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Comment by hcho | Hacker News Reader

Is the person you are trying to negotiate with non-western by any chance? Bringing in the costs to the discussion is quite a common negotiation tactic for some cultures. I've seen Indians, Arabs and a few other Middle Eastern cultures doing that.

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This seems like a tactic that would be completely ineffective - it has nothing to do with salary. High-cost employees are hired because they're valuable, not cheap. If someone asked about my personal finances, I would simply say:

"I ask for 95,000$ because I'll easily provide that value to your company. Pay has nothing to do with my personal finances - it's how much my work is worth. Are you looking to hire someone valuable? Because that's what I bring to the table."

I kept trying to avoid adding "If you want cheap, go hire some college interns and let me know so I can go short on your stock."

Yes, it wouldn't work with western cultures. Things like rent of the shop, mouths to feed, etc get used a lot in bazaars. I reckon it's a form of appeal to fairness.

I've always understood it as part of an act, a way to say 'lower the price or I walk' without causing offense. An equivalent response would be 'I would love to give you this deal, but my wife would divorce me for giving such a low price'.

You do realize that this thread is about discrimination, right?

I am from a Middle Eastern country originally and was trying to help out by making sure that things are not getting lost in translation.

You're missing my point. You are using your personal experience to paint huge populations of people ("Indians, Arabs and a few other Middle Eastern cultures") with a very broad (and probably inaccurate) brush. It's speculative at best, offensive stereotyping at worst.

Being one of them, I believe I have enough anecdotes that I can call them data.

And you have enough data, from your personal experience, to know that these negotiation tactics are strongly correlated with ethnicity/race and not something else? This is exactly what discrimination is and how stereotypes form.

"Discrimination" means the use of the brain to tell one thing from another. There is nothing morally wrong with using this power. I think hcho is plainly trying to offer the benefit of his knowledge here. The morally problematic "discrimination" is that which systematically give different treatment in such a way that innocent people are being shut out of opportunities. It is not wrong to say that Culture X is like Y, what's wrong is to then say you'll automatically disqualify individuals of Culture X for opportunity Z (C?)

EDIT: By the way, it's pretty interesting that your comment seems to justify differential treatment if based on that particularly modern folly called "statistical correlation". Are you saying that discriminating against Arabs or women, for example, is only wrong because the stereotypes are false? For that statement is absurd. There are stereotypes because certain things are true, on average, about those groups. Averages are not individual people. Prejudice is a moral problem, not a statistical error.

I don't think that "being one" (and don't get me started on how someone can consider themselves as part of a group labeled as "Indians, Arabs and a few other Middle Eastern cultures") gives someone enough information to make sweeping statements about whole groups of people. Even if you're right 60% of the time (good enough for your typical stereotype), you're wrong 40% of the time and that's important.

Does me being a male give me enough data points to make generalizations about men? I'm married and I know quite a few women, should I offer my viewpoints on them as useful information?

Anyway, it's all probably a moot point. As I understand, the OP mentioned that the negotiators were discussing the costs of the female applicant (e.g. student loans, etc.) while I think hcho was describing the negotiator describing their own costs (e.g. I can't pay you more because my costs are too high).

> Even if you're right 60% of the time (good enough for your typical stereotype), you're wrong 40% of the time and that's important.

This disagrees with your previous comment, where you suggested that stereotyping would be okay if there was a statistical correlation.

Cultures as I stated in my initial post. British publicans get baffled when you tip them, Arabic businessmen bring costs to negotiations, Americans are good at service...All cultural.

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