alt Hacker News> 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.
I agree: I don't think it's inevitable; I think this was an unfortunate unintentional side-effect of well-intentioned policy. I was primarily responding to the question of whether it was "absurd" to blame Obama. Life would surely be easier if we were judged only on our good intentions and not their unintended consequences.
But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs.
There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize?
I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job...
*If, like me, you find this astonishing and question the legality -- apparently it's the "neutral" policy that may be discriminatory! Because of the base rate: https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diver...
By the way, short story by Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron