In the spirit of trying to learn something from the community: while I can certainly understand the rationale and goals behind DEI programs (many of which I agree with, others not), I honestly can't understand these "DEI statements" at all. They always seemed very "1984" to me, and almost designed to engender resentment in a way that would ultimately backfire. So perhaps I'm in a like-minded echo chamber, but is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument, or can you point me to one online? If so, I'd honestly love to hear it, and I mean this quite genuinely. I did some googling beforehand and found loads of "how to write a good DEI statement" articles, but literally every single one of them just took it at face value that these were a good thing to begin with (or, perhaps in their defense, that "academic jobs require it", so you better learn how to write one in any case).
>but is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument, or can you point me to one online
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.
I’ve heard this same argument for DEI statements every time the topic has been debated: They sidestep arguments about DEI statements and instead retreat to safer arguments about how advancing DEI is a good thing.
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.
Feels a little bit like making people take anti-theft pledges. I don't think anyone could reasonably expect that theft would be prevented by someone pledging not to engage in it yet it might be tricky to publicly remove because "what are you, pro-theft!?!"
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.
Imo it's very different bc the ideology pledge itself is mostly distracting from the real purpose of the dei statement (again imo), which is to provide a way to select employees based on race, etc, without it being the explicit reason.
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.
I don't agree. "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men. Female or non-white are "diversity." A great example are the statements and articles from 2020 when Biden announced the most diverse ever White House Communications Team which was 100% female. Biden talked about how critical diversity was and bragged about this 100% female communications team. All the articles I read about it had things like "most diverse White House Communications Team in history" to describe it. At least from a gender perspective, I don't see how they could make it more clear that diversity == women
> "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men.
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.
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.
In the US almost no-one would say "asian" for any country west of Nepal. Sometimes they say "south-asian" for India or the surrounding countries, but even that term is only sometimes extended out to pakistan.
An Asian-owned company in US can easily get 80%+ Asian. Is that "diversity"?
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.
It does go beyond simply making a pledge, though. Applicants are required to list all the ways they've furthered the cause of this very specific issue, regardless of whether the job itself would entail or even offer opportunities to exercise such experience or not.
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.
Perhaps that is a good analogy, because I agree, and that is true whether it is Erlang or if it is DEI statements or if it is something else, even if they can be good things it is certainly no good to make this a central focus of acceptance for the jub.
But the problem is they can’t even get “diverse” right. Do they mean diverse in ideas? In thought? In opinion? No.
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.
Or like the pledges that university students have to fill out before each exam, promising not to cheat in any way. As if "you broke the pledge you signed" carries any more weight than "you cheated".
I suspect you could get away with speaking out publicly on this if you said something like "DEI statements aren't actually advancing DEI" first. You need to break the link between the statements and the goal first, so that you don't look like you're attacking the goal.
You have a much more optimistic view of the current state of public discourse than I do.
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 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.
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.
> Motte and bailey accusations only work if the statemnts in question are being made by the same person.
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.
> On the other hand, this is the textbook example of a Motte-and-bailey fallacy
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?
Because it's not just equivocation. Read more of the actual original definition/usage of motte-and-bailey.
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.
You haven't actually described any differences between the terms. (Well, you did claim one, that "motte-and-bailey is more specific", but combined with your appeal to "actual usage", that is clearly untrue.)
Motte-and-Bailey speaks to equivocating about positions in argument. There are many other ways to equivocate, e.g. over the meaning of a single word, used in multiple ways in the same argument, as opposed to a retreat to an easier-to-defend position over the initial one presented/being discussed - as in the thread above.
The relationship between the two words is akin to the one between “rectangle” and “square”.
The original SSC article about Motte-and-Bailey used "strategic equivocation" as an alternate name, not just plain old equivocation. I.e. intentionally equivocating whenever is convenient for some political/social/whatever goal
Alternatively, you're reversing the causality. As such fallacies have become borderline ubiquitous in many relevant aspects of life, greater appreciation and understanding of what's happening led to the emergence of language that's not only more figurative and visual, but also more precise. Because while all motte and bailey fallacies will be false equivocations, not all false equivocations will be motte and bailey fallacies.
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.
Thanks very much! I haven't watched this yet, but this was exactly the kind of honest discussion I was looking for that I didn't previously find, so much appreciated.
The exact question doesn't even matter that much. They could just as well give you a blank page.
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.
> (eg. "I did a, b, and c in my previous position to enhance DEI in my department")
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?
> What if they worked for a dept. that didn't promote these things and may have had policy against them?
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.
My first reaction to this news was, “fine, sounds like a silly requirement.” However, being a PhD graduate from a minority background, I really have to thank my advisor for the undergraduate outreach work he did, without which there is realistically a negligible chance I would have ended up with a PhD and a great research career. I don’t know what motivated him to do this work, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, if professors know that performing such duties helps them get promoted, perhaps it’s not a bad policy, as long as inequities exist in academia. There are so many other pressures on young faculty, outreach may be something that is hard to justify spending time on unless you have to do it in some sense.
I think this is a good point. I wonder how useful diversity statements are for accomplishing this task. It just seems like cheap talk to me. More useful would be to reward people in tenure review for outreach to minorities.
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 once helped my advisor write a grant application and he put in some great outreach stuff in the DEI section of the app. What turns me cynical about DEI statements/sections is that after we won the grant, there was no money for that inclusion programming and nobody ever checked whether we'd really done it.
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.
It's also a way to compel action across all professors, not just professors from historically-underrepresented groups, who would likely be bearing the brunt of the work.
This comment does not make sense in reply to this question...where did they say anything about evaluation, the point they made is the difference it made is their advisor doing outreach.
No it's not on an individual basis, outreach work means something more like the professor talked to a group of students about their work and what they can do to join their lab for a phd. There are lots and lots of undergrads who don't know a thing about graduate school.
they very well might have been evaluated based entirely on their abilities alone.
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.
Just like the justice system. People should be assumed innocent until proven guilty. DEI and more broadly CRT are toxic because minorities, like all humans have faults and these ideas promote minorities to assume discrimination instead of faults. Therefore not helping these individuals improve their faults. This also promotes division and hatred in society. Overall net negative.
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)
STEM is something you gotta have some substantial internal motivation to do, such as doing it for a hobby. The kind of work I enjoy, you gotta really like it or it isn't going to work out for you.
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.
I get very little joy from programming. I never program outside of work - I hike, climb, work on my house, raise my kids. But it pays the bills and I can do it, so I've put in the time to learn enough to be worth paying a salary.
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.
Maybe decades ago when college students based their choice of majors on feelings or whatever that might have been true. Nowadays college students are much more practical. An obvious example is the rise in CS majors in the last decade.
The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.
> The notion of substantial motivation or hobby to go into STEM is absolutely ridiculous.
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.
Okay but the difference is that being a mediocre athlete or musician means that you're unemployed, whereas you can be a totally mediocre programmer and make well into the 6 figures. My friends who are professional musicians know far more about their craft than even the most motivated engineers I've worked with, and they make less money than the worst paid engineers I've met. I've casually played guitar for almost 20 years and been programming less than half that time ane I can't even think about going pro without a massive dedicated effort.
Ha ha ha. I have a CS PhD and am friends with grad students in many other STEM fields. There are just as many who are "passionate", or whatever geeky losers who waste their life obsessing over minutiae want to be called, as there are people who are working on their degree for the sake of practicality. I would say the latter are in fact generally more successful.
As a society we have purposely shaped the way we do STEM so that it can be carried out by an army of employees trained to do relatively simple tasks. 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.
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.
> As a society we have purposely shaped the way we do STEM so that it can be carried out by an army of employees trained to do relatively simple tasks.
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.
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.
Not to be flippant but the saying "when you're robbing peter to pay paul, you can always count on the support of paul" comes to mind. Maybe you really are a super qualified researcher that is doing great work, but all I see as the result of this DEI stuff is sinecures and make work jobs and generally lower standards across the board. (e.g. the former harvard president, or the current press secretary)
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 not about treating students differently. Rather it's about where you spend your limited resources for outreach.
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.
That's not really DEI. That's just targeting schools with skills gaps, and it might have turned out to be mostly white. To be DEI, they'd have to be chosen because of ethnicity, gender, etc.
DEI is applied broadly, for example here's a list of demographics targeted for DEI from one of Biden's executive orders [1]:
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.
I was on the academic job market recently. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the process of writing my DEI statement was a valuable learning experience. For example, I read several interesting papers about randomized controlled trials testing the effects of various classroom interventions. I also have some more clarity about the relevant philosophical questions, both due to reading others' thoughts and due to being forced to articulate my own thoughts.
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.
Yeah, this is what I am also thinking of. It makes sense for people in a position to create a culture or hire a team to know, it's a science you probably weren't exposed to in school and knowing the real effects that are known and studied is a darn good start to implementing DEI well. Doing it based on guesswork is probably worse than useless. So that's the non-ideological part.
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.
>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
A lot of things have "said purpose" and the "real purpose" because of which such absolutely kafkaesque things survive in organizations.
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.
The pinned comment at the top of this thread requests that "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". Bravo to you for providing exactly that.
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.
> The pinned comment at the top of this thread requests that "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". Bravo to you for providing exactly that.
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.
> The above commenter framed the situation as the DEI folks being necessarily strategically dishonest and malicious.
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.
Hard disagree. The argument assumes bad intent on the part of the evil DEI and implies the only reason for the policy is too get rid of "troublemakers".
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 don’t think that is what the poster was saying. If it was, they wouldn’t have used ‘kafkaesque’.
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’.
It's not that, the reality of fascism on uni campuses (in tech) is really bleak. Lots of people don't see the problems that don't bother them.
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.
> A lot of things have "said purpose" and the "real purpose" because of which such absolutely kafkaesque things survive in organizations.
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 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.
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.
My wife enjoys going to these struggle sessions on DEI for academics (she has a PhD in neuroscience). She’s of the opinion she hasn’t been oppressed and in fact has regularly given opportunity because of her sex, so when lecturers try to reason with her or she has to write these letters they don’t know how to respond. I’ve attended a few where they try to convince her she’s repressed and the entire room just starts arguing she is. Weirdest discussion to witness, especially when the real repressed folks are probably the janitors and security. Many never even had the opportunity to go to school
There's also this weird mentality of, "If I was oppressed because of quality X, everyone else who has quality X was also oppressed because of it." When did it become OK to assume everyone would have the same experience just because they have some specific quality in common?
There are a handful of contexts where it makes more sense, like for a HR person potentially, without trying to bring ideology into it that's the place it makes sense since that's the place where you can actually implement the concepts.
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.
Sorry, I meant to explicitly include faculty as people who create teams and are responsible for a good work culture. I agree with you, they are HR people in practice.
Faculty select teaching assistants and the research staff for their labs, effectively unilaterally. They have the power to hire and fire. They choose topics of research, and can instruct their mentees to stop a line of inquiry. This is similar in scope and power to a combined project-manager, research-manager and person-manager. They also are the decider to grant later-stage credentialing, so throw in a bit of training instructor too…
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.
Land acknowledgement statements are creeping into the US these days. I could be wrong, but they've been in Canada for a while.
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.
I frequent a lot of Australian architecture and design firm websites. 99% of them all have this disclaimer on their site before you can see any content.
Is this by force or is it en vogue to do this in certain industries?
They are valid points; they do bad things with "diversity". I have seen such acknowledgements in Canada too sometimes, although I don't know if it is as bad as you describe there, because I do not know the details.
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.
it’s great that you as a person of european descent can be annoyed that people in the office have to make statements about traditional ownership of the land. You know how aboriginal australians live, and yet you think that changing attitudes towards the past—and reason why certain groups are disadvantaged—doesn’t help?
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.
If reading a mandatory statement is ever changing attitudes then it's not in the direction you want. Doing this serves no real purpose, and I bet if you asked any of the affected people they'd prefer more than forced empty words.
Applications for faculty positions typically comprise a CV, copies of 2-5 significant papers you’ve written, 3 letters of recommendation, a research statement, and a teaching statement. As I understand it, the DEI statement is supposed to go along with the last two.
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.
I think that’s consistent with the example that I gave. I suspect someone who said “I plan to give all multiple choice exams in order to simplify grading.” in their teaching statement would likely get a poor rating?
(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?)
I’m still looking for the single person who was offended by the use of master as the default git branch name. I never found them but everyone got to pretend like they were making a difference for a little bit.
But what if you disagree with the underlying political ideology of DEI, ie the mandating equality of outcome over equality of opportunity? That's apparently a political opinion you are not allowed to hold if you are going through those application processes (and I have seen the same in the promotion process of large corporations). Is that acceptable? Do I also need to be a registered democrat to apply? I think it is morally bankrupt and reminiscent of the hollywood blacklist days.
I'm not a big fan of mandatory DEI statements, but if I were trying to make a positive case for them, it might go something like this:
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.
Yes this is definitely a part of it. And another part is the usual underlying question about how well the candidate understands and is prepared for the specific job they are entering. Different universities have different kinds of diversity challenges: some have a lot of working students who aren’t in the traditional student age range, some have a disproportionately large number of deaf students due to the presence of a good program there, some have large numbers of students for whom English is a second language, etc. Each of these requires different skill sets and interests on the part of the teacher. And a DEI statement can be a way to show/evaluate how seriously the candidate is considering the actual on-the-ground demographics of the institution and the challenges it poses, as well as how the institution is trying the change demographics (whether for reasons of market demands or principle).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
The science doesn’t know race. But determining which area to research can bias toward the benefit of certain groups.
> We need to hire academic staff who can leverage their own personal, intellectual and cultural background to help us become a "bigger tent",
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.
> You ultimately can't become a bigger tent across demographics while also shrinking your tent in terms of admissions selectivity.
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?
>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%.
I guess I take it for granted that top research universities intend to directly serve top students and researchers, and the general public will benefit indirectly from the research they produce.
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.
I don't know if it's just DEI, or other types of politics, but there seems to be a recent trend towards "you must say you agree with us, otherwise you are ostracized".
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.
Our understanding of what constitutes harassment or a hostile work environment has evolved over time. Likewise, there is growing acceptance that systematic racism exists in the U.S.
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.
I'm not getting into what's "masculine" or "feminine" because I believe that's contextually constructed nonsense, but I will say that some people use "nonviolent communication" tropes in a metaphorically violent way. I've also seen it used well to improve relationships and outcomes.
It’s easier to defend than you think. It’s enough to show that there was no proof of that they didn’t work at the time of introduction, and there was indication that it maybe worked. I definitely don’t have the knowledge to prove or disprove it. If there is no evidence now about its efficacy, it should be removed. Unfortunately, I’ve seen 0 discussions which mentioned any hard evidence. Even in this case, it was removed because of feelings according to the link.
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.
Did you know that prospective faculty also have to write a statement about their research, teaching, and service when they apply for a job? Is that also conspicuously performatively doing the right thing in those job responsibilities?
I think it would help to know what you think a coherent DEI statement would be.
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.
> 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 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.
Not really the same thing but I worked for an organisation which had as a policy that every single team meeting had to have diversity & equality as a recurring item for discussion. 95% of the time this just meant the meeting lead saying "So...diversity - anyone got anything to say?" and then we moved onto the next item after a short silence. But every once in a while someone would raise something that might not have otherwise been brought up. It's a very crude instrument but it probably did get people to think a little more in that direction and maybe led to a little more awareness overall. The other standing item was health and safety which had a similar outcome.
It likely wasn’t General Motors you worked at… but every GM meeting must start with a safety tip - or some DEI claim.
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.
When we have all the infrastructure for an even more oppressive and intrusive total information awareness regime, DEIs are so far from 1984. DEIs are just dumb paperwork and formal procedure on top of the usual facade of hiring and promotion rigamarole
I'll give you an answer for how we have used them - essentially, helping set context (indeed, we have context statements as well).
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.
Thank you for your response. But looking at your answer highlights even more to me why I think DEI statements are dumb. E.g. taking your example specifically, if the university is truly invested in DEI, simple solution: unpaid summer research internships should be forbidden; all summer research internships must be paid, and here are the guidelines around amounts, funding, etc...
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).
True, although in this case there's a lot of pushback - if it's not during the summer, can students get both credit and paid? How hard is it to make your lab jobs work-study positions, given they are all one-off positions? And there would definitely be pushback on it being mandatory, because academics, as much as I hate that we do, tend to love free labor.
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.
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 understand you’re trying to strong man this. But I think we need to interrogate the premise here. How does “inequity” represent a “threat” to our “long term survival and prosperity?” What is the specific causal mechanism by which we expect that to happen?
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?
> Research has generally linked economic inequality to political and social instability, including revolution, democratic breakdown and civil conflict.
> There are outstanding systemic inequities at every level of American society.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Are you arguing that society operates from a position of optimal market theory, and that cultural norms, prejudices, and biases play no role in salary or pay rates for anyone It's not particularly hard to find examples of disparity or exploitation.
Disparity and exploitation are not the same thing as ignoring an obvious way to reduce labor costs. Why would companies be smart enough to outsource labor overseas, but somehow lack the know-how to simply hire women and save 23% of labor costs? Because the "women make 77 cents on the dollar" meme is just looking at raw incomes, and not adjusting for type of job and experience.
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.
Then why don't they just hire women to do the exact same jobs as men and save a ton of money? You're still not offering a rationale for why companies aren't making use of an easy way to reduce labor costs. Which is more likely: that companies hate women so much that they're willing to ignore an opportunity to make a massive leap in profitability? Or perhaps you need to read your studies more closely and it's not the case that men and women are paid differently for the same work?
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.
There's a vast difference between suboptimal decision making and ignoring a massive cost saving. The line that "went make X% as much as men" is widely spread, it's inconceivable that executives haven't heard this line. And the profi gains from a 10-20% reduction in labor costs would be staggering. No, prejudice doesn't cut it as a rationale.
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.
> The line that "went make X% as much as men" is widely spread
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.
Your statement (which I happen to agree with) supports DEI policies but not the specific practice of requiring a written DEI statement, which is the important distinction OP made.
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.
Well, the “acknowledge and mark” phrase gets at the statement—That if the org thought objective X was authentic existential goal, it behooves them to understand how an applicant understands and would configure into that plan. (I have no claim about its efficacy. The highly-structured nature of the statement is a head-scratcher. I’m here watching the fallout with everyone else.)
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!
> it behooves them to understand how an applicant understands and would configure into that plan.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
As someone who is pro DEI and participated in DEI related activities and brainstorms during hiring: I very much doubt that.
This is an ideological statement which brings no fact, no new perspective, is not substantial and does not refute the opponent’s argument (which is that unfair DEI creates resentment that you later pay).
As per Dang’s guidelines above (specifically for this thread), this should not have been allowed on HN.
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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267862. The principles are the same, so 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.
I dont like the DEI industry, but affirmative action is good. Slavery ended 150 years ago and its disgraceful that so many African-Americans still live zero wealth, poor jobs, with second rate schools and healthcare. Many/most corporate jobs really dont require a lot of unique skills, its good that employers have a preference to hire under represented minorities, hopefully it'll help improve society for all of us.
Tons of people had it shitty much more recently who aren’t black.
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.
The issue is that there are many who suffer from generational poverty and are not “diverse”. The DEI benefits should go to all of disadvantaged people regardless of skin color. And there are many wealthy African Americans. Why are they getting the benefits of DEI vs the generationally low income white kid?
Not in America, but I was talking to some managers for a childcare service here and they were explaining why they try to favor brown people. One put it as "for want of a better measure". It's kind of strange since that's sort of what all racism is, isn't it? An easy shortcut for evaluating people without having to go to the trouble of investigating each individual.
I'll preface this with I'm not american, and I'm from a country that historically doesn't have a problem with racism against the minorities these policies affect.
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
Ah, the old argument that to end racism we must embrace noble bigotry.
How about ignoring immutable characteristics, period, and picking solely on merit? I love other commenters mentioning removing personal characteristics such as name, gender and race from resumes - spot on.
There's a pattern that I see come up quite often, and it's really common with any discussion about things that involve diversity and inclusion efforts. I don't know if there's a specific term for it, but it happens roughly like this:
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.
I am very interested in increasing diversity but I don't like the idea that anyone disagreeing with any dei suggestion should be labeled as intentionally disruptive and bad faith.
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.
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.
Anyone with a brain and sense of dignity will feel like racism is bad and unfair. Experiencing negative racism is enraging and depressing. Experiencing positive racism instantly gives you impostor syndrome and a sense of dehumanization.
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).
> 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.
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.
I agree with the “eliminate artificial barriers” version of DEI. I’m a huge beneficiary of the push in the 1990s to “not see race.” But I don’t think that’s the dominant version of DEI today. I think the notion that “diverse teams are better” actually erects barriers, because it socializes people to think that the races are different.
I think the situation is different for sex diversity because men and women are different in ways that require accommodation.
It seems to me like we’re probably not too far apart in our opinions- and perhaps each of us bringing a separate set of experiences is letting us come to a better and more nuanced view.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
you've contradicted yourself, that's all the parent was saying, that comparing your demographics with national demographics is used to identify the degree to which your organization needs to institute race quotas
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".
> 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.
No it's not. That's a dumb strawman. "The over riding DEI principle" is not some guy that doesn't understand statistical variance, and doesn't accept any reason at all for fields to differ.
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.
> 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.
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.
You’ve accurately described the differences, but none of those things are relevant to the workplace. All the ways I’m actually different from Americans are just a source of consternation where I have to bite my tongue and remind myself that it’s their country and I have to put up with the dog in the office, etc.
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!)
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.
To be clear, Bangladeshis (and I think most Muslims) don’t “hate” dogs. There are dogs—my dad had them in the village and we had one when I was young. It’s a hygiene taboo. They’re viewed as unclean. They live outside—you don’t snuggle them or put your face up to them. It’s similar to their view of using toilet paper instead of washing after going to the bathroom. Or how North Americans view the Latin American practice of disposing of toilet paper in the trash bin rather than flushing it.
I don’t subscribe to that view of nationhood. It’s a constant source of discomfort (not just at the office, but visiting people’s houses or visiting my in laws) but it’s not my place to impose on the people whose ancestors built this country. I feel bad enough that I won’t let my wife have a dog, but I have to draw the line somewhere.
On behalf of the group of slightly-longer-ago immigrants to the country that you're classifying as having "built this country": I'm not sure why my ancestors coming here a while back means you can't say "I don't want a dog next to my desk at work".
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.
If it’s just cultural have you thought of “getting the fuck over it” and letting your wife get a dog? You seem like a logical person, unless you specifically have an issue with them that isn’t cultural baggage, just embrace the ability to have dogs.
Culture includes some of our most deep-down disgust responses. I have trouble even being at people’s houses if there’s dog hair on the couch or I can smell them. It’s coded to me as a dirty environment.
As the owner of a bulldog that is essentially a furry, shedding alimentary canal with feet, I assure you there are perfectly legitimate reasons to find dogs unclean.
A few years ago I worked at a company that let people bring in dogs and I hated it. I actually like dogs and have had some myself (although not at that time), but one of my team members always brought in his huge rescue pitbull. It was always under control, never barked or lunged, but it liked to sit perfectly still, alert and upright giving me a death stare for hours at a time. All I could think was "this dog is probably not going to do anything, but if it snaps it could probably maim me in an instant."
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.
> I don't like the idea that anyone disagreeing with any dei suggestion should be labeled as intentionally disruptive and bad faith.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Anyone still using the term "woke" in a serious discussion at this point is using a thought terminating cliche.
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.
> 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.
I agree with you that it is best avoided whenever possible.
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.
> 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.
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.
DEI is a lot like a headless religion that nobody's asked for. It's headless because instead of talking about spirit or similar high matters, it says "you are your body" and proceeds to divide people based on a few visible traits such as skin color. This quasi-religion doesn't talk about what we have in common. Instead it's fixated on superficial traits that make us different. When DEI got support among the rich and they pushed it down to the people, it obviously created resentment. Nobody likes when you're forced to say things you don't believe in and find disgusting.
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.
As a moderate, I do suspect that a lot of conservatives like to concern troll, but on the other hand, the far left really seems to like to double down on defending wild takes, like the university presidents refusing to answer whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates the code of conduct of their universities, which makes this line of questioning relevant.
> 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.
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.
> Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it.
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.)
HN tends to avoid politics, but when it does show up, there is a definite bias if you look at the pattern of up and down votes. What's more interesting is seeing how that bias has changed over time.
I don't think that HN is middle of the road politically, I think it is mostly apolitical; the average has no significance. Some people on HN are of all political opinions, this is great, but voting seems sometimes skewed in some direction - it does not even indicate where the average is. Being very little political is one of the things I like most about HN.
> There is no such a thing as cultural Marxism. That's a conspiracy theory the nazis first created.
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.
I learned something today, I had no idea there was a coherent ideology of cultural Marxism. I had always assumed it was just a term made up on the spot in the spirit of “Marxism=bad leftie thing” (don’t you know how many died under Mao/Stalin?!), therefore lumping all of progressive politics in with it.
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.
> 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).
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
I think we have a disagreement about how to deal with a situation where two different concepts are called by the same name. In some sense they may seem the same because they have the same name, but in another they actually have no relationship. There is no logical path from A to B or vice versa. It’s not like the Norway terrorist was simply disagreeing with cultural Marxism in the academic sense. He wasn’t engaging with it at all, and simply borrowing the term (or more likely, organically reinventing it).
As a simple example, in the conspiracy, cultural Marxism is used nearly synonymously with multiculturalism. Neither of your links mention multiculturalism even once.
Well, coming back to my World Zionist Congress example – you might equally say that antisemites who accuse the WZC of "secretly controlling the world" are not "engaging with it at all, and simply borrowing the term (or more likely, organically reinventing it)". And yet, I don't think that makes sense. Antisemites make all kinds of unhinged, baseless accusations against Jewish people and their community organisations – and yet, that doesn't mean that when an antisemite says "Jew" they are talking about something completely unrelated to what non-antisemites mean by that word – if that were the case, they wouldn't (strictly speaking) be antisemites at all.
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.
Language is a tool. We use words because they are useful. As a practical matter, the conspiracy versions of terms have only passing resemblance with their real-world counterparts. Mentioning the relevant people isn’t actually engaging with the content of it, it is more like worldbuilding in a fictional story. New York is a real place but Spider-Man doesn’t live there. MI6 is a real organization but James Bond isn’t on their payroll.
The problem is, where do you draw the line between legitimate criticisms and conspiratorial nonsense?
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.
The Nazi concept of "Cultural Bolshevism" has nothing to do with Cultural Marxism the post-war academic movement
"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
I'm pretty sure that "cultural Marxism" is a conspiracy theory, so I'd probably downvote you for that still. Seriously, what is your definition of cultural Marxism? I'm not gonna respond by picking it apart or whatever, I'll just read it and write "thank you" as a response after you've posted it.
The culture of class revenge/justice that fuels Marxism.
"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."
I was not aware that that the term cultural Marxism comes from a specific conspiracy theory from the 90s. I meant to say that some of these left wing social movements divide the entire world into an oppressor and an oppressed class the way you saw in the Chinese communist revolution for example, except not on economic lines (ie Marxism) but on race/identity lines which is why I said cultural Marxism but I should have been more careful with the terminology.
There was a very simple reason for them: to hire more non-Asian minority faculty. Just as with SAT scores, if you evaluate candidates numerically, Asian faculty will take ~50% of the spots and Black faculty will take ~1% of the spots. But if you add a job requirement of "has helped do DEI woo for Black students" then it's a lot easier to justify hiring the Black candidate.
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.
> DEI statements are important because they show individual awareness of historical inequities and current biases that form modern society.
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.
> but is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument
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.
I’m going to be honest, those examples don’t really make me feel that DEI is serving a valid purpose. If those are the best cases then I will say good riddance. Uniformity of opinion should not be a goal of academia.
>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.
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...>
I have no idea which side you're on (I'm not parsing the thread for that) but your comments are standing out as particularly bad flamewar. Please stop.
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 hn@ycombinator.com.
I don't know if or not this is "coherent," but my experience has been that the type of person to oppose something like this is more often than not the type of person we were trying to filter out anyway. There may be some false negatives of course, but in terms of keeping the klan from high positions in your institution, this sort of thing seems to work.
> There may be some false negatives of course, but in terms of keeping the klan from high positions in your institution, this sort of thing seems to work.
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.
I can see a DEI program as promoting the social values of an institution. A position that I once had was this. If all ethnic groups have a bell curve of intelligence. All things being equal, the ethnic groups would have similar distributions of academic qualifications.
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.
> is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument
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.
> 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.
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.
A huge fraction of humans don't have gametes. That definition only works for describing a species, not individuals. That doesn't need debating, he's off in his own corner talking about a completely different metric.
Now you're cursing me to read entire twitter threads?
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's in the second paragraph of one of the links I posted:
"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.
