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> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message tha

> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking. It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. That's not "pro homogeneity" - only someone whose perspective is entirely warped by this one factor would think that way.

ajross 1y ago
> It excludes the many, many more people Are these people actually attested? In my experience, virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having some... unsavory attitudes more generally. Scratch hard in discussion or check post histories[1] and you end up at some variant of white nationalism or men's rights, almost every time. Basically no one goes to bat for "wanting the best people in a role". People get political when they feel aggrieved. "DEI mania" is always a response to "I think this is going to hurt people like me". [1] Edit: I did. And... well...
- rowanG077 1y ago
  men's right? I'm shuddering in my chair. Next you tell me they volunteer for a homeless shelter too.
- machomaster 1y ago
  > virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having (...) men's rights So people who dislike a cultural type of discrimination also dislike practical discrimination against men? People who dislike what is going on in general, also have practical opinions how the situation could be improved in practice, how to make the situation more fair? This is akin to being surprised that people who are actively against animal abuse are also helping animal shelters.
dangus 1y ago
> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking. This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked. The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now. If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us. This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  > The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now. I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
  - dangus 1y ago
    I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second amendment people could help stop his opposition. This “violence on the left” that you speak of, I haven’t personally seen a whole lot of it. No Kings was the largest protest in American history and not a single person was arrested for any protest infraction in New York City. The NYPD publicly announced it. How many people wearing Joe Biden hats breached the capitol? Is there any left-wing violence in the past few decades of America that you would call more extreme than breaking into the capitol building?
    - nxor 1y ago
didibus 1y ago
The issue is more complex. If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything. But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group. In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool. The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate. It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances. Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best. Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth. Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board. In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society. To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too. The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential. Thus true meritocracy demands accepting diversity, equity, inclusion and fair equal opportunities. Without it, you're only circumstancially demonstrably the best, and you never know if you truly are the better one.
- dangus 1y ago
  This complex discussion does exist, you’re right. At the same time, this complex discussion is not what the present administration is engaging in. At best they are using it as a cover story.
- machomaster 1y ago
  You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one. > In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to > max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person. If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.
trehalose 1y ago
Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?
- philipallstar 1y ago
  Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.
mrguyorama 1y ago
>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc. That's not how the human brain can work. That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality. If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery. Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all. We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to. And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind. Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.
latexr 1y ago
> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.
- abbycurtis33 1y ago
  This is mystical thinking. We can establish systems for hiring based on capability.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    We've yet to establish such a system, so I'm not holding out much hope (and anyone who has been through a handful of tech interview loops ought to realise this)
  - devmor 1y ago
    This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve? A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
    - philipallstar 1y ago
      Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.
      - devmor 1y ago
        What? Customers do not do hiring and hiring is not done to benefit customers. That is a nonsense viewpoint.
estimator7292 1y ago
It's not an "us vs them" situation, that's just a strawman argument. The real point is that you either believe that all humans are worthy of the same rights and respects by default then you're a bad person. Such people aren't against "us" they're against everyone apart from their select group of the "right kind" of people. This isn't a quid pro quo or zero sum bullshit. This is a matter of being a moral person or not. It's not even an opinion, it's the cold hard fact that if you think entire groups of people are subhuman, unworthy of basic rights, and fit to be abducted abused and deported, you are a bad person. It's that cut and dry. You either think all people should be equal or you don't. You either want a civilized society for everyone or you only want it for the "right kind" of people. One of these stances is objectively moral and the other is objectively bad
- machomaster 1y ago
  And that's exactly the point. DEI and other "positive" discriminatory practices are making the field uneven for people. People should be treated as individuals, representing themselves and standing for their own abilities, instead of being treated as members of whatever group. Those type of racists, sexists and DEI activists are objectively bad people.
  - nxor 1y ago
    Exactly! They try to free us from this thinking by forcing everyone to follow it.

ajross 1y ago

> It excludes the many, many more people Are these people actually attested? In my experience, virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having some... unsavory attitudes more generally. Scratch hard in discussion or check post histories[1] and you end up at some variant of white nationalism or men's rights, almost every time. Basically no one goes to bat for "wanting the best people in a role". People get political when they feel aggrieved. "DEI mania" is always a response to "I think this is going to hurt people like me". [1] Edit: I did. And... well...

rowanG077 1y ago
men's right? I'm shuddering in my chair. Next you tell me they volunteer for a homeless shelter too.
machomaster 1y ago
> virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having (...) men's rights So people who dislike a cultural type of discrimination also dislike practical discrimination against men? People who dislike what is going on in general, also have practical opinions how the situation could be improved in practice, how to make the situation more fair? This is akin to being surprised that people who are actively against animal abuse are also helping animal shelters.

dangus 1y ago

> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking. This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked. The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now. If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us. This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.

philipallstar 1y ago
> The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now. I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
- dangus 1y ago
  I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second amendment people could help stop his opposition. This “violence on the left” that you speak of, I haven’t personally seen a whole lot of it. No Kings was the largest protest in American history and not a single person was arrested for any protest infraction in New York City. The NYPD publicly announced it. How many people wearing Joe Biden hats breached the capitol? Is there any left-wing violence in the past few decades of America that you would call more extreme than breaking into the capitol building?
  - nxor 1y ago

didibus 1y ago

The issue is more complex. If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything. But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group. In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool. The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate. It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances. Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best. Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth. Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board. In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society. To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too. The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential. Thus true meritocracy demands accepting diversity, equity, inclusion and fair equal opportunities. Without it, you're only circumstancially demonstrably the best, and you never know if you truly are the better one.

dangus 1y ago
This complex discussion does exist, you’re right. At the same time, this complex discussion is not what the present administration is engaging in. At best they are using it as a cover story.
machomaster 1y ago
You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one. > In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to > max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person. If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.

trehalose 1y ago

Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?

philipallstar 1y ago
Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.

mrguyorama 1y ago

>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc. That's not how the human brain can work. That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality. If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery. Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all. We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to. And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind. Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.

latexr 1y ago

> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.

abbycurtis33 1y ago
This is mystical thinking. We can establish systems for hiring based on capability.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  We've yet to establish such a system, so I'm not holding out much hope (and anyone who has been through a handful of tech interview loops ought to realise this)
- devmor 1y ago
  This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve? A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.
    - devmor 1y ago
      What? Customers do not do hiring and hiring is not done to benefit customers. That is a nonsense viewpoint.

estimator7292 1y ago

It's not an "us vs them" situation, that's just a strawman argument. The real point is that you either believe that all humans are worthy of the same rights and respects by default then you're a bad person. Such people aren't against "us" they're against everyone apart from their select group of the "right kind" of people. This isn't a quid pro quo or zero sum bullshit. This is a matter of being a moral person or not. It's not even an opinion, it's the cold hard fact that if you think entire groups of people are subhuman, unworthy of basic rights, and fit to be abducted abused and deported, you are a bad person. It's that cut and dry. You either think all people should be equal or you don't. You either want a civilized society for everyone or you only want it for the "right kind" of people. One of these stances is objectively moral and the other is objectively bad

machomaster 1y ago
And that's exactly the point. DEI and other "positive" discriminatory practices are making the field uneven for people. People should be treated as individuals, representing themselves and standing for their own abilities, instead of being treated as members of whatever group. Those type of racists, sexists and DEI activists are objectively bad people.
- nxor 1y ago
  Exactly! They try to free us from this thinking by forcing everyone to follow it.