YouTube sued for limiting white, Asian male hires for diversity purposes | Hacker News Reader

YouTube sued for limiting white, Asian male hires for diversity purposes

fastcompany.com

59 pointscohaagen30 comments

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551

What is the stated goal of explicitly discriminatory behavior, where white males and otherwise conservative people are targeted?

I don‘t think anyone has actually stated this, so perhaps this won’t do as an answer, but I think in general the purpose is to counteract decades of bias and discrimination?

By introducing new bias and discrimination? Well, what can go wrong?

To break endemic, systemic bias and discrimination, the majority group must choose to be biased and discriminatory against itself.

I can almost guarantee you it was a white male that had ultimate responsibility to make the decision to take action with regard to that demographic.

> His manager, Allison Alogna, informed Wilberg and his colleagues that they were to “only accept” a certain rank of engineers (“Level 3”) if they were diverse.

That's an interesting definition of "ultimate" you have there.

Who's up the org chart from her?

So bias and discrimination aren't inherently wrong? If the newly introduced discrimination is alright what actually made the old one wrong in the first place?

It's a paradox.

And white dudes (like me) aren't ever going to fix it without actively trying to fix it, which is going to make other white dudes (like the ones in the lawsuit) discriminated against.

If your car consistently steered left, would you bias your steering right to compensate? Or sit there in a field going "This is fine, I don't want to introduce a new bias to my steering."

Do you really think that steering (a pretty neutral action) is a right analogy to an action that is inherently hurting people? The problem here is that you try to compensate injustice done to some people by doing injustice to others.

It's a simplistic analogy, sure.

> to an action that is inherently hurting people?

Which action is that? The original biases which has been hurting people for hundreds of years or the current attempt at bias correction which has been around for, let's say, 5 years?

> The problem here is that you try to compensate injustice done to some people by doing injustice to others.

No. What's happening here is that people are trying to balance the scales by helping up the lower pan and the people on the higher pan are bleating about this "injustice".

Putting aside the fact that I believe that any race-based discrimination is inherently wrong. I don't believe those actions can balance scales. They only increase the scale of conflict between "diverse" and "non-diverse people". Right now both of the camps will be able to say that they are discriminated by the other one. To introduce yet another simplistic analogy: it's putting out fire with gasoline.

> Right now both of the camps will be able to say that they are discriminated by the other one.

But only one of those camps is actually correct.

> it's putting out fire with gasoline

Not even slightly.

> But only one of those camps is actually correct.

Yes, currently. I spoke about long term effects of using discrimination to fight discrimination.

>> But only one of those camps is actually correct. > Yes, currently.

To clarify, then, is the "Right now" part of this wrong?

"Right now both of the camps will be able to say that they are discriminated by the other one."

Most likely. I used "right now" as "In consequence of that", probably a carry over from my native language.

Counteracting decades of bias and discrimination with bias and discrimination. What a great idea!

What's more absurd is that the new victims are not the old beneficiaries. They discriminate before hiring against unrelated people.

How would you address it?

Hire the most qualified people

How does that address the bias and discrimination?

Well it means you aren't discriminating for a start. If you look just at performance independent of melanin you'll probably be eliminating bias too.

I'm biased I find judging people based on there race silly. My "race/culture" is navy submariner, and I always enjoyed watching the few sailors who hadn't had their background racism washed out of them at boot-camp realize that getting the job done well was what mattered, some sailors came in with some bad biases but within a year those issues usually had been resolved by working in a meritocracy, if a very authoritarian and hierarchical one.

> "My "race/culture" is navy submariner, and I always enjoyed watching the few sailors who hadn't had their background racism washed out of them at boot-camp realize that getting the job done well was what mattered, some sailors came in with some bad biases but within a year those issues usually had been resolved by working in a meritocracy, if a very authoritarian and hierarchical one."

+100

I think a lot of submariners can relate to this (I'm also a submariner). I do remember when I was a senior sailor, and one of my division's nubs was this smart and hard-working kid from bumfuck nowhere Georgia (he was from a small town of <500 people)...well, we were sitting on crews mess and getting GMT on gays in the military and this kid was like "there's no way i'm working with some fag"...to which I, and pretty much ever person senior to him were like "shut the fuck up nub, you most certainly will work with someone who is gay, in fact you already do (we had a gay guy in our division but he was pretty hush-hush about it), and that 'fag' as you called him, might be in a position to one day save your life, so you better drop whatever bullshit prejudice you may have...and get quallified"....he dropped some of his outwardly shitty behavior pretty quick...like you said, it didn't matter what your background or sexual orientation was, the only thing that mattered was coming together to get the job done...and you totally saw this during any kind of emergency...sometimes I do miss the "togetherness" we had as a crew...just not the unpaid overtime.

Decades of bias and discrimination against white males? Government has been doing it for years.

Isn't there a way to do this without discriminatory behavior, or are punitive measures a requirement? Specifically, punitive measures towards those that otherwise have not committed any offense other than simply being born the wrong race and/or gender.

Google has been accused of being too "white male" so this was an (illegal if true) attempt to balance what the company looks like.

I can also see it being a case of the CEO pounding their fist and saying, "Do something about X, which you're being explicitly measured on in your OKR" and then middle management choosing methods that are explicitly wrong.

I have no inside info on this case though.

> "white males and otherwise conservative people"

I find it perplexing if Asian men are considered "white males and otherwise conservative people", these days.

Asian men (according to a quick Google search) are 28% of the entire world population, incidentally.

I think they're basically considered white for diversity purposes, because of their stereotypical success in engineering roles.

IIRC, one of the main results of eliminating affirmative action in university admissions was to increase the proportion of asians in top schools. The affirmative action policies were used to discriminate against them and keep them out.

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