I listened to a few episodes of this podcast, I don't think they are necessarily fair with each book they discuss. There are, however, many problems with Freakonomics drawing conclusions that aren't justified. They quite rightly point a few out.

I wouldn't say the hosts' ideology is "DEI", whatever you mean by that.

I fail to see how a "quick perusal" could possibly be sufficient to come to such a sweeping conclusion.

That’s not even correct use of the word

DEI?

What's wrong with a Diverse, Equitable, Inclusive world?

Of the podcast, not a fan. Nor of the book. But DEI, that's Startrek TOS/TNG bread and butter. What's the problem?

DEI the goal is great. Basically every approach to achieve it has been straight up racism and sexism in an attempt to “balance things”.

This statement is a contradiction. Did you edit it?

What? I’m saying DEI as an abstract goal is great. The problem is that every institutional attempt to solve DEI results in blatant discrimination. So it ends up being that you can assume anyone who actually works on DEI initiatives at a corporation is doing pretty shitty things.

> What's wrong with a Diverse, Equitable, Inclusive world?

Ingestion of folly is not wisdom. The litmus test of ideas is the fruit they bear, and the verdict on DEI isn't stellar thus far.

Examples such as?

I'm not sure a work of fiction is the best example.

Bud Light, then. It's all the same cultural context. But quibble on, by all means.

When your source of evidence is an opinion article, you should seriously re-evaluate the strength of your claims.

The evidence of societal decay abounds, along with the studious denial thereof.

> What's wrong with a Diverse, Equitable, Inclusive world?

If you center the putative ends and ignore the means, what’s wrong with communism?

Also, even in terms of ends: I come from Asia, where most countries are homogenous. Are you suggesting that Taiwan or Japan is somehow worse because everyone is Taiwanese or Japanese? Would India and Bangladesh both benefit if we took some people from one side of the border and swapped them over to the other side? Or better yet—added a bunch of white people and Latinos? Would Aladdin or Mulan be better with a diverse cast?

That sounds… racist.

What does DEI mean?

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Yes, the world-ending horror of ... inclusiveness.

The idea is fine, the execution is not.

Marxists regularly use doublespeak in their cult ideology. DEI is a great example, where each letter means the opposite of what it implies.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. Basically the right wing’s latest boogeymen to scare up their base. Think how “woke” has been co-opted and used by pundits to make people angry.

You’ve got the causality reversed. What “makes people angry” is what certain progressives believe and say and do. Co-opting the label “woke” just gives people a way to communicate about those ideas; it doesn’t create the anger.

Nor does it refer to a “boogeyman”—those ideas definitely exist and aren’t made up, regardless of what you choose to label them: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...

The anger comes from the discomfort that people have (some more than others) with change.

People propose lots of changes, most get shot down and rejected by society because they’re bad ideas. Go look at all the dead-end ideas from the 1960s. Most of what falls within the umbrella of “woke” today will meet the same fate.

For example, I’m pretty sure that 10 years from now the racial affinity groups in my 5th grader’s school are going to be an embarrassing idea liberals will pretend never happened, rather than being the future of race relations in America.

A useful idiot blissfully thinks they're changing the world for the better while installing a Party member to enforce "Equity" on the unwilling.

Anger comes from change they perceive to be bad.

That doesn't make intellectually honest people angry though?

My litmus test for what’s real versus manufactured outrage is running things by my CNN-watching, Biden-voting immigrant parents. Most woke ideas get a derisive snort from my dad, though he’s quite worked up over racial preferences, affinity groups, and the idea that you can’t be racist towards whites. My mom, meanwhile, got very worked up over the 2020 riots and mass immigration from Latin America. She approvingly texted me Trump’s ban on DEI trainings in the federal government.

These are people who consume zero right wing content, so it’s not like they’re being socialized to be mad about stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise be mad about. In fact it’s the opposite—they would be madder if CNN wasn’t careful to hide the full scope of what woke people think and believe.

What is this full scope?

For example the collection of beliefs that led Google to engineer an AI that draws pictures of black Nazis. That did percolate up to CNN, because it was so silly. But all the stuff that these engineers learned about race in college that led them to make the AI this way doesn’t make it to CNN.

What are you talking about? Be specific? What beliefs?

This is like asking a Roman to "be specific" in describing early Christianity (and doing so in a couple of sentences). What, like you're not seeing what I'm seeing?

But let's pick one example: woke people believe that skin-color diversity is both meaningful and a good thing in and of itself. They would say that, all else being equal, a group of people with a mix of races is better than a group of white people, even if there was no evidence that the white group was that way due to discrimination.

Do they? I thought the woke thing was more about discrimination, but I don’t know much about this. The statement makes sense though, why do you think it’s wrong?

“Discrimination is bad” is what we learned in the 1990s. “Woke” is a label we use to refer to this new thing we have now: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2007308/northwestern...

The statement is wrong because skin color is superficial and meaningless. Here’s a thought experiment: say you have a group of white people, and then I (a “brown” person) join them. Woke thought posits that, through added “diversity,” the group has become “stronger.” But to be “stronger” it must be “different.” What non-superficial characteristic about me are you inferring about me that leads you to conclude I changed the group by joining it? Any answer to that is going to be racist.

Do you think a bias for selecting people that look similar to you is racist as well?

Sure. But that’s just the old “don’t discriminate” attitude, which is why I worded the hypothetical to exclude that. What distinguishes “woke” ideology is that it posits ”diversity” is better even if the lack of diversity isn’t due to discrimination. Universities aren’t saying that they need diversity to counteract the discrimination that’s happening in admissions.

This idea manifests in media, for example adding a characters of different races to historical contexts where the lack of diversity isn’t due to discrimination. (E.g. adding a random African character to medieval Scandinavia in Frozen 2.)

You're upset that a fantasy world that is based on a real place, but isn't that place mind you, added a black character? In a world with ice magic, animated snowmen, and singing reindeer you are upset about diversity because it's not realistic.

And this is a significant political issue for what you claim is the “left”? Well hidden from mainstream media-stream media (why?) i find it a bit hard to follow

Regardless of skin color, a group with N members vs a group with N+1 members has the added advantage of that one extra person; assuming that person isn't a negative influence on the group's productivity. That's one extra set of eyes, one extra point of view, one more set of hands. Regardless of skin color, that extra person is going to have different life experiences leading them to have a different perspective from the rest of the group.

Fine, say instead of joining the white group, I sub in for one of the white people. Woke people would still say that it’s an improvement because of increased “diversity.”

“a quick perusal” ah yes with such intellectual rigor it must be blissful to float self-satisfied above the masses in their “ideological stronghold silos.” nodding to yourself confident in the fact that it simply cannot be you who is missing the point

I've listened to their whole catalog and the only book I can remember getting more heat that it deserved was actually Freakonomics. While it has quite a lot of correctly pointed out issues, I find the book entertaining and informing enough that it should be read, while most the other hooks they review are indeed harmful, and not bacause of any DEI misalignment in general, but mostly because of pseudoscience. I don't remember ALL episodes of course.

I'm not sure they listened to the Freakonomics podcast either, because I find it as left leaning as possible for anyone that can consider themselves Capitalists.