Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech | Hacker News Reader

Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

news.yale.edu

163 pointsallthebest254 comments

Key bit here:

> Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social status.

So while I don't fault the study here, it's not clear that this really demonstrates what the title says ("shows bias in hiring"). It shows bias if you tell a hiring manager they need to make a hiring decision based on no actual interviewing. It'd be like if a candidate came in for an interview, made 60 seconds of small talk, and then the hiring manager had to immediately make an offer. And, yeah, I'm not surprised that in a situation like that, hiring managers make decisions based on the slimmest of signals, amplifying class-based biases. Would they have way less bias if given any real signal about a candidate's fitness for a job? That's not shown one way or another according to this press release.

That said, I generally do believe the thesis here (that speech patterns influence class perceptions which significantly bias hiring), even if I'm not convinced that this particular study shows that.

Yeah, the point taken from the study is really designed to stoke tension when it is not really reflective of anything meaningful when it comes to job applicant filtering.

It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities in those industries consequently went up, not down. The reason? Without an impartial and indifferent scan of a person's background, employer's were left to use the signals they could pick up on in person, filtered through their own biases. The solution was to allow background checks again.

It sounds like this study is basically saying that without the background check (in this case, actual interviews assessing qualifications), that people are more likely to filter through whatever biases they have at their disposal. Sounds like no surprise... That's the whole point of the interview, to be the impartial and indifferent filter that anyone would be judged by. The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue. Which nobody does anyway. So it's not testing for anything real.

(Cue many knee-jerk anecdotal counterpoints to "nobody does that anyway." Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds.)

> So it's not testing for anything real.

You are too quick to dismiss the study, I think. What the study shows, I think, is that other things being equal the person who sounds to be from higher class is likely to get the job. The study simulates the other things being equal scenario by eliminating all other avenues for the hiring manager to judge.

Here is the quote from the TFA, lightly edited for emphasis:

  The study, ... , demonstrates that:

    (a) people can accurately assess a stranger’s socioeconomic 
    position — defined by their income, education, and occupation
    status — based on brief speech patterns and 

    (b) shows that these snap perceptions influence hiring managers 
    in ways that favor job applicants from higher social classes.

> The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge based on a few seconds of dialogue.

Agree, but ALSO be aware of such biases and try prevent those.

This is how research works, you isolate variables. By OP’s logic science is never testing for anything “real.”

I’m not surprised that HN rushes to discredit the idea that hiring is not a perfect meritocracy, but this is kinda silly.

Isolating this variable allows one to study how good hiring managers are at estimating base probabilities for education/competence given social class (news alert: they are not independent).

It says nothing about what actually matters: do hiring managers with the ability to properly interview "equally qualified" candidates from different social backgrounds do so effectively (i.e. offer them similar compensation), or do they still rely on the base rates (i.e. bias), and how big is that effect?

But this is also not how isolating variables works. If you give someone no information, and require them to make a decision based only on speech patterns, that does not actually tell you very much about how they would make a decision if they had lots of information including speech patterns. Compare:

a) only speech

b) lots of complex skills-based information that is (verified in a separate experiment) equivalent on balance, plus also speech

It's quite possible that you could see a large difference in decisions in (a) without any detectable difference in (b).

For example, imagine in this study hiring managers are (perhaps subconsciously) estimating education level from speech. If they already have lots of details about candidate's education, that "screens out" the rough proxy of their speech patterns.

Questioning the validity of the isolation, and conclusions drawn from the result is how science works.

> I’m not surprised that HN rushes to discredit the idea that hiring is not a perfect meritocracy, but this is kinda silly.

I think this is a straw man argument, unless you can point to more than one person here (now I see none) arguing hiring is a perfect meritocracy.

I see lots of people questioning the methodology and conclusions drawn, but I don't see anyone claiming hiring is perfectly meritocratic.

On the one hand, if we need to perfectly understand the problem before starting to solve it, we'll be forever stuck in analysis. On the other hand, if we are incorrect in our initial analysis, we risk wasting time and other resources on the wrong solutions, reducing resources available for other solutions further down the road. It's very important to distinguish constructive criticism from animosity.

>I’m not surprised that HN rushes to discredit the idea that hiring is not a perfect meritocracy

I'm surprised you evidently haven't seen the thousands of threads where HN predominantly does nothing but complain about how hiring is not a perfect meritocracy.

Well, the experimenters could have combined their corpus of job candidates describing themselves with a bunch of recordings of actors giving the same descriptions in different accents.

Then each hiring manager could have been presented with a different subset of that pool, with both resume and recording.

A multivariate regression would then reveal the relative impacts of class, being an actor, and the different self-descriptions.

> education

I.e. something that does matter.

I notice with wry amusement that my own speech patterns vary depending on who I'm talking to. For an obvious example, using simpler words and a higher pitch when talking to very young children. But I use different vocabularies when talking to different groups of adults, too. This is all quite unconscious. I bet we all do this.

More dramatically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

> What the study shows, I think, is that other things being equal the person who sounds to be from higher class is likely to get the job.

In an interview where you're not allowed to evaluate "all other things".

In other words, absent any other information, people believe those from a higher class are more likely to be competent. Is that true? The link says nothing about it. If it is true, the hiring managers did a good job at estimating average competence from social class based on their knowledge (i.e. "bias").

It does not show that in an interview process where you are allowed to evaluate the candidate on factors that matter for the job, higher class matters at all (i.e. given two equally qualified candidates that are interviewed by an experienced hiring manager, the higher class one gets better offers/evaluation of competence).

And this is the bias that matters because it applies to the real world.

Exactly. It's not discrimination if it is objectively true.

I would certainly want to see proof before I accepted it was true. And even if it were true, we might find it socially undesirable for people to act on (it's "objectively true" that hiring disabled people costs an employer money too). I have previously seen a similar study to this one where landlords were able to determine a prospective tenant's race in brief phone conversations and were less willing to rent to minority tenants. Was that also just sound, evidence based reasoning?

Few challenge that the children of highly educated parents have higher academic achievement. As highly educated parents is strongly correlated with upper class. This is enough to make it quite likely that someone from an upper class background will be the better candidate in expectation, even if the only information you get is the socioeconomic background. We can quibble over details, but the more you dig into this the more convincing this will become. It does not matter as you already believe this.

With regards to minority tenants, institutionalized racism often leads to the case that non-racist agents will have sound evidence based reasons to discriminate. Not based on the properties of the group discriminated, but based on the behaviour of a third party. A decent example is if banks discriminate against a group, then their availability of credit is worse. This can create self perpetuating circles of discrimination, which can be sustained even if all involved organisations and individuals aren't racist. For a hilarious example of something similar, see: https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg This is a communication and organisational failure, not racism, but its difficult to distinguish, but critically yes, it means it could be.

Non-discrimination and positive discrimination is best viewed as taxes designed to address this kind of problem, and its working. But the habit people have of challenging this kind of thing as a kneejerk reaction is harmful. What you are doing is essentially claiming that their judgements are corrupt or trying to shame by implied association, and that isn't helpful.

As shopworn as the term is, this is what is meant by "institutional racism." Racist sentiment is not necessary for people to behave in what is ultimately a racist way.

I would also challenge your notion. It is true that wealth is correlated with educational achievement. But educational achievement will not, in itself, lead to someone speaking in a way that is more patrician. Is it the kind of society we want to create where you are essentially "locked in" to your parents' social position? It may even be the case that, assuming two people with the same education, the person from a lower class background is more likely to be exceptional.

> Is it the kind of society we want to create where you are essentially "locked in" to your parents' social position?

No, that is why interviews should look more like the ones Google performs and less like "please describe yourself, hobbies and life experiences"

Yes, I agree. For all the complaints, I think it is a much fairer system than the alternative.

!As shopworn as the term is, this is what is meant by "institutional racism." Racist sentiment is not necessary for people to behave in what is ultimately a racist way.! With the way you put it now, the people living within such systems would be racists taking racist actions based on sound evidence based reasoning. The term itself is also problematic, as no institutions nor race need to be involved for this kind of problem to occur, its simply the most familiar form to americans. Inadequate equilibria is better, but the corresponding the problem xxx would disappear if people weren't idiots isn't productive either.

Just like it is not necessary for the upper class to be more educated, its not necessary for the more educated to speak upper class. But it is more likely.

That such would be enough to stagnate social mobility seems like pessimistic hyperbole to me. Given that we are talking about high value added, high paying, i.e. worker shortage jobs and that there are significantly more demand for such workers than the upper class could provide, meaning, even at worst, such behaviour could only slow down social mobility, not stop it.

If the people who are evaluated are drawn randomly from the population as they claim to in the study, then no. If its a real hiering situation, then possibly yes, though it depends on how the position was advertised. That however may not even change the outcome of the study. In most big companies recruiters are not looking for the best applicant for the job, or atleast have no incentives to do so. They are looking for the easiest to motivate hiring for the job. Similarly, their boss may not have ordered them to find the best worker for the job, they likely asked for a good enough worker who causes minimum issues and who if they cause issues were easy to motivate having hired in the first place. Note that I never claimed that upper class speech meant better at the job, I explicitly wrote academic achievement, i.e the kind of thing which makes for an easily justified hire. Imagine having hired Dr House except without a degree, or a slightly below average doctor with an average grade degree. Now one is plain better, but the other will never get you fired. But thats a whole other problem.

I wonder what the class breakdown would be if the hiring managers had access to all other relevant information about the candidates, EXCEPT socioeconomic class... I'd expect the more 'upper class' candidates probably would do better on average.

Do you have a hypothetical explanation for why, if people are only allowed to evaluate speech and accent, they prefer a certain group, but if allowed to evaluate lots of different more meaningful things, which all lead to the same conclusion about competence EXCEPT for speech and accent, that preference no longer applies?

That seems like an extraordinary claim unless you have some evidentiary base for it.

Sure, it's very credible that a general tendency will remain if other sources of information are available. The unresolved question is what weight is assigned to each preference.

If a hiring decision is influenced to 0.01% by speech and accent and 99.99% by whatever you deem reasonable criteria, then what do you learn from filtering out the latter?

And of course, decisions like this need not have linear behavior in reality either. A gross mismatch between different indicators could result in significantly worse hiring manager opinions than the (weighted) sum of the individual aspects.

Imagine that a candidate shows moderate (but sufficient) aptitude but then tries to disguise it with "high brow" rhetoric. In isolation using such speech may be considered a positive, but in this case it will be probably be to their detriment.

Isn't the existence in a more realistic hiring process of a huge weight of objective and reasonable criteria an unjustified, unlikely and politically subjective assumption?

Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias, perhaps it's more reasonable to assume that most others also involve unconscious or explained-away bias? So perhaps hiring decisions are influenced 0.01% by speech and accent, 64.99% by other class, race and gender markers, and 35% by reasonable criteria such as competence? Why wouldn't this be your base case assumption?

> Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias

No such thing was shown in this study. The study makes no attempt to measure E(skills | social class). For all we know, the hiring managers provided an unbiased (i.e. the opposite of "irrational bias") estimate of the expected skills conditioned on the social class of the applicant, absent any other information.

Interesting that you are claiming both that people making hiring decisions are not biased along class lines and that any such bias would be rational and based on ability.

> The study simulates the other things being equal scenario by eliminating all other avenues for the hiring manager to judge.

I think the issue here is that if the hiring manager only has one variable on which to judge, of course that variable will be used. Whatever that variable may be.

Here is the speech, which is a proxy for class, which is a delicate topic. What if the candidates only differed in the color of their shirt?

I think the issue is not so much to see whether certain criteria matter "all else being equal". It probably does, and the fewer different criteria there are, the more a particular one will matter.

What's more interesting to me, though, is how much a given criteria matters compared to others. Especially criteria I cannot influence (say my race) versus others I can (say my coding level or even speech). And this kind of study cannot show that.

Should we all show up to interviews wearing lime shirts if some study showed that's what a bunch of hiring managers preferred when they had nothing else on which to judge? And how important is that compared to, say, knowing how to code a FizzBuzz? Given limited resources, should I invest in learning to code or in finding the greenest shirt possible?

Ironically, HN frequently touts the benefits of "just talk to someone about their work" over the impartial whiteboard interview.

I far prefer the Software Engineering industry's focus on design and coding interviews. Impartial. Unrealistic. But fair.

Software coding interviews can be extremely subjective. I have seen someone rate similar responses vary differently based on their overall assessment of the candidate. It’s also extremely difficult to be equivalently helpful when answering questions.

Even deciding what’s a fair assessment is difficult. Should you give someone more slack if they haven’t used a language in 2 years, but remember most things well enough?

Fair enough but "just talk to them" is clearly worse.

Unfortunately once you move past the lower working level software/engineering jobs, either vertically to team lead positions or horizontally to product management or marketing or sales, whiteboard interviews are not that helpful, as soft skills becomes as important if not more important than technical skills for success at work.

Not only that, but whiteboarding very rarely tests for skills actually needed at the job. As you progress in your career, things like "I have held down the following software development jobs for X years...." are going to be far better ways to judge technical capabilities that are actually relevant to the job than 30-60 minutes of whiteboarding.

Many many different industries have jobs that require technical skills -- not tech as in technolgy -- and they get away just fine with managing to hire people. Nurses need to be able to nurse, a highly technical skillset; no one is having nurses give fake shots on test dummies during interviews. They use credentials and experience, and accept the risk that a hire might not pan out.

The fact that we want senior level developers to have to refresh/cram before interviews on how to implement graph search algs and hash tables just so they can pass some artificial whiteboarding section is a bit crazy. Their actual job experience over the past N years should be what counts.

Now, conversations about how one would solve technical problems of a sort actually faced on the job are totally on point, and really should be a part of any job interview in any field.

edit: Really, what we want as engineering types is for there to exist a way to gauge ability in a purely objective way. But there isn't one; it doesn't exist. Furthermore, you are building a team of people. IMO the focus should really be on fit and soft skills regardless. Make sure they meet a minimum bar of technical ability, then work to verify whether they'll be a productive, beneficial teammate.

Credentialing for software engineers (such as licensing and continuing education for nurses) has its own set of problems, both in terms of gate-keeping but more importantly in the type of work being entirely different.

There’s a spread in performance from the +1σ to the -1σ nurse, but both will be functional in a nursing role, so checking credentials is a mostly sufficient evaluation of occupational ability.

The spread in software ability is so much larger that the -1σ candidates (the least-effective ~15% of people who have ever worked in computer programming jobs) are worth trying to select against in a way the least effective ~15% of nurses probably are not. (I’m not in medicine so I’m not sure; apologies if the same effect is at play there as well.)

> The spread in software ability is so much larger that the -1σ candidates (the least-effective ~15% of people who have ever worked in computer programming jobs) are worth trying to select against in a way the least effective ~15% of nurses probably are not.

This isn’t an argument against credentialling since it is literally the direct effect of not having credentialling in software. Credentialing cuts most-to-all of what would be the low tail of the profession off before it ever enters. Nurses and lawyers who can’t do their profession’s equivalent of fizzbuzz mostly wash out of the exams to enter the profession (or earlier), they don’t show up in job interviews, except where the inability is produced by some kind of post-entry decline in capacity. And even then, decertification is a real possibility, which further purges the low end of the distribution.

So, yeah, a -1σ software developer (or at least software developer job applicant) is worse compared to basic expectations than a -1σ nurse, because a nurse as below expectations as a -1σ software developer is would be compelled to find a different profession because of credentialling requirements.

You make a good point about an idealized credentialing mechanism cutting off the left tail of the distribution, but the spread in performance will still be much higher in credential-holding SWE than nursing and, because of the high leverage, still worth selecting for.

You can only be so much better at nursing than the average qualified nurse. How many more patients will the best nurse save? You can be several multiples (whether it’s 10 or not, I won’t get into here, but I think it’s at least 3) more effective than the average in SWE.

> You can only be so much better at nursing than the average qualified nurse

I...disagree rather strongly that this, to the extent it is true, differentiates SWE from nursing. Comparing workers with identical responsibilities, the same is true in SWE, in both cases there are large impact multiples possible within the field, but they come from roles with greater responsibility; in nursing, because different roles require different credentials, this is reflected in the fact that a more competent nurse will be more likely to take on a more responsible role within the same credentialed category, and also be more likely to acquire greater credentials over time compared to a less competent nurse. “Nursing” isn’t a binary credential, but a whole set, starting with a basically heirarchical set: CNA -> LVN/LPN -> RN and beyond that various Advanced Practice Nursing credentials.

SWEs likewise have wide variety of scopes of practice and responsibility, but because we have no structure in the profession, they are assigned ad hoc and even with common titles there isn’t consistency in substantive roles, skills, or qualification. But, again, that’s a product of the absence of structure and credentialling, not an argument for it.

Whatever the entry-level credential is, SWEs as a set will have a spread of productivity/capability that’s wider than the entry-level nurse.

Whatever the highest-level credential is, SWEs will have a spread that’s wider than the highest-level nursing credential (and likely wider than the ratio in the entry-level SWE range as well).

> Whatever the entry-level credential is, SWEs as a set will have a spread of productivity/capability that’s wider than the entry-level nurse.

I see, and you have presented, no reason whatsoever to believe that this is true.

In the right position, excellent SWEs have enormous leverage. A median SWE might maintain some line-of-business app for an insurance company, and an excellent one might create software that is used by an entire industry (say, Redis just as an example).

By comparison, given the physical and time constraints of the job, an excellent nurse might be able to spread their expertise to 2x as many patients as a median? 3x? I think even 3x is a stretch. Maybe they can make a life-saving catch in the hardest 5% of cases (definitionally, very rare opportunity to apply this level of skill)?

Who is the Jon Carmack of nursing? How many more patients did they treat in a shift than the median nurse?

(Jon would have started with entry-level credentials at some point.) Substitute with Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, Bjarne S, Peter Norvig, James Gosling, Brenden Eich, rtm, rms, or whomever your idea of someone obviously on the right tail of the distribution is.

I'm sure there are famous and outstandingly accomplished nurses, just as there as there are for SWEs. My claim is that there are likely more of the latter and more continuous distribution of them.

Knowledge workers have a scale effect that others don't. Software stuff has a scale effect.

This is why a top PI or scientist can literally save hundreds of millions (as Norman Borlaug did) but the best surgeon can save mere thousands in their life at best using surgery¹. There is a scale effect.

Likewise, SWEs can write code that can apply to all people.

Same with the top public policy people, for instance. It's the length of the lever and where the fulcrum is placed.

No nurse has that lever.

¹ I hate having to handle the edge-casers, but scientists can come up with new surgical procedures (as Werner Forssmann did) and that is way for them to use a long lever.

> The solution was to allow background checks again.

I'm not sure this learning shows what you think it does, nor that the 'solution' is really a solution. Employers don't want to hire black people because they fear they might be criminals, and background checks allay this fear, allowing them to hire a subset of black people they feel are ok? To me this confirms that both background checks and hiring managers have a tendency to be racially biased, and the 'solution' is simply accepting of that bias.

Another perspective is that a lot of bias isn't "I don't like X people", but rather "I feel X people are disproportionately Y, and I don't like Y". Objective data that this X person isn't Y seems like a good way to (1) reduce the harm of the bias in the short term and (2) hopefully diminish the bias over time, given enough objective data to fix their biased priors via observation.

If fixing people's biases via objective data isn't the solution, is the solution figuring out which people are unbiased and only hiring sufficiently unbiased people? What if evidence suggests that there aren't enough sufficiently unbiased people in the world? Is unsubstantiated rhetoric preferable to objective data in breaking down people's biases?

Of course the ideal solution to bias is to just not be biased in the first place, but that's not an implementable solution.

> Another perspective is that a lot of bias isn't "I don't like X people", but rather "I feel X people are disproportionately Y, and I don't like Y"

Of course. But the answer to this depends on: 1. the source of the belief that 'X people tend to be Y'. 2. The truth or otherwise of that belief. 3. The source of the dislike of Y. 4. Whether or not Y is a reasonable cause for dislike.

Suppose that I tell you that the most important political issue for me is the welfare of animals, and in particular, that animals raised for meat should be stunned before they are slaughtered. There are definitely some people for which this is a genuinely held and rationally arrived at belief, consistent with their other beliefs and actions. There are others for which this is a device for attacking certain religious communities, through opposition to halal and shechita. Isn't it correct that we should try and understand which is taking place before responding to it?

Presenting objective data to someone arguing an irrational position in bad faith does no good - the bad faith argument simply adapts.

Sure, but we usually group these sorts of disagreements as axiomatic disagreements, not bias.

Maybe I'm grossly naive, but I doubt that percentage wise there are many hiring managers who hold racial superiority as axiomatic.

My understanding is that hiring bias usually boils down to assumptions about aggregate intelligence, trustworthiness, and/or work ethic of groups of people. If someone thinks Swedes just aren't that smart, it's not a matter of axiomatic disagreement about if being smart is good or bad in an employee, it is something that objective data can fix. If someone is worried that black people are generally untrustworthy due to criminal pasts, that's something that they can be objectively shown to be untrue.

(Yes, I grew up in a time and place where racist/originist Sven and Ole jokes about dumb Swedes were common.)

This is far too simplistic. There are well studied phenomena by which people apply bias along the following lines (an arbitrary example chosen):

1. I believe a stereotype that Swedish people are more friendly than Scottish people. 2. I know this person is Swedish, so I will tend to judge their behavior as generally friendly when I would interpret the same behavior by a Scottish person as less friendly. 3. I tend to assume that Scottish people do better in this job than Swedish people, perhaps because I've seen more Scots and fewer Swedes succeed in the past. 4. I therefore believe that success in this job is anti-correlated with friendliness. 5. The person in front of me would perform poorly in this role - not because he is Swedish, but because he is too friendly.

Note that although in practise, I might reject a Swede and accept a Scot (who is exactly as qualified and exactly as friendly) for the same job, I don't have any dislike of Swedish people, nor do I seek to avoid hiring them. In fact I might personally prefer Swedes to Scots (because they are so friendly) and seek out their company, yet still behave as above! That's literally the meaning of unconscious in unconscious bias.

1. That's very interesting. Thanks for enlightening me.

2. I think the case of the background checks is, however, one of the simple cases. It looks like some managers have an irrational belief that they're interviewing people likely to have criminal convictions, but change their minds when background checks come back clean. Hopefully as more and more background checks come back clean, managers adjust their biases.

On a side note, there is something to be said for giving convicted criminals a second chance. I'm not sure if people with a single criminal conviction are that much more likely than someone with a clean record to commit a crime that harms their employer.

> ... Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds...

You make it sound like that kind of thing is impossible. It's NOT. Class signals, in many cases, are absolutely critical to landing a job. You give an example of "an artist with no experience" grifting into a SW engineering job-- that's a bit extreme. What is common, however, are corporate HR/hiring-managers and even entire professional networks that dismiss otherwise qualified people based on class signals.

You people are thinking of software engineering, of course because this is HN. But keep in mind that for some people, that's just "the help". There's a whole world of business jobs and networks where even showing up with the wrong suit will get you instantly, silently, and permanently dismissed unless you have some incredibly strong connections to that group. I know this anecdotally because I grew up in my father's tailor shop!

This isn't a shocking or unbelievable finding.

It's been well known for a very long time that for some the education you receive at Yale or Harvard is more about how to be a member of that class, to learn the manners, speech, and dress, that will win you the job at companies playing by those rules. The "Gentleman's C" you earn is less consequential.

Wow I was about to make this more or less exact comment before I read yours. Including, by the way, that last sentence.

It's wild how people with different assumptions about the world can read the same thing, focus on the same part, and walk away with opposite conclusions.

I read that as them trying to control for other factors and get a clean signal to demonstrate their hypothesis as a testable, verifiable, and falsifiable phenomenon.

But some people apparently think that the process of isolation IS the confounding factor that produces the results.

This makes things difficult. If they don't do this people will accuse them of not controlling for everything but when they do do it then they say "well yeah, you're controlling for everything else, of course you'll get that".

The point from my reading was all things being equal except for the subtle verbal patterns of class, the verbal patterns are a real influencing factor in outcome

It’s simply invalid science.

It’s equivalent to having variables x, y, z, setting x = 0 and then exploring the correlation between y and z. That’s a fair experiment, but you simply cannot generalise the conclusion outside of the tested range for x (i.e. for x != 0).

No it's not.

It's like having x and claiming y and z might exist. You set it equal to zero and then you demonstrate the existence of the others.

Every study I've ever seen dealing with messy social sciences has some kind of fundamental counternarrative. That's why there's follow-up studies to try to demonstrate things in different ways.

Take the Milgram experiment. Some participants have claimed they knew the machine was fake but didn't want to mess up the experiment so they played along. Do we throw that out then? Everything real is complex, we aren't dealing with carefully defined clean room abstractions.

The Asch conformity test with the lines, many participants expressed extreme indifference to the arbitrary exercise after the confederates disagreed. They simply did whatever was required to complete the experiment. Do we toss that out?

All experiments are like this. Every single one. That's why you have to do multiple different kinds and have a preponderance of evidence from a diversity of approaches. That's the whole point

The opposite baseline belief, that mannerisms, poise and confidence have absolutely nothing to do with class signalling and that class absolutely does not reproduce itself through social institutions, seems to me to be the more implausible hypothesis here.

There'd have to be some new hypothesis to explain why it so clearly looks like going to Eton or Harvard and growing up in the Hamptons affords one preferences in the job market even when the prospect employer doesn't know such details.

Personally I think that's the one that should be on the defensive. A confounding factor there is the one that needs demonstration.

I would fully expect that receiving a good education would provide benefits even if you didn’t tell anyone specifically where you went.

I daily use my education to my benefit and very rarely does it come up where I attended.

If I had to study the effect on fuel economy of having the top down on a convertible, I'd want to control for speed.

But if I controlled for speed by simply setting the speed to zero, people ought to question my work even if my results agree with their expectations :)

That's not this. It's a false equivalency.

You've just restated the same error as the thing I responded to

The thing you'd be "zeroing" in this situation would be to find a specified road and weather condition and then demonstrate the existence of a drag coefficient by letting the car coast down the same hill with the top on or off and seeing how far it goes before stopping and how long it takes to get there

In your analogy you'd be up against the assumption that fuel economy is universally constant. Here, you're trying to show that it's not constant and the shape of the vehicle is part of the reason why.

You do this by removing confounding variables to demonstrate whether a phenomena is real or just a confluence of other things and merely presenting a convincing illusion.

We would want to take engine combustion and driving habits out of the tests. We would be pushing the car off at neutral down the hill. You want those noise creating events to not disrupt your signal

We're trying to establish if something is potentially real.

Coincidentally there's been a slew of bogus fuel efficiency additive products that have measurable effects because the people using them habitually change their driving style creating a false positive. Grifters have successfully been hawking this driving placebo scam for 50 years because when you bring all the other stuff in it's hard to tell what's real and what's just in the head. It's easy to falsely attribute things based on the stories we like to tell ourselves.

Also to extend the car pushing thing to the counternarrative example someone could claim that it was merely the tires were warmed up the second run, thus being more inflated and that's what caused a time discrepancy so drag coefficient is still an unsupported idea. No matter what you do, there's always a hole somewhere. That's why it's gotta be more than one type of demonstration. To borrow a French idiom, it's all about cherchez le creneau and constructing new experiments.

"It’s simply invalid science"

So the whole peer review comittee was asleep, but you are here to tell us

I don't think it's generally sound life advice to outsource thinking to others.

In addition, judging by the topic, this was a sociology department study. Social studies are hardly even science, and the practitioners aren't exactly renowned for their statistical skills. I'm much more confident about my Oxford Masters of Science degree in math.

Can you be an expert in all things that affect your life? Have you studied nutrition, medicine, law, finance, construction and soil stability, to the extent where you can distinguish a phony research paper?

All of us rely on others in society to do their part and to get it mostly right. So if you are going to declare research invalid purely based on your judgement, you better have a bullerproof argument.

As an exaggerated example, I know a bloke who is "thinking for himself" and has concluded that a medicine is dangerous because it contains clorine, and clorine is toxic. So he has a set of facts, and they are correct, but the conclusion is wrong because he does not understand the basics of chemistry, and that once that clorine atom is part of a larger molecule, it has completely different properties.

If you study "facts" without understanding the field these mistakes are easy to make, all the more so if you approach from the high horse of a 'i am clever and have a brilliant degree"

But I’m not doubting chemistry or physics. I’m doubting sociology (not a science), and even more I’m doubting math/stats (the basis of experimental science).

> The point from my reading was all things being equal except for the subtle verbal patterns of class, the verbal patterns are a real influencing factor in outcome

No, because as other people replying to you have stated, being able to observe "other things" is the crucial difference between an actual interview and what happened in this study. Inferences about variable X, depend on whether you can observe only Y, or also A,B,C,W,Z.

Here is what an experiment measuring what you believe this one does would look like:

- Find participants with a range of skills/experience and pair up participants from low social class with participants from high social class according to skill

- Allow hiring managers to conduct realistic interview processes and grade the candidates

- Assess the bias due to social class by looking at the differences in average rating for participants in each pair. If you have enough interviews/participants, you can also estimate the size of the bias from social class as a function of applicant skill

- Issues: you do need another metric to quantify "skill" that does not rely on hiring managers performing interviews (education level, GPA, written tests, etc.)

Here is what this experiment did:

- Allow hiring managers to infer social class

- Measure the expected skill given social class assigned by the managers with no other information present

- Issues: decisions from "no other information present" and "after conducting a rigorous interview and all other (job related) things being equal" are not comparable

It's quite common to infer social status from speech. Since the level of education used to correlate with social status, it made sense to have a preference. If that correlation still holds is hard to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised.

It's worse than that - the hiring managers were accurately identifying things that matter. The article isn't saying that the hiring managers were unfairly biased, but that they were somehow able to pick up on traits (their level of education, their level of professional success) that they'd otherwise care about.

It'd be more worrying if hiring managers picked up on thing that didn't matter (their parents' level of education, controlled for their own, their parents' income level, controlled for their own, where they grew up, again, controlled for other markers of professional success) but the article isn't saying that's what the study found.

To me it sounds like they were going to come to the same conclusion no matter what. If the hiring managers were unable to identify any meaningful signals and discern better credentials from the recordings, they could've spun this as: the hiring managers, unable to discern things that matter, picked up on irrelevant cues and discriminated against people with certain irrelevant characteristics (it's inevitable that some traits would be correlated with the hiring managers' selection). In this case, the hiring managers managed to discriminate in favor of better candidates - so they are just reframing better credentials as class.

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy.

Racial discrimination also occurs.

A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never addressed at all.

There once was a study where they eloquently demonstrated this by putting the same white actor into two situations: one had him lay down acting like he was dying from a hear attack in front of Wall Street wearing a suit. The other had him doing the same thing but wearing worn out sports clothing.

They found that people responded more favorably to the actor when he appeared to be of the same social class.

We can thank the wars against poverty, drugs, homelessness, and crime for this. These all serve as foils against considering ones own class and how easy it is to move downwards in America without any support for those not in abject poverty nor consideration for the disappearance of community building locations, events, and organizations, in large part due to union busting.

You are suggesting that draconian actions against drugs, homelessness and crime are causes for people associating with their own class and prejudicing other classes. I suspect it's the other way around; we are prejudiced to favor our own kind across many metrics and the consequence of that prejudice is homelessness, crime, poverty etc...

I say this because the kind of prejudice you point out is rampant across all societies, not just America and if anything, America handles it a lot better than any other society.

"America handles it a lot better than any other society."

How did you come to that conclusion? If I come up with some metrics, like the amount of support and education poor people can access, or the amount of people in jail, or access to justice, America is near the bottomn out of 'developed' nations.

99 percent correlation is too high and contradicts the spirit of the statement that it's more class bias than race bias. If the correlation is 99 percent then they're nearly completely identical

the point is how to address it and gain support from people that don't experience it but have the power to change it

if we tell everyone they have problems with skin tones and phenotypes when really their primary unconscious bias is being pretentious, then we need to adjust the messaging and address it more accurately

Correlation doesn't mean causation. If the cause is class bias, and you spend all your energy trying to make people more tolerant of other races, when actually they have no racist feelings whatsoever but have terrible class prejudices, then all your efforts are in vain. Trying to conflate the two things just because a correlation might exist is the problem OP is talking about.

The two are so incredibly intertwined given our history that it's hard to separate them. While I think talking about race without talking about class is a huge mistake, it's also a mistake to think that class in a way that doesn't take race into consideration.

For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all.

The kind of racial reductionism we've seen come from (often well-to-do) liberal circles that presents being white (or not Black) no matter the class background as a walk in the park is a dead end of course, but we have to be careful to recognize that there are a number of structural racial problems that don't always have a targeted class character (unless you get to the very upper echelons of wealth).

That said, the popular discourse in America is woefully under-prepared to understand class divisions between and within racial groups. That lack of nuanced discussion is why we end up favoring an understanding that is fully rooted in upper-middle-class experiences and study.

A Black writer who grew up poor, went to a city college and still lives in their neighborhood will never get an op-ed position at the New York Times no matter how good of a writer they are, so their experience gets completely lost in the mainstream, despite being so important to understanding class and race in America.

Yes, and on your first point I think this will be a recurring addendum to my post. My point is that we must address the class issue between and within racial groups or simply put: American culture. It requires compartmentalizing and understanding this more heavily, instead of looking only at the result. We are chiseling at the top of an iceberg, trying to trace backwards and assuming people feel a way that many otherwise supportive people really don't feel, instead of tackling a root cause.

I think class is primarily dictated by three things on a superficial level, e.g ten minutes or less of a first interaction with someone:

- How you speak

- How you dress

- How physically attractive you are, specifically in regards to things like height, fitness, and angular features.

Skin color takes a backseat to these factors in the modern era

I'd say it's more like 10 seconds, maybe even less than that, but I agree.

Yes, with the addendum of, "If any of these things place you into a minority community, you immediately lose."

What is "good speech"? What is "good dress"? What is "attractive"? To much of society, those answers are, "Whatever sounds/looks like the popular culture I consume." and that's a problem.

Imagine you are someone who lives in Beijing meeting a person from the Chinese countryside for the first time. That should help you come up with answers to your questions.

> A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority

There was a study on that recently:

https://osf.io/tdkf3/

released yesterday, wow

nice to see the collective conscious is producing similar paths of study

I've got a lot of problems with this work, but I think I can best summarize my issues with the question: Who are the "Democratic elites"? A list of "Democratic politicians" and quotes from them is given, but I'm curious if that's the full summation of who the "elites" are, or if there are other, thus far unnamed "elites".

I can't think of a better example, but this reminds me of some of the papers on skull size from the late 19th/early 20th century (Mortonites? A bit fuzzy, it's been a minute). There was an undeniable correlation, but it took decades to undo the false causation that was implied (not directly stated in that paper or this one), and that damage still has not been fully undone, despite the heroic lifelong work of Franz Boas and others.

This paper needed to discuss why racial framing isn't persuasive, and it doesn't do that. The whole, "We should trick white people into being kinder to minorities" argument is, frankly, insulting to white people, among many other not-very-noble things. White people should be able to hear arguments about racial inequality without losing their collective minds.

While I don't think the study is particularly strong by itself, your criticisms are kind of strange.

I find that hard to believe that defining a roster of "Democrat elites" materially changes the survey responses and analysis. The only way this critique is relevant is if you reject the premise of the paper, but you don't seem to be doing that?

Is that a critique of all correlative studies? What specifically is this paper doing that you think bridges on phrenology (or all that other brain-size hokum)?

Why must this paper do that? There's a whole field of political science and opinion polling devoted to effective messaging, and they produce studies like this all the time. Maybe you find focus-group-shaped messaging "insulting", but that seems orthogonal to the goals of this paper. But maybe you can crack that nut and then we can purge like half of Twitter and most political talking heads ;)

I expect a paper to at least facially address potential confounding aspects, which the paper does, just not this (to me obvious) one.

The issue as I see it is that this supposes there's a selective group of people setting an arbitrary agenda, whereas the reality is closer to the idea that the majority of Americans are expressing this point of view and these specific politicians are repeating it.

They're committing the very sin they're trying to study, dividing the point of view into a class-based one, by claiming it's the "elites" holding the viewpoint, and not the people themselves.

I would scrub the word "elite" from the paper, it creates needless tension and isn't accurate (or at the very least, define the term specifically). Additionally, I'd directly address the idea that these results could be confounded by latent racism, and I'd probably do that by introducing the concept in the introduction, and refer back to it in the conclusion.

In other words, "Future research should investigate the causal mechanisms behind this." is not enough. Maybe end with this, but do more.

> The whole, "We should trick white people into being kinder to minorities" argument is, frankly, insulting to white people, among many other not-very-noble things. White people should be able to hear arguments about racial inequality without losing their collective minds.

I think this is missing the problem with that framing.

You're kind of assuming that the reason people oppose a bill purported to solve a problem for minorities is that they hate black people and want them to be miserable.

Suppose you're a white fisherman just scraping by on the Gulf Coast. Things are bad. You wish something would change.

The media reports there is a bill being debated in Congress. It's a thousand pages long and you don't understand it, but they say its purpose is to help black people. Gosh, you wish they would do something that would help you for once. Probably going to raise your taxes to pay for it, too. This bill sucks.

Compare this to saying that the bill is to help working class people. Hey, working class, that's you! Finally!

It's the same bill. It helps black people because they're disproportionately working class. To specifically tell other working class people that it's only meant to help someone else is how you destroy solidarity. It's what you do if you want them to fight each other even though they have a shared interest.

I hear you, and I can soften my tone somewhat, but I still think this is trying to advocate for some kind of "secret liberal agenda" (and I mean those words specifically, not as a dig), and I don't think that's a good idea. If you're trying to help black people, say that's what you're doing, don't "hide" your intention, if that's what your intention is.

I think it's the responsibility of the white fisherman in your story to read the parts of the text and listen to the parts of the arguments that address him and his problems (and there are plenty), and to be glad that it also helps minorities. His failure to figure that out is his fault, not the people trying to help's fault (I'm not great at softening my tone, you may notice; I'm genuinely sorry about that).

> His failure to figure that out is his fault, not the people trying to help's fault

So it's pretty unrealistic to expect every fisherman to go out and read every bill that comes before Congress. Members of Congress don't even read the bills.

It's supposed to be the role of journalists to convey what the bills do to the public. And then that's what we're talking about.

If the media is telling everyone that the bill is to help someone else and not you (with the plausible implication that it could come at your expense in a zero sum game), it can't be that surprising that this gets less support than putting more emphasis on the fact that it also helps you.

Agreed, with the one quibble that I don't believe the majority of media is actually doing that.

> class bias is never addressed at all

You see this a lot in online forums, e.g. a person will blithely mock "wal-mart shoppers" or "rednecks" without rebuke and then jump down your throat with "white privilege" if they perceive the slightest possiblity of you questioning a racial bias claim.

Interestingly, I see some of the former in online forums. I see a decent amount of the latter, both with and without justification. I've never in my life seen a single poster do that. You have a cite demonstrating this happens "a lot"?

This sounds like a strawman. You're taking a criticism often made (again, not without justification) against "your side" and arguing against it by charging the "other side" with hipocrisy despite the fact that e.g. the /r/FloridaMan community has almost no overlap with woke SJWs (or even the surburban families in my neighborhood with BLM signs in their yards).

You can search my username and the word "redneck" and you'll find one.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702815

Reading the thread shows a very different story to the one in the GGP.

Another poster describes the Capitol riot as a "day-out for rednecks". You say "there aren't many rednecks in San Diego" and the other poster replies to say that they believe there are a lot of 'rural conservatives' around San Diego. Then you accuse them of using a slur, although it's not really clear if you are rebuking him for calling Capitol rioters 'rednecks' or for accusing rednecks of being Capitol rioters.

I don't see where that poster told someone off for using racist slurs, but I believe you that it happened.

Not sure this is even one example of what was claimed above to happen 'a lot'?

A redneck is usually a white, working class person of meager means. This is how I've known the term growing up.

What the commenter I originally replied to was doing was using the term to refer to white people, any white person. When I pointed out that a good portion of the people in the article are from San Diego (I followed a doxxing thread on Reddit during this, nearly all of these people were business owners or people of means), another person tried to reframe the original posters context as "rural conservative". Again, pretty plainly misses the mark, and again, the people in that article are not rural at all. They live in this city, where it costs $600k to get a basic house. One of them owned a coffee shop of all businesses. I don't know about you, but I generally do not see people who call themselves rednecks opening coffee shops in the middle of a major city.

I can't speak to the frequency that this happens. The person I responded to in this thread claimed they'd never seen it, so I linked to an instance of it that I remembered.

I mean I agree with you that it was wrong to use the word 'rednecks' to refer to people protesting at the Capitol. However this doesn't seem at all to be an example of what the other poster claimed, of people who loudly object to racial slurs and yet 'mock rednecks and Wal-mart shoppers'?

SJW and "woke" are nebulous terms with grass-roots participation. Personally, I don't know how you can establish patterns of grass-roots groups without extensive research and observation, which does not happen today. It seems like a fruitless conversation to have because any time you accuse any grass-roots group of something people will say things like:

- that's not a group

- they're not affiliated with x

- anyone can join

- no true Scotsman

- not enough data

Plausible deniability is built-in. That's why I only responded to the bit about frequency, because someone saying it never happens is quite surprising, someone implying it's a norm is equally surprising, at least to me.

But... YOU were the one who implied it was a norm, by insisting that it happens "a lot" that the same people who make fun of rednecks then jump on people or other perceived racial bias. And I didn't, and still don't, think that's true at all. And nothing you've shown here seems like evidence to me, you're just lumping all your "enemies" in one bucket and figuring that they're the same folks.

> But... YOU were the one who implied it was a norm, by insisting that it happens "a lot" that the same people who make fun of rednecks then jump on people or other perceived racial bias. And I didn't, and still don't, think that's true at all. And nothing you've shown here seems like evidence to me, you're just lumping all your "enemies" in one bucket and figuring that they're the same folks.

I am not the same person you were replying to here, FYI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961742

I am guessing you are mixing me and the person you were originally replying to up. If you'd bothered to read my response I said that I find statements regarding "never" and "norm" around this equally surprising. The thread I linked you to has me correcting two posters use of the term. I never asserted it was a norm.

Furthermore, in another of these replies I very clearly stated that I don't think allegations against SJW or "woke" people are worth chasing because nobody is really out collecting data and studying their behavior, both online and in person.

as a white that grew up very very poor, I can't possibly understand why so many black people try to convince me that I'm guilty of white privilege, when most of them had many more resources growing up.

Sure you can. You're less likely to be pulled over in most of the US than a black person driving the same car and wearing the same clothes.

I was stopped too by police and one time briefly searched, so what? Being stopped by the police is not a game changer. If you haven't done anything wrong you'll walk away and go to work and back home.

Why is being stopped by police such a big deal? I think the police should do more of that in the US, it would reduce crime considerably.

Let's work through a hypothetical. Say that drug use is evenly distributed regardless of race across a group of people. If orange people get searched more frequently, even if every search is equally justified, then the number of orange people being prosecuted for drug infractions would be disproportionate.

Note: I am not making a statement about the propriety of this, but merely working through an example of applied statistics.

Because one should have the freedom to continue about their day without being detained for no reason. Can you support your claim? In my city people who have outstanding warrants (arguably having met a standard of having committed a crime) are regularly released after being stopped by police. It seems to me that being stopped by the police doesn't result in the detention of people actually charged with crimes - so why should an average citizen be subject to that or worse?

I honestly don't understand this argument. Please help me do so, because I keep hearing it.

If you're doing crimes, you're paying for them. Now the police, the argument goes, lets white people walk away with warrants. In the same time, they let less black people walk away. Is that the argument?

This might be true, but my problem is the letting people walk away in the first place. I don't want the police to do that at all. If the crime is not too bad, then don't emit warrants to begin with. But if there is a warrant, then that should be enforced.

I don't see how not enforcing warrants for black people or criminals of any color will make things better. It won't make things better for the society at large or for the black community. I believe the hard working black people also want less crime on the streets.

There is a problem with longer sentencing for black people, from what I heard. That is not a police issue. Police violence is a police issue, for all races. But police trying to arrest based on a warrant is not an issue, even if it devolves in violence.

What am I getting wrong?

In my city (non US), the police block a bridge over the river, stop everyone, and check the levels of alcohol in their breath. I don't make a fuss about it, because it probably keeps me safer as a lot of idiots won't drink and drive because of this being done regularly.

Deal with it. The police stopping you is not them thinking you are a criminal necessarily.

stop everyone

That's a very different situation which is obviously non-discriminatory. But consider how you'd feel if they just stopped some and waved others through, don't you see the potential for unfairness?

The rapidly evolving complexity of your arguments above and below suggests to me your appearance of cluelessness was no more than a rhetorical posture. I have more respect for people who make their strongest arguments up front.

Classic sealioning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

It's a pity you're getting downvoted.

How did I troll? I started a conversation, it evolved in a way I didn't anticipate. I did write full answers, with both personal experience, data and articles? How is that "trollinhg by asking concerned questions"?

I did make my point and tried to support it with (some) data.

"it would reduce crime considerably"

There are several things wrong with this statement: the idea that most crimes are commited by individuals and not corporations, the idea that they are commited on the street, and the idea that searching a person somehow can prevent crime.

Firstly a large chunk of crime, is commited by corporates, thats wage theft, consumer law breaches, money laundering, environmental protection, etc. Secondly most crimes are white collar crimes, and we do a very poor job of investigating both.

Lastly even for street crime, which is a small percentage of all crime, stop and search is just a populist show of force that does nothing usefull.

You know what actually reduces crime? Having competent detectives, investigators and prosecutors who can actualy arrest not the individual weed smoker but the kingpin running the show, or bring a complex case against a major company have it stand up to their highly paid team of lawyers.

This is where you are wrong. First of all, I was only talking about violent crimes.

Real life experiment, look at Baltimore homicides https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015

Look at pre-2015 and post-2015. The homicides increased from 200s to 300s. All because of a police crime and BLM protests in 2015. Now you have 100 extra people each year losing their lives. US needs more police, not less. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim...

All the police did was not getting proactively involved on the streets, those stop and search you were mentioning. They still responded to calls and did their investigations. The result is 50% more deaths from homicides, each year.

I mean the past year hasn't shown you that being stopped while being black is could end up being a dangerous situation?

not really.

Jacob Blake was wanted for rape and he violated a restraining order(approaching the said rape victim). He fought the police and even choke-hold one of them. He was preparing to run away with a stolen car with the kids in it (that he did not have custody of). Their mother was the one that called the police, and the police knew who they were dealing with. If he would have been let go by the police, I assume an amber alert would have been issued.

Floyd was being arrested for passing counterfeit bills.

Brianna Taylor was shot after her boyfriend started shooting at the cops. The cops were executing a warrant for drug dealing. They didn't find anything, but that is beyond the point.

The guy that was shot at Wendy's (Rayshard Brooks -had to look him up)was so drunk that he fell asleep at the drive through, and the employees had to call the police to clear the lane. He had prior DUIs and he fought during the arrest, stole a taser and fired it at the cops.

These were the big cases of last year that I can remember right now. None of these were because of mere stops in traffic.

The 3 shouldn't have died, sure, but I am addressing your point: It was more than a benign stop for any of the big cases last year. I am assuming there are traffic stops where innocent people died, but BLM of 2020 was not protesting for them.

It isn't my argument, but as I try to understand all sides I'll do my best to explain the position anyway.

The idea goes something like this. You have white privilege because you are visibly white. By being visibly white you gain an automatic differentiation from those who are non-white. The belief is that the system, being largely run by white people will extend courtesy and nicer treatment to those who look like it whilst those who differ in appearance must "earn" the position you are given by the elements of your birth. It's a bit more complicated than that but that's my understanding of the core of it.

I am not trying to strawman the argument and if I have it wrong, please explain where I wandered off course.

I don't think he argued that by being white he might have some advantages, although it can be argued especially these days. His point was that there are million of other parameters that can affect ones life experience, so why just one advantage in the skin colour department makes him priviliged when he had so many other disadvantages in other departments.

What I was explaining is my understanding of the point of view of the people who believe he does have privilege for his race. It is not my belief but I try to understand all sides of arguments and did my best to represent it.

To continue, briefly. The difference between the various other types of benefits vs "whiteness" is twofold but interconnected. It is obvious who is and is not in the group and the group has institutional power. Most other sets of parameters do not work together in this way.

Again this isn't my position so if it is yours and I've misrepresented it, chime in please.

I don't care whose position it is and I apreciate your effort to explain it, no need to apologise.

Regarding the point itself, rich people or higher classes people as a group also have "institutional power", much more than white people as a group. It is pretty easy to differentiate people background after some sentences as the research shows. So the only difference between those two disadvantages is exchanging some words. Even if it is a significant difference, it still doesn't change or cancel other circumstances in a person life and doesn't make this difference overruling any other difference.

`By being visibly white you gain an automatic differentiation from those who are non-white.`

Thought experiment. Two crazy looking homeless people approach you yelling. They are dirty in ripped clothes and look to be high on strong drugs. One is black, one is white. Do you feel better about, or differentiate the white person because he is "your people"?

If you are a cop —- the answetis yes, yes of course.

There's probably an unconscious bias, but I'd still be fearful to some degree of both.

Homelessness is a problem that must be solved at the highest possible level of government. Since the 'problem' is able to move around the entire country that is the only way to fairly have the collective whole (society) integrate and restore the individual in need to either being a productive member of society, or at least a dignified living solution for when medicine or some other aspect has failed.

Seen in an even wider view, much of illegal immigration is quite likely driven by the homeless or persecuted ignoring the borders of nations that have failed them, as they seek the natural birth rights of anyone on their planet.

That isn't a good thought experiment.

Unconscious biases are likely to have much more effect in ambiguous situations where it's harder to try to understand someone's motivations or how to react, than in a situation where those things are clear. Their absence in the latter does not imply their absence in the former.

you may find this interesting - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-o...

you will get some replies with the depth of "it would be worse if you were not white." I think there is only the smallest amount of truth there. Here are things that have happened to me, a poor white kid from california (and this is just off the top of my head):

I could never join a sports team in school or other extra curricular, that shit's expensive.

I had to steal food to get enough to eat.

I've been pulled over multiple times, nearly every case because my car was shitty and the cop was shaking me down.

I've been stopped by cops for walking through a hospital parking lot to go visit a friend.

I've had a cop pull a gun out at me and order me to the ground. I was 14.

I was told at a young age to follow cop orders exactly and be non threatening else I may get shot.

My mom didn't come to a complete stop at a side street stop sign. Pulled over and the entire car tossed. The cop told my mom she likely stole it and they will find out what she did.

A white buddy got the shit beat out of him by a cop. His crime was being poor and skating.

I've seen a lot of nice cars going to a car race and then there was my buddy and I in a shitty car. We got pulled over and harassed.

I was constantly excluded from most of my peer group because I was poor.

I had to work multiple jobs to put myself through college -- little financial aid there.

I spent over a decade scraping by because I didn't have a single role model on how to grow my career (or even really start one). Living in a low socio-economic area makes it hard to earn enough to get out.

I was the first and only person in my family to go to college.

I've been ghosted on interviews, called racist names, and hell, my wife had rocks thrown at her as a kid because she was one of like 5 white kids at her inner city school.

Classism is elephant in the room nobody seemingly will acknowledge. But, hey, I'm white, so it can't be that bad, right? /s

As someone who grew up poor and white, this was similar to my experience.

> accused of being guilty of white privilege

Maybe "accused" and "guilty" are not the right framing here - you inherit white privilege because of your ethnicity, it doesnt necessarily make you guilty of anything, but you benefit from it whether you want it or not.

You can think of it in the same way that the wealthier people you mention have inherited a better social class by just being born. They can profit from the privilege of their wealth, while suffering from racial discrimination. You can suffer from poverty, while not being hindered by your skin color. People are multi-dimensional.

I think a fairer way to compare would be to compare people from the same social class when looking for privilege and inequality here. Is a poor white person doing better than a poor black person? Is a rich black person doing better than a poor black person? Is a white rich female doing better than a white rich male? Etc...

If people are multi dimensional, why are you grouping people by race and saying they have inherent characteristics based on race?

Going by your second paragraph, a black person born from wealthy parents who send their kid to harvard, has much more priviledge than a trailer park white kid.

So why are you grouping "whites" together as priviledged? What the hell does race have to do with anything?

There are many vectors by which one can measure privilege: race, class, money, educational opportunity, parental guidance/availability, physical ability, and many more. It is entirely possible to benefit from one of those things without another.

> so many black people try to convince me that I'm guilty of white privilege

The articles beating this drum are actually overwhelmingly written by white people.

I think the term was popularized precisely because it is needlessly incendiary, as controversy means better click-bait. If you ignore the blanket term entirely and focus simply on meaning, people mostly agree with one another.

For instance, it's uncontroversial to suggest that most white people will not face racial discrimination on the level that black people do in America. It's uncontroversial to suggest that there is a disprivilege by virtue of discrimination. But the term "white privilege" is employed to convey that all white people get "special treatment". That is literally what privilege means, after all. And of course people don't respond so well to that.

If you ask a proponent of the term whether they would tell a homeless white man they have "white privilege", they will hem and haw, finally suggesting that it would be "impolite" but that they do indeed have it. *Why the hesitation* if it's innocuous? Cognitive dissonance is why. When they have to explain it to people, white privilege is typically defined in terms of black dis-privilege, but the literal meaning is that every white person gets special treatment. Of course that will be met with resentment.

All of which to say, if use of language isn't well designed to create an understanding, it's not designed to further social causes. It's designed to create friction.

Very well put. This whole BLM and white priviledge movement looks like it's setup to cause trouble, not solve issues. I think it's detrimental to the black cause too, so I wonder who and with what purpose is pushing this messaging?

Like you said, it would have been so much easier for everyone to acknowledge the black dis-priviledge. In the current state of affairs, the poors of Appalachia are somewhat privileged? That's laughable, they haven't had a good chance in generations.

It's being pushed by the corporations are politicians so they don't have to treat the real cause, or give away their own wealth, in order to solve the class problems. It's easier to blame some random redneck with low intellect as the root cause instead of watching into their own wallets.

privilege is a misnomer when its really freedom from some distractions

nobody is going to call the police on you for simply walking in a neighborhood

nextdoor and facebook groups arent going to have messages from vigilant bored housewives just because you walked down the street

sundown towns and the ideas that reinforce them don't exist for you

but saying “privilege” suggests other things are handed to you that wouldn't necessarily be true

What I find interesting in all your examples is it feels the cause for issues are power imbalances and racism.

The people calling the cops are likely the white neighbors on their black neighbors and not the other way around. In your nextdoor example, it's not just "bored housewives", it's "white bored housewives". I don't suppose you feel that black bored housewives are also posting those messages.

Correct. Did you need that validated or I am missing the point of your post….? Not sure how to respond, you know that we are agreeing, like 100%?

No response needed, but I think it's interesting that you (and others) use safe language to describe the perpetrators, like "nobody" and "nextdoor groups", when really it's just other white people.

Totally agree with you. Which explain why African immigrant that speak (proper) English and wear a suit and tie. Don't have trouble in job interview even if they are "black". While the Black American blame it on racism.

I must say it also looks rather beneficial to some - while the lower classes are duking it out over a divisive issue the upper classes are safe from social reform. Divide and rule.

President Lyndon Johnson said

>If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

It does not just apply to dynamics between white and non white people, it applies to all people, even within tribes of the same skin color, and probably even other tribal species.

He didn’t make it up either - the French government did exactly that about 200 years ago in Haiti. They introduced apartheid for the purpose of sowing discord between people and undermining the independence movement.

An even older example is Indians and the caste system. I would even posit it greatly assisted Britain in being able to pilfer the subcontinent from halfway around the world with a fraction of the population.

Why would all social classes be the same in motivations and goals? You can never trust the "loyalty" of groups they never signed up for.

A mining company owner, a wall street trader, a tech start up millionaire, a head partner of a law firm and old-money heir(ess) would all have different interests and goals. The same goes for lower classes as well.

For starters, the rich have uniform interest in taxation policy - brackets, inheritance, wealth tax, loopholes, trusts, offshores.

Uniform interest perhaps, but decidedly not uniform motivation and goals on those topics.

Racial equality is a moot point since there are no races. Everyone can even make their children a different color/race by simply "marrying" someone of the desired color/"race".

Removing the idea people are segregated in races, a fight long won in Europe, should maybe be the first priority in America. I still can't believe pollers are allowed to split vote intention by random color groups (I'd be ok with segregating by "descendant of slaves, recent immigrant from africa, recent immigrant from Canada, things like that - but "black" means literally nothing at all).

Or, your assumptions of values, ethics, and how humans function is twisted in a knot. Humans are built to synthesize multitudes of facts, signals, etc using a rubric of experience. The result is imperfect.

Agree, except

> 99% correlation to racial discrimination

suggests that other races do not occupy the lower classes in any significant numbers compared to Blacks. I'd say 40ish %, which is still very high.

I never said that, the article never said that, nobody ever said that except you. Giving the benefit of the doubt here: I think you are thinking about a specific form of discrimination, which some people of some heritage overcome.

Me saying that you suggested something means I understand you did not literally say it.

>A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never addressed at all.

It works so well and so consistently one might be fooled into think it is by design to protect social elites.

Doesn't suprise me. My wife is from a rural town in NC, and was told by her high school teachers that she needed to lose her southern accent if she wanted to be taken seriously in college. When she was working on or master's degree in Maryland, a writing professor commented "you speak and write so well, I never would have guessed you're from the south". That kind of discrimination is very prevalent in academia and media in general, but nobody cares.

Yes, but this illustrates that it's possible to make changes in how you present yourself to overcome potential class biases. This levels the playing field a lot. And why shouldn't people seeking higher status jobs or education be expected to present and conduct themselves accordingly?

"Don't speak like you, speak like me"

"Don't speak like you, or like me some years ago, speak how I learned to speak in order to signal that I'm both perceptive and capable, but also not so rich that I can wisely choose not to signal those traits".

Most people are downright hackable and consistently bugged to that effect regardless of strata. Low key mannerism mimicry (not obvious enough to make it look like you are mocking them) consistently gets you received better along with "proper faking" of desired emotions. For some dumb reason they think "proving they can change their apparent true selves on a whim" means they are more trustworthy instead of less.

This is pretty much the idea behind Received Pronounciation in BE.

When my wife was working in the tutoring center during grad school, they were told that telling a minority student to write in "proper english" is racist. So there's clearly a double standard where you're advised that telling a black student to stop using slang and write in "proper english" is racist, but it's fine to tell a white southern student that if they had talked with an accent and used a southern vocabulary, that it's acceptable to assume they're stupid.

And now that "anti-racist" advice leaves this student with less of a chance later on when college is over.

"And why shouldn't people seeking higher status jobs or education be expected to present and conduct themselves accordingly?"

Because accent has nothing to doing with "conducting oneself accordingly". Why is the onus on the victim of discrimination to align with your bogus, outdated way of thinking?

> Why is the onus on the victim of discrimination to align with your bogus, outdated way of thinking?

Everyone seems to understand what standard American spoken English sound like. If not, we would not have a concept of accents at all.

Perhaps one day all accents will be treated equally, but it won’t be this century. You can rage against the machine, but it will only hurt yourself.

The world doesn’t change at the pace people seem to want it to.

> This levels the playing field a lot.

If one person has to change an accent to play at the same level as another who did not have to change at all - I wouldn't call it "leveling the playing field".

This is really unsurprising for an European. Where I live, a couple day hike can take you to places where people speak at least 6 distinct languages. It's rather obvious that any attempt at mobility will cause you to be treated as an immigrant.

> will cause you to be treated as an immigrant.

Me, an immigrant: :|

I've had the same experience.

I grew up in Staten Island, the son of a couple of Brooklyn Italians. As a kid I had what I now hear as a comically heavy Brooklyn accent.

As a middle-middle class kid surrounded by other kids like me, I considered my accent normal. As I got older and was exposed to people from outside our little bubble, I began to notice their reactions to my accent, which were always in jest but affected me just the same.

Hearing their jokes and their own accents, I began associate the 'standard' American accent with upperclassness, which I wanted to achieve. So I consciously worked on my accent over a number of years. By the end of high school, my R's were nearly properly rounded. By the end of college, my accent had almost completely gone. Today, it is 100% gone. I speak like a journalist from Ohio, except with more swearing.

In many ways, I miss the accent. I feel like an outsider wherever I am, whether it's at work (where I feel like I'm playing a part to fit in) or at a deli, buying a mortadella sandwich, where it feels like returning to a place I've left. But 'fixing' the accent has undoubtedly made it easier for me to advance my career.

A good friend of mine works a logistical analysis job that involves dealing with a lot of warehouses and warehouse workers. There is a saying in the offices of his company that goes: "Get your head out of the warehouse!" This is a play on the popular "Get your head out of the gutter" and is jokingly used in the offices when people say something considered lewd/offensive.

This company brags about its major focus on "diversity" and "helping the underprivileged", but no one bats an eye when "warehouse worker" is used synonymously with "gutter trash".

This company is also shocked--just shocked!--that so few warehouse workers sign up for their "career transformation" program that promises to help educate warehouse staff for office jobs. Because why wouldn't they want to get away from their dirty, dirty warehouse? /s

This is such a huge issue in America, and I feel there's far too little conversation about it. I'm happy to see these kinds of studies shed a bit of light on it.

This hits really hard for people that are 20y +, Dir or VP level people... but they really get along mostly with the oilfield guys on the weekend. You almost just have to turn off your personality.

My friend falls into this category, which is why the snobby culture hits him so hard. Those ladies and gents in the warehouse are his people, and he loves his community deeply, despite its economic issues. But he also has a family to support, so waging a war against the office culture really just isn't a choice.

I think you and your friend first should start work at the warehouse. Then, possibly we should make everyone rotate timeshares in factories, warehouses and fields, and then maybe we'll have our utopia when everyone understand each other and lost all humour.

It worked in China, clearly, so why not in the US ?

Joke aside, fixing people joking about each other is a lost battle. Listen to them speak about diversity behind closed door (I'm a minority in the country I work in, I hate these things so much making me feel different when I try to integration and assimilate), it won't be utopian paradise-style speech either.

Let the warehouse worker mock the headquarter, let the headquarter mock the warehouse, it's not the problem and will happen within the border of whichever gradient. Parisians mock Normandy, Europeans mock Americans, Aliens mock the Earth, your friend's office mock the field workers...

I think the issue is that companies like this pump millions of dollars into "diversity programs" and strictly police any language that could be considered racist. But they often seem completely blind to the fact that many minorities identify strongly with their lower-class communities, and that office culture that mocks and denigrates those communities actively drives away minorities (and all lower-class individuals) from applying for those jobs. Which kind of defeats the purpose of pledging millions toward "diversity".

A lot of American leftists seem to have labeled any political rhetoric about "the elites" as alt-right talking points. But as someone who works frequently with lower class individuals across the political spectrum, this is a deep-seated frustration I hear from people of all races and political parties.

Regardless of race, no one wants to work at a workplace where you know the majority of people think less of you. This is something that I think corporate America needs to understand better, if they genuinely want better diversity numbers.

I've always wondered with things like this, could it be possible to make all interaction "text-based" until final stage?

Specifically for hiring:

What if applicants submitted resumes, but the name and school they attended are replaced with numbers. Then throughout the interview process all interactions were text-based and they were addressed by this number. Then offer/acceptance is based on merit (hopefully) and not on economic status, race, gender, etc.

I admit this isn't exactly well thought out, just a thought I've had as a possible way to hopefully weed out any areas for bias to creep into the process.

Sounds like applying for a loan right now. The person at the bank puts a few numbers into a computer that ties to a big database maintained by Experian/TransUnion/Equifax/ProfessionalParasites, and then it decides if I should get a loan or not.

Look up redlining to see how banks accomplish this even when they're legally supposed to be blind.

I like that but race and gender blind admissions will lead to a huge number of East Asian males which won't be tolerated.

Why would it lead to a huge number of East Asian males?

Universities use an unblinded selection process as a way to intentionally handicap East Asians (and to a slightly lesser extent, white people). Their proportion in enrolment has been trending down steadily over time and has converged to be nearly identical across all the top universities (except for Caltech) which suggests they're all silently colluding (by copying each others' quotas) to keep the Asian enrolment percentage at precisely the depressed X percent.

Private companies don't have such explicit Asian quotas in place but the spirit of affirmative action is to handicap Asian men and white men in the interview process. Google does this by making the interview process easier for non majority groups. If you can't apply the handicap then it follows that the majority groups proportions will increase.

Of course, the counter argument is that implicit bias and so on will mean the opposite will occur. But empirically that isn't what has happened in universities, and so I have no reason to expect it to happen in private hiring either.

> suggests they're all silently colluding (by copying each others' quotas) to keep the Asian enrolment percentage at precisely the depressed X percent.

You need more evidence than a trend to claim that there is a conspiracy. And you can look the data & admissions guidelines publicly released in SFFA v. Harvard to see that there is no evidence that quotas exist.

> Google does this by making the interview process easier for non majority groups.

Uh, but it doesn't. Speaking as someone who has interviewed 30+ candidates at Google and been present at hiring committees, there is no "lowering of the bar" for people of certain races.

I wonder if there are socioeconomic indicators in writing style, too. I wouldn't be surprised if there were, even if we consider only text in which grammar and spelling are correct. (As a small example, there are ways to sound more or less like a mathematician, even when writing about topics unrelated to math.)

If we did decide to do hiring this way, you could be sure that there would be, even if there aren't any currently.

People would try choosing their words to make them sound like they're part of the "in" group.

Of course there are. They're easier to pick out in informal writing, of course, but even, "is capable of writing extensively in SWE without screwing up or revealing lower-class status through choice of word or idiom" is a pretty strong class marker. One can even infer gender with much better-than-even odds, though, again, it's easier the less-formal the writing. There exist computer programs that attempt that trick with fair success, too, though humans are plenty capable of it on their own.

As for your example of mathematicians, and to offer a sense of how easy it can be to accidentally and innocently give these things away, something as simple as preposition use can give away a mathematician (or at least someone who's had some exposure to mathematical writing and usage). Consider: "over", and "in", for example, and also seemingly-innocent usage like the transitive verb "having", in a revealing context.

See the commas after the closing quotation marks, in that second paragraph? If I'm American, and not obviously-deficient in the rest of my writing, that's a fairly reliable signal that I'm a programmer.

The more formal education someone has, the less their writing will reflect these origins. Spoken language has both an accent and a sociolect (dialect associated with a social class). I don't think there's a writing equivalent of accent that is associated with a social class.

Consider that people will do all of their writing in an educational or formal context. I.e. nobody grows up writing to their parents, siblings, and neighbourhood kids in a particular sociolect the way they do with speaking. Many people who speak with not just the accent but also the sociolect of a particular class group will nonetheless write in a way that only really reflects their education since that is the context where they have done most of their writing.

There are definitely stylistic tics that reflect certain ways of thinking. Someone who describes an idea as a "first order approximation" which is "correct to an order of magnitude" reveals that they have come from a particular way of thinking about the world. I'm not sure how may social class related style "tells" would make it into someone's written communication though. Especially task-related communication during a hiring process. Unlike accent which is always on, particular sociolect may only be deployed in a particular context.

It is often pretty easy to tell writing, even if grammatically correct, which comes from someone who is not highly educated and doesn't used writing as a main method of communication. They tend to ramble and their writing reads like a transcript. I used to follow the legal advice subreddits and often the people with the most complex and troubling problems would describe them in this wildly digressive way where right in the middle of a paragraph about something that X had done to Y we're suddenly treated to completely irrelevant details about Y's sister of X's uncle.

Again though, this only shows up in the writing of someone who hasn't had a lot of education. Someone from a humble background but a lot of practice writing may have an obvious accent while writing like any other educated professional. Unlike accents which are almost indelible.

I have wished for a system like this forever.

I have no qualms over a test. We all need to take tests.

Give all applicants a few written tests on the job they are hiring for.

The people who do well on the test are given the job on a probationary basis.

I might even exclude references, and schooling?

> The people who do well on the test are given the job on a probationary basis.

This sounds terrible. Not everyone can take tests well (even if they strongly understand the content), and few people can afford to accept a job that's probationary.

In the US at least, at-will employment means that all jobs are "probationary".

I've met plenty of average people / mediocre performers that probably test worse than their other performance, but I've never met an exceptional performer that was a poor tester. I have met some exceptional testers that were poor performers due to personality issues.

Tests have issues, but in general, the statement: "if you're a "bad tester" you're not an excellent performer" is pretty true.

The caveat being that, IMO, most of the time, institutions are using the wrong test.

Interestingly, Automattic (where I work) is completely text-based throughout the entire hiring process for many roles. The first interview is via Slack, the code test and trial stages are via pull requests, slack, and p2. It’s great because day-to-day work uses these async tools rather than calls. So it’s more accurate anyways.

Because (admittedly an extreme example) if I'm hiring for a public-facing position, I don't want to get someone with pink and blue hair, excessive piercings and poor hygiene even if they're smart and capable of performing the job function otherwise.

In at least some cases, presenting and conducting yourself as a "normal" person is important.

I thought this frame of mind was slowly disappearing in the millenial and later generations.

From my personal perspective, if I see a person like you have described at your front desk, I am much more likely to think you are a company that cares about people more than just the bottom line. Seriously my first impression of such a person is, "Oh, this company clearly hires based on skills instead of just looks." My expectations are typically that the person will be quite adept.

So, slight devils advocate, but there are some economics at play as well. If someone presents themselves as having a lot of options, and they've chosen the field you are interviewing them for, they're probably pretty good at it - because to have options, they must be. It signals a bargaining position.

The other piece is that few people understand what elite competition really is. You don't just act a certain way or have certain taste, collect some symbols, and then you win.

In olympic sports, the competitors are at super human levels to qualify, and yet the margins of victory and loss between them are tiny. Milliseconds, milimeters, grams. That difference of performance in the moment is the effect of a training trajectory of months and years that culminates in what is essentially a psychological advantage in the moment of performance. That's pretty close to what class is. It's the effect of a long trajectory.

People who train don't take big risks, they develop technique so they don't lose a season to an injury. Similarly, the advantage of class means you never have to bet what you couldn't afford to lose, which makes you a safer bet in a corporate interview situation.

It doesn't sound very equitable, but if you can't easily fake it, it may actually be an honest signal.

Is class stereotype bias accurate? I don't know. But if so then the optimal amount of actual bias may be nonzero. So does the study show the right amount of bias, too little, or too much?

It wouldn't be easy to measure the correlation between classes and employee performance, but not impossible either. Lacking such data it's hard to know how to interpret such results.

Of course any such bias should be deeply discounted by any actual personal data you can gather. Any group-based bias should be considered trivial in comparison. But this study is designed to only consider class signals.

Swap out race and class here and see how you feel about it.

This makes sense given that there have already been studies that show that this is already practiced when people call to search for housing. https://source.wustl.edu/2006/02/linguistic-profiling-the-so...

It's not that much of a stretch to say that if real estate agents or landlords do it, that hiring professionals also do it.

I do the same thing when I hear people speak. Certain American dialects will make me rate a person's ability, intelligence, or trustworthiness more or less highly. I am aware of it and do what I can to mitigate the effects, yet it does not stop these biases from triggering consciously and I'm sure unconsciously.

The only thing unusual about you in this regard, is that you are aware of it (which is good).

Also: weight, looks, gender, attire, name, skin color, mannerisms, confidence, positivity/enthusiasm/attitude/energy, and age are definitely biases that will get candidates hired or discarded.

It never clicked to me at the time, but when I was 14-18, I was offered interviews for office jobs nearly everyday where other workers were 25+ and had degrees. At 15, by attending a colloquia at IBM, I was offered a paid dark matter research assistant job, which didn't make any rational sense. I think it was physical attributes and speech bias rather than utility for a particular job.

There's nothing at all new here, it's well known.

See "My Fair Lady".

What else matters:

1. height

2. vocabulary

3. posture

4. clothes (see "Dress For Success")

5. age

6. attractiveness

7. health

"Just yew wight, 'enry 'iggins, just yew wight!"

P.S. Back around 1975, John Molloy wrote "Dress For Success" in which he noted that men wearing a tan trenchcoat got better jobs and pay than men wearing a black trenchcoat. Black trenchcoats quickly disappeared :-)

I still have my London Fog tan trenchcoat circa 1980.

Newsbreak: A Univ of YALE study/research confirms that you'll have a better chance to get hired if you talk like a YALE professor at your job interview. Unless the job interview is working the cash register at Sonic's.

>The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that people can accurately assess a stranger’s socioeconomic position — defined by their income, education, and occupation status

One takeaway here is that biases tend to be correct, which makes them that much harder to eliminate.

>"They discovered that speech adhering to subjective standards for English as well as digital standards — i.e. the voices used in tech products like the Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant — is associated with both actual and perceived higher social class."

I'd be interested in learning exactly what these "standards" are. I have a harder time understanding slurred speech and when people leave off the end consonant sounds, for instance, and will likely have a bias against that. (I'm reminded of this profound elocution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzHIs7j1CCs ) Good diction is just easier and more pleasing to listen to.

I think I've only experienced actual diction / speaking lessons in a theater class, but it's a useful skill in general.

“ The researchers based their findings on five separate studies. The first four examined the extent that people accurately perceive social class based on a few seconds of speech. They found that reciting seven random words is sufficient to allow people to discern the speaker’s social class with above-chance accuracy. They discovered that speech adhering to subjective standards for English as well as digital standards — i.e. the voices used in tech products like the Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant — is associated with both actual and perceived higher social class. The researchers also showed that pronunciation cues in an individual’s speech communicate their social status more accurately than the content of their speech.”

From the article.

Social class may very well be highly correlated with competency - even moreso than any other information a hiring manager may have access to - and therefore a good indicator for a hiring manager to use.

The article seems to be saying that the study shows that hiring managers are able to identify with not a lot of interaction candidates that are well-educated, gainfully employed and earn a high salary and unsurprisingly favors such candidates. This is not class bias - you can't just define class as that which employers care about and then accuse hiring managers of having a class bias when they understandably look for these traits.

The study is here, if anyone is interested: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/46/22998

Does it apply in tech space? I've seen so many hires barely speaking any English. Ultimately what gets the deal is how cheap one can sell themselves, then the managers don't care about the rest.

As someone with a varied background, this makes me curious to learn where my speech patterns place me.

Is there any frame of reference for what characterizes a “higher class” speech pattern compared to a “lower class” one?

So then what’s the easiest way to drop an unattractive accent quickly. As much as I would rather hack my way around the bigots it’s probably more realistic for me to blend with them.

I enjoy driving my old box Chevy down the back end church road to go fish'n at the crick. It's also fun when the roads get slippy in the winter.

Seriously, that's stuff I'd say.

Where is Professor Higgins when we need him?

    Henry Higgins: 

    Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter,
    Condemned by every syllable she utters
    By right she should be taken out and hung,
    For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.

    Eliza Doolittle: Aaoooww!

    Henry (imitating her): Aaoooww!
    Heavens! What a sound!
    This is what the British population,
    Calls an elementary education.

    Pickering: Oh Come sir, I think you picked a poor example.

    Henry: Did I?
    Hear them down in Soho Square,
    Dropping "h's" everywhere.
    Speaking English anyway they like.
    You sir, did you go to school?
   
    Man: Wadaya tike me for, a fool?

    Henry: No one taught him 'take' instead of 'tike!
    Hear a Yorkshireman, or worse, hear a Cornishman converse.
    I'd rather hear a choir singing flat.
    Chickens, cackling in a barn, just like this one (pointing to Eliza)

    Eliza: Gaaarn

    Henry (writing, imitating Eliza): Gaaarn..

    I ask you Sir, what sort of word is that? (to Pickering)

    It's "aoow" and "gaarn" that keep her in her place
    Not her wretched clothes and dirty face
    Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
    This verbal class distinction, by now,
    Should be antique. If you spoke as she does, sir,
    Instead of the way you do,
    Why, you might be selling flowers, too!

    Henry: An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
    The moment he talks he makes some other
    Englishman despise him.
    One common language I'm afraid we'll never get.
    Oh, why can't the English learn to
    set a good example to people whose
    English is painful to your ears?
    The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.
    There even are places where English completely disappears.
    Well, in America, they haven't used it for years!
    Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
    Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks have taught their Greek. 
    In France every Frenchman knows his language from "A" to "Zed"
    The French never care what they do, actually,
    as long as they pronounce it properly.
    Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.
    And Hebrews learn it backwards,
    which is absolutely frightening.
    Use proper English you're regarded as a freak.
    Why can't the English,
    Why can't the English learn to speak?

Such a great play / movie. I sometimes sing Hymn to Him just to get a nasty look out of my wife.

Or, in movie-musical form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg

Was just going to post about My Fair Lady. Just recently on Netflix and very striking to watch it vis a vis the culture conflict we're in yet again.

I take the lesson of the film to be that high culture can be truly graceful and enriching (ie for Eliza) but can become a hangup when take as its own end (thus Higgins' faults)

In certain industries, majority of employees come from a certain south-asian country, so "class" should be probably replaced by "caste".

I’d love to hear these audio recordings and the research subject’s responses. Curious what sounds triggered what bias.

where is the link to the actual study? is it one of these https://som.yale.edu/publications/faculty/michael.kraus-at-y...

> the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes.

What if applicants from higher social classes actually are better fits for the job?

What if they’re not?

> What if applicants from higher social classes actually are better fits for the job?

What a perfect example of social class bias. Change "from higher social class" to "from purple descent" or "from a Pastafarian background" and you have racial or religious bias.

No, because higher social class = access to better learning resources, e.g. tutors, and given everything else equal, better learning resources will lead to higher proficiency at a particular skill, on average. Therefore, if you do not know anything else about a group of candidates, hiring the person from the highest social class is the only rational choice. This study was doomed from the beginning.

You could rephrase your sentence and replace "higher social class" with race, gender, religion, or member of my favorite club and you'd have the most base -ism ever. This sentence is the root of almost all discrimination.

"Therefore, if you do not know anything else about a group of candidates"

Then the solution is to know more. Often our stereotypes (higher class) mask deep incompetencies or stop us from a deeper evaluation of the talent. You substitute accent, mannerisms and fashion for evaluating skills, aptitude, experience for the false assumption that in general will rule over the specifics of the candidate pool... which leads to horrible hiring practices, dystopian culture and worse.

Not necessarily. Some of the most brilliant and hardworking people I know have a background that is anything but "high social class".

They are like that because they have something to aspire to.

Meanwhile high social class people I've met are generally dependable, but that's about it. Perhaps because they never had an incentive to think outside the box.

Bias implies deviation from the correct outcome. If Pastafarians happen to be the best at astrophysics, are you saying we should intentionally keep better qualified Pastafarians out so other religious groups can be represented?

Today we learn that Aaron earned an iron urn.

Pygmalion, J.B. Shaw, 1913

It would be nice to get a transcript so we could identify what speech was declared to be lower socioeconomic speech.

It's important to be able to speak and write proper English for a job interview, even though most speak in an informal English most of the time.

The article specifies pretty clearly that the data used included, in part, things like voices from consumer speech recognition products. Furthermore, they found that speech patterns were associated with an actual higher social class.

This doesn't take into account things like accent, which does count. Many people native to the Boston area looking to get high-paying jobs (esp. in tech) work on breaking their Boston accents to sound higher class.

This is probably also true in the UK that has class lines often built around geography and therefore accents. In the US people with southern accents are viewed by many others as having a lower socioeconomic status. Things get more interesting when the history of the modern Boston accent comes from popular British speech trends hundreds of years ago and co-opted by the aristocrats of Boston, so what is an oftentimes low-caste Boston accent today was meant to be a high-caste accent around 1800.

The ridiculousness of it all is staggering

I like hearing different accents. I'm Southern and have a slight accent, but there are many different Southern accents. My father grew up with a thick Southern Alabama accent, but he took speech classes to get rid of it before I was born. I really like hearing the Boston accent too. Deep Louisiana accent is great. I like hearing both James Carville and the LSU coach talk.

On a side note, money can't buy class.

Practically all US regional accents, especially if thick, register as "lower" than Standard American English spoken with a generic or newscaster accent.

There is no Standard US English accent. Even people from the US Pacific Northwest speak with an accent.

Interestingly, there are AI apps to make your English accent [1] more mainstream, but the fact is that judging a person by their accent is xenophobic.

Anyways, I practice my pronunciation for a foreign language using speech recognition software/apps.

[1] Class Is in Session: AI App Schools on English Pronunciation: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/06/26/class-is-in-session...

The national news anchors de facto define the standard US accent.

Perhaps analogous to BBC and Received Pronunciation (RP).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English

Also called "Standard American English" (as noted in the article). It's what you mostly hear on the radio, in film actors when they're acting but not "doing an accent", among professional newscasters, et c. It's not been static through time—ever watch early talkies or listen to '30s radio serials?—but it exists.

There's an interesting documentary on American accents.

Do You Speak American?

https://www.pbs.org/speak/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_You_Speak_American%3F

What's interesting is I moved to Austin from CA. I'm used to Texans having accents because my maternal family is from north Texas. I haven't heard one drawl yet. It could be class or proliferation of CONUS emigration.

I know a woman who now works at Google who is from Boston. I had no idea until she told me, as she had no accent at all. She laughed and said "oh only poor idiots have the Boston accent, they actually have to practice to sound like that".

She had a pretty dim view of the Boston accent, and she was from Boston.

> as she had no accent at all

Everyone has an accent.

Erasing your regional accent probably goes a long way. I have a pretty strong Maine accent and it’s hard to suppress.

I don’t think I could fake a true bourgeoisie affect though, partly because I find it so repulsive. But also I think you have to have had grown adults as your personal servants as I a child to really nail that sort of bored/unconcerned affect. Where you truly consider certain people to be beneath you. They see you as an NPC. I’ve seen it, a handful of times.

I guess there’s a professional class in between too where the attitude is in between, you treat people with a friendliness that doesn’t seem superior, but also is guiltless and free of guile, lacking in any suspiciousness which speaks of a person who has never truly been hungry and not had food, or has considered breaking the law as their best option, or lived in an area where there was a lot of crime.

I don’t know why all that comes out in your speech but it does. Truly lower class people are reserved- they don’t volunteer information, because they don’t trust you. Upper class people don’t either, because they don’t have to care what you think, and they don’t consider you an equal. In between, people tend to be more talkative.

Sending out an HN bat signal here:

I can't find the article/post that this comment reminded me of but it was a semi-recent discussion/breakdown of class in the USA.

All I remember is that it called out Jeff Bezos as upper middle class.

Yes, I recall what you’re taking about as well. The article submitted was about a book in class in the US. I believe from the 80s. The classes were defined differently from their colloquial usages.

And I found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913

The line about Bezos is in the linked article.

That's the one. Thank you!

I guess I should also say that from a theoretical perspective your class is all about how you get your money: if it comes from work, then you’re working class, if it comes from ownership of property, then you’re ruling class/bourgeoisie.

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