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Comment by raxxorraxor | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand how anyone can find such rules attractive. This is as strict as the catholic church. In the private sector it tells me that a company values show much more than their employees, which probably are treated badly and have to work in an extremely strict environment. If you have to say it...

People that honestly fall for such statements are too naive to really fill out any leadership position in my opinion, but it really seems that is their expectation after they paid that much tuition?

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Academia is such a brutal cutthroat battle for faculty positions, you have zero choice but to participate. An acquaintance was applying for faculty positions and every single position they were applying to required a DEI statement. It's only a matter of time till it starts bubbling out of academia to industry.

This is one of the things that nudged me out of academia. Once I realized the odds of making a Feynman-class discovery were low, but that was the bar for tenure (and salary scales below tenure were... Uncompetitive), I started crunching the numbers and decided I'd likely be happier in industry applying discoveries than in academia making them.

There's plenty of academics to go around. I need my hands dirty.

> It's only a matter of time till it starts bubbling out of academia to industry

Hard disagree. This is the type of thing only colleges do, it’s the equivalent of an essay and also displays how different academia is from the professional world. No one cares about publications in industry, and people buy into this stuff much less sincerely than in academia

This absolutely will leak into MBA programs and become "best practice".

You don't want to hire a racist now, do you? No? Good, so mandatory DEI pledges for all!

We're nearing a decade of academia spilling over to the real world, rocketing political polarisation at every level. "Industry" doesn't have any particulars that would render it immune.

Did you attend college?

I’ve been in and around various colleges for years and I’ve yet to see anything worth getting upset about; let alone worth people outside of this space getting upset about.

Not in industry?

Once neglected, DEI initiatives now present at all Fortune 100 companies: https://www.hrdive.com/news/2022-fortune-companies-dei/62765...

A major tech company forces DEI statements on RFPs for outside vendors. They wanted stars by the names of the diverse people on the proposed team.

This stuff have been in the private sector for years now.

It's only a matter of time until it's required by law to be employed, which is pretty fucked up when you remember that health insurance is so closely tied to employment, in america at least.

That could actually be a net benefit for society considering that the people who are most likely to hold views outside of the DEI norms are also the ones who are most likely to vote against candidates who support real healthcare reform.

Just lie about it when it does.

Nobody verifies my impressive resume claims. Just my employment dates and degrees, if even those.

So claim you ran a workshop for transgender black women. Nobody is going to dig deep enough in most cases to know if it is true.

I think the artificial rules will increase, but the authority of academia as a whole will suffer from those that come out on top here. I think the progress already started when education become a very expensive product instead of a privilege.

Academia does have to find a new place since the logistics of information and knowledge transferal became very cheap. You can acquire a lot of knowledge in today's world without a formal education. Not comparable to having a mentor, but neither is true for students in university.

Have you ever fought a war on symbolism before? Do you believe in free speech, personal liberty, and hard work?

New epistemologies have taken root and from them, derived new values. Stamping out new ideas is a very very difficult task after they've reached enough people. The new guard sees the old rules as constraining as you find the new rules.

Most revolutions happen in people's minds decades before social relations change. You have to realize that there is no repeating the thesis to the antithesis. If you want to get a step ahead of the antithesis, synthesis is one's only option.

Do people share these values? They are implemented by authority. And some new values are old mistakes that are repeated ad nauseum.

Kissing the scepter doesn't mean you love the scepter. Rejection is a strong possibility. Most ideas do die (dei?).

People share these values. The most dangerous unforced error is to fool oneself that true-believers don't exist.

Deciding the because one must be forced to believe universalizes into other's being forced to believe is an empathy gap. If you wish to understand how how these ideas take root, don't fall into the "enemy is strong and weak" trap. Deciding that oneself believes because principles but others believe because they are forced to or are told to is a good way to fight the wrong fight.

You cannot simply wield and old value against a new symbolic universe. You either have to derive it in the new universe or create an even newer symbolic universe which probably can't happen yet because the problems with the new symbolic universe have to be realized within itself, not within the old universe.

Take free speech as an example. The DEI universe was created as a response to the symbolic universe free speech was forged in. In order to value free speech again, a post-DEI symbolic universe has to be developed as a response to the internal contradictions of the DEI universe - not the contradictions external to it. Trying to maintain a steady state symbolic universe is itself a contradiction - it's simply not possible. Evolve or die.

There are certainly a lot of true believers. And intellectuals often reflect future changes in society, but I think the ship for DEI has sailed as the ideas from its opposition are on the table as well. Even if inertia creates new initiatives today and tomorrow. And the alternative ideas are more popular among intellectuals. Maybe not academics, but intellectuals.

It might help to speak of the specific alternatives created as a response to DEI. Would you care to share?

I believe the set of beliefs associated most often with DEI are weakest with no opposition at all. I believe a lot of it is reactionary. This is why it needs huge media events where people can be outraged.

But as far as ideas goes that would be general humanism like color blindness, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of association, guilty until proven innocent, equality instead of equity (although a balance here is probably most desirable, DEI tends toward totalitarianism).

Maybe DIE isn't opposed to all these values, but it has positioned itself as such. And I believe opposing such values became en vogue by a class of academics to set themselves apart ironically. Although its ideas aren't that new as well.

Sorry, but I think we're talking past each other.

My claim is that the values you mentioned(free speech &c.) are derivatives of enlightenment thought whose epistemological basis is objective reality. This appears tautologically true for true-believers within objective reality.

The DEI values are derived from an internal contradiction within objective reality which is something like, "How can X,Y,and Z bad things exist when people can [supposedly] embody <the values you've listed>?" That's the contradiction I'm referring to within the symbolic universe of objective reality. This contradiction creates cognitive dissonance that is typically either resolved through individual failings (individualism being another value) or in the case of the avant-garde, substituting the whole or parts of objective reality with an alternative one ie: the subjective one.

The big hurdle here seems to be understanding objective reality as itself a totalizing and reified instantiation of a particular symbolic universe. It's something that's difficult to explain through text, but a glancing shot might be to examine the contradiction at the horizon of objective reality, namely that the displacement of a subjective reality by objective reality's totalizing nature precludes the values that objective reality contains, specifically "the individual's freedom to choose one's reality." In a universe where individuals are free to choose anything, not being able to choose subjective reality feels like the universe singing a version of Meatloaf's ballad on repeat[1].

I can't help but point out that the values you've mentioned (to me) aren't a response to DEI, but what DEI is responding to. The way I know this is that they predate DEI. Values that are a response to DEI cannot predate DEI.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27d_Do_Anything_for_Love_(Bu...

I do indeed believe in objective reality, but enlightenment also taught me that my perspective can only ever be subjective as well as I can only hope that I can approach these values to a sufficient degree. This is an important realization and a potent argument to disarm a lot of DEI initiatives. Because it often proposes to be able to discern inequality objectively and redistribute it in a just manner. Impossible from an equally subjective perspective. And they do that by violating the values first proposed. Subjectively and objectively they simply do away with them completely.

Abstracted further, the way you describe some DEI ideas react to the enlightenment ideas, is to say that idealism doesn't solve real problems (color blindness is nice an all, but inequalities remain). That is not wrong even if everyone indeed believed in equality. Everyone wants to provide disability access and is in favor of that. But ask yourself how often you actually acted on that wish. Or how often you forgot about it. But there are pragmatic ways to solve it without discriminating the healthy at all.

But don't let all that fool you. This isn't a battle about objective or subjective reality. It is much more simple. It is about monarchy and people believing their ideas makes them your betters. This is what prestigious institutions want to sell in the modern world where logistics of knowledge come into reach of everyone. The need to differentiate themselves and their institutions. People that believe they should cut the pieces of the pie you deserve in their opinion. One as subjective as everyone else's. Why is it successful? Because it instills fears in its followers. That there are evil racist and sexist people that are out to get you. In response the believers do away with enlightenment values. I believe it to be wrong that there are deeper thoughts behind it. In the end these are just people with special interests trying to sell their religion. The Alex Jones of Harvard. I wouldn't even say they are smarter in selling their product. Maybe a bit more subtle.

Their failure is that they are absolutely incapable to connect to the working class in a competitive economy. No, psychologically safety and bad words aren't on the mind of people that try to get by and fear the need to justify their jobs every minute.

Great exchange! thank you

> This is as strict as the catholic church.

Much stricter: they have a well-established mechanism for reconciliation and forgiveness! In fact, several!

academics are contracting in an already competitive situation.. expect more "soft pressure" not less, and ugly fights bursting into the public view

Fairness is not a tenant of the new cultural revolution, nor are the revolutionaries responsive to human nature, individual rights, or even capable of rational and critical thought.

The end always justifies the means, with little care given to the truth or reality of whatever means is co-opted and tortured to advance their end.

You must adhere to the core beliefs, which will change depending on the red fool's soup de jour. Your beliefs are not important, as their beliefs are gospel without question. It is an old and very insidious religion, revitalized, that has no place in a free and civilized society. We've been down this road before. We know where it leads.

Yet we go head-long into the abyss to the chants - the same Marxist slogans and ideology that heralded the starvation and torture of tens of millions of people, whose only 'crimes' were opposition to compelled speech and the desire for individual liberty.

I'd like to think it will get better, that western civilization would reject cultural revolutionaries that produce nothing but misery and death under the banner of "equity"

...which means ownership, not exclusive equality...

but I am not hopeful. The red guard is back, but this time, they are even more dangerous given the cornucopia of deceit, false promises, reach, and old but effective tactics that poison the minds of the young, so that they march lock-step with cheers & smiles into oblivion, dragging everyone and everything with them.

TBF, fairness also wasn't a tenant of the old cultural revolution either. That's why these things keep happening.

A free and civilized society has allowed the oppression, dispossession, and outright murder-without-consequence of far, far too many of its citizens to traipse along unquestioned.

Fairness used to be about treating individuals equally. For example, blind hiring practices.

The new 'fairness' is incompatible with blind hiring or individual merit, because its ultimate aim is to make what you are more important than what you have done.

You might say 'that's a good thing' but to claim these aren't polar opposite concepts of fairness or justice is disingenuous.

The ultimate aim is to give a better world to the next generation than the one the current generation inherited.

We tried, for decades, a simple meritocracy solution. It brought us deeply-embedded racism and the robber-baron era of industrial monopoly. And in the current era, we're watching technology create another gilded-age-style haves-and-have-nots divide.

Turns out a society that's as close to best for everyone sometimes needs some thumbs on some scales to work, because people are selfish and short-sighted and "meritocracy" depends heavily on where you start and how lucky you get.

On the contrary, the freest societies were most successful in doing away with oppression. No authoritarian rule came close to that. There is ample empirical evidence for that too.

I don't understand how that is contrary to my statement.

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