5 ms·

The thing is, this is a laughable anecdote because clearly there is no causal relationship between lacrosse and job performance. But should a company care? Sure

by tyho 4y ago

The thing is, this is a laughable anecdote because clearly there is no causal relationship between lacrosse and job performance. But should a company care? Surely what matters most is whether a factor is predictive of job performance. We can assume that playing lacrosse was predictive, does it matter to Amazon if the relationship is causal? Obviously this doesn't take into account political pressures to achieve outcomes other than that hiring the candidate most likely to perform well.

mjhay 4y ago
Selecting for lacrosse players (which as you say, has no causal relationship to job performance) necessarily selects against non-lacrosse players. Lacrosse players tend to be white and male, Amazon should care, due not only to obvious legal risk, but also because they are excluding candidates who otherwise do as well or better than a particular lacrosse player. Why would it make any kind of sense to artificially shrink their candidate pool? This is also a moral thing, not just a political thing. It's not right to discriminate against people for reasons other than job performance.
- hbrn 4y ago
  Playing devil's advocate here: > Lacrosse players tend to be white and male I suspect they also tend to attend certain schools, and that could very well be causal. > Why would it make any kind of sense to artificially shrink their candidate pool? It doesn't make sense to shrink it if you have 10 candidates. But if you have thousands of resumes, it's not shrinking, it's filtering. > It's not right to It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally.
  - eru 4y ago
    > It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally. That's not the only avenue. Big corporations do what their managers, customers, employees and investors want. Eg restaurants will typically try to serve tasty food, even if there's no legal requirement to do so. Similarly Google has free lunch, because that's what employees want. The recent fad for ESG shows that investor can want 'morality', too, and companies are willing to satisfy them. (I quote 'morality', because different people have different ideas, and often people only want the fig-leaf of morality, but not pay the price for what they would consider real morality. See eg greenwashing.) Customers and investors etc get what they are willing to pay for, and that's not necessarily what they say they want.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > excluding candidates who otherwise do as well But the explicit, stated goal of diversity efforts is specifically to exclude candidates who otherwise might do well, but are not diverse, because non-diverse teams can't perform as well as diverse teams.
  - pseudalopex 4y ago
    They said as well or better. Did you leave it out or did they edit? Most diversity efforts are to get more diverse candidates or remove potential bias from interviews. This excludes no one.
Veuxdo 4y ago
Over-fitting.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  overfitting is a pretty well-understood and well-documented problem that we have statistical models to guard against - if this was just a simple case of overfitting, you'd think that Amazon of all organizations would be able to confirm and correct it.
mjburgess 4y ago
There's several ways of something not being causal. You're assuming here that there's a reliable proxy variable (eg., wealth -> good education -> "Jared") -- which is unlikely to be the case. These proxies will disappear: poorer people will adopt those baby names. Whilst, yes, everything else being equal some non-zero knowledge of reliable proxies is useful. But in a hiring process, not everything is equal. You can, eg., trivially examine the candidate. its trivial to get actually relevant data to hiring, making "AI" dangerously useless. Is substitutes a high-quality process (measurements of the actual applicants) for a low-quality process (random statistical properties of aggregates of existing employees). The story of "AI" over the last decade, it must be said.
- eru 4y ago
  Weirdly enough, (poorer) people don't seem to be very good at picking names that signal success. So that proxy is pretty good. If you are poor and want to give your child a name to signal success, you'd need to look at the names rich people are giving their kids right now. In practice at most we are seeing poor people imitating the past naming practices of rich people. (Of course, that's just a generalisation. Individual people make their individual choices.)
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Sure, I think the more important point is that if I can ask you anything, that's immediately far suprerior information about you than any average bucket you happen to fall into.
    - eru 4y ago
      I'm not sure. People don't always answer truthfully.
brightball 4y ago
> clearly there is no causal relationship between lacrosse and job performance IMO it could have an effect on "soft skills". Learning to have an authority push you to beyond your known limits. Working and training within a team to achieve a goal. Learning as a team to face and overcome weaknesses. Social skills that go with it. Humility from dealing with loss. Learning to celebrate victory with dignity. There's a lot of educational positives that come from team sports. It's certainly not the only place that a person can get those skills, but it's a very common one. IMO it's one of the biggest benefits of US football simply because the teams are so large, diverse and position groups have different but complimentary jobs.
- golemiprague 4y ago
- csydas 4y ago
  I understand your point, but I disagree with it. Just like there are different versions of "good" leaders and "good" workers in any given field, there are different types of "good" in sports. Similarly, sports has a much more straight-forward rewards system; score a point, prevent the opponent from scoring, immediate result and reward. For anything technology related, the action => reward system tends to be far more delayed and requires a different approach and type of patience. Whether it's Devops, Programming, Administration, or Support, even if you do everything right, the reward might be delayed or sullied by negative rewards. (e.g., network is never fast enough for users, it's still too complex to use your program, the solution is just not desired by the user) Again I do understand the premise of your statement, and for some situations I can agree there is crossover, but my experience in hiring for technical positions is that sports participation has been a non-factor at best. Too often, it's been a negative one because the rewards for technology related challenges tend to be very delayed or difficult for the participant to recognize. Success in Technology is very personal and goes beyond the tangible result, and instead is a victory of the self as you grow intellectually and better understand something. This does happen in sports also (you train yourself to recognize openings that maybe didn't exist for you before or you couldn't act on due to physical limitations), but there are other rewards that make sports more compelling.
retrac 4y ago
> clearly there is no causal relationship between lacrosse and job performance There's almost certainly a correlation due to success in lacrosse having a lot of crossover with success generally. A young man who plays lacrosse is probably going to be physically healthier than average. It's also a very upper middle class sport, typically played by wealthier types. And children who grew up in wealthier households tend to be ... well, better at everything, really. Hockey is a great indicator of that here in Canada; the equipment is expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's causative, either. Sports may improve cognitive performance, and they tend to teach cooperation and leadership. Plenty of studies suggest it helps academics. If I felt free to discriminate and if I knew nothing else about a candidate other than whether they had played a physically-demanding and expensive team sport within the last year, I would hire the ones who had over the ones who had not. It'd skew heavily towards fit 20-40 something guys from middle-class backgrounds with college educations. Surprise! Probably what the algorithm picked up, indirectly. Of course, it also blatantly skews white, male, and economically elite.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  That's great, but you're still making assumptions. And that's the whole problem with diversity and anti-diversity both.
  - retrac 4y ago
    It's not an assumption that sports is associated with general success and intelligence. I felt it was well-established enough of a fact, that there's no need to link to studies showing that. It's even the basis for public policy in my country; we do sports-based interventions for troubled youth; such programs are one of the few things that seem to actually work to keep young men going to school and improve academics. Now if you mean I'm making an assumption about a candidate, based on nothing more than one weak indicator, well yes. That was the point of my thought experiment. If you only knew whether they played sports, while not a very good indicator, it's better than flipping a coin. Ultimately, that's what hiring is. You have some indicators like education and previous work experience, and you make an assumption based on those facts, none of which align 100% with how they're going to perform at the job you're hiring them for.
mannykannot 4y ago
> We can assume that playing lacrosse was predictive. I am not going to assume that without further investigation. I am rather skeptical of the robustness of predictive models in the absence of relevant causal relationships.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Here's a sport that is analogous to lacrosse in terms of racial makeup and financial demographics: golf. See the correlation now? Except that in golf's case, you usually see golf played around the country by rich white guys. Lacrosse is pretty much a northeastern thing, and when it's played elsewhere, it's normally at schools with the resources to host those clubs.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
There is a positive correlation between athletic ability and intellectual ability; strong bodies and strong minds correlate with each other (both are downstream of good nutrition and genetics.) Furthermore successful participation in team sports implies good teamwork and social skills.
permo-w 4y ago
> Surely what matters most is whether a factor is predictive of job performance not go all critical race theory, but is this all that matters? should there not be a place in society for people who have lesser aptitude for corporate work?
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  Yes, but should that place be performing work they aren't good at? Look for round holes before pounding a round peg into a square hole.
randcraw 4y ago
If a vendor can't recognize extreme overfitting in their product, don't buy it.
throw__away7391 4y ago
Well obviously the solution here is to set aside a few million dollars a year of public money to send a dozen randomly selected children from low income households and disadvantaged backgrounds to learn to play lacrosse.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Wouldn't it be simpler to send them to the nearest courthouse to get their names legally changed to Jared?
idontpost 4y ago

by tyho 4y ago

mjhay 4y ago

Selecting for lacrosse players (which as you say, has no causal relationship to job performance) necessarily selects against non-lacrosse players. Lacrosse players tend to be white and male, Amazon should care, due not only to obvious legal risk, but also because they are excluding candidates who otherwise do as well or better than a particular lacrosse player. Why would it make any kind of sense to artificially shrink their candidate pool? This is also a moral thing, not just a political thing. It's not right to discriminate against people for reasons other than job performance.

hbrn 4y ago
Playing devil's advocate here: > Lacrosse players tend to be white and male I suspect they also tend to attend certain schools, and that could very well be causal. > Why would it make any kind of sense to artificially shrink their candidate pool? It doesn't make sense to shrink it if you have 10 candidates. But if you have thousands of resumes, it's not shrinking, it's filtering. > It's not right to It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally.
- eru 4y ago
  > It's naive to expect big corporations to act morally. Best you can do is force them to act legally. That's not the only avenue. Big corporations do what their managers, customers, employees and investors want. Eg restaurants will typically try to serve tasty food, even if there's no legal requirement to do so. Similarly Google has free lunch, because that's what employees want. The recent fad for ESG shows that investor can want 'morality', too, and companies are willing to satisfy them. (I quote 'morality', because different people have different ideas, and often people only want the fig-leaf of morality, but not pay the price for what they would consider real morality. See eg greenwashing.) Customers and investors etc get what they are willing to pay for, and that's not necessarily what they say they want.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> excluding candidates who otherwise do as well But the explicit, stated goal of diversity efforts is specifically to exclude candidates who otherwise might do well, but are not diverse, because non-diverse teams can't perform as well as diverse teams.
- pseudalopex 4y ago
  They said as well or better. Did you leave it out or did they edit? Most diversity efforts are to get more diverse candidates or remove potential bias from interviews. This excludes no one.

Veuxdo 4y ago

Over-fitting.

commandlinefan 4y ago
overfitting is a pretty well-understood and well-documented problem that we have statistical models to guard against - if this was just a simple case of overfitting, you'd think that Amazon of all organizations would be able to confirm and correct it.

mjburgess 4y ago

There's several ways of something not being causal. You're assuming here that there's a reliable proxy variable (eg., wealth -> good education -> "Jared") -- which is unlikely to be the case. These proxies will disappear: poorer people will adopt those baby names. Whilst, yes, everything else being equal some non-zero knowledge of reliable proxies is useful. But in a hiring process, not everything is equal. You can, eg., trivially examine the candidate. its trivial to get actually relevant data to hiring, making "AI" dangerously useless. Is substitutes a high-quality process (measurements of the actual applicants) for a low-quality process (random statistical properties of aggregates of existing employees). The story of "AI" over the last decade, it must be said.

eru 4y ago
Weirdly enough, (poorer) people don't seem to be very good at picking names that signal success. So that proxy is pretty good. If you are poor and want to give your child a name to signal success, you'd need to look at the names rich people are giving their kids right now. In practice at most we are seeing poor people imitating the past naming practices of rich people. (Of course, that's just a generalisation. Individual people make their individual choices.)
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Sure, I think the more important point is that if I can ask you anything, that's immediately far suprerior information about you than any average bucket you happen to fall into.
  - eru 4y ago
    I'm not sure. People don't always answer truthfully.

brightball 4y ago

> clearly there is no causal relationship between lacrosse and job performance IMO it could have an effect on "soft skills". Learning to have an authority push you to beyond your known limits. Working and training within a team to achieve a goal. Learning as a team to face and overcome weaknesses. Social skills that go with it. Humility from dealing with loss. Learning to celebrate victory with dignity. There's a lot of educational positives that come from team sports. It's certainly not the only place that a person can get those skills, but it's a very common one. IMO it's one of the biggest benefits of US football simply because the teams are so large, diverse and position groups have different but complimentary jobs.

golemiprague 4y ago
csydas 4y ago
I understand your point, but I disagree with it. Just like there are different versions of "good" leaders and "good" workers in any given field, there are different types of "good" in sports. Similarly, sports has a much more straight-forward rewards system; score a point, prevent the opponent from scoring, immediate result and reward. For anything technology related, the action => reward system tends to be far more delayed and requires a different approach and type of patience. Whether it's Devops, Programming, Administration, or Support, even if you do everything right, the reward might be delayed or sullied by negative rewards. (e.g., network is never fast enough for users, it's still too complex to use your program, the solution is just not desired by the user) Again I do understand the premise of your statement, and for some situations I can agree there is crossover, but my experience in hiring for technical positions is that sports participation has been a non-factor at best. Too often, it's been a negative one because the rewards for technology related challenges tend to be very delayed or difficult for the participant to recognize. Success in Technology is very personal and goes beyond the tangible result, and instead is a victory of the self as you grow intellectually and better understand something. This does happen in sports also (you train yourself to recognize openings that maybe didn't exist for you before or you couldn't act on due to physical limitations), but there are other rewards that make sports more compelling.

retrac 4y ago

> clearly there is no causal relationship between lacrosse and job performance There's almost certainly a correlation due to success in lacrosse having a lot of crossover with success generally. A young man who plays lacrosse is probably going to be physically healthier than average. It's also a very upper middle class sport, typically played by wealthier types. And children who grew up in wealthier households tend to be ... well, better at everything, really. Hockey is a great indicator of that here in Canada; the equipment is expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it's causative, either. Sports may improve cognitive performance, and they tend to teach cooperation and leadership. Plenty of studies suggest it helps academics. If I felt free to discriminate and if I knew nothing else about a candidate other than whether they had played a physically-demanding and expensive team sport within the last year, I would hire the ones who had over the ones who had not. It'd skew heavily towards fit 20-40 something guys from middle-class backgrounds with college educations. Surprise! Probably what the algorithm picked up, indirectly. Of course, it also blatantly skews white, male, and economically elite.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
That's great, but you're still making assumptions. And that's the whole problem with diversity and anti-diversity both.
- retrac 4y ago
  It's not an assumption that sports is associated with general success and intelligence. I felt it was well-established enough of a fact, that there's no need to link to studies showing that. It's even the basis for public policy in my country; we do sports-based interventions for troubled youth; such programs are one of the few things that seem to actually work to keep young men going to school and improve academics. Now if you mean I'm making an assumption about a candidate, based on nothing more than one weak indicator, well yes. That was the point of my thought experiment. If you only knew whether they played sports, while not a very good indicator, it's better than flipping a coin. Ultimately, that's what hiring is. You have some indicators like education and previous work experience, and you make an assumption based on those facts, none of which align 100% with how they're going to perform at the job you're hiring them for.

mannykannot 4y ago

> We can assume that playing lacrosse was predictive. I am not going to assume that without further investigation. I am rather skeptical of the robustness of predictive models in the absence of relevant causal relationships.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Here's a sport that is analogous to lacrosse in terms of racial makeup and financial demographics: golf. See the correlation now? Except that in golf's case, you usually see golf played around the country by rich white guys. Lacrosse is pretty much a northeastern thing, and when it's played elsewhere, it's normally at schools with the resources to host those clubs.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

There is a positive correlation between athletic ability and intellectual ability; strong bodies and strong minds correlate with each other (both are downstream of good nutrition and genetics.) Furthermore successful participation in team sports implies good teamwork and social skills.

permo-w 4y ago

> Surely what matters most is whether a factor is predictive of job performance not go all critical race theory, but is this all that matters? should there not be a place in society for people who have lesser aptitude for corporate work?

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
Yes, but should that place be performing work they aren't good at? Look for round holes before pounding a round peg into a square hole.

randcraw 4y ago

If a vendor can't recognize extreme overfitting in their product, don't buy it.

throw__away7391 4y ago

Well obviously the solution here is to set aside a few million dollars a year of public money to send a dozen randomly selected children from low income households and disadvantaged backgrounds to learn to play lacrosse.

wizofaus 4y ago
Wouldn't it be simpler to send them to the nearest courthouse to get their names legally changed to Jared?

idontpost 4y ago