Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 415 posts

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#71

Post by h4nkoslo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #65
h4nkoslo wrote: post #50

Compliance would be a lot fairer and lower-overhead if the government would simply inform businesses of the racial composition they wanted to see, rather than randomly cracking down on firms because particular groups were "only" 4x overrepresented rather than 10x.

They aren't cracking down because of the ratio, they cracking down because of allegations of systematic elimination of qualified Asian applications from consideration at various stages in the hiring process. The applicant:hired ratios are among the pieces of evidence supporting the conclusion that discrimination was happening, but aren't the subjects of targets.

Right. I am saying that auditing the process is significantly more onerous on all parties than auditing the result, especially when it looks like the jurisprudence around the former is a complete clusterfuck that only exists so the feds can non-transparently and non-equitably mandate the latter anyway.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#72

Post by yodsanklai »

duaneb wrote: post #20
yodsanklai wrote: post #16

I'm wondering, how do they define equally qualified? Suppose for instance that a company has an anonymous interviewing procedure (e.g. maths puzzles, supposing it is relevant for the job) that somehow discriminates against a minority, would that be an issue?

How would you have a process that is both anonymous and discriminatory?

Discriminatory in the sense that the distribution of "winner" in terms of minorities doesn't match the distribution of candidates. I assume it can be the case that minority X is much better at solving maths puzzles than minority Y.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#73

Post by what_ever »

lettergram wrote: post #7
kafkaesq wrote: post #2

In one example cited by the Labor Department, Palantir reviewed a pool of more than 130 qualified applicants for an engineering intern position, about 73 percent of whom were Asian. The lawsuit, which covers Palantir's conduct between January 2010 and the present, said the company hired 17 non-Asian applicants and four Asians. "The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a bil…

This is 100% a political move. The number of people hired matches the national average, which is what is usually used to determine "diversity". Honestly, there is no reason this lawsuit should be pressed. As you pointed out I'm sure there were visa's required for some applicants, and 20% Asian is still good by percentage.

Work authorization for internships is very easy to get. If you are on F1 visa, you just need to apply for CPT (Curricular Practical Training) and it does not require any costs on the employer's side or different visa. You remain on F1 visa.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#74

Post by dragonwriter »

h4nkoslo wrote: post #71
dragonwriter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't cracking down because of the ratio, they cracking down because of allegations of systematic elimination of qualified Asian applications from consideration at various stages in the hiring process. The applicant:hired ratios are among the pieces of evidence supporting the conclusion that discrimination was happening, but aren't the subjects of targets.

Right. I am saying that auditing the process is significantly more onerous on all parties than auditing the result, especially when it looks like the jurisprudence around the former is a complete clusterfuck that only exists so the feds can non-transparently and non-equitably mandate the latter anyway.

> only exists so the feds can non-transparently and non-equitably mandate the latter anyway.

This premise is unsupported and, I would argue, completely unsupportable. Though I suppose if you start with the premise that the government is trying to mandate particular outcomes, the enforcement actions they take probably look like the target is capriciously moving, but that's just because the premise is incorrect.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#75

Post by palakchokshi »

Jugurtha wrote: post #69

What is the definition of Asian, here? One has to remember that Middle Eastern countries and Pakistan are in Asia. Given the nature of what Palantir does, it is easy to guess why it would discriminate against a certain category of people who have ties to foreign countries in general, and sensitive countries in particular. It is the same problem intelligence agencies faced when they wanted Arabic/Urdu speakers. Those…

There are well established processes to vet someone who might be handling sensitive information. There are security clearances that can be obtained. The fact that someone is from a foreign country should not be the basis of discriminating against them.

Secondly if Palantir works on highly sensitive data it probably requires applicants to be US citizens. So essentially it is probably discriminating against Asian Americans and not citizens of other countries.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#76

Post by munchbunny »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #45
rb2k_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea, but just a random guess: If you try to sell a lot of secret spying services to the government (which I think Palantir does?), they probably think it helps if your employees don't look/sound Chinese, seeing as the government might be afraid of China's espionage efforts. I also don't know how much trouble they have getting clearance for someone that grew up in China compared to other countries. (again:…

That's what I thought too. I would imagine if something like this were the case, it would be more likely done out of clearance concerns or even a genuine fear of infiltration, than for customer facing optics.

Maybe I'm just naive, but I have trouble believing that one group of US citizens as a whole has more "loyalty" issues than another. Is it a concern about spies? Racially biased hiring practices seems like an overly broad way of trying to address focused espionage.

If it's about hiring non-citizens, then I think there's a legitimate procedural issue around employees needing clearance levels, but I'd find it hard to believe that there would be a lawsuit over racial biases if it's driven by clearance requirements making non-citizens ineligible.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#77

Post by Steeeve »

The cited example was interns.

Who doesn't favor employee referrals for interns? You can be encrusted in diamonds and you're going to get put in the back of the line behind the known quantities and get-in-so-and-so's-good-graces hires for an intern position. There's also the fact that people start to favor/discriminate schools based on history. Had a great intern from Stanford? Hire another Stanford kid. Had a terrible intern from Texas Tech? Scratch all the TT kids who apply for a few years.

We'll see how this pans out, but like most of the other people in this thread, I'm inclined to give Palantir the benefit of the doubt at the moment.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#78

Post by onmatest »

guelo wrote: post #12

Here's the actual government complaint, the allegations are listed in sections 10 and 11, https://www.dol.gov/sites/default/files/newsroom/newsrelease... My concerns, 1) why is the qualified candidate pool, whatever that is, so overwhelmingly Asian, 73-85%? Isn't the candidate selection process biased towards Asians? 2) The complaint is concerned about the use of employee referrals. Studies have shown that building t…

I would guess for the second part that the government prohibits it because it could result in unequal opportunities for job seekers based on race. While referrals are more acceptable in non-government-sponsored companies, government-sponsored companies are held to higher standards because that is where taxpayer dollars are directly headed.

If the applicant pool was overwhelming black and Palantir hired more white people because of referrals, there would be more uproar.

Ultimately, the implications would be that if that logic were applied to government positions, (ie, if government positions took into account referrals more than merit) you could end up with a government that is overwhelmingly white and/or arbitrarily discriminates against people applying to positions.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#80

Post by sumitgt »

Indian here (I hope that still makes me Asian). I did interview on-site at Palantir in 2014. I did not feel like any kind of discrimination was in play at any point. In fact, 3/6 of the people I interacted with during the course of my interviews seemed to be from a Asian / east-Asian ethnicity. I did feel like the people working there were a little overly confident in nature, but discriminating? I don't think so.
Post reply on HN