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So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance p

So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the job you are hiring for are straight white men, because they are the only ones who had the opportunity to get the training, should we fix that at the hiring level? The initial reaction is probably no, we should push that fix further down to make sure those people get the same chances as everyone else. But that will take decades. What do we do until then? And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.

MrStonedOne 4y ago
>you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man So, where i get stuck, is that you can't actually make this statement about any individual black woman or white man. The one common theme across all of social justice is that stereotyping is bad. Erasing individuality and forcing people to live in the shadow of their stereotypes is bad. Yet its apparently allowed here? Because it mostly benefits minorities? This is the unspoken line the separates identity politics and equality. A focus on minorities vs a focus on ending discrimination and stereotyping, which under equality would include AA. When (most) people say they are against "woke" culture or "sjws" they generally mean they are against the identity politics flavor of ""equality"". Because identity politics is just a racist sexist dog whistle for discrimination against majorities.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. The solution is not to systematically discriminate in another direction, forever. In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy, and you have abandoned the high moral ground that racial discrimination is always a bad thing, and you end up in a worse situation than you started.
- Izkata 4y ago
  > In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy Something related that tends to be forgotten, the temporal aspect: People just entering the workforce who have only ever been on the wrong end of affirmative action. For them, there is no "balance" or "correction" going on, they're just plain being discriminated against.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I think this is exactly what is happening with the rise of right-wing groups. We tried fighting racism with racism and now we’re surprised that there is more racism than when we started. Sadly the “fight racism with racism” people interpret the increase in racism as a need to double down.
Empact 4y ago
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied? We could start by not forcing them into a school system that is highly correlated with outcomes of criminality[1]. Then we could stop subsidizing dependency and instead ease the paths work, education, and entrepreneurship, e.g. by reducing the cost of compliance by e.g. reducing scope and burdens of licensure requirements, instituting opportunity zones. I leave as an exercise to the reader considering why the Democrat party does not support the above policies, while the Republican party does. [1] "Overall, I find that winning the lottery to attend a first-choice school has a large impact on crime for high-risk youth. High-risk lottery winners experienced roughly a 50 percent reduction in the measures of criminal activity that weight crimes by their severity." https://www.educationnext.org/does-school-choice-reduce-crime/ https://www.educationnext.org/does-school-choice-reduce-crim...
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > I leave as an exercise to the reader considering why the Democrat party does not support the above policies, while the Republican party does. Simple, because these policies don’t threaten the status quo.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- MrStonedOne 4y ago
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Genuinely inquiring here, on the study you linked: The study is that high-risk youth are less likely to engage in criminal activity if they attend a first-choice school. Why not inquire why those schools are first choice & if those factors can be deployed to every other school? Similarly, what do you mean stop subsidizing dependency? What specific dependencies are being subsidized and what are the outcomes of no longer subsidizing them?
  - 4y ago
dmix 4y ago
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. I'm trying to imagine how this would work in practice but products aren't usually designed by committee in giant brainstorming sessions where everyone gets to provide their opinion from their little expert/experience positions. That usually happens through research and feedback loops. Being flexible and adapting. It doesn't require having to hire from every demographic and expert group, and putting them directly on your product/engineering teams. If you're targeting a specific demographic or niche market is typically helps to be from that group or at a minimum be constantly talking to them (ala what Steve Blank talks about endlessly). It also helps with sales/marketing when communicating, etc. But this stuff doesn't seem like a rule you can apply generally when composing a team or building a company like choosing the right Lego blocks by demographic profile. It's not like building a team in an RPG video game where you're trying to find the right balance of race/gender/religion/culture.
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
I'd previously bought into the meritocracy argument, but was eventually convinced to update those beliefs when presented with a new perspective. If you only look at the end-result, then meritocracy makes sense. But the trajectory which each person takes in order to arrive at that destination can vary wildly depending on how priviledged of a lifestyle you were born into. It's entirely possible to pick up and develop the required skills while on the job in many cases. Companies ultimately end up benefiting from this by spreading out the responsibility of training people, which results in a stronger more robust workforce.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  If you want to account for privilege, that's fine. But there are much better proxies than "skin color". For example, if you want to reduce poverty, why write a check to people of a certain race (on the basis that people of that race are more likely to be poor) rather than just writing a check to poor people directly? The problem is that people are obsessed with the median person of a given race (and how these "median people" compare with each other) that they project these median personas onto individuals. In other words, they treat individuals as fungible tokens of their race. It doesn't matter if a black candidate has had an easy suburban life and a white candidate grew up in poverty, the DEI lens just sees a black candidate and a white candidate, and the perennial social imperative to bring the median black person and the median white person closer to parity.
colpabar 4y ago
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. Doesn't this seem like a weird thing to say? How do you know that? Isn't this the definition of stereotyping? Is every question going to be of the form "as a black woman, what do you think about X?" And why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say?
- handoflixue 4y ago
  > why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say? I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences. > How do you know that? I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people". There's obviously some very low-hanging fruit in terms of having even one voice who will look at the situation and notice stuff like that. All that said: Obviously a white person can notice that, and a black person can miss it. It's just statistics. And a white person can still be diverse along a dozen other axes! If you want to sell your product to conservatives, you probably want at least one conservative on your team for the same reason!
  - hpkuarg 4y ago
    It's more possible than you think for people who share the same ethnic background to have had radically different experiences from each other, and people who look very different from each other to have gone through very similar life stories. I'm not just saying this in theory (which is trivially true) -- I lived in a stereotypically liberal cosmopolitan city where most people I encountered, despite the visible diversity in their ethnic backgrounds, all had four-year degrees, worked in high-paying knowledge-based jobs, and had no experience in military service or single motherhood; then in a much smaller city in a stereotypically conservative rural state where most people were of the same ethnic background, but had more variety in what they went through in life. My own habits did not change between the two cities as to put me in touch with such a different group of people between them. This is just anecdata, but I question the premise you appear to take for granted.
joe-collins 4y ago
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied? I'd posit that there is no good answer to this question, and that attempting to find or optimize one is a distraction. In very broad strokes, if you try to fix a problem too slowly, bad things keep happening; if you try to fix it too fast, you're liable to upset other things around you (e.g. the economy, delicate sensibilities, your short-term profitability, etc.). And the problem is too grossly high-dimensional to hope for any kind of consensus (or often, any analysis) at any level of detail beyond simply "yup, that's a problem". With no hope of finding an ideal solution, the pragmatic response is to just address the problems you can see with the resources you can afford. Trust in being directionally correct.
deleted 4y ago
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cetahfh14615 4y ago
> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. I mean, you give a very cliche example. Consider an alternative situation where you need to decide between the same black woman or a Latino man. Or the same black woman and an Asian woman. Should you be permitted to make the same racially motivated decision in this context? And also: if you're provided race data in the hiring process, you're essentially put in a position to not only make decisions like the one you listed, but also ones regarding other races. You're in a position to establish which races are "above" one another in the hiring process. How can your employer guarantee that you don't do this, even if you say that you don't? We know of the disgusting things white people have historically done. We also know that white people are over represented in hiring and admissions decisions. I ask: should white people, given their track record, be allowed to make this call?
- Thiez 4y ago
  > We know of the disgusting things white people have historically done Really? Let the "race" that is without sin cast the first stone.
Georgelemental 4y ago
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. From the post: > If people of different races think differently, presumably that’s because of their different experiences (rather than, say, because different beliefs and attitudes are genetically programmed into different races). In that case, the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries. They’ve not just grown up in a different part of our society; they’ve grown up in a completely different society. So affirmative action proponents would greatly favor affirmative action for, say, African immigrants over affirmative action for blacks born in America.
jjslocum3 4y ago
I mainly agree with the OP. While they don't come out and say it, most on the DEI frontlines execute on the idea that the fix to the fact that "those people have been discriminated against, well, forever" is not to do away with discrimination completely, but rather to discriminate actively against races/genders/orientations that haven't been discriminated against in the same way. This strikes me as faulty thinking. Revenge-driven justice fails; two wrongs don't make a right. Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator. Anyone who followed that "Activism as a Vocation" link here a few days ago can probably agree that the fix to the current cancel-culture chaos of academia isn't going to happen within academia. It's about mass media dollars. School administrators, like the rest of us, are just manipulated "useful idiots."
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  > Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" Moreover, I strongly suspect this kind of "reverse discrimination" (and general conditioning to identify racially) is driving a lot of right-wing radicalization. Even if you don't think "reverse racism" qualifies as "racism", surely you should be concerned if it is indeed driving more ole-fashioned, anti-minority racism, right?
  - MrStonedOne 4y ago
- handoflixue 4y ago
  Giving alms to the poor isn't "revenge-driven justice against the rich" - it's helping out people in need. Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me. Surely one can by analogy reason that there are ways to support historically disadvantaged groups that aren't "perpetuating discrimination"?
  - 4y ago
throwaway894345 4y ago
> So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. I think we get into trouble when we start treating individuals as mere tokens of their groups. To pick on your comment for example, "those people have been systematically discriminated against forever" is true at the collective level, but is very likely not true at the individual level. There's no justice in choosing a well-off black candidate on the basis that other black people disproportionately experienced slavery slavery, poverty, Jim Crow, etc, especially when it comes at the expense of a white person who had a very hard life. Moreover, even if we insist on tokenizing people, we rarely treat people as the median of their group, and instead we treat whites, men, etc as though they have the privilege of board room executives, politicians, kings, etc (e.g., arguments that a given male has privilege based on the observation, "men have ruled for millennia"). > And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. I emphatically deny this, especially the idea that a black woman is going to have interesting things to say, but a white man won't. There is far more diversity within a race than between them, including diversities of experience and how we process those experiences (for example, even if you have two people of the same race with similar adverse experiences, one could come out of those experiences with additional resilience and another with a trauma response). If you want interesting/different experiences, there are much better proxies (e.g., if your team is coastal and well-educated, a well-educated rural candidate is probably going to offer a lot more diversity than a black woman who came from the same pipeline as the rest of the company). What does a white man from rural Appalachia have in common with a white man from the Bay Area that you can conclude that neither will have interesting thoughts? Moreover, if your company is super ideological about diversity, people who don't want to be regarded as tokens probably opt out, and you end up with a bunch of people with different skin color but similar viewpoints (and anyone with a unique viewpoint is probably afraid to speak it). Not exactly a way to optimize for "interesting thoughts".
LatteLazy 4y ago
>you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man Of all the people at my company, black and white, male and female, I am the only one from a poor background. My life experience is vastly different from all of them. This is the issue with defining life experience or diversity purely in terms of race and sex. I think the demand for a simple and easy answer to diversity (we have x% from group y!) Is well intentioned but very counterproductive.
gnull 4y ago
> But that will take decades. What do we do until then? We wait. I don't understand why people want these issues to be resolved here and now. Society and culture take decades to change, that's natural, and shortcuts—however tempting they might be—often come at a cost of something else. The conditions of these oppressed groups are not terribly bad, compared to what was going on with people in general throughout history. An average man who lived in Europe 100 years ago would gladly change places with an average black woman living in Europe nowadays. And even lots of white people from poorer countries nowadays have a lower standard of living than black people in developed countries. I speak from my own experience, as a person who grew up in a countryside where people don't have running water in their homes and toilet is just a hole in the ground; then I come to Northern Europe for work and hear how hard it is to be a black person here and that I'm apparently privileged because I'm white. My point is, current conditions of people in developed countries are not so bad that it requires urgent measures to improve. If solving it takes 2-4 generations of people living in these conditions, it's not that much of a tragedy, and I don't think we must urgently start dumping resources to speed it up.
- Rapzid 4y ago
  Agree; it IS decades later right now. Thank you Sesame Street, thank you counter-culture alum that went on to dominate our media and children's programming (pun intended). The diversity initiatives are misguided attempts by those raised to care about it to fast-track the process. Now they are adults and impatient to see more change that really only occurs generationally. Not everyone came along for the ride though and they absolutely know what Sesame Street and friends did. Hence the attacks on PBS, schools, and etc. People act like these are the worst times but great progress had been made. Piers was on Real Time a few weeks back with his sky is falling schtick about free speech in the US. He is not dumb, but is he really not aware of how burning a flag would have gone over 60 years ago? A white man would have gotten his ass beat and a black man hung(maybe by the police in either case!). What about Elvis and rock-and-roll "smut"? Anyone remember X-rated films? We are relatively unbounded in 2022 lol. A bonified Indian immigrant runs Microsoft. I get it though. Was hoodwinked myself. Raised on Sesame Street and Fern Gully. Shocked that so many people were not on board with the social progress I took for granted. Parents who seemed progressive aged and now parrot Moon hoax and anti-vax talking points.. I'm impatient too. What can we change what can I do?! How can we see this promise fulfilled in my lifetime?! Maybe we can't though. Bad policy is bad policy. Bottom-up has been the real progress. Starts with the children. Gay marriage? The children. People coming out; don't talk about my child/nephew/niece/sister/brother/friends child like that! It's a journey like security and performance. You don't just "solve" security at a company; "Whelp we finished those tickets and now we have achieved security; our work here is done!". MAGA? We are greater now than ever before. Ask a 70 year old black man from the south how great America was..
tootie 4y ago
You're not wrong but really the whole problem is cyclical. It has to be broken down everywhere. Diversity and anti racism in education is getting raked over the coals right now. Housing discrimination is still pretty rampant. Racists are winning elections. There's an unfortunate tendency to force compliance on those who can best accommodate it rather than who is more in need of regulating.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I posit that "racists are winning elections" precisely because of the broken race ideology that was meant to combat racism in the first place (not just in admissions and hiring, but all over our discourse). The stuff we do in the name of fighting racism looks like exactly the sort of thing one would do if they wanted to create a thoroughly racist society--get everyone to hyper-identify with their race and create separate and mete out rewards and consequences on the basis of race. Imply that fault and victimhood are racial (rather than individual) attributes. Deal only in abstractions and ignore intra-racial variance. Police people to make sure they don't explore ("appropriate") cultures outside of their own. Use "nazi" and "white supremacy" as liberally as possible--make sure those words have no power to censure actual, bonafide racists. Stuff like this.
  - tootie 4y ago
    I think that's a completely specious perspective and one that is peddled by conservative politicians as propaganda. Being antiracist is not about assigning blame or curing racism with HR policy and certainly not about curing all societal ills. It's about taking small steps to counteract injustice instead of just saying "I'm not racist" and washing your hands. Trying to teach kids accurate history of deplorable things done by some people's ancestors is just teaching accurate history. Out of control name-calling is happening in all quarters but all I'm saying that we are electing racists and we definitely are. The past president's response to the Charlottesville car attack was incredibly ambivalent and the perpetrator could be accurately described as a nazi.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
scifibestfi 4y ago
How do you explain the following data given your premise? https://i.redd.it/9n4lf8f5hrc91.png https://i.redd.it/9n4lf8f5hrc91.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
- account42 4y ago
  I know for Taiwanese it is/was not uncommon for the rich to fly to the US for the birth to get dual cititizenship for their children. In general, US immigration has sufficient hurdles that any group that is actively migrating there will skew towards those already well off. Of course that's not an argument for discrimination based on race - if anything, cements that race is a poor proxy for "priviledge".
bluefirebrand 4y ago
> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man I think this argument always fails to realize that even in a group of white dudes, probably all of them have had a vastly different life experience and can bring those perspectives too.
thayne 4y ago
> you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man No. But two white men could also have vastly different life experiences, possibly even more different than between one white man and a black woman, depending on who they are. If your primary goal is to increase intellectual diversity than you need to look at more than just race, gender, and sexual identity. And I don't think that would be a bad thing. But that's not to say that there aren't other goals of DEI, such as trying to offset the disadvantages faced by certain groups of people.
sagebird 4y ago
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied? I think the only way to solve it would be - Randomized child dna assignment, ie, every child is adopted or the dna material is swapped. I think people would like to solve historical unfairness problem - but I believe it would require abandoning the very foundation of our biologically influenced culture. Ie- nobody is willing to give up the possibility of having mini-me.

MrStonedOne 4y ago

>you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man So, where i get stuck, is that you can't actually make this statement about any individual black woman or white man. The one common theme across all of social justice is that stereotyping is bad. Erasing individuality and forcing people to live in the shadow of their stereotypes is bad. Yet its apparently allowed here? Because it mostly benefits minorities? This is the unspoken line the separates identity politics and equality. A focus on minorities vs a focus on ending discrimination and stereotyping, which under equality would include AA. When (most) people say they are against "woke" culture or "sjws" they generally mean they are against the identity politics flavor of ""equality"". Because identity politics is just a racist sexist dog whistle for discrimination against majorities.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. The solution is not to systematically discriminate in another direction, forever. In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy, and you have abandoned the high moral ground that racial discrimination is always a bad thing, and you end up in a worse situation than you started.

Izkata 4y ago
> In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy Something related that tends to be forgotten, the temporal aspect: People just entering the workforce who have only ever been on the wrong end of affirmative action. For them, there is no "balance" or "correction" going on, they're just plain being discriminated against.
throwaway894345 4y ago
I think this is exactly what is happening with the rise of right-wing groups. We tried fighting racism with racism and now we’re surprised that there is more racism than when we started. Sadly the “fight racism with racism” people interpret the increase in racism as a need to double down.

Empact 4y ago

> So the question is, where should the fix be applied? We could start by not forcing them into a school system that is highly correlated with outcomes of criminality[1]. Then we could stop subsidizing dependency and instead ease the paths work, education, and entrepreneurship, e.g. by reducing the cost of compliance by e.g. reducing scope and burdens of licensure requirements, instituting opportunity zones. I leave as an exercise to the reader considering why the Democrat party does not support the above policies, while the Republican party does. [1] "Overall, I find that winning the lottery to attend a first-choice school has a large impact on crime for high-risk youth. High-risk lottery winners experienced roughly a 50 percent reduction in the measures of criminal activity that weight crimes by their severity." https://www.educationnext.org/does-school-choice-reduce-crime/ https://www.educationnext.org/does-school-choice-reduce-crim...

mikkergp 4y ago
> I leave as an exercise to the reader considering why the Democrat party does not support the above policies, while the Republican party does. Simple, because these policies don’t threaten the status quo.
- deleted 4y ago
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MrStonedOne 4y ago
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
Genuinely inquiring here, on the study you linked: The study is that high-risk youth are less likely to engage in criminal activity if they attend a first-choice school. Why not inquire why those schools are first choice & if those factors can be deployed to every other school? Similarly, what do you mean stop subsidizing dependency? What specific dependencies are being subsidized and what are the outcomes of no longer subsidizing them?
- 4y ago

dmix 4y ago

> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. I'm trying to imagine how this would work in practice but products aren't usually designed by committee in giant brainstorming sessions where everyone gets to provide their opinion from their little expert/experience positions. That usually happens through research and feedback loops. Being flexible and adapting. It doesn't require having to hire from every demographic and expert group, and putting them directly on your product/engineering teams. If you're targeting a specific demographic or niche market is typically helps to be from that group or at a minimum be constantly talking to them (ala what Steve Blank talks about endlessly). It also helps with sales/marketing when communicating, etc. But this stuff doesn't seem like a rule you can apply generally when composing a team or building a company like choosing the right Lego blocks by demographic profile. It's not like building a team in an RPG video game where you're trying to find the right balance of race/gender/religion/culture.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

I'd previously bought into the meritocracy argument, but was eventually convinced to update those beliefs when presented with a new perspective. If you only look at the end-result, then meritocracy makes sense. But the trajectory which each person takes in order to arrive at that destination can vary wildly depending on how priviledged of a lifestyle you were born into. It's entirely possible to pick up and develop the required skills while on the job in many cases. Companies ultimately end up benefiting from this by spreading out the responsibility of training people, which results in a stronger more robust workforce.

throwaway894345 4y ago
If you want to account for privilege, that's fine. But there are much better proxies than "skin color". For example, if you want to reduce poverty, why write a check to people of a certain race (on the basis that people of that race are more likely to be poor) rather than just writing a check to poor people directly? The problem is that people are obsessed with the median person of a given race (and how these "median people" compare with each other) that they project these median personas onto individuals. In other words, they treat individuals as fungible tokens of their race. It doesn't matter if a black candidate has had an easy suburban life and a white candidate grew up in poverty, the DEI lens just sees a black candidate and a white candidate, and the perennial social imperative to bring the median black person and the median white person closer to parity.

colpabar 4y ago

> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. Doesn't this seem like a weird thing to say? How do you know that? Isn't this the definition of stereotyping? Is every question going to be of the form "as a black woman, what do you think about X?" And why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say?

handoflixue 4y ago
> why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say? I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences. > How do you know that? I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people". There's obviously some very low-hanging fruit in terms of having even one voice who will look at the situation and notice stuff like that. All that said: Obviously a white person can notice that, and a black person can miss it. It's just statistics. And a white person can still be diverse along a dozen other axes! If you want to sell your product to conservatives, you probably want at least one conservative on your team for the same reason!
- hpkuarg 4y ago
  It's more possible than you think for people who share the same ethnic background to have had radically different experiences from each other, and people who look very different from each other to have gone through very similar life stories. I'm not just saying this in theory (which is trivially true) -- I lived in a stereotypically liberal cosmopolitan city where most people I encountered, despite the visible diversity in their ethnic backgrounds, all had four-year degrees, worked in high-paying knowledge-based jobs, and had no experience in military service or single motherhood; then in a much smaller city in a stereotypically conservative rural state where most people were of the same ethnic background, but had more variety in what they went through in life. My own habits did not change between the two cities as to put me in touch with such a different group of people between them. This is just anecdata, but I question the premise you appear to take for granted.

joe-collins 4y ago

> So the question is, where should the fix be applied? I'd posit that there is no good answer to this question, and that attempting to find or optimize one is a distraction. In very broad strokes, if you try to fix a problem too slowly, bad things keep happening; if you try to fix it too fast, you're liable to upset other things around you (e.g. the economy, delicate sensibilities, your short-term profitability, etc.). And the problem is too grossly high-dimensional to hope for any kind of consensus (or often, any analysis) at any level of detail beyond simply "yup, that's a problem". With no hope of finding an ideal solution, the pragmatic response is to just address the problems you can see with the resources you can afford. Trust in being directionally correct.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cetahfh14615 4y ago

> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. I mean, you give a very cliche example. Consider an alternative situation where you need to decide between the same black woman or a Latino man. Or the same black woman and an Asian woman. Should you be permitted to make the same racially motivated decision in this context? And also: if you're provided race data in the hiring process, you're essentially put in a position to not only make decisions like the one you listed, but also ones regarding other races. You're in a position to establish which races are "above" one another in the hiring process. How can your employer guarantee that you don't do this, even if you say that you don't? We know of the disgusting things white people have historically done. We also know that white people are over represented in hiring and admissions decisions. I ask: should white people, given their track record, be allowed to make this call?

Thiez 4y ago
> We know of the disgusting things white people have historically done Really? Let the "race" that is without sin cast the first stone.

Georgelemental 4y ago

> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. From the post: > If people of different races think differently, presumably that’s because of their different experiences (rather than, say, because different beliefs and attitudes are genetically programmed into different races). In that case, the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries. They’ve not just grown up in a different part of our society; they’ve grown up in a completely different society. So affirmative action proponents would greatly favor affirmative action for, say, African immigrants over affirmative action for blacks born in America.

jjslocum3 4y ago

I mainly agree with the OP. While they don't come out and say it, most on the DEI frontlines execute on the idea that the fix to the fact that "those people have been discriminated against, well, forever" is not to do away with discrimination completely, but rather to discriminate actively against races/genders/orientations that haven't been discriminated against in the same way. This strikes me as faulty thinking. Revenge-driven justice fails; two wrongs don't make a right. Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator. Anyone who followed that "Activism as a Vocation" link here a few days ago can probably agree that the fix to the current cancel-culture chaos of academia isn't going to happen within academia. It's about mass media dollars. School administrators, like the rest of us, are just manipulated "useful idiots."

throwaway894345 4y ago
> Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" Moreover, I strongly suspect this kind of "reverse discrimination" (and general conditioning to identify racially) is driving a lot of right-wing radicalization. Even if you don't think "reverse racism" qualifies as "racism", surely you should be concerned if it is indeed driving more ole-fashioned, anti-minority racism, right?
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
handoflixue 4y ago
Giving alms to the poor isn't "revenge-driven justice against the rich" - it's helping out people in need. Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me. Surely one can by analogy reason that there are ways to support historically disadvantaged groups that aren't "perpetuating discrimination"?
- 4y ago

throwaway894345 4y ago

> So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. I think we get into trouble when we start treating individuals as mere tokens of their groups. To pick on your comment for example, "those people have been systematically discriminated against forever" is true at the collective level, but is very likely not true at the individual level. There's no justice in choosing a well-off black candidate on the basis that other black people disproportionately experienced slavery slavery, poverty, Jim Crow, etc, especially when it comes at the expense of a white person who had a very hard life. Moreover, even if we insist on tokenizing people, we rarely treat people as the median of their group, and instead we treat whites, men, etc as though they have the privilege of board room executives, politicians, kings, etc (e.g., arguments that a given male has privilege based on the observation, "men have ruled for millennia"). > And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. I emphatically deny this, especially the idea that a black woman is going to have interesting things to say, but a white man won't. There is far more diversity within a race than between them, including diversities of experience and how we process those experiences (for example, even if you have two people of the same race with similar adverse experiences, one could come out of those experiences with additional resilience and another with a trauma response). If you want interesting/different experiences, there are much better proxies (e.g., if your team is coastal and well-educated, a well-educated rural candidate is probably going to offer a lot more diversity than a black woman who came from the same pipeline as the rest of the company). What does a white man from rural Appalachia have in common with a white man from the Bay Area that you can conclude that neither will have interesting thoughts? Moreover, if your company is super ideological about diversity, people who don't want to be regarded as tokens probably opt out, and you end up with a bunch of people with different skin color but similar viewpoints (and anyone with a unique viewpoint is probably afraid to speak it). Not exactly a way to optimize for "interesting thoughts".

LatteLazy 4y ago

>you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man Of all the people at my company, black and white, male and female, I am the only one from a poor background. My life experience is vastly different from all of them. This is the issue with defining life experience or diversity purely in terms of race and sex. I think the demand for a simple and easy answer to diversity (we have x% from group y!) Is well intentioned but very counterproductive.

gnull 4y ago

> But that will take decades. What do we do until then? We wait. I don't understand why people want these issues to be resolved here and now. Society and culture take decades to change, that's natural, and shortcuts—however tempting they might be—often come at a cost of something else. The conditions of these oppressed groups are not terribly bad, compared to what was going on with people in general throughout history. An average man who lived in Europe 100 years ago would gladly change places with an average black woman living in Europe nowadays. And even lots of white people from poorer countries nowadays have a lower standard of living than black people in developed countries. I speak from my own experience, as a person who grew up in a countryside where people don't have running water in their homes and toilet is just a hole in the ground; then I come to Northern Europe for work and hear how hard it is to be a black person here and that I'm apparently privileged because I'm white. My point is, current conditions of people in developed countries are not so bad that it requires urgent measures to improve. If solving it takes 2-4 generations of people living in these conditions, it's not that much of a tragedy, and I don't think we must urgently start dumping resources to speed it up.

Rapzid 4y ago
Agree; it IS decades later right now. Thank you Sesame Street, thank you counter-culture alum that went on to dominate our media and children's programming (pun intended). The diversity initiatives are misguided attempts by those raised to care about it to fast-track the process. Now they are adults and impatient to see more change that really only occurs generationally. Not everyone came along for the ride though and they absolutely know what Sesame Street and friends did. Hence the attacks on PBS, schools, and etc. People act like these are the worst times but great progress had been made. Piers was on Real Time a few weeks back with his sky is falling schtick about free speech in the US. He is not dumb, but is he really not aware of how burning a flag would have gone over 60 years ago? A white man would have gotten his ass beat and a black man hung(maybe by the police in either case!). What about Elvis and rock-and-roll "smut"? Anyone remember X-rated films? We are relatively unbounded in 2022 lol. A bonified Indian immigrant runs Microsoft. I get it though. Was hoodwinked myself. Raised on Sesame Street and Fern Gully. Shocked that so many people were not on board with the social progress I took for granted. Parents who seemed progressive aged and now parrot Moon hoax and anti-vax talking points.. I'm impatient too. What can we change what can I do?! How can we see this promise fulfilled in my lifetime?! Maybe we can't though. Bad policy is bad policy. Bottom-up has been the real progress. Starts with the children. Gay marriage? The children. People coming out; don't talk about my child/nephew/niece/sister/brother/friends child like that! It's a journey like security and performance. You don't just "solve" security at a company; "Whelp we finished those tickets and now we have achieved security; our work here is done!". MAGA? We are greater now than ever before. Ask a 70 year old black man from the south how great America was..

tootie 4y ago

You're not wrong but really the whole problem is cyclical. It has to be broken down everywhere. Diversity and anti racism in education is getting raked over the coals right now. Housing discrimination is still pretty rampant. Racists are winning elections. There's an unfortunate tendency to force compliance on those who can best accommodate it rather than who is more in need of regulating.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I posit that "racists are winning elections" precisely because of the broken race ideology that was meant to combat racism in the first place (not just in admissions and hiring, but all over our discourse). The stuff we do in the name of fighting racism looks like exactly the sort of thing one would do if they wanted to create a thoroughly racist society--get everyone to hyper-identify with their race and create separate and mete out rewards and consequences on the basis of race. Imply that fault and victimhood are racial (rather than individual) attributes. Deal only in abstractions and ignore intra-racial variance. Police people to make sure they don't explore ("appropriate") cultures outside of their own. Use "nazi" and "white supremacy" as liberally as possible--make sure those words have no power to censure actual, bonafide racists. Stuff like this.
- tootie 4y ago
  I think that's a completely specious perspective and one that is peddled by conservative politicians as propaganda. Being antiracist is not about assigning blame or curing racism with HR policy and certainly not about curing all societal ills. It's about taking small steps to counteract injustice instead of just saying "I'm not racist" and washing your hands. Trying to teach kids accurate history of deplorable things done by some people's ancestors is just teaching accurate history. Out of control name-calling is happening in all quarters but all I'm saying that we are electing racists and we definitely are. The past president's response to the Charlottesville car attack was incredibly ambivalent and the perpetrator could be accurately described as a nazi.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago

scifibestfi 4y ago

How do you explain the following data given your premise? https://i.redd.it/9n4lf8f5hrc91.png https://i.redd.it/9n4lf8f5hrc91.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

account42 4y ago
I know for Taiwanese it is/was not uncommon for the rich to fly to the US for the birth to get dual cititizenship for their children. In general, US immigration has sufficient hurdles that any group that is actively migrating there will skew towards those already well off. Of course that's not an argument for discrimination based on race - if anything, cements that race is a poor proxy for "priviledge".

bluefirebrand 4y ago

> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man I think this argument always fails to realize that even in a group of white dudes, probably all of them have had a vastly different life experience and can bring those perspectives too.

thayne 4y ago

> you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man No. But two white men could also have vastly different life experiences, possibly even more different than between one white man and a black woman, depending on who they are. If your primary goal is to increase intellectual diversity than you need to look at more than just race, gender, and sexual identity. And I don't think that would be a bad thing. But that's not to say that there aren't other goals of DEI, such as trying to offset the disadvantages faced by certain groups of people.

sagebird 4y ago

> So the question is, where should the fix be applied? I think the only way to solve it would be - Randomized child dna assignment, ie, every child is adopted or the dna material is swapped. I think people would like to solve historical unfairness problem - but I believe it would require abandoning the very foundation of our biologically influenced culture. Ie- nobody is willing to give up the possibility of having mini-me.