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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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There exists an entire consulting industry that performs research on the benefits of DEI training, the benefits of a more diverse workforce, the success of organizations which have more women/LGBT people in leadership positions, etc. Here is the consulting company Accenture's summary of the benefits of DEI to companies and organizations that adopt their practices.

I am of the belief that it is people's knowledge, experience and competence that determines whether or not an organization will be successful in its goals. It seems extremely unlikely to me that any problem corporations are interested in solving becomes easier the more members of your project team possess a uterus. Likewise, it seems unlikely your organization will gain magical insight into any real problem of interest by virtue hand-selecting team members whose ancestors have a specific continent of origin. And I have a hard time believing there is a benefit to adding more members of your team who are sexually aroused by humans who share their same sex organs (or adding members of your team who wish to change their sex organs via surgery or chemical sterization).

My priors are stacked so incredibly hard against studies which demonstrate that there is actually a benefit to structuring teams based on hand-selecting people who are LGBT, people from Africa, or adding more women. Indeed, it feels like if you lower qualifications to hire people from these groups, it can only result in organizations which are less qualified.

I'm wondering how it is possible that these consulting companies succeed in designing studies that show the opposite of (what I believe to be) reality. Is it all publication bias and p-hacking? My intuition says that it is. But there are some pretty powerful-looking studies that seem to be hard to explain via that explanation alone. Looking at an example of one of the studies done by McKinsey in the above link:

Earnings Before Interests and Taxes (EBIT) margins

McKinsey & Company’s global study of more than 1,000 companies in 15 countries found that organizations in the top quartile of gender diversity were more likely to outperform on profitability—25% more likely for gender diverse executive teams and 28% more likely for gender-diverse boards. Organizations in the top quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity among executives were 36% more likely to achieve above-average profitability. At the other end of the spectrum, companies in the bottom quartile for both gender and ethnic/cultural diversity were 27% less likely to experience profitability above the industry average. Researchers measured profitability by using average EBIT margins

What is the plausible mechanism behind which research that shows these kind of results are created? Are they measuring something that is real (i.e. does a more diverse workforce actually make companies more money)? Or are the brilliant people at McKinsey meticulously hand-selecting the companies to design studies which will show the opposite of reality?

  1. Imagine a universe where Steph Curry obtains Kobe Bryant's mystical manuscript book on basketball training, then brings in MJ to help him edit and add to the knowledge in it, and together they publish their work as The Basketball Bible which contains every piece of information to become the greatest Basketball player of all time, a flawless training program for any player if followed. Assume that if you follow the whole program, you will always be better than someone who doesn't. Except, there's this one weird thing, a superstition of Kobe's that they didn't take out because of the death thing, that you should always masturbate with your left hand, to improve ambidexterity. Now because the rest of the book does contain the sum total of basketball knowledge, and if you follow the program you will be superior at basketball ceteris paribus to someone who doesn't, studies would quickly find that basketball players who masturbate with their left hand are superior to those who masturbate with their right hand, on average. Of course, some people will question whether it really helps to masturbate with your left hand, but because devotion to the system helps you get better people who obey it unquestioningly will be more likely to follow closely and get better at basketball as a result; most people who don't do the pointless things probably will start skipping important drills too, and will likely drop out.

Now replace "Kobe Bryant's mystical basketball manuscript" with "the university and corporate system" and "left handed masturbation" with "diversity."

  1. Consider that your idea of "qualifications" may not be as important as you think it is. You say:

My priors are stacked so incredibly hard against studies which demonstrate that there is actually a benefit to structuring teams based on hand-selecting people who are LGBT, people from Africa, or adding more women. Indeed, it feels like if you lower qualifications to hire people from these groups, it can only result in organizations which are less qualified.

I'm applying this in terms of the selective school that I attended. It was fairly well known that URM candidates could score about half a standard deviation lower on the primary entrance exam than white and asian candidates. Yet, in the time I attended the school, I never met any URM students who were significantly noticeably dumber than average. Nor did I notice usable correlations between entrance exam scores and class performance or competition performance. (For what it's worth, I was half a standard deviation higher than average at my school, I nonetheless achieved the same level I have from High School to TheMotte itself: above average, but just below the level at which anyone gives a shit)

Over time I came to the conclusion that the upsetting thing about AA for a lot of people wasn't that less qualified people were being admitted to our exclusive club, it was that the qualifications that the gunners were agonizing over for years before applying didn't mean shit once you got in, they had no really useful predictive value. Your SAT and your LSAT and your GRE not being real accomplishments is much more horrifying than race.

An aside on the same point, I find the idea behind the way AA is applied in colleges to be extra disgusting: SATs matter, but only for white kids, they don't work "as well" for Black kids.

So a mix of those two.

it was that the qualifications that the gunners were agonizing over for years before applying didn't mean shit once you got in, they had no really useful predictive value.

I mean, this really depends on the program in question. I agree that there are tons of programs for which these tests are not terribly predictive; even moreso when we consider individual components of such tests. My graduate program was pretty math-heavy. I spoke to multiple prospective departments, and they pretty much all didn't give a shit about the non-math parts of the GRE. And even then, it's hard to say that the math section was predictive of how you'd do once you got in, but this is because of how the math score was used. Basically everyone who was admitted had off-the-charts math scores; they only used the math score as a quick check, "Is there something off about this guy? Like, did they manage to get through some random university's undergrad program while avoiding math stuff or cheating their way through or something?" I wasn't actually part of those decision processes, so I'm not going to say that it would be impossible to get in if you only had a 700-or-whatever, but my sense was that if you only had a 700-or-whatever, they were going to go through extra steps to make sure that there wasn't something wrong and to ensure that you had some hope of actually being capable enough to succeed (and you better have a patron on the faculty who wanted you there).

In such cases, I would be shocked to see a department like that start admitting a bunch of, say, ~600 GRE math score students, of any race, for whatever weird political/non-political reason... and not have a meaningful, visible reduction in student quality that either leads to reduction of standards or significant failure rate. At the same time, I would be willing to bet that the non-math part of the GRE would be near useless in predicting how students perform in the program.

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