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Who cares about diversity?

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Re: Who cares about diversity?

#491

Post by vlod »

beej71 wrote: post #466
vlod wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understand this argument. Wouldn't market forces, i.e. capitalism, gekko's greed-is-good argument fix this? If there were a group of basketball players with blue eyes (that were the best in the world), wouldn't someone see the huge money potential and create a team full of blue-eyes and win the title/cup/trophy?

Maybe in many decades after the anti-blue-eye bias had been successfully mitigated such a team would be formed. But until then, money and winning is not enough. Bias is stronger than capitalism. Some people willingly give up money to not serve gay people, for example.

Sure, if a minority is a small percentage and it wont hurt you financially (much), plus you can milk it to get press (and most likely increase your profit), then I can understand that. (I think you're referring to the cake shop if I remember correctly).

However setting up shop and not serving cakes to a vast majority of your customers who are a minority is just asking for bankruptcy.

I also find it really hard to believe that there isn't one greedy capitalist that will take advantage of this situation. e.g. Huge talent shortage of tech workers. Assume that there is a cohort minority who are probably price themselves cheaper (becz they are having it harder to find a job), then there's not one person who will seize this opportunity in America?

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#492

Post by [deleted] »

croes wrote: post #473
beej71 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in many decades after the anti-blue-eye bias had been successfully mitigated such a team would be formed. But until then, money and winning is not enough. Bias is stronger than capitalism. Some people willingly give up money to not serve gay people, for example.

Exactly, people don't act always rationally, they sometimes even act against their own interests. Homo oeconomicus is a myth.

[deleted]

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#493

Post by stefantalpalaru »

xtracto wrote: post #406
ScipioAfricanuz wrote: post #362

Hiring for social diversity (e.g race, ethnicity, gender, age) when the benefits of diversity come from cognitive diversity (micro vs macro pov, engineer working with computer scientist) is a very inefficient way of doing things. Yes it may be that someone of a different gender/race/ethnicity may have a different way of thinking, but it may also not be the case

As an Hispanic Engineer I would hate to be hired to fill up a diversity quota... I am better than that. And as a Software Engineering hiring manager, when hiring I always strive to to be statistically unbiased in the diversity distribution in my team. My base distribution is the population of Software Engineering University graduates. As long as that base population has 1/10 women and 1/20 "non majority population" (…

No post body was provided.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#495

Post by stefantalpalaru »

breadbreadbread wrote: post #417

ideology is not just your political views or opinions, it is fundamentally how you interact with and view others. If your ideology is that "I am right and everyone else is wrong" or "women should be subservient to men" or "the scientific method is a tool of Satan", you are obviously a bad fit for university and a learning environment. I think it should be obvious that some ideologies are fundamentally a bad fit for a…

No post body was provided.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#496

Post by throwaway894345 »

hpkuarg wrote: post #426
handoflixue wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving alms to the poor isn't "revenge-driven justice against the rich" - it's helping out people in need. Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me. Surely one can by analogy reason that there are ways to support historically disadvantaged groups that aren't "perpetuating discrimination"?

> Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me. In what way is this obviously fallacious? Alms have to come from somewhere, and if you take them from the rich then it is clearly discrimination against the rich. You could very well make the argument that this is justified, but fallacious it is not. That aside, it doesn't take a lot of scanning thro…

It’s also a broken analogy because “the rich” are always more privileged than “the poor”, but a given white person may be less privileged than a given nonwhite person.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#497

Post by throwaway894345 »

handoflixue wrote: post #400
colpabar wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say. Doesn't this seem like a weird thing to say? How do you know that? Isn't this the definition of stereotyping? Is every question going to be of the form "as a black woman, what do you think about X?" And why is it okay to assume that white people don'…

> why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say? I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences. > How do you know that? I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people". There's obviously…

> I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.

The problem is the assumption th at all else is equal.

> I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people".

Face recognition is one of the few areas where skin color matters. Most of the time it doesn’t.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#498

Post by throwaway894345 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #204
jedberg wrote: post #180

So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the…

> But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. The solution is not to systematically discriminate in another direction, forever. In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy, and you have abandoned the high moral ground that racial discrimination is always a bad thing, and you end up in a worse situation than you start…

I think this is exactly what is happening with the rise of right-wing groups. We tried fighting racism with racism and now we’re surprised that there is more racism than when we started. Sadly the “fight racism with racism” people interpret the increase in racism as a need to double down.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#499

Post by psyfi »

gnicholas wrote: post #258
psyfi wrote: post #137

All diversity policies and measures are leading to Cobra effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina... The only policy that is actually right is not to discriminate against colors, ethnicities, political views, etc.. but putting pressure to try to hire african/asian/latinos/women/whatever is like putting pressure on people to buy products from someone just to proof they don't discriminate ag…

I agree that unintended consequences (a subset of which are the Cobra effect) are bad. Can you explain further what type of unintended consequences you are thinking of in the AA context? The main one that springs to mind is that some people will assume that employees were hired/promoted based on race/gender/etc. Are there other unintended consequences in this context?

Basically, hiring someone because they're from minority/vulnerable race/gender/etc.. to diversify instead of hiring the one that has the best skillset for the job

If we put the idea of Cobra effect aside, these companies are also trying to bargain because vulnerables and minorities would prefer to work for them than for other companies that don't express their preference of minorities, so eventually many of them will accept less pay to feel more welcomed, which is - in my opinion - pure emotional exploitation, they claim they have ethical reasons but actual many of them has only unethical reasons

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#500

Post by psyfi »

endtime wrote: post #275
gnicholas wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that unintended consequences (a subset of which are the Cobra effect) are bad. Can you explain further what type of unintended consequences you are thinking of in the AA context? The main one that springs to mind is that some people will assume that employees were hired/promoted based on race/gender/etc. Are there other unintended consequences in this context?

I don't know what's actually happening, but my interpretation of the cobra effect reference is that people are inventing new identities/affinities in order to be able to benefit from the systems which reward them.

No, it's about trying to make a policy to reach some goal but this policy cause an opposite effect

i.e trying to diversify to discourage racism so you end up prefering minorities who are less fit for a job than just to be "diversified"

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