Comment by ShredKazoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ShredKazoo | Hacker News Reader

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>I don't see how you've rebutted the study at all

You're correct, I haven't rebutted the study. Again, I explained that it doesn't make the point he wants it to make. See first 2 paragraphs here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214917

>using voice changers on interview calls (come on)

What I describe has already been done for gender: https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...

And if researchers can change the name on an applicant's resume to do a study, why can't HR departments do the same thing?

"Come on" is not a good faith counterargument.

>But both of those interventions just mitigate the racism, they don't directly reduce it.

I'm not sure that is true. Imagine someone had the experience of interviewing a Black developer using a voice changer, giving them a thumbs up, meeting them in person for the first time, and learning that they were Black -- counter to the stereotype they held. You don't think that experience could be a powerful demonstration of a person's racial bias which could cause them to rethink some stuff?

Past that, I don't see why the distinction between mitigating and reducing is so important. Racism is bad because it causes bad effects. (CF argument earlier in the thread: "If another race with a far larger population was 50% more likely to get job callbacks than you were, I guarantee you'd agree.") If the easiest way to reduce the bad effects doesn't involve reducing racism, we should do it anyway. The point is to help people, not ideologically purify people.

>Mewanwhile, you've just cited a totally unrelated (and widely dunked-upon) NYT op-ed as evidence for your position

I cited it as evidence for the position that some extremists want to abolish the police. It's right there in the title of the op-ed. I don't see what dunking has to do with it.

Here's a woman with almost half a million Twitter followers saying the same thing in 2022: https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1547223384643231744 She tweets something like this every few months. Here's one of her tweets where she explains what she means in more detail: https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1267138648174137345

Interviewing.io ran an experiment with voice changes, in part for the publicity value (that's not a criticism). Can you cite a tech company with more than 20 employees that uses voice changers in interviews?

There's a bunch of other problems with what you're saying here (for instance, the idea that you can correct for ethnicity with a voice changer), but they're not interesting compared to this question.

>Can you cite a tech company with more than 20 employees that uses voice changers in interviews?

No, I cannot. It seems that despite the big conversation about diversity in tech, people aren't very interested in practical solutions to reducing discrimination.

It comes down to the point I made about helping people vs ideological purification. Many people prefer the latter. This is the sort of left-wing extremism I referred to earlier.

To be honest, I think the main reason companies don't use voice changers is if they do, the ideological purifier types will go after them. Just in this thread you can see how upset you and DrewADesign got, after I suggested the idea.

>the idea that you can correct for ethnicity with a voice changer

If it can work for gender, why can't it work for race?

> If it can work for gender, why can't it work for race?

Because pitch/tone is different than ethnolect, and voice changers can obscure differences of the first but not the second.

Women and men also use language differently. I doubt this is a big issue in practice -- you could mask the ethnolect using AI.

> Women and men also use language differently

Not as significantly.

> I doubt this is a big issue in practice

It absolutely is.

> you could mask the ethnolect using AI.

That’s not just a “voice changer”, and if you are going beyond pronunciation to alter grammar and vocabulary that is ethnically identifying, with even modern AI, you have a non-negligible chance of occasionally whiffing and radically altering semantics.

Also worth pointing out that this ethno-masking AI is a service that, so far as I know, does not currently exist. Which makes citing it a particularly weak response to the studies that show candidates with identifiably Black ethnicity do poorly compared to white-coded candidates with identical backgrounds.

There does seem to be a bit of conflating “this is an idea which might have potential and be worth investment in researching and developing” with “this is an alternative which actually exists, and if there was any concern people would just use it”.

I only meant to make the first claim, FWIW.

The idea was suggested in response to someone who implied I favored "deliberately avoiding intervention". I mentioned the idea to clarify my position, and give an example of the sort of intervention I'd be in favor of.

If someone turns it into a product, they deserve mega kudos as far as I'm concerned.

Lets not forget that you changed the framing on this discussion, from (paraphrased) "there is evidence that race-based preferences are widespread in hiring, suggesting that we should take seriously the idea of race-specific privileges and disadvantages among candidates", to your preferred discussion of "is it possible to engineer a system that would prevent hiring managers from knowing the race of applicants".

How "upset" I got?

Here's a user telling me I'm "desperate to assuage and protect racist beliefs" because (a) I said we should avoid methods that backfire, and (b) I suggested a practical idea for reduction of racial discrimination in hiring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34226817

What does that have to do with the question I just asked you? Can you just answer it directly?

You're confusing me with the poster you're responding to.

The best way to put out a fire is to ensure that it doesn't start in the first place.

Racism stems from racist beliefs, and your approach to putting out spot fires ignores the raging wildfire that's spitting them out. Confronting the source of racist behavior, racist beliefs, is confronting the root cause of discrimination.

In the 90s and 00s, much of the anti-racism education consisted of the same things you'd cry "woke" about, but were instead called "politically correct". The education confronted racist beliefs, and engaged the how and why those beliefs were wrong, and gave students and intuition about why those beliefs were wrong when they encounter them in their lives.

CRT, for example, is nothing new. Anti-racism education in the 90s and 00s was direct implementations of the CRT school of thought that existed in the decades prior. At the time, the right-wing was losing their minds over how "PC" it was to say "African American", or to teach that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and not the fig leaf of "states' rights", or that they shouldn't say the n-word but black people can.

"Woke" is the new "PC", and the CRT that gets derided as "woke" is the same CRT that was derided as "PC" in the past, and it is the same CRT that influenced anti-racism education during your halcyon days of the 90s and 00s. That same anti-racism education addressed those very same racist beliefs you're desperate to assuage and protect.

Dancing around the problem and pretending racism and racist beliefs don't exist, because pointing that out makes some people uncomfortable, is something we've tried for decades, and it doesn't work, as MLK has pointed out:

> First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."

Right-wing resistance to the results of liberal democracy is as old as time, and not anything new that suddenly appeared in 2015 like you seem to beleive. All of the rhetoric you hear now is the same rhetoric espoused by the right in the decades prior. The right has spent decades getting triggered over direct action and society acknowledging racism, and "woke" is just what they're calling it instead of "PC".

These beliefs existed before 2015, but they were mostly only expressed in "good company" between like-minded individuals, because blatant racism became a social faux pas. They were allowed to fester and go unaddressed because addressing them made people uncomfortable. But then Trump comes in and welcomes the far right renaissance that was happening around the world, a world-wide renaissance that had nothing to do with the NY Times posting articles that upset you, to the US. Trump showed them that no, they don't have to speak about those beliefs in hushed tones, you can wear bigotry on your sleeve and millions of people will celebrate it. Since you seem to take their rhetoric seriously, you can find plenty of far right leaders and ideologues saying just that, that Trump is "their guy" and that he opened the door to mainstream their far right ideas and rhetoric.

I object to "anti-racist" advocacy which has been shown to be actively counterproductive. It's not a firefighting method if it makes the fire worse.

I don't claim we should never confront racism. I claim we should do it in an evidence-based way.

I went through the public education system in the 90s and 00s, in California's Bay Area of all places, and the discussion around race was very different than the discussion today. The idea that we should treat people the same regardless of race has switched from being a liberal position to being a conservative position. It seems to me that whatever was being done in the 90s and 00s "worked" in a way that what we're doing today does not. Probably because what we're doing today is very different, and is the product of an ideological conversation on social media rather than a conversation informed by data or reasoned discussion.

>But then Trump comes in and welcomes the far right renaissance that was happening around the world, a world-wide renaissance that had nothing to do with the NY Times posting articles that upset you, to the US.

Generally speaking the rest of the world takes their cultural cues from the US much more than the US takes their cultural cues from the rest of the world. Hollywood movies are viewed globally. The entire world follows news from the United States closely. Much of the rest of the world uses American social media websites. Etc.

It's a common observation that the current rise of wokism started in the US and then spread elsewhere in the world, which fits the general pattern. So the overall hypothesis that NY Times left-wing extremism is the root cause of the current worldwide far-right renaissance is pretty plausible to me. As you said -- treat the root cause.

>Since you seem to take their rhetoric seriously, you can find plenty of far right leaders and ideologues saying just that, that Trump is "their guy" and that he opened the door to mainstream their far right ideas and rhetoric.

I don't claim otherwise.

You were just confronted with evidence, and invented an AI ethnic voice masker on the spot to dismiss it. Your evidence, meanwhile, is an NYT op-ed about police abolition. I don't necessarily endorse anything this person wrote (I didn't read it that carefully), but in this thread you've been deploying a number of really weak arguments.

I don't think you've been reading my comments very carefully either -- it seems like you are generally missing the structure of my reasoning, and reinterpreting it as a sort of collage of bits of pieces of what I'm saying. (I'm going to stop responding to you in this thread, because I have a feeling neither of us is getting much out of this discussion -- but if you're interested in understanding my position better, I encourage you to read what I've already written more carefully. Please don't attribute positions to me that I don't hold, and keep in mind that I'm a human who makes mistakes.)

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