[vineyardmike]

Not sure if the ditch the exam here is related to that, since there’s a lot of pre-existing discourse around exam practices anyways, but

> I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is … or …

It’s possibly both. I’ve seen a lot of arguments (poorly cited usually) to the affect of

* diverse organizations tend to perform better. The general claim is that providing psychological safety enables people to work better. And diverse groups of people have more different experiences, and can contribute increasingly different ideas and perspectives.

* DEI initiatives are beneficial people and society at large. This claim is obvious.

So it can be true that the benefits of these initiatives are important AND they lead to better performing organizations.

[narrator]

People who are granted access to opportunities based on DEI and not on merit will be forever indebted to the DEI power structure and will aid them in their long march through the institutions by loyally doing whatever it takes to increase and ensure their political power. They claim that their is a conspiracy against DEI and they are just rebalancing the scale and this is why there are different scores on standardized tests, etc. They say the only way for you to get justice is to give political power to the DEI hierarchy and ignore their crimes and corruption and prosecute to the maximum extent those who want to do things based on merit.

[vineyardmike]

And conversely, anyone who has been granted opportunity due to suppressing the opportunities of others despite merit will do whatever it takes to maintain their political power.

Source: the entire civil rights movement going all the way back to slavery

[gopher_space]

You need a definition of merit and an understanding of when it matters and to whom.

[narrator]

It's just a means of assembling a very large clique of underqualified people, who everyone knows are underqualified and who know they are underqualified who will, in the name of job security and gratitude and whatever fake intellectual "justice" sophistry the PHDs in whatever studies come up with, will willingly participate in and ignore political corruption and call it "justice" and persecute anyone trying to clean it up. This model has been replicated among many big cities in America that demand "diversity." Over time in the name of "social justice", a whole cadre of underqualified civil servants lining their pockets and waving whatever flag of the month protects them from any scrutiny at all milk to death the historical wealth of cities and slowly turn them into Detroit. All the productive people give up on and move out of the cities. The tax revenue falls, cities services decline, lots of buildings become derelict and burn down, and everyone cheers about how "diverse" they are.

In cities that just won't die like San Francisco, they spend $300 million dollars on a homeless problem that would put thousands of diversity hires out of a job if it was ever solved. They do a subway expansion that costs more than $1 billion dollars for a mile, and they demand more taxes to fix problems that could be solved by simply enforcing the existing laws.

[rayiner]

Your score on a multiple-choice exam, testing basic concepts about the law seems like a pretty good definition of merit here.

[jimz]

If only that was the bar exam. Now it's all UBE so what you end up with is 2/3 multiple choice questions that bear little relationship to actual law you'll be practicing, and 1/3 are answers to absurd hypotheticals that you'd answer in a formulaic fashion, situations that you will pretty much never see IRL and certainly will never be in a position where you can't look up the law, except this one time.

Oh, and the software that's used to conduct the test is practically malware in the way it operates. At the NY State Bar exam I took there were about 100 people who didn't finish because the crappy software crashed and you had to handwrite the whole thing from the first question on. If it crashes your computer, you might as well leave since you won't have time to finish.

Really, the bar exam has virtually nothing in common with the actual practice of law. It's a separate skill, like taking the SATs. Although, there are so many legal niches that it's unlikely that testing real law would really resemble how legal practicecs work today anyway. It's pretty much an arbitrary test that might fry your computer. Hopefully they at least they should have released a newer version of the software in the intervening years.

[genman]

There is an interesting hypothesis by Oded Galor that states that there should be a balance between not enough and too much diversity when it comes to innovation and progress - with the first you'll get stagnation and with the second you'll get chaos.

[s0kr8s]

I agree that it could certainly be both.

However, most professional boards are created with an explicit mandate to promote efficacy and competency, which makes a hypothesis like "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)" rather troublesome for a professional board to rally around. Even if true, it seems out of scope.

The "more DEI = more efficiency && competency" hypothesis seem like it should be where a professional board should focus its efforts and messaging instead.