DEI = Racist

[Chap]

The question to which I replied was :

Why is diversity and inclusion important inside a fire department?

My response was, in essence, that in a very diverse nation such as the USA and indeed th UK, a fire department staffed only by white men is unlikely (notice I only said unlikely) to be drawing on the complete pool of talent suitable for recruitment, and will therefore not have the best staff that it could if the selection process was not one that excluded non-with non-males.

Of course, once you have an open selection process, it must be systematic and rigorous as the one you described. I am puzzled that you felt it relevant to ask:

Do you want someone with a cognitive disability working as an air traffic controller?

Any selection well-designed selection process for air traffic controller will obviously ensure that those unable to think and communicate clearly, quickly and calmly in an emergency are excluded at an early stage. But it shouldn't matter whether they are white, brown, black or yellow. If there is a selection process that only ever recruits white people, it probably is not working in a way that locates the best qualified people.

[Jersey Girl]

Do you want someone with a cognitive disability working as an air traffic controller?

Do you want someone with a cognitive disability calling the shots sitting at the Resolute Desk?

[yellowstone123]

The question to which I replied was :

Why is diversity and inclusion important inside a fire department?

My response was, in essence, that in a very diverse nation such as the USA and indeed th UK, a fire department staffed only by white men is unlikely (notice I only said unlikely) to be drawing on the complete pool of talent suitable for recruitment, and will therefore not have the best staff that it could if the selection process was not one that excluded non-with non-males.

Of course, once you have an open selection process, it must be systematic and rigorous as the one you described. I am puzzled that you felt it relevant to ask:

Do you want someone with a cognitive disability working as an air traffic controller?

Any selection well-designed selection process for air traffic controller will obviously ensure that those unable to think and communicate clearly, quickly and calmly in an emergency are excluded at an early stage. But it shouldn't matter whether they are white, brown, black or yellow. If there is a selection process that only ever recruits white people, it probably is not working in a way that locates the best qualified people.

So give me data that only white men are being given the job as a fireman.

Explain to me the selection process and what it entails; show me interviews where the department personnel were selected solely on race, excluding others. I needed examples. Even if it’s a small sample and you want to make an inference to the entire country then give me that data. Show me the interviews. Even if it’s from 60 minutes.

Did it happen in the Southern States. I’m sure it did. The good ole boy network was very strong in the Southern States. Just look at all the white male Democrats that voted together to oppose the confirmation of associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who I quote in my signature line.

Everyone to a degree are tribal in thinking as their tribe can do no wrong and the other one can do no right. Then you have the exhorters with their megaphones yelling that the other tribe can do no right.

[yellowstone123]

Do you want someone with a cognitive disability working as an air traffic controller?

Do you want someone with a coginitive disability calling the shots sitting at the Resolute Desk?

Given who was at the “Resolute Desk” the previous four years, does one really need to respond.

[Morley]

The question to which I replied was :



My response was, in essence, that in a very diverse nation such as the USA and indeed th UK, a fire department staffed only by white men is unlikely (notice I only said unlikely) to be drawing on the complete pool of talent suitable for recruitment, and will therefore not have the best staff that it could if the selection process was not one that excluded non-with non-males.

Of course, once you have an open selection process, it must be systematic and rigorous as the one you described. I am puzzled that you felt it relevant to ask:



Any selection well-designed selection process for air traffic controller will obviously ensure that those unable to think and communicate clearly, quickly and calmly in an emergency are excluded at an early stage. But it shouldn't matter whether they are white, brown, black or yellow. If there is a selection process that only ever recruits white people, it probably is not working in a way that locates the best qualified people.

So give me data that only white men are being given the job as a fireman.

Explain to me the selection process and what it entails; show me interviews where the department personnel were selected solely on race, excluding others. I needed examples. Even if it’s a small sample and you want to make an inference to the entire country then give me that data. Show me the interviews. Even if it’s from 60 minutes.

The selection process doesn't need to be solely on race for it to be flawed. If race is one of the factors for selection--even if it's not openly acknowledged--the process is flawed.

Many years ago, I worked for a school district in Utah. All of the upper echelon of the district was composed of white, Mormon males active in Church leadership--though the population of the clientele and teachers was about 40% non-Mormon, half female, and 25% ethnic minorities. The district's hiring practices did not overtly state that only white Mormon males would be promoted to management, but in practice, that was the outcome. In the entire history of the district, this had been the case. You seem to be saying that this was okay.

Did it happen in the Southern States. I’m sure it did. The good ole boy network was very strong in the Southern States. Just look at all the white male Democrats that voted together to oppose the confirmation of associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who I quote in my signature line.

It happened in all of the states. The network is strong everywhere.

Everyone to a degree are tribal in thinking as their tribe can do no wrong and the other one can do no right. Then you have the exhorters with their megaphones yelling that the other tribe can do no right.

No, what you have is exhorters saying that we need to take a second look at what seems to be our reflexive tribal practices. Do you disagree?

[Morley]

Do you want someone with a coginitive disability calling the shots sitting at the Resolute Desk?

Given who was at the “Resolute Desk” the previous four years, does one really need to respond.

Yes, one does. Biden, for all his faults and frailty, did not attempt to run the ship of state into the shoals.

[Chap]

So give me data that only white men are being given the job as a fireman.

I made no such ludicrous claim as that "only white men are being given the job as a fireman".

Someone asked:

Why is diversity and inclusion important inside a fire department?

My answer was that in order to ensure that the very best talent is recruited, it is important to avoid the risk of there being a self-sustaining process in some fire departments whereby white male decision makers may unconsciously or otherwise tend to favour people lie themselves (white males) as candidates. This does not happen because all white men are bad guys (I am a white man). It happens because people naturally find it easier to see the good points of people like themselves.

Diversity and inclusion is there to make sure people will, if necessary, start to ask themselves questions like "Hey! We've recruited 12 people to the department in the last couple of years and they are all white guys. Maybe we need to ask ourselves why this is happening?" Of course if recruitment is already reasonably varied, there is nothing to be done.

[Some Schmo]

Any time a right winger asks what good diversity is, I can't help imagine they're implicitly defending their decision not to diversify their own gene pool (because cousin Betsy has almost a full set of teeth and is hot).

[Physics Guy]

The goal of DEI is not supposed to be greater fairness at the price of lower competence. It's higher competence at the price of having to work with people who look and act differently in ways that are irrelevant to the job. It's supposed to be ruthless meritocracy: ruthless enough to recognize how much pressure it takes to get most people to stop favoring people like themselves even when the likeness has nothing to do with job performance.

We worry most about really finding the most competent people in a certain kind of job. In some other jobs competence doesn't matter all that much, so we don't worry so much about it. And in some other jobs, competence must be demonstrated clearly all the time, and then it's just obvious whether our people are competent enough. We don't worry whether our jugglers are "just DEI hires" because either they keep the balls up or they don't, and we see that right away. The jobs where we worry are ones in which big threats or opportunities come up, but only rarely. We want to be ready for those when they happen, but we can't use performance in those rare cases as our test for competence, because the big threats or opportunities are too rare, and because they are too big to let a mere applicant handle them. We can't use an actual five-alarm fire, or an idea for a radically new cancer treatment, as a recruiting test.

So we try to use proxies for the actual challenges. We test for things that we think are good predictors of performance in the actual crisis. This is where we can be badly inefficient, though, because for some kinds of rare but important challenge there are no really reliable proxies. It's too easy to wind up using "sounds like a good guy" as a proxy for "can find someone in a burning building", or "speaks fast and sounds confident" for "can tell when a crazy idea will actually work". It's too easy to use "looks and sounds like me" as a proxy for things that actually have nothing to do with that.

[Moksha]

Trump is still following Steve Bannon's philosophy that the American government needs to be destroyed to be rebuilt into something else, such as the Confederate States or Trumplandia. Adhering to fascist principles and abandoning civil rights would appeal to conservatives.