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.
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.