It's not the same, but it shows why the argument that "there are alternatives" doesn't hold water.
1,964 karma · joined December 1, 2021
DEI programs don't help guard vs. litigation, therefore that can't ever have been a cause for their or their antecedents' inception!
> discrimination suits are decreasing
If the problem DEI programs are intended to address was shrinking, then DEI programs would have shrunk with it! No different than how you shrink police forces after crime significantly drops.
Yeah I remember when Microsoft came perilously close to dominating the desktop OS market and using that dominance to push their other products, like their suite of Office software. Fortunately the safety checks of anti-trust policy kicked in and they were forced to break up the company to prevent such abuses from happening in the future.
The same thing routinely happens when ISP, TV, and media companies merge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating#Existing_programs
https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consoli...
I'm arguing no such thing. Hiring of people that espouse and practice DEI has been legally incentivized. Whether they believe in them or not doesn't matter, and after the law got the ball rolling (and made sure it stays rolling even in companies that otherwise wouldn't cooperate), it's perfectly likely lots of true believers would also join.
In fact, I implied the opposite in my root comment ("plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society"), which you would have known if you weren't busy coming up with the most bad-faith interpretation of my words that you could find.
> a legal threat so amorphous that we can't come up with a single instance of it happening
I literally linked to a legal case of it happening in my root comment. Unless you want a lawsuit specifically about a missing DEI program, something which I never claimed, and already explained so.
> a correlation between the deployment of DEI programs and the number of discrimination lawsuits.
Here's the number of discrimination lawsuits - you'll notice the upward trend, though it's only for '78-'06: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/total-number-of-civil-ca...
And you'll find a graph of HR departments in https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j... - you probably missed it in your hurry to dismiss the author as an overt racist (a claim for which you presented no evidence).
Notice how both trend upwards, therefore are correlated. Unfortunately I don't think there's a graph like that specifically for DEI programs, as "equity" itself is a word that only recently became fashionable. And I couldn't find a graph showing the proportion of companies with generic diversity programs either. A crucial weakness in my argument, that will allow a motivated reader such as yourself to dismiss it entirely.
But you are correct, my evidence is circumstantial, and if you really want to disbelieve such basic inference, you can. I'm sure you apply this degree of skepticism evenly.
They don't have to be foreign. And tangentially, good propaganda is not recognized as such. For a borderline example, see how Call of Duty changed the attackers in the highway of death from the US to Russia [1]. But since it's only "inspired" by real events, they can claim they didn't falsify history, all the while contributing to a false perception of US forces.
Non-borderline cases are even subtler and more insidious, often indistinguishable from artistic intent, and can be anything from casting choices to subject matter (ever notice how some historical events get more attention than others?). Less overt, less coherent, but when so much media comes from California or New York, it makes their attitudes the default everywhere where that media dominates.
Imagine if the default, ambient culture, was shaped by Mumbai as much as it is today by Hollywood/New York. Yet even with your experience with propaganda, it slips under your radar. That's power.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbmwgn/modern-warfare-the-hi...
She made the right choice, as much as The Guardian might dislike it. They seem more interested in reporting on the background bickering, rather than on the leaks themselves. A common tactic when one wants to obfuscate a story. And when they do report on the leaks, they use the most discreet of headlines:
Matt Hancock: what do the leaked WhatsApp messages reveal? Texts sent at height of pandemic suggest former health secretary rejected advice on testing in care homes - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/mar/01/matt-hancoc...
What the author, Kenan Malik, calls a "complex, intricate history" and glosses over, consists of Spain, conquered and colonized by Muslims for seven centuries, and used as a source of slaves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Spain#Slavery_in_Al...
Is it any wonder why the Spanish wouldn't want monuments on their soil to their former colonial masters and slavers?
Please don't lie to me:
"I have surveyed the programming of every Fortune 100 company and have confirmed that all of them have now adopted so-called DEI programs." - https://www.city-journal.org/the-diversity-equity-and-inclus...
Though I'm sure if you look at all companies, including every corner store, hair salon, and taco shop, the proportion of DEI initiatives and HR departments falls.
> It's a trend because it's fashionable.
And it's fashionable in part because any company where it's not encouraged is in legal peril.
While releasing a new version of one's book without noting any significant changes can be somewhat deceptive, it is not even remotely comparable to rewriting someone else's book, and passing it off as the original.
"I've warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!
...
When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send along the 'enormous crocodile' to gobble them up."
-- Roald Dahl, 1982
I never would have thought the culture war could go so poorly that we have to fight just to keep our old books from being rewritten. The metaphorical front line is past our doorstep, and high command is cowering in their bunker.
> This change I feel is one of the least objectionable, IMHO.
I think it's one of the most objectionable changes. Removing authors whose politics have gone out of style, and replacing them with more palatable ones, reminds me of Party members airbrushed out of photos with Stalin.
That it's done in a children's book is that much worse - a middle-man censor posing as Dahl and recommending what books to read, and presenting a false consensus on which authors were popular.
But you were not deceived into thinking those were the originals.
A key component of censorship or falsification is hiding the fact that it even takes place. They are tools of deception, and if you tell people exactly how you are deceiving them, it is no longer effective.
Key paragraphs:
Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.
Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
[..]
Clarissa Aykroyd, 43, who works in children’s publishing, reported on social media that ebooks she bought before 2020 had been changed. She told The Times: “It feels Orwellian that we are having the updated versions forced upon us and has made me weary of ebooks. “I assumed that because the changes to the work were so big that I would be given the option of whether to download it.”
And even if it were the author doing it, it would be dishonest to have multiple versions under the same title, unless there was a note at least briefly mentioning alterations.
Excerpt: Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
They're legally required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its consequences. Let me explain:
The act prohibits discrimination on several protected characteristics, and the Supreme Court has expanded that to cover even things that merely correlate with those characteristics, unless an employer can convincingly show those characteristics are required [1].
But how can employers shield themselves from the legal risk of a discrimination lawsuit, when "discriminating" is so vaguely defined? By showing they engaged in "best effort" not to discriminate, which means mouthing all the right platitudes, employing ever-evolving "best practices", and having departments devoted to the cause (first HR, now DEI).
It's a red queen's race to be the most progressive and anti-racist, plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society, and these are the results after 60 years of it. Any corporation, school, or university that goes against it, that merely tries to stay neutral, will fall behind and be made a legal and PR example of [2].
[1] To see how harsh a test this is, requiring an IQ test for management positions is prohibited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
[2] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...
The policy the article talks about addresses none of these issues.
This conflates two distinct things: the belief that things differ (e.g. blue is different from red), and the belief that there are clear and unambiguous distinctions between categories (on the color spectrum, where exactly does blue transition to red?)
It seems one side argues there is a clear, objective line between blue and red, while the other argues blue and red are the same color.
I believe I described PCA accurately, so could you elaborate which part of my statement is wrong?
> extracting features to artificially cluster points along the most characteristic axes is what PCA is for
How is the clustering "artificial"? Because if you generate data without clusters (e.g. points evenly distributed within a sphere), applying PCA to it won't show clusters either.