Marc Andreesen says universities will 'pay the price' for DEI

58 pointsposted 7 months ago
by perihelions

52 Comments

dahart

7 months ago

I wonder why Andreesen doesn’t suggest public funding of higher education, instead of fighting DEI. If education was free for all Americans, it would achieve what he’s arguing for and it would undermine and make DEI efforts completely moot. As far as I can tell, we can afford to fund university for all entirely on the extra income taxes that people with degrees make above people without degrees, at least according to income data studies I’ve read from the Fed. (I’m honestly curious why our country hasn’t come to this conclusion already - it certainly looks today like funding higher education for all would increase GDP and reduce the tax burden.)

UncleMeat

7 months ago

He also writes that the NSF should experience "the bureaucratic death penalty."

Andreesen doesn't actually give a shit about the university system whatsoever. He wants people like him to be at the top of society and everybody else to grovel at his feet.

arp242

7 months ago

Last year he wrote in his "techno-optimist manifesto" that anyone delaying roll-out of AI is guilty of murder. Andreesen has tons of investment in AI and stands to make loads of money from it. Completely unrelated, I am sure. He also said that growth through AI has no upper bounds. Obviously not mathematically possible. Maybe he's Jack Kennedy too now.

He is a deeply unserious person seemingly becoming more unserious by the day.

hollerith

7 months ago

Even better: college degrees for everyone

dahart

7 months ago

Yes, that’s definitely what I’m suggesting. Did I accidentally imply something else? I feel like taking the whether someone can afford college off the table would just immediately end this DEI argument and give Americans a boost. Why isn’t Adreesen fighting for that?

rbanffy

7 months ago

A much needed boost. China has about 200 million STEM graduates, which is the entire US workforce.

> Why isn’t Adreesen fighting for that?

We can only infer the best interests of the country and its people don’t align with his own plans.

chomp

7 months ago

That’s what the parent commenter is saying, if everyone has the same opportunity to go to college and get a degree, then colleges don’t need to pick and choose students. Right now, only people with means can do to college, and so universities wind up balancing the scales.

malcolmgreaves

7 months ago

Most likely it’s because he doesn’t actually want what he claims. Billionaires become corrupted by their wealth. Like a junkie, they need their fix. And their fix is to see their wealth increase.

rbanffy

7 months ago

It’s not wealth and power that corrupts. It’s the fear of losing them.

jaybrendansmith

7 months ago

It's very simple in my opinion. The discrimination we have in the US is all about wealth, not diversity. If we shift all DEI to simply focus on those who don't come from wealth, we will have solved discrimination without resorting to subjective racial or ethnic or sexual qualifications.

ethbr1

7 months ago

That's been a sub-strain of post election US Democrat thinking: that it should be more about poor vs rich and less about identity.

Unfortunately, there's a large cottage industry that hitched their careers / thought leadership to identity and are fighting it tooth and nail.

Imho, it's pretty obvious and simple. Two poor folks have more in common with each other these days than the poor with the rich, whatever combination of other identities.

const_cast

7 months ago

It's simple, but not that simple, because poverty and outcomes are weighed and distributed by race. Meaning, if we do implement this sort of DEI, we will be helping black people WAY more than white people. And conservatives don't like that, that's their original complaint with DEI.

ethbr1

7 months ago

Don’t look at it from the perspective of leaders —- look at it from the perspective of voters.

Poor voters could care less which party actually helps more minorities, as long as they believe they’re going to be helped.

The modern GOP’s greatest sleight of hand was convincing poor voters they’d be helped by tax cuts for the rich.

rbanffy

7 months ago

When you do that you’ll realize it is also about identity, about how some ethnic and sexual minorities are discriminated against and end up with fewer economic opportunities than the white-cis-male-christian norm, whose privilege is encoded not in law, but in the fabric of our societies.

drcongo

7 months ago

This is low key genius.

jrflowers

7 months ago

Seeing as the only form of “DEI” that existed in the education system 60 years ago was court-enforced desegregation, this guy has written a whole lot of words to convey his position that black people shouldn’t be allowed in schools with white people

davidw

7 months ago

Guy who owes his fortune to public funding of research wants to tear it all down.

davidw

7 months ago

arp242

7 months ago

I remember when the video first came out and EVERYONE was up in arms about it. Left, right, centre, far-right. People normally ranting about Deep State Democratic Nazi Communist Satan cult led by extreme-left Muslim Barrack HUSSEIN Obama were up in arms about it. Everyone. That's because it showed, at best, a wilful shocking disregard for someone in clear distress not just in the heat of the moment, but calmly for ten long minutes.

It's absolutely unreal how politicised it became.

davidw

7 months ago

Yeah, to your point, Mitt Romney marched in a George Floyd protest.

cameldrv

7 months ago

Yeah specifically NCSA where he and Eric Bina developed Mosaic was created by an NSF grant.

jbverschoor

7 months ago

[flagged]

UncleMeat

7 months ago

Andreesen says that its been 60 years of "discrimination" against white people. My alma mater didn't even admit women in 1965. He says that immigration is "discrimination." The world he pines for is a world of explicit and massive discrimination against women and non-whites.

Andreesen is calling for the NSF to be destroyed. What does that have to do with DEI? The Trump administration is demanding that universities expressly hire conservatives as faculty and admit conservatives as students. Where's Andreesen's concern about this?

If Andreesen gives a shit about merit, why'd a16z hire Daniel Penny when his entire "qualification" is killing somebody on the subway?

DoctorOW

7 months ago

A friend of mine involved with the Coast Guard lemented someone who was fired in Trump's DEI purge. She was hard working, and well respected by those who worked for her, but she was a woman so she was deemed "without merit".

The problem I have with the anti-DEI stuff is that they have no means of proving merit. They're just seeing someone who is a minority and imagining a more qualified white guy.

ethbr1

7 months ago

The truth here is that bureaucracies are shit at implementing nuance -- they'll do DEI poorly; they'll do anti-DEI poorly.

The original point of merit exams wasn't that they were objective, but that they were outside bureaucratic control, which ended up producing better results than the status quo.

Anti-DEI especially is being implemented in such a rapid manner that it's no surprise incompetent people are making bad calls, because nobody will question them if it's "anti-DEI".

Such is the great harm of strong beliefs + groupthink: they justify bad decisions by covering them as compliant decisions.

skywhopper

7 months ago

[flagged]

gjsman-1000

7 months ago

… by reverse discrimination in many companies.

Changing words doesn’t change practice. Inventing words like “unhoused” doesn’t fix “homeless.”

rbanffy

7 months ago

I see a very civil discussion here. It might be worth to unflag and give this discussion a second chance.

jmclnx

7 months ago

The title should be "The US will pay the price for the insane policies of Trump". I have a name for this guy, but I do not want to get banned :)