DreamlandLividity

If you want to do a pointless hypothetical, at least make it ethically interesting.

What if Harris did the Natzi salute while shouting "Heil Hitler!" before the election? No change in policy or anything else.

Would you rather vote for Harris doing a Natzi salute or Trump doing Trump things? Words or actions? Or would you give up and not vote at that point?

Except 99% of people pay with credit/debit cards.

Besides, if it takes you more then 5 seconds to get the penny, count it and use it again, you worked below minimum wage for that penny.

I don't want to convince you here, you do you.

But it seems funny to say that while you are using Linux, where almost nothing has official support.

I personally love that even if GoG shut down or otherwise was inaccessible, I would still have offline installers (that can be installed to wine manually). Obviously having a launcher is nicer, but I hate that there is no backup with Steam.

I just switched to Linux and there are multiple Launchers that support GoG. It is not official but honestly, that makes it better in my eyes. They are open-source, no bloat, no tracking, ...

Games not being on GoG is much more of an issue. :(

does the US generally let firms have such leeway and lack of paperwork with hiring?

I don't know for sure. With their at will employment, I would be surprised if they had such requirements in most states. In Czechia, we have no such requirements. We brainstormed interview questions in the office hours before the interview.

UK job applications have the requirements, essential and ideal, written out beforehand

Writing them ahead of time does not really change my point much. Write many requirements if you prefer hiring "on merit" or as few as possible if you want to give preference to diverse candidates.

Thank you for the time, effort, and thought out replies.

Thank you as well, it is so refreshing to be able to genuinely discuss and find common ground about topics like this these days.

On the main point, I agree that there is often a perception/"PR" problem for these policies.

I think calling it perception/PR problem is misleading, because it implies it is just misunderstood. If that was the case, it would just be a question of how to inform people. The issue is informed people dislike these policies as well, because they genuinely are unfair towards individuals and people are rarely willing to to be treated unfairly for the good of the society. People are also extra sensitive to governments and other people in positions of power treating people unfairly, arguably for a good reason.

But then, in the UK where the policy was just "when deciding between two equally qualified candidates, choose the under represented one" still got done in the right wing media as "law mandating hiring on unqualified individuals", so I don't think that adjusting would do a huge amount of work.

Yeah, obviously political parties fear mongering about the policies to get votes is a very big issue on it's own. But even if the criticism is way over exaggerated, can you rationally defend even that policy? Two simple points:

1. There are no two equal candidates in practice, you can always add more tie-breaker criteria, like their expected salary, volunteering activities, ... So despite how it is worded, in reality, it just gives the decision to hiring managers, since they can just decide to only check basic qualifications and call all candidates equal, if they want to preferentially hire the diverse ones or they can keep adding criteria until the candidates are not equal if they dislike the policy.
2. Winning tie-breakers is a significant advantage. Casinos never lose, and in most games it is just because they win in case of ties. Meaning it can still be significantly unfair.

And again, I don't see how you could defend it other than insisting it makes things more fair overall even if it is unfair to individuals.

If the hiring process has an interview stage, how to make it identity-blind? How to deal with the perception of people, especially women, in a management position?

Yeah, it is a really difficult issue that probably does not have a single answer that can be applied everywhere. There probably have to be individualised solutions for various scenarios. There even may be situations where it can't be fixed at all until peoples perceptions improve and biases erode. Hopefully, showing people their biases are incorrect in different situations will be enough to do that. I really think normalizing diversity through means people perceive as fair could do that.

I do agree that the main thing is hitting the underlying perception issues, but how to do that without creating a world where they're visibly untrue is trickier. But if it was an easy problem there'd probably be less division on how to tackle it.

Yeah, unfortunately, it is one of the most difficult issues our society faces. :(

I feel like instead of trying to implement one solution right now, we maybe should try to encourage workplaces to experiment with various policies and collect data back. Try to find working solutions by iterating and continuously improving policies like we do in engineering. Hopefully, it can help find decent enough solutions to chip at peoples biases.

Wouldn't that make Bernie in charge at this point?

First, maybe this will help fill in as a starter on the French situation.

So they picked extremely stupid ones, got it.

Secondly, I do agree that targets and statistics inevitably distort and pervert any goals. So it will tend towards failure, but that's government. It never really works, and since I assume we're talking about the system we're in rather than a new one I don't think it's a deal-breaker.

Depends on how much they get "perverted and distorted". It absolutely is a deal breaker if it makes things worse than before.

Thirdly, and most pertinently: due to systemic racism/prejudices there is a barrier to various arbitrary socially constructed groups that other arbitrary socially constructed groups do not need to deal with.

By ignoring that there is a barrier to some in the form of systemic prejudice you don't actually help those more discriminated against groups. You just help the arbitrary groups that are less discriminated against. Maybe you have less inequality overall because the discriminated against group is a minority, but I don't think either of us think that that makes it "better".

I don't think we understand each other. I am not saying we should do nothing. We should try to create policies that enforce color blind hiring, rewarding, etc. E.g. have people evaluate work before knowing whose work it is where possible. I am not saying there can't be any color/gender-aware policies anywhere. I am certainly not saying we should stop collecting statistics and put our heads into the sand. But we shouldn't hire/promote/reward people based on their race/gender in either direction.

How would such a policy even work? You measure by how much is each minority disadvantaged on average and give them advantage by that amount via whatever mechanism? So the individuals that were already treated fairly now have an advantage even compared to the majority, those that were disadvantaged most are still disadvantaged, but a bit less and some random people from the majority are disadvantaged, because hiring is a zero sum game. You arguably did not make the system any more fair. The only good part is that it probably reduces by how much the most disadvantaged people are disadvantaged by.

More importantly, you do nothing to fix the impression people have, that minorities are doing less/worse work, yet show everyone they are treated preferentially. This will cause people from the majority to wonder with every failure, whether it is because of the unfair advantage minorities are given. You can't even try to disprove it, because it is true in some cases. Rare cases perhaps, but very few people would care.

Then act surprised when this creates conscious racists and the majority tells you to fuck off and elects a candidate that cancels DEI initiatives entirely. See the issue?

In a democracy, you will never be able to enact policies that fix subconscious racism without fixing peoples perceptions. You will get voted out. That's why the policies have to be color-blind, even if they are less effective (take longer to work).

And if we are lucky and do the policies well, we may even fix plenty of other biases unrelated to race and gender and eventually have much better results than color-aware.

PS: If you know how to say color-aware and color-blind in a way that includes gender and other minorities, can you let me know? I think you understand what I mean but it still bothers me I am using the wrong word.

Look, I don't know what exactly France did, maybe colorblind measures are not very effective. Maybe France picked stupid ones and implemented them badly. Let's not pretend there is only one way to do colorblind hiring.

But my counter question is this. You say it did not help in France. How do you measure that? If one black person has it much easier while another was not helped at all, is that success? That is what I have issue with. Color-aware policies are extremely likely to just fake the statistics about groups, while if you actually compare random person to random person, it is just as (if not more) unfair as before. I believe it does not create real equity, it just fools statistics.

You should not measure inequity between arbitrary groups. You should measure inequity between individuals to get a reliable metric.

I think it would considerably vary from place to place, even workplace to workplace. In some (rare) places not at all, in some places considerably. I would be entirely guessing if I was to say what the average was.

Honestly, if the app was open-source so we can check it does not leak data, I would probably have no issue with it.

Making it a separate app makes sense if google wants to allow other apps to re-use the code. No reason to have the same functionality bundled into each app separately.

And the feature, as long as it is configurable, seems useful.

The auto-install is bad but understandable. As far as I am aware, there is no easy way to mark an app as a dependency of another app so it gets automatically installed only when needed. This should be fixed, but auto-install for all is not terrible temporary solution. This does not apply when the app is closed source and may steal your data.