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A comment on Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society. Parent comment

Re:Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to qui... by jknoepfler on Sunday October 02, 2022 @10:33AM (#33056171)
"Our lab specializes in developing hypergraph analysis techniques with applications in cybersecurity. The success of these techniques will force threat actors to innovate in order to survive. As more diverse organizations are more innovative [1][5][26] and threat actors are rational and well-informed [9][10], we expect our efforts to encourage threat actors to become more diverse as more effective cybersecurity techniques pressure them to adapt and innovate.

As threat actors account for a non-trivial fraction of global economic activity [6], we expect our research to play an active role in the co-creation of a more inclusive and diverse lifeworld for the people of earth."

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Re:Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to qui... by auntienomen on Sunday October 02, 2022 @01:02PM (#33057820)
This is a bad example: local knowledge (popular scams, exploits, software, etc) does play a nontrivial role in determining what the population of threats looks like; this activity is in part socially determined. So having a more diverse crowd of researchers -- with all else equal -- can improve your research group's understanding of what threats are out there. Diversity gives you edge here. Unless of course, the graph analysis research isn't really about the applications and that was just some bullshit to drum up funding.
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Re:Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to qui... by jknoepfler on Sunday October 02, 2022 @03:15PM (#33059214)
It was a satirical example of "bullshit" application writing. I personally don't dispute the relevance of diversity (variously operationalized) within human knowledge production institutions.

I do - I think reasonably - dispute the applicability of the outputs of many of our knowledge production institutions to social justice questions. (Just as I don't dispute that there are, conversely many which are).

If we find ourselves in a situation where we can't make a useful distinction between research that is and isn't relavent to social justice, I think we're at risk of our language seeming vaccuous and nonsensical.

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