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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

So you're proposing to push people to speak at conferences who aren't necessarily the most knowledgeable speakers, simply because they have the correct gender or skin color?

This is an extremely bad idea. Firstly, it reduces the value of the conference itself as a means to share the best possible information. Secondly, it lowers the esteem and respect of the speakers by allowing the audience room to question their abilities. Lastly, and most importantly, it allows politics into the selection of speakers, and moves the system further towards a popularity contest from a meritocracy, where people argue for speakers based on increasingly superfluous factors.

These are technical conferences, and you guys need to keep them this way. The selection of speakers need to be done on merit.

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> So you're proposing to push people to speak at conferences who aren't necessarily the most knowledgeable speakers, simply because they have the correct gender or skin color?

On the contrary :

   Conferences are simply showing up the diversity problem    
   in a particularly acute way – we will never fix it by 
   pretending the industry is more evenly distributed than 
   it actually is, and later blaming organisers for it.

Did you read the OP?

I honestly don't understand why you've left this comment, because the OP is arguing against positive discrimination, not for it.

The fallacy behind arguments like this is that when someone says that we're "proposing to push people to speak at conferences who aren't necessarily the most knowledgeable speakers" it is implicitly assumed that it is known how to rank the speakers, and that doing so is easy.

In practice, however, while one can often tell a really bad speaker and a really good speaker apart there are plenty of bordeline cases and the variance is big, so using minority-biased criteria to "break ties" will not necessarily lead to worse speakers on average, as long as these criteria are uncorrelated with actual skills.

(and I'm not sure they are, as the mean quality of a woman-presented talk in conferences I've attended has been consistently higher than the mean man-presented talk)

Indeed. It's more a case of 'we know we collectively have an unfair bias against women, let's try to consciously adjust our bias a bit.'

The fact that a decision process is noisy and imperfect doesn't mean that deliberately adding errors to it won't give worse results.

All it does is give you statistical noise, making it easier to bury your head in the sand.

When you have a 22:1 male to female ratio and a 23:0 white to non-white ratio, it'll take more than a tie-breaker to make it look as diverse as a PBS cartoon.

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