So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era? And that wasn't a merit policy, that was an explicitly discriminatory policy against women long after the Soviet Union sent Valentina Tereshkova into space.
(at time of writing, she is still alive and the only woman ever to have had a solo spaceflight!)
> In the UK I had a grant application denied based only on DEI
Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse. It's the same as wanting the best doctor, or the best pilot.
The UK team for Olympic 100m is majority non-white. I have no doubt that these are amongst the fastest people in the world. Based on DEI standards, should we pick people who are shown slower just to make a more colourful team?
> Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.
You can call BS all you like, the application literally stated it so. The threshold for funding was met, but was rejected on the basis.
Considering color or religion doesn't have any impact on the ability of someone to be a "best astronaut", if your groups isn't diverse, it's most likely there is a bias in action.
That's not quite true.
> A mixture of their environment, parenting
One would wonder what could be behind that... Also, poorer schools in poor neighborhoods because they receive less funding, lowering the value or real estate in the neighborhood, attracting poor people to it.
> and genetics probably
Funny how this always comes up.
If a group of 'X' people (based on any factor you like, be it race, gender, ideology, protected characteristics, etc) are statistically lower IQ, you would expect this to be reflected in selection over a large enough sample.
Equally, I would expect that when you're fighting for people who are in high demand, that the wage reflects it. Merit is a "positive discrimination" for people who do the job better.
You have 8 blue people and 2 purple people. The blue people and purple people have different colour, different ideology, but are the same in all ways that count.
The astronaut programme opens up and needs 5 people. From 10 people, choose 5. It turns out that there are 252 ways of doing this [1]. At most you could only have 2 purple people selected, when 1 purple person is selected it looks unbiased, but actually the vast majority of cases are when only blue people are represented.
Another way to think about it is this: 8 blue people, 2 purple people. You pick one at random, there is an 8/10 chance you pick blue, 2/10 purple. If you select a purple, for the next pick there is now just a 1/9 chance of picking purple, but an 8/9 chance of picking blue.
[1] https://www.hackmath.net/en/calculator/n-choose-k?n=10&k=5&o...
Do you have any control over this?
Now: in what way will you avoid addressing the point (if you do reply)....will it be in the heart of the distribution as usual, or can you generate an anomaly....
"(Climate Change|Evolution|The concept of a flat earth) is like an ideology to some people — they get angry the minute you start to question it".
> The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed ... and put social grievances ahead of objective truth".
They proved their point. When only papers of a certain conclusion are accepted which further an ideological belief, Science is dead.
If you look at CEOs you will see that white men are very overrepresented. I (as a white man) don't for a moment believe that that is because white men are better at being CEOs (achieve better outcomes). Rather I believe it is because the selection process has long been biased in favor of white men (both in the last steps, and the path to get there). And this is not just my biases at play, many studies have been done, and none show that white men generically achieve better outcomes.
So DEI is the idea that we need to make the selection process better account for people's biases (largely unconscious) that have been driving this outcome (white men preferentially being selected). It is not about quotas or giving people points for being a woman/black person/disabled/etc. It is all about making sure that those characteristics do not subtract points.
And I have used white men as an example here, as that has been where the largest biases have been (both white, and men), and also because I am currently a beneficiary of those biases, making it hard to argue that I am only arguing this to get an advantage for myself. But you could just as easily point to the current over-representation of women in colleges and universities and worry about an anti-man bias there.
In India they’re more explicitly called out as ‘reservations’, in the US they are based on statistical models of the population.
Once your company gets above a certain size, or if it does business with the gov’t it is required to comply or you’ll get the Department of Labor on your butt and get sued using the evidence that the composition of your employees doesn’t match the model - so you are defacto illegally discriminating. It hit Google pretty hard.
You do not get to unilaterally decide what DEI is and is not.
At 3 out of the four companies I've worked at DEI came in the form of explicit discrimination on the basis of race and gender. Including quotas and prohibiting non-diverse candidates from segments of our headcount.
I won't doubt your lived experience with DEI, and I believe you if you say you've never encountered discriminatory DEI practices. But plenty of people have, and this attempt to deny that DEI is carried out through discriminatory practices at least part of the time is not productive.
It literally is a push for quotas. Their ideology dictates that there is not enough X's, therefore bias. It's not necessarily true either, please see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907690
Annec data is that the UK police force would be harassed by head office for not having a diverse enough team. A friend spent a while breaking down the local makeup of ethnicity and proving that the one black colleague they had was actually an over-representation for the local area. It was not easy to convince them either, as they had a literal quota for each area.
> I (as a white man) don't for a moment believe that that is because white men are better at being CEOs (achieve better outcomes). Rather I believe it is because the selection process has long been biased in favor of white men (both in the last steps, and the path to get there).
It's not particularly cut and dry. There is a class bias towards being promoted to CEO, and the pool of black people in upper class society is smaller [1].
> And this is not just my biases at play, many studies have been done, and none show that white men generically achieve better outcomes.
Would be interested to read if you have them.
> It is not about quotas or giving people points for being a woman/black person/disabled/etc. It is all about making sure that those characteristics do not subtract points.
It is no different from a quota. You believe that some end ratio must result i.e. B% black people, there are N positions, therefore there should be a minimum of N x B black people in those positions. Then everything is done to meet that quota, otherwise there is still bias based on this quota.
> But you could just as easily point to the current over-representation of women in colleges and universities and worry about an anti-man bias there.
But nobody does make that case. Women are under-represented in dirty jobs, dangerous jobs, gruelling jobs, but there are no advocates to put more women in those positions. DEI itself is only fighting over the cream. They want more diversity in STEM, but I see zero fighting to get diversity into the arts, languages, etc.
What's worse is that we literally have to lower standards to make it DEI possible. The military lower fitness requirements to help more women get in, colleges lower entrance exam thresholds to increase diversity, the list goes on. DEI has made us a society of lowering standards.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issue at all with women CEOs if they cut mustard. But if you lower your expectations too much, you get the likes of Elizabeth Holmes, where there was near zero scrutiny by anybody [2]. Or a black CEO such as Kanye West, who clearly has large mental instability (which backfired on Adidas) [3].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-wealth-is-increasin...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/11620036/theranos-ceo-elizabe...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/01/08/kanye-we...
The tax payer should not be funding ideological projects. For example there shouldn't be a DEI astronaut requirement, in the same way there shouldn't be a religious or gun carrying requirement for astronauts.
In the UK I had a grant application denied based only on DEI, despite the grant being accepted as high value to the tax payer and likely to be successful.