#FFFFFF Diversity

Re:#FFFFFF Diversity by malandrew on Monday October 19, 2015 @08:56PM (#10416821)

    You understand, don't you, that your implicit assumption 
    here is that there just aren't enough competent non-
    straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference 
    list?

I think you're deliberately misrepresenting the OP. The way I read the OP, they are making the assumption that for every single identity group in tech, that the prevalence of great speakers to bad speakers is approximately equal. For shits and giggles, let's say that assumption is 2% of white guys, 2% of white women, 2% of black women, 2% of black men, 2% of asian women, 2% of asian men, 2% of trans people, etc. etc. etc. are no only competent by talented speakers you'd want to see at a conference.

The moment you intentionally ignore base rates of the availability of each group, you're no longer getting the 2% of the engineering population that are the best speakers regardless of their identity. You're instead optimizing for diversity over technical excellence. Nothing wrong with that, just be clear that you can't optimize for both unless the base rates for all groups are approximately equal or unless one identity group actually have a greater percentage of technically excellent speakers than another identity group.

That said, I don't really care about conferences either way, just statistical truths. I rarely go to conferences any more, since I prefer reading code, papers and technical writings that are shared based on the quality of content instead of the identity of the author.

    In my experience, the conferences that work really hard on 
    diversity are better.

I'm really curious to know your definition of "better" because I would venture that both you and the OP are completely correct in your viewpoints and arguments, because you two don't share the same definition of "better". Those conferences are better based on your criteria of better, but may be subjectively worse for the OP based on their criteria of better.

FWIW, I'm a non-straight "white" dude (half anglo, half latino (by way of iberian and mediterranean descent) (more specifically a anarchoamorous, pansexual, agender male with a cisgender visual appearance because I don't see the value of wearing my identity on my sleeve)

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Re:#FFFFFF Diversity by wpietri on Monday October 19, 2015 @11:27PM (#10417245)

> you're no longer getting the 2% of the engineering population that are the best speakers regardless of their identity.

That's not what you're getting now, either.

And note that you've shifted the goalposts. He was not claiming that the talks would no longer be the world's best possible speakers. His concern was that the "probability of bad talks would be too high".

> Those conferences are better based on your criteria of better, but may be subjectively worse for the OP based on their criteria of better.

All sorts of things could be true. Unless you're claiming that they actually are and that this difference is material, it seems irrelevant.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:#FFFFFF Diversity by malandrew on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @02:34PM (#10420888)

    That's not what you're getting now, either.

Completely agree. The point I was making is that a quota system not only isn't better, but is worse if those quotas are not proportional to base rates of the population you are drawing from (software engineers in this case).

The only way to select speakers based on quality of content is to select speakers by content alone and hide all other criteria and characteristics of the speakers when selecting. Pretty much any other system introduces implicit and explicit biases, especially a quota system.

FWIW, yes, I'm claiming that your definition of better is different than that of the OP and that this difference is material. I may be wrong about this but based on your arguments in this thread and their arguments, if feels to me like you're both optimizing for different things. You're optimizing for diversity and the OP is optimizing for quality of content. The only way you get both is if the population from which you're drawing speakers at random has already been optimized for diversity.

There are 100 fibbwobblers. 10 are blue, 90 are green. Approximately 10% of fibbwobblers are great conference speakers (evenly distributed among all fibbwobblers regardless of color).

You want to hold a fibbwobbler conference with 10 speakers. To get only good speakers, you'd need to draw the 1 out of 10 blue fibbwobblers that are great speakers and the 9 that are green. If you have no quota system and end up with 10 green fibbwobblers speaking, approximately 1 of them is likely going to be bad speakers. If you decide to have a quota system where fibbwobblers of both colors are equally represented, 50/50, then you'll likely end up with the one great fibbwobbler speaking that is blue, and 4 blue ones that are not great speakers and 5 green ones that are great speakers. Under no quota, you get 1 bad speaker out of 10, under and equal representation quota system you get 4 bad speakers out of 10. Keep in mind that this is all based on the perfectly reasonable assumption that all fibbwobblers are equally capable of being a great speakers, regardless of their blueness or greenness.

Your worst case scenario in terms of quality of speakers gets comparatively worse as the spread between % of population that has identity X and the % of speakers that must be of identity X widens.

This is root of exception the OP was pointing out.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:#FFFFFF Diversity by wpietri on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @05:34PM (#10421972)

> quota system [...] You're optimizing for diversity and the OP is optimizing for quality of content.

I have never advocated for a quota system and I am not optimizing for diversity. Perhaps you should go argue with someone who holds those views, as I find this irritating and tiresome.

> There are 100 fibbwobblers. 10 are blue [...] 10 speakers [...]

And here you construct a ridiculous scenario to generate false intuitions. In particular, you are trying to generate the exact false intuition I pointed out with my first post: the notion that "there just aren't enough competent non-straight-white-dude speakers to fill out a conference list". It's horseshit. Peddle it elsewhere.

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