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- Let's play a game
- Have a deck of standard playing cards.
- Remove everything 10 and lower.
- You have 16 cards in your deck now. The A, K, Q, and J times 4, for each suit.
- Pick one card at random.
- How likely is that card to be a diamond?
- If you said 1 in 4, gold star for you.
- No problem. That's statistically possible.
- Do it again
- And again
- And again
- Do it 100 more times.
- How likely is it that EVERY card you pick EVERY time is ALWAYS a diamond?
- (¼ × ¼ × ¼ × ¼) ... A hundred times.
- a 1 in 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance.
- Basically impossible.
- Let's say we make a rule that, if you draw a diamond 5 times in a row, the next card can't be a diamond.
- If it just "happens to be" another diamond, put it back, and draw a different one.
- Now shuffle the deck and draw another card.
- How likely is that card to be a diamond now, after our rule change?
- Still 1 in 4. Right.
- How likely is that card to be a 7 of clubs, after our rule change?
- Correct. Zero.
- That's DEI.
- DEI does NOT mean that a bunch of unqualified 2s and 7's and Jokers and tarot cards get added into the deck.
- It doesn't mean diamonds are bad and should be removed from the deck
- It doesn't even mean you HAVE to draw spades, hearts, or clubs.
- DEI means cards of any color get an equal chance at being drawn, as long as they're high enough value.
- You know... A meritocracy.
@Lana
They introduced DEI practices in orchestras, because they believed male musicians were getting chosen over female musicians due to bias.
Everyone performed their auditions blind, behind a screen.
This … didn't work. Male musicians still got chosen over similar or better female musicians.
Because of shoes.
The panel were hearing female footwear sounds on the stage as the auditioners walked out behind the screen.
Once they eliminated that problem by having everyone wear sneakers, it turned out that "merit" included a way higher percentage of female musicians.
I love how this ended up - thanks for sharing.
Focus on merit and make the selection process blind to any possible physical (which includes brain function and thus mental health) and genealogical identifier of the candidate.
Seriously, this is the point - pick candidates on merit, it does not matter what their identity group is.
Outside the selection process, this must be complemented by capacity-building (funding, resources like technology, literature and training of any necessary kind) for folks of lower-socioeconomic strata (purely because of their economic situation) to get them up to the same level of confidence and qualifications as other candidates.
I was just talking with a student about this after watching a clip of Karajan conducting Dvorak from the 60s and every single person on the screen was a man.
Happy to report that the musicians roster at our Edmonton Symphony is currently 44% men.
@negative12dollarbill @Lana I saw the benefit of a similar blind test when I was on a recruitment panel for a graphic artist once many years ago in the Netherlands. Panel was deadlocked so candidates were given an assignment on the spot and the panel agreed to blind adjudication in 30 minutes.
The hands down winner was brown, the other was white.
Both were competent but one was also FAST.
It’s almost as if, to receive the same opportunities, the minority candidate has to be better. @Lana @negative12dollarbill @samueljohnson
@Lana It's a bit more like as if all the diamonds were still in the deck. All the garbage diamonds that you might pick are making it harder to pick a high card of the other suits.
@Lana Yeah, people against DEI know that but they don't care about excellence, they just care about diamonds. And they'd rather hire a 10, 9, 8 or fucking 7 of diamonds rather than an ace of any other suit.
@Lana @toybox Those were not competitive businesses. Example would be baseball in the bad old days. The teams were obviously deprived of a lot of talented Black athletes. Well, surprise, baseball has an antitrust exemption from Congress!
Yes, there was and is racism. There is less of it in highly competitive businesses where you HAVE to hire the best people even if they are the "wrong color." Breaking up monopolies will reduce racism. Not eliminate, but reduce and expose.
@Lana @toybox Most of them got to "billion dollar" scale by putting up barriers to competition. They therefore no longer have to be the most efficient, because nobody can challenge them on price. And that allows them to create "country club" or "old boys network" hiring systems, wherein they can screen for the "right kind of people" rather than for excellence.
@Lana Average MAGA voter does not understand your game. Average MAGA voter understands that if you draw 10 tails in a row, the next one almost surely will be a heads.