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Comment by b6 | Hacker News Reader

But do you agree that the goal should be, more or less, to create a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes matter as little as, say, eye color does today?

If so, what is the plan to achieve that goal? Don't we achieve it by actually acting that way as much as possible? That's what makes sense to me.

Suppose we, in the name of equality or diversity or fairness, actually elevate the importance of bodily attributes like ethnicity and sex, deliberately considering them during hiring, and build that practice into our culture. Having practiced doing it wrong for however many years, will we someday decide it isn't needed anymore and get rid of it?

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It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending you've already achieved it. If current problems are driven by subconscious biases then you need to eliminate those. It seems to me that the best way to eliminate them is to forcibly overcome them until people get used to seeing more minorities in these positions and replace their subconscious biases with new ones.

OK, I can readily believe lots of our problems stem from subconscious biases. But what do you think about the questions I posed? Are we trying to create a world where we don't care about body attributes? If so, do you advocate doing the exact opposite behavior (deliberately paying attention to body attributes and factoring them into decisions) for some temporary period and then stopping?

Yes to both.

We're already factoring these things into decisions whether we want to or not. I don't see anything weird about saying that we should change how we do so, as a step towards getting rid of it altogether.

I think that as long as we have large discrepancies in how many people with or without a particular attribute are in a particular profession, we'll have subconscious biases in evaluating who's good at that profession. If you spend your whole life in an environment where almost all the best programmers are purple people, you'll have a hard time overcoming the notion that purple people are generally better programmers. Pretending not to notice color will simply persist the status quo. If we deliberately include more orange people for a time, then we may be able to overcome that.

I don't want to be unfair to you or your argument, but I can't understand what you're saying any other way than that we should build racism and sexism into our policies and processes as a step toward eliminating racism and sexism.

I don't see why you should understand it any other way, done that is in fact what I'm saying. It's like putting wheels on an airplane. You want to be in the air, but you have to deal with the fact that you're on the ground or else you won't get anywhere.

I don't believe the two approaches conflict.

We're all familiar with the possibly apocryphal experiment of five monkeys, a ladder, and an electric shock - with the end of the experiment being five monkeys that have never been shocked, but their behaviour is changed. I think we all like to think we've evolved above this kind of manipulation, though I also suspect we each have stories of having worked in professional environments, staffed by evidently smart people, where we observe this same phenomenon.

(Aside -- it's sobering to consider that the people we've worked with may have stories about such effects operating upon us.)

Anyway, point being that while you may be correct in the assertion:

  > It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending
  > you've already achieved it.

What if the goal is to have the next generation(s) achieve a way of thinking by pretending (I'm not ecstatic about that word, but it'll have to do) we think that way now.

Do you think that may have a positive effect?

I'm reminded of the Garbage Dump Troop - a fascinating story, told in many places, but here's a succinct explanation of the effect:

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-tr...

Unsurprisingly, alpha males usually don't find the story charming. ; )

I think the next generation will tend to do what we do. If a certain profession has a racial makeup that greatly differs from that of the general population, that will tend to cause the next generation to think of that profession as being typically whatever race is predominant. In short, if you grow up in an environment where almost all programmers are young black women (being deliberately opposite here) then you'll tend to see young black women as being more qualified, all else being equal, and this will perpetuate the disparity.

It seems to me that if you want to get to a state where diversity just happens by not consciously thinking about race, you need to first get to a state where diversity happens, let it sit for a while, then relax it. I don't see how it's supposed to work if you just stop deliberately discriminating against people and otherwise let things take their course. It seems like trying to achieve flight by making airplane noises and thinking real hard about being up in the air.

How is race or sex aware hiring going to help with eliminating subconscious bias? It reinforces bigotry, because it gives a rationalization for bigots to not respect their minority coworkers, as they can claim that they were not subject to the same scrutiny when they were hired.

What is the historical justification for the effectiveness affirmative action? Certainly, countries like Malaysia and South Africa with extreme disparity seem to have mixed results at best.

I agree that pretending ethnicity/sex are not visible, is not the same thing as making ethnicity/sex invisible. But actually implementing enrollment and employment laws or policies that hide this information from decision makers could make it nearly invisible.

That's actually not the fundamental problem though. Even if you managed to a perfectly even proportion of middle class stem graduates from 1st and 2nd tier universities represented on your payroll, you'll still end up with a monoculture. Not because of some hard to pin down unconscious bigotry, but because little has been done to eliminate class from society, and social class is a big factor in a persons access to education and the quality of their childhood.

Poor, working class women have less work opportunities than men, as less educated ( religious ) working class people tend conform to traditional gender roles more than middle class people, well paid working class jobs require more physical strength, and unlike middle class mothers, working class mothers cannot afford childcare or help with housework while working or studying. Like ethnicity, class is almost hereditary so is easily confused with ethnicity in statistics.

Making the statistics look better by hiring proportionally more middle class minorities is a face saving exercise, not a solution.

Who cares what coworkers claim? If job performance is used for evaluations and promotions, then fairness is preserved.

And the assumption that minorities can only be hired by insufficient scrutiny is not a very enlightened attitude. Perhaps the company can look really hard for qualified candidates that help balance the workforce. How about that?

I agree that real progress is the right way to evaluate hiring/ admissions programs. Do qualified people end up in a diverse student/worker population? Then you're doing it right.

I would care if my coworkers were bigots, and I would especially care if they were prejudiced against me, how can you effectively work with someone who doesn't respect you? Pretending bigotry doesn't exist is the same thing as pretending that race/sex aren't visible. You will also have to apply the same affirmative action when promoting people, as a couple of years work experience doesn't erase the generations of privilege you're competing with.

I never said that minorities can only be hired by applying insufficient scrutiny. What I will say is as a group, minorities can only be hired in a proportion that is different to the proportion of minorities in group of qualified applicants if some weighting is taken off the job relevant qualifications, and applied to their membership in minority groups.

If you could come up with a huge list of entirely fungible, interchangeable resumes and interview notes, you could consciously pick minorities first without harming the quality of your recruiting. What kind of roles would have that weak of a job market though?

If candidates aren't fungible weighting any importance to race/sex means taking some weighting off something else, and it means that bigots will assume individuals from minority groups are less qualified, because of the fact that the group as a whole is less qualified, because of your own policies. It perpetuates both inequality and bigotry.

If you merely know about the race/sex/whatever of your candidates then you're already giving some weight to those attributes whether you want to or not.

If we had some way of scoring candidates numerically, then yes, you'd just pick the biggest number. But I've never heard of a hiring system that worked like that. There's always some subjectivity. You can look at a bunch of resumes and rank them, but a good chunk of that ranking is guesswork and opinion. That gives room for your biases to play, and you'll end up with the "best" candidates tending to match those biases. And don't tell me you don't have any racial or gender biases; you do, everybody does.

You shouldn't give up a 9.9/10 because he's white, and hire a 2.4/10 because she's black. But if you have a bunch of candidates around 8/10, consider hiring the minority candidate who's a 7.9 rather than the candidate who matches the existing demographics of your team and is an 8.1. Your numbers are probably ±3 anyway, so it's not the irrational decision it sounds like it would be in a universe of pure numbers.

So you'll just take a guess at your biases and then try to counteract them arbitrarily?

I'd like to know how you even begin to judge what ethnicity someone is just by looking at them. Sounds like an extremely fraught game to play.

Part of the answer is surely to try your utmost to take all the subjectivity out of the process. I've mentioned it here previously, and people said that they enjoy getting to make subjective value judgments of candidates. I think that is a poor attitude.

This is the kind of process I was thinking:

One person strips CV's of irrelevant info (names, ages, schools, etc). They hand that to another person who decides who to interview. When the candidate is interviewed, pre-determined questions get asked, and then notes are taken of their answers and any relevant info, and that gets handed over to the person who makes the ultimate hiring decision.

Even that process probably leaks a bit, but it's better than simply trying to guess.

You don't have to guess at your biases. Look at the demographics of your company and you will see them.

Your idea sounds great too. I think there's still room for error there, in how the questions are formulated or answers interpreted. Think a mild version of the old Jewish Problems. But it could certainly make things a lot better.

Let's say we all started ignoring everything you're talking about today.

Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly the same area as a white family making $30k.

This family is also much more likely to have family that has gone to prison due to previous racist institutions, and less likely to have had 3 generations of parents having gone to Stanford.

So sure, race gets ignored, but do you think people will start ignoring all the other social signals? Even if you ignore everything else, being born to a white family in itself means you inherit centuries of advantages

This is the justification behind affirmative action. Even if it might not be "fair" when looking at an individual case, its also pretty unfair when a kid just happens to be born to a family that has had opportunity robbed from them until extremely recently.

Your end goal might be laudable, but the path to reach it requires corrections

> Your end goal might be laudable, but the path to reach it requires corrections

If you think it's a good goal, how would you would try to achieve it?

Well... Things like affirmative action do help price in the advantages race have given people, at least for a while. A stronger safety net works too.

Obviously in combination with "magically getting rid of all racist/sexist thoughts".

But doesn't affirmative action necessitate the exact behavior we want to eliminate, making decisions based on body attributes?

    Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly 
    the same area as a white family making $30k.

I've heard this figure several times and no one using it has yet cited a source for this. Could you please provide a citation for this figure and any secondary sources that study primary sources attempting to explain this disparity.

I don't doubt this figure could exist at some time pre-1990, but I don't understand how this could possibly be the case since the start of the housing bubble that burst in 2008 in which many many firms pretty much threw out all prejudices in the pursuit of money as people tried to source any and all loans to sell Wall Street. They not only threw out prejudices, they actively overlooked issues that might correlate with and work against some identity groups like credit rating and earning power.

>Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed.

>Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.

(From http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...)

The logic here seems circular. How do you get from a world with racism/sexism/etc issues, to one without? Simply by assuming it to be true?

How does acting like the problem doesn't exist solve the problem? If that's not what you mean, then do you mean we should all just suddenly stop being racist/sexist/bigotted/etc? Just like that? How would that work? How do you get your neighbor to go along with that? Or white middle manager, who means well but is uncomfortable hiring people of certain ethnicities or sexualities because of "culture fit"? It seems that anyone willing to do what you are saying, if I'm understanding it correctly, is probably already of the belief that a world without racism/sexism/etc would be better, and already behaves in the manner you suggest. In which case, we still live in a fucked up world and system where these things are actually still big problems.

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