I take it from your response that you entirely ignored my response about targeting outreach at demographics that have high attrition and low entrance rates. Specifically those groups. That's what we do when we do outreach.
I don't know what else to say. It's extremely simple. Targeted outreach works. You pick groups you want to include, and you target them for outreach.
Why are you making this so hard? Honestly, I question whether you're really interested. You do this on literally every thread where sexism comes up. It sounds to me like you really just want an argument.
EDIT: And, your insinuation that it's all tribal politics, instead of a very careful investigation of what outreach methods work for getting disadvantaged people into programs they wouldn't normally have access to is in such bad faith it's hard to even muster up the will to reply.
I'm not asking for empirics. The question cannot be resolved by empirics alone. I'm asking for your normative principle. You are ducking the question if you throw more positive statements at me.
You can't get a normative ("we should" or "it's acceptable to do") conclusion without a normative principle. The empirical claim "Ebola causes death" alone is not a justification for preventing ebola. You need the normative principle "death is bad". If I ask for a normative principle and you tell me about experiments with monkeys, you are missing the point.
I understand (a). I understand your normative conclusion (racially biased decisions in favor of women are good). I'm asking you to explain (b), and maybe (c) if it is not obvious. And I have no idea why this is such a ridiculous thing to ask.
We say we're interested in targeted outreach to demographics whose attrition rates are especially high, and whose entrance rates are especially low.
You come up with the normative claim. Because the normative claim should be obvious.
Ok, now that you've made your guess, let's see what you've written down. If you guessed that the normative claim is that "we should consider it bad to have an industry so vile that (e.g.) competent female engineers exit the field at many times the rate of male engineers", then you win your gold star.
If you did not guess that this is the normative claim, then it is time to retire all this philosophy and set theory that you have going, because you clearly don't have the basics down.
I'm asking about this because my views are very confused. I don't have a good normative principle to appeal to.
On the one hand, I lean towards "you shouldn't make racially biased decisions". On the other hand, while I'm intuitively disliking the criteria for these scholarships, I impose more or less the exact same criteria when deciding if a woman is worth dating.
Unlike most of the people here, I'm completely willing to admit that my views are rather confused. And I don't understand the resulting hostility - why does asking questions make me a villain?
You ask the same questions every single time. You make exactly the same confused bigoted points each time this subject comes up.
You don't create as much discussion going the other way - there are no posts from you askng why society accepts most corporate boards having no women or asking why society accepts discrimination against people with Arab sounding names. All your questions are about why it's okay to discriminate against white males in these kinds of programmes.
No one on HN is defending discrimination against people with Arab sounding names. If they did I'd probably ask similar questions, particularly if this viewpoint seemed common among intelligent people.
There is only one other case where people on HN will defend such discrimination - when the person being discriminated against is from Haiti or India. I do tend to ask the exact same question in that case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6856315
As for society "accepting" some statistical fact, I can very easily recognize principles to explain that view - the normative premise is basically individual rights (if no individual has been discriminated against due to their gender, nothing is wrong). I don't think that normative premise is unreasonable, so I don't mind attributing it to people who seem to be implicitly using it. The normative conclusion logically follows from that premise plus an empirical point. I'm fully capable of reproducing the reasoning.
I simply cannot cook up a logical chain in favor of discrimination by hacker school except by using uncharitable normative premises (e.g., "black people are the master race and deserve special treatment" or "sins of the great great grandfather shall be repaid by the son and anyone who looks like him"). I don't think anyone defending hacker school's discriminatory practices will actually endorse these normative premises, so I'm curious what normative premises the defenders do use in their reasoning.
I ask the same questions because I'm attempting to be charitable. When a viewpoint is widespread among intelligent people I go to great efforts to try to understand it - this is the "Chesterton's Fence" principle. Given the complete vacuousness of the responses I receive, I am already leaning towards the view that most defenders of such practices are simply being emotional and tribal.
Now you can call me a bigot if you want. But that's very confusing - in the one case where I do make racially biased decisions (sex) my decisions are almost exactly the same as those of hacker school scholarships (4/9 African, 1/9 White, over the past year). (Note that I live in a country which is approximately 99% Asian.) I truly do not understand how you draw this conclusion.
Comments
I take it from your response that you entirely ignored my response about targeting outreach at demographics that have high attrition and low entrance rates. Specifically those groups. That's what we do when we do outreach.
I don't know what else to say. It's extremely simple. Targeted outreach works. You pick groups you want to include, and you target them for outreach.
Why are you making this so hard? Honestly, I question whether you're really interested. You do this on literally every thread where sexism comes up. It sounds to me like you really just want an argument.
EDIT: And, your insinuation that it's all tribal politics, instead of a very careful investigation of what outreach methods work for getting disadvantaged people into programs they wouldn't normally have access to is in such bad faith it's hard to even muster up the will to reply.
I'm not asking for empirics. The question cannot be resolved by empirics alone. I'm asking for your normative principle. You are ducking the question if you throw more positive statements at me.
Concretely: Empirical claim (a) + normative claim (b) + reasoning (c) = normative conclusion.
You can't get a normative ("we should" or "it's acceptable to do") conclusion without a normative principle. The empirical claim "Ebola causes death" alone is not a justification for preventing ebola. You need the normative principle "death is bad". If I ask for a normative principle and you tell me about experiments with monkeys, you are missing the point.
I understand (a). I understand your normative conclusion (racially biased decisions in favor of women are good). I'm asking you to explain (b), and maybe (c) if it is not obvious. And I have no idea why this is such a ridiculous thing to ask.
Let's do an exercise.
We say we're interested in targeted outreach to demographics whose attrition rates are especially high, and whose entrance rates are especially low.
You come up with the normative claim. Because the normative claim should be obvious.
Ok, now that you've made your guess, let's see what you've written down. If you guessed that the normative claim is that "we should consider it bad to have an industry so vile that (e.g.) competent female engineers exit the field at many times the rate of male engineers", then you win your gold star.
If you did not guess that this is the normative claim, then it is time to retire all this philosophy and set theory that you have going, because you clearly don't have the basics down.
I'm asking about this because my views are very confused. I don't have a good normative principle to appeal to.
On the one hand, I lean towards "you shouldn't make racially biased decisions". On the other hand, while I'm intuitively disliking the criteria for these scholarships, I impose more or less the exact same criteria when deciding if a woman is worth dating.
Unlike most of the people here, I'm completely willing to admit that my views are rather confused. And I don't understand the resulting hostility - why does asking questions make me a villain?
You ask the same questions every single time. You make exactly the same confused bigoted points each time this subject comes up.
You don't create as much discussion going the other way - there are no posts from you askng why society accepts most corporate boards having no women or asking why society accepts discrimination against people with Arab sounding names. All your questions are about why it's okay to discriminate against white males in these kinds of programmes.
Can you see how that skews perception of you?
No one on HN is defending discrimination against people with Arab sounding names. If they did I'd probably ask similar questions, particularly if this viewpoint seemed common among intelligent people.
There is only one other case where people on HN will defend such discrimination - when the person being discriminated against is from Haiti or India. I do tend to ask the exact same question in that case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6856315
Interestingly, I did get a rather surprising response - the nation state is more important than humanity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5533155#up_5533791
As for society "accepting" some statistical fact, I can very easily recognize principles to explain that view - the normative premise is basically individual rights (if no individual has been discriminated against due to their gender, nothing is wrong). I don't think that normative premise is unreasonable, so I don't mind attributing it to people who seem to be implicitly using it. The normative conclusion logically follows from that premise plus an empirical point. I'm fully capable of reproducing the reasoning.
I simply cannot cook up a logical chain in favor of discrimination by hacker school except by using uncharitable normative premises (e.g., "black people are the master race and deserve special treatment" or "sins of the great great grandfather shall be repaid by the son and anyone who looks like him"). I don't think anyone defending hacker school's discriminatory practices will actually endorse these normative premises, so I'm curious what normative premises the defenders do use in their reasoning.
I ask the same questions because I'm attempting to be charitable. When a viewpoint is widespread among intelligent people I go to great efforts to try to understand it - this is the "Chesterton's Fence" principle. Given the complete vacuousness of the responses I receive, I am already leaning towards the view that most defenders of such practices are simply being emotional and tribal.
Now you can call me a bigot if you want. But that's very confusing - in the one case where I do make racially biased decisions (sex) my decisions are almost exactly the same as those of hacker school scholarships (4/9 African, 1/9 White, over the past year). (Note that I live in a country which is approximately 99% Asian.) I truly do not understand how you draw this conclusion.
Let's take this to email.