The DEI stuff though is gone and isn’t coming back. The concept was well intentioned but, quite ironically, these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else.
> these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior
Professional sports went through a "DEI" phase. Despite some rough patches, I'd say that it worked out for the better as a whole if you look at it in retrospect.
Similarly, individual companies may have fumbled DEI initiatives, but years on, I think it will have had a (small) positive impact.
DEI created a lot of bad blood and even more prejudices than before. People will be accused of being DEI hires for years and some groups are now under more heavy scrutiny than before. Sure, if you reduce your perspective on the prevalence of your own artificial metrics like skin color, the numbers might look better.
The concept of using discrimination against discrimination wasn't even new, but it was never successful. Quite analogous to violence for that matter.
All in all it was a vanity project and it destroyed trust in academia and the press that defended such initiatives, pushed for censorship and tried to dictate language rules. I would argue that the political costs were quite immense and the effects still persist today given the shift towards more right leaning parties throughout the western world.
Time will tell indeed. Question is if any progress could reasonably be attributed to DEI or happened despite of it. Compared to universal humanism DEI just had worse ideas and I think those need to be overcome. And all parties need to overcome them, not only the most obvious opposition.
How does professional sports go through a DEI phase?? Professional sports are one of the few true meritocracies in the world, where the best players, no matter their race, religion or gender, will play.
I’m guessing you’re referring to Colin Kaepernick? The dude went 2-14 his last year in the NFL! 2-14!!! That fact always seems to be left out by people claiming “racism”. The fact that he didn’t get another job is because sports is a meritocracy and he sucked, not because of his race or any DEI issue.
Wow, your counterpoint is about discrimination in sports 80 YEARS ago. Barely anyone alive even remembers segregated baseball firsthand. You seem to be backing my point even more that sports have been a true meritocracy for many generations now.
I have a more nuanced take on whether professional sports are actually a meritocracy. It depends on the level at which you look. Yes, in any given event it’s generally fair to say the rules are equitable. However, look at golf - we can either accept white people have some genetic advantage, or that access is not equal and the best talent never got a chance to develop. This could be extended to other leagues as well.
Access is not equal or interest is not equal? Minority participation in golf skyrocketed after Tiger Woods, but I’d argue the best athletes still far preferred basketball, football, etc over golf. Your argument also falls apart if you look at golf as a whole, where Asian women dominate the LPGA.
Coaching hires and selection process in more recent history.
I'd also argue that Venus and Serena Williams were a prerequisite to Coco Gauff. That's the point of representation: to make it easier for the meritocracy to work by creating a path for talent that might otherwise not consider a field (or sport, in this case). In many cases with minorities, what we see are extraordinary individuals who are able to shatter these biases and be pathmakers for others to follow. Jeremy Lin has also talked a lot about his experiences with racism all along his journey to the NBA (racism and prejudice is just a form of exclusion).
But it's ironic, right? Professional sports is a meritocracy that for decades excluded other non-white races from participating. The only reason we can call it a merit based system today is because there were strong efforts by individuals and organizations throughout the 20th century to make it inclusive, you know, the "I" in "DEI". You cannot have a functional meritocracy if individuals are being excluded from participating.
There's this assumption that certain races or genders are just better at coding or engineering or finance or math and that these fields are already merit based. Isn't it more likely that these fields still suffer greatly from the same type of prejudiced exclusion that professional sports suffered from and that "non-conforming" talent is being excluded at the candidate prospecting phase?
> Professional sports is a meritocracy that for decades excluded other non-white races from participating
I’m sorry, you don’t get to argue that modern sports aren’t a true meritocracy because of policies that existed 80 years ago. You’re also putting too much into the selection process, implying that there’s active efforts to exclude, for example, blacks from hockey. I’d argue it’s more a result of cultural preferences - basketball and football see much higher participation and enthusiasm.
I didn't argue that modern sports aren't a meritocracy; the exact opposite. Modern sports are a meritocracy at the player level precisely because of the efforts to make it inclusive in the 20th century. Look at the sport of baseball, basketball, and football in the early 20th century. Look at the history of racism and exclusion in each of these sports and the efforts by extraordinary individuals to shift them towards merit and not race. The Negro Leagues were a thing not that long ago.
Modern sports at the coaching level is a more recent shift to meritocracy through a concerted effort to include minority candidates in the hiring process. It is only a meritocracy today because of extraordinary individuals like Jackie Robinson breaking the barriers and decades of integration.
> ...there’s active efforts to exclude, for example, blacks from hockey.
Exclusion works in many ways. Two of which are access and socioeconomic stratification. The reason why there aren't many minority hockey players can probably be easily traced to access and socioeconomic reasons. Go on Google Maps and search for ice rinks and then basketball courts. Find a "free" community ice rink. Now go find free community basketball courts, soccer fields, or any open space for football. There simply aren't as many ice rinks where there are minority populations are concentrated and the cost of access is high compared to alternatives like soccer, football, baseball, and basketball. The process is self-selecting and exclusionary through lack of access and cost.
Isn’t this the opposite of DEI then? There’s “momentum” in sports - kids want to play what their heroes play, Dominicans have Dominican baseball heroes and play baseball. There’s nothing DEI about that.
The process is self-selecting because it is not merit based; it is based on access and economic factors. It's not that black Americans or Hispanic Americans have no talent for hockey, it's that they have no access so the sport is "self-selecting" wealthier, white athletes who have access and the economics to start and sustain the sport from a young age. To make this a meritocracy, it requires inclusion (I'm not advocating for this, but simply as a thought experiment). Imagine if every community had plenty of free ice rinks on the same order as basketball courts. Do you think the racial composition of the sport of hockey would remain the same?
Tiger Woods would not be Tiger Woods if his dad didn't have access to Navy golf courses.
If you think the reason we don't see many Dominican hockey players is because they have no talent for the sport and not because of access, then well, I don't think this conversation is of any use; you already have it in your mind that because professional hockey is predominantly white, only white players have the merit or talent for the sport.
If you don't have access, it is not a meritocracy. That is the intent of DEI: to improve access and enable meritocracy.
The practice of DEI at any individual org is a different story.
> If you don't have access, it is not a meritocracy.
I think you’re running into resistance because of this stance.
You’re talking about an optimized meritocracy or a meritocracy at one level of abstraction in which raw talent is able to be manifested due to optimal (or at least good enough) access. This sort of definition might fly in certain academic circles, but it doesn’t fly outside of those circles.
For most folks, “meritocracy”, by which people are selected based on ability, refers to actualized talent rather than theoretical talent. In your case of Dominican ice hockey players, I think most people think that their absence from the NHL does not compromise whatever meritocracy the NHL is (it has other issues), rather it’s merely that most/all Dominican ice hockey talent hasn’t been actualized to a point that it can be professionally competitive.
Bringing this back to DEI, improving access doesn’t really “enable meritocracy”, rather it just makes a meritocracy utilize its available resources more efficiently.
Also, a side note about the failings of DEI discussions outside of academic circles…
Individuals (e.g., NHL team owners) have a great deal of agency in ensuring that the players on their team are more or less chosen by meritocratic standards. These same individuals have much less agency in actualizing ice hockey talent in every place in the world (massive undertaking). As such, they may bristle when their system is accused of being non-meritocratic or non-inclusive because of societal issues that they don’t really have any or much agency to change.
Don’t get me wrong… discussions of underutilized talent are absolutely fascinating. The US in particular is absolutely flooded with underutilized talent, and there have been times in my life when I’ve been able to move the needle in certain organizations about how they tapped into that underutilized talent.
That said, labeling people or orgs as “racist” or “non-meritocratic” just doesn’t fly when the issue is structural rather than something that they actually have direct control of.
There was a zero chance the company with the best AI LLM models would not get involved in weaponization, willingly or not.
DAI is going to be one of the first things the next administration brings back, mark my words. Saying it's discriminatory is like saying affirmative action is discriminatory
Affirmative action is discriminatory. It is literally discriminating between different people based on sex, race, religion, or gender identity. You can argue it's good discrimination, but it is by definition discrimination.
But its absence demonstrably leads to discrimination based on the same things through subconscious bias. At least with it in place you get fairer spread of people being affected.
If you want to discriminate for the greater good, you elevate yourself above others. The only thing you could do is to take a step back yourself instead of forcing others to do so.
If you cannot restrict yourself to that, you are as bad as those that discriminate without further reflection.
If you don't "discriminate for the greater good" (your phrasing, not mine) and you are part of the dominant group who benefits from not doing so then you also elevate yourself above others. That is not a morally superior choice.
Personally I do take that step back. I would consider myself a violent person if I did not. I look around and I see my peers choosing not to work towards dismantling the systems that privelege themselves and I consider their inaction a form of violence against people who are already struggling. I am not American so I can't speak for the culture there but in my society there is a general acceptance of using collective power to limit the violence of individuals, and even more so when there is such an evident power disparity.
No, it would not be morally superior and it is commendable if you do take a step back. But to remove discrimination you have to leave others to make their choice too.
> I consider their inaction a form of violence against people who are already struggling.
To help people in need, you do not have to put them in groups first. This grouping is already discrimination. I would say literally, but the term is a bit overused. But the good thing is that you never need discrimination to alleviate injustices.
Any argument for social security policies and everything that remotely fits under that umbrella does not need discrimination. In fact it would work much better without it or using discrimination as a justification. It even undermines the argument for it.
> To help people in need, you do not have to put them in groups first.
I don't "put" them in groups. I recognise that we are all put into groups by the systemic nature of society. I also recognise the active grouping of others who feel that they are disadvantaged and try to listen to various advocacy groups who again and again ask for me to "use my privilege" to help. The idea of choosing not to do that but rather to respond with "your sense of Otherness is constructed, just let it go and don't worry about this group or that group" would feel both cruel and absurd.
> Any argument for social security policies and everything that remotely fits under that umbrella does not need discrimination.
Again you're the one framing this as discrimination. Something I would advocate for in my workplace is bias training, where people can learn to spot unconscious biases in themselves and can learn about the effects of systemic inequality on the individual and societal levels. I think it would be difficult to argue that such actions are "discriminatory."
I understand that the conversation is about specific DEI legislation and I have to admit that I am not American and am not familiar with the minutia of what was enacted there. But I am specifically responding to the idea that any action taken to combat implicit discrimination will lead to explicit discrimination.
There's the example of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra which I always think back on. They opened up to allow women to join but after some years no woman had managed to get a position on merit. Eventually a blind audition was introduced and the split quickly became reflective of broader societal demographics. To my mind it feels like many people here are jumping to say that blind auditions are discriminatory because they im some way disadvantaged the white men who "looked like" professional musicians. In some way that is true but it feels like such a warped reading of reality to me that I struggle to advocate for my own views in the face of it.
One simple thing we do at my company is to scrub things like names from applications, so that John Smith doesn't get preference to Aphiwe Mvala because of the ease/familiarity of the name. Would I advocate for mandating that practice in public jobs? Most certainly, I don't see why not, especially if I see the outright discrimination scandals such as [0] that can result from overly homogeneous institutions. Is the argument really that John is discriminated against with this policy?
A recent Gallup poll has reported that "...Support for a more moderate Democratic Party among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents has grown by 11 percentage points, to 45%, since 2021..." so the Democrats seem to be headed in that direction.
DEI got an extreme level of support from NGOs even while Trump was the president that they won't have at the next election. I hope they can renew themselves.
The good news on the left side though that I don't think the next candidate could be worse than Kamala Harris.
my guess is any new administration would realize it’s a massive political loser.
i’m personally in favor of some limited AA in unis, but if even black people are majority against AA when polled… it’s definitely not coming back. might be that this changes once minority groups realize how much of an impact it was actually having, i think a large segment of people convinced themselves that a lot more of these admissions were by pure merit than is supported by the data.
> these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else
The last corporate DEI initiative I was pulled into was so blatantly discriminatory that many of us were scrambling to remove ourselves from hiring roles as quickly as possible.
One of the few times I’ve been speechless in a meeting was when someone proudly told us they had just rejected a perfect candidate for the role because they were a man and not a minority, and we “had enough of those”. This was followed by a debate about whether Asians qualified as a minority in the context of a tech company.
I started working on my exit from that company as quickly as possible. These were ex-FAANG executives but they had been out of FAANG long enough that they likely came up with these ideas on their own, I think.
To be honest, I’ve been very hesitant to even talk about that situation in person because it’s such a minefield.
DEI did feel a lot like paying off debt by getting a new credit card. Equal competition doesn’t mean equal footing though. We will eventually need something to replace it and I hope that doesn’t go worse.
Does it? My "I just want the best for everyone" side likes to think being consciously and explicitly open to all candidates, having a women's day on stereotypical men's jobs, quotas, etc., makes things better because you get more perspectives in your org. Your business/government is more likely to cater to the whole population if it's lead by a reflection of the whole population and all that. But I don't actually know if anyone ran the numbers on that. You seem to suggest it's like taking on debt — is it? I'd be interested. As I do want the best for everyone, if my intuition is wrong then that's also useful to know about and adjust my opinion on
One plane crash is also n=1 for whether the maintenance interval of the element that failed should increase, not n=num_victims, since there's only one aircraft that failed after all. Here, it's one organisation
I'm not asking for data points to do a study into individual companies applying their policies and compiling anecdotal results to do statistical or qualitative tests on all by myself in spare time when there's people being paid to do this properly. I was wondering if someone knew if the evidence has already been compiled and we know the overall effect, rather than stories which are surely plenty on both sides (assuming we agree that racism and other biases are not legitimate selection reasons, thus there being a reason to push against them). The question is: where is the balance? What policy creates the greatest median happiness in the population, all else being equal? This isn't trivial to determine, I can't do that by myself in an afternoon based on a few news reports of individual cases
Just to be a bit more clear, this was more a Chesterton Fence comment than a condemnation. Everything has trade-offs and I hope our next solution to this problem is better, not worse.
They are also now illegal by executive order which is the main reason companies are getting rid of them. I agree with you they were biased but companies don't care about that
> [The executive order] also instructs the U.S. attorney general to create a plan that would deter the private sector from continuing DEI programs.
So while it is not technically illegal yet, seems like they are getting ahead of that issue before it may arise based on pretty strong signaling that it will
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here, but even if so: This phrasing is too close to just spreading a pro-Trump lie outright.
Better to say that companies are avoiding these policies because a wannabe dictator has thrown a hissy fit about them while CCing everyone on the email.
It's analogous to "working toward the führer" and, like most historical content about the rise of the Nazis, the parallels with today's USA are haunting.
DEI stands for "diversity, equity and inclusion", discriminatory hiring is a pretty extreme misinterpretation of those three words. It's no doubt true that somebody out there decided that the way to achieve the aim of a diverse/equitable/inclusive workplace was discriminatory hiring, but it's not the only way to get there, and it's not how most workplaces were going about it.
at pretty much every large tech company there were interview quotas imposed, top down pressure on hiring decisions.. it matches pretty closely what universities did
DEI is not about preferential hiring. It’s the opposite. It’s about broadening the perspectives so that one group that has enjoyed historical preferential hiring no longer gets preferential treatment.
I think the point is that a big bunch of studies really point to the fact that if you have two persons with a real merit score of 8/10 (for example), the one from a minority will be considered, due to unconscious biases, as having a score of 7/10 instead.
So, yes, there is a correction and this correction is based on race because this is the correct variable to de-bias the evaluation. But does it mean "preferential"? The point is to correct the evaluation such that this evaluation is not preferential and is neutral with respect to the race.
Except we're seeing the opposite in the real world.
Let me give you a scenario. It's the 1940's, a company has a policy that privileges white applicants. Someone says, "let's remove this policy, and tell the company they have to treat all applicants easily." Someone else replies, "no, because if this company was told they had to treat everyone equally and not privilege white people they would discriminate against white people. I have many studies proving this!"
Does that pass the smell test? A company that's intentionally trying to privilege group X is suddenly going to discriminate against group X if they're told they have to treat everyone equally?
In your scenario, if they indeed have convincing and independent studies proving this, then, yes, they should not remove this policy.
It is also worth mentioning that in real life, we apply such policies. If I remember correctly, black people are more prone to prostate cancer, and therefore there are policies that "discriminate": the process for cancer screening is different between black and white people. Does it mean it is racist? Does it mean it is unfair?
I think the difference is that I focus on equality of opportunity while you focus on equality of outcome. You are targeting "when looking at the process, I want to see everyone treated the same". Others may target "when looking at the opportunities, I want to see everyone with the same merit having the same probabilities of success". It reminds me of the famous cartoon of people wanting to watch a football game over a fence. The drawing illustrates that "treating everyone the same" without considering that not everyone starts from the same situation is stupid.
i’m very familiar with the arguments around DEI/AA. as i said in a different comment, i’m in favor of limited AA.
We have little data from jobs for various reasons - but if we look at the data from universities, the “correction” is clearly far in excess of any bias by race against same score candidates, which is why URM admits typically have significantly lower scores. It is only a correction if you are saying that it is also correcting for a lot more upstream stuff that might be causing the divergence in scores. There might be merit to the claim but it does also mean that the end result is you are picking worse candidates “on paper” on the basis of their skin color.
> i’m very familiar with the arguments around DEI/AA. as i said in a different comment, i’m in favor of limited AA.
You were saying "maybe that’s okay, but that is absolutely what it means".
Now you are saying that DEI/AA is not preferential, some applications of it are.
> but if we look at the data from universities, the “correction” is clearly far in excess of any bias by race against same score candidates
You cannot easily compare such numbers, and in this case, "clearly far in excess" is just totally subjective. This is typically where biases and cognitive dissonance are the most easy to creep in.
> There might be merit to the claim but it does also mean that the end result is you are picking worse candidates “on paper” on the basis of their skin color.
But if you don't apply any correction, you are picking worse candidates "on paper" on the basis of their skin color.
That the fundamental flaw of people who are so vocal about the over-correction of DEI/AA: they care a lot about over-correcting but don't seem to care that much about under-correcting. Over-correcting is a big injustice, under-correcting is just something that may happen, hey, what can you do, right?
This is just another justification for discrimination. You can be sure that everyone that discriminates has their own reasoning.
I doubt that studies in this field are less biased for that matter but they certainly lack hard substantial data.
You yourself are free to take a step back for someone you deem disadvantaged. If you demand this from others, you are just as plainly discriminating. I would argue that you overstep your bounds.
The problem is that "let's not apply the correction" is also just another justification for discrimination.
Let's approach the problem theoretically. Let's imagine a distant planet where, by construction of our thought experiment, there are 2 groups, A and B, and when evaluated for a job position, people of group A are scored as "their real score plus a random value sampled from a gaussian centered on 1" and people of group B are scored as "their real score minus a random value sampled from a gaussian centered on 1".
In this world, without correction, just using the evaluated score, there is discrimination: for the same merit (or sometimes even when they merit it more), people of group B will usually not be chosen when competing with a person of group A.
In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.
Now, we can come back to our reality. You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think. Great. I'm saying that these biases exist or are bigger than what you think. Your position is not better than mine.
As for the "overstep your bounds", what you are basically saying is that "if you think there is something unfair, it does not count, I'm the only one allowed to decide what is fair or unfair". I'm pretty sure that it exists things that you find unfair and that you don't accept when you are the victim of the unfair situation. And I'm pretty sure that you can, for each case, find individuals that will argue that they don't find it unfair. In this case, be honest, will you really say "I think you are treating me unfairly, but if you think it's not the case, I cannot demand you to change anything or force anything to get retribution, because it will be overstepping my bounds"?
> The problem is that "let's not apply the correction" is also just another justification for discrimination.
No, that is not true, you have changed the statement. The statement was "let's not apply discrimination". You just reframe your discrimination as something different, in this case a "correction".
> In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.
Wrong, you do not "correct" discrimination and instead argue to implement it.
> You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think.
I did no such thing. You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that. You are free to take a step back and give your advantages up for others. That is very commendable and perhaps your deeds bring about the corrected world in your example.
> Your position is not better than mine.
I don't argue anything like that. I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.
Even with applying groups in your hypothetical example you apply discrimination, a group as an abstract representation of the individual. Your whole argument cannot stand on its own without discrimination and the reasoning is inherently circular.
> if you think there is something unfair, it does not count
Again, I am saying nothing like that. I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies. But I don't argue about fairness or what someone deserves and I cannot judge who is up for a bigger part of the pie in the contrast to someone other. And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".
Please don't be so aggressive. I did not take your statement, I was just saying that in the situation where there is a need of a correction, not applying the correction is also a justification for discrimination.
The question is "do we need a correction", and it is a very tricky question, and people who jump on "of course no" usually are just careless and don't realise that they put themselves as "the judge who decide what is fair and what is not", as much as the person who says "yes it needs a correction".
> You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that.
My point is that if you judge that it does not need a correction, then you are doing exactly the same as me: you judge which discrimination is justified.
> I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.
But that's exactly my point: if you just say "obviously there is no need for correction, obviously the default value is neutral", you are judging that the needed correction is 0. How is that not as bad as me if I judge that the needed correction is 1.
> I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies.
But you are therefore discriminating: you give advantages to the poor that you don't give to the rich. How is that different?
> And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".
But I haven't said that I support any concrete DEI/AA. For all you know, I'm opposed to all the DEI/AA you have in mind, and just support the same policies as you about the poor and the sensible policies.
I think that in fact we are exactly the same. All I'm saying is that everyone, including you, end up applying "corrections" to reach fairness (decided by them or not, it does not matter). And that the choice "the correction should be 0" is as much a "choice of discriminating to a given level" than the choice "the correction should be 1".
White men in the U.S. have a hard time coming to grips with living in a society where women have sexual autonomy and where they are subjected to genuine competition for jobs. Every POC hire over a white man must be becuase of DEI!
It’s easy to demonize DEI for the reasons I stated above. It’s because I don’t follow the news media that I haven’t fallen for the DEI Scare that has gripped white society. It’s modern America’s version of blaming everything on communism.
We live in a society where no one calls a wholly unqualified moron like Hegseth a “DEI hire” but people referred to Karine Jean-Pierre as such.
1. in practice, does “DEI”/AA typically mean using race to influence hiring decisions? i think the answer is unequivocally yes, not taking a position on the merit of doing so.
2. Has “DEI” become some sort of boogeyman that is almost equivalent to communism of a past era? Yes, I agree with you - it has really accelerated in the past year and people are using it in ways that don’t even make any sense or blaming it for things that clearly are unrelated.
But I never made a claim of the 2nd form. Hegseth is obviously a nepo hire, most plum book positions in general are nepo hires.
So my comment then wasn’t directed to you. It was directed to those with more extreme views on what DEI means and to those reading. Apologies for casting too wide a net.
That’s a circular definition; stating it’s not about preferential hiring but then saying it’s about not giving a certain demographic preferential treatment.
“Enjoyed” is not the right word either. It’s better explained by stating the tech industry is dominated by certain demographics because that’s just how it is, and DEI initiatives give preferential treatment to those who are not in those demographics, in an attempt to increase diversity, and give equitable opportunities, and make people feel included.
For the last 500 years white men have had preferential treatment when it came to hiring. Indeed a stronger word than “enjoyed” is merited. But you think using “enjoyed” is too strong a word to use to describe such a state of affairs?
> It’s better explained by stating the tech industry is dominated by certain demographics because that’s just how it is
Bigots have used that one forever, defining the current state of affairs as natural and any attempt to improve things as <insert loaded term of the time here>.
great reply and i think hits on what i was trying to get at which is it is obviously discriminatory, but the merits of that discrimination are quite possibly positive or certainly up for debate.
It depends which side you look at it from. Increasing diversity of the group being hired into, means that a potentially discriminatory hiring approach must be taken, depending on the candidate applying.
I’d assume that demographics should somewhat match real demographics. If your country is 50% white people and 50% black people, you’d see that in hiring in general with some variance.
You’d probably have to adjust for socioeconomic level etc. It’s no good if all the hires in the low paying jobs are one type of people.
I don’t think it’s impossible to tell even if “99%” is hyperbole.
> I’d assume that demographics should somewhat match real demographics.
At work? I doubt that. Only for a job available to anyone and chosen by everyone. I don't think there's any jobs even roughly like that.
People get jobs and then their social and professional network now has someone who works at $BIGCO. Now folks can see themselves there and apply for openings, which could accelerate this effect. Now you can see minorities hired on merit, showing up in clusters.
> I don’t think it’s impossible to tell even if “99%” is hyperbole.
I dunno - it just seems like "majority ethnicity implies merit, minority implies DEI" to me.
People remember famous scientists like Einstein, Feynman, or even Bill Nye the Science Guy, and believe it's obvious that white men are more qualified in STEM, and anyone denying it is in denial. They ignore that before the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, discrimination was legal in the US, and that Ivy League universities only started admitting women from 1969 to 1981 (depending on the university).
People who say they can tell the percentage of DEI hires on sight—up to two significant digits from a data set, like "99%"—imagine that the past was a meritocracy, because they never grew past these simple stories to encourage children to pursue science.
Is it an accident that your example consists of three Jewish people and would you argue that they did receive less discrimination compared to other demographics regarding access to education?
The Nazis, who were white supremacists, persecuted Einstein and dismissed his theory of relativity as "Jewish science". Einstein fled to the US, which was a much less racist environment compared to Nazi Germany, and Einstein's theory helped the US create the atomic bomb that defeated the Nazis.
The US had a "Jewish quota" to limit the number of Jews allowed in universities, so "white" Jews experienced more discrimination than white Christians. However, racial segregation between white and black people was legal until 1954-1964, so white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.
If Germany and the US wasn't so racist, science would have advanced further than it is today. Famous Jewish scientists (and science communicators) proved that white supremacy was wrong, not right.
> white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.
Perhaps. And yet your initial statement would assume that you would want to discriminate against them.
This is more or less exactly what I believe DEI policies would lead to. There are enough people that believe Jews are advantaged but the opposite is mostly true. Still under the metrics DEI generally proposes they would need to be discriminated against.
This is why having the premise to treat everyone equally is the better solution than what DEI proposes. And criticism of DEI is not white supremacy.
Einstein moved to the US well after he became a famous scientist. The University of Zurich, where he got his degree, has been open to women since the mid 19th century.
The Ivy League first started admitting women in 1870 (Cornell). The rest, however, were far later.
Being a DEI hire does not make the hire discriminatory. I think you don’t understand the issue.
I gather you assume any person of color or female hire is a “DEI” hire and by that you mean someone who isn’t qualified. This assumption is quite stupid.
> The concept was well intentioned but, quite ironically, these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else.
I think the programs basically did nothing. They were ineffective. Yet, that made a lot of people really angry.
This is also a rug pull for many international researchers working at google.
How should they feel helping to build weapon systems for a country that openly threatens their home countries or close allies?
If google didn't start with "don't be evil" and didn't continue to pledge not use use AI for weapons, this would be different.
This is as bad as having an "Open" for-profit company.
Let's see which of the big labs remain attractive non-US citizens.
The no weapons thing was fine for years but now you've got Putin sending thousands to troops Europwards there's an argument for using tech to stop that. Also detering the Chinese who will no doubt develop AI weapons themselves.
> “What’s not changing is we’ve always hired the best person for the job,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting the Guardian reviewed.
This is obviously a lie. Google’s more senior leaders had (and probably still have) quotas for hiring and promotions. If you didn’t hit quotas, not only did you face intense pressure to artificially skew things when HR reviewed numbers, but your performance (and compensation) would also be affected. Many people have privately talked about this, but most are afraid to speak up, due to the aggression of the progressive employees and the official DEI machine (from HR).
I wonder if Sundar will be brave enough to admit fault in how they handled the past, instead of just pretending nothing is changing. I am reminded of James Damore’s situation - he discussed something controversial in a polite way, with sources backing up his ideas, but was viciously attacked inside Google and also outside. News media regularly misrepresented what he said. His firing was unfair. That was just one example of how the company operated all this time. If that’s changing, they should own up to it.
I was at Google during the Damore period and had previously gone through their interview pipeline multiple times from outside at various points before being hired. I never saw the faintest hint of a sign of "diversity quotas" or anything similar to that, and I never saw Damore present any evidence to support it. Do you have anything to support your claim that there were race or gender or (insert criteria here) quotas? Were these supposed impacts on performance and comp documented anywhere or just rumored in whispers? Do you know anyone firsthand whose performance or comp were impacted? I don't know anyone first or second hand who was impacted, and I know quite a few Googlers and ex-Googlers.
I dunno. Could be that the hiring practices at the time, or the team that interviewed him vetted algorithmic problem solving skill and did not run a vibe check on social or emotional intelligence. Because blasting out a company wide post / email disparaging and entire class of people (who are like 50 percent of the population), and then getting indignant about the entirely foreseeable backlash is indicative of extremely low EQ.
You know neuroticism is a term of art in psychology, right? It's a value neutral term, not a pejorative. If your argument is that he deserves firing because he's sexist and your evidence that he's sexist is he called women neurotic then you're part of the reason we can't have reasoned debates.
You can argue until you are blue in the face that people should not have interpreted what he wrote as offensive. But in fact a very large number of people did.
I usually evaluate people based on how they behave by their own stated values and codes. It's been a good rule.
What's been amazing to me is how skin-deep the stated values across the tech industry were. Virtually every executive is behaving in ways they would fire their employees for just a few months ago. The executives have no moral compass as human beings. I believed this to be the case before, since the people I've interacted with who rose that high did so by being psychopaths, but what's amazing is how on display it is.
I don't mind the before or the after so much as the very, very transparent about-face.
It's more-or-less impossible to become a sufficiently-senior executive at a sufficiently-large company without being a psychopath. You should have a baseline assumption that all executives at large corporations have no values whatsoever beyond doing what benefits them personally, you'll be a lot less surprised at their behavior if you do.
Depends on how they got there. It's in the selection process. Anything with competition about 1000:1 leads to cheating and psychopathic behavior. Anything below 1:4 doesn't. Iterated 1:4 does again.
That's generally my assumption, but with some exceptions. What selects for psychopaths is the process of climbing the corporate ladder. However, there are ways to get to the top of the corporate ladder without climbing it.
For example, Larry and Sergei didn't seem like psychopaths. Neither did Omar Bose. Many other founders aren't.
Ditto for most processes with extreme selective pressures (e.g. most senator, PoTUS, many elite academics, elite law firm partner, etc.). People win by optimizing to the process. People with ethics, or who don't cheat, don't win. There are exceptions, but they're in the minority. For example, if you are an extreme genius or stumble on a major breakthrough, in science, and don't have it stolen by a psychopath.
You got downvoted, so I'll provide two references:
* Power by Pfeffer
* Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Very different takes, but same general conclusion. Both are respected academics at Stanford and NYU, respectively, with de Mesquita being far more respected, and an excellent read. Power is a bit less so
> "What's been amazing to me is how skin-deep the stated values across the tech industry were."
The whole "Don't be evil" brouhaha several years ago didn't clue people in? It was marketing fluff from the beginning but it should have been obvious even to the most oblivious that it was marketing fluff by the time it was removed.
It wasn't marketing fluff at the beginning. Young Google was a uniquely ethical organization. I think the problem has been how you sustain that culture.
That's a deep problem. Checks-and-balances are hard, and Google had none. Ergo, it went from good to evil.
Google used AI to summarize the ~200 questions its employees posed ahead of this meeting regarding its DEI and AI policies.
The final two paragraphs of the article are telling:
The third-most-popular question employees asked was why the AI summaries were so bad.
“The AI summaries of questions on Ask are terrible. Can we go back to answering the questions people actually asked?” it read.
I thought summarization was a task AI was considered good at. If their own tech sucks at this, what makes us think it's safe to use in the context of war?
They're okay at best for getting the most generic possible vibe from a large piece of text.
Actually relying on it to accurately summarize many points, it's completely useless. We have it enabled in our meetings and it's hilariously bad at summarizing even the simplest and shortest of meetings.
TLDR: it all comes back to the same principle: LLMs are predicting words based on their training. Which means they are not actually summarizing ideas from documents (or whatever other task we give them).
Summarization can be okay when letting you know the general content of a longer document or conversation.
Summarization is universally disappointing when it tries to reduce a lot of different pieces of information (like answers to a lot of different questions) into a much smaller number of bullet points.
It’s simply not possible to compress a lot of disparate pieces of information into a much smaller set of sentences.
> Parker said that, as a federal contractor, the company has been reviewing all of its programs and initiatives in response to Donald Trump’s executive orders that direct federal agencies and contractors to dismantle DEI work.
Who should qualify? Do we go by a one-drop rule, if so what percentage of the population are we talking here? Do you have to prove that one drop came from slaves in the United States of America(e.g. "Based on best records available your one drop likely came from slaves in Bermuda no reparations for you")?
And finally how should this be funded? Should people who immigrated or whose families immigrated to America after slavery was abolished be taxed also?
That’s right. It’s about American slaveholders. So you’d have to prove a direct descendant was a slave. Then there’d be the capitalization of the bank. Could probably be structured as a loan.
And yes, everyone would indirectly be taxed for slavery reparations.
To the people defending the reduction in Google's DEI program, I want to tell you that you are missing the point.
For some reason, they think DEI means some unqualified woman or minority is taking the position over someone more qualified. That is not the case.
DEI was created because corporate leadership structures were "the good old boys club" where less qualified people were hired because they knew someone or were related to someone in the company over a more qualified candidate.
Still today, qualified job candidates do not get calls back because their name sounds foreign. [1, 2]
There are many reasons why qualified candidates cannot even get into the interview process.
In theory, I'm a proponent of DEI. But your description is every description: "People have bias when hiring." That's the easy part to explain. A clear summary of how the solution can be fair is never quite spelled out (either because it isn't fair, or because explaining it clearly and briefly is intractable). "The fair amount of each of type person" is impossible to define, so there's no way to fairly get us there.
I.e. we can demonstrate that the scale is unfair, but we can't measure exactly how. The results of the bias are apparent, but the bias itself is unobservable. But when we put a thumb on it, that's highly observable, and we know the thumb doesn't know exactly whom to prefer over whom. You can't possibly expect humans to not revolt against that.
More practically speaking: Yes, the loud assholes focus on unqualified people theoretically being hired, but even if you dismiss them, there are still a bunch of people who won't be able to ignore the fact that, while DEI will cause the best candidate to sometimes be hired when they otherwise wouldn't, it intuitively causes the still-qualified-but-not-as-qualified candidate to be hired at least as often. Additionally, being denied by human bias (unconscious bias, charitably) is less angering than being denied by policy.
Solution of a problem starts from stating and understanding of the problem. The DEI statement and understanding of the problem was alike USSR’s “we have too many Jews in the University” and thus similar result.
The problem needs to be solved earlier along the chain than hiring. At education and marketing for education ideally. Companies should hire the best, but schools should be starting everyone off on the right track and the rest should work out.
This started as admonishment: that diversity, equity, and inclusion is an existing and important aspect of our education system that is being actively and unconstitutionally destroyed. It became something more, because the crisis we face if we allow the current situation to proceed is much greater than the degradation of our education->corporation pipeline.
The people that are reimplementing Jim Crow apartheid in America under the guise of protecting us from diversity, equity, and inclusion are the same people who have been actively undermining the education system in America, from banning accepted science such as evolution to clever extortion schemes diverting collective funds from public education to private religious/ideological indoctrination. As part of the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion from American society, Trump has mandated that schools teach a false version of American history that forbids acknowledging that the USA has ever done racist things. They are currently working to completely eliminate the Department of Education.
Meanwhile, in between threatening to arrest congresspeople, commentators, and journalists for clear first-amendment-protected speech and retweeting literal white supremacist propaganda, Elon Musk is guiding his strike team of blackhats and/or neonazis to completely purge the government of patriotic workers and destroy its ability to do anything but wage offensive wars and enforce the radical puritanical mores of millenarian "Christian" sects. The American people (and indeed, citizens of the developed world) currently exist in a hyperreality that requires self-deprivation to clear the fog of algorithmic far-right radicalization employed by our media companies social and traditional. We suck at that. The history of countries in analogous situations is bleak: we are rapidly approaching moral oblivion. There is not a human in this world who will remain unscathed by the devastation we unleash.
Microsoft interestingly enough appears to be standing their ground on DEI. [0]
Yet, they hopped on the layoff train this time around with a particularly nasty twist. [1]
Perhaps they were afraid they'd need to be sociopathic in at least one regard, lest they buck the wider ethos lately. Facebook for example, offered generous severance packages but threw DEI in the trash immediately. [2]
Companies with strong DEI programs most certainly have an authoritarian leadership style and for Microsoft that certainly is the case.
As DEI sees itself as better to determine who needs discrimination, so does Microsoft leadership. It is not much more complicated than that and fits the picture. A company with a long history of policies to not enable people to be more independent.
That is nothing new for Microsoft. I don't think they invented stack-ranking, but they were doing it basically from the 90s until Ballmer left. That's where you're required to cut the bottom 20% of your team every year.
When MSFT did stack ranking officially, the buckets were 20% "overachievers", 70% "achievers", and 10% "underachievers", with the latter being targeted for cuts. If I remember correctly, these specific numbers originated at GE.
For Many people on Hacker News, DEI has become synonymous with unqualification, implying that if a non‑white person works at a company, they're only there because of these programs, and are taking opportunities away from more qualified white men.
In their view, these employees don't truly deserve their positions.
This is an exaggeration - a bad faith interpretation based on the most extreme opinions (unless you are defining "many" relatively - i.e. if 10 out of 100 people in a room are openly racist, that's "many" by colloquial usage, because being openly racist is so dramatic, not because 10% is an intrinsically big number).
It's funny that this could be interpreted as either far left (the biases against marginalized people need to be heavily counteracted in order for them to succeed) or far right (without DEI they would be unable to succeed on their own merits because they are less able than the typical white male straight christians).
What it can't be interpreted as is reasonable. It's insulting no matter how you look at it, either paternalistic or white supremecist. Saying that everyone who isn't of certain skin color, gender, religion, or orientation is "fucked" without relatively recent HR initiatives is on its face ridiculous and insulting to those who have succeeded without it, which is the vast majority of them!
Probably not what you actually meant but this whole topic seems so ridiculously polarized that people will post those type of extemist interpretations without a second thought.
e: ah, just looked at the username and account creation date. I'm now rescinding my assumption of good faith intent.
I think it's definitely helpful to describe a source's political leaning to add context to a discussion. However, claiming that they generally "hate big tech, love DEI" seems a little disingenuous. I think, HN is best when it's nuanced and does not jump and feed on hyperbolic culture war topics primarily used as ragebait.
There surely are many articles supportive of diversity initiatives published by the Guardian. But they have also published critical and nuanced articles on the subject. Here are a two examples:
Fucked because of the deeply engrained racism, sexism, and homophobia in American society right?
It's like people forget many of the people you see in those photos hanging black people, letting the police dogs go into a crowd, putting glass in the chairs of the Little Rock nine, etc are still alive. My living parents and grand mother were both born into a segregated country.
The civil rights legislation was passed in 1965
Donald Trump lived his entire childhood in a country where it was completely fine to use and treat minorities like trash. I think he and a lot of other people miss it.
I always wonder how they do it. These spineless corporate suits. One month they're shoving DEI down your throat ("underrepresented, marginalized"), next month they're killing these programs and writing that they have always hired the "best" people for the job. Obviously, some people of the organization are different, but not all.
How do they do it? Just treat it like a job and do whatever the bag full of money demands? Or do they double-think like in 1984 and convince themselves that they themselves also believe it?
How did democrat politicians go from saying we shouldn't legalize gay marriage to then saying you are a horrible homophobe if you are against it in a couple of years?
The answer is the same, some people just say what they think will give them the most power and advantages. If denying gay rights gives them votes? "Of course they shouldn't have any!" Wait, no, gay rights give votes?? "Oh, yeah anyone who doesn't give them rights is the worst!"
Almost all leaders are like that in a large enough population, since if you say what people want to hear you tend to bubble upwards.
In 2004 John Kerry lost the election due to two things. One of them was his support for gay marriage being legal. Stupid commericals like this one were made:
Obama was adamant that he did not support legislation to legalize gay marriage. When SCOTUS legalized it he was caught off guard but he and other Democrats were able to then fully embrace the issue. The nation’s view on the topic rapidly changed and now it is a nonissue for most Republicans.
John Kerry was for civil unions and against gay marriage in 2004. Not saying that position or what people claimed or thought his opinion was didn't effect it but he didn't come out pro gay marriage until much later.
Is say the swift boat thing and the flip flop accusations are what hurt him
Also many Republicans are still very anti gay marriage
Civil unions/gay marriage were essentially the same thing in the oppositon’s talking points. Slippery slopes and all that. Gay marriage was an issue that hurt him badly. Evidence for this is Obama being ok with gay marriage while running a campaign that was adamantly opposed to it.
Gay marriage is a virtual nonissue with Republican voters. They didn’t run on repealing it this past election cycle. They may care about it but not enough to run on the issue. DEI is the new fear mongering b.s. for the idiots.
My memory is that when he ran for President in 2008 he and the Demicratic Party made it clear there would be no federal push for gay marriage/civil unions.
According to the article he publicly held a variety of positions on the topic over the years. Apparently you can find a quote of his to fit whatever narrative one wants but they didn’t push for federal legislation on the isssue in 2009.
The book Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers explores this question. It was written in the 80s as an anthropological study of the ethics of middle managers at large companies. It still holds up today!
The book is descriptive - describing the ethical norms in large corporations, but it doesn't make a value judgement on whether those norms are good or bad.
A fascinating read of you're curious about the structural reasons for this sort of behavior. Really interesting to see how people act by different ethical codes inside vs outside of work.
It's not ideal, but also not likely to change. Understanding the structural reasons why it is the way it is has helped me to be less surprised / angry by things like this which I can't change.
You tell yourself it's a well intentioned effort and that it works well, brining in people you otherwise would have missed. And then you later say "mission accomplished," the program ran its course, no longer doing the job it was made to do, pat yourself on the back both times for your good decision making. It might even be true both times! And you can't know it wasn't, so it's possible to believe it.
The amount of sociopaths in positions of power of a large bureaucracy is proportional to its size and how powerful the position in question is. Seems to be true of just about anything, from governments to corporations.
The DEI stuff though is gone and isn’t coming back. The concept was well intentioned but, quite ironically, these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else.