I mean, you have the same problem. What does 'best' mean, and how do you accurately measure it?

Of course you will have an answer, but how various things are weighted when making a decision is pretty subjective.

Hiring will always have a subjective aspect to it, which is just the nature it. And I do agree that techniques like being conscious of bias and trying to interrupt it are useful.

But yes, I do have an answer, which is that excluding factors that do not relate at all to job responsibilities is strictly better than including those, even if the result is still subjective.

Categorizing factors as not related to job responsibilities is also subjective!

Of course it can often be easy to identify the most salient factors, but that doesn't make it a concrete activity.

are you making a claim that sexual identity and race (two most common DEI factors) are part of the job ?

how is being a black lesbian part to any job whatsoever ?

No, I'm making a claim that a sloppy argument was made.

You are focusing on factors that you consider obvious, which is exactly my point, using your subjective judgement doesn't give you a framework that isn't subjective.

You have constructed and debating a strawman.

Everything involving human judgement will be subjective, yet we still can distinguish between good and bad decisions and discuss tradeoffs about being less wrong while being subjective

I don't think it's a straw man. No one has actually solved hiring, "best" isn't defined.

Like people are freaking out about any sort of DEI factor even getting considered and then actually hiring based on how Phil vibes with the candidate. Good stuff.

Can I mathematically disprove that if I take the Lagrangian of the standard model and combine it with with Einstein's field equations, and chase down emergent complexity over many levels, that the properties that DEI selects for are actually what makes a great SDE (in my world)? No I cannot. But we're getting silly here.

I will settle for the most salient factors if that sounds more precise to you. I will interpret that as a large number of sigmas, but we don't have to agree on the exact number of sigmas here!

we can go from the other side. If you want to hire the best, you need to stop looking at skin-level shallow factors and stop hiring decisions based on skin/race/sexual identity/ethnicity.

Just fair competition and pick the best candidate you think will do the job best. If you see the population is unbalanced (too many males or whites for example) => you go to the root of the problem and address the underlying root cause, not try to cover up the discrepancy by reverse discrimination at the end of the hiring pipeline.

There are a lot of societal problems in America and under-represented minorities absolutely have it worse than the generally well-off white population. But this is the argument to go and fix the root cause: income inequality, education inequality, lack of jobs, housing, etc.

The moment America decides to improve poor people's lives, not just promote and hire rich people with the "right" diversity traits, is when the whole country will improve in terms of outcomes