Bias in radiology resident selection against the obese and unattractive?
journals.lww.com
journals.lww.com
In the most sincere way, I implore you to prove them wrong. Even judging only by your articulate comment (and in a place like HN), you have a lot going for you. Be the outlier with the personality and drive that the studies can't account for.
This is contradicted by the very large body of scientific literature "proving" phenomena that are in fact imaginary.
The phenomenon is not restricted to parapsychology, though; it runs through everything but the hardest, most objective experiments.
It would be better to find ways of hiring without such biases being available. Like blind auditions for musicians. We should be aiming to hire the best person for the job, not trying to be aware of such biases and then trying to compensate the other way for such things.
I agree we should hire the best people. I agree compensating for bias is not as good as eliminating bias. My hope is that in cases where technical changes can't be done, self-reflection might allow people to reduce their own bias.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if obese/unattractive people still discriminates against those perceived negative characteristics, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that discrimination was to a lower degree than when the person doing the discrimination isn't obese/unattractive.
This meant that everyone knew which female residents were a larger size and which male residents were a smaller size. Everyone knew this which just added a distraction to an already information overloaded profession.
In a profession where the goal is identifying the people with top competencies, it never made sense to me who signed off on ordering that particular type of scrubs. I would have thought everyone should wear the same color or at least have the colors indicate something useful e.g. speciality.
The reality is, if you have a list of doctors and their pictures and know nothing of them except for their appearance I highly doubt anyone would pick the obese person as their first pick.
It’s just reality. Someone capable of going through medical school is capable of reducing their weight to being merely overweight as opposed to obese.
People going on “yeah if they know their stuff” are missing the point. You don’t know if they know their stuff at all.
As for unattractive, yes that’s bad.
There's a big difference between behaviours applied to self and knowledge applied at work.
It's possible that they're obese due to some condition relatively out of their control, or that they're working on it, (and my answer applies specifically to the US) but when 40% of the US is obese, it more than likely reflects on them as a person and their values.
Maybe he's so skilled that his employers (e.g. hospital) disregarded his appearance?
Or perhaps you were thinking if he's sloppy with his appearance, he'll be sloppy providing care.
As another example, it's not unusual for top-level sports coaches (e.g. soccer, tennis) to be older, and to be overweight - it's their past experience that is useful, not their current appearance.
Being fat is different to smoking.
To get high from smoking you must smoke. To love food you don't have to be fat.
Being an alcoholic is more comparable. Or a two pack a day smoker.
A doctor should be vaping though. If they don't vape that is bad. But I feel like these things are small compared to all the other problems we have with doctors, like overwork.
Realistically, adding any non essential criteria to my search would narrow my choices down to possibly a very small number.
Many parents even interview pediatricians before choosing who to go with.
Or maybe doctors should just wear fat suits.
I had to fact check and he did say it -
https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surg...
I think it would depend on the specialty. I wouldn't really care if my radiologist is obese. He can read and interpret my scans just fine. Same for pathology, endo and renal docs. I don't think I'd want an obese ER doc as CPR is pretty tiring, same with my anesthesiologist- don't want them sweaty and out of breath while trying to put in an airway.
He also had bad teeth.
I have a zoom interview soon, we will see how that goes, maybe I need to hold banana or something for scale.
1. They have something to point to if/when they get sued for rejecting someone
2. Make you feel like you failed so you don’t ask for as much money
3. Helps prevent there being >=2 perfect interviews and then dealing with ties
However, if a candidate answers my first question easily I will try to extend or constrain the problem enough that it pushes them out of their comfort zone a bit. This gives them a chance to show off more skill than if I only asked an easy question.
Also, there are very rarely "perfect interviews"; it's rare for people to get the highest score on even one of their interviews, let alone all of them.
Do you know for a fact that you failed them, or is that just your perception? Interview questions are typically a little more open-ended than you suspect, and not being able to deliver the full answer of what's being asked for isn't a failure when you've only got 30 minutes.
At least your appearance and test scores are mutable characteristics.
Discriminating against unattractive people, has no equivalent justification. In fact, discriminating against unattractive people exaggerates a society-wide bias against unattractive people.
Racism says an ethnicity is better or worse than another intrinsically.
This is recognizing a section of our population has been, by and large, historically kept from making those connections and intentionally favoring them, not just for their sake but for the sake of their children’s children, by working to get them the same levels of connections the privileged class has historically had.
I very intentionally point out particular groups in my original comment, because proponents of race-based affirmative action always avoid grappling with why it's fair to discriminate against some relatively successful subgroups of Asian Americans by bringing up red herrings about Hmong and Cambodian refugees (who, it's worth pointing out, are typically excluded from the benefits of affirmative action anyway, which makes it even more of a red herring).
It’s not hard to tell that their experiences must be vastly different, because 20k is a very small proportion of the total Asian American population, while 3.5m is a much larger percentage.
I hope this help you with differentiating how relatively homogeneous groups are.
Should Hmong refugees, as one of the less successful Asian American subgroups, be extended the benefits of affirmative action?
Who is 'you' white man?
Asian communities face less discrimination from the white community as there hasn't been a lot of reinforcement of negative stereotypes relating to any of the Asian communities. Compare that with the history and treatment of the black community and you can trace a direct line from slavery to where many communities are today. A lot of propaganda regarding black people had been fed to whites for hundreds of years in order to justify their enslavement.
The black community has seen Asians as a "preferred minority" who has benefited from their civil rights work and at the same time given opportunities they didn't have without giving back to black communities.
There is a lot of nuance in there, but that's the super short version.
I am based in Europe so I maybe things are different here. We still hear a lot about how minorities are discriminated against, but it always seems based on equality of outcome as the "proof", and it seems to be pretty selective where they are looking. I see little evidence of real discrimination in fact most people seem quite disgusted by it.
There are plenty of eg, black doctors who raise privileged black children, and plenty of eg, poor rural whites who grew up in poverty.
Race-based affirmative action based on race doesn't do a good job of addressing the systemic problems with economic opportunity, and just causes rifts within society.
The historical lines correlate strongly (though yes, not 100%) with race so the white kid who's in the program as a result of the affirmative action who grew up in a poor area with poor schools is going to blend in with the "regular" whites whereas the black kid who was the child of doctors is going to still be judged on the first thing people notice about them - their skin.
Fixing our past sins will take both proactive action AND continual vigilance by all of us to fight our snap judgments and first impressions.
But I believe it would be MUCH better than today's "merit" based systems which just create insane amount of pressure on kids starting in middle school or even earlier, to pad resumes and compete for the best schools, etc. That's a race to the (mental health) bottom of a whole different sort.
Being white in America, or really anywhere else in the world comes with its privileges. If you haven't taken advantage of them, that's your own fault.
If you're white re you more likely to be successful and face less discrimination from your point of birth going forward? Yes you are.
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/race-report-statistic...
If you think people who are systemically disadvantaged deserve some additional help, then target it to people who are systemically disadvantaged. You can do that without without creating any racial discrimination, or any of the harm that comes along with it.
I agree that a more level playing field along income lines would create a more fair and just society, but you're talking about a problem that the free market cannot solve and would lead to an argument for a very different type of economic model. I'm all for it, but it's a tough sell in the US.
The free market also has nothing to do with this conversation at all. All possible programs you could conceive for addressing problems like this fall under the umbrella of market intervention.
This type of marginalization has happened and is still currently happening in Eastern Europe, but it's done around ethnic and/or religious lines. The most obvious examples of this are the the treatment of Jews and more recently the Bosniaks in the Balkans. It also happened in Russia to the Cossacks and Crimean Tatars, among others. It operates on the same principal.
All the minority groups you just mentioned are also Caucasian, so they are priviliged, but at the same time they... are not? In your original post you made a racial claim that just didn't make much sense to me at all, same as all race-related stereotypes that try to somehow classify groups of billions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Hungary#Ethnic_changes...
In the Americas, the dominant group, both financially and politically has been people with lighter skin. This is how we've been trained to think for a very long time and it persists to this day. Had history played out differently and people with dark skin did the colonizing to people with white skin, things would be different, but that's not the case.
This same thing has been done to Jews in Europe and elsewhere for a couple thousand years. These groups of people who are "different" have been used as convenient scapegoats, which we know has played a central role in civilization since the very beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating
To bring it back to the US, the black population and eventually the Hispanic population have been used as scapegoats for white societies to look at as the source of their problems. It's a way of maintaining social cohesion (in the dominant group).
Racism also doesn’t presuppose any particular motive. There are many reasons that somebody could choose to be racist, and if you look at real world racists, you’ll find that they offer a wide variety of justifications for their views. Just as you have done in this comment. You are making the argument that your racism is morally righteous, and that it will create positive outcome (which, coincidentally, certainly isn’t an uncommon position for racists to take).
You’ve also made the mistake of presuming that the problem you describe requires a racist solution. It absolutely doesn’t. If wealth creates more inter-generational wealth, and poverty creates more inter-generational poverty, then you need a solution for social mobility, not to artificially elevate people based on ethnic group membership (which of course also disadvantages others based on their different ethnic group membership). A poor white or Asian kid, who’s family has always been poor, is going to face the same socio-economic disadvantages that you’re describing, and a wealthy black kid isn’t going to be facing them at all. The solution your offering (aside from being racist) doesn’t solve the problem you’re describing. In many cases, it actually makes it worse, because if you look at how such systems operate, you’ll find that a decent portion of the people who benefit from them actually come from relatively well off families.
Suppose we created a national social graph, and gave each person a value in it. High prestige, high social access people automatically get a certain high rating, and other nodes are given fractional social access ratings dependent on their neighboring nodes. The devil's in the details here, but you get the idea.
Affirmative action could then be targeted depending on your level of social access. The less you have, the more affirmative action you get. This would allow for a lot more mixing of the social graph and result in a gradual leveling over time.
Is this appealing, in lieu of race-based affirmative action?
Ironically, it turns out that discrimination against minorities + discrimination against majorities = worse outcomes for everyone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
But instead of rewarding and praising this behavior, and trying to make it a role model for the struggling minorities, we try to punish and discourage the kids that have learned the skills with their parents' help, so they won't succeed in life either.
Of course, this doesn't affect the "admission by donation" kind of families, that leaves me wonder: is it about helping minorities succeed, or is it about replacing arrogant self-reliant challengers with grateful and loyal underperformers, to further entrench the elites' position?
There, fixed that for you
Mostly unrelated: That's also the correct use of an Oxford/serial comma, yes?
In the off chance you were being serious, no. An Oxford comma goes (or doesn't go) after the second to last (penultimate) item, not after the final. And even then it's only used when there's a conjunction between the penultimate and last item.
It’s good to get the data but surely they knew what the results would be?
Next up: “The sun is bright”.
For me, the discussion ultimately leads to two points:
First, do we believe that the playing field must be leveled for all from birth. If the answer to that is Yes, then you're probably in favor of socialism to some degree, such that opportunity is provided in equal measure to all citizens, regardless of the circumstances they are born into. Personally, I don't find this realistic, but I accept that there are people who do and that's fine.
Second, if you don't feel the playing field should be leveled from birth, but rather that every citizen is born with a set of advantages and disadvantages, then the question is, do we need to afford special attention to those whose disadvantages are insurmountable? Regardless of whether you're born dull or smart, attractive or unattractive, African or Asian American, most Americans can find success in life by making more good decisions than bad and persistently working towards the life they'd like. We have had a 2 term black president, have a black woman vice president, an openly gay presidential candidate, an openly gay cabinet member, multiple black Fortune 500 CEOs, openly gay entertainers, and many wealthy black athletes and entertainers. Achieving success is possible for all, some have to work harder at it than others.
But is such success possible for all? It's obvious to me that the answer is no. I am not referring to those with disabilities, but rather those whose life circumstances guarantee they have zero chance at success as defined in the US today. A kind of worst case situation might be a child born into a one parent household, parent is addicted, and neglects them. They live in the worst school district in the city, and in an area ruled by street gangs. What forces would enable an 8 year old in such circumstances to somehow push through all of that adversity and actually wind up in a college earning a degree that enables him to get a steady professional job? Or expose him to an opportunity to learn a trade, such as electrician or plumber? Or work up the ladder in food service or retail companies? In many cases, he's exposed to drugs, persistent gang violence, likely frightened for his life most of the time and learning that survival means physically subduing others or being subdued by them. Many life lessons about discipline, team work, 'social skills', and earning what you want are not modeled to such a child, and I'd not be surprised to learn there are 100s of thousands of them in America right now.
My view is that if we are going to maintain the approach that hey, we all have advantages and disadvantages, we must recognize that groups faced with insurmountable obstacles to success need an effective accommodation or we are failing overall as a society.
No, what I would like to see is the occasional acknowledgement that it might affect a few situations. I do not need any kind of recognition ceremony or anything, just a nod to it. I don't want attractive people to feel bad over it or rub it in their faces, just ... could stand to have fewer people falling all over themselves to say no no, that cannot possibly be.
I'm really pretty good at Scala, though.
In my teens/early 20s was so common for women to approach me and tell me I have beautiful eyes that I didn't realize they were expressing interest. At my first programming job, a chinese woman came up to me and haltingly said (yes, this was a programming joke): "your eyes are so captivating, like a python's." I said thank you. She blushed and rushed away.
My control here is that my weight fluctuates between 150-180, though, and when I'm heavier and I don't shave, the attention vanishes. Humans are just apes trying to be near the best apes. I'm glad I got a nice mannequin to walk around in, and I'm glad it compensates for the fact that I'm an objectively pretty weird dude. But it kind of sucks in every direction - beauty prevents people from getting really important negative social feedback, and often just exempts people from social consequences and warps their sense of reality. Likewise, preference-ing physical attributes over competence has to drive hilariously iniquitous outcomes, leaving a lot of smart, capable people in inferior positions.
While I'm just talking about random stuff: taking pride in one's appearance is off putting because you didn't earn it. Likewise, being smart/likeable/socially capable are also things that people generally haven't earned. All of the good things in our lives are arbitrary, as are all of the bad things. The things we work for are the only things that are of value - "our actions are our one true possession."
Beauty and intelligence are in the resources bucket. Just like oil in the ground is valuable, so is beauty and intelligence.
Beauty has its professions: politics, movies, modeling, CEO, trophy spouse etc.
Intelligence has its professions: engineering, law, medicine, accounting, entrepreneurship, science etc.
Einstein doesn’t go and compete in swim suit competition for the brilliant.
Don’t worry about people mistakenly hiring you over a more capable programmer because of your height / looks. Worry more about if you are maximizing your potential not putting your height, looks, and intelligence to work more efficiently all together.
Appearance can be earned. Staying fit, learning how to dress, what hairstyles work for you, how to do makeup, correcting your posture, etc. All these take a lot of effort, and makes a big difference in how people perceive you.
I have a friend who I met at the gym who’s a software engineer at Amazon, and she has ~50k instagram followers because she lost a lot of weight. Like, from 300lbs to “the fit girl at the gym”. She was used to being bullied when she grew up. Social perception of attraction can definitely be earned.
Similarly, being likeable and socially capable is something that can be earned too. From personal experience, it takes a lot of practice and putting in effort to understand others. Even gaining perspectives from MDMA and LSD helps a lot. Human behavior isn’t set in stone, and with effort can be changed.
I agree about all of that - I have spent substantial time figuring out grooming/dressing/posture, and it helps.
But in my thinking, I take the nature of initial conditions out to the extreme. The fact that I was able to identify deficiencies, make a plan, and execute that plan - that's just kind of lucky. If I was too emotionally dysregulated to follow through on plans, I'd be hosed. Or if I wasn't intellectually capable of identifying problems and forming viable plans, I'd be hosed.
And even on a day to day basis: I feel like my ability to program is a product of decisions my past self made. My current self isn't responsible for my capabilities, he's just the beneficiary/victim of past choices I've made.
Maybe this is all a little woo, I don't know. But I feel like the only reality is the one directly before me, and the only meaningful choices are the ones I make in this moment.
Videoconferencing seems to encumber both communication and charisma in some ways -- big and small, apparent and subtle.
For example, it seems like even slight latency or difficulty hearing people can make a very smooth interaction seem non-smooth.
And (as was exceedingly painful to me in a recent team meeting), none of the tools currently available would've come close to having a real-world whiteboard. There have been CSCW research efforts at this for a few decades, but, in practice, at the moment, it's usually just a dumb camera&mic, and sometimes screen-sharing.
Maybe, in getting an impression of a person, people haven't yet re-calibrated expectations for the videoconferencing media we're currently stuck with?
And maybe there's still some charisma projection adjustments that individual people can try tweaking, if they want, such with lighting, eye contact, lens distortion, etc.? (As someone who once dabbled in studio portraiture, I'm aware of some ways I could look better on videoconf, but it's been a relatively low priority, compared to countless other aspects of startup tech work.)
W/r/t the whiteboard thing - one of my interviews recently used google jamboard, and my input was lagging by like 30 seconds. I was writing a solution, and talking through it, and one of the interviewers started trying to help by starting a solution directly on top of mine. So apparently I just sounded like I was talking about hypothetical code. No harm, really - the interviewer was embarrassed, we moved on. But it was pretty awkward not inhabiting the same visual reality, and thus building divergent mental models of the interaction.
I live with a therapist, who confirms that their rapport building is encumbered via video chat. She's incredibly warm and emotive, and I think this compensates: her content is presumably affirming, and her tone (which comes through the thin walls) just oozes authenticity and positive regard. Certainly rapport building isn't dead, but the relative value of the parameters seem to have shifted.
You've inspired me to go read one of the guides on videoconferencing lighting I keep seeing. Hopefully to let my, um, inner beauty and competence shine through.
The company behind Invisalign had a blast the last quarter which they attributed to the people doing more Zoom these days. So, it seems it is still about appearances - now it is about whatever appears in the Zoom window. (not a comment on your teeth either way, it is just that Zoom-ing reminded me that my teeth aren't the best around - somehow it looks worse on the computer screen than in the mirror :)
Sadly one of them died recently at ~40, turns out he had an underlying heart condition since birth which might explain alot about his past performance.
Having said that I did know a particularly fat and ugly friend that has a great personality and was quite successful running her own small publishing business. Smarts and drive can shine through no matter what you look like.
If you can't get a job, start your own. Once you start seeing opportunities instead of wages you'll probably never go back.
Personally, I find it very surprising most hackers have such a disdain for physical beauty, given the huge ROI for every $ invested - reportedly about 1,000x for Elon Musk personal worth.
Still, only a few CEO seems to have taken action to maximize their appearance, and mostly against their premature baldness. Even that is kind of taboo - while studying before an interview is not, even if it will certainly have a much lower ROI.
Why not hack your appearance?
There are many scientific studies documenting all that, but we ignore them. For an example of all the known variables, check for ex table 1 of the following for "Zero-order Pearson’s correlations between facial appearance and health, with the corresponding p-values and sample sizes":
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/
If you want more example for a given variable, for example the effect of adiposity (we know it's quadratic), read one of the original papers:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/
All this is well known now, as the first study was about 22 years ago:
Perrett, D. I., Lee, K. J., Penton-Voak, I., Rowland, D., Yoshikawa, S., Burt, D. M., … Akamatsu, S. (1998). Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness. Nature, 394(6696), 884–887. doi:10.1038/29772
So why do we keep ignoring it, while focusing on other signals like which search engine (or operating systen) you use?
Where does this number come from?
Maximize profits!
> If i want success and you give me a choice of "improve what you do" or "improve what you look like" for the same result, I'll take the first one every time.
In doing so, you are then neglecting the diminishing marginal returns: spend say the equivalent of 1 month or time (or earning from your work) on learning 10 times in a row will yield less than doing that 9 times + improving your appearance once (or twice, you get the idea...)
> I know that people around me care on a deeper level than a lie of appearance
You THINK you know. The studies in law, in resident selection in medicine, etc. seem to prove you wrong - unless you believe hackers are very different from doctors and lawyers at an essential level
What you are not free to do is judge someone’s looks and use that as a criteria in the hiring process in jobs where beauty is not a relevant criteria.
If this study proved that X number of over-weight or unattractive people applied, but were rejected at a noticeable clip, how is this not legally actionable?
Bringing it back to tech for a second. We all acknowledge the pipeline problem with women at tech companies. But, in my experience, a lot of your startups are really white across the various job disciplines (from the CEO down to the interns). That stuff is not an accident either, would love to see some studies on this.
I suppose we all need to do a good job filling out the optional questions at the end of a job application that identifies your ethnic background. Where is all this data and how do we get it, and is it possible to dig down into the tech center and really see what’s going on?
Because attractiveness is not a protected class, unlike sex, age over 40, religion, family status, race, or the couple other I must be missing.