What if it's a cultural difference that has negative effect on the population in question?
Do you respect the difference, or try to change things so that those in said population who would prosper under different outlooks can do so?
This is a serious question, and I genuinely don't have a good, general answer. I can see this line of thought being used to superficially validate any bias one cares to in a "that's just how things are" kind of manner, which helps no one.
But we also have to acknowledge that differences will lead to, well, differences. How do we differentiate between negative and neutral causality?
Now we can speculate how many submissions were from people that don't identify as male (was it 50 or less%? Github hasn't released details to my knowledge). The issue though is that once the results (of what appears to be a fair process) didn't match the desired narrative, people screamed sexism and made mostly emotional arguments.
You've mentioned an "inter-generational correction schema" elsewhere in the thread. In most institutions, this essentially gets instated as quotas which embitters the majority in the system (including the people they target to enable because it's assumed they had to get past a "lower bar").
[1] https://archive.is/8SsNp#selection-381.122-494.0 [2] http://archive.is/NrLqE [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
Applying the selection quota to the hiring pool that passes skills would get around the "quota-implies-less-skilled" issue.
Let's formalize it a bit, I think this helps clarify.
Let A be the hiring propensity, B be job preparation (education, experience, what have you), and C be the "blinding factors" Helsinki is trying to address.
As a model we would like the joint propensity for everyone to be normalized. In other words, P(A,B,C) would be about the same.
The joint propensity P(A,B,C) would be expressed as
P(A,B,C) = P(A | B,C) * P(B | C) * P(C) [0]
Helsinki is making the first term, P(A | B,C) independent of their "blinding factors", or, in other words, P(A | B,C) = P(A | B).[1]
The remaining terms P(B | C) and P(C) are unaffected. It is P(B|C) differential that many arguing for what I call non-autarky "social corrections" (we do something as a society).
Since Helsinki's decision affects _only_ the conditional probability P(A| B,C), the other factors are still at play, and P(A,B,C) remains at issue.
There is nothing that can be done by Helsinki's hiring department for P(B|C) in the short term -- people are dealt the hand they have, life isn't fair, and so on. Completely true.
By blinding themselves, they set P(A|B) to be flat on C and no "equalization" of P(A,B,C) can be observed.
A truly egalitarian society would have P(B|C) = P(B). However, we aren't there. C, what Helsinki blinds themselves to, matters for qualifying life experiences.
The model that is being argued for by you and others I believe is formalized as a conditional independence model, namely that the propensity of hiring is independent of race, conditional on life preparation: P(A,C | B) = P(A|B) * P(C|B).[2] Note though: bias still persists: P(C|B) = P(B|C)*P(C)/P(B) -- we can't get away from that P(B|C) term in either model, and we know qualitatively that P(B|C) != P(B), hence why a correction can be positively argued for (rather than solely from emotion or duty).
Anyhow, that's the model in mind, and I'm open to being wrong/corrected. Thoughts?
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After thinking about it more, it seems that the ultimate goal of Helsinki is to make P(A|B,C) = P(A|B), not the latter model.
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[0] Chained conditional probabilites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_rule_(probability)
[1] Independent variables definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_(probability_theo...
[2] Conditional independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence
Edit: I should have been more precise when referring to blind hiring. I meant completely blind hiring, including the "on-site" interview stage(making it "blind" could be difficult). Obviously you're also correct about the earlier life experiences which could have been impacted by numerous factors, but my perception on that is the same as with law, it shouldn't be retroactive because you can't change people's past. Besides, each case is different and applying counter-biases here is like blind shooting.
If I understand where you are coming from, "landing the job interview" are the direct factors Helsinki is choosing to be blind to, like name and so forth. Am I understanding that right? If so, let me clarify the point -- the factors that Helsinki _will_ judge resumes on -- experience and so forth -- are pre-conditioned on your name (etc.). So the fact that one makes the initial cut is still driven by the factors Helsinki chose to be blind to.
> Also, I completely condemn the notion of attempting to fix the problem with affirmative action, primarily because it attempts to solve inequality(evil) with deliberate and explicit discrimination(greater evil).
I get where you're coming from on this. The method I propose, if Helsinki uses the blinding methodology, is to impose any "corrective"/affirmative actions after the the blind evaluation of skills. That way every person is ensured to be qualified (avoiding the critique of "diversity hires"). One possible (and usually a default) "corrective" approach is autarky/doing nothing.
And... that's my whole point! I appreciate the discussion.
The identification of the issue is at hand. Consider Computer Science. Historically far fewer women go through the training for a variety of personal reasons and societal pressure. So, on the margin, blind/anonymous hiring ignores that upstream delta between females in population and skilled females in hiring pool. Whether this is desirable or not is not my point, only that this is "baked in bias" perpetuating down the line.
It's noble to build a society where we value blindness on characteristics irrelevant to hiring. Doing it piecemeal can result in furthering these baked in biases.
A better approach would be to split the skills validation (blind) from the move-forward decision (adhering to whatever inter-generational correction schema the society has decided upon) where the only pool of eligible move-forwards meet the established skills validation. In this way, you only get skilled candidates, and you can satisfy whatever other characteristics that need satisfaction.