I don't think there's going to be a winter this time. The current boom may only take us so far, but there are a couple more booms on the horizon that in all likelihood will be cusping well before this one is finished.
The complaints about "SJWs", while indelicately phrased, aren't completely off-base. Hacker News has gotten way more PC over the past 5 years, much to its detriment. I remember what the site was like before the big reddit influx in 2010, and the actual political center wasn't that different, but the quality of discussion was a lot higher. People were forthright, analytical, and thorough. Conversation wasn't so prone to being dominated by groupthink, memes, and keeping up appearances.
Some of this doesn't come from HN itself but from the overall tech culture. But I think a big part of the story is that the site saw a massive expansion in users, thus becoming more generic and "public", meaning people have to be a bit more reflexive about what they say on here. When your audience is a trusted community of people with a shared understanding of the rights and protections that discussion participants grant to one another, you can cut through the bullshit a lot easier.
I've observed that the SJW hive think has skyrocketed over the last year on HN. I used to be able to predict ridicule in the comments, but instead I find pandering and PC nonsense. It's pretty depressing overall.
This technology isn't a luxury. The vigor of youth and the wisdom of age underlie all of human flourishing. Whatever meager good we manage to achieve in the world flows from these things.
The first world wouldn't be doing the third world any good by forgoing this type of research. Far to the contrary.
The Pythagorean comma is nothing to worry about -- it's tiny and more or less negligible. It's the syntonic comma that's the killer.
The fifths in equal temperament are completely fine, but the thirds are really quite a ways off from the harmonic 5/4 major third. I would recommend experimenting with the traditional meantone tuning system if you're interested in this -- it offers almost as much flexibility as equal temperament (with 6 adjacent keys on the circle of fifths being free of wolf intervals), and it lets you play with "real thirds".
Very interesting. What if you took a large set of musical notes on various instruments, with about a two-second duration, with the same pitch, same volume, and same sample rate, and did the same thing? Eigensounds! And that's just with a time-domain representation of the sound -- you'd get different eigensounds if you used a frequency-domain representation.
I have to wonder if something like this is used by those song-recognizing apps that can tell you what a song is just by hearing a snippet through your phone.
This is true, but it's too easy to go from that to assuming that ALL our cognitive biases were selected for. Some of them just emerge because it's hard to design a brain that doesn't work like that.
But some really basic cognitive biases, like the tendency for irrational confidence, are clearly evolutionarily adaptive.
True -- if you take this too far you get into the flimsier parts of evolutionary psychology.
On irrational confidence I've long wondered about whether Dunning-Krueger type effects are adaptive. If we had a rational image of our level of expertise, would we give up in despair in the face of undertakings like trying to understand theoretical physics?
I don't think the over evaluation part of the Dunning-Krueger effect has much to do with evolution. Basically it is a fundamental physical limitation: if you've never even seen an obstacle you can't say whether you could jump over it or not. After that it's just the natural optimism that's required by all species on earth to do anything non-trivial, nothing special.
The under evaluation part is more interesting though, why not just keep going?
Since we can understand theoretical physics, giving up trying to understand it would not be rational, at least not in every case. You'd need to somehow derive the utility you expect to gain from understanding a thing and then compare that with the resources required to understand it. Admittedly, both of these things are hard to estimate when you have no idea what you're talking about in the first place.
"When I'm hiring, I have an HR intern (or the external recruiter) strip anything that could indicate gender or race from the résumés before they get their initial evaluation. For the ones that make the first cut, I have the recruiter print out code from Github, with the username redacted. This has resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of women who make it through to an actual interview."
Show us the data. Unless you believe an average woman is better at the job than the average man, stripping all gender / race information should at best bring it up to the baseline; with the huge skew at the college level (maybe 10% of my year at graduation were women) this doesn't really result in a 'tremendous increase in the number of women'.
Of course it could. If only say 4% of their workforce was women before, and this increased to 8% after stripping out gender identity, then that is a huge increase (double) the amount of women. This is because women are being hired at the rate of 10% (using your figure), which would increase the number of women dramatically over time.
I agree that if the initial starting proportion was 10% (again assuming your number is correct) then gender stripping should make no difference - just pointing out that unless you know the starting proportion then the OP's statement is perfectly valid.
Wish I could upvote twice. Very important insight, and one that is constantly missed in gender discussions. One shouldn't expect any change downstream to suddenly cancel out the effects of something high upstream. BTW. the huge skew at college level seems to be a result of a skew in as early as high-school, or maybe even earlier. [0] has an interesting discussion on the topic.
Let's assume a simplified model of reality that has exactly two biased filters - an "upstream" bias that causes the pool of qualified candidates to contain only (as an assumed example) 10% women, and a "downstream" bias that causes qualified women candidates to disproportionally not get chosen or get worse offers, that results in a majority of companies hiring only (again, assumed example) 5% women.
If your company gets publicly known for hiring fairly, avoiding the second filter, then it may actually result in an effect that would "cancel out the effects of something high upstream" - simply because qualified women candidates may preferentially choose to apply at your organization, and your pool of candidates may contain significantly more qualified women developers than the national average, and thus also the people you hire would contain more qualified women developers than the national average.
A company with a reputation "if you're of group X, you'll hate it here" can have a perfectly fair hiring process, but still won't get much of group X simply because they will avoid that organization. An organization like Ku klux klan doesn't really need to do racial discrimination when hiring as most black people simply won't apply.
A fair hiring process would result in a proportion of women employees that generally matches the proportion of qualified women applicants, but the proportion of women among qualified applicants may vary significantly between different companies.
It doesn't even need that feedback-to-candidates loop to work.
Imagine that the female population of developers is 10%, that they exhibit in every way a performance distribution equal to males in job and interviewing performance, but that every company except yours is half as likely to hire a female candidate as the straight odds would suggest.
The candidate pool as experienced by all companies would consist of more than 10% females (as they would need to apply to twice as many places on average) and the average quality of the female candidate may well be higher than the average male candidate because of the adverse selection at play. (Qualified female candidates are being preferentially passed up in favor of inferior male candidates, leaving the residual female candidate pool more talent-rich than the male pool.)
It is not missed at all. But the reality of discrimination at a young age is no excuse for not fighting it in software companies, where women constantly report hostile working conditions.
The article you linked to is quite good, but it ignores the very real decline over the past few decades[1] in women participation in software relative to other professions.
So these two things don't seem to fit together. The linked article seems to provide pretty solid evidence that women are just as successful as men when you control by numerical SAT score. But some[1] women do indeed report hostile working conditions.
How can this be? Is it:
* Working conditions are hostile to women, but this doesn't actually affect anything in terms of income, number of women in the industry and so on?
* More cynical variation: any woman who makes it to graduation in a STEM field has already taken a lot of hostility; those who hostility can affect are driven out earlier?
* Women and men actually experience equal amounts of hostility, and simply interpret it differently?
* Women are better at their jobs (or somehow have it easier) in a way that doesn't show up in numerical SAT scores, and this effect is exactly equal and opposite to that of a hostile work environment?
* Something else I haven't thought of?
[1] though by no means all, I remember lorettahe's post here a year or so ago
It seems that any work environment with a homogeneous group over 90% has reports of hostile working conditions for minorities. Reading reports about women entering a workplace dominated by men, men entering a a work place dominated by women, or blacks entering a predominated white work place, I constantly hear the same kind of abuse.
"By being the only Y in the work place, people expect me to represent the whole Y group just because I am Y."
"Because I am Y, everyone assume {common fear about group Y} about me".
"People think something is wrong with me because I applied to a X dominated work place and not one of the Y dominated ones."
It seems to me that the hostile working environment is the result of human nature when confronted with a minority. When the number of women in the industry increases, then the hostile working conditions will likely go away as quickly it initial started.
Probably, but I'd like to point out that this subject has been studied for the past forty years or so, so we can do better than conjecture. While it is true that minorities often feel left out in homogenous groups, there is a big difference between cases where that minority is simply a numeric difference and those where that minority has less power[1] in society. We now know that the discussion of sexism and racism is not about numbers and differences but about certain groups having more power than others, and that causes some very specific behaviors.
I don't think you can combine different statistics of such high dimensionality like that. Unless women math GRE scores are in decline since the eighties -- and they don't correlate with success in science or medicine -- they don't explain the decline in participation in this industry alone. Also, the correlation of women participation and GRE math scores can remain just as strong regardless of the actual participation rates: the high correlation does not explain sex differences (as in this illustration http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Heritabil...)
There is also a danger in looking at statistics about human behavior that only take a snapshot in time, because the data itself changes all the time. For example, it is very possible that ever since women participation started to decline, there have been few role models for women, less desire to participate, and therefore less desire to excel in math.
It is as impossible to study social dynamics from a statistical snapshot as it is to study planetary motion from a still photograph of the sky.
> the correlation of women participation and GRE math scores can remain just as strong regardless of the actual participation rates: the high correlation does not explain sex differences (as in this illustration http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Heritabil...)
I don't understand what you're claiming. The differences in numeric GRE scores absolutely do explain the post-graduation sex differences. Are you claiming that low numeric GRE scores and low workplace success might have some common cause? Sure, but that cause would necessarily be pre-graduation, meaning that's the place to tackle it, and efforts to e.g. make workplaces less hostile aren't going to make any difference.
I am saying two things. One, that the differences highlighted in the article do not predict the observed women participation rates in SV startups (i.e. the correlation of GRE scores could stay the same, but the participation baseline still increase 10%). In fact, the numeric difference he mentions (19% men, 6% women passing the cutoff) is a 3x difference, while the participation difference is more than 6x. So at best, it can explain less than half the effect.
Two, and this is the more important point, I absolutely claim that low numeric GRE scores and low workplace success might have some common cause, as I explained in my description of the feedback. That cause is not pre-graduation -- its effect is. Low participation in the industry causes fewer women to be drawn to the field, to be less interested in math etc.
I just want to point out what it is that I don't claim: I don't say that there is no significant innate difference in math abilities between men and women. Maybe there is and maybe there isn't. But its existence -- if it exists -- cannot nearly account for the huge gender gap we see in SV, doubly so because participation rates have been dropping since the eighties.
> That cause is not pre-graduation -- its effect is. Low participation in the industry causes fewer women to be drawn to the field, to be less interested in math etc.
If it's just that kind of feedback loop, how would the fall have started? Mathematics was once almost exclusively a men's game and early computer science fell in with that; the kids of the '80s would have had more female role models in the computer industry (and certainly as you say more in biology or physics) than those of the '70s or '60s, so why would they have been less interested in numerate fields?
I'm not saying that the feedback loop you describe can't amplify things, but I think the underlying cause has to lie outside it.
I've been thinking more about your decline-since-the-80s point. The narrative I've heard most often is that '90s compsci classes contained women with lower GRE-type scores than men (either through explicit positive discrimination/affirmative action, or because there were plenty of applicants who passed the admission criteria and a roughly-even split were accepted), who went on to do less well in industry (in line with their GRE-type scores), and the crash of the early '00s prompted an adjustment to more natural levels. But that leaves a lot of unexplained questions.
Maybe Yvain's page is right about academia, but those results don't extend to SV where there is more outright discrimination? Maybe it's about men being more able or willing than women to move to SV? Maybe SV's standards are stricter than the GRE cutoff and the difference at the end of the bell curve is even starker?
I still feel like we must be missing something. The simplistic explanation of "it's all innate ability" doesn't fit, but neither does "it's all discrimination/hostility", nor even "it's a 50/50 split between the two". Something remains to be explained here.
> If it's just that kind of feedback loop, how would the fall have started?
That's a good question. So these guys[1] have one theory. Another is that changes in SV ethos have made companies less hospitable to women. It's probably a combination of many different effects.
> I still feel like we must be missing something.
Probably lots of things. What troubles me is the pervasive lack of curiosity and lack of empathy. You see people here on HN drool over sci-fi notions of cryonics or believe all sorts of scientific "findings" of dubious nature about nutrition, but dismiss all attempts to really understand this issue. You also see people here express such decisive opinions about pretty much anything, but when a woman tells of a negative experience at a SV company, the responses turn into, "wait, we have to wait and hear the other side first".
If we realize this is important -- and I have more to say about this point -- and investigate this in depth, then I think we will have benefitted already. In the meantime, we should take it to heart that employees in our industry feel distressed by the working environment we create.
Now, why is it so important? Many people confuse sexism and racism with mere discrimination between sexes/races, or unequal representation in various professions. But that women are underrepresented in the waste-disposal industry does not make anyone lose sleep. The reason is that sexism and racism are all about power[2] (the academic shorthand for racism/sexism is "discrimination + power". It is a very serious problem when groups of the population are absent or underrepresented in seats of power, and when that happens, it requires investigation (the assumption being that no group would freely yield power -- over itself -- to others). Because the tech industry, and Silicon Valley in particular, pack so much power these days, and since we share this power and can influence its future, we should be very concerned to learn that we're distributing this power unfairly.
I am curious about good solutions. But I feel like "first, do no harm" is vital here - the reason we're happy to speculate about cryonics is that the worst case is you're still dead, whereas SV is astonishingly productive to the point where we don't want to look at it funny in case it stops working.
And there are specific worries. I've worked at a place that appeared to make a point of hiring equal numbers of men and women - and implemented this by hiring a number of women who simply weren't capable of performing their jobs (whether this was a question of talent or training I don't know). It was bad for me, as in programming incompetent colleagues are not just dead weight but actively harmful. It was bad for those women, who had a frustrating time at a job where they knew they weren't contributing. And it was even worse for the highly-skilled women on the team, as others who hadn't worked closely with them would - understandably, and probably unconsciously - make the calculation that they were probably in the incompetent group, and act accordingly. So naturally, avoiding that particular failure mode is a matter that's close to my heart, and I get defensive when I hear people saying things that I think might lead to that.
Well, obviously no one has come up with full solutions, and whatever solutions there are, they will be slow, because changing culture is slow. But just as democratic societies have come to accept the preposterous notion that women should be allowed to vote, so too will it start seeing engineering as a non-manly profession, and one that's perfectly natural for women, too. Right now, I think there are two things we can do: 1) place more women role models in popular culture who are engineers (I think Hollywood has started doing this), and 2) place more actual women role models in engineering positions.
The latter will only be achieved if the level of hostility women feel in the workplace is reduced, and to do that, employers (and engineers in general) will need to undergo some training. Part of that training (though certainly not all of it) would be learning to recognize sexism. Recognizing sexism is very hard if you're not trained for it; there are two reasons for that: one, people confuse sexism with misogyny and assume that since they're not misogynist, they can't be sexist (while actually most forms of sexism are inadvertent/structural/cultural), and two, because sexism is cultural, we just don't think of things that seem so natural to us, and can't perceive the harm they cause. Because sexism and racism are discrimination + power, the best way to recognize them is not to look for discrimination (which is hard to see, and we don't want to find it because it feels we're being judged or doing something wrong) but for power. Once you know what power is, it is relatively easy to see. Once you learn to see power, you see who has more of it and who has less of it. Once you see that, it's much easier to see whether through action or inaction your organization keeps the current unfair power distribution.
One of the other results I've seen posted on SSC (will try to find the link later) is that sensitivity training, at least as it's been actually implemented in the real world, makes people more discriminatory, not less.
The ones that say, e.g. that if you have 10 men educated in software engineering per one woman and you change your hiring practices to be less discriminating, you shouldn't suddenly expect to have 50/50 gender balance among tech workers in your company. You should see that 10/1 proportion reflected in your staff, if you hire based on merit alone.
I don't think so, because the rates are not immutable, and you're discounting causation going the other way. If the women who are hired are treated well (which would require their employers to undergo some training), the rate of women attaining software education is likely to rise. "Downstream" likely has a strong effect on "upstream".
First, I don't think they claim a 50/50 split. I guess there's still room for improvement even before hitting the applicant pool limitation (I have seen it, too, BTW, when we hired; the number of women applying is higher than their representation in startups).
Second, it's also very possible that there is a local, fast, feedback loop. I think women would be more attracted to companies that already employ a higher number of women, and are known for a hospitable working environment, so it's likely those companies will receive a higher share of women applicants.
Everyone (including women) is biased against hiring women in tech. Even if it is tiny, why wouldn't you take steps to reduce your own bias?
Even if "the pipeline is the problem", why wouldn't you take all possible steps to reduce the bias at your stage of the pipeline?
If the industry hires 2% women, out of 10% talent then there is 8% _of the entire industry_ that this company could snag. This could easily mean more than the entire company being women.
Your intuition is right when/if this gets implemented everywhere.
I've worked with a few women in technical roles that decided to take more masculine versions of their names (Jackie -> Jack, Ashley -> Ash, Jessica to Jesse). For two of them it started out as a way of getting hassled less online, and the other did it as an experiment to see which resume got more interviews (surprise, the masculine name got more than double the callbacks.)
Now, if only German companies would do away with requiring, photos, place of birth and marital status in their Lebenslaufs... I mean, this is a good thing to do, but wish it would happen overseas as well. Could you imagine requiring photos and marital status in the US (aside from modeling and the like)
I haven't added marital status, place of birth or birth name in my Lebenslauf, ever.
But then I never listened to teachers or any public employment agencies and their leaflets since I had HR people in family who knew more contemporary habits (eg. that handwritten long-form CVs mean pretty much immediate rejection, while they were sold in class as the best thing ever)
The photo requirement is still rather annoying though.
All were major corporations. I had to apply for job interview using their website. After I would fill out CV and relevant information, I was redirected to survey or something like that. This was in Ireland, since 2006.
I think you're referring to an optional survey. Companies ask that so that they have metrics on what kind of people they get applications from. You can choose not to answer.
The sanitization process should also be repeated in the interview process. Only objective information is taken down by the interviewer, and this is passed on to someone else, who can make a value judgement about the candidate without that judgement being coloured by the candidates gender, race, looks, height, perfume or whatever else is considered to be extraneous information.
Are you being sarcastic? This would be expensive, and is that how you are going to work with them?
I know that HN and the world in general is on a kick about equality of everything, but when your interviewee wears 100 gallons of perfume to the interview that is a problem I have to address even before they start working.
I absolutely think that the work can have objective measures, but back in reality much of work is not based around how good the candidate fits the job description exactly as described in the requirements.
That's not really fair to the candidate when you remember the potential employee is also interviewing the employer. I don't think I'd want to work somewhere that thought myself and my boss' should not meet.
