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Jiro comments on Saying "Everyone Is Biased" May Create Bias - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: JQuinton 05 May 2015 03:31PM

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Comment author: Jiro 08 May 2015 03:40:43PM *  2 points [-]

I don't think it would be right even when applied to individuals. If someone tells you "X is an expert nuclear engineer" and you know that X is a woman, the prior for nuclear engineers being male no longer applies, because you can observe that X is a woman with 100% certainty. But in the resume evaluation example, what the resume evaluator wants to discover (how good a worker the applicant is) is not something that he can observe. It is true, of course, that the more detailed facts on the resume also should affect the evaluator's result, but that just means that both the applicant's race/sex and the other facts should affect the result. Even if the sex/race has a small positive correlation with being a good worker and the other facts have a larger positive correlation, the evaluator is better off using both race and the other facts rather than using the other facts alone.