OK, this one is hilarious.
The story starts with a comment from Jordan Anaya, pointing to the story of Michael Eisen, a biologist who, as editor of the academic journal eLife, changed its policy to a public review system. It seems that this policy was controversial, much more so than I would’ve thought. I followed the link Anaya gave to Eisen’s twitter feed, scrolled through, and came across the above item.
There are so many bizarre things about this, it’s hard to know where to start:
– The complicated framing. Instead of just putting them in a lifeboat or something, there’s this complicated story about a spaceship with Earth doomed for destruction.
– It says that these people have been “selected” as passengers. All the worthy people in the world, and they’re picking these guys. “An Accountant with a substance abuse problem”? “A racist police officer”? Who’s doing the selection, exactly? This is the best that humanity has to offer??
– That “Eight (8)” thing. What’s the audience for this: people who don’t know what the word “Eight” means?
– All the partial information, which reminds me of those old-fashioned logic puzzles (“Mr. White lives next door to the teacher, who is not the person who likes to play soccer,” etc.) We hear about the athlete being gay and a vegetarian, but what about the novelist or the international student? Are they gay? What do they eat?
– I love that “militant African American medical student.” I could see some conflict here with the “60-year old Jewish university administrator.” Maybe best not to put both on the same spaceship . . .
– Finally, the funniest part is the dude on twitter who calls this “demonic.” Demonic’s a bad thing, right?
Anyway, I was curious where this all came from so I googled *Whom to Leave Behind* and found lots of fun things. A series of links led to this 2018 news article from News5 Cleveland:
In an assignment given out at Roberts Middle School in Cuyahoga Falls, students had to choose who they felt were “most deserving” to be saved from a doomed Earth from a list based on race, religion, sexual orientation and other qualifications. . . .
In a Facebook post, Councilman Adam Miller said he spoke with the teacher who gave the assignment. He said the teacher intended to promote diversity. Miller told News 5 the teacher apologized for the assignment that has caused such controversy.
The Facebook link takes us here:
Hey—they’re taking the wife but leaving the accountant behind. How horrible!
The comments to the post suggest this activity has been around for awhile:
And one of the commenters points to this variant:
I’m not sure exactly why, but I find this one a lot less disturbing than the version with the militant student, the racist cop, and the Jew.
There are a bunch of online links to that 2018 story. Even though the general lifeboat problem is not new, it seems like it only hit the news that one time.
But . . . further googling turns up lots of variants. Particularly charming was this version with ridiculously elaborate descriptions:
I love how they give each person a complex story. For example, sure, Shane is curing cancer, “but he is in a wheelchair.” I assume they wouldn’t have to take the chair onto the boat, though!
Also they illustrate the story with this quote:
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are” – Roy Disney
This is weird, given that the whole point of the exercise is that it is hard to make decisions.
Anyway, the original lifeboat activity seems innocuous enough, a reasonable icebreaker for class discussion. But, yeah, adding all the ethnic stuff just seems like you’re asking for trouble.
It’s more fun than the trolley problem, though, I’ll give it that.
So if I had to answer seriously (it seems unlikely but let’s see). These people will have to recreate the human species, so I would start by taking all the women of childbearing age (3,4,6 and 8 for sure, maybe some of the others are female as well like the medical student, the novelist or the police officer?). Regardless I’d take the medical student (2) because it’s probably gonna be useful to have someone with a medical background. Then I’d pick the younger males (10 and 11), if anything because they’re probably more likely to be fertile. And finally the accountant (1) for family reasons. I guess we’ll just put a lock on the drug drawer. So I’m leaving behind the novelist, the clergyman, the police officer and the university administrator. Sorry!
> maybe some of the others are female as well like the medical student, the novelist or the police officer?
Don’t forget the accountant and the clergyman.
An accountant can be a female, of course. But a clergyman is explicitly a man, no?
You can get into trouble if you say that (clergy)men cannot get pregnant. Or (orphaned) boys, for that matter.
OK, the clergyman can get pregnant just like any other man! But he’s still a clergyMAN!
“You can get into trouble if you say that (clergy)men cannot get pregnant. Or (orphaned) boys, for that matter.”
The clergyman in question is “against homosexuality”, so he’s probably not a trans man. I don’t think it’s yet a thought crime to say that cis-men can’t get pregnant.
But you can’t repopulate humanity from 8 people. I’ve seen a “10,000 people” figure for the genetic diversity. I don’t want to say that’s set in stone. But it’s not 8! So I don’t know what you should optimize for here, really. Maybe someone who might be able to contact aliens and ask for help? Anything seems like really a long shot, and none of these people would be on my list for that. Do they even food? Like, how exactly are the logistics of this supposed to work? It would make more sense if there was already a colony set up there. Maybe that’s implicit.
I’ve seen the claim (here, for example https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm ) that the entire human species went through a bottleneck of about 2000 people at some point. That’s a very old news story and I don’t know how well it has stood the test of time. If only I had some sort of vast information repository at my fingertips, so that I could type a query into a machine and get an answer to questions like this. What a marvelous world that would be.
Lord knows I’m no expert, but at first thought 10,000 seems far too high to be required. Easter Island, for example, had a much smaller population than that at first European contact, and was not part of a transportation network that was providing new genetic diversity. They weren’t doing so well, but not (I think) because of insufficient genetic variability.
But I certainly agree with your main point: 8 is far too low.
Public review at eLife sounded reasonable enough until I saw how wildly people reacted. And yes, the framing on Eisen’s Twitter was genuinely bizarre—the setup alone made me do a double take before I even got to the punchline.
This seems like the plot for Deep Impact: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120647/
Except there are no details in the exercise on the contributions people can make in rebuilding civilization, just their identities.
Reminds me of the plot of the Neal Stephenson sci-fi novel “Seveneves”.
(TL;DR: about 1500 people are manage to escape Earth before it becomes inhabitable, a lot more get to donate gametes for future repopulation. Ironically, the next third of the book is about how they kill each other and themselves in various ways other so that only 8 of remain alive; incidentally all the gene banks are destroyed in the process.)
I think TL;DR is good advice regarding Seveneves.
At least they said “whom!!!”
For a disquisition regard “whom” and other grammatical controversies,
https://qz.com/1517643/should-we-let-the-word-whom-die
As always, the battle is between what we view as fluff and what we hold sacred.
It seems to me that a minute’s discussion would establish that this is not enough information. Isn’t that the point of DEI?
Yep. People getting up in arms are missing the point.
The point is to reveal personal biases based on participants’ Worldview and Mental Models and provide an opportunity for the group to unpack the meaning and their thoughts and feelings.
Something in the original seems off. I am very skeptical that this appeared in a public university’s DEI training. I’d like further evidence.
It can be found here:
https://ccsi.org/CCSI/media/pdfs/_OASAS_CulturalCompTraining_FacilitatorGuide-Day_1.pdf
The description of the activity includes a (broken) link to the Center for Diversity of Inclusion of the University of Houston. I’ll send what seem the correct location in another reply to pass the spam filter.
In case the activity is not controversial enough one can also do this:
OPTIONAL: For 5 mins. – After the 8 have been selected, the group must select who among the training group will be the additional passenger.
The correct link mentioned above: https://www.uh.edu/cdi/resources/student-resources/_files/_activities/diversity-activities-resource-guide.pdf
Googling for “whom to leave behind” one can find this activity included in other “diversity training” materials.
I guess my mom was right when she told that no one ever went broke betting on the reality of stupidity. You have given me a third reason not to live in Houston
I’d leave the people who write and assign these things.
I love that last one. It reads like a handy random table for a Dungeon Master to use for generating quick NPCs. Just sprinkle in a few references to dwarves and half-orcs and you’re set!
So I’m a staunch liberal Democrat, don’t decry DEI as wokeness gone awry, etc. etc. But I would defend the tweeter’s “demonic” comment. One key development of the 2010s in social progressivism is the turn away from post-modernism to essentialism, i.e. the labels you use for your identity (and the wider groups who also use those same labels) are a critical part of your being. A cohort among social progressives, a minority I think, but a loud minority–especially on twitter–have combined Crenshaw’s original version intersectionality with a Marxist class view towards oppression to build a ladder of oppression, where a white gay man is strictly less oppressed than a black gay man who is strictly less oppressed than a black trans woman, etc.
The assignment is essentially asking us to create our own ladder of oppression, while also conflating “useful for tasks space colonists have to do” with “virtuosity, deserving to be the seed for the restart of the human race”. I myself would be very uncomfortable to give any comments about e.g. the physically disabled novelist not being fit for such a mission because of this conflation. I am sure that there’d be a cohort on twitter that would call that viewpoint problematic, and boy is it not fun when social progressives think you’ve got problematic views on something. At least when it’s on twitter or reddit I can log off, but this assignment is designed to be used with co-workers! The benefits of increased identity awareness certainly seem to me to be outweighed by the interpersonal resentment that might be built up between employees with different “oppression rankings”.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
I don’t know whether it is post-modernist twaddle or essentialist twaddle, but as an old progressive, I’m also alarmed by what Jack describes.
“The only winning move is not to play.”
Couldn’t agree more. If I were confronted with this, I would leave the room. And I’d probably bring a copy of that worksheet to an attorney to find out what my options are with regard to hostile work environment complaints.
I’m all for diversity, equity, and inclusion as concepts. But some of the things that are being done in their name are very destructive.
You’re saying that merely by being given these questions to discuss, you’re being subjected to a “hostile work environment”?
Maybe we really have become a society of “snowflakes”. Nothing can be discussed if even a single person might find it offensive, and there is always someone to judge something offensive.
Don’t get me wrong, I think this exercise seems ridiculous—although I am willing to entertain the possibility that there’s some context in which it isn’t. But “hostile”? Please.
“So I’m a staunch liberal Democrat, don’t decry DEI as wokeness gone awry, etc. etc.”
This is kinda par for the course when it comes to DEI. If you’ve read any popular anti-racism books (best sellers no less), you get exactly what you think only represents a minority in this space. Read a little more and you might fall on the side of “DEI as wokeness gone awry”.
Don’t forget that CocaCola’s DEI training in 2021 told employees to “be less white”. Here’s CocaCola’s apology for that: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/media-center/diversity-equity-inclusion-training
I’ve been to a couple of trainings at my work (thankfully we don’t have many mandatory trainings in this area), and the stuff in this post is kind of mild. I would also be wary of speaking up during these events if you disagree with how things are framed. Constructive feedback isn’t really welcome.
Jfa:
Given that Coca-Cola is itself dark brown, I can see its motivation in getting people to be less white. If they were selling milk, it would be another story entirely.
Hahaha.
Since the passengers will almost certainly die (quite possibly horribly) and the human race will not be saved by them under a plausible scientific scenario, people might interpret the exercise quite differently.
I think perhaps a more interesting exercise would be to have administrators/employers read the prompt and then discuss what
qualifications/competencies its facilitator would need to exhibit in a job interview to have an “ethics” discussion about it.
I think I share the opinion of most commenters here: nearly none of the information we are given is even relevant to the question, and it’s certainly not sufficient. The candidates can draw straws or something. My guess is that those of us who feel that way have simply bypassed an hour or so of fraught discussion and leapt to the conclusion the creators of the exercise had in mind.
Why isn’t ‘Egomaniac tech billionaire’ on the list? That would surely lend it a semblance of reality.
Monty Python could not have done it better.
Actually, the example with the life boat raises some further bizarre questions.
Does the thirteen year old twins do count as one or two people? If the latter, is it possible to split them up?
Why do I give an option that might represent two people at once and why do I not highlight that option, if so?
Those “exercises” are real crazy stuff.
If the “Thirteen year old twins” is an option that might represent two people at once so does “Two young adults who recently married”.
(I don’t think that they are supposed to come as a pack, unlike the woman-allegedly-with-child.)
One thing I notice about the “militant African American medical student” is that “militant” is so vague. It could mean anything from “strident” to “willing to use violence for a cause”. I’d guess that the DEI worksheet is thinking the former rather than the latter, but it’s hard to tell.
(I’d also wonder how a racist cop accused of using excessive force would even be a candidate for this space trip, given that he’d likely be an obvious liability.)
I don’t know what this says about me, but my first reaction was, “Ooh! This is ripe for a factorial survey!” (Not the point, I know.)
Isn’t this a legal thing? They write things twice because the nobility of england spoke french after 1066:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_English#Style
I think there are two (2) reasons for doing this, one is legal and the other is for comic emphasis. It is a deliberately unusual task after all.
For a stats blog, really disappointing absence of solutions using lotteries :)
Agreed. Drawing numbered marbles from a barrel means that each person has to urn their place on the rocket ship.
Howard, best reply on this post!
I’m with Andrew: there are so many imbecilic features of this it’s hard to know what to laugh at first. One thing is for sure: it’s classic social science fare in that it operates on quack presumptions, but something real is supposed to come out of it: it’s analogous to power posing training.
I like the “33 yr old Native American manager who does not speak English”. WTH???? What 33 year old Native American doesn’t speak English? Much less a “manager”??? I have it on good authority that even in Tuktoyaktuk the Inuit speak English.
Or as Andrew points out, how did the “racist cop” get to the final 12 in the first place? There were no non-militant black medical students on the entire planet? Or the “militant” part is a feature not a bug? I don’t want to risk investing too much analysis in this careful selection of personality traits, but no doubt it’s done for a reason regardless of how poor the reason might be.
It’s interesting that, other than the vaguely stereotypical and apparently carefully selected properties given the characters, there’s no readily apparent “DEI” content in the problem. All the DEI content apparently comes with the discussion? Interesting that the discussion guidelines aren’t included. I can only wonder what kind of reaction they might evoke if exposed in print.
Point your web browser to moralmachine.net and click “Start Judging” to play the role of the AI driving a car. You have to make choices about who(m?) to kill and save. Maybe inverting the Roy Disney quote, the site then tells you what your values are based on what decisions you’ve made. I use it in my history of technology class.
It’s clear this started as a brainteaser which had an answer: pick proven fertility, then potential, over all else. Someone who misunderstood this transmogrified the same list into a thing of nonsensical DEI horror.