But that assumes bias actually exists in the first place. This argument is eerily similar to the religious argument of "just believe [that god is real]". No, prove it first, then I'll believe. And inb4 "they fired more old old people so that's bias". Correlation does not equal causation. Show me the causation.
> does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong
Moral platitudes are irrelevant to this discussion.
Not really. It only assumes the possibility of bias. At the very least, one must look for it. There's a lot of subjectivity involved in deciding who to hire or fire, and unfortunately a lot of people in tech seem to think they're perfect rational machines immune to bias, so they never even look. Don't have to look far for examples.
In any case, causation can look an awful lot like correlation when you've got many layers of indirection and noise to account for. So for practical purposes, they very well could be the same thing. You can shout "correlation is not causation" as loud as you like, but reality doesn't work on the basis of popular slogans.
And causation is pretty much completely irrelevant to law.
You lost me there.
Exactly. Which is why I call out unsubstantiated claims (or "slogans", as you put it) whenever and wherever I see them. The most common places I've observed them happen to be with blanket leftist allegations of sexism/racism/ageism in the tech industry.