An argument against DEI

Great Debates
203

As previously mentioned, I’ve done the test.

Why do any of the questions have any scoring at all, if supposedly the whole motivation was just “give the jobs to minorities”?
Anyway, as I say, we’ll find out eventually. In the meantime, DEI has been effective throughout the western world, not just in the US, and wasn’t an issue until it was manufactured into a wedge issue.

Again, no, you don’t get to just keep asserting that. You have qualifications to be in a role, and then you have many other factors that might influence an employer’s decision. DEI is the latter, it’s not about dropping qualification standards. Or, IOW, cite please? Which jobs can I get without being qualified?

The reasonableness of the objections is the thing that needs to be demonstrated. Because, to me, it’s still at the level of “You can’t say Christmas any more!” which is another thing lots of people are concerned about and is almost entirely manufactured BS.

Again, that’s a thing that needs to be demonstrated.

If that’s the only reason for the difference in numbers then fine. I’ve said multiple times here that no-one should be setting a goal of, say, 50:50 gender representation.
The key is that we have as open a field as possible, so the most talented pilots, no matter what color / gender / faith / orientation they are feel it is a job that they can do, that they would be welcomed to join and employers similarly have seen all kinds of people doing a job so have no preconceptions.
And, as I say, this kind of open environment should happen naturally in the fullness of time if we do nothing. It’s just that time can be very, very long. And in the meantime we are missing many of the best candidates.

204

So that they could leak the “correct” answers to the applicants who they wanted to hire, and have a pretextual reason on which to disqualify the rest.

It was explained pretty clearly in the article: Shelton Snow “sent voice-mail messages to NBCFAE applicants, advising them on the specific answers they needed to enter into the Biographical Assessment to avoid failing, stating that he was ‘about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question.’” The FAA’s report confirmed that.

I’d love to hear your explanation for the nonsensical scoring method if you think it was legitimate.

205

Right, so if that allegation stands up, then that’s an outright cheating scandal, not DEI.
Are we really going to judge a policy by people doing things that aren’t part of the policy and are actually illegal? Because we can use this logic to show basically every policy is bad.

I’ve already explained it to the maximum extent someone who isn’t in the FAA possibly could. Some personality and situational behaviour traits may be particularly desirable for ATC: remember personality tests are common. And some other questions may just have been informational, like asking a candidate what their outside interests are.

206

You’re ignoring the context that this whole arrangement was set up explicitly for the purpose of hiring more minorities.

No, you ignored all these questions:

Why would a legitimate test ever be scored like that? You don’t have to work at the FAA to answer that. Use your imagination. Is there any conceivable legitimate reason to do it that way?

You seem to be stretching awfully far to assume there was some secret, non-discriminatory rationale for a policy that, on its face and according to the communications of the people who set it up, appears to be obviously discriminatory. I wonder if you’d put this much effort in to defend the test if it had been used to benefit white candidates instead (like the old “literacy tests” used to disenfranchise black voters).

207

It’s not DEI though, which is the topic of this thread.
It would like saying that high school athletics is bad because there’s this gym teacher who gave performance enhancing drugs to her students. That’s not high school athletics, and illegal actions – if they happened – are not DEI.

Third time now: personality tests may put more weight on some questions that the people hiring for that role consider to be more important. Whilst other questions may be purely informational.

You can be skeptical that that’s the case here, but you cannot claim that it’s crazy outlandish to do that, because it’s completely normal.

No, I am showing a reasonable amount of skepticism for an ongoing case that is being used for political purposes right now.

208

It gave the scores when you answered the questions, so you should have already known all this.

There’s no supposedly about it, the change in recruitment policy was explicitly to remove barriers to hiring ethnic minorities and women. And the major barrier was the AT-SAT test, on which the white male candidates did better than other groups. They had already revised it once to reduce these disparities, but they didn’t want to eliminate it entirely, because it was predictive of job performance. Nor could they simply use a quota to hire the highest scoring X of each race and sex, because that is illegal in the US. The major problem was that scores were grouped into two bands, and candidates in the ‘well qualified’ band were hired before those in the ‘qualified’ band. The majority of the differences between groups appeared in this split between bands. AIUI, their solution was to arbitrarily eliminate the majority of candidates before even giving them the AT-SAT, meaning there would no longer be enough candidates scoring in the ‘highly qualified’ band to fill most of the positions, and more hires would therefore be made from the more-diverse ‘qualified’ band.

So the main purpose of the biographical assessment was simply to be hard to pass, whether you were honest, or tried to guess the likely ‘correct’ answers. Additionally, there is some evidence the questions were designed to favour African Americans, and the FAA seemingly allowed cheating from the NBCFAE, as @Ms2001 said.

Did you sleep through 2020 and the ‘racial reckoning’? I’m old enough to remember the big push to increase hiring and promotion of minorities, and the new diversity trainings that instead of emphasising treating people as individuals, told us that aspirations to colour blindness are racism in disguise. It’s very strange that the left will set out to remake society, eliminate injustice - as they see it - and then act surprised that conservatives might object to their efforts, and claim that the very programs they support are an invention of the right.

209

I am old enough to remember scare stories from the far right that "this is happening everywhere!!", but I don’t recall actually seeing it in person.

210

I’m going to draw a line at this point. There are two things that I am not going to do, no matter how long this thread goes:

  1. Say that there was wrongdoing in a case that is still ongoing (and is being heavily utilized right now on conservative media)
  2. Say an illegal action, like actual cheating, is what DEI is

I’ll stick in the thread, because I think topics like the distinction between qualified and “standards” is still a valid one, as well as any other topic that comes up.

211

For jobs, rarely is there a singular best candidate. There are typically many candidates who would be great for the position. Each individual candidate will have their own strengths and weaknesses and pros and cons. Using something like the SAT to determine the best candidate for a job is not very reliable. The real world is not like an SAT test. Employees are faced with novel problems and have to come up with innovative solutions in environments where the answers aren’t given as multiple choice options. For instance, if you were picking a candidate to write fiction stories, using their SAT score would not be a good indicator of the quality of their stories. A good SAT score is a sign that they are smart, but you’d want to look at a variety of abilities when making your choice.

One reason to encourage diversity is so that you can attract the best candidates from the widest candidate pool possible. If your company is all white men in their 20’s, then that will limit the candidates who will choose your company. Someone who is not white, not male, and not in their 20’s, may look at the homogeneous employees and realize they won’t fit in. But if there are a variety of races, ages, and genders, then it’s more likely that variety of races, ages, and genders will consider working there.

When an employer is looking at candidates, chances are there will be many great candidates that are basically all qualified for the job. Any one would do an excellent job. In a case like this, it makes sense to consider diversity when making your choice. If the employer picks yet another white male in his 20’s like all the rest, then the candidate pool for the next job will be smaller. But if the employer strives for a diverse workplace, then their candidate pool will be bigger.

212

Next time, drop the simile and just say “I invoke the No True Scotsman fallacy.” It’s cleaner.

Sometimes the pursuit of noble and legal goals leads to ignoble and illegal actions. The illegal discrimination that took place at the FAA and Google happened because they had diversity goals that they hadn’t been able to meet through legal means, and they were convinced either that those goals were important enough to justify illegal actions, or that those actions were somehow not illegal when they were done to benefit minority groups.

If you’re saying that it stops being “DEI” as soon as someone breaks the law, that sure seems like trying to wordplay your way out of an untenable position.

Keep those counting fingers ready, because I’m happy to go around as many times as it takes to get you to acknowledge and/or understand the facts that have been presented to you. As the masthead says, sometimes it takes longer than we thought, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try!

You say personality tests put more weight on some questions than others. What you’re still ignoring – what the whole block of questions I quoted was about – is that the answers give it away.

For example:

  • There’s a question about what your worst grade was in high school.
  • The applicant gets 15 points for saying their worst grade was in science, and 0 points for saying any other subject.
  • The same question for college grades gives points for history instead.

For the third or maybe fourth time now: What conceivable legitimate explanation could there be for that?

If you can’t even imagine a non-discriminatory rationale, that’s a red flag.

The way they scored the answers was, in fact, crazy outlandish and not at all normal.

Ah, there’s that No True Scotsman fallacy again. Thanks for at least admitting that no amount of evidence will change your position here – that explains why you didn’t bother to look at it.

213

Moderating:

Dial back the snark. A lot. You can make your points without edging into Personal Attack territory.

214

I can only speak for myself, but I suspect I had more exposure to this than the average person because I was at a Bay Area tech company during the years when it really started to take off (2013-2016). It was always a shock to go home for the holidays and be reminded that the rest of the country wasn’t inundated with posts, townhalls, and corporate initiatives about the sociopolitical topic du jour.

215

Fair enough, thank you. It’s been a while and I see I’ve missed some rules posts.

Sorry about that, @Mijin.

216

Well yeah, pretty much every noble and legal goal that the human brain can think of sometimes leads to ignoble and illegal actions. But that in no way delegitimizes or invalidates the noble and legal goals themselves, or their sincere and law-abiding pursuit.

There are incidents of cheating scandals on all kinds of tests. Elite West Point cadets cheat on math exams. IT professionals seeking certification cheat on certification tests. Nursing students cheat on tests evaluating their knowledge of their field.

Does that mean that recruiting and teaching military academy cadets or IT professionals or nursing students is a bad thing, or an unrealistic goal, or too dangerous to attempt because sometimes the pursuit of those goals leads to ignoble and illegal actions? Of course not.

Similarly, there’s no logical reason to jump to the conclusion that occasional ignoble and illegal actions occurring in the context of DEI recruiting thereby discredit or invalidate pursuing the goals of DEI. The people who jump to that conclusion have generally already made up their minds that they think DEI is bad, and any stick will serve to beat it with.

217

This wasn’t a cheating scandal.

Cheating is an offense by the students against the institution. Students who cheat are subverting the process that’s meant to assess their performance, but the process is still legitimate. Notice how in the examples you linked, the cheating was caught by the institution and the cheaters were disciplined.

When the institution is in on it, it’s a whole different story.

What happened in the FAA hiring scandal was an offense by the institution against the applicants (other than the ones they favored). The institution subverted the process meant to assess applicants’ performance. They were caught by the disfavored applicants, and the law was changed as a result to prevent the institution from doing it again.

If someone is unable to attain their goals without taking ignoble and illegal actions, then they should stop pursuing those goals. So:

  • If a student is unable to get a nursing license without cheating on the exam, they should accept that they aren’t going to become a nurse.
  • If the FAA is unable to hire as many minority air traffic controllers as they’d like without concocting a ruse to disqualify the non-minority applicants, they should accept that the new hires are only going to be as diverse as the applicant pool.
  • If Google is unable to hire as many minority SWEs as their critics are demanding without ordering their recruiters to violate civil rights laws, they and their critics should accept that the new hires are only going to be as diverse as the applicant pool.

I agree, DEI encompasses a lot of things, most of which are unobjectionable. I thought Meta’s DEI efforts were pretty good, and I was surprised when they shuttered them: the diversity onboarding class led with an anecdote about a product decision where involving diverse perspectives in the design had a clear impact on its success.

But, to the extent that a given DEI program’s goals create an incentive to break the law in order to get results in the short term, those goals should be changed.

218

But that story also has innumerable parallels in other forms of cheating. If your criterion is that “the institution is in on it”, there are plenty of those examples too.

Like, for instance, this Philadelphia school where for years “teachers and the principal of a Philadelphia elementary school allegedly engaged in an cheating operation to raise test scores for a state standardized exam”.

You can equally well declare that “if a school is unable to get their students’ standardized test scores above a certain threshold without deliberately facilitating student cheating, then they should accept that their students on average are not performing above that threshold.”

But nothing about that incident intrinsically invalidates school education or educational standards. So, again, your attempt to single out DEI as a goal that’s somehow uniquely vulnerable to abuse is unconvincing.

Nonsense; every program’s goals on some level create an incentive to break the law in order to get results in the short term. For example, the goal of monitoring educational performance with student testing in that Philadelphia school created an incentive to break the law in order to get results in the short term. (Namely, schools with high-performing students get rewarded, sometimes simply with less onerous supervision and reporting requirements, sometimes with increased compensation for faculty and administrators, and so forth.)

Does that automatically mean that we need to change the fundamental goals of monitoring educational performance in schools? Again, nonsense.

You’re not ever going to get any programmatic improvement goal, of any kind, that doesn’t somehow create some sort of perverse incentives to engage in unethical behavior for the sake of getting short-term results that don’t reflect true improvement.

That’s just a fact of life in human-run organizations, not some specialized flaw peculiar to DEI initiatives in particular.

219

I kind of feel like the discussion is going a bit wonky. Can we at least agree that DEI efforts are harmed when institutions are seen to engage in discriminatory practices to meet their goals? If I applied for a job as an air traffic controller and was denied, I might look askance at any company I apply with touting their DEI program. It might not be logical, but in the back of my mind I’d be leery.

220

That’s an offense by the institution (and, unwittingly, the students) against the state. The school subverted the process that was meant to assess its performance, but the process is still legitimate.

A better analogy would be if the school artificially lowered the grades of its right-handed students—say, by requiring every student to take a bogus test, after emailing the answer key to all the left-handed students—in order to flunk them, because a statistical report had shown that only 5% of their graduates were left-handed.

In that example, like in the FAA’s case, it’s an offense by the institution against a subset of the people being tested. The test itself isn’t legitimate, because it’s not measuring anything other than whether the person taking it had been given the answer key. Instead, the test is a weapon, used by the institution to harm the majority of people taking it in order to raise the standing of a select few.

That’s true. But it does illustrate the danger of measuring success toward their goal in a way that’s easily gamed.

If there were a nationwide movement to end discrimination against left-handed people, focusing on disparate school graduation rates, and it turned out that some of the biggest school districts had “improved” their left-handed graduation rates through illegal means because legal means weren’t working, I think it’d be reasonable to conclude that focusing on graduation rate was a mistake. It’s too easy to game, and the incentives are such that organizations that should know better are gaming it. It might also be reasonable to conclude that discrimination probably isn’t the reason for the disparate rates, because if it were, they could’ve fixed it without breaking the law.

And ultimately, the reason it’s easily gamed—and why it should’ve been obvious from the start that it would be gamed—is that it isn’t actually a measure of discrimination, and it never has been. Disparate graduation rates might be a sign of discrimination, or they might be caused by a hundred other things; graduation rate is pretty far downstream from discrimination.

Likewise, disparate employment rates in a particular company or industry might be a sign that some groups are being blocked from entering or pushed out by a toxic environment… or it might be caused by a hundred other things. The assumption that something bad must be happening whenever employees’ demographics don’t match the population was invalid from the beginning.

221

Not really, studies still point at the price of predijuce for society, and get this, it does affect the bigoted.

And no, the Chewbacca defence can’t distract from noticing that Trump and Musk are tossing the babies with the bathwater, regarding DEI.

222

I’m not sure what your point is. Your links are about discrimination, but the part of my post you quoted was about a difference in demographics between employees and the population. Those aren’t the same.

Like I said, that difference can be (and often is) caused by a lot of things other than discrimination.