I have heard one anecdote of an EA saying that they would be less likely to hire someone on the basis of their religion because it would imply they were less good at their job less intelligent/epistemically rigorous. I don’t think they were involved in hiring, but I don’t think anyone should hold this view.
Here is why:
As soon as you are in a hiring situation, you have much more information than priors. Even if it were true that, say, ADHD[1] were less rational then the interview process should provide much more information than such a prior. If that’s not the case, get a better interview process, don’t start being prejudiced!
People don’t mind meritocracy, but they want a fair shake. If I heard that people had a prior that ADHD folks were less likely to be hard working, regardless of my actual performance in job tests, I would be less likely to want to be part of this community. You might lose my contributions. It seems likely to me that we come out ahead by ignoring small differences in groups so people don’t have to worry about this. People are very sensitive to this. Let’s agree not to defect. We judge on our best guess of your performance, not on appearances.
I would be unsurprised if this kind of thinking cut only one way. Is anyone suggesting they wouldn’t hire poly people because of the increased drama or men because of the increased likelihood of sexual scandal? No! We already think some information is irrelevant/inadmissible as a prior in hiring. Because we are glad of people’s right to be different or themselves. To me, race and religion clearly fall in this space. I want people to feel they can be human and still have a chance of a job.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this cashed out to “I hire people like me”. In this example was the individual really hiring on the basis of merit or did they just find certain religious people hard to deal with. We are not a social club, we are trying to do the most good. We want the best, not the people who are like us.
This pattern matches to actual racism/sexism. Like “sometimes I don’t get hired because people think Xs are worse at jobs”. How is that not racism? Seems bad.
Counterpoints:
Sometime gut does play a play a role. We think someone would get better on our team. Some might argue that it’s fine to use this as a tiebreaker. Or that its better to be honest that this is what’s going on.
Personally I think they points outweigh the counterpoints.
Hiring processes should hire the person who seems most likely to do the best job. And candidates should be confident this is happening. But for both predictive reasons, community welfare reasons and avoiding obvious pitfalls reasons I think small priors around race, religion, sexuality, gender, sexual practice should be discounted[2]. If you think the candidate is better or worse, it should show in the interview process. And yes, I get that gut plays a role, but I’d be really wary of gut that feeds clear biases. I think a community where we don’t do that comes out ahead and does more good.
I would be unsurprised if this kind of thinking cut only one way. Is anyone suggesting they wouldn’t hire poly people because of the increased drama or men because of the increased likelihood of sexual scandal?
In the wake of the financial crisis it was not uncommon to see suggestions that banks etc. should hire more women to be traders and risk managers because they would be less temperamentally inclined towards excessive risk taking.
I think that we have more-or-less agreed as societies that there are some traits that is is okay to use to make choices about people (mainly: their actions/behaviors), and there are some traits that is is not okay to use (mainly: things that the person didn’t choose and isn’t responsible for). Race, religion, gender, and the like are widely accepted[1] as not socially acceptable traits to use when evaluating people’s ability to be a member of a team.[2] But there are other traits that we commonly treat as acceptable to use as the basis of treating people differently, such as what school someone went to, how many years of work experience they have, if they have a similar communication style as us, etc.
I think I might split this into two different issues.
One issue is: it isn’t very fair to give or withhold jobs (and other opportunities) based on things that people didn’t really have much choice in (such as where they were born, how wealthy their parents were, how good of an education they got in their youth, etc.)
A separate issue is: it is ineffective to employment decisions (hiring, promotions, etc.) based on things that don’t predict on-the-job success.
Sometimes these things line up nicely (such as how it isn’t fair to base employment decisions on hair color, and it is also good business to not base employment decisions on hair color). But sometimes they don’t line up so nicely: I think there are situations where it makes sense to use “did this person go to a prestigious school” to make employment decisions because that will get you better on-the-job performance; but it also seems unfair because we are in a sense rewarding this person for having won the lottery.[3]
In a certain sense I suppose this is just a mini rant about how the world is unfair. Nonetheless, I do think that a lot of conversations about hiring and discriminations get the two different issues conflated.
Employment is full of laws, but even in situations where there isn’t any legal issue (such as inviting friends over for a movie party, or organizing a book club) I view it as somewhat repulsive to include/exclude people based on gender/race/religion/etc. Details matter a lot, and I can think of exceptions, but that is more or less my starting point.
I’ve heard the phrase “genetic lottery,” and I suspect genes to contribute a lot to academic/career success. But lots of other things outside a person’s control affect how well they perform: being born in a particular place, how good your high school teachers were, stability of the household, if your parents had much money, and all the other things that we can roughly describe as “fortune” or “luck” or “happenstance.”
I know lots of people with lots of dispositions experience friction with just declining their parents’ religions, but that doesn’t mean I “get it” i.e., conflating religion with birth lotteries and immutability seems a little unhinged to me.
There may be a consensus that it’s low status to say out loud “we only hire harvard alum” or maybe illegal (or whatever), but there’s not a lot of pressure to actually try reducing implicit selection effects that end up in effect quite similar to a hardline rule. And I think harvard undergrad admissions have way more in common with lotteries than religion does!
I think the old sequencesy sort of “being bad at metaphysics (rejecting reductionism) is a predictor of unclear thinking” is fine! The better response to that is “come on, no one’s actually talking about literal belief in literal gods, they’re moreso saying that the social technologies are valuable or they’re uncomfortable just not stewarding their ancestors’ traditions” than like a DEI argument.
There is more to get into here but two main things:
I guess some EAs, and some who I think do really good work do literally believe in literal gods
I don’t actually think this is that predictive. I know some theists who are great at thinking carefully and many athiests who aren’t. I reckon I could distinguish the two in a discussion better than rejecting the former out of hand.
...they would be less likely to hire someone on the basis of their religion because it would imply they were less good at their job.
Some feedback on this post: this part was confusing. I assume that what this person said was something like “I think a religious person would probably be harder to work with because of X”, or “I think a religious person would be less likely to have trait Y”, rather than “religious people are worse at jobs”.
The specifics aren’t very important here, since the reasons not to discriminate against people for traits unrelated to their qualifications[1] are collectively overwhelming. But the lack of specifics made me think to myself: “is that actually what they said?”. It also made it hard to understand the context of your counterarguments, since there weren’t any arguments to counter.
Religion can sometimes be a relevant qualification, of course; if my childhood synagogue hired a Christian rabbi, I’d have some questions. But I assume that’s not what the anecdotal person was thinking about.
The person who was told this was me, and the person I was talking to straight up told me he’d be less likely to hire Christians because they’re less likely to be intelligent
Please don’t assume that EAs don’t actually say outrageously offensive things—they really do sometimes!
Edit: A friend told me I should clarify this was a teenage edgelord—I don’t want people to assume this kind of thing gets said all the time!
And since posting this I’ve said this to several people and 1 was like “yeah no I would downrate religious people too”
I think a poll on this could be pretty uncomfortable reading. If you don’t, run it and see.
Put it another way, would EAs discriminate against people who believe in astrology? I imagine more than the base rate. Part of me agrees with that, part of me thinks its norm harming to do. But I don’t think this one is “less than the population”
“I think religious people are less likely to have trait Y” was one form I thought that comment might have taken, and it turns out “trait Y” was “intelligence”.
Now that I’ve heard this detail, it’s easier to understand what misguided ideas were going through the speaker’s mind. I’m less confused now.
“Religious people are bad at jobs” sounds to me like “chewing gum is dangerous” — my reaction is “What are you talking about? That sounds wrong, and also… huh?”
By comparison, “religious people are less intelligent” sounds to me like “chewing gum is poisonous” — it’s easier to parse that statement, and compare it to my experience of the world, because it’s more specific.
*****
As an aside: I spend a lot of time on Twitter. My former job was running the EA Forum. I would never assume that any group has zero members who say offensive things, including EA.
I think the strongest reason to not do anything that even remotely looks like employer discrimination based on religion is that it’s illegal, at least for the US, UK, and European Union countries, which likely jointly encompasses >90% of employers in EA.
(I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true for most other countries as well, these are just the ones I checked).
There’s also the fact that, as a society and subject to certain exceptions, we’ve decided that employers shouldn’t be using an employee’s religious beliefs or lack thereof as an assessment factor in hiring. I think that’s a good rule from a rule-utilitarian framework. And we can’t allow people to utilize their assumptions about theists, non-theists, or particular theists in hiring without the rule breaking down.
The exceptions generally revolve around personal/family autonomy or expressive association, which don’t seem to be in play in the situation you describe.
I think that I generally agree with what you are suggesting/proposing, but there are all kinds of tricky complications. The first thing that jumps to my mind is that sometimes hiring the person who seems most likely to do the best job ends up having a disparate impact, even if there was no disparate treatment. This is not a counterargument, of course, but more so a reminder that you can do everything really well and still end up with a very skewed workforce.
I generally agree with the meritocratic perspective. It seems a good way (maybe the best?) to avoid tit-for-tat cycles of “those holding views popular in some context abuse power → those who don’t like the fact that power was abused retaliate in other contexts → in those other contexts, holding those views results in being harmed by people in those other contexts who abuse power”.
Good point about the priors. Strong priors about these things seem linked to seeing groups as monoliths with little within-group variance in ability. Accounting for the size of variance seems under-appreciated in general. E.g., if you’ve attended multiple universities, you might notice that there’s a lot of overlap between people’s “impressiveness”, despite differences in official university rankings. People could try to be less confused by thinking in terms of mean/median, variance, and distributions of ability/traits more, rather than comparing groups by their point estimates.
Some counter-considerations:
Religion and race seem quite different. Religion seems to come with a bunch of normative and descriptive beliefs that could affect job performance—especially in EA—and you can’t easily find out about those beliefs in a job interview. You could go from one religion to another, from no religion to some religion, or some religion to no religion. The (non)existence of that process might give you valuable information about how that person thinks about/reflects on things and whether you consider that to be good thinking/reflection.
For example, from a irreligious perspective, it might be considered evidence of poor thinking if a candidate thinks the world will end in ways consistent with those described in the Book of Revelation, or think that we’re less likely to be in a simulation because a benevolent, omnipotent being wouldn’t allow that to happen to us.
Anecdotally, on average, I find that people who have gone through the process of abandoning the religion they were raised with, especially at a young age, to be more truth-seeking and less influenced by popular, but not necessarily true, views.
Religion seems to cover too much. Some forms of it seems to offer immunity to act in certain ways, and the opportunity to cheaply attack others if they disagree with it. In other communities, religion might be used to justify poor material/physical treatment of some groups of people, e.g. women and gay people. While I don’t think being accepting of those religions will change the EA community too much, it does say something to/negatively affect the wider world if there’s sufficient buy-in/enough of an alliance/enough comfort with them.
But yeah, generally, sticking to the Schelling point of “don’t discriminate by religion (or lack-thereof)” seems good. Also, if someone is religious and in EA (i.e., being in an environment that doesn’t have too many people who think like them), it’s probably good evidence that they really want to do good and are willing to cooperate with others to do so, despite being different in important ways. It seems a shame to lose them.
Oh, another thought. (sorry for taking up so much space!) Sometimes something looks really icky, such as evaluating a candidate via religion, but is actually just standing in for a different trait. We care about A, and B is somewhat predictive of A, and A is really hard to measure, then maybe people sometimes use B as a rough proxy for A.
I think that this is sometimes used as the justification for sexism/racism/etc, where the old-school racist might say “I want a worker who is A, and B people are generally not A.” If the relationship between A and B is non-existent or fairly weak, then we would call this person out for discriminating unfairly. But now I’m starting to think of what we should do if there really is a correlation between A and B (such as sex and physical strength). That is what tends to happen if a candidate is asked to do an assessment that seems to have nothing to do with the job, such as clicking on animations of colored balloons: it appears to have nothing to do with the job, but it actually measures X, which is correlated with Y, which predicts on-the-job success.
I’d rather be evaluated as an individual than as a member of a group, and I suspect that in-group variation is greater than between-group variation, echoing what you wrote about the priors being weak.
I have heard one anecdote of an EA saying that they would be less likely to hire someone on the basis of their religion because it would imply they were
less good at their jobless intelligent/epistemically rigorous. I don’t think they were involved in hiring, but I don’t think anyone should hold this view.Here is why:
As soon as you are in a hiring situation, you have much more information than priors. Even if it were true that, say, ADHD[1] were less rational then the interview process should provide much more information than such a prior. If that’s not the case, get a better interview process, don’t start being prejudiced!
People don’t mind meritocracy, but they want a fair shake. If I heard that people had a prior that ADHD folks were less likely to be hard working, regardless of my actual performance in job tests, I would be less likely to want to be part of this community. You might lose my contributions. It seems likely to me that we come out ahead by ignoring small differences in groups so people don’t have to worry about this. People are very sensitive to this. Let’s agree not to defect. We judge on our best guess of your performance, not on appearances.
I would be unsurprised if this kind of thinking cut only one way. Is anyone suggesting they wouldn’t hire poly people because of the increased drama or men because of the increased likelihood of sexual scandal? No! We already think some information is irrelevant/inadmissible as a prior in hiring. Because we are glad of people’s right to be different or themselves. To me, race and religion clearly fall in this space. I want people to feel they can be human and still have a chance of a job.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this cashed out to “I hire people like me”. In this example was the individual really hiring on the basis of merit or did they just find certain religious people hard to deal with. We are not a social club, we are trying to do the most good. We want the best, not the people who are like us.
This pattern matches to actual racism/sexism. Like “sometimes I don’t get hired because people think Xs are worse at jobs”. How is that not racism? Seems bad.
Counterpoints:
Sometime gut does play a play a role. We think someone would get better on our team. Some might argue that it’s fine to use this as a tiebreaker. Or that its better to be honest that this is what’s going on.
Personally I think they points outweigh the counterpoints.
Hiring processes should hire the person who seems most likely to do the best job. And candidates should be confident this is happening. But for both predictive reasons, community welfare reasons and avoiding obvious pitfalls reasons I think small priors around race, religion, sexuality, gender, sexual practice should be discounted[2]. If you think the candidate is better or worse, it should show in the interview process. And yes, I get that gut plays a role, but I’d be really wary of gut that feeds clear biases. I think a community where we don’t do that comes out ahead and does more good.
I have a diagnosis so feel comfortable using this example.
And I think large priors are incorrect
In the wake of the financial crisis it was not uncommon to see suggestions that banks etc. should hire more women to be traders and risk managers because they would be less temperamentally inclined towards excessive risk taking.
I have not heard for such calls in EA, which was my point.
But neat example
These thoughts are VERY rough and hand wavy.
I think that we have more-or-less agreed as societies that there are some traits that is is okay to use to make choices about people (mainly: their actions/behaviors), and there are some traits that is is not okay to use (mainly: things that the person didn’t choose and isn’t responsible for). Race, religion, gender, and the like are widely accepted[1] as not socially acceptable traits to use when evaluating people’s ability to be a member of a team.[2] But there are other traits that we commonly treat as acceptable to use as the basis of treating people differently, such as what school someone went to, how many years of work experience they have, if they have a similar communication style as us, etc.
I think I might split this into two different issues.
One issue is: it isn’t very fair to give or withhold jobs (and other opportunities) based on things that people didn’t really have much choice in (such as where they were born, how wealthy their parents were, how good of an education they got in their youth, etc.)
A separate issue is: it is ineffective to employment decisions (hiring, promotions, etc.) based on things that don’t predict on-the-job success.
Sometimes these things line up nicely (such as how it isn’t fair to base employment decisions on hair color, and it is also good business to not base employment decisions on hair color). But sometimes they don’t line up so nicely: I think there are situations where it makes sense to use “did this person go to a prestigious school” to make employment decisions because that will get you better on-the-job performance; but it also seems unfair because we are in a sense rewarding this person for having won the lottery.[3]
In a certain sense I suppose this is just a mini rant about how the world is unfair. Nonetheless, I do think that a lot of conversations about hiring and discriminations get the two different issues conflated.
People’s perspectives vary, of course, but among my own social groups and peers “discrimination based on race/sex/etc. = bad” is widely accepted.
Employment is full of laws, but even in situations where there isn’t any legal issue (such as inviting friends over for a movie party, or organizing a book club) I view it as somewhat repulsive to include/exclude people based on gender/race/religion/etc. Details matter a lot, and I can think of exceptions, but that is more or less my starting point.
I’ve heard the phrase “genetic lottery,” and I suspect genes to contribute a lot to academic/career success. But lots of other things outside a person’s control affect how well they perform: being born in a particular place, how good your high school teachers were, stability of the household, if your parents had much money, and all the other things that we can roughly describe as “fortune” or “luck” or “happenstance.”
I know lots of people with lots of dispositions experience friction with just declining their parents’ religions, but that doesn’t mean I “get it” i.e., conflating religion with birth lotteries and immutability seems a little unhinged to me.
There may be a consensus that it’s low status to say out loud “we only hire harvard alum” or maybe illegal (or whatever), but there’s not a lot of pressure to actually try reducing implicit selection effects that end up in effect quite similar to a hardline rule. And I think harvard undergrad admissions have way more in common with lotteries than religion does!
I think the old sequencesy sort of “being bad at metaphysics (rejecting reductionism) is a predictor of unclear thinking” is fine! The better response to that is “come on, no one’s actually talking about literal belief in literal gods, they’re moreso saying that the social technologies are valuable or they’re uncomfortable just not stewarding their ancestors’ traditions” than like a DEI argument.
There is more to get into here but two main things:
I guess some EAs, and some who I think do really good work do literally believe in literal gods
I don’t actually think this is that predictive. I know some theists who are great at thinking carefully and many athiests who aren’t. I reckon I could distinguish the two in a discussion better than rejecting the former out of hand.
Some feedback on this post: this part was confusing. I assume that what this person said was something like “I think a religious person would probably be harder to work with because of X”, or “I think a religious person would be less likely to have trait Y”, rather than “religious people are worse at jobs”.
The specifics aren’t very important here, since the reasons not to discriminate against people for traits unrelated to their qualifications[1] are collectively overwhelming. But the lack of specifics made me think to myself: “is that actually what they said?”. It also made it hard to understand the context of your counterarguments, since there weren’t any arguments to counter.
Religion can sometimes be a relevant qualification, of course; if my childhood synagogue hired a Christian rabbi, I’d have some questions. But I assume that’s not what the anecdotal person was thinking about.
The person who was told this was me, and the person I was talking to straight up told me he’d be less likely to hire Christians because they’re less likely to be intelligent
Please don’t assume that EAs don’t actually say outrageously offensive things—they really do sometimes!
Edit: A friend told me I should clarify this was a teenage edgelord—I don’t want people to assume this kind of thing gets said all the time!
And since posting this I’ve said this to several people and 1 was like “yeah no I would downrate religious people too”
I think a poll on this could be pretty uncomfortable reading. If you don’t, run it and see.
Put it another way, would EAs discriminate against people who believe in astrology? I imagine more than the base rate. Part of me agrees with that, part of me thinks its norm harming to do. But I don’t think this one is “less than the population”
That’s exactly what I mean!
“I think religious people are less likely to have trait Y” was one form I thought that comment might have taken, and it turns out “trait Y” was “intelligence”.
Now that I’ve heard this detail, it’s easier to understand what misguided ideas were going through the speaker’s mind. I’m less confused now.
“Religious people are bad at jobs” sounds to me like “chewing gum is dangerous” — my reaction is “What are you talking about? That sounds wrong, and also… huh?”
By comparison, “religious people are less intelligent” sounds to me like “chewing gum is poisonous” — it’s easier to parse that statement, and compare it to my experience of the world, because it’s more specific.
*****
As an aside: I spend a lot of time on Twitter. My former job was running the EA Forum. I would never assume that any group has zero members who say offensive things, including EA.
I think the strongest reason to not do anything that even remotely looks like employer discrimination based on religion is that it’s illegal, at least for the US, UK, and European Union countries, which likely jointly encompasses >90% of employers in EA.
(I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true for most other countries as well, these are just the ones I checked).
There’s also the fact that, as a society and subject to certain exceptions, we’ve decided that employers shouldn’t be using an employee’s religious beliefs or lack thereof as an assessment factor in hiring. I think that’s a good rule from a rule-utilitarian framework. And we can’t allow people to utilize their assumptions about theists, non-theists, or particular theists in hiring without the rule breaking down.
The exceptions generally revolve around personal/family autonomy or expressive association, which don’t seem to be in play in the situation you describe.
I think that I generally agree with what you are suggesting/proposing, but there are all kinds of tricky complications. The first thing that jumps to my mind is that sometimes hiring the person who seems most likely to do the best job ends up having a disparate impact, even if there was no disparate treatment. This is not a counterargument, of course, but more so a reminder that you can do everything really well and still end up with a very skewed workforce.
I generally agree with the meritocratic perspective. It seems a good way (maybe the best?) to avoid tit-for-tat cycles of “those holding views popular in some context abuse power → those who don’t like the fact that power was abused retaliate in other contexts → in those other contexts, holding those views results in being harmed by people in those other contexts who abuse power”.
Good point about the priors. Strong priors about these things seem linked to seeing groups as monoliths with little within-group variance in ability. Accounting for the size of variance seems under-appreciated in general. E.g., if you’ve attended multiple universities, you might notice that there’s a lot of overlap between people’s “impressiveness”, despite differences in official university rankings. People could try to be less confused by thinking in terms of mean/median, variance, and distributions of ability/traits more, rather than comparing groups by their point estimates.
Some counter-considerations:
Religion and race seem quite different. Religion seems to come with a bunch of normative and descriptive beliefs that could affect job performance—especially in EA—and you can’t easily find out about those beliefs in a job interview. You could go from one religion to another, from no religion to some religion, or some religion to no religion. The (non)existence of that process might give you valuable information about how that person thinks about/reflects on things and whether you consider that to be good thinking/reflection.
For example, from a irreligious perspective, it might be considered evidence of poor thinking if a candidate thinks the world will end in ways consistent with those described in the Book of Revelation, or think that we’re less likely to be in a simulation because a benevolent, omnipotent being wouldn’t allow that to happen to us.
Anecdotally, on average, I find that people who have gone through the process of abandoning the religion they were raised with, especially at a young age, to be more truth-seeking and less influenced by popular, but not necessarily true, views.
Religion seems to cover too much. Some forms of it seems to offer immunity to act in certain ways, and the opportunity to cheaply attack others if they disagree with it. In other communities, religion might be used to justify poor material/physical treatment of some groups of people, e.g. women and gay people. While I don’t think being accepting of those religions will change the EA community too much, it does say something to/negatively affect the wider world if there’s sufficient buy-in/enough of an alliance/enough comfort with them.
But yeah, generally, sticking to the Schelling point of “don’t discriminate by religion (or lack-thereof)” seems good. Also, if someone is religious and in EA (i.e., being in an environment that doesn’t have too many people who think like them), it’s probably good evidence that they really want to do good and are willing to cooperate with others to do so, despite being different in important ways. It seems a shame to lose them.
Oh, another thought. (sorry for taking up so much space!) Sometimes something looks really icky, such as evaluating a candidate via religion, but is actually just standing in for a different trait. We care about A, and B is somewhat predictive of A, and A is really hard to measure, then maybe people sometimes use B as a rough proxy for A.
I think that this is sometimes used as the justification for sexism/racism/etc, where the old-school racist might say “I want a worker who is A, and B people are generally not A.” If the relationship between A and B is non-existent or fairly weak, then we would call this person out for discriminating unfairly. But now I’m starting to think of what we should do if there really is a correlation between A and B (such as sex and physical strength). That is what tends to happen if a candidate is asked to do an assessment that seems to have nothing to do with the job, such as clicking on animations of colored balloons: it appears to have nothing to do with the job, but it actually measures X, which is correlated with Y, which predicts on-the-job success.
I’d rather be evaluated as an individual than as a member of a group, and I suspect that in-group variation is greater than between-group variation, echoing what you wrote about the priors being weak.
You don’t need to apologise for taking up space! It’s a short form, write what you like.