4 ms·

This seems like a well articulated case that you're making, though I'd like to argue from the opposite perspective for a bit. > If you do not acknowledge this

This seems like a well articulated case that you're making, though I'd like to argue from the opposite perspective for a bit. > If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair. This is a non-trivial objection. I struggle to think of many acceptable scenarios in which we have to choose between acknowledging something which we don't believe as true, or living in an unfair system. Likewise, I don't know of any people personally who object to DEI efforts to make fields more appealing to a wider audience, or bringing in more diverse perspectives, or even critiquing existing processes. The main objection that I see is against the policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal. For instance, saying "our engineering team is largely Asian, we might be missing other perspectives" is a good call-out, and I can think of nobody who'd oppose calling that out. Enacting a policy that said "for the next engineer in this team, let's make sure we hire a non-Asian employee", that is the source of a lot of the umbrage with DEI efforts. In my experience, opponents largely agree with the goals (more diverse viewpoints), but disagree with the methods (pandering in the best case, and preferential treatment by group in the worst case.) You are correct that there is no inherent cost to learning about and bringing in different perspectives. There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained. Moreover, an even bigger concern is that these decisions aren't being made based on perspective, but only on immutable identity (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender). In these cases, the cost is even greater, since one can't address the situation by bringing in more perspectives; if the company says "we need more non-Asian employees", it is a really big cost (and one you can't avoid) if you happen to be Asian, regardless of how many heterodox opinions you might otherwise bring. Nobody I know opposes thegoals of DEI, but it's not hard to see how policies enacted which disadvantage people based on immutable characteristics might be reasonably considered unfair.

blindmute 4y ago
You know people like that; they just don't say it because it's career suicide. I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team. One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful. Two, it has been more than proven through human history that people get along better with people culturally similar to them. How can we simultaneously hold the belief that massively successful corporations systematically exclude minorities, and that you need minorities to be more successful? No field needs to be more appealing to any audience than it already is. Software does not need to have more women or black people in it; that has nothing to do with software. Basketball doesn't need more Asians; teaching doesn't need more men; chess doesn't need more women; the entire concept of a group needing more of something else, as though every group must be diverse, as though cultures and genders have no inherent preferences at all, is strange and absurd. The goals of DEI are useless, and any policy made to actively reach those goals is a waste of time and resources, at best.
- uoaei 4y ago
  > One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful. This is just a wildly baseless assertion on the scale of disinformation, not even misinformation. It's not worth the time to go into the rest of this comment but the quote above summarizes it well.
  - blindmute 4y ago
    It is one of those things that gets "proven" by one or two politically funded studies that shows a mild effect size with tiny sample, then magnified 100x in headlines until it is "common knowledge". There is no such proven source like you believe and imply. The effect sizes shown are on the order of those showing eggs raise cholesterol, eggs don't raise cholesterol, dietary fat causes obesity, sugar causes obesity, chocolate is healthy, chocolate is unhealthy, masks work, masks don't work. It's noise; the data is trash. There is not even any historical or anecdotal reason to believe it's true, in this case. It exists in the mind of the public entirely because it's politically expedient for it to do so.
    - uoaei 4y ago
      Another completely made-up assertion. Just saying it doesn't make it true.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    >Whole Foods is keeping an eye on stores at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by Business Insider. >... >Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a "diversity index" that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers' compensation claims, according to the documents. https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...
- 4y ago
uoaei 4y ago
> The main objection that I see is against the policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal. That's fair, but then, baby goes out with the bathwater when people come onto public fora to discuss in less precise ways than you have stated here. > There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained. This is an individualized cost, which does not bear the externalities which exist on the society as a whole. On a societal scale, there is significant and obvious opportunity cost to excluding people from the workplace in systematic ways. It is, in a word, selfish. > Moreover, an even bigger concern is that these decisions aren't being made based on perspective, but only on immutable identity This is where the pathologies ossify, and I agree we should address this issue to make the endeavor even better. In any other setting, though, we would not collectively conclude to dissolve the initiative entirely because of this. This may be why discussions (debates) on the matter go so poorly: critics use language which suggests they want to do away with the matter entirely, while advocates are fighting back only against that proposed solution and not against what you have identified as a deeper (and definitely fixable!) problem. If conversations were to start there, and SOPs set up to encourage outcomes that do not have that quality, we could get a lot more done. I acknowledge that there are some who would exclude white voices based on whiteness alone -- every movement has that element -- so conversations may be non-starters in certain situations. But there's clearly a lot of hurt and trauma on both sides and the way we come together to discuss it looks basically exactly like how DEI advocates suggest anyway, so you're only hurting the cause if you decide to exclude yourself from these conversations when they are available to you. One last point about the unfairness: there is a distinct tension in the collective mind between considering outcomes from individual vs societal perspectives. We love to hear about rising tides but hate to hear about one person getting unfair benefits. But that's just a matter of statistics, fortunately or otherwise! Do we want more equity, or do we want such a strict ranking of individuals that social mobility is made impossible? Individuals may have bad outcomes because random things happen, individuals may have good outcomes because random things happen, and there are always people moving up and down the ladder. Just because you can point at a single person who got advantaged one time does not mean it's not happening elsewhere, all the time, and it seems really immature to direct vitriol at individuals when we are only really concerned with aggregate quantities.
- 4y ago

blindmute 4y ago

You know people like that; they just don't say it because it's career suicide. I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team. One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful. Two, it has been more than proven through human history that people get along better with people culturally similar to them. How can we simultaneously hold the belief that massively successful corporations systematically exclude minorities, and that you need minorities to be more successful? No field needs to be more appealing to any audience than it already is. Software does not need to have more women or black people in it; that has nothing to do with software. Basketball doesn't need more Asians; teaching doesn't need more men; chess doesn't need more women; the entire concept of a group needing more of something else, as though every group must be diverse, as though cultures and genders have no inherent preferences at all, is strange and absurd. The goals of DEI are useless, and any policy made to actively reach those goals is a waste of time and resources, at best.

uoaei 4y ago
> One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful. This is just a wildly baseless assertion on the scale of disinformation, not even misinformation. It's not worth the time to go into the rest of this comment but the quote above summarizes it well.
- blindmute 4y ago
  It is one of those things that gets "proven" by one or two politically funded studies that shows a mild effect size with tiny sample, then magnified 100x in headlines until it is "common knowledge". There is no such proven source like you believe and imply. The effect sizes shown are on the order of those showing eggs raise cholesterol, eggs don't raise cholesterol, dietary fat causes obesity, sugar causes obesity, chocolate is healthy, chocolate is unhealthy, masks work, masks don't work. It's noise; the data is trash. There is not even any historical or anecdotal reason to believe it's true, in this case. It exists in the mind of the public entirely because it's politically expedient for it to do so.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    Another completely made-up assertion. Just saying it doesn't make it true.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  >Whole Foods is keeping an eye on stores at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by Business Insider. >... >Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a "diversity index" that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers' compensation claims, according to the documents. https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...
4y ago

uoaei 4y ago

> The main objection that I see is against the policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal. That's fair, but then, baby goes out with the bathwater when people come onto public fora to discuss in less precise ways than you have stated here. > There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained. This is an individualized cost, which does not bear the externalities which exist on the society as a whole. On a societal scale, there is significant and obvious opportunity cost to excluding people from the workplace in systematic ways. It is, in a word, selfish. > Moreover, an even bigger concern is that these decisions aren't being made based on perspective, but only on immutable identity This is where the pathologies ossify, and I agree we should address this issue to make the endeavor even better. In any other setting, though, we would not collectively conclude to dissolve the initiative entirely because of this. This may be why discussions (debates) on the matter go so poorly: critics use language which suggests they want to do away with the matter entirely, while advocates are fighting back only against that proposed solution and not against what you have identified as a deeper (and definitely fixable!) problem. If conversations were to start there, and SOPs set up to encourage outcomes that do not have that quality, we could get a lot more done. I acknowledge that there are some who would exclude white voices based on whiteness alone -- every movement has that element -- so conversations may be non-starters in certain situations. But there's clearly a lot of hurt and trauma on both sides and the way we come together to discuss it looks basically exactly like how DEI advocates suggest anyway, so you're only hurting the cause if you decide to exclude yourself from these conversations when they are available to you. One last point about the unfairness: there is a distinct tension in the collective mind between considering outcomes from individual vs societal perspectives. We love to hear about rising tides but hate to hear about one person getting unfair benefits. But that's just a matter of statistics, fortunately or otherwise! Do we want more equity, or do we want such a strict ranking of individuals that social mobility is made impossible? Individuals may have bad outcomes because random things happen, individuals may have good outcomes because random things happen, and there are always people moving up and down the ladder. Just because you can point at a single person who got advantaged one time does not mean it's not happening elsewhere, all the time, and it seems really immature to direct vitriol at individuals when we are only really concerned with aggregate quantities.

4y ago