Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#41

Post by tuna-piano » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

blululu wrote: post #27

tuna-piano wrote: post #9

What person from an underrepresented group wants to be chosen just because of their group status? Isn't that highly patronizing for someone who likely had worked hard to get to where they got? Do you want to be "pretty great for a xxxxx person!" or just "one of the best". Is this a lesson that people want their kids to learn? Doesn't this also lead discrimination actually being a rational (and maybe ethical) thing to…

>>What person from an underrepresented group wants to be chosen just because of their group status? Isn't that highly patronizing for someone who likely had worked hard to get to where they got? Do you want to be "pretty great for a xxxxx person!" or just "one of the best". For comparison, consider the case of people who get their jobs via nepotism. The people who are hired for nepotism are seldom concerned with the…

I think your nepotism example and "preponderance of talent and success is hard to quantify precisely" are nice arguments and give me something to think about, thanks.

But when you say "I'm not sure if meritocracy makes sense"... you are really saying that instead of trying for meritocracy, they should just use skin color?

How do you feel about the idea of blind auditions for orchestras (auditions where the candidate cannot be seen, only heard)? These were originally done to eliminate the possibility of discrimination.

I think orchestras could also qualify for "preponderance of talent and success is hard to quantify precisely"... should they eliminate blind auditions so they can choose performers based on skin color+gender?

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#42

Post by john_moscow » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #37

john_moscow wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would actually blame the corrective action for it. Companies are not personal, they are purely about managing business and risks. When you hire a person, you care for 2 things: 1. How likely will they perform their duties in a way that is profitable to the company? 2. How much will it cost to the company to fire them, if they turn out to generate loss. Some people may have a stereotype that people of certain backgr…

> Companies are not personal, they are purely about managing business and risks. Let's completely refute this notion: "Companies with more culturally and ethnically diverse executive teams were 33% more likely to see better-than-average profits. In McKinsey’s previous study—conducted with 2014 numbers—that increase had been 35%. At the board of directors level, more ethnically and cultural diverse companies were 43%…

I would dare say the causality is reversed here. Once your company reaches a certain size, NOT having a diverse executive team will very quickly get you labeled as racist and will cost you dearly. Nobody cares about a mom and pop bakery, but imagine the outrage in the media, if Apple or Google did not pick their executive teams based on the diversity constraints.

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#43

Post by perl4ever » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

TheGrim999 wrote: post #19

amluto wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by being as racist as it's possible to be. Even if someone were to hire someone else solely because of the color of their skin, this would be nowhere near as racist as it’s possible to be. Hint: people are being killed because of the color of their skin right now. People in the US used to buy people in large numbers because of the color of their skin.

I know this will be hard to accept, but no matter how many people tell me that minorities are being killed because of the color of their skin, I've noticed that not a single one of these people ever include any facts or data to back up that claim. Sure, black people are killed by police. So are white people. So are people of every race. All the actual data I've seen is that black people are killed less frequently, in…

"in proportion to the violent crime they commit"

This comes across as tone deaf when people are talking about victims who were not committing violent crimes. For example, allegedly passing a counterfeit $20.

Furthermore, the violent crime statistics exist in the context of people not being able to trust the police, and to the extent they do, the police not doing anything in response to shootings.

So it's easy to see a causal relationship between police misconduct and the prevalence of violent crime in certain communities. People are trying to penetrate the mindset that it's intrinsic, and say, no, police corruption systematically produces the problem and racism saps the motivation to solve it.

I was just noticing that my Google News feed is reporting local shootings, seemingly in a different world than the rest of the news, but it's quoting the police response as basically saying "gee, we have no leads, we wish people would stop settling their disagreements with violence". With the most charitable interpretation, it's ineffectual and lends support to people saying "gee, why don't we just defund the police in favor of social workers".

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#44

Post by lbj » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

bitcurious wrote: post #32

lbj wrote: post #17

I still don't see the value in diversity for diversities sake. Having read much from Thomas Sowell on the matter I think most of these terms will lead to much worse outcomes than what we have present day.

Diversity of viewpoints is essential for long term prosperity - it allows for a marketplace of ideas and limits blind spots. The first time this really clicked for me was when I dived deeply into the history of the First World War. If I could restate the root cause, it was complete failure by both the British and especially the Germans to envision a point of view different from their own. They each operated like they…

Do you have any evidence/studies to back up this point of view?

Sowell has done quite a bit of research which backs up his conclusions. He has a couple of books on the subject you might be interested in.

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#45

Post by karpierz » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #31

karpierz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like it or not it is not a natural human sentiment to stop and go "well one hundred years ago my great grandfather benefited unfairly...". It's not a hundred years ago, it's this year, right now. And I think if you're going to bend to "natural human sentiment", then you might as well give up on trying to get people to change at all. Why try to get people to exercise or learn if "natural human sentiment" is to sit o…

I removed that portion of my comment before I saw your response because it was a poorly developed thought that detracted from the substance of my original comment.

The point is that we shouldn't adapt our processes because people feel cheated. Just because you feel like someone didn't earn something doesn't mean much.

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#46

Post by Natsu » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

TheGrim999 wrote: post #6

whatshisface wrote: post #2

What's the end goal here, to have people hired "because they are black?" I guarantee that will happen if there is money to be made by doing it.

If you haven't noticed, that's been the goal for a long time now. People get accepted to college because of the color of their skin. People get better SAT scores now because of the color of their skin. Every major company has diversity boards which make sure to hire people based in the color of their skin. Hollywood and big business choose who to be in ads, movies, and other customer facing media because of the color…

It's weird that people act like this is the only solution to correct past injustice, too, when there's a much simpler racially-neutral method. You just help all disadvantaged persons equally. Inasmuch as any particular identifiable group is thereby disadvantaged, they're disproportionately helped by this neutral method. If only people of race X were poor, then helping all poor people would be isomorphic to helping all people of race X. But it will always remain balanced to the degree that any group is disadvantaged.

So if we just make things biased in favor of the poor, this will be able to self-correct automatically.

I don't get why that isn't seen as the best solution.

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#47

Post by dang » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

mtgp1000 wrote: post #36

"diversity and inclusion" initiatives are coming up on a long overdue reckoning. The premise is to allege discrimination, based solely on "evidence" in the form of inequality of outcome, and then use that unilateral accusation as justification for the accusing party to practice the discrimination they claim to oppose. Bonus: you are liable to lose your job for criticising these practices. The comments ITT suggest tha…

You can't conclude anything from a single thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23555398

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules on HN? I'm afraid you've been breaking them in two ways. First, it's not ok to use the site primarily [1] for political or ideological battle. That's probably the single most destructive thing people do here, because battle mode and curiosity mode do not go together. Some political overlap is ok [2], but it's not ok to use the site primarily this way.

Second, please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. [3]

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#48

Post by OminousWeapons » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

lbj wrote: post #17

I still don't see the value in diversity for diversities sake. Having read much from Thomas Sowell on the matter I think most of these terms will lead to much worse outcomes than what we have present day.

The classic argument in favor of diversity for diversity's sake is that people frame expectations for themselves based on what they see around them. If there are no members of group X in a field, then many people in group X will assume that field is not for them. At a societal level, we miss out if people who would have been highly productive in a field choose not to enter it behind assumptions about inclusion. By injecting members of group X into the field, we can help eliminate those assumptions thereby enticing more qualified people into the field and yielding productivity benefits long term. At an individual corporate level, the value is less clear. I've heard that people do not want to be the only member of group X at a company, so by building a base of members from group X it might make it easier to attract high tier talent who might otherwise pass and work for a competitor. This should be somewhat measurable for a company.

This is somewhat tangential, but it's also important to make sure that your user base is appropriately represented in your workforce (eg if you are developing products catering to white males then it probably doesn't make sense to have no white males in your workforce). That's less diversity for diversity's sake and more representation for the sake of accurate product development though.

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#49

Post by mullingitover » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #38

mullingitover wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really so interesting that these groups of politically motivated people think they're ending what they perceive as racism ... by being as racist as it's possible to be. The existing system is already very biased against them, I don't have a problem with some corrective action. "In fact, companies are more than twice as likely to call minority applicants for interviews if they submit whitened resumes than candi…

> I don't have a problem with some corrective action. What you're arguing in favor of is addressing problems from technical debt by adding more technical debt on top. The corrective action is to perform a root cause analysis and fix things at the root.

The clear, obvious root cause is that humans have a deep tribalistic streak. I would love to hear a solution to that that doesn't involve invasive action to educate people in early childhood. A baby step in that direction was integrating public schools, and to this day a major political party is still trying to reverse that simple measure.

Re: Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds

#50

Post by malandrew » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

john_moscow wrote: post #42

mullingitover wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies are not personal, they are purely about managing business and risks. Let's completely refute this notion: "Companies with more culturally and ethnically diverse executive teams were 33% more likely to see better-than-average profits. In McKinsey’s previous study—conducted with 2014 numbers—that increase had been 35%. At the board of directors level, more ethnically and cultural diverse companies were 43%…

I would dare say the causality is reversed here. Once your company reaches a certain size, NOT having a diverse executive team will very quickly get you labeled as racist and will cost you dearly. Nobody cares about a mom and pop bakery, but imagine the outrage in the media, if Apple or Google did not pick their executive teams based on the diversity constraints.

Not only that, for the time period when this study was done, the most successful businesses will be in cities where there is statistically a more diverse pool to draw from.

Is the cause the diversity or is it that cities are generally hyper-competitive places that draw the most competitive people in society and filter out those that can't hack it.

Your reason and my reason are just two possibilities of reversed causality. I'm sure there are many others.

The conclusion of that study is basically a wet streets cause rain conclusion.

One only needs to look at foreign firms like those in China that are crushing it to see that many non-diverse businesses are doing very well. I'm sure those businesses weren't included because it wouldn't support the conclusion the researcher wanted to arrive at.