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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   28434 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Meta ends its DEI program (internal memo, Ars Technica verification). The company is disbanding its DEI team. It will no longer use "diverse slate hiring" (intentional seeking-out of candidates of particular underrepresented minorities). It is "sunsetting our supplier diversity efforts", which probably means that they will no longer privilege minority/women-owned suppliers.

It is ending the perception that it has representation goals. Yes that's convoluted, but how else does one interpret this statement:

"We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it."

The stated reason for the shift in policy:

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics.

That is, they expect to no longer be sued based on "disparate impacts", but possibly sued based on preferential treatments. This... makes sense for a company to do. McDonalds is doing it; Walmart did it more than a month ago.

I expect more companies to follow suit (quietly or loudly). My question is: are there any corporate for-profit true-believers who will stick with the DEI initiatives? Ben and Jerry's, maybe?

Trump will decide whether or not to enforce the TikTok ban (yes, it may happen the day before he takes office, but presumably if his justice department says ‘we won’t take any enforcement action’ then in effect the ban won’t happen, the same way that they aren’t sending the FBI to arrest every legal weed dealer in Colorado).

TikTok being banned and that ban being enforced (meaning no US advertisers can buy TikTok ads directed at Americans) likely leads to billions of dollars in bonus ad spend for Meta given they control all competing platforms except Snapchat. Ad budgets are mostly fixed, cut out one platform with hundreds of millions of American users and existing platforms with the same reach all profit.

You don't consider X a competing platform to Instagram, Tiktok etc.?

People boycotting meta over lack of DEI are not going to suddenly go over to X.

I was asking in the context of advertisers redirecting their TikTok ad spend to competing social networks if TikTok is no longer a viable platform.

To an extent, but it gets much less ad spend than the other platforms, is less conducive to serving ads, and has stable or slightly declining MAUs so seems unlikely to attract much more ad spend in the near future once some reversal of the anti-Musk cancellation effort takes place, which it already has.

Apple:

https://9to5mac.com/2025/01/10/apple-opposes-investor-calls-to-end-its-dei-efforts/

Investors will vote on four outside proposals at next month’s annual shareholders meeting. Apple is urging shareholders to vote against those proposals, including one that calls on the company to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The shareholder proposal, submitted by the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, claims that DEI “poses litigation, reputational and financial risks to companies, and therefore financial risks to their shareholders, and therefore further risks to companies for not abiding by their fiduciary duties.”

Though the company doesn't like such external proposals as a matter of principle, and may have adviced shareholders to vote against it regardless how they feel about DEI internally..

Yay it's now a tiny bit easier to be hired at Facebook (if you're white)

At least for engineering, the bar was never raised or lowered to actually get hired, they just fucked with the top of the pipeline. So for what they called under-represented minorities the standards were lowered to get a call back on your resume and to get to the first set of screening interviews performed by engineers. But once you reached that point the pipeline didn't differentiate.

I'm sure given the size of the company and how so many are outwardly ideological on these issues that there was some very concious bias being applied by interviewers, but that won't change because we're done with the company officially endorsing DEI.

The pipeline absolutely differentiated. Maybe URMs didn't formally have to meet a lower bar, but if one of them failed the bar, recruiting would send them back through the loop to collect more "signal" until that URM passed. Given that interview performance has a random component, what tech did is statistically indistinguishable from lowering the bar for URMs.

Why? The white percentage will stay exactly the same or decline slightly, the black and Hispanic numbers will go down, the Asian numbers will go up. That’s how it works everywhere that “stops” DEI / affirmative action.

Not much room for the Asian numbers to go up at Meta in particular, frankly.

It depends. For example, when affirmative action was banned in the UC system, both Asian and white numbers went up at UCB and UCLA, and black and latino numbers down, although I forget if it was acceptances, enrollments, or both.

That was in 1996 though, plus the numbers crept up over time (and the white numbers declined significantly) since then despite the ban remaining in place.

The percentage of "white" people has dropped by large amounts in that time, partly because of mixed race people choosing to self-identity as non-white to get a leg up.

At the extreme edge, see Elizabeth Warren who self-identified as Native American because of a 1/1024 share or something.

She identified as a Cherokee because her grandparents(from Oklahoma) told her that's what they were; that it turned out not to be true is unsurprising. There are a lot of white people in Oklahoma who call themselves Cherokee, and sometimes they have Cherokee ancestry and sometimes they don't. Either way, you can't visually distinguish Cherokee Indians from regular white southerners; my grandpa believed that this was because the Cherokee's eager adoption of civilization caused their skin to lighten, but other elders have told me that they have weak genes and a Cherokee woman was provided a dowry by the government at some vaguely defined point. Basically, though, Cherokees are the US equivalent of, like, Argentines. It's not implausible that a random white-looking person from the appropriate part of the country be Cherokee, and this is common knowledge for a certain generation.

my grandpa believed that this was because the Cherokee's eager adoption of civilization caused their skin to lighten

Was he a Mormon, by any chance? Back when they considered dark sin to be a curse from God, the LDS church officially taught that Native Americans’ skin would lighten if they became Mormon. I haven’t heard of any similar beliefs outside of that group.

No, he belonged to the church of Christ, scientist. He didn’t go to doctors and believed that personal physical health and appearance were downstream of attitude and closeness to God. To him, study, virtue, and prayer made a person healthy, strong, wise, successful, and physically perfect. He was a true believer in that stuff.

I don’t know how far off base he was from official Christian Scientist teaching. But it seems like a connection that someone of a certain age could easily make from dogmatized faith healing.

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The most likely reason for that is they came up with ways around the ban.

The percentage of Asian students kept climbing at places like UCB, but white enrolment is essentially the same as it was before prop 209 passed in ‘96. All the data is publicly available.

According to the interactive graph at kidsdata.org, the proportion of young (<18 years old) white persons in California has fallen from 40% in 1995 to 28% in 2010, and still remains under 30% as of 2021. The percentage for Asian increased slightly from 2000 to 2021. Latino went from 41% to 51% from 1995 to 2010. Perhaps it's partially a flight from white as @jeroboam suggested, but likely it's mostly just the Great Replacement doing its thang.

So if percentage of enrolled students at UCB being white is "essentially the same" in 1995 as it is now, that does imply affirmative action was disadvantaging whites prior to the 1998 admission class (first class in which the ban went into effect).

This graph, for UCLA, also suggests affirmative action disadvantaging both whites and Asians. In the first admission year after the affirmative action ban went into effect (1998), the percentage of UCLA acceptances that went to whites increased from about 29% to 31%, and the percentage of acceptances that went to Asians went from 37% to 40%. Latino decreased from 20% to 10%, and black from 7% to 3%.

However, one can Notice that the percentage of Unknowns going way up from 1995 to 1998 (from 6% to 15.5% or so), before decreasing thereafter. Possibly, with affirmative action in the spotlight in California, due to Asians and white applicants going "oh shit" and selecting "Unknown" or "Prefer not to disclose" on their applications. Adjusting for this, the percentage white increases from about 31% to 37% from 1995 to 1998, and Asians 39% to 47%. Latinos decrease from 21% to 12%, and blacks 7% to 4%.

This reinforces my earlier recollection that the affirmative action ban led to UCB and UCLA white and Asian numbers spiking up, and latino and black numbers going down, the effects receding only slightly in the years thereafter. It does however look like, at least for blacks, UCLA found some way to increasingly put their thumbs on the scale starting around 2005.

The line graph I have in mind went quite a few years into the 2000s—it showed that Asian and white numbers spiked up after the ban, then decreased slightly each year for a few years (as the admission committee tried to pull different non-explicitly racial levers to decrease the white + Asian rate [and increase the black + latino one]), before plateauing for the years thereafter (there’s only so much blood you can squeeze from a stone). During the plateau period both the Asian and white numbers were still noticeably higher than pre-ban.

As it should be tbh, and what we would expect if the previous status quo was a world where Asians were being hurt even worse than white people because of DEI (it was).

I think it depends on the brand. Companies that cater to left leaning and left coded things or hobbies will likely continue and maybe double down a bit. Things geared to the general public will probably quietly drop DEI, I expect any company that’s right coded will be shouting from the housetops.

That certain companies are drifting away from DEI doesn't imply that that the relative prevalence of DEI policies is largely a function of government disposition, nor even that those programs were uneconomical or counter-productive. In many ways it seems likely that extensive DEI stuff was a zero-interest rate phenomenon. When capital was scrambling about for productive uses, putting some of it into DEI to try to improve hiring/retention/productivity may have been perfectly rational, even if it has ceased to be now interest rates are higher.

I admire how you structured this post in such a way as to make refuting it require about a thousand times the effort you put in to it. Is any of that actually your perspective though? Do you believe the relative prevalence of DEI policies is not largely a function of government disposition? Do you believe those programs were economical and productive?

Those programs were uneconomical but it wasn't just a function of goverment disposition. Nor is it really easy to separate the goverment from the NGO networks, rich donors, intelligence agencies, and ideologues who marched in institutions and support this ideology not only through their influence in business but as journalists, academics, lawyers, and yes goverment officials and of course donors of political parties. And of course for some of the people in a system that rewards these ideologues might be doing it also to get higher positions.

There is something to the logic of extreme disloyal plutocrats that might prefer, sometimes in a short sided manner even from a $ point of view when one considers human capital and also willingness of migrants to redistribute resources and positions at expense of productive workers and vote badly, that labor pool is as big as possible. With costs such as welfare costs given to society, but even that wouldn't necessarily lead to DEI, except as a compromise to the kind of attitute the migrants and their supporters have. Still, I don't think that is the primary factor but more so the ideology of hostility towards the group subject to DEI due to a combo of motte and bailey radical egalitarianism and tribalism for the identities benefiting (including by people who don't belong in those groups) and anti-white racism.

Even in regards to economic interests. Rich people and corporations have a minimum duty to their nation to not commit treason and act at its expense, so any desire to expand the labor pool cannot simply be accepted as legitimate and they ought to be reined in and even subject to criminal prosecutions if their vision of economic success it at the expense of their country. In a better functioning system, Facebook and Zuckerberg shouldn't be allowed to lobby for mass migration for example.

Your critique of @HaroldWilson is a touch indelicate, but fair.

Let me try to steelman.

Under ZIRP, a lot of companies, especially those with Silicon Valley style startup funding, raised more money than they could reasonably deploy. There are a lot of reasons for this but, suffice it to say, it was quite common up until 2020 for a startup founder to have far more money than he or she knew what to do with.

The one thing you can't do is not spend the money. So, companies would do all sorts of odd stuff. Usually, you just overhire sales and marketing as even if the ROI isn't great, you're still probably driving revenue. Others would launch new product lines willy-nilly. Others would turn into acquisition firms without saying so.

It stands to reason that DEI may have been an actually earnest attempt to capture talent that had been "overlooked" somehow. You can say "well, the very fact that they think the talent was overlooked is evidence that these people have horrible biases blah blah blah" - but that's thinking too deeply. They had too much cash, they had to do something with it, and this was the very noisy-random something they came up with.

DEI as a plan doesn't make any sense under this theory though. You are a startup. Your first 10 guys are all still there. You know them. They aren't DEI in the slightest. You went to the same school as this potential DEI hire, you thought she/he was a dunce not worthy of being part of your SR design team that is now literally your company.

The only reason you are going for DEI is because your funders want it. Why they want it is a black box to you, but it is because either the government or their funders are demanding it. This will always be the case because DEI is the most inorganic type of movement. People will often refer to it as race communism, and usually such ridiculous descriptions of large movements are not well founded, but that one is. The demands of DEI ask a team to violate both ingroup preferences and competency preferences. Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you. Such a system will almost never be ground up or organic.

Look, I'm no DEI fan at all. My previous comment literally said I was going through the exercise of steelman-ing.

When you say things like "Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you" you're demonstrating that you don't want to think through the other side's position, you just want to yell at it - which is exactly one of the core criticisms of DEI.

This is what's at the heart of the Motte - this community demands more than "boo outgroup." This is why there's literally the boo outgroup reporting button.

I tried to come up with a rational market explanation for DEI. It could very well be wrong. Your counter, however, was "no, actually DEI is just stupid and evil."

No one thinks there aren't some DEI true believers. The problem with your hypothetical is not that. It is that thinking people at a dynamic startup (statistically started by a small group of white & asian men with technical backgrounds) are all of the sudden going to go through an organic switch from thinking about bringing in people they know can do the job to thinking about hiring in a different way. And they then, again, organically start hiring based on the criteria that the university scolds who discriminated against them before would like them to?

No, that is a terribly unlikely mechanism. Because they had too munch money to spend they hired DEI candidates? Thats not how engineers work. They loathe on-boarding even competent people. They would rather buy 1000 servers to sit in an empty closet.

You are operating under the assumption that a positive perspective towards the left and DEI is the ethical way to go and accurate.

You haven't established that anti-dan perspective is uncharitable and unfairly describes the DEI policies. You are just asserting that it is booing his outgroup. Ironically, you are attacking as an outgroup people who have a more negative view of DEI and the left. That kind of thing isn't harmless. Far left extremists who were too defensive about the failures of their ideological perspective have probably been among the most destructive forces of the 20th century, including towards their hated right wing outgroup. In general right wing lack of conformity to leftist ideological dogma and their more negative perspective is directly related to plenty of hatred towards the right by leftists who feel entitled to conformism to their ideology and falsely believe it is somehow bad to have a more negative perspective of it.

Underestimating the DEI problem and to the extend it is about incompetent people getting a benefit at expense of those they dislike not only can lead to unnecessary excessive hostility but can lead to underestimating a genuine problem.

Since people who are incompetent and dislike those they replace are benefiting by DEI and that is a central part of it, I don't see any valid reason to dismiss this as inaccurate.

Understating genuine problems and far left extremism and even the racist hatred that has been part of such movements must be taken more seriously because it a much more central problem to the reaction to left wing extremism than people being too unfair towards it. It how the slippery slope happens, through insufficient backlash, which has been what has been observed rather than too much right wing backlash.

Also backlash that leads to reversal of bad policies and agendas would be good thing. I see no reason to be invested in defending the honor of DEI. If people have a more negative view of failed policies, that is a good thing in fact.

You are operating under the assumption that a positive perspective towards the left and DEI is the ethical way to go and accurate.

I don't think you understand what steelmanning means.

It doesn't mean "Adopt a positive perspective of the other side's point of view."

It means "Try to understand why they think the way they do." Assume they act out of rational (to themselves) motives, even if it's purely self-interest. At the very least, you should be able to describe their motives in a way they would agree with.

Do you think anyone carrying out DEI policies would agree "My job is to hire incompetent people who hate me?" I suppose a very cynical person who actually hates DEI but just does it because it's their job might. But surely you can imagine what an actual believer would say that would make sense from their perspective.

It has nothing to do with believing that their perspective is accurate or ethical.

You can of course insist that the only reason your enemies do anything is that they are stupid and evil, and this may be a satisfying and self-gratifying thing to believe, but it's probably not accurate either.

I am interested in the reasons people genuinely do things and far more so the substance of what they support and not the way they will present what they are after since of course people constantly present things too favorably in a manner that distorts things. Whether they are lying to others or to themselves, the positive version of a strawman where it is a positive distortion is a bad thing and not something that should be accepted without exploring where it is wrong.

Censoring reality for the sake of political corectness is bad, but I don't object to someone explaining where a negative conclusion is too negative. And of course being overly charitable towards the left comes along with being overly uncharitable to both those harmed by the left and to those critical of the left.

I don't think OP was merely steelmaning though but was arguing in favor of a specific perspective and against a different view. But there was an entitlement to positive bias towards the left, and I don't think OP sufficiently demonstrated anti-dan's position being inaccurate and anti-dan's argument more accurately captures the reality of DEI than it being about market outcomes.

You can of course insist that the only reason your enemies do anything is that they are stupid and evil, and this may be a satisfying and self-gratifying thing to believe, but it's probably not accurate either.

But this is a strawman! You are framing my perspective too negatively and in a manner that I wouldn't present it while complaining about others supposedly doing the same.

I think some of the people who some include my "enemies" other people who I dislike what they are doing but not necessarily consider my enemies are immoral or insufficiently moral and sellouts who don't even care about what is the right and smart things to do from a broader perspective, or are blind ideologues, or some are neither but something not as bad but still bad enough from the perspective of what is the common good.

There are people who don't have the freedom to resist doing stupid things that enough people push as an agenda and are doing it to get along. Others are smart and malicious and support DEI because they think they will benefit or think it will harm a group that they ideologically or ethnically dislike. Some are not zealous ideologues but might follow a stupid and disastrous ideology

A lot of people can do evil and stupid things all the time, in all sorts of societies, sometimes even ideologically opponents of each other. The expectation of wise and ethical and correct conduct is much more presumptuous.

A very decent % of them can have stupid beliefs while in other facets not be stupid. One could call them misguided I guess and I am not after calling all people doing destructive things with the label idiots/stupid but using your terms. People acting in a self destructive irrational manner such as promoting incompetents at their own expense is an aspect of DEI.

Is the point to make it as if it is about calling people stupid, so you can dismiss the negative criticism that is about irrational ideology and promote the perspective that it is about market outcomes?

Misguided/Stupid/irrational and immoral ideologies and policies happen all the time. There are plenty of different people who support what is wrong for reasons that don't reflect positively upon them, for others to find legitimate things to criticize for lifetimes. Certainly the left is far from exempt from this. There is no legitimate basis to bias in favor of what reflects more positively but could be inaccurate, over what doesn't reflect as positively, and in this case is more accurate.

It can even be beneficial to some of the ideologues if enough influential types have rigged the system to benefit ideological conformism, even if what they support is bad in general. And while it wasn't my original language, but I defended it, yes there are people who support incompetent people who hate them to replace them for reasons of ideological blindspot, going along with zeltgeist, following a bad and irrational ideology, etc.

Have you considered that you might be biased against right wingers who are critical towards the left and are trying to frame such criticisms and negativity as irrational, illegitimate, hysterical, unfair, etc, etc?

You might not be as negative to the establishment neocon type to a degree, I guess, but I simply do not see any of intensity from you for people to steelman your right wing outgroup, but you are in fact the one who is constantly framing the anti feminist, white identitarians, HBDers, those critical of Jews, those critical of the left, etc, you name it, in very a negative light and not in the way they would like to represent their views. Yes you can always try to explain how they genuinely are that bad, and are terrible extremist evil irrational haters, but there is zero consistency here. You might even try to frame it again at how people want to get away with being uncharitable haters. But you are doing so while you are uncharitable and hating. So that would be again trying to frame people in a way that is too negative, incorrect and not how they like to present themselves. This can go ad nauseum with repetition.

It is more that you are using the "unfairness towards left" as a weapon to dismiss the other side, or in fact censor it.

Leftist cancel culture towards people being insufficiently politically correct/insufficiently conformist and positive over left wing visions which has in fact also had a more violent form in history, is actually a very serious deal. You don't seem to care whatsoever if in your extreme zeal to protest perceived unfairness toward the left you are unfair towards the people who you frame as these terrible irrational people, in my view very uncharitably and with distortions.

There are consequences of doing this both in censorship and in booing correct speech that leftists find offensive because it is politically incorrect *. Both in mistreating the naysayers and in not allowing bad ideologies, and bad harmful factions that comprise of people, to be treated accurately, as bad as they really are. And therefore to be allowed to continue to do harm. The rape gangs continuing in Britain after far righters sounded the alarm but they were dismissed, in addition of course to the victims who were also dismissed with some of the stories being especially horrific, is one example of the consequences of zealous pro left and associated groups political correctness which treats negative reality towards its in-groups as too unbelievable and offensive to be taken seriously.

  • Hell, there are even negative consequences of being overly dismissive and uncharitable towards both the argument and the people who are 80% correct in a negative criticism towards the left but have some element of exaggeration. Rather than trying to disentangle only the areas where they might be 20% wrong while accepting where they are 80% correct.

Do you think anyone carrying out DEI policies would agree "My job is to hire incompetent people who hate me?" I suppose a very cynical person who actually hates DEI but just does it because it's their job might. But surely you can imagine what an actual believer would say that would make sense from their perspective.

Well, if I look up what DEI enjoyers actually believe, they might no phrase it as "hire incompetent people who hate me", but if I'm working in some techie / shit-actually-needs-to-get-done field, and believe that:

  • Aspects of white culture include
  1. Emphasis on the scientific method
  2. Objective, rational, linear thinking
  3. Quantitative emphasis
  • White culture needs to be enhanced by diversity

Even if I believe that this combination will magically work out as an improvement over the status quo, how is it anything other than:

  • Me already hating myself, and believing I should hire people with similar attitudes?
  • Me believing I should hire people who are clearly incompetent for the job?

If I thought we should abolish medical licensing, would we be splitting hairs over whether or not I believe that incompetent people should be permitted to practice medicine?

Do you think anyone carrying out DEI policies would agree "My job is to hire incompetent people who hate me?" I suppose a very cynical person who actually hates DEI but just does it because it's their job might. But surely you can imagine what an actual believer would say that would make sense from their perspective.

The person carrying out the DEI policies is likely a DEI candidate themselves. The job is not to hire people that hate her (statistically) its to hire people who hate the core employees so they can, in the long run, execute a coup and take over the company.

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"Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you" follows from the DEI-pushers stated reasoning, actions, and claims. The part about hate follows from the whole oppressor-oppressed thing; if white people are oppressors and the under-represented minorities are the oppressed, not only do the URMs hate the white, but the whites deserve the hate for being oppressors. The part about incompetence falls out from the fact that they insist on representation above competence; they will tend to switch between claiming the URMs really are competent but you're measuring it wrong and that competence doesn't actually matter depending on the situation. Generally you can get them to agree to various bits of this but if you put it together they'll claim it's false. That doesn't make putting it together boo-outgroup.

However, nonetheless, even when you think somebody's position implies something you shouldn't say that they believe that thing. I think that's in the rules? And humans don't really work that way to start with.

Such a rule merely provides cover for those engaged in doublespeak or doublethink.

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Why not take less cash but give away a smaller amount of your start up?

There's an economics paper to be written about this.

Start up valuations are mostly a game until they're not. Signaling is a big part of it. If I'm raising at any stage (pre-seed, seed, series A, B, C etc.) I have to look around at the other companies who are raising at the same time, I have to figure out what VC firms are expecting over the next several years, I have to look at the IPO markets. That is how I create my own valuation, not my internal metrics (cashflow, margin, customer churn etc. etc.) The game of it is building a narrative that takes your internal metrics and creates a direct path to the du jour valuations.

If I don't do that and ask for less money, I am inadvertently signalling that I am not as high growth as the other companies I'm competing with. If I do that, no one will invest in me. Sure, you're going to say "but a real value investor---" No, that's not how big time VC works. Now, there are under the radar investors (I hesitate to call them VCs because they're too smart for that label) who purposefully try to find companies at good prices and don't care about the competitive pricing environment. But, the VC world being highly relationship and network driven, it's not like any company can flee to these "smart" investors. If you don't know them already, you don't knew they even exist.

So, most companies, especially those with first time founders, are playing the Big VC game. Investors will quite literally tell you "You have to take 5 million, even though you only asked for 3 million. If you don't, we're walking away. Also, make sure you spend all of that - we can't have a bunch of extra cash."

Why tho?

Because the VCs themselves have to make their fund performance metrics work; their IRR, their Multiples. A funny thing developed over the past two decades, however. This article is legendary for explaining it; deploying capital really fast creates its own outperformance even up to billions of dollars. So, if I am a VC with no particular investing talent but a lot of money (which is most of them) I want to find as many companies as I can (the later the stage the better, up to about Series C) and just cram huge amounts of money into their face. Because it works.

Even if it doesn't make any sense.

Often you're not getting just money from a VC fund. You're also getting their prestige, connections, and """mentorship""". Sometimes the legitimizing effects of those secondary things is worth more than the money you raise in the first place. Many prestigious and well connected funds have minimum check sizes that are quite large.

There are other incentives to raise more than you need. If you have a failed startup on your resume, people will use how much it raised as a proxy for how far it got. There's also some weird recursive perception things where raising money improves the perceived value of the company. This can frequently result in your stake rising in value more than it's diluted.

Most likely Keynesian beauty contest reasons - if you behave in an unusual way, especially in one that means you get less money out of the gate, that implies you believe you have less opportunity to make money than other prospects, which means investors will get less money if they invest in you, which compounds on itself to make you unattractive to any investor and so you end up with no money at all.

One thing that is important to keep in mind is that there was a little cottage industry in the academic literature that strained to try to prove that diversity initiatives were actually supported by a simple business case, that increasing diversity would increase performance and increase profits. There were plenty of lit spats about such claims. But some folks still believe genericized versions of it.

The kind of funny thing is that a lot of those same people are the ones who are now saying that these companies are cutting such programs now just to make more money. If one truly believes that DEI programs increase performance/profits, then they should believe that cutting DEI programs decreases performance/profits. Thus undercutting at least one of their two rationales.

One would think that some set of these large companies who adopted such programs ≅4yrs ago would have seen their performance indicators and profits taking off. They'd be saying, "We can't cut this; it would cost us too much money." Instead, I think the much more likely interpretation is the one that is supported by the current claims, not the former claims - lots of companies adopted these programs in the wake of George Floyd; some were just trying to play the PR game, others may have legitimately believed the predictions of increased performance/profits. ≅4yrs later, they've seen that the magical increased performance/profit simply hasn't materialized, the political pressure is decreased, and they now, indeed, want to save some money.

One thing that is important to keep in mind is that there was a little cottage industry in the academic literature that strained to try to prove that diversity initiatives were actually supported by a simple business case, that increasing diversity would increase performance and increase profits. There were plenty of lit spats about such claims. But some folks still believe genericized versions of it.

As goes the possibly apocryphal quote, "a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

The kind of funny thing is that a lot of those same people are the ones who are now saying that these companies are cutting such programs now just to make more money. If one truly believes that DEI programs increase performance/profits, then they should believe that cutting DEI programs decreases performance/profits.

Schrodinger's Profitability. Companies embrace DEI because having more women and non-Asian minorities obviously increases your company's human capital and thus will render it more profitable; companies cut DEI because they're filled with racist and misogynistic sociopaths who care only about the bottom-line.

I think a lot of these companies were being told by big consulting firms like McKinsey that these strategies would open new markets and bring them a lot of money, and the companies genuinely believed them. They started cooling off on DEI and the Modern Audience when the promised returns never materialized.

Usually this comes up in discussions of management consulting firms making a guest appearance to recommend layoffs—but stereotypically, management consulting firms like McKinsey/BCG/Bain ("MBB") are used by the managers of industry companies not for their novel insights nor research.

The stereotypical role of management consulting firms is to Read the Room and make suggestions for things company management already wanted to do, and to lend an air of credibility and serve as a scapegoat for the consequences of any decisions that are made. It's not like management consulting firms have any specialized knowledge or brilliant insight that would make industry management go "ohh... squeeze the costs and juice the revenue, why didn't I think of that?" drake_lil_yachty.gif

Sometimes young consultants will tell you this as well. After a few years (or even months) in management consulting their cynicism is sufficient that, regardless of the (lack of) inherent value-add of their research and analyses, they see it as a good career path for those with just Excel and PowerPoint monkeying skills and are broadly smart, with great compensation and exit opportunities (and investment banking was too hard to get into and/or too many hours). "It ain't much, but it's honest work." Well, mostly honest.

And even when not serving as water-carrier for industry management, the research of management consulting firms is usually basic and pandering as fuck. For example, "Return-to-office mandates: Women, minorities hardest hit".

Industry management typically have decades of experience (at least intermittently) interacting with management consulting firms, and many have oftentimes done a stint in MBB themselves, so they should be red-pilled as to the "thought leadership" of management consulting firms.

This is not to say that management consulting firms are worthless, so to speak. Being a lubricant for corporate decision-making can be value-add in and of itself, even if you're unable to deliver ground-breaking insights.

As these companies continue to move away from DEI, and if it becomes increasingly apparent to the general public that it didn't work, how will the vocal proponents, like Mark Cuban, attempt to shift the narrative to avoid admitting they were wrong? The most surprising outcome is someone like him admitting fault, or that he was mistaken. My guess is that it will be some combination of "It wasn't properly implemented." or "It works perfectly fine where I invested." or "People didn't give it the chance it deserved."

Whatever the case, I suspect the Mea Culpas will be few and far between, and the deflections will be many. These people are masters of self-preservation.

Look at what happened after COVID: influential people who get things wrong don't admit they were wrong. They instead avoid the whole subject, act confused when you bring it up, and pivot to the next serious person thing.

That is --- unless the law. I imagine that thousands of white male tech workers will have good cases for suing FAANG companies for a decade of bigotry.

Indeed, I suspect that this is the real reason for the pivot. A Harris appointed AG wouldn't allow such cases to go forward but a Trump appointec one...

There are a lot things (DEI programs among them) that are deeply unpopular and in some cases blantanly illegal based on a plain reading of the law that only persist because they are fashionable amongst the priestly class. The priestly class looks after its own, which is how Alvin Bragg is able to talk on national TV about how his office absolutely considers a potential defendants' political leanings and racial identity when deciding which cases to pursue without getting charged under title 18 section 241.

Indeed, one of the old Trump admin's final policies was to try to pursue discrimination complaints against anti-white discrimination.

That is --- unless the law. I imagine that thousands of white male tech workers will have good cases for suing FAANG companies for a decade of bigotry.

No. The rule is you don't have standing to sue unless you can demonstrate "but-for" discrimination. That is, you have to demonstrate that you, personally, would have been hired if it weren't for the discriminatory practice. This is a very high bar and the courts tend to require it before discovery. Both right-leaning and lefty courts apply this to discrimination against white males. Lefty courts are in effect far laxer when it comes to discrimination against minorities and women, and often the EEOC will help there as well.

"It wasn't working just because companies were doing it cynically for profit."

I wouldn't call Mark Cuban a true believer, but someone that panders to them. To the true believers their worldview implicitly or explicitly imagine capitalism as tainting ideals or progress as soon as it comes in contact with them, so it's easy to dismiss any negative result. It's not a proof through competition that their idea doesn't work, it's proof number 473935 that capitalism needs to go because it gets in the way of their ideas.

  1. Bunch of companies eliminate DEI

  2. Inevitably, some executive or employee will say or do something boneheaded, costing the company money

  3. Attribute that boneheadedness to the elimination of DEI

  4. Watch that anecdote spread like wildfire through media

I'm sure there will be infinite variations on "true communism DEI has never been tried".

Or, no one ever believed those claims. They were merely there as part of the toolkit to silence those opposed to the program.

There’s three types of people here. It’s like my hobby horse of black people in Medieval England. There’s the people who knowingly lie or obfuscate the truth. Then there’s the people who believe those people because they are “experts “. The vast majority are the latter. There’s also some who know it’s not true but pretend to because it’s fashionable or expedient. This is Zuck. There’s no way he didn’t know it was nonsense but he went along with it when he had to but now that he can get rid of it he will.

It’s like my hobby horse of black people in Medieval England

Were you the one who had a planned effortpost on that at some point?

Not me. I haven’t posted here in a long time. I lurked for like a year because my Mac crashed and I forgot my username/password. I actually have been accumulating scholarly articles and peer reviewed articles about this though because I wanted to make a substack to deboonk this once and for all but I haven’t had time. I also bought two of the most cited books about this and have been reading them, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get to finish this. It’s a huge undertaking. My only motivation is my absolute hatred that people are allowed to lie about this with impunity.

I, for one, hope you find the time to do a write-up and post or link it here.

Did he really have to, though? What would have happened to him if he had said no to DEI? This isn't a rhetorical question on my part, by the way.

Discrimination lawsuits against Meta? They could have been fought.

Loss of woke employees? Not that significant for a company that people in general want to work for as much as they want to work for Meta.

Government interference of some kind? Not sure about this one. I can imagine the government forcing companies to add surveillance or censorship, since we have seen both happen, but I don't know if the government would bother to enforce DEI programs.

Angry investors? Also not sure about this one. How many would have cared?

I haven't watched the quite lengthy Rogan Zuck interview, so maybe someone could fill me in.

An advertising boycott. It's no joke, I can't find the link, but I remember posting here that Elon lost 80% of advertising revenue on Twitter. He possibly made up for it by corresponding 80% emoyment cuts, and the shift to paid subscriptions, but the company's finances are now private, so we don't know.

This was also a very tangible threat for Zuckerberg, not a hypothetical. I remember seeing the "No Clicks For Hate" campaign, which was specifically targeted at Facebook, pop up in various places in the tech sector.

Interesting. I feel a bit silly for having missed that obvious factor.

That does bring up the question, though... why wouldn't an advertising boycott be a similar problem for Meta nowadays? Has culture really shifted that much in the last few years?

Boycotts require lots and lots of buy in from the rank and file, as both gun control and pro-life movements have discovered, so you can’t just deploy them Willy-nilly. You can use them effectively against companies that take major stands on current thing, you can use them against companies with easily available alternatives, and in both cases you need a big true believer base.

Calling the boycott bluff is economically rational and Zuckerberg is smart enough to know it. There just isn’t a good alternative to meta- TikTok is about to be banned, Twitter has an even stronger reputation for far-right, and it’s no longer the current thing. Advertisers have learned this- especially after the bud light boycott(which is a great example of the conditions for a successful boycott- there’s a big true believer base which thinks transgenders are mentally ill perverts, they drank bud light and there were lots of easy alternatives, and trans was a big current thing). Contrast with the boycotts of Starbucks or home depot.

Advertising boycotts are a bit different, you don't need to convince consumers, you need to convince marketing departments. Who are staffed entirely with people who already want to believe Facebook is being hateful, and who are profoundly inside filter bubbles making them believe everyone agrees with them (if they weren't advertising wouldn't look like it currently does).

Zuck can call the bluff now (and couldn't before) because of the election. Marketing departments that try pushing their companies into the "woke" side of the culture war will probably be overruled by CEOs who have now recieved a very strong signal as to where the population stands with regards to this.

Elon Musk already took a lot of the available heat. It's an even tougher sell now than it was a few years ago for an advertiser to burn their own revenues to deliberately antagonize both Facebook and the incoming President of the United States out of sheer ideological bloody-mindedness. Doing it now, when you've already seen that the last tech billionaire who faced a boycott like that did not cave in like he was supposed to and instead joined the other team whole-heartedly and is now poised to enact whatever revenge he has in mind using whatever influence he's curried over the last election, would not be a safe investment.

I can't say I understand what happened. I also don't think the actual culture could change so fast, but it feels like some rubber band snapped the moment Trump won.

It reminds me of one of the 1989 revolutions (am I thinking of Hungary?). The dictator was getting worried at the people's lack of enthusiasm and bleak countenance, so decided to hold a huge rally in the capital. The people got there, noticed that everyone else looked as miserable as they felt, and someone finally grumbled out loud. So it went from people cowed into submission to overthrowing the government fairly quickly and without coordination, because the culture had been quietly changing but everyone was so afraid to admit it that it took something big and public for everyone to realize it was safe to complain all at once.

It's kinda felt like it's been heading that way since 2014 or so. The Woke wave grew strong, scared people into compliance, but the more people got canceled, the more damage they did, and the more all that damage demonstrably failed in achieving their stated goals, the more people quietly slinked (slank?) off to the "I swear I'm liberal; it's just that the rest of the left went crazy!" hoarde. The media and SJWs' hold on the narrative™ grew increasingly obviously wispy, and then the election was everyone's signal that it was finally safe to breathe. Elon Musk's buying Twitter, the backfiring of the Hogwarts Legacy boycott, the utter destruction of culturual juggernauts like Star Wars and Marvel, and the Biden administration's utter failure to bring back even Obama era levels of seeming stability, probably all had a lot to do with it, but the election was the most public sign of all, with very straightforward numbers and everything. The Cancel mobs have always been a loud minority, but now everyone knows it to be so.

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The advertiser boycott depended on threatening the advertisers, not Twitter. And running even one successful boycott is a high bar to clear.

At the end of the day it doesn’t take a very big shift in culture against woke for boycotts to stop being a credible threat.

The line of reasoning seemed to work on Boomercons.

"Diversity is just good business. After all, I read it in BusinessWeek."

Boomercons still place a lot of trust in the media and academia, having come of age in an era when those wells were less poisoned than today.

Notably, whites over 65 were the only sizeable demographic that shifted from (R)->(D) during the last election. The geriatrics who run much of our country can still be reached with the old hamfisted propaganda methods.

Older people often have assets. Assets did pretty great between 2021-2024. So maybe they weren’t as harmed as others by inflation etc.

Yeah. I also think the Democrats have a great bargain for older whites:

  1. You get: Comfort and prosperity until you die

  2. We get: Destruction of your culture

It's the same method that can be used to effectively defang a union. You grandfather in the older members who then lose any incentive to fight for the benefits of the younger members.

I don't think it was about silencing, more like a sales pitch to a clueless Boomer exec, that sounds just plausible enough they might buy it. Same thing as "this $mediaArtifact needs a more diverse cast, so we can appeal to a wider audience"

In related news, Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan where, among other things, he talked about the pressure the Biden Administration put on him / his employees.

I never expected to be this bitter at the turning of the tide, but I feel the need to bookmark this clip for future use. Oh well, I suppose that was the most likely way something approaching a win would pan out, so I can't complain too much, but boy, would I like to have a few words with some people.

Alternatively Zuck doesn't give a shit about either the left or the right or free speech or all that jazz, he's playing a different game: maximizing money. This isn't any less moral or worthy than serving the left/right, in fact I'd argue it's more moral than the self contradictory belief systems held by almost everyone on the left/right except for the most principled (probably a few percent of humans, definitely not more than 10%).

Ideologically, I think he's more like Musk shooting for Mars, but Zuck's goal is something more like automated super AI VR future tech. Previously, he thought that allying with Democrats was most conducive to that goal, but that relationship started to sour. His loyalty is with neither side.

I think the opposite is true. Zuckerburg's stance shows some courage and indicates a genuine belief in free speech and equality.

Is he a hero? No. Heroic would have been taking the same stance in 2021 and having his company taken from him by government pressure and angry shareholders.

But if he was a coward he would just have kept the DEI going, albeit at a lower profile. No one forced him to make this announcement. There are real risks. Even though Trump barely won the election, California is still a one-party Democratic state. Furthermore, Facebook's employees could fairly be classified as far-left. A corporate goon like Sundar (Google) or Satya (Microsoft) would never have taken such a bold stance.

I think this Scott article is relevant:

Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade

Mark is fighting the fight that can be won, not heroically dying on the battlefield to inspire later generations. I give him credit for standing up for what's right, even if it's not maximally brave.

Is he a hero? No. Heroic would have been taking the same stance in 2021 and having his company taken from him by government pressure and angry shareholders.

Unlike Musk or Bezos, who could conceivably have their company taken from them by investors, Zuck owns an ironclad majority of Facebook voting stock. He could be jailed, but he’d still control the company. Even if the SEC forced him to resign as CEO for some manufactured violation of securities law, he’s still be able to appoint his successor.

I don't even have a high opinion of the guy, but if you want an example of someone who was fighting the fight that can be won, than that would be Elon.

Mark can't even be called the guy that waited on the sidelines to see who wins. He was fighting for one side, and then turned his cloak when they started losing.

If you want an example of someone who's no hero, but can say he has principles and did what he could, that would be Jack Dorsey.

Elon strikes me more as the hero archetype. He fights the battle that can't be won but somehow wins it anyway.

He will eventually fail. You can't just keep doubling your bet forever. At some point, something will happen and he will lose. If Trump had lost the election, I believe Musk would have been subject to lawfare and then jailed. Normal people just don't take those kinds of risks.

One day he will die on the battlefield.

But... until that happens, I will take Peter Thiel's advice and never bet against Elon.

Elon has engaged in some bet hedging, like moving everything to Texas.

I’d argue moving everything to Texas is, if anything, doubling down on the chud wing of the right.

Yes, it’s siding with the right, but it’s bet hedging against retaliation from democrats.

Wow, this was a lightbulb post for me.

I've been critical of Elon in the past because something about the guy rubs me the wrong way. I've never doubted his intelligence or capability, but my spidey sense always goes off whenever I see him in long interviews and, definitely, when scrolling through his twitter posts. I've rooted against him, I've just been very suspicious.

And this is why - going all in on Elon may indeed be heroic / brave what have you, but it's going to lead to ruin. Sure, that could be "glorious" ruin or whatever but, still - you gon' die!

So, yes, let's be Thielists in this case - not on Elon's side all-in per se, but also definitely not betting against him.

Everyone dies. The goal is to die well.

Yeah, I don't think Elon ranks up there with William Wallace and Maximus Decimus Meridius in terms of being able to stir the hearts and souls of men. Plenty of folks have decided to give their whole mind and heart over to him, though.

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Furthermore, Facebook's employees could fairly be classified as far-left.

Pissing them off maybe a feature rather than a bug. Why do more layoffs when you can get some of your most troublesome employees reason to quit in anger or do something that gives you cause to fire then?

This isn't any less moral or worthy than serving the left/right,

It is, if you're not honest about it.

Alternate headline "Meta renames its DEI program". No one will be fired, they will all be moved to new departments with boring names that continue to do the exact same thing. They'll be working hard to use technology, algorithms and AI to advantage/disadvantage whatever group their slack channel demands for the rest of their careers.

For a story where that's the case: Jamie Sarkonak: The University of Alberta said it was ending DEI. That's not true.

They simply renamed it to ACB, or Anti-Caucasian Bias "access, community and belonging".

And the euphemism treadmill rolls onward. DEI used to be called Affirmative Action.

Indeed, but in a rare instance where the euphemism treadmill leads to greater legibility: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is more immediately understandable than Affirmative Action, especially without contextual/historical knowledge.

I can translate "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" word for word to an acquaintance whose primary language is not English, and he or she could get the gist. Unlikely so for "Affirmative Action," which for he or she would just sound like two random (English) words paired together.

That's because it is just two random English words paired together. You don't need a non-English speaker (real or imaginary) in the picture to see that. You'd never guess its meaning from the words alone if you didn't know the history and context behind them.

ACB is also close to 'all cops are bastards' which was a popular slogan during BLM but they used the acronym ACAB.

The factcheckers and Californian moderators are getting fired. The former will be replaced by a Community Notes -like system and are freaking out because, from what I understand, Zuckerberg was more or less single-handedly supporting the entire industry, while the latter will be replaced by Texans.

I'm not one for early celebrations, but it looks like these are actual policy changes.

I’m skeptical about the replacement by Texans as a strong policy change rather than a cost saving measure. Doing business in California is ruinously expensive.

If that was the only change they announced, I might be more skeptical too, but it seems like a comprehensive shift.

Diverse slate hiring -- assuming this means insisting on interviewing at least N minorities for a given opening -- was legally perilous. One of my former employers was told by their lawyers that they couldn't do it directly but perhaps could through an intermediary providing the leads.

Huh really? It seems designed to ensure that no individual candidate would ever be disadvantaged.

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