Hacker News Reader

Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

Viewpoint diversity is very, very important. But for a large contingent of the workforce, their viewpoints are already represented in the numerous implicit and ideological supports that our society has developed, without them even needing to be present: this is called "hegemony".

If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair. But one should be careful not to allow emotions and sensitivities to creep in, to do the ideological work for you. Your status is not threatened by people of different backgrounds coming together and critiquing the processes and pathologies that dominate today (and that white men typically grow up in, and so are already comfortable navigating to the point they assume that it is the natural way of things). It will make everything better for everyone if we take the time to put effort into including (injecting) the diversity of viewpoints that you find so valuable, and that is precisely the aim of DEI.

View on HN

The point is that DEI groups can seem very homogeneous, without diverse viewpoints, and they can weild large amounts of power.

Posters above you have illustrated how issues of DEI are not investigated, if they happen to not fit into the agenda of the DEI group, e.g. examples of Ageism, or things that discriminate against rather than for white men. Such effects exist, as the OP article illustrates.

To say that the DEI groups don't need any white voices because they are some form of silent majority is to elevat the white voice too, which itself seems inequitable and problematic wherever you stand.

What is your point? As you seem to have not engaged with the viewpoints above, it seems you are more reacting against perceived sentiment, rather than trying to discuss ideas

> is to elevat[e] the white voice too

Elevate?? We are not assigning authority to the white voice, we are assigning hegemony. It is a material fact that whiteness and maleness are the centers of Western philosophy, and everything else is measured based on deviance from that perceived center. There are by now centuries of literature on the matter.

> if they happen to not fit into the agenda of the DEI group

What you call "agenda" I call "bandwidth". Think about it: a fledgling DEI group, small to start, must tackle a lot of metastasized workplace issues. But they're not going to get anything done by spreading their forces too thin. So they focus first on what will make the most material effect with the least effort: call it "productivity". Ageism does fall down the list of priorities, for the simple matter that older people tend to have a larger net worth and so are more insulated from material consequences writ large. It is those who are poorest who need insulation from poverty first, who get help first: this is called "triage". The rising tide starts at the lowest point, right? Without directly asking for everyone's net worth, which is extremely illegal as I'm sure you know, we must resort to proxy measures.

Would you join an engineering team who was constantly switching contexts instead of focusing in on particular features during particular sprints? No, that would be counterproductive. Afford your colleagues the same consideration, even if their goal is not a webapp but compassion in the workplace.

Whiteness and maleness are not and cannot be material facts and it is a category error to insist otherwise, nevermind elevating them as the axiomatic center of your worldview.

The inequity resulting from the material consequences of appearing in, being raised in, and interacting with society as white and male is a well-established statistical fact.

There are important differences between material and statistical facts you would be better off not glossing over.

And more centrally, whiteness (in particular) and maleness are still not facts. You're in voodoo territory if you center them as such.

A nice bit of wordplay but that's nonsense. The difference between statistical facts and material facts is, one is a(system-scale) summary of the other (individual-scale) measure.

I fail to see the nit you're picking at with that second bit. Are you saying they are categories? Suppositions? Made up? Do you mean to imply then that they are "spooks" and their presence in the minds of physical agents has no bearing on physical outcomes?

This seems like a well articulated case that you're making, though I'd like to argue from the opposite perspective for a bit.

> If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair.

This is a non-trivial objection. I struggle to think of many acceptable scenarios in which we have to choose between acknowledging something which we don't believe as true, or living in an unfair system.

Likewise, I don't know of any people personally who object to DEI efforts to make fields more appealing to a wider audience, or bringing in more diverse perspectives, or even critiquing existing processes.

The main objection that I see is against the policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal. For instance, saying "our engineering team is largely Asian, we might be missing other perspectives" is a good call-out, and I can think of nobody who'd oppose calling that out. Enacting a policy that said "for the next engineer in this team, let's make sure we hire a non-Asian employee", that is the source of a lot of the umbrage with DEI efforts.

In my experience, opponents largely agree with the goals (more diverse viewpoints), but disagree with the methods (pandering in the best case, and preferential treatment by group in the worst case.)

You are correct that there is no inherent cost to learning about and bringing in different perspectives. There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained.

Moreover, an even bigger concern is that these decisions aren't being made based on perspective, but only on immutable identity (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender). In these cases, the cost is even greater, since one can't address the situation by bringing in more perspectives; if the company says "we need more non-Asian employees", it is a really big cost (and one you can't avoid) if you happen to be Asian, regardless of how many heterodox opinions you might otherwise bring.

Nobody I know opposes thegoals of DEI, but it's not hard to see how policies enacted which disadvantage people based on immutable characteristics might be reasonably considered unfair.

You know people like that; they just don't say it because it's career suicide. I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team. One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful. Two, it has been more than proven through human history that people get along better with people culturally similar to them. How can we simultaneously hold the belief that massively successful corporations systematically exclude minorities, and that you need minorities to be more successful?

No field needs to be more appealing to any audience than it already is. Software does not need to have more women or black people in it; that has nothing to do with software. Basketball doesn't need more Asians; teaching doesn't need more men; chess doesn't need more women; the entire concept of a group needing more of something else, as though every group must be diverse, as though cultures and genders have no inherent preferences at all, is strange and absurd. The goals of DEI are useless, and any policy made to actively reach those goals is a waste of time and resources, at best.

> One, it has not been proven or even shown somewhat that a diverse team is more successful.

This is just a wildly baseless assertion on the scale of disinformation, not even misinformation. It's not worth the time to go into the rest of this comment but the quote above summarizes it well.

It is one of those things that gets "proven" by one or two politically funded studies that shows a mild effect size with tiny sample, then magnified 100x in headlines until it is "common knowledge". There is no such proven source like you believe and imply. The effect sizes shown are on the order of those showing eggs raise cholesterol, eggs don't raise cholesterol, dietary fat causes obesity, sugar causes obesity, chocolate is healthy, chocolate is unhealthy, masks work, masks don't work. It's noise; the data is trash. There is not even any historical or anecdotal reason to believe it's true, in this case. It exists in the mind of the public entirely because it's politically expedient for it to do so.

Another completely made-up assertion. Just saying it doesn't make it true.

>Whole Foods is keeping an eye on stores at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by Business Insider.

>...

>Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a "diversity index" that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers' compensation claims, according to the documents.

https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...

> I am opposed to the goal, in principle, of seeking a diverse team.

This is really interesting to me, and is honestly a viewpoint I don't think I've seen before, I'd like to learn more about this.

It seems to me that there are self-evident wins to be had by appealing to a larger group. For instance, I really like jazz music. If all of a sudden (through no intervention or modification to how we approach it), jazz music were really appealing to everyone, that seems like an easy win to me: I get more jazz to listen to.

I can understand the viewpoint of saying "We shouldn't need to change anything or take any action with the goal of appealing to more people". For instance, if focus groups said "Featuring pop-singers on jazz albums will broaden the appeal to teenagers", it's fair to oppose that in preference of the way jazz is now.

It is new to me to say that one would be opposed to appealing to a larger group, though, even if the cost of that appeal were zero.

I almost wrote "having a diverse team", but that's incorrect. I have no real problem with anyone having a diverse team. I specifically take issue with seeking one, actively, like you elaborated on.

The problem I have with broadening appeal, at least for hobby type things, is that you're spending a lot of effort to attract people who are by definition not very attracted to your hobby. You're working extra hard to attract people because they're different, not because you want more participants, but because you want different kinds of participants. This is not a goal I find desirable or worthy. I like playing chess; chess is mostly male; I would benefit if chess had more players; getting more people into chess is good. Yes, all this I agree with. But then, somehow, the course of action becomes 'get more women to play chess'. Do you know how few women enjoy chess? Very few. For every dollar spent on 'women in chess' initiatives, women's chess scholarships, etc, you could have attracted probably 3 times as many players if you just focused on 'chess' instead of 'women in chess'. You'd attract mostly males, but that is okay. There is no reason to want the diversity! It's about chess, not gender!

Likewise with many things, including the workplace. If you market jazz everywhere, the people who like it are going to get into jazz. You don't need to specifically have a 'young asian teenage girls jazz' marketing division. Who cares if that specific demographic is underrepresented in jazz? What the hell does that have to do with jazz? Just attract people to the thing by advertising the thing; leave DEI crap out of it.

> The main objection that I see is against the policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal.

That's fair, but then, baby goes out with the bathwater when people come onto public fora to discuss in less precise ways than you have stated here.

> There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained.

This is an individualized cost, which does not bear the externalities which exist on the society as a whole. On a societal scale, there is significant and obvious opportunity cost to excluding people from the workplace in systematic ways. It is, in a word, selfish.

> Moreover, an even bigger concern is that these decisions aren't being made based on perspective, but only on immutable identity

This is where the pathologies ossify, and I agree we should address this issue to make the endeavor even better. In any other setting, though, we would not collectively conclude to dissolve the initiative entirely because of this. This may be why discussions (debates) on the matter go so poorly: critics use language which suggests they want to do away with the matter entirely, while advocates are fighting back only against that proposed solution and not against what you have identified as a deeper (and definitely fixable!) problem. If conversations were to start there, and SOPs set up to encourage outcomes that do not have that quality, we could get a lot more done. I acknowledge that there are some who would exclude white voices based on whiteness alone -- every movement has that element -- so conversations may be non-starters in certain situations. But there's clearly a lot of hurt and trauma on both sides and the way we come together to discuss it looks basically exactly like how DEI advocates suggest anyway, so you're only hurting the cause if you decide to exclude yourself from these conversations when they are available to you.

One last point about the unfairness: there is a distinct tension in the collective mind between considering outcomes from individual vs societal perspectives. We love to hear about rising tides but hate to hear about one person getting unfair benefits. But that's just a matter of statistics, fortunately or otherwise! Do we want more equity, or do we want such a strict ranking of individuals that social mobility is made impossible? Individuals may have bad outcomes because random things happen, individuals may have good outcomes because random things happen, and there are always people moving up and down the ladder. Just because you can point at a single person who got advantaged one time does not mean it's not happening elsewhere, all the time, and it seems really immature to direct vitriol at individuals when we are only really concerned with aggregate quantities.

> This is an individualized cost, which does not bear the externalities which exist on the society as a whole.

This is a reasonable stance, but is also the one that I personally object to the most (if this is the core of our disagreement, then I think that's fine, and that reasonable people can disagree on this.)

In my view, it is not fine to disadvantage individuals for their immutable characteristics, regardless of societal benefits. It is fine to disadvantage individuals for their mutable characteristics, if it benefits society. I agree across the board with your point of focusing on social mobility, and that is precisely why I'm opposed to DEI policies that focus on immutable characteristics.

For instance, if we were to say "under-resourced communities tend to produce fewer STEM grads, let's invest more in STEM programs for those communities", that is great! It may be the case that a majority of the benefit from such programs would be to traditionally under-represented groups. This is great too, but it isn't the objective of the policy; the objective of the policy is to provide the same opportunities across the board. In this circumstance, there is no disadvantage to anyone. If nine-in-ten members of these communities are from under-represented groups, then awesome: you're helping more members of these groups get opportunities in engineering. If one-in-ten members of the under-resourced community happens to be Asian, though, they'll receive the same benefit as anyone else from the new investment. Wins all around!

What I object to, though, is the idea that we should prioritize actions based on the immutable characteristics of individuals for social benefit. For instance, saying "Black communities are traditionally under-represented in STEM: we are going to offer opportunities only to Black students". The only difference between the scenarios, in my mind, is that the latter case explicitly disadvantages the one-in-ten Asian members of the aforementioned community who also is under-resourced.

> Just because you can point at a single person who got advantaged one time does not mean it's not happening elsewhere, all the time, and it seems really immature to direct vitriol at individuals when we are only really concerned with aggregate quantities.

To be clear, I'm not trying to direct vitriol at anyone here, nor to nit-pick cases where individuals got "unfair" gains through chance. I'm merely trying to point out that for the stated set of goals (which are largely to make sure we're incorporating diverse viewpoints), directing policies to address circumstance rather than identity is far more likely to actually achieve these goals in the long-term. It also has the side-benefit of largely being perceived as more fair.

DEI is never focused on viewpoint diversity, though, it's focused on racial, ethnic, gender, disability, etc diversity. The latter kind of diversity does not imply the former.

> one should be careful not to allow emotions and sensitivities to creep in, to do the ideological work for you

Attributing all questioning/resistance of DEI to emotions and sensitivities is pretty condescending. GP was clear and reasoned about the contradictions they saw in DEI efforts, and your dismissal of them is quite frustrating and unproductive.

Also, are you saying that the work that needs to be done is, in fact, ideological? Ideology should be nowhere near this.

> DEI is never focused on viewpoint diversity, though, it's focused on racial, ethnic, gender, disability, etc diversity. The latter kind of diversity does not imply the former.

I strongly agree, but then, how do you measure the diversity a person will contribute before you have incorporated that person into your organization? Obviously a moving target like "viewpoint diversity" cannot be acquired in that setting, so we resort to proxy measures. I would say race and class diversity achieves that better than alternatives.

> Attributing all questioning/resistance of DEI to emotions and sensitivities is pretty condescending.

Didn't imply "all", but it is certainly a factor, just as it is a factor in literally every other concern. As well, it is certainly no worse than the bad faith, straw man arguments all across this post, so in the interest of equity let's make sure to point those out, too.

> Ideology should be nowhere near this.

Ideology is everywhere, all of the time... it's the stuff worldviews are made of. My point in the previous comment was specifically about the chronic lack of acknowledgment of that very crucial issue, and the resulting line of criticism that starts from an inappropriate place. Of course, someone who believes their viewpoint is natural, inevitable, or rational will reject this concern as irrelevant. That is the treachery of ideology -- everything you say and do is contextualized on your own personal model, so much so that it is like the stories of the fishes talking about the water. It is so all-encompassing that it cannot be distinguished until your own exposure to a critical mass of alternative viewpoints has made it clear just how few people you share a common ground with.

The backlash we see here and elsewhere against DEI is coming from those who are insulated from truly alternative viewpoints to the point that they cannot conceive of valid arguments for the other side. They judge the validity based on their brand of rationality which is of course correlated very strongly to the kinds of things they have exposed themselves to thus far.

There is no diversity in seeing a million faces and meeting a million people, if those people already think and speak with concepts derived from the same foundational framework as you. Disagreeing about how many cops to have is a policy issue; disagreeing about whether to have cops is still basically outside the Overton window, so people have not really been exposed to the substantive arguments at scale that make a conversation about that productive. The aim of DEI is to bring that conversation into the workplace, where real material consequences are felt and where everyone is together (ostensibly) working in good faith toward a common goal. It is saddening but not surprising to see the reaction to this initiative.

But the dei perspective is the one that is hegemonic at this point. Something off a paradox for those possessed of it, displayed in such absurdities as believing that viewpoint diversity is the (precise) aim of dei.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com