Even if some critics of AA are committing that fallacy, debunking a weaker argument when a stronger argument exists is ineffective.

The implicit argument is that AA's largest challenge is a coordination problem. It's not. It's a clash in values and a fight over zero-sum rewards.

> Do you disagree that some critics of AA are committing that fallacy?

This is is such a weird non-argument dressed as some gotcha. "Some critics of x are committing y fallacy" is probably universally correct statement. It is so devoid of any meaning that this particular type of discourse has not only a name, but a mascot too.

That feels more like a cop-out than a legitimate criticism of a fallacy.

If the author could propose an affirmative action program that didn’t have that “single component” at the core of how it operates then I’d be more interested in the argument, but as-is it just feels like an attempt to forcefully ignore valid criticisms.

If what skibidithink says is true, doesn't it mean that it's not a fallacy at all? And that the failure he identifies does undermine the entire thing?

Either way, seems like a very narrow distinction you are drawing when he is making the meatier claim that affirmative action is fundamentally flawed.

>Indeed, I'm sure the author would agree that part of the comprehensive solution is to increase the amount of university admission slots.

A large part of the value of elite education is its scarcity, and adding more slots dilutes that value.

I certainly claim that almost nobody "commits" that "fallacy" and that it is not a remotely notable viewpoint in the civic discourse of any country I know about.

No doubt in a world of 8 billion people, there exists someone, somewhere, who has for some reason voiced the belief described - i.e. that if institutions really heavily based their selection of applicants on skin color rather than merit, that would be good, but that because in reality institutions have only been convinced to somewhat compromise on merit-based selection in favour of skin-color-based selection, it's bad, and should thus be abandoned completely in favour of total meritocracy. But that belief would really be rather odd, and I have never seen it expressed even once in my entire life.

Nor am I convinced, despite its oddness, that it is properly considered to contain a fallacy! After all, sometimes it really is the case, for various reasons, that some endeavour is only worth doing if total success can be achieved, and not worth the downsides if you can only succeed partially. No doubt if someone really held the allegedly fallacious view described, they would believe affirmative action is exactly such an endeavour and be able to explain why!

It's only positive sum if they grew because of affirmative action. And if affirmative action caused net friction, it'd be a Moloch.

University admission is arguably bad for society.

(See Caplan's Case Against Education.)

CA Prop 209 is a good natural experiment: https://reappropriate.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Total-UC...

Yeah, they are assuming that different actors are responsible for those different links, probably with different incentives. And it is also a resource allocation problem.

You are stawmanning. You are attempting to say what they think meritocracy is - and your basing your thoughts on your own stereotypes.

> You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks

That is not meritocracy.

> It depends, there were a lot of studies that showed prejudice and bias in the meritocratic process.

A meritocratic process by definition is not prejudiced or biased. There were studies that claimed to show processes to not actually be meritocratic. In my experience, these findings either haven't reproduced or don't appropriately account for confounders; and if they held up they would be pointing at things that are already illegal (and irrational).

> It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process

What? How do you come to the conclusion that "we" thought any such thing? The term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy) was coined in the 50s for socialist criticism invoking satire. The discourse had nothing to do with race and was about disputing how merit is measured, not about supposed prejudices (except perhaps class privilege). Nor did coaches, managers etc. imagine any inferiority on the part of black athletes in regards to physical prowess. Segregation was to keep the peace; see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_color_line :

> Before the 1860s Civil War, black players participated in the highest levels of baseball.[2] During the war, baseball rose to prominence as a way to bring soldiers from various regions of the country together. In the aftermath of the war, baseball became a tool for national reconciliation; due to the racial issues involved in the war, baseball's unifying potential was mainly pursued among white Americans.[3]

Anyway,

> You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect.

This time lapse isn't required for a moral judgment, however.

> Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.

An employer, or a college admissions officer, cannot provide what was missing from someone's "environment" during the formative years, and should not be expected to try; nor ought they shoulder the risk of anyone's "full potential" being absent. Everyone might as well hire randomly from the general population at that point.

And many against affirmative action will agree that there have been massive historical injustices for certain demographics that have lingering effects. The difference between these two sides is which value they prioritize.

Singapore does the whole "race based quotas for everything" and they have by many metrics, the best standard of living in the entire world.

It turns out that the government forcing racial integration actually works! Being a "quota ridden society" would be good for America.

>AA is meant to correct historical instances of this which snowball into familial / generational wealth and (most difficult to diffuse) social capital that was distributed unfairly.

If that was the case it would be based on family wealth/income.

AA doesn't prevent the rich from buying admissions. It redistributes slots from middle and lower class folks with the wrong ethnicity.

The problem in practice is that these programs don’t actually select for diverse ideas, they select for demographic traits like gender or ethnic background.

If the team uses relational databases but someone shows up to an interview with a strongly held belief that NoSQL is the way to go, they’re likely to be rejected because their ideas don’t match the team’s. Same if the team strongly believes in some version of agile but a person they interview doesn’t like agile. Diversity programs in practice never even attempt to push diversity of ideas, they ignore all of that and focus on things like gender and ethnic background.

This feels like a dangerous opinion to voice, but the workplace affirmative action programs I’ve seen in practice have been very poor in their implementation. At my last workplace that instituted diversity targets, HR would just start rejecting hires if they thought it would skew the diversity numbers in the wrong way. So you’d hit a wall where the only candidates you were allowed to hire couldn’t be, for example, men or of Asian descent or some other demographic trait they thought was over-represented. None of this improved diversity of ideas, it became a game to find a person whose ideas matched the team who also happened to have the right gender or skin color to keep our diversity statistics going in the direction HR demanded.