By conducting studies where you study the effect of the race variable. This has been done many times over in multiple countries and the results have shown that colored people and racial minorities are discriminated against. But despite the vast amount of empirical data, people still refuse to believe that racial discrimination is a factor in the job market.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli... https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276548 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lehr-2015-000...
Well, your examples seem pretty cherry-picked and not necessarily generally empirical (ie. lots of embedded subjectivity).
Now your first link is more interesting and is usually the one that everyone pulls out as "absolute proof" that discrimination is live and well in modern hiring against Black people.
I wonder, though, how much of this is in the bias of the experimenters when they selected "Black sounding names" and how much is just unfamiliarity with an "unusual" (and by this I mean rare) name and how much is the knee-jerk reaction to a name (basically real prejudice).
For example the actual most common names for Black children in the US are – Jacob, Emma, Michael, Ava, William, Emily, etc. And I suspect they are not choosing those names on purpose.
On the other hand, my ex's sister named their son "Air Jordan" (for his first name) and their daughter Cinnamon for her first name. And I personally have great uncles with the real first names of "Snapbean" and "Squawk" (I am not joking).
None of these people are Black, but how do you imagine their resumes are accepted at large (or small) companies?
So I am wondering how much is prejudice against the person and how much is prejudice against the name?
Why is it your choice to make? When you hire someone, you're hiring everything they bring to the table. You might be wrong in your interpretation, but it's what you've got. So perhaps you find names beyond the pale, but why not dress codes too? Names and many other characteristics involve human choices well beyond genetics.
You do realize that the orchestras used to hire blind, that is, the audition was done with the musician hidden behind a curtain and all other factors withheld, so that the only factor that was perceivable was the sound of the music from the musician, in an effort to remove bias. And New York Times in the last year or two had an editorial decrying this as unfair, because it didn't give the correct outcome of reducing underrepresentation. The DIE crowd does not want fairness and equality of opportunity; they want equality of outcome. They want diversity hires, not hires of the maximally strong candidates.
I always find it weird that people see this is a bad thing. Equality of outcome is equity. Extra time for people with learning disabilities is equity, ada regulations is equity, hearing aids, glasses, booster seats, handicaps in golf and chess, giving bus seats to the elderly are all equity. Equity is the thing we naturally strive for in basically all aspects of life. Provide aid when we can, receive aid when needed.
> They want diversity hires, not hires of the maximally strong candidates.
That's not what affirmative action is, it's recognizing both the systematic and individual disadvantages that someone experienced and, potentially, depending on what they are, realizing that they have more potential than meets the eye. It's like basing hiring decisions entirely on leetcode challenges and putting on your blinders on not realizing that the people who have the time to waste on leetcode is a skewed sample of the population.
Who is the more impressive student? Alice who had a stable suburban comfortable upbringing and went to prestigious private high school and got a 34 on her ACT, or Bob who grew up with a single father, went to a public high school in an high needs district, had to work a part time job after school and babysit his little brother every day before his dad got home and got a 29?
The above is an example of an individual disadvantage, now apply that same logic to systematic disadvantages.
The kid with the higher score is a more impressive student. But there might certainly be a justification for giving the kid who had a tougher road to get there a leg up.
But that’s different from what we’re doing, where we apply racist assumptions and treat certain minorities as if they’re all from single parent homes, regardless of whether that’s true for the individual.
That’s not what you should have taken from that example at all, which is specifically why I used two white coded names. The point is that people grok individual disadvantages easily and giving them a leg up feels natural, and the same reasoning should be applied to systematic disadvantages.
> regardless of whether that’s true for the individual.
What you’re describing is looking at privilege through the lense of intersectionality, which nobody disagrees with.
What’s a “white coded name?” Most Black people have names similar to other Americans. E.g. here are the top names by ethnicity for babies in NYC in 2013: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/vs/baby-names-.... The top 3 Black baby names are Ethan, Jayden, and Aiden. Playgrounds in Park Slope are full of kids with those names.
Cough. Intersectionality assumes that people's problems are the problems of their identities, and that their identities are the ones visible to others. Black, short, etc.
Identity politics seems purpose-built by "allies" to explain why the allies don't actually listen to the people they're helping.
For instance, Thomas Sowell isn't treated as an individual who disagrees with BLM's policies instead he's declared to be a defective or traitorous black man who isn't part of the real black people group.
By contrast, progressive POC are always presented as representative of their race even when they’re not. Ilhan Omar is held up as the face of Islam in America. But there’s way more Trump voting Muslims than ones who are as far left as Omar.
If equity was our standard we wouldn't give eyeglasses to anyone because blind people can't see at all.
Instead we strive for equality, where everyone is able to use the best devices they or their insurance can provide regardless of others. I can get glasses to restore my vision to 25/20 even if yours never was 20/20.
> That's not what affirmative action is, it's recognizing both the systematic and individual disadvantages
Affirmative action doesn't treat people as individuals. It's specifically about using people's visible identities (whether or not they do!) to determine how they're treated. Under affirmative action a rich black man would get a job before a poor white man and it would be defended by its supporters as undoing systematic obstacles even if the recipient never encountered those obstacles themselves.
> people who have the time to waste on leetcode
Why do we hate people who teach themselves a skill? Why is it literally considered a negative these days?
> a skewed sample of the population
They're individuals, not population samples.
> Who is the more impressive student
If I was running a scholarship this would be the criteria because it would indicate who would get the most out of the resources. If I'm hiring them to fit a defined role I only care about their current skills, not where they started.
Yes, you are missing my point. I am not insinuating anything, I am stating directly that some people might be biased against unusual (to them) names. Names that are difficult to say, spell, etc. depending on the language, or just out-right stereotypical prejudice with a name (which is what these studies just assume). I am not saying that any of this is ok, people rarely get to pick their names. What I am saying is that it might not all be based on the color of people's skin.
Begin biased against Black skin is a problem (and is the important bit in some instances). Being biased against "Black" names is also a problem, even if you can devise situations where the name is attached to a person who doesn't have Black skin. And both are racism, because they are directed at people based on the assumption that they are in a particular ethnic group, even if that assumption is wrong.
You assume a racist motive in your scenario, but what if the bias is actually towards all unfamiliar names, only some of which are black names?
The specter of racism is so great that people are expected to be free from every potential bias because it could be race-equity related somewhere.
> You assume a racist motive in your scenario
No, I don't assume any motive whatsoever. I'm talking only about actions.
You are of course entirely right that it shouldn’t matter in the decision process, unless the job at hand is “person named John”. But a point to raise is that this holds for positive discrimination as well, if the goal is to increase the number of X minority employees, then you cant optimize for that by selecting for X-sounding names if that’s a bad proxy.
A black person, a white person, and an asian person with the exact same credentials mean extremely different things in terms of absolute rather than relative competence level, as a consequence of affirmative action policies. The filters they had to pass through are different, and therefore an Asian person who went to Harvard almost certainly is in the top 1% of the absolute test score distribution, whereas the same is not necessarily true for the others.
Since job performance is correlated with absolute capability, and not group-relative capability, discrimination on the basis of race is rational in a society that employs affirmative action policies at prior points in the credentialism pipeline. Correcting and controlling for this would only be possible by designing resumes that don't reference achievements that have group-relative thresholds.
> A black person, a white person, and an asian person with the exact same credentials mean extremely different things in terms of absolute rather than relative competence level
Say these sentences out loud.
That doesn't change the fact that the absolute level of current ability implied by the same credential differs between groups, when the credential is conferred via affirmative action.
Based on your other comment, you would claim "Affirmative Action" is why you think this. But it is important to realize that by making this assumption at all you are expressing biased judgements on these three humans entirely based upon their race.
One of the other two could have had the highest possible score of all time, but you have written them off by making an assumption about them, based on race. You have made a judgement based on statistical inference, when you should have treated them all equally.
You may not intend it in any ill-meaning way, but it is important to realize that minor assumptions like this are pervasive, and they have far-reaching effects.
I think it's important to distinguish between probabilities and possibilities. It is possible that any of them has the highest score. However, it is most likely that the Asian does.
Let me articulate this phenomenon in a more neutral example. Suppose you start an elite academy for the game Go. All of the best Go players in the world come from places like South Korea, China, etc, who have a long history of playing the game. However, you would like to increase the appeal of the game internationally, so you institute an affirmative action policy that says 50% of your students must come from non-asian countries.
Let's say you have 100 slots to fill each year, and you operationalize your affirmative action policy as follows: You take all the asian applicants, rank them by ability, and take the top 50. You take all the non-asian applicants, rank them by ability and take the top 50.
It should be obvious that, in this example, the average absolute ability level of the two groups will be quite different. The incoming Asian group would crush the non-Asian group in competition. This isn't due to any innate racial capacity gap, but due to the historical and cultural relationship to the game of Go.
Now, you educate each group together for say, 4 years. That education process may homogenize ability a little bit - helping the lower performers improve more than the higher performers (though the opposite may also be true), but it's probably not sufficient to close the rather large incoming skill gap.
Now, if you were watching a match, and the only things you knew about the two competitors were that they both attended your elite academy, and one was from South Korea, and the other was from California, who would you bet on to win?
It's entirely possible that the Californian is better! It's just less likely, given no additional information. Critically, this isn't an argument against the affirmative action policy. The AA policy is doing just what it should do - helping to close the skill gap. But it does means that statistical reasoning about racism has to be sensitive to this confounding variable if it wants to make truly accurate inferences.
However, the point that I am trying to make is that we, as a society, should be trying to ignore these obvious statistical likelihoods when we are choosing a candidate. Those statistical likelihoods have nothing to do with the candidate themselves. If we make these kinds of interpretations, we are no longer judging a candidate based on who they are, but rather who we think they might be. And who am I to make that judgement? I'm nobody special. That's all I'm trying to say, really.
EDIT Someone else in the thread brought up the idea of why there is AA for school, but not for the workplace as in my argument. It's kind of a different topic, but I think it's a good counterargument about the complexity of this. I don't really have a good answer, to be honest, but it will be on my mind for awhile now.
Ah, ok I see. I didn't understand your point then. I think we at least kind of agree on that point. What I was trying to say is that, I don't think that it's accurate to characterize the resume study as proving racism or racial discrimination, given the bias induced by AA. At least, providing they are not going further than correcting for that bias.
I do agree with you that in an ideal world, people would try to avoid factoring that in. But, it is important to keep in mind I think that hiring decisions are often extremely consequential for the people that make them (in a way that university admissions are not), and as a consequence, asking the decision makers there to intentionally ignore pertinent information is almost always going to be a losing proposition.
I think, even if people are correcting a bit for this bias in the hiring pipeline, AA is still providing considerable value to historically disadvantaged candidates, by helping them get access to alumni networks, and presumably a higher quality education and hopefully that will be sufficient to close the remaining skill gaps over time.
The truth is one. If you lie to other people and demand they lie to you it affects your entire model of the world. If there are facts about the world that you would prefer not to acknowledge they are linked to other facts. Lying consistently requires enormous effort.
* A name: must be in top 1% of test scores
* B name: must be in top 5% of test scores
* C name: must be in top 10% of test scores
The following 3 students are admitted:
* Allison (is in top 1%)
* Brian (is in top 4%)
* Caitlin (is in top 1%)
We can only safely assume that Allison is in the top 1% because her criteria certifies it. Even though Caitlin in actuality is in the top 1%, because her entrance criteria is more lax, we are not sure.
I think this is one downside of affirmative action, people are unsure if a person passes based on affirmative action or purely on merit. Now we consider the upsides and downsides of affirmative action, and decide whether it should be implemented.
Making assumptions about them based on probabilities is exactly the problem here, and it is one that we can easily avoid.
Using the credentials is making assumptions about them based on probabilities.
This is obviously the golden standard we are trying to achieve, but how do we get there? It's theoretically impossible to treat everyone equally and apply affirmative action at the same time. I understand there is a difference between equality and equity, but I'm replying to the words you wrote.
Affirmative action may be the best solution we currently have to deal with systemic racism, but ultimately it's trying to fix prejudice with prejudice - and that is not a perfect solution. It also creates a lot of confusion because sometimes we say to treat people equally (as you say when trying to decide between hiring candidates), and other times we say we should help out the disenfranchised (such as when admitting students to schools). So where do we draw the line for when we want equality versus equity?
My point is this is a complicated problem with no perfect solution, and people will correctly point out flaws with it both theoretically and (more relevant for this discussion) how we implement it.
Anyway, I think we mostly agree. Cheers.
Study results may only suggest something, which can often have the appearance of showing it.
> It's clearly because of some more innate qualities measured by IQ.
This is an absurd statement, because even if the IQ differences exist, you are jumping to a conclusion here: that difference in IQ is innate, and not a result of racism or other external factors, with your only justification being:
> And the differences appear before school age, so it's hardly any opportunity for racism to cause it.
One of the biggest factors for childhood success is how much time your parents spend with you when you are young. If historic racism means your family is poorer, it likely means your parents can spend less time with you. Just one example of many of how this argument just doesn't hold water.
See, for example, Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. (2004). General Mental Ability in the World of Work: Occupational Attainment and Job Performance, cited 1600+ times:
> The psychological construct of general mental ability (GMA), introduced by C. Spearman (1904) nearly 100 years ago, has enjoyed a resurgence of interest and attention in recent decades. This article presents the research evidence that GMA predicts both occupational level attained and performance within one’s chosen occupation and does so better than any other ability, trait, or disposition and better than job experience. The sizes of these relationships with GMA are also larger than most found in psychological research.
One main reason why you might not have seen this is that you didn't go out of your way to find it, and the mainstream publications systematically hide, distort, and often blatantly lie about the existing evidence.
Seriously who cares about a couple of IQ points?
It is a legitimate metric of *something*.
No one falls for pseudoscientific groupthink like communities of affluent, well-educated people.
Using deeply culturally and/or language biased IQ tests.
Using IQ tests that essentially just test the quality of education they received.
Sampling unrepresentative populations.
Using studies from an Apartheid state as an example of "a state without systemic racism".
Using tests that aren't IQ tests and the author explicitly say isn't equivalent and "converting" them with arbitrary systems. Literally just making up data.
Cherry picking the worst data from studies which the original study explicitly calls out as less likely to be accurate.
Every correlation vs causation mistake you can possibly make.
Just discounting every environmental factor except parental socioeconomic status.
Assuming environmental factors are a result of genetic factors (which is literally just assuming their conclusion).
Regularly citing a literally white-supremacist funded source as unbiased.
Then you weren't doing proper IQ tests. They must be administered by suitably qualified professionals and not made available for practice. You were cheating. Of course you're going to get good at a game by breaking the rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism#Impacts_o...
is contested/wrong
How do you fight intentional racism, with a healthy dose of residual lasting generational effects from past racism, with passivity?
It's like creating a game with rules, but having no penalty for breaking them for the first half of the game, and then saying it's just the fault of the loser if someone cheats to beat them.
Or saying "I can't tell for sure if it's below freezing, my thermometer has an error bar of +/- ten degrees" and ignoring a bunch of freezing water around you.
If the movement to fight this spectre of "institutional" racism would focus less on applying their rules to everyone, and more on applying their rules to actual perpetrators, it would garner more support from the people it needs. To use your analogy if you're sitting in your neighbors pool and he says it's not freezing, but there's freezing water, perhaps don't blame all of his neighbors.
Others pointed out some studies which showed potential biases in hiring and that seems like a great potential proxy to understand the current level of racism in hiring.
A foundational belief here is that correlation is causation!
The assumption alone is wrong yet any other assumption inevitably leads to stigmatisation and segregation.
Whatever study anyone comes up with it will inevitably turn into a discussion if either racism or discrimination.
Obviously there are a lot of mechanisms that might change that equal expectation, but it still seems reasonable to me that for most jobs the default expectations should be around equal.
> In recent decades, as understanding of human genetics has advanced, claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
The article is full of references of primary sources that support this claim.
It is heavily censored with wikipedia's left-leaning bias. Go read the talk page to see it in action.
Wikipedia doesn't have a left-leaning bias, reality does.
It's impossible to take you seriously when you say things like this.
No wonder you think there's nothing wrong with Wikipedia. As long as your "side" controls the narrative, you'll nod your head and clap like a trained seal no matter what lies and "misinformation" they spread.
Wiki rules are tools to build better content, not absolutes we must die on. If 90% of readers of an entry find it lacking or untrustworthy because it doesn't mention well-known studies or even fields of endeavor then it's not a useful article.
> despite what a number of skull-measuring right-wingers would like you to believe
Do you believe that acceptance of the theory that genes impact IQ is split along communist/non-communist lines? That communists are less likely than average to believe this? These broad statements and the identities around them are the partisanship behind much of the politically-motivated editing going on in Wiki now.
>Do you believe that acceptance of the theory that genes impact IQ is split along communist/non-communist lines?
Maybe. I think the idea that genes impact IQ and that IQ actually usefully measures anything - certainly anything that could be described as 'intelligence' - is probably split that way.
The point of Wiki is to educate and that means reaching the uneducated who are going to have those nasty uninformed opinions. Even if I agreed with your assessments of the people involved I'd want to improve them, not crap on them for where they are. If Wiki is only for those who already believe the right things, why even have Wiki?
> split along communist/non-communist lines?
Why would a support for a scientific concept be split across groups by economic philosophy? Is there anything inherently capitalist or communist about these ideas or are these ideas conflated with identities?
> [IQ being] anything that could be described as 'intelligence'
That it's related at all, or that it's a perfect match? Because of course we'll always have subjective views of the definition of intelligence and no one test will satisfy everyone.
> the idea that genes impact IQ and that IQ actually usefully measures anything
Unlike intelligence, IQ is definable, stable, and correlates highly to job performance. (Of course, because the tests resemble many work-skill tasks...)
Why would IQ be the only trait that isn't genetic at all?
I have no desire to see any given racial group maligned, even with "correct" data, but I feel the discussion about genetic traits is limited for fear of this, and that this censoring falls exactly along the lines of the USA's post-slavery racial lines. To me this suggests that this is a you (the USA) problem, not an us (the rest of the anglo-sphere) problem, and that it should be treated with racial sensitivity training and honesty, not with demonization and censorship and quashing research.
So the OP is correct in saying that even if you remove discrimination there would still be differences, because the environmental factors that caused those differences remain.
There's not an objective/standardized way to even measure intelligence, so you'll forgive me if I treat the claim that there's an empirical difference in intelligence between races with a mountain of skepticism.
It’s irrelevant to the obvious and provable incidence of racism on the individual level.
Is there a diverse country that doesn't have a strong history of racism?
Is US worse than India, with it's caste system?
Is US worse than China, with it's Uyghur genocide?
Is US worse than Russia with it's Slavs-only rental ads?
Mind you, those are not the examples of past discriminations.
Is it possible that the reason you know more about discrimination in the US is not because US had more of it, but because you are better educated about US?
What I don’t understand is why that is assumed true. If we want to encourage many different cultures to live together wouldn’t it naturally make sense that different cultures would have different outcomes in job preferences? How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences?
My fear is if there are strong cultural differences that lead to disparate racial outcomes so organizations will always be able to point out that systemic issues exist even when they may be eradicated. I don’t know how we measure this.