed that these things actually were true. That people may believe they are "obviously" true is an entirely different matter, and probably the crux of the problem.

Because people believe in false things as "obviously true" all the time. For example, people used to believe that the sun obviously revolves around the earth, and many still do (and our language certainly still does: sunrise, sunset etc.)

And these things are just as false.

> that now acting like there are no identities is just another form of identity politics.

No it's not, and that's also a false dichotomy. Repudiating identity politics does not require claiming that (or acting like) there are no identities. But group identities don't define us, and certainly not to the exclusion of everything else. I am an individual first, and a member of various groups second. This isn't hard.

> anti-racism is racist

Glad we agree.

> It is because white people tend to double down when confronted with anti-racist data.

That's both untrue and also even if it were true it would not mean that "anti-racism" is racist. "Anti-racism" is racist all by itself without any external help required.

> when whites are told that the legal system is unjust to blacks, they tend to support it more.

This is not true.

However, speaking of doubling down on the false (and inconsistent) things people believe: the same people who believe that blacks are discriminated against, and use the legal system bias to justify their belief, also fervently believe that males are privileged. Yet the bias against males in the criminal justice system has been shown to be 6x larger than the bias against blacks. When confronted with these facts, do they ever double down!

But thanks for clarifying that what you are talking about is the not actual facts, but all the various false beliefs that people in fact do have.

My experience has been that it is better to base policy based on actual facts, not on things that feel truthy, though of course policy based on the latter is easier to sell.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#787

Post by wizofaus » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 8:48 AM UTC

hbrn wrote: post #761

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cure for discrimination is forgiveness. Too handwavy, the cure for discrimination is at the very minimum adequate public funding for primary and secondary education _everywhere_ (with adequate student to teacher ratios _everywhere_). Although the discussion is at NYU this problem is not limited to the US. The issue with this and other societal problems is that state governance is operated in 4 year cycles (much…

> the cure for discrimination is at the very minimum adequate public funding for primary and secondary education _everywhere_ (with adequate student to teacher ratios You know that when you're describing a policy with vague words like "adequate" you are actually giving yourself an escape hatch in case the policy fails? "The policy was great, it's just that funding wasn't adequate". Which makes your policy unfalsifiab…

"Adequate" is less vague than most other ways you could describe levels of funding though. You can easily enough define a base set of requirements that all educational institutions need to be able to provide (independent of any proposed goal such as combating entrenched discrimination against particular minorities) and establish what the minimal funding necessary for that much is. And if after doing so, given a reasonable span of time of ensuring those requirements are met (let's say 10 years), there's still no measurable (relative) improvement in educational outcomes for those you're aiming to help, it's fair to say the theory is falsified - or at least, you've proven that adequate funding for all education institutions regardless of location or ethnic make-up of students isn't enough on its own. Which personally is the result I would expect to see, for various complex reasons - while I'm not a fan of policies that explicitly show favoritism to individuals based on ethnicity etc., I don't have a problem with accepting that it costs more to provide effective education to students from certain socio-economic backgrounds, and therefore there's an argument for allocating taxpayer funding accordingly (esp. in parts of the world, and it's certainly the case here in Australia, where even public schools rely on a percentage of their funding to come from the community/parents).

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#788

Post by DoingIsLearning » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

hbrn wrote: post #761

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cure for discrimination is forgiveness. Too handwavy, the cure for discrimination is at the very minimum adequate public funding for primary and secondary education _everywhere_ (with adequate student to teacher ratios _everywhere_). Although the discussion is at NYU this problem is not limited to the US. The issue with this and other societal problems is that state governance is operated in 4 year cycles (much…

> the cure for discrimination is at the very minimum adequate public funding for primary and secondary education _everywhere_ (with adequate student to teacher ratios You know that when you're describing a policy with vague words like "adequate" you are actually giving yourself an escape hatch in case the policy fails? "The policy was great, it's just that funding wasn't adequate". Which makes your policy unfalsifiab…

Ok I will bite, adequate budget means you can keep a 20 students to teacher ratio. And you have enough school supplies (for all students) in order for teachers to follow their programmes.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#789

Post by mpweiher » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 9:40 AM UTC

beowulfey wrote: post #647

meowtimemania wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what GP said was logical. Imagine Harvard has 3 entrance criteria, and the criteria a student receives depends on the first letter of their first name: * A name: must be in top 1% of test scores * B name: must be in top 5% of test scores * C name: must be in top 10% of test scores The following 3 students are admitted: * Allison (is in top 1%) * Brian (is in top 4%) * Caitlin (is in top 1%) We can only safely…

Yes, I understand that affirmative action can have this consequence. I am not arguing for or against affirmative action. I am pointing out that it should not matter whether someone has an A, B, or C name when applications are being triaged. Because Allison, Brian and Caitlin all have the same credentials, they should be viewed as equally likely candidates. Making assumptions about them based on probabilities is exact…

> same credentials ... making assumptions about them based on probabilities is exactly the problem here

Using the credentials is making assumptions about them based on probabilities.

Re: Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

#790

Post by lazyeye » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 9:59 AM UTC

skyde wrote: post #692

naasking wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." It's not fair. Neither is discriminating in the other direction because these people are not at fault for what their ancestors did, not to mention that affirmative action policies divide people along racial lines rather than the factor more relevant to today, class lines. Ask yourself whether a black student…

you hear people from minority group all the time saying they want to keep the bloodline pure and not dare someone from a different races. If a white people said this everyone would say he is a nazi.

Similarly when immigrant minorities gravitate to particular localities for their shared culture and background, this is a wonderful example of diversity. When white people do this, its called white flight and is akin to nazism.