Shorter commutes by living in the suburbs

From The Shorter Commutes in American Suburbs and Exurbs by Wendell Cox.

An examination of American Community Survey (ACS) data in the major metropolitan areas of the United States shows that suburbs and exurbs have the shortest one-way work trip travel times for the largest number of people.

I think most people immediately connect living in the suburbs with very lengthy commutes in to the city. While that impression is correct, it ignores that many people in the suburbs work in the suburbs and many people in the urban core also work in the suburbs. The article goes in to some depth exploring the various permutations and nuances, but the net is that in addition to all their many other attractions, the suburbs represent a material time saving in commuting time.

I sought my brother, And I found all three.

Listening to an interview of Gregory Allan Williams on NPR the other day. He is not an actor of whom I have been aware but he sounded a pleasant and intelligent fellow. One striking thing in the interview was his lack of reluctance to refer to his Christianity which is often otherwise frowned upon in the media.

He mentioned in passing a striking quote which I enjoyed. I didn't catch the attribution.

I sought my soul, But my soul I could not see.
I sought my God, But my God eluded me.
I sought my brother, And I found all three.

Searching around it appears that it is a paraphrase of an original that is attributed to William Blake. However, I cannot find that in Blake quotes.

It appears from Bartleby, that the actual quote is somewhat different and is by Ernest Crosby.

No one could tell me where my Soul might be.
I searched for God, but God eluded me.
I sought my Brother out, and found all three.

No insult to Crosby but I prefer the vernacular version I heard from Williams.

Europe is sort of like derpfish.

Sarah A. Hoyt is a science fiction/fantasy author, originally from Portugal, now an American. She is also one of those authors who helped pioneer self-publishing in the modern era, providing an example to would-be writers incapable of breaking through the old guard gate-keepers of traditional publishing.

While occasionally chaotic for my preferences, I usually find her writings intriguing and always a different perspective. I enjoyed this piece, Fish And Water by Sarah A. Hoyt. She is addressing the perennial problem of calibrating what constitutes Left or Right when speaking across Europe or the USA. It is a fruitful discussion because we use the same terms for dramatically different meanings and, while laborious, it can lead to insight.

Hoyt makes the argument that European chattering classes have absorbed a gramscian framing of ideas that is unconscious on their part and Marxist in origin. I would make the same argument with different evidence, less stridently, and with more caveats but still fundamentally along the same lines.

I liked this passage.

Look, it’s like Derpfish, my betta. (He’s better, thank you. An aggressive new filter and part water changes are getting rid of his face fungus, slowly.) He’s not aware of everything I have to do to keep his aquarium at right temperature, filtration, salt content, etc. to keep him alive. He’s not aware I buy water so his acidity level doesn’t change. To him, that’s how life is, is all. And it’s natural, of course.

Now suppose Derpy were a little derpier and thought to start a war on “people who change water in aquariums at least part way every day” because he doesn’t like the agitation and changes in temperature (though I try to keep it pretty close.)

Well!

If he succeeded in that campaign, he’d be doing the back stroke in no time at all.

Europe is sort of like derpfish. It never got that “pacifism” and “internationalism” were ideas propagated by the soviet union, to make it easier for them to invade with no resistance. They also never noticed that the ONLY thing keeping the Soviet Union from marching across Europe was …. the US. The US whose “militarism” they reviled.

De gustibus non est disputandum

De gustibus non est disputandum from Wikipedia:

De gustibus non est disputandum, or de gustibus non disputandum est, is a Latin maxim meaning "In matters of taste, there can be no disputes" (literally "about tastes, it should not be disputed/discussed"). The implication is that everyone's personal preferences are merely subjective opinions that cannot be right or wrong, so they should never be argued about as if they were. Sometimes the phrase is expanded as De gustibus et coloribus... referring to tastes and colors. The phrase is most commonly rendered in English as "There is no accounting for taste" (or "There is no accounting for tastes").

Seems like 2016 ought to be called the De Gustibus Election.

Lots of things are going to stand in your way. Don’t make up additional stupid new ones to hold you back.

I came across the articles criticizing it before I came across the article itself.

The originating article is Science fiction publishing has a major race problem, new report shows by Andrew Liptak.

Liptak's is the usual numeracy-challenged social justice warrior statistically-impaired compost of nonsense that is regrettably common. The basic argument is that in the most progressive genre (science fiction/fantasy) of the most progressive sector (publishing) of the most progressive industry (media entertainment), the editors and publishers are incorrigibly bigoted and racist. I hear Luke (4:23) whispering in my ear.

And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.

If progressives are so unremittingly bigoted and racist, then it is up to them to put their own homes in order. There is little the rest of us can or ought to do to heal them. Which, since we are on a biblical role, brings to mind the wisdom of Matthew (7:3).

3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

But of course, not all is as it seems. SJW are not interested in law, justice or facts. They are advancing their own special interests, both political and commercial. Brad Torgersen and Larry Coreia are here to dissect and fisk the logical and empirical fallacies being stewed up to arrive at the social justice nonsense.

Respectively, here is the heavy lifting to deconstruct, as it were, the Liptak nonsense: Addressing The Problem™ by Brad Torgersen and, even more colorfully, Fisking the Latest Diversity in Sci-Fi Freak Out by Larry Correia.

I like Correia's framing.

After reading this defeatist garbage I figured I needed to say something. This fisking is addressed toward the aspiring authors in the audience. You are trying to make it as a professional author. Lots of things are going to stand in your way. Don’t make up additional stupid new ones to hold you back.

For some sort of tribal reason the hard left really hates the musical “Hamilton”.

I came across this essay (You Should be Terrified That People Who Like "Hamilton" Run Our Country by Alex Nichols) courtesy of Scott Alexander's comment in Slate Star Codex that, "For some sort of tribal reason the hard left really hates the musical “Hamilton”."

Well, yes, apparently. I must admit I wasn't perfectly aware that Current Affairs magazine was hard left but I accept that as a working proposition. Left or not, they certainly hate Hamilton. I am not inclined to view myself as particularly inclined to look kindly on the delusions of the left but the opening to the essay is in itself interesting.

Brian Eno once said that the Velvet Underground’s debut album only sold a few thousand copies, but everyone who bought it started a band. The same principle likely applies to Hamilton: only a few thousand people could afford to see it, but everyone who did happened to work for a prominent New York/D.C. publication.

The media gushing over Hamilton has been downright torrential. “I am loath to tell people to mortgage their houses and lease their children to acquire tickets to a hit Broadway show,” wrote Ben Brantley of the New York Times. “But Hamilton… might just about be worth it.” The hyperbolic headlines poured forth unceasingly: “Is Hamilton the Musical the Most Addicting Album Ever?” “Hamilton is the most important musical of our time.” “Hamilton Haters Are Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” The media then got high on their own supply, diagnosing all of America with a harrowing ailment called “Hamilton mania.” The work was “astonishing,” “sublime,” the “cultural event of our time.” Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune said the musical was “even better than the hype.” Given the tenor of the hype, one can only imagine the pure, overpowering ecstasy that must comprise the Hamilton-viewing experience. The musical even somehow won a Pulitzer Prize this year, alongside Nicholas Kristof and that book by Ta-Nehisi Coates you bought but never read.

One of the publications to enter swooning raptures over Hamilton was BuzzFeed, which called it the smash musical “that everyone you know has been quoting for months.” (Literally nobody has ever quoted Hamilton in my presence.) BuzzFeed’s workplace obsession with the musical led to the birthing of the phrase “BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack.” That three-word monstrosity, incomprehensible to anyone outside the narrowest circle of listicle-churning media elites, describes a room on the corporate messaging platform “Slack” used exclusively by BuzzFeed employees to discuss Hamilton. J.R.R. Tolkien said that “cellar door” was the most beautiful phonetic phrase the English language could produce. “BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack,” by contrast, may be the most repellent arrangement of words in any tongue.

Those of us unfortunate enough not to work media jobs can never be privy to what goes on in a “BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack.” But the Twitter emissions of the Slack’s denizens suggest a swamp into which no man should tread.

This is the Nichols meditation that I find interesting. Hamilton is a cultural phenomenon that involves virtually nobody in the culture. If more people were to see it, it seems likely that its reputation would plunge. It's high standing depends on only a small segment of like-minded people seeing it. People who do not, as it turns out, look like America today, at least in terms of ideology.

The upshot is that you have a huge cultural celebration of something that the culture actually would not celebrate. At least, if we are to believe Nichols. I am inclined to guess that he is right.

One could question the fairness of appraising a musical before putting one’s self through its full three-hour theatrical experience. But if nobody could criticize Hamilton without having seen it, then nobody could criticize Hamilton. One of the strangest aspects of the whole “Hamiltonmania” public relations spectacle is that hardly anyone in the country has actually attended the musical to begin with. The show is exclusive to Broadway and has spent most of its run completely sold out, seemingly playing to an audience comprised entirely of people who write breathless BuzzFeed headlines. (Fortunately, when you can get off the waitlist it only costs $1,200 a ticket—so long as you can stand bad seats.) Hamilton is the “nationwide sensation” that only .001% of the nation has even witnessed.

There’s something revealing in the disjunction between Hamilton’s popularity in the world of online media and Hamilton’s popularity in the world of actual human persons. After all, here we have a cultural product whose appeal essentially consists of a broad coalition of the worst people in America: New York Times writers, 15-year-olds who aspire to answer the phone in Chuck Schumer’s office, people who want to get into steampunk but have a copper sensitivity, and “wonks.” Yet because a large fraction of these people are elite taste-makers, Hamilton becomes a topic of disproportionate interest, discussed at unendurable length in The New Yorker and Slate and The New York Times Magazine, yet totally inaccessible to anyone besides the writers and members of their close social networks. When The New Yorker writes about a book that nobody in America wants to read, at least they could theoretically go out and purchase it. But Hamilton theatergoing is solely the provenance of Hamilton thinkpiece-writers. The endless swirl of online Hamilton-buzz shows the comical extreme of cultural insularity in the New York and D.C. media. The “cultural event of our time” is totally unknown to nearly all who actually live in our time.

Given that Hamilton is essentially Captain Dan with an American Studies minor, one might wonder how it became so inordinately adored by the blathering class. How did a ten-million-dollar 8th Grade U.S. History skit become “the great work of art of the 21st century” (as the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik says those in his circle have been calling it)?

To judge from the reviews, most of the appeal seems to rest with the forced diversity of its cast and the novelty concept of a “hip-hop musical.” Those who write about Hamilton often dwell primarily on its “groundbreaking” use of rap and its “bold” choice to cast an assemblage of black, Asian, and Latino actors as the Founding Fathers. Indeed, Hamilton exists more as a corporate HR department’s wet dream than as a biographical work.

Curiosity and Expectations

An interesting article on an area of research I have been thinking about lately. From Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing by Dan M. Kahan, et al.

This paper describes evidence suggesting that science curiosity counteracts politically biased information processing. This finding is in tension with two bodies of research. The first casts doubt on the existence of “curiosity” as a measurable disposition. The other suggests that individual differences in cognition related to science comprehension - of which science curiosity, if it exists, would presumably be one - do not mitigate politically biased information processing but instead aggravate it. The paper describes the scale-development strategy employed to overcome the problems associated with measuring science curiosity. It also reports data, observational and experimental, showing that science curiosity promotes open-minded engagement with information that is contrary to individuals’ political predispositions. We conclude by identifying a series of concrete research questions posed by these results.

There are all sorts of deterministic theories about how and why individuals/companies/groups/cities/cultures/nations turn out the way they do. Popular deterministic theories include IQ determinism (individual and group), Biological determinism, Technological determinism, Resource determinism, Institutions determinism, Geographical determinism, Culture determinism, Path Dependency determinism, Random Chance, Great Man determinism, Religious determinism, Government structure determinism, Economic system determinism, etc.

I am pretty certain no single-variable deterministic theory is accurate. I believe that all of these variables play a greater or lesser role depending on the circumstances. I have a sneaking suspicion that sequencing is likely much more important than is ever discussed. For example, while China has in ancient times displayed great technological innovation, they often failed to incorporate the technological innovation into the broader economy. They innovated before they had the political and economic systems mature enough to benefit from and propagate the innovations.

Lately I have been mulling two additional factors. What role does familial expectations play in creating prospective paths for children, and what role does curiosity play in driving societal/economic/cultural change? As an example: While the economy has been flat for the past decade, the absolute income is still much higher than it was twenty and thirty years ago. Why do millennials appear to be having such a hard time kick-starting their lives, marrying, starting families, buying homes, etc. Yes, flat economy doesn't help but as I say, things are cheaper and absolute income levels are higher than a generation or two ago.

I wonder whether part of it might be absence or discontinuities in familial expectations. It is notable that the biggest struggles are among those originating out of the bottom one and two income quintiles who also have very high levels of family fracturing, growing up with a single parent or multiple parental combinations over time. In those circumstances, I wonder if part of the young adult challenge is that they did not receive consistent and sustained familial expectations in a way that children from the upper quintiles do?

I suspect familial expectations and native curiosity are important factors in development and life outcomes but the research is skimpy and as topics they don't garner much attention.

New study finds that men are often their own favorite experts on any given subject - Pure, unadulterated tosh

Oh dear, what an execrable article based on execrable research. It would appear to be yet another example of the progressive clerisy telling themselves the tales they want to believe without having any rigor of thought to actually test their assumptions. Because the belief system of the progressive clerisy is at such variance with the general population, their circulation rates keep falling and there is little trust in them (60% distrust them according to Gallup).

From New study finds that men are often their own favorite experts on any given subject by Christopher Ingraham. The set-up is the implication that gender studies theorists are right, men are simply egotistical brutes, endorsed by Ingrams with his approving description of the research as "fascinating". It hardly needs a particularly skeptical mind to see that this is ideologically motivated research lacking basic research design features. You don't need an especially skeptical mind; just not a credulous one.

Here is the substance of the research as reported by Ingrams.

When an academic writes a research paper, it is common practice to give citations for various facts and assertions. It is not enough, for instance, to simply assert that "the global rise of the hyperdiverse ant genus Pheidole is an evolutionary epic with many subplots." You need to cite biologist Corrie S. Moreau's 2008 paper on "Unraveling the evolutionary history of the hyperdiverse ant genus Pheidole" to make that argument.

In academia, article citations like these are a marker of authority and influence: If your work gets cited by others hundreds of times, that's a good indicator that you're making a mark on your field. Universities often factor in citation counts when making decisions about hiring, tenure and pay.

As it turns out, academics have a handy tool at their disposal for juicing their citation counts: They cite themselves. There's nothing inherently shady about this practice. If you're an expert in a relatively obscure field like ant taxonomy, you're probably going to need to cite your previous work because few people people are doing similar work.

So Molly M. King and her colleagues at Stanford University, the University of Washington and New York University set out to find how often this so-called "self-citation" happens. They did so by examining a massive database of academic work: 1.5 million research papers in JSTOR, a digital library of academic books and papers published between 1779 and 2011.

What they found, first of all, is that self-citation represents a significant chunk of all academic citations. There were 8.2 million citations contained in the 1.5 million papers they studied. Nearly 775,000 of those citations, or about 10 percent of them, were of authors citing their own work.

[snip]

But more strikingly, King and her colleagues found a huge difference in self-citation patterns between men and women. "Over the years between 1779-2011, men cite their own papers 56% more than women do," they found. And in recent decades, men have stepped up their self-citation game relative to women: "In the last two decades of our data, men self-cite 70 percent more than women."

So if there is nothing wrong with self-citation, why is a gender disparity in self-citation an issue? According to Ingrams,

Regardless of the underlying mechanism, the self-citation disparity has a real-world impact on female academics' careers. Academics are more likely to cite papers that are already well-cited, so citing yourself means more citations from others. And more citations means better career-advancement opportunities.

This phenomenon probably contributes to women's continued under-representation on college faculties. Women have earned at least half of all bachelor's degrees in science and engineering fields since the late 1990s, according to the National Science Foundation, but as of 2013, they represent fewer than a quarter of university faculty members in those fields.

Tosh.

And as a miniscule aside, note the math. The size of the self-citation problem is 775,000/8,200,000, or 9.4512195%. Ingrams rounds this up to 10% when in fact it is either 9% or 9.5% depending on which decimal place you are rounding to. It seems like a pedantic point but there is value in precision and even more value in accuracy. Assigning a value of 10% seems like motivated reasoning on the part of the author, arbitrarily making the issue bigger than it is. It is a minor detail but perhaps indicative.

If you go to the original paper, you can see that the issue exercising the researchers is ideological. The opening summary sounds like a classical gender studies indictment of the ever present ethereal patriarchy, much discussed but never seen.

We know from the work of Claudia Goldin and others that the predominance of men in most fields of competitive endeavor is a function of parenthood and family structure and is not attributable to gender discrimination. Not just academia but law, accounting, politics, C-level business executives, best-selling authors, award winning authors, surgeons, etc. In most of these competitive fields (and others), at the top of the profession, women are about 15-30% of the members. That proportion is due primarily to personal decisions around marriage, children, and family structure to the extent that those decisions impinge on the investment of the voluminous and continuous hours of effort necessary to create high levels of expertise and accomplishment.

If more men are achieving tenured positions due to focused, and continuous (no interruptions) hours over long periods of time, it is likely that they are also creating deep knowledge in narrow fields. If you are the established expert in your narrow field, you are likely to cite your previous work more often simply because it is the only work available.

The researchers in this paper appear to not have controlled for the various important variables which are independent of gender but which are also likely to increase degrees of self-citation. Without even considering these variables, much less controlling for them, the research is without value. It cannot tell us anything other than the authors' own self-motivated speculation. Examples of uncontrolled variables that would likely affect the self-citation rate.

* Collaborative work - The researchers did put in place a mechanism for measuring self-citation when there are multiple authors. However, they did not address whether there are gender disparities in collaboration. I believe I have read something to the effect that female researchers tend to participate in co-authored papers at a greater rate than male researchers. If that were the case, then is there a difference in self-citation simply arising from the difference in sole versus multi-author papers? I don't know but without controlling for that possibility, the research is questionable. For example, let's say that women are much more likely to participate in collaborative research than men. Let's also speculate that in collaborative projects, there is greater social pressure to not play the prima donna and therefore not to self-cite, and that among the team members there is also a greater knowledge of the broader field and so other papers can be cited in place of one's own. In this plausible example, the tendency towards self-citation is not a function of gender but of preference for research form (sole versus collaborative).

* Productivity - If a researcher has produced a highly productive 100 papers, there is likely to be more self-citation than if they have produced a single paper. Indeed, there is no possibility of self-citation in the first paper. The more papers one has produced, the more likely it is that there is a reason to self-cite. If male tenured professors are more productive researchers than female researchers (for whatever reasons) then they will have a higher self-citation rate, not because they are male but because they are more productive.

* Years of continuous intense research - It is a simple fact of observed sociology that male professionals in any field are more likely to have a support spouse who handles all the familial and operational aspects of family life while female professionals are more likely to have a peer spouse (division of domestic labor). The consequence of these private family arrangements means that male researchers are more likely to be able to invest voluminous hours over long periods of time in a fashion that female researchers are not, particularly if the female researchers also have children. The implication is that women researchers are more likely to have periods of career discontinuity when they exit the workforce or are not as engaged for a period of time.

What this means, though, is that if the researcher (male or female) produces three papers in a year, there is a higher probability of citing one's own paper if you are working continuously than if you have exited temporarily. If you have been away and come back, you are more likely to find that someone else has written the paper with the necessary information to support your argument and you cite their paper. A male researcher producing research continuously over a ten year period will have a different self-citation rate than a female researcher who might have had two 12 month interruptions for children. Not because they are male but because they have worked continuously.

* Narrowness and specificity of field - The hard sciences (physics, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, etc.) tend to be cumulative in nature over time, building on earlier factual work. Hard sciences are likely to have a much higher self-citation rate because it builds on what came before. The narrower the field, the higher the rate of self-citation. The softer sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, etc.) tend to be more speculative and therefore less dependent on earlier factual work. If there is a strong gender split between the two types of sciences, as there is, then you would expect to see higher rates of self-citation because of field and not gender. Males tend to dominate in the hard sciences and economics whereas females disproportionately dominate sociology and psychology. Therefore, accepting the preceding observations, you would expect males to have the higher self-citation rate.

* Heterogeneity of researcher topics. If a researcher has produced a highly productive 100 papers across 100 independent topics, there is likely to be very little self-citation. If they have produced 100 papers in a single topic area where later papers are additive to earlier ones, there will be a lot of self-citation. If males are more field specific than females (for whatever reason) then, again, you would expect them to have a higher self-citation rate than females, not because they are male but because they are focused.

It appears that once again, ideology is driving blindness to real world causations. The researchers wanted to find a simplistic reason for why female researchers are less represented at the summit of their fields and they came up with the gem that women simply need to cite their own work more often. This type of approach is what gives sociology such a bad name. Simplistic, poorly designed and completely dependent on correlation without demonstrated causation.

It is also counter-productive. If any or all the above variables are operational, then getting women researchers to increase their self-citation rate will not increase their prevalence in their field. By focusing on the wrong issue, the problem goes unsolved or is made worse by application of inappropriate solutions to misunderstood problems. We need for ideology motivated researchers to quit muddying the cognitive waters with tosh of this sort and start demonstrating real rigor in their research.

Theory, practice and contradictions

From Does Pretrial Detention Reduce or Increase Crime? by Alex Tabarrok. Research across domains of knowledge, in this case economic theory and justice theory, is more interesting and more fruitful because it involves the recombination of ideas and evidence in new contexts. On the other hand, it is also more challenging, expensive to conduct and more subject to definitional and comprehension issues (one field not fully grasping the other).

Tabarrok summarizes the results from one study as:

In other words, the right to counsel makes it easier for criminals to escape justice and since the price of crime falls the quantity of crime increases. Makes sense!

And the other as:

In other words, when you lock people up before trial they lose their jobs and are more likely to get a record so pretrial detention severs attachments to civil life and increases attachments to criminal life with the end result being increased crime. Makes sense!

His overarching observation is:

What’s frustrating is that both of these papers are good–they have a plausible theory and sound research design–yet they reach opposite conclusions! To be sure, the time periods, places, people and exact experiment are different so both papers could be true. From the policy maker’s perspective, however, the fact that both papers could be true only adds to the difficulty of using academic evidence to make policy.

Marginal Revolution is a blog with highly intelligent and sophisticated readers and while the commenting can occasionally get raucous, it is usually, as in this case, highly discerning and informative.

Raw population and disparate impact example based on college degrees

These numbers explain a lot more than they might appear to do at first glance.

US: Young adults with 4 year college degree
Asians 63%
Whites 41%
Blacks 22%
Hispanics 15%https://t.co/Tr1aWdmZ4A pic.twitter.com/RNorexrFMR

— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) July 28, 2016

On a back of envelope basis the raw demographic numbers are roughly:

Asians - 5%
Whites - 67%
Blacks - 13%
Hispanics - 15%

Make the rough assumption that most or all professional/managerial roles require a college degree. If that is acceptable as a rough working hypothesis then Hackett's numbers have a buried implication. If you multiply the college degree percentages by the population percentages, you get a professional/managerial workforce that looks something like:

Asians - 9%
Whites - 76%
Blacks - 8%
Hispanics - 9%

Against raw demographics, Asians are especially over-represented (by nearly a factor of two) as are Whites. Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented by nearly half (17% of the managerial workforce instead of 28% of the population).

On the face of it, a company with this disparate impact between their workforce demographics and the population demographics would invite the question as to whether or not there might be some invidious discrimination occurring, explicit or unconscious. But that would be a false positive. No discrimination at all, simply a mathematical consequence of individual choices.

Disparate impact with raw population as the base has always been a crude and less than useful tripwire to find actual instances of discrimination. As this example shows, disparate impact occurs based on other factors as well.

We ought to pursue actual corporate racial discrimination with some vigor. This exercise suggests that we need a more attuned tripwire for whether possible discrimination is occurring. Too many false positives is a waste of everyone's time and discredits the process when there are actual meritorious cases.

Probably something like Raw Demographics adjusted for Education Attainment, Degree Field, Total Years of Work Experience, Continuous Years of Work Experience. I am guessing that those four variables likely would be very simple adjustments to make and might dramatically reduce the instances of False Positive discrimination claims, leaving the resources available to adequately prosecute real cases.