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Comment by ericdykstra | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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