If you haven't noticed, that's been the goal for a long time now. People get accepted to college because of the color of their skin. People get better SAT scores now because of the color of their skin. Every major company has diversity boards which make sure to hire people based in the color of their skin. Hollywood and big business choose who to be in ads, movies, and other customer facing media because of the color of their skin. Groups decide their memberships based on the color of people's skin. CHAZ protesters in Seattle are arguing for judging people in court differently based on the color of their skin.
It's really so interesting that these groups of politically motivated people think they're ending what they perceive as racism ... by being as racist as it's possible to be.
It's weird that people act like this is the only solution to correct past injustice, too, when there's a much simpler racially-neutral method. You just help all disadvantaged persons equally. Inasmuch as any particular identifiable group is thereby disadvantaged, they're disproportionately helped by this neutral method. If only people of race X were poor, then helping all poor people would be isomorphic to helping all people of race X. But it will always remain balanced to the degree that any group is disadvantaged.
So if we just make things biased in favor of the poor, this will be able to self-correct automatically.
I don't get why that isn't seen as the best solution.
Because people who promote these policies have their own vested interest. The formula is always the same:
1. You pick a minority that suffers from something, compared to the majority. The minorities usually feel intimidated by the majority, and the viral/network effects within them are much stronger. Once you get them to back you, this directly translates to political capital.
2. You find a way to offer help to them, that is seen as beneficial at the first glance, but in the long run will not solve the problem. This entrenches them, making them dependent on your help.
3. You find a party that will pay for your policy. It needs to be a relatively large group with much weaker network effects. They also need to be wealthier than the minority, so you will be seen as a nuisance, rather than a real threat.
4. You use the "*ist" label to quickly shut up people criticizing your policy and pointing out its long-term inefficiency. Because most of the critics won't have a vested interest, they won't fight you till their political death. Instead, they will quickly retreat in fear of social media outrage against them.
Rinse and repeat. The minority continues to suffer, the silent majority is scared to criticize anything, the society becomes more and more polarized and divided.
Yeah it's a weird contortion of the mind that a vast majority of people are willing to make. Like the issue is poverty and opportunity, for every race, but no, suddenly there is this disproportionate rush to be "anti-racist" by being racist, it's so obviously orwellian 2+2 = 5 i'm surprised it hasn't been made the headline of every major media
Most people aren't smart enough to think these types of things through, instead of just following the crowd. So cheaters get to put in policies that high income people from non-white races can game while continuing to oppress poor people from all races in the name of "social justice".
Yeah, we noticed with the last BLM protests. It's funny to see your government rushing to virtue signaling and pushing people into the streets, in the middle of the current crisis and calling the opposition to be criminals just a few weeks ago for suggesting that we had to stop quarantines.
And this in a country ravaged with structural unemployment and <1% black population.
It's an increasing problem. People gets distracted with american internal agenda.
These policies exist because we live in an imperfect system that does see race and actively favors whiteness. It’s the pinnacle of white privilege and ignorance to say that “I don’t see race.”
> It’s the pinnacle of white privilege and ignorance to say that “I don’t see race.”
Who gets to decide when "white privilege" no longer exists? Not intended to be inflammatory, just curious what the benchmark is. “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” sort of thing.
No one. The statistics decide. Roughly speaking, the USA is a corporatocracy. With the powerful lobbying and incentives the corporations have on how the government functions, these organizations and the people who control them have the most power to influence the country. The answer to the question "when has power been appropriately dispersed" is ultimately simple--Look at the makeup of the executive leadership at the most powerful companies. When it consistently matches the demographic makeup of the country as a whole, then it will have largely been demonstrated that there is a certain level of equality.
Even if someone were to hire someone else solely because of the color of their skin, this would be nowhere near as racist as it’s possible to be.
Hint: people are being killed because of the color of their skin right now. People in the US used to buy people in large numbers because of the color of their skin.
I know this will be hard to accept, but no matter how many people tell me that minorities are being killed because of the color of their skin, I've noticed that not a single one of these people ever include any facts or data to back up that claim.
Sure, black people are killed by police. So are white people. So are people of every race. All the actual data I've seen is that black people are killed less frequently, in proportion to the violent crime they commit than white people are.
I believe your thought process is no more than a mind virus, a viral meme, that's wrapped up in emotion and pushed as hard as possible for political gain.
There's plenty of videos of white people being killed by police that you all just ignore. You don't look at the actual data or think critically, you're just driven by emotion and group think.
You've brought exactly as many sources to bear in this conversation as the parent you've replied to, which is to say, none. When admonishing others for their lack of sources and making a counterclaim, you may want to consider providing the source yourself.
As for sources of evidence suggesting disproportionate use of force against black persons, here's one to consider:
Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black. Additionally, black individuals were unarmed when fatally shot more frequently than white persons.
>Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black.
That depends on what you take as a baseline. I would assume that police shootings mostly happen in response to violent behavior. I couldn't find any data on the violent behavior, however there is an open FBI dataset on homicide offenders by race [0].
If you assume a correlation between the number of homicide offenders and the general probability of violent behavior, it could very much explain the disproportion you pointed out.
The table you linked is a little confusing because it's focused on the murders, but the offenders are more relevant to your point. It also excludes a lot of murders where information about the offender is missing, so the overall numbers seem too low.
So your point stands: when you talk about "disproportionate", you need a baseline. If you choose the proportion of the general population as a baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts blacks. But if you choose the proportion of known murderers as the baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts whites.
Note that there is a subtlety here: the baseline ratio is simply a ratio to use as a comparison point. I am in no way implying that all people killed by police are known murderers. Nor am I saying the ratio of known murderers necessarily extrapolate to the number of justifiable-use-of-force incidents.
EDIT: I am really just saying the baseline expectation matters, and that the general population is not the only meaningful baseline. I am not saying which baseline is the "right" one. That depends on which specific policy you are considering.
I think the GP would use your source to prove his point as well. An absolute disparity of 2.8x but it does not consider the level of violent crime a particular racial category commits.
Your source also suggests unarmed white people are nearly twice as likely to be shot than unarmed Hispanics. Doesn't that contradict the narrative of racist motive by white police?
I have to wonder how many people were killed by police. Was it 100 or 10,000? The difference in magnitude could see these racial biases diminish or worsen.
And select 2018, you'll see a total of 991 people killed by police. If you also filter by race, you'll see that 229 were black and 454 were white. I'm using 2018 because it's the most recent year with good FBI stats to compare to.
That table is excluding a lot of cases where there is missing information (that's why the numbers don't add up to 14123). It shows 2600 blacks were murdered by blacks out of 6570 murders with enough information to be included in the table. If you were to extrapolate to 14123 total murders, then you would estimate 5589 blacks were murdered by blacks in 2018; and 5754 whites were murdered by other whites in 2018.
That means blacks in 2018 were over 20 times as likely to be murdered by another black as to be killed (justifiably or not) by a police officer (black or white). Whites are about 13 times as likely to be murdered by another white as killed by a police officer. Note that "white" include latino in these numbers, but it doesn't look like the number of latino murders is high enough to have a major impact on the overall analysis (though feel free to dig in to that as well).
I'm not passing any value judgement here, but the data do seem to paint a different picture than the simplistic view of a racist police system. I conjecture (and am open to evidence that supports or refutes this claim) that the vast majority of problems blacks face in the U.S. happen long before risky police encounters, so police reform is unlikely to be very impactful by itself. In fact, there is a major risk that it will be counterproductive, if reform causes police departments to be less effective at their jobs and allow criminals to do far more damage.
Ending qualified immunity, no-knock warrants, civil asset forfeiture, over-criminalization, mandatory minimums and militarization of police are not race specific issues. They affect all Americans.
I too was fooled by this mind virus until I got curious recently and looked at the stats. I was surprised at what I found and I felt played. The whole thing is a massive lie, and a highly successful manipulation by groups with radical agendas, and the well-meaning masses that they have managed to zombify.
I’ve noticed that, in defending your previous claim that affirmative action is as racist as it’s possible to be, you’ve chosen to dispute that police killings of black people are racist, but you’ve chosen to ignore legalized slavery. genocide, lynchings, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, WW2 interment, etc.
Affirmative action absolutely could be construed as racist, and one can reasonably debate whether it’s ethical or effective, but regardless, it’s nowhere near as racist as it’s possible to be.
(I left the Holocaust out of the list above because I bet you’d reply either that there is insufficient evidence that it happened or that it wasn’t racist per se.)
This comes across as tone deaf when people are talking about victims who were not committing violent crimes. For example, allegedly passing a counterfeit $20.
Furthermore, the violent crime statistics exist in the context of people not being able to trust the police, and to the extent they do, the police not doing anything in response to shootings.
So it's easy to see a causal relationship between police misconduct and the prevalence of violent crime in certain communities. People are trying to penetrate the mindset that it's intrinsic, and say, no, police corruption systematically produces the problem and racism saps the motivation to solve it.
I was just noticing that my Google News feed is reporting local shootings, seemingly in a different world than the rest of the news, but it's quoting the police response as basically saying "gee, we have no leads, we wish people would stop settling their disagreements with violence". With the most charitable interpretation, it's ineffectual and lends support to people saying "gee, why don't we just defund the police in favor of social workers".
This is ridiculous trying to pin the prevalence of violent crime in some communities as the fault of the police. What evidence supports this?
Maybe you can say that violent crime is an offshoot of poverty, but a lot of poor communities don't have the same violent crime as others..so that's tenuous at best.
The big experiment would be to reduce the poverty of all groups and see what happens to violent crime, maybe then we don't need police and can have un-armed social workers. But until then, the correlation is community with high violence...incites violence from police, suspicion is then generated against that group. Simple statistics.
Well, I wrote a comment and then I decided to delete it and start over, rereading what you wrote and studying it.
First you say it's ridiculous to blame the police.
Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it.
Then you propose the experiment of reducing poverty.
But you don't believe that's the cause! And I don't either. So it seems to me like you're not providing an alternative hypothesis to blaming the police.
I think in order to select evidence, two alternative hypotheses are a pre-requisite. And if you think the one is "ridiculous", then it implies you have another one. You just haven't stated it so I am aware.
Also, your last two sentences really bother me, despite being far from an expert in statistics. Do you think it's reasonable to say that correlation is symmetric, while causality is not? And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility? It doesn't seem to me like the answer is simple or purely a matter of statistics.
>And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility
Not sure exactly what you mean here.
>Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it.
I don't necessarily doubt it, but I find it curious that there is not a universal poverty == violence.
I think reducing poverty is more of a solution than blaming the police, I apologize if I wasn't as clear with my statement on poverty.
My hypothesis is something like this: I doubt police cause violence in communities (except perhaps violence against police). There seems to be a correlation with poverty and violence, it's not universal. Picking a group based on skin color and saying "we reduce this poverty and not other kinds" is fairly immoral, therefore the experiment is to flatten the problem of poverty and control to see if there are spikes of violence across this flat plane and to see in which communities it occurs. That would help to isolate a potential root cause of violence. Other experiments could be done.
I'm pretty sure the causality is baked into most people not being an expert in statistic, hence "simple" statistics. If the police are running a really basic pattern matching algo, the line between correlation and causation may not be perpendicular. What I mean is that if the situation on the ground "community A has % higher violence" then in situations interacting with A implies higher chance of % violence. The causality is reached because of the simple understanding. At least that's my take.
Logic and experience lead me to have an appreciation for how harmful and painful catch-22 or double-bind situations are.
When people are vocally backing the police at times like these, then I think it's obvious they are empathizing viscerally with the police who are subject to no-win situations, so they have that capacity for empathy.
But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions.
Have you ever been, in some sense, punished by someone with power or leverage over you, because you were less than trusting, and that made them distrustful or fearful of you? I tend to think this is common, whether or not it's exactly a conscious preoccupation for most.
There are things you can't explain, you have to demonstrate and/or experience.
"But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions."
How would you explain people who empathize strongly with the images that we've all seen on TV... but then look at the numbers a week later and realize that the narrative of police violence against blacks is highly misleading.
I haven't been watching TV for ages, but I've had interactions with the police over the years that demonstrate the difficulties that come with a lack of trust on both sides.
There doesn't have to be a specific amount of violence in order to prevent dialogue and trust in a community. It's much more significant where and how it's applied. When people are punished for trusting in the authorities, then it's a huge multiplier of the criminal activity that the authorities then blame on the community.
I recently learned something interesting about corruption in my state, not directly related to the police, but about how corrosive it is when people are punished for trusting the system. In NYC, rent is regulated in various ways. One thing is that, if a landlord wants to raise rent, they can justify it with a certain dollar amount of renovations, but they may fraudulently inflate that amount. If you are a victim of that and about to be evicted because your rent was doubled, then you can sue in housing court. However, whether or not you have a good case and win, it will be on record that you sued and the authorities subsequently sell access to the data to interested parties, which means, essentially, that if you exercise your rights you will be put on a blacklist and it will be difficult going on impossible to rent anywhere. Now, this sounds like some activist's tendentious characterization, but this idea that the government effectively runs a blacklist came from court documents. The courts are cognizant this is how the system works, and to some extent they try to compensate for it, by for instance granting injunctions to stop eviction early on.
> It's really so interesting that these groups of politically motivated people think they're ending what they perceive as racism ... by being as racist as it's possible to be.
The existing system is already very biased against them, I don't have a problem with some corrective action.
"In fact, companies are more than twice as likely to call minority applicants for interviews if they submit whitened resumes than candidates who reveal their race—and this discriminatory practice is just as strong for businesses that claim to value diversity as those that don’t."
I would actually blame the corrective action for it. Companies are not personal, they are purely about managing business and risks. When you hire a person, you care for 2 things:
1. How likely will they perform their duties in a way that is profitable to the company?
2. How much will it cost to the company to fire them, if they turn out to generate loss.
Some people may have a stereotype that people of certain backgrounds would perform worse than people of other backgrounds, so that would affect heir judgement at point 1. However, if we make special rules that make it harder to fire underperformers from certain backgrounds, it greatly increases the costs at point 2, making them actually much less favorable candidates.
So in the current political climate, companies at the same time are forced to:
1. Claim that they will prefer diverse candidates and have diversity policies.
2. Actually avoid diverse candidates, because in case they underperform, laying them off would be considerably more expensive due to PR issues.
The study very much confirms this behavior, and I bet that making more special rules will only make it worse.
> Companies are not personal, they are purely about managing business and risks.
Let's completely refute this notion:
"Companies with more culturally and ethnically diverse executive teams were 33% more likely to see better-than-average profits. In McKinsey’s previous study—conducted with 2014 numbers—that increase had been 35%. At the board of directors level, more ethnically and cultural diverse companies were 43% more likely to see above-average profits, showing a significant correlation between diversity and performance."
I would dare say the causality is reversed here. Once your company reaches a certain size, NOT having a diverse executive team will very quickly get you labeled as racist and will cost you dearly. Nobody cares about a mom and pop bakery, but imagine the outrage in the media, if Apple or Google did not pick their executive teams based on the diversity constraints.
Not only that, for the time period when this study was done, the most successful businesses will be in cities where there is statistically a more diverse pool to draw from.
Is the cause the diversity or is it that cities are generally hyper-competitive places that draw the most competitive people in society and filter out those that can't hack it.
Your reason and my reason are just two possibilities of reversed causality. I'm sure there are many others.
The conclusion of that study is basically a wet streets cause rain conclusion.
One only needs to look at foreign firms like those in China that are crushing it to see that many non-diverse businesses are doing very well. I'm sure those businesses weren't included because it wouldn't support the conclusion the researcher wanted to arrive at.
China is a great example, very mono-cultural (relative to the US, I know there is different great diversity in China) and (personal experience) a bit racist or dismissive of Non-Chinese.
Yet they absolute crush it with almost everything they do? How do we square that circle and say well..if everyone just looked different we would be better off. Minus the white people, they shouldn't be around anymore.
Not to mention, anyone with half a brain that they are willing to use should already know that it’s absurd to think that 2 people with a different skin pigment have an advantage over 2 people with the same skin pigment. The willful delusion and mental gymnastics to justify reverse racism are a wonder to behold.
It's pretty easy to pick this apart. China is actually quite diverse culturally, but communism has long had a focus on equality. They're demonstrating that equality is a competitive advantage.
I've lived in China and the US and it doesn't even come close to the diversity of thought as the US. That said, they still crush it despite the lack of diversity of thought. With the US diversity of thought also comes the diversity of work ethic. China doesn't have that issue. A lot of the diversity of thought China has typically comes from expatriates that have returned home after meaningful experiences living abroad. This alone demonstrates that genetics is a terrible proxy for diversity of thought. What matters is cognitive diversity and diversity of experience.
Seems like you're assuming that having an all-white workforce, absent the political blowback that this would cause, is some kind of competitive advantage? Am I understanding you correctly?
I am assuming that having workforce hired purely based on their ability to perform the job, would be a competitive advantage if the company was aiming at efficiency rather than playing games with investors (which is another long story). I am not saying anything about their race and I personally know many competent people from many races and ethnicities.
Ironically, by interpreting my statement as an claim that such a policy would lead to an all-white workforce, you yourself just made an assumption that many people would call very racist.
> I am assuming that having workforce hired purely based on their ability to perform the job, would be a competitive advantage if the company was aiming at efficiency rather than playing games with investors (which is another long story)
Have you considered that the companies with diverse executive teams and boards did exactly that?
Can you point me to the list of companies where their lack of diversity at the executive and board members level has 'cost them dearly'?
More evidence of systemic bias in hiring practices:
"This paper suggests that African-Americans face differential treatment when searching for jobs and this may still be a factor in why they do poorly in the labor market. Job applicants with African-American names get far fewer callbacks for each resume they send out. Equally importantly, applicants with African-American
names find it hard to overcome this hurdle in callbacks by improving their observable skills or credentials."
The clear, obvious root cause is that humans have a deep tribalistic streak. I would love to hear a solution to that that doesn't involve invasive action to educate people in early childhood. A baby step in that direction was integrating public schools, and to this day a major political party is still trying to reverse that simple measure.
Transfer of wealth from a social group that is perceived as unfairly advantaged, to another group, that is perceived otherwise. Since pensions are gone for most of the people nowadays, targeting pension funds will result in relatively low public pushback, compared to other targets.
And as long as the public approves it, millions could be spent on committees figuring out "the best way to do it", bureaucrats making policies, etc. Political game as it is, nothing new.
I could probably respond in several ways but I think I'm the most curious about the economic angle here.
What if there is no money to be made or lost but a certain group is simply worse off? What if fairness lowers GDP? Does that mean it should be abandoned? Without even getting into what the realities are, I'm trying to understand what you're saying here.
What person from an underrepresented group wants to be chosen just because of their group status? Isn't that highly patronizing for someone who likely had worked hard to get to where they got? Do you want to be "pretty great for a xxxxx person!" or just "one of the best".
Is this a lesson that people want their kids to learn?
Doesn't this also lead discrimination actually being a rational (and maybe ethical) thing to do?
Simply put- if the top 100 medical students (based on MCAT, boards scores, etc) are chosen to become heart surgeons, choosing a heart surgeon from those 100 based on race or gender is not only absolutely egregious morally but it's also irrational.
But if the top 90 of the 100 medical students are chosen and then 10 are chosen because of non-relevant factors (race, gender, etc)... doesn't it become rational (and maybe morally acceptable) to try and avoid choosing those lesser-qualified 10 for your life-or-death surgery?
>Thomas has recollected that his Yale Juris Doctor degree was not taken seriously by law firms to which he applied after graduating. He said that potential employers assumed he obtained it because of affirmative action policies.[18] In 1969 Dean Louis Pollak wrote that the law school was expanding its program of quotas for black applicants, with up to 24 entering that year admitted under a system that deemphasized grades and LSAT scores.[19] According to Thomas, he was "asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated."[20] He further reflected:
> ⠀⠀ "I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value."[21]
This effect was so obvious from the outset that it frustrates the hell out of me how many people didn’t see how shortsighted these policies are.
People who genuinely care about the success of those who were given fewer opportunities were called racist for pointing this out, and the righteous virtue signalers ended up doing way more damage to the groups they were supposedly helping. Same thing is currently happening with women in tech.
Hiring quotas and racist/sexist hiring policies make more problems, not fewer problems. It doesn’t matter which group is on which side of these policies. They are inherently bad for everyone.
Yet, people can’t fathom how a black man like Thomas could lean conservative. They all think that he must be an self-hating fool who doesn’t get it, and as a result, he’s on the receiving end of some of the most racist language of any public figure, being called Uncle Tom and Coon probably more than anybody else. They don’t entertain the possibility that maybe he knows something that they don’t.
>>What person from an underrepresented group wants to be chosen just because of their group status? Isn't that highly patronizing for someone who likely had worked hard to get to where they got? Do you want to be "pretty great for a xxxxx person!" or just "one of the best".
For comparison, consider the case of people who get their jobs via nepotism. The people who are hired for nepotism are seldom concerned with the fact that they were chosen because of who their parents were. In many cases these people are reasonably qualified and do just fine in spite of the fact that they were given the job because of their family's status.
When there is a preponderance of talent and success is hard to quantify precisely, choosing the best means choosing between a number of comparably good alternatives (to within the large uncertainty of the measurement). In certain cases there are very meritocratic scenarios where I think your statement holds, but when there is a surplus of talent for a role and quantifying success is very imprecise, I'm not sure if meritocracy makes sense.
Given that many hedge funds are basically glorified ETFs that average to the market, I'm not if there is much difference between reasonably qualified candidates for these jobs.
I think your nepotism example and "preponderance of talent and success is hard to quantify precisely" are nice arguments and give me something to think about, thanks.
But when you say "I'm not sure if meritocracy makes sense"... you are really saying that instead of trying for meritocracy, they should just use skin color?
How do you feel about the idea of blind auditions for orchestras (auditions where the candidate cannot be seen, only heard)? These were originally done to eliminate the possibility of discrimination.
I think orchestras could also qualify for "preponderance of talent and success is hard to quantify precisely"... should they eliminate blind auditions so they can choose performers based on skin color+gender?
Well I'm not really advocating for choosing people based on skin color or gender per se. Rather that in a cases where there is an surplus of talent for the role we should consider making a choice based upon serving the interests of society more broadly. Sometimes this will fall along racial lines. For example, having doctors of color to serve communities of color has demonstrable positive health outcomes for society more broadly.
In the case of managing portfolios, I think that there are compelling reasons from a risk management perspective to cultivate different perspectives (a room full of Bulls will get burned in a downturn). Increasing the number of people from working class backgrounds, genders with different spending priorities, or races with different community ties can potentially add a lot of important perspectives to a financial portfolio.
Blind Auditions in orchestras are an interesting idea. People are actually much better and judging sound quality of violins than they are judging the quality of stock options, so it is easier to definitively state that someone is the 'best' Violinist in a group.
>But when you say "I'm not sure if meritocracy makes sense"... you are really saying that instead of trying for meritocracy, they should just use skin color?
I'm not GP but that doesn't seem like a charitable rendering of their argument. Its the stupidest possible rendering of their statement.
> The people who are hired for nepotism are seldom concerned with the fact that they were chosen because of who their parents were.
Nepotism is personal and hidden. It isn't a rule everyone knows about, but something done on an individual level. If people could spot nepotism as easily as they could spot race and knew about confirmed corporate nepotism as easily as they knew about diversity initiatives, it would carry a greater stigma.
People see the race question on the job application. I have never seen a form ask about family members.
>I have never seen a form ask about family members.
You haven't? Because I definitely have seen it. I'm not sure it's universal, and I know people do go to work for companies where their relatives work, but it's something that is asked on applications I've filled out, and as far as I know, is perfectly legitimate to factor into decisions.
Furthermore, race, that I can remember, always has a disclaimer that it's kept separate without identifying the person and used for reporting on diversity. And you can decline to select an answer too.
My view is that if there is a bar set that is reasonable and results in competent people being hired, then how people are selected within that set doesn't matter that much. Maybe with the caveat that I wouldn't want everyone to use the same preferences such that every employer would exclude me.
I don't see why I should be threatened by either nepotism or affirmative action. If I'm at a disadvantage, then I can take pride in having to work a little harder. Conversely, people give you more credit if they are aware you are disadvantaged, even if it's unspoken and unofficial.
If the people in underrepresented groups are anything like the females I knew in the military, most of them will hate that they were treated differently. The females had lower physical fitness standards, but competed for the same promotion slots as males. Most females I knew resented the fact that they were put in a position where their male subordinates would always question whether they were actually qualified to be in charge, or if they just happened to get promoted earlier because it was easier for them to get high physical fitness scores.
I remember several comments in the Iowa Caucus app debacle threads calling out the ex-googler who led the project as an affirmative action hire. Irregardless of morality or righteousness the more affirmative action permeates our culture the more resentment is going to build up in groups that feel cheated by such a system.
> like it or not it is not a natural human sentiment to stop and go "well one hundred years ago my great grandfather benefited unfairly...".
It's not a hundred years ago, it's this year, right now.
And I think if you're going to bend to "natural human sentiment", then you might as well give up on trying to get people to change at all. Why try to get people to exercise or learn if "natural human sentiment" is to sit on the couch and watch TV?
I removed that portion of my comment before I saw your response because it was a poorly developed thought that detracted from the substance of my original comment.
The point is that we shouldn't adapt our processes because people feel cheated. Just because you feel like someone didn't earn something doesn't mean much.
If someone has to complete a marathon with a 20 lbs weight around their neck, I'm willing to adjust their time downwards to reflect that. I'm not going to avoid doing it because unencumbered runners feel cheated by it.
The point I was making is that your argument seems to be inconsistently applied. It would seem that it’s equally wrong to adjust anyone’s time just because one person felt cheated for forgetting to remove a 20lbs weight from their own neck.
> What person from an underrepresented group wants to be chosen just because of their group status? Isn't that highly patronizing for someone who likely had worked hard to get to where they got?
Your question rests on the assumption that that's actually how they feel about it.
If they are from an underrepresented group, then by definition there is some factor that works against them. (Or multiple factors.)
If you appropriately counterbalance that factor with another factor that works in their favor, then it shouldn't make them feel bad about themselves. Competing on a level playing field doesn't reflect negatively on someone. It doesn't undermine their confidence or cast doubt on their achievements.
Of course, this assumes the playing field is actually level. In theory it's possible to get this wrong. (You could apply either too little or too much correction. It's ultimately a quantitative question.) But my point is, to argue that someone would feel bad, you need to do more than say that correction has been applied; you also need to show that it is the wrong amount of correction.
> But if the top 90 of the 100 medical students are chosen and then 10 are chosen because of non-relevant factors (race, gender, etc)... doesn't it become rational (and maybe morally acceptable) to try and avoid choosing those lesser-qualified 10 for your life-or-death surgery?
What if the 90 were chosen in a process that is also not really entirely about their qualifications? Isn't this also a problem? Why focus only on the problems in choosing the 10?
Particularly as, when you get surgery, you're way more likely to get surgeon who is one of the 90. If this is the real concern, Amdahl's Law tells you to look first at the 90.
>But if the top 90 of the 100 medical students are chosen and then 10 are chosen because of non-relevant factors (race, gender, etc)... doesn't it become rational (and maybe morally acceptable) to try and avoid choosing those lesser-qualified 10 for your life-or-death surgery?
Isn't that assuming test scores have a linear relationship to ability?
I would pick one of the conscientious hardworking "lesser-scoring" surgeon over the class valedictorian who might just happen to be a functioning alcoholic.
I agree (and I hope most people could agree) that this downside exists. I think the harder question is how to weigh this downside against the upsides of better representation. For example, of course it's also bad for kids to learn that "xxxxx people can't be doctors." Affirmative action comes in lots of different forms, and I think there's room to optimize for more than one problem at the same time.
We just want justice.
We need to ask how and why people found themselves in “underrepresented” and “marginalized” categories in first place. Piketty [1], Katznelson [2] (white people are happy to go along with set asides and actions to address class inequity, as long as no Black or Brown folk are involved) might be worth pondering.
I hope that everyone is using the opportunity to understand the processes that got us to mass uprisings in most U.S. cities.
Funny, I had to have drawn out argument with a white surgeon — day after day a few months back. He didn’t think my mother’s Black life was worth much.
This analogy is weak for a few reasons, first off companies are not doctors and with diversification no one is at risk of death.
Secondly, expanding the pool of available investments with an eye towards attempting to correct systematic injustice doesn’t need to accompany a loss of quality, which is what is argued here. If the pool of quality candidates is large, then having a diversity goal in an investment fund doesn’t necessarily lead to lower quality.
After all, can you honestly say that all the worthy startups and teams are getting investment now?
As a side note, if the diversity argument lowering quality is “correct”, then why wouldn’t any investment hypothesis also lead to lower quality? There are tons of vc firms that only invest in certain types of companies. They still manage to keep quality high while being discerning about who they invest in. Think funds that only do bio or only do social media.
Instead of coming up with reasons why status quo is totally fine or why giving money to black entrepreneurs is going to cause losses, perhaps we could imagine a world where such investment thesis are successful, and expand the total success of everyone?
"At this moment of heightened public awareness, forcing big public pension funds to commit to putting more of their dollars in funds controlled by minorities could have a major impact. These public institutions, unlike their corporate kin, represent a wide and diverse swath of the country, making investment decisions for public servants like teachers, firefighters and municipal workers."
While I think this is a phenomenal idea, it should be noted that systems like this that currently exist are frequently, almost typically, gamed. I went to work for a Federal Government certified 8a minority woman owned business with at the time about 20 employees in my mid-20s. I remember thinking how cool that was.
The "CEO" was a highly competent woman of Filipino descent who, after having kids, had chosen to become a stay-at home mom. She was CEO in name only, and her husband (a big giant white dude who was also highly competent) was the actual CEO, but with a different title.
The company's main source of revenue was acting as a prime contractor on contracts only available to 8a companies, then subbing the work out to large contractors. Another regulation on the company was a cap on it's profits, as well as a cap on salaries of individual employees. Their way around that was that the acting CEO and his wife both earned max level salaries. Another C level co-founder also payed his wife the maximum salary, and near as we can tell, her sole item of work for the company was sending out holiday gift baskets.
Again, good idea, but we need to think very hard about how to ACTUALLY help, rather than just making a small number of people who know how to game the system wealthy.
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted. It describes common practice for US Federal government business in response to the creation of minority business preferences in contracting.
Many companies that are not actually minority-owned essentially rent minority-owned shell companies to clear the qualification hurdle for contract preferences, it is de rigueur unless you have unique capabilities that make it likely you'll get a contract award regardless. The obvious consequence is that once every company is "minority owned" no company is and you are back to where you started, just with some middlemen.
It's probably getting downvoted because people who support the preferences view it as someone trying to keep minorities down. I've seen a lot of people game the system, where they'll have specialized knowledge from the government of military, then start a small contracting company and make their wife the CEO so they can win contracts. I've also known people doing government contracting where the prime won because it's an Alaskan Native company, but they subcontract out all the work, and there's only 1-2 natives actually doing work on the contract.
O wow this takes me back to my first software job we did pretty much only government contracts but were not eligible for 8a. We had another company was that eligible that we sort of brought on to tons on contracts to make the requirements; they were pretty much a single person shop that got paid to be visible.
I still don't see the value in diversity for diversities sake. Having read much from Thomas Sowell on the matter I think most of these terms will lead to much worse outcomes than what we have present day.
Diversity of viewpoints is essential for long term prosperity - it allows for a marketplace of ideas and limits blind spots.
The first time this really clicked for me was when I dived deeply into the history of the First World War. If I could restate the root cause, it was complete failure by both the British and especially the Germans to envision a point of view different from their own. They each operated like they were sparring with themselves, and shit got out of control. The problem is that it’s now vogue to assume what point of view a person holds bases entirely on their race/gender/etc.
P.S. If WWI sounds interesting, I very much recommend the podcast “When Diplomacy Fails.”
Hey I agree, once we say "you're genetics give you a diversity of viewpoint" we are typecasting by genetics. Once we say, "you're genetics make you think this way" we are walking right down the path of eugenics....seem's wrong?
I don’t have any studies I could point to, but there is the fact that children of immigrants are over represented as founders. I unscientifically attribute that to growing up with two points of view on everything - the old country and the new. It gives you ideas.
The classic argument in favor of diversity for diversity's sake is that people frame expectations for themselves based on what they see around them. If there are no members of group X in a field, then many people in group X will assume that field is not for them. At a societal level, we miss out if people who would have been highly productive in a field choose not to enter it behind assumptions about inclusion. By injecting members of group X into the field, we can help eliminate those assumptions thereby enticing more qualified people into the field and yielding productivity benefits long term. At an individual corporate level, the value is less clear. I've heard that people do not want to be the only member of group X at a company, so by building a base of members from group X it might make it easier to attract high tier talent who might otherwise pass and work for a competitor. This should be somewhat measurable for a company.
This is somewhat tangential, but it's also important to make sure that your user base is appropriately represented in your workforce (eg if you are developing products catering to white males then it probably doesn't make sense to have no white males in your workforce). That's less diversity for diversity's sake and more representation for the sake of accurate product development though.
That’s always been a really silly assertion backed by a very small number of cherry picked examples.
How does anything we buy in the US even work at all, considering it’s all made in China by people of a different culture and race with zero diversity and zero representation of the customer?
We shouldn’t accept arguments like this, no matter how uncomfortable the righteous want to make us feel for thinking critically.
> How does anything we buy in the US even work at all, considering it’s all made in China by people of a different culture and race with zero diversity and zero representation of the customer?
Because most products are targeted very widely and are for general purpose use. For general purpose products, my second comment does not apply. What I am saying is that if your product is targeted to a niche group of people who tend to occupy a specific demographic that you aren't in, then it makes sense to have members of that demographic on your team because they can provide you basic data that you might not know. This is to gain a business advantage, not to pacify diversity proponents, and I don't think it is at all a contentious statement. If you were going to start a healthcare startup and no one on your team had a healthcare background, that would probably be concerning. Are you guaranteed to fail without that user input? Not necessarily, but you will likely have to work a lot harder than you would otherwise need to in order to properly understand the space. Similarly, if you were going to start a shampoo company catering towards black women and your team was all white guys, it would probably be a good idea to bring a black woman onboard to help steer product development.
> That’s always been a really silly assertion backed by a very small number of cherry picked examples...We shouldn’t accept arguments like this, no matter how uncomfortable the righteous want to make us feel for thinking critically.
These are not particularly value adding comments and detract from your argument. Please stick to attacking my argument rather than trying to attack me personally.
For those who don't read the article, here's a quote: "Unless you're only selling to white people, if I was at a firm I would want every point of view represented in the investment process"
Is this how people view the world these days? Where skin color is important?
I feel like I'm totally lost and saddened by this new race-focused world. Can someone please tell me when I can go back to caring about the quality of air traffic controller's[1], the quality of a manager's returns[2], and a restaurant's food[3] and NOT their skin color? I'm exhausted by it.
How fortunate you are to merely be "exhausted" emotionally. This isn't really a conversation about skin color its a conversation on how we treat each other and we happen to treat people with certain skin colors in ways that make their lives worse and in some cases more dangerous. Talking about it like its about skin is foolish. It's about behavior.
Who is this "we" that you speak of? What institution anywhere in the US treats people of certain skin colors worse than others? I know of many (including those referenced in the linked article), but yet all of them discriminate against whites and asians, not blacks and hispanics.
Why do you believe that racism is so widespread? If there is evidence of widespread racism among people and institutions, please share (the only evidence I've seen is some name-on-resume-callback studies that appear more to do with class than with race).
I'm guessing you believe that there is widespread racism because of disparate outcomes. But disparate outcomes between groups doesn't mean discrimination.
For example, Iraqi-Americans avg income $32k, Iranian $78k income. How many Americans even know the difference between those two peoples even if they wanted to discriminate?[1]
I think there's a certain part of the population (generally on the left from what I've seen) that is so deep in an ideological bubble that they cannot believe that reasonable and legitimate alternate perspectives exist. When countered with fair and legitimate points, they unfortunately wish to exit conversations.
This is just a fun little an online message board and I do not wish to criticize the poster who accused me of being in bad faith (whatever that means). However, I don't believe I said anything improper, even if it was jarring to their world view.
"diversity and inclusion" initiatives are coming up on a long overdue reckoning. The premise is to allege discrimination, based solely on "evidence" in the form of inequality of outcome, and then use that unilateral accusation as justification for the accusing party to practice the discrimination they claim to oppose. Bonus: you are liable to lose your job for criticising these practices.
The comments ITT suggest that perhaps the taboo surrounding criticism of diversity initiatives is finally lifting, and rightly so.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules on HN? I'm afraid you've been breaking them in two ways. First, it's not ok to use the site primarily [1] for political or ideological battle. That's probably the single most destructive thing people do here, because battle mode and curiosity mode do not go together. Some political overlap is ok [2], but it's not ok to use the site primarily this way.
Second, please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. [3]
For people to use a consistent identity especially with issues where you get fired for an unorthodox opinion, it's necessary for people to be able to go back and delete comments that could be used to doxx them. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of HN and why I increasingly use throwaway accounts.
I can meet you partway on that by agreeing that there are lots of constraints on this problem. But if someone is repeatedly creating accounts on HN just to post on flamewar topics, that's not a high quality use of the site.
