> We can't really think about whether rules are applied fairly or not, but whether the rules produce the outcomes that we want.
This is a more explicit way of phrasing an attitude that I've noticed in my community (a liberal U.S. university). However, I don't think it's obvious that this is the right principle to uphold.
I squirm with discomfort at the idea that we will only support "fairness" and empirical data to the extent that it is applicable to the outcome that we personally desire. This seems to imply that all evaluation metrics are "biased", until we can find a measure that selects equal representation across all demographics, regardless of the size of applicant pool or ability distribution among that pool.
What outcomes, exactly, do we want? More representation of under-represented groups? How does this relate to the goal of maximizing return on the portfolio? What does this mean for people who want a "meritocracy" (if such a thing can exist)?
Thoughts?
You can find the same inherent bias in many walks of life. Many of the hurtles to becoming a Doctor have nothing to do with being a good Doctor there just there to ensure the right kinds of people get into and out of the program.
Anyway, I think pg's whole argument is rather moot because the three assumptions that he states are incredibly difficult to measure (Part of the reason why it is very difficult to argue for or against affirmative actions without coming across as "biased").
Which essentially no one does? People favor fair outcome because they don't think the rules are, or can be, fair and often as a proxy for rules becoming more fair.
The "fair" rules would probably be to let people do stupid things and accept their own consequences, but Western culture is not willing to let houses burn down because people didn't buy into the local fire department co-op.
http://static.themetapicture.com/media/funny-equality-justic...
The left hand side is fair rules, the right hand side shows a fair outcome
Kurt Vonnegut on the subject: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
Don't forget that it's these "best" people who add a vastly disproportionate amount of value to the world. They're the ones who invent new technology and discover new science. We all benefit greatly from their success.
Inequality of outcome is the entire reason we see baseball played at a high level. When you demand equality of outcome regardless of talent or effort, you're asking for society to stagnate. You're asking for pervasive mediocrity. You're asking for us to kill effort and motivation. No thanks.
Alan: I believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
Bob: How do you know there isn't equality of opportunity?
Alan: Well, just look at how unequal the outcomes are!
Bob: Can you give me an example?
Alan: Group X is underrepresented in Field Y.
Bob: Maybe Group X isn't as good at Field Y.
Alan: What? That's racist and/or sexist!
nl: Sure.
To overcome possible biases in hiring, most orchestras revised their audition policies in the 1970s and 1980s. A major change involved the use of blind' auditions with a screen' to conceal the identity of the candidate from the jury. Female musicians in the top five symphony orchestras in the United States were less than 5% of all players in 1970 but are 25% today. We ask whether women were more likely to be advanced and/or hired with the use of blind' auditions. Using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases by 50% the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds.[1]
Bob: What? But that doesn't count because...
[1] http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact...
That's a pretty view, but it's inconsistent with reality, and radical egalitarians need to come up with increasingly implausible explanations to explain everyday circumstances that make perfect sense once you drop the blank slate model.
Or both. They're not mutually exclusive. Do Jamaican sprinters excel because they grow up around other sprinters or because they are blessed with natural ability? Yes. Simply put, or != xor.
A. Interviewers prefer candidates who are like themselves, interviewers are mostly white men, therefore most hires are white men.
B. The uterus and melanin both inhibit programming ability, interviewers are perfect judges of programming ability, therefore most hires are white men.
To look at the present (incomplete) evidence and decide that B is the more likely story, is racism/sexism.
Serious question: can you at least steel man this point of view rather than making it a ridiculous straw man? If you cannot steel man it, what makes you so sure you really understand the argument?
For bonus points, you can also point out the glaringly obvious complication to this chain of logic: A. Interviewers prefer candidates who are like themselves, interviewers are mostly white men, therefore most hires are white men.
a) the action of natural selection, sexual selection, and the hormone environment magically stop at the blood-brain barrier, or
b) there are real group differences between human populations?
We've already eliminated all overt discrimination. If you continue to cry discrimination, you're essentially postulating a giant unconscious conspiracy. I find the idea wildly implausible. It's much simple to just accept that not everyone is equal in aptitude and ability.
If biases affect how a professional musician hears music, is it so shocking to think unconscious bias might affect someone's judgment a candidate based on multiple fuzzy factors like ability, culture, and personality?
And that's just for job applications. You really think the criminal justice system has removed unconscious bias?
So of course the bosses pick out their friends and cronies. And a decent polity should restrain their corruption with blind auditions and accountable audits of prosecutions.
But investors should be looking for a good return on their money. They should be looking for the best investments they can find. If they're not, that is the source of bias right there.
Of course, the Wall Street industry is located in New York because you can use big city lights, strippers, and steaks to scam small town municipal pension fund managers who aren't investing their own money. Sand Hill Road is supposed to operate on different principles.
Have you ever actually worked for an orchestra? I have. The Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony and other top orchestras take quality very seriously.
Do you think, say, Georg Solti or Daniel Barenboim were happy with "just pretty good" musicians? Their reputations (and fortunes, for top conductors are very well paid) depend on consistently outstanding performances.
And I don't know how you call it non-market. When you're income depends on millionaires donating vast sums of money, you damn well better care about quality.
It's like saying a football coach doesn't benefit if his team drafts the best players.
Let me introduce you to the extensive scientific literature on implicit bias: http://www.aas.org/cswa/unconsciousbias.html
I don't agree.
One doesn't need to advocate accusing and manhandling to think the police should use statistically valid inferences in the name of justice. I myself am a member of a minority group—men—that is responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of crime, especially violent crime. You could mandate that cops ignore this reality and treat men and women with equal suspicion, but the result would be worse policing. For example, if you look at the statistics for New York's supposedly racist "stop-and-frisk" policy, you'll find that the disparity between whites and blacks is smaller than the disparity between men and women—indeed, smaller even than the disparity between white men and black women. Why have you never heard stop-and-frisk described as "sexist"?
This inconsistency is best explained politically: complaining about racial injustice against blacks is an effective route to power; complaining about gender injustice against men is not. It's the same reason you hear constant complaints about how white tech is, but not about how black sports are. Jesse Jackson can effectively shake down Apple and Intel [1], but there is no white equivalent shaking down the NFL. (Can you imagine if "increasing diversity in the NFL" meant "increasing the relative proportion of white players"? It would be a different world—not, incidentally, one I would particularly want to live in.)
Being male means people will infer based on a superficial assessment that I'm more likely to be a criminal than, say, my sister. But that inference is correct. Being a member of such a group is my lot in life, and complaining doesn't change what is.
[1]: See, e.g., http://www.mercurynews.com/census/ci_29048321/q-jesse-jackso...
[1]: See, for example, The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Then, once you get over your knee-jerk "That's racist!!!" reflex, take a look—I mean actually read for comprehension—The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray. Maybe add a little Cavalli-Sforza (via Steve Sailer) to the mix (http://www.vdare.com/articles/052400-cavalli-sforzas-ink-clo...). You can then graduate to basically anything by Arthur Jensen. As a topper, read "Rational"Wiki's entry on Human Biodiversity (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Human_biodiversity) and cringe at the smug, supercilious tone, endless strawmanning and distortion, and at the realization that you, too, were once taken in by the ridiculous "mainstream" views. (I certainly was.)
"Don`t believe any of this. It`s merely a politically-correct smoke screen that Cavalli-Sforza regularly pumps out to keep his life`s work — distinguishing the races of mankind and compiling their genealogies — from being defunded by the leftist mystagogues at Stanford."
"As you can imagine, this finding could get him in a bit of hot water if the campus thought police ever found out about it."
If you want a book length treatment, Michael Hart's Understanding Human History is the complete opposite of the typical, Jared Diamond, environmentalist accounts of human society. It is worth perusing - https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/har...
Condemning that inequality is different from affirming that selection should be altered to produce the outcomes people view as fair. One is saying, "Don't discriminate against Xs." The other is saying, "Not only can't you discriminate against them, you need to ensure that Xs have outcome Y. That is, you may be required to discriminate in their favor."
The latter is a value, and your point about mathematics being irrelevant stands. But the former is a mathematical claim, and pg was making a mathematical claim, so the mathematical argument you replied to is relevant.
There's a genetic basis for this, as well: women have two copies of each chromosome, whereas men have X and Y, so there's no second copy to take over in men, leading to more extreme outcomes, whether good or bad.
Now of course we ought to treat every group of people fairly, but we do need to examine our priors when doing so, especially when proposing ways to detect and punish people who may be thinking bad things, consciously or otherwise.
[1] We may not know just what 'IQ' is, but we do know that tests of mental ability all correlate with each other, suggesting an underlying factor. This, in turn, can be correlated with many other things, like success (or lack thereof).
When people complain about bias, they are not really talking about mathematical bias, but about something else: Their idea of fairness. They are talking about discrimination. And when we are discussing that, we can't really think about whether rules are applied fairly or not, but whether the rules produce the outcomes that we want.
Let's go for a ludicrous example: We'll accept all applicants whose IQ is higher than their weight in pounds. We'll be explicitly discriminating against heavy people, but at the same time, we have pretty clear implicit biases against men, and ethnic groups who tend to be taller. We might as well have said that we prefer children and Japanese women. There's no need for mathematical bias: The bias comes from the rule selection.
So, in your example, if our actual objective is to graduate an even amount of people from groups A and B, we have to, explicitly, make it easier for group B to get the scholarship. And many times organizations have objectives like that.
As a more real example, let's consider a police department. If the objective is to have a racial makeup that represents the community, and different races have different drop-out rates, the candidate selection will prefer one kind over the other, precisely to counter the drop-out differential.
So when regular people, and not mathematicians, discuss bias, the mathematical definition is unimportant. The one important thing is our stated objectives.