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Comment by mLuby | Hacker News Reader

I mean, doesn't the madness stop once the identity breakdown in a given field roughly matches the identity in the general population?

If X% of people are Black, I would expect given no structural impediments that roughly X% of Mathematicians would also be Black.

The how to get there in the quickest and fairest way is a political question.

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As a statistician or economist, I would actually be quite shocked if the proportion was often close. This rarely or never happens in other fields, even ones where there is essentially no possibility of such supposed impediments. Randomness happens.

Instead of stealing someone's thunder by putting them on easy mode, give them the opportunity to kill it.

This is baseless, unscientific blank-slateism, and isn't true anywhere in the world among any demographic segment in any measure.

If 10% of Singaporean men are gay would you expect 10% of male plumbers in Singapore to be gay? If women are 30% of the workforce in Canada, would you expect Canadian dental assistants to be 70% male?

Disparate outcomes doesn't imply unfair treatment.

No, that's true. They just suggest it.

No, again, this is blank-slateism. People are born with genetic predispositions that influence things such as height, eye color, mathematical ability, and career preference. You would only expect population-proportionate outcomes if genetics played no role. Even if they only play a 10% role, you get vastly different outcomes.

So your belief is that black people as a group have inherently less mathematical ability than whites people? Am I misinterpreting you?

A mathematics PhD is going to be in the far right tail of aptitude for a lot of relevant skills. This is the admittedly very rare case where altogether tiny differences in "inherent" ability will get amplified to the point where they actually start to matter - whatever "inherent" might mean, in the first place! Yup, crucially, even differences that are generally understood as "not inherent" can be so hard to address that they might as well be, for all we can do about them. If you ate too many lead paint flakes as a kid, the probability that you're going to be a successful math PhD drops quite a bit. And, short of tearing down and rebuilding a lot of homes that happen to have lead paint, lead pipes, etc. in them, we're unfortunately not going to be able to address this "inherent" unbalance for the foreseeable future.

You understand that the perception that you're looking at someone's skin color or facial features, making a prediction as to whether they ingested lead paint as a child, and then acting accordingly is going to be problematic, right?

But of course no one sane is doing anything of the sort. The issue is how to explain the difference between "% of people with visible feature X in the general population" and "% of folks with feature X who happen to be math PhD's". Well, if feature X correlates with issues like eating lead paint as a kid, even to a small, otherwise undetectable extent, you're going to find that sort of difference.

No, you're falsely projecting your own concerns about your interlocutors onto me. It doesn't follow from "sharply disparate outcomes suggest unfairness" that I must be a "blank-slate" purist. And, in fact, your response suggests you're the one with the extremist take: that disparate outcomes are most likely the result of fair processes running on unequal inputs. Approximately nobody on HN believes processes in general to be fair (see: any thread about which companies VCs choose to fund, or about the impact of lobbying on government decisions).

I conceded something about the point you made --- that disparate outcomes are not dispositive of structural unfairness --- and you responded to that concession by trying to caricature me. In this exchange, you have not come across as someone trying to discuss a complicated issue in good faith. Try again.

What specifically do you think is the reason black people should not be expected to achieve demographic parity in academic math? And how does that relate to “blank slate-ism”? You seem to be implying that there is some inherent characteristic of black people that prevents them from attaining equal representation in math academia. Is this what you intended to convey? Please be explicit.

> What specifically do you think is the reason black people should not be expected to achieve demographic parity in academic math?

I don't expect demographic parity in anything.

> And how does that relate to “blank slate-ism”?

You only expect demographic parity in everything if you think genetics doesn't play a role in what type of careers people choose.

> You seem to be implying that there is some inherent characteristic of black people that prevents them from attaining equal representation in math academia.

Well, for one, it looks like Black students choose Math as a major significantly less often than Asian students do. Blacks having some genetic predisposition to prefer other subjects seems like a pretty decent hypothesis.

Well, if you'd care to let us measure the bumps on your head, I'm pretty sure we could now come up with an equally moronic theory about related misshapen heads with a predisposition for making irrational, racist comments on the web.

"given no structural impediments" is the keyword - without any structural impediments, all your examples should be true.

Structural impediments aren't inherently unfair - for example, if gay men simply prefer not to be a plumber for some unknown reason, that is enough to say that there is a structural impediment for gay Singoporean plumbers, and there doesn't have to be anything unfair about that.

On the other hand, sometimes structural impediments are immoral and should be rectified. If a whole bunch of gay singoporean men wanted to be plumbers, but weren't allowed to enter the profession as a result of laws against their sexual orientation, that would be an unfair treatment and action should be taken to fix the unfair treatment.

With this in mind, we KNOW that minority populations have been very negatively affected for MANY generations from legal discrimination, which directly caused poverty. It is also widely accepted that family wealth is strongly correlated with success academically, and it is widely accepted that success academically is strongly correlated with socio-economic mobility.

Thus, the basis for affirmative action is that there is a moral burden to rectify structural impediments that are a legacy of legal racism, and that helping oppressed minorities get an education in spite of their circumstances helps propagate the socio-economic mobility that education enables.

You can disagree with many parts of this chain of logic. Perhaps higher education doesn't really help socio-economic mobility. Perhaps the moral burden should not be on universities to rectify past mistreatments. Perhaps you believe there is no moral burden to take action to rectify the legacy of last generations' (and all previous generations') racism & sexism. Maybe you even believe that the absurd underrepresentation of minorities and women in certain fields that were historically limited to white men is not at all tied to said historical oppression but simply due to preference or other factors considered acceptable.

However, examining underrepresentation is not baseless or unscientific, whether or not you agree with the conclusions.

An impediment by its very nature is unfair, even when it's something clearly genetic, because it impedes one group from doing the same as another group. However, to my knowledge there's no evidence of predispositions to fields of study based on (sex or race) genetics despite lots of effort to find scientific basis for such claims.

I can't imagine a good reason why young gay singoporeans wouldn't dream of being plumbers any more than the next kid.

Just to clarify, when I write "unfair" I mean specifically that it is something that public policy should potentially address as a public concern.

There are impediments that should not be addressed by public policy - for example , if young gay singoporeans are less likely to become plumbers because gay culture looks poorly upon plumbers, that's unfortunate but shouldn't be a matter of public policy.

>If X% of people are Black, I would expect given no structural impediments that roughly X% of Mathematicians would also be Black.

What makes you assume that? Do you feel the same about the NBA?

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