18 ms·

>The best way to improve the representation of women in the field is not to recruit them, important though that is, but to promote them. To create role models.

>The best way to improve the representation of women in the field is not to recruit them, important though that is, but to promote them. To create role models. To push them into positions of influence. I find the idea that we should "push them into positions of influence" abhorrent. These are zero sum games, to give them a special advantage over any other demographic is to disadvantage another. This is antithetical to everything most people believe about fairness and equality. And what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap, pushed upwards beyond their skill by well-meaning but naive men? What sort of message will that send to them? None of this is even mentioning the basic question of, what do we even get out of trying to "correct" disparities in employment demographics? How do we even know that women as a demographic have an equal interest in computer science to men? If they don't, what do we get out of "correcting" the disparity by given them special treatment, handicaps, incentives, etc? Pushing people into positions of influence based on their gender is nothing other than deeply sexist, discriminatory to people who don't need to be pushed, and should be absolutely unacceptable to anyone who actually cares about equality.

exolymph 10y ago
An essay that winds around to a similar point: https://status451.com/2016/11/06/exclusive-inclusivity/ https://status451.com/2016/11/06/exclusive-inclusivity/
tptacek 10y ago
If you disagree with Pike's implied priors, do so directly; don't huff about how logic that starts from a different set of premises to yours ends at a bad place when you swap the premises out from under it. One very simple, coherent way to arrive at Pike's position without sacrificing the notion of merit is to accept the idea that it's very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men, and thus the gender gap must itself be an indication that something other that merit is systematically advantaging men and disadvantaging women. You're welcome to argue that point (or any other), but don't pretend that you've beaten it by default.
- rationalcult 10y ago
  Hey 400 lbs man, please please for the love of god, get off this side and go the gym. You are wasting everyone valuable timing from your pussified comments and white-knighting. You will do us a big favor by going to the gym and not having us pay through your medical bill through medicare when you stop working.
- adwn 10y ago
  > accept the idea that it's very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men To be fair, the gender gap is present in many engineering professions, computer science is in no way unique here.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    The article we're talking about opens with an observation about better gender parity in another hard science field, so it's hard to see how computer science can somehow exempt itself from the observation without special pleading.
    - throwaway399 10y ago
      How do you know that all hard science fields are equally interesting to women?
      - tptacek 10y ago
        * Molecular biology * Chemistry * Math * Evolutionary biology * Biochemistry * Statistics * Astronomy All these fields have greater than 30% participation among women. It's always possible to compose a special-pleading argument; that's why we have the term "special pleading". But to be convincing, that argument would have to come up with a compelling difference between computer science and all those other fields (it would also need to account for the fact that women are also far better represented in the rest of the professions).
        10y ago
bbatsell 10y ago
I think it might be valuable to reflect on why your immediate reaction to "push them into positions of influence" is to think that women are unqualified to be there and they must be receiving "special advantage" if they are.
- Oxitendwe 10y ago
  Was it not his entire point that these people should be given an advantage? What else do you think it means to be "pushed into positions of influence"?
  - geofft 10y ago
    I think it means that due to existing biases, the role models, promoted people, etc. are biased towards men and women, and therefore by definition include some number of men less qualified than women who could potentially have those roles. We need to push back on these biases, which means that we need to push women into roles where they are qualified, and push out unqualified men as a result. It's harsh, but if we want a meritocracy, it's the right thing to do.
    - said 10y ago
      Do you believe the vast physical differences between men and women end at the brainstem? Do you believe the flood of sex hormones during puberty don't result in different mental tendencies, including tolerances to rejection? Do you believe the different ratios of neurotransmitters between men and women across all cultures and haplogroups are a result of culture? Before we explicitly institutionalize discrimination against men and boys to correct nebulous discrimination against women and girls, we must really make sure: 1. We aren't ignoring potential opportunity costs 2. We are okay with the fact that our policies will hurt disadvantaged men and boys the most
      - geofft 10y ago
        I certainly believe there are physical differences between (biological) men and women, in aggregate across men and women. I do think that the standard deviation is very high, though; I don't think that the vast physical differences make all men more suited to a task than all women, any more than all men are taller than all women. And I think that defining particular "mental tendencies" as favorable or unfavorable to success in computing is a very difficult task. I do a lot of things at work; I figure out how to do a dynamic library upgrade smoothly, I work with other people to figure out what sort of capacity requirements their application needs, I Google for an answer to a problem I'm having, I report a bug when nobody else seems to have done so, I respond to a page and figure out what broke as quickly as possible, and I enter flow state and work on some algorithmic thing for an hour or so. It seems unlikely to me that I'm good at all these things, let alone that everyone of a certain gender is. To say that men are better at programming because of some male-genetic-linked mental tendency seems as ill-reasoned as saying that men are better at cooking because we're taller and can reach the top shelf. For 1, I believe in other people's agency. If someone says "I want to be part of this industry, but these are the reasons I'm being pushed out," I'm inclined to believe them on both fronts. If they say "I would rather join this other industry," I'm not going to try particularly hard to convince them they're wrong. For 2, that doesn't seem plausible to me; won't it hurt disadvantaged women and girls even more?
ericjang 10y ago
> And what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap, pushed upwards beyond their skill by well-meaning but naive men? Proponents of affirmative-action policies argue that the handicap offsets disabilities from the glass ceiling, discrimination / stereotype threat in the workplace/education pipeline. The calculus of what "balances out inequality" is imperfect, but arguably better than just having the disability.
- Oxitendwe 10y ago
  >proponents of affirmative-action policies argue that the handicap offsets disabilities from the glass ceiling, discrimination / stereotype threat in the workplace/education pipeline. How do you know that the disparity in women in the general population versus women in computer science is caused by the things you mentioned? How do you know that they have an equal interest and potential in this field than demographics who do not need special treatment? Will the value that these people provide be greater than what is expended to advantage them over other demographics who do not need special treatment? These are very serious and important questions you should be asking yourself when you decide to advantage certain people over others. I don't believe they have been answered.
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    The implication that women need "special treatment" in order to excel in tech is why there are so few women in tech. How do I know this? Because women who have excelled in tech have told me so, I've read their blogs, I've read their tweets, I believe them (because they're clearly competent, and they've clearly explained why tech has been an unfairly challenging career path for them). At this point, the only way to be wholly convinced that tech doesn't discriminate against women (and some people of color) is to willfully ignore the huge array of evidence, and to assume that every woman who has spoken out about their experience is lying. I'm unwilling to ignore the evidence or to assume that a bunch of women I admire are lying (for what reason, I can't imagine, because the women who speak out face being doxxed, harassed for years, and otherwise making their life miserable with the only goal being to make things a little more fair in the future for other women).
  - 10y ago
dastbe 10y ago
So I'll preface my opinion with the fact that we're both putting words into some dudes mouth. When he or anyone else says that we should promote women, it's not saying that we should promote incompetent women. It's saying we should promote women who deserve it by challenging our biases. Take as an example orchestra auditions; when orchestras move to blind auditions the gender ratios for top positions suddenly become much more representative of the actual population. Since we do not have the luxury of blind auditions, we have to challenge ourselves to lean more on objective measures, as well as questioning our subjective measures that (unknowingly) take gender into account. And maybe you're right; maybe women have less interest in science than men. The problem is we'll never actually know because society tells children, teens, and adults that women don't like math and men don't like nursing. So the best mechanism we have is encouraging women and men that the status quo is arbitrary, which involves having events focused on women in tech and working to promote women who deserve to be promoted so that there is an alternate narrative. Because that narrative has just as much validity (and in my opinion much more so) as the narrative that women just don't like science.
SwellJoe 10y ago
>I find the idea that we should "push them into positions of influence" abhorrent. These are zero sum games, to give them a special advantage over any other demographic is to disadvantage another. You're assuming women aren't currently at a disadvantage in that selection process. Which, evidence indicates they are. So...leveling the playing field is not disadvantaging others at the expense of women. It is recognizing that our current culture has biases that need to be corrected for. Your argument is essentially that there are almost no women talented enough to be in leadership roles in tech, if they were chosen fairly; because that's the situation we are currently in. I'm not suggesting quotas here, and I don't think Pike is either, but there's clearly a bunch of broken segments in the path to advancement for women in tech. We're chasing off talented people because they're women (and minorities), whether we mean to or not. Acknowledging that deficit (on our part, as members of the tech community who aren't subject to those biases) is not unfair or a zero sum game.
- Oxitendwe 10y ago
  >Your argument is essentially that there are almost no women talented enough to be in leadership roles in tech This is wrong. There are plenty. My point is that these people should not be given special treatment and more opportunities if they come at the expense of other demographics. >I'm not suggesting quotas here, and I don't think Pike is either He didn't mention quotas, but he did mention preferential hiring. "It may take proactive behavior, like choosing a women over a man when growing your team, just because, or promoting women more freely." How would you feel if you applied for a job and it was given to someone else because they were a woman? Would that not be unfair? Would this practice applied in aggregate not chase off even more talented people? I can only imagine most people would not want to stick around in a situation like that.
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    Given the current bias our industry holds toward men, it will require people to give women (and people of color) the benefit of the doubt more often when making hiring or promoting decisions. If our biases favor some kinds of people, our "objective" assessment of people's abilities will not actually be objective, and we have to self-correct in some way. Intentionally giving a female candidate another look, or giving her a chance in the role, is likely a necessary step toward correcting those biases. How would you feel if you applied for a job and it was given to someone else because they were a woman? Probably not much different than women feel every day when passed over for a job they're similarly or better qualified for by a man. It sucks to lose an opportunity that you wanted, but the industry will be healthier for it. Would this practice applied in aggregate not chase off even more talented people? Our industry chases off, or under-utilizes by not promoting to their level of greatest impact, talented women every day. Evening that imbalance out is not unfair to men.
solipsism 10y ago
This is antithetical to everything most people believe about fairness and equality If you're going to make a wide-reaching claim like that, please back it up. Or narrow the claim by making it anecdotal. My experience is quite the opposite. I, my friends, and most of my co-workers can see the very clear disenfranchisement suffered by women and believe work must be done to counter it. These are zero sum games That's not clear at all. Let's take a small example. Imagine the Go community lacks influential thought leaders of the female gender (I have no clue if this is the case). Now imagine they seek to address this by urging respected but below-the-surface women to write more blog posts, attend more meetings. Who exactly suffers? You don't think we can find more chairs in the meeting room? Is the blog going to fill up? None of this is even mentioning the basic question of, what do we even get out of trying to "correct" disparities in employment demographics He was pretty clear about that actually. He started with it. He said he felt, but could not prove, the high quality of his experience had to do with the diversity of the members of that community. It's fine to challenge that idea, but don't pretend like it wasn't discussed. what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap When I tell my kids to go out of their way to be friends with a kid who seems lonely, they fundamentally get why. They don't have these delusions that everyone starts at an equal footing and that the status quo reflects everyone getting what they deserve.
nickparker 10y ago
I see where you're coming from, and I think we reach different conclusions because you see merit as a much more readily judged quantity than I do. I wholeheartedly agree, elevating people above the level of responsibility/work they can handle is a bad idea, as is taking away responsibility from more qualified people. Where you run into trouble is the people judging qualifications. Human judgment is an insanely noisy tool that heavily weights a bunch of stuff with no actual effect. For a stupid example, look at the earning difference between tall men and taller men -- it's about $800/yr/inch [1]. The effects of gender, race, and apparent country of origin (eg "foreign sounding" names) are all larger and equally useless in actually predicting job performance. I'm not saying hire dim women over bright men. As I see it, the claim is that there are often many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error, and in those situations it's wise to pick the disadvantaged candidate because A) your flawed human judgement's probably lying to you ie they're more qualified than you think and B) if they are truly equal, elevating them will help encourage the next generation of candidates with their background, as TFA suggests. We can argue whether such a strategy will discourage the advantaged group's next generation in an equal and opposite manner, but I suspect the effect is strongly net positive on the size / quality of the labor pool. Lastly, I realize I've made this comment quite narrowly focused on a hypothetical "hiring" scenario with a single human arbiter, but I hope HN can extrapolate the ideas to other choices we make as a society. 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-financial-perks-of-being-tall/393518/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...
- prodigal_erik 10y ago
  > many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error Too many acceptable candidates? Nobody I've ever worked for had this problem. If you meet the bar, you're getting an offer, even if Chuck Norris and Jeff Dean carpooled to the next session.
  - nickparker 10y ago
    I think I'm discussing the upper end of the funnel while you're pointing toward the bottom. At the level of phone screens and first interviews, there should be many potentially acceptable candidates. If there aren't it's indicative of a flaw at the very top of the funnel (ie, the opening needs to be better publicized, or the org. may have a public image problem).
swang 10y ago
You're assuming the playing field is level. That men somehow don't inherently have advantages like having the proper "look" consider the stereotypes of computer programmers "wear hoodies, look kinda disheveled and drink mountain dew. probably asian or white" women/girls don't (shouldn't?) look like that. therefore they can't be programmers. and let's step away from gender entirely. let's talk baseball. the entire game is based on winning but rather than choose players based on their ability to play the game, a large portion of them are chosen based on how they "look" based on opinions from scouts. "is he tall? muscular? does he have nice teeth?" "this guy threw a 90mph fastball. he doesn't have any other pitch and 3 people hit homeruns off him but he's going to be a star!" nothing in life is fair. promoting people who have been overlooked is not a "special advantage" it is merely re-balancing the "special advantage" others have had due to gender, race, or just plain genetics.
- Oxitendwe 10y ago
  >consider the stereotypes of computer programmers "wear hoodies, look kinda disheveled and drink mountain dew. probably asian or white" women/girls don't (shouldn't?) look like that. therefore they can't be programmers. I am skeptical of the claim that anybody actually thinks this. >and let's step away from gender entirely. let's talk baseball. the entire game is based on winning but rather than choose players based on their ability to play the game, a large portion of them are chosen based on how they "look" based on opinions from scouts. "is he tall? muscular? does he have nice teeth?" "this guy threw a 90mph fastball. he doesn't have any other pitch and 3 people hit homeruns off him but he's going to be a star!" You don't think someone's height and musculature might affect how well they can play baseball? That their nice teeth will help their team's image and thus, their bottom line? That someone who is physically skilled but bad at the game can be taught to become better? These all feel like absolutely reasonable discrimination to me. >nothing in life is fair. promoting people who have been overlooked is not a "special advantage" it is merely re-balancing the "special advantage" others have had due to gender, race, or just plain genetics. You're right, fair was perhaps not the right word to use. But what do we actually get out of this? How do we even know that these people have been overlooked? Does this "re-balancing" provide more value than what is expended to achieve it?

exolymph 10y ago

An essay that winds around to a similar point: https://status451.com/2016/11/06/exclusive-inclusivity/ https://status451.com/2016/11/06/exclusive-inclusivity/

tptacek 10y ago

If you disagree with Pike's implied priors, do so directly; don't huff about how logic that starts from a different set of premises to yours ends at a bad place when you swap the premises out from under it. One very simple, coherent way to arrive at Pike's position without sacrificing the notion of merit is to accept the idea that it's very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men, and thus the gender gap must itself be an indication that something other that merit is systematically advantaging men and disadvantaging women. You're welcome to argue that point (or any other), but don't pretend that you've beaten it by default.

rationalcult 10y ago
Hey 400 lbs man, please please for the love of god, get off this side and go the gym. You are wasting everyone valuable timing from your pussified comments and white-knighting. You will do us a big favor by going to the gym and not having us pay through your medical bill through medicare when you stop working.
adwn 10y ago
> accept the idea that it's very unlikely that computer technology is unique among the professions in being suited to men To be fair, the gender gap is present in many engineering professions, computer science is in no way unique here.
- tptacek 10y ago
  The article we're talking about opens with an observation about better gender parity in another hard science field, so it's hard to see how computer science can somehow exempt itself from the observation without special pleading.
  - throwaway399 10y ago
    How do you know that all hard science fields are equally interesting to women?
    - tptacek 10y ago
      * Molecular biology * Chemistry * Math * Evolutionary biology * Biochemistry * Statistics * Astronomy All these fields have greater than 30% participation among women. It's always possible to compose a special-pleading argument; that's why we have the term "special pleading". But to be convincing, that argument would have to come up with a compelling difference between computer science and all those other fields (it would also need to account for the fact that women are also far better represented in the rest of the professions).
      - 10y ago

bbatsell 10y ago

I think it might be valuable to reflect on why your immediate reaction to "push them into positions of influence" is to think that women are unqualified to be there and they must be receiving "special advantage" if they are.

Oxitendwe 10y ago
Was it not his entire point that these people should be given an advantage? What else do you think it means to be "pushed into positions of influence"?
- geofft 10y ago
  I think it means that due to existing biases, the role models, promoted people, etc. are biased towards men and women, and therefore by definition include some number of men less qualified than women who could potentially have those roles. We need to push back on these biases, which means that we need to push women into roles where they are qualified, and push out unqualified men as a result. It's harsh, but if we want a meritocracy, it's the right thing to do.
  - said 10y ago
    Do you believe the vast physical differences between men and women end at the brainstem? Do you believe the flood of sex hormones during puberty don't result in different mental tendencies, including tolerances to rejection? Do you believe the different ratios of neurotransmitters between men and women across all cultures and haplogroups are a result of culture? Before we explicitly institutionalize discrimination against men and boys to correct nebulous discrimination against women and girls, we must really make sure: 1. We aren't ignoring potential opportunity costs 2. We are okay with the fact that our policies will hurt disadvantaged men and boys the most
    - geofft 10y ago
      I certainly believe there are physical differences between (biological) men and women, in aggregate across men and women. I do think that the standard deviation is very high, though; I don't think that the vast physical differences make all men more suited to a task than all women, any more than all men are taller than all women. And I think that defining particular "mental tendencies" as favorable or unfavorable to success in computing is a very difficult task. I do a lot of things at work; I figure out how to do a dynamic library upgrade smoothly, I work with other people to figure out what sort of capacity requirements their application needs, I Google for an answer to a problem I'm having, I report a bug when nobody else seems to have done so, I respond to a page and figure out what broke as quickly as possible, and I enter flow state and work on some algorithmic thing for an hour or so. It seems unlikely to me that I'm good at all these things, let alone that everyone of a certain gender is. To say that men are better at programming because of some male-genetic-linked mental tendency seems as ill-reasoned as saying that men are better at cooking because we're taller and can reach the top shelf. For 1, I believe in other people's agency. If someone says "I want to be part of this industry, but these are the reasons I'm being pushed out," I'm inclined to believe them on both fronts. If they say "I would rather join this other industry," I'm not going to try particularly hard to convince them they're wrong. For 2, that doesn't seem plausible to me; won't it hurt disadvantaged women and girls even more?

ericjang 10y ago

> And what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap, pushed upwards beyond their skill by well-meaning but naive men? Proponents of affirmative-action policies argue that the handicap offsets disabilities from the glass ceiling, discrimination / stereotype threat in the workplace/education pipeline. The calculus of what "balances out inequality" is imperfect, but arguably better than just having the disability.

Oxitendwe 10y ago
>proponents of affirmative-action policies argue that the handicap offsets disabilities from the glass ceiling, discrimination / stereotype threat in the workplace/education pipeline. How do you know that the disparity in women in the general population versus women in computer science is caused by the things you mentioned? How do you know that they have an equal interest and potential in this field than demographics who do not need special treatment? Will the value that these people provide be greater than what is expended to advantage them over other demographics who do not need special treatment? These are very serious and important questions you should be asking yourself when you decide to advantage certain people over others. I don't believe they have been answered.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  The implication that women need "special treatment" in order to excel in tech is why there are so few women in tech. How do I know this? Because women who have excelled in tech have told me so, I've read their blogs, I've read their tweets, I believe them (because they're clearly competent, and they've clearly explained why tech has been an unfairly challenging career path for them). At this point, the only way to be wholly convinced that tech doesn't discriminate against women (and some people of color) is to willfully ignore the huge array of evidence, and to assume that every woman who has spoken out about their experience is lying. I'm unwilling to ignore the evidence or to assume that a bunch of women I admire are lying (for what reason, I can't imagine, because the women who speak out face being doxxed, harassed for years, and otherwise making their life miserable with the only goal being to make things a little more fair in the future for other women).
- 10y ago

dastbe 10y ago

So I'll preface my opinion with the fact that we're both putting words into some dudes mouth. When he or anyone else says that we should promote women, it's not saying that we should promote incompetent women. It's saying we should promote women who deserve it by challenging our biases. Take as an example orchestra auditions; when orchestras move to blind auditions the gender ratios for top positions suddenly become much more representative of the actual population. Since we do not have the luxury of blind auditions, we have to challenge ourselves to lean more on objective measures, as well as questioning our subjective measures that (unknowingly) take gender into account. And maybe you're right; maybe women have less interest in science than men. The problem is we'll never actually know because society tells children, teens, and adults that women don't like math and men don't like nursing. So the best mechanism we have is encouraging women and men that the status quo is arbitrary, which involves having events focused on women in tech and working to promote women who deserve to be promoted so that there is an alternate narrative. Because that narrative has just as much validity (and in my opinion much more so) as the narrative that women just don't like science.

SwellJoe 10y ago

>I find the idea that we should "push them into positions of influence" abhorrent. These are zero sum games, to give them a special advantage over any other demographic is to disadvantage another. You're assuming women aren't currently at a disadvantage in that selection process. Which, evidence indicates they are. So...leveling the playing field is not disadvantaging others at the expense of women. It is recognizing that our current culture has biases that need to be corrected for. Your argument is essentially that there are almost no women talented enough to be in leadership roles in tech, if they were chosen fairly; because that's the situation we are currently in. I'm not suggesting quotas here, and I don't think Pike is either, but there's clearly a bunch of broken segments in the path to advancement for women in tech. We're chasing off talented people because they're women (and minorities), whether we mean to or not. Acknowledging that deficit (on our part, as members of the tech community who aren't subject to those biases) is not unfair or a zero sum game.

Oxitendwe 10y ago
>Your argument is essentially that there are almost no women talented enough to be in leadership roles in tech This is wrong. There are plenty. My point is that these people should not be given special treatment and more opportunities if they come at the expense of other demographics. >I'm not suggesting quotas here, and I don't think Pike is either He didn't mention quotas, but he did mention preferential hiring. "It may take proactive behavior, like choosing a women over a man when growing your team, just because, or promoting women more freely." How would you feel if you applied for a job and it was given to someone else because they were a woman? Would that not be unfair? Would this practice applied in aggregate not chase off even more talented people? I can only imagine most people would not want to stick around in a situation like that.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Given the current bias our industry holds toward men, it will require people to give women (and people of color) the benefit of the doubt more often when making hiring or promoting decisions. If our biases favor some kinds of people, our "objective" assessment of people's abilities will not actually be objective, and we have to self-correct in some way. Intentionally giving a female candidate another look, or giving her a chance in the role, is likely a necessary step toward correcting those biases. How would you feel if you applied for a job and it was given to someone else because they were a woman? Probably not much different than women feel every day when passed over for a job they're similarly or better qualified for by a man. It sucks to lose an opportunity that you wanted, but the industry will be healthier for it. Would this practice applied in aggregate not chase off even more talented people? Our industry chases off, or under-utilizes by not promoting to their level of greatest impact, talented women every day. Evening that imbalance out is not unfair to men.

solipsism 10y ago

This is antithetical to everything most people believe about fairness and equality If you're going to make a wide-reaching claim like that, please back it up. Or narrow the claim by making it anecdotal. My experience is quite the opposite. I, my friends, and most of my co-workers can see the very clear disenfranchisement suffered by women and believe work must be done to counter it. These are zero sum games That's not clear at all. Let's take a small example. Imagine the Go community lacks influential thought leaders of the female gender (I have no clue if this is the case). Now imagine they seek to address this by urging respected but below-the-surface women to write more blog posts, attend more meetings. Who exactly suffers? You don't think we can find more chairs in the meeting room? Is the blog going to fill up? None of this is even mentioning the basic question of, what do we even get out of trying to "correct" disparities in employment demographics He was pretty clear about that actually. He started with it. He said he felt, but could not prove, the high quality of his experience had to do with the diversity of the members of that community. It's fine to challenge that idea, but don't pretend like it wasn't discussed. what of the girls who learn that their role models have been given a handicap When I tell my kids to go out of their way to be friends with a kid who seems lonely, they fundamentally get why. They don't have these delusions that everyone starts at an equal footing and that the status quo reflects everyone getting what they deserve.

nickparker 10y ago

I see where you're coming from, and I think we reach different conclusions because you see merit as a much more readily judged quantity than I do. I wholeheartedly agree, elevating people above the level of responsibility/work they can handle is a bad idea, as is taking away responsibility from more qualified people. Where you run into trouble is the people judging qualifications. Human judgment is an insanely noisy tool that heavily weights a bunch of stuff with no actual effect. For a stupid example, look at the earning difference between tall men and taller men -- it's about $800/yr/inch [1]. The effects of gender, race, and apparent country of origin (eg "foreign sounding" names) are all larger and equally useless in actually predicting job performance. I'm not saying hire dim women over bright men. As I see it, the claim is that there are often many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error, and in those situations it's wise to pick the disadvantaged candidate because A) your flawed human judgement's probably lying to you ie they're more qualified than you think and B) if they are truly equal, elevating them will help encourage the next generation of candidates with their background, as TFA suggests. We can argue whether such a strategy will discourage the advantaged group's next generation in an equal and opposite manner, but I suspect the effect is strongly net positive on the size / quality of the labor pool. Lastly, I realize I've made this comment quite narrowly focused on a hypothetical "hiring" scenario with a single human arbiter, but I hope HN can extrapolate the ideas to other choices we make as a society. 1: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-financial-perks-of-being-tall/393518/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...

prodigal_erik 10y ago
> many candidates who are equally "qualified" within our margin of error Too many acceptable candidates? Nobody I've ever worked for had this problem. If you meet the bar, you're getting an offer, even if Chuck Norris and Jeff Dean carpooled to the next session.
- nickparker 10y ago
  I think I'm discussing the upper end of the funnel while you're pointing toward the bottom. At the level of phone screens and first interviews, there should be many potentially acceptable candidates. If there aren't it's indicative of a flaw at the very top of the funnel (ie, the opening needs to be better publicized, or the org. may have a public image problem).

swang 10y ago

You're assuming the playing field is level. That men somehow don't inherently have advantages like having the proper "look" consider the stereotypes of computer programmers "wear hoodies, look kinda disheveled and drink mountain dew. probably asian or white" women/girls don't (shouldn't?) look like that. therefore they can't be programmers. and let's step away from gender entirely. let's talk baseball. the entire game is based on winning but rather than choose players based on their ability to play the game, a large portion of them are chosen based on how they "look" based on opinions from scouts. "is he tall? muscular? does he have nice teeth?" "this guy threw a 90mph fastball. he doesn't have any other pitch and 3 people hit homeruns off him but he's going to be a star!" nothing in life is fair. promoting people who have been overlooked is not a "special advantage" it is merely re-balancing the "special advantage" others have had due to gender, race, or just plain genetics.

Oxitendwe 10y ago
>consider the stereotypes of computer programmers "wear hoodies, look kinda disheveled and drink mountain dew. probably asian or white" women/girls don't (shouldn't?) look like that. therefore they can't be programmers. I am skeptical of the claim that anybody actually thinks this. >and let's step away from gender entirely. let's talk baseball. the entire game is based on winning but rather than choose players based on their ability to play the game, a large portion of them are chosen based on how they "look" based on opinions from scouts. "is he tall? muscular? does he have nice teeth?" "this guy threw a 90mph fastball. he doesn't have any other pitch and 3 people hit homeruns off him but he's going to be a star!" You don't think someone's height and musculature might affect how well they can play baseball? That their nice teeth will help their team's image and thus, their bottom line? That someone who is physically skilled but bad at the game can be taught to become better? These all feel like absolutely reasonable discrimination to me. >nothing in life is fair. promoting people who have been overlooked is not a "special advantage" it is merely re-balancing the "special advantage" others have had due to gender, race, or just plain genetics. You're right, fair was perhaps not the right word to use. But what do we actually get out of this? How do we even know that these people have been overlooked? Does this "re-balancing" provide more value than what is expended to achieve it?