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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

#791

Post by Dylan16807 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #790
Dylan16807 wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so you are suggesting that one situation where colors match invalidates situations where colors are different. You're implying that if red's meaning in one situation is the same, then red's other meanings in other situations must be the same. Okay I guess. I don't know why you would think that, but I don't have much hope of convincing you otherwise.

If it's all chosen because colors are deeply cultural then they would be the same. If important stuff is all different and arbitrary then it's not cultural.

> all chosen because colors are deeply cultural

> all different and arbitrary

Those are the extremes of the spectrum.

Color choices are not at either extreme.

Most color choices are arbitrary, some of them are shallowly cultural, and some of them are deeply cultural.

HN having an orange banner at the top isn't significantly cultural. Traffic lights are worldwide culture. Black or green for positive money and red for negative money are US culture. Red for positive money and black or green for negative money are Chinese culture. These choices tie into older associations, which affects the depth. But even if they were shallow they'd still be culture.

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

#792

Post by primax »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #682
primax wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is the most likely country for this to happen to, due to the unresolved issues surrounding slavery and the abandonment of reconstruction after the civil war. This is compounded when viewed through the USAs founding mythology. Other countries have done worse, but they haven't done so as hypocritically as the United States.

>unresolved issues surrounding slavery >country was founded 248 years ago >the "issue" stopped happening 159 years ago I don't think an issue that lasted for barely 1/3 of our country's history and hasn't been legal for the entirety of this century, last century, or much of the century before that is the problem. I think people's addiction to being full-time victims is the issue, because if you're always a victim, yo…

You were the last western country to deal with slavery, and it took a civil war to force the issue.

Then reconstruction was ended due to a political backlash from the south.

Don't pretend this is all over.

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

#793

Post by keepamovin »

eapressoandcats wrote: post #460
keepamovin wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The American obsession with race is deeply rooted in … [history of slavery] I think that’s part of it. But Europeans invented (or at least widely commercialized ) this instance of slavery, and they aren’t fretting about it. I think America’s fiery vivisection of its own morality Probably comes more out of Its role as “world saving hero police” in WWII. The ‘suddenly thrust upon them heroism’ caused them, in the sub…

Yes Europeans invented slavery, but the deadliest war as a percentage of the population in American history was the American Civil War. This lead to a period of violent segregation and repression even after the Union won. In many places Black people had effectively fewer rights than naturalized and second generation immigrants and until at least 1964. I agree that there is other complexity for the US psyche but slave…

Hmmm, war is often fought under a 'banner' that is different from the fundamental motivations. This the the classic "Jihadi's Dilemma": you need to craft an ideology to recruit those willing to die in the name of it.

Race has been a reliable 'cause-de-celebre' in the US politik for long eras, seemingly. I think you ought focus less on these superficial causes and more on fundamental ones: economics, resources, capital.

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

#794

Post by CyberDildonics »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #791
CyberDildonics wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's all chosen because colors are deeply cultural then they would be the same. If important stuff is all different and arbitrary then it's not cultural.

> all chosen because colors are deeply cultural > all different and arbitrary Those are the extremes of the spectrum. Color choices are not at either extreme. Most color choices are arbitrary, some of them are shallowly cultural, and some of them are deeply cultural. HN having an orange banner at the top isn't significantly cultural. Traffic lights are worldwide culture. Black or green for positive money and red for…

Do you have a source for any of this?

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

#796

Post by rayiner »

skissane wrote: post #764
rayiner wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, “south asian” is fine. In the UK, there’s enough of each group where I think you should distinguish Indian versus Pakistani versus Bangladeshi. It’s not a group of people who want to be lumped together, same with Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese. They're also far less closely related to each other than say British people and French people.

> I think you should distinguish Indian versus Pakistani versus Bangladeshi. It’s not a group of people who want to be lumped together, same with Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese. It is a very different situation though. 100 years ago, there was just one country, India – with a great deal of internal ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. And then, it was split into two over religion, and then one of those splits…

India was never one country until the modern incarnation. It was centrally administered under a series of empires, like the Austro-Hungarian empire. The groupings within the subcontinent are more different from each other than Western European countries. Even Bengalis, a distinctive ethnolinguistic group, are divided between India and Bangladesh based on religion, which is a major division—a much bigger one than the religious divisions that differentiate countries in Europe.

Many countries we identify as distinct in Western Europe are much more similar to each other than India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are. For example, France and Spain—both are Catholic, and their languages were considered merely different dialects of Vulgar Latin until the 1400s.

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

#797

Post by Dylan16807 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #794
Dylan16807 wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all chosen because colors are deeply cultural > all different and arbitrary Those are the extremes of the spectrum. Color choices are not at either extreme. Most color choices are arbitrary, some of them are shallowly cultural, and some of them are deeply cultural. HN having an orange banner at the top isn't significantly cultural. Traffic lights are worldwide culture. Black or green for positive money and red for…

Do you have a source for any of this?

You want me to pick one out of google? They all say the same thing https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/paradox-red-green-festive-per... https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-33464903

Here's a link full of its own links https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/6982/excep...

Or we can look at how old the western association with red as negative money is: https://grammarist.com/idiom/in-the-red-and-in-the-black/

If you wanted specific links you should have said so 4 days ago after I wrote "You can also do a text search for china red green stocks, or japan red green stocks."

If you want a citation for HN's orange not being deeply cultural, then you got me, I didn't actually check. But let's see... "The orange logo was chosen because it was the opposite of VC websites which were typically forest green or navy blue" yeah that's not deep culture.

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

#798

Post by juunpp »

kristopolous wrote: post #629
nxicvyvy wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples in the last paragraph not enough? https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini...

what? an implementation of an ai? no not really. Those things are hard, take millions of dollars to train ... it doesn't really show, say Marx's M-C-M' equation, r = s/(c + v) or any of the other theories in his text or anything else in that comment. I don't see how say https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3 relates to a place "with no dissent". That's just a bunch of trigger-words and scapegoats pasted…

You seem very confused about how Google Gemini, or any ML-based system for that matter, is trained.

It is a natural consequence of these systems that they output the same biases that go into the input; e.g., the classic translation of "they are a doctor/nurse" in a language with gender-neutral pro/nouns to "he/she is a doctor/nurse" in English. Therefore, if one were to train any such system on the Founding Fathers or Nazi soldiers, it is only natural to expect that the system would output white/German/Eastern European men in each case. Yet Gemini doesn't; instead, Gemini introduces its own bias to erase the one in the input and instead always produce an "equal" cocktail of white/black/asian men/women (which, ironically, is still biased and racist because that only captures the races that woke employees at Google feel are important, but it takes actual intellectual honesty to see one's own biases), regardless of whether that results in historical inaccuracies or downright falsehoods. This is a very intentional bias and dishonesty, not something that can just be shrugged off as "it's hard and takes millions of dollars to train".

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

#799

Post by kristopolous »

juunpp wrote: post #798
kristopolous wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what? an implementation of an ai? no not really. Those things are hard, take millions of dollars to train ... it doesn't really show, say Marx's M-C-M' equation, r = s/(c + v) or any of the other theories in his text or anything else in that comment. I don't see how say https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3 relates to a place "with no dissent". That's just a bunch of trigger-words and scapegoats pasted…

You seem very confused about how Google Gemini, or any ML-based system for that matter, is trained. It is a natural consequence of these systems that they output the same biases that go into the input; e.g., the classic translation of "they are a doctor/nurse" in a language with gender-neutral pro/nouns to "he/she is a doctor/nurse" in English. Therefore, if one were to train any such system on the Founding Fathers o…

You're looking at buggy output, attributing political agency to it and speculating some fanciful story about a moustache twirling blue haired villain burning tiny american flags.

It was a software defect.

It's like claiming Stability AI wants everyone to have 6 or 7 fingers because that's how it draws hands or they're secretly occult theosophists because their mirrors don't generate reflections right so they believe mirrors are dimensional portals.

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

#800

Post by ForHackernews »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #758
ForHackernews wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You ultimately can't become a bigger tent across demographics while also shrinking your tent in terms of admissions selectivity. Whether or not this is strictly true in a mathematical sense, assuming a static applicant pool (a faulty but common assumption), the fact that this is such a knee-jerk response even from commenters here on HN is really depressing. Are we so conditioned to think of disadvantaged groups as…

>Are we so conditioned to think of disadvantaged groups as inferior that the idea of expanding access to members of historically under-represented groups appears to you to be definitionally at odds with being a selective institution? I was assuming that diversity and inclusion was not reducible to the proverbial "talented tenth" of various demographic groups but in fact entailed serving the 99%.

I guess I take it for granted that top research universities intend to directly serve top students and researchers, and the general public will benefit indirectly from the research they produce.

If you entirely reject the idea of meritocracy, then yeah, go nuts. Just hold a lottery and the 2,000 luckiest kids that year go to MIT.

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