141–150 of 224 posts
The implication of this analysis of http://10years.firstround.com/ is that First Round is biased against founding teams with experience at Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft or Twitter. Can this be true?
Yes, it can be true. FirstRound could still positively value that experience, but just not be valuing it enough.
They excluded Uber from the results. Which, if included, makes the male-run companies look "oversuccessful". What would happen if I excluded the top female-run business, I'd bet that makes the differences between the two groups much smaller.
Given both the small sample size as well as the outsized influence of outliers, drawing conclusions from this population group is going to be fraught with issues.
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Compute min(accepted a) and min(accepted B) instead of the means. Dude, your comments are normally smarter than this. Yeah, you can easily fix Grahams's test -- all you need are some numbers that do not exist and that we cannot measure. We're talking about VC's evaluating founders. That does not, and cannot, get reduced to a numerical score. And even if VC's did use some sort of scoring rubric, then we would still no…
A charitable interpretation of what he or she said is this: don't evaluate bias by looking at outcomes of the average applicant, look at the outcomes of the borderline applicants. Even if there is no perfect way to define or measure the minimum acceptable applicant, I think it is reasonable to identify whether applicants were borderline or not.
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Favoring fair outcome over having fair rules is against everything I believe. We should not strive for a participation trophy culture.
This well-circulated image shows that making everyone a winner has merit in some circumstances. http://static.themetapicture.com/media/funny-equality-justic... The left hand side is fair rules, the right hand side shows a fair outcome
Don't forget that it's these "best" people who add a vastly disproportionate amount of value to the world. They're the ones who invent new technology and discover new science. We all benefit greatly from their success.
You need to know that the probability of acceptance is conditionally independent of the "type" of the applicant given the success of the applicant.
For example, consider the following hypothesis for the First Round data: women are more honest than men. A woman presenting a bad idea to a VC will be rejected whereas a man may be able to weasel his way into getting funding. This will make men have a lower success rate, and correspondingly women will have a higher success rate.
However, this isn't really the same thing as having an across-the-board hidden bias against women.
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Indeed. The problem is that people frequently infer unfair rules from unequal outcomes, without taking into account the possibility of systematic group differences. Alan: I believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Bob: How do you know there isn't equality of opportunity? Alan: Well, just look at how unequal the outcomes are! At this point, Bob would be wise to change the subject, because if he pre…
Apply Occam's Razor to these supposed group differences. Which do you think is a more plausible reality? A. Interviewers prefer candidates who are like themselves, interviewers are mostly white men, therefore most hires are white men. B. The uterus and melanin both inhibit programming ability, interviewers are perfect judges of programming ability, therefore most hires are white men. To look at the present (incomplet…
[1]: See, for example, The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Then, once you get over your knee-jerk "That's racist!!!" reflex, take a look—I mean actually read for comprehension—The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray. Maybe add a little Cavalli-Sforza (via Steve Sailer) to the mix (http://www.vdare.com/articles/052400-cavalli-sforzas-ink-clo...). You can then graduate to basically anything by Arthur Jensen. As a topper, read "Rational"Wiki's entry on Human Biodiversity (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Human_biodiversity) and cringe at the smug, supercilious tone, endless strawmanning and distortion, and at the realization that you, too, were once taken in by the ridiculous "mainstream" views. (I certainly was.)
On a simple mathematical basis, this is false. Consider two groups of candidates for a scholarship, A and B. We want to select all candidates that have an 80% or better chance of graduation. Group A comes from a population where the chance of graduation is distributed uniformly from 0% to 100% and group B is from one where the chance is distributed uniformly from 10% to 90%, with the same average but less variation i…
I can almost here him thinking in response, "if I throw a dog a bone, I don't want to know if it tastes good or not."
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The problem here is language and what our actual objectives are. When people complain about bias, they are not really talking about mathematical bias, but about something else: Their idea of fairness. They are talking about discrimination. And when we are discussing that, we can't really think about whether rules are applied fairly or not, but whether the rules produce the outcomes that we want. Let's go for a ludicr…
Your comment makes sense; indeed, fairness in selection process does not imply that people aren't being discriminated against. For instance, the SAT is fair, but denies those with less opportunities a chance to get into top-tier schools. I can get on board with that. > We can't really think about whether rules are applied fairly or not, but whether the rules produce the outcomes that we want. This is a more explicit…
You can find the same inherent bias in many walks of life. Many of the hurtles to becoming a Doctor have nothing to do with being a good Doctor there just there to ensure the right kinds of people get into and out of the program.