[CoastalCoder]

I'm interested in the question of who decides which attributes are relevant, and which values of those attributes shall be favored.

I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.

[somedude895]

Agree. A white person from a trailer park home and a black person from a government housing home are much more alike than a group of like-skinned people among each other.

I also notice the change in the reasoning of proponents of these measures. The issue affirmative action was to address originally was that a hiring manager might choose a candidate based on race, the goal being fairness. Today it's moved to 'righting the wrongs of the past.' The goal I don't know, but it's not fairness.

[genrilz]

The people who decide which attributes are relevant are the higher ups in the company. These people are making their decisions based off traits that they believe unfairly disadvantage people. The reason for that belief is the political advocacy of people who have those traits.

Ideally, I would hope that everyone who has such a trait also has a group to advocate for them, and thus the hiring managers would be making perfect decisions. I do not think this is at all the case though. Regardless, I think it is better to correct for the traits that do have advocacy behind them rather than just not doing any correction at all.

[woojoo666]

I think what's more important is transparency. Tell us the modifiers used in the hiring process. Are black people a 1.25x or 1.5x modifier? What are the modifiers for impoverished individuals? Then we can start to come to a consensus as a society, how much we want each modifier to be. But as long as these weights and biases are kept behind closed doors, we'll be left spouting speculation until the end of time.

[genrilz]

Currently, the hiring process is opaque in pretty much every respect. I think this probably is a benefit to companies, since if they list the metrics they use, candidates will optimize for those metrics instead of actually being good at the job (Goodhart's law)

Thus, I don't think we can expect the hiring process to become transparent anytime soon. It is known that the (opaque) hiring process does discriminate based on race. If I had to guess, the policy mentioned in the article is a direct response to papers like [1], which show that simply changing a person's name to be more "ethnic" results in their application being considered less. Thus I don't mind if someone tries to opaquely enforce a rule like the one in the article to counterbalance this.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053