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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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I had a good discussion regarding the case of Sam Brinton, buried deep in last week's thread. I am reposting here so that more people can see it and possibly participate. I hope this is appropriate and doesn't constitute self-promotion.

I wrote:

What would even constitute evidence that Brinton was hired based solely or primarily on his identity? He has a master's degree in the relevant field (from MIT, though other comments are telling me that doesn't really matter) and has co-authored several research papers. To me it looks like he's about as qualified as anyone.

@Astranagant replied:

Well this is the problem with identity hiring, isn't it? How does anyone know you didn't get the edge over your competitors because of that? Unless he was literally the only applicant for the job, I'd find it hard to swallow that the topic of his... presentation... never came up. Meaning the department most likely consciously chose him, and whether this is in spite of or because of his affectations would largely come down to whether he was wildly head-and-shoulders better than his competition. Employers will overlook some affectation for a genuine rockstar employee, but there's a limit proportionate to how irreplaceable you are.

So either Brinton is hyper-competent and got the job in spite of his affectations, which according to the rest of the thread -- and your own comment "as qualified as anyone" -- his education history and performance on the job doesn't bear out. So if it's not that, can we then assume that the affectations served the purpose of the administration somehow? This is a government job, it's impossible... alright, improbable to believe they didn't do their due diligence.

To which I replied:

If the employer has whittled down the list of applicants to a group of people with similar qualifications, and more detailed information that might help the decision is impossible or infeasible to attain, then the choice of whom to hire will be arbitrary. In this case, I don't see how hiring Brinton because of his unusual presentation is any worse than rolling a die or flipping a coin to make the final choice.

To me, the phrase "hired for your identity" implies that standards have been lowered and the candidate was picked over someone more qualified but with a less-favoured identity. As far as I can tell, this is not true in Brinton's case.

One form of affirmative action that I've heard about is that, when two or more candidates appear to be equally qualified, and one belongs to a historically marginalized group, that candidate should be chosen. As I said above, when it comes down to this kind of decision, the choice is arbitrary, and I don't see any harm in the affirmative action method. Indeed, if the group to which the candidate belongs really does face some kind of disadvantage, picking them is the rational choice for the self-interested employer, as it indicates that the candidate has achieved the same qualifications despite more difficult circumstances. Of course, simply considering a few categories such as race and gender can never provide the full picture: for example, among two candidates there may be a woman from a rich family and a man whose family was poor growing up; overall, the man had it worse, but an application generally includes gender but not family circumstances, so applying the method here would lead to the wrong choice. It is just a heuristic, and no heuristic is perfect, but as I said, at some point acquiring more information about the candidates becomes impossible or infeasible; except for some very specific positions, an employer won't hire a personal investigator to carefully investigate the candidate's past: this is where heuristics come in.

The above method is very different from lowered standards for different groups, or straight-up quotas, both of which I vehemently oppose. Finally, it must be noted that:

  1. In the real world, "historically marginalized" groups have been granted various advantages, which might reduce the method's accuracy.
  1. Situations where several candidates are, in fact, equally qualified, and only one belongs to a historically marginalized group, are not actually that common.
  1. The heuristic requires that the candidates' identity not be considered until the final choice: a woman must be just as good as a man, without considering the fact that she is a woman. Otherwise, we would be adjusting for identity twice, which would result in a lower standard for women.

Yeah, whatever about Brinton's real qualifications, there is no way that their previous advocacy for LGBT causes didn't come up, even on the application as to "So what were you working at for the past few years?" While they did do work in the field of nuclear waste disposal, they were also out and about in LGBT affairs:

Calling themselves a "survivor" of conversion therapy, Brinton was the first such individual to testify before the United Nations Convention against Torture regarding their experience in November 2014, as the advisory committee co-chair of the National Center for Lesbian Rights' #BornPerfect campaign. Brinton held the position until at least September 2015.

Brinton, on December 1, 2016, founded the #50Bills50States campaign with the goal of prohibiting the pseudoscientific practice of conversion therapy throughout the U.S.

In 2016 and 2018, Brinton was the principal officer for the Washington DC chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBTQ charity and human rights group.

From 2017 to 2019, Brinton was the head of advocacy and government affairs at the non-profit LGBTQ youth suicide prevention organization The Trevor Project.

Work they did in the field:

In 2016, Brinton was a senior policy analyst for the Bipartisan Policy Center, lobbying for updated regulations so nuclear waste can be used to power advanced nuclear reactors. In February 2020, the website of Deep Isolation, a Berkeley, California, nuclear waste storage and disposal company, listed them as its Director of Legislative Affairs and in May 2022 they were its Director of Global Political Strategy. In 2022, Brinton's profile at the Department of Energy (DOE) indicated their previous work with the Breakthrough Institute, the Clean Air Task Force, and Third Way.

2022, Brinton became a deputy assistant secretary at DOE, serving in the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition.

In February 2022, an unidentified Department of Energy employee filed allegations of hiring malpractice with the Office of the Inspector General due to concern regarding Brinton's qualifications for a Senior Executive Service (SES) level position, i.e. "the class of federal career officials who rank just below top presidential appointees in seniority".

So they were indeed qualified for the job, but. And it's that "but" which is causing all the queries. Would Brinton have been hired if they had been "Samuel Otis Brinton, cis white bisexual man, he/him pronouns"? Maybe. But what about "Samuel Otis Brinton, cis white straight man, he/him pronouns"? All the publicity about "first non-binary gender-fluid person in federal government leadership" does mean that the question of "is this a diversity hire first and foremost?" will be asked. And then we have the two charges of stealing luggage, which only muddies the water even further. Sexual fetish? Impulse control disorder like kleptomania? Any more shoes to drop (as it were) when it comes to sticky fingers or other misdeeds?

One form of affirmative action that I've heard about is that, when two or more candidates appear to be equally qualified, and one belongs to a historically marginalized group, that candidate should be chosen. As I said above, when it comes down to this kind of decision, the choice is arbitrary, and I don't see any harm in the affirmative action method.

Yeah, but that does rely on them not blotting their copybook, like having little habits such as robbing other people's property. "We hired this stunning brave and valid token representation" looks like a bad decision when it becomes "and they're a thief/other criminal behaviour" because then you don't have the cover of "but they were really, really qualified!", so the rejoinder is "Well maybe you should have picked the equally qualified boring conventional type, there might be a chance they wouldn't turn out to be a whacko".

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