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I know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evid
by woodman 11y ago
I know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evident truths - with a strong smell of moral superiority. I say let the market decide, because the magic words: "Affirmative action", "diversified", "represents our community"... don't pay the bills. If it were such an advantage to have such a work force of everymen, then you wouldn't need to compel companies to act - through law or otherwise.
- geofft 11y agoThe market is remarkably inefficient. In particular, given the startup costs of making a new company, the network effects required to get users, the more different network effects required to get employees, the connections required to get venture capital, etc., it should be completely unsurprising that it's easier for a company to get started and get traction if it plays to the biases of the surrounding society.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago>The market is remarkably inefficient. Then why aren't you exploiting this?
- geofft 11y agoBecause I don't have the startup costs to start a successful Twitter-competitor sitting in my pocket?
- woodman 11y agoYou're doing it wrong, that isn't how you displace a market leader - you invent a new market. The barrier to entry isn't that high in tech, unless your pocket contains a fist full of lint and buttons - you do have enough capital.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- paulddraper 11y agoYep. Just like if you found out that probability didn't work, go to Vagas and exploit it.
- wpietri 11y agoThis is one of those "econ 101 in a vacuum" scenarios that I find entirely tiresome. Look at this graph: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-... I'm pretty sure that capitalism wasn't invented in 1970. Was the market totally malfunctioning before 1970, when women were excluded from a variety of professions? Or was there possibly, maybe, potentially some sort of relevant factor outside the banal bounds of commerce? There are more things, Horatio, etc, etc.
- woodman 11y agoYou could just as easily use your own argument to say that the inclusion of women in a variety of professions demonstrates the validity of "econ 101 in a vacuum". This is a different issue though, less to do with market efficiency than social pressure.
- foldr 11y agoWe don't have lots of women doctors now because it suddenly became more profitable to hire them in the past couple of decades. Market forces aren't going to magically make hiring practices less discriminatory. We need to make an actual effort.
- wpietri 11y agoYou could only use my argument that way if you had some justification for what happened in 1970, and why the market failed to sort things out for millennia. My claim is that what happened was "vocal proponents [...] with a strong smell of moral superiority" made it happen in basically the same way that women finally got the vote. That is to say, market efficiency is a relatively weak and gradual force, not something that proves that all current social structures are perfectly optimal.