It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition, because in the absence of DEI pressure campaigns they'd have been selecting suppliers based on standards and quality by default. Any other criteria inherently trades off against that.

And you seem to know that's true because your claim slides smoothly from "getting something of lesser quality" to "lowering standards below acceptable levels" which aren't the same thing. The latter phrasing means the products are worse but you consider the lowered quality to be an acceptable tradeoff.

> It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition

It does not require it. My second point refers to the fact that people often talk about evaluating candidates/choices as if there’s a single, objectively measurable metric by which we can rank them. I argue that’s not how people really make decisions, but even if they did, who’s to say that the top three choices of suppliers are not all owned by minorities or women? You can both fulfill a mission to engage with more diverse suppliers and not lower your standards.

I’ve personally never been a fan of stringent DEI requirements, especially those that came from companies that were clearly in it just for the optics, and I do think it can result in lower quality. It’s the way that some people almost take lower quality as a given if diversity is involved that doesn’t sit well with me.

> You can both fulfill a mission to engage with more diverse suppliers and not lower your standards.

That is bypassing competition, instead sorting by identity first. Competition is how the world found the best services/products for the best price for over a century and the foundation of our economy. Supporting that idea is how the west became as dominant and wealthy as it was. Only recently have large organization and gov bypassed that for social justice experiments and using ranked systems, similar to giving preferential treatment for 'national security' (aka keeping zombies like Boeing alive).

Even massive US defense contracts are being forced to contract out to minority owned businesses first. It's not an optional thing where the decision maker gets leeway, they are required to start there and narrows the options by definition.

> You can both fulfill a mission to engage with more diverse suppliers and not lower your standards.

There's no hidden genius in technocractic top down manipulation when it comes to purchasing decisions. The options are what they are. The less options you have the harder it will be to find the best. Like being forced to choose between 2 gov-backed monopoly ISPs for your internet here in Canada.

"we have the same product/service, and charge the same price as all our competitors. But because we're owned/operated/benefits minorities, you should be choosing us as a form of guilt driven affirmative action"

If all the competitors have the same quality and price then you're always going to be using some subjective criteria to decide between them. Why is choosing a minority supplier worse than any other criteria in this case?

It's not worse (or better). But it should be a private criteria, rather than a publicly mandated one.

I can tell you, even a massive corporation that makes medical devices definitely does NOT choose their suppliers just by quality, a LOT of the suppliers we used were thanks to "people who know people", such as the painter that sucked but was buds with the plant manager so we kept dumping money into his company to fix their deficiencies.

The biggest lie that they told you was that the world actually works on merit: it does not.

That kind of nepotism is the exception, not the rule, and it stands out like a sore thumb when it happens.

You’re right that success (as a company, or individual) is not only based in merit though. There’s plenty of examples of people continuing to do business with Oracle to prove that point.

Making a good enough product, at a good enough price point and make the executive with money happy enough with the trade-offs: and you’re successful. Same as B2C, really.

That’s not necessarily true. In fact, by not having DEI programs, companies could, because of leaders’ own biases, reject better suppliers based on owners or employees being minorities.

There's no reason to believe pure meritocracy is somehow the default state and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Humans are naturally biased in how we make choices and "this person looks and sounds like me" is probably one of the most common and deep rooted subconscious (or sometimes conscious) preferences. This isn't just a workplace hiring problem either. Humans are objectively bad at making purely objective decisions, even when they think they're doing so.

This isn't to say DEI programs as implemented today are the best solution to this problem, or even an effective one. I personally think more broad anti-bias training and programs could be a good alternative since race and gender are hardly the only biases that lead to bad decision making (e.g. hiring someone just because they went to the same school as you is also bad). But it seems silly to pretend bias doesn't exist or that it doesn't take active effort to counter, although I understand the appeal of doing so especially for uncomfortable topics like race.

Reading this, it's like reading someone disagreeing with the commutative property just because they don't want it to be true. You're arguing with a trivially provable fact, not an opinion.

If you're shopping for a car and your top criteria is reliability, then your spouse overrides that and says your top criteria is now fuel efficiency, you have, by definition, lowered your requirements for reliability from first to second place.

> Here, you assume that focusing on businesses owned by people of color necessitates lowering your standards of your suppliers below acceptable levels.

And it does. Otherwise, the movement would be simply named: "focus on businesses with the best product".

The irony is that he didn't say that at all and it's actually you who assumed this.

Yes you need to read carefully and not let your own assumptions get in the way.

He did say: Filtering based on the owner's identity is bad. He did not say: Filtering based on the owner's identity is bad while that identity matches a person of color

The optimum outcome comes if there's zero racism, i.e. we only look at the quality of the company. Let's say there's R amount of racism, and D amount of DEI to counter it (super hand-wavy of course). The optimum outcome is if R = D. If R > D, racism skews the outcome away from the optimum. If D > R, DEI skews the outcome away from the optimum.

The anti-DEI (and anti-affirmative action, etc) crowd is claiming that in 2024, D > R. They would probably also claim that in 1960, R > D, i.e. a black doctor is likely to be more qualified than his/her peers.

This is disingenuous.