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What I struggle with when it comes to claims of {whatever group} bias as a cause (the correlation is easy, but I stress "cause") for why any given industry or s
by mbostleman 6y ago
What I struggle with when it comes to claims of {whatever group} bias as a cause (the correlation is easy, but I stress "cause") for why any given industry or sector of the economy doesn't represent a desired mix of group attributes is this: There are millions or even tens of millions of actors involved in these economic models and if group attribute bias is driving these hiring or promotion or pay decisions then that means, by definition, that the motivation of bias is overriding the motivation to optimize for value (whether it be NOI for a mature business or speed of market capture for a new one).
So what I don't get is, if everything else is equal between two candidates except for a) their contribution to value and b) their group attribute, how is it that so many actors choose b and leave a on the table thus knowingly performing poorer for shareholders and risking failure at the hands of competition purely because of a group attribute bias?
I get that there would be some actors that would choose bias over value. But how is that no one break ranks. Wouldn't there have to be a massive amount of collusion and coordination to make sure that every founder and manager from every entity all agrees to do this? Because anyone that breaks from the mold would end up benefiting financially.
I get that this perspective undermines the popular narrative, so go ahead and down vote if you think my intention is to do that. But that's not my intention. What I'm looking for is a rational description of how the economic mechanics work with a popular narrative about bias against what is also a popular narrative that humans are greedy?
- Androider 6y agoSee all of professional sport in the US before 1950, and what professional teams look like today? How come none of the pre-1950 teams simply figured they could completely dominate their respective leagues by just not ignoring all the "value left on the table". The story in the article about how the Duke university students were wined and dined, given direct recruiting contacts and wooed, and the A&T students were given the previous days leftovers and NO recruiter contacts isn't some aberration. It's happening right now, this year, literally leaving all that talent on the table.
- stormbeard 6y agoCheck out the Dan Luu blog linked in the first paragraph of the article [1]. He tackles exactly this and does a really good job at explaining it and citing sources. I might butcher this, but there’s an excellent part in there where he takes a look at the papers that showed discrimination in sports and how teams that discriminated less, actually had an advantage and performed better. For decades, teams were hiring less qualified white players and actually were leaving money on the table. Looking at sports data is nice because there’s tons of it and it’s easier to evaluate “employee performance”. The issue with ignoring those NC A&T students was that those recruiters didn’t even bother evaluating them to see if there were a few rockstar developers in the group. Had they given them a fair shot and evaluation, we might have made better hires overall. [1] https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/ https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/