disagreeabletot
disagreeabletot on Hacker News
I think a lot of 'AA' in practice is similar to what is done with Harvard admissions either by deliberate design or poor incentives. For example say a business notices an incorrect distribution of employees and then decides to introduce the steelman AA policy in order to try and fix this disparity. Businesses prefer to measure outcomes over process so you end up having either implicit or explicit racial proportions as goals instead of having the 'steelman AA' process being the goal. This ends up leading to explicit racial preferences and the strawman AA as the implementation.
https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sa...
Let's say we lived in a world where racial spoils were being used as a way to distribute contested goods and services. How could I differentiate between this world and the world of affirmative action? In both places the defenders claim to me all the candidates were otherwise identical in aggregate and race was only used as a tie breaker in order to better represent demographics. I put forward some objective measures that show candidates did not appear to be equal in aggregate and they claim these are not a complete measure and once you include a more holistic evaluation then the non-AA candidates were either equal or less good.