[jwond]

> black peoples' bodies are far more suited for strenuous physical activities than asians'

> […]

> The reality is asians aren't as physically capable as other races, generally speaking.

Do you apply similar logic to explain why black people are underrepresented in technical fields while Asian people are over-represented? Would you say that Asian peoples’ minds are “far more suited” for strenuous intellectual activities than black peoples’?

[the_third_wave]

Given that he's "accusing" his own race of being less physically capable I can only assume that the same goes for other traits in other races. Have a look at who has been winning long distance running events for the last few decades and you'll quickly find out that people from a certain area - nay, a certain tribe [1] - in Kenya are grossly overrepresented. This is not because they're all using doping like e.g. athletes from the former DDR did, it is because they share a mixture of genes and culture which makes them exceed in this field. Going by the data it seems clear that people from certain areas in the world - mostly in Asia and Europe - share a mixture of genes and culture which makes them exceed in what you call "strenuous intellectual activities" [2].

You seem to be upset over his pointing out this fact. Why is it no problem to point out that these Kenyans are dominating long distance running - even NPR reports about this - but problematic [3] to point out that the Japanese, Swiss, Chinese, Americans and Dutch dominate when it comes to intellectual pursuits? I suspect this is because intellectual pursuits have a higher standing among the "educated" classes who tend to ruminate about these things than physical activities. In a way this itself is problematic just like the way many "educated" people look down upon physical labour is problematic - to use a term often bandied about by those same people. A healthy society needs both those who are more into physical activities as well as those who are more into intellectual pursuits to develop and thrive - this is true diversity.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/01/241895965/...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/duncanmadden/2019/01/11/ranked-...

[3] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-problematics/

[jwond]

I’m not particularly upset, and I don’t necessarily disagree with the rest of your comment.

My comment was more related to the fact that in my experience there are quite a number of people who have no qualms about suggesting that black people are over represented in sports like running and sprinting, professional basketball, and professional football because they are just naturally better athletes, but then will absolutely refuse to even entertain the possibility that some other races or ethnic groups might be naturally better in other fields like science and engineering. I find that sort of thinking rather inconsistent, so I was mostly just probing to see what the person I was replying to believed.

Of course this sort of discussion is going to be controversial since suggesting that a certain ethnic group is naturally better than other ethnic groups in some sense, even if only in certain areas, would seem to fit the traditional definition of racism.

[Dalewyn]

I definitely agree that society should be more open to admitting that certain groups and individuals are better at a given task than others.

We can't make meaningful decisions until we properly understand the reality in which we all live.

[kesor]

I wouldn't say they are less intellectually capable. But the number of black people who grow up in an environment of computers, engineering, etc... is much much lower than the comparable number of white or asian young men who grow up in such environments.

This is also the reason why there are far few women software engineers than men. It is not about their capabilities, physical, intellectual or otherwise. It is about their environment where they grow up in - some people grow up with programming computers from very early age because their parents do something similar, most of these (by a wide margin) are white or asian boys.

[zztop44]

But most early computer programmers were women. If it’s just the environment they grew up in, then why did programming computers shift over the 20th century from being a job dominated by women to a job dominated by men?

For the record, I also don’t think it’s about “differences in capabilities”. I think that amongst other things, as personal computing came of age different types of men became attracted to computing, and changed the culture around computing to one which excluded women (in most cases probably unintentionally). If that’s true, there might be parallels with the software industry today and race.

[gruez]

> But most early computer programmers were women. If it’s just the environment they grew up in, then why did programming computers shift over the 20th century from being a job dominated by women to a job dominated by men?

Early computer "programmers" were doing something more akin to data entry than churning out CRUD apps using the latest js framework. Comparing the programming jobs of the 70s or whatever to the jobs today therefore makes little sense.

[kesor]

Early "computers" were also women. Because the engineering work was done by men and the computational "menial work" was done by women. These same women were replaced by digital computers later on, and some of these women felt "at home" with the new medium since they had better familiarity with what is going on in there than men did.

But that was the 60s and 70s, and the women at the time were in their 20s and 30s.

Many of those women remained "computers" and did not go into "engineers", and there is a big difference between the two. A computer is great at solving equations and doing the menial work of data calculation, similar to what we use spreadsheets for today.

Engineers on the other hand is a more creative approach to problem solving, when presented with various problems (not just of math) that need some solutions, an engineer would try and find that solution by being creative.

About 20-30 years ago, there was a large population of engineers around the world who are the parents of today's engineers who are 20-30yo right now. Those engineers were white men, and women, and asian men and women. Not many of them were black families, so today's 20-30yo black men (and women) are not only a small portion of the world population, they are also heavily underrepresented in engineering. That is not to say they are incapable, as I mentioned above, it is more influenced by the "environment" where these people grew up in.

Also, early women programmers does not mean that today's women had the same upbringing and attraction to the same professions as the women in the 60s and 70s. Back then being a "computer" was similar to being a secretary, it involved a lot of menial work and precision. Today's secretaries might be required to be good with spreadsheets and document writing software, quite a leap away from programming.

The above are generalizations, since there are absolutely definitely amazing women software engineers today, as well as black men software engineers. It is just that they are barely a minority in the software engineering industry, there are just very few of them - which makes sense why the software engineering jobs don't have any significant representation of these people working there.

[Dalewyn]

Assuming there are no underlying systemic discriminations or inhibitors at play, the results speak for themselves.

The brutal reality is that various peoples and individuals have varying aptitudes to various things depending upon their genetic makeup, upbringing, social factors, and more.

You literally can not round up a random group of people and expect them all to behave the same. That's not how this works.

[makeitdouble]

> Assuming there are no underlying systemic discriminations or inhibitors at play, the results speak for themselves.

Systemic discrimination and inhibitors can't be set aside in a discussion about representation. The results you're referring to have those two baked in.