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I feel like people who say this haven't read the research about our unconscious biases. My personal "hit me on the head" moment was reading about the Cincinnati Orchestra who started auditioning candidates behind a curtain and suddenly found their ratio of male:female went from 3:1 to 1:1. No one at that organization was consciously discriminating. Everyone thought as you did that they were acting without racism/sexism. And yet (at least) sexism was obvious once they removed it from the hiring equation.

And this leaves people in a quandary. How do you control for sexism when you can't just hide your candidate behind a curtain? The solution society has tried is to mandate ratios. Why they tried this makes sense. It's obvious downfalls make sense. I'm not aware of any other suggestion that is viable.

This is a funny example because some in the pro-DEI movement advocate for ending blind auditions to enhance diversity[1].

I think if we could somehow do "blind auditions" for any kind of work, that would be the ideal case of non-biased hiring. But if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI advocates would be on board.

[1] https://archive.is/iH2uh

> if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI advocates would be on board.

I really disagree with this. Obviously there are the extremists on the far end of the spectrum which this accurately describes, but the vast majority of people who support these types of programs arrive at it by observing 1) the literal centuries of examples like the one above and 2) the numerous visible day-to-day examples of racism/sexism one sees directly (not talking about silly microaggression shit)

It doesn't take an extreme viewpoint to come to the conclusion there are knobs that might need to be turned a bit more deliberately in our society to bring it closer to the blind evaluation model.

It's a shame how much of our discourse is people in the middle of the bell curve arguing principally against people on the far ends of it (or observing such arguments and wisely choosing to stay out of it).

Thing is, the "extremists" are the ones with strong beliefs, so they tend to be the ones actively promoting such programs and running them, not the middle of the ground people.

One is reminded of the famous debacle when GitHub canceled ElectronConf after using a blind review process to select talks, and ended up with al male speakers.

Sure but the DEI programs have only ever constituted a tiny, tiny portion of hiring/firing/economic activity in general.
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