Racism and Meritocracy
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Silicon Valley has many biases, of varying levels of connection to actual merit. One is that it is a very chummy place: who you know is, historically, the first filter applied to you (there is an entire culture around intros) and some folks consider it to be the best available method of approximating merit. This suggests the existence of a strategy which repeatably beats the tar out of the Valley: invest in people before they are known by the powers-that-be, introduce them to the powers-that-be, make out like a bandit. You will probably end up rich enough to take up amusing hobbies like running message boards in your spare time.
It is entirely possible that Silicon Valley has a blind spot with respect to X, where X is a entrepreneurial demographic or a market or a business model or a geographic location or a personality type or a whatever. If X is unconnected to merit, then that suggests the existence of a strategy which will predictably produce crushing. I might even go so far as to say that absence of crushing is fairly persuasive circumstantial evidence about either the existence of the blind spot or about the connection to merit.
I don't think capitalism can solve all ills; even if there is an opportunity for, say, seed-stage investment for startups run by tech "minorities", there is a whole litany of necessities and problems which give it long odds of being successful. You have to find individuals who are both interested in the problem, and have the resources required to address it; they have to have the right recipe of skills; they, themselves, have to know certain people (that chumminess again); and, moreover, they have to be willing to throw significant capital at addressing a problem which might not exist in 5 years.
Or, to put it another way: I think there can be common agreement at this point that YC is not funding and accepting as many startups as they would like to, which implies that there is a strong market demand for another YC which could be as successful, or nearly as successful, as YC itself.
So why doesn't one exist?
long odds of being successful
Do you realize that, if you believe the odds are long against this strategy succeeding, you have to be taking the position that this isn't a serious problem in the status quo? And vice versa? I mean, you're not going to give long odds against gravity or penicillin winning, right? They're going to ROFLstomp the alternatives. If diversity is not ROFLstomping the alternatives, then we did not have a diversity problem.
I do not believe that this is so. I mentioned a few of the things which might prolong or even prevent such a thing from being successful even if there is sufficient opportunity for it.
I might be willing to change my position if there were a much greater number of people with the resources necessary to launch YC-like companies.
I am skeptical, but willing to be convinced by evidence, that access to capital contributes more to success of software companies than talent. If, hypothetically, companies fail because of lacking access to capital but do not fail because of lacking access to talent, and the market selected for people who were fundable instead of people who were talented, I would not come to the conclusion that the free market has failed. I would come to the conclusion that the free market had allocated resources correctly to capital and away from talent (in the dystopian world where talent, apparently, doesn't really matter).
If you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution risk trump diversity in investment outcomes, you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution risk matter more than diversity.
So, I think you carried my argument a little bit further than I would have. For example, I don't think that access to capital contributes more to success than talent, nor do I think that talent doesn't really matter.
It's a bit more nuanced than that.
I understand that you're more attracted to data than supposition; unfortunately, I'm neither a researcher of sociology, nor prepared to locate data on "unsuccessful but extremely talented people" (which is where this is going) -- largely because I'm gobsmacked by the very thought of trying to dig up such data, especially historically.
The only thing that I have to fall back on is a particular series of reasoning:
- We assume that there are varying degrees of talent, i.e., "extremely talented" and, let's say, "normally" (or "moderately") talented.
- We assume that YC does not restrict itself only to teams of the most extremely talented. I think I can at least support this with pg's own past statements; he's far more likely to cite Sam Altman as an example of extreme talent than any other given YC graduate. I doubt pg would want to say that anyone in YC wasn't extremely talented, especially publicly, nor am I going to put those words in his mouth. However, it's clear from his own statements that YC has funded a range of differing talents, with Sam Altman on one end and many other people at another end.
- We assume that some of these YC graduates have been successful by nearly any measure. If these successful individuals are not Sam Altman, then we have an example of people who have been successful despite having less talent than someone else. (Again, I am very very carefully here not implying that they are not talented, or even that they are not extremely talented. This is not in any way to be taken as a criticism of anyone involved with YC in any way.)
- Given those, we have now shown a non-1:1 correspondence between talent and success.
- So: talent alone is not a predictor of success.
My position was not that talent doesn't matter, nor that access to capital matters more. My position was that access to capital matters. You can have people with identical levels of talent, and some will be successful, and some will not, based upon the resources that are available to them and any number of other semi-random influences.
I will readily agree that a person with an extreme amount of talent has better odds of succeeding than someone with less talent. They are more likely to possess the skills necessary to overcome a greater number of more serious challenges. But, those individuals are terribly rare in society; we would be trying to draw conclusions about sociology from a 1% of a 1% of a 1% of a 1%.
When discussing the greater general population, I think that environmental factors -- like access to funding and resources -- can greatly affect someone's success in life.
> If you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution risk trump diversity in investment outcomes, you're betting that access to capital and social networks and execution risk matter more than diversity.
I think that the original article covered this:
"So, again, racial or gender diversity is not an end in itself. But we have to ask ourselves: if teams are consistently being put together with homogeneous demographics, what are the odds that they also will contain a diversity of perspectives? Shouldn’t we be worried that the same selection process that produces homogenous results in one area might be accidentally doing the same in the area that we care about (but that is harder to measure)?"
i.e., this is not about betting so much on a winning strategy, as wondering if perhaps we're collectively missing out on some opportunities.
One reason that the contrary belief is so persistent is that 'talent' is defined after the fact as that which was successful. If someone is talented but unsuccessful, you'll never hear of them. It's the dog that didn't bark. I believe that capital is a much better predictor of success than talent, as it is a much simpler, mathematically proven explanation for financial success and doesn't rely on a highly subjective judgment. I'm open to evidence to the contrary, but so far no one has produced any.
Unfortunately, that is the crux of the problem. In the short-term diversity isn't really that important to the "majority". And diversity isn't going to ROFLstomp the alternatives. It isn't like there are a group of Blacks that are all Mark Zuckerbergs and Steve Jobs. White males are long shots for the most part as are Blacks.
The reason why diversity matters is more for society in the long-run. You want everyone to maximize their potential. And lastly, I think most people want others to have a fair shot at their full potential. People like to at least think they are fair.
So the diversity problem isn't about short-term ROI, but rather long-term maximization of human potential. Of course this is almost the total opposite of the argument proposed in the article.
And there's obstacles to how good the schools are, too--good teachers will be scared away by the violence and gang activity that's common in those environments, and district-based taxing, funding, and student allocation procedures mean that kids in those areas are trapped in bad schools. If the school system is racist on top of that, that's even another barrier.
If you don't fix something that's that bad when the kid is five years old, by the time they're eighteen and getting out of high school, let's suppose they go to college. Okay, the colleges do everything they can not to be racist, but it's genuinely harder to meet academic standards for admission if you went to shitty schools your whole life. And even if you get in, you have to compete with the students who went to better schools and got a better start. That's a barrier against even getting into difficult academic tracks like STEM. And if the university system is racist, that's even another barrier.
Okay, the job market for developers is pretty good right now even in startups. It probably isn't even racist. But even at this point, all the forces I've already described have thinned out the numbers to the point where a disproportionately small minority of the genuinely qualified population of entry-level developers are, well, minorities. But let's say the job market is racist, too.
Once you're ready to found a startup, it's absolutely true that the pool of candidates coming to YC and others for funding is genuinely unbalanced. Even if investors do everything they can to be perfectly non-racist, racism in any or all of the levels previous to this in the person's life is going to take them out of the population of qualified startup founders. And no matter what you do to fix investment, it's not going to restore the proportion of minority startup founders to the proportion of minorities in the population. You have to fix these problems at the root, not all the way out here when it's too late to make any difference.
Come on, let's not be coy about this. The particular issue that philwelch is referring to is not that of women, but of blacks. Women have a completely different set of reasons for why they don't achieve as much career-wise as men, despite similar levels of education (the first thing that comes to mind is of course the time demands of child-bearing/rearing).
But for blacks, there definitely is a "pipeline problem." The quality of education available to the average black child is much poorer than that available to the average white child. Although there is definitely both conscious and subconscious discrimination against blacks, in the enterpreneurial industry as well as a raft of others, the biggest chunk of the problem can be attributed to subpar education and a culture that actively discourages success through math/science/engineering.
If we really want to understand what's going on we need to look at areas that attract more women than men. It turns out that the northern Virginia area has a significant female bias where there are far more young well educated females than you would expect based on graduation rates etc. Perhaps the prospect of a safe 80+k job in a good area acts a golden handcuffs that prevents many young capable women from 'seeking their fortune'. But, good or bad, cultural or biological, it's not simply a question of employer bias, people chose the areas they want to live in far more than they are force into or out of a specific region.
Further, pg somewhere argued that there's a multiplicative factor once you factor in cofounders--cofounding a startup implies an extremely close platonic relationship, people are more likely to form extremely close platonic relationships with members of the same sex, and hence men have a wider range of possible cofounders than women. I think this argument is at least partially flawed--many businesses are started by husband-and-wife teams and there's no clear reason why opposite-sex platonic cofounder relationships couldn't work either.
Diversity for the sake of diversity hurts us all. You really do need to fix the underlying problems. I believe that there really are few qualified minority candidates for these jobs out there and there would be a lot more if we could fix some of the poverty and segregation that exists out there.
Black people in this country live in a separate America. They have their own culture as a result of past racism. So many black youth are living in these poor neighborhoods where they're learning that the only way to get ahead is to hussle in the bad sense of the word. Take a look at hip hop and the ideals being broadcast with that music. Make that money (however you can), trust no one, the world is against you. And it really is against them. Violence, crime, gangs, drugs, poverty. This is what a lot of minorities have to deal with growing up. If they manage to avoid the pitfalls of growing up that way they then have to adjust to a whole different world in college and beyond. If we can fix this issue then we'll have a lot more qualified minority candidates.
Look at pro sports. Why are so many star athletes black? Because they had no other way out. Meanwhile the suburban white kids have the luxury of living in a safe cul de sac where they can sit quietly and study or save up an allowance to pay the smart kid I'm the block to take his SAT.
Women are brought up to be these frail creatures and have heavy emphasis on things that won't help them become the career women we see in movies. There's a lot of talk about women's rights and equality but it isn't practiced as much as rhetoric is thrown around about it.
We as white males benefit greatly from White Privilege. It isn't our fault and we shouldn't feel guilty about it but we should recognize it and try to change it. The fact of the matter is that our culture and society is heaviily biased toward helping white men succeed with the ideals we're taught, the opportunities we're given, and just the way we're generally raised.
If we can extend White Privilege to everyone then we will have more diversity. There really is just less qualified minorities than whites in this industry and going out of our way to find a minority isn't helping anything. It just covers up a problem and leaves behind the greater issue. This needs to be addressed at the root.
I agree with this, but at the same time, a lack of diversity might (I stress might) indicate a problem with racism or (more likely these days) disparate impact and it's worth investigating and rectifying if need be. Just chalking it up to "well, I guess blacks/women/etc just aren't into tech" (not that you said that, but other posts here reflect that) may be ignoring a problem. If proper research shows that is the case, then fine, but let's not leap to assumptions.
>Black people in this country live in a separate America. They have their own culture as a result of past racism.
I see what you're trying to say here, and there are cultural/regional differences, but saying "[blacks] have their own culture" makes it sound a bit like an alien society. American black culture is just a subset of American culture - a random black guy from Chicago is going to have a lot more in common culturally with a white guy from Seattle compared to a black guy in sub-Saharan Africa.
>If we can extend White Privilege to everyone then we will have more diversity.
I'd rather just get rid of privilege totally, but that's a tall order. I do a lot of consulting for government agencies and in that world you really do get work based primarily on who you know. As a result a lot of my colleagues tend to be white males, not because of any sort of overt racism, but because the white males who head up government agencies tend to look within their circles of other white males for recommendations. Making the procurement process fairer and more reliant on merit will probably increase diversity in my market, and that's a good thing in terms of increasing opportunities for all.
I can't say how many of those 30 million are living in entrenched poverty, but simply seeing the discrepancy between these numbers revokes the idea that pro sports is a viable way to improve your lot if you are in a poor place.
It's as if your knowledge of black people comes solely from watching rap videos and the NBA.
"Imagine that you were a professional musician thinking about which orchestra to audition for. You have a choice between an all-male orchestra that conducts interviews out in the open, and a mixed-gender orchestra that conducts auditions behind a screen. Which would you choose to apply to? Wouldn’t your answer be different if you were a man or a woman?
I think thought experiments like this are helpful for suggesting an alternate hypothesis to the pipeline problem: that there are qualified minority applicants who are choosing – rationally – to invest their time and energy elsewhere. I am not aware of any scientific study that proves this hypothesis is correct. But I have seen enough existence proofs to believe it is likely."
> Remember, part of the defense against the racism theory is that the applicants are already skewed before any selection is done.
> I once spent time with a promising entrepreneur who was not a white man. Because their startup sold a product that a lot of tech entrepreneurs buy, many of their customers were graduates of Y Combinator. So I asked if they were planning to apply. Their response: “oh, no, it’s a waste of time. Y Combinator doesn’t accept people like me.” Where did they get that idea? Surely not from YC’s partners, who as far as I can tell are scrupulously fair in their dealings with entrepreneurs. Rather, they got that impression by inferring that there is probably implicit bias in YC’s admissions process, and that they’d be better off spending their time doing something else other than applying to YC.
I realize you're talking about Railsconf and not YC, but is it really a leap of logic to suppose that there might be a similar mechanism at work at Railsconf, or other social conferences? Is it possible that individuals of certain minorities in tech -- women or various ethnicities -- are more sensitive to discriminatory undertones that other people aren't conscious of? e.g., they feel like they just won't "fit in" there, and are more inclined to spend their time elsewhere.
I think the article was well-written, thoughtful, and presented solid evidence as it gradually built its case point-by-point. I think it merits more consideration than a link to Google Images.
(The point of that link, for anyone who didn't get it, is that the lack of diversity Eric Ries perceives in the output of our filter is also present in the input, which implies it's not caused by bias in the filter.)
A bias in the input may exist because of a bias -- perceived or actual -- in the filter.
Again, I think one of the points of the article is that post-input selection problems can cause selection problems in the input.
As a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which a particular minority were to believe that, even if they followed the rules of their majority peers, they would still be selected against, then we might also imagine that as a consequence they would actually select against themselves.
(For example: I'm terrible at casual party-like get-togethers, so I tend not to go to them, which in turn prevents me from getting any better at them; I'm selecting against myself in this situation because of an expected problem. Likewise, if I were a woman and an entrepreneur, I might not attend certain events because I believed in advance that I wouldn't do well there.)
I'm not at all arguing that this is actually the case. But, I don't think that limiting ourselves to looking at problems in education is taking a complete enough approach to the overall problem.
Entities should not be multiplied divergently. A sufficient explanation for the fact that Y Combinator winners are mostly white is the fact that YC applicants are mostly white. As shown by the similar Ruby-enthusiast pool, which has clearly been filtered by the same phenomenon (ie, the vast racist conspiracy - known to some as "The Plan.")
Therefore, it is unnecessary to postulate the additional cause: that YC itself is in on "The Plan." Alas, when tinfoil hats go mainstream, Occam himself is powerless.
Yet another related thought: PG once quoted Caesar as not trusting thin men. This idea may have scientific basis: dietary fats stimulate oxytocin production. http://paleohacks.com/questions/56261/dietary-fats-reduce-ca... http://althouse.blogspot.com/2010/01/people-instinctively-kn...
This stuff is related because it's important to ask whether a meritocracy should necessarily discount the single-generation advantages of genes.
Disclaimer: I am skinny and have the AG variant.
What is this phenomenon? Of course it could be some kind of unconscious conspiracy. If it's an unconscious conspiracy, it's a pretty unconscious one.
If it's a conscious conspiracy - but the thought is too terrible to think. As vile as the KKK and as insidious as communism! The Vast White Conspiracy, now on TechCrunch.
We Jews are often accused (at least on the danker corners of teh internets) of conspiring unconsciously against you goyim. Indeed if you had a camera with built-in Jew-dar - I'd hate to know what it would pick up at Ruby conferences, OWS, raw-food restaurants, BM, etc. Good lord! The Mossad must prevent it!
Stormfront can probably also fill you in on the percentage of Jewish lawyers in Berlin in 1932. Versus the percentage in the population, of course.
In modern EEO parlance, any disparity in these figures is called "disparate impact." Hundreds of thousands of Americans today work in the disparate-impact industry - so how can we be surprised to see it on TechCrunch?
"My visceral perception of brotherhood harmonizes with our best modern biological knowledge. Such union of feeling and fact may be rare indeed, for one offers no guide to the other (more romantic twaddle aside). Many people think (or fear) that equality of human races is a hope of liberal sentimentality probably squashed by the hard realities of history. They are wrong.
This column can be summarized in a single phrase, a motto if you will: Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen."
[http://www.sjgarchive.org/library/text/b16/p0425.htm]
Surely it's a good thing that the Ruby on Rails community doesn't face any "moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude." Object-relational mapping is hard enough!
Such language is unimpeachable on the surface and conveys something different underneath.
In fact, the only reason I think this argument has any chance of having an impact is that I think SV is one of the most meritocratic places in the world.
I'm pointing out a bug that we could easily fix if we want to.
From my experience most people who end up working in technology are or were at one point part of the geek subculture.
You can't just look at Tech fields and say look it's all white and asian. It's not, it's predominantly a particular subset of white and asian men. That subset has it's own culture.
Maybe there is some cultural reason that white and and asian men are more drawn to this subculture than other demographics.
Fact: there are far fewer minority hires working in our industry
Fiction: the previous fact is a result of racism
If that were the case maybe there's reverse racism in pro sports?
Two normal distributions that are 0.15 standard deviations
apart (i.e d=0.15. This is the approximate magnitude of
the gender difference in mathematics performance,
averaging across all samples.)
So let's take a look at actual data. Here is a significantly more rigorous analysis:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm
This actually uses data from three different tail populations: Female mathematicians in the NAS, Fields Medalists, and Putnam Competition winners. Lo and behold, a simple Gaussian model predicts that small differences in average mathematical ability produce significant sex differences in the tail[1]. And these predictions tally with reality (e.g. the empirical proportion of females in the NAS).
Ms. Oda also does not consider two other crucial aspects, which are:
1. The large difference in spatial ability between men and women:
http://goo.gl/SGhDw
On the whole, variation between men and women tends to be
smaller than deviations within each sex, but very large
differences between the groups do exist–in men’s high
level of visual-spatial targeting ability, for one.
http://goo.gl/ccKyj
A study by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of
mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All
were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less
than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in
mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while
almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not
withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more
than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at
almost three times the rate of boys.
[1] This is of course assuming that distributions remain Gaussian, though it is well known that correspondence to Gaussianity drops off considerably as you move into the tails.
See for example Lisa Sauermann, the all time best performer in the international math olympiad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Sauermann
As I wrote four years ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65494
The thing is that intelligence isn't some kind of nice, statistically normed quantity. There's more to most variables than a mean and a standard deviation -- so I don't know why people seem to always think that you can restrict a discussion of intelligence to such concepts.
...
But intelligence isn't a gene. Researchers have, since the time of Galton, tried to find a simple, biological basis for genius. You know, memory capacity, reaction times, brain size, brain structure convolution, etc. They haven't found anything -- literally everything has turned out to be a false start, even brain size, which, has been shown, within families does not even predict g. In the mid ranges, there are greater standard deviations, yes. But every single normed test is normed on a sample on the order of 1000. They're designed for regular people. The designer of the Weschler has adamantly opposed the use of IQ tests for anything other than clinical settings, for this reason. It's just no good at drawing conclusions on the extremes of ability. A better guide might be actual performance. The IOI this year had more girls than ever before -- 11. That's nearly 300% more than last year, where they had 4, and one medal. They are: Emina Bukva (Bosnia and Herzegovina) Constanza Contreras (Chile) Anna Currel (Spain) Romina Huenchunao (Chile) Vaiva Imbrasaite (Lithuania) Taksapaun Kittiakrastien (Thailand) [Silver] Sepideh Mahabadi (Iran) [Gold!] Radwa Metwali (Egypt) Katie O'Mahony (Ireland) Phitchaya Phothilimthana (Thailand) [Silver] Ye Wang (USA) [Silver] Sepideh Mahabadi had one of the best performances of anyone. If you're familiar with IOI scoring, only the top 1/12 are to get golds, and 2/12 to get silvers, thus 1 gold and 3 silvers out of 11 implies that they did at least as good as the boys, and in fact somewhat better. Were the 'standard deviation' explanation correct they should have, instead, had 0.4 girls earning maybe 0.01 medals. It just doesn't work.
And three years ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244449
Why is it sexist to say we show up more frequently in science departments because we have also been designed by evolution to be better at math?
Because compared with bench-pressing, claims of mathematically ability being better in men (and partially ordered, to boot) is seriously jumping the gun. We know what's involved in a bench press. We understand how testosterone stimulates the production of muscle. We are nowhere close with mathematical ability. We have no theory of mathematically ability -- we really don't know what it means, or if the simplest metrics are even useful for higher level math. We have no experimental results, because we have no controlled variables. We have few pieces of data, none of which are conclusively disentangled from cultural and historical influence. In the past two decades, the number of women scoring highly on the IMO, the IOI, the Putnam, and SMPY has gone up by roughly a factor of six. Doubtful that the number of girls with 'math talent genes' have sextupled that quickly. Isn't this evidence that we should hold off on our conclusions?
And four years ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65524
"Brain size does not predict general cognitive ability within families" http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/97/9/4932 You can't discount that IOI statistic becuase it's an outlier. Every single participant at the IOI is an outlier in cognitive ability. Do you know about the theory of outliers? There's this thing called the central limit theorem. It says that if you have a lot of small independent variables, randomly assigned some value, then the mean of all these variables (or, by the same token, the sum of the variables) is distributed approximately normally. But suppose the variables are not small, or they're not independent. Then the central limit theorem doesn't hold, and what you have, almost all of the time, is an outlier -- that's why there are often many more outliers than you'd predict in a given population, using a small sample. Now, I'm not saying that g is zero. I said that psychometrics is a non-science, in the same sense that a lot of the social sciences are non-sciences (you can find papers which try to show a causal effect of insurance regulation on premium prices, ignoring profits entirely, for example). The fact that g is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- most academic subtests, including IQ's, rely on skills that are either practiced as a group, or on skills that are shared between subtests. One example is focus, in general. Another is visualisation. Another is working memory. And so on and so on. Many of these skills are also practiced in situations, like school, where if one does well in one area, they do well in another. If you're the teacher's pet, you get more attention. If you're known as the bad kid, you're immediately discounted (and I've been on both sides). If you're poisoned against a learning environment, you just won't put any effort in. So it's no mystery to me that g is non-zero. The point is that the field of psychometrics is totally absent of content. There's no objective test for the validity of a test, for example -- the best they have is g-loading. Over the years, this means that tests have become higher and higher g-loaded. Now this could mean that the tests are getting better, or it could be that the subtests only look different, they are becoming more similar in content. I've been studying these tests, the actual tests, since I was twelve. It didn't take long before I figured out how poor they were at answering research questions, or questions of individual ability. If you get the chance, try to look up the history of the Stanford-Binet, or Terman's kids, or actually take a look at the scoring method behind most of these things. They're totally full of crap...
This is false. It could be that mathematical ability is genetic and normally distributed, but some component of women's underrepresentation is caused by factors other than this (e.g., discrimination, personal preferences).
"It's just no good at drawing conclusions on the extremes of ability. A better guide might be actual performance. The IOI this year had more girls than ever before -- 11... Were the 'standard deviation' explanation correct they should have, instead, had 0.4 girls earning maybe 0.01 medals."
Come on. I know you know better than to draw statistical conclusions from a single event with a sample size of 11. So why do it?
"The fact that g is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- most academic subtests, including IQ's, rely on skills that are either practiced as a group, or on skills that are shared between subtests. One example is focus, in general. Another is visualisation. Another is working memory. And so on and so on."
You've come up with a plausible theory of what g is. It might be f(focus, visualization, working memory). This does not make the theory of psychometrics "totally absent of content", it just means they don't understand everything yet.
The fact that pressure is non-zero can be readily explained by the following simple observation -- air is made of particles obeying Newtonian mechanics which impart a force upon a vessel when they collide with it. Does this make thermodynamics "totally absent of content"?
The fact of the matter is that a variety of seemingly unrelated tests are correlated with each other. They are also strongly correlated with various life outcomes in a manner which more or less corresponds to our intuitive intuition about the idea of "intelligence". Stuff like this rarely happens by chance, and it is highly likely there is something behind it.
I mean this to be evidence against a genetic explanation of under representation.
Come on. I know you know better than to draw statistical conclusions from a single event with a sample size of 11. So why do it?
Performances like this are more the norm now than ever, but the main reason is that the counterexample is such an extreme outlier that it blows a hole in the gaussian theory of distribution explanation for female under-representation.
They are also strongly correlated with various life outcomes in a manner which more or less corresponds to our intuitive intuition about the idea of "intelligence".
The Terman study of the gifted missed both future Nobel Prize winners in their sample.
The methods used to 'validate' IQ tests are not at all sufficient for equating their results with intelligence, or for arguing that it represents an immutable, genetic, predisposition of groups.
As Cosma Shalazi writes:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/494.html
Q: Would you put on your right-thinking left-liberal educated-in-Berkeley-and-Madison hat for a moment?
A: I'd find nothing easier. (You left out the dirty hippyprogressive Montessori school where they taught me Pirandello and Diderot.)
Q: Very good. (It didn't fit the rhythm, and anyway they get the picture.) How would you react to the idea that a psychological trait, one intimately linked to the higher mental functions, is highly heritable?
A: With suspicion and unease, naturally.
Q: It's strongly correlated with educational achievement, class and race.
A: Worse and worse.
Q: Basically nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it; before that it's also correlated with diet.
A: Do you work at the Heritage Foundation? Such things cannot be.
Q: What if I told you the trait was accent?
A: I'm sorry?
It is evidence against such an explanation, but it's very weak evidence. It shows other factors are involved, which no one disputes, but it does not rule out genetics as a factor.
Incidentally, your Q&A argument is incomplete. We have data which shows accent is not genetic - correlation between the accent of genetic parent and child is gone if you look at adopted children. If there is a twin study on the topic, I'd give 1/p value of the study odds that identical twins raised apart have minimal correlation of accent.
In contrast, identical twins raised apart have a 75% correlation in intelligence and adoptees have a 25% correlation with genetic parents. (I'm working from memory here since I don't have the book with me. The numbers are far from zero, but might be 70% and 20% or 80% and 30%. http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-23-Chapte... )
The source you cite is simply being dishonest by leaving this part of the dialogue out of his conversation with a straw man.
Also, your source has a very different philosophical basis for knowledge than most people. He believes that aggregate quantities (e.g., pressure, temperature, possibly g) are statistical myths. See here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210600 , which is a response to http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html (which he cites in the article you link to).
The core of my argument is that other factors have been shown to dominate underrepresentation for some time. While other factors persist and dominate, it is scientifically incorrect, and ethically irresponsible, to continually make reference to innate differences and outmoded, procrustean interpretations of how talent fits a curve.
It is genuinely too early, if not simply too brutal, to claim a group's intellectual inferiority. The evidence is flimsy, the mathematical framework naive, the conceptual underpinnings insufficiently examined, the data is simply not in.
Worse, people use tiny differences in group performance as justification for wildly unfair stereotypes, as applied to individuals. Even if those supposed group differences withstood criticism at the level of rigor exceeding that accorded to physics or mathematics, it still would be ethically irresponsible to make it publicly and commonly known, or the focus of so much discussion.
Directly contradicts this one: The evidence is flimsy, the mathematical framework naive, the conceptual underpinnings insufficiently examined, the data is simply not in.
You can't have it both ways. Either intellectual inferiority of some groups is a possibility (i.e., "the data is simply not in"), or else it has been accurately measured and shown not to be the case. Pick one.
Even if those supposed group differences withstood criticism at the level of rigor exceeding that accorded to physics or mathematics, it still would be ethically irresponsible to make it publicly and commonly known, or the focus of so much discussion.
It would be ethically irresponsible to make true facts public? Um, ok.
Have you considered the possibility that you don't actually object to the data/methodology, but rather you are seeking justification to reject conclusions that contradict your moral values?
Where did you get the idea that I was saying it was impossible?
"What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth. - Richard Feynman."
Appeals to a supposed scientific justification of the inferiority of women in mathematics are extremely weak, and certainly damaging if untrue. The supposed scientific proof is thus pseudo-science - thinly veiled politics. I'm not going to spell it out again.
people often claim that greater variance in mathematical ability accounts for lower numbers of women in high level scientific positions. this is doesn't match the data: one can't mathematically fit a gaussian curve to explain the distributions. thus the supposed scientific explanation for why women are underrepresented is actually faulty science.
likewise, genetic explanations cannot account for the recent and rapid ascendancy of woman in such technical areas (though we have a long way to go). participation at the highest levels of academic competition has increased dramatically.
given the holes in these, and other, explanations, it is both scientifically and morally irresponsible to posit innate differences as the governing factors. yet despite these arguments, many people still feel they have the station to proclaim some scientific basis for what would otherwise be evidence of continued unequal opportunity.
the scientific claims of a human group's inferiority must withstand scientific scrutiny far beyond that expected in physics for, say, proving faster than light neutrinos. yet the scientific rigor of studies of human inferiority is actually far below that of physics. i ascribe the difference to politics.
an actual big problem preventing women from advancing: being successful, as a woman, is anticorrelated with being liked. this is far from the fault of men alone -- it is a pervasive cultural bias.
see Sheryl Sandberg's TED Talk: why we have too few women leaders.
http://blog.ted.com/2010/12/21/why-we-have-too-few-women-lea...
likewise, academic success among some african american communities is occasionally dismissed as 'acting white.' social pressure is a powerful, powerful thing.
It would have been nice if he'd cited the reseach which supports this claim.
There's Robert Rosenthal's study that showed that others' belief that you are "gifted" actually results in an IQ increase. There's the famous "McKay" study, in which test subjects evaluated identical academic papers by "John" and "Joan" McKay. And on and on.
What's really interesting is the experience of post-op transsexuals, like biologist Ben Barres (who was Barbara Barres until he was in his 40s). These folks are the true secret shoppers of gender-- and the ultimate control group in terms of understanding how gender affects one's experience of the world. It would be really interesting to find a comparable race test case (an updated "Black Like Me").
A few years ago I wrote about this phenomenon in Slate-- I looked at women and ambition in general. Check out the piece if you're interested in a more generalized analysis: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/200...
http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Journey-Manhood/d...
There are also a lot of interesting works by transgender people, but the perspective there is different, since they usually report that they never felt comfortable in their birth gender.
Ben Barres (formerly Barbara Barres) wrote a great piece in Nature ("Does Gender Matter?") after the Larry Summers debacle. There's an interview with him here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18conv.html?pagewa...
Pretty convincing stuff on the role gender plays in our interactions with each other. To me, what's so fascinating about the experience of transsexuals is that they literally have controlled experiments going on-- they're the only people who can experience life in two different bodies. What a useful perspective to have-- I'll never know what life is like as someone of another gender/race/ethnicity, but I imagine it would be incredibly mind-expanding if I could.
In my chess club have the same kind of female/male ratio: 12 females on 220 members. Leaving out the youth members it is 8 out of 180 or about 4% ;-) Something must be wrong with our non-existent selection process.
2. When giving money, Eric Ries is right, you don't just go off empirical data. I want to give money to someone I relate to and feel comfortable evaluating. Someone I can understand. When doing that, I'm probably going to choose someone who's like me. If I'm a VC or angel, that probably means a white male. That goes, without saying, for founders. I want someone who has my back, not someone who feels like more of a wild card--I'm taking enough chances as it is starting the company.
So is it Racisim? Hell yes. Are these people Racist? No. It's not as if these words are sticky bombs that implicate anyone who gets near them with an indelible smear. The world is not a fair place--rain falls and the just and unjust alike. Let's call it like we see it.
Silicon Valley, just like anywhere in the world, is not a 100% meritocracy (that I think we can all agree on). What percent meritocracy is it? That's completely subjective. However, trying to convince yourself otherwise is an attempt to wash your hands of the problem while doing nothing to correct it.
What has to happen to solve this is, thankfully, what SV does best--take risks. That means hiring someone who isn't your ideal and seeing how they pan out. That means giving a second look at people that you normally would pass over--if only to keep your lifeblood fresh.
It doesn't mean ruining your company in a futile attempt to change the entire world--but it does mean doing things different, ie, hard.
Enough with the outrage. There is racisim/sexism in the world guys (yes, guys). It doesn't mean you're a racist. Let's man up to it.
We're looking forward to the new Stanford CS101 online class, hopefully I can base my teaching on this which should spin off into the kids taking other online classes of their own volition.
And sexist.
I subconsciously attribute certain qualities to men and women, and to various ethnicities. Underneath all of the various common jokes -- "Asians are good at math", etc. -- there is an undercurrent of discussion where other people are admitting their biases, too.
When I get on the phone with technical support and hear a thick East Asian accent, the first thing that happens is I grit my teeth. I feel frustrated that I am having to try to resolve a technical issue with someone that I have to actively concentrate on in order to understand clearly; I feel annoyed in expectation of their overstated politeness; I am immediately resigned to not getting the problem resolved at all, as they are probably going to ask me to troubleshoot a networking problem by rebooting a computer.
These are biases that have been built up over a period of many years of similar experiences, one little bias at a time. And, when the call actually resolves the issue quickly and without any frustration at all, I find myself thinking, "That went better than expected."
I recognize this about myself. So, when I notice these things happening, I consciously moderate my tone, and try to consciously manage my opinions and feelings and statements. But, that doesn't change the fact that the bias is there, affecting my subconscious.
Likewise, for women in tech. I know there are amazing women in technology, and in other male-dominated fields. I'm occasionally fortunate enough to work with some of them, covering a wide range of other demographics. Still, when it comes time to hire again (someday soon, I hope), applications from women will first be met with biases built up one-by-one from a lifetime of experiences: all the various women friends that need help "fixing their computers", or of a past applicant who we hired, presented with an easy starting project and clear instructions -- "no coding necessary, just do some nice-looking Photoshop mockups" -- and who called, the next day, saying that she had cried all night and talked to her mom because she didn't think she could do the work because we used iframes in an ajax-y way.
Or, when I hear about a black entrepreneur. The first thing that bubbles up from my subconscious is, "Wow, they're succeeding in spite of modern black culture." I have to beat that thought down and consciously regard them as an individual.
These are uncomfortable admissions to make. I would be loathe to admit them in more polite company. Terms like "racism" and "sexism" themselves carry strong biases -- that the only forms of "racism" are "white superiority" and the only forms of "sexism" are blatant misogyny and creepy sexual undertones.
But, racism and sexism and other -isms are a part of who we are, a part of our psychology that dates back to our tribal and "us versus them" cultural influences. I think that trying to pretend that they don't exist is only going to prolong their effects.
Knowing that they exist can help us make better decisions.
That's not a bias, it's simple fact. Asians have SAT math scores 72 points higher than average, TIMSS scores 74 points higher than average, and are disproportionately represented in professions requiring significant mathematical background.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883611.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...
Further, the top 5 nations on the math component of TIMSS have been the 5 first world countries in Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) in all years since 1995 (in 1995, Taiwan was not included, and Belgium was #5).
Reminiscent of an earlier era in which any statements that contradicted church doctrine must simply be false. Indeed, the very concept of a "heretical but true" statement was impossible to comprehend.
There is a group with even higher SAT and IQ scores - the Jews. And they are way overrepresented in Field's, Turing, Nobel awards.
I did not go so far as to say that biases have no basis in fact, because that's an argument I'm neither prepared to make, nor want to make.
I was making the point that biases exist.
What's a better way of figuring out if someone is good at math: give them a math test? Or look up their ancestry?
"Knowing that they exist can help us make better decisions."
He's making this admission with the expressed desire of changing, not trying to justify or excuse it.
So my conclusion is that the parent comment is only looking for excuses for being racist, namely that it allegedly helps and that people are generally racist. It doesn't and we don't have to be.
I do not think that racism and sexism help us make better decisions; I think that acknowledging our own racist and sexist biases can help us make better decisions. i.e., if we become aware of the problem, then we can address it.
I do not condone or excuse racist or sexist behavior, either.
A lot of the original article was founded on the idea that we can have cognitive biases -- prejudices -- that we don't mean to, or even that we are aware of, and that those biases and prejudices can affect other people. I thought it was worth standing up and admitting that these biases are a part of my psychology, and by doing so, take the first steps towards creating a better environment for other people.
I was especially prompted to speak up because of the tendency for people in discussions like this to downplay their own vulnerability to such biases. The default response seems to be, "these are just the people that are interested in this industry, so I don't see a problem." I think it's better to say, "there might be a problem that we aren't fully aware of yet, so we should examine it more closely."
Hope this helps clear things up.
And clearly, many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now. The most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them.
And in any case, there is this theory: if you pick any group of people at all, there are going to be a few people who are simply more able to do many things. Let's say these people are more talented and more intelligent. These people tend to work on what is currently 'intellectually trendy'. For example, a while back they would have been painters, another while back, they would have been writers, another while they would have been physicists, now they are technologists. These people search out a trendy intellectual effort and then spend their time developing their abilities there. This 'trend' is different for different groups, depending on the media that they are exposed to, and what the people around them are talking about.
Groups in America are pretty segregated, and there is a form of intellectual segregation betwen men and women. It leads to gender specific roles. It also leads to the effect observed above: Smart black guys did not start fiddling with computers 15 years ago, so they are not currently active in the tech industry.
You use words like "clearly" and "probably" but provide neither explanation nor evidence to back up your suppositions. Clearly, you expect your audience thinks exactly the way you do and will probably confirm your bias.
Do you think African American students, 15 years ago, were spending time studying how to use computers? I think it's rather likely because:
- I've never heard of this
- Such playing-with-computers is something that was confined to the somewhat richer and educated people in American society, which the african-americans were not, 15 years ago.
I doubt that my audience thinks the exact way I do, and I doubt I have any bias that needs to be confirmed.
I was, as were all of the other black computer science students who graduated with me at MIT. Do we get to question your bias now?
Good for you.
When you say you've "never heard of" black people learning how to use computers, it behooves me to refute you with the fact that not only are there are plenty of black people who know how to use computers, but there are plenty of black people graduating from the best computer science programs in the world.
OK, now you're grasping at straws.
First it was that there are no black hackers because black people didn't put in the work to learn how to use computers. Now you're claiming that black hackers from good schools may just not be the kind of hackers beneficial to starting a tech company.
When you're reduced to spouting really bad versions of No True Scotsman, you should probably move on. It's just embarrassing now.
That explains the "many african-americans and many women were not doing the steps needed to be talented enough to be able to make it big now" part of your sentence. It does not explain the "the most likely reason they did not do that, is probably because it just did not occur to them" part of your sentence. Hence the request from raganwald and myself for a source to back this up.
Maybe because it would take all of 12 seconds of Googling to confirm that this is probably (at least partially) correct? We all know what the statistics say and what they don't say, so asking other people to do your homework for you in place of actually contributing something is lame. I meant granted, the original comment was a bit simplistic, but the lack of statistics isn't the issue.
I have a great deal of personal intest in the subject of race and bias, and I assure you that in twelve seconds of Googling, I will find enough conflicting evidence and explanations to suggest that the causes for bias are complex.
If I looked at a mountain of conflicting evidence with a predetermined belief, I'm sure I could find validation for whatever I already believed. So, I don't doubt for a moment that if you already agree with these statements, twelve seconds with Google will confirm our suspicions, just as I am sure that someone who vehemently disagrees with these statements will also find confirmation of their disagreement with twelve seconds of Googling.
UPDATE: To be clear, I'm not saying that Max is wrong: I don't live in the US, much less in SV. How should I know what American women and minorities are thinking? But what I am saying is that statements like this in a forum like this suggest not only that the speaker has preconceived beliefs about this, but that he also expects evryone else to share those beliefs.
Because "I think that something bad is happening but I don't know what" does not lead to a constructive discussion at all.
To make it move you have to provide a new one.
That's how arguing works in real life when the object is vast and non-deterministic (like, population).
Is your stated reason ("it just did not occur to them") more likely than "they didn't have the opportunity to take those steps because of (economics/insert reason)"? A quick Google search give this link: http://www.brookings.edu/articles/1998/spring_education_darl... which indicated that in the 1990's, minority students generally had access to fewer or lower-quality resources than white students.
edit: downvotes for asking for evidence? I provided some, I'd be happy to evaluate more.
I am a quadriplegic due to a diving accident when I was 13. I know my limitations better than any recruiter or HR department ever could, & while I have some personal concerns with meritocracies in general (especially as social policy), I only ever apply for positions in which I can be sure I meet the inherent requirements of the job. Again, I am a good worker with good skills, but I will not apply for positions in which I can't bring proper, uninhibited value.
So no problem, right? I should be awarded consideration in line with my meritocratic value. That's how the world works... Rubbish.
Regardless of council regulations mandating otherwise, I cannot access most (yes, most) workplaces due to physical barriers (poor parking, doorways, stairs etc). I'm sure some places in the world are better, but here I am. In fact I've been knocked back for not being able to access an interview room upstairs (in a semi-govt. owned office, mind you) - the actual workplace for the job was on ground level. That's not even to mention the stereotype I'm perceived as by a frightening majority of interviewees.
No, I don't have a chip on my shoulder, far from it. I'm just saying it's hard to ignore the greetings of (half-speed) "HELLO BUDDY! ARE YOU GOOD TODAY?" from people who have administered & approved your intellectual aptitude tests. Unfortunately I'm not exaggerating.
Meritocracies are not dependent on a passive HR stance. Get active about it. Educate your staff, ensure equality of access, or at least have the guts to be honest about what attributes you're looking for.
I am reminded of something I heard about a distant relative of mine who was involved in breaking the color barrier in Opera back in the 50's. People told her it was silly to "waste" an opportunity on a talented singer of color, because they (of course) would never be accepted by the public.
These kinds of biases can be deeply ingrained in a culture, even when individuals in said culture are honestly free of first-order bias themselves.
1. Men and women are different, hundreds of millions of years of evolution made them so. Men are more aggressive. Women are better at communication (talk a lot more, learn foreign languages faster, etc.). Men are better at geometry. Women are better at working with sets and groups.
IQ scores of men are more widely distributed than women's. Women's average IQ is a little bit higher. Most of the stupidest people (IQ under 70) and smartest people (over 140) are man.
2. Different races and ethnic groups have different physical and mental abilities, including IQ. As an example look at the different Olympic sports. I'm quite sure different races dominating different disciplines is in big part due to genetics.
All the inter-racial IQ scores I've seen published in peer reviewed journals show the following picture: Black < White < Asian < Jewish.
And then take a look at what the Harlem Children's Zone has been doing lately: http://www.hcz.org/books/HCZ%202011%20Biennial/files/assets/...
And send them a few bucks, so they can do some more of it.
I am disappointed by underlying presumption of the article that you must have diverse demographic correlates with diverse skill sets because it doesn't.
If we continue to think that superficial physical qualities such as skin color or having a certain genitalia defines who we are as individuals, then we do indeed live in a racist and sexist society where people are judged based on race and sex.
Try replacing every instance of the word merit with the word Jesus, and you'll see there is essentially no loss of meaning.
Figuring out how to reduce bias in startup funding is important, but really it's only a small part of the larger problem of identifying talent in general.
"I attempt to hire based on Jesus in order to increase the probability that my startup will succeed and make me rich." <- Huh?
"The guy I hired based on merit has certainly brought my startup closer to success - he's built several useful apps, caught plenty of bugs, and has kept our India operation running smoothly in my absence."
"The guy I hired based on Jesus has certainly brought my startup closer to success - he's built several useful apps, caught plenty of bugs, and has kept our India operation running smoothly in my absence." <- Doesn't make so much sense. What does Jesus have to do with building useful apps, fixing bugs and keeping our worker's pipelines full?
That's the point.