Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother • Hacker News Board

Re: Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

#41

Post by sorasoraflora » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #28

sorasoraflora wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please go into more detail? I'm not sure what you mean by that. I'm not trying to argue, I just want to understand.

I went more in depth in another reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788460

Thank you! That clears it up, makes sense. It sounds like a different thing than what the other person was talking about.

I don't have personal experience either way - I see both of you saying the thing you're talking about exists and the thing the other doesn't. Is it possible both are happening? How would you know if the other isn't?

Re: Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

#42

Post by pyrale » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:46 PM UTC

sorasoraflora wrote: post #41

pyrale wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went more in depth in another reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788460

Thank you! That clears it up, makes sense. It sounds like a different thing than what the other person was talking about. I don't have personal experience either way - I see both of you saying the thing you're talking about exists and the thing the other doesn't. Is it possible both are happening? How would you know if the other isn't?

It's definitely possible some people do wrong stuff. I wouldn't trust people not to mess things up badly sometimes. But if you intend to criticize the whole discipline, you can't base your analysis only its failures.

Re: Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

#43

Post by AStonesThrow » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 9:49 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #23

lynx23 wrote: post #2

Rather longwinded personal intro, followed by due to the war, my grandma was allowed to become a dentist without actually going to medical school! YAY! What a horror story.

Very tangential, but interesting enough story: My dad grew up the youngest in a relatively poor family in Montana with four kids and a father that drank most of their cash away. My dad really needed braces, but they couldn't afford to pay a dentist, so my grandmother got a part time job as a dental assistant and paid very close attention to the process of installing and removing braces. After a few months, she "borro…

Ask an experienced cosmetologist at a salon how many of their clients come in, wearing a hat or scarf, asking them to rescue a home project going awry.

And then scroll around Google Maps to see how many nail and hair "salons" are running in someone's private home.

Re: Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

#44

Post by sorasoraflora » Wed, Oct 09, 2024, 11:24 PM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #42

sorasoraflora wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! That clears it up, makes sense. It sounds like a different thing than what the other person was talking about. I don't have personal experience either way - I see both of you saying the thing you're talking about exists and the thing the other doesn't. Is it possible both are happening? How would you know if the other isn't?

It's definitely possible some people do wrong stuff. I wouldn't trust people not to mess things up badly sometimes. But if you intend to criticize the whole discipline, you can't base your analysis only its failures.

If there isn't a reliable way of knowing whether its failures or its successes are the exception, I can see why this is a frustrating issue. Especially since both positions of for and against the approach ultimately have the same aim. The only real solution I see is solid data, but for something this complex and multifaceted that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

Re: Teeth as time capsules: Soviet secrets and my dentist grandmother

#45

Post by myrmidon » Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 2:55 PM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #26

myrmidon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather than doing the usual outreach programs only to the usual universities, you could decide to turn stones that you wouldn't usually turn in order to find people you wouldn't usually find. This reads to me "onesidedly relax hiring criteria to keep quota" and is exactly the kind of intervention into the hiring process that I expect to decrease average capability of new hires. Sure, if your criteria themselves are…

Outreach programs typically don't influence the hiring decision. But they influence the stream of people that will try to get an internship at your company. For instance, if you're a Stanford grad and keep strong ties with the alma mater, teachers there may say a word about you to their promising students, and you'll end up with more people from Stanford than from e.g. Yale. A DEI program could look to fix that by ad…

I will concede that if you do this very rigorously (reject out-of-quota candidates very early in the hiring pipeline, without letting current quota deviation ever influence any specific hiring decision) it is possible to not affect candidate quality.

But I think in practice (also from personal experience) it is very hard to make a business stick to this.

I also think that this mostly amounts to investing additional ressources into expanding the candidate stream (=> outreach programs), hiding a bunch of the costs (those outreach programs could have gotten you twice the benefit without the quota-rejection) for extremely questionable gain; consider: You could've probably gotten the same result from a DEI perspective by just paying female candidates the cost of those outreach programs (that would be a strictly better outcome for them, but a shit framework from an ethical POV).

In summary: I think it's always an excellent idea to remove racial/gender bias in hiring (=> create non-hostile environment, accomodate needs where possible, get rid of condescending, sexist pricks in HR), but I think it is misguided, pointless and wasteful to try and balance the outcomes at the very end...