A Way to Detect Bias • Hacker News Board

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#51

Post by TillE » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #31

gizmo wrote: post #7

A related observation (which I've been making for a long time) is that the absence of mediocre women in positions of power is strong evidence of bias. Men can succeed when they're mediocre, but women have to be exceptional. Likewise for minorities.

What's "exceptional"? I've known many women in my career and many of them were mediocre. Some were in positions of authority and some weren't. Another commenter lists several "mediocre" women in the corporate and political world (and leaves out some big ones, like Meg Whitman). If you're talking about becoming a CEO, you have to be an "exceptional" man to get there too, in absolute terms. I feel like the root erroneo…

> and nurse children

Science mostly solved that problem decades ago, if you hadn't noticed, to the extent that breast feeding is now viewed as strange or embarrassing in certain cultures.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#52

Post by ChicagoBoy11 » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

WildUtah wrote: post #20

On a simple mathematical basis, this is false. Consider two groups of candidates for a scholarship, A and B. We want to select all candidates that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. Group A comes from a population where the chance of graduation is distributed uniformly from 0% to 100% and group B is from one where the chance is distributed uniformly from 10% to 90%, with the same average but less variation i…

Great insight. I had the great fortune to take a course with Gary Becker where we went into some of the mathematics of college admissions. He made this precise point -- the variances of the particular populations you are looking at matter a great detail. He managed to build some pretty convincing models which provided a compelling narrative for "biases" that we seemed to observe in the real world, all with simple changes to the distributions of populations. Great comment.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#53

Post by SFLemonade » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

rewqfdsa wrote: post #43

WildUtah wrote: post #20

On a simple mathematical basis, this is false. Consider two groups of candidates for a scholarship, A and B. We want to select all candidates that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. Group A comes from a population where the chance of graduation is distributed uniformly from 0% to 100% and group B is from one where the chance is distributed uniformly from 10% to 90%, with the same average but less variation i…

Why are you using biased mathematics? If statistics and the scientific method (the tools through which dead white men continue to colonize) give us obviously problematic results, we should abandon them in favor of a method of inquiry that promotes social justice.

Please tell me this is sarcasm...

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#54

Post by gizmo » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:20 PM UTC

jblow wrote: post #48

All other arguments aside ... this idea also fails if the judging party's idea of quality is mostly uncorrelated with actual quality. Which Graham says in other essays is usually the case (it's what you mean when you say it's almost impossible to predict which companies will be successful). Graham says the subjects of bias "have to be better to get selected", but what is really going on is they have to be better acco…

This is also in large part why people tend to hire/fund younger versions of themselves. If judgement wasn't arbitrary much more diversity should be expected.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#55

Post by tansey » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #49

WildUtah wrote: post #20

On a simple mathematical basis, this is false. Consider two groups of candidates for a scholarship, A and B. We want to select all candidates that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. Group A comes from a population where the chance of graduation is distributed uniformly from 0% to 100% and group B is from one where the chance is distributed uniformly from 10% to 90%, with the same average but less variation i…

Graham's intuition is assuming equality of the two distributions. As I noted in a different comment here, you can pretty easily fix Graham's test. Compute min(accepted a) and min(accepted B) instead of the means. In your example, the min of the accepted distributions would both work out to be 80%.

So the PG estimator is clearly problematic. I agree that the yummfajitas (YM) estimator looks to be consistent. In this case though, we're dealing with (small) finite sample sizes, so we need to come up with some sort of test statistic. What would the YM test be here? It seems tricky since you are dealing with a conditional distribution based on left-censored data. I'm also not aware of any difference-of-minimums test, though I am happy to be educated if there is one!

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#56

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#57

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

tansey wrote: post #55

yummyfajitas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graham's intuition is assuming equality of the two distributions. As I noted in a different comment here, you can pretty easily fix Graham's test. Compute min(accepted a) and min(accepted B) instead of the means. In your example, the min of the accepted distributions would both work out to be 80%.

So the PG estimator is clearly problematic. I agree that the yummfajitas (YM) estimator looks to be consistent. In this case though, we're dealing with (small) finite sample sizes, so we need to come up with some sort of test statistic. What would the YM test be here? It seems tricky since you are dealing with a conditional distribution based on left-censored data. I'm also not aware of any difference-of-minimums tes…

I don't know of something to refer to, but I don't think the statistics are too hard. The test statistic would be exactly min(sample1) and min(sample2).

Suppose the cutoff sample is distributed according to f(x)H(x-C). Then the probability of the minima of a sample exceeding C+e by random chance, assuming the null hypothesis, is p = (1-\int_C^{C+e}f(x) dx)^N.

So now you have a frequentist hypothesis test. If you make reasonable assumptions on f(x) (non-vanishing near C, quantified somehow), it's even nice and non-parametric.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#58

Post by cookiecaper » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:39 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #51

cookiecaper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's "exceptional"? I've known many women in my career and many of them were mediocre. Some were in positions of authority and some weren't. Another commenter lists several "mediocre" women in the corporate and political world (and leaves out some big ones, like Meg Whitman). If you're talking about becoming a CEO, you have to be an "exceptional" man to get there too, in absolute terms. I feel like the root erroneo…

> and nurse children Science mostly solved that problem decades ago, if you hadn't noticed, to the extent that breast feeding is now viewed as strange or embarrassing in certain cultures.

>Science mostly solved that problem decades ago

Medical practitioners strongly emphasize breastfeeding as the ideal form of nourishment for the baby. Formula should be used as little as possible. It's cool that we have a viable alternative solution in formula, but it's still worse than natural breastfeeding.

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#59

Post by mattmaroon » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:41 PM UTC

WildUtah wrote: post #20

On a simple mathematical basis, this is false. Consider two groups of candidates for a scholarship, A and B. We want to select all candidates that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. Group A comes from a population where the chance of graduation is distributed uniformly from 0% to 100% and group B is from one where the chance is distributed uniformly from 10% to 90%, with the same average but less variation i…

So in this particular case, assuming that First Round's sample size is significant, it may just be that the female founders who seek them out are just on average better than the male ones? I suppose that if women think that the selection process is biased against them, and most do (and it may be) perhaps the less than excellent ones just don't apply, whereas that isn't true for males?

Re: A Way to Detect Bias

#60

Post by cookiecaper » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 9:42 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #46

cookiecaper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's "exceptional"? I've known many women in my career and many of them were mediocre. Some were in positions of authority and some weren't. Another commenter lists several "mediocre" women in the corporate and political world (and leaves out some big ones, like Meg Whitman). If you're talking about becoming a CEO, you have to be an "exceptional" man to get there too, in absolute terms. I feel like the root erroneo…

> People make decisions based on social, cultural, and physical expectations of them, and there's not anything wrong with that. I couldn't disagree more. If the culture is plain chauvinism ("women belong in the kitchen not the boardroom") then there's everything wrong with that. All oppression throughout history is essentially "just culture", but that justifies nothing. Your biological reductionism is completely at o…

I didn't say "just culture"; I said the confluence of social, cultural, and physical factors.

Why does "culture" develop? Because people are naturally evil and black-hearted? These things don't happen in a vacuum, they develop organically because they are the best way to support human and tribal propagation and prosperity. Perhaps some things can and should change, but things that are constant across nearly all successful human societies should be considered fairly well tested.

We should note that it takes a long time to see the full effects of changes to social structures and institutions, generally at least 3-4 generations. If a society is "testing" something and the society itself expires or its success is greatly diminished within 6-8 generations of implementation, the test should probably not be seen as successful.

The West will find that traditional principles that assign gender roles based on that gender's inherent advantages and disadvantages are much more useful than currently acknowledged. Forcing people to do things that they a) don't even want to do and b) aren't well-suited for is a losing proposition, no matter how much outrage you try to manufacture to justify it.