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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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It could just be the wrong way around; established, profitable companies can afford to spunk money away on diversity hires and vanity projects like stuffing boardrooms for social goodboy points, and less or un-profitable companies who don't have that kind of capital would just go bust when they try to do so. The end result is that only the companies who can afford to shoulder X% of deadweight engage in this behaviour.

A more convincing metric would be if startups are more or less likely to fail due to being diverse, but even this can be skewed by things like grants for X-led companies or whatever.

Companies that make themselves attractive to investors by having high ratings in diversity ratings get more investments and therefore do better. When companies have to put stats such as percentage of female employees, diversity scores etc in their annual report, these numbers will matter. I was somewhat connected to a company that makes software that scrapes the numbers from financial statements and annual reports and helps investors make decisions without having to manually dig through tonnes of paper. These numbers did play a small but not insignificant role.

I can believe the relation exists and causality goes the opposite way. Anecdote: the woke tech company I work for recently had a big layoff+bad stock market results and now suddenly there's just less of all this stuff.

Teams devoted to diversity/etc had fairly big cuts, while teams devoted to making money with tech had comparatively small cuts. Within the tech part of the org it's openly acknowledged that individual performance played a big role in who got cut. Most of the people whose names you recognize for woke stuff are gone and the people who remain you recognize because of what they shipped.

You sound like a 'character', is that right?

While I'd heard similar groups had gotten caught, I'd heard mixed things about performance. It would actually be encouraging if it were more performance based, and less random-seeming, as it does from the other side of the Atlantic, where the cuts aren't all through yet.

This is definitely it. Big/more prominent companies generally adhere more to DEI ideology because they are bigger targets for woke gleichschaltung. Big/more prominent companies are also generally more successful otherwise they wouldn't be big/more prominent in the first place (plus they can more readily leverage economies of scale).

Let's imagine that I, myself the writer of this post, suddenly found some app like in a hentai doujin that can perform actual hypnosis on people. And let's imagine that I hypnotized every player in the NBA to become a dedicated pedofascist. Does this prove that believing in pedofascism makes you a better basketball player or that a pedofascist ideological orientation has any relationship to skill at basketball? Would any of the answers to these questions change if I had merely browbeat, gaslight, etc. them into it or even just honestly convinced them (woke conversion is somewhere in between the two, though obviously leaning towards the more coercive end in many cases)? Of course not. Replacing "DEI" with a more obscure ideology makes it clear that the whole thing is a non-sequitur.

(To be clear, being a dedicated pedofascist might make you more likely to be a better basketball player, given that fascism tends to emphasize competitiveness and physical vigor, but a mere correlation created by convincing good basketball players of it could never prove that by itself. And unless "DEI" advocates can offer up a more fundamental explanation of why their ideology might enhance business productivity as I just did for my example, they have nothing else.)

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