News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by oh_sigh on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:03PM (#25231624)
I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful.

Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by slg on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:19PM (#25231758)
>I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful.

N = 15 while p ≈ 20. It has been a while since I have taken a stats class, but that sample seems plenty large enough to me.

>Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.

Corroborating is exactly what journalists do. From the article:

>five people with knowledge of the situation said.

>But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations

>according to a recording of the session shared with The New York Times

>In a company email he sent later, which was also shared with The Times

>wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by The Times.

>three people briefed on the situation said

>according to a recording of the event

>according to a copy of the message seen by The Times

>according to a copy reviewed by The Times.

>two people with knowledge of the situation said

The NYT talked to dozens of people, watched/listened to multiple recordings, and viewed numerous emails and Slack messages. This story is corroborated.

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by opinion-is-bad on Friday November 27, 2020 @08:48PM (#25234406)
Addressing only the viability of the sample for basic binomial analysis, the sample size is on the small end. This would be okay if we could reasonably expect the underlying events to follow identical and independent distributions, but when we know the people involved worked together that assumption is clearly void. Unfortunately this means we really can’t use any sort of statistical analysis on this datum. The models just don’t support it.
Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by oh_sigh on Friday November 27, 2020 @03:25PM (#25232272)
If you order the claims in the article on a scale of not racist at all to clearly racist, you'll see basically all of the corroboration comes from claims on the left side of that scale, and few if any on the right side. The claims I was specifically thinking about were things like:

> One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.

These have no corroboration, even though they allegedly happened in front of multiple coworkers.

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by slg on Friday November 27, 2020 @03:35PM (#25232343)
We don't need to corroborate each individual complaint. The story here isn't that one employee was passed over for a promotion. The story is the trend that all these anecdotes support. There is corroboration for the trend.
Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by googlryas on Friday November 27, 2020 @03:43PM (#25232413)
But the point is that the corroborations are all on the lesser or non-complaints of the article, not the most egregious ones. To make an extreme example, posting a series of actual facts that culminate in aliens have visited earth doesn't make the latter assertion any more true.

edit: Sorry, I'm the poster from above, I just posted from my phone which has a different account logged in that I originally intended to give hiring advice unlinked to my main account(opsec fail).

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by slg on Friday November 27, 2020 @03:56PM (#25232507)
The egregious complaints are corroborated by the other egregious complaints.

Let's use another example in which evidence is hard to find: sexual assault. If one woman accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, the burden of proof for her story is high. She would need some pretty strong evidence to get Cosby charged let alone convicted. She probably wouldn't even receive coverage in the mainstream media without some other form of evidence. However the entire situation would change if she was one of 60 women coming forward. Suddenly the burden of proof for that first woman is greatly diminished. Each individual's story is corroborated by someone else having a very similar story.

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by tomp on Friday November 27, 2020 @09:27PM (#25234635)
> Each individual's story is corroborated by someone else having a very similar story.

Our culture is full of anecdotes and stories that serve as a warning why this is a very bad idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by slg on Friday November 27, 2020 @10:02PM (#25234868)
Well I guess some witnesses lied over three centuries ago so we can't trust any group of people anymore for the rest of history. It is a bummer how that worked out.
Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by oh_sigh on Saturday November 28, 2020 @11:21PM (#25242900)
Well I guess Bill Cosby raped a bunch of people so we need to believe every claim for the rest of history. It is a bummer how that worked out.
Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by inglor_cz on Saturday November 28, 2020 @04:25AM (#25236490)
Interestingly, "carrying a gun" is an American stereotype here in Europe, not race-specific.

Isn't there like 400 million guns in private hands in the US? If so, the assumption that pretty much anyone you meet in the street might have concealed gun on them is not absurd per se.

But speaking about it aloud seems strange, yes.

"passed over for promotions"

This is the oldest workplace complaint ever and happens in racially homogeneous countries all the time. Favoritism in the workplace is probably as old as the pyramids.

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by fractionalhare on Friday November 27, 2020 @02:18PM (#25231746)
> I can think of contexts

Yes that's what was asked; which ones?

> especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions)

And those people would be wrong. It's incorrect to dismiss a study based on sample size without a discussion of significance and effect size in the context of the data.

Moreover I reject the premise that you should be assessing this story quantitatively rather than qualitatively. But if you insist: what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by googlryas on Friday November 27, 2020 @03:39PM (#25232380)
Okay - one context is where one department has a large number of black people, and that department is defragged for purely business reasons to a different office across the country. Most people never choose the relocation package, and so a big chunk of black employees end up quitting. That's the event that triggered 8 black employees of the 15 who left as I understand it from the article.

> what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?

I completely agree that it's a very bad look. It is probably even more likely than not that given those facts, it is due to racism. I guess the question comes down to, philosophically, how one answers the following question: In the quest to eradicate racism and racists, is it better to be over-zealous and destroy a few non-racists to make sure you get all the actual racists(the chemo approach) - or is it better to be slightly more circumspect and let a few racists slip through the cracks so that far fewer non-racists are punished (the US judicial system ideal)?

Re:‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase by whakim on Friday November 27, 2020 @06:58PM (#25233712)
But this question assumes that the root cause of the problem is that Coinbase has a disproportionately high number of "bad apples." To me that's exactly backwards; it seems much more likely that institutional culture tolerates and even encourages racism.