I couldn't find the story I was looking for but here are a few. Both TSA and CBP represented here; the CBP stories are closer to what the grandparent post describes.
These stories describe sexual assault graphically (to various degrees).
I would argue that it is not just bias. Indeed, not all people of color in the U.S. are experts on racism, but the vast majority of people with a good understanding of racism are people of color.
Yeah, people are generally able to solve a problem only when they understand the problem. Direct experience is a valuable form of learning. Of course it isn't sufficient, but we shouldn't pretend it doesn't matter either. Obviously almost any statement concerning race is a generalization.
> Yeah, people are generally able to solve a problem only when they understand the problem. Direct experience is a valuable form of learning.
I'm sorry, but this is pseudo-reasoning to me. These are logically linked on the surface, yet extremely vague truisms that can only pass for some form of a coherent argument because they're so full of weasel words.
Based on the same principle you could argue that in order to improve car safety, to have a better chance at it, one needs to have had a life-threatening accident. Why not? After all, people generally are able to solve a problem when they understand it... and direct experience is a valuable form of learning... etc.
It really depends on the nature of the problem though, and the nature of this direct experience, and so forth. Painting the situation with such an overly broad brush doesn't lead to any meaningful conclusions.
For starters, first-hand experience is typically caused by symptoms of a problem, the underlying nature of a complex problem isn't readily apparent, or else it wouldn't be complex.
For instance getting sick from air pollution doesn't do anything to help you understand the nature of these pollutants, how they're emitted, what is the economical context and therefore possible countermeasures etc. It just reassures you that the symptoms of such pollution are a bad thing, which isn't that much of a discovery by itself.
Not everything is as simple as an itchy-scratchy situation, and we shouldn't pretend that it is, especially when it leads to racially biased claims.
In the U.S., a black software engineer is more likely to be able to design technology that helps keep people safe from police regardless of geekery and socioeconomic status.
Just a supposition, but from an American (I'm white). I don't think it's a stretch to say that people who have experienced e.g. anti-black racism will be better able to make technology that addresses it.
Willing? Or able? You're saying it makes a difference in the ability itself. In either case this argument - well, it's not even much of an argument, merely a belief - is so absurd to me that frankly I can't believe you're serious, no offence.
Care to share any examples of what technologies is, in turn, a white software engineer more likely to be able to design? Or does this philosophy only work one way : )
Is designing medical software better left to be implemented by software engineers who themselves eg. battled cancer?
1. Able. Not that skin color itself affects any sort of intellectual ability, but race--including, importantly, the experiences people have because of their skin color--definitely impacts who you are and what you are good at.
2. White software engineers are better at designing racist software (mostly joking). Another half joke: white people are better at designing technology that gets taken seriously by the government and the public (i.e. their technology will be taken more seriously because they are white, not any special ability there). But seriously, white engineers would probably be better at designing technology for teaching other white people about race.
3. Yes, there are absolutely some parts of designing medical software that engineers who have battled cancer would be better at. Imagine you are making one of those medical devices that sits next to a cancer patient's bed post-chemo and shows a bunch of numbers. Now if you fought cancer, you've probably had lots of experience lying in that bed next to those screens, and you could have a much better intuition about how those screens should look and how they should present their visualizations in ways that make a patient more confident. Or imagine the software engineer wants to, you know, talk with some patients or doctors to understand what to make: the engineer who battled cancer will probably be much better understanding what the patients (and doctors) want.
I don't know the race of any software engineers I haven't met. Which is almost all of them. How could govt and the public know either? It seems strange to imagine it could matter.
Well, there are the famous ones. I'd bet facebook would have been treated differently if Mark Zuckerberg were black. You also probably automatically make guesses about people's race online. Race is a bit trickier, but it's not too hard to guess gender online (usernames, and things like this thing I just found on google: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze)
Planet money's coverage is great; I think a bunch of the posts below would be answered by listening to the podcast.
One of the main things I remember taking away from the podcast was that the soloists in the study were not the most famous "best" violinists in the world (they may not even have been professionals?). One of the violin makers they interviewed thought this was the biggest weakness of the study, and he was confident he could tell the difference (not that that means too much).
This is cute. How could you pick e.g. Google-esque adjectives?
Is there a corpus of press releases, etc. from lots of big (tech) companies? If so, has anyone done basic comparative word/n-gram frequency analysis of it?
These stories describe sexual assault graphically (to various degrees).
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110906/11065015824/tsa-a...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/woman-sues-borde...
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/immigration/201...
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/21/cbp-awards-us-citize...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cnns-angela-rye-was-subj...