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Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

This is backwards. We need do this type of investment at the pre-K, elementary, and middle school levels. We need to provide funding to local communities. If all these top tier colleges (I'm looking at squarely my alma mater--Duke--as an example) invested directly in their local communities instead of affirmative action we'd have made far more progress as a nation.

Meanwhile, big tech is gentrifying Durham, people of color are being pushed out, and these companies keep plastering signs everywhere about how they stand for diversity and inclusion.

Science is science. Leave it the fuck alone. Give everyone equal opportunity, and train them to become the best damn scientists they can be. Then give out grants.

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Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech?

I remember about 5 years ago, Facebook issued a report about its diversity numbers, and it put partial blame on the pipeline problem, saying they basically couldn't hire enough qualified people of certain demographics, and the entire DEI community blew up with how incorrect that was. I specifically remember some ridiculous outrage over "How can you compare people to oil?!"

However, I've never really found any compelling arguments that the entire situation isn't a pipeline problem, and my own anecdotal experience is that there is definitely something amiss in the pipeline - in my "Intro to Programming" middle school class in the mid 90s, purely elective(you just check a box on a mail in form over the summer), the students were 24 white boys and 1 white girl, despite the school being 50/50 by sex, ~20% black and 15% latino.

It is a pipeline problem, but there are very strong social and political vested interests that really don't want to admit it. The whole DEI industry leeches off productive companies by setting impossible standards of 50% female software engineers or perfect racial representation. If we admit that this is unrealistic, many DEI departments will no longer have a reason to exist. To tweak the popular Upton Sinclair quote, it's difficult to get an industry to admit that a problem is solved, when their salary depends on not solving it.

>The whole DEI industry leeches off productive companies

I actually think it's a little more insidious than that. Large companies, already established in their respective industries, build what are competitive moats by employing the DEI industry. Scrappy start-up that has something intriguing to offer? Oh but you don't have a VP of Diversity and Inclusion (that you can't afford) and you don't have a plan for ... I don't know what, exactly. Well you're not part of the team then. Companies like Google, Amazon, and so on actually want this to continue because it stifles competition.

> I actually think it's a little more insidious than that.

It's worse than that.

FB sent me and my cofounder a C&D for our side project, then wanted to hire me for their "black clique" in NYC to work on react ~2015 when i was working on brain computer interfaces at the time at a lab.

You know you are gonna get the "easy lay up", everyone there will know it too (I'm not the type to put much effort into studying for tech interviews and I have cheme background not compsi so i find the questions dull many times). And all of the "of color" people who play into it for their personal benefit just make it worse... (not to mention, even for a lot of these kinds of software jobs i had that weren't very interesting intellectually but paid alot, I pretty much vaped as much weed as I could just to make to lunch, and I would have played into all those sterotypes about black men as well...)

Fuck em.

I get the sense that a lot of these people that push these initiatives would be the kind of people who get upset that Ireland is full of the Irish.

Ha, I have no idea what goes on in their minds. But it took a lot of energy to pretend to care all the time when i'm around those types (because they see that I have the same skin color, and immediately their expectations are primed).

The pipeline is leaky, with different leak rates for different groups. But it is leaky over the whole length. This tries to get people to think about the leaks in the second half. This doesn't invalidate that we also should fix the other leaks, but the existence of leaks not addressed doesn't invalidate this attempt either.

The DEI community is basically a cult at this point. Anything that goes against their dogma or preferred narrative is blasphemy.

Pointing to the (fairly obvious) impact of the pipeline issues goes against their dogma and the grift that goes with it.

I mean, what other explanation do you think there is? Isn't the alternative that for one biological reason or another, white men, asians, and jews are winning the meritocracy of tech?

This is actually fairly mainstream elite conservative opinion, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve for instance.

Not all that satisfying an answer in my opinion, but I can't entirely discount it. I'd say the jury is still well out though.

What bothers me about this sort of idea is more the follow-up. Let's imagine for the sake of discussion that we prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that some groups are, on average, less intelligent than others. What then would the people advancing this argument suggest we do as a society? My gut feeling tells me they won't stop at just removing some current measures in the name of meritocracy, but will also gradually impose restrictions and it'll get real somber real fast.

I'll put on my elite conservative hat to answer your question.

Is concern for the consequences worth it to suppress the truth - being that some races are simply less intelligent than others (on average). If that is true, then there is no need to make any changes - each race has already assumed their proper place in our meritocratic society.

And taking off that hat, I agree with your thoughts and concerns. I will say that it's uncontroversial that there are IQ differences in race, but it's far from proven that those differences are purely genetic and can't be attributed to societal differences.

I'm not entirely sure what elite conservatism is or whether you endorse this view or not, but there's no civilizational context where meritocracy can exist given first mover advantages, resource accumulation, and institutional capture. What meritocracy usually ends up meaning in a practical sense is a deeply hierarchical society that happens to be pleasing in a certain way to the groups defining what meritocracy is in the local context.

The search for objective truth isn't the main concern but rather the premise from which we jump to justifying prescriptive claims, which are by definition outside of the purview of the scientific method. In this case, using the idea that certain groups are more intelligent than average than others to push forward highly culturally specific modes of societal organization.

> Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech?

Yes and no - this explanation is partially correct, in that the impossibility of hiring the kind of demographic distribution DEI advocates want causally precedes any decision made by tech companies.

However, "pipeline problem" incorrectly implies that the reality of hiring demography is the result of some kind of process failure (e.g. in early schooling) rather than a natural outcome of culture, biology, etc. (which high-quality research is fairly unequivocal about, although most people would never know this as it violates core dogma of the American state-secular belief system).

Why do you feel like neighborhoods need to be static in terms of racial composition, forever?

Science is science? Okay then. Is tech tech? It seems that there are more white and Asian people in tech, and Apple is hiring in RDU. Should they not hire the best technologists? Should those technologists not have homes in the area?

By “gentrifying”, it seems you just mean white people moving for their jobs. Why isn’t that allowed in your book? Have black people claimed the Durham area as theirs forever? What nonsense.

Let’s just speak openly: you’re part of the problem. Neighborhoods can’t get claimed by any given race. People can move where they want. Successful businesses adding jobs to a historically poorer area is a good thing, and you shouldn’t use silly code words like “gentrification” to signal that you don’t want whites moving into your town.

Should they not hire the best technologists?

I do worry about the long-term consequences of removing the "natural selection" factor. My best friend growing up was Korean. His parents were dirt-poor but he was still more academically successful than me and got a better job out of university than me. Because he worked the absolute shit out of himself. The idea someone would deny him an opportunity in order to give it to someone else because of their ethnicity who didn't work as hard nauseates me.

By “gentrifying”, it seems you just mean white people moving for their jobs. Why isn’t that allowed in your book? Have black people claimed the Durham area as theirs forever? What nonsense.

White people move in, it's gentrification. White people move out, it's white flight. Some arguments are doomed to intractability from the start.

I have no issue with racial composition. I have no issue with Apple hiring the best technologist independent of race. To me, gentrification is a symptom that the people being "displaced" did not have *equal opportunity* to become the best technologists.

This is because funding for upstream programs are ignored in these discussions about student loans, affirmative action, and now DOE grants.

K-12 public schools and literacy rates are shit in the US compared to much of the developed world, and we're sitting here yapping about diversity in applied physics research.

What the actual fuck?

Ultimately a job at Apple is the pinnacle for most engineers. You aren’t doing anyone any favors by kicking this racial bias / affirmative action anywhere else down the chain, or onto a different ladder, whether it be in tech, physics, education, research, sports, or whatever.

Equal standards for every one. Every adult, child, race, and creed. Every ladder at every rung. Not all outcomes will be equal and any sort of do-gooder (and often do-badder) effort to “correct” for disparities will be worse than doing nothing at all.

How is making sure kids are well educated everywhere "affirmative action"? Surely everyone has the right to a good basic education regardless of where they come from?

> How is making sure kids are well educated everywhere "affirmative action"?

Because the admission programs to the desirable schools at all levels utilize affirmative action to try to reach this end.

Source: went to private schools my entire life. Saw affirmative action at every admission level (1st grade, 6th, 9th, undergrad, and grad school). Have plenty of friends today working in some prestigious jobs/industries who were basically pushed to the next level undeservingly for the final ~6-8 years of their education. And even when they weren’t reaching the next rung undeservingly, they were attending a school that they didn’t have the test scores to get into on pure merit alone. And you better believe they displaced more deserving kids from the area.

>Surely everyone has the right to a good basic education regardless of where they come from?

The poster that I was replying to never made this claim, and I never rebuked it.

>Because the admission programs to the desirable schools at all levels utilize affirmative action to try to reach this end.

I don't think you're addressing what the OP was suggesting. We should be making public schools desirable to go to. If everyone can get a decent education, you might have a chance of not having an affirmative action problem.

For example in Australia, wealthy private schools over funded. But the parents are already well off, they can fund themselves. Meanwhile there are public schools that are under funded. All that money should be going to public schools and building a great public schools system. The US probably has problems with the public school system too.

Let's leave aside the American-style debate around ethnicity for a moment. We know what happens when high-income workers move en masse to a neighborhood. Things get more expensive, and the quality of life decreases for people who did absolutely nothing wrong except live in a place that eventually got settled by some adtech company. The character of the neighborhood changes, and is destroyed in favor of a copy-pasted hipster area with expensive coffee shops. The previous locals do not get the new jobs because the highly-educated workers are imported from other places or work remotely. They do not have the capacity to move easily unlike the new workers.

Yes, you could say tough luck, kids: that's just life and people can move in and out. However, we can clearly see that gentrification is a real concept that people will fight to prevent with some justification and not just some social justice dog-whistle.

There is actually a one to one mapping between anti immigrant rhetoric and this gentrification nonsense.

If people wish to maintain the racial makeup of their neighborhood then they should at least be honest about it. Don't use dogwhisles like neighborhood character when everyone knows it means race

I live in one such neighborhood. The ethnic mix has not changed, at least not in a noticeable way. The cool people are gone, and were replaced by tech workers. The old locals are struggling. A new coffee shop with high-priced drinks and a co-working space literally just opened a few weeks ago.

Don't assume your own North American perspective maps to everything.

There are two problems, the first is acheiving a good meritocratic system and to that end I agree with your sentiment.

The second problem is intentional and unintentional prejudice and biases people have, there is no way around combating that actively. I don't mean giving someone an upper hand because of their color but focusing on schools and companies that admit and hire applicants in a way that deviates from meritocracy. What prevents someone from thinking "asians are smart" or the unconsciously think "asian CEOs aren't a thing"? (Just an example.)

There will always be a need to enforce meritocracy, use whateber name you like. If all this affirmatice action b.s. is to end the you better also support very agressive meritocracy enforcement and paying taxes to support communities you don't live in that were affected by historical racism and prejudice. If you live in a nice suburb and you don't want to pay taxes for inner city schools, parks,etc... (or rural) then you don't get to complain about bullshit affirmative action. Something gotta give.

So big tech is disproportionately screwing over black people in Durham, but it would be terrible and hypocritical to make it easier for a few black people in Durham to get a piece of the pie?

I can’t help but notice that this is a bit self serving.

I agree 100%. If this is the problem to solve, the solution has to happen in the schools.

We throw a ton of money into the public school system, but the results are less than ideal. It is a system that has not changed much over time.

While I agree that more must be done so that good basic education is available to everyone, you do realize that this aims at schools? Grants go to researchers at universities. A part of the change is that you need to explain how your university actually tries to recruit an appropriate share of underrepresented groups. If your school doesn't, the researchers will pressure the school until it does, because they want grants. For example, I just prepared a grant application, and doing so I realized that the web pages for the offices that deal with DEI are terribly outdated. I will certainly raise that topic with the administration here.

For reference what is actually required, have a look at this FOA, search for "Appendix 5": https://science.osti.gov/grants/FOAs/-/media/grants/pdf/foas...

>> Science is science

For me, science is sacred and this initiative is a true sacrilege.

Your plan of action isn't inconsistent:

> Researchers seeking funding from the United States’s single biggest funder of the physical sciences will now have to think about how they can structure their own efforts to promote greater participation by researchers and students of color and from other underrepresented groups.

ie. If a well endowned university that was recieving DoE grants were to underwrite the expansion of education and scholarships programs at pre-K, elementary, and middle schools within their intake catchment areas to be more inclusive of people diverse in background,

then they can submit that activity as evidence of their efforts to expand the divisity of the researcher pool.

Granted it's an approach that takes years to bear fruit .. but it's the kind of approach that actually works and happens within the education sector of other countries that seek to lift all citizens access to education that matches their ability.

Of course, this smacks of five year (and ten year (and fifteen year)) planning .. so, communism | socialism. etc.

Hmm... so we're going to give money to wealthy universities so they can in turn give it to local communities instead of trying to develop good K-12 schools directly?

Brilliant.

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