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Comment by ElCheapo | Hacker News Reader

I think these institutions believe that more diversity ----> more inclusivity and less racism. How would a racist indian national deeply entrenched in caste culture help my company be less racist? How would an asian supremacist laotian increase the workplace's acceptance?

If you want a place of tolerance then it should be populated by tolerant people. Throwing together males and females with a random sample of skin colors and passports is not going to make your university a more inclusive place by default.

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> How would a racist indian national deeply entrenched in caste culture help my company be less racist?

To be fair, there are many people from traditionally chauvinistic groups who despise the very chauvinism they live in. Many of them may be intelligent and productive people. Dismissing each and every individual because of the group is the root of discrimination.

Some attempts at diversity may go too far - tolerating intolerant people just because "they grew up in different environment" - leading to the paradox of tolerance [0]. I've read news [1] about the very phenomenon.

The fact is - tolerance, diversity, open-mindedness - those are all values, and they need to be enforced. In order to keep a tolerant society, you must show the door to anyone who disagrees with that philosophy. The same way you need to lock up criminals to keep an ordered society from devolving into chaos.

But ultimately, in order to have a truly tolerant society, each and every member of it must be evaluated as an individual.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[1] https://restofworld.org/2022/tech-india-caste-divides/

You can't meaningfully enforce open-mindedness or tolerance. The very idea is an oxymoron. The whole notion of tolerance is based on the idea that we might sometimes find it expedient to work alongside people we don't agree with about everything.

Every single person I've met in my life that was racist or sexist or whatever-ist (including myself) has only become a better person and more open-minded when they were forced to work in close proximity to people of other races and cultures. As to myself, I was raised in a pretty racist place in the USA, and via the military I met so many other people that I finally realized that the stereotypes I was taught about others were incorrect, or at least if they were correct there was some cultural context to why that stereotype had been warped from the original context. I think it's better to randomly throw people of different races, sexes, and cultures together than not, personally, even if it makes business a bit less productive or the person hired is slightly less optimal for that position. We're not machines, after all, and shouldn't be treated like only our output matters.

> ... We're not machines, after all, and shouldn't be treated like only our output matters.

Sure, but that's not enforcing open-mindedness or tolerance. It's just creating the kind of setting where the benefits of a more tolerant stance are easiest to get.

Sure, but now we're just discussing the meaning of the word "enforce". Perhaps I've just chosen an inappropriate word for the meaning I wanted to convey.

Yea, and I guess I agree we can't enforce it, we can just do things to make it easier to become open minded. One way to do that is to force people to interact in close proximity to cultures and individuals who are different than what they have experienced to date. Mostly, today, that involves putting people of different skin colors and sexes together. Tomorrow, perhaps we'll have to make sure humans and intelligent cows work closely together, I don't know (I'm serious! perhaps if humans and cows spent more time together we'd eat less of them?).

> Every single person I've met in my life that was racist or sexist or whatever-ist (including myself) has only become a better person and more open-minded when they were forced to work in close proximity to people of other races and cultures.

Apart from this being anecdotal evidence, were they not forced to act as a better person and more open-minded in that environment ?

> The whole notion of tolerance is based on the idea that we might sometimes find it expedient to work alongside people we don't agree with about everything.

There's a difference between disagreeing about something in theory, and acting maliciously in order to exclude someone from your group because they disagree with you. As you said, the whole idea of tolerance boils down to tolerating disagreements. Someone who doesn't tolerate disagreements cannot work with others who do.

It's not agreement that must be enforced in order to have a tolerant society, it's tolerance to disagreement.

> There's a difference between disagreeing about something in theory, and acting maliciously in order to exclude someone from your group

The main difference is that preventing malicious actions is generally feasible, via tweaking institutional rules (such as by outright forbidding tests of religious/ideological conformity like the ones OP discusses). That's still not enforcing anything in any substantial sense; it's just a direct tweak to the "rules of the game", meant to drive improved outcomes.

No, but you can foster and protect a culture of open minded people by pushing back against people who are actively being divisive and promoting intolerance of some groups in the name of diversity and equity.

Most of the metrics that I have been judged by over the course of my career (e.g. lines of code, story point velocity, etc) are absolute bullshit, and easily manipulated. And yet... I continue to build "dashboards" for VP's to stare at, and continue to be measured by deeply flawed metrics.

I believe that every rational thinking person would agree that tracking racial and ethnic and sexual headcount percentages doesn't necessarily mean what they purport to mean. But... what are you gonna do? We just need metrics, any metrics. Bad metrics are better than no metrics, or at least this seems to be the deeply entrenched mindset of business.

I find it so eerie that institutions are trying to design their work force's distribution of skin color. Unless your work force is make-up models or something.

Because context matters.

With some exception (specifically our industry), all the privilige of a high caste indian or Laotian supremacy goes away when you move to a Western/White dominated culture.

They are much more likely to encounter racism against THEIR race, than have the opportunity to promote their own racism.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/googles-caste-bias-pr...

https://qz.com/apple-meta-and-google-must-fight-caste-discri...

https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...

We also need DEI at the border in addition to the colleges and for job opportunities. The way LatinX people are oppressed at the border is inhumane. Not to mention the trauma inflicted on LatinX people during last administration.

LatinX is a racist term that is deeply offensive to people of latin american background.

Polls consistently show less than 5% of hispanic and latin american people want to be called latinx. Lets respect their wishes.

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