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Comment by cucumber3732842 | Hacker News Reader

To quote one of the most prolifically insufferable linkposters of HN: "Demographics are destiny."

So, you fill your university marketing and publication department with people who think this is ok and this is the sort of PR faux-pas whoopsie you eventually get.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can at a glance see someone that looks like them and identify with it but something tells me the university isn't gonna come out and own it like that and even then using AI to make a replacement when you have a student body to pull from is kind of icky.

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> I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can see it and see someone that looks like them and identify

It's regressive to want someone to look like you in order to identify with them. And universities like Stanford should be fighting that regressive instinct, not indulging it.

The consequences of not doing so will get ugly. My kids go to a "diverse" private school (but not economically or politically, obviously) and the message the kids get is that white people must reject special affinity for their co-ethnics, while that's acceptable or even encouraged for non-white people. There's a special "black girl magic" weekly lunch, which my daughter was invited to attend once a month because I guess that's how the math works for a half-white, half-asian girl. There is, of course, no affinity group for white (or British or whatever) kids. I think this double standard has only a decade or two before it collapses completely, and the result will be ugly.

I fail to see how these are related whatsoever.

If anything, it adds more fuel to the maga "woke academia" fire.

EDIT: GP has since been edited to elaborate more since this reply was written

They're related because of an ironic lack of diversity of thought.

If they could have pried any one of the dozen line cooks that Standford RD&E surely employs away from the hookers and blow or got the drunkest frat boys to put down the bottle for a few seconds to ask them they would have been told that AI replacing people with different races and slimming people up is slimy enough that you should give a black girl a free hoodie if that's what it takes to get her to be the token for your stupid staged photo.

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