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Notes -
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.
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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