"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."
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?
> 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.
"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!