> an organisation funded by almost all of big tech
Agreed, and this sucks, but what should be done about this? Some NGO called "We Stop Bad Guys" approaches your company with its hand out. You have two choices:
1. kick down some money, get great headlines
2. don't, and then have it known that you don't support stopping Bad Guys -- then maybe write ten thousand never-to-be-read words about how your position is actually quite principled
God bless Hacker News, where "just start building your own package management system, like I did" is an earnest comment, including a sketched out implementation.
The thread you're weighing in on is about whether the four-fifths rule is merely diagnostic, or functionally punitive.
You're arguing about something else, using the form "given we know that racism is happening, and furthermore we know where and how it is happening, why shouldn't we just do these Totally Cost Free and Obviously Good Things that are just like fighting money laundering"
Well, I just don't think any of these things are as evident as you seem to assume they are. Also fwiw I grew up in the US, where I was called all sorts of slurs -- like, the real ones you probably censor in your internal monologue when you see them written -- throughout K-12 education. I still don't believe in the existence of pervasive and oppressive racism the way you seem to assume it.
Prior to the beginning of your excerpt is the word "You", meaning the comment's author is the subject, not "companies". I'm saying the commenter is appealing to black letter law for the answer to the question "what happens when..." but we have observational evidence to answer the question.
You are selectively adhering to the letter of the law, when the practical effects are already well known and studied. One is not obligated to ignore literature, nor abstain from doing a simple extrapolation from the incentives placed on the table.
There is a large body of literature concerning the question "does disparate-impact enforcement cause employers to alter hiring behavior in ways unrelated to actual productivity or discrimination?" and the answer is largely "yes". As you suggested elsewhere in this discussion, Google may be useful.
This is an application of the disparate impact doctrine. Even facially neutral policies are considered suspect if they produce results that correlate against protected groups, irrespective of intent.
This doctrine is the basis for much of employment law. It is a significant reason why employers don't administer IQ tests (or equivalents) to screen candidates since ~the 90s.
A common objection to the doctrine is that it leads to unfalsifiable discrimination claims, which is why it seems nonsensical to you.
That's the role of rhetoric as a skill: all the true and sufficient syllogisms in the world will be ignored by most readers, if the argument leads with priors-triggering hyperbole and bombast.
So long as that OSS keeps accumulating features, there isn't quite the equilibrium you're imagining. If you can pin to a stable version, which continues to audited, you're fine. But if the rest of the world moves on to newer versions of the software, you'll have to as well, unless you want to own the burden of hardening older versions.
in other words, if you see behavior in others that doesn't seem reasonable, there's two possibilities:
1. it makes sense to the subject, using the axioms they're reasoning from, which they've chosen because they have a stake in the outcome
2. an uninvolved, anonymous commenter on the internet knows -- better than the subject -- what's best for them
It's not always the case that (1) is correct, but it's the better prior than (2). And this fact being a downvote magnet here doesn't change that.