Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

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HIV transmission is a good example of a wildly controversial topic, that is actually no longer discussed. it's considered a settled issue that everyone is equally likely to get HIV.

on IQ - I'm not sure that's necessarily true, or at least, the differences are complex (one group has a slightly higher average, the other a higher standard deviation, which has implications at the right-end of the bell curve). but for day-to-day social impact, that's not nearly as important as wondering what society should with people in the bottom 50% of the IQ distribution, which is another topic we don't discuss.

I often wonder whether the political correctness furies directed at pg were a factor in him putting sam altman in charge.

for example - it was considered wildly controversial to say that not being able so speak english without a heavy accent might put you at a disadvantage in starting a company in an english speaking country. really?

also - yc is the most forward thinking vc on women's issues in the country, and yet they were still accused of gender bias etc. wildly unfair, you might say.

kind of hard for a thoughtful person to deal with all that chatter. you have to adopt a PR perspective, make general statements - no longer operating from a place of logic, just a desire not to offend.

my sense is that there are many foolish things progressive americans believe which future generations will laugh at. we already laugh publicly at conservatives, but we're supposed to take everything progressives say seriously.

here's a controversial closer - even if we equalized educational access to EECS, funding - women would be less likely to start companies than men, because men are hard-wired to take risks (hormonal profiles, probably other brain circuitry). tens of thousands of years of evolution can't easily be overcome, in even 100 years.

doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage women, or that they can't do it (they obviously can) but bemoaning the out-of-whack ratios constantly, and expecting parity to be around the corner, seems foolish IMHO.

> it's considered a settled issue that everyone is equally likely to get HIV.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Under every interpretation I can think of, it is incorrect. In the first place, people vary in their CD4 and CCR5 (&c.) receptors, so they also vary in their susceptibility to HIV infection given exposure. My understanding is that some alleles confer such resistance to infection that carriers are considered naturally immune. As ever in immunology, that's not the entire story, but it certainly enough to falsify the view that "everyone is equally likely to get HIV" _even given exposure_.

More importantly, people have different rates of exposure. Those rates depend on what sort of potential transmission events one faces, and the prevalence of infection among partners for potential transmission events. Both of those differ between groups of people.

Hence, not everyone is equally likely to get HIV. That implies nothing, of course, about what we ought to _do_ about that.

I think the OP is saying for the general public it's considered a settled matter that everyone is equally likely to get HIV. Not that it's true, but that for PC reasons thats the acceptable "truth". To imply or state otherwise, regardless of its actual truth, would be some kind of ism.

>but that for PC reasons thats the acceptable "truth"

Are blood donations accepted from gay men now?

PG really only stirs up controversy because he won't admit the fact that we're all biased to some degree. Even women in tech are biased against women in tech. It's natural because pattern matching is natural, and female developers & founders are (currently) rare.

Women _on average_ may very well be better or worse than men in all sorts of ways, but that doesn't mean some of them won't be extraordinary.

We have to be careful about our biases so we don't miss out on the extraordinary ones.

It takes extra work to do this.

For example orchestras (traditionally very male dominated) tried to remove bias from their auditions by having the musicians play behind a curtain. The curtain increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent(!).

Bemoaning may be tiresome, but it can also lead to changes that really do make a difference.

I wonder if YC applications are gender neutral (names removed)?

I think that one of the key challenges though is that speaking is an action not only of expressing an opinion but also furthering an agenda. I think one must understand this link to understand why I think PG is not quite exactly right here.

Very often times ideas which stir controversy do so because of a real or perceived agenda behind them. If I say, for example (as I have on HN and gotten flack for) that women tend to be more likely to think in ways which are socially more complex than men, I get flack because there is a fear that anything essentialist about gender (outside of, say, the abortion debate) is essentially a way of trying to imprison women in limiting gender roles. That isn't my intention naturally but I have to accept that this is the framework behind the controversy that saying something like that arises.

Similarly if I argue that the natural order is for people to retire with their children, this has huge impacts for modern ideas of sexuality and the choice of childlessness.

There are tons of attitudes that I think that I would be cautious (though perhaps I am too foolish to be reluctant) about discussing. But the key issue is the concern about the perceived agendas, and the perceived power structures that come with those.

Ideas themselves must exist in a context, and that context is defined in part by how they are used, not only by the person discussing them but also by others.

> I wonder if YC applications are gender neutral (names removed)?

That could eliminate unconscious bias during the application screening process, but it would be hard to run face-to-face interviews without revealing the sex of the person doing the interviewing.

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