4 ms·

What are you arguing for? Equality of outcome or equality of opportunity? The first can be dismissed as another form of racism outright, so let's talk about th

What are you arguing for? Equality of outcome or equality of opportunity? The first can be dismissed as another form of racism outright, so let's talk about the second. Do you think that black people have not had equal opportunity?

Traster 6y ago
Equality of outcome might not be a good target if you assume that there are underlying factors that we don't want to control for that would cause unequal outcomes - which I think we can probably agree on, since (the relevant) minorities are under-represented in the pool of potential candidates and let's just say that's probably beyond the scope of what YCombinator can reasonably be aiming to achieve. However, let's say I build a function that selects a random item from a list of length 100. I run it 50 times and it only ever returns an item from the first 5 elements of that list. That's a pretty good reason for me to take another look at the function. It's probably broken. In the same way, whilst you're not aiming for a specific outcome, if the outcome is a long away from your priors - if you seem to be excluding a specific group of people from your company, you probably need to take another look at why that's happening and I don't think "Let's just assume we're doing a great job and that there are just no under-represented people to hire" is a reasonable explanation.
deleted 6y ago
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camillomiller 6y ago
Yes, I might have rushed my comment, but that’s what I meant. If even a diverse organization like YC can’t have enough African-Americans in their ranks, it has to mean something about the access these people get compared to white folks and people of other heritage. To further elaborate: Reddit hiring a black person to fill a board seat vacated By a white man on the premise of giving it to an African-american is a patch that’s worse than the hole.

Traster 6y ago

Equality of outcome might not be a good target if you assume that there are underlying factors that we don't want to control for that would cause unequal outcomes - which I think we can probably agree on, since (the relevant) minorities are under-represented in the pool of potential candidates and let's just say that's probably beyond the scope of what YCombinator can reasonably be aiming to achieve. However, let's say I build a function that selects a random item from a list of length 100. I run it 50 times and it only ever returns an item from the first 5 elements of that list. That's a pretty good reason for me to take another look at the function. It's probably broken. In the same way, whilst you're not aiming for a specific outcome, if the outcome is a long away from your priors - if you seem to be excluding a specific group of people from your company, you probably need to take another look at why that's happening and I don't think "Let's just assume we're doing a great job and that there are just no under-represented people to hire" is a reasonable explanation.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

camillomiller 6y ago

Yes, I might have rushed my comment, but that’s what I meant. If even a diverse organization like YC can’t have enough African-Americans in their ranks, it has to mean something about the access these people get compared to white folks and people of other heritage. To further elaborate: Reddit hiring a black person to fill a board seat vacated By a white man on the premise of giving it to an African-american is a patch that’s worse than the hole.