In previous research I found this one, brought by white firefighters protesting the affirmative action policies in Chicago, and while I recall a second I’m on a different computer and so can’t easily check my history.
But I don’t think that case makes the point you want it to make. It does not disapprove of hiring by lottery- indeed, the remedy involves selecting which African Americans (but not white or other races!) who scored between 65 and 88 (who are still interested) will get the available jobs by lottery- they just think that the city did not put the passing score bar low enough, and the standard they used to determine what was “low enough” was the disparate impact standard, not any sort of job performance criterion.
[Edit]: I should clarify that, again, the court’s decision is made with the presumption that tests are guilty until proven innocent, and so when the decision says “the test was biased” or “there was no evidence that the test was necessary,” they do not mean that “there is evidence that the test was biased” or “there was evidence that the test was not necessary,” they just mean “there was not sufficient presented evidence that the test was necessary.”
I think I’ve disproven the factual basis you gave for your speculation: the real standard is orthogonal to your cutoff-with-lottery versus rank-by-test-scores.
And it’s now 80 karma paperclips. Do you know how ridiculous this looks, how badly Less Wrong is breaking its own rules of conversation?
the real standard is orthogonal to your cutoff-with-lottery versus rank-by-test-scores.
The real standard was that ‘disparate impact’ of the black pass rate being less than 80% of the white pass rate was prima facie evidence of discrimination; the more recent cases suggest that any statistically significant difference can be evidence of discrimination. If you ever got the impression that I didn’t think that was how the courts behaved, I apologize for the miscommunication on my end. (I left out the four-fifths part, and just mentioned ‘over 90%’, because I thought it would be more communicative than adding the additional detail.)
I still maintain that if you are seeking to promote, say, 5% of the population, no merit-based test which gives you the top 5% of the population will pass the four-fifths rule in the presence of underlying racial differences in merit. (This would be the ‘rank-by-test-scores’ approach.) Promoting from the entire pool at random would not discriminate by race, but it also wouldn’t discriminate by merit. The way to both have some merit selection, and not run afoul of the four-fifths rule, is to set some cutoff such that the rate at which blacks are above the cutoff is at least 80% of the rate at which whites are above the cutoff, declare everyone above that cutoff as having passed, and then promote randomly from those who passed.
It’s still not clear to me what you think you’ve disproven, or why you think you’ve disproven it. How long this conversation has gone and the propensity for others to downvote your comments suggest to me that it may be wise to call this conversation done here, or move it to PMs if you’re interested in carrying on.
I’ve lost about 150 karma (and the actual loss if it wasn’t for people voting up −1 comments would probably be more like 250). The moderators have done squat, if we even have anything that passes for moderators. (The admins, then.)
For what? Is there a particular explicit rule that’s being broken?
It violates “How should I use my voting powers?” in http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Site_Etiquette_and_Social_Norms but even aside from that, most forums have a rule of “if you’re enough of a dick, we can ban you regardless of whether there’s an explicit rule prohibiting your exact behavior”.
What?
In previous research I found this one, brought by white firefighters protesting the affirmative action policies in Chicago, and while I recall a second I’m on a different computer and so can’t easily check my history.
But I don’t think that case makes the point you want it to make. It does not disapprove of hiring by lottery- indeed, the remedy involves selecting which African Americans (but not white or other races!) who scored between 65 and 88 (who are still interested) will get the available jobs by lottery- they just think that the city did not put the passing score bar low enough, and the standard they used to determine what was “low enough” was the disparate impact standard, not any sort of job performance criterion.
[Edit]: I should clarify that, again, the court’s decision is made with the presumption that tests are guilty until proven innocent, and so when the decision says “the test was biased” or “there was no evidence that the test was necessary,” they do not mean that “there is evidence that the test was biased” or “there was evidence that the test was not necessary,” they just mean “there was not sufficient presented evidence that the test was necessary.”
I think I’ve disproven the factual basis you gave for your speculation: the real standard is orthogonal to your cutoff-with-lottery versus rank-by-test-scores.
And it’s now 80 karma paperclips. Do you know how ridiculous this looks, how badly Less Wrong is breaking its own rules of conversation?
The real standard was that ‘disparate impact’ of the black pass rate being less than 80% of the white pass rate was prima facie evidence of discrimination; the more recent cases suggest that any statistically significant difference can be evidence of discrimination. If you ever got the impression that I didn’t think that was how the courts behaved, I apologize for the miscommunication on my end. (I left out the four-fifths part, and just mentioned ‘over 90%’, because I thought it would be more communicative than adding the additional detail.)
I still maintain that if you are seeking to promote, say, 5% of the population, no merit-based test which gives you the top 5% of the population will pass the four-fifths rule in the presence of underlying racial differences in merit. (This would be the ‘rank-by-test-scores’ approach.) Promoting from the entire pool at random would not discriminate by race, but it also wouldn’t discriminate by merit. The way to both have some merit selection, and not run afoul of the four-fifths rule, is to set some cutoff such that the rate at which blacks are above the cutoff is at least 80% of the rate at which whites are above the cutoff, declare everyone above that cutoff as having passed, and then promote randomly from those who passed.
It’s still not clear to me what you think you’ve disproven, or why you think you’ve disproven it. How long this conversation has gone and the propensity for others to downvote your comments suggest to me that it may be wise to call this conversation done here, or move it to PMs if you’re interested in carrying on.
I’ve lost about 150 karma (and the actual loss if it wasn’t for people voting up −1 comments would probably be more like 250). The moderators have done squat, if we even have anything that passes for moderators. (The admins, then.)
The moldbuggians seem to prefer downvoting to argument. Maybe it’s cooler.
What exactly do you think the moderators should do?
They could ban the stalker.
Alternately, they could release the stalker’s name.
And of course they could always use the incident as evidence that the code needs support for other measures.
For what? Is there a particular explicit rule that’s being broken?
Yes, I know how well-kept gardens die. But that’s not the only way for a garden to die.
It violates “How should I use my voting powers?” in http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Site_Etiquette_and_Social_Norms but even aside from that, most forums have a rule of “if you’re enough of a dick, we can ban you regardless of whether there’s an explicit rule prohibiting your exact behavior”.