Beware the Pretty People
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I really don't get this. Most people acknowledge there should be a more even balance of women in technology. But, the diversity is only welcome if the women are other nerds? If non nerds want to come to the party, that's despoiling things?
No one owns industries. Yes industries have a history and there were important people who started industries, but they mature and they become part of the mainstream --stop bemoaning this. Accept that things which become mainstream have to acquire aspects of the mainstream.
Of course, this is tech crunch and always wants to eat their cake and have it too.
Groupies didn't spoil rock & roll (!)
But I don't think that's really the debate.
I guess my take away was that when weirdness becomes mainstream it becomes nothing more than a toothless affectation. That you should beware of the savvy newcomers who have learned how to adopt a style formed out of rebellion but will use it to push traditional objectives. They will push out the rule breakers while co-opting their mission statements.
So yeah, it's a pretty standard statement about any fashion cycle. The point of the article then is to warn the weirdos, the divergent thinkers who birthed this industry to not let the handsome dudes laughing at them get them down. It's a cute narrative about larger issues. It's about the status quo's tendency to prevent really weird and innovative ideas to take off out of fear it will spoil their comfortable fun. The people who show up after all the weird work is done weren't their in the start because they don't take risks like that.
It's a decent read. It's called "Beware of the Pretty People" and it is written for the freaks. Reminding them to keep on freaking people out, even when it's no longer the standard game plan.
This article preys on people's weaknesses --like feeling that their values or lifestyles are being co-opted -as if that were bad in and of itself. If you have solid beliefs, what others do or don't do are irrelevant to you.
I don't think tech crunch really believes in what they say but rather they believe that what they say will resonate with their audience and will result in more income for them. They couldn't possibly care any less about the principles of technologists --whatever alignment there is, is coincidental. Let's ask this, have they ever run articles which would drive down their readership? They may run something with some ironic distance, etc. but that's just a form of co-opting their audience.
Do you see a 'tech crunch' of the mortuary industry? If embalming became the next big industry affording millions good earnings and made millionaires out of many, you'd see the same thing. And you'd see publications making much ado about nothing for reasons of self interest. Some times some of the things they would raise would raise valid questions but for the most part those publications would just ride the wave and decry the "posers" coming into the industry who didn't have to put up with decades of irrelevance and stigma --taking advantage of people's fears and weaknesses.
Just let people try and make a living wherever they see fit. Sure, they bring 'disruption' to the old guard, but so what. That's life.
In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side, and it is important to show that you don't have to conform to this subculture to succeed in tech.
However, in the context of the corporatization of tech, suddenly the nerds are the good guys. And funnily enough, nerd culture was actually part of the counterculture movement. The old guard of cyber-hippies need to stop the slide into corporate monotony.
In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side...
This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their person directly ("creep", "racist", "nerd").
It's a fairly general purpose attack that can be targeted at almost anything. One of the more dangerous places is in hiring and evaluation; witness how objective and meritocratic nerd hiring practices (e.g. hire-by-github, death by brainteaser) are now attacked. Similarly, the idea of an individual contributor is also under attack ("you can't have a 10x programmer, you can only have a 10x team"). Once objective measures are eliminated, we'll just descend into petty politics of the sort that "pretty people" are very good at.
For instance, I've done a lot of interviewing with the Google-type whiteboard coding questions, and all it's really told me is that they don't show crap for how good they're going to be at their everyday job (e.g. will this person consistently submit un-tested code to code review, will they pay as much attention to detail in their job as they do in interview-mode...).
It make sure people all meet a minimum bar for a certain sort of smartness, but that smartness doesn't have a lot to do with most development tasks.
It works pretty well for identifying the superstars—there's always that tier that blows through whatever you give them way faster—but if you need to hire more people than you have superstars applying, it's kinda crappy. (Except for all the others that have been tried...)
In the meantime, when not stuck doing interviews, I'll continue to pay attention to details, deploy code that's been tested and handles its edge cases, get stuff done, and get my hair cut regularly, play basketball, and buy nice clothes even if others in the office are in flip flops. And sometimes I'll wear flip flops too, depending on how I feel that day, whatever.
I have no desire to prevent an intellectual discussion. Quite the opposite - as one of the nerds, I strongly favor a fact based argument over the status competition that this topic usually drives.
Maybe the MBAs jump on the bandwagon, but I think they mostly do it to pick the winning side, not because they fear the latent power of nerds.
That said, I think you've very accurately described the various attacks on traditional nerd/Silicon Valley culture that are occurring.
So of course many think it's meritocratic; they don't see the obstacles because they never experienced them. And of course some think they are victims of persecution; they don't see what they are perpetrating.
Here's an intellectual way to approach the problem: Stepping back from our society, if a system is truly meritocratic then why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)?
[1] U.S. population is 77% white, so I estimate 38% white male. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
[2] Wild guess at the % of SV tech workers that are white male.
EDIT: Minor rewording for emphasis
That is actually the least intellectual way you could approach the issue. You are relying on people self-censoring (and we may see some downvotes to provide some real censorship). But I will give you the uncensored answer. There are, in fact, a number of possible reasons apart from the one you have in mind. Here are some.
1) Tech is meritocratic so it attracts men who are less physically attractive or socially capable, because they mainly need technical skill. This in turn makes the field less attractive to women.
2) Tech is a monotonous job with low social status, and so it attracts people driven by ambition and desire for money, who tend to be male.
3) Women are fundamentally less interested in technology because they prefer fields with human interest (though this doesn't explain the gap between programming and, for example, math or physics).
I have only really addressed the gender issue above, but I think that's enough to critique your original way of phrasing the problem.
Then I don't think much of your thinking.
Making up scenarios that are trivially refuted by a moment's thought is silly. How about
4) Aliens come down every night and surgically remove the bits of women's brains that are used in programming tasks.
There, now I've really addressed the issue. See why 'making stuff up' isn't actually some mark of intellectual superiority?
Or how about
1) How many jobs that are known for attracting socially adjusted, good looking men can you name where most of the winners are women?
2) How many high social status, well varied jobs can you name where most of the winners are women?
3) You defeat your point in your own parentheses.
You've addressed nothing. You've made up some nonsense and pretended to be smarter than the person you're responding to, but you've directly avoided addressing the actual point.
2) How many high social status, well varied jobs can you name where most of the winners are women?
Law is both high status and favors people who are attractive and have good social skills. According to [1], women are 34% of the law industry compared with 12.33% of software engineers [2].
3) You defeat your point in your own parentheses.
Not really, because there is still a gender gap in math and physics, and so this just means (3) does not explain all of the gender gap in CS.
EDIT: I'm not going to reply to any comment that isn't a reply to this. You don't have to agree with the way that the delay before you can respond to a post grows exponentially as thread depth increases, but threads are unreadable if you try to circumvent it.
[1] http://www.americanbar.org/groups/women/resources/statistics...
[2] http://qz.com/143967/the-tech-industrys-woman-problem-statis...
Where are all these competent women who are eschewing tech because of the lack of hot guys? Which fields are they dominating?
The point I'm making is somewhat different. The pretty people and the social justice types oppose the idea of meritocracy itself.
...in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth...
Using google/twitter's easily googleable demographic numbers as representative, white males only make up about 42% of the "winners". Google/twitter are 60% white and 70% male, 70% of 60% is 42%. White males are only marginally overrepresented. It's actually Asian males who are wildly overrepresented - they make up 21% of google/twitter (70% of 30%) and 2.5% of the population. Are Asian males 8x more privileged than whites?
An alternate hypothesis is that merit is not uniformly distributed and Asian males simply have more of it. But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist "creep" who can't get laid, and intellectual discussion stops.
Not at all. There is little doubt that 'merit' defined as an capability or skill of an individual is not uniform. The point is that 'merit' is systemically produced. It is a function of money, aspiration, parental ambition, education, culturation, in-group bias, and many other factors. Another way to phrase this is 'privilege', though that word is considered some kind of anathema by people who don't like to see their elevated status and capabilities as somehow a function of their environment.
Absolutely Asian males are more privileged in terms of their ability to access tech jobs. Immigrant populations can have privileges in this way. Hindu families that are second or third generation immigrants to the UK from the Indian subcontinent are over-represented in medicine, for example. Is that because Indian people just make better doctors? Or is it because children of Indian descent are cultured and supported and mentored into medicine?
Anyone who actually understands the last 20 years of social science, far from 'stopping intellectual discussion' are more likely to recognize that you've simply not found out or understood the issue. Which can, of course, be a sign of racism or sexism, if one is willingly ignorant. But can just be naivete or a Dunning Kruger effect.
Similarly, water is wet.
All you've really said is "I assign the word 'privilege' to whatever the cause is for Asian males performing well in tech." That's not really relevant to this discussion.
[edit: Sago, I think you've gotten off track. hackeruser was using the term "privilege" differently than you, treating it somewhat analogously to wealth and power and orthogonal to merit. When you use the word to describe anything that might cause disparities in merit, you are describing something far different than him.]
Change the word 'privilege' for 'boondoggle', it doesn't matter, the point still stands. But as I pointed out, the use of the word 'privilege' is often such anathema that it prevents certain groups of people listening to the point, instead having them focus on the word.
If you can't construct such a scenario, then by definition it is a tautology.
My point was that what is seen as 'merit' is a function of a whole bunch of other factors, which means it isn't somehow a racists discussion stopping thing to point out that Asian men have higher levels of 'merit' (when merit is defined in the way I understood it to be in the post I was responding to). My point in using 'privilege' is to say that the idea of 'merit' overlaps with 'privilege' in the ways I described, and that the people the OP might thing of as wanting to 'stop' the discussion, do, in fact, have this discussion a lot, though they'd use 'privilege' instead to mean those things, because that is the term of art.
You seem to have a problem with a word. Call it 'probabilistic causes of non-equal representation', then. Point out there are many such causes, and some of them are hardly things we could easily change (there are very few people with very low IQ in top tech jobs, so higher IQ is a 'privilege'). Your reaction to the word, rather than the point, seems rather ideological.
Tautology is not a synonym for synonym. And the equation you accuse me of making is a strawman, my point was to unpack merit, not to define privilege. I'm sorry if it was unclear.
If privilege means "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation", then that's a very broad definition and every non-deterministic unequal representation is caused by privilege. But you were responding to a discussion where we were using "privilege" to mean something along the lines of "social biases unfairly favoring one group".
By definition, Asian males have 8x the "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation". It seems highly unlikely that they have 8x the "social biases unfairly favoring one group", which is what hackeruser and myself were actually discussing.
You also don't seem to be using this definition consistently. For example, if I take this comment of yours and substitute this definition in, it makes no sense:
"When you find achievement highly correlated with a cultural group, however, it is pretty likely to be a function of probabilistic causes of non-equal representation. The alternative hypothesis is that, for example, Jews are just innately better at science."
I'm beginning to think you are attempting a Motte and Bailey: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...
In this case, I think one version of "privilege" is the idea that our society involves unipolar power relations where one group/ideology is privileged and enjoys special advantages. Individual people might in some ways align with this group/ideologies, and in other ways not (this is called "intersectionality"). But when they do align with this group/ideology they receive some of its benefits.
Sago's version is that privilege is just another word for any group having any advantage for any reason. I.e. "privilege" stripped of its underlying assumptions about societies power structure. It's unfortunate that Sago feel so strongly that they represent sociological research, when I think that almost all sociologists use the other definition.
Sago says that Asians might be privileged simply because their culture [0]. The orthodox view would be that Asians only receive White privilege, by their willingness to accept both the White lifestyle, working under a capitalist system, and adopt White views on Black/White race relations. To the extend that Asians also study harder, that would be an accident of history, and probably something an orthodox sociologist would try to downplay (e.g. by looking at Nth generation Asians).
Privilege is used in various senses: both the narrow power one group has over another, propagated by their ability to pass it to others in the group and more generally (in the later camp I gave the example somewhere on here of privileges of high IQ). I was trying to be clear in my OP by listing what I meant, so I really don't see why the word is what you're hanging on. OR why you think my purpose was to define it. As I said, call it boondoggle, I was explicit what I meant by it.
By definition, Asian males have 8x the "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation". It seems highly unlikely that they have 8x the "social biases unfairly favoring one group", which is what hackeruser and myself were actually discussing.
Why would the factors have to be equal for the point to stand? If something isn't 100% the cause, then it isn't significant? If it turns out that 4x the effect is due to cultural privilege, of the kinds I listed, and 4x is due to demographic, bias, so what?
If it turns out that 4x the effect is due to cultural privilege, of the kinds I listed, and 4x is due to demographic, bias, so what?
Scroll up - as I said, you completely lost the context of the conversation.
Hackuser was asking "if a system is truly meritocratic then why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners?" The implicit assumption here is that "money, power, privilege" (as defined by hackuser) and merit are distinct, otherwise the question makes little sense.
Now if only 4x the effect is due to cultural privilege, then the answer to his question is "yes" - a perfectly meritocratic system can have disproportionate representation of Asian males.
If you scroll back, you'll see I was responding to a particular point that I quoted: the idea that, pointing out the over representation of Asian men would be considered racist and lead to (I assume) proponents of equality and social justice (or the "Pretty People" as you wrote) stopping intellectual discussion.
My goal was to provide evidence for my disagreement with that point. So I wanted to show that, embedded in this idea of 'merit' are a whole bunch of factors that absolutely are talked about by those Pretty People (or, perhaps not them, but the intellectuals from whom their derive their outlook), albeit in different terms. And, modulo that change in terminology, not only do they not stop intellectual discussion, they are absolutely central to that discussion.
So, given that was the point I responded to, and what I was trying to say (and, again, sorry if I was unclear). Can you see why being badgered about whether my definition of 'privilege' is overly broad seemed obtuse? Can you see why I felt that the definition of 'privilege', whether tautological, specific or not, was irrelevant?
I suspect, in contrast, you tried to read my comment arguing against the entire point you were making, and therefore, trying to support hackeruser's argument in some sense. And therefore you missed what I was attempting to get at. Fair enough. Again, I could have been clearer. And I should have thought more carefully about why you seemed to be missing my point. It seemed I'd hit some nerve just using the word 'privilege'.
I didn't actually note hackeruser's use of the term, so I wasn't responding to that. My point, I think, stands alone. It doesn't become a tautology, it has a specific meaning, and one important point is that when folks say 'merit' they are often bundling a bunch of stuff in there which is problematic and discriminatory.
Merit sounds like a good thing. (Who wouldn't want to be Pro-Life, right?) But there are structural oppressions within it that deserve to be challenged.
Because similarly if you define merit as "anything that causes one person to do better in the tech industry than another" then the tech industry is tautologically a meritocracy - water is wet.
Until and unless we can unpack merit and privilege in the manner that Sago is attempting then we will continue to misunderstand our problem and continue to let the best programmers become nurses because of that misunderstanding.
Sex appeal does not contribute to merit, nor does being a nerdy-but-attractive hipster.
Does that clarify?
Note that Sago's definition, "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation", quite deliberately doesn't unpack anything. All it does is apply the label "privilege" to the cause, whether that cause is explicit deliberate racism (to take one extreme) or completely biological factors with entirely unbiased decisions (to take another).
money, aspiration, parental ambition, education, culturation, in-group bias, and many other factors
(note, many was not intended to be exclusive)
that you continue to think my point was to apply the label "privilege" seems obtuse, bordering on the willfully ignorant, since I've explicitly said that was not the point at all, and that the label is irrelevant.
I don't think anyone is really arguing that privilege affects merit, but to say that what makes up merit can be called privilege is to say that they are one and the same, which they are note. Of course access to resources to grow whatever talent you have, and allow you to make the most of your ambition will affect your merit, but to discount talent and ambition entirely by making the conversation entirely about privilege is to error in the other direction.
In modern western societies we attempt to smooth the privilege curve through socializing some aspects of it, such as education, and to differing degrees, health. While obviously not perfect, I would argue that we at least attempt to mitigate the problem by supplementing the biggest differentiators in merit that are based on privilege. Beyond that, what do you suggest? I don't think it's possible to eliminate the benefit of privilege, entire nations have gone to war to try, and the result was not what what I would call a success by that criteria.
Meritocracy has the benefit of shepherding those most capable and qualified into the positions where they can do the most. There may be a system better for the individual and society, but I would need quite a bit of info and evidence before I endorsed it.
>> But that's where the "pretty people" will just call me a racist/sexist "creep" who can't get laid, and intellectual discussion stops.
> Anyone who actually understands the last 20 years of social science, far from 'stopping intellectual discussion' are more likely to recognize that you've simply not found out or understood the issue. Which can, of course, be a sin of racism or sexism, if one is willingly ignorant. But can just be naivete or a Dunning Kruger effect.
Did you really just do that? Did you just respond to someone complaining about how the conversation eventually degrades into the opposition tossing out labels instead of arguments by stating he's either racist, sexist or ignorant?
'Merit' has its own problems, because it connotes 'deserving', and it is a problem to suggest that a rich, Harvard educated white male deserves a job more than a poor, community college educated black female. So language has baggage.
But let's say we're talking about 'imminent capability (as opposed to potential capability) and qualifications', then yes, it is an undeniable short-term optimisation to fill roles with these people. The economic argument to take seriously is that, by doing so we propagate privilege, and that in doing so we miss bringing forward people with high potential capability but low social privilege, who would be, in the long term, a better optimised workforce. And that is irrespective of the moral argument, that an economic optimisation at the cost of the opportunity of all is perhaps too high a price to pay.
> Did you really just do that?
Yes. There's no problem with being ignorant of things we don't know. Every single article on HN is full of stuff that I'm ignorant of. The things I am ignorant of knows no bounds. The poster I responded to seemed unaware that the things he was bringing up have long histories of being discussed and wrestled with in more sophisticated terms. He seemed to think that discussions of such things were 'stopped' because they were not allowed in some way, where actually they are discussed in very great detail and sophisticated by hundreds perhaps thousands of writers.
I think it more likely he is ignorant of that, than racist or sexist, though since he bought up the question of being accused of those things, I thought it wise to include those options.
I disagree. Finding a shared vocabulary can be essential to actual communication. It's far too easy for people to argue a similar or even the same point without that shared reference point. That doesn't really need to be what it "really means" as long as it's meaning in the discussion is well understood.
'Merit' has its own problems, because it connotes 'deserving', and it is a problem to suggest that a rich, Harvard educated white male deserves a job more than a poor, community college educated black female. So language has baggage.
That's a problem depending on how you define deserves and what your goal in filling the position is, and even what your eventual goal is (all as an outside observer). Is the goal of getting more participation in certain roles better achieved through artificial insertion of people into those roles, or more focus on earlier stages to make them better fits for those roles so they are naturally chosen at a later stage?
That we optimize for imminent capability is obvious. To do otherwise is gambling. Perhaps it could be considered too high a price to pay - if it had not shown over the past few hundred years that it pays great dividends. I think my stance here is that there are other ways to attack the downsides of privilege rather than putting sub-optimal workers in positions. Namely, work to fulfill the potential of those workers that have said potential.
I think an argument could be made that the current strategy, which has been in place for at least the last few hundred years in the west, has lead to a higher percentage of people utilizing their talents optimally than ever before, with a higher standard of living for more people than ever before, with a higher survival rate as well. I think it's folly to attack what I see as the fundamental mechanism that's lead to this while there are still other avenues to pursue.
There's no problem with being ignorant of things we don't know.
The problem is not the being ignorant, the problem is the use of the label ignorant as an argument tactic to cast the opposition's position as unworthy of consideration. Being ignorant has no bearing on whether an argument has merit. You may not want to rehash topics that you think have been well covered before, but in that case, a reference could be included with your statement of your position and where it was informed from, and why you think it's a decided issue (we are far, far from the hard sciences here, so let's not delude ourselves with notions that our opinions are fact).
Note: Click on the unique comment link to view that specific comment to reply directly when the topic is hot and reply links are not being shown.
I suspect you don't, because I agree with your counter-argument. I think language is flexible. It only matters that someone can understand what we mean, because it is the meaning that matters, not the word. Too often discussions end up about what words really mean or should mean. That feels like an argument that is getting somewhere, but it actually does very little intellectual work. It distracts from talking about the actual topic. That's all I meant.
> That we optimize for imminent capability is obvious.
Not to me. There's nothing gambling about, trying to make it so that potential capability is more accurately correlated to imminent capability. Then both strategies align.
As you say work to fulfil everyone's potential.
But as long as systemic privilege exists there will be some with more resources and access to capabilities despite lower potential. So we end up employing large numbers of sub-optimal people just because they could afford to become educated / mentored / inspired, and ignoring others with far more potential because they didn't happen to have those benefits.
As I said, I'm not totally convinced by the economic argument (or rather I'm not convinced that, if it were false in some way, it would be a good reason to keep privilege unchecked), but that's what the argument is, as I understand it.
> Note: Click on the unique comment link
You're my hero/ine thank you!
Case in point.
Not to me. There's nothing gambling about, trying to make it so that potential capability is more accurately correlated to imminent capability. Then both strategies align.
I wasn't stating the choice is obvious, I was stating that I think what we currently do is obvious. The difference is do we hire based on potential capability, which there's no way of knowing for sure, or hire based on imminent capability, which is at least somewhat testable?
So we end up employing large numbers of sub-optimal people just because they could afford to become educated / mentored / inspired, and ignoring others with far more potential because they didn't happen to have those benefits.
Yes, and my argument is that I'm not convinced that an alternate method at the hiring stage would be beneficial in the long run. I believe we continue to hire those people that are sub-optimal in potential capability yet have higher imminent capability (through privilege, yes). To hire others would in no way guarantee a better outcome, even if you could identify the ones with untapped potential - there's no guarantee that potential could be developed well in many work environments. If done one a wide scale, there would be a necessary drop in societal imminent capability, but the real question is how fast does it recover (if it does), and does it result in a better eventual outcome than another strategy?
That other strategy I would propose is to hire as we currently do (mostly based on imminent capability), and leverage the gains we know this gives us into reducing the effects of privilege where possible. I think the United States has practiced this in greater or lesser degrees over the last century, and I think it's worked quite well. I just think changing the formula of who works based on capability is messing far too closely with one of the fundamental levers of capitalism, and there are less radical approaches that can and should be followed through on first.
When I was hiring for good C++ game engine programmers, our recruitment test had people program in a language they'd never seen before. Because I believed that the imminent capability of a person in C++ wasn't as good a determiner of their long term value as their potential capability, which I thought was more likely correlated to flexibility, learning speed, calmness under difficult conditions, clarity of reasoning.
So I think this already happens in hiring. What I'm describing is one end of a continuum. My point is that it isn't clear to me that day 1 competence is a good optimisation strategy. And if I optimize for day 10 competence, then why not day 100, 500, and so on? There's got to be a tipping point somewhere, but it isn't obvious where.
Re: hiring programmers, I think we attempt to mostly hire for imminent capability, but we aren't always very good at it in some industries. When referring to someone that knows one computer language learning another one, I don't even really consider that potential capability in the same respect to what we've been discussing. That's so far past the major effects of privilege, as we've been discussing them, that I think it's nearly inconsequential. Programming is a very high level skill in our current society, I view privilege having the most influence here in affecting whether the person learns the discipline at all, not whether they can abstract from one category to another within it.
With respect to our earlier discussion, I would view it more as choosing to hire someone that knows how to program, or someone that seems bright but does not know how to program and hoping they will develop some aptitude for it at a later date based on their general intelligence. I think there are a lot of assumptions and waiting pitfalls in that.
Can you say what systemic biases you think have been driven out so far by doing this? I'm curious what you're thinking about. I'd certainly say that there have been some improvements. But 'quite well' seems overly optimistic to me.
I think education, health and income are the big winners there, and I also think those are the biggest differentiators that privilege provided prior to that. Sure, income may not initially seem like a big win, but compared to pre-minimum wage and labor law America, I think the change is massive. Not having to go to work at 10 because your family needs the money to not starve is quite a contrast to the current situation. Not having to devote your life to god in a convent or monastery to get a good education without spending money. Civil rights. Suffrage.
That's not to say these are solved problems, and the privilege afforded in some of these cases doesn't still provide a very large benefit, but there have been major improvements, and I attribute the climate that allowed them to the rapidly improving economic situation of the average person, and I attribute that to the massive speed of innovation, which I think was allowed by attempting to maximize the effectiveness of the resources we have available at the specific time.
Do you really think that what is being advocated here is employing people who don't know how to program at all for programming jobs? I don't get that sense at all.
I got the sense it is more, do you employ someone who has had advantages and has top-notch qualifications and day 1 skills, or someone who has struggled with fewer advantages, but still has pretty good (though not as good) qualifications and skills.
At the point where someone suggests hiring people with fine arts degrees to write physics simulation code, because diversity, I agree the plot has been completely lost. But I think that is a bit of a strawman.
And, because I haven't said this for a while, I'm kindof trying to play the economic argument here, because that is your focus. I'm not conceding my feeling that economic arguments can't be trumped by moral ones.
Thanks for the second half of that response. Your examples feel wrong to me. But I can't say why. Which is often a sign that I'm relying on bias rather than reason. I'll muse on it.
Good conversation, overall, thanks.
I think we are far beyond the original scope of the article. When the discussion is about hiring people based on their potential because of how they would have been able to develop if privilege was normalized, then yes, I think that and equivalents is what it boils down to, because I don't think privilege does all that much after a person has identified their career and interests. I think it primarily affects the finding of that career and interest, through exposure and training.
At the point where someone suggests hiring people with fine arts degrees to write physics simulation code, because diversity, I agree the plot has been completely lost.
A bit more extreme than what I meant to imply. I guess it really comes down to what hiring based on potential really means.
And, because I haven't said this for a while, I'm kindof trying to play the economic argument here, because that is your focus. I'm not conceding my feeling that economic arguments can't be trumped by moral ones.
I've been trying to field the idea that the economic argument is the moral one. Or at least it may be, and I think it can't be immediately discounted as not being the moral one.
Good conversation, overall, thanks.
To you as well. I found it really productive, it gave me a lot to think about.
Can you say what systemic biases you think have been driven out so far by doing this? I'm curious what you're thinking about.
I'd certainly say that there have been some improvements. But 'quite well' seems overly optimistic to me.
I think that you yourself are falling into the stereotyping trap here. There are people that would take offence at what you said, but there are also people on the other side of your discussion that would argue that those Asian males gained though skills through privileges that are not evenly distributed in society.
If a system is truly meritocratic, how is it that 0.2% of the population of a particular demographic has 20% of the Nobel prizes?
Do you think, by your standards, there is some sort of a Jewish "discriminatory behavior" at play here?
I'm sure you see by now that playing this percentage game quickly gets very discriminatory itself. I think a certain percentage of a population (may that be white nerds or jews) can be over-represented not because of discrimination but because of other factors like affinity to particular subjects or being unwanted in other places (e.g white nerds might not have the social savvy to do banker schmooze jobs).
Yes. No doubt. Jewish men have certain forms of privilege, which makes it easier for some of them to access elite scientific institutions.
They also have several axes in which they lack privilege. Those axes are less significant in the earning of a Nobel prize.
You seem to think you've discovered intersectionality and it is a huge surprise. Or that people who are interested in a more just society would somehow recoil from identifying power differentials favouring groups that also suffer forms of oppression. That is the opposite of my experience dealing with the people who actually write and research on this topic.
So yes, a long history of achieving X in a group tends to act as a privilege for children born in to that group, because there is a well-worn and understood path to going in that direction.
I get why people hate the word 'privilege' so much, but that is basically the hegemonic term of art.
Is that meaningfully different from "luck"?
But when privilege is correlated with a particular group, then it isn't helpful to see it as random. It self perpetuates.
But an individual can be lucky to be born into a rich family, but the rich family probably isn't lucky to be rich: it tends to retain its status over generations. Not in terms of absolute dollar value, but its social status.
When you find achievement highly correlated with a cultural group, however, it is pretty likely to be a function of privilege (in the social science sense). The alternative hypothesis is that, for example, Jews are just innately better at science.
I think the research that has been done into racial differences in intellectual abilities has generally failed to find anything that suggests the latter is likely.
IQ has been shown to be mostly genetic
Can you give a citation that controls for cultural privilege?
I'm not willing to assume without evidence that privilege is the primary contributor.
Why would one need to assume it is the primary contributor. If there was a genetic advantage, isn't is equally if not more morally important to not add social advantages on top?
I know this wasn't the point I made, which I'm not yet conceding, but is another statement that sounds black-and-white all-or-nothing.
Consider this: "The differences in average IQ between men and women are small in magnitude and inconsistent in direction, although the variability of male scores has been found to be greater than that of females, resulting in more males than females in the top and bottom of the IQ distribution." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence) We don't have any stats about the most failed business ideas - but I bet that males would also be overrepresented there - and this is because males are crazy risk takers.
As to the other part "And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)?" - I believe that this might be a tautology in a capitalistic system - those that 'win the business race' are those that also gain power in this kind of society.
And I don't really mean that there is no discrimination - this is only to show that "why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners" can have answers other than discrimination. I do think there is discrimination and we should fight it, I even believe that even if there was no discrimination then still we would be better off if we had more diversity in many places - so it might make sense to do the 'reverse' discrimination (but you'd need to be very careful with that). I only want to say that to do anything positive you need to start with a good understanding of the mechanisms at play.
"'Meritocracy' is not what you think: don’t forget about the 'ocracy'"
http://themonkeycage.org/2013/07/13/meritocracy-is-not-what-...
(The Monkey Cage is a/the leading blog on political science.)
I think that you're just falling into the same stereotyping game. Talking about all of this in such generalities is useless. Nothing is specific enough to be actionable or really be "proven" or "disproven." It just devolves into people shouting at each other.
That selects for adequately privileged (generally) white males with the spare time to create projects on github and a particular interest in brain-teasers.
To my knowledge, hiring in all fields is an utter joke, with essentially zero research ever having been performed. It's entirely based on bias and guided by HR-fueled fears of lawsuits.
All "colours" of people have free time to create projects.
I'd like to see how you analyzed the race of github contributors. I'd also like to know what "plenty" means. Personally, I strongly suspect that you'll see fairly small set of race/location/income combinations.
All "colours" of people have free time to create projects.
Given that we're not really talking about color, per se, I seriously hope that you don't honestly believe that statement.
Why, me and my friends and colleagues, Chinese and South African and Ghanian and Kenyan are on github. I'm very offended you suggested only white people can afford to be on github.
Given that we're not really talking about color, per se, I seriously hope that you don't honestly believe that statement.
You specifically mentioned "white males".
It takes half a day to write something you can put on github. If anyone can't do that it's because they're not as experienced as those who can. It's not much more effort than writing a resume. The point of github is so people who aren't interested in brain teasers can demonstrate their ability to write good code.
You can argue people who aren't good at programming enough to be able to write something in half a day should be hired anyway, and I'll tell you the communism experiment is over.
You, sir, are racially biased.
That's not what I said. Go back and reread my comment.
You specifically mentioned "white males".
Go back and reread my comment.
You, sir, are racially biased.
You're a goddamned idiot who can't read.
Some of them are the reason that these tech culture problems are recognized as important problems.
So yes, the stereotype acts as a stereotype: taking on only the set of features needed to support an argument.
So don't use or think in terms of "nerds", as that's too coarse to be useful or to tell you anything. Tech is an industry with various subcultures. The OP didn't use the stereotype anyway.
The same will occur in the tech industry, as you forcefully insert people from other subcultures into the tech industry, rejects and misfits that first started the industry up will be, well, seen as misfits and become rejected, and will thus leave. The tech industry will become more diversified and conformist, and the misfits and rejects will move on to other things, and then some big wave of change will come from those other things, and those other things would be full of misfits and rejects who happen to be white males, (well america is majority white, what else do you expect), and then we can start this misogyny debate all over again.
You can't force everyone to work well with misfits and rejects. Though you can kick out the misfits and rejects, there will always be misfits and rejects, if not here, then they will be somewhere else, working on what society has ignored, so far.
My first thought, reading that, was of Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, the battery-swap electric car company. Years ago I went to a meeting in SF where he spoke, and saw that that he was very good looking, spoke very well, and had a business plan that was total bullshit. Several heads of state and many investors were convinced by him. In the end, he burned through about $800 million and only put about a few hundred cars, built by Renault, on the road, before the bankruptcy.
That's what I was thinking when I read the title.
Well what use do I have for those people exactly? They can't stop me from building what I want to. They have no say in the matter, no influence over me. They only become part of my equation if I allow it. For $30, or $50, or $200 per month I can build almost anything I care to in the software realm. Today my biggest limitation is time.
The tech industry is lacking in (or no longer dominated by) geeks, nerds, weirdos? Even if that's true: 1) who cares 2) it has no impact on me 3) that would be the fault of the geeks, nerds and weirdos that are allowing themselves to be told what to do.
I'm going to build whatever the hell I please. If I allow one of the so-called pretty ivy league type to stop me, then I have nobody to fault but myself.
I don't need venture capital. I don't need pretty ivy league types with freshly printed MBAs. I need sales, and a product worth paying for that makes sales possible.
Customers provide growth capital. Anything else - including allowing the types dreaded by this article to be on the playing field - is optional.
http://www.textfiles.com/news/hackpape.hac
I would rather see kids encouraged to hack all things (not just web sites and walled garden mobile app) to keep the old school tech culture alive, and I certainly feel the need to make sure things like GNU continue, as it, amongst other things, have provided the means to rally against big corporations controlling access to the interesting bits of technology (like being priced out) back in the day. I personally feel as though copyleft is important from this perspective, though this is probably a somewhat controversial opinion. One thing the author doesn't mention as something we should focus on, is if we want to keep the tech industry from locking us out of technology as we know it, I think we should also work to make sure tech giants and other corporations don't strong arm standards organizations and force development into walled non-free gardens, especially like with Google and Apple's threatening moves with regards to the internet (i.e. iOS locking out competing browsers, Google trying to completely lock out others from gTLDs like .dev).
EDIT: Just to be clear, I also find the equating of "pretty people" and the use of "nerd" around a lot of the culture surrounding technology both click-baity and ad hominem.
I think the big problem is that this has reduced the barrier to entry to nothing, and so standards have gone way up. To do a professional-seeming webapp, it's not enough to hack out some HTML as a high-school student. You need a professional designer, and professional front-end engineer, and professional back-end engineer, etc.
A functional computer for $56. Not the best but probably a lot faster than the one you paid $2500 for.
There _is_ a unifying theme to the trends TechCrunch is writing about, but it's not what TechCrunch says it is. TechCrunch: "the establishment is flocking to the tech industry."
That's just the eternal september, ad infinitum. Hate being pushed out? So did the people _you_ pushed out, when you were annoying and first found IRC and you and your peers flooded all the old cool dives, driving hackers ever deeper underground.
The easy ways out don't work when you're faced with filtering out annoying newcomers. Some are fundametally wrong (racism is essentially a quick band-aid reaction to newcomers). Using money as a filter (country clubs) doesn't work either--there's always that annoying newly-minted millionaire who wants to break into your circle. Legislation to suppress young upstart competition even fails for the same reason: eventually your industry becomes so totally ossified that the whole thing can be toppled (US automakers).
Fundamentally, anybody who doesn't get Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is going to fail. "When voters have three or more distinct options, no rank order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a pre-specified set of criteria." I would propose strengthening it to: any pre-specified set of criteria, at all, ever. In other words, you just can't have all three:
1. Purely democratic or meritocratic or whatever
2. Total transparency (of rules and laws)
3. Adaptation of the rules and laws
So you get this never-ending cycle: the hackers get together and make something really cool. They are able to work together. Then comes the flood of newbies. After things get overloaded, anybody actually contributing to the original project either sells out or goes deeper underground. The project coasts on autopilot until something breaks, then it crashes and burns.
It doesn't matter who the participants are, from simple rule-based sims up to human-level intelligence, the outcome is the same.
The exceptions, I think, prove the rule:
1. BSD and the Linux kernel -- essentially ruled by benevolent dictators.
2. Representative democracies -- they can work. I'm deliberately refusing to think about why here, since that's politics.
3. The internet. Not IP or the OSI model or the DNS system, but the idea that anyone, anywhere can conceive of an idea, and then communicate it nearly instantly. This includes a worldwide language (or tools to automatically translate), global comms and the hacks to circumvent state-sponsored net terrorism, the unwritten code of conduct that most netizens are guided by, the ability to search and explore, and on and on.
I think any good example would have some element of a social hack in it. The social hacks are the most interesting.
An oversimplification, but entertaining nonetheless.
The last few paragraphs are a bit more interesting. Understandably, lots of people are now seeing that you can gain things from your work or financial input into something that aren't just financial. For some people, non profits will provide greater rewards than for profits.
You are taking "pretty people" too literally.
I think it's really this applied to the Valley - and I think what you're seeing is people who don't have tech chops, but they've seen what tech success brings and they want that, so they have to sell something else and in this case it's charm, good looks or good taste in shoes.
> What’s more, there has never been a better time to try to found a genuinely subversive company than right now. Consider Y Combinator’s new openness to not-for-profit startups. Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate. [http://www.redditblog.com/2015/02/announcing-winners-of-redd...] It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there. A huge audience. You might even call it a market.
I'm not sure that I trust Jon Evans' -- or any one person's -- assessment of subversion. The whole point of subversion is to overturn ("vertere") the status quo from below ("sub"), while this article seems content to maintain the current systems of marginalized nerd-dom (which has always been a suspect category) and capitalism (which is interesting and because as a system it preferences what's mainstream and marketable -- Evans has contradicted himself again).
When Evans writes, "Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate," in support of his call for subversion, he glosses over the fact that the list includes some of the most mainstream nonprofits in the world (plus two well-known psychoactive research organizations). I'm not saying that these charities aren't doing good things -- I think it's fair to assume that they are -- I'm saying that supporting them can't be viewed as an act of subversion, and that assuming limited resources, support for them means lost support for other _actually subversive_ organizations that mean to do just as much good in the world.
"It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there." But change doesn't mean patching what exists; change -- subversive change -- means offering a replacement.
I am sad to see it passing, but I also know that Change Happens.
Is the author suggesting capitalism is doing good or bad things for the developing world?
As if one must be a social misfit or physically misshapen to be involved with computers in the first place, which is itself a ridiculous premise.