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Anyone who claims that hiring racism/sexism/ageism/etc. dominates in some industry should be ignored unless they’ve already conditioned on obviously-relevant fa

Anyone who claims that hiring racism/sexism/ageism/etc. dominates in some industry should be ignored unless they’ve already conditioned on obviously-relevant factors with sex/race/age/etc. correlates, like the desirable strength/intelligence/etc. distribution of workers in that industry. You might naively claim that professional basketball has a racist preference for black men, until you remember that black men are vastly more likely to fall into the height and athleticism distribution optimal for playing basketball. There are also industries where you rationally expect e.g. whites and asians to be disproportionately represented.

TeaDrunk 6y ago
This rhetoric in commenting on venture capital and tech implies that whites and asians are more likely to fall into some biological distributions optimal for being in tech or being a venture capitalist. could you explain what they are? Genuine question.
- exolymph 6y ago
  It's a matter of whether or not you believe IQ test results. (Personally, I don't have a position, not being familiar with the literature brandished by either side of the debate. I am, however, aware of the debate's existence — hence this clarifying comment.)
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    You don't need IQ test results. The SAT measures actual performance at solving math problems. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-percentile...
    - asdff 6y ago
      SAT measures your ability to complete the SAT, not your ability to solve math problems. If you are nervous in a testing environment or need to take your time with math problems or write them out beyond the scraps of paper they give you, you will have a bad time on the SAT. Even when I took the GRE for grad school, I ran out of time on the math section. It wasn't difficult, it was just trigonometry and very basic algebra, but I ran out of time anyway. I still got into grad school, so it turned out none of this testing stress mattered at all.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    IQ results are meaningful, but there's nothing 'biological' about them. Variation in IQ is heavily influenced by all sorts of social factors, and variation across social groups even comes with difficulties in measurement. The meme that 'IQ is biological' is just that, a baseless urban legend.
    - SamReidHughes 6y ago
      Don't be ridiculous. Performance on IQ tests is highly heritable and is also severely affected by metabolic disorders, childhood iodine deficiency, and sleep deprivation. That's biological.
    - centimeter 6y ago
      It's funny when people are so uniformly wrong but write with such confident language. Most estimates based on twin and sibling studies place 60-80% of variance in intelligence as genetically heritable, with a single-digit percentage of adult IQ attributable to known environmental factors.
      - zozbot234 6y ago
        Twins-vs.-siblings studies are irrelevant to variation across large social groups. There's no way anyone can "write with confident language" about any of that variation being biological in nature, given that the social milieus are so starkly different.
        zo1 6y ago
        Twin vs sibling studies aim at quantifying what effect genetics has on IQ rather than environmental conditions. If there are hereditary components to it, then they most certainly can be mapped to some extent across population groups, as have a lot of other "traits". There are only so many ways to slice this, but it is unfortunately a delicate topic.
        diffrinse 6y ago
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    IQ tests aren’t biological the way height is, thus my confusion. Additionally, we can’t know that tech/VC have significantly higher IQs. My inquiry is genuinely asking if this persons rhetoric had any merit whatsoever since on its face it looks dumb
    - diffrinse 6y ago
      Well, at least we got over phrenology... right?
doorstar 6y ago
Are you flat out saying that some races and sexes are not intelligent enough to be in the tech industry?
- user982 6y ago
  They also said that non-white races look too alike for facial recognition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568
  - doorstar 6y ago
    Ah, a kook. Good to know, thanks
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    They didn't say "they all look alike", they said that white faces have more contrast so are easier to differentiate even with a naïve CV algorithm. It's one more source of systemic bias in the ML literature, especially given the comparative scarcity of source data from non-majority groups.
    - user982 6y ago
      > It's one more source of systemic bias in the ML literature, especially given the comparative scarcity of source data from non-majority groups. centimeter's posts in that thread directly reject your proffered line of thought: > your training data does not have enough people with dark skin or African American face features This isn’t the issue - the issue is lower variance across black faces in any basis.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    Here's what I said: "if you partitioned the faces by race the output of the SVD would be much wider for white people [...] white people have more light/dark contrast, more hair colors, more eye colors, etc.". This is an obvious fact that is widely recognized by CV practitioners.
- 6y ago
mekoka 6y ago
I love seeing comments like this surface on HN, because they serve to show how some people can think of themselves as rational while being so oblivious about their ignorance. It can go on silently for years, because they think it's just politically incorrect to say it, but that the "facts" are true. This is why, despite what you may believe, "race" issues are still of actuality in SV. You would be amazed at what some of the supposedly smart and powerful people in these circles believe when it comes to this stuff.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  Psychology researchers don't have any major disagreement about the relationship between race and IQ. It's well established that blacks have lower IQ than whites. Where they're still in disagreement is what causes it and the definition of "race". It's amazing to see so many seemingly intelligent people being such avid science deniers. Just because you've demonized the people who believe something different from you doesn't mean they're wrong.
- centimeter 6y ago
  You should consider the hypothesis that the supposedly smart people actually are smart (as one might expect), and have put more thought into this than you.
  - mekoka 6y ago
    I stand by my assertion. Anyone trying to use a concept as misunderstood as IQ to explain a disparity in tech regarding black people is most probably misguided and jumping to conclusion. The other person responding to my comment (and who seems to be in the same boat as you) said: where they're still in disagreement is what causes it and the definition of "race". There's a very good reason for that. There are many other attributes that correlate _very strongly_ with what people like to call "race", that are likelier candidates (based on strong evidence) as factors of IQ disparity. IQ researchers know that unless you can trace the direct origin of their findings to genes (as it's been done for some diseases), you cannot claim causation. Especially when there is also strong evidence of socio-cultural factors (environment, history, culture, nutrition, education, lifestyle, means, etc). Even the plasticity of IQ suggests that since it's not a number set in stone, it wouldn't be prudent to make wild genetic claims. Unfortunately the public at large doesn't want to hear that part, and would rather run with its own version of what I like to call "tldr science", that purports to explain why the world works the way it does with cliff notes. In a discussion about bias against a specific genetic group, if you want to bring arguments that excuse the status quo, by basically saying that the discriminated group is just genetically at a disadvantage, you need to damn well know what you're talking about. But as it's common with many "bottom-line" numbers like IQ, people tend to look at them and make the same mistake of drawing overly simplistic conclusions to very complicated and entangled issues. The issue at hand here is the relative invisibility of black people in the tech scene. You brought up a point. I will assume that you're in tech, as I am. Despite what we pride ourselves to be able to accomplish, nothing in that field places it beyond the grasp of 99% of humans with a functioning brain, whether those individuals belong to a low scoring group or not. It's a challenging field, yes, but you don't need genius level IQ. What you need is a favorable environment (education, food, etc) that adequately prepares you for it. And this is true for most other fields. The fact that you ran with "IQ" to explain the phenomenon (and that you had many advocates coming to your rescue in that endeavor) is very interesting to me, as it really is symbolic of how otherwise smart people may convince themselves that they've figured something that they really don't understand that well. As I said earlier, this is how we remain in that situation.

TeaDrunk 6y ago

This rhetoric in commenting on venture capital and tech implies that whites and asians are more likely to fall into some biological distributions optimal for being in tech or being a venture capitalist. could you explain what they are? Genuine question.

exolymph 6y ago
It's a matter of whether or not you believe IQ test results. (Personally, I don't have a position, not being familiar with the literature brandished by either side of the debate. I am, however, aware of the debate's existence — hence this clarifying comment.)
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  You don't need IQ test results. The SAT measures actual performance at solving math problems. https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-percentile...
  - asdff 6y ago
    SAT measures your ability to complete the SAT, not your ability to solve math problems. If you are nervous in a testing environment or need to take your time with math problems or write them out beyond the scraps of paper they give you, you will have a bad time on the SAT. Even when I took the GRE for grad school, I ran out of time on the math section. It wasn't difficult, it was just trigonometry and very basic algebra, but I ran out of time anyway. I still got into grad school, so it turned out none of this testing stress mattered at all.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  IQ results are meaningful, but there's nothing 'biological' about them. Variation in IQ is heavily influenced by all sorts of social factors, and variation across social groups even comes with difficulties in measurement. The meme that 'IQ is biological' is just that, a baseless urban legend.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    Don't be ridiculous. Performance on IQ tests is highly heritable and is also severely affected by metabolic disorders, childhood iodine deficiency, and sleep deprivation. That's biological.
  - centimeter 6y ago
    It's funny when people are so uniformly wrong but write with such confident language. Most estimates based on twin and sibling studies place 60-80% of variance in intelligence as genetically heritable, with a single-digit percentage of adult IQ attributable to known environmental factors.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Twins-vs.-siblings studies are irrelevant to variation across large social groups. There's no way anyone can "write with confident language" about any of that variation being biological in nature, given that the social milieus are so starkly different.
      - zo1 6y ago
        Twin vs sibling studies aim at quantifying what effect genetics has on IQ rather than environmental conditions. If there are hereditary components to it, then they most certainly can be mapped to some extent across population groups, as have a lot of other "traits". There are only so many ways to slice this, but it is unfortunately a delicate topic.
        diffrinse 6y ago
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  IQ tests aren’t biological the way height is, thus my confusion. Additionally, we can’t know that tech/VC have significantly higher IQs. My inquiry is genuinely asking if this persons rhetoric had any merit whatsoever since on its face it looks dumb
  - diffrinse 6y ago
    Well, at least we got over phrenology... right?

doorstar 6y ago

Are you flat out saying that some races and sexes are not intelligent enough to be in the tech industry?

user982 6y ago
They also said that non-white races look too alike for facial recognition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568
- doorstar 6y ago
  Ah, a kook. Good to know, thanks
- zozbot234 6y ago
  They didn't say "they all look alike", they said that white faces have more contrast so are easier to differentiate even with a naïve CV algorithm. It's one more source of systemic bias in the ML literature, especially given the comparative scarcity of source data from non-majority groups.
  - user982 6y ago
    > It's one more source of systemic bias in the ML literature, especially given the comparative scarcity of source data from non-majority groups. centimeter's posts in that thread directly reject your proffered line of thought: > your training data does not have enough people with dark skin or African American face features This isn’t the issue - the issue is lower variance across black faces in any basis.
- centimeter 6y ago
  Here's what I said: "if you partitioned the faces by race the output of the SVD would be much wider for white people [...] white people have more light/dark contrast, more hair colors, more eye colors, etc.". This is an obvious fact that is widely recognized by CV practitioners.
6y ago

mekoka 6y ago

I love seeing comments like this surface on HN, because they serve to show how some people can think of themselves as rational while being so oblivious about their ignorance. It can go on silently for years, because they think it's just politically incorrect to say it, but that the "facts" are true. This is why, despite what you may believe, "race" issues are still of actuality in SV. You would be amazed at what some of the supposedly smart and powerful people in these circles believe when it comes to this stuff.

lopmotr 6y ago
Psychology researchers don't have any major disagreement about the relationship between race and IQ. It's well established that blacks have lower IQ than whites. Where they're still in disagreement is what causes it and the definition of "race". It's amazing to see so many seemingly intelligent people being such avid science deniers. Just because you've demonized the people who believe something different from you doesn't mean they're wrong.
centimeter 6y ago
You should consider the hypothesis that the supposedly smart people actually are smart (as one might expect), and have put more thought into this than you.
- mekoka 6y ago
  I stand by my assertion. Anyone trying to use a concept as misunderstood as IQ to explain a disparity in tech regarding black people is most probably misguided and jumping to conclusion. The other person responding to my comment (and who seems to be in the same boat as you) said: where they're still in disagreement is what causes it and the definition of "race". There's a very good reason for that. There are many other attributes that correlate _very strongly_ with what people like to call "race", that are likelier candidates (based on strong evidence) as factors of IQ disparity. IQ researchers know that unless you can trace the direct origin of their findings to genes (as it's been done for some diseases), you cannot claim causation. Especially when there is also strong evidence of socio-cultural factors (environment, history, culture, nutrition, education, lifestyle, means, etc). Even the plasticity of IQ suggests that since it's not a number set in stone, it wouldn't be prudent to make wild genetic claims. Unfortunately the public at large doesn't want to hear that part, and would rather run with its own version of what I like to call "tldr science", that purports to explain why the world works the way it does with cliff notes. In a discussion about bias against a specific genetic group, if you want to bring arguments that excuse the status quo, by basically saying that the discriminated group is just genetically at a disadvantage, you need to damn well know what you're talking about. But as it's common with many "bottom-line" numbers like IQ, people tend to look at them and make the same mistake of drawing overly simplistic conclusions to very complicated and entangled issues. The issue at hand here is the relative invisibility of black people in the tech scene. You brought up a point. I will assume that you're in tech, as I am. Despite what we pride ourselves to be able to accomplish, nothing in that field places it beyond the grasp of 99% of humans with a functioning brain, whether those individuals belong to a low scoring group or not. It's a challenging field, yes, but you don't need genius level IQ. What you need is a favorable environment (education, food, etc) that adequately prepares you for it. And this is true for most other fields. The fact that you ran with "IQ" to explain the phenomenon (and that you had many advocates coming to your rescue in that endeavor) is very interesting to me, as it really is symbolic of how otherwise smart people may convince themselves that they've figured something that they really don't understand that well. As I said earlier, this is how we remain in that situation.