ghort

I don't think it's a trivial difference. Lowering the bar suggest that people are now being accepted on lesser merits. But a false negative is a binary condition. Both positive and false negative results are over the bar. False negatives are positive results we misjudge. If he is suggesting something else he should say that and support it. I would define "a higher percentage of applicants succeed" as "more likely".

Guess people didn't get it. It's not believable to claim to want to correct biases when you want to remove measures that correct biases. Even more ironic is using much of the paper to argue differences between men and women just to say that men are being discriminated against because they aren't treated exactly the same as women. Therefor the program should be replaced by his own version with 4 out of 5 measure focused on women, but despite the differences between men and women doesn't discriminate against men, because he said so. The guy isn't rational, he has just come up with a lot of synonyms for "I disagree".

> The initiatives that the author links to in this section are presumably aimed at reducing the false negative rate for women, and thereby lowering the bar that women need to clear to get hired.

You (he) can't say that you are lowering the bar since a false negative is positive like any other positive. Widening the bar is a more apt analogy.

> he believes that biases should be corrected

So he believes in decreasing the false negative rate? I'm confused.

I don't think people necessarily understand which career they choose. When girl wants to become ballerinas it is presumably because they have some idea that it is glamorous, not that it entails working hard under strict discipline for many years. They figure that out later.

What happened in the 80s was likely because computers went from being for business to being a hobby with the home computer [0]. I would imagine that because men dominated technical professions at the time most computers were bought by men, which then shared their interests with their sons [1]. Programmers like John Carmack and Linus Torvalds is born around 1970 and would be teenagers when home computers became available [2]. Games went from adventure quests and puzzles to shooters like quake and duke nukem. Social settings like mailing lists became more important to learn programming through open source. So the cycle continues.

Of course just like girl, boys probably didn't know what the profession actually meant. They wanted to be programmers because of things like video games, but ended up making business systems.

How do you fix it? Many CS programs are antiquated and changing the curriculum to software engineering doesn't seem to help much to attract a broader group of people. If the large companies are serious about this, they should do what the banks did and train smart people with more generic backgrounds.

[0]

1977 Atari 2600

1977 Apple II

1981 Sinclair ZX81

1981 BBC Micro

1982 Commodore 64

1983 WarGames (movie)

1983 Nintendo Entertainment System

1985 Amiga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers

[1]

"When I was 5 or 6, my parents got me a Commodore 64."

"My dad left his old Atari (2600 Junior, I think) in my room and I found basic on there towards the end of grade school."

"1982-83 (grammar to high school age): My parents bought a word processor in the 80's that you could also program."

"In 1982 my Dad brought home a Sirius microcomputer for his work."

"My dad brought home a 386 IBM-PC so he could learn AutoCAD."

"I got started with BASICA on a Tandy 1000. My dad had a newer computer at the time but he certainly wouldn't let me use it."

"I'm not sure if this counts; the birth of my hacking started on my dad's lap, doing amateur radio."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1015879

[2]

"It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20."

http://www.linfo.org/linus.html

Not sure what you are saying. It is the first amendment that grants the right to fire people you don't agree with. So presumably not everyone agrees on what free speech is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...