5 ms·

"Promoting diversity" only equates to "sacrificing performance" if you accept the premise that white men are by default the most qualified for everything. Or m

"Promoting diversity" only equates to "sacrificing performance" if you accept the premise that white men are by default the most qualified for everything. Or maybe to be slightly more generous, the premise is that the prior state of affairs where mostly white men were being hired was colorblind and based on merit, so anything else must be sacrificing merit based hiring. I see no reason to buy that framing though and plenty of reason to think it's bunk. Even liberals can fall into the trap though, because policies to promote diversity are explicitly stated while it's been a bit (although not all that long in the grand scheme of things) since the biases that can lead to prioritizing white men are actually written down. That's how the "tradeoff" ends up in things like the FAA slides. It's unclear what factual support that slide had, but clearly the author just took it as a given, as do a lot of other people.

anonymars 1y ago
I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring?comments=true&commentId=91046659 https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...) The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions > Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9 See also e.g. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132 https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132
- rainsford 1y ago
  > I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content I don't think that's a wild take at all and actually agree with you. But I also don't think it's a wild take to think there may be barriers to attracting or hiring good minority candidates independent of whether or not there is also a pipeline problem, and there is no reason you'd have to pick just one or the other. The water pressure analogy only works if you presuppose the water pressure issue is exclusively upstream, and of course in the real world faucets can be the source of waterflow problems as well. I should also add that I'm not defending the particular case discussed by the blogger, although I'm less sold on the idea that it was clearly bad than a lot of other people seem to be. But even a bad example would not strongly support the idea that an EO or other push to promote diversity and equal opportunity must inevitably lead to lower performance.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    I agree: I don't think it's inevitable; I think this was an unfortunate unintentional side-effect of well-intentioned policy. I was primarily responding to the question of whether it was "absurd" to blame Obama. Life would surely be easier if we were judged only on our good intentions and not their unintended consequences. But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs. There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize? I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job... *If, like me, you find this astonishing and question the legality -- apparently it's the "neutral" policy that may be discriminatory! Because of the base rate: https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diversity-and-disparate-impact-liability/ https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diver... By the way, short story by Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron
- const_cast 1y ago
  While you have a point, we can't just ignore the fact that white people have systemic advantages simply because they're white. White people have always had "DEI" or whatever you want to call it. If you show up to the interview and you're white, congratulations, you're 50% of the way there. They've done studies on this, but I think even without the studies it's just obvious to everyone: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-white-names-black-names https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...
  - amy214 1y ago
    Your article basically says auto dealers are racist but federal contractors and "profitable companies" are generally more comparable. The solution would be to enforce racist regulations against the auto dealer, not falsely generalize the problem and enforce a solution. Secondly, there are fields of academia that make it a point to show racism exists and to uncover racism, so publications like this are as fraught with conflicts of interest as a cigarette company researcher investigating the benefits of nicotine. Pointing the finger at white people is also problematic, it's a racial supply/demand, and generally at competitive fields like medicine or programming, competitive schools, one sees a proportional oversaturation of asians (per capita) versus whites. Shall we say employers are favoring asians and talk about the asian menace, as we do the white menace? If particular races, often tagging a cultural history, are associated with different cultural preferences for lifestyle or career, I would simply say "so what?" If the goal is to homogenize equal participation from all demographics groups to all vocations, to me that seems silly and runs against human nature, it can be expected to work as well as the communist efforts of societal homogenization we saw in the 20th century. Yes, we need to kick the tires and convince ourselves that all are afforded somewhat fair opportunities, but seeing race as a confounder here or there, and immediately leaping to systematic racism as the purported mechanism - that's just poor science.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      I'm not "pointing the finger" at anyone. Part of the problem with pointing out systemic racism and unconscious bias is that white folk are very fragile. They get uncomfortable when you point out very obvious deductions - like hundreds of years of racial injustice not magically disappearing in the late 60s. I'm not saying that other racism doesn't exist. But I am saying that complaints from white people on account of their whiteness is pathetic at best and willfully ignorant at worst. At the end of the day, white people, which includes me, are advantaged in virtually all areas of modern society. It would be easy to say that I got where I am based purely on my own skill and intellect. It would also not be true. The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.

anonymars 1y ago

I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring?comments=true&commentId=91046659 https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...) The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions > Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9 See also e.g. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132 https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132

rainsford 1y ago
> I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content I don't think that's a wild take at all and actually agree with you. But I also don't think it's a wild take to think there may be barriers to attracting or hiring good minority candidates independent of whether or not there is also a pipeline problem, and there is no reason you'd have to pick just one or the other. The water pressure analogy only works if you presuppose the water pressure issue is exclusively upstream, and of course in the real world faucets can be the source of waterflow problems as well. I should also add that I'm not defending the particular case discussed by the blogger, although I'm less sold on the idea that it was clearly bad than a lot of other people seem to be. But even a bad example would not strongly support the idea that an EO or other push to promote diversity and equal opportunity must inevitably lead to lower performance.
- anonymars 1y ago
  I agree: I don't think it's inevitable; I think this was an unfortunate unintentional side-effect of well-intentioned policy. I was primarily responding to the question of whether it was "absurd" to blame Obama. Life would surely be easier if we were judged only on our good intentions and not their unintended consequences. But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs. There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize? I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job... *If, like me, you find this astonishing and question the legality -- apparently it's the "neutral" policy that may be discriminatory! Because of the base rate: https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diversity-and-disparate-impact-liability/ https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diver... By the way, short story by Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron
const_cast 1y ago
While you have a point, we can't just ignore the fact that white people have systemic advantages simply because they're white. White people have always had "DEI" or whatever you want to call it. If you show up to the interview and you're white, congratulations, you're 50% of the way there. They've done studies on this, but I think even without the studies it's just obvious to everyone: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-white-names-black-names https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...
- amy214 1y ago
  Your article basically says auto dealers are racist but federal contractors and "profitable companies" are generally more comparable. The solution would be to enforce racist regulations against the auto dealer, not falsely generalize the problem and enforce a solution. Secondly, there are fields of academia that make it a point to show racism exists and to uncover racism, so publications like this are as fraught with conflicts of interest as a cigarette company researcher investigating the benefits of nicotine. Pointing the finger at white people is also problematic, it's a racial supply/demand, and generally at competitive fields like medicine or programming, competitive schools, one sees a proportional oversaturation of asians (per capita) versus whites. Shall we say employers are favoring asians and talk about the asian menace, as we do the white menace? If particular races, often tagging a cultural history, are associated with different cultural preferences for lifestyle or career, I would simply say "so what?" If the goal is to homogenize equal participation from all demographics groups to all vocations, to me that seems silly and runs against human nature, it can be expected to work as well as the communist efforts of societal homogenization we saw in the 20th century. Yes, we need to kick the tires and convince ourselves that all are afforded somewhat fair opportunities, but seeing race as a confounder here or there, and immediately leaping to systematic racism as the purported mechanism - that's just poor science.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    I'm not "pointing the finger" at anyone. Part of the problem with pointing out systemic racism and unconscious bias is that white folk are very fragile. They get uncomfortable when you point out very obvious deductions - like hundreds of years of racial injustice not magically disappearing in the late 60s. I'm not saying that other racism doesn't exist. But I am saying that complaints from white people on account of their whiteness is pathetic at best and willfully ignorant at worst. At the end of the day, white people, which includes me, are advantaged in virtually all areas of modern society. It would be easy to say that I got where I am based purely on my own skill and intellect. It would also not be true. The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.