Heather Heying on gender differences; Mike Solana on Hereticon; Razib Khan vs. Scientific American; Jordan Peterson vs. DEI; Glenn Loury hosts a school voucher proponent
Note that the craziness of the DIE movement in the academic non-STEM areas of decades ago has metastasized into taking over STEM education. The non-STEM (aka junk) sciences like the social sciences/humanities/X-studies departments have not solved any significant social problems while moving away from reality since the '70s as more and more resources have been devoted to their non-functional solutions.
Now in the STEM areas I have known professors where the academic search committee found him the "best" in the field and gave him an offer, which would make their department best in the world, only to have the University DEI overlords override the search committee because of an inadequate "diversity, equity, and inclusiveness statement". Besides, he was a white male who spend many decades becoming a world expert in his area (an area where DIE was totally irrelevant).
In very technical STEM areas, a good "DEI statement" is orthogonal to the actual knowledge necessary to actually understand or teach a complex scientific subject. Unlike most social science areas, you can't fake it with BS and your "own lived truth", you have to actually understand what you are teaching. To handle that problem, we are seeing STEM departments like Electrical Engineering/Computer science hire "lectures and adjuncts" at much lower costs and outside the tenure track DEI requirements to do the actual teaching of the students. Some teaching classes with 400 to 500 students and 20 teaching assistants for CS lab work.
Biological science department heads I know can't hire white males or Asian males or females for tenure track positions. It has been made clear to search committees that their choices are limited. One woman I know on a search committee said that the Ph.D. thesis and the transcripts of their academic work couldn't be examined. Race and gender information counted more than competence in the subject. She retired.
One of the best academics in my narrow field (very smart and creative) was forced to take one of the DIE training classes and on the second day stood up and said this was pure BS and a waste of time and walked out. He retired from his full professor tenured position and started a business.
Meanwhile, China is becoming the dominant STEM player in the world and the source of the majority of scientific papers I review each year (scientific journal peer review). While they pick people on competence, we use DIE. Guess who will win.
1) The teacher wears the least protective mask type and lets it slide under her nose often, by contrast the kids all wear more restrictive masks that cover their nose (anyone can tell you that these things are a lot less uncomfortable worn under the nose).
2) "My parents believe COVID is a hoax" is the big punchline of misinformation. Note that this is in a school district steep in COVID misinformation, that has been shut down and barely functional for two years over that disinformation, wearing masks that don't work, being taught by a woman whose mask doesn't even cover her nose.
Interestingly, the parents aren't interviewed for the news clip. Which you would think would be the most basic step in objective journalism.
3) At 30 seconds note that the quote: "everyone understands the importance of free markets...eventually" is considered "misinformation".
4) The teacher began teaching this 7 years ago, so 2015. This is pre-Trump and perhaps the cutting edge of what we might call wokeness. It reminds me of Auster's quote about talking to a teacher in the 90s who said that when she got her education degree they didn't talk about education but about race all day. Wokeness in education colleges goes back a long way.
5) The place that provided her this information is "non-partisan" and its used by 37,000 teachers.
I do not think Peterson is exaggerating the harm of DIE.
An increasing share of jobs at large organizations are now taken up by DIE bureaucracy and HR more generally. These positions have simultaneously been vested with moral authority that allows them to confer status on those who pipe in to affirm whatever initiative is being discussed, or worse, suggest that it has not done nearly enough to address X form of injustice/oppression/marginalization. If DIE wants to hold a meeting or take the mic from managers of traditional business operations during their meetings they get to do so.
The discussions that follow from these dynamics are a toxic ordeal where meeting organizers and many of the participants benefit from prolonging them/increasing their frequency and the longer they go on the harder it is to object to any aspect of the proceedings.
No one really has the guts to shut off this kind of conversation and signaling your commitment to DIE is becoming a chief consideration for advancement so the people with the most sway have both been selected on the basis of enthusiastically supporting (or at bare minimum putting up with) these meetings and stand the most to lose by saying “the wrong thing” in this setting.
I would add one additional point that I think may be under-discussed/under-rated. At many leading organizations (e.g. Google, Amazon, the Fed), a very large percentage of employees are coming from other countries. Many of them speak english as a second language and/or are unfamiliar with important aspects of American history and culture. These workers have a particularly hard time knowing what to say or how to phrase it in a way that steers clear of the land mines of perceived racial insensitivity. Thus they often lack both the context and the ability to do anything but fall in behind initiatives put forward almost exclusively by the relatively articulate woke American radicals who run DIE.
DIE in the corporate and academic STEM world is sort of performative justification that allows them to hire large quantities of Asian talent. It's often been said as a defense of Silicon Valley that it is 'more diverse' than the American average. But that is not what the law looks for: the law seeks proportional representation, and the over-representation by many multiples of East Asian and Indian workers and students represents an enormous disparate impact in hiring decisions. Reformulation of certain categories would reveal even more disparate impacts.
But if you do the DIE ghost dance, you stave off litigation. You do strategic coordination and peace talks with pressure groups. You pay them off. But ultimately, corporate America wants to keep doing what it's doing. Capitalist classes throughout history have been criticized for preferring their own narrow interests to national interests, religious principles, and social cohesion.
The pro-immigration factions are really two separate factions importing 'diverse' workers from two major regions: you have the higher corporates and academics looking to elite-skim from large Asian populations, and then you have employers like the meatpackers and the Walmarts who just want lower end laborers from Latin America and similar regions. They both do the DIE dance but both of their policies have disparate impacts, so they both engage in ritual sacrifice to keep their predators at bay. This is bullish for DIE. There's no real debating against DIE because it performs a very useful function of legal risk mitigation. The way to deplete DIE is to find another way to mitigate the risk, or change the law so that the risk no longer needs to be mitigated.
In the future I think that it just means less gets done in the US and more gets done in Asia and Latin America. Should be the easiest prediction in the world to make, like "things released from high place fall down to ground." Ambitious people will move to Asia and not to the US. The US will be this weird big consumer market which is chaotic, dangerous, and unpredictable: the world's breadbasket and basket case.
In your 2/2/2018 post, "Jordan Peterson and other intellectuals", you make a number of simplistic criticisms and do-nothing questions that show an a prior unwillingness to engage.
Go visit the halls of AA and other Anonymous meetings. Help out in the rooms of the psych wards at your local hospitals. Talk to the fathers and mothers of broken families who lost 10-20 years of their lives due to divorce. Get some experience outside of a book.
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist. He is a front-line fighter against mental illness. And you criticize his ideas as "strange"? This seems very weak and indefensible, if not simply unread. You clearly have not even tried to meet Jordan Peterson at his level.
So, perhaps instead of spreading your ignorance, your own tribal stupidity, why don't you ask better questions and shed some light on the darkness and shadow of your own soul rather than lobbing shallow criticisms or epithets.
Wake me up when DIE political violence is a regular occurrence, a mainstream political party advocates or tolerates random security force violence in support of a DIE agenda, and the actual gates of power and wealth, like banks, courts, securities markets, and election commissions become implacable bastions of DIE zealotry.
Note that the craziness of the DIE movement in the academic non-STEM areas of decades ago has metastasized into taking over STEM education. The non-STEM (aka junk) sciences like the social sciences/humanities/X-studies departments have not solved any significant social problems while moving away from reality since the '70s as more and more resources have been devoted to their non-functional solutions.
Now in the STEM areas I have known professors where the academic search committee found him the "best" in the field and gave him an offer, which would make their department best in the world, only to have the University DEI overlords override the search committee because of an inadequate "diversity, equity, and inclusiveness statement". Besides, he was a white male who spend many decades becoming a world expert in his area (an area where DIE was totally irrelevant).
In very technical STEM areas, a good "DEI statement" is orthogonal to the actual knowledge necessary to actually understand or teach a complex scientific subject. Unlike most social science areas, you can't fake it with BS and your "own lived truth", you have to actually understand what you are teaching. To handle that problem, we are seeing STEM departments like Electrical Engineering/Computer science hire "lectures and adjuncts" at much lower costs and outside the tenure track DEI requirements to do the actual teaching of the students. Some teaching classes with 400 to 500 students and 20 teaching assistants for CS lab work.
Biological science department heads I know can't hire white males or Asian males or females for tenure track positions. It has been made clear to search committees that their choices are limited. One woman I know on a search committee said that the Ph.D. thesis and the transcripts of their academic work couldn't be examined. Race and gender information counted more than competence in the subject. She retired.
One of the best academics in my narrow field (very smart and creative) was forced to take one of the DIE training classes and on the second day stood up and said this was pure BS and a waste of time and walked out. He retired from his full professor tenured position and started a business.
Meanwhile, China is becoming the dominant STEM player in the world and the source of the majority of scientific papers I review each year (scientific journal peer review). While they pick people on competence, we use DIE. Guess who will win.
Richard posted a fascinating news clip of public schools teaching kids to spot "misinformation":
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1485386155604381698?cxt=HHwWhMCo8dW1k50pAAAA
There is so much in these 3 minutes:
1) The teacher wears the least protective mask type and lets it slide under her nose often, by contrast the kids all wear more restrictive masks that cover their nose (anyone can tell you that these things are a lot less uncomfortable worn under the nose).
2) "My parents believe COVID is a hoax" is the big punchline of misinformation. Note that this is in a school district steep in COVID misinformation, that has been shut down and barely functional for two years over that disinformation, wearing masks that don't work, being taught by a woman whose mask doesn't even cover her nose.
Interestingly, the parents aren't interviewed for the news clip. Which you would think would be the most basic step in objective journalism.
3) At 30 seconds note that the quote: "everyone understands the importance of free markets...eventually" is considered "misinformation".
4) The teacher began teaching this 7 years ago, so 2015. This is pre-Trump and perhaps the cutting edge of what we might call wokeness. It reminds me of Auster's quote about talking to a teacher in the 90s who said that when she got her education degree they didn't talk about education but about race all day. Wokeness in education colleges goes back a long way.
5) The place that provided her this information is "non-partisan" and its used by 37,000 teachers.
I do not think Peterson is exaggerating the harm of DIE.
An increasing share of jobs at large organizations are now taken up by DIE bureaucracy and HR more generally. These positions have simultaneously been vested with moral authority that allows them to confer status on those who pipe in to affirm whatever initiative is being discussed, or worse, suggest that it has not done nearly enough to address X form of injustice/oppression/marginalization. If DIE wants to hold a meeting or take the mic from managers of traditional business operations during their meetings they get to do so.
The discussions that follow from these dynamics are a toxic ordeal where meeting organizers and many of the participants benefit from prolonging them/increasing their frequency and the longer they go on the harder it is to object to any aspect of the proceedings.
No one really has the guts to shut off this kind of conversation and signaling your commitment to DIE is becoming a chief consideration for advancement so the people with the most sway have both been selected on the basis of enthusiastically supporting (or at bare minimum putting up with) these meetings and stand the most to lose by saying “the wrong thing” in this setting.
I would add one additional point that I think may be under-discussed/under-rated. At many leading organizations (e.g. Google, Amazon, the Fed), a very large percentage of employees are coming from other countries. Many of them speak english as a second language and/or are unfamiliar with important aspects of American history and culture. These workers have a particularly hard time knowing what to say or how to phrase it in a way that steers clear of the land mines of perceived racial insensitivity. Thus they often lack both the context and the ability to do anything but fall in behind initiatives put forward almost exclusively by the relatively articulate woke American radicals who run DIE.
DIE in the corporate and academic STEM world is sort of performative justification that allows them to hire large quantities of Asian talent. It's often been said as a defense of Silicon Valley that it is 'more diverse' than the American average. But that is not what the law looks for: the law seeks proportional representation, and the over-representation by many multiples of East Asian and Indian workers and students represents an enormous disparate impact in hiring decisions. Reformulation of certain categories would reveal even more disparate impacts.
But if you do the DIE ghost dance, you stave off litigation. You do strategic coordination and peace talks with pressure groups. You pay them off. But ultimately, corporate America wants to keep doing what it's doing. Capitalist classes throughout history have been criticized for preferring their own narrow interests to national interests, religious principles, and social cohesion.
The pro-immigration factions are really two separate factions importing 'diverse' workers from two major regions: you have the higher corporates and academics looking to elite-skim from large Asian populations, and then you have employers like the meatpackers and the Walmarts who just want lower end laborers from Latin America and similar regions. They both do the DIE dance but both of their policies have disparate impacts, so they both engage in ritual sacrifice to keep their predators at bay. This is bullish for DIE. There's no real debating against DIE because it performs a very useful function of legal risk mitigation. The way to deplete DIE is to find another way to mitigate the risk, or change the law so that the risk no longer needs to be mitigated.
In the future I think that it just means less gets done in the US and more gets done in Asia and Latin America. Should be the easiest prediction in the world to make, like "things released from high place fall down to ground." Ambitious people will move to Asia and not to the US. The US will be this weird big consumer market which is chaotic, dangerous, and unpredictable: the world's breadbasket and basket case.
Hello In My Tribe,
In your 2/2/2018 post, "Jordan Peterson and other intellectuals", you make a number of simplistic criticisms and do-nothing questions that show an a prior unwillingness to engage.
Go visit the halls of AA and other Anonymous meetings. Help out in the rooms of the psych wards at your local hospitals. Talk to the fathers and mothers of broken families who lost 10-20 years of their lives due to divorce. Get some experience outside of a book.
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist. He is a front-line fighter against mental illness. And you criticize his ideas as "strange"? This seems very weak and indefensible, if not simply unread. You clearly have not even tried to meet Jordan Peterson at his level.
So, perhaps instead of spreading your ignorance, your own tribal stupidity, why don't you ask better questions and shed some light on the darkness and shadow of your own soul rather than lobbing shallow criticisms or epithets.
Sincerely,
J
Hi, I apologize for my lack of knowledge, but what does FIT stand for in this context? First time I am seeing it used this way
DEI sia good thing and we should promote it optimally.
Wake me up when DIE political violence is a regular occurrence, a mainstream political party advocates or tolerates random security force violence in support of a DIE agenda, and the actual gates of power and wealth, like banks, courts, securities markets, and election commissions become implacable bastions of DIE zealotry.