Hacker News Reader

I once found a "casual encounters" ad on craigslist, in which a woman sought men to attend a certain type of party, which type I do not remember.

I looked it up at Urban Dictionary, the objective of that kind of party is to impregnate as many women as possible.

I contemplated attending but then concluded that I want to know who my children are, and that they would want to know who their father is. Even under the best of circumstances it is painful not to know one's father - look at Steve Jobs.

I was once invited to have unprotected sex with a complete stranger. She was quite lovely, definitely someone I would want to be with but we just happened to stumble across each other at Burning Man. I expected I would never see her again so I declined.

I suspect this is not unusual. I was asked to be a sperm donor at a party by a lesbian couple I'd never met before. They were completely serious, but the catch was no contact with the child.

The problem with arguments from reproductive psychology is that we know very little about reproductive psychology in history.

So modern ideas about female partner choice shaping genetics aren't necessarily a given. It's not unlikely there was plenty of rape, random sex with strangers because why not?, and all kinds of other non-vanilla behaviour.

Edit: And there's another issue - the implication that selecting for male variability is more successful as a species-wide reproductive strategy than selecting for high IQ.

That may be true, but it's a slightly strange place to end up in, because it implies that both ends of the bimodal curve are equally successful, and there's no selection advantage to being at the top of the curve. (If there were the bimodal would collapse to a standard Gaussian.)

"both ends of the bimodal curve"

Technically it's still a unimodal curve (single mode, roughly at the center of the distribution - i.e. ~= mean, median), it's just that the variance is increased.

There are other traits than IQ which promote the success of the species.

Even if unintelligent, physical strength and endurance enable one to hunt, to flee from predators.

Sharp eyesight and sensitive hearing.

Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells.

...or red hair, or blue eyes, which spread simply because they were so darn cute. They're only like 12,000 years old!

A recent study found that those with blue eyes are predisposed to alcoholism. Doubtlessly that will lead to employment discrimination against those with brown eyes, as management types like to party.

I once read that every human society that had agriculture also had beer. We have had agriculture for roughly 12,000 years.

> Those of African heritage commonly have Sickle Cell Anemia. While it is a crippling illness it gives one resistance to malaria; in much of Africa that enables one to live longer than those with healthy blood cells.

That's not quite right. Being heterozygous for the sickle-cell trait produces reduced symptoms from malaria (but not immunity), while being homozygous for the trait produces sickle cell disease and and, consequently, greater vulnerability to malaria (since malarial infection, in addition to its other effects, frequently produces sickle cell crises in persons with sickle cell disease.)

I stand corrected.

I expect that I was actually taught what you explained however it has been many years.

> But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that.

I don't think that intelligence is the most important factor for those positions, so let's talk about researchers and university teachers instead. Do you really think that society would be better if less intelligent people would be better represented there?

Certainly for university teachers we don't want to solely go on 'intelligence'. Looking back at my university career the correlation between how good a teacher someone was and how they ranked globally as researchers within their field was at best very weakly correlated. In fact I think hiring undergraduate lecturers based on their research performance is a pretty flawed idea, but that's a different debate.

Well, there is a reason why I chose those examples.

I'm not arguing for diversity at all costs, which seems like what you're arguing against.

I'd say in general having researchers and university teachers that are intelligent is good. Diversity is also good. There should be a balance - I think that diverse researchers and teachers can solve problems that a homogenous group of researchers would never solve.

For example, what problems do researchers tackle? They tend to choose problems that they see, and may never try to solve problems that affect other groups. Or they may choose solutions that only work for people like themselves.

For example, a lot of computer graphics algorithms like face recognition don't work well for black faces. Even more troublesome, many cameras (both digital and film) have a dynamic range that works well for white faces, but poorly for black faces.

Another example, the amount of research into male birth control vs. female birth control is very uneven.

Would it be worth it to have slightly less intelligent but much more diverse researchers and teachers? Would society as a whole be better off?

It has to be a balance, but I'd bet the answer is 'sometimes yes'.

All of this is somewhat beside my main point, which is that I think it's simplistic to say that society and morality should only be determined by genetics.

> For example, a lot of computer graphics algorithms like face recognition don't work well for black faces.

There's probably less contrast to be used in edge detection.

> Even more troublesome, many cameras (both digital and film) have a dynamic range that works well for white faces, but poorly for black faces.

The dynamic range is limited by objective factors and the automated exposure setting takes into consideration what gets more pixels in the frame - usually not a human face.

Diversity is also good. There should be a balance

There's a huge assumption built into this, about what dimensions of diversity are virtuous. Our society places great value on showing diversity on scales of gender and race, and to a lesser extent also on religion and more recently, gender identity.

Why are these demographics the ones for which we should be endeavoring to ensure diversity? Why shouldn't we strive to find a balance between, say, people from an urban background versus those from a rural background? Or people with fluency in various languages? Or "morning people" versus "night people", or those who prefer to file things versus those who stack papers on their desk, or left- versus right-handed?

Having variations along all these dimensions, and countless others, would also bring greater variation in world view, and thus presumably improve the pool of ideas that could drive their work. So why is it that seeking diversity in race and sex is paramount, while finding someone from out in the countryside is never even thought of?

In Soviet Union class background played a role (worker background was a plus).

Moreover, many countries had Jewish quota (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota) - very often at the percent of the Jews in their population.

But what is striking, we now consider such quotas as blatant discrimination, rather than good affirmative actions for the (really or allegedly) underprivileged groups.

I think the general principle is that societal decision makers should be roughly representative of the people whose lives are impacted by the decisions.

Of course it's possible to take this too far.

As for why race and gender are considered important, I think it's probably because they are easy to measure, and there has been a lot of discrimination. Most of the other demographics are probably pretty evenly represented? I've never heard of someone getting passed over for promotion or housing because they were left-handed.

The city/country split is a good point. There is some provision for that in many political systems, with different geographical regions being represented based on population, but it's far from a perfect system.

> But even if we took the argument as fact, it doesn't mean that we have to accept every naive consequence. We don't need to say "Of course the vast majority of CEOs, world leaders, and very wealthy people are male, because the most intelligent people are almost all male". We can choose to have a better society than that.

Which in practice means help relatively successful women crack "the glass ceiling", while the men who find themselves in the bottom of the lower half of the distribution in some sense by societal standards can get stuffed.

My Russian instructor at Caltech was the victim of Bride Abduction while vacationing in Soviet Georgia when she was fifteen years old. Her, uh, "fiance's" mother failed to understand why Valentina was unhappy about it.