4 ms·

Assume you apply for college at an Ivy League. Or a SWE job. Or a faculty position. Or for SMB grants. At some point you'll meet the hiring manager / committee

Assume you apply for college at an Ivy League. Or a SWE job. Or a faculty position. Or for SMB grants. At some point you'll meet the hiring manager / committee face2face. The animus against your skin color will kick in regardless of the box you filled on the application.

dissent 5y ago
Small tangent, but if I type "animus" into Google the first hit is a photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I can't decide if that's a coincidence or not.
- angelzen 5y ago
  Probably your personalization. I see no such image on a fresh incognito session.
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
If this is how it works, it is truly a horrible discrimination. I thought that you check a box on an application and it gives you bonus points. If it is an individual that assesses your racial status then it is bad. People who have ancestors with a specific race but do not show the proper external signs are doomed. This is so fucked up that I cannot imagine how it can work if someone decides you are "enough Asian" to not think you are using the system. We are talking in France to anonimize as much as possible the applications to avoid bias, and have someone who may be racist (or in love with your race) to decide on your fate. This is because we have the opposite problem: if your origins show up too early you may be discriminated more easily.
- angelzen 5y ago
  I'm not making any claims of which race gets penalized, only remarking that it's difficult to effectively lie about race. If we were to listen carefully to refugees from Lebanon / Syria civil wars, we may learn that the trajectory of an identitarian system is an acerbically contested tug of war between identity groups ever spiralling into violence. At the end of WW1 the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke down along ethnic identity lines for a reason.
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    Race appartenance in the US is self-declarative. You are what you say you are, there is no "measurement of race match".
    - angelzen 5y ago
      Seriously speaking, the point of using identity markers as admission criterion not to be fair or coherent. Good luck telling the hiring manager that race is self-declarative after they rejected you without disclosing the motives.
      - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
        Yes, and this is why I do not understand why this exists in the first place. Either you tick a mark and you get extra points, no questions asked - or you are subject to someone's appreciation and it does not matter if there are points or not because that person would have been positive or negative to your origins anyway. If you go for subjective - there is planty of that anyway everywhere in the world (and as you said, good luck proving that you were discriminated)
        angelzen 5y ago
        One of the points is to create social coordination. I know that you know that everybody knows that there are too many / too few Xs in this institution, keep that in mind when the next X shows up at the door with an application in their hand. This even turns into a linguistic battle of sorts, see, e.g. "How the Asians became white" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/29/how-the-asians-became-white https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
        BrandoElFollito 5y ago
        This is the case everywhere in the world. Then when X comes, the jury/hiring manager/... look at them, their skin color, sex, social provenance, name and, in their minds, know that X is supposed to be given less or more weight. There is no need to have "race" in a form for this discrimination to work, it is as you said an informal message. Or a formal one, but then one has to play the game and add extra formal points to the applicant. If they do not play the game, we are back to the informal, subjective discrimination I mentioned at the beginning. EDIT: your link in a nice example of the craziness, indeed.
me_me_me 5y ago
This whole identity politics leads to circular results via games theory strategies: - If I cannot question someone gender because its bigotry/discrimination etc - then you cannot question race that I identify as - and I can identify as any race that is treated preferentially I identify as X, and if you dare to question it during the interview I will sue for discrimination. In the end we end up with a layer of bureaucratic song and dance where everyone will identify as X race and Y gender and no one can say anything about the absurdity. Its The Emperor's New Clothes where everyone is forced not to shout 'The king is naked'
- angelzen 5y ago
  Oh, we are such a bunch of over-rationalizing social unfits. The way things work in practice is more akin to the small kids in this adorable video: https://twitter.com/Kolamide/status/1453655850447515648 https://twitter.com/Kolamide/status/1453655850447515648 Good luck having them admit they flunked you because of your race. You were just insufficiently qualified for that specific position and a poor fit at the moment.
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    Yes and no. There is an open bias in US University to make it harder for Asian students to get accepted to uni. They are discriminated based on their race not their exam scores/capabilities. If you knew that part of your score will be artificially deducted in order to meet diversity quota what would you do?

dissent 5y ago

Small tangent, but if I type "animus" into Google the first hit is a photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I can't decide if that's a coincidence or not.

angelzen 5y ago
Probably your personalization. I see no such image on a fresh incognito session.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

If this is how it works, it is truly a horrible discrimination. I thought that you check a box on an application and it gives you bonus points. If it is an individual that assesses your racial status then it is bad. People who have ancestors with a specific race but do not show the proper external signs are doomed. This is so fucked up that I cannot imagine how it can work if someone decides you are "enough Asian" to not think you are using the system. We are talking in France to anonimize as much as possible the applications to avoid bias, and have someone who may be racist (or in love with your race) to decide on your fate. This is because we have the opposite problem: if your origins show up too early you may be discriminated more easily.

angelzen 5y ago
I'm not making any claims of which race gets penalized, only remarking that it's difficult to effectively lie about race. If we were to listen carefully to refugees from Lebanon / Syria civil wars, we may learn that the trajectory of an identitarian system is an acerbically contested tug of war between identity groups ever spiralling into violence. At the end of WW1 the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke down along ethnic identity lines for a reason.
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  Race appartenance in the US is self-declarative. You are what you say you are, there is no "measurement of race match".
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Seriously speaking, the point of using identity markers as admission criterion not to be fair or coherent. Good luck telling the hiring manager that race is self-declarative after they rejected you without disclosing the motives.
    - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
      Yes, and this is why I do not understand why this exists in the first place. Either you tick a mark and you get extra points, no questions asked - or you are subject to someone's appreciation and it does not matter if there are points or not because that person would have been positive or negative to your origins anyway. If you go for subjective - there is planty of that anyway everywhere in the world (and as you said, good luck proving that you were discriminated)
      - angelzen 5y ago
        One of the points is to create social coordination. I know that you know that everybody knows that there are too many / too few Xs in this institution, keep that in mind when the next X shows up at the door with an application in their hand. This even turns into a linguistic battle of sorts, see, e.g. "How the Asians became white" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/29/how-the-asians-became-white https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
        BrandoElFollito 5y ago
        This is the case everywhere in the world. Then when X comes, the jury/hiring manager/... look at them, their skin color, sex, social provenance, name and, in their minds, know that X is supposed to be given less or more weight. There is no need to have "race" in a form for this discrimination to work, it is as you said an informal message. Or a formal one, but then one has to play the game and add extra formal points to the applicant. If they do not play the game, we are back to the informal, subjective discrimination I mentioned at the beginning. EDIT: your link in a nice example of the craziness, indeed.

me_me_me 5y ago

This whole identity politics leads to circular results via games theory strategies: - If I cannot question someone gender because its bigotry/discrimination etc - then you cannot question race that I identify as - and I can identify as any race that is treated preferentially I identify as X, and if you dare to question it during the interview I will sue for discrimination. In the end we end up with a layer of bureaucratic song and dance where everyone will identify as X race and Y gender and no one can say anything about the absurdity. Its The Emperor's New Clothes where everyone is forced not to shout 'The king is naked'

angelzen 5y ago
Oh, we are such a bunch of over-rationalizing social unfits. The way things work in practice is more akin to the small kids in this adorable video: https://twitter.com/Kolamide/status/1453655850447515648 https://twitter.com/Kolamide/status/1453655850447515648 Good luck having them admit they flunked you because of your race. You were just insufficiently qualified for that specific position and a poor fit at the moment.
- me_me_me 5y ago
  Yes and no. There is an open bias in US University to make it harder for Asian students to get accepted to uni. They are discriminated based on their race not their exam scores/capabilities. If you knew that part of your score will be artificially deducted in order to meet diversity quota what would you do?