The entire article was soft and squishy.

"They tried really hard to hire black folk," isn't hard data.

"Some black folk who applied to work here didn't meet our qualifications," isn't hard data.

"This particular black guy didn't get hired," isn't hard data.

"Out of our graduating class of 30 CompSci students, none got hired by Google, even though Google did show up to our job fair," is kind of almost like hard data if you push on your eyeball to make it appear to be hard data, but is just one applicant more than an anecdote.

I rather explicitly pointed out that I don't think that sort of overt racism is driving these disparities, try again.

Again, actually reading the article is rather illuminating.

It's not illuminating. It's a bunch of made-up excuses. I could write a very similar article about Asian coders getting hired - the poverty, the lack of opportunity, starting computers late (often not until college), language and cultural barriers. It would all be true, but Asians are 29% coders despite being 5% of population, so no one does.

Anyway, the reason coding is such a stark example is that it's a strong meritocracy. You want to claim there's a sexist or racist bias in management? Go ahead, I've no hard evidence against that (or for it apart from pure numbers). Midwifing? Sure.

But coding is very strongly a question of whether you have the intellectual horsepower to do the job. There's not much more to it. You can learn an MIT computer science degree in about a year - in fact people have done just that. Coding is about juggling large numbers of concepts at once in your head, at various levels of abstraction.

From an old coding blog I like to read

This is very true and many programmers will tell you the same thing. Programming is an intellectual aptitude, and the tests for the big companies test that aptitude in detail. It's not about learned skill or time spent learning - you can pick it up in no time if you have the aptitude. The Asian coders that turn up have it in spades, so they get hired. The black coders that turn up, don't, so they fail the tests. It's as simple as that. And despite Silicon Valley's desperation to hire more black people, and women, and all the money they're throwing at it, you can't teach aptitude, so they have to say "no hire".

In the study you aren't actually citing, Asian-Americans actually crushed European-Americans on performance IQ (not the same thing as spatial analysis, but it does have decent weighting on spatial skills). The differences between Asians and Blacks on full-scale IQ were nearly as large as the difference in South Africa between those of British and Dutch ancestry or the difference between those of Korean ancestry and Japanese ancestry in Japan.

The between-country data (East Asians in Asia, etc.) is far beyond messy in the rare instances where it wasn't entirely fictional. The only proper response to seeing what is available is to say, "please go back and do some proper research please."

More interestingly, how would you explain the strong link between conservativism/liberalism and IQ? The difference is only twice as large as the black-white difference.

Please refrain from muddying the waters. Thank you in advance.

Crushed? No, not close to crushed. Beaten, sure. Hence why there are more Asian coders. They certainly crush blacks though. And yes the spatial component is most of it; verbal is about the same.
Yawn. Post actual numbers if you want to claim this. Also, I think it's hilarious that you think you've got a trump card on tests of minor, probably selection biased, minorities in a couple of countries.

And again, as relates to this topic, spatial analysis is what matters, not verbal skills. As much as your former profession can say (which isn't much) men and women also have a disparity in spatial analysis skills, and the structure of the parietal lobe, both closely linked to math and hence professions like coding.
We have solid sets of data for China, which is good enough for me. When arsenic poisoned rural Chinese villagers with next to no education are beating wealthy blacks in the US, we have a problem, Houston.

So we've descended into "making **** up" now? I mean you did that already when you claimed that the evidence showed that homosexuality was entirely inborn (it shows the opposite, and clearly), but this is pretty brazen.

You cited the study. What was the performance IQ of Asian Americans in the study? What was the performance of European Americans in the study?

Around 10 points difference (about 2/3's of a standard deviation) in all cases.

Also, wat?!? I'm pointing out weaknesses in the data and making a joke of you taking certain silly studies (that you've only read summaries of) as being telling.

Again, would you check someone's underwear to determine whether to hire them for a job that involved math?

Ok. Show me these data sets.

They aren't.

Making **** up? I never said that sexuality was entirely genetic. I'm not entirely certain whether it is even 25% genetic. It clearly isn't 100% genetic or birth order and fetal environment wouldn't have such a huge effect. I said that it isn't a choice and that promoting gayness is as near as a nothingburger as encouraging people to listen to Nickleback. Clearly no one would like Nickleback if they could chose not to, yet some people like them.

You can use scholar.google.com to get some info on the relationship between conservatism and IQ. I like to assume that you are one of the extremely rare high functioning conservatives,* so I will leave it to you to find some possible squishy narrative that makes it not entirely necessarily true that conservatives are, on average, pretty much dumb as **** compared to average folk.

*the alternative to the assumption is that I am an ******* who gets my kicks by kicking mental toddlers.

[My Bold]

We? How many of you are there?

A non-interesting blend of zero content sounds pretty interesting.
Followed by:

Please don't muddy the water

This whole thread is remarkably evidence-free, despite Toothy's best efforts at making like the Evidence Fairy.

Here are a few instances where evidence (by which I mean, actual data) would support Toothy's perspective.

What sort of metrics are you using to develop "psychological profiles?" You touch on individual variation, but you're actually arguing mean differences. Do you have any evidence that distinguishes intergender <whatever metric you choose> mean vs variation in that metric?

Data supporting this? Define "high-end" coding (vs low-end coding)?

I'm at a loss to understand how selection pressures might vary between sexes in humans. Sexual selection isn't especially strong in humans afaik...I mean, it's not like there's a natural selection/sexual selection tradeoff. I've never seen a male with tail feathers so long that he can't outrun a predator. Citations and data for selection coefficients and how they differ between sexes please?

That's funny, because there was literally no data or discussion of research (or even anecdotes lol) that supports the assertion that "black coders as a group underperform." Is there a standard coding test that Silicon Valley code monkeys take on a regular basis to support this?

I assume a certain background knowledge of the world in people who post here. Perhaps that is unwarranted.
Define hgher end coding?

- Desirable coding jobs as measured by number of applications or applications vs acceptance rate.
- Salary relative to peers
- Highly skilled coding as opposed to more routine (C++/assembly/CS algorithms vs business software)
This bit is speculative. I'm not sure you understand how evolution works though. Women will have powerful selection pressures for:

- Ability to carry a baby to term
- Ability to have a healthy, thriving baby
- Ability to turn that helpless thing, through constant nurturing and care in a hostile environment, into an adult which itself has at least an average chance of breeding
- Tendency to bond powerfully and emotionally with children, in order to facilitate the above where it conflicts her other instincts and traits
- Ability to coerce potential protectors and providers into providing protection, nutrients, etc with

Men have very different selection pressures.

- Ability to impregnate multiple females
- Ability to protect mates and children from other males and physical threats
- Ability to get on with other males

There's a little bit of overlap, but the gender roles are quite stark. In fact it's quite likely that female-child pair bonding, combined with the child growing weaker and more helpless than most animals and requiring far longer care, has driven brain evolution toward greater intelligence and language skills.

In case this isn't completely obvious to you, look at the strength of the mother-child bond, and compare it to the strength of the father-child bond. That's pure evolution working in the mother's brain, and less in the father's.
Silicon Valley, which mostly leans fairly far left, is desperate to hire black people. They're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this effort. Yet very very few of them are passing the rigorous tests to get in. A bad or even mediocre coder is a liability so they can't take people who can't pass basic tests of competence and aptitude, like reversing a linked list.

As for hard data on aptitude, here is what it says. The GRE for example, which tests general skills.



Asian men score 1.4 standard deviations above black men on a widespread post-college test of general quantitative reasoning aptitude. What does this mean? That if hiring is fair, we will see EXACTLY what we see now in Silicon Valley -Asians will outnumber blacks in high end jobs by a huge amount. 1 standard deviation to the upside puts blacks at 2.4 standard deviations.

So there will be 14% of the Asian population in this sample, and <1% of the black population. And this is precisely what we see in the higher end jobs - blacks are outnumbered 15:1 or more.

If you go even further out (the kind of jobs there are at Google), you'll have 1 in 1000 black people with the ability to do quantitative reasoning at a high level, and about 1 in 20 Asians. That's a 50:1 ratio in the hiring pools. And this is what we see. Asians make up 34% of high end coders, blacks make up 1%. Asians are about 5% of the population while blacks are 13%.

It's all perfectly explained by demonstrated post-college aptitude in the general field of quantitative reasoning attitude, not racism or bias at the hiring level.

Interestingly, the data disproves (of course) Brian's false assertion that women in non traditional disciplines will outperform the average. This is very telling given the selection bias toward a same-sized talent pool picking the best. Women in non-traditional roles don't outperform, at least not in the GRE.

So, women have wombs and boobs, men have testicles and penises and therefore coding. More masculine men are better at coding, quite obviously. This is why google tests for testicle size, physical prowess and aggression as a more pure method of choosing employees.

Why did you pick a test that has been demonstrated to have virtually no ability to predict future performance?

Toothy,
First, would you explain how intraspecific and interspecific competition differs, and how life history strategies have anything to do with selective pressure? Males and females having different parenting roles is not unique to humans, so asserting that differing roles drives skill differences is not supported by using solely human examples. Don't worry, you're not unique in committing this fallacy. Most laymen do.

Second, would you provide evidence that supports a positive correlation between standardized tests, academic performance, and professional aptitude? (brianthemick already pointed this out, but still...)

Finally, to your credit, you did provide candidate metrics for what might constitute a "high end" coding job. Perhaps you could point us to some relevant data that supports your assertions?

How many of your incoming biology majors have <550 on SAT math? Exactly.

If you look at a correlation between height and ability to dunk, but only run it on a sample of NBA players, you'll miss the obviously correct conclusion.

Just under 200k take the test annually. I believe this is slightly more than get drafted into the NBA.

How is it that the people so obsessed with genetic superiority know so little about evolutionary theory?

Exactly!

And then, there's data that support your common sense assertion. Oh wait, you don't have data. Oh well your argument is invalid.

Would you like to hear my argument about music theory? I mean, I did watch a youtube video that a guy who has a beard made, and I found this 17th Century philosopher who wrote something that I agree with, and there is this other thing that links it to quantum mechanics AND fractals that I saw posted somewhere, so I am definitely knowledgeable.

I just gave you one data point to show you that you're thinking about it totally wrong. The correlation between SAT/GRE scores and the performance of professional biology by professional biologists may well be low (I have no idea and no data, but I wouldn't expect it to be high). That's completely missing the point because the lower scores are never professional biologists and the middling scores are rarely professional biologists (not to mention the people who don't even bother taking the test because they know they'd score horribly).

So if you correlate SAT score to the ability to perform professional biology, it would be huge because the low scores have ~no ability and the high scores have some. It's just selective sampling that causes the opposite conclusion, and it doesn't take more than a rudimentary knowledge of the country to realize it.

No one is claiming anything about people can't learn how to properly operate a broom.

I'm just catching up on this whole thread, and after one page I had feelings, those of perturbsion. I since feel much better about the state of matters as they stand. Balance has been brought back to the thread.

Only one guy got his mojo working right ITT

You're as dumb as a brick. Humans require uniquely (very uniquely) long periods of nurturing, both to properly socialize them and for them to survive. We are weak and useless for > 8 years of our childhood. The quality of that nurturing is correlated strongly with success of breeding of their offspring as an adult. This is true even for other social mammals - there's powerful evolutionary pressure on the nurturing ability of the mother. And the effects are far more powerful in humans, given the above.

Just one random study:
This is a well established part of evolutionary biology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_investment

And nothing I've said is controversial. Your questions and claims above show that you're a either total ****wit who knows nothing about the subject, or desperately trying to obfuscate. Which was obvious from your first contribution here. You're both ignorant and incapable of critical thought.
What, precisely, is my fallacy? Spell it out in specific terms. There's a powerful selection pressure here and it acts on females to make them more nurturing. This is not even a controversial statement, you're just completely ignorant.

Brian lies to further political aims, he's pretty much anti the spirit of SMP. There is extensive evidence of the positive correlation and this is not in dispute. The only thing in question is the degree of the correlation.The GRE and similar standardized tests has been under heavy attack lately by dishonest cultural warriors like Brian, because it shows up minorities very badly (although not Asian or Jewish minorities, who outperform both on the GRE and in the workplace, but they don't count to the losers on the left).

But if you want a study:

The GRE predicts participation in the tails very well. It predicts overall GPA moderately well.

I'm sure you can come up with studies that pick arbitrary subcategories (like publication volume in psychology postgrads), and show they don't correlate with GRE. Like I said, standardized has been under sustained dishonest attack from people who hate that it shows up minority performance, and therefore must be racist because all groups must have the same aptitude according to leftist theory. But the GRE has the same results as SAT, as intelligence tests like Raven's Progressive Matrices, etc. And it all correlates well with job success. Maybe there's some grand racist conspiracy or maybe, just maybe, Occam's Razor works just fine, and lower aptitude explains it all.

We have all the data for minority wages in coding (one plank of my metrics). We have the data for minority participation in high end coding (another plank of my metrics). Black minorities under perform in both, while Asians outperform strongly - very strongly - even the dominant racial group (whites). This is despite the fact that the blacks are underrepresented in coding, something which Brian claims means they should be better than average, while Asians are hugely over represented, meaning they're going much further down from the top of the talent stack. The data is just crushing to the hypothesis (required to prove discrimination in hiring) that blacks are even in the ballpark of Asians in coding aptitude.