I’m not sure that local norms do tilt in favour of my position. Many EA orgs already have demographically-biased hiring, so it’s fair to say I’m not winning the argument. And there just seem to be a lot more people willing to propose this stuff than criticise it. As I mentioned, the only public pushback comes from 2-4 people, and I do think it is personally costly for me to do this.
I think it is important to consider the social costs of discussing this. Demographic favouritism has ~completely taken over the public, private and nonprofit sector. I think recognising why this has happened requires one to analyse the social costs of opposing it given that at least a significant fraction, if not a majority, of voters are opposed to demographic favouritism. Because people are scared to push back for fear of being called bigoted, weak evidence can be adduced in favour of demographic favouritism. eg People often share things like magazine articles allegedly showing that a gender diverse board increases your stock price.
In this case, weak evidence has been adduced and unsubstantiated claims have been made, and some people have criticised it. The response to this has not been that the criticism is wrong, but that it is wrong to criticise at all in this domain. Several commenters have basically tried to guilt trip the critics even though they don’t disagree with what the critics said. This never happens for any other topic. No-one ever mockingly argues against citing high quality peer reviewed literature in any other domain. No-one ever says correctly criticising obviously bad literature has bad vibes in any other domain.
I think the correct response would not be to get annoyed about the vibes, but to get better evidence and arguments
I’m not sure that local norms do tilt in favour of my position. Many EA orgs already have demographically-biased hiring, so it’s fair to say I’m not winning the argument. And there just seem to be a lot more people willing to propose this stuff than criticise it. As I mentioned, the only public pushback comes from 2-4 people, and I do think it is personally costly for me to do this.
I think it is important to consider the social costs of discussing this. Demographic favouritism has ~completely taken over the public, private and nonprofit sector. I think recognising why this has happened requires one to analyse the social costs of opposing it given that at least a significant fraction, if not a majority, of voters are opposed to demographic favouritism. Because people are scared to push back for fear of being called bigoted, weak evidence can be adduced in favour of demographic favouritism. eg People often share things like magazine articles allegedly showing that a gender diverse board increases your stock price.
In this case, weak evidence has been adduced and unsubstantiated claims have been made, and some people have criticised it. The response to this has not been that the criticism is wrong, but that it is wrong to criticise at all in this domain. Several commenters have basically tried to guilt trip the critics even though they don’t disagree with what the critics said. This never happens for any other topic. No-one ever mockingly argues against citing high quality peer reviewed literature in any other domain. No-one ever says correctly criticising obviously bad literature has bad vibes in any other domain.
I think the correct response would not be to get annoyed about the vibes, but to get better evidence and arguments