Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

So this is based on one anecdote with one company and this ends up with a blanket statement about society at large?

Since this is written by a Black person in tech, my guess is that his beliefs are based on a lifetime of being treated as a second-class citizen, and this anecdote was merely a particularly obvious case.

However, like you, I am way of anecdotes and put more faith in empirical studies [1]. So what do the data say? Turns out they align with the lived experience of the author: widespread hiring bias by employers hurting Black people.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

This is BS. The study is from 2003 and isn't about elite tech jobs. There is evidence that, nowadays, there is a large bias in favor of women and under-represented minorities in, for example, academia and top-tier tech when controlling for resume.

Present that evidence, please. The comment you're trying to rebut did you that courtesy; repay it.

This is a good point and a reasonable request! Here's one https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360

Note, when looking at this literature: there is a huge publication bias. Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide. Also, the bar for what constitutes good enough science in these areas is very low.

> Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide.

The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.

Yes, the person you're responding to made a point about precisely that — available evidence.

The file-drawer effect is real and multifaceted, including political narrative strategy. If you don't think that editors consider this aspect of maintaining their journals' reputations, you are simply naive.

> The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.

That seems like a bit of abuse of Occam's razor. Narratives are popularized by the general media, not scientists. Just compare how popular the idea that IQ is meaningless and not heritable is amongst the general population and the media compared to those who actually study the topic full time at universities.

Universities and people in them are not immune to pressure. Wasn't Hsu fired partly because he funded research into police shootings that ended up getting a politically incorrect result?

Authors of unpopular results (Rind et al anyone?) often get attacked a lot, their research subject to a disproportionate level of scrutiny and it's very career limitting (or is at least rumoured to be, which is plenty of a chilling effect).

Steve Hsu wasn't fired. He resigned from his position overseeing other people's research. He kept his position as a professor with tenure.

Cesario and Johnson studied fatal shootings by police. Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings. That was only a small part of the case the graduate employee union presented against Hsu. The letter started by faculty[1] didn't mention it at all.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jb7w02E5GAdrJ_QnAokp7Ier...

Twas a forced resignation.

I don't want to get too down into the weeds as my point is that people and the media have a big influence on what science gets done and what is career limitting. That said:

Most of the "case" was nonesense, with the actual letter (which had a fraction of the signatures of the counter-letter) being mostly guilt by association.

> Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings.

It was relevant because Floy was a police killing. Racial bias in police killings (the vast majority are with guns) was the main thing the protestors I've heard were protesting.

Someone could argue Hsu was effectively demoted but he wasn't even effectively fired. Someone can disagree with the case against him but that isn't a good reason to misrepresent it.

Only a small fraction of the signatures supporting Hsu have any affiliation with his university. And would you care which petition had more signatures if it was the other way around?

The protesters' demands for equity and police accountability aren't limited to fatal shootings or even all killings.

The problem with controlling for resume is that getting a strong resume requires getting those jobs in the first place. That doesn't disprove that there could be a bias against women and minorities that stopped them from achieving equivalent resumes in the first place.

It's something important to think about, but I don't think it holds in the case of beginning-of-career resumes. It's not about getting "those jobs", it's about getting admitted to one of the best programs. That's the filter. You're right that subsequent steps flow from that, generally. Though I would argue that there is much more space in CS / programming for the self-taught and self-motivated than there is in most other fields. Most other fields: you don't have the credentials? There's the door. Try being a biologist without a degree in biology!

Saying you're discriminated against is more of a function of what you are told to perceive. Current generation blacks are more likely to say they are discriminated against than any generation prior.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/racial-discrimination-americans...

The story is interesting even if it doesn't prove a trend by itself. Combining it with other evidence is up to the reader.

How many anecdotes do we need before we accept there's an issue?

Always more than what we currently have, until the dam breaks, then people start saying "wow! I had no idea! Why didn't anyone say something sooner?".

See police brutality, me too, etc.

"Wir haben es nicht gewusst" is what the Germans used after WW2, but part of me can believe it because the world wasn't as connected as it is today.

Today though? It does not fly. People know about it, and if they are not actively participating in stopping it, they are complicit - "not my problem, I don't care, blue/all lives matter, what about these crime statistics, muh freedom", these are all people that know about it but do not care, or they do care but they're on the wrong side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com