The problem is that institutional bias and discrimination are unmeasurable. So dropping the quotas never seems like a reality.
Quotas are inherently unfair and take opportunity away from others.
Isn't it better to treat people as individuals?
Quotas are inherently unfair and take opportunity away from others.
Isn't it better to treat people as individuals?
James Damore suggested something like that, it didn't go down well. (Though I completely agree).
> Isn't it better to treat people as individuals?
This is an equally impossible goal. The system is already unfair. You want to preserve the current unfairness. I think we should instead calibrate the unfairness to optimize for undoing the weirdness caused by humanity’s awful history of subjugating, robbing, and denying the rights of various kinds of people over many centuries. People born today experience various benefits and drawbacks related to conditions completely beyond their control.
If we have privilege this is the god damn least we can do.
> This is an equally impossible goal.
For being such impossible goal it seem strange then that 21th century society is basically built around that exact concept. Banks lend out money based on it. Courts make judgement based on it. Government gives out social support based on it. Insurance rates and medical care is all about individual assessment. Even education here in Sweden is by law now individualized and each teacher must teach to the ability of each individual student (a new law since a decade ago).
A few hundred years ago that was not the case. If a person were of the lower class then they were treated as such. Government was not expected to operate on anything except category of people, and the idea of treat people as individuals was seen as indeed impossible. Education in particular was extremely bound by this idea, and a person worth was categorized and put in predefined box from a very young age.
However impossible it is to treat people as individuals, it is better to do so and fail rather then to return to the old ways. If you get a wave of low economic immigrants should we throw up our hands and say “we’ve done our best” with individual assessment in the legal system and just prosecute based on class, or should we double up on it and try to do better? The political winds here is swinging, and I honestly hope that treating people as individuals wins over any attempt of short-term gain from treating people based on class. A person born under low economic class should not have their life hindered because others before them of same low economical class had a higher rate of crime that higher economical classes. That would be a failure of society to treat people as individuals. History does not dictate the future and it doesn't create any benefits and drawbacks unless we treat people based on category and class rather then individuals.
... these are all examples of places where bias is rampant. Banks, courts, government assistance, insurance premiums, and even medical care are not delivered to all individuals equally. Not at all. Not remotely.
Through activism and lawsuits that these areas have made strides towards fairness... but you seem to be holding them up as an example of treating people as individuals “done right” or “done successfully”.
To briefly take these one by one:
> Banks lend out money based on it.
- banks had to be forced to do this.
> Courts make judgement based on it.
- this is laughable. The legal system in the US punishes African Americans more strongly that Caucasians for the same crimes.
> Government gives out social support based on it.
- maybe?
> Insurance rates and medical care is all about individual assesment
- doctors provide more medication for pain at the same level to white patients vs black patients. Proxies for race are all over insurance. Women had to pay more for healthcare until very recent.
Without active efforts that were made over many years to tip the scales and correct these bad outcomes, all of this would be much much worse.
> History does not dictate the future and it doesn't create any benefits and drawbacks unless we treat people based on category and class rather then individuals.
I respectfully suggest that the above statement is completely incoherent with reality, and represents weird wishful thinking.
Where courts make predefined judgment and don't even bother to giver a person their day in court?
Where government make one size fit all decision based on gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation?
Where insurance companies refuse insurance based on race?
Where doctors use force sterilization, or outright refuse service based on race or economical class?
Where kids of low economical class is not allowed to go to school.
> Through activism and lawsuits that these areas have made strides towards fairness... but you seem to be holding them up as an example of treating people as individuals “done right” or “done successfully”.
Through equal respectfully suggestion, the above statement is completely incoherent with reality of today, and represents weird negative thinking. The improvement on those area are real, and suggesting that the old ways are better is sad.
> I respectfully suggest ...
If you are trying to insult someone don't bother to wrap it up like that. If you want a thread full of insults then just insult, and if you do not want that then rethink what you wrote and why you wrote it.
However your questions in this reply, and the idea that I think the "old ways" are better ... I mean that's not in my argument. That's creating a false binary and trying to contort my statements into something that you can readily dismiss. You are insisting that somehow continuing to improve things means returning to the old ways.
It also seems to be a common tactic used by people with power to justify the status quo. I'm ok with dropping it here since we're apparently talking right past each other.
Lets apply a quota system to those system above that today operate on individual assessment, using current imbalance that statistical evidence can detect.
Banks have data on who defaults on loans based on any number of conceivable categories, and likely incorporate some of that during an assessment. A quota system where they would grant or deny loans based on a single identity would not only be less fair because individuals can be part of multiple groups, but it would also institutionalize discrimination based on historical data. For the benefit of society it would be better if the system was more blind and relied less on the fact that people from low economic class defaults more on their loan that those from the higher economic classes.
Insurance companies is in the same boat. Having people of different categories pay higher rates make sense from a historical perspective, but it make for a worse society when women automatically pay higher medical insurance and men pay higher car insurance. Quotas where people are sorted into specific rates create a worse society.
Thankfully for both banking and insurance, individual assessment is more economical from a corporate perspective. A strict quota system which simply represented a single category of assumed risk is less effective at predicting a individual person. Individual employees of companies might still use discriminative quotas as shortcuts, but thankfully in most places that is illegal under anti-discrimination laws. There is no quota on how many African Americans can get a loan regardless of the rate of defaulting that that group historically has.
Some people have jested and suggested to have quotas in the legal system to correct existing bias. They say: Simply put more white people (and women) in jail! Obviously a quota system here would be terrible and the issue of racism and sexism in the legal system should be fixed through better individual assessments rather than quotas. Race and gender blindness would be a major improvement, while quotas would make society a much darker place.
See the theme here where blindness is the general cure to the ailment of bias and where quotas based on historical data would be terrible? Let see some examples where quotas are used.
There is an infamous school "lottery" in some places where kids from rich families have multiple choices (since they can sigh up to any number of good schools and move to places where they "win"), while kids from low economical class do not have that option and simply has to hope that they get one of the token slots from the good schools that their class get a quota from. Quotas has made matters worse, as been argued by teacher, parents and politicians alike. You don't fix the problem of good and bad schools through quotas, but rather by fixing the schools. The school should be blind to how much money a child parents has and simply provide the teaching that each individual child need.
Which lead us to the last area, medicine. Here quotas is currently used as a cost saving mechanism, where instead of individual assessment you have screenings and vaccines based on race, gender and age. It is a definitively worse system but since individual assessments are costly and doctors are limited in numbers it is still being used. The idea to give people medical care without medical assessment is at odds with modern practice of not doing harm, and the optimal solution is always to do individual assessments based on personal needs. Quotas is used as a last ditch effort when the benefits clearly outweighs the cost through careful and very conservative considerations. Quotas are dangerous and medical history is full of the harm they have done.
This is why I brought those examples. Each of them operate today on treating people as individuals and while neither system is perfect, adding quotas to them makes things worse rather then better. At best it can be used as a last ditch effort, but only if all other methods have been explored and one recognize the massive potential for harm that it introduce. I understand why it quotas feel attractive but to claim that it is impossible to treat people as individuals is practically giving up on the foundation of modern society.
“Blindness” is ideal once people get into the stages of the process where they are being evaluated on an individual level. It should be the goal.
Quotas are not targeted at those problems.
The important piece that a lot of us people seem to miss is that the ongoing effect of historical racism and sexism messes things up and creates unfairness before people even get in the room. Massive unfairness. Compounded in a thousand different ways over somebody’s life. Creating pressure away from one kind of life and towards another simply through historical inertia, because for most of history people like them did not have full rights as human beings.
Quotas seem bad at solving the problems you point out because they are not for that. They are an attempt to measure, and correct for, much bigger trends.
Well-designed quotas at the right places in processes could let the pool of people (who are then evaluated blindly) be a much more representative group. Quotas (or some other measurement) would let you know if some proxies for discrimination were still getting through the process.
Insurance companies my not use race, but a zip code can be a proxy for race, and the kind of neighborhood a person lives in can make them more likely to suffer a break-in or make a claim for some other reason.
I really do believe that it’s impossible to treat people as individuals with 100% certainty that that’s what you are doing. No matter how hard you try. Even in all the examples you gave, there is progress but things are not done.
Hopefully this makes my point more clear.