Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Women aren’t interested in tech the way guys are and are still slaves to fashion in professions where talent counts for everything. So of course men won’t take them seriously, really if they are concerned about dressing sexy, they aren’t focusing on the job but trying to catch a man(usually a management type – more prestige for the woman). Geeks know this. This is why geeks distrusts guys in suits. They know suits are tech stupid and treacherous.

Really if a woman wants to be taken seriously, stop obsessing over how to dress and focus on the work, not socializing.

As for dating all standard rules apply. Women are looking either for a senior management or engineer type as dating material. Problem they are generally taken. They will not date a equal so it forces them out and trying to meet guys from the humanities. The male humanity majors know you never date a woman scientist because 1) They are much smarter than you and will become contemptuous of her doltish boyfriend quite rapidly. 2) The guy will either be unemployed or making minimum wage. 3) STEM women aren’t exactly the sort of woman a man wants as well. Some are married to their job, others are ice princesses with all the femininity of a block of iron.

And they will not date a bluecollar even he makes a lot more than her because he’s at the bottom of the status totem pole society wise.

* There’s also a shift in types of IQ, with women having higher verbal IQ (is anyone surprised?) and men having higher mathematical and spatial IQ.

The female verbal IQ advantage results in better social skills, which are an advantage in most other areas in life. But that’s not good enough for them…as long as there’s one area men are ahead, there’s a problem.

* That’s only one factor. Another is that women, including the ones who score high on IQ tests, are much more interested in the human, interpersonal world, than in facts, figures or logic. Since this difference has been observed in all cultures and in all time periods that left records, it’s very likely that it’s a biological difference.

* I graduated in 1969 with a BA in physics and mathematics from a very prominent university (ranked among the top ten graduate math programa at the time). There were a fair number of young women in both the math and physics programs and those that could hack it did well and graduated. Many went on to graduate school and succesful careers in physics. The young women who had the capability were respected and treated as colleagues by faculty and their fellow students. Those that didn’t have the capability dropped out of physics and math sooner or later. The same wsas true of their male colleagues.

I have a very strong suspicion that Pollack dropped out of her science major either because she couldn’t hack it or because she lost interest in the amount of intellectual effort that most need to succeed at these fields. Those who are drawn to a STEM major in college don’t usually like to admit that the field is beyond their capabilities unless forced to. I speak from observation and personal experience. I found that at least at the undergraduate level – say through advanced real analysis, complex analysis, abstract algebra through, e.g., Galois theory, and fundamental point set and algebraic topolgy — everything came pretty easily for those with some minimal talent in the field. I left math after a brief foray into graduate work where I found that a great deal more effort was required for success than I had theretofore experienced. But I did complete a Ph.D. in a math oriented field with a thesis that involved some moderately advanced mathematical analysis.

* No, Asians are neither vibrant nor diverse.

This has been another edition of easy answers to easy questions.

But anyways, the holy commandments of diversity have been handed down by the NRC and they are not to be questioned.

Kid of Argentine immigrants, Diverse
Kid Italian immigrant, not diverse
kid of japanese parents born and lived a few years in Brazil came to the U.S., diverse
japanese immigrant kid to the U.S., not diverse

Phillipino or Vietnamese immigrant kids, Not Diverse
Yemeni, not diverse.
Ethiopian immigrant’s kids, diverse.
Samoan immigrant kid, not diverse

Those who violate or question these commandments will be exiled from the cathedral.

* I never see any women garbage collectors.

I also never see any women demanding to be given jobs as garbage collectors.

* The federal government recognizes Asians as a protected class of diversity.

As a result, Asians receive some privileges of diversity, including:

1. Preferential US immigration, citizenship, and asylum policies for Asian people
2. 8a set-aside government contracts for Asian owned businesses
3. Affirmative Action for Asians especially in government jobs
4. Government anti-discrimination laws for Asians
4. Government hate speech prosecutions for Asians
5. Sanctuary cities for Asians, and other protected classes
6. Asian espionage directed at the US is very common
7. American policy allows mass importation of Asian products built with slave wage standards

Diversity theory rationalizes Asian privileges because it claims Asians are eternally oppressed by occidentals.

* There is no real problem with women in engineering (STEM careers) in Silicon Valley. It’s just that they are Indian and Chinese women. That’s because there is no diversity problem in silicon valley engineering. Eyeballing, it’s pretty much something like >80% Indian and Chinese. A lot of the remainder are Russians, Arabs, from the Balkans, stuff like that. So if “diversity” means “not heritage white”, SV has arrived.

I’d guess something like 20% to 40% of the Indians, for example, are female. As with non-Indian programmers/engineers, as soon as they have kids they do tend to target management or QA over programming. That’s mostly a matter of simple time management and ability to schedule, compared to development.

The ironic thing is many of these people are no longer from US universities. At one time it was typical that they would be. No more. No, the real problem now for Yale and Harvard is the big silicon valley tech firms are not hiring nearly as many US programmers from the big name US schools. They are getting a lot of their US programmers in SV direct from the IITs, little colleges in Mumbai and Pune, that sort of thing. The Yales, Harvards, and even to some extent MITs and Stanfords are being shut out, except at the highest level. At the ugrad level, the big companies are going for “good enough, as cheap as possible”.

I think women, white women in particular, when they are ugrads are sharp enough to catch on to what’s happening. Talking to their friends a few grades above them, that sort of thing. If the large companies that women used to look to for secure jobs are preferentially hiring Indians and Chinese, doesn’t it make sense for a white women at Harvard to do something else? Why fight the system?

People that don’t get around silicon valley much might not get this. If you haven’t seen what’s happened so fast in the engineering side of big multinationals it’s hard to believe.

* “a lower variance in IQ”

That’s why there are very, very few girls at the self-driving car team at Google and the network throughput switch design team at Twitter and the Artificial-Intelligence sentiment analysis team at Facebook and the Stanford Computer Science Department and the camera sensor processing optimization team at Apple.

But that level of technical work is a sliver of the profession. Most computer tech jobs require an IQ around 110 or 115 and women exist in equal numbers to men in that range.

But the website for your local insurance salesman and the accounting program at your local small-time law firm are run 90% by men. The guy who maintains the computer network at your doctor’s office is a guy. Those jobs can be done well by anyone smart enough to get a B+ average at community college.

So there’s a lot more to it than IQ variance.

* Undergraduate CS curriculums have become a lot more rigorous, cognitively demanding and theoretically oriented in the past 30 years. Some of this is a response to increased student demand for those departments, so the weed out factor has been upped, particularly in intro classes. CS programs now have 50% or higher dropout rates. Whereas 30 years ago the degree was more about learning simple programming, today knowing how to program is expected upon entry so the courses can focus on complex and mathematically intensive subjects.

Some of this is also driven by the changing nature of the field. There’s been a proliferation of languages, tools, libraries and frameworks. Most of these advances have comparatively favored the highly intelligent. They allow superstar developers to leverage highly abstract patterns to solve entire classes of problem in a single solution, through a highly reductionist non-intuitive and at sometime alien approaches.

Circa 1980 programming in COBOL on a large corporate mainframe system was closer to being an accountant. Yes, it required a definite above average intelligence. But more important was a high degree or organization, rigidly structured thinking, and the ability to meticulously follow rules and manuals. Nowadays programming a bleeding-edge distributed Scala system with a NoSQL backend and a machine learning inference engine is closer to the mental complexity of theoretical physics.