5 ms·

Your post makes me think about how great diversity training was in my place. It was mostly about - diversity is good - it increases a pool of workers and ideas

Your post makes me think about how great diversity training was in my place. It was mostly about - diversity is good - it increases a pool of workers and ideas to pick from - we all are minorities in something, so please be nice. We're in this boat together - everyone has unconscious bias. Including you. Beware - please make an effort to be inclusive: being the only black/white/green person in the team sucks - don't do anything illegal Kinda reasonable approach, I'd say, but I doubt they do it anymore.

ccffpphh 6y ago
Sorry to kind of jump off of you here, but what do you mean by "diversity is good"? Diversity of what? If we have 5 people that all think the same but they're all different races, is that good? Is that better than or worse than 5 people of the same race with diversity of thought? From my point of view, I believe diversity of thought enables groups of people to consider new ideas and positions that wouldn't be considered, i.e. thinking outside of the box, but I don't understand why this is extrapolated to different races, gender identities, immigration statuses, sexualities, etc. I am not claiming you brought them up but they tend to be common "diversity" points the modern populace loves to clamor around. Why do any of those imply anything about how people will think? We've all seen some creative people that are of our own race, or that were also our own sexuality, etc. All of this is of course at the expense of speed, in that greater variance in thought/ideas leads to slower movement, which I think is important in business (a solo or very tight knit organization can move much faster).
- nickff 6y ago
  Many (but not all) diversity advocates are looking for evidence to back up their preference for racial, gender, and other forms of non-ideological diversity, so they make the (often true) assertion that people of different backgrounds bring different perspectives. This is ideology searching for evidence (often known as 'motivated reasoning').
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    I can accept ideology seeking evidence, as long as everyone is clear about that. If it results in good evidence (either way) that holds up to critical analysis, all the better.
  - OminousWeapons 6y ago
    I think at a high level they are right. It probably is true that being a different race or sex or whatever results in different experiences on average which inform worldview. The problem is that any differences that might arise are largely out of scope of work. My domain knowledge, acuity, communication style, and professionalism really have nothing to do with experience relating to race, sex, orientation, or any other factor these people are concerned about. In reality these diversity programs are basically societal anti-discrimination programs in disguise. While those types of programs aren't necessarily bad, proponents know that if they pitched them purely in this way they would never get management buy in because that's largely not work related; hence all the ill supported talk about diversity automatically yielding better teams.
  - scooble 6y ago
    I remember when this was known as ‘prejudice’, in the strict sense of pre-judging aspects of a person (such as their perspective) based on e.g. their race. It was considered to be a bad thing, so it’s been very strange to see it used as a premise by diversity advocates.
    - lopmotr 6y ago
      I've seen it justified as every single member of the marginalized group has some life experience that no member of the majority/powerful group has. So although it's a prejudice, it's a correct one. That's different from traditional prejudices that aren't true for every individual.
      - waterhouse 6y ago
        Just to note, it is possible for an academic who is not part of a group to interview many members of the group, and combine other sources of information, and end up knowing more about "the experience" of that group than most individual members of that group. Because it's not a single experience. It is even possible that, say, the black son of a black doctor, raised in a rich neighborhood, knows less about the plight of blacks in ghettos than the white son of a white janitor, raised in a ghetto with lots of blacks—even if the latter made no deliberate study. One could also consider Africans who immigrated to the United States as adults. They do have the experience of being a certain race, but that may not imply nearly as much as people seem to think. (In fact, I would hazard a guess that the members of "marginalized groups" that do get hired for the highly professional jobs that diversity advocates talk about, are very disproportionately likely to have come from well-off backgrounds, and to have no direct ghetto experience.)
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  Diversity of everything: race, age, sex, alma mater, native language... I think the key message is: limiting your hiring to a specific race is equally as stupid as limiting it to MIT graduates or to people who grew up in Queens.
  - scooble 6y ago
    You seem to be talking about diversity in the hiring pool being good whereas your interlocutor was questioning whether diversity in hirings was a good.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    This is a motte. "Limiting your hiring to a specific race" means excluding everyone outside that race because of race. I think everyone here agrees that's stupid, and today almost no one is openly doing that. It's not the "key message" because 99% of those hearing it already agree, and the 1% who disagree probably aren't changing their minds and don't have much power anyway. The key message (the bailey) that diversity advocates tend to push these days is that, if you just go about hiring in what you normally think is the best way, and you end up with hires of only one specific race (or of a few races, but none of a certain few other races), then you are doing something wrong and bad, and you should change your hiring process so you end up with people of more races, even if that means sacrificing some of the goals for which you originally optimized your hiring process.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      > This is a motte. "Limiting your hiring to a specific race" means excluding everyone outside that race because of race. I think everyone here agrees that's stupid, and today almost no one is openly doing that. Intentionally perhaps not, but that doesn't mean that they aren't doing so unintentionally. As a silly example, if you restrict yourself to hiring Stanford CS grads, you'll have a hard time hiring more than a few Black people each year. If you aren't offering the best possible offers, and going out of your way to court those handful of students, you may not end up with any. > then you are doing something wrong and bad This isn't a bailey. To continue the above example, you have a few options. You can court those specific students, maybe that's a bad idea. Alternatively, you can look in more places. Hire from other schools, like state schools especially in the southeast. You'll find a ton more candidates, many of whom are just as qualified as those from Stanford. And you'll end up with a more diverse workforce along just about any axis you could pick. You didn't sacrifice anything except the ability to say "we only hire Stanford grads", which isn't really a sacrifice.
- causality0 6y ago
  Diversity of thought isn't really something we do anymore. If you pay attention you'll notice how you always have to put things in a particular way depending on the group you talk to. You have to avoid mentioning certain other groups. You have to couch your position in friendly terms, or talk about a problem that primarily affects one group as if it affects everyone equally, or vice-versa. People have a laser-focus on whose flag they perceive you to be flying and it's almost impossible to get anything done when they decide you're playing for the wrong team.
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > Sorry to kind of jump off of you here, but what do you mean by "diversity is good"? Diversity of what? If we have 5 people that all think the same but they're all different races, is that good? Is that better than or worse than 5 people of the same race with diversity of thought? Some people got fired for framing the problem exactly as you framed it: https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j... The irony is that the person that was fired was part of that "minority" the ideologues who wanted her head are supposed to support at first place.
- andreskytt 6y ago
  In system architecture, there’s entire fields of research exploring ways to expand the space from which we pick our solutions. It is not about variety of opinions but about a variety of ways of thinking about problems. More options means more creativity, more chances of a novel approach, better chances of standing out. Having a culturally (gender, race, native language, education, age, you name it) diverse team is a really efficient way to gain that. So diversity of perspective is directly financially beneficial for certain organizations.
rgoulter 6y ago
Defensive behaviour would come from that many diversity trainings foster insecurity, anxiety, and self-contempt. What I think avoids that are these principles from Chloe Valdary's Theory of Enchantment: https://theoryofenchantment.com/ https://theoryofenchantment.com/ - Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. - Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down, never to destroy. - Root everything you do in love and compassion.
- lliamander 6y ago
  As someone who has pretty much discounted diversity training initiatives as a class, this actually intrigues me on account of the first point. It runs pretty contrary to the Critical Race Theory (CRT) based training materials that I've seen.
orangecat 6y ago
we all are minorities in something, so please be nice. We're in this boat together Pretty sure that would pattern-match to "all lives matter" according to those currently running the show.
jbay808 6y ago
We had a DEI workshop at a previous workplace. The presenter suggested that {minority group members} typically don't feel comfortable speaking up in meetings, so I kept track of how many times each person spoke and got interrupted. Then halfway through, I proposed an experiment -- for the rest of the meeting, we leave a full second, by the clock, between when one person finishes talking and the next person starts. The presenter thought that would be interesting so we tried it. I tracked which people spoke after that (and how many times the rule was violated). If you ever try this experiment, be aware that maintaining a 1 second silence is very uncomfortable. The results were pretty unexpected, but perhaps the most surprising thing (although it shouldn't have been surprising in retrospect) was that the group that benefitted the most in this experiment -- most underrepresented in the meeting before, and proportionately represented after -- was a minority group whose existence wasn't even mentioned once in the entire DEI presentation. Can you guess who it was? That's right: English-as-a-second-language immigrant employees, who were fluent but needed an extra ~0.25s more than the native English speakers to compose their thoughts. Coincidentally this group was mostly composed of {members of groups classified as majority by more common axes of classification}, who unlike other {members of their group}, almost never had their voices heard in meetings because they were ESL.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  I apologize that this adds nothing of substance to the discussion, but I wanted to thank you for your extraordinarily interesting post.

ccffpphh 6y ago

Sorry to kind of jump off of you here, but what do you mean by "diversity is good"? Diversity of what? If we have 5 people that all think the same but they're all different races, is that good? Is that better than or worse than 5 people of the same race with diversity of thought? From my point of view, I believe diversity of thought enables groups of people to consider new ideas and positions that wouldn't be considered, i.e. thinking outside of the box, but I don't understand why this is extrapolated to different races, gender identities, immigration statuses, sexualities, etc. I am not claiming you brought them up but they tend to be common "diversity" points the modern populace loves to clamor around. Why do any of those imply anything about how people will think? We've all seen some creative people that are of our own race, or that were also our own sexuality, etc. All of this is of course at the expense of speed, in that greater variance in thought/ideas leads to slower movement, which I think is important in business (a solo or very tight knit organization can move much faster).

nickff 6y ago
Many (but not all) diversity advocates are looking for evidence to back up their preference for racial, gender, and other forms of non-ideological diversity, so they make the (often true) assertion that people of different backgrounds bring different perspectives. This is ideology searching for evidence (often known as 'motivated reasoning').
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  I can accept ideology seeking evidence, as long as everyone is clear about that. If it results in good evidence (either way) that holds up to critical analysis, all the better.
- OminousWeapons 6y ago
  I think at a high level they are right. It probably is true that being a different race or sex or whatever results in different experiences on average which inform worldview. The problem is that any differences that might arise are largely out of scope of work. My domain knowledge, acuity, communication style, and professionalism really have nothing to do with experience relating to race, sex, orientation, or any other factor these people are concerned about. In reality these diversity programs are basically societal anti-discrimination programs in disguise. While those types of programs aren't necessarily bad, proponents know that if they pitched them purely in this way they would never get management buy in because that's largely not work related; hence all the ill supported talk about diversity automatically yielding better teams.
- scooble 6y ago
  I remember when this was known as ‘prejudice’, in the strict sense of pre-judging aspects of a person (such as their perspective) based on e.g. their race. It was considered to be a bad thing, so it’s been very strange to see it used as a premise by diversity advocates.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    I've seen it justified as every single member of the marginalized group has some life experience that no member of the majority/powerful group has. So although it's a prejudice, it's a correct one. That's different from traditional prejudices that aren't true for every individual.
    - waterhouse 6y ago
      Just to note, it is possible for an academic who is not part of a group to interview many members of the group, and combine other sources of information, and end up knowing more about "the experience" of that group than most individual members of that group. Because it's not a single experience. It is even possible that, say, the black son of a black doctor, raised in a rich neighborhood, knows less about the plight of blacks in ghettos than the white son of a white janitor, raised in a ghetto with lots of blacks—even if the latter made no deliberate study. One could also consider Africans who immigrated to the United States as adults. They do have the experience of being a certain race, but that may not imply nearly as much as people seem to think. (In fact, I would hazard a guess that the members of "marginalized groups" that do get hired for the highly professional jobs that diversity advocates talk about, are very disproportionately likely to have come from well-off backgrounds, and to have no direct ghetto experience.)
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Diversity of everything: race, age, sex, alma mater, native language... I think the key message is: limiting your hiring to a specific race is equally as stupid as limiting it to MIT graduates or to people who grew up in Queens.
- scooble 6y ago
  You seem to be talking about diversity in the hiring pool being good whereas your interlocutor was questioning whether diversity in hirings was a good.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  This is a motte. "Limiting your hiring to a specific race" means excluding everyone outside that race because of race. I think everyone here agrees that's stupid, and today almost no one is openly doing that. It's not the "key message" because 99% of those hearing it already agree, and the 1% who disagree probably aren't changing their minds and don't have much power anyway. The key message (the bailey) that diversity advocates tend to push these days is that, if you just go about hiring in what you normally think is the best way, and you end up with hires of only one specific race (or of a few races, but none of a certain few other races), then you are doing something wrong and bad, and you should change your hiring process so you end up with people of more races, even if that means sacrificing some of the goals for which you originally optimized your hiring process.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > This is a motte. "Limiting your hiring to a specific race" means excluding everyone outside that race because of race. I think everyone here agrees that's stupid, and today almost no one is openly doing that. Intentionally perhaps not, but that doesn't mean that they aren't doing so unintentionally. As a silly example, if you restrict yourself to hiring Stanford CS grads, you'll have a hard time hiring more than a few Black people each year. If you aren't offering the best possible offers, and going out of your way to court those handful of students, you may not end up with any. > then you are doing something wrong and bad This isn't a bailey. To continue the above example, you have a few options. You can court those specific students, maybe that's a bad idea. Alternatively, you can look in more places. Hire from other schools, like state schools especially in the southeast. You'll find a ton more candidates, many of whom are just as qualified as those from Stanford. And you'll end up with a more diverse workforce along just about any axis you could pick. You didn't sacrifice anything except the ability to say "we only hire Stanford grads", which isn't really a sacrifice.
causality0 6y ago
Diversity of thought isn't really something we do anymore. If you pay attention you'll notice how you always have to put things in a particular way depending on the group you talk to. You have to avoid mentioning certain other groups. You have to couch your position in friendly terms, or talk about a problem that primarily affects one group as if it affects everyone equally, or vice-versa. People have a laser-focus on whose flag they perceive you to be flying and it's almost impossible to get anything done when they decide you're playing for the wrong team.
throw_m239339 6y ago
> Sorry to kind of jump off of you here, but what do you mean by "diversity is good"? Diversity of what? If we have 5 people that all think the same but they're all different races, is that good? Is that better than or worse than 5 people of the same race with diversity of thought? Some people got fired for framing the problem exactly as you framed it: https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j... The irony is that the person that was fired was part of that "minority" the ideologues who wanted her head are supposed to support at first place.
andreskytt 6y ago
In system architecture, there’s entire fields of research exploring ways to expand the space from which we pick our solutions. It is not about variety of opinions but about a variety of ways of thinking about problems. More options means more creativity, more chances of a novel approach, better chances of standing out. Having a culturally (gender, race, native language, education, age, you name it) diverse team is a really efficient way to gain that. So diversity of perspective is directly financially beneficial for certain organizations.

rgoulter 6y ago

Defensive behaviour would come from that many diversity trainings foster insecurity, anxiety, and self-contempt. What I think avoids that are these principles from Chloe Valdary's Theory of Enchantment: https://theoryofenchantment.com/ https://theoryofenchantment.com/ - Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. - Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down, never to destroy. - Root everything you do in love and compassion.

lliamander 6y ago
As someone who has pretty much discounted diversity training initiatives as a class, this actually intrigues me on account of the first point. It runs pretty contrary to the Critical Race Theory (CRT) based training materials that I've seen.

orangecat 6y ago

we all are minorities in something, so please be nice. We're in this boat together Pretty sure that would pattern-match to "all lives matter" according to those currently running the show.

jbay808 6y ago

We had a DEI workshop at a previous workplace. The presenter suggested that {minority group members} typically don't feel comfortable speaking up in meetings, so I kept track of how many times each person spoke and got interrupted. Then halfway through, I proposed an experiment -- for the rest of the meeting, we leave a full second, by the clock, between when one person finishes talking and the next person starts. The presenter thought that would be interesting so we tried it. I tracked which people spoke after that (and how many times the rule was violated). If you ever try this experiment, be aware that maintaining a 1 second silence is very uncomfortable. The results were pretty unexpected, but perhaps the most surprising thing (although it shouldn't have been surprising in retrospect) was that the group that benefitted the most in this experiment -- most underrepresented in the meeting before, and proportionately represented after -- was a minority group whose existence wasn't even mentioned once in the entire DEI presentation. Can you guess who it was? That's right: English-as-a-second-language immigrant employees, who were fluent but needed an extra ~0.25s more than the native English speakers to compose their thoughts. Coincidentally this group was mostly composed of {members of groups classified as majority by more common axes of classification}, who unlike other {members of their group}, almost never had their voices heard in meetings because they were ESL.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I apologize that this adds nothing of substance to the discussion, but I wanted to thank you for your extraordinarily interesting post.