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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. I read the article:

> Since the 80% test does not involve probability distributions to determine whether the disparity is a “beyond chance” occurrence, it is usually not regarded as a definitive test for adverse impact. Instead, other statistically significance tests, such as the standard deviation analysis, may be used for this purpose.

But then my question recurs: isn’t this a ridiculous way to measure discrimination? It’s assuming that the only thing that differs between the different ethnic applicant pools is their ethnicity, which is essentially never going to be true.

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It's not used to measure discrimination. It's used to identify outcomes that appear to be potentially discriminatory. You have to do the legwork afterwards.

Like. If I am evaluating a developer on lines of code written, I am a bad manager. But if an engineer has 40% fewer lines of code than the team median, it's absolutely ok for me to go, "Interesting. What's the story there? Are they slower or is there some other factor?"

Same idea -- this is purely a fast, first pass metric that can quickly assess if something warrants a deeper evaluation.

You are correct, but especially in current day that analogy is quite bad.

I expect Median LoC might be very high with the average developer using AI these days... but the dev who is making atomic changes that are fixing the AI output is probably tiny LoC but way more important

Right, but what I meant was: the other tests that the article says are used for definitively proving discrimination are equally bad, and subject to the same objection. Just substituting “one standard deviation“ or “statistical significance“for “80%“ doesn’t fix the fundamental problem here, which is that there are unmeasured confounders.

How would you like me to define "starting point" in a way that you believe you'll be able to understand?

If you are trying to say "more data needed, headline misleading" you should say that instead of misrepresenting the 4/5ths rule. Also the word "can" implies uncertainty of conclusion. This isn't ridiculous, the authors point out that this is the first large scale study of this topic. Nothing has been "proven" here, it's showing that this warrants further investigation and attention.

Do you read many academic papers, because you seem to be having a rough go here.

You could be an Iranian sponsored bot. I'm not saying you are. You could be so don't get mad at me for publishing that statement. Because if I say "can," then I don't need to be accountable for any misinformation.

I could be! And in science when you posit a hypothesis you then back it up with data points of statistical significance.

The authors of this study have done that here. To borrow from your example, if you saw a statistically significant amount of my posts highlighting the merits of the Iranian government in a ways that run counter to the general global consensus of their actions, you would then have something that other people might agree was worth looking into. A hypothesis is not “misinformation”.

This article has not claimed to have proven anything other than outcomes in a process. I don’t understand why this is so upsetting to you.

I don't know who you think you're talking to about being upset, but this was exactly the halfwitted "u maaaad" response I would expect from a bot.

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