5 ms·

Why affirmative action? Because if one person takes everything from another person, is it fair to say "you know, that was bad, and it shouldn't have happened,

Why affirmative action? Because if one person takes everything from another person, is it fair to say "you know, that was bad, and it shouldn't have happened, but since that's in the past we should just make sure that we treat both of them the same now"? (I will also note that all the work I see being done to end 'regular' discrimination, a.k.a get to the state where we do see people as individuals and don't act based on racial biases, is being done by the left. The arguments that affirmative action is a bad distraction from our current utopian racial blindness that we should 'continue' are based on a baffling disregard for all the evidence for the current existence of racism).

OCASM 9y ago
A person is not the same as a group. You want some individuals punished for what other people did. There's no justice there.
asabjorn 9y ago
Don't you think its a bit odd to try to compensate for implicit bias with explicit bias? To me it seems unlikely that bigotry, sexism and racism will be fixed by more of the same.
- joshuamorton 9y ago
  Not particularly. We do it all the time when the free market misses some context. I see no major difference between a carbon tax and an affirmative action policy. In both cases, the naively optimal action misses some important context, so the system is then tweaked to modify the outcome to take the external factors into account. Do you have any alternative that isn't isomorphic to affirmative action?
  - asabjorn 9y ago
    > Do you have any alternative that isn't isomorphic to affirmative action? Possible alternative: We need to embrace that all decisions we make are emotional, even the rational ones [1], and create a process that facilitates the desired change. I believe this can be done by hiring competent minorities into teams [2], where although they are a minority in general they will not be on their team. These teams should not only be that minority as you in a truly inclusive system can't define people by a trait. Since its a minority you probably have to do some extra legway in facilitating matching these teams well to problems the the team members find interesting and that there are growth opportunities. However, that is an ongoing conversation you should be having at any rate. By these teams being competent they will through normal work-conversations and collaborations open minds on how successful people look like. Very suddenly it will be clear that both nerdy and pretty girls as well as anyone in between can code well, and that people that talk and walk in ways that make you uncomfortable might actually be competent and give you a unique perspective if you truly include them in your conversation. Yes, it is not flashy and won't make great campaign posters. However, it empowers individuals while helping those individuals deal with being a minority without it being a zero sum game. And then we can watch history unfold, like how asians went from being railroad grunt work to model immigrants. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst-ebook/dp/B01IAUGC5S https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst-eboo... [2] suggested action by feminists and researchers like Francis Frei, although I am not sure they support this full proposal
    - joshuamorton 9y ago
      So, as an alternative to affirmative action, your proposing we create teams that are essentially ghettos for minorities, and suggesting that this will improve their respect amongst their peers?
      - asabjorn 9y ago
        Read my comment again; in no way this is a ghetto for minorities as the teams are not entirely comprised of minorities and this team structure is supported by research that shows that it feels socially isolating to be the sole representative of your minority in your daily life. Maybe even a majority is not a minority on the team. To be honest this kind of comment that makes any alternative proposal into a cartoon while attacking points clearly not made is whats wrong with american discourse. I think we can do better.
        joshuamorton 9y ago
        But I'm not making it into a cartoon. You're suggestion is to take minorities and segregate them into specific majority-minority teams. Here's a definition of "ghetto" from a Google search: > put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated area or group That is absolutely what your proposal entails. Consider the outcomes of this proposal: > I'm sorry, we don't have any $minority teams working on $area_of_expertise right now, so I don't see a good fit for you. Note that now your minority group is explicitly a marker of what you can or cannot work on. Whether or not you intended it, your proposal creates a racially defined hierarchy, much in the same way that we already have stereotypes about "women work in frontend/ui roles", you'll only support those stereotypes and make them systematically ingrained. Further, without minority advocates and voices at the level of people picking the "minority" teams, minorities will be less likely to access those projects that are considered more interesting/challenging/prestigious. And note that the more reasonable "make all teams minority majority" is not possible unless your population is also minority majority, and even then its artificial and perhaps too strict. Please don't object to my calling a spade a spade. I've provided a reason that your suggestion is flawed, and instead of defending it on its merits, you've objected to my word choice.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    The better alternative would be to improve the situation where the original injustice occurs, not sometime later in the pipeline. E.g. affirmative action in university admissions assumes that members of traditionally underprivileged groups did not have the opportunity to display their full potential and will have higher peak performance than their current scores suggest. While this is true on average and affirmative action is the best you can do if you are limited to influencing this single funnel in the pipeline, it also ends up unfairly benefiting privileged members within unprivileged groups. If more wide-reaching changes are possible, e.g. ensuring that everyone has the same chance to actually learn something in school, affirmative action would soon become redundant, since the difference it aims to correct would not exist any more.
    - joshuamorton 9y ago
      >The better alternative would be to improve the situation where the original injustice occurs, not sometime later in the pipeline. Well...yes. No where did I say that affirmative action policies are the only or a permanent solution, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who did. But they are an immediate bandaid that at least in theory stops the feedback loop. In other words, I agree, but I'm asking in the context of "is there anything that can be done in that funnel that is superior to affirmative action", and it appears that you also agree that the answer is no. In which case, it comes down to whether or not the outsized[1] benefit to privileged minorities is worth it. [1]: And depending on your opinions of privilege, there's compelling arguments to be made that the benefit to otherwise privileged minorities isn't outsized, they'd just be even more successful. Also that often you don't care about the most privileged since they'd all "pass" anyway, but the marginal group. But that's a bigger discussion.
    - noobermin 9y ago
      It would be a better alternative, but we can't go back in time and stop the Dred-Scott v. Stanford or just generally stop the enslavement of Africans in America. Also, things like universal free college, more funding of public schools, end to segregation would do a lot to "fix things," and that's why I fight for such things. Affirmative action is one of the weakest things we can do, but it's what we have now and I support doing what you can. Btw, your point about AA helping privileged members in unprivileged groups rings true, which is part of why I think it's the weakest thing we could do.
  - dcow 9y ago
    There is also general disagreement whether we build a system that dishes out equal opportunity regardless of outcome or wether we tweak inputs (opportunity) to achieve equal outcome. Relating AA to carbon tax misses some nuance. Namely, we agree discrimination against fossil fuel is okay because burning too much of it is bad for everyone. Presumably you'd be okay (logically) taxing schools and businesses that have too many whites. But the message is very different. You have to show too many whites is bad for everyone and not simply a product of a more successful culture (for example).
    - joshuamorton 9y ago
      >Presumably you'd be okay (logically) taxing schools and businesses that have too many whites. No, I think this is a slight misinterpretation. I personally don't support quotas. On the other hand, I might be in favor of a credit to schools that give a bonus to minority students who apply, but I think that that's a more palatable result in general. Note that under that equation, you're no longer enforcing equality of outcome, but instead controlling for unequal opportunity.
- pjc50 9y ago
  If you have a car that pulls to the right, you can compensate for this by steering to the left. If the car is in fact travelling straight down the road while you're doing this, and a backseat driver says "you're pulling to the left, that's not a safe way to drive", are they correct?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dcow 9y ago
    Cars pull to the right by design, but assuming they didn't, shouldn't you get the tracking adjusted?
  - imtringued 9y ago
    Yes, that is not a very safe way to drive.
  - pathseeker 9y ago
    If you have a car that pulls to the right, do you keep chopping parts off of the right side to make up for it?
Veelox 9y ago
>I will also note that all the work I see being done to end 'regular' discrimination ... is being done by the left. Disclaimer: I am a random person on the internet so have as much faith in my anecdotal evidence as you have in humanity. I think the issue with what you are seeing is confirmation bias. Because the left and right have different views on what causes the disparity between whites and blacks they go about trying to fix it different ways. Those on the left see it as a systematic issue and want a systematic fix. There is implict bias in the system against blacks so if we add explicit bias for blacks it will come out about equal. Add the bias for long enough the system will correct for past injustice and everything will be fine. This contrasts strongly with the view I was raised with, that the difference between whites and blacks is because of different cultures that place value on different outcomes or fail to instill positive traits into members of the culture. Some of the big ideas that are not valued is hard work, respecting property, valuing education, disdaining violence and avoiding having children until you can afford to support them. The fix for this is to teach these values to those that do not have them. I grew up in a small very white community. Yet, when a black student at my highschool aged out of foster care. My family took him in for the rest of the school year. This let him get his diploma. While he understood most of these values, my father worked with him to control his temper. Another example is a camp in rural Midwest that is for kids of prisoners even though it is close to a mostly white town the drive black children in from the major city because they want to help them and give them hope. I guess all of this is to make the point that just because some opposes affirmative action does not mean they hate PoC. I won't denie some people are like that. But I think the majority of those against AA see it as fighting fire with fire and don't expect good to come from it.
- noobermin 9y ago
  The problem with your perspective is it's wrong. I don't mean to be mean to you, but it just isn't correct. The difference isn't culture, it's simply access to capital. Here's an enlightening video[0], a 12-minute video about the representation of black families in media. It touches on the myth of black fathers not being involved with their kids, which is a good example of false attitudes that lead people to blame "culture" rather than systemic inequalities. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q21XGV2z7hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q21XGV2z7hw
dcow 9y ago
Your worldview is pretty narrow, then. What you see as lack of desire for enacting social policy aimed at "fixing" implicit biases we see as acknowledging that in a truely diverse society we must tolerate and and navigate the inevitable biases at an individual human level and each one in a uniquely intimate way. In other words, in the US at least, you can't solve higher order human problems with government policy. You can't do it because the government is not what tells you to be nice to your neighbor or to treat Suzy the same as Jimmy, or not to make fun of La-a's name. It explicitly does not dictate one religious/moral paradigm over another. I feel like I'm not being very clear. Here's the reality: the world isn't fair. Let that sink in for a little bit because it's pretty sobering. The world is not fair. This is the resting state of the world. Why though? Why is the world not fair? That's a pretty dumb thing to say when our constitution demands all humans are created equal. We are /created/ equal. We do not die equal. Not in the sense of how we lived our lives. To die equal means we all lead pretty boring lives. We all got good institutually respected jobs. We all suffered the same and we all experienced the same joys in exactly the same amounts and in exactly the same ways. We all liked the same things and given the same set of opportunities made the same choices. It is not human. It is machine. "Welcome to the jungle. We've got fun and games." Snap back to reality—what is institutional racism? Well it's defined as a discrepancy between desired and empirical outcomes, but only if that discrepancy negatively impacts a minority group. How can we possibly control for a perfect society when we can't even formulate a consistent definition of the issue let alone agree on a desired outcome? We have literally defined our society as racist and so as long we have diversity and inequality, racist we will be: oh there goes gravity. On the right we are more optimistic. We believe in giving everyone a fair foundation. We want the rules applied equally to all. We care less what crazy interesting, happy, sad, angry stories get told along the way so long as they are told bay all. And that is life. To answer your question: yes. Treat both the same. I very strongly disagree with punishing future generations for the transgressions of their ancestors. The correct response is to punish the people who acted intolerably and reset the playing field. It's fruitless and silly to pick and choose who does and does not deserve empathy. And it just makes people angry when they don't get their perceived share. Empathy is a framework for understanding the paths others have taken, understanding their plight. It's not a finite resource we must regulate and dish out with politics. This essay is a plea for people to stop treating an industry like it's their social battleground demanding universal empirical equality in a way that destroys its ability to be logical, meritocratic, and empathetic towards people on the spectrum. Unfortunately, that is the consequence of affirmative action. And even though I suspect you will continue to advocate for it, at least take this opportunity to try and have a little empathy yourself. People who disagree with affirmative action don't do so because they lack empathy. They do so because they do not wish to ration empathy and they feel the lick of discrimination such a mindset breeds.
belorn 9y ago
Eye for an eye punishment is not very left-wing. If one person takes everything from another person by killing them, is it left politics to do collective punishment based on class, race or gender? No. We punish the guilty as humanely as possible and accept that there will always be some number of bad actors and those individuals should be addressed. Utopian racial blindness is good when dealing with crime. We don't want police to look at race and do affirmative action. We don't want insurance or bankers looking at race or gender and do affirmative actions. We even have explicit laws forbidding judges to look at race when determining recurrence risks (through what they use now has some major flaws that acts as proxy for race). Discrimination is wrong. Like theft and murder it need to be stopped and have the guilty charged and judged. Discrimination is a crime. We would be abhorred if affirmative action was openly (officially) used to address any other crime, so why should discrimination be any different?

OCASM 9y ago

A person is not the same as a group. You want some individuals punished for what other people did. There's no justice there.

asabjorn 9y ago

Don't you think its a bit odd to try to compensate for implicit bias with explicit bias? To me it seems unlikely that bigotry, sexism and racism will be fixed by more of the same.

joshuamorton 9y ago
Not particularly. We do it all the time when the free market misses some context. I see no major difference between a carbon tax and an affirmative action policy. In both cases, the naively optimal action misses some important context, so the system is then tweaked to modify the outcome to take the external factors into account. Do you have any alternative that isn't isomorphic to affirmative action?
- asabjorn 9y ago
  > Do you have any alternative that isn't isomorphic to affirmative action? Possible alternative: We need to embrace that all decisions we make are emotional, even the rational ones [1], and create a process that facilitates the desired change. I believe this can be done by hiring competent minorities into teams [2], where although they are a minority in general they will not be on their team. These teams should not only be that minority as you in a truly inclusive system can't define people by a trait. Since its a minority you probably have to do some extra legway in facilitating matching these teams well to problems the the team members find interesting and that there are growth opportunities. However, that is an ongoing conversation you should be having at any rate. By these teams being competent they will through normal work-conversations and collaborations open minds on how successful people look like. Very suddenly it will be clear that both nerdy and pretty girls as well as anyone in between can code well, and that people that talk and walk in ways that make you uncomfortable might actually be competent and give you a unique perspective if you truly include them in your conversation. Yes, it is not flashy and won't make great campaign posters. However, it empowers individuals while helping those individuals deal with being a minority without it being a zero sum game. And then we can watch history unfold, like how asians went from being railroad grunt work to model immigrants. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst-ebook/dp/B01IAUGC5S https://www.amazon.com/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst-eboo... [2] suggested action by feminists and researchers like Francis Frei, although I am not sure they support this full proposal
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    So, as an alternative to affirmative action, your proposing we create teams that are essentially ghettos for minorities, and suggesting that this will improve their respect amongst their peers?
    - asabjorn 9y ago
      Read my comment again; in no way this is a ghetto for minorities as the teams are not entirely comprised of minorities and this team structure is supported by research that shows that it feels socially isolating to be the sole representative of your minority in your daily life. Maybe even a majority is not a minority on the team. To be honest this kind of comment that makes any alternative proposal into a cartoon while attacking points clearly not made is whats wrong with american discourse. I think we can do better.
      - joshuamorton 9y ago
        But I'm not making it into a cartoon. You're suggestion is to take minorities and segregate them into specific majority-minority teams. Here's a definition of "ghetto" from a Google search: > put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated area or group That is absolutely what your proposal entails. Consider the outcomes of this proposal: > I'm sorry, we don't have any $minority teams working on $area_of_expertise right now, so I don't see a good fit for you. Note that now your minority group is explicitly a marker of what you can or cannot work on. Whether or not you intended it, your proposal creates a racially defined hierarchy, much in the same way that we already have stereotypes about "women work in frontend/ui roles", you'll only support those stereotypes and make them systematically ingrained. Further, without minority advocates and voices at the level of people picking the "minority" teams, minorities will be less likely to access those projects that are considered more interesting/challenging/prestigious. And note that the more reasonable "make all teams minority majority" is not possible unless your population is also minority majority, and even then its artificial and perhaps too strict. Please don't object to my calling a spade a spade. I've provided a reason that your suggestion is flawed, and instead of defending it on its merits, you've objected to my word choice.
- yorwba 9y ago
  The better alternative would be to improve the situation where the original injustice occurs, not sometime later in the pipeline. E.g. affirmative action in university admissions assumes that members of traditionally underprivileged groups did not have the opportunity to display their full potential and will have higher peak performance than their current scores suggest. While this is true on average and affirmative action is the best you can do if you are limited to influencing this single funnel in the pipeline, it also ends up unfairly benefiting privileged members within unprivileged groups. If more wide-reaching changes are possible, e.g. ensuring that everyone has the same chance to actually learn something in school, affirmative action would soon become redundant, since the difference it aims to correct would not exist any more.
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    >The better alternative would be to improve the situation where the original injustice occurs, not sometime later in the pipeline. Well...yes. No where did I say that affirmative action policies are the only or a permanent solution, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who did. But they are an immediate bandaid that at least in theory stops the feedback loop. In other words, I agree, but I'm asking in the context of "is there anything that can be done in that funnel that is superior to affirmative action", and it appears that you also agree that the answer is no. In which case, it comes down to whether or not the outsized[1] benefit to privileged minorities is worth it. [1]: And depending on your opinions of privilege, there's compelling arguments to be made that the benefit to otherwise privileged minorities isn't outsized, they'd just be even more successful. Also that often you don't care about the most privileged since they'd all "pass" anyway, but the marginal group. But that's a bigger discussion.
  - noobermin 9y ago
    It would be a better alternative, but we can't go back in time and stop the Dred-Scott v. Stanford or just generally stop the enslavement of Africans in America. Also, things like universal free college, more funding of public schools, end to segregation would do a lot to "fix things," and that's why I fight for such things. Affirmative action is one of the weakest things we can do, but it's what we have now and I support doing what you can. Btw, your point about AA helping privileged members in unprivileged groups rings true, which is part of why I think it's the weakest thing we could do.
- dcow 9y ago
  There is also general disagreement whether we build a system that dishes out equal opportunity regardless of outcome or wether we tweak inputs (opportunity) to achieve equal outcome. Relating AA to carbon tax misses some nuance. Namely, we agree discrimination against fossil fuel is okay because burning too much of it is bad for everyone. Presumably you'd be okay (logically) taxing schools and businesses that have too many whites. But the message is very different. You have to show too many whites is bad for everyone and not simply a product of a more successful culture (for example).
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    >Presumably you'd be okay (logically) taxing schools and businesses that have too many whites. No, I think this is a slight misinterpretation. I personally don't support quotas. On the other hand, I might be in favor of a credit to schools that give a bonus to minority students who apply, but I think that that's a more palatable result in general. Note that under that equation, you're no longer enforcing equality of outcome, but instead controlling for unequal opportunity.
pjc50 9y ago
If you have a car that pulls to the right, you can compensate for this by steering to the left. If the car is in fact travelling straight down the road while you're doing this, and a backseat driver says "you're pulling to the left, that's not a safe way to drive", are they correct?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dcow 9y ago
  Cars pull to the right by design, but assuming they didn't, shouldn't you get the tracking adjusted?
- imtringued 9y ago
  Yes, that is not a very safe way to drive.
- pathseeker 9y ago
  If you have a car that pulls to the right, do you keep chopping parts off of the right side to make up for it?

Veelox 9y ago

>I will also note that all the work I see being done to end 'regular' discrimination ... is being done by the left. Disclaimer: I am a random person on the internet so have as much faith in my anecdotal evidence as you have in humanity. I think the issue with what you are seeing is confirmation bias. Because the left and right have different views on what causes the disparity between whites and blacks they go about trying to fix it different ways. Those on the left see it as a systematic issue and want a systematic fix. There is implict bias in the system against blacks so if we add explicit bias for blacks it will come out about equal. Add the bias for long enough the system will correct for past injustice and everything will be fine. This contrasts strongly with the view I was raised with, that the difference between whites and blacks is because of different cultures that place value on different outcomes or fail to instill positive traits into members of the culture. Some of the big ideas that are not valued is hard work, respecting property, valuing education, disdaining violence and avoiding having children until you can afford to support them. The fix for this is to teach these values to those that do not have them. I grew up in a small very white community. Yet, when a black student at my highschool aged out of foster care. My family took him in for the rest of the school year. This let him get his diploma. While he understood most of these values, my father worked with him to control his temper. Another example is a camp in rural Midwest that is for kids of prisoners even though it is close to a mostly white town the drive black children in from the major city because they want to help them and give them hope. I guess all of this is to make the point that just because some opposes affirmative action does not mean they hate PoC. I won't denie some people are like that. But I think the majority of those against AA see it as fighting fire with fire and don't expect good to come from it.

noobermin 9y ago
The problem with your perspective is it's wrong. I don't mean to be mean to you, but it just isn't correct. The difference isn't culture, it's simply access to capital. Here's an enlightening video[0], a 12-minute video about the representation of black families in media. It touches on the myth of black fathers not being involved with their kids, which is a good example of false attitudes that lead people to blame "culture" rather than systemic inequalities. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q21XGV2z7hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q21XGV2z7hw

dcow 9y ago

Your worldview is pretty narrow, then. What you see as lack of desire for enacting social policy aimed at "fixing" implicit biases we see as acknowledging that in a truely diverse society we must tolerate and and navigate the inevitable biases at an individual human level and each one in a uniquely intimate way. In other words, in the US at least, you can't solve higher order human problems with government policy. You can't do it because the government is not what tells you to be nice to your neighbor or to treat Suzy the same as Jimmy, or not to make fun of La-a's name. It explicitly does not dictate one religious/moral paradigm over another. I feel like I'm not being very clear. Here's the reality: the world isn't fair. Let that sink in for a little bit because it's pretty sobering. The world is not fair. This is the resting state of the world. Why though? Why is the world not fair? That's a pretty dumb thing to say when our constitution demands all humans are created equal. We are /created/ equal. We do not die equal. Not in the sense of how we lived our lives. To die equal means we all lead pretty boring lives. We all got good institutually respected jobs. We all suffered the same and we all experienced the same joys in exactly the same amounts and in exactly the same ways. We all liked the same things and given the same set of opportunities made the same choices. It is not human. It is machine. "Welcome to the jungle. We've got fun and games." Snap back to reality—what is institutional racism? Well it's defined as a discrepancy between desired and empirical outcomes, but only if that discrepancy negatively impacts a minority group. How can we possibly control for a perfect society when we can't even formulate a consistent definition of the issue let alone agree on a desired outcome? We have literally defined our society as racist and so as long we have diversity and inequality, racist we will be: oh there goes gravity. On the right we are more optimistic. We believe in giving everyone a fair foundation. We want the rules applied equally to all. We care less what crazy interesting, happy, sad, angry stories get told along the way so long as they are told bay all. And that is life. To answer your question: yes. Treat both the same. I very strongly disagree with punishing future generations for the transgressions of their ancestors. The correct response is to punish the people who acted intolerably and reset the playing field. It's fruitless and silly to pick and choose who does and does not deserve empathy. And it just makes people angry when they don't get their perceived share. Empathy is a framework for understanding the paths others have taken, understanding their plight. It's not a finite resource we must regulate and dish out with politics. This essay is a plea for people to stop treating an industry like it's their social battleground demanding universal empirical equality in a way that destroys its ability to be logical, meritocratic, and empathetic towards people on the spectrum. Unfortunately, that is the consequence of affirmative action. And even though I suspect you will continue to advocate for it, at least take this opportunity to try and have a little empathy yourself. People who disagree with affirmative action don't do so because they lack empathy. They do so because they do not wish to ration empathy and they feel the lick of discrimination such a mindset breeds.

belorn 9y ago

Eye for an eye punishment is not very left-wing. If one person takes everything from another person by killing them, is it left politics to do collective punishment based on class, race or gender? No. We punish the guilty as humanely as possible and accept that there will always be some number of bad actors and those individuals should be addressed. Utopian racial blindness is good when dealing with crime. We don't want police to look at race and do affirmative action. We don't want insurance or bankers looking at race or gender and do affirmative actions. We even have explicit laws forbidding judges to look at race when determining recurrence risks (through what they use now has some major flaws that acts as proxy for race). Discrimination is wrong. Like theft and murder it need to be stopped and have the guilty charged and judged. Discrimination is a crime. We would be abhorred if affirmative action was openly (officially) used to address any other crime, so why should discrimination be any different?