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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and is expected to strike down racial preferences in college admissions. The looming decision is starting to worry people in the DEI industry.

This Supreme Court case could spell the beginning of the end for affirmative action. It’s a looming crisis for corporate America (use reader mode to unmask the article. Paywalled version here).

Gillard and her colleagues in DEI are bracing for a crisis. Gillard created Factuality, a 90-minute interactive game and “crash course” in structural inequality that has been used as an employee-training tool at companies such as Google, Nike, and American Express, as well as at Yale University, among others. Factuality has seen an uptick in demand in recent years, but Gillard is under no illusions about why companies hire her: “I really feel that there are people who participate in these programs and initiatives because it’s required and mandatory,” she tells Fortune, “and that with this decision they’re just emboldened to stop.”

There's some funny stuff in the article too, for anyone who's wise enough to not bring up politics or religion at work:

It’s crucial, too, for companies to diligently vet public statements related to diversity initiatives. For example, in today’s climate, making public promises that a company’s board will be 25% female could create a legal vulnerability, Bryant, the McGlinchey Stafford lawyer, says. “Sometimes messages that are very well intended can get an organization in hot water if it’s not necessarily done and crafted in the right way.”

That’s a lesson several of Carter’s clients learned last year after announcing plans to pay for employees’ travel costs if they have to cross state lines to get abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Instead of just applause, they faced controversy and complaints.

“There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”

If the legal landscape does change, this is a chance to empirically test Richard Hanania's thesis that Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. If the majority of woke supporters (at least within institutions) are supporters only because of civil rights law, then support for wokeness could turn pretty quickly.

I would be happy to let corporations discriminate at will, as long as there's no law requiring them to discriminate in a particular direction. Let woke capital duke it out with meritocratic techbros and see which kind of company performs better. There's a lot of iffy research out there claiming that diversity has benefits for team performance etc. but this would be the true test. I'd expect the equilibrium to be a diversity of companies with different hiring policies based on their company goals and the purpose of each job role. Maybe for engineers and accountants meritocracy is best, while for public-facing roles the workers should be chosen by their appeal to customers, including by matching customers' race and other currently-protected characteristics.

” There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”

I just want to highlight this, because it’s possibly a (partial)datapoint against the Hanania thesis that woke is just civil rights law.

The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it. That bears repeating, because lots of us here seem to be cynical about it. This pushes towards corporate progressive platitudes originating with true believers, who might intellectually know that not everyone agrees with them but are shocked when they run into it irl.

Now obviously Hanania falls into the group of people who broadly hold progressive stances on cultural issues, he just doesn’t agree with woke, so it’s understandable that he tends towards an explanation of wokeness as realpolitik. After all, these people are his neargroup, so they must have logical reasons for doing things he disagrees with. But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.

But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.

This can be true, but it also ignores how a modern well run corporation (and admittedly not all of them are) works. There are many different factions, each with their own motivations, and it's not a straightforward matter to simply arbitrarily impose one's preferences on others.

Imposing more "training" requirements can't be done arbitrarily. The head of customer support has a spreadsheet which tracks the time taken to onboard a new agent, there's a cell which multiplies this by the number of agents they need to hire to deal with churn, and there's another cell which multiplies by agent wages. The net result is $cost. The head of customer support gets paid more if he makes this go down. He understands the value of diversity, but also maybe HR could tone it down and push some of the training into month 7 (average tenure of agent: 6 months) a bit and save the company $M?

Similarly, the head of backend engineering has a spreadsheet tracking time his devs spend on interviews. He also has a spreadsheet showing that he's hired 5 engineers/15 candidates from scraping github for cool repos and 0 engineers/75 candidates from HR's new diversity in eng program full of black people with an amazon certification (most of whom failed at technical screening). He totally supports diversity, so vitally important to have diverse perspectives on latency and uptime, but maybe HR could target this program better?

If HR can push back with "but lawsuits can cost $M", HR wins more of these arguments.

At a well run company, everyone is forced to produce such spreadsheets and justify them to their bosses. As the anti-empirical thread in modern wokeness (measuring stuff is raaacist) hints at, quantitative measurement more or less nukes most woke arguments.

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