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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.

People are never exactly the same. Standards are lowered. As the pressure rises on recruiters, the scales are pushed on ever harder. And typically, for the good jobs, you're punishing people who didn't benefit from their 'privilege' (more than their peers) and rewarding people who never suffered.

Competence matters, and it's hurting.

And really, come on -- you've seen the 300 pts on the SAT and the 80% of Berkeley professors being pitched on the diversity statement. Hell, we had the supreme court justice primarily selected on her identity. Apparently the question wasn't if a black woman would be taken, it was which one. It's not just tie-breakers, it's nowhere close, even if that were meaningful.

In a sense, it really is a motte and bailey, to harken back to the sub/site's name -- the motte is "when things are exactly equal, it's a small tie-breaker to help out" and the bailey is 300 points on the SAT and men being on 40% of college graduates, but women are the victims because there are still a few majors where there are more men.

Hell, we had the supreme court justice primarily selected on her identity

This is always the worst example people who dislike affirmative action bring up. First, the idea that there are specific seats for various ethnic groups or genders or whatever has been true of the Supreme Court since the early 20th century when there was a Jewish seat. In addition, there's no actual way to determine whose the best qualified person to be a Supreme Court Justice, outside of personal political beliefs, and if there are a few dozen people who'd basically vote the same, there's no reason to not try to diversify things.

In addition, there's no actual way to determine whose the best qualified person to be a Supreme Court Justice, outside of personal political beliefs

I find this to be a pretty dubious claim. There are particular skills required of a SC justice. They need a deep knowledge of constitutional law, they need to be able to understand and elucidate complex logical arguments, etc. It's certainly possible to evaluate these skills in a candidate (even if not with perfect precision or inter-annotator agreement). You might say that of the many candidates with the appropriate baseline level of experience, their respective competencies are just too close to distinguish, but that doesn't seem right to me.

Listening to SCOTUS oral arguments and reading decisions, I get the distinct sense that some justices are just a lot better at their jobs than others. Some consistently come up with incisive hypotheticals and clear, eloquent lines of reasoning, and some waste the court's time with meandering, muddled questions. Occasionally, some make even egregiously elementary errors. In one of the recent affirmative action cases, Sotomayor confused de jure and de facto segregation. (I'd ordinarily be happy to give the benefit of the doubt and say this was just a slip of the tongue, but if you look at the full context, it doesn't seem possible that this was the case. She repeats it a few times, and even when sort of given an opportunity to correct herself by Alito, she seems to double down on her misunderstanding.)

I mean, yes, I agree, and I think every Justice on the Court, even the ones I think are terrible and are making the country worse are well-qualified in that they know the law, etc. Like, I think Clarence Thomas has done irreparable harm, but I'm also sure he's smart enough to figure out arguments to get what he wants in an opinion.

If you go through the arguments and opinions of every single Justice in history, they all make mistakes or get caught up in a bad argument, because they're not robots.

if anything, due to the bias toward judges w/ elite credentials, the Supreme Court today has far more well-qualified people than when it was explicitly a place for political favors, whether it was former Congressman who were never judges, or anything else. It wasn't until the Nixon era the idea that the Supreme Court was a place for elite legal minds to put down judgement was even something thought of by many people at all, considering even Eisenhower named Earl Warren to the Court, basically to get his support at the RNC in 1952.

Some Supreme Court justices are better than others in some abstract sense, but in practice, the main consideration is that the appointee should reliably take the appointing party's side while being creative and erudite enough to avoid looking like too much of a hack while doing it.

This is the unfortunate reality but the institution does stand for something symbolic and it's worth preserving that symbol. People learn what to expect by what happens at the high profile appointments, if race is such an important characteristic as to be the deciding factor in appointing someone to one of the most powerful positions in the country what does that say to the common man? Race is hyper important and if your race is not getting favors then you should agitate. You can only broadcast this message so loudly and so long before you start getting whites to internalize it and wake up a racial consciousness and that has traditionally catalyzed the stuff on nightmares.

No, the not looking like a political hack thing is optional.

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