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Comment by nopatternhere | Hacker News Reader

> If you truly believe people are equal and deserving of equal treatment then you must

The two don't follow, at all. Lets replace this statement, and make it about the NBA.

"If you truly believe people are equal and deserving of equal treatment then you must see a game where black men hold the vast majority of positions as a failure of the game".

If the NBA example should be laughed at, why shouldn't the opposite? Neanderthals don't exist anymore, but homo sapiens do, despite very little relative advantage to us. Small differences in averages between groups will lead to dramatically different results. For the best example of all, see casinos (advantage: 2-4%) versus gamblers.

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Are you serious? Of course it doesn't make sense if you change my words to be about the NBA.

Look at the government. The majority of the US government leadership is older white males.

Either you think: wow, white males are really good at getting into top government positions. Old white males must be superior to other humans.

Or you think: society really gives an advantage to older white males and it's much easier for them to get into government. Maybe power structures are balanced in their favour?

(Hint: the latter is true. The author of the article thinks along the lines of the former, that's why it's sexist and discriminatory and people are upset by it.)

Or maybe it's both? After eliminating incorrect biases, perhaps we'd find top leadership to be 60/40 male/female. Or even 40/60 (I'd be surprised but hey).

Maybe women have a higher avg IQ but a smaller standard deviation. Then what?

I'm only taking issue with the sacrosanct idea that every mind is equal and that we should expect proportional representation in everything that's not obviously physically biased like sports. (How the brain isn't physical is still an open question.)

Or maybe IQ itself favours only certain types of intelligence and the test is fundamentally flawed because it simplifies intelligence into something that distorts our understanding of it?

How long did we think women performed more poorly with spatial reasoning tasks? Then we realised cultural gender inequality was the culprit, not biological traits [1].

The original author continues to propagate the harmful idea that women aren't making it because of biology, when there is no evidence to support that biology is the reason. And you seem to believe the same thing, despite the science in this area changing and even reporting the opposite results.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/06/why-judy-cant-...

So if Google was serious, they'd attempt to measure productivity or coding performance, then apply IQ (and other) tests. They can take rigorous approaches to find out the truth, rather than operating off of feelings.

So, to make it clear: you are arguing that discrimination would be ok if you can prove it is effective?

(I'm sure I don't need to point out on this forum how difficult it is to measure productivity or coding performance. AFAIK there are no measures of this which are effective outside controlled conditions, and controlled conditions are close to irrelevant for actually being effective at a job)

Uh, yes? I'm saying if we somehow magically determined that group A had 10% benefit than group B at a task, then we should expect to see more of group A represented, even if their populations are equal.

Exactly like we expect to see certain phenotypes over-represented in basketball.

Despite the difficulty, saying it's hard but it just must be true that everyone's equal doesn't seem like a robust approach. Or is Google saying it just has zero way of evaluating a person's work? Perhaps they could do blinded code reviews or something.

Uh, yes?

I think you mean "no" here, right? Because discrimination means making decisions based on gender, not on individual characteristics.

Also your other comments seem to means you support Google's pro-diversity approach then, right?

They aim to give equal opportunities to a more diverse set of people. They don't force hiring from under-represented classes.

I'm saying discrimination, meaning non-equal results, is fine. I don't think there should be any active discrimination, and incorrect unintentional discrimination should also be removed.

I'm saying discrimination, meaning non-equal results

I think you may want to reconsider the word you use for that, because that isn't a widely shared definition.

To be clear, when you say "discrimination.. [snip] is fine" most people hear that as "making hiring or promotion decisions based sorely or primarily on the gender of the person is fine". That's what the dictionary definition is too.

This isn't discrimination, and (almost) no one says it is. Unequal outcomes have many sources, and provided they are non-discriminatory that's defensible.

The issues arise when unequal outcomes occur and no one can agree on the cause, because there is a (very good) chance that there is an inequality of opportunity somewhere in the process.

I suspect there is a miscommunication here and your defense of the possibility of unequal outcomes is being confused by the wording.

I think the other person with which you are speaking is communicating clearly enough without your help on what the definition of words are supposed to mean.

I am constantly amazed that "society" means America. Also, that all the examples are always how white majority countries have white majority X. What about China? What about Indonesia? What about Malaysia, where there is a lot of racial diversity?

Americans think their country is the world. Trust me, you are definitely less than 5% of the world population-wise, even if you are ~25% of nominal world GDP.

It is really sad how insular Western culture has become, and weird in an industry and era where the biggest tech IPO was Chinese.

I am not American. But I do live in a western society.

The author of the manifesto lives in a western society. So I'm discussing society with respect to our experiences.

I'm not sure how your comment relates. There are other societies in the world, I agree.

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