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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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From what I have seen, they don't claim that the company is necessarily racist but instead they advocate expanding our recruitment to things like HBCUs or removing degree requirements for jobs.

Good luck with that.

Yeah. Google, several times, tried to recruit heavily from HBCUs and when that didn't work tried to improve the educational program (the CS program, anyway) at HBCUs so it would work. There was resistance from some of the people at the HBCUs of course, but I doubt that was the only problem. The top HBCUs just have a lower quality of student (e.g. as measured by standardized test scores) than median state flagships.

I was mostly referring to the idea that removing degree requirements would lead to hiring more black people; as discussed in the comment I linked, degree requirements actually benefit black people.

But yeah, it's slim pickings at HBCUs, not only because of the IQ gap, but also because top universities take all the best black students. Howard's interquartile SAT range is 1050-1290.

I'm curious, has Google or any other company ever tried recruiting directly from Africa? It seems like there are some talented people in Africa, like Igbo Nigerians, who might be overlooked by the US.

Disclaimer: That avoids doing anything for ADOS.

But that gets the right ratios and avoids negative selection bias. Even if I believed HBD was smaller but we still had affirmative action then Google recruiting at HBCUs is bound to fail. A 1400 SAT black high school student is going to select into Harvard and not go to the HBCU. I could almost say this is true even if HBD did not exists. New England private liberal arts schools have collapsed and can not compete with the big boys. If HBD was not true then the best HBCU would be like Amherst. And what does everyone at Amherst have a rejection letter from Harvard. Once you add in affirmative action and hbd the gap gets much larger.