3 ms·

Well, we certainly should concentrate on removing hurdles, of course. But patching problems is not necessarily a bad idea, especially from the point of view of

by edanm 9y ago

Well, we certainly should concentrate on removing hurdles, of course. But patching problems is not necessarily a bad idea, especially from the point of view of the employers themselves. Legality aside, there is a moral/practical argument for some discrimination based on "race" as a patch, which benefits the employer, so it's what we should expect employers to do. It's also something to keep in mind when thinking people are just hired to fill a "diversity quota checklist", which may or may not be true. For example, say I'm an employer that wants the best performing employees. I know that, for whatever societal/biological/whatever reasons, the black population in the US tends to have worse schooling (maybe the schools have less money, maybe the parents tend to be less wealthy, it doesn't really matter so long as I believe that the black population has some biases against them). I can deduce just from these biases that the black population will tend to have lower grades, just because of these biases. I may choose to "correct" this bias by preferring equivalent hires that are black, on the assumption that if they have equivalent grades, they had to work harder/be smarter to achieve them, because of the aforementioned biases. I do this entirely from a selfish perspective - I want the best, and if my beliefs about the world are right, this gets me the best! The same reasoning can theoretically be reversed for e.g. asian populations (maybe their schooling tends to be better, because e.g. wealthier or stricter parents causing more focus on school? Which would imply higher grades without necessarily translating into better workers). Note: This is a hypothetical case for why an employer might voluntarily and correctly choose to use some form of "affirmative action". It is not necessarily what I think is right or what I think is happening, and is based on a lot of possible assumptions which I have no idea if true. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there is a case, which doesn't rely on "social justice" or anything other than correct self-interest of the employer.

danieltillett 9y ago
This approach only works if someone higher up in the education food chain hasn’t already correct for any earlier poor schooling by using some form of “affirmative action” in grading. The best way of overcoming handicaps based on poor schooling or other social/environmental handicaps is to fix the schooling (hard and long term) or just use g. Of course if you use g you run straight into Spearman’s Hypothesis [0]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis
- edanm 9y ago
  Of course. My assumption can be stated as: the employer, for whatever reason, sees that empirically the correlation between e.g. GPA and work performance is different for different populations, and therefore corrects it. If the "correction" is done beforehand, then the employer won't see this phenomenon.
manigandham 9y ago
The only thing you can really measure is motivation, merit and output. How much "harder/smarter" someone worked to achieve something seems incredibly vague, and in your instance it seems like you're just guessing? How does this get you "the best" in any objective way?
- edanm 9y ago
  Well I'm talking totally theoretically, just to show that it's possible to discriminate in order to achieve a better end result for the business. But theoretically, if a large employer were to collect the statistics to calculate the correlation between GPA and job performance, and then were to discover that an equivalent GPA between, say, men and women lead to higher job performance in women, then faced with two candidates with the same GPA, you'd prefer the woman. This is not vague and has nothing to do with the underlying mechanics - you as the employer theoretically don't care, all you care is that same GPA woman leads to a better job performance as same GPA man. An employer like Google could discover things like this, if they exist, and might want to, for purely business reasons, do this. (No idea on the legality of any of this, seems to me like it's illegal but I have no idea).
  - manigandham 9y ago
    That doesn't make sense. Reviewing by motivation + results already delivers you the best people, which is the best for the business. Why use some random group dimension? It is absolutely vague because that is only relevant when talking about averages of the whole group, but the point of fairness and equal opportunity is to treat people like individuals and judge them accordingly. Instead of using some strange GPA proxy for job performance across a giant group, just use the actual job performance (history) of the individual and see if they're good for your business. You cannot use generic group attributes to judge a single person. It sounds "good" but never works out and is the cause of the most of the mess in the first place.
    - edanm 9y ago
      Look, I don't think we really disagree on anything fundamental here. Of course you should judge people as individuals. Of course looking at past performance is probably better, and fairer, than anything else. I'm completely with you on that. The only thing I'm saying is, there are logically plausible situations, in which you might want to use generic group attributes. Especially in cases where you have no prior knowledge - e.g. everything you say is great, but how do I look at past history when judging college grads with no work experience? I mean, let's take an extreme case and see if we can at least agree on that. One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity, since if for example everyone is refusing to hire black people because of racial discrimination (think 1930s), then an employer will come along and offer to hire black people for cheaper, and will therefore outcompete other companies, who will have to also hire black people at slightly higher wages, etc. If we were in such a (1930s-like) world where every employer refuses to hire black people, and we were deciding who to hire, and our normal practice would be only to hire people with 2 years' worth of job experience. We would never hire a black person, because none of them would fit our requirements. In such a world, wouldn't it make sense, from a purely self-interested economic perspective, to change the requirements for black people to compensate for the screwed-up biased world we find ourselves in? If not, then is the classic economic argument wrong?

by edanm 9y ago

danieltillett 9y ago

This approach only works if someone higher up in the education food chain hasn’t already correct for any earlier poor schooling by using some form of “affirmative action” in grading. The best way of overcoming handicaps based on poor schooling or other social/environmental handicaps is to fix the schooling (hard and long term) or just use g. Of course if you use g you run straight into Spearman’s Hypothesis [0]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis

edanm 9y ago
Of course. My assumption can be stated as: the employer, for whatever reason, sees that empirically the correlation between e.g. GPA and work performance is different for different populations, and therefore corrects it. If the "correction" is done beforehand, then the employer won't see this phenomenon.

manigandham 9y ago

The only thing you can really measure is motivation, merit and output. How much "harder/smarter" someone worked to achieve something seems incredibly vague, and in your instance it seems like you're just guessing? How does this get you "the best" in any objective way?

edanm 9y ago
Well I'm talking totally theoretically, just to show that it's possible to discriminate in order to achieve a better end result for the business. But theoretically, if a large employer were to collect the statistics to calculate the correlation between GPA and job performance, and then were to discover that an equivalent GPA between, say, men and women lead to higher job performance in women, then faced with two candidates with the same GPA, you'd prefer the woman. This is not vague and has nothing to do with the underlying mechanics - you as the employer theoretically don't care, all you care is that same GPA woman leads to a better job performance as same GPA man. An employer like Google could discover things like this, if they exist, and might want to, for purely business reasons, do this. (No idea on the legality of any of this, seems to me like it's illegal but I have no idea).
- manigandham 9y ago
  That doesn't make sense. Reviewing by motivation + results already delivers you the best people, which is the best for the business. Why use some random group dimension? It is absolutely vague because that is only relevant when talking about averages of the whole group, but the point of fairness and equal opportunity is to treat people like individuals and judge them accordingly. Instead of using some strange GPA proxy for job performance across a giant group, just use the actual job performance (history) of the individual and see if they're good for your business. You cannot use generic group attributes to judge a single person. It sounds "good" but never works out and is the cause of the most of the mess in the first place.
  - edanm 9y ago
    Look, I don't think we really disagree on anything fundamental here. Of course you should judge people as individuals. Of course looking at past performance is probably better, and fairer, than anything else. I'm completely with you on that. The only thing I'm saying is, there are logically plausible situations, in which you might want to use generic group attributes. Especially in cases where you have no prior knowledge - e.g. everything you say is great, but how do I look at past history when judging college grads with no work experience? I mean, let's take an extreme case and see if we can at least agree on that. One of the things that some economists often claim about capitalism is that it helps with diversity, since if for example everyone is refusing to hire black people because of racial discrimination (think 1930s), then an employer will come along and offer to hire black people for cheaper, and will therefore outcompete other companies, who will have to also hire black people at slightly higher wages, etc. If we were in such a (1930s-like) world where every employer refuses to hire black people, and we were deciding who to hire, and our normal practice would be only to hire people with 2 years' worth of job experience. We would never hire a black person, because none of them would fit our requirements. In such a world, wouldn't it make sense, from a purely self-interested economic perspective, to change the requirements for black people to compensate for the screwed-up biased world we find ourselves in? If not, then is the classic economic argument wrong?