Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

Equality of opportunity (equality) is good. Equality of outcome (equity) is only possible if you deliberately handicap the most competent and most productive people of the group, because humans are differently abled.

I am not mad that the NBA hires a massively disproportionately large number of African Americans, for instance, because small differences in average height (African Americans are taller, on average, than Caucasian Americans) result in much larger discrepancies at the extremes. If you're playing a game where you need extreme height, you'd expect an overrepresentation of African Americans relative to whites.

If you're playing a game that benefits players with a different extreme stat that Asian Americans score better in, on average, than Caucasian Americans, you'd expect the highest levels of that game to have an overrepresentation of Asian Americans relative to Caucasian Americans there too.

And the result is good. Watching a bunch of pudgy, (comparatively) short Caucasian Americans playing basketball interests me a lot less than a bunch of 6'6"+ African Americans who are objectively superior at the sport playing.

I'd rather listen to music made by the world's best band than by the world's most racially equitable band.

I'd rather get surgery at the world's best hospital than the world's most racially equitable hospital.

This is why we have social hierarchies stratified by competence, rather than by racial equity.

We should never be denying anyone the opportunity to try their best at something just because of their skin color, but we shouldn't expect perfect equality of outcome on that front either.

Note this also applies to gender. I'm a fat, heavy person, if I'm in a burning building, I want my firefighter to be able to carry 300 pounds. I'd make an educated guess that there are a lot more men than women who can carry 300 pounds.

I read a study a while ago that said women are 77% less likely to die in a car accident. By that same logic (and personal anecdote), I much prefer female drivers to male drivers when I am a passenger.

That's not to say there aren't women who can carry me, or that there aren't men who drive responsibly, but equity in either of these fields would probably lead to more deaths, because different types of people, on average, are better at different things, and an economy which encourages everyone to do what they are best at brings out the best in all of us.

An economy in which the most competent are artificially handicapped and the least competent are artificially boosted is worse for everyone.

What did the white child do to deserve this? How much better could they possibly be at drooling and crawling to have so much more wealth available to them?

So I guess your belief is that household wealth has no impact on children?

> The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

This makes it sound like affirmative action is illegal. But it is currently allowed and many companies brag about doing it.

What Twilio is doing is basically the same. It's like affirmative action for layoffs.

I agree that GP was wrong to say that discrimination is mandated, which it is not.