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Comment by HL33tibCe7 | Hacker News Reader

> By all accounts, these two teenage math students are the exact opposite of the majority of the math establishment. They are female, they are African-American, and they come from an area which is not particularly renowned for producing high academic achievers. This is just an awesome turn of events and one which should inspire anyone — no matter what their ethnic, gender or socio-demographic background — that excellence in your chosen field of study is always attainable

I think it’s remiss not to point out here that these students attend a private, fee-paying Catholic all-girls academy.

None of that detracts from the impressive achievement of discovering this elegant proof, of course.

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Perhaps the website for the school is incomplete and only listing registration fees and not tuition but the only figure I see is $750, which is not nothing for plenty of families but is hardly what I would call expensive when it comes to private education. Am I missing something? Very well could be!

Parents that care are a huge predictor of academic success. Putting your child in a private school, even an affordable one, is more effort than just going with the default option and thus serves as signal for parents caring.

Are new articles about people’s accomplishments “remiss” for not including statements about how much their parents cared about them?

Wealth is a huge predictor of academic (and business) success. Let’s put family wealth at the top of any news article about achievements, please.

I see tuition of several thousand (e.g. 7,800 for 8-11th grade): https://smaneworleans.com/tuition-fees

Still quite a steal as private schools go, and significantly less than one would have to pay in yearly rent / mortgage to get their kids into a good school district.

It’s a “steal” if you make California wages. For Louisiana, that’s a lot of money. The median home price in New Orleans is roughly $230k — in Santa Clara county, CA, it’s $1.3 million. That makes the tuition comparable to $45k per year which is more expensive that the best private schools in Silicon Valley.

The math is sloppy, but the point is that the tutoring isn’t really a “steal.”

Ahh, the tuition was cut off on mobile and did not realize there was horizontal scroll.

How would it be remiss to omit these factors, several of which seen irrelevant.

Are you suggesting that their proof be discounted because it might be divinely inspired?

The article is highlighting the inspirational quality of two black women from an underachieving area; it's not just about the proof. The inspirational story is an important element.

Adding that these two youths came from a private school certainly relates to the "underachieving area" part of the story.

> Adding that these two youths came from a private school certainly relates to the "underachieving area" part of the story.

I don't want to take anything away from these two; the proof is novel and interesting and even if it wasn't novel after all it's still incredible to see high school students interested in math and capable of that level of reasoning.

But yeah, that the two researchers (they've earned the tittle by giving a conference talk!) are from a private, selective school undermines a lot the "bad area and underachieving" narrative. It reminds me of a tech company who had a panel about their black engineers, pointing to the gap between the proportion of black SWE in the bay area relative the the percentage of people who identify as black. Three out of the four panelists were Nigerian born. When discussing their path to tech, one of them explained it was hard for him to convince his parents that he was not going to study surgery like his father and uncle. I assumed it would have resonated with anyone from an "underachieving area" in the audience...

> Are you suggesting that their proof be discounted because it might be divinely inspired?

I read it in a totally different way, that the merit of such institutions should be acknowledged. More so because of the culture because of any divine inspiration.

I guess the main thing would be if people were trying to use this as an example of "poor kids from the hood achieving" then the fact they went to a private school makes it a less good example.

I think it's just fucked up these things needs to be mentioned at all.

We're all fucking humans. Great job to these persons*

* = a human being regarded as an individual

That's what centuries of oppression does. It makes this rare. Hopefully, elevating these achievements in the community can make a difference. Ignoring that this problem exists certainly won't. If you don't care about broadening the pool of mathematicians, simply ignore the part of the article about that subject.

It doesn’t need to be mentioned though.

I’m Asian if I read an Asian name doing something that Asians don’t normally do (like the recent accolades for Everything Everywhere), it’s going to inspire me. You don’t have to point it out. The people who need to hear it are not dumb.

Mentioning it just sounds pandering and cringy.

Publicly stating that it doesn't matter sounds pandering and cringey to me. Pretending that you would be inspired by an Asian doing mathematics sounds even more pandering cringey. If the proof came from the adult sons of educated Asian immigrant parents in Boston, it would be far less newsworthy.

For people who care about speeding up progress in mathematics, the fact that this comes from a marginalized group is worthy of mention to understand how to repeat it. For everybody else, ranting about how it doesn't matter is simply off-topic flamebait utilized by culture warriors and their dupes.

I don’t think Privilege matters in all cases, look at the background of Ada Lovelace.

It matters when you try and make the point that this case “should inspire anyone — no matter what their ethnic, gender or socio-demographic background“, as the article does

That's not the way I took the article. Rather I took it to mean something slightly different:

Your ethnicity and/or gender should not be seen as a barrier to advanced mathematics.

There is a nuanced difference there.

I would also take that interpretation if the author didn't explicitly mention "socio-demographic background". They should just leave that one out next time.

> > Your ethnicity and/or gender should not be seen as a barrier to advanced mathematics.

> I would also take that interpretation if the author didn't explicitly mention "socio-demographic background". They should just leave that one out next time.

Please help me understand. Are you saying that it’s okay to say that ethnicity and/or gender should not be seen as a barrier to advanced mathematics, so long as you don’t explicitly acknowledge that ethnicity and/or gender may presently be a barrier to advanced mathematics?

How does that even work? We achieve a meritocracy inherently based on not mentioning that we don’t have anything resembling a meritocracy? Because identifying reality is what makes it real?

Read the thread I am responding to.

I did.

Cool. The summary then is:

Ethnicity and Gender and Socio-demographic background != Ethnicity and Gender

What you asked in your first comment seem to be orthogonal to the point I was making.

Ethnicity and gender are two socio-demographic factors of many, yeah. So if I’m understanding you, it’s okay for the educator to want students to feel encouraged to succeed regardless of their ethnicity and gender, but shouldn’t mention any other socio-demographic barriers they might overcome? Or should specify them all? I’m trying to understand why mentioning the term is objectionable.

Mentioning ethnicity, gender AND socio-demographic factors, implies this case is a good illustration of OTHER socio-demographic factors that have to be overcome in order to succeed.

In particular, with no further information, one might assume a lot more about the difficulties these two girls had to overcome being African American in Louisiana. The State's public schools famously rank very poorly, and there is a strong correlation between socio-economic reality and ethnicity.

That's why a comment upthread quoted that section of the article and mentioned it is remiss not to mention the two girls attended a private Catholic school with ~$10k/year tuition.

Further down the thread, someone says the message they got from the article was how ethnicity and/or gender should not be seen as a barrier to advanced mathematics.

I disagreed that is the only thing the article says. The article does mention this as an inspiring case for people who may see themselves excluded from advanced mathematics because of gender/ethnicity AND other socio-demographic factors. Some very important ones that hold back a lot of black girls (and boys) in the US do not apply in this case.

So your problem is that these individual students weren’t oppressed enough to warrant an educator’s broader generalization that all students shouldn’t be held back by their many and varied forms of barriers?

If you recognize that there’s a vast set of intersecting disadvantages, why would you want to turn it into Oppression Olympics? It’s fine to recognize that not all of those power dynamics might be in play in this particular case. But do they really have to all be in play to make a fairly bland statement that no one should be held back by any of them?

I have solidarity with these students just as I have with others who have different socio-demographic factors to contend with. They’re not and shouldn’t be in competition for access to education or achievement in life. I don’t understand why that should be controversial even if each and every student has a different configuration of advantages and disadvantages. And I think it does a disservice to the students who have different disadvantages to say no one should speak about them in a unifying way unless they meet an exacting criteria of total disadvantage.

The articles’s author does not say that “students shouldn’t be held back”.

He says:

“This is just an awesome turn of events and one which should inspire anyone — no matter what their gender, ethnic or socio-demographic background — that excellence in your chosen field of study is always attainable”

“Inspire”. A child who is abused or malnourished or whose caregivers care little or nothing about their education or whose classroom is constantly disrupted by other children living in terrible situations and whose teachers are overworked with large class sizes and incapable of providing them with a proper education (“no matter their socio-demographic background”) will find little to be inspired in this story (if they know the full story that is), regardless of their ethnicity or gender.

Read the comment I initially replied to and see how it interprets the article’s quote as a message of empowerment about “gender/ethnicity” only. It could have been. All the author had to do was remove the “and regardless of socio-demographic background”. As I stated in my initial comment.

I’ve been a child in several of the situations you describe, so I have little reason to speculate about how I would react, and I think you’re engaging this whole discussion in the worst faith possible to find much greater fault in a statement, which itself is a pretty milquetoast blanket wish for students to succeed without artificial barriers. You’re parsing a thing so far out of its intended context that it can’t help but be absurd, because it doesn’t have any tether to the idea the person expressed at all.

Thanks for the feedback.

... The daughter of Lord Byron?

Their point is that Ada Lovelace is still a salient example of a woman who made significant discoveries in computer science, even though she was also privileged in other ways. Indeed, in general, it's often otherwise-privileged members of disadvantaged groups who are the first to make advances.

The equivalent in Lovelace's case would be saying she's a woman from an area where most women are illiterate and work sixteen hour days in death trap factories. It's true, but ignoring that she was part of the nobility adds a disingenuous element to the statement.

And saying that privilege doesn't matter is nonsense, without it she's unlikely to have had the opportunity to do what she did.

I don’t think OP was suggesting that Ada Lovelace wasn’t aided by her privileged position. Rather, they were saying that even though she was privileged, that doesn’t take away from her significance as a woman who was a pioneer in computer science.

I doubt that is a controversial point. I think all three of us probably agree, and you may just have misinterpreted the original post.

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