For your examples of intent vs actual net targeting, it is not unreasonable to expect that an employer check the actual results of their targeting selections and ensure that they produce sound results.
"what is the underlying criteria that supposedly separates job listings from product listings?"
It is called Equal Opportunity Employment Law. If you want to employ someone, you MUST give equal opportunity, and cannot discriminate based on any of the protected classes (and ignorance of the law is no excuse).
Re your various characteristics, again, you MUST check your results for parity of results. Your example of "oh, I'm just targeting these particular characteristics and I had no idea that they happened to correlate 100% with young white males, oh my!", would provide such an easy work-aroud the EEO laws as to make them worthless. So, no, you can't do that.
> “It is called Equal Opportunity Employment Law.”
Sorry I was not clear about this. I meant what are the sociological / philosophical reasons. Legal reasons get created at the whim of lobbying or party politics and don’t usually have much to do with protecting the welfare of people (even though they can selectively serve that purpose after the fact).
I’m asking why we choose to emphasize this along some axes of characteristics and not along others.
E.g. introvert / extravert axis is something employers are free to discriminate / harass along (e.g. open plan office layouts, less “outgoing” people often paid much less for the same job) even though it likely causes as much damage as any other axis that roughly splits the population. Yet few people seem bothered enough by this to organize legislation or talk about it seriously.
I think it’s interesting to ask why some kinds of characteristcs (gender, sexual orientation) are allowed to have this elevated status, and what does it mean about true intentions behind why there are protected classes of characteristics?
Because of the existence of unprotected characteristic axes like introvert / extravert that few seem to care much about, the explanation of protected classes, by definition, cannot be mitigation of harm / equitable treatment, etc.
> it likely causes as much damage as any other axis that roughly splits the population.
I wonder how you are measuring 'damage'? Are you saying that introverts suffer as much damage from loud workplaces as racial minorities do from being denied employment? I'm really struggling to understand the logic here.
> I think it’s interesting to ask why some kinds of characteristcs (gender, sexual orientation) are allowed to have this elevated status,
You are free to read up on the history of why the protected classes exist in employment law if interested. The relevant laws and judgments behind them are all public knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group#United_States
> Because of the existence of unprotected characteristic axes ... the explanation of protected classes, by definition, cannot be mitigation of harm
Or ... here's another explanation–you may not have fully understood the history of the relevant laws, why the existing protected classes reached that status, and mistakenly believe that other classes were not considered. Fortunately, you have plenty of opportunity to educate yourself if interested.
> “First of all–'introversion' is, scientifically speaking, not as clear-cut as what most people think it is”
Why do you believe this matters to the discussion? Some may say the same about gender identity, which is only just being understood, yet that lack of scientific understanding has not prevented it from being a protected class.
> “Are you saying that introverts suffer as much damage from loud workplaces as racial minorities do from being denied employment?”
It’s juvenile that you seem to think that a certain class has to “suffer as much as” some other class before the characteristic defining that class might be seriously considered for protected status. It reminds me of the inanity in Berlin local politics about which of various holocaust victim groups get the best real estate for memorials. Nobody is talking about totalling up exact amounts of suffering of this group or that. But it is quite telling to me that you’d rather be dismissive of possible suffering of a large cohort like introverts than to engage with the point.
> “You are free to read up on the history of why the protected classes exist in employment law if interested. The relevant laws and judgments“
You didn’t read my comment above, where I specifically mentioned I’m not interested in the legal process that led to this, rather the entirely separate sociological and philosophical parts that people seem to use to justify protection of one type of characteristic but not others.
> “I'm really struggling to understand the logic here.”
> Why do you believe this matters to the discussion?
It matters because we can't just go around making laws based on whatever we feel like. Laws need to be about equity and need to be supported by evidence. Otherwise we can make a law saying that left-handed people are not allowed to use public washrooms, because they might not be able to use the facilities properly and make a mess.
> Some may say the same about gender identity ... lack of scientific understanding has not prevented it from being a protected class.
Some may say that. Some also say that vaccines are just a money-making scheme by pharma companies, or a potential cause of autism. But the people who actually studied it–i.e. doctors–don't. The American Medical Association is committed to informing policymakers of their current science-based understanding of gender as a spectrum: https://policysearch.ama-assn.org/policyfinder/detail/gender...
> It’s juvenile that you seem to think...
The factors that you associate with introversion and correlate with suffering in open office plans haven't even been scientifically established. In fact, scientifically there is doubt that the factors that people normally associate with introversion are actually about introversion. Given this lack of evidence, I don't know how you can make such a strong claim that introverts are discriminated against in offices, especially in a thread about already-established discriminatory practices.
But if you feel so strongly about it, absolutely no one is stopping you from writing up a post and submitting it to HN.
> I’m not interested in the legal process that led to this, rather the entirely separate sociological and philosophical parts
The legal process used the sociological and philosophical factors to arrive at the discrimination judgments. Law doesn't just appear out of thin air–it's based on human factors. That's why I pointed you to those sources in the first place. They cover all that. If you're really interested, please go ahead and read them.
because there exist some characteristic axes that are not protected,
that it is therefore impossible that the reason that some classes are protected cannot, by definition be in order to mitigate hare and provide equitable treatment?
That is like saying: 'in 1875, because women didn't yet have the right to vote, the purpose of banning slavery could not have been to reduce harm to the slaves and give them equality, because women are still being harmed and are unequal'.
I'd like to know, if you think that the purpose of the EOE laws is not to reduce harm and promote equitable treatment, what do you think IS the purpose of these laws?
I find it frustrating that rather than engaging with the question I asked, you rush to turn it around and say that I’m supposed to answer my own question, very obviously so you can take whatever my answer is (which you seem to have made up your mind to ridicule and disagree with prior to even knowing what it is) and put it down or gainsay it.
But at the risk of such unthinking ridicule I’ll say that personally my theory is something along the lines of homo hypocritus of economist Robin Hanson, similar in spirit to what is discussed (about wealth inequality) here:
I think we arrived at the particular protected classes we have now because people saw opportunities where someone could be shown to be harming a certain class and some other people (who couldn’t care less about the harm being caused) saw the opportunity to create a new way to take wealth from those people.
It turns out this was to society’s benefit mostly, and over time we use social norms and legal structure to increase its use as a humanitarian tool, but it almost surely was not invented for that reason.
I’d speculate that other characteristics like introversion never received this treatment because there weren’t preexisting social norms or religious cultural attachments to the class of introverted people, so in a mob justice sense you’d have a hard time taking wealth away from those in power over claimed mistreatment of this class. But for classes like gender identity or religious creed, there were preexisting big scale cultural norms / civic principles / etc. that allowed making the wealth-grab arguments catch on in the public eye.
"what is the underlying criteria that supposedly separates job listings from product listings?"
It is called Equal Opportunity Employment Law. If you want to employ someone, you MUST give equal opportunity, and cannot discriminate based on any of the protected classes (and ignorance of the law is no excuse).
Re your various characteristics, again, you MUST check your results for parity of results. Your example of "oh, I'm just targeting these particular characteristics and I had no idea that they happened to correlate 100% with young white males, oh my!", would provide such an easy work-aroud the EEO laws as to make them worthless. So, no, you can't do that.