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You're welcome, of course, to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It's not hard to effect change over time with a few memos (e.g. no more "pregnant people") and reviews. It may not be quick enough for certain items already in motion, but that really doesn't matter if the pipeline quickly empties out as the memos take effect.
The scorched earth policy is intended to sow fear.
> sanity check (why it is problematic): The phrase sanity check is ableist, and unnecessarily references mental health in code bases. It denotes that people with mental illnesses are inferior, wrong, or incorrect. Using an appropriate replacement will also clarify what is intended.
There are of course endless examples. Such sentiments are so absurd on their face, and yet they abound. The first thing "actual leadership" must do is speak the truth and acknowledge that there is a problem.
[1] https://it.uw.edu/guides/identity-diversity-inclusion/inclus...
These people in power are using any good faith doubt about dei that an everyday citizen may have, and are using it to revert to White-by-default government, and tearing up the entire civil service.
If you don't know if and despise Russell Vought and Stephen Miller and their philosophy of the Constitution, you need to.
That's racist. It doesn't excuse existing racist policies.
There may places where it has become discriminatory in practice by overcorrection or by demonizing certain groups.
My point is that the people you cheer on are white supremacists, and people who want to destroy the federal government while making the president completely unaccountable.
You're cheering on a serial killer being made a custodian because he's a clean freak and the halls are messy.
You think we need to start trade wars with our allies, hire white supremacists throughout government, end all DEI, cease all foreign aid, attempt to illegally abolish multiple federal agencies, gut consumer and worker protections, and institute a purge of apolitical career civil servants because you saw a stupid list of words put out by a liberal college group?
Are you serious? I'm not trying to troll. You can't separate out what is being done right now, and who is being put in charge. Trump is a package deal with no surprises. Reading your other comments I can tell we disagree but you seem to be reasonable. I simply can't see how what is happening to the US right now is worth it in order to clean up perceived problems with DEI.
Some just shrink away, others lash out with vengeance, but I do think it is a huge societal problem, especially as the demographics of the country shift and white men may no longer have the majority in a democratic society.
Many democratic societies that are ruled by a minority demographic do not tend to survive, and so I think the transition from white majority to non-white majority is actually a fundamental issue for our democracy.
But about why people are upset about DEI, I think that has more to do with white people, especially men, not feeling well. Unless there's a huge portion of non-white people who have such vitriol towards DEI. I think maybe some of the Asian-American population, but I don't know about other segments. But im open to being wrong on that
University of Michigan DEI is 1100+ employees strong (!!) at a cost of over $30M/year (the equivalent of 1,800 students’ worth of tuition), and they are launching an even bigger DEI 2.0.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2025/02/02/kabbany...
I am not a DJT fan at all, but stories like these are exactly what has people stark raving mad. I can’t really blame them.
While the stated goals are noble, the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males. And I expect downvotes, but you don’t have to look too far to see the truth.
I think the challenge with DEI is the framing of it. If we called it intercultural competence, or intercultural teambuilding, or whatever, then it focuses on how we are a highly multicultural society in the US and that there are huge benefits to being able to connect and collaborate with people across a wide variety of cultures.
Have customers who are in a rural area? Well, sometimes it's really hard for people in the city to comprehend what rural life is like, sometimes much easier to have someone on your team from the rural area to provide that tacit knowledge. Sell beauty supplies and looking to get into the African-American market? Can be really hard for white men to know the tacit knowledge involved in managing 4c level curly hair (most white men probably have never knew there was a classification system on the level of curliness of hair).
I worked in innovation consulting for a few years. The ability to empathize and connect with people across cultures may be one of the most important skills in innovation and problem solving. So maybe it's just a framing issue.
And it would be a lie because DEI is not solely about race.
I don’t see DEI helping poor white males, for example, and there’s a lot of those in America. Even those whose families don’t own property and have never been to college.
> the truth in many cases is that it is an excuse to exclude white males.
One might think that the current pushes are an excuse to exclude various minorities. Considering what DEI initiatives were born of just a few decades ago, I don't think that's an unreasonable conclusion either.
I do think there's some truth to listen to from those so opposed to the initiatives - there's some that go too far and should be reigned in - but, as others have pointed out in this thread, drinking the Kool Aid with this push isn't really going to fix anything. It's just swinging back and forth on the political pendulum. Is that really what people want?
Even if someone thinks DEI had to go, they ought to be aware that their beliefs are being used as nothing but a smokescreen for unparalleled destruction and plunder.
White men feel abandoned, powerless, ignored, blamed, and all sorts of attacks, and if we don't talk about this, then this country may continue a sort of death spiral, borderline suicidal people taking us all down with them.
I think it was someone on the right, Steve Bannon or even Andrew Breitbarting, that said politics follows culture. So to focus on culture first.
They're trying to change culture at the political level, and I'm not sure that's how it works.
What is happening now is not at all a rational response to DEI. It's not even motivated by DEI. Trump and his gang simply want to gut the federal government, because they don't want to pay taxes. DEI is just an excuse.
They don’t have an entitlement to other people’s money, and if they are perceived as wasting it or spending in discriminatorily then you should expect the public to become less willing to give it to you.
The Federal government found a niche in basic research for a few decades and funded the vast majority of that. Per NSF, today even basic research is <40% funded by the Federal government, again not due to a decline in Federal funding but due to vast increases in industry investment. This shift toward industry investment in basic research was not overnight, it has been a monotonic trend for decades. Over the last century, the areas where Federal research funding is critical have dwindled greatly in scope because industry spends more money and is willing to take more risks.
One of the more interesting stories here is why and how this change happened in the US, to the point where the vast majority of R&D is funded by industry even in areas historically dominated by Federal government funding.
Also, industry isn't really doing that much to train the next generation of scientists.
Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.
The R&D figures you're citing are for engineering the latest iPhone, not for figuring out how basic biology works.
Maybe it’s more true in some fields (biotech?)
How is this counted? If it’s based on tax figures, there’s a lot of corporate “R&D” that gets written off that wouldn’t be considered research in an academic setting.
The rise in basic research in industry coincides with the rise of technology as a major component of the US economy decades ago. I suspect these are not unrelated. The growth of deep tech investment by the private sector probably has a lot to do with it.
The idea that the blatantly illegal actions by the current administration reflect public will simply isn't based in any kind of reality- just calling it out as a lie.
For example, I suspect the public strongly supports taxpayer funding of medical research, but strongly opposes taxpayer funding for social sciences.
I'm not saying this is what's coming from you, just reminded me of how many people have had so much animosity towards me over the years because of my intelligence, or maybe more so, my confidence in my intelligence. A jealousy/envy/admiration all mixed together.
I don’t think the public resent intelligence per se, but rather dislike when it is combined with judgementalism
The american public, beyond all else, hates being told they are wrong.
They are rarely right. So how do you square that circle?
Defence is a homogenous concept, or close to it, so people can confidently state they support it.
Research is a messy mix of things people like and things they don’t.
It is it significantly easier to obtain public support for, say, cancer research, than say, fat phobia, but both are lumped together from the public’s perspective as NIH funding.
This makes it harder for people to support, because they cannot easily support what they care about without supporting what they perceive as wasteful spending.
The key is to tie it to national pride, something everyone instinctively appreciates.
I've struggled with the former a lot in my life. I was really good at school and feel very confident in my intelligence. So when I feel attacked, I often punch back at someone's intelligence without even realizing it.
Sometimes me feeling attacked is just confusion or sadness or disappointment that someone doesn't know something and I feel lonely that I'm the only one who does, and often angry when their decisions impact my life. Takes a lot to remind myself they know other things a lot better than me.