lexcorvus

“I thought Obama would do a perfectly fine job, but it just felt inappropriate to have a black man as President of the United States.”

Such a person would be pilloried as a racist.

It's astonishing how often people imply or explicitly assert that white men don't understand what it's like to live in a society hostile to their race and sex. A cursory glance at, say, the New York Times shows that such hostility is in fact pervasive—even, bizarrely, among white men themselves.

—Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, 1840

More accurately, they are usually taking the politically fashionable stand on controversial topics. If you can imagine a Nobel Peace Prize being granted to a vocal defender of apartheid or a staunch opponent of abortion, you imagine a world very different from the one we live in.

If you think, "and thank God for that", it simply means that your political beliefs are fashionable, too. Being on the "right side of history" just means that your side won. Louis XVI was on the wrong side of history, but that doesn't mean we should all become Jacobins—although, in many ways, we have. (I'd guess the Nobel Peace Prize committee would have little problem endorsing liberté, égalité, fraternité.)

In the case of sex differences, we need only one empirical result to determine the null hypothesis: male and female members of H. sapiens have different reproductive incentives. The null hypothesis then follows from an application of simple logic. That I do find convenient.

This doesn't mean the null hypothesis is always correct, of course. For example, there is strong evidence that mean IQ for men and women is virtually the same, which suggests the null hypothesis in this case is wrong. Neither need the null hypothesis conform to a "sexist" narrative; e.g., credible studies in cognitive neuroscience show that women are better on average at multitasking and verbal fluency. But the entire mainstream is committed to marginalizing the null hypothesis whenever it contradicts the politically correct narrative, logic be damned.

You are evidently a supporter of the mainstream, which is why you deride my [use of mathematical notation](https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/493116213803757568) instead of addressing the content of my comment. My respect for your technical work is high, though, and I know you're smart and thoughtful. I suggest grappling with the strongest arguments of those you disagree with rather than resorting to such puerile snark.

(a) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially due to differences in how women and men are treated.

There's also no question that women and men differ biologically. The null hypothesis is thus

(b) differences in reactions to a competitive environment are partially biological in origin.

We thus have joint null hypotheses. Most commentators focus on a for obvious political reasons. Most contrarians focus on b, partially because a receives most of the attention, thus perhaps discounting a unfairly. But both a and b deserve consideration, and the burden of proof is on those asserting either ¬a or ¬b.

By stating that women are "victimized by the perception that their gender prevents them from being competitive", you've implicitly asserted that women are not in fact less competitive because of their gender, but rather are merely perceived to be so. You have thus placed the burden of proof on those who claim otherwise. In other words, by asserting a while discounting b, you have implicitly asserted ¬b as the null hypothesis.

You're in good company, of course: virtually the entire mainstream treats ¬b as the null hypothesis. Indeed, publicly supporting anything other than ¬b in the workplace is not only socially unacceptable, it is probably illegal. Unfortunately, it is also fallacious. The burden of proof is on those who assert that women's biology doesn't make them less competitive in startups and tech.

So, what evidence is there that women and men are equally well-suited to highly competitive environments? Bear in mind that nearly every highly competitive field (not just startups and tech) is now, and has historically been, dominated by men—including in far-flung locations without significant cultural contact. Contra the mainstream, ¬b is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidence.

How did Hacker News evolve from the discussion board for YC, to the discussion board where the first comment on any post involving a YC company is reliably someone crapping on it? What an amazing shift.

My comment was even-toned and didn't criticize any organization in particular. If writing that "[nonprofits] thus deserve extra scrutiny" constitutes "crapping on" anything, we are operating under very different definitions of what it means to crap on something.

(Bayes Impact has explicitly aligned themselves with the social justice movement; if I'd crapped on them, you'd have known it. Instead, I tried to write as even-handed a comment as I could while still making my point. Indeed, it took several edits to remove all traces of snark. I've been rewarded for my efforts with downvotes and a reprimand. This is not the way to foster reasoned discussion.)

In order to be able to evaluate nonprofits more accurately, it would be helpful if they answered the following questions:

(1) What are your goals?

(2) What would constitute meeting your goals?

(3) What is an acceptable cost (in time, money, and attention) to achieve your goals?

(4) What are your plans if you fail to meet your goals at an acceptable cost?

(5) If you end up doing more harm than good, how will you know, and what do you plan to do about it?

It looks like you may be conflating several separate issues here. My point is that science seemed to work fine in, say, the period 1550–1950 without the NSF, NIH, etc., and it's not necessarily a disaster if we return to that model. We don't, at the same time, have to shorten lives, increase brutality, etc. (Democracy is a mixed bag at best, though; for example, in 1783 France was a troubled but basically functional absolute monarchy, and by 1793 it was a universal suffrage democracy that guillotined tens of thousands in the streets of Paris and bound books in leather made from human skin. [1])

[grant writing is] tedious, time-consuming, but apolitical and based on merit.

Getting federal research grants is apolitical only if your subject is apolitical, and the list of apolitical scientific subjects gets shorter every year. There are whole fields of inquiry—exploring heritable cognitive differences (if any) as a function of ancestry, for example—that are essentially verboten, while others (e.g., stem-cell research and climate science) are impossible to separate from politics. Moreover, even apolitical fields are notoriously subject to the whims of (democratically elected) Congress.

[1]: http://bit.ly/FrRevHL

It's worth noting in this context that the current system of government-funded science, which seems normal, in fact was invented more or less single-handedly by Vannevar Bush shortly after World War II. [1] The scenario that worries you was the norm for approximately the previous history of humanity. (This isn't to say governments never funded science, just that they didn't dominate it as the US Government does today.)

Will these patrons support academic freedom? An organization that challenges the social order? What if your research upsets someone; is your career/organization at risk? Will their ideas and whims serve the nation and world?

Every one of these questions applies with equal or greater force to government-funded science. Anyone worried that a private patron of science might, e.g., put his career at risk, should be a thousand times more afraid of the Feds.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush

One of Moldbug's claims is that similar declines in the last two centuries or so have been masked by technological improvements. For example, in the 1960s many people routinely left their cars unlocked, often even leaving their keys in the ignition. [1] Meanwhile, technological improvements in the intervening ~50 years have made it much harder to steal cars. The way to factor out technology in this case is to imagine what would happen if modern cars had no alarm systems, no LoJacks, were easy to hot-wire, etc., and if people routinely left keys in the ignition of unlocked cars. It's not even hypothetical—you could actually do this as a real experiment. The result would, I predict, show that (at least in this narrow respect) American civilization has declined in the intervening years.

[1]: http://www.vdare.com/articles/why-hasnt-crime-fallen-further...

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-alt...

The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone.

It's a long post, but if you're interested in examining the problems we face from a fresh and unusual perspective it's worth reading the whole thing.

Bentham was "ahead of his time" only because his intellectual descendants triumphed. If, e.g., the Nazis had won WWII, 19th-century anti-Semites would have appeared "ahead of their time". In other words, it's wrong to equate "being ahead of your time" with "being righteous".

Bentham was also wrong about sodomy being harmless, at least regarding anal sex. Among other things, anal intercourse causes loose sphincters in its recipients and is far more effective at spreading sexually transmitted diseases than vaginal intercourse. (This is a Humean is, though—a matter of fact. It doesn't necessarily justify banning the practice. That's a Humean ought—a matter of opinion.)

Rogue spellchecker, typo, or Freudian slip?

This statement only applies to the founders, employees, and customers of the company. My point is that it doesn't apply to the investors: from an investor perspective, it doesn't matter if almost every company dies as long as the Droboxes and Airbnbs survive and grow. Almost all the returns come from a tiny number of outrageous successes, to the point where even a big hit like Weebly is a drop in the bucket.

https://medium.com/p/d96f431f4e8e

Money quote:

Around the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.

This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees.

This doesn't make the article true, of course, so absent corroboration we must rely on internal evidence to assess credibility. To my eye, such internal evidence indicates that the story is credible. In particular, the details in the article explain for the first time exactly why Theresa Preston-Werner would have met with Julie Ann Horvath and why the conversation turned so quickly from casual to serious. [1] It also explains more credibly the relationship between Horvath and the allegedly "harassing engineer".

It's tempting to try to shoehorn these incidents into the "sexism in tech" narrative, but we should be willing to concede the point if the shoe doesn't fit. My own guess is that several people screwed up, there were misunderstandings galore, and there's plenty of blame to go around.

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes...