Hacker News Reader

> it seems very unfair to paint Google as a prejudiced organization for carrying out a diversity exercise that is explicitly recommended by organizations who specialize in this field

The site [1] says the "diversity exercises listed below are geared toward college students, faculty and staff." Out the door, they're being mis-applied.

The PDF [2] is attributed to the "Office of First-Year Programs Northern Kentucky University". No names, let alone specialists.

For an organization (Google) claiming to be scientific about its decision making, they seem to have misapplied a program with a propensity for being abused, put it in the hands of someone without "a background or expertise in facilitating exercises that may be culturally sensitive," and retaliated against individuals who complained.

This is worth calling out.

[1] https://www.uh.edu/cdi/diversity_education/resources/activit...

[2] https://www.uh.edu/cdi/diversity_education/resources/activit...

You're right, that's a good call out. I'm certainly not well-versed enough to know the nuances between diversity training intended for University staff vs Google staff. My first instinct is that "college staff" covers a very generic and broad set of workplaces, hence why it seems reasonably applicable to Google's workplace as well. But I might certainly be mistaken.

I was mostly responding to the parent comment which stated: "Can’t even wrap my mind around why someone thought this would be a good idea". I'm not endorsing this exercise myself. But given the above source and purpose, I can wrap my mind around why a reasonable well-intentioned person might think this was a good idea.

1) You selected one PDF from one organization, that has no visible attribution to anyone, generalized that to "recommended by academics", and based on that questioned the light of the rest of the post.

This is poor reasoning.

2) You uncritically examined the diversity activity. There is a large difference between deftly running an activity like this and horribly running an activity like this. The undertones of the original post is that this was handled poorly.

I would hope that here on HN, people would recognize that uncritically accepting 'best practices' or making an 'appeal to authority' is insufficient.

1) Yes, I selected an organization that is explicitly aiming to facilitate diversity and inclusion in professional workplaces. You appear to have completely misunderstood the chain of reasoning here. I did not claim that the above exercise is constructive. Rather, my claim is that this is the exercise recommended by at least some organizations that specialize in promoting diversity and inclusion.

> You uncritically examined the diversity activity

Your post assumes that the people running the organization are capable of critically examining diversity and inclusion related matters. Sometimes, people are best off acknowledging that something is completely outside of their area of expertise, and deferring to the advice given by specialists. I certainly do this very frequently, when it comes to advice given by my doctors or lawyers.

If you wish to critically examine any and all advice you come across, more power to you. But you don't get to call someone out for being prejudiced when they are literally following the advice given to them by specialists who are trying to promote diversity and inclusion.

> There is a large difference between deftly running an activity like this and horribly running an activity like this. The undertones of the original post is that this was handled poorly.

There is no details or explanation in the article whatsoever, providing support to the conclusion that the activity was run horribly or poorly, and not simply following the exercise instructions given. I would hope that here on HN, people would avoid jumping to conclusions based purely on conjecture.

Hi, I understand that this can be a hot button issue, and I know when that happens to me I sometimes misread or I am hasty in my response. Perhaps that's what has happened with your response here. I took a few minutes to read your posts again, set them aside, re-read them, and am now responding. I hope to not misrepresent your words.

You did not engage with my first point. I agree that sometimes people are best off deferring to experts. In this case, we have no idea who that is. The University of Houston is far too generic. I would want to know are any of these people Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPoC)? If so, does they or their viewpoint match up with other specialists in this field? ^Getting a map of the territory and vetting your resources are absolutely things anyone should be capable of doing, especially anyone at an organization of Google's scale and with its resources.

"you don't get to call someone out for being prejudiced when they are literally following the advice given to them by specialists" 1) I did not call you prejudiced. You seem to have inferred that. 2) In the general sense, if someone is wrong/prejudiced/racist, it doesn't matter who the advice is coming from, it can and should in fact be point out so that it can be learned from.

As for your last quote of mine--I said "undertones" and you ignored that. Perhaps your inference based on the author's writing is different. Based on my experience, I read those undertones as a diversity exercise done poorly.

Hi, I appreciate the response. I agree with you that I know very little about University of Houston or its Center for Diversity and Inclusion. FWIW, it is one of the top results when I google for "diversity exercise", but make of that what you will.

My larger point is not that the exercise is great and should continue to be used. My larger point is that the exercise is something that a reasonable and well-intentioned person could have chosen, in a sincere effort to promote diversity and inclusion. This seems to be a point worth making, given the parent comment of "can’t even wrap my mind around why someone thought this would be a good idea".

When I first read the linked article, I had a similar shocked reaction. Knowing the origin of the exercise, and its purposes, is very valuable context that the original article should ideally acknowledge.

> But you don't get to call someone out for being prejudiced when they are literally following the advice given to them by specialists who are trying to promote diversity and inclusion.

Wait, why not? Why is this appeal to authority iron clad? Why is this authority better than any other? If I claim to be a "specialist[] who [is] trying to promote diversity" and I am doing bigoted things, where does that leave my authority?

I don't believe defending an appeal to authority by asserting that your authority is correct is a sound line of reasoning.

> But you don't get to call someone out for being prejudiced when they are literally following the advice given to them by specialists who are trying to promote diversity and inclusion.

"Just following orders" does not absolve one of responsibility.

If I "listen" to the advice of a specialist to call an African American the n-word, and then I scream the n-word repeatedly in front of others, then those people have the right to call me prejudiced. The onus is on me to prove my lack of prejudice, not on my accusers. The alternative is enabling racial supremacists to hurl vitriol so long as they "do a bit of Googling" and supply a PDF that says "expert says epithets are ok!"

Do you know the difference between authority and morality?

In a court of law, if someone sues over the scenario you've described, appeal to authority is exactly how a defendant would argue that what they did isn't considered racist and therefore doesn't violate the law.

To understand the pathological behavior if megacorporations, look to the law under which they operate.

Then you would have been willing to risk your job (as it was implied to have an element of accountability) AND you think you have an established ethic that would reject this exercise. That is a rare position and quality, which should give you pause. ie Not everyone is you.

> You uncritically examined the diversity activity

That's also how a company trying to do its best to cover the sometimes ambiguous intent of diversity law will often interface to academia, so it's a fair approach in this context.

(Remember, critically examining a diversity activity rather than doing what academia guides as best practice can open a company up to more liability than the opportunity to "defer to authority" on the topic. "We didn't, in our opinion, think this approach was best so we trusted our guts and didn't do it" is a much worse defense in a labor-practices case than "We followed the program as set forth in such-and-such university's diversity exercise policy handbook").

>That's also how a company trying to do its best to cover the sometimes ambiguous intent of diversity law will often interface to academia, so it's a fair approach in this context.

Agree that it provides cover for an org to defer to experts and best practices.

Hard disagree on the "fair approach" part. An outside individual examining this activity can be better than an organization simply trying to cover its legal bases.

"It seems very unfair to paint Google as a prejudiced organization for carrying out a diversity exercise that is explicitly recommended by academics who work in this field."

Yeah and the guy who invented the lobotomy was awarded a Nobel Prize. Following the advice of academics is not a license to take off your ethics hat.

License, no.

... but it makes for great legal cover.

And that's all this training is about: legal cover. One of many kubuki theatrics one must engage in as a corporate drone.

This is just the following orders excuse, but with more institutions participating.

As much hay is made of "just following orders" being no excuse, one sees it made so often because it does work, depending on the context.

(In a sense, it even worked in the Nuremberg trials---basically everyone tried was executed, but the entirety of the German army and the civilian populace who supported the Nazi party were not, even though they, too, were "just following orders").

It would be more honest if they all said, "we weren't thinking."

I think they would have even been acquitted on the charges of criminal conspiracy if they used that argument.

Surely you don't think they went through the trouble of having this diversity exercise in order to encourage discrimination? This is a case of someone who's trying to reduce bigotry being stupid, not unethical.

I think the scholarly consensus is that the blue-eyes-brown-eyes exercise, at least as applied to adults, is of limited value and might in fact be net harmful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott#Academic_research...

(It would make sense to me that this exercise is helpful in a time and context where people are open about segregation, and you want to train children out of absorbing it from their culture. Corporate diversity training is a wholly different context: if you have employees who do not already believe that segregation is bad and do not actively want to prevent unjust discrimination, fire them or at least prevent them from managing or interviewing people. No hour-long training is going to make your racist boss suddenly realize that racism is bad.)

This exercise seems like a much more extreme form of it, where you're encouraging people to say stereotypes about actual people who are in the room. Is there any academic study saying that it works? Or is this just something on a .edu website?

(And aren't there studies showing that if you make people listen to stereotypes of a group they belong to being unintelligent, they'll perform worse on standardized tests?)

The "blue-eyes/brown-eyes" experiment was essentially a lighter variation on the better-known "Robbers' Cave Experiment" in psychology. You arbitrarily divide people into two groups, like "blue-eyed folks" and "brown-eyed folks" (in other words, the arbitrariness is quite overt and visible) and then look at how conflict and cooperation play out between the two groups. That's a far cry from what happened during OP's "diversity training" exercise.

(It turns out that conflict won't necessarily arise in that kind of situation, but that it's exceedingly easy for a bad actor (such as the experimenter herself) to manipulate the groups into hating each other. Reference https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/16/a-real-life-... )

>"carrying out a diversity exercise that is explicitly recommended by organizations who specialize in this field."

It doesn't matter that the exercise is recommended or designed by specialists in the "field" when the entire "field" is wrong-headed and backwards in the first place.

The field of diversity studies (grievance studies) serves only to divide and exacerbate the very problems it identifies while ignoring actual solutions.

The justification for the field and its methods consists of a set of assumptions that are intently racist, sexist and divisive. This is bad enough, but then the internal logic guiding the field, built upon these initial assumptions, is weak at best.

Ultimately the diversity mafia is able to throw its weight around unimpeded because people are afraid that if they criticize it or its methods they will be slandered as racist or sexist. It is driven by the clear benefits it gives to people who can claim membership in certain classes, so of course they have a clear incentive to endorse and spread its divisive and unproductive rhetoric and methods.

To me, the issue here isn't (just) that someone felt extremely uncomfortable with a diversity exercise - it's the way their concerns were handled. Rather than empathizing with the person and learning from the experience, HR ignored the person's discomfort, and chose to "do some digging" on them instead.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) exercises are designed to make you feel uncomfortable because coaches believe discomfort is evidence of your "DEI muscles" being exercised. The thinking is that you cannot change your attitudes, opinions, and behaviors unless you can first become uncomfortable.

Causing discomfort in a respectful way is one thing. Causing discomfort by encouraging employees to call someone racist and homophobic names is a very different thing.

But again, the main point isn't the diversity exercise. It's the way his complaint about the exercise was handled.

The best-practice seems to indicate assigning people randomly to groups so they can examine their own biases. This instance at Google was to assign people to their own stereotypes so they can wallow in it? Not the same thing, is it?

We lack evidence that's what happened.

If you assign people randomly to labels that are supposed to be disjoint from their attributes (but you use the pejorative names of real attributes), there's a non-zero chance you'll randomly assign someone to the group named by the pejorative version of an attribute they have.

Whether it works or not it's a psychological manipulation, and it should be unacceptable to force it on people. Absolutely dystopian.

I'm interested to read more about these programs. I confess that superficially they seem ridiculous to me. Is there a link that you are aware of to the research underlying these activities?

Making a list of prejudices against particular groups and discussing their negative effects sounds beneficial. Shouting out a bunch of derogatory stereotypes with no consideration or discussion does not. How these things are handled matters and how failures to handle these things well is then handled also matters.