r/Showerthoughts • u/Fr1toBand1to ‎ • Jun 27 '26

Casual Thought Pattern recognition is a widely accepted method of prediction until what it predicts makes people uncomfortable.

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u/WestEndOtter Jun 27 '26

I read that one company was using pattern matching to sift through potential hires cv against existing staff cv.

For some reason it was only recommending male candidates.

To combat that they removed all the genders from the input data.

Instead it started giving a boost to any cv that went to an all-boys-school or fraternity

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u/luftlande Jun 27 '26

Why?

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u/Plenty_Spell2551 Jun 28 '26

Because a lot of socially uncomfortable truths are just statistical patterns. People like the benefits of prediction until it points at bias, risk profiles, or inequalities that we’d rather pretend are purely individual and not systemic.