= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ShardPhoenix comments on Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (163)
I'm not really commenting on the object-level issue, just on the dubious logic of claiming that the name can't matter if everything else is equal. In practice I'd guess it's likely that the difference in rating is larger than justified.
I'm not sure anyone's quite claiming that.
Just that if you asked, ahead of time, a question like "So, what would it take to convince you beyond reasonable doubt that there's bias favouring men over women in the academic employment market?", the answer you'd get would likely be pretty much exactly what this study found.
Of course, there are always loopholes, just like a sufficiently ingenious creationist can always find contrived explanations for why some scientific finding is compatible with creationism. The speed of light is changing! The aftermath of Noah's flood just happened to deposit corpses in the layers we find in the fossil record! The world was created with the appearance of great age! Similarly, we can find contrived explanations for why an identical-looking application gets such different assessments depending on whether it's thought to come from a man or a woman. They might be really worried about maternity leave, and choose to define taking maternity leave as a variety of incompetence! There might be differences in competence between men and women that make a big difference to scientific productivity but are completely undetectable by academic testing and unmentionable by faculty! There might be really big differences that everyone conspires not to admit to the existence of! Sure, there might. And the earth might be 6000 years old.
If this is indeed the case than why isn't the system approaching an equilibrium similar to the one the system reached for Asians, Irish, and Scottish Highlanders?
I don't think I can usefully attempt to answer the question, because it isn't perfectly clear to me (1) what sort of "equilibrium" you have in mind or (2) why you think I should "if this is indeed the case" expect the system to approach such an equilibrium. The linked article, consisting mostly of several pages of Macaulay, doesn't do much to make either of those things clear to me.
Would you care to be more explicit?
The point is that Asians, Irish, and Scottish Highlanders were able to overcome negative stereotypes and "microagressions", and whatever other epicycles the SJW crowd feels like inventing, towards them. Why not blacks and women? You know maybe there really are innate differences involved here.
The question seems like it has a false premise, namely that women and black people haven't made progress in overcoming those things. In fact the treatment of both groups has improved tremendously over, let's say, the last 50 years. Which is roughly what we might expect if in fact much of the difference in how they'd been treated before was due to bias.
(It's probably also what we'd expect if the difference was not due to bias and these groups gained in political power for some reason other than having their genuine merits recognized better. So I'm not claiming this as positive evidence for that bias. But your argument, if I've understood it right, is that the bias theory must be wrong because if it were right then the treatment of these groups would be improving -- and in fact it is improving. I'm not aware of any reason to think it's converged to its final state.)
I agree the "treatment" has improved. They still can't make it in intellectually demanding occupations except by affirmative action. Let's take the most technologically innovative part of the economy: Silicon Valley. Men massively outnumber women in technology jobs, as for race Blacks are massively underrepresented and Asians are massively overrepresented.
To avoid begging the question, that should be "don't".
200 years ago it was basically unthinkable for most women to have any role other than parent and housekeeper. 50 years ago it was basically unthinkable for women to have senior leadership roles or to work in the most intellectually demanding jobs. Now it is thinkable but uncommon; at least some of them appear to do pretty well but they are few in number. Prima facie, the continuing underrepresentation could be because of differences in ability distribution or personality traits or sometihng; or because of (reduced but still remaining) prejudice; or some mixture of both.
Your argument a couple of posts back, if I understand it right, was: It must be because of differences in ability, because otherwise they'd be doing OK now just like East Asians are. So far as I can see, that argument only works if there's some reason to think that if the past shortage of women in those roles were the result of prejudice, then by now it would be completely repaired. But I see no reason to expect that; prejudices can last a very long time. It looks to me (though I don't have statistics; do you?) as if the current rate of change in women's career prospects is still substantial, suggesting that if the last few decades' changes are the result of prejudice reduction then the process isn't yet complete and we shouldn't assume that we are now at the endpoint of the process.
Note also that there were no people tacking about "microagressions" or for that matter much in the way of affirmative action when these groups succeeded.
Also, the closing of the gender gap appears to have stopped during the last 30 years.
That language seems to presuppose that whatever change they achieved has now stopped. As I said above, I think that's very far from clear.
That post seems long on anecdote and short on data.
Pages 10-11 of this document seems to show a steady decline in full-time gender pay gap from 1970 to 2010. The part-time figures are weirdly different; by eye they seem to show one downward jump circa 1974, then approximate stasis, then another downward jump circa 2005.
What it would take to show that there is bias favoring men over women would involve showing that men are more likely to be hred than women and that this imbalance in hiring rate is not justified.