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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

I think your nepotism example and "preponderance of talent and success is hard to quantify precisely" are nice arguments and give me something to think about, thanks.

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?

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Well I'm not really advocating for choosing people based on skin color or gender per se. Rather that in a cases where there is an surplus of talent for the role we should consider making a choice based upon serving the interests of society more broadly. Sometimes this will fall along racial lines. For example, having doctors of color to serve communities of color has demonstrable positive health outcomes for society more broadly.

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.

> we should consider making a choice based upon serving the interests of society more broadly. Sometimes this will fall along racial lines.

This line kind of contradicts this line:

> Well I'm not really advocating for choosing people based on skin color or gender per se.

>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?

I'm not GP but that doesn't seem like a charitable rendering of their argument. Its the stupidest possible rendering of their statement.

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