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This is a great idea, and I have already implemented similar ideas into my education products. There is evidence it works. Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning(PDF)

Hackers go to jail for insider trading because it rips off punters without access to the inside information.

So what about High-frequency trading? Investment bankers pay a premium to the stock exchange to connect their computers closer than everyone elses. They get inside information microseconds before those same punters, and milk them for it, and it's all legit. Isn't High-frequency trading just another kind of insider trading?

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/re...
http://faculty.chicagobooth.ed...

It's more than that though.

It's also about making sure that when non white men apply they're actually evaluated on merit rather than on their perceived race and/or gender.

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...
http://www.pnas.org/content/10...

But yes, the entire thing is actually about making sure the best people get the job.

Your comment is absolutely true. But that's not the whole story... in a study a few years back, "applicants with white-sounding names were 50% more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with black-sounding names." This is a real problem that affects minorities, so while preferential treatment is also a problem the biases have to change quite far before it's likely that minorities are getting actual preferential treatment.

It has been the deal since the early 90s: "Shaniqua" and similar names are ancient African words all meaning "I was raised by a single mother who couldn't really afford a child and definitely wasn't emotionally prepared to raise one but decided to get knocked up anyway by some dude that she knew had no intention of being a father". I wouldn't hire them either. But I would hire a black person from a nuclear family who speaks English well and grew up thinking the whole "East Coast vs. West Coast" rap disputes were stupid. And that my fellow Slashdotters is the difference between race and culture, two things we keep conflating just because they are often strongly correlated.

Your comment is absolutely true. But that's not the whole story... in a study a few years back, "applicants with white-sounding names were 50% more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with black-sounding names." This is a real problem that affects minorities, so while preferential treatment is also a problem the biases have to change quite far before it's likely that minorities are getting actual preferential treatment.

Here's one:

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).

Studies like that have been done repeatedly for decades. I expect that if you read the NBER study, they'd have a bibliography of older research.

Each one repeatedly demonstrates actual discrimination against blacks in hiring. I don't know how anyone could avoid that conclusion. Employers are more likely to hire a person with a white name than a person with a black name with the identical resume. It's not just socioeconomic disadvantage, inability to do the job, lack of qualifications or laziness.

I don't know if anyone has done a similar study in tech fields specifically, but it would be a good thing to do. If you're taking a black studies course, you could get a good paper out of it. Send out 100 resumes to Monster.com from Greg and 100 resumes from Jamal.

If you want to know generally why there are so few minorities in science, Science magazine has had many articles.

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep...

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).

Employers' Replies to Racial Names

"Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback."

Now a "field experiment" by NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan measures this discrimination in a novel way. In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are "remarkably common" in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.

To see how the credentials of job applicants affect discrimination, the authors varied the quality of the resumes they used in response to a given ad. Higher quality applicants were given a little more labor market experience on average and fewer holes in their employment history. They were also portrayed as more likely to have an email address, to have completed some certification degree, to possess foreign language skills, or to have been awarded some honors.

In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.

Here's more:

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/200...

Study: Black man and white felon – same chances for hire

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...

In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap

"A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did."

"There is also the matter of how many jobs, especially higher-level ones, are never even posted and depend on word-of-mouth and informal networks, in many cases leaving blacks at a disadvantage. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Problems found that white males receive substantially more job leads for high-level supervisory positions than women and members of minorities."

You are not your race, gender, age, or place of birth.

But those things are all part of you and are life experiences that helped shape you into what you are. The entire rest of your statement is a ridiculous strawman.

If a company of 5 people doesn't include 1 woman, that's perfectly believable as a result of pure chance just like a company of 5 people not including anybody who grew up in poverty, or anybody who did not grow up in poverty, or anybody whose parents were not religious, or whatever.

If a company of ten thousand doesn't, that seems like evidence of some sort of filtering (a filter which may be removing other things!). And if a representative sample of 2000 companies, each of 5 people, doesn't include 1 woman, that's not chance there's some filter.

Somebody who speaks multiple languages may have something to say about localizability of software. A software company made up of only employees aged 50 or higher, trying to make a culturally-relevant educational game for university students, is likelier to fail than a company with diverse ages because of a failure to relate.

And if your company is making the ultimate in comfort-bras? Well there's good reason to include mostly women and mostly not men. Vice-versa for comfortable jockstraps. If your company is making something irrelevant, like a television remote control, then an extreme skew has a high chance of being evidence of bias. In remotes, that bias could lead to under-reporting the fact that the remote is too big to fit in the average woman's hand. Even if there is a small-handed male in the crowd too, he could be seen as the extreme exception. These are, of course, examples off the top of my head.

Race means nothing. Sex means nothing.

They mean something during hiring:

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

etc.

People where literally the only difference in their resume is their first name, get consistent, measurably different results from the hiring process.

If you can't... that isn't my fault.

Well actually you are right now making it your fault by insisting that we not even examine whether there's a problem, and conflating the issue with a "push for sexual and racial quotas". Nobody but you is talking about explicit quotas.

Your first name should not matter to somebody who does hiring. If it does, that's an unreasonable bias. It's not "pushing a quota" to try to level off that bias. In fact, defending the status quo in the face of such biases is arguably pushing a quota.

Generally though, this isn't about blaming you or anybody else. It's about

For those of you not frothing at the mount, Eric Budish has an interesting critique and proposal to replace continuous-time markets with auctions every second or so. The idea is that being forced to wait for the next auction mitigates the advantages of low-latency trading.

I think he makes a very good argument.

Another thing is that this sort of thing has been tested and quantified. Of course, any study that touches politics is controversial (ie., upsets people's long held convictions/prejudices/biases), but this sort of discrimination is out there and has been documented. I guess whether the reverse happens (this whole "privilege" thing) would be a nice thing study, imho.

This is not the only solution - although you are right that we need to give more people a share in the economy. Our society needs to recognize that highly productive people work too much and would be happier if the worked less and earned less. Yes, one of the world's elite business schools says that productive people work too much.

depends on your definition of too much, i am sure that everyone would like to work 1 minute per year and would be happiest than, its maybe even possible if robots do 99% of work but than progress of our race will stop, we will never colonize other planets or develop other cool stuff ... for our (human) race it is best if everyone worked as much as it is optimal (maximal number of hours that will not make people reduce performance because of tiredness i believe its calculated by Ford its 40 hours/week anything more and work per hour decreases more than time worked increases)

All employees should receive overtime pay if they work more than X number of hours in a week. Period. The X number of hours should be indexed to productivity measures so that it changes in step with the productivity levels of our economy.

on the contrary all overtime should be forbidden because it actually reduces total productivity, and normal time should be set to "optimal" for maximum total work done per worker, current belief is that it is 40 hours/week

also problem with unemployed should be easy solved by giving every unemployed person full minimum (livable) wage, and of course take it away if person declines any job offered to him (or her).
after if you have to much unemployment like over 3% or 5% unemployment rate just get unemployed to build new roads or bridges or buildings or internet/fiber or do whatever we need but is not provided by some company in good enough quality

The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system, with higher taxes for the high-earners so that everyone has a fair share of the increased productivity.

This is not the only solution - although you are right that we need to give more people a share in the economy. Our society needs to recognize that highly productive people work too much and would be happier if the worked less and earned less. Yes, one of the world's elite business schools says that productive people work too much.

We have become much more productive—output per hour worked increased more than fourfold between 1950 and 2012... In the United States, the average working year went from 1,963 hours in 1950 to 1,790 hours last year, a drop of less than 10%.

Research shows that highly productive people would be far happier (and still have plenty of economic security) if they worked fewer hours. If the amount of work to do doesn't change, the economy has room for more workers.

I think that a better solution to taxation changes is for the government to change employment law - no more exemptions for overtime. All employees should receive overtime pay if they work more than X number of hours in a week. Period. The X number of hours should be indexed to productivity measures so that it changes in step with the productivity levels of our economy.

You just said that because I am a white male that I *must* be benefiting from past slavery.

No, I did not say slavery. I said institutional racism. And it looks like I was 100% correct in predicting that you don't believe it exists.

Does a fish know what water is? As a white male you benefit in so many ways that you don't even realize. Losing unearned privilege tends to really burn which is probably what explains your raging.

Best way to smoke pot and not go to jail? Be white.

Best way to get a good primary education? Be white.

Best way to get a job interview? Be white.

Best way to not be poor? Be white.

Best way to buy or rent a house? Be white.

This water you swim in is as big as an ocean, the problem is that you just don't know what its like to be a fish out of water.

The gov't stands out from private enterprise only because whenever society needs something done and it's too expensive to get anyone to pay for it we have the gov't do it.

The ignorance here is profound. First, government does a lot of stuff that neither needs doing nor is too expensive that only government can do it. Most congressional earmarks, for example, are easily affordable on the private side, if one were say, addicted to burning money. The small size is how those things get under the radar.

That brings us to the second point which is that a lot of what government does is remarkably useless and overpriced. For example, I work with a non-profit aerospace group out of Sacramento. Last winter we put an airship up to 95,000 feet and moved it around a bit. Total cost was roughly $30,000 plus one or two man-years of volunteer work (which including the launch of balloon systems to vet gear that was to go on the airship).

Northrup Grumman recently announced a half a billion dollar project (funded by the US Department of Defense) to launch three airship prototypes for reconnaissance work. The first will go up to 20,000 feet. While I doubt any of them will near 95,000 feet altitude, it's still clear that they have a lot of features and functionality that our airship didn't have (such as a three week loiter time, versus a vehicle that went up and then down or considerably higher power delivery). On the other hand, there's three orders of magnitude difference in cost and our vehicle likely will go higher.

That leads me to the last point. It's worth remembering that one can inflate costs of a project by changing the requirements for the project, namely, adding bells and whistles until it's firmly in big project territory. This is a popular game among contractors and politicians. It is common for someone to say, "Sure, you can do it for less, but then you wouldn't get all these cool features!" They ignore that many of these features never get used and many of the rest can be dropped without impacting the value of the project significantly.

For example, the Space Shuttle had excellent cross range capability (they could shift several hundred miles side to side as they were gliding towards a landing. It could handle payloads up to roughly 25 tons. That capability drove up the cost of the Shuttle considerably and generated some additional compromises (such as the delicate tiles of the thermal protection system and low launch frequency).

A more modest vehicle would have fit NASA's budget much better. Didn't happen though.

Same is true for drugs. You didn't think those companies actually PAID for their research, did you?

Yes, they did. In the US, private funding of medical research is more than half of overall funding.

The United States invests over $35 billion annually in medical research. Federal support accounts for about 38 percent of this total, and private industry about half; the rest comes from various public and private sources. Federal support of medical research has also grown substantially: between 1986 and 1995 real federal expenditures on medical research increased by 46 percent, reaching $13.4 billion annually.1 This is more than one fifth of federal outlays on research and development.

But if some government wants to vastly overpay for my research efforts, then go ahead and make my day.

...in theory. In actual practice, prices are random.

The government debt is one thing but household debt is a bigger factor in the economy and that grew wildly from 1980 to 2008. http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/amir.sufi/sufidebt.pdf

Jesse Shapiro has done some real research on the segregation of political groups online. Here's the abstract:

We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideologi- cal segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.

Cass Sunstein got rather famous for books Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0 , warning that, "as ... the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving. I listened to Mr. Sunstein speak on his topic, and heard only loose speculation, unsupported by research or rigorous reasoning, so I never read the books. Perhaps there is something more substantial in the books.

Jesse Shapiro has done some real research on the segregation of political groups online. Here's the abstract:

We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideologi- cal segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.

Cass Sunstein got rather famous for books Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0 , warning that, "as ... the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving. I listened to Mr. Sunstein speak on his topic, and heard only loose speculation, unsupported by research or rigorous reasoning, so I never read the books. Perhaps there is something more substantial in the books.

I wasn't criticizing the summary, I was criticizing the Slashdot community and its gung-ho reaction to the summary.

Ah. I guess I read "Slashdot" in your statement "You would think Slashdot could tell the difference..." to mean "the Slashdot editors" and not "the Slashdot community"...though one wonders if you're committing the same fallacy looking at a few of these posts that you accuse us of making looking at this People's Daily article.

All newspapers and almost all "companies" in China are party- (=government in their Leninist system) owned.

Not true. I don't know what rock you've been living under the last 20 years, but China has had rapid development of privately owned enterprise, including both foreign and domestic investment. What you said was true when Mao was alive. Now, however, China has over 85 million privately owned businesses. As for regulation, yes, there is immense government regulation of most business (certain industries like roadside food stands/carts seem to be exempt). And there are sectors of the economy which are still government owned; for example, the government owns all land, and private entities can only own leases. But all newspapers and almost all companies? No.

If you know your product is highly likely going to fail, why not add some poetry to existence by showing the maximum hubris possible?

If you can't be a good example of success, then you can also play a role of being a very loud example of failure.

The problem is that, at looking to politics and business, most extremely loud examples of failure end up being repeated anyway the very next political/financial cycle, with very little modifications to counter that same method of failure.

Ultimately, it is because people remember claims, not results - so the loud hubris ends up attracting more imitation than the results drive a logical reaction.

Ryan Fenton

Completely agree.
Since the 80's, americans have lost the last of the respect they had for scientists previously (since perhaps the 40's?)

Meanwhile, they increasingly pay smart, non-science positions increasingly disproportionate amounts of money.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_salaries_in_the_1950s

In the 50's, average pay was $3000.
Scientists who were "middle class" (or perhaps higher, earned as much as $10,000).

So far so good, since $46k is the average today and scientists earn about $138k... oh wait, actually their pay is more like $70-80k but senior ones can make $110k.. past their we are talking about the top edge of the bell curve these days.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/06/25/305448/index.htm
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/workshops/AppliedEcon/archive/pdf/FrydmanSecondPaper.pdf

CEO's received, in adjusted for inflation year 2000 dollars, $500,000 annual salaries in the 1950's.
So they earned about 150x the average national salary. A princely sum. But nothing near the 6,000x the average national wage today.

Here's the problem...
A person who wants to go to a ski resort or to a nice beach can save up enough money to compete with a 1950's CEO salary.
There is no hope of competing with the current ultra rich. You could save your entire lifetime and they could out bid you with an hour's wages.

---
So meanwhile back to scientists... they produce the work-- but management has highjacked their compensation. If CEO's were earning a million a year today, then scientists could be earning the $150k average that would justify the expense and effort that goes into acquiring a degree in science.

Look at the work of Burt, Granovetter or Podolny (head of Apple University) and tell me again that sociology isn't scientific. That social network analysis has informed biology and physics and vice-versa speaks to how ridiculous it is to try to divide the hard sciences from the soft sciences. Critique the article on its merits.