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Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

It could be that the people do care about the values listed, but don't know an effective way to guarantee them, and that existing diversity statements are a stopgap measure until something better is figured out.

But no, let's jump directly to "Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy."

Or... perhaps don't ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by incompetence.

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He argued that if universities cared about diversity their positions on affirmative action would be more dynamic than is commonly accepted. e.g.:

> Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society.

The examples he uses demonstrate that, in his mind, caring about diversity requires measuring circumstance. You might argue that universities are not so shallow as he's claiming, but I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.

> their positions on affirmative action would be more dynamic than is commonly accepted

People are already trying to get affirmative action programs dismantled. Making them more complicated would lead to larger surface area, and be easier to attack.

> I don't believe the article is mere mudslinging.

The entire argument of the article is that they don't measure diversity the same way he wants them to measure diversity, and therefore they don't care about it. It never considers that schools consider it differently, or whether his method is consistent, or whether what he proposes has been considered and dismissed.

I agree, the idea that they don't care and go to all this work seems absurd.

Seems more likely they're just bad advocates / come up with bad policies for ideas they like. THAT does not surprise me the least. The amount of "If you get what you want here, I don't think that gets you any closer to your goal, in fact it might do the opposite." situations is pretty high out there.

I've really wondered how much ESG scores affect how much companies "care" about this sort of thing.

University bureaucrats have spent decades creating new kinds of work for themselves. It is an end in itself. They don't need to care.

> Or... perhaps don't ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by incompetence.

Hanlon's razor is a heuristic which doesn't work very well in this case. Clearly, there is a lot of social pressure to at least pretend to care about diversity, so by default you'd expect at least some people to lie about it.

Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by apathy.

I’ve seen it in myself and can only speculate about others, but sometimes I’ll leave a meeting completely unconvinced by an argument and come in the next day singing a different tune.

People like the echo chamber because it’s comfortable. But comfortable doesn’t lead to growth.

The original article went into an in-depth analysis that you label as “jump directly to…”

An in depth analysis can still miss possible logical conclusions. I don't think the GP is saying they skipped possible analysis, just that they fail to consider alternatives.

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