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A comment on Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems. Parent comment

Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by woodman on Saturday November 07, 2015 @11:21PM (#10527465)
I know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evident truths - with a strong smell of moral superiority. I say let the market decide, because the magic words: "Affirmative action", "diversified", "represents our community"... don't pay the bills. If it were such an advantage to have such a work force of everymen, then you wouldn't need to compel companies to act - through law or otherwise.
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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by geofft on Saturday November 07, 2015 @11:27PM (#10527486)
The market is remarkably inefficient. In particular, given the startup costs of making a new company, the network effects required to get users, the more different network effects required to get employees, the connections required to get venture capital, etc., it should be completely unsurprising that it's easier for a company to get started and get traction if it plays to the biases of the surrounding society.
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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by Moshe_Silnorin on Saturday November 07, 2015 @11:39PM (#10527516)
>The market is remarkably inefficient.

Then why aren't you exploiting this?

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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by geofft on Saturday November 07, 2015 @11:46PM (#10527532)
Because I don't have the startup costs to start a successful Twitter-competitor sitting in my pocket?
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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by woodman on Saturday November 07, 2015 @11:55PM (#10527553)
You're doing it wrong, that isn't how you displace a market leader - you invent a new market. The barrier to entry isn't that high in tech, unless your pocket contains a fist full of lint and buttons - you do have enough capital.
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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by paulddraper on Saturday November 07, 2015 @11:44PM (#10527527)
Yep. Just like if you found out that probability didn't work, go to Vagas and exploit it.
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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by wpietri on Sunday November 08, 2015 @12:44AM (#10527669)
This is one of those "econ 101 in a vacuum" scenarios that I find entirely tiresome. Look at this graph:

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.

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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by woodman on Sunday November 08, 2015 @01:55AM (#10527807)
You could just as easily use your own argument to say that the inclusion of women in a variety of professions demonstrates the validity of "econ 101 in a vacuum". This is a different issue though, less to do with market efficiency than social pressure.
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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by wpietri on Sunday November 08, 2015 @10:29AM (#10528714)
You could only use my argument that way if you had some justification for what happened in 1970, and why the market failed to sort things out for millennia. My claim is that what happened was "vocal proponents [...] with a strong smell of moral superiority" made it happen in basically the same way that women finally got the vote. That is to say, market efficiency is a relatively weak and gradual force, not something that proves that all current social structures are perfectly optimal.
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Re:Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversi... by foldr on Sunday November 08, 2015 @06:24AM (#10528208)
We don't have lots of women doctors now because it suddenly became more profitable to hire them in the past couple of decades. Market forces aren't going to magically make hiring practices less discriminatory. We need to make an actual effort.
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