There is a conflation in the idea behind this comment that drives me crazy. This version of equity based on race is using race as a proxy for outcomes in life that are actually based on a wide variety of factors. Equality based on race is treating peoples race as equal.

The idea that we care about equity is important, but using race as a proxy means we need to care especially about the proxy and making sure the proxy is representative of the outcomes and how the inputs are effecting the outputs. And, if we're being honest, it's kind of an arbitrary proxy beyond the correlation.

We are already seeing huge problems here with men vs women using gender as a proxy for outcomes, where we've basically flip-flopped graduation rates, but since it's a lagging indicator, we've really gotten ourselves into a pickle where we are creating an equity problem while trying to solve an equity problem, because we're so focused on outputs throughout every stage of the life process that we're missing a massive shift in the inputs (like who we're graduating).

Equality is important. Equity is important. They are different things, that should have different attention. Equality uses identity directly. Equity uses identity as a proxy for outcomes. We need to be very careful when we focus too much on one over the other.

To people downvoting the above comment - could you explain your reasons? You may feel all arguments have already been said on this issue but the situation is different today. And especially young people, whether white or colored, feel they have more bleak future in front of them than the previous generations and basically refuse to reproduce globally. In this light, it's worth having this discussion again because it is not the same.

Of course it was typed by a secretary. At a computer company I worked at starting in the mid 1980s it was not unheard of for some execs to have their admins print out emails for them and type in the handwritten responses. This was an internal-only system. No external email.

> It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.

This was indeed standard until colour laser printers became cheap (and physically printing letters became less common), well into the 2000s.

That is a REALLY nice typewriter; wow.

Wow, TIL.

Or his secretary would have :-)

I don't think that necessarily follows. For example, if 20% of some minority are qualified and without quotas only 5% would be hired, then a quota requiring hiring 10% wouldn't result in unqualified candidates.

That being said, I haven't heard virtually any advocates of DEI calling for quotas and they don't seem to be common at all.

> By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas.

What? By pulling from a larger pool of candidates, you’re more likely to get someone more skilled.

> E.g. how does this argument account for the data we have that someone with black sounding name will get less opportunity than someone with a white sounding name and an identical resume?

You're referring to a decades-old study that failed to replicate:

https://datacolada.org/51

(This is extremely common in social sciences.)

https://thefederalist.com/2018/12/07/thomas-sowell-explains-...

It still has to do with economic circumstance, but here, according to Sowell it's about the cost of employing empirical discrimination (judging each specific case through complete knowledge of the individual) instead of a proxy for empirical discrimination (like likelihoods based on a non-arbitrary characteristic such as income or neighborhood).

The solutions that follow from that conclusion are to find ways to make empiricism less costly, or to change the stereotype (such as people from a poor neighborhood are likely to be a bad risk for a loan).

Systemic racism tends to apply so much economic drag to the system that any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand. Apartheid in South Africa was systemic racism, and businesses were violating those laws long before they were abolished just out of profit-motive. It became obvious and common-sense for the system to be ended. Thomas Sowell, in that same work, points out that Type II discrimination (discrimination based on arbitrary characteristics like race, ethnicity, belief... etc.) always ends up being economically unfeasible.

> However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with my own culture.

For this to be a major factor you'd need some explanation for the over-representation of Asian Americans in many lucrative fields in the US. Shouldn't they otherwise be seeing a significant negative impact from this?

> I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.

The issue is that the rules are often created without respect to how they impact smaller entities, or are purposely designed to impair them at the behest of larger ones.

A lot of regulatory overhead is reporting requirements. Reports from small entities are typically going into a database never to be read by anyone ever. But you still have to spend time filing them, and then they'll stick you for filing fees even though you're just uploading 2kB of text to a website, and the filing fees are the same whether you're a sole proprietorship or Walmart.

The rules are often completely nuts, e.g. you can be ineligible to collect unemployment if you were self-employed but you're still legally required to pay for the unemployment insurance coverage. Some states have paid leave policies that assume every employer is a bureaucracy large enough to absorb the cost of hiring a temporary employee while concurrently paying the one on leave.

There are also tons of rules that are simple enough to comply with if you know about them, but with no reason to expect them to exist and a book of regulations which is thousands of pages long and full of rules that don't apply to you, the first time you find out can be when you get a fine or somebody files a lawsuit. In many cases these will be some kind of reporting or registration requirement that exists for no good reason, but exists nevertheless, e.g. did you remember to register a DMCA agent, or list your physical mailing address when you sent that email? These things aren't actually protecting anybody, they're just a trap for the unwary.

Access to capital is hardly the reason why it's hard to start a business. I know two first-generation immigrants who started a landscaping business with a used pickup truck and a few tools. They reinvested their earnings in the business and now run multiple crews servicing properties all over the area. So it's not a unicorn tech startup but they seem to be doing pretty well. Anyone willing to work hard can accomplish something like this, no talent required.

> Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.

Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without having to pay a ton for commercial real estate (i.e. capital)? Nope, zoning violation. But surely if you rent a commercial shop for your restaurant then you can then live there instead of having to maintain two separate pieces of property and a car to commute between them? Nope, sorry, the commercial unit isn't zoned for residential. Also, you'll have to outbid Starbucks and McDonalds for the site because there is only a small area of land zoned for commercial use and it's already full with nowhere empty zoned to add more.

Now that you've put yourself in debt for real estate you're not allowed to live at and opened a business with ~4% net margins, your customers expect to pay with credit cards and the law allows that racket to take ~3% of your total revenue.

To make this work at all you're going to have to do enough volume that you'll end up hiring people. Congrats, you now get to do Business Taxes. This isn't the thing where you file a 1040 which is just copying some numbers from a sheet you got from your employer, it's the thing where you have to calculate those numbers for other people and also keep track of every dollar you spend on every chair, kilowatt hour and jar of tomato sauce so the government can take half your earnings instead of the three quarters or more you lose if you're bad at math or forget to deduct something big. But don't be bad at math the other way either or then you go to jail.

Now that you're almost making enough money to be able to eat at your own restaurant, the power to your stove goes out and shuts down your whole operation. You track it down to a defective splice put in by the licensed electrician who wired the place before you bought it. You're not allowed to fix this because you're not licensed as an electrician. You're also not able to get licensed because it's both prohibitively expensive for someone who only does occasional electrical work and requires you to do a multi-year apprenticeship even if you could pass every test to get the license. So you either have to wait a week for someone with a license to have time for you even though the actual fix is only going to take five minutes, or pay through the nose for emergency service, or break the law and do it yourself.

I could go on. The reason "access to capital" is such a problem is that the regulations make everything so expensive, and most of the regulations are a result of regulators being captured by the incumbents.

> And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.

Racial discrimination has been illegal for quite some time. When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases. That doesn't necessitate casting aspersions in cases where there isn't any evidence of that, just because the economic disparity tends to create an outcome disparity even when the entity isn't doing anything racist.

> One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.

Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?

> In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.

"My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.

It's rather ironic since we know that women, poc, and more often face a lot of professional resistance, and therefore have to be better than average to succeed.

Which means when you come across a black or female professional who has risen, it means they actually are much more likely to be MORE talented than the average white man.

In other words, this notion of "diversity hires" is not logical. It barely makes sense.

Of course, that's the reality of it - fairness is iterative and reactive. My questions are:

- Do you think DEI was the right path forward? Did it achieve its goals? If not was that because of counter currents or something else?

- If and when we have "perfect DEI" will we declare the world a fair place? If not, what comes next?

GPs comment is a perfect example of GPs comment. The burden of proof is on the person trying to make a point. They gave no arguments or evidence in their favor. I lay out a point that shows they have no ground to stand on.

Do you have a citation for that? I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, or that employers couldn't do better with writing job postings. But I've found that a lot of corporate training content is total BS, often based on a single low-quality study that was never reproduced. When the results seem "truthy", people tend to believe without being sufficiently critical.

That sounds like a sexist stereotype to me. Men and women are the same in all the ways that matter, except for the small percentage of areas where we forget that and admit they act differently because it gives us an excuse to treat women better? Please.

With respect to education, I'm not attached to SAT scores. Pick any non racial metric of merit, and I'm OK with it. Income is fine, not a protected clause. Random is fine too. Just don't promote or penalize people based on race.

With respect to jobs, if you agree the most qualified person should get it, we are similarly aligned.

If you agree with all that, we are good, not matter what it is called.

I just call it non discrimination.

> the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people

There is no opportunity pipeline for white people.

There is an opportunity pipeline for a small number of well connected, wealthy people who can get their kids into elite prep schools starting from kindergarten.

It's not open to working class white people.

Edit: that doesn't mean no working class white person can succeed. Just that the prep school, elite university, big corporation (or startup founder) "pipeline" - which certainly does exist - is for wealthy people.

I guess we don't agree what DEI is. I'm against different criteria for people based on race. This is most apparent in school admissions and affirmative action.

I think it is a clear violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to have dual standards based on race.

Also, I don't appreciate you blatant racism putting all white people into a single stereotype, not do I think it is accurate

That didn't work very well for the folks that tried that defense in the Nuremberg trials.

If the agenda is to commit crimes and destroy the constitution I would have expected people to be a bit more patriotic.

Not everyone should be treated equally, because not everyone behaves the same. Everyone should get the same opportunity to excel or fail, but you shouldn't treat excellence the same as failure or mediocrity.

Talking about how to encourage more excellence... now that's an interesting conversation.

> Of course, being good at passing tests doesn't mean one will be good at other things, in much the same way that one can be good at Leetcode problems but not good at building and maintaining large scale software systems in a large corporate environment. Still, it remains a 'credible' example of 'how to do meritocracy right', [...]

It's important not to forget Goodhart's law in this context: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Unless the tested skill is wholly and directly applicable to the position you're testing for, the results will still be unfairly skewed towards those with more resources - they can afford more time to study for this specific test, and more importantly they have the resources to buy specialized learning material as well as tutoring.

Of course that's not to say that merit doesn't factor into the results at all, but it does mean that even examples of 'how to do meritocracy right' show that merit is never the only thing that matters.

> White children who don’t have daddy big bucks backing them (e.g. 90+ percent of them) are left out of important programs, less likely to be chosen for university admission and job placement, etc.

There's a lot of anti-DEI folks who are furious at what they believe DEI is.

First generation college students, veterans, disabled people, including white ones, benefit from DEI programs. Our Vice President benefitted from Yale's Yellow Ribbon program as a veteran! He's a DEI admit!

> White children who don’t have daddy big bucks backing them (e.g. 90+ percent of them) are left out of important programs, less likely to be chosen for university admission and job placement, etc.

None of this is true, which really problematizes your entire manifesto: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-racial-wealth-gap-fin...

Little Rock Nine is 68 years ago. Several of those screaming women are still alive. It's really not that long ago.

But it's very telling that you keep phrasing it as 'punishment'. The problem when you truly fuck over people for many generations, is that it takes generations to make up for it. Not to punish, but to actually give the children and children's children of the victims a fair chance. Especially in such a hard and competitive society as the American one, where your familys wealth is so indicative of how well you will do.

> The book “the coddling of the American mind” should be a must read for anyone who takes the societal problem of DEI hysteria seriously.

Hey, look at that, it's an If Books Could Kill alum!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-am...

The problem with your argument is that's not actually what advocates of DEI actually believe.

Economic inequality is part of DEI so there's no reason why people without "daddy big bucks" backing them would be left out.

In fact, most advocates of DEI want UNIVERSAL social welfare programs. The only reason that the advocate for more targeted programs is because otherwise conservatives start screaming about socialism.

The reason you are likely to get downvoted is because you are substituting personal attacks and rhetoric ("coddling", "hysteria", etc.) for actually engaging with the issues.

I think they are: the sociological definition of a minority is a member of a class which is socially disadvantaged (sociologists talk about women as minorities for this reason) and a sociological "-ism" (racism, sexism) is policy or decisions which disadvantage the socially disadvantaged.

Presuming that position, it's understandable that they further believe that not favoring the disadvantaged is continuing the status quo, which is a disadvantage to the already-disadvantaged, hence the sociological "-ism".