Comment by _kulang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _kulang | Hacker News Reader

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Look. Academia is also tertiary education. To have teachers not practice a diversity mindset is to the detriment of all else. Tolerance of intolerance is not tolerance at all. I think the mistake you make is attributing all of this to ideology as if it is the only thing that matters. That is such a post-modern and bleak world view when in fact the majority of people are looking for opportunity. Diversity of thinking, as AI itself sort of proves, is a driver of innovation within a given environment and culture. AI’s usefulness is directly related to the diversity of data on which it is trained and nothing else.

I will say to have DEI policy cover research is a terrible thing; but how many examples do you really have? How many are proven; scientists are not arbiters for truth themselves and colour science as much as policy and media. There will always be extreme outliers in all directions and mistakes, and what have you. The solution is to relax those constraints,not to fight back with more.

But that’s okay, because academia will once again become the domain of those rich and fortunate enough to practice it in their free time. Obviously, it has no value to the administration outside of the results it returns to business and productivity. So there’s not point arguing about something that won’t be here

>To have teachers not practice a diversity mindset is to the detriment of all else.

It depends what you mean by diversity mindset but a lot of people along those lines seemed to see it as practicing racial discrimination - more blacks, less asians and the like. I think there's a lot to be said for not discriminating by race.

Berkeley's rubric was docking people for saying they want to "treat everyone the same". Arizona universities were requiring DEI statements in up to 80% of job postings. That's not just "some bias".

If you actually look at the rubric, that statement is described as a vague response to the question, not one promoting an "incorrect" ideology, and the rubric shows other responses with more specificity that would be graded better. The source given by GGP cites this quote from another article by John Sailer of the Manhattan Institute, who originally pulled that quote out of context to promote a right wing culture war narrative for MI's flagship rag, The City Journal, which publishes an alternative college ranking that laughably ranks The University of Florida first. Caltech is 21st, below ASU, and Harvard is 37th. I didn't know who these people were fooling, but GGP demonstrated that it's unfortunately not nobody.

The rubric explicitly gives a low score to candidates who "state the intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and 'treat everyone the same'".

It listed a number of other positions that it would penalize, with the totality of tbe effect being to actively downgrade the colorblind position, and reward DEI positions.

You do understand that the state is entrusted to fix problems in society and that having some pockets of society not contribute as well as other pockets is a problem, right? Pretending a problem doesn't exist ("ignoring their backgrounds") is not a good way to solve a problem. That is the error in that statement, not the "treat everyone the same" part, which is merely overly vague. If you treat everyone with the goal of trying to get them to succeed, this necessarily involves understanding the backgrounds of the people you're trying to help. Ramanujan didn't have a background in formal mathematical proof, but Hardy was able to get him to do great things by understanding his strengths and filling in the gaps.

Typically, the people against programs that attempt to solve these problems assume that some pockets of society are unfixable. Korea had a literacy rate of 22% in 1945. These people, had they existed in 1945, would have said, "Well, that's just the normal order of things. No need to try to fix it because you can't."

1. There are many different perspectives on how societal problems should be fixed. The preferred solution of social democrats, of racially discriminating in favor of some groups, has not been scientifically proven to be effective, let alone societally accepted as just. In fact, it is unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court recently ruled in connection to affirmative action policies at Ivy League universities. This is strictly outside the domain of science, yet being presented as science.

2. The job of science is to present the facts, not decide on social policy. It is the prerogative of the public at large, and their elected representatives, to decide policy. People in the scientific establishment do not have a mandate to push social policy outside of what the elected government has legislated.

> There are many different perspectives on how societal problems should be fixed. The preferred solution of social democrats, of racially discriminating in favor of some groups

This is not being proposed by the universities. You're attacking a straw man.

> The job of science is to present the facts, not decide on social policy

The job of a public university is not science but to serve society, just as with all other organs of the state. Doing science is just one of the ways that it does so.

I don't want to quibble on the specifics, but the rubric being encouraged by Berkeley is an example of the kind of analytical framework that is being favored in academia, or had been until very recently. It acts as an ideological filter. And yes, affirmative action manifested as racial preferences in hiring absolutely happened and was implicitly encouraged through the so-called equity lens.

As for the job of a public university, the job is to serve society through only one mechanism, and that is through the pursuit and transmission of scientific knowledge and truth.

It is not just another organ of the state that is free to serve society through political activism.

> As for the job of a public university, the job is to serve society through only one mechanism, and that is through the pursuit and transmission of scientific knowledge and truth.

The role of educational institutions is to educate. In the case of universities, part of that is educating how to do science. The state chooses how to educate to get the most impact for the educational dollar, and Californian voters, despite their many failings, are smart enough to understand that educating more people successfully yields better outcomes than educating fewer because each field gets to draw the top people from a wider population and more pockets of society developing talent earlier as a result of knowing it won't be wasted later. This is validated by the scientific method (with many studies showing that the intuitive result actually holds). The ideological filter being applied is to find those who are willing to do their jobs as required by the employers who have a mandate from the voters.

If the University of California system were only interested in further preparing the best prepared students, it would only accept students from mainland China. Why that is not in the best interest of California I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Having a mandate to educate people in California is not the same thing as having a mandate to politicize science or have racial discrimination in hiring. Also, having a mandate to educate more people is not the same thing as having racial preferences in hiring or advancing ideologies through scholarship.

Finally, I want to make the point that this is about federal spending. The whole article is complaining about the federal government cutting its spending for various activist fields and studies. If the people of California have a right to decide how their education spending is allocated, so do the people of the United States when they elect their federal government.

> having a mandate to politicize science or have racial discrimination in hiring

Once again, there is no politicized science or racial discrimination hiring alleged in the linked articles. You are arguing against a straw man.

> If the people of California have a right to decide how their education spending is allocated, so do the people of the United States when they elect their federal government.

And scientists have a right to accurately explain why the spending rules are broken for voters to make better decisions, just as you have a right to criticize any policies you don't like to try to convince voters. The linked article succeeds because it is accurately addressing cited parts of the statute and not straw men.

Why should the current rightist adminstration be tolerant of an academia that is intolerant towards rightists?

I don't think your "Diversity of thinking" approach applies, if I am reading your comment as a rebuttal of the GP? By following Popper's paradox in this case you are sacrificing diversity of thinking in exchange for an artificial racial diversity.

The GP argues that the system is set up to promote racial/gender diversity first and then ideological homogeneity to that end.

>The solution is to relax those constraints,not to fight back with more.

I think this is the solution for a free society at large, but the power play for the right wing is to just defund all academia- they don't have the right demographics or positioning to work within academia and tilt it to their side (or even to tilt it neutrally)

Agree on the last paragraph, sadly.

Those accusations are mostly bullshit pushed on so that they can destroy it.

Can you explain how, to take just one example from my post, 80% of job postings for Arizona’s public universities requiring applicants to submit a statement detailing their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion [1], is "mostly bullshit"?

Or is it just that you support banning your ideological enemies, so you don't see it as objectionable?

[1] https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-report/the-new-loy...

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