It’s not clear to me if Google is changing its politics or is just hiding it more cleverly. But either way, this type of political activism never had a place in business or government. Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination. The fact that one half of America openly supported discrimination in the workplace - things like hiring or promotion goals/quotas based on race or gender - still shocks me. I hope we return to a more moderate balance.
"Equity" is the whole problem. MLK was looking for equality, but activists in the 21st century moved the goalposts, and now they're looking for reparations and other ways to try to offset the sins of our past. The problem with this is that children and relatives cannot be held legally responsible for crimes (or wrongs) committed by their parents/ancestors. (At least not in the USA.)
I'm presently in the most oppressed group -- I'm a white heterosexual male. There are no politically correct support groups, because they're all considered to be racist organizations, but the support groups for all other races (and genders) seem to be just fine.
All the DEI training materials claim that I'm "inherently racist", which is a ploy to punish me unjustly. None of my ancestors (at least going back 300 years) have ever owned slaves, and my wife is non-white and our kids are bi-racial.
I am looking forward to the return of merit-based systems, rather than racist policies and quotas. I'm dismayed that we've gone so far astray.
Yes, let's all go back to MLK's times, surely things were more fair then! Who, me, racist? Nooooo...
Every conservative has the same exact belief system: every conservative ideology before them was wrong, but this time, they're right. This time, for the first time in human history, conservatism is right, and we need to stop all progress immediately. We made it far enough. Any further and then it's bad!
Of course, that's why conservatives before you said. And the ones before them. And the ones before them. And the ones before them. And the ones before them.
Of course, we all know now they were wrong. Usually very wrong. But, surely, if we maintain the exact same ideology we will magically be right this time! Right guys? Right...?
> The problem with this is that children and relatives cannot be held legally responsible for crimes (or wrongs) committed by their parents/ancestors. (At least not in the USA.)
But no reparations scheme attempts to find anyone legally responsible, surely?
Most of them are simply aimed at pricking the consciences of organisations that benefited from (and sometimes exist only because of) slavery.
If even transfers of money are concerned it's usually in the form of donations to foundations and state aid, at least that is how it is here in the UK.
Then explain the one picture that every single DEI advocate shares at the start of their intro sessions. You know the exact one that I'm talking about.
I have personally gone through HR trainings that directly contradict what you're saying. "just and fair" allocation is also a vacuous qualifier. According to whom? If it's just and fair allocation according to someone that believes in equality of outcome, then you're not disagreeing with the comment you're responding to.
I think in practice, equity does in fact mean equity of outcome. Pretending that that's not the case feels like gaslighting to people, and drives people away from DEI initiatives.
FTA> Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.
It doesn't appear to be voluntarily "changing politics" but instead a mandate from the feds to change ideology or not work with them.
> Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination.
Do we still do 'citation needed' around here? Find me one serious person who has ever argued for equality of outcomes. Even fucking Lenin said "He who does not work shall not eat".
“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.”
This was a widely held stance in certain circles. Additional examples in different domains/disciplines are not difficult to find.
When an employer demands the composition of the engineering team must match the composition of the nation in sex and race, with an exception allowed to favor anyone who is not a white or Asian male, that’s equality of outcome.
When white and Asian males are eliminated if they didn’t attend a top-20 computer science program, but the existence of a degree doesn’t matter for anyone else, that’s equality of outcome.
When the stated goal of HR during an all-hands is literally to facilitate equality of outcomes.
I agree that all of those things would be bad! But I repeat - 'citation needed'. And when I say that, I do not mean "it happened once somewhere", I mean - I need you to prove that this is a systemic thing that requires changes in legislation, because that is what a bunch of tiny scaredbois are asking for.
I disagree. It doesn’t need some systemic proof or some other artificial - and frankly arbitrary - barrier to make changes in legislation. It’s obvious that the DEI programs of many companies are discriminatory. And also, this type of discrimination is already illegal under existing law. It nevertheless did not stop activists or the companies they infiltrated from making discrimination an official policy.
Political activism requires the entity to give a damn. Google doesn't. It was marketing to strengthen the Google brand. Now more money is to be made by sucking up to the Trump regime. Hence, that's what entities whose only real goal is greed do.
> Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination
Could you explain how you got to that definition? Being a non-native speaker, words do not have inherent meaning to me, and no matter how I look it up, this is not the definition I get. Instead, I get an explanation along the lines of "equality of opportunity additionally weighted against circumstances".
I understand that at a lot(?) of workplaces, sex and ethnic quotas did/do exist, and that there are folks who were hired over people who were better fit for the various positions (although my source for both of these is just accumulated and often blatantly biased internet gossip). But I don't see how these relate to the E in DEI necessarily, not any more than I see over-zealousness and malicious compliance towards an idea simply manifesting in this.
The fundamental question is whether you think the population distribution of a company with thousands (or tens of thousands) of employees should look similar to the population distribution of the countries it's based in.
If the distribution doesn't look similar, why not? Is there a good excuse for being predominantly male, or predominantly white, or predominantly asian, or predominantly indian? What does that good excuse look like? I see people complain about these things all the time.
There's an assumption here that discrimination in the workplace only exists because of DEI which is a weird leap to make IMO. You could argue that DEI made the situation worse and that gets us somewhere but it's not clear to me whether that's your position.
The discrimination is likely occurring much earlier in the employment pipeline (this was obvious in 2008). Why is it Google's job to solve that problem?
This gave me a funny thought, can you imagine the absolute shitstorm if the government mandated ethnic and gender quotas for every workplace? Now that'd have been some real popcorn time, if I get my eyes roll over from all the overreach and oppression talk here now, that'd be a thread I would not dare to open for sure.
I agree that it is probably occurring at multiple points in the pipeline. We recently observed one attempt at fixing this earlier in the pipeline (affirmative action at universities) being struck down, though - perhaps for good reason. So it seems like it's not allowed to fix it at the university level, and it's not FAANG's job to fix it in their hiring pipeline, so whose job is it to fix it? Elementary school teachers?
My instinct is that it has to be addressed broadly across all stages of the pipeline for there to be any results.
Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to blame these organizations "now-demonstrated to have been performative", as DEI's critics have been (performatively?) accusing them to be for so long? Or would that count as performative too?
IDK what 'performative' means. But according to my calculations, if I donated $50,000 to a charity last year and $0 this year, I've still donated $50,000 to the charity.
Whereas someone who donated $0 last year and $0 this year has donated $0.
It'd be pretty weird if the former got worse press than the latter.
I was being sarcastic. For a lot of people the narrative is more important; I'd even argue it's what people normally default to, including me. What I meant to convey then was that at this point I find all those narrative driven perspectives beyond tiresome, and yet I fully expect them to barrel on regardless, unlike what you're hoping for.
Your napkin math is one demonstration why a focus on narrative can prove misguided. It can matter very little how genuine their intents were if in practice they materially helped a significant amount.
The companies which followed their principles even when it was against the prevailing ideology du jour? (Being originally from USSR I hate ideologies and those 180 turns people do on a dime the moment the ideology changes)
Writing as a person who wants the future to be a better place, the number one pass time of progressives is complaining about other progressives. The number two pass time is complaining about conservatives.
Anyway, my complaint is that a lot of DEI flavored stuff is very very lazy.
A fundamental issue is that once a person has been raised, you don't get to raise them again. You can't parent a grown person - even if they need more parenting. Social punishment only works inside a socially cohesive group. The shame and anxiety you create with social punishment may be exploited by someone else.
Anyway, I'm sure some DEI groups are coming to terms with why anti-woke trolling is so effective, and I hope they find a good way to tell that story.
I’m not sure how this is the center. We have devolved into something else. This is an expression of the tight control this authoritarian government holds on business. What we’re stumbling toward is possibly white nationalism. It’s not just the crackdowns on free speech, which are now commonplace, but mass deportation and concentration camps. I get that DEI is a conservative talking point but what’s taking shape before our eyes is far more sinister than just a rollback of Democrat identity politics.
How does meritocracy and color-blind hiring lead to white nationalism, mass deportation and concentration camps? Are you suggesting that foreign-born population would fail if judged on merit? That seems like quite a leap.
> Let's shut down these employee networks based on immutable characteristics.
Each of these networks is open to everyone. You can be straight and a member of the LGBTQ+ network just fine. You can be white and join the Black network too.
The networks exist because people have (and are) the targets of persecution. It's nice to find other people who will understand what that feels like and make connections and advocate for less systematic persecution.
I agree with everything you said to some degree, except, unfortunately, the first sentence. The pendulum is obviously swinging to the right, generally, which, to be 100% transparent, I believe is worse than when the pendulum is on the left. I wish we could keep it centered, but I guess that's not how it works.
I’m worried that the pendulum will swing far past center and back to biases though.
I’m a bit of a leftie, but it has been really painful for the last 10 years watching my side be the one that is actively racist and proposing systematic racism & sexism with a bare face.
We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
> I’m a bit of a leftie, but it has been really painful for the last 10 years watching my side be the one that is actively racist and proposing systematic racism & sexism with a bare face.
Examples?
> We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? But in the meantime, while we wait for the racists and sexists to become enlightened, should we not have initiatives, laws, education, to protect those who have historically been underrepresented and/or discriminated against?
We should, though you've phrased it very generically. Obviously there is a line, and actively disadvantaging those who are systemically/historically advantaged is chaos - I'm even comfortable calling it immoral. "Treating the symptom", or "brute-forcing" it, is a catastrophe in culture-sized problems.
Ideally, via cultural development, one day we can look at statistics and see that no race or gender gets more/better jobs than another. Legally demanding that it simply be the case is insane.
Apple VP stated officially as their hiring policy:
>We’ve made some changes to the way we do manager hiring … There’s two questions at the top of an offer when it goes to approval. One is that a female was interviewed and that a URE [underrepresented employee] was interviewed. And … for management positions, I have said that I won’t approve an offer unless there’s a yes next to one of those.
It's a tragedy how many people feel unrepresented by their nearest political party. Everybody is necessarily rounded to "right" or "left", but they both have such obvious, horrible issues (this is not a "both sides" argument, because I believe the issues of the right are much worse than the issues of the left).
Pendulums don't swing towards center, they end up resting on center when they run out energy. This analogy mostly fails because center is not correct, it is generally just less wrong than the extremes but sometimes the extremes are right.
This is absolutely correct; it's as true in the UK as in the USA. Nobody can identify even the slightest window of time in which there really was a non-sexist, colour-blind, non-homophobic, chill meritocratic consensus that did not need rebalancing.
People often point at the 1980s but culture was extremely aware back then of the need to re-balance, but it did so in a kind of crass way at every level of the media. Token hiring was rampant, and used as a way to wash society's hands of the problem by laundering seemingly diverse figures into the unmodified culture, as long as they didn't question it too much.
I would echo your point. Anyone here: when was it better, genuinely, for everyone, than it is now? When was it less complicated?
What's really funny to me about all of this is how little "merit" actually plays out in the real world for most people.
It doesn't seem to be as impactful as who you know, where you were born, who your parents are, where you live, where you go to school, what university you went to, etc. Sure, hard work is important, absolutely, but it's not the only marker.
Often in the real world all of these things actually make a better candidate.
I would have more empathy for programs that attempt to seperate things like who you know and institutional clout from a hiring process, anonymised candidates seems ideal. But this has been tried with the result of less diversity in hiring than suited the agenda of the day.
racism is bad business. the market deals with it in the following ways:
- the competent people who are being discriminated against leave and go to places where they aren’t discriminated
- people in protected classes sue for discrimination
- companies that don’t discriminate get a reputation as such and attract the best
- companies that keep discriminating keep losing talent and getting hit with lawsuits
what else could you possibly need to show that racism is bad business? that racists get what’s coming to them in the long term?
As the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. There are any number of ways a firm can do things that, in isolation, are bad for business, and still do very well overall if they’re protected by other factors (such as, case in point, the money printing machine that is Google ads). I think what the GP is saying is that sitting back and leaving things to the market to work out is essentially resigning the issue not to be resolved in our lifetimes.
> racism is bad business. the market deals with it in the following ways:
There's theory, and then there's practice.
If practice is directly contradicting your theory, that doesn't mean you should double down on your theory and hopefully it comes true. It means your theory is bullshit, and you should burn it and start over.
This comment got me thinking how relative the centre is to your experience, ideology, and perhaps the particular policies being referenced.
From my vantage point the US has never in my lifetime been remotely left of centre, they are moving from right to slightly further right.
DEI hiring is of course an easy target. It's a weak policy to tackle a complicated problem with obvious flaws and no track record of success. I think a truly left wing society would have quickly replaced it with more direct policies to hit generational poverty - EU style public education comes to mind.
It has nothing to do with a swinging pendulum and everything to do with training corporate America to obey in advance: strategically-chosen wedge issues that can be used to train major businesses, non-profits, universities and law firms to first ask what the executive might not like, before acting.
Visualizing it as a "pendulum" is probably not accurate. That assumes that there is some natural force like gravity or entropy seeking some neutral "center". What's happening here is a human force (the federal government) is acting deliberately by telling companies to adopt ideology or not be federal contractors. It's not some natural force swinging things left and right.
>It's time to return to meritocracy, colour-blind hiring and treating all employees as equally valuable.
We can't return to a state we've never been in.
Meritocracy has never existed - wealth, status, privilege and connections have always mattered. Colorblind hiring has never existed - race has always been a factor, and all employees have never been equally valuable to all others.
So let's be honest about where we're going - back to the status quo under which there was nothing in place, even in theory, to counteract the systemic effects of racial bias in hiring.
In a meritocracy you need to have equal chances to show merit. I’m not American and I don’t give a damn about DEI. But talking about meritocracy in a country where schools get funding based on the property taxes of the school district is pathetic. Maybe DEI wasn’t the answer but at some point some people just need help to be on a fair and level playing field.
I’m actually somewhat surprised that people see this as good. Like I said, maybe DEI wasn’t a good solution but seeing this as anything but a step back is just weird.
It’s not clear to me if Google is changing its politics or is just hiding it more cleverly. But either way, this type of political activism never had a place in business or government. Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination. The fact that one half of America openly supported discrimination in the workplace - things like hiring or promotion goals/quotas based on race or gender - still shocks me. I hope we return to a more moderate balance.
For those who are reading the parent comment, no, that's not what equity means.
Equity means just and fair allocation of resources and opportunities, not equality of outcomes.
"Equity" is the whole problem. MLK was looking for equality, but activists in the 21st century moved the goalposts, and now they're looking for reparations and other ways to try to offset the sins of our past. The problem with this is that children and relatives cannot be held legally responsible for crimes (or wrongs) committed by their parents/ancestors. (At least not in the USA.)
I'm presently in the most oppressed group -- I'm a white heterosexual male. There are no politically correct support groups, because they're all considered to be racist organizations, but the support groups for all other races (and genders) seem to be just fine.
All the DEI training materials claim that I'm "inherently racist", which is a ploy to punish me unjustly. None of my ancestors (at least going back 300 years) have ever owned slaves, and my wife is non-white and our kids are bi-racial.
I am looking forward to the return of merit-based systems, rather than racist policies and quotas. I'm dismayed that we've gone so far astray.
You are objectively incorrect almost across the board but especially about what “MLK was looking for.” See: https://www.diverseeducation.com/opinion/article/15661878/ho...
> I'm presently in the most oppressed group -- I'm a white heterosexual male.
The group you are in is the perpetually seeking victimhood group.
> All the DEI training materials claim that I'm "inherently racist", which is a ploy to punish me unjustly.
Right, the problem is not the actual racism rather it’s pointing out things that could be racist and making racists feel bad about being racist.
> I am looking forward to the return of merit-based systems, rather than racist policies and quotas. I'm dismayed that we've gone so far astray.
Around what time period would you pin this to? When do you think hiring and career progression was at its most meritocratic and colorblind?
You didn't include "gamer" in your group; you're hardly the most oppressed.
Yes, let's all go back to MLK's times, surely things were more fair then! Who, me, racist? Nooooo...
Every conservative has the same exact belief system: every conservative ideology before them was wrong, but this time, they're right. This time, for the first time in human history, conservatism is right, and we need to stop all progress immediately. We made it far enough. Any further and then it's bad!
Of course, that's why conservatives before you said. And the ones before them. And the ones before them. And the ones before them. And the ones before them.
Of course, we all know now they were wrong. Usually very wrong. But, surely, if we maintain the exact same ideology we will magically be right this time! Right guys? Right...?
> The problem with this is that children and relatives cannot be held legally responsible for crimes (or wrongs) committed by their parents/ancestors. (At least not in the USA.)
But no reparations scheme attempts to find anyone legally responsible, surely?
Most of them are simply aimed at pricking the consciences of organisations that benefited from (and sometimes exist only because of) slavery.
If even transfers of money are concerned it's usually in the form of donations to foundations and state aid, at least that is how it is here in the UK.
Isn’t that what equality already meant?
Here’s Kamala Harris saying exactly OP’s definition.
>we are talking more rightly about equity … it has to be about a goal of saying that everybody should end up in the same place
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LaAXixx7OLo
It is literally all about equality of outcomes.
Then explain the one picture that every single DEI advocate shares at the start of their intro sessions. You know the exact one that I'm talking about.
https://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-eq...
I guess it's up to each individual or organization on how to interpret it. Some places may interpret it as the more controversial equality of outcome.
I have personally gone through HR trainings that directly contradict what you're saying. "just and fair" allocation is also a vacuous qualifier. According to whom? If it's just and fair allocation according to someone that believes in equality of outcome, then you're not disagreeing with the comment you're responding to.
I think in practice, equity does in fact mean equity of outcome. Pretending that that's not the case feels like gaslighting to people, and drives people away from DEI initiatives.
FTA> Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.
It doesn't appear to be voluntarily "changing politics" but instead a mandate from the feds to change ideology or not work with them.
> Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination.
Do we still do 'citation needed' around here? Find me one serious person who has ever argued for equality of outcomes. Even fucking Lenin said "He who does not work shall not eat".
> Find me one serious person who has ever argued for equality of outcomes.
Without commenting on or evaluating the merits or demerits of the argument, here is a representative example:
https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/equity-vs-equal...
“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.”
This was a widely held stance in certain circles. Additional examples in different domains/disciplines are not difficult to find.
When an employer demands the composition of the engineering team must match the composition of the nation in sex and race, with an exception allowed to favor anyone who is not a white or Asian male, that’s equality of outcome.
When white and Asian males are eliminated if they didn’t attend a top-20 computer science program, but the existence of a degree doesn’t matter for anyone else, that’s equality of outcome.
When the stated goal of HR during an all-hands is literally to facilitate equality of outcomes.
I agree that all of those things would be bad! But I repeat - 'citation needed'. And when I say that, I do not mean "it happened once somewhere", I mean - I need you to prove that this is a systemic thing that requires changes in legislation, because that is what a bunch of tiny scaredbois are asking for.
I disagree. It doesn’t need some systemic proof or some other artificial - and frankly arbitrary - barrier to make changes in legislation. It’s obvious that the DEI programs of many companies are discriminatory. And also, this type of discrimination is already illegal under existing law. It nevertheless did not stop activists or the companies they infiltrated from making discrimination an official policy.
> activists or the companies they infiltrated
Name them. Please. Why do you all refuse to tell me who's doing all the bad things you're so worried about?
Political activism requires the entity to give a damn. Google doesn't. It was marketing to strengthen the Google brand. Now more money is to be made by sucking up to the Trump regime. Hence, that's what entities whose only real goal is greed do.
> Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination
Could you explain how you got to that definition? Being a non-native speaker, words do not have inherent meaning to me, and no matter how I look it up, this is not the definition I get. Instead, I get an explanation along the lines of "equality of opportunity additionally weighted against circumstances".
I understand that at a lot(?) of workplaces, sex and ethnic quotas did/do exist, and that there are folks who were hired over people who were better fit for the various positions (although my source for both of these is just accumulated and often blatantly biased internet gossip). But I don't see how these relate to the E in DEI necessarily, not any more than I see over-zealousness and malicious compliance towards an idea simply manifesting in this.
Conservatives have been trying to redefine equity as equality out of outcomes for some time now. It is disingenuous at best.
The fundamental question is whether you think the population distribution of a company with thousands (or tens of thousands) of employees should look similar to the population distribution of the countries it's based in.
If the distribution doesn't look similar, why not? Is there a good excuse for being predominantly male, or predominantly white, or predominantly asian, or predominantly indian? What does that good excuse look like? I see people complain about these things all the time.
There's an assumption here that discrimination in the workplace only exists because of DEI which is a weird leap to make IMO. You could argue that DEI made the situation worse and that gets us somewhere but it's not clear to me whether that's your position.
The discrimination is likely occurring much earlier in the employment pipeline (this was obvious in 2008). Why is it Google's job to solve that problem?
> Why is it Google's job to solve that problem?
This gave me a funny thought, can you imagine the absolute shitstorm if the government mandated ethnic and gender quotas for every workplace? Now that'd have been some real popcorn time, if I get my eyes roll over from all the overreach and oppression talk here now, that'd be a thread I would not dare to open for sure.
I agree that it is probably occurring at multiple points in the pipeline. We recently observed one attempt at fixing this earlier in the pipeline (affirmative action at universities) being struck down, though - perhaps for good reason. So it seems like it's not allowed to fix it at the university level, and it's not FAANG's job to fix it in their hiring pipeline, so whose job is it to fix it? Elementary school teachers?
My instinct is that it has to be addressed broadly across all stages of the pipeline for there to be any results.
Conserve the existing discrimination based upon race and gender (white men rule!) is the statistical reality your argument makes.
Shocked to see it on this forum of all places. /s
Well the "D", Diversity, is also a rebrand of discrimination.
The new South Park episode offers further insights into this very topic
I hope critics will be equally critical of the companies that weren't donating to any DEI-related orgs in the first place.
Most people aren’t critical of either and don’t care about DEI initiatives.
Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to blame these organizations "now-demonstrated to have been performative", as DEI's critics have been (performatively?) accusing them to be for so long? Or would that count as performative too?
Getting lost in the narratives at this point.
IDK what 'performative' means. But according to my calculations, if I donated $50,000 to a charity last year and $0 this year, I've still donated $50,000 to the charity.
Whereas someone who donated $0 last year and $0 this year has donated $0.
It'd be pretty weird if the former got worse press than the latter.
I was being sarcastic. For a lot of people the narrative is more important; I'd even argue it's what people normally default to, including me. What I meant to convey then was that at this point I find all those narrative driven perspectives beyond tiresome, and yet I fully expect them to barrel on regardless, unlike what you're hoping for.
Your napkin math is one demonstration why a focus on narrative can prove misguided. It can matter very little how genuine their intents were if in practice they materially helped a significant amount.
Disadvantaged folks getting jobs is not performative.
Well yeah. Sure didn't stop from people claiming otherwise though, or at least ignoring it / focusing on the performance and narrative aspect instead.
The companies which followed their principles even when it was against the prevailing ideology du jour? (Being originally from USSR I hate ideologies and those 180 turns people do on a dime the moment the ideology changes)
Writing as a person who wants the future to be a better place, the number one pass time of progressives is complaining about other progressives. The number two pass time is complaining about conservatives.
Anyway, my complaint is that a lot of DEI flavored stuff is very very lazy.
A fundamental issue is that once a person has been raised, you don't get to raise them again. You can't parent a grown person - even if they need more parenting. Social punishment only works inside a socially cohesive group. The shame and anxiety you create with social punishment may be exploited by someone else.
Anyway, I'm sure some DEI groups are coming to terms with why anti-woke trolling is so effective, and I hope they find a good way to tell that story.
*pastime
Still working with the IDF to kill children in Palestine though!
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I’m not sure how this is the center. We have devolved into something else. This is an expression of the tight control this authoritarian government holds on business. What we’re stumbling toward is possibly white nationalism. It’s not just the crackdowns on free speech, which are now commonplace, but mass deportation and concentration camps. I get that DEI is a conservative talking point but what’s taking shape before our eyes is far more sinister than just a rollback of Democrat identity politics.
White nationalism is the neutral state of the United States, hence the misperception of a return to “the center”.
How does meritocracy and color-blind hiring lead to white nationalism, mass deportation and concentration camps? Are you suggesting that foreign-born population would fail if judged on merit? That seems like quite a leap.
> Let's shut down these employee networks based on immutable characteristics.
Each of these networks is open to everyone. You can be straight and a member of the LGBTQ+ network just fine. You can be white and join the Black network too.
The networks exist because people have (and are) the targets of persecution. It's nice to find other people who will understand what that feels like and make connections and advocate for less systematic persecution.
[dead]
I agree with everything you said to some degree, except, unfortunately, the first sentence. The pendulum is obviously swinging to the right, generally, which, to be 100% transparent, I believe is worse than when the pendulum is on the left. I wish we could keep it centered, but I guess that's not how it works.
I hope we do get a bit more sense in things.
I’m worried that the pendulum will swing far past center and back to biases though.
I’m a bit of a leftie, but it has been really painful for the last 10 years watching my side be the one that is actively racist and proposing systematic racism & sexism with a bare face.
We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
> I’m a bit of a leftie, but it has been really painful for the last 10 years watching my side be the one that is actively racist and proposing systematic racism & sexism with a bare face.
Examples?
> We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? But in the meantime, while we wait for the racists and sexists to become enlightened, should we not have initiatives, laws, education, to protect those who have historically been underrepresented and/or discriminated against?
>should we not...
We should, though you've phrased it very generically. Obviously there is a line, and actively disadvantaging those who are systemically/historically advantaged is chaos - I'm even comfortable calling it immoral. "Treating the symptom", or "brute-forcing" it, is a catastrophe in culture-sized problems.
Ideally, via cultural development, one day we can look at statistics and see that no race or gender gets more/better jobs than another. Legally demanding that it simply be the case is insane.
One example:
Apple VP stated officially as their hiring policy:
>We’ve made some changes to the way we do manager hiring … There’s two questions at the top of an offer when it goes to approval. One is that a female was interviewed and that a URE [underrepresented employee] was interviewed. And … for management positions, I have said that I won’t approve an offer unless there’s a yes next to one of those.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UfuYjAj1jZM
https://aflegal.org/press-release/america-first-legal-demand...
This is illegal, it clearly violates the civil rights act.
It's a tragedy how many people feel unrepresented by their nearest political party. Everybody is necessarily rounded to "right" or "left", but they both have such obvious, horrible issues (this is not a "both sides" argument, because I believe the issues of the right are much worse than the issues of the left).
Pendulums don't swing towards center, they end up resting on center when they run out energy. This analogy mostly fails because center is not correct, it is generally just less wrong than the extremes but sometimes the extremes are right.
>return to meritocracy, colour-blind hiring
Yeah, let's "return" to that. Let's "go back" to the good old pre-racism days that we all remember that totally happened.
Please enlighten me as to when this period occurred in American history. Forget America, give me an example in any ethnically diverse society.
This is absolutely correct; it's as true in the UK as in the USA. Nobody can identify even the slightest window of time in which there really was a non-sexist, colour-blind, non-homophobic, chill meritocratic consensus that did not need rebalancing.
People often point at the 1980s but culture was extremely aware back then of the need to re-balance, but it did so in a kind of crass way at every level of the media. Token hiring was rampant, and used as a way to wash society's hands of the problem by laundering seemingly diverse figures into the unmodified culture, as long as they didn't question it too much.
I would echo your point. Anyone here: when was it better, genuinely, for everyone, than it is now? When was it less complicated?
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So you think fairness in opportunity is just declaring that we should be fair. I guess that should do away with the racists. Got it.
The best argument against DEI is that its proponents actively oppose merit.
Merit based hiring and rewards are fair, and actually build trust.
The ends of the pipeline (the private companies) should never have tried to evaluate the opportunitys someone had received.
What's really funny to me about all of this is how little "merit" actually plays out in the real world for most people.
It doesn't seem to be as impactful as who you know, where you were born, who your parents are, where you live, where you go to school, what university you went to, etc. Sure, hard work is important, absolutely, but it's not the only marker.
Often in the real world all of these things actually make a better candidate.
I would have more empathy for programs that attempt to seperate things like who you know and institutional clout from a hiring process, anonymised candidates seems ideal. But this has been tried with the result of less diversity in hiring than suited the agenda of the day.
racism is bad business. the market deals with it in the following ways: - the competent people who are being discriminated against leave and go to places where they aren’t discriminated - people in protected classes sue for discrimination - companies that don’t discriminate get a reputation as such and attract the best - companies that keep discriminating keep losing talent and getting hit with lawsuits
what else could you possibly need to show that racism is bad business? that racists get what’s coming to them in the long term?
> racism is bad business
The history of the US is littered with riots that not only targeted individuals and families, but businesses and other sources of minority wealth.
Turns out that you don't need to be better at business if you can prescribe the competition with impunity.
As the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. There are any number of ways a firm can do things that, in isolation, are bad for business, and still do very well overall if they’re protected by other factors (such as, case in point, the money printing machine that is Google ads). I think what the GP is saying is that sitting back and leaving things to the market to work out is essentially resigning the issue not to be resolved in our lifetimes.
> racism is bad business. the market deals with it in the following ways:
There's theory, and then there's practice.
If practice is directly contradicting your theory, that doesn't mean you should double down on your theory and hopefully it comes true. It means your theory is bullshit, and you should burn it and start over.
What if teams of white men actually perform better than diverse ones?
I think this is what the left tends to believe, so that they can see any non white hire as a political win.
This comment got me thinking how relative the centre is to your experience, ideology, and perhaps the particular policies being referenced.
From my vantage point the US has never in my lifetime been remotely left of centre, they are moving from right to slightly further right.
DEI hiring is of course an easy target. It's a weak policy to tackle a complicated problem with obvious flaws and no track record of success. I think a truly left wing society would have quickly replaced it with more direct policies to hit generational poverty - EU style public education comes to mind.
Not the center, we’re returning to the hellish far right shithole after making marginal progress towards the center.
It has nothing to do with a swinging pendulum and everything to do with training corporate America to obey in advance: strategically-chosen wedge issues that can be used to train major businesses, non-profits, universities and law firms to first ask what the executive might not like, before acting.
The center of political pendulums is a maintenance of the status quo.
Visualizing it as a "pendulum" is probably not accurate. That assumes that there is some natural force like gravity or entropy seeking some neutral "center". What's happening here is a human force (the federal government) is acting deliberately by telling companies to adopt ideology or not be federal contractors. It's not some natural force swinging things left and right.
>It's time to return to meritocracy, colour-blind hiring and treating all employees as equally valuable.
We can't return to a state we've never been in.
Meritocracy has never existed - wealth, status, privilege and connections have always mattered. Colorblind hiring has never existed - race has always been a factor, and all employees have never been equally valuable to all others.
So let's be honest about where we're going - back to the status quo under which there was nothing in place, even in theory, to counteract the systemic effects of racial bias in hiring.
In a meritocracy you need to have equal chances to show merit. I’m not American and I don’t give a damn about DEI. But talking about meritocracy in a country where schools get funding based on the property taxes of the school district is pathetic. Maybe DEI wasn’t the answer but at some point some people just need help to be on a fair and level playing field.
I’m actually somewhat surprised that people see this as good. Like I said, maybe DEI wasn’t a good solution but seeing this as anything but a step back is just weird.
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Do you have any examples of dei actually making a better product?
Do you consider the countless examples where a small startup grows and becomes more diverse while the product becomes shit as counterexamples?
>let me guess what privileges you have.
Let's not. This snideness should be indefensible, in an ideal world.