What do you do when both A and B score a 95 and there is only one job?
That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"
affirmative action as implemented requires percentage targets (based on statistical models of the overall population) based on race/gender/etc.
If you don’t get enough candidates, or the candidates you do get don’t happen to exactly align quality wise on whatever other criteria you are using, of the right race, gender, etc. what do you think actually happens?
NOTE: I have been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that what happens is not what you assert. I have also been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that I should say what you are asserting if anyone asks.
If you interview 10 people for one job opening, you have to pick one of them. If 5 of them pass the technical interview you start filtering them on other non-technical things. "Would I like to hang out with this person", "were they funny", "do they have similar hobbies to me?", "did they go to the same school as me?"
Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.
Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.
Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.
Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.
Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"
Those situations you are describing are discrimination. At least by the meaning of ‘a choice based off criteria’. The vast majority of them are legally just fine, but as you note produce a specific, rather predictable outcome yes?
Some discrimination is perfectly fine (generally when it is a legitimate requirement of the job). For instance, hiring vivacious young women for a stripper job? Perfectly acceptable per the gov’t. Same
with hiring only men of a specific age, and ‘build’ for male underwear models.
Some legally not fine criteria, would be for example if your wife threw out any black sounding names. Or any women that sounded young enough to be having kids soon. Or foreigners.
But many of those legally fine criteria are, practically, can be somewhat effective proxies for illegal discrimination, yes?
Someone not getting an opportunity because of some consistent criteria, especially a criteria they cannot change, and especially one that is not related to the actual performance of the job, is taking away an opportunity. You are quite right though, that it happens every day, and is a necessary part of hiring.
Civil rights laws are to help stop large classes of people from being from being consistently screwed because they are consistently losing opportunities based on some criteria that society judges should be protected. It’s a small list, but includes race, national origin, gender, etc.
DEI has come about (or chicken/egg? Resulted in?) a re-interpretation of Civil rights and labor law enforcement that says for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population, or that is de facto evidence of discrimination. I can link to some DOL consent decrees if you don’t believe me.
In some areas (like Gov’t contractors/employment), this has been required for decades. There are explicit Gov’t mandates for Affirmative Action, which requires employers who meet certain criteria to actively discriminate based on otherwise legally protected classes like race to ensure they hire enough of each category. It’s after all practically impossible to end up with X% of a certain race/gender/whatever if you never keep track of, or make decisions in hiring, based on it eh?
For larger companies, it’s generally been less required, and a more lenient ‘someone needs to have been explicitly using illegal discrimination’ standard was used. Until relatively recently.
A number of companies have gotten huge fines over the years (including Google, among others) because the composition of the employees hired and their pay did not align with expected population wide statistical norms. You’ve almost certainly heard it as one group being ‘overrepresented’.
Well, when hiring freezes/stops, or there are layoffs, guess what happens to that ‘over represented’ group disproportionately?
Notably, this entire post is because Trump is changing the criteria so that it is no longer required that companies meet the ‘in proportion to the population’ standard, and rather that someone has to prove they are actually discriminating illegally on race.
Which, since you have to actual discriminate on race to do affirmative action, seems to defacto make Affirmative Action illegal?
Or at least makes de facto (but not explicit) discrimination on an otherwise protected class just fine again for large companies.
> for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population
But there are also personal preferences, and some groups have different average preferences than other groups. Look at rich countries, women often prefer non-STEM jobs if they have the choice, while poor countries can have more equality because women will pursue traditionally male jobs lacking other good options.
I think you may have missed a bit of their point... a plex server is a video hosting server.. like a personal Netflix. They wouldn't push their code to their Plex server because it's not a server that accepts code pushes.
somebody needs a shovel to make the hole they are digging easier. this is sad to watch, but i'm enjoying the popcorn.
there's an original point, and then your attempt and being clever which is so far off the mark that it clearly was meant in jest...had it be left alone. but you then attempted take it further like you are serious. which is just sad really.
I agree. Algebra based Statistics is one of the things that makes people say "Math is a religion". There is a lot of "just trust me" in statistics when you don't know calculus.
I suppose you could switch Probability & Statistics to "Just Enough Calculus" & Statistics to make it a less religious experience... but that also sort of defeats the "nobody really uses Calculus" mentality.
I think you need Algebra 1... maybe I'm too stuck in the old ways.. but at some point you need to understand what a variable is and how to "solve for x". How to plot points, read and interpret a graph. Identify patterns in series of numbers, etc.. Call it what you want, but without the content of Algebra 1 you're going to have a hard time communicating ideas in the language of Mathematics. And these kids also have a Physics graduation requirement where they will need to at least solve f=ma.
Geometry is usually the "proofs" class. You're only really learning geometry so you can write proofs. You could plug&play that with a Discrete Math/Sets/Boolean/Logic class. I think Geometry is conceptually easier to understand as a 14/15 year old because you can "see" that the proofs work. Truth tables are kind of visual, but still a little more abstract than triangles and rectangles.
Combinatorics/Probability is already a half year course that's usually combined with the half year course of Statistics. I can see non-AP versions of this class split into two full year classes.
I imagine this would be something like what you're thinking of:
Algebra 1 -> Discrete Math -> Probability -> Statistics
The only thing standing in the way of something like this is politicians (state boards of education) and startup costs. For example, the graduation requirements in Texas are "4 credits of Math including Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2" (and the content of those classes are explicitly laid out in the TEKS). And you would also need to buy new textbooks/curriculum... which is money that schools don't really have to spend.
I think it all depends on where you went to school and possibly who noticed you while you were there.
I took 2 years of Probability and Statistics in Highschool in 1998-99 and 1999-00 at a school with 200 students. At the 4000 students school I taught at a few years ago we offered AP Probability and Statistics (had have been for at least 10 years, but probably much longer than that). In both situations, you could (and many did) take Stats without Calc.
Most times when people say "schools should teach X", many schools are (and have been) doing it (taxes, car maintenance, carpentry, gardening). Just maybe not your school ... or maybe nobody told you that it was a possibility at your school... Or maybe it's not at your school, but it is offered at another school in your district...
Or maybe it's just not offered at your school. Because there is an AP exam associated with Stats, it is fairly easy to get the class made as long as there are students that want to take the class and enough teacher slots to accommodate that. If a school is understaffed in the math department and class sizes are nearing 40, then you probably won't find a Stats class there.
> select kids (perhaps based on prior performance in math classes, or overall GPA) to opt them into the class.
That's how it works now, pretty much everywhere. Your 7th grade teacher recommends you to take the 8th grade algebra class based on your performance (or, at least, their interpretation of your performance)
The question is, where do you draw the line that qualifies someone to take 8th grade algebra? Who do you let in when there is 1 seat left and 3 eligible students to fill that seat? How do you make sure that the grades you are using to determine who makes the cut are accurately measuring mathematical ability of the students and not biased in some other way?
I'm not advocating for either the California or the Dallas solution to this problem, but both those school districts have identified that letting the 7th grade teachers make this placement decisions is a problem.
Grades are a score that parents can use to compare their children to other children.
It doesn't take too many parent-teacher conferences to figure out that the parents that ask for parent-teacher conferences want to see "the line go up" and aren't necessarily concerned with their children being challenged or learning much of anything.
The squeekiest of those wheels move from parent-teacher conferences to parent-administrator conferences (and sometimes parent-lawyer-administrator conferences) and you end up with school-wide policies like failure quotas where you are not allowed to have more than 5% of your students fail your class (ie the responsibility of the students grade falls on the teacher, not the student). And that is how grades stop being a measure of a student's understanding of the material.
The pathology about grades is caused by colleges giving far too great a weight to high school GPA. If it falls below a 3.5, your chances of getting into the kind of school that people who give a shit about their or their child's education are gunning for drops precipitously.
Meanwhile, universities don't take the time to seriously consider what courses a student took, save for a few APs. That leads to a situation where it may well be in the student's best interest to coast through an easy A rather than get a B or C in a more challenging course. An example I can think of immediately was a friend who got an offer rescinded from a UC because they failed Discrete Mathematics as a senior, despite the fact that taking the class at all was completely optional for him.
I dropped my wife off downtown in her car and she had the key in her purse. The car did make a weird beeping noise as I drove away, but I had no idea what it meant and I was pulling onto the highway which would have been a bad time for the car to stop driving on me.
How many paving stones do I need to buy for the walkway I'm building in my backyard?
How far from the top of the roof should I start attaching this gutter so that I still have roof to nail it to 30 feet later?
How big of a ladder do I need to get to that branch I want to cut down in that tall tree?
Will I be able to get this couch up the stairs, around the corner, and through the door?