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Whites not born in rich anglo countries are still perceived as privileged despite a lot of them growing up in much harder conditions than your average black person in tech.

Citation required.

Citation for what? That I cant apply for diversity internships despite growing up in a family with 10k/pa budget? And no...this is not shitloads of money where I am coming from.

> despite a lot of them growing up in much harder conditions than your average black person in tech.

How would you know? And how do you measure it?

It was harder to grow up in Kiev because you were in worse poverty than blacks in the US. Possibly. Were you also discriminated against in Kiev? Was your family broken, and your community broken? Did you have a failing school system relative to others in your community? It goes on. The point is there are many systems that make up "black in America" that doesn't translate to only family income.

Citation required.

>How would you know? And how do you measure it?

I measure it by the number of opportunities one has or had in the past.Your practical education happens later because you did not have access to computers in any form.

You can't travel not only because of your passport but also because you simply cannot afford it.One cannot simply just go from Ukraine to a richer country in Europe like you can in the US.

It's simply the lack of available opportunities that hinders any progress.Even for world class engineers like Michal Zalewski that was the case: http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2015/03/on-journeys.html

>It was harder to grow up in Kiev because you were in worse poverty than blacks in the US. Possibly. Were you also discriminated against in Kiev? Was your family broken, and your community broken? Did you have a failing school system relative to others in your community?

You were always discriminated in Eastern Europe because of your lack of connections and corruption.Inept people have always had an upper hand here.

I dont know what you mean by "family broken".Many EE families were broken.I come from such family.After the fall of iron curtain i grew up in relative poverty where my mother had no job and she was constantly harassed by her drug addicted partner.My father dumped us long time ago and simply did not care.

What do you consider a broken community? You mean one where mafia runs free and where you cant go to the police because they are corrupt? Yes those were the times of 90s.

>The point is there are many systems that make up "black in America" that doesn't translate to only family income.

I think you dont understand the reality here.Being "already" in America makes you incredibly privileged.I remember EE STEM PHD engineers earning better wages frying chicken in the US than doing what they have actually studied for back home.

I am glad americans are finally acknowledging this phenomenon (BBT scene with russian janitor/physicist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZd8sDquNYw) but since this is not their problem it is overshadowed by your racial wars.

It still makes me angry and sad though...

> if opportunity was truly equal, the data should not show a big gap in the choices of work made between races

I can understand that would be the case wrt race but what about different cultures?

I want to preface that it's a very strong claim to say that the true and accurate cause would be culture, and claiming the possibility isn't good enough, you'd need to strongly demonstrate evidence that this is the real contributing factor.

Having said that, Culture could be an explanation, but it would still be a problem, because children should have equal opportunity, and if it were true that culture can affect your opportunities, then it wouldn't be fair to have some children born into a culture that diminishes their opportunity. That's why we have a lot of laws already related to restricting certain ways you can raise your kids, like mandatory school, bans on corporal punishments, requirements to meet their basic needs, etc.

Beyond that, there are questions around culture as well, such as, would it be culture on its own? Or culture within a particular environment that might favor against certain cultures? And this might not even be in an actively and conscious discriminatory fashion. It could be as an accidental effect of compounding factors. For example, imagine that a particular market buying power is dominated by mostly people of culture A, they have the money, but as someone of culture B, you might not be able to understand or relate to that market and thus fail to appeal to them, meaning your business will be less successful as an effect of that.

Another big question around culture would be historical, for example, if you include in culture say a tendency to be illiterate, or a lack of insistence on intellectualism or education or reading, etc. It is possible the historical context influenced such a culture and did so unfairly.

My point basically is that first I think it's very early to really advance that the cause could be cultural and there are many other possibilities just as likely if not more. And even if culture is a factor, it's not a justification, and we should still strive to address the unequal opportunities it creates.

> claiming the possibility isn't good enough, you'd need to strongly demonstrate evidence

This is true for anyone making any claim here, including the claim that it is race alone (which i am pointing out is unaccounted for in op post)

> it wouldn't be fair to have some children born into a culture that diminishes their opportunity

I wholeheartedly disagree. It depends on what a culture values and monetary outcomes isnt everything. As an example, American culture is very different from my own (based in EU though ive lived and am frequently in the US). Our culture is generally less work centric, which may look like worse outcomes on paper, but there are so many things that cant be or aren't measured.

> This is true for anyone making any claim here, including the claim that it is race alone (which i am pointing out is unaccounted for in op post)

That's not the claim being made, the claim is the observed gap when grouping the data by race. That is a fact of the data as represented.

Why that gap exists is an open question, and so is how to potentially reduce the gap.

I think the fact that some people like you jump to believe immediately that it could be due to culture is just showing of your inherent bias. The same is true for those immediately jumping to believe it is caused by racism, that's showing of their inherent bias too.

Bias is unsubtiantied beliefs that you bring to the search space.

> Our culture is generally less work centric, which may look like worse outcomes on paper, but there are so many things that cant be or aren't measured

Three things. The first is that the article is about American jobs in the US. That means culturally we're talking about sub-groups within an American cultural context. The second is that we're comparing the same jobs in the same sector against each other. And the third is that I'd be interested in testing your theory, if true, it would mean that it should predict that if you grouped US tech salaries by your EU based culture, we should also see a lower pay compared to white American culture. I think that be interesting if the data was available for it. And if that does show, then I'd start to say that your theory is on the path of being more demonstrated correct, since it shows predictive capabilities.

I will claim that all races have different sub-cultures and that sub-cultures are more important than race. If you are white and grow up in a poor uneducated sub-culture where education is strongly discouraged, the opportunities you have will be very different from a white person growing up in a sub-culture where going to University is expected and encouraged. The same goes for any other race.

Yes, I agree, the environment probably matters to some extent, even possibly to a large (maybe even largest) extent.

I think it all matters what people mean by culture. Is access to capital, good education, mentoring, support in developmental growth, time (time to learn, study, play, etc.), and safety/care (loving parents, health issues taken care of, well fed, comfortable living/sleeping, etc.) is included in "culture" or is that separate?

Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if those environmental elements play a big factor, and it's likely that some races simply line up more perfectly with those things as well which could explain why in turn you see the data show a gap between races.

But if by culture we mean things like music, native spoken and written language, traditions and customs, spiritual/religious beliefs, foods, clothes, art, folklore, etc. Well I don't know, I feel those would likely play less of a role.

I think some people might also imply "values" when they mean "culture". But I feel that possibly translates into environmental factors. Like if you don't value caring for your kid, helping them with their homework, encouraging them to read, learn, go to school, and all that, well it probably just leads to similarly deficient environmental factors, like maybe ending up in an environment with bad education, no mentorship, lack of safety and all that.

I agree. Culture is a large umbrella term. I am mainly talking about the unquestioned assumptions, values and expectations of people living in the sub-culture. Especially how the sub-culture, and especially parents, value (or not) education and intellectual pursuits. People of different races but sharing compatible sub-cultures have a lot more in common than people of the same race that don’t.

What I wonder though is how useful the distinction becomes.

Maybe I'm reading into it, but I feel some people want to say that it's their fault, because their culture doesn't value education and intellectual pursuits and honesty, and hard work, etc.

And it seems to become a justification why they don't deserve any help or support or special treatment.

But to me, it seems to be exactly why something would need to be done. You don't actually choose your culture, you're born into it, and that seems unfair if by culture we imply those essential things that matter for success in life.

Especially if we talk about certain races, where other races probably directly contributed to that culture by forcibly curbing their interest in education, intellectualism and ambitions.

The distinction is important because you can’t change race but you can change culture. However it isn’t easy and it has to start with the children. It is too late for the adults. And any practical solution (boarding schools for talented kids designed to extract them from their dysfunctional culture) has serious negative consequences as well. Australia tried to change the culture of the indigenous population and it ended badly. It is a very hard problem. Especially because the feedback loop of the culture is self-reinforcing. When I lived in the US I remember talking to a successful well-educated African-American that I worked with who said he was called an “Icecream” (black on the outside white on the inside) by other African-Americans! In other words, people in his community resented his success instead of celebrating it. That just blew my mind.

What you're saying to me here sounds to be talking about culture as in clothing, language, food, music, hairstyles, etc.

I find more modern efforts are probably going to yield much better effects on value of education, intellectualism and work ethics. And those are things like actual financial support and investment into better schooling for underprivileged neighborhoods, better access to loans, more access to paid for higher education programs, and yes, even things like accepting more people from those "cultures" into high paying jobs, and good graduate programs and schools, even if they aren't necessarily the top performers, as long as they still show the qualities needed to succeed.

Otherwise you've got a chicken and egg problem, so you need to take the ones that show promise to be able to break out, and really give them that chance and help them doing so, that can break the cycle.

I'm happy to adapt this to not a traditional notion of "race", there are white sub-culture like you say that suffer from these difficulties as well, and I think they'd need similar support.

Tangentially, on the topic of "ice-cream", I think you're simplifying things. It's a well known issue where hiding your culture (as in the way you dress, talk, eat, joke, the music you listen too, etc.) when your culture is surrounded by negative bias, can be necessary for yourself to enter higher financial spheres. Being called an ice-cream doesn't mean that the person was a cop out because they have a good job or make good money, it generally means that they adopted actual white cultural norms, as in, clothing, hairstyles, accent, behaviors, etc. And not as-in, honesty, hard working, and intellectualism.

The variance of personality between individuals is around 40-60% genetic in origin (i.e. genes have a huge impact on personality). Given this, if you believe personality has any impact on career selection at all, a differing distribution of career selection between sexes and races would be an expected outcome, no discrimination or bias necessary.

> if you believe

That's the problem, that's why I said unless we have a very good explanation.

It's easy to fit some model over any data to explain it, but that doesn't make it a very good explanation.

So what we would need is very strong evidence that the surprising data we see is the result of some inherent cause, and not that of a sub-optimal system. Until then, the possibility that the system is sub-optimal remains, and the data continues to be surprising.

Do you think personality wouldn't have an effect on job selection?

Just so we're on the same page, me and the article is talking about an observed pay gap between people employed in the US for the SAME tech job roles. I think you're debating something tangential.

I was addressing your comment on equality of outcome:

And if you see that the gap is caused by the distribution of the type of work, for example, raceX is more likely to do work that pays more than raceZ. Well that's also an issue, because we value equal opportunity between races, and the assumption is if opportunity was truly equal, the data should not show a big gap in the choices of work made between races

Oh I see. Well in that case I think you're probably referring to the study of twin grown appart, for which in a large number of cases both twins turned out to have ended up doing very similar work?

I think it's a big leap to assume that the genes that are similar between twins and which are responsible for such similar outcomes would also be similar between individuals of the same skin color.

For example, even once the study looked into non-identical twin, the similarities in outcomes drastically started to drop.

I'm not denying the possibility, when you still don't have a sure explanation lots of things are still a possibility. But I think you're jumping ahead with your conclusion a little too hastily, and in my opinion, I still think the data is surprising and that we don't really know why this difference in distribution really exists.

Furthermore, I'll add that modern genetic research is really putting in question our traditional categorization of "race".

> In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.

-- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...

What modern availability of large scale genetic data tells us, is that what we call "black", "white" and "asian" actually have very little genetic variance and uniqueness, and that it's actually possible some white people are closer genetically to some black people than they'd be to other white people.

Which would mean that if you grouped by traditional notion of race, like skin color, you might not be grouping by genetic similarities at all. That would reinforce the possibility then that the difference in the distribution is not genetic, but possibly socio-cultural.

From your article:

there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded. It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions.

The title is is not representative of what the article is saying; no serious scientist is making the claim that race is a social construct. They're just saying we shouldn't make medical or other assumptions about individuals based on race, which is of course true.

The idea that races don't exist is a postmodern rejection of science based on a political agenda, and you should be skeptical of folks pushing it. If you study biology or evolution at any reasonable length the notion is just silly.