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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

The key thing is there needs to be a falsifiable condition whereby we agree these programs have achieved their primary goal, and that the risk of scope creep, corruption, or other externalities like the ones the OP mentions has exceeded the potential further benefits, so they should be wound down. I'm not going to state my opinion here, but if such a condition is not identified in any way, we should assume these groups will do what it takes to perpetuate themselves far past their point of utility, like any bureaucracy that doesn't have a way to prove directly how they're contributing to the bottom line.

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The falsifiable condition is that the underlying social attitudes driving the racism/sexism/etc have dissolved.

Problem is, this is a social process that takes centuries to complete. You are never going to hit a point in a single institution where you can say "We fixed our diversity problem, let's go home", because it can just come back as you hire more people and older hires leave.

Furthermore, society is frustratingly prone to generating new discriminatory attitudes. America is pretty conscious of a handful of very specific racial minorities, and we have a vague idea of what sexism looks like, but we have little knowledge of things like caste discrimination[0], colorism[1], classism and so on.

To fully explain why this is a problem, try re-reading your original comment, but pretend it's talking about the police instead of DEI initiatives. What's our falsifiable condition where we say "ok, all the crimes are solved, let's abolish the police?"

[0] Discrimination based on the occupation of your ancestors, typically driven by religious beliefs. India is the poster child for this though Japan had a form of it too.

[1] Skin-color discrimination within a specific race. We don't see this in the US or Canada all that often because the mix of European ancestry that we brought over and called "White" is universally one skin color. Latin America has this in droves.

What you have pointed out is the exact opposite of a falsifiable condition. If we can’t disprove the possibility of a regression back to the past, then this is not meeting the test, and we should expect the results I mentioned.

You actually could and should abolish the police in certain kinds of terminal states where crime was eradicated - the eradication may be due to a genuine shift in the way people behave (due to some other underlying reason.) One falsifiable condition would be “surveys show a fundamental shift in sentiment by the public towards the motives that have historically led to crime.” If you’re going to condition the abolishment of the police on a scenario where we need to also prove that this won’t regress, then in a scenario where the underlying motive of crime is systematically gone, the police will exist and seek out ways to regenerate it to ensure they have a purpose, among other toxic phenomena.

> the eradication may be due to a genuine shift in the way people behave (due to some other underlying reason.)

For a generation or two, sure, but eventually it will come back unless the cultural training continues. I mean, there's a reason for historic cultural universals such as racism, dueling between men, and talking down to lessers.

I think the best case scenario is that DEI eventually gets rolled up into regular HR.

Tribalism is pretty innate but the tribes change. I’d argue if DEI programs had an analog during the reformation era we would be more likely to see Protestant vs Catholic discrimination persist as those programs inflamed it for their own self preservation.

Why do you assume any particular DEI goalpost will persist for years or decades or centuries? It's not as if generalized racism has persisted against the same categories since the late 1500s.

And why do you assume the generalized tribalism will persist based on particular initiatives? The old initiatives used to be hire from the gentry. Attitudes amongst the many do change. It doesn't matter if some vocal minorities keep the same attitudes going.

DEI initiatives and targets are measured periodically: https://hbr.org/2021/02/research-how-companies-committed-to-...

The entire question of this thread is the mechanism by which DEI can unwind a given goalpost. (And if/when the last goalpost evaporates, so would DEI.) It sounds to me like your own perspective there is no way for them to do so, given that any given goalpost could be argued as possibly at risk of regression.

Concretely, if your own perspective is taken as the standard, we ought to expect that without any motive or standard to dictate we unwind DEI goalposts around (for example) racial groups, we should expect those goalposts to persist, regardless of the general presence of the phenomena which motivated their creation in the first place.

Irrational bias will always exist, but it will always be a bunch of shifting goalposts.

Once DEI systematizes enough it can be incorporated into whatever HR eventually turns in to, instead of being a separate division.

Purely irrational bias isn’t really the issue since most people of sound mind can be dissuaded from purely irrational acts. The issue is stereotyping of individuals based upon statistical or anecdotal patterns by people imagined to be a member of the same class combined with the usual human natures of otherization and tribalism. This isn’t purely irrational, since stereotypes can provide predictive power beyond pure randomness - if you don’t believe me, consider the fact that there are countless “positive stereotypes” for certain groups we happily tend to accept and make decisions on given it complements the presumed members of that group, as opposed to increasing distrust or hatred of them.

Ironically, programs seeking to reduce discrimination which characterize the former phenomenon as entirely irrational is what helps perpetuate the latter, because it undermines any sense that there is a good faith engagement going on.

I didn't use "purely", "entirely", or other otherwise modify "irrational", because I didn't want to be too verbose, but yes, any stereotyping has some degree of irrational underpinnings. Figuring out and teaching people what is irrational (or at least irrelevant) bias and what isn't irrational bias are the difficult parts.

> "Ironically, programs seeking to reduce discrimination which characterize the former phenomenon as entirely irrational is what helps perpetuate the latter, because it undermines any sense that there is a good faith engagement going on."

From what I recall I don't believe these programs generally characterize implicit bias as entirely irrational. I see them characterize it as problematic. So I don't see how the "undermine good faith engagement" follows from this.

On a total tangent I think the main problem with counteracting people's biases is that it can lead to people totally discounting their gut reactions. Which has lead to people getting murdered, raped, etcetera, by bad people.

Very much agree with this comment, creating and gaming KPIs is at the heart of most DEI departments now.

We do need long term improvements at the start of the funnel, but no-one is adding a 7 year KPI for improving stats of 14 year old girls quitting AP math.

I don't know about falsifiable, and I think you never reach a goal as broad as eradicating ethnocentric thinking, but one way to short circuit a lot of this nonsense is to somehow achieve a lot more intermarriage between disparate ethnic groups, as well as mire immigration.

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