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Racism and Meritocracy

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Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#11

Post by amirnathoo »

pg wrote: post #3

http://www.google.com/search?q=railsconf+audience&hl=en&...

Eric is not suggesting that the applicant pool is diverse and the selection process biased. Instead, I think he's suggesting that different selection processes can result in different applicant pools:

"Imagine that you were a professional musician thinking about which orchestra to audition for. You have a choice between an all-male orchestra that conducts interviews out in the open, and a mixed-gender orchestra that conducts auditions behind a screen. Which would you choose to apply to? Wouldn’t your answer be different if you were a man or a woman?

I think thought experiments like this are helpful for suggesting an alternate hypothesis to the pipeline problem: that there are qualified minority applicants who are choosing – rationally – to invest their time and energy elsewhere. I am not aware of any scientific study that proves this hypothesis is correct. But I have seen enough existence proofs to believe it is likely."

Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#12

Post by raganwald »

maxklein wrote: post #10

I really fail to see how anyone can see racism in this. The current people trying to make it big in silicon valley now did not start the process now, they started 10 or 15 years ago when they started fiddling around with computers or learning to code or reading business books. And it's at that stage that the current audience was created, and not right now. The people applying and the selection is just a result of tha…

And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them.

You use words like "clearly" and "probably" but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions. Clearly, you expect your audience thinks exactly the way you do and will probably confirm your bias.

Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#13

Post by sarchertech »

Isn't it possible that it has nothing to do with race, but with culture.

From my experience most people who end up working in technology are or were at one point part of the geek subculture.

You can't just look at Tech fields and say look it's all white and asian. It's not, it's predominantly a particular subset of white and asian men. That subset has it's own culture.

Maybe there is some cultural reason that white and and asian men are more drawn to this subculture than other demographics.

Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#14

Post by jsnk »

Diverse demographic =/= Diverse skills and expertise

I am disappointed by underlying presumption of the article that you must have diverse demographic correlates with diverse skill sets because it doesn't.

If we continue to think that superficial physical qualities such as skin color or having a certain genitalia defines who we are as individuals, then we do indeed live in a racist and sexist society where people are judged based on race and sex.

Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#16

Post by Alex3917 »

raganwald wrote: post #12
maxklein wrote: post #10

I really fail to see how anyone can see racism in this. The current people trying to make it big in silicon valley now did not start the process now, they started 10 or 15 years ago when they started fiddling around with computers or learning to code or reading business books. And it's at that stage that the current audience was created, and not right now. The people applying and the selection is just a result of tha…

And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them. You use words like "clearly" and "probably" but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions. Clearly, you expect your audience thinks exactly the way you do and w…

"You use words like 'clearly' and 'probably' but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions."

Maybe because it would take all of 12 seconds of Googling to confirm that this is probably (at least partially) correct? We all know what the statistics say and what they don't say, so asking other people to do your homework for you in place of actually contributing something is lame. I meant granted, the original comment was a bit simplistic, but the lack of statistics isn't the issue.

Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#17

Post by merkat »

Ant11 wrote: post #8

In the article: "When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process" In my chess club have the same kind of female/male ratio: 12 females on 220 members. Leaving out the youth members it is 8 out of 180 or about 4% ;-) Something must be wrong with our non-existent selection process.

The problem is not in the admission process, but (amongst other things) in each individual's perception about it. A mostly male club with only 4% women will naturally attract more male population, making the group even more unbalanced over time.

Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#18

Post by guard-of-terra »

raganwald wrote: post #12
maxklein wrote: post #10

I really fail to see how anyone can see racism in this. The current people trying to make it big in silicon valley now did not start the process now, they started 10 or 15 years ago when they started fiddling around with computers or learning to code or reading business books. And it's at that stage that the current audience was created, and not right now. The people applying and the selection is just a result of tha…

And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them. You use words like "clearly" and "probably" but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions. Clearly, you expect your audience thinks exactly the way you do and w…

His explanation sounds believable and unless you supply a believable one or maybe one backed by data and other empirical evidence, we'll going to use his.

That's how arguing works in real life when the object is vast and non-deterministic (like, population).

Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#19

Post by yummies »

philwelch wrote: post #7

One of the problems with racism in particular is that it has effects on people from birth. Past racism may have hurt their parents' socioeconomic prospects, forcing them to be born in an economically depressed ghetto with poor schools and gang violence. Even if there's no racism past that point, if their parents were prevented from ascending to the middle class, they won't pass on middle-class virtues emphasizing the…

I think this train of thought would be considered a violation of the author's "No hand-wringing" rule. The last half of this article is dedicated towards debunking the "pipeline problem" which you are describing. Now whether or not he effectively debunked it is up to debate, but at least in the case of women entrepreneurs he offers some compelling data: "...women receive only about 30% of degrees in CS. But 30% is a lot larger than 4% – and that’s a big math problem for advocates of the pipeline theory."

Re: Racism and Meritocracy

#20

Post by moldbug »

pg wrote: post #3

http://www.google.com/search?q=railsconf+audience&hl=en&...

Stephen Jay Gould on racism, 1984:

"My visceral perception of brotherhood harmonizes with our best modern biological knowledge. Such union of feeling and fact may be rare indeed, for one offers no guide to the other (more romantic twaddle aside). Many people think (or fear) that equality of human races is a hope of liberal sentimentality probably squashed by the hard realities of history. They are wrong.

This column can be summarized in a single phrase, a motto if you will: Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen."

[http://www.sjgarchive.org/library/text/b16/p0425.htm]

Surely it's a good thing that the Ruby on Rails community doesn't face any "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude." Object-relational mapping is hard enough!

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