121–130 of 265 posts
See "My Fair Lady".
What else matters:
1. height
2. vocabulary
3. posture
4. clothes (see "Dress For Success")
5. age
6. attractiveness
7. health
"Just yew wight, 'enry 'iggins, just yew wight!"
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Ironically, HN frequently touts the benefits of "just talk to someone about their work" over the impartial whiteboard interview. I far prefer the Software Engineering industry's focus on design and coding interviews. Impartial. Unrealistic. But fair.
Software coding interviews can be extremely subjective. I have seen someone rate similar responses vary differently based on their overall assessment of the candidate. It’s also extremely difficult to be equivalently helpful when answering questions. Even deciding what’s a fair assessment is difficult. Should you give someone more slack if they haven’t used a language in 2 years, but remember most things well enough?
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Erasing your regional accent probably goes a long way. I have a pretty strong Maine accent and it’s hard to suppress. I don’t think I could fake a true bourgeoisie affect though, partly because I find it so repulsive. But also I think you have to have had grown adults as your personal servants as I a child to really nail that sort of bored/unconcerned affect. Where you truly consider certain people to be beneath you.…
Sending out an HN bat signal here: I can't find the article/post that this comment reminded me of but it was a semi-recent discussion/breakdown of class in the USA. All I remember is that it called out Jeff Bezos as upper middle class.
And I found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26351913
The line about Bezos is in the linked article.
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I've got a lot of problems with this work, but I think I can best summarize my issues with the question: Who are the "Democratic elites"? A list of "Democratic politicians" and quotes from them is given, but I'm curious if that's the full summation of who the "elites" are, or if there are other, thus far unnamed "elites". I can't think of a better example, but this reminds me of some of the papers on skull size from…
While I don't think the study is particularly strong by itself, your criticisms are kind of strange. I find that hard to believe that defining a roster of "Democrat elites" materially changes the survey responses and analysis. The only way this critique is relevant is if you reject the premise of the paper, but you don't seem to be doing that? Is that a critique of all correlative studies? What specifically is this p…
The issue as I see it is that this supposes there's a selective group of people setting an arbitrary agenda, whereas the reality is closer to the idea that the majority of Americans are expressing this point of view and these specific politicians are repeating it.
They're committing the very sin they're trying to study, dividing the point of view into a class-based one, by claiming it's the "elites" holding the viewpoint, and not the people themselves.
I would scrub the word "elite" from the paper, it creates needless tension and isn't accurate (or at the very least, define the term specifically). Additionally, I'd directly address the idea that these results could be confounded by latent racism, and I'd probably do that by introducing the concept in the introduction, and refer back to it in the conclusion.
In other words, "Future research should investigate the causal mechanisms behind this." is not enough. Maybe end with this, but do more.
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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…
> 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…
I.e. something that does matter.
I notice with wry amusement that my own speech patterns vary depending on who I'm talking to. For an obvious example, using simpler words and a higher pitch when talking to very young children. But I use different vocabularies when talking to different groups of adults, too. This is all quite unconscious. I bet we all do this.
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…
I must say it also looks rather beneficial to some - while the lower classes are duking it out over a divisive issue the upper classes are safe from social reform. Divide and rule.
>If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
It does not just apply to dynamics between white and non white people, it applies to all people, even within tribes of the same skin color, and probably even other tribal species.
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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. There are 32 million traffic stops each year. In 2019 the police shot 14 unarmed black Americans. I think every death is unforgivable, but let's not pretend that going to work and back as a black person you're putting your life at risk when meeting the police. Ther…
I’m familiar with these talking points and what influences you would have to regurgitate them. That talking point still assumes that the killings of armed people was necessary. It doesn't tell you if they were legal holders, responsible concealed carry holders, the type of weapon or anything. Supporting this frame of thought requires being too much of an apologist for an institution that just has too many options wit…
I was making an argument that the police is about as shitty for whites and blacks. It's not a matter of racism, but of bad policing. I want police to be better to everyone, not just black people.
If we don't address the root of the problem (and racism isn't it), you just end up with other Baltimores. For example just the other day I saw in the news that NYPD is losing officers at twice the rate since 2020.
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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.
privilege is a misnomer when its really freedom from some distractions nobody is going to call the police on you for simply walking in a neighborhood nextdoor and facebook groups arent going to have messages from vigilant bored housewives just because you walked down the street sundown towns and the ideas that reinforce them don't exist for you but saying “privilege” suggests other things are handed to you that would…
The people calling the cops are likely the white neighbors on their black neighbors and not the other way around. In your nextdoor example, it's not just "bored housewives", it's "white bored housewives". I don't suppose you feel that black bored housewives are also posting those messages.
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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…
> 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…
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 good job at estimating average competence from social class based on their knowledge (i.e. "bias").
It does not show that in an interview process where you are allowed to evaluate the candidate on factors that matter for the job, higher class matters at all (i.e. given two equally qualified candidates that are interviewed by an experienced hiring manager, the higher class one gets better offers/evaluation of competence).
And this is the bias that matters because it applies to the real world.
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> 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…
This is how research works, you isolate variables. By OP’s logic science is never testing for anything “real.” I’m not surprised that HN rushes to discredit the idea that hiring is not a perfect meritocracy, but this is kinda silly.
It says nothing about what actually matters: do hiring managers with the ability to properly interview "equally qualified" candidates from different social backgrounds do so effectively (i.e. offer them similar compensation), or do they still rely on the base rates (i.e. bias), and how big is that effect?