4 ms·

No, this is all wrong. By the time you apply your equal tests, it's already way too late. The societal damage has been done, and you're going to confirm inequal

No, this is all wrong. By the time you apply your equal tests, it's already way too late. The societal damage has been done, and you're going to confirm inequalities that already exist. You shouldn't hire someone just for being a minority, but as a human being you should care if one group is inexplicably doing worse at some task, and work to figure out why and correct it. I assume you know that there are no biological differences between races that are significant in the workplace, and nearly zero significant different differences between sexes. Despite this, it is trivial to find extreme inequalities in the workplace that can't be explained at all by biology. You despise "artificial equality", but this is artificial inequality. It is deeply immoral to not care about this. It is totally reasonable to be opposed to diversity quotas and affirmative action and such as a solution, although there are good arguments in favor, but it is not reasonable to say "let's never even ask questions about it so we won't have to think about it". In this particular case, we find that men and women perform differently on a mental task, but there's no obvious reason to expect a difference. If we never asked the question, women would be underrepresented in jobs that require this task, and would disproportionately fail at equally applied tests. This is unfair, especially if the inequality is caused by differences in their upbringing. The solution is not to hire women despite their worse performance, but to apply training to correct the inequality, and then continue to hire the best. Again, if we never asked the question, we would perpetually have an inequitable and inefficient system, even if all employers treated candidates exactly equally. In the longer term, the goal should be to figure out the root cause of this inequality and fix it, so we don't need to do this extra training.

fromthesky 9y ago
> I assume you know that there are no biological differences between races that are significant in the workplace, and nearly zero significant different differences between sexes. Unless your workplace is, say, the National Basketball Association.
- burkaman 9y ago
  Yes, that's why I said nearly zero.
  - fromthesky 9y ago
    "Nearly zero" doesn't have any well-defined meaning. Either there are legitimate, non-subjective differences in job performance, or there aren't. What's your take on the NBA - do we need diversity quotas to insure a proper gender and ethnic balance? How about professional chess?
    - sctb 9y ago
      This is not what a thoughtful discussion looks like, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
badrabbit 9y ago
You're asking the very same questions that troubled me. If people belonging to a certain group are not doing well,why do you take a group based approach instead of asking why individual applicants and employees are not doing well? I get why you are trying to find cause to explain your correlation and I understand adjusting whatever barrier tests and controls there are that are found to be unfair or discriminatory. What I am saying is,adjust the tests for everyone,not for specific groups. At the end of the day,whether I get the job or school acceptance or get rejected,I want my test to be the same as everyone else. Jim crow era voting tax is a good example,the test was unfair and discriminatory in nature so they got rid of the test(tax). Imagine if instead they made it so that black people were exempt but everyone else had to pay the tax. That is what I am against. An unfair test should be removed because it is unfair. It should not be augmented so that the intended victims of the unfair test are exempt from the test or get special considerations. If a job requirement test can unfairly be abused to discriminate against a candidate,then get rid of the requirement. Good example - "Must be an excellent oral and written communicator" - this is too vague and too subjective. How about laying out the specific communication requirements of the task and testing all candidates based on their use of slang words,verbage,vocabullary,etc.. ?
- burkaman 9y ago
  I take a group based approach because there are too many examples of group-based discrimination and unfair treatment to count. I think history shows that group-based solutions are much more widely effective than individual approaches. Your voting tax example is perfect: poll taxes were applied to everyone equally, so why do you think they were unfair? Everyone, white or black, had to pay the same tax. What's the problem? What do you mean by "unfair and discriminatory in nature"? There are 26 female CEOs of S&P 500 companies. http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500 http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500 I see four possibilities. One, biological differences: Women are somehow innately less capable of leading a business. This is obviously wrong. Two, random chance: Men and women are equally qualified and face no unequal obstacles, but 95% of CEOs just happen to be men at the moment. This is obviously wrong. Three, unfair hiring practices: Men and women are equally qualified and face no unequal obstacles, but essentially every large company has an unfair CEO hiring process that usually selects men. This is possible, but it seems unlikely to explain the whole gap. There would be a competitive advantage to hiring good female CEOs that were unfairly screened out by your competitors. Four, societal inequality: Men and women are not equally qualified because they face unequal obstacles in the workplace and in life, and an unbiased hiring committee will find that almost all qualified candidates are men. If this is true, what do we do? It doesn't make any sense to ask companies to hire less qualified women; that's bad for everyone, and doesn't address the underlying issues at all. This can't be solved at the hiring stage, because the real problem is with the pool of candidates. Instead, we need to address why there are so few women in leadership positions, why they tend to leave the workforce earlier. We need to look at history, and acknowledge that since the best qualification for a CEO job is already being a CEO, there's a kind of bootstrapping issue that's difficult to solve. If we just look at individual CEO candidates, we won't even really there's a problem to be solved. We'll just look at good candidates with former C-level experience and probably end up picking a man.

fromthesky 9y ago

> I assume you know that there are no biological differences between races that are significant in the workplace, and nearly zero significant different differences between sexes. Unless your workplace is, say, the National Basketball Association.

burkaman 9y ago
Yes, that's why I said nearly zero.
- fromthesky 9y ago
  "Nearly zero" doesn't have any well-defined meaning. Either there are legitimate, non-subjective differences in job performance, or there aren't. What's your take on the NBA - do we need diversity quotas to insure a proper gender and ethnic balance? How about professional chess?
  - sctb 9y ago
    This is not what a thoughtful discussion looks like, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

badrabbit 9y ago

You're asking the very same questions that troubled me. If people belonging to a certain group are not doing well,why do you take a group based approach instead of asking why individual applicants and employees are not doing well? I get why you are trying to find cause to explain your correlation and I understand adjusting whatever barrier tests and controls there are that are found to be unfair or discriminatory. What I am saying is,adjust the tests for everyone,not for specific groups. At the end of the day,whether I get the job or school acceptance or get rejected,I want my test to be the same as everyone else. Jim crow era voting tax is a good example,the test was unfair and discriminatory in nature so they got rid of the test(tax). Imagine if instead they made it so that black people were exempt but everyone else had to pay the tax. That is what I am against. An unfair test should be removed because it is unfair. It should not be augmented so that the intended victims of the unfair test are exempt from the test or get special considerations. If a job requirement test can unfairly be abused to discriminate against a candidate,then get rid of the requirement. Good example - "Must be an excellent oral and written communicator" - this is too vague and too subjective. How about laying out the specific communication requirements of the task and testing all candidates based on their use of slang words,verbage,vocabullary,etc.. ?

burkaman 9y ago
I take a group based approach because there are too many examples of group-based discrimination and unfair treatment to count. I think history shows that group-based solutions are much more widely effective than individual approaches. Your voting tax example is perfect: poll taxes were applied to everyone equally, so why do you think they were unfair? Everyone, white or black, had to pay the same tax. What's the problem? What do you mean by "unfair and discriminatory in nature"? There are 26 female CEOs of S&P 500 companies. http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500 http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-sp-500 I see four possibilities. One, biological differences: Women are somehow innately less capable of leading a business. This is obviously wrong. Two, random chance: Men and women are equally qualified and face no unequal obstacles, but 95% of CEOs just happen to be men at the moment. This is obviously wrong. Three, unfair hiring practices: Men and women are equally qualified and face no unequal obstacles, but essentially every large company has an unfair CEO hiring process that usually selects men. This is possible, but it seems unlikely to explain the whole gap. There would be a competitive advantage to hiring good female CEOs that were unfairly screened out by your competitors. Four, societal inequality: Men and women are not equally qualified because they face unequal obstacles in the workplace and in life, and an unbiased hiring committee will find that almost all qualified candidates are men. If this is true, what do we do? It doesn't make any sense to ask companies to hire less qualified women; that's bad for everyone, and doesn't address the underlying issues at all. This can't be solved at the hiring stage, because the real problem is with the pool of candidates. Instead, we need to address why there are so few women in leadership positions, why they tend to leave the workforce earlier. We need to look at history, and acknowledge that since the best qualification for a CEO job is already being a CEO, there's a kind of bootstrapping issue that's difficult to solve. If we just look at individual CEO candidates, we won't even really there's a problem to be solved. We'll just look at good candidates with former C-level experience and probably end up picking a man.