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Beware the Pretty People

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Re: Beware the Pretty People

#81

Post by sago »

moultano wrote: post #77
sago wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not at all. I think a large amount of diversity among individuals has nothing to do with privilege. Privilege is an inherently probabilistic bias, it doesn't determine anything. When you find achievement highly correlated with a cultural group, however, it is pretty likely to be a function of privilege (in the social science sense). The alternative hypothesis is that, for example, Jews are just innately better at…

We won't be able to tease apart the two hypotheses for certain until we can trace the attribution to individual genes, but at least at an individual level, IQ has been shown to be mostly genetic. It seems inplausible that individual differences are mostly genetic but group differences are entirely cultural. The mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is a standard deviation higher than the European average. In a group so genetical…

Here's where I'm not an expert, so I'm happy to defer to others who know about this research. So this is a genuine question.

IQ has been shown to be mostly genetic

Can you give a citation that controls for cultural privilege?

I'm not willing to assume without evidence that privilege is the primary contributor.

Why would one need to assume it is the primary contributor. If there was a genetic advantage, isn't is equally if not more morally important to not add social advantages on top?

I know this wasn't the point I made, which I'm not yet conceding, but is another statement that sounds black-and-white all-or-nothing.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#82

Post by marcus_holmes »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #50
sago wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist Not at all. There is little doubt that 'merit' defined as an capability or skill of an individual is not uniform. The point is that 'merit' is systemically produced. It is a function of money, aspiration, parental ambition, education, culturation, in-group bias, and many other factors. Another way to phrase this is 'privilege', though that word…

If you want to define "privilege" as pretty much anything which causes merit to be non-uniformly distributed, then the fact that Asian males are overrepresented due to privilege is tautologically true. Similarly, water is wet. All you've really said is "I assign the word 'privilege' to whatever the cause is for Asian males performing well in tech." That's not really relevant to this discussion. [edit: Sago, I think y…

hang on, but where are you drawing the lines between "merit due to innate skill/aptitude" and "merit due to favourable environmental factors"?

Because similarly if you define merit as "anything that causes one person to do better in the tech industry than another" then the tech industry is tautologically a meritocracy - water is wet.

Until and unless we can unpack merit and privilege in the manner that Sago is attempting then we will continue to misunderstand our problem and continue to let the best programmers become nurses because of that misunderstanding.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#85

Post by proveanegative »

sago wrote: post #69
jqm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be less privilege and more a long cultural history of intellectual activity and thus, being raised in an environment that encourages these kind of endeavors.

When 'privilege' is used in these topics, it is often rather broadly defined to mean any feature of the accident of your birth that is beneficial compared to others who lack it. So yes, a long history of intellectual achievement is a privilege in that sense: the prevalence of expectation (you can do this), of value (it is worth doing this), of role-models (so and so, who is similar to you, did this), mentorship (so a…

>'privilege' is used in these topics, it is often rather broadly defined to mean any feature of the accident of your birth that is beneficial compared to others who lack it.

Is that meaningfully different from "luck"?

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#86

Post by yummyfajitas »

sago wrote: post #78
yummyfajitas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To demonstrate that it's not a tautology, can you describe a world in which a group is overrepresented but not privileged? If you can't construct such a scenario, then by definition it is a tautology.

Why are you so exorcised by the word privilege? My point was nothing to do with what you seem to have a problem with. My point was that what is seen as 'merit' is a function of a whole bunch of other factors, which means it isn't somehow a racists discussion stopping thing to point out that Asian men have higher levels of 'merit' (when merit is defined in the way I understood it to be in the post I was responding to)…

I don't know why you think I'm "exorcised" by a word. I'm simply pointing out that you are using a completely different definition of it than myself and hackeruser, and as a result your posts are completely missing the point.

If privilege means "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation", then that's a very broad definition and every non-deterministic unequal representation is caused by privilege. But you were responding to a discussion where we were using "privilege" to mean something along the lines of "social biases unfairly favoring one group".

By definition, Asian males have 8x the "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation". It seems highly unlikely that they have 8x the "social biases unfairly favoring one group", which is what hackeruser and myself were actually discussing.

You also don't seem to be using this definition consistently. For example, if I take this comment of yours and substitute this definition in, it makes no sense:

"When you find achievement highly correlated with a cultural group, however, it is pretty likely to be a function of probabilistic causes of non-equal representation. The alternative hypothesis is that, for example, Jews are just innately better at science."

I'm beginning to think you are attempting a Motte and Bailey: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#88

Post by yummyfajitas »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #82
yummyfajitas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to define "privilege" as pretty much anything which causes merit to be non-uniformly distributed, then the fact that Asian males are overrepresented due to privilege is tautologically true. Similarly, water is wet. All you've really said is "I assign the word 'privilege' to whatever the cause is for Asian males performing well in tech." That's not really relevant to this discussion. [edit: Sago, I think y…

hang on, but where are you drawing the lines between "merit due to innate skill/aptitude" and "merit due to favourable environmental factors"? Because similarly if you define merit as "anything that causes one person to do better in the tech industry than another" then the tech industry is tautologically a meritocracy - water is wet. Until and unless we can unpack merit and privilege in the manner that Sago is attemp…

I'm defining "merit" as the ability to get the job done and make the company money. For example, I'm trying to hire a data scientist/data oriented generalist. Knowledge of statistics and aptitude for learning contributes to merit, as does the ability to write scalable and deployable code.

Sex appeal does not contribute to merit, nor does being a nerdy-but-attractive hipster.

Does that clarify?

Note that Sago's definition, "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation", quite deliberately doesn't unpack anything. All it does is apply the label "privilege" to the cause, whether that cause is explicit deliberate racism (to take one extreme) or completely biological factors with entirely unbiased decisions (to take another).

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#89

Post by 001sky »

mc32 wrote: post #57

No one has or should have stranglehold on nor should claim to own an industry (territorialism). Industries just are -they don't care who the constituents are. People come and go. Does it matter what it once was, and what it's becoming? No. Stop the provincialism and the bemoaning of the illegitimate successors. Things change. They are meant to. People will always try to seek success wherever it can be found, now it's…

If non nerds want to come to the party, that's despoiling things?

Groupies didn't spoil rock & roll (!)

But I don't think that's really the debate.

Re: Beware the Pretty People

#90

Post by jkuria »

Animats wrote: post #19

The headline didn't match the rant. My first thought, reading that, was of Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, the battery-swap electric car company. Years ago I went to a meeting in SF where he spoke, and saw that that he was very good looking, spoke very well, and had a business plan that was total bullshit. Several heads of state and many investors were convinced by him. In the end, he burned through about $…

Everything you say about Better Place is true but give the man a little credit. He emerged from the hacker culture in Israel and was a programmer himself for a long time before moving to the US in '96.
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