hckrnws

WARNING: article is only tangential related to teeth. I gave up skimming halfway through. There were a few mentions of the effects of jail and torture on teeth.

Rather longwinded personal intro, followed by

due to the war, my grandma was allowed to become a dentist without actually going to medical school!

YAY! What a horror story.

Very tangential, but interesting enough story:

My dad grew up the youngest in a relatively poor family in Montana with four kids and a father that drank most of their cash away. My dad really needed braces, but they couldn't afford to pay a dentist, so my grandmother got a part time job as a dental assistant and paid very close attention to the process of installing and removing braces.

After a few months, she "borrowed" the materials required for braces, and installed them on my dad, and removed them about a year later. Apparently it worked out fine, my dad's teeth are alright.

Obviously, things going "alright" is more a matter of luck than anything else: there's a reason that people go to dental school, and they were fortunate that there weren't any complications, but I always thought it was amusing that that's how my dad got his teeth straightened.

> they were fortunate that there weren't any complications

I long ago saw a proposal for a country-scale medical training system designed for graceful upgrading. A highly experienced nurse, wishing to become a doctor, just learns the delta, rather than restarting from scratch. Similarly for a community heath worker moving into nursing, etc. And a different proposal, for automated support and oversight of community health workers' hard-to-take-well cervical-cancer screening photos, integrated with ai-filtered city-based expert consults. And then there's patients who become single-disease domain experts.

So looking forward, perhaps we could imagine a human-computer-hybrid setup where a grandma training and executing with oversight was gracefully supported? Especially if haptic vr becomes widely available.

Ask an experienced cosmetologist at a salon how many of their clients come in, wearing a hat or scarf, asking them to rescue a home project going awry.

And then scroll around Google Maps to see how many nail and hair "salons" are running in someone's private home.

That explains quite a lot about dentistry in USSR

[flagged]

I've often heard this claim touted - that people hired via DEI initiatives are incompetent or cannot do their job - do you have any statistics showing it? It always sounded to me like an "obvious conclusion" that was never proven, just assumed to be true, but I'm interested to see how the numbers play out, if any exist.

Well, president mentioned some time ago "pregnancy flight suits" for fighter jet pilots. I have no data how pregnancy and 10G are compatible. Also there are no physiological differences.

So I guess you are right!

The truth is less exciting. The flight suits are for air crew. The air force has a wide array of craft that need plenty of crew on board that will not go through the stresses of fighter combat.

Or more likely they will never get deployed.

Having been part of many such hiring initiatives, it hasn't ever panned out in any of my data. It means that everyone needs to be less of a shithead (because folks are no longer broadly homogenous), which makes everything a lot more bearable. The work is the same, but the people are better to each other. It's not that surprising everything ends up working better a year or two later.

> that people hired via DEI initiatives are incompetent or cannot do their job

I think this is a strawman. The argument would be that if you hire for diversity, you are no longer hiring for capability first (which is much harder to refute than the straw-man "all DEI hires are incompetent").

You could make an argument for DEI-hiring being possibly helpful against nepotism, though.

Personally, I think that DEI efforts (especially quota-driven hiring) just paper over underlying problems while being actively unethical on their own (discriminating against the majority, basically).

> The argument would be that if you hire for diversity, you are no longer hiring for capability first

And a counter-argument is to question the assumptions that:

current hiring practices actually select for capability. See discussions on live coding tests for one example.

In most work, where output requires a team, the output of the team is simply the sum of the capability of the members (i.e. team dynamics/composition/morale do not influence team output).

> The argument would be that if you hire for diversity, you are no longer hiring for capability first

That claim is also hard to prove in the first place, but apparently people can just peddle it, and expect other people to do the hard work to debunk it.

Usually, whenever you start asking people to justify that claim, you end up with an anecdote or two and, if you point out that anecdotal data don't make a point, personal attacks.

That claim seems the more intuitive understanding - if candidates are judged entirely by capability and fit for a role, then background wouldn't factor in. If diversity tips the scales toward a candidate that would have been otherwise passed over then ability is no longer the highest priority. If this understanding is flawed, could you explain how?

There are more parameters than just changing the evaluation method applied on a fixed pool of candidates.

Could you please go into more detail? I'm not sure what you mean by that. I'm not trying to argue, I just want to understand.

I went more in depth in another reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788460

Thank you! That clears it up, makes sense. It sounds like a different thing than what the other person was talking about.

I don't have personal experience either way - I see both of you saying the thing you're talking about exists and the thing the other doesn't. Is it possible both are happening? How would you know if the other isn't?

It's definitely possible some people do wrong stuff. I wouldn't trust people not to mess things up badly sometimes. But if you intend to criticize the whole discipline, you can't base your analysis only its failures.

If there isn't a reliable way of knowing whether its failures or its successes are the exception, I can see why this is a frustrating issue. Especially since both positions of for and against the approach ultimately have the same aim. The only real solution I see is solid data, but for something this complex and multifaceted that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

Maybe we are just talking past each other.

What I mean by "hiring for diversity" is that the business has some DEI goals, like "more female software devs" and lets those influence its hiring decisions.

As soon as you have gender/race distribution goals that deviate from your candidate stream, you have to make hiring decisions that discriminate against your otherwise "most capable candidate", or you're not gonna reach those goals.

Just making sure that your hiring is not actively racist itself is not something I'm arguing against (and I would not call that "DEI hiring").

> As soon as you have gender/race distribution goals that deviate from your candidate stream, you have to make hiring decisions that discriminate against your otherwise "most capable candidate"

The issue with this logic is that you assume the candidate stream can't be changed/expanded.

An example of a business decision that could be influenced by DEI hiring: rather than doing the usual outreach programs only to the usual universities, you could decide to turn stones that you wouldn't usually turn in order to find people you wouldn't usually find. This has zero impact on the quality of people you hire.

Also, "We only hire the best" is a bullshit catchphrase designed to flatter the ego of fresh grads in order to soften them for comp discussion. What usually happens is that you hire whoever passes an arbitrary bar you've set, and you're content not to have and waste another month in a new interview round before you start your new project.

> Just making sure that your hiring is not actively racist itself is not something I'm arguing against (and I would not call that "DEI hiring").

edit: Unfortunately, it is. e.g. someone created a throwaway account to peddle weird fantasies in answer to this message.

> rather than doing the usual outreach programs only to the usual universities, you could decide to turn stones that you wouldn't usually turn in order to find people you wouldn't usually find.

This reads to me "onesidedly relax hiring criteria to keep quota" and is exactly the kind of intervention into the hiring process that I expect to decrease average capability of new hires.

Sure, if your criteria themselves are bad in the first place (you are basically rejecting a huge pool of candidates randomly), it does not matter. But plenty of companies don't have a somewhat infinite stream of candidates that would be willing to relocate from across the world, and expanding that candidate stream has a very real cost for the business, too.

Outreach programs typically don't influence the hiring decision. But they influence the stream of people that will try to get an internship at your company.

For instance, if you're a Stanford grad and keep strong ties with the alma mater, teachers there may say a word about you to their promising students, and you'll end up with more people from Stanford than from e.g. Yale. A DEI program could look to fix that by advertising your company to other venues.

> expanding that candidate stream has a very real cost for the business

I don't dispute that, but we've moved from "it would lead to worse hires" to "it would cost money to the company". If the company is willing to put $0 into the issue, business as usual is the only viable solution.

I will concede that if you do this very rigorously (reject out-of-quota candidates very early in the hiring pipeline, without letting current quota deviation ever influence any specific hiring decision) it is possible to not affect candidate quality.

But I think in practice (also from personal experience) it is very hard to make a business stick to this.

I also think that this mostly amounts to investing additional ressources into expanding the candidate stream (=> outreach programs), hiding a bunch of the costs (those outreach programs could have gotten you twice the benefit without the quota-rejection) for extremely questionable gain; consider: You could've probably gotten the same result from a DEI perspective by just paying female candidates the cost of those outreach programs (that would be a strictly better outcome for them, but a shit framework from an ethical POV).

In summary: I think it's always an excellent idea to remove racial/gender bias in hiring (=> create non-hostile environment, accomodate needs where possible, get rid of condescending, sexist pricks in HR), but I think it is misguided, pointless and wasteful to try and balance the outcomes at the very end...

[flagged]

[flagged]

See, this is exactly what I was referring to. It's "obvious" that these things happen as a result of DEI, but you provide no evidence for it. Some anecdotes, sure, but I want to see how it plays out broadly - I'm sure there are cases where it's good and cases where it's bad if you just pick anecdotes from the data! I also think calling out censorship for this is lazy, to be honest. I really doubt a topic as contentious as DEI has no useful data to prove your point.

You assume we are having some sort of discussion. Like I say sken rational argument, you say something back, than I refute it... Nobody gets cancelled, or death threats...

> want to see how it plays out broadly - I'm sure there are cases where it's good

Old promise for DEI was to improve efficiency by unlocking potential in groups that could not work. Are there some data to suggest it is working? All I see is move from "equality" to "equity" bcos some people are just lazy.

Clearly you didn't read the article. The grandmother was in Poland.

It is called holocaust denial, and crime in many countries including Poland. A#hole!

What are you on about? The GP said that it explains dentistry in the USSR - Poland wasn't in the USSR.

Poland wasn't in the USSR

But large chunks of it did become part of the USSR, as the article points out very clearly:

  Zosia grew up fatherless in Vilnius, which between the wars belonged to Poland and was called Wilno. On 1 September 1939, she was just about to start her first year of medical school when Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union joined in, and quickly took Wilno, along with most of Poland’s east. A month later, the Soviets gave the city to Lithuania, which had coveted it since the end of the previous war.

The grandmother received her qualification in Warsaw, which is part of modern day Poland and has never been part of the USSR - so her qualification explains nothing about dentistry in the USSR - as per the comment I was responding to.

  Warsaw itself was in ruins. A great portion of the country’s doctors had been killed, and there was a desperate need for medical professionals of every kind. The intensity of this demand led to a certain loosening of standards in training. This relaxation was even more pronounced in the sister discipline of dentistry. Instead of going to years of medical school, all Zosia had to do to become a dentist was endure a short practicum and pass a test. The test was a set essay, on the “role of the mouth in the beauty of the face”.

You are correct, and I wasn't reading too carefully.

The snippet at the end does touch on Soviet dentistry directly, however.

[flagged]

I see, you are just a troll that cant even keep track of what thread they are on. You created an entire throwaway and calling me a racist nazi because i said you didn't read the article? lol.

Well, roughly a third of pre-WWII Poland ended up in the USSR and remains part of Russia today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

And a fair chunk of pre-WWII Germany ended up in Poland. Poland basically moved westward, losing parts in the east and gaining territory in the west.

[flagged]

It explains your bias and preconceived notions.

One could read the story as "people had to do what they had to in order to survive and help their fellow humans". But no, you choose to focus on "Soviet dentistry hurrr" without knowing a thing about it.

The article is also guilty. It talks at length about this book with a story of horrible torture that is entirely made up. Essentially that book is a collection of every stereotype and conspiracy mashed into one. The modern-day equivalent would be a book about how QAnon and Pizzagate are real. But no, the author says "the book is a lie, but Russia is bad so it's justified", missing the obvious: the book is trash.