But DEI is denying this difference, expecting any behavioral pattern should deserve the same result.
They can’t even reach a logic consistency.
After all, the elite applicants all have essentially the same background and identity, and the only difference is skin color.
Downvote away!
I've been explicitly told "WE WILL HIRE A XYZ BECAUSE THAT WILL IMPROVE OUR US NEWS RANKING, AND ONLY THAT. BUT DON'T SAY IT OUT LOUD B/C IT'S NOT VERY LEGAL."
Beyond that, when I'm mentoring pre-phds that are preparing their applications, something I need to very carefully explain if they are white males (I'm a minority but I'm a male, fyi) is that they will have to do much better on the exams and predoc research than most of their peers in order to have the same success.
Now, everyone does their DEI incantations. Everyone puts their pronouns in their emails, their pronunciation link at the end of their signature (so they don't get mispronounced), and we participate in many alliship programs in coordination with our DEI leaders. But I doubt people really believe any of this, instead of mostly being in fear of getting fired or at the very least reprimanded. My ex-soviet colleagues joke that this is even worse than in the Soviet era, because back then you could at least joke in private about the speech being BS, but nowadays anyone would snitch on you.
Diversity claims groups are different, hence there must be some different outcomes, due to their different culture, language, mindset, sex, etc. If the outcomes are the same, then the only difference will be just color. I'm sure it is not what you want.
Then, given the expected outcomes will be different, why DEI is asking for equity of outcomes?
A bag has 100 balls: 90 are white and 10 are black. Please randomly grab 10, and send to to university, or jail. In this the only way you can get your DEI equity.
Your second point undoes your first point. “Ideas” can certainly be compared and ranked; there are good ideas and bad ones, ideas that have worked in practice and ideas that don’t work in practice. Defining people by “ideas” widely held by their group is a recipe for discrimination.
The thing about people and cultures is that they are comprised of many different, often changing, sometimes mutually conflicting ideas. This why ranking people and their cultures is an impossible, asinine idea.
Once you actually unpack this diversity idea it unravels. You can’t have it both ways. If you posit that people are basically the same regardless of identity group, then your notion of “diversity” being anything other than neutral makes no sense. But if you posit that people’s group membership makes them substantively different, then you’re inviting analysis of whether those differences are good ones or bad ones.
You're setting up a false dichotomy: people are the same and diversity is neutral or some people are better and diversity is bad.
You seem to be assuming that its perfectly knowable which groups are “best”, and that we should therefore assemble teams strictly out of those people. My contention is that this is hubris and instead we should bring together lots of different types of people, then let them figure it out.
So defend your premise. What is the “culture” of Mexican Americans (or any other group of your choosing) and how does that make a team of Chinese programmers better? That’s the central premise of “diversity”—that individuals from different groups are materially different—so give me one concrete example.
Are you asking about how a hypothetical non-Chinese person would improve an all Chinese team?
If so, I don’t presume to know. That would be up to the team members to find the ideas that best help them. This is the fundamental idea, put together different kinds of people and they’ll work out how to exhange cultural ideas in a way that works
The fundamental problem with your reasoning is that you’re taking on faith the notion that differences are good ones. There is no reason to assume that. If differences between people can be good ones, they can just as easily be bad ones.
Since you insist, I can provide a personal example. My former boss is from Colombia. I’m from the US. He insisted I take more time than I would have chosen when my child was born. He said this was based on his cultural upbringing in which family takes precedence over work. I appreciated that and I feel that it prevented my burnout.
Here’s a well known case: Kaizen in manufacturing, which was originated in Japan based on a mix of American and Japanese ideas then reimported to America.
I base my more general and abstract belief that cultural exchange is good on many examples throughout human history. Cultures that don’t admit new ideas generally haven’t fared well in the long term.
PS: I saw an academic department with unwitting ideological and morphological homogeneity that couldn't see their hiring and selection biases. It wasn't done with malice, but most PI's hired people who looked like them because the dept chair was so hands off that there was no leadership conferred, i.e., blinding resume or CV details. The dept chair was rarely in and basically just a salesman and occasional figurehead.
I kind of pieced something together recently that makes me feel sick to my stomach. Diversity only matters in white majority areas or white countries. Too many white people anywhere is a bad thing apparently. Nobody in Japan is losing out on a university job for being Asian.