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Comment by Geminidog | Hacker News Reader

I got 8/10 which says otherwise. I voted serial killer for both women just because of how unlikely it is for a female to invent a programming language. If it wasn't for that I would be basically 90% correct.

This means statistically that there likely is a difference.

I can't put my finger on what it was though, I just knew. Basically anybody who looked insane must be an inventor of a programming language and anyone who looked normal must've not invented a language and therefore must be a killer.

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I assume you were trying to describe how you did well using statistics and demographics, but your wording comes off sexist. It hits my ear as bragging about the disparity in the field, and I have to consciously try to change my initial interpretation to allow for something different. I also got an 8/10, but I had at least one woman in my set who was a language developer (one of the Cobol designers) and I got that right too. I went with the intensity in the eyes. By my method, I most certainly would have marked Steve Jobs as a serial killer, so it's not perfect, although in his biography he said he learned his trademark expression from a guy he knew who later started a cult.

I said something akin to men are unlikely to be nurses, so I didn't choose men.

I think the ideological rhetoric of feminism has infected the viewpoints of normal people so much so that one needs to tiptoe around something that is obviously true. This may be good from a social standpoint as it opens up equality of opportunity but it is bad for science. The movement has silenced people who point out inevitable differences in observation. Women are different then men and giving them equal opportunities will yield unequal outcomes based simply off of actual biological differences in behavior and physical stature. Such censorship is bad for science.

I stated an observation between sexes that is completely obvious and avoided even entertaining the reasoning behind why such observations are true because I don't know why they're true. Yet it still hit your ideological nerve, no doubt due in big part to the tenets spread by ideological feminists. I support equality but not equality to the point where it denies reality.

I'm sorry I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I shouldn't take the bait but, hey, you played a GAME that was structured such that you'd have a 50/50 shot of being right. Rather than assume that the balance of demographics in the photos were waited towards that game's premise, 50/50 split, you used your own biased heuristic and happened to get a good score. You happened to get a set of 10 that included no female language developers. I had a mixed set. 8 coin flips out of 10 of heads is not special. I had a heuristic too and I'm probably equally wrong about it meaning something. I'm being honest with myself, though.

>I'm sorry I gave you the benefit of the doubt.

This is basically your way of saying that my viewpoint is sexist. I have not acted in such a manner, and please cite evidence as to where I am acting that way if you believe otherwise. Basically all I'm saying is that people should stop turning every freaking conversation about real demographic differences into an ideological witch hunt. It's completely off topic and nobody is thinking about such things yet there always has to be some social justice warrior pointing out some "infraction" whoops did I say women are physically weaker than men even though it's generally the truth? My bad for being a heathen sexist.

>Rather than assume that the balance of demographics in the photos were waited towards that game's premise, 50/50 split.

I assumed the balance was not weighted towards sex. I assumed he picked random set of people where the sex and race were random and only whether or not they were language developers/serial killers was the heuristic. It was a mistaken assumption because if the picks were truly random, it is highly unlikely for women to appear in the question set at all (assuming women are unlikely to be serial killers as stated by some people in this thread). Obviously, because two women appeared in the question set, the heuristic is biased for other attributes as the test maker deliberately made sure the question set included two women.

Frankly, the test actually masks reality as we know it. Programmers, Language creators and serial killers are highly, highly unlikely to be women.

I'll confess I possibly misread your initial post. Were you saying your score would have been higher if you hadn't picked serial killer for both women?

The alternative pick which is marking both women as programmers would have made the score exactly the same.

Women are also highly unlikely to be serial killers. I don't know which is more unlikely.

Camille Paglia (feminist academic, professor) has written and lectured about why that is. She has a famous line: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

People need to balance there weaknesses with strengths. Just because one demographic is weak at something doesn't mean they're strong in another.

While intuitively I agree that what Camile Pagila says makes sense, there is no definitive evidence that was causes men to more likely be serial killers is what causes men to more likely be geniuses. Scientifically we still need to entertain the possibility that women aren't geniuses because of biology and this has nothing to do with the fact that they're unlikely to be serial killers. It might be true it might not be true, don't let ideology or pride in your own race/sex blind you from the truth.

Case in point, white people are more likely to be serial killers than other races. You may automatically think a racial centered biological origin of serial killer behavior is absurd but again this is the irrational need for "balance" and equality that is throwing you off. There is no scientific evidence either way, it could be Caucasian in origin it could not be.

Behaviorally we should be ideologically neutral for different demographics, but for observations of reality and discussing truth we should be scientifically neutral.

> Case in point, white people are more likely to be serial killers than other races

According to Wikipedia, that is false. There are more serial killers that are white in the US, but based on percentages of the U.S. population, whites are not more likely than other races to be serial killers.

I really don’t understand this. Is she saying that women tend to be less bold, outgoing, risk-taking? I’m a bit confused.

Basically that men tend to be more obsessive and more likely to occupy the extremes.

Here's a lecture where she explains in more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=243&v=HrscwJYO8G8

That's new information to me. Thanks for pointing it out, it might have changed my selection process for the women.

I found that qualities of the photo played a strong role in my 8/10 score. I can't say exactly which qualities helped make that determination, aside from one case which looked like a police photo.

Oddly enough, I thought that both women were programming language creators for similar reasons to yours. This is because they were older women. (Well, a new photo of an old woman and an old photo of a young woman.) While my impressions may be off, it seems like women played a much stronger role in computer programming before the 1980's than in the 80's and 90's.

It's pretty well documented that there's been a general decline of women in computer science over the past two or three decades. There are various theories.

The probability to get 8/10 choosing randomly with equal probability is 4.4%. This has 241 points now, so if we assume that the number of people that took the test and has an account to write a comment is similar to the amount of people that upvoted, we get 10.6 with 8/10. I prefer to round it to 10, because there are too many approximations.

So it's not unexpected to get a few person that got 8/10, even if it were a topic anyone knows nothing about.

(With a similar calculation we get 2.5 persons with 9/10 and .2 with 10/10.)

(From other posts informal statistics, there are like x100 visits for each upvote, but I guess more of them don't have an account or don't want to make a comment.)

The logic is sound when applied to my singular observation. But a good number of people got > 8/10. Read the thread.

I count 6 people with 8/10. So there are approximately 4 shy ones.

Anyway, one said that can recognize Guido. If you know one, you only have to get 7 out of 9, that has a probability of 7%. As expected, knowing one answer make the test easier.

The numbers are off. You can't have votes be your basis in how many people took the test ( I didn't vote for example) and you can't have the amount of 8/10 comments be a metric for the sole count of people who scored that much. The numerical game can't be played here because the information is too cloudy.

That being said, anecdotally a good number of people got 8/10, 9/10 and 10/10 which anecdotally makes it likely to be statistically significant. Hard to say quantitatively but we can make a qualitative prediction here.

I think that everyone that upvoted played the game. So I think that at least 241 persons played the game. (The actual number of players is probably way higher.)

If you assume that players have no knowledge, With 241 the expected to number of persons with 8/10 in 10, and with 10/10 is 0.2. (The actual number of players is probably way higher, so these expected values are way higher, but we must not count lurkers.)

Last time I counted, I found 6 comments that say 8/10, so even if only 241 persons played and none of them have any insight, it would be underreported. This is not unexpected, not everyone is posting the result.

Last time I counted, I found 3 comments that say 10/10, that's much more than the expected value if only 241 persons played and none of them have any insight. So that's slightly interesting. (Did a lot of people get 10/10 and didn't upvote? The people that say 10/10 is lying or cheating? Do they recognize a few of the photos and were lucky in the others? Do they have a sixth sense to recognize serial killers?...)

You were just lucky. There is at least one woman who developed a programming language on the list this quiz is using. I got Jean E. Semmet and she did invent the FORMAC programming language.

With a sample of one, it is hard to make any meaningful inferences ;) But intuitively, I do tend to agree with your point. Perhaps PL creators look a touch more... extravagant?

But I took 10 samples.

Let's take it to the extreme. Lets say the test had 100 questions.

If out of all the people who took the test, one person got a score of 100/100 out of 10 million people who took the test it means that there are meaningful differences, it's just that most people can't identify those differences.

it's also statistically unlikely for females to be serial killers as well.

It's also statistically unlikely for males to be serial killers as well.

hmm yes that's true, but not in the same way it is a statistically unlikely for females.

It is statistically unlikely for a male to be a serial killer, but it is statistically likely for a serial killer to be male.

Hmmm, didn't know this, thanks for pointing it out.

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