> I imagine that the fields like fairness & bias have to encounter this a lot, so they might be some insights.
It makes sense to me that the implicit pathways for these dynamics would be an area of interest to the fields of fairness and bias. But I would not expect them to have any better tools for identifying causes and mechanisms than anyone else[1]. What kinds of insights would you expect those fields to offer?
[Rephrasing to require less context.] Consider questions “Are companies ‘trying to’ override the safety concerns of their employees?” and “Are companies ‘trying to’ hire fewer women or paying them less?”. I imagine that both of these will suffer from the similar issues: (1) Even if a company is doing the bad thing, it might not be doing it through explicit means like having an explicit hiring policy. (2) At the same time, you can probably always postulate one more level of indirection, and end up going on witch hunt even in places where there are no witches.
Mostly, it just seemed to me that fairness & bias might be the biggest examples of where (1) and (2) are in tension. (Which might have something to do with there being both strong incentives to discriminate and strong taboos against it.) So it seems more likely that somebody there would have insights about how to fight it, compared to other fields like physics or AI, and perhaps even more than economics and politics. (Of course, “somebody having insights” is consistent with “most people are doing it wrong”.)
As to how those insights would look like: I don’t know :-( . Could just be a collection of clear historical examples where we definitely know that something bad was going on but naive methods X, Y, Z didn’t show it, together with some opposite examples of where nothing was wrong but people kept looking until they found some signs? Plus some heuristics for how to distinguish these.
[Rephrasing to require less context.] Consider questions “Are companies ‘trying to’ override the safety concerns of their employees?” and “Are companies ‘trying to’ hire fewer women or paying them less?”. I imagine that both of these will suffer from the similar issues: (1) Even if a company is doing the bad thing, it might not be doing it through explicit means like having an explicit hiring policy. (2) At the same time, you can probably always postulate one more level of indirection, and end up going on witch hunt even in places where there are no witches.
Mostly, it just seemed to me that fairness & bias might be the biggest examples of where (1) and (2) are in tension. (Which might have something to do with there being both strong incentives to discriminate and strong taboos against it.) So it seems more likely that somebody there would have insights about how to fight it, compared to other fields like physics or AI, and perhaps even more than economics and politics. (Of course, “somebody having insights” is consistent with “most people are doing it wrong”.)
As to how those insights would look like: I don’t know :-( . Could just be a collection of clear historical examples where we definitely know that something bad was going on but naive methods X, Y, Z didn’t show it, together with some opposite examples of where nothing was wrong but people kept looking until they found some signs? Plus some heuristics for how to distinguish these.