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0 pointsgacgacgac1d ago0 comments

It's not used to measure discrimination. It's used to identify outcomes that appear to be potentially discriminatory. You have to do the legwork afterwards.

Like. If I am evaluating a developer on lines of code written, I am a bad manager. But if an engineer has 40% fewer lines of code than the team median, it's absolutely ok for me to go, "Interesting. What's the story there? Are they slower or is there some other factor?"

Same idea -- this is purely a fast, first pass metric that can quickly assess if something warrants a deeper evaluation.

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dash26h ago

Right, but what I meant was: the other tests that the article says are used for definitively proving discrimination are equally bad, and subject to the same objection. Just substituting “one standard deviation“ or “statistical significance“for “80%“ doesn’t fix the fundamental problem here, which is that there are unmeasured confounders.

blharr1d ago

You are correct, but especially in current day that analogy is quite bad.

I expect Median LoC might be very high with the average developer using AI these days... but the dev who is making atomic changes that are fixing the AI output is probably tiny LoC but way more important

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