| HN Mirror

At UC Berkeley, 76% of applicants were rejected on the grounds of their diversity statement: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/480603-what-is-uc-davi...

The suspicion is that inclusion of these diversity statements in the hiring process is a way to stealthily discriminate on the basis of race when it is ostensibly illegal to do so.

wolongong942 1224 days ago

I'm unfamiliar with US colleges, but could this just be a scheme to allow wealthy or well connected people to get into positions without the grades part? It would otherwise be pretty easy to show unjust discrimination if it were only grades being considered, but an applicant's 'diversity score' could mean anything, and is arbitrary on purpose to justify approving just about anybody.

Agreed, much like the "personality score" that Harvard notoriously used to the detriment of Asian applicants. It could very well also be that the children of wealthy donors just happen to have good personalities.

pclmulqdq 1224 days ago

This is for faculty positions, which are employment. Ironically, that has stricter non-descrimination provisions than school admissions.

Not in public California universities. Racial discrimination has been banned in California public university since Proposition 209 was passed in 1996.

ucprof 1223 days ago

Prop 209 bans racial discrimination, but UC does it in hiring anyway through a number of means. For example, although Prop 209 bans taking race into account in the hiring decision, it doesn't ban taking it into account in earlier phases, like preparation of shortlists. If a department's shortlist for hiring a professor is found to have a bad proportion of under-represented minorities, the department can be punished by informal means such as being denied future hires. There are several other tricks that the administration does to promote race-based hiring and admissions, with the overall effect that Prop 209 is nullified through policies that are never put into writing.

rayiner 1224 days ago

Which democrats tried to repeal in 2020.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673427

judge2020 1223 days ago

Because it was used to achieve diversity goals, and 209 prevents that. Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies). Whether or not this is the right way to go about it is indeed a split issue evidenced by the 57/43 2020 vote and 55/45 vote that passed the original 96 proposition.

The proposition you failed to link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16

fche 1223 days ago

> Racial discrimination has been banned in California

someone should send a memo to remind countless california institutions who nevertheless persist

romwell 1224 days ago

>I'm unfamiliar with US colleges, but could this just be a scheme to allow wealthy or well connected people to get into positions without the grades part?

The "grades part"?

We are talking about academic positions here, not student applications.

kova12 1224 days ago

It is not a suspicion, as suspicion would indicate there is a chance discrimination might not be happening; when d&i literally is discrimination, by definition.

> https://651d7eef-05d1-4785-8f04-93b49cc8d71f.filesusr.com/ug...

reading the guidelines for 'grading' those submitted diversity statements... I'm not sure I see what's so objectionable about them:

It seems like you are expected, as a staff member in a position to influence the diversity of your workplace and of the students whose educational experience you exercise power over, to do so in a manner consciences of issues of diversity, not even just in general, but in the specific context of your job.

I mean, just for instance, a low '1' rank is described as, among other things: (*my emphasis*)

> Defines diversity only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities, but doesn’t discuss gender or ethnicity/race. Discusses diversity in vague terms or platitudes. Does not provide any evidence of having informed themselves about diversity. *May discount the importance of diversity.*

I mean - yeah, I wouldn't want someone who fits that description being in charge of my education, or my kid's education - I wouldn't even want to be around a coworker who fits that description. I'm not even sure how well it would work trying to be friends with someone like that - I mean, in this day and age? How could you possibly excuse being so irresponsibly underinformed of such an important issue?

Compare that to a high '5' rank: (again *my emphasis*)

> Clear knowledge of experience with, and interest in dimensions of diversity that result from having URM identities. This understanding can result from personal experiences *as well as an investment in learning about the URM experiences of those with identities different from their own* ... Comfort discussing diversity-related issues (including distinctions and connections between diversity, equity, and inclusion), both in writing, and in a job talk session and one-on-one meetings with students, staff, and faculty.

I mean - that sounds really good doesn't it? Why shouldn't that skill set make someone a more attractive candidate to hire? Isn't that all good stuff that we would all benefit from more people being well-versed in? Doesn't demonstrating that well-versedness indicate a willingness to put the work in, as required to help actively oppose systemic oppression and bigotry? (as opposed to merely paying lip service to an ideal?)

What would you rather see here?

naravara 1223 days ago

> Comfort discussing diversity-related issues

I don't know a single person who has anything genuinely thoughtful or insightful to say on these topics that I would describe as "comfortable" discussing them in the current environment.

You'd have to be exceedingly naive to feel like you can include any amount of nuance into the prevailing narrative, let alone push back against it, without opening yourself up to a slew of mendacious attacks on your character. In many places you can, but within academia or certain corners of the media it's downright risky. There seems to be a rotating example of the day of poorly informed and hyper-reactive school administrators coming down hard on faculty based on nothing at all. Like most recently, the thing with the images of Muhammad being shown in an Islamic history seminar with warnings included in the syllabus and before the lecture being attacked as "Islamophobic."

Nobody is ever comfortable talking about this stuff unless they're up on the current jargon and issues and willing to parrot whatever the approved dogmas and shibboleths of the moment happen to be.

And yet plenty of people ranked high enough that they were hired. Just because you and the people you know wouldn’t have qualified, doesn’t meant that the qualification is unworthy.

I don’t personally know a single union master craftsman carpenter, but I have no problem acknowledging their existence, or their market value to employers. Why should this skill set be any different?

Yes all of the problems you mention are real - so why should an employer not specifically look to hire individuals who are equipped to face them? Like seriously, in what other industry would you protest the necessity of being conversant in applicable jargon? If I walk into a technical interview, and they ask me to use a ternary statement to assign an enum value to a constant based on whether the result of performing a spread operation on a collection of tuples yadda yadda yadda… do you really think my smug “I don’t keep up on shibboleths and dogma” is going to make me look like an appealing candidate?

They’re asking that applicants demonstrate their awareness of the current lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression. Why should lack of awareness and lack of ability or willingness to engage with these issues be attractive when hiring? these are important issues, the handling of which are essential to the continued effort to reverse the effects of bigotry in our country. You might not want to do the work yourself, but that doesn’t mean the work doesn’t need to be done, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who are much better qualified than you and I to do it.

naravara 1223 days ago

> They’re asking that applicants demonstrate their awareness of the current lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression.

Because it's not the lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression. It's the lay of the land as perceived by a clade of under-qualified and unaware administrative functionaries. These people are operating off vibes and public outcry, not any research or evidence backed understanding of history or sociology or policy analysis. The images of Muhammad example is a perfect case because that's exactly what happened. The DEI initiatives were used as a cudgel by the most extreme elements of Islamic movements to impinge on the academic freedom of the professor, and they just dressed up their highly conservative point of view in DEI jargon to manipulate the administration into taking action against her. But all the Muslims who did not agree with that perspective, as well as most scholars of Islamic history, had way more nuanced perspectives on the issue that agreed with the professor. This is basically just an instrument for the administration to erode worker power among an already beleaguered and exploited labor force.

It's also not really germane to most of their disciplines. It would be like asking a mathematician about their knowledge of epidemiology during the COVID pandemic. Why would I expect that of a mathematician? I expect them to do math and to follow whatever directives the public health experts tell them to.

I don't actually think conscripting random people whose core expertise is not policy or equity into doing bootleg equity initiatives are actually going to result in very good policies or a very accurate understanding of equity or diversity issues. I think what it actually ends up getting you is more people who operate off vibes and truthiness they picked up from social media instead.

The issue isn't that people care about diversity or equity, the issue is that this is done in such ham-fisted, lazy, and counterproductive ways. This all suggests they don't care enough about the thing in itself, they care about showing off that they're doing something so everything just revolves around optics instead of outcomes.

mock-possum 1222 days ago

I've got opinions about the Muhamad picture incident, but just to check, we're talking about the one at Hamline University, right?

As to whether it's germane to their disciplines - my understanding is that it's germane because of the position they are in as educators, as employees of educational institutions, not because of their particular discipline. Of course you don't need to need to know anything about the modern concept of diversity to be a mathematician - you need that concept to be an effective teacher. Every one of those people in that class room is a whole person, with an entire life leading up to that day of attendance - "Why would I expect that of a mathematician?" - because you should expect that of everyone, but especially of people in positions of power, who have the ability to either reinforce or disrupt systems of oppression. That's the angle.

caskstrength 1223 days ago

Hmmm, I'm not from the US and I really can't tell whether your comment is serious or a parody.

I’m being serious - what about it sounds parodic to you?

ehvatum 1223 days ago

> What would you rather see here?

Viewing race as a quaint and antiquated concept that is completely irrelevant to higher education.

Me too - but crucially, that isn’t the way the world is right now. That’s what this criteria is about - not just viewing race as irrelevant, but being aware of all the unjust ways in which race has been made to be relevant, specifically so you know how to work to reverse that racist element. The thing about systemic racism is that it persists even after the founding racists are long gone - it’s self-perpetuating. It requires hard work and determination to dismantle.

It’s essentially the argument against “I don’t see colour” - the problem is that modern racists and the legacy of racism persists whether you see colour or not, and the targets of systemic oppression continue to experience repercussions whether you personally target them or not.

In other words, they don’t want employees to simply opt out of racism - that’s comparatively easy. They want employees to actively work against racism. That’s harder, and more worthy, and in my opinion worth actively seeking in new hires, especially in areas like education, politics, health and social services, and real estate that have an outsized impact on the accessibility of the American dream.

It’s not asking employees to pass a test to prove they’re not racist - it’s asking employees to be actively equipped to fight racism as part of their job description. Think of it like being hired for a UX/UI position - are you educated on Dark Patterns in user flows, and can you show experience in identifying and reversing them?

vmilner 1223 days ago

I’d be quite happy for my students to use the terms “tarball”, “git master branch”, and “American”. Am I getting a 5?

My feeling is the diversity statement would not be a good place to state your position on the controversy, so much as it would be a good place to demonstrate your understanding of the controversy itself. Your comment comes off as flippant dismissal, which I think we both know would not be received well.

I’m willing to bet 99% of the people commenting on this thread have never read a single diversity statement, let alone dozens. I’ve read many, and showing a basic understanding of the controversies and struggles is a good example of what you should do in a diversity statement. The high rate of rejections here come from people who don’t want to even think about diversity, and just want to do their research project. They write sarcastic, flippant, unserious and uninformed essays.

Unfortunately for them, the job includes teaching a diverse classroom, so applicants who don’t give serious consideration on how they will do a critical aspect of the job, or even what are the salient issues, are rejected. This is true of any job.

vmilner 1223 days ago

I’m not getting a 5.

seanmcdirmid 1223 days ago

Note the above article is referring to job applicants, not student applicants. It lowers the severity of the finding a bit, but just a bit.

gamblor956 1224 days ago

The opinion piece you cited made the mistake of citing its source.

It misrepresents what happened at Cal. Candidates were not rejected on the basis of their statement, which was merely one factor in scoring the 800+ candidates they interviewed.

1. https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/life_sciences_...

From the cited sources [1]:

> A total of 993 applications were received, of which 893 met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a first review and evaluated candidates based solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only candidates that met a high standard in this area were advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to 214 for serious consideration.

What was misrepresented? "Evaluated solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion [sic]" is not quite the same as evaluated solely on their diversity statement, but it doesn't seem too far off the mark. Aside from the candidates' diversity statement, how would the bureaucrats evaluate their "contribution to diversity, equity, and inclusion"?

As far as the effect on applicant demographics, here's the stats before the diversity evaluation / After diversity evaluation:

Female: 41.7% / 60.3%

Male: 56.5% / 39.3%

African American: 2.8% / 6.1%

Hispanic: 13.2% / 22.9%

Native American: 0.4% / 1.4%

Asian: 25.7% / 18.7%

White: 53.7% / 48.1%

msla 1224 days ago

I note nothing in there about Rich / Poor or anything similar.

It's interesting (by which I mean utterly unsurprising and completely typical but in a revealing way) that social class and money are not considered for "diversity" and are, in fact, rather pointedly ignored. This debunks the whole thing, but I'm sure the proponents will be incapable of understanding why.

All the applicants are Ph.D. academics, so they are a priori known to be poor.

gamblor956 1224 days ago

The candidates were reviewed based on their "contributions to diversity, equity, etc." They were not reviewed based on their DEI statements.

This is a fancy way of saying that they used affirmative action to advanced African American, Hispanic, and Native American candidates.

> The candidates were reviewed based on their "contributions to diversity, equity, etc." They were not reviewed based on their DEI statements.

And what does this mean, besides reviewing their DEI statements? We know that review of diversity statements are one component of this - you keep alluding to the notion that there's more to it than that, but neglect to actually provide any such example of how the universities measured this contribution besides their diversity statement.

> This is a fancy way of saying that they used affirmative action to advanced African American, Hispanic, and Native American candidates.

This is illegal in California. This is why people speculate that the review of diversity statements is a smokescreen for universities to illegally discriminate on the basis of protected classes.

> you keep alluding to the notion that there's more to it than that, but neglect to actually provide any such example of how the universities measured this contribution besides their diversity statement.

Many ways. For one there’s an interview where such topics can be probed. For another there are various talks given, where candidates can expand on their DEI activities. Finally there are grant applications and grant activities which relate to DEI that can be evaluated.

gamblor956 1223 days ago

Affirmative action is not illegal in California with respect to hiring. It is only illegal with respect to college admissions...

heygood 1224 days ago

Considering affirmative action is explicitly illegal in California, I would hope that it wouldn't be the case of candidates being advanced solely by race, and that the diversity statements are what is being considered the 'contribution' here, unless there are some loopholes in the law that I'm not aware of.

crackercrews 1224 days ago

Not illegal everywhere. But it is illegal for CA govt hiring, so this would be illegal.

gamblor956 1223 days ago

In California, affirmative action is only illegal with respect to university admissions (meaning students), not with respect to hiring.

Race-conscious hiring is allowed if it would increase under-represented minorities. Whether you agree, or disagree with this policy (which I think most of us do), it is nonetheless legal in California, and it is what happened at the UC schools mentioned in the opinion piece you cited.

Fun fact: Berkeley and UCLA each employ more conservative professors than most "conservative" schools do. But they employ real conservatives, not the modern snowflake conservatives that constantly portrays themselves as victims.

throway33 1223 days ago

> their contributions to diversity

It sounds like a fancy way of saying "the sign says no Homerssss. We're allowed to have one."

(From the Simpsons:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwHGE7uhjco

zone411 1224 days ago

No. In addition to what the sibling posts cited, this https://651d7eef-05d1-4785-8f04-93b49cc8d71f.filesusr.com/ug... says:

>...ways of using the statements by reading them _prior_ to any other components of the application, scoring them using a rubric of their choice, and deciding which applicants to consider further using the entirety of the application. Exercising their discretion, faculty on some committees elected to move most applicants forward, while others (especially from the large colleges) preferred to continue with less than 50% of the original applicant pool.

So based solely on the DEI statement, some have rejected over 50% of applicants without taking the rest of the application into consideration.

anigbrowl 1224 days ago

In other words, UC Berkeley rejected 76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence or their ability to contribute to their field. As far as the university knew, these applicants could well have been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.

Welcome to the historical experience of numerous underprivileged people who were excluded through no fault of their own. But since DEI statements can be rewritten at any time, applicants are not stuck with the prospect of permanent exclusion.

I am not a fan of college administrators in general, nor of the heavy-handed bureaucratic approach described here. But administrators are looking for faculty who can produce more distinguished grads in the future, who might be 'the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk'. You could be an outstanding brain in your field, but if you're not interested in maximizing the search for undiscovered talent, are you likely to attract it to your school?

crackercrews 1224 days ago

> Welcome to the historical experience of numerous underprivileged people who were excluded through no fault of their own.

Emphasis on historical. You have to make sure not to swing the pendulum too far, otherwise you'll just end up creating a new generation of aggrieved people. Especially if your actions are themselves illegal.

anigbrowl 1223 days ago

Maybe you should have read the rest of the comment, which addressed these concerns.

crackercrews 1223 days ago

Maybe you should consider the possibility that I read your entire comment multiple times and found it unconvincing.

anigbrowl 1223 days ago

I would have if you had made an effort to address it instead of cherry-picking a bit that was easy to react to.

opportune 1224 days ago

I think framing DEI policies and initiatives as unassailable is what scares people more than the policies and initiatives themselves.

Of course, many people would react negatively to someone saying flat-out “diversity is bad”, especially because people with those opinions tend to be coming from a place where that’s a toned-down version of more abhorrent views.

But, people with more measured criticisms of specific policies get lumped in with the first set. So because it’s very hard to say “there is a better way to do this” or “this may not have positive systemic effects” or “this does not seem relevant in the context it appears in”, there are few checks and balances, and you get these instances where it’s clumsily shoehorned into things because nobody dared disagree.

I think for many people, this bothers them more than any specific thing.

onetimeusename 1223 days ago

The way diversity is implemented is bad. It gives power to people on the basis that they are aggrieved and have a higher moral status than others in the same position. So why should we assume that once those people are in, they would voluntarily choose to surrender their own power and status which comes from allegedly being aggrieved?

The whole point of DEI was supposedly to "equalize" things so once you are a beneficiary of a DEI policy, you should no longer be able to claim victim status. In fact, once they get in, they argue for even more grievance policies, power, and special treatment. Often that is specifically what the job is meant to do. What is the real end result of this in particular for universities which are gateways to power? It's not surprising that universities are where this battle is being fought and not fast food or retail jobs.

Animats 1224 days ago

> framing DEI policies and initiatives as unassailable is what scares people.

The first rule of ___ is that you don't talk about ___.

wellthisisgreat 1224 days ago

> “diversity is bad”

Diversity is good. Protectionism and enforcement of artificial diversity is bad

brnaftr361 1224 days ago

I expect your diversity and their diversity are intrinsically different concepts. And I think it's a really important distinction to be made. You calling it artificial isn't adequate because what you deem artificial and what they have classified as diversity are more equivocal. And they have the framework to do the mental gymnastics to argue they're right until you're blue in the face, if any definition is concrete it must be theirs.

A lot of these "forward" ideas are undergirded by postmodernist ideology. I think this is interesting on two points, one being that class is almost unanimously ignored, and this was criticised by the communists of the era as being liable to divide the proletariat - and so it is. But also the deconstructivism and conception of language furnishes jointly a strange shibboleth and doublespeak which further promulgates this... Invisible enemy. Unironically, though, most of the social ills which are lambasted as systemic failures are products of class, itself a function of race but only coincidentally - the reality is these things are mostly independent in the US. But when you divide the the poor and the poor and the middle class and the middle class and the poor and the middle class, you get a rapidly deteriorating status quo for everyone.

But it also creates a disruptive interface: When you hear equity as someone who is not strictly apprised of the meaning it sounds good, as does diversity, but their definition lies outside the canon of the English language.

Equity, equ- equal... The implicit connotation of that word, even the definition equality of rights sounds noble to anyone that hears it. But that isn't what they're saying, what they're saying is give someone with an unquantifiable disadvantage (which may not exist at all), based singularly on outward identity, a step up. Nothing to do with legitimacy of hardship or their class, just blatant and racist, sexist, and sexual assumptions. Literally doling out extra credit for being a trans Asian.

And it's all really patronizing, it's all really racist and sexist. Most of all it's performative, and falls hard into Goodhart's Law. Protectionism is paternalistic, but patronizing people is just wanton disrespect towards someone's individual potential. I'm all for helping hands, but now when it isn't inclusive (another term they misuse) and fair.

> But that isn't what they're saying, what they're saying is give someone with an unquantifiable disadvantage (which may not exist at all), based singularly on outward identity, a step up.

That’s not what we are saying.

The DEI efforts at my university at least aren’t about giving disadvantaged people a step up, they’re about raising the bar for everyone, and making sure it’s not lowered for anyone.

In practice, what this means is expanding the applicant pool and not just considering applicants from the ivies. It turns out there are just as good candidates elsewhere, and they will apply to your program or job if you market it to them.

The end result is that you can have a diverse faculty and student body without compromising on quality at all.

Nothing about this process is patronizing, racist, or sexist. The main tool we use is to just not be lazy and out in the extra work to find good candidates. Because they are there. I’m guessing the “performative” aspect you are noticing would be places who don’t want to do the extra work but don’t want to seem like they’re doing nothing. But you can’t conclude that’s what everyone is doing based on your limited experience.

postsantum 1223 days ago

I think you're missing a critical piece - good for whom?

wellthisisgreat 1223 days ago

good as in drinking water is good, cancer is bad

Spooky23 1224 days ago

It’s just a new old boys network, except you get different types of infighting. Movements like this aren’t new and always burn out. Once the tribe in charge gets in trouble, it will move on to the next fad. 1990s diversity gave way to late 90s run everything like a business.

If you work in a huge bureaucracy like the University of California, if leaving isn’t practical, you just need to behave and hunker down and focus on what’s productive to you.

jasmer 1224 days ago

I'm not nearly as optmistic. This is bureaucratic entrenchment across many systems and will take a 'movement' to unseat.

The populist paradox is that most people probably disagree with this, but are not willing to stick their necks out, leaving it to those who have nothing left to loose aka the crazies who have populist leaders few of us want to support.

It's a bit like border policy, the vast majority of Americans don't want willy nilly open borders, and recognize that 'it's complicated' but it seems 'one side' doesn't have the tenacity to do much about it and their more radical elements kind of want 'de facto' open borders, but the people screaming about the problem and wanting to 'build a wall' are themselves to angry and radical, not a movement regular people want to be supportive of.

We need calmer heads to prevail.

It may be more possible now that Trump is gone, whatever you think of him he was a least 'polarizing' and put people in a tizzy.

Spooky23 1223 days ago

Optimism is a strong word :)

Bureaucracy does whatever it's master wants. I've been acquainted with organizations where these sorts of bureaucracies get usurped by changes at the top. You'll get some variant of crazy, just with different target. It's sad and silly, but what can you do?

The border policy stuff is different. "No" is very simple and easy to understand. You can say "Hey Farmhand Bob, illegal aliens are taking good american jobs" and there's a visceral reaction to it. Never mind that Farmhand Bob's job depends on his boss hiring migrants to get the harvest in. Anything other than "no" is nuanced, and is easily shot down by reactionaries.

Identity bureaucracy is just tribal/sectarian politics.

I'm asking from a sincere position here, so I don't wish to come off sounding antagonistic, but could you explain why the statement "diversity is bad" is wrong?

From my own perspective, the idea of encouraging or endorsing something that hurts unity, cohesion, and understanding. I cannot think of a way in which diversity would not be a bad and damaging thing.

I have, of course, heard comparisons to things like species of dogs, "Mutts are healthier than purebreds", but people aren't dogs. Or the human immune system being able to fight of disease, "Being exposed to different diseases makes your immune system stronger", but people aren't diseases, either. It disturbs me when people are boiled down to those types of inhuman terms. Those types of analogies never really address the issue without comparing it to something that isn't the issue itself. It always seems to fall short. I've never heard of someone explain why encouraging intrinsic division wouldn't be a destructive thing.

I've heard some vague phrases like, "It's good to have different perspectives to appeal to different groups of people", but that seems to be a criticism against diversity, not encouragement for it. It seems to say that diversity is disunity; chaos. That it is a kind of confirmation that different groups do not understand each other at all, and can only communicate through some kind of manufactured means. It just seems like a position that isn't very well thought out.

Again, I hope it doesn't come off sounding some specific way. It seems like it's a topic that's easy to sound hateful on. I don't wish to seem such a way; I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at. It's like there's some core concept that's never been said out loud, and there's just been a lot of assumptions built off of that thing that was left unaddressed. I'd really like to understand what that inner thing is.

cormacrelf 1224 days ago

You are thinking very, very shallowly about this. Diversity has become a goal in many organisations because primarily (1) too much cohesion entails out-groups and that often means racism or other illegal and immoral attitudes and practices thrive, and that is a huge problem both for legal reasons and generally; and secondarily (2) too much cohesion means you aren’t exposed to enough different opinions.

You have apparently only considered reason (2). Your comment then runs the gauntlet of extreme reactions to the idea of diversity. It seems to be because you don’t understand that both cohesion and diversity sit somewhere in the middle of a priority order for most organisations. The only people who agree with where you appear to have placed cohesion in the priority order are the architects of 1930s fascism. The reason saying “diversity is bad” and all the other things you said (“Diversity is disunity. Chaos”) is wrong is because you sound like a fascist. I am not exaggerating. You absolutely do sound like one. That is a prime example of “bad systemic effects” as the comment above said; if you say stuff like this, your organisation will no longer be conducive to anything except violent political movements. You should, in swift order, reconsider how important cohesion is to you and any organisations you’re a part of.

Addendum: you did say you didn’t know how to ask this without sounding hateful. Fair. Pointing out the connection to hateful groups is still appropriate and necessary because the devotion to absolute cohesion was a huge part of what made fascism successful. Saying stuff like you did is a bad way for society to go, good people recognise it and rightly reject it vehemently. So your ideas about cohesion being always preferable to diversity are always going to get this reaction from most, and eventually your organisations will be filled with the remaining people who do agree with your comments, and those people are amenable to hate even if you were originally just trying to get some team spirit going. It is a bad path. So is making your university staff swear allegiance to ideology. The only way forward is a balance of cohesion and diversity.

Thank you very much for the response, and for not being too harsh in your critique. :)

cormacrelf 1223 days ago

I’m not sure it’s a smiley face moment for all of us, more just another day on the internet, but thinking about this on your own is good.

One more point to consider is that you might have a mistaken impression of how important idea (2) is in organisations’ views of diversity. Despite the primacy of idea (2) in framing the issue (as in, “diversity is strength” etc), organisations often care about (1) more because the harms from not enough diversity are so stark and obvious and measurable. The benefits of diversity are real, but the toxicity you get from too much cohesion is really dangerous, unproductive, damaging to a company’s hiring and retention ability, and makes your product unattractive if consumers hear about it. (I would cite Travis Kalanick’s tenure at Uber, where “cohesion” seems to have meant “being male”.) But you won’t hear companies talk about that danger, because it would sound like they already have a problem or that they are thinking about this purely in a liability sense or that they feel like they’re being forced to do it which seems like they don’t care. So everyone talks about the potential upside instead, which needs not be measurable in dollars or dramatic, but is regardless a good excuse to take action to avoid the dangers that do have a very concrete cost that these places have learned primarily through the real pain of having done it wrong and run into trouble.

It’s easy to lose sight of that when everyone talks about diversity in flowery terms, but remember this is the marketing-department-approved translation of a century of learnings through civil rights movements, political movements, legal reforms, huge lawsuits, spiralling company failures, and wars over this stuff, and it is all still lurking right there behind the flowery language.

brnaftr361 1223 days ago

It does not follow. Race itself (since you're using 20th century fascism, read: Nazi) is a singular aspect of diversity. Organization is a poor selection of term, too. Institution is better suited.

It doesn't matter how you mince it the only truly homogeneous populations are at-risk marginalized nomads. With that framed: you can find greedy, lecherous, exploitative, amoral or immoral slouches in every corner of the Earth regardless of race, you can equally find people that you'd invariably frame as noble, selfless, vulnerable understanding humanitarians... and we can fairly posit then, from every race, creed, region and religion you can pull from these pools any imaginable quantity of the human spectra - and I expect anyone else would, and they would elect people deliberately close to their own beliefs and goals because it's necessary to have some alignment within any large organization and especially a society. In fact there's something to be said for religion to affect this conversation, and it's that it permeated every early civilization - and one would rightly point out that's because values were made concrete and "objective".

Now I expect you didn't consider it, but there are a lot of groups that don't share your values. They feel very strongly, to the extent they would kill you and dismember you over it, some would just kill you, maybe torture you beforehand. I mean, that's really diverse is are those individuals you'd want in your institutions? I expect no. Likewise there is not necessarily some imminent moral concern that doesn't at least parallel that: some people don't want to be around other people - values collide because ultimately we live in a relativistic world.

The real problems you described can be chalked up to a few things:

The state: Monopoly on power, disempowers individuals, individuals relinquish their moral obligations including refusal to participate

Nucleated power: Institutions are supposed to act exemplars of behavior, instead they simply are exemplars and people follow, and then more follow suit. Suddenly the Third Reich is marching on Poland. Purpose and moral delegation is performed by institutions that are, due to human limitations, intrinsically unsuitable for the task. Obviously there is the element of controlling incalculable resources like every competing power in WWII had which emerges from this...

Limited options: Individuals and communities are unable to disband from their respective state apparatus e.g. secession due to the imminent threat of violence, retaliation and/or a complete lack of peaceable legislative or political option.

Scale: Dunbar's number, hypothetical maximum of about 150 people for functional human communities. When a neighborhood school in rural America doubles that easily, one is left to wonder how an institution deals with that, it's by mishandling every human it deals with. Catch-22's and C.S. Lewis's hell. People are abstracted into cattle (see Eichmann) or mechanisms in a greater machine, expected to go flawlessly whirring away without question or complaint at the throw of a lever.

It doesn't matter if my friend group is a contractile 10-man squad because we all came from different backgrounds and currently live entirely disparate lives. And we're from one of the most demographically and politically homogeneous states in the US and not one of us has similar views. We're irrelevant because everyone defers to the clueless state, for one, for two we're 10 out of a denominator of millions of hundreds of millions.

The problem is with institutions, and hierarchy, and bona fide power, and the concepts of property on which they're founded which again, circularly is a reference to the deference individuals must grant the state which makes it all fall into disproportion. Nazis couldn't work to found a kingdom without people to participate in their game.

I elected "institution" because there are a lot of voluntary organizations, but an institution is fundamental and intersections with them are inevitable. My friends, my [hypothetical] church, the workout classes organized by some nice lady, the food bank, salvation army... Individuals have mobility and they're able to reject or accept. Institutions your workplace and government - by dint of being necessitous - drastically reduces one's degrees of freedom, limits their mobility, and entraps them to varying extents. That's a real problem. If I don't like Nicaragua they can arbitrarily refuse me a Passport so I can't leave, forcing me to work at a sweatshop, and then the government can hold me at gunpoint to take some fraction of my infinitesimal income.

Anyways, there's different strokes for different folks and there's just as big of a proportion of any "minority group" in every corner of the world that would just as soon self-segregate so they can attend to their communities as there are people who want to live in "diverse" communities in accord with their values. And there's also a lot of performative white guilt bullshit from people who won't bend their ear to a black man, but will naively attempt to run to his "defense" at every opportunity. It's disrespectful.

cormacrelf 1223 days ago

I think you have failed spectacularly at understanding fascism. It was not only racial purity that they went for. That wasn’t even a thing in Italian fascism, it simply did conformity and allegiance to the state and took that to an extreme. Nazism used racial purity to exclude people from its cohesive in-group and enhance the cohesion that in-group had. It built an extremely cohesive structure that worked at every level to enforce itself. No aspect of life was not subject to this enforcement. You had to demonstrate cohesion everywhere you went. The power to control this was necessarily centralised; there had to be some figure outside the cohesive mass who was not subject to the cohesion enforcement regime, who could interpret the rest of the world and then direct the mass to respond etc. The same can be said of Stalin, and these ideas are all laid out explicitly in the communist “vanguard” doctrine too. The results are not only bad because of the racism, they are also bad because of the day-to-day experience of living under such a regime, the weakness that comes from relying on a single fallible leader to direct the cohesive mass, the waste in rejecting independent minds, the brain drain from smart people leaving, the brutality required to hold all of this together, and finally the destruction it enabled. All of that is true of organisations and “institutions” (a term that excludes companies, by the way!) but with all of the sliders scaled down and the potential harms a little lower because companies don’t have armies.

So yeah, mate, I am very aware that there are groups who would murder me for expressing the views I have on cohesion and diversity. Was that meant to be a threat or just an appeal to tribalism as a natural thing? Everything else you said is… You seem to be grappling with the idea that there are a lot of people in the world. I don’t really see a point emerging from it.

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...

brnaftr361 1223 days ago

Fascism has been a catch all for "other" forever. Orwell, an expert wordsmith who was present at the time actually described this phenomena not only in terms of the fascist movements but also the Communist movements, crucially, if you read An Homage to Catalonia this actually caused a considerable deal of internal manipulation which was coordinated in such a way that foreign press promulgated [by Orwell's account] false stories.

It was really an economic classification wherein business was subordinated to an authoritarian government. And again to my point, hierarchy, institutions, power, and scale are what lead to the immense destructive forces witnessed in the early 20th century.

And by that logic I don't see a whole lot of distinction between the Axis and Allies - there was a difference in values but hardly one in architecture at the time. There was also the point of aggressors and aggressed which paints moral connotations.

And companies do have armies, really it's private property, but... Companies own all of the property that's valuable. Corporations in particular, which mind you do have a history of directly or indirectly leveraging government power, in some cases military or "intelligence". You don't need an army when you can threaten someone with global sanctions for attempting something like a sovereign default or violation of international IP law. There is no distinction between starving someone out and killing them in war, in fact, that's what war used to consist of. Siege the city and hold the walls, wait and watch as they starve to death and wallow in their own filth as disease creeps in.

Your last point is grasping at straws. You know as well as I do I wasn't specifying you, or your particular values. Stop parading legitimate diversity around as tribalism and painting it, self-righteously, as some inexorably evil idea. I can do the same with your naive globalist cosmopolitanism: whatever intrinsic real diversity does emerge, it's amalgamated into a uniform homogeneity because the elements within are pigeonholed, and expected to behave in a narrow band of "cosmopolitan acceptability". Isn't that what you don't want? One totally uniform population and a flat earth? Politically, nationally, racially, philosophicallt identical, because to me that is the logical conclusion.

Schismogenesis is a self-limiting principal and had ought to be embraced. It would be hard for a continuously dividing society to accrete enough power to do what the West did to the Americas, or colonialism or Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler or the Russian revolution... The scale is the important factor. And those dividing lines that we create in these nuanced differences in value are important by that nature. Some will fail, some will succeed. It's hardly any different than mitosis. Forbidding that from occuring is holding back evolution, isn't it? That was the whole proposition democracy was suppose to solve in the US - it was a laboratory for experimenting with... Everything, and yet the accretion, centralization, scale, and institutionalization has all but defeated that.

benrbray 1224 days ago

As a simple example: I wouldn't want to work with ten copies of myself. It would magnify my strengths but also my weaknesses. It's much better if a team is comprised by people with different backgrounds, different strengths, different weaknesses. Of course, it is helpful if everyone has some common ground, to facilitate better communication. Diversity in college admissions is one way to create an environment where these sorts of teams can form organically.

Of course, the devil is in the details. I tend not to agree with how most diversity programs are implemented, despite agreeing with the mission.

JamesBarney 1224 days ago

This always assumes that the primary way people are different is race. A liberal white and a black business major from Princeton who both grew up upper class in the north going to private school probably have much more in common than a poor conservative white guy from a Alabama and a rich liberal one from New York.

chelmzy 1224 days ago

This is my entire problem with most diversity programs. Economic class and location are much larger factors in diverse thinking than strictly race.

But what do I know. I'm just a hick from Alabama (:

Spooky23 1224 days ago

That’s one of the reasons why in some circles the “1620 project” and similar interpretations of history are so threatening to some people.

The biggest fear of reactionary types who control resources is that rural poor that trends white and urban poor that trends minority will figure out that they share more common interests and challenges.

The whole schtick is to keep people angry at their neighbor so they don’t notice what they don’t have.

2muchcoffeeman 1224 days ago

I don’t think we should be down voting this comment even if you disagree. I don’t think we are approaching diversity and inclusion in the right way, but this comment also sounds very wrong to me.

Thank you for the kind words! I do think it's unfortunate that you seem to disagree severely, but I certainly appreciate the concern and thoughtfulness. If you have anything you'd like to add, I'm happy to hear you out, even if we might not agree on it. :)

Honestly, I'm just glad that I haven't received any death threats, so far.

2muchcoffeeman 1224 days ago

I grew up in a multicultural place. Your comments sound very incorrect to me, diversity is a good thing.

However getting a multicultural society to function is indeed very hard, and many places that aren’t so diverse definitely operate with less conflict.

What I don’t have a good answer for at the moment is if we should be purposely building diverse societies or if we are just trying to make what we have work better.

Some things seem obviously true e.g people should have equal rights and women should participate in the work force.

When we travel we often talk of broadening our horizons. So incorporating new ideas also seems obviously true.

But this mandated bureaucracy seems wrong and unhelpful when you have teaching staff limiting contact with students to minimise the possibility of perceived slights.

anonymouskimmer 1224 days ago

> I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at.

Active inclusion of members of currently or formerly marginalized peoples. The "inclusion" term of DEI I think more speaks to once the person is inside the group, or sometimes in reaching out to particular outsiders (such as a local community) for input into decisions, because they are also stakeholders.

I think my confusion is I do not understand what the motivation to do this is.

anonymouskimmer 1223 days ago

Anything from pitchforks at the gate, to sympathy for the unfulfilled struggles of other people, to we're leaving talent and opportunities on the table and if we pick it up we'll win over our competitors.

[1] https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/medical-vibrators-treatment-fem...

claytongulick 1224 days ago

I think the idea is that when you have people from diverse backgrounds they bring unique perspectives to problems to help break out of rigid mindsets that can result from inculturation/monocultures. Take a look at the male model of medicine for an example of this. An eyebrow raising example of this is the "treatment" for "female hysteria" in the 1800s [1].

On the surface it seems reasonable that adding diverse viewpoints to a problem set would result in a higher likelihood of locating an optimal solution, though I haven't seen any real science to support this.

I also haven't seen any studies that have attempted to measure this effect and balance it against the cost of DEI initiatives, all of which are difficult to quantify.

opportune 1224 days ago

I guess it depends on the context - both the immediate context like whether it’s a university/employer/neighborhood/group of friends, and the cultural context. There are differing views on this but here are mine (wanted to keep it short, but also wanted to keep it comprehensive for those who don’t understand the reasoning):

Speaking as someone in the US, where many disadvantaged groups for a long time were systematically prevented from doing things (like living in a certain area or having a certain kind of job) and represent sizable parts of the population, a lack of diversity often suggests that there is still some kind of inequality causing it. If your institution is big or important enough, people will wonder why those benefitting from it aren’t representative of society as a whole.

A cause that unfortunately still exists, and any respectable person wants to avoid associating themselves with, is when you are just outright excluding or hostile to a particular group. This could vary from outright discrimination to a historical association with discrimination that nobody is actively trying to reverse (such as with country clubs, Greek life). The second one that is much harder to deal with and more pervasive, is when there are not explicit barriers preventing diversity, but rather lingering systemic problems stemming from things like historical discrimination - for example, segregation and redlining created black ghettoes with cyclic poverty and poor educational outcomes that still exist today. Another big one is unconscious bias, like how if you modify the same resume to have a “black sounding” name it may get fewer interviews.

I’m not saying some group of tabletop gamers in rural Minnesota need to go out of their way to find a non-white person to not be racist. I think a lot of people not from the US or from monocultural parts of the US think that’s what being “pro-diversity” means. I don’t think hiring someone with different color skin magically means your team will be more effective either.

In essence it boils down to:

1. Discrimination still exists. Effects from discrimination from the past remain into the present day. Fundamentally nobody should be barred from a job/college because of something like race. And considering the historical injustices that occurred, along with many people harboring those views to the present day or very recently, it’s not enough to not-exclude people - you need to make efforts to actively include people, since they may otherwise think that they “don’t belong” somewhere because of their race.

2. When an institution operates across a broad population, it should try to represent that population. If it doesn’t even come close, this may suggest they are discriminating. Let’s say for instance I start a tech company in the bay area and I only hire white people - with more than a handful of employees that starts becoming astronomically improbable if I’m fairly considering the entire pool of eligible hires.

Also, I think some level of representation is helpful from a simple effectiveness standpoint. Maybe some product doesn’t perform as well on darker skin, or maybe it doesn’t address the needs of a bilingual sub population, or unknowingly commits some cultural faux pas.

3. The huge problem is what to do when outcomes are still very far off from being representative even without any kind of active discrimination. Sometimes this leads to controversial policies. But IMO we shouldn’t let those bad implementations detract from the problem or make us think diversity is bad.

fwungy 1224 days ago

Same thing with covid. People with good questions that went against the narrative were lumped up with people spouting the most stupid and awful things. That's a propaganda technique.

WWLink 1224 days ago

There was also a seemingly endless supply of "good questions" where the answers were never deemed acceptable for some long list of reasons, a new reason added to the list every week.

I think at some point a lot of people got fed up trying to give answers to those "good questions" and just settled on "eat shit" and "get the fuck out of my store!" and "I am tired of your shit and I quit!" (or something along those lines lol)

fwungy 1223 days ago

They used to have debates about controversial subjects where the two sides would face-off in front of a crowd.

I think if Fauci and someone really smart like Peter Hotesz would have beat anyone the covid skeptics could have put up and established their credibility and authority in the eyes of the general public by not appearing to run.

One thing Steve Jobs did well was take hard questions in public venues. He didn't always make everyone happy but his willingness to stand for his ideas inspired confidence in the Apple community.

Fauci's lack of willingness to face a respectfully adversarial audience or interview really hurt his perception as a leader. It almost certainly cost many lives.

red-iron-pine 1223 days ago

Jobs was a misanthropist who regularly made coworkers cry, stole their ideas (e.g. Woz and an arcade competition), and was often the target of shareholder revolts or lawsuits (that he usually won).

Fauci attempting that tack would have been disasterous, esp. in the midst of an unknown and (for a while) scary pandemic.

Hell, "be like Jobs" is terrible advice for most businesses, too. Final nail in that coffin was Holmes and Theranos.

fwungy 1223 days ago

Jobs was no saint for sure, but he did build one of the most distinctive brands of all time and rallied a strong development community. Oftentimes that sort of visionary person can be an a-hole. Linus is known to be somewhat ornery too.

naravara 1223 days ago

Talented debaters are not necessarily honest or knowledgable in their fields.

In fact, being too honest or too nerdy is often a disadvantage. There’s a reason cases on technical matters in courts still get argued my litigators with subject-matter experts as witnesses, not by the SMEs themselves.

fwungy 1223 days ago

However they do it, if you look like you're avoiding questions people aren't going to trust you.

rayiner 1224 days ago

> Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it.

They are. And for the “diverse” people themselves they are a sort of minstrel show. The goal is to show off a superficial version of diversity in a way that’s pleasing to white people. For example if you’re Muslim, they want you to one of those Ilhan Omar intersectional Muslims, not one of those billion other Muslims who believes what Islam teaches to be true. Or if you’re Indian immigrant you’ll get a lot further writing about the need for “solidarity between black and brown people” than anything that maps onto how typical Indian immigrants view their experience as a minority.

1: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/453007-pressley-democrats...

crackercrews 1223 days ago

Omar's colleague Ayanna Pressley made this explicit: "We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice" [1]

rayiner 1223 days ago

The irony is that most of Pressley’s “brown voices” sound exactly like white people. It’s a bizarre sort of identity politics where the people who are selected to “represent” different groups don’t advance the views or positions of those groups, but instead lend their identity to advance the views and positions of white allies.

devwastaken 1224 days ago

The very question of "are we taking some DEI ideas too far?" is now censored in well known university systems. You cannot even ask questions without persecution, you are treated as a threat to humanity.

This is how I know this is about politics, power, and paychecks.

malandrew 1223 days ago

The only solution is to aggressively defund until there is only budget left for teaching.

the_third_wave 1224 days ago

> Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person.

Labelled as "A Witch" [1]

> .. and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it.

And what do you do with witches? BURN THEM!

These D.I.E. apparatchiks are no better than the witch-hunters of yore. No better than those in the Monty Python clip [1] linked to here and a lot less entertaining at that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2xlQaimsGg

lordgroff 1224 days ago

Those appratchicks are no better than Soviet appratchicks who had their own litmus tests of what was and was not acceptable. I'm not from Russia or the ex Soviet sphere but I did spend a large portion of childhood in a communist system in Eastern Europe and am still horrified that people don't seem to understand that this is exactly the kind of bullshit you had to deal with in that system.

No, you didn't get shot for dissent. No you didn't disappear. It was all much more bland and insidious than that, you were accused of a thought crime and that might kill your career. Conformity was the name of the game and I see increasing evidence that we're very much following this trajectory in North America. And it has that insidious quality too that you can't speak out against it because if you do you're clearly a racist/misogynist/homophobe/insert-bad-thing-hereist.

the_third_wave 1224 days ago

They are probably hoping to become a new Nomenklatura [1], a category of people ... who h[o]ld various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions [a]re granted only with approval by the [modern equivalent of the communist party].

The nomenklatura formed a de facto elite of public powers in the former Eastern Bloc [comparable to] the Western establishment holding or controlling both private and public powers (for example, in media, finance, trade, industry, the state and institutions).

That is what they seem to be aiming for: cushy jobs for them and ideological purity for their organisations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura

Animats 1224 days ago

Today you have to say the right things to keep the political commissars happy.

red-iron-pine 1223 days ago

People used to hang for insulting the king. Now private, 3rd party websites decide to remove your vanity AI sitcom project? Clearly the same thing...

akomtu 1224 days ago

DEI bureaucrats are good at defending their turf. They've internalized the Lenin's playbook: never debate your opponents on public, as that may reveal flaws in your position and undermine your authority, instead silence your opponents, ridicule them and get rid of them later, when out of public sight.

If you were a medieval knight, you wouldn't say "it's unfortunate that our opponents, occupying that castle, shout us down whenever we attempt to discuss their position." Of course they shout you down: they compete with you for authority.

inglor_cz 1223 days ago

The situation makes sense once you start viewing DEI as a religious orthodoxy and its enforcers as the priestly class.

Heresy and heretics are usually extirpated with extreme prejudice, at least if they threaten the interests of the establishment. Fortunately the DEI bureaucrats at the universities cannot condemn people to death, but the big question is if the Western civilization can survive if its own sources of knowledge and truth are slowly converted into a secular equivalent of Pakistani madrasas, where articles of faith are mindlessly chanted.

Theocracies tend to become very ossified and ossified academy is worse than useless.

lazyeye 1223 days ago

Otherwise known as a kafka trap:-

"A rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt."

itwontworkwo 1224 days ago

How can you solve a distributed measurement problem when everyone trying to solve it has their own rulers with different scales?

This is why this social issue is unsolvable. Everyone has a different version of what is fair.

asdf_snar 1224 days ago

I like your formulation of this as a "distributed measurement problem", but I'm not sure I follow. Could you elaborate? Specifically, I'm not sure if you agree or disagree with the post you are replying to. Thanks in advance.