You can't possibly be for real. You don't know her qualifications, so you assume she doesn't have any. Then you come up with a straw-man of "non-engineers lacking skills" and assign that to her! You're more willing to assign traits you made up to her than look up what she's actually capable of!
My other response was flagged for a part that was distracting to the main point, so I'm going to repost it without that part:
If you've been in academia for awhile you've seen this happen time and time again. Student does excellently in undergrad, masters, phd coursework but when it comes to making real technical contributions, they hit a wall. It was a clever move by her to use her pedigree to pivot into "AI ethics" where the standards for publishing are much lower (as we can see from this draft that was circulated).
This is an outrageous racist statement in itself. The idea that she reached her position because of AA is unbelievable. Getting into Google isn't easy, and the company doesn't give a rat's ass about diversity, HR statements and pablum notwithstanding.
If any company has a reputation for hiring only talented people, it's Google. She got her position based on merit, like the overwhelming majority of Google employees.
The existence of affirmative action is not in any doubt, and it's not racist to suppose that some people benefit from it, given that's the entire purpose it exists for.
the company doesn't give a rat's ass about diversity
I have no idea how anyone could think that. It's famous for being obsessed with diversity to the extent that they publicly fired, slandered and screwed over a guy who wrote an essay saying maybe the company is approaching diversity the wrong way. This is a company in which managers have apologised for using the word "family" because it's supposedly offensive to LBGT people, in which they organise competitions which ban men (see Code Jam for Women), in which they fund female-only scholarships, which literally has a website called https://diversity.google/, which puts "Google is committed to advancing racial equity for Black communities" at the top of its developer documentation, which labels businesses in Google Maps if they're women or black owned and a million other things that show this is a topic they think about all the time.
As for merit, you're about a decade behind the times. Google was relaxing hiring standards for women in particular a long time ago. For example they could fail phone screens and be advanced to the next stages anyway, whereas men would just be dropped at that point. You can't be so strongly pro-diversity and not have that problem because ultimately the only way to seriously improve in your self-chosen metrics is to hire 'diverse' people aggressively.
> *Given her background/race, we can't actually rule out the possibility that she got carried through the ranks by AA.
The reality is that she hard to work three times as hard as a white man to make it: effort to learn the knowledge, and double effort to overcome the effects of sexism and racism, of which you've perfectly demonstrated.
It might be true that she faced more hurdles than her white peers to get to where she is. That is irrelevant to the question of whether she was weaker than her peers.
That is a simple statistical problem: If your program has lower admission standards for a certain group of people , a randomly chosen person from that group will be weaker than their peers.
"If your admissions criteria gives "bonus points" to people of a certain race, a randomly chosen person who was admitted of that race will be weaker than people not of that race."
Please point out the flaw(s) in my reasoning. I've clarified it a little bit. If you think my clarification significantly changes what I was trying to say, then I apologize for not being clear enough.
It's mind-blowing. It's like they've never walked down the street of a major city, and see the $200+ AirPods line are already the most popular headphones used.
And if you're actually the target market for that stand and monitor, they are also quite a bargain, because if you're not mounting that monitor on that stand, you're mounting it on a more expensive rigging.
