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by doorstar 2171 days ago
Are you flat out saying that some races and sexes are not intelligent enough to be in the tech industry?
3 comments

You’re just asking for a long drawn out fight over which cultures emphasize education more.
Scratch out race.

Are you flat out saying that some sexes are not intelligent enough to be in the tech industry?

"Some sexes" is a weird way of saying that, and no. However, women experimentally have a narrower IQ distribution, which means that low and high IQs tend to be dominated by men. It's (I suspect) why there are more male nobel laureates (and programmers) but also more male prisoners.

This is also the expected result if you're familiar with GMV as mediated by sex chromosome pseudodominance in most mammals, including humans.

> women experimentally have a narrower IQ distribution

A glance at Wikipedia shows that this statement is contested. Pretty much every statement about men, women, intelligence, and IQ is contested.

> This is also the expected result if you're familiar with GMV

OK, I'll bite.

https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13293-019-02...

"few sex differences (if any) remain statistically significant"

It amuses me that any article about racism and sexism in the tech inevitably devolves to "It's not racism and sexism if we just think that other races and sexes don't perform well in the tech industry."

> Pretty much every statement about men, women, intelligence, and IQ is contested.

Well obviously, but most of the contests against hard IQ data don’t have much merit.

> <link to paper about gray matter volume>

GMV isn’t “gray matter volume”, it’s “greater male variability” - hence the mention of sex chromosome pseudodominance.

> in the tech industry.

It’s not just the tech industry - every industry will have some selective pressures.

That’s not the reason man. Socially women were driven away from certain fields, that’s all.
I’m not the OP, but I doubt anyones saying that. If anything you’re asking for a long drawn out fight over why some sexes don’t major in STEM more.

The argument is going to boil down to the “pipeline” problem, ‘there’s not enough to begin with for it to be represented in proportion’, which leads to the moral hazard dilemma of do we just started filling quotas.

Edited

The OP has clarified that he thinks that women inherently do not have the skills needed for the tech industry. It's not an unusual attitude, and challenges your assessment that this is a 'pipeline' problem.

As long as tech workers think that some races have 'cultural' problems and as long as some tech workings think that there are differences between men's and women's brains that make women less suited for tech work, I think we have to stop dismissing this as a pipeline problem.

The prejudice is real and all over this thread posters are happily justifying it.

You should try to learn how to discern the difference between “<group> doesn’t have the skills for <activity>” and “<group> is statistically less likely to match selective criteria of <activity>”. It’s a pretty critical distinction.
Does it lead to the same conclusion though. At the end of the day, do you believe that the lack of minorities and women in tech is justified?

If so, that only supports allegations of racism and sexism in the tech industry.

They also said that non-white races look too alike for facial recognition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23462568
They didn't say "they all look alike", they said that white faces have more contrast so are easier to differentiate even with a naïve CV algorithm. It's one more source of systemic bias in the ML literature, especially given the comparative scarcity of source data from non-majority groups.
> It's one more source of systemic bias in the ML literature, especially given the comparative scarcity of source data from non-majority groups.

centimeter's posts in that thread directly reject your proffered line of thought:

  > your training data does not have enough people with dark skin or African American face features
  This isn’t the issue - the issue is lower variance across black faces in any basis.
Here's what I said: "if you partitioned the faces by race the output of the SVD would be much wider for white people [...] white people have more light/dark contrast, more hair colors, more eye colors, etc.". This is an obvious fact that is widely recognized by CV practitioners.
No, but I am saying that there are differences in population-level intelligence distributions across groups. The data is pretty clear on this.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction. If there are differences in 'population-level' intelligence, then some populations are less intelligent, correct?

If some populations are less intelligent, then it is OK to not hire them in the tech industry.

In your opinion, how do you tell the less intelligent populations from the more intelligent populations?

If you use population-level characteristics to make blanket individual-level determinations, you are an idiot.
You can't use statements about populations to draw inferences about individuals - and we hire individuals, not populations. Your entire framing of this issue is 100% backwards.