Canadian Politics Today

So you think there's a problem because of some anecdotes, and this is enough for Seinfeld to change his hiring practices?  5 of the 10 highest paid comedians are POC or women, including the top paid, and there's also Dave Chappelle who is up there with Kevin Hart in popularity but not on the list.  How do we as a society address a problem if we can't define it or know how big of a problem it is?  Surely we can figure something out. 

How do we know when we, like Seinfeld, should hire more women/POC?  And how do we know when we've hired enough women/POC?  Is it based on gut feelings?  Should numbers be equal (50/50 men vs women) or match what the census makeup of the general population is?  Should we just ballpark it and hire a bunch until it kinda looks good?

How do we know the lack of female comedians is due to sexism?  Maybe more men are good at making people laugh than women?  Funny women seem to do well, like Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Amy Schumer etc.  To what extent is the lack of women an industry problem or a "less woman are funny" problem?  To what extent is this Seinfeld's problem, or his responsibility to help fix?

So black people are better at basketball than other races?

And women are smarter and/or harder working than men?

How is there an objective standard in these 2 examples and there isn't for people who are good at making other people laugh

How are there more university grads who are women, and more female medical doctors graduating than men, but STEM is sexist because of lack of women?  Is the teaching professional or medical doctor profession sexist because of lower male graduates? Are anecdotes and number disparities sufficient to show sexism/racism?

So you're not asking for quotas and believe people should be hired on merit alone?

The interviewer was basically criticizing Seinfeld for not having more female comedians on his show.  Is it Seinfeld's problem that there are more successful male comedians in the industry who are funny, in his assessment, than women?  Does that make him sexist?  Why should we trust some interviewers' insinuation that there's some kind of sexist imbalance on the show, or in the industry?  Why should we trust anyone making claims if they're unable to back up their claims with evidence?

As I've shown with basketball players and teachers, a disparity in gender or race isn't sufficient on its own to show there's racial or gender bias occurring in hiring, and yet people do it constantly.

We should be looking at social problems like this like social scientists, based on evidence, not making claims pulled out of our butts and then claiming some employer is sexist, racist, or whatever simply because of anecdotes and gender/race disparities, and then pressuring them to change hiring practices because things *appear* to some people to be unfair when there's little to no evidence that it actually is or not.

I agree.  Is it possible that there are more men who are good comedians than women?  If one disagrees with that statement, i think they'd need evidence it's wrong.

If more men graduated university than women for these exact same reasons you propose, some people would claim it is due to sexism, just as they do in STEM fields.  And they would bring forward this claim without any real evidence.  It sounds like people are pulling claims out of their rear end.  Nobody is going to say that more women graduate due to sexism.  Why?  Because there's no evidence to back up that claim.  Is it possible in our society we're sometimes reaching conclusion like this before actually investigating whether a claim is true or not? I find that likely.

I'm not sure.  Something that can be verified?  One study was conducted where the exact same resumes were sent to many employers and they just changed the names on them.  The resumes with POC sounding names got more callbacks for interviews than the white sounding names.  This is an effective study that shows racial bias was a factor in hiring because all variables were controlled for except for the ethnicity of the candidates names.

Therefore you believe that quotas are a solution to this problem, correct?  So maybe i'm not the one obsessed with quotas.

Merit means the best person for the job gets the job regardless of what they look like (race, gender, eye colour, whatever).  That's what POC and women have been asking for since the beginning.  It's the only way to choose someone for a job without discriminating on the basis of race or sex.

Why is it difficult?  Conduct a study like the ones mentioned.  You want to discriminate against caucasians and men and give those jobs to women or POC.  I don't really have a problem with this if there's discrimination going on against POC/women in order to negate that discrimination, but if you're going to discriminate against people based on race/sex and take their jobs away to give to others you have an obligation to at least know what you're talking about and have some kind of evidence that a problem exists due to racism/sexism.  Yelling "racism and sexism" isn't good enough, it's terrible social science, and so are basing conclusions on anecdotes.  You either believe in justice, or you believe in justice only for certain people based on their race or gender, which is what racists and sexists do.

No you haven't, you simply dodged the question.

No.  Again, if you want to discriminate against people on the basis of race and sex, which is kind of a serious thing to do, the onus is on you to provide evidence that it's justified, not pull things from your behind.

If you want to know what acceptable evidence means you can take a social science class on research methods. Correlation doesn't equal causation, for instance.

Merit is likely the case in most hirings, but not in all cases.  I think most would agree that hiring based on merit is the ideal.

Astral Projection and the CIA ?

Whack.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7e4g3/found-page-25-of-the-cias-gateway-report-on-astral-projection

I have no interest in this thread until Charles Anthony shows up.

I think that was the first time I truly understood that we were dealing with a complete total mentally deranged crazy-person.