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....
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.