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.
With reference to Africa, you can define the Cathedral as the permanent staff of the U.S. State Department, the universities and think tanks that operate with a revolving door with the State Department, and the NGOs funded by State (or funded by the UN which is in turn funded by USG according to State Department policy). There was a conventional wisdom among this network of institutions. They had great power, they pushed policies across Africa. They insisted that the colonial rulers give up power and hold universal suffrage elections, and used the hard and soft power of the world hegemon to make it so. They got their wish, and that change resulted in disaster across the continent.
At exactly the point where you think this actually fucking matters when evaluating the value of those people.
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?
You know, that there actually really were/are actually people who actually thought black/latino/etc. people were actually inferior... actually. For Real. Historical Fact. Period. That the term "racist" clearly and unambiguously identifies those people.
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?
Does free speech have the power to corrupt other minds at a level that that free speech should instead be controlled?
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?
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.
For example, in one comment he rambles on about colonialism being not-so-impeachable because those Africans were brutes prior to and after colonization. The problems with a statement like this really are quite obvious
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.
All human fields of study are very messy, they are not precise sciences in the way that Newton's laws are.
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.
If the top article on the Hacker News home page contradicts the evidence and the data that I have read, what am I supposed to do? I did not paste in a pre-written screed. I have read a lot on this subject, so I had a bunch of links and sources at my fingertips. It seems to me that posting as someone who has read a lot on this issue, and who can cite sources, is a much greater net contribution to the discussion than otherwise.
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 gave a link to stereotype threat earlier - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-none... And keep in mind, even if the studies were replicable, the studies did not even show that stereotype threat shows up in the real world, or that it causes the one standard deviation gap. What the original study showed was that on a non-meaningful test, if the professor suggests a stereotype, the gap in test scores grows bigger than one standard deviation.
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).
The imgur photo came from the Bell Curve by Charles Murray. There was some controversy about parts of the book, but the fact that blacks score one standard deviation lower on IQ tests was never disputed. You can also find this by just googling "race and SAT scores" "race and LSAT scores". Look at the official results put out by those organizations, and you will find that on every single test the average black score is about one standard deviation lower than the average white score.
After the Bell Curve was published a 52 professors from around the country, representing a majority of those responding, signed a statement on the mainstream science on intelligence, saying:
> "The bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the bell curve for American blacks roughly around 85; and those for different subgroups of Hispanics roughly midway between those for whites and blacks. IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes. Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Source: https://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea...
Again, the difference in average cognitive test scores is simply not in dispute.
Computer programming is one of the most cognitively demanding professions in existence. Ability to program correlates pretty highly with cognitive test scores, such as the SAT Math. If you look at the top scorers on such tests in America, only about 1% are black. The ratio of black engineers in Silicon Valley matches what you would expect based on the test scores.
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.
“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.
This idea that statistics can only confirm and supplement "qualitative observations" (I.e. my priors) is completely unscientific and anti-intellectual.
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.
This may be a better place to start -- https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i... and https://jaymans.wordpress.com/about/. VDare tends to preach and agitate to the already converted, that is the peril of having to survive on donations. That said, while Steve Sailer is snarky, he is also reputable. He takes good care to not get things wrong. I've been following him for a while, and when some bit of news comes out, or some new policy gets announced, and the NY Times says one thing, and Sailer says another, Sailer almost always ends up getting proved right.
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...
OK I missed that you meant "easily fixed" in the strictly mathematical sense, not in the practical, real-world application sense.
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.
A charitable interpretation of what he or she said is this: don't evaluate bias by looking at outcomes of the average applicant, look at the outcomes of the borderline applicants.
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.
B. The uterus and melanin both inhibit programming ability, interviewers are perfect judges of programming ability, therefore most hires are white men.
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.
Compute min(accepted a) and min(accepted B) instead of the means.
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.
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.