We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

I don't think they miss out on this though. The people from disadvantaged backgrounds that have these traits will have leveraged them throughout their life to get in the door based on merit alone.

> In any case, I disagree that the burden on businesses would be that significant. I've seen coding bootcamps churn out pretty decent frontend engineers in 3 months. Make it 6 and who knows what a company could do.

My experience is the opposite of yours. I've done a lot of hiring, managing and mentoring and I can say without a doubt that businesses do not have the resources to grow people to the extent that you're suggesting and they certainly can't pass on people who already meet the requirements needed for a role in favor of someone who doesn't.

> To do that, we need people that have lived through those situations to find the best way to lift people out of bad situations.

As someone who has lived through these situations I can say that people who are capable and want out of poverty can get out today. If you can code, you can get a job and learning to code is within reach for any smart person with enough drive regardless of how poor they grew up. I couldn't afford a computer growing up and had to write code by hand on paper then type it into our school's 20 year old Apple IIe. Where there's a will there's a way.

Sure, you're not wrong, but you've just stated an individual trait, not a population one. Try now to make the argument that someone is more "likely" to be pro NBA if they're of some arbitrarily chosen genetic background. You will run into the fact that 1. You will be totally unable to create rigid constraints for your genetic background, and 2. Statistical variance will be so high that you won't actually be generating useful information anyway (i.e. an effective predictor).

So yea, maybe one couple of tall people could have a tall kid and of course the kid has a better chance at the NBA than a short kid (sort of maybe. He could end up a footsie god, it's happened before and we have no way of predicting when it will happen next), but they might have had a short kid despite their genetic factors so the point is moot.

>My guess is that software development also has genetic mental requirements but there’s no definitive answer for that

You may guess all you want but I carefully avoid any feelings that are not fact based and don't generate any useful planning or information for me so I disagree with this point. There's simply no evidence of this and I don't see how this information could be significant enough to have an effect on any decisions I make in life (for example, hiring decisions).

No, I’ve stated a population trait. The population of professional athletes. Not all tall people can be NBA stars but all NBA stars are tall. Being genetically athletic is a prerequisite to professional sports not a guarantee that one can become a professional athlete. Being genetically unathletic does disqualify you from the profession though.

> I don't see how this information could be significant enough to have an effect on any decisions I make in life (for example, hiring decisions).

You’ve been advocating strongly for your position so I’m not sure it makes sense to just discount the opposition as useless. At the very least this seems like a great field for further study.

Ok... but we've now left the field of genetics. Professional athletes are determined by whether they get hired to play sports professionally, not by genetic birthright.

> Not all tall people can be NBA stars but all NBA stars are tall.

Again, unsure the relation to genetics here, but this also isn't true. Muggsy was a god and is 5'3". Curry is 6'3" which is definitely tall, but among NBA players, not that tall... but his skill level is far, far, far higher than his height would indicate. The statistical variation between height and skill, even in the highly-artificially-selected-for population of NBA players, doesn't correlate perfectly enough to derive a good predictor. You just can't say "the taller the player, the better the player." Not even on average! So, it's not useful information.

AND! This doesn't even get into the sociological aspect of NBA - how many young Muggsys are out there not getting put in (or accepted) to basketball camps/programs because they're "too short?" How many 7 year old future Currys are too hungry to train?

> You’ve been advocating strongly for your position so I’m not sure it makes sense to just discount the opposition as useless.

I certainly don't intend to imply your position is useless, I'm trying to demonstrate that correlative "evidence" (i.e. that a certain population is better at xyz) is unable to overcome sociological noise, and therefore the information is useless.

But what about ex-drug-addicts? Or convicted felons that have served their time? The government "fixes" the problem and them drops them into society and says "good luck!" (well, it actually doesn't, but for the sake of argument)

I'm saying in cases like this, these people can offer valuable insight due to their circumstances. Perhaps valuable enough to spend a couple extra months on upskilling an ex-felon on, I dunno, product design. You do it, then they turn around and create an educational product for inmates that you can sell to a state penitentiary system for millions, which you do for all 50 states. A silly example, but do you see my point?

I think we've gone way into the weeds here and I'm confusing myself at this point, but I appreciate the dialogue.