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Comment by cmeacham98 | Hacker News Reader

This is super misleading/wrong.

First of all, that poll is about discrimination against Indian-Americans (presumably based on race or ethnicity), while TFA is about caste-based discrimination.

Secondly, the option below "major problem" in that poll is "minor problem", there is no in-between. In other words, 90% or Indian-Americans think it isn't a major problem, but over half do think there is a problem.

Most importantly, polling opinions about this is the worst method of determining if discrimination exists. A better method would look at objective measures like salary/job/hiring rate/layoff rate/etc of lower-caste Indians compared to Indians as a whole.

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> Most importantly, polling opinions about this is the worst method of determining if discrimination exists. A better method would look at objective measures like salary/job/hiring rate/layoff rate/etc of lower-caste Indians compared to Indians as a whole.

I don’t get this at all. If we treat a group as fairly as possible and on average they perform worse than other groups, is that evidence of discrimination? Is there a hypothesis that they need to perform equally as well.?

Do you think that lower-caste Indians are inherently inferior to upper-caste Indians at IT work? Because that is what you are proposing here.

The other, much more reasonable explanation, is that these differences are explained by the fact that lower-caste Indians are actually _not_ treated "as fairly as possible" by society.

At the individual level exceptions exist, but when you scale out to sufficiently large populations there aren't random demographics that magically perform worse than everyone else because they're all lazy bums.

I don't think inferiority is implied in that statement. Is there any reason why we expect different groups to perform equally? Can't some groups perform worse than others by random chance? Are there really no other factors besides discrimination that could cause this?

> Is there any reason why we expect different groups to perform equally?

Becuase I do not believe an Indian's caste affects their inherent ability to perform IT work. If you do believe that to be true, of course you should expect a difference even in a perfectly fair society.

> Can't some groups perform worse than others by random chance?

This is extremely unlikely once you get to higher sample sizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

> Are there really no other factors besides discrimination that could cause this?

Well of course there are. For example, if one group is more educated than the other they're going to perform better.

I made it sound as easy as "just see if the numbers don't match up", but in real life the statisticians that do these kinds of analysis account for other factors that could impact performance, so that if there is a difference it's purely "because" of the caste.

whats TFA? edit --> ... thank you all for the info ... i guess i learned today?

The "Fine" Article

The Fantastic Article

A poor substitute for "OP" - original poster.

Everyone’s being so diplomatic :) … it’s The Fxxxing Article…

ahhh, gotcha. that really went over my head

:) I believe it’s usually used in similar context as rtfm—-to request that the poster read the article being discussed before commenting.

Oh, I always thought it was The Featured Article

To add to what others have said, the original form was a rebuke: "RTFA", meaning "read the fucking article", directed at people who make ignorant comments without having read the article. I first came across it on Slashdot in the late 90s, but I imagine it may have its roots earlier than that, and possibly from somewhere else.

I think nowadays most people use "TFA" (no leading "R") in a fairly benign way, without the aggressive tone of the original.

I think it stems from RTFM, where M means "manual", going back decades.

Yes, I think that's very likely. Curious when the 'A' bit started being used, though.

The Friendly Article

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