Can we please move on from the topic of affirmative action, or lack thereof, in high-paying software engineering jobs? I kinda doubt that's "what's really going on out in the country."
If you are intending to suggest that the discussion of alleged affirmative action is off-topic in this thread, I disagree. I also disagree with your analysis of the scope of the thread.
If we assume for a moment that the original poster completely defines the permissible scope of topics in a thread, then the title of this thread still needs to be considered in the context of the entire original post. The premise of the original post is a reaction by the original poster to a quote from user "Another Reader", in which Another Reader proposed that "[m]any middle class people are very angry about what has happened to them over the last 10 years". This quote caused the original poster to suspect that he or she was living in a bubble (the District of Columbia), and he or she then posted this thread to solicit views from outside of that bubble (i.e. the rest of the USA).
Given this context, the phrase "out in the country" in the title could at least arguably refer to the rest of the United States outside of where the original poster lives, not just rural areas. This would be consistent with the interpretation of many of the respondents in this thread, who have posted general theories about the motives and beliefs of suspected or actual Trump voters in general, not just ones who live in rural areas. (To be sure, rural areas are discussed as well, no doubt because of their role in granting Trump apparent victory, but I do not detect that most respondents understood the thread to be
limited to a discussion of rural areas.)
That said, even if we assume that "out in the country" referred specifically to rural areas (which I doubt), the ongoing discussion of affirmative action in a particular field is still directly related to the original scope of the topic for at least two distinct reasons:
- Affirmation action is something that one could imagine that "many middle class people are very angry about", which again was the original scope of the thread. Even if the actual affirmative action practices are happening in big coastal cities and outside of rural areas, people who live in rural areas are still aware of those practices, and still able to get angry about them (and if comments on popular news media articles are any indication, they actually are angry about these alleged practices). To be clear, I express no view on the merits of affirmative action, to the extent it actually exists.
- The existence of affirmation action, or not, affects the ease at which members of historically privileged groups living in rural areas are able to move out of those rural areas, increase their income, and increase their standard of living. If more rural voters had done that, there would have been fewer of them in areas that voted for Donald Trump, and more of them in coastal cities, which conceivably could have affected the vote.
Therefore, even if we assume that the original post defines the outer limits of permissible discussion in the thread, and even if we assume that the title of the thread referred specifically to rural areas (which is not the best interpretation), this line of discussion is still directly on topic for those two distinct reasons.
However, the analysis doesn't stop there because the original post does not define the outside limits of permissible discussion in a thread. In a conversation, the topic naturally progresses over time, and this isn't necessarily something that needs to be clamped down and suffocated; indeed, doing so might prevent interesting and relevant ideas from surfacing. In this thread, the discussion of affirmative action didn't come out of nowhere, but was a natural progression of the conversation from other posts, including posts to which you did not object. This is a further, and alternative, reason why this line of discussion is not objectionable in this thread.
I know a recruiter at a TOP software company whose job is specifically to increase diversity in engineering new hires.
Diversity recruiting is
not a secret, but as you acknowledge yourself, it doesn't necessarily entail applying a different or lower standard to "[f]emale" or "minority" candidates. If we take the companies at their word, the theory behind diversity recruiting is that plenty of qualified women and minority candidates exist in the wild, but that traditional sourcing methods have simply failed to locate them; hence, diversity recruiters are tasked with broadening the search to include other avenues for finding candidates. Once the candidates are found, however, the same hiring standards apply to them as to all other candidates; it's not a different or lower bar, according to the information put out by the companies and the people who work at them (including in the Quora answer I just linked to).
Also, I'm not claiming 100% certainty or large-scale scientific evidence. Just like you are not. You can't provide evidence of equal skills for any sub-population, like I can't.
You are right that I haven't provided any particularly convincing evidence, but I'm not the one making the extraordinary claim that women and minority employees in a particular field are "relatively poor[]" at their jobs compared to white (etc.) men. Extraordinary claims should come with extraordinary evidence. In the absence of any compelling evidence either way, we should refrain from making claims that impugn the abilities of members of disadvantaged groups.