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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

  Only 12 Black women led startups (yes only 12) have raised 
  $1MM or more in outside funding since 2012.

Twelve is now "zero"?

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As we all know, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

So, translation:

"I'm intentionally trying to deceive you when I say, NO (Meaning Zero) Black Women Have Raised Venture Funding. Definitely zero, not 12...shutup, math is hard, OK?"

Exactly. Don't be duped by this. If there were 24 black women seeking funding and 12 received funding, then they have a success rate of 50%. Whatever the real value for that figure is would be more telling.

Still, these attempts to slice and dice demographics in order to prove one class is held down for the sake of another is pointless and meaningless. It proves nothing. Attempts to use them to enforce draconian measures to elevate a class in the name of equality could just as easily backfire.

The other day, I saw a FB post from an old acquaintance about how racial economic equality needs to be mandated by law for minorities. To which I replied, "Yeah, Asians and Jews have it rough these days".

Astonishingly I was told Asians and Jews are not minorities (news to me). Apparently, minority is code word for being black (also news to me). To which I responded, "yeah Jay Z really has it rough these days".

Unfortunately, my point was lost on this poor soul. In his attempt to "recognize his white privilege" he fell into the Black == Poor trap and when Black != Poor it's just an anomaly. Sorry, but I call that racist.

The fact that Asians are generally a successful minority in the US has no bearing on a poor Asian person.

We need to elevate all the down trodden. Why do we have arbitrarily slice them by race and gender?

All fine in the philosophy realm. But real programs deal with real people. Different cultures respond differently. So solutions have to recognize race and gender, or they might not work at all.

It would have been more accurate to say "virtually no" black women have led startups. Though I guess she gets a pass for saying "statistically". It would have also been nice if a comparison was done as to the race of other startup founders and... I don't know more than a single chart listing the companies and how much they raised each? This isn't a very good statistic to trumpet around if its going to be presented out of context like this.

Ironically, saying 'virtually no black women have led startups' would still be 100% wrong, just emphatically so.

12/10000 is noise.

The number of black women is 12, not 0. I don't understand what you wish to gain by egregiously twisting the numbers. Yes, it's a low percentage. No, it's not zero.

What do you wish to gain by being painfully pedantic? Black women are 5-6% of the population, but 0.01% of funded founders. That is a rounding error, effectively zero. Why not focus on the actual point of the post instead?

Because the title primed me to expect one thing, and then the post body rapidly contradicted it by providing twelve vetted examples of the class that the title claimed should not exist. My mind does not get over being misled and confused like that easily, especially when the fix to improve it is so trivial (like saying "virtually none" instead of "statistically zero").

OK. So... that's you entire comment? That's it? Problem solved?

You asked a question and I answered it. What's your deal?

The deal is that targeted pedantry like this completely derail the discussion, which is not 12 ≠ 0, but how and why black women are being excluded from tech.

Okay, but "effectively zero" != "statistically zero"

The "actual point" of the post is a lie.

So there's no discrimination, the entire post is a lie, because you found a point of math to be pedantic about. Got it.

The post is "statistically" a lie and you just used a straw man argument. Congrats.

I've got a great way of increasing the percentage by an order of magnitude! Doing the math correctly would immediately boost the number to 0.1% from your stated 0.01%. See, being painfully pedantic has already paid off handsomely.

(And don't worry, at least you were only off by a factor of 10. The original article is off by a factor of 100).

The margin of error is too high to say what the true value is (or should be), but in no way does that imply that the true value should be ZERO. A small number does not automatically mean zero.

You could make up similar lies and say that "statistically, the amount of lead in your drinking water is zero", and have it be well less than 12 parts in 10,000, and it's still non-zero, and at neurologically toxic levels. Just because a number is small does not mean that we cannot accurately measure it, nor does it mean that the expected value is zero. Claiming that the expected value is zero when there are twelve in your (large) sample is a horrible misuse of statistics.

In the US there are 12/100000 suicides annually. So is the suicide rate in the US zero?

Are you people high? "Statistically" doesn't mean "12 == 0". It means "Effectively zero"

I may be extremely dumb for learning math and statistics incorrectly, but as far as I know, 12 statistically is not 0.

When you're comparing it to 10,000 fundraises, it is..

24/10000 = 0.0024 -> two tenth's of 1%.... ie... statistically zero..

Depends upon sig figs and other statistical calculations. I was kinda expecting to see some statistics that showed that the 95% confidence interval had a minimum of 0 within it, which would have made far more sense to claim 'statistically 0 black women have received funding'.

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