If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was not involved. The person was hired based on merit.

But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent, and/or experience necessary for the job. The person was hired not based on merit, but based on some other, unrelated factor.

Hiring based on something other than merit automatically means that standards were lowered, or at best they were merely ignored.

If I'm trying to staff a 10-person team, and I find 30 qualified candidates who are willing to take the job, there is zero sense in which I'm lowering standards to look at factors other than merit once I have already looked at merit. So if one-third of those candidates are from some minority demographic, and there's a company policy that encourages me to extend five offers to that one-third, I'm still keeping my standards right where they've always been.

In fact, it is precisely because there are more than enough candidates with technical merit that we have other measures like "culture fit".

I find that hard to believe, at least for any realistic scenario.

Even if all of those candidates exceed the minimum level of merit required for the job, it's very likely that some will still have more or better skill/talent/experience than the others. There will still be an ordering based purely on merit.

Ignoring this ordering when choosing the 10 successful candidates would be a case of ignoring merit, which would indicate a lowering of standards.

And I'm not aware of any company that actually manages to rank all candidates by their exact position relative to other candidates. Interviewers tend to get to say just "hire" / "no-hire", not all candidates talk to the same interviewers, etc.; that loss of information isn't, in practice considered an unacceptable lowering of standards.

So, given that standards have already been lowered in the real world from this ideal, affirmative action is certainly not lowering them any more.

One is just the small amount of information gleaned. Last time I hired, I ended up spending ~5 hours with each candidate who made it all the way through. But that's 0.1% of how much time I hope to spend with them, and it's them attempting to put their best foot forward. Any score I might give them would have big error bars.

The other is the extent to which ranking candidates is personal and nearly arbitrary. This time we did blinded reviews of code and it amazed me to see how often each reviewer valued different things. We would eventually converge with discussion, but I don't have a lot of faith that the parallel-universe versions of ourselves would be particularly consistent. And that's without reviewers even knowing the identities of the code writers.

The whole "lowered standards" thing strikes me as built upon a fantasy of clarity that is nothing like my actual experience of hiring.

Could you point to some of this research? I'd be interested to learn more about research that has been done.

Not that you hire anyone based on race / etc. you still hire the best candidate.

I forget that the words affirmative action mean something different to a younger generation who mostly have encountered a weird perversion of the original meaning in higher education.

Wikipedia describes it differently:

"Affirmative action or positive discrimination is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group [...]. The nature of affirmative action policies varies from region to region. Some [...] use a quota system, whereby a certain percentage of jobs or school vacancies must be reserved for members of a certain group."

Wouldn't using a quota system be lowering the bar?

Using your definition, if I recruit in California, and I expand to begin recruiting in Oregon, then I have diversified my applicant pool. Have I successfully employed affirmative action?

Wait I don't understand - how exactly do you do that without letting race influence your hiring decisions?

Whether Twitter needs black engineers to secure its higher-than-average black userbase is, I think, at best dubious (as Gibson tells us, users find their own use for things), but it might want to reconsider its stance as Wall Street begins side-eying its valuation. Meanwhile, as Brian Brackeen of Kairos put it, the unicorns' failure means startups have a lot of potential talent to grab....

I'm not sure which study you are talking about, because the USMC has been fighting it for several decades - and conducted many studies to back their position. I wrote a paper on the subject many years ago, it is a very complicated issue - lots of very obvious and undeniable cons, with a few potential pros. One of the funnier cons that I remember was the statistical analysis of female service members' pregnancy rates prior to deployment. For some reason, as soon as deployment time comes up - a great many females find themselves impregnated and unable to go overseas... Apparently the problem is so bad that many commanders don't include females in the total organization count for predeployment planning. Also, the USMC is pretty much the only branch that would benefit from the potential pros - pushing problem-solving and ethics further down the chain of command. I'm guessing that they've done the math and decided that it would still be a net negative.

Pregnancy is a stickier issue, and for the Corps is more problematic because they historically have had much higher undeployable numbers than the other services. Unplanned pregnancies are lower than the civilian population for officers and senior noncoms, but are roughly average for junior enlisted when adjusted for socioeconomic factors. Military policies forbidding any access to abortion procedures on-base also makes it harder to terminate unplanned pregnancies and, often when deployed overseas, impossible, which could account for some of the statistical correlation you cite. Actually, if you happen to dig up a citation to that study, I'd love to read it!

> ...but I'd like to see an analysis of the field effectiveness of units in combat as well as training.

That would only be an effective analysis if a long term trial were to be conducted, 10 years might be enough. The context of this conversation is kind of funny, because the USMC's success is rooted solidly in homogeneity - the long term impact is the real point of concern.

> ...I'll note that plenty of female Marines (and soldiers) have over the past decade and a half of war operated effectively as light infantry in high OPTEMPO environments...

Not really. I can't really say it without sounding like an asshole, so I won't try :) The infantry experience is very different, and comprised of much more than simply being in a non-permissive environment - not comparable.

> ...the enemy doesn't care if you're an officer leading an infantry platoon or a logistics convoy.

Oh yes they do, it would be totally insane to conduct an attack on an infantry platoon in the same way you would attack a logistics convoy. In 2006 my unit took over a formerly national guard AO, they got direct fire pretty regularly - and so did we for the first few days. After the locals figured out that we weren't national guard, we experienced no more direct fire - just IEDs and mortars. I don't think it is a stretch to say that females would likely be treated differently by the enemy.

> Unplanned pregnancies...

I guess I was too subtle, I wasn't talking about unplanned pregnancy. This sort of behavior is not limited to females of course, I once saw a guy shoot himself in the foot, but the pattern of predeployment medical issues is much clearer with the females.

Could you point to some of this research? I'd be interested to learn more about research that has been done.

Then why aren't you exploiting this?

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

I'm pretty sure that capitalism wasn't invented in 1970. Was the market totally malfunctioning before 1970, when women were excluded from a variety of professions? Or was there possibly, maybe, potentially some sort of relevant factor outside the banal bounds of commerce?

There are more things, Horatio, etc, etc.

But... does it provide a competitive advantage? Are industries in places like China, India, Japan and Korea at a disadvantage compared to the US because they are more or less monocultural?

Which is why Chinese and Japanese sites for example have struggled to extend beyond their own borders.

But then there's companies like Nintendo and Sony that are globally successful in spite of their lack of diversity.

Most of Nintendo's failings in the past can actually be traced to where they refused to innovate simply because they followed the Japanese business culture too strictly (where, if your boss tells you to do something, you do it. Otherwise, you don't. And so on). If they had a diversity of ideas, they would likely not be in so much trouble right now.

I am not defending AA, the racial/gender/whichever thing; I'm not talking about that right now. This is simply about the diversity of ideas.

This is separate from the question of providing fair and gainful employment for everyone --I think that's a goal as a society we should strive for _even if_ it puts us at a disadvantage. My question was more geared toward questioning the received wisdom.

One obvious advantage for companies operating in a homogenous society is they don't face the challenges in hiring a diverse workforce.

I'm curious, what do you think of the opposing goal of eliminating the need for all employment through automation?

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-st...