| > You are asserting that the signal from race/gender is very noisy and the signal from the resume is very precise. > We can debate the precision of the signal from the resume, but race at least is highly predictive of many objective qualities, e.g. it is highly correlated with IQ. So what you call a vague, dubious, and unquantified signal is actually a highly informative signal. You’re only making a very short statement, so I don’t know what you personally think. However, the statement is imprecise enough that others may mistake what you mean for the following fallacy. Let’s say we have two kinds of Sneetches: Those with stars and those without stars. A star is highly correlated with success taking a certain type of test that we’ll say measures “Scintillence.” I am interviewing Sneetches for a job where scintellence is also highly correlated with competence. I ask for Sneetches with five years of experience doing this job. Now: Should I refuse to interview Sneetches without stars, because not having a star correlates with less success in the scintellence test, which then correlates with less competence in the job? The trap that many fall into is saying that since there is a correlation in the general population of Sneetches, we can draw inferences about the Sneetches applying for this particular job. However, we are dealing with the subset of Sneetches who have already demonstrated their aptitude for the job by having five years of actual experience competently performing a job that correlates with scintellence. We are not selecting Sneetches at random from the general population, we are using a combination of self-selection (“apply for this job if you have a desire to do this job”) and external filtering (“apply for this job if you have five years of experience doing this job.”) The presence or lack of a star on a Sneetch may be highly informative about their ability to do this job if we pick Sneeteches at random, but that’s not what we’re doing here, so no, it isn’t highly informative for the purpose of choosing whom to interview. Summary: The presence or lack of a star may be highly informative if we have no selection pressure on the sample, but when we apply other filters that are themselves correlated with the attribute that interests us, it loses its ability to inform us. |