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I don't understand why affirmative action would be a problem for physics departments. What's the basis of that? As an outsider, I'll say that I see the jobs of

I don't understand why affirmative action would be a problem for physics departments. What's the basis of that? As an outsider, I'll say that I see the jobs of a physics department as a) making physics b) making physicists c) teaching physics d) funding making physics. How is affirmative action an "obvious" issue?

inglor_cz 6y ago
"How is affirmative action an "obvious" issue?" This isn't obvious to me either. While I can see that hiring to match predetermined racial quota can result in subpar performance, most of the world does not play the diversity/inclusion game in the way that USA does, and does not seem to have better results.
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  It's not a problem if you assume, as most affirmative action does, that 2+ sigma talent (baseline physics professor) and motivation is evenly distributed across populations. It probably isn't; virtually nothing else is in any biological population above the evolutionary level of a paramecium, and so you get numskulls like this in your physics department: https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI Merit is a pretty good criterion; worked for a long time!
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Still, there is a natural experiment. There is no affirmative action in Taiwan or Japan (or Czechia, where I live). In that case, shouldn't teams from those countries exhibit some advantages against American ones? Or is the effect so small that it gets erased by, say, better facilities or funding?
  - vharuck 6y ago
    I've come to see affirmative action's value for the future. Hiring was not free from bias in the past. Even if that's no longer true, the existing lack of physicists in a community means less people from that community will have physics as a goal. Kids rarely dream of attaining roles they don't see. And if kids don't see roles on television or in daily life, that leaves their community. Underrepresentation causes an artificial self-fulfilling prophecy. It's hard to come up with an unbiased way to correct current problems caused by past bias.
  - wbsss4412 6y ago
    Assuming that capacity to produce valuable scientific results is uncorrelated with society’s historical prejudice (ie people from historically disadvantaged backgrounds are as likely as any other to produce such results, given they aren’t hampered by historical prejudice), seems more reasonable than assuming that “talent” is reducable to a single normally distributed variable that we have consistently been able to measure in practice.
getlawgdon 6y ago
It's just more "subtle" dogwhistling on HA. There's nothing wrong with AA in physics because there is still huge underrepresentation in physics.

inglor_cz 6y ago

"How is affirmative action an "obvious" issue?" This isn't obvious to me either. While I can see that hiring to match predetermined racial quota can result in subpar performance, most of the world does not play the diversity/inclusion game in the way that USA does, and does not seem to have better results.

scottlocklin 6y ago
It's not a problem if you assume, as most affirmative action does, that 2+ sigma talent (baseline physics professor) and motivation is evenly distributed across populations. It probably isn't; virtually nothing else is in any biological population above the evolutionary level of a paramecium, and so you get numskulls like this in your physics department: https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI Merit is a pretty good criterion; worked for a long time!
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Still, there is a natural experiment. There is no affirmative action in Taiwan or Japan (or Czechia, where I live). In that case, shouldn't teams from those countries exhibit some advantages against American ones? Or is the effect so small that it gets erased by, say, better facilities or funding?
- vharuck 6y ago
  I've come to see affirmative action's value for the future. Hiring was not free from bias in the past. Even if that's no longer true, the existing lack of physicists in a community means less people from that community will have physics as a goal. Kids rarely dream of attaining roles they don't see. And if kids don't see roles on television or in daily life, that leaves their community. Underrepresentation causes an artificial self-fulfilling prophecy. It's hard to come up with an unbiased way to correct current problems caused by past bias.
- wbsss4412 6y ago
  Assuming that capacity to produce valuable scientific results is uncorrelated with society’s historical prejudice (ie people from historically disadvantaged backgrounds are as likely as any other to produce such results, given they aren’t hampered by historical prejudice), seems more reasonable than assuming that “talent” is reducable to a single normally distributed variable that we have consistently been able to measure in practice.

getlawgdon 6y ago

It's just more "subtle" dogwhistling on HA. There's nothing wrong with AA in physics because there is still huge underrepresentation in physics.