Oh rubbish. She's demonstrated the bias in ad delivery exists and is unlikely to be the result of chance, identified possible vectors, and observed that there's no way of knowing where the bias originates at present. The paper [1] is cautious and methodical.
It is you who is 'just flinging around wild accusations'. Read the paper and critique it on its merits, by all means. As it is, your little rant tells us far more about you than its subject.
> there's no way of knowing where the bias originates
Just off the top of my head, why not go make a Google Ads account and bid on keywords that sound like black names, and then bid on keywords that sound like white names (according to the professor's criteria)? Wouldn't the price differences show that there is greater demand for one set or another?
My hypothesis would be that the discrimination happening here is simply happening in the ad marketplace, and that while it may reveal something unpleasant about our culture which we would like to see changed, doesn't lend itself to prescriptive intervention-type remedies. I'd like to believe that it may only be revealing that when a bunch of white marketing guys buy adwords in bulk they aren't cognizant of their list of "common names" being essentially "white names," and the arrest record websites caught on to this fact first.
Comments
Oh rubbish. She's demonstrated the bias in ad delivery exists and is unlikely to be the result of chance, identified possible vectors, and observed that there's no way of knowing where the bias originates at present. The paper [1] is cautious and methodical.
It is you who is 'just flinging around wild accusations'. Read the paper and critique it on its merits, by all means. As it is, your little rant tells us far more about you than its subject.
1. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.6822.pdf
Asking for a coherent definition of racism in an academic paper is (presumably you are attempting to insinuate) racist. Natch.
The intro handwaves a very general definition, but never brings it back to the question at hand.
I don't think you're racist. I think you're relying on a lazy assumption that social scientists don't understand statistics.
> there's no way of knowing where the bias originates
Just off the top of my head, why not go make a Google Ads account and bid on keywords that sound like black names, and then bid on keywords that sound like white names (according to the professor's criteria)? Wouldn't the price differences show that there is greater demand for one set or another?
My hypothesis would be that the discrimination happening here is simply happening in the ad marketplace, and that while it may reveal something unpleasant about our culture which we would like to see changed, doesn't lend itself to prescriptive intervention-type remedies. I'd like to believe that it may only be revealing that when a bunch of white marketing guys buy adwords in bulk they aren't cognizant of their list of "common names" being essentially "white names," and the arrest record websites caught on to this fact first.