I'd really like to know what the endgame is for DEI. Can anyone explain that?
I think that is an example of where we wind up.
Like, this sub-thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/10u0zvl/disaster_avert...
I should point out that this is all, like, third hand.
No, not that this is its purpose. But it may be the effect of how it's being implemented. Fealty to the gods of Equity prevent anyone from admitting that EEO claims can be a tool to unjustly shield bad workers.
IF it's not obvious, I don't mean that no EEO claims are justified. But on the other side of the coin, many of them are unjustified.
If this dude wasn't any good then he probably got shit-canned rapidly and played EEOC to CYA.
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2021/07/63-workers-who-fil...
Anyone who says this is the reason a person isn’t fired is probably lying or doesn’t know the facts on the ground.
Every time my brother brought the person in question in to talk about issues the person ran to an EEOC complaint.
I don't think you meant it that way, but your claim is false. It's saying that if you file an EEOC claim, you'll probably get fired.
The question we should be asking is, "how much crap are companies willing to put up with because the employee in question belongs to a protected group and the company fears EEOC claims even when those claims are unjustified?"
I didn't mean that, but that may be the reality of the situation. In any case, it doesn't appear that filing an EEOC claim provides much protection. And as also noted in the article, the results are rarely favorable to the filer.
Again, in my experience, we assume anyone who is getting fired will file a claim of some sort. A claim has never stopped any firing that I know of.
Did my Korean friend growing up who spent his every afternoon and weekend studying while I was playing videogames deserve to get into a better university than me and make more money than me? I say he did. DEI says he didn't.
But why was your friend able to spend his every afternoon and weekend studying?
Because he was raised in a supportive, nurturing environment. Probably with grandparents and aunts/uncles to help take care of him. He probably had older relatives in professional careers to aspire to and mentor him. He probably never had to work a job in high school to help support his family, or raise his younger siblings while mom worked night shift. His parents were probably married and able to hold decent jobs to provide a stable home, good nutrition, and a lack of stress. They probably were able to make sure he went to preschool, and had reliable transportation to get him to/from there and kindergarten, and drilled into him the importance of education from a young age. All of these things are what DEI tries to correct for. The people who had none of that never get a shot at redemption otherwise.
The cards are stacked from birth.
We can trade anecdotes all day long, but the general point stands. And yes, things were different 20 years ago. But the average asian family today in the US is actually better off than the average white family:
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...
Exactly. Why is that? It isn't because they came over to America and enslaved people, or won a war, or placed themselves at the head of a religion that all the white people believed in. They excelled because they worked harder than everyone else. One can argue that the majority white population discriminated against asians less than african-americans or latinos and that's why asian people are more successful than them, but that falls apart once asian people are more successful than the majority ethnic group.
This is ofcourse an exaggeration but you get the idea.
> lack of stress
As an immigrant Asian child I can tell you usually we had none of these things.
What drove me and my friends was pressure. I knew what my parents gave up to give me this chance. I knew they probably wouldn’t have enough savings to ever retire without me helping them out later. I knew I didn’t want to disappoint them.
Why must countless Asian parents’ sacrifices and kids effort be swept away under DEI? Of course I get that it helps to create a society where no one would have to go such lengths to provide opportunity for their children. But man, it just rubs me the wrong way.
"Diversity" is supposedly all about "helping minorities", except when those minorities are too successful for the narrative. Can't have success, oh no! Minorities are supposed to be oppressed and victims in need of saving by the good diversifiers!
And so asians quite often get rounded up with whites.
Fuck that noise. Meritocracy is by far the best system we have to figure out the good people from the bad. Judging by the quality of one's character rather than the color of one's skin. We are all humans, race literally doesn't and shouldn't matter.
Latin@s are going through this development right now. A growing number of them are choosing to identify as white and reject the whole framing of racial grievance mongering.
He who controls language controls thought. He who controls thought wields absolute power.
What is it about being a minority that is important?
What makes you say 'rich minority'? Can you really treat a group of millions of people as a monolith and say they're all rich and don't need help?
I'm not claiming all minorities are rich, I'm saying a few are and yet their kids get advantages that others don't have beyond their advantage of being born rich.
I'm saying I know poor white people who have all the same problems as the black and Hispanic families living in the same area, but they get less help.
(note to the repliers - the assumption given by the parent is, we live in a pure meritocracy and the reason people achieve less is strictly because "they're lazy". I did not say I believe that. )
Wait until you find high disparity between Latinos themselves. Ever heard of Severo Ochoa? Ramon y Cajal? Torres Quevedo?
Not every Latino it's lazy. Not every American rides a walking device and it's overwight. Not every Brit/Irish it's deeply drunk at pubs.
Why would laziness be the only possible reason?
I grew up in a fundamental religious cult. The culture within that bubble instills a world view that does not value learning, and from the earliest age, kids in that environment are indoctrinated to believe certain things about the nature of the world that if true, would legitimately make “worldly” pursuits a bad use of time.
I escaped the bubble, but plenty (most) of the people I grew up with did not. They work hard, provide for their families, and are absolutely not lazy.
When a meaningfully large portion of your worldview is shaped and informed by those around you in childhood, there’s a lot more working against you than some notion of laziness.
I’m well into my 30s and still work hard in therapy to undo the damage. I don’t think most people who haven’t experienced a broken upbringing can understand its impact.
And for every “but so and so was fine despite everything”, there are 100 who were not.
If you expand that question a bit to include a concrete scenario, the problem quickly becomes apparent:
“Are people who had no choice but to be indoctrinated that pianos are evil less deserving of the award for best emerging pianist?”
That question would depend entirely on whether or not that person learned to play the piano at an advanced level.
We might marvel that someone with such early beliefs about pianos could overcome those beliefs (and this might even increase “merit” in the minds of some), but at no point does it make sense to invert the argument and conclude that children of the anti-piano cult are any more or less deserving of the award regardless of whether or not they ever pursued piano. It’s simply an irrelevant point.
We might draw other conclusions like: anti-piano cults threaten equal opportunity, because they lead some to believe that they shouldn’t try the piano to begin with.
Meritocracy is an equalizing force in that it allows people from all backgrounds to reach success regardless of background. I never finished a degree, but still acquired the skills to succeed, got accepted by a major employer and that’s all that matters. Meritocracy is the thing that actually allowed me to succeed despite my upbringing.
Breaking out of the bubble to begin with is a separate problem entirely, and one that still needs solving.
It seems unsurprising (but tragic) that the enslavement of a race over hundreds of years would leave deep imprints about the nature of meaning on the resulting culture.
Does this fully account for the discrepancy you mention? I’m sure there are other factors that play a part, and the fact that racism is still alive and well almost certainly is one of those factors - and another cultural artifact that hasn’t been fully addressed.
No more than the average Southern white American is inherently more racist. Your culture is an influence, an advantage or disadvantage for any particular endeavor. If the endeavor in question is academic and economic success in the academic and economic environment of early 21st century America and Western Europe, growing up in most Asian immigrant cultures will confer upon you an advantage in the form of habits, behaviors, and attitudes.
Also, Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Absolutely.
Right now DEI is trying to solve a problem at the finish line that should be solved before the job race starts?
Kinda. DEI is trying to address an outcome that is in large part caused by disadvantage and discrimination. The outcome itself, in this case the ethnic makeup of academic and business positions not precisely reflecting the ethnic makeup of the country, is not by itself bad or good, just as it isn't "evil" that most nail techs are women. It's an indicator, not a disease. Artificially manipulating the racial makeup of a company or university is like dunking your head in ice water and saying "look, no fever!"
If so, how do we do so without considering race?
You address disadvantages that include those stemming from race without counting race itself. If your admissions process, for example, gives X points for coming from a single parent household, then those points will be distributed to each race in exact proportion that race experiences disadvantage from having single-parent households. Same for poverty and other factors.
The focus here is on race, but what about culture? In my region of the world, there are many Indian immigrants. For whatever reason, the boys are treated like princes and given a ton of freedom, while the girls are given a lot more responsibility and pressured to succeed academically.
As a result, at the local highschool only about 70% of the Indian males are graduating, while the females have close to 100%, higher than ANY other ethnic group.
In my class, a disproportionate amount of the Indian women I grew up with are now doctors and scientists (this is especially impressive as the area is very rural and low SES).
I'm pretty sure I've seen American research on how much pressure and resources different ethnic groups put towards the academic success of their children. You can quantify this in a bunch of different ways, including making sure homework is done, helping them with it, reading with them, etc.
There were pretty stark difference, with black families dedicating a lot less, and Asian ones dedicating a lot more.
Why does that need to boil down to useless concepts like "laziness" or proto-racist bullshit about genes we barely understand?
Maybe populations should have these things measured, and resources should be poured into helping them correct it. Eg, after school programs dedicated for groups that are lagging behind. Extra time and resources in school to bolster reading time for groups that might not be getting it at home.
I'll use the relatively non-controversial example of the Chinese. In Malaysia, they're a small minority of the population yet totally dominate business.
Why? Because they are extremely entrepreneurial, work crazy hours, and do this consistently up and down, from the tiny boutique in the streets to the multinational.
Why? I have no idea. But somehow its ingrained in their culture. I don't believe they have a special gene that uniquely benefits them. They're simply culturally centered around business and productivity.
On the opposite end there's the culture of apathy. To live by the day, accept one's state even if bad, and to make zero effort to improve it, even if opportunities present themselves.
These cultural differences very much exist and are plain to see and replicable, and lead to drastically different outcomes. But I guess simple truths are too controversial now, so let's go with the "systemic" nonsense.
There's a whole strain of academic sociological research that asks why efforts to fix this always fail. I read one of the papers once, it got linked to from somewhere and it was interesting. It described the cultural issues reasonably well but bent over backwards to paint the problems as mere differences, not something they should fix but as things others should just learn to somehow work around (they had no suggestions for how). The possibility that the aboriginals are fine as they are and don't care about getting richer didn't really come up either which was interesting.
The major problem is timekeeping. Apparently you can't say to an aboriginal, "let's meet at 10am" because they might just turn up at 2pm instead and not see anything wrong with that. Or they might go walkabout and you don't see them for days. In turn it means they can't be integrated into any kind of team-based workforce, which in turn means they can't hold down any kind of job (like mining).
Another issue is the cultural fixation with funerals. They're expected to travel back to attend a funeral for almost anyone in their village, at any time, at short notice, and they always do it even if it conflicts with work commitments. They don't care if they lose their job as a consequence.
The sociologists have a neat way to describe this cultural feature - they say aboriginals view time as circular and endless, vs the linear time that everyone else uses. To what extent this is a rationalization of western academics vs something real is a bit of a open question.
I see instead:
"People with a cultural background that fosters academic achievement"
"Korean friend growing up who spent his every afternoon and weekend studying while I was playing videogames"
Also, as an aside, as someone with a recognisable name, I'm surprised you are using your regular account for these controversial political topics.
Meritocracy is a myth. participants have too much variability on starting points and environment for the concept to have any usefulness.
That being said, the "nihilistic" attitude of DEI towards meritocracy is as unsatisfactory as that "naive" attitude of pretending it exists. The right attitude is to recognise that the concept is meaningless in a society of staggering (and rising) inequality, and take steps to correct that.
Say you are deciding who gets into a college. To simplify say you have only one metric, GPA/test scores. What do you do?
- You might have a student from a wealthy family, comfortable upbringing, two loving parents invested in his well-being and education, with money to spend on extracurriculars, and a nice school with all the trimmings. He has 3.8/4 GPA.
- You might have another student from a lower-class family, with, say, trouble at home, parents shouting, no money for extracurriculars like music or sport, studying in a shitty dilapidated school. He has 3.5/4 GPA.
Whom do you choose? It's definitely not so simple! In fact, remember that you are choosing people to come to college: an environment where they will all have equal access to resources, including professors, study materials, facilities, etc. I argue that you should choose the student which is more likely to make the most out of those resources.
In this situation, wouldn't a better predictor of success in higher education be, instead of overall GPA, the difference in GPA compared to students in the same cohort? Wouldn't that be (a) a better measure of "merit" and (b) a better practical investment in someone who is more likely to excel and make the best out of the resources/opportunity invested?
Just an example to illustrate that one dismissive sentence cannot possible solve this issue.
The guy who performs better.
>I argue that you should choose the student which is more likely to make the most out of those resources. ... the difference in GPA compared to students in the same cohort?
The entire point of equality is that we are all one cohort: Regardless your race, gender, background, or creed you will be treated the same as the next guy in line; and there is only one line.
To treat otherwise is discrimination.
Did you read what I wrote?
> The entire point of equality is that we are all one cohort
Well but we aren't. One of the strongest predictors of academic performance is parental income. Burying your head in the sand and pretending the problem doesn't exist is not a satisfactory answer.
I did.
If you aren't rewarding effort, skill, and talent there is no incentive to be successful. You pick the 3.8 GPA, aka the guy who performs better.
>Well but we aren't. One of the strongest predictors of academic performance is parental income. Burying your head in the sand and pretending the problem doesn't exist is not a satisfactory answer.
If the objective is to further equality, then the answer is to treat everyone the same with no arbitrary separators because that is the entire point of equality.
With regards to university admissions, the performance measure in question is one's GPA or whatever objective measure the university wants to use.
Income brackets can become a consideration if we are discussing financial assistance programs, but that is tangent to admission.
Any program that favors people of a certain race or gender, either minority or otherwise, is literally racist and/or sexist and should not be tolerated.
If however you want to make GPA weighted by household income instead of identity I say knock yourself out, because that would still greatly reduce discrimination compared to the status quo. It will never happen though because DEI is designed to fuck over the Asian working class while leaving the privileged classes alone. The whole point is to fuck over poor Asians , that’s the reality and truth of the system you apologize for.
> If however you want to make GPA weighted by household income instead of identity I say knock yourself out
It was more along these lines that I was thinking, yes.
Not to mention the second half: is it acceptable to reward merit with 10x salaries? 100x?
So it's extremely complex and a politically charged topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Meritocracy: "the notion of a political system in which economic goods and/or political power are vested in individual people based on talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class", as per wikipedia.
> If you don't like the distribution of who's at the top, then you can address that elsewhere, such as providing more educational opportunities, or promoting qualities like hard work
Isn't this exactly what I said?
I would point out that responding to the strongest possible interpretation of someone's argument is also in the HN guidelines.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Unfortunately, you've been breaking them in other places too, and posting a lot of flamewar and ideological battle-style comments. This isn't allowed on HN, regardless of which ideology you're for or against. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules in the future? Note these:
"Eschew flamebait."
"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Depends on what you mean by starting point.
If my neighbor is genetically advantaged from the start to perform in a particular task then that may be "unfair", it's still best to let that person win. Dragging down top performers is the worst we can do nor should we boost non-performers in artificial ways.
If the unequal starting point is socio-economic, say a genius going to waste because they have no access to education, then I agree that this is bad. The solution is accessible/affordable schooling. Importantly though, that gives access, not outcomes. You still need to pass the test and prove (and improve) your capability.
Any system that does not manage that issue cannot be a meritocracy, because people who would be the best WILL be passed over for someone who had a luckier start.
Why must this be "combatted" at all?
It's not about determinism at all, and pointing to people born in shitty situations who managed through luck and hard-work to overcome those difficulties does not mean everything is all-right, that is just silly.
In fact, especially for disadvantaged people merit is the dream maker.
But it doesn't, and this can be easily measured. Are you saying this is how you wished things were? Then I agree with you, that's what we should strive for. Are you saying this is how things are? That's just false (hilariously so).
What you can do is to offer a baseline equal chance, in the form of an accessible/affordable high quality public schooling system. It's one of the most sound investments any society can make.
Those that are able (capable, talented, willing) then have a fighting chance. Some will have to grind a little harder than others, but that's life. The point is that you get a chance to perform, and then you perform to your ability. You don't have to match the luckiest and most talented out there.
I myself was born in the lower working class, with no studying peers in my entire network, and dysfunctional parents. Yet, lucky to live in a country with a pretty decent public schooling system.
You know what shocked me most? How stupidly easy it is. The bar really is absurdly low. All I did was to consistently show up and pay attention in class. To take the education serious, which supposedly is a tall order nowadays.
Next, in my follow-up education I was advised to take the middle road, and to not aim too high. I dismissed the school director's advise and said that I will aim high. I'll simply cope by grinding through it. I'll study day and night if needed to match my superior peers.
Guess what? No such grinding was needed. Again I simply consistently showed up and paid attention, whilst my peers were drunk and couldn't bother to even show up. It was so stupendously easy that I could work so much on the side that I graduated debt-free.
If you don't do well on a test, do better. The world shouldn't give you an easier test because that's not the point of a test.
You know who scores well on test? Girls. Consistently better than boys. Why? They take the education more serious. They pay attention, ask questions, take notes, do their homework. Consistently and with discipline.
Sounds almost like...merit.
That makes no sense. Ranking people by their merit in some dimensions doesn't stop being useful even if their merit would be different if they had been born into different circumstances.
I'm reminded of the saying "if things were different then things would be different." Well, things aren't different, and it's useful to use merit to judge who would be best to do a job.
I like to think about it from the stand point of star trek. When Gene Roddenberry was asked "would a starship really have a bald captain? Wouldn't they have invented a cure for baldness in the 24th century?" Gene Roddenberry replied, "In the 24th century nobody cares if you are bald or not."
That is a rather innocuous example, but the point remains, the future should be a place where it doesn't much matter who you are, only what you do. The future should be a place where everyone is accepted as they are and there are no personal difficulties due to being different. A blind man can be the pilot of a ship, a black woman a deck officer, a person with a handicap (like the alien going to starfleet academy that doesn't breathe oxygen) isn't kept back from their job. All that is expected that you want to be there and you want to work towards being where you want to be. And if some things are more difficult for you, society will help you out. You will get a VISOR if you are blind, or a device to help you breathe.
The argument that often comes from post-modernist DEI advocates is that the world I'm describing is an ideal and doesn't exist. Well that is true. Ideals don't exist. That doesn't keep us from seeking them. We cannot reject DEI on face value or because some activists see change needing methods we disagree with (e.g., top down approaches that refuse to have the system accept responsibility and force the individual to account for the inequities and injustices). the internal ideals of DEI are good, differences cannot be simply tolerated, they must be accepted and accounted for.
I agree. DEI and a true meritocracy are not at odds with each other. In fact, a true meritocracy can't exist without DEI.
Also, the authoritarian method of labeling people with an -ism for questioning* DEI initiatives/principles, doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that will inspire the positive change you describe. It feels more like drawing lines in the stand to setup the coming culture war.
> You will get a VISOR if you are blind
Then you are no longer blind, hence there was no actual change. In comparison, maybe LGBT can serve in the forces without change, via the political visor that is the "don't say gay" policy.
For instance consider two students:
Student A: Lived in a comfortable middle-class home in which parents worked in professional jobs and went to the best schools
Student B: Grew up in a deprived area to single parent who worked menial jobs. Had to work at weekends as well as study.
If both students apply to a job or college, should their final academic grades be treated equally? If both students got the same grade, who would you think was "smarter"?
Yes. Grades reflect what the student did, which is a distinct question from why they were able to do it.
> when it's the universal condition of humanity everywhere, and at all times?
Doesn't it make sense to question or try to change these assumptions? Or are things fine the way they are?
> Doesn't it make sense to question or try to change these assumptions? Or are things fine the way they are?
Pretty much every new government since the US or French revolutions have tried, and the outcomes have been less than ideal. Inequality is a constant feature of human society that cannot be engineered away.
> Pretty much every new government since the US or French revolutions have tried, and the outcomes have been less than ideal.
Are you saying that people in the United States were less free? Or just the same as they were before?
In general, meet the new boss -- same as the old boss, and for the most part, upheavals swap one ruling class for another. The children of the revolutionaries become the new privileged ruling elite. This is as inevitable as bureaucracy, regardless of whatever glowing utopian rhetoric the activists had used to mobilize the masses for the revolution.
You cool with that too?
Is it "shit" that Liza Minelli had a great head-start in her entertainment career by being Judy Garland's daughter?
Of course it is. Same goes for all the other nepo babies.
This has nothing to do with (and is antithetical to) DEI initiatives.
I think that is genuinely the intended endgame that most proponents seek.
Unfortunately they do not grasp that their methods are counterproductive and will probably achieve the opposite.
Power and control for those that advanced it, power and control for those who join in to advocate for it.
The monster though has now escaped its creator and is a threat to meritocracy and what makes America great. If I was an enemy country with patience I would just fund and promote the movement from the shadows and wait for the fall.
"History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme"
> Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!
—George Wallace, 1963
> The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
—Ibram X. Kendi, 2019
Where here, I would agree there is a problem around biases, systems which favour certain people unfairly. Disagree with me on that point if you want but I claim the motivation is/was largely rooted in sincere recognition of injustice.
But does the typical DEI implementation actually address that injustice? Or is it just a new evolutionary force for sociopaths and abusers to adapt to and subvert for their own power, most likely aided by a mass of well-intentioned people along the way. (This is an anecdotal personal opinion based on experience, not double blind randomized trials.)
If DEI had anything good in it, it would focus on what all races and sexes have in common. Instead DEI is fixated on differences.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe in genetics. I do believe that certain groups of people form genetic clusters. Nevertheless, I don't think that "race" the genetic cluster and "race" the social concept are that much intertwined. Of the 4 major racial groups in America, there are two that very obviously don't cluster (Asians and Hispanics): this somehow is ignored by both pro and anti DEI sides.
In a world in which DEI efforts are successful, the current races would just become non-sensical, in the same way in which considering Irish and Italians non-white has become non-sensical today.