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Right-Libertarian anti-racism policy.
I’m sure you’ve all seen a lot of awful anti-racism/diversity/etc policies put in place by leftists; every thread here features at least some examples.
That said, I really don’t like racism. It is one of the most disgusting instances of collectivist thinking: judging an individual for the actions of a group of people that ostensibly contains him; in this case people get lumped together by skin color.
Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?
Suppose you are a CEO of a corporation, what policies do you put in place to ensure there is no discrimination based on skin color in hiring, promotion, etc?
Assuming I live in the United States, partake in litigation against affirmative action. Continue to press on the blatantly racist measures Harvard and other elite institutions have implemented to exclude academically qualified Asian-American and flyover white Americans.
Well, it's going to be hard, because the way EEOC rules work in the United States, I pretty much have to put a thumb on the scale in favor of black candidates. Then once they're hired and (as a cohort) underperform their peers, I have to have HR continue putting a thumb on the scale at each level of promotion, lest I be said to racistly only hiring them, but not promoting them.
Personally, I'd prefer to do away with those measures altogether, but trying to avoid the voracious testers and attorneys of the United States Justice Department isn't easy.
Say you get your way and the disparate impact hiring regime is dismantled. What do you do about the fact that your company now hires disproportionately large numbers of white and Asian people and almost no Black people, and the Black people who do get hired never get promoted?
What does the NBA do about paucity of 5'5" tall basketball players?
People assume that height is correlated with skill, but the best basketball players tend to not be the tallest, especially for free throws. Short basketball players can be quite good and have roles in which their shortness is not liability but actually a benefit. Basketball is dynamic enough to have uses for people of all sorts of body types...tall people for blocking, short people for speed , big people for centers, etc. Long-distance running however is much more dominated by one body type.. very skinny people between 5'6 to 5'11.
Those propositions do not contradict each other.
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Yeah, because it factually is. The average NBA player is 9 inches taller than the average American. The top 5 guys in the league by win shares last year are all 7 footers. If height weren't correlated with basketball skill, there's zero chance that would happen.
Do you watch basketball? There are basically zero "short people" in the NBA. Steph Curry looks like a short guy because he's constantly surrounded by guys that are 6 inches taller, but he's actually 6'3". Including "tall people for blocking" and "big people for centers" is incredibly odd phrasing for someone that watches the game in question.
The greatest distance runner ever is 5'5".
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Derrick Rose and Steph Curry are the shortest players to win MVP in the past decade, at 6'2", or in the 96th percentile of American males.
So room for everybody, provided you're in the top 5%.
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Do you actually not believe height is an advantage in basketball. That's ridiculous. As is using free throws as your measure of talent.
I dunno if height as as much of an advantage because the other players are tall , so it's like a Red Queen problem, or being taller makes for actually better players. I think the evidence is mixed in the latter. Smarter people obviously make for better engineers, but shorter basketball players may still be competent at basketball.
here we see plenty of examples of successful short basketball players
https://www.quora.com/Can-you-be-short-and-good-at-basketball
So even if the mean is 6'5 or so, being 5'7 is at least three standard deviations lower than the mean basketball player height, yet some short players are still very good, good enough to play at D1 college or NBA level. That would be in IQ terms like having an IQ of 85 and being a top mathematician, which you would never see. So I think basketball admits for more variance than maybe assumed by the mean height alone.
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I also doubt that heigh is much of a disadvantage to shooting free throws. Instead, I would guess that poor free throw shooting doesn't necessarily rule someone out if they're a 7-footer that can block shots, but if you're 6 foot flat, you'd damned well better be a marksman. There are too many examples of tall guys shooting free throws well, even really goony tall guys like Big Z, for me to think that it's a big effect. There might be something there, but I think it's mostly just selection bias.
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Muggsy notwithstanding I recall there is something of a high pass filter effect when it comes to height and skill correlations in basketball. Once you've filtered out all the people below 5'6" then other factors dominate.
That's an effect you'll see with any correlation that has a strength below 1. Your distribution will look elliptical, and for any eccentricity below 1, the maximum x-coordinate and maximum y-coordinate will not be on the same point.
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It's definitely more than filtering out people below 5'6". The NBA league average height is 6'6" that's 9" taller than the average American man. And only about 20% of men are below 5'6". Filtering them out is not raising the average by 9". Height is pretty much a pure advantage in basketball all other things being equal.
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