Racism and Meritocracy

Good for you.

When you say you've "never heard of" black people learning how to use computers, it behooves me to refute you with the fact that not only are there are plenty of black people who know how to use computers, but there are plenty of black people graduating from the best computer science programs in the world.

people often claim that greater variance in mathematical ability accounts for lower numbers of women in high level scientific positions. this is doesn't match the data: one can't mathematically fit a gaussian curve to explain the distributions. thus the supposed scientific explanation for why women are underrepresented is actually faulty science.

likewise, genetic explanations cannot account for the recent and rapid ascendancy of woman in such technical areas (though we have a long way to go). participation at the highest levels of academic competition has increased dramatically.

given the holes in these, and other, explanations, it is both scientifically and morally irresponsible to posit innate differences as the governing factors. yet despite these arguments, many people still feel they have the station to proclaim some scientific basis for what would otherwise be evidence of continued unequal opportunity.

the scientific claims of a human group's inferiority must withstand scientific scrutiny far beyond that expected in physics for, say, proving faster than light neutrinos. yet the scientific rigor of studies of human inferiority is actually far below that of physics. i ascribe the difference to politics.

an actual big problem preventing women from advancing: being successful, as a woman, is anticorrelated with being liked. this is far from the fault of men alone -- it is a pervasive cultural bias.

see Sheryl Sandberg's TED Talk: why we have too few women leaders.

http://blog.ted.com/2010/12/21/why-we-have-too-few-women-lea...

likewise, academic success among some african american communities is occasionally dismissed as 'acting white.' social pressure is a powerful, powerful thing.

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.

It's a bit more nuanced than that.

I understand that you're more attracted to data than supposition; unfortunately, I'm neither a researcher of sociology, nor prepared to locate data on "unsuccessful but extremely talented people" (which is where this is going) -- largely because I'm gobsmacked by the very thought of trying to dig up such data, especially historically.

The only thing that I have to fall back on is a particular series of reasoning:

- We assume that there are varying degrees of talent, i.e., "extremely talented" and, let's say, "normally" (or "moderately") talented.

- We assume that YC does not restrict itself only to teams of the most extremely talented. I think I can at least support this with pg's own past statements; he's far more likely to cite Sam Altman as an example of extreme talent than any other given YC graduate. I doubt pg would want to say that anyone in YC wasn't extremely talented, especially publicly, nor am I going to put those words in his mouth. However, it's clear from his own statements that YC has funded a range of differing talents, with Sam Altman on one end and many other people at another end.

- We assume that some of these YC graduates have been successful by nearly any measure. If these successful individuals are not Sam Altman, then we have an example of people who have been successful despite having less talent than someone else. (Again, I am very very carefully here not implying that they are not talented, or even that they are not extremely talented. This is not in any way to be taken as a criticism of anyone involved with YC in any way.)

- Given those, we have now shown a non-1:1 correspondence between talent and success.

- So: talent alone is not a predictor of success.

My position was not that talent doesn't matter, nor that access to capital matters more. My position was that access to capital matters. You can have people with identical levels of talent, and some will be successful, and some will not, based upon the resources that are available to them and any number of other semi-random influences.

I will readily agree that a person with an extreme amount of talent has better odds of succeeding than someone with less talent. They are more likely to possess the skills necessary to overcome a greater number of more serious challenges. But, those individuals are terribly rare in society; we would be trying to draw conclusions about sociology from a 1% of a 1% of a 1% of a 1%.

When discussing the greater general population, I think that environmental factors -- like access to funding and resources -- can greatly affect someone's success in life.

> If you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution risk trump diversity in investment outcomes, you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution risk matter more than diversity.

I think that the original article covered this:

"So, again, racial or gender diversity is not an end in itself. But we have to ask ourselves: if teams are consistently being put together with homogeneous demographics, what are the odds that they also will contain a diversity of perspectives? Shouldn’t we be worried that the same selection process that produces homogenous results in one area might be accidentally doing the same in the area that we care about (but that is harder to measure)?"

i.e., this is not about betting so much on a winning strategy, as wondering if perhaps we're collectively missing out on some opportunities.