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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Our company keeps hiring DEI folks, and it worries me -- they seem a net negative, beyond just their salary.

My post was partially inspired by having to sit through 2 hours of DEI training organized by HR.

Maybe it's me spending too much time here and getting used to good faith, high quality arguments, but those two hours felt like being schooled by teenagers who were giving it half their effort. It was painful. For example, we had a module about how diversity is a smart business choice because it gets more diverse ideas injected into the company, after which we had to get into groups of 3-4 and discuss how each of us would work toward increasing diversity in our specific roles.

My first thoughts were:

  • leading the question -> there's no room for discussion, even questions, but you're made to feel "as if" you have any choice or input. You're given a goal (diversity) and ordered to come up, in front of your peers (social pressure), with ways to achieve that goal.

  • motte and bailey -> basically arguing for an unfair, politically-motivated redistribution of wealth ("bad diversity") and hiding it behind a good, meaningful idea of diversity.

At the end, I couldn't tell what's worse. The icky ways someone was trying to pressure people into doing/thinking what they wanted us to think OR the form it took, which was so poor, it would get you a C at most if you did that for a school project.

leading the question -> there's no room for discussion, even questions, but you're made to feel "as if" you have any choice or input. You're given a goal (diversity) and ordered to come up, in front of your peers (social pressure), with ways to achieve that goal.

The snarky, but reasonably accurate, way to answer is, "in the context of getting fresh ideas in, I'd suggest that we hire smart people with non-college backgrounds; we could probably do that using aptitude testing on an open pool of candidates". For me, this has the virtue of being something that I actually believe is true in addition to it baiting someone to say that they actually don't give a shit about ideas and that "diversity" doesn't mean anything like the dictionary definition.

Edit - Of course, the latter part is a ridiculous fantasy of a gotcha moment. In real life, the answer is that aptitude testing is racist and doesn't actually measure intelligence anyway.

In real life, the answer is that aptitude testing is racist and doesn't actually measure intelligence anyway.

But, one might answer, how well do they predict one's ability to come up with unconventional ideas ? Because that's what would matter here.

The entire DEI infrastructure may be leaning towards the negative but, as long as the laws and regulations are what they are, it might be locally beneficial (to that company) to hire people to help them navigate that mess.

They may keep the Justice Department's Civil Rights division at bay. Regulatory burden can be costly enough that taking a hit to productivity and profits internally still makes sense.

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