Your article is dated 2015. You're ignoring a decent amount of historical growth. Here's a pretty decent chart to let you know how good your news sources are
As you can see, all of these paint a much rosier picture than HuffPo. And places like BLS and FRED and Census are vastly more trustworthy for data, since you remove opinion piece writers trying to get eyeballs.
>Edit: it took me 30 seconds of googling to find this, next time research your position before you make a fool of yourself.
You just sprayed links all over, expecting me to fish through that data? From what I can tell, your data shows mediocre growth that has barely kept pace with inflation. Half the links you show are for "median" values, which will always increase in an economy that is growing (as it did under the Obama years). It's fact that the middle class as stagnated as the ultra-wealth have gained immensely over the past decades, no amount of FUD will make your argument factual. I'm not arguing any further with someone who argues in bad faith.
>Half the links you show are for "median" values, which will always increase in an economy that is growing (as it did under the Obama years). It's fact that the middle class as stagnated as the ultra-wealth have gained immensely over the past decades,
You're confusing median with mean. Median is the middlemost income, which represents the middle class well. Mean is the average including tops and bottoms.
>I'm not arguing any further with someone who argues in bad faith.
You presented worse sourced, out of date data, misuse or don't understand basic terms, and don't look at evidence from well respected sources when presented. How am I the one not arguing in good faith?
Your cultural views can affect your scientific work. The imagination of children in America vs. China is different, people have different dreams and experiences, etc. I am constantly baffled by people like yourself who don't understand that cultural diversity IS diversity of ideas. Whether that culture comes from your location, race, upbringing, wealth, religion, or something else, any sort of diversity is good in business or other organization as it helps you think of new ways to innovate within your area of expertise.
I believe the difference is the concept of "uplifting."
Given two people, one who had money and therefore lots of high-quality STEM education, and another who does not have money and struggling to acquire a STEM education while also dealing with poverty (and the poorer quality education that comes with it), yes, probably the rich kid will do better at their job sooner.
But there's nothing inherently preventing the poorer kid from doing just as good, if not better, a job. Get them on the job, help them deal with the obstacles, and they're just another person, and across populations that means equally likely to "perform" or "succeed." Meanwhile, you also have the advantage of their unique cultural perspectives.
You can have it both ways, the question is whether you take that information and say "fuck it, don't hire poors, they didn't get as good of an education and therefore will preform worse," or you say "if we invest time in this underrepresented culture, we may be exposed to markets we didn't even realize existed."
> But there's nothing inherently preventing the poorer kid from doing just as good, if not better, a job.
Maybe, maybe not. I say this as a poor person who often out competes people with much more privileged backgrounds. There are plenty of "stereotypical poor people" that will never be as good as those who grew up with healthy diets, education, parental supervision... Yes, I've done well but I was always in the top 1% of achievement, even when poor. People like me are already succeeding today and don't need any special "uplifting". Those that do will most likely never be at the level of their peers. If they could, they would already be there.
You did not refute any of my points. Do you really think lowering the barrier of entry for poor people then giving them on the job training will bring them to the level of people that are already high performing? Companies do not have the resources to make that happen as it would require decades of training, education, therapy, life adjustments... just to get to the same level as some people have coming through the door (including some poor people who were self driven).
This reminds me of McNamara's Folly - during the Vietnam war, then Secretary-of-Defence Robert McNamara lowered mental standards for service in an effort to increase the size of the conscript pool. [0] (Gwern's review is a nice summary IMO [1]) They'd just need a little more training, right?
Suffice to say, this did not go well.
Might go a bit better without live weapons and people shooting at you, but it really should say something that there are people that the army literally cannot find a use for.
> Companies do not have the resources to make that happen as it would require decades of training, education, therapy, life adjustments... just to get to the same level as some people have coming through the door (including some poor people who were self driven).
Well, then perhaps they'll be missing out on some of the advantages that you've listed as your own selling points - perhaps a stronger sense of entrepreneurship, problem solving, and hardiness?
In any case, I disagree that the burden on businesses would be that significant. I've seen coding bootcamps churn out pretty decent frontend engineers in 3 months. Make it 6 and who knows what a company could do.
Furthermore, I don't believe it is necessarily a company's job to solve, like, illiteracy. That would be the governments' job, and considering a higher literacy would drive a greater GDP (and make a better society), that should be an objective everyone strives for. To do that, we need people that have lived through those situations to find the best way to lift people out of bad situations. To do that, we need their perspective. To get their perspective, we need them working for us... which means we need diversity.
> Well, then perhaps they'll be missing out on some of the advantages that you've listed as your own selling points - perhaps a stronger sense of entrepreneurship, problem solving, and hardiness?
I don't think they miss out on this though. The people from disadvantaged backgrounds that have these traits will have leveraged them throughout their life to get in the door based on merit alone.
> In any case, I disagree that the burden on businesses would be that significant. I've seen coding bootcamps churn out pretty decent frontend engineers in 3 months. Make it 6 and who knows what a company could do.
My experience is the opposite of yours. I've done a lot of hiring, managing and mentoring and I can say without a doubt that businesses do not have the resources to grow people to the extent that you're suggesting and they certainly can't pass on people who already meet the requirements needed for a role in favor of someone who doesn't.
> To do that, we need people that have lived through those situations to find the best way to lift people out of bad situations.
As someone who has lived through these situations I can say that people who are capable and want out of poverty can get out today. If you can code, you can get a job and learning to code is within reach for any smart person with enough drive regardless of how poor they grew up. I couldn't afford a computer growing up and had to write code by hand on paper then type it into our school's 20 year old Apple IIe. Where there's a will there's a way.
>The people from disadvantaged backgrounds that have these traits will have leveraged them throughout their life to get in the door based on merit alone.
Generally speaking, diversity efforts are targeting those that were "missed" by this. That is, the people who life just threw too much at, and slipped through the cracks. "How many Einsteins died hungry in Africa?" is along the lines of what I mean.
> As someone who has lived through these situations I can say that people who are capable and want out of poverty can get out today.
Huh, disagree. I know people that are too ill from addiction or mental illness, but still quite smart. Or, they have a socially debilitating illness that means they have all the tools to crank out incredible code, but the social illness (high anxiety, autism at a level that makes them "uncomfortable to work with") prevents gainful employment, to no real "fault" of their own. When I was a recruiter, some people didn't get hired because they were of vaguely Arabic or Hispanic descent, and some oil and gas company owners were straight racist and simply wouldn't hire, merit be damned.
> I couldn't afford a computer growing up and had to write code by hand on paper then type it into our school's 20 year old Apple IIe. Where there's a will there's a way.
There's kids in America that are too hungry to do this. I've taught some. Smart, but too hungry. Or too sleepy, because of fighting at home.
I want to be perfectly clear - I am not knocking your achievements. I am sure you worked hard and I don't want to devalue that. I want to just highlight that there are people out there working as hard if not harder and yet don't "win," because we have built an unfair society. I don't think that's ok (i.e. the "life aint fair" argument won't hold water with me) and I think there's a lot we can do about it. I think we can increase "capability" to align with the "want" (desire) people have to get out of poverty.
I appreciate your response. I don't agree with all of it (I'm in the 'life ain't fair' camp) but certainly there are people whose latent ability is there but can't be utilized due to one reason or the other. The thing is though, that there's no way a company can correct for that. Let's take addiction as an example. A company most definitely should not be hiring addicts. Getting work done is difficult in the best of situations but having drug addicts as co-workers would make it impossible to succeed. Managing even mentally healthy individuals is a great challenge. I think you're expecting too much from organizations and managers as individuals if you can think they can repair drug addicts, people with mental illness...
Fair. I don't expect companies to manage drug addicts.
But what about ex-drug-addicts? Or convicted felons that have served their time? The government "fixes" the problem and them drops them into society and says "good luck!" (well, it actually doesn't, but for the sake of argument)
I'm saying in cases like this, these people can offer valuable insight due to their circumstances. Perhaps valuable enough to spend a couple extra months on upskilling an ex-felon on, I dunno, product design. You do it, then they turn around and create an educational product for inmates that you can sell to a state penitentiary system for millions, which you do for all 50 states. A silly example, but do you see my point?
I think we've gone way into the weeds here and I'm confusing myself at this point, but I appreciate the dialogue.
I actually practice this more than my argument probably leads on. Coming from an unorthodox background means that I don't really evaluate potential hires based on their school, upbringing... I look solely at ability to do the job. I don't have the liberty of gambling on unqualified people though. I personally would hire an ex-felon if they could demonstrate the ability to code at the level required for a position. That's a pretty personal choice though and I wouldn't fault someone for not being comfortable doing that.
What I won't do is hire someone who's unqualified. I've seen (and passed on) plenty of unqualified people with degrees from high end schools so this cuts both ways.
This position hinges on the giant assumption that "genetic mutations" are effectively the only important factor in one's life outcomes.
It's a point of view I'm thoroughly familiar with as I've read/listened to plenty of material by Richard Dawkins et al, and spent a solid few years of my life subscribing to that deterministic/materialistic worldview.
But, both for reasons of curiosity and personal need, it's a worldview I ended up researching deeply enough to progress beyond, and it turns out there's plenty of evidence that factors beyond one's genetic code are at least as important, and quite possibly vastly more so.
Most importantly: genetic expression (epigenetics), which we already know can change during one's lifetime, and may be able to be changed far more significantly/rapidly, and have a far greater propensity to change one's life outcomes, than has been previously accepted.
> Are you suggesting the individual could reverse a detrimental inherited mutation in his own lifetime (as opposed to the lifetime of his distant descendants), if properly nurtured?
I don't suggest that but I think it's far less important than you assume.
However I do suggest that a person can reverse a detrimental genetic expression if properly nurtured.
I've spent about the last 8 years putting this hypothesis to the test and so far have been successful in overcoming multiple debilitating health conditions and dramatically improving my capabilities and outcomes in my professional and personal life.
And yes, I'm fully cognisant that I am an n=1 self-evaluated anecdote, so my case is at-best suggestive, not conclusive.
But I'm not alone in applying these theories and having these kinds of outcomes, and there is a growing body of scientific theory and research to provide a basis for these experiences/observations.
> How do you reconcile that with the notion of Darwinian evolution? Is it not true that individual organisms are born with small mutations which make them more or less suitable for an environment, and that over long time periods, the ones who are more suitable for an environment will flourish in that environment?
Very true. Nothing has changed about the facts of natural selection in biology. I'm not talking about biology, though, I'm talking about sociology, and I don't think the mechanisms that act on biology have much of anything to do with sociology. For example, we can demonstrate that natural selection can be totally annihilated by, for example, keeping people with birth defects alive with medicine. We can even develop entire industries around keeping these people "equal." One of these industries is Optometry.
> Are you suggesting the individual could reverse a detrimental inherited mutation in his own lifetime (as opposed to the lifetime of his distant descendants), if properly nurtured?
Since we are talking about sociology, the "mutation" is a result of society, not of biology (or anything to do with the individual, really), in which case yes, any aspect caused sociologically can be reversed/changed/altered sociologically.
People born poor and thus lacking education can be given education, which both solves the problem for new "people born poor" while also "reversing" the detrimental effects of a lacking education in existent individuals (through nurturing them).
I believe this method of nurturing or uplifting is not only morally superior to the concept of social darwinism (and I am happy to defend this point moralistically), but it is also better by all other traditional measures of society "success" - average happiness, productivity, technological advancement.
Thanks for the answer. I think you touch on something with the Optometry example, and that example helped me to articulate a proto-idea I've been trying to get a finger on and haven't been able to grasp until now.
To avoid unnecessary anguish, pretend there's a country called Foo.
Natives of Foo are much less intelligent than the average human, and racists point to them as an example validating their racism. But imagine what's really going on is, the natives of Foo are all genetically disposed to have terrible sleep apnea, and that's what's causing their reduced intelligence.
If we ask "Why on earth are natives of Foo less intelligent?", then we can follow that thread and eventually realize it's because they all have sleep apnea. Then we can give them CPAP machines and fix the problem.
But if we dogmatically put our fingers in our ears and scream "everyone is equal!", then we have no hope of sorting the mess out. It would be as ludicrous as condemning optometry because we're afraid of hurting the feelings of people born with poor eyes.
Thanks for the comments about sociology vs. biology. Pragmatically speaking, we need to figure out how we can change our society to legitimately incentivize this "uplifting" (it isn't free). Our current tactic seems to be to brainwash people about magic pixie dust qualities of diversity. This doesn't do anybody any favors, because the invisible hand of the market doesn't care about propaganda. Push it far enough and the whole job market will be made of shell company contracting agencies whose sole purpose is to take on "diversity liability".
I understand the point you're making - that we must not be afraid to talk about genetic differences between people.
While I respect the perspective, there's a couple critical "implementation issues":
1. I've never heard of a case like you used in your example, of everyone from an island having sleep apnea which leads to lower IQ. The obstacles are that we've never seen a universal population wide disease like that (before you bring up sickle cell or something hold on), we've never seen such a disease consistently lead to "employable" side effects (say, intelligence or charisma or something), and we've just never had such a homogeneous population anyway.
2. The CPAP issue is open to literally anyone, and so what's the point in trying to figure out whether a given population is genetically predisposed to sleep apnea? Just continue to treat at an individual level (by providing universal access to healthcare)
It boils down to: separating populations to find cause of "issue" doesn't actually generate any useful information but does create fantastic weapons for racists. Instead, just persuing socially liberal policies such as universal education and healthcare do a great job of evening the scales for us.
Please don't use foul language. I'm genuinely interested in komali2's answer. I'm not pulling some rhetorical trick or something. Please follow HN guidelines and give fellow commenters the benefit of the doubt. There are obviously many causes of under-representation of minorities, not least of which is that if they were more fully represented, then that would help them to pass their genes along and thus over a long period of time, they would cease to BE minorities to begin with.
>"people less genetically able to do certain jobs tend to become minorities"
This is a sidenote to my longer comment - I've never seen evidence, ever, of a genetic component to the ability to do a certain job, that surpasses a statistical margin of error.
That’s not true. Arguably all professional athletics require a very large genetic component. Good luck in the NBA if you’re 5’1” tall.
I think the ability to accurately identify tones is also largely genetic, so professional musicians are probably on the list as well.
My guess is that software development also has genetic mental requirements but there’s no definitive answer for that.
Probably a lot of jobs have genetic components whether that’s cognitive speed, athletic ability, ability to focus, fine motor control, a particular enhanced sense...
Sure, you're not wrong, but you've just stated an individual trait, not a population one. Try now to make the argument that someone is more "likely" to be pro NBA if they're of some arbitrarily chosen genetic background. You will run into the fact that 1. You will be totally unable to create rigid constraints for your genetic background, and 2. Statistical variance will be so high that you won't actually be generating useful information anyway (i.e. an effective predictor).
So yea, maybe one couple of tall people could have a tall kid and of course the kid has a better chance at the NBA than a short kid (sort of maybe. He could end up a footsie god, it's happened before and we have no way of predicting when it will happen next), but they might have had a short kid despite their genetic factors so the point is moot.
>My guess is that software development also has genetic mental requirements but there’s no definitive answer for that
You may guess all you want but I carefully avoid any feelings that are not fact based and don't generate any useful planning or information for me so I disagree with this point. There's simply no evidence of this and I don't see how this information could be significant enough to have an effect on any decisions I make in life (for example, hiring decisions).
> No, I’ve stated a population trait. The population of professional athletes
Ok... but we've now left the field of genetics. Professional athletes are determined by whether they get hired to play sports professionally, not by genetic birthright.
> Not all tall people can be NBA stars but all NBA stars are tall.
Again, unsure the relation to genetics here, but this also isn't true. Muggsy was a god and is 5'3". Curry is 6'3" which is definitely tall, but among NBA players, not that tall... but his skill level is far, far, far higher than his height would indicate. The statistical variation between height and skill, even in the highly-artificially-selected-for population of NBA players, doesn't correlate perfectly enough to derive a good predictor. You just can't say "the taller the player, the better the player." Not even on average! So, it's not useful information.
AND! This doesn't even get into the sociological aspect of NBA - how many young Muggsys are out there not getting put in (or accepted) to basketball camps/programs because they're "too short?" How many 7 year old future Currys are too hungry to train?
> You’ve been advocating strongly for your position so I’m not sure it makes sense to just discount the opposition as useless.
I certainly don't intend to imply your position is useless, I'm trying to demonstrate that correlative "evidence" (i.e. that a certain population is better at xyz) is unable to overcome sociological noise, and therefore the information is useless.
> Again, unsure the relation to genetics here, but this also isn't true. Muggsy was a god and is 5'3". Curry is 6'3" which is definitely tall, but among NBA players, not that tall... but his skill level is far, far, far higher than his height would indicate. The statistical variation between height and skill, even in the highly-artificially-selected-for population of NBA players, doesn't correlate perfectly enough to derive a good predictor. You just can't say "the taller the player, the better the player." Not even on average! So, it's not useful information.
This is actually a common fallacy - height is a fantastic predictor of NBA skill, that's why something like 15% of everyone in the US over 7' tall will play in the NBA at some point in their life. But once you've limited the question to the set of people who play in the NBA, it won't be nearly as good of a predictor of skill - because you're measuring after a selection effect.
I admit I’m using height as a shorthand here. I’ll put it more simply: Do you think anyone can become a professional athlete with the right training?
I don’t. I think it’s a field where genetics determine who can succeed and who can’t. That isn’t to say that everyone who can become a professional athlete becomes one though.
> Sure, you're not wrong, but you've just stated an individual trait, not a population one.
No, I’ve stated a population trait. The population of professional athletes. Not all tall people can be NBA stars but all NBA stars are tall. Being genetically athletic is a prerequisite to professional sports not a guarantee that one can become a professional athlete. Being genetically unathletic does disqualify you from the profession though.
> I don't see how this information could be significant enough to have an effect on any decisions I make in life (for example, hiring decisions).
You’ve been advocating strongly for your position so I’m not sure it makes sense to just discount the opposition as useless. At the very least this seems like a great field for further study.
Is it really so outlandish to suggest that populations have diverged cognitively after tens-hundreds of thousands of years of separation? Or are you really that determined to pretend that all population differences just stop at the shoulders?
The consistently different outward expression of genetic variation among populations is obvious - skin color, height, weight, fat proportion, hair type, eye color, predisposition to disease - everything is influenced by our genes. But you don't think you're performing Olympic level mental gymnastics in pretending that a structure as complex as the brain isn't deeply influenced by heritable genes?
You cannot judge plausibility by convenience. Nature is cruel, and your outrage is inappropriate.
> Is it really so outlandish to suggest that populations have diverged cognitively after tens-hundreds of thousands of years of separation?
Yes, actually, because civilization is only (barely) 10,000 years old, which is not many generations to develop "cognitive" difference.
Take a newborn member of one population, plop it in one on the other side of the planet, and in 20 years they'll be indistinguishable from anyone else (minus whatever effects that society applies to the child due to differences in their appearance).
I disagree the genetic heritage of an individual affects their cognitive ability in a way to overcome statistical error, with all the cognitive "noise" of society existing.
Humans diverged long before the appearance of civilization. According to Wikipedia[1], the first homo sapien migration out of Africa began 300,000 years ago.
>Take a newborn member of one population, plop it in one on the other side of the planet, and in 20 years they'll be indistinguishable from anyone else (minus whatever effects that society applies to the child due to differences in their appearance).
Your point that all differences arise from societal treatment is debatable. There are adoptive population studies from the late 20th century where non-white infants adopted by white families were evaluated during adolescence and consistently showed measurable, significant differences SAT scores, for example. Of course, how much of that is still an effect of nurture neither of us can say.
Ultimately it is still an open question, but, appropos to the article, the current political climate of the scientific establishment will unlikely allow for an unbiased study, or any study, into the subject.
Several sites do that now, it's annoying and you sometimes cannot even get back to the previous article. I like to read the text on my screen near the top of my browser, so I scroll constantly as I read, and for these sites I continually scroll off the end of the article into the next one before I have finished the last vertical page of text due to the way I read. I'm not changing the way I read content due to these shitty sites, so I guess I will never finish one of their articles.
I don't get the "extra letters" argument as a Computer Scientist. Most of my time is spent figuring out what I'm going to do before I type anything, whether that's research, staring at code for hours to see how it works, or something else. I could type 3x as many characters each day and would probably only work an extra 10 minutes per day. Maybe I'm the exception, but I don't like brevity for brevity sake.
I normally use "git push --fo<TAB>" or "git push --fo<UP ARROW>" in zsh, but after seeing the switch option "--force-with-lease" pop up each time I've memorized it now. I let my CLI do the work for me most of the time, but when I can't there's always "man COMMAND". After doing anything a bunch of times, you remember it.
I use `--force-with-lease` instead of `--force` or `-f` because it ensures that if someone happened to push before me it would fail and I could manage that manually. Even on branches that no one "should" be touching other than me, it seems safer to type the extra characters `-` and `orce-with-lease` around the `-f`.
This was new to me, and makes me feel better about force pushing. However, while googling to find out if I could set this as the default behaviour I found an Stack Overflow answer that as well as saying "no" points out a very git-like gotcha:
Apparently it will think you know about the changes if you've fetched them, even if you've not merged them. And some systems auto fetch in the background.
Yep, Google Maps still shows my home and work locations on the Commute tab from before I disabled almost everything in my Google account, but won't let me change the work address since we moved locations. So I guess when I change houses (the only one I really care about, since I use it to send an ETA to my wife) I can just turn everything on, change the address, then turn it all off again. It's illogical dark patterns like this that made me start detaching from Google, and will probably drive me to buy a non-Android phone next time, although I detest Apple UI even if their quality is usually great.
> I can just turn everything on, change the address, then turn it all off again
You can't - or, rather, I can't. It may be a problem that only affects me, I haven't talked to other people about it, but that was exactly my thinking a few months ago. So I activated location services, changed my home address to my new address, checked that it was set right, and disabled it again. And whoops, it's my old address again.
They might've fixed that in the mean time, I haven't checked it recently, I've just given up on using maps.
Is this on desktop or mobile? It could match the theory in the grandparent post that they preferred sticking to one backend. That also allows handling conflicts in one place, with one protocol. E.g. what would the behaviour be if you edited the home address with a ZIP code on your phone, while offline? What if you try to make the same change from your laptop and e.g. you set a ZIP+4 code? And then what happens when your phone is online again?
It's on mobile. I haven't tested it much, but I'm really not interested in doing so. I only keep Google Maps because my wife and I like to share locations, which I am trying to do via some direct method between our phones eventually anyways.
How else do you ship it? Radioactive materials count as pretty much anything irradiated, so for a Navy nuclear plant (something they transport on trains that is radioactive) that's every pipe, valve, and metal fitting from the primary loop. You're not shipping all that by truck or plane with more security than a train, which is pretty unstoppable and it's easy to anti-air missiles and stuff to a train vs. a truck. Also, you'd need dozens of trucks or planes for one reactor decommissioning vs. one fairly compact train.
it was a point in time. I have no problem with casks on secured trains. I've even watched the crash-test videos for amusement like everyone else.
I'm talking about ancient history where they put two guys on a train with a box.
This 'its the company don't ask questions' airline is much more what I would have expected, back in the day. I would have expected they detailed off a truck and some troops to do the drive. But no: they gave a suitcase to somebody and sent it on the red-eye.
My big question with face rec is this: what happens when the tech is so good that people can find out the identity of someone whose "special" photos were stolen or shared on the internet? That's going to be a huge deal and will cause huge problems for some people if not handled correctly.
I think society has actually gotten better at this. A strategically leaked sex tape is already an acceptable career move for celebrities, and I don’t think many people would necessary care about it in politics, either.
I don't care about the elites, I care about people who are not well known who get exposed due to this technology, or who's endangered because their stalker who happened on their nude stolen photos can now track them in real time.
Celebrities and politicians have money and power to ensure they recover from this event, your sister or wife doesn't.
I think it's often more about hypocrisy than it is about the act/actions. It seems to, at least from my pov, work out worst for conservative/republican politicians than left leaning ones. Of course when you get bad actors on the left, this also means things are overlooked or forgiven that really shouldn't be.
This had already happened. There are quite a lot of online services that run facial recognition and match provided photos against the datasets derived from porn.
The tech is nowhere near as good as humans are. It's just leveraging the fact that computers can search through a much bigger data set. It's going to take a long time before it gets better than humans considering the fact that progress generally plateaus.
I assure you it wasn't nearly as big of an obstacle to the guy writing the ticket as you think it would be. Humans are very good at improvising when a new situation is thrown their way.
I assure you, bothering someone like this when they are trying to get through their day is not hilarious to that person. Not only did your friend act like an ass and part illegally or over the time limit, but they then risked possibly running over a person's foot or something while fucking around.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/middle-class-charts_n_6507506
Check out these charts and tell me you're not full of shit.
Edit: it took me 30 seconds of googling to find this, next time research your position before you make a fool of yourself.