[steve_adams_86]

I would say this is exactly where you want that kind of policy. At the bottom, where you’re cultivating what will end up at the top. You want the diversity of ideas for exactly the reasons you stated.

People get upset as though this policy is dictating that a minority from the corner of the earth with no meaningful experience is going to be mandated into the role of heart surgeon or airplane pilot as well. That’s not how this works. However, those roles themselves stand to benefit from the diversified cultivation at the bottom of the stack, eventually.

Even very intelligent people seem to think inclusive policies mean that incompetent people will be promoted in private industry or government, but frankly, I never witnessed that to any abnormal degree until the people decrying it the most ended up in power. A game show host as president. A Fox News anchor as secretary of war. I can only keep a straight face because I’m so jaded by it.

[somenameforme]

The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical to punishing people for having a different set of implicitly unwanted checkboxes. You are trying to combat discrimination by engaging in discrimination. Discrimination is discrimination, even if well intended.

And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.

[bonsai_spool]

> The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical

Not functionally identical. No grants were getting slow-rolled or cancelled.

Why are you having a hard time understanding this?

> And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.

Hmm. Do you think it was an accident that these settings are not homogeneous today? Do you think these settings were different in the past? Did you spend any time trying to test your hypothesis before writing and posting it?

[somenameforme]

Your reading comprehension is remarkably low.

[bonsai_spool]

I am just ignoring obvious propaganda - no reason to accept lies that are designed to set up a straw man

[xp84]

I don’t really disagree with the closing quip about those guys’ (lack of) qualifications. But I think what upsets a lot of people (including me) is that if you’re Asian or white, and male, graduating with a 4.5 and doing literally everything right, the Democrats tell us it’s virtuous to have a quota system screen you out of the most competitive schools so that someone of an “underrepresented” race/gender expression, someone who has not achieved the same, can get in.

It was idiotic to squander the talent of the best and brightest Black people that way 75 years ago, and it’s just as idiotic to use race and gender as a factor in admissions or employment today.

[steve_adams_86]

I’m not convinced my demographic is discriminated against so much as the playing field is levelled to some degree, because discrimination already occurred in our favour.

The nice thing about regulated discrimination is that it can be an editable, transparent, public document that can be voted on and driven by data. This is better, even if imperfect, than the kind we have when we’re not honest about it.

I’m not saying it’s perfect or wholly good. Just, arguably better. I see a lot of problems with it. It’s a bandaid on deep social and systemic problems.

If anything I appreciate that it’s in the open.

Regardless, I’ve done well in my career at times someone else could have done better. I saw it when I managed hiring processes. Discrimination was everywhere. But I was there, I was white, I was male. That was good enough. I certainly wasn’t the best for the job. There’s something wrong with that in my opinion. I should have had to try harder at times. It would have been better for everyone. How do we fix that?

[xp84]

First, you cannot know if "discrimination" gave a positive boost to a kid from looking at their skin. Poor white and Asian kids can have all the same disadvantages (or more) than a randomly-selected Black kid. You can only make such a claim in the aggregate. The punishments applied by the quota systems that Democrats embrace, however, are applied individually to all members of the races deemed "too represented." That's what makes it so odious (and it's why those of us who used to proudly identify as "Strong Democrat" 15 years ago have always hated racist policies.)

The punitive institutionalized discrimination being extended against Asians merely because they on average do better at school than other ethnic groups really drives home how unfair this is. I'd go so far as to claim that no structural/institutional factors have boosted Asian kids. They do better (better than the white kids) probably because their parents value education the most, due to a shared cultural value. Our society's response to that shouldn't be to treat those kids as surplus unneeded human capital because of where their ancestors were born.

> Discrimination was everywhere... I was white, I was male... I certainly wasn’t the best for the job.

Well, if that truly did happen to you (you interviewed all those competing for the positions and knew who was best?) then yeah, that's quite racist. The solution to racism isn't "More racism, but flipped against whoever's done better recently." We already had the actual solution figured out many years ago, and it's judging people only by their merits.

[expedition32]

In my country white males actually started to believe in their own bullshit so they let a little Jewish girl take the medical exam as a joke.

They immediately regretted it but the results were already printed in the newspapers. The rest as they say is history.