Who doesn't favor employee referrals for interns? You can be encrusted in diamonds and you're going to get put in the back of the line behind the known quantities and get-in-so-and-so's-good-graces hires for an intern position. There's also the fact that people start to favor/discriminate schools based on history. Had a great intern from Stanford? Hire another Stanford kid. Had a terrible intern from Texas Tech? Scratch all the TT kids who apply for a few years.
We'll see how this pans out, but like most of the other people in this thread, I'm inclined to give Palantir the benefit of the doubt at the moment.
It's common practice, but that doesn't make it ok. In fact, afaik, those network-based hiring practices are a major obstacle to social mobility and to ending racial and gender inequality.
Think of it this way: In the U.S. in 1950, white men[0] controlled access to resources like education and jobs, and shared them only with other white men, intentionally discriminating against non-white and non-male applicants. In the past 66 years, network-based hiring practices have extended that systematic discrimination well past its expiration date. White men still dominate those resources, in large part because they network with and therefore hire each other. Who has good schools in their neighborhood? Who got into the good college? Who are their college buddies? Who do their professors and other mentors know? etc.
Isn't time we broke that cycle? Only 33% of Americans are white males, yet look at photos of SV leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Senate, etc.: If we step back from our expectations, conditioned over our lifetimes, those photos are absurd - and represent an enormous waste of talent, self-determination, and achievement.
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[0] Really it was Protestant, heterosexual white men, and maybe some other parameters applied too, but let's keep this simple.
> Only 33% of Americans are white males, yet look at photos of SV leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Senate, etc.
But they're not just white men. Not even just protestant heterosexual white men. They're white men with rich parents and Ivy League degrees and so on. And when you realize that, you realize that the percentage of CEOs who have rich parents and Ivy League degrees is higher than the percentage of CEOs who are white men. A century ago the graduates of Harvard may have been 100% white men, but the graduates of Harvard are less than 1% of 1% of white men.
The thing you're training your sights on is the scenario where 67% of the candidates are white but >85% of the employees are white. Here's how we got there: The company hired 100 people. First they hired 65 white people who the owners know ("the privileged"). Then they hired 35 more people who all got there on the merits, 67% of whom are white. Company is now 88.45% white.
But let's separate the <1% of people (arguendo all of them white) who get the job no matter what and fill the first 65 slots, from the 67% of people who are white but still have to compete for the job like everybody else. What happens to those people? They suffer the same fate as minorities -- competing for 35 slots instead of 100 because 65 were lost to the Old Boys Network. So that 67% of people fills 23.45% of the slots when it should have been 67%. That's how it is now, before you change anything.
Now suppose you require the company to balance on race. All the people the owners know are still in. They only made up 65% of the employees, up to 67% can be white, they all get to stay. But now only 2% of the slots are available to 67% of the population, because they were classified as the privileged elite when they weren't.
It isn't a race problem, it's a class and social mobility problem.
> They're white men with rich parents and Ivy League degrees and so on.
I think that's a very good point.
However, that doesn't mean that racism doesn't also exist and is not very prevalent. Endless research supports that it exists in many areas of society, it seems very unlikely that after centuries of overt, legalized racism it would disappear so quickly, and IMO it's unlikely to be coincidence that the excluded groups today are exactly those that that suffered overt, legalized discrimination until the civil rights era.
Sadly, my anecdotal experience is far too many white people expressing racist views in private, often grouping all blacks together and saying 'they' do X or Y. One, who holds a PhD, told me that Kenyan runners were faster because the harsh life of slaves caused natural selection to favor strength!
I would be interested in research on the relative social mobility of various excluded groupings (people who are black, Latino, Muslim, or women) and also of poor white people. Lots of people try to claim there is no difference, as a sort of political blow against people seeking to address race issues, but I've never seen data supporting it.
> However, that doesn't mean that racism doesn't also exist and is not very prevalent. Endless research supports that it exists in many areas of society, it seems very unlikely that after centuries of overt, legalized racism it would disappear so quickly, and IMO it's unlikely to be coincidence that the excluded groups today are exactly those that that suffered overt, legalized discrimination until the civil rights era.
It's clearly not a coincidence, the problem is that part of the cause is present day racism and part of it is the economic fallout of historical racism, and they're separate because only the first is actually a race problem. The second is just a slice from the general problem of poverty and mobility and has to be solved in the same way.
But that means the statistics don't mean anything unless you can identify what caused it, because it changes what we have to do about it. If black people are underrepresented because of real live racists then we need to hunt down the racists, but if they're underrepresented because they're poor or raised by single parents or other such things where everyone like that is underrepresented, then we need to fight poverty and promote premarital contraception and so on.
And in practice it's going to be both, but that doesn't save you any work. You still need to find each root cause to destroy it. The problem isn't that there aren't enough black Senators, the problem is that a promising black entrepreneur who would otherwise have become a Senator had no choice other than to go to a racist loan officer who denied the loan. The lack of black Senators is the consequence.
> Sadly, my anecdotal experience is far too many white people expressing racist views in private, often grouping all blacks together and saying 'they' do X or Y. One, who holds a PhD, told me that Kenyan runners were faster because the harsh life of slaves caused natural selection to favor strength!
A hundred psychology experiments have shown that if you put people on a team and put some other people on another team, they'll instantly become adversaries. To actually eliminate racism you have to destroy the idea of it. It was never a real thing -- the human race is the only race. To make it go away we have to stop having "African Americans" as a category. They need to be just Americans.
I mean your PhD friend is clearly wrong. Weren't the people still in Kenya the ones not captured as slaves? Otherwise they would be in Alabama. But the stupidity of the argument doesn't phase because it isn't meant to convince. It's meant to rationalize a win by The Other Team when Our Team is supposed to be better at everything.
But we can't convincingly argue that race isn't important and people shouldn't identify with it, while at the same time making a big deal about racial disparities and rehashing the differences between races.
> I would be interested in research on the relative social mobility of various excluded groupings (people who are black, Latino, Muslim, or women) and also of poor white people. Lots of people try to claim there is no difference, as a sort of political blow against people seeking to address race issues, but I've never seen data supporting it.
The reason there is never any good data one way or the other is that people keep trying to measure the empty space. You can't just go to companies and do a survey that says "how many black people didn't you hire because you're a dirty racist?" So what people do instead is to say that there is X amount of disparity, and if you account for income then this much goes away, and if you account for education level then this much etc., and then whatever is left at the end is labeled the contribution of racism.
But there are arbitrarily many confounders. If you account for enough of them then the whole amount might be "explained," but it isn't really because you e.g. accounted for credit history but that includes the racist creditors who maliciously ruined the credit of minorities. It turns into a political fight over what factors should be considered and there is no answer. And even if there was, it would only tell you how much racism there is, not where it is.
But there is a simple solution, which is to realize that the exact number is irrelevant. It isn't zero. Nobody seriously claims that there is no racism at all. It doesn't matter if it's 50% or 0.0001%. You do the same thing in each case -- fight every instance of racism you find.
But actual racism, not statistics and aggregates. Your friend with the PhD is Wrong. It is now your responsibility to fix it by convincing them.
> It's common practice, but that doesn't make it ok.
It's inevitable, and it happens from both ends of the hiring funnel. When I decided it was time to look for a new job, the first thing I did was to look at where people I'd worked with before had ended up. I knew those were places where I would be qualified to work, would be likely to advance my career, and where I would be happy on a daily basis. This is incredibly valuable information for me as I live my life.
(This is in addition the business's gain of being able to save dozens of engineer-hours discarding junk candidates from the hiring process, thousands of dollars in job advertising, and tens of thousands on recruiter fees.)
Asking everyone to destroy this information and waste resources on alternative sources in the service of a more valuable but vague, distant and nebulous goal is... impractical. Pursuing it any regulatory manner would either be a joke or carry a crushing burden on the ability of business to actually conduct business and might very well violate Constitutional protections on the freedom of speech. It would fuel backlash and resentment. It cannot possibly be the best way to do things.
If you want to fix this then we need to find a world where individual self-interest and the pursuit of this goal are at least roughly in alignment with each other. That means making hiring for minorities and the poorly-connected better, rather than making it worse for everyone else - and, from a human perspective, is about making connections between human beings rather than trying to sever them.
If we are talking about the U.S.: Jews were widely excluded from society. I know an American man who is Jewish and went to college in the 1950s. His whole family changed their last name so he could get in; many colleges barred or put quotas on Jewish applicants. Jewish lawyers couldn't work in many leading 'white shoe' firms. Jewish people couldn't join the country clubs and other social organizations where serious networking and business took place. Remember also that the KKK and similar groups preached hate against Jewish people as much as against black-skinned people.
I don't know the answer in greater detail than that, and my impression is that a person had much more opportunity believing in Judaism than being black-skinned, but clearly there was plenty of discrimination and much more, I expect, in some areas of the U.S.
Even to this day, has any leader of a major country been Jewish? Any country besides Israel? (A quick search found a couple French Prime Ministers.)
Well, you'll have to work with what I could find in about a minute of searching the internet, which is only suggestive:
> As elsewhere in the United States, the Jews of postwar Los Angles made their most spectacular fortunes in property development. S. Mark Taper, an English Jew with experience in London home construction, arrived in Los Angles in 1939 to lay the basis for one of California’s great real estate empires. Louis Boyer similarly became one of the state’s largest home developers, putting up 50,000 units by the mid-1960s.
> At one point in the late 1960s, Jew comprised perhaps 40 percent of southern California’s homebuilders and at least half of the builders of shopping centers. Other Jewish entrepreneurs provided their building materials. David Familian’s pipe and supply company was the city’s largest. Reuben and Lester Finkelstein built their grandfather’s scrap business into the vastly successful Southwest Steel Rolling Mills, the city’s second largest. Harvey Aluminum Inc., founded in 1934 as a small machine tool company, became southern California’s leading producer of aluminum, titanium, and special alloys.
> Jewish builders not infrequently began investing their savings in banks and savings and loan associations, until Jewish builders-cum-financiers surpassed even the older film magnates as the city’s economic heavyweights. All the while, too, Jews continued to play their traditional role as producers of consumer goods. As in the East, southern California’s clothing industry was largely Jewish, as were liquor and tobacco, and much of the wholesale food trade.
Being "excluded from society" doesn't mean you get shut out of good jobs. It means you get shut out of certain good jobs. Jews weren't exactly popular in Europe from the Middle Ages forward, but everyone acknowledged that they nevertheless had good jobs.
Disraeli was the English prime minister. (He was formally Anglican, and I find it very plausible that that was politically significant. But it is fairly common for Jews to identify as Jewish by ancestry but not by religion, so he's at least worth bringing up.)
On a different note, I find it interesting how Jews get completely glossed over in opinings such as this one, from elsewhere in the thread:
> IMO it's unlikely to be coincidence that the excluded groups today are exactly those that that suffered overt, legalized discrimination until the civil rights era.
> Being "excluded from society" doesn't mean you get shut out of good jobs. It means you get shut out of certain good jobs
That may be true, but I'm not sure what your point is. Certainly it's prejudiced against, and harmful and oppressive to people, even if not everything is bad or someone else has it worse.
> Jews weren't exactly popular in Europe from the Middle Ages forward, but everyone acknowledged that they nevertheless had good jobs
I'm not sure that's the case, about "good" jobs being common. But certainly Jewish people were victims of widespread, brutal, and sometimes horrific discrimination and oppression in Europe. At one point, in the lifetimes of many people still living, 6 million were murdered over the course of a few years, including almost the entire populations of Jewish people in Poland and other countries. And that well-known event was the worst of a long history of brutal oppression. Did some have good jobs at some times? I don't see the point.
> Disraeli
Disraeli converted; he was no longer Jewish. It's nothing like the people of many religions who still claim to be part of their religion but don't observe its rituals or share its core beliefs.
I'll add to my comment above: The example in the grandparent post was the most successful people in one community at one time; I'm not sure what it actually represents.
Who doesn't favor employee referrals for interns? You can be encrusted in diamonds and you're going to get put in the back of the line behind the known quantities and get-in-so-and-so's-good-graces hires for an intern position. There's also the fact that people start to favor/discriminate schools based on history. Had a great intern from Stanford? Hire another Stanford kid. Had a terrible intern from Texas Tech? Scratch all the TT kids who apply for a few years.
We'll see how this pans out, but like most of the other people in this thread, I'm inclined to give Palantir the benefit of the doubt at the moment.