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Quirinus_Quirrell comments on Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments - Less Wrong
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That doesn't close the loophole, it adds a constraint. And it's only significant for those who both hire enough people to be vulnerable to statistical analysis of their hiring practices, and receive too many bad applicants from protected classes. If it is a significant constraint, you want to find that out from the data, not from guesswork, and apply the minimum legally acceptable correction factor.
Besides, it's not like muggles are a protected class. And if they were? Just keep them from applying in the first place, by building your office somewhere they can't get to. There aren't any legal restrictions on that.
You joke, but the world [1] really is choking with inefficient, kludgey workarounds for the legal prohibition of effective employment screening. For example, the entire higher education market has become, basically, a case of employers passing off tests to universities that they can't legally administer themselves. You're a terrorist if you give an IQ test to applicants, but not if you require a completely irrelevant college degree that requires taking the SAT (or the military's ASVAB or whatever the call it now).
It feels so good to ban discrimination, as long as you don't have to directly face the tradeoff you're making.
[1] Per MattherW's correction, this should read "Western developed economies" instead of "the world" -- though I'm sure the phenomenon I've described is more general the form it takes in the West.
You say 'the world', but it seems to me you're talking about a region which is a little smaller.
I'm not sure the correction is that relevant. The US and the EU together make up about 40% of global GDP (PPP).
Several minor economies with nearly identical conditions and restrictions such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Norway, Switzerland ... add up to another 3% or so.Most states in Latin America have similar legal prohibitions as well, they are not as well enforced, but avoiding them still imposes costs. This is mentioning nothing of Japan or other developed East Asian economies (though to be fair losses are probably much smaller than the developed West and perhaps even Latin America).
The other half of the world's has a massive opportunity cost due to the mentioned half's described inefficiency. Converting this loss into number of lives or quality of life is a depressing exercise.
Fortunately that is only a problem if you care about humans.
Well, I'm in the UK, and there's no law against using IQ-style tests for job applicants here. Is that really the case in the US? (I assume the "You're a terrorist" bit was hyperbole.)
Employers here still often ask for apparently-irrelevant degrees. But admission to university here isn't noticeably based on 'generic' tests like the SAT; it's mostly done on the grades from subject-specific exams. So I doubt employers are treating the degrees as a proxy for SAT-style testing.
Correction accepted.
Yes, it does close the loophole. You say conceal the cause (intent to discriminate) and you can get away with as much effect (disproportionate exclusion) as you want. Except the law already specifies that the effect is punishable as well as the cause.
So now the best you can do, assuming the populations are equally competent and suited for the job, is 20% discrimination.
And of course, in the real world, populations usually differ in their suitability for the job. Blacks tend not to have as many CS degrees as whites, for example. So if you are an employer of CS degrees, you may not be able to get away with any discrimination before you have breached the 20% limit, and may need to discriminate against the non-blacks in order to be compliant.
I would suspect that if the US Muggle legal system had anything to say about it, they would be. If magical-ness is conferred by genes, then it's violating either the general racial guideline or it's violating recent laws (signed by GWB, IIRC) forbidding employer discrimination based on genetics (in the context of genome sequencing, true, but probably general). If it's not conferred by genes, then there may be a general cultural basis on which to sue (Muggles as disabled because they lack an ability necessary for basic functioning in Wizarding society, perhaps).
You can put degree requirements on the job advertisement, which should act as a filter on applications, something that can't be caught by the 80% rule.
(Of course, universities tend to use racial criteria for admission in the US, something which, ironically, can be an incentive for companies to discriminate based on race even amongst applicants with CS degrees.)
The 80% rule is only part of it. Again, racist requirements is an obvious loophole you should expect to have been addressed; you can only get away with a little covert discrimination if any.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact#Unintentional_discrimination :
If you add unnecessary requirements as a stealth filter, how do you show the requirements are job-related?
I thought we were talking about how to use necessary requirements without risking a suit, not how to conceal racial preferences by using cleverly chosen proxy requirements. But it looks like you can't use job application degree requirements without showing a business need either.
topynate:
The relevant landmark case in U.S. law is the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. The court ruled that not just testing of prospective employees, but also academic degree requirements that have disparate impact across protected groups are illegal unless they are "demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance."
Now of course, "a reasonable measure of job performance" is a vague criterion, which depends on controversial facts as well as subjective opinion. To take only the most notable example, these people would probably say that IQ tests are a reasonable measure of performance for a great variety of jobs, but the present legal precedent disagrees. This situation has given rise to endless reams of of case law and a legal minefield that takes experts to navigate.
At the end, as might be expected, what sorts of tests and academic requirements are permitted to different institutions in practice depends on arbitrary custom and the public perception of their status. The de facto rules are only partly codified formally. Thus, to take again the most notable example, the army and the universities are allowed to use what are IQ tests in all but name, which is an absolute taboo for almost any other institution.
I wasn't. I was talking about how the obvious loopholes are already closed or have been heavily restricted (even at the cost of false positives), and hence how Quirrel's comments are naive and uninformed.
Yes, that doesn't surprise me in the least.
You really are new here, aren't you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990#Title_III_-_Public_Accommodations_.28and_Commercial_Facilities.29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning
In short, there most certainly ARE legal restrictions on building your office somewhere deliberately selected for it's inaccessibility to those with a congenital inability to e.g. teleport, and a lack of teleportation-specific case law would not work in your favor, given the judge's access to statements you've already made.
The Americans with Disabilities Act limits what you can build (every building needs ramps and elevators), not where you can build it. Zoning laws are blacklist-based, not whitelist-based, so extradimensional spaces are fine. More commonly, you can easily find office space in locations that poor people can't afford to live near. And in the unlikely event that race or national origin is the key factor, you get to choose which country or city's demographics you want.
This is the identity under which I speak freely and teach defense against the dark arts. This is not the identity under which I buy office buildings and hire minions. If it was, I wouldn't be talking about hiring strategies.
Up voted for having the sense to employ a blindingly obvious strategy that somehow consistently fails to become common sense.
But that they could, in principle, walk to and from.
My google-fu is not strong enough to find the legal doctrine, but in the US at least, you can be sued for ~implicit discrimination, i.e. if the newspaper you advertise in has a reader population that does not refelect the general population, you're discriminating against the under represented population.
...I thought this was a joke. Now... not so sure.
Disparate Impact