4 ms·
We had a great music director once, now world renowned (we never deserved him), who believed in blind as in blindfolded auditions. Whoever the candidates were,
by washadjeffmad 6y ago
We had a great music director once, now world renowned (we never deserved him), who believed in blind as in blindfolded auditions.
Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent.
During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than historically comprised their body, but they were from everywhere. It turns out musicians didn't want to be reduced to bigoted demographics, so it attracted many more "non-traditional" candidates when word spread you could make it on merit.
Blind auditions were scrapped when he left, and so did actual diversity. You can include everyone today in a single introduction by mentioning Yale, Juilliard, Paris Conservatory, Royal Academy, etc.
Merit destroys class privilege, which is a big faux pas when your patrons tend to be family of people who want to advance their careers in your institution. Just recently, I couldn't help but notice the timing of the creation of another superfluous position being filled by a fledgling choral director and a $MM donation by his parents to expand the performance hall he'll be using.
Mere dutiful patronage, surely, in these times of austerity.
- vlod 6y agoI've read about this before (some fancy orchestra, not sure if it's the same one as you've mentioned) and I went to one of those "Let's get more X in technology" speeches. They had some crazy complicated ways to solve this (not Occam's Razor thinking). I asked a question, mentioned the orchestra approach and suggested blind tests for tech recruiting. i.e. HR scrubs the name, pronouns and anything likely to subconsciously discriminate and pass their resume to the hiring team. Not perfect, but it gives X at least a better shot. I was pretty much told it would never work and there were better ways and dismissed with a wave of a hand. So why don't we do these somewhat blind tests?
- ip26 6y agoSome recent-ish research (I can't remember enough keywords to find it right now) has found that doing this actually hurts women's success rate a couple percentage points.
- thu2111 6y agoIt's been done. They dismissed it because when hiring is blinded like that the percentage of ordinary men who get hired goes up, not down. Men are discriminated against in hiring and that fixes it, but the type of people who want "diversity" don't want fair or blind hiring. They want to get trophy diversity hires.
- justatdotin 6y agothis was part of the tech hiring method at one place I worked. The main filter was colleague review of an anonymised coding test. I don't know any details but it seemed to have the desired effect - high quality colleagues with diverse cultural identities.
- LockAndLol 6y agoThis is the kind of thing I think of when people talk a out meritocracy. Somehow social studies have warped the perception of meritocracy to mean "anti my group" by selecting examples that aren't meritocratic. Just look up "meritocracy dead" on a search engine of your choice. It's pretty minds boggling what people want to replace the goal of meritocracy with these days.
- ausbah 6y agomerit weakens class privilege but it doesn't destroy it. even on tests of merit like the SAT, higher class students usually have advantages in tutoring, more free time to study, etc. it is certainly still possible for lower class children to get a leg up, but it's still an uphill climb
- datavirtue 6y agoOften times it's pretty cheap. Really nice girl I knew at college, her dad dropped $10k on the school. This set her up for life in a town where a $45k per year job was life changing. When I left she was a VP in the college administration knocking down a very easy $85k. (The president made $155k, for comparison)