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Board seats are literally not a zero sum game: we can make more in any of several ways. It troubles me that you’re factually mistaken on basic things like that
by FakeComments 7y ago
Board seats are literally not a zero sum game: we can make more in any of several ways.
It troubles me that you’re factually mistaken on basic things like that — new board seats come into existence literally daily, to which every indication shows women are free to compete — but expect me to take your arguments seriously that we should institute bigotry at the highest levels.
No, get your facts straight first.
You’re also trying to respond to empiric failures in the real world with parables and abstract highly simplified models, which is somewhat silly: the decayed state of gender and race relations in the US and elsewhere is due to the sexist and racist policies enacted to “fix” things, and somewhere between 1990 and 2000 started stepping backwards decades of progress, with the situation the worst it’s been in a generation by 2020. Forcing the final steps of integration has been shown time and again to foster generation-scale resentment and undermine healing, particularly through forcing every interaction to be viewed through the lens of base racial or gender tribes. It literally teaches people to be bigots all over again.
A rotten tree bears rotten fruits: I don’t believe you can cause a good outcome through institutional bigotry, and I challenge you to show me it works. It’s certainly been tried enough it should have produced positive results — show me those, and not a cheap game.
Also, yes, merely removing bias in a dynamic system that shows a strong reversion to the mean on generational scales is enough to remove historical bias within just a few generations — a fact that comes directly from analysis of system dynamics and differential equations. Notice that if you drop the bias below 10%, there’s absolutely no problem — it just sort of wanders over long time periods.
To me, you merely seem a fiddler: someone who knows very well that debiasing works on the 3-4 generation scale, you’re just not willing to wait a century because you believe you’re smart enough to use evil for good, and are willing to risk sure progress based on that belief.
I think that’s reckless and immoral.
Reckless because you’re endangering something important — the fixing of gender and race relations in society; and immoral because you’re knowingly doing harm and discriminating, out of some very strange logic that’s making the world “better”.
Your model also has massive failures as a mechanism to explain social situations: it doesn’t, for instance, explain why Asian immigrants have thrived. Were the interned and destitute Japanese incomparably better off than other groups? If not, how does your model explain their recovery and integration compared to other groups?
What the puzzle actually seems to say is that if people have a preference you don’t like, you feel entitled to overrule them because you know better, and your global vision for society is better than the emergent one from individual choices. (The conclusions really seem oriented around forcing people to integrate when their natural tendencies would have them live in more or less homogeneous clusters.)
It’s tyranny gussied up with math: look at how if people have wrongthink preferences, we need to overrule them via force and targeted discrimination for the greater good!
- jakelazaroff 7y agoSure, you can make more board seats and allocate them specifically to women, but then you're back to square one. Check out the debate on this not-zero-sum attempt by a YC investor to teach women to program [1]. I can't really find anything that indicates that merely removing bias (which hasn't happened in corporate America, mind you; we're several steps behind that) is sufficient to break down power structures long term. If you have a source, I'd love to see it! With regard to the polygons simulation, I think you misunderstood it: once they're segregated, they remain so even if you drop the bias to zero. Active de-biasing is necessary to re-integrate them. Edit: are you seriously suggesting that e.g. race relations in the U.S. are due to affirmative action and not slavery, redlining, Jim Crow, ongoing police brutality, racial sentencing disparity, etc? If so, I think we're done here. FakeComments indeed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269
- FakeComments 7y agoNope, I’m suggesting the change in the trend of race relations is due to affirmative action and other instances of modern institutional racism: it was on a 120-140 year upswing, then started crashing. I also didn’t meant allocate them specifically to women: women should compete for new board seats, and based on the trends prior to sexist policies being implemented, that alone should be enough for discover equilibrium in a few generations — no need to randomly discriminate to force the result you believe should occur. That static state of your game is purely an artifact of the game and doesn’t correspond to the real world in any meaningful analogy, because there’s other forces on movement than your unhappiness with the racial composition of your neighbors — why would I support you enacting bigoted policies based on what is literally toy fiction? All that game concludes is if people aren’t biased, they won’t move because of their neighbors; but if they are, they will. Duh, you built that into the model. That you’re putting that forward as a serious argument is genuinely frightening. Also, you should be more specific what you mean by “break down power structures”, what specifically would that look like and what specifically do you mean by “power structures”?