On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

I believe you and I agree that there has been systemic oppression against, let's choose african-americans in particular. Slavery, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, Block-Busting, these are pretty cut-and-dried examples.

So the government did this stuff. I maintain that, as beneficiaries of our forefathers' efforts in establishing this country, we owe a debt to continue their work and clean up their messes. It's a great benefit to live here and I have to be honest, I didn't do shit. I was born here. I did nothing but get born. My grandfather fought, my father fought, on for several generations. I am a businessman, that's what I do, and that's fine.

But there's unfinished work to be done. I think we owe a debt to continue that work. And this injustice is one that merits redress. Would you do nothing? Can you argue that point? Do you have a better idea? I hear so much from the right that basically boils down to "let somebody else do it." And that's... disappointing to me, as a fairly conservative guy with fairly conservative values. I really do believe in this dumb 'America' thing and I believe it merits sacrifice. An old-fashioned idea, I realize.

To say nothing of the muddiness of a 'power imbalance'. I have been the only white kid on my block, and I got my ass kicked more than a few times because of it. Was there a power imbalance on the block? Sure. Was there a power imbalance in the school or court system the other way? Absolutely. Who's the victim this time? Where does the dividing line between them being racist and me being racist lie?

The stop sign? The school boundary?

Lot of those dudes, we became friends after knocking the hell out of each other for no reason, and let me tell you, we walk into their house and systemic racial prejudice popped right up again, poor family, bad education, trouble with the law. "You're so smart, help Alejandro with his homework and then you can play nintendo. Yes Ms. P."

So at school, I'm racist, on the block, they're racist, inside their house, I'm sort of racist but I still might catch a beating if the wrong cousin was hanging out because his dad was in jail again and he's looking for a skinny white kid to blame.

What a muddled mess. How could you make sense out of that gibberish?

Actual affirmative action programs do not include the exclusion of racial or gender groups, so your comment is a non-sequitur regardless of its validity in isolation.

> Equality of opportunity will never, and can never guarantee an equality of outcome.

Which is why its likely affirmative action will always be necessary, though the calibration will need to change over time, because while a cohort having equality of opportunity between subcohorts does not, as you accurately describe, produce equality of outcome, inequality of outcome within the cohort does guarantee inequality of opportunity in the successor cohort.

However, we're nowhere near that sort of nearest-approximation-of-ideal situation where the inequality of opportunity we are concerned with leveling is merely the result of the result of the inevitable inequality of outcome in a prior cohort with equalized opportunity; we still see historically disadvantaged groups (by race/ethnicity, but also gender, gender identity, sexuality, and other axes) continuing to be disadvantaged not only by durable effects of past de jure and de facto discrimination, but also in many cases by overt and covert current discrimination.

> The vast majority of people under under 60 do not sees these type of policies as fair or good

Every poll I've ever seen breaking out support for affirmative action policies by age groups, and I've seen a lot over the from the early 1990s through the last couple of years, has consistently found support higher among younger Americans. (And also shown overwhelming majority support for Affirmative Action generally, though only minority support for the kind of strict mechanical preference measures which have generally been eliminated many decades ago everywhere except college admissions.)

The data from other professions overall seems to be in line with a "women less interested in systemizing activities" http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

In particular, why is math so much better?

It's a much smaller field, with far fewer lucrative jobs. For any given smaller fields, there could be a number of reasons why it is more or less equal. My hypothesis is that men are biologically more inclined toward geeking out and doing coding or such for fun. If men who are good at math are also geeking and out and coding, while women just do their high school math homework, women would have a comparative advantage at plain math as opposed to computer science.

This would suggest that the gender gap could be reduced by forcing women and men to do computer programming as part of a standard high school curriculum. But the idea of forcing women to do something other than what they do in their free time, just to close a gender gap, seems to me pretty appalling totalitarian.

Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity

Reading the studies, some things are positively correlated, some are negative. Some things have no correlation. There are lots of controls and data manipulation going on, hard to tell if the dredged for the results or not. And if you look at other types of studies you see the opposite result -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability

If the scores are equal, this would suggest no bias in selection. If women are unfairly excluded from computer science, or face a higher bar due to discrimination, then since they were more selected their scores should be higher.

A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems

Keep in mind girls mature faster and differently, so differences in elementary school aren't all that predictive of differences later.