There was a recent debate on this[1] and even the debater for the pro DEI statement side (that they could find) admitted that DEI statements that were just ideological pledges were wrong, and he was only in favor of statements about concrete things you did to advance the DEI agenda (eg. "I did a, b, and c in my previous position to enhance DEI in my department"). He argued that was justified because DEI (at least the principles, not necessarily the specific policies like affirmative action or whatever) were ostensibly things that the university cares about, and therefore they were fair game to ask for.

[1] https://opentodebate.org/debate/are-dei-mandates-for-univers... (it's a podcast but there's a transcript tab on the page)

On one hand, I get it. Arguing for DEI in an abstract sense is much easier than arguing for specific interventions.

On the other hand, this is the textbook example of a Motte-and-bailey fallacy, where the debater conflates two topics and then retreats to the safer position while hoping that the audience will accept it as an argument for the more difficult position.

DEI statements have been quite unpopular as specific interventions, as noted in the article by the way that the majority of staff disagreed with them when polled privately. However, speaking out against them publicly was viewed as a very risky move and serious career mistake, so they slowly slipped into mainstream acceptance.

It’s interesting to see how they’re now quietly being removed from processes with as little attention as possible. Nobody wants to be known as the person who campaigned against them publicly, but I suspect there are a lot of people feeling relief in this case as they’re being quietly removed from the process.

Similar to DEI training in general which doesn't appear to do too much. It should be argued that "we shouldn't do these trainings" yet you also don't want to be the one saying that.

What does appear to work is a company actually hiring and promoting skilled diverse individuals and not just their buds.

Slate Star Codex covered this so well on https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

A better comparison would be if instead of an anti-theft pledge, there were a ten-commandments plus beatitudes test/ statement, without referencing the source religion. Maybe call it a morality pledge.

It's essentially a religious test hiding behind another name and terms, and even if it doesn't explicitly discriminate based on religion, it's obviously designed so that people of certain religions do better.

And filters people not from those religions by boosting those who essentially share the same values, or can fake it.

In the same way, dei doesn't explicity select for diversity applicants, but for people who are explicitly pro-diversity-applicant.

Which doesn't sound quite as pure of you replace "diversity" with any of the approved / included groups...

'I'm not picking applicant based on them being black, but based on them having an ideology that is pro-black-applicant.'

Although sadly we've normalized it to crossing that line as well, with the last SCOTUS nominee.

Friendly nudge that this isn’t a meaningful term. Once you start noticing people saying things like “our hiring pool is 60% diversity” it’s hard to unsee.

Asking because the term has different meanings in say the UK (asian -> from middle east) vs Australia (asian -> from south east asia).

it is actually more common from the European and Middle Eastern context to call the (Turkish and Levantine and Arabian) Middle East "oriental"; in Israel, "oriental food" is hummus and felafel; the Orient Express train went to Istanbul. East Asian is the term for ... east Asians and of course the SE Asians you mentioned, and South Asian is the term for "India+Pakistan+" people. Central Asian is the "the -stans" and Mongolia and parts of Russia.

\> Everyone rightfully goes “bro wtf are you talking about”

\> Guess the triggered snowflakes are really just proving my point

May be in the HN bubble "South Asia" is an expected term, very likely because HN crowd might be subjected to far left academia. But it is offensive and racist for actual Indians.

Maybe such a region is too large and diverse to be meaningful, but there's no reason to accuse anybody of confusing parts of the old British empire or of embracing silly nationalist newspeak.

If hypothetically the government of India were to declare that the name in English of the country shall in the future be "Bharat" or "Hindustan", Americans would rapidly switch to the new name, and I would no longer be tempted to say "South Asian" when I mean Indian.

It is a very different situation though. 100 years ago, there was just one country, India – with a great deal of internal ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. And then, it was split into two over religion, and then one of those splits split again (due to a whole host of issues, although ethnicity and language were both significant factors). Whereas, China, Japan and Korea were distinct countries going back many centuries. You aren't comparing like and like here.

> They're also far less closely related to each other than say British people and French people.

In ethnic and linguistic terms, the majority populations of both Dhaka and Kolkata are basically the same people, the big difference is their religion (although Kolkata is 20% Muslim, and Dhaka around 3-4% Hindu). One can make similar points about the relationship between Lahore and Ludhiana. It is true that people in Dhaka and Lahore are not closely related, but the same is true between Kolkata and Ludhiana. The case of the British and French doesn't have any real parallels.

Many countries we identify as distinct in Western Europe are much more similar to each other than India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are. For example, France and Spain—both are Catholic, and their languages were considered merely different dialects of Vulgar Latin until the 1400s.

At the height of the Mughal Empire, it encompassed most of what would later be considered India, with the exception of the far south. You can argue that an empire is not a country, but if we argue in that way, well for most of European history, Europe didn't have countries either.

> Even Bengalis, a distinctive ethnolinguistic group, are divided between India and Bangladesh based on religion, which is a major division—a much bigger one than the religious divisions that differentiate countries in Europe.

There is a significant minority of Bengali Muslims in India, and a smaller minority of Bengali Hindus in Bangladesh. The Indian-Pakistan and India-Bangladesh divides have never neatly followed the religious divide, certainly never as neatly as religious nationalists on both sides would have it.

> For example, France and Spain—both are Catholic, and their languages were considered merely different dialects of Vulgar Latin until the 1400s.

Old French and Old Spanish were already identifiably distinct languages by the 9th century. Some argue (following Robert Wright) that a major impetus for them becoming identified as distinct languages was Charlemagne's Latin pronunciation reform. Prior to Charlemagne, Latin in Romance Europe was pronounced based on the local dialect – so the same Latin text would be read aloud using a French pronunciation in France, a Spanish pronunciation in Spain, an Italian pronunciation in Italy, etc. Monks from Britain and Ireland, having no indigenous tradition of Latin pronunciation, instead devised their own based on phonetic spelling. Charlemagne's advisors convinced him (however incorrectly) that the British/Irish tradition of pronouncing Latin was truer to the original, and so he imposed it on the Church–which suddenly made Latin and the vernacular seem like much more different languages. Now, that said, Wright's thesis is controversial – but even its academic critics, I don't think many of them would agree with you in putting the distinction between vulgar Latin and Old Romance so late.

And, while no denying the difference between Islam and Hinduism is bigger than difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, Europe shows parallel cases of countries with a common language and culture, where the major difference is the dominant religion – the primary difference between Austria and Germany, is the former has traditionally had a Catholic supermajority with a small Protestant minority, the latter was traditionally dominated by Protestants, albeit with a large Catholic minority.

"South Asian" = > Racist and Hindu-phobic is the established norm.

All cultures are fractal. For my own ethnic heritage, for example, I could insist on splitting out:

* South Indian Dravidians from North Indian Arynans

* Kannadigas from other South Indians

* Lingayats from Vaishnavites

But that level of detail (absent special contexts where its relevant) would almost always confuse rather than clarify.

> Lingayats from Vaishnavites

This tells me you are probably some kind of humanities graduate from some murican university ?

I'm not sure what part of the Lingayat distinction bothers you. My grandparents would characterize it as "Lingayat" vs "Brahmina"; would you have preferred that framing?

Read replies to this: https://twitter.com/USAndMumbai/status/1787772852084830251

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271871.

This depends on how you frame. It is not diverse for the company, but it could be in the larger social context. Putting the same thing in, say, San Francisco can be different from doing the same in Utah.

Unfortunately this is common, because they do bad things with "diversity", even though diversity itself isn't bad. This isn't a very good defintion of what "diversity" should be, of course. There are many kind of diversity, and which are more important depends on the situation. But, regardless of it, diversity includes white men (and everyone else, too).

Visible diversity in skin colours, height, etc can be relevant for some things (e.g. movies that will have a lot of different people, or when doing research for a computer program that works on pictures of people (to do compression, colour correction for lighting conditions, etc)). Diversity in experience (even if all of them happen to be white men) can be relevant for many things (and is very helpful).

Of course, none of this should mean that you should deny application of other diversity because of their skin colours, height, gender, etc; they should not deny an application for such reasons. Having women in the White House Communications Team is not a bad thing, but that doesn't mean that having men is a bad thing!!! Having men is not a bad thing. One thing being good does not make the other one bad.

Is there any evidence that anybody was _ever_ doing this after about 1950 or so?

Like requiring an applicant for a fullstack python/js position to list in detail all of their Erlang experience, projects, talks and initiatives, and gatekeeping on that.

Now Erlang itself is great, and understanding the principles that guide it will almost certainly help you in your career (even if you never write a single line professionally). But to make this a central focus of acceptance for the job is just plain silly.

My LARGE company is on a tirade to ensure we use diverse supplies. We’re collecting metrics on this so we can proudly state how many diverse vendors we we use. When asked what we define as diverse they stated (among other things) that they were members of the LGBQ community. So I asked “so our company is very much concerned if the owners of the companies we work with are bisexual?”

Im married to a woman, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that I’m bi-sexual. So if, in addition to being attracted to my wife, I’m also attracted to men, then all of a sudden I’m a priority for the company.

It boggles my mind.

Motte and bailey accusations only work if the statemnts in question are being made by the same person. For the debater in the post above at least, is there any evidence he personally is engaging in this? Or anyone else? Otherwise it's a bit fallacious to lump everyone who's pro DEI as one entity.

I think it's perfectly justified in cases where debater self-identifies as part of the "bailey" community -- that is, if in other contexts the debater wouldn't oppose people arguing for the bailey position.

In a textbook, it would be called "equivocation".

> where the debater conflates two topics

Yep.

I continue to be somewhat disturbed by the fact that giving a new name to a problem we've recognized for thousands of years has apparently increased awareness. Did people not realize equivocation was bad before Scott Alexander?

Motte-and-bailey isn't just an argumentative form, it's also a political strategy. It's people pushing/doing controversial thing A but every time they get called on it they bring up uncontroversial thing B. Or, they even retreat to thing B, but then when the pressure is off they come back out and start pushing/doing thing A again.

"Equivocation" covers a wide variety of situations, but motte-and-bailey is more specific and includes the notions of a strategy executed over time which includes action.

The relationship between the two words is akin to the one between “rectangle” and “square”.

Engaging in a genocidal action and then claiming it's self defense when scrutinized is a textbook motte and bailey fallacy. Claiming that people who oppose said genocide are supporters of fringe radical elements within the genocided, is a false equivocation, but not a motte and bailey fallacy. Indeed, you could make your exact argument about association fallacies, or a wide array of other fallacies for that matter - as most tend to involve false equivocation at some point.

There are plenty of organizations and people ready to tear down anything seen as against the party line for their own benefit. It's so much easier to criticize than contribute, and it only takes a few criticisms that ignore nuance and present things in a different context for critical mass to gather behind those misinterpretations.

The same things that make certain public forums resistant to this are the same things limit their growth, or that limit the spread of the message (content bubbles), so I'm not sure how to get around that without a major societal and cultural shift to how information is consumed.

Basically, a "aside from your teaching and research ability, what have you done to improve your campus that would make us want to hire you"

It's much more ambiguous, on what is valuable.

(I have no idea what the hiring process is like, just a random thoughts)

What's more important is how they grade and rank you and make decisions. Eg imagine they only hired you if filled that blank page with a picture of the Pope, even if there are no explicit instructions or questions asking for it.

What if they worked for a dept. that didn't promote these things and may have had policy against them? Why should a candidate need to please yet another committee or reviewer of their "body of work" to now include and require certain achievements in an area that isn't even understood by many and all but squashed now by the supreme court as a tool to recruit students?

Then they lack experience relevant to the job, right? That's like asking "what if the applicant has no experience teaching computer science because he previously worked in the history department", except they can still make up something about feeling oppressed or fighting back against a culture they disagreed with.

This seems like the least problematic thing about mandatory DEI statements: if you value DEI, you should value candidates with some previous experience of working in the DEI industry.

For those reasons, my feelings toward DEI statements are more positive now than they were before. Still, on balance, I think I'm inclined to favor removing DEI statements from faculty applications.

If you actually care enough to study it and propose hiring processes that encourage it then that's an actual worthwhile education process. It can be little stuff... like I hide names on resumes and obscure gender to avoid that very well known bias. It's not perfect, but it's actually a net win all around to do that kind of thing, and you wouldn't know how big a deal it is and how much benefit it is for your team without reading. It's a complicated topic, and I think many of the concepts applied earnestly but scientifically testing them is a good idea. To be ideological.

This requirement wouldn't stop that, necessarily, but it means that such learning occurs after hiring rather than before. And after hiring there's a lot less incentive, and a lot to do.

Interesting take, why do you think it is you likely weren’t expose to DEI in school?

While I’m thinking about it, didn’t we just used to call it “affirmative action”?

no. in short, affirmative action represented an attempt at "equality of opportunity" in the belief that some extra pushes would remediate "the problem"

"equity" refers to forcing particular outcomes, using various measure that operate as "quotas" including the lowering of standards like entrance exam scores.

Affirmative action did not result in enough doctors meeting various criteria, so we must need to force the results we want by whatever means necessary; since we believe all people are equal, anything short of that must be the result of a pernicious mechanism

Oh, ok. Well we used to have a different word for that.

DEI statements are important because they show individual awareness of historical inequities and current biases that form modern society.

In an organization that wishes to promote more equitable outcomes for society and its employees, ensuring that existing/prospective employees are aware of biases that might color their own judgement is useful in counterbalancing them.

As a consequence, a DEI statement at the time of hiring or promotion is useful in encouraging self-reflection and promoting DEI.

... that said, from a personal perspective (and with apologies to anyone working in HR), they seem like the typical "moderately good idea that's run through the HR cost center grist mill and comes out as the most unimaginative, milquetoast check box possible" implementation.

Even assuming that’s true, what is the rationale for plucking that issue out of the various ones facing society and demanding that professors express concern about it? Forcing people to characterize something as a priority is itself quite an ideological imposition.

In the engineering meetings I can tell you which one happens. And in the executive meetings that certain people can’t wait to spend 5-10 min of probably $20,000 worth of a dozen executives time with their feelings on the matter.

I fondly remember a heated discussion about chainsaw safety techniques.

That way they can point to their statement anytime grant writers/sponsors need to show their respective stakeholders that they’re ’good folks’.

Don’t worry, regardless they’ll still treat their grad students as terribly as the law allows (and a bit worse).

If so, then I wouldn’t consider them performative at least.

There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society. The threat these represent to our long term survival and prosperity are such that we are keen to at least acknowledge and mark our and our prospective collaborators’ efforts to improve the status quo.

Maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe it’s asking for a virtue signal in service of performative posturing. Maybe this requirement had adverse effects (evidently it has.)

But there is a through-line of coherent logic, and the total failure here may be cause for alarm.

I think you can be for DEI as a concept and as a corporate or school policy, but against the performative act of writing it out as some kind of weird "pledge of allegiance" in a job application.

I hasten to restate that is my understanding of the premise, in the spirit of collectively untangling the causal chain here. This is incendiary stuff on HN!

I (and a lot of us I think) follow you up to this point, but then you lose us here.

How does a written statement, the expected content of which is clearly known, give any understanding of the individual's position? This type of approach to education seems to me that it actively harms the ability to sway people's opinions.

I have this issue with a lot of discussions of DEI, there are a lot of arguments that support the DEI goal and a dearth of arguments that support the methods being used to achieve that goal.

ChatGPT, please write me a DEI statement for this job interview.

As per Dang’s guidelines above (specifically for this thread), this should not have been allowed on HN.

Now I wonder: Why is it here?

The internet gods bestowed two* of these on us today. The other one is Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267639. I posted an answer there to someone who asked more or less the same question, just about the other topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267862. But the principles are the same. If you're willing to read it mutatis mutandis and maybe take a look at some of the other posts I linked to, you should find what you're looking for.

* (No, that's not a trend—just random fluctuation)

I'm very skeptical that there is any threat to our survival here, or that DEI is any kind of response capable of resolving it. DEI is about "justice", a set of ethical principles, not about some utilitarian calculation about social survival or prosperity.

It seems facially implausible to me, given that America became prosperous when these inequalities were much worse. Why do we accept this premise as a given?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality

As someone who is pro DEI and participated in DEI related activities and brainstorms during hiring: I very much doubt that.

No one thinks inequality is desirable. The opposition you speak of think it's unavoidable. And bad public policy will have effects that make the situation worse for everyone.

I suggest that's an extraordinarily naive statement.

No True Scotsman detected.

I suggest that categorical statement that, universally, everyone is against inequality, needs some justification. Historically it's certainly not true AT ALL.

“ As an imprecise working definition (not for all times and places but for the United States today), “far right” is used here to mean political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural, ”

In a world with limited resources I think it makes sense to allocate more resources towards people who perform acts for society which require rare skill sets, talent, etc. That might mean more money, it might mean land, it might mean status, or anything else really.

The idea being that those rewards both serve as motivation and also help those people to focus on the good work that they are doing.

You can apply this to basically anything - I think that a more beautiful person, all else being equal, should recieve favourable treatment over an ugly one.

The main downside of such an approach seems to be that, to put it simply, losers get less than winners and to some people that seems unfair. But it's only unfair if the rewards allocated aren't proportional to merit.

I don't really consider this to be controversial to be honest - I think someone who is twice as good as me as a programmer, or contributes twice as much value to the business, or hell, is twice as good at football as me - should receive at least twice as much. That's unequal, but it's also sane and right.

A society in which the children of successful people are prioritised over the children of unsuccessful people is almost certain to lead to better outcomes for exactly the same reasons.

I came from an underprivileged background myself, if I were investing money with an aim to generating a return, I'd far sooner give it to a banker's son than someone from the estate I grew up on. I was the exception, not the rule, and the older I get the more I figure I must just be some sort of genetic freak, since the overwhelming opinion seems to be that our fate is predestined, nowadays.

But I thought we were talking merit and opportunity? No, being a banker's son doesn't predestine you to being more skillful. You should already have enough counterexamples to demonstrate that fact.

Your comment is borderline bewildering. It's like corruption and nepotism don't exist.

I think this needs to be backed up with evidence rather than merely asserted. I've been reading through a number of books by Thomas Sowell lately and he presents enough statistical evidence to explain disparities without any hint of racism, sexism, etc. Regardless of if you agree with him or not, the mere fact that alternate theories exist that explain why society looks as it does today should be enough to question the foundational problem that DEI claims to address.

Take as an example the gender pay gap which is presented as women earning 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. While statistically true in aggregate, DEI tends to treat this axiomatically as a sign of sexism. If you dig into the statistics the vast majority of this difference is due to the fact that many women voluntarily take time off of their career to raise children.

Expect there is evidence to suggest that women that earn a higher income are less likely to leave the workforce, which is further influenced by access to affordable childcare and dual incomes.

The point is that when you control for these factors, a woman with the same title and responsibilities as a man will earn less for the same work.

That can't possibly be true, because in a market economy, the more-expensive workers (men) would be laid off and replaced by less-expensive, equally-capable "same title and responsibilities" workers (women). This doesn't seem to be the case on a grand scale, which means it's more deep/complex than the "men get paid more than women" headline we're all used to seeing.

So you've done more search than everyone else putting out data? Maybe you can share all your hard-earned discoveries on the subject, since so you're so confidently well-informed.

Men account for 13% of nurses, but average $90k vs $76k for women.

https://blog.carlow.edu/2022/12/29/how-the-gender-pay-gap-im...

Female lawyers under 35 make 90% of their male counterparts, but the gap increases to 76% by middle age.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers...

The trend continues for doctors, police, and even teachers.

> lack the know-how to simply hire women and save 23% of labor costs

If you think "know-how" is the problem, you're ill equipped for this conversation.

Your study on nurses offers an explanation in the article:

> Male nurses also reported working more hours per week, at an average 39 hours plus five hours of overtime, while female nurses reported working an average of 37 hours plus four hours of overtime.

I agree that if you just count the W-2s and ignore hours worked, subfields, travel, etc. then men make more than women. My whole point is that this kind of comparison is naive.

Likewise your study on lawyers grouped a hugely varied profession all into the same category. As an analogue, take doctors. Yes male and female doctor have different average incomes even for the same level of experience. But that doesn't capture the fact that over 70% of anesthesiologists are male while in pediatrics it's the opposite. This one will have an income disparity even when men and women are equally paid for the same work. It's a similarly naive analysis to lump together all lawyers into one category.

It's a fantasy world to believe that people operate purely on rational and logical long-term thinking. What's your rationale for slavery? Why couldn't women vote until recently? What's your rationale for why American women couldn't go to bars unattended as late as the 1970s? There's literally no shortage of examples showing the mistreatment of women, yet it's hard to believe that pay discrepancy remains till this day?

The entire premise if flawed if your operating under the assumption that people think in market and game theory. Prejudices and biases easily overcome rational thinking.

> Your study on nurses offers an explanation in the article:

The differences in hours doesn't account for the difference in pay.

> over 70% of anesthesiologists are male while in pediatrics it's the opposite

Show me a single study that reinforces the data that backs up your position that satisfies the level of granularity you're grasping at. Until then, the research and data that's in supports only one of our positions.

Slavery existed because preindustrial societies were heavily labor intensive and the returns on more skilled labor was marginal. The industrial revolution changed this, which is why abolition movements largely coincided with industrialization.

Restrictions of women's liberties stem from thousands of years of family dynamics where child mortality rates meant that women had to spend most of their fertile years bearing and caring for children. The replacement rate in preindustrial societies was something like 5-6 births per woman due to such high infant mortality rates.

> The differences in hours doesn't account for the difference in pay

It actually does, men work 2 more normal hours and 1 more overtime hour on average. Assuming overtime is paid at 2x normal wages this is about a 10% disparity in paid hours. And again, there's more than just hours worked there's travel nursing, different metro areas, and more.

> Show me a single study that reinforces the data that backs up your position that satisfies the level of granularity you're grasping at.

You're asking me to prove a negative. I don't doubt you can find individual instances of discrimination against women (and against men), my point is that the large disparities between men's and women's average wages overwhelmingly stem from differences in men and women's behavior rather than discrimination.

It's not "widely spread", it's widely researched. Show me a study that explains the pay gap as owing to mostly to behavior.

You've provided post-hoc academic rationale, rather than something the average person would have been operating under. People simply do not make decisions the way you seem to be under the impression of. I'm sure the average slave owner used your explanation rather than believing that subset of the population was sub-human chattel.

An example of a behavioral difference is salary negotiation, where assertive women are viewed negatively while a man chest-thumping is viewed positively. Tell that woman who took a lower salary because of cultural stigmas and traditions your rationale and see how far that goes. I've been in the room when a man waved off a woman because of such behavior.

> You're asking me to prove a negative.

I'm asking you to back up your claim with evidence, which you have thusly been unable to do. What you have done is nitpick specific details like that's a gotcha, rather than owing to statistics and population sampling.

And yes, when you account for experience, field, location, etc. the pay disparity effectively disappears (less than 1%)

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/08/01/are-wome...

I frankly see it as a cheap shortcut that some very privileged people want to take to try to wash away the sins of our racist past, not to help people, but to make ourselves feel better- or attempt to.

I don't think that's true.

Suppose you find a bona fide instance of ongoing discrimination. Let's pick an egregious example. Karen, the HR manager, is an avowed white supremacist and automatically rejects all black applicants. Then you could improve DEI by removing her. Clearly not an act of discrimination.

The problem comes when Karen doesn't work for your company, instead she's the superintendent of the local school system and screws the underprivileged black kids out of the chance to go to college. Then twenty years later you're trying to hire college graduates from the local candidate pool and they're disproportionately white. You can't fix this through candidate selection because the damage is already done and any attempt to fudge your own numbers is not going to save the kids from twenty years ago who have already been screwed out of an education. Attempting to is unable to reverse its effects, all you're doing is hiring the few upper class black kids who made it because their parents had money for private school, or the ones from a different locality with no Karen and thereby no corresponding disadvantage, at the expense not of privileged upper class white kids who get in by a wide surplus, but instead the white kids from poor families at the margin. Meanwhile you're doing nothing for the poor black kids who are Karen's actual victims.

You have to root out the Karens where they are because you can't fix it years later when their statistical consequences show up somewhere else. By then the missing victims are already out of the pool.

Diversity, the platonic form, is about diversity of thought, opinion, and experience. It is about improving our ability as a group to solve the problems we face by introducing alternative perspectives and viewpoints. It has nothing to do with race or gender necessarily but demand for diversity greatly outweighs the supply and as with all measured things, measuring the number of “diverse” hires has ceased to be a meaningful metric. Granted, it never was a meaningful metric as such, but it has become actively harmful in modern day.

I absolutely agree with this. To use myself as an example: as a Bangladeshi who grew up in the American south, I bring a super diverse viewpoint to a group of say white new englanders.

But why does that matter in a professional setting? I’d love to hear someone precisely articulate how they think I’d behave differently from a white new englander in the same position, and why that “diversity” would make the team “stronger.”

But things like that often have more to do with culture/geography than race. Someone from Mississippi will have a much different perspective than someone from Massachusetts, even if they're the same race. And a larger difference in perspective than two people who grew up across the street from each other, even if they're different races. But that doesn't show up in the group photo for the brochure.

If not, isn’t it concerning that in the year 2024 we casually assume that these sorts of differences exist? Isn’t that an example of DEI thinking accentuating the notion of differences? It seems like a new take on this: https://youtu.be/E8PBrhFN35c?si=90DSnwgHubAvJwr8

https://blog.grio.com/2020/06/uxui-design-across-cultures-us...

Ethnicity is then being used as a proxy for culture, even though it's a bad one, because it's a visible one.

It's basically starting from the premise that cultural diversity is valuable and then applying Goodhart's Law to the thing most easily measured. Whereas traditional racism is more like starting from the premise that cultural homogeneity is valuable and then applying Goodhart's Law to the thing most easily measured. It's applying the same fallacy to the opposite premise, which is an error regardless of which premise is correct.

This is ideological tea-leaf reading.

Suppose you don't care anything for all of this political noise and you just want to make money. Do you want to use the same colors on your website in the countries where red implies danger as the ones where red implies prosperity and vitality? If it will be the same for everyone, might knowing how some large subset of the viewers will interpret it change what you choose?

just like how 13 is taboo, 4 and 7 can be taboo. these things do matter sometimes. respect matters.

Show me some examples and evidence. Anyone can make claims based off of cliches, but when it comes time to back it up with real world examples everyone either goes silent or gets upset and makes the same claim more aggressively.

Chinese historical art has a use of red due to cinnabar being believed to be healthy and that persists in a few areas like red envelopes, but 'red means prosperity in some cultures' doesn't mean their computer interfaces are different. Their stop lights are the same too.

https://soft4europe-france.com/documentation2018/11-40/EN/do...

I don't know about that prosperity thing, but I can give you an example that happens a lot. Some groups use red to mean stopped and green to mean moving, while others use red to mean danger and moving, and green to mean safe and stopped. This isn't directly country-related but I believe there's significant variation based on location.

Oh, wait, while searching to double check that I found an example of exactly what you asked for. CJK stock market displays tend to use red for increases, while the West uses red for decreases.

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-JH281_0708NY_M_...

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/A14FJ5/a-screen-with-the-market-sh...

You can also do a text search for china red green stocks, or japan red green stocks.

Bonus fun fact: If the little display on the taxi in japan is red, that means available, and green means occupied.

Why does everyone have the same colors in traffic lights (except for japan's blue lights which comes from language, not cultural significance)

https://www.rd.com/article/heres-japan-blue-traffic-lights/

It's funny that this person speaks multiple languages and actually used different apps but was downvoted anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271465

I'll quote it again.

"UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures."

And all the examples I gave have red meaning opposite things in user interfaces based on cultural assumptions.

Off/danger. Number up/number down. Occupied/available.

Websites were just one example of UI.

> It's funny that this person speaks multiple languages and actually used different apps but was downvoted anyway.

They said they haven't seen any. That doesn't override actual examples!

If it was cultural then newer designs like computer interfaces would be affected. Also you ignored traffic lights.

That sounds like a description of culture.

> If it was cultural then newer designs like computer interfaces would be affected.

Does the big TV run by a computer not count as an interface?

Okay, do you have some pictures of chinese stock websites?

> Also you ignored traffic lights.

What about them? Yes Japan uses the same color scheme as the US for traffic lights. Because the idea spread that way. I don't see how that's relevant to either of my examples that talked about Japan?

...you're not suggesting that one situation where colors match invalidates situations where colors are different, right?

So either colors were chosen because they have a deep cultural meaning or they were chosen arbitrarily?

Older choices affect newer choices, and consistent choices become culture.

Once upon a time, stock chart makers made an arbitrary choice influenced by older choices that had become culture. Those older choices being a general association with fortune, and a specific association with loss of money. (With intermediate steps, I think, but I'm being brief.) And those associations were different for different groups. Now the chart colors are part of culture too.

A choice being arbitrary doesn't mean it was random. You can trace the influence here.

But even if it had been random, it's culture now. Money in red has implications, and the implications vary.

Different choices have different levels of cultural depth. Often the depth is zero. But it varies.

And culture is created by arbitrary decisions coalescing into guidelines. If it's not coalescing, then it's not culture. You have to look at the big picture to tell if something is culture or not.

You're implying that if red's meaning in one situation is the same, then red's other meanings in other situations must be the same.

Okay I guess. I don't know why you would think that, but I don't have much hope of convincing you otherwise.

> all different and arbitrary

Those are the extremes of the spectrum.

Color choices are not at either extreme.

Most color choices are arbitrary, some of them are shallowly cultural, and some of them are deeply cultural.

HN having an orange banner at the top isn't significantly cultural. Traffic lights are worldwide culture. Black or green for positive money and red for negative money are US culture. Red for positive money and black or green for negative money are Chinese culture. These choices tie into older associations, which affects the depth. But even if they were shallow they'd still be culture.

Here's a link full of its own links https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/6982/excep...

Or we can look at how old the western association with red as negative money is: https://grammarist.com/idiom/in-the-red-and-in-the-black/

If you wanted specific links you should have said so 4 days ago after I wrote "You can also do a text search for china red green stocks, or japan red green stocks."

If you want a citation for HN's orange not being deeply cultural, then you got me, I didn't actually check. But let's see... "The orange logo was chosen because it was the opposite of VC websites which were typically forest green or navy blue" yeah that's not deep culture.

Really? Can you provide actual examples?

JFYI, I speak Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Mandarin Chinese. I've used native-written apps in all these languages, and I have not seen any significant variations in the UI color selections.

I guess Mandarin Chinese is probably the best example because the red color is seen as more "festive", so it's more common in various app icons.

On the one hand, there are people who deeply understand the technical intricacies of Unicode BiDi yet can’t actually read Arabic or Hebrew

On the other hand, if the business doesn’t view Arabic markets (or Israel) as viable to pursue, it doesn’t matter how much you are aware of those languages, it is irrelevant to the product

And what about backend developer roles, where UI concerns like BiDi are largely a non-issue?

More broadly speaking, exposure to different languages can often make you aware of issues that are not familiar to someone who only knows English, such as e.g.: existence of grammatical gender; pluralization that has to deal with more cases than just one/many (e.g. different forms for 2/3/...); the fact that placeholders in a format string may need to be reordered in different locales; drastically different length of text in different languages; the fact that notions such as upper/lowercase are not universal; sequences of letters that are treated as single characters in some languages; etc. Now of course all this applies to non-native speakers as well, but for more "exotic" languages out there it's usually their native speakers who provide such experience.

I work in the post secondary education sector. I am the only person on my team who doesn’t have a college degree. I often have to help them see our software through that lense so that we don’t make assumptions that all of our users are college educated or even know what their post-high school options are.

I’m white, but I find this pretty offensive. As if enslaving black people, depriving them of the right to vote, torturing and murdering them, preventing them from using the same facilities as white people, terrorizing with police brutality - as if all that isn’t enough to warrant reparations.

In this day and age, we are still trying to get the police to stop murdering black men in their custody. The ability to just not see all that is truly astounding.

I wish I could live in your world.

The difference between you and me is that I live in the world I’ve seen, you live in the world the news media has shown you. If you are actually a Caucasian American I can say with 99% certainty you have never personally witnessed a police officer murder _anyone_ let alone an African American. Furthermore, the statement I made was an implication that reparations as a concept is absurd, not that African American slaves haven’t been made to suffer in the semi-recent past. The point is that every people, every race, has at some point been a victim of slavery, torture, suffering, genocide, and so on. Reality is cruel. The obsession with semi-recent American history is just cherry-picking based on your own personal experience and history, it has nothing to do with the philosophical moral imperative of reparations.

your point is so utterly disingenuous it begs the question: why do you have such vitriol for understanding that certain groups are not treated preferentially? is paying attention to minorities and their plight so egregious?

not everything caters to the white cisgender heterosexual christian man.

Corporate America (which increasingly includes universities whose primary business is endowment investment) don’t just want to wash away our past, they want to ensure they can keep operating business as usual.

DEI is insurance. Yeah the bad thing may happen but we paid for it before hand so we are insulated against further repercussions.

You mean nearly everybody agrees in your circle, because you can easily find strong opposition if you bother to look. And that’s after making saying the opposite out loud a career-ending offense in lots of places, kinda hard to not agree with it if you want to remain employable.

My personal opinion/observation is that as corporate and academic has trended towards less direct confrontation/arguments, this has resulted in a lot more passive aggressive behavior such as statements like these, some debatable "codes of conduct", etc.

I mean no harm when I say that it has always felt like a more "feminine" way of fighting and arguing vs "masculine" like physical or verbal arguing. Perhaps it's a result of more women in the workforce and leadership.

The original sin of this country was slavery. We continue to try to find ways to ameliorate the long term harm which it did to our national culture. DEI is one of those attempts. And likewise, there is a desire to treat all people as individuals with equal opportunity. For the most part, this country has not lived up to that ideal.

The large crowd was easily swayed into going along with stuff like this and its just taken a while to get rolled back because we realized it went too far.

What do I know is that I have not met anyone who used that term who could explain it, or most of their other very confidently-held beliefs either.

There is such a thing as "cultural Marxism", and it is not a conspiracy theory invented by the Nazis or anyone else.

Consider for example the 1981 book by academic Richard Weiner, "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" [0] – it discusses "cultural Marxism" as a real thing, in a positive light, and it is a real academic book, not some conspiracy theory hoax. Or similarly consider Dennis L. Dworkin's 1997 book "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies" [1] – not some conspiratorial tome, it was published by Duke University Press. Or American philosopher Frederic Jameson's 2007 book "Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism" [2] – also published by Duke University Press, and not a conspiratorial work either

Cultural Marxism is a real movement in post-war Marxism and academia. To what extent it influenced movements such as BLM is a question about which reasonable people can disagree. But its existence is not a conspiracy theory.

No doubt some of the more extreme claims uninformed people have made about it do venture into the realms of conspiracy theory. But it would be wrong to assume that everyone who makes a claim like "cultural Marxism influenced BLM" is using the phrase "cultural Marxism" in such a sense. You'd have to investigate what they actually mean by it.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=4G0XAAAAIAAJ

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=dY1Cgg8NV64C

[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=pY69yJnmEAYC

This might be contrasted with “postmodern Marxism” or “postmodern neo-Marxism” which is some kind of pseudointellectual epithet but is seems fundamentally incoherent. Postmodernism rejects grand narratives about society, but Marxism itself is a grand narrative (namely, that capitalist society should be framed as a class struggle between workers and capitalists).

In the other hand, I think there’s reason to believe the term “cultural Marxism” has undergone semantic shift recently. I see this quite frequently in progressive/conservative politics (another example is the term “woke”). So it may be best to either retire the term altogether or at least explicitly define it first. The cultural Marxism discussed in 60s and 70s academia is not the same thing as what the Norway terrorist was referring to in his manifesto.

Postmodern Marxism is a real thing too. See for example yet another Duke University Press book (Duke University is really into this kind of stuff for some reason) from 2001, "Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism" [0]. Another more recent book is "The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life" (University of Westminster Press, 2020) [1]

Are postmodernism and Marxism inherently contradictory? Well, "postmodernism" is a very broad and amorphous school of thought. The idea of postmodernism as opposition to "grand narratives" is due to Lyotard, and yes that idea seems rather incompatible with Marxism, at least in its classic form; but other postmodernist thinkers emphasised different ideas, whose incompatibility with Marxism is less obvious.

I also am picking up on the fact that you are obliquely referring to Jordan Peterson, who is known to use the phrases “postmodern Marxism” and “postmodern neo-Marxism”. Honestly, I've never paid him a great deal of attention – I'm neither one of his fans nor one of his haters, I'm just not that interested in him. So, I can't say whether he is using the phrase "postmodern Marxism" in the same sense as those academic books I cite do, or in a different sense.

> The cultural Marxism discussed in 60s and 70s academia is not the same thing as what the Norway terrorist was referring to in his manifesto.

I don’t know about that. Let me put it this way: the World Zionist Congress (WZC) is a real thing, an international conference that was first held in Switzerland in 1897, and it was held for the 38th time in Jerusalem in 2020. So the conference is not a conspiracy theory. But, if you go looking for them, you will find antisemites who will tell you that the WZC secretly controls the world’s banks and governments-that is a baseless conspiracy theory. However, even though we have both a real world factual discourse about the WZC and an unhinged antisemitic conspiracy theory about it, that doesn’t mean that the two discourses are using the term “World Zionist Congress” to mean fundamentally different things-no, they are both talking about the same thing. In the same way, just because Breivik talked about “Cultural Marxism”, doesn’t in itself prove he was talking about something different - he could be talking about the same thing, but making baseless/unhinged claims about it, and wrongly using those claims to justify his senseless mass murder of innocents

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=0PdqvSOo-rgC

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=qSkNEAAAQBAJ

As a simple example, in the conspiracy, cultural Marxism is used nearly synonymously with multiculturalism. Neither of your links mention multiculturalism even once.

And, it is false that "cultural Marxism" the real world academic movement has "no relationship" with Breivik's concept of "cultural Marxism". In his manifesto, Breivik cites figures such as Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and György Lukács, who were foundational influences on that academic movement. So he is talking about the same thing. That doesn't mean his criticisms of it are sensible, nor do they in any way justify the unspeakable horror of his violence.

Imagine reading an antisemitic screed against the World Zionist Congress, which mentions its real founder and first President Theodor Herzl, and other key early figures such as Max Nordau, Abraham Salz and Samuel Pineles – but then baselessly accuses them of secretly controlling the world's governments. The baseless and irrational accusation doesn't change the identity of the targets of the accusation, it doesn't mean "the screed isn't actually attacking Theodor Herzl et al, rather it is attacking imaginary persons who by coincidence have the same names". In the same way, Breivik's claims about the academic cultural Marxist movement are ignorant and over-the-top, but that doesn't mean he isn't actually talking about them, and instead talking about something completely unrelated.

Again, the Zionist example: there are definitely criticisms of Zionism which are nothing more than baseless antisemitic conspiracy theories (e.g. "Zionist Occupation Government"). But, that doesn't mean all criticisms of it are so baseless. If you read pro-Palestinian authors, or even left-wing Jewish Israelis, you will encounter critiques of Zionism, which whether they ultimately be right or wrong, can't be dismissed on the same grounds.

You will also find claims that some people on the pro-Israel side want to erase the difference between non-antisemitic criticisms of Zionism and antisemitic criticisms of Zionism, in order to put Zionism itself beyond criticism – and I think sometimes those claims are correct. On the other hand, sometimes pro-Palestinian criticisms of Zionism do cross the line into antisemitism, and as applied to those particular cases the claim is false. Part of the problem here, is it isn't always clear where to draw the line between non-antisemitic and antisemitic criticisms of Zionism–it is a question about reasonable people can disagree. Non-antisemitic criticism of Zionism and antisemitic criticism of Zionism aren't totally disjoint, they bleed into each other at the edges.

And I think we have a similar situation with "cultural Marxism". Yes, Breivik's criticisms of it are conspiratorial nonsense – but is everyone else's? There are right-wing criticisms of it which, whether correct or incorrect, arguably aren't "conspiratorial nonsense" – see for an example, see the 2018 article by the conservative lawyer Alexander Zubatov in the Jewish magazine Tablet, "Just Because Anti-Semites Talk About ‘Cultural Marxism’ Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Real" [0]. There are even left-wing criticisms of it – the cultural Marxist desire to switch the focus of Marxism from economic to cultural issues was (and still is) heavily criticised by orthodox Marxists who view that switch as a distraction and a mistake.

And I see two other parallels to the Zionism case: firstly, just as some Zionists arguably seek to dishonestly erase the distinction between non-antisemitic and antisemitic criticisms of Zionism, in order to put it beyond criticism – in a similar way, my own impression is that some progressives seek to erase the distinction between conspiratorial (even antisemitic) criticisms of cultural Marxism, and non-conspiratorial (even if possibly mistaken) conservative criticisms of it, in order to shut down debate.

And secondly, just as the boundary between non-antisemitic and antisemitic criticisms of Zionism is open to debate, I think the same is true for the boundary between non-conspiratorial and conspiratorial criticisms of cultural Marxism. In my own mind, Zubatov is clearly on the "could well be wrong but not conspiratorial" side of that line, and Breivik is definitely on the "conspiratorial" side of the line – but I'm less clear about where to put something like the Heritage Foundation's criticisms of it. [1] And that's the core problem with your idea that we consider conspiratorial criticisms and non-conspiratorial criticisms of "cultural Marxism" to be talking about two completely unrelated things – it assumes a clearcut boundary between the two which may not actually exist. I think it makes more sense to speak of a continuum of criticisms of the one thing (ranging from the reasonable to the ludicrous, with the boundary between the two being debatable) rather than claiming the reasonable criticisms and the ludicrous criticisms are criticising two completely different things.

[0] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/just-becaus...

[1] https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2022-11/SR262.p...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

"Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory" is about claiming that said post-war academic movement is a "Jewish plot". Yes, that's an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But stating that the academic movement exists, and discussing to what degree its ideas influenced contemporary social movements such as BLM, is not a conspiracy theory, and not per se antisemitic.

I think what is happening here, is some people are motivated to ignore the difference between what is a reasonable argument ("to what degree was a contemporary social movement influenced by a contemporary academic theory") and what is an unreasonable one ("it's a Jewish plot"), because they want to shut down that reasonable argument

Did you bother to look at the sources? https://newrepublic.com/article/144317/trumps-racism-myth-cu...

Good stuff.

"The tradition of Marxist cultural analysis has also been referred to as "cultural Marxism", and "Marxist cultural theory", in reference to Marxist ideas about culture."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_cultural_analysis

It is >also< a name used by people who believe in a conspiracy theory about egalitarian politics.

When Richard Dawkins spoke at UC Berkeley in 2008, he argued that "raising awareness" about feminism by changing how we speak and think has changed society for the better. (In the same discussion, he seeks to do the same for children's freedom from their parents' religion.) There is no doubt that Western society has changed how it treats and speaks about women.

That said, Dawkins has in more recent years found himself opposing identity politics as they seek to change language usage and perceptions of gender.

Correction: Dawkins doesn't care one whit about gender, and he has literally said so. He only cares when people cross into talking about sex, make incorrect claims about the nature of sex (spectrums and such), conflate sex with gender, and make unscientific claims about being able to change one's sex. Basically, when they enter his wheelhouse and start making a confusing mess of things.

> making a confusing mess of things.

Which seems to be the prevailing state of discourse about the matter of DEI. If I may add a reflection, maybe it was just relatively easier sociologically to recognise the injustices and inequalities that feminism decried.

> the nature of sex (spectrums and such)

Sex shows itself to be a spectrum pretty often.

> unscientific claims about being able to change one's sex

Phenotype or genotype?

They don't always match even without any medical intervention, and a change in hormones can drastically change phenotype.

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/178678872412412757...

You can debate him there if this is your hobby horse.

This isn't in fact my hobby horse so without more specifics I'll just treat him as talking past people and move on.

Looking at the video in the second link, it looks like he only spent three minutes talking about trans people and I don't see any explanation there about how you're supposed to apply his universal biological definition to individual people.

"It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish."

Sometimes you don't get gametes. At that point, you either need to exclude those people from your classification system because it's ill-suited for this task, or you need to make your classification system significantly more complicated because there's a lot of edge cases.

HR is also a hilariously complex set of rules and bullshit that isn't that easy to manage in large organizations. Separating out DEI specifically from HR allows companies and organizations the ability to have employees ensure that the obligations of companies regarding their legal obligation towards discrimination laws are met without interfering with core HR functions. Companies haven't been adopting DEI out of the goodness of their hearts. There's a direct financial advantage when you can prove to a court that you have provided direction on issues regarding diversity. It's just a collection of CYA, and their DEI statements are an extension of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...

There are contexts where it is mandatory but makes no sense, like NSF Fellowship Applications where they're asking someone who is just finishing an undergraduate degree and is proposing a research project that ends in a PhD -- who has effectively no influence on hiring or even culture really, and is supposed to focus on the technical aspects and personal aspects of who they are. There are things you can fit in there, but let's say the mandatory question is worded so confusingly that it is hard to even guess what to write about. What, you're going to hire people to assist you in your research under DEI principles when you have no control over the budget? It's just confusing for someone in that position.

Staff hiring? That kind of makes more sense honestly, trying to be non-ideological here. Those people can actually hire people and create a culture that is either DEI positive or not, whatever you believe about whether they should.

In academia, faculty functionally ARE HR people - with significant power

I work in industry.

Is my my tech lead an HR person? My manager? My VP? My Board? My majority shareholders? If not, why is a faculty professor an HR person?

Professor is like CEO of 8 person company (or independent division). All your other examples are cogs in huge machine.

First, someone identifies an opportunity to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion in some way. DEI statements in academia, codes of conduct in open source projects, some rules around topics or specific language on a social media site, I'm sure you can name some other examples.

Now, this new thing may be a way to address the problem, or not. The problem it's trying to address might have been well understood or not. One way or another the idea gets some momentum.

Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is carefully crafted with a veneer of respectability and plausibility. Any accusations are re-directed. There are people who are motivated and very skilled at making plausible sounding bad-faith arguments. The plausibility of course also convinces people might not intend to be making a bad faith argument, and so are authentic in their indignant responses to accusations of acting in bad faith. Still, the entire point of the arguments was ultimately to disrupt efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to uphold inequality. In some cases these bad faith arguments can end up being a vast majority of the discussion. They make up maybe 80% (not an exact figure) of the comments in any given HN thread about anything tangentially related to DEI for example.

The people trying to make a positive change who have been at it for a while are generally exhausted with trying to deal with the torrent of bad faith arguments, quickly recognize the pattern of them, and ultimately often end up serving as fuel for further bad-faith arguments.

In the end, it becomes nearly impossible to have a productive good faith discussion about whether the original idea is good or not, or how to improve it, because nobody can disentangle legitimate contributors and arguments from the torrent of bad faith actors who are ultimately just trying to disrupt the process. Meanwhile, communities that ought to be served by the initiative are often left standing around watching their value as people or rights to participate equally being thrown around as an abstract subject of ideological argument.

Without any better options, people double down on the original idea because it was at least made in good faith.

It might sound like all of that is an argument against DEI statements- after all, I just spent several paragraphs talking about why it would be hard to have a reasonable good faith debate about it. Still, I think that in this situation they serve a couple of useful purposes. First, I think that it moves discussions around concrete improvements away from a forum where they can be undermined by bad faith arguments and toward a form where individual authors of DEI statements can focus on concrete actions. It incentivizes action over getting mired in these bad faith arguments. If one is to write specifically about how they have or will work to improve DEI, then they necessarily must move past the bad faith and concern trolling arguments and pick some specific actions. Second, I think that it acts as a useful honeypot for people who simply can't act in good faith. If you can't identify any dimension at all along which you will work to improve DEI for any group, then it's hard to see how you can further that part of the mission of an organization. Finally, while it is virtue signaling, that doesn't necessarily need to be bad.

Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be thrown around lightly in a good faith post.

My point isn't that anyone disagreeing with a particular suggestion is arguing in bad faith, it's that there are enough bad faith arguments that it becomes effectively impossible to have a productive discussion.

> Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be thrown around lightly in a good faith post.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. Are 80% of the comments I see on DEI related threads actually acting in bad faith, or am I simply so exhausted by the constant stream of bad faith arguments that I lack the ability to discern between people acting in bad faith, uninformed people acting in good faith parroting bad-faith actors arguments, and people who are legitimately trying to engage. For that matter, am I an exhausted person who is simply tired of accusations of "wokeism" being thrown at me when I advocate for basic respect and decency, or am I a bad faith actor who tried to sneak an outrageous claim into a reasonable sounding post in order to undermine people who are in favor of DEI programs by making them all sound unreasonable? I may know that I'm simply exhausted, cynical, and seeing a steadily increasing amount of anti-DEI rhetoric here, but such is the state of discourse that there's no way for you to know for sure one way or another.

(I still catch myself using it sometimes, and will try to do better.)

In December 2020, New Republic published an essay by the African-American Marxist Adolph Reed Jr (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania), entitled "Beyond the Great Awokening: Reassessing the legacies of past black organizing" [0] in which he criticises "the Woke".

Now, you may or may not agree with his criticisms, but he is not using "a thought terminating cliche". On the contrary, he means something quite specific by it: a contemporary form of progressive politics which prioritises race over class, as opposed to Reed's own classic Marxism which prioritises class over race.

I myself tend to avoid invoking the word, because I find it derails discussions from whatever the substantive topic was, into debating what that word means and the appropriateness of using it.

But, on the other hand, I think the phenomenon which Reed labels as "Woke" is a real thing, and if we aren't to call it "Woke", what then should we call it? I get the impression that some people don't want to let people call it anything, as part of a strategy to put it beyond criticism.

[0] https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin...

This is the point I was trying to make.

However, I think the other points I made, that (a) some invocations of it are legitimate, and (b) it serves a useful purpose in labelling a real phenomenon, for which we don't have any widely accepted alternative label – still stand.

Try using those words instead of the woke buzzwords. Everyone else is having the same reaction to "DEI"/etc that you're having to their common arguments.

Or perhaps your experiences on DEI run contrary to the typical experiences of other people? You seem awfully eager to call other commenters bad faith or misinformed, but do little in the way of introspection. It reminds me of an old joke:

Someone sees on the news live coverage of a car driving the wrong way down the freeway their spouse uses to commute. Worried, they call their spouse to warn them, "honey there's a car driving down the freeway, be careful!"

"It's not one, there's hundreds of them!"

As for myself, "DEI" has been a thinly veiled dogwhistle for illegal hiring policies at 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at for the last 10 years. Examples in include: explicitly designating segment of headcount as exclusive to certain races and genders, setting specific percentage quotas on the basis of protected class (and these quotas were well above industry-wide representation of these groups), and constructing separate hiring pipelines depending on race and gender.

However, I'm not going to accuse people who have different or opposing views on DEI as acting in bad faith. 75% of the companies I've worked at used DEI as a dogwhistle for illegal policies, but that's still a very narrow slice of the world at large. I'm not going to allege that people are being disingenuous or acting in bad faith because I recognize that people have different experiences with DEI and can arrive at vastly different opinions on the acronym while acting entirely in good faith. I suggest you do the same.

Why? As a non-white immigrant, I’m deeply suspicious of the notion that a team with me on it is in any way different than a team without me on it based on my skin color or ethnicity. I think that line of thinking doesn’t go anywhere good, especially for me, but for everyone else too.

As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people are different based on group membership, they will start to notice those differences and categorize them as good and bad. DEI is based on the premise that people will recognize all of those differences as good but that’s completely delusional. You are socializing people to identify other people with their group membership and they’re going to take those observations in directions you don’t expect.

Perhaps, but a team that would not have hired you because of your skin color or ethnicity would also be a worse team since they would not be willing or able to hire the best candidates.

> As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people are different based on group membership, they will start to notice those differences and categorize them as good and bad. DEI is based on the premise that people will recognize all of those differences as good but that’s completely delusional.

I don't think this is the right angle to look at it. Everyone has a unique combination of experiences that they bring, and what groups someone belongs to are one part of the set of experiences that make up how they experience the world. DEI programs aren't inventing this, it's just a part of the human condition that we're shaped by the unique combination of our experiences.

Focusing on specific unique aspects of individual people's backgrounds isn't the only shape DEI can take though. Done well, I think they instead look at the shape of systems and processes in place and try broadly to consider how to remove artificial barriers so that people have an equal chance to contribute.

> You are socializing people to identify other people with their group membership and they’re going to take those observations in directions you don’t expect.

I think this does happen a lot. Tokenism and only being seen as a particular part of your identity are problems. I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience. It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant experience, but it's clear that the only thing the recruiter cares about is that you could add gender diversity to a team. It sucks to be told that I'm wrong to suggest take-home exercises in interviews are a good option because women have caregiver duties and can't make time for them when I, a woman, prefer them because I feel like they offer a better opportunity for me to think deeply about a problem.

I don't think this is a reason to ignore DEI programs though, it's simply a failure case to be aware of.

But this is the dominant strain of DEI thinking today, and why it's seeing such a backlash.

The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.

A moment's thought reveals why this is impractical to impossible, especially in the short to medium term. But this is how everything is evaluated through a DEI lens. Every discussion devolves just to counting how many people of each kind of group are represented in whichever topic is under discussion.

All the stuff about eliminating barriers is just the motte for this Bailey.

No it's not. That's a dumb strawman.

But we should have a starting position of being extremely skeptical of any big group that has a significantly different breakdown, especially if it's different in the specific ways that fit common discrimination.

I don't know how much simpler I can make this. Those statements are not the same.

It depends on why the balance is the way it is.

It's good to check sometimes.

I’ve simply never seen this happen, although I’ve seen a lot of accusations of it. In a very large organization you might look at how your organizations demographics compare to industry demographics in different ways, but that’s always been at most an individual data point that elicits further investigation.

Nuh uh. jimbokun intensified it by a huge amount with those "every" terms and saying "must" and "exactly", describing a mandate that is very stupid and ignorant of statistics in a way that rebeccaskinner's description is not very stupid and ignorant of statistics. Also,

> race quotas

The post you're replying to says "further investigation", not "race quotas".

I think the situation is different for sex diversity because men and women are different in ways that require accommodation.

I still do personally think that at a high level diverse teams and companies do tend to be better than non-diverse ones, especially when you have many axes of diversity. I imagine that some of that is direct benefit when someone is able to pull on their experiences to directly benefit a project, and some of it is simply that teams who hire the best people without artificial barriers will both be better and tend to be more diverse.

That’s observational rather than prescriptive though. When it comes to individual teams and individual hiring decisions I’d never advocate for anything other than hiring the best available candidate. Similarly, while you can say that across the population having diversity is good, you shouldn’t assume any specific part of an individual’s background or experience should manifest in any particular way.

All that said, I do think understanding the general ways that different aspects of a persons background impacts their work experience is a necessary part of building an effective workforce. How can you remove artificial barriers without taking time to understand what those barriers are?

Although I’ve had my own negative experiences at times, my experience overall is that most DEI initiatives I’ve been involved with have not been unaware of the risks and nuance, and people involved are usually trying to do the right things. I don’t think modern DEI approaches are overall worse- just more controversial because of broader social, cultural, and political tensions.

The only systems that aren't racist are those that strive to be colorblind (in the sense that we're colorblind to eye or hair color).

Eye/hair color being a distinguishing feature is mostly a white people thing in its own right...

In various threads you've repeatedly argued (paraphrasing here) that you have a different set of values — e.g., giving higher priority to the family and community, vice individual choice, than in contemporary American mass culture. You've correlated this with your Bangladeshi heritage and upbringing, and you've said (again paraphrasing) that you adamantly seek to instill the same values in your own kids.

Perhaps some teams would find your values a useful addition to their mix. For those teams, your Bangladeshi name, skin tone, etc., could be instances of what the late (Black) free-market economist Walter Williams [0] referred to as "cheap-to-observe information."[1] I can't find the piece I read years ago in which Williams said that if you were choosing up sides for a pickup basketball game at a city park, and didn't know any of the other players, you'd choose the Black guys because the odds — not a certainty by any means, but the odds — were that the Black guys had played more basketball growing up than the white guys.

A related anecdote about cheap-to-observe information and its possible correlations: Years ago at my then-law firm, I was called into the office of the chair of the recruiting committee. The chair wanted me to meet a third-year law student who was at the firm for interviews. The recruiting chair said that the law student, like me, was a former Navy "nuke" officer. We shook hands; I asked, "[chief] engineer-qualified?" He smiled and nodded. "Surface-warfare qualified?" The same. I turned to the recruiting chair and said "that's all I need to know; I'm good." I had both quals myself, so I immediately concluded — provisionally — that the student was very likely to have personal qualities (work ethic, leadership, etc.) that I knew law firms found to be valuable. (I did stick around to chat for a while longer, and I knew the student wouldn't even have been invited for an interview if he wasn't already a good candidate.) We hired the student, who turned out to be a fine lawyer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Williams

[1] https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/opinion/walter-williams-our...

As to “cheap to observe” information: you might observe that Asian and Mormon communities socialize people to work without complaining or making demands. That seems profitable in the workplace. Is that the kind of cheap to observe information you can rely on? (It’s not—it’s illegal!)

If you're a person who lives here and works here, you get to participate in defining what the society and workplace look like, respectively. Having to type it out actually feels weird, because it's pretty self-evident. You're here, the things you do impact the culture.

Are you making a category mistake here?

A company I worked for long ago decided that it was ok for employees to bring their dogs to work. This worked for a time until one of the dogs pooped in the executive's office.

That was the end of that.

My dad lived in a small town for a few years. He was friendly with the mayor, and asked him what was his biggest problem. The mayor said the town was equally divided between dog lovers and dog haters. It was simply impossible for him to please both.

Which was a relief for me.

How can I focus on work under circumstances like that? But how can I complain when it hasn't actually done anything yet? I would be "that guy." Now dog policy is something I pay attention to when choosing jobs.

How can you possibly have a good faith argument if you've already made your mind up that most or everyone who disagrees with you is arguing in bad faith? That in itself is not a good faith position.

You sound like you've basically constructed a closed system of thought for yourself, in which anyone who disagrees with you is arguing in bad faith.

I know one person here who frequently posts in disagreement to DEI initiatives is rayiner. He might be wrong, but I don't believe for a minute he is a bigot or acting in bad faith.

I do admit that DEI has some goodwill in it, in particular the idea that our society doesn't have to be a wolf-eats-wolf "meritocracy", but I'm afraid that the goodwill has been skillfully perverted.

When you assume it’s bigots who are the ones who show up with concerns, do you see how fucked up that is?

“Whenever we propose X, the bigots get wind of it and spread FUD. All of their arguments sound fine, but I know they are in bad faith because they are exhausting.”

Have you ever considered that maybe they aren’t bigots and ironically you’re the bigot here just calling everyone who disagrees with respectability and plausibility a bigot?

(P.S. I tried to not be respectable so I don’t get lumped in with “the bigots” and have my ideas rejected out of hand.)

In other words, their arguments aren't intrinsically bigoted and you can't prove bigotry is their motivation because they have a "veneer" of respectability and plausibility, but because they oppose the thing you believe and feel they are secretly bigots.

> it becomes nearly impossible to have a productive good faith discussion about whether the original idea is good or not,

Because anybody that tries to gets judged to be a cryptobigot.

Lacking concrete information on who the commenters are, maybe you should judge the arguments themselves rather than trying to "read between the lines" to divine secret motives that conveniently free you from the burden of considering other points of view.

For example, during my PhD I did outreach in both elementary and middle schools where teachers said there were skills gaps they needed help with. The demographics in some of those schools happened to be such that 80-90% of the students were black and brown.

  The initiative will advance opportunity for communities that have historically faced employment discrimination and professional barriers, including: people of color; women; first-generation professionals and immigrants; individuals with disabilities; LGBTQ+ individuals; Americans who live in rural areas; older Americans who face age discrimination when seeking employment; parents and caregivers who face employment barriers; people of faith who require religious accommodations at work; individuals who were formerly incarcerated; and veterans and military spouses.

Edit: what are the arguments against this?

I happen not to agree with them, but leaving that aside they're often that Ok fine, it's a pipeline problem^, but the solution is to address that at every stage, not just the beginning.

(^meaning for example schoolgirls aren't sufficiently interested and encouraged into STEM so university applications are low, so admissions are low, so graduations are low, so job applications are low, so offers are low, so employer gender ratios are low)

For example, I was taking machines apart when I was 7 trying to figure out how they worked. I'd break open resistors to see what was inside - just baffling grey dust. Eventually I took bicycles apart, then engines, then whole cars. It was just foregone that I was going to engineering school.

The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.

I mean, sure, people can go into any subject, but... if they're to succeed?

Pretty much all the ones I know that are good at it love it. Just like musicians and athletes.

Sure, there are those in it for the money. They're usually the tweeners.

> Nowadays college students are much more practical.

I'm not so sure about that. There's a large number of math avoiders in college, and when they graduate discover their degree is worth a minimum wage job.

The pay isn’t fantastic and your career is basically doing the same thing (with more skill over time) for 30 years. With most of your work a failure.

Even people who liked it often bailed.

Programming is a bit different. You can make a lot of money, have varied jobs and just grin and bear it for the money.

You clearly don't have much exposure to the stem bubble. Overwhelming majority are passionate geeks.

Enjoying your work is not the same thing as obsessing over irrelevant minutia.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a paleontologist. Then I wanted to be a smoke jumper. Now I'm a staff engineer.

Not everyone gets to do what they love. Some of us are just following the money.

The extra cost is just passed on to the consumer, and you gain predictability and managerial prestige.

As an example, Amazon had twice as many people working just on Alexa as there are employees total at JPL. And JPL designs, engineers, builds and operates dozens of groundbreaking spacecraft, including several space telescopes, Mars rovers, and the Voyager programme. JPL needs people with substantial internal motivation, Amazon et al. do not.

I see no purposeful force "shaping" this.

> It is much better for a company to hire 15 people to do one thing, than to hire one brilliant person to do the same.

They would hire the one brilliant person if they could. The trouble is finding them.

Also, brilliant is not the same thing as enjoying the work.

  the extending of services or assistance beyond current or usual limits

  | an outreach program

A toxic element of DEI is that now they have to always wonder (as does everyone else) if it was done because of their skin color/gender/race, regardless of what their mentor says. Because it very well may be true as well.

It's white men who can fantasize that they are evaluated on their skills alone because their race & gender is the norm.

My reasoning can be summed up as "look at prison recidivism vs Skinner's work on positive reinforcement".

Maybe put some value and engage with someone's articulation of their personal experience as opposed to simply dismissing it because it does not comport with your world view.

By all accounts they sounds quite successful as well as appreciative of their undergraduate advisor.

Engage in their experience? See above. Should I have snuck in there somewhere “nice job kind gentle person, you succeeded” or something?

What world view is that?

I’m from a minority, just not one that is recognized as such in the convoluted system that is racial politics in the US (I am of Iraqi descent). But if I were in the shoes of someone who should be benefiting from DEI policies, I’d be pissed off with how it’s shaken out. Seems like a whole lot of empty, performative symbolism with negligible actual change. Things like DEI statements read like box ticking to me, allowing administrators to say they’ve “tried” without doing anything. Same goes for sensitivity trainings, and flashy renaming of, for example, master to main. The singular focus on symbolism has not done anyone any favors apart from a few semiotics professors, although I wonder if they’ve been chastened by how little their favored policies have accomplished.

I dont think anyone would have a problem with DEI if it was about identifying unrecognized talent and making sure it got the proper attention. Thats not what it is right now.

It’s similar to making everyone sort their recycling, and then just throwing it all in the same landfill when it actually gets to the dump.

Why not actually recycle?

And/or if we’re not going to actually recycle, why make everyone go through such a complicated song and dance and spend so much time on something that ends up not mattering?

Wait, this is a lot more applicable of an analogy than I was expecting.

We're a big university that is trying to serve the general public, reach students across all demographics, and produce research that is broadly applicable, not narrowly relevant to one segment of the population. We need to hire academic staff who can leverage their own personal, intellectual and cultural background to help us become a "bigger tent", but also put themselves in the shoes of others unlike themselves in the course of their teaching and research.

To that end, part of our hiring criteria are based around evaluating your ability and willingness to help us fulfil that part of our academic mission. Please provide a statement explaining how you have demonstrated this in your career to date and how you'd continue to do so at the University of Utopia.

A problem I've seen with this is the assumption that subjects like Physics or Chemistry or Mathematics are not broadly applicable, if it was a discovery or research by a white man.

> We need to hire academic staff who can leverage their own personal, intellectual and cultural background to help us become a "bigger tent", but also put themselves in the shoes of others unlike themselves in the course of their teaching and research.

This last part is just wrong.

You should not assume on your own what the experience of minorities unlike yourself must be like, and then treat them according to whatever you imagined in your mind.

You need to talk to people, of whatever back ground, and find out how they, as individuals, would like to be treated, what their needs are, what they are experiencing, etc.

The science doesn’t know race. But determining which area to research can bias toward the benefit of certain groups.

But I see this more often assumed than demonstrated.

I think there are contradictory imperatives here. You ultimately can't become a bigger tent across demographics while also shrinking your tent in terms of admissions selectivity. At some point, if people really mean it about serving a larger public, you just have to make yourselves into a less selective institution.

Whether or not this is strictly true in a mathematical sense, assuming a static applicant pool (a faulty but common assumption), the fact that this is such a knee-jerk response even from commenters here on HN is really depressing.

Are we so conditioned to think of disadvantaged groups as inferior that the idea of expanding access to members of historically under-represented groups appears to you to be definitionally at odds with being a selective institution?

I was assuming that diversity and inclusion was not reducible to the proverbial "talented tenth" of various demographic groups but in fact entailed serving the 99%.

If you entirely reject the idea of meritocracy, then yeah, go nuts. Just hold a lottery and the 2,000 luckiest kids that year go to MIT.

Meaning if you want to compete in the olympics, you need to justify it to yourself. This includes grouping others with you.

In Australia, there was a recent introduction of "Acknowledgement of Country" at both the federal and state government level. Universities and other large institutions are also "doing their part". For example, in video call meetings with more than 'n' people, a manager will read out a statement for a minute at the start of the call acknowledging the "traditional custodians of the land upon which a meeting or event is to take place". In other words, the Aboriginals that white men largely wiped out over 200 years ago. See, e.g.: https://www.indigenous.unsw.edu.au/strategy/culture-and-coun...

So now, the descendants of those white men feel guilty and have to make a little speech before each meeting. It's the most dystopian bullshit I've ever had to personally participate in, ever.

This leads to some truly bizarre moments, like a recent meeting where half of the people were Indian subcontractors physically overseas, everyone else was a first-generation immigrant to Australia, and we had to acknowledge the traditional custodianship of the area by a tribe that was completely wiped out and no longer exists, not even descendants that might appreciate the gesture.

Similarly, in another meeting an "aboriginal elder" was chosen to speak because of their native heritage. That would be nice, except that this person was pasty white, blonde haired, blue eyed, and had freckles. Literally a white person making other white people feel guilty for something their common ancestors did!

The whole thing is an absurd farce played for political points, with no substance of any kind behind it. Actual aboriginals are no better off if in some city office a bunch of people in suits verbally self-flaggilate for sins committed hundreds of years ago by people that they might not even be descendants of. (Half the population is either a first or second generation immigrant!)

I wish there was some term that is the equivalent of "realpolitik", but for race relations, so that I can more succinctly express my disdain for this type of divorced-from-reality behaviour.

There's been a bit more push back here. There's a lawsuit where a University of Washington compsci professor is suing the school for retaliation because he mocked the policy. He pointed out there is no evidence that the Salish people made use of University of Washington lands, so the whole thing is a farce.

What are the odds they make it to Israel?

This one is really interesting. I note that you don't list the counterpart at all, but here's a selection from Weavers, Scribes, and Kings:

> In Syria in the early second millennium BCE, Amorite-speaking people grew up knowing if they belonged to the Banu-Yamina ("sons of the right" or "sons of the south") or the Banu-Sim'al ("sons of the left" or "sons of the north").

Benjamin is the only name I know of to memorialize an ethnic conflict that was apparently won long, long ago, so long ago that most people with an active interest in the time period have no idea it existed.

As far as your question goes, just the form of your answer is pretty good at reinforcing the point of my question.

I know it's annoying when these things get declared offtopic because of course they're connected by a sequence of associations—and you're right, it doesn't take that long of a sequence—but if you think about it from the overall topic of the thread, hopefully it makes more sense.

it’s not a “sin” — it was genocide over land that did not belong to the Crown. it’s a good thing that immigrants also have to acknowledge australian culture and heritage, as well.

as far as the white-looking aboriginal is concerned, we’re just not gonna open that door.

Is this by force or is it en vogue to do this in certain industries?

Better would be to actually avoid damaging the indigenous people and avoid damaging the land. What was done in the past is done, but you could avoid doing it again.

Saying stuff (especially stuff that doesn't even have proper good points and doesn't even help anything) is not a substitute for actually doing actually good things.

DEI statements as you're hinting can be quite performative and full of pagentry and then things slowly drift back to how they were all along.

DEI as a field is new, and I find they are not given as much slack as non-DEI people figuring out something new and getting slack for taking risks and improving messaging.

I can try to find a few links that helped me understand more. One thing was the difference between DEI and EDI.

It seems EDI (equity, diversity, inclusion) in that order might be an updated revision that can help.

I don't think I agree with this. The only reason I think people have such an issue with DEI is that in has permeated much of their academic and professional life (in certain professions). To be honest, if you look back years ago you'd be just as likely to see people complain about the management fad of the day, but the difference with DEI is many people were/are genuinely afraid to speak against it for fear of the negative impact on their careers and lives. "non-DEI people" in new fields are "given more slack" because people just don't care if what these non-DEI folks are doing doesn't affect others' day-to-day lives.

> One thing was the difference between DEI and EDI. It seems EDI (equity, diversity, inclusion) in that order might be an updated revision that can help.

To be honest, the "E" in DEI is always the framing I had the most problems with, because in practice I've often seen it arguing for equality of outcome, vs. equality of opportunity, and this is something I fundamentally disagree with. Yes, I know what equity perhaps is intended to mean, but in practice I've seen examples where if the outcome distribution doesn't exactly match the population at large then some people conclude the process is somehow unfair and needs to be changed. This is not hypothetical, e.g. consider the kerfuffle when ElectronConf was canceled years ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868.

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...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. In case anyone's worried about this - if there are other accounts behaving this badly who have not been moderated yet, the reason is that we haven't seen them. You can help by flagging the comments or letting us know about them at [email protected].

In 2020 the Smithsonian—The Smithsonian—said that individualism, the nuclear family, the scientific method, working hard, and planning for the future are aspects of "white culture". Years later I still can't believe it. <https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...>

Much of what is said about DEI statements can also be said about the teaching statement. At R1 universities like MIT, people are hired for tenure track positions based on their past (and future) research, and many teaching statements can be recitations of current hot topics (“flipped classrooms” “active learning” etc). But good ones (with evidence in letters of rec and CV) indicate that the candidate really has practiced what they propose to do in the future. To be clear, at MIT I’m sure a stellar teaching statement won’t get someone hired, but a patently false or over the top “I don’t care” one might give people pause.

As I understand, DEI statements are the same. If someone wrote “my philosophy is that we should perpetuate the structures of power and mediocrity created by focusing on wealthy pedigreed individuals rather than ability and potential found by looking in unusual places” that would raise eyebrows. Conversely, if they instead said “I TA’d for an international computational neuroscience summer school that gave opportunity to impoverished students from Africa and Asia”, people might think “That’s cool!”

But I think that most academics who are motivated by equity are not interesting in reading a ChatGPT DEI statement.

I do think that the conversation around this is really unfortunate. I find little philosophical difference between what people are looking for with DEI statements and what goes into college applications from HS students, but I hear fewer people advocating for getting rid of those essays.

[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/education/480603-what-is-uc-davi...

(The 76% refers to applications to an “Advancing diversity” grant program, so it seems a bit duplicitous to suggest it represents happens in faculty hiring?)

You've highlighted exactly the problem so many people have with these DEI statements in the first place. If people have some (IMO valid) disagreements about what DEI has become, they're basically bucketed in with "the klan". So instead, people just shut up and tell reviewers what they know they want to hear, and this ideological litmus test becomes the norm.

Means testing already covers all of the “zero wealth, poor jobs, and second rate schools and healthcare”. Being a minority has jack shit to do with that.

Any of the disadvantages the minorities have should be tested for directly and those should be targeted. That way all disadvantaged populations benefit and we’re not giving unfair advantages to the minority who grew up wealthy.

These policies always seem a bit ridiculous to me. I've done nothing to discriminate against these people, so why am I being treated worse because of the actions of people I had nothing to do with? Affirmative action policies are discriminative, just not to the group they're targeted at helping. Why can't there just be equality and leave it at that?

My personal opinion is you can't discriminate based on information you don't have, so universities/employers etc shouldn't get information on a candidates race/gender/whatever that's not relevant, because that way they can't have discriminated using it

So if a particular ethnic group is disadvantaged in a quantifiable way. Then applying a factor to who is accepted into the academic programs. Would bring in people at the upper ends of the bell curve across the different ethnic/racial groups.

In other words, all things being equal across quantifiable ethnic/racial opportunity. This would bring in the top tier candidates across all ethnicities/racial groups. And if all ethnicities/racial groups are equal in intelligence. Then it would bring in the top tier candidates across *all* ethnicities/racial groups.

The said purpose of-course is to make sure that the candidate is "committed to diversity". We can argue all day on whether a statement is in any way good measure of it. It really isn't. I have helped people write such statements and we have always written it with cynicism and great contempt for the people who might actually read it.

But the "real reason" which such concept found a great foothold in modern American universities is that it kind of acts as top kill to get rid of potential people who might actually ask questions critical of various ideological positions that the university's internal bodies might have. You either want a radical zealot or at least someone who is willing to play along for his own career-maxing goals. What you don't want is someone who can call the emperor naked. Diversity statements are excellent way to achieve this as I have seen people write one line diversity statements such as 'I don't have one as I do not think diversity is important'. Such person IMO is more intellectually honest and would be a good addition to faculty position but will not be hired.

You are right that there is tons of resentment around the DEI BS that people have to go through. Tech companies have esoteric training problems with terms like "allyship" and "bystander effect" and all that which basically smells rotten to lot of engineers but they cynically complete those trainings any ways.

Too much of the discourse around this insists that these statements are useless and counterproductive. But as you've explained, they do pretty well in staffing the leadership of these orgs with people who believe in this philosophy by weeding out people who disagree or won't go along for career progression.

Consider the fine grained details of the logic involved in combining "more" with "exactly(!) that".

The above commenter framed the situation as the DEI folks being necessarily strategically dishonest and malicious, as opposed to being True Believers (more technically: Naive Realists), like most people are, though with different fantasy worlds, due to the consumption of different training material combined with the same flawed interpreter.

I think the question of whether DEI folks are dishonest is entirely irrelevant (but important). You have to put yourself in the shoes of some diversity officer and think of what you will do to feel important, save your job and get promotion.

You will obviously have to come up with idea like "diversity statements", "diversity OKR" for your engineering managers. Most engineering managers are busy building products, they might think it is stupid but still would play along since the cost of compliance is very low.

When someone stands up to this, diversity officials get the villains that further help them justify their role and existence. "Look this person is creating unsafe work environment, he needs to go". All this results into an organizations which loses its ability to question DEI initiatives even more.

It is not my claim that DEI folks are all vile, they get into a conference room and make these grand plans. It is just that the moment you create positions like "DEI officials" the incentives are aligned to set the ball rolling.

Affairs on this planet always remind me of this movie clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmHy34EWlpw

....except, it's hard to figure out who is chasing who!! lol

The line at 2:40 gets me every time.

Maybe us folks should get together and decide if our Dear Leaders and Experts might need a bit of a time out to consider how they've been behaving.

From what I can tell, they are saying the purpose of the statements is to weed out people who will be openly honest about concerns or be willing to debate pros and cons of a controversial position held by leadership.

They could still privately disagree or not go along, they’d just have to be able to do so while keeping up appearances.

Which in my experience academically and with big-corp is very accurate. There are plenty of folks who will spout DEI party lines all day long while only hiring Asian women, or Indian men, or white women, or white men, etc. as long as no one makes a stink about it in a way they’ll get in trouble.

Notably, those folks have also finely honed their ability to nuke anyone from orbit that attempts to get them in trouble for what they are definitely doing.

From an organizational perspective, it’s actually a very valuable skill - because to make this work, they have to placate stakeholders while also getting some key metric that the organization needs ‘done’ well enough to offset their other shenanigans.

And in any sufficiently large organization, it’s essentially impossible to do that by actually doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing to the level you’re supposed to be doing them.

Which is why large organizations (and frankly societies) tend to be kafkaesque - they have too many conflicting interests and power bases that all have potentially legitimate reasons for applicability, but are irreconcilable-in-fact/impractical when ‘the rubber meets the road’.

This is some peak choir preaching. If you polled people neutral, or those with the opposite opinion they would think it's nonsense.

But on this site you can just chant things like "all hail the gray ones, the ones that can't be silenced by the blues!" and be celebrated. In fact, I suspect there's a high chance of me getting banned for pointing this out.

I think this is probably a feature not a bug. Companies are all about having programs whose sole purpose is to limit liability and to (for lack of a better term) quite cynically virtue signal. And if that causes the programs to be hated and later dismantled, all the better -- because it was never about actually achieving DEI but about appearing to support it. All of the corporate DEI training that I've been through were considered "cringeworthy" by literally everyone in the company. And this was in a very left-leaning company, but it was run by mostly a pile of middle aged white guys at the top.

I remember sitting in conference room once and between meetings we started discussing the MBA degree and how you often needed one to move up at big companies. I mused that I didn't understand why this was so important since an MBA program didn't teach you much that you couldn't learn on the job or by reading a few books.

A colleague of mine, who'd recently gotten his MBA, started laughing out loud. He said, "You're missing the whole point. Nobody cares about the course content or what you learn. The value of the MBA is that it's proof you can spend a lot of time and effort completing bullshit assignments on time without too much heel-dragging or back talk. It tells the world you'll keep your head down and not cause too much trouble for the organization".

You don't need an MBA for that, a highschool GPA would be enough proof.

So it's not trying to off people for asking the wrong questions. They're trying to cut back on the assholes that say things like:

"Awktually, there is a scientific arguement that whites smarter than blacks" "I see you're black, but how ghetto are you?" etc. etc.

Some things may get blown out of proportion, but I think people that claim it's not so bad don't know how bad it is for someone that doesn't fit a specific mold.

These statements are the exact same thing to me.

Keyword: virtue signalling

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

(in Germany, it is common to use a much more derogatory term for a related concept: "[der] Tugendterror" [virtue terror]).

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

DEI activities often take a lot of time, and are often undervalued by many traditional academic metrics - they don't produce papers, rarely produce grants outside perhaps the occasional diversity supplement, etc. As a small example, to ensure that undergraduate research experience isn't reserve for those without the need to take summer jobs, I ensure all the undergraduates in my lab are paid - and this costs my lab money I don't technically have to spend. Many of my colleagues do a great deal more.

Having a required DEI statement both lets people who work in these areas highlight their work, and also makes it obvious those who don't. It's a way to do something beyond just saying "These activities are important" by moving them to the forefront.

All that being said, they are often used in a very perfunctory fashion, and while I do somewhat agree with the idea of them, in practice they've not proved useful.

The above would be one real solution to increase diversity (while not necessarily being cheap/free), with the benefit of also one not likely to be opposed from either side of the political spectrum (a true rarity these days).

Devoting energy to those fights, and the political capital consequences of doing so, and success if you were successful, would be an excellent addition to a DEI statement, and would help explain why you were less productive than J. OtherProfessor, who chose to devote their time strictly to research.

The best DEI statements are ones that discuss action.