4 ms·
The article defines bias as follows: > Want to know if the selection process was biased against some type of applicant? Check whether they outperform the othe
by eoi 11y ago
The article defines bias as follows:
> Want to know if the selection process was biased against some type of applicant? Check whether they outperform the others. This is not just a heuristic for detecting bias. It's what bias means.
Under that definition, you have been biased against A. [edit: on reflection I see this as a weakness of his definition. I missed that your selection process does in fact select the best candidates.]
- bjwbell 11y agoYes, but that's not the common usage of the word. Or how most people understand it. With that usage you could say ivy league schools are NOT biased against Asians since Asian graduates aren't more successful than non-Asian ones, except nobody does.
- 1457389 11y agoHypothetical logic is flawed anyway. Higher ability Asian graduates could be less / only equally successful in the workplace due to pervasive external bias too. A lot of this is exacerbated by the fact that "soft skills" are more important for high status careers, and your "soft skills" are pretty much defined by tribal associations. It's the core of how we interact socially, and it causes problems that are really only fixed by alleviating scarcity.
- decisiveness 11y agoUnless you know what exactly caused A to outperform others, you won't really know if the process is biased or what made it biased. When asserting biases, you must first distinguish them from random noise. Using pg's logic, every selection process that isn't perfect is biased.
- azakai 11y ago>> This is not just a heuristic for detecting bias. It's what bias means. > Under that definition That's not a definition. It's a claim about what the term "bias" means.