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Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

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Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#251

Post by relaxing »

thrashh wrote: post #242
rayiner wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unscientific point. One, test prep doesn’t help that much. Two, it’s not that expensive: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/... > For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That comes to a bit less than $5 an hour, which is not exactly the “thousands of dollars in test prep” that Mr. Carranza cited.

$650 is a lot of money for a lot of people

Who is downvoting this?

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#252

Post by JamesBarney »

thrashh wrote: post #242
rayiner wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unscientific point. One, test prep doesn’t help that much. Two, it’s not that expensive: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/... > For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That comes to a bit less than $5 an hour, which is not exactly the “thousands of dollars in test prep” that Mr. Carranza cited.

$650 is a lot of money for a lot of people

Money helps with any metric.

If your GPA is bad, a tutor will help far more with GPA than test prep will help with your SAT and cost far more.

School project, if you live in a household where one parent doesn't have to work, they can basically do your whole project moving a 50 to a 95.

Extra curriculars, these require a large investment of time and money that is harder for a single working parent to pull off.

College entrance essays. You can literally just pay someone to write them.

You can't look at SATs in a vacuum. You have to compare it to the other possible metrics which all privilege the privileged more.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#253

Post by harryh »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #193
commandlinefan wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you think about ... how much harder IIT JEE math is Seems to me that there are only a couple of different ways somebody could feel about that. The first is to be opposed to the "the smarter you are, the more money you make/better you do in life" meritocratic egalitarianism that these tests support. The second is to support that ideal (whether you agree we're there or not), but insist that tests don't accura…

I guess it depends on what you want out of the test; if you want something meritocratic, what we find is that testing ends up reinforcing existing social strata more often than not, because wealth often correlates to factors like quality of education, which in turn correlate to test scores. A stupid rich person will always be stupid, but a smart rich person will probably have access to better schools, private tutorin…

"less than 14% of the variance in SAT scores can be explained by SES in two massive and representative samples"

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-think-critically...

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#254

Post by rayiner »

thrashh wrote: post #242
rayiner wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unscientific point. One, test prep doesn’t help that much. Two, it’s not that expensive: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/... > For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That comes to a bit less than $5 an hour, which is not exactly the “thousands of dollars in test prep” that Mr. Carranza cited.

$650 is a lot of money for a lot of people

Not really, for a one-time per kid expense. Asian immigrants are among the poorest people in NYC and they scrape it together.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#255

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

thrashh wrote: post #242
rayiner wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unscientific point. One, test prep doesn’t help that much. Two, it’s not that expensive: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/... > For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That comes to a bit less than $5 an hour, which is not exactly the “thousands of dollars in test prep” that Mr. Carranza cited.

$650 is a lot of money for a lot of people

In a lot of places these days it's really easy to get a $15/hr job (I mean that's like entry-level fast food work, ubering, etc.) So $650 works out to slightly more than a week's work, be super conservative with taxes/expenses/benefits and let's say 2 weeks.

So 2 weeks' work is a considerable amount of work, but it's also certainly within the realm of possibility for the vast, vast majority of people. I'd really say this just highlights how some communities value educational attainment and others do not.

Sure, it's much easier to come up with $650 if you're rich than if you're poor, but that's true of just about anything. $650 is certainly within the reach of nearly everyone, it just depends on whether your parents are willing to sacrifice for it.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#256

Post by commandlinefan »

harryh wrote: post #253
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends on what you want out of the test; if you want something meritocratic, what we find is that testing ends up reinforcing existing social strata more often than not, because wealth often correlates to factors like quality of education, which in turn correlate to test scores. A stupid rich person will always be stupid, but a smart rich person will probably have access to better schools, private tutorin…

"less than 14% of the variance in SAT scores can be explained by SES in two massive and representative samples" https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-think-critically...

What does SES stand for? Your link doesn’t appear to define it and I can’t find it defined anywhere else.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#257

Post by harryh »

commandlinefan wrote: post #256
harryh wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"less than 14% of the variance in SAT scores can be explained by SES in two massive and representative samples" https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-think-critically...

What does SES stand for? Your link doesn’t appear to define it and I can’t find it defined anywhere else.

socioeconomic status

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#258

Post by MonaroVXR »

xondono wrote: post #35
whimsicalism wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more? It seems like it would only encourage equality of outcome if you took the assumption that black people are innately less interested in tech as true.

> if you took the assumption that black people are innately less interested in tech as true. Or maybe more interested but much more discriminated. The point is that you can’t see equality of opportunity by looking at the output.

>but much more discriminated.

This right here.

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#259

Post by thrashh »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #255
thrashh wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$650 is a lot of money for a lot of people

In a lot of places these days it's really easy to get a $15/hr job (I mean that's like entry-level fast food work, ubering, etc.) So $650 works out to slightly more than a week's work, be super conservative with taxes/expenses/benefits and let's say 2 weeks. So 2 weeks' work is a considerable amount of work, but it's also certainly within the realm of possibility for the vast, vast majority of people. I'd really say…

I could afford private flights on my salary, for my example, and it’s true: “it’s just more hours.”

The only thing is… I can’t find more hours in my week.

And the real bigger issue is, even through I can afford it, it may be hard to justify it because it amounts to a major opportunity cost.

For a working class family, they probably are going to find it difficult to source $650. …Especially if no one has gone to college and no one even knows the importance of that $650.

If $650 seems like nothing, all that you are saying is that your social group is limited to people who find $650 to be nothing. It’s like the Lucille Bluth banana quote in living…

Re: Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

#260

Post by dang »

morelisp wrote: post #134
gonehome wrote: post #5

Somewhat related tweet thread from today: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461633512344326146?s=21 Don’t talk to journalists (at least if you work in tech, but probably outside of it) - they’re not your friends and your incentives are not aligned with theirs (and they’re not looking to tell the objective truth). You’re better off writing your own articles about what you’re doing. They historically owned distribution…

Haha, you're all so fucking angry you don't have breathless useful idiots like Wu, Scoble, Kelly, Swisher, or Shirky dominating the tech press anymore. It's precious!

Posting like this breaks the site guidelines badly. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and drop the name-calling, flamebait, fulmination, and snark.

We've had to ask you this more than once before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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