Stubborn Idealism

On Affirmative Action

Date: Tue 16 September 2008
Time: 9:44 PM EDT

This blog has been pretty slow for a while, and it's high time I started updating it again. I plan to start posting frequently on topics I find to be interesting. Most posts will probably be short due to time constraints. The first topic is affirmative action.

This topic has been on my mind because of a talk I attended recently about interviewing job applicants who belong to minority groups (including all women). The speaker took it as axiomatic that demographics within the company should match the demographics of society at large, without really explaining why other than to say that "diversity is good." He then went on to explain how interviewers should not ask 'filtering' questions of minority interviewees because they are "rare individuals." Filtering questions are fine if you've got hundreds of applicants that you're trying to narrow down to just a few, but you should only ask them of the white men. His justification for this was that members of minority (and therefore presumably disadvantaged) groups had to work harder to obtain an education and get to the point where they would even be invited in for an interview, so they should automatically be recognized as hard-working achievers and be given an easier time in the interview.

In my opinion, the speaker was wrong for the following reasons:

Physical Traits vs. Class Status

Skin color and gender are not infallible predictors of socio-economic status. They're merely statistical predictors. The point of interviewing an individual is to assess the qualifications of that individual. Some white males come from disadvantaged backgrounds and had to work extra hard to get where they are, while some minority people had it easy. If you want to make it easier for underprivileged, hard-working people to get a job, you should make sure you really know who falls into this category, and you can't learn that just from looking at them. You need to look thoroughly at their backgrounds on a case-by-case basis. Anything less is racial or sexual discrimination.

The Roots of the Problem

If the goal is to make internal company demographics match society demographics, then you need to answer the question, "Why don't they match up to begin with?" Why are there fewer women or African Americans, proportionally, than white males in the industry? Sometimes the answer is cultural: Perhaps that kind of work doesn't fit with what women perceive, whether consciously or unconsciously, as "womanly". Sometimes the answer is historical: Many African American families fall into a lower economic class than the average family because their ancestors were slaves just a handful of generations back. And, perhaps, sometimes the answer is biological: It is known that there are structural differences between the brains of men and women, so maybe men and women are innately attracted to different types of work.

The solution to the cultural cause is education. If you want women (or members of any minority group) to think differently about what kinds of careers are suitable for them, then you need to teach them when they're young.

The solution to the historical cause is societal reparations for past injustices. Wasn't each freed slave family supposed to get 40 acres and a mule? It didn't happen. They were at an economic disadvantage from the get-go, and their descendants have inherited their status.

The solution to the biological cause, assuming it exists, would be genetic engineering or childhood hormone therapy. But I doubt anybody wants to go there.

Conclusion

While some people believe that all minority groups should be represented in every industry to the same proportion that they exist in society at large, they tend to miss the real causes of the discrepancies, and instead they "cheat" by altering their hiring practices to force things to look right. Furthermore, instead of making the interview process easier for people based on their individual circumstances, they lump people into categories based on highly visible physical traits and then lob soft balls to the people in the minority categories. This practice is unfair to those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds but happen to fall into the majority category because of how they look. Rather than changing hiring practices to force things to look nice, they should focus on the root causes of why internal and external demographics fail to match up.

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Beware the Frenulum

Date: Sun 17 August 2008
Time: 10:10 PM EDT

I was reading Wikipedia just now (as I often do when I'm bored), and learning about moths and butterflies. According to the article on the differences between butterflies and moths:

Many moths have a frenulum which is a filament arising from the hindwing and coupling with barbs on the forewing. The frenulum can be observed only when a specimen is in hand. Some moths have a lobe on the forewing called a jugum that helps in coupling with the hindwing. Butterflies however lack these structures.

How interesting, I thought. I'd never seen one of these frenulums (frenula? (yes, frenula)), because rarely have I studied a moth close up. I wondered what a frenulum looked like. Naturally, I googled the word, and HELLO!

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Wiki4CAM

Date: Sat 16 August 2008
Time: 8:31 PM EDT

It's a wiki for unscientific medicine created by a homeopath who got fed up with all the skeptical criticism of CAM in Wikipedia. Let's exploit the lack of critical review in CAM by putting up parody articles and see how long it takes for somebody to notice that they're parody. Here's an entry that I contributed a little bit to about Nullopathy. I'm preserving it here because it's been flagged for speedy deletion (my addition in italics):

Nullopathy

Nullopathy is treatment by doing nothing. It works by stimulating the body's natural healing abilities, fighting injuries and diseases naturally and holistically[1]. Nullopaths believe that nullopathy is the true mechanism by which homeopathy works[2].

Nullopathy was first discovered by Neil Essam in 1842, however it fell into disuse and was largely unheard of until recently. Despite this, many people have been unwittingly and successfully using nullopathy to treat minor (and sometimes major) conditions for centuries. Nullopathy is the cheapest and simplest alternative medicine modality currently known. It is also the most effective. All other CAM treatments require human intervention, which is by definition artificial and gives detrimental vibrations that hamper the body's natural healing processes. Nullopathy is the only CAM treatment that is free from unnatural human meddling.

Nullopathy is not currently accepted by medical science, despite many trials in which it is shown that groups of subjects given no medicine exhibit large improvements over the course of the study. Sceptics attribute this to the placebo effect but scientists have never dared conduct a trial with a third group who get neither conventional medicine or nullopathy.

In Germany, Nullopathy is known as nichtsopathie and is practiced by some Heilpraktikers. While Heilpraktikers are unable to call themselves a nichtsopath, they may indicate on their sign that they practice it.

The entry on faith healing is parody as well, but the author was subtle.

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