14 ms·

The destruction of meritocracy. Meritocracy forces people to confront things about themselves they don't like and influences them to change. Change is hard and

by causi 4y ago

The destruction of meritocracy. Meritocracy forces people to confront things about themselves they don't like and influences them to change. Change is hard and painful. Especially now, when the things people need to change about themselves are also things they hold as being very important to their identity. People with a cultural background that fosters academic achievement will on average achieve more than people who don't. In the Western world, those cultural differences often also line up with ethnic differences. That's what we refuse to confront: that, by ourselves or in response to circumstances imposed on us by others, some of us have developed cultures that put us at a disadvantage. Did my Korean friend growing up who spent his every afternoon and weekend studying while I was playing videogames deserve to get into a better university than me and make more money than me? I say he did. DEI says he didn't.

ramesh31 4y ago
>Did my Korean friend growing up who spent his every afternoon and weekend studying while I was playing videogames deserve to get into a better university than me and make more money than me? I say he did. DEI says he didn't. But why was your friend able to spend his every afternoon and weekend studying? Because he was raised in a supportive, nurturing environment. Probably with grandparents and aunts/uncles to help take care of him. He probably had older relatives in professional careers to aspire to and mentor him. He probably never had to work a job in high school to help support his family, or raise his younger siblings while mom worked night shift. His parents were probably married and able to hold decent jobs to provide a stable home, good nutrition, and a lack of stress. They probably were able to make sure he went to preschool, and had reliable transportation to get him to/from there and kindergarten, and drilled into him the importance of education from a young age. All of these things are what DEI tries to correct for. The people who had none of that never get a shot at redemption otherwise. The cards are stacked from birth.
- goatlover 4y ago
  And that's a bad thing that should be penalized (weighted negatively for admissions or hiring)? What kind of society are you hoping to incentivize?
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Except that the openly stated goal of DEI activists is the opposite. It's to destroy the "Western-prescribed nuclear family structure". Which would be all well and good if they supported viable alternatives such as a greater reliance on extended families or building up a resilient structure of tightly-knit local communities - but nope, they hate these things even more!
- causi 4y ago
  Try again. His parents were first-generation immigrants and his dad died when he was little. His mom was an RN, he had two younger siblings, and he worked at Kroger his last two years of high school. Our friendship fell off because he never had time to hang out. Perhaps being bilingual was his "unfair advantage"?
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >Try again. His parents were first-generation immigrants and his dad died when he was little. His mom was an RN, he had two younger siblings, and he worked at Kroger his last two years of high school We can trade anecdotes all day long, but the general point stands. And yes, things were different 20 years ago. But the average asian family today in the US is actually better off than the average white family: https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequality-in-the-united-states https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...
    - causi 4y ago
      The average asian family in the US is actually better off than the average white family Exactly. Why is that? It isn't because they came over to America and enslaved people, or won a war, or placed themselves at the head of a religion that all the white people believed in. They excelled because they worked harder than everyone else. One can argue that the majority white population discriminated against asians less than african-americans or latinos and that's why asian people are more successful than them, but that falls apart once asian people are more successful than the majority ethnic group.
- adapa 4y ago
  A monkey has all the cards stacked against him/her. No so developed brain. Non supportive parents. All the things DEI aims to correct. should we make the monkey the president ? This is ofcourse an exaggeration but you get the idea.
  - zzzeek 4y ago
    [flagged]
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  > Because he was raised in a supportive, nurturing environment. Probably with grandparents and aunts/uncles to help take care of him. > lack of stress As an immigrant Asian child I can tell you usually we had none of these things. What drove me and my friends was pressure. I knew what my parents gave up to give me this chance. I knew they probably wouldn’t have enough savings to ever retire without me helping them out later. I knew I didn’t want to disappoint them. Why must countless Asian parents’ sacrifices and kids effort be swept away under DEI? Of course I get that it helps to create a society where no one would have to go such lengths to provide opportunity for their children. But man, it just rubs me the wrong way.
Dalewyn 4y ago
Asians (read: a minority in the US) throwing a spanner in "diversity" and revealing the whole charade for what it is is hilarious (for all the wrong reasons) every time. "Diversity" is supposedly all about "helping minorities", except when those minorities are too successful for the narrative. Can't have success, oh no! Minorities are supposed to be oppressed and victims in need of saving by the good diversifiers! And so asians quite often get rounded up with whites. Fuck that noise. Meritocracy is by far the best system we have to figure out the good people from the bad. Judging by the quality of one's character rather than the color of one's skin. We are all humans, race literally doesn't and shouldn't matter.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  You can't forget about ethnically Jewish people, another minority group that has disproportionately good outcomes. All of a sudden, these are just a new type of white people who (according to some notable activists like the BLM founders) have even more whiteness than the normal white people.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > All of a sudden, these are just a new type of white people Latin@s are going through this development right now. A growing number of them are choosing to identify as white and reject the whole framing of racial grievance mongering.
    - warning26 4y ago
      I’d just like to appreciate your use of “latin@“; I’ve never seen it before but it’s so much better than “LatinX”
      - bitwize 4y ago
        "Latinx" is used because it avoids an unfortunate implication intrinsic to "Latino", "Latina", or "Latin@": the gender binary.
zzzeek 4y ago
from that logic, the only reason that nationwide higher education achievement for African Americans and Latinos being about half of what it is for whites would be...that people of those backgrounds are inherently more lazy. What other reason can you offer ? If we live in a pure "meritocracy" as you claim, why does this "merit" seem to correlate so highly with racial background? Specific reasons please (note to the repliers - the assumption given by the parent is, we live in a pure meritocracy and the reason people achieve less is strictly because "they're lazy". I did not say I believe that. )
- anthk 4y ago
  >Latinos Wait until you find high disparity between Latinos themselves. Ever heard of Severo Ochoa? Ramon y Cajal? Torres Quevedo? Not every Latino it's lazy. Not every American rides a walking device and it's overwight. Not every Brit/Irish it's deeply drunk at pubs.
  - zzzeek 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - anthk 4y ago
      I'm from Spain. I'm living under a two-millenial old blend of Germanic Goths, Iberians, Celts, Basques, Romans, Moors, Castillians, modern French, Italians and who knows more. What am I according to your "theories"?
    - anthk 4y ago
      Wait until you read about the School of Salamanca from 4 centuries ago basically defining modern economics, philosophy and the New World a few years before the Lutherans. So, saying 'X ethnics it's inherently lazy' it's bullshit. It's more related to poverty and how rich were you parents. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca
      - 4y ago
andrepd 4y ago
>The destruction of meritocracy. Meritocracy is a myth. participants have too much variability on starting points and environment for the concept to have any usefulness. That being said, the "nihilistic" attitude of DEI towards meritocracy is as unsatisfactory as that "naive" attitude of pretending it exists. The right attitude is to recognise that the concept is meaningless in a society of staggering (and rising) inequality, and take steps to correct that.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Why does the process matter? The question is whether <candidate> can do his job right here right now. If he can: Great. If he can't: Tough shit.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    As is usually the case, things are not so simple. Say you are deciding who gets into a college. To simplify say you have only one metric, GPA/test scores. What do you do? - You might have a student from a wealthy family, comfortable upbringing, two loving parents invested in his well-being and education, with money to spend on extracurriculars, and a nice school with all the trimmings. He has 3.8/4 GPA. - You might have another student from a lower-class family, with, say, trouble at home, parents shouting, no money for extracurriculars like music or sport, studying in a shitty dilapidated school. He has 3.5/4 GPA. Whom do you choose? It's definitely not so simple! In fact, remember that you are choosing people to come to college: an environment where they will all have equal access to resources, including professors, study materials, facilities, etc. I argue that you should choose the student which is more likely to make the most out of those resources. In this situation, wouldn't a better predictor of success in higher education be, instead of overall GPA, the difference in GPA compared to students in the same cohort? Wouldn't that be (a) a better measure of "merit" and (b) a better practical investment in someone who is more likely to excel and make the best out of the resources/opportunity invested? Just an example to illustrate that one dismissive sentence cannot possible solve this issue.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
mnky9800n 4y ago
i would say that is a bit biased view of it all. i would suggest the goal of DEI is a true meritocracy. One where the only thing that matters is merit. There would be no measurable difference based on uncontrollable factors. There would be true acceptance of differences without any tolerance of differences. I like to think about it from the stand point of star trek. When Gene Roddenberry was asked "would a starship really have a bald captain? Wouldn't they have invented a cure for baldness in the 24th century?" Gene Roddenberry replied, "In the 24th century nobody cares if you are bald or not." That is a rather innocuous example, but the point remains, the future should be a place where it doesn't much matter who you are, only what you do. The future should be a place where everyone is accepted as they are and there are no personal difficulties due to being different. A blind man can be the pilot of a ship, a black woman a deck officer, a person with a handicap (like the alien going to starfleet academy that doesn't breathe oxygen) isn't kept back from their job. All that is expected that you want to be there and you want to work towards being where you want to be. And if some things are more difficult for you, society will help you out. You will get a VISOR if you are blind, or a device to help you breathe. The argument that often comes from post-modernist DEI advocates is that the world I'm describing is an ideal and doesn't exist. Well that is true. Ideals don't exist. That doesn't keep us from seeking them. We cannot reject DEI on face value or because some activists see change needing methods we disagree with (e.g., top down approaches that refuse to have the system accept responsibility and force the individual to account for the inequities and injustices). the internal ideals of DEI are good, differences cannot be simply tolerated, they must be accepted and accounted for.
- matwood 4y ago
  > i would suggest the goal of DEI is a true meritocracy. I agree. DEI and a true meritocracy are not at odds with each other. In fact, a true meritocracy can't exist without DEI.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  How are you going to decide who fills the role of captain? In this hypothetical, is there any accounting for merit and individual agency?
gadders 4y ago
Yes and no. I do genuinely think that there are some things that should be taken into account when hiring - not in terms of quotas, but in terms of allowances made. For instance consider two students: Student A: Lived in a comfortable middle-class home in which parents worked in professional jobs and went to the best schools Student B: Grew up in a deprived area to single parent who worked menial jobs. Had to work at weekends as well as study. If both students apply to a job or college, should their final academic grades be treated equally? If both students got the same grade, who would you think was "smarter"?
- MockObject 4y ago
  > If both students apply to a job or college, should their final academic grades be treated equally? Yes. Grades reflect what the student did, which is a distinct question from why they were able to do it.
  - gadders 4y ago
    "In the UK, a low ability child from a high income family is 35% more likely to be a high earner than a high ability child from a low income family." You cool with that too?
    - MockObject 4y ago
      Isn't that one of the chief goals of accumulating wealth? Being able to offer their children more opportunity?
      - gadders 4y ago
        Depends what it is. If it's "more opportunity because you inherited my house when I died" - fair enough. If it's "more opportunity because I got my mate Dave to hire you over other more qualified candidates" then that's shit.
        MockObject 4y ago

by causi 4y ago

ramesh31 4y ago

>Did my Korean friend growing up who spent his every afternoon and weekend studying while I was playing videogames deserve to get into a better university than me and make more money than me? I say he did. DEI says he didn't. But why was your friend able to spend his every afternoon and weekend studying? Because he was raised in a supportive, nurturing environment. Probably with grandparents and aunts/uncles to help take care of him. He probably had older relatives in professional careers to aspire to and mentor him. He probably never had to work a job in high school to help support his family, or raise his younger siblings while mom worked night shift. His parents were probably married and able to hold decent jobs to provide a stable home, good nutrition, and a lack of stress. They probably were able to make sure he went to preschool, and had reliable transportation to get him to/from there and kindergarten, and drilled into him the importance of education from a young age. All of these things are what DEI tries to correct for. The people who had none of that never get a shot at redemption otherwise. The cards are stacked from birth.

goatlover 4y ago
And that's a bad thing that should be penalized (weighted negatively for admissions or hiring)? What kind of society are you hoping to incentivize?
zozbot234 4y ago
Except that the openly stated goal of DEI activists is the opposite. It's to destroy the "Western-prescribed nuclear family structure". Which would be all well and good if they supported viable alternatives such as a greater reliance on extended families or building up a resilient structure of tightly-knit local communities - but nope, they hate these things even more!
causi 4y ago
Try again. His parents were first-generation immigrants and his dad died when he was little. His mom was an RN, he had two younger siblings, and he worked at Kroger his last two years of high school. Our friendship fell off because he never had time to hang out. Perhaps being bilingual was his "unfair advantage"?
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >Try again. His parents were first-generation immigrants and his dad died when he was little. His mom was an RN, he had two younger siblings, and he worked at Kroger his last two years of high school We can trade anecdotes all day long, but the general point stands. And yes, things were different 20 years ago. But the average asian family today in the US is actually better off than the average white family: https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequality-in-the-united-states https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...
  - causi 4y ago
    The average asian family in the US is actually better off than the average white family Exactly. Why is that? It isn't because they came over to America and enslaved people, or won a war, or placed themselves at the head of a religion that all the white people believed in. They excelled because they worked harder than everyone else. One can argue that the majority white population discriminated against asians less than african-americans or latinos and that's why asian people are more successful than them, but that falls apart once asian people are more successful than the majority ethnic group.
adapa 4y ago
A monkey has all the cards stacked against him/her. No so developed brain. Non supportive parents. All the things DEI aims to correct. should we make the monkey the president ? This is ofcourse an exaggeration but you get the idea.
- zzzeek 4y ago
  [flagged]
creakingstairs 4y ago
> Because he was raised in a supportive, nurturing environment. Probably with grandparents and aunts/uncles to help take care of him. > lack of stress As an immigrant Asian child I can tell you usually we had none of these things. What drove me and my friends was pressure. I knew what my parents gave up to give me this chance. I knew they probably wouldn’t have enough savings to ever retire without me helping them out later. I knew I didn’t want to disappoint them. Why must countless Asian parents’ sacrifices and kids effort be swept away under DEI? Of course I get that it helps to create a society where no one would have to go such lengths to provide opportunity for their children. But man, it just rubs me the wrong way.

Dalewyn 4y ago

Asians (read: a minority in the US) throwing a spanner in "diversity" and revealing the whole charade for what it is is hilarious (for all the wrong reasons) every time. "Diversity" is supposedly all about "helping minorities", except when those minorities are too successful for the narrative. Can't have success, oh no! Minorities are supposed to be oppressed and victims in need of saving by the good diversifiers! And so asians quite often get rounded up with whites. Fuck that noise. Meritocracy is by far the best system we have to figure out the good people from the bad. Judging by the quality of one's character rather than the color of one's skin. We are all humans, race literally doesn't and shouldn't matter.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
You can't forget about ethnically Jewish people, another minority group that has disproportionately good outcomes. All of a sudden, these are just a new type of white people who (according to some notable activists like the BLM founders) have even more whiteness than the normal white people.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > All of a sudden, these are just a new type of white people Latin@s are going through this development right now. A growing number of them are choosing to identify as white and reject the whole framing of racial grievance mongering.
  - warning26 4y ago
    I’d just like to appreciate your use of “latin@“; I’ve never seen it before but it’s so much better than “LatinX”
    - bitwize 4y ago
      "Latinx" is used because it avoids an unfortunate implication intrinsic to "Latino", "Latina", or "Latin@": the gender binary.

zzzeek 4y ago

from that logic, the only reason that nationwide higher education achievement for African Americans and Latinos being about half of what it is for whites would be...that people of those backgrounds are inherently more lazy. What other reason can you offer ? If we live in a pure "meritocracy" as you claim, why does this "merit" seem to correlate so highly with racial background? Specific reasons please (note to the repliers - the assumption given by the parent is, we live in a pure meritocracy and the reason people achieve less is strictly because "they're lazy". I did not say I believe that. )

anthk 4y ago
>Latinos Wait until you find high disparity between Latinos themselves. Ever heard of Severo Ochoa? Ramon y Cajal? Torres Quevedo? Not every Latino it's lazy. Not every American rides a walking device and it's overwight. Not every Brit/Irish it's deeply drunk at pubs.
- zzzeek 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - anthk 4y ago
    I'm from Spain. I'm living under a two-millenial old blend of Germanic Goths, Iberians, Celts, Basques, Romans, Moors, Castillians, modern French, Italians and who knows more. What am I according to your "theories"?
  - anthk 4y ago
    Wait until you read about the School of Salamanca from 4 centuries ago basically defining modern economics, philosophy and the New World a few years before the Lutherans. So, saying 'X ethnics it's inherently lazy' it's bullshit. It's more related to poverty and how rich were you parents. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca
    - 4y ago

andrepd 4y ago

>The destruction of meritocracy. Meritocracy is a myth. participants have too much variability on starting points and environment for the concept to have any usefulness. That being said, the "nihilistic" attitude of DEI towards meritocracy is as unsatisfactory as that "naive" attitude of pretending it exists. The right attitude is to recognise that the concept is meaningless in a society of staggering (and rising) inequality, and take steps to correct that.

Dalewyn 4y ago
Why does the process matter? The question is whether <candidate> can do his job right here right now. If he can: Great. If he can't: Tough shit.
- andrepd 4y ago
  As is usually the case, things are not so simple. Say you are deciding who gets into a college. To simplify say you have only one metric, GPA/test scores. What do you do? - You might have a student from a wealthy family, comfortable upbringing, two loving parents invested in his well-being and education, with money to spend on extracurriculars, and a nice school with all the trimmings. He has 3.8/4 GPA. - You might have another student from a lower-class family, with, say, trouble at home, parents shouting, no money for extracurriculars like music or sport, studying in a shitty dilapidated school. He has 3.5/4 GPA. Whom do you choose? It's definitely not so simple! In fact, remember that you are choosing people to come to college: an environment where they will all have equal access to resources, including professors, study materials, facilities, etc. I argue that you should choose the student which is more likely to make the most out of those resources. In this situation, wouldn't a better predictor of success in higher education be, instead of overall GPA, the difference in GPA compared to students in the same cohort? Wouldn't that be (a) a better measure of "merit" and (b) a better practical investment in someone who is more likely to excel and make the best out of the resources/opportunity invested? Just an example to illustrate that one dismissive sentence cannot possible solve this issue.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago

mnky9800n 4y ago

i would say that is a bit biased view of it all. i would suggest the goal of DEI is a true meritocracy. One where the only thing that matters is merit. There would be no measurable difference based on uncontrollable factors. There would be true acceptance of differences without any tolerance of differences. I like to think about it from the stand point of star trek. When Gene Roddenberry was asked "would a starship really have a bald captain? Wouldn't they have invented a cure for baldness in the 24th century?" Gene Roddenberry replied, "In the 24th century nobody cares if you are bald or not." That is a rather innocuous example, but the point remains, the future should be a place where it doesn't much matter who you are, only what you do. The future should be a place where everyone is accepted as they are and there are no personal difficulties due to being different. A blind man can be the pilot of a ship, a black woman a deck officer, a person with a handicap (like the alien going to starfleet academy that doesn't breathe oxygen) isn't kept back from their job. All that is expected that you want to be there and you want to work towards being where you want to be. And if some things are more difficult for you, society will help you out. You will get a VISOR if you are blind, or a device to help you breathe. The argument that often comes from post-modernist DEI advocates is that the world I'm describing is an ideal and doesn't exist. Well that is true. Ideals don't exist. That doesn't keep us from seeking them. We cannot reject DEI on face value or because some activists see change needing methods we disagree with (e.g., top down approaches that refuse to have the system accept responsibility and force the individual to account for the inequities and injustices). the internal ideals of DEI are good, differences cannot be simply tolerated, they must be accepted and accounted for.

matwood 4y ago
> i would suggest the goal of DEI is a true meritocracy. I agree. DEI and a true meritocracy are not at odds with each other. In fact, a true meritocracy can't exist without DEI.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hcurtiss 4y ago
How are you going to decide who fills the role of captain? In this hypothetical, is there any accounting for merit and individual agency?

gadders 4y ago

Yes and no. I do genuinely think that there are some things that should be taken into account when hiring - not in terms of quotas, but in terms of allowances made. For instance consider two students: Student A: Lived in a comfortable middle-class home in which parents worked in professional jobs and went to the best schools Student B: Grew up in a deprived area to single parent who worked menial jobs. Had to work at weekends as well as study. If both students apply to a job or college, should their final academic grades be treated equally? If both students got the same grade, who would you think was "smarter"?

MockObject 4y ago
> If both students apply to a job or college, should their final academic grades be treated equally? Yes. Grades reflect what the student did, which is a distinct question from why they were able to do it.
- gadders 4y ago
  "In the UK, a low ability child from a high income family is 35% more likely to be a high earner than a high ability child from a low income family." You cool with that too?
  - MockObject 4y ago
    Isn't that one of the chief goals of accumulating wealth? Being able to offer their children more opportunity?
    - gadders 4y ago
      Depends what it is. If it's "more opportunity because you inherited my house when I died" - fair enough. If it's "more opportunity because I got my mate Dave to hire you over other more qualified candidates" then that's shit.
      - MockObject 4y ago