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I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As is t

I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As is the idea that we need to measure diversity on more than one axis. (My wife is not Caucasian but she looks Caucasian... The cultural and ethnic diversity she brings to her team is invisible to most people.) What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "diversity quotas" while, of course, imperfect and clumsy, reflect an effort to counterbalance institutional discrimination and measure our success. Of course arbitrary targets sometimes lead to suboptimal outcomes in specific cases. But, in aggregate, they are better than no measurement at all and I believe they do improve things. There are many forms of institutional discrimination that alter the candidate pool before people even apply. Your blind process can be perfect but that's the last link in the chain. Quotas are a blunt tool to force us to compensate for unfairness that occurred before our process for which we are not responsible in order to build stronger teams. As such I believe quotas are a good thing, because institutional bias and discrimination are bullshit and need to be eradicated. When they are, we can drop the quotas. If we come up with anything better than quotas, we can drop the quotas.

manigandham 8y ago
All that is covered under "make the process fair", but enforcing quotas based on random unchangeable physical characteristic is the opposite of fair.
- conception 8y ago
  I think what they were trying to also say is "make the process fair" isn't as simple as 4 words. It's a struggle for even the most ardent of believers in giving everyone a fair shot. The problem is defining what is fair.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Of course it's not simple or easy. It's not completely possible either, as life itself isn't fair. That's just the reality we live in. But that's why we should do the best we can, to make it as fair as possible, and while there is much progress to be made around the world, there are also some clearly wrong ways to go about it and diversity quotas are about as worse as it gets.
    - themarkn 8y ago
      I guess quotas is such a vague term maybe it’s pointless to argue this. There can me more or less effective/fair implementations of a quota system. I’m not sure what better ideas are out there that don’t involve measuring the result in terms of diversity in a certain field, and optimizing to increase that result... which is in effect a quota.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        But that's the issue, nothing should be done for a certain result because that's assuming there is some omniscient knowledge of what is the "right" outcome. That just doesn't exist so attempting it will always lead to chaos. Give people freedom and the opportunity to do what they want, and then the result will naturally be the fairest possible.
        themarkn 8y ago
        > Give people freedom and the opportunity to do what they want, and then the result will naturally be the fairest possible. If we all started with the same options, this would be true. Our limits would only be reflections of our preferences and natural abilities. Like in an RPG where we pick wether to be a warrior or mage or whatever - you go down a skills path by choice based on what you want to achieve and what resources (xp etc) you have. Unfortunately people are born into an active system wherein millions of events from before they were born are exerting pressures on their lives, pressures that we are mostly unaware of until it’s too late. There’s no neutral “fair” option. This sucks. It’s bad. It’s stupid. People’s location or race or sex at birth should not bless them or condemn them. It should just be an interesting detail. But those things have real effects. Ignoring this means accepting the current biases as somehow natural, and continues rewarding those already born with advantages. Fighting it means adding NEW biases, and reducing the advantages inherited by people with privilege. Which naturally seems unreasonable if you currently enjoy the benefits of those advantages. Solutions like yours, which require no work be done to change things by the privileged, and ask the less privileged to reinterpret the status quo so that they realize things are fine as they are, should be suspect. They are not all definitely wrong, but they are especially attractive because of their convenience. And that pretty exterior can mask their lack of actual substance.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
AmericanChopper 8y ago
>What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "diversity quotas" while, of course, imperfect and clumsy, reflect an effort to counterbalance institutional discrimination Diversity quotas are by their very nature institutional discrimination. You can’t jusify it by saying the people they discriminate against deserve it.
- gattilorenz 8y ago
  > Diversity quotas are by their very nature institutional discrimination. Sure, they are institutional discrimination in the sense that institutions recognize the differences between gender/races and the differences in the treatment they receive, which is often based on negative prejudice (the other meaning of "discrimination" [1]). Discrimination is not negative per se, as long as it's the "neutral" meaning of the word (e.g., having different toilets is also discrimination). [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/discrimination https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/discrimination
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    Picking candidates of your preferred gender/ethnicity over candidates of your non-preferred gender/ethnicity is the canonical definition of institutional discrimination. It takes a huge amount of double-think to arrive at the conclusion that this is the same as having gendered bathrooms. Any institution that prefers candidates of a particular gender/ethnicity is prejudicially discriminating against all other candidates on the basis of gender/ethnicity.
    - collyw 8y ago
      Sad to see this comment down voted.
    - gattilorenz 8y ago
      Well, my point was exactly that discriminating is fine, if it means recognizing differences and providing equal opportunities (sure, that's not exactly what quotas do all the times, but it's what they are trying to do). You don't have to agree, of course. I wonder if you think that there is prejudice/discrimination that quotas are trying to fix (in a deeply flawed way, according to your view; in an imperfect but still better-than-nothing way according to mine), or if the whole starting point is wrong.
foobarbazbat 8y ago
The problem is that institutional bias and discrimination are unmeasurable. So dropping the quotas never seems like a reality. Quotas are inherently unfair and take opportunity away from others. Isn't it better to treat people as individuals?
- collyw 8y ago
  > Isn't it better to treat people as individuals? James Damore suggested something like that, it didn't go down well. (Though I completely agree).
- themarkn 8y ago
  We are very far away from the inherent limitations of measurement in this case though. Eventually we will hit those limits and have to throw up our hands and say “we’ve done our best”, but there are lots of big, well-documented effects of individual biases, which end up aggregated into systems and institutions in various ways, the effects of which are readily measurable. > Isn't it better to treat people as individuals? This is an equally impossible goal. The system is already unfair. You want to preserve the current unfairness. I think we should instead calibrate the unfairness to optimize for undoing the weirdness caused by humanity’s awful history of subjugating, robbing, and denying the rights of various kinds of people over many centuries. People born today experience various benefits and drawbacks related to conditions completely beyond their control. If we have privilege this is the god damn least we can do.
  - belorn 8y ago
    >> Isn't it better to treat people as individuals? > This is an equally impossible goal. For being such impossible goal it seem strange then that 21th century society is basically built around that exact concept. Banks lend out money based on it. Courts make judgement based on it. Government gives out social support based on it. Insurance rates and medical care is all about individual assessment. Even education here in Sweden is by law now individualized and each teacher must teach to the ability of each individual student (a new law since a decade ago). A few hundred years ago that was not the case. If a person were of the lower class then they were treated as such. Government was not expected to operate on anything except category of people, and the idea of treat people as individuals was seen as indeed impossible. Education in particular was extremely bound by this idea, and a person worth was categorized and put in predefined box from a very young age. However impossible it is to treat people as individuals, it is better to do so and fail rather then to return to the old ways. If you get a wave of low economic immigrants should we throw up our hands and say “we’ve done our best” with individual assessment in the legal system and just prosecute based on class, or should we double up on it and try to do better? The political winds here is swinging, and I honestly hope that treating people as individuals wins over any attempt of short-term gain from treating people based on class. A person born under low economic class should not have their life hindered because others before them of same low economical class had a higher rate of crime that higher economical classes. That would be a failure of society to treat people as individuals. History does not dictate the future and it doesn't create any benefits and drawbacks unless we treat people based on category and class rather then individuals.
dnautics 8y ago
I was going to write this as a throwaway but you know f it. I stand by my stories. > As such I believe quotas are a good thing You don't address the article's claim that quotas make stereotype threat worse. This is a real, lived experience. In high school, I (an overrepresented minority) failed to get in to MIT, and my best friend (an underrepresented minority) got in, despite me looking better 'on paper'[0]. He chose not to go even though I pled with him that it would be a better life choice. Not going to MIT was disastrous because his college experience was bad, including an unjustified arrest, and dropping out. Don't worry, it all worked out - he's the CEO of a startup that's doing well now. I can't claim to know what was in his mind in high school but a part of me thinks there was real stereotype threat in play. Second issue with quotas: In the case of Harvard with their overrepresented minority, they usually reject based on soft qualities like "no leadership potential". This really irks me, as my father in his government job was denied promotion several times because of that exact phrase, "no leadership potential". This is considerably ironic since for a brief stint he took a sabbatical and went full-time with his job in the navy, as an O-6 (captain, as in Picard, not America). During this year, the team he commanded completed the US Navy's first ever fully databased inventory system, on time and under budget, saving the navy billions of dollars. "no leadership potential" and phrases of its ilk are basically cover for discrimination, as they can be so easily issued even in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary. [0] for example I had great scores in the AP sciences and a high-performing science fair project that placed at the international level - which are relevant skills for MIT.
- adrianN 8y ago
  "No leadership potential" was in fact invented by Ivy League schools to keep the overachieving Jews out.
- themarkn 8y ago
  Thank you for this perspective. I’m not going to argue. It sounds like this experience sucks mightily and I need to give it some thought.
  - dnautics 8y ago

manigandham 8y ago

All that is covered under "make the process fair", but enforcing quotas based on random unchangeable physical characteristic is the opposite of fair.

conception 8y ago
I think what they were trying to also say is "make the process fair" isn't as simple as 4 words. It's a struggle for even the most ardent of believers in giving everyone a fair shot. The problem is defining what is fair.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Of course it's not simple or easy. It's not completely possible either, as life itself isn't fair. That's just the reality we live in. But that's why we should do the best we can, to make it as fair as possible, and while there is much progress to be made around the world, there are also some clearly wrong ways to go about it and diversity quotas are about as worse as it gets.
  - themarkn 8y ago
    I guess quotas is such a vague term maybe it’s pointless to argue this. There can me more or less effective/fair implementations of a quota system. I’m not sure what better ideas are out there that don’t involve measuring the result in terms of diversity in a certain field, and optimizing to increase that result... which is in effect a quota.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      But that's the issue, nothing should be done for a certain result because that's assuming there is some omniscient knowledge of what is the "right" outcome. That just doesn't exist so attempting it will always lead to chaos. Give people freedom and the opportunity to do what they want, and then the result will naturally be the fairest possible.
      - themarkn 8y ago
        > Give people freedom and the opportunity to do what they want, and then the result will naturally be the fairest possible. If we all started with the same options, this would be true. Our limits would only be reflections of our preferences and natural abilities. Like in an RPG where we pick wether to be a warrior or mage or whatever - you go down a skills path by choice based on what you want to achieve and what resources (xp etc) you have. Unfortunately people are born into an active system wherein millions of events from before they were born are exerting pressures on their lives, pressures that we are mostly unaware of until it’s too late. There’s no neutral “fair” option. This sucks. It’s bad. It’s stupid. People’s location or race or sex at birth should not bless them or condemn them. It should just be an interesting detail. But those things have real effects. Ignoring this means accepting the current biases as somehow natural, and continues rewarding those already born with advantages. Fighting it means adding NEW biases, and reducing the advantages inherited by people with privilege. Which naturally seems unreasonable if you currently enjoy the benefits of those advantages. Solutions like yours, which require no work be done to change things by the privileged, and ask the less privileged to reinterpret the status quo so that they realize things are fine as they are, should be suspect. They are not all definitely wrong, but they are especially attractive because of their convenience. And that pretty exterior can mask their lack of actual substance.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

AmericanChopper 8y ago

>What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "diversity quotas" while, of course, imperfect and clumsy, reflect an effort to counterbalance institutional discrimination Diversity quotas are by their very nature institutional discrimination. You can’t jusify it by saying the people they discriminate against deserve it.

gattilorenz 8y ago
> Diversity quotas are by their very nature institutional discrimination. Sure, they are institutional discrimination in the sense that institutions recognize the differences between gender/races and the differences in the treatment they receive, which is often based on negative prejudice (the other meaning of "discrimination" [1]). Discrimination is not negative per se, as long as it's the "neutral" meaning of the word (e.g., having different toilets is also discrimination). [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/discrimination https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/discrimination
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  Picking candidates of your preferred gender/ethnicity over candidates of your non-preferred gender/ethnicity is the canonical definition of institutional discrimination. It takes a huge amount of double-think to arrive at the conclusion that this is the same as having gendered bathrooms. Any institution that prefers candidates of a particular gender/ethnicity is prejudicially discriminating against all other candidates on the basis of gender/ethnicity.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Sad to see this comment down voted.
  - gattilorenz 8y ago
    Well, my point was exactly that discriminating is fine, if it means recognizing differences and providing equal opportunities (sure, that's not exactly what quotas do all the times, but it's what they are trying to do). You don't have to agree, of course. I wonder if you think that there is prejudice/discrimination that quotas are trying to fix (in a deeply flawed way, according to your view; in an imperfect but still better-than-nothing way according to mine), or if the whole starting point is wrong.

foobarbazbat 8y ago

The problem is that institutional bias and discrimination are unmeasurable. So dropping the quotas never seems like a reality. Quotas are inherently unfair and take opportunity away from others. Isn't it better to treat people as individuals?

collyw 8y ago
> Isn't it better to treat people as individuals? James Damore suggested something like that, it didn't go down well. (Though I completely agree).
themarkn 8y ago
We are very far away from the inherent limitations of measurement in this case though. Eventually we will hit those limits and have to throw up our hands and say “we’ve done our best”, but there are lots of big, well-documented effects of individual biases, which end up aggregated into systems and institutions in various ways, the effects of which are readily measurable. > Isn't it better to treat people as individuals? This is an equally impossible goal. The system is already unfair. You want to preserve the current unfairness. I think we should instead calibrate the unfairness to optimize for undoing the weirdness caused by humanity’s awful history of subjugating, robbing, and denying the rights of various kinds of people over many centuries. People born today experience various benefits and drawbacks related to conditions completely beyond their control. If we have privilege this is the god damn least we can do.
- belorn 8y ago
  >> Isn't it better to treat people as individuals? > This is an equally impossible goal. For being such impossible goal it seem strange then that 21th century society is basically built around that exact concept. Banks lend out money based on it. Courts make judgement based on it. Government gives out social support based on it. Insurance rates and medical care is all about individual assessment. Even education here in Sweden is by law now individualized and each teacher must teach to the ability of each individual student (a new law since a decade ago). A few hundred years ago that was not the case. If a person were of the lower class then they were treated as such. Government was not expected to operate on anything except category of people, and the idea of treat people as individuals was seen as indeed impossible. Education in particular was extremely bound by this idea, and a person worth was categorized and put in predefined box from a very young age. However impossible it is to treat people as individuals, it is better to do so and fail rather then to return to the old ways. If you get a wave of low economic immigrants should we throw up our hands and say “we’ve done our best” with individual assessment in the legal system and just prosecute based on class, or should we double up on it and try to do better? The political winds here is swinging, and I honestly hope that treating people as individuals wins over any attempt of short-term gain from treating people based on class. A person born under low economic class should not have their life hindered because others before them of same low economical class had a higher rate of crime that higher economical classes. That would be a failure of society to treat people as individuals. History does not dictate the future and it doesn't create any benefits and drawbacks unless we treat people based on category and class rather then individuals.

dnautics 8y ago

I was going to write this as a throwaway but you know f it. I stand by my stories. > As such I believe quotas are a good thing You don't address the article's claim that quotas make stereotype threat worse. This is a real, lived experience. In high school, I (an overrepresented minority) failed to get in to MIT, and my best friend (an underrepresented minority) got in, despite me looking better 'on paper'[0]. He chose not to go even though I pled with him that it would be a better life choice. Not going to MIT was disastrous because his college experience was bad, including an unjustified arrest, and dropping out. Don't worry, it all worked out - he's the CEO of a startup that's doing well now. I can't claim to know what was in his mind in high school but a part of me thinks there was real stereotype threat in play. Second issue with quotas: In the case of Harvard with their overrepresented minority, they usually reject based on soft qualities like "no leadership potential". This really irks me, as my father in his government job was denied promotion several times because of that exact phrase, "no leadership potential". This is considerably ironic since for a brief stint he took a sabbatical and went full-time with his job in the navy, as an O-6 (captain, as in Picard, not America). During this year, the team he commanded completed the US Navy's first ever fully databased inventory system, on time and under budget, saving the navy billions of dollars. "no leadership potential" and phrases of its ilk are basically cover for discrimination, as they can be so easily issued even in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary. [0] for example I had great scores in the AP sciences and a high-performing science fair project that placed at the international level - which are relevant skills for MIT.

adrianN 8y ago
"No leadership potential" was in fact invented by Ivy League schools to keep the overachieving Jews out.
themarkn 8y ago
Thank you for this perspective. I’m not going to argue. It sounds like this experience sucks mightily and I need to give it some thought.
- dnautics 8y ago