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U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#61

Post by malchow »

kafkaesq wrote: post #15
malchow wrote: post #6

"The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion," said the lawsuit, which was filed with the department's Office of Administrative Law Judges. What in the world does that alleged statistic mean?

It's an elementary statistics calculation (which I'm not saying was done right; but that's the direction it was most likely coming from). Left unstated was what P(portion of Asian applications being >= 74%) should be given that, if I'm not mistaken, the percentage of Asian undergraduates (even at upper-tier schools) seems to top out at around 45% (a very rough figure based on quick eyeballing; but I doubt it pushes 6…

I understand that, thanks. The problem of course is that it bears no relation to actual reality. It may be the case that, for a pipefitter, every human body with Pipefitter Certification 409B can do the job identically to his fellow 409Ber. But there are very few jobs like that–trending to zero.

Result of this case: lawyers make a few million bucks. Government gets a few million bucks. Palantir has a few million bucks fewer with which to grow and produce new value. Fewer people get hired. No one wins. Administrative overreach: it's a thing.[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Administrative-Law-Unlawful-Philip-Ha...

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#62

Post by Spooky23 »

ones_and_zeros wrote: post #49

Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian. Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in…

There's alot of cheating and other shady nonsense.

Bodyshop contractors will do anything. I've seen cases where those companies send shill candidates to interview, claim that candidates have more experience in reality (in one case a 22 year old with a decade of Oracle Financials experience) and submitting fake resumes.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#63

Post by danso »

thedz wrote: post #53

I think many of the comments are missing a few important points: 1. Yes, 20% Asian hiring rate is pretty decent when you compare to the general Asian population at large. However , the lawsuit specifically alleges that, in one example case, the qualified application pool was 73% Asian. In that case, it's extremely abnormal to hire 17 non-Asians and only 4 Asians. 2. Palantir is involved in government contracting, so…

Has any other major tech company released numbers on what their hiring demographics look like compared to their qualified application pool? I've seen the demographics for employees in diversity reports, but not qualified-applicant pool numbers.

Because, sure, perhaps many of the Asian applicants are poor enough at English that it outweighs whatever got them into the qualified-pool. But I would guess that would be a problem for every SV tech company. So how does Palantir's stats compare to theirs such that it warrants the DoL to file a lawsuit?

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#64

Post by gnicholas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #51
gnicholas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the last line of the article: "The lawsuit seeks relief for impacted individuals, including lost wages." This sounds like remuneration to me. I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants, since this cannot reliably be done by surname or by any other indirect method. And since applicants cannot be required to provide this information in an application, there is no direct method either (othe…

> From the last line of the article: "The lawsuit seeks relief for impacted individuals, including lost wages." This sounds like remuneration to me. I missed that in reviewing the actual lawsuit (and thought it was an error in the article), but see it on review. In any case, the point that the government knows who the applicants are remains. > I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants The go…

Thanks for the link. I'm a little surprised that there isn't any info in the press release indicating how individuals can share their experiences with the DOL. Perhaps they figure they have 90% of the info already, and that's good enough?

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#65

Post by dragonwriter »

h4nkoslo wrote: post #50

Compliance would be a lot fairer and lower-overhead if the government would simply inform businesses of the racial composition they wanted to see, rather than randomly cracking down on firms because particular groups were "only" 4x overrepresented rather than 10x.

They aren't cracking down because of the ratio, they cracking down because of allegations of systematic elimination of qualified Asian applications from consideration at various stages in the hiring process. The applicant:hired ratios are among the pieces of evidence supporting the conclusion that discrimination was happening, but aren't the subjects of targets.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#66

Post by barkbro »

nicolashahn wrote: post #30
malchow wrote: post #6

"The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion," said the lawsuit, which was filed with the department's Office of Administrative Law Judges. What in the world does that alleged statistic mean?

Without actually doing the math, I believe it means that the odds that, if 21 names were pulled out of a hat with 130 names of "qualified applicants," and 73% were Asian, the probability that only 4 names (or less, I assume) are Asian is 1:1,000,000,000.

Isn't this correct though? That the probability of picking only four asians (if you chose at random) is just over one in a hundred million

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#67

Post by [deleted] »

gnicholas wrote: post #64
dragonwriter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From the last line of the article: "The lawsuit seeks relief for impacted individuals, including lost wages." This sounds like remuneration to me. I missed that in reviewing the actual lawsuit (and thought it was an error in the article), but see it on review. In any case, the point that the government knows who the applicants are remains. > I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants The go…

Thanks for the link. I'm a little surprised that there isn't any info in the press release indicating how individuals can share their experiences with the DOL. Perhaps they figure they have 90% of the info already, and that's good enough?

[deleted]

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

gnicholas wrote: post #64
dragonwriter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From the last line of the article: "The lawsuit seeks relief for impacted individuals, including lost wages." This sounds like remuneration to me. I missed that in reviewing the actual lawsuit (and thought it was an error in the article), but see it on review. In any case, the point that the government knows who the applicants are remains. > I don't know how the government can identify race of all applicants The go…

Thanks for the link. I'm a little surprised that there isn't any info in the press release indicating how individuals can share their experiences with the DOL. Perhaps they figure they have 90% of the info already, and that's good enough?

> Thanks for the link. I'm a little surprised that there isn't any info in the press release indicating how individuals can share their experiences with the DOL. Perhaps they figure they have 90% of the info already, and that's good enough?

The processes under the contracting rules at issue are fairly well established, and I suspect if additional information from applicants was relevant they would have actively reached out before filing the lawsuit. I think that this action is about the overall nature of the hiring processes at issue where the key evidence is the internal documentation of the hiring process and decisions made with in it, and not the experiences of individual applicants.

I imagine it must feel weirdly impersonal as someone within the affected class, though, since its both about your experience in a general sense, but not all that concerned with it in a specific sense.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#69

Post by Jugurtha »

What is the definition of Asian, here? One has to remember that Middle Eastern countries and Pakistan are in Asia.

Given the nature of what Palantir does, it is easy to guess why it would discriminate against a certain category of people who have ties to foreign countries in general, and sensitive countries in particular.

It is the same problem intelligence agencies faced when they wanted Arabic/Urdu speakers. Those who spoke these languages would never be vetted.

Re: U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians

#70

Post by toraforms »

Houshalter wrote: post #57
colmvp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "Asians" with "Blacks" or "Women" in that sentence and see how much support you'll get with that statement.

It's not equivalent, because those are traditionally oppressed groups. Whereas Asians are not oppressed and are fantastically successful relative to their tiny portion of the general population. Based on the report above, they were hiring between 20%-40% asians, which is 5-9 times their rate in the general population! You could make an equally strong case that they are disparately impacting whites!

Internement Camps, Chinese Exclusion Act, the Asian massacre of 1871, low representation in sports and the media.
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