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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

Well, there's at least 2 perspectives here.

If the two people were fired due to race, gender, or even ethical opinion, this reaction is more than appropriate.

If the two people were fired due to breaking established rules and processes, exfiltrating files or similar — this can very well backfire on minorities. It indirectly creates another hurdle to hiring a minority member if the company needs to consider that they can't viably fire them for breaking rules.

I'm unaware of good public information supporting either perspective. And both the ex-employees and Google may be restricted from publishing sensitive information to support their cause. I'm not sure how to form an informed opinion on this, honestly.

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The idea of something “backfiring on minorities” as an entire group is part of the problem here. The fact that there was a backlash after someone was fired can’t be used as a justification for not hiring other people whose only relationship to the original person is “also some kind of minority”.

Of course it's part of the problem. But it's also a somewhat unavoidable side effect of supporting minorities.

In a very weird way, anti-discriminative behaviour itself needs to be discriminative, because it needs to support minorities. And rightfully so, there needs to be a positive bias for minorities who were historically disenfranchised. Otherwise the historical disadvantage will propagate itself further. But then when you look at firings like this, it becomes very hard to distinguish whether it's discrimination or rightful. These two are members of minority groups. Their firing is, rightfully, examined to fine detail. But that same magnification lens has that chilling effect for the decision of hiring minority members.

It's really a have-your-cake-and-eat-it problem. It f_cking sucks. And I don't know how to do better. I absolutely think we need affirmative action to relieve historic deficits, but at the same time this affirmative support is in itself discriminatory and can have negative effects. What to do? :(

You know who is at the end disadvantaged by affirmative action? Minorities / women.

Even if a PoC / woman is actually talented, people will subconsciously perceive them as diversity hires.

There were plenty of instances of people telling on this forum that they don't want to be seen as diversity person, but actual engineer.

I think we've officially reached the point where you can stomp lumping all women together. Some companies are now prioritizing interns and junior devs from HBCUs, because they ended up with a new problem where the overwhelming majority of non-male hires for those roles were Asian.

>there needs to be a positive bias for minorities who were historically disenfranchised

>I absolutely think we need affirmative action to relieve historic deficits, but at the same time this affirmative support is in itself discriminatory and can have negative effects. What to do?

Quit affirmative action at anything above the high school level and poor resources into fixing the issues before high school. Personally I reject the framing that we need it and fully agree with you about the negative effects. The long term effects of people "being given" jobs or school placement I think are more negative than positive and you are seeing that. The Irish, Italian, Jews, Chinese, and Koreans were all able to get to parity or better without affirmative action.

> The Irish, Italian, Jews, Chinese, and Koreans were all able to get to parity or better without affirmative action.

This of course assumes that genetic (racial) differences in intellectual (and physical, for that matter) ability do not exist. This has never been proven to be the case [1], and never will.

We all know dog breeds have different intellectual and physical characteristics. Why are humans supposedly immune from this? Because it is a morbid reality that throws a wrench in the "all men are created equal" liberal lie.

This is not me advocating for gross eugenics or even discrimination. I just want to point out something frequently missing from these conversations.

"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." – Aristotle

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Biologist with a background in genetics here- there is no compelling evidence for statistically valid differences in measured intelligence on a racial genotypic basis. Most attempts to sort races by intelligence (e.g. The Bell Curve) end up being poorly designed junk science.

Dr. Adam Rutherford is a great pop science presence for debunking, or at the very least, addressing the claims that intelligence tracks with race on a genetic basis if you're truly interested in this topic.

https://youtu.be/3F0YSyeQavU

I agree with some of Taleb's critiques of IQ as a whole, and am quite interested in this topic. I will check out Dr. Rutherford's talk, thanks!

It’s fascinating that you’ve so casually compared people to dogs.

Out of curiosity, of the groups of people that are impacted by affirmative action, which groups remind you of which breeds and why? For example, are women border collies? Or some other breed?

Every day people have innocuous conversations such as "Ohhh, look at how cute that Border Collie is. I heard they're herding dogs and are very intelligent. I wish my Lab was half as intelligent as those Border Collies..."

When it comes to humans, it's just "purely socioeconomic factors" causing intelligence differences between races. The alternative is simply too morbid for our "nice" liberal society to accept.

I would argue denial of reality always causes more suffering than it purportedly "prevents."

I understand that it might be difficult for nice liberal society to accept that dogs and people differ identically.

Considering that it appears as though you’ve accepted this concept as being true, can you please give me an example of an actual category of people that you feel is analogous to a category of dog? I don’t see how that would be difficult.

I understand your desire to make the point about things that may be hard for squares to swallow, but what exactly is this truth that you’re privy to? So far this point seems a bit like gesticulating without actually committing enough to make a statement of substance.

BTW your own linked source, the Wikipedia article states clearly:

"The current scientific consensus is that there is no evidence for a genetic component behind IQ differences between racial groups."

Yes, it's the biggest lie of the 21st century. Every scientist that does not agree with the "consensus" on the genetic-IQ link is almost always fired and ostracized from academia.

Even James Watson saw the same fate.

You believe there's a conspiracy against racists and promotion of racist ideas in science?

Yeah, I don't know what the answer is. It feels like any attempt to design a solution ends up having to work around racism or, as you said in another comment, having to "take the devil's (racist's) advocate position". And sometimes the racism even takes the form of someone playing devil's advocate, in an honest attempt to make sure the solution is "realistic", but actually advancing the racists' position for them. The goal ultimately has to be to get to a place where we never have to think about what the racists will do because they don't have power any more.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Oh, how far we have strayed.

Legally, no. From a practical standpoint, people do whatever they think they can get away with.

We have to resort to legal solutions because the sad truth is that you can't at all trust entire demographics to alter or even reflect on their ethical stance.

I mean, there are enough people on this very board whose response to Black diversity initiatives in particular, is that they're too low IQ on average and therefore will be disruptive to team productivity and cohesion, despite people like Naseem Taleb going after IQ measurements.

Can you find any examples of HN comments that have suggested Black people are too low IQ on average and will be disruptive? I really doubt such a thing exists.

Reasonably, no. It's not a reasonable conclusion to make. Most people are minorities.

In America? Are we cutting up the European-American demographic by gender and sexuality, cause that'd be the most immediate way for me to grasp this idea?

Gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, “race” (however you define it), “caste” (however you define it), disabilities (however you define them, tbh, though it generally makes more sense than “race” or “caste”)… Either I just have a really skewed social circle, or most people are minorities in at least one category.

I don’t think this is an example of “can’t viably be fired”. They don’t seem to be saying Google or its employees are banned from the conference; they just don’t want Google’s money. (And Gebru used to be on the executive committee for this conference, so it can’t be a surprise to Google that they might be on her side.)

I wish you were right, but IMHO you need to take the devil's (racist's) advocate position here. Even an average not-really-racist but-slightly-prejudiced ("non-woke") HR manager can look at this and go "oh, Google got f_cked so hard for firing these two minority members... I really don't want to possibly end up in that situation"... and, even if that's certainly discriminatory thinking, it's not "wrong" on the pure logical level. And even worse, it's unlikely to be noticed and very hard to fight. The decision not to hire someone won't come with an explainer why, and proving discriminatory practice there is quite hard.

... and the HR manager may even do this subconsciously! In that case noone is even aware discrimination is happening. (Which is why blanking applications is so important!)

I have no doubt that there are bad consequences to the attitude that anything which happens to anyone is about their race. I just don't think that this particular happening is an example.

I'm not following your second perspective.

If I read you comment correctly, your second perspective would be "Gebru and Mitchell were fired with good cause, but people are rushing to their defense only because they are members of a minority".

If that's what you meant, I would counterargue: I haven't seen anything in this saga that implies anything of the sort. Simplified, it is my understanding that people either defend the firing claiming that Gebru and Mitchell acted in bad faith or object to it claiming that their only fault was speaking the truth back to Google (who hired them to do so).

It is, unfortunately, a pretty common thing in our society to have rules that are selectively enforced. How often did the NYPD stop-and-frisk a trader walking down Wall Street?

In that case, the pressure isn't so much "don't hire minorities" as "don't be more stringent about enforcing your established rules and processes on certain groups of people," which is a great pressure.

Gebru has spoken publicly about the allegation that she broke processes. See this thread: https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335017526112227329

Notably, the official description of the process includes the sentence, "There is no such thing as the perfect policy. Fortunately Googlers like to do the right thing. Please do that here—read the policy and do what makes sense."

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