alt Hacker NewsI would say this is exactly where you want that kind of policy. At the bottom, where you’re cultivating what will end up at the top. You want the diversity of ideas for exactly the reasons you stated.
People get upset as though this policy is dictating that a minority from the corner of the earth with no meaningful experience is going to be mandated into the role of heart surgeon or airplane pilot as well. That’s not how this works. However, those roles themselves stand to benefit from the diversified cultivation at the bottom of the stack, eventually.
Even very intelligent people seem to think inclusive policies mean that incompetent people will be promoted in private industry or government, but frankly, I never witnessed that to any abnormal degree until the people decrying it the most ended up in power. A game show host as president. A Fox News anchor as secretary of war. I can only keep a straight face because I’m so jaded by it.
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I don’t really disagree with the closing quip about those guys’ (lack of) qualifications. But I think what upsets a lot of people (including me) is that if you’re Asian or white, and male, graduating with a 4.5 and doing literally everything right, the Democrats tell us it’s virtuous to have a quota system screen you out of the most competitive schools so that someone of an “underrepresented” race/gender expression, someone who has not achieved the same, can get in.
It was idiotic to squander the talent of the best and brightest Black people that way 75 years ago, and it’s just as idiotic to use race and gender as a factor in admissions or employment today.
The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical to punishing people for having a different set of implicitly unwanted checkboxes. You are trying to combat discrimination by engaging in discrimination. Discrimination is discrimination, even if well intended.
And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.