Friday, June 07, 2024

Links - 7th June 2024 (1 - Diversity)

Matching students and schools by religion improves academic outcomes—Dr. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk explains why - "The paper of course is “A Good Fit: How Matching Students and Schools by Religion Improves Academic Outcomes”"
This actually follows on from left wing claims about representation, diversity and why segregation is needed (and seems more robust than their claims). But they hate Christianity, so they're not going to want Christian schools to exist

Meme - James Kirkpatrick @VDAREJamesK: "Once you start inserting the tokens and affirmative action characters into a franchise, it doesn't make anyone happy. They are so forgettable that even the journalists, activists, and pronoun people demanding them forget about them almost instantly."
Geekdaddy @Geekdaddy75: "Sorry, Commander Iden Versio. They've forgotten you."
"Kay Vess is set to become the first female to lead a full Star Wars game, which is long overdue for a franchise almost 50 years old."
Iden Versio: "BITCH WHAT"

Dane on X - "The University of Rhode Island announced plans to remove two murals depicting World War II veterans because they were deemed to be predominately white and lacking diversity, according to complaints from students. This is how it should have gone:
Them: That's racist
Me (the Dean): GFY and while you're doing that pack your bags, you're gone."
🗼$SigSal 🐍🪵 on X - "@UltraDane "Ethnic minorities in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II comprised about 13% of all military service members." So out of 100 people, 87 were white, is that too many. -They're just non-stop attempting to delete/change American(white) history. https://t.co/L8Ua9m8o3Y"
Ethnic minorities in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II - Wikipedia - "A considerable number of groups legally defined as white could still be considered ethnic minorities at the time, particularly those from Southern or Eastern Europe."

Meme - "r/college, 3 yr. ago
No cap, I feel bad for white males trying to get internships
USA
 I myself identify as 'Hispanic' more than anything else, with an average GPA I am getting a response to about 1/7 of my applications to engineering internships. It doesn't mean that all of them have gone too far however I am at least getting the first interview / phone call / assessment.  My girlfriend, Asian Hispanic engineering student, has like a 3.3 GPA and she gets a response to like 1/5 of her applications. Same situation as me, many of them are interview once and never hear back kinda deal but we both are looking at potential offers with more than one company.  Two of my roommates are white males studying engineering, they both have above a 3.0 GPA and only one of them has even had an interview. They've both been applying to internships for ~3 months, each one has applied to at least 100 positions (even with a cover letter) and they aren't getting the same attention as me and my girlfriend. Our resumes / work experience are pretty much the same give or take .1 or .2 on the GPA and maybe a specific tech elective.  Has anyone else noticed this?  They were asking us for help but we really don't notice anything different about what they are doing and their qualifications. As strange as it sounds, I've even sat down with one and watched him apply to ~4 positions, the way he does it is exactly how I would do it. Not like would expect differently but I thought maybe I would see."
And this was around 2021

Community managers at @warhammer have started blocking X accounts mocking or questioning the retcon of 40k Custodes. : r/KotakuInAction
Meme - "BUT I THINK IT IS TIME YOU PLAY ALONG WITH EVERYONE. NOW REPEAT AFTER me, THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN FEMALE CUSTODIANS."

Meme - Skrotar @Skrotar: "What lore was changed? Quote anywhere the lore prevents females from being custodes. I'll wait."
Based Aragorn @basedaragorn: "God loves you too
It is known that all Custodians begin their lives as the infant sons of the noble houses of Terra. It is a mark of incredible prestige to surrender one's child to this most glorious of callings I within the Imperium, and many notable clans amongst the Terran aristocracy have willingly given up almost entire generations of newborn sons to earn it."

Meme - "Nobody has an issue with Sisters of Battle; Sisters of Silence, women in the Guard, Tau, Eldar, Necrons and Inquisition. Almost every faction that even have genders have women in them. Maybe GW should try fleshing out one of the all female factions more instead of retconning one of the two all male factions."
"I see, the issue is clearly that you hate women. l am very intelligent."

Breast cancer surgeons must submit DEI statement for UC Davis job - "Applicants for a job as a surgical oncologist must submit a “Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” to be considered at the University of California Davis... while a DEI statement is mandatory, a “Statement of Teaching” and “Statement of Research” both are listed as optional under the job application instructions.   A former associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania medical school criticized the requirement.  “The key to being a good surgical oncologist is having vast knowledge about how to treat cancer,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, told The Fix via a media statement.  “That and a strong ethical sense should be the only requirements,” he said. “A surgical oncologist’s political ideas are irrelevant to his or her ability to treat patients.” “There is no evidence that DEI adherence does anything to improve medical care,” he said. “There is a great deal of concern that adherence to DEI lead to divisiveness and mistrust on the part of patients.”  The requirement may also be illegal according to a former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Education.  “It is already a mistake and likely First Amendment violation for UC Davis to have mandatory diversity statements for faculty and staff applicants,” Adam Kissel, senior fellow at the Cardinal Institute, told The Fix via email. “It’s even more of a mistake to hire a worse surgeon over a better one because of what’s in a diversity statement.”  “Patients are being harmed by scaring them into thinking that there is systemic racism in healthcare,” Kissel said. “This mistaken ideology leads some patients to avoid needed care. DEI in medicine probably costs many black lives.”  He said patients “should trust UC Davis less because of its use of diversity statements.”   “Patients should seek providers whose priority is to save lives rather than engage in social engineering,” Kissel said, a point shared by Dr. Goldfarb.  Other universities have adopted DEI requirements for cancer care.  For example, San Diego State University’s job listing in 2022 for a cancer biologist also required a DEI statement, as reported by City Journal.  Goldfarb told The Fix DEI can “lead to divisiveness and distress on the part of patients of their physicians, then medical care will suffer.”  “Also, if adherence to DEI means that less capable individuals are recruited, medical care will suffer.”"
Weird. I thought DEI was about making sure qualified minorities got the job, and that it's not political (even though you need to swear a political oath to get the job).

Richard Hanania on X - "Federal government suing convenience store Sheetz, saying criminal background checks violate the Civil Rights Act. The company responds we love diversity and inclusion, so please don’t sue us. You think every random business started spouting the exact same nonsense by choice?
Government admits no evidence of an intent to discriminate.  Blacks failed the background check 14.5% of the time, multiracial 13.5%, Native Americans 13%, and whites 8%.  That’s it. That’s the entire lawsuit."
It's racist to not hire ex-cons. Is it racist not to hire the stupid and the lazy?

The federal government is spending millions on equity, diversity, and inclusion research - "I completed a review of how the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)—a major federal granting agency at the intersection of government and academia—has implemented EDI. It may not be a perfect proxy for the post-secondary sector as a whole but SSHRC’s policies and programs provide a useful empirical window into these broader debates.   What did my analysis find? As SSHRC declares its mission to “create a culture where embedding equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) considerations into all aspects of research is second nature”, it’s beginning to face its own institutional challenges.  The evidence that I discovered shows an institution in a tug of war between two versions of equity, diversity, and inclusion: the “soft” EDI of what we’ve historically seen as affirmative action and the “hard” EDI of new critical social justice activism. How SSHRC and other granting agencies manage this tension will determine the future quality of Canadian research... It might seem obvious that the two EDI-focused grants produced so many recipients with explicitly activist titles (63 percent compared with 9 percent of traditional grants). Yet it didn’t need to be this way. Examples of non-activist titles of Race, Gender, and Diversity Initiative recipients included “Understanding Race and Racism in Immigration Detention” and “Open-Access Education Resources in Deaf Education Electronic Books as Pedagogy and Curriculum.” One can study marginalized communities without engaging in social justice activism.   However, most of the EDI-focused grants awarded left no doubt as to the type of research that would be undertaken...   If the federal government wants universities to keep the public’s trust, it should avoid any future activist-themed grants and ensure that granting agencies eschew social justice priorities. Federal granting agencies using taxpayer dollars should be explicit that their primary commitment is to promote excellence via the creation and dissemination of objective, falsifiable research knowledge. The university is supposed to function as a system of knowledge production. Policies that openly tie research to activist political ends threaten to undermine that very system"

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Does diversity make teams work better?  Apparently not!  A new, comprehensive preregistered meta-analysis found that, whether the diversity was demographic, cognitive, or occupational, its relationship with performance was near-zero. These authors were very thorough  Just take a look at the meta-analytic estimates. These are in terms of correlations, and they are corrected for attenuation  These effect sizes are significant due to the large number of studies, but they are very low, even after blowing them up. You may ask yourself: are there hidden moderators?  The answer looks to be 'probably not.' Team longevity, industry sector, performance measures, power distance, year or country of study, task complexity, team interdependence, etc.  None of it really mattered.  Here's longevity... Using these disattenuated effects, if you selected from two groups you expected to have comparable performance otherwise, but one was more diverse, you'd make the 'correct' (higher-performing) decision in 51% of cases (vs. 50%). That assumes there really hasn't been any bias in what gets published. If there has been, you might want to adjust your estimate downwards towards zero, or upwards if you think the literature was rigged the other way. The paper paints an unsupportive picture of the idea that diversity on its own makes teams more performant.  I recommend giving it a read."
The previous literature on diversity has similar results

Meme - "Disney announces remake of 101 Dalmatians *all black dogs*"

Meme - *Black Einstein* "K = FC^2"

Thread by @aaronsibarium on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "NEW: Harvard has tapped an ex-McKinsey consultant who has criticized meritocracy, argued for explicit diversity targets in C-suits, and published shoddy research on the so-called business case for diversity to help select the university’s next president. 🧵  Vivian Hunt, who in 2015 co-authored McKinsey’s influential paper, "Why diversity matters,” has been appointed to lead the Harvard Board of Overseers, the head of which has historically sat on Harvard’s presidential search committees. The overseers can also veto presidential appointments with a majority vote.  The system means that Hunt—who has argued that meritocracy "isn’t good enough"—will likely play a major role in picking former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s successor. Her appointment comes amid plummeting donations and a major drop in applications to the Ivy League school, which has been at the center of a debate about diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in higher education. Critics of those programs say Hunt’s selection is a red flag as Harvard gears up to find a permanent replacement for Gay—a major champion of DEI—who resigned in January amid allegations of plagiarism. "Vivian Hunt leading the search for the next president of Harvard perfectly encapsulates the rot in higher education and corporate America," said Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, a nonprofit that has led a campaign against DEI in the business world. "If Harvard was serious about rebuilding their floundering reputation, Hunt would be the last person chosen to lead this search." Hunt has been a driving force behind the proliferation of DEI initiatives. Her 2015 paper has been cited by countless companies and institutions, including the Pentagon, to justify their diversity programs, even as more recent research has challenged her findings. A study in Econ Journal Watch this March found that diversity has no effect on company returns and that Hunt’s results don’t replicate. The findings were a major rebuke of Hunt, who has spent nearly a decade making the business case for diversity—and against meritocracy. She has argued that a "meritocratic" policy of "treating people evenly isn’t good enough" because it "allows the bias that is in our systems … to perpetuate."  "You have to proactively stand for an antiracism environment," she said in a 2020 interview, "to positively include people who have been historically excluded." Hunt’s appointment is likely to raise questions about whether Harvard has learned any lessons from Gay, who was hired through one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard history—one that did not include a review of her scholarly record. Gay stepped down after accusations of plagiarism compounded the fallout from her disastrous congressional testimony in December, when she equivocated about whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s code of conduct. Her downfall fueled the perception that she had been hired because, as J.D. Vance put it, "she checked a box." The decision to elevate Hunt could portend more box-checking as the school seeks to manage alumni unhappy with their alma mater’s priorities, including those around DEI. In a write-in campaign to join the Board of Overseers, which advises the Harvard Corporation and has a veto over its members, former Facebook executive Sam Lessin said that "academic excellence" should be the university’s "only goal." The message resonated: Though Lessin didn’t make it onto the ballot for board elections, he did secure 2,901 nominations from alumni—the most in the history of Overseers write-in campaigns. "The Overseers are a critical check and balance on making sure that we have the right leadership across the board," Lessin told the Harvard Crimson in an interview. "They haven’t taken that role seriously enough in modern times.""
David Bernstein on X - ""She has argued that a 'meritocratic' policy of 'treating people evenly isn’t good enough' because it 'allows the bias that is in our systems … to perpetuate.'"  One can argue about that philosophically, but "treating people evenly" based on race, sex, ethnicity, etc happens to be the law, and it is kind of outrageous for Harvard to appoint as chair of its Board of Overseers someone who argues for flouting civil rights law."

Meme - "really a gamer of your tatents playing 90's games"
"it's a DEI free life"

Meme - "If youre in the Steam forums and you look at the profiles of all of the people asking for LGBT to be added youll notice that pretty much every one of them dont even have the game in their Steam library. Thats how sad and pathetic these people are."
Those demanding diversity aren't the paying customers

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "Hispanics and blacks — together about 1/3 of the US population — contribute next to nothing to innovation. They are rewarded for this underperformance with preferential treatment in STEM hiring, university admissions, and placement in fellowships and various specialty programs."
Sean Last @Sean__Last: "Paper estimates that 96.5% of US inventors were either White or Asian as of 2016. Down slightly from 97.8% in 2000."
The cope is that patents are unrelated to innovation, or that black and hispanic inventions are being stolen by white people

Companies told to give two in five board seats to women - "Public companies with too few women on their boards will be forced to explain themselves to the City of London under new proposals meant to boost diversity, amid claims the top table of corporate Britain remains “very male and white”.  Those with fewer than two out of five female directors will be required to provide an annual statement to investors on why they have fallen short.  At least one of the key board positions of chairman, chief executive, finance director or senior independent director should also be held by a woman under the “comply or explain” rules, the Financial Conduct Authority said.  Further proposed changes to the listings regime would require companies to have at least one director from an ethnic minority background.  However the City watchdog could face accusations of hypocrisy as it fails to hit some of these benchmarks itself, given only a third of its board is female and all are non-executive directors... Santander has decided that bankers will get bigger bonuses for hiring more women and ethnic minority staff from 2022, and more lenders are expected to follow after the FCA told the banks that it regulates that bonuses should be tied to diversity targets... Andrew Bailey is under fresh pressure to reform the Bank of England after an internal report last week found that "unconscious bias" and "microaggressions" were holding back ethnic minority staff."
From 2021. Left wingers still deny that there're quotas and pretend that "diversity" is about not discriminating against "minorities" and getting the widest possible talent pool

The Cascading Complexity Of Diversity - "does the [New York Times] staff reflect the demographics of New York City as a whole?... It draws overwhelmingly from the college educated, who account for only 37 percent of New Yorkers, leaving more than 60 percent of the city completed unreflected in the staffing. It cannot include the nearly 19 percent of New Yorkers in poverty, because a NYT salary would end that. It would also have to restrict itself to the literate, and, according to Literacy New York, 25 percent of people in Manhattan “lack basic prose literary skills” along with 37 percent in Brooklyn and 41 percent in the Bronx. And obviously, it cannot reflect the 14 percent of New Yorkers who are of retirement age, or the 21 percent who have yet to reach 18. For that matter, I have no idea what the median age of a NYT employee is — but I bet it isn’t the same as all of New York City. Around 10 percent of staffers would have to be Republicans (and if the paper of record nationally were to reflect the country as a whole, and not just NYC, around 40 percent would have to be). Some 6 percent of the newsroom would also have to be Haredi or Orthodox Jews — a community you rarely hear about in diversity debates, but one horribly hit by a hate crime surge. 48 percent of NYT employees would have to agree that religion is “very important” in their lives; and 33 percent would be Catholic. And the logic of these demographic quotas is that if a group begins to exceed its quota — say Jews, 13 percent — a Jewish journalist would have to retire for any new one to be hired. Taking this proposal seriously, then, really does require explicit use of race in hiring, which is illegal, which is why the News Guild tweet and memo might end up causing some trouble if the policy is enforced. And all this leaves the category of “white” completely without nuance. We have no idea whether “white” people are Irish or Italian or Russian or Polish or Canadians in origin. Similarly, we do not know if “black” means African immigrants, or native black New Yorkers, or people from the Caribbean. 37 percent of New Yorkers are foreign-born. How does the Guild propose to mirror that? Ditto where staffers live in NYC. How many are from Staten Island, for example, or the Bronx, two places of extremely different ethnic populations? These categories, in other words, are incredibly crude if the goal really is to reflect the actual demographics of New York City. But it isn’t, of course.  My point is that any attempt to make a specific institution entirely representative of the demographics of its location will founder on the sheer complexity of America’s demographic story and the nature of the institution itself. Journalism, for example, is not a profession sought by most people; it’s self-selecting for curious, trouble-making, querulous assholes who enjoy engaging with others and tracking down the truth (at least it used to be). There’s no reason this skillset or attitude will be spread evenly across populations. It seems, for example, that disproportionate numbers of Jews are drawn to it, from a culture of high literacy, intellectualism, and social activism. So why on earth shouldn’t they be over-represented?   And that’s true of other institutions too: are we to police Broadway to make sure that gays constitute only 4 percent of the employees? Or, say, nursing, to ensure that the sex balance is 50-50? Or a construction company for gender parity? Or a bike messenger company’s staff to be reflective of the age demographics of the city? Just take publishing — an industry not far off what the New York Times does. 74 percent of its employees are women. Should there be a hiring freeze until the men catch up? The more you think about it, the more absurdly utopian the Kendi project turns out to be. That’s because its core assumption is that any demographic discrepancies between a profession or institution and its locale are entirely a function of oppression. That’s how Kendi explains racial inequality in America, and specifically denies any alternative explanation. So how is it that a white supremacist country has whites earning considerably less on average than Asian-Americans? How does Kendi explain the fact that the most successful minority group in America are Indian-Americans — with a median income nearly twice that of the national median? Here’s a partial list of the national origins of US citizens whose median earnings are higher than that of white people in America: Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Iranian, Lebanese, Sri Lankan, Armenian, Hmong, Vietnamese. One group earning less: British-American. You can argue that these groups are immigrants and self-selecting for those with higher IQs, education, motivation, and drive. It’s true. But notice that this argument cannot be deployed under the Kendi test: any inequality is a result of racism, remember?... America is also a much more hopeful place than the woke left would have you believe — a country with a nearly unique mix of races, religions, and identities, in which whites are just one part of a kaleidoscopic whole, and not the most successful. And for all those reasons, attempting to categorize people in the crudest racial terms, and social engineering them into a just society where every institution looks like every other one, is such a nightmare waiting to happen. It’s a brutal, toxic, racist template being imposed on a dazzling varied and constantly shifting country.  But of course, this explicit reintroduction of crude racism under the guise of antiracism is already happening. How many institutions will it tear apart, and how much racial resentment will it foment, before it’s done?"
There is only a duty to reflect the population when that helps "minorities"

ALLISON: Schools shouldn’t sacrifice student performance to vague notions of ‘equity’ - "highly equitable and inclusive schools — with declining PISA scores, as is currently the case in Canada — do a disservice to students and society at large. Why? Because higher test scores translate into greater “knowledge capital” — that is, the full body of knowledge available to an economy — and boost economic growth (and, incidentally, the tax revenues that fund our schools). Indeed, the goal should be equitable access to a quality education. And the most realistic and meaningful way to measure student progress is through PISA tests, which every three years assess the performance of 15-year-olds worldwide in core subjects of math, science and reading rather than the limited curriculum objectives used in provincial testing, which can only show progress or decline within individual school systems. In today’s world, where competition is truly global, we must know how our students and schools perform compared to their peers in other countries, especially the “Asian Tigers” of Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan whose rapidly growing economies have been driven by rising PISA scores.Obviously, countries with higher test scores can teach other countries how to improve — although there are limits and some traps here. Attempting to cut and paste Singapore’s or Korea’s much more meritocratic systems of highly competitive student assessment and selection would be impractical and impolitic in Canada. Even so, policymakers should consider reinstating more meaningful meritocratic norms in Canadian schools to encourage and recognize academic achievement. Nothing succeeds like success, except recognized and rewarded success. Closer to home, other provinces could benefit from considering why Quebec is such a stellar performer in math and why Alberta has the highest overall PISA test score average of all provinces. But fair warning , recent attempts at school improvement in Canada show that top-down one-size-fits-all changes — including extending compulsory attendance, reducing average class size and tinkering with course content — have had little positive effect on student performance, although they may please teacher unions. If policymakers want to achieve more equitable success for more students, they should introduce more flexibility, school autonomy and choice into our top-heavy centrally regulated school systems. In this respect it may be no accident that the three highest performing, mid-spending provincial K-12 education systems (Alberta, Quebec and Ontario) offer relatively high levels of school choice, although of quite different kinds."
You can only redistribute when you have enough excess to seize. But you can always find kulaks to scapegoat
No wonder the left wingers hate Alberta so much

End Wokeness on X - "New York just announced a historic $2.3 billion tax-funded grant to fix up the JFK International Airport. This grant, signed off by Governor Katy Hochul, is exclusively for non-White or women-owned businesses. "This is FOR US, and made BY US"
"You gotta have equity in these projects"  Rep. Gregory Meeks admits that the entire project to fix JFK Airport is built on DEI:"
I still see left wingers pretending that equity is equality

Meme - End Wokeness @EndWokeness: "NEW: Maine Governor Mills just signed an executive order to make the construction industry more inclusive for women.  Government grants will be distributed to companies to incentivize hiring female construction workers.     She believes the construction industry is dominated by men due to sexist barriers."
i/o @eyeslasho: "Men do society's most dangerous jobs, and then get blamed for the fact that they do these jobs."
"Top 20 Most Dangerous US Occupations and Percent Male, 2016
Fatal Injury Rate per 100,000 workers: 10.0-135.9
Percent Male: 75.2% (outlier)-99.9%
All US Workers, All Occupations: 3.6 per 100,000 workers
All US Workplace Fatalities: 92.5% male"
Moke @Moke1966758: "A year from now. "Why are woman dying on construction sites? Answer: Trump""

puzzled on X - "Now wait for the change in construction and increase in price. Security measures will multiply, extra breaks, permission to refuse jobs, hand over the heavy work to the men but demand equal pay, demand enclosures at 20 degree C for work areas, flowers in common rooms. Etc etc"
John Tang on X - "The women aren't going to do dangerous jobs they'll put them as traffic watch or sign holder."

Peachy Keenan on X - "Prayers up for the rich white lib private school parents who spent the last 12 years paying $70K/yr full price private--where they subsidized the DEI admits who got free rides--but they never complained because that would be racist.  But the joke's on them: the DEI kids got into the top schools their own kids didn't, despite lower scores.  Right now, thousands of wealthy liberal parents are staring into space, slowly realizing their million$ investment in private helped dumber kids steal their own kids spot at their alma mater--and their kid's heading to Tufts or UNC.   This is what reparations feels like, enjoy!"

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