- Dishonesty expert is dishonest
- Politicians who constantly talk about freedom want to restrict anything that doesn't fit their world view
- Militant anti-gay preachers hire call boys
- Diversity teams are the least diverse
See also: every freedom fighter that launches a coup to overthrow a dictator, then becomes a dictator themselves within a decade. Or cops that get caught stealing child porn from the evidence locker, despite not being pedophiles by any definition.
Not all these types start this way, or are inherently hypocrites. Repeat exposure to something tends to rub off. You can't rail against the evils of prostitution as the basis of your career without being forced to spend cycles processing what about them is so awful. Thinking about round tits on display, the mechanics of sex, etc. The unthinkable is literally on your mind 24/7, which effectively normalizes the behavior and makes it less outrageous over time. It's a weird cycle of grooming yourself to accept what you purport to hate.
I'm an anti-fraud professional. I'm surrounded by so much of it (seemingly without consequence) that I'm frequently tempted to break bad myself. I never will, but it's a "conscious" decision (as an extremely stubborn Slav) and not because I'm a saint. Temptation just comes with the territory. It wears you down until you fail and make headlines in the most humiliating way.
TL;DR: If you were a public person, watch your actions during bad times.
CGP Grey made great recap in one of his videos [2] called Rules for Rulers.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&feature=share8
Has this happened? He thought it was normal porn?
I haven't heard any new cases of exfiltration in a very long time (at worst, just vice cops soliciting prostitutes) so I like to think the technical/procedural changes are working as intended.
I read some article about some poor cop watching and trying to identify victims for all CSA cases in the country where I live. I wonder if you give such a task to some "psychopath", or atleast I hope so.
IME DEI is usually a function rolled into HR (although they often contract with diversity training firms), rather than a separate team, except at large companies. Where there are separate DEI teams, they tend to be the most diverse, at least among the white-collar workforce - the requirements for these jobs tend to be quite nonspecific, because they don't really need to do much besides write stuff and give presentations related to diversity. These tasks can, at a pinch, be mostly handed off to interns and ChatGPT, or else involve cribbing from preexisting presentation templates. The actual engineering, PM, etc., teams tend to be less diverse - graduates of specific university programs tend to be less diverse, in the non-euphemistic sense, than university graduates as a whole.
Yes, otherwise you're saying hiring is just a political test.
It'd be like hiring a reckless loudmouth who loves to make people look bad as your head of PR. Literally the opposite of what you need them to accomplish.
(I also find it suspect that equity or inclusion are "political," but that's another matter.)
And I'm speaking as someone who falls into several ""diverse"" hiring categories. As much as I appreciate the philosophy of DEI work, I personally find most of it pretty toothless. There have even been multiple instances of myself and other rank-and-file coworkers trying to have discussions about bigotry at large (not even in the workplace itself), only to be shut down by those very same DEI coordinators under the guise of "let's use kind words instead of unkind words," because it's not good HR-speak to call a spade a spade.
Like, these are people employeed by huge corporate entities, not radical freedom fighters. A lot of it is just image work to make sure your company doesn't do or say shit that makes you look bad.
I know the type you're referring to—people punchdrunk on their own performative "activism" who love to make everything about themselves—and they're pretty cringey, but at least in my experience they're far from the norm on corporate DEI teams. Honestly super ballsy of her to pull the Diverse White Lady move like that... I'd be shocked if no one else on the team gave her a talking-to, unless (1) she's the boss or (2) everyone else on the diversity team is white.
(Which does happen, and isn't great, but also is pretty funny in juxtaposition with the claims you'll hear about DEI teams being radical Marxist plots or whatever. Half the time these teams are just a bunch of HR managers named Linda who get the letters in LGBT mixed up.)
How do you have these conversations such that you're using unkind words? Are you racially stereotyping people as bigots?
> I'm speaking as someone who falls into several ""diverse"" hiring categories.
Yeah, that makes sense. If your intersectionality was switched those conversation probably would have gotten people fired.
> I have literally never once heard language like that from DEI professionals
Like the "whiteness" thing from the other post. Rules for thee and not for me.
> not good HR-speak to call a spade a spade.
"Although the term has its origins in Greek literature, the subsequent negative connotations with the word 'spade' means that the phrase should be used with caution or not at all." -- Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, Stanford
You might not be held to the same standard as other employees, if you can freely speak in this fashion...
The way you say "suspect" seems like an attempt to sway opinion, which seems like a tacit admission that that the terms are political.
For instance, inclusion of who? What groups do you divide the world's people into such that you need one of every group for proper representation?
> Logistically speaking, it makes zero sense to hire an anti-diversity advocate for a DEI role.
I think most people can do jobs they don't agree with. An engineer can design a bridge that they didn't vote for, an administrator can follow rules they wouldn't have chosen, etc.
> Companies only have DEI teams because they want to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion;
How should you do that though? Is any diversity of thought allowed? For instance, is anyone allowed to think that affirmative action is ultimately harmful and focus on the diversity and inclusion over "equity", and/or argue for what they feel are more helpful methods?
Is DEI defined as a specific set of practices or a general goal of bettering society?
That's not my observation at all.
That being said, some work in practical ethics has had a huge impact. Peter Singer's work on animal ethics started the modern animal rights movement, and his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" has inspired many people to donate a lot more to charity than they otherwise would.
Someone can likewise have every intention of being ethical, but just be bad at it. Conversely, someone could know ethics well and simply choose to disregard them and do unethical things anyways. An ethicist isn't necessarily someone who practices ethics particularly well, it's someone who understands the concepts of ethics well.
Is there really any empirical evidence that such people exist and could be helped by an ethics course? I think laymen [to ethics] with a desire to be ethical can generally go about being ethical with little more than the Golden Rule. And if somebody hasn't figured out the Golden Rule yet by the time of their mandatory ethics course in college, there's probably something wrong with them (narcissism? psychopathy? some compulsion that makes them listen to intrusive thoughts?) that will make the ethics lectures basically pointless.
The most effective time to teach ethics is probably Kindergarten, plus or minus a few years. I just don't believe in the existence of adults who want to be ethical but don't know how because a college professor hasn't explained it to them.
Yes. Many, many people (including me) don't speak up when we see someone else doing something wrong. These ethics courses not only drill home the point of the importance of speaking up, but helpfully give many mechanisms in which one can speak up anonymously, or otherwise in a protected manner.
A hypothetical of a situation the GP may have had in mind would be a person who is thinking of fudging or taking a shortcut, but doesn't want anything bad to happen. Ethics courses can show how minor deviations in ethical practice can have major impacts (jokingly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dWjKkF0Zi4 ). These courses can also show that actively stopping work for an ethical reason will not be punished or looked down on in any way. Because of this the person will feel confident in checking their initial impulse to fudge and instead do what's right.
Showing people how they can be ethical is just as important as showing them what ethics are. We don't need to be moral heroes in order to take more ethical action.
And you don't, or shouldn't, need an ethics course to tell you that minor deviations from the plan can have unintended consequences that might have ethical implications. Take taxi drivers for instance, a minor shortcut over a sidewalk could have lethal consequences; do we expect taxi drivers to know this already without having taken an ethics course in college? Of course.
Many people learn early in life that to speak up is to get shut down. This can be combated later in life with good examples and policies.
Incidentally I still have my assigned text from that course, right next to me in fact. "Cyberethics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace" Hmmm...
As you might expect, it's among "one of the most popular" courses offered at Harvard.
Why do people use the term "ethical" as though there were a single agreed-upon "right" system of ethics?
My understanding is that there are numerous concepts of right and wrong, some of which are very divisive.
So i.e. there are people who would be widely detested for being "ethical" in unfashionable frameworks.
All ethics assert a universal ethical framework. Moral relativism just offers a really complicated one.
Except it doesn't. Moral relativism doesn't make any claims about the way one should behave. It's entirely consistent with a moral relativist point of view to oppose commonly accepted morality. Moral relativism merely asserts that there is no absolute arbiter of good and evil, no immutable arc of history towards freedom, no inalienable right. Everything is a matter of opinion and consensus, and consensus is always fluid.
(Of course it wasn't really "all" , either within one community or between communities. People in power were just better about killing the weak people were just better about silencing people who disagreed.)
What studying ethics offers the individual is the tools to analyze their moral beliefs and ensure they are at least internally consistent. That "and why?" is probably the most valuable takeaway from studying ethics. Rather than saying "that act was wrong", a student of ethics can explain, down to axiomatic beliefs, why that wrong. If a disagreement between two people boils down to axiomatic beliefs, then you're never going change each others minds. But a difference in interpretation can be argued with the potential for persuasion.
It also gives you a lot of practice justifying your own actions. Useful, but perhaps not exactly altruistic.
Try the trolley problem. Is it okay to divert a trolley to kill 1 innocent person to save 10? What about 5? What about 1? And this is just an abstract thought problem. Now try war, nukes, abortion, death penalty, etc. Everyone has a simplistic and superficial idea of ethics. An ethics class helps you develop a deeper and broader understanding of ethics. To develop the what and why of ethics.
e.g. Innovation Managers have most likely never done an innovative thing in their life