Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

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This is such a "ugh" topic. Of course it's kind of absurd to be like "Write me an essay on how Woke you are", but it's the inevitable result of pretty low quality individuals trying to solve a real problem.

Academia has obviously been historically discriminatory, and due to the massive problems with the structure of US universities it still has all sorts of problems. The way to fix that is obviously to bring in senior leadership who have experience and understanding of the myriad complex issues facing academia today and who can create a series of changes to tackle some of the systemic underlying issues which have embedded a monoculture in most institutions. Actually doing that is really difficult though, and challenges a series of power structures that are well embedded and aren't going to change. Senior leadership at universities answer to donors, not junior staff.

So there's a push to change, but it's not going to change? What do you do? You cover your ass by making sure you meticulously document just exactly how you are making changes so you can point to stuff when people realise that absolutely nothing is changing. You say to your woke alumni "look at the great initiatives" and you say to your non-woke alumni "Psstt... I think we've got a spare space for your 85 IQ grandson"

I was asked to describe the diversity within my private life during a job interview last year. It was a relatively lower end position, not even vaguely academic, and neither the role nor the company have any particular applicability to "diversity".

Is it illegal to lie on these sorts of questions? Like, you could say you're gay, married to an indigenous trans man raising 3 URM children you've adopted. All of these things are illegal to use in hiring decisions, so the veracity of your answers would only matter if the company was engaged in unlawful hiring practices.

Exactly. Just lie about this in whatever way will get you the job. Truths do not belong in the hiring process.

yes. Its illegal racial discrimination. If white people actually called the bluff of civil rights by suing on these grounds the ruling class would be forced to either explicitly add anti-white discrimination to the law or stop their anti-white policies.

Sovereign-man levels of understanding of the US legal system and governmental processes here

Companies basically never get forced to hire a white person to make it more diverse even if doing so would. These laws are not uniformly applied. Understand that.

That seems like the greatest question to get. One could spin all sorts of fantasies and talk for hours...

>The way to fix that is obviously to bring in senior leadership

No. No, my goodness no.

The way to fix that isn't to continue to expand an already bloated bureaucracy that is uninterested in actual intellectual development. The way to fix it is to blow up the university system itself in this country.

> Academia has obviously been historically discriminatory, and due to the massive problems with the structure of US universities it still has all sorts of problems.

Which problems, in particular? At the big land grant school I attended in the 1990s minority representation in classes and teaching positions exceeded their demographic representation in the surrounding area.

Fast-forward 30 years and the same is true at the big school my kid is attending now with the notable exception of one minority.

The issue with DEI is that it tries to addresses discrimination with MORE discrimination

While some DEI policies are arguably discriminatory, many are not.

If you know that the general population is 20% race A, 10% race B, 30% race C, and yet your admissions are only pulling in 40% race C, 5% race B and 55% race A, you know something is wrong. Policies designed to keep your admissions closer to the general population would not count as discrimination because if everything is functioning correctly your distribution is going to at least resemble the gen pop distribution. Obviously it will never be a perfect fit, because various factors like location, education etc will influence your hiring pool.

A lot of people insist that trying to get your metrics to match reality is discrimination because they think it means someone who "doesn't deserve it" will get hired instead of them. The reality is that a biased pipeline might exclude you too, regardless of your gender or skin color, because a biased pipeline is probably filled with things like nepotism, people blackballing candidates off of Vibes(tm), hiring based on appearance, etc. For every time biased hiring benefits you, it probably hurt you 3 times and you might not have noticed.

The reality is that if you look at the raw DEI metrics for most large corporations they do not even vaguely resemble the general population. There's no rational excuse for that, you have to do something.

Are you willing to apply this DEI guidelines to music and sports? Black Americans are overrepresented and Asian Americans are massively underrepresented. Do you not think there is an element of personal choice and culture involved here?

If you had metrics on race distribution in music, spread across the entire population of the US, yes I would expect that a record label fairly and evenly recruiting would have artist metrics that match.

Where artist choice comes in to the picture is if a label focuses on a single genre, you're now subject to the race balance in that genre. I don't think that's a problem, but it still is ideally fair recruiting.

Is there a single Asian American in the Billboard Top 100? Do you think if you asked 100 Asian American families and 100 Black American families; would you rather have your child go to an Ivy League college or appear in the Billboard Top 100, that the answers would be relatively equal between the two groups?

It is not a problem to be solved when different cultural groups make different choices for themselves and their families. The real problem is that DEI comes about 20 years too late to do anything to help, and sometimes it is in industries that don't appeal to the cultures it is trying to attract. Properly investing in children will greatly increase the number of minorities in the pipeline for college and well-paying jobs.

I don't think "it's way too late to easily solve these problems" really supports claims that DEI is discriminatory or bad, though. It just means it's ineffective.

Investing in children and creating equal opportunities for children are both great measures to take to boost diversity in education and the workplace.

An ineffective waste of time is bad

Maybe, maybe not. One can have a heated discussion about whether this style of DEI / affirmative action is discrimination, but there’s a less heated and more empirical discussion to be had: is it effective, or, on a related note, is it the right approach?

Suppose I observe that 10% of the population is in class X, but only 5% of my hires are. I could try to adjust my job application acceptance criteria to increase that number to 10%. I could try to change my outreach efforts to encourage more of that class to apply. And I could possibly determine that a lot less than 10% of the pool of potential qualified applicants is in the class, that much of the bottleneck is earlier in the pipeline, and that something needs to be done about the pipeline.

And note that those latter options are hard. In many respects, affirmative action is an easy way out.

There was a large case study on this in California: prop 209. Here’s an article about the outcomes:

https://archive.is/bjv8J

The upshot is that the measures taken after public university affirmative action was outlawed in California were more effective than affirmative action was.

I read a much better and more detailed article about this, but I’m having trouble finding it now.

Strongly agreed that many actions people are taking don't work very well. I still think something has to be done, and we should use evidence and analysis to figure out which methods are most effective. We can't just leave it alone.

> If you know that the general population is 20% race A, 10% race B, 30% race C, and yet your admissions are only pulling in 40% race C, 5% race B and 55% race A, you know something is wrong.

Doesn't this ignore the fact that there actually might be biological differences between various races of humans? I mean, aren't most top runners black? I don't follow this closely, but it does seem there is bigger percentage of black people compared to general population.

Isn't the fair way to focus on equal opportunities, not outcomes? Give everyone the chance, but pick based on objective criteria (ideally in a blind way)?

> Doesn't this ignore the fact that there actually might be biological differences between various races of humans?

Show me that we have a society in which everyone is enabled to thrive to their full potential and then make this argument. Until then biological essentialism is profoundly stupid.

you are walking a dangerous line with that question.

Yes, genetic advantages are a thing which is why the NBA is dominated by black people but social factors are also a thing which is why the NHL is dominated by Canadians.

Diversity programs aim to address the second factor i.e. giving a temporary boost to people who didn't have access to social and economic privilege.

> but social factors are also a thing

Why are black people disproportionately in pro basketball? "It must be genetics!". It couldn't possibly be the fact that basketball courts are easier to build in the inner city than baseball fields. It couldn't be the fact that many poor black kids see the salaries that sports stars make, see the accessibility of a basketball court, and think "that's my ticket out.". (A neat documentary about this is "Hoop Dreams")

For some reason people find it easiest to default to looking at personal characteristics, which in the alt-right online spaces is genetics (in the regular right it's culture). If I had to guess a reason I'd guess that we're evolutionarily used to living in small tribes, sharing the same environment with everyone we meet, so we look to personal factors to explain preferences and abilities. But we no longer live in those homogeneous environments.

In the NBA, it IS genetics. You cannot increase your height through your own efforts, the limit IS genetic. Basketball is one of the few sports where genetic advantages are a major factor. The reason many black americans are so tall is some part a cruel history but an equal part genetics - you would be foolish to deny this.

The location of basketball courts is incidental and i'm not certain what your point is.

There are about 130 thousand people 6' 6" or taller in the US: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585718168419c246cf6f2...

Which is coincidentally the average height of NBA players (meaning almost half of them are below this height).

There are a maximum of about 600 NBA players at any given time, so a little more than 300 at 6' 6" or above.

Having good height genetics means you have a 0.25% chance of being an NBA player in any given year. Not factoring in foreign players. Maybe a 2% chance in your lifetime.

Being a black person doesn't give you any more advantage than being a white person when it comes to height. In fact, in the USA, white American males average an inch taller than black American males: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-hei...

(Yes, I'm aware of standard deviations, and unfortunately don't have this statistic for the two groups.)

> The location of basketball courts is incidental and i'm not certain what your point is.

The importance of social factors in opportunity (and motivation) to build talent in certain endeavors.

I was wrong. The US CDC has data for height by percentile and race. Black americans are not taller than white americans - you are absolutely correct. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_211.pdf See figure 8.

However - and this is a major issue - the outliers aren't captured in averages. I read a book called Taboo by John Entine that went into this exact issue. The issue is that the outliers are what determine champions at the elite level and people with west african heritage have slightly more genetic advantages - notably in sports like basketball. there is also the issue of rising incomes and the breaking down of societal barriers. As more black americans have access to sports like basketball, more of their slight genetic advantages can express themselves. All this gets masked by averages.

Entine's book makes a point in passing - africans will slowly start to dominate sports like football (soccer) that were traditionally dominated by white people. The french men's and women's football teams are showing this, as are many other european football teams. Football is more about skill and places less of a premium on height but there is one role where height is important - the goalkeeper. In the french squad, all their goalies except Lloris are either black or mixed heritage.

I just think it's shitty to point to race instead of pointing to familial, or social, hereditary and non-hereditary factors.

Do certain traits tend to be more prevalent within certain broad genetic backgrounds? Sure. But for any given individual, or even family, this tells you nothing. And unfortunately, when people start to use these broad genetic backgrounds for prediction, you end up with cultural filtering whether you wanted it or not. The measuring stick becomes the goal in some way.

Let people be people. Let them find their own path through trial and error, unless they actually come looking for advice. Let them know if they're genuinely not a competitor after they have tried, but give them the genuine chance (a rare few will overcome even this).

Within the last couple of hundred years we've finally developed societies in which people don't have to follow in their parents footsteps, but can find their own vocations. I don't want to lose this because of some eugenics inclination and racial stereotypes.

:D Sumo wrestler football goalies FTW. :D

You ignore the fact that DEI people aren't after equality, they are after revenge.

> Academia has obviously been historically discriminatory

Academia may have been historically discriminatory, but their biggest problem today is a pipeline problem. K-12 education, and especially public K-12 education, is not just historically discriminatory but has very real, ongoing discrimination against BIPOC minorities, and against female students' success in STEM subjects. That's what really needs to be addressed head-on, DEI is pointless window dressing.

Does this mean they will increase the representation of non leftist in academia because universities are starting to become completely unrepresentative of the populations at large and with this disconnect will come their irrelevance.

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