Comment by luchak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luchak | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The lengths to which this article goes to construct a model sympathetic to the author's views are incredible. It takes data showing a greater variance among males than females:

- in mathematical ability

- among schoolchildren

- on a standardized test

and generalizes them to:

- many different types of abilities

- among the Y Combinator applicant pool

- on the Y Combinator application process

Not only that, but by its end, the article is postulating a model in which literally one in a million people have sufficient aptitude to be accepted by Y Combinator - whether they're interested in it or not!

Even if you grant the author all of those assumptions, plus the risk aversion thing, you're only down to 13% women, three times what TechCrunch says Y Combinator actually accepts. I guess you could add another independent 99.9th percentile ability requirement, but then you're talking about one in a billion people being Y Combinator worthy. Or you could try to find a different, more tilted risk aversion statistic -- but at that point I think we'd be cherry-picking citations to fit a conclusion.

So, sure, if you accept a whole raft of dubious assumptions, you can explain the 4% acceptance rate by aptitude alone. But enough dubious assumptions can explain almost anything.

Not only that, but by its end, the article is postulating a model in which literally one in a million people have sufficient aptitude to be accepted by Y Combinator - whether they're interested in it or not!

Why do you feel this is unreasonable? Do you think there is some huge pool of people good enough for YC who just don't get in? Maybe the true numbers are 1 in 100,000, but I'd be surprised if they are much higher than that.

In any case, I'm not attempting to claim my assumptions are correct. The only point I'm making is that small differences in underlying probability distributions can have large effects in the composition of people accepted into a highly selective program.

I.e., Eric Ries is making the fallacy of the excluded middle: "either aptitude/preference differences are huge, or else they don't explain much." This is simply mathematically incorrect.

Do you think there is some huge pool of people good enough for YC who just don't get in?

Yes, I believe that there are probably more than 300 people in the United States who could potentially be accepted to Y Combinator. I'd believe there are a lot more than 3000. We're talking about aptitude here, remember, so you have to consider people who could potentially get in, but don't apply. Do you really believe that the vast majority of the people who could even conceivably get in to YC, given some set of life choices, do in fact apply?

The only point I'm making is that small differences in underlying probability distributions can have large effects in the composition of people accepted into a highly selective program.

Yeah, if we're willing to grant you all kinds of crazy concessions, you can cobble together an explanation. But you're asking for a lot to make YC selective and sensitive enough for your example to be reasonable. The YC selection process has to be consistent and incredibly accurate. Most of the people who are even capable of getting in must apply. Acumen in various areas has to be minimally or negatively correlated, and to even be considered for YC, one person has to have all of the relevant skills.

And this is just to get close to the gender disparity that YC sees.

Sure, I agree that normal distributions with minor differences in variance are very different at the tails. But to get this to explain away the gender disparity in YC selectees? Epicycles on top of epicycles.

(Also: if this is really about the tails of the aptitude distribution, going by the paper you cited and your same arguments, we'd expect to see a lot more Asian women than Asian men in YC. I suspect this is not the case.)

If anything, I suspect your risk aversion point is closer to the mark, but that opens up an entirely new cultural and political can of worms.

I thought you had a point. Professional basketball comes to mind, where it's incredibly unusual for someone to be of "normal" height. A height difference gives you an advantage which I suspect creates a positive feedback loop (advantage leads to more enjoyment, which leads to more practice...etc) and remains a significant factor even when all other things are equal (like innate talent).

advantage leads to more enjoyment, which leads to more practice...etc

I actually agree with you here. This is why I think things like sexist/marginalizing presentations at conferences are a big deal: a hostile environment seems to me a lot more likely to achieve this than possible differences at the bare fringe of the aptitude spectrum.

FWIW: I'm female and I'm very aware of the chill effect when, say, in an online forum some guy says something hostile about women/a woman and gets a group high five out of it (massively upvoted and that kind of thing). In such cases, it is not uncommon for me to feel like saying something like "there's some truth to that but there's another side to that story as well" only it's obvious that the other side is not welcome information and trying to present it won't accomplish anything constructive. In other words, I am keenly aware that if it were a neutral, not emotionally charged discussion, I have additional information which might cast light on the subject for the guys and might even be helpful to them but there is no hope of being heard, so I keep my mouth shut rather than borrow trouble. And I'm a rather loud mouthed brassy broad, so I'm sure the chill effect has an even stronger ability to keep your typical woman quiet.

From the very start he shows he thinks programming requires godlike mastery of the universe:

> people who are in the top 2.5% in mathematical ability alone, i.e. people with the capability to be decent programmers

Decent? Top 2.5% in mathematical ability can be "decent" programmers? Most programmers don't do rocket science. You don't need to be a world-class software engineer to make most of the web apps that come out each day. CRUD operations on a database, ETL code, implementing someone else's graph algorithm... these do not require over 2 sigmas in raw math skill to do. A "decent" programmer can do these things just fine.

When you're coming from such a warped worldview, it's not too surprising that he thinks only 1 in 1000 people have the math skills alone to write code for a Y Combinator startup and that successful applicants are literally 1 in a million.

Dunning-Kruger strikes again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com