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U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

reuters.com

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

#341

Post by TallGuyShort »

mikeryan wrote: post #216
TallGuyShort wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same complaint is the basis of sexism in the tech industry. I haven't seen many resumes from women cross my desk. So it's not that I'M being sexist, but clearly there's a problem somewhere. And it could be the way I'm soliciting those resumes in the first place.

The same complaint is the basis of sexism in the tech industry No it's not. It's in fact the opposite. Sexism is systemic to the point where you're lucky to have 5% of your applicants be female.

That's exactly what I'm saying. "5% of my employees are female because 5% of my applicants are" does not mean that you've actually done what you can to eliminate bias in your recruiting, marketing, etc.

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

#343

Post by burkaman »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #338
jonnybgood wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then got scholarships because of only ethnicity. Are you absolutely certain of that? How did you know?

One can't be 100% certain of anything. However, between 2/3 and 5/6 of black students at top colleges probably would have been rejected under a meritocratic admission system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11904256 Similarly, it's established that Asians tend to meet a much higher SAT cutoff than blacks and whites. http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/ethnicity-health/asian-... It's pretty safe to say that most…

I don't think you can jump straight from "some people benefit from affirmative action" to "they don't deserve to be there". Obviously supporters of affirmative action do think they deserve to be there, despite their lower test scores, and it's worth at least considering that point of view.

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

#344

Post by kelvin0 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #62
ones_and_zeros wrote: post #49

Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian. Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in…

There's alot of cheating and other shady nonsense. Bodyshop contractors will do anything. I've seen cases where those companies send shill candidates to interview, claim that candidates have more experience in reality (in one case a 22 year old with a decade of Oracle Financials experience) and submitting fake resumes.

While I was studying at University there were quite a few instances where particular groups of student got caught cheating in various forms. It seems some people want to get ahead at all costs because they seem to have a lot of pressure from their family or peers to make it in a particular discipline. This is something foreign to me, as I chose what/where I wanted to study, free of these particular pressures.

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

#345

Post by rmxt »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #340
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, under affirmative action programmes and the like, nobody gets anything “just because of their ethnicity”. Rather, they may be given slightly reduced entry requirements, for example, to compensate for their background potentially disadvantaging them.

1.0 lower on GPA (e.g. 2.5 vs 3.5) is "slightly reduced entry requirements"? http://web.archive.org/web/20080423221308/http://www.umich.e...

Surely college admissions procedures have changed significantly in the intervening 17 years, right? We're talking about the advent and removal of the 2400 point SAT, the rise of digital applications, and the rise of SAT subject tests, among other changes.

Furthermore, this specific point system in question was ruled unconstitutional and is no longer in use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger

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

#346

Post by Chris2048 »

kstenerud wrote: post #282
ChuckMcM wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the case, and the records show that, then the company is probably ok. But you have to show that all of the people you hired could pass FizzBuzz right? Google gave one of the best hiring training lectures I've ever attended on eliminating personal bias from interviewing questions. A lot of it was thinking about the question and the response and putting it in the context of someone you knew, what would you t…

Too bad it didn't stop the bias in my Google interview :/ Passed through all the on-site interview problems and then they silently dropped me. No "we're sorry, you're not a good match." No emails, no phone calls. Nothing.

What bias does this show?

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

#347

Post by Retric »

arghnoname wrote: post #330
Retric wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had many people with 3-5 years of 'experience' developing not know how to find the smallest element in an array. Initially I was thinking it would be a quick check to see if people thought about null values, but apparently this is a hard problem... Now they might have been useful for something, but I suspect they are just playing the numbers game and showing up to a lot of interviews until they get in. So even…

I think it is interview paralysis. They can't believe an interview answer is ever supposed to be O(n). I've had it happen to me where I get tripped up on relatively easy problems because the initial easy solution I came up with wasn't sufficiently clever and magically log n or some such thing.

Any suggestions for dealing with this? I try and keep things as relaxed as possible to start with and make it clear that trivia and syntax is not what I am going after.

I would walk out of the room, but I am happy to walk someone though most of a problem they are not getting. The goal is going from an understood problem to actual code.

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

#348

Post by mildbow »

danieltillett wrote: post #179
mildbow wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which they obviously don’t given who they actually hire It's not obvious to everyone, that's why there is discussion/lawsuit. > if they did hire 73% Asians they would rightly be criticised for discriminating against non-Asians. Why would they rightly "be criticised for discriminating against non-Asians."? Anyway, what you are suggesting does happen when listing jobs (eg how startup jobs are marketed towards younger…

>It's not obvious to everyone, that's why there is discussion/lawsuit. It is obvious to Palantir. They are rightly recognising that talent is much more evenly spread despite attracting a disproportional number of Asian candidates at the top of the funnel. They are trying to fix a broken funnel by discriminating at the end of the process. I don’t think anyone would think the appropriate solution is to just hire 73% pe…

Feels like we are talking past each other :)

Of course it's obvious to Palantir: they are the ones doing it. Of course it's not obvious to DOL: they are the ones with the lawsuit.

Of course it obvious to anyone that demographics at various level of any funnel wont/cant be translated to the bottom.

What's not obvious are the causes in this specific case.

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

#349

Post by palunon »

dnautics wrote: post #329
dastbe wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you give them a graph data structure or something that is explicitly a tree?

A acyclic graph is isomorphic to a tree, but the way you access the vertices and edges is completely different.

Depends on your memory representation of the graph. If you simply use the obvious one (a node have a list of pointers to its successors), I don't see the difference except for successors[]/children[]

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

#350

Post by palunon »

DavidHm wrote: post #302
danieltillett wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Masters programs are run as a cash cows for many universities to be filled will anyone who can fog a mirror. As a former academic I can tell you that there are literally different marking criteria for overseas masters students than local undergraduates.

That is fascinating. Anecdotally, in European universities, bachelors are the "get in as many people as we can for the tuition fees", while masters are the "let's be as selective as we can get away with".

Sometimes it's even worse... For example, in France, a university is required by law not to be selective for it's first year programs, as long as the candidate graduated high school.
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