Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Analysis of sytemic failures in a meritocracy

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/19/racism-and-meritocracy/

This is a really articulate analysis of the problems that I have seen in a number of "people" systems that involve a selection component.  (Duh! Now I think about it) I have just not seen it articulated so cleanly. 

Bias is a fun concept and it ties into all sorts of research going on here.  Its fun when you start to break it down and look for bias in a system, its, as the article stated, part of the patten recognition system that is based on experience. We have a bias for successful strategies based on past experience... not optimal strategies.

Makes you wonder about every single decision a person makes in a day.  If they were completely un-biased would they make "chance" decisions?  Is there any other mechanism at work?

The idea, mentioned in the article, that if confronted with a choice about something that is not part of our experience we are slower and have to work it out based on other aspects... this is just aggregating the bias from many less primary aspects of the decision, it cannot be that suddenly we are non-bias.. just less biased in comparison to a scenario where the decision can be made using a more developed pile of experience.

Need to add some thinking to this.

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