This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Your link admits:
So WindeningGyre's suggestion of selection bias seems very plausible to me. (Another possibility: the most prestigious companies hire from elite schools, so they get employees who are already woke-aligned, and expect/implement these trainings). I'm not sure about the noise aspect, since in at least some cases there's both a large effect size and sample size (although maybe the effect size increases the chance of selection bias). For example:
That seems nearly impossible to generate from noise mining, but also too large to just be a result of having more women in leadership.
Some others seem to have more believable effect sizes. E.g.
2% more cash flow seems believable to me, and 3,000 companies is probably enough data that it isn't noise (although they could always have checked very many outcomes).
However, I think there are some plausible explanations that are at least somewhat favorable to "DEI."
I would not expect, a priori, interviewers and other people involved in the hiring process to be doing a particularly good job. As described in https://youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA&ab_channel=Veritasium, interviewers don't have fast feedback and may be worse at predicting performance than a simple algorithm. Companies may also face principal-agent problems, where mid-level employees over-hire to make their own team seem more important. And individuals may very well be biased, even if the effect size for the whole market is much smaller than activists claim. So it wouldn't be particularly difficult to improve upon that.
Whether DEI actually does so depends on what it actually consists of. Just saying "hire more blacks and women no matter what" could maybe help if the company in question does engage in outright discrimination (or to be specific, its employees do), since it would correct a legitimately poor practice. More likely, a company might implement changes like having a longer interview process, having more people interview candidates, making the questions and the acceptable answers more consistent, etc. This would correct for some amount of individual bias, but would also improving the hiring pipeline more generally (something James Damore pointed out in his infamous memo). I know that many tech companies have extensive hiring processes for this reason; whether it does anything to increase female or minority representation I can only speculate.
More options
Context Copy link