[philstephenson]

> Let me flip your quote back on you: how can intelligent people still believe in unbiased meritocracy being the default? Very few people I think would argue that systems based on meritocracy have zero bias. This is not the point. The point is that today’s conventional wisdom by the progressive left is that these biases must be resolved by a system of affirmative action where every sub culture or group somehow is proportionally representative of the overall population based on race, gender, etc. For some reason, that outcome is thought to be the best way to affirm that no bias exists in a group. Personally I think that premise is just very flawed. Meritocracy is not a perfect system. No one is saying that. But it’s the best system we have for engaging with the actual content that is relevant to any given group. As far as bias is concerned, the best we can do is call out specific instances of it and try to squash and correct those (and maybe this case in this blog post is one). There is no commonly understood way to measure bias or racism that everyone agrees with and so why would we think that measuring representation would somehow be the best solution?

[dagmx]

You’re ascribing affirmative action to this when that wasn’t what was suggested.

The person in question called out bias and then asked what could be done.

That’s exactly the same as you suggested. The person I replied to then spun that out as reverse racism.

Which is a very common tactic to squash actual discussion on the topic of biases in the industry.

[philstephenson]

I agree with you though about the cries about reverse racism. Not helpful to the discussion.

But I also believe that when someone cries out bias or discrimination by some group because of underrepresentation or lack of diversity, they are implying that affirmative action is the way to solve it. Maybe I'm putting words into people's mouths there, but it's just anecdotal

[dagmx]

“They are implying” is putting words in their mouths like you say.

There’s a whole field of nuance in between “do nothing” and “affirmative action”. People deserve the benefit of not having someone else’s argument ascribed to them.