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Selecting for lacrosse players (which as you say, has no causal relationship to job performance) necessarily selects against non-lacrosse players. Lacrosse play

by mjhay 4y ago

Selecting for lacrosse players (which as you say, has no causal relationship to job performance) necessarily selects against non-lacrosse players. Lacrosse players tend to be white and male, Amazon should care, due not only to obvious legal risk, but also because they are excluding candidates who otherwise do as well or better than a particular lacrosse player. Why would it make any kind of sense to artificially shrink their candidate pool? This is also a moral thing, not just a political thing. It's not right to discriminate against people for reasons other than job performance.

hbrn 4y ago
Playing devil's advocate here: > Lacrosse players tend to be white and male I suspect they also tend to attend certain schools, and that could very well be causal. > Why would it make any kind of sense to artificially shrink their candidate pool? It doesn't make sense to shrink it if you have 10 candidates. But if you have thousands of resumes, it's not shrinking, it's filtering. > It's not right to It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally.
- eru 4y ago
  > It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally. That's not the only avenue. Big corporations do what their managers, customers, employees and investors want. Eg restaurants will typically try to serve tasty food, even if there's no legal requirement to do so. Similarly Google has free lunch, because that's what employees want. The recent fad for ESG shows that investor can want 'morality', too, and companies are willing to satisfy them. (I quote 'morality', because different people have different ideas, and often people only want the fig-leaf of morality, but not pay the price for what they would consider real morality. See eg greenwashing.) Customers and investors etc get what they are willing to pay for, and that's not necessarily what they say they want.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> excluding candidates who otherwise do as well But the explicit, stated goal of diversity efforts is specifically to exclude candidates who otherwise might do well, but are not diverse, because non-diverse teams can't perform as well as diverse teams.
- pseudalopex 4y ago
  They said as well or better. Did you leave it out or did they edit? Most diversity efforts are to get more diverse candidates or remove potential bias from interviews. This excludes no one.

by mjhay 4y ago

hbrn 4y ago

Playing devil's advocate here: > Lacrosse players tend to be white and male I suspect they also tend to attend certain schools, and that could very well be causal. > Why would it make any kind of sense to artificially shrink their candidate pool? It doesn't make sense to shrink it if you have 10 candidates. But if you have thousands of resumes, it's not shrinking, it's filtering. > It's not right to It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally.

eru 4y ago
> It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally. That's not the only avenue. Big corporations do what their managers, customers, employees and investors want. Eg restaurants will typically try to serve tasty food, even if there's no legal requirement to do so. Similarly Google has free lunch, because that's what employees want. The recent fad for ESG shows that investor can want 'morality', too, and companies are willing to satisfy them. (I quote 'morality', because different people have different ideas, and often people only want the fig-leaf of morality, but not pay the price for what they would consider real morality. See eg greenwashing.) Customers and investors etc get what they are willing to pay for, and that's not necessarily what they say they want.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> excluding candidates who otherwise do as well But the explicit, stated goal of diversity efforts is specifically to exclude candidates who otherwise might do well, but are not diverse, because non-diverse teams can't perform as well as diverse teams.

pseudalopex 4y ago
They said as well or better. Did you leave it out or did they edit? Most diversity efforts are to get more diverse candidates or remove potential bias from interviews. This excludes no one.