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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

This is an honest question to people who side with the proposal. At what point would these measures become unnecessary? What are the conditions?

Btw what is the name of the ideology that one would use to justify this?

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> This is an honest question to people who side with the proposal. At what point would these measures become unnecessary? What are the conditions?

> Btw what is the name of the ideology that one would use to justify this?

I'm not one of the supporters, but I've talked many times to such people and have encountered a lot of resistance to them laying out stopping or success conditions. I'm of the option that the diversity activists want these diversity programs to continue until they are happy with the results, which (more than likely) will be never.

I've also seen a lot of resistance the idea considering the perspectives of anyone who's not a member of one of these "victim"-groups (at least not until their group has experienced "10,000 years of oppression and discrimination."

This is a hard question to answer. But I'd consider something like racial bussing in the 60s. This was a positive step and was enacted without explicit exit conditions. Such exit conditions are not necessarily a requirement for these sorts of initiatives.

The two are very different tho. One is in some sense removing a rule, one is adding it.

Bussing is actually a classic example of a well intentioned policy most supported for its symbolism which ended up damaging its supposed beneficieries because it ignored the necessity of matching peoples' abilities with the expectations placed on them. Putting 2nd-grade readers in classes with 4th-grade readers is a recipe for frustration and failure, not matter how pure your heart.

The other question is for people who side with the proposal: what would be considered 'too much effort' when it comes to inclusion and equitability?

The answer to this question I usually get is that you cannot oversteer because a) we are still far away from a fair state and b) even if you oversteer it’s fair to make up for past injustice.

It’s not about effort. It’s aboit discriminating against people to fill quotas and turning away qualified candidates when they’re not the “correct” gender or race.

It's wrong to claim that qualified candidates are being rejected in favor of less qualified, but diverse, candidates.

No position in this argument supports anything like that.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40538483/youtube-sued-for-limiti...

At no point in that article does it mention hiring unqualified candidates.

To be a bit blunter, there are plenty of great engineers out there, and some of them happen to not be white/Asian.

I don't know if what YouTube did was right or wrong, but pretending like only white/Asian people can be good at computers is quite insane.

If you reject candidates based on race, the probability of that having happened is very high.

Sorry, but that's simply not true. There are plenty of qualified candidates, all of whom can do any given engineering job.

The probability of hiring an under qualified candidate is entirely unaffected by refusing to interview white/Asian people.

Edit: Replying here, since I'm now rate limited...

I can see how you might think you're not selecting the "most qualified candidate" by limiting who you interview based on diversity criteria, if you believed hiring was very precise, but in my experience, hiring is much fuzzier than that.

"The most qualified candidate" is not an objective number you reach after plugging values into a formula (please, show me the formula that can accurately calculate "fit"), and saying there is a singular objective "most qualified candidate" isn't actually how the hiring process works.

Further, if you identify a competitive disadvantage among your teams related to diversity, hiring someone who doesn't diversify your team (though is otherwise qualified) may actually hurt your ability to meet team goals and deliver (in this case) quality software. That "most qualified candidate" may not be qualified to provide the viewpoints you need for you team to thrive.

> The probability of hiring an under qualified candidate is entirely unaffected by refusing to interview white/Asian people.

But the probability of false negatives for white and Asian candidates rises drastically. There is a very high probability that the most qualified candidate was rejected immediate on the basis of race.

That is how that works. Like if you look at the possible distributions and the outcomes, you'll see it.

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