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Comment by iamdamian | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure yet whether to be concerned about this particular example or not.

I am concerned about DEI being used as a sort of backdoor for bad ideas being accepted and enforced in the workplace or university. There's a real chance, in my mind, for DEI to justify actions that we normally consider unethical: suppressing or compelling speech, unjustly firing people, excluding people who don't think like us from positions of power.

But I'm not sure how often this happens. I do see plenty of headlines that make bold, negative claims about DEI, but they seem to fall apart under scrutiny.

So I'm curious: what specifically are we concerned about with this article? And is anyone aware of a list tracking egregious but solid examples of DEI-run-amok?

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There’s two bits that concerns me about this article, taking his statement at face value.

One is the lack of transparency. Honestly, the guy sounds like an arsehole, but even arseholes should be treated fairly. “Quit or we’ll fire you” when you won’t even explain why is definitely outside the realm of fairness.

Second is the theatre. There’s a whole range of ways they could get him to meet the dean. You could email him asking to schedule a meeting, or at the other end of the spectrum, you could politely ask him to come with you at the end of the lecture. Unless they expected some harm to come from letting him complete his lecture, sending campus police into a classroom and interrupting a lecture to escort him away serves no purpose other than humiliating him.

Subscribe to Bari Weiss’s substack (free press) and you’ll get an article about this every other day. Her backlogs will give a fairly lengthy list, but certainly not exhaustive.

Thanks for the pointer, I will do that.

I followed Bari early on after she left the Times, and I was always intrigued by the examples she brought up of unjust actions taken in the workpace or university in the name of 'wokeness'.

That said, I noticed that some of these examples didn't hold up to scrutiny, at least in my eyes. What I mean is that actions taken in those cases seemed justified to me, even without relying on DEI or 'wokeness'.

A couple of years have passed now, though, so it does seem like I should take a second look.

bear in mind, Bari is not a neutral player and has an ideological axe to grind.

Just like I dont consider the source for this (the WSJ Opinions are only slightly less unhinged than NRO) to be ideologically neutral.

It’s not surprising that those opposed to this ideology have been most motivated to catalog its excesses.

BTW, to get crisp: she and similar others (I’m in this camp) support fair and equal treatment of minorities. What we oppose is the following (a common def of the form of wokeness they oppose). (1) assertion that any observed inequality is due to racism sexism etc (2) that we should fix this via racial or other quota systems.

We think (1) is obviously wrong and that (2) is highly unethical — Ie this particular ideology is rubbish and very harmful for our society.

Others disagree and they influence many of our institutions today. Maybe you think these axioms are cool, I don’t know. At any rate, There are people who do and in fact they are prevalent. Bari Weiss’s work (among other things now) catalogs examples of people who follow these principles and in this context argues why she and others find their principles wrong.

Bear in mind (look for my other comment in this post), I'm no fan of the emerging DEI Raj, or frankly the New Racialism (that race is the root of all problems) that seems to be developing along side it.

But just like this article, its one side of a complex story - so when I show up and suggest people apply a filter for ideological bias - its just that, a warning that this content should be consumed with and awareness of the ideological priors of the people writing it.

I actually want people to reconsider their own priors - but I think that to do that, you need to have a good awareness of what those priors are - not just for you, but for the media you consume.

FWIW, I'm an ardent believer in Poverty being at the root of most issues, including most cases of perceived institutional racism, because Poverty and Race have become so intrinsically linked that Race is now a proxy for Poverty.

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