Worst case; in a field where logic is paramount, emotion trumping it on a political correctness card starts to creep into the culture, poisoning everything it touches and slowly bleeding it into just another mostly political, messy, emotional human endeavour.

Honestly, if that’s what it takes for women to feel accepted in this field I would prefer they were not.

etherael (eric@umbralservices.com) on Dear Hacker Community – We Need To Talk

Source: news.ycombinator.com

The answer to why there are more female founders in New York than the Valley is easy: Valley startups tend to be a lot more tech-heavy than NYC startups as a whole. And women in general aren’t drawn to deep technology. I find it interesting how whenever issues of women and technology come up, everyone gets all pc and pretends not to know what the root of the gender gap is. But then if you ask them to count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction, they can’t. Human nature doesn’t change just because we pump a few billion dollars into figuring out how to get girls to love STEM. It’ll never change. Tech heavy centers like Silicon Valley will always have a preponderence of male entrepreneurs and less tech heavy centers like NYC will always be more appealing to female entrepreneurs. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls.
discolemonade

Source: news.ycombinator.com

> That’s because in the past, the IQ tests were not fair, objective and colour-blind, but were set up in such a way as to bias against poorer people (which will be mostly black in the USA).

This isn’t true at all. They haven’t been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. “Disparate impact” merely means that blacks score lower, not that the tests are biased.

> This is easy to do with IQ tests, just ask lots of questions that require good schooling and education (e.g. word questions).

The black-white gap is as large or larger on tasks that require very little education, e.g. “reverse digit span”, which merely requires that you repeat a sequence of numbers in the reverse order from the direction you heard it.

> and has hence probably improved equality.

I’ve never understood why eliminating one of the few objective measures and making the hiring process entirely subjective was an improvement.

kahirsch

Source: news.ycombinator.com

Don’t be too optimistic:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21latina.html

As I said, the confounding factors exist, but they seem relatively minor. Attempting to effectively homogenize the diverse human gene pool through education is anything but a new effort. If it was possible to educate the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo into the cognitive equivalent of Great Neck Jews, don’t you think someone would have tried this already?

Imagine that the remedy proposed was not educational, but rather pharmaceutical. Someone’s selling you a drug that purports to turn Pygmy populations (mean IQ 55 or so - but let’s be generous and add 10 points for cultural bias) into Ashkenazi populations (mean IQ 115 or so).

You might ask: has this drug ever been tried before? Is there any evidence that it can work? And what happens if the Beastie Boys take it - do they become the world’s leading physicists? These would all be very rational questions.

moldbug

Source: news.ycombinator.com

Note also that the methods of 60 years ago (a) discovered Gwen’s ability, (b) promoted her to a commensurate position, (c) gave a productive citizen a genuine sense of achievement and accomplishment. All in a period which was universally racist and sexist by today’s progressive standards.

Now? Gwen’s intelligence would probably also be detected, if by less straightforward and reliable methods. Because her African X chromosomes confer not one but two Diversity Points (tm), every institution she came in contact with would have a strong bureaucratic incentive to promote her not only to her actual abilities - but beyond them.

As a result, she’d be very likely to end up placed in a position where rather than leading enterprise IT projects, she was competing with (say) top-notch particle physicists. Lacking (like almost all of us) the mental horsepower to perform at this level, she would constantly feel like a fraud, and her colleagues would constantly suspect her of being a fraud. A suspicion which would be correct, though you couldn’t really say it was her fault.

Lesson: be careful about hating on the past. Often the past looks pretty retarded by the standards of the present. Often the converse is the case as well.

moldbug

Source: news.ycombinator.com

Assuming this isn’t a trick…

There are two likely scenarios:

1) The employers are racist biggots based on things that don’t correlate with job performance. In this case betting against them is a winning strategy.

2) The employers are racist based on observed data from previous hires. Based on that they assume that a person with an Arab name is less able to perform. This may not be fair for the individual, but may be right on average. In this case betting against them is a losing strategy.

Given that the muslim world had all the knowledge the western world used to restore science after the dark ages yet have partially returned to them today, there may be some (tangential) evidence for 2.

And that is really scary.

Tommy Jensen (tomjen3)

Source: news.ycombinator.com

The problem with the pedophile argument is that being called a bitch or treated like a secretary cannot result in you ending in jail.

After this can we please not post anymore racist/sexist/*ist stuff? I don’t know about you, but I come here for the news about tech and the super insightfull comments and these stories seem a waste of brain power.

Tommy Jensen (tomjen3)

Source: news.ycombinator.com

Man this proves that -women- python programmers have no sense of humor.

Yes it is a lame joke. Really lame and yes it should probably have been turned of.

But dammit that joke is not sexistic — just because it involves naked women (and presumably the the guy) doesn’t mean it is against women. The joke has been said plenty of times in response to ‘it is very small and hard to find’, ‘it doesn’t look like much yet’, etc.

Go be a feminist somewhere else.

Tommy Jensen (tomjen3)

Source: news.ycombinator.com