Want to Solve Venture Capital's Diversity Problem? Start with Pension Funds
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And as long as the public approves it, millions could be spent on committees figuring out "the best way to do it", bureaucrats making policies, etc. Political game as it is, nothing new.
It's really so interesting that these groups of politically motivated people think they're ending what they perceive as racism ... by being as racist as it's possible to be.
We don't have much of that in my country but we have it with women. Anyway it will eventually reach us as we're already colonized by American culture.
And this in a country ravaged with structural unemployment and <1% black population.
It's an increasing problem. People gets distracted with american internal agenda.
Who gets to decide when "white privilege" no longer exists? Not intended to be inflammatory, just curious what the benchmark is. “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” sort of thing.
Even if someone were to hire someone else solely because of the color of their skin, this would be nowhere near as racist as it’s possible to be.
Hint: people are being killed because of the color of their skin right now. People in the US used to buy people in large numbers because of the color of their skin.
Sure, black people are killed by police. So are white people. So are people of every race. All the actual data I've seen is that black people are killed less frequently, in proportion to the violent crime they commit than white people are.
I believe your thought process is no more than a mind virus, a viral meme, that's wrapped up in emotion and pushed as hard as possible for political gain.
There's plenty of videos of white people being killed by police that you all just ignore. You don't look at the actual data or think critically, you're just driven by emotion and group think.
As for sources of evidence suggesting disproportionate use of force against black persons, here's one to consider:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/
Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black. Additionally, black individuals were unarmed when fatally shot more frequently than white persons.
That depends on what you take as a baseline. I would assume that police shootings mostly happen in response to violent behavior. I couldn't find any data on the violent behavior, however there is an open FBI dataset on homicide offenders by race [0].
If you assume a correlation between the number of homicide offenders and the general probability of violent behavior, it could very much explain the disproportion you pointed out.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
The following table is more relevant:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
And here's the one from 2018:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
So your point stands: when you talk about "disproportionate", you need a baseline. If you choose the proportion of the general population as a baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts blacks. But if you choose the proportion of known murderers as the baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts whites.
Note that there is a subtlety here: the baseline ratio is simply a ratio to use as a comparison point. I am in no way implying that all people killed by police are known murderers. Nor am I saying the ratio of known murderers necessarily extrapolate to the number of justifiable-use-of-force incidents.
EDIT: I am really just saying the baseline expectation matters, and that the general population is not the only meaningful baseline. I am not saying which baseline is the "right" one. That depends on which specific policy you are considering.
Your source also suggests unarmed white people are nearly twice as likely to be shot than unarmed Hispanics. Doesn't that contradict the narrative of racist motive by white police?
I have to wonder how many people were killed by police. Was it 100 or 10,000? The difference in magnitude could see these racial biases diminish or worsen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
And select 2018, you'll see a total of 991 people killed by police. If you also filter by race, you'll see that 229 were black and 454 were white. I'm using 2018 because it's the most recent year with good FBI stats to compare to.
According to the FBI, were 14123 murders in 2018:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
For blacks and whites, it looks like most murder victims are killed by a member of their own race:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
That table is excluding a lot of cases where there is missing information (that's why the numbers don't add up to 14123). It shows 2600 blacks were murdered by blacks out of 6570 murders with enough information to be included in the table. If you were to extrapolate to 14123 total murders, then you would estimate 5589 blacks were murdered by blacks in 2018; and 5754 whites were murdered by other whites in 2018.
That means blacks in 2018 were over 20 times as likely to be murdered by another black as to be killed (justifiably or not) by a police officer (black or white). Whites are about 13 times as likely to be murdered by another white as killed by a police officer. Note that "white" include latino in these numbers, but it doesn't look like the number of latino murders is high enough to have a major impact on the overall analysis (though feel free to dig in to that as well).
I'm not passing any value judgement here, but the data do seem to paint a different picture than the simplistic view of a racist police system. I conjecture (and am open to evidence that supports or refutes this claim) that the vast majority of problems blacks face in the U.S. happen long before risky police encounters, so police reform is unlikely to be very impactful by itself. In fact, there is a major risk that it will be counterproductive, if reform causes police departments to be less effective at their jobs and allow criminals to do far more damage.
Systematic racism and segregation is another problem.
The first problem exacerbates the second. We have to fix both.
This comes across as tone deaf when people are talking about victims who were not committing violent crimes. For example, allegedly passing a counterfeit $20.
Furthermore, the violent crime statistics exist in the context of people not being able to trust the police, and to the extent they do, the police not doing anything in response to shootings.
So it's easy to see a causal relationship between police misconduct and the prevalence of violent crime in certain communities. People are trying to penetrate the mindset that it's intrinsic, and say, no, police corruption systematically produces the problem and racism saps the motivation to solve it.
I was just noticing that my Google News feed is reporting local shootings, seemingly in a different world than the rest of the news, but it's quoting the police response as basically saying "gee, we have no leads, we wish people would stop settling their disagreements with violence". With the most charitable interpretation, it's ineffectual and lends support to people saying "gee, why don't we just defund the police in favor of social workers".
Maybe you can say that violent crime is an offshoot of poverty, but a lot of poor communities don't have the same violent crime as others..so that's tenuous at best.
The big experiment would be to reduce the poverty of all groups and see what happens to violent crime, maybe then we don't need police and can have un-armed social workers. But until then, the correlation is community with high violence...incites violence from police, suspicion is then generated against that group. Simple statistics.
First you say it's ridiculous to blame the police.
Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it.
Then you propose the experiment of reducing poverty.
But you don't believe that's the cause! And I don't either. So it seems to me like you're not providing an alternative hypothesis to blaming the police.
I think in order to select evidence, two alternative hypotheses are a pre-requisite. And if you think the one is "ridiculous", then it implies you have another one. You just haven't stated it so I am aware.
Also, your last two sentences really bother me, despite being far from an expert in statistics. Do you think it's reasonable to say that correlation is symmetric, while causality is not? And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility? It doesn't seem to me like the answer is simple or purely a matter of statistics.
Not sure exactly what you mean here.
>Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it.
I don't necessarily doubt it, but I find it curious that there is not a universal poverty == violence.
I think reducing poverty is more of a solution than blaming the police, I apologize if I wasn't as clear with my statement on poverty.
My hypothesis is something like this: I doubt police cause violence in communities (except perhaps violence against police). There seems to be a correlation with poverty and violence, it's not universal. Picking a group based on skin color and saying "we reduce this poverty and not other kinds" is fairly immoral, therefore the experiment is to flatten the problem of poverty and control to see if there are spikes of violence across this flat plane and to see in which communities it occurs. That would help to isolate a potential root cause of violence. Other experiments could be done.
I'm pretty sure the causality is baked into most people not being an expert in statistic, hence "simple" statistics. If the police are running a really basic pattern matching algo, the line between correlation and causation may not be perpendicular. What I mean is that if the situation on the ground "community A has % higher violence" then in situations interacting with A implies higher chance of % violence. The causality is reached because of the simple understanding. At least that's my take.
When people are vocally backing the police at times like these, then I think it's obvious they are empathizing viscerally with the police who are subject to no-win situations, so they have that capacity for empathy.
But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions.
Have you ever been, in some sense, punished by someone with power or leverage over you, because you were less than trusting, and that made them distrustful or fearful of you? I tend to think this is common, whether or not it's exactly a conscious preoccupation for most.
There are things you can't explain, you have to demonstrate and/or experience.
How would you explain people who empathize strongly with the images that we've all seen on TV... but then look at the numbers a week later and realize that the narrative of police violence against blacks is highly misleading.
There doesn't have to be a specific amount of violence in order to prevent dialogue and trust in a community. It's much more significant where and how it's applied. When people are punished for trusting in the authorities, then it's a huge multiplier of the criminal activity that the authorities then blame on the community.
I recently learned something interesting about corruption in my state, not directly related to the police, but about how corrosive it is when people are punished for trusting the system. In NYC, rent is regulated in various ways. One thing is that, if a landlord wants to raise rent, they can justify it with a certain dollar amount of renovations, but they may fraudulently inflate that amount. If you are a victim of that and about to be evicted because your rent was doubled, then you can sue in housing court. However, whether or not you have a good case and win, it will be on record that you sued and the authorities subsequently sell access to the data to interested parties, which means, essentially, that if you exercise your rights you will be put on a blacklist and it will be difficult going on impossible to rent anywhere. Now, this sounds like some activist's tendentious characterization, but this idea that the government effectively runs a blacklist came from court documents. The courts are cognizant this is how the system works, and to some extent they try to compensate for it, by for instance granting injunctions to stop eviction early on.
Two perfect examples are the videos of Daniel Leetin Shaver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc) and Tony Timpa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X4PUwrq8tA).
Ending qualified immunity, no-knock warrants, civil asset forfeiture, over-criminalization, mandatory minimums and militarization of police are not race specific issues. They affect all Americans.
Affirmative action absolutely could be construed as racist, and one can reasonably debate whether it’s ethical or effective, but regardless, it’s nowhere near as racist as it’s possible to be.
(I left the Holocaust out of the list above because I bet you’d reply either that there is insufficient evidence that it happened or that it wasn’t racist per se.)
The existing system is already very biased against them, I don't have a problem with some corrective action.
"In fact, companies are more than twice as likely to call minority applicants for interviews if they submit whitened resumes than candidates who reveal their race—and this discriminatory practice is just as strong for businesses that claim to value diversity as those that don’t."
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
"This paper suggests that African-Americans face differential treatment when searching for jobs and this may still be a factor in why they do poorly in the labor market. Job applicants with African-American names get far fewer callbacks for each resume they send out. Equally importantly, applicants with African-American names find it hard to overcome this hurdle in callbacks by improving their observable skills or credentials."
https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...
1. How likely will they perform their duties in a way that is profitable to the company?
2. How much will it cost to the company to fire them, if they turn out to generate loss.
Some people may have a stereotype that people of certain backgrounds would perform worse than people of other backgrounds, so that would affect heir judgement at point 1. However, if we make special rules that make it harder to fire underperformers from certain backgrounds, it greatly increases the costs at point 2, making them actually much less favorable candidates.
So in the current political climate, companies at the same time are forced to:
1. Claim that they will prefer diverse candidates and have diversity policies.
2. Actually avoid diverse candidates, because in case they underperform, laying them off would be considerably more expensive due to PR issues.
The study very much confirms this behavior, and I bet that making more special rules will only make it worse.
Let's completely refute this notion:
"Companies with more culturally and ethnically diverse executive teams were 33% more likely to see better-than-average profits. In McKinsey’s previous study—conducted with 2014 numbers—that increase had been 35%. At the board of directors level, more ethnically and cultural diverse companies were 43% more likely to see above-average profits, showing a significant correlation between diversity and performance."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2018/01/25/more-...
Is the cause the diversity or is it that cities are generally hyper-competitive places that draw the most competitive people in society and filter out those that can't hack it.
Your reason and my reason are just two possibilities of reversed causality. I'm sure there are many others.
The conclusion of that study is basically a wet streets cause rain conclusion.
One only needs to look at foreign firms like those in China that are crushing it to see that many non-diverse businesses are doing very well. I'm sure those businesses weren't included because it wouldn't support the conclusion the researcher wanted to arrive at.
Yet they absolute crush it with almost everything they do? How do we square that circle and say well..if everyone just looked different we would be better off. Minus the white people, they shouldn't be around anymore.
Ironically, by interpreting my statement as an claim that such a policy would lead to an all-white workforce, you yourself just made an assumption that many people would call very racist.
Have you considered that the companies with diverse executive teams and boards did exactly that?
Can you point me to the list of companies where their lack of diversity at the executive and board members level has 'cost them dearly'?
I suspect the same bias would hold true if someone applied for a job bragging about being in a white student organization.
Would you hire someone was a member of the Society of White Engineers? Probably not.
What you're arguing in favor of is addressing problems from technical debt by adding more technical debt on top.
The corrective action is to perform a root cause analysis and fix things at the root.
So if we just make things biased in favor of the poor, this will be able to self-correct automatically.
I don't get why that isn't seen as the best solution.
1. You pick a minority that suffers from something, compared to the majority. The minorities usually feel intimidated by the majority, and the viral/network effects within them are much stronger. Once you get them to back you, this directly translates to political capital.
2. You find a way to offer help to them, that is seen as beneficial at the first glance, but in the long run will not solve the problem. This entrenches them, making them dependent on your help.
3. You find a party that will pay for your policy. It needs to be a relatively large group with much weaker network effects. They also need to be wealthier than the minority, so you will be seen as a nuisance, rather than a real threat.
4. You use the "*ist" label to quickly shut up people criticizing your policy and pointing out its long-term inefficiency. Because most of the critics won't have a vested interest, they won't fight you till their political death. Instead, they will quickly retreat in fear of social media outrage against them.
Rinse and repeat. The minority continues to suffer, the silent majority is scared to criticize anything, the society becomes more and more polarized and divided.
What if there is no money to be made or lost but a certain group is simply worse off? What if fairness lowers GDP? Does that mean it should be abandoned? Without even getting into what the realities are, I'm trying to understand what you're saying here.
Is this a lesson that people want their kids to learn?
Doesn't this also lead discrimination actually being a rational (and maybe ethical) thing to do?
Simply put- if the top 100 medical students (based on MCAT, boards scores, etc) are chosen to become heart surgeons, choosing a heart surgeon from those 100 based on race or gender is not only absolutely egregious morally but it's also irrational.
But if the top 90 of the 100 medical students are chosen and then 10 are chosen because of non-relevant factors (race, gender, etc)... doesn't it become rational (and maybe morally acceptable) to try and avoid choosing those lesser-qualified 10 for your life-or-death surgery?
Secondly, expanding the pool of available investments with an eye towards attempting to correct systematic injustice doesn’t need to accompany a loss of quality, which is what is argued here. If the pool of quality candidates is large, then having a diversity goal in an investment fund doesn’t necessarily lead to lower quality.
After all, can you honestly say that all the worthy startups and teams are getting investment now?
As a side note, if the diversity argument lowering quality is “correct”, then why wouldn’t any investment hypothesis also lead to lower quality? There are tons of vc firms that only invest in certain types of companies. They still manage to keep quality high while being discerning about who they invest in. Think funds that only do bio or only do social media.
Instead of coming up with reasons why status quo is totally fine or why giving money to black entrepreneurs is going to cause losses, perhaps we could imagine a world where such investment thesis are successful, and expand the total success of everyone?
It's not a hundred years ago, it's this year, right now.
And I think if you're going to bend to "natural human sentiment", then you might as well give up on trying to get people to change at all. Why try to get people to exercise or learn if "natural human sentiment" is to sit on the couch and watch TV?
If someone has to complete a marathon with a 20 lbs weight around their neck, I'm willing to adjust their time downwards to reflect that. I'm not going to avoid doing it because unencumbered runners feel cheated by it.
For comparison, consider the case of people who get their jobs via nepotism. The people who are hired for nepotism are seldom concerned with the fact that they were chosen because of who their parents were. In many cases these people are reasonably qualified and do just fine in spite of the fact that they were given the job because of their family's status.
When there is a preponderance of talent and success is hard to quantify precisely, choosing the best means choosing between a number of comparably good alternatives (to within the large uncertainty of the measurement). In certain cases there are very meritocratic scenarios where I think your statement holds, but when there is a surplus of talent for a role and quantifying success is very imprecise, I'm not sure if meritocracy makes sense. Given that many hedge funds are basically glorified ETFs that average to the market, I'm not if there is much difference between reasonably qualified candidates for these jobs.
Nepotism is personal and hidden. It isn't a rule everyone knows about, but something done on an individual level. If people could spot nepotism as easily as they could spot race and knew about confirmed corporate nepotism as easily as they knew about diversity initiatives, it would carry a greater stigma.
People see the race question on the job application. I have never seen a form ask about family members.
You haven't? Because I definitely have seen it. I'm not sure it's universal, and I know people do go to work for companies where their relatives work, but it's something that is asked on applications I've filled out, and as far as I know, is perfectly legitimate to factor into decisions.
Furthermore, race, that I can remember, always has a disclaimer that it's kept separate without identifying the person and used for reporting on diversity. And you can decline to select an answer too.
My view is that if there is a bar set that is reasonable and results in competent people being hired, then how people are selected within that set doesn't matter that much. Maybe with the caveat that I wouldn't want everyone to use the same preferences such that every employer would exclude me.
I don't see why I should be threatened by either nepotism or affirmative action. If I'm at a disadvantage, then I can take pride in having to work a little harder. Conversely, people give you more credit if they are aware you are disadvantaged, even if it's unspoken and unofficial.
I mean, to prevent nepotism.
But when you say "I'm not sure if meritocracy makes sense"... you are really saying that instead of trying for meritocracy, they should just use skin color?
How do you feel about the idea of blind auditions for orchestras (auditions where the candidate cannot be seen, only heard)? These were originally done to eliminate the possibility of discrimination.
I think orchestras could also qualify for "preponderance of talent and success is hard to quantify precisely"... should they eliminate blind auditions so they can choose performers based on skin color+gender?
I'm not GP but that doesn't seem like a charitable rendering of their argument. Its the stupidest possible rendering of their statement.
In the case of managing portfolios, I think that there are compelling reasons from a risk management perspective to cultivate different perspectives (a room full of Bulls will get burned in a downturn). Increasing the number of people from working class backgrounds, genders with different spending priorities, or races with different community ties can potentially add a lot of important perspectives to a financial portfolio.
Blind Auditions in orchestras are an interesting idea. People are actually much better and judging sound quality of violins than they are judging the quality of stock options, so it is easier to definitively state that someone is the 'best' Violinist in a group.
This line kind of contradicts this line:
> Well I'm not really advocating for choosing people based on skin color or gender per se.
>Thomas has recollected that his Yale Juris Doctor degree was not taken seriously by law firms to which he applied after graduating. He said that potential employers assumed he obtained it because of affirmative action policies.[18] In 1969 Dean Louis Pollak wrote that the law school was expanding its program of quotas for black applicants, with up to 24 entering that year admitted under a system that deemphasized grades and LSAT scores.[19] According to Thomas, he was "asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated."[20] He further reflected:
> ⠀⠀ "I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value."[21]
People who genuinely care about the success of those who were given fewer opportunities were called racist for pointing this out, and the righteous virtue signalers ended up doing way more damage to the groups they were supposedly helping. Same thing is currently happening with women in tech.
Hiring quotas and racist/sexist hiring policies make more problems, not fewer problems. It doesn’t matter which group is on which side of these policies. They are inherently bad for everyone.
Yet, people can’t fathom how a black man like Thomas could lean conservative. They all think that he must be an self-hating fool who doesn’t get it, and as a result, he’s on the receiving end of some of the most racist language of any public figure, being called Uncle Tom and Coon probably more than anybody else. They don’t entertain the possibility that maybe he knows something that they don’t.
Funny, I had to have drawn out argument with a white surgeon — day after day a few months back. He didn’t think my mother’s Black life was worth much.
[1] http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2020SlidesLongVersion... [2] http://origins.osu.edu/review/when-affirmative-action-was-wh...
Physical fitness is important for the grunts.
Your question rests on the assumption that that's actually how they feel about it.
If they are from an underrepresented group, then by definition there is some factor that works against them. (Or multiple factors.)
If you appropriately counterbalance that factor with another factor that works in their favor, then it shouldn't make them feel bad about themselves. Competing on a level playing field doesn't reflect negatively on someone. It doesn't undermine their confidence or cast doubt on their achievements.
Of course, this assumes the playing field is actually level. In theory it's possible to get this wrong. (You could apply either too little or too much correction. It's ultimately a quantitative question.) But my point is, to argue that someone would feel bad, you need to do more than say that correction has been applied; you also need to show that it is the wrong amount of correction.
> But if the top 90 of the 100 medical students are chosen and then 10 are chosen because of non-relevant factors (race, gender, etc)... doesn't it become rational (and maybe morally acceptable) to try and avoid choosing those lesser-qualified 10 for your life-or-death surgery?
What if the 90 were chosen in a process that is also not really entirely about their qualifications? Isn't this also a problem? Why focus only on the problems in choosing the 10?
Particularly as, when you get surgery, you're way more likely to get surgeon who is one of the 90. If this is the real concern, Amdahl's Law tells you to look first at the 90.
Isn't that assuming test scores have a linear relationship to ability? I would pick one of the conscientious hardworking "lesser-scoring" surgeon over the class valedictorian who might just happen to be a functioning alcoholic.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/lynnwood-man-tried...
https://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7431391/guess-where-white-ame...
While I think this is a phenomenal idea, it should be noted that systems like this that currently exist are frequently, almost typically, gamed. I went to work for a Federal Government certified 8a minority woman owned business with at the time about 20 employees in my mid-20s. I remember thinking how cool that was.
The "CEO" was a highly competent woman of Filipino descent who, after having kids, had chosen to become a stay-at home mom. She was CEO in name only, and her husband (a big giant white dude who was also highly competent) was the actual CEO, but with a different title.
The company's main source of revenue was acting as a prime contractor on contracts only available to 8a companies, then subbing the work out to large contractors. Another regulation on the company was a cap on it's profits, as well as a cap on salaries of individual employees. Their way around that was that the acting CEO and his wife both earned max level salaries. Another C level co-founder also payed his wife the maximum salary, and near as we can tell, her sole item of work for the company was sending out holiday gift baskets.
Again, good idea, but we need to think very hard about how to ACTUALLY help, rather than just making a small number of people who know how to game the system wealthy.
Many companies that are not actually minority-owned essentially rent minority-owned shell companies to clear the qualification hurdle for contract preferences, it is de rigueur unless you have unique capabilities that make it likely you'll get a contract award regardless. The obvious consequence is that once every company is "minority owned" no company is and you are back to where you started, just with some middlemen.
The first time this really clicked for me was when I dived deeply into the history of the First World War. If I could restate the root cause, it was complete failure by both the British and especially the Germans to envision a point of view different from their own. They each operated like they were sparring with themselves, and shit got out of control. The problem is that it’s now vogue to assume what point of view a person holds bases entirely on their race/gender/etc.
P.S. If WWI sounds interesting, I very much recommend the podcast “When Diplomacy Fails.”
Sowell has done quite a bit of research which backs up his conclusions. He has a couple of books on the subject you might be interested in.
Maybe the solution here is to develop a standardized test that measures diversity of viewpoint in a way that is blind to genetics.
This is somewhat tangential, but it's also important to make sure that your user base is appropriately represented in your workforce (eg if you are developing products catering to white males then it probably doesn't make sense to have no white males in your workforce). That's less diversity for diversity's sake and more representation for the sake of accurate product development though.
How does anything we buy in the US even work at all, considering it’s all made in China by people of a different culture and race with zero diversity and zero representation of the customer?
We shouldn’t accept arguments like this, no matter how uncomfortable the righteous want to make us feel for thinking critically.
Because most products are targeted very widely and are for general purpose use. For general purpose products, my second comment does not apply. What I am saying is that if your product is targeted to a niche group of people who tend to occupy a specific demographic that you aren't in, then it makes sense to have members of that demographic on your team because they can provide you basic data that you might not know. This is to gain a business advantage, not to pacify diversity proponents, and I don't think it is at all a contentious statement. If you were going to start a healthcare startup and no one on your team had a healthcare background, that would probably be concerning. Are you guaranteed to fail without that user input? Not necessarily, but you will likely have to work a lot harder than you would otherwise need to in order to properly understand the space. Similarly, if you were going to start a shampoo company catering towards black women and your team was all white guys, it would probably be a good idea to bring a black woman onboard to help steer product development.
> That’s always been a really silly assertion backed by a very small number of cherry picked examples...We shouldn’t accept arguments like this, no matter how uncomfortable the righteous want to make us feel for thinking critically.
These are not particularly value adding comments and detract from your argument. Please stick to attacking my argument rather than trying to attack me personally.
Do some heuristics, we might even calculate a bias score.
Is this how people view the world these days? Where skin color is important?
I feel like I'm totally lost and saddened by this new race-focused world. Can someone please tell me when I can go back to caring about the quality of air traffic controller's[1], the quality of a manager's returns[2], and a restaurant's food[3] and NOT their skin color? I'm exhausted by it.
[1]https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/affirmative-action-lands-in...
[2]The article from this discussion
[3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/korihale/2020/06/09/uber-eats-d...
Why do you believe that racism is so widespread? If there is evidence of widespread racism among people and institutions, please share (the only evidence I've seen is some name-on-resume-callback studies that appear more to do with class than with race).
I'm guessing you believe that there is widespread racism because of disparate outcomes. But disparate outcomes between groups doesn't mean discrimination.
For example, Iraqi-Americans avg income $32k, Iranian $78k income. How many Americans even know the difference between those two peoples even if they wanted to discriminate?[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
The comments ITT suggest that perhaps the taboo surrounding criticism of diversity initiatives is finally lifting, and rightly so.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules on HN? I'm afraid you've been breaking them in two ways. First, it's not ok to use the site primarily [1] for political or ideological battle. That's probably the single most destructive thing people do here, because battle mode and curiosity mode do not go together. Some political overlap is ok [2], but it's not ok to use the site primarily this way.
Second, please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. [3]
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...