Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy

Lexico

I remember seeing a talk of the concept of privilege show up in the discussion thread on contrarian views.

Some discussion got started from "Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real."

This is an article that presents some of those ideas in a way that might be approachable for LW.

http://curt-rice.com/quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy/

One of the ideas I take out of this is that these issues can be examined as the result of unconscious cognitive bias. IE sexism isn't the result of any conscious thought, but can be the result as a failure mode where we don't rationality correctly in these social situations.

Of course a broad view of these issues exist, and many people have different ways of looking at these issues, but I think it would be good to focus on the case presented in this article rather than your other associations.

I remember seeing a talk of the concept of privilege show up in the discussion thread on contrarian views.

Some discussion got started from "Feminism is a good thing. Privilege is real."

This is an article that presents some of those ideas in a way that might be approachable for LW.

http://curt-rice.com/quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy/

I wasn't merely arguing that if there were such a large difference everyone would admit it. I was also arguing that if there were such a large difference we'd all know it. Obviously this argument will be more persuasive to people who (like me) think it's clear from observation that there isn't so huge a difference between men and women, than to people who don't.

Just by way of reminder: we'd be looking for a difference large enough that, knowing

what degree a person got from what institution
what their grade point average was
what their GRE scores are
what was written about them by a faculty member writing a letter of recommendation
what they wrote themselves in an application letter

the difference between male and female suffices to make a difference to their estimated competence of 0.7 points on a 5-point scale. That would have to be either a really really enormous difference between men and women, or a really weird difference -- weird in that whatever it is somehow manages to make a big difference in competence without having any effect on academic performance, test scores, or reported faculty opinions. Which presumably would require it to be quite narrow in scope but, again, really really enormous in size.

And it seems about as obvious to me that there isn't such a difference as that (say) there isn't a difference of 20cm in typical heights between men and women. Not just because if there were then it would be widely admitted (maybe it would, maybe not) but because it would be obvious.

Now, of course I could be wrong. There could be such an enormous difference and I could be somehow blind to it for some weird cultural-political reason or something. But is it really too much to suggest that when

the exact same job application gets radically different evaluations depending on whether the candidate's name is "John" or "Jennifer"

it's reasonable to take that as strong evidence for bias in favour of men over women that isn't simply a proportionate response to actual differences in competence? I mean, it's just Bayes' theorem. How likely is that outcome if people do have such bias? How likely is it if they don't? (Not "is it possible if they don't?". The answer to that sort of question is almost always yes, regardless of what's true.)

I wasn't merely arguing that if there were such a large difference everyone would admit it. I was also arguing that if there were such a large difference we'd all know it.

It's not entirely clear that these are two different things. Admitting a highly politically incorrect opinion publicly and admitting it to oneself or one's friends aren't really completely separate. People tend to believe what they profess, and what they hear others profess.

That would have to be either a really really enormous difference between men and women, or a really weird diffe

... (read more)

-1ChristianKl12y

By the same logic you could say that someone who hires people with high SRT scores engages in SRT bias. Someone who hires based on SRT scores could simply reasonably believe that people with high SRT scores are more competent. Google's HR department has a variety of factors on which it judges candidates. A few years afterwards they reevaluate their hiring decisions. They run a regression analysis and see which factors predict job performance at Google. They learn from that analysis and switch their hiring decision to hiring people which score highly on the factors that the regression analysis found predictive. That's how making rational hiring decisions looks like. In the process they found that college marks aren't very relevant for predicting job performance. Being good at Fermi estimates unfortunately isn't as well, so those LW people who train Fermi estimates don't get benefits anymore when they want to get a job at Google. Given current laws Google is not allowed to put values such as gender into the mix they use to make hiring decisions. That means that Google can't make the hiring decisions that maximize predicted job performance. The politics of the issue also make it pretty bad PR for them to publish results about the effects of a model that includes gender if the correct value in the regression analysis would mean worse chances for woman getting a job. It's good PR for them if the correct value would mean to favor woman. No big company that does regression analysis on job performance published data that favoring in gender would mean hiring more woman. Factoring in gender into a regression analysis would mean that any bias against woman in subjective competence evaluations in interviews would be canceled by that factor. Just imagine if a big company would find that by putting gender into their regression analysis they would hiring more women and get better average job performance as a result. Don't you think those companies would lobby Washington to al

2ChristianKl12y

No. If the argument is more clear because you think that it supports the outcome that you prefer you are engaging in motivated cognition. It's an error in reasoning.

-4

Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy

-4

-4

-4

Link: quotas-microaggression-and-meritocracy

-4

-4