On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 08:17:21AM -0700, Dan Harkins wrote:
white and male. The fallacy works like this:
"If there was bias in favor of white males then we would have a
leadership that is predominantly white and male. We have a
leadership that is predominantly white and male, therefore we
have bias."
Just for the record, that is not a line of reasoning I am taking.
The line I am taking is something more like the following. First,
assume that, if there were bias in favour of (we're not testing for
white, so I'm leaving that out) males, there might be an observable
pattern of difference between the percentage of women in "leadership"
positions and the percentage of women in overall participants. So,
look at the "leadership" and the general participant populations over
time. If there appears to be a difference, then that is reason to
encourage further inquiry. If there appears to be no difference, then
we are justified in saying that there is no evidence of an issue.
That approach is just basic empiricism, and not the fallacy of
affirming the consequent that you're claiming people are making. If
such an approach is controversial, then every modern empirical science
is on a shaky footing. It's certainly true (Hume makes this point
rather more eloquently than I can) that such empirical argument is
_formally_ false. But that's the wrong criterion, because empirical
argument is useful. Even Hume played billiards.
So a problem statement has been made: there is a notable lack of
diversity in the areas of race and gender. Why is this a problem?
Because some people report that they experience a chilly environment,
and we respect those people for their other contributions and would
like more people like them to contribute in similar ways, and
therefore we want to make the environment less chilly. I'm sort of
surprised that that problem, which has been stated in my view quite
plainly more than once in this thread, isn't evident to anyone
participating.
If this is just some innocent question to find out "who we are" then why
don't we ask about the size of the organization we work for?
We don't need to. A large number of participants include an
affiliation, and using by and large public data we could just find
this out using the data we already have. I agree it would be useful.
Best regards,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)anvilwalrusden(_dot_)com