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

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

news.yale.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 265 posts

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

#211

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Kranar wrote: post #111
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can thank the wars against poverty, drugs, homelessness, and crime for this. These all serve as foils against considering ones own class and how easy it is to move downwards in America without any support for those not in abject poverty nor consideration for the disappearance of community building locations, events, and organizations, in large part due to union busting.

You are suggesting that draconian actions against drugs, homelessness and crime are causes for people associating with their own class and prejudicing other classes. I suspect it's the other way around; we are prejudiced to favor our own kind across many metrics and the consequence of that prejudice is homelessness, crime, poverty etc... I say this because the kind of prejudice you point out is rampant across all soc…

"America handles it a lot better than any other society."

How did you come to that conclusion? If I come up with some metrics, like the amount of support and education poor people can access, or the amount of people in jail, or access to justice, America is near the bottomn out of 'developed' nations.

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

#212

Post by zpeti »

sopp wrote: post #77
flavius29663 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a white that grew up very very poor, I can't possibly understand why so many black people try to convince me that I'm guilty of white privilege, when most of them had many more resources growing up.

> accused of being guilty of white privilege Maybe "accused" and "guilty" are not the right framing here - you inherit white privilege because of your ethnicity, it doesnt necessarily make you guilty of anything, but you benefit from it whether you want it or not. You can think of it in the same way that the wealthier people you mention have inherited a better social class by just being born. They can profit from the…

If people are multi dimensional, why are you grouping people by race and saying they have inherent characteristics based on race?

Going by your second paragraph, a black person born from wealthy parents who send their kid to harvard, has much more priviledge than a trailer park white kid.

So why are you grouping "whites" together as priviledged? What the hell does race have to do with anything?

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

#213

Post by ClumsyPilot »

flavius29663 wrote: post #69
anigbrowl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. You're less likely to be pulled over in most of the US than a black person driving the same car and wearing the same clothes.

I was stopped too by police and one time briefly searched, so what? Being stopped by the police is not a game changer. If you haven't done anything wrong you'll walk away and go to work and back home. Why is being stopped by police such a big deal? I think the police should do more of that in the US, it would reduce crime considerably.

"it would reduce crime considerably"

There are several things wrong with this statement: the idea that most crimes are commited by individuals and not corporations, the idea that they are commited on the street, and the idea that searching a person somehow can prevent crime.

Firstly a large chunk of crime, is commited by corporates, thats wage theft, consumer law breaches, money laundering, environmental protection, etc. Secondly most crimes are white collar crimes, and we do a very poor job of investigating both.

Lastly even for street crime, which is a small percentage of all crime, stop and search is just a populist show of force that does nothing usefull.

You know what actually reduces crime? Having competent detectives, investigators and prosecutors who can actualy arrest not the individual weed smoker but the kingpin running the show, or bring a complex case against a major company have it stand up to their highly paid team of lawyers.

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

#214

Post by bongobingo »

open0 wrote: post #74
throwawayboise wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but this illustrates that it's possible to make changes in how you present yourself to overcome potential class biases. This levels the playing field a lot. And why shouldn't people seeking higher status jobs or education be expected to present and conduct themselves accordingly?

"And why shouldn't people seeking higher status jobs or education be expected to present and conduct themselves accordingly?" Because accent has nothing to doing with "conducting oneself accordingly". Why is the onus on the victim of discrimination to align with your bogus, outdated way of thinking?

> Why is the onus on the victim of discrimination to align with your bogus, outdated way of thinking?

Everyone seems to understand what standard American spoken English sound like. If not, we would not have a concept of accents at all.

Perhaps one day all accents will be treated equally, but it won’t be this century. You can rage against the machine, but it will only hurt yourself.

The world doesn’t change at the pace people seem to want it to.

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

#215

Post by ClumsyPilot »

tomp wrote: post #208
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It’s simply invalid science" So the whole peer review comittee was asleep, but you are here to tell us

I don't think it's generally sound life advice to outsource thinking to others. In addition, judging by the topic, this was a sociology department study. Social studies are hardly even science , and the practitioners aren't exactly renowned for their statistical skills. I'm much more confident about my Oxford Masters of Science degree in math.

Can you be an expert in all things that affect your life? Have you studied nutrition, medicine, law, finance, construction and soil stability, to the extent where you can distinguish a phony research paper?

All of us rely on others in society to do their part and to get it mostly right. So if you are going to declare research invalid purely based on your judgement, you better have a bullerproof argument.

As an exaggerated example, I know a bloke who is "thinking for himself" and has concluded that a medicine is dangerous because it contains clorine, and clorine is toxic. So he has a set of facts, and they are correct, but the conclusion is wrong because he does not understand the basics of chemistry, and that once that clorine atom is part of a larger molecule, it has completely different properties.

If you study "facts" without understanding the field these mistakes are easy to make, all the more so if you approach from the high horse of a 'i am clever and have a brilliant degree"

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

#216

Post by tomp »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #215
tomp wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's generally sound life advice to outsource thinking to others. In addition, judging by the topic, this was a sociology department study. Social studies are hardly even science , and the practitioners aren't exactly renowned for their statistical skills. I'm much more confident about my Oxford Masters of Science degree in math.

Can you be an expert in all things that affect your life? Have you studied nutrition, medicine, law, finance, construction and soil stability, to the extent where you can distinguish a phony research paper? All of us rely on others in society to do their part and to get it mostly right. So if you are going to declare research invalid purely based on your judgement, you better have a bullerproof argument. As an exagge…

But I’m not doubting chemistry or physics. I’m doubting sociology (not a science), and even more I’m doubting math/stats (the basis of experimental science).

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

#217

Post by vmception »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #157
vmception wrote: post #3

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy. Racial discrimination also occurs. A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who exper…

Agree, except > 99% correlation to racial discrimination suggests that other races do not occupy the lower classes in any significant numbers compared to Blacks. I'd say 40ish %, which is still very high.

I never said that, the article never said that, nobody ever said that except you. Giving the benefit of the doubt here: I think you are thinking about a specific form of discrimination, which some people of some heritage overcome.

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

#218

Post by sokoloff »

dragonwriter wrote: post #185
sokoloff wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credentialing for software engineers (such as licensing and continuing education for nurses) has its own set of problems, both in terms of gate-keeping but more importantly in the type of work being entirely different. There’s a spread in performance from the +1σ to the -1σ nurse, but both will be functional in a nursing role, so checking credentials is a mostly sufficient evaluation of occupational ability. The spre…

> The spread in software ability is so much larger that the -1σ candidates (the least-effective ~15% of people who have ever worked in computer programming jobs) are worth trying to select against in a way the least effective ~15% of nurses probably are not. This isn’t an argument against credentialling since it is literally the direct effect of not having credentialling in software. Credentialing cuts most-to-all of…

You make a good point about an idealized credentialing mechanism cutting off the left tail of the distribution, but the spread in performance will still be much higher in credential-holding SWE than nursing and, because of the high leverage, still worth selecting for.

You can only be so much better at nursing than the average qualified nurse. How many more patients will the best nurse save? You can be several multiples (whether it’s 10 or not, I won’t get into here, but I think it’s at least 3) more effective than the average in SWE.

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

#220

Post by midjji »

emodendroket wrote: post #160
ErikVandeWater wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's not discrimination if it is objectively true.

I would certainly want to see proof before I accepted it was true. And even if it were true, we might find it socially undesirable for people to act on (it's "objectively true" that hiring disabled people costs an employer money too). I have previously seen a similar study to this one where landlords were able to determine a prospective tenant's race in brief phone conversations and were less willing to rent to minor…

Few challenge that the children of highly educated parents have higher academic achievement. As highly educated parents is strongly correlated with upper class. This is enough to make it quite likely that someone from an upper class background will be the better candidate in expectation, even if the only information you get is the socioeconomic background. We can quibble over details, but the more you dig into this the more convincing this will become. It does not matter as you already believe this.

With regards to minority tenants, institutionalized racism often leads to the case that non-racist agents will have sound evidence based reasons to discriminate. Not based on the properties of the group discriminated, but based on the behaviour of a third party. A decent example is if banks discriminate against a group, then their availability of credit is worse. This can create self perpetuating circles of discrimination, which can be sustained even if all involved organisations and individuals aren't racist. For a hilarious example of something similar, see: https://i.snipboard.io/kdu77.jpg This is a communication and organisational failure, not racism, but its difficult to distinguish, but critically yes, it means it could be.

Non-discrimination and positive discrimination is best viewed as taxes designed to address this kind of problem, and its working. But the habit people have of challenging this kind of thing as a kneejerk reaction is harmful. What you are doing is essentially claiming that their judgements are corrupt or trying to shame by implied association, and that isn't helpful.

Post reply on HN