33 ms·

I'll eat the pages of the law if anyone can find a clause that calls for quotas

16 points by nhchris 4y ago

gabrielsroka 4y ago
Title is "Battle Against Bias Waged on Shifting Legal Ground : Civil rights: Discrimination was banned in a 1964 law. But the prevailing view of the measure changed greatly." Article is from 1995.
- haihaibye 4y ago
  Thanks for pointing out the date, I was shocked at how un-woke it was for a mainstream news article.
vannevar 4y ago
The key observation that drives modern affirmative action policy is that you can have systemic bias even in a system where there is no hiring bias at all, if past bias has resulted in under-representation for minorities. If young people in the minority population rarely encounter role models to follow in a specific career, they will be less likely to pursue that career, resulting in under-representation of that minority in the career population, which perpetuates the dearth of minority role models, leading to a vicious cycle. Adding in the economic consequences of historic bias makes the situation even worse. To ignore this systemic bias would be to endorse it, which is in effect the same as endorsing institutionalized bias against the minorities affected.
- fear_and_coffee 4y ago
  [dead]
- haihaibye 4y ago
  It also relies on blank slate theory - ie that all groups should perform equally, and if they don't, that's evidence enough that there is a conspiracy against them. Perhaps a way to test the "different groups have different abilities" vs "past bias" theory, would be to find people with high IQ / historical record of accomplishment who suffered great historical discrimination and deprivation (eg Ashkenazi Jews from the holocaust, Chinese families purged in the great leap forward) and then compare their descendants test scores and job outcomes in the USA. You could look at outcomes a generation or two afterwards and tell whether their performance was high/low ie was "reversion to high group accomplishment" or "underperformed due to present or previous oppression"
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    There is really no basis for any sort of theory that says underperformance of Black Americans is purely due to genetics. Primarily because genetic diversity among Black people is too broad. In other words, if you randomly compare the genetics between two randomly selected Black people, the difference, on average, will be far greater than comparing any two randomly selected white people. This is simply because all of humanity stems from Africa, so that is where the most diversity lies. There are hundreds of genetic markers involved in something as comparatively simple as skin color. The genetic markers involved in something as complex as intelligence are likely orders of magnitude more complex. You might be able to extrapolate something from certain sub-groups that branch from very narrow branches of the human diaspora, but you certainly could never, ever come up with something that made any sense to apply to the extremely broad strokes that we use to "group" people here in this melting pot we call the USA.
    - haihaibye 4y ago
      Nobody has ever claimed a 100% genetic basis of difference. The individual heritability of IQ is .5 to .8 for example Sub-Saharan diversity is a real thing, eg Bantu, Nilotic, Pygmy and Bushmen are extremely diverse (African Americans are not Pygny or Bushmen so not as diverse) But if you use cluster analysis on human genomes and ask it to divide humanity into 2 clusters, it divides humans into Sub Saharan Africans and everyone else. The key is selection not just randomness (most variation does little or nothing) you can't say eg "Africa is the most diverse therefore it will have the best adaptations for altitude" (that would be Tibetans, courtesy of interbreeding with Denisovians) The number of variants responsible for skin color is actually extremely small. It's why you can have such large variation between siblings. In contrast yes intelligence is highly polygenic. However, given sufficient sample sizes you can calculate genome wide association scores and work this all out.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        I think the more telling test for bias (genetic, social, or otherwise) is to compare groups with long standing US ancestry with recent immigrants of the same background and education. My understanding is that while we attribute much of inequality to bias in treatment, recent immigrants and their decedents vastly outperform comparable individuals with the same skin color. To me, this indicates that much of the differences we observe are due to biases of past treatment, opposed to discriminatory treatment in the present.
- kbelder 4y ago
  >To ignore this systemic bias would be to endorse it, which is in effect the same as endorsing institutionalized bias against the minorities affected. Which is an attempt to imply that you must take race into account when hiring or you're a racist, without actually saying that, because it would be roundly rejected by most people if made plain.
  - vannevar 4y ago
    Sure, no one wants to admit they're endorsing racism. But it doesn't change the fact that they are. There is no easy solution to this problem, it means facing some hard truths.

16 points by nhchris 4y ago

Title is "Battle Against Bias Waged on Shifting Legal Ground : Civil rights: Discrimination was banned in a 1964 law. But the prevailing view of the measure changed greatly." Article is from 1995.

haihaibye 4y ago
Thanks for pointing out the date, I was shocked at how un-woke it was for a mainstream news article.

vannevar 4y ago

The key observation that drives modern affirmative action policy is that you can have systemic bias even in a system where there is no hiring bias at all, if past bias has resulted in under-representation for minorities. If young people in the minority population rarely encounter role models to follow in a specific career, they will be less likely to pursue that career, resulting in under-representation of that minority in the career population, which perpetuates the dearth of minority role models, leading to a vicious cycle. Adding in the economic consequences of historic bias makes the situation even worse. To ignore this systemic bias would be to endorse it, which is in effect the same as endorsing institutionalized bias against the minorities affected.

fear_and_coffee 4y ago
[dead]
haihaibye 4y ago
It also relies on blank slate theory - ie that all groups should perform equally, and if they don't, that's evidence enough that there is a conspiracy against them. Perhaps a way to test the "different groups have different abilities" vs "past bias" theory, would be to find people with high IQ / historical record of accomplishment who suffered great historical discrimination and deprivation (eg Ashkenazi Jews from the holocaust, Chinese families purged in the great leap forward) and then compare their descendants test scores and job outcomes in the USA. You could look at outcomes a generation or two afterwards and tell whether their performance was high/low ie was "reversion to high group accomplishment" or "underperformed due to present or previous oppression"
- jjeaff 4y ago
  There is really no basis for any sort of theory that says underperformance of Black Americans is purely due to genetics. Primarily because genetic diversity among Black people is too broad. In other words, if you randomly compare the genetics between two randomly selected Black people, the difference, on average, will be far greater than comparing any two randomly selected white people. This is simply because all of humanity stems from Africa, so that is where the most diversity lies. There are hundreds of genetic markers involved in something as comparatively simple as skin color. The genetic markers involved in something as complex as intelligence are likely orders of magnitude more complex. You might be able to extrapolate something from certain sub-groups that branch from very narrow branches of the human diaspora, but you certainly could never, ever come up with something that made any sense to apply to the extremely broad strokes that we use to "group" people here in this melting pot we call the USA.
  - haihaibye 4y ago
    Nobody has ever claimed a 100% genetic basis of difference. The individual heritability of IQ is .5 to .8 for example Sub-Saharan diversity is a real thing, eg Bantu, Nilotic, Pygmy and Bushmen are extremely diverse (African Americans are not Pygny or Bushmen so not as diverse) But if you use cluster analysis on human genomes and ask it to divide humanity into 2 clusters, it divides humans into Sub Saharan Africans and everyone else. The key is selection not just randomness (most variation does little or nothing) you can't say eg "Africa is the most diverse therefore it will have the best adaptations for altitude" (that would be Tibetans, courtesy of interbreeding with Denisovians) The number of variants responsible for skin color is actually extremely small. It's why you can have such large variation between siblings. In contrast yes intelligence is highly polygenic. However, given sufficient sample sizes you can calculate genome wide association scores and work this all out.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I think the more telling test for bias (genetic, social, or otherwise) is to compare groups with long standing US ancestry with recent immigrants of the same background and education. My understanding is that while we attribute much of inequality to bias in treatment, recent immigrants and their decedents vastly outperform comparable individuals with the same skin color. To me, this indicates that much of the differences we observe are due to biases of past treatment, opposed to discriminatory treatment in the present.
kbelder 4y ago
>To ignore this systemic bias would be to endorse it, which is in effect the same as endorsing institutionalized bias against the minorities affected. Which is an attempt to imply that you must take race into account when hiring or you're a racist, without actually saying that, because it would be roundly rejected by most people if made plain.
- vannevar 4y ago
  Sure, no one wants to admit they're endorsing racism. But it doesn't change the fact that they are. There is no easy solution to this problem, it means facing some hard truths.