If candidates from group A perform more strongly on average than those from group B there are other possible causes than bias in the selection process itself. For instance, members of group A may only apply at a higher level of self-assessment for how likely they are to succeed than those in group B. The reason for this could be opportunity cost not present for group B, overconfidence or lack of underconference in group B or underconference or lack of overconfidence in group A.
Comparing sociology to biology in particular ends up unflattering for the former. Biology is a lot more obviously successful than sociology. Sociology has so far failed to produce its equivalent to evidence-based medicine and whenever treatments it has tried to design for social illnesses have not delivered.
I don't think sociology is completely hopeless but given its track record so far I would sooner expect intelligence (and empathy, willpower, etc.) augmentation to cure whatever problems plague society than any attempt at "institutional change".
It is unusual to claim that programming in a statically typed language is more error-prone than in a dynamically typed language, even if only when dealing with HTTP requests specifically. Could you elaborate? It sounds like there might be a story behind this.
I believe that democracy does not scale beyond roughly several hundred voters of roughly equal expertise and ability. I decide whether or not to vote accordingly, which means saying no to local and national elections.
That said, I vote on Hacker News stories. Could HN be an example of a moderated democracy (constitutional monarchy?) working well on a larger scale?
>I just feel like this is the one
thread where there are much bigger
things at stake.
I have no objections to your cause but your current headline is, whether on purpose or not, clickbait. I clicked it because I thought it described an usual event that already happened. I would guess most did for the same reason.
You can't justify clickbait headlines with them having noble causes behind them. It's how you end up with Upworthy.
Speaking of politics, one of the most interesting practical user-facing things about Urbit that I saw in an earlier video demo was the user choosing his or her political affiliation when registering. The claimed affiliation then acts as a mandatory filter for political conversations. You can opt out of participating in any political discussion but not opt in to more than one camp. I think this is a brilliant idea.
Off the cuff, I agree with you, but I also wonder if it isn't an approach only used by a minority of people involved in hiring, primarily those with a technical background. This is the sort if matter on which I would love to see an empirical study based on real data from the industry, not stimulated hiring experiments, unlikely as it may be to happen.
>The sooner we shift
from labor to education as our
source of social dignity the better.
Twin studies suggest educational achievement is highly (over 50%) heritable. If you succeeded at replacing labor with education as a source of human dignity it would be surprising if the relative amount of dignity with which one was imparted did not depend on one's educational achievement. Combined with the first point it would lead to the formation of a kind of hereditary estates of the realm; you'd have the clergy (the academics), the nobles (the highly educated) and the commoners (everybody else). Would you find such an outcome acceptable? (Just to be clear, I mean this as a genuine, not rhetorical, question.)
I think it is only a matter of time until MOOCs start eating into high school and even middle school-level education. Considering that many adults do not remember their high school experience fondly it will be a welcome alternative.
>He also says people with strong
accents are bad founders
More accurately, he said that people who fail to improve their accent over time are likely to be bad founders. I don't have a strong belief about this hypothesis one way or another but I see no reason to dismiss it out of hand (expect for signaling).
>we
shouldn't allow women to be
founders today because they
probably haven't been hackers for 10
years
That "we" shouldn't allow women to be founders is not just an uncharitable interpretation of PG's words, it's a downright implausible one.
>how much a person
is willing to question the hand that
feeds them can reveal the strength of
their character to others.
Careful! You are straying into fundamental attribution error territory. Those who bite the hand that feeds them may be in a better position to do so or feel more encouraged by the people they know.
It boils down to keeping
your identity small (http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html), which may
or may not be truly
possible in practice for
humans who do not lead
a monastic life.
My impression of [4] is that it amounts to a protection racket scheme: "Your business is racist and sexist! I will continue to denounce it until you hire me." Of course, a lot of consultants will approach companies with a "your business sucks but I can fix it" routine but the difference here is the implicit threat to go on giving the company negative publicity if it didn't pay.
I'd answer this question with one word, cynical though the answer may sound to some: signaling. Whatever positive consequences for the socially disadvantaged their efforts might have going about it by hiring loud and popular self-appointed advocates looks a lot like a PR move. There is better bang for the buck in helping the poor in particular (e.g., through the effective charity community) and better expertise available to direct tech projects that might help them but those generally come without the glamour associated with Twitter personalities. Hiring them allows a company to leverage their existing social networks to present a certain image of itself.
As far as I can tell Teflon fumes themselves are only confirmed to be acutely toxic; in humans they cause flu-like symptoms and damage the lungs. The articles I have found do not say anything about there being long-term consequences for those who didn't get the acute symptoms.
You can't edit the text of an Ask HN submission, only change the title.
I tried asking exclusively about the future of Grails a few days ago but it didn't work out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986602. This time I thought I'd cast a broader net; the questions I'm asking are not exactly unrelated anyway.