avs733

> but is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument

hi! that would include me, and I would ask you to think about the following question at the moment: You are wondering if a widely utilized, and VOCALLY critiqued practice is supported by anyone...then why would it be continued to be practiced. Generally what I have found is there are two sides to this - one of which is just trying to do their job and one of which is trying to shout over those arguments.

I say that because when I talk with people like yourself who are asking sincerely, they kind of go 'oh'. I think you nailed the 'how to write a good DEI statement' articles are saying simply - this is required, here is how to do it. Looking more broadly, articles like that exist for most pieces of the academic hiring process simply because the process feels opaque and is steeped in traditions that are not well communicated. You can find them for things like the academic cover letter, the difference between resumes and CVs, research statements, teaching philosophies (which have nothing to do with philosophy), etc. The people actually involved in the DEI statement process not to talk about it, in part because they don't want to get screamed at by uninformed people and in part because they are busy.

Speaking personally, as an academic, DEI statements or some equivalent are as are many things - incredibly effective when used well and just taking up space when not. DEI statements are not, or at least not supposed to be, 'WHY IS DIVERSITY GOOD'. They aren't supposed to be that simply because anyone can write that and its useless for evaluation. We don't want some 1984 article of faith because its unhelpful to the actual goals of increasing equitable opportunities, which is still a big problem. What DEI statements are meant to be is more along the lines of 'here is how I practice inclusion' which isn't all that far removed from 'here is how I'm not actively an asshole'. That might trigger the same response from others of 'why' - but I (and others) think that's short sighted. The goal is to understand how you go about your work in a way that increase rather than restricts the opportunities of people of different identities. Academia has strong and tall power structures in classrooms, labs, etc. Making active efforts to hire people who are not going to use those power structures to reinforce a long history of racism and sexism is (from my perspective) the only way we can make history history. Someone who can identify why only using classroom examples about baseball or american football is an educational problem, and not do it, is beneficial to the overall enterprise because it (in increasing classroom equity) ensures equal opportunity and that we identify the best students - rather than the biggest sports fans. Bigger picture, they show not just things about DEI but about a much broader range of skills around engaging with people that are critical to effectiveness in all the roles a faculty member plays. We already fight that most graduate labs look very homogeneous. The problem isn't that they do, the problem is that those norms reduce opportunities for everyone.

To add some color, I'll give actual examples from DEI statements/conversations that help me do the job of hiring better:

* One candidate wrote in theirs about how title IX was unconstitituional and is unfair to men by giving spots to women who are bad at math. Great, you can have that opinion, but our school is going to flag you as a liability risk because we are legally compelled to comply with title IX

* Talked about their experience in a truly punishing lab environment as a person of color and how important that was to their success and 'tough love' as their mentoring style. Again, think what you want but we care and are evaluated in part by our completion rate for phd students - we also care about their well being and success and experience tells us this wouldn't.

* Last one got asked in an interview about initiatives to 'diversify' the participant pools in medical research to do more representative science. They saw it as a non issue, and then brought up several tropes about Black people in particular - including trouble being on time, holding still, following instructions and how that could negatively impact their research. Again, sure agree to disagree between them and me, but NIH cares and if you blow off NIH requirements you aren't going to get grants and aren't going to get tenure.

If you want to see how it works in practice, here are the rubrics I developed for my department to evaluate DEI statements (which are totally blinded as are all application materials): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3agby1zv572km6bjuiymd/Teachin...

> Cultural Anthropology is a good field, but it is a qualitative field, and not a quantitative one.

I do both quant and qual research. I generally find my qual peers more methodologically rigorous, more thorough, and more trustworthy.

As far as I know there is no qual equivalent to Numeracy/precision bias.

>I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC

...

> they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries

So obviously truncated your quote, but this seems like exactly the types of training that would make this person a credible source to make such observations?

is the issue they aren't credible or you disagree? you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone.

you are expecting good faith from US police?

Under the enhanced content developer tools you can download it as:

* A JSON (https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents/2024-06526?...)

* An XML (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/full_text/xml/2024...)

* A standardized government metadata format called MODS (https://www.govinfo.gov/metadata/granule/FR-2024-04-04/2024-...)

They also have developer resources for all of the above:

https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/developer-resour...

From what I can tell its actually 133, the rule not the law.

The first five pages are the table of contents, definitions of acronyms, and then about a 10 page explanation of background and what CISA is required to do by the law. Starting on 98 there is also an analysis, as required by law, of who is affected, what the cost of implementation is, and a wide variety of other details to inform the public on why this on rule and this way. That cost includes what it will cost CISA to implement the rule (e.g., CISA estimates that a covered entity would spend six hours per submission to collect, store, and maintain records ... hourly compensation rate of $35.19). It analyzes this rule for people who might want to critique it from a variety of perspectives and an enormous amount of potential impacts as required by law (e.g., its compliance with technical standards, energy usage, tribal implications).

Its easy to jump on these things for being long, but I would imagine the goal is to be thorough and precise. That matters to making this useful - as it does any law or regulation.

Doing government well is hard...just like writing good code or designing any complex system is hard. Documentation is often, and more often should be extensive. The headline is a cheap shot meant to undermine the actual rule itself.

1000%.

Funny enough my engineering capstone tried something very similar but much more stupidly complicated. Do it while flying a parabola with a winged drone. Never got the control system to work…crashed into a lot of local power lines.

Our assumed customer was power companies doing inspection.

It gives the appearance of innovation and disruptive thinking to people who don’t know better.

Same...I honestly am furious at the effort to link Steve and Aaron here. Having known Steve, not well but for a LONG time I would struggle to label him anti-authority in any way. I think he wears many of the trappings of antiauthoritarianism - but only as a path to what he wants.

> Why is there no competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine market?

There is plenty of competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine market. There is no competition in the commercial-grade ice cream machine for mcdonalds franchisee market

I see the push back on bureaucracy all the time in ways that imply government is the problem. When explained, what it ends up perpetually looking like to me is rent seeking middlemen who are really good at pointing at every one but themselves while they line their pockets.

It’s not about interpretation it’s about ignorance. Where they trained in the difference between a door and a plug? Did they realize it was a door plug and not plug door? Interpretation requires awareness that you are interpreting and that is a surprisingly high bar.

Right…there are always going to be concerns, no manufacturer is perfect…some are bad, some good, soon change with time, some don’t.

What the conversation was pointing out that coverage of such issues tends to shift with the closeness in time to something really bad. If your one of your planes crashes, anytime your planes has an issue for a whole the coverage is going to be amplified. The manufacturer is irrelevant…it’s the nature of media coverage and human biases

Because courts use mootness to allow law enforcement to escape criticism all the time.

Whether time proves that out - and whether 'more than a narrative' (meaning..safety culture) is actually related to this incident matter and are independent of it emerging as a narrative.

A very similar thing happened post Air France 447's crash into the Atlantic ocean. The reporting on it began to include any incident involving any airbus plane for quite a while until it was determined the crew was primarily at fault. There was a narrative building simply because of our tendency in media to have extreme recency bias.

Lets be clear - I do not know the answer to this.

What I have read varies. Some say the door plug was installed and bolted. Some say the door plug was installed but not bolted. Some say the door plug wasn't installed - which I suspect from a lot of prior experience is a linguistic gap between engineers and reporters on installed but not bolted.

I remember reading but can't find at the moment something suggesting that inspecting the door plugs and the bolts was a required Boeing assembly line 'job' (think 'ticket'). But none of that matters if someone, as has been reported, later uninstalled the bolts to fix something else, without creating a record of doing so, because they misunderstood the specific procedure they were undertaking.

so its worth clarifying something because 'plug door' is a confusing term as it relates to the bolts. The issue here isn't about trusting workers to do things, its about systems and processes to ensure they know what the right thing to do is and they know how to do it correctly. You CAN (and SHOULD) use things like checklists to ensure people do each job correctly. There are tens of thousands of 'jobs' in an assembly like this - no one knows/remembers exactly how to do each one correctly, nor should a system expect rely on them doing so. Here's how that happens without anyone doing something 'random' and following their instructions as they understand them:

There are doors on an aircraft - you enter through them, they have inflatable slides attached. Then there are plugs - plugs that fill a space (this is one, there are a lot, basically any penetration of the pressure vessel). If there were a space where a door could be but isn't on this model, you need to plug it (hence, door plug or...plug door). In terms of assembly, maintenance, operation, etc. they have different functions and those functions have different documentation and traceability requirements. Doors are meant to be opened and closed - that is different from being removed (i.e., 'taking the door off its hinge'). That leaves us here:

* Doors can be opened and closed (this does not require documentation because it is part of the normal function)

* Doors can be removed, which is different from opened and closed (requires documentation because it is not part of its normal function, requires inspection after reinstallation)

* Plugs cannot be opened and closed (opening and closing them is not part of their normal function so...to whit...doing so is impossible within the vocabulary/concept of documentation rules, they are not designed for regular use)

* Plugs can only be REMOVED (documentation required, inspection required just like a door removal)

Where does that leave the door plug? is undoing the bolts and pushing it up off the stop blocks opening it or is it removal? In the minds of Boeing and the FAA - that is removal. In the minds of line workers, opened a door.

Suddenly, door plug and plug door become potentially different concepts. One is a plug for a door and is discussed and documented like a plug. The other is a door that serves the purpose of a plug...and is discussed and documented like a door. What seems to have happened is that workers opened the plug , which isn't 'possible' - meaning they 'removed' the plug and treated it like opening it. That meant it didn't trigger anything about a required set of procedures to do so, didn't trigger inspection, didn't trigger documentation, didn't trigger inspection, just got closed up and moved down the line.

I've dealt with a lot of these...a personal favorite was a company I worked with having someone who couldn't read be responsible for recording each serial number he stamped on each federally tracked part in our factory. He relied on his memory of the last serial number he did the day before.

>I wonder if intent matters.

I doubt that the dealership would feel their intent mattered if they overcharged the same guy and he balked. Isn't that the whole goal in this stupid way of buying cars that we have to deal with?

"sure you can secede"

"sweet! look at this nuclear weapons plant that's now ours"

"sure, enjoy!"

"HEY...you just left us the giant nuclear waste dump, where's the boom booms?"

my sense is that our society treats government corruption as significantly more problematic than private, individual, or corporate corruption.

Not taking a position...just noting

A lot of this is from memory so...possibly wrong...

Very but also its solveable. You stop manufacturing, realign the tools, and then move on. With the 2011(?) japanese earthquake, there were impacts of the earthquake vibrations on lithography well beyond Japan - and it took a while for the earth to settle back down to the point that lithography was stable again. Aftershocks, tsunamis, reverberation of earthquake energy are all sources of vibration that can affect lithography.

The bigger issue (to me with what you are saying) is actually within the semiconductor supply chain. At least when I was involved, many/most/a huge fraction of the basic wafers come from Japan. Two of the major players were (are?) SUMCO and Shin-etsu, and they had huge fleets of CZ furnaces because power was relatively cheap, and more importantly, generally very stable. The process time for ingot (the precursor to wafer) growth is on the order of like weeks/months and is very energy intensive. So, power stability is a big deal. The power issues after the earth quake had huge impacts on wafer availability over the following year or so.

It is an article from the bmj “Christmas issue”[0] which is meant to be light hearted or satirical. My personal favorite was about the efficacy of parachutes when jumping out of a plane[1] - which fails to clearly describe that the plane was on the ground. Their point was about replication and clear thorough explanation of methodology in science.

The Christmas issue has been critiqued for exactly the reason you made this comment - indexers don’t pickup on the differences of the Christmas edition making it functionally invisible if you see it in pumped unless you know about it

[0] https://www.bmj.com/about-bmj/resources-authors/article-type...

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11&q=bmj...

which is exactly WHY they want to own these things.

c.f. elder care, child care, basic utilities.

If you own things that cannot be allowed to completely collapse, you can always dangle them over the edge and demand ransom.

I think we are slowly realizing Sam won and we all lost

There’s an entirely different way of looking at this that is perfectly in line with why self driving. Cars have failed several times before…

Who is liable?

That’s what largely killed prior attempts, especially those using custom built roads. If the car crashes who is liable - the manufacturer, the road builder, or the driver? I think it is telling that the pull back we’re seeing is correlated with early cases in this becoming more salient.

Why does this have to be a technical limitation/success (im not saying it is or isn’t) only?

and they can still get viruses and its a shit show. Fortunately most of the stuff runs on not windows or incredibly out of date versios of windows (3.1?)

Its worth noting...there are sub systems upon subsystems at play here. I'll bet there are probably around 100 discrete computers within a modern lithography tool. It is more like (well...literally is) a network as opposed to a single computer.

>I don’t think anyone has a problem with that, and we can leave them alone. The NLRB, SEC, FTC. These cases belong in a real Article III court.

So in other words, its a judgement question which should be left up to the legislature? What is the constitutional basis for that differentiation? The only difference I can see is a comfort subjecting individuals to this process and a discomfort subjecting corporations to it.

...I assumed that was assumed :)

We could - we haven't. We probably should - we haven't.

Its also worth noting that these decisions by administrative judges are already reviewable by appellate courts.

There are over 1900 administrative law judges. There are around 900 TOTAL Article III juges, including appellate courts.

Finally, I'll note that (my opinion) whether people think this is a good idea should be held independent of the fact that most of these arguments are being raised in bad faith by people with more power to avoid the legal process not so they can meaningfully avail themselves of it.