Claire Cain Miller: “Can an Algorithm Hire Better Than a Human?”
23rd December 2015
Steve Sailer does a little gentle fisking.
Everybody vaguely knows that the problem with the Supreme Court’s invention of disparate impact theory is that if it were applied rigorously enough, we’d be living in a Max Max post-apocalyptic wasteland in about ten years.
So, parts of society goes through various paroxysms for awhile as the Eye of Sauron turns its baleful gaze on X. But it simultaneously ignores Y so that Y can get a lot of work done while X is being roasted. For a long time, for example, fire departments were carefully scrutinized while Silicon Valley was ignored because it was High Tech!
Similarly, nice white liberals in places like Marin Valley have used environmentalism to justify keeping their neighborhoods nice and white. Environmentalism has massive disparate impact, but that’s been okay because it’s environmentalism, which is, as everybody knows, nice, not nasty. But today the Supreme Court turned the Eye of Sauron a little more on disparate impact in housing, so we’ll see what will happen next.
The problem is, of course, that if you Really Look At Hard Data, you’ll get ‘disparate impact’ all over the place, because Reality is Reality and not subject to ‘pregressive’ fantasies about how the world ought to work.
Of course, as they get deeper pockets, the shakedown artists will eventually get their claws into them, but paying off Jesse Jackson, like Intel is doing now, is just a cost of doing business.
So, the point of these Big Data hiring app firms is to outsource responsibility for hiring to Science. Eventually, the leeches will catch up with them, but professional SJWs really aren’t that smart and are easy to fool for quite awhile, so lots of money can be made in the meantime.