Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo
by TimPC on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @01:40AM
(#14954758)
I think the quinessential example of this is reminding people about their bias against minorities. Several studies have shown this drastically reduces false negatives and raises false positives to a level that is no higher than the false positive rate in the non-minority population. This isn't enough to say the false positive rate doesn't raise, but it's more than enough to say increasing false positives doesn't imply unqualified.
Re:Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo
by evolve2017 on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @09:38AM
(#14957669)
I think we're drifting away from the author's article.
His statement about 'lowering the bar' with respect to decreasing false negatives directly implies a relationship between candidate quality and the false negative rate.
I can't comment on your hiring analogy, as you have more experience in this area than I do. My responses were only to highlight the subtle negative character of the author's statement.
Here's one:
* Phone screens have a 50% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
* On-site interviews have a 0% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
Non-diverse candidates do one phone screen, and if passed, do an onsite. Diverse candidates do two phone screens, and if either passes, they go on to the onsite. For all candidates, if the onsite is passed, the candidate gets an offer.
* Unqualified candidates, regardless of diversity, never get an offer.
* Qualified, non-diverse candidates get an offer 50% of the time (the other 50% are erroneously eliminated at the phone interview stage).
* Qualified, diverse candidates get an offer 75% of the time (25% eliminated at the phone interview stage due to false negatives).
It seems to me that the author is advocating either doing two phone interviews for all candidates, or one phone interview for all candidates. Neither change would alter false positive rates, since false positive rates are 0% at all times.
If you're inclined to point out that all tests have a false positive rate >0%, substitute 0% for 0.00000001% and note that I stated the change in false positive rates could be trivially small to the point of omission in the comment above.