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Comment by eoi | Hacker News Reader

The article defines bias as follows:

> Want to know if the selection process was biased against some type of applicant? Check whether they outperform the others. This is not just a heuristic for detecting bias. It's what bias means.

Under that definition, you have been biased against A. [edit: on reflection I see this as a weakness of his definition. I missed that your selection process does in fact select the best candidates.]

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Yes, but that's not the common usage of the word. Or how most people understand it. With that usage you could say ivy league schools are NOT biased against Asians since Asian graduates aren't more successful than non-Asian ones, except nobody does.

Hypothetical logic is flawed anyway. Higher ability Asian graduates could be less / only equally successful in the workplace due to pervasive external bias too. A lot of this is exacerbated by the fact that "soft skills" are more important for high status careers, and your "soft skills" are pretty much defined by tribal associations. It's the core of how we interact socially, and it causes problems that are really only fixed by alleviating scarcity.

Unless you know what exactly caused A to outperform others, you won't really know if the process is biased or what made it biased.

When asserting biases, you must first distinguish them from random noise. Using pg's logic, every selection process that isn't perfect is biased.

>> This is not just a heuristic for detecting bias. It's what bias means.

> Under that definition

That's not a definition. It's a claim about what the term "bias" means.

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