Silicon Valley Big Data Startup Palantir Responds To Labor Department's Discrimination Lawsuit (fortune.com) 80
Silicon Valley's big data startup Palantir, founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, has filed a response to the Department of Labor after the agency sued the company for discriminating against Asian job applicants. From a Fortune report: Palantir says that no discrimination took place and that the Labor Department's statistical analysis -- the basis for the recent suit -- is faulty. The suit, according to Palantir's 15-page response, wrongly suggests that the company "should have hired a workforce that matched the racial composition of the group of individuals whose resumes Palantir received, without regard to candidate qualifications." Palantir's response also points out that the suit addressed only three out of 44 job titles for which Palantir hired employees within the 18-month analysis period conducted by the Labor Department. What's more, says the response, 36% of those eventually hired across all the job openings within that timeframe were Asian -- a rate that exceeds the percentage of qualified Asian employees in the external labor market, according to stats from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Yes, exactly (Score:3, Funny)
It's wrong BECAUSE they hired a bunch of asians. It simply isn't fair to Americans who were raised with an institutionalized inability to do math.
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I just know that, whenever I see "Peter Thiel", I think of PayPal, and read the last part of it as "Thief".
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Whatever flips your bippy, Skippy.
Flawed Assumption in that Asian =/= American (Score:2)
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no, statistically it just means that he's highly likely to be racist and think of women as second class people.
"Startup" (Score:3)
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Depends how long you can keep bilking investors into giving you long term loans
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*Bill Clinton voice*
"Could you please explain to me what the definition of 'Startup' is?"
Heh
guilty! (Score:5, Insightful)
See, they are guilty after all!
(This is pretty obviously a politically motivated action by the administration, to punish Thiel for supporting libertarian and conservative causes. This will likely be followed by dropping government contracts, whether or not the company is found guilty of any wrongdoing.)
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Lies, damned lies and statistics.
36%... But in what kind of work? If they are including all the low paid stuff, the call centre staff or outsourced contract coders etc...
I actually bothered to read the Department of Labour's complaint. It's more than just a simply statistical aberration. The response from Palantir is clearly designed more for PR than as a legal argument, e.g. the bit about them only considering 3 job titles. Yeah, they looked at high skill jobs where the problem was, that's the normal way i
Re:guilty! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe they, *gasp*, hire based on qualifications and merit rather than some racist guideline the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has laid out.
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome.
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Or maybe they, *gasp*, hire based on qualifications and merit rather than some racist guideline the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has laid out.
Equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome.
You are NOT allowed to do that. EVER. BAD, Anonymous commenter. BAD! *rolls up newspaper*
Re:guilty! (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea that hiring for any company or job should be statistically representative of "the population" is ludicrous in and of itself. Any such enforcement is a farce.
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So they do not claim that the hirings should be representative of "the population", just that this is an unlikely outcome for a discrimination free selection (actually they claim a chance of 1 in 741).
Re:guilty! (Score:5, Interesting)
The argument is bullshit no matter what "the population" refers to (that's why I put it in quotes). Companies select the best applicants from a pool of applicants, not a random subset of people who meet the requirements. That is almost guaranteed to result in a highly biased selection of applicants when you look at gender or cultural background, even in the absence of any bias.
To see how subtle this can be, consider a large applicant pool of equally qualified men and women (on average). If you pick the 7 best applicants, they will almost all be male, yet there is no gender discrimination. Likewise, if you pick the 7 worst applicants, they will also almost all be male. That's because male and female populations have different variances even when they have the same averages. Another counterintuitive property of these kinds of selections is that the law of large numbers works against you: the larger the applicant pool, the more biased the outcome of the selection. That's why Nobel prize winners are overwhelmingly male, and why prisons are also filled primarily with males.
The DOL statisticians aren't stupid, they understand this, which strengthens the case that this is malicious, politically motivated persecution of a political opponent.
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In a few easy steps other nations could be enjoying a flood of export quality US design jobs.
Position your nation as smart, safe, clean, friendly, low tax, free of government interference and have your top graduates ready.
US brands will be sending your smart nation design work in a few years just to protect the shareholders.
Just fund US lawyers to enforce that neutral selection process and big br
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I agree, but that's not what the complaint says. You fell for their misdirection.
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Here is the argument that the DOL is making:
That is, they are making an argument (in statistical terms) about random samples from the population of applicants,
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That's the summary. Keep reading for the detailed argument.
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If you had actually read the complaint, you'd know that there is no more "detailed argument" in the report about the statistics. The entire "analysis" is limited to page 3, 20 lines of 12pt text, consisting of three paragraphs that repeat the above kind of statement for three different jobs, and a fourt paragraph making unsubstantiated claims of additional bias.
You are blowing smoke out of your ass and pretending you have read the report when you o
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Here is the argument that the DOL is making:
That is, they are making an argument (in statistical terms) about random samples from the population of applicants, and that argument is utterly wrong.
So if I understand correctly, the DOL is saying that when presented with qualified candidates of this racial distribution, the odds that the "best 7" would consist of one Asian and six non-Asians are 1 in 741? As far as odds go, that's not so low as to be mathematically impossible. Consider the number of companies hiring for a position at any given time, and the odds of one of those companies facing a 1-in-741 scenarios is not that low. I think you'd need to actually examine the particulars of the applic
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Actually, I think if that number were right, it is sufficient for liability in civil and/or administrative proceedings ("preponderance of the evidence"). The trouble is that it i woefully wrong.
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yes, yes, of course, it's all part of the international conspiracy of the media, the bankers, the administration, the IRS, the Mexicans, the Republican leadership, and pretty much everybody else.
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No conspiracy needed here; it's the political appointees in the DOL doing what the people that hired them wanted them to do.
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You know, there are actually people who are victims of persecution. And then there are people who are just victims of their own persecution complex.
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Any white guy is considered automatically racist and shunable these days
Don't forget that the guy is gay, which is a form of sexism and violence against womyns.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not sure that this is enough data to prove discrimination, but at first glance those numbers do warrant some suspicion.
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Do we need to repeat the whole discussion from the original story? Anyone who hires in IT will tell you that nowadays you get a tidal wave of resumes from unqualified Indians that are crammed with buzzwords and acronyms that "look" legit. When you remove that thick layer of spam you usually get a more diverse array of candidates.
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Discrimination would be if NO Asians were hired.
God I hate P.C. america.
We don't threaten to jail political opponents (Score:2, Troll)
And of course, we never threaten to jail political opponents [npr.org] in this country. *That* would be a dictatorship!!!
I read that quote the other day, and my first response was "yeah, we totally fukken' do!".
I could think of a half dozen examples off the top, but here's a good list [thefederalist.com] of previous Democratic examples.
From that article:
They seem to be forgetting that throwing the book at one’s political opponents is what Democrats do all the time. Here’s 16 times Democrats tried to prosecute their opponents for political gain, not justice.
Looking at the press bias in this election, we are totally boned as a nation. I expect we'll have rioting in several cities after the election.
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If they do it they lose that moral high-horse called "Only liberals protest violently."
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Press bias == reporting what Trump says
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The "guy" in question was a known as a real estate con artist a quarter century ago, and his views on women in general have hardly been secret.
But hey. you wanted Bill Cosby for President, well this is what you get.
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"press bias is fucking hunting down and dragging through the mud, the entire life history of a guy who had the temerity to ask a tough question of our political overlord wannabes while having opinions of his own."
If I end up voting for Trump, it will be out of pure spite for press tactics like this. The bias is rich and ripe and on full display.
That's OFFICIALLY okay per written regulations (Score:5, Interesting)
I was surprised to find that's actually explicitly stated in the official regulations. The Code of Federal Regulations actually says "discriminination [against white men] is not discrimination". I thought they just unofficially ignored it, but it's official, written policy.
One might think such discrimination is rare, but it's actually extremely common, just worded in a way that makes it harder to recognize immediately. It looks something like this:
Admittance to the school is competitive. Highest scores get admitted.
Being female adds 15 points
Being black adds 20 points
Being latino adds 10 points
Being asian adds 5 points
Nobody is being discriminated AGAINST, right, only discriminated FOR. Except with competive admissions that's *precisely* the same result as this:
Being male subtracts 15 points
Being white subtracts 20 points
Being latino subtracts 10 points
Being asian subtracts 15 points
In a competitive context, discriminating FOR anyone is discriminating AGAINST everyone else.
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Try Title 34, Subtitle B, Chapter 1 (Score:2)
It's from Title 34, Subtitle B. I don't have time right now to find the exact subsection, but it's probably in part 100, or maybe 106.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cf... [cornell.edu]
I came across it when reading the regulations that apply to education, so that's why I say Title 34, Subtitle B - it could have been another similar subtitle. What really struck me was the wording, "discrimination ... is not discrimination".
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SJW's don't like to count Asians as a minority or even talk about them since they run counter to the SJW narrative that historically oppressed peoples in the U.S. will never be able to rise above it (because of the evil white male patriarchy, of course). Asians show that through hard work and education, historical racial discrimination can be overcome and excellence can be achieved. SJW's hate this because it suggests that blacks could actually overcome discrimination too if they didn't sit around in the gh
Meh (Score:2)
Just making sure that every company in Silicon Valley can still discriminate against straight white men
I'd say this is mostly a problem for "average" white males. When you're a rockstar, you typically don't deal with the layer of politically correct bullshit - either it doesn't apply to you, or you take your rockstarness somewhere else.
And as far as I'm concerned. average people can use whatever shenanigans or political trends to get ahead, I don't care.
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Your friends sound like obnoxious idiots. Why are you still friends with them?
How to report a business? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Chinese restaurant down the street has a higher than average ratio of Asians working there. Shit, same deal with the Mexican restaurant. Whole lotta Hispanics working there.
Kind of a small startup for statistics (Score:2)
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If they converted 1160 "qualified on 'paper'" applicants to (say) 205 next round of interview applicants and eliminated all of one ethnicity in that process then statistics are a fine way to show bias. 25 and 7 ultimate positions aren't enough to use statistics alone to make the case, particularly when 11 out of the 25 and one out of the 7 were asian. So, the number of cases where they claim bias did the decision making are 10 or fewer. I'm not saying that the department of labor is wrong. But, I am saying that it's idiotic to use only statistical mathematics to argue about 10 decisions. They need additional evidence of bias.
Agreed. Side-note and would love to hear your thoughts on this (this is a real question, not some BS or trick)...
Pre-question info - if you have 100 applicants; 40 asian; 30 white; 20 hispanic; 10 misc... They all have resumes that show that they meet the direct technical knowledge specifications for a position (e.g. Oracle Database Migration, Windows Server 2008+ administration, etc) but have an interesting little logic which is perfectly valid in there: "able to think outside the box".
All 100 are interv
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Re: Kind of a small startup for statistics (Score:2)
Thank you for your candor!
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How do you define "applicant" though? It's not as though most jobs these days actually make you fill out an application form, after all.
Is it: "someone who's submitted their resume on the web site"? In my experience, 90% or more of these will never even be seen by a human. They'll get filtered either for not having the right keyword match, or for poor spelling or grammar. Of the remainder, most will get little more than a cursory glance. Trends for what constitutes a good resume change over time. Five
No mystery -- Thiel supports Trump (Score:2)
This has nothing to do with discrimination. Peter Thiel is a major supporter of Trump [nytimes.com] and Obama administration is now punishing him. This is no different than Obama's IRS going after Tea-party organizations before the last elections.