(Other than that: yes, I agree, except that actually conducting hiring interviews that way would probably actually lose more signal than it eliminated noise, at least in the fields I'm familiar with interviewing in. Alas.)
Just curious... What fields are those?
Software development, engineering, mathematics (in industry rather than academia).
The loss of signal could probably be eliminated in all of these, with some effort. The sort of thing I'm thinking of where signal would be lost by default is where you ask the interview candidate to design something, write a bit of code, sketch a system they worked on in the past, etc., on paper or whiteboard. If the candidate has to be behind a curtain, that's difficult to do and probably involves irksome extra latency (e.g., a system where they write or sketch whatever they...
I remember seeing a talk of the concept of privilege show up in the discussion thread on contrarian views.
Some discussion got started from "Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real."
This is an article that presents some of those ideas in a way that might be approachable for LW.
http://curt-rice.com/quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy/
One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought, but can be the result as a failure mode where we don't rationality correctly in these social situations.
Of course a broad view of these issues exist, and many people have different ways of looking at these issues, but I think it would be good to focus on the case presented in this article rather than your other associations.