It’s the biology department!
It's unclear what using genes to predict educational outcomes adds beyond just trying to provide the best possible opportunities over and over again. It doesn't really matter if it's genes or some fixed environmental history.
"Eugenics" or nah?
Is using CRISPR (or similar) to fix hemophilia "eugenics" or not?
Judging a movement by its fringe is unhelpful.
> if there is any discrepency in outcome between two groups (whichever way you cut the population), it is the result of discriminations and power struggles
A more accurate way to frame this would be "If there is any discrepancy... it is likely influenced by discriminations and power struggles, and we should be paying very close attention to the societal factors at play in an effort to reduce their impact."
You end up in looney tunes land pretty quick if you swing too far in either direction with absolute conviction. Too far in favor of DEI, you wind up with things like "actually, women are only physically weaker because they're oppressed". Too far in the other direction, you wind up with things like "actually, crime is genetic".
Claiming that these people are somehow at the fringe of the DEI movement is ridiculous. These sorts of beliefs are openly professed and put into action with actual discriminatory policies.
Walking it back to "influenced by factors" is just a classic motte and bailey defense. These people don't act like these factors need to be carefully investigated, they have a fucking checklist and it's all based on race, sex and sexuality.
Then, you try to somehow equate the idea of white supremacy with the idea that DEI is an anti-white movement: as if any defense of white people requires belief in racial superiority. This is ridiculous.
The irony is that it is exactly this sort of biased, sloppy reasoning that has allowed the looney tunes land of DEI to proliferate.
Even if you can point to hard evidence of well recognized figures holding extremist views which are put into practice, there is always some eager nelly standing by to carefully explain why that's actually totally normal and the real worry is those scary right wingers over there.
Absolutely nuts.
the best response to a dichotomy is rarely centrism (taking the middle position). that's just implicitly accepting the framework of the dichotomy. critical thinking requires moving laterally among multiple dimensions to uncover the crux of the dichotomy itself (the power interests that form the dichotomy) and to reason yourself into a better framing.
with respect to DEI, the term DEI itself is now political, so that slides us right into the false dichotomy. if we want to talk reasonably about the issue, we should probably leave that term aside.
>Judging a movement by its fringe is unhelpful.
The difference is that the "fringe" DEI types who believe this are the ones running our universities and most of our most powerful institutions, while the "fringe" racists wearing white hoods sipping whiskey around a campfire in West Virginia have no institutional power whatsoever.
Montani Semper Liberi
Not so sure about the “whichever” part here - you can cut the population a lot of ways that prove that current DEI efforts are focusing on the wrong subset(s).
Critics, execs trying to CYA, and incompetent practitioners of DEI work focus obsessively on simplistic guidelines around race, gender, and sexuality, but legitimate DEI work aims to support everyone in the areas where prevailing attitudes are letting them down.
You’re never going to hear about all the DEI professionals capably doing that work because it’s uncontroversial and often very private, but it’s happening all the same and it materially improves employees’ lives every day.
<< This just isn’t true. At the core of DEI is the understanding that negative cultural biases make life worse for everyone. These cultural biases (which differ individually based on a million factors) are an unavoidable part of the human experience and impact all of us in different ways, so DEI initiatives encourage being mindful of them in order to limit their harm.
Hmm. I am currently participating in a group that uses a more, lets say aggressive, interpretation ( white supremacy is pervasive and all that ). It gets old fast.
<<You’re never going to hear about all the DEI professionals capably doing that work because it’s uncontroversial and often very private, but it’s happening all the same and it materially improves employees’ lives every day.
Maybe, but then good actors have some responsibility to denounce bad actors.
[1]https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/pol...
Go read my reply again, I namedrop the kind of people who fixate on this stuff. DEI is way, way more than "white supremacy is bad"; if that's all you're getting, they're letting you down.
> Maybe, but then good actors have some responsibility to denounce bad actors.
And they do, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately to the CEO who hired a grifter "DEI" consultant for a year-long engagement that only delivers experiences like yours.
There aren’t simple answers or one-size-fits-all solutions. Picking a representation metric for one demographic and pushing it up won’t fix things, even for that population. Many people are, at minimum, skeptical of DEI, and are inundated with clickbait news reinforcing their skepticism.
The people doing the real work understand all this and still show up every day trying to making things better for people.
A big reason is that biology is a very nuanced science.
A lot of the so-called anti vax or misinformation wars are really just conflicts between the people who already realized that academia prefers collectivist ideology to the scientific method, and people who still talk about public sector expertise as if it's platonic ideal rendered real.