What is DEI, and why is it dividing America?

[Phi for All]

3 hours ago, dedo said:

Since you sound like a Dem supporter, then the greatest harm is if this admin. / Maga, turns out to be as bad as you believe, because DEI got it elected causing Dems to force policies on US that millions considered to be abhorrent.

I can't help drawing a parallel between the stories I'm hearing about TFG supporters who are happy he's going after Obamacare, as long as he leaves the ACA alone, and all the misinformation surrounding DEI. People in democracies in general are in favor of initiatives aimed at supporting people from all walks of life, that try to be just and fair with everybody, and allow everyone a seat at the table when it comes to important decisions that affect them, yet many of those same people have been told it's bad when you call it DEI.

[CharonY]

That is part of it, for sure. But don't underestimate the bias and preconception some folks have regarding certain types of the population. I think quite a few would consider certain folks undeserving of support, regardless in which form.

[dedo]

6 hours ago, CharonY said:

What is the problem you spoke of. Why do you think that the issue is unrelated to racism. What do genocides have to do with DEI? You are making wide speculations on various unrelated topics and you keep failing to tie anything to DEI. Potentially these things are tied together in your head somehow, but so far you have not really explained it in a way that someone other than yourself could understand what you mean.

Perhaps to lay some groundwork, could you explain precisely what you think DEI is and what it tries to address? Without any excursions to dooms day, genocide, wars etc. please. Just the basic definitions first.

Maybe you could try explaining exactly what you are for as we seem to be talking past each other.  I believe I gave 2 huge examples to support DEI failure including the LA fires, & the election of the current administration.  Here is one more of a more general analysis of it's poor implementation:

https://eric-sandosham.medium.com/the-problem-with-dei-cb81d1053543

I believe I likely support and have practiced DEI, the way it should work likely more than anyone here meaning hiring totally done on merit, without regard to race or sexual preference.  Furthermore, what is practiced here the majority of the time, meaning talking down to people was rare, and was punished if it was a chronic problem.  Saw two highly competent people hounded into forced retirement for that, one shown the door the next day after derision to staff on a night shift.  In our work place a simple question from anyone, even the person that mopped the floor, was answered on the spot, with respect.  That is a foreign concept for many if not most people.

Thus, if you don't believe I supplied enough evidence for poor DEI implementation, say what you do believe.  Personally, I don't think supplying even 100 examples matters to people with tribal agendas.  Your agenda & the agenda of most here, is the Democratic Party.  Mine, as an independent, is to solve problems & I believe the last admin. did a good job in difficult circumstances.  So say what you believe, & maybe I will agree with you.  Otherwise, I've said enough here & more examples won't matter.  One lady on X was trying to argue a subject with me she clearly never practiced or even watched a single event, yet she just had a tribal narrative she wanted to push.  More examples or evidence in that situation won't change POV.  What might work, is to make the subject "how can this problem be solved", not who is right and who is wrong.

[CharonY]

I will note that yet again you failed to describe what you think DEI actually means. You basically just described what you think are DEI failures without linking the mechanism (how DEI works in practice) to the actual outcome. So again the question, how do you think DEI works, say in hiring processes?

[swansont]

30 minutes ago, dedo said:

the way it should work likely more than anyone here meaning hiring totally done on merit, without regard to race or sexual preference

That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin” That means you can’t hire someone based on any of those attributes. 

Anyone claiming DEI is doing so, is misrepresenting DEI.

 

Quote

if you don't believe I supplied enough evidence for poor DEI implementation, say what you do believe

How about you supply evidence? I don’t see any. It’s your claim, so it’s up to you to support it. 

[dedo]

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

I will note that yet again you failed to describe what you think DEI actually means. You basically just described what you think are DEI failures without linking the mechanism (how DEI works in practice) to the actual outcome. So again the question, how do you think DEI works, say in hiring processes?

Pass on the proctoring.  What DEI should mean is what I described in the way we did it.  What I believe it actually became, was it got morphed into part of the political ideology of the Democratic Party enraging voters & played a major role in getting the current administration elected.  Look at who ran LA.  Do you really believe those people were hired on merit?  The article I linked to also describes the flaws.

My proctoring, I mean the ideology of derision against the current administration is celebrated, and anyone not goose stepping to that faces interrogation, straw man arguments & repeated tribal bias.  So pass on answering more questions until, you state what you believe / support, or phrase a problem to solve.  

It is almost impossible to convince a tribe that their ideology is flawed, but there are examples of the most extreme ideologies cooperating to solve a hard problem.  So if you like the latter, will try to add something.  If you want to decline to answer anything & just proctor, hard pass as convincing you of anything is impossible.  

The desire to proctor / be a deity is part of the pathology infecting the world from my POV.  It drives people like Putin to invade, & fuels the issues DEI was originally planned to resist like discrimination.  But that is outside the scope of this thread.  I have studied it for decades.

[iNow]

29 minutes ago, dedo said:

What I believe…

Has been spoon fed to you like the good scapegoating propaganda it is by people with divisive self-serving agendas, and you swallowed it all up like a good little baby bird taking in daddy’s latest regurgitation.

 

34 minutes ago, dedo said:

It is almost impossible to convince a tribe that their ideology is flawed

Pot. Kettle. Black. There’s only one side pushing DEI narratives. It’s the same side that screamed the loudest about BLM interestingly enough.

 

37 minutes ago, dedo said:

the ideology of derision against the current administration is celebrated, and anyone not goose stepping to that faces interrogation, straw man arguments & repeated tribal bias

It’s clear you’ve been swimming regularly in toxic waters and it’s spreading through you like malignant cancer. I hope one day you’re able heal and purge all of this unhealthy bile.

[CharonY]

In addition I will note again the failure to provide specifics or any evidence that the provided assertions are true and caused by DEI. It is not explained how the situation in LA is linked to DEI, for example.

There are issues with DEI policies, no doubt. This is true for virtually all policies. However, if one keeps harping on merit, it is pretty clear that no discussion in good faith can be had. Event he link provided to seemingly support their position does not mention merit a single time. Rather it is more talking about whether DEI measures actually contribute to diversity.

Let's make things rather clear as the provided gish gallop clearly shows that there is no meaningful discussion to be had with that poster. There is a huge body of literature showing that in many cases, meritocracy is mostly a myth in many respects- selection parameters of successful candidates in job searches for example do not necessarily predict ability reliably. Even worse, there are many non-performance parameters which strongly influence hiring preferences. Especially in low-diversity environments conformity is such a parameter, i.e. having a similar look, accent and mannerism as the majority becomes very important. Meritocracy is then used as an excuse to solidify such a status quo. We often trick ourselves into thinking that our selection is objective by assigning scores to various parameters, but as everyone involved in hiring will tell you (if they are honest) this really just hides the underlying subjectivity. It does not mean that merit has no, ehm merit. But it means that we often have biased and imperfect rubrics to measure merit.

If one really want to create a system that is based on merit, it needs to be flexible enough to identify positive characteristics, even if folks look or behave differently, as long as it does not affect the core mission. A secondary goal is to increase diversity in the group to avoid this type of groupthink where folks start to believe that having a beard and polo shirt is a sign of intelligence, because they all look like that and are clearly the most intelligent folks in the bunch.

Ironically, one very valid criticism of DEI is not that they start hiring unsuitable folks, this only happens if the hiring committee or manager themselves are incompetent (i.e. they are unable to spot suitable candidates regardless of measures present). What is more likely to happen is that DEI policies amount to little more than window dressing (the link provided hinted at that). I.e., in many cases it is not really effective at breaking the mold as it does not address the actual barriers present.

But again, bringing out merit in context of DEI is just a mildly veiled suggestion that minorities are fundamentally less capable, as obviously fully merit-based systems for some reason keep on benefiting white (and orange) men.

An older but easy-to-follow read is here Lawton, Anne. "The meritocracy myth and the illusion of equal employment opportunity." Minn. L. Rev. 85 (2000): 587.

Another well-cited article using an empirical approach using personnel data is here https://doi.org/10.1086/588738

This article describes the illusion of objectivity and how it can lead to discrimination https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2007.07.001

[dedo]

2 hours ago, iNow said:

Has been spoon fed to you like the good scapegoating propaganda it is by people with divisive self-serving agendas, and you swallowed it all up like a good little baby bird taking in daddy’s latest regurgitation.

 

Pot. Kettle. Black. There’s only one side pushing DEI narratives. It’s the same side that screamed the loudest about BLM interestingly enough.

 

It’s clear you’ve been swimming regularly in toxic waters and it’s spreading through you like malignant cancer. I hope one day you’re able heal and purge all of this unhealthy bile.

Just put DEI on your post, or on your mirror, reread it periodically, & maybe you will start to understand the results of the election.  Had I known more people like yourself, I might have voted for Maga too.  However, congratulations, your POV & deity wannabe desire to bully others, that people like you stamped all over Dem policies including DEI, drove anyone near the middle right into the Rep voting booth

[KJW]

10 hours ago, dedo said:

Your agenda & the agenda of most here, is the Democratic Party.

No, the "agenda" of most here is science. Bear in mind that this is an international website with people here from countries other than the USA. For example, I am an Australian. I'm guessing that most scientists tend to lean towards the left, perhaps because they see the policies of right-wing political parties as tending towards evil.

Here's an example from my own country: The previous government (the right-wing major party) trialled a policy whereby 80% of a person's social security payment would be placed into a cashless card account that was operated by a particular private company. There were tight restrictions on what this money could be used for as no cash could be obtained from the account. The message was that the people on social security payments were unable to manage their own money (often referred to as "taxpayer's money") and needed to have their spending restricted by the government (via a private company). Although the government intended to have this policy extended to most if not all people on social security payments, the trials took place in locations with largely indigenous populations.
 

Edited 11 hours ago by KJW

[dedo]

3 hours ago, KJW said:

No, the "agenda" of most here is science. Bear in mind that this is an international website with people here from countries other than the USA. For example, I am an Australian. I'm guessing that most scientists tend to lean towards the left, perhaps because they see the policies of right-wing political parties as tending towards evil.

Here's an example from my own country: The previous government (the right-wing major party) trialled a policy whereby 80% of a person's social security payment would be placed into a cashless card account that was operated by a particular private company. There were tight restrictions on what this money could be used for as no cash could be obtained from the account. The message was that the people on social security payments were unable to manage their own money (often referred to as "taxpayer's money") and needed to have their spending restricted by the government (via a private company). Although the government intended to have this policy extended to most if not all people on social security payments, the trials took place in locations with largely indigenous populations.
 

If the agenda is science, can you show where?  Specifically:

Science is defined as the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena.

I don't consider pushing an agenda, talking down to people, or distorting facts to be science.  Teaching the known facts is a small part of science but the important part is to explain the natural world through investigation.  So you have remarked on pathology in Australia.  I submit that the same kind of pathology brought the right wing to power in the US.  Who does it more, or who is worse, is tribal arguing that may or may not even qualify as debate.  So you have noted a natural phenomenon and have even brought in a moral / spiritual measure for that behavior as evil.

So do you have an idea or an opinion for the theoretical explanation for the behavior pathology you noted in Australia, or any similar pathology?  If you are able to theorize that, then you have done actual science especially if you can combine your hypothesis with anyone else's.  Personally have not seen it occur on the internet, so am curious what it takes to enable that, meaning real science, or investigating the unknown, to occur on the internet where the other techniques of science (experimentation, observation etc.) can't be used & all you really can do is to combine data toward some goal.

So if you have a theory of this behavior pathology you observed, let us know.

[swansont]

15 hours ago, dedo said:

Your agenda & the agenda of most here, is the Democratic Party.

There are a fair fraction of people here who are not US citizens, so I don’t see how they would have the agenda of US politics.

Science deals in verifiable facts and the current/recent Republican party largely rejects facts and science, so it shouldn’t be surprising that scientist would tend to align with the party that isn’t hostile to it.

Your own agenda is becoming clear. Further, your avoidance of supporting your claims has become an issue.

13 hours ago, dedo said:

Pass on the proctoring.  What DEI should mean is what I described in the way we did it.  What I believe it actually became, was it got morphed into part of the political ideology of the Democratic Party enraging voters & played a major role in getting the current administration elected.  Look at who ran LA.  Do you really believe those people were hired on merit?  

That’s not evidence. It’s thinly-veiled racism. The dog-whistle is quite clear: They aren’t white men, so they must be inferior. 

13 hours ago, dedo said:

 

The article I linked to also describes the flaws.

The article you linked to was an opinion piece, citing no data, and with no actual definition of DEI and using that as a way to attack it. That’s equivocation (a logical fallacy) which is hardly a solid basis for a critique

[TheVat]

Speaking as an Independent (40+ years), I find it easy to recognize a partisan ideologue hiding behind the facade of independence.  One big clue was the conflation of elected and hired positions in LA municipal and county government.  Key positions are elected and therefore DEI is irrelevant.  And the grievance, that current bad government was somehow an overarching cause (vs, say, bad zoning and building codes over the past 70+ years, or profiteering developers running amuck in the urban/wildlands boundaries) of the fires, is transparently partisan and, as Swanson noted, something of a racist dog whistle.  I think Hitchens Law may be invoked and the shrill notes dismissed.

[npts2020]

18 hours ago, dedo said:

Look at who ran LA.  Do you really believe those people were hired on merit?  The article I linked to also describes the flaws.

So why is DEI responsible in LA? Pretty sure you can have bad government without DEI. Ever hear of Tammany Hall?

Edited 29 minutes ago by npts2020
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