[scottlocklin]

It's not a problem if you assume, as most affirmative action does, that 2+ sigma talent (baseline physics professor) and motivation is evenly distributed across populations. It probably isn't; virtually nothing else is in any biological population above the evolutionary level of a paramecium, and so you get numskulls like this in your physics department:

https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI

Merit is a pretty good criterion; worked for a long time!

[vharuck]

I've come to see affirmative action's value for the future. Hiring was not free from bias in the past. Even if that's no longer true, the existing lack of physicists in a community means less people from that community will have physics as a goal. Kids rarely dream of attaining roles they don't see. And if kids don't see roles on television or in daily life, that leaves their community. Underrepresentation causes an artificial self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's hard to come up with an unbiased way to correct current problems caused by past bias.

[inglor_cz]

Still, there is a natural experiment. There is no affirmative action in Taiwan or Japan (or Czechia, where I live). In that case, shouldn't teams from those countries exhibit some advantages against American ones?

Or is the effect so small that it gets erased by, say, better facilities or funding?

[wbsss4412]

Assuming that capacity to produce valuable scientific results is uncorrelated with society’s historical prejudice (ie people from historically disadvantaged backgrounds are as likely as any other to produce such results, given they aren’t hampered by historical prejudice), seems more reasonable than assuming that “talent” is reducable to a single normally distributed variable that we have consistently been able to measure in practice.