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Notes -
I've read an article a couple of years ago (unfortunately, link long lost) about how they did it in California (where explicit racial discrimination is banned). They hire a set of "evaluators", which evaluate the candidates and rank them by their acceptability (I don't remember the exact details of ranking mechanism, but it's largely irrelevant here). They have the training program, which never explicitly mentions race of anything like that. The most they get is the standard "we value diversity, inclusion and treating everybody in the most inclusive and welcoming manner" spiel. And they have a set of supervisors, which oversee the training. The training is done as a set of fake (or maybe real, from past years?) student profiles, which the candidate evaluator has to evaluate, and then the supervisor reviews it and tells the candidate where they may be wrong, if they are. The author of the article was one of the candidates. The supervisors, again, never explicitly mention the race or any prohibited criteria, but if the candidate evaluates certain profiles not in the "correct" way, the supervisor suggests they may want to reconsider - maybe they didn't take all the necessary factors into account, or overlooked something? They may remind them to re-read the policies, etc. That is repeated, until the candidate "gets it" - and starts producing the results that satisfy the supervisors - or the candidate "doesn't get it" even after a set of repeated suggestions, and then it turns out their services are not required at the present time. The author of the article was one of the latter.
If you see similarities to some other, currently popular, area of research - it is probably not coincidental. But it's hardly possible to prove that any racially discriminatory criteria were used. Of course, somebody has to train the supervisors, but it's California we're talking about, Berkeley could supply thousands of such supervisors which wouldn't need a word of discoverable explanations to produce the correct results.
For all the obvious-in-hindsight problems with disparate impact, you can kind of see how it might have made sense at the time.
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Mechanical Turk + Gradient Descent
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