Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech • Hacker News Board

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#191

Post by michaelt » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #168

tomp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s simply invalid science. It’s equivalent to having variables x, y, z , setting x = 0 and then exploring the correlation between y and z . That’s a fair experiment, but you simply cannot generalise the conclusion outside of the tested range for x (i.e. for x != 0 ).

No it's not. It's like having x and claiming y and z might exist. You set it equal to zero and then you demonstrate the existence of the others. Every study I've ever seen dealing with messy social sciences has some kind of fundamental counternarrative. That's why there's follow-up studies to try to demonstrate things in different ways. Take the Milgram experiment. Some participants have claimed they knew the machine…

If I had to study the effect on fuel economy of having the top down on a convertible, I'd want to control for speed.

But if I controlled for speed by simply setting the speed to zero, people ought to question my work even if my results agree with their expectations :)

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#192

Post by ingleswood » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

beaner wrote: post #75

fishtoaster wrote: post #35

Key bit here: > Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social s…

Yeah, the point taken from the study is really designed to stoke tension when it is not really reflective of anything meaningful when it comes to job applicant filtering. It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities…

> The solution was to allow background checks again.

I'm not sure this learning shows what you think it does, nor that the 'solution' is really a solution. Employers don't want to hire black people because they fear they might be criminals, and background checks allay this fear, allowing them to hire a subset of black people they feel are ok? To me this confirms that both background checks and hiring managers have a tendency to be racially biased, and the 'solution' is simply accepting of that bias.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#193

Post by bjourne » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

esyir wrote: post #166

bjourne wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not when accounting for a higher level of crime. In fact, whites are more than half of police victims, while causing way less than half of violent crimes. ... Think about it. How does higher levels of crime among black Americans explain why more unarmed black Americans are killed by police? Think about it ...

Simple. Assuming that unarmed shooting rate is a proportion of police calls, more crime directly results on more calls and thus more shootings.

I don't see how you get from point A to point B. More police calls means that more perpetrators get shot, perhaps, but why would it mean that more unarmed people get killed?

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#194

Post by ingleswood » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

pedrosorio wrote: post #129

mavelikara wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's not testing for anything real. You are too quick to dismiss the study, I think. What the study shows, I think, is that other things being equal the person who sounds to be from higher class is likely to get the job. The study simulates the other things being equal scenario by eliminating all other avenues for the hiring manager to judge. Here is the quote from the TFA, lightly edited for emphasis: The study…

> What the study shows, I think, is that other things being equal the person who sounds to be from higher class is likely to get the job. In an interview where you're not allowed to evaluate "all other things". In other words, absent any other information, people believe those from a higher class are more likely to be competent. Is that true? The link says nothing about it. If it is true, the hiring managers did a go…

Do you have a hypothetical explanation for why, if people are only allowed to evaluate speech and accent, they prefer a certain group, but if allowed to evaluate lots of different more meaningful things, which all lead to the same conclusion about competence EXCEPT for speech and accent, that preference no longer applies?

That seems like an extraordinary claim unless you have some evidentiary base for it.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#195

Post by ingleswood » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 9:46 AM UTC

kodah wrote: post #180

newacct583 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, I see some of the former in online forums. I see a decent amount of the latter, both with and without justification. I've never in my life seen a single poster do that. You have a cite demonstrating this happens "a lot"? This sounds like a strawman. You're taking a criticism often made (again, not without justification) against "your side" and arguing against it by charging the "other side" with hipocr…

You can search my username and the word "redneck" and you'll find one. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702815

Reading the thread shows a very different story to the one in the GGP.

Another poster describes the Capitol riot as a "day-out for rednecks". You say "there aren't many rednecks in San Diego" and the other poster replies to say that they believe there are a lot of 'rural conservatives' around San Diego. Then you accuse them of using a slur, although it's not really clear if you are rebuking him for calling Capitol rioters 'rednecks' or for accusing rednecks of being Capitol rioters.

I don't see where that poster told someone off for using racist slurs, but I believe you that it happened.

Not sure this is even one example of what was claimed above to happen 'a lot'?

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#196

Post by ingleswood » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 9:48 AM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #174

epgui wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can take these experiences away from you or discount the difficulties you went through. But saying that you don't have white privilege because you grew up poor is not quite right either. The thing with privilege is that there's more than one kind, and they all add up (and most likely they interact as different factors, so they're more than additive). * If you're non-white in the US, you're underprivileged. * I…

Do you believe that being black or white has a larger impact than being poor or rich? If so, why? If not, why do people focus so much on race instead of wealth?

Do you believe that being black or white has no impact? If not, then racism and white privilege are real things that exist. The presence of other forms of discrimination and oppression does not change this.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#197

Post by tgv » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 10:19 AM UTC

fishtoaster wrote: post #35

Key bit here: > Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social s…

It's quite common to infer social status from speech. Since the level of education used to correlate with social status, it made sense to have a preference. If that correlation still holds is hard to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#198

Post by kristopolous » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 10:26 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #191

kristopolous wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. It's like having x and claiming y and z might exist. You set it equal to zero and then you demonstrate the existence of the others. Every study I've ever seen dealing with messy social sciences has some kind of fundamental counternarrative. That's why there's follow-up studies to try to demonstrate things in different ways. Take the Milgram experiment. Some participants have claimed they knew the machine…

If I had to study the effect on fuel economy of having the top down on a convertible, I'd want to control for speed. But if I controlled for speed by simply setting the speed to zero, people ought to question my work even if my results agree with their expectations :)

That's not this. It's a false equivalency.

You've just restated the same error as the thing I responded to

The thing you'd be "zeroing" in this situation would be to find a specified road and weather condition and then demonstrate the existence of a drag coefficient by letting the car coast down the same hill with the top on or off and seeing how far it goes before stopping and how long it takes to get there

In your analogy you'd be up against the assumption that fuel economy is universally constant. Here, you're trying to show that it's not constant and the shape of the vehicle is part of the reason why.

You do this by removing confounding variables to demonstrate whether a phenomena is real or just a confluence of other things and merely presenting a convincing illusion.

We would want to take engine combustion and driving habits out of the tests. We would be pushing the car off at neutral down the hill. You want those noise creating events to not disrupt your signal

We're trying to establish if something is potentially real.

Coincidentally there's been a slew of bogus fuel efficiency additive products that have measurable effects because the people using them habitually change their driving style creating a false positive. Grifters have successfully been hawking this driving placebo scam for 50 years because when you bring all the other stuff in it's hard to tell what's real and what's just in the head. It's easy to falsely attribute things based on the stories we like to tell ourselves.

Also to extend the car pushing thing to the counternarrative example someone could claim that it was merely the tires were warmed up the second run, thus being more inflated and that's what caused a time discrepancy so drag coefficient is still an unsupported idea. No matter what you do, there's always a hole somewhere. That's why it's gotta be more than one type of demonstration. To borrow a French idiom, it's all about cherchez le creneau and constructing new experiments.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#199

Post by KMag » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

ingleswood wrote: post #192

beaner wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the point taken from the study is really designed to stoke tension when it is not really reflective of anything meaningful when it comes to job applicant filtering. It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities…

> The solution was to allow background checks again. I'm not sure this learning shows what you think it does, nor that the 'solution' is really a solution. Employers don't want to hire black people because they fear they might be criminals, and background checks allay this fear, allowing them to hire a subset of black people they feel are ok? To me this confirms that both background checks and hiring managers have a…

Another perspective is that a lot of bias isn't "I don't like X people", but rather "I feel X people are disproportionately Y, and I don't like Y". Objective data that this X person isn't Y seems like a good way to (1) reduce the harm of the bias in the short term and (2) hopefully diminish the bias over time, given enough objective data to fix their biased priors via observation.

If fixing people's biases via objective data isn't the solution, is the solution figuring out which people are unbiased and only hiring sufficiently unbiased people? What if evidence suggests that there aren't enough sufficiently unbiased people in the world? Is unsubstantiated rhetoric preferable to objective data in breaking down people's biases?

Of course the ideal solution to bias is to just not be biased in the first place, but that's not an implementable solution.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#200

Post by crispyambulance » Wed, Apr 28, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

beaner wrote: post #75

fishtoaster wrote: post #35

Key bit here: > Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social s…

Yeah, the point taken from the study is really designed to stoke tension when it is not really reflective of anything meaningful when it comes to job applicant filtering. It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books. There were communities that thought that background checks for employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities…

> ... Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds...

You make it sound like that kind of thing is impossible. It's NOT. Class signals, in many cases, are absolutely critical to landing a job. You give an example of "an artist with no experience" grifting into a SW engineering job-- that's a bit extreme. What is common, however, are corporate HR/hiring-managers and even entire professional networks that dismiss otherwise qualified people based on class signals.

You people are thinking of software engineering, of course because this is HN. But keep in mind that for some people, that's just "the help". There's a whole world of business jobs and networks where even showing up with the wrong suit will get you instantly, silently, and permanently dismissed unless you have some incredibly strong connections to that group. I know this anecdotally because I grew up in my father's tailor shop!

This isn't a shocking or unbelievable finding.