[samps]

I'm honestly shocked at the lack of empathy on display in this comment thread. The technology world has a diversity problem—why not assume that this is a good-faith effort to address it, just expressed in words you don't like? Why instead flip directly into Internet Outrage Status?

This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are people complaining about the very notion that there might be something wrong with how hiring and promotion happens in technology. There are people, like @yoodenvranx, equating their own anecdotal problems with the victimization of white men. There are countless comments asserting that we are capable of "pure meritocracy," a notion that is invalidated by research on implicit bias.

The overwhelming consensus here is that (a) there is no problem, and (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust. This is why Hacker News looks to the outside world like a self-affirming bubble with no grounding in reality.

[malandrew]

Did you read that slide and the comments others have made addressing it? Even after going through some seriously generous contortions to assume good faith, it's racist and alarming.

I also don't think your comment extends good faith you are demanding to the comment and commenters which you're addressing.

    there are people complaining about the very notion that 
    there might be something wrong with how hiring and 
    promotion happens in technology.

I haven't gotten past the topmost comment thread on this HN post, but I have yet to read one comment here that makes this argument. Many here are addressing a particularly troublesome form of racism using a slide and other primary evidence as exemplary of this type of creeping racism. I haven't yet read a comment that argues that "(a) there is no problem", so the "consensus" you're asserting isn't there. I do agree that there is generally consensus about your second point " (b) GitHub's attempts to address it are unjust.", but maybe it's because GitHub's attempts just might be unjust?

[hitekker]

Comments like the one you replied to, threaten to derail our discourse with the distortions you've already pointed out.

Comments like yours, on the other hand, are the reason I come to HN. Measured rebuttals without being too biased one way or the other-- it really enhances the reading experience of those going through this thread.

It's hard to convey my appreciation through an upvote, since that can be confused for just popularity, so I had to say it here.

[colmvp]

Personally it irks me that tech has excellent representation of diversity in the forms of people of colour, specifically Asians from different a diverse set of backgrounds, yet they don't count in the tally of diversity.

[samps]

Yes, that's worth celebrating!

But we also have to remember that, to someone not in those well-represented groups, it's not a huge consolation. Diversity isn't a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.

[malandrew]

True, but we need to ask valid questions like "Why do we have a bunch of diversity in this vector, but not this other vector? If tech was fundamentally intolerant of diversity in general like many claim, wouldn't we lack diversity in all vectors? Why causes might contribute to the disparity between these two diversity vectors with different representations?

Overall, I rarely if ever see anyone arguing for diversity asking hard questions like "Why are there many Asians and Indians even though there aren't many Women, Hispanics/Latinos and Black people?". What are these successful identity groups doing differently that is affording them much success in being well represented or even over represented? How might the under represented groups adopt the same approaches to achieve the same success?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't solve unconscious bias as well, but I'm less inclined to first consider solutions that address unconscious bias if those solutions are proposed by someone who hasn't also considered other explanations and solutions because they aren't applying the null hypothesis in their thought process.

Also, how about some multi-variate analysis to determine which factors most greatly contribute to the diversity gap for each underrepresented group? We can't adequately fix what we don't measure and I really don't see a lot of measurement going on. For example, all successful startups understand and apply concepts of a user acquisition funnel and pipeline, but then people complain loudly in simplistic terms that the "pipeline problem is a myth". I don't understand how you can the former technique with great success and hold the latter incongruous thought in your head at the same time.

https://medium.com/life-tips/the-null-hypothesis-loves-you-a...