DW_a_mom wrote:
In most professions it isn't just today's performance that matters, but tomorrows, and five years down the road.
So take your example b) and add the following information:
The black men couldn't afford the same level education as the white man, and started his career in an inferior company, thus learning less on the job. But in the interview you can tell how driven he is, how intelligent, and how quick to learn, while the white man seemed competent but fixed and unlikely to grow in his skills.
Now who do you hire?
Actually what you wrote is the exact concept the "true racists" appeal to. They are saying that, even if black currently performs better than white, they don't anticipate black to perform better in the future since blacks are less capable due to whatever racial theory they believe in. Now we both agree that not hiring a black person due to a personal belief in a racial theory is unfair. But then how would not hiring a white person due to "subjective impression of them" be any better? Ultimately belief in racial theory *and* an opinion about an individual are both subjective, and they are both unfair and hurtful for that very reason.
Well, I guess you might say I am going too far since now I am questioning the whole interviewing process. Well, I am. As someone with Asperger I found it very hurtful when people assumed "I won't show affection in dating since I appear not to be affectionate" -- even when I know for a fact that affection is exact thing I am missing which logically show I do want affection, it is just that my outside "appearance" doesn't match what I feel inside. That is ultimately what makes me think that judging people by appearance is wrong, which would include the way job interviews are set up.
The only reason you didn't see me complaining on WrongPlanet about "unfairness of job interviews" is that I never tried to apply for a real job. I spent all my adult life earning money either as a TA or a postdoc. So maybe if I did apply for a real job then I *would have* been complaining about interviewing process. And since I have a major problem with the way people evaluate their dates, maybe I would have major problems with how they evaluate job interviews, too.
On a flip side, here are some examples of when I did *not* complain. So SAT has that section where they test the knowledge of words. I was at a big disadvantage because I came from Russia. I remember myself sitting all summer trying to memorize a list of 500 words that they had in some booklet. No I wasn't successful. But, thankfully, I found a way to avoid it. Someone later told me that ACT doesn't have that section with words that SAT does. So I simply took ACT instead of SAT and the problem was solved.
But here is the point. Before I ever learned about ACT, and I was sitting there memorizing SAT words, I never felt angry. It was just a practical hurdle to overcome (or not). Why is that? Well, because nobody made any "subjective judgements" about me as a person. It was all very formal and graded by machine.
Then the other situation where I did not complain is when I lost points for sloppy mistakes in calculations in various math and science classes I took. Again, that is because it was all formal. I remember my mom kept trying to convince some of my teachers to give me better grade because I told her those were sloppy mistakes, but I thought it was silly because there is no reason for the teacher to believe that either me or my mom are telling the truth. The teacher graded my performance on a formal basis, so its all fair and square.
And I also I knew that my GPA and GRE scores were probably the main reasons I didn't get accepted into top graduate schools (although I did end up in good graduate schools just not the top). But I didn't complain about it either. And thats *despite* the fact that I don't think GPA and GRE accurately represents my skill. Because you see, accurate or not, it lacks any kind of prejudice. So its all fair.
Thats why I feel like the formal, merrit-only, basis of dealing with applicats is the most fair one. I never felt insulted by anything formal. It was always informal things that I felt insulted by. Now, "formal application process" is what the right sides with more than the left, at least as far as race is concerned.
DW_a_mom wrote:
Because of all that, affirmative action is asking people consider that the less expensive and less impressive school may be less an indicator of talent or ability, than financial disadvantage coming into the game.
Affirmative action is not about "asking people to consider" but more about "forcing people" to do something. I mean "asking people to consider" would be sitting them down and talking to them about it. I have no issues with that. But affirmative action is basically telling people to hire that many black people. Thats different.
Actually a simple "free market" has ways of dealing with racial prejudice, as well as any other prejudice. If someone has a prejudice that doesn't match reality, then they would end up hiring lesser qualified candidates, so they would end up being out-competted by someone who doesn't have that prejudice. And that applies not just to racial prejudice but to any other prejudice.
But of course the "problem" with this is that if a prejudice "is" real, then the above phenomenon won't punish it like you wish it did. Yet, on purely emotional basis, you *want* a particular prejudice to be punished. And thats where the need for affirmative action comes in. But if a certain procedure (be it affirmative action or anything else for that matter) is put in place for emotional reasons as opposed to productivity reasons, then one would logically anticipate it would be at the expense of productivity. The only question is how much.
Well, I am not all that materialistic, I am one of the people who actually feels that emotional things do matter -- and oftentimes more than material things. So I can see the situations where I would support some action that would help emotional things at the expense of material things. But affirmative action is not one of those situations because it only focuses on "protected minorities" as opposed to other people. Yet, like I mentioned earlier, when other people are judged at the job interview, it can be just as hurtful. And if you are still sticking to the whole principle of "subjective judgement" while at the same time forbidding *certain kinds* of "subjective judgement, then you are encouraging people to replace it with *other kinds* of subjective judgement. Thus other members of "protected minorities" (such as myself) end up getting judged even more.
07 Jan 2022, 6:29 am
