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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

This is a correction of the previous tendency, which was to take the default assumption that all discrimination was in fact rational and a reflection of consistent differences in merit between sub-populations. We've gone from assuming that discrimination is probably rational to assuming discrimination is probably irrational.

You could argue that we've over-corrected, but my own subjective experience leads me to disagree. I see constant reminders every day in the media and on the Internet of the persistence of irrational emotionally driven biases against groups of people. Wake me up when Reddit and Twitter are not overflowing with inane frothing at the mouth bigotry.

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There are still some major irrational points that I see:

- Bias (conscious and not) is assumed to be a problem mainly perpetuated by white men, when reality is that, for example, women may have as much or more bias toward women than men do. I.e. the factor of women enforcing gender roles among themselves is dismissed.

- The success of white men in startups is assumed to be caused by them excluding others, rather than because they share a culture with each other from an early age with a lot of positive characteristics. Saying we excluded girls from programming and chess teams, or from spending long hours alone at a computer instead of socializing, is at least an oversimplification.

- Men being attracted to things and systems and tinkering vs socializing and people is real. It's more than a standard deviation (i.e. differences between groups are more than differences between average individuals), it starts hours after birth, it correlates to pre-natal testosterone levels, it happens across species. Scientifically it's a slam dunk and it is a pretty plausible hypothesis for why women are poorly represented in coding positions, compared to other equally demanding jobs, e.g. doctors and lawyers where women are doing just fine.

Nobody is saying that only white men have bias. However, white men are overwhelmingly in positions where that bias can be used to discriminate against others. Women may have just as much, but far fewer of them are in positions where that bias comes into effect.

I think bias and gender expectations among peers could have a very large effect.

It's striking to me watching my nieces play and how strictly they enforce whether something is for boys or girls. Also it looks to me like groups of women in an office enforce very different norms on each other than men do in terms of fashion, socialization, communication style.

How large is this effect compared to biases down the power structure? I don't know, it's an empirical question but everyone seems to pre-assume the answer.

The pendulum has swung so much further in the other direction that it's become trendy to be a victim. That's a very self-limiting mindset to have.

If you're watching the media then I assume you saw the article today about the bigoted statements that occurred last month at the Air Force academy? Turns out the "victims" were the ones that wrote those messages> Because claiming victimhood status is socially beneficial these days.

Not to say there aren't real problems out there, but we're deep in "boy who cried wolf" territory.

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