What about this do you perceive to be flamebait or a generic tangent? I’m directly and sincerely commenting on the article. Plenty of other comments are expressing either support or criticism of the policy change.
The comment didn't respond to anything specific in the article. It just used it as a springboard to make a generic comment about a much more general topic. That's what I mean by generic tangent.
Generic tangents always make threads less interesting, because they take attention away from the specifics of what's new in an article and direct it instead to one of the large pre-existing topics that people tend to fixate on. I sometimes compare this to a spacecraft flying too close to a black hole and getting sucked in: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
It was flamebait in two ways: (1) Generic tangents on inflammatory topics are already flamebait; and (2) the comment makes a huge assumption (that the previous situation was "racism / sexism") and treats that as fact without substantiating it. Large unsubstantiated claims about inflammatory topics are also flamebait.
Many many other top-level comments are similarly non-specific to anything in the article and more or less generic springboards. But you didn't respond to them in the same way. shrug. That DEI policies were an form of racism/sexism is not an especially novel or heterodox opinion. Opinions aren't facts and can't be substantiated. And I think agnostics and even DEI promoters can correctly infer why detractors would perceive these policies to be racist/sexist in nature without elaborating in depth.
You're probably right about other comments but I'd have to see specific links to be able to say anything about them.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, and therefore makes you feel like moderation is inconsistent and unfair, the most likely explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing all of what gets posted here. There's just far too much. You (or anyone) can help by flagging posts that break the guidelines, and in egregious cases, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
It's true that moderation knobs would probably be turned up on comments like "DEI is just racist/sexist", not because we agree or disagree one way or the other, but because those are flamewar clichés. The main thing we're trying to avoid is repetition, especially flaming repetition. What we want here is curious conversation, which seeks new things to look into and talk about.
I feel like people who say this haven't read the research about our unconscious biases. My personal "hit me on the head" moment was reading about the Cincinnati Orchestra who started auditioning candidates behind a curtain and suddenly found their ratio of male:female went from 3:1 to 1:1. No one at that organization was consciously discriminating. Everyone thought as you did that they were acting without racism/sexism. And yet (at least) sexism was obvious once they removed it from the hiring equation.
And this leaves people in a quandary. How do you control for sexism when you can't just hide your candidate behind a curtain? The solution society has tried is to mandate ratios. Why they tried this makes sense. It's obvious downfalls make sense. I'm not aware of any other suggestion that is viable.
This is a funny example because some in the pro-DEI movement advocate for ending blind auditions to enhance diversity[1].
I think if we could somehow do "blind auditions" for any kind of work, that would be the ideal case of non-biased hiring. But if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI advocates would be on board.
> if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI advocates would be on board.
I really disagree with this. Obviously there are the extremists on the far end of the spectrum which this accurately describes, but the vast majority of people who support these types of programs arrive at it by observing 1) the literal centuries of examples like the one above and 2) the numerous visible day-to-day examples of racism/sexism one sees directly (not talking about silly microaggression shit)
It doesn't take an extreme viewpoint to come to the conclusion there are knobs that might need to be turned a bit more deliberately in our society to bring it closer to the blind evaluation model.
It's a shame how much of our discourse is people in the middle of the bell curve arguing principally against people on the far ends of it (or observing such arguments and wisely choosing to stay out of it).
Thing is, the "extremists" are the ones with strong beliefs, so they tend to be the ones actively promoting such programs and running them, not the middle of the ground people.
One is reminded of the famous debacle when GitHub canceled ElectronConf after using a blind review process to select talks, and ended up with al male speakers.
DEI seems to me to be the _opposite_ of blind auditions though, where instead of hiding immutable characteristics in the hiring process, they are factored in
You should read the research because its actually good.
They studied the effect of telling people that they had an unconscious bias and it worked in eliminating it.
I would like to see that reproduced as it seemed like only certain demographics followed as you would expect; and primarily not the one you would like to hear. But it would be good to do something actually effective that doesnt introduce racism to fight racism.
and the claims about the orchestra also didn't replicate.
Actually DEI promoters hate blind hiring and usually try to kill it because when implemented it always raises the number of white men being hired - there is racism and sexism in society, it's just in the opposite direction to what DEI programmes claim, and it's not unconscious.
An interesting example of this kind of meltdown was the one attempt to organize a conference for Electron developers. They decided to select speakers using blind reviews of abstracts, because they believed the non-replicable pseudo-science you're repeating here. When the results were unveiled it turned out every speaker they had selected was a man (the expected outcome of blind auditions), so they cancelled the entire conference in fit of anger. The whole community lost, because the organizers had believed in these lies told by social studies academics.
I'm more worried because it's part of a big package of swinging to the right politically. The moderation rule about "You can only call someone mentally ill if they're also queer" seems particularly uhhh nuts, deranged, stupid even.
