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Comment by slt2021 | Hacker News Reader

slt2021

>what the conservatives think DEI actually is

  Speaking as part of a video that aired during a commercial break for the FOX show 9-1-1 about firefighter capabilities, Larson said, "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place"

https://www.newsweek.com/lafd-deputy-chief-faces-backlash-pa...

DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males

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DEI means, thinking about your hiring practices and looking hard at yourself if the population of people you hire is out of proportion with the general population.

DEI can be implemented badly, but that doesn’t mean that DEI is bad

And a true Scotsman would know this.

> if the population of people you hire is out of proportion with the general population.

why it should be in proportion? This argument is flawed as it ignores that not everyone in general population has the same abilities.

You can look at the roster of any top performing NBA team and tell me if their players population represents general population.

Companies and organizations want to hire the best for any given job, and given this preference, there will always be discrepancy btw hired and general population.

In fact the only case when both population would be equal, is if hiring decisions are based on random chance

> Companies and organizations want to hire the best for any given job, and given this preference, there will always be discrepancy btw hired and general population.

This is an assumption, not a fact. Companies hire less-qualified candidates all the time through nepotism.

I have a mixed opinion on this. There are cases when nepotism fires back via poor job performance and quickly self-corrects itself.

But there are cases when nepotism is a job requirement, as in being connected to a powerful network is job description. You can find it in investment banking, big law, VC, sales when people are hired because they know the right people and can get the right results through back-channels/established network.

You cannot make the same argument however in favor of hiring lesbians, unless being a lesbian is a job requirement

Why isn’t DEI being used to hire men in female dominated industries?

It is.

Here is a supporting example found from a DDG search for "DEI nursing":

"The Rise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Practitioners in Academic Nursing" at https://ojin.nursingworld.org/table-of-contents/volume-27-20...

> Efforts to strengthen diversity in nursing have not targeted race alone. That is because the nursing profession also lacks gender diversity, with the vast majority of nurses (over 87%) being female (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). In addition, the racial demographics of faculty reflect a body of academicians who are 82% White, 9% Black/African American, 3.4% Hispanic/Latino, 2.9% Asian, and 93% female (NLN, 2021). Ideally, the nursing workforce should closely align with the racial, ethnic, and gender makeup of the U.S. population.

> DEI can be implemented badly, but that doesn’t mean that DEI is bad

I really doubt that DEI per your definition above can be implemented for a general benefit. Fundamentally you need to show that not hiring the best candidate is best. This is typically squared by saying that group dynamics and output improve with diverse viewpoints, which I actually agree with within limits (the limit being that if nobody agrees nothing gets done). But here we made a sleight and equated diversity based on innate properties to diversity of viewpoints, which are different things and it’s actually rather stereotypical to equate them.

I mean, you have the same problem. What does 'best' mean, and how do you accurately measure it?

Of course you will have an answer, but how various things are weighted when making a decision is pretty subjective.

we can go from the other side. If you want to hire the best, you need to stop looking at skin-level shallow factors and stop hiring decisions based on skin/race/sexual identity/ethnicity.

Just fair competition and pick the best candidate you think will do the job best. If you see the population is unbalanced (too many males or whites for example) => you go to the root of the problem and address the underlying root cause, not try to cover up the discrepancy by reverse discrimination at the end of the hiring pipeline.

There are a lot of societal problems in America and under-represented minorities absolutely have it worse than the generally well-off white population. But this is the argument to go and fix the root cause: income inequality, education inequality, lack of jobs, housing, etc.

The moment America decides to improve poor people's lives, not just promote and hire rich people with the "right" diversity traits, is when the whole country will improve in terms of outcomes

Hiring will always have a subjective aspect to it, which is just the nature it. And I do agree that techniques like being conscious of bias and trying to interrupt it are useful.

But yes, I do have an answer, which is that excluding factors that do not relate at all to job responsibilities is strictly better than including those, even if the result is still subjective.

Categorizing factors as not related to job responsibilities is also subjective!

Of course it can often be easy to identify the most salient factors, but that doesn't make it a concrete activity.

are you making a claim that sexual identity and race (two most common DEI factors) are part of the job ?

how is being a black lesbian part to any job whatsoever ?

No, I'm making a claim that a sloppy argument was made.

You are focusing on factors that you consider obvious, which is exactly my point, using your subjective judgement doesn't give you a framework that isn't subjective.

You have constructed and debating a strawman.

Everything involving human judgement will be subjective, yet we still can distinguish between good and bad decisions and discuss tradeoffs about being less wrong while being subjective

I don't think it's a straw man. No one has actually solved hiring, "best" isn't defined.

Like people are freaking out about any sort of DEI factor even getting considered and then actually hiring based on how Phil vibes with the candidate. Good stuff.

Can I mathematically disprove that if I take the Lagrangian of the standard model and combine it with with Einstein's field equations, and chase down emergent complexity over many levels, that the properties that DEI selects for are actually what makes a great SDE (in my world)? No I cannot. But we're getting silly here.

I will settle for the most salient factors if that sounds more precise to you. I will interpret that as a large number of sigmas, but we don't have to agree on the exact number of sigmas here!

> DEI means lowering standards to accomodate minorities and discrimination against more qualified white males

Women are perfectly capable of working in firefighting, the military or police. I've personally seen a female police officer of barely 1.60m throw a drunk 2m Russian dude on a rampage in a bar fight onto the ground and tie him up alone, about a solid third of the volunteer force in my THW unit are women, a good friend of mine is a trained volunteer firefighter at about the same height as the police officer, and the IDF has women in active fighting roles since the 70s, and fully equal to males since 2000 - and look where the IDF is, they are without question the top dog in the MENA region, despite all the cries about women threatening the fighting capability.

"DEI" means opening up the gates for everyone on actual merit. For women, it can sometimes mean having to rely more on skill than on brute strength (as in my first example), but in the end it doesn't matter much.

I’m not sure you read this part of the comment you’re replying to:

> "Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place"

You’re making points that women can be physically strong. Nobody is doubting this, the parent was providing evidence that these women themselves say they are not strong.

> Nobody is doubting this, the parent was providing evidence that these women themselves say they are not strong.

Yeah and that's where the last sentence with the skill I wrote comes into play. Instead of just "manhandling" said husband and carry him in the front of you, lift him on your back, and anyone too heavy for that will also be too heavy for most male firefighters (bodybuilders are rare, especially in volunteer corps most people will be of average strength and body stature). That's also one part of why firefighters always go in pairs (besides providing backup for personal safety) - you never know who and what you come across.

Besides: Carrying a person in front of oneself is a movie cliche about firefighters, it's extremely rare to see it in practice and banned outside of actual life-and-death emergencies because it's dangerous as fuck - trip over a hose or debris and suddenly you're falling with the full weight of you and your gear onto the already injured person, possibly injuring yourself in the process. Not nice.

> Instead of just "manhandling" said husband and carry him in the front of you, lift him on your back

Lifting someone onto your back still qualifies as carrying someone out of a fire which this firefighter says she can’t do.

Existence of some counterexamples does not upend the basic observation: that way, way fewer women are capable of carrying a 100 or even a 60 kg person out of a fire than men.

Which makes efforts to recruit as many women into firefighting as possible a sad ideological travesty, and people are perfectly right calling it out. There is a difference between emancipation and group delusion. There are meaningful physical differences between the sexes, and everyone knows that, even people who try to engage in sophistry when it comes to this topic.

BTW the IDF, which conscripts women out of necessity, tries to keep them away from the most dangerous combat roles, and employs them mostly in support roles. Your description is very misleading. The vast majority of the really dangerous stuff in IDF is still done by men, not least because of the risk of rape when falling into hands of enemies. IIRC only about 1 in 20 of the "enemy-facing" IDF soldiers like helicopter pilots are female.

> Existence of some counterexamples does not upend the basic observation: that way, way fewer women are capable of carrying a 100 or even a 60 kg person out of a fire than men.

My point is the need for this ability is next to zero because it is extremely dangerous, and yet women are judged by that on their inability to be a firefighter at all? That's bullshit, pardon my French.

> The vast majority of the really dangerous stuff in IDF is still done by men, not least because of the risk of rape when falling into hands of enemies.

A lot of the men that got taken hostage or got found dead on Oct 7 were raped as well. And yes, IDF tries to dissuade women from enemy-facing action, but if a woman decides she accepts this risk, she can go for any role she wants.

My point is the need for this ability is next to zero because it is extremely dangerous

That is an absolute non-sequitur. Yes, it is dangerous to carry a person out of a fire. But it is still an expected, though infrequent occurrence during duties of a firefighter. By deliberately striking this capability from list of demands, you are also deliberately restricting the total life-saving capabilities of the firefighting crew, all for checking some ideological boxes.

I am absolutely against this and I want firefighters in my city to be physically capable of doing such tasks. It may happen that my life or life of my loved ones is actually at stake, and such capability will make a difference.

On the other hand, I couldn't care less about diversity checkboxes. The idea that a firefighting corps is better for having more women is as weird to me as the idea that a firefighting corps is better for having more Taylor Swift fans.

> On the other hand, I couldn't care less about diversity checkboxes. The idea that a firefighting corps is better for having more women is as weird to me as the idea that a firefighting corps is better for having more Taylor Swift fans.

Fact is, volunteer corps are already struggling with obtaining and retaining volunteers. Excluding women excludes 50% of the potential force.

So, an overall unattractive activity, and for some reason, we need more women stuck there?

If volunteer firefighting is a people repellent now, the "repellent" part needs to change, unless the "everybody needs to be equally miserable" hairshirt version of equity applies.

The case of the two policewomen which ran away from a shooting and left their male colleagues to fend for themselves caused quite a stir in Germany. During the trial they said they were deadly afraid and didn’t see how many shooters there were and from where the shots were coming.

Got in their car and left.

I tried to find an equivalent male example, but every newspaper was writing about this particular case.

> I tried to find an equivalent male example, but every newspaper was writing about this particular case

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting

me thinks if newspapers can only write about one case, it's not that widespread

This happened during the Uvalde school shooting.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/07/13/uvalde-sho...

It's interesting there was a trial, because in America police have no specific duty to protect the public.

Thanks for the link. It looks like in your and the sibling poster’s link the police didn’t protect the public because of cowardice and/or incompetence.

In the case I link, the trial was about abandoning their fellow policemen in danger, not the public. They probably view things differently when they themselves are affected.

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