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You can't use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it's annoying when you keep parroting it like you're so logical. Your

You can't use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it's annoying when you keep parroting it like you're so logical. Your model as inferred from this comment is that there's some way to quantify the current applicants, and that applicants below a certain value are always rejected. The remaining applicants are "above the bar" and could be hired. The current "above the bar" group is not 50/50, therefore changing it means accepting people below the bar. The problem is that none of your assumptions hold water. Technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin. Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance. You can't brush this off as social ignorance, this is simply ignorance of the facts.

jariel 7y ago
You did not actually refute any of his claims or demonstrate in any way that his argument 'does not hold water'. If you truly believe that 'interviewing is completely random' then I have some other, far deeper concerns you might want to address before we even remotely broach the subject of gender disparity. Moreover - you're totally missing the point: it's not sexist to merely make the argument that 50/50 hiring can lower the bar. It's just intellectual rhetoric. Maybe it's good maybe it's bad, but it's not inherently sexist. Ergo: if you don't agree with the PC, even if you make a reasonable argument (or even one that's very good) you're put out to pasture. This is just one example of PC insane enforcement, there are many. Which is why it's probably better to avoid such subjects because even intelligent people seem to have difficulty being tolerant, or even navigating the issues.
unscrupulous_sw 7y ago
Yes! This is the kind of response I would like to have from my coworkers. Attack my models, my assumptions, my arguments. Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards. Your presumption that I have some agenda and it wasn't social ignorance is a little offensive but whatever. "Ignorance of facts" should not be used as an insult but an opportunity to educate. The social fact that I am guilty of not knowing is that this a commonly parroted argument instead of the first logical model you come up with. I do think you represented the argument I had at the time very well. The difference is that I used competitive programming as my example for something more controlled (plenty of stats going all the way back to high school level and on the internet no one knows if you're a man/woman/dog). Your counterargument that it isn't predictive is still valid. Regardless, my current stance is that the question of "whether it lowers the bar or not" is not a relevant question to ask. The only point I was trying to make with my story is that you can evoke very passionate attacks just for talking about the topic.
- mike00632 7y ago
  >Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards. Why can't you criticize your own model, though? Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say? Why isn't it the case that the bar is already lowered for straight, white men or people who otherwise fit tech stereotypes? Or why does the value of diversity have to manifest in every individual? Maybe being in a diverse work force makes the cis, straight, white men and the company as a whole perform better. And even if everything I'm saying is just flowery rhetoric with no rational basis, it's still a respectful way to view and treat other people, and your model that suggests women are generally inferior to men takes a big shit all over the aspiration of living in an inclusive, harmonious society.
  - onecool 7y ago
    "Anybody can create a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break" -- it's easy to not see something wrong with what you're proposing for a variety of reason, this is why level-headed discussion is necessary and valuable. Nobody has the same background or viewpoint, and it's oftentimes harder to criticize others than it is to criticize yourself.
    - mike00632 7y ago
      But it's difficult. Nobody likes to confront people and tell them that their views on women's biology affecting their engineering skills are sexist. It also causes strife in the workplace. What I suggest is to just be polite to your coworkers and let HR worry about the hiring process. Don't say anything to your coworkers that could suggest they are somehow inferior or have "bad" genetic traits. This seems like basic human civility that gets tossed out the window when someone has a right-wing view about a minority or women.
  - unscrupulous_sw 7y ago
    > Why can't you criticize your own model, though? I do but lunchtime only lasted so long before it imploded > Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say? If you're making "embarrassingly obvious deductions" you might be pattern matching me into your favorite straw man and not really deducing anything at all. I never said women are inferior to men and it's not possible to logically deduce that from what I said. The only premise I assumed is that there are currently more men than women at the top (e.g., pipeline problem). You can even have the average women be way superior to men and still have the problem of hiring more women leading to lower standards, if the few top women are all happily employed elsewhere. I am not even saying this reflects reality, just that your logic sucks. Why does everything have to be a dog whistle to fit people into hate groups? Some assholes like me are merely technical correctness assholes.
ambien_ 7y ago
Regardless of the model, how can optimizing two metrics ever yield an improvement in the first compared to just optimizing it alone? Or is the idea that, because the old model sucks, we need to optimize this intermediary metric (diversity) in the interests of the ultimate goal of raising-the-bar?
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  It could work better because we are so bad at actually optimizing for the first variable that we would get better results by not optimizing for it.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. [citation needed] If this is just inferred based on that observation about judges and meal breaks, then keep in mind that this is just a factoid, and a one that fails the sniff test. C.f. http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges.
blub 7y ago
You don't need statistical models to figure out that if you're desperate to hire certain people and there's very few of them in your hiring pipeline, you'll turn a blind eye towards certain interview mistakes where you would normally disqualify candidates.
xyzzyz 7y ago
This is the standard model used in education, military, and industry. Millions of people go through processes designed according to this model every year, and probably tens of thousands of scientific papers have been written in context of this model. Your complaints are mostly utterly false (eg. “technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin“ is in contrary of the established consensus in literature, and so is “ Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance“). If this was indeed a shitty model, it would have been pointed out to grandparent when he brought it up, but since this model is commonly used and extremely useful, what he got instead was silencing and penalizing through anonymous back door channels.

jariel 7y ago

You did not actually refute any of his claims or demonstrate in any way that his argument 'does not hold water'. If you truly believe that 'interviewing is completely random' then I have some other, far deeper concerns you might want to address before we even remotely broach the subject of gender disparity. Moreover - you're totally missing the point: it's not sexist to merely make the argument that 50/50 hiring can lower the bar. It's just intellectual rhetoric. Maybe it's good maybe it's bad, but it's not inherently sexist. Ergo: if you don't agree with the PC, even if you make a reasonable argument (or even one that's very good) you're put out to pasture. This is just one example of PC insane enforcement, there are many. Which is why it's probably better to avoid such subjects because even intelligent people seem to have difficulty being tolerant, or even navigating the issues.

unscrupulous_sw 7y ago

Yes! This is the kind of response I would like to have from my coworkers. Attack my models, my assumptions, my arguments. Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards. Your presumption that I have some agenda and it wasn't social ignorance is a little offensive but whatever. "Ignorance of facts" should not be used as an insult but an opportunity to educate. The social fact that I am guilty of not knowing is that this a commonly parroted argument instead of the first logical model you come up with. I do think you represented the argument I had at the time very well. The difference is that I used competitive programming as my example for something more controlled (plenty of stats going all the way back to high school level and on the internet no one knows if you're a man/woman/dog). Your counterargument that it isn't predictive is still valid. Regardless, my current stance is that the question of "whether it lowers the bar or not" is not a relevant question to ask. The only point I was trying to make with my story is that you can evoke very passionate attacks just for talking about the topic.

mike00632 7y ago
>Don't just silently disagree and then label me a sexist afterwards. Why can't you criticize your own model, though? Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say? Why isn't it the case that the bar is already lowered for straight, white men or people who otherwise fit tech stereotypes? Or why does the value of diversity have to manifest in every individual? Maybe being in a diverse work force makes the cis, straight, white men and the company as a whole perform better. And even if everything I'm saying is just flowery rhetoric with no rational basis, it's still a respectful way to view and treat other people, and your model that suggests women are generally inferior to men takes a big shit all over the aspiration of living in an inclusive, harmonious society.
- onecool 7y ago
  "Anybody can create a cryptosystem that they themselves cannot break" -- it's easy to not see something wrong with what you're proposing for a variety of reason, this is why level-headed discussion is necessary and valuable. Nobody has the same background or viewpoint, and it's oftentimes harder to criticize others than it is to criticize yourself.
  - mike00632 7y ago
    But it's difficult. Nobody likes to confront people and tell them that their views on women's biology affecting their engineering skills are sexist. It also causes strife in the workplace. What I suggest is to just be polite to your coworkers and let HR worry about the hiring process. Don't say anything to your coworkers that could suggest they are somehow inferior or have "bad" genetic traits. This seems like basic human civility that gets tossed out the window when someone has a right-wing view about a minority or women.
- unscrupulous_sw 7y ago
  > Why can't you criticize your own model, though? I do but lunchtime only lasted so long before it imploded > Your assertion that hiring more women will lower standards is premised on a belief that men are inherently better. Isn't that embarrassingly obvious to deduce from what you say? If you're making "embarrassingly obvious deductions" you might be pattern matching me into your favorite straw man and not really deducing anything at all. I never said women are inferior to men and it's not possible to logically deduce that from what I said. The only premise I assumed is that there are currently more men than women at the top (e.g., pipeline problem). You can even have the average women be way superior to men and still have the problem of hiring more women leading to lower standards, if the few top women are all happily employed elsewhere. I am not even saying this reflects reality, just that your logic sucks. Why does everything have to be a dog whistle to fit people into hate groups? Some assholes like me are merely technical correctness assholes.

ambien_ 7y ago

Regardless of the model, how can optimizing two metrics ever yield an improvement in the first compared to just optimizing it alone? Or is the idea that, because the old model sucks, we need to optimize this intermediary metric (diversity) in the interests of the ultimate goal of raising-the-bar?

lazyasciiart 7y ago
It could work better because we are so bad at actually optimizing for the first variable that we would get better results by not optimizing for it.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. [citation needed] If this is just inferred based on that observation about judges and meal breaks, then keep in mind that this is just a factoid, and a one that fails the sniff test. C.f. http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges.

blub 7y ago

You don't need statistical models to figure out that if you're desperate to hire certain people and there's very few of them in your hiring pipeline, you'll turn a blind eye towards certain interview mistakes where you would normally disqualify candidates.

xyzzyz 7y ago

This is the standard model used in education, military, and industry. Millions of people go through processes designed according to this model every year, and probably tens of thousands of scientific papers have been written in context of this model. Your complaints are mostly utterly false (eg. “technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin“ is in contrary of the established consensus in literature, and so is “ Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance“). If this was indeed a shitty model, it would have been pointed out to grandparent when he brought it up, but since this model is commonly used and extremely useful, what he got instead was silencing and penalizing through anonymous back door channels.