alt Hacker NewsI don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content
I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...)
The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions
> Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9
See also e.g. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132
Replies
While you have a point, we can't just ignore the fact that white people have systemic advantages simply because they're white. White people have always had "DEI" or whatever you want to call it. If you show up to the interview and you're white, congratulations, you're 50% of the way there.
They've done studies on this, but I think even without the studies it's just obvious to everyone:
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...
> I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content
I don't think that's a wild take at all and actually agree with you. But I also don't think it's a wild take to think there may be barriers to attracting or hiring good minority candidates independent of whether or not there is also a pipeline problem, and there is no reason you'd have to pick just one or the other. The water pressure analogy only works if you presuppose the water pressure issue is exclusively upstream, and of course in the real world faucets can be the source of waterflow problems as well.
I should also add that I'm not defending the particular case discussed by the blogger, although I'm less sold on the idea that it was clearly bad than a lot of other people seem to be. But even a bad example would not strongly support the idea that an EO or other push to promote diversity and equal opportunity must inevitably lead to lower performance.