I see this a lot and I just don't understand it. Everyone in this problem seems desperate to point the finger to someone else. And it's not just sex, it's race too.

Having problems hiring black tech workers? It's the college's fault.

Having problems graduating black students with BSs in STEM? It's the high school's fault.

Having problems graduating black students from high school? Really it's the fault of the community or family that raised them.

Having problems fixing the community's culture? Really it's the fault of poverty.

Having problems fixing poverty? Really it's the fact that no good jobs will hire us.

This isn't a pipe that just spits kids out when they're about to be hired, every single person in that pipeline is desperate to pretend that it's someone further down the line's problem, except once you go far enough down the pipe you end up back where you started. It's not a linear pipe spitting individual kids out that we just can't do anything about. It's a cycle and wherever it is that we exist in that cycle, be it elementary education or hiring Senior Devs at a FAANG, we have a responsibility to step in and do something about it. Enough passing the buck.

It’s just a regressive position on diversity masquerading as being a reasonable progressive one. Take something that’s easier to fix from a centralized location, and instead argue for individual responsibility. Like how instead of complaining about oil companies destroying the environment and corrupting our political system, we should all just recycle and buy Teslas, like a buncha radicals or something :)

I think sure, do what you can at an individual level if you want but that’s so much less important. You’re not gonna change the household conversations happening in millions of houses, and telegraphing what YOU are doing for your daughters in Silicon Valley is more narcissistic than political.

It is the supply pipeline. It takes 20+ years for the easy path to grow a competent software developer. If the supply stalls in primary school, you don’t recover from that. Looking at the end of the pipe isn’t that useful.

Even the hard path (someone going into it starting at college) takes 4+ years.

All FAANG is doing right now is concentrating a limited supply, making diversity worse in the rest of the industry. They aren’t magically creating new supply via aggressive hiring practices.

We've asked you several times to stop using Hacker News for ideological purposes and you haven't, so we've banned the account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at [email protected] and we believe you'll post according to the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Success Sequence is bunk, here's some reading on it[1] but the basic idea is that in those three points you laid out number 3 does basically all the explanatory work, number one does a little work and number 2 does almost nothing.

>This is a problem of culture and a lack of personal responsibility.

Okay then where does that culture problem come from? Does it just emerge from the ether to grab black people and wipe away their "personal responsibility"? No, that culture emerges from the same society you're desperate to exonerate. There are many factors that influence that culture and systemic poverty is a huge one. You want to fix poverty in black America? Great, then hire them.

[1] http://www.demos.org/blog/8/5/15/economic-institutions-shoul...

http://www.demos.org/blog/8/13/15/success-sequence-extremely...

http://mattbruenig.com/2017/07/31/the-success-sequence-is-ab...

So the conclusion here is that failing to graduate high school and becoming a teen parent has little impact on life outcomes? I'm sure Bruenig is right when when he says that the ability to stay out of poverty is mostly determined by the ability to hold a job. But thats basically a tautology.

Did AEI shoe-horn in their pet theories into the analysis? Sure. On the other hand, does Bruenig (or anyone) believe that holding a job is casually independent from the sets of behavioral traits that lead people into failing high school and becoming teen parents?

> that culture emerges from the same society you're desperate to exonerate

Accusations of motivated reasoning cut both ways. He could say that you seem just as desperate to implicate society as he is to exonerate it.

>So the conclusion here is that failing to graduate high school and becoming a teen parent has little impact on life outcomes?

The conclusion is that it has little impact on your ability to not be "permanently poor" as the prior commenter stated.

>On the other hand, does Bruenig (or anyone) believe that holding a job is casually independent from the sets of behavioral traits that lead people into failing high school and becoming teen parents?

Saying "these things aren't independent" and saying "these things have a strong causal connection and here's the direction" are worlds apart so let's not treat the former as our motte and the latter as our bailey.

>Accusations of motivated reasoning cut both ways. He could say that you seem just as desperate to implicate society as he is to exonerate it.

Motivated reasoning requires a motivation, eg motivated reasoning would be '... that you're desperate to exonerate because you're racist.' But I never did that. And I don't mind the accusation that I'm implicating society here, I am.

The steelman of the Success Sequence (i.e. ignoring the shoe-horning that Bruenig pointed out) is that there are cultural/normative/behavioral tendencies that come prior to systemic oppression or poverty. These tendencies have a "strong casual relationship" with life outcomes like teen pregnancy, successfully holding jobs, etc.

Is there any conceivable evidence for this view that would be compelling to you? Is there a possible state of life outcomes that cannot be explained by pointing at "the system"?

> Motivated reasoning requires a motivation

Suppose X says to Y, "you are desperate for claim Z to be true." I think a strait-forward reading implies that X has some motivation to believe in Z independent of Z's truth value. No claim regarding the nature of the motive is necessary.

>The steelman of the Success Sequence

Well now I'm interested, what do you take to be the steelman of Bruenig's/my position?

>Is there any conceivable evidence for this view that would be compelling to you?

Well for one I'm not talking about behavioral tendencies writ large, I'm specifically talking about cultural and normative tendencies. Two you haven't posted any evidence that those come prior to systemic oppression.

>Is there a possible state of life outcomes that cannot be explained by pointing at "the system"?

Let's think about fish in an aquarium. Is there a possible state of the life outcome of a fish that isn't actually explained by pointing at the conditions of the tank? (I'm actually interested in your answer)

Whoa whoa whoa back up.

>the most assisted demographic in America has been black

source?

>and they've shown little to no progress

source?

>whereas Asians have been the most prejudiced against

source?

>and they've shown the most

source?

And that doesn't even begin to address the issue of comparing Asians, who had the resources to immigrate here, with black Americans, who were brought here as slaves and had restricted civil rights until 1964.

Sex targeted toys sell. Most parents want that for their kids. It's not a conspiracy by the toy companies.

I wouldn’t say, “most parents want [sex targeted toys]”. Rather parents give the toys their kids want. Kids want what they see, and the see gender specific toys.

>I wouldn’t say, “most parents want [sex targeted toys]”. Rather parents give the toys their kids want. Kids want what they see, and the see gender specific toys.

I don't know. The pink bicycles vs non-pink bicycles thing applies to adults too. See 'pink tax'.

Sure its not the parents. Kids 'want' what they see on tv, see their friends have, see who the toy's aimed at etc. Its cultural. Which means, learned.