111–120 of 123 posts
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So? What are you going to do with that information? What's a better way of figuring out if someone is good at math: give them a math test? Or look up their ancestry?
I didn't claim an immediate and obvious use for this info, I merely claimed that it was a true statement rather than a bias.
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So I think we're coming at this in two different ways. It is possible that we're just philosophically irreconcilable on that. I am skeptical, but willing to be convinced by evidence, that access to capital contributes more to success of software companies than talent. If, hypothetically, companies fail because of lacking access to capital but do not fail because of lacking access to talent, and the market selected fo…
I think we are, too. Still, you're forcing me to think more carefully about my position on this, which I appreciate. I had to go outside and rake the leaves and think about what you said before replying. So, I think you carried my argument a little bit further than I would have. For example, I don't think that access to capital contributes more to success than talent, nor do I think that talent doesn't really matter.…
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I think we are, too. Still, you're forcing me to think more carefully about my position on this, which I appreciate. I had to go outside and rake the leaves and think about what you said before replying. So, I think you carried my argument a little bit further than I would have. For example, I don't think that access to capital contributes more to success than talent, nor do I think that talent doesn't really matter.…
This civilized, well-considered, thought-provoking back-and-forth is one of the reasons I fucking love this site.
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"And if mathematical ability were distributed as a Gaussian, and genetic , women couldn't be ascending so rapidly." This is false. It could be that mathematical ability is genetic and normally distributed, but some component of women's underrepresentation is caused by factors other than this (e.g., discrimination, personal preferences). "It's just no good at drawing conclusions on the extremes of ability. A better gu…
It could be that mathematical ability is genetic and normally distributed, but some component of women's underrepresentation is caused by factors other than this (e.g., discrimination, personal preferences). I mean this to be evidence against a genetic explanation of under representation. Come on. I know you know better than to draw statistical conclusions from a single event with a sample size of 11. So why do it? P…
It is evidence against such an explanation, but it's very weak evidence. It shows other factors are involved, which no one disputes, but it does not rule out genetics as a factor.
Incidentally, your Q&A argument is incomplete. We have data which shows accent is not genetic - correlation between the accent of genetic parent and child is gone if you look at adopted children. If there is a twin study on the topic, I'd give 1/p value of the study odds that identical twins raised apart have minimal correlation of accent.
In contrast, identical twins raised apart have a 75% correlation in intelligence and adoptees have a 25% correlation with genetic parents. (I'm working from memory here since I don't have the book with me. The numbers are far from zero, but might be 70% and 20% or 80% and 30%. http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-23-Chapte... )
The source you cite is simply being dishonest by leaving this part of the dialogue out of his conversation with a straw man.
Also, your source has a very different philosophical basis for knowledge than most people. He believes that aggregate quantities (e.g., pressure, temperature, possibly g) are statistical myths. See here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210600 , which is a response to http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html (which he cites in the article you link to).
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…
Exactly! Maybe this is a small minority being extra loud. Thank you for saving me a lot of typing. Diversity for the sake of diversity hurts us all. You really do need to fix the underlying problems. I believe that there really are few qualified minority candidates for these jobs out there and there would be a lot more if we could fix some of the poverty and segregation that exists out there. Black people in this cou…
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It could be that mathematical ability is genetic and normally distributed, but some component of women's underrepresentation is caused by factors other than this (e.g., discrimination, personal preferences). I mean this to be evidence against a genetic explanation of under representation. Come on. I know you know better than to draw statistical conclusions from a single event with a sample size of 11. So why do it? P…
I mean this to be evidence against a genetic explanation of under representation. It is evidence against such an explanation, but it's very weak evidence. It shows other factors are involved, which no one disputes, but it does not rule out genetics as a factor. Incidentally, your Q&A argument is incomplete. We have data which shows accent is not genetic - correlation between the accent of genetic parent and child is…
The core of my argument is that other factors have been shown to dominate underrepresentation for some time. While other factors persist and dominate, it is scientifically incorrect, and ethically irresponsible, to continually make reference to innate differences and outmoded, procrustean interpretations of how talent fits a curve.
It is genuinely too early, if not simply too brutal, to claim a group's intellectual inferiority. The evidence is flimsy, the mathematical framework naive, the conceptual underpinnings insufficiently examined, the data is simply not in.
Worse, people use tiny differences in group performance as justification for wildly unfair stereotypes, as applied to individuals. Even if those supposed group differences withstood criticism at the level of rigor exceeding that accorded to physics or mathematics, it still would be ethically irresponsible to make it publicly and commonly known, or the focus of so much discussion.
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I mean this to be evidence against a genetic explanation of under representation. It is evidence against such an explanation, but it's very weak evidence. It shows other factors are involved, which no one disputes, but it does not rule out genetics as a factor. Incidentally, your Q&A argument is incomplete. We have data which shows accent is not genetic - correlation between the accent of genetic parent and child is…
It is evidence against such an explanation, but it's very weak evidence. It shows other factors are involved, which no one disputes, but it does not rule out genetics as a factor. The core of my argument is that other factors have been shown to dominate underrepresentation for some time. While other factors persist and dominate, it is scientifically incorrect, and ethically irresponsible, to continually make referenc…
Directly contradicts this one: The evidence is flimsy, the mathematical framework naive, the conceptual underpinnings insufficiently examined, the data is simply not in.
You can't have it both ways. Either intellectual inferiority of some groups is a possibility (i.e., "the data is simply not in"), or else it has been accurately measured and shown not to be the case. Pick one.
Even if those supposed group differences withstood criticism at the level of rigor exceeding that accorded to physics or mathematics, it still would be ethically irresponsible to make it publicly and commonly known, or the focus of so much discussion.
It would be ethically irresponsible to make true facts public? Um, ok.
Have you considered the possibility that you don't actually object to the data/methodology, but rather you are seeking justification to reject conclusions that contradict your moral values?
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Of course they can, and in fact the article touched on this: > Remember, part of the defense against the racism theory is that the applicants are already skewed before any selection is done. > I once spent time with a promising entrepreneur who was not a white man. Because their startup sold a product that a lot of tech entrepreneurs buy, many of their customers were graduates of Y Combinator. So I asked if they were…
I used images of a conference audience because it's the best way I could think of to get a sample of what the hacker community looks like. If you can think of a better one, let me know. (The point of that link, for anyone who didn't get it, is that the lack of diversity Eric Ries perceives in the output of our filter is also present in the input, which implies it's not caused by bias in the filter.)
Yet another related thought: PG once quoted Caesar as not trusting thin men. This idea may have scientific basis: dietary fats stimulate oxytocin production. http://paleohacks.com/questions/56261/dietary-fats-reduce-ca... http://althouse.blogspot.com/2010/01/people-instinctively-kn...
This stuff is related because it's important to ask whether a meritocracy should necessarily discount the single-generation advantages of genes.
Disclaimer: I am skinny and have the AG variant.
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"Courageously" admitting something doesn't make it OK, simply based on the speculative assertion that a lot of people do the same. We may be living in a biased society, but admitting this doesn't make it excusable.
Did you miss the very last line of his comment? "Knowing that they exist can help us make better decisions." He's making this admission with the expressed desire of changing, not trying to justify or excuse it.
So my conclusion is that the parent comment is only looking for excuses for being racist, namely that it allegedly helps and that people are generally racist. It doesn't and we don't have to be.
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It is evidence against such an explanation, but it's very weak evidence. It shows other factors are involved, which no one disputes, but it does not rule out genetics as a factor. The core of my argument is that other factors have been shown to dominate underrepresentation for some time. While other factors persist and dominate, it is scientifically incorrect, and ethically irresponsible, to continually make referenc…
This statement: The core of my argument is that other factors have been shown to dominate underrepresentation for some time... Directly contradicts this one: The evidence is flimsy, the mathematical framework naive, the conceptual underpinnings insufficiently examined, the data is simply not in. You can't have it both ways. Either intellectual inferiority of some groups is a possibility (i.e., "the data is simply not…
Where did you get the idea that I was saying it was impossible?
"What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth. - Richard Feynman."
Appeals to a supposed scientific justification of the inferiority of women in mathematics are extremely weak, and certainly damaging if untrue. The supposed scientific proof is thus pseudo-science - thinly veiled politics. I'm not going to spell it out again.