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Comment by bArray | Hacker News Reader

> So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era?

We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse. It's the same as wanting the best doctor, or the best pilot.

The UK team for Olympic 100m is majority non-white. I have no doubt that these are amongst the fastest people in the world. Based on DEI standards, should we pick people who are shown slower just to make a more colourful team?

> Calling BS on this, they're not going to simply state "DEI" as a reason.

You can call BS all you like, the application literally stated it so. The threshold for funding was met, but was rejected on the basis.

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> We should want the best astronauts, not the most diverse

Considering color or religion doesn't have any impact on the ability of someone to be a "best astronaut", if your groups isn't diverse, it's most likely there is a bias in action.

No, that isn't true at all. Employers can only hire from the pool that exists. If the applicant pool is 90% white dudes, then an unbiased hiring process will result in a very skewed employee demographic. Assuming bias based on differences in statistics is motivated reasoning and should not be entertained.

And why would the applicant pool be 90% white dudes?

> Considering color or religion doesn't have any impact on the ability of someone to be a "best astronaut", if your groups isn't diverse, it's most likely there is a bias in action.

You have 8 blue people and 2 purple people. The blue people and purple people have different colour, different ideology, but are the same in all ways that count.

The astronaut programme opens up and needs 5 people. From 10 people, choose 5. It turns out that there are 252 ways of doing this [1]. At most you could only have 2 purple people selected, when 1 purple person is selected it looks unbiased, but actually the vast majority of cases are when only blue people are represented.

Another way to think about it is this: 8 blue people, 2 purple people. You pick one at random, there is an 8/10 chance you pick blue, 2/10 purple. If you select a purple, for the next pick there is now just a 1/9 chance of picking purple, but an 8/9 chance of picking blue.

[1] https://www.hackmath.net/en/calculator/n-choose-k?n=10&k=5&o...

Funny you'd use "best actor" as an example. What makes the best actor? For a long time there were no leading Asian male actors for example, is that because Asians can't act or because of cultural bias?

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