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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Right-Libertarian anti-racism policy.

I’m sure you’ve all seen a lot of awful anti-racism/diversity/etc policies put in place by leftists; every thread here features at least some examples.

That said, I really don’t like racism. It is one of the most disgusting instances of collectivist thinking: judging an individual for the actions of a group of people that ostensibly contains him; in this case people get lumped together by skin color.

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

Monkey's paw curls up one finger: If you could exterminate the human species, there would be no racism anymore. A nasty enough bio-engineered pandemic could maybe do it; or you could get to work on that paperclip maximizer.

Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?

I offer normal incentive bonuses based on performance and hire people smart enough and self interested enough to understand that discrimination not based on merit is suboptimal. Whether this creates a diverse group or not it is besides the point that race would play little role in hiring, especially if I mercilessly culled the poor performing managers.

Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?

I don't think you can use rules to determine a lack of discrimination unless you also have some metric by which you decide what a "no discrimination" state looks like. There are efforts to do this, of course, one notable example being the implicit bias test. But humans have complicated subconscious reasoning for what they do, and if we place any amount of trust in each other, then we're essentially demeaning others by saying their word isn't strong enough.

Which is not necessarily a problem. We know people can misremember or lie. But strong evidence to contradict them is probably very lacking in this case.

What are your thoughts on contingent-racism: judging people exclusively on their individual capability (obviously this isn't really what nazis or even republicans are doing), and then ending up with a class / friend group / group of employees that's smething vaguely like 33% jewish, 33% asian, 20% white and 20% indian/middle eastern (0% black/hispanic)? Is this racism? Would it be racism to say this has something to do with genes? Because "no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc" would do that (and already has to significant extents) in those places.

You see, I view all the HBD stuff as a motte and bailey thing. Obviously there might be some population level differences, but then still, one has a moral duty not to draw Bayesian inferences out of these statistics and instead evaluate every person on their own merits, disregarding traits like race, nationality or gender. As long as you do that any proportion you get is fine. That said, obsessing over genes or IQ differences or whatever is always sus. It’s a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to provide flimsy justifications for racist practices. I don’t care whether or not Blacks have better or worse IQ than Whites on average — I’m dealing with people, not with averages.

That said, obsessing over genes or IQ differences or whatever is always sus. It’s a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to provide flimsy justifications for racist practices

why? Say you own an polygenic testing / embryo selection company that could make anyone significantly smarter by 'obsessing over genes or iq differences'. that sounds interesting.

one has a moral duty not to draw Bayesian inferences out of these statistics and instead evaluate every person on their own merits, disregarding traits like race, nationality or gender

Not that it does, the individual approach is much more practical as seen above. But if "drawing bayesian inferences" or "evaluating groups on merits" was a more efficient way to promote total intelligence or capability - wouldn't that be better than 'measuring every individual', but doing so poorly?

If you work on gene modification then of course it’s your job to do that, I for one can only commend this valuable line of work

I am merely saying that it’a morally bankrupt to apply anything other than the individual approach when dealing with individuals, even if it is not always practical to do so

It’s a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to provide flimsy justifications for racist practices.

Close. It's a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to refute flimsy justifications for racist practices.

I don’t care whether or not Blacks have better or worse IQ than Whites on average — I’m dealing with people, not with averages.

Which is commendable, but only as long as you're actually dealing with people, not averages. When one is collecting statistics about racial outcomes, averages matter. If one is concluding racist discrimination from unequal outcomes while denying alternate explanations of average differences, they're likely wrong, and HBD might explain the mistake, so bringing it up corrects a mistake. HBD is only one of several possible confounders, mind, but if you actually want to make sure you're right, you need to consider all the ways you could be wrong.

And if one falsely concludes one racial group is discriminated against, and installs practices like, for example, Affirmative Action quotas while getting the target number wrong due to failing to consider average differences, that is racial discrimination, and that's why HBD can be important to prevent racial discrimination.

(And to be clear, racial discrimination is still a possibility, but you can't know that from just the statistics. You need to either ignore racial outcome statistics, or, among other confounders, consider HBD. Only when you're eliminated all possible confounders (or use an entirely differend method) you can actually conclude discrimination.)

You have a point, I’ll concede you that, but..

Close. It's a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to refute flimsy justifications for racist practices.

There are many ways to argue against affirmative action and I think it’s best to focus on the ones that don’t sound like a scientific references section to mein kampf. I guess by now it should be pretty evident that shilling for HBD ain’t going to win you the hearts and minds of normal people.

Therefore I think the practice of using HBD to refute affirmative action presumptions should also be considered thoroughly uninteresting.

It's true that with an unsympathetic audience you would want to lead with other arguments. But here on The Motte, we should be more concerned with finding the truth more than convincing the audience.

And a true argument being dismissed without consideration of the facts, worse, dismissing the person who brought it up, is an unacceptable state of being. At least here, we can do better than that.

Especially as this is a meta discussion - we're not arguing whether "HBD is true", but what it and discussing it implies. And for what it's worth, I seem to have convinced my audience - you. Your previous comment suggested that bringing up HBD implies bad motivations - you going back on that is a success.

That said, obsessing over genes or IQ differences or whatever is always sus. It’s a thoroughly uninteresting topic, unless when used to provide flimsy justifications for racist practices.

You can call it "uninteresting" all you like but it's actually very important. It is necessary to bring up genetic differences in IQ because there is a large group of people who like to go around claiming that any differences in representation are necessarily the result of discrimination. The only way to argue against this claim is to have a solid understanding of genetic differences.

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

I dedicate my wealth to the advancement of Whites, who have shown themselves now and historically to be the group with the smallest outgroup bias; I myself probably can't solve racism, but I know that if White people run the world eventually it'll happen, even if they destroy themselves in the process. Help Whites network, support White entrepreneurs, donate and campaign for pro-White Republicans, etc.

Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?

In the short term, I embrace a racist outlook to correct for past mistakes -- I prioritize the hiring and advancement of Whites, who on average demonstrate significantly less racial bias than non-Whites, and I trust that in a few decades these White saviors will have significantly decreased the racial bias on display.

Okay, this is a very well done parody, but you are failing to make your point clearly and speak plainly. Do not test Poe's Law because you think it's clever.

My point is very clear when you realize I am being sincere, this is not parody. I am a genuine White supremacist, but I also unironically believe the evidence points strongly toward Whites on the whole being the least racist. While reducing racism isn't a goal of mine, nevertheless I honestly assert Whites in charge will produce a less racist society.

Wait, you prioritize the hiring and advancement of whites because whites have decreased racial bias? Is this itself not racial bias in its clearest form?

I live in Japan, and am more or less white, and regularly experience what is usually called racism but is more probably often a mix of cultural biases and in-group preference based on language and shared values (but undeniably too has a factor based on shaky, pseudoscientific views of race). I'm also from the deep South of the US. So it's always interesting to me to read/hear people expressing what are baldly racist views and rationalizing them.

Do...do you have a source for that, or are you just trolling?

A source for what, racial outgroup sentiments? Whites being less racist than non-Whites? PEW and your eyes are good sources for those; alone among nations have white-led ones embraced immigration policies that will lead to them becoming minorities in their own homelands, Whites show less race-consciousness than other races, and the infamous polling indicating Whites, both liberal and conservative, have less in-group preference than non-Whites

All evidence points toward the White race being a sort of enlightened species, and one best suited to elevating the rest. If we are to solve racism, it can only be through White supremacy.

Wait, you prioritize the hiring and advancement of whites because whites have decreased racial bias? Is this itself not racial bias in its clearest form?

I contribute a small amount of racism to have a disproportionately anti-racist impact down the line. This is the same thinking as affirmative action, a widely recognized and popular form of correcting racial imbalances. I, however, support affirmative action for Whites, because when Whites are in power they are demonstrably less racist than everyone else, even to their own detriment.

Edit: I meant this for @netstack whoops

Edit2: I somehow combined two replies into one. Uh, the second part is for @george_e_hale. weird.

They're poking fun at the study showing that white liberals have negative in-group bias which on average means whites compared to other races have the lowest in-group bias (even non-liberal whites have lower in-group bias compared to other races on average). So preferentially hiring from whites compared to other races means the business will have less in-group racial bias than some other demographic mix, making it better from a lessening racism, in-group bias perspective.

Irony is often lost on me, thx.

Do...do you have a source for that, or are you just trolling?

LARPing the White Man’s Burden strikes me as a profoundly unsound strategy to reduce racism in any sense.

I find it pretty hard to believe that you haven't seen this.

I have, and I don't think "feeling thermometers" are good enough evidence for a very, very strong claim.

This is obviously going to be very socially determined. The minorities are both 'newer' to american/progressive culture and are guided to progressive versions of "ingroup bias" (because they're oppressed so they need it!). A thousand years ago - well, none of the ways we phrase these things would make any sense in "surveys" a thousand years ago, but you'd probably be hard-pressed to find anyone supporting racial equal rights.

Progressive minorities (on social media at least) are some of the most viciously racist (against whites) people you’ll find today. I doubt more time to soak in progressivism will solve that.

Progressive minorities (on social media at least) are some of the most viciously racist (against whites) people you’ll find today. I doubt more time to soak in progressivism will solve that.

yes, that you'll find today, and specifically that you will find today in america. Five hundred years ago, they were in africa killing each other, and we were in europe killing each other. A rural african of any stripe is much more "racist" than an american black or american white.

The survey questions were literally using this thermometer widget to answer these among other questions in a random order:

  • How would you rate blacks?
  • How would you rate whites?
  • How would you rate Hispanics?
  • How would you rate Asians?

Then cross referenced against other answers about the survey takers demographics. "On a scale of warm-or-favorable to cold-or-unfavorable how do you feel about $race" is the kind of thing you could ask someone from 1022 as easily as 2022.

I'm not sure an african in 1022 familiar with the 'number rating' instrument, or give coherent answers to it. And their answers would be totally incomparable to ours - what if 5 is "they seem fine, we only had a minor blood feud with them ten years ago"?

In the USA in 2022 the vast majority of skin color based discrimination occurs under the guise of so called "affirmative action" programs. These programs pretend to be anti racist but at their core they are just racial discrimination against whites and Asians. So the question becomes, "what is the most effective way to fight affirmative action" and I think the answer is just spreading awareness of the extent of discrimination that goes on, especially in elite universities. Affirmative action already polls as quite unpopular but I find that in my own social circle many less online people are shocked to see the extent of discrimination that is going on. In public school I was fed lies about affirmative action, I was told it never meant picking a less qualified candidate it only meant considering the underrepresented candidate thoroughly or using race as a tie breaker for equally qualified candidates. A quick look at admission statistics disproves these lies quickly. Another pervasive lie is the idea that AA helps underprivileged students but at elite universities the main beneficiaries are wealthy blacks, not kids from the ghetto. I think if this knowledge was more widespread public support would collapse even further and hopefully the supreme court would be pressured to make a strong ruling.

It may even hurt qualified minorities because employers may assume they were recipients of AA

In the USA in 2022 the vast majority of skin color based discrimination occurs under the guise of so called "affirmative action" programs.

Looking at the way policies are de jure defined, of course, but if one starts from the assumption that disparities in outcomes reflect the magnitude of discrimination, you can conclude that there must be a lot of "discrimination dark matter" out there that necessarily more than cancels out any official policies pointing in the other direction. So the direction one would go with this challenge depends on whether one makes that assumption or not.

Literally God of the Gaps, social justice version. Also this is a form of circular reasoning.

Well if you start with false assumptions you can literally prove anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion

but if one starts from the assumption that disparities in outcomes reflect the magnitude of discrimination

One can always prove too much if one starts from false assumptions.

If one starts from that assumption, then one would observe that there are minorities (Jews, some Asians) who are More Likely than whites, yet have suffered more discrimination than them.

This would mean that it has to be a Jewish and partially Asian conspiracy to suppress all the other races, and that any observed historic anti-black discrimination is marginal compared to the discrimination dark matter of the Jews.

Barring a very small minority, people don't start from that assumption. They use the historic treatment of blacks as a rhetorical club, and under no circumstances permit actual science or reason to touch their assumed Original Sin substitute. But it's so stupidly obvious when you add more data points than white American and black American, and look at the relationship between historic oppression and current outcomes, I tend to default to assuming that no one actually starts with that assumption.

I don't think anyone takes that assumption seriously though, they just apply it selectively to professions that their preferred group is underrepresented in. Downthread, people bring up the NFL and NBA, which seem like pretty good examples of desirable jobs that have one race wildly overrepresented. The MLB has a big overrepresentation of Latinos. Marathoning is dominated by East Africans. Physics and mathematics have way more Jewish and Asian-American representation than the general population. Software has more Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans. All of these examples make it seem entirely obvious that there are contingent reasons for differences in representation and that rounding off to "disparity = discrimination" is ridiculous.

The original disparity = discrimination impetus was feminism.

Why aren't there equal ratio of female CEO's?

While the approach isn't sound logically, it is extremely powerful at a memetic level, bonding feminists together in a holy war against their obvious perceived oppression.

It was so succesful with feminism that it was ported into race relations, and gay issues, and now trans movement.

Well, yes, I've said as much before. If you're flexible with the application, or just use this formula:

Group Doing well? Doing badly?
Oppressor: Undeserved Deserved
Oppressed: Deserved Undeserved

You can be quite supremacist in your pursuit of equality.

Define racism. Do you want equal opportunity or equal outcomes?

Equal opportunity

They already did:

judging an individual for the actions of a group of people that ostensibly contains him; in this case people get lumped together by skin color.

Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?

I'm starting from the equality of opportunity assumption, not the Kendi assumptions.

Racism is primarily bad in that it reflects class assumptions made permanent. The problems of the Black bourgeoisie are relatively uninteresting to me, both because they're already more than adequately addressed by other actors and because they're uneconomical. My concern is for Black proles who are stuck in a cycle of generational poverty, unable to break into the middle classes because of racist assumptions they face or a lack of opportunity and connections that a white individual might have. So pro-social-mobility and anti-classist policies are the best way to combat racism, if the same policies benefit the odd white person on the way that's a feature not a bug.

Minimize credentialism, encourage promoting from within and offer training and advancement opportunities to lower level employees, aim to market your product to underserved demographics.

  1. Minimize credentialism to the extent legally possible. 40% of White Americans 25 and older have bachelors degrees, while only 28% of Blacks and 20% of Latinos have completed a Bachelors. College is expensive, and college-tracking is largely a matter of parents/relations guiding you and high school quality. Whenever you make a bachelors a soft or a hard requirement to get a job, you are massively advantaging White (and Asian) applicants over Black and Hispanic applicants. Be willing to use alternative credentialing methods, or thorough skill-based interviews that give everyone a chance whether they spent those years at college or not. Ditto advantaging prestigious colleges over Community College or outlying state school campuses that have better diversity numbers.

  2. One way to substitute for credentialism is allowing entry-level employees to advance to higher level positions based on their work history. You have more information on your current employees than you have on raw outsiders, so you don't have to rely on things like degrees to vouch for intelligence and conscientiousness. Encourage managers to take note of employees who might be capable of taking the next step, offer them training opportunities to advance. Black employees who are smart and capable might be less likely to have had the wherewithal to go to college at 18, but once they're working for you you'll find them just as well, give them the opportunity to grow and they will.

  3. Look for underserved markets to sell your products to. Black people loooove Cadillacs. In the 1930s, Black people saved Cadillac:

General Motors was on the verge of shutting down the division when Nick Dreystadt, German-born service manager at Cadillac, persuaded the company to try promoting its cars to Negroes. “It was company policy not to sell Cadillacs to Negroes,” he said, because it wanted the “prestige” buyer. But affluent white customers were disappearing as the economy sank. Dreystadt knew the car was already doing well among wealthy Negroes, mostly entertainers, boxers, doctors, or realtors, who often had to have a white friend or manager buy the car for them, and persuaded his bosses to actively court the African-American consumer. The company ended up selling enough cars “to make the Cadillac division break even by 1934”…

Affluent Black buyers bought Cadillac cars because they could buy a luxury car (even if they needed a white straw buyer) and drive it around, where they couldn't get into tony neighborhoods or exclusive country clubs at the time. Think about how different demographics interact with your product differently, and how you can serve those demographics in a way your competitors aren't.

I'm not sure there are opportunities as obvious today, but be looking out for them!

College is not expensive, at least not relative to any other major expense, like a car (yet there is much less outrage by pundits and politicians about car debt compared to college debt). It's only expensive if you fail to graduate or you take out $200k of debt for a low-ROI subject at a bottom-ranked school. I don't think poor blacks are at that much of a disadvantage given how much aid there is; I think they are much more disadvantaged by dropping out because of not being academically qualified enough to begin with. With credentialism, companies save money and it's a signal of competence that can be done quicky and indiscriminately . I would like to see this change, but I am not optimistic it will.

Arguably companies could administer aptitude tests to make a similar determinations. This would likely be more expedient and lower cost. To the extent that some jurisdictions prohibit or discourage this promotes the credentialism we see.

Force everyone to work from home, to only interact via text chat, forbid the sharing of pictures, names or any other personal data.

If someone can discern your race purely from the work you hand in, then consider racism impossible to be rid of.

Race blind is now racist for not being anti-racist.

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

The options for anti-woke billionaires are limited. Major tech companies are worth hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars. A billion dollars does not get you far. Trump and Peter Thiel have had no successes at changing anything. Trump appointed Thiel as an advisor and then a year later decided he had no use for him . Politics is still dominated still by lawyers and ivy elites, not CEOs. Billionaires like Elon Musk can help direct sentiment against wokeness but this not the same as policy.

Here is what I would do if I had a billion: create a competitor to Ivy League, but the criteria for admission is a highly g-loaded test correlated with IQ, and there would be no actual school. Just the test. Because the reason why these schools are prestigious is not for their curriculum or learning, but for the superior intellect of their students. Harvard grads are implicitly understood to be smarter than average, because they got in, not because Harvard's curriculum is superior.

Isn’t this basically cal tech? Or is your Ivy League competitor also teaching social sciences?

the SATs have a low ceiling due to recent revisions, and also only test two subsets of intelligence, those being verbal and quantitative

To test for diligence, graduation from the school should require 1 month of extremely difficult and often boring work, 7 days a week 15 hours a day often with students working in teams. To test for emotional resilience, while working students will be insulted and yelled at by the instructors. To get students to go through this, pay the first few graduates $50,000. Eventually, the quality of the past graduates will make graduating from the program a good enough signal so that you don't have to pay students.

Tired: Feminists accidentally reinventing traditional marriage.

Wired: Greytribe galaxy-brain rationalists accidentally reinventing Army Boot Camp.

That’s nice. But what policies do you put in place to ensure no skin-color discrimination?

Fighting “wokeness” is not the same thing as fighting “racism.” This is true even if you believe one is a strict subset of the other. Donald Trump is not an anti racist. His opposition to woke politics is downstream of tribal alignment and rational self-interest. I don’t know how Thiel fits into this either.

You can't "ensure" an absence of skin-color discrimination any more than a 7-Eleven can ensure that their minimum-wage, bored clerks never get lazy and sell a beer to an underage purchaser. All you can do is make clear that you don't like it, and refuse to deal with people who engage in it.

If you're hiring a lot of people but don't want to switch to blind hiring entirely, you can maybe do blind hiring spot-tests, where you get a preliminary accept/reject for a candidate via the regular process, then mask out or randomize the name and rerun the process. The distributions should be the same. If they aren't, that provides evidence that blind hiring may be better.

One classical response is "since X are paid 10% less I am going to hire all the X at what their wages 'should' be, and end up with an awesome and overlooked workforce."

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

Lobbying politicians and funding research (think George Mason, Hillsdale College, or private think tanks) come to mind.

Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?

A lot of tech companies have attempted to make hiring as merit-based as possible. Have several people interview every candidate. Make teams set up rubrics so that candidates can be evaluated according to specific, objective criteria that correspond to their ability to do the job. Everyone fills out their feedback separately, then if needed, everyone meets for an open discussion. If you have a personal connection to the person, you're separated from the hiring process. Similarly for salary, raises, and promotions: These are all based on specific factors which get written down, collected, and evaluated by multiple people. Also, make sure that the job requirements actually match the job; unnecessary college degree requirements will unfairly exclude a lot of minorities. Some companies are working towards salary transparency as well, where the salary range for every position is available to the whole company and employees are not discouraged from discussing salary with each other.

These measures have the advantage of reducing a wide range of negative hiring practices, not just those based on race. For example, it prevents a charismatic but unqualified person from charming their way through.

I don't know if "billionaire" is enough to have a substantial impact. Let's say you have $999B of wealth at 5% returns. You can therefore direct $50B to zero-return initiatives (whether or not they qualify as "charities") without reducing your nominal wealth.

If you choose to target elementary/secondary education, that's a 6% increase over the current US funding. Similarly, it's a 10% increase in new housing, 2% in welfare, etc. If you have a mere $1B instead of $999B, then all of those numbers drop by three orders of magnitude.

I don't think you can solve racism without solving racial differences in outcomes. I don't think you can affect the outcomes on a national scale with merely billions of dollars of wealth.

There are ways to influence society with greater leverage than that. Instituting policies at your company, and spreading them via professional conferences and such (if they're successful), is one possibility. Another would be to influence politicians, who can certainly be rented for what one company or rich person can afford to spend. A third is to sponsor research.

I don't know how much progress can be made using zero-sum tools like selective hiring/promotions or unspecified political/scientific efforts.

I'm sympathetic to the "war on noticing" framing of the fight against racial discrimination (aside: I wish "anti-racism" wasn't the name of a specific movement, since it would otherwise fit perfectly there). For example, if you ban criminal record checks for employment while keeping the same criminality rates, you'll find that employers start discriminating based on race as a proxy measure.

I think that fighting against noticing racial differences (and acting on them), without having a change is the raw situation is doomed to failure.

judging an individual for the actions of a group of people that ostensibly contains him

My comment is just about this bit. Imagine 5000 Koreans migrated to the Bronx. Through discipline, patience, and sacrifice they’ve made for themselves businesses and a safe community with low criminality. Everything they earned they worked for. Should they have to send their kids to a school filled with non-Koreans, say Dominicans or Haitians, who have average worse values and higher criminality? Should they be forced at threat of ruin to hire non-Koreans?

Although certain kinds of racism are bad (an individual should always be judged chiefly by his merit), most racism falls into the category of people wanting to be left alone to segregate so that they can take full advantage of the fruit of their own labor.

It’s interesting that despite racism being a problem for Black Americans, we have three hundred years of White Americans living in ethnic enclaves without much complaint about discrimination. Sure, some Anglo might not want to hire an Irishman, but that Irishman found gainful employment with another Irishman and created his own Irish towns and cities without real complaint. I don’t even think they found it immoral if an Anglo didn’t want to work with an Irishman, because they might feel the reverse. Italians, Germans, Portuguese and Spaniards also just developed their own areas and their primary political identity was not “discrimination is bad”.

Collectivism is what made America’s unique and beautiful architecture and neighborhoods. It is how Americans lived in peace for hundreds of years. Can it really be that bad? I think the groups that complain the most about discrimination are those that stand to lose the most if they did not have access to another group’s wealth. If Chinese in America wanted to segregate (as they did, actually), I might have national security concerns but I wouldn’t consider it a moral evil.

My comment is just about this bit. Imagine 5000 Koreans migrated to the Bronx. Through discipline, patience, and sacrifice they’ve made for themselves businesses and a safe community with low criminality. Everything they earned they worked for. Should they have to send their kids to a school filled with non-Koreans, say Dominicans or Haitians, who have average worse values and higher criminality? Should they be forced at threat of ruin to hire non-Koreans?

No, I don’t think we should infringe on their freedom of association.

However, when I hire a Korean to work for my company I don’t want him to promote or hire people based on them being or not being Korean. When my company is small I can ensure that personally. But when it gets big, then I must replace my own judgement (a limited resource) with some kind of a company policy. What options do I have here?

Where's the issue? Just make it strict company policy.

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

Eugenics? The best way to stop people noticing group differences in IQ is to eradicate those differences. There's no reason that in principle we couldn't uplift all races to the same level.

Eugenics?

To be fair, the first thing you should do is fund HBD research at a massive scale, so as to find out to the satisfaction of all fair-minded observers the nature and extent of racial differences in intelligence, conscientiousness and other socially-relevant cognitive traits. Then, having done that, you can get to work on your uplift project.

Pay people to voluntarily segregate?

What do you do when the black segregated areas are worse off than the white segregated areas?

That's a different issue.

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

Assuming I live in the United States, partake in litigation against affirmative action. Continue to press on the blatantly racist measures Harvard and other elite institutions have implemented to exclude academically qualified Asian-American and flyover white Americans.

Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?

Well, it's going to be hard, because the way EEOC rules work in the United States, I pretty much have to put a thumb on the scale in favor of black candidates. Then once they're hired and (as a cohort) underperform their peers, I have to have HR continue putting a thumb on the scale at each level of promotion, lest I be said to racistly only hiring them, but not promoting them.

Personally, I'd prefer to do away with those measures altogether, but trying to avoid the voracious testers and attorneys of the United States Justice Department isn't easy.

Say you get your way and the disparate impact hiring regime is dismantled. What do you do about the fact that your company now hires disproportionately large numbers of white and Asian people and almost no Black people, and the Black people who do get hired never get promoted?

Who cares? None of those things is bad in and of itself. It all comes down to motive. If you are hiring very few black people because you are discriminating against them, that's certainly bad. But if it's because the applicants really are less qualified, or because there are fewer applicants, that's perfectly fine.

Why is that a problem? What do differential outcomes have to do with the racism and collectivism your OP was concerned with?

It wasn't my op, but if racism isn't the cause of your company no longer hiring Black people, what is?

  • -13

if racism isn't the cause of your company no longer hiring Black people, what is?

The entire purpose of HBD is to provide an answer for this question. And I reject the premise that your company would no longer hire black people, perhaps at a lower rate than other races but companies hire individuals and not races.

Because the company wants to hire only the most qualified people and in technical fields those people are very rarely black. It's the same same reason NFL teams don't have many Asian players.

Every other KPI that results in a hire or promotion? You're the one creating the hypothetical situation that absent disparate impact "almost no Black people" will be hired and those that are will "never get promoted". In your hypothetical is the only reason such a thing would happen because of racism?

What does the NBA do about paucity of 5'5" tall basketball players?

How is promoting a Black man to a corporate position similar to a 5 foot tall man playing basketball?

  • -13

People assume that height is correlated with skill, but the best basketball players tend to not be the tallest, especially for free throws. Short basketball players can be quite good and have roles in which their shortness is not liability but actually a benefit. Basketball is dynamic enough to have uses for people of all sorts of body types...tall people for blocking, short people for speed , big people for centers, etc. Long-distance running however is much more dominated by one body type.. very skinny people between 5'6 to 5'11.

People assume that height is correlated with skill, but the best basketball players tend to not be the tallest

Those propositions do not contradict each other.

People assume that height is correlated with skill

Yeah, because it factually is. The average NBA player is 9 inches taller than the average American. The top 5 guys in the league by win shares last year are all 7 footers. If height weren't correlated with basketball skill, there's zero chance that would happen.

Short basketball players can be quite good and have roles in which their shortness is not liability but actually a benefit. Basketball is dynamic enough to have uses for people of all sorts of body types...tall people for blocking, short people for speed , big people for centers, etc.

Do you watch basketball? There are basically zero "short people" in the NBA. Steph Curry looks like a short guy because he's constantly surrounded by guys that are 6 inches taller, but he's actually 6'3". Including "tall people for blocking" and "big people for centers" is incredibly odd phrasing for someone that watches the game in question.

Long-distance running however is much more dominated by one body type.. very skinny people between 5'6 to 5'11.

The greatest distance runner ever is 5'5".

People assume that height is correlated with skill, but the best basketball players tend to not be the tallest, especially for free throws.

Derrick Rose and Steph Curry are the shortest players to win MVP in the past decade, at 6'2", or in the 96th percentile of American males.

So room for everybody, provided you're in the top 5%.

Do you actually not believe height is an advantage in basketball. That's ridiculous. As is using free throws as your measure of talent.

I dunno if height as as much of an advantage because the other players are tall , so it's like a Red Queen problem, or being taller makes for actually better players. I think the evidence is mixed in the latter. Smarter people obviously make for better engineers, but shorter basketball players may still be competent at basketball.

here we see plenty of examples of successful short basketball players

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-be-short-and-good-at-basketball

So even if the mean is 6'5 or so, being 5'7 is at least three standard deviations lower than the mean basketball player height, yet some short players are still very good, good enough to play at D1 college or NBA level. That would be in IQ terms like having an IQ of 85 and being a top mathematician, which you would never see. So I think basketball admits for more variance than maybe assumed by the mean height alone.

As is using free throws as your measure of talent.

I also doubt that heigh is much of a disadvantage to shooting free throws. Instead, I would guess that poor free throw shooting doesn't necessarily rule someone out if they're a 7-footer that can block shots, but if you're 6 foot flat, you'd damned well better be a marksman. There are too many examples of tall guys shooting free throws well, even really goony tall guys like Big Z, for me to think that it's a big effect. There might be something there, but I think it's mostly just selection bias.

Muggsy notwithstanding I recall there is something of a high pass filter effect when it comes to height and skill correlations in basketball. Once you've filtered out all the people below 5'6" then other factors dominate.

That's an effect you'll see with any correlation that has a strength below 1. Your distribution will look elliptical, and for any eccentricity below 1, the maximum x-coordinate and maximum y-coordinate will not be on the same point.

It's definitely more than filtering out people below 5'6". The NBA league average height is 6'6" that's 9" taller than the average American man. And only about 20% of men are below 5'6". Filtering them out is not raising the average by 9". Height is pretty much a pure advantage in basketball all other things being equal.

Literally nothing. If I think my business is optimizing for profits and efficiencies, I'm unconcerned with the ethnic distribution of my employees. If I owned the Buffalo Bills, I wouldn't insist that we get a white cornerback on the field to start correcting for the injustice of underrepresentation in the NFL either.

You still should be concerned about stopping your unscrupulous employees making hires and promotions based on race and not on competency

And you still should be concerned about not hiring talented people held back by racism in their previous history, someone might have worse GPA or worse employment history but actually be a better hire

How is not hiring Black people for corporate positions the same as not hiring White athletes for sports teams?

  • -15

I genuinely don't understand the question. They're both positions that people are desirous of that have racial demographics that differ from the general population. What would you say the materially relevant difference is?

Assuming I live in the United States, partake in litigation against affirmative action. Continue to press on the blatantly racist measures Harvard and other elite institutions have implemented to exclude academically qualified Asian-American and flyover white Americans.

The problem also with Harvard is enrollment has not kept up with population growth. A lot of talented people excluded for this reason too.

Yes it 100% has the capacity to enroll 50,000-100,000 undergrads instead of 5'000... and this would have the bonus effect of destroying a lot of the cache and elite networking associated with it....If you got the entire ivy league to do that you'd have close to 2 million slots, which would probably have the added bonus of destroying the teir 3 and 4 schools that do nothing but churn out government employees (mind you might lead to dangerous centralization, but when everything about culture and research is determined by the Acreditation agencies and department of ED... does it even matter)

Couldn’t an employer concerned about meeting diversity targets without compromising performance actively recruit from highly skilled West Africans and get them H1Bs? Or at the very least, make a special effort to recruit from US citizens who are first or second generation West African migrants? These groups seem to outperform ADOSs by pretty much every metric, from skills to income to educational attainment, and - in the UK at least - some West African groups outperform White British on standardised tests. Obviously this is to some extent an immigrant-filter effect, but then why not take advantage of that as an employer by e.g. advertising job vacancies in Nigerian media?

These groups seem to outperform ADOSs by pretty much every metric, from skills to income to educational attainment, and - in the UK at least - some West African groups outperform White British on standardised tests. Obviously this is to some extent an immigrant-filter effect, but then why not take advantage of that as an employer by e.g. advertising job vacancies in Nigerian media?

Selection bias could be playing a role. These Nigerians are not representative of the country as a whole. v

Probably (and I'm pretty sure universities are doing exactly that), but I wouldn't say that this satisfies the stated goal of having a less racist society. It's probably the optimal thing to do from an employment compliance perspective, but it doesn't seem to improve life for any of my countrymates of any race. I guess maybe it furthers some global anti-racist goal, but this is not a goal of mine.

I largely agree, but the normative framework of contemporary corporate anti-racism is that of equality, diversity, and inclusion, and I think suggestions like mine can be framed as satisfying that. What they don't satisfy is a murkier (but probably more important) set of anti-racist principles concerning something like restorative justice and fairness; I can imagine an ADOS looking at these diversity efforts and not unreasonably saying something like -

My ancestors were sold into slavery and we have been subjected to generations of mistreatment, exclusion, and abuse, resulting in us being a damaged and vulnerable community to this day. Puritanical whites then looked at our suffering and decide to repent by implementing a system in which people who superficially look like me but don't come from my community and haven't been subject to our suffering are brought in to assuage their consciences! What outrage, what insult. It's like trying to assuage your guilt about the suffering of the meat you just ate by letting your dog chew on the bones!

And they would have a damn good point. This is NOT restorative justice by any measure. On the other hand, I have some mild-Bryan Kaplanesque sympathy for systems that can attract the best of global talent from around the world and provide opportunity to bright and ambitious people in the developing world, so I do like this aspect of the policy on those grounds.

That may conflate cause and effect. It could be the ancestors were sold into slavery because they were damaged. Arguably at the time they were economically less valuable than the trade goods for which many were exchanged.

equality, diversity, and inclusion

The E in DEI is actually 'equity', which is an altogether different concept that equality. It focuses on outcomes and historical redress, instead of opportunity.

First, I’d appreciate if you pointed me towards a more detailed discussion of these regulations — what do they demand the CEO does; how is the compliance checked; what is the mechanism of enforcement?

Second, what do you think are the policies of the ideal world? Suppose you removed all the affirmative action laws — what do you propose to do next? Surely just doing that is not enough, the pre-affirmative action America wasn’t a place free of racism; in fact, quite the opposite.

You've moved the goalposts from

Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?

to

Second, what do you think are the policies of the ideal world?

The first is a reasonable question--"how would I improve this situation, given resources?" The second is unreasonable. An ideal world has no policies because it needs no policies: it is ideal. It is trivially true that removing a large source of racism would not remove all racism; it would, however, be an improvement.

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." --A. Hamilton

Fair enough; the first question better represents what I meant to ask.

First, I’d appreciate if you pointed me towards a more detailed discussion of these regulations — what do they demand the CEO does; how is the compliance checked; what is the mechanism of enforcement?

There is so much that it's hard to even know where to start. Obviously, the best resource should be the EEOC home page, but you'll find quite a few platitudes that aren't that easy to decipher as an employer. Is there something in particular you're looking for? I'm not being sardonic when I say that compliance is complex and the regulations are many. The punch line is that if your hiring doesn't reflect local demographics, you'd better have an explicit reason or you're guilty, and you might be guilty anyway. You're definitely going to need to keep a record of the race of each of your employees and each candidate that you're interviewing, along with a number of other characteristics.

The requirements and legal actions available are the sort of things that I would think would make a libertarian see red.

Second, what do you think are the policies of the ideal world? Suppose you removed all the affirmative action laws — what do you propose to do next? Surely just doing that is not enough, the pre-affirmative action America wasn’t a place free of racism; in fact, quite the opposite.

I think allowing freedom of association is the least racist policy choice. I do not agree with the Ibram X Kendi position that the cure to past discrimination is future discrimination.

I am not being snarky in my statements above - I think the present state of the United States includes academic and employment discrimination against Asian and white Americans, particularly in favor of black Americans. I doubt there's a perfect equilibrium to be achieved, but think movement in the direction of less racist academic and employment practices would mostly be about mitigating the discrimination against Asian and white Americans. I don't think you can find any prestigious or high paying sector of work in the United States where there isn't a thumb on the scale in favor of black Americans currently.

Yeah, what I would like to see are the concrete stories, requirements, laws, court decisions, etc that would make me see red — it’s the specifics that interest me. I’m well aware of the general argument

Back to the intent of the original post, I don’t intend to argue against the principle of freedom of association — I support it wholeheartedly, and am interested in ideas that reduce racism and at the same time do not go against the spirit of such principle.

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