I think this is a great article talking about a thorny point in Golang but boy do I wish I never read this article. I wish this article was never useful to anyone.
Non-American here, but I'd say yes on the apple pie, no on the baseball. I'm used to multiple countries sharing a 'national sport' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_sport) so it doesn't seem like a claim about baseball being uniquely American, so much as Americans being really into baseball. Also the sport really was developed in the US and then exported, so I think they have the right to claim some kind of spiritual ownership if they want to.
edit: looks like that last point applies in the case of African-Americans and spades, too
For me the thing is that emacs can be overwhelming. So focus on doing one task at a time. I still don't know the whole spacemacs interface. I know where my major mode keybinds are. I know how to deal with my .spacemacs. I know where to find documentation. I deal with everything else on a case by case basis.
Also people act as though software is a job without anxiety. There is plenty of anxiety in this job. Sometimes under pressure you really do have to perform or push back and its good to know if people can do it.
> Also people act as though software is a job without anxiety.
Not. All. Anxiety. Is. The. Same.
Ask a firefighter to give a speech in front of 1000 people. This is an entirely different kind of anxiety than running into a burning building. Ironically, it may be the former rather than the latter that makes the firefighter sweat.
Writing code is generally not a performance art. We're not stage performers. Interviews are an unusual situation that aren't anything like our daily jobs. Stress on the job is not the same as interview stress. Work emergencies are not the same as interviews.
We need to take into account human psychology. These factors are all well known, but the tech industry seems to act in deliberate ignorance of humanity.
It doesn't have to be stressful. Whether or not you have a gun to your head is due to management. Deadlines are an abstract concept created by humans and can always be moved. The best companies keep them very elastic.
I think the idea that people are the same no matter what the rules are just isn't true. It stated as though it is obvious and I need evidence that that is the case. The rest of the argument falls apart based on that point.
I suppose it is fair to say speech of those in leadership positions with executive power is chilled by this. I think that's how its supposed to be though. Part of being in leadership is managing relationships with stakeholders. Part of it is being beyond reproach. Undisclosed conflicts of interest on published papers is not a small thing for an Executive at a university. Being responsible in an academic honesty sense is important in that position I think.
The problem is that he was largely removed for refusing to lie about the state of the science. But the state of the science is not politically acceptable.
Scientific consensus is pretty heavily on the side of "50+% of within-group variation in intelligence is genetic, the remainder is non-shared environment" (in the US, barring known negative confounders such as fetal alcohol syndrome), and as far as I know the science on between-group variation is still very much undecided, but genetic components are as far from ruled out as you can get. But that debate won't be settled until you can 1) find the environmental differences that lead to IQ differences between groups, including (IIRC) in adopted children, 2) show that IQ tests only correlate with g within ethnic groups, but not across them, or 3) decode the genetic basis of IQ and show how differing frequencies explain group differences. Which is going to take a number more years, no matter which it ends up being.
Fringe view among geneticists, or fringe view among the public? (And honestly, I'd like to see those criticisms - I'd hate to be defending a guy who's genuinely wrong instead of just politically incorrect, which has been the impression I've had so far from SSC and elsewhere)
> IQ scores are heritable: that is, within populations, genetic variation is related to variation in the trait. But a fundamental truism about heritability is that it tells us nothing about differences between groups. Even analyses that have tried to calculate the proportion of the difference between people in different countries for a much more straightforward trait (height) have faced scientific criticisms. Simply put, nobody has yet developed techniques that can bypass the genetic clustering and removal of people that do not fit the statistical model mentioned above, while simultaneously taking into account all the differences in language, income, nutrition, education, environment, and culture that may themselves be the cause of differences in any trait observed between different groups. This applies to any trait you could care to look at – height, specific behaviours, disease susceptibility, intelligence.
So I think we got fundamentally different things from that article. You see "between-population differences aren't genetic". I see "we don't know if between-population differences are genetic or environmental, and with our techniques we don't think this is knowable". Which, funnily enough, matches this quote of Hsu's pretty strongly (quoted elsewhere in these comments)
> "I've always said that I'm agnostic on whether... so there are observed test score differences between groups, I think that's clear, you can't deny that.
> The causality of that, whether it's partially due to genetics, I've always been agnostic on. Not because I think it's impossible, but because it's such a charged thing we should really make sure the science is solid before we speculate. We shouldn't randomly speculate on something that sensitive.
> But even just not being willing to categorically rule out that God could have created us with average group differences has gotten me into trouble. And I think that's just absurd. So for someone to attack me for saying 'We don't know the answer to this question, let's do the science first and then talk about it.' Even that position is actually not tenable in the current social justice warrior political climate."
Disqualify him from being a professor? He’s still a tenured full professor with a nice salary. He’s just no longer in charge of all research at the university.
That's not the point. On this particular sub-thread we're discussing his research. You said he has fringe views. I'm just saying that it does not disqualify his research per se.
Otherwise, I have no background or in fact interest about whether or not Steve Hsu was a good VP of research and innovation. The reason given for why he's being fired for this position has nothing to do with his performance, good or bad, and has everything to do with his research. Since he his tenured, they can't fire him for his research, so they found an other way to punish him. That's low.
Agreed and of course. He can and should continue his research as a well paid full professor at MSU, which I assume he will. He gets a lot of attention for doing so. Otherwise he’d just be a random really bad quantitative geneticist you’ve never heard of that thinks that no one else but him understands L2 regression.
>But when you say "I'm not sure if meritocracy makes sense"... you are really saying that instead of trying for meritocracy, they should just use skin color?
I'm not GP but that doesn't seem like a charitable rendering of their argument. Its the stupidest possible rendering of their statement.
How fortunate you are to merely be "exhausted" emotionally. This isn't really a conversation about skin color its a conversation on how we treat each other and we happen to treat people with certain skin colors in ways that make their lives worse and in some cases more dangerous. Talking about it like its about skin is foolish. It's about behavior.
Who is this "we" that you speak of? What institution anywhere in the US treats people of certain skin colors worse than others? I know of many (including those referenced in the linked article), but yet all of them discriminate against whites and asians, not blacks and hispanics.
Why do you believe that racism is so widespread? If there is evidence of widespread racism among people and institutions, please share (the only evidence I've seen is some name-on-resume-callback studies that appear more to do with class than with race).
I'm guessing you believe that there is widespread racism because of disparate outcomes. But disparate outcomes between groups doesn't mean discrimination.
For example, Iraqi-Americans avg income $32k, Iranian $78k income. How many Americans even know the difference between those two peoples even if they wanted to discriminate?[1]
I think there's a certain part of the population (generally on the left from what I've seen) that is so deep in an ideological bubble that they cannot believe that reasonable and legitimate alternate perspectives exist. When countered with fair and legitimate points, they unfortunately wish to exit conversations.
This is just a fun little an online message board and I do not wish to criticize the poster who accused me of being in bad faith (whatever that means). However, I don't believe I said anything improper, even if it was jarring to their world view.
