Title 7 Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal

llike_any_other about 3 hours ago 12 commentsRead Article on nyujll.com

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userbinator•about 1 hour ago

Unfortunately the only way to have everyone "equal", seems to be to make everyone equally stupid. This idea has been explored in fiction, e.g. Harrison Bergeron.

atomicnumber3•about 1 hour ago

I struggle a lot with the potentially nonzero overlap between

a) "just legislate that being racist/sexist to people is illegal, then have judges interpret" (which is what seems to be simply necessary to actually make progress against the endlessly inventive evil of racism/sexism),

and b) "but also don't simply make everything illegal because then abusers can selectively enforce the law to punish groups they dislike".

Tough. Gotta try, though.

ryandrake•about 1 hour ago

Evaluating a policy based on Disparate Impact is important because it gets rid of the truck-sized plausible deniability of "Well, see, our policies aren't technically or intentionally racist, even though the end result is clearly that racial minorities are excluded/avoided/attacked/whatever. But since we don't specifically and consciously mention race, then we're in the clear!"

It's kind of a corollary to "The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does": The purpose of a policy is who it impacts. Disparate Impact recognizes this.

JackFr•43 minutes ago

Imagine a city where the schools woefully underserve minority students. Despite equal budgets etc. there is a persistent gap, probably due to income gaps but that’s not the point. Within the education system there is no one institutional factor to blame.

Now imagine a civil service exam in that same city, entirely race neutral but resulting in a disparity because it tests general skills. The test is de jure racist when all it does is expose the poor education system. Because the education is so poor, the only remediation is to hire unqualified people. So you end up with a deficient civil service in the name of fairness.

There are other ways to examine whether a test or policy is racist.

ameliaquining•43 minutes ago

Do you reject the paper's claim (that disparate impact liability makes almost everything presumptively illegal, including in situations where no one has done anything wrong), or do you think that there's no way to address plausibly-deniable intentional discrimination with less collateral damage?

Most of the criticisms of POSIWID in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo... seem equally applicable to your proposed corollary.

braiamp•about 1 hour ago

I would say that some systems are not designed to be discriminatory against a group, but since the designer blind spot for the problem might still play a part. Systems designed to be "neutral" has to be evaluated against a ideal neutral. If we find discrepancies then the system is fixed until it's as close to neutral as possible.

By ideal neutral is that their outcome aren't that disparate considering the supposed goal of the system: access to X resource, ability to accomplish X, etc.

EGreg•about 1 hour ago

I think a) seems very quixotic and causes more problems than it solves.

Instead, I would say that discrimination should probably only be illegal in places where there aren’t enough of the thing (jobs, etc). For example, what about x-only clubs, or ladies’ nights or gyms or etc.

xboxnolifes•25 minutes ago

> discrimination should probably only be illegal in places where there aren’t enough of the thing

That's every job everywhere as far as I can tell. There's fewer jobs that people want than people who want them.

profsummergig•about 1 hour ago

Obama forced something similar on schools:

https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/civil-rights-laws/race-co...

The policy warned schools that racial disparities in punishments could trigger federal civil rights investigations under a "disparate impact" standard.

Ergo, presumably, if a school had a single purple student. And that purple student was punished for something. Then the entire school had to also be punished for the thing. To not fall afoul of the law. (Or maybe I'm just too autistic to have a nuanced take.)

(Trump rescinded it.)

MithrilTuxedo•about 1 hour ago

>Or maybe I'm just too autistic to have a nuanced take.

Who is doing the presuming? That sounds like a bad-faith interpretation.

It's bad math. You can't expect statistics to be applied at that scale, and I think courts would have agreed if anyone had tried.

wredcoll•31 minutes ago

> Ergo, presumably, if a school had a single purple student. And that purple student was punished for something. Then the entire school had to also be punished for the thing. To not fall afoul of the law. (Or maybe I'm just too autistic to have a nuanced take.)

Then why even post? You just made something up and then spewed it out.

yieldcrv•28 minutes ago

Our industry should be going after the ATS system use and harmonizing its implementation

Should be going after the camera on policy

Should be going after leetcoding, take home interviews, and every subjective metric that isnt able to be verified in its uniform apllicability across candidates

and according to this paper, even if it was uniform lol