So essentially, passing Google's hiring bar is a lottery, and Google is giving out more tickets to diversity candidates?

Google has a conceptual "bar", and sure, in theory there's a way to map every candidate onto that bar. Passing the bar isn't a lottery (it's just a deterministic mapping), but actually getting an offer is. Having gone through the interview process and received an offer recently, I'd certainly say it is.

I don't know that I'd agree with the second part; one thing you can reasonably conclude is correlated with false negatives is diversity (there are studies that people form hire/no-hire opinions within seconds of meeting a candidate, and studies that people have immediate biases when meeting people based on race/gender; there's also the simple fact that's put to good use in small companies that hiring people like yourselves, although mostly in ideological bias etc., is a good means for team cohesion). I assume Google has done more research on this than I have. Handing out "more tickets" may just be a way to cancel out the fact that so-called diversity candidates are getting worse tickets.

However, even if they were simply giving out more tickets to diversity candidates, the average level of qualification of these candidates doesn't change. You just have more of them. Maybe that's a problem because you're discriminating in their favor, but it certainly does not "effectively lower the bar" or impugn the qualifications of this over-represented group. They're all qualified. They're all on the right side of the "bar". There's no alleged increase in the false positive rate.

The fact that he chose to interpret this as "effectively lower[ing] the bar" is not just insulting to his colleagues and unprofessional, but also a sign that he doesn't understand math enough to pass a well-tuned Google interview and got one of the rare false-positive lottery tickets.

>Unless we have a reason to believe that false negatives are strongly correlated with the axis on which "the bar" is placed (and I don't think we do; false negatives are generally going to come from asking an out-of-left-field question, or the interviewee having a bad day, or something, which are pretty random), this doesn't lower the bar, "effectively" or otherwise.

I don't think that works. If the process is optimised for accuracy, then decreasing the false negative rate should increase the the false positive rate, right? Intuitively that's how it would work for most classification tasks. If you can decrease the false negative rate without increasing the false positive rate then you're improving accuracy. The bar must be correlated with the false negative rate.

Also, I'd mention that, even if, say, you have a noisy (presumably cheap) test that you give to everyone, and then you give an absolutely perfect (presumably expensive) test to minorities that fail the first test... It's probably the case that, of the people who failed the first test due to noise but would pass the second test, most of them are just barely above the "passing" bar. Because it seems reasonable to guess that people way above the bar have a smaller chance of failing the noisy test than people just barely above the bar. The policy would then lower the average ability level for hired minorities (though it wouldn't bring it below the "bar").

How large this effect is depends on just how noisy the first test is and on how widely above the bar people's abilities range.