Many years ago, I worked a security job that involved selecting some people for “additional screening”. We were issued a mechanical pseudorandom number generator. Essentially, you would click the button each time someone would come through the checkpoint. After some (non-constant) number of clicks, it would have a different readout that is supposed to prompt you to select the next person in line for additional screening. We were also instructed to never tell the public how they are selected.
The majority of the time, the person selected was a member of the majority demographic category in the region in which we were operating (as would be expected). They would be selected, shrug, and say something along the lines of “I guess it’s my lucky day”. Much more rarely, someone would get selected from a minority group. A fraction of these people would say something along the lines of “Oh, what a surprise, you picked the #{minority class/race/etc…} person” and be visibly agitated. At the time, I wondered how many of these incidents got recounted to others as clear instances of discrimination, not knowing that the result was determined by a dumb clicker.
(Crossposted from the SSC comment thread)
Many years ago, I worked a security job that involved selecting some people for “additional screening”. We were issued a mechanical pseudorandom number generator. Essentially, you would click the button each time someone would come through the checkpoint. After some (non-constant) number of clicks, it would have a different readout that is supposed to prompt you to select the next person in line for additional screening. We were also instructed to never tell the public how they are selected.
The majority of the time, the person selected was a member of the majority demographic category in the region in which we were operating (as would be expected). They would be selected, shrug, and say something along the lines of “I guess it’s my lucky day”. Much more rarely, someone would get selected from a minority group. A fraction of these people would say something along the lines of “Oh, what a surprise, you picked the #{minority class/race/etc…} person” and be visibly agitated. At the time, I wondered how many of these incidents got recounted to others as clear instances of discrimination, not knowing that the result was determined by a dumb clicker.