> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. That's not "pro homogeneity" - only someone whose perspective is entirely warped by this one factor would think that way.
> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.
We've yet to establish such a system, so I'm not holding out much hope (and anyone who has been through a handful of tech interview loops ought to realise this)
We can?
I'm pretty sure companies have spent billions trying to achieve this and failed. The best they can do is maybe sort of sometime hire people that are good enough
This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve?
A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.
Diversity is good when it is either applied in a neutral and identify-agnostic way, or if we as a society all agree on which groups deserve getting benefits and which ones don't.
The first one is sadly horrible disliked and tend to lose support as soon the "wrong" demographic get benefits. If you have a diversity program to benefit minority X, and then later X become majority, then the program get canceled rather than applied for any new minority. The programs always get designed with a specific target in mind.
Similar for the second, if a group get popular support, diversity programs will help those while ignore any similar but disliked group. The program is not there to fix diversity, it is to help the intended group. When the political environment becomes polarized, it becomes very clear which groups get support from which side.
It has been very clear by diversity programs, and those who oppose diversity programs, that no one want a difference in perspectives, or for that matter catching their own blind spots.
Any system that tries to not hire for competence has a known, conscious blind spot. That's much worse than a system that arrives for the best but has accidental blind spots.
It's funny how the quest for "unique strengths" entirely ignores people with pale skin who grew up in trailer parks in Appalachia or farms in the midwest, despite the fact that they are dramatically underrepresented in our industry and in elite universities.
The DEI policies favor people with dark skin (as long as they're not Asian) and 1250 SATs from wealthy suburbs over pale skin 1450 SATs from rural backwaters. It's discrimination, it's "diversity" only on the surface. Incredibly shallow, condescending, and dehumanizing. It's so shallow that in most of the places it's implemented, it doesn't differentiate between descendants of slaves and recent West African immigrants, some of whom are wealthy descendants of the elites who captured and sold slaves in ports like Lagos.
And before you call me a bigot:
My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
I agree with you, and I am a minority, but as someone from the midwest, sometimes people here fail to succeed because they are lazy, like any other person. Midwesterners are modest, and this is great, but the stereotype that we are somehow more hardworking is lost on me.
Also, certainly someone can have principled opposition to DEI without being called a Nazi. But frankly, having a wife or kids "of color" doesn't necessarily prove anything one way or another. Lots of plantation owners in the 19th century also had biracial kids while somehow maintaining their raging bigotry. We humans are quite skilled at compartmentalizing.
i'm one of those poor whites you're talking about (from another region; ethnic and economic bases covered though). you believe falsehoods.
> And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
i would never ask you that. but i wonder if you should ask yourself how your views could potentially negatively impact your relationships with your family.
And thank you for the condescending, pious, moral superiority in the "your views" comment. It perfectly encapsulates the quasi-religious nature of the DEI adherents.
Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?
Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.
>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc.
That's not how the human brain can work.
That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality.
If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery.
Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all.
We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to.
And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind.
Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.
Are these people actually attested? In my experience, virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having some... unsavory attitudes more generally. Scratch hard in discussion or check post histories[1] and you end up at some variant of white nationalism or men's rights, almost every time.
Basically no one goes to bat for "wanting the best people in a role". People get political when they feel aggrieved. "DEI mania" is always a response to "I think this is going to hurt people like me".
> virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having (...) men's rights
So people who dislike a cultural type of discrimination also dislike practical discrimination against men? People who dislike what is going on in general, also have practical opinions how the situation could be improved in practice, how to make the situation more fair?
This is akin to being surprised that people who are actively against animal abuse are also helping animal shelters.
If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.
But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.
In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.
The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.
It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.
Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.
Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.
Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.
In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.
To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.
The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.
You have a lot of incorrect logic. I will only comment on one.
> In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to
> max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower.
Wrong. There are limited resources and it is not feasible to give every person every opportunity. "Let's give everybody a chance to become an opera singer, an Olympic 100m winner or a lotto winner, to see how they will use that chance. Even if they won't be any good at this and waste money, at least they will raise their starting position, improve on their potential and raise the average!". This is just silly. No, it is mathematically impossible to give every opportunity to every person.
If anything, giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human). It makes no sense to make a potentially brilliant mathematician an below-average kindergarten teacher, while forcing a good teacher-to-be, to become a 20-years-in-a-making-junior-vibe-programmer. This is a terrible idea for economy, society and individual people (including the ones that DEI are trying to promote). People have different preferences and different abilities (some have in many areas, many have in a few, some are terrible at everything). Maximizing potential should be based on an individual's merit. Fair and equal opportunities will naturally lead to different results, because people are different. You can't simultaneously have equity and equal opportunities, discrimination (racism, sexism, DEI) and inclusion, equity and efficiency.
"Give everyone what they need to max out their potential" is not "give everyone every opportunity". That’s a strawman.
Floor, not ceiling. We set a floor of real opportunity (nutrition, basic health, safety, functional education, accessible selection processes). It doesn’t promise bespoke elite tracks for all. Removing constraints is different from subsidizing every aspiration. By doing so, you lift the average, and allow the best to develop to their fullest, growing society's total output.
If the signal of ability is suppressed by early disadvantage, you’ll misallocate talent. Low cost, well aimed supports (early literacy, assistive tech, unbiased hiring screens) improve matching, which is exactly what meritocracy needs to place the brilliant mathematician in math and the gifted teacher in the classroom.
We have noisy priors shaped by wealth, networks, and bias. They need removed so that comparative advantage can actually surface. That raises both the mean and the max.
We're talking about true meritocracy: merit, not circumstances.
Funnily enough, we agree:
> giving extra resources to worse people (with lower potential) is a waste of resources (money, human)
That's exactly my point, currently we spend resources on a bunch of people that are only circumstantially better, remember pro-sports before black people were allowed?
Spend your resources to realize the best to be the best, and to make even the worse better. That gives you full global maximum.
It's not an "us vs them" situation, that's just a strawman argument.
The real point is that you either believe that all humans are worthy of the same rights and respects by default then you're a bad person.
Such people aren't against "us" they're against everyone apart from their select group of the "right kind" of people.
This isn't a quid pro quo or zero sum bullshit. This is a matter of being a moral person or not. It's not even an opinion, it's the cold hard fact that if you think entire groups of people are subhuman, unworthy of basic rights, and fit to be abducted abused and deported, you are a bad person. It's that cut and dry.
You either think all people should be equal or you don't. You either want a civilized society for everyone or you only want it for the "right kind" of people. One of these stances is objectively moral and the other is objectively bad
And that's exactly the point. DEI and other "positive" discriminatory practices are making the field uneven for people. People should be treated as individuals, representing themselves and standing for their own abilities, instead of being treated as members of whatever group. Those type of racists, sexists and DEI activists are objectively bad people.
> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked.
The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us.
This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.
> The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second amendment people could help stop his opposition.
This “violence on the left” that you speak of, I haven’t personally seen a whole lot of it.
No Kings was the largest protest in American history and not a single person was arrested for any protest infraction in New York City. The NYPD publicly announced it.
How many people wearing Joe Biden hats breached the capitol? Is there any left-wing violence in the past few decades of America that you would call more extreme than breaking into the capitol building?
How many conservatives celebrated Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting beaten? I remember Donald Trump Jr. said that a Halloween costume would be funny.
Yes, that’s basically the one notable example. Now the challenge becomes whether you can name two more without looking anything up.
Because I can name January 6 (capitol police officers lost their lives, Trump rioters intended to harm Nancy Pelosi specifically), Nancy Pelosi’s
Husband as mentioned above, Charlottesville (counter-protestor run over by a car intentionally), the two
Democratic Minnesota lawmakers who were injured recently, the pizzagate shooter, pulse nightclub (bonus: perpetrated by an ISIS sympathizer, a right-wing extremist terrorist group)
People don’t wonder why you shy away from the trans movement, we know it’s got nothing to do with left wing violence and more to do with creating a scapegoat class that is rare enough (<1% of the population) so that most people don’t know any of them. Gay men didn’t work as a scapegoat class because just about everyone eventually knew a gay man and figured out that they are normal, nice people.
Agreed it's not really to do with violence per se, even though that is a concerning behavior amongst a small number of activists.
People on both the right and the left, and in-between, are shying away from that movement more because of the demonstrably negative impact on women's rights.
"so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US"
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, right-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of left-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the right commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the left together, then you can't complain when the right gets lumped together).
That doesn’t surprise me at all. Islamic radicals aren’t that different in belief system from a lot of Christian nationalists.
We have all seen family portraits where people pose with American flags, bibles, and guns.
American Christians talk about how the woman/wife is subservient to the husband, how women should stay at home and forego a career and perform traditional roles at home. Many denounce and try to restrict contraceptive access. Many insist that women should/should not dress a certain way.
American Christian talk about how being gay is a sin and how America is a Christian country, not a secular democracy, how we need to have the Ten Commandments in school and in government buildings.
American Christians even grow beards, wear tactical/military-style gear, and drive pickup trucks just like Islamic radicals! (Okay that last one is a a half-joke but it’s kind of funny how the similarities bleed into the aesthetic).
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
It's the Left that:
- is against Israel
- supports Hamas
- is against neocons and meddling in the Middle-East
- is anti-free speech
- is fanatically religious in their beliefs that have no base in reality and are cheering on the death (professional cancelling or real) of the people who dare to disagree with their delusion
- are antiscience (antibiology, for one)
- are for mutilation of children
The list can be continued.
My point is that classifying Islamists as right-wing is an attempt to gaslight people, to lie to them, is purposefully misleading. Context and public perception matter.
To paraphrase:
```
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, left-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of right-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the left commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the right together, then you can't complain when the left gets lumped together).
```
Both he and you are empty talkers who simply insult the other side without any basis.
> if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion
No, because we are not talking about Boolean variables where you can discover the logical opposite by negation. These are words with deeply fuzzy meanings. Supporters can support the best possible meanings, and opposers can oppose the worst possible meanings, and be closer to consensus than this binary, polarized, with-us-or-against-us rhetoric might imply.
I am going to going even further than you and suggest if you are an American do not support America First, that means you instead support America Last.
If you believe that, you should think about what other countries and groups support those kinds of things, and what kind of company supporting terrorist groups puts you in.
No, there isn't a legitimate reason not to want America First.
Yes, it's important we call out anyone and stand against people who want to tear down America and fully pursue all applicable laws that apply to this destructive behavior.
I am going add more on top of that: we should automatically assume bad faith of anyone still willing, in 2025, to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.
