What qualifies these groups as tech circles? Sure 4chan is a website, but there's nothing that seems to indicate that it's primarily populates by tech workers. It seems just as [un]justifiable to point at Tumblr, Jezebel, etc. and claim that far left progressives "came out of tech circles".
Activists target an organization for not having a proportional representation of Group X, and claim this must be solely due to racism, misogyny, white supremacy, and so on. The most effective argument against this claim is that the skill distribution of Group X is different. Activists claim this argument is itself racist or white supremacist, so the only people making it publicly are fringe racists.
There is plenty of peer-reviewed research suggesting IQ differences between racial or ethnic groups. Cultures are different too. Groups of people differ, on average, in every other aspect, why would intelligence be any different?
Does this mean we should deport all immigrants, refuse to interview certain races, judge people collectively rather than as individuals, speak hatefully about them, or bar them from our neighborhoods? Of course not.
Does this mean only high IQ people are valuable and deserving of respect? No way. Every human deserves dignity and equal treatment.
Does this mean I'm a white supremacist or misogynist? I'm a woman from a WASP family. I used to work as a quant, a perfectly meritocratic job: Either your ideas made money or they didn't. The market doesn't know or care what color your skin is, which gender you prefer dating, or what's between your legs.
My best colleagues weren't the country club elite. They were disproportionately Eastern European Jewish, Chinese, and Indian immigrants. And when you look at the data, those are the groups that perform best on standardized tests, on average. People from my background are pretty average in that regard, nothing to get supremacist about.
I do have some issues with what you wrote.
My first problem is with IQ tests in general. Psychology is a soft science. It's recently been revealed to be even softer than we thought. The replication crisis in psychology and other soft sciences has made me very skeptical of science that's not hard enough to be tied immediately down to physics, math, and logic. In softer sciences the beliefs of the researchers seem to have a disturbing amount of effect on the outcome.
My second and larger problem is that racism and sexism are extremely common. Years ago I would not have said that, but the recent outpouring of overt hard-core racism and misogyny has convinced me that the activists were right. Either a huge number of formerly not-racist and not-misogynist people suddenly underwent a mass conversion, or the taboo on openly discussing these topics was broken on social media and people suddenly started saying what they really thought. I lean toward the latter, since the explosion of this stuff was just so fast and so extreme.
Given that huge numbers of people are racist and sexist, it's extremely hard to untangle any biological a priori differences from outcomes owing to prejudice.
Personally I think both you and the activists are right in that both causes are in play, but the only way to find out what percentage is due to what is probably to attack prejudice as a potential cause and then see what residual remains. Prejudice is easier to address than genetic differences since ideas are not encoded in DNA and we don't really have the technology (yet?) to boost intelligence physically either through genetic engineering or augmentation.
I do not personally support heavy-handed imposition of quotas as advocated by some activists, but I do think something ought to be done. Again I wouldn't have said that years ago, but the explosion of racism and misogyny on social media changed my mind significantly on this issue. I've been driven a lot further to the left on numerous issues in recent years from being just so shocked and appalled at ideas that are apparently much more common out there than I would have thought. I thought that stuff was dead.
But I've been in tech all my life and I haven't experienced any neo-nazi ideology within it. Neither have any of my friends. Sure you're not exaggerating?
I do have to add though that all human experiences suffer from the curse of small sample size. I guess a more rational takeaway from my comments would be that the liberal bias in tech is not as universal as some people would think, and that the extreme hard right does have a presence in tech.
And while mysogyny, sexism, racism, and even hardcore violence "exists" in tech, it is FAR more prevalent in hip hop circles ( http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/ ).
So you're going to be just as hard about this with rappers, right?
As for rappers-- you're right, but rap doesn't have a progressive public image at least insofar as womens' issues are concerned. As far as I can remember the rap scene has always been criticized as full of misogyny.
I think the recent rise in online fascism and racism is because activists force normal people to deny the reality they see and live every day. Otherwise they're shouted down as racist, white supremacist, misogynist, have their jobs threatened by online mobs, and so on. Like Captain Picard defiantly insisting there are four lights, they seek places where they can speak their truth.
When everyone who speaks against blank slateism, cultural relativism, and white privilege gets shouted down, these places only exist underground, in unmoderated spaces. They're quite seductive and even reasonable at first: Men and women are a little different; Unlimited unskilled immigration can hurt a country; Cultures that engage in female genital mutilation are bad; Nuclear families produce better outcomes for children; Being overweight is unhealthy and unattractive; It's not a problem if Google has a lot of Asian men working there.
"Wow, I've finally found a place where people aren't lying to my face all day" they think. But since they're unmoderated, things quickly take a more sinister turn: [Race or religion] is responsible for all our problems; Gays are degenerate; All women are whores; Build the wall; Naziism gives your life meaning; Violence is the answer.
I think if we let up a bit on the over-moderation, online mobbing, calling people racists thing, most sane people would never seek those spaces to begin with.
FWIW, I've really enjoyed discussing this with you. Most people who disagree with me are very aggressive and resort to insult rather than an honest two-way conversation. The thing you said about eliminating prejudice is especially important. Even though I believe people in America enjoy some of the least biased treatment in all of human history, there are still problems like corporations shielding executives from serious sexual harassment claims and police brutality against unarmed minorities. We can, and should, do better.
Anyway I still have a hard time buying that tech is a prejudiced place run by privileged, straight, white, Christian men: Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are Indian, with tan skin and a totally foreign culture to most Americans, yet they run Google and Microsoft. Larry and Sergey are descendants of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Sandberg is a Jewish woman in a high-level, power position at Facebook. Tim Cook is openly gay. These people are in the highest level positions running some of the most valuable companies in the entire world.
1) IQ is a good measure of aptitude
2) White people have higher IQs
Congratulations you are a white supremacist.
Certain groups of black men are taller and stronger, on average, than any other sub-population of humans. When I watch the NBA, which selects for the far-far-right tail of the distribution in height and strength, it's not surprising that an astonishingly large majority of players are drawn from those groups. I'm not surprised to see zero women. I'm not surprised to see very few white men, and even fewer Asian men able to compete at that level.
Does that make me a black supremacist or something?
Hell a lot of it incubated right here on HN before the de-facto policy became to flag/shadowban that stuff. Go back to HN circa 2010-2011 and the site's full of it. I'm pretty convinced that if the admins hadn't banned that stuff HN would be a highbrow 4chan /pol by now, since everyone else would have bailed when it got increasingly hard-core.
I've encountered casual racist attitudes elsewhere, but tech circles are the only places I've found significant numbers of true believers in the Bell Curve and people who think a single number (IQ) quantifies the worth of a human being. It's also, like I said, the only place I've had people try to evangelize me to hard-core fascist ideology.
There's a world of difference between having casual negative attitudes toward other races because your family held them when you grew up and having an explicit ideological belief system that advocates racism, totalitarianism, and hyper-elitism. It's the difference between an un-examined bias and an examined, affirmed bias. I've found the former in places like Ohio and North Carolina. I've found the latter primarily in tech.
It does surprise me to find these views in tech. It surprises me because tech is all about changing the way things are, so I wouldn't expect to find total commitment and capitulation to the naturalistic fallacy. But here it is.