Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, you can make more board seats and allocate them specifically to women, but then you're back to square one. Check out the debate on this not-zero-sum attempt by a YC investor to teach women to program [1].

I can't really find anything that indicates that merely removing bias (which hasn't happened in corporate America, mind you; we're several steps behind that) is sufficient to break down power structures long term. If you have a source, I'd love to see it!

With regard to the polygons simulation, I think you misunderstood it: once they're segregated, they remain so even if you drop the bias to zero. Active de-biasing is necessary to re-integrate them.

Edit: are you seriously suggesting that e.g. race relations in the U.S. are due to affirmative action and not slavery, redlining, Jim Crow, ongoing police brutality, racial sentencing disparity, etc? If so, I think we're done here. FakeComments indeed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269

Nope, I’m suggesting the change in the trend of race relations is due to affirmative action and other instances of modern institutional racism: it was on a 120-140 year upswing, then started crashing.

I also didn’t meant allocate them specifically to women: women should compete for new board seats, and based on the trends prior to sexist policies being implemented, that alone should be enough for discover equilibrium in a few generations — no need to randomly discriminate to force the result you believe should occur.

That static state of your game is purely an artifact of the game and doesn’t correspond to the real world in any meaningful analogy, because there’s other forces on movement than your unhappiness with the racial composition of your neighbors — why would I support you enacting bigoted policies based on what is literally toy fiction?

All that game concludes is if people aren’t biased, they won’t move because of their neighbors; but if they are, they will. Duh, you built that into the model.

That you’re putting that forward as a serious argument is genuinely frightening.

Also, you should be more specific what you mean by “break down power structures”, what specifically would that look like and what specifically do you mean by “power structures”?

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