wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues
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I don't agree. You're reacting to a one-sided, very partial critique of a policy change that no longer benefitted a specific group and the only tradeoff was a hypothetical and subjective drop of the hiring bar. This complain can also be equally dismissed as members of the privileged group complaining over the loss of privilege.
The article is very blunt in the way their framed the problem: the in-group felt entitled to a job they felt was assured to them, but once the rules changed to have them compete on equal footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem.
To make matters worse, this blend of easily arguable nitpicking is being used to kill any action or initiative that jeopardizes the best interests of privileged groups.
Also, it should be stressed that this pitchfork drive against discriminate hiring practices is heard because these privileged groups believe their loss of privilege is a major injustice. In the meantime, society as a whole seemed to have muted any concern voiced by any persecuted and underprivileged group for not even having the chance of having a shot at these opportunities. Where's the outrage there?
* The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants.
* The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
* Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers to other people, to reduce competition for admission.
This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT were leaked.
This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of this evaluation.
> * The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants.
???
> which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group
> The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
??????
It wasn’t on equal footing, so your entire post is based on either a misunderstanding or you’re just blatantly trolling in which case well done, I totally bit.
Man, you are now losing audiences that are sympathetic to your position. Are you accusing Manuel_D of edit-sniping you? Or are you claiming that the comment as it is currently written omits the above fact?
My take is we, collectively, pride ourselves on staying up-to-date with the latest and best practices. However, that staying up to date tends to be a rather shallow understanding at best. It's as if we read a short summary of the best practice, then cargo cult it everywhere, fully convinced that we're right because it is the current best practice.
The psychological intent is to outsource accountability and responsibility to these best practices. I'd argue that goal isn't always consciously undertaken. I'm not asserting malevolence, but more a reluctance to dig into the firehose of industrial knowledge that gets spewed at us 24/7.
I suspect this is not just confined to software dev. It's a sort of anti-intellectualism, ultimately. And it's hard to cast it as that, because I don't think we should tell people they're wrong for triaging emotional energy. But it also isn't right that we're okay with people generally checking out as much as possible.
Furthermore, this also negatives impacted Latin and Asian people. And also Black people that weren't part of the aforementioned affinity group.
Not every white person has "privilege", the advantages typically referred to by this word is about heavily overlapping normal distributions between racial groups. We see statistical level differences in these overlapping curves, but people can be on opposite ends of the curve and that width is greater than the width between races. Ultimately when you boil things down the issue is individuals within systems discriminating against other individuals. In addition, skin color is one axis, there are literally thousands of axes in which one may be privileged, just to name a few examples, how many medical issues you have, the quality of your parents friends, the quality of your early school friends and teachers, whether you're attractive or ugly, many of these things are out of the control of a child and in many cases have a much bigger impact on the quality of your life than skin color, or even the big obvious ones like sex and sexuality.
It's becoming really common for advantaged people to feel justified in being a racist towards disadvantaged people, because the disadvantaged people are white. When this happens i'm not sure how you can see this as a good thing. By assuming every white person has "privilege" to be taken away you are committing racism against individual human beings with complex lives and life experience. Basically, stop! You can fight racism without devolving into racism yourself. I still remember the MLK era speeches about how fighting racism with more racism was unacceptable, we are all human beings with individual humanity, not our skin colors. Not sure what happened that so many people lost the plot.
How non-racist of you (and non-presumptuous) to “eliminate someone’s privilege” based solely on the color of their skin. You do know there are poor and disadvantaged white people too, right? You might even be surprised that they outnumber black people.
And shame on you for even thinking you have the right to make such a call, or even entertain such a notion.
Talk about privilege.
i wonder if/when AGI becomes real, could it help with writing better policies/laws since it would have a broader understanding of issues and (hopefully) no bias so it would be able to predict outcomes we can't