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A Woman’s Story

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: A Woman’s Story

#91

Post by yummyfajitas »

roguecoder wrote: post #64
tomjen3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this isn't a trick... There are two likely scenarios: 1) The employers are racist biggots based on things that don't correlate with job performance. In this case betting against them is a winning strategy. 2) The employers are racist based on observed data from previous hires. Based on that they assume that a person with an Arab name is less able to perform. This may not be fair for the individual, but may b…

It isn't a trick: the same thing happens in the US with African-American names on resumes and is trivially repeatable on your own if you are so inclined. It has nothing to do with job performance either: measured job performance isn't variable. It does have to do with cultural comfort, and the fact humans make hiring decisions instead of machines. In any case where human judgement has been replaced by measurement or…

It has nothing to do with job performance either: measured job performance isn't variable.

Citation needed for this one. It's pretty easy to to measure resume response rates, but I'd love to know how you would even go about measuring this one.

In any case where human judgement has been replaced by measurement or judgement blind to demographics diversity has increased.

This is simply false. For one example, take university admissions - after Grutter, universities have switched from objective systems to systems with human biases in order to increase demographic diversity.

Similarly, take a look at Ricci - the objective measurement system (firefighting tests) was replaced with a human judgement system in order to increase the number of minorities.

It's certainly true that diversity has increased in some cases, however - I believe women in classical music is the standard example.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#92

Post by Tichy »

tomjen3 wrote: post #61
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #28

The biggest lesson I see here is how much family solidarity and positive expectations makes in a childs education and life. Without her male tribe, and presumably the female tribe who sent the male tribe along, Reg's mum would have taken a different path. As a father of a young family with a spotty family past I wanted to focus on things I knew for my children. Perhaps I need to focus more on building that kind of su…

If you want to raise your child to be successful look at the mars-mellow experiment. Unlike IQ they could come up with a really strong correlation to school performance and later success and it seems (at least partially) to be something the family has some influence over.

I've read about it recently and found a snippet interesting that said the kids who could wait longer were better at distracting themselves with other stuff. Interesting because the initial thinking would be "discipline", but just teaching your kid discipline might not be the thing that helps them over the marshmallow challenge...

Re: A Woman’s Story

#93

Post by moldbug »

Tichy wrote: post #74
kahirsch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's because in the past, the IQ tests were not fair, objective and colour-blind, but were set up in such a way as to bias against poorer people (which will be mostly black in the USA). This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. "Disparate impact" merely means that blacks…

"They haven't been shown to be biased" When I think about that question, I think about questions that would be harder for me (white caucasian) than somebody from another "race" or culture. That is easy: for example imagine selecting some kind of image puzzles involving kanjii symbols, or telling apart chinese faces. They are just images, right, so no bias? But it will be much more easy to tell them apart for somebody…

* Another example I read about is how different cultures see the drawing of a box (a 3d wireframe). Apparently in western cultures people would see it as a drawing of a 3d box, whereas some poor test takers in Africa just saw a 2d drawing. This was then interpreted as Africans being less intelligent, when really they were just as correct as the people who saw the 3d shape. It just wasn't such a common meme where they lived to draw 3d shapes like that.*

This is an excellent example of the way IQ tests can indeed succumb to cultural training effects. It's pretty clear that this is what's going on with the Flynn Effect, for instance, which is not a real increase in intelligence since not g-loaded:

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/2010%20Editoria...

It's also why Raven's matrices don't work as well as they used to (IMHO). I think my own childhood IQ score is 10-20 points too high, because I'd seen too many IQ-test-like problems.

So, certainly a problem with all IQ tests. But a minor problem, or an existential major one? If it was a major one, these tests would lose their predictive validity - which remains quite high.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#94

Post by albertsun »

mhartl wrote: post #9

There were a lot of questions about numbers such as guessing the next number in a sequence. There were some logic puzzles, the kind where you have to figure out that it’s the baker who rides a bicycle and the mechanic who lives in the house with a red door. There were some strange questions where she was given a sketch of a three dimensional figure such as a cube with some missing pieces, and she had to guess which s…

I was (somewhat) recently given the Wonderlic test as part of the standard interview procedure for a fairly large US company that does a lot of recruiting on college campuses.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#95

Post by whyenot »

moldbug wrote: post #76
jberryman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. This says nothing about whether an IQ test is biased when used for other purposes than predicting future achievement (such as a job interview), and a supposedly-but-not-actually-objective test is a very dangerous thing; there's a lot of ugly historical baggage where science has met race in the past.

Job interviews aren't for the purpose of predicting future achievement? Say again? there's a lot of ugly historical baggage where science has met race in the past. There is indeed: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/gould-morton-lewis-2... If that isn't ugly, what is?

Here is a link to the actual paper instead of someone's highly editorialized blog post.

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal....

Re: A Woman’s Story

#96

Post by yummyfajitas »

roguecoder wrote: post #66
barrkel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in essence, black people today are "likely" incompetent at their jobs because of affirmative action? That seems to be what you're writing. And it doesn't look good.

It's also not how affirmative action works, even if it was still broadly used (which it's not): http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/granting-women-a... Aggregate performance was either unaffected or improved in the presence of affirmative action. This fits with history: until 1972 almost no women were admitted to MIT, but it didn't make the men perform less well for all the affirmative action they received no…

The issue is not that men perform less well because women are admitted into MIT. The issue is that women admitted due to AA might be lower quality than other candidates (men and women who would be admitted without AA), and therefore drag their group average down.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#97

Post by yevy »

albertsun wrote: post #94
mhartl wrote: post #9

There were a lot of questions about numbers such as guessing the next number in a sequence. There were some logic puzzles, the kind where you have to figure out that it’s the baker who rides a bicycle and the mechanic who lives in the house with a red door. There were some strange questions where she was given a sketch of a three dimensional figure such as a cube with some missing pieces, and she had to guess which s…

I was (somewhat) recently given the Wonderlic test as part of the standard interview procedure for a fairly large US company that does a lot of recruiting on college campuses.

Good luck in the NFL draft.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#98

Post by vannevar »

mhartl wrote: post #9

There were a lot of questions about numbers such as guessing the next number in a sequence. There were some logic puzzles, the kind where you have to figure out that it’s the baker who rides a bicycle and the mechanic who lives in the house with a red door. There were some strange questions where she was given a sketch of a three dimensional figure such as a cube with some missing pieces, and she had to guess which s…

[U]nfounded prejudice is unstable in a competitive market for labor.

Ah, if only this were true. This assumes the market is ultimately a meritocracy, and I don't think the evidence supports that assumption. And even if it were, inefficiencies in a market can persist for a very long time. While conscious, ideological racism is less common today, unconscious racism is a virtually universal feature of human behavior, affecting all corners of the job market. Adam Smith's invisible hand isn't going to fix job discrimination.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#99

Post by Daniel_Newby »

mhartl wrote: post #59
lambda wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowadays, it is illegal in the U.S. to give IQ tests to job applicants Citation needed. It is legal (at least based on the guidelines provided by the US Department of Labor: http://www.onetcenter.org/dl_files/empTestAsse.pdf ) to give people all kinds of tests as long as (a) they do not select against certain protected traditionally disadvantaged classes more than it does for the average applicant or (b) if it does…

Citation needed. I've edited it to read "effectively illegal", but the essential point remains. In practice, any company using a straight-up IQ test in job interviews is practically begging to be sued.

> In practice, any company using a straight-up IQ test in job interviews is practically begging to be sued.

Not if they secretly use undocumented race quotas.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#100

Post by rickmb »

'In Toronto, they could marry, but they couldn’t rent an apartment together as landlords were afraid of “trouble."'

A bit off-topic, but I'm somewhat shocked by this (and my own ignorance). I know about the US, but this was an issue in Canada?

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