Hacker News Reader

Comment by RestlessMind | Hacker News Reader

There is a clear reversal of trend in American society when it comes to DEI policies. Lots of corporate layoffs in the DEI department, elimination of DEI statements in hiring (first MIT, now Harvard, probably others too), reinstating SAT in admissions, firing of incompetent hires who checked the right profile boxes (Claudine Gay) etc.

I am rather glad about that. While I support DEI goals, the effort seemed to tackle only the superficial symptoms rather than core problems which are hindering diverse representations. It also didn't help that there was no clear leader with a coherent goal (eg. MLK in 60's who wanted voting rights for Blacks). Instead, we had weak-sauce thought leaders (Kendi or DiAngelo) and DEI essentially meant whatever one wanted it to mean, leading to a lot of potential attack surface for detractors.

View on HN

> It also didn't help that there was no clear leader

The public narrative is that DEI was being pushed by some outside, socially progressive force, but when you look into the details it was almost always investors that were pushing for DEI in companies with internal cheerleaders being the champions.

I'm not entirely sure what the true motivations of this trend coming from investors was but I'm a bit too cynical to believe it was primarily "love for humankind".

Like many left-ish leaning ideas (I'm one myself), it came from ideas about how to improve the world around us, but when the practical implementation of the great ideas came around they turned out to be far more complicated with unintended negative consequences than most imagined and now we're backtracking from the idea.

The same thing was true with the anti-police movement. We can all see problems with policing and envision alternatives, but most practical attempts to implement alternatives (like the now wildly unpopular reformist prosecutors elected in the bay area) had unintended consequences people didn't expect and got walked back.

The thing that's frustrating to me about these outcomes is that they're so easily foreseeable. Whenever things tip over to an "ideology", you start getting these power plays that are light years away from the original goals.

With DEI the "flip" for me in my head was when it switched from ensuring that there was no bias in hiring and reaching out to try to give everyone a fair shot to instead seeing that every single instance where the racial/gender outcome doesn't match the population distribution is inherently an issue of discrimination. My favorite example for the HN crowd is when they cancelled ElectronConf years ago after only getting male speakers despite having a fully blinded application process (and explicitly stating that any "ties" would be given in favor to underrepresented groups). The problem with that stance is that it becomes an unfalsifiable position, allowing everything to forever be blamed on discrimination even if there was no evidence. Even the language changed: it was no longer about "minority" representation, it was about "underrepresented minorities", as if the discrimination and struggles of East Asians and Indians no longer counted.

> Whenever things tip over to an "ideology", you start getting these power plays that are light years away from the original goals.

It's worse. Whenever things tip over to an "ideology", you no longer can question whether the original goals are right, just, moral, fair, reasonable, or achievable.

DEI hurt many companies. If anything it eliminated diversity of thought for those superficial categories of difference, and caused strong leaders to mutate their contributions from clear direction and achievement into playground cow towing to participation award saboteurs dragging the entire team down.

DEI has always been in companies before the term even arose to the larger public discourse. I have to go through such trainings every year at every company I've been at. There has never been true "diversity of thought" at most institutions and I doubt you would really want it, especially if you were on the receiving end of it every day and it was just blatant bigotry towards you. As far as achievements, I can't recall a single instance of someone being brought down because of a participation award. Unless you think being 1st, 2nd, or third gets robbed of all meaning because everyone got an award.

While I believe what you're saying could be true in some cases, I work at a tech giant and there's no "diversity of thought" anyways because anything remotely controversial is not allowed to be discussed at work.

This is a company which went hard on and is now currently backtracking from DEI but this policy of "don't discuss anything controversial at work" has strengthened the entire time making diversity of thought a moot point.

FWIW that stance is (probably) in direct response to the realization that the "bring your whole self to work" movement was a bad idea anyway.

Sure, but diversity of thought doesn't matter if everyone is required to keep their divisive thoughts at home.

Without measuring the changes that _have_ stuck around, it's not really easy to tell whether it's a matter of two steps forward and one step back, or two steps forward and two steps back, or one step forward and two steps back.

I think Claudine Gay is a bad example. First of all, she wasn't fired, she resigned. If you look at her credentials, she is more than qualified for the position. Many people attacked her primarily for the faux claims of antisemitism and her logical response to an inflammatory question from a Congressional hearing. Such a notion of antisemitism has been largely not backed up by much of anything other than spurious claims and deliberate misinterpretations (from the river to the sea, etc.) because people are obsessed with Israel which has been condemned for their actions against the Palestinians. As far as her plagiarism allegations, they have much more merit. However, so many academics have deliberately faked data and plagiarized that a few examples of miss-citations and misquotes (that were largely discovered due to the fact that people wanted her fired anyways, nobody cared before) is very weak in my opinion, especially if it wasn't deliberate. Not to excuse it, but its not out of the realm of possibility for it to be a mistake and it certainly isn't because of DEI that she somehow plagiarizes worse (all races and genders do it). She also requested to make corrections to some of these accusations showing an attempt to fix it. DEI is an attempt to level the playing field for people who have far worse upbringings by nearly every statistical measure. It's what affirmative action attempted to alleviate. These poor upbringings largely affect minorities and this is a statistical fact.

I agree that the "oh my god, she plagiarized someone" shock & horror was mainly (not entirely) an exercise in firing her, without admitting the main reason - that she initially gave lukewarm pushback to the hysterical "anti-semitism is widespread on campus" fake hoax.

In hindsight, she (& others) might feel that they ought to have pushed back more strongly, and debunked this hoax more definitively, when it was first trotted out.

Since then, we've had, on campuses, Zionist students made into media darlings for a day for being stabbed in the eye, when all that happened is that a piece of fabric lightly brushed her cheek. While other (Seinfeld funded) students attacked campus protestors with lead pipes and whatnot, but getting away scott free.

It's like McCarthyism, mixed with 30's era brownshirts, with the mainstream media coverage being directed by Goebbels.

I agree with your sentiments, but she was not fired. She resigned. There is a big difference. Of course, I wasn't there so I don't know if it was a forced resignation (ie. firing) or not, but everything I look up says she resigned.

Almost no one is ever "fired" from executive roles. They almost always "resign" under pressure. People don't want to give up the best job they will ever have.

You can always get a job as another executive, so I doubt its the "best job she will ever have". But I agree, she was most likely pressured.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com