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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Feels a little bit like making people take anti-theft pledges. I don't think anyone could reasonably expect that theft would be prevented by someone pledging not to engage in it yet it might be tricky to publicly remove because "what are you, pro-theft!?!"

Similar to DEI training in general which doesn't appear to do too much. It should be argued that "we shouldn't do these trainings" yet you also don't want to be the one saying that.

What does appear to work is a company actually hiring and promoting skilled diverse individuals and not just their buds.

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Imo it's very different bc the ideology pledge itself is mostly distracting from the real purpose of the dei statement (again imo), which is to provide a way to select employees based on race, etc, without it being the explicit reason.

A better comparison would be if instead of an anti-theft pledge, there were a ten-commandments plus beatitudes test/ statement, without referencing the source religion. Maybe call it a morality pledge.

It's essentially a religious test hiding behind another name and terms, and even if it doesn't explicitly discriminate based on religion, it's obviously designed so that people of certain religions do better.

And filters people not from those religions by boosting those who essentially share the same values, or can fake it.

In the same way, dei doesn't explicity select for diversity applicants, but for people who are explicitly pro-diversity-applicant.

Which doesn't sound quite as pure of you replace "diversity" with any of the approved / included groups...

'I'm not picking applicant based on them being black, but based on them having an ideology that is pro-black-applicant.'

Although sadly we've normalized it to crossing that line as well, with the last SCOTUS nominee.

> diversity applicants

Friendly nudge that this isn’t a meaningful term. Once you start noticing people saying things like “our hiring pool is 60% diversity” it’s hard to unsee.

I don't agree. "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men. Female or non-white are "diversity." A great example are the statements and articles from 2020 when Biden announced the most diverse ever White House Communications Team which was 100% female. Biden talked about how critical diversity was and bragged about this 100% female communications team. All the articles I read about it had things like "most diverse White House Communications Team in history" to describe it. At least from a gender perspective, I don't see how they could make it more clear that diversity == women

Asians aren't counted as "diversity" either. This is why they're referred to as "an inconvenient minority" in the context of DEI.

For that, does "asians" mean people from the middle of asia (ie middle east), or people from south east asia (ie oriental)?

Asking because the term has different meanings in say the UK (asian -> from middle east) vs Australia (asian -> from south east asia).

In the US almost no-one would say "asian" for any country west of Nepal. Sometimes they say "south-asian" for India or the surrounding countries, but even that term is only sometimes extended out to pakistan.

>people from south east asia (ie oriental)

it is actually more common from the European and Middle Eastern context to call the (Turkish and Levantine and Arabian) Middle East "oriental"; in Israel, "oriental food" is hummus and felafel; the Orient Express train went to Istanbul. East Asian is the term for ... east Asians and of course the SE Asians you mentioned, and South Asian is the term for "India+Pakistan+" people. Central Asian is the "the -stans" and Mongolia and parts of Russia.

Wow, it's even more complicated than I realised. :)

An Asian-owned company in US can easily get 80%+ Asian. Is that "diversity"?

This depends on how you frame. It is not diverse for the company, but it could be in the larger social context. Putting the same thing in, say, San Francisco can be different from doing the same in Utah.

> "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men.

Unfortunately this is common, because they do bad things with "diversity", even though diversity itself isn't bad. This isn't a very good defintion of what "diversity" should be, of course. There are many kind of diversity, and which are more important depends on the situation. But, regardless of it, diversity includes white men (and everyone else, too).

Visible diversity in skin colours, height, etc can be relevant for some things (e.g. movies that will have a lot of different people, or when doing research for a computer program that works on pictures of people (to do compression, colour correction for lighting conditions, etc)). Diversity in experience (even if all of them happen to be white men) can be relevant for many things (and is very helpful).

Of course, none of this should mean that you should deny application of other diversity because of their skin colours, height, gender, etc; they should not deny an application for such reasons. Having women in the White House Communications Team is not a bad thing, but that doesn't mean that having men is a bad thing!!! Having men is not a bad thing. One thing being good does not make the other one bad.

> none of this should mean that you should deny application

Is there any evidence that anybody was _ever_ doing this after about 1950 or so?

It may not be a category (imo it is), but it's at least a hierarchy.

It does go beyond simply making a pledge, though. Applicants are required to list all the ways they've furthered the cause of this very specific issue, regardless of whether the job itself would entail or even offer opportunities to exercise such experience or not.

Like requiring an applicant for a fullstack python/js position to list in detail all of their Erlang experience, projects, talks and initiatives, and gatekeeping on that.

Now Erlang itself is great, and understanding the principles that guide it will almost certainly help you in your career (even if you never write a single line professionally). But to make this a central focus of acceptance for the job is just plain silly.

Perhaps that is a good analogy, because I agree, and that is true whether it is Erlang or if it is DEI statements or if it is something else, even if they can be good things it is certainly no good to make this a central focus of acceptance for the jub.

But the problem is they can’t even get “diverse” right. Do they mean diverse in ideas? In thought? In opinion? No.

My LARGE company is on a tirade to ensure we use diverse supplies. We’re collecting metrics on this so we can proudly state how many diverse vendors we we use. When asked what we define as diverse they stated (among other things) that they were members of the LGBQ community. So I asked “so our company is very much concerned if the owners of the companies we work with are bisexual?”

Im married to a woman, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that I’m bi-sexual. So if, in addition to being attracted to my wife, I’m also attracted to men, then all of a sudden I’m a priority for the company.

It boggles my mind.

Or like the pledges that university students have to fill out before each exam, promising not to cheat in any way. As if "you broke the pledge you signed" carries any more weight than "you cheated".

> “feels a little bit like people making anti-theft pledges”

Slate Star Codex covered this so well on https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

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