The world is relying on a flawed psychological test to fight racism (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The world is relying on a flawed psychological test to fight racism (2017)

qz.com

22 pointsTomte10 comments

> Google employee James Damore, who complained about the training days and wrote a scientifically ill-informed rant arguing that his female colleagues were biologically less capable of working at the company.

I remember that case being discussed at length on here at the time. Without going back and regarding all the details, I don't remember it being nearly so clear-cut. As a result I'm now skeptical of the other claims in the article about things I'm unfamiliar with. (Is this "Gell-Mann mnesia"?)

Damn, this is a pet peeve of mine. A supposedly-objective article simply assuming the results of an old debate, when there was no actual conclusion to it (and thus the situation is a lot more nuanced than the article implies). It's like doing the whole "history is written by the winners" thing but way too early.

When you notice it, you'll realize that it happens everywhere. Good media is rare (understandable, given how we don't like to pay for it), media tends to be slop or activism. Wikipedia is actually pretty terrible at being objective about controversial topics, too[1]...

[1] https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

At the risk of diving into flame war territory - he argued that tech lacking women was primarily a pipeline problem. He thought you might be able to address this by giving young girls opportunities in tech that appealed to the big five personality traits more common in women, as most were more appealing to young men according to him. He never mentioned that women were less capable, just less likely to be interested. They'll never pull a quote from his essay because there isn't one that supports that conclusion.

What specific part are you saying was not “clear-cut”? The analysis of Damore’s rant?

The rant is, well, a mess. If something is a mess that doesn’t mean that it’s 100% wrong. It contains unsubstantiated claims and logical leaps mixed in with observations and logically justified conclusions. You know, a mess.

Yes. I thought the article wrote it off as being a hater spouting nonsense, whereas in my estimation it was a mix of good points and nonsense by a mostly well-meaning but jaded human.

An honest assessment would get less clicks and thus less revenue for whoever is publishing on the topic.

You need to lean all in on either the “he’s a toxic male” narrative or the “woke leftists are ruining everything” narrative for your website to make money.

How to game the test:

https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/how-to-game-the-implici...

"A psychological test is considered strong if it has a test-retest reliability of at least 0.7, and preferably over 0.8.

Current studies have found the race IAT to have a test-retest reliability score of 0.44, while the IAT overall is around 0.5 (pdf); even the high end of that range is considered “unacceptable” in psychology. "

Took 1/4 the article to show the goods

Given the way the world is going, I'll predict that the death of the IAT won't come from recognizing its scientific flaws, but rather from racism becoming more acceptable.

It is actually not much of a joke to say that if you're white you are racist according to some people.

See definition 2A added after the George Floyd murder:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

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