News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
If much of the interest of high-quality papers lies between the lines—in the metaphorical fire that a paper lights in…
I would also recommend that potential grad students make inquiries into how far the compensation package actually goes towards cost…
It’s a mix. I’m still in the UAE with my family, and we feel safe. But some students and faculty…
In the above comment, Michel wrote: “As an aside, every once in a while I check out how the chatbots…
I could imagine LLMs having saved me a *ton* of time in graduate school–e.g., by having supplied reasonable answers to…
The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…
A new study finds no such effect. If it is accurate, that is hopeful: it may mean that norms, including the implicit ones, are changing in positive ways. Comments are open for any readers who know more about this latest study and its soundness.
They seemed to want to control for socio-economic signals, but my bet is that what they ended up doing was failing to signal African American racial status (though the Hispanic signals were probably good enough). Here's the relevant claim:
"Unlike in Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), we did not use distinctly African American–sounding first names because these names are associated with relatively low socio-economic status among African Americans (Fryer and Levitt 2004), and we wanted to avoid confounding employers’ perceptions of race and socio-economic status. A trade-off is that the surnames in our experiment may not indicate racial background to employers as strongly as the distinctly African American–sounding names in their study."
Again, it doesn't just seem like a trade-off to me; instead, it seems like it probably straight-up failed to do the relevant signaling. Though, again, the results with respect to Hispanic names are interesting.
"Americans think they don't have a class system, but they do – it's just that they call it race." – an expat friend of mine. I suspect the two are so thoroughly confounded in practice as to be hard to disentangle experimentally.
Perhaps the smart thing would be to identify subsets of typically 'Black' *and 'White'* names perceived to have lower-class associations, then run the resume exercise again and test for all four combinations.
—–
KEYWORDS:
Primary Blog
Leave a Reply