11 ms·

Make no mistake, inclusion and diversity at all costs is the new "religious" standard. Your personal beliefs do not matter. You will conform or you will suffe

by rsyring 10y ago

Make no mistake, inclusion and diversity at all costs is the new "religious" standard. Your personal beliefs do not matter. You will conform or you will suffer. (Vote down, that's fine, but it's still true.)

ivanbakel 10y ago
Indeed, go on Stormfront and you'll find it a religious bastion of diversity and inclusion! Communities have always been free to choose their members and morals. If I can kick someone out for being verbally abusive, why can't I do it for whatever the community agrees on?
- skylan_q 10y ago
  Indeed, go on Stormfront and you'll find it a religious bastion of diversity and inclusion! Most people laugh, but I'm a regular visitor of a forum where people share a lot of the same controversial views but the makeup of people (except for the fact that it's 99% male) is way more diverse than anywhere else I've been and I've lived in Toronto.
minsight 10y ago
I'm not too sure that diversity or inclusion has a net cost.
- tnones 10y ago
  Diversity and inclusion have a cost of having to deal with ongoing disagreement and friction that comes from coexistence. Diversity(tm) and Inclusion(tm) have a cost of inviting Diversity Experts to tell you why you cannot do any of this on your own and why you need to pay them for it, even though none of their materials or solutions have been peer-reviewed and the readily observable effect is that they make everyone miserable. One is how communities work, the other is how protection rackets work.
- stillkicking 10y ago
  Diversity and inclusion have a cost of having to deal with ongoing disagreement and friction that comes from coexistence. Diversity(tm) and Inclusion(tm) have a cost of inviting Diversity Experts to tell you why you cannot do any of this on your own and why you need to pay them for it, even though none of their materials or solutions have been peer-reviewed and the readily observable effect is that they make everyone miserable. One is how communities work, the other is how protection rackets work.
Flow 10y ago
I've started to mentally replace the words "inclusion and diversity" with "conformity" on certain places on the net.
- sitepodmatt 10y ago
  Agreed. These people are essentially bullies acting from their ivory tower of unchallengable beliefs and morals. Their non-sense such as "he holds views that are in opposition with the values of the Drupal project." actually do more to suppress tolerance, diversity, and inclusion than encourage it. tl;dr think like me or I throw the dummy out the pram. I wish techies would get back to focusing on tech, it seems every other tweet and hacker news post is something meta about diversity, inclusion, tolerance, racism etc..
  - nebabyte 10y ago
    They're in a capitalist meritocracy, this sort of nonsense is just their hilarious attempt to recoup the costs they sunk into this project. Branch off into your own community and accept that you made a mistake jumping in without testing whether your "leader" was acceptable to your standard of "tolerance". It's not on them to change how they run something you literally gave up control over just because it was convenient for you at the time. Lol @ them listing their donations and time 'wasted' on something they had no idea or assurance of control over. I'm reminded of the Bane scene. "I gave you a lot of money..." "And this gives you power over me?" Next time, get it in (legal) writing, folks! :)
  - bonaldi 10y ago
    Well, in part everything you complain about is because the tech industry is suffering from the "focusing on the tech". Focusing on the tech unquestioningly meant only the privileged (in one sense or another) were able to get access to the community, and so it has unwittingly become exclusionary. While we were all "focusing on the tech", the number of women and minorities in tech somehow and mysteriously plummeted. And software was made, even by big companies, that excluded huge swathes of people (hello Apple Health). And companies were made that badly suffered from this too (Uber). So, belatedly, the community is addressing that, by trying to actively work towards diversity, inclusion, tolerance, etc. Tech being tech, this has meant a whole assload of bike-shedding and "works for me, close as wontfix", as this thread yet again evidences. Doesn't mean we still don't have the bugs, and should still be trying to figure out how to fix them.
hpaavola 10y ago
In this particular case, who should have conformed and who had to suffer? Would you say that it was because the exact opposite of inclusion and diversity?
- humanrebar 10y ago
  It's impossible to be absolutely "inclusive". Situations like this make the cognitive dissonance obvious. 1. There is no standard of what ethical behavior entails. Many thoughts are actually incompatible. In this context: 1a. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to be violent even in a consensual sexual context. This could include certain religious people, but it could include certain kinds of pacifists and feminists as well. 1b. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to have anything beyond a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In this view, if you know about it and they didn't tell you personally, it's messed up. 1c. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to be anything less than 100% supportive of any kind of sexual expression. 1d. Some people really don't care and are offended that their desire to be left out of all this isn't respected. ...there are certainly more positions and combinations of positions here. 2. There is the secondary question as to what means in the pursuit of (1) are ethical or moral. 2a. What information is public? 2b. Once something is leaked, can we use it? How do we pretend we hadn't learned something? 2c. What opinions are worth respecting? Understanding? Should we silence people with unconscionable opinions? 2d. Can we outright exclude people for having non-inclusive beliefs?
redsummer 10y ago
"Diversity in everything except thought" is the mantra. The problem with this is that to solve problems you need diversity in thought: https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-theyre-more-cognitively-diverse https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-the...
- YCode 10y ago
  I've wondered this for a long time but never felt comfortable asking... Has ethnic/racial diversity in the workplace actually been shown to increase productivity or innovation, or is that dogma used to justify the practice?
  - redsummer 10y ago
    The article addresses this question: "Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance."
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- mnglkhn2 10y ago
  It is a social construct to try and keep everyone at peace. The alternative would be a society with fault lines along racial and religious beliefs. And this would most likely lead to conflict. So, if you don't want conflict, then you need to integrate in some ways. You don't want to have identities develop and take hold. At that point it gets complicated. For instance, in Brazil, once you know you are a person confined to live in favelas forever, then you participation in the broader society will be very limited. And with that the regard for the rules of the larger society.
  - redsummer 10y ago
okreallywtf 10y ago
Finally, someone willing to stand up for the majority. When will this discrimination end? When will the weak and marginalized release their stranglehold on our society and let the rest of us fly free? Not a day goes by when I don't imagine what it would be like to not be able to say or do whatever I want and the fear of that makes me absolutely terrified. We must be constantly vigilant to ensure that fantasy never becomes a reality.
- rybosome 10y ago
  Cute, but your glib dismissal of this viewpoint is partly why Trump won. Here's a little explanation of how people work: if a person holds a belief or fear, and one person demonizes then for it while another validates it, the person is going to be drawn to the validator. It's the same reason why gay pride has soared over the last few decades; as a gay person, would you rather listen to a person saying "you're perfect the way you are", or "you should be ashamed"? Some people in the majority ethnic group are afraid that they will be attacked, in bad faith, for expressing a view in conflict with the current set of liberal views. By dismissing their fears and telling them to piss off, you're guiding them into the arms of Trump and his ilk (who genuinely hold extremist views). The right way to move people is through negotiation, not shaming and heckling. In this case, "negotiation" means understanding their goals and motivations, explaining your own, and finding a consensus agreeable to everyone. And to preempt accusations: I voted for Sanders in the primary, Clinton in the general, and am constantly horrified by the Trump administration. I'm not defending genuinely hateful views. I am just aware enough of how people work to know that failing to listen because you're on the moral high ground is more likely to breed extremism than genuinely change minds.
  - okreallywtf 10y ago
    I generally agree with you but the seemingly unaware irony of people up in arms for accusations made against someone for what they did behind closed doors got the better of me. I appreciate that this is a nuanced situation and my personal feeling is the best thing to do is apply tolerance equally to everyone as long as you can (ie, tolerating peoples intolerant beliefs as a way to teach them more tolerance) and I can't really see how ostracizing this guy will be a net positive at all but it also seemed as if there are things we don't know about the situation but we'll see if anything more comes out. I am though getting tired of the "that is why Trump won" accusations that float around, everyone seems to have perfect hindsight now that its over but few people seemed willing to actually do anything to prevent it. The party of personal responsibility has done a great job of blaming the victim (once again) for why they were seemingly forced to elect Trump. The truth is though: we don't have to do anything, there are plenty of shills who will drum up fear, frustration, and anger against marginalized minority groups simply for their existence. Yes, we can give them ammunition but they also have perfectly good ammunition factories churning it out day after day. All it takes is one loudmouth freshman SJW filmed on a campus to bias millions of people while thousands of trained people try to educate others about diversity issues get totally ignored. There is an inherent conflict between people who see more rights for others as less rights for themselves. Should we take the high road and stick to our ideals (even when it means accepting people who would see our rights squashed)? Absolutely, but if we think by doing so we will actually achieve our goals we are delusional. I find it endlessly ironic that people who are typically derisive of the left as being coddling have to be coddled by the left lest they inflict more discrimination on the rest of us. People who joke about being "triggered" are themselves triggered constantly even though they are typically part of the unchallenged majority. It is like an abusive relationship where you are walking on eggshells and if you get out of line (ie, by standing up for yourself) the result is your fault.
simias 10y ago
You could have spared us the downvote bait but I do agree that this weird new "progressive orthodoxy" is worrying, and that's coming from a pretty hardcore liberal feminist atheist leftist globalist whateverist myself. I've worked with pretty strict christians and muslims in the past without issue. As long as it remains in the private sphere I don't see why anybody would have issue with that. It's also interesting to challenge you world view from time to time, echo chambers are never a good thing for critical thought.
- michaelsbradley 10y ago
  The whole keep-public-and-private-life-separate principle can itself be problematic. That is, it's not always clear what that even means. If it's the same as "never, ever do/say something offensive to current-day 'progressives'", then we have a problem. Speaking as a Christian, I actively seek to more deeply integrate my beliefs into every aspect of my existence: how I do my work and fulfill my responsibilities, how I speak to and treat others, i.e. many aspects of my behavior that resonate throughout my daily life regardless of temporal or physical context (at the office, at home, etc., during work, during play). At times, this means my words and actions clash with the "progressive" culture of the software development world; that can happen because someone puts me on the hot seat, or because I choose to speak/act, according to my beliefs, in response to some evil that cannot be ignored. I do pro-life/anti-abortion volunteer work in my area — I don't wear it on my sleeve, but sometimes people ask, or maybe they've seen me out and about, so engaged. I have tech peers who've told me they find such activity heinous. I go to a church where most of the women in attendance (voluntarily) veil their heads during the liturgy — personal photos related to my liturgical life (an important part of every week/year, so media ends up quasi/publicly accessible via the usual social platforms) have... raised eyebrows among the same peers. Who I am, what I believe — I categorically refuse to put a wall around those things so that "offensive" life-content doesn't leak into my professional sphere. At the same time, I don't actively seek to offend my tech peers and if I do get into a disagreement with someone, I strive to be patient, respectful, and caring. I have friends in tech who share much in common with all the above, but are more guarded (even fearful — that's really the thing) about insulating their traditional Christian lifestyles from their professional peers and employers. I certainly don't intend to out them, and I understand their fears, but that way feels duplicitous to me, and it's not a path I'll take.
samirillian 10y ago
I'm not actually sure what you're getting at. I have two theories: a) You are implying that this article is an exception to the rule, b) This article is an example of the rule insofar as you can believe anything at all insofar as "practical" conformity is enforced regardless?

by rsyring 10y ago

ivanbakel 10y ago

Indeed, go on Stormfront and you'll find it a religious bastion of diversity and inclusion! Communities have always been free to choose their members and morals. If I can kick someone out for being verbally abusive, why can't I do it for whatever the community agrees on?

skylan_q 10y ago
Indeed, go on Stormfront and you'll find it a religious bastion of diversity and inclusion! Most people laugh, but I'm a regular visitor of a forum where people share a lot of the same controversial views but the makeup of people (except for the fact that it's 99% male) is way more diverse than anywhere else I've been and I've lived in Toronto.

minsight 10y ago

I'm not too sure that diversity or inclusion has a net cost.

tnones 10y ago
Diversity and inclusion have a cost of having to deal with ongoing disagreement and friction that comes from coexistence. Diversity(tm) and Inclusion(tm) have a cost of inviting Diversity Experts to tell you why you cannot do any of this on your own and why you need to pay them for it, even though none of their materials or solutions have been peer-reviewed and the readily observable effect is that they make everyone miserable. One is how communities work, the other is how protection rackets work.
stillkicking 10y ago
Diversity and inclusion have a cost of having to deal with ongoing disagreement and friction that comes from coexistence. Diversity(tm) and Inclusion(tm) have a cost of inviting Diversity Experts to tell you why you cannot do any of this on your own and why you need to pay them for it, even though none of their materials or solutions have been peer-reviewed and the readily observable effect is that they make everyone miserable. One is how communities work, the other is how protection rackets work.

Flow 10y ago

I've started to mentally replace the words "inclusion and diversity" with "conformity" on certain places on the net.

sitepodmatt 10y ago
Agreed. These people are essentially bullies acting from their ivory tower of unchallengable beliefs and morals. Their non-sense such as "he holds views that are in opposition with the values of the Drupal project." actually do more to suppress tolerance, diversity, and inclusion than encourage it. tl;dr think like me or I throw the dummy out the pram. I wish techies would get back to focusing on tech, it seems every other tweet and hacker news post is something meta about diversity, inclusion, tolerance, racism etc..
- nebabyte 10y ago
  They're in a capitalist meritocracy, this sort of nonsense is just their hilarious attempt to recoup the costs they sunk into this project. Branch off into your own community and accept that you made a mistake jumping in without testing whether your "leader" was acceptable to your standard of "tolerance". It's not on them to change how they run something you literally gave up control over just because it was convenient for you at the time. Lol @ them listing their donations and time 'wasted' on something they had no idea or assurance of control over. I'm reminded of the Bane scene. "I gave you a lot of money..." "And this gives you power over me?" Next time, get it in (legal) writing, folks! :)
- bonaldi 10y ago
  Well, in part everything you complain about is because the tech industry is suffering from the "focusing on the tech". Focusing on the tech unquestioningly meant only the privileged (in one sense or another) were able to get access to the community, and so it has unwittingly become exclusionary. While we were all "focusing on the tech", the number of women and minorities in tech somehow and mysteriously plummeted. And software was made, even by big companies, that excluded huge swathes of people (hello Apple Health). And companies were made that badly suffered from this too (Uber). So, belatedly, the community is addressing that, by trying to actively work towards diversity, inclusion, tolerance, etc. Tech being tech, this has meant a whole assload of bike-shedding and "works for me, close as wontfix", as this thread yet again evidences. Doesn't mean we still don't have the bugs, and should still be trying to figure out how to fix them.

hpaavola 10y ago

In this particular case, who should have conformed and who had to suffer? Would you say that it was because the exact opposite of inclusion and diversity?

humanrebar 10y ago
It's impossible to be absolutely "inclusive". Situations like this make the cognitive dissonance obvious. 1. There is no standard of what ethical behavior entails. Many thoughts are actually incompatible. In this context: 1a. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to be violent even in a consensual sexual context. This could include certain religious people, but it could include certain kinds of pacifists and feminists as well. 1b. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to have anything beyond a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In this view, if you know about it and they didn't tell you personally, it's messed up. 1c. Some people might think it's unethical or immoral to be anything less than 100% supportive of any kind of sexual expression. 1d. Some people really don't care and are offended that their desire to be left out of all this isn't respected. ...there are certainly more positions and combinations of positions here. 2. There is the secondary question as to what means in the pursuit of (1) are ethical or moral. 2a. What information is public? 2b. Once something is leaked, can we use it? How do we pretend we hadn't learned something? 2c. What opinions are worth respecting? Understanding? Should we silence people with unconscionable opinions? 2d. Can we outright exclude people for having non-inclusive beliefs?

redsummer 10y ago

"Diversity in everything except thought" is the mantra. The problem with this is that to solve problems you need diversity in thought: https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-theyre-more-cognitively-diverse https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-the...

YCode 10y ago
I've wondered this for a long time but never felt comfortable asking... Has ethnic/racial diversity in the workplace actually been shown to increase productivity or innovation, or is that dogma used to justify the practice?
- redsummer 10y ago
  The article addresses this question: "Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance."
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
mnglkhn2 10y ago
It is a social construct to try and keep everyone at peace. The alternative would be a society with fault lines along racial and religious beliefs. And this would most likely lead to conflict. So, if you don't want conflict, then you need to integrate in some ways. You don't want to have identities develop and take hold. At that point it gets complicated. For instance, in Brazil, once you know you are a person confined to live in favelas forever, then you participation in the broader society will be very limited. And with that the regard for the rules of the larger society.
- redsummer 10y ago

okreallywtf 10y ago

Finally, someone willing to stand up for the majority. When will this discrimination end? When will the weak and marginalized release their stranglehold on our society and let the rest of us fly free? Not a day goes by when I don't imagine what it would be like to not be able to say or do whatever I want and the fear of that makes me absolutely terrified. We must be constantly vigilant to ensure that fantasy never becomes a reality.

rybosome 10y ago
Cute, but your glib dismissal of this viewpoint is partly why Trump won. Here's a little explanation of how people work: if a person holds a belief or fear, and one person demonizes then for it while another validates it, the person is going to be drawn to the validator. It's the same reason why gay pride has soared over the last few decades; as a gay person, would you rather listen to a person saying "you're perfect the way you are", or "you should be ashamed"? Some people in the majority ethnic group are afraid that they will be attacked, in bad faith, for expressing a view in conflict with the current set of liberal views. By dismissing their fears and telling them to piss off, you're guiding them into the arms of Trump and his ilk (who genuinely hold extremist views). The right way to move people is through negotiation, not shaming and heckling. In this case, "negotiation" means understanding their goals and motivations, explaining your own, and finding a consensus agreeable to everyone. And to preempt accusations: I voted for Sanders in the primary, Clinton in the general, and am constantly horrified by the Trump administration. I'm not defending genuinely hateful views. I am just aware enough of how people work to know that failing to listen because you're on the moral high ground is more likely to breed extremism than genuinely change minds.
- okreallywtf 10y ago
  I generally agree with you but the seemingly unaware irony of people up in arms for accusations made against someone for what they did behind closed doors got the better of me. I appreciate that this is a nuanced situation and my personal feeling is the best thing to do is apply tolerance equally to everyone as long as you can (ie, tolerating peoples intolerant beliefs as a way to teach them more tolerance) and I can't really see how ostracizing this guy will be a net positive at all but it also seemed as if there are things we don't know about the situation but we'll see if anything more comes out. I am though getting tired of the "that is why Trump won" accusations that float around, everyone seems to have perfect hindsight now that its over but few people seemed willing to actually do anything to prevent it. The party of personal responsibility has done a great job of blaming the victim (once again) for why they were seemingly forced to elect Trump. The truth is though: we don't have to do anything, there are plenty of shills who will drum up fear, frustration, and anger against marginalized minority groups simply for their existence. Yes, we can give them ammunition but they also have perfectly good ammunition factories churning it out day after day. All it takes is one loudmouth freshman SJW filmed on a campus to bias millions of people while thousands of trained people try to educate others about diversity issues get totally ignored. There is an inherent conflict between people who see more rights for others as less rights for themselves. Should we take the high road and stick to our ideals (even when it means accepting people who would see our rights squashed)? Absolutely, but if we think by doing so we will actually achieve our goals we are delusional. I find it endlessly ironic that people who are typically derisive of the left as being coddling have to be coddled by the left lest they inflict more discrimination on the rest of us. People who joke about being "triggered" are themselves triggered constantly even though they are typically part of the unchallenged majority. It is like an abusive relationship where you are walking on eggshells and if you get out of line (ie, by standing up for yourself) the result is your fault.

simias 10y ago

You could have spared us the downvote bait but I do agree that this weird new "progressive orthodoxy" is worrying, and that's coming from a pretty hardcore liberal feminist atheist leftist globalist whateverist myself. I've worked with pretty strict christians and muslims in the past without issue. As long as it remains in the private sphere I don't see why anybody would have issue with that. It's also interesting to challenge you world view from time to time, echo chambers are never a good thing for critical thought.

michaelsbradley 10y ago
The whole keep-public-and-private-life-separate principle can itself be problematic. That is, it's not always clear what that even means. If it's the same as "never, ever do/say something offensive to current-day 'progressives'", then we have a problem. Speaking as a Christian, I actively seek to more deeply integrate my beliefs into every aspect of my existence: how I do my work and fulfill my responsibilities, how I speak to and treat others, i.e. many aspects of my behavior that resonate throughout my daily life regardless of temporal or physical context (at the office, at home, etc., during work, during play). At times, this means my words and actions clash with the "progressive" culture of the software development world; that can happen because someone puts me on the hot seat, or because I choose to speak/act, according to my beliefs, in response to some evil that cannot be ignored. I do pro-life/anti-abortion volunteer work in my area — I don't wear it on my sleeve, but sometimes people ask, or maybe they've seen me out and about, so engaged. I have tech peers who've told me they find such activity heinous. I go to a church where most of the women in attendance (voluntarily) veil their heads during the liturgy — personal photos related to my liturgical life (an important part of every week/year, so media ends up quasi/publicly accessible via the usual social platforms) have... raised eyebrows among the same peers. Who I am, what I believe — I categorically refuse to put a wall around those things so that "offensive" life-content doesn't leak into my professional sphere. At the same time, I don't actively seek to offend my tech peers and if I do get into a disagreement with someone, I strive to be patient, respectful, and caring. I have friends in tech who share much in common with all the above, but are more guarded (even fearful — that's really the thing) about insulating their traditional Christian lifestyles from their professional peers and employers. I certainly don't intend to out them, and I understand their fears, but that way feels duplicitous to me, and it's not a path I'll take.

samirillian 10y ago

I'm not actually sure what you're getting at. I have two theories: a) You are implying that this article is an exception to the rule, b) This article is an example of the rule insofar as you can believe anything at all insofar as "practical" conformity is enforced regardless?