Comment by overrun11
6 days ago
Its more common for proponents to obscure what affirmative action actually is. The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular and the magnitude of the affirmative action effect is much larger than popularly known.
Here's the Harvard data from the somewhat recent SCOTUS trial: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/222325/202...
Asians in the top academic decile are half as likely as African Americans in the 5th decile to be accepted. I highly doubt exposing Americans to this data would make them more favorable to affirmative action– the very opposite is more likely.
> The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular
When stated by opponents seeking to strawman it, certainly.
But:
"when faced with multiple equally qualified candidates for a position, it is permissble and perhaps even desirable to use demographic factors such as race or gender to select among them"
generally doesn't get much opposition. It's not absolutely impossible that this is a steelman version of affirmative action, but it's also the one I grew up hearing from the actual proponents of the concept.
We all heard that but it was never really true and was the camel's nose under the tent. "Equally qualified" is meaningless given how interview processes work in the tech industry: you keep interviewing until you find the first person that passes the bar and then make an offer. Holding offers back in the hope that someone more demographically attractive comes along is a bad policy that results in lost candidates who get tired of the BS, but is a natural consequence of this definition of affirmative action.
Regardless it took only a few years for what I heard to go from "we should use gender/race as a tie breaker" to "our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call. And that's inevitable because the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions. The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was, which results in people being targeted and fired for -isms of whatever kind.
So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
>"our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call.
I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
> the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions
That doesn't seem to be the case for other problems. I don't see what makes this problem special so there can be no push back on extreme solutions.
> The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was
What about using non-extreme steps to try to mitigate the issue.
> So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
Idiots is a word that originated in ancient Greek and was used for the people who did not care about the matters of the Polis. Everybody is born an idiot until they participate in public matters. That costs (time and effort to familiarize yourself). In that sense maybe the people you are talking about are idiots...
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