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I don't understand why you are calling it a religion. What has been your personal experience with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in employment? Min

I don't understand why you are calling it a religion. What has been your personal experience with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in employment? Mine has been that I watched a few videos that basically said: don't hit on people at work, don't mock people for disabilities, and don't treat people as lesser based on physical attributes. In other words, don't be an asshole to people at work. The only people I've seen given preferential treatment at work have been those who suck up to the leadership to get promoted.

joshvm 2y ago
This is an interesting question. I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information. For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation. The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.
- admissionsguy 2y ago
  > The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". Why do you say it is a fallacy when the E in DEI stands for the so called equity, which means exactly that. You seem to be describing equality, which is something that DEI was intended to supersede. When you look at pre-Trump guidelines for FAA job applications, for example, there is an explicitly described preferential process for hiring from the favored groups.
  - joshuamorton 2y ago
    Equity doesn't mean that though. There are people (like the current president) who certainly have something to gain from selling you that bridge, but no one I know who works in or advocates for "equity" initiatives considers them to advocate for token or diversity hires. Have you considered that your sources of data may be biased? Consider, for example that need-based scholarships are perhaps one of the clearest examples of a equitable, but explicitly unequal program. Should they be removed, or perhaps is there some legitimacy to this "equity" thing?
    - Manuel_D 2y ago
      > Consider, for example that need-based scholarships are perhaps one of the clearest examples of a equitable, but explicitly unequal program. Should they be removed, or perhaps is there some legitimacy to this "equity" thing? That's discrimination on the basis of income, which is legal. Discrimination on the basis of race and gender is not. All of the DEI programs I've seen have focused on equity with respect to race and gender. And 3 out of 4 companies I've worked at employed discrimination to that end. Plenty of people have seen their employers adopt discriminatory practices in pursuit of equity. Condescending towards people and insisting that they're being misled about DEI is not a good way to defend it when loads of people have witnessed discrimination carried out under DEI programs firsthand. While I respect that none of your experiences with DEI involved discrimination, I urge you to meet other people who've had different experiences with the same respect.
      - joshuamorton 2y ago
        I want to break down this post a bit, because this topic is often divisive and I'm aiming to be constructive. So, the question I asked, "Is there some legitimacy to this equity thing", and the question you chose to answer, which as best as I can tell is "Is racial discrimination legal?". Those aren't the same question and I don't think conflating them is constructive. I'm not arguing that companies can do harmful things in the name of diversity. But the goal of equitable outcomes being worthwhile is independent from anyone's feelings about the legitimacy of any particular approach to meeting that goal, and that's what I asked about, and what you didn't reply to. I'd ask you to consider why. Reading some of your other posts on the topic, you keep quoting a "3/4" statistic, and you've described different practices when asked to describe what they were you've described: - Explicit racial and gender quotas in headcount (which are flatly illegal and so I doubt) - Hiring goals in OKRS (which aren't inherently discriminatory, and probably weren't achieved!) - Giving candidates multiple attempts on interviews in certain cases - Requiring a certain number of underrepresented candidates to be offered interviews before the candidate can be picked I want to dig into this last one, because in my experience, this is somewhat common, but only with executive hiring, where often roles aren't open for public application, and this forces executive search companies to make a modicum of additional effort to source and provide diverse candidates to the hiring company. This has, in some cases I've seen, also resulted in executive level positions having open public job postings. I also want to dig in to something you said in another comment, because I think you're using discrimination in a particular way that's not how most people think of it. Phrased more forcefully, the definition of "racial discrimination" you appear to be using and considering harmful includes practices that are both generally considered legal and generally considered moral. > Not every form of discrimination involves lowering hiring standards. For instance, imagine I flip a coin whenever a Catholic candidate applies. Tails, their resume goes into the garbage bin, heads and their application process as normal. Does this lower lower hiring standards for non Catholics? No. Does this advantage non-Catholics over Catholic candidates? Yes. It would halve the hiring rate of Catholics, though it doesn't result in any "lowering the bar". So, I agree that this would lower the hiring rate of Catholics, but under this definition, ending this (clearly) discriminatory practice would lower the hiring rate of non-catholics. If your metric is "it is discriminatory if it harms the hiring rate of some group", then you've created an explicitly zero-sum definition of discrimination, and anything that reduces discrimination against some group causes discrimination against another. In doing so you've baked in an assumption about the correctness of the methodology at some particular time and place that you're measuring against. You can call that discrimination, and I actually do in a lot of circumstances, but it isn't bad. It's actually a good thing, and we recognize that in a lot of circumstances that discrimination in pursuit of equity is moral and legal and even necessary! Outside the US, for example, there are explicit racial quotas in a lot of situations, for example in New Zealand[0] there are explicit quotas in parliament to ensure continued native representation, and India has quota systems to help support lower caste individuals in opposition to active discrimination in society by upper-caste folks. Even in the US, Due to the 1965 Voting Rights Act [1], ensuring representation of minority groups and actively "discriminating" in district drawing to ensure minority representation is both legal and in some cases required. And while the supreme court has defanged the voting rights act in recent years, it still recognizes that looking at race explicitly as part of disparate impact tests makes sense in many cases. So while I do in fact meet with and talk with lots of people who have different experiences, I urge you to do the same: consider if your interpretation of what is harmful discrimination is in line with common use. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_electorates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_electorates [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  Unfortunately, the incorrect implementations are much more common in my experience. Out of the 4 companies I've worked at 3 carried out explicit discrimination under the banner of DEI. > For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation And as a counterexample, STEM hiring experiments showed a 2:1 bias in favor women: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
1over137 2y ago
>I don't understand why you are calling it a religion. There's a book on the topic: "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" by John McWhorter
- toomim 2y ago
  There's also a documentary online: https://x.com/MikeNayna/status/1861213812046864768 https://x.com/MikeNayna/status/1861213812046864768 ...which shows a specific instance of the religion take hold at Evergreen State.
xyzzy123 2y ago
What you are describing is the motte. What happened to James Damore was the bailey. Did he fail a critical vibe check / badly fail to read the room? Sure. Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired. But is everyone already forgetting what things were like?
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired. He was fired because he placed himself in a position where at least half the company would refuse to work with him.
  - xyzzy123 2y ago
    Not disagreeing with you. It didn't matter if he was wrong or right, his mistake was entertaining the notion that people would entertain an earnest (if misguided) discussion when in fact that whole topic was taboo.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Questioning the status quo is very different from drawing conclusions the way he did. It should never be taboo to question whether DEI practices are fulfilling their goals or harming other metrics.
      - lazide 2y ago
        It definitely has been taboo to have that discussion for many, many years.
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      The topic is not "taboo". In an organization where compensation is based on non-anonymous peer review, you cannot have a person going around with their thesis that women are objectively inferior engineers. That person has to be fired (directly into the sun, when practical).
UltraSane 2y ago
"I don't understand why you are calling it a religion." Because it is using racism to try to cure racism and if you point out that this is wrong you will be called racist.

joshvm 2y ago

This is an interesting question. I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information. For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation. The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.

admissionsguy 2y ago
> The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". Why do you say it is a fallacy when the E in DEI stands for the so called equity, which means exactly that. You seem to be describing equality, which is something that DEI was intended to supersede. When you look at pre-Trump guidelines for FAA job applications, for example, there is an explicitly described preferential process for hiring from the favored groups.
- joshuamorton 2y ago
  Equity doesn't mean that though. There are people (like the current president) who certainly have something to gain from selling you that bridge, but no one I know who works in or advocates for "equity" initiatives considers them to advocate for token or diversity hires. Have you considered that your sources of data may be biased? Consider, for example that need-based scholarships are perhaps one of the clearest examples of a equitable, but explicitly unequal program. Should they be removed, or perhaps is there some legitimacy to this "equity" thing?
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    > Consider, for example that need-based scholarships are perhaps one of the clearest examples of a equitable, but explicitly unequal program. Should they be removed, or perhaps is there some legitimacy to this "equity" thing? That's discrimination on the basis of income, which is legal. Discrimination on the basis of race and gender is not. All of the DEI programs I've seen have focused on equity with respect to race and gender. And 3 out of 4 companies I've worked at employed discrimination to that end. Plenty of people have seen their employers adopt discriminatory practices in pursuit of equity. Condescending towards people and insisting that they're being misled about DEI is not a good way to defend it when loads of people have witnessed discrimination carried out under DEI programs firsthand. While I respect that none of your experiences with DEI involved discrimination, I urge you to meet other people who've had different experiences with the same respect.
    - joshuamorton 2y ago
      I want to break down this post a bit, because this topic is often divisive and I'm aiming to be constructive. So, the question I asked, "Is there some legitimacy to this equity thing", and the question you chose to answer, which as best as I can tell is "Is racial discrimination legal?". Those aren't the same question and I don't think conflating them is constructive. I'm not arguing that companies can do harmful things in the name of diversity. But the goal of equitable outcomes being worthwhile is independent from anyone's feelings about the legitimacy of any particular approach to meeting that goal, and that's what I asked about, and what you didn't reply to. I'd ask you to consider why. Reading some of your other posts on the topic, you keep quoting a "3/4" statistic, and you've described different practices when asked to describe what they were you've described: - Explicit racial and gender quotas in headcount (which are flatly illegal and so I doubt) - Hiring goals in OKRS (which aren't inherently discriminatory, and probably weren't achieved!) - Giving candidates multiple attempts on interviews in certain cases - Requiring a certain number of underrepresented candidates to be offered interviews before the candidate can be picked I want to dig into this last one, because in my experience, this is somewhat common, but only with executive hiring, where often roles aren't open for public application, and this forces executive search companies to make a modicum of additional effort to source and provide diverse candidates to the hiring company. This has, in some cases I've seen, also resulted in executive level positions having open public job postings. I also want to dig in to something you said in another comment, because I think you're using discrimination in a particular way that's not how most people think of it. Phrased more forcefully, the definition of "racial discrimination" you appear to be using and considering harmful includes practices that are both generally considered legal and generally considered moral. > Not every form of discrimination involves lowering hiring standards. For instance, imagine I flip a coin whenever a Catholic candidate applies. Tails, their resume goes into the garbage bin, heads and their application process as normal. Does this lower lower hiring standards for non Catholics? No. Does this advantage non-Catholics over Catholic candidates? Yes. It would halve the hiring rate of Catholics, though it doesn't result in any "lowering the bar". So, I agree that this would lower the hiring rate of Catholics, but under this definition, ending this (clearly) discriminatory practice would lower the hiring rate of non-catholics. If your metric is "it is discriminatory if it harms the hiring rate of some group", then you've created an explicitly zero-sum definition of discrimination, and anything that reduces discrimination against some group causes discrimination against another. In doing so you've baked in an assumption about the correctness of the methodology at some particular time and place that you're measuring against. You can call that discrimination, and I actually do in a lot of circumstances, but it isn't bad. It's actually a good thing, and we recognize that in a lot of circumstances that discrimination in pursuit of equity is moral and legal and even necessary! Outside the US, for example, there are explicit racial quotas in a lot of situations, for example in New Zealand[0] there are explicit quotas in parliament to ensure continued native representation, and India has quota systems to help support lower caste individuals in opposition to active discrimination in society by upper-caste folks. Even in the US, Due to the 1965 Voting Rights Act [1], ensuring representation of minority groups and actively "discriminating" in district drawing to ensure minority representation is both legal and in some cases required. And while the supreme court has defanged the voting rights act in recent years, it still recognizes that looking at race explicitly as part of disparate impact tests makes sense in many cases. So while I do in fact meet with and talk with lots of people who have different experiences, I urge you to do the same: consider if your interpretation of what is harmful discrimination is in line with common use. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_electorates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_electorates [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
Manuel_D 2y ago
Unfortunately, the incorrect implementations are much more common in my experience. Out of the 4 companies I've worked at 3 carried out explicit discrimination under the banner of DEI. > For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation And as a counterexample, STEM hiring experiments showed a 2:1 bias in favor women: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112

1over137 2y ago

>I don't understand why you are calling it a religion. There's a book on the topic: "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" by John McWhorter

toomim 2y ago
There's also a documentary online: https://x.com/MikeNayna/status/1861213812046864768 https://x.com/MikeNayna/status/1861213812046864768 ...which shows a specific instance of the religion take hold at Evergreen State.

xyzzy123 2y ago

What you are describing is the motte. What happened to James Damore was the bailey. Did he fail a critical vibe check / badly fail to read the room? Sure. Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired. But is everyone already forgetting what things were like?

rbanffy 2y ago
> Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired. He was fired because he placed himself in a position where at least half the company would refuse to work with him.
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  Not disagreeing with you. It didn't matter if he was wrong or right, his mistake was entertaining the notion that people would entertain an earnest (if misguided) discussion when in fact that whole topic was taboo.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Questioning the status quo is very different from drawing conclusions the way he did. It should never be taboo to question whether DEI practices are fulfilling their goals or harming other metrics.
    - lazide 2y ago
      It definitely has been taboo to have that discussion for many, many years.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    The topic is not "taboo". In an organization where compensation is based on non-anonymous peer review, you cannot have a person going around with their thesis that women are objectively inferior engineers. That person has to be fired (directly into the sun, when practical).

UltraSane 2y ago

"I don't understand why you are calling it a religion." Because it is using racism to try to cure racism and if you point out that this is wrong you will be called racist.