Who cares about diversity?

But it's a testament to the HN community that the most-upvoted comment on this thread is one with a link to a video that is long form (over an hour!) and truly presents both sides. It is also legally sophisticated — not something that most HNers can digest at 3x. Yet enough folks engaged with it that this rose up slowly to be the top comment.

Most communities aren't able to perform conversational alchemy — starting out with bronze and ending up with gold. HN doesn't always do this, but the fact that it can is much of the reason why I'm here.

Also below is a particularly egregious example from Canada, where it explicitly states white straight men need not apply.

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/search-job/?job_id=58317

Seems to be fairly widespread and growing rapidly.[1] "68 percent of job ads in the fall of 2020 mentioned diversity, and 19 percent required a separate diversity statement. That number requiring diversity statements is even higher for elite schools and tenure-track jobs. Certain fields are more likely to require diversity statements than others, with political science being the most likely among fields included in the survey."

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/05/23/diversity-st....

To be fair, there are many people from traditionally chauvinistic groups who despise the very chauvinism they live in. Many of them may be intelligent and productive people. Dismissing each and every individual because of the group is the root of discrimination.

Some attempts at diversity may go too far - tolerating intolerant people just because "they grew up in different environment" - leading to the paradox of tolerance [0]. I've read news [1] about the very phenomenon.

The fact is - tolerance, diversity, open-mindedness - those are all values, and they need to be enforced. In order to keep a tolerant society, you must show the door to anyone who disagrees with that philosophy. The same way you need to lock up criminals to keep an ordered society from devolving into chaos.

But ultimately, in order to have a truly tolerant society, each and every member of it must be evaluated as an individual.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[1] https://restofworld.org/2022/tech-india-caste-divides/

I believe that every rational thinking person would agree that tracking racial and ethnic and sexual headcount percentages doesn't necessarily mean what they purport to mean. But... what are you gonna do? We just need metrics, any metrics. Bad metrics are better than no metrics, or at least this seems to be the deeply entrenched mindset of business.

With some exception (specifically our industry), all the privilige of a high caste indian or Laotian supremacy goes away when you move to a Western/White dominated culture.

They are much more likely to encounter racism against THEIR race, than have the opportunity to promote their own racism.

https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/harrison_matthew_s_200512_ms....

"If I want to focus on merit, fairness and equality, then you get called out as racist or sexist."

I'm still waiting for an example where someone can actually vet people based on merit, fairness and equality without any of their own unconscious biases being a factor. Humans are most comfortable with people that think, look, and act like them. No matter how hard they try, it skews their thinking at times.

And of course now every minority employee at your company has to excel or else they might torpedo the entire diversity hiring initiative.

This is a major difficulty we face today, mass irrationality in society.

Affirmative action / Diversity Initiatives are a blunt instrument that attempts to address these historical inequities. If e.g., a student from a school in a poor area had the same quality of a K-12 education, did not have to worry about tuition (I.e., make university free again) / living expenses to be able to continue at university as the wealthy kid, affirmative action could have been phased out from higher ed.

The problem is that the inequities continue, so what should have been a short-term policy to address historical inequities has become a long-term papering over of deep issues in our society.

Policies to allow affirmative action to be phased out in higher ed might include, funding K-12 schools equitably instead of based on local property tax revenue + parental donations. Changing college entrance policies to accept only the top n students from any school, to create an incentive for wealthy to place their children in "worse" schools which would incentivize those same wealthy to properly fund all schools. Paying the parents of the children in the "bad" schools a wage that allows them a life with dignity and time to spend with their children. Mandatory paid time off so sick children are not just left on their own at home (possibly getting into trouble). Policing that doesn't target certain demographics foreclosing future opportunities-- e.g., a kid with an arrest record is barred from attending paramedic classes at the local community college. Etc.

We need to make fundamental changes in all areas of society to address inequities in opportunity just in college / university admissions. A great side effect is poor rural whites would benefit just as much as other marginalized groups by systemically addressing the issues (one fewer way for the wealthy elite to divide us). But, our society has collectively decided it is easier just to keep affirmative action / diversity programs around.

Workplaces are downstream from schools, so everything that needs to be solved around equitable access to education needs to occur before the "temporary" policies to address the fallout of not addressing our societal issues systemically can be phased out at the workplace.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-ben...

[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/dec02/gi-bill-world-war-ii-and-e...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...

Edit: fixed grammar

And as a Software Engineering hiring manager, when hiring I always strive to to be statistically unbiased in the diversity distribution in my team. My base distribution is the population of Software Engineering University graduates.

As long as that base population has 1/10 women and 1/20 "non majority population" (in our case is average Mexican) my team should be expected to follow the same diversity distribution.

The problem with a lot of "diversity" pushes is that they treat use the full country population distribution as a base, which is unreal for ALL labours, Hospitality may be skewed to females, Basketball may be skewed to Blacks, mechanics may be skewed to males, etc. Unless the distribution in the upper part of the funnels do not change, it will be unfair to attempt to force a change in the distribution in the lower stages of the funnel.

> Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.

https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/equity-vs-equal...

Yes. I do not want to live in a world where genetic editing is used to give everyone equal opportunity. I am ok with not having the genetics to play in the NBA while others do.

Diversity should not be the end goal. A healthy society that provides basic needs for all should be. If that means we have mostly people that share X characteristics in Y field that’s fine as long as they’re the best people for the job.

If we assume (rightly) that american society is inherently and irredeemably racist, how exactly can we trust admissions officers or people involved in employee recruitment to make decisions that aren't racist?

Racism runs to the core of how people see each other in america, so much so that race data shouldn't be allowed into any decisions period. Or at least, people should feed inaccurate data into the system in order to subvert the white privilege that it rests apon

Stop for a second and think about what this question implies. First, there are genetic characteristics which affect opportunity and can't be smoothed out. But even environmental characteristics are intractable. Factors like whether your parents read to you, make you do your homework, or make you go to school can't be corrected by social policy. Equal opportunity isn't a realizable goal.

The focus should be on preventing discrimination. But, while there is plenty of discrimination, discrimination explains a smaller share of unequal outcomes than unequal opportunity, which can't be fixed.

As a white man who grew up with a single mother, this is exactly what affirmative action appears to be. Why? Because I already had a rough start, and saw opportunities broadcast and given out to others that I didn't qualify for simply because I wasn't non-white.

I understand the on-paper intents and purposes perfectly well, but the reality is these programs are racist to the core.

You mean like making it harder to get into limited college slots (requiring higher scores, etc) based on your race? You're right, that seems awful.

Look at discrimination against unattractive people for one - it is actually more pronounced (although less overtly visible) than discrimination by race, but gets significantly less media coverage. There are also many other axes - height, intelligence, character - most of which are heavily influenced by genetics; we simply consider it acceptable to discriminate based on these attributes.

How do we know that those fewer opportunities are necessarily linked to the characteristics you were born with? For example: in Britain, white working class kids are the least likely of any major racial group to go to university. But that is evidently not because they're white. Poor parenting and low levels of expectation in some schools have been cited as some of the reasons for this.

For the record, in 2021 in terms of State school students getting into universities the rates were as follows: Chinese/72%, Asian/54.9%, Mixed/48%, Black/46.8% and White (of any class)/33.3%

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education...

So, where i get stuck, is that you can't actually make this statement about any individual black woman or white man.

The one common theme across all of social justice is that stereotyping is bad. Erasing individuality and forcing people to live in the shadow of their stereotypes is bad.

Yet its apparently allowed here? Because it mostly benefits minorities?

This is the unspoken line the separates identity politics and equality. A focus on minorities vs a focus on ending discrimination and stereotyping, which under equality would include AA.

When (most) people say they are against "woke" culture or "sjws" they generally mean they are against the identity politics flavor of ""equality"". Because identity politics is just a racist sexist dog whistle for discrimination against majorities.

The solution is not to systematically discriminate in another direction, forever.

In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy, and you have abandoned the high moral ground that racial discrimination is always a bad thing, and you end up in a worse situation than you started.

We could start by not forcing them into a school system that is highly correlated with outcomes of criminality[1]. Then we could stop subsidizing dependency and instead ease the paths work, education, and entrepreneurship, e.g. by reducing the cost of compliance by e.g. reducing scope and burdens of licensure requirements, instituting opportunity zones.

I leave as an exercise to the reader considering why the Democrat party does not support the above policies, while the Republican party does.

[1] "Overall, I find that winning the lottery to attend a first-choice school has a large impact on crime for high-risk youth. High-risk lottery winners experienced roughly a 50 percent reduction in the measures of criminal activity that weight crimes by their severity." https://www.educationnext.org/does-school-choice-reduce-crim...

I'm trying to imagine how this would work in practice but products aren't usually designed by committee in giant brainstorming sessions where everyone gets to provide their opinion from their little expert/experience positions.

That usually happens through research and feedback loops. Being flexible and adapting. It doesn't require having to hire from every demographic and expert group, and putting them directly on your product/engineering teams.

If you're targeting a specific demographic or niche market is typically helps to be from that group or at a minimum be constantly talking to them (ala what Steve Blank talks about endlessly). It also helps with sales/marketing when communicating, etc.

But this stuff doesn't seem like a rule you can apply generally when composing a team or building a company like choosing the right Lego blocks by demographic profile.

It's not like building a team in an RPG video game where you're trying to find the right balance of race/gender/religion/culture.

It's entirely possible to pick up and develop the required skills while on the job in many cases. Companies ultimately end up benefiting from this by spreading out the responsibility of training people, which results in a stronger more robust workforce.

Doesn't this seem like a weird thing to say? How do you know that? Isn't this the definition of stereotyping? Is every question going to be of the form "as a black woman, what do you think about X?" And why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say?

I'd posit that there is no good answer to this question, and that attempting to find or optimize one is a distraction. In very broad strokes, if you try to fix a problem too slowly, bad things keep happening; if you try to fix it too fast, you're liable to upset other things around you (e.g. the economy, delicate sensibilities, your short-term profitability, etc.). And the problem is too grossly high-dimensional to hope for any kind of consensus (or often, any analysis) at any level of detail beyond simply "yup, that's a problem".

With no hope of finding an ideal solution, the pragmatic response is to just address the problems you can see with the resources you can afford. Trust in being directionally correct.

I mean, you give a very cliche example. Consider an alternative situation where you need to decide between the same black woman or a Latino man. Or the same black woman and an Asian woman. Should you be permitted to make the same racially motivated decision in this context?

And also: if you're provided race data in the hiring process, you're essentially put in a position to not only make decisions like the one you listed, but also ones regarding other races. You're in a position to establish which races are "above" one another in the hiring process. How can your employer guarantee that you don't do this, even if you say that you don't?

We know of the disgusting things white people have historically done. We also know that white people are over represented in hiring and admissions decisions. I ask: should white people, given their track record, be allowed to make this call?

From the post:

> If people of different races think differently, presumably that’s because of their different experiences (rather than, say, because different beliefs and attitudes are genetically programmed into different races). In that case, the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries. They’ve not just grown up in a different part of our society; they’ve grown up in a completely different society. So affirmative action proponents would greatly favor affirmative action for, say, African immigrants over affirmative action for blacks born in America.

This strikes me as faulty thinking. Revenge-driven justice fails; two wrongs don't make a right. Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator.

Anyone who followed that "Activism as a Vocation" link here a few days ago can probably agree that the fix to the current cancel-culture chaos of academia isn't going to happen within academia. It's about mass media dollars. School administrators, like the rest of us, are just manipulated "useful idiots."

I think we get into trouble when we start treating individuals as mere tokens of their groups. To pick on your comment for example, "those people have been systematically discriminated against forever" is true at the collective level, but is very likely not true at the individual level. There's no justice in choosing a well-off black candidate on the basis that other black people disproportionately experienced slavery slavery, poverty, Jim Crow, etc, especially when it comes at the expense of a white person who had a very hard life.

Moreover, even if we insist on tokenizing people, we rarely treat people as the median of their group, and instead we treat whites, men, etc as though they have the privilege of board room executives, politicians, kings, etc (e.g., arguments that a given male has privilege based on the observation, "men have ruled for millennia").

> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.

I emphatically deny this, especially the idea that a black woman is going to have interesting things to say, but a white man won't. There is far more diversity within a race than between them, including diversities of experience and how we process those experiences (for example, even if you have two people of the same race with similar adverse experiences, one could come out of those experiences with additional resilience and another with a trauma response). If you want interesting/different experiences, there are much better proxies (e.g., if your team is coastal and well-educated, a well-educated rural candidate is probably going to offer a lot more diversity than a black woman who came from the same pipeline as the rest of the company). What does a white man from rural Appalachia have in common with a white man from the Bay Area that you can conclude that neither will have interesting thoughts?

Moreover, if your company is super ideological about diversity, people who don't want to be regarded as tokens probably opt out, and you end up with a bunch of people with different skin color but similar viewpoints (and anyone with a unique viewpoint is probably afraid to speak it). Not exactly a way to optimize for "interesting thoughts".

Of all the people at my company, black and white, male and female, I am the only one from a poor background. My life experience is vastly different from all of them.

This is the issue with defining life experience or diversity purely in terms of race and sex.

I think the demand for a simple and easy answer to diversity (we have x% from group y!) Is well intentioned but very counterproductive.

We wait.

I don't understand why people want these issues to be resolved here and now. Society and culture take decades to change, that's natural, and shortcuts—however tempting they might be—often come at a cost of something else.

The conditions of these oppressed groups are not terribly bad, compared to what was going on with people in general throughout history. An average man who lived in Europe 100 years ago would gladly change places with an average black woman living in Europe nowadays. And even lots of white people from poorer countries nowadays have a lower standard of living than black people in developed countries. I speak from my own experience, as a person who grew up in a countryside where people don't have running water in their homes and toilet is just a hole in the ground; then I come to Northern Europe for work and hear how hard it is to be a black person here and that I'm apparently privileged because I'm white.

My point is, current conditions of people in developed countries are not so bad that it requires urgent measures to improve. If solving it takes 2-4 generations of people living in these conditions, it's not that much of a tragedy, and I don't think we must urgently start dumping resources to speed it up.

https://i.redd.it/9n4lf8f5hrc91.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

I think this argument always fails to realize that even in a group of white dudes, probably all of them have had a vastly different life experience and can bring those perspectives too.

No. But two white men could also have vastly different life experiences, possibly even more different than between one white man and a black woman, depending on who they are.

If your primary goal is to increase intellectual diversity than you need to look at more than just race, gender, and sexual identity. And I don't think that would be a bad thing. But that's not to say that there aren't other goals of DEI, such as trying to offset the disadvantages faced by certain groups of people.

I think the only way to solve it would be - Randomized child dna assignment, ie, every child is adopted or the dna material is swapped.

I think people would like to solve historical unfairness problem - but I believe it would require abandoning the very foundation of our biologically influenced culture. Ie- nobody is willing to give up the possibility of having mini-me.

Problem is, the 74% Asian was almost entirely Chinese born Chinese, and I do feel it hurt the program. They did not want to join groups with non-Chinese people because they preferred speaking Chinese in group projects. They didn't want to talk to you before or after class if you were not speaking Mandarin. The chit chat and sharing of ideas is the whole point of higher education IMO. There were other problems not related to the fact they only wanted to speak Chinese their whole duration of their time in the program (such as talking during class, cheating, etc.) but I wont go into that. The point is, having nearly 70% of the program being Chinese born Chinese made the education experience worse. Unfortunately, American born Chinese (or even Korean) gets lumped into the Asian group and they have to compete against 1 billion Chinese applicants taking paper GRE tests (cheating on these paper tests is common, as you can buy the answers ahead of the test ).

Also suggests why it shows up in high-status highly paid jobs like engineering, finance, executive suites, law, etc.

What was it a few generations ago? Patriotism? Being the correct race or religion instead of posturing about diversity?

I’ve seen it in myself and can only speculate about others, but sometimes I’ll leave a meeting completely unconvinced by an argument and come in the next day singing a different tune.

People like the echo chamber because it’s comfortable. But comfortable doesn’t lead to growth.

Hanlon's razor is a heuristic which doesn't work very well in this case. Clearly, there is a lot of social pressure to at least pretend to care about diversity, so by default you'd expect at least some people to lie about it.

Seems more likely they're just bad advocates / come up with bad policies for ideas they like. THAT does not surprise me the least. The amount of "If you get what you want here, I don't think that gets you any closer to your goal, in fact it might do the opposite." situations is pretty high out there.

> Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society.

The examples he uses demonstrate that, in his mind, caring about diversity requires measuring circumstance. You might argue that universities are not so shallow as he's claiming, but I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.

I mean, I just think that no one seems to be aware of this. She's not French in the movie adaptation, which is what most of those kids would be familiar with. (And the musical does heavily draw from the movie – including leaving out her meeting her mother).

Without the added context of the original book's description, since it seems no one was aware of it, do you think the uproar was justified?

On the other hand, there are examples of the musical performed with a caucasian lead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5wNynK1tHg

Suppose it is problematic if the author does indulge in that, but am not going searching for it. Found this piece reasonable on the whole. It does have an opinion on intolerance, and not everyone is going to like it.

Would you mind saying them?

Ad-hominem, man in the arena, etc.

Man, that's disappointing. I like Prof. Huemer's writings on free will and philosophy of mind [1] a lot ("Existence Is Evidence of Immortality" is a fun one). I was unaware of his blog up until now—reading it makes me think significantly less of him.

[1]: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers.htm

Other than style and tone, what is your issue with the content of this writer's position? What are your suggestions for how it could be amended?

I think he's also wrong in the factual sense about what diversity initiatives are for. It's not actually that diversity is an automatic net win for companies because diverse workers are better. It exists specifically to combat bias and discrimination. Both conscious and unconscious. It's literally anti racism (or anti misogyny or anti homophobia etc). I support DEI programs because that's a laudable goal unto itself. Even if it makes a company less profitable. I think the goal of any human endeavor should be to make the world a marginally better place. Not just to maximize profit.

This logic only makes sense looking backward, assuming you got hired.

Good. But in the end, if you end up with an all-male team then questions will be asked, and rightly so.

Now, there is some possible justification, in the sense that diversity may bring value to the team. After all, hires are holistic (communication skills, etc.). Especially if diversity of {race, sexuality, gender, etc} meant a diversity of ideas. But without evidence for this (please correct me as needed), and with seemingly less-than-well-justified reasons, it was quite upsetting to me. Something to think about: if we value diversity of ideas, why not value diversity of religion? Beyond the fact that it's a legally protected class, of course (i.e. ethics/value prop, not legality). Or would that somehow be less than ideal?

As an Asian, I feel the issue of "reverse" affirmative action well.

This is constraining the definition of protected class.

For example, if you're over 40 or a veteran, there could be the same doubt regardless if you are hetero and white. And that says nothing of non-visible disability status. The list is surprising long of protected classes so we'd probably do our organizations a service to not presume we know if someone belongs to one.

That is very surprising to me. Can you share any examples of this happening?

I'd sort of expect the CxOs at most major companies to be ~25-40 years into their career. I'd therefore expect them to look a lot like the white collar workforce new entrants looked in 1982-1997.

That isn't to say there aren't companies that have Chief Diversity Officers who aren't taken seriously, but that's a completely different story.

That's not "woke", that's just garden variety nepotism.

Then the only diversity they need worry about is income diversity, where they need to have equal #'s from extreme poverty as they have from extreme wealthy. Income does trend some in more diverse communities anyways, so it'll happen naturally that this will create more diversity, but it takes away some of the stigmas and angst around it because everyone being accepted is more of a number and acceptance is more based on their achievements etc..

That may be true in your party of the world but at least in the IT industry in mine, diversity in skin colour (*) isn't really an issue. Diversity in sex, age and physical ability levels definitely are though, and I'd like to see a much stronger push to ensure an older disabled or blind woman is given the same consideration as a younger able-bodied/sighted man, given the there's no reason the former should be any less capable of fulfilling the job requirements, but examples of are vastly underrepresented, meaning we're almost certainly missing out on hiring the most talented engineers that we can find.

(*) admittedly I'm treating skin colour as just a proxy for ethnic/racial background. There's not a marked difference in skin colour between most East Asian backgrounds for instance, but within the Indian subcontinent there's a decent range. There probably still is something of an implicit bias towards lighter skin tones even given a wide range of backgrounds, and certainly those from an indigenous background are underrepresented. But that problem starts much earlier than at the point of being hired professionally as an adult.

Having a bias towards people based on skin colour and gender alone is racist and sexist by definition.

If people really cared about diversity they'd ask you about your upbringing, your views on life and how you would bring diversity into the work place.

I know I've never been asked such a question during an interview...

Diversity doesn't only mean race. It can mean cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints. It can mean creative vs. analytic thinkers, artistic vs. not, leadership, extroversion, unusual contributions to society, and so on. If you're a physics expert in a team of math experts, you add diversity.

Someone close to me hired a writer to pen a woke entrance essay for their son. This was after a guidance counselor warned that "people like him" are having a hard time getting into medical school right now. We can't say if it worked or not, but he did get in.

The southern strategy was to literally go against anything that would benefit black people, EVEN if it benefited poor white people too, because it's better to be miserable and white than to let a black person get ahead of you from government handouts. This was the entire strategy of the GOP(still is) since the 1950s.

I think the centrists (which may even just be a 'role' they play) goal is to keep both parties fighting on fringe issues like abortion and guns so we don't stop to reevaluate how much we're being fleeced by the govt to create $$ for their buddies in the oil and defense industries. Their purpose is to appear w/ the others, but only slightly and to ensure that the status quo remains intact.

Lee atwater said in 1981:

“As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*er, n*er, n*er’. By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*er’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N*r, n*r.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”

When I read this a few years back, it totally just clicked - that this is the entire economic platform of the right. Working class republicans support things that go against their own best interest (medicare for all for example), simply because they damn well don't want non-whites to have nice things, even if it means they don't get to either. Asinine as hell, but generations of racism and bigotry don't generally create tolerant people wanting to switch things up.

The thing nearly everyone tries to gloss over when they pull this "Well why don't you let more conservatives in then" is that many front-and-center conservative platforms these days are explicitly intolerant. Why should you be surprised or upset when tolerant institutions seek to reject those? It's a feature of modern civil society, not a liberal conspiracy.

To me at least, it feels loaded with expectations that you answer a certain way. I mean, you are almost certainly going to be judged (or at least feel judged) based on what you write, so that undermines the incentive to be truly honest with yourself.