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Comment by walterman | Hacker News Reader

What are you implying?

I read his comment as "inherent racial disparities in ability". For basketball, I doubt you'll find many that disagree.

For STEM, or computer programming and math at least, it's far harder to know. Certainly there are very few black people in tech/math, at least at the higher levels.

Perhaps part of the problem is that empty virtue signaling (like banning the terms "master" and "slave") is easy, but actually doing the work that would really matter is hard. I spent a couple hours helping a black kid polish up for his Google interview (he made it).

That's something, but it will really take serious tutoring and a society wide scale to bridge the gap. And other socioeconomic factors might still prove overwhelming.

And for gods' sake, the whole "girls that code" thing needs to die right now. Can you imagine how a young black man would be affected by that?

I'm implying no such thing. There's no gene for basketball, just as there's no gene for engineering. Yet, certain populations excel at one or the other. Aptitude arises out of cultural and socioeconomic factors. Clearly, science and engineering are not strong factors in some populations' culture and lifestyle. Whereas, it is a lifestyle from an early age for hundreds of millions of whites and Asians, mostly boys. There could be a genetic component but such has not been proven.

I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. There is a gene for basketball--it's called being tall and fairly muscular. There's a reason why there are very few great Ashkenazi basketball players, and it's not racism or culture.

> There is a gene for basketball--it's called being tall and fairly muscular

so then by that logic, you can argue why there are so few whites in basketball must be that they aren't as tall and muscular.

I think most basketball fans would agree with that argument.

And yet when there's little or no representation of one race in one area of human endeavour, it's OK and accepted. But in another endeavour, it's frowned upon and spell racism.

Professional sports is a competitive industry where absolute performance is irrelevant. Only relative performance counts. In cooperative industries like engineering and software development only absolute performance counts. As long as someone is competent enough to be able to bring in enough money to pay for food and rent they will be hired and since that is such an incredibly low bar there is no reason to exclude "less skilled" people who perform 3.4% worse than the best. Those "less skilled" people are more important than the top performer simply because they are in the majority. Having 10 competent people is better than only having the best person for the job.

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