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Comment by lone_haxx0r | Hacker News Reader

> we've (mostly) decided that unfairly classifying someone based on correlated but non-causal characteristics is wrong, EVEN in the extreme that you're right more often than you're wrong if you make that assumption.

Ironically, the only places where it's legally prohibited or frowned upon to use these heuristic techniques are situations that people have arbitrarily (heuristically or conveniently) decided.

For example: It's "not fair" to hire someone because they're white (and consequently have a higher chance of being wealthy and hence a higher change of being educated.)

But it's "fair" to choose a love partner based on their height, their waist-to-hip ratio, their weight (and hence having a higher chance of giving birth to healthy offspring, better physical protection, etc.).

Maybe it's hypocritical, and I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Maybe being hypocritical helps us survive.

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The hiring vs mating issue is perhaps simpler than you picture. US federal discrimination law only applies to companies with more than 15 people. If we regularly married 15+ people at a time, we might very well put legal restrictions on your mating choices. The more personal the decision, the more agency you get.

wow, interesting. Why does it only apply to companies with more than 15 people? Is it the idea that you're more likely to have family help (and only family being willing to help) when your company (more small business than traditional startup) is this small?

If you are starting a small company you either pick people you already know (whoever those might be) or maybe a few random experts with very specific skillsets. There is no place for you to actively discriminate someone that would have maybe been a better pick, just because you didn't like their skin color or gender... Or if you still do it comes at your own loss.

> if you still [discriminate] it comes at your own loss.

This applies to companies of any size.

A job contract is naturally a relationship between two entities: employee and employer.

Sure, some people in some countries have tried (sometimes successfully) to undermine this principle, but it's akin to forcing people to marry in groups.

While (modern? ideal?) marriage is a peer-to-peer relationship, the relationship between employee and employer is unbalanced, more like pet-owner.

Societal restrictions on contracts are a way to balance this. Virtually all societies have some form of this, outside utopian ultra-liberal hellholes.

That's not very arbitrary. If you're hiring someone, you're always in a position of power. If you're dating someone, there's no power differential (or if there is, that's a problem all by itself).

And yet from the point of view of the one who everyone is discriminating against, the feeling is pretty similar: Everyone rejects me and there's nothing I can do about it.

How are you "always in a position of power" when hiring someone? That's only true when there's more supply than demand, and it's the opposite in markets where the candidates get multiple high-quality offers to choose from.

Because you are paying that person money and have the ability to fire them. In the US you're also probably providing their health care.

I get what you're saying, but no one moves jobs every week. The sunk costs of switching employment are significant for the employee, less so for the company.

They provide you valuable work in exchange for that... Internally you are probably imagining some big corp that can pick from 100s of replaceable workers.

If you provide health care, you always have power over that person. Less so if they are relatively healthy - but any condition, theirs or a family members, means that the person has no real choice but to do enough good work to keep the job. Even if they hate the company. Even if you treat them poorly. They still must work for you. This is even more true if you have hundreds of people that will replace them and your health coverage is good enough - or at least, better than the opposition.

To a lesser degree, the same goes with vacation time and other benefits. At least in the US, anyway. This is why having some of this stuff coded into law and decoupled from employment takes some power away from employers.

Ideally there are multiple companies which you could choose from... And some might really need your specific skillset.

In practice, that's how it works, particularly at the lower end of the economic spectrum. If that wasn't the case then the concept of a minimum wage wouldn't be necessary - the market would take care of it.

Of course, this is a point of view and not everyone agrees with me, but to me it appears that for a chunk of the population the available jobs do not pay well enough to meet a certain standard of living.

> it appears that for a chunk of the population the available jobs do not pay well enough to meet a certain standard of living.

That is definitely true, but it's also pretty much the exact opposite of "always".

> If you're hiring someone, you're always in a position of power.

What? Can you explain the reasoning behind this statement?

If the candidate had more power, she would set up interviews and force the employers to impress her.

Of course, that scenario happens only in extreme edge cases. Even in a booming economy with a shortage of workers, John Doe is not going to be pursued aggressively to fill the Senior Marketing Manager role.

This makes intuitive sense: employers have a ton of money, so people come to them.

Right now I have a client who needs to hire truck drivers and can't do it fast enough. I asked him what he'd done to make his company the most attractive (pay, technology, perks, etc.). He said he's done nothing.

> John Doe is not going to be pursued aggressively to fill the Senior Marketing Manager role.

That's exactly what recruiters and headhunters do. Aggressively nails it.

Recruiters and headhunters don't necessarily seek people to fill a role. They seek people to fill their batch of application forms to send to those actually doing the hiring.

Recruiters don't replace the interview process, where the dynamic is that the applicant is the interviewee. They only change the way the applicant discovers the job.

Most people will never be headhunted.

By that same logic, it's unfair for attractive people to choose who they date, because they're in a position of power.

If candidate had more power, companies would create whole section of company to try to find and hire talents. Companies would literally pay to find candidates.

There are two possible situations:

A candidate has multiple job offers, and decides which one to take.

The company interviews multiple people for a single position, rejecting the others.

There are only a small number of sectors where the first situation is reasonably possible, a lot of us on here are incredibly fortunate that engineering happens to be one of them. For the majority of the job market (by volume of people rather than volume of money), it takes people attempt after attempt to get a job. They don't get to choose between multiple offers, they have to take the first thing that will allow them to pay the rent, and then they have to hold on to it.

Turning it around though. It's entirely fair to hire someone because they are well educated, which presumably means you're disproportionately hiring white people.

Europe has the concept of indirect discrimination, which could make that illegal, certainly things less central to the role could amount to indirect discrimination.

This is over stated:

"are situations that people have arbitrarily (heuristically or conveniently) decided"

The Holocaust was not convenient, even to those who were for it. Slavery was convenient for those who benefited from it, but not those who suffered under it. Over the last 200 years racial categories lead to many millions of dead. This is not merely a matter of convenience.

The holocaust and slavery fall in the realm of physical violence, or at least coercion.

Violence and coercion don't logically follow from racial differentiation. One may point out the differences between populations of different races, but that wouldn't justify attacking any individual from those populations.

My comment is framed inside that basic (and obvious) principle. Choosing a partner or an employee is not a violent or coercive act.

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