proveanegative

If candidates from group A perform more strongly on average than those from group B there are other possible causes than bias in the selection process itself. For instance, members of group A may only apply at a higher level of self-assessment for how likely they are to succeed than those in group B. The reason for this could be opportunity cost not present for group B, overconfidence or lack of underconference in group B or underconference or lack of overconfidence in group A.

Comparing sociology to biology in particular ends up unflattering for the former. Biology is a lot more obviously successful than sociology. Sociology has so far failed to produce its equivalent to evidence-based medicine and whenever treatments it has tried to design for social illnesses have not delivered.

I don't think sociology is completely hopeless but given its track record so far I would sooner expect intelligence (and empathy, willpower, etc.) augmentation to cure whatever problems plague society than any attempt at "institutional change".

Of course, it has to be noted that academics lean left, and sociologists overwhelmingly so.

See, e.g., http://www.criticalreview.com/2004/pdfs/cardiff_klein.pdf.

It is unusual to claim that programming in a statically typed language is more error-prone than in a dynamically typed language, even if only when dealing with HTTP requests specifically. Could you elaborate? It sounds like there might be a story behind this.

Would you say the same about Metasploit or Wireshark? If not, where do you suggest the line be drawn?

This seems like a feature that would be generally selected for in types of social organization.

I believe that democracy does not scale beyond roughly several hundred voters of roughly equal expertise and ability. I decide whether or not to vote accordingly, which means saying no to local and national elections.

That said, I vote on Hacker News stories. Could HN be an example of a moderated democracy (constitutional monarchy?) working well on a larger scale?

I just feel like this is the one thread where there are much bigger things at stake.

I have no objections to your cause but your current headline is, whether on purpose or not, clickbait. I clicked it because I thought it described an usual event that already happened. I would guess most did for the same reason.

You can't justify clickbait headlines with them having noble causes behind them. It's how you end up with Upworthy.

Urbit embodies Moldbug's politics.

Speaking of politics, one of the most interesting practical user-facing things about Urbit that I saw in an earlier video demo was the user choosing his or her political affiliation when registering. The claimed affiliation then acts as a mandatory filter for political conversations. You can opt out of participating in any political discussion but not opt in to more than one camp. I think this is a brilliant idea.

Off the cuff, I agree with you, but I also wonder if it isn't an approach only used by a minority of people involved in hiring, primarily those with a technical background. This is the sort if matter on which I would love to see an empirical study based on real data from the industry, not stimulated hiring experiments, unlikely as it may be to happen.

The sooner we shift from labor to education as our source of social dignity the better.

Twin studies suggest educational achievement is highly (over 50%) heritable. If you succeeded at replacing labor with education as a source of human dignity it would be surprising if the relative amount of dignity with which one was imparted did not depend on one's educational achievement. Combined with the first point it would lead to the formation of a kind of hereditary estates of the realm; you'd have the clergy (the academics), the nobles (the highly educated) and the commoners (everybody else). Would you find such an outcome acceptable? (Just to be clear, I mean this as a genuine, not rhetorical, question.)

I think it is only a matter of time until MOOCs start eating into high school and even middle school-level education. Considering that many adults do not remember their high school experience fondly it will be a welcome alternative.

He also says people with strong accents are bad founders

More accurately, he said that people who fail to improve their accent over time are likely to be bad founders. I don't have a strong belief about this hypothesis one way or another but I see no reason to dismiss it out of hand (expect for signaling).

we shouldn't allow women to be founders today because they probably haven't been hackers for 10 years

That "we" shouldn't allow women to be founders is not just an uncharitable interpretation of PG's words, it's a downright implausible one.

how much a person is willing to question the hand that feeds them can reveal the strength of their character to others.

Careful! You are straying into fundamental attribution error territory. Those who bite the hand that feeds them may be in a better position to do so or feel more encouraged by the people they know.

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

But how do you do that?

It boils down to keeping your identity small (http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html), which may or may not be truly possible in practice for humans who do not lead a monastic life.

My impression of [4] is that it amounts to a protection racket scheme: "Your business is racist and sexist! I will continue to denounce it until you hire me." Of course, a lot of consultants will approach companies with a "your business sucks but I can fix it" routine but the difference here is the implicit threat to go on giving the company negative publicity if it didn't pay.

Curious what they are upto .

I'd answer this question with one word, cynical though the answer may sound to some: signaling. Whatever positive consequences for the socially disadvantaged their efforts might have going about it by hiring loud and popular self-appointed advocates looks a lot like a PR move. There is better bang for the buck in helping the poor in particular (e.g., through the effective charity community) and better expertise available to direct tech projects that might help them but those generally come without the glamour associated with Twitter personalities. Hiring them allows a company to leverage their existing social networks to present a certain image of itself.

As far as I can tell Teflon fumes themselves are only confirmed to be acutely toxic; in humans they cause flu-like symptoms and damage the lungs. The articles I have found do not say anything about there being long-term consequences for those who didn't get the acute symptoms.

Is there an Azul equivalent for SmallTalk?

You can't edit the text of an Ask HN submission, only change the title.

I tried asking exclusively about the future of Grails a few days ago but it didn't work out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986602. This time I thought I'd cast a broader net; the questions I'm asking are not exactly unrelated anyway.

Slippery Slope Fallacy

In the broader society there is a trend towards increasingly intolerant tolerance. That what is going on on GitHub is a part of this trend and thus can get worse is a reasonable inference.

That used to be the case but now it is not entirely so. If reputable people (e.g., high-karma HN users) continue to use either word it will eventually be "redeemed" wherever they are reputable and become acceptable to use.

edit: For the record, I didn't downvote you.

I'll bite.

Your mind is wired by evolution to assess, evaluate and react to human behavior. It is equipped to defend you another humans' attempts to influence your behavior for their own ends when you interact with them in person. Software that you run daily should be able to bypass those built-in protections in a more subtle and personalized manner than traditional advertising or propaganda could ever dream of. In an untrained mind it won't meet resistance but the mind can be trained; the "bigotry against 'robots'" (really, human organizations acting at a distance) on the part of humans who read enough stories like this one emerges as a result and is completely justified.

If this is where the things are going the time may soon come for someone to launch a GitHub clone that deliberately only bans illegal content and provides technological means of protection against Twitter mobs.

Meanwhile, it would be nice to have a reusable code of conduct written with the same attitude. E.g., it would only forbid personal attacks, credible threats of violence against other contributors and violations of the law (like committing warez to the repository). It would deny any responsibility for what the contributors say elsewhere on the Internet and state an unwillingness to discuss their speech on the project grounds. It could include anti-blackmail clauses like that agitating people on social media to "support" your issue by shaming the maintainers will get you banned and the issue closed immediately and irrevocably. The latter would have to be carefully written, though, to not be exploitable.

If you do not declare your ideology upfront you will still end up having one, only implicit and ad hoc.

This does not apply to Python, however. It does have a explicit, if not entirely serious, statement of its ideology in The Zen of Python. (For those unfamiliar, read http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonPhilosophy. It has The Zen and some discussion.) Python takes its ideology pretty seriously, too, as evidenced by how much the words "pythonic" and "unpythonic" used in discussions involving the language. In discussions around, e.g., Java you will find no terms of that sort.

In particular, this leaves all repositories open to media-induced attention and controversy, followed by a takedown.

It should be emphasized that this, rather than the possibility of censorship by GitLab's staff on their own initiative, is the main concern here.

On the other hand, what incentives does GitLab have to host controversial projects? The kind of person who appreciates it is not the exactly the social or technological trendsetter at the moment. It would make a good marketing point for a niche repository hosting service targeting a "red tribe" or "gray tribe" audience* but a mainstream service could rationally choose to not get involved with it.

* https://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/the-rise-of-th...

I pretty much abandoned the thought of someone being wrong and someone being right.

Frankly, this sounds like taking a good idea too far. People around you will make assertions about objective reality that are beyond any reasonable doubt incorrect, sometimes dangerously so. Considering them wrong can be important to prevent harm to yourself, your family and your job or business. Beyond that, calling out people you care about on their being wrong can prevent harm to them and their respective families and jobs even if at first they hate you for it.

Empathizing with people who are wrong for understandable reasons but still being keenly aware that they are wrong seems to me like a much better long-term strategy.

Sorry to be a pedant but the diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome was eliminated from the DSM in 2013. It was replaced with "autism spectrum disorder".

This sounds a bit like people who go "haha, I'm so OCD, I like my pencils all pointing the wrong way" - incorrect self-diagnosis.

And yet there may be a connection between a predisposition to work in tech and autism. See http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.htm... for the argument but also http://www.kennethrobersonphd.com/silicon-valley-breeding-gr... for an objection.

Is Kotlin's type system identical to Java's?