devalier

Guess there's a reason we don't invite speakers notorious for advocating enslaving fellow conference-goers' families

So our standard is, if diversity activists can lie, and make the lies stick, then we don't let the target of their lies speak anywhere? Sounds reasonable.

Well I certainly would wish that the entire issue of the racial test score gap would be dropped. We should only worry about treating individuals based on who they are as individuals, and that does not require using statistics broken down by race.

But the racial test score gap is a huge issue, and blame does get assigned, and action is taken based on that blame. So if I am in a conversation and someone says, "Well if you don't think schools/culture/racism/poverty causes the gap, what does?", then I'm going to give my honest opinion. If that explanation includes genes, then am I a racist bigot who should be ostracized from polite society?

No it does not. For it is not at all defined what it means to view "black people as inferior".

For instance, it is a fact about the world that across a vast number of tests of cognitive ability -- SAT's, NAEP, LSAT's, AFQT, IQ tests, etc, -- the average score among blacks is about a standard deviation lower than the average among whites. This is not controversial, I read articles in the NY Times all the time about closing the test score gap. If I believe have read evidence that convinces me that 1% of that gap is due to differences in gene frequency between the races, am I a racist who believes that "black people are inferior"? What if I believe that genes explain 10% of the gap? 50%? 100%? At what percentage am I an evil bigot who should be excluded from polite society?

Yes. And ironically, the one who convinced me of that point is Yarvin/Moldbug. (He actually argued, partly tongue-and-cheek, that Egypt should shut off its internet from the world. And while this sounds outrageous and terrible, remember that he was right about the revolutions in the Arab world, and virtually everyone in the tech world who cheered on the revolutions were wrong).

I think it is fine that some speech is considered beyond the pale. Some speech is in fact dangerous. Power comes from the barrel of the gun -- but speech is used to organize the gun holders. Speech tells the people with the guns who the bad guys are.

My problem is that the wrong people are controlling speech, and for the wrong reasons. De-platforming is being instigated via a heckler's veto -- the biggest cry-bullies try to dictate what is acceptable. I'd rather have speech controlled by an official council selected by a random lottery of citizens, than by self-appointed censors.

And also I don't agree with banning Yarvin/Moldbug in particular. I have found Yarvin/Moldbug to be an amazingly insightful and interesting blogger. The history and sources he has cited has greatly enhanced my understanding of the world. Sometimes he can be abrasive, hyperbolic or a troll, but overall I am better off for having read him. I hate it that I'm scared in real life to mention that I have read his material. I'd rather see him inside the Overton window of conversation.

But the worst aspect of the current attempt to deplatform, is that the line of what is acceptable is constantly changing. If I say "it's silly that someone with male equipment be allowed to use a women's bathroom", does that make me transphobic? Should I be banned from conferences? What about five years from now, when the line has moved? And what belief that is normal now, will be unacceptable in twenty years?

I think MM's answer to the racism charge was much better here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9677367 - he wrote:

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The word "racist" and its conjugations does not appear in the English language until the 1920s - see Peter Frost's cultural history [0]. If you asked Shakespeare if he was a "racist," he would not know what you meant.

"Racist" is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party has ever applied to itself. Like most such epithets, it has two meanings - a clear objective one, describing a person who fails to believe in the anthropological theories of human equality which became first popular, then universal in the mid-20th century; and a caricature of the vices, personal or political, typically engaged in by such a foul unbeliever.

I actually like the answer given by Steve Klabnik above [1]. To call Steve a communist is a serious personal insult, and you can get banned for it [2]. However, Steve reserves the right to call himself a communist, or not, as he likes. This is actually kind of cool... [0] - http://www.unz.com/pfrost/age-of-reason/ [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676630 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676861

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This debate over whether MM is a racist is silly. The word is just an epithet with an ever changing meaning. It's not a descriptive label.

It seems to me you could divide African history into several phases:

1. Pre-Colonialism 2. Era of conquest, enslavement, and plunder (1500s-1900) 3. High Colonialism (c1920-1960) 4. Rule by Cathedral (ie, nominal rule by Africans, but with massive meddling by NGOs, academic experts, leftist activists, and the US State Department)

I took classes on this in college, followed this debate over time, and read many Moldbug cited materials. It seems to me quite clear that era 3 was better for Africans than era 1 and era 4. What Moldbug de-emphasizes in those debates is that era 2 was probably the worst of all. And I think it is ok to criticize him for his lack of emphasis to that point.

However, I think he is right to be upset over the denial that era 3 was better than era 4. Or if it is admitted, the blame always goes the colonialists for not preparing the people for independence, or the blame goes to the CIA, or the blame goes to companies that still maintained a presence in Africa. Never is it admitted that Cathedral meddling has had a massively bad influence.

It seems obvious to me that in the countries of the Congo, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Ivory Coast, that replacing the prior system (which was either colonial rule, limited suffrage) with an attempt at universal suffrage democracy, resulted in massive destabilization and those countries much more violent, and made them materially worse off (I list these because I have actually looked into their history, the same is probably true of the other countries, but I am less sure). Yet it is completely forbidden to make this argument in academia or any establishment media. On this point, Moldbug is very much in the right, and the official point of view is wrong.

IQ tests are designed to be excellent proxies for what we generally understand to be intelligence. They can be better or worse proxies depending on the circumstance. In the particular case of testing black Americans, the IQ tests are quite predictive, and the world looks like what we would expect, if the tests were indeed actually testing intelligence. What is your evidence that IQ tests are poor proxies in the case of testing African-Americans?

A great deal of data seems to show that IQ still is very predictive, even when accounting for socio-economic status. That is exactly what they were originally designed for. SAT tests for instance were designed to find students from poorer and more marginalized backgrounds who nonetheless were still very smart and could achieve if given the chance. This is all covered in the Bell Curve, and well some professors thought that Murray exaggerated the degree of certainty, no one showed that his data was false, nor that the conclusion was false.

Believe it or not, I used to be much more in your camp, but after reading a bunch of sources, including the Bell Curve, Gould's the Mismeasure of Man, dozens of papers from scientists contesting the Bell Curve, responses to those papers, and so on, I came to the conclusions I did. Personally, I would much prefer if the evidence had said otherwise. I don't like being called a racist asshat. But given the evidence is what it is, I don't think it is fair to accuse Silicon Valley of judging people by race over merit, simply based on hiring statistics.

race is not accepted as a biological handicap

That's not an accurate phrasing of my view. If a black person has a 130IQ, they have a 130IQ and their race is not a handicap. No person should view their race as a handicap, or be personally stereotyped based on their race. It is just statistically less likely that a black person has a 130IQ. And that was what the original charge was based on -- the statistical underrepresentation of black people in Silicon Valley.

And yeah, I understand that my particular account has an ideological bent to it. I wish one account could fully represent who I am. But I am a active HN member with a long history of posts on all sorts of issues. But for obvious reasons, in cases where I believe the truth is highly politically incorrect, I have to post on a different account. I do try to respect the spirit of the guidelines, but I am not sure what I should do differently going forward.

I think the whole idea of stereotype threat is ridiculous. Just because of a stereotype I'm going to get dozens of questions wrong on the SAT? That just does not make any sense. (And now that we have a black president who was from Harvard Law, wouldn't we see average LSAT scores start to converge, surely there would be less of stereotype against black people in law).

To see it visually, this is the bell curve based on millions of test results: http://i.imgur.com/zB1oENS.png?1 There are very simply very few black people in the far-right portion. This is not even a disputed fact (the dispute is mainly over why the curve is skewed and if it can be fixed; the existence of the skew is incontrovertible).

This was at least partly because of the way companies recruited: From 2001 to 2009, more than 20 percent of all black computer science graduates attended an historically black school, according to federal statistics—yet the Valley wasn’t looking for candidates at these institutions.

The average SAT scores at Howard are thoroughly mediocre, on par with second and tier state colleges, and you would not expect an elite school to concentrate on Howard, any more than you would expect it to concentrate on Southern Illinois University or the like. The only reason an elite company would recruit at Howard is for diversity reasons.

Foreman is strong-willed, which sometimes gets him in trouble. “I just chalked it up to soft skills, I guess,” he says, explaining that he and his interviewer had clashed. Pratt says he’d been “furious” to learn that Foreman had been passed over. Other companies said no, too.

So was he a good programmer or not? How do we the readers know that he good do the job and was passed up unfairly?

The phenomenon, “stereotype threat,” is getting more attention in the Valley, and companies have begun training employees to be aware of it.

The idea of stereotype threat is extremely dubious - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-none...

“She doesn’t fit the profile of what people think of when they think of engineers. Even though people think of Silicon Valley as a big meritocracy, I don’t think that’s how it works.”

There are now a number of companies that do automated programming interviews -- Starfighter, Hacker Rank, etc. Do these manage to overcome stereotype threat? Do these blind interviews allow through more African-Americans? Before throwing around slanderous accusations, one should actually show that Silicon Valley is treating people with the same programming ability differently.

The sad thing is that these tech companies cannot just admit, "We don't recruit at Howard because the SAT scores are not there." Rather these companies have to pretend that anyone can be a great programmer if they just put in the work, and a lot of people end up with false hopes that only get crushed.

Since when is investing in startups a science? What is anti-intellectual, what is anti-science is to use the wrong tool for the job. Human affairs are not a science in the way that physics is a science. Statistics are far, far more fraught because there are so many variables in play, phenomena are hard to quantify, each case is so heterogenous, etc. You cannot use statistics in human affairs without also having a very good observational understanding of what is actually going on, otherwise you will end up in all sorts of trouble.

If you want a book length treatment, Michael Hart's Understanding Human History is the complete opposite of the typical, Jared Diamond, environmentalist accounts of human society. It is worth perusing - https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/har...

With statistics on human affairs, 99% of the hard part is not the math, it is applying that math to a complicated, heterogenous, and difficult to measure underlying phenomena. And in most cases, statistics alone will never give you a straight answer, the best they can do is supplement and confirm qualitative observations. Failing to recognize this is how you get all those unending media reports about how X is bad for your health. PG's post was at the level of one of those junk health news articles.

That is fine, that is what he was saying. The point is that his solution is completely impractical for the original goal of finding an objective, statistically valid way of measuring whether bias exists. "Borderline" cannot be measured objectively, only by subjective rubric scoring. And when you only measure the borderline candidates, you have reduced an already way-to-small sample even further.

Serious question: can you at least steel man this point of view rather than making it a ridiculous straw man? If you cannot steel man it, what makes you so sure you really understand the argument?

For bonus points, you can also point out the glaringly obvious complication to this chain of logic: A. Interviewers prefer candidates who are like themselves, interviewers are mostly white men, therefore most hires are white men.

Dude, your comments are normally smarter than this. Yeah, you can easily fix Grahams's test -- all you need are some numbers that do not exist and that we cannot measure.

We're talking about VC's evaluating founders. That does not, and cannot, get reduced to a numerical score. And even if VC's did use some sort of scoring rubric, then we would still not know if there was unfairness in the way they made the scores, or unfairness in the selection process. It would just be punting the problem down a layer. PG's central claim -- that a third-party can detect the bias/unfairness in the funding process just using math -- is false.

You can only know if the process is biased/unfair if you have deep qualitative understanding of the process.

First, the sample size not significant. Adding back one data point, Uber, which was a real data point that was intentionally removed, likely reverses the effect.

But imagine we had real sample of thousands of companies, and it did show the result.

A typical scenario is that different demographics might connect with First Round via different deal flow channels. For instance, one channel might be longstanding personal connections, another channel might be outreach to companies in the news.

Now imagine female founders are much more likely to be found via outreach rather than personal connections. Perhaps this is due to a negative personal bias -- the VC's are less likely to be chummy with females because of their sex. So they only find female founders when their company is in the news.

It is typical in all businesses that different deal-flow channels have different average returns. So:

* If both channels perform equally well, no bias will be seen in the statistics, even though the VC's are in fact biased.

* If the outbound channel generally performs worse, then women founders in the sample will perform worse than average, even though the VC's are actively biased against them (they are ignoring all the women who would have done well, if only that had personally known them. Sine the VC's never invest in them, their results are not measured). This is the opposite of the statistical relationship that PG claims should exist.

* If the outbound channel generally performs better, then women in the sample will be better than the average.

I should also add that the differences in the channels might be due to a positive bias on the part of the VC -- perhaps they do more aggressive outbound outreach in order to get more female founders in the pipeline. Or the difference might be due to something completely neutral.

The lesson here is that using statistics is a perilous endeavor. If you want to detect something like bias, you cannot use numbers alone, you need to combine any numbers with a deeper understanding of the selection process. There is no way that a third party can run a simple correlation and determine with any degree of certainty that the field is in fact biased or not.

Except if you want to use statistics to measure bias, you need a statistically significant sample. And actually, if you are studying complex human affairs, with a hundred different variables, you need more than statistical significance, you need a sensitivity analysis. It is similar to nutrition studies. There are so many variables at play that something can always be found to increase or decrease your risk of cancer by 50%. You really only need to pay attention when statistics show an order-of-magnitude correlation, as with the link between smoking and lung cancer.

With the First Round Capital data, they excluded Uber from their calculations, because it would skew everything. If a single data point can switch your findings to be opposite, then you just have to admit that you do not have enough data to make determination one way or another. In science it is sometimes ok to exclude an outlier, since it often indicates a measurement error. But in venture capital, you make most of your money off of the Uber-like outliers. So if you are trying to study the data to be the best venture capitalist possible, throwing out outliers is not valid.

Also, the initial premise is incorrect too. You cannot measure bias by comparing average results, because the average is not the marginal. Consider PG's footnote: "Although I used female founders as an example because that is a kind of bias people often talk about, the most striking thing was the degree to which First Round undervalue founders who went to elite colleges." Does he honestly believe that First Round is biased against founders from elite colleges?

At my last company my sense was that the MIT grads were better than the average programmer. So were we biased against MIT grads? Should we have hired more MIT grads until the average performance of MIT grads overall equaled the average performance of an employee overall? Should we have done more outreach to MIT? Should the industry as a whole hired more MIT grads?

If a talent distribution has a bunch of elite, and then a steep drop-off filled with "pretenders", then you can get this type of effect without being biased.

When we got an elite MIT grad, we hired them. When we got a "pretender", someone who was trading on the name but did not put in the work, we rejected them. And yes, I personally saw MIT grads that did terrible on simple coding exercises.

So even though the average MIT grad we hired was better than the average programmer at our company, there was no way to alter our hiring process to get more MIT grads. If we hired the marginal MIT grad that we rejected, we would have been worse off. Now we could do more outreach to MIT, and we did, but that is a highly competitive process. There were diminishing marginal returns to how much outreach we can do to get more applicants.

The statistical illiteracy of PG's post is simply stunning. Imagine a YC company gets a 100% ROI from PPC ads, and a 50% ROI from banner ads. Are they biased against PPC ads? Should they buy more PPC ads? Such an analysis is ridiculous. You look at what you are spending on the marginal PPC ad, and you stop spending when the ROI on the marginal ad is at zero, regardless of what the average is. That one advertising channel has a higher ROI on average does not mean that the company is biased against that channel.

The questions I asked were representative of things we actually had to do on the job, for instance: "write code to spider a web site." Does that unfairly weed out woman?

Umm, in the actual example we are talking about, the evidence is on the side of that assumption being false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977751 https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i...

1) ask people not include their names on their resume. Or don't use resumes at all. Create a web form application that does not require a name and only asks about the crucial skills you actually need.

2) Create a highly objective hiring process, such as this: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

I don't really buy that subconscious bias is the problem in tech. I've been part of a lot of hiring, we were actually consciously biased toward hiring women since we wanted better numbers. I had an objective interview process, always giving the same questions, and the hiring was still very disproportionately male whasian (the applicant pool was also very disproportionately male whasian, despite doing active reach out to woman-in-tech events).

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But of course the minds of men and women are not identical, and recent reviews of sex differences have converged on some reliable differences. Sometimes the differences are large, with only slight overlap in the bell curves.

...

With some other traits the differences are small on average but can be large at the extremes. That happens for two reasons. When two bell curves partly overlap, the farther out along the tail you go, the larger the discrepancies between the groups. For example, men on average are taller than women, and the discrepancy is greater for more extreme values. At a height of five foot ten, men outnumber women by a ratio of thirty to one; at a height of six feet, men outnumber women by a ratio of two thousand to one. Also, confirming an expectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for males is flatter and wider than the curve for females. That is, there are proportionally more males at the extremes. Along the left tail of the curve, one finds that boys are far more likely to be dyslexic, learning disabled, attention deficient, emotionally disturbed, and mentally retarded (at least for some types of retardation).

At the right tail, one finds that in a sample of talented students who score above 700 (out of 800) on the mathematics section of the Scholastic Assessment Test, boys outnumber girls by thirteen to one, even though the scores of boys and girls are similar within the bulk of the curve [NOTE this was from the pre-1994 SAT where the math section was harder and not truncated at the top. Today the ratio is a bit less than 2-1 at the top end.]. With still other traits, the average values for the two sexes differ by smaller amounts and in different directions for different traits. Though men, on average, are better at mentally rotating objects and maps, women are better at remembering landmarks and the positions of objects. Men are better throwers; women are more dexterous. Men are better at solving mathematical word problems, women at mathematical calculation. Women are more sensitive to sounds and smells, have better depth perception, match shapes faster, and are much better at reading facial expressions and body language. Women are better spellers, retrieve words more fluently, and have a better memory for verbal material.

...

Nonetheless, discussions of the leaky pipeline in science rarely even mention an alternative to the theory of barriers and bias. One of the rare exceptions was a sidebar to a 2000 story in Science, which quoted from a presentation at the National Academy of Engineering by the social scientist Patti Hausman: "The question of why more women don’t choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer: Because they don’t want to. Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works."

An eminent woman engineer in the audience immediately denounced her analysis as “pseudoscience.” But Linda Gottfredson, an expert in the literature on vocational preferences, pointed out that Hausman had the data on her side: “On average, women are more interested in dealing with people and men with things.” Vocational tests also show that boys are more interested in “realistic,” “theoretical,” and “investigative” pursuits, and girls more interested in “artistic” and “social” pursuits.

...

The most dramatic example comes from an analysis by David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow of a sample of mathematically precocious seventh-graders selected in a nationwide talent search. The teenagers were born during the second wave of feminism, were encouraged by their parents to develop their talents (all were sent to summer programs in math and science), and were fully aware of their ability to achieve. But the gifted girls told the researchers that they were more interested in people, “social values,” and humanitarian and altruistic goals, whereas the gifted boys said they were more interested in things, “theoretical values,” and abstract intellectual inquiry. In college, the young women chose a broad range of courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences, whereas the boys were geeks who stuck to math and science. And sure enough, fewer than 1 percent of the young women pursued doctorates in math, physical sciences, or engineering, whereas 8 percent of the young men did. The women went into medicine, law, the humanities, and biology instead.

...

Gottfredson points out, “If you insist on using gender parity as your measure of social justice, it means you will have to keep many men and women out of the work they like best and push them into work they don’t like.” She is echoed by Kleinfeld on the leaky pipeline in science: “We should not be sending [gifted] women the messages that they are less worthy human beings, less valuable to our civilization, lazy or low in status, if they choose to be teachers rather than mathematicians, journalists rather than physicists, lawyers rather than engineers.” These are not hypothetical worries: a recent survey by the National Science Foundation found that many more women than men say they majored in science, mathematics, or engineering under pressure from teachers or family members rather than to pursue their own aspirations— and that many eventually switched out for that reason. I will give the final word to Margaret Mead, who, despite being wrong in her early career about the malleability of gender, was surely right when she said, “If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”

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When you combine the imbalance in high-end math test scores, with the imbalance of innate preference for abstract work versus people work, it is not at all surprising that only 20% of Pinterest would be female.

If Pinterest feels like its hiring practice is not meritocratic, it should fix that.

If Pinterest feels like it is missing out on an untapped candidate pool, it should figure out how to tap that pool.

But there is zero reason to try to make the female ratio 30% for the sake of making it 30%. There is no moral reason, there is no practical reason. Males and females are different, twas ever thus. This obsession with equalizing employment number in all spheres is a bizarre (and destructive) fashion of our age.

With a shareholder system, home owners also have a dividend paying share in the city government. The government pays dividends out of the profits of property taxes. New construction increases property taxes, since new high rises pay a lot more tax than old row homes or vacant blocks. Thus, the owner-shareholder will also gain money from new construction. Conceivably, the city could charge a supplementary "new construction" tax to make the numbers balance out so that home owners would always net gain from new construction. This might not be perfect, the surcharge would discourage building to some extent, but it would be a lot better than the state of affairs right now.

The joint-stock form of government works extremely well for companies that make software operating systems, so I would like to see it tried for companies making physical operating systems (a city being an operating system for people). I don't go as far as moldbug's proposal (and I'm not sure if Moldbug goes as far as Moldbug's proposal, he always likes to frame the debate by making the most extreme argument in one direction). I don't want the corporation to operate the courts or to run the army. There should be an independent court system and the city government would have to follow rule-of-law. But in general, I think formalizing ownership over the city would lead to more pareto optimal solutions, and I think that would be good for the existing residents.

It would be unwise to give all new residents shares, for the reason that you point out. But you would want them to be able to buy shares at market rates. And maybe you also give shares to some class of people who move in, reside a long time, do a certain amount of volunteering, etc.

Actually it is possible. But the irony is that the person who came up with best idea that would have fixed/prevented this problem, has now been ostracized as a "fascist" by the left-wing tech community: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formali...

If circa 2007, San Francisco itself had been turned into a join-stock corporation, with all the existing residents given shares, then all residents would have grown wealthy as the city grew rich. Furthermore, the government would have had an incentive to allow new housing, since that would increase total tax revenues, and thus increased dividends for all residents. Right now, the politically powerful have no incentive to improve new building, since they do not directly benefit.

"He apologized for the series of columns he wrote, and acknowledged that he sourced them poorly"

Are you referring to this article? http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur... I read this as him downplaying the certainty of the genetic hypothesis, in order to get the heat off his back. It is pretty obvious he is scared at getting purged: "I don't want this role...You'll have to judge the evidence for yourself." It is not obvious that he changed his mind. And he apologizes for not disclosing Rushton's associations, not for citing Ruston. He doesn't make any claims that Rushton's studies were bad science that should not be cited. Again, sounds like non-apology apology to get the heat off his back. But I can't peer into Saletan's soul so I don't know.

I don't actually think Saletan's article is a great article. I'm lukewarm on how accurate Rushton's stuff is; I think other evidence for the hypothesis that Saletan leaves out is actually more compelling. But I don't think the article is idiotic either.