Helsinki to Begin Anonymous Recruiting
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I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives!
A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success.
And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line.
A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant.
If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change.
I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated
The problem with bias is that it has affected peoples opportunities in the past. This will be reflected in a CV.
I'm not sure the inclusion of name / age / etc will solve this problem, so Helsinki might still be on the right track.
It feels like the solution is to intentionally introduce a reverse bias towards these candidates. But that idea does sit well... Also interested in any other suggestions here.
(No I didn't go to a famous school)
(Disclosure: I went to a well-known school, but without either of the parental benefits I just described. My parents helped in other more indirect ways throughout my upbringing, but they didn't come from a wealthy or connected family background.)
For starters, because it's a lot easier to "get in" if you have no trouble paying for it, and you have your "legacy admissions."
If you really think XYZ is that great, you should really want to hire the people who fought to get in, fought to succeed, and did.
Stack Overflow's got an Azure SRE spot open, asking for experience with PowerShell DSC and Terraform, among others. The main goal for the role appears to be scaling their enterprise offering.
I've worked as both a sysadmin and a dev for years now, and used both to manage sizable deployments in public clouds, both Azure and others, mostly for enterprise software companies. This is a mildly specialized skillset (though getting less specialized by the day), and I figured I'd get at least a screening call.
I didn't even make it through the automated resume screening, and if I had to guess it's because I don't have a degree, much less a CS degree.
* On the off-chance my employer reads this, this was more of an exploratory application than me actively hunting for other opportunities.
It's something that I fought against (I have a technical background and had the advantage of being able to evaluate technical skill somewhat independently), and did well because of it.
There were a few candidates that I brought in that I was reprimanded for - physically brought into our partners' office to be told off - only to have that candidate receive multiple job offers from our clients. The partners weren't qualified to really evaluate technical skill, but knew what candidate qualities that a start up is willing to pay a recruiter's fee for.
At the end of the day, my candidates were exceptional for having risen above their alma maters' reputations, and the Ivy league grads are more consistently good/qualified.
When hiring, time is such an important factor. Many engineering teams are unwilling to take the chance on an a candidate that graduated from unfamiliar school because their hiring process is weak and/or inefficient. Or they waited too long to hire, and need someone "yesterday". At least they're more likely to end up with a good candidate by using the school as the qualifier, even if it costs them more because of the candidate's demand.
TL;DR : The 'top' candidates' values are artificially inflated as a result of high demand, which itself is due to ill-conceived and insufficient hiring processes across most companies.
There's a chapter about "blind auditions" that Orchestras began to implement in the 1970's that you might find interesting.[2] After reading that chapter I remember wondering how much we're overthinking a lot of these issues and whether we might be overlooking some pretty easy changes that could have a significant impact.
One interesting fact from the blind auditions study was that even without being able to see the musician they were able to demonstrate bias (likely unconscious) when women wore high heels to their audition because the sound gave away their gender. It's really fascinating some of the ways we unconsciously "judge" those around us.
[1]https://hbr.org/2016/07/designing-a-bias-free-organization
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
The allegations against Google actually really caught me off guard because, in my experience, a lot of men in Silicon Valley seem like they're almost too... progressive (if that's the right word) to overtly harass their female peers the way men on Wall Street sometimes do. On the other hand I really struggle with inclusion in tech in a way that I never did in finance. I often feel dismissed by my tech colleagues. Both personally and professionally. Experiencing that sort of divide is much more difficult to explain and, to your point, much more difficult for me to navigate. Not to diminish women who have been sexually harassed at work, I'm one of them, but this silent divide takes a much bigger toll on me personally.
Thank you for pointing it out.
But there are a few problems: 1. A/B testing in talent mgmt practices is costly in terms of time-investment. - Final, long term impact of such experiments are not visible to the org for, well, a long while. Sure, may be some short term impacts like increased diversity - may be visible in the short term. But is that worth all the experimentation for all the firms except the largest ones like FANG?
The experiment cost is probably not worth the value for the smaller orgs.
Such skill tests can probably be done easily for programming and other situations but a lot of roles do not have a strictly defined evaluation criteria as the KPIs are...well... fuzzy. Or at least not something which can be demonstrated in a short "test". Think sales / pro-management. You can not demonstrate in a test if you are a good enough sales person who can meet the revenue projections ("sell this pencil to me" doesn't count).
Issue here is lack of a easily reproducible and reliable signal for your future success for such roles, thereby increasing the dependency on past history - and by association, your pedigree.
Of course there will be other issues like isolating performance factors into "chance" and "skill" in a noisy dataset that is usually available, if at all. Or hiring mindset which focuses on the required skillset (what is needed to get the job done) but the "best person" for the job which muddies the waters by adding evaluation factors which are really not material to performance on the job at hand.
But if the cost of experimentation can be reduced by devising quick tests for generating reliable signals independent from historical background, it would be awesome!
Politics about bias and diversity aside, if your goal was to objectively disable people from being biased, the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply any of their biases.
I say this as someone who won the "game" on every count with this. Near-perfect SAT score, perfect high school performance, 100% acceptance rate into the Ivies (Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Cornell).
These say nothing about me other than my parenting, background and ability to win games that other people made up. Any intelligence or ability or skill or discipline that I have is in spite of those things, not because of them.
A common game bosses make up: "impress me with growth in this KPI by next quarter"
Rather than proving it is laughable, you are instead giving the exact reason why (under a certain value system) it makes lots of sense to select for this ability.
Going more meta, starting a median VC-backed company in the Valley is largely playing the same kind of game as in elite private schools and colleges - observing a social scene, identifying powerful players and the ladder to reach them, meticulously performing the necessary social roles in order to achieve funding, cargo cult management styles from the group.
Bias will exist regardless of which information you present, the most you can hope for is shifting and limiting the types of bias that come into play to eliminate useless or harmful bias. Even if you grant anonymity to the applicant, recruiters can still be biased against or in favor of the school somebody went to, what they studied, the organizations they were involved in, etc.
I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives!
A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success.
And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line.
A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant.
If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change.
I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated
Adhere hiring decisions to defined generational imbalance correction mechanisms (in the US, "affirmative action"/EEOC/similar state laws).
The goal of these bindings are to remove inherent bias. Some of that is bred into the intercept defined by unchangeable characteristics. Others by the vector field of rewards return for effort, often defined by thar initial condition. The goal with most of these (apparently feared? do I have your emotion right?) corrections is to offset at least the most damning of these.
Perhaps what's most insidious about ascribing group victimhood is that you must also accept the converse, which is group responsibility. Are you suddenly going to be held responsible for any wrongs that your group has ever committed? Are you truly certain that's what you want?
You are ignoring that life is not fair, and never will be. We cannot control the bodies and circumstances we are born into. But every individual has the ability to make the most of their opportunity and achieve their goals, and quite a few in history have proven that they are able to accomplish far more by effort and will than any natural advantage otherwise. That is the best we can do, and unless you create some matrix world where we are all exactly equivalent clones of the same capacity, that is all that is possible.
It is important to note that the unfairness you describe doesn't affect the positive (non-normative) observations of bias-preservation that the blind hiring approach persists.
Now, pivoting to moral claims along the lines of your comment:
Discrimination has a long history, of which slavery, carting to reservations, redlining,and so forth favored certain groups consistently above others, in the past and in the present. In my view, repairing at least the present entrenched bias by any name is in order, the question is to what level. Autarky is a feasible outcome, if desired, which is to do nothing. The diffusion of favored and privileged status will always feel like discrimination to the group that had favored status. There is still a moral imperative to at least correct current entrenched bias, which in the US can show up in incarceration rates, ability to invest, etc.etc.
Unless you feel these groups that are historically and currently biased against are somehow responsible for their own situations? If that is the case, autarky or favoring your personal situation has a basis to build on. However, I fail to see how various denigrated groups through time brought their current biased outcomes. You've been shown evidence by other commentators that in the US blacks receive longer sentences than whites. Is that just how it is, or do we have as a society a moral imperative to fix at least the current system, let alone offer historical reparations?
Anyways, you didn't answer why people must be considered as groups instead of individuals? That seems to be the only lens you consider people, while also only choosing the group identity of the most perceived victimhood over an arbitrary time frame. And again, if you want to say that someone takes on the wrongs experienced by a group, then they must also take responsibility for the wrongs committed by the group. So in your example about US blacks, that group also commits the majority of crimes so they must acknowledge and resolve that too. Are you prepared to say that?
You're changing the argument into something about morality but the reality is that there is no cosmic justice. You can be born with missing limbs, or to a destitute family, or inside North Korea. The best we can do is make sure that if you work hard (and yes, harder than others who might be born to a billionaire US family) that you get the same exact chance to gain a position because you are actually competent and qualified for it, and what you look like and what some group in the past has done has absolutely nothing to do with that.
The question is whether the school is offering a harmful bias -- people get screened by school, GPA, etc all the time but at the point that society agrees these are harmful then you can just anonymize them out. It gets murkier on the moral/ethical side but I think that's the nature of the problem, not a problem with the solution.
Anecdotally, I've been on the recruiting end of "anonimized" CVs pushed by outsourcing companies. I was never fully clear on whether this was a legal requirements for them, or if it was a gesture to show inclusiveness and social responsibility on their part (take this with a pinch of salt, most outsourcing companies in France are little better than horse-dealers and will push any warm body your way if they think they can turn a profit). At any rate, most of these were hilariously badly done: using initials for the last name but leaving the first name in full, leaving telling initials (1), or other subtle or less subtle ways to hint at the contractor's origin and gender.
(1) e.g. a first name initialed J.L., J.M. or some other variation points to a Jean-something (Jean-Louis, Jean-Michel, etc.) composite first name, which is a clear indication of a "native" Frenchman (and a hint as to the person's age as well)
It's still unclear whether the problem was with the implementation (the experiment) or the method.
If there's spooky action/unintuitive reality at play here it's the job of a good scientific study to pull it out and lay it bare.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
The people who reviewed and approved the designs for our office space were all males. Guess what they forgot to put in the women's restrooms? When women complained, they put an open trash can next to the toilet with no lid...
The problem with the whole conversation around this topic is everyone pretending that women and men on average have the same level of skills and experience as each other. Then they act shocked when there are so few qualified male nurses or female mechanics.
Businesses only care about this topic, because it helps them design products and provide services that address a wider market. So, maybe they should just admit they don't always hire the absolute technically best candidate as the goal is to improve the social structure of the team.
Following through on their source [1], it says that the study outcome actually favors women and minority candidates, but it doesn't say how much, or talk about statistical signifance. It seems like the experiment design has been criticized on this one study too, and not releasing the results seems suspect.
The study also cites that blind auditions were a success for Orchestras [2]:
>In a well-known study analysing data on auditions and hiring by orchestras over this period, Goldin & Rouse (2000) found that the use of blind auditions had a major impact on gender bias in orchestras, increasing the likelihood of female musicians being selected by 25-40%.
[1] http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/projects/going-blind-...
http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/p...
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And if it's not true, arguably what you've done is removed the adjustment variables that could correct the bias, rather than the bias itself.
At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course, we kill these unbiaseds shortly after every selection process, since the mere process of selection itself, generates bias.
Some SF writer must have beaten me to this right?
>> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
Seems like it did the job of removing existing bias when details were blind.
If I write on my application that I have 25 years of experience, does that have to be excluded due to it revealing that my date of birth is likely more than 40 years ago? Can they really believe that the amount of experience isn't important?
Other steps people my age take are to stop listing dates--either select dates like university graduation, or--in extreme cases--all employment dates.
Keep in mind that there are different biases at different screening points along the way. The manager with the open position may want someone older and more experienced, but the people recruiting, screening, and filtering the candidates may be biased or simply not familiar with the value of experience that doesn't match today's buzzwords.
Does my outlook not resonate with you/other older employees?
The cover letter seems to have fallen out of fashion, but I find a couple paragraphs of prose far more revealing about a person's abilities than a resume. Of course it's also more work to craft one for every position you're interested in, and doesn't help much if you're looking to put yourself into a database for recruiters (e.g. LinkedIn or any other job site), where they force you to iterate your experience in chronological order and list technologies with no context.
I think it's important to leave off things you're not interested in. I did Perl for years but there is no amount of money that would get me to do it again, so I minimize or eliminate its presence on my resume, and put extra emphasis on the technologies I want to work with now.
When they come in for an in-person interview racial/gender/age/whatever bias is still going to be there.
Only way to prevent this would be to forbid in-person interviews before hiring/signing a conract, but then companies would presumably simply stop hiring from applications, because the qualifications are unreliable and they can't get a character impression of the applicant.
Hiring by reference from existing employees would become the norm (maybe it already is).
Also, I relate this to culture. Not to offend anyone, but from my personal experience lying in CV is much more common for some countries, that for others.
Scale maybe terrible, like multiple certifications in some field with no actual basic knowledge or skills. Like Certified Senior (sic!) Software Developer who can't tell you difference between stack and queue, or CCIE certified network engineer who has no idea what is DNS and how it works (real case).
If both the application and the work is completely remote and anonymous it might be possible to avoid most bias, but that's only feasible in IT and a couple other sectors and even there it's not common.
The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.
"eh, midwestern state school"
"what even is an HBCU are those accredited?"
"fortran though?"
the initiatives are at least conscious of sensitivities in the space, but we have a long way to go
It would be nice to build a group-blind world, and the more we adopt these specific approaches the better can can iterate towards. However, care should be taken to ensure the baked in biases don't further entrench.
Engineer here, and no, blind hiring will not bake-in any biases, because that's exactly the problem this approach solves - it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.
The identification of the issue is at hand. Consider Computer Science. Historically far fewer women go through the training for a variety of personal reasons and societal pressure. So, on the margin, blind/anonymous hiring ignores that upstream delta between females in population and skilled females in hiring pool. Whether this is desirable or not is not my point, only that this is "baked in bias" perpetuating down the line.
It's noble to build a society where we value blindness on characteristics irrelevant to hiring. Doing it piecemeal can result in furthering these baked in biases.
A better approach would be to split the skills validation (blind) from the move-forward decision (adhering to whatever inter-generational correction schema the society has decided upon) where the only pool of eligible move-forwards meet the established skills validation. In this way, you only get skilled candidates, and you can satisfy whatever other characteristics that need satisfaction.
Now we can speculate how many submissions were from people that don't identify as male (was it 50 or less%? Github hasn't released details to my knowledge). The issue though is that once the results (of what appears to be a fair process) didn't match the desired narrative, people screamed sexism and made mostly emotional arguments.
You've mentioned an "inter-generational correction schema" elsewhere in the thread. In most institutions, this essentially gets instated as quotas which embitters the majority in the system (including the people they target to enable because it's assumed they had to get past a "lower bar").
[1] https://archive.is/8SsNp#selection-381.122-494.0 [2] http://archive.is/NrLqE [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
Applying the selection quota to the hiring pool that passes skills would get around the "quota-implies-less-skilled" issue.
What if it's a cultural difference that has negative effect on the population in question?
Do you respect the difference, or try to change things so that those in said population who would prosper under different outlooks can do so?
This is a serious question, and I genuinely don't have a good, general answer. I can see this line of thought being used to superficially validate any bias one cares to in a "that's just how things are" kind of manner, which helps no one.
But we also have to acknowledge that differences will lead to, well, differences. How do we differentiate between negative and neutral causality?
Let's formalize it a bit, I think this helps clarify.
Let A be the hiring propensity, B be job preparation (education, experience, what have you), and C be the "blinding factors" Helsinki is trying to address.
As a model we would like the joint propensity for everyone to be normalized. In other words, P(A,B,C) would be about the same.
The joint propensity P(A,B,C) would be expressed as
P(A,B,C) = P(A | B,C) * P(B | C) * P(C) [0]
Helsinki is making the first term, P(A | B,C) independent of their "blinding factors", or, in other words, P(A | B,C) = P(A | B).[1]
The remaining terms P(B | C) and P(C) are unaffected. It is P(B|C) differential that many arguing for what I call non-autarky "social corrections" (we do something as a society).
Since Helsinki's decision affects _only_ the conditional probability P(A| B,C), the other factors are still at play, and P(A,B,C) remains at issue.
There is nothing that can be done by Helsinki's hiring department for P(B|C) in the short term -- people are dealt the hand they have, life isn't fair, and so on. Completely true.
By blinding themselves, they set P(A|B) to be flat on C and no "equalization" of P(A,B,C) can be observed.
A truly egalitarian society would have P(B|C) = P(B). However, we aren't there. C, what Helsinki blinds themselves to, matters for qualifying life experiences.
The model that is being argued for by you and others I believe is formalized as a conditional independence model, namely that the propensity of hiring is independent of race, conditional on life preparation: P(A,C | B) = P(A|B) * P(C|B).[2] Note though: bias still persists: P(C|B) = P(B|C)*P(C)/P(B) -- we can't get away from that P(B|C) term in either model, and we know qualitatively that P(B|C) != P(B), hence why a correction can be positively argued for (rather than solely from emotion or duty).
Anyhow, that's the model in mind, and I'm open to being wrong/corrected. Thoughts?
--------------------
After thinking about it more, it seems that the ultimate goal of Helsinki is to make P(A|B,C) = P(A|B), not the latter model.
--------------------
[0] Chained conditional probabilites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_rule_(probability)
[1] Independent variables definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_(probability_theo...
[2] Conditional independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence
Edit: I should have been more precise when referring to blind hiring. I meant completely blind hiring, including the "on-site" interview stage(making it "blind" could be difficult). Obviously you're also correct about the earlier life experiences which could have been impacted by numerous factors, but my perception on that is the same as with law, it shouldn't be retroactive because you can't change people's past. Besides, each case is different and applying counter-biases here is like blind shooting.
If I understand where you are coming from, "landing the job interview" are the direct factors Helsinki is choosing to be blind to, like name and so forth. Am I understanding that right? If so, let me clarify the point -- the factors that Helsinki _will_ judge resumes on -- experience and so forth -- are pre-conditioned on your name (etc.). So the fact that one makes the initial cut is still driven by the factors Helsinki chose to be blind to.
> Also, I completely condemn the notion of attempting to fix the problem with affirmative action, primarily because it attempts to solve inequality(evil) with deliberate and explicit discrimination(greater evil).
I get where you're coming from on this. The method I propose, if Helsinki uses the blinding methodology, is to impose any "corrective"/affirmative actions after the the blind evaluation of skills. That way every person is ensured to be qualified (avoiding the critique of "diversity hires"). One possible (and usually a default) "corrective" approach is autarky/doing nothing.
And... that's my whole point! I appreciate the discussion.
Yes, it will: if you're born to a well-off family, you'll go to better schools before college. Due to this, you'll have a better chance at succeeding in college, have more resources to delve deeper into your field of study, better manage studying abroad, &c. All of these factors will make your list of skills more attractive to employers.
Compared to someone who was poor who went to worse schools, didn't study abroad, and couldn't afford to spend more time on their field of study due to having to work to pay for college. This will make your list of skills less attractive to an employer.
Right out of the gate, there is a bias against people who grew up poor in the hiring process.
> it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.
It does so by devaluing repressed classes of people. This is a societal cost to benefit businesses.
EDIT: I have missed the whole point of the parent comment.
That expertise is a direct result of class. I feel like I've sufficiently explained how class-based biases will still slip through this system, so respond to it directly and tell me _how bias is not present_ in that system.
> Based on it, the one from high class has more skills and more experience than the one from lower class. So of course, you will hire the one with more skills.
I never said businesses ought do x, I just said that certain classes will be biased against in this attempt at a bias-less recruitment process which will produce negative outcomes for society.
You're right. I've missed your point. You're correct that this will have negative results.
On average, it's important to note.
There seems to be this implied belief that there's a conspiracy in the West to hire white males above all. This simply isn't true. By having access to race and gender and even age in some cases it allows us to select for a diverse set of candidates. So although we may not (or we may!) end up with an outcome that is as diverse as the set we started with, we at least made the effort to give different people an equal opportunity.
If I'm only allowed to recruit based on the best credentials then those with a socioeconomic advantage will continue to.
Putting people into permanent "social classes" is far worse than letting people use their abilities and become competent independently.
This is the exception to the rule and not really relevant to anything I said I think? What about the kid who grew up poor and could have gotten into Harvard but didn't go because their parent was sick and couldn't afford care and they attended a local college to be home with them? This is more likely.
> Putting people into permanent "social classes" is far worse than letting people use their abilities and become competent independently.
I agree - letting people use their abilities to advance themselves is best. If anything, I support blind screening of applicants. But I think the approach here has different intentions than what will very possibly occur - those with access continue to compound that.
There are trillions of decisions and situations in your life that accumulate, and there is absolutely no way you or anyone else can judge that to engineer some kind of fair outcome. It is good intentioned but not realistic, and it ends up causing far more bias because you think you're doing the right thing, while basing it on a faulty perception.
Right, which means we shouldn't cry when it turns out to be unfair as you are here.
> There are trillions of decisions and situations in your life that accumulate, and there is absolutely no way you or anyone else can judge that to engineer some kind of fair outcome.
When have I even once said there should be "fair outcomes"? I don't believe in equal outcomes. I do believe in equal opportunities.
> It is good intentioned but not realistic, and it ends up causing far more bias because you think you're doing the right thing, while basing it on a faulty perception
What is the "faulty perception"? I'm simply stating that if the goal is to have a diverse workforce then removing the heuristics we are told make us diverse from the recruiting process makes it difficult to achieve this goal. If I want to fill a position and my company has given us a goal of eventually having the ideal diverse workplace without sacrificing the quality of our people then I need tools to do this. I will use the, possibly arbitrary and political, heuristics they give me (age, gender, race, etc) and ask my recruiting staff to give me a group of 12 candidate for in-person interviews.
From these 12 there must be at least 1 attribute from each heuristic across the group. So maybe we say there are 3 races we optimize for, 3 age bands and 2 genders. This means that my set of 12 could have a black woman who is 41, for instance, and a white male who is 25, and an Asian male who is 55. This has all of these covered and the remaining 9 candidates can be any combination. But at least I have committed to creating an equal opportunity in the way the company and a large part of society see as "diverse". Even if I don't agree with it 100%.
Does this create far more bias when the goal is to create the ideal, diverse workforce? By systematically including certain biological features of people in the candidate pool are we at least ensuring we gave a diverse group of individuals an equal opportunity?
There is no "ideal diverse workforce". By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity. You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.
This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.
I didn't make the definition. The company leadership makes it based on internal feedback, advice and general societal beliefs in what "diversity" means.
> irrelevant and unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do with a person's individual character
I agree - everyone should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. However, it is difficult to judge someone's character alone from a CV.
> You're making decisions not on competence but on subjective biases and your perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with merit.
Every person I'd hire deserves to be hired. There are no bones thrown to fill a quota (which doesn't exist). However, to help achieve the goal of a "diverse workplace" a systemic method needs to be incorporated to ensure that a diverse set of candidates were given an opportunity to join the interview pool. With a large enough pool we can reasonably assure that every hire is hired on merit alone as they will be competing with other people that have different immutable physical characteristics. This also means if the hires tend to all look a certain way I can reference the systemic method used to ensure that in fact we actually removed bias from the selection process by ensuring certain attributes were included in the overall pool.
> There is no "ideal diverse workforce".
Ask 1000 people and you'll get 1000 answers.
> By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity.
No, you are creating a pool that is defensible in terms of who you end up hiring. No one is guaranteed a job because they are in the candidate pool. They will compete with their cohort on equal grounds.
> You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.
See, this is where you're making a mistake. The specific heuristic across the group includes everyone. It doesn't say "not white males in their 20's" - in fact 9 out of 12 candidates could be just that so long as the other 3 candidates somehow cover every other enumeration of attributes. But with a large enough pool you can ensure that each characteristic the company determines is "diverse" is somehow included in the candidate pool without diluting it in terms of merit. This doesn't mean the outcome looks anything like the candidate pool.
> This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.
Fair enough - I don't know your thoughts but it could be from the point of view you're looking at if from. To me, you sound like someone who thinks a systematic method of candidate pool selection sounds like exclusion of certain people. And it would be if we excluded certain candidates because they didn't possess an arbitrary diversity attribute. However, this process is inclusive because it demands that each enumeration of each diversity attribute be included at least once. And with a large enough candidate pool (this is key - you need to do the work here interviewing enough people) this means there are still very many seats for the dominate attribute enumeration - white guys that are youngish as it happens to be.
However, it would be an illegitimate candidate pool if there wasn't a white person in it, or a male in it, or a young person in it as well! That would be exclusionary.
This is a pragmatic approach to fulfilling a diversity goal (regardless of if my personal beliefs are different) while ensuring that there is no exclusion, that the quality of hires remains at the level desired and most importantly that nobody who is hired or anyone they work with has any reason to believe they only got the job because they won diversity bingo.
We're going in circles here as long as you fundamentally believe diversity of physical and biological details is important. If that's what you want to enforce in your workforce, even though it is meaningless to the job, then you're designing for an outcome, and not opportunity. Inclusive does not exist in a vacuum; to include some means to exclude others.
I think this is quite valid. Especially from the progressive side I guess I'd say, there's a certain moral altruism that has no regard for other ideas or even the questioning of certain ideas and ideals. And to me, a lot of it is certainly a feeling of moral superiority that self legitimizes certain values from the authority of a middle and upper middle class socioeconomic position with complete disregard for the working and lower classes. The classes which served the progressive side so well until they became inconvenient.
My points are only trying to find a balance such that we can still live in a world with merit; where we can compromise a bit by ensuring there is a measurable opportunity available but yet the outcome is up to the individual.
To be frank, my dissenters here are people I probably agree with more from an idealist vantage. But I also understand that when working in a larger social system we need to be considerate of other points of view and to create systems that the reasonable people on "both sides" can live with. It's when we play to the unreasonable that extremism gains foothold.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
It raises, I think, some very interesting points. Not so much in the way you may agree with it or not, but in terms of how to frame the problem itself.
From my perspective what makes sense is we have large groups of people that believe diversity as defined by certain attributes is important. We also have large groups of people that don't. And both groups have some good and some poor reasons for their beliefs. Both "sides" are legit. So how do we reconcile this?
To me, the most agreeable aspect of each side is that:
1) We live in a diverse society whether we like it or not, which has a history of certain exclusion and we should try and improve on that to make all of our lives more peaceful.
2) Not everyone has an advantage or disadvantage because of certain immutable attributes and we should be conscious of this as well. Social engineering is less engineering than politics.
The idealist approach is to optimize one way or the other; mainly for political reasons which results in resentment and bitterness. The pragmatic approach is to try and create a system that is defensible one way or another - even if it is flawed in both regards. The perfect system is impossible anyhow and a matter of opinion.
So, you design a system that takes into account both points above. You ensure you interview across certain enumerative attributes generally agreed upon as important. But you don't optimize across it as it can turn into an exclusionary system in its own right with awful side effects such as legit resentment, meritless and simply political. You don't exclude any of the apparent important diversity attributes - they all are important. You also create a reasonable metric around what this means. This ensures you, in some way, have at least given the opportunity to a vast range of of people. It doesn't mean you've given an outcome to anyone.
The trick becomes in keeping it honest - that you don't assume that a certain set of attributes is more important than another. Where a lot of similar systems get it wrong is they define that a certain subset of attributes must be included. They should demand that over the entire pool all attributes must be included. And only to a limit and after that it's fair game.
I'm only saying that we should at least try and ensure we speak with everyone in terms of various individual attributes that are generally accepted, albeit arbitrary, when opening an opportunity. And that's it. What is alarming about this? How is this not pragmatic? Who is this stealing from? How is this bad for anyone?
Inclusion and exclusion are two sides of the same thing. If you forcefully include group X, then you are by definition excluding group Y as a reaction. Therefore, the only truly fair design is to not preference anyone by any physical attribute, and in this case only judge for positions based on competence and merit.
Regarding your questions, I can't think of a clearer explanation that the comment that I initially replied to. Fundamentally, the core argument is that the moment you start using immutable characteristics as part of your heuristic, you've already lost- there will be resentment, because now, by definition, you've given something to someone that they did nothing to earn, and that position is coming from someone else.
That these exact things happened in the past, and happen now, doesn't mean that reversing the arrow makes things better- it just breeds a new generation of the same thing.
In terms of how do we move forward as a society, and speaking strictly as just my own opinion: we need to focus on what our commonalities are, not our differences, and go from there.
I had the great luck of growing up as the child of a diplomat, and thus getting to see a much wider variety of countries and ways of life than most people do. One of the most important lessons I took from the experience is that people are far more alike than different, even in areas that have had little previous cultural exchange. It takes some time to find out how to translate across different givens, but once you understand the shared local model of how things work, people's decisions make sense.
The catch is that if you don't agree with some of the base assumptions, then some decisions will seem utterly abhorrent, and the same is true in reverse. Some are mutually exclusive, in that there is no such thing as a middle ground. That is the problem of diversity, and it is a very real one.
So, moving forward- these schisms exist because the world used to be far more closed off from itself than it is today. I'm only in my mid-40's, and yet when I was a child, a letter to the US and back was a 3-month round trip. Now I can hop on any of a dozen free webcams if I felt so inclined and look at who is walking down the street where I used to live. All we can do is start talking to those now so close, find out what we can agree on, and try to forge something we can all live with.
(I realize this is a bit further afield than the original subject of applying for jobs, but I think a friendly reply deserves an honest answer.)
Small quibble: it will persist the existing advantage through the offer stage. Then income differentials could/would apply. The blind approach is not a guaranteed proximate cause towards increasing bias, but rather an entrenchment of existing bias.
But, agree that amplification begins shortly after point of offer.
You argue that removing identifying marks unfairly tips the balance toward those who will be better prepared for the job (i.e. those who did not grow up poor). But assuming a particular test is the best measure of one's on-the-job performance, how can changing that test for some (based on things that identify them as "repressed") create any societal good? You're only pushing the problem out in front of you, and you'll eventually meet it again, but in a different form.
The problem is that people grow up poor, and that poverty creates severe disadvantage. Let's fix that problem at the source (there are a lot of NPOs that try to do this - free after-school programs, etc.) and keep hiring standards constant and unbiased.
Poverty can't be solved by changing admissions and hiring standards to avoid rejecting poor-performing people who grew up poor. That approach only creates new problems.
This is unfair: I never said anything about affirmative action, made normative claims, or appealed to emotion. I stated why this test would still have bias towards poorer classes.
The narrative I was concerned with pointing out was that class characteristics could be biased in similar ways to physical characteristics and that mechanisms seeking to remove bias of physical characteristics will still allow bias for class characteristics.
> mechanisms seeking to remove bias of physical characteristics will still allow bias for class characteristics.
If by "bias for class characteristics" you mean "objective standards", I call that nonsense. By definition, an objective standard will cease to be objective once a subjective-based alteration is introduced.
If an objective standard happens to favor one class over another, it's not the standard's problem. The problem lies in whatever caused that class to do worse.
Inequality is another discussion than bias and discrimination, in my view. Inequality is solved by implementing encouraging measures. Discrimination is resolved by removing entrenched barriers.
Of course people are a sum of everything that happened in their life, but this is a way to make a particular job application much more fair, based on capability to do the job rather than irrelevant physical details. This is not meant to solve everything at once.
The very examples you post are about situations that would be helped if there was blind judgement.
Yes, it would be much better if we are able to remove discrimination earlier in life.
But this is not a either/or solution between affirmative action and equal opportunity.
But if the assumption that positive reinforcement make a better just society for future generation then doesn't it mean equal opportunity will make also have the same positive effect albeit a little less ?
Affirmative action laws were introduced to address this, but the trend toward meritocracy counters them.
My guess; we end up with the worst of both worlds: One stream blind to these factors and a bunch of regulated exceptions.
> The same group(s) facing discrimination at the employment point also face discrimination earlier in life
The goal of Helsinki here is to make the hiring decision independent of direct factors they blind themselves to (name, sex, etc.). However, the factors they condition on (education, experience) are impacted by these factors, so the hiring decision won't be independent of the factors.
The "best" thing to do is to correct the inherent bias, as you're pointing out as the real problem. We agree. This isn't something Helsinki can do in a vacuum, so if they want to achieve their goal of true "blindness" to the above factors, they have to take into account their impact on their "seen" factors somehow.
I put the formalized model I have in mind in another comment on this thread, which walks through my thought process here.[0]
[...]
> when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant
So they base their assessment of know-how and capabilities on age, gender, mother's tongue, and other personal information that has been hidden? I feel like I must reading this wrong.
In my experience it's the opposite. Like with small countries: the odds they produce someone extremely good at a certain sport is just smaller than in large countries, so large countries are more likely to win some world cup or the Olympics. I know only a handful of women in IT to begin with, but most of them aren't great at it.
But that's not your point. You're saying that there are biases in hiring, and I agree. What I'm surprised by is that the article quotes them saying that they now find it very hard to judge someone. Who would say, alongside a press release about anonymous applications, that they find it difficult to base their judgement solely on only relevant information?
Best I think I can do is certain descriptions for projects highlighting my role, as well as stick a little section at the bottom describing a personal experience and showing a bit of my personality and value system. Stuff like "Led hackathon team of 4 to develop a serverless app integrating several APIs." It's really quite tricky to show off your soft skills on your resume. I think the resume should be more to just get your foot in the door. If I can get on the phone, I'm usually good to go.
Of course, there might some clear marks that will give away your gender and age, but that's up-to the interviewer to decide. All the things you have on your resume can be done by a woman or 20-year old as well as 60-year old.
So, I don't this would hurt you in any way and you can still demonstrate your soft skills.
There is no perceivable bias that would penalise me, besides the fact that I do not fulfil diversity quotas... Or do I? I am not straight! I really am the full package.
Can you hear that? It's the sound of the worlds tiniest violin playing you a sad song.
The good news is that because gender is a social construct, no one can challenge your assertion that you are in fact non-binary. Religion is the same. Verdict is still out on race however.
"The City of Helsinki is Finland’s biggest employer with around 38,000 employees."
Is this common for governmental organizations to be such large employers? Even in Europe, this is surprising to me.
http://www.stockholm.se/OmStockholm/Forvaltningar-och-bolag/
38,000 for a capital city in a country with real health care, public schools and developed public services is not that much.
Then there is the city in Germany which controls a bunch of public companies - starting with Zepplins. My understanding is that their wealth, jobs, and social programs are all essentially controlled by the local government using company profits (I don't know if the VW emission problems have changed that.)
Then more specific to Helsinki: city of Helsinki is notorious for inefficiency and shitloads of publicly funded feelgood projects. I've seen it from inside and the handouts that fund weird little art projects and museums that can't attract customers.. Shitshow.
Still there is relatively large amount of tax payers and relatively low municipal tax. Only because the comparison is municipalities where majority of the population is pensioners.
If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be chosen to interview, no?
Not really. Imagine three candidates: A, B and C. A is much better as professional, but B is good enough and has much better CV, C is trash but with great CV. If you interview B and C, you will hire B and never call A. Not optimal. If B is not good enough, you will hire A, but also waste time. If I know that B or C is from culture where lie is more common I will adjust my expectations and call A and B or C, but A will be included.
Actually I believe that some statistically proven bias is healthy thing. I conducted many interviews and I can say the following: 1) People tend to lie in CV in very specific patterns. By just reading CV, even with name and age hidden I can guess sex and age relatively easy. Not 100%, but much better than 50%. 2) Everybody lies (c) House M.D. Really, everyone. But different people lie differently, because different things are important to them and they want to look better at different things. I simply saw that many times. By knowing personal details I may adjust what I see in CV to get much more realistic picture. This is bias, yes, it is. But what can I do? Ask them not to lie? Real life does not work like that. 3) I will not, for instance, hire someone of significantly different hygiene standards. Has nothing to do with CV.
Here's the cognitive dissonance of it all. How can we achieve the goal of a "diverse" workplace (which is based on certain attributes like gender, race, age, etc) when we can't select a candidate pool with these things taken into consideration? Will this have a net negative effect on at least creating an equal opportunity?
I'm not saying I'm for or against this blind screening. But I am skeptical it will work as intended. If anything, those with the most advantage due to their socioeconomic status from birth will simply advance in the system even more quickly.
That's not a good goal. Diversity of what you look like is absolutely terrible.
How would you select a candidate this way? A CV is a document comprised entirely of personally identifying information and potential sources of bias. Would you ask for the CV when you invite them to interview, and invite everyone who applies? You certainty couldn't ask for recommendations until after the interview as well.
Do I have an overriding "need" to know what my neighbour is earning and its certainly open to abuse eg other UK media organisations using it as a stick to beat the BBC with.
I get that everyone who's bad at interviews want to do away with them. But you could likely find charming individuals who want to do away with technical requirements because they feel their great personality is more important than what their gradepoint average was. Neither of those groups are right to discard the "other side" of the equation.
You need both, and hiring blindly based strictly for technical competence will have you feeling like you're managing a daycare center. Trust me, the interview is not a problem.
If you want an interview to favor a higher level of competence, do away with the hiring managers. Have candidates interviewed by their equally titled peers, or members of the group the candidate would be working most closely with. People who not only have a technical background, but an understanding of how the specific job actually works day to day.
They call it "name-blind" recruitment.
What exactly do you learn about a candidate's know-how and capability by knowing their name, gender, etc? Unless you are so deep in denial that you'd just blatantly say "Men are more capable than women".
But I applaud the concept. I'd be interested in the results.
It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments ... that you are not better than the last widget you created compared to the next person you are compared in preparation for creation of the next widget.
Does anyone else realize this is really just a sneaky way of introducing the degenerate nature of communism into the equation? ... that your humanity means nothing if you are not a featureless and characterless humanoid with zero of your own "biases" that contributes to the hive mind collective. I really don't think people have thought this thing through and the ways in which it can go wildly out of control once edge cases start gripping.
So you are hiring totally blindly, without consideration for anything but merits ... it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor
None of that seems remotely healthy or sane to me, and really just smacks of the idealistic and self-deluding narrow view of the effete and decadent who live sheltered in a bubble, without any fear of their own replaceability (whether rightful or not), let alone possessing event the remotest understanding for the wider consequences of their actions and outcomes, even fore themselves, if that bubble were to burst.
This type of technocratic and authoritarian mentality that somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans, ideally in their minds, a mixed master race devoid of "bias" and therefore devoid of their humanity; is really a rather detestable and clearly inhumane ideology by its inherent characteristics.
It's a lack of privacy that sounds Orwellian to me.
I disagree with the whole premise that supports the first post; reducing someone to a short list of standard data points like age is the dehumanising action. It's exactly what is done when we wish to treat people as statistics.
Leaving them off is accepting that people's humanity can't be reduced to them.
Personally, back when I was in positions that participated in hiring, I didn't give a damn about a person's name, gender, race, skin color, sexuality, gender identity, age, personal hobbies, political persuasion, religion, food preferences or any other characteristic that wasn't directly related to: Can this person do the job we're hiring them to.
If we needed further consideration to distinguish between equally competent candidates, then we'd look at how motivated they are to grow, aka contribute in other areas. Not because we wanted younger people with longer (cynically: cheaper) career paths, but because the needs of companies change over time, and a flexible outlook means they might keep pace with change, and that's something anyone can do.
Precisely. It's hard enough to find qualified people as it is, without disqualifying them for characteristics that don't even impact ability.
However, I pretty strongly disagree. When evaluating a resume, there's no legitimate reason to consider the name, age, address, or gender of a candidate. Contrariwise, there are significant problems with people considering that information anyway. Therefore, it seems like that information shouldn't be present.
You say "does it really seem healthy to ignore value of cross-generational achievements," but that's the same thing as saying "throw out the resumes of any young people who apply, we already have enough of them."
Now, if you're fine with the plan of explicitly deciding to hire only a man/woman/old/young/person-from-the-right-neighborhood/school, that's a different discussion, which I won't get into here, but if you're going to do that, it should at the least be done very intentionally and not in some sort of informal "eh, guessing based on their name, this is the wrong sort of candidate" way.
I mostly agreed, except with age. When I have two candidates who have roughly the same amount of experience or achievement, but one of them is far younger than the other, that tends to be more impressive.
To the best of my understanding, not hiring somebody because of age would be age discrimination.
Inferences about learning speed or motivation based on achievements per years don't sound like age discrimination to me.
Maybe the older candidate only recently started to do the work. And this just the first thing the young person did?
I always get weird when people make a big deal about things people do at some young age. Most of the time the age is not important for the things we praise young people for doing. Most of the time it was just something their parents pushed them into to doing that any of many kids could have done had they just had the right parents.
Is it impressive that a 22 year old has 6 years of professional experience? Yes, certainly. Does it mean that they'll be better than a 40 year old with 6 years of equivalent experience? It's possible, but I suspect it'd be a weak signal at best.
That's a really interesting perspective.
The idea behind this line of thought is that equality matters only if you don't have enough, but communist society will provide so much surplus that envy simply disappears, and equality withers. It is interesting to ponder the correctness of this line of thought, e.g. do the slim in the rich world envy the obese, despite the latter consuming more food? Traces of this argument go back to Aristotle.
Marx & Engels erred in that they assumed capitalist modes of production cannot produce vast amounts of surplus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
when their physical needs
It's difficult sometimes to shake off the feeling that some status competition is sexual competition that dare not speak its name.
Unmentioned is the judgment that you don't need that, I don't need this, buy they do need that other thing. I'm being overly generic, but what counts as a need and what needs are fulfilled is still a political issue of discrimination in communism. Do you need shelter if the weather isn't lethal? Do you need food that is anything above the bare minimum to survive? Do you need emotional support? All needs are equal, but some are more equal than others.
What exactly does this mean? Giving someone credit for their ancestors' achievements sounds like nepotism
True, but we also punish groups for the actions of their ancestors as well as credit them.
Which is particularly ironic considering that most of these schemes are proposed to fight _against_ meritocracy.
What is wrong with meritocracy? Isn't it a system where your talent, effort and achievement are meaningful, and attributes like race, gender, wealth, sexual orientation etc. are irrelevant to your success? Isn't a meritocracy a platform that is equal to all?
Has someone redefined the terminology somehow?
I mean, I've always thought a meritocracy is a good thing. It does not matter "what" you are, it matters how good you are in what you do. And if you are not good at something, it is not due to your sex or race etc.
The thing is, if you decide that Applicant #42 is a good candidate, you're going to bring them in anyway. If you have a ton of biases, you still have just as much of an opportunity to enact them as you would have before, though you might have to be a bit more subtle. This doesn't solve the problem; it's a patch on top of it designed to feel good while accomplishing nothing.
> Does it really seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments
If by this you're referring to the heritability of traits, yes, it's a shame that things that are statistically and demographically visible have to be erased in the attempt to flatten everything.
> somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans
I don't know if this is the ultimate goal; my instinct is that this is the projected goal, because it is at least somewhat defensible philosophically even if I dislike it. The actual behind-the-scenes goal might be as simple as reducing people to more-manageable consumers that cause less trouble and more reliably produce the quarterly numbers we need.
We're working to remove barriers that create inequality, such as discrimination by gender/race/creed etc. And I don't buy crocodile tears for the (generally white/male/older) people currently propped up by the status quo.
I do share your concern, however, that any policy can have ulterior motives. I see that more coming from knee-jerk and nanny state policies crafted by the far right today (that used to supposedly be a province of the far left). See: the military industrial complex growth in response to 9/11, the prison industrial complex growth in response to the war on drugs, etc.
Some UK examples..
No longer does anyone bother getting letters from past employers as references, since none of the information in the reference can be verified as true or false employers cannot legally form a judgement based on this. Consequently all an employer is allowed to say is 'yes, they worked here, regards, x'.
Another example, every candidate at interview must be asked the same 'opening' questions, otherwise a failed candidate could bring legal action because they were not given the same opportunity as other interviewees. Candidates are also legally allowed to ask to see interviewer's notes (even during the interview) so interviewers should not be writing anything besides 'scores' for interviewee competancies, unless they want to get into legal trouble.
I think you're trying to say, "having an advantage due to your birth or family." You're really suggesting that someone's name, address, and gender should be part of the resume evaluation process? Your whole position seems like a thinly veiled endorsement of racism, sexism, and conferring advantages based on your family's accomplishments.
That aside, I'm less cynical about this than either you or the parent commenter. While I wouldn't want my professional skill set to be my sole defining characteristic as a person, I'm perfectly content to let it define me as an employee, keeping in mind that attributes like ambition, creativity, and passion are components of that skill set. But I acknowledge that this may be the start of a slippery slope, and you may be right to say that I underestimate that risk because I haven't lived in a Communist state.
As for why I see things the way I do, all I'll add is that if things do go the way that all other characteristics are stripped away, leaving nothing but one's professional skill set... Ok. Who decides what qualifies for what box? You should keep a very close eye on who the final arbiters are that get to decide what, exactly, a professional skill set is, and what checks and balances are in place to prevent them from abusing their position.
You may find that suddenly characteristics that you thought had nothing to do with one's profession are added or removed as is convenient for the power structure at large, or that capabilities that you would consider core to the job at hand no longer considered worthy due to opaque political decisions. Again, I'd love to be wrong about this. We'll see, I suppose.
There is no compounding value of cross-generational achievements. You are not your ancestors. You are not responsible for anything they did, good or bad.
Yes, I want a world where your "humanity means nothing" in that I don't judge a prospective hire based on who their parents are.
That's not even the point though, personal information is disclosed in the job interview. I certainly hope I don't see anyone listing their ancestors' accomplishments on a resume.
What are you suggesting we judge a resume on if not merits? Should we be declining people for being the wrong race or having names we don't like instead?
Edit: Changed "replied to" to "originally replied to".
Since we've moved into philosophy, why is it important that everyone be treated this indiscriminately? Veil of ignorance? Couldn't it be valid to protect the community from the risk that the bad behavior is heritable (genetically or socially)?
> it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor
I feel you're making my point for me.
As for human bias, I don't sue how it eliminates the bias. I don't even get why biases makes us human. Ultimately you are hiring humans and statistically like to hire diverse set of humans.
Unfortunately parents response simply comes as rant with some intelligent sounding words rather than any thoughtful objections to the OP.
I would only be concerned about this if I lacked merits.
An ideal worker in my mind has many human qualities that make them enjoyable and inspiring to be around. They make other employees happier to come to work and help them be more effective at work.
Granted, it's a lot easier to measure that Tom produces 15% more widgets per hour than it is to tell that Cindy's presence increased the entire factory's output by 5%. But still, the latter provides more value to a company so I expect improvements in evaluating that.
Why do you think we should continue to include those physical characteristics, especially if they have nothing to do with the actual job?
I think I agree with your post except for this part. What did you mean by that? Are you talking about a person’s pedigree?
But for this fragment that makes it obvious, this post is a masterpiece of hiding its racism and sexism behind a veil of words the author knows HN will like. It’s almost impressive, in a way.
Depends if you are helped or hurt by this view. There are people who are discriminated due to no fault of their own over factors they cannot control. And not every bias is called out or even something we are socially cognizant of. If one previously benefited from this it can be worrisome but for others this will be a boon.
>simply strip humans of their humanity
What is humanity? Not in ideal, in actuality? Do beautiful people have more humanity than ugly people? The Hale Effect says that they do. When called out on it we will say that is not the case, but in our every day actions that is how we work. Mechanized equalization will be a benefit for those who have already been assigned as having less humanity for no fault of their own.
Life isn't fair, some will be rich. Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual. People move between classes all the time, and in the US you'll see many people going in both directions.
https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
"Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders during the Post-Report period (fiscal years 2012-2016), as they had for the prior four periods studied."
The concept of legacy admissions to Ivy League schools alone.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2004/12/29/ever-hig...
It turns out that we can, in fact, make general statements about large populations.
> Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual.
Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will.
>> Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will.
...What?
Why do you think that the biases from both race and legacy aren't still there whenever an applicant is effectively just a number tied to a varying skill set?
By judging competence for the job, we remove all the various "how" and "why" they got there.
It does nothing to the joint distribution, in that the conditional distribution ignores that systemic bias has already been applied, this full independence at that point perpetuates the accumulated, extant bias.
You mention an iterative process and yet are seemingly against even the 1st step. Bias is not a one-time thing. It's not just applied and then you live with it forever. Life is a constant stream of dynamic decisions and improving opportunity in one scenario is a positive step forward to improving it elsewhere, and perhaps even countering any earlier biased treatments.
I am for a bit of redistribution, myself, but the positive claim made about perpetuation of bias is simply a systemic fact. Blinding means that, conditional on prior experience and work, your likelihood of landing the job should be constant. That means prior bias gets perpetuated (is built into the factors that generate prior experience and work).
Please don't foment flamewars on HN.
The GP comment wasn't so bad, but the problem is that generic comments about ideological topics usually lead to flamewars.
Respectfully, the discussions are valid, received upvotes, and seem to end on their own just fine. Outside of a few personal tangents, which are rightly disallowed, the rest don't seem to need any moderation.
It could not.
It really comes down to implementation (of which "doing nothing"/autarky is one choice).