>Hanania has an article about France, which forbids the collection of any government statistics on any of this. I found this interesting, because I’d always heard claims this was a left-wing plot to avoid having statistics on the racial balance of (eg) crime. But actually France just takes a principled stance against any race statistics! Wild!
I'm not sure why this would be phrased as "forbidding the collection of any government statistics" instead of just... government not collecting statistics on this. Which it can do completely by its own decision, indeed one could argue it's not even an action but rather a lack of one.
Presumably at least the more libertarian-minded would find it better for government to refrain to collect information on whatever instead of insisting on collecting that information, whatever that specific piece of information is.
> I'm not sure why this would be phrased as "forbidding the collection of any government statistics" instead of just... government not collecting statistics on this.
Because this is the legislative branch forbidding the executive branch from collecting these data. It is a way stronger restriction than just having the executive branch choosing not to collect it.
Within the French Consitution, the governement refers to (a part of) the executive branch. In that regard, it is correct to say that it is not allowed to collect racial data, because it is indeed prevented from doing so by laws enacted by the Parliament.
“The government” is not usually one entity. In most countries, there are national governments, city governments, regional governments, legislatures, executives, courts, and often lots of things like transit agencies and electrical utilities that are separate from any of these. You could treat “the government” as one entity that makes a coherent choice, but this would be as misleading as saying that “humanity” made a choice that many individuals would like to go against but can’t.
No it can't. There are far too many people involved in these things, someone out there is going to have the idea to collect this stuff and do it on their own, unless you expressly prohibit them from doing so.
A lot of these comments seem like they're beating up a strawman where Hanania supposedly claimed that affirmative action kills merit-based hiring entirely, i.e. that any nonwhites hired would be utterly unqualified for the position they were hired for. Since that's not the case, they thereby assume that Hanania's entire argument is wrong. This is pretty goofy and isn't what Hanania is saying.
Yes, as he points out above it's an explicitly political book. He's not trying to make airtight academic arguments, he's trying to make persuasive ones. I'm sure that means he elides some information to make concise arguments, meaning he doesn't go into detail about every caveat or counter-argument. Considering the genre, I don't think that should be interpreted as being intellectually dishonest as long as his points are directionally correct.
Not really, I think maybe some people don't feel the visceral unfairness of being knocked down the totem pole because of the color of your skin but that seems like all that is required to be angry about AA.
The argument Hanania puts forward is deliberately slippery. Some relevant questions that aren't addressed (per Scott's review). How much has affirmative action has reduced the meritoriousness of new hires? How meritorious was the system pre-civil rights? Why should we think things would be more meritorious if it was removed? And related, what is the value of employees having a recourse in cases of discrimination?
The on-its-face premise of the book is that we should care about the this, but even if you can prove that there's a non-zero effect on one dimension, you haven't proved that it matters or even shown the net effect is negative.
Do you hold the pro-affirmative action side to this same standard of evidence, or is it assumed to be axiomatically worthwhile and only dissenters have to climb this hill?
Why do you choose to write this fully general counterargument under only this comment? Why don't you hold the anti-affirmative action side to this same standard of scrutiny?
Women are overrepresented in HR because HR departments started later than Operations or Finance or other parts of the business, and started at a time of increased female participation in the workforce.
And also at the same time as the gender diversity push. So, a company has 7 men in director level positions, and 21 experienced men one level down, but wants to have women in director level positions. Hey, look, we just created a new director position with no clear internal hires available... might as well hire a female.
> Women are overrepresented in HR because HR departments started later than Operations or Finance or other parts of the business, and started at a time of increased female participation in the workforce.
No, women are most of HR because it is work that appeals to women. Recruiters are also mostly women. Recruiters are not a new thing.
Do you really believe that, in businesses founded after the 70s, women aren't overrepresented in HR?
Yeah I would agree it is more a disposition sort of thing (and I also think partly political). HR is about being a busybody/gossip/school marm. About avoiding risks and scolding people.
All things that are a little more appealing to women generally.
As far as the political element, since one of the main things HR does is "enforce rules regarding the treatment of women", you can see where it would be more attractive to women than men.
"HR departments started later than Operations or Finance or other parts of the business"
When I entered the workforce (late 80s), HR departments were just starting. But they were simply another name for the Personnel departments. I never really understood the difference in terms.
There was an old joke from Dilbert or something about how "Human Resources" still made employees sound too valuable, so they were going to change to either "Livestock" or "Biomass".
> I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.
That's funny, a Swedish person would immediately get why this could be a thing. Friday afternoons are *significantly* more casual here and not uncommonly involve alcohol; possibly this is an European phenomenon that doesn't exist in America?
E.g. wrapping up shortly after lunch, (maybe grab a beer from the office fridge as you finish up your work, depends on the workplace) then sit around to chat for a bit before leaving at 3 or something. Colleagues also commonly beeline directly to the nearby pub to drink together: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/afterwork
Traditional in the UK as well, although becoming increasingly rarer. Some industries/companies do still do the "pint at Friday lunch followed by an hour or two of half hearted emails and then back to the pub" pattern. Journalists/parliamentary work often follows this pattern still from what I can tell. Slowly being killed off by a) increasing Americanisation ("professionalism") of corporate world, b) working from home on Fridays and c) "PC culture".
(I like the word "afterwork"- we'd usually call this 'after work drinks' in the UK but that'd apply more to Thursday evenings rather than Friday afternoons)
This exists in at least some American companies too (but maybe not hospitals/doctor offices given the weird schedules, which would explain Scott not having encountered it).
Yeah, I was surprised Scott was surprised. Friday is the end of the work week/start of the weekend. People probably have plans to go out and socialise after work, maybe with co-workers. So after lunch till clocking-off time, you're winding down and not really doing anything serious or too much. Finishing up things but not starting them. Getting ready to end the day and go home and enjoy the weekend.
Not everywhere, and the drinking culture isn't as strong as it used to be, but "Friday afternoons are the boys' club times" doesn't sound that unusual to me.
The culture in the US has changed A LOT is my understanding. In the 90s I had employers where they would talk about how they used to keep alcohol and drink during the day in the staff/break rooms. This was in places a disparate as a car dealership and a university TA/Faculty departmental office.
It sounded like this was fairly normal even in the late 70s? But in the late 90s/early 00s it seemed very alien and not ok. Like if you had brought a beer and were drinking that in the TA/Faculty departmental office that would be frowned on.
I did work at a non-profit where we once or twice had the (very old) boss bring beer for everyone to share to a staff party. But even then it was like 6 beers for 15 people and it was seen as pretty out of the ordinary.
Going to the bar after work is a thing at many workplaces. Or having drinks at an evening company party. But not during the day.
Depends not only on industry, but regional subculture and employment supply/demand dynamic. My anecdata:
-- large old-line defense contractor tech company, late 90s, upper Midwest: alcohol use during business hours absolutely prohibited, automatic firing offense, people occasionally rolled their eyes but nobody thought it was weird or worth challenging.
-- Big Tech back when it was cool, California, 2005-2015ish: alcohol flowed freely with more or less explicit official sanction. The coolest engineering subculture was known for their "Whiskey Thursdays," bottles of whiskey were standard thank-you gifts for co-workers who had gone above and beyond to help you out, and off-site events frequently featured unlimited open bars and people going around proactively offering you drinks as social bonding lubricant.
-- Big Tech post honeymoon, CA, 2015ish-2020: still somewhat alcohol tolerant but dialed way back, no more unlimited open bars or proactive offers. Partly this was concern about social discomfort caused to nondrinking employees, especially those in recovery; but mostly it was due to real and significant stories of alcohol fueled sexual harassment coming out, including one notorious case where a generally wonderful and responsible senior VP did something truly stupid while drunk at an off-site and was justifiably made to resign over it.
I recall one tech company that repeatedly told me during interview/onboarding about "Beer Thirty" (similar to my first programming job), only to then send me an employee handbook claiming a very strict zero-tolerance policy toward alcohol which prohibited even having a beer during a business lunch.
I recall reading a pamphlet from the 90s? Early 2000s? for some sort of professional nuclear conference where you could optionally sign up for the conference's pub crawl.
Back when American companies still used to expect formal dress at work “casual Fridays” was a thing. And TGIF is a saying that predates the bar that opened in the 1970s.
In the Netherlands it is also common to have drinks with colleagues to end the workday on Fridays (vrijmibo), and, depending on the company, to keep the drinks going later into the night :)
Most American offices I have experience with have similar, if less pronounced, traditions. Usually not every week, but if it's a slow week or you just completed a major project, it's not uncommon for managers to take their teams to happy hour at like 3 or 4 on a Friday. People will also occasionally take off early on Friday without officially taking PTO without anyone caring because it's understood that very little productive is likely to get done after about noon. Then again, I've known offices (thankfully never worked in one) where Friday afternoons were dreaded as the time when managers pawned off work they didn't finish on their subordinates so they could take off for the weekend. YMMV.
It definitely happens in the US too. After a whole week of work, people want to relax, and your coworkers are right there to relax with. At my old company, we would drink beer for the last couple hours on Friday afternoons.
It's pretty bizarre to me that Scott claims not to understand why people would drink on Friday afternoons. I guess he's a teetotaller but even teetotallers relax after work in some form, surely.
Missed the window to comment on the original...I found myself confused about the implicit/explicit line between "you can't use quotas" and "nice business you have there, it'd be a shame if it wasn't diverse enough". Maybe the confusion is the point, in the same way the process is the punishment. Yet the regional-level management for [popular grocer] where I work...it's not literally quotas, but it's well-known and agreed upon by everyone that there's been a strong official-unofficial mandate to always privilege women and minorities in hiring*, promotion, and HR incidents for years now. (This also includes Don't Call Us, We'll Call You - diverse employees get approached more often by management about mentoring/maybe seeking promotion if they don't self-pursue, after controlling for ability. It's always kind of...surprising? when there's a new vanilla manager, unless there's just no other current candidates.)
Also weird is that this clear directionality coexists with an open contempt for diversity training and relatively lax codes of conduct around things like jokes and fraternization. So it's hardly an all-in position, we aren't staffed with True Believers and the culture isn't particularly PC. I keep comparing my workplace to the Sheetz case - which sounds way more towards "woke" than anything I deal with - and just come away puzzled about inconsistent standards. Civil rights law seems pretty complicated. Maybe it really is an Eye of Sauron pretext-type situation, and us being weirdly culturally popular is doing the actual bulk of CYA work. You don't actually have to be progressive as long as progressives shop with you anyways, or something...
*extra awkward to implement cause it's...a grocery store, it's not like we require resumes or use any sort of screening tests besides interviews. So there's weird kludge criteria like "are they passionate about shopping at [company] and specifically wanting to work for us more than competitors", which...seems to have as much correlation to the job as the FAA biographical questionnaire. Or definitely-disparate-impact stuff like (unstated) narrow effectively-mandatory availability windows. I often feel like half the existing veteran employees couldn't get rehired under the current regime...
> Maybe the confusion is the point, in the same way the process is the punishment.
Yup.
> Yet the regional-level management for [popular grocer] where I work...it's not literally quotas, but it's well-known and agreed upon by everyone that there's been a strong official-unofficial mandate to always privilege women and minorities in hiring*, promotion, and HR incidents for years now.
I'm curious about why the company would *need* to privilege women in hiring and promotion. This isn't a tech company--gender differences in interests or aptitudes don't seem like they would be very relevant for work at a grocery store.
I suspect it's partly because of the (unstated obviously) "every successful bar/restaurant has Attractive Women staff and/or clientele" thing which applies to many othe retail roles...and partly that it is, indeed, somewhat of a gendered difference. Automation and productivity enhancements come very slowly in my sector, but improvements in, like, inventory management don't help much with the "soft skills" feminine-coded Customer Service duties. The actual unloading trucks, breaking down pallets, putting stuff on shelves, that stuff gets easier and easier. It's dealing with increasingly high standards for service, needy/problematic customers, and being able to convincingly (pretend to) care about others that keeps us up at night. Hard to teach, too; if someone doesn't meet a certain baseline for Social And Friendly, they're rarely getting hired/promoted, no matter their skills or experience elsewise. Cf. anyone can eventually learn to run a register semi-efficiently. Actually, many customers don't notice how shitty the actual checkout is if the cashier's an empathetic sweet-talker, so maybe that's Feature Not Bug?
I guess it could just be a coincidence, but...it feels like there's a reason female managers choose to staff the customer service desk while male managers run the floor (a mutually beneficial state of affairs for both parties, I've often been told). Likewise for grunts - guys want to stay in the dairy fridge all day and never talk to anyone except the yogurts, girls want to work in the floral department or the food sample station. There's a balance to be struck, of course, but it feels like (the company believes that) the Pareto optimization of employee gender more heavily favours females. Enough that making it an implicit explicit preference is worth the hassle, anyway.
(The cynical third theory would be that it's all just a ploy to give the customers/staff/media what they demand, whether there's any particular merit or not, a gendered pound of CYA flesh. I have no idea how we compare to the industry average, but it's frankly shocking how much sexual harassment one witnesses on the regular. Perhaps that's the thinking - lopsided gender balance for safety in numbers + plausible deniability.)
"[C]ould someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary?"
No... but also yes.
No, You couldn't do the actual suing, because you don't have standing. US courts can only decide if there is a "case or controversy" (Constitution, Article III, Section 2, Clause 1) and you aren't yourself affected (because you hold a degree, and because you never applied for any of these jobs).
But also yes, you could fund a "test case" on this: an organisation will find a bunch of people who didn't hold a degree, were otherwise qualified for a job, applied and were rejected on the grounds they didn't have a degree. They'll then go through each case very carefully to make sure there's no other special factors (because they want to force the court to decide that the degree requirement isn't necessary, and the court will look to find some other reason to rule on the case so they can avoid making a broad ruling about degrees), and to make sure that this person was really good for the job; ideally, they should now be doing that job for a competitor and they should be successful. Also, if they're trying to prove disparate impact, the test case needs to be from the protected class (ie, they need to be black). You also have to be pretty confident that your test case won't settle the case: you need to actually go to court to get a ruling as a precedent.
But - almost by definition - the test case will not be able to afford to pay for the amount of lawyers needed to take this through the various levels of the courts and win at the Supreme Court. If the test case wins, then the next cases will be a lot simpler and cheaper, as they can use the test case as precedent.
And this is why some random local small business that refused to make a cake for a gay wedding ends up in front of the Supreme Court: because some organisation decided that Masterpiece Cakeshop was the perfect test case and paid for their lawyers.
Also, you wouldn’t need to. A few dozen states and the federal government have already started trying to crack down on this, including ending degree requirements for many government jobs.
One other thing is that companies often include an "or equivalent experience" clause in the job reqs. Occasionally they even act on it! I work as a programmer in an old-tech firm (we make things you can kick ... very expensive things you can kick) and have worked with an engineer who was a drama major in college and was part of an interview team that recommended hiring a high school (but nothing further) graduate with a few years experience that looked good.
Our *typical* hire has a BS and MS in computer science. But we have some folks who don't have CS degrees at all and then the occasional very odd background.
True, but that seems like it's just kicking the can over to some other company. How are you supposed to get that "equivalent experience" in the first place with no degree? It seems like there are various possibilities, but none of them are good:
- (best case) start out long enough ago that they didn't care about degrees. But now that ladder has been pulled up.
- lie/exaggerate and get some sucker to hire you when you're really not qualified. "yeah I totally have a law degree from Columbia... " (not said- the country, not the university)
- get that first job through nepotism or someone randomly taking a flier on you "haha yeah it was pretty rough going there for the first few years... luckily they stuck with me and I eventually figured things out."
- get funding (from a rich family?) and launch your own startup, just for the experience. "we ran out of our runway, but I learned a lot along the way. Like, did you know that 'revenue' is really important?"
ideally we could pay for an internship/bootcamp, but it seems like that model is also going away.
Companies don't care about kicking the can. In the case I'm discussing the companies just don't want to get sued by the DoJ -- they don't care about HOW the potential employee gets that experience. The magic phrase "or equivalent experience" helps the company here because it makes it clear that the company isn't requiring a degree. This is especially true if the company occassionally hires people without the default degree.
You are considering the quesiton: How does a candidate get the experience to get hired without jumping through the hoops of getting a degree. A valid question, but not one that companies are spending a lot of time on.
The *military* solves the problem by requiring folks to sign up for a 4-year stint (technically, 8-years, but you can go reserves after 4). This allows the military to justify spending money on training because the military doesn't have to worry that after spending a year training someone who will then go work for a competitor offering more pay. Hollywood studios used to work this way, too: actors/actresses would sign a long term contract and the studio would pay for acting classes, etc. Apprenticeships worked that way in the past.
As a society, the US decided that this was bad (except for the military and sports contracts) so employees can quit a job pretty much whenever they want but employees are now responsible for their own training.
The companies mostly just want to (a) find competent employees, and (b) not get sued while doing (a).
There are other ways. A buddy of mine was a hobbyist, and ended up doing some very basic work for a seminary where he was taking classes. He got that gig because they knew him, and it started as "turn it off and turn it back on" level tech support, evolved into macros and (i think) some simple access and and then website stuff.
Then he moved up to Albany for his husband's work and he got on with a local consultancy on a try me basis, as their 20 or 30-somethingth employee. He worked out, and after three or six months they gave him a relatively real salary.
He's still there something like ten years later, making well below market rates while being one of their senior guys. I've been trying to get him to jump ship, or at least test the waters for a while now. I think he could probably double his salary.
Anyway, his company can't compete with top line employers on salary and they're not in a desirable destination, so they take chances. If you're looking to break in from a non-credentialed background, there are probably a lot of places like them.
What I take away from both this discussion and my own experiences is that both sides have a correct narrative (and correctly observe lots of uncorrected harms) that seems to support their interpretation and it's a very difficult issue to make progress on because we lack any real way to either measure or even agree on a cost/benefit framework. This is especially true because people care both about the impact and symbolic import of these laws.
In particular, it seems like all of the following are true.
1) It's absolutely true that there are still instances of discrimination and that, in practice, it can be very hard to impossible for the victim to meaningfully get legal redress. Bringing lawsuits is very expensive and they are hard to win.
2) Big employers often have limited control over and ability to measure productivity in their employees and lawsuits have a substantial element of random chance to them so often will take action -- or uninformed employees with principle-agent issues will -- which is meant to reduce the risk of losing these lawsuits that isn't what anyone thinks they should be obliged to do.
3) Lots of employment deciscions involve pretty arbitrary and unconsidered rules (why do we want employees who do Y well?) and it's true that sometimes these absolutely impose disparate impacts.
At the same time, that's often how we want buisness to work -- the founder/executive has a hypothesis that running the biz this way not that will work better and tests it (that's how we get evidence) and race/gender correlates with almost everything so it's really hard to prevent even intentional disparate impact without limiting that freedom.
--
I don't really have a good solution to this issue but the best I've got is that the court system isn't the right way to deal with these kind of incentives given both the high costs of lawsuits and high variance in outcomes.
>At the same time, that's often how we want buisness to work -- the founder/executive has a hypothesis that running the biz this way not that will work better and tests it (that's how we get evidence) and race/gender correlates with almost everything so it's really hard to prevent even intentional disparate impact without limiting that freedom.
This is really underdiscussed. It seems so harmless to suggest that people prove their tests work, but it effectively kills all market innovation in hiring (if you were consistent about it). Instead of trying whatever you believe, you have to get it to a point where you can convince a judge/expert witnesses. It would be almost centrally planned hiring.
What notably nobody other than the civil rights lawyers reported observing is anyone discriminating against underrepresented/historically disadvantaged minorities or women, or anyone expressing a desire to discriminate against them if only it were legal. The only narratives people report are either colorblind treatment, or discrimination against whites/Asians/men. That's one piece of anecdata in the direction that civil rigts law has outlived its usefulness, that there is only uncorrected harm in one direction (at least in the skilled, white collar professions most readers work in).
I dunno if you've met people but of course some people discriminate. Now you can ask whether that happens at a high rate or on net but I've certainly met people who feel they are 'compensating' for affirmative action. And there are certainly a certain fraction of people who are very much convinced that blacks are less intelligent, less trustworthy etc but of course don't call it discrimination. For instance, there are really quite compelling studies on traffic stops by cops showing they do target black drivers and treat them less respectfully (interestingly white and black cops do it about the same) despite the fact that no cops are are going to raise their hand and say they discriminate.
Of course people discriminate like crazy against other categories too like short men. So there is a question about whether it still makes sense to have a rule against but that gets to the point about the laws having both symbolic and practical aspects.
I'm not even an American, so my experience is less relevant to the context. Maybe people discriminate (I take that you mean discriminate against disadvantaged-on-average groups), but it's not an "of course". Being convinced that blacks are less intelligent, trustworthy etc. isn't discrimination, discrimination is to treat people differently, not to think of them differently. Did the studies about traffic stops correct for driver behavior?
"they do target black drivers and treat them less respectfully"
No - the studies say that cops talk more casually to black drivers because - guess what - the black drivers themselves talk more casually and cops are trained to talk like the people they're questioning to make them more comfortable.
On HR and Unions (the Helen Andrews point), I can't speak for the US. In the UK, it simply isn't true that HR is in some sense balancing between employer and employee interest. It is clearly acting in the employer interest. That may involve things like trying to make good employees happy (hmmmm) and it may well mean saying to managers "you can't do that". But isn't some kind of neutral party.
It's indirectly in the employee's interests, because HR will prevent management from breaking rules that protect employees, even if the basic aim is to protect management.
HR is theoretically for the employer's interest, but I think in practice they've become their own interest center, with goals that neither align with the employer or with the employee.
In my experience, it is either "HR is there to protect the owner(s)" or "HR is doing its own thing". When HR helps an employee (even if that's the majority of what they actually do), it is a value add to the department.
Also, I feel like a hugely under considered point in this debate is the extent to which the ignorance of legal standards by non-lawyers plays in this whole area.
And I think this discussion here proves that at least many people believe there are legal risks for doing all sorts of things and I suspect that the average person running a buisness or working in HR is less informed than the readers here. And even when lawyers are involved it can be hard to translate that knowledge into something useable by the rest of the company without over correcting (it's the equivalent of telling someone who doesn't understand computers to never ever go to a website w/o a valid ask cert).
Not too surprising. The lawyers don't have money at stake, they're getting paid regardless. Either they're billing hourly, or they're on contingency. If they're on, then they're running a bunch of cases at the same time.
Meanwhile, the defendant is betting his or her livelihood on their lawyer's theory holding up in court. Wouldn't you be (possibly overly) cautious about getting into this situation?
And yes, it's livelihood. Certainly it's the business being bet on, and if it goes belly up, what are the chances of being able to start again?
Lawyer’s rule of thumb: if you’ve ended up in a courtroom, you’ve screwed up somewhere. Of course lawyers have something at stake: you want repeat business from the client, you have your reputation to protect - most underrated lawyer skill is taking complicated rules and translating them into “how can I make more money” practical advice.
It's like eggs vs. bacon. The chicken loses something, but the pig loses a lot more.
Yes, if a lawyer loses, he's taken a hit to his reputation. But with an EEOC lawsuit, his client may be out of business, and certainly loses a lot of both money and reputation. Particularly if it's a long drawn out affair, which seems to be happening more these days.
I’ll admit, I’m not from the states so have no great knowledge of the EEOC. I’m just sceptical because it’s so common for people to make big bold claims about the law, while the reality is a bit more complicated
Are you actually a lawyer? Because that might be true re: individuals but is about as wrong as can be regarding big corporations. Indeed, part of what's wrong with certain areas of the law is that so much of it was developed by litigation of massive firms where the legal fees are just an expected cost of doing buisness (yes, under full information those cases should settle but full information isn't always the norm). For instance, copyright and patent law spring to mind.
Nope, I was just surprised a lawyer would say this in a way that included corporations. I mean how does Google stay out of court given how many subpoenas it will receive in any short period of time.
Or do you just mean this about people in their private capacity?
Maybe I misinterpreted your original comment. You talked about bosses who don’t understand the law getting scared and over correcting - I interpreted that as being about SMEs, not corporate giants
I agree that there is a lot of ignorance about this. This seems like the kind of topic that everyone has an opinion on regardless of how little they know about the topic.
During the past year I've read two different textbooks focused on preparing for HR certification exams (SPHR and SHRM-SCP, if you are curious). EEOC and the legal process around adverse impact was covered. I was amazed that so many parts of Scott's post (quoting the book) and the comments contained ideas that were either 1) completely inaccurate or 2) oversimplified to the point of being misleading. And I am not even an expert on this topic; I've only read a dozen or so pages about it from textbooks, so my own knowledge is quite superficial.
It was odd to read a post by Scott and to have the feeling that I know more about this topic that people who are speaking loudly on it.
I'll give an attempt. Obvious caveats are that A) I'm not an expert, so I might be mis-remembering and you should confirm with reliable sources, and B) I might be mis-interpreting the intended meaning of what was written in various comments.
If you search Google and Google Scholar for "validity diversity dilemma" you should find some reliable resources. In brief, selection methods that tend to be more valid for predicting on-the-job performance tend to have higher levels of adverse impact. The other thing to look at is the
The general ideas that I've seen in posts or in comments (these are non-charitable summaries, sorry that I'm too lazy now for precise citations):
* The idea that a company's employees must perfectly match the demographic makeup of the general population.
* The idea that it is really easy to sue a company for discrimination, or that the EEOC is doing lots of suing.
* Not acknowledging or being aware of the shifting burden of proof (this is a little more complex: what I mean by this is that at first John Doe candidate has the burden to demonstrate that a hiring practice has disparate impact, at which point the burden of proof shifts to the company to proof either A} that is isn't discriminatory or B} that it is a valid predictor of job performance and thus is allowed even if it is discriminatory, at which point the burden of proof shifts back to John who can then prove that even if this selection method is a valid predictor of job performance, there are other methods that are equally valid and that have lower adverse impact.)
* The idea that it is ridiculously expensive and complex to avoid getting sued. In reality, using structured interviews, documenting why decisions are made (especially adverse employment decisions), and making sure that the criteria for decisions are job-relevant are actually a pretty solid defense if you get sued for discrimination. Most employers don't need to do validation studies of their own (which would require more stats and psychology knowledge than the average manager has), but can instead rely on relatively standardized and widespread methods.
Sorry for giving a sloppy answer, but that's all I have energy/motivation/knowledge for. Hopefully this is enough so that you are able to explore more.
TBF to Scott, I didn't see any claims of the form "the law says you must do X"
What there were was a lot of claims of the form, people do X out of a belief it reduces their practical legal liability. Sometimes based on incorrect understanding but often based on the fact that the practical and theoretical aren't always the same.
And there are alot of things that the law doesn't facially require that absolutely are hugely important in limiting legal liability. For instance (to use an example from harassment law), no of course a single sexual joke or even proposition doesn't rise to the level of corporate liability under existing precedent on sexual harassment. But as a corporate executive you need to recognize that you may not actually be hearing the full situation. Maybe you got a report that Bob told one offensive joke but if it goes to court it will turn out that Bob is actually good friends with his direct superior who has been ignoring complaints because it's just Bob being bob and maybe the plantiff will find a bunch of other bad evidence and juries can be pretty random.
So if Bob is a low skilled employee (fry cook) putting Bob out on his ass might be the cheapest solution (you could investigate further but that's costly). I mean you don't actually care if employees can tell jokes (maybe you should pay more attention to working conditions but it's a common failure).
So I don't think it's all just confusion but this is part of what makes it such a contentious issue. One side says, don't be ridiculous that's not what the law requires and the other side says, but it's a causal effect of the law whether it's based on confusion or practical minimization of liability.
Robert Ellickson's "Order Without Law" was in large part about a community not understanding what the law was and avoiding interacting with it. Those were Shasta County ranchers, but yes I'd expect it applies in offices too.
There are several basic factual errors in the comments about the "Tumblr theory", of the "if one's chronology looks like this it's a shibboleth that one is wrong about something very fundamental" sort.
1. "Moving from Tumblr to Livejournal and Something Awful" is very, uh, 'the chronological sequence of events is my passion'. Livejournal was already dead in the Anglosphere by the 2010-2012ish point that Tumblr started really coalescing into "the social media site for eccentrics". As the other comment notes, a lot of this is "people moving from LJ to Tumblr" -- LJ was bought out by a Russian company that liked doing things like "randomly banning gay communities". There was absolutely no shortage of people moving to e.g. Dreamwidth, though, such that Tumblr's eccentricity was in large share its own thing. Something Awful was an entirely different pole of "social media sites for eccentrics" entirely, though shares an "internet equivalent of Velvet Underground" quality with Tumblr and to lesser degrees LJ and 4chan. "Teenagers on Tumblr seized control of Something Awful and this invented Wokeness" is approximately as accurate as the joke in Paranoia where the communist secret society is obsessed with the teachings of Groucho Marx.
2. Describing Tumblr as "a melange of content instead of a staid list of people the user chose to follow"...eh, I mean, maybe compared to journal-type sites? But it's very, very hard to make the case for in the broad spectrum of "what social media can look like". Certainly it was a far more curated site than e.g. forums. It was *far* more curated than the modern social media majors -- it's of the pre-algorithmic era in precisely the way that makes this claim weird. You saw on Tumblr ultimately what you chose to see on Tumblr, in the sense you saw the posts made by the people you actively followed, or in the tags you actively checked, which were two separate sections of the site and purely human-determined (rather than algorithmic). The "reblog" structure meant you might see posts by your followees you wouldn't personally choose to see, but presenting this as melange-type requires presenting forums as melange-type, given "posts in forum threads" work the same way.
3. People like ascribing "wokeness" to "mentally ill teenagers", which raises, as noted, the huge glaring question of "inasmuch as things people associate with 2012 Tumblr are now mainstream takes, how did that happen". Partially this is because no, fewer of them are mainstream takes than you think (I very consciously describe Tumblr as a "site for eccentrics" rather than applying any particular lens to it -- places like /r/tumblrinaction had hilariously dumb levels of outgroup homogeneity, and in particular assumed *far* more of the weird parts of Tumblr were specifically left-wing-political than they actually were). But also, the answer is "no, that's mostly not who was doing that". The biggest political accounts were mostly run by undergrads and grad students. This just loops you back into the "college movements became a big deal in the non-college world" phenomenon, which is much better understood.
(I specify "biggest political accounts" because, again, Tumblr was way more heterogeneous than generally presented, and a lot of stuff that was parsed by outsiders as political claims wasn't. The big-name-political-accounts, specifically, were mostly well-educated people in their 20s.)
Desertopa is pretty accurate, I think. By 2012ish, this had consolidated into a clearer "these are the positions people in this sphere tend to hold". The actual roots go back deeper.
Insofar as I remember it, Something Awful forums culture taking a large step leftwards didn't have anything in particular to do with Tumblr, which was a separate development. Roughly speaking it happened due to... Ron Paul.
Well, not Ron Paul directly, but it was Ron Paul that initiated the following sequence of events:
1. Before 2008, SA had a very typical 90s-00s userbase - mostly young white male atheist/secular nerdy men, most commonly liberal in the 90s-00s sense (votes Democrats because GOP is associated with Christianity, nanny-state style censorship and Iraq War stuff), with a smattering of communists, libertarians and others
2. During the course of the 2008 election - a momentous election in most ways - the forums libertarians and some others get *very* excited about Ron Paul and start spamming other forums, chiefly D&D (SA's politics/current events discussion forum) with incessant propaganda
3. Lowtax/admins eventually tire of this and create Laissez's Fair subforum, ostensibly to quarantine the Ron Paul libertarians but also to create a "relaxed" shitposting adjunct forum for D&D
4. Commies and others also move to this board to troll libertarians, the admins accept this because it's funny
5. Eventually the Ron Paul stuff dies down, partly because Ron Paul, you know, doesn't get elected president, and also partly because a lot of libertarians participate in a "Permaban me if Ron Paul doesn't win" thread and get permabanned
6. The commies stay in LF, turning it effectively into a communist subforum
7. They then end up self-radicalizing to the "Maoist-Third-Worldist" position that claims that Western working class is fundamentally a capitalist-bribed labor aristocracy and any true revolution would start with Third World creating a communist state and then violently conquering the West - a suitable position for commie goons (there are more of these than previously due to Obama disappointment/burnout) since it means you can have an edgy "Fuck you, dad!" position without being a racist (which would get you banned for good) and share the revolutionary romanticism of communism without any need to appeal to Western working class that you don't really like that much, or having to do any actual organizing (since it's not your country the revolution's starting from anyway)
8. Eventually, after some years, a bunch of other forums drama happens and LF is temporarily shut down, causing a part of the subforum population to return to D&D to push the forums culture of that forum leftwards and a part to form independent forums (just like banned racists and others have found right-wing SA splinters)
LF has later been restored and continues to have a remarkably left-wing forums subculture even for SA, but its greater effect probably happened way earlier.
Totally agree and all of it stretches back to the "studies" departments through at least the 90s, and likely before, but definitely personally observed it back to then. "wokeness" was more or less the program there in say 1997, and was desperately trying to project out its norms/power into the rest of academia and the world. The surprising thing was that at the time I would have said it was failing at this, but the long term trend is that it was actually making slow and steady progress, especially in school admin.
I think it might really be so simple as:
*once you set yourselves up as the "experts" in racism/sexism you get to set the terms of those debates and their remedies*. It is simply a failure mode for academia where expertise is seen as king. If the experts are ideologues ideology becomes king.
You can use this status as the experts to pursue your political /religious agenda (this is largely a surrogate religion IMO).
I went back to actually check the dates and realized I'd muddled it up. LJ was bought by Russians in 2007, Racefail was in 2009, and LJ began its final swan dive around 2011, which is also when Tumblr was really coming into its own. Perhaps the two are different branches of the same tree, or that the infection spread from LJ to Tumblr instead of the other way around -- I recall Tumblr being relatively chill around that time. It was a while before it earned its reputation.
I maintain that the tag/reblog structure of Tumblr accelerated things, though, because following a tag instead of people means anything that gets into the tag and becomes popular gets spread to everyone following the tag. So when proto-wokeness got into the tags it was sent directly to millions of immature teenage girls alongside their SuperWhoLock memes.
I'll also leave this here regarding things starting on Tumblr (although interestingly, this suggests LiveJournal also gets the blame): https://archive.is/W4XRl
Prior to that, after it was taken over by SixApart, they had already been shopping it around, and forcing communities to clean up so they could monetise/sell it (there was a whole porn purge of its own which dragged in, for instance, breastfeeding or breast cancer groups on the clean-up of "no pictures of bare breasts"), so people were already starting to leave. The sale to the Russians just sealed the deal.
I wasn't there for Strikethrough but I did see the rest of it:
Oh, that's right! I'd completely forgotten about the porn ban/strikethrough. Tumblr had just been formed in February 2007 a few months earlier, I feel like this event sent a number of people there.
Apropos of nothing I was surprised to see Anil Dash's name there as a Livejournal executive at the time. God, that guy sucks.
I flounced off LJ around that time, but it wasn't due to the porn bans (which I recognised were the same kind of "we need to clean up the site's image so we can tell advertisers it's family-friendly" manoeuvre Tumblr would later engage in), but rather because on one news thread an Official LiveJournal Staff Member assured everyone that no dirty rotten stinking pro-lifers would be let near the place dead, much less alive.
That engendered some comment, and I was one of those who shook the dust of the place off my sandals and left. What made it even more strange was that I wasn't engaging with communities that were fighting over pro-choice versus pro-life or anything to do with abortion, it was just Staffie taking the chance to loudly virtue-signal that they were the *right* sort of person with the *right* sort of views, that LJ was such a place for such people, and of course everyone was pro-choice and liberal and the rest of it.
And then a little while afterwards it ended up sold to the Russians who let the English-language site crater while they concentrated on the Russian one, and didn't give a flying fig about PC or any of the rest of it into the bargain.
Looking back, I imagine that such "no dirty Christians here" signalling was because of the porn purge and related matters (child porn allegations which also involved incest and if you know anything about certain fandoms, incest between characters was/is a big part of them) which seem to be blamed on/in part down to groups allegedly Christian or motivated by moral concerns, but at the time it seemed gratuitously offensive to those of us who just wanted to converse with others about our interests and who weren't marching around with banners demanding everyone take on our code of conduct.
The funny thing was, Tumblr was one of the places mentioned as "so if/when LJ goes down the drain, where do we all go?" but I actually only signed up there to follow my nephew's account. He's long finished with it, but I'm still hanging out with a few mutuals!
> This does not mean the test isn't a good test in the sense that it doesn't measure job performance. See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left.
This isn't quite right. When you run a test you have a threshold (you hire anyone who scores over X points) and then hire anyone who passes it. If your test is good, it should still have some people who passed with an 80 and some people who passed with a 100, and the people with a 100 should (in general) perform better.
Now this is weaker the stronger your selection is, since at the top end people are hard to differentiate by talent and test scores beyond that are mostly luck. If you had a test for the NBA (say some mix of height, athletic ability and a test game) you'd probably only hire the top 0.01% of performers and see no correlation left over. But for a normal company that hires, say, 25% of qualified applicants, you should expect to see some residual correlation above your threshold.
I think 25% of qualified applicants is probably a very high estimate. Glassdoor claims [1] that, on average, a corporate position will recieve 250 applications. In order to get to 25%, you'd need 98.4% of applicants to either be unqualified or to find another position at the company. I don't know what number would be appropriate instead of 98.4%, but I'd roughly guess we're talking <5% of qualified applicants get hired. Still, 500x less selective than your number for the NBA
So this is hard to estimate. Part of the problem is that unqualified people are going to be applying to a whole lot of places - if you're willing to accept 25% of the qualified workforce (and since most people have jobs, the average employer is probably much more lenient than that), most of the people you'll accept are happy in their jobs and not actively interviewing. But you're still probably willing to accept anyone who does decent at your hiring test (not just the few who ace everything).
Another way to think about it - height isn't super predictive of success in the NBA, which is super selective, but I'm guessing it's pretty predictive at the high school basketball level (even though making the school basketball team is a nontrivial challenge - even Jake Berenson didn't make it in, and he saved the world from aliens).
Is this how tests for choosing employees are actually used though? It isn't the way they would ideally be used in theory if there is other information available (e.g. subjective impressions from interviews, qualifications, experience) that is at least partially independent. If you plot a candidate's test score on one axis and everything-else score on the other axis and accept only the upper triangle who had a total score above some threshold, then that reduces the correlation between test score and performance among those actually accepted. If the very best are applying to other, more prestigious/better paying positions elsewhere instead, then the correlation drops even more.
So if the employers are correctly weighing each feature (test performance, height, whatever) then the features would be anticorrelated with each other but they would still all be positively correlated with job performance. If the employer has more prestigious competitors so that it can only hire people in a band of competence (or of test performance) that will make the employees closer to each other in competence levels, but shouldn't weaken the correlation within the band the employer does hire (although it would make it harder to detect).
>So if the employers are correctly weighing each feature (test performance, height, whatever) then the features would be anticorrelated with each other but they would still all be positively correlated with job performance.
I'd expect the features to be anticorrelated with each other _for the set of employees that all have the same overall weighted score_. ( For the case where the weighted score is the most accurate possible predictor of job performance, given the available information ) I'd expect the overall correlation of each of the features with job performance to, roughly speaking, depend on the _dispersion_ of the overall weighted score amongst the employees.
And, given how fast gaussians drop off, I agree with your point that highly selective organizations should wind up with less correlation with job performance - because they are trying to pick people from a rapidly diminishing tail, so we'd expect less dispersion in the overall weighted score than for less selective organizations (_if_ the distribution is gaussian, not something with fatter tails, or even multimodal).
So they're anticorrelated for all employees, not just ones with the same overall score, because the employees are selected to be over a threshold (this is like the paradox where better looking actors are worse at acting - if you take two uncorrelated features and look at the subset of the population for which their sum is over a threshold, they will be anticorrelated within that subset)
Something seems off. Consider the case where the threshold is very low, in fact below the lowest score in the whole population. Then the correlation of features in the group over that low threshold is just the correlation of features for the whole population.
Also, say we had two features, X and Y, and say we had a score which is just X+Y, and we have a threshold at zero and a population with:
low scorers: ( X = -1, Y = -1), (X = -2, Y = -2)
medium scorers, all with score = 1 : (X = 0, Y = 1), (X = 1, Y = 0)
high scorers, with score = 9 : (X = 4, Y = 5), (X = 5, Y = 4)
The slice with score = 1 has X and Y anticorrelated
The slice with score = 9 has X and Y anticorrelated
The total population above threshold has X and Y positively correlated
Why couldn't it be the case that scoring over X threshold is highly correlated with job performance, but scores above that don't make a significant difference? Like, reaching a minimal technical competency is absolutely required, were you literally can't do the job without that, but beyond that minimal technical competency other things such as conscientiousness, ambition, willingness to work overtime, etc are what determine job performance?
This is possible (though unusual - usually skills don't have quickly diminishing returns, and this has been studied for general intelligence in particular), but it's a different phenomenon than height being uncorrelated with performance in the NBA (being seven feet tall is still more useful for basketball than being six and a half feet tall)
I thought this too, but there is a good point made by Medieval Cat (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-cf9/comment/55779608): a firm that doesn't hire the cream of the crop has not only a lower threshold, but also a de facto upper threshold: potential employees who are better on a combination of various traits are poached away by more prestigious companies that value better combined aptitude more, and pay more. Then, within the slice of aptitude a company is hiring for a given position, there may indeed be very little correlation between test score and performance.
Do you think it is possible that an explanatory factor here is range restriction (https://www.statology.org/restriction-of-range/)? I'm hypothesizing that if all the people who didn't make the cut for the NBA were considered, then we might see a much stronger correlation between height and performance.
> The evidence, however, shows that employees who have not completed high school or taken the tests have continued to perform satisfactorily and make progress in departments for which the high school and test criteria are now used.
So they can compare people employed at the company who did and didn't take the test. But this still isn't the same as comparing people who score above and below the threshold. (The argument works for high school completion, since we can compare people who did and didn't complete high school.)
Much of this commentary seems to yearn for the 'good old days' when things were much more meroticratic and obvs white dudes got all the good jobs. In this context, the findings of Hsieh et al. (2019) seem relevant: they estimate that 20-40% of labour productivity growth from 1960-2010 can be attributed to reduced discrimination leading to better allocation of talent. (see https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/HHJK.pdf).
I’m not an economist, but by my read, that paper assumes that changes in employment and wages must be due to either reduced discrimination or changes in worker preferences, finds it isn’t changing preferences, and so concludes it must be reduced discrimination.
In a hypothetical world where the commenters you are arguing against were 100% correct, I think the model in the paper would still spit out the exact same result.
This paper is the platonic ideal of "let's put the results I want already into the assumptions, and wow somehow it gets the results I want, funny how that works". The abstract already admits as much.
As splendric has already mentioned, this kind of study design – though unfortunately all too common, especially in the social sciences – fundamentally lacks the power to tell us much of anything other than how much stock the author puts in their own assumptions. This kind of “assume A can only happen because of B or C, so if we prove B does not change than it must be C” analysis is exactly the fatal flaw that befell studies about lead impact on intelligence. It’s a product of magical thinking around the impact of artefactual error-term endogeneity, really. See Cremieux Recuiel on lead impact and Hill et al.’s 2021 paper “Endogeneity: A Review and Agenda…” for more.
With regards to lawsuits, billion dollar companies get sued all the time. There's a reason why the GC is considered equal to a C-Level executive. An EEOC lawsuit is bad for PR reasons, but from a legal perspective it's one of a dozen legal actions they have to deal with every week. If it doesn't cause a big splash in the media the CEO probably won't even hear about it.
I have to imagine a significantly non-zero number of regular, established commenters hesitated to report preferential hiring (or perhaps more importantly, *management*) of minority employees in their workplace. I know I sure did, and I have a doozy of an anecdote.
Edited to add: This comment has gotten a surprising number of likes (I know they're turned off on the site, but I think they're via email, I think?).
There might be quite a bit more to subtle chilling effects than is being accounted for, especially as self-censorship is pretty difficult to quantify.
[joke, not actually a shakedown] That's a nice online identity you have there. Very respectable, lots of social links to other upstanding online identities.
I am now curious as to how things will shake out in the future Ireland. We never had preferential hiring of minorities previously because, frankly, we hadn't enough minorities until you count the Poles/Eastern Europeans who came to the country to work during the Celtic Tiger era. Unless you count the Jewish population, or the Indian/Chinese people running the takeaways.
But now we're seeing a lot of Africans, to the point where I can see black people on the streets in my hometown. I've mentioned before that I've already, to my surprise, gotten the emails with "my pronouns are X/Xs" in the signature line, something I thought was safely confined to the USA. So will I see "preferential minority hiring" in jobs round here? Will that be brought in as a requirement where I work? I'll have to see!
> So will I see "preferential minority hiring" in jobs round here?
I was under the impression, that many american tech firms are already in ireland (or at least in dublin). So I think it would only be a matter of time until their influence radiates out into the rest of the nation.
Depends on whether the multinationals are looking for minority employees; a lot of the "foreign worker hiring" has been other European nationals for language etc. abilities. We're still too white to have a meaningful pool of "you must employ this percentage of Latinx/Black/Asian in line with the population" to draw from.
Where hiring is done from abroad, meaning outside the EU, there seem to be two ways to go about it:
(1) Employees can't/won't relocate to Ireland, so you hire them in their home country via an intermediary company to work for you
(2) Outsourcing - I'm basing this on my own impression, from dealing with a pensions company for work. They went from "I can email the team in the Dublin office who all have recognisably Western names and if I have to, I can phone directly and get to talk to someone" to "The people emailing me have Indian/SE Asian names, I can't get a hold of them directly, and based on the time I phoned the head office and wasn't able to get through to anyone on that team, I'm guessing they all work in their home country and this is just one of several companies for which they do this outsourced work".
So the DEI requirements may or may not apply if you're an American company with its offices in Silicon Docks, and I'm sure they'd love to have staff photos of every shade of skin colour on the webpage, but like I said, we're just not at the stage of having enough black and brown people working here, native to here, or willing to move here *and* who can do tech/IT work as yet:
I think not hiring Irish Catholics because of the historical benefit of “whiteness” would be highly ahistorical, and create more tension than even the US. After all didn’t the Irish leave the United Kingdom in part because of discrimination? Aren’t Catholics in Northern Ireland discriminated against?
I’m not Irish but it would make much more sense for Ireland to follow the French route here.
Today I learned that I'm not the only SSC reader who goes by "gjm". I was super-confused to see "gjm wrote:" followed by something I could not possibly have written :-).
Your confusion on the law is the biggest problem. You are more intelligent than the average hiring manager and spent more time researching this than nearly all of them, and yet, you are not certain what is or is not prohibited by the law. The Plaintiff side lawyers can correctly say that it is very hard to win a civil rights lawsuit and the only cases that win are egregious. The defense lawyers can feel good about winning the majority of their cases while billing their clients in the millions.
I am in HR, and as soon as a manager has been sued, they call me and ask to make sure it never happens again, win or lose. An EEO lawsuit is one of the most unpleasant things that can happen to a manager. They have to attend depositions, retrieve hundreds of emails, testify at court, be called a racist, and know that if they lose their case their career goes down the toilet. Regardless of what is good for the company, they now want to do everything they can to avoid further litigation. If rewriting policies, cracking down on jokes, and hiring less qualified applicants will prevent lawsuits, they will gladly do it.
I am actually fighting managers to tell them to not overreact, you won the lawsuit, there is no need to change everything and make it worse. I can usually convince the managers, but what do you think most HR people do when a supervisor comes to them begging them to do anything to avoid lawsuits? They happily enforce draconian measures. Confused managers are going to err on the side of caution, to the detriment of everyone else in all but the best functioning organizations.
Thanks, this is part of how I was feeling reading the comments.
Sam B said they work in civil rights law and they sounded frustrated that companies easily win a lot of times. But they also seemed unconcerned about the impact of a company being sued in the first place.
I notice lawyers who spend all their time in courtrooms tend to be unafraid of courtrooms. But everyone else in the world who basically sees courtrooms as a black box where outcomes can seem random and life ruining dreads and fears courtrooms.
I'd be willing to do pay or do quite a lot to avoid courtrooms in my personal life. When considering whether I'd tank the productivity of a business I worked for to avoid a courtroom the answer is an easy "yes".
> An EEO lawsuit is one of the most unpleasant things that can happen to a manager. They have to attend depositions, retrieve hundreds of emails, testify at court, be called a racist, and know that if they lose their case their career goes down the toilet. Regardless of what is good for the company, they now want to do everything they can to avoid further litigation. If rewriting policies, cracking down on jokes, and hiring less qualified applicants will prevent lawsuits, they will gladly do it.
> I am actually fighting managers to tell them to not overreact, you won the lawsuit, there is no need to change everything and make it worse.
The process is the punishment. Even if you win the case, you still lose because you got put through the wringer, putting tremendous stress on your business and your life.
I get where you're coming from, but also ... sometimes people actually get discriminated against, but probably fewer than would without EEO laws on the books?
So yes, frivolous lawsuits are bad, and having more laws that enable lawsuits means, at the margin, you probably get more frivolous lawsuits.
But that's not an argument against EEO laws. At best, it's half of one.
I hear you, and I agree to some extent. I think the thing that's egregiously missing is a safe harbor. In various areas of law, where it's understood that there's a high potential for abusive lawsuits, there are provisions of law where a person being sued can say "I am doing XYZ, I am not doing ABC," and have the case thrown out without going through The Process. Sometimes, such as with anti-SLAPP laws, the dismissal includes requiring the plaintiff to pay their legal fees or even pay damages for wasting their time with malicious lawsuits.
As far as I'm aware, there are no safe harbors in EEO laws, which is how you end up in this situation where, no matter how utterly, obviously baseless the suit, you still get dragged through The Process.
Realistically speaking, these laws aren't going away. Adding some safe harbors to them would be a great way to mitigate the damage they do while retaining their more positive aspects.
LIkewise, if you eliminate due process, presumption of innocence, and the appeals process, you get a lot more convictions and recidivism will drop near zero! Shame about all the innocent people going to jail and the explosion in the prison population, though.
Ahh el Salvador one of those extremely uncomfortable places to talk about because they... did all that and also reduced crime to western nation levels.
As I read about how the courts/government use companies' applicant-pool statistics against them, I remembered how during my last job search, the demographics forms always had a "prefer not to answer" option.
If more non-minority people started selecting that option, would that tilt things in their favor? It might not necessarily help any individual applicant much, but what if a significant fraction started doing so?
This would only possibly tilt things in their favor if minority people also selected that option. But why would they? It removes any advantage being in a minority has.
I conclude that checking "prefer not to answer" is effectively the same as "caucasian/white" except in cases where there is no default, such as gender.
Has anyone ever been refused employment because they refused to designate their 'gender'? It seems to me one can't be faulted for refusing to subscribe to a phantasm, an artificial construct. According to my personal data, I have a sex.
Some states log one's "gender" on driver licenses, without bothering to explain what that imaginary disease is.
It probably won't help you get hired, but it might help weaken this law. Because although a hiring manager can guess you're probably white, the law probably can't. So if all the statistics say "10% white, 10% minority, 80% prefer not to answer" instead of "89% white 11% minority" it makes it a lot harder for them to do statistics and prove discrimination or disparate impact.
Or just lie about not being white. Scott had a post on this sometime within the last year or so. You can't be asked to prove your race. HR might give you a dirty look for obviously lying, but they won't do anything about it.
I sometimes consider this since I was actually born in Asia (though white), but never have stooped that low. I figured if called out saying "I was born in Asia and lived there until grade school" is some fairly strong argument I am "Asian".
I think commenter Mathues (or whatever it was too lazy to scroll back up) from Brazil is confused about both his own nation and the US, but I'll stick with the US part for now:
1.) Our Brazilian friend seems to believe the issue is something like "the 13%, blacks, vs the other 87%, which is uniformly white". No, it's not "just 13%" that the woke are concerned about, even discounting the "misogyny" element.
2.) *Even if it were* only that unofficial quotas were set for "just 13%", what happens when there aren't enough qualified applicants anyway? What has this commenter taken from e.g. the air traffic controller debacle...? Aside from the demonstrable issues this can certainly cause in and of itself (here, how about a ~1/10–1/5 chance your surgeon is unqualified next hospital visit; too small to matter, right?), consider also the runaway effect that can be caused when x companies/positions all need some share of only 0.5x candidates.
(In my own former company, we had to deny promotions and turn down qualified hires more than once due to leadership fears of not being diverse enough: "no, leave that open, Tim will be unofficial interim director until we can find a minority to stick on the website and in the position!" — it can sort of make you bitter, after a while.)
3.) Relatedly, check out what happens at the tails of a normal distribution when the center is moved 1 SD (or half of one, even) in either direction. That is, a comparatively insignificant difference in average results in much larger differences at the tails, such that while it may be easy to rustle up a quota-satisfying batch of our hypothetical 1-SD-lower group for "regular" jobs, it becomes increasingly more difficult to do so for the high-visibility and high-ability positions (i.e., the very ones that will get the most lawsuits and outrage &c.!).
4.) nvm I've run out of energy. l used to have so much more to say; but now... *slaps own face* c'mon wake up man WAKE UP–
(note: have shown great forbearance in not responding to Tatu's "international theory" by saying "yeah, I shudder to imagine what would have become of us without the goodwill of the Congolese!" hahaha–... oh, no, I think this counts as doing it anyway, aw... hell!—)
(that's mostly a joke, although tbh I do wonder whether the African "man on the street" liking or not liking us reaaallly changes so much that it is the most significant element behind our own domestic policy...
...beyond that, though, it has not at all been my impression that the A.M.o.t.S. *does* look favorably upon the U.S.! I'm reminded of the African compilations about how crappy the U.S. and West as a whole are, when Black Panther came out, lol. we have held them back from becoming Wakanda, not shown that we're great by uplifting black celebrities...
...hey, hold on: black celebrities have just about 0 to do with affirmative action in the first place! this theory explains less and less!)
My point was not that it's just *Africans* who cared about the treatment of blacks in the US during the Cold War, it was Third World peoples in general, who saw it as symbolic of the general treatment of non-white nations under Western imperialism.
The American current interest in Africa is obviously nonzero from how much there's been talk about Chinese influence in Africa and how to counter it.
> ...beyond that, though, it has not at all been my impression that the A.M.o.t.S. *does* look favorably upon the U.S.!
>...hey, hold on: black celebrities have just about 0 to do with affirmative action in the first place! this theory explains less and less!)
Media obviously does not just indicate that there are black celebrities (and when I talk about American policy I'm not talking about just affirmative action but a wide range of sociocultural policies), but also offers at least some indication of how minorities, in general, live and are treated in America, in a way that is also visible to the rest of the world.
The Middle East is a bit of an expection to the general dynamic for a variety of reasons. Even then, it would easily be possible for Middle East to be *even more fiercely* anti-American, so much so that it would genuinely threaten the stability of America's allied countries, chiefly the oil-producing ones.
The point isn't the status of Black Americans *as* Blacks. During the Cold War, there was a great amount of sympathy around the world for the African-American freedom struggle as a general example of a historically oppressed minority nation struggling for its rights at the so-called heart of the empire, with their specific race being a secondary question. Similar sympathy was extended to AIM and other Native American activists. In the Arab world you had examples like Algeria offering asylum to Black Panthers - of course North Africa is a bit distinct anyway, since there exists a certain idea of pan-African solidarity there.
Would you say then that the effect is "sub-linear", instead of the "super-linear" as I suggested? Each additional point of underrepresented group with less-than-ideal labor skills, the harm of forcing equal representation is smaller? This doesn't fit with my priors.
I understand what you're saying about other groups, like latinos and veterans, or even women, but my intuition is that the effect is substantially smaller.
And anyway, my complain is (as it seems by the review) that Richard didn't qualify the size of the problem. You can complain as a matter of principle. Or you can present evidence that the problem is really big.
"The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before."
I think that David Chapman's Meaningness blog does a good job of providing a narrative for this. He actually read those continental/pomo academics, thought that some of them were not entirely full of shit, successfully collated and presented their (and some Buddhist) ideas in a readable form.
Do you have the post(s) in which he does this? I would be interested, but cannot obviously locate them on the blog, and it is hard to easily browse substack I find
>"The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before."
I don't think it's at all obvious that the defection did give an advantage. I don't think it accelerated the progression of actual social justice gains, but I think it did a lot to galvanize resistance. If I were more deeply versed in the academic roots, it's possible I'd think otherwise, but my impression is that this wasn't an inevitable response to incentives, but a specifically cultural transition, and very likely an own-goal from a pragmatic standpoint.
I consider writing books which advocate for departing from the mechanisms of liberalism in order to achieve policy goals to be a defection, in much the same way that I'd consider writing books advocating for pursuing policy goals through the use of violence.
“I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.”
A lot of corporate jobs treat Fridays as slack days. All the work that needs to be accomplished can be done in 4 days. All the client meetings are scheduled for those 4 days as well. Friday is there just in case a project is behind or something needs to be done urgently. You go in, check your emails, and if there is not anything urgent you BS with coworkers throughout the day. These places usually also have casual Friday and an hour long social event in the middle of the day. So once that social event is finished at 2:00. Work really never gets done, unless it has to be.
I also heard from a German coworker that drinks are served at the social events, so I can imagine that’s why the sexist jokes come out and the women go home. It’s why a lot of people are pushing for 4 day work weeks, or hybrid jobs. There is no need to actually work 5 days a week outside something like a hospital.
I would like to hear more about the alternatives to civil rights laws that critics would prefer. Tweaks? “Everyone just be more reasonable?” “Let ‘er rip?” (i.e., just repeal the laws)
And how would we judge the alternatives against each other? Would this require utilitarian reasoning like we do with animal welfare arguments, where we have to grapple with number of animals suffering vs intensity of suffering? (To be clear, the analogue is amount of people subject to discrimination vs. intensity/outrageousness of discrimination faced by fewer people.)
I come away from all of this suspecting that the current system does a pretty good job if the goal is “everyone is able to get a job they are qualified for.” But people are noticing that this doesn’t accomplish a different goal, something like “I, personally, can get the specific job I want.” These are just two of many possible goals when evaluating civil rights laws.
Which goal would each of us pick under the Rawls’ “veil of ignorance?” Which one allocates talent best? Which one is morally less outrageous?
I think removing the "if there's two equally qualified candidates the minority should get it" expectations (especially in civil service jobs), removing contracting laws set to advantage women and minority owned businesses, and making clearer criteria for cases where you can't be persecuted for discrimination (to avoid frog boiling due to reasonable people being worried about being sued) would be major steps that improve the balance. This doesn't require repealing all civil rights laws.
I generally don't like when the government attempts to launder its social programs through the legal system.
If the voters want a particular social program in place then the government should pay for it out of its budget, and the full costs of it should be internalized to the government so voters can have an appropriate accounting of things.
In the case of discrimination there are two systems that the government could put in place:
1. They control the pipeline to the workforce, aka schools and to some extent universities. They should put in place metrics to figure out what they are doing wrong and try to fix it within the pipeline.
2. They can hold themselves accountable to how well they are doing by implementing a social security payroll subsidy for minorities that they are failing. Say race X is under-represented in the workforce and payscale by 10%. Cut the employer contributions to social security for race X by 10%.
The government is responsible for the pipeline of job candidates, and their failure if that pipeline still sucks. And the total cost of this program is a line item on the budget that voters can actually look at and say "is this worth it?"
Same should happen for disability. Right now private individuals can just sue others if there isn't enough disability stuff in place. Change the responsible party to the government. If something isn't accessible to disabled people the government can either subsidize the fix in its entirety, or pay the disabled person for not being able to subsidize a cheap fix. The entire costs of subsidizing disabled people should be a line item on the budget so voters can decide "is this worth it?"
In my opinion it is really slimy for the government or voters to say "hey we want this massive social program, but we want its costs to be entirely hidden, and for it to be unchallengeable if it turns out to be a bad idea"
Everyone prefers that costs are hidden from them. People don’t want a carbon tax, they want “corporations” to “pay” to solve carbon emissions and clunky efficiency standards. People buy airline tickets with lower headline price and higher bullshit fees. People buy the lowest cost durable goods that break in 6 months, failing to do a basic lifecycle cost analysis.
I tend to only want costs hidden when someone else is paying for something of mine. When I am paying for something I get very frustrated when costs are hidden and unclear. This is why I think its slimy for government programs to hide costs.
I don't buy that "everyone prefers that costs are hidden from them". Do you enjoy having costs hidden from you?
That is not really how "revealed preferences" work. Part of the whole idea behind revealed preferences is that two choices are presented in an equal way.
Otherwise you could run a very simple experiment and say people have a "revealed preference" for lying:
Walk up to someone on the street and offer them either $10 or $0. Most of them will prefer $10. But you were lying and always intended to give them $0.
Perhaps “revealed preference” is a technical term that I am stretching too far. What I mean is “people disproportionately buy products from companies that attempt to hide costs from them.” And I t looks like people vote for candidates that pretend costs aren’t happening or are being paid by someone else. You are saying it ought not be that way, I am saying it is that way and likely always will be. I declare us not to be actually arguing against each other’s positions.
I think "let 'er rip" is clearly the right answer here. At this point, outright racial discrimination is so taboo that you're absolutely not going to get a bunch of companies actively discriminating against people because of their race/sex even if they were legally allowed to. Plus, woke people love to say that diversity increases productivity. If that's true, then even totally selfish business will practice it, and we don't need civil rights law at all.
That's not to say that there wouldn't be a minor uptick in racial discrimination; there definitely would be. But at a certain point we have to ask: Is avoiding some small amount of discrimination worth the MASSIVE costs created by the current Civil Rights regime? Ask anyone who's worked for a judge or a discrimination-defense law firm, and they will tell you that the vast majority of civil rights cases are totally frivolous. Even those cases that are technically meritorious enough to survive a motion to dismiss or summary judgment and go to a jury are often things like, "Yeah, I guess a jury could maybe think that when your boss was mean to you in a facially non-racist way that was racist?" But resolving these frivolous lawsuits nonetheless takes a ton of resources: the cash to pay the lawyers, the time of the judges who must deal with them (which, remember, makes the legal system worse for everyone else), the time of the people involved (taking depositions, providing emails and other documents, etc.), the social costs to people who are unfairly accused of being racist, and the massive inefficiencies which companies must introduce to try and avoid future lawsuits (which Hanania's book and Scott's original post talk about). We would be far better off as a society avoiding all those costs while just accepting a slightly higher amount of real discrimination.
And remember too that all those woke firms would now be free to openly practice reverse-racial discrimination to their hearts' content! It might even be the case that newly legal preferential hiring of minorities might make up for any increased discrimination they might face.
Yes, repealing the laws is the obvious answer. Children are being born today whose grandfathers were born after the passage of these laws. The laws were explicitly intended as temporary solutions to an acute problem. Groups that still haven’t achieved rough parity (the same rough parity enjoyed by the Chinese and the Irish and the Italians) three full generations later have something else going on that is not going to be fixed by anti-discrimination laws. And if the laws aren’t fixing the problem — if they’re failing to do what they were explicitly passed to do — then they should be repealed.
It's curious that even people opposed to civil rights law adopt the progressive terminology of reserving "discrimination" for discrimination against groups that are less successful on average than the majority. Outright racial discrimination isn't taboo, outright racial discrimination against minorities is what's taboo.
Specifically organizing conferences, mentorship etc. for minorities that aren't available for whites, specifically recruiting minorities, all with the express purpose of increasing the proportion of minorities, is discrimination. And it is zero sum vs. organizing similar conferences, mentorship, outreach etc. in a race-blind manner. If a company organized mentorship etc. available to whites only, and made sure to interview a white candidate for every position, with the express purpose of maximizing the proportion of white employees, no one would argue that this isn't discrimination. It would also immediately get sued and lose.
My comment was addressed to a commenter who opposes civil rights law, and likely doesn't share your perspective that these are harmless, positive-sum actions that don't result in effective discrimination against whites, nor your apparent belief that the illegality of outright discrimination against whites (say, preferentially hiring minorities among the applicants) tends to be enforced even if it's behind a thin veil.
Actual racial discrimination against whites is not nearly as taboo as the other direction, though you're right it is illegal [1]- that said, it's held to a considerably higher standard of proof than the other, at least in the Sixth Circuit [2].
"Plus, woke people love to say that diversity increases productivity. If that's true, then even totally selfish business will practice it, and we don't need civil rights law at all."
This seems false without some key additional assumptions. Like if you believe there's no discrimination to begin* with then you'd conclude economically rational actors will prefer to have more diversity, but this is essentially assuming the conclusion.
*more rigorously, if you assume there's no a) employer taste-based discrimination or consumer taste-based discrimination in eg the Becker model.
You're right, that was a bit of a slapdash comment. It's true that if racial discrimination persists then there may be lots of businesses who irrationally discriminate. I was moving under the assumption, made earlier, that racial discrimination is so taboo now that relatively few businesses/consumers would irrationally discriminate.
Thanks for engaging constructively! :) Maybe I'm just being overly cynical, but it's very easy for me to imagine situations where explicit/public racial discrimination is taboo but people's behavior are still somewhat driven by irrational discrimination.
Specifically he talks about how he thought public antisemitism was very taboo in Britain in the 1940s while private antisemitism/disliking jews was on the uptake, and that because of the public taboo, there was no real way to honestly discuss this.
>I come away from all of this suspecting that the current system does a pretty good job if the goal is “everyone is able to get a job they are qualified for.”
Yeah and I suspect the main thing the people who disagree with you think is that this statement is wrong, or at least badly dumbing down the definition of "qualified". That you end up with a lot of mismatching between hires/promotions and who has what job specifically in part due to civil rights law.
They can disagree, fine. But before radically changing the status quo, it seems like proponents should consider whether the current system might have some positive effects. And maybe go so far as to compare costs and benefits!
Mandate color-blindness instead of racial preferences. Drop “disparate impact” - you have to prove discrimination instead of inferring it based on outcomes.
Agreed. In a nutshell, that sounds like the basic solution. And discrimination, _if present and meeting a bar for burden of proof_ , should be equally penalized against _any_ group.
[tone=sarcastic] You're missing the point. The critics don't need to come up with solutions. All they have to do is reliably drive proponents into misery and despair, until some proponents comes up with an acceptable solution. How good is good enough? That the proponents' problem.
[tone=serious] If you have a problem with that tactic, maybe you could start there?
Ideally, repeal the parts applying to private companies entirely.
More realistically (and also ideally w.r.t. government employment) keep anti-discrimination laws, but make it very explicit that the plaintiff must prove discriminatory intent, statistical disparities aren't evidence, discrimination against overrepresented or advantaged groups is just as illegal as discrimination against underrepresented or disadvantaged ones, discrimination attempting to correct for historical injustice is still illegal, verbal harassment isn't discrimination, and rulings involving some groups can be used as precedent in similar cases involving a different combination of groups, even if the analogous groups are underrepresented/disadvantaged in one case and overrepresented/advantaged in the other. All this should be written into the law in as much detail as possible to minimize the chance of left-wing bureaucrats and courts twisting it.
Repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (which codified hostile workplace environment/harassment law and the disparate impact doctrine, not to be confused with the CRA of 1964) would be a good start, as would be striking down harassment law as a violation of the 1st Amendment, and various affirmative action-incentivizing applications of the laws as violations of the 14th.
I'm not a utilitarian or a Rawlsian, I'm a libertarian (which is why I want to get rid of anti-discrimination law applying to private entities altogether, albeit with a low priority), plus I regard freedom of speech and equality before the law as human rights as a terminal value (which is why I put a high priority on getting rid of harassment law and asymmetric applications of anti-discrimination law). But even from a Rawlsian point of view, I think I would choose one of the above options (get rid of it, or make it symmetric).
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Everyone generally being able to get a job one is a very low bar, more-or-less measured by the unemployment rate, which basically any system that doesn't put especially onerous rules on laying off people (which in turn make companies cautious with hiring) accomplishes. Hell, even under Jim Crow, black people got menial jobs, which they were qualified for. Perhaps they would have been qualified for *better* jobs than they got, or could have been if they had been allowed better education, but what they got they were qualified for.
Abolish all national governments and return to city states. These governments then only concern themselves with externalities. Unlikely to actually happen, but it's what I'd prefer.
I appreciate that there are in fact people who go too for and are annoyingly uptight in the way they talk about social justice issues. But there is something deeply comical about trying to find a "patient zero" in like a tumblr blog in 2007. James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, W. E.B. Du Bois... there is such a rich history of deep thinkers who are the obvious antecedents of this discourse, and it is bizarre to not engage substantively with *their* thought which expending all this energy on their contemporary epigones.
Edited my comment to make a more focused and less (but still somewhat) grouchy point. The problem with the concept of "woke" is that it is used to refer to any sort of reference to systemic racism, the phenomenology of marginalization, etc., everything from the stupid and counterproductive (corporate DEI, diversity statements) to the profound (Baldwin, Fanon, etc.). Even if the goal is to criticize a certain kind of shallow application of those ideas, it would be a lot more informative to engage at the roots that to write it all off with the "mentally ill teenagers on tumblr" theory that Scott endorses.
Again: There is over a decade of conversation talking about these things. Go read those. This is a book review talking about a particular subject, and this is demanding that the conversation taking place here be about something else entirely - something which Scott has covered in-depth before the term "woke" arose as a popular term to describe this cluster of beliefs.
The problem isn't necessarily with the obvious antecedents, but with the dumbed-down, stripped-of-any-nuance (if there was any to start with; I rather doubt it for Fanon but my reading of him is limited) version that spread much more virulently via the internet. Rebutting the deep history is useless when your interlocutor is instead based on some much more terrible version corrupted by the game of telephone.
Wow! This summary makes me wish I had more time to read all the comments. I have two responses based on your summary (which I'll make separately).
First, on "Diversity" in corporate hiring, I have personal experience but no broad or deep data. I spent most of my career working for a large aerospace OEM. As you might expect, it was very engineering focused, but also very strongly influenced by finance/accounting. It was historically male-dominated, although there were some women managers and executives. People who didn't deliver results tended to get weeded out. Bottom line up front: Wokeness (DEI) got a lot more attention, and apparently a lot more effort, in the time I worked there (1993-2020).
One of the first presentations I attended (in 1993) was a group of young HR professionals working on establishing a process to identify candidates for training and promotion. The objective was to identify the best candidates for greater responsibility, so they could get extra training and mentoring. The proposed metrics were: (1) numbers of women and minorities selected for training, (2) percentages of women and minorities selected for training, (3) numbers of women and minorities completing training, (4) percentages of women and minorities completing training, and (5-8) the same things relative to promotion. I asked "How are the metrics related to the objectives?" After a short pause, the presenter said "They're not." I let it lie there.
Then, in 2002, I started noticing something odd. My boss, apropos of nothing, told my small group (all men) that it was important to bring foster different perspectives and thinking styles, because it led to more group creativity - he had seen this effect in other organizations where he worked. And women were a good example of different thinking styles. Shortly after that, a woman joined our group.
Later, there was a requirement from HR that "hiring slates" include at least 1/3 "diversity candidates", which were not publicly defined, but I assume meant Black, Hispanic, or female candidates.
Around 2005, I started seeing explicit company-wide justifications for Diversity. At first, it was "We need to have different thinking styles in order to be more effective problem solvers." This sounded nice, but I could not find any effort to identify different thinking styles. If you added a female MIT Mechanical Engineer to a group of male MIT Mechanical Engineers, did you get a different thinking style? Who exactly had these "different thinking styles," and why were demographic statistics the only relevant measurement? If you assume that different demographics have different thinking styles, doesn't this imply that some thinking styles (and therefore some demographics) are "better" for one position or another? And wouldn't that be unlawful discrimination, if we acted on it?
Around 2010, I saw a different justification for Diversity. Our customers were airlines (and to some extent governments) around the world, so we needed people with different cultural backgrounds to deal with our very diverse customers. (And suppliers.) This sounded reasonable, except that most of our employees had no dealings with people outside the company. Maybe 5% in sales and customer support, a few percent dealing with suppliers, a very few preparing external communications or representing the company in trade groups, conventions, government interactions, etc. So, it wasn't obviously relevant for most employees. And, for sales and customer support, the justification didn't seem to fit the implied goal of supporting hiring more US minorities: Should we assign Black employees to Africa? If so, that would be a good way to kill their careers, because the entire continent had less business than one large US airline. And why wouldn't we hire actual Indians to sell to (and support) Indian customers, or actual Mexicans to sell to (and support) Mexican customers? Would it be better to assign a Puerto Rican to a Mexican account, rather than a white? Shouldn't we avoid assigning women to deal with Latin Americans, who (supposedly) wouldn't take women seriously in high-level positions?
Around 2012, the President of the Commercial part of the company, in a presentation to managers, announced (apropos of very little) that we "will achieve gender parity" within two years. He did not explain what "gender parity" was, or how it would be achieved, or why it was an important goal. Later still, around 2017, a woman executive, in an "all-hands" meeting, proudly announced that women would be given preference in all hiring and promotion decisions. Both of these announcements were delivered as if they were applause lines, but they got no applause.
My interpretation from these items, and from reading more broadly, was that these initiatives were driven mainly by HR convincing the company's senior leadership, based on two things:
(1) As a very large company (Fortune 50) and major government contractor, we had risk of legal liability if we didn't have "enough" of the right demographic groups in the right levels of the company.
(2) Polling indicated that social justice considerations were very important to college students, especially at the elite universities where we wanted to recruit, so we needed to have a robust DEI program to get the new hires we wanted.
Thank you for sharing these specific experiences. A lot of the people in this thread don’t seem to believe this stuff really happens.
> If you assume that different demographics have different thinking styles, doesn't this imply that some thinking styles (and therefore some demographics) are "better" for one position or another? And wouldn't that be unlawful discrimination, if we acted on it?
Yes, exactly. I am always amazed how few people seem to understand how stereotypes work — even when they subscribe to sociological frameworks that describe it quite accurately! Namely: stereotypes ascribe traits to their targets, and those traits exist within a matrix that defines them in contrast to each other. This, if whites are effete and uptight and nerdy, then blacks are brutish and careless and stupid. And if blacks are creative and rhythmic and relaxed, then whites are analytical and deliberate and disciplined. In the US, racial and ethnic stereotypes are largely arranged along the black-white axis, with groups like Latinos placed somewhere in between, and groups like Asians and Jews being more “white” than whites. Of course, when the cultural traditions of these groups get invoked to deny the charge of ultra-whiteness, this just highlights a second axis: the “product of a culture”-“individual” axis, where whites are understood as individual persons with agency and free will, and non-whites are understood as automatons following the dictates of their culture (and of other environmental factors, like “systemic racism” or whatever).
Similarly, women are understood to be “intuitive” and “nurturing” to exactly the degree that men are understood to be rational and tough.
In other words: the idea that you can elevate a group (like women) using “positive” stereotypes, or denigrate a group (like whites or men) using “negative” stereotypes, is fundamentally false. All stereotypes simply limit your ability to think clearly and treat people as individuals.
It would be helpful for people to define just what "woke" means. Some people use it to mean language: ever-changing rules on what words can be used, and which are anathema. Others use it to refer to ideas: "white privilege", "systemic racism", power dynamics and disparate treatment in the legal system.
Racial preferences in employment in the US go back at least to the early 1970s. Businesses were being sued, sometimes by the government, and sometimes by employees who weren't promoted or candidates who weren't hired. Businesses asked for some rules they could follow that would leave them protected against lawsuits. Nixon's labor department obliged by publishing guidelines, telling businesses how many people of different demographics they should have in each occupational group. These couldn't be called quotas, because quotas were illegal. Businesses couldn't hire to meet the targets, because that would mean quotas, which were illegal. But people knew what was wanted, and worked behind the curtain to do it.
This stuff is very institutionalized, in much the same way as in college admissions, without public acknowledgement. I also think it's essentially unconnected to discussions of white privilege, intersectionality, hierarchies of victimization, new terms like BIPOC, Latinx, or LGBTQIA+.
I've been mulling over a new version of the origins of woke hypothesis, which isn't new so much as a different slant on the Tumbler / online teens theory.
I do believe that Woke ideas originated in academia. But academics can be blowhards with little follow through - as a commentor above notes, they mostly write books. This missing key here is that most people that have gained positions in highly competitive fields, like academics, have been sucked into Moloch, or, as some others might say, they have overoptimized to achieve and maintain their position, stripping out anything that doesn't support these goals. This leads a lot of academics (and other upper class folks) to have convenient ethics, which means they talk a lot about being good, because it benefits them and their position, but they largely don't follow through, because that also benefits their position.
But the middle class, and especially wide-eyed idealist middle class teenagers, don't know that. As the middle class has to sacrifice less to Moloch to attain and maintain their middle class jobs, they have the ability to retain the belief that ethics actual matter. That one should act in accordance with what one believes, and that beliefs are not just something to espouse when they benefit you, but are something to espouse even at a cost.
What happened is that the dominant, but smaller, class created a ideology it didn't actually, really mean, and the middle and working class (a much bigger group of people) got a hold of it and took it seriously. This had the weird effect of both empowering and elevating academics and other high level thought leaders (while Twitter was booming), while at the some time holding them accountable to all the radical crap they had been writing for decades.
What was the upper class to do, but run with it? They couldn't look like charlatans.
Maybe there should be a generational component? That is, it might have started out with a handful of activists and professors, but in the next "generation" there were more of them, and a greater number of true believers, and in the next generation more, up until it reached a critical mass?
Also, it feels like there's something intensely Molochian about the zero-sum mentality behind the modern culture war, where scruples and principles are to be set aside if it leads to victory. It might even be traceable back through identity politics to Marxist class struggle, but that's probably out of scope for this theory.
That doesn't fit in any way, shape, or form, my experience or voting/poll results. Middle class and working class people deeply, deeply hate wokeness. It's primarily a top-down enforcement from university-educated HR and management for them.
Academics, on the other hand, do in fact enforce it among each other. Also, it's the other way around in terms of competitive fields; Since academics are primarily socially judged through peer review, complaining about ethics is extremely useful to give yourself an edge.
My personal pet theory is this: Roughly since the enlightenment, science just kept winning. On the theoretic level, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, etc. greatly expanded our understanding of the world around us, in a way that was hard to argue against by traditional theology. In practical terms, large parts of our technological progress would not have been possible without the scientific groundwork. However, during this time being a scientist wasn't really beneficial; Almost every scientist was already independently rich or at least not poor, and they generally were constantly nagged by family & friends to stop this nonsense and earn money. This caused a strong selection for only people who really, really like science in itself (which doesn't mean they were without biases!).
This greatly increased the social standing of science over time, which led to the establishment and expansion of actual, reasonably paid scientific positions, and thus ultimately to more people entering university that aren't intrinsically interested in science itself, but who like the social idea of being a scientist who leads society forward. There is also a positive feedback loop from adding new scientific fields who have to have more vague & lower evidence standards by the nature of the topic, which also appealed to different people than the older fields with clearer and higher standards, which led to an increased establishment of new fields whic are even more vague, and so on.
After WW2, economic prosperity sped up this process, and it got turbo-charged once western societies realised that university is in a certain sense a natural progression of school. This was mediated as well by elite interests, as they could indirectly push education costs on the government or individual. Nowadays entering university is basically the default for the middle class and higher. You can outright stumble into a scientific career despite not having any special interest in it. Furthermore, it turned into a greater political-media-academia complex, where every politician and journalist is not only university-educated, but went to largely the same universities with the same culture, together with the people who also end up becoming top scientists.
Once you really internalize this development, it becomes a foregone conclusion that university will eventually end up being dominated by a vague political ideology that can be used and interpreted to serve whatever are the needs of the current elite. Wokeness is just really convenient; I haven't met a single privileged person who didn't find a way to either claim oppressed status for themselves or more commonly to claim to speak on behalf of the oppressed. It's in particular very effective to keep the middle class, the primary enemy of the upper class, down, since they aren't as experienced in the discourse while being sufficiently privileged to fall on the wrong side of the conflict.
Some possible explanations: Of course academics "enforce" wokeness - it's how they take down their competitors. But if you peeled back their skull and could look inside their brain, I don't think you find a deep, emotional commitment to woke ideas. Oh yes, they can talk the talk very well, and make their neighbors accountable. But they don't actually care about their own behavior, just defending their own position. I think this is best illustrated by inconsistent application of woke values across different situations and domains.
Of course, there are academics that benefit more from this than others.
Well, as for the working and middle class - it depends. I would say that maybe the majority of these groups are against wokism, but for those that did adopt it, they did so very sincerely.
I think this is normal? I've seen it with RFCs and implementation guides for WWW technologies, and in house rules for tabletop RPGs (especially pre-3e D&D), and I bet there was a similar gap between the writings of Karl Marx and the actual operational behavior of the USSR. It's one thing to write up a theory, but another thing to have that theory brought into the real world and reshaped by passing through the minds of people who try to use it. Some parts are added, some parts are discarded, and the focus may drift away.
There were lots of Communist leaders (like Lenin) who were both theorists and practitioners. Academia is a realm more of theory than practice, and there's a bigger divide between that world (particularly law schools not intended for undergrads) and kids on social media.
"Lots of people wrote in to say that there was definitely unfair affirmative-action-style discrimination going on at their workplaces, and lots of other people wrote in to say there definitely wasn’t and they’d never seen anything like that in their whole career. Sometimes these people worked in the same industry, or even the same employer (eg the US civil service)!"
The US federal civil service (nonuniformed) is an enormous set, almost 3 million people. That's almost 1% of the US population!
It includes hundreds of agencies. It does an enormous number of quite different things. I suspect anything you can take away from examining it is about as much as you could take away from examining "humans" (except possibly children; I don't think there are any child employees but I could be wrong).
They do try to have uniform standards, but that works out about as well as you would think it would.
I noticed in my five decades or so of work that civil service seemed to have a broader range of diversity in staff than the private sector. While most of my employment came after Johnson's administration, I think the opportunities for employment for a wider range of applicants opened up in the Truman administration -- a good decade before 'affirmative action'. I think it was Truman who mandated racial integration in the military.
In the 1960s and 1970s, cultural and ethnic diversity wasn't achieved by mandate, but by giving candidates equal opportunity to compete. Reliable and conservative minorities often worked decades for the same public service agency, and retired. They didn't need an advantage -- just equal opportunity. Recruitments that exclude people according to their race aren't just unconstitutional, they're patronizing and counterproductive.
Richard Gadsden's comment on the importance of football is significant, but not the whole story. I recall an actual court case against Brown University, started in 1991, which claimed insufficient opportunities for women athletes. Brown has no athletic scholarships, so scholarships weren't the issue. One of the facts in the case was that Brown had done extensive surveys to assess their students' interest in sports, and found that men were much more interested. They claimed that the number of team sports positions matched the level of interest between men and women. The judge ruled that level of interest didn't matter - the only acceptable situation was for the percentages of women and men on sports teams to match the percentages among the student body.
Interpretations of Title IX have led to cancellation of some men's sports, in order to avoid having "too many" men on teams, as well as reclassifying some women-heavy activities (cheerleading and dance) as "sports" in order to count more women athletes. This last effect is not necessarily to the advantage of the cheerleaders and dancers. Some may get scholarships, which is good for them, but participants smaller, poorer schools that have few or no scholarships won't get that benefit. But it means that teams must have designated coaches, defined seasons, defined rules on practice hours, defined academic performance rules, etc.
Yes this was very explicitly the case at the direction state U I attended in the late 90s early 00s. You had them struggling to round up women to replace male programs which had hundreds of students interested. The difference in level of interest was striking. This included the complete elimination of a national champion winning wrestling team which was very popular on campus.
The number of RFPs/solicitations from government entities and government adjacent entities that explicitly say they give preference to "women and minority owned businesses" might be over 50%. It is VERY common.
And I have seen it in action as well. At one point this federal agency I was a freelance subcontractor for (so I worked with a bunch of their consulting firms) was using ~9 consulting firms to help it with a certain kind of work. One was the "black" consulting firm, black owned and mostly black staffed. It was a complete fuckup failure and terrible at its assignments. This was well known for years and basically the other firms would get hired to "mentor" them and back check their work rather than deal with the fact that this attempt to diversify the consultant base was a failure.
The firm were eventually dumped (by not giving it more $/assignments, nothing was ever actually taken away), but they got about 8 or 9 strikes before being out compared to the 2 or 3 most other firms would get. No one explicitly said "X cannot be dropped due to diversity considerations", but they said about every combination of words around that except those exact words. Talk about how important diversity is generally, talk about how the consultant base needs to match the demos of the staff, talk about how some firms cannot be dropped for political reasons, etc.
>This leaves me with more questions than it answers. For example, if a company hasn’t explicitly measured how tests correlate with performance (which I assume is the case with most tests), are the tests okay or not?
1. Under Griggs, if a test results in disparate impact, the burden shifts to the employer to show that the test is related to successful job performance. If the company has not measured how the tests correlate with performance, I don't see how it can carry that burden.
Second, Griggs was fifty years ago. The basic law has been very clear since then: Any pre-employment test that has a disparate impact must correlate with performance. Why would a company be so stupid as to use a pre-employment test without determining that it correlates with performance? Obviously some small companies might be ignorant of the law, but that can't possibly be the norm.
Finally, the assumption that companies use tests without measuring their efficacy is inconsistent with the claim that Griggs has altered company behavior by changing incentives.
Or even if you have, say you have had the position for 8 years and had 3 people do it. That isn't a relevant sample, and at any point you want to implement the test you won't have a sample demonstrating it is helpful.
All you ever have is your guess it would be helpful and then after using it for a while you could look back and see if it was (if it is a small number of positions this might be decades).
As I understand it, in such a case, the plaintiff would also not have sufficient evidence to show disparate impact, so would be unable to make a prima facie case and hence the company would not have to show that the test is related to job requirements.
Isn't there a pretty extensive literature that IQ is the top predictor of job success? Shouldn't that justify using an IQ test, or would they just say you have to prove it for every individual job?
I am not an expert in this area of the law, but as I understand it, the test must be relevant to skills needed for the specific job. In Griggs itself, the company required new employees in any department other than Labor to "register satisfactory scores on two professionally prepared aptitude tests, as well as to have a high school education." One of the tests was "the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which purports to measure general intelligence." Note that the departments other than Labor included "Coal Handling" and "Maintenance." One can see why courts might look askance at that particular IQ test requirement.
And, something can be the "best predictor" of success, without being particularly necessary for success. A high LSAT score is a great predictor of success in law, but plenty of people with only OK LSAT scores are very successful lawyers (in part because successful lawyering often requires skills not measured on the LSAT)
Also, of course, even if IQ is a predictor, what level of IQ? A company that requires an IQ over 120 for janitor jobs might well end up with marginally more proficient janitors, but if 95% of people with an IQ under 120 can perform the duties, the requirement seems a bit suspect, does it not? And, remember, if the company can show that a 120+ IQ is really necessary (perhaps there is a lot of dangerous and sensitive equipment, and those with 120+ IQs are much less accident-prone), then great!
> “Also, I find it interesting that everyone, even in this politically correct age, agrees to call human resources staffers “HR ladies”. I haven’t worked at enough corporations to have much personal experience of this - why should it be such a universal phenomenon?”
As far as why this is, I think it is mostly interest. I see a lot of women very excited to join HR because they wanted a white collar job that let them build relationships and help people get along and avoid conflicts, while avoiding math. They are high in both agreeableness and neuroticism. This by no means just women, this includes me as well, but it certainly skews that way.
Other theories are that women are better at HR or affirmative action makes organizations hire more women, and HR is the place they will not do worse in. I disagree with both these ideas, but only because my first theory seems better. A combination of multiple factors is always possible.
The two areas you tend to see more men in are labor relations and compensation, which is more evidence that interests play a major factor.
Thank you. This seems the very obvious explanation of why HR is more female-dominated. There is a *tendency* for women to *on average* be more interested in the relational kinds of jobs, and so *on average* we'd expect more women to go for HR and more men to go for the "lock yourself in a tank for 3 weeks writing software" kinds of jobs. There are of course plenty of exceptions on all sides, but that's my understanding of the general statistical trends.
Perhaps that depends on how far out on the tails of the overlapping bell curves we go?
Although HR is a common institution, so it seems like it would have to heavily select for this sort of thing, to get the current balance? Is HR actually something people set out to do as a career from day 1, or more of something people wind up doing and settle for?
It's odd, thinking about it now most of the places I've worked with "HR Departments" they are all/majority female.
But in my first job, back when these were called "Personnel Departments", it was mostly male, or at least the person in charge was a guy. I would still happily hang the SOB because he dawdled so much on getting my paperwork processed, I was weeks paying emergency tax (and that really hurt, back in the days of 33% income tax) just because he was having too much fun schmoozing with his buddies to do his damn job.
So all in all, even if the HR ladies are wokescolds, at least they get my paperwork done on time! 😁
Yeah - when it was "Personnel", it was male. Now it's "HR" and it's female. I have no idea why.
I'm a bit late to this thread, but I have an answer for this!
*Women get humanities degrees.* The humanities departments are universally terrible at promoting employment options post-college that aren't academia, and so humanities majors have to make do with what they can find that will take a humanities degree... which is HR.
(For context, I am a female English major who managed to score a technical writing job... but a survey of my HR department is an even mix of humanities and business majors.)
It is largely something you settle for. I have met a couple that considered it a passion from the get go, but most people moved into it once they realized it paid better or had better WLB than their passion, or maybe they failed their passion.
"HR ladies" is DEFINITELY NOT AN ACCEPTABLE TERM. I hope no one reads this and starts using this term at work! In the workplace, you treat men and women equally, you don't refer to their sex/gender unless you have a good reason to bring it up, and you do not talk as if a majority-female group is 100% female.
Agreed, I have never referred to anyone as an HR Lady, and it’d honestly be a little weird to hear it when I’m a man in HR. And of course, if you were known to refer to people as HR Ladies, you would be more likely to lose an EEO lawsuit. But hopefully we can still point out that HR is a female dominated role.
I'm in academia, and we massively prioritize diversity in applicants. If an applicant is black and minimally competent, then this applicant is very likely to at least get an interview and probably the job too. I've noticed that this has changed somewhat in the past year or two as the salience of racial politics has declined nationally. But it's still basically true.
Of course, there's a racial and gender hierarchy. Black people are the most desired applicants, followed by people who are visibly Native American and Hispanic. Asians are still preferable to whites. Women are preferable to men.
None of this is driven by the law, as best I can tell. In fact, I'm pretty sure what we're doing is illegal. Instead, this happens because it's what academics want.
I want to quibble with two comments I think are probably mostly correct.
One is about the Tumblr theory of woke origins, from somebody who says they think the left end of the spectrum has run away from them. I think this actually reflects their increasing awareness of what the far left is rather than that changing; for example, in 2009 there was no such thing as "breadtube." For those unfamiliar, that's a term for far-left YouTube pundits, who make left-wing ideologies more visible, and I'm not surprised the poster has been seeing such ideas more since then. "Breadtube" is called that in reference to *The Conquest of Bread*, a key work of anarchist theory written by Peter Kropotkin in 1892, which according to my notes is earlier than 2009. As far as I can discern, Karl Marx, Emma Goldman, and Joe Hill were also primarily famous for things they did before 2009. Yeah, Tumblr changed social discourse, but radical leftism isn't new - you're just seeing it more clearly.
The second is with the story of a workplace that got way less fun after a series of escalating harassment complaints which "everyone knew" were bogus. I have no doubt that that's the poster's true experience, but I have to ask - how much fun do you think the woman making the complaints was having? I'm gonna guess not much. Could whatever problems she was experiencing have been addressed without those complaints being made? If they were bogus, probably! But clearly that wasn't done. It sounds like a pretty bad outcome, but it also sounds like there was a real issue the company failed to address.
I know a woman who has and will again use the law to hurt others over slights. She’s had some success. It’s very true that she’s unhappy in her workplaces and relationships but that’s all on her.
I can’t know if this is the same situation but I do know it is sometimes true that there’s no placating some people. For them, the pain they inflict is the point.
Yup! That comment reads to me like something somebody who had been part of a culture of harassment might say, but it *also* reads like exactly the situation you just described and I'm going to trust it's the latter.
If somebody is making the workplace miserable in ways other than the bogus harassment complaints, management should have stepped in (or asked HR to) well before it escalated to the point of those complaints being filed.
I do not say that the problem at that workplace was genuine harassment, because it sounds like it probably wasn't. I do say there was a problem, and bad management means it was addressed in a way that solved nobody's problems. That outcome sucks and I've got a lot of sympathy for John having to suffer for it.
It's honestly a hard question to parse. There are places and situations where bad things are allowed to happen and to slide under "it's all in fun, can't you take a joke, it was only one guy, that was out of character" and there are places and situations where absolutely there are people willing to jump at legal proceedings for "you didn't say hello to me today!"
Some people will use the rules to satisfy grudges, some people are forced to it because all their other efforts have been ignored or down-played. You have to take it case-by-case.
The graph in Neike Taika-Tessaro's comment doesn't have a y-axis label and the text doesn't make it clear what it's showing (it's number of internet users in the US).
> Also, could someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary?
I say all this as someone without a college degree who'd personally love it if degree requirements were replaced with aptitude tests.
In order to even get your foot in the door in court, you would have to 1. have no college degree, 2. apply for a position, 3. get rejected, and 4. be able to establish that you were actually qualified for the position. In order to circumvent "you're not qualified because you don't have a college degree", you would ideally have experience in the position at another company. Failing that, you could attempt to piece together an argument for (4) based on independent work - for instance, if the position is web development, you might have built websites for your friends and family; if the position is ditch-digging, you've dug many ditches in your backyard, etc.
You need to show that your lack of a college degree is a "but-for" requirement - that is to say, you would have been hired and performed as good or better than the average person in that job, but for your lack of a college degree.
If you can't show all four of the above, your case is automatically dismissed for failure to state a claim. It's not very expensive or time-consuming for the company to respond with "your honor, the Plaintiff has failed to state a claim, we request dismissal" - the cost is anywhere from free to about $1000, depending on if they actually hire a lawyer to draft the motion for them or if they feel comfortable just filling in the blanks on a boilerplate Motion to Dismiss.
(If you're really determined, you can of course appeal that all the way up to the federal circuit, which will happily rubber-stamp an affirmation of the district court's decision that the initial hearing was correct in dismissing your complaint without action. It will cost you more in time and money than it will the company you're trying to sue, because all they have to do is whip out the same increasingly-tattered note that says "plaintiff has (still) not stated an actionable claim, we (again) request dismissal")
If you *can* show all four of the above, then you'd also have to establish that either 1. the company's "real" reason for not hiring you is due to your membership in a protected class or 2. regardless of intent, the company's policy creates disparate impact on a protected class. You'd likely pick "people with disabilities" as the protected class in question here - ADHD and depression being the most obvious disabilities to frame the college degree case around. You have to be a member of the protected class in question, because otherwise you have no claim, no matter how objectively correct you may be about the discriminatory intent - the company could literally be named "We Hate Women and Refuse to Hire Them and Our College Degree Requirements Are Just an Excuse LLC" and you would have no claim.
Keep in mind that all that's just to get to the point where you present a case with discovery and witnesses and testimony and gavels going bang-bang. You probably lose the case, because all the company has to do is establish that the degree requirement satisfies a rational (even if it's not "the most" rational - perfect is not going to be the enemy of the good-enough) company interest. As long as you don't find a bunch of people saying "man, it's great how the college degree requirement lets us keep out those freaking ADHDweebs!! lol!!" in discovery, then there's no reason to doubt the company on their word when they say the college degree helps establish a pool of qualified candidates who are better-equipped to handle the day-to-day intellectual micro-rigors of the job.
So the short answer is "no", because I'm pretty sure you have a college degree, and thus can't state a claim.
The slightly-less-short answer in the world where you don't have a college degree is "no, because you'd have to spend time applying to every company that requires a college degree and getting rejected, plus more time self-training to become objectively qualified for the positions you apply for so your case isn't immediately dismissed, plus more time in court actually filing all these claims".
The alternative answer in the world where you don't have a college degree and I also don't take your question completely literally is "well, you can certainly try to sue a few of them, but you'd honestly have a far better and more financially-productive time just doing DoorDash, and it'd be about as likely to change the broader hiring culture".
There’s been a big shift in the past five years or so as a few dozen states, and lots of federal and private employers, have dropped degree requirements. This has been pushed about equally by Democratic and Republican governors and presidents and CEOs.
Sure, but it's not because of EEOC / CRA considerations (which can be sort of hinted at by the fact that it's pretty bipartisan, and neither Cortez nor Greene is shrieking about how bad / good the shift is).
It's a combination of factors that I think can be very roughly boiled down to 1. "as college has become more expensive, the amount of college graduates willing/able to work for the salaries an employer can afford to pay for entry-level positions has shrunk" and 2. "a college degree does not select for the same factors as it once did, so unless that degree is specific to particular requirements - e.g., an Engineering degree for an engineering job, or (just to make clear this isn't about STEM) an English degree for a job involving written communication - its value as a behavioral signifier has been eclipsed by its expense in deterring otherwise-qualified candidates".
EEOC/CRA type considerations are pretty bipartisan these days. When I was at Texas A&M, we were required to treat “carrying a gun” or “unvaccinated and unmasked” as protected classes with exactly the same sort of protections as race or disability groups. If your office was a lab with a ban on guns, you had to be willing to meet with students for office hours elsewhere to avoid inconveniencing gun carriers. We weren’t allowed to ask questions in class or make statements that would make unvaccinated or unmasked students feel uncomfortable. Republicans are totally happy to use this sort of approach.
Yes, and from my past experience doing hiring as a research manager in one branch of the US govt, by far the biggest boost was given to veterans (as others have mentioned) -- this was the only one that ever caused us problems and which we spent time needing to work around. Yet conservatives don't seem to get quite as apoplectic about that form of affirmative action / gaming the system.
The rules were very explicit about not giving any preference (even tie-breaking) to women or minorities, and we followed those rules 100% in my experience -- while also doing extra outreach to increase applications from under-represented groups (which seemed like a good compromise to me). Whereas I've also done hiring at universities in the US and UK, where there is a clear and open preference for women especially.
I think the key difference with veteran's preference is that, since it is often seen as part of the compensation package for joining the military in the first place, it is an earned benefit of something the candidate has done rather than an unearned benefit of something the candidate is.
Hi - I certainly agree that it isn't perfectly analogous, as you say in large part because it is a choice rather than due to birth. Although by the standard logic of preferential treatment for minorities (which to be clear I'm not defending), their claim is stronger for exactly that reason. However this is a very inefficient system for compensating the military: it distorts later hiring decisions, adds bureaucracy, and frankly isn't going to have nearly as much impact on recruitment as say a larger signing bonus. If we need to pay more in order to get what we want, pay more. My point is that normally conservatives would argue in favor of the efficient market-based approach, and I can't help but think the fact that they don't do so here is purely political rather because they believe it's an optimal compensation package design.
Out of curiosity I looked into the history of veterans preferences and it wasn't designed to encourage people to join the military -- it came about after forced conscription (in the Civil War and the World Wars), in order to allow veterans to compete more fairly for jobs with those who had gained work experience instead of serving. Needless to say that doesn't apply nowadays, mostly because we no longer have a draft (in the US) but also very much because experience as a veteran is in fact valued by many private employers -- and quite reasonably so (my sense is that the military is much more like a standard employer now than it was in the 19th century, with all the associated opportunities to learn work skills).
> we were required to treat “carrying a gun” or “unvaccinated and unmasked” as protected classes with exactly the same sort of protections as race or disability groups
It sounds like you're talking about this being applied to students, but ... Does this actually mean that they were required to preferentially hire people who were unvaccinated and unmasked? Could they at least do antibody tests or something? (That's what I mostly care about, in the service of reducing spread, and I don't much care if the antibodies are from vaccines or the virus itself.)
This was about “hostile environment” type discrimination and rules about not creating it. This wasn’t about employment or admissions.
I suspect even allowing people to volunteer the results of antibody tests would have been interpreted as creating a hostile environment for unvaccinated people.
I could do that actually. But I have found that once you have a decade of experience and interview well, a lack of a degree doesn’t matter. People are actually impressed.
But when I only had a few years of relevant experience, I was rejected by the manager for lacking a degree. I know because I was ultimately hired over her protests.
Not for DEI or whatever reasons. He just wanted qualified people in that role, not yet another of her college friends.
- <i>Our Eastern European branch office DID turn into a old boys club on Friday afternoons</i> [...]
- I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.
That's an easy one. Alcohol is generally not consumed openly in European corporate workplaces. However, Friday afternoon is an exception in many companies. For example, in Dutch and German banks in early 2000s it used to be relatively common to send at Friday lunchtime a couple of juniors to fetch 3-4 crates of beer to be consumed in the office after lunch. This is probably somewhat less common now.
Fond, if bleary, memories of Friday at 4. Not very productive then but our customers weren't either and nobody noticed. We looked at that as pre-functioning before hitting the then-new happy hour free appetizer spreads. Visualize shrimp, taquitos and other usual items, washed down with cheap drinks.
Later on, we all realized that our company was run by alcoholics. Glad we all survived and repented.
>You just have to show there is a “manifest relationship to the employment in question" (a more lenient standard added by subsequent more conservative courts) then the burden shifts to the plaintiffs to prove its not legitimate or that the employer could achieve the same goal in a way that doesn't have a disparate impact.
Say I own an IT company. The highly intelligent social butterfly A-people all work at FAANG, so my recruitment gets me ten 140 IQ but social inept programmers and ten 120 IQ but socially functional programmers. Their strengths and weaknesses balance out so they all get equal employee ratings. But then some civil rights bureaucrat with mid statistical skills tells me I can't do IQ tests in hiring anymore since I can't show that there's a "manifest relationship to the employment in question" since "IQ tests doesn't measure job performance". Would I have to obey those orders?
Seems obvious to me that courts lack the statistical proficiency that is needed to handle cases like this and that involving them was a big mistake, per Hananias original point.
EDIT: I see now that Hadi Khan already made this point.
Well and just to make the problem here clear because people miss it. Is once you throw out the IQ tests because they "don't tell you anything", now you need to put the 140 but inept applciants, and 120 but adept applicants, up against the 90 but adept applicants, and cannot discriminate.
This is the real teeth/harm of the problem. You go from a situation where "120/140 doesn't make a huge difference depending on the soft skills" to being boxed into picking 90s because you cannot measure the "IQ" at all anymore.
Obviously it is a little more complicated than that, but that is the core problem with ditching aptitude testing.
Exactly right. The idea of the civil rights lawyer that Scott quotes that Griggs is not a big deal because you can still use tests that have a "manifest relationship" to the job is absurd. We all know courts are not the right actors to be making decisions about what tests are related to a given job
> I unfairly forgot to mention one of Hanania’s strongest arguments, which was how naturally we avoid thinking about some categories of inequality when we’re not forced to think about them by the government. Nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?) etc. Hanania thinks the reason racial discrimination has become so much more talked about than these other superficially-equally-interesting questions is that the government makes all companies keep racial statistics and talk about things in those terms. If there were no AA, companies wouldn't keep the statistics and people might forget about it, the same way they've forgotten about everything else.
But... it is exactly as illegal to discriminate on the basis of religion as it is to discriminate on the basis of race. The same laws that say you can't choose to hire/fire based on the color of someone's skin also say you can't choose to hire/fire based on whether somebody's a Protestant or a Catholic or an atheist. It really seems like an extremely strong argument AGAINST a purely legalistic cause for "woke"!
Also, if anyone thinks France is a paradise with no racial or religious discrimination because they banned the public tracking of race or religion, they haven’t been paying attention to any French news stories over the past decade. (Or maybe they have, and they see that there’s a ban on wearing a cross over your head or a hijab over your head, and assume that Macron must be of a racial background they can’t see.)
I'm aware of laïcité, but I haven't been following the situation in France closely, only reading occasional articles when they bubble up, which gives me a skewed perspective. Would you mind going into more detail about what's going on?
My view as an outsider? The secular question is about anti-Catholicism and the Muslims just got dragged in because they too are visible about their religion. I don't think the French state is too worried about Protestants, and as for the Jews there's always been the strain of anti-Semitism (see the Dreyfus affair) but the real struggle is post-Revolution over Church and State, since the Church was so heavily linked with the old regime.
"No crucifixes!" got easily turned into "No hijabs!" as required.
Quoting from "The Ball and the Cross":
"Yes, France!" said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him came to the top, his face growing as red as his hair. "France, that has always been in rebellion for liberty and reason. France, that has always assailed superstition with the club of Rabelais or the rapier of Voltaire. France, at whose first council table sits the sublime figure of Julian the Apostate. France, where a man said only the other day those splendid unanswerable words"—with a superb gesture—"'we have extinguished in heaven those lights that men shall never light again.'"
"No," said MacIan, in a voice that shook with a controlled passion. "But France, which was taught by St. Bernard and led to war by Joan of Arc. France that made the crusades. France that saved the Church and scattered the heresies by the mouths of Bossuet and Massillon. France, which shows today the conquering march of Catholicism, as brain after brain surrenders to it, Brunetière, Coppée, Hauptmann, Barrès, Bourget, Lemaître."
"France!" asserted Turnbull with a sort of rollicking self-exaggeration, very unusual with him, "France, which is one torrent of splendid scepticism from Abelard to Anatole France."
"France," said MacIan, "which is one cataract of clear faith from St. Louis to Our Lady of Lourdes."
"France at least," cried Turnbull, throwing up his sword in schoolboy triumph, "in which these things are thought about and fought about. France, where reason and religion clash in one continual tournament. France, above all, where men understand the pride and passion which have plucked our blades from their scabbards. Here, at least, we shall not be chased and spied on by sickly parsons and greasy policemen, because we wish to put our lives on the game. Courage, my friend, we have come to the country of honour."
Speaking as someone with a bit of Huguenot ancestry, I am happy with French Catholic religious fervor being tamped down a bit. ;-) And I don't mind at all if other religions have to play along, and I think those who complain don't know how good they have it, and might be horribly surprised at what happens if the rules are lifted. (Or, well, probably not, we don't usually burn people alive today.)
To mix metaphors a bit, don't go into the grizzly bear cage at the zoo and lecture it about unceded black bear land.
That idiot kid at Columbia who was talking about how other people should "be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists", needs to stop and seriously think what would happen to him if other people adopted that attitude. He's not the only person in the universe.
France has a history of making laws that are formally equal in how they ban displays of religion, but they always target aspects of display that are far more central for Islam than for Christianity. They ban wearing of very visible religious clothing (which is a major imposition for certain kinds of Muslim women and nearly irrelevant for Christians, who basically never do more than wear a cross, which can just go under the shirt anyway) but they don’t ban buildings that display their religion (which would be as much of an imposition on churches as mosques).
It's not the solution that I, as an American grew up with, but I think the French people get to make their own rules, and this falls well within what I consider acceptable. When in Rome, and all that. The French used to burn people alive for being a slightly different version of Christian, and we should all be thankful that they've stopped.
There may even be value in forcing people to prioritize Frenchness over religion, and excluding people who have religions that conflict with French culture. Maybe it'll let their 5th republic outlast our 2nd.
I'm definitely not advocating forceful regime change in France, and not saying that their policy is worse than every alternative they've had! I'm just saying that it's still enforcing a kind of religious discrimination in a guise of neutrality. They get to make their own rules, and I get to state my opinion of those rules, and even get to make reasoned arguments against them.
People do care about religious discrimination when it comes to jobs in Catholic schools, see the court cases over "I had an adulterous affair, got pregnant, had an abortion, and the horrible bigots at St Goretti Girls' School terminated my teaching contract" or the "I'm gay, I like to talk about my boyfriend with my students, why are the bigots at St Tarcissus Academy firing me?"
Or look at this pippin from Slate (and by the bye, what the heck is an "Aussiedoodle"?):
Oh, the monsters! But could there just possibly be more to the case than that, given that the court ruled *against* the Biels?
It seems that this case was folded in with another one, so that may have influenced the final decision. The position of the school was that the one-year teaching contract was not renewed due to Mrs. Biel's performance in the classroom; the position of the late Mrs. Biel was that she was being fired for getting sick with cancer. The court ruled that religious institutions are free from government interference with employment:
> I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.
In Serbia, I had a tech job for about 7 months where we did outsourced test writing and a little programming. On Fridays, most of us would be done with work by 3 PM and start socializing. Some employees would drink—we had wine and beer in the office—gossip was common, and there was a PS4 with FIFA on a big TV. The office had about four women (1 in HR, 1 senior technical staff, 1 intern, and 1 junior) and 16-20 men on my floor, including the director/owner of the firm.
Perhaps the whole thing is much simpler than it appears, but taboo to say: white men are too nice. It wasn't black politicians who abolished slavery, or female voters who voted in the female right to vote. Tell white men not to discriminate against women and non-Whites and they fall all over themselves showing - each other, other white men- how 'good' and 'nice' they are. At some point, this allows a critical mass to build up and destroy the system from within.
In 1985 it was white men passing you over for a promotion for being white and male, not 'hr ladies'. Now, the tail wags the dog - - or rather sues it out of existence.
Not so much of a joke in the context of "white men did it because they're so nice". Of course the groups without power could not grant themselves power, but the reason being "because they're so nice"? I think the anti-slavery Evangelicals, for an example, can't be brushed off with simply being tagged as "oh they're so *nice*". Well, not unless you're going to say the seraph with the flaming sword at the gates of Eden was "nice".
I'm struggling to see how a bunch of kind hearted egalitarians who have a book that has a character with a sword in it has anything at all to do with this topic. One time I drove by an elementary school that had a wolverine as its mascot.
>>Tell white men not to discriminate against women and non-Whites and they fall all over themselves showing - each other, other white men- how 'good' and 'nice' they are.
This is misses a *lot* of resistance, both civil and violent, to civil rights progress, especially in the context of race. White people hardly "fell all over themselves" to pass the voting rights act, or integrate schools or legalize interracial marriage. If we'd been "falling over ourselves"
to do those things, there'd have been no need for freedom rides, marches, or letters from Birmingham jail. Those hoses and dogs didn't exactly loose themselves.
Burning crosses, lynchings, closing the pools rather than integrate them, redlining neighborhoods, "massive resistance" to school integration, food thrown on men sitting at counters in Greensboro, the Selma church bombing, the shooting of MLK... it wouldn't be hard to go on, and it seems like a lot to just gloss over with "White men are just too nice."
Mmhmm. And all those heroes were non white and had no support from the evil whites. Sure.
Who do you suppose all those protests were aimed at, the black electorate and black lawmakers? Or at the white people in power? Like the civil war, the whole thing was the majority of whites (nice, progressive, egalitarian) dragging the regressive whites along towards a nicer world. If the majority weren't nice and hadn't long ago lost their stomach for overt repression, there'd have been no hoses or dogs. There'd have been guns and gallows.
Imagine a group of ten white men. Seven are nice, three are not nice. The three not-nice ones want to do not-nice things, but are prevented by the seven nice ones. Later we look back and say "Wow white men sure weren't very nice, look at these three not-nice ones!" Absolute I-just-learned-about-MLK-at-elementary-school understanding of history.
>>Imagine a group of ten white men. Seven are nice, three are not nice. The three not-nice ones want to do not-nice things, but are prevented by the seven nice ones. Later we look back and say "Wow white men sure weren't very nice, look at these three not-nice ones!"
No. Later, we look back and have to correct a man who seems to have forgotten that the three not-nice-men existed at all, throwing around glossed takes on history like "white men are too nice" and "tell white men not to discriminate against women and non-Whites and they fall all over themselves showing - each other, other white men- how 'good' and 'nice' they are."
It's silly that we have to do this (just like it's silly when we have to remind someone wearing their own left wing set of the same blinders that there have been people throughout history who've done good things and nevertheless somehow managed to be white while doing them), but that's just how it is sometimes.
I do not know where you get this idea that when you offer an incredibly shallow and un-nuanced take on history like "tell white men not to discriminate against women and non-Whites and they fall all over themselves showing - each other, other white men- how 'good' and 'nice' they are," any person who corrects you by reminding you that history is more complicated than "white people are too nice" is magically as un-nuanced as your original statement, by mere virtue of having made the correction.
>I unfairly forgot to mention one of Hanania’s strongest arguments, which was how naturally we avoid thinking about some categories of inequality when we’re not forced to think about them by the government. Nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?)
I don't see how this is a strong argument at all. There's an obvious reason why people would worry more about racial discrimination than religious discrimination even in the absence of the government forcing people to think about it - because more racial discrimination was (and is) happening. Black people got full equality less than a century ago. Catholics never had laws forcing them to go to separate schools and ride at the back of the bus.
And in the cases where religious discrimination is still happening, people do think about it a lot. More people thought about Islamophobia after 9/11, and it wasn't because the government passed a Muslim Rights Act. The Holocaust made people worry about antisemitism for generations, despite a complete lack of the government going around and cracking down on Holocaust deniers. Atheists became significantly more visible and organized a decade ago when people started trying to sneak creationism into schools, which is the opposite of government support for their group. The presence of a problem for the group leads to the group becoming more visible and organized. Once organized, the group can *cause* government action, but exists independently of it.
I don't understand why you call this one of Hanania's best arguments, because (unless there actually is some significant anti-Baptist discrimination that I just haven't heard about), it seems like it's basically just saying "people notice existing discrimination more than non-existing discrimination." And I guess implying that in an ideal society, people would be equally vigilant about all forms of discrimination, whether or not they existed? Just seems more and more nonsensical the more I think about it.
I understood that to mean that racial discrimination has a minimum so long as a law exists to enforce race as a division between people. If the laws were repealed then racism would decline further.
I’m not convinced but that is sorta the book’s thesis: law begets culture.
I'm not convinced either. Jews don't have to declare their religion on any government form, you generally can't identify a Jew by sight, and yet antisemitism is one of the most enduring forms of prejudice on the planet.
>More people thought about Islamophobia after 9/11
And isn't that weird, though? It's not Muslims who were attacked on 9/11, and despite the narratives that instantly started being pushed by the media there were not widespread attacks on American Muslims after 9/11 and the government itself went to enormous lengths to avoid even the perception of going after ordinary Muslims.
If you agree that it seems weird or out of nowhere then I think it actually supports my point - ethnic or religious groups often become marked by outside events without requiring any sort of government action, contrary to Hanania's claim that government action leads to people "noticing" racism and deepening their stance on one side or another.
But also, I think you're revising history a bit, because the government did engage in mass surveillance of Muslim communities:
9/11 was an instance of Muslims killing Americans, rather than anything happening to Muslims a la the Holocaust. People were concerned in advance about a backlash to Muslims, which one may call a "frontlash".
Maybe Scott’s analogy is weak but there’s clearly one form of discrimination that is by far the most common, that used to be talked about but now isn’t, and that’s class.
I can't think of where to find it again but I remember someone mentioning that a Japanese automaker exec specifically mentioned choosing plant locations away from black urban areas based on avoiding disparate hiring rate difficulties
Perhaps more powerfully, Thomas Sowell studied the incredibly granular statistics on affirmative action in India and observed that the people who benefited in a group were the top cohort who were going to do fine in any case. I assume it has very little genuine benefit for the cost compared to widespread adoption of charter schools
Similarly, go look at the current crop of Ivy grads. You'll see a substantial number of racial minorities, but almost none of them will come from disadvantaged backgrounds. I went to law school with a lot of black children of lawyers and wall street executives who went to prep school in Connecticut. The amount of money and resources thrown at children who grew up with French tutors and fencing instructors in the name of "social justice" is obscene.
Going to repeat my comment from the other thread -- so, the tetralemma that Scott posed, I have a memory of some other writer posting basically a very similar tetralemma recently, although the options and the framing and the implied point were different. It was... I forget, Matt Yglesias? Noah Smith? Josh Barro? Someone from like that cluster of political writers, pretty sure. Was it on Substack or on Twitter? Gah, I wish I'd saved the link. But I think it would be amusing to compare the two and how they delineate and frame the options, if anyone can dig it up.
> In Griggs, there was direct evidence from the employer's own experience that the test they were using was uncorrelated with job performance.
How do you conclude something like this? If you're using a test as a filter, then everyone who got hired had to do well on it. This can cause correlation *among hired employees* to be 0 or even negative for a test that's positively correlated in the general population. This is an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
...
I think the incredibly wide range of personal experiences reported here highlights a major problem: Even 60 years after being passed, 50 years after Griggs, etc. it's not at all clear what the law actually requires. Some of the stories (e.g. Jack Cable) may be government-specific or even federal-government-specific (although possibly partially downstream of discrimination laws). But why do even private companies have such a wide range of practices? I think this lack of clarity is something brought up in the original review, as well as in things like the book review of public citizens. It's a feature rather than a bug--risk-averse institutions are incentivized to follow the incentive gradient, even if some didn't get the memo. Plus the standards and endpoints can be changed without requiring additional legislation; just capture the legal profession ideologically.
> If you're using a test as a filter, then everyone who got hired had to do well on it.
Presumably the test was scored, and if candidates that scored higher don't seem to perform better at the job, it calls into question the validity of the test. Certainly there might be an explanation, but it arguably could be enough to change the burden of proof.
Depends on a few things. If the range of the scores that are accepted is small, you might not be able to observe any correlation because what remains is mostly noise. It might also be the case that other factors are used to determine acceptance, so that the worst performers on a given test (who still manage to make it in) must have performed especially well on the other metrics, and vice-versa. See the article I linked above.
Great comments. I've always been impressed by the ACX commentariat and the diversity of perspectives it brings, and I was delighted to see them apply their insights to the arguments I make in my book.
One thing I was waiting for Scott to point out, and this is something I stress in the book, is that how bad civil rights law is in any industry seems dependent on how closely it is tied to government. For government hiring itself, it's arbitrary box checking all the way down, so this allows race and gender based decision making to run wild, undisciplined by the profit motive. In the free market, wokeness is more of a nuisance. All this is to say that libertarianism is the correct ideology because it makes people behave rationally and we need more freedom. For more on this topic, see this article where I was pushing back on rightists predicting wokeness was going to soon make planes fall out of the sky.
Speaking of which, the comment from the EEOC staffer highlighted a deeper philosophical disagreement I have with leftists. He acts as if government watching over you is the only way you can get people to behave fairly towards others, as if businessmen are simply free to indulge whatever preferences they have without consequence. The correct answer if you believe that there is discrimination in a field or industry is to start your own business, invest in the companies or actors you think are not discriminating, etc. It's not going to deliver perfect justice and life will in many ways remain unfair, but this is just quite plainly a better system then expecting government lawyers to act as mind readers and know the correct qualifications for every industry in the country and the degree to which every sex and race meets those qualifications. The whole project is absurd.
Regarding the Helen Andrews quote, if unions are the alternative to HR, then count me as a supporter of HR. Males may believe more strongly in zero-sum thinking, but if so that shows the supremacy of women and we should probably have them run everything. This anti-woke to socialist pipeline that I see Andrews representing (she once praised East Germany), is something I am strongly opposed to.
Finally, for those interested in the question of how many civil rights lawsuits there are, there are facts and figures in the book about this. Something like 10-20% of all federal civil suits are related to civil rights. It's a huge industry, and in the book I even do some back-of-the-envelope calculations like the one Scott does in this post.
The second last paragraph makes no sense. You don’t like unions, but that is given without explanation. Then a non sequitur about zero sum thinking amongst men, not women. Then it’s back to Helen Andrews again (who is a woman ) which seems to negate the previous sentence about what gender believes in “zero sum” thinking.
Not that it’s explained why being pro trade union is zero sum. Nor do libertarians make any sense, except as mouth pieces of the powerful, why they don’t think workers should self organise.
As for east Germany it was, empirically, fairly successful for about 2-3 decades. Just not as successful as west Germany - a country that was far from being libertarian.
I'm sure there are libertarians who make bad arguments against unionization, same way as there are other ideologies who make bad arguments against unionization.
Here's mine, degree of badness and/or libertarian-ness TBD:
"The job of management is to turn information into decisions, some of them about wages and worker conditions. The job of a union rep is also to turn information into decisions, mostly about wages and worker conditions (infinitely competent unions do not, I assume, wish to render their companies bankrupt, merely to extract the most compensation possible). This degree of specialization is only worth the effort at larger scales of company; therefore, workers should not unionize unless they're dealing with a sufficiently large organization.
The above logic is recursive, though, so workers not feeling adequately represented by their current union should be free to form another one, either in competition with the first union or as a sub-union of it (for matryoshka-style hilarity). Repeat until complete organizational anarchy has been achieved.
>All this is to say that libertarianism is the correct ideology because it makes people behave rationally and we need more freedom.
>Regarding the Helen Andrews quote, if unions are the alternative to HR, then count me as a supporter of HR. Males may believe more strongly in zero-sum thinking, but if so that shows the supremacy of women and we should probably have them run everything. This anti-woke to socialist pipeline that I see Andrews representing (she once praised East Germany), is something I am strongly opposed to.
Libertarianism is one of the most male ideology out there. Does this show the supremacy of men and mean that men should probably run everything?
"Thanks. Is there some protection in place if unqualified people apply? That is, if a job requires a PhD, and 100 blacks (all without PhD) and 100 whites (all with PhD) apply, is the applicant pool 50% black or 0% black?"
Usually, any important qualifications would be controlled for, and/or a separate analysis run based only on the sample with the relevant job qualifications. Of course, relevant job qualifications is fuzzy, decided on a case-by-case basis, but multiple people at the firm in questioned are almost always deposed and so the analyst should have a good understanding of the position. If the analyst didn't account for an important, defensible job qualification, the firm being sued would definitely bring it up and argue the analysis was invalid. In your example, if it was for an assistant professor position, the pool would be zero % black. For something like an adjunct, or a teaching job at a community college, that depends. Normally, the analyst would try to figure out what the qualifications of people working at those jobs at that firm in particular (or those types of firms) and try to see if those qualifications were really enforced/needed. In all my conversations with lawyers, the focus was on making the minimally defensible claims supported by the evidence. If we went beyond that, the other side would be sure to point it out, and you would really weaken your standing in front of the judge/jury.
I should also say everything I'm saying about how the EEOC operates is based on my experience and my former team within the agency, so I can't speak for what was done in the past.
Anyone else watch the comedy series Loving Lyfe? The technically female-owned businesses thing felt very reminiscent of the joke about the Female Boss Mom Award For Women.
> See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation.
I think the logic might not be right here; the required implicit assumption is that height and the other things contributing to performance are *negatively* correlated. This happens to be true in the NBA for mechanical (dribbling) and physical (tall people are generally less agile/explosive etc.) reasons. But there's no reason to expect it would be true for say, cognitive ability and the other things that make you a good power company worker.
The argument here is that, at the hiring of the marginal worker, you're making trade-offs between multiple competing positively-correlated qualities. If you're targeting a work metric of, arbitrarily assigning numbers, 100, then your marginal candidate pool will include only people who are at approximately 100 work metric units. (The average marginal candidate with a work metric of 120 will be working somewhere targeting 120 work metric units.)
Thus, all the positively-correlated traits will, in the post-filter pool, look meaningless.
I think I understand what you're getting at here, but you also appear to rely heavily on there being a narrow upper and lower bound of performance for workers at a particular company. At the limit, if everyone working at a patricular company has 100 work metric units, then nothing can be correlated with performance because there is no variation in performance! Additionally, if we are relying on the notion of an upper bound for the filter, then the NBA is a particularly bad illustrative example, because there is no upper bound for the NBA.
Basically, I don't think the idea of "leaving money on the table" targeting the marginal person works here, because there are obviously inframarginal people. The existence of inframarginal people is actually most notable in the NBA, but probably exists in all power companies.
It doesn't actually need to be narrow, that just helps make the thing I'm gesturing at more obvious. It can be arbitrarily wide, so long as there are multiple correlated variables, and the relationship between work output and all the correlated variables remains linear and consistent across the measured range.
To see this, consider the following. Suppose for simplicity that output A* is the sum of three variables X, Y, Z, such that A* = f(X,Y,Z) = X + Y + Z. The sum is an example of a relationship that is linear and consistent across the measured range. Now, suppose X, Y, Z are uncorrelated (although the same will hold if they are positively correlated) and uniformly distributed across people. Finally, suppose WLOG, X, Y, Z can take on values 1-10. Unless you literally fix A* = a = X + Y + Z, there is no (filtered) range of A* for which A* and X will not be positively correlated.
To clarify, consider filtering from a pool of 1,000 people. The highest person is the guy with X = 10, Y = 10, Z = 10, then the next people are the three with two 10x and one 9, and so on. You keep selecting until X + Y + Z < b, where b is the minimum ability level. No matter where you place the cutoff, A* and X will be positively correlated. The same relationship holds if there exists an upper cutoff. Filtering will reduce the magnitude of the positive correlation, but will not eliminate it.
I expect there to be a very strong negative correlation between the variables, because there is filtering at two steps; who applies for a job, and who is hired for a job.
> the required implicit assumption is that height and the other things contributing to performance are *negatively* correlated.
That's not necessary for this. You can even have positive underlying correlation between the two things and still see a negative value in your restricted subsample.
One of the canonical examples (don't know whether this was actually real, it was just given as an example of a pitfall to avoid in my causal inference class) is that if you just look at people in a hospital, smoking is negatively correlated with having broken bones (hence a study design that looked at hospital admits to find the link between smoking and bones would be bad).
This seems very surprising because smoking shouldn't be protective against having broken bones at all, if anything there are good arguments for why it should make broken bones more likely. However you have to realise that the people who don't smoke and don't have broken bones are less likely to end up in hospital than the people who do smoke and don't have broken bones (because smoking causes cancer and other things that land you in hospital).
For didactic purposes we can simplify things a lot. Suppose that smoking always caused cancer which landed you in hospital and that the only two ways to land in hospital are broken bones or cancer from smoking. Plus suppose that the two were completely independent and there's a 50% chance of either happening to you (i.e. 50% chance you smoke and get cancer and 50% chance you get broken bones). Then in a quadrant graph with smoking status on the x-axis and broken bones status on the y-axis we'd have 25% of the people in each quadrant. This shows no correlation as expected.
However when we just limit ourselves to the people in hospital we don't see the bottom left quadrant (those who don't smoke or have broken bones) any more because they aren't in hospital. This means we are left with smokers without broken bones, non-smokers with broken bones and smokers with broken bones. In this subsample we notice that everyone who doesn't smoke has broken bones while there are smokers who don't have broken bones, so it looks like smoking protects you from getting your bones broken, even though there is no real link. Alternatively you can think of the graph again where we had no correlation before but now because we removed the bottom left quadrant from our analysis we see a negative correlation between what remains.
In more formal terms this is an example of collider bias. Being in hospital is a collider for the link between smoking and broken bones, much like how playing in the NBA is a collider for height and how good you are at basketball or how getting hired in a cognitively demanding job is a collider for doing well in IQ tests and doing well on the job and by restricting to a sample that's in hospital/playing in the NBA/got hired you're effectively conditioning on the collider which is something you shouldn't be doing.
I understand how a filtering restriction (hiring/hospital/drafted) creates a negative correlation between two traits, but that isn't what the original claim was. The original claim was about the relation between the traits and performance, not each other.
In your hospital example, suppose for simplity that overall sickness level was a linearly increasing function of how much you smoke and how broken your bone is. As you have shown, even if smoking level and brokeness level are uncorrelated *overall*, selection on hospital admission causes smoking and brokeness to be negatively correlated in the sample. But both smoking level and brokeness level are still positively correlated to overall sickness level, even in the sample.
Analogously, suppose intelligence and conscientiousness are uncorrelated, and job performance is a linear function of intelligence and conscientiousness. Although hiring on minimum performance causes intelligence and conscientiousness to be negatively correlated, both traits remain positively correlated to job performance, even among the hired. Even if you condition on the collider (getting hired), the relationship should persist, although the magnitude will decrease.
> The original claim was about the relation between the traits and performance, not each other.
Generally since we can write performance as the sum of traits if (in our simplified model) the two traits making up performance are negatively correlated by changing the weights of how much performance is affected by each trait we can easily convert examples of two traits being anti-correlated into examples of cases where trait and performance itself are negatively correlated in the sample. For instance consider a case if job performance was 100% conscientiousness but for whatever reason hiring managers cared about IQ, so that they passed over high conscientiousness candidates for high IQ candidates then in the hired sample IQ and conscientiousness (which is identical to job performance in this case) would be negatively correlated (same argument as last post).
Now suppose that instead job performance was 99.9% conscientiousness and 0.1% IQ. You'd still expect that overall job performance is negatively correlated to IQ in the sample of hired people because the 0.1% IQ contributes to performing well doesn't compensate for the other 99.9% (and if the correlation is so weak that this 0.1% does then replace it with epsilon and let it tend to 0, eventually it'll get small enough that the correlation between IQ and job performance in the selected sample becomes negative), and so IQ and job performance are negatively correlated in our sample even though they are positively correlated in reality.
This is all very theoretical though, see below for a direct counterexample.
> As you have shown, even if smoking level and brokeness level are uncorrelated *overall*, selection on hospital admission causes smoking and brokeness to be negatively correlated in the sample. But both smoking level and brokeness level are still positively correlated to overall sickness level, even in the sample.
This isn't necessarily true. The simplest couterexample I can think of has 3 points, one at (S,B) (smoking and brokenness respectively) at (0,0), one at (10,5) and one at (5,10) where Sickness = S+B. Then we have a case where smoking and brokenness are positively correlated with each other and with sickness in the whole population, but if we restrict to "sick people" with total sickness >= 10 we are left with just (10,5) and (5,10); leading to a case where smoking and brokenness are negatively correlated with each other and have zero correlation to sickness (since in our restricted sample sickness = 15 regardless of how much you smoke/how broken your bones are).
In fact it's not like zero correlation is some hard boundary either, you can very easily get negative correlation between smoking and total sickness by chaging the three points to (0,0), (10,4) and (5,10). Smoking is, like before, positively correlated with brokenness and sickness in the whole sample but when you restrict to sick people we are just left with (10,4) and (5,10) and in this subset smoking is now strictly negatively correlated with total sickness (since at the point with smoking = 10 we have sickness = 14 while at the point with smoking = 5 we have sickness = 15).
Note that you changed the smoking example, specifically to eliminate the (10,10) person from the original setting! It originally *was* necessarily the case for your example that smoking was positively correlated with sickness, because you specified that there were 25% of people in each quadrant.
But more importantly, we are not arguing about whether it's *possible* that filtering could change the correlation. Remember the original argument was:
"This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left."
I think the underlying logic requires that there exists some tradeoff between height and everything else, such that if you observe a positive correlation between ability and height, you can move marginally in the tradeoff space towards height and away from everything else, until the correlation disappears. My point is that while in the NBA there actually *is* a tradeoff between being maximally tall and maximally athletic, there's no reason to think this tradeoff exists in other domains.
There are just inframarginal people that are good at everything, such that the correlation persists. I think you are picturing a Berkson-type downward-sloping line across two traits, and my point is that the positive-positive quadrant exists (to bring it back to the smoking example).
Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting your claim, or explain how your argument that selectors would pick taller people until the correlation disappears works if there is no inherent tradeoff at the highest levels.
Yes you are right that in this specific case I took out the point at the top and of course my claim can't be true for literally every single possible distribtion, e.g. if there was no such thing as brokenness so smoking was the only thing that made you sick of course sickness would always be perfectly corelated with smoking regardless of how you select your subsample (because the correlation of anything with itself is always 1).
However if instead of looking at pathological population distributions like the one above where brokenness = 0 all the time and the one in my previous post which didn't have the high (10,10) point we look at a natural normal distribution for both smoking and brokeness we can still get the negative observed correlation/effect size as long as our filtering effect is stringent enough or people with a high enough score are removed (perhaps in our hospital example these people are so sick that they've had to be taken elsehwere to an ICU so aren't present in our sample anyone).
You turned out to be right that if the filtering effect was perfectly calibrated to what makes up job performance then the effect size/correlation is reduced in magnitude but is still positive. However if the filering criterion is not completely calibrated and is slightly over reliant on test scores compared to the optimal amount then you can get a negative effect size/correlation between test scores (smoking) and job performance (sickness) even with both constituent components (smoking and brokenness) normally distributed and the end results for the strength of the selection from this over reliant on test scores critera are better than that for a criteria which didn't look at test scores at all and focused just on other factors. I have lots of graphs in my post showing how these things interplay with each other and have also put up the code I used if you want to play around with it.
I read your article and it was excellent. I think my intuition was right but also deeply confused; thanks for doing the work to figure it out.
If you're taking requests, I have another statistical puzzle that confuses me :)
Suppose you think events A and B are independent, with estimated probabilites P(A), P(B), repspectively. Suppose further that you estimate P(A) > P(B). Now suppose you [later] find out A => B [with certainty].
Obviously since A => B, then it must be the case that P(B) >= P(A), so your initial estimates were wrong somehow. How should you revise your probability estimates P(A)', P(B)'? To fix intuitions, suppose the initial estimates are given by: P(A) = 0.7; P(B) = 0.4
One intuition would be to note that A => B gives additional independent reasons to think B obtains, so you should revise P(B) upwards to account for this. The way to do this would be, from the region in which you previously thought B does not obtain, add the portion of it where A obtains to your estimate of P(B). [You can use the original probabilities because you initially thought A and B were independent??]
However, this is not the full story. [A => B] => [~B => ~A], so you have additional independent reasons to think A doesn't obtain! By the same logic as above, we have: P(A)' = 1 - P(~A)' = 1 - [P(~A) + P(A)*P(~B)] = 1- [0.3 + (0.7)(0.6)] = 0.28 < 0.3 = P(B).
Both seem plausible, but they obviously can't both be true. It seems you are supposed to simultaneously revise P(A) downwards and P(B) upwards, but it's not clear how much.
Scott says "I continue to be a little confused how and why stuff that deranged teenagers were discussing on microblogs made it to the halls of power...The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully...Yeah, something like this also has to be part of the picture, although I still don’t feel like I understand the mechanism well enough that I could have predicted this ahead of time."
Well, the explanation for all this seems really clear to me. Let me try to explain how I think this happened.
I've said before that this was obviously mostly caused by Obama. But when I say that people respond with "but clearly these ideas existed before Obama so that can't be right" and seem to think I'm saying Obama personally invented wokeness. Which is not what I'm saying. So I'll try to explain more fundamentally:
In a free society, you're going to have all sorts of ideologies being invented and developed and spread around constantly, all the time, by different people and through different channels. A look around the internet right now will probably find you five to ten distinct ideologies with their own little subcultures. At any given time there'll be a few of them (a few on the right, a few on the left, a few hard to place) that have a bit more salience, a bit more concentrated influence in some important environment (e.g. academia, business, local community, media, and so on). But still, even those will be almost powerless, since nobody outside their niche has to pay them any attention and they don't. And that means even within their niche they have very limited power (e.g. if an ideology is prominent in academia, but completely ignored outside of it, even within academia it will be ignored by many and will struggle to gain much respect, since there's always a strong pro-mainstream element within any subculture).
But the thing that changes everything is gaining political power.
When your ideology has control of the government, you have at least four different kinds of power:
The legal power to push for laws to outright impose whole aspects of your ideology on society.
The cultural power to spread your ideas to everyone through your extreme level of publicity.
The everyday executive power to appoint people who share your ideology, direct whole sections of the government to change their thinking and their priorities in ways your ideology approves of, have innumerable opportunities every day to subtly pull levers for your ideology (change the wording of policies, shift priorities, slip things into budgets and laws that no one will notice) etc.
The symbolic power of everyone knowing you can do the above things, even if you don't. As long as everyone knows you stand for something and you are in power, even if you don't lift a finger to advance your cause it may very well advance on its own. "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest". The people who support your ideology will feel elboldened to aggressively assert their influence, knowing they have the power on their side. The people who oppose you will feel demoralised and disordered, perhaps scared of the consequences of standing against the ideology in power, and many of them will give ground or give up.
So, with that in mind, it's clear that it's all about power. Now the way elections work, especially in America, is that each party tends to significantly change its ideology each time it loses, and double down on its current one each time it wins. The Republicans had very a different ideological focus with McCain/Palin (Christian moralism combined with neoconservatism), with Romney (pro-business libertarianism) and with Trump (nationalism). Before that, the Democrats had the soft liberalism of Clinton and Gore, the...whatever John Kerry stood for (some sort of vague utilitarianism? I'm too young to remember)...and the identity politics of Obama.
So a lot of ideologies are floating around on each side, and each time a party loses it looks for a new ideology to embrace (which may have sone connections with a previous one, but also has a distinct character of its own). If the left had won in 2000, they would have continued the Clinton approach of moderate social liberalism. They lost so they tried something else. They lost again so they tried identity politics. And they won. And so they emraced that. Because that's how power works.
So Obama didn't invent the ideas. He didn't even need to talk about them or advocate them directly (though he obviously did to a significant extent). It was enough that he *represented* the ideas of identity politics, by running as the "first black president" and making that a central part of his campaign. And by being elected he gave a movement that had until then existed only in the shadows and in the back rooms of academia a position of symbolic supremacy. And emboldened them and discouraged their opponents. (He also did some actual policies that advanced wokeness: the letters his Department of Education sent to colleges, deeming any speech offensive if a minority was subjectively offended and nothing more, were kind of like an instruction manuel for cancel culture. But I think merely being the image of identity politics for his campaign and presidency did a lot on its own).
Does anyone disagree with my explanation?
I don't see how you can deny the central role Obama's presidency played in the rise of wokeness, based on the dates everyone mentions first seeing it. And I think it really took off just after his re-election, which further strengthens my point about parties reinforcing their ideology every time they win.
It does omit the part where his meteoric rise was partly due to his mixed-race heritage and his incredible eloquence in favor of a color-blind society. As far as I can tell, though, once he was elected he switched over to a platform of competent technocratic administration, and feeding his left-wing political allies at the expense of his centrist liberal political allies. As one of those centrist liberals, I was very disappointed.
In retrospect, I think some of the right-wing rhetoric about him was accurate, but at the time I couldn't separate it from the noise. I don't know how much of that was them failing to distinguish themselves from wingnuts, or me not trying hard enough. And I don't even know if I can blame this all on Obama: you can't be a reconciliator if one side refuses to participate. The sneering about "how's that hopey-changey thing going" was disgusting at the time, but I can empathize with the visceral desire to not be a pawn in someone else's grand scheme.
Other than that, yeah, it seems plausible. I'll need to ponder it for a bit.
Maybe your theory of platform change could explain why this election is so quiet. Nothing changed, no one's doing anything different, no one has to respond to anything different.
I completely agree about the insanity of the right's reaction to Obama. But the way I see it, if they were saying hysterically over and over that Obama was going to drastically change society and take away freedom, and then during his presidency society *does* change drastically and there *is* a major loss of effective freedom...doesn't that suggest they were on to something? I just can't comprehend the liberal response of "nah, he had nothing to do with it. Pure coincidence!"
But the right hugely overplayed their hand with all the hysteria, and made most people stop taking seriously warnings about totalitarian political correctness for a long time (and some people *still* aren't taking them seriously; just how totalitarian and how widespread does it need to get? Whatever that limit, it was passed a long time ago on any measure.)
On the other hand, I do think conservatives formed their opinions of Obama very early on, *before* he really got his conciliatory face on properly. 2007 Obama was very different to 2010 Obama. In the early days of his campaign, if I'm remembering right:
He referred to rural whites as "bitter people who cling to guns and religion"
His wife said after his first primary win "for the first time in my life I'm proud of my country"
He was on record supporting full gay marriage (in 2000 before it was legal anywhere in the world) and single-payer health care
His pastor had made radical and racist remarks
He had led an (unprecedented I think) filibuster against Justice Alito
Liberals weren't even bothered by these things and barely noticed them, and centrists quickly forgot them, but conservatives formed their impressions of him as a radical leftist and kept those impressions even as he made a strong turn towards compromise and careful language and a moderate image.
I think that explains a lot of the disconnect with how liberals and centrists saw him as so obviously a moderate, and conservatives saw him as so obviously an extremist. Which did a lot to fuel the polarisation that exists now.
It was obvious to conservatives even before his presidency that Obama was diametrically opposed to most of their beliefs. His pastor Jeremiah Wright was pretty explicitly a black supremacist. All the other stuff you point to. And don't forget the Jan 2008 interview where "energy prices must necessarily skyrocket." Obama was a clear vanguard for green energy politics.
It's funny how Obama gets blamed for pretty much everything by the right though. A lot of conservatives see him as the father of the deep state, and point to things like the IRS targeting conservative non-profits. But I remember an interview with Bush when he was running for reelection. Bush was talking to a conservative pundit - Glenn Beck maybe? - who asked him why he didn't implement a lot of policies he promised. And Bush responded that the people in the civil service kept blocking him. Bush shrugged and said these people were here before him and would be there after him and what could he do?
I’ve never noticed how political parties find a new ideology each time they lose but at a glance it seems to fit what I’ve seen until the Biden presidency.
Biden ran on being a boring liberal to contrast with Trump then the democrats went hard to the left instead of doubling down on being boring liberals.
I know a lot of woke people. They viewed Biden winning as a loss. Perhaps the left is splitting from the democrats, dragging the democrats leftward to keep power. That’s explicitly what the Left wants to happen.
I think it is less than Obama promoted identity politics - indeed, I'd argue he actually tried pretty hard to squash left-wing identity politics, but that's its own considerable topic - and more that the right finally started deploying identity politics in that timeframe, and so it became much more obvious what was going on.
> If the left had won in 2000, they would have continued the Clinton approach of moderate social liberalism. They lost so they tried something else. They lost again so they tried identity politics. And they won. And so they emraced that. Because that's how power works.
This explanation tying Obama to the rise of wokeness seems like it neither requires Obama (any democrat would do) nor predicts wokeness (so would any ideology).
My explanation tags into Carateca's question too but I don't think you can tag in subtack comments? Terrible system. Anyways-
It doesn't require Obama specifically but someone Obama-like in the mixed race or otherwise visibly-non-white sense. Massive amounts of cultural energy (including totally bizarre messianic stuff in fairly mainstream papers) were tied up in *that moment* of Obama supposed to usher in a new post-racial era, and he didn't. HOPE AND CHANGE just became new boss same as the old boss, and so any remaining affection for liberalism was lost as it was too slow, too ineffective. People wanted to feel *something*, and when it turned out he wasn't some Black Messiah, that energy and disappointment had to go somewhere. Easily channeled into the last nail in the coffin of 90s colorblindness. The racially-charged excitement that elected Obama, and the charged disappointment that followed, lead fairly directly to "wokeness" rather than alternatives in that atmosphere IMO.
Not just any Democrat would've resulted in the same cultural moments, nor would those cultural moments have resulted in the rise of a similar ideology. If Hillary had won 2008- the Trayvon Martin shooting would not have had or generated so much cultural energy. *Possibly* still a national moment, but it could've just as easily slipped away as local news instead. Obama's position and his reaction boosted that.
There is an element of truth to calling the woke cultural Marxists. Marx is all about class struggle, which is really compelling if your country is mostly composed of serfs. Not so much for countries with a comfortable middle class, as it turns out. Some academic Marxists then tried to adapt Marxism to the West by replacing class with other social divisions like race.
But when I say Marx is all about class, I mean it. Any ideology not predicated on class isn't really Marxist. There is no woke theory of labor value. Ask a woke person what they think about dialectic philosophy. I bet you get a blank stare in return. Woke ideas also borrow from Christianity, like the veneration of victims and apostasy as a sin. Yet no one goes around saying the woke are Cultural Papists.
Calling people who don't read Marx, don't understand Marxist principles, and don't care about class struggle Marxists doesn't need a rhetorical trick to be a bad term.
Marxists wouldn’t classify as middle class the average worker, comfortable or not. Otherwise your analysis is correct. Marx would reject nearly all modern academic Marxism, and the vast majority of self proclaimed Marxists haven’t even read the communist manifesto.
>Ask a woke person what they think about dialectic philosophy. I bet you get a blank stare in return.
Not quite. They'd parrot back some half-forgotten quote from a Frankfurt School political philosopher of their choice. Those people, after all, made a big deal of being descended from Marx, despite disagreeing with him on nearly everything, including basic methodology. The greatest trick they, the so-called "Cultural Marxists" pulled, was convincing the world that Cultural Marxism is not a literal oxymoron. It's all very dialectical, now that I think about it.
Marx was about economic class, yes. But from a different perspective, he was about group conflict: the Exploiters vs. the Exploited (or the Oppressors vs. the Oppressed). The Exploited have superior numbers, and so need to unite (Lenin adds: under a vanguard) and overthrow the Exploiters, by violence if necessary, and then everything will work out. Because this is the ultimate struggle, because everything will work out in the end, all methods are allowed, and no scruples can be retained in service of the Revolution.
But this is simply the recipe for primitive tribal conflict, except with constructed groups rather than genetic groups. If we replace economics with race or sex or gender or religion or some other identity, it's the same story. Two groups, one violently overthrows the other, happiness ever after. Even Ayn Rand got into the action with Atlas Shrugged, except that the Exploited had superior quality, not superior quantity.
So it's not about class, and in that sense it's not about Marxism. But it lifts the entire structure of Marxist practice and re-uses it in service of other goals, and in that sense it is exactly Marxism. Hence the friction between the economic left and the identitarian left - they're two animals that fill the same ecological niche, but have different DNA.
I disagree, I think that confuses a mechanism with a transition in power. But if you're talking about something like "permanent revolution", that might be an interesting take on what a durable democracy requires?
That’s precisely how I see it. I don’t use the term Cultural Marxism because it’s so unrelated to Marxism - it usually entirely ignores economic class, to the degree that a poor white male is virtually always an oppressor - but the perspective of everything existing in a dynamic of oppression Oppressed what’s happening.
Some months ago I read an article about how political ideologies are defined by the dynamic or axis with which they see the world. The Left sees everything as Oppressor and Oppressed. The Conservatives are concerned with Civilization and Barbarism. The Libertarians are concerned with Freedom and Tyranny.
By my view, anyone who can’t understand a different dynamic/axis as meaningful at least to others is an ideologue. Once someone understands at least one other, they either swap ideologies or cease to be any kind of ideologue.
Usually you swap. Hopefully you then eventually realize that a single axis isn’t enough and so break free from ideology.
The oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is one of two factions in the left, and has been steadily losing power for the last decade. The faction currently making headway in the left, by virtue of a, well, more effective axis, is "Effective and Ineffective". (If this sounds good to you, remember that little things like "rule of law" are ultimately nothing but deliberately making things less effective than they could be in pursuit of other agendas.)
I don't see those as factions. I think it's what they refer to as "respectability politics", and it's more like another axis. How revolutionary and radical is the person willing to be, in service of their vision of justice?
Also as a reply to malloc below - I still think this is too broad. Essentially you want any framework that reduces society to a binary struggle to be identified as Marxist. Maybe Karl was the first guy to ever formally espouse this idea, I don't know.
If I espouse that the free peoples of the world unite and overthrow the tyrants, am I a Libertarian Marxist? Regardless of your answer, I think this is a funny enough term to claim as my political stance.
I think we can make this work! We establish a few categories like "free liberty-lovers", "tyrants", and maybe some equivalent of "bourgeois". We organize to educate/convince/brainwash people into establishing their primary identity as "free liberty-lover". We set up a cell structure, with us at the top, naturally. (This is where normal libertarians start to go wrong.) We talk about the glorious libertarian future, but - and this is key - never work out the specifics. (And this is where modern libertarians go **completely** off the rails.) We identify people as "tyrants", demonize them, demonstrate how everything they do is horrible, and wait for the right moment. When the tyrants make a mistake, we strike! Not, like a labor strike, necessarily, but maybe more like an air strike. Whatever works. With the tyrants out of the way, we can finally move forward into our shining future of liberty, safeguarded by our secret police who tirelessly work to root out the weeds of tyranny. How will the free liberty-lovers know they are free? We will tell them so, repeatedly, over and over and over...
I do think that "Marxism" is relevant, but only as a paint job on a fairly shitty, denatured version of old-school American religious puritanism like you say. It gives the ideology the veneer of being about Big Serious Topics like class struggle and economics and Third World liberation, which helps get well-connected wannabe Communist revolutionary university types onboard with throwing Goody Wilson into the river because she was seen cavorting with the Devil.
Occasionally you do get people calling the woke Cultural Calvinists (original sin, the elect versus the irredeemably damned, etc), but only in weird spaces similar to this one. Largely because there are many progressive theorists, critical theorists, who call themselves Marxists (like Patrisse Cullors: https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herself-as-trained-marxist/), and I assume literally zero that call themselves Calvinist.
What folks usually refer to as "wokeness" is basically a phase in the following four movements: antiracism, anticolonialism, feminism and the sexual liberation. Antiracism and anticolonialism are pretty connected though not fully the same movement, feminism and sexual liberation have at times been at odds and at other times had common goals, anticolonialism and feminism have necessary not always been connected at all etc., but all the things that are commonly called "woke" can be traced to these movements.
These movements have had Marxist and non-Marxist variants, which is probably why there's so much confusion on whether they're "Marxist" or not - different advocates see them differently in this way. However, a large reason why they gained currency in the West during the Cold War was that they were quite popular in many circles and Soviet Union could lay claim to a Marxist interpretion to be stronger for three out of four of the movements, ie. the ones that weren't sexual liberation, which the Soviets had junked quite conclusively after the initial revolutionary phase.
(One could even argue that sexual liberation became a way for the West to showcase itself as *more* progressive than the Soviets by contrasting the carefree, liberated post-60s culture with the dour and sexless Soviets - much of the Western culture that would appeal to East Block citizens was appealing precisely due to its sexual undertones and sometimes overtones).
However, as said, the evolution of thes e causes didn't *by themselves* require Marxism to begin, usually since the intellectual developments in these fields were usually basically articulation of very basic ideas like "We like having sex" and "We, as women, don't like it when men hold all the power over us" or "We, as (say) Algerians, don't like it when the French rule this country and give us no rights".
When people say things like "wokery is just the Marxist oppressors/oppressed dynamic transposed over race", it's like they're saying that the only reason why, for instance, an African-American man might have been historically oppressed in the US with elements of this oppression continuing to this day (independently of how comparable the current situation of African-Americans is with their historical status) is the dread wizard Marx putting this idea to his head.
You have to ask then why Marx wasn’t more anti colonial, and anti white, and anti imperialism. He was there at the height of it.
In fact his concerns were primarily the workers in industrial society. In no way did he think these workers were benefitting from colonialism - it would dismantle his theory to believe that.
After all if workers in the West are better off because of the oppression of workers in the third world, then the capitalist is not exploiting them.
Rather the capitalist who owns factories outside the west must be transferring some kind of value back to the metropole, and this must be more than the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist, or else the western worker wouldn’t be richer because of colonialism (or neo colonialism).
Of course third worldist often thinks he’s a Marxist but he isn’t.
Nevertheless, this was a slightly confusing reply, since my comment didn't really have that much to do with Marx himself, but the latter-day Marxist movement, which of course isn't always reliant on Marx, directly.
If that’s the sum total of Marx’s writings on anti colonialism then it’s not much. And in the case of Indian independence he clearly supports independence only in the abscence of a proletarian revolution in the metropole.
In any case I was talking about a specific economic theory that third worldists have, about colonialism benefitting workers which doesn’t square with Marxism and surplus value.
Other people already mentioned it but how can we figure out if a test has the correlation. We would only want to hire people who are well performing thus have the same outcome.
We hire 100 candidates with a PHD (80 of them white) and 10 with a highschool diploma (70 of them white).
If the ones with the highschool diploma perform significantly worse our hirings were a bad decision. Our additional criteria might be interview performance, previews projects, positions ... Will the judges/juries accept that and their performance conditioned for those requirements?
What if the hiring/applicant pool of candidates with a highschool diploma includes percentage-wise way more black people (40%) than the PHD (20%) one. However, the pool of qualified people with just a highschool diploma has 30% black and 70% white.
Now, the company might be incentivized to only hire people with PHD and overall less black people ...
Of course, this is constructed but it seems incredibly hard to prove the efficacy of our test.
Now, assuming the government had to prove that a test did not work.
How do you argue any of this?
What if the jobs change during the years. Technology changes and different people will perform better ...
How do you evaluate all the different other more subjective criteria? Do you have big enough groups to even get statistically significant results to test Diff(performance(Highschool|given XYZ) vs performance(PHD| ABC)?
Which effect size do you require? Do both sides p-hack their studies to hell and back? How about corrections for multiple testing. How do you even prove no difference?
What about the fact that with 0.05 p-value sometimes the test will just give the wrong result in either direction.
Will the one side argue for a different prior than the other side?
What are the null hypothesis and alternatives? Do you argue for a bayesian approach.
How the fuck do you even track job performance in a significant way.
> Did the changes just influence how much people could flirt at work? Was flirting at work so much fun that stopping it ruined the job? If not, what were the other negative changes that the harassment complaint caused?
Scott is a psychiatrist and as far as I know has never worked in a typical corporate environment. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) I feel like this sometimes limits his understanding of very, very basic facts that 99% of the rest of us understand intimately.
Stuff like this is so ubiquitous that a five minute web search would produce laundry lists, but just try to imagine every single corporate policy that could be put in place to eliminate every interpersonal dynamic in the workplace that could potentially make someone feel “uncomfortable”, and then understand that the person who feels like that could potentially be a woman or a nonwhite person, and that will give you a sense of the kinds of policies that get put in place as a matter of course after a company has been burned (or is afraid of getting burned) on a “hostile workplace” claim.
No parties. No alcohol. No funny outfits. No talking to each other about clothes, or personal lives, or weekend plans. No mentorship. No social activities that might be more appealing (or less appealing) to one group than it is to others. No celebrations of accomplishments — could lead to socializing. In short: a barren, lifeless workplace. “Flirting” need not enter into it.
I worked at an institution once that occasionally organized social outings for employees. Once, the outing was paintballing. One of the female employees grumbled that the men found this more appealing than the women. She had a point! I think the bosses ended up giving the option of a spa day as an alternative. But think of the can of worms you’ve now opened with that gendered binary of options. Now extrapolate this logic out to its absurd conclusion and you have the current state of HR in every workplace in America.
Hey, it's not barren and lifeless. Look at all the Corporate Memphis cartoon characters we have to lecture us about workplace policies! They're hip, young, wacky (but not too wacky) companies who most importantly care about everyone enough to infantilize them, denying any human experience more complicated than can be expressed by a third grader.
“Infantilize”? Sir, I’ll have you know that the Acceptable Workplace Decorations policy identifies dozens of Disney franchise characters whose Funko Pop representations can be displayed on the shelf of your cubicle (not any from prior to 2010, obviously).
And they all count as pieces of flair that identify your unique and wacky style (15 pieces of flair minimum).
Anecdote: when my brother was an intern at Goldman Sachs in the late '00s, he saw all the young women interns being systematically steered to sales (ask pharmaceutical companies about the benefits of having a sales force made up of beautiful young women) and away from technical roles that had better long-term earnings potential. He said yes, this was pretty much blatant sex discrimination but the obstacles are large enough that nobody is ever going to take them to court over it.
Goldman Sachs actually has ended up settling class action gender discrimination suits for large sums of money...
> The previous incarnation of woke was called "political correctness" and it existed in late 80s-early 90s. That's when Alan Bloom's book came out. PC suffered a setback when Bill Clinton really wanted to win the election in 1992 and, needing the white vote, came down on Sister Souljah. A period of return to normalcy followed, until the recrudescence of PC as woke in late 00s.
I don't fully agree with this. As someone who was too young to remember the Sister Souljah incident, I remembered that the PC movement was growing from the mid 90s onward, much like it did in the 2010s (albeit at a much reduced, more primitive state compared to the 2010s), but suddenly came to a halt around the time of 9/11, and didn't start up again for a decade. My theory is basically that the threat of an outside terrorist attack overrode all of the PC instincts for infighting. Squabbling about who is more oppressed, and how language oppresses minorites in some obscure way suddenly seems much less relevant and carries much less weight in the face of an attack on American soil that killed thousands of American citizens.
I'd elaborate to say that the outside threat worked for a little bit, but then other problems surfaced to distract the left. WMDs, Abu Ghraib, military subcontracting, intelligence agencies invading privacy, Hurricane Katrina, the continuing failure to kill Osama bin Laden, etc. Maybe once Obama was elected, the left assumed all of those problems would be magically fixed, and moved on to other issues. (Except for the people who noticed that some of the problems kept on happening in Obama's presidency, but they were a real buzz-kill, so no one wanted to listen.)
I'm not so sure it's that people who would have been wokescolds otherwise became patriots, and more that when 9/11 happened the wokescolds were the ones forced to keep quiet for once because no one wanted to hear about how evil America was while the bodies in Lower Manhattan were still warm.
Sure, I could agree to that. I actually think it's probably both, though I don't have an idea of proportions. I really know a lot of wokescolds who are just bandwagon jumpers, and some older ones who were patriots after 9/11. And so much woke stuff I see these days is so vindictive, with people relishing the act of hating on the outgroup with the same fervor that I remember others chanting USA, or making cartoons in which Bin Laden or Saddam get killed, or hating on Bill Maher, for example, after 9/11.
> the wokescolds were the ones forced to keep quiet for once
I don't think that's quite right (I say this as a lefty person who was 17 when 9/11 happened, and spent my student politics years during the Iraq war). I don't think people unified, or the woke-types were silenced. It's just that there was a big new thing going on which took up all the oxygen in the room.
The woke-types suddenly had a new cause célèbre, which was complaining about the military overreaction to 9/11 (i.e., starting the war in Iraq).
I think the crux of the issue was that no-one wanted to hear how language oppresses minorities in some obscure way when Iraqis were being killed in the hundreds of thousands by an illegal war led by a creationist bible-thumping president.
While I'm no fan of the Bushes, I feel this is a rather odd characterisation of Bush II. Yes, he had a conversion experience which led him to take religion seriously and give up drinking, but I don't know if he's a creationist (I'm presuming here you mean "Young Earth Creationist" and not generic "Christians believe God created the universe" which would be all of us). I suppose it's the image of the Republican, Religious Right, wing of the party that leads to this stereotype?
"Then in the summer of 1985 Mr. Bush met with Billy Graham -- a meeting engineered by his parents -- at the family compound in Kennebunkport. They had lunch on the patio overlooking the ocean, dinner by the fire and long conversations as they strolled along the shore. Mr. Bush was inspired to begin reading the Bible daily (which he says he still does), and back in Midland he began attending a Bible study class.
Mr. Bush had grown up in a religious household, attending First Presbyterian Church in Midland, but it was an austere, restrained Yankee faith. After his daughters were born, he switched to his wife's church, First United Methodist, but a close friend says that in those days he went to church each Sunday more for the sake of his daughters than because of any deep inner commitment.
Yet after the meeting with Mr. Graham and his Bible study sessions, Mr. Bush became increasingly serious about his religion. He is at home discussing religious matters with evangelical leaders in a way his father never was. Mr. Bush is publicly guarded about his beliefs (partly because of a much cited incident in which he suggested that non-Christians could not get to heaven), but by all accounts, his faith has developed into something that is an important part of his inner life and that was a significant element in his maturing.
In July 1986, a year after he began studying the Bible seriously, George and Laura Bush went with a half-dozen friends to celebrate their collective 40th birthdays at the luxurious Broadmoor resort in Colorado. There was one evening when they all stayed up late, drinking a bit too merrily.
The next morning, Mr. Bush has recalled, he woke up feeling befuddled -- and quietly resolved that he would never touch alcohol again. Friends say he told nobody, not even his wife, until weeks after their return to Midland. He simply drank sodas instead of beers, and it was many weeks later that he finally explained to his friends that he had given up liquor."
It seems that had Hillary won in 2016, you might also have had a "Bible-thumping president" in the White House!
Presumably the reference would be to how GWB was seen by the left in this time, and "creationism" in particular a reference to the intelligent design controversy, which was quite hot all through the 00s.
One of the commenters cited a California jury instruction that says something like, one joke does not make a hostile work environment and civil rights law is not a civility code. Be that as it may, one joke CAN lead to liability for hostile work environment, if that joke involves a pun on N-word. https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_fails_to_see_humor_in_n_word_joke_refuses_to_toss_suit_against_quinn. Maybe the n-word is an unfair or extreme example. But it goes to show that, as far as civil rights law is concerned, formal rules tend to fall away in the hands of woke judges and administrators. And, perhaps, the N-word is just the lead example. As it turns out, civil-rights law IS a civility code for that word. And, then you have creative plaintiffs pushing the boundaries of other slurs tantamount to the N-word (misgendering???). Corporations play it safe and ban any speech that could possibly fall under the expanding penumbra. People morally justify the systems to which they’ve submitted. They sincerely buy into the woke rules, because it feels better to be “moral” than subjugated. Then, they apply woke corporate norms to interpersonal relationships generally.
"The plaintiff, Spencer Marin, had alleged the comment **and other remarks** by the director had created a hostile work environment **and that his complaint was met with retaliation.**"
Emphasis added. The article clearly says that it wasn't just a single joke that triggered the lawsuit, but rather a pattern of behavior.
Also, from the end of the article:
>Caproni said Marin’s amended lawsuit “just barely” states a claim for a hostile work environment, and it’s enough to survive a motion to dismiss. She added that she was “somewhat skeptical” that Marin would be able to show the complained of conduct was sufficiently pervasive to survive a later motion for summary judgment.
>She also said the allegations were sufficient to support a retaliation claim, but “it may well not survive summary judgment.”
All the judge said was they had enough of a claim to not be thrown out at the first step. Did this lawsuit actually go anywhere?
They settled, which is practically a win for the plaintiff and his lawyers. Some money for not much work; pretty much all the work they had to do at that stage was allege the N-word pun. I included the link the link because it’s clear from context that “other remarks” were not anything special or out of the ordinary. It’s basically a placeholder, as the rest of the judge’s comments imply.
I don’t want to out anyone, but I got an invite to a blacks-only coding competition sponsored by a big-tech company (I’m a quarter black). Seems racist? But it does fit a narrative of illegible affirmative action.
I’m curious about why a generic math test isn’t sufficiently related to a blue collar job. I’m not an expert, but isn’t math a proxy for general intelligence? An employer could want blue collar workers of some base level intelligence. I seem to remember also that some jobs used to have an intelligence ceiling (not likely to stay long enough at the wage? Too quick to question things?). Also, an employer would have to pay higher wages for workers better at math. So, maybe they would exclude blacks. (Are blacks bad at math?) But like, they would be leaving money on the table if they were paying extra for premium labor when they didn’t really need the math ability. Seems weird.
I also find it interesting people attribute purported racial differences in the average/ distribution of math ability to deprivation or inequities. What is the purported deprivation or inequity? Schools are equally funded. I’m not aware of a plausible causal mechanism for these differences, aside from that some people are better at math than others.
"I’m curious about why a generic math test isn’t sufficiently related to a blue collar job."
Because you don't need the guy to be able to recite the Pythagorean Theorem but you do need him to know at what angle to rest the ladder against the wall. And how to put up scaffolding. And able to eyeball concrete mix ratios before the slump test:
Practical skills involve maths but the worker may not have the formal maths education to be able to define what they're doing. And conversely, someone able to pass a written test may not have the practical skills (yes you can be trained in on the job, but that's different to "can you start the job right away?")
Sure, if by “math test,” you mean recite a formula, I can see how that could be like a trivia quiz. But, even then, the presumably discriminatory company would be excluding whites who didn’t know the trivia. Also, if a fact is truly trivial and something people might have randomly picked up from “formal education,” it’s not clear to me that blacks wouldn’t also know it. Everyone has formal education; no one is excluded from public school.
Ha, I would have cleaned up my snark a notch if I thought it was going to get quoted!
There's a pattern here though, that brings to mind an argument I'm passably fond of: Americans do not trust their government to dictate what is True or Just, and so systems are not put into place that even purport to deliver such things. Instead, the American system applies the Law - one might hope that after a few filters of government that still ends up reflecting a democratically-adjusted will of the people, but it's certainly not a direct link. So despite the name, it is a category error to think that the judicial system can be found at fault for failure to deliver justice.
Executive agencies go a step further since they have, well, *agency* and are even more resource constrained than the judicial system. Statutory authorization may be a raison d'etre but e.g. the FBI isn't going to start at the top of the Federal Register and work their way down in order - the Law ends up being a tool to enforce a strategic mission that is shaped by politics and an inevitably flawed understanding of the world.
> The review talks about a lot of bad cases, many of the cases do eventually get dismissed, but “the process is the punishment” and I don’t know how much power even dismissed cases have to exert chilling effects.
I'm struck by how in EEOC v. Freeman, the case I was looking at, the brief makes a persuasive argument that Freeman really did go beyond its nominal criteria in excluding Ms. Vaughn. I know not what lurks in the hearts of men and can't say whether race had anything to do with it, but unless the facts presented are outright lies it does seem that she was genuinely treated unjustly.... but that's not what the case is about, is it? That's just the launching-off point for a disastrously sloppy attack by the EEOC about systemic discrimination against a target that may or may not have discriminated at all, so "the process is the punishment" doesn't even apply to punish Freeman's conduct towards Ms. Vaughn except in the loosest statistical sense. The human is lost beneath the (dubiously competent) machinery of deterrence.
I currently work at the same location mentioned by John Schilling, although I was not here when the incident he discussed took place. I cannot speak with confidence regarding hiring practices, but I can to culture. We have some highly competent women working here (in fact, I'd guess rate a female competence here is ~= to male), but every male knows that angering any woman carries a huge risk. This risk is openly spoken of whenever some old male technician makes an off color or even non-woke statement. (E.g "I can't believe he did that! That was really dumb.") Acceptable culture here is determined by the wokest female in your group. Thankfully, our groups are small and spread out over many square miles of desert, so this doesn't affect all groups equally. But everyone knows women have the political power.
I'll provide one final anecdote to demonstrate this:
A few months ago, an engineer with 30 years of experience at the site was told he was not to travel to a particular test area unescorted. His talents were irreplaceable and desperately needed at this site, but this was irrelevant. Budget and schedule did not matter, a woman had complained that he said something bad. What did he say? Nobody (other than management) knows. He was not allowed to know what he said or when he said the thing that apparently angered the woman. All that mattered was that a woman was mad, and it had to be "investigated". That particular project is now 6 months further behind schedule.
Wow. I'd hoped the passage of time would have lead to things getting a *bit* more relaxed, but it sounds like it has become significantly worse. Glad I'm out of there, and you have my sympathy.
> Acceptable culture here is determined by the wokest female in your group.
That tracks.
I have a dear friend who was the sole woman in a department which performed a technical artistic skilled craft for one of the biggest companies in the world. Literally everyone almost certainly owns or uses one of its products.
Her first few days of working in the department (perhaps 12 years ago), the six men were pretty quiet, even tense. There was distinct sense of uneasiness and a chill that she couldn't understand.
Then one of her male colleagues unthinkingly made a casual dirty joke in response to a work-related conversation - something in the "that's what she said" vein of comedy - and all six dudes instantly and fearfully turned to her to see her reaction.
She had naturally chuckled at the joke, but when she suddenly realized the source of the tension, she said something like, "Holy fuck, you guys are worried about ME? Oh, shit, I don't give a flying fucky fuck what any of you pussies joke about!"
The relief was immediate, if a little skeptical, but over the next several weeks / months she did enough swearing and dirty-joke making that the men came to trust her completely. They would even proactively reassure tense male employees either visiting or new to the department, "Don't worry, she's totally cool."
She's not at that job anymore, but she's friends with most of her ex-coworkers still.
Probably a more auspicious name than "the Selina Meyer strategy"...
> "If I don't win the White House, O'Brien is going to sink your stupid boats and you're going to look like a hair-sprayed asshole in your 1980s mother-of-the-bride dress. And if I do win, I'm going to have my administration come to your shitty little district and shake it to death like a Guatemalan nanny. And then I'm going to have the IRS crawl so far up your husband's colon, he's gonna wish the only thing they find is more cancer. So, can I count on your vote? Or do I need to shove a box of White House M&M's up your stretched-out, six-baby vag?"
Also, check out this NYT article on a racial discrimination lawsuit for how jokes can make a liability verdict more likely and more severe. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/nyregion/equinox-settlement-discrimination.html. The plaintiffs claim was, at core, that she was punished unfairly for being late. Now, it’s not illegal to unfairly fire workers! In other words, imagine an employer who has 5 workers. Every worker is late several times the past month. To make an example, the fires one, maybe at random (fair) of maybe the one whose smell he doesn’t like (arguably unfair). Technically, not illegal!!! But. Suppose the fired employee is a black women. Further suppose that employer had tolerated off-color jokes. Now, suppose the employer entertained a customer’s request for a white trainer. By themselves, each aspect is technically fine. Plenty of lawyers will lecture you on “the law” and how civil rights law allows these things. Free speech, not a civility code, no quotas, blah blah blah. But also, companies know that each above marginally increases the likelihood of catastrophic legal liability. They’re even worse together. So, corporations rationally respond by banning edgy jokes and institutionalizing DEI and lowering expectations for blacks, cost/benefit. And that’s how you get from civil rights law to woke work environments.
In the comment about the racial classification of Mexican Americans and the 14th Amendment, isn't this inaccurate? Whites benefit just as much as anyone else from anti-discrimination law and the 14th Amendment (obviously they do not benefit from affirmative action [usually] but that's not related to Equal Protection [technically it's probably contrary to it?]).
Anti-discrimination laws actually being broadly treated as applying to white people (and also men) is quite recent, and most people haven't updated on this yet. Which has resulted in a handful of law firms making bank seeking out and suing for discrimination - because a lot of places haven't gotten the memo yet they still have a steady supply of targets to fund themselves with.
I read it as: if MA's are counted as white, the resulting statistics wouldn't vary in the presence discrimination against MA's in favor of non-MA whites.
Wow, these aim to be the selected smartest comments on the selected smartest blog on the selected hottest-button topic. And it's a serious contender. You have to read it to believe it.
"I appreciated John’s story of his workplace culture becoming much worse after harassment complaints, but I still want to know more about how it happened."
A fair request. And it was more than just the loss of workplace flirtation; given the ~80/20 gender ratio that was only ever a minor factor. More flirtation happened at off-site social events, which involved a somewhat broader spectrum of the population. And those social events became a lot rarer and duller after the "sexual harassment" fiasco. Close friend groups still got together; my carpool mate and I still stopped at our favorite bar on the way home every once in a while, but the bit where we coordinated that with half a dozen other people from the lab, didn't happen. If you were in the know, you'd know about the Thursday night dinner at the Haasienda, but if you weren't, you'd never get the invite. Seemed too dangerous, I guess.
Even on-site, there was less social interaction; people were less likely to walk en masse to the cafeteria for lunch, much less make the drive to Domingo's. The occasional lunch-hour Settlers of Catan games mostly stopped. And at the academic conferences we sometimes attended, there was noticeably less after-hours socializing - one of the bogus sexual harassment complaints had involved an "after-party" at such a conference. I think two of my coworkers pretty much stopped socially interacting with their work colleagues altogether for a good while.
Above all, there was a loss of trust with management. Nobody understood what the rules were, so everybody kept their head down. Nobody trusted that their boss had their back, when their boss had folded so blatantly when his boss told him he needed to crack down. And there was a definite witch-hunt atmosphere w/re possible future sexual harassment. Two cases that I think were real but minor and would have been adequately handled informally, resulted in people being fired without any chance to defend themselves, and one of the female "victims" wound up quitting not long after, I think feeling management had disregarded her wishes in the matter and leaving her socially isolated.
This was temporarily alleviated a few years later when we hired a young woman who turned out to be a very gregarious nerd, mostly unaware of the recent history and unwilling to have no social life just because she was working in a remote desert outpost. She reinstated after-hours social events as a regular thing for all, and pretty much single-handedly re-moralized the lab. And I'm pretty sure without sleeping with anyone or even suggesting that she might sleep with anyone.
She was fired after a little more than a year, for reasons indirectly related to the first sexual harassment fiasco, and because management had no clue how important she was. I made the mistake of sticking around for two years after that, but that's another story.
Fortunately not that, but I don't think I can safely post about that part under my real name. If you see me at a meetup, I can perhaps add some detail.
> "Also, I find it interesting that everyone, even in this politically correct age, agrees to call human resources staffers “HR ladies”. I haven’t worked at enough corporations to have much personal experience of this - why should it be such a universal phenomenon?"
I think usage of the term "HR ladies" is a pretty strong anti-political-correctness signal. Note that you're quoting Helen Andrews, a conservative writer, in a passage where she argues that civil rights laws are bad and unions are a more "masculine" (i.e. better) alternative. Clearly, not someone who's concerned about political correctness.
In fact, I was mildly surprised when you used it in the book review. But now I see why - you thought it was universal, rather than a pithy term of contempt.
Interestingly, Richard Hanania's 2021 post about civil rights law - arguably the post that made him famous - uses, as its thumbnail, a graph of HR departments' gender balance over time, even though this is just a brief aside within the actual post, seemingly disconnected from his other points.
"Therefore it should not be surprising that Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University all have lower percentages of black students than Atlanta (~47%), Georgia (~31%), or the USA (~14%), given that Georgia (and Atlanta specifically) has eight popular historically black colleges and universities (more, depending on how you count them)."
I don't think this is what's going on with Emory, Georgia Tech, or Georgia State.
Unlike the public schools, Emory mostly recruits from out of state: only 18% of Emory students are Georgian (vs 60% for Georgia Tech and 90% for Georgia State). Emory is 11% black, which is not too different from the 14% black for the entire country.
Georgia Tech is an engineering school: 60% of students are in the College of Engineering, 15% are in the College of Computer Science, and 10% are in the College of Sciences. It's more reasonable to compare Georgia Tech to other schools' engineering departments. Compared to other engineering departments, Georgia Tech's 8% black is unusually high - probably because a lot of students are drawn from Atlanta & Georgia, which are more black than the country as a whole.
Georgia State is 38% black.
This explanation might work for why UGA has surprisingly few black students (8% - slightly lower than Georgia Tech). But I don't think it makes sense for any of the three schools mentioned.
Great points: I appreciate the extra context and correction (I almost certainly confused UGA's numbers with Georgia State's). I hope it's not too much of a cop out to say I was trying to convey an idea more than make an empirical argument.
I should have made a comment on the original post, but as usual I'm late to the party. Anyway:
Internet history channel Strange Aeons makes a pretty convincing case that many of the norms of modern social justice culture actually came from Tumblr. Two of the best examples of cases where you can really see this happening are:
1) The case of a fan fiction writer who created multiple fake identities in order to cancel people who objected to her work, essentially creating the playbook for modern cancel culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNyIuUixY6U
2) The creation of a lot of current discourse around gender identity and sexuality, again, largely from fandoms in early 2000s Tumblr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBOmffiWss0
This suggested timeline and origin of social justice culture aligns most closely with my experience: basically, a group of chronically online tweens and teens in the early 2000s created a bunch of group norms for mediating vicious fandom dramas (and in the case of 4chan, for trolling other chronically online tweens), and then this cohort went to college at about the same time and starting using this language in the real world, mixing online language with bits of critical theory and liberal arts terminology to make a completely new social movements.
My family was involved in social activism and I have spent many years among different generations of activists, and they are all confused by the post-Tumblr activist movements of the 2010s onward, even though these movements claim to be a "continuation" of earlier efforts. In my opinion, this is because there is a lack of IRL continuity between pre-online activism and now. This is why modern social justice language often sounds--to me--less like a cohesive agenda and more like radical history forced through a blender of internet hearsay, Reddit posts, urban legends, and Wikipedia and then reconstituted in an ultra-processed and unrecognizable form.
The fact that modern social justice culture was created and incubated mostly online explains a lot: the strange priorities that can seem disconnected from most people's realities (these norms were created by chronically online teens who didn't have jobs of families to support!); the extreme focus on language (online cultures optimize for meme-ability, virality, and trolling more than IRL change); the focus on cultural discourse and representation (because a lot of these norms came out of fandom drama). Modern identity politics itself also has a lot in common with the fan fiction norm of "tagging": labeling content with quick, searchable labels mediated by particular sub-communities that set fundamental expectations about engagement, with steep social penalties for violating linguistic norms that have almost no material consequences.
TDLR; I don't think it's correct to trace the roots of modern social justice culture back beyond early 2000s Tumblr. Even if modern activists claim to be continuing the work of earlier movements, this relationship seems false/nominal. There is a distinct break--in language, behavioral norms, priorities, worldview, participation--between 20th century English-language social movements and now.
"The case of a fan fiction writer who created multiple fake identities in order to cancel people who objected to her work, essentially creating the playbook for modern cancel culture"
There were other communities before Tumblr, just to point it out. Sure, the big exodus was off LiveJournal when it finally became untenable and DreamWidth never took up the slack, but before then there was *plenty* of fandom drama and shenanigans. For example, FanFiction.Net, otherwise known as "the pit of voles". Dissatisfaction with FFN for its clamp-down on 'mature content' was one of the reasons why Archive Of Our Own was set up.
You may or may not know the writer Cassandra Clare for her novel series "The Mortal Instruments", I think they were turned into a TV show. Or movies? However, she started off writing Harry Potter fanfiction, and the original works were, at the start, a retread of her fanfic. No problem there, after all, fanfic is where some writers hone the craft before turning pro.
But the big accusations were over plagiarism in the HP fanfic world, and they got spicy. The Wikipedia article on Clare is very restrained about it, but I remember the radioactivity even though I was only hearing about it at second- and third-hand. Sockpuppet accounts, bullying, the works. Clare (or Cassie Claire with an "i" as she was at the time) was *massively* popular and had a lot of clout. A detailed account of the whole adventure here:
EDIT: Gosh, reading that takes me back! I was never in HP fandom but I was in LOTR (my goodness, is it really 20+ years ago?), and "The Very Secret Diaries" were *hugely* popular, also written by her. They were, of course, inspired by Adrian Mole/Bridget Jones but they were funny. Now, though, you do have to wonder how much was copied from other writers.
What is fascinating with the new generation of fans on Tumblr is, as mentioned by others, how puritanical they are. They really do set down moral standards over "this is correct, this is bad wrong horrible and must not be done". From time to time there gets to be some fighting by the old-timers with the new 'uns over their demands, where the history lessons about how the fandoms developed get brought out. But there's a definite change in expectations, and I wouldn't blame it on even Tumblr so much as the Twitter and other social media (Tik-Tok gets a bad rap but think of the other brands that faded from popularity before it as well) setting up expectations about interactions and especially being able to block and curate what content you see. Coming from the days of web-rings, this is all very strange,
Before "woke", there was "PC". It's not a wholly new and novel phenomenon.
"Modern identity politics itself also has a lot in common with the fan fiction norm of "tagging": labeling content with quick, searchable labels mediated by particular sub-communities that set fundamental expectations about engagement, with steep social penalties for violating linguistic norms that have almost no material consequences."
This does sound plausible, as there was a huge fanfic bust-up around content warnings/trigger warnings, again, back in the LiveJournal and FFN days. Some wanted absolutely anything that could possibly be triggering tagged; some wanted just the major stuff (which was the compromise position); some authors wanted to keep the liberty to not content warn (e.g. if they were going to kill off a major character in the story or have a violent incident, they wanted this to be a surprise for the reader instead of expecting it to happen from the content warning) and there was a lot of demands on all sides from both "I have PTSD and if you mention "toast" in the story I'll be triggered due to associations with breakfast" (this is a version of a real argument I read*) to "I want to be able to put in rape, torture, murder and all that good stuff and have it hit you like a brick to the face when you get to that part of the story and I don't care if it makes you cry and I'm not going to warn for content".
*The story behind it was actually sensible and rather sad, but it was also "you can't warn for everything because you never know what is a particular trigger for someone".
As someone who worked at both UK and german universities: I never witnessed ethnicity-based discrimination myself (though I wouldn't be surprised given the culture at university), but preferential treatment for women is openly practiced. Some examples, in no particular order:
-(UK) My PhD supervisor wanted to get her husband (scientist in the same field) hired in an institute nearby. There was an opening for two people. She knows someone on the hiring committee, gets told that her husband is in the second place, yay! Except they hired place 1 and place ... 8 (it's a math department, yes they make a specific order of applicants for every open position). Turns out, the reason why there were two position was bc they wanted to hire one man and one woman. None of this was official, of course, but everyone involved knew it and nobody thought this was in any way odd or questionable.
-(Germany) My wife wanted to do a start-up. She is in one local, general start-up group that is almost exclusively male, and one less local female-specific group that is, obviously, all-female. She gets female-specific funding more or less instantly the moment she even applies. There is a specific course teaching business skills which lots of people want to get into. According to the organizer, roughly 300 people apply to it, and only ~20-30 get in. Her entire female-specific group is told that they don't need to worry, they'll get in by default, and indeed they do. For the other group, only a few men get in, and according to her she didn't get the impression the women are that much more competent. Oh and also the women get in for free, while the men have to pay money.
-(Both) It's normal among colleagues to explicitly mention how important it is to hire more women to get access to female-specific funding.
-(Germany) An institute at my university notices they have too few women professors, so they plan to make a new position with the goal of hiring a women. They even wanted to make it extra-easy for themselves and outright offer it to some women at the same university (for the curious, yes they'd still need to write it out openly, but it's very easy to tailor-make the position to one person). Turns out though that none of them actually wants to be a professor, it's too much work. So they write out the position openly anyway, and end up with someone who has just finished her PhD with a single publication. She is quite competent, but in any other situation she would have to go through a postdoc first.
-(UK, admittedly minor but I'm still kinda salty) our PhD offered several classes on valuable academic skills and networking clubs that I would have liked to join, but were all female specific. Best part, when I complained about this in an informal setting (in the pub), I immediately got lectured by a female PhD whose parents I knew were extremely rich how much more she deserves this help than me - meanwhile, to my knowledge none of my ancestors ever finished high school, let alone got an academic degree.
"My PhD supervisor wanted to get her husband (scientist in the same field) hired in an institute nearby. There was an opening for two people. She knows someone on the hiring committee, gets told that her husband is in the second place, yay! Except they hired place 1 and place ... 8"
That's nearly kind of fair, though? I mean, I know how the world works, I know about pull and connections (more politely called "networking"), but even so, it's better to have someone hired *not* because "they're married to a friend of mine". It was unfair in the opposite direction (hired on basis of sex) but there's been a bit too much "friend/family member/spouse/family member of spouse" hiring for public jobs (and private ones too) in Ireland where it's not competence that counts but "who do you know?"
I understand you being salty about the last example, because I'm salty about the first example as it happened to me years back when I was newly qualified and looking for a job. This was the 80s in Ireland which was a bad time to be looking for work, but I tried applying to the local pharma plant for a summer job in the lab (where my first qualification was). Not a chance, I was told, nobody is being hired on even for summer jobs. Next thing I hear, (let us call her) Jane is now working in the lab for a summer job. Oh? thinks I. Has she a better qualification than me, like a degree? Not at all, she isn't even in the same field. BUT Daddy is the managing director. So he gets the company to pay his daughter for the summer so she has extra spending money before she goes back to university or whatever, and I'm left trying to find something, anything, to get even a foot in the door.
Needless to say, Daddy and Daughter were to me as your female PhD and her parents were to you - a lot better off and more educated than me and my family ever were. So ever since, I'm rather sensitive about "Can I get Family Member hired on in this place?" 😀
I can understand this perfectly; I also think we should avoid hiring being influenced positively by family or close friends wherever possible. Your example indeed sounds quite unfair.
But at least for my supervisor, I don't think she meaningfully influenced the hiring committee, she merely was notified in advance about the current state of their decision making. They were probably somewhat biased since they knew her - but lots of people know each other one way or the other, the field isn't that large. I know the husband well enough also to believe that he indeed got second place primarily by virtue of his competence. He got a very big grant shortly afterwards by himself anyway, which allowed him to switch to a (different) institute nearby.
Oh, I'm sure there was nothing dodgy going on, but there is always a tendency here to be "who you know not what you know" and for mini-scandals to break out. Right now our state broadcaster is mired in financial and reputational woes originating, but not confined to, making under-the-counter payments to a former "star" (I put that in quotes because the guy was no star and had a big head but he was one of the 'star names' for the station):
Then this bubbled over into a related scandal over a loss-making musical which was a spin-off from the successful Christmas 'Toy Show' episodes of the weekly chat show:
And this just kept going and going as the government and the public wanted to know how the money was being spent, because it is part-funded by the licence fee which everyone is legally obliged to pay, yet it keeps pleading poverty and a shortage of money each year. So where were they pulling all these hundreds of thousands of euro to waste on such secret back-scratching arrangements from?
FWIW, in the US, I think there's generally an understanding that a university will find a way to get a professor's spouse s job. Sometimes this means hiring them as another professor when they wouldn't ordinarily pass the bar. And sometimes it involves cutting deals with other local institutions. But it's seen as what needs to be done, in order to catch a good hire who has a two-career family.
> This is also how I remember things. The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before.
To me, this is the easy part. Existing norms were not robust to new social technologies. I think it's much harder to explain the rise of wokeness specifically, the identity politics bit, than it is to explain why mobbing, shunning, and "if you let him speak, it will be too late" levels of outgroup hostility had a revival in the context of vast, structureless affiliation landscapes where people can operate somewhat anonymously. It may have been that identity politics gave better ideological cover to these behaviors than extant alternatives, and the people who successfully wielded those techniques to gain local status while justifying them in the least psychopathic sounding ways were copied.
You might be underestimating the difficulty of making an entirely new football department. Football has uniquely complex requirements due to the number of players on the field at a time and the lack of interchangeability. A linemen couldn't just fill in for a wide receiver with no issue. Even the smallest high school football teams need at least ~25 players in order to have a functional team. Add in equipment expenses such as pads and the need for a practice field and most high schools simply couldn't afford to have a women's football team. Even if some could, they'd need a dozen nearby schools nearby to take on the same expense in order to have a functional league.
In contrast, fencing and crew are relatively simple. Any individual student could take up fencing without requiring dozens of teammates and attend tournaments with more than two schools in attendance. Crew is a little more complex, but also allows more than two schools to compete at a time.
(I say this, but Illinois is apparently trying to have a girls' flag football league next year:
Numerous time Scott expresses something like, “how [had] the pre-existing norms stayed in place before.” The answer is Gatekeeping and the cause of the destruction is the flattening of society through the mechanism of anonymity on the internet. In 2009 (and today) there is no measurable difference between an 80yo college professor and a 12yo Fortnite player except the strength of their argument or the volume of their noise. Knowing that the people hounding you on Twitter, doxxing you, calling your workplace are kids doesn’t make any difference to the outcome.
I guess the counter to my argument is that it didn’t make a difference during the Salem witch trials either. Though that ended in eternal shame and didn’t spread to every corner of society. Americans are suckers for a good Puritan cleansing ritual and the Internet makes this as easy as water flowing off a table.
I was surprised by the few explicit examples of how AA can look; let me contribute my example. I was on the admissions committee for a US R1 university, think top 20 in the world and top 1/2 in some subfield. The basic process for admissions was to convert GPA, general GRE and subject GRE along with recommendations, parsed by reviewers, all into an overall score, and we would go down the scores giving admit/rejects. The scores were ~40% recommendations, 25% subject GRE, 25% GPA and 10% combined general GRE. Here are some explicit and implicit AA steps taken:
-Women and underrepresented minorities (URM) were given +50 points to their subject GRE scores (or +100 for both). This represents a 5-10% increase in percentile score, or 15-20% for both. This one was easy to check because it was coded into the sheet we used! Ostensibly this was because the subject GRE was biased against these categories, I have not done the research on it.
-Women and URMs were nearly automatically bumped up levels of "signing bonuses," these fellowships we gave the incoming students to entice them. This could be an extra $1000-4000, which at grad school pay combined with moving was quite a lot. Scholarships for females and URMs-only also existed.
-As we went down the list and reached our quota of admits, we saved spots to look "further down" for promising women and URMs who otherwise would not have made the cut.
-Being female or an URM was frequently mentioned in reviewer comments, which could be construed as boosting reviewer scores. This was more implicitly directed in the committee.
So there were a variety of ways we tried to boost female and URM admissions. There was nothing against males or non-URMs, but of course with a limited number of admissions slots someone has to lose out. All that said, generally the process was "meritocratic" in that just about everyone was qualified and we had many great candidates to choose from; we rarely had to compromise to admit a woman or URM, although at the end of the process with very marginal candidates it could get dicey. The reality is that we had so few *qualified* females and URMs that it just didn't make much of a dent, and the better ones were taken by the absolute top universities anyway. But to be clear, if you were male and/or non-URM , you received a lower score for admission and less money to join compared to females and/or URMs, even with equal qualifications.
> Also, could someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary?
Let's assume someone actually did this and succeeded in companies giving up on degree requirements[1]. What do you expect would happen next?
I think that we get even worse system[2]. Because you need some way to choose candidates. Banning whatever people are using because it has serious disadvantages isn't likely to improve the situation unless there is a better alternative. So the first step would be to line up at least one better way to choose candidates. I'd say something like CodeSignal for everyone but if I understand correctly something like that has beed tried but it's illegal for some reason so :/
But please don't ban the tools currently in use unless you see an better tool available. And if there are better tools I think it would be better to promote using them without banning the current tools[3].
[1] Maybe they win those lawsuits, maybe there is enough chilling effect for everyone to decide it's not worth the trouble of being sued and they drop the requirement, I don't think details matter much.
[2] For example (just a story of what might happen I don't know what exactly the system will choose) companies start filtering by experience. So now you have to do a bunch of unpaid internships. And to get those internships you have to go through "holistic evaluation".
[3] Maybe the tool isn't actually better (at least in some cases). Maybe it will break when you try to scale up it's use. Maybe it'll break when you make it mandatory...
If we switch to some other tool that is just as bad at predicting job ability as a degree, it is still a huge success. Because people don't need to accumulate 6 figure debt for the new tool.
Unless the new tool is even more costly. A bunch of necessary unpaid internships could still saddle people with huge debt. It still could require arranging your life to pass „holistic evaluation”, only for longer (because every job now does this).
If there is idea for approximately as good filter, that is less costly I’m curious
re: women's football, there is actually a big nationwide push (mostly to create a generation of female NFL fans, but satisfying those scholarship equivalences is probably a push too) to create the sport of women's flag football at all levels. At my town just outside Cleveland, they are trying to set teams up at every level, from 1st grade to college, with I think the end goal being something nominally equivalent to men's football. Someone said something about an Olympic event?
Disclaimer: my daughter is playing on a 2nd grade girls flag football team and loves it. :)
>For example, many countries held Black Lives Matter and Defund The Police protests even when they had approximately no black people.
At least locally speaking, the BLM protests (there were maybe... two?) were basically about two things:
1. General "international solidarity" protests that happen *all the time* in Europe between different European countries. I remember seeing or participating in minor protests related to various Russian events before 2022 (or even 2014), or on protests related to Polish abortion law, or Turkish policies regarding the Kurds, or solidarity to some university occupation or some anarchist or activist imprisoned somewhere or whatever. Usually these arouse something like 10-100 people and are noticed by approximately nobody outside the "scene". Americans seemed to consider similar BLM protests in Europe completely bizarre and unusual, even though it's a standard pattern of protests that lefty organizations and networks basically do whenever they feel like it (and more justifiable than many in the sense that US is the most powerful and influential country in the world, obviously).
2. A "news hook" to organize a general antiracism protest that's basically used as a news hook to talk about developments inside one's own country, ie. "We have all seen the photos of George Floyd but we can't forget the case X that just happened in town Y in this country" etc.
There's a saying in security that you shouldn't attribute to malice what's adequately explained by incompetence. And the following article explains a lot of things when the US government or civil service tries to do tech (hiring in particular): https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/
Spoiler: it's nothing to do with affirmative action. We do hear about Jack Cable again, but with a different explanation.
In Susan Fowler's reflections on her year at uber - one of the posts that kicked off the #MeToo movement (https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber), we even see how HR can sometimes be used to try and cover up evidence of sexual misconduct (apparently keeping notes on every time your boss has directly broken company policy by soliciting you for sex is "unprofessional").
I’m a woman who worked in software engineering for 5 years back in the 00’s. I have a MS in CS from a selective school. But I frequently felt like the diversity hire, because I struggled to be assigned high profile projects and was the only or one of two women, and usually ended up under-studying the rockstars and maintaining after they moved on. It’s hard to develop a career in that situation, and soured me on the industry. My situation would have to be dire for me to try to go back into software engineering.
Being the diversity hire, whether in actuality or in perception, is awful.
RH: ‘Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth.’
Okay, but what impelled congress to write that law? Why did the high courts interpret it the way they did? (Yarvin has answers here.)
Unless you understand the culture that created civil rights law, you cannot create one that will disassemble it. And make no mistake, you will need a well-defined counter-culture to supplant wokism. Yankee moral fanaticism will not just ride off into the sunset because a law gets repealed.
One thought about Hanania's weird comments about sexual harassment and flirting at work: roughly speaking, there's a spectrum along which you can move toward favoring men or favoring women. Extreme examples of the former are visible before 1960 or so; of the latter are visible now in academia, and you have the misadventures of guys like Scott Aaronson, whose blog post about self-hatred got so much feminist ire.
Because there is a tradeoff--unlike gay and straight rights, men and women both comprise roughly half of the population, so anything that favors one winds up hurting the other.
Here are some of things we're doing to hit our goals:
We're outbound sourcing 100% female candidates. We have a lot of male candidates who apply through our jobs page or are referred to us, so we feel comfortable doing this.
Someone not seeing X is actually evidence against X occurring. Otherwise one couldn’t estimate at all about an event that’s never been observed.
>Hanania has an article about France, which forbids the collection of any government statistics on any of this. I found this interesting, because I’d always heard claims this was a left-wing plot to avoid having statistics on the racial balance of (eg) crime. But actually France just takes a principled stance against any race statistics! Wild!
I'm not sure why this would be phrased as "forbidding the collection of any government statistics" instead of just... government not collecting statistics on this. Which it can do completely by its own decision, indeed one could argue it's not even an action but rather a lack of one.
Presumably at least the more libertarian-minded would find it better for government to refrain to collect information on whatever instead of insisting on collecting that information, whatever that specific piece of information is.
> I'm not sure why this would be phrased as "forbidding the collection of any government statistics" instead of just... government not collecting statistics on this.
Because this is the legislative branch forbidding the executive branch from collecting these data. It is a way stronger restriction than just having the executive branch choosing not to collect it.
Still, it's the government (as a whole entity) choosing not to collect them.
Within the French Consitution, the governement refers to (a part of) the executive branch. In that regard, it is correct to say that it is not allowed to collect racial data, because it is indeed prevented from doing so by laws enacted by the Parliament.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Fifth_French_Republic_(amended,_2008)#Title_III:_The_Government
“The government” is not usually one entity. In most countries, there are national governments, city governments, regional governments, legislatures, executives, courts, and often lots of things like transit agencies and electrical utilities that are separate from any of these. You could treat “the government” as one entity that makes a coherent choice, but this would be as misleading as saying that “humanity” made a choice that many individuals would like to go against but can’t.
>Which it can do completely by its own decision
No it can't. There are far too many people involved in these things, someone out there is going to have the idea to collect this stuff and do it on their own, unless you expressly prohibit them from doing so.
A lot of these comments seem like they're beating up a strawman where Hanania supposedly claimed that affirmative action kills merit-based hiring entirely, i.e. that any nonwhites hired would be utterly unqualified for the position they were hired for. Since that's not the case, they thereby assume that Hanania's entire argument is wrong. This is pretty goofy and isn't what Hanania is saying.
I mean, it’s pretty clear that Hanania is engaged in some amount of Motte and Bailey-ing here. The question is just how much.
Yes, as he points out above it's an explicitly political book. He's not trying to make airtight academic arguments, he's trying to make persuasive ones. I'm sure that means he elides some information to make concise arguments, meaning he doesn't go into detail about every caveat or counter-argument. Considering the genre, I don't think that should be interpreted as being intellectually dishonest as long as his points are directionally correct.
Not really, I think maybe some people don't feel the visceral unfairness of being knocked down the totem pole because of the color of your skin but that seems like all that is required to be angry about AA.
That seems like the sort of thing one would establish by quoting him.
The argument Hanania puts forward is deliberately slippery. Some relevant questions that aren't addressed (per Scott's review). How much has affirmative action has reduced the meritoriousness of new hires? How meritorious was the system pre-civil rights? Why should we think things would be more meritorious if it was removed? And related, what is the value of employees having a recourse in cases of discrimination?
The on-its-face premise of the book is that we should care about the this, but even if you can prove that there's a non-zero effect on one dimension, you haven't proved that it matters or even shown the net effect is negative.
Do you hold the pro-affirmative action side to this same standard of evidence, or is it assumed to be axiomatically worthwhile and only dissenters have to climb this hill?
Why do you choose to write this fully general counterargument under only this comment? Why don't you hold the anti-affirmative action side to this same standard of scrutiny?
Women are overrepresented in HR because HR departments started later than Operations or Finance or other parts of the business, and started at a time of increased female participation in the workforce.
And also at the same time as the gender diversity push. So, a company has 7 men in director level positions, and 21 experienced men one level down, but wants to have women in director level positions. Hey, look, we just created a new director position with no clear internal hires available... might as well hire a female.
Also HR were created in many businesses as the anti-union, and unions tended (even more so then than now) to be very dominated by men.
> Women are overrepresented in HR because HR departments started later than Operations or Finance or other parts of the business, and started at a time of increased female participation in the workforce.
No, women are most of HR because it is work that appeals to women. Recruiters are also mostly women. Recruiters are not a new thing.
Do you really believe that, in businesses founded after the 70s, women aren't overrepresented in HR?
Yeah I would agree it is more a disposition sort of thing (and I also think partly political). HR is about being a busybody/gossip/school marm. About avoiding risks and scolding people.
All things that are a little more appealing to women generally.
As far as the political element, since one of the main things HR does is "enforce rules regarding the treatment of women", you can see where it would be more attractive to women than men.
Also, as the old joke goes: why are all HR directors women? (Punchline: because you don’t have to pay them as much.)
The political valence of that joke is actually pretty illegible.
"HR departments started later than Operations or Finance or other parts of the business"
When I entered the workforce (late 80s), HR departments were just starting. But they were simply another name for the Personnel departments. I never really understood the difference in terms.
Possibly "Personnel" has "person" in it. "Human Resources" sounds so much more scientific and well, impersonal.
There was an old joke from Dilbert or something about how "Human Resources" still made employees sound too valuable, so they were going to change to either "Livestock" or "Biomass".
The PHB also once asked if it made them feel better to know that resources were their most valuable asset.
"We said before that employees are our most valuable asset, but that was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset. Employees came in ninth."
For the record, when I started a company, I made a promise with my business partner that we would always refer to it as "personnel".
Soylent green is a human resource.
I rather like the line in a commentary about Stross's "The Fuller Memorandum" https://www.sffworld.com/2010/07/bookreview643/
>zombie servants (though they’re called Residual Human Resources here)
> I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.
That's funny, a Swedish person would immediately get why this could be a thing. Friday afternoons are *significantly* more casual here and not uncommonly involve alcohol; possibly this is an European phenomenon that doesn't exist in America?
E.g. wrapping up shortly after lunch, (maybe grab a beer from the office fridge as you finish up your work, depends on the workplace) then sit around to chat for a bit before leaving at 3 or something. Colleagues also commonly beeline directly to the nearby pub to drink together: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/afterwork
Traditional in the UK as well, although becoming increasingly rarer. Some industries/companies do still do the "pint at Friday lunch followed by an hour or two of half hearted emails and then back to the pub" pattern. Journalists/parliamentary work often follows this pattern still from what I can tell. Slowly being killed off by a) increasing Americanisation ("professionalism") of corporate world, b) working from home on Fridays and c) "PC culture".
(I like the word "afterwork"- we'd usually call this 'after work drinks' in the UK but that'd apply more to Thursday evenings rather than Friday afternoons)
This exists in at least some American companies too (but maybe not hospitals/doctor offices given the weird schedules, which would explain Scott not having encountered it).
I would guess -- by which I mean, hope to God -- that "drink then back to work" is pretty uncommon with MDs.
Yeah, I was surprised Scott was surprised. Friday is the end of the work week/start of the weekend. People probably have plans to go out and socialise after work, maybe with co-workers. So after lunch till clocking-off time, you're winding down and not really doing anything serious or too much. Finishing up things but not starting them. Getting ready to end the day and go home and enjoy the weekend.
Not everywhere, and the drinking culture isn't as strong as it used to be, but "Friday afternoons are the boys' club times" doesn't sound that unusual to me.
America has had an odd relationship with alcohol, as well as being both much more casual about some things and more formal about others.
The culture in the US has changed A LOT is my understanding. In the 90s I had employers where they would talk about how they used to keep alcohol and drink during the day in the staff/break rooms. This was in places a disparate as a car dealership and a university TA/Faculty departmental office.
It sounded like this was fairly normal even in the late 70s? But in the late 90s/early 00s it seemed very alien and not ok. Like if you had brought a beer and were drinking that in the TA/Faculty departmental office that would be frowned on.
I did work at a non-profit where we once or twice had the (very old) boss bring beer for everyone to share to a staff party. But even then it was like 6 beers for 15 people and it was seen as pretty out of the ordinary.
Going to the bar after work is a thing at many workplaces. Or having drinks at an evening company party. But not during the day.
Depends not only on industry, but regional subculture and employment supply/demand dynamic. My anecdata:
-- large old-line defense contractor tech company, late 90s, upper Midwest: alcohol use during business hours absolutely prohibited, automatic firing offense, people occasionally rolled their eyes but nobody thought it was weird or worth challenging.
-- Big Tech back when it was cool, California, 2005-2015ish: alcohol flowed freely with more or less explicit official sanction. The coolest engineering subculture was known for their "Whiskey Thursdays," bottles of whiskey were standard thank-you gifts for co-workers who had gone above and beyond to help you out, and off-site events frequently featured unlimited open bars and people going around proactively offering you drinks as social bonding lubricant.
-- Big Tech post honeymoon, CA, 2015ish-2020: still somewhat alcohol tolerant but dialed way back, no more unlimited open bars or proactive offers. Partly this was concern about social discomfort caused to nondrinking employees, especially those in recovery; but mostly it was due to real and significant stories of alcohol fueled sexual harassment coming out, including one notorious case where a generally wonderful and responsible senior VP did something truly stupid while drunk at an off-site and was justifiably made to resign over it.
I recall one tech company that repeatedly told me during interview/onboarding about "Beer Thirty" (similar to my first programming job), only to then send me an employee handbook claiming a very strict zero-tolerance policy toward alcohol which prohibited even having a beer during a business lunch.
I recall reading a pamphlet from the 90s? Early 2000s? for some sort of professional nuclear conference where you could optionally sign up for the conference's pub crawl.
Back when American companies still used to expect formal dress at work “casual Fridays” was a thing. And TGIF is a saying that predates the bar that opened in the 1970s.
In the Netherlands it is also common to have drinks with colleagues to end the workday on Fridays (vrijmibo), and, depending on the company, to keep the drinks going later into the night :)
Most American offices I have experience with have similar, if less pronounced, traditions. Usually not every week, but if it's a slow week or you just completed a major project, it's not uncommon for managers to take their teams to happy hour at like 3 or 4 on a Friday. People will also occasionally take off early on Friday without officially taking PTO without anyone caring because it's understood that very little productive is likely to get done after about noon. Then again, I've known offices (thankfully never worked in one) where Friday afternoons were dreaded as the time when managers pawned off work they didn't finish on their subordinates so they could take off for the weekend. YMMV.
It definitely happens in the US too. After a whole week of work, people want to relax, and your coworkers are right there to relax with. At my old company, we would drink beer for the last couple hours on Friday afternoons.
It's pretty bizarre to me that Scott claims not to understand why people would drink on Friday afternoons. I guess he's a teetotaller but even teetotallers relax after work in some form, surely.
Missed the window to comment on the original...I found myself confused about the implicit/explicit line between "you can't use quotas" and "nice business you have there, it'd be a shame if it wasn't diverse enough". Maybe the confusion is the point, in the same way the process is the punishment. Yet the regional-level management for [popular grocer] where I work...it's not literally quotas, but it's well-known and agreed upon by everyone that there's been a strong official-unofficial mandate to always privilege women and minorities in hiring*, promotion, and HR incidents for years now. (This also includes Don't Call Us, We'll Call You - diverse employees get approached more often by management about mentoring/maybe seeking promotion if they don't self-pursue, after controlling for ability. It's always kind of...surprising? when there's a new vanilla manager, unless there's just no other current candidates.)
Also weird is that this clear directionality coexists with an open contempt for diversity training and relatively lax codes of conduct around things like jokes and fraternization. So it's hardly an all-in position, we aren't staffed with True Believers and the culture isn't particularly PC. I keep comparing my workplace to the Sheetz case - which sounds way more towards "woke" than anything I deal with - and just come away puzzled about inconsistent standards. Civil rights law seems pretty complicated. Maybe it really is an Eye of Sauron pretext-type situation, and us being weirdly culturally popular is doing the actual bulk of CYA work. You don't actually have to be progressive as long as progressives shop with you anyways, or something...
*extra awkward to implement cause it's...a grocery store, it's not like we require resumes or use any sort of screening tests besides interviews. So there's weird kludge criteria like "are they passionate about shopping at [company] and specifically wanting to work for us more than competitors", which...seems to have as much correlation to the job as the FAA biographical questionnaire. Or definitely-disparate-impact stuff like (unstated) narrow effectively-mandatory availability windows. I often feel like half the existing veteran employees couldn't get rehired under the current regime...
> Maybe the confusion is the point, in the same way the process is the punishment.
Yup.
> Yet the regional-level management for [popular grocer] where I work...it's not literally quotas, but it's well-known and agreed upon by everyone that there's been a strong official-unofficial mandate to always privilege women and minorities in hiring*, promotion, and HR incidents for years now.
See? It's working!
I'm curious about why the company would *need* to privilege women in hiring and promotion. This isn't a tech company--gender differences in interests or aptitudes don't seem like they would be very relevant for work at a grocery store.
I suspect it's partly because of the (unstated obviously) "every successful bar/restaurant has Attractive Women staff and/or clientele" thing which applies to many othe retail roles...and partly that it is, indeed, somewhat of a gendered difference. Automation and productivity enhancements come very slowly in my sector, but improvements in, like, inventory management don't help much with the "soft skills" feminine-coded Customer Service duties. The actual unloading trucks, breaking down pallets, putting stuff on shelves, that stuff gets easier and easier. It's dealing with increasingly high standards for service, needy/problematic customers, and being able to convincingly (pretend to) care about others that keeps us up at night. Hard to teach, too; if someone doesn't meet a certain baseline for Social And Friendly, they're rarely getting hired/promoted, no matter their skills or experience elsewise. Cf. anyone can eventually learn to run a register semi-efficiently. Actually, many customers don't notice how shitty the actual checkout is if the cashier's an empathetic sweet-talker, so maybe that's Feature Not Bug?
I guess it could just be a coincidence, but...it feels like there's a reason female managers choose to staff the customer service desk while male managers run the floor (a mutually beneficial state of affairs for both parties, I've often been told). Likewise for grunts - guys want to stay in the dairy fridge all day and never talk to anyone except the yogurts, girls want to work in the floral department or the food sample station. There's a balance to be struck, of course, but it feels like (the company believes that) the Pareto optimization of employee gender more heavily favours females. Enough that making it an implicit explicit preference is worth the hassle, anyway.
(The cynical third theory would be that it's all just a ploy to give the customers/staff/media what they demand, whether there's any particular merit or not, a gendered pound of CYA flesh. I have no idea how we compare to the industry average, but it's frankly shocking how much sexual harassment one witnesses on the regular. Perhaps that's the thinking - lopsided gender balance for safety in numbers + plausible deniability.)
"[C]ould someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary?"
No... but also yes.
No, You couldn't do the actual suing, because you don't have standing. US courts can only decide if there is a "case or controversy" (Constitution, Article III, Section 2, Clause 1) and you aren't yourself affected (because you hold a degree, and because you never applied for any of these jobs).
But also yes, you could fund a "test case" on this: an organisation will find a bunch of people who didn't hold a degree, were otherwise qualified for a job, applied and were rejected on the grounds they didn't have a degree. They'll then go through each case very carefully to make sure there's no other special factors (because they want to force the court to decide that the degree requirement isn't necessary, and the court will look to find some other reason to rule on the case so they can avoid making a broad ruling about degrees), and to make sure that this person was really good for the job; ideally, they should now be doing that job for a competitor and they should be successful. Also, if they're trying to prove disparate impact, the test case needs to be from the protected class (ie, they need to be black). You also have to be pretty confident that your test case won't settle the case: you need to actually go to court to get a ruling as a precedent.
But - almost by definition - the test case will not be able to afford to pay for the amount of lawyers needed to take this through the various levels of the courts and win at the Supreme Court. If the test case wins, then the next cases will be a lot simpler and cheaper, as they can use the test case as precedent.
And this is why some random local small business that refused to make a cake for a gay wedding ends up in front of the Supreme Court: because some organisation decided that Masterpiece Cakeshop was the perfect test case and paid for their lawyers.
Also, you wouldn’t need to. A few dozen states and the federal government have already started trying to crack down on this, including ending degree requirements for many government jobs.
One other thing is that companies often include an "or equivalent experience" clause in the job reqs. Occasionally they even act on it! I work as a programmer in an old-tech firm (we make things you can kick ... very expensive things you can kick) and have worked with an engineer who was a drama major in college and was part of an interview team that recommended hiring a high school (but nothing further) graduate with a few years experience that looked good.
Our *typical* hire has a BS and MS in computer science. But we have some folks who don't have CS degrees at all and then the occasional very odd background.
True, but that seems like it's just kicking the can over to some other company. How are you supposed to get that "equivalent experience" in the first place with no degree? It seems like there are various possibilities, but none of them are good:
- (best case) start out long enough ago that they didn't care about degrees. But now that ladder has been pulled up.
- lie/exaggerate and get some sucker to hire you when you're really not qualified. "yeah I totally have a law degree from Columbia... " (not said- the country, not the university)
- get that first job through nepotism or someone randomly taking a flier on you "haha yeah it was pretty rough going there for the first few years... luckily they stuck with me and I eventually figured things out."
- get funding (from a rich family?) and launch your own startup, just for the experience. "we ran out of our runway, but I learned a lot along the way. Like, did you know that 'revenue' is really important?"
ideally we could pay for an internship/bootcamp, but it seems like that model is also going away.
Companies don't care about kicking the can. In the case I'm discussing the companies just don't want to get sued by the DoJ -- they don't care about HOW the potential employee gets that experience. The magic phrase "or equivalent experience" helps the company here because it makes it clear that the company isn't requiring a degree. This is especially true if the company occassionally hires people without the default degree.
You are considering the quesiton: How does a candidate get the experience to get hired without jumping through the hoops of getting a degree. A valid question, but not one that companies are spending a lot of time on.
The *military* solves the problem by requiring folks to sign up for a 4-year stint (technically, 8-years, but you can go reserves after 4). This allows the military to justify spending money on training because the military doesn't have to worry that after spending a year training someone who will then go work for a competitor offering more pay. Hollywood studios used to work this way, too: actors/actresses would sign a long term contract and the studio would pay for acting classes, etc. Apprenticeships worked that way in the past.
As a society, the US decided that this was bad (except for the military and sports contracts) so employees can quit a job pretty much whenever they want but employees are now responsible for their own training.
The companies mostly just want to (a) find competent employees, and (b) not get sued while doing (a).
There are other ways. A buddy of mine was a hobbyist, and ended up doing some very basic work for a seminary where he was taking classes. He got that gig because they knew him, and it started as "turn it off and turn it back on" level tech support, evolved into macros and (i think) some simple access and and then website stuff.
Then he moved up to Albany for his husband's work and he got on with a local consultancy on a try me basis, as their 20 or 30-somethingth employee. He worked out, and after three or six months they gave him a relatively real salary.
He's still there something like ten years later, making well below market rates while being one of their senior guys. I've been trying to get him to jump ship, or at least test the waters for a while now. I think he could probably double his salary.
Anyway, his company can't compete with top line employers on salary and they're not in a desirable destination, so they take chances. If you're looking to break in from a non-credentialed background, there are probably a lot of places like them.
What I take away from both this discussion and my own experiences is that both sides have a correct narrative (and correctly observe lots of uncorrected harms) that seems to support their interpretation and it's a very difficult issue to make progress on because we lack any real way to either measure or even agree on a cost/benefit framework. This is especially true because people care both about the impact and symbolic import of these laws.
In particular, it seems like all of the following are true.
1) It's absolutely true that there are still instances of discrimination and that, in practice, it can be very hard to impossible for the victim to meaningfully get legal redress. Bringing lawsuits is very expensive and they are hard to win.
2) Big employers often have limited control over and ability to measure productivity in their employees and lawsuits have a substantial element of random chance to them so often will take action -- or uninformed employees with principle-agent issues will -- which is meant to reduce the risk of losing these lawsuits that isn't what anyone thinks they should be obliged to do.
3) Lots of employment deciscions involve pretty arbitrary and unconsidered rules (why do we want employees who do Y well?) and it's true that sometimes these absolutely impose disparate impacts.
At the same time, that's often how we want buisness to work -- the founder/executive has a hypothesis that running the biz this way not that will work better and tests it (that's how we get evidence) and race/gender correlates with almost everything so it's really hard to prevent even intentional disparate impact without limiting that freedom.
--
I don't really have a good solution to this issue but the best I've got is that the court system isn't the right way to deal with these kind of incentives given both the high costs of lawsuits and high variance in outcomes.
>At the same time, that's often how we want buisness to work -- the founder/executive has a hypothesis that running the biz this way not that will work better and tests it (that's how we get evidence) and race/gender correlates with almost everything so it's really hard to prevent even intentional disparate impact without limiting that freedom.
This is really underdiscussed. It seems so harmless to suggest that people prove their tests work, but it effectively kills all market innovation in hiring (if you were consistent about it). Instead of trying whatever you believe, you have to get it to a point where you can convince a judge/expert witnesses. It would be almost centrally planned hiring.
What notably nobody other than the civil rights lawyers reported observing is anyone discriminating against underrepresented/historically disadvantaged minorities or women, or anyone expressing a desire to discriminate against them if only it were legal. The only narratives people report are either colorblind treatment, or discrimination against whites/Asians/men. That's one piece of anecdata in the direction that civil rigts law has outlived its usefulness, that there is only uncorrected harm in one direction (at least in the skilled, white collar professions most readers work in).
I dunno if you've met people but of course some people discriminate. Now you can ask whether that happens at a high rate or on net but I've certainly met people who feel they are 'compensating' for affirmative action. And there are certainly a certain fraction of people who are very much convinced that blacks are less intelligent, less trustworthy etc but of course don't call it discrimination. For instance, there are really quite compelling studies on traffic stops by cops showing they do target black drivers and treat them less respectfully (interestingly white and black cops do it about the same) despite the fact that no cops are are going to raise their hand and say they discriminate.
Of course people discriminate like crazy against other categories too like short men. So there is a question about whether it still makes sense to have a rule against but that gets to the point about the laws having both symbolic and practical aspects.
I'm not even an American, so my experience is less relevant to the context. Maybe people discriminate (I take that you mean discriminate against disadvantaged-on-average groups), but it's not an "of course". Being convinced that blacks are less intelligent, trustworthy etc. isn't discrimination, discrimination is to treat people differently, not to think of them differently. Did the studies about traffic stops correct for driver behavior?
"they do target black drivers and treat them less respectfully"
No - the studies say that cops talk more casually to black drivers because - guess what - the black drivers themselves talk more casually and cops are trained to talk like the people they're questioning to make them more comfortable.
On HR and Unions (the Helen Andrews point), I can't speak for the US. In the UK, it simply isn't true that HR is in some sense balancing between employer and employee interest. It is clearly acting in the employer interest. That may involve things like trying to make good employees happy (hmmmm) and it may well mean saying to managers "you can't do that". But isn't some kind of neutral party.
It's indirectly in the employee's interests, because HR will prevent management from breaking rules that protect employees, even if the basic aim is to protect management.
HR is theoretically for the employer's interest, but I think in practice they've become their own interest center, with goals that neither align with the employer or with the employee.
In my experience, it is either "HR is there to protect the owner(s)" or "HR is doing its own thing". When HR helps an employee (even if that's the majority of what they actually do), it is a value add to the department.
(I didn't actually see the parallel with AI doom when I wrote it, so boy do I feel dumb.)
I was once told to remember that:
"The HR department is there to protect the company from you, not you from the company."
Even in a good company with well meaning HR employees (like mine) this is almost self evidently true.
Also, I feel like a hugely under considered point in this debate is the extent to which the ignorance of legal standards by non-lawyers plays in this whole area.
And I think this discussion here proves that at least many people believe there are legal risks for doing all sorts of things and I suspect that the average person running a buisness or working in HR is less informed than the readers here. And even when lawyers are involved it can be hard to translate that knowledge into something useable by the rest of the company without over correcting (it's the equivalent of telling someone who doesn't understand computers to never ever go to a website w/o a valid ask cert).
Not too surprising. The lawyers don't have money at stake, they're getting paid regardless. Either they're billing hourly, or they're on contingency. If they're on, then they're running a bunch of cases at the same time.
Meanwhile, the defendant is betting his or her livelihood on their lawyer's theory holding up in court. Wouldn't you be (possibly overly) cautious about getting into this situation?
And yes, it's livelihood. Certainly it's the business being bet on, and if it goes belly up, what are the chances of being able to start again?
Lawyer’s rule of thumb: if you’ve ended up in a courtroom, you’ve screwed up somewhere. Of course lawyers have something at stake: you want repeat business from the client, you have your reputation to protect - most underrated lawyer skill is taking complicated rules and translating them into “how can I make more money” practical advice.
It's like eggs vs. bacon. The chicken loses something, but the pig loses a lot more.
Yes, if a lawyer loses, he's taken a hit to his reputation. But with an EEOC lawsuit, his client may be out of business, and certainly loses a lot of both money and reputation. Particularly if it's a long drawn out affair, which seems to be happening more these days.
I’ll admit, I’m not from the states so have no great knowledge of the EEOC. I’m just sceptical because it’s so common for people to make big bold claims about the law, while the reality is a bit more complicated
Are you actually a lawyer? Because that might be true re: individuals but is about as wrong as can be regarding big corporations. Indeed, part of what's wrong with certain areas of the law is that so much of it was developed by litigation of massive firms where the legal fees are just an expected cost of doing buisness (yes, under full information those cases should settle but full information isn't always the norm). For instance, copyright and patent law spring to mind.
Nah, I quit to become a plasterer. Are you?
Nope, I was just surprised a lawyer would say this in a way that included corporations. I mean how does Google stay out of court given how many subpoenas it will receive in any short period of time.
Or do you just mean this about people in their private capacity?
Maybe I misinterpreted your original comment. You talked about bosses who don’t understand the law getting scared and over correcting - I interpreted that as being about SMEs, not corporate giants
I agree that there is a lot of ignorance about this. This seems like the kind of topic that everyone has an opinion on regardless of how little they know about the topic.
During the past year I've read two different textbooks focused on preparing for HR certification exams (SPHR and SHRM-SCP, if you are curious). EEOC and the legal process around adverse impact was covered. I was amazed that so many parts of Scott's post (quoting the book) and the comments contained ideas that were either 1) completely inaccurate or 2) oversimplified to the point of being misleading. And I am not even an expert on this topic; I've only read a dozen or so pages about it from textbooks, so my own knowledge is quite superficial.
It was odd to read a post by Scott and to have the feeling that I know more about this topic that people who are speaking loudly on it.
could you list some of the most significant mistakes?
could you also reference a concise resource elaborating these mistakes? (i feel like asking you to elaborate yourself would be asking too much)
I'll give an attempt. Obvious caveats are that A) I'm not an expert, so I might be mis-remembering and you should confirm with reliable sources, and B) I might be mis-interpreting the intended meaning of what was written in various comments.
If you search Google and Google Scholar for "validity diversity dilemma" you should find some reliable resources. In brief, selection methods that tend to be more valid for predicting on-the-job performance tend to have higher levels of adverse impact. The other thing to look at is the
Uniform Guidelines On Employee Selection Procedures, which is about as dull of a document as I've ever read, but is official and widely referenced. This snippet on Wikipedia is also relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact#:~:text=An%20important%20thing,business%20necessity%20defense%22)
The general ideas that I've seen in posts or in comments (these are non-charitable summaries, sorry that I'm too lazy now for precise citations):
* The idea that a company's employees must perfectly match the demographic makeup of the general population.
* The idea that it is really easy to sue a company for discrimination, or that the EEOC is doing lots of suing.
* Not acknowledging or being aware of the shifting burden of proof (this is a little more complex: what I mean by this is that at first John Doe candidate has the burden to demonstrate that a hiring practice has disparate impact, at which point the burden of proof shifts to the company to proof either A} that is isn't discriminatory or B} that it is a valid predictor of job performance and thus is allowed even if it is discriminatory, at which point the burden of proof shifts back to John who can then prove that even if this selection method is a valid predictor of job performance, there are other methods that are equally valid and that have lower adverse impact.)
* Not acknowledging that there are specific measures/standards for adverse impact (such as the 80% rule, or the regression method). I haven't read this book, but if I was going to work professionally in this area I would: https://biddle.com/books-adverse-impact-and-test-validation.html This also looks good: https://rforhr.com/disparateimpact.html
* The idea that it is ridiculously expensive and complex to avoid getting sued. In reality, using structured interviews, documenting why decisions are made (especially adverse employment decisions), and making sure that the criteria for decisions are job-relevant are actually a pretty solid defense if you get sued for discrimination. Most employers don't need to do validation studies of their own (which would require more stats and psychology knowledge than the average manager has), but can instead rely on relatively standardized and widespread methods.
Sorry for giving a sloppy answer, but that's all I have energy/motivation/knowledge for. Hopefully this is enough so that you are able to explore more.
thank you very much.
this is already much more than I hoped for.
TBF to Scott, I didn't see any claims of the form "the law says you must do X"
What there were was a lot of claims of the form, people do X out of a belief it reduces their practical legal liability. Sometimes based on incorrect understanding but often based on the fact that the practical and theoretical aren't always the same.
And there are alot of things that the law doesn't facially require that absolutely are hugely important in limiting legal liability. For instance (to use an example from harassment law), no of course a single sexual joke or even proposition doesn't rise to the level of corporate liability under existing precedent on sexual harassment. But as a corporate executive you need to recognize that you may not actually be hearing the full situation. Maybe you got a report that Bob told one offensive joke but if it goes to court it will turn out that Bob is actually good friends with his direct superior who has been ignoring complaints because it's just Bob being bob and maybe the plantiff will find a bunch of other bad evidence and juries can be pretty random.
So if Bob is a low skilled employee (fry cook) putting Bob out on his ass might be the cheapest solution (you could investigate further but that's costly). I mean you don't actually care if employees can tell jokes (maybe you should pay more attention to working conditions but it's a common failure).
So I don't think it's all just confusion but this is part of what makes it such a contentious issue. One side says, don't be ridiculous that's not what the law requires and the other side says, but it's a causal effect of the law whether it's based on confusion or practical minimization of liability.
Robert Ellickson's "Order Without Law" was in large part about a community not understanding what the law was and avoiding interacting with it. Those were Shasta County ranchers, but yes I'd expect it applies in offices too.
There are several basic factual errors in the comments about the "Tumblr theory", of the "if one's chronology looks like this it's a shibboleth that one is wrong about something very fundamental" sort.
1. "Moving from Tumblr to Livejournal and Something Awful" is very, uh, 'the chronological sequence of events is my passion'. Livejournal was already dead in the Anglosphere by the 2010-2012ish point that Tumblr started really coalescing into "the social media site for eccentrics". As the other comment notes, a lot of this is "people moving from LJ to Tumblr" -- LJ was bought out by a Russian company that liked doing things like "randomly banning gay communities". There was absolutely no shortage of people moving to e.g. Dreamwidth, though, such that Tumblr's eccentricity was in large share its own thing. Something Awful was an entirely different pole of "social media sites for eccentrics" entirely, though shares an "internet equivalent of Velvet Underground" quality with Tumblr and to lesser degrees LJ and 4chan. "Teenagers on Tumblr seized control of Something Awful and this invented Wokeness" is approximately as accurate as the joke in Paranoia where the communist secret society is obsessed with the teachings of Groucho Marx.
2. Describing Tumblr as "a melange of content instead of a staid list of people the user chose to follow"...eh, I mean, maybe compared to journal-type sites? But it's very, very hard to make the case for in the broad spectrum of "what social media can look like". Certainly it was a far more curated site than e.g. forums. It was *far* more curated than the modern social media majors -- it's of the pre-algorithmic era in precisely the way that makes this claim weird. You saw on Tumblr ultimately what you chose to see on Tumblr, in the sense you saw the posts made by the people you actively followed, or in the tags you actively checked, which were two separate sections of the site and purely human-determined (rather than algorithmic). The "reblog" structure meant you might see posts by your followees you wouldn't personally choose to see, but presenting this as melange-type requires presenting forums as melange-type, given "posts in forum threads" work the same way.
3. People like ascribing "wokeness" to "mentally ill teenagers", which raises, as noted, the huge glaring question of "inasmuch as things people associate with 2012 Tumblr are now mainstream takes, how did that happen". Partially this is because no, fewer of them are mainstream takes than you think (I very consciously describe Tumblr as a "site for eccentrics" rather than applying any particular lens to it -- places like /r/tumblrinaction had hilariously dumb levels of outgroup homogeneity, and in particular assumed *far* more of the weird parts of Tumblr were specifically left-wing-political than they actually were). But also, the answer is "no, that's mostly not who was doing that". The biggest political accounts were mostly run by undergrads and grad students. This just loops you back into the "college movements became a big deal in the non-college world" phenomenon, which is much better understood.
(I specify "biggest political accounts" because, again, Tumblr was way more heterogeneous than generally presented, and a lot of stuff that was parsed by outsiders as political claims wasn't. The big-name-political-accounts, specifically, were mostly well-educated people in their 20s.)
Desertopa is pretty accurate, I think. By 2012ish, this had consolidated into a clearer "these are the positions people in this sphere tend to hold". The actual roots go back deeper.
Insofar as I remember it, Something Awful forums culture taking a large step leftwards didn't have anything in particular to do with Tumblr, which was a separate development. Roughly speaking it happened due to... Ron Paul.
Well, not Ron Paul directly, but it was Ron Paul that initiated the following sequence of events:
1. Before 2008, SA had a very typical 90s-00s userbase - mostly young white male atheist/secular nerdy men, most commonly liberal in the 90s-00s sense (votes Democrats because GOP is associated with Christianity, nanny-state style censorship and Iraq War stuff), with a smattering of communists, libertarians and others
2. During the course of the 2008 election - a momentous election in most ways - the forums libertarians and some others get *very* excited about Ron Paul and start spamming other forums, chiefly D&D (SA's politics/current events discussion forum) with incessant propaganda
3. Lowtax/admins eventually tire of this and create Laissez's Fair subforum, ostensibly to quarantine the Ron Paul libertarians but also to create a "relaxed" shitposting adjunct forum for D&D
4. Commies and others also move to this board to troll libertarians, the admins accept this because it's funny
5. Eventually the Ron Paul stuff dies down, partly because Ron Paul, you know, doesn't get elected president, and also partly because a lot of libertarians participate in a "Permaban me if Ron Paul doesn't win" thread and get permabanned
6. The commies stay in LF, turning it effectively into a communist subforum
7. They then end up self-radicalizing to the "Maoist-Third-Worldist" position that claims that Western working class is fundamentally a capitalist-bribed labor aristocracy and any true revolution would start with Third World creating a communist state and then violently conquering the West - a suitable position for commie goons (there are more of these than previously due to Obama disappointment/burnout) since it means you can have an edgy "Fuck you, dad!" position without being a racist (which would get you banned for good) and share the revolutionary romanticism of communism without any need to appeal to Western working class that you don't really like that much, or having to do any actual organizing (since it's not your country the revolution's starting from anyway)
8. Eventually, after some years, a bunch of other forums drama happens and LF is temporarily shut down, causing a part of the subforum population to return to D&D to push the forums culture of that forum leftwards and a part to form independent forums (just like banned racists and others have found right-wing SA splinters)
LF has later been restored and continues to have a remarkably left-wing forums subculture even for SA, but its greater effect probably happened way earlier.
>and then violently conquering the West
That's not Maoist-Third-Worldism at all.
Totally agree and all of it stretches back to the "studies" departments through at least the 90s, and likely before, but definitely personally observed it back to then. "wokeness" was more or less the program there in say 1997, and was desperately trying to project out its norms/power into the rest of academia and the world. The surprising thing was that at the time I would have said it was failing at this, but the long term trend is that it was actually making slow and steady progress, especially in school admin.
I think it might really be so simple as:
*once you set yourselves up as the "experts" in racism/sexism you get to set the terms of those debates and their remedies*. It is simply a failure mode for academia where expertise is seen as king. If the experts are ideologues ideology becomes king.
You can use this status as the experts to pursue your political /religious agenda (this is largely a surrogate religion IMO).
Harsh but fair!
I went back to actually check the dates and realized I'd muddled it up. LJ was bought by Russians in 2007, Racefail was in 2009, and LJ began its final swan dive around 2011, which is also when Tumblr was really coming into its own. Perhaps the two are different branches of the same tree, or that the infection spread from LJ to Tumblr instead of the other way around -- I recall Tumblr being relatively chill around that time. It was a while before it earned its reputation.
I maintain that the tag/reblog structure of Tumblr accelerated things, though, because following a tag instead of people means anything that gets into the tag and becomes popular gets spread to everyone following the tag. So when proto-wokeness got into the tags it was sent directly to millions of immature teenage girls alongside their SuperWhoLock memes.
I'll also leave this here regarding things starting on Tumblr (although interestingly, this suggests LiveJournal also gets the blame): https://archive.is/W4XRl
"LJ was bought by Russians in 2007"
Prior to that, after it was taken over by SixApart, they had already been shopping it around, and forcing communities to clean up so they could monetise/sell it (there was a whole porn purge of its own which dragged in, for instance, breastfeeding or breast cancer groups on the clean-up of "no pictures of bare breasts"), so people were already starting to leave. The sale to the Russians just sealed the deal.
I wasn't there for Strikethrough but I did see the rest of it:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough
Oh, that's right! I'd completely forgotten about the porn ban/strikethrough. Tumblr had just been formed in February 2007 a few months earlier, I feel like this event sent a number of people there.
Apropos of nothing I was surprised to see Anil Dash's name there as a Livejournal executive at the time. God, that guy sucks.
I flounced off LJ around that time, but it wasn't due to the porn bans (which I recognised were the same kind of "we need to clean up the site's image so we can tell advertisers it's family-friendly" manoeuvre Tumblr would later engage in), but rather because on one news thread an Official LiveJournal Staff Member assured everyone that no dirty rotten stinking pro-lifers would be let near the place dead, much less alive.
That engendered some comment, and I was one of those who shook the dust of the place off my sandals and left. What made it even more strange was that I wasn't engaging with communities that were fighting over pro-choice versus pro-life or anything to do with abortion, it was just Staffie taking the chance to loudly virtue-signal that they were the *right* sort of person with the *right* sort of views, that LJ was such a place for such people, and of course everyone was pro-choice and liberal and the rest of it.
And then a little while afterwards it ended up sold to the Russians who let the English-language site crater while they concentrated on the Russian one, and didn't give a flying fig about PC or any of the rest of it into the bargain.
Looking back, I imagine that such "no dirty Christians here" signalling was because of the porn purge and related matters (child porn allegations which also involved incest and if you know anything about certain fandoms, incest between characters was/is a big part of them) which seem to be blamed on/in part down to groups allegedly Christian or motivated by moral concerns, but at the time it seemed gratuitously offensive to those of us who just wanted to converse with others about our interests and who weren't marching around with banners demanding everyone take on our code of conduct.
The funny thing was, Tumblr was one of the places mentioned as "so if/when LJ goes down the drain, where do we all go?" but I actually only signed up there to follow my nephew's account. He's long finished with it, but I'm still hanging out with a few mutuals!
> This does not mean the test isn't a good test in the sense that it doesn't measure job performance. See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left.
This isn't quite right. When you run a test you have a threshold (you hire anyone who scores over X points) and then hire anyone who passes it. If your test is good, it should still have some people who passed with an 80 and some people who passed with a 100, and the people with a 100 should (in general) perform better.
Now this is weaker the stronger your selection is, since at the top end people are hard to differentiate by talent and test scores beyond that are mostly luck. If you had a test for the NBA (say some mix of height, athletic ability and a test game) you'd probably only hire the top 0.01% of performers and see no correlation left over. But for a normal company that hires, say, 25% of qualified applicants, you should expect to see some residual correlation above your threshold.
I think 25% of qualified applicants is probably a very high estimate. Glassdoor claims [1] that, on average, a corporate position will recieve 250 applications. In order to get to 25%, you'd need 98.4% of applicants to either be unqualified or to find another position at the company. I don't know what number would be appropriate instead of 98.4%, but I'd roughly guess we're talking <5% of qualified applicants get hired. Still, 500x less selective than your number for the NBA
[1 ]https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/50-hr-recruiting-stats-make-think/
So this is hard to estimate. Part of the problem is that unqualified people are going to be applying to a whole lot of places - if you're willing to accept 25% of the qualified workforce (and since most people have jobs, the average employer is probably much more lenient than that), most of the people you'll accept are happy in their jobs and not actively interviewing. But you're still probably willing to accept anyone who does decent at your hiring test (not just the few who ace everything).
Another way to think about it - height isn't super predictive of success in the NBA, which is super selective, but I'm guessing it's pretty predictive at the high school basketball level (even though making the school basketball team is a nontrivial challenge - even Jake Berenson didn't make it in, and he saved the world from aliens).
Is this how tests for choosing employees are actually used though? It isn't the way they would ideally be used in theory if there is other information available (e.g. subjective impressions from interviews, qualifications, experience) that is at least partially independent. If you plot a candidate's test score on one axis and everything-else score on the other axis and accept only the upper triangle who had a total score above some threshold, then that reduces the correlation between test score and performance among those actually accepted. If the very best are applying to other, more prestigious/better paying positions elsewhere instead, then the correlation drops even more.
So if the employers are correctly weighing each feature (test performance, height, whatever) then the features would be anticorrelated with each other but they would still all be positively correlated with job performance. If the employer has more prestigious competitors so that it can only hire people in a band of competence (or of test performance) that will make the employees closer to each other in competence levels, but shouldn't weaken the correlation within the band the employer does hire (although it would make it harder to detect).
>So if the employers are correctly weighing each feature (test performance, height, whatever) then the features would be anticorrelated with each other but they would still all be positively correlated with job performance.
I'd expect the features to be anticorrelated with each other _for the set of employees that all have the same overall weighted score_. ( For the case where the weighted score is the most accurate possible predictor of job performance, given the available information ) I'd expect the overall correlation of each of the features with job performance to, roughly speaking, depend on the _dispersion_ of the overall weighted score amongst the employees.
And, given how fast gaussians drop off, I agree with your point that highly selective organizations should wind up with less correlation with job performance - because they are trying to pick people from a rapidly diminishing tail, so we'd expect less dispersion in the overall weighted score than for less selective organizations (_if_ the distribution is gaussian, not something with fatter tails, or even multimodal).
So they're anticorrelated for all employees, not just ones with the same overall score, because the employees are selected to be over a threshold (this is like the paradox where better looking actors are worse at acting - if you take two uncorrelated features and look at the subset of the population for which their sum is over a threshold, they will be anticorrelated within that subset)
Many Thanks!
Something seems off. Consider the case where the threshold is very low, in fact below the lowest score in the whole population. Then the correlation of features in the group over that low threshold is just the correlation of features for the whole population.
Also, say we had two features, X and Y, and say we had a score which is just X+Y, and we have a threshold at zero and a population with:
low scorers: ( X = -1, Y = -1), (X = -2, Y = -2)
medium scorers, all with score = 1 : (X = 0, Y = 1), (X = 1, Y = 0)
high scorers, with score = 9 : (X = 4, Y = 5), (X = 5, Y = 4)
The slice with score = 1 has X and Y anticorrelated
The slice with score = 9 has X and Y anticorrelated
The total population above threshold has X and Y positively correlated
( I _think_ that this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox )
So the thing I was talking about is apparently called berkson's paradox - see here for more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox?wprov=sfla1
Why couldn't it be the case that scoring over X threshold is highly correlated with job performance, but scores above that don't make a significant difference? Like, reaching a minimal technical competency is absolutely required, were you literally can't do the job without that, but beyond that minimal technical competency other things such as conscientiousness, ambition, willingness to work overtime, etc are what determine job performance?
This is possible (though unusual - usually skills don't have quickly diminishing returns, and this has been studied for general intelligence in particular), but it's a different phenomenon than height being uncorrelated with performance in the NBA (being seven feet tall is still more useful for basketball than being six and a half feet tall)
I thought this too, but there is a good point made by Medieval Cat (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-cf9/comment/55779608): a firm that doesn't hire the cream of the crop has not only a lower threshold, but also a de facto upper threshold: potential employees who are better on a combination of various traits are poached away by more prestigious companies that value better combined aptitude more, and pay more. Then, within the slice of aptitude a company is hiring for a given position, there may indeed be very little correlation between test score and performance.
Do you think it is possible that an explanatory factor here is range restriction (https://www.statology.org/restriction-of-range/)? I'm hypothesizing that if all the people who didn't make the cut for the NBA were considered, then we might see a much stronger correlation between height and performance.
From the comment by gdanning:
> The evidence, however, shows that employees who have not completed high school or taken the tests have continued to perform satisfactorily and make progress in departments for which the high school and test criteria are now used.
So they can compare people employed at the company who did and didn't take the test. But this still isn't the same as comparing people who score above and below the threshold. (The argument works for high school completion, since we can compare people who did and didn't complete high school.)
Much of this commentary seems to yearn for the 'good old days' when things were much more meroticratic and obvs white dudes got all the good jobs. In this context, the findings of Hsieh et al. (2019) seem relevant: they estimate that 20-40% of labour productivity growth from 1960-2010 can be attributed to reduced discrimination leading to better allocation of talent. (see https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/HHJK.pdf).
I’m not an economist, but by my read, that paper assumes that changes in employment and wages must be due to either reduced discrimination or changes in worker preferences, finds it isn’t changing preferences, and so concludes it must be reduced discrimination.
In a hypothetical world where the commenters you are arguing against were 100% correct, I think the model in the paper would still spit out the exact same result.
This paper is the platonic ideal of "let's put the results I want already into the assumptions, and wow somehow it gets the results I want, funny how that works". The abstract already admits as much.
As splendric has already mentioned, this kind of study design – though unfortunately all too common, especially in the social sciences – fundamentally lacks the power to tell us much of anything other than how much stock the author puts in their own assumptions. This kind of “assume A can only happen because of B or C, so if we prove B does not change than it must be C” analysis is exactly the fatal flaw that befell studies about lead impact on intelligence. It’s a product of magical thinking around the impact of artefactual error-term endogeneity, really. See Cremieux Recuiel on lead impact and Hill et al.’s 2021 paper “Endogeneity: A Review and Agenda…” for more.
Friday because "Friday" is extrovert code for "alcohol"
With regards to lawsuits, billion dollar companies get sued all the time. There's a reason why the GC is considered equal to a C-Level executive. An EEOC lawsuit is bad for PR reasons, but from a legal perspective it's one of a dozen legal actions they have to deal with every week. If it doesn't cause a big splash in the media the CEO probably won't even hear about it.
I have to imagine a significantly non-zero number of regular, established commenters hesitated to report preferential hiring (or perhaps more importantly, *management*) of minority employees in their workplace. I know I sure did, and I have a doozy of an anecdote.
Edited to add: This comment has gotten a surprising number of likes (I know they're turned off on the site, but I think they're via email, I think?).
There might be quite a bit more to subtle chilling effects than is being accounted for, especially as self-censorship is pretty difficult to quantify.
[joke, not actually a shakedown] That's a nice online identity you have there. Very respectable, lots of social links to other upstanding online identities.
LOL!
I am now curious as to how things will shake out in the future Ireland. We never had preferential hiring of minorities previously because, frankly, we hadn't enough minorities until you count the Poles/Eastern Europeans who came to the country to work during the Celtic Tiger era. Unless you count the Jewish population, or the Indian/Chinese people running the takeaways.
But now we're seeing a lot of Africans, to the point where I can see black people on the streets in my hometown. I've mentioned before that I've already, to my surprise, gotten the emails with "my pronouns are X/Xs" in the signature line, something I thought was safely confined to the USA. So will I see "preferential minority hiring" in jobs round here? Will that be brought in as a requirement where I work? I'll have to see!
Reminds me of a few years back at The Motte when someone took a wackadoo's complaint seriously and calculated the mathematical impossibility of """fixing""" racism in Ireland the American way: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/jzbis2/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_november_23/gdo0g7u/
> So will I see "preferential minority hiring" in jobs round here?
I was under the impression, that many american tech firms are already in ireland (or at least in dublin). So I think it would only be a matter of time until their influence radiates out into the rest of the nation.
Depends on whether the multinationals are looking for minority employees; a lot of the "foreign worker hiring" has been other European nationals for language etc. abilities. We're still too white to have a meaningful pool of "you must employ this percentage of Latinx/Black/Asian in line with the population" to draw from.
Where hiring is done from abroad, meaning outside the EU, there seem to be two ways to go about it:
(1) Employees can't/won't relocate to Ireland, so you hire them in their home country via an intermediary company to work for you
https://www.thejournal.ie/working-abroad-from-ireland-6143601-Aug2023/
(2) Outsourcing - I'm basing this on my own impression, from dealing with a pensions company for work. They went from "I can email the team in the Dublin office who all have recognisably Western names and if I have to, I can phone directly and get to talk to someone" to "The people emailing me have Indian/SE Asian names, I can't get a hold of them directly, and based on the time I phoned the head office and wasn't able to get through to anyone on that team, I'm guessing they all work in their home country and this is just one of several companies for which they do this outsourced work".
So the DEI requirements may or may not apply if you're an American company with its offices in Silicon Docks, and I'm sure they'd love to have staff photos of every shade of skin colour on the webpage, but like I said, we're just not at the stage of having enough black and brown people working here, native to here, or willing to move here *and* who can do tech/IT work as yet:
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-01-tech-companies-eyeing-expansion-luck.html
Give it another five to ten years when the kids of immigrants graduate from college and maybe, but right now not so much.
I think not hiring Irish Catholics because of the historical benefit of “whiteness” would be highly ahistorical, and create more tension than even the US. After all didn’t the Irish leave the United Kingdom in part because of discrimination? Aren’t Catholics in Northern Ireland discriminated against?
I’m not Irish but it would make much more sense for Ireland to follow the French route here.
Today I learned that I'm not the only SSC reader who goes by "gjm". I was super-confused to see "gjm wrote:" followed by something I could not possibly have written :-).
I am now in a state of Cartesian doubt about which stuff I have previously noted as being “written by gjm” was by you or the other gjm.
Only three letters makes collisions more likely. I've got 4, which is a multiple on top of that.
Your confusion on the law is the biggest problem. You are more intelligent than the average hiring manager and spent more time researching this than nearly all of them, and yet, you are not certain what is or is not prohibited by the law. The Plaintiff side lawyers can correctly say that it is very hard to win a civil rights lawsuit and the only cases that win are egregious. The defense lawyers can feel good about winning the majority of their cases while billing their clients in the millions.
I am in HR, and as soon as a manager has been sued, they call me and ask to make sure it never happens again, win or lose. An EEO lawsuit is one of the most unpleasant things that can happen to a manager. They have to attend depositions, retrieve hundreds of emails, testify at court, be called a racist, and know that if they lose their case their career goes down the toilet. Regardless of what is good for the company, they now want to do everything they can to avoid further litigation. If rewriting policies, cracking down on jokes, and hiring less qualified applicants will prevent lawsuits, they will gladly do it.
I am actually fighting managers to tell them to not overreact, you won the lawsuit, there is no need to change everything and make it worse. I can usually convince the managers, but what do you think most HR people do when a supervisor comes to them begging them to do anything to avoid lawsuits? They happily enforce draconian measures. Confused managers are going to err on the side of caution, to the detriment of everyone else in all but the best functioning organizations.
Thanks, this is part of how I was feeling reading the comments.
Sam B said they work in civil rights law and they sounded frustrated that companies easily win a lot of times. But they also seemed unconcerned about the impact of a company being sued in the first place.
I notice lawyers who spend all their time in courtrooms tend to be unafraid of courtrooms. But everyone else in the world who basically sees courtrooms as a black box where outcomes can seem random and life ruining dreads and fears courtrooms.
I'd be willing to do pay or do quite a lot to avoid courtrooms in my personal life. When considering whether I'd tank the productivity of a business I worked for to avoid a courtroom the answer is an easy "yes".
> An EEO lawsuit is one of the most unpleasant things that can happen to a manager. They have to attend depositions, retrieve hundreds of emails, testify at court, be called a racist, and know that if they lose their case their career goes down the toilet. Regardless of what is good for the company, they now want to do everything they can to avoid further litigation. If rewriting policies, cracking down on jokes, and hiring less qualified applicants will prevent lawsuits, they will gladly do it.
> I am actually fighting managers to tell them to not overreact, you won the lawsuit, there is no need to change everything and make it worse.
The process is the punishment. Even if you win the case, you still lose because you got put through the wringer, putting tremendous stress on your business and your life.
This is largely by-design.
I get where you're coming from, but also ... sometimes people actually get discriminated against, but probably fewer than would without EEO laws on the books?
So yes, frivolous lawsuits are bad, and having more laws that enable lawsuits means, at the margin, you probably get more frivolous lawsuits.
But that's not an argument against EEO laws. At best, it's half of one.
I hear you, and I agree to some extent. I think the thing that's egregiously missing is a safe harbor. In various areas of law, where it's understood that there's a high potential for abusive lawsuits, there are provisions of law where a person being sued can say "I am doing XYZ, I am not doing ABC," and have the case thrown out without going through The Process. Sometimes, such as with anti-SLAPP laws, the dismissal includes requiring the plaintiff to pay their legal fees or even pay damages for wasting their time with malicious lawsuits.
As far as I'm aware, there are no safe harbors in EEO laws, which is how you end up in this situation where, no matter how utterly, obviously baseless the suit, you still get dragged through The Process.
Realistically speaking, these laws aren't going away. Adding some safe harbors to them would be a great way to mitigate the damage they do while retaining their more positive aspects.
LIkewise, if you eliminate due process, presumption of innocence, and the appeals process, you get a lot more convictions and recidivism will drop near zero! Shame about all the innocent people going to jail and the explosion in the prison population, though.
Ahh el Salvador one of those extremely uncomfortable places to talk about because they... did all that and also reduced crime to western nation levels.
As I read about how the courts/government use companies' applicant-pool statistics against them, I remembered how during my last job search, the demographics forms always had a "prefer not to answer" option.
If more non-minority people started selecting that option, would that tilt things in their favor? It might not necessarily help any individual applicant much, but what if a significant fraction started doing so?
This would only possibly tilt things in their favor if minority people also selected that option. But why would they? It removes any advantage being in a minority has.
I conclude that checking "prefer not to answer" is effectively the same as "caucasian/white" except in cases where there is no default, such as gender.
Has anyone ever been refused employment because they refused to designate their 'gender'? It seems to me one can't be faulted for refusing to subscribe to a phantasm, an artificial construct. According to my personal data, I have a sex.
Some states log one's "gender" on driver licenses, without bothering to explain what that imaginary disease is.
It probably won't help you get hired, but it might help weaken this law. Because although a hiring manager can guess you're probably white, the law probably can't. So if all the statistics say "10% white, 10% minority, 80% prefer not to answer" instead of "89% white 11% minority" it makes it a lot harder for them to do statistics and prove discrimination or disparate impact.
Or just lie about not being white. Scott had a post on this sometime within the last year or so. You can't be asked to prove your race. HR might give you a dirty look for obviously lying, but they won't do anything about it.
I sometimes consider this since I was actually born in Asia (though white), but never have stooped that low. I figured if called out saying "I was born in Asia and lived there until grade school" is some fairly strong argument I am "Asian".
"I sometimes consider this since I was actually born in Asia (though white), but never have stooped that low."
A while back I pointed out to one of my Israeli co-workers that he WAS Asian if he wanted to be. Also Middle Eastern.
There isn't anything "stooping low" about doing whatever to reduce discrimination against whites a tiny bit. May not work with "Asian" though.
Per Dynomight, if employees pick the “prefer not to answer” option, the employers are required by the EEOC to guess at their race:
https://dynomight.net/2021/01/15/eeo/
That sounds like it could turn ironically racist.
I think commenter Mathues (or whatever it was too lazy to scroll back up) from Brazil is confused about both his own nation and the US, but I'll stick with the US part for now:
1.) Our Brazilian friend seems to believe the issue is something like "the 13%, blacks, vs the other 87%, which is uniformly white". No, it's not "just 13%" that the woke are concerned about, even discounting the "misogyny" element.
2.) *Even if it were* only that unofficial quotas were set for "just 13%", what happens when there aren't enough qualified applicants anyway? What has this commenter taken from e.g. the air traffic controller debacle...? Aside from the demonstrable issues this can certainly cause in and of itself (here, how about a ~1/10–1/5 chance your surgeon is unqualified next hospital visit; too small to matter, right?), consider also the runaway effect that can be caused when x companies/positions all need some share of only 0.5x candidates.
(In my own former company, we had to deny promotions and turn down qualified hires more than once due to leadership fears of not being diverse enough: "no, leave that open, Tim will be unofficial interim director until we can find a minority to stick on the website and in the position!" — it can sort of make you bitter, after a while.)
3.) Relatedly, check out what happens at the tails of a normal distribution when the center is moved 1 SD (or half of one, even) in either direction. That is, a comparatively insignificant difference in average results in much larger differences at the tails, such that while it may be easy to rustle up a quota-satisfying batch of our hypothetical 1-SD-lower group for "regular" jobs, it becomes increasingly more difficult to do so for the high-visibility and high-ability positions (i.e., the very ones that will get the most lawsuits and outrage &c.!).
4.) nvm I've run out of energy. l used to have so much more to say; but now... *slaps own face* c'mon wake up man WAKE UP–
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(note: have shown great forbearance in not responding to Tatu's "international theory" by saying "yeah, I shudder to imagine what would have become of us without the goodwill of the Congolese!" hahaha–... oh, no, I think this counts as doing it anyway, aw... hell!—)
(that's mostly a joke, although tbh I do wonder whether the African "man on the street" liking or not liking us reaaallly changes so much that it is the most significant element behind our own domestic policy...
...beyond that, though, it has not at all been my impression that the A.M.o.t.S. *does* look favorably upon the U.S.! I'm reminded of the African compilations about how crappy the U.S. and West as a whole are, when Black Panther came out, lol. we have held them back from becoming Wakanda, not shown that we're great by uplifting black celebrities...
...hey, hold on: black celebrities have just about 0 to do with affirmative action in the first place! this theory explains less and less!)
My point was not that it's just *Africans* who cared about the treatment of blacks in the US during the Cold War, it was Third World peoples in general, who saw it as symbolic of the general treatment of non-white nations under Western imperialism.
The American current interest in Africa is obviously nonzero from how much there's been talk about Chinese influence in Africa and how to counter it.
> ...beyond that, though, it has not at all been my impression that the A.M.o.t.S. *does* look favorably upon the U.S.!
Polling says otherwise: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/07/23/5-charts-on-americas-very-positive-image-in-africa/
>...hey, hold on: black celebrities have just about 0 to do with affirmative action in the first place! this theory explains less and less!)
Media obviously does not just indicate that there are black celebrities (and when I talk about American policy I'm not talking about just affirmative action but a wide range of sociocultural policies), but also offers at least some indication of how minorities, in general, live and are treated in America, in a way that is also visible to the rest of the world.
That may have changed in the recent Middle East events. Egypt went from positive about the US to highly negative.
The Middle East is a bit of an expection to the general dynamic for a variety of reasons. Even then, it would easily be possible for Middle East to be *even more fiercely* anti-American, so much so that it would genuinely threaten the stability of America's allied countries, chiefly the oil-producing ones.
I doubt Arabs would care. From what I gather, they can be pretty damn racist against black people.
The point isn't the status of Black Americans *as* Blacks. During the Cold War, there was a great amount of sympathy around the world for the African-American freedom struggle as a general example of a historically oppressed minority nation struggling for its rights at the so-called heart of the empire, with their specific race being a secondary question. Similar sympathy was extended to AIM and other Native American activists. In the Arab world you had examples like Algeria offering asylum to Black Panthers - of course North Africa is a bit distinct anyway, since there exists a certain idea of pan-African solidarity there.
Egypt is a weird middle ground in that it hates the US and Israel officially while also relying on both to protect it from ISIS and similar groups.
Would you say then that the effect is "sub-linear", instead of the "super-linear" as I suggested? Each additional point of underrepresented group with less-than-ideal labor skills, the harm of forcing equal representation is smaller? This doesn't fit with my priors.
I understand what you're saying about other groups, like latinos and veterans, or even women, but my intuition is that the effect is substantially smaller.
And anyway, my complain is (as it seems by the review) that Richard didn't qualify the size of the problem. You can complain as a matter of principle. Or you can present evidence that the problem is really big.
"The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before."
I think that David Chapman's Meaningness blog does a good job of providing a narrative for this. He actually read those continental/pomo academics, thought that some of them were not entirely full of shit, successfully collated and presented their (and some Buddhist) ideas in a readable form.
>David Chapman's Meaningness blog
Do you have the post(s) in which he does this? I would be interested, but cannot obviously locate them on the blog, and it is hard to easily browse substack I find
The one most directly related to that question:
https://meaningness.com/systems-crisis-breakdown
thanks - I had not realised there was a non substack blog also!
>"The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before."
I don't think it's at all obvious that the defection did give an advantage. I don't think it accelerated the progression of actual social justice gains, but I think it did a lot to galvanize resistance. If I were more deeply versed in the academic roots, it's possible I'd think otherwise, but my impression is that this wasn't an inevitable response to incentives, but a specifically cultural transition, and very likely an own-goal from a pragmatic standpoint.
I consider writing books which advocate for departing from the mechanisms of liberalism in order to achieve policy goals to be a defection, in much the same way that I'd consider writing books advocating for pursuing policy goals through the use of violence.
“I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.”
A lot of corporate jobs treat Fridays as slack days. All the work that needs to be accomplished can be done in 4 days. All the client meetings are scheduled for those 4 days as well. Friday is there just in case a project is behind or something needs to be done urgently. You go in, check your emails, and if there is not anything urgent you BS with coworkers throughout the day. These places usually also have casual Friday and an hour long social event in the middle of the day. So once that social event is finished at 2:00. Work really never gets done, unless it has to be.
I also heard from a German coworker that drinks are served at the social events, so I can imagine that’s why the sexist jokes come out and the women go home. It’s why a lot of people are pushing for 4 day work weeks, or hybrid jobs. There is no need to actually work 5 days a week outside something like a hospital.
I would like to hear more about the alternatives to civil rights laws that critics would prefer. Tweaks? “Everyone just be more reasonable?” “Let ‘er rip?” (i.e., just repeal the laws)
And how would we judge the alternatives against each other? Would this require utilitarian reasoning like we do with animal welfare arguments, where we have to grapple with number of animals suffering vs intensity of suffering? (To be clear, the analogue is amount of people subject to discrimination vs. intensity/outrageousness of discrimination faced by fewer people.)
I come away from all of this suspecting that the current system does a pretty good job if the goal is “everyone is able to get a job they are qualified for.” But people are noticing that this doesn’t accomplish a different goal, something like “I, personally, can get the specific job I want.” These are just two of many possible goals when evaluating civil rights laws.
Which goal would each of us pick under the Rawls’ “veil of ignorance?” Which one allocates talent best? Which one is morally less outrageous?
I think removing the "if there's two equally qualified candidates the minority should get it" expectations (especially in civil service jobs), removing contracting laws set to advantage women and minority owned businesses, and making clearer criteria for cases where you can't be persecuted for discrimination (to avoid frog boiling due to reasonable people being worried about being sued) would be major steps that improve the balance. This doesn't require repealing all civil rights laws.
I generally don't like when the government attempts to launder its social programs through the legal system.
If the voters want a particular social program in place then the government should pay for it out of its budget, and the full costs of it should be internalized to the government so voters can have an appropriate accounting of things.
In the case of discrimination there are two systems that the government could put in place:
1. They control the pipeline to the workforce, aka schools and to some extent universities. They should put in place metrics to figure out what they are doing wrong and try to fix it within the pipeline.
2. They can hold themselves accountable to how well they are doing by implementing a social security payroll subsidy for minorities that they are failing. Say race X is under-represented in the workforce and payscale by 10%. Cut the employer contributions to social security for race X by 10%.
The government is responsible for the pipeline of job candidates, and their failure if that pipeline still sucks. And the total cost of this program is a line item on the budget that voters can actually look at and say "is this worth it?"
Same should happen for disability. Right now private individuals can just sue others if there isn't enough disability stuff in place. Change the responsible party to the government. If something isn't accessible to disabled people the government can either subsidize the fix in its entirety, or pay the disabled person for not being able to subsidize a cheap fix. The entire costs of subsidizing disabled people should be a line item on the budget so voters can decide "is this worth it?"
In my opinion it is really slimy for the government or voters to say "hey we want this massive social program, but we want its costs to be entirely hidden, and for it to be unchallengeable if it turns out to be a bad idea"
Everyone prefers that costs are hidden from them. People don’t want a carbon tax, they want “corporations” to “pay” to solve carbon emissions and clunky efficiency standards. People buy airline tickets with lower headline price and higher bullshit fees. People buy the lowest cost durable goods that break in 6 months, failing to do a basic lifecycle cost analysis.
I tend to only want costs hidden when someone else is paying for something of mine. When I am paying for something I get very frustrated when costs are hidden and unclear. This is why I think its slimy for government programs to hide costs.
I don't buy that "everyone prefers that costs are hidden from them". Do you enjoy having costs hidden from you?
I don’t think I prefer that, but the aggregate “revealed preference” of most people is that costs are hidden
That is not really how "revealed preferences" work. Part of the whole idea behind revealed preferences is that two choices are presented in an equal way.
Otherwise you could run a very simple experiment and say people have a "revealed preference" for lying:
Walk up to someone on the street and offer them either $10 or $0. Most of them will prefer $10. But you were lying and always intended to give them $0.
Perhaps “revealed preference” is a technical term that I am stretching too far. What I mean is “people disproportionately buy products from companies that attempt to hide costs from them.” And I t looks like people vote for candidates that pretend costs aren’t happening or are being paid by someone else. You are saying it ought not be that way, I am saying it is that way and likely always will be. I declare us not to be actually arguing against each other’s positions.
There are revealed preferences for individual consumers, government policy is another story.
I think "let 'er rip" is clearly the right answer here. At this point, outright racial discrimination is so taboo that you're absolutely not going to get a bunch of companies actively discriminating against people because of their race/sex even if they were legally allowed to. Plus, woke people love to say that diversity increases productivity. If that's true, then even totally selfish business will practice it, and we don't need civil rights law at all.
That's not to say that there wouldn't be a minor uptick in racial discrimination; there definitely would be. But at a certain point we have to ask: Is avoiding some small amount of discrimination worth the MASSIVE costs created by the current Civil Rights regime? Ask anyone who's worked for a judge or a discrimination-defense law firm, and they will tell you that the vast majority of civil rights cases are totally frivolous. Even those cases that are technically meritorious enough to survive a motion to dismiss or summary judgment and go to a jury are often things like, "Yeah, I guess a jury could maybe think that when your boss was mean to you in a facially non-racist way that was racist?" But resolving these frivolous lawsuits nonetheless takes a ton of resources: the cash to pay the lawyers, the time of the judges who must deal with them (which, remember, makes the legal system worse for everyone else), the time of the people involved (taking depositions, providing emails and other documents, etc.), the social costs to people who are unfairly accused of being racist, and the massive inefficiencies which companies must introduce to try and avoid future lawsuits (which Hanania's book and Scott's original post talk about). We would be far better off as a society avoiding all those costs while just accepting a slightly higher amount of real discrimination.
And remember too that all those woke firms would now be free to openly practice reverse-racial discrimination to their hearts' content! It might even be the case that newly legal preferential hiring of minorities might make up for any increased discrimination they might face.
Yes, repealing the laws is the obvious answer. Children are being born today whose grandfathers were born after the passage of these laws. The laws were explicitly intended as temporary solutions to an acute problem. Groups that still haven’t achieved rough parity (the same rough parity enjoyed by the Chinese and the Irish and the Italians) three full generations later have something else going on that is not going to be fixed by anti-discrimination laws. And if the laws aren’t fixing the problem — if they’re failing to do what they were explicitly passed to do — then they should be repealed.
It's curious that even people opposed to civil rights law adopt the progressive terminology of reserving "discrimination" for discrimination against groups that are less successful on average than the majority. Outright racial discrimination isn't taboo, outright racial discrimination against minorities is what's taboo.
Specifically organizing conferences, mentorship etc. for minorities that aren't available for whites, specifically recruiting minorities, all with the express purpose of increasing the proportion of minorities, is discrimination. And it is zero sum vs. organizing similar conferences, mentorship, outreach etc. in a race-blind manner. If a company organized mentorship etc. available to whites only, and made sure to interview a white candidate for every position, with the express purpose of maximizing the proportion of white employees, no one would argue that this isn't discrimination. It would also immediately get sued and lose.
My comment was addressed to a commenter who opposes civil rights law, and likely doesn't share your perspective that these are harmless, positive-sum actions that don't result in effective discrimination against whites, nor your apparent belief that the illegality of outright discrimination against whites (say, preferentially hiring minorities among the applicants) tends to be enforced even if it's behind a thin veil.
Actual racial discrimination against whites is not nearly as taboo as the other direction, though you're right it is illegal [1]- that said, it's held to a considerably higher standard of proof than the other, at least in the Sixth Circuit [2].
Also, how much work is "actual" doing there?
[1]:https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/4th-circuit-backs-34-mln-award-white-ex-hospital-execs-bias-case-2024-03-12/
[2]:https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/sixth-circuit-requires-additional-5882289/
"Plus, woke people love to say that diversity increases productivity. If that's true, then even totally selfish business will practice it, and we don't need civil rights law at all."
This seems false without some key additional assumptions. Like if you believe there's no discrimination to begin* with then you'd conclude economically rational actors will prefer to have more diversity, but this is essentially assuming the conclusion.
*more rigorously, if you assume there's no a) employer taste-based discrimination or consumer taste-based discrimination in eg the Becker model.
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/society-politics-law/economics/economics-explains-discrimination-the-labour-market/content-section-5.2
You're right, that was a bit of a slapdash comment. It's true that if racial discrimination persists then there may be lots of businesses who irrationally discriminate. I was moving under the assumption, made earlier, that racial discrimination is so taboo now that relatively few businesses/consumers would irrationally discriminate.
Thanks for engaging constructively! :) Maybe I'm just being overly cynical, but it's very easy for me to imagine situations where explicit/public racial discrimination is taboo but people's behavior are still somewhat driven by irrational discrimination.
Coincidentally I was reading about Orwell's writings on antisemitism in Britain. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/antisemitism-in-britain/
Specifically he talks about how he thought public antisemitism was very taboo in Britain in the 1940s while private antisemitism/disliking jews was on the uptake, and that because of the public taboo, there was no real way to honestly discuss this.
>I come away from all of this suspecting that the current system does a pretty good job if the goal is “everyone is able to get a job they are qualified for.”
Yeah and I suspect the main thing the people who disagree with you think is that this statement is wrong, or at least badly dumbing down the definition of "qualified". That you end up with a lot of mismatching between hires/promotions and who has what job specifically in part due to civil rights law.
They can disagree, fine. But before radically changing the status quo, it seems like proponents should consider whether the current system might have some positive effects. And maybe go so far as to compare costs and benefits!
Mandate color-blindness instead of racial preferences. Drop “disparate impact” - you have to prove discrimination instead of inferring it based on outcomes.
Agreed. In a nutshell, that sounds like the basic solution. And discrimination, _if present and meeting a bar for burden of proof_ , should be equally penalized against _any_ group.
[tone=sarcastic] You're missing the point. The critics don't need to come up with solutions. All they have to do is reliably drive proponents into misery and despair, until some proponents comes up with an acceptable solution. How good is good enough? That the proponents' problem.
[tone=serious] If you have a problem with that tactic, maybe you could start there?
Ideally, repeal the parts applying to private companies entirely.
More realistically (and also ideally w.r.t. government employment) keep anti-discrimination laws, but make it very explicit that the plaintiff must prove discriminatory intent, statistical disparities aren't evidence, discrimination against overrepresented or advantaged groups is just as illegal as discrimination against underrepresented or disadvantaged ones, discrimination attempting to correct for historical injustice is still illegal, verbal harassment isn't discrimination, and rulings involving some groups can be used as precedent in similar cases involving a different combination of groups, even if the analogous groups are underrepresented/disadvantaged in one case and overrepresented/advantaged in the other. All this should be written into the law in as much detail as possible to minimize the chance of left-wing bureaucrats and courts twisting it.
Repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (which codified hostile workplace environment/harassment law and the disparate impact doctrine, not to be confused with the CRA of 1964) would be a good start, as would be striking down harassment law as a violation of the 1st Amendment, and various affirmative action-incentivizing applications of the laws as violations of the 14th.
I'm not a utilitarian or a Rawlsian, I'm a libertarian (which is why I want to get rid of anti-discrimination law applying to private entities altogether, albeit with a low priority), plus I regard freedom of speech and equality before the law as human rights as a terminal value (which is why I put a high priority on getting rid of harassment law and asymmetric applications of anti-discrimination law). But even from a Rawlsian point of view, I think I would choose one of the above options (get rid of it, or make it symmetric).
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Everyone generally being able to get a job one is a very low bar, more-or-less measured by the unemployment rate, which basically any system that doesn't put especially onerous rules on laying off people (which in turn make companies cautious with hiring) accomplishes. Hell, even under Jim Crow, black people got menial jobs, which they were qualified for. Perhaps they would have been qualified for *better* jobs than they got, or could have been if they had been allowed better education, but what they got they were qualified for.
Abolish all national governments and return to city states. These governments then only concern themselves with externalities. Unlikely to actually happen, but it's what I'd prefer.
I appreciate that there are in fact people who go too for and are annoyingly uptight in the way they talk about social justice issues. But there is something deeply comical about trying to find a "patient zero" in like a tumblr blog in 2007. James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, W. E.B. Du Bois... there is such a rich history of deep thinkers who are the obvious antecedents of this discourse, and it is bizarre to not engage substantively with *their* thought which expending all this energy on their contemporary epigones.
There is over a decade of conversation talking about these things from a variety of perspectives here.
Edited my comment to make a more focused and less (but still somewhat) grouchy point. The problem with the concept of "woke" is that it is used to refer to any sort of reference to systemic racism, the phenomenology of marginalization, etc., everything from the stupid and counterproductive (corporate DEI, diversity statements) to the profound (Baldwin, Fanon, etc.). Even if the goal is to criticize a certain kind of shallow application of those ideas, it would be a lot more informative to engage at the roots that to write it all off with the "mentally ill teenagers on tumblr" theory that Scott endorses.
Again: There is over a decade of conversation talking about these things. Go read those. This is a book review talking about a particular subject, and this is demanding that the conversation taking place here be about something else entirely - something which Scott has covered in-depth before the term "woke" arose as a popular term to describe this cluster of beliefs.
Hanania would regard that as "idea-ism".
The problem isn't necessarily with the obvious antecedents, but with the dumbed-down, stripped-of-any-nuance (if there was any to start with; I rather doubt it for Fanon but my reading of him is limited) version that spread much more virulently via the internet. Rebutting the deep history is useless when your interlocutor is instead based on some much more terrible version corrupted by the game of telephone.
Wow! This summary makes me wish I had more time to read all the comments. I have two responses based on your summary (which I'll make separately).
First, on "Diversity" in corporate hiring, I have personal experience but no broad or deep data. I spent most of my career working for a large aerospace OEM. As you might expect, it was very engineering focused, but also very strongly influenced by finance/accounting. It was historically male-dominated, although there were some women managers and executives. People who didn't deliver results tended to get weeded out. Bottom line up front: Wokeness (DEI) got a lot more attention, and apparently a lot more effort, in the time I worked there (1993-2020).
One of the first presentations I attended (in 1993) was a group of young HR professionals working on establishing a process to identify candidates for training and promotion. The objective was to identify the best candidates for greater responsibility, so they could get extra training and mentoring. The proposed metrics were: (1) numbers of women and minorities selected for training, (2) percentages of women and minorities selected for training, (3) numbers of women and minorities completing training, (4) percentages of women and minorities completing training, and (5-8) the same things relative to promotion. I asked "How are the metrics related to the objectives?" After a short pause, the presenter said "They're not." I let it lie there.
Then, in 2002, I started noticing something odd. My boss, apropos of nothing, told my small group (all men) that it was important to bring foster different perspectives and thinking styles, because it led to more group creativity - he had seen this effect in other organizations where he worked. And women were a good example of different thinking styles. Shortly after that, a woman joined our group.
Later, there was a requirement from HR that "hiring slates" include at least 1/3 "diversity candidates", which were not publicly defined, but I assume meant Black, Hispanic, or female candidates.
Around 2005, I started seeing explicit company-wide justifications for Diversity. At first, it was "We need to have different thinking styles in order to be more effective problem solvers." This sounded nice, but I could not find any effort to identify different thinking styles. If you added a female MIT Mechanical Engineer to a group of male MIT Mechanical Engineers, did you get a different thinking style? Who exactly had these "different thinking styles," and why were demographic statistics the only relevant measurement? If you assume that different demographics have different thinking styles, doesn't this imply that some thinking styles (and therefore some demographics) are "better" for one position or another? And wouldn't that be unlawful discrimination, if we acted on it?
Around 2010, I saw a different justification for Diversity. Our customers were airlines (and to some extent governments) around the world, so we needed people with different cultural backgrounds to deal with our very diverse customers. (And suppliers.) This sounded reasonable, except that most of our employees had no dealings with people outside the company. Maybe 5% in sales and customer support, a few percent dealing with suppliers, a very few preparing external communications or representing the company in trade groups, conventions, government interactions, etc. So, it wasn't obviously relevant for most employees. And, for sales and customer support, the justification didn't seem to fit the implied goal of supporting hiring more US minorities: Should we assign Black employees to Africa? If so, that would be a good way to kill their careers, because the entire continent had less business than one large US airline. And why wouldn't we hire actual Indians to sell to (and support) Indian customers, or actual Mexicans to sell to (and support) Mexican customers? Would it be better to assign a Puerto Rican to a Mexican account, rather than a white? Shouldn't we avoid assigning women to deal with Latin Americans, who (supposedly) wouldn't take women seriously in high-level positions?
Around 2012, the President of the Commercial part of the company, in a presentation to managers, announced (apropos of very little) that we "will achieve gender parity" within two years. He did not explain what "gender parity" was, or how it would be achieved, or why it was an important goal. Later still, around 2017, a woman executive, in an "all-hands" meeting, proudly announced that women would be given preference in all hiring and promotion decisions. Both of these announcements were delivered as if they were applause lines, but they got no applause.
My interpretation from these items, and from reading more broadly, was that these initiatives were driven mainly by HR convincing the company's senior leadership, based on two things:
(1) As a very large company (Fortune 50) and major government contractor, we had risk of legal liability if we didn't have "enough" of the right demographic groups in the right levels of the company.
(2) Polling indicated that social justice considerations were very important to college students, especially at the elite universities where we wanted to recruit, so we needed to have a robust DEI program to get the new hires we wanted.
Thank you for sharing these specific experiences. A lot of the people in this thread don’t seem to believe this stuff really happens.
> If you assume that different demographics have different thinking styles, doesn't this imply that some thinking styles (and therefore some demographics) are "better" for one position or another? And wouldn't that be unlawful discrimination, if we acted on it?
Yes, exactly. I am always amazed how few people seem to understand how stereotypes work — even when they subscribe to sociological frameworks that describe it quite accurately! Namely: stereotypes ascribe traits to their targets, and those traits exist within a matrix that defines them in contrast to each other. This, if whites are effete and uptight and nerdy, then blacks are brutish and careless and stupid. And if blacks are creative and rhythmic and relaxed, then whites are analytical and deliberate and disciplined. In the US, racial and ethnic stereotypes are largely arranged along the black-white axis, with groups like Latinos placed somewhere in between, and groups like Asians and Jews being more “white” than whites. Of course, when the cultural traditions of these groups get invoked to deny the charge of ultra-whiteness, this just highlights a second axis: the “product of a culture”-“individual” axis, where whites are understood as individual persons with agency and free will, and non-whites are understood as automatons following the dictates of their culture (and of other environmental factors, like “systemic racism” or whatever).
Similarly, women are understood to be “intuitive” and “nurturing” to exactly the degree that men are understood to be rational and tough.
In other words: the idea that you can elevate a group (like women) using “positive” stereotypes, or denigrate a group (like whites or men) using “negative” stereotypes, is fundamentally false. All stereotypes simply limit your ability to think clearly and treat people as individuals.
That was a satisfying AF read.
This timeline is interesting, and predates the wider DEI/wokeness trends. Supports more of the civil rights movement as a primary driver.
It would be helpful for people to define just what "woke" means. Some people use it to mean language: ever-changing rules on what words can be used, and which are anathema. Others use it to refer to ideas: "white privilege", "systemic racism", power dynamics and disparate treatment in the legal system.
Racial preferences in employment in the US go back at least to the early 1970s. Businesses were being sued, sometimes by the government, and sometimes by employees who weren't promoted or candidates who weren't hired. Businesses asked for some rules they could follow that would leave them protected against lawsuits. Nixon's labor department obliged by publishing guidelines, telling businesses how many people of different demographics they should have in each occupational group. These couldn't be called quotas, because quotas were illegal. Businesses couldn't hire to meet the targets, because that would mean quotas, which were illegal. But people knew what was wanted, and worked behind the curtain to do it.
This stuff is very institutionalized, in much the same way as in college admissions, without public acknowledgement. I also think it's essentially unconnected to discussions of white privilege, intersectionality, hierarchies of victimization, new terms like BIPOC, Latinx, or LGBTQIA+.
I've been mulling over a new version of the origins of woke hypothesis, which isn't new so much as a different slant on the Tumbler / online teens theory.
I do believe that Woke ideas originated in academia. But academics can be blowhards with little follow through - as a commentor above notes, they mostly write books. This missing key here is that most people that have gained positions in highly competitive fields, like academics, have been sucked into Moloch, or, as some others might say, they have overoptimized to achieve and maintain their position, stripping out anything that doesn't support these goals. This leads a lot of academics (and other upper class folks) to have convenient ethics, which means they talk a lot about being good, because it benefits them and their position, but they largely don't follow through, because that also benefits their position.
But the middle class, and especially wide-eyed idealist middle class teenagers, don't know that. As the middle class has to sacrifice less to Moloch to attain and maintain their middle class jobs, they have the ability to retain the belief that ethics actual matter. That one should act in accordance with what one believes, and that beliefs are not just something to espouse when they benefit you, but are something to espouse even at a cost.
What happened is that the dominant, but smaller, class created a ideology it didn't actually, really mean, and the middle and working class (a much bigger group of people) got a hold of it and took it seriously. This had the weird effect of both empowering and elevating academics and other high level thought leaders (while Twitter was booming), while at the some time holding them accountable to all the radical crap they had been writing for decades.
What was the upper class to do, but run with it? They couldn't look like charlatans.
Nice ACX-style theory!
Maybe there should be a generational component? That is, it might have started out with a handful of activists and professors, but in the next "generation" there were more of them, and a greater number of true believers, and in the next generation more, up until it reached a critical mass?
Also, it feels like there's something intensely Molochian about the zero-sum mentality behind the modern culture war, where scruples and principles are to be set aside if it leads to victory. It might even be traceable back through identity politics to Marxist class struggle, but that's probably out of scope for this theory.
That doesn't fit in any way, shape, or form, my experience or voting/poll results. Middle class and working class people deeply, deeply hate wokeness. It's primarily a top-down enforcement from university-educated HR and management for them.
Academics, on the other hand, do in fact enforce it among each other. Also, it's the other way around in terms of competitive fields; Since academics are primarily socially judged through peer review, complaining about ethics is extremely useful to give yourself an edge.
My personal pet theory is this: Roughly since the enlightenment, science just kept winning. On the theoretic level, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, etc. greatly expanded our understanding of the world around us, in a way that was hard to argue against by traditional theology. In practical terms, large parts of our technological progress would not have been possible without the scientific groundwork. However, during this time being a scientist wasn't really beneficial; Almost every scientist was already independently rich or at least not poor, and they generally were constantly nagged by family & friends to stop this nonsense and earn money. This caused a strong selection for only people who really, really like science in itself (which doesn't mean they were without biases!).
This greatly increased the social standing of science over time, which led to the establishment and expansion of actual, reasonably paid scientific positions, and thus ultimately to more people entering university that aren't intrinsically interested in science itself, but who like the social idea of being a scientist who leads society forward. There is also a positive feedback loop from adding new scientific fields who have to have more vague & lower evidence standards by the nature of the topic, which also appealed to different people than the older fields with clearer and higher standards, which led to an increased establishment of new fields whic are even more vague, and so on.
After WW2, economic prosperity sped up this process, and it got turbo-charged once western societies realised that university is in a certain sense a natural progression of school. This was mediated as well by elite interests, as they could indirectly push education costs on the government or individual. Nowadays entering university is basically the default for the middle class and higher. You can outright stumble into a scientific career despite not having any special interest in it. Furthermore, it turned into a greater political-media-academia complex, where every politician and journalist is not only university-educated, but went to largely the same universities with the same culture, together with the people who also end up becoming top scientists.
Once you really internalize this development, it becomes a foregone conclusion that university will eventually end up being dominated by a vague political ideology that can be used and interpreted to serve whatever are the needs of the current elite. Wokeness is just really convenient; I haven't met a single privileged person who didn't find a way to either claim oppressed status for themselves or more commonly to claim to speak on behalf of the oppressed. It's in particular very effective to keep the middle class, the primary enemy of the upper class, down, since they aren't as experienced in the discourse while being sufficiently privileged to fall on the wrong side of the conflict.
Some possible explanations: Of course academics "enforce" wokeness - it's how they take down their competitors. But if you peeled back their skull and could look inside their brain, I don't think you find a deep, emotional commitment to woke ideas. Oh yes, they can talk the talk very well, and make their neighbors accountable. But they don't actually care about their own behavior, just defending their own position. I think this is best illustrated by inconsistent application of woke values across different situations and domains.
Of course, there are academics that benefit more from this than others.
Well, as for the working and middle class - it depends. I would say that maybe the majority of these groups are against wokism, but for those that did adopt it, they did so very sincerely.
The people spreading dumbed down versions of academic ideas outside academia are essentially just religious heretics: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/heresy/
I think this is normal? I've seen it with RFCs and implementation guides for WWW technologies, and in house rules for tabletop RPGs (especially pre-3e D&D), and I bet there was a similar gap between the writings of Karl Marx and the actual operational behavior of the USSR. It's one thing to write up a theory, but another thing to have that theory brought into the real world and reshaped by passing through the minds of people who try to use it. Some parts are added, some parts are discarded, and the focus may drift away.
There were lots of Communist leaders (like Lenin) who were both theorists and practitioners. Academia is a realm more of theory than practice, and there's a bigger divide between that world (particularly law schools not intended for undergrads) and kids on social media.
> I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.
Friday lunch drinks?
"Lots of people wrote in to say that there was definitely unfair affirmative-action-style discrimination going on at their workplaces, and lots of other people wrote in to say there definitely wasn’t and they’d never seen anything like that in their whole career. Sometimes these people worked in the same industry, or even the same employer (eg the US civil service)!"
The US federal civil service (nonuniformed) is an enormous set, almost 3 million people. That's almost 1% of the US population!
It includes hundreds of agencies. It does an enormous number of quite different things. I suspect anything you can take away from examining it is about as much as you could take away from examining "humans" (except possibly children; I don't think there are any child employees but I could be wrong).
They do try to have uniform standards, but that works out about as well as you would think it would.
I noticed in my five decades or so of work that civil service seemed to have a broader range of diversity in staff than the private sector. While most of my employment came after Johnson's administration, I think the opportunities for employment for a wider range of applicants opened up in the Truman administration -- a good decade before 'affirmative action'. I think it was Truman who mandated racial integration in the military.
In the 1960s and 1970s, cultural and ethnic diversity wasn't achieved by mandate, but by giving candidates equal opportunity to compete. Reliable and conservative minorities often worked decades for the same public service agency, and retired. They didn't need an advantage -- just equal opportunity. Recruitments that exclude people according to their race aren't just unconstitutional, they're patronizing and counterproductive.
Second comment, on college sports:
Richard Gadsden's comment on the importance of football is significant, but not the whole story. I recall an actual court case against Brown University, started in 1991, which claimed insufficient opportunities for women athletes. Brown has no athletic scholarships, so scholarships weren't the issue. One of the facts in the case was that Brown had done extensive surveys to assess their students' interest in sports, and found that men were much more interested. They claimed that the number of team sports positions matched the level of interest between men and women. The judge ruled that level of interest didn't matter - the only acceptable situation was for the percentages of women and men on sports teams to match the percentages among the student body.
Interpretations of Title IX have led to cancellation of some men's sports, in order to avoid having "too many" men on teams, as well as reclassifying some women-heavy activities (cheerleading and dance) as "sports" in order to count more women athletes. This last effect is not necessarily to the advantage of the cheerleaders and dancers. Some may get scholarships, which is good for them, but participants smaller, poorer schools that have few or no scholarships won't get that benefit. But it means that teams must have designated coaches, defined seasons, defined rules on practice hours, defined academic performance rules, etc.
Yes this was very explicitly the case at the direction state U I attended in the late 90s early 00s. You had them struggling to round up women to replace male programs which had hundreds of students interested. The difference in level of interest was striking. This included the complete elimination of a national champion winning wrestling team which was very popular on campus.
Martin Blank's comment on women-owned businesses matches what I saw for vendors used by state IT.
Also, I have personally seen someone get promoted despite being grossly incompetent due to a diversity push. Just another data point :)
The number of RFPs/solicitations from government entities and government adjacent entities that explicitly say they give preference to "women and minority owned businesses" might be over 50%. It is VERY common.
And I have seen it in action as well. At one point this federal agency I was a freelance subcontractor for (so I worked with a bunch of their consulting firms) was using ~9 consulting firms to help it with a certain kind of work. One was the "black" consulting firm, black owned and mostly black staffed. It was a complete fuckup failure and terrible at its assignments. This was well known for years and basically the other firms would get hired to "mentor" them and back check their work rather than deal with the fact that this attempt to diversify the consultant base was a failure.
The firm were eventually dumped (by not giving it more $/assignments, nothing was ever actually taken away), but they got about 8 or 9 strikes before being out compared to the 2 or 3 most other firms would get. No one explicitly said "X cannot be dropped due to diversity considerations", but they said about every combination of words around that except those exact words. Talk about how important diversity is generally, talk about how the consultant base needs to match the demos of the staff, talk about how some firms cannot be dropped for political reasons, etc.
>This leaves me with more questions than it answers. For example, if a company hasn’t explicitly measured how tests correlate with performance (which I assume is the case with most tests), are the tests okay or not?
1. Under Griggs, if a test results in disparate impact, the burden shifts to the employer to show that the test is related to successful job performance. If the company has not measured how the tests correlate with performance, I don't see how it can carry that burden.
2. But I question the assumption that it is the case with most tests. First, there is a whole employment testing industry out there. Eg: https://totaltesting.com/eeoc-compliance/ and https://www.ccoleadership.com/services/identify/pre-employment-testing
Second, Griggs was fifty years ago. The basic law has been very clear since then: Any pre-employment test that has a disparate impact must correlate with performance. Why would a company be so stupid as to use a pre-employment test without determining that it correlates with performance? Obviously some small companies might be ignorant of the law, but that can't possibly be the norm.
Finally, the assumption that companies use tests without measuring their efficacy is inconsistent with the claim that Griggs has altered company behavior by changing incentives.
Probably-stupid question: *how* do you correlate test performance with job performance if you haven't had anyone to do the job yet?
Or even if you have, say you have had the position for 8 years and had 3 people do it. That isn't a relevant sample, and at any point you want to implement the test you won't have a sample demonstrating it is helpful.
All you ever have is your guess it would be helpful and then after using it for a while you could look back and see if it was (if it is a small number of positions this might be decades).
As I understand it, in such a case, the plaintiff would also not have sufficient evidence to show disparate impact, so would be unable to make a prima facie case and hence the company would not have to show that the test is related to job requirements.
Typically the case for disparate impact is just the current demographics of the employer + some anecdotes.
My understanding is that that is what test companies do. There just are not that many super-unique jobs out there.
Isn't there a pretty extensive literature that IQ is the top predictor of job success? Shouldn't that justify using an IQ test, or would they just say you have to prove it for every individual job?
I am not an expert in this area of the law, but as I understand it, the test must be relevant to skills needed for the specific job. In Griggs itself, the company required new employees in any department other than Labor to "register satisfactory scores on two professionally prepared aptitude tests, as well as to have a high school education." One of the tests was "the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which purports to measure general intelligence." Note that the departments other than Labor included "Coal Handling" and "Maintenance." One can see why courts might look askance at that particular IQ test requirement.
And, something can be the "best predictor" of success, without being particularly necessary for success. A high LSAT score is a great predictor of success in law, but plenty of people with only OK LSAT scores are very successful lawyers (in part because successful lawyering often requires skills not measured on the LSAT)
Also, of course, even if IQ is a predictor, what level of IQ? A company that requires an IQ over 120 for janitor jobs might well end up with marginally more proficient janitors, but if 95% of people with an IQ under 120 can perform the duties, the requirement seems a bit suspect, does it not? And, remember, if the company can show that a 120+ IQ is really necessary (perhaps there is a lot of dangerous and sensitive equipment, and those with 120+ IQs are much less accident-prone), then great!
> “Also, I find it interesting that everyone, even in this politically correct age, agrees to call human resources staffers “HR ladies”. I haven’t worked at enough corporations to have much personal experience of this - why should it be such a universal phenomenon?”
HR is 73% women. https://www.hrdive.com/news/the-hr-professions-big-diversity-question-where-are-the-men/542611/
As far as why this is, I think it is mostly interest. I see a lot of women very excited to join HR because they wanted a white collar job that let them build relationships and help people get along and avoid conflicts, while avoiding math. They are high in both agreeableness and neuroticism. This by no means just women, this includes me as well, but it certainly skews that way.
Other theories are that women are better at HR or affirmative action makes organizations hire more women, and HR is the place they will not do worse in. I disagree with both these ideas, but only because my first theory seems better. A combination of multiple factors is always possible.
The two areas you tend to see more men in are labor relations and compensation, which is more evidence that interests play a major factor.
Thank you. This seems the very obvious explanation of why HR is more female-dominated. There is a *tendency* for women to *on average* be more interested in the relational kinds of jobs, and so *on average* we'd expect more women to go for HR and more men to go for the "lock yourself in a tank for 3 weeks writing software" kinds of jobs. There are of course plenty of exceptions on all sides, but that's my understanding of the general statistical trends.
The trend seems stronger than the trait distribution would suggest though.
Perhaps that depends on how far out on the tails of the overlapping bell curves we go?
Although HR is a common institution, so it seems like it would have to heavily select for this sort of thing, to get the current balance? Is HR actually something people set out to do as a career from day 1, or more of something people wind up doing and settle for?
It's odd, thinking about it now most of the places I've worked with "HR Departments" they are all/majority female.
But in my first job, back when these were called "Personnel Departments", it was mostly male, or at least the person in charge was a guy. I would still happily hang the SOB because he dawdled so much on getting my paperwork processed, I was weeks paying emergency tax (and that really hurt, back in the days of 33% income tax) just because he was having too much fun schmoozing with his buddies to do his damn job.
So all in all, even if the HR ladies are wokescolds, at least they get my paperwork done on time! 😁
Yeah - when it was "Personnel", it was male. Now it's "HR" and it's female. I have no idea why.
I'm a bit late to this thread, but I have an answer for this!
*Women get humanities degrees.* The humanities departments are universally terrible at promoting employment options post-college that aren't academia, and so humanities majors have to make do with what they can find that will take a humanities degree... which is HR.
(For context, I am a female English major who managed to score a technical writing job... but a survey of my HR department is an even mix of humanities and business majors.)
It is largely something you settle for. I have met a couple that considered it a passion from the get go, but most people moved into it once they realized it paid better or had better WLB than their passion, or maybe they failed their passion.
"HR ladies" is DEFINITELY NOT AN ACCEPTABLE TERM. I hope no one reads this and starts using this term at work! In the workplace, you treat men and women equally, you don't refer to their sex/gender unless you have a good reason to bring it up, and you do not talk as if a majority-female group is 100% female.
Agreed, I have never referred to anyone as an HR Lady, and it’d honestly be a little weird to hear it when I’m a man in HR. And of course, if you were known to refer to people as HR Ladies, you would be more likely to lose an EEO lawsuit. But hopefully we can still point out that HR is a female dominated role.
I'm in academia, and we massively prioritize diversity in applicants. If an applicant is black and minimally competent, then this applicant is very likely to at least get an interview and probably the job too. I've noticed that this has changed somewhat in the past year or two as the salience of racial politics has declined nationally. But it's still basically true.
Of course, there's a racial and gender hierarchy. Black people are the most desired applicants, followed by people who are visibly Native American and Hispanic. Asians are still preferable to whites. Women are preferable to men.
None of this is driven by the law, as best I can tell. In fact, I'm pretty sure what we're doing is illegal. Instead, this happens because it's what academics want.
I want to quibble with two comments I think are probably mostly correct.
One is about the Tumblr theory of woke origins, from somebody who says they think the left end of the spectrum has run away from them. I think this actually reflects their increasing awareness of what the far left is rather than that changing; for example, in 2009 there was no such thing as "breadtube." For those unfamiliar, that's a term for far-left YouTube pundits, who make left-wing ideologies more visible, and I'm not surprised the poster has been seeing such ideas more since then. "Breadtube" is called that in reference to *The Conquest of Bread*, a key work of anarchist theory written by Peter Kropotkin in 1892, which according to my notes is earlier than 2009. As far as I can discern, Karl Marx, Emma Goldman, and Joe Hill were also primarily famous for things they did before 2009. Yeah, Tumblr changed social discourse, but radical leftism isn't new - you're just seeing it more clearly.
The second is with the story of a workplace that got way less fun after a series of escalating harassment complaints which "everyone knew" were bogus. I have no doubt that that's the poster's true experience, but I have to ask - how much fun do you think the woman making the complaints was having? I'm gonna guess not much. Could whatever problems she was experiencing have been addressed without those complaints being made? If they were bogus, probably! But clearly that wasn't done. It sounds like a pretty bad outcome, but it also sounds like there was a real issue the company failed to address.
I know a woman who has and will again use the law to hurt others over slights. She’s had some success. It’s very true that she’s unhappy in her workplaces and relationships but that’s all on her.
I can’t know if this is the same situation but I do know it is sometimes true that there’s no placating some people. For them, the pain they inflict is the point.
Yup! That comment reads to me like something somebody who had been part of a culture of harassment might say, but it *also* reads like exactly the situation you just described and I'm going to trust it's the latter.
If somebody is making the workplace miserable in ways other than the bogus harassment complaints, management should have stepped in (or asked HR to) well before it escalated to the point of those complaints being filed.
I do not say that the problem at that workplace was genuine harassment, because it sounds like it probably wasn't. I do say there was a problem, and bad management means it was addressed in a way that solved nobody's problems. That outcome sucks and I've got a lot of sympathy for John having to suffer for it.
It's honestly a hard question to parse. There are places and situations where bad things are allowed to happen and to slide under "it's all in fun, can't you take a joke, it was only one guy, that was out of character" and there are places and situations where absolutely there are people willing to jump at legal proceedings for "you didn't say hello to me today!"
Some people will use the rules to satisfy grudges, some people are forced to it because all their other efforts have been ignored or down-played. You have to take it case-by-case.
The graph in Neike Taika-Tessaro's comment doesn't have a y-axis label and the text doesn't make it clear what it's showing (it's number of internet users in the US).
Thank you
You write:
> Also, could someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary?
I say all this as someone without a college degree who'd personally love it if degree requirements were replaced with aptitude tests.
In order to even get your foot in the door in court, you would have to 1. have no college degree, 2. apply for a position, 3. get rejected, and 4. be able to establish that you were actually qualified for the position. In order to circumvent "you're not qualified because you don't have a college degree", you would ideally have experience in the position at another company. Failing that, you could attempt to piece together an argument for (4) based on independent work - for instance, if the position is web development, you might have built websites for your friends and family; if the position is ditch-digging, you've dug many ditches in your backyard, etc.
You need to show that your lack of a college degree is a "but-for" requirement - that is to say, you would have been hired and performed as good or better than the average person in that job, but for your lack of a college degree.
If you can't show all four of the above, your case is automatically dismissed for failure to state a claim. It's not very expensive or time-consuming for the company to respond with "your honor, the Plaintiff has failed to state a claim, we request dismissal" - the cost is anywhere from free to about $1000, depending on if they actually hire a lawyer to draft the motion for them or if they feel comfortable just filling in the blanks on a boilerplate Motion to Dismiss.
(If you're really determined, you can of course appeal that all the way up to the federal circuit, which will happily rubber-stamp an affirmation of the district court's decision that the initial hearing was correct in dismissing your complaint without action. It will cost you more in time and money than it will the company you're trying to sue, because all they have to do is whip out the same increasingly-tattered note that says "plaintiff has (still) not stated an actionable claim, we (again) request dismissal")
If you *can* show all four of the above, then you'd also have to establish that either 1. the company's "real" reason for not hiring you is due to your membership in a protected class or 2. regardless of intent, the company's policy creates disparate impact on a protected class. You'd likely pick "people with disabilities" as the protected class in question here - ADHD and depression being the most obvious disabilities to frame the college degree case around. You have to be a member of the protected class in question, because otherwise you have no claim, no matter how objectively correct you may be about the discriminatory intent - the company could literally be named "We Hate Women and Refuse to Hire Them and Our College Degree Requirements Are Just an Excuse LLC" and you would have no claim.
Keep in mind that all that's just to get to the point where you present a case with discovery and witnesses and testimony and gavels going bang-bang. You probably lose the case, because all the company has to do is establish that the degree requirement satisfies a rational (even if it's not "the most" rational - perfect is not going to be the enemy of the good-enough) company interest. As long as you don't find a bunch of people saying "man, it's great how the college degree requirement lets us keep out those freaking ADHDweebs!! lol!!" in discovery, then there's no reason to doubt the company on their word when they say the college degree helps establish a pool of qualified candidates who are better-equipped to handle the day-to-day intellectual micro-rigors of the job.
So the short answer is "no", because I'm pretty sure you have a college degree, and thus can't state a claim.
The slightly-less-short answer in the world where you don't have a college degree is "no, because you'd have to spend time applying to every company that requires a college degree and getting rejected, plus more time self-training to become objectively qualified for the positions you apply for so your case isn't immediately dismissed, plus more time in court actually filing all these claims".
The alternative answer in the world where you don't have a college degree and I also don't take your question completely literally is "well, you can certainly try to sue a few of them, but you'd honestly have a far better and more financially-productive time just doing DoorDash, and it'd be about as likely to change the broader hiring culture".
There’s been a big shift in the past five years or so as a few dozen states, and lots of federal and private employers, have dropped degree requirements. This has been pushed about equally by Democratic and Republican governors and presidents and CEOs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stand-together/2023/11/13/why-companies-should-drop-college-degree-requirements/?sh=21e6a653517c
Sure, but it's not because of EEOC / CRA considerations (which can be sort of hinted at by the fact that it's pretty bipartisan, and neither Cortez nor Greene is shrieking about how bad / good the shift is).
It's a combination of factors that I think can be very roughly boiled down to 1. "as college has become more expensive, the amount of college graduates willing/able to work for the salaries an employer can afford to pay for entry-level positions has shrunk" and 2. "a college degree does not select for the same factors as it once did, so unless that degree is specific to particular requirements - e.g., an Engineering degree for an engineering job, or (just to make clear this isn't about STEM) an English degree for a job involving written communication - its value as a behavioral signifier has been eclipsed by its expense in deterring otherwise-qualified candidates".
EEOC/CRA type considerations are pretty bipartisan these days. When I was at Texas A&M, we were required to treat “carrying a gun” or “unvaccinated and unmasked” as protected classes with exactly the same sort of protections as race or disability groups. If your office was a lab with a ban on guns, you had to be willing to meet with students for office hours elsewhere to avoid inconveniencing gun carriers. We weren’t allowed to ask questions in class or make statements that would make unvaccinated or unmasked students feel uncomfortable. Republicans are totally happy to use this sort of approach.
Yes, and from my past experience doing hiring as a research manager in one branch of the US govt, by far the biggest boost was given to veterans (as others have mentioned) -- this was the only one that ever caused us problems and which we spent time needing to work around. Yet conservatives don't seem to get quite as apoplectic about that form of affirmative action / gaming the system.
The rules were very explicit about not giving any preference (even tie-breaking) to women or minorities, and we followed those rules 100% in my experience -- while also doing extra outreach to increase applications from under-represented groups (which seemed like a good compromise to me). Whereas I've also done hiring at universities in the US and UK, where there is a clear and open preference for women especially.
I think the key difference with veteran's preference is that, since it is often seen as part of the compensation package for joining the military in the first place, it is an earned benefit of something the candidate has done rather than an unearned benefit of something the candidate is.
F.D., I am veteran.
Hi - I certainly agree that it isn't perfectly analogous, as you say in large part because it is a choice rather than due to birth. Although by the standard logic of preferential treatment for minorities (which to be clear I'm not defending), their claim is stronger for exactly that reason. However this is a very inefficient system for compensating the military: it distorts later hiring decisions, adds bureaucracy, and frankly isn't going to have nearly as much impact on recruitment as say a larger signing bonus. If we need to pay more in order to get what we want, pay more. My point is that normally conservatives would argue in favor of the efficient market-based approach, and I can't help but think the fact that they don't do so here is purely political rather because they believe it's an optimal compensation package design.
Out of curiosity I looked into the history of veterans preferences and it wasn't designed to encourage people to join the military -- it came about after forced conscription (in the Civil War and the World Wars), in order to allow veterans to compete more fairly for jobs with those who had gained work experience instead of serving. Needless to say that doesn't apply nowadays, mostly because we no longer have a draft (in the US) but also very much because experience as a veteran is in fact valued by many private employers -- and quite reasonably so (my sense is that the military is much more like a standard employer now than it was in the 19th century, with all the associated opportunities to learn work skills).
> we were required to treat “carrying a gun” or “unvaccinated and unmasked” as protected classes with exactly the same sort of protections as race or disability groups
It sounds like you're talking about this being applied to students, but ... Does this actually mean that they were required to preferentially hire people who were unvaccinated and unmasked? Could they at least do antibody tests or something? (That's what I mostly care about, in the service of reducing spread, and I don't much care if the antibodies are from vaccines or the virus itself.)
This was about “hostile environment” type discrimination and rules about not creating it. This wasn’t about employment or admissions.
I suspect even allowing people to volunteer the results of antibody tests would have been interpreted as creating a hostile environment for unvaccinated people.
>Republicans are totally happy to use this sort of approach.
Somewhere between "give them a taste of their own medicine" and "your rules, applied fairly" being an acceptable compromise?
I could do that actually. But I have found that once you have a decade of experience and interview well, a lack of a degree doesn’t matter. People are actually impressed.
But when I only had a few years of relevant experience, I was rejected by the manager for lacking a degree. I know because I was ultimately hired over her protests.
Not for DEI or whatever reasons. He just wanted qualified people in that role, not yet another of her college friends.
- <i>Our Eastern European branch office DID turn into a old boys club on Friday afternoons</i> [...]
- I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.
That's an easy one. Alcohol is generally not consumed openly in European corporate workplaces. However, Friday afternoon is an exception in many companies. For example, in Dutch and German banks in early 2000s it used to be relatively common to send at Friday lunchtime a couple of juniors to fetch 3-4 crates of beer to be consumed in the office after lunch. This is probably somewhat less common now.
Fond, if bleary, memories of Friday at 4. Not very productive then but our customers weren't either and nobody noticed. We looked at that as pre-functioning before hitting the then-new happy hour free appetizer spreads. Visualize shrimp, taquitos and other usual items, washed down with cheap drinks.
Later on, we all realized that our company was run by alcoholics. Glad we all survived and repented.
Thank you for a good discussion. That is a rare commodity these days, so is much appreciated.
>You just have to show there is a “manifest relationship to the employment in question" (a more lenient standard added by subsequent more conservative courts) then the burden shifts to the plaintiffs to prove its not legitimate or that the employer could achieve the same goal in a way that doesn't have a disparate impact.
Berkson's Paradox! ( https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/beware-berksons-paradox )
Say I own an IT company. The highly intelligent social butterfly A-people all work at FAANG, so my recruitment gets me ten 140 IQ but social inept programmers and ten 120 IQ but socially functional programmers. Their strengths and weaknesses balance out so they all get equal employee ratings. But then some civil rights bureaucrat with mid statistical skills tells me I can't do IQ tests in hiring anymore since I can't show that there's a "manifest relationship to the employment in question" since "IQ tests doesn't measure job performance". Would I have to obey those orders?
Seems obvious to me that courts lack the statistical proficiency that is needed to handle cases like this and that involving them was a big mistake, per Hananias original point.
EDIT: I see now that Hadi Khan already made this point.
Well and just to make the problem here clear because people miss it. Is once you throw out the IQ tests because they "don't tell you anything", now you need to put the 140 but inept applciants, and 120 but adept applicants, up against the 90 but adept applicants, and cannot discriminate.
This is the real teeth/harm of the problem. You go from a situation where "120/140 doesn't make a huge difference depending on the soft skills" to being boxed into picking 90s because you cannot measure the "IQ" at all anymore.
Obviously it is a little more complicated than that, but that is the core problem with ditching aptitude testing.
Exactly right. The idea of the civil rights lawyer that Scott quotes that Griggs is not a big deal because you can still use tests that have a "manifest relationship" to the job is absurd. We all know courts are not the right actors to be making decisions about what tests are related to a given job
> I unfairly forgot to mention one of Hanania’s strongest arguments, which was how naturally we avoid thinking about some categories of inequality when we’re not forced to think about them by the government. Nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?) etc. Hanania thinks the reason racial discrimination has become so much more talked about than these other superficially-equally-interesting questions is that the government makes all companies keep racial statistics and talk about things in those terms. If there were no AA, companies wouldn't keep the statistics and people might forget about it, the same way they've forgotten about everything else.
But... it is exactly as illegal to discriminate on the basis of religion as it is to discriminate on the basis of race. The same laws that say you can't choose to hire/fire based on the color of someone's skin also say you can't choose to hire/fire based on whether somebody's a Protestant or a Catholic or an atheist. It really seems like an extremely strong argument AGAINST a purely legalistic cause for "woke"!
Also, if anyone thinks France is a paradise with no racial or religious discrimination because they banned the public tracking of race or religion, they haven’t been paying attention to any French news stories over the past decade. (Or maybe they have, and they see that there’s a ban on wearing a cross over your head or a hijab over your head, and assume that Macron must be of a racial background they can’t see.)
I'm aware of laïcité, but I haven't been following the situation in France closely, only reading occasional articles when they bubble up, which gives me a skewed perspective. Would you mind going into more detail about what's going on?
My view as an outsider? The secular question is about anti-Catholicism and the Muslims just got dragged in because they too are visible about their religion. I don't think the French state is too worried about Protestants, and as for the Jews there's always been the strain of anti-Semitism (see the Dreyfus affair) but the real struggle is post-Revolution over Church and State, since the Church was so heavily linked with the old regime.
"No crucifixes!" got easily turned into "No hijabs!" as required.
Quoting from "The Ball and the Cross":
"Yes, France!" said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him came to the top, his face growing as red as his hair. "France, that has always been in rebellion for liberty and reason. France, that has always assailed superstition with the club of Rabelais or the rapier of Voltaire. France, at whose first council table sits the sublime figure of Julian the Apostate. France, where a man said only the other day those splendid unanswerable words"—with a superb gesture—"'we have extinguished in heaven those lights that men shall never light again.'"
"No," said MacIan, in a voice that shook with a controlled passion. "But France, which was taught by St. Bernard and led to war by Joan of Arc. France that made the crusades. France that saved the Church and scattered the heresies by the mouths of Bossuet and Massillon. France, which shows today the conquering march of Catholicism, as brain after brain surrenders to it, Brunetière, Coppée, Hauptmann, Barrès, Bourget, Lemaître."
"France!" asserted Turnbull with a sort of rollicking self-exaggeration, very unusual with him, "France, which is one torrent of splendid scepticism from Abelard to Anatole France."
"France," said MacIan, "which is one cataract of clear faith from St. Louis to Our Lady of Lourdes."
"France at least," cried Turnbull, throwing up his sword in schoolboy triumph, "in which these things are thought about and fought about. France, where reason and religion clash in one continual tournament. France, above all, where men understand the pride and passion which have plucked our blades from their scabbards. Here, at least, we shall not be chased and spied on by sickly parsons and greasy policemen, because we wish to put our lives on the game. Courage, my friend, we have come to the country of honour."
Speaking as someone with a bit of Huguenot ancestry, I am happy with French Catholic religious fervor being tamped down a bit. ;-) And I don't mind at all if other religions have to play along, and I think those who complain don't know how good they have it, and might be horribly surprised at what happens if the rules are lifted. (Or, well, probably not, we don't usually burn people alive today.)
To mix metaphors a bit, don't go into the grizzly bear cage at the zoo and lecture it about unceded black bear land.
That idiot kid at Columbia who was talking about how other people should "be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists", needs to stop and seriously think what would happen to him if other people adopted that attitude. He's not the only person in the universe.
France has a history of making laws that are formally equal in how they ban displays of religion, but they always target aspects of display that are far more central for Islam than for Christianity. They ban wearing of very visible religious clothing (which is a major imposition for certain kinds of Muslim women and nearly irrelevant for Christians, who basically never do more than wear a cross, which can just go under the shirt anyway) but they don’t ban buildings that display their religion (which would be as much of an imposition on churches as mosques).
It's not the solution that I, as an American grew up with, but I think the French people get to make their own rules, and this falls well within what I consider acceptable. When in Rome, and all that. The French used to burn people alive for being a slightly different version of Christian, and we should all be thankful that they've stopped.
There may even be value in forcing people to prioritize Frenchness over religion, and excluding people who have religions that conflict with French culture. Maybe it'll let their 5th republic outlast our 2nd.
I'm definitely not advocating forceful regime change in France, and not saying that their policy is worse than every alternative they've had! I'm just saying that it's still enforcing a kind of religious discrimination in a guise of neutrality. They get to make their own rules, and I get to state my opinion of those rules, and even get to make reasoned arguments against them.
> They get to make their own rules, and I get to state my opinion of those rules, and even get to make reasoned arguments against them.
But of course! :-)
Since the idea of French secularism goes back to the Revolution, and lacitié is a compromise from the earliest 20C then that’s unlikely.
Unless you can prove that they had a Time Machine or the ban on clothing only applied to Muslims and not Catholics, or was more recent.
It was 2010 that the law was imposed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering
Though perhaps the more relevant one was from 2004: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_conspicuous_religious_symbols_in_schools
The French are probably still resentful about all those Andalusians that tried to conquer them.
It's Martel time!
People do care about religious discrimination when it comes to jobs in Catholic schools, see the court cases over "I had an adulterous affair, got pregnant, had an abortion, and the horrible bigots at St Goretti Girls' School terminated my teaching contract" or the "I'm gay, I like to talk about my boyfriend with my students, why are the bigots at St Tarcissus Academy firing me?"
Or look at this pippin from Slate (and by the bye, what the heck is an "Aussiedoodle"?):
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/supreme-court-religious-school-discrimination-fired-teacher-cancer.html
Oh, the monsters! But could there just possibly be more to the case than that, given that the court ruled *against* the Biels?
It seems that this case was folded in with another one, so that may have influenced the final decision. The position of the school was that the one-year teaching contract was not renewed due to Mrs. Biel's performance in the classroom; the position of the late Mrs. Biel was that she was being fired for getting sick with cancer. The court ruled that religious institutions are free from government interference with employment:
https://www.becketlaw.org/case/biel-v-st-james-catholic-school/
The government doesn't require the collection of statistics on Catholic vs Baptist employees.
> I don’t understand why this would happen on Fridays in particular.
In Serbia, I had a tech job for about 7 months where we did outsourced test writing and a little programming. On Fridays, most of us would be done with work by 3 PM and start socializing. Some employees would drink—we had wine and beer in the office—gossip was common, and there was a PS4 with FIFA on a big TV. The office had about four women (1 in HR, 1 senior technical staff, 1 intern, and 1 junior) and 16-20 men on my floor, including the director/owner of the firm.
Why Fridays? It's the start of the weekend.
Perhaps the whole thing is much simpler than it appears, but taboo to say: white men are too nice. It wasn't black politicians who abolished slavery, or female voters who voted in the female right to vote. Tell white men not to discriminate against women and non-Whites and they fall all over themselves showing - each other, other white men- how 'good' and 'nice' they are. At some point, this allows a critical mass to build up and destroy the system from within.
In 1985 it was white men passing you over for a promotion for being white and male, not 'hr ladies'. Now, the tail wags the dog - - or rather sues it out of existence.
" female voters who voted in the female right to vote"
Do us the justice to admit it would have been rather difficult to vote in the right to vote if we couldn't vote in the first place 😁
thatwasthejoke.gif
Not so much of a joke in the context of "white men did it because they're so nice". Of course the groups without power could not grant themselves power, but the reason being "because they're so nice"? I think the anti-slavery Evangelicals, for an example, can't be brushed off with simply being tagged as "oh they're so *nice*". Well, not unless you're going to say the seraph with the flaming sword at the gates of Eden was "nice".
I'm struggling to see how a bunch of kind hearted egalitarians who have a book that has a character with a sword in it has anything at all to do with this topic. One time I drove by an elementary school that had a wolverine as its mascot.
>>Tell white men not to discriminate against women and non-Whites and they fall all over themselves showing - each other, other white men- how 'good' and 'nice' they are.
This is misses a *lot* of resistance, both civil and violent, to civil rights progress, especially in the context of race. White people hardly "fell all over themselves" to pass the voting rights act, or integrate schools or legalize interracial marriage. If we'd been "falling over ourselves"
to do those things, there'd have been no need for freedom rides, marches, or letters from Birmingham jail. Those hoses and dogs didn't exactly loose themselves.
Burning crosses, lynchings, closing the pools rather than integrate them, redlining neighborhoods, "massive resistance" to school integration, food thrown on men sitting at counters in Greensboro, the Selma church bombing, the shooting of MLK... it wouldn't be hard to go on, and it seems like a lot to just gloss over with "White men are just too nice."
Mmhmm. And all those heroes were non white and had no support from the evil whites. Sure.
Who do you suppose all those protests were aimed at, the black electorate and black lawmakers? Or at the white people in power? Like the civil war, the whole thing was the majority of whites (nice, progressive, egalitarian) dragging the regressive whites along towards a nicer world. If the majority weren't nice and hadn't long ago lost their stomach for overt repression, there'd have been no hoses or dogs. There'd have been guns and gallows.
Imagine a group of ten white men. Seven are nice, three are not nice. The three not-nice ones want to do not-nice things, but are prevented by the seven nice ones. Later we look back and say "Wow white men sure weren't very nice, look at these three not-nice ones!" Absolute I-just-learned-about-MLK-at-elementary-school understanding of history.
>>Imagine a group of ten white men. Seven are nice, three are not nice. The three not-nice ones want to do not-nice things, but are prevented by the seven nice ones. Later we look back and say "Wow white men sure weren't very nice, look at these three not-nice ones!"
No. Later, we look back and have to correct a man who seems to have forgotten that the three not-nice-men existed at all, throwing around glossed takes on history like "white men are too nice" and "tell white men not to discriminate against women and non-Whites and they fall all over themselves showing - each other, other white men- how 'good' and 'nice' they are."
It's silly that we have to do this (just like it's silly when we have to remind someone wearing their own left wing set of the same blinders that there have been people throughout history who've done good things and nevertheless somehow managed to be white while doing them), but that's just how it is sometimes.
Yeah, you remind that imaginary forgetful man! Keep up the good work!
White men, in aggregate, are nice. Did you think I meant every single white man ever to exist, you ridiculous person?
I do not know where you get this idea that when you offer an incredibly shallow and un-nuanced take on history like "tell white men not to discriminate against women and non-Whites and they fall all over themselves showing - each other, other white men- how 'good' and 'nice' they are," any person who corrects you by reminding you that history is more complicated than "white people are too nice" is magically as un-nuanced as your original statement, by mere virtue of having made the correction.
Please bring back the goal-posts, I was planning on making a garden arch out of them.
>I unfairly forgot to mention one of Hanania’s strongest arguments, which was how naturally we avoid thinking about some categories of inequality when we’re not forced to think about them by the government. Nobody cares about religious discrimination (do Baptists get better jobs than Catholics?), intra-race discrimination (do Germans get better jobs than Irish? Japanese compared to Korean?)
I don't see how this is a strong argument at all. There's an obvious reason why people would worry more about racial discrimination than religious discrimination even in the absence of the government forcing people to think about it - because more racial discrimination was (and is) happening. Black people got full equality less than a century ago. Catholics never had laws forcing them to go to separate schools and ride at the back of the bus.
And in the cases where religious discrimination is still happening, people do think about it a lot. More people thought about Islamophobia after 9/11, and it wasn't because the government passed a Muslim Rights Act. The Holocaust made people worry about antisemitism for generations, despite a complete lack of the government going around and cracking down on Holocaust deniers. Atheists became significantly more visible and organized a decade ago when people started trying to sneak creationism into schools, which is the opposite of government support for their group. The presence of a problem for the group leads to the group becoming more visible and organized. Once organized, the group can *cause* government action, but exists independently of it.
I don't understand why you call this one of Hanania's best arguments, because (unless there actually is some significant anti-Baptist discrimination that I just haven't heard about), it seems like it's basically just saying "people notice existing discrimination more than non-existing discrimination." And I guess implying that in an ideal society, people would be equally vigilant about all forms of discrimination, whether or not they existed? Just seems more and more nonsensical the more I think about it.
I understood that to mean that racial discrimination has a minimum so long as a law exists to enforce race as a division between people. If the laws were repealed then racism would decline further.
I’m not convinced but that is sorta the book’s thesis: law begets culture.
I'm not convinced either. Jews don't have to declare their religion on any government form, you generally can't identify a Jew by sight, and yet antisemitism is one of the most enduring forms of prejudice on the planet.
>More people thought about Islamophobia after 9/11
And isn't that weird, though? It's not Muslims who were attacked on 9/11, and despite the narratives that instantly started being pushed by the media there were not widespread attacks on American Muslims after 9/11 and the government itself went to enormous lengths to avoid even the perception of going after ordinary Muslims.
If you agree that it seems weird or out of nowhere then I think it actually supports my point - ethnic or religious groups often become marked by outside events without requiring any sort of government action, contrary to Hanania's claim that government action leads to people "noticing" racism and deepening their stance on one side or another.
But also, I think you're revising history a bit, because the government did engage in mass surveillance of Muslim communities:
https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-the-fbi-spied-on-orange-county-muslims-and-attempted-to-get-away-with-it
9/11 was an instance of Muslims killing Americans, rather than anything happening to Muslims a la the Holocaust. People were concerned in advance about a backlash to Muslims, which one may call a "frontlash".
Maybe Scott’s analogy is weak but there’s clearly one form of discrimination that is by far the most common, that used to be talked about but now isn’t, and that’s class.
I can't think of where to find it again but I remember someone mentioning that a Japanese automaker exec specifically mentioned choosing plant locations away from black urban areas based on avoiding disparate hiring rate difficulties
Perhaps more powerfully, Thomas Sowell studied the incredibly granular statistics on affirmative action in India and observed that the people who benefited in a group were the top cohort who were going to do fine in any case. I assume it has very little genuine benefit for the cost compared to widespread adoption of charter schools
Similarly, go look at the current crop of Ivy grads. You'll see a substantial number of racial minorities, but almost none of them will come from disadvantaged backgrounds. I went to law school with a lot of black children of lawyers and wall street executives who went to prep school in Connecticut. The amount of money and resources thrown at children who grew up with French tutors and fencing instructors in the name of "social justice" is obscene.
Going to repeat my comment from the other thread -- so, the tetralemma that Scott posed, I have a memory of some other writer posting basically a very similar tetralemma recently, although the options and the framing and the implied point were different. It was... I forget, Matt Yglesias? Noah Smith? Josh Barro? Someone from like that cluster of political writers, pretty sure. Was it on Substack or on Twitter? Gah, I wish I'd saved the link. But I think it would be amusing to compare the two and how they delineate and frame the options, if anyone can dig it up.
> In Griggs, there was direct evidence from the employer's own experience that the test they were using was uncorrelated with job performance.
How do you conclude something like this? If you're using a test as a filter, then everyone who got hired had to do well on it. This can cause correlation *among hired employees* to be 0 or even negative for a test that's positively correlated in the general population. This is an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
...
I think the incredibly wide range of personal experiences reported here highlights a major problem: Even 60 years after being passed, 50 years after Griggs, etc. it's not at all clear what the law actually requires. Some of the stories (e.g. Jack Cable) may be government-specific or even federal-government-specific (although possibly partially downstream of discrimination laws). But why do even private companies have such a wide range of practices? I think this lack of clarity is something brought up in the original review, as well as in things like the book review of public citizens. It's a feature rather than a bug--risk-averse institutions are incentivized to follow the incentive gradient, even if some didn't get the memo. Plus the standards and endpoints can be changed without requiring additional legislation; just capture the legal profession ideologically.
> If you're using a test as a filter, then everyone who got hired had to do well on it.
Presumably the test was scored, and if candidates that scored higher don't seem to perform better at the job, it calls into question the validity of the test. Certainly there might be an explanation, but it arguably could be enough to change the burden of proof.
Depends on a few things. If the range of the scores that are accepted is small, you might not be able to observe any correlation because what remains is mostly noise. It might also be the case that other factors are used to determine acceptance, so that the worst performers on a given test (who still manage to make it in) must have performed especially well on the other metrics, and vice-versa. See the article I linked above.
Great comments. I've always been impressed by the ACX commentariat and the diversity of perspectives it brings, and I was delighted to see them apply their insights to the arguments I make in my book.
One thing I was waiting for Scott to point out, and this is something I stress in the book, is that how bad civil rights law is in any industry seems dependent on how closely it is tied to government. For government hiring itself, it's arbitrary box checking all the way down, so this allows race and gender based decision making to run wild, undisciplined by the profit motive. In the free market, wokeness is more of a nuisance. All this is to say that libertarianism is the correct ideology because it makes people behave rationally and we need more freedom. For more on this topic, see this article where I was pushing back on rightists predicting wokeness was going to soon make planes fall out of the sky.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-the-technocapital-machine-is
Speaking of which, the comment from the EEOC staffer highlighted a deeper philosophical disagreement I have with leftists. He acts as if government watching over you is the only way you can get people to behave fairly towards others, as if businessmen are simply free to indulge whatever preferences they have without consequence. The correct answer if you believe that there is discrimination in a field or industry is to start your own business, invest in the companies or actors you think are not discriminating, etc. It's not going to deliver perfect justice and life will in many ways remain unfair, but this is just quite plainly a better system then expecting government lawyers to act as mind readers and know the correct qualifications for every industry in the country and the degree to which every sex and race meets those qualifications. The whole project is absurd.
Regarding the Helen Andrews quote, if unions are the alternative to HR, then count me as a supporter of HR. Males may believe more strongly in zero-sum thinking, but if so that shows the supremacy of women and we should probably have them run everything. This anti-woke to socialist pipeline that I see Andrews representing (she once praised East Germany), is something I am strongly opposed to.
Finally, for those interested in the question of how many civil rights lawsuits there are, there are facts and figures in the book about this. Something like 10-20% of all federal civil suits are related to civil rights. It's a huge industry, and in the book I even do some back-of-the-envelope calculations like the one Scott does in this post.
The second last paragraph makes no sense. You don’t like unions, but that is given without explanation. Then a non sequitur about zero sum thinking amongst men, not women. Then it’s back to Helen Andrews again (who is a woman ) which seems to negate the previous sentence about what gender believes in “zero sum” thinking.
Not that it’s explained why being pro trade union is zero sum. Nor do libertarians make any sense, except as mouth pieces of the powerful, why they don’t think workers should self organise.
As for east Germany it was, empirically, fairly successful for about 2-3 decades. Just not as successful as west Germany - a country that was far from being libertarian.
I'm sure there are libertarians who make bad arguments against unionization, same way as there are other ideologies who make bad arguments against unionization.
Here's mine, degree of badness and/or libertarian-ness TBD:
"The job of management is to turn information into decisions, some of them about wages and worker conditions. The job of a union rep is also to turn information into decisions, mostly about wages and worker conditions (infinitely competent unions do not, I assume, wish to render their companies bankrupt, merely to extract the most compensation possible). This degree of specialization is only worth the effort at larger scales of company; therefore, workers should not unionize unless they're dealing with a sufficiently large organization.
The above logic is recursive, though, so workers not feeling adequately represented by their current union should be free to form another one, either in competition with the first union or as a sub-union of it (for matryoshka-style hilarity). Repeat until complete organizational anarchy has been achieved.
> This anti-woke to socialist pipeline that I see Andrews representing (she once praised East Germany)
Is this what you refer to? (Unfortunately most of it is behind a paywall.)
https://herandrews.com/2023/05/25/what-soviet-nostalgia-gets-right/
https://www.compactmag.com/article/what-soviet-nostalgia-gets-right/
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/jacob-heilbrunn/what-helen-andrews-gets-wrong-about-communism-206500
>All this is to say that libertarianism is the correct ideology because it makes people behave rationally and we need more freedom.
>Regarding the Helen Andrews quote, if unions are the alternative to HR, then count me as a supporter of HR. Males may believe more strongly in zero-sum thinking, but if so that shows the supremacy of women and we should probably have them run everything. This anti-woke to socialist pipeline that I see Andrews representing (she once praised East Germany), is something I am strongly opposed to.
Libertarianism is one of the most male ideology out there. Does this show the supremacy of men and mean that men should probably run everything?
"Thanks. Is there some protection in place if unqualified people apply? That is, if a job requires a PhD, and 100 blacks (all without PhD) and 100 whites (all with PhD) apply, is the applicant pool 50% black or 0% black?"
Usually, any important qualifications would be controlled for, and/or a separate analysis run based only on the sample with the relevant job qualifications. Of course, relevant job qualifications is fuzzy, decided on a case-by-case basis, but multiple people at the firm in questioned are almost always deposed and so the analyst should have a good understanding of the position. If the analyst didn't account for an important, defensible job qualification, the firm being sued would definitely bring it up and argue the analysis was invalid. In your example, if it was for an assistant professor position, the pool would be zero % black. For something like an adjunct, or a teaching job at a community college, that depends. Normally, the analyst would try to figure out what the qualifications of people working at those jobs at that firm in particular (or those types of firms) and try to see if those qualifications were really enforced/needed. In all my conversations with lawyers, the focus was on making the minimally defensible claims supported by the evidence. If we went beyond that, the other side would be sure to point it out, and you would really weaken your standing in front of the judge/jury.
I should also say everything I'm saying about how the EEOC operates is based on my experience and my former team within the agency, so I can't speak for what was done in the past.
Anyone else watch the comedy series Loving Lyfe? The technically female-owned businesses thing felt very reminiscent of the joke about the Female Boss Mom Award For Women.
> See how there is no correlation between a players height in the NBA and how well they perform. This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation.
I think the logic might not be right here; the required implicit assumption is that height and the other things contributing to performance are *negatively* correlated. This happens to be true in the NBA for mechanical (dribbling) and physical (tall people are generally less agile/explosive etc.) reasons. But there's no reason to expect it would be true for say, cognitive ability and the other things that make you a good power company worker.
The argument here is that, at the hiring of the marginal worker, you're making trade-offs between multiple competing positively-correlated qualities. If you're targeting a work metric of, arbitrarily assigning numbers, 100, then your marginal candidate pool will include only people who are at approximately 100 work metric units. (The average marginal candidate with a work metric of 120 will be working somewhere targeting 120 work metric units.)
Thus, all the positively-correlated traits will, in the post-filter pool, look meaningless.
I think I understand what you're getting at here, but you also appear to rely heavily on there being a narrow upper and lower bound of performance for workers at a particular company. At the limit, if everyone working at a patricular company has 100 work metric units, then nothing can be correlated with performance because there is no variation in performance! Additionally, if we are relying on the notion of an upper bound for the filter, then the NBA is a particularly bad illustrative example, because there is no upper bound for the NBA.
Basically, I don't think the idea of "leaving money on the table" targeting the marginal person works here, because there are obviously inframarginal people. The existence of inframarginal people is actually most notable in the NBA, but probably exists in all power companies.
It doesn't actually need to be narrow, that just helps make the thing I'm gesturing at more obvious. It can be arbitrarily wide, so long as there are multiple correlated variables, and the relationship between work output and all the correlated variables remains linear and consistent across the measured range.
I don't think this is right.
To see this, consider the following. Suppose for simplicity that output A* is the sum of three variables X, Y, Z, such that A* = f(X,Y,Z) = X + Y + Z. The sum is an example of a relationship that is linear and consistent across the measured range. Now, suppose X, Y, Z are uncorrelated (although the same will hold if they are positively correlated) and uniformly distributed across people. Finally, suppose WLOG, X, Y, Z can take on values 1-10. Unless you literally fix A* = a = X + Y + Z, there is no (filtered) range of A* for which A* and X will not be positively correlated.
To clarify, consider filtering from a pool of 1,000 people. The highest person is the guy with X = 10, Y = 10, Z = 10, then the next people are the three with two 10x and one 9, and so on. You keep selecting until X + Y + Z < b, where b is the minimum ability level. No matter where you place the cutoff, A* and X will be positively correlated. The same relationship holds if there exists an upper cutoff. Filtering will reduce the magnitude of the positive correlation, but will not eliminate it.
I expect there to be a very strong negative correlation between the variables, because there is filtering at two steps; who applies for a job, and who is hired for a job.
I think you're misunderstanding the argument. It's basically this: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/beware-berksons-paradox
> the required implicit assumption is that height and the other things contributing to performance are *negatively* correlated.
That's not necessary for this. You can even have positive underlying correlation between the two things and still see a negative value in your restricted subsample.
One of the canonical examples (don't know whether this was actually real, it was just given as an example of a pitfall to avoid in my causal inference class) is that if you just look at people in a hospital, smoking is negatively correlated with having broken bones (hence a study design that looked at hospital admits to find the link between smoking and bones would be bad).
This seems very surprising because smoking shouldn't be protective against having broken bones at all, if anything there are good arguments for why it should make broken bones more likely. However you have to realise that the people who don't smoke and don't have broken bones are less likely to end up in hospital than the people who do smoke and don't have broken bones (because smoking causes cancer and other things that land you in hospital).
For didactic purposes we can simplify things a lot. Suppose that smoking always caused cancer which landed you in hospital and that the only two ways to land in hospital are broken bones or cancer from smoking. Plus suppose that the two were completely independent and there's a 50% chance of either happening to you (i.e. 50% chance you smoke and get cancer and 50% chance you get broken bones). Then in a quadrant graph with smoking status on the x-axis and broken bones status on the y-axis we'd have 25% of the people in each quadrant. This shows no correlation as expected.
However when we just limit ourselves to the people in hospital we don't see the bottom left quadrant (those who don't smoke or have broken bones) any more because they aren't in hospital. This means we are left with smokers without broken bones, non-smokers with broken bones and smokers with broken bones. In this subsample we notice that everyone who doesn't smoke has broken bones while there are smokers who don't have broken bones, so it looks like smoking protects you from getting your bones broken, even though there is no real link. Alternatively you can think of the graph again where we had no correlation before but now because we removed the bottom left quadrant from our analysis we see a negative correlation between what remains.
In more formal terms this is an example of collider bias. Being in hospital is a collider for the link between smoking and broken bones, much like how playing in the NBA is a collider for height and how good you are at basketball or how getting hired in a cognitively demanding job is a collider for doing well in IQ tests and doing well on the job and by restricting to a sample that's in hospital/playing in the NBA/got hired you're effectively conditioning on the collider which is something you shouldn't be doing.
I understand how a filtering restriction (hiring/hospital/drafted) creates a negative correlation between two traits, but that isn't what the original claim was. The original claim was about the relation between the traits and performance, not each other.
In your hospital example, suppose for simplity that overall sickness level was a linearly increasing function of how much you smoke and how broken your bone is. As you have shown, even if smoking level and brokeness level are uncorrelated *overall*, selection on hospital admission causes smoking and brokeness to be negatively correlated in the sample. But both smoking level and brokeness level are still positively correlated to overall sickness level, even in the sample.
Analogously, suppose intelligence and conscientiousness are uncorrelated, and job performance is a linear function of intelligence and conscientiousness. Although hiring on minimum performance causes intelligence and conscientiousness to be negatively correlated, both traits remain positively correlated to job performance, even among the hired. Even if you condition on the collider (getting hired), the relationship should persist, although the magnitude will decrease.
> The original claim was about the relation between the traits and performance, not each other.
Generally since we can write performance as the sum of traits if (in our simplified model) the two traits making up performance are negatively correlated by changing the weights of how much performance is affected by each trait we can easily convert examples of two traits being anti-correlated into examples of cases where trait and performance itself are negatively correlated in the sample. For instance consider a case if job performance was 100% conscientiousness but for whatever reason hiring managers cared about IQ, so that they passed over high conscientiousness candidates for high IQ candidates then in the hired sample IQ and conscientiousness (which is identical to job performance in this case) would be negatively correlated (same argument as last post).
Now suppose that instead job performance was 99.9% conscientiousness and 0.1% IQ. You'd still expect that overall job performance is negatively correlated to IQ in the sample of hired people because the 0.1% IQ contributes to performing well doesn't compensate for the other 99.9% (and if the correlation is so weak that this 0.1% does then replace it with epsilon and let it tend to 0, eventually it'll get small enough that the correlation between IQ and job performance in the selected sample becomes negative), and so IQ and job performance are negatively correlated in our sample even though they are positively correlated in reality.
This is all very theoretical though, see below for a direct counterexample.
> As you have shown, even if smoking level and brokeness level are uncorrelated *overall*, selection on hospital admission causes smoking and brokeness to be negatively correlated in the sample. But both smoking level and brokeness level are still positively correlated to overall sickness level, even in the sample.
This isn't necessarily true. The simplest couterexample I can think of has 3 points, one at (S,B) (smoking and brokenness respectively) at (0,0), one at (10,5) and one at (5,10) where Sickness = S+B. Then we have a case where smoking and brokenness are positively correlated with each other and with sickness in the whole population, but if we restrict to "sick people" with total sickness >= 10 we are left with just (10,5) and (5,10); leading to a case where smoking and brokenness are negatively correlated with each other and have zero correlation to sickness (since in our restricted sample sickness = 15 regardless of how much you smoke/how broken your bones are).
In fact it's not like zero correlation is some hard boundary either, you can very easily get negative correlation between smoking and total sickness by chaging the three points to (0,0), (10,4) and (5,10). Smoking is, like before, positively correlated with brokenness and sickness in the whole sample but when you restrict to sick people we are just left with (10,4) and (5,10) and in this subset smoking is now strictly negatively correlated with total sickness (since at the point with smoking = 10 we have sickness = 14 while at the point with smoking = 5 we have sickness = 15).
Note that you changed the smoking example, specifically to eliminate the (10,10) person from the original setting! It originally *was* necessarily the case for your example that smoking was positively correlated with sickness, because you specified that there were 25% of people in each quadrant.
But more importantly, we are not arguing about whether it's *possible* that filtering could change the correlation. Remember the original argument was:
"This is because if there was a correlation then selectors would be leaving money on the table and they could improve their selection for the coming year by increasing the weighting on height (compared to everything else), which would in turn reduce the amount of correlation. Rinse and repeat until there is no correlation left."
I think the underlying logic requires that there exists some tradeoff between height and everything else, such that if you observe a positive correlation between ability and height, you can move marginally in the tradeoff space towards height and away from everything else, until the correlation disappears. My point is that while in the NBA there actually *is* a tradeoff between being maximally tall and maximally athletic, there's no reason to think this tradeoff exists in other domains.
There are just inframarginal people that are good at everything, such that the correlation persists. I think you are picturing a Berkson-type downward-sloping line across two traits, and my point is that the positive-positive quadrant exists (to bring it back to the smoking example).
Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting your claim, or explain how your argument that selectors would pick taller people until the correlation disappears works if there is no inherent tradeoff at the highest levels.
Sorry for taking so long to reply. I was busy for the past few days and my reply grew longer and longer until it turned into its own post basically: https://ofaurochsandangels.substack.com/p/an-analysis-of-berksons-paradox. Thanks for providing me the impetus to write that post.
Yes you are right that in this specific case I took out the point at the top and of course my claim can't be true for literally every single possible distribtion, e.g. if there was no such thing as brokenness so smoking was the only thing that made you sick of course sickness would always be perfectly corelated with smoking regardless of how you select your subsample (because the correlation of anything with itself is always 1).
However if instead of looking at pathological population distributions like the one above where brokenness = 0 all the time and the one in my previous post which didn't have the high (10,10) point we look at a natural normal distribution for both smoking and brokeness we can still get the negative observed correlation/effect size as long as our filtering effect is stringent enough or people with a high enough score are removed (perhaps in our hospital example these people are so sick that they've had to be taken elsehwere to an ICU so aren't present in our sample anyone).
You turned out to be right that if the filtering effect was perfectly calibrated to what makes up job performance then the effect size/correlation is reduced in magnitude but is still positive. However if the filering criterion is not completely calibrated and is slightly over reliant on test scores compared to the optimal amount then you can get a negative effect size/correlation between test scores (smoking) and job performance (sickness) even with both constituent components (smoking and brokenness) normally distributed and the end results for the strength of the selection from this over reliant on test scores critera are better than that for a criteria which didn't look at test scores at all and focused just on other factors. I have lots of graphs in my post showing how these things interplay with each other and have also put up the code I used if you want to play around with it.
I read your article and it was excellent. I think my intuition was right but also deeply confused; thanks for doing the work to figure it out.
If you're taking requests, I have another statistical puzzle that confuses me :)
Suppose you think events A and B are independent, with estimated probabilites P(A), P(B), repspectively. Suppose further that you estimate P(A) > P(B). Now suppose you [later] find out A => B [with certainty].
Obviously since A => B, then it must be the case that P(B) >= P(A), so your initial estimates were wrong somehow. How should you revise your probability estimates P(A)', P(B)'? To fix intuitions, suppose the initial estimates are given by: P(A) = 0.7; P(B) = 0.4
One intuition would be to note that A => B gives additional independent reasons to think B obtains, so you should revise P(B) upwards to account for this. The way to do this would be, from the region in which you previously thought B does not obtain, add the portion of it where A obtains to your estimate of P(B). [You can use the original probabilities because you initially thought A and B were independent??]
Therefore: P(B)' = P(B) + P(~B)*P(A) = 0.4 + (0.6)(0.7) = 0.82 > 0.7 = P(A). Everything seems to make sense.
However, this is not the full story. [A => B] => [~B => ~A], so you have additional independent reasons to think A doesn't obtain! By the same logic as above, we have: P(A)' = 1 - P(~A)' = 1 - [P(~A) + P(A)*P(~B)] = 1- [0.3 + (0.7)(0.6)] = 0.28 < 0.3 = P(B).
Both seem plausible, but they obviously can't both be true. It seems you are supposed to simultaneously revise P(A) downwards and P(B) upwards, but it's not clear how much.
Scott says "I continue to be a little confused how and why stuff that deranged teenagers were discussing on microblogs made it to the halls of power...The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully...Yeah, something like this also has to be part of the picture, although I still don’t feel like I understand the mechanism well enough that I could have predicted this ahead of time."
Well, the explanation for all this seems really clear to me. Let me try to explain how I think this happened.
I've said before that this was obviously mostly caused by Obama. But when I say that people respond with "but clearly these ideas existed before Obama so that can't be right" and seem to think I'm saying Obama personally invented wokeness. Which is not what I'm saying. So I'll try to explain more fundamentally:
In a free society, you're going to have all sorts of ideologies being invented and developed and spread around constantly, all the time, by different people and through different channels. A look around the internet right now will probably find you five to ten distinct ideologies with their own little subcultures. At any given time there'll be a few of them (a few on the right, a few on the left, a few hard to place) that have a bit more salience, a bit more concentrated influence in some important environment (e.g. academia, business, local community, media, and so on). But still, even those will be almost powerless, since nobody outside their niche has to pay them any attention and they don't. And that means even within their niche they have very limited power (e.g. if an ideology is prominent in academia, but completely ignored outside of it, even within academia it will be ignored by many and will struggle to gain much respect, since there's always a strong pro-mainstream element within any subculture).
But the thing that changes everything is gaining political power.
When your ideology has control of the government, you have at least four different kinds of power:
The legal power to push for laws to outright impose whole aspects of your ideology on society.
The cultural power to spread your ideas to everyone through your extreme level of publicity.
The everyday executive power to appoint people who share your ideology, direct whole sections of the government to change their thinking and their priorities in ways your ideology approves of, have innumerable opportunities every day to subtly pull levers for your ideology (change the wording of policies, shift priorities, slip things into budgets and laws that no one will notice) etc.
The symbolic power of everyone knowing you can do the above things, even if you don't. As long as everyone knows you stand for something and you are in power, even if you don't lift a finger to advance your cause it may very well advance on its own. "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest". The people who support your ideology will feel elboldened to aggressively assert their influence, knowing they have the power on their side. The people who oppose you will feel demoralised and disordered, perhaps scared of the consequences of standing against the ideology in power, and many of them will give ground or give up.
So, with that in mind, it's clear that it's all about power. Now the way elections work, especially in America, is that each party tends to significantly change its ideology each time it loses, and double down on its current one each time it wins. The Republicans had very a different ideological focus with McCain/Palin (Christian moralism combined with neoconservatism), with Romney (pro-business libertarianism) and with Trump (nationalism). Before that, the Democrats had the soft liberalism of Clinton and Gore, the...whatever John Kerry stood for (some sort of vague utilitarianism? I'm too young to remember)...and the identity politics of Obama.
So a lot of ideologies are floating around on each side, and each time a party loses it looks for a new ideology to embrace (which may have sone connections with a previous one, but also has a distinct character of its own). If the left had won in 2000, they would have continued the Clinton approach of moderate social liberalism. They lost so they tried something else. They lost again so they tried identity politics. And they won. And so they emraced that. Because that's how power works.
So Obama didn't invent the ideas. He didn't even need to talk about them or advocate them directly (though he obviously did to a significant extent). It was enough that he *represented* the ideas of identity politics, by running as the "first black president" and making that a central part of his campaign. And by being elected he gave a movement that had until then existed only in the shadows and in the back rooms of academia a position of symbolic supremacy. And emboldened them and discouraged their opponents. (He also did some actual policies that advanced wokeness: the letters his Department of Education sent to colleges, deeming any speech offensive if a minority was subjectively offended and nothing more, were kind of like an instruction manuel for cancel culture. But I think merely being the image of identity politics for his campaign and presidency did a lot on its own).
Does anyone disagree with my explanation?
I don't see how you can deny the central role Obama's presidency played in the rise of wokeness, based on the dates everyone mentions first seeing it. And I think it really took off just after his re-election, which further strengthens my point about parties reinforcing their ideology every time they win.
> Does anyone disagree with my explanation?
It does omit the part where his meteoric rise was partly due to his mixed-race heritage and his incredible eloquence in favor of a color-blind society. As far as I can tell, though, once he was elected he switched over to a platform of competent technocratic administration, and feeding his left-wing political allies at the expense of his centrist liberal political allies. As one of those centrist liberals, I was very disappointed.
In retrospect, I think some of the right-wing rhetoric about him was accurate, but at the time I couldn't separate it from the noise. I don't know how much of that was them failing to distinguish themselves from wingnuts, or me not trying hard enough. And I don't even know if I can blame this all on Obama: you can't be a reconciliator if one side refuses to participate. The sneering about "how's that hopey-changey thing going" was disgusting at the time, but I can empathize with the visceral desire to not be a pawn in someone else's grand scheme.
Other than that, yeah, it seems plausible. I'll need to ponder it for a bit.
Maybe your theory of platform change could explain why this election is so quiet. Nothing changed, no one's doing anything different, no one has to respond to anything different.
I completely agree about the insanity of the right's reaction to Obama. But the way I see it, if they were saying hysterically over and over that Obama was going to drastically change society and take away freedom, and then during his presidency society *does* change drastically and there *is* a major loss of effective freedom...doesn't that suggest they were on to something? I just can't comprehend the liberal response of "nah, he had nothing to do with it. Pure coincidence!"
But the right hugely overplayed their hand with all the hysteria, and made most people stop taking seriously warnings about totalitarian political correctness for a long time (and some people *still* aren't taking them seriously; just how totalitarian and how widespread does it need to get? Whatever that limit, it was passed a long time ago on any measure.)
On the other hand, I do think conservatives formed their opinions of Obama very early on, *before* he really got his conciliatory face on properly. 2007 Obama was very different to 2010 Obama. In the early days of his campaign, if I'm remembering right:
He referred to rural whites as "bitter people who cling to guns and religion"
His wife said after his first primary win "for the first time in my life I'm proud of my country"
He was on record supporting full gay marriage (in 2000 before it was legal anywhere in the world) and single-payer health care
His pastor had made radical and racist remarks
He had led an (unprecedented I think) filibuster against Justice Alito
Liberals weren't even bothered by these things and barely noticed them, and centrists quickly forgot them, but conservatives formed their impressions of him as a radical leftist and kept those impressions even as he made a strong turn towards compromise and careful language and a moderate image.
I think that explains a lot of the disconnect with how liberals and centrists saw him as so obviously a moderate, and conservatives saw him as so obviously an extremist. Which did a lot to fuel the polarisation that exists now.
It was obvious to conservatives even before his presidency that Obama was diametrically opposed to most of their beliefs. His pastor Jeremiah Wright was pretty explicitly a black supremacist. All the other stuff you point to. And don't forget the Jan 2008 interview where "energy prices must necessarily skyrocket." Obama was a clear vanguard for green energy politics.
It's funny how Obama gets blamed for pretty much everything by the right though. A lot of conservatives see him as the father of the deep state, and point to things like the IRS targeting conservative non-profits. But I remember an interview with Bush when he was running for reelection. Bush was talking to a conservative pundit - Glenn Beck maybe? - who asked him why he didn't implement a lot of policies he promised. And Bush responded that the people in the civil service kept blocking him. Bush shrugged and said these people were here before him and would be there after him and what could he do?
I’ve never noticed how political parties find a new ideology each time they lose but at a glance it seems to fit what I’ve seen until the Biden presidency.
Biden ran on being a boring liberal to contrast with Trump then the democrats went hard to the left instead of doubling down on being boring liberals.
I know a lot of woke people. They viewed Biden winning as a loss. Perhaps the left is splitting from the democrats, dragging the democrats leftward to keep power. That’s explicitly what the Left wants to happen.
I don't feel like Obama really started pouring gasoline on the fire until his second term, though? And that's after winning re-election.
I think it is less than Obama promoted identity politics - indeed, I'd argue he actually tried pretty hard to squash left-wing identity politics, but that's its own considerable topic - and more that the right finally started deploying identity politics in that timeframe, and so it became much more obvious what was going on.
> If the left had won in 2000, they would have continued the Clinton approach of moderate social liberalism. They lost so they tried something else. They lost again so they tried identity politics. And they won. And so they emraced that. Because that's how power works.
This explanation tying Obama to the rise of wokeness seems like it neither requires Obama (any democrat would do) nor predicts wokeness (so would any ideology).
My explanation tags into Carateca's question too but I don't think you can tag in subtack comments? Terrible system. Anyways-
It doesn't require Obama specifically but someone Obama-like in the mixed race or otherwise visibly-non-white sense. Massive amounts of cultural energy (including totally bizarre messianic stuff in fairly mainstream papers) were tied up in *that moment* of Obama supposed to usher in a new post-racial era, and he didn't. HOPE AND CHANGE just became new boss same as the old boss, and so any remaining affection for liberalism was lost as it was too slow, too ineffective. People wanted to feel *something*, and when it turned out he wasn't some Black Messiah, that energy and disappointment had to go somewhere. Easily channeled into the last nail in the coffin of 90s colorblindness. The racially-charged excitement that elected Obama, and the charged disappointment that followed, lead fairly directly to "wokeness" rather than alternatives in that atmosphere IMO.
Not just any Democrat would've resulted in the same cultural moments, nor would those cultural moments have resulted in the rise of a similar ideology. If Hillary had won 2008- the Trayvon Martin shooting would not have had or generated so much cultural energy. *Possibly* still a national moment, but it could've just as easily slipped away as local news instead. Obama's position and his reaction boosted that.
Re: Cultural Marxism
There is an element of truth to calling the woke cultural Marxists. Marx is all about class struggle, which is really compelling if your country is mostly composed of serfs. Not so much for countries with a comfortable middle class, as it turns out. Some academic Marxists then tried to adapt Marxism to the West by replacing class with other social divisions like race.
But when I say Marx is all about class, I mean it. Any ideology not predicated on class isn't really Marxist. There is no woke theory of labor value. Ask a woke person what they think about dialectic philosophy. I bet you get a blank stare in return. Woke ideas also borrow from Christianity, like the veneration of victims and apostasy as a sin. Yet no one goes around saying the woke are Cultural Papists.
Calling people who don't read Marx, don't understand Marxist principles, and don't care about class struggle Marxists doesn't need a rhetorical trick to be a bad term.
Marxists wouldn’t classify as middle class the average worker, comfortable or not. Otherwise your analysis is correct. Marx would reject nearly all modern academic Marxism, and the vast majority of self proclaimed Marxists haven’t even read the communist manifesto.
>Ask a woke person what they think about dialectic philosophy. I bet you get a blank stare in return.
Not quite. They'd parrot back some half-forgotten quote from a Frankfurt School political philosopher of their choice. Those people, after all, made a big deal of being descended from Marx, despite disagreeing with him on nearly everything, including basic methodology. The greatest trick they, the so-called "Cultural Marxists" pulled, was convincing the world that Cultural Marxism is not a literal oxymoron. It's all very dialectical, now that I think about it.
I think there's still something there.
Marx was about economic class, yes. But from a different perspective, he was about group conflict: the Exploiters vs. the Exploited (or the Oppressors vs. the Oppressed). The Exploited have superior numbers, and so need to unite (Lenin adds: under a vanguard) and overthrow the Exploiters, by violence if necessary, and then everything will work out. Because this is the ultimate struggle, because everything will work out in the end, all methods are allowed, and no scruples can be retained in service of the Revolution.
But this is simply the recipe for primitive tribal conflict, except with constructed groups rather than genetic groups. If we replace economics with race or sex or gender or religion or some other identity, it's the same story. Two groups, one violently overthrows the other, happiness ever after. Even Ayn Rand got into the action with Atlas Shrugged, except that the Exploited had superior quality, not superior quantity.
So it's not about class, and in that sense it's not about Marxism. But it lifts the entire structure of Marxist practice and re-uses it in service of other goals, and in that sense it is exactly Marxism. Hence the friction between the economic left and the identitarian left - they're two animals that fill the same ecological niche, but have different DNA.
I disagree, I think that confuses a mechanism with a transition in power. But if you're talking about something like "permanent revolution", that might be an interesting take on what a durable democracy requires?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution
That’s precisely how I see it. I don’t use the term Cultural Marxism because it’s so unrelated to Marxism - it usually entirely ignores economic class, to the degree that a poor white male is virtually always an oppressor - but the perspective of everything existing in a dynamic of oppression Oppressed what’s happening.
Some months ago I read an article about how political ideologies are defined by the dynamic or axis with which they see the world. The Left sees everything as Oppressor and Oppressed. The Conservatives are concerned with Civilization and Barbarism. The Libertarians are concerned with Freedom and Tyranny.
By my view, anyone who can’t understand a different dynamic/axis as meaningful at least to others is an ideologue. Once someone understands at least one other, they either swap ideologies or cease to be any kind of ideologue.
Usually you swap. Hopefully you then eventually realize that a single axis isn’t enough and so break free from ideology.
The oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is one of two factions in the left, and has been steadily losing power for the last decade. The faction currently making headway in the left, by virtue of a, well, more effective axis, is "Effective and Ineffective". (If this sounds good to you, remember that little things like "rule of law" are ultimately nothing but deliberately making things less effective than they could be in pursuit of other agendas.)
I don't see those as factions. I think it's what they refer to as "respectability politics", and it's more like another axis. How revolutionary and radical is the person willing to be, in service of their vision of justice?
Also as a reply to malloc below - I still think this is too broad. Essentially you want any framework that reduces society to a binary struggle to be identified as Marxist. Maybe Karl was the first guy to ever formally espouse this idea, I don't know.
If I espouse that the free peoples of the world unite and overthrow the tyrants, am I a Libertarian Marxist? Regardless of your answer, I think this is a funny enough term to claim as my political stance.
I think we can make this work! We establish a few categories like "free liberty-lovers", "tyrants", and maybe some equivalent of "bourgeois". We organize to educate/convince/brainwash people into establishing their primary identity as "free liberty-lover". We set up a cell structure, with us at the top, naturally. (This is where normal libertarians start to go wrong.) We talk about the glorious libertarian future, but - and this is key - never work out the specifics. (And this is where modern libertarians go **completely** off the rails.) We identify people as "tyrants", demonize them, demonstrate how everything they do is horrible, and wait for the right moment. When the tyrants make a mistake, we strike! Not, like a labor strike, necessarily, but maybe more like an air strike. Whatever works. With the tyrants out of the way, we can finally move forward into our shining future of liberty, safeguarded by our secret police who tirelessly work to root out the weeds of tyranny. How will the free liberty-lovers know they are free? We will tell them so, repeatedly, over and over and over...
I do think that "Marxism" is relevant, but only as a paint job on a fairly shitty, denatured version of old-school American religious puritanism like you say. It gives the ideology the veneer of being about Big Serious Topics like class struggle and economics and Third World liberation, which helps get well-connected wannabe Communist revolutionary university types onboard with throwing Goody Wilson into the river because she was seen cavorting with the Devil.
Occasionally you do get people calling the woke Cultural Calvinists (original sin, the elect versus the irredeemably damned, etc), but only in weird spaces similar to this one. Largely because there are many progressive theorists, critical theorists, who call themselves Marxists (like Patrisse Cullors: https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herself-as-trained-marxist/), and I assume literally zero that call themselves Calvinist.
What folks usually refer to as "wokeness" is basically a phase in the following four movements: antiracism, anticolonialism, feminism and the sexual liberation. Antiracism and anticolonialism are pretty connected though not fully the same movement, feminism and sexual liberation have at times been at odds and at other times had common goals, anticolonialism and feminism have necessary not always been connected at all etc., but all the things that are commonly called "woke" can be traced to these movements.
These movements have had Marxist and non-Marxist variants, which is probably why there's so much confusion on whether they're "Marxist" or not - different advocates see them differently in this way. However, a large reason why they gained currency in the West during the Cold War was that they were quite popular in many circles and Soviet Union could lay claim to a Marxist interpretion to be stronger for three out of four of the movements, ie. the ones that weren't sexual liberation, which the Soviets had junked quite conclusively after the initial revolutionary phase.
(One could even argue that sexual liberation became a way for the West to showcase itself as *more* progressive than the Soviets by contrasting the carefree, liberated post-60s culture with the dour and sexless Soviets - much of the Western culture that would appeal to East Block citizens was appealing precisely due to its sexual undertones and sometimes overtones).
However, as said, the evolution of thes e causes didn't *by themselves* require Marxism to begin, usually since the intellectual developments in these fields were usually basically articulation of very basic ideas like "We like having sex" and "We, as women, don't like it when men hold all the power over us" or "We, as (say) Algerians, don't like it when the French rule this country and give us no rights".
When people say things like "wokery is just the Marxist oppressors/oppressed dynamic transposed over race", it's like they're saying that the only reason why, for instance, an African-American man might have been historically oppressed in the US with elements of this oppression continuing to this day (independently of how comparable the current situation of African-Americans is with their historical status) is the dread wizard Marx putting this idea to his head.
You have to ask then why Marx wasn’t more anti colonial, and anti white, and anti imperialism. He was there at the height of it.
In fact his concerns were primarily the workers in industrial society. In no way did he think these workers were benefitting from colonialism - it would dismantle his theory to believe that.
After all if workers in the West are better off because of the oppression of workers in the third world, then the capitalist is not exploiting them.
Rather the capitalist who owns factories outside the west must be transferring some kind of value back to the metropole, and this must be more than the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist, or else the western worker wouldn’t be richer because of colonialism (or neo colonialism).
Of course third worldist often thinks he’s a Marxist but he isn’t.
Marx did have many anticolonial and anti-imperialist writings. See eg. https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/on-may-day-karl-marx-on-india-colonialism-and-religion
Nevertheless, this was a slightly confusing reply, since my comment didn't really have that much to do with Marx himself, but the latter-day Marxist movement, which of course isn't always reliant on Marx, directly.
If that’s the sum total of Marx’s writings on anti colonialism then it’s not much. And in the case of Indian independence he clearly supports independence only in the abscence of a proletarian revolution in the metropole.
In any case I was talking about a specific economic theory that third worldists have, about colonialism benefitting workers which doesn’t square with Marxism and surplus value.
There's quite a bit more, such as Marx's writings on China (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/china/index.htm) or, late in his life, North Africa (https://jacobin.com/2024/01/karl-marx-colonialism-algeria-egypt). India (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/india/index.htm) is just the subject that is the most instructive, since it's directly related to Great Britain (where Marx of course lived after 1849) and in general probably the most notable example of colonialism in its way.
In any case none of what I said is directly connected to third-worldism, which is a whole other subject in itself.
Other people already mentioned it but how can we figure out if a test has the correlation. We would only want to hire people who are well performing thus have the same outcome.
We hire 100 candidates with a PHD (80 of them white) and 10 with a highschool diploma (70 of them white).
If the ones with the highschool diploma perform significantly worse our hirings were a bad decision. Our additional criteria might be interview performance, previews projects, positions ... Will the judges/juries accept that and their performance conditioned for those requirements?
What if the hiring/applicant pool of candidates with a highschool diploma includes percentage-wise way more black people (40%) than the PHD (20%) one. However, the pool of qualified people with just a highschool diploma has 30% black and 70% white.
Now, the company might be incentivized to only hire people with PHD and overall less black people ...
Of course, this is constructed but it seems incredibly hard to prove the efficacy of our test.
Now, assuming the government had to prove that a test did not work.
How do you argue any of this?
What if the jobs change during the years. Technology changes and different people will perform better ...
How do you evaluate all the different other more subjective criteria? Do you have big enough groups to even get statistically significant results to test Diff(performance(Highschool|given XYZ) vs performance(PHD| ABC)?
Which effect size do you require? Do both sides p-hack their studies to hell and back? How about corrections for multiple testing. How do you even prove no difference?
What about the fact that with 0.05 p-value sometimes the test will just give the wrong result in either direction.
Will the one side argue for a different prior than the other side?
What are the null hypothesis and alternatives? Do you argue for a bayesian approach.
How the fuck do you even track job performance in a significant way.
> Did the changes just influence how much people could flirt at work? Was flirting at work so much fun that stopping it ruined the job? If not, what were the other negative changes that the harassment complaint caused?
Scott is a psychiatrist and as far as I know has never worked in a typical corporate environment. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) I feel like this sometimes limits his understanding of very, very basic facts that 99% of the rest of us understand intimately.
Stuff like this is so ubiquitous that a five minute web search would produce laundry lists, but just try to imagine every single corporate policy that could be put in place to eliminate every interpersonal dynamic in the workplace that could potentially make someone feel “uncomfortable”, and then understand that the person who feels like that could potentially be a woman or a nonwhite person, and that will give you a sense of the kinds of policies that get put in place as a matter of course after a company has been burned (or is afraid of getting burned) on a “hostile workplace” claim.
No parties. No alcohol. No funny outfits. No talking to each other about clothes, or personal lives, or weekend plans. No mentorship. No social activities that might be more appealing (or less appealing) to one group than it is to others. No celebrations of accomplishments — could lead to socializing. In short: a barren, lifeless workplace. “Flirting” need not enter into it.
I worked at an institution once that occasionally organized social outings for employees. Once, the outing was paintballing. One of the female employees grumbled that the men found this more appealing than the women. She had a point! I think the bosses ended up giving the option of a spa day as an alternative. But think of the can of worms you’ve now opened with that gendered binary of options. Now extrapolate this logic out to its absurd conclusion and you have the current state of HR in every workplace in America.
Hey, it's not barren and lifeless. Look at all the Corporate Memphis cartoon characters we have to lecture us about workplace policies! They're hip, young, wacky (but not too wacky) companies who most importantly care about everyone enough to infantilize them, denying any human experience more complicated than can be expressed by a third grader.
“Infantilize”? Sir, I’ll have you know that the Acceptable Workplace Decorations policy identifies dozens of Disney franchise characters whose Funko Pop representations can be displayed on the shelf of your cubicle (not any from prior to 2010, obviously).
And they all count as pieces of flair that identify your unique and wacky style (15 pieces of flair minimum).
Sadly, my quick searches for "corporate memphis porn" don't turn up anything particularly interesting.
Anecdote: when my brother was an intern at Goldman Sachs in the late '00s, he saw all the young women interns being systematically steered to sales (ask pharmaceutical companies about the benefits of having a sales force made up of beautiful young women) and away from technical roles that had better long-term earnings potential. He said yes, this was pretty much blatant sex discrimination but the obstacles are large enough that nobody is ever going to take them to court over it.
Goldman Sachs actually has ended up settling class action gender discrimination suits for large sums of money...
> The previous incarnation of woke was called "political correctness" and it existed in late 80s-early 90s. That's when Alan Bloom's book came out. PC suffered a setback when Bill Clinton really wanted to win the election in 1992 and, needing the white vote, came down on Sister Souljah. A period of return to normalcy followed, until the recrudescence of PC as woke in late 00s.
I don't fully agree with this. As someone who was too young to remember the Sister Souljah incident, I remembered that the PC movement was growing from the mid 90s onward, much like it did in the 2010s (albeit at a much reduced, more primitive state compared to the 2010s), but suddenly came to a halt around the time of 9/11, and didn't start up again for a decade. My theory is basically that the threat of an outside terrorist attack overrode all of the PC instincts for infighting. Squabbling about who is more oppressed, and how language oppresses minorites in some obscure way suddenly seems much less relevant and carries much less weight in the face of an attack on American soil that killed thousands of American citizens.
I'd elaborate to say that the outside threat worked for a little bit, but then other problems surfaced to distract the left. WMDs, Abu Ghraib, military subcontracting, intelligence agencies invading privacy, Hurricane Katrina, the continuing failure to kill Osama bin Laden, etc. Maybe once Obama was elected, the left assumed all of those problems would be magically fixed, and moved on to other issues. (Except for the people who noticed that some of the problems kept on happening in Obama's presidency, but they were a real buzz-kill, so no one wanted to listen.)
I'm not so sure it's that people who would have been wokescolds otherwise became patriots, and more that when 9/11 happened the wokescolds were the ones forced to keep quiet for once because no one wanted to hear about how evil America was while the bodies in Lower Manhattan were still warm.
Sure, I could agree to that. I actually think it's probably both, though I don't have an idea of proportions. I really know a lot of wokescolds who are just bandwagon jumpers, and some older ones who were patriots after 9/11. And so much woke stuff I see these days is so vindictive, with people relishing the act of hating on the outgroup with the same fervor that I remember others chanting USA, or making cartoons in which Bin Laden or Saddam get killed, or hating on Bill Maher, for example, after 9/11.
Yeah, that's fair.
> the wokescolds were the ones forced to keep quiet for once
I don't think that's quite right (I say this as a lefty person who was 17 when 9/11 happened, and spent my student politics years during the Iraq war). I don't think people unified, or the woke-types were silenced. It's just that there was a big new thing going on which took up all the oxygen in the room.
The woke-types suddenly had a new cause célèbre, which was complaining about the military overreaction to 9/11 (i.e., starting the war in Iraq).
I think the crux of the issue was that no-one wanted to hear how language oppresses minorities in some obscure way when Iraqis were being killed in the hundreds of thousands by an illegal war led by a creationist bible-thumping president.
"a creationist bible-thumping president"
While I'm no fan of the Bushes, I feel this is a rather odd characterisation of Bush II. Yes, he had a conversion experience which led him to take religion seriously and give up drinking, but I don't know if he's a creationist (I'm presuming here you mean "Young Earth Creationist" and not generic "Christians believe God created the universe" which would be all of us). I suppose it's the image of the Republican, Religious Right, wing of the party that leads to this stereotype?
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/29/us/how-bush-came-to-tame-his-inner-scamp.html
"Then in the summer of 1985 Mr. Bush met with Billy Graham -- a meeting engineered by his parents -- at the family compound in Kennebunkport. They had lunch on the patio overlooking the ocean, dinner by the fire and long conversations as they strolled along the shore. Mr. Bush was inspired to begin reading the Bible daily (which he says he still does), and back in Midland he began attending a Bible study class.
Mr. Bush had grown up in a religious household, attending First Presbyterian Church in Midland, but it was an austere, restrained Yankee faith. After his daughters were born, he switched to his wife's church, First United Methodist, but a close friend says that in those days he went to church each Sunday more for the sake of his daughters than because of any deep inner commitment.
Yet after the meeting with Mr. Graham and his Bible study sessions, Mr. Bush became increasingly serious about his religion. He is at home discussing religious matters with evangelical leaders in a way his father never was. Mr. Bush is publicly guarded about his beliefs (partly because of a much cited incident in which he suggested that non-Christians could not get to heaven), but by all accounts, his faith has developed into something that is an important part of his inner life and that was a significant element in his maturing.
In July 1986, a year after he began studying the Bible seriously, George and Laura Bush went with a half-dozen friends to celebrate their collective 40th birthdays at the luxurious Broadmoor resort in Colorado. There was one evening when they all stayed up late, drinking a bit too merrily.
The next morning, Mr. Bush has recalled, he woke up feeling befuddled -- and quietly resolved that he would never touch alcohol again. Friends say he told nobody, not even his wife, until weeks after their return to Midland. He simply drank sodas instead of beers, and it was many weeks later that he finally explained to his friends that he had given up liquor."
It seems that had Hillary won in 2016, you might also have had a "Bible-thumping president" in the White House!
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/25/hillary-clinton-gets-personal-on-christ-and-her-faith/
https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2016/11/02/the-hidden-faith-of-hillary-clinton
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-private-faith-of-hillary-clinton
https://time.com/4193231/hillary-clinton-faith-christianity-iowa/
Presumably the reference would be to how GWB was seen by the left in this time, and "creationism" in particular a reference to the intelligent design controversy, which was quite hot all through the 00s.
The French ban on ethnicity data is less 'wild' in the context of what ethnicity tracking was used for in the Vichy regime.
One of the commenters cited a California jury instruction that says something like, one joke does not make a hostile work environment and civil rights law is not a civility code. Be that as it may, one joke CAN lead to liability for hostile work environment, if that joke involves a pun on N-word. https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge_fails_to_see_humor_in_n_word_joke_refuses_to_toss_suit_against_quinn. Maybe the n-word is an unfair or extreme example. But it goes to show that, as far as civil rights law is concerned, formal rules tend to fall away in the hands of woke judges and administrators. And, perhaps, the N-word is just the lead example. As it turns out, civil-rights law IS a civility code for that word. And, then you have creative plaintiffs pushing the boundaries of other slurs tantamount to the N-word (misgendering???). Corporations play it safe and ban any speech that could possibly fall under the expanding penumbra. People morally justify the systems to which they’ve submitted. They sincerely buy into the woke rules, because it feels better to be “moral” than subjugated. Then, they apply woke corporate norms to interpersonal relationships generally.
From your link:
"The plaintiff, Spencer Marin, had alleged the comment **and other remarks** by the director had created a hostile work environment **and that his complaint was met with retaliation.**"
Emphasis added. The article clearly says that it wasn't just a single joke that triggered the lawsuit, but rather a pattern of behavior.
Also, from the end of the article:
>Caproni said Marin’s amended lawsuit “just barely” states a claim for a hostile work environment, and it’s enough to survive a motion to dismiss. She added that she was “somewhat skeptical” that Marin would be able to show the complained of conduct was sufficiently pervasive to survive a later motion for summary judgment.
>She also said the allegations were sufficient to support a retaliation claim, but “it may well not survive summary judgment.”
All the judge said was they had enough of a claim to not be thrown out at the first step. Did this lawsuit actually go anywhere?
They settled, which is practically a win for the plaintiff and his lawyers. Some money for not much work; pretty much all the work they had to do at that stage was allege the N-word pun. I included the link the link because it’s clear from context that “other remarks” were not anything special or out of the ordinary. It’s basically a placeholder, as the rest of the judge’s comments imply.
I don’t want to out anyone, but I got an invite to a blacks-only coding competition sponsored by a big-tech company (I’m a quarter black). Seems racist? But it does fit a narrative of illegible affirmative action.
I’m curious about why a generic math test isn’t sufficiently related to a blue collar job. I’m not an expert, but isn’t math a proxy for general intelligence? An employer could want blue collar workers of some base level intelligence. I seem to remember also that some jobs used to have an intelligence ceiling (not likely to stay long enough at the wage? Too quick to question things?). Also, an employer would have to pay higher wages for workers better at math. So, maybe they would exclude blacks. (Are blacks bad at math?) But like, they would be leaving money on the table if they were paying extra for premium labor when they didn’t really need the math ability. Seems weird.
I also find it interesting people attribute purported racial differences in the average/ distribution of math ability to deprivation or inequities. What is the purported deprivation or inequity? Schools are equally funded. I’m not aware of a plausible causal mechanism for these differences, aside from that some people are better at math than others.
"I’m curious about why a generic math test isn’t sufficiently related to a blue collar job."
Because you don't need the guy to be able to recite the Pythagorean Theorem but you do need him to know at what angle to rest the ladder against the wall. And how to put up scaffolding. And able to eyeball concrete mix ratios before the slump test:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLBspIRPKJI
And then able to pour and finish the concrete:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=365f0QV-aOs
Practical skills involve maths but the worker may not have the formal maths education to be able to define what they're doing. And conversely, someone able to pass a written test may not have the practical skills (yes you can be trained in on the job, but that's different to "can you start the job right away?")
Sure, if by “math test,” you mean recite a formula, I can see how that could be like a trivia quiz. But, even then, the presumably discriminatory company would be excluding whites who didn’t know the trivia. Also, if a fact is truly trivial and something people might have randomly picked up from “formal education,” it’s not clear to me that blacks wouldn’t also know it. Everyone has formal education; no one is excluded from public school.
Ha, I would have cleaned up my snark a notch if I thought it was going to get quoted!
There's a pattern here though, that brings to mind an argument I'm passably fond of: Americans do not trust their government to dictate what is True or Just, and so systems are not put into place that even purport to deliver such things. Instead, the American system applies the Law - one might hope that after a few filters of government that still ends up reflecting a democratically-adjusted will of the people, but it's certainly not a direct link. So despite the name, it is a category error to think that the judicial system can be found at fault for failure to deliver justice.
Executive agencies go a step further since they have, well, *agency* and are even more resource constrained than the judicial system. Statutory authorization may be a raison d'etre but e.g. the FBI isn't going to start at the top of the Federal Register and work their way down in order - the Law ends up being a tool to enforce a strategic mission that is shaped by politics and an inevitably flawed understanding of the world.
There's no end to the arguments about what agency has its priorities screwed up and I'm sure everyone has their own take, but I'll boost Scott's writing here and urge people to keep the complex equilibria in mind: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/
> The review talks about a lot of bad cases, many of the cases do eventually get dismissed, but “the process is the punishment” and I don’t know how much power even dismissed cases have to exert chilling effects.
I'm struck by how in EEOC v. Freeman, the case I was looking at, the brief makes a persuasive argument that Freeman really did go beyond its nominal criteria in excluding Ms. Vaughn. I know not what lurks in the hearts of men and can't say whether race had anything to do with it, but unless the facts presented are outright lies it does seem that she was genuinely treated unjustly.... but that's not what the case is about, is it? That's just the launching-off point for a disastrously sloppy attack by the EEOC about systemic discrimination against a target that may or may not have discriminated at all, so "the process is the punishment" doesn't even apply to punish Freeman's conduct towards Ms. Vaughn except in the loosest statistical sense. The human is lost beneath the (dubiously competent) machinery of deterrence.
I currently work at the same location mentioned by John Schilling, although I was not here when the incident he discussed took place. I cannot speak with confidence regarding hiring practices, but I can to culture. We have some highly competent women working here (in fact, I'd guess rate a female competence here is ~= to male), but every male knows that angering any woman carries a huge risk. This risk is openly spoken of whenever some old male technician makes an off color or even non-woke statement. (E.g "I can't believe he did that! That was really dumb.") Acceptable culture here is determined by the wokest female in your group. Thankfully, our groups are small and spread out over many square miles of desert, so this doesn't affect all groups equally. But everyone knows women have the political power.
I'll provide one final anecdote to demonstrate this:
A few months ago, an engineer with 30 years of experience at the site was told he was not to travel to a particular test area unescorted. His talents were irreplaceable and desperately needed at this site, but this was irrelevant. Budget and schedule did not matter, a woman had complained that he said something bad. What did he say? Nobody (other than management) knows. He was not allowed to know what he said or when he said the thing that apparently angered the woman. All that mattered was that a woman was mad, and it had to be "investigated". That particular project is now 6 months further behind schedule.
Good Lord, when things pop off with China we really are cooked, aren't we.
Yeh. I was about to post something similar.
Wow. I'd hoped the passage of time would have lead to things getting a *bit* more relaxed, but it sounds like it has become significantly worse. Glad I'm out of there, and you have my sympathy.
> Acceptable culture here is determined by the wokest female in your group.
That tracks.
I have a dear friend who was the sole woman in a department which performed a technical artistic skilled craft for one of the biggest companies in the world. Literally everyone almost certainly owns or uses one of its products.
Her first few days of working in the department (perhaps 12 years ago), the six men were pretty quiet, even tense. There was distinct sense of uneasiness and a chill that she couldn't understand.
Then one of her male colleagues unthinkingly made a casual dirty joke in response to a work-related conversation - something in the "that's what she said" vein of comedy - and all six dudes instantly and fearfully turned to her to see her reaction.
She had naturally chuckled at the joke, but when she suddenly realized the source of the tension, she said something like, "Holy fuck, you guys are worried about ME? Oh, shit, I don't give a flying fucky fuck what any of you pussies joke about!"
The relief was immediate, if a little skeptical, but over the next several weeks / months she did enough swearing and dirty-joke making that the men came to trust her completely. They would even proactively reassure tense male employees either visiting or new to the department, "Don't worry, she's totally cool."
She's not at that job anymore, but she's friends with most of her ex-coworkers still.
We should call this the Avasarala strategy.
Probably a more auspicious name than "the Selina Meyer strategy"...
> "If I don't win the White House, O'Brien is going to sink your stupid boats and you're going to look like a hair-sprayed asshole in your 1980s mother-of-the-bride dress. And if I do win, I'm going to have my administration come to your shitty little district and shake it to death like a Guatemalan nanny. And then I'm going to have the IRS crawl so far up your husband's colon, he's gonna wish the only thing they find is more cancer. So, can I count on your vote? Or do I need to shove a box of White House M&M's up your stretched-out, six-baby vag?"
Also, check out this NYT article on a racial discrimination lawsuit for how jokes can make a liability verdict more likely and more severe. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/nyregion/equinox-settlement-discrimination.html. The plaintiffs claim was, at core, that she was punished unfairly for being late. Now, it’s not illegal to unfairly fire workers! In other words, imagine an employer who has 5 workers. Every worker is late several times the past month. To make an example, the fires one, maybe at random (fair) of maybe the one whose smell he doesn’t like (arguably unfair). Technically, not illegal!!! But. Suppose the fired employee is a black women. Further suppose that employer had tolerated off-color jokes. Now, suppose the employer entertained a customer’s request for a white trainer. By themselves, each aspect is technically fine. Plenty of lawyers will lecture you on “the law” and how civil rights law allows these things. Free speech, not a civility code, no quotas, blah blah blah. But also, companies know that each above marginally increases the likelihood of catastrophic legal liability. They’re even worse together. So, corporations rationally respond by banning edgy jokes and institutionalizing DEI and lowering expectations for blacks, cost/benefit. And that’s how you get from civil rights law to woke work environments.
In the comment about the racial classification of Mexican Americans and the 14th Amendment, isn't this inaccurate? Whites benefit just as much as anyone else from anti-discrimination law and the 14th Amendment (obviously they do not benefit from affirmative action [usually] but that's not related to Equal Protection [technically it's probably contrary to it?]).
Anti-discrimination laws actually being broadly treated as applying to white people (and also men) is quite recent, and most people haven't updated on this yet. Which has resulted in a handful of law firms making bank seeking out and suing for discrimination - because a lot of places haven't gotten the memo yet they still have a steady supply of targets to fund themselves with.
I read it as: if MA's are counted as white, the resulting statistics wouldn't vary in the presence discrimination against MA's in favor of non-MA whites.
Wow, these aim to be the selected smartest comments on the selected smartest blog on the selected hottest-button topic. And it's a serious contender. You have to read it to believe it.
Indeed
"I appreciated John’s story of his workplace culture becoming much worse after harassment complaints, but I still want to know more about how it happened."
A fair request. And it was more than just the loss of workplace flirtation; given the ~80/20 gender ratio that was only ever a minor factor. More flirtation happened at off-site social events, which involved a somewhat broader spectrum of the population. And those social events became a lot rarer and duller after the "sexual harassment" fiasco. Close friend groups still got together; my carpool mate and I still stopped at our favorite bar on the way home every once in a while, but the bit where we coordinated that with half a dozen other people from the lab, didn't happen. If you were in the know, you'd know about the Thursday night dinner at the Haasienda, but if you weren't, you'd never get the invite. Seemed too dangerous, I guess.
Even on-site, there was less social interaction; people were less likely to walk en masse to the cafeteria for lunch, much less make the drive to Domingo's. The occasional lunch-hour Settlers of Catan games mostly stopped. And at the academic conferences we sometimes attended, there was noticeably less after-hours socializing - one of the bogus sexual harassment complaints had involved an "after-party" at such a conference. I think two of my coworkers pretty much stopped socially interacting with their work colleagues altogether for a good while.
Above all, there was a loss of trust with management. Nobody understood what the rules were, so everybody kept their head down. Nobody trusted that their boss had their back, when their boss had folded so blatantly when his boss told him he needed to crack down. And there was a definite witch-hunt atmosphere w/re possible future sexual harassment. Two cases that I think were real but minor and would have been adequately handled informally, resulted in people being fired without any chance to defend themselves, and one of the female "victims" wound up quitting not long after, I think feeling management had disregarded her wishes in the matter and leaving her socially isolated.
This was temporarily alleviated a few years later when we hired a young woman who turned out to be a very gregarious nerd, mostly unaware of the recent history and unwilling to have no social life just because she was working in a remote desert outpost. She reinstated after-hours social events as a regular thing for all, and pretty much single-handedly re-moralized the lab. And I'm pretty sure without sleeping with anyone or even suggesting that she might sleep with anyone.
She was fired after a little more than a year, for reasons indirectly related to the first sexual harassment fiasco, and because management had no clue how important she was. I made the mistake of sticking around for two years after that, but that's another story.
Did someone accuse HER of sexual harassment?
Fortunately not that, but I don't think I can safely post about that part under my real name. If you see me at a meetup, I can perhaps add some detail.
> "Also, I find it interesting that everyone, even in this politically correct age, agrees to call human resources staffers “HR ladies”. I haven’t worked at enough corporations to have much personal experience of this - why should it be such a universal phenomenon?"
I think usage of the term "HR ladies" is a pretty strong anti-political-correctness signal. Note that you're quoting Helen Andrews, a conservative writer, in a passage where she argues that civil rights laws are bad and unions are a more "masculine" (i.e. better) alternative. Clearly, not someone who's concerned about political correctness.
In fact, I was mildly surprised when you used it in the book review. But now I see why - you thought it was universal, rather than a pithy term of contempt.
Interestingly, Richard Hanania's 2021 post about civil rights law - arguably the post that made him famous - uses, as its thumbnail, a graph of HR departments' gender balance over time, even though this is just a brief aside within the actual post, seemingly disconnected from his other points.
You're referring to this post https://www.richardhanania.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights with this graph https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc9a171b4-e580-41e9-af53-19e945103c02_1520x1004.png right?
Yes, that one.
"Therefore it should not be surprising that Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University all have lower percentages of black students than Atlanta (~47%), Georgia (~31%), or the USA (~14%), given that Georgia (and Atlanta specifically) has eight popular historically black colleges and universities (more, depending on how you count them)."
I don't think this is what's going on with Emory, Georgia Tech, or Georgia State.
Unlike the public schools, Emory mostly recruits from out of state: only 18% of Emory students are Georgian (vs 60% for Georgia Tech and 90% for Georgia State). Emory is 11% black, which is not too different from the 14% black for the entire country.
Georgia Tech is an engineering school: 60% of students are in the College of Engineering, 15% are in the College of Computer Science, and 10% are in the College of Sciences. It's more reasonable to compare Georgia Tech to other schools' engineering departments. Compared to other engineering departments, Georgia Tech's 8% black is unusually high - probably because a lot of students are drawn from Atlanta & Georgia, which are more black than the country as a whole.
Georgia State is 38% black.
This explanation might work for why UGA has surprisingly few black students (8% - slightly lower than Georgia Tech). But I don't think it makes sense for any of the three schools mentioned.
Great points: I appreciate the extra context and correction (I almost certainly confused UGA's numbers with Georgia State's). I hope it's not too much of a cop out to say I was trying to convey an idea more than make an empirical argument.
I should have made a comment on the original post, but as usual I'm late to the party. Anyway:
Internet history channel Strange Aeons makes a pretty convincing case that many of the norms of modern social justice culture actually came from Tumblr. Two of the best examples of cases where you can really see this happening are:
1) The case of a fan fiction writer who created multiple fake identities in order to cancel people who objected to her work, essentially creating the playbook for modern cancel culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNyIuUixY6U
2) The creation of a lot of current discourse around gender identity and sexuality, again, largely from fandoms in early 2000s Tumblr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBOmffiWss0
This suggested timeline and origin of social justice culture aligns most closely with my experience: basically, a group of chronically online tweens and teens in the early 2000s created a bunch of group norms for mediating vicious fandom dramas (and in the case of 4chan, for trolling other chronically online tweens), and then this cohort went to college at about the same time and starting using this language in the real world, mixing online language with bits of critical theory and liberal arts terminology to make a completely new social movements.
My family was involved in social activism and I have spent many years among different generations of activists, and they are all confused by the post-Tumblr activist movements of the 2010s onward, even though these movements claim to be a "continuation" of earlier efforts. In my opinion, this is because there is a lack of IRL continuity between pre-online activism and now. This is why modern social justice language often sounds--to me--less like a cohesive agenda and more like radical history forced through a blender of internet hearsay, Reddit posts, urban legends, and Wikipedia and then reconstituted in an ultra-processed and unrecognizable form.
The fact that modern social justice culture was created and incubated mostly online explains a lot: the strange priorities that can seem disconnected from most people's realities (these norms were created by chronically online teens who didn't have jobs of families to support!); the extreme focus on language (online cultures optimize for meme-ability, virality, and trolling more than IRL change); the focus on cultural discourse and representation (because a lot of these norms came out of fandom drama). Modern identity politics itself also has a lot in common with the fan fiction norm of "tagging": labeling content with quick, searchable labels mediated by particular sub-communities that set fundamental expectations about engagement, with steep social penalties for violating linguistic norms that have almost no material consequences.
TDLR; I don't think it's correct to trace the roots of modern social justice culture back beyond early 2000s Tumblr. Even if modern activists claim to be continuing the work of earlier movements, this relationship seems false/nominal. There is a distinct break--in language, behavioral norms, priorities, worldview, participation--between 20th century English-language social movements and now.
"The case of a fan fiction writer who created multiple fake identities in order to cancel people who objected to her work, essentially creating the playbook for modern cancel culture"
There were other communities before Tumblr, just to point it out. Sure, the big exodus was off LiveJournal when it finally became untenable and DreamWidth never took up the slack, but before then there was *plenty* of fandom drama and shenanigans. For example, FanFiction.Net, otherwise known as "the pit of voles". Dissatisfaction with FFN for its clamp-down on 'mature content' was one of the reasons why Archive Of Our Own was set up.
You may or may not know the writer Cassandra Clare for her novel series "The Mortal Instruments", I think they were turned into a TV show. Or movies? However, she started off writing Harry Potter fanfiction, and the original works were, at the start, a retread of her fanfic. No problem there, after all, fanfic is where some writers hone the craft before turning pro.
But the big accusations were over plagiarism in the HP fanfic world, and they got spicy. The Wikipedia article on Clare is very restrained about it, but I remember the radioactivity even though I was only hearing about it at second- and third-hand. Sockpuppet accounts, bullying, the works. Clare (or Cassie Claire with an "i" as she was at the time) was *massively* popular and had a lot of clout. A detailed account of the whole adventure here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140802045351/http://www.journalfen.net/community/bad_penny/8985.html
EDIT: Gosh, reading that takes me back! I was never in HP fandom but I was in LOTR (my goodness, is it really 20+ years ago?), and "The Very Secret Diaries" were *hugely* popular, also written by her. They were, of course, inspired by Adrian Mole/Bridget Jones but they were funny. Now, though, you do have to wonder how much was copied from other writers.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/TheVerySecretDiaries
What is fascinating with the new generation of fans on Tumblr is, as mentioned by others, how puritanical they are. They really do set down moral standards over "this is correct, this is bad wrong horrible and must not be done". From time to time there gets to be some fighting by the old-timers with the new 'uns over their demands, where the history lessons about how the fandoms developed get brought out. But there's a definite change in expectations, and I wouldn't blame it on even Tumblr so much as the Twitter and other social media (Tik-Tok gets a bad rap but think of the other brands that faded from popularity before it as well) setting up expectations about interactions and especially being able to block and curate what content you see. Coming from the days of web-rings, this is all very strange,
Before "woke", there was "PC". It's not a wholly new and novel phenomenon.
"Modern identity politics itself also has a lot in common with the fan fiction norm of "tagging": labeling content with quick, searchable labels mediated by particular sub-communities that set fundamental expectations about engagement, with steep social penalties for violating linguistic norms that have almost no material consequences."
This does sound plausible, as there was a huge fanfic bust-up around content warnings/trigger warnings, again, back in the LiveJournal and FFN days. Some wanted absolutely anything that could possibly be triggering tagged; some wanted just the major stuff (which was the compromise position); some authors wanted to keep the liberty to not content warn (e.g. if they were going to kill off a major character in the story or have a violent incident, they wanted this to be a surprise for the reader instead of expecting it to happen from the content warning) and there was a lot of demands on all sides from both "I have PTSD and if you mention "toast" in the story I'll be triggered due to associations with breakfast" (this is a version of a real argument I read*) to "I want to be able to put in rape, torture, murder and all that good stuff and have it hit you like a brick to the face when you get to that part of the story and I don't care if it makes you cry and I'm not going to warn for content".
*The story behind it was actually sensible and rather sad, but it was also "you can't warn for everything because you never know what is a particular trigger for someone".
As someone who worked at both UK and german universities: I never witnessed ethnicity-based discrimination myself (though I wouldn't be surprised given the culture at university), but preferential treatment for women is openly practiced. Some examples, in no particular order:
-(UK) My PhD supervisor wanted to get her husband (scientist in the same field) hired in an institute nearby. There was an opening for two people. She knows someone on the hiring committee, gets told that her husband is in the second place, yay! Except they hired place 1 and place ... 8 (it's a math department, yes they make a specific order of applicants for every open position). Turns out, the reason why there were two position was bc they wanted to hire one man and one woman. None of this was official, of course, but everyone involved knew it and nobody thought this was in any way odd or questionable.
-(Germany) My wife wanted to do a start-up. She is in one local, general start-up group that is almost exclusively male, and one less local female-specific group that is, obviously, all-female. She gets female-specific funding more or less instantly the moment she even applies. There is a specific course teaching business skills which lots of people want to get into. According to the organizer, roughly 300 people apply to it, and only ~20-30 get in. Her entire female-specific group is told that they don't need to worry, they'll get in by default, and indeed they do. For the other group, only a few men get in, and according to her she didn't get the impression the women are that much more competent. Oh and also the women get in for free, while the men have to pay money.
-(Both) It's normal among colleagues to explicitly mention how important it is to hire more women to get access to female-specific funding.
-(Germany) An institute at my university notices they have too few women professors, so they plan to make a new position with the goal of hiring a women. They even wanted to make it extra-easy for themselves and outright offer it to some women at the same university (for the curious, yes they'd still need to write it out openly, but it's very easy to tailor-make the position to one person). Turns out though that none of them actually wants to be a professor, it's too much work. So they write out the position openly anyway, and end up with someone who has just finished her PhD with a single publication. She is quite competent, but in any other situation she would have to go through a postdoc first.
-(UK, admittedly minor but I'm still kinda salty) our PhD offered several classes on valuable academic skills and networking clubs that I would have liked to join, but were all female specific. Best part, when I complained about this in an informal setting (in the pub), I immediately got lectured by a female PhD whose parents I knew were extremely rich how much more she deserves this help than me - meanwhile, to my knowledge none of my ancestors ever finished high school, let alone got an academic degree.
"My PhD supervisor wanted to get her husband (scientist in the same field) hired in an institute nearby. There was an opening for two people. She knows someone on the hiring committee, gets told that her husband is in the second place, yay! Except they hired place 1 and place ... 8"
That's nearly kind of fair, though? I mean, I know how the world works, I know about pull and connections (more politely called "networking"), but even so, it's better to have someone hired *not* because "they're married to a friend of mine". It was unfair in the opposite direction (hired on basis of sex) but there's been a bit too much "friend/family member/spouse/family member of spouse" hiring for public jobs (and private ones too) in Ireland where it's not competence that counts but "who do you know?"
I understand you being salty about the last example, because I'm salty about the first example as it happened to me years back when I was newly qualified and looking for a job. This was the 80s in Ireland which was a bad time to be looking for work, but I tried applying to the local pharma plant for a summer job in the lab (where my first qualification was). Not a chance, I was told, nobody is being hired on even for summer jobs. Next thing I hear, (let us call her) Jane is now working in the lab for a summer job. Oh? thinks I. Has she a better qualification than me, like a degree? Not at all, she isn't even in the same field. BUT Daddy is the managing director. So he gets the company to pay his daughter for the summer so she has extra spending money before she goes back to university or whatever, and I'm left trying to find something, anything, to get even a foot in the door.
Needless to say, Daddy and Daughter were to me as your female PhD and her parents were to you - a lot better off and more educated than me and my family ever were. So ever since, I'm rather sensitive about "Can I get Family Member hired on in this place?" 😀
I can understand this perfectly; I also think we should avoid hiring being influenced positively by family or close friends wherever possible. Your example indeed sounds quite unfair.
But at least for my supervisor, I don't think she meaningfully influenced the hiring committee, she merely was notified in advance about the current state of their decision making. They were probably somewhat biased since they knew her - but lots of people know each other one way or the other, the field isn't that large. I know the husband well enough also to believe that he indeed got second place primarily by virtue of his competence. He got a very big grant shortly afterwards by himself anyway, which allowed him to switch to a (different) institute nearby.
Oh, I'm sure there was nothing dodgy going on, but there is always a tendency here to be "who you know not what you know" and for mini-scandals to break out. Right now our state broadcaster is mired in financial and reputational woes originating, but not confined to, making under-the-counter payments to a former "star" (I put that in quotes because the guy was no star and had a big head but he was one of the 'star names' for the station):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT%C3%89_secret_payment_scandal
Then this bubbled over into a related scandal over a loss-making musical which was a spin-off from the successful Christmas 'Toy Show' episodes of the weekly chat show:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Show_The_Musical
And this just kept going and going as the government and the public wanted to know how the money was being spent, because it is part-funded by the licence fee which everyone is legally obliged to pay, yet it keeps pleading poverty and a shortage of money each year. So where were they pulling all these hundreds of thousands of euro to waste on such secret back-scratching arrangements from?
FWIW, in the US, I think there's generally an understanding that a university will find a way to get a professor's spouse s job. Sometimes this means hiring them as another professor when they wouldn't ordinarily pass the bar. And sometimes it involves cutting deals with other local institutions. But it's seen as what needs to be done, in order to catch a good hire who has a two-career family.
> This is also how I remember things. The part that seems mysterious to me is how the left defected from pre-existing norms so successfully - or rather, if defection gave such an obvious advantage, how the pre-existing norms had stayed in place before.
To me, this is the easy part. Existing norms were not robust to new social technologies. I think it's much harder to explain the rise of wokeness specifically, the identity politics bit, than it is to explain why mobbing, shunning, and "if you let him speak, it will be too late" levels of outgroup hostility had a revival in the context of vast, structureless affiliation landscapes where people can operate somewhat anonymously. It may have been that identity politics gave better ideological cover to these behaviors than extant alternatives, and the people who successfully wielded those techniques to gain local status while justifying them in the least psychopathic sounding ways were copied.
You might be underestimating the difficulty of making an entirely new football department. Football has uniquely complex requirements due to the number of players on the field at a time and the lack of interchangeability. A linemen couldn't just fill in for a wide receiver with no issue. Even the smallest high school football teams need at least ~25 players in order to have a functional team. Add in equipment expenses such as pads and the need for a practice field and most high schools simply couldn't afford to have a women's football team. Even if some could, they'd need a dozen nearby schools nearby to take on the same expense in order to have a functional league.
In contrast, fencing and crew are relatively simple. Any individual student could take up fencing without requiring dozens of teammates and attend tournaments with more than two schools in attendance. Crew is a little more complex, but also allows more than two schools to compete at a time.
(I say this, but Illinois is apparently trying to have a girls' flag football league next year:
https://www.ihsa.org/News-Media/Announcements/girls-flag-football-to-debut-as-ihsa-sport-in-fall-of-2024)
Numerous time Scott expresses something like, “how [had] the pre-existing norms stayed in place before.” The answer is Gatekeeping and the cause of the destruction is the flattening of society through the mechanism of anonymity on the internet. In 2009 (and today) there is no measurable difference between an 80yo college professor and a 12yo Fortnite player except the strength of their argument or the volume of their noise. Knowing that the people hounding you on Twitter, doxxing you, calling your workplace are kids doesn’t make any difference to the outcome.
I guess the counter to my argument is that it didn’t make a difference during the Salem witch trials either. Though that ended in eternal shame and didn’t spread to every corner of society. Americans are suckers for a good Puritan cleansing ritual and the Internet makes this as easy as water flowing off a table.
I was surprised by the few explicit examples of how AA can look; let me contribute my example. I was on the admissions committee for a US R1 university, think top 20 in the world and top 1/2 in some subfield. The basic process for admissions was to convert GPA, general GRE and subject GRE along with recommendations, parsed by reviewers, all into an overall score, and we would go down the scores giving admit/rejects. The scores were ~40% recommendations, 25% subject GRE, 25% GPA and 10% combined general GRE. Here are some explicit and implicit AA steps taken:
-Women and underrepresented minorities (URM) were given +50 points to their subject GRE scores (or +100 for both). This represents a 5-10% increase in percentile score, or 15-20% for both. This one was easy to check because it was coded into the sheet we used! Ostensibly this was because the subject GRE was biased against these categories, I have not done the research on it.
-Women and URMs were nearly automatically bumped up levels of "signing bonuses," these fellowships we gave the incoming students to entice them. This could be an extra $1000-4000, which at grad school pay combined with moving was quite a lot. Scholarships for females and URMs-only also existed.
-As we went down the list and reached our quota of admits, we saved spots to look "further down" for promising women and URMs who otherwise would not have made the cut.
-Being female or an URM was frequently mentioned in reviewer comments, which could be construed as boosting reviewer scores. This was more implicitly directed in the committee.
So there were a variety of ways we tried to boost female and URM admissions. There was nothing against males or non-URMs, but of course with a limited number of admissions slots someone has to lose out. All that said, generally the process was "meritocratic" in that just about everyone was qualified and we had many great candidates to choose from; we rarely had to compromise to admit a woman or URM, although at the end of the process with very marginal candidates it could get dicey. The reality is that we had so few *qualified* females and URMs that it just didn't make much of a dent, and the better ones were taken by the absolute top universities anyway. But to be clear, if you were male and/or non-URM , you received a lower score for admission and less money to join compared to females and/or URMs, even with equal qualifications.
May I ask what department this was? It seems like favoritism for women in academia is confined to certain STEM fields, no?
> Also, could someone who’s annoyed at ballooning degree requirements (eg me) sue every company that requires a college degree, asking them to prove that it’s really necessary?
Let's assume someone actually did this and succeeded in companies giving up on degree requirements[1]. What do you expect would happen next?
I think that we get even worse system[2]. Because you need some way to choose candidates. Banning whatever people are using because it has serious disadvantages isn't likely to improve the situation unless there is a better alternative. So the first step would be to line up at least one better way to choose candidates. I'd say something like CodeSignal for everyone but if I understand correctly something like that has beed tried but it's illegal for some reason so :/
But please don't ban the tools currently in use unless you see an better tool available. And if there are better tools I think it would be better to promote using them without banning the current tools[3].
[1] Maybe they win those lawsuits, maybe there is enough chilling effect for everyone to decide it's not worth the trouble of being sued and they drop the requirement, I don't think details matter much.
[2] For example (just a story of what might happen I don't know what exactly the system will choose) companies start filtering by experience. So now you have to do a bunch of unpaid internships. And to get those internships you have to go through "holistic evaluation".
[3] Maybe the tool isn't actually better (at least in some cases). Maybe it will break when you try to scale up it's use. Maybe it'll break when you make it mandatory...
If we switch to some other tool that is just as bad at predicting job ability as a degree, it is still a huge success. Because people don't need to accumulate 6 figure debt for the new tool.
Unless the new tool is even more costly. A bunch of necessary unpaid internships could still saddle people with huge debt. It still could require arranging your life to pass „holistic evaluation”, only for longer (because every job now does this).
If there is idea for approximately as good filter, that is less costly I’m curious
re: women's football, there is actually a big nationwide push (mostly to create a generation of female NFL fans, but satisfying those scholarship equivalences is probably a push too) to create the sport of women's flag football at all levels. At my town just outside Cleveland, they are trying to set teams up at every level, from 1st grade to college, with I think the end goal being something nominally equivalent to men's football. Someone said something about an Olympic event?
Disclaimer: my daughter is playing on a 2nd grade girls flag football team and loves it. :)
Just noticed this:
>For example, many countries held Black Lives Matter and Defund The Police protests even when they had approximately no black people.
At least locally speaking, the BLM protests (there were maybe... two?) were basically about two things:
1. General "international solidarity" protests that happen *all the time* in Europe between different European countries. I remember seeing or participating in minor protests related to various Russian events before 2022 (or even 2014), or on protests related to Polish abortion law, or Turkish policies regarding the Kurds, or solidarity to some university occupation or some anarchist or activist imprisoned somewhere or whatever. Usually these arouse something like 10-100 people and are noticed by approximately nobody outside the "scene". Americans seemed to consider similar BLM protests in Europe completely bizarre and unusual, even though it's a standard pattern of protests that lefty organizations and networks basically do whenever they feel like it (and more justifiable than many in the sense that US is the most powerful and influential country in the world, obviously).
2. A "news hook" to organize a general antiracism protest that's basically used as a news hook to talk about developments inside one's own country, ie. "We have all seen the photos of George Floyd but we can't forget the case X that just happened in town Y in this country" etc.
There's a saying in security that you shouldn't attribute to malice what's adequately explained by incompetence. And the following article explains a lot of things when the US government or civil service tries to do tech (hiring in particular): https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/
Spoiler: it's nothing to do with affirmative action. We do hear about Jack Cable again, but with a different explanation.
As to HR being an alternative to unions - I'm with Rachel Kroll: HR is not your friend: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/01/17/woe/
In Susan Fowler's reflections on her year at uber - one of the posts that kicked off the #MeToo movement (https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber), we even see how HR can sometimes be used to try and cover up evidence of sexual misconduct (apparently keeping notes on every time your boss has directly broken company policy by soliciting you for sex is "unprofessional").
On the timeline of tech industry culture, Susan Fowler’s blog post was written in the tail-end of the antediluvian period.
I’m a woman who worked in software engineering for 5 years back in the 00’s. I have a MS in CS from a selective school. But I frequently felt like the diversity hire, because I struggled to be assigned high profile projects and was the only or one of two women, and usually ended up under-studying the rockstars and maintaining after they moved on. It’s hard to develop a career in that situation, and soured me on the industry. My situation would have to be dire for me to try to go back into software engineering.
Being the diversity hire, whether in actuality or in perception, is awful.
Thank you, I think this is a less heard of perspective
RH: ‘Basically I think if you’re going to have a one sentence explanation of how society became woke, “It was civil rights law” would be the closest thing to the truth.’
Okay, but what impelled congress to write that law? Why did the high courts interpret it the way they did? (Yarvin has answers here.)
Unless you understand the culture that created civil rights law, you cannot create one that will disassemble it. And make no mistake, you will need a well-defined counter-culture to supplant wokism. Yankee moral fanaticism will not just ride off into the sunset because a law gets repealed.
One thought about Hanania's weird comments about sexual harassment and flirting at work: roughly speaking, there's a spectrum along which you can move toward favoring men or favoring women. Extreme examples of the former are visible before 1960 or so; of the latter are visible now in academia, and you have the misadventures of guys like Scott Aaronson, whose blog post about self-hatred got so much feminist ire.
Because there is a tradeoff--unlike gay and straight rights, men and women both comprise roughly half of the population, so anything that favors one winds up hurting the other.
If you'd like an example of bay area - here is a direct example from a tech company there: Gusto (gusto.com):
https://engineering.gusto.com/diversity-in-zenpayrolls-engineering-team/
*****
Here are some of things we're doing to hit our goals:
We're outbound sourcing 100% female candidates. We have a lot of male candidates who apply through our jobs page or are referred to us, so we feel comfortable doing this.