Usually an accident, or unconscious. In this case, I suspect intentional. It's pretty common for someone with good intentions to institute a policy for decidin

Usually an accident, or unconscious. In this case, I suspect intentional. It's pretty common for someone with good intentions to institute a policy for deciding what they thought was previously disorganized and substandard. Instead, all they've done is create a way for powerful people to hide their choices behind the "objective" policy. The trick is that the folks in power control the inputs, even if they don't control the algorithm. As a management consultant, the client boss didn't tell me what to say, but they decided who I could talk to. Note the current trend in machine learning. Imagine if Harvard had fed its past admissions into an artificial neural network! Maybe they could have hid behind that back box.