"Qualified" requires qualification. Domingos obviously feels he is the arbiter of qualification but a faculty is a delicate thing. I think CP Snow pointed out a college has to last beyond the life of the current senior encumbents and a dullard with few jokes, but who knows how to pass the salt quietly might be more important than a genius with temper tantrums sometimes. You need a fertile mix. Suitability, the idoneous candidate, is a non trivial question.
The important question is not "who is more highly qualified" it's contextual: at the payscale we hire for, and the roles we need filled, from the abundantly capable candidates who do we actually... WANT.
I don't have a role in hiring any more, but from qualified candidates I've hired for diversity and I'd do it again without question. I know of companies who hire alternating men and women to maintain equity. They're successful. Domingos appears to want to imply this cannot be true or equitable.
If it's measured solely by grant applications and peer review publishing, remember bad actors score highly in both. Perhaps Domingos forgets the pastoral quality of staff in a department? Does he think this has no importance? Women students need women faculty to become successful.
In the 1960s and 1970s the compsci field was not skewed as much as it has been since. Why is this?
I am told by Iranian friends, reliable ones, that 75% of students in engineering are women. What would Domingos expect faculty ratios to be, in Iran?
That could trivially be the consequence of men's relative freedom to travel, while women's movements are rigidly controlled.
Looking to Iran for any comparison regarding the equitable treatment of women is beyond absurd. Let us know when honor killings and genital mutilation and child marriages have been dealt with, and maybe then we can start including Iran in discussions about how to treat women.
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With regards to the rest - If I'm paying for an education, I don't give a flying rat's ass about how much sensitivity and care has been put into achieving the correct ratios of skin color, gender, sexuality, or really any other factor than the qualifications of the person from which in learning. I want the best teachers.
Social justice issues are cultural. Trying to arbitrarily and artificially correct such problems with bureaucratic checklists is a tragic and infuriating response, often introducing whole new categories of harm. All they accomplish is the selection of one person over another based on their race, gender, or sexuality, regardless of the hard work and effort expended as an individual human being. No matter how you slice it, that is a deeply wrong and troubling mindset.
Race and gender and sexuality aren't knowledge, competence, capability, or character. They aren't qualifications. Treating them as such is social justice theater.
> Trying to arbitrarily and artificially correct such problems with bureaucratic checklists is a tragic and infuriating response
It isn't just an infuriating response, it is racism and sexism. There is institutional sexism because they implement it. Your motivation behind your deed is irrelevant.
In Iran women try to get into these jobs because it promises them freedom and self-determination. They don't have to do that in freer countries and most decide against it.
Maybe (though, it's hard to believe) and this is mainly click bait. But we have had centuries of women excluded from education and work only because of their gender. At some point things need to start to get straitened , this is one way of doing it.
Every women from a stem faculty will get a job, just like nearly every man does. This focus to diversify certainly will prefer them over men. Women are already more successful in education. Where do you want to go from here?
I reject any companionship to men as a group, just for the record.
I think the critical question is what is an acceptable rate to try to achieve equality, and what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve it. There are tradeoffs that can be made, and must be made if affirmative action is the tool selected to achieve change
You cannot achieve equality by discriminating against people. It may be cliché to say "two wrongs don't make a right," but it became a cliché for a reason.
That said, it isn't entirely clear to me that the facts are as stated. There appear to be some studies that support the idea that sex is being used as a preference, but I don't see any support for the linked tweet's apparent position that the preference is so strong as to result in clearly disparate outcomes half the time.
Domingos' cited support:
- "preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611984/
- "men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males" but no analysis regarding more-qualified males. https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360
None actually and it would equalize the playing field within a few generations. My family was discriminated because of racism and while I am covered, I hate people advocating for this far more than racists that are honest about it. At least they have self-reflection compared to moderately educated faculty staff and have the decency to state their opinion.
Took me twenty seconds to click through and determine that the concluding sentences of the abstract in the first link Domingos uses to prove his point, actually does the opposite.
"This suggests that preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts. Thus these data give no support to the twin claims that weaker males are chosen over stronger females or weaker females are hired over stronger males."
To me this reads like they concluded that affirmative action (bias towards women among identically qualified candidates) is not occuring at the expense of merit.
Why would you need affirmative action though since HR policies already dictate that there should be discrimination against genders and HR drones get bonus points for it? To counter bias?
2) How am I breaking the guidelines? "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."
The person writing the twitter post is the author of "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World" so I believe his comment does follow the On-Topic criteria as he is a renowned person in the science community.
The tweet is not even a story, it’s a flatly divisive statement with nothing to back it up. It makes claims about affirmative action, so it is political, and IMO it is also flamebait. Starting a flame war doesn’t appear to be your intent based on your other comment, but linking directly to that tweet gives no surrounding context to prevent one. (I’m not sure more context would prevent one, but it might help.)
I guess it might be interpreted as a political statement. However, I saw it as a ‘scientific’ claim that could be refuted by someone in our HN community as I believe his statement is factually wrong. His only citation is this study https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12062/gender-differences-at-crit.... You are right, It was never my intention to start a flame war at all.
Right, that’s why I think that Twitter posts need higher scrutiny before landing on the main page =)
From what I read of the Twitter “thread,” the original post went up and sat for a day or so, then someone else finally posted some references and the first guy retweeted them. Other HN posts have already said they don’t support the original tweet. Which seems to be the answer you were looking for.
If the original tweet and the eventual references had all been rolled up into a digestible blog post, I would have been less likely to flag it—even though I don’t think HN is the right place for it.
My take on the post has nothing to do with you personally. If you had made the same reply without mentioning that you were the OP, I would not have known and would have responded mostly the same way. Probably less charitably TBH, since I wouldn’t have seen your other comment.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadThe important question is not "who is more highly qualified" it's contextual: at the payscale we hire for, and the roles we need filled, from the abundantly capable candidates who do we actually... WANT.
I don't have a role in hiring any more, but from qualified candidates I've hired for diversity and I'd do it again without question. I know of companies who hire alternating men and women to maintain equity. They're successful. Domingos appears to want to imply this cannot be true or equitable.
If it's measured solely by grant applications and peer review publishing, remember bad actors score highly in both. Perhaps Domingos forgets the pastoral quality of staff in a department? Does he think this has no importance? Women students need women faculty to become successful.
In the 1960s and 1970s the compsci field was not skewed as much as it has been since. Why is this?
I am told by Iranian friends, reliable ones, that 75% of students in engineering are women. What would Domingos expect faculty ratios to be, in Iran?
Looking to Iran for any comparison regarding the equitable treatment of women is beyond absurd. Let us know when honor killings and genital mutilation and child marriages have been dealt with, and maybe then we can start including Iran in discussions about how to treat women.
---
With regards to the rest - If I'm paying for an education, I don't give a flying rat's ass about how much sensitivity and care has been put into achieving the correct ratios of skin color, gender, sexuality, or really any other factor than the qualifications of the person from which in learning. I want the best teachers.
Social justice issues are cultural. Trying to arbitrarily and artificially correct such problems with bureaucratic checklists is a tragic and infuriating response, often introducing whole new categories of harm. All they accomplish is the selection of one person over another based on their race, gender, or sexuality, regardless of the hard work and effort expended as an individual human being. No matter how you slice it, that is a deeply wrong and troubling mindset.
Race and gender and sexuality aren't knowledge, competence, capability, or character. They aren't qualifications. Treating them as such is social justice theater.
It isn't just an infuriating response, it is racism and sexism. There is institutional sexism because they implement it. Your motivation behind your deed is irrelevant.
As long as they can do the work, hire them!
The key word is equity.
I reject any companionship to men as a group, just for the record.
That said, it isn't entirely clear to me that the facts are as stated. There appear to be some studies that support the idea that sex is being used as a preference, but I don't see any support for the linked tweet's apparent position that the preference is so strong as to result in clearly disparate outcomes half the time.
Domingos' cited support:
- "preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611984/
- "men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males" but no analysis regarding more-qualified males. https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360
- With identical CVs, women chosen 2:1 over men. (Silent as to outcomes when men have the more qualified CVs.) https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/women-twice-as-likely-to...
- (No relevant summary available) https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12062/gender-differences-at-crit...
- "We find the evidence for recent sex discrimination–when it exists–is[,] occasionally, bias in favor of women." https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/8/3157.full.pdf
"This suggests that preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts. Thus these data give no support to the twin claims that weaker males are chosen over stronger females or weaker females are hired over stronger males."
To me this reads like they concluded that affirmative action (bias towards women among identically qualified candidates) is not occuring at the expense of merit.
2) How am I breaking the guidelines? "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."
The person writing the twitter post is the author of "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World" so I believe his comment does follow the On-Topic criteria as he is a renowned person in the science community.
The tweet is not even a story, it’s a flatly divisive statement with nothing to back it up. It makes claims about affirmative action, so it is political, and IMO it is also flamebait. Starting a flame war doesn’t appear to be your intent based on your other comment, but linking directly to that tweet gives no surrounding context to prevent one. (I’m not sure more context would prevent one, but it might help.)
From what I read of the Twitter “thread,” the original post went up and sat for a day or so, then someone else finally posted some references and the first guy retweeted them. Other HN posts have already said they don’t support the original tweet. Which seems to be the answer you were looking for.
If the original tweet and the eventual references had all been rolled up into a digestible blog post, I would have been less likely to flag it—even though I don’t think HN is the right place for it.
My take on the post has nothing to do with you personally. If you had made the same reply without mentioning that you were the OP, I would not have known and would have responded mostly the same way. Probably less charitably TBH, since I wouldn’t have seen your other comment.