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Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech? I remember about 5 years ago, Facebook issued a report about its dive

Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech? I remember about 5 years ago, Facebook issued a report about its diversity numbers, and it put partial blame on the pipeline problem, saying they basically couldn't hire enough qualified people of certain demographics, and the entire DEI community blew up with how incorrect that was. I specifically remember some ridiculous outrage over "How can you compare people to oil?!" However, I've never really found any compelling arguments that the entire situation isn't a pipeline problem, and my own anecdotal experience is that there is definitely something amiss in the pipeline - in my "Intro to Programming" middle school class in the mid 90s, purely elective(you just check a box on a mail in form over the summer), the students were 24 white boys and 1 white girl, despite the school being 50/50 by sex, ~20% black and 15% latino.

davrosthedalek 4y ago
The pipeline is leaky, with different leak rates for different groups. But it is leaky over the whole length. This tries to get people to think about the leaks in the second half. This doesn't invalidate that we also should fix the other leaks, but the existence of leaks not addressed doesn't invalidate this attempt either.
kadabra9 4y ago
The DEI community is basically a cult at this point. Anything that goes against their dogma or preferred narrative is blasphemy. Pointing to the (fairly obvious) impact of the pipeline issues goes against their dogma and the grift that goes with it.
pseudo0 4y ago
It is a pipeline problem, but there are very strong social and political vested interests that really don't want to admit it. The whole DEI industry leeches off productive companies by setting impossible standards of 50% female software engineers or perfect racial representation. If we admit that this is unrealistic, many DEI departments will no longer have a reason to exist. To tweak the popular Upton Sinclair quote, it's difficult to get an industry to admit that a problem is solved, when their salary depends on not solving it.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  >The whole DEI industry leeches off productive companies I actually think it's a little more insidious than that. Large companies, already established in their respective industries, build what are competitive moats by employing the DEI industry. Scrappy start-up that has something intriguing to offer? Oh but you don't have a VP of Diversity and Inclusion (that you can't afford) and you don't have a plan for ... I don't know what, exactly. Well you're not part of the team then. Companies like Google, Amazon, and so on actually want this to continue because it stifles competition.
  - cinquemb 4y ago
    > I actually think it's a little more insidious than that. It's worse than that. FB sent me and my cofounder a C&D for our side project, then wanted to hire me for their "black clique" in NYC to work on react ~2015 when i was working on brain computer interfaces at the time at a lab. You know you are gonna get the "easy lay up", everyone there will know it too (I'm not the type to put much effort into studying for tech interviews and I have cheme background not compsi so i find the questions dull many times). And all of the "of color" people who play into it for their personal benefit just make it worse... (not to mention, even for a lot of these kinds of software jobs i had that weren't very interesting intellectually but paid alot, I pretty much vaped as much weed as I could just to make to lunch, and I would have played into all those sterotypes about black men as well...) Fuck em.
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      I get the sense that a lot of these people that push these initiatives would be the kind of people who get upset that Ireland is full of the Irish.
      - cinquemb 4y ago
        Ha, I have no idea what goes on in their minds. But it took a lot of energy to pretend to care all the time when i'm around those types (because they see that I have the same skin color, and immediately their expectations are primed).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hotpotamus 4y ago
I mean, what other explanation do you think there is? Isn't the alternative that for one biological reason or another, white men, asians, and jews are winning the meritocracy of tech? This is actually fairly mainstream elite conservative opinion, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve for instance. Not all that satisfying an answer in my opinion, but I can't entirely discount it. I'd say the jury is still well out though.
- Bakary 4y ago
  What bothers me about this sort of idea is more the follow-up. Let's imagine for the sake of discussion that we prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that some groups are, on average, less intelligent than others. What then would the people advancing this argument suggest we do as a society? My gut feeling tells me they won't stop at just removing some current measures in the name of meritocracy, but will also gradually impose restrictions and it'll get real somber real fast.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I'll put on my elite conservative hat to answer your question. Is concern for the consequences worth it to suppress the truth - being that some races are simply less intelligent than others (on average). If that is true, then there is no need to make any changes - each race has already assumed their proper place in our meritocratic society. And taking off that hat, I agree with your thoughts and concerns. I will say that it's uncontroversial that there are IQ differences in race, but it's far from proven that those differences are purely genetic and can't be attributed to societal differences.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      I'm not entirely sure what elite conservatism is or whether you endorse this view or not, but there's no civilizational context where meritocracy can exist given first mover advantages, resource accumulation, and institutional capture. What meritocracy usually ends up meaning in a practical sense is a deeply hierarchical society that happens to be pleasing in a certain way to the groups defining what meritocracy is in the local context. The search for objective truth isn't the main concern but rather the premise from which we jump to justifying prescriptive claims, which are by definition outside of the purview of the scientific method. In this case, using the idea that certain groups are more intelligent than average than others to push forward highly culturally specific modes of societal organization.
wyager 4y ago
> Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech? Yes and no - this explanation is partially correct, in that the impossibility of hiring the kind of demographic distribution DEI advocates want causally precedes any decision made by tech companies. However, "pipeline problem" incorrectly implies that the reality of hiring demography is the result of some kind of process failure (e.g. in early schooling) rather than a natural outcome of culture, biology, etc. (which high-quality research is fairly unequivocal about, although most people would never know this as it violates core dogma of the American state-secular belief system).

davrosthedalek 4y ago

The pipeline is leaky, with different leak rates for different groups. But it is leaky over the whole length. This tries to get people to think about the leaks in the second half. This doesn't invalidate that we also should fix the other leaks, but the existence of leaks not addressed doesn't invalidate this attempt either.

kadabra9 4y ago

The DEI community is basically a cult at this point. Anything that goes against their dogma or preferred narrative is blasphemy. Pointing to the (fairly obvious) impact of the pipeline issues goes against their dogma and the grift that goes with it.

pseudo0 4y ago

It is a pipeline problem, but there are very strong social and political vested interests that really don't want to admit it. The whole DEI industry leeches off productive companies by setting impossible standards of 50% female software engineers or perfect racial representation. If we admit that this is unrealistic, many DEI departments will no longer have a reason to exist. To tweak the popular Upton Sinclair quote, it's difficult to get an industry to admit that a problem is solved, when their salary depends on not solving it.

remarkEon 4y ago
>The whole DEI industry leeches off productive companies I actually think it's a little more insidious than that. Large companies, already established in their respective industries, build what are competitive moats by employing the DEI industry. Scrappy start-up that has something intriguing to offer? Oh but you don't have a VP of Diversity and Inclusion (that you can't afford) and you don't have a plan for ... I don't know what, exactly. Well you're not part of the team then. Companies like Google, Amazon, and so on actually want this to continue because it stifles competition.
- cinquemb 4y ago
  > I actually think it's a little more insidious than that. It's worse than that. FB sent me and my cofounder a C&D for our side project, then wanted to hire me for their "black clique" in NYC to work on react ~2015 when i was working on brain computer interfaces at the time at a lab. You know you are gonna get the "easy lay up", everyone there will know it too (I'm not the type to put much effort into studying for tech interviews and I have cheme background not compsi so i find the questions dull many times). And all of the "of color" people who play into it for their personal benefit just make it worse... (not to mention, even for a lot of these kinds of software jobs i had that weren't very interesting intellectually but paid alot, I pretty much vaped as much weed as I could just to make to lunch, and I would have played into all those sterotypes about black men as well...) Fuck em.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    I get the sense that a lot of these people that push these initiatives would be the kind of people who get upset that Ireland is full of the Irish.
    - cinquemb 4y ago
      Ha, I have no idea what goes on in their minds. But it took a lot of energy to pretend to care all the time when i'm around those types (because they see that I have the same skin color, and immediately their expectations are primed).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hotpotamus 4y ago

I mean, what other explanation do you think there is? Isn't the alternative that for one biological reason or another, white men, asians, and jews are winning the meritocracy of tech? This is actually fairly mainstream elite conservative opinion, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve for instance. Not all that satisfying an answer in my opinion, but I can't entirely discount it. I'd say the jury is still well out though.

Bakary 4y ago
What bothers me about this sort of idea is more the follow-up. Let's imagine for the sake of discussion that we prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that some groups are, on average, less intelligent than others. What then would the people advancing this argument suggest we do as a society? My gut feeling tells me they won't stop at just removing some current measures in the name of meritocracy, but will also gradually impose restrictions and it'll get real somber real fast.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I'll put on my elite conservative hat to answer your question. Is concern for the consequences worth it to suppress the truth - being that some races are simply less intelligent than others (on average). If that is true, then there is no need to make any changes - each race has already assumed their proper place in our meritocratic society. And taking off that hat, I agree with your thoughts and concerns. I will say that it's uncontroversial that there are IQ differences in race, but it's far from proven that those differences are purely genetic and can't be attributed to societal differences.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    I'm not entirely sure what elite conservatism is or whether you endorse this view or not, but there's no civilizational context where meritocracy can exist given first mover advantages, resource accumulation, and institutional capture. What meritocracy usually ends up meaning in a practical sense is a deeply hierarchical society that happens to be pleasing in a certain way to the groups defining what meritocracy is in the local context. The search for objective truth isn't the main concern but rather the premise from which we jump to justifying prescriptive claims, which are by definition outside of the purview of the scientific method. In this case, using the idea that certain groups are more intelligent than average than others to push forward highly culturally specific modes of societal organization.

wyager 4y ago

> Does anyone have a strong rebuttal against DEI issues being a "pipeline problem" in tech? Yes and no - this explanation is partially correct, in that the impossibility of hiring the kind of demographic distribution DEI advocates want causally precedes any decision made by tech companies. However, "pipeline problem" incorrectly implies that the reality of hiring demography is the result of some kind of process failure (e.g. in early schooling) rather than a natural outcome of culture, biology, etc. (which high-quality research is fairly unequivocal about, although most people would never know this as it violates core dogma of the American state-secular belief system).