Before writing the post off with a logical fallacy, perhaps you should consider the biases inherent in doing so, and whether they are distorting your reasoning: http://plover.net/~bonds/bdksucks.html

If my reasoning is incorrect, you should have no trouble finding the error and replying with it.

Or feel free to cite applause points and declare victory. HN is still smart enough to see through such nonsense, though it does get worse every day.

Sure. The error in your reasoning is that you greatly mischaracterize his point, which is that the concept of the natural-born "10x programmer" is quite destructive.

How did I mischaracterize it? From my post: "The article provides lots of evidence that women react badly to this belief..."

Do you disagree that the original author characterizes the belief as false, in addition to destructive?

The effect is not specific to women. The paper he linked is, but it also has a bibliography.

I'm not wasting any more time debating this with you. Cheers.

Isn't the women's performance being the same as men's in the math tests when they weren't told math skills are innate evidence that women are just as good at math as men?

"Women are just as good at math as men" is not the same proposition as "mathematical ability is innate". The latter is not incompatible with the former.

Further, the evidence cited here does not show that women are just as good at math as men, since the samples used were not randomly chosen. The samples chosen consisted of men and women who had already taken calculus (and some other criteria).

http://www.lscp.net/persons/ramus/fr/GDP1/papers/spencer99.p...

The articles do a good job of showing women are sensitive to stereotype threat. But that's all they show.

No. Their performances are the same when they believe it is an ability.

Lots of people like to believe they got something from working hard for it, when they really had a lucky breaks (genetics perhaps for math?, height for basketball, rich parents for business).

I see this in sports interviews all the time. The current best in any sport is always "the hardest worker." Too bad nobody else in the league ever thought about that.

What effect nature has on it may be unclear, but it is definitely there.

>"mathematical ability is not innate, because if it were, women would react badly to this fact."

That's not the argument. I think the argument is that when people are told that they are expected to do worse than their peers, they do, but when they are not told that, the gap disappears. Therefore arguments from statistics about innate ability to perform being associated with other characteristics (being a woman, for example) when widespread, become circular.

This is the argument.

>[...]belief in gift and natural born ability is toxic to all, and by eliminating it, we won’t alienate so many from technology.

This is a consequence of the argument.

As to the identification of some actual physical ability in math or programming which is defined at birth, it requires a positive proof that's not circular. A study on the innate relative unemployability of American blacks would find a lot of statistics to back it up, but would be a circular waste of everyone's time and a consequence of that (based on experimental evidence) would be a higher rate of unemployment in American blacks. Note that the fact that there's a pragmatic consequence of pursuing a field of study in a particular way has no reflection on the truth of the thesis, yet taints the effort of determining that truth.

As far as I'm aware, the only arguments for innate mathematical ability are dripping with survivorship bias.

The article talks about "the myth of the natural born programmer". It is described as "magic" and a "petulant belief". If the article merely argued that the data was not so good and the case for "natural born programmers" was not solid, I'd have no objection.

I think the author is more arguing that believing that talent is innate leads to worse performance.

I thought the article said "People react to bias that can cover up actual innate ability." I buy that idea.