safek

Since it's certainly possible that blacks have genetically higher IQs than whites but are environmentally made to underperform, isn't that all the more egregious? Wouldn't that be an important, uplifting thing to know? Why not find out?

When people are anxious about genetic explanations, it's usually because they're afraid of one group underperforming. "Look, we know blacks score lower on IQ tests, but we've got to be careful here—they have bad environments." But actually we have the tools necessary to model outcomes like this. If it's true that blacks are underscoring despite a genetic advantage, eventually this truth will emerge.

So when people are worried a priori that an investigation into genetic explanations will disfavor blacks, either they fundamentally don't believe these things can be rigorously studied, or they're worried that even under fair standards blacks will underperform. The former implies unknowability of truth, the latter genuine racism.

The canonical reply here is that while it's true IQ tests a narrow range of abilities, (a) it's highly predictive of various facets of success in life, and (b) "specialists" are relatively rare, in that intelligence tends to be fairly well correlated across disciplines.

They concede that IQ (a) exists, (b) predicts many life outcomes, (c) differs between groups, and (d) is partly heritable. If an alien at this point were presented with these premises, does anyone suppose its natural conclusion would be, "this must be completely due to environmental factors, and not in the least genetic ones?"

Surely claiming a difference of outcome is entirely due to environmental factors is as extreme as claiming it's entirely due entirely to genetics. Yet imagine the uproar if someone had claimed the latter. Contrast that with the support Vox has gotten for their article.

It is dangerous to require a conclusion to be true rather than being open to whatever is.

Fair enough.

You are possibly right to be frustrated about gender problems, but your suggestion — that in the fight for gender equality it's ok to construct a double standard for men and women — is mistaken. If you want to fix gender inequality, fix specific unjust advantages and disadvantages. The idea that because men have blanket "privilege" women should be compensated with additional privileges leads to more inequality, not less.

The assumption that a woman is not capable of holding that opinion is sexist.

The strange thing is that the same comment has been used in support of gender equality. In Iceland, where every board must have at least 40% representation for each gender, they interviewed some female CEOs, who said something like, "Men are selfish! That's how we got the financial crises. Women will look out for the good of the group. It's in our DNA."

Sorry. I wrote it impulsively and thoughtlessly.

Have you considered using a Chromebook? It costs $150 and runs Ubuntu.

Holy shit are you the dude who was on Shark Tank? That episode was hilarious hahahaha

Link is down.

> Do not ever even attempt a big-bang rewrite

Really? Are there no circumstances under which this would be appropriate? It seems to me this makes assumptions about the baseline quality of the existing codebase. Surely sometimes buying a new car makes more sense than trying to fix up an old one?

That's true. I suppose my next argument is that seeing matrix.append(row) on its own line signals strongly that this is not a functional language.

On the other hand, how many languages do you know where arrays are passed by value?

That's the fallacy GP is anticipating and parodying.

I wish people would drop the theatrics when writing these. Here's the same article rewritten without loss of substance:

---

I looked in­to blockchain tech­nolo­gies care­ful­ly and I’ve end­ed up think­ing it’s an over­pro­mot­ed niche sideshow.

I’ve seen wave af­ter wave of landscape-shifting tech­nol­o­gy sweep through the IT space: Per­son­al com­put­er­s, Unix, C, the In­ter­net and We­b, Java, REST, mo­bile, pub­lic cloud. And with­out ex­cep­tion, I ob­served that they were ini­tial­ly load­ed in the back door by geek­s, with­out ask­ing per­mis­sion, be­cause they got shit done and helped peo­ple with their job­s.

That’s not hap­pen­ing with blockchain. Not in the slight­est. Which is why I don’t be­lieve in it.

Yeah, on a personal note, I do actually wish I had more time for my own stuff. And I'm not so sure I could get up to 90 again these days :)

But the point is, even if working 90 hour weeks was a stupid thing to do, for better or worse it positioned me to negotiate more pay. Not because the company somehow had a fetish for long-hour workers, but because of what I learned during those hours. Is there a real way to prevent that? If not, is part of the pay gap inevitable?

I can't get into too much detail, but I didn't rewrite it just because I was a stubborn stickler. At one point it became impossible to read our code and explain the logic of our asynchronous workflow, which was spread out over and interwoven through about ten monstrous functions. Speaking with humility, at that particular company, no one else was going to rewrite it, because everyone had the mentality "we may as well keep stacking as much debt as needed, as long as we meet this deadline." Meanwhile every bug fix introduced two more.

I'm relatively inexperienced, so I can't comment on the rest of your comment. There's a good chance you're right.

Beyond my own anecdote, the larger allegory I was trying to get at was: I can't think of any real way to stop someone who really wants to work long hours; and at least some of the time, those extra hours will translate into more pay, resulting in a pay gap.

Edit: I like your username! I yowl, I yowl.

What if I secretly kept coding at home?

That's funny, but the pay gap is about how much people receive in compensation, not the net amount that goes into sustaining their existence.

Wait, but it wasn't like they forced me. In fact the founder openly talked about the importance of work-life balance. Believe it or not, I actually wanted to do it.

(As for why I'd be so masochistic, I'm weird in that I actually enjoy mundane work like refactoring and rewriting abstractions. It's interesting to me.)

This actually borders on being a rather comical point. People in prison have an income of zero. So if we're going to arrive at 0.77 by dividing one average by another, I for one would like to know, is the prison population being included?

Where can I fund a journalistic investigation into the matter right away?

So, people sometimes suggest deemphasizing long hours as a solution to the wage gap.

I once worked at a startup where we'd established product-market fit, and all our problems boiled down to tech debt. The codebase simply needed to be rewritten. Doing so wasn't so intellectually hard that you needed to be a genius; you just needed a decent mastery of general programming, and to be willing to put in the hours. I worked a couple 90-hour weeks to get it done in time for our largest client's launch, and became the person on our team who knew the most about our codebase. This gave me enormous leverage in salary negotiation.

How do we stop me from doing that?

Hm, yeah, good point. I'm not sure how much we know. Maybe you're right and we really don't know enough to make those distinctions.

I'm guessing that where I'm maybe communicating this badly is in the word "real." I don't mean to suggest that people whose problems don't meet some arbitrary criteria shouldn't be taken seriously. And I certainly think hasty, dismissive judgments can have sinister consequences.

What I do think it's productive to do is to assess based on evidence the relative weight of people's issues. I think we'd agree that treatment depends on successfully and accurately identifying the problem. A huge part of that is figuring out what order of magnitude of difficulty you've got in front of you.

I'd say that in distinguishing between 'raised with too much self-esteem' and 'chemical imbalance,' the difference in the resulting treatment is so drastic that it may as well be a different diagnosis. Someone in the former category needs to acquire some combination of acceptance, a sense of agency, and goals to strive toward. Someone in the latter needs medication. The former is easier to solve, because the latter in some cases may not be solvable at all. This doesn't mean we should abandon compassion and start yelling at the person, but isn't it a good litmus test? Shouldn't someone who genuinely wants to get better be delighted to hear that their problem wasn't so big after all?

It sounds like you're less against judgment in general and more against lazy, dismissive, heartless judgments. But that's not what I'm advocating at all. I just have sympathy for the war veteran rolling his eyes when he hears a story about someone who got mugged getting PTSD. Of course no one should be mugged, and getting mugged sucks, but oh come on, let the guy roll his eyes.

Fair enough on the first two points. That makes sense.

> How so? Far more often, people tell others that their problems are non-problems in an attempt to shut them up, not to help them. What actual value comes from attempting to precisely determine who has it worst?

Now that I think about it, I do see this on the internet a lot, and agree that it's highly unconstructive.

What I was more getting at was a critique of a pervasive idea that everyone's self-reports should be taken at face value, and treated with equal gravity.

A contrived example: imagine someone who feels depressed because they were pumped full of self-esteem as a kid, then found out in their twenties that they weren't that special; and someone who feels depressed because of chemical imbalances they can't control. Both people would use the word "depression" to describe themselves, and in our culture, you're not allowed to say that one is "real" while the another "isn't." But in fact it would probably help the first person to know that their depression isn't, in a strict sense, real: they can get out it by improving their external circumstances, while the second person can't.

(That's not analogous to the situation here; it's just a random example.)