No. Like I said: “This goes even if it’s nowhere near a majority of companies doing it”. You even quoted that!
You’re right, my phrasing was unclear. What I meant is that we shouldn’t put off tackling the problem at its root until it becomes widespread.
We can’t expect to catch it every time; the instances we know about are merely a subset of all the times it has happened. As long as the same incentives are in place, the behavior will most likely keep happening. Especially in a competitive environment, where if one participant pulls ahead, the others will have to go even further to catch up to them.
I know what point you were trying to support with that analogy. I’m saying the analogy doesn’t support that point, because if the analogous problem happened (high school coaches were giving students drugs), that would call for the analogous solution (change the incentive structure that makes coaches value a few points more than students’ health).
PEDs might not “be” high school athletics, but high school athletics are obviously what creates the incentive to use them. Likewise, illegal discrimination like what happened at the FAA and Google might not “be” DEI, but the pursuit of diversity goals that don’t reflect the applicant pool is what creates the incentive to do it.
I wouldn’t say “inequities” are the problem. If every high school athlete were juicing, or if every company’s recruiters were discriminating illegally, that’d be even worse, even though there’d be no inequity. The behavior is the alarming part, not necessarily the outcomes it produces.
Your logic only follows if a large proportion are acting in bad faith though. With the example of college PEDs you were immediately framing it in the terms of needing significant numbers. So let’s see the data of significant numbers of DEI being implemented illegally. Given, as I say, the vast numbers of DEI initiatives and the handful of dubious cases the RW has been harping on.
Which no-one disputes either.
The root of criminal behaviour here – if indeed that has happened – is not diversity initiatives.
I don’t know what distinction you are attempting to draw here. No-one is forcing targets on companies so they are analogous.
Nope, read it again. What I actually said was: “If there were as many high-profile cases of high school coaches giving their students drugs to improve their standing as there have been of companies breaking the law to improve their diversity numbers, then yeah, I think it’d be reasonable to say something’s probably wrong with the concept of high school athletics.”
I agree that companies breaking the law to improve their diversity stats isn’t “common”, isn’t happening in “significant numbers”. But I think even the amount that we have seen is troubling enough to justify taking action to make sure it doesn’t become common. The cases we’ve seen have been pretty serious: Google is the 8th largest company in the Fortune 500, and their hiring practices tend to influence other companies; the FAA oversees the safety of over 45,000 flights per day. And no one believes we’ve caught 100% of the companies who’ve done it, so the cases we’re aware of are only part of the total.
The root is the incentives that make coaches care more about a few points than preserving students’ health, and that make companies care more about a few percent in their diversity reports than following labor laws.
How do you propose to change those incentives?
Or do you propose that we don’t change them, we just expect some baseline amount of PED and illegal discrimination to happen, and we hope that we can catch enough of them to act as a deterrent? That may sound like a viable option to someone who doesn’t think discrimination is all that bad, but personally, I think it’s very, very bad.
No? The companies didn’t just make those targets up to challenge themselves. They did it because they felt they had to, in response to criticism (internal or external) or regulation (or the threat thereof).
A major issue here is that many people on the right don’t agree with you that these programs are benign. I was going to link to some Reddit posts with comments earlier in the thread to show some representative claims, and they also show attitudes to various AA schemes, but it’s far too much effort to vet all the comments to make sure they don’t break any board rules.
I’m not just talking disagreement on facts, plenty of people disapprove of any diversity scheme that takes anything but merit into account in hiring, which includes fiddling with the pool to contain more minorities, and favouring minorities from some nominally ‘qualified’ shortlist. I think companies frequently lower requirements for this - the FAA clearly said in their internal communications that increasing diversity would have the trade off of lowering job performance, and the question was how much it was acceptable to lower performance to reach what diversity goals - but regardless, they are hiring based on something other than who they think would be best for the job.
And as you say, such programs are very common, so people who object to them are opposing something real, and no amount of rebranding will change that.
I was referring to your defending the scoring of the Biographical Assessment, here:
When I gave specific examples of nonsensical scoring, you first didn’t answer, then said:
The fact is the scoring is outlandish, no justification is given for it in the trial documents (feel free to look) and it is IMO unreasonable to defend it with no evidence. You are of course free to reserve judgement; I have no intention of trying to convince you further, and I am extremely tried of wasting my time repeating things I’ve already said, so I am not going to respond further on this.
I don’t know enough about General Brown or why he was fired to have an opinion. It’s plausible it was due to racism, or to Trump wanting yes-men in key positions. As for right-wing identity politics, I think its very bad and dangerous, an ominous sign - and it’s something I predicted would be the result of left-wing identity politics. I wish this hadn’t come to pass.
You use of the word “scheme” earlier aside, can you name any major programs that do this? By the way, what percentage of people would you say count as “plenty”?
Right so you’re beginning with a number requirement, which is what I said.
In terms of the rest of what you say: sure, I am of course not against checking that hiring policies are not unfairly discriminatory.
That’s very different from trying to demonize and throw out DEI wholesale, which is what this administration and their media friends are trying to do.
I don’t know that either of those things are the case. Again, it’s as though you’re implying illegal activities to meet targets that no-one mandated is a common problem. When we have a couple of pending cases out of thousands of initiatives.
Yes, they did. Again, no-one gave them a target, and conducting illegal activities to hit an arbitrary target is nothing to do with DEI the same as conducting illegal activities to maximize profits isn’t the fault of the marketplace.
Finally?
I’ve said throughout that DEI has been successfully demonized.
ETA: Ah I think your “finally” is me stating a position that most DEI is being implemented ethically? I think that’s strongly implied by what I have been saying, but I will give you it hadn’t been stated up to now (although I also hadn’t been asked)
I know, because it’s been successfully demonized. Most people think it’s about hiring people who aren’t qualified, because that’s what RW media says, over and over again.
The reality is there’s still massive leeway beyond just shortlisting based on qualifications, and incentivizing companies to try to recruit from a wide pool is in society’s interest for the reasons I’ve said many times at this point.
Let’s just bury this dreadful tangent at this point because you clearly aren’t going to take back your accusation of inconsistency on my part.
Personality tests, if they are scored at all, often won’t have simple 1:1 scoring. Whether it seems “outlandish” to you is just an opinion. I make no claim other than nothing standing out as noteworthy for me. Plus it’s irrelevant anyway, because the issue is supposed to be with favoring particular groups and, in itself, a million points for the first question would not do that. You’d need to also give the answer to question 1 out, which is an accusation in this case, and that’s the actual unethical thing.
That’s my last word on that questionnaire because we’re just going round in circles.
LOL, so finally some acknowledgement of the identity politics of the right, but it’s all the left’s fault. If only they hadn’t tried to force us to acknowledge 37 genders and sexually groomed our children, amirite?
No, you said “common” and “significant numbers”—you even quoted that part!—and you repeatedly demanded a cite for those significant numbers.
Come on, dude. We can all scroll up and read what you wrote. Why is it so hard to admit that?
You think they just decided to set arbitrary goals for themselves, unprompted by anything, which were so ambitious that they’d have to break the law trying to meet them? And then they went ahead and broke the law, rather than revising those arbitrary goals that no one was holding them to?
Because you’re being disingenuous. You put a number requirement on it “if there were as many”, which the rest of your logic then follows on from.
So, let’s bin the words “significant” and “common”. *poof*
You’re suggesting that the proportion of DEI implementations where illegal activity has occurred is X, and if there was such a proportion in high school athletics it would be cause for us to change the incentives for all high school athletics. What’s X and where’s the cite that DEI has reached that level?
X is “the FAA and Google” and the cite is this thread.
I haven’t made any claims about any particular proportion of DEI implementations.
Look, it was your analogy. You asked if we’d have the same response if it were about high school athletics instead of DEI. I said that if the situation were analogous—i.e. if it were equally widespread—then yes. Now you’re demanding to know what exactly it would mean for the situations to be analogous? If you want to know the details of your analogy, supply them yourself.
Of course not. To them, anything that helps anyone but a white straight Christian male is pure evil. So of course they think practices that help people they think should all be enslaved or killed isn’t “benign”. That’s how Nazis think.
So no claim about the number of such cases, but referring to it as “widespread”.
But ok, your answer is X = 2, fine*. So all that I need to do is find two instances where someone working at a school was involved in students tooking PEDs for us to need to rethink the incentives behind all high school athletics?
And, since that was an arbitrary analogy, only two cases of anything criminal happening around any policy means we need to rethink that policy nationwide?
* Technically no criminal behaviour has been found in either case though; Google was settled it seems, and the FAA case is ongoing. But I am happy to go with 2; Google isn’t going to settle for fun, and I would agree that some of the filings for the FAA case look damning.
It’s important to mention this upfront though, because otherwise one might look at policies other than DEI and declare they aren’t as bad because no one was convicted. Well, no-one’s been convicted here either.
Two things gave them a target: the Supreme Court, and social pressure. The Supreme Court when they decided any hiring test or requirement that had a disparate impact on protected groups was presumptively illegal, and opened up the company to government investigation and/or a lawsuit in which they’d have to prove their innocence, not the other party prove their guilt. And additional social pressure after George Floyd’s death, when there was a big public focus on diversity, and it became common to say discrimination was the only possible explanation for under and overrepresentation of different groups.
And this probably doesn’t apply to Google, but any federal agency or private contractor providing services to the federal government was required to take affirmative action to increase the number of minorities and women in their workforce if they were underrepresented. Ie they were literally given targets by the government, and were in danger of being investigated, sued, or losing their government contracts if they failed to meet the targets, while it was also illegal to directly use a quota. This was one of the executive orders Trump rescinded.
No, it was you answering the question I asked and not a different question. The point was you agreeing such schemes are common, rather than demanding that I waste my time trying to prove something you believe anyway.
IMHO an unbiased observer would find this stuff noteworthy, even if they preferred to wait for the end of the court case to agree there was wrongdoing:
But I would also be happy to drop the subject.
I’ve said repeatedly that I disagree with @Ms2001 on this and the main purpose of the test was not to directly favour certain groups, but to cut down the number of applicants to enable hiring less qualified (on the AT-SAT) but more diverse ones.
If you’re going to ignore what I’m actually saying and respond to something else instead, debate is pointless.
That’s why I didn’t want to get into it. Of course it’s not the only factor, but encouraging people to identify with their race and sex, to see themselves as members of a group, and treat other people differently according to which group they belonged to rather than treat them as individuals was very obviously going to make people more racist and sexist. This is a major element of the American DEI trainings I’ve seen.
You mean George Floyd Sr’s birth correct?
Since it became common to say discrimination was the only possible explanation for under and overrepresentation of different groups because discrimination has been fucking happening since, at least, 1949.
Professor West pointed to several major studies indicating that equally qualified minority candidates consistently lose out to white candidates.
Once again, what is clearer is that many in power did not like to hear advise about considering that there are indeed capable minorities, women and disabled that can do the jobs.
Neither of those things are a specific target, even with the loaded phrasing. Your suggestion was that targets led to the criminal behaviour but there is nothing in “don’t discriminate against minorities” that equates to “hire N% minority, break the law if you have to”
Please elaborate, because this is pretty central to the whole issue if true.
I was going to let this go, but I resent this. Can you quote an example of me not answering the question?
Yes apologies for steelmanning your argument into something making coherent sense. I should have taken your position literally as that they needed to weed out some applications to enable them to select applicants that they could have selected anyway.
But it is interesting that you and @Ms2001 differ on this.
Right – being gay, trans, female or african american is the problem. People should stop doing that. White male christian is an OK thing to identify as though.
That’s what bigotry is, and what the right is engaged in. Floyd was treated differently, General Brown was treated differently, banning people who are transgender from enlisting is treating them differently.
Versus DEI, which is just about ensuring a door which tries to encourage companies to look a bit wider than they otherwise would i.e. not be bigoted, or have entrenched biases
They were and are being judged not on whether they discriminate against minorities, but on what percentage of their workforce belongs to various demographic groups, and those two things are frequently not the same. If doing the former does not result in the latter, then they will be tempted to find other means of reaching their goals.
As I read this, EO 11246 (rescinded by Trump) required federal contractors over a certain size to set specific targets for employing women and minorities and actively work toward those targets, while prohibiting them from using quotas. Title VII (a law enacted by congress which Trump cannot simply repeal) does not require this, but still bans employment discrimination on the basis of various protected characteristics.
If you don’t understand or I wasn’t clear enough, please ask me to explain, rather than substituting a completely different argument. I suppose this is the same reason you answered a different question above: you didn’t understand why I asked about DEI schemes you said were benign, so you thought I must have meant something else.
They needed to weed out applicants because it would be illegal to simply select the ones they wanted on the basis of race and sex, and they didn’t want to stop using the AT-SAT, because it was predictive of job performance.
No, just the opposite. It’s very dangerous and should be discouraged. But making everyone focus on race, gender, etc and whether they fall into various ‘privileged’ and ‘oppressed’ classes encourages it.
We are obviously never going to agree on this. Maybe the real question is whether the Democratic Party, or the left in general, can convince enough American voters that your view is correct? And if not, what should they do?
Why not go the other way, and convince right wing voters that honesty, integrity, and fairness to all are a good thing, and that “winning above all else” is actually wrong?
Flee the country before being rounded up and killed or enslaved. That’s what this is all about, the desire of the Right to kill and enslave everyone else. That’s all this is about.
