Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity in Tech

Re:Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity i... by Retra on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @06:49PM (#9735786)

If you want organizations to be merit-based, you need the larger social context to be merit based, so as to provide a 'background of fairness' to establish what is right or wrong for an organization. To do this, you have to take actions that drive wider social change, not simply optimize your organization.

(If you optimize at the organization level, you end up taking advantage of existing social biases, which is why those subcultures are heavily dominated by the male majority.)To fix this, organizations must not optimize within the existing social biases, but attempt to shift the social biases to that their optimizations are aligned with a merit based-society.

In other words, if you want to hit your target, you have to account for gravity and aim up a little.

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Re:Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity i... by caligastia on Thursday June 18, 2015 @10:53AM (#9738873)

"background of fairness" - very impressive, maybe social engineering is a science now!

This is BS - in a normal society, competence rises to the top on its own accord - people naturally out of laziness defer to those who know what they are doing, regardless of race.

In the US we are living in a social engineered bubble that does not reflect reality. Take a look at the current administration, (and the several before, to be fair) - competence is not even on the radar for consideration of a job - it's political connections and race first. And we see the results in the news every day.

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Re:Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity i... by Retra on Thursday June 18, 2015 @09:31PM (#9742604)

You're not saying anything. Obviously politics is a matter of politics, the concept of 'merit' there is corrupt beyond belief. And it's precisely because people don't have the means to think properly about these kinds of issues.

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Re:Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity i... by peterhadlaw on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @08:07PM (#9736048)

Wouldn't the company perform best if they didn't pay attention to the larger social context and rather simply hired solely on merit? Like I don't see how in the end hiring on anything but merit mathematically comes out better.

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Re:Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity i... by Retra on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @08:22PM (#9736087)

Of course, but that's selfish and damaging in the long term. It's a long term social investment.

You could also get a better score on a test by cheating, but there's a reason you shouldn't do that, and it's not "I might get caught."

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Re:Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity i... by Nadya on Thursday June 18, 2015 @12:21PM (#9739629)

>Of course, but that's selfish and damaging in the long term.

[Citation Needed]

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Re:Facebook Starts Its ‘Rooney Rule’ to Increase Diversity i... by Retra on Thursday June 18, 2015 @09:31PM (#9742608)

[Funding required]

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