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Last week, my company released its 3rd annual DEI report. It consists of a laundry list of DEI achievements, some questionable statistics, and inspiring messages from very well-paid executives.
Performance reviews are another feature of this time of year. Conventional wisdom holds that getting a good review depends on meeting your pseudo-self-defined goals for the year—and, by implication, on setting achievable ones. With that in mind, our executives set measurable, sensible goals with every expectation of meeting them.
That was a joke. The goals were 1/2 women and 1/3 people of color. We were reasonably close on the latter, not that this required any particular change. But our goal for gender parity was hilariously out of line with the ~1/4 we currently have. I could propose various reasons why an engineering- and manufacturing-heavy corporation that makes devices for killing people might not employ so many women, but that’s not really the point. No, this is not a serious goal. It’s advertising.
My company is not particularly woke. It repeats some of the phrases and buys into the aesthetic, but it’s clearly not ideologically captured. If there are true believers, they sure aren’t in charge. DEI is valued insofar as it keeps us from alienating potential talent and potential customers—and no more. At the end of the day it’s not going to shoot itself in the foot in service of equality or equity.
I believe this is true of the vast majority of corporations in the US! Identity politics are a small part of the business signaling that goes on every day. It’s directly proportional to how much the product is a cultural symbol rather than a material good. Apple products or Amazon media or Super Bowl ads are more likely to publicly proclaim their diversity because they’re selling an idea. It does not require true believers, though they help with credibility. The idea itself is what benefits from woke signaling.
This has implications for the trajectory of DEI. Debating whether woke ads are going to increase or alienate support is missing the point. That sort of identity politics is downstream of the culture war, and should not be used to make predictions about “peak woke.” It represents corporate ability to score points off the prevailing winds, not ideologues’ level of infiltration into corporations.
Defense contractors are wildly biased towards veterans. Our hiring is more likely to involve some sort of aggressive patriotism; their scruples are more likely to support selling drones and bombs. Sometimes this even has an advantage of rapport with customers. But this is an end, not a means. It would be a mistake to predict growing evangelism for veterans due to our obvious ideological capture. Likewise, reading DEI reports as a foothold in the culture wars is missing the point. They are a specific form of advertising, and follow the popularity of idpol rather than driving it.
In a prior post talking about discrimination against conservatives in online dating we discussed almost this exact question as far as the value of signaling political beliefs in an asymmetric way.
In the same way, it doesn't require that a company is "woke" or even that they want to signal "wokeness" to choose to advertise in that way. The company's officers merely must "know" that woke is the objectively correct answer in terms of how to advertise/signal. That's the way that the fashionable folks signal, so if you signal that way you are signaling that you know what you're doing and that you are aware of the social mores in question. Doing otherwise indicates that you are either ignorant of those social mores, or so incapable of hiding your politics that it would be pointless to try. Neither are good looks, in dating or in corporate marketing. The socially accepted provision of a "correct" answer makes using the incorrect answer a sign of stupidity or extremism.
But isn’t the goal in dating to find a partner; not appeal to the modal partner?
So differentiating yourself even if it turns off the modal user may maximize chance of matching with relevant partner. Could be the same in business.
Yes but, in both cases, there is no cohesive conservative market to which one would target. There's no huge store of ideologically conservative high end workers to tap, because making money is the terminal value for many conservatives, they just won't take a pay cut for ideology. Affirmative action only produces bitter victims a tier below the one you were looking for. And despite what films tell us, given the option most leaders would prefer obedience to free thinking.
And in dating there is no significant subset of women who are single, attractive, conservative, and non religious.
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The parallels between a woman on a dating site and a manager looking to hire a new employee are strong. Both are in a position of negotiating strength; both are going to have vastly more "applicants" than they have positions to fill. However, that doesn't necessarily make their job an easy one, because finding the one applicant that will actually work out for them long-term is quite difficult. I have no experience being a woman, but I do have experience being a hiring manager, and I can tell you a few things:
You're looking for reasons to quickly eliminate candidates from consideration (so you don't waste time interviewing/dating them). Auto-rejecting somebody because they have misspelled words on their resume (or wearing Crocs in their profile pic) might seem cruel, but anybody who is paying attention knows what the rules are, and you don't want to hire/date people who aren't paying attention.
Unless you're the sole owner of a private company, you will have people to answer to if you end up making a bad hiring decision, and so it's important that your choice be defensible according to your applicable social consensus. "I'm sorry so and so didn't work out, but they went to Harvard and their resume had all the right keywords" =~ "I can't possibly be blamed for Chad turning out to be an asshole, he went to Harvard and said he was a feminist and wanted a long-term relationship and kids". You're not really looking to take chances on people who have what most people consider red flags even if you personally don't think they're a big deal.
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IMO with Online Dating the amount of stuff that'll be an instant killer when you're one profile of 100's and not to be too big a deal when you've got some actual traction/met in person is huge. Down to the gender dynamic and the lack of communicative nuance, really.
I’ve never done any online dating (met my wife in college). But just seems like there could be different strategies between maximizing dates and maximizing potential mates.
As someone who has dated online, I think this is a bit naive.
I went on about 20 first dates but only a handful of second dates and met only one potential long term partner (my fiance). Online connection != real life connection so it's necessary to cast a wide net.
I was lucky and was able to get lots of dates. Many men are not. Removing themselves from consideration at the first stage of a long funnel would be an unwise dating strategy.
Essentially my point. A lot of stuff that a girl might nix you for on paper will be fine with some in-person chemistry and vice-versa.
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For the average heterosexual man, it's probably best to lean hard into a particular niche; a perfectly reasonable, inoffensive profile of an average man who would be fine in the real world has nothing to offer women over the dozens of similar profiles of very attractive men. There has to be something to make a woman choose your profile. The default is not being in consideration at the first stage of the long funnel, and you've got to place yourself in consideration.
Attractive men are probably best off being generic, getting a suitably wide funnel, and filtering out based on in-person compatibility. Prefiltering by leaning hard into a niche doesn't improve the quality of the matches nearly enough to counteract the lost opportunities and the battered Elo score (so you won't even be presented to compatible matches who would like your non-generic profile).
Ugly men are pretty much SOL on online dating, no matter their strategy, and should mostly focus on real life and becoming more attractive.
Sure, but it has to be a niche that exists. There is no unserved market of single, conservative women who are looking for a conservative man to hook up with. 61% of women identify as Feminists {higher among the young women mottizens are actually looking at} while 53% belong to a church. Obviously these are non-exclusive, some religious women describe themselves as Feminists; and for that matter some religious women are interested in hookups and some Feminists are conservative. But for the most part, marketing yourself as conservative on a dating app is marketing yourself to women who are neither religious nor Feminists, which is a vanishingly small portion of the dating market. In my lifetime, I can count the number of women like that I've known on my hands. For the most part Feminists will not be interested in a man whose niche is being obnoxiously conservative, while religious women will not be interested in hookup apps and will marry young to someone they meet in real life. Actively excluding the majority of young women from your dating pool, in exchange for nothing, won't help you. Picking an evolutionary niche is great, picking one that doesn't exist in your environment is a path to extinction.
To bring it back to corporate, referencing my own prior comment:
...
Corporations get very little benefit from going hard right, among the competitive classes of employees that companies need to attract. This is worsened by Rightists being, broadly, Capitalists by belief, and family men by inclination. Rightists are going to prioritize making money, both personally and for their families, and not making a political point in their choice of job. Making signaling Left the "correct" choice.
Also frankly from hanging out with such circles, young female conservatives are in a pretty insanely good spot to meet people 'organically' but also tend to be sensible to date up in both age and resources.
Anecdotally I'd say there's a very limited market for young male conservatives who aren't plugged into families with means. Conservatism trends very masculine to begin with, and the rare young females who trend that way can suddenly have their pick of the litter with both males of the same age and males who are older.
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Since Orwell is totally not overused, I'll submit the following quote.
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”
Even in the rare world of college educated young right wing women that this might attract; you are more likely to run into a Q-Anon Trumpist or a "How dare you suggest my 95 year old crippled gramma who spends every day screaming in pain should have the option of euthanasia" fundamentalist type. Women have always relied exclusively on their alliance with the social consensus to extract the resources and protection offered by others. This means that by definition there are not enough matches to go around for the loosing side. Now maybe men have overcompensated in their coyness about their political beliefs; leaving an avenue to be exploited, but most non-crazy right wing men are by definition going to loose.
Speaking as a bigoted fundamentalist anti-euthanasia type: it starts out like that.
Then it ends up like this. "Oh, hey, yeah, our new law that we put in place back in 2015? Yeah, we sorta have to revise it a bit because it was working too well":
So "95 year old grandma screaming in pain" became "persons who are not in danger of death" and then had to be rowed back to "but if you're only suffering from something like depression, we'll put a hold on that for a year or two" probably due to public pushback.
And don't worry, you won't be able to ask for government assisted suicide just on the basis of being homeless! At least for now:
And I'm supposed to favour the alleged interests* of a infintesimal percentage of unproductive disordered strangers to have their decisions overriden over my own interest, and that of everyone I know and love to not end our lives in agony because???
How well do you think opiates control the pain of having fluid building up in your lungs so that you can't breath? What exactly do you think a "natural" death looks like?
Oh, he died in his sleep, you might say. But did he? Did the pain ripping through his chest shake him out of his final dream while he stared into the dark or did his brain merely confabulate a drowning, or burning within it?
Of course I don't expect these issues to matter much to you, just like a woke person's fetish for sacred diversity is entirely unaltered by the mass rape of girls in Rotterham. Both easily disgust the average person, and yet it seems we've been condemned to be ruled by zealots whose vision of morality is entirely unconnected to the reality of the human experience. In either case the Publics preferences are destined to loose most of the time.
I'll add Scott Alexander's poem, inspired by his own experience working in hospitals below:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the gurney that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sack of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene with cancer, bitter with the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues
My friend, you would not so pontificate
To reasoners beset by moral strife
The old lie: we must try to cultivate
A culture of life.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
Before I nitpick, I just want to state that I mostly agree with you, and certainly have little interest in Amy's moralizing claims on any given day.
That being said:
https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/50/5/1701153
Opioids, other than themselves causing respiratory depression, are also effective in reducing the unpleasantness of breathlessness. It's commonly used for that purpose in palliative/EOL care.
I've seen enough people die ignominiously in ICUs to share your views of euthanasia, but just wanted to correct an error!
Thanks for the data, nitpicks are always appreciated!
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If I and mine are to shoulder blame for "death by suffocating slowly on the fluid in your lungs instead of a tidy medical overdose of morphine", then you and yours will have to shoulder blame for "no, we can't get you a stair lift, but how about we arrange to kill you?"
It starts with "mercy". It ends with "lives unworthy of life".
Well not exactly, one is the immediate result of nature and the exact realization of your political values. The other is the (highly plausible) result of my not having full control over other players, most of them my sworn enemies, in a likely slippery slope scenario (*).
Nonetheless, I will bite the bullet and say that yes, I'd prefer a world where the horror stories you mention are normal than one where the current state remains. One involves 1) a willing victim I probably won't ever meet, the other an 2) unwilling one that I'm likely if not guaranteed to know and love. I see choosing 2 over 1 is basically the definition of completely inverted moral instincts.
As for your "lives unworthy of life" comment, I love it how ostensible righties just can't help accusing lefties of being nazis, when leftism in it's current stage is most accurately described as the worship of the weak, the ugly and the stupid.
Of course I suspect our gap is even greater because opposition to euthanasia tends to be a terminal value in and of itself for fundamentalist types; with the horror stories being merely how you lobby people who do not share these. This is of course entirely fair, I just feel it should be mentioned.
(*) I use this phrasing ("slippery slope") reluctantly because I know well that there are agents actively working for the worst case version of euthanasia. A decent person must be willing to face the likely consequences of their actions, and not hide behind platitudes.
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To add on to the wild Canadian MAID stories: Alan Nichols relieved euthanasia in Canada and the only medical problem claimed was hearing loss.
There was a woman in Belgium in her 20s who was euthanized because of PTSD she had after an ISIS bombing, no physical wounds at all.
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