Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

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This was the controversial section in the retracted article in "Angewandte Chemie" which was given as an example:

> In the last two decades many groups and/or individuals have been designated with "preferential status". This in spite of the fact that the percentage of women and minorities in academia and pharmaceutical industry has greatly increased. It follows that, in a social equilibrium, preferrential treatment of one group leads to disadvantages for another. New ideologies have appeared and influenced hiring practices, promotion, funding, and recognition of certain groups. Each candidate should have an equal opportunity to secure a position, regardless of personal identification/categorization. The rise and emphasis on hiring practices that suggest or even mandate equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates. Such practice affects the format of interviews and has led to the emergence of mandatory “training workshops” on gender equity, inclusion, diversity, and discrimination.

I apologize for my naivety on this topic, but: Isn't this basically saying that if A and B have the same qualifications, but B is a member of a discriminated group, B should be preferred. If A has better qualifications, A should be preferred. I can see that this might be controversial, but what exactly is offensive here (or "appalling" [0])? Am I misunderstanding the section above?

[0] https://twitter.com/CIC_ChemInst/status/1269003560357773312?...

"The rise and emphasis on hiring practices that suggest or even mandate equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups is counter-productive if it results in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates."

This criticism seems entirely reasonable to me. I find it appalling that this is not only controversial but controversial enough to warrant censorship.

I also think it's telling that none of the critiques of this essay actually address this specific point; rather, they hand wave about historic injustice as if that has anything to do with what he's saying.

I think it's likely that the people pushing these mandated group quotas in the name of diversity were the racists of yesteryear, whose opinions seemingly change with the winds of what's popular, rather than having ideologically sound footing.

The way I think about it in the case of A and B are equal merit or extremely close: on some level, you must decide if you accept or reject the underlying ideas that

1. There are groups of people 2. Some groups are in better positions than others 3. There are historical reasons for claim 2 4. The people in the worse off group today, did not cause this historical reason, yet still suffer from it (be it done by or to their predecessors, doesn't matter). 5. a just world is one in which all groups, when given the opportunity, are represented in positions of power at the expected rates.

So let's say I run a school that generates successful powerful people regularly. I always get a greater than capacity nunmber of applicants scoring perfectly. Some might argue that random choice is the most fair - but I'm not interested in being fair to the better off group at the expense of furthering what I believe to be the creation of a just world. It is of no concern that some white upper class student didn't get in. If I go by random choice that group has an outsized chance of winning at the expense of the worse offs, because we would expect them to have a non-representational ratio of applicants to the worse. off group. Say, 15:1 or something.

Oh but that's not fair to the individual, you might say.

Well, groups are made of individuals and so my belief about group representation in a world of equal opportunity isn't over ridden. It's for _those_ individuals in the worse off group.

So I see little to no problem in caseas of equal merit being decided with an explicit favouring.

Furthermore, where the merit is not equal but the imbalance in merit is solidly explained by the inherent deficits of the worse off group, I see no problem in leaning that too (think extra curricular - captain of sailing team in high school and attended expensive code boostcamps in summers, or something). Two activities that would be unjustly unavailable to the worse off group.

No, that’s not what that it is saying.

It is saying that worse candidates get jobs over better candidates because there is an artificial minority quota that must be achieved.

I helped fill a PhD position in Germany, it took 6 months to fill, because the first 19 properly qualified candidates were men. The 20th was a women, their qualifications were significantly worse than most men, but she got the job because of the quotas set by the German research foundation.

I never helped with filling a position again and this was one of the contributing factors for my decision against staying in academia.

It is "what that is saying"(!).

It is another story whether handling the formalities of hiring for German universities is easy. It is not.

You assume in the first scenario that B is worse off than A. Simply being a member of a group does not guarantee its benefits. There are very well to do B's, and A's who has their own unique disadvantages.

At a more abstract level, it is dehumanizing, by way of eliminating individual characteristics and treating all people of a group by some imaginary group identity.

So this guy wrote an opinion piece which some people found ot be controversial. The essay got retracted and the editors suspended. This reminds me of what happened after that Cotton oped in the NYT. Same chain of events.

As with most articles on controversial topics, it's not just what it says but that it might not fairly or at all represent the counter argument. I won't get into this specific debate, both because I'm not an expert and don't want to encourage a tangent.

That said, removing an article for not encompassing the whole conversation isn't a good thing.

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