postnihilism
It seems like you're arguing that shareholders should reap rewards for actions that a company takes but be shielded from negative financial repercussions that result from criminal actions it takes.
This creates a moral hazard similar to to the "too big to fail" situation of banks. It incentivizes risky and potentially criminal behavior because ownership is able to capture the value of any upside and is shielded from the downsides of the behavior.
> "Living learning organisms have limited resources (energy and time), and they cut the search space drastically through shortcuts and heuristics and hardcoded biases instead of doing some kind of brute force optimization."
But those heuristics and hardcoded biases were developed through brute force optimization over the course of billions of years, a massive amount of energy input and many organisms being devoured.
It's objectionable because it introduces yet another mechanism for dramatically increasing inequality and economic stratification while also making capital markets more corrupt and less efficient, which undermines core aspects of our economic system.
I made a little framework for building these types of models: https://github.com/jrhdoty/SwarmJS
Here's a boids implementation using it: http://jrhdoty.github.io/SwarmJS/
This comment posits that companies act in a closed system. Companies don't just act within the boundaries set by the law, they actively seek to directly change laws by lobbying and to change the interpretation of laws through litigation in order to best suit their interests. They are political agents as are their workers.
It might bring more gray area into your life but like it or not what you do for your day job can have moral implications. You may have taken this post as a personal attack because you work at Google, which may be why you are so vociferously arguing against it. But even if one disagrees with where this person drew the line I think it behooves everybody to at least occasionally reflect on the ethical implications of how they spend their time, especially in tech where what you work on can easily affect millions or billions of people.
I'd hope this discussion would be more about the merit of where this line was drawn in this case rather than whether or not one is even justified in taking a moral stance instead of just putting their head down and shutting up or quitting.
You saddle up to a co-worker at the water cooler. Hi Yasir (he's from the Bay Area), you know your religion has a terrible record of human rights? Yeah? Cool, see you at the standup in 30 minutes.
https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/google-cloud-off...
"This workout routine is a waste of time and effort. See, look at Usain Bolt doing it."
This course is not to be confused with the one-off deep learning course they offer [1], which I have not taken but have heard is not as good.
[0]https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning-nanodegree-foun...)
I have many white male coworkers (as you'd expect given the demographic statistics for tech) and I have nothing but the utmost respect for their ability. I don't harbor any assumption that, "that they've had a silver spoon in their mouths their whole life."
I don't think that believing that there are groups that have been more economically and socially marginalized than white males is alienating. I also don't think that it implies that I believe my white male coworkers have been given a free pass to the positions they are in today. Everyone I work with has had to pass the same bar.
As I've stated, all of the statements I've made here are my own, made on my own time, on a public site and do not represent the views of my employer. I leave my politics at home.
That is how it is possible to logically disenfranchise a group of individuals by ignoring their group characteristics. The disenfranchisement already happened.
Diversity programs are not about punishment it is about recognizing the historical context in which we are acting.
We can have a discussion about the merits of public companies engaging in diversity programs without starting from that premise though.
The economic and social structure of the United States is the result of historical processes that were driven by racism and sexism; disparities in wealth and power between these groups continue to exist today due to that legacy.
To take one example, "If average black family wealth continues to grow at the same pace it has over the past three decades, it would take black families 228 years to amass the same amount of wealth white families have today." [0]
While it is a great sentiment that everyone should be treated purely as individuals and it is something to strive for, it completely ignores the economic reality of our country and is an ahistorical approach to public policy or the construction of a hiring pipeline.
We can argue about to what role public companies can or should play to reduce these historical inequities. I think that outreach and education at all levels to increase the number of candidates from underrepresented groups in the tech hiring pipeline is a great step and that reducing these inequities, beyond being ethical, will create a stronger workforce. Others might disagree and have good reasons to disagree. That is a conversation worth having, but it needs to happen in the historical context in which we find ourselves.
Writing a manifesto that claims that the disparity in tech is the result of biological differences that lead women to be inferior at performing in tech and leadership capacities is not the way to start this conversation. In fact this is the exact kind of sentiment that you call out by saying, "I personally find it inflammatory to equate the concept of diversity with differences in sex and race in the first place."