Diversity as a goal is fundamentally flawed. It is what leads to policies like "affirmative action" which are in themselves simply a form of reverse discrimination.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18275156.
There was nothing generic about my comment nor was it a tangent from the topic at hand. It was a direct reply to an individual in favor of "diversity as a goal" policies as a means for correcting biases.
The link back to the original parent is there to provide context for anyone who wants it.
It may be true that you didn't introduce the generic topic; flamewars arise by degrees, so the choice of where to snip them is often a little arbitrary. Usually we snip it where the discussion becomes unmoored from the topic, which might not be where the bait first appeared.
And if you believe discrimination should be banished, when will you be showing up to protest schools which give preferential admission to "legacies" (descendants or other kin of alumni), to protest companies which preferentially recruit from only very specific schools, or other forms of admission/recruiting/hiring which give weight to factors other than pure individual merit?
Accepting that, you can of course debate what sorts of racism we should allow, and perhaps even encourage. I probably disagree with you, but that's just my opinion.
But if you believe anything which assigns admission/hiring/recruiting scores on any basis other than objectively-measured individual merit is "racist", you cannot plausibly be in favor of current hiring, recruiting or admissions practices, and have far larger fish to fry than the relatively small number of people whose admission/hiring is solely due to affirmative action.
In all seriousness: look up the ratio of "legacy" admits to, say, black students admitted at top colleges, and then remind yourself that "black" is not synonymous with "affirmative action admit", and then ponder which of "legacy" and "affirmative action" would cause the greatest overall change toward fairness if eliminated. Then focus your efforts accordingly.
This can only be changed by changing the image of coders within mainstream pop culture, which in turn is mainly influenced by lower class culture, especially Hip-Hop culture in the last decades.
I feel like this is a strawman - fossdev didn't say he agreed with such things.
And yet I find no evidence of concerted effort against those things, or even minimal effort to express disagreement with those things, on fossdev's part. Only their presence here.
It would have been easy to add a condemnation of those things in the original comment, too, in order to make sure nobody could read the lack of it as support or at least acceptance. But they didn't do that.
It's fair to see someone condemn what they believe to be one instance of a violation of a principle, and ask why they picked that one and not other, larger or more impactful, violations of the same principle.