Does he get fewer diversity points, even though his life experiences are so far removed from that of the white person growing up in, say, southern California, that they might as well have grown up in different countries?
The rub is that on average, people who aren't white have a way harder time in America, hence the need for these types of opportunities. It doesn't matter that one white person may have had a hard life, it matters that systemically, non-white people have many disadvantages that white people don't have.
Among other things, the category "people who suffered lots of disadvantage" is more disadvantaged than either women or any racial group. Why do you explicitly exclude this subgroup of humans from consideration?
Downmodding, BTW, still counts as ducking the question. Good to know that it's a difficult one.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...
Because, and honestly I think you know this, in America a disadvantaged white person is still better off than a disadvantaged black person. A disadvantaged man trying to make it in tech is still better off than a disadvantaged woman trying to make it in tech. The problem in America is race and gender, everything else being equal - race & gender become filters because of racism and sexism. Two resumes that are _exactly_ the same, but one of them has a name normally associated with a black male will get far fewer bites from companies. Same thing with matching resumes but one has "Bob" and the other "Susan". The point of efforts like this is to close the gap that is created by sexism & racism. Yes, you could keep expanding the focus of the program until you become "Organization to solve every problem ever, LLC." ...but that's silly. There are some focused on AIDS/HIV, there are some people focused on Ebola, some people focused on Cancer.... and the people in this article are focused on race/gender in the tech industry.
The problem in America is race and gender, everything else being equal...
Again, let me repeat the question: why do you hold everything else equal?
A related question. I've observed that ever since LASIK, people find me more attractive but less intelligent. I'm currently running an experiment to objectively measure this. Suppose my experiment confirms my anecdata. Should we preferentially give scholarships to people with good vision?
If not, why not? I.e., what makes race special?
What makes cancer special? Ebola? AIDS/HIV? Why/how does anybody focus on anything? btw, these are the kinds of specious debates on HN that derail the main topic into oblivion. Having to redefine & rehash all kinds of things you, as an adult, should already know about society. I'm not going down this path again. You should already know racism & sexism is a serious enough problem that merits focus. Not knowing that is a symptom of arrogance/ignorance/stubborness that can't be resolved in an HN thread. It's just a waste of time and detracts from the main issue at hand that wiser(employees of hackerschool.com) people already have a grasp on and wish to address.
EDIT: And off the front page this article goes. I want that comment-endorsing system to come back.
1) Positive claim: Ebola causes death.
1a) Death due to Ebola are probably easier to prevent than a random sample of death. This is because we can probably find a single procedure to prevent { ebola death 1, ebola death 2, ... }, while we cannot find a single procedure to prevent {shooting death 1, drowning death 2, ebola death 3, cancer death 4}.
1b) Thus, preventing death due to Ebola will likely be cheaper than preventing a random selection of deaths.
2) Normative claim: Death is bad.
2a) Preventing death cheaply is better than preventing death expensively.
3) Preventing ebola will reduce incidents of death by (1), and that will be good (by claim (2)). It will likely be cheaper to prevent deaths due to ebola than due to a random sampling of causes (1b). Preventing deaths cheaply is better than preventing deaths expensively, by (2a).
It's not remotely difficult to justify the normative claim that stopping Ebola is good. And you can now see my normative principles - if you believe death is good, we know why we disagree.
If we want to come to agreement, we now know we need to debate moral philosophy rather than empirical claims like "is ebola really a single disease".
Most of this conversation is me asking "what goes into slot (2)" and a bunch of people repeating to me what they put in slot (1).
I, too, find the fixation on race/sex/class weird when there are many factors that seem much more important. I wrote about it before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8160608
Your previous writing is simplistic rationalisation of racist attitudes. "People aren't racist, the problem is black people for not inheriting hard work nor intelligence".
Those categories (like race or sex) seem not only arbitrary but not even very good. Yet, commenters here insist that they are obvious and the question why those and not some other doesn't even require (deserve?) an answer.
How so? For those who, like me and yummyfajitas, missed that social insight.
[1] http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/08/10/sunday-review/0810...
> Because, and honestly I think you know this, in America a disadvantaged white person is still better off than a disadvantaged black person.
The point is that sexism and racism are sufficiently institutionalized in America so that members of either group will struggle solely because they belong to that group. Ideally all people of lower socioeconomic statuses could be lifted up by these types of initiatives, but minorities and women especially have the deck stacked against them.
That's the core question and it's a normative one. If you give me a positive answer (e.g., citing statistics about group averages) you are ignoring the question. Telling me about group averages does not address this question at all.
I am asking what normative principle you are using to derive your normative claims like "it's ok to discriminate against disadvantaged white people in favor of advantaged black people".
Your attempt to create equivalencies between poor blacks and poor whites misses one crucial fact: our government did not systematically oppress and deny opportunity to the ancestors of poor whites. If the government burns down my house, then my neighborhood suffers flooding because of a hurricane, I am not made whole by the government addressing the flood damage. I am not satisfied with the government's attempts to "forget the past" and treat my case as no more important than that of every other person affected by the flooding. That makes no sense.
I could have said that in response to me looting a store... I shouldn't be handed punishment, because the rules of the government that were up 2 weeks/years/decades ago when I robbed the store don't apply today now that I've been caught.
That's a meaningless response. The fact of the matter is, injustices were once done (effects of which we still see reverberating today), now it's time to put the dollar on the line to make up for those past injustices. And, you know, it wasn't that long ago that these things were happening... it was merely a generation ago. Black folks you see walking and talking outside -- it's them, and their sons and daughters who couldn't drink from the same fountains as others. I don't think a lot of people really get this. Imagine your mother and father were subject to this kind of horror... how badly this would break them, what effects it would have on their parenting...
It's unchangable, it's easily measurable, and it has one of the most extreme biases.
[ ] Unchangable
[ ] Easily measurable
[ ] One of the most extreme biases
Short
[x] Unchangable
[x] Easily measurable
[ ] One of the most extreme biases
Note that sex is changeable, so I guess we can take it off your list. In fact, one can also pull a michael jackson for race.
So all you've really got to stand on is the subjective "extreme" criteria. Ok.
First, how does one directly measure disadvantage suffered? It's not a trivial thing to do. Hacker School doesn't have a lot of resources. Measuring race/gender/etc. is easy and correlates strongly with disadvantage. It's also a hard measure to "game" or fake.
Second, race/gender/etc. problems are (as pointed out) systemic in our society and in programmer culture specifically. That is to say, there are cultural habits, assumptions, attitudes, institutions, etc. which disadvantage people for no other reason than being nonwhite/nonmale. One thing that is enormously helpful in fixing these kinds of problems is simply having more nonwhite/nonmale people in the culture.
Helping a person who was disadvantaged by a mere quirk of fate helps only them. Helping someone disadvantaged by their race or sex helps them and helps everyone like them, in the long run. It reduces stereotype threat; it wears away at unfortunate cultural assumptions and attitudes; it provides positive role models; etc. etc.
Third, and most speculatively, I think these are the kind of problems that an organization like HS is particularly well-positioned to tackle. I believe that (e.g.) simple poverty and other forms of "brute disadvantage" are serious problems in our society (and indeed there still are some lingering class prejudices against poor people, so it's not an entirely "brute" disadvantage either). But I don't think that HS is likely to substantially help these problems by, say, merely offering grants to poor people. Poverty is too big, too general a problem to solve that way. But racism and sexism in programmer culture is a problem where HS actually has a shot at making a (small) difference.
First off, the rate of attrition among these specific minority groups is dramatically higher than it is for whites of any class. How many women who start as engineers are still engineers 10 years out? Look it up. If the disadvantages really are the same, then why is it that whites from lower income brackets do not have the same problem?
The answer -- as other users have pointed out to you repeatedly over the last few months -- is because the disadvantage is systemic and widespread.
That is why these scholarships are a good thing.
To prove this fact all I need to do is find a single black person who isn't. This proves that P(disadvantage|black) < 1, whereas P(disadvantage|disadvantage)=1.
So now we have the following groups, ordered by disadvantage:
white < black < disadvantaged
Why do you attempt to remedy the disadvantage of the second most disadvantaged group, but not the most disadvantaged group?
Telling me stats about blacks and whites does not address this question. The disadvantage stats are, by definition, higher for the group I've explicitly constructed to be 100% disadvantaged.
Look, we're not writing a philosophy paper or doing set theory here. We don't have room for any of this "theoretical best" philosophical stuff you're working on here. There are reasons why this shit is set up like it is.
Concretely, are you saying my set D does not contain Sasha Obama, but it should?
Or another example - my girlfriend is an upper middle class black woman from a majority black country. The minute she steps off a plane in the US, will she suddenly become more deserving of assistance than the white son of a single mother who earned $11,000/year household income?
If you are determined to slice by race, the answer is yes. Let M represent either Sasha Obama or my girlfriend.
Your assertions about racial averages takes the following form:
1. mean(M,N,O) < mean(U,V,W) 2. M > U 3. ??? 4. Therefore, we should preferentially support M over U, N over V, etc.
Step 3 is where I'm confused. Step 3 is a normative principle - you cannot derive a "should" conclusion from a fact without one. What is that principle?
Look, we're not writing a philosophy paper or doing set theory here...There are reasons why this shit is set up like it is.
How is this not a philosophical question? I'm sure there are reasons why "shit is set up like it is" - "tribal politics" fits the facts well. But I'm hoping for a more interesting explanation than that.
And I'm asking because I'm honestly interested. A lot of smart people seem to buy into stuff like this, and I try to understand it due to Chesterton's Fence.
I don't know what else to say. It's extremely simple. Targeted outreach works. You pick groups you want to include, and you target them for outreach.
Why are you making this so hard? Honestly, I question whether you're really interested. You do this on literally every thread where sexism comes up. It sounds to me like you really just want an argument.
EDIT: And, your insinuation that it's all tribal politics, instead of a very careful investigation of what outreach methods work for getting disadvantaged people into programs they wouldn't normally have access to is in such bad faith it's hard to even muster up the will to reply.
Concretely: Empirical claim (a) + normative claim (b) + reasoning (c) = normative conclusion.
You can't get a normative ("we should" or "it's acceptable to do") conclusion without a normative principle. The empirical claim "Ebola causes death" alone is not a justification for preventing ebola. You need the normative principle "death is bad". If I ask for a normative principle and you tell me about experiments with monkeys, you are missing the point.
I understand (a). I understand your normative conclusion (racially biased decisions in favor of women are good). I'm asking you to explain (b), and maybe (c) if it is not obvious. And I have no idea why this is such a ridiculous thing to ask.
We say we're interested in targeted outreach to demographics whose attrition rates are especially high, and whose entrance rates are especially low.
You come up with the normative claim. Because the normative claim should be obvious.
Ok, now that you've made your guess, let's see what you've written down. If you guessed that the normative claim is that "we should consider it bad to have an industry so vile that (e.g.) competent female engineers exit the field at many times the rate of male engineers", then you win your gold star.
If you did not guess that this is the normative claim, then it is time to retire all this philosophy and set theory that you have going, because you clearly don't have the basics down.
On the one hand, I lean towards "you shouldn't make racially biased decisions". On the other hand, while I'm intuitively disliking the criteria for these scholarships, I impose more or less the exact same criteria when deciding if a woman is worth dating.
Unlike most of the people here, I'm completely willing to admit that my views are rather confused. And I don't understand the resulting hostility - why does asking questions make me a villain?
You ask the same questions every single time. You make exactly the same confused bigoted points each time this subject comes up.
You don't create as much discussion going the other way - there are no posts from you askng why society accepts most corporate boards having no women or asking why society accepts discrimination against people with Arab sounding names. All your questions are about why it's okay to discriminate against white males in these kinds of programmes.
Can you see how that skews perception of you?
There is only one other case where people on HN will defend such discrimination - when the person being discriminated against is from Haiti or India. I do tend to ask the exact same question in that case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6856315
Interestingly, I did get a rather surprising response - the nation state is more important than humanity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5533155#up_5533791
As for society "accepting" some statistical fact, I can very easily recognize principles to explain that view - the normative premise is basically individual rights (if no individual has been discriminated against due to their gender, nothing is wrong). I don't think that normative premise is unreasonable, so I don't mind attributing it to people who seem to be implicitly using it. The normative conclusion logically follows from that premise plus an empirical point. I'm fully capable of reproducing the reasoning.
I simply cannot cook up a logical chain in favor of discrimination by hacker school except by using uncharitable normative premises (e.g., "black people are the master race and deserve special treatment" or "sins of the great great grandfather shall be repaid by the son and anyone who looks like him"). I don't think anyone defending hacker school's discriminatory practices will actually endorse these normative premises, so I'm curious what normative premises the defenders do use in their reasoning.
I ask the same questions because I'm attempting to be charitable. When a viewpoint is widespread among intelligent people I go to great efforts to try to understand it - this is the "Chesterton's Fence" principle. Given the complete vacuousness of the responses I receive, I am already leaning towards the view that most defenders of such practices are simply being emotional and tribal.
Now you can call me a bigot if you want. But that's very confusing - in the one case where I do make racially biased decisions (sex) my decisions are almost exactly the same as those of hacker school scholarships (4/9 African, 1/9 White, over the past year). (Note that I live in a country which is approximately 99% Asian.) I truly do not understand how you draw this conclusion.
Here's how I suggest HS reach out to women/minorities: provide them with grants if they apply to Hacker School.
Done! Effective outreach so that traditionally-marginalized groups might participate enough to overcome institutionalized racism/sexism.
If I'm understanding right, your reasoning is:
1) Positive claim: women and minorities (including asians?) suffer systemic racism.
2) Normative claim: Victims of systemic disadvantage deserve special privileges, victims of non-systemic disadvantage do not. (I'm a bit shaky on this one - let me know if it's wrong.)
3) Normative conclusion: special privileges for women/minorities.
If that's correct, I can fully reproduce your reasoning once I know the definition of "systemic".
Also, I would amend #2 to say: "victims of systemic racism/sexism may be able to overcome those via targeted outreach."
Your amended (2) is a positive claim. It tells us "if X happens then Y will happen". You cannot draw a normative conclusion from a sequence of positive claims. You need a "should" or "aught" or "morally good" or "ethical" in there somewhere.
Discussions like this online are pushing me in the direction of favoring mandatory philosophical education.
One conclusion I have drawn from this - none of the pro-racist decisions people have a clue what the moral underpinnings of their views are beyond "liberal authorities tell me to believe this, so I do".
because society does.
You're getting caught up in a taking a very specific sample and comparing it to a general population.