Nice Interview

I don’t either. Unless, of course, I have to.

Important thing about analogies is they have to make sense, though.

2 Likes

Not hiring based on race and gender is discrimination. That’s exactly what’s been going on since… forever.

Not giving equal opportunities to people based on their race and gender is discrimination. Also been going on forever.

Does this apply to white males, too?

Look, women and minorities that are equally or better qualified have been passed over for as long as this country’s been around. It’s still ongoing. Having your company reassess its hiring practices and try to right that ship is hardly discrimination. If a company has a reputation for being fair and equitable in hiring, job advancement, and wages there will naturally be a larger pool of minority and female applicants to choose from. This is what companies that are striving for better diversity are doing.

Nowhere is anyone saying they’re going to choose unqualified women and minorities over white males.

No one is discriminating for the sake of diversity.

Companies that lack diversity, however, are failing themselves.

https://observer.com/2017/01/diversity-workplace-economic-returns-hiring/

Edited to add

Since you apparently have a problem with the McKinsey study you might like to take a look at some others.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/business-case-for-diversity-in-the-workplace/

The paper you’re referring to is just, as of now, slapped up on SSRN. Not saying there’s no merit to the research but it hasn’t been peer-reviewed. They also used a much smaller sample size than McKinsey and only US firms.

Also worth noting that the McKinsey study isn’t the only one that showed diversity is beneficial to companies.

Yea I noticed the same thing. Its like literally a month old, but it still doesn’t say what he thinks it does

1 Like

Well there you have it. Blizz needs to hire Colin Kaepernick asap.

1 Like

I’m glad you brought this up. Colin is advertising a new flavored Change the Whirled Icecream. Non Dariy. (good for me! I have hard time with dairy.)
Each purchase supports Colin’s Abolition Movement.
The original Abolition movement was an organized effort to end the practice of slavery in the United States. Colin compares paying Athletes to play Football is the same as enslaving a race to forced labor. Colin believes abolishing the police and prisons will fix it.
The problem is it’s Ben and Jerry’s. It’s owned by Unilever. Unilever British multinational consumer goods company headquartered in London, England. A British corp is financially supporting and advocating abolishing the Police and Prisons in a foreign land. Hello?

1 Like

Politics is a great job if you can get it.

Ben and Jerrys has been incredibly active on cultural/social issues over the years. I think you can eat it with a clear conscious

Nothing like combatting injustice by partnering with a huge corporation to sell ice cream. What a time to be alive really.

3 Likes

The only people who think this are racists. Period. We’re not doing this. We’re not highlighting someone’s worth because of their skin color, that ish is creepy and stupid and historically ignorant. The only diversity that matters is diversity of ideas and thought, and those are never necessarily tied to skin. Whatever stereotype you think to be true about how the average white dude lives, you can find a white dude who doesn’t abide that. Same for every race. There IS NO POINT in highlighting the race, gender or any other immutable characteristic of someone as a candidate. Especially for such a non-physically oriented job as game designer.

4 Likes

This is the part that makes you so wrong.

This is really the problem.

Perspective, experience, and thought are heavily effected by variables such as race and origin.

This is definitively naivety.

1 Like

Which obviously means if you get married to an Indian, your children will automatically be experts at making Chicken Makhani and Naan and will be invariably drawn to pursue a career in tech support.

1 Like

This is a classic failure to understand multicollinearity and confuse it with causation.

If the goal is a diversity of experience, people will resort to race and nation of origin as ANALOGS for that diversity of experience because race and nation of origin are often collinear with white American experience, particularly when you rely upon studies that get broad sample sizes across a multitude of other statistics like wealth, education, etc.

However, the error in reasoning is that BECAUSE someone is non-white they MUST have a differing experience. You might as well “reason” that because someone is non-white they MUST be lesser educated, less wealthy, experienced a host of particular prejudices, etc. This is also faulty, and is easily exemplified:

Suppose there exists a male, >70-yr old, African American person who currently (or recently) spends much of their time actively working in and around places like the DC Metro area, NYC, Chicago, LA, etc. If you already have in your mind the kind of politics, religion, socio-economic background, life experiences, etc, this hypothetical person has… your thinking is faulty, illogical, and biased. This hypothetical person could be:

  • Justice Clarence Thomas
  • Louis Farrakhan
  • Thomas Sowell
  • Colin Powell

Of these, Farrakhan had the fanciest of upbringings, if you can even call it that, especially considering how poor Sowell and Thomas were. But their shared non-white-ness meant nothing towards how they approached their own race, that of other races, their politics, their activism, and their overall ideology and trajectory in life.

Using race as an analog for experience/perspective is LAZY at best, and outright stupidly bigoted at worst.

Indeed.

And for the record, this doesn’t even touch the presumption that a variety of perspectives and experiences is even valuable in the first place. Not all companies are crafting pseudo-art projects like a video game where rules and standards don’t typically apply. No one wants a civil engineer who spent more time learning the nuances of gender representation in bridge building than learning how to actually build a bridge that won’t kill people, notably when most failures in civil engineering come from poorly communicated adaptations and modifications, not a failure to follow basic blueprints.

5 Likes

You sound smart. That’s hot.

I put on my robe and wizard hat…

3 Likes

Meet me at The Slaughtered Lamb. More private.

That’s true to a degree. I mean, sure, people are products of their environments to an extent but at the end of the day we’re only talking about one race - the human race.

1 Like

My statement accounts for what you just said, you didn’t read closely enough; “The only diversity that matters is diversity of ideas and thought, and those are never necessarily tied to skin”.

Key word NECESSARILY. I know 2nd / 3rd generation asian and other immigrants who lived suburban lives identical to white kids, whose parents assimilated to the culture quickly out of their own free volition and desire to as appreciative citizens.

I also know white people in MY family who come from such extremely crippling poverty so as to live in towns that are essentially a decade or two behind on technology you would expect to exist in a mid sized town or small modern city.

The point is, that it’s ILLEGAL to discriminate based upon race, AND on top of that I’m making a personal argument that it’s also BORING to do so. The ultimate minority is the individual and getting to know their PERSONAL experience and perspective is the most valuable thing you can do, rather than to generalize about what experiences they may or may not have had based on their EXTERNAL SKIN COLOR.

5 Likes

The term “necessarily” is always a tough one for folks who don’t like any kind of absolute, maxim, or other form of sign-posting/fencing… usually because they never want to be pinned down in an argument so they go for amorphous, uncritical, and inconsistency instead.

I have more in common with Cajuns of all colors with an “X” in their last name than I do anyone that is typical of my race or profession. Then again, you have to have actual life experience outside of heavily gentrified urban centers to know this…

1 Like