[twofornone]

I strongly disagree. These accusatory virtue signals are everywhere, deliberate, and most importantly antithetical to reason. Ignoring this stuff is how we ended up with diversity quotas. We should all be pushing back at this point, meritocracy is literally at stake when people are hired for race/gender, and the dysfunction is already visible across many of our institutions.

I came here to read an article about sunscreen, not be implicitly lectured with distilled identity politics.

[trompetenaccoun]

Filter out the chatter and follow the actual information. The article is on some online magazine site, who cares what they write. The original study says nothing about race whatsoever.

[betwixthewires]

I'm with you, but I take a different approach: mercilessly mock the chatter and noise, discuss the information. Encourage information, discourage senseless garbage.

[deanCommie]

Diversity quotas irrespective of skill, and those that denigrate meritocracy are antithetical to reason.

But from where I sit I do not see any diversity quotas that choose race/gender over skill. There might be exceptions somewhere, I won't lie. I only know about my corner which is big tech hiring.

What I see is an acknowledgement that much selection in our society (to universities, for jobs, etc) are subjective decisions that incorporate objective and subjective factors. Every student trying to get into Yale has perfect GPA, SATs, and a list of extra-curricular activities as long as my arm. So if they are equal on these measures, why not bring in slightly more folks from races that have been historically disadvantaged to offset past injustices? Is that fair to white students? No. But there is no "fair" way to make a choice like this.

Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race. The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability. And nobody gets through those except on merit. But the FIRST step of hiring for multi-billion dollar companies is to sift through thousands of interview applicants, or contact thousands of applicants on LinkedIn with identical sounding resumes. These steps are HIGHLY subjective and unscientific - they're based on keywords, feel of recruiters, overindexing on past signals (other big tech companies, big universities, etc). The first "screen out" phase of hiring has NEVER been a meritocracy. It's always been a gut feel of who "feels" like they would be a successful candidate.

This is where the diversity initiatives are focused - to try to shift the variables in a subjective non-meritocratic process to - again - offset past racial discriminations to try to even the playing field slightly.

I ask you to have patience with "being lectured about identity politics". I ask you to wonder why you find virtue signals "accusatory" if they're not talking to you or about you. Don't discount those talking about this subject as "woke", or "virtue signalers" or "social justice warriors".

Some of them are overly angry and vitriolic, yes. Some are tired of explaining concepts that are clear and for granted to them, thinking that at this point anyone that disagrees is simply an agitator. Not all show good faith. Some are in it for themselves, and the glory of being holier-than-thou. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't exist.

But most of the concepts being discussed are sound. And there is a lot of fire behind the smoke. There is a lot of past, present, and future "racism" that still needs to be understood, and addressed.

[BlargMcLarg]

Shorter people (relative to their gender) systematically earn less. Yet we aren't in uproar about this, and they are still allowed to be the butt of many jokes.

Introversion is still taken poorly, as if it is a sin. Despite introversion having almost no relation to job performance without further context.

People who work better on different schedules are still funneled primarily into a 9-6 rhythm, being told to suck it up.

"White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more, as they are selected against for "not being diverse enough".

Really, most companies with diversity quotas might not hire Joe, but they'll hire Juan who's basically the same as Joe except he's Mexican and loves Taco Tuesday more than Pizza Friday. It's diversity in the most superficial sense, looking for the same car with a different paint job. They're not in this to combat "racial injustices", they're in this to appease some crowd with too much money in an attempt to get more money out of them.

[deanCommie]

> Shorter people

Remote work should help with this. I have no idea how tall my coworkers are.

> Introversion

In my corner of the world - the tech industry - it's taken to be a baseline, so there is no discrimination.

There IS insufficient accordances made for neuroatypical (ADHD, Autistic) people with interviews, but there is active discussion happening about it.

> "White students" from poor backgrounds now struggle to move up even more

So long as any part of our society remains not a pure meritocracy, of course some people will struggle against others. Money is still the best way to get ahead. So poor people will struggle, and there is not enough opportunities for everyone. White people still get selected to "move up" by the forces that be, they just aren't the ONLY ones that do so. Instead of 99% of the scholarships going to white students, maybe 50%% are. But if that reflects the demographics of the part of society that is making that choice, where is the problem?

> diversity in the most superficial sense

It's a correction for discrimination in the most superficial sense. It's a start. It's a stepping stone towards not having any discrimination, and not needing corrective action like diversity initiatives.

[twofornone]

I don't have space to respond to your whole commend but upon skimming these two points stood out:

>Big tech hiring focus on diversity is much the same - the bar is NOT lowered for women or anyone from a minority race.

When employers industry wide are tripping over themselves to hire minorities, then yes, the bar is absolutely lower and pay higher. Its a classic perverse incentive.

>The last step of hiring before an offer is an objective test of programming ability.

Having been on both ends, there is absolutely nothing objective about interviews, and its perfectly possible to even pass a hard leetcode interview while lacking hard/soft skills. This is the basis for the diversity overcorrection: the allegation was that the system was implicitly biased against minorities, and the solution was to apply bias in the other direction.

Except the fundamental premise, all of the "proof" upon which the justification for racist/sexist hiring is a giant conflation; inequality of outcome is not strong evidence of discrimination. Especially when you have a glaring and obvious pipeline problem.

You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit. Statistics and the normal distribution guarantee that a smaller pool of candidates will have a disproportionately smaller pool of high achievers and once those are vacuumed by corps virtually signalling for ESG Goodboy points you are forced to either abandon quotas or draw from closer to the mean. It is a statistical inevitability that minority hiring quotas lead to reduced average competence.

Something about the road to hell and pavement.

[amzn-throw]

> You can't snap your fingers and decide that you're going to hire up a bunch of minorities to senior positions tomorrow when they don't even exist in college today without sacrificing merit.

You can, if OP's premise is sound - that you can get more diveristy hires simply by expanding the pool of candidates being considered.

I am deeply involved in hiring at Amazon, (and am a bar raiser) and we work super hard to make sure diversity candidates want to apply, are being considered fairly, don't fall through the cracks, but when it comes to the final on-site, it might as well be a blind audition. We teach interviewers to refer to candidates impartially and focus purely on the questions, and answers. The analysis and conclusions is reviewed in a group. There is no way to make a hire decision without supportive data from their performance on the coding test, or in their behavioural experience.

I can't speak for the entire tech industry, but I know at Amazon the bar has absolutely not lowered.