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rayiner | on: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different.

I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?

Many people alive today have parents that went to segregated schools in America. But my dad went to a school without walls in a Bangladeshi village. That’s almost certainly worse in terms of objective educational quality. But why does that path dependence mater anyway?

fzeroracer | parent | next
> Are we perpetuating them?

Yes.

> Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?

Because Black people are jailed at far higher rates than white people. The poor white potsmoker in Appalachia is likely to get a pass from the police while the Black man gets jailed for 10 years and sentenced to forced labor for pennies.

Now what would you call this exactly?

rayiner | root | parent
What factors were controlled for that led you to the conclusion that is racism? E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia. What about non-marijuana criminal records? A person is more likely to be charged with marijuana possession if they have other crimes on their record. What about age? The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44. People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.

Race-related factoids in ACLU reports should be viewed with skepticism. It’s made-for-litigation advocacy, not science. People of different races differ on many other dimensions and it’s easy to cherry pick results for advocacy reasons.

For example, I was interested in this notion of a “bamboo ceiling”—the idea that Asians are underrepresented in management or as corporate directors. Turns out that effect disappears when you account for age (the median Asian is 36), language proficiency (most Asian Americans are foreign born, and only 57% of those are proficient in english).

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KPGv2 | parent
> Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different.

It is not clear to me that they are fundamentally different in any way other than deontology.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | root | parent
Hmm. I think you suffer from the illusion that your shell does not influence your behavior. Even if we are the same species, the genetic baggage, expression of that baggage and how we react to it cannot simply be ignored as not 'fundamentally different' partially, because genetic makeup is very much part of the foundation.

We are not all the same. It is silly to suggest that. We share common form factor and there are things that bring us together, but pretending otherwise is how we end up where we are now.