• Due to ongoing issues caused by Search, it has been temporarily disabled
  • Please excuse the mess, we're moving the furniture and restructuring the forum categories

[Split Thread] Diversity Equity and Inclusion and merit in employment etc

I'm at a TA event this morning (well afternoon now) and the divergence between the form of DEI being portrayed by certain posters in this thread, and the reality of HR/TA policies, solutions and practices.

Will anyone here be addressing the fatherhood premium ?
 
And that is exactly the point. Undergraduates are being told to read articles/books by Kendi and DiAngelo, and then they go out on campus and things that were previously (and correctly) seen as innocent are suddenly fraught with racism. Racial tension increases and therefore there is need for more Kendi and DiAngelo (and DEI staffers).
You mean the putative undergraduate are finally recognising racism,seeing past the layers of apologise.
 
You mean the putative undergraduate are finally recognising racism,seeing past the layers of apologise.
Not everything problematic is necessarily racism. People are fallible and often grasp onto easy answers, rather than ones that actually are based in reality. Fears of overcompensation and injustices related to that aren't baseless. Also, just about no one actually likes being falsely accused of wrongdoing or having to pay for wrongdoings even when such are actual wrongdoings that they committed, much less when the wrongdoings were done by others.

With that said, our country has long had real and serious issues with actual racism that haven't magically disappeared and those who have benefited from such have a vested interest in downplaying and denying that, including emotionally, so many do. Just as the chances of mistaken conclusions rise with such trainings, so too do the chances of correctly identifying the influence of racism. Who likes acknowledging that their success is notably influenced by great injustices, rather than just their hard work? They often did work hard to get what they have and bear understandable pride in their hard work, after all.

Lithrael and TomB look to have entirely reasonable criticisms of this specific study, either way.
I'm at a TA event this morning (well afternoon now) and the divergence between the form of DEI being portrayed by certain posters in this thread, and the reality of HR/TA policies, solutions and practices.

Will anyone here be addressing the fatherhood premium ?
The DEI trainings that I've had seem to be rather different than the portrayal made by said posters, too. Doesn't mean that problematic trainings don't exist and given human nature, it would be more surprising if they didn't, but it's not a factor that leads me to take the negative portrayals more seriously.
 
Oh, absolutely, I'm sure that CRT based materials exist, that have been written in a way that creates bad feelings without offering any solutions. I would not want to see that used as DEI training, and that study demonstrates why you shouldn't use that as DEI training.

Some people are claiming it shows that IS what is being used as DEI training, and I disagree.

For one thing, the 'CRT based DEI essay' is literally ONLY a couple sentences of grievances. Nothing else. The ONLY action statement is 'capitalism should be desconstructed.' That's not what DEI training is.
 
Oh, absolutely, I'm sure that CRT based materials exist, that have been written in a way that creates bad feelings without offering any solutions. I would not want to see that used as DEI training, and that study demonstrates why you shouldn't use that as DEI training.

Some people are claiming it shows that IS what is being used as DEI training, and I disagree.

For one thing, the 'CRT based DEI essay' is literally ONLY a couple sentences of grievances. Nothing else. The ONLY action statement is 'capitalism should be desconstructed.' That's not what DEI training is.
That's a legitimate limitation of the study, although how do you set up a control to a full-blown DEI training course; are you going to make the other students sit through hours of discussion of corn production? I also puzzled as you did about some of the results--the number of microaggressions was particularly a head-scratcher. However I think I can explain this question of yours from an earlier post:
I'd LOVE to see the questions and raw numbers instead of the percentage difference between groups. How did the control group get ANY bias into their answers unless it was impossible not to? Those bars should all have been a 100 point difference. not five, eight point two, seventeen, etc etc.

Keep in mind the control group is made up of college undergrads who may be prone to believing the worst about admissions officers, and who have at least some exposure to DEI. But where you see a 17-point difference you should assume that the ones who read the DEI materials were 17 percentage points more likely--that is, if say 37% of the DEI group said the admissions officer was White, only 20% of the control group agreed. So you would never get a 100 percentage point difference because not all of the DEI group were swayed and not all of the control group were impervious to illogical conclusions (college students).
 
All right, I found the supplemental doc with the stuff I was wondering. The prompt for the questions (they alternated the names given to the story's characters) was "We will next ask you questions about Eric Williams, Michael Robinson, and the interview.

Although you may not know the answers to these questions, we want you to try your best."

So they tell the subject to go ahead and try to answer despite the lack of information.

Now, for the first two questions, the race of the characters, they do at least give the option of 'it's not clear.' But pretty soon we are getting questions constructed like this:

"4. Was Michael Robinson's rejection influenced or not influenced by Eric Williams's biases against People of Color?
  1. Not at all influenced
  2. Probably not influenced
  3. Unclear whether influenced
  4. Probably influenced
  5. Definitely influenced"
They have written the idea that the admissions guy is biased, into the question. You're allowed to say it's not clear if his bias affected his decision, but you're TOLD he is biased against people of color. This isn't just 'seeing racism where none exists,' this is 'seeing racism where you've just been told it exists.'

The questions later, to decide how you score on a left wing authoritarian evaluation, are apparantly genuinely used to evaluate extremism, but if I were participating in this study I would not be able to take it seriously. They sound like Teen Lister in Red Dwarf, angry about crypto-facists.
 
"4. Was Michael Robinson's rejection influenced or not influenced by Eric Williams's biases against People of Color?
  1. Not at all influenced
  2. Probably not influenced
  3. Unclear whether influenced
  4. Probably influenced
  5. Definitely influenced"
They have written the idea that the admissions guy is biased, into the question. You're allowed to say it's not clear if his bias affected his decision, but you're TOLD he is biased against people of color. This isn't just 'seeing racism where none exists,' this is 'seeing racism where you've just been told it exists.'
Even if the question implies that the admissions officer is biased, that same information was given to both the DEI group and the control group. The result shows that exposure to DEI materials increases the amount by which respondents judge that that bias influenced the admission decision.
 
My point was, not only are they prompted with a very short and exclusively negative essay, they are re-prompted within the questions themselves.

I can't buy that they didn't have room to include anything but the 'there is so much injustice' part of 'there is so much injustice which we should address in these positive ways' because they were soooo contrained for space. The 'essay' is tiny. I read/watched/skimmed a handful of the 'we used these as examples' materials and found examples of Tema Okun (who gets both parts of their name charted in big dots in the paper's "word cloud" of DEI focus which it uses to justify its choices of what sentences to put in the short essay) reminding the audience to avoid scspegoating; that the point is to bring everyone in and not to throw anyone away.

In general a lot of the material they fed to their algorithm seems like it's stuff IN race-sensitivity etc libraries without actually being part of a DEI program.

The 'punishment' section seems odd as well; for example one option to evaluate was "The university should require race-based diversity training throughout the Admissions Office" which I could see as a pretty neutral option (hey we can all use training etc) but it seems to be described in the paper's graph as "admissions officer should be required to take a DEI training course." That one has a ten-point difference from control. But there's also the option "Eric Williams[/Michael Robinson] should be required to take a race-based diversity training program," which seems to be graphed as "Race-based training should be required for the admissions officer," with less than half a point difference from control.

Again, if the point is that overly negative presentations prime people into negativity, I agree. Don't do DEI training this way.
 
Yes, the control group got the question with prompting baked into it; and the essay group was doubly prompted.
 
Yes, the control group got the question with prompting baked into it; and the essay group was doubly prompted.
Therefore, the control group controlled for the question effect, negating your complaint about it.
 
Every such training I've ever taken was explicitly about helping me to see racism where I hadn't previously seen it. I don't see why anyone would doubt it has the effect it's intended to have.

The real questions are whether it encourages people to see racism where none exists, and to take offense where none is warranted.
 
Every such training I've ever taken was explicitly about helping me to see racism where I hadn't previously seen it. I don't see why anyone would doubt it has the effect it's intended to have.

The real questions are whether it encourages people to see racism where none exists, and to take offense where none is warranted.
Or why does this training exist at all? What value does it provide? How many folks like their work day interrupted for this tripe?
 
Or why does this training exist at all? What value does it provide? How many folks like their work day interrupted for this tripe?
Oh, pretty much all of the ones who have experienced stigma and discrimination in the workplace because of who they are.
 
One of the materials fed into the algorithm for the study was titled 'antiracism for physics 101 at Brown U' or something, which on its face seemed scoff-worthy. It turned out to be a lecture that sounded very waffly for the first twenty minutes but then finally hit the meat, which was a bunch of decentering and recontextualizing the guy had started to use after reading this type of stuff. Ways to foster teamwork, deeper feedback, students getting to know each other's context for the class, helping to design/select some of the coursework etc. and genuinely getting a good results from them. He describes students going from seeming lost, distracted, disengaged, doing the work without getting a feel for it or its flow or that it's FOR anything, to being more attentive etc, especially getting better results with students who were only in the class as a core credit requirement.

I didn't realize the word for 'let's try doing it as something besides a plain lecture class where the prof stands at the front and tells you stuff and then you do assignments and tests about it' was antiracism but apparantly it basically is.

Chalk it up to 'progressives like to use framing that will make conservatives hate their ideas' I guess.
 
Last edited:
Oh, pretty much all of the ones who have experienced stigma and discrimination in the workplace because of who they are.
No one should face stigma or discrimination due to their race. But you don't need DEI programs robbing folks of their time to enforce that. It's just grift.

wokelady.png
 
Last edited:
Every such training I've ever taken was explicitly about helping me to see racism where I hadn't previously seen it. I don't see why anyone would doubt it has the effect it's intended to have.

The real questions are whether it encourages people to see racism where none exists, and to take offense where none is warranted.
That is precisely the question that the Rutgers study addressed.
 
I did a diversity awareness course decades ago, when I was working in the telecoms industry and had just been promoted to team leader, and it was made very clear that the motivation for building diverse teams was not laws and quotas but that such teams were simply more successful. People from different backgrounds with different perspectives, challenging each other and bouncing ideas off each other, is how you get innovation.
Of course that's what they told you. That's the dogma.

But it's like paranormal claims. If ghosts were real, we'd be making money off them. If clairvoyance were real, we'd have industrialized and militarized it by now. Capitalists don't need to be dragged kicking and screaming towards things that work, that pay.

If DEI worked, it wouldn't need a national program. It would already be in place. Labor unions would have fought against it and lost in the 1800s. Modern progressives would be railing against it as yet another of The Man's insidious schemes. Forced assimilation and erasing culture to make space for wage slavery. Something like that.
 
When does it stop being education and start being indoctrination? You're an academic, you should be able to answer that.
That one's easy. Education aims at instilling productive mastery of a body of knowledge. Indoctrination aims at instilling acceptance of dogma and belief without question.

An engineer understands engineering, and produces feats of engineering commensurate with his mastery of the subject. He doesn't blindly believe in engineering because that's what he's been told. Because he's been educated, not indoctrinated.
 
Who said anything about enforcing? This is about educating.
Why do people need educating? Just make a non-discrimnation policy. Why waste employees' time on useless seminars to enrich race hucksters? And, in any case, unconscious bias, which so much of this garbage is premised, famously fails to replicate. It's just a religion of hate.
 
Why do people need educating? Just make a non-discrimnation policy. Why waste employees' time on useless seminars to enrich race hucksters? And, in any case, unconscious bias, which so much of this garbage is premised, famously fails to replicate. It's just a religion of hate.
Because otherwise they might not think the policy applies to them.
Now why might black people in America think that, I wonder?
 
Because they've been indoctrinated into the cult of Critical Race Theory.
That is a position that seems far less defensible than even "All White People are Racist." After all, that would at be least tenuously defensible under the very stretched banner of "All People are Racist to some extent." There's something to be said about the normality of overgeneralization and hyperbole, either way, especially when there's significant actual underlying cause.

On the other hand, Critical Race Theory, as you're using it, seems likely to be little other than the scam version popularized by Christopher Rufo that was never driven by or meant to be driven by truthfulness or view of the full picture. Rather, it seems to be little more than an outlet for grievances, real and imagined, and a more socially acceptable excuse to channel racism through.
 
Newsflash: I don't care if you believe me. I'm currently a co-investigator on a systematic review of evidence supporting the claim that diverse teams do better science. We haven't found any evidence of it yet, but it is a work in progress. I'll have a definitive answer in a few months. But you have also said you don't believe that I do scholarly work in this area. That, again, is your problem. Not mine. I don't care.
It's been a few months. Do you have a definitive answer yet?
 
Because the racists pushing DEI want people to hate each other.

yjqhygxpbegosy0bswgsda.png
I hope you at least realize that your attempted argument invokes a bunch of fallacies? It may work for those who are solely interested in feeding their desired narrative and have no concern for the quality of what they use to do so, but trying to use this on a skeptics forum just invites disdain and ridicule, at least from those who aren't similarly more concerned with feeding their narrative and also aren't employing quality standards.
 
Enlighten us. You didn't identify the fallacies.
Ditto. How is showing how race relations have worsened with the rise of DEI a fallacy? It's probably inconvenient for a preferred political narrative, but not a fallacy.
 
Back
Top Bottom