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Comment by zenplatypus | Hacker News Reader

Blind hiring is a good idea. But definitely cannot explain the bulk of the issue. It is systemic and the article completely writes of the idea that there is a pipeline problem - which ignores a lot of the pre-college factors that go into whether or not a student of a minority demographic can succeed in a top tier engineering program in particular (I mention engineering because the article refers to Silicon Valley jobs a lot).

Below are two pieces on the demographics of engineers at Harvard and Stanford: they show pretty clearly that the percent of Black and Hispanic students in these programs lags significantly to the US population percentage.

https://medium.com/@jcueto/race-and-gender-among-computer-sc...

https://medium.com/@winniewu/race-and-gender-among-computer-...

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"Stanford Computer Science majors are Asian (46.4%), followed by White (38%), Hispanic (9.5%) and Black (6.1%)."

High school: Nationwide, black students graduated at a rate of 69 percent; Hispanics graduated at 73 percent; whites graduated at a rate of 86 percent.

13.2% of the population is black, 17.1% Latino, 63% white.

If White = (38%) then you would expect black to be: 38% / (.63 * .86) * (13.2 * .69) = 6.39%. So if anything Standford is about right for black people, and massively over represents Asians.

It seems like HS graduation rates are the real issue everything else just flows from that. But, income and graduation rates are linked so it's a self perpetuating cycle.

    > So if anything Standford [sic] is about right for black
    > people, and massively over represents Asians.

That assumes only local applications though. And even then ignores demographic prejudice in where to apply (which is probably more slight).

I would guess Asian students are a majority among international applicants to Stanford. If we then looked at high school 'graduation' worldwide as the baseline, that's probably an underrepresentation.

I am ignoring where people apply, just adjusting for % of population and % of high school graduates. There are a lot of ways to play with the numbers but that seemed like a good first approximation.

Also, international students are 8.70% of undergrads at Stanford, so they can't really change the stats that much.

Asians is a huge group. Would be nice to see a break down between Chinese, Indians and the rest of asia

Stanford and Harvard are top-level universities aiming to enroll (mostly) those who are in top 5-15% of national IQ levels. How would the characteristic of their diversity efforts change if instead of comparing to the US population percentage you start comparing to the population percentage at the right end of the IQ distribution?

Are you really suggesting that underrepresented groups are just less intelligent?

He's suggesting that we should dig up academic papers studying the topic and run the numbers based on the intelligence distributions found therein.

Here are a few review articles to get you started - more detailed studies can be found referenced therein.

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

https://home.ubalt.edu/tmitch/645/articles/roth%20et%20al%20...

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

http://matt.colorado.edu/teaching/highcog/fall8/nbbbbchlpsu9...

https://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea...

J. Philippe Rushton, who you cite directly twice here, ran The Pioneer Group, an organization that funds both research and public policy premised on the idea that "white persons" are superior to other "races"; it's an organization that was literally founded (prior to World War 2) to promote the eugenics ideas of the Third Reich.

Technically I cite him once, I copy&pasted the same thing twice. Anyway, suppose everything you say is correct; are he and the studies he cites factually wrong?

This reflexive denial of any possibility of group differences by the left is quite dangerous. In the short run denying reality and socially punishing those who acknowledge it works. But in the longer run you alienate people who don't like being lied to. Witness Trumpkins and the rise of the anti-Muslim right in Europe.

Why not just acknowledge reality and make a moral case that isn't based on incorrect facts? E.g.: "we should help refugees who need our help, and ISIS will try and bomb us because of that. We'll bomb them back if they try, but we won't give them what they want and stop helping people who need it."

Also, the research doesn't even support any white superiority claims. On most dimensions - intelligence, criminal propensity, conscientiousness - it suggests that Ashkenazi Jews, Chinese and Indians are superior to white people. Whoops, looks like your attempt to conflate human intelligence research with Nazis kind of backfired in a comical way.

Hold on. I'm not answering anything else in this comment until you acknowledge that opposition to American neo-Nazism isn't "leftism". I have plenty of conservative friends, and am interested enough in conservative ideas that half of HN seems to think I work for the GOP. None of them would share a room with Rushton. The first person you cited in this discussion helmed an organization whose charter was to create an American Lebensborn system. Not, like, "something that would effectively function like the Lebensborn", but literally take the template of the Lebensborn and apply it America.

I acknowledge this.

Now let me note that I linked to some studies, and rather than engage with their content, you just compared a guy to the Nazis for citing work that contradicts Nazi ideology without even discussing whether it is correct or incorrect.

Let me also point out that you know my general background; spend large amounts of time in Asia, advocate open borders vs nativism, have slept with 2 white ladies in the past 5 years (one Jewish), and argued against white superiority in the very thread you are replying to. Do you really think I'm pushing some sort of pro-Nazi position?

I don't have time to fully answer this right this second but I want to duck in real quick and say that I don't think you're pro-Nazi --- but please find a better way to say that than "I've only slept with...".

Seriously? Ok, first of all, why would universities use IQ as an enrollment measure? IQ is a general (and contested) measure of potential, not of effort, accomplishment, interpersonal skills, or any of the many other qualities that make a person successful in college and later in life. That's why the admissions process uses a combination of test scores, GPA, essays, and interviews. If you just enroll the top 5% IQ students you could easily end up with a class full of intelligent slackers who fail out in a year because everything in high school was easy.

Second, IQ and race is a highly studied area and the differences are likely to do with many of the exact same factors that lead to socioeconomic inequality between the races. Remember: IQ is correlated with general intelligence, but there are many reasons people do better or worse on IQ tests beyond that. You should really read the Wikipedia page on the subject and take a look at some of the cited research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

Lastly, to answer your question, if universities just wanted the highest IQ students they would overlook American students entirely and fill their classes with East Asian, and maybe European students instead.

This is true. Various studies have been done which measure how much of college GPA and other such things can be predicted based on academic inputs.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf

http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/09/the_underperformance...

It turns out that "underprivileged" people actually do worse than what IQ and other academic measurements alone would predict.

If universities actually wanted to accurately choose the students most likely to succeed, they would penalize blacks, hispanics, males and people with low family income.

Second, IQ and race is a highly studied area and the differences are likely to do with many of the exact same factors that lead to socioeconomic inequality between the races.

If this is true, you should be able to run a multiple regression analysis which takes into account those "exact same factors" as well as race, and which accurately predicts outcomes. Further, the coefficient on race should be close to zero.

(This is the exact opposite of what is found in the studies I link above.)

Can you cite a study demonstrating this?

Did you read the link I provided? It covers exactly what you're asking for with multiple references.

The wikipedia page agrees with what I said: Different aspects of the Socioeconomic environment in which children are raised have been shown to correlate with part of the IQ gap, but they do not account for the entire gap.[79] Generally the difference between mean test scores of blacks and whites is not eliminated when individuals and groups are matched on SES...

I haven't read every study cited there, though I've read a few. Which ones (you claim multiple) do you believe provide what I'm asking for?

What are you talking about? That was about half of the article.

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