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Comment by meken | Hacker News Reader

I’m an American and I just had the thought - if I was working in Japan at a Japanese company and I had the opportunity to hire, would I have a bias to hire other Americans?

Honestly probably, since I understand them the best.

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I’d disagree. I’m not American or British but and in my experience Americans or British are the least ethnically biased people on the planet. Any other group, I could believe that they are biased but not Americans, or British. Something in their particular culture right now.

It isn’t just a lack of ethnic bias, it’s a belief in capitalism or professionalism or “enlightened self-interest”: hire the best person for the job, and everyone will be better off.

You’re responding to an American who says he’d be biased towards Americans and telling him he’s wrong.

Maybe Americans are the least biased (though being an American I am not so sure) but that doesn’t mean we aren’t biased (even if sometimes for legitimate reasons like ease of communication).

Or perhaps said American genuinely is unaware of how much more biased other ethnic groups are in their own homelands.

Yes exactly, the American bias level right now is probably as low as it can get humanly.

Now this I disagree with. I expect that you are interacting with a specific subset of Americans. A lot of Americans are deeply racist and xenophobic and I believe that the average could definitely get lower.

I guess I work in tech. Maybe it’s different elsewhere but even there I think it’s probably lower than most of the world among similar classes of society.

So I actually agree with you here. America has a deep, ugly pit of unconstrained racism, and a less deep pit of quiet racism that permeates a lot of society. But so do many (and very possibly most) other nations, where the level of racism is often even worse, just with different targets than Americans. I think in a way America is much more aware of our tendencies than other nations.

Okay, but the conversation was:

Meken: “I would be biased”

Sashank: “I disagree”

Others being more biased doesn’t make Americans unbiased.

Yes that's why country clubs and the Greek system never caught on...

And this is why it's in the interest of Japanese people in Japan not to make it easy for you to have an opportunity to hire people for jobs in Japan.

And that seems suboptimal for a Japanese company?

I've actually been in such a situation and I didn't. Or if I did have such a bias it must've been rather small as none of the applicants benefited from it.

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