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Comment by anon946 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the goals are worthwhile, and also feel that requiring every proposal to include this is not efficient and/or very effective. They should take all the funds and time spent on this every year as part of every award, and just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.

I would be happy to spend time mentoring URM, etc. But it'd work a lot better if others managed such a program, thought about how to attract them, etc. Specialization is good.

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>They should take all the funds and time spent on this every year as part of every award, and just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.

Or just have pay for decent, functional K-12 schools in non-rich districts without housing bubbles?

>just fund programs specifically designed to attract inner-city kids to science, or funnel talented, low-income, high school students to be mentored, taught advanced classes, etc.

And how do you find out which programs successfully do that without studying them?

The magic of "just" in a suggestion I guess.

That seems like a reasonable middle ground to me. But I didn't have any problem with DEI. If you have inner-city kids underrepresented by 50% then fund according to %population * %underrepresnted -- if 25% population then 12.5% of funding for programs to increase participation (don't think it would be that high). Maybe divide that by N if you have N different groups you would like to be more represented (eg rural kids). Performance is just that. Funding would be more effective. I expect anti-DEI folks would like the funding effort even less than the performance effort. It's obvious they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).

> they believe diversity itself is part of the problem (whether admitted or not).

they admit it. President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvmdm1m7m9o

> Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: "Because I have common sense."

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