Gabriel54

Unfortunately I think the problem is much deeper than something that can be fixed with a few memos. I was just Googling for examples and found this "inclusive language guide" from University of Washington [1]:

> 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...

Is this also a lie?

From psychology department at University of Washington [1]:

> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)

> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...

If the sentiments expressed in those internal deliberations seem perfectly normal to you, we really do have irreconcilable moral and ethical viewpoints.

> breadth of viewpoints gives richer coverage

Breadth of viewpoint has nothing intrinsically to do with the color of one's skin.

> Journalism, good reporting, brings deep informed insights from the ground. That's not going to happen when reporting on foreign countries and disadvantaged communities if all the reporters are (say) from a WASP background and perspective.

Again, the quality of a reporter and their work has nothing to do intrinsically with the color of their skin.

> The nonsense narrative that is being pushed is, without concern for the truth, entirely grounded in the assertion that certain groups are unqualified to do intellectual work (c.f.[3]).

Also, I would like to say, I agree with you! Such a sentiment is deplorable and must be condemned. However, it does not follow that academic departments should use race or sexuality or gender as a factor when hiring professors.

In fact, when you are hiring professors on the tenure track, I am sure the first ten or even twenty professors (at least!) are all eminently qualified. Of course, there is a degree of randomness in any selection process. But as the sources in my sibling comment suggest, DEI factors are being used explicitly to distinguish and rank people. That I believe is unacceptable.

I'm not happy with what is going on, to be clear. But I am also not surprised that it is happening, and furthermore I don't believe there was any other alternative to this scorched earth war against DEI. If one had any reservations against DEI before, one would speak only in whispers. Now the backlash is here.

> ...Faculty Diversity Action Plan, a special funding program for diversity-focused faculty hiring, which ran until 2023, when it was restructured and renamed. Created in 2020, the program played a significant role in dictating whom the university hired. In a 2022 faculty meeting, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was asked how many professors were hired through the program since it began. He estimated that around 90% were either hired through the program or were spousal hires.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...

> Unethical race-based preferences is what those policies have been trying to fix.

I understand that that is the stated intention. I also believe they are racist and discriminatory.

> Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.

I also understand this. And now it is not. What is the point here?

> You think that [it] is based on giving some preference, but it isn't - its based on acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice.

I would like to understand your point here. I agree with you that the stated justification for DEI policies is based on "acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice". I also believe that they explicitly give preference to certain groups of people over others. So what is the point here? Because they are based on a noble goal, we should accept them? And if, instead, they were based on another nefarious purpose, they would not be acceptable?

A policy may arise from various motivations, but eventually it must be evaluated on its own merits. Of course, the same policy may be implemented in various ways, toward a nefarious purpose or to a noble purpose. You sound like you genuinely care about this issue and I appreciate that when you hire people you consider they may contribute to the community in your department, how well they will mentor students, and so on. Those are all important things and I am happy you interpret DEI that way, but unfortunately that is not how they are often interpreted.

From the journalism department at UC [1]:

> Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community

From the geography department at UC [1]:

> Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member

From ethnic studies at UC [1]:

> We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.

From psychology dept. at U Washington [2]:

> I advise deleting the statement below as it shows that URM [underrepresented minority] applications were singled out and evaluated differently than non-URM applications (which is not allowed as [redacted] noted)

> At a faculty meeting, someone whose name is redacted “informed faculty that the Hiring Committee had three outstanding candidates and so they used DEI to distinguish and select a first offer"

> Before finalists were narrowed to three, five finalists were invited to virtual visits, with the schedules including meetings with the Women Faculty and Faculty of Color groups. But a member of the latter group expressed opposition to meeting the white candidates. “As a person who has been on both sides of the table for these meetings, I have really appreciated them,” the unnamed person wrote in an email. “Buuut, when the candidate is White, it is just awkward. The last meeting was uncomfortable, and I would go as far as burdensome for me. Can we change the policy to not do these going forward with White faculty?”

If you believe that the sentiments expressed above are acceptable in a professional, academic setting, then we have totally different ethical values.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-dei-conquered-the-university...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity...

You are speaking on an intellectual level. The comment you replied to is speaking on a practical, political level. If voters do not like what is going on in universities, they will defund them. This is a political reality.

Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going on in addition to unethical race based preferences.

1. There are thousands of universities in the US that are neither R1/R2 nor "historically minority serving". What about those universities?

2. Where did you get the idea that outreach is not still an important priority? The issue is what is euphemistically called "under-represented demographics" which we understand excludes many Americans on the basis of their race.

I'm genuinely puzzled by people's reaction to DEI measures. In my experience, they have in many cases been explicitly exclusionary (e.g. a conference only for certain minorities, specific support preferences). I have never heard anyone criticize "outreach" in general. The problem starts when outreach means only targeting specific minorities.

The SAT is not an IQ test.

As someone who once heard, in 11th grade pre-calculus, that pi is a rational number equal to 22/7, I cannot be so surprised that many parents would choose to homeschool their children. Most parents have no idea what is going on in their childrens' schools.

As someone who (almost!) has a PhD in mathematics I'm going to have to call you out on this point. You are thinking like an engineer and talking about precision, but this is mathematics, not engineering. We make no distinction between the "real" number 3, the "complex" number 3, and the "whole" number 3. The number 3 lives in each of these universes as the same object (so to speak) because these sets (whole, real, complex) numbers are included in one another. Writing 3.0 is a representation for 3 just as 2.9999... is a representation of 3. Perhaps the bigger question we should be asking here is what was the purpose of all of this discussion? I've seen such petty treatment by teachers all the time and it always discouraged me from pursuing math until I met professors in university who actually tried to teach us something interesting and beautiful about math. This question could have led in that direction actually with a discussion of different kinds of numbers but unfortunately many math teachers in the US are not capable of this, or are too discouraged by the other craziness in schools to have the energy for such conversations.

As someone with a background in mathematics I appreciate your point about cryptography. That said, there is no guarantee that any particular implementation of a secure theoretical algorithm is actually secure.

I do not have anything backed up on any cloud servers on any provider. If I had to buy a new phone I would start from a fresh installation and move all of my data locally. It's not that I'm a "luddite", I just couldn't keep track of all of the different ways each cloud provider was managing my data, so I disabled all of them.

In response your second question, opt in would look exactly like this: don't have the box checked by default, with an option to enable it: "use this to improve local search, we will create an encrypted index of your data to send securely to our servers, etc..." A PhD is not necessary to understand the distinction between storing data locally on a machine vs. on the internet.

In response to your question in the parent comment, no, I do not use iCloud. And I do not sync any of the things you mentioned here. If someone already consented to using iCloud to store their photos then I would not consider the service mentioned this post to be such a big issue, because Apple would already have the data on their servers with the user's consent.

edit: I will just add, even if we accept the argument that it's extremely secure and impossible to leak information, then where do we draw the line between "extremely secure" and "somewhat secure" and "not secure at all"? Should we trust Apple to make this decision for us?

I appreciate the explanation. However, I think you do not address the main problem, which is that my data is being sent off my device by default and without any (reasonable) notice. Many users may agree to such a feature (as you say, it may be very secure), but to assume that everyone ought to be opted in by default is the issue.

I've flown on almost all of the major airlines in the US and Spirit was always pleasantly better than expected compared to the horrible experiences I've had on other airlines. I don't see why people are bashing on Spirit. Flying in the US is uniformly terrible and there is no "luxury" option (unless you consider getting free peanuts or crackers with your $500 ticket a luxury).

> As Sartre warned, everything changes when you tell a story. Narratives limit our potential. Though we are complex beings, living in a chaotic universe, our stories create the illusion that our lives are ordered, logical and complete.

Of course life is full of endless potential, but people and in general society could not function without some kind of shared narrative. In the case of society the narrative is culture. It both limits us and nurtures our potential to move beyond it. There is a duality.

Forgive me my ignorance, but if I write

  int foo(int *x) {
    *x = 0;
    // wait until another thread writes to *x
    return *x;
  }

Can the C compiler really optimize foo to always return 0? That seems extremely unintuitive to me.

That is a perspective I had not thought of. I also suppose that if every rental management company starts behaving like this then it can be difficult for a landlord to find an alternative.

Now I see the source of confusion. I think $100 from the perspective of a tenant may be quite a lot (as mentioned a 12.5% increase). However as you said my thesis is from a landlord's perspective $100 is insignificant with all things considered. If even one unit were empty for two months, that would be an annual loss greater than the extra money they would make from the previous tenants. Also in our case they already have had a unit empty for over six months now which further baffles me.

> Which one is it? Was the increase "substantial" or was it only 100 bucks?

A 100 increase over 800 is a 12.5% increase, which is substantial relatively speaking. In my case they wanted 150 over 800 which is an 18.75% increase. After I said no (as well as everyone else in the complex) they wanted 1000 which is a 20% increase. I have to say your comment comes off as condescending to me. For many people $100 may be the difference between being able to afford a home and being homeless. Now everyone has left, the units are all empty, and they are asking for 800 (after asking 950, then 900, then 850).

> Hindsight is 20/20. My guess is that the landlord thought the market was going to bear the price increase, and went all-in on it rather than only doing it on a portion of his tenants.

That is one way to describe it. Or, to describe what you said in other words, trying to squeeze every penny out of tenants, creating an inconvenience for five people (who would have probably rather stayed and put up with a modest 2-5% increase), then losing money after all because all of the properties are now vacant.

It is completely anecdotal but in my local experience I've seen the following pattern happen: rent is increased substantially, present tenants move out, no one new applies, unit becomes empty, rent is decreased until someone new finally moves in. I'm not a landlord but I don't think there is a rational basis for kicking all of your rent paying tenants out and then having half a dozen units go empty in the hope that you can squeeze an extra 100 every month out of someone, maybe, in the future.

Not the OP but as a mathematician I can say this, if you study analysis and start to ask questions about why or how certain things work, you will quickly fall deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole until you reach the basic axioms. In analysis the distance between these axioms and what people use analysis for on a daily basis can be quite large.

> Another side-note: both TeX and METAFONT still see releases, at a slow pace. TeX is currently at version 3.14159265, METAFONT at 2.7182818. Yep, TeX is slowly converging towards pi, while METAFONT towards e. Take that, semantic versioning advocates!

That unexpected novelty made my day.

Trying my best to assume this comment in good faith... Low compared to what? For reference, in the recent war in Ukraine (post 2022), there have been approximately 11,000 Ukrainian civilians killed and approximately 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...