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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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:
Even if I believe that this combination will magically work out as an improvement over the status quo, how is it anything other than:
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?
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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.
First—do you have any statistics on this? How can you know someone is a DEI candidate?
Assuming you’re right, and most DEI is implemented by a fifth column, there’s still an obvious bootstrap problem. Someone had to implement the first DEI policies. Someone at each firm, even.
If so…why? Why is this cause the one which gets a conspiracy? How’d they overcome the profit motive, the complacency bias, all the things which kept commies and anarchists from pulling the same shtick?
My theory is in my above posts. The entryism starts because the legal environment is hostile to a non-DEI company. Its either coming from the funds, who already had been entered, or the law firms advising the startup, who also have been entered. Why do those continue on? Because legacy profits at most of our larger firms in the US are significant and there is also the issue of the entire education-industrial complex being a captured institution that is slowly burning its legacy reputation in service of DEI.
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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.
There's a difference between "Your policies mean you are hiring incompetent people who hate you" and "Your goal is to hire incompetent people who hate you because that's what you want."
This is iterated ad nauseum with every ideology people don't like here: DEI, feminism, semitism, socialism, environmentalism, what have you. "Your beliefs are bad and lead to X" is not the same as "You want X." Otherwise we could just reduce 90% of arguments here to "You hate truth and beauty and life because you're evil and stupid."
They will agree that the underrepresented minorities hate their oppressors, members of the majority. They will sometimes admit that they're less competent, though they will typically blame members of the majority for this. They will not typically agree to these things at the same time in the context of hiring, but it's a lot stronger than merely "My logic says that your beliefs imply this".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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