[netbioserror]

>It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.

We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity. One man's "hire people besides white men" is another's "hire using racist criteria and violate every hard-fought and hard-won civil, moral, and ethical principle of the past century of US history."

[hcayless]

Binaries are cool and all, but maybe it's better for your organizational health to have (for example) your company look something like the population they're selling to? Maybe not everyone gets the same level of boost in their education? Maybe they've overcome some adversity and that will make them a better, more resilient colleague, but it also meant their grades weren't as high? Like I said, this isn't easy stuff, and binary thinking doesn't really help.

[mwbajor]

" look something like the population they're selling to"

Would the car have been any less useful to african people if it was invented by a black henry ford?

[hcayless]

Of course not. What does that have to do with anything? People with different lives and experiences will have different perspectives that are likely to be helpful. We all care deeply about the things that directly affect us and our loved ones and less about the things that do not. You can cover more bases with a diverse workforce and avoid making dumb mistakes. I don’t get why this is controversial.

[verall]

I have to wonder if this comment is made in good faith -

Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?

Are they adjustable for different people's shapes and sizes?

How long was it before car chairs were adjustable to be driven by women, and how much longer until regulators started considering women-sized crash dummies?

Sure, your skin color doesn't mean much to a car, but it does to an automatic faucet, a skin-toned band aid, face login (or whatever apple calls it). There are obvious benefits to hiring or doing studies within your target market.

[mwbajor]

Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like.

"Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?"

I would argue they always were. The color of a band-aide does not change its main functionality. Neither do any of your other examples. Humans all need a car with 4 wheels and band-aides that stick.

[xethos]

> I would argue they always were.

I would posit we can't even get healthcare without bias for people that aren't straight white men. There are subtle differences in body composition between men and women, doubly so for larger (or smaller) body types, but ignoring those differences isn't exactly something from the far-flung past [0].

Otherwise we can quibble over how treating everyone as an average can and has cost lives [1]. People are different, and very small differences can have unexpectedly outsized impacts on usability.

> The most important products don't care about what you look like

The product doesn't care, but this site is awash in stories about how management or engineering should have just talked to the damn floor workers. Worked together, instead of dictating from on-high that the machine in question works well in the lab, and is an elegant, cost-effective solution - that the people actually in the shop know will fail immediately.

DEI (when done right) is not diversity hires. It's accepting others have different ideas that you may not have seen.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28343109/

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

[mwbajor]

"should have just talked to the damn floor workers. "

You're all over the place trying to avoid my question. We're talking about product consumers. Mismanagement is an aberration in a long reversion to the mean of the product's specs that people want. What car would black Henry Ford make? What kind of induction motor would hispanic Tesla make? Keep cherry-picking references, though. Isn't there a crisis in the replication of journal articles anyway??

[miffel]

I would insist that you try to open up your worldview slightly and accept that sometimes having a team with more than just white men can be desirable and lead to better outcomes for the end product. Maybe bandaids are not the best example, but consider pulse oximeters[0].

There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for some very well done research on the way that you can codify human biases in processes that should neutral.

I would also personally recommend that you give an earnest try to understanding why so many people argue for diversity. A genuine attempt. Even if you don't fully change your mind on it I think you will find it easier to approach the world with a little more compassion for people who don't look like you.

[0]: https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/commentary-more-health-inequalit...

[mwbajor]

Lets make a deal: I'll read your diversity books if you realize that meritocracies will never go away. You might be able to suppress them, but the smart people (and they're not just white people) will reorganize behind your back and be better than whatever you are doing. See INTC vs. TSMC for probably the best example since you're into references.

Pulse oximiters are another terrible example by the way. Couldn't we hire a bunch of really tanned white people since you're just talking skin color?

[smfugit]

Diversity does make a diff but it depends on the problem. Its sort of the Explore-Exploit trade off.

For Explore type problems diversity has a much bigger impact then Exploit type problems. To add to the drama/misunderstandings/confusion sometimes you assemble a team for explore and they do find the gold mine, but then they arent suited to exploit it cuz its in their nature to explore. And vice versa.

[darkerside]

Bandaids are a bit of an ironic example. They were probably made the skin color of their majority customers, and not that of their inventors, but someone might have been in a position to ask whether there should be more than one color.

[verall]

Why answer? Your argument as far as I can read it is "Physics exists, therefore DEI is bad". Can you help me fill in the gap?

What is your clearly rhetorical question getting at?

[darkerside]

You said you were astonished. Parent poster is just explaining how some people view the world in an attempt to make it a bit less astonishing to you. Why not read it through that lens instead of calling it a binary strawman?

[kurikuri]

> We have two criteria here: Hire on merit and try pick the best person for the job; or, subsume merit to picking based primarily on skin color and/or ethnicity.

The word ‘merit’ is doing a lot of work here. What traits/aspects of a person would you use to calculate into their merit? I’ll argue that between two people who’ve crossed a finish line at the same time, the one who started furthest from that line is more meritorious. From a hiring/placement perspective however, especially during the first screening, there isn’t a good way to determine a candidate’s starting line.

The dichotomy is a bit wrong as well, but I’ll get into that once we get past the first hurdle (for the curious, it is about a selection bias after an initial screen).

[add-sub-mul-div]

The most eye opening aspect of this issue is how many people find the all white male default to be normal and self evidently meritocratic, and a deviation from that is what they instinctively consider to be contrived.

[lordloki]

That only shows your flawed understanding of the issue. Nobody is saying that everything was meritocratic throughout history and that's why the most successful people in the west were white. However, there was a move towards meritocracy that did help many people in disadvantaged groups and throwing that away is foolish and short sighted. Meritocracy was a hard fought win by people who were not white and or male, throwing that away now will not lead anywhere good. It wasn't in societies best interest before meritocracy, why would it be now?