>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.
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.