Subject: Re: What he said
No, and I cannot believe I have to explain in this granularity.

'Competence' is not a statistically verifiable commodity ahead of time . If you interview five people you may find three who you think competent. Unless there is one who is an absolute standout, for whatever reason, then consider other factors such as background, life experience, and so on.

That is clearly stated.

I'll tell you why I prefer Buffett not say this same thing AND when in my own life and career I have thought it important to find individuals of the female or black persuasion because I believed this was actually material to their competence at what I sought from them.

It is certainly true that when I have looked at candidates we might hire I have generally found more than one candidate "exciting" in the sense that I thought they would be a great hire and would have to work hard to figure out which of them was the best.

I was a professor of electrical engineering at a 2nd tier research university. We had 17 white male faculty during most of the time I was employed. At least one time we were hiring we had an AMAZING female candidate that I would have hired in a heartbeat had she been white and male (or even green and trans). We had other good white male candidates. We did offer the position to the woman, and she did not take it, I think she wound up on the faculty of Stanford. But there was no doubt in my mind that part of the job of a professor was to recruit great students, and I found it more than likely that having a woman on the faculty would certainly make it more likely we would get more and therefore better female students wanting to work with us. In my opinion, I was still hiring for competence, but there were multiple competencies we were hiring for and some candidates checked the boxes better on some than on others.

So if your complaint against Buffett was "I think he underestimates the value of this guys competence which is different in these important ways from the competence he has amply represented on his board" I'd say that is a reasonable concern. Of course to make that case, you would have to go beyond the color of their skin or the body parts you inferred were under their clothing. If your suggestion was "I just have no reason to think that Buffett is smart enough to pick a woman or a black guy because he isn't smart enough to weight properly any diversity of view they have against the other factors", I would likely disagree with you, but I would agree with your approach of thinking it was Buffett's idea to hire competence, and that included not having 18 accountants on the board and no one who knew marketing or actuarial.

But it seems to me that GENERALLY those who push affirmative action hardest REJECT the kind of competence calculus that Buffett or I would like as RACIST and SEXIST. This is of a piece with those anti-racist documents that have shown up now and again where not being on time and objective logic are described as racist. To the extent saying we look for competence, but also diversity, leaves even a crack in the door for that point of view, is worth pedantically resisting with the cry "competence is all the diversity I care about" or whatever it is that Buffett said.

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So when anti-racism became a thing like 3 years ago or whatever, I had a visceral reaction against it. And I remembered the conversations I had with my grandmother, who was born a poor white girl in a poor section of Brooklyn in 1905. And as I grew up she told me about the importance of being aware of which blocks were controlled by the German-Americans, which the Italian-Americans, and she just always seemed to be a little racist to me. And I wondered, now that I am in my 60s, am I the modern version of my grandmother? How could I tell?

SO I went on youtube to see if there were any black American's who agreed with me. And you know what, there are PLENTY, but that is not the point. The point is, yes, for some things, your sex and your race read on COMPETENCIES you may offer in various circumstances.

And knowing that, if one were to argue that "appointing more black or female directors to Brk's board will increase the hiring pool of black and female employees and expand the likelihood of gaining black and female customers" would be, IMHO, a good reason to argue for diversity in hiring on the board of directors. I would tend to disagree with your conclusion, since in my experience, the average employee of Sees does not even know what Berkshire Hathaway is, let-alone what the racio-sexual make-up of its board of directors is, or even that corporations have boards of directors. But at least it would be a sensible claim that could be discussed based on evidence.

And I would counter "I'm pretty sure that restricting directors to superbly competent directors will have more of an impact on the business than will expanding the racio-sexual diversity. After all, the highly competent candidates for C-suite jobs and directorships actually will know about the board and how it has operated so far, and will love being part of such a thing, I would go so far as to say, regardless of their own racio-sexual backgound".

So thanks for the granularity, I hope you have enjoyed my further granularity at least 1/3 as much as I enjoyed your granularity.

To summarize, if you hire for competence you will get competence, if you hire for diversity you will get diversity, competent systems get what they measure for, and their is not a lot of evidence that Buffett isn't a superb judge of competence so concerns that he is not taking diversity into account enough have an uphill battle.