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Comment by systemstops | Hacker News Reader

People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute force, which is the problem with DEI thinking. That is also why so many companies are silently ditching those policies.

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DEI is not about brute forcing an environment for success, at all. That's not the goal even a little bit.

DEI is about recognizing that our culture has placed some people at a disadvantage by virtue of properties they have no control over and attempting to remedy that imbalance.

Based on the theory that gaps between groups are caused by systemic factors. The gaps exist, so an explanation and fix is needed, which is morally commendable. The problem is that the theory is far too overconfident and completely ignores the fact that the gaps also show up in cognitive testing.

The foundational document of our nation's government literally treats Native Americans as non-people and slaves (who were overwhelmingly of African descent) as 3/5 of a person.

The majority of Black people in the US are literally descended from people who were brought here as slaves. Half of the country was so attached to the idea of being able to own Black people and treat them as property that they started a civil war to hold onto it.

This is the country that was founded on enslaved Black people, created the Trail of Tears, and placed Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.

It shouldn't be very hard to figure out an explanation for why certain races in the US have historically been at a disadvantage.

Both things can be true. That fact is that some groups that were discriminated against now thrive, and some don't (even after trillions of dollars in public spending). That is why cognitive testing is helpful at figuring out what is going on.

New ideas, such as the US was "founded on enslaved Black people" really only gained attention the last few years because of our inability to solve the gaps. People wanted an explanation, so the past had to be retconned. The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.

Perhaps the fact that the US was founded on enslaved Black people is considered a "new idea" is why we have failed to address cultural roots of that systemic problem.

> The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.

How well off are First Nations people in Canada and Aboriginal people in Australia and New Zealand?

How would you know when the problem is solved though? If you look at average earnings of groups and correct for IQ, the gap disappears. If you want all groups to score the same on tests of cognitive ability, we've been trying to do that for decades with no success. Every attempt to create a test where all groups get the same average have failed. Sorry, it sucks, but it's the truth.

I don't know what you're trying to say here, but the evidence for malleability of IQ and for SES influence on IQ --- IQ itself being a diagnostic output and not a latitudinal ranking of people by capability --- is pretty strong. It's important when having serious conversations about this to structure the causality correctly: "correct for IQ" sounds at first blush like you've established a causal role for IQ, but really you might be (and probably are) just manipulating whatever X variables are causally linked both to IQ and to other outcomes.

Knowing when the problem is fully solved is hard.

But we currently have a President who described participants in a white supremacist rally as "a lot of good people on both sides" so I think we are very far away from needing a precise definition of "done".

[flagged]

Casual mentions of “IQ gaps” are flamebait and thus offtopic on Hacker News.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, not my intent to flamebait. I'll drop it.

"IQ gaps between groups" meaning...? I doubt very much that whatever statistic you're going to provide means what you think it does.

If the remedy is to force environments then both are true at once.

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