I recall hearing in casual conversation "ohh this guy is Asian and went to X so you know he's good". I was shocked.
It must create a weird dynamic to have two identifiable groups where you know one got there on merit alone, while the other one maybe benefited from a quota.
Absolutely. This is one of the reasons affirmative action is poisonous—it creates rational reasons for discrimination. Which will, of course, be exaggerated by actual racists; but it's much harder to argue "Discriminating against group X is bad" when it's public knowledge that group X has passed a lower bar.
It literally mathematically requires a lower bar. If your criteria for hiring a software engineer is that an applicant demonstrate proficiency in a given set of tasks, for example, you will result in a pool of applicants sorted by proficiency. Say we have 100 slots open to hire people, and we would normally just take the top 100 applicants according to this proficiency criteria.
Now, introducing any criteria which results in a different set of applicants than the top 100 necessarily lowers the bar of proficiency. It doesn't have to be affirmative action, it could be any arbitrary change in criteria. "We want just as many people named Michael as people named Jim." Well, if that wasn't the case in the original set of applicants, you're no longer getting the top 100. Affirmative action by race is no different. It's not that there is a debate here, as I said, it is that you are necessarily lowering the bar of proficiency by introducing another set of arbitrary criteria.
Maybe there were 6 Michaels and 1 Jim in the top 100. In order to balance them out, there would likely have to be some Michaels removed, some Jims added, and some people from other common names removed. Every person that was removed for a Jim from outside of the original 100 was more qualified and excluded due to the arbitrary criteria. The bar was lowered.
This assumes that the existing system is already a perfectly ordered meritocracy. Affirmative action supporters are coming at it from a different hypothesis: that 20 of the applicants pass the objective proficiency bar, and now people will apply subjective criteria like "culture fit", who has "leadership potential", etc, and this is where bias creeps in. Somehow the qualified candidates from certain groups don't make the cut as often you'd statistically expect (if you also do not believe in group differences).
If this is the starting position, then it is mathematically possible for affirmative action to deliver more equitable outcomes without lowering the objective bar.
So yes, affirmative action produces suboptimal results if you believe the world is already perfectly fair, and the "losers" weren't as qualified, due to differences between groups in preferences or abilities. Alternatively, affirmative action provides a slight correction to an unfair world, if you believe that all groups are equally capable, and differences in outcomes indicate how much bias is left to overturn.
> that 20 of the applicants pass the objective proficiency bar, and now people will apply subjective criteria like "culture fit", who has "leadership potential", etc, and this is where bias creeps in.
If that was the case they wouldn't drop SAT. Fact is they want to accept people with worse objective scores, this whole discussion and article is about that fact. Instead they will use "culture fit" and "leadership potential" to discriminate against Asians and bring in more desirable minorities.
> This assumes that the existing system is already a perfectly ordered meritocracy.
No, just that it's as close as you can get with the imperfect tools at your disposal. Even if your tools are really bad—like, if the variation in scores on your test suite is 10% ability, 90% luck—well, if that's the best tool you have for sorting by ability, then you should use it, and to the extent that you ignore its recommendations in favor of racial or other preferences, that will lower the average ability of the candidates you accept. (Unless your tool is so bad that selecting by race outperforms it—which is a very unfortunate situation, and one that should be avoided as much as possible.)
> apply subjective criteria like "culture fit", who has "leadership potential", etc, and this is where bias creeps in
This would no longer be the example I described. This is why people who support something approximating a meritocracy are typically in favor of any efforts to remove bias, and move in a direction of blind hiring. It is disingenuous to say that this is the objective of those in favor of affirmative action, however, as color/gender blindness is not their goal at all. The example here of getting rid of the SAT is a perfect example of that.
> you believe that all groups are equally capable, and differences in outcomes indicate how much bias is left to overturn
And this is the fundamental difference. Advocates of affirmative action/CRT believe that different population outcomes can be used as a de facto post hoc rationalization that the system which produced the outcomes must be necessarily biased in favor or against the groups. This is fallacious thinking. The conclusion doesn't even follow your own premise, and your premise is simply an assertion of what you believe to be true.
"[I] believe that all groups are equally capable, therefore differences in outcomes indicate that systems are biased." This is a fallacious statement. Capability is a minor, minor portion of the equation. Interest, culture, behavior, geography, income, wealth, history... Where do these fit into your model?
Let me tell you something about hiring. I've been responsible for hiring engineers on many occasions, and still am. If I were instructed to achieve, for example, 50/50 parity between male and female engineers: I would have to hire 100% of the female engineer applicants. If I were instructed to make sure that 13% of the engineers were black (to be in line with population levels): I would have to hire 100% of the black engineer applicants.
Your de facto reasoning that the reason that engineers are overwhelmingly white/east Asian/Indian/Eastern European is that the hiring system is favored as such. The pool of applicants, however, skews even further towards this representation. Almost all companies are already trying to capture a greater proportion of other demographics, and are simply unable to do so. But in regards to sacrificing proficiency, if you understand the proportionality of the applicant pool, your argument of not sacrificing proficiency completely falls apart. It's as I said, if I were to get 50/50 female representation, I would literally have to get rid of proficiency criteria altogether and literally hire every woman on the spot. It would absolutely be a massive hit to proficiency. That isn't saying that women are less proficient at engineering.
Lastly, I'm curious if you care about this for anything else. For example, Indians are extremely over represented in medicine as compared to their population. Filipinos are extremely over represented in nursing as compared to their population. Because you believe all group are equally capable, you surely believe that a cabal of Filipino nurses and their in group preferences are responsible for maintaining the hegemony of Filipino nurse supremacy, correct?
The one strategy I've heard of that doesn't do this, and isn't something any rational organization who saw no intrinsic benefit to "diversity" would already be doing, is "spending extra recruitment resources to yield good candidates of the underrepresented groups". For example, you could send 5 recruiters to all-female colleges or majority-black colleges that aren't highly ranked in CS, in the hopes of turning up as many good programmer candidates as you'd get from sending 1 recruiter to a highly-ranked CS college. That indeed does not require a lower bar—although it spends resources in a way I'd consider wasteful.
But I don't think that's what affirmative action normally means, and I'm generally leery of allowing proponents to redefine the term more broadly (that type of thing enables motte-and-bailey argumentation).
Funny story in Malaysia it's well known that if you get sick you want a Chinese doctor because the Malaysian government discriminates heavily against the Chinese, and thus the ones that actually become doctors are only the elite.
We actually had a few Pacific Islanders express anxiety with selecting "Asian American/Pacific Islander" because they were worried that identifying as such would subject them to more competition. They were advised to do it anyways.
There are most certainly meaningful genetic clusters in human populations. You can call these races or something else but to assert that differences between human populations only extend to a few superficial traits like skin tone is just ignorant and silly. For example there is a meaninful genetic reason why some sub-saharan populations have a higher incidence of sickle cell anaemia than Irish people or why most of those with native American heritage are less able to tolerate alcohol than Europeans.
> Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity.
This is true in the exact same sense as is saying that all animal species are social constructs with no basis in reality other than the social perceptions of the group delineating them. Which is to say, in not very useful sense at all.
It’s a self label though, so social perceptions aren’t involved. I am whatever race I identify as, not whatever race other people think of me as. I can tell people that I’m Mexican and who are they to say otherwise?
It must create a weird dynamic to have two identifiable groups where you know one got there on merit alone, while the other one maybe benefited from a quota.