An Actually Civil Comment Thread About Affirmative Action — BCB #101

Also: a place for women to speak freely, and protests are unpopular today but maybe not tomorrow

Astral Codex Ten readers manage to have constructive disagreements

Recently, Astral Codex Ten’s Scott Alexander ran a review of Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke. The (skeptical) review is itself worth reading, but we’re most interested in the comment thread that erupted in response — because it’s a rare example of informed, diverse, and constructive argument about affirmative action. Posters included employees, attorneys, and public servants at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC).

In his review, Alexander spends some time on the legal doctrine of disparate impact, which is commonly interpreted to mean that employers can’t use any hiring criteria that result in a workforce that doesn’t match community race and gender demographics. The implication is that any difference in employee composition must be due to discrimination. Some see this as the end of merit-based hiring.

But a reader who worked at the EEOC for a number of years says the government and the courts don’t actually interpret “disparate impact” this way:

Companies are required to track and maintain records of candidates. When the EEOC considers a hiring discrimination case, they obtain this data and can use it to see if there is a statistically significant difference in hiring rates between applicants who are in the protected class and applicants outside the protected class. Ideally, the expert the EEOC uses can account for job-related characteristics of applicants (previous experience) and the characteristics of the job applied to.

(This is part of why there should not be hard quotas, job-relevant characteristics are sometimes correlated with protected class-status.)

If the company does not have quality applicant records, the EEOC needs some benchmark to compare the share of protected class members to. Usually, this is the share of the protected class within the geographic vicinity of the firms locations who work in the firm’s specific industry. This is obviously imperfect, but … the company really should be keeping track of its applicants! If they aren’t, or they don’t give the data they have (illegal) the EEOC has to do something.

But just as discrimination really does happen — there are several blatant cases cited in the thread — so too are there circumstances where people are hired based on identity. Several posters described how intertwined legal, social, and economic forces end up favoring factors other than how well someone can do the job:

Merit is important, but other factors are clearly taken into consideration. … 

I recall one case where we interviewed a guy from an underrepresented group, and both of us gave a thumbs down. The next week I was surprised to see him sitting at a desk because he'd been hired. I approached the manager just to make sure there wasn't a miscommunication in our interview feedback, and he just sort of shrugged it off and said he thought the guy was a good fit. It wasn't a meritless hire--he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed.

I can't really say I blame the manager. We were in a client-facing consultancy group, and some potential clients do like to see diversity on a team.

There’s lots more in this thread, most of it careful and informative. These posters managed to argue without devolving into noxiousness, even though they were discussing affirmative action, civil rights, wokeness, and other volatile issues.

An online community for “problematic” women

Writer and podcaster Meghan Daum is building a novel online community for “free-thinking” women, The Unspeakeasy. Inspired by Prohibition-era speakeasies, the community:

offers a private space where intellectually curious (AKA, “problematic”) women from everywhere on the political spectrum can talk honestly about complex issues and ask meaningful questions to which there are no easy answers.

Why just women? Daum writes that she noticed, over time, that while ideological polarization is making everyone feel alienated from those around them, women often bear the brunt of speaking out, which incentivizes staying silent.

Women who join The Unspeakeasy gain access to discussion forums, book clubs, and a professional directory of other members. The organization’s programming includes workshops and lectures on topics like “Writing Irresistible, Publishable Fiction” and the chance to participate in intimate retreats featuring guest speakers like Katie Herzog of the Blocked and Reported Podcast or Tara Henley of Lean Out.

Polling tells us what we already know: Americans don’t like protest movements

A recent poll from YouGov/The Economist found that support for the recent pro-Palestine protests on college campuses is limited. Of the 9,012 adults surveyed, 28% at least somewhat supported the protests, while 47% opposed them. Unsurprisingly, support for student activists was highest among those under 45, Democrats, and Muslim-Americans. In short, this polling data reiterates a point many have made before: regardless of the issue, Americans tend not to be in favor of protests while they’re happening.

(Source) 

Many historical movements that most people would support today were unpopular in their time, including both the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights protests. As Maggie Astor wrote in the New York Times in the summer of 2020, “Social movements are almost always messy—and that’s part of what makes them effective, historians say. The neatly packaged narratives exist only in retrospect.”

Public opinion has a poor track record of predicting what will be effective: A Gallup poll in 1961 found that 57 percent of Americans thought sit-ins and the Freedom Rides hurt the chances of integration in the South. And after the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, Gallup found that 74 percent of Americans believed mass demonstrations harmed the cause.

This isn’t to say that public opinion polls like the one above one aren’t useful. It’s never a bad thing to know what people think. But these protests will be narrativized over time, as all the complexities and contradictions are erased, and the memory of terrible ideas and inexcusable actions (on both sides!) fades over time. The protests fall short of majority support now, but might or might not end up on the right side of history.

Quote of the Week

Around 2015 or so, being woke was cool. Then it became gauche once too many people bought into it. Then being anti-woke became lame after your boomer uncle started complaining about snowflakes. New synthesis is being above it all, wokeness is dumb but so is being too anti-woke.

– Rob Henderson