Re:Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
by lmm on Saturday August 29, 2015 @06:35AM
(#10139597)
> I don't know of many people who assert that people are blank slates, they just take equality as the null-hypothesis until they see evidence to the contrary.
You've not been paying attention to the media then. But even a "null hypothesis" of equality is indefensible given the facts. Everything heritable is correlated to a lesser or greater extent, that's just how genetics works. Pretty much anything you can think of a measure for - height, weight, IQ, myers-briggs personality traits, religiosity... - will have different averages for different sexes. It would take an extraordinary coincidence for job performance at some particular job to be uncorrelated with sex.
> And I'm not sure what you mean by "suddenly make sense". Differences caused by discrimination also "make sense", the question is which is the better assumption.
> I think it's unhelpful to assume innate differences, because that assumption encourages discriminatory differences, and so confounds observation.
Assuming that any difference is evidence of discrimination is equally unhelpful. If you want the truth you can't assume one way or the other; you need to consider all the possibilities.
> Poverty traps are caused by economic policy, not anti-discrimination policy.
It can be both. Some anti-discrimination policies (e.g. having black students taught by black teachers) have made things worse for those they were trying to help. And I think those mistakes largely happened because the people involved were unwilling to even consider the possibility of innate differences.
> Do you have any other examples of this "massive collateral damage", because I'm not finding your examples particularly compelling.
Compelling (at least to me), relevant-to-here example: it's illegal in the US, and possibly elsewhere, to use an IQ or similar test in hiring (without doing an expensive study that large organizations may be able to afford but startups generally aren't). This is foolish; it damages the ability of companies to hire the best person for the job, dragging down the whole economy.
You've not been paying attention to the media then. But even a "null hypothesis" of equality is indefensible given the facts. Everything heritable is correlated to a lesser or greater extent, that's just how genetics works. Pretty much anything you can think of a measure for - height, weight, IQ, myers-briggs personality traits, religiosity... - will have different averages for different sexes. It would take an extraordinary coincidence for job performance at some particular job to be uncorrelated with sex.
> And I'm not sure what you mean by "suddenly make sense". Differences caused by discrimination also "make sense", the question is which is the better assumption.
I think there are cases where people will tie themselves in epicycle-like knots where innate differences offer a much simpler explanation - see e.g. http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...
> I think it's unhelpful to assume innate differences, because that assumption encourages discriminatory differences, and so confounds observation.
Assuming that any difference is evidence of discrimination is equally unhelpful. If you want the truth you can't assume one way or the other; you need to consider all the possibilities.
> Poverty traps are caused by economic policy, not anti-discrimination policy.
It can be both. Some anti-discrimination policies (e.g. having black students taught by black teachers) have made things worse for those they were trying to help. And I think those mistakes largely happened because the people involved were unwilling to even consider the possibility of innate differences.
> Do you have any other examples of this "massive collateral damage", because I'm not finding your examples particularly compelling.
Compelling (at least to me), relevant-to-here example: it's illegal in the US, and possibly elsewhere, to use an IQ or similar test in hiring (without doing an expensive study that large organizations may be able to afford but startups generally aren't). This is foolish; it damages the ability of companies to hire the best person for the job, dragging down the whole economy.