Jews in Silicon Valley

When people say that Silicon Valley is run by old white men, they’re wrong. It’s run by Jews.

Thats an exaggeration, but Jewish people are over-represented in technology, especially in the top jobs. Jews are only 2% of the population in the USA, but:

• Steve Ballmer
• Marc Benioff
• Larry Ellison
• Larry Page, Sergey Brin
• Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz
• Max Levchin

This list is just off the top of my head, by no means exhaustive. Jews tend to be a huge portion of the successful people in technology, way more than 2%. But they make up a huge number of successful technology founders.

Why?

Because Jews have the highest IQ. And technology companies need people with extremely high intelligence. The average Jewish American IQ is 113, Asian-Americans have 106. Latino Americans have 89 and African-Americans have 85. Is it a coincidence that the highest IQ groups are over-represented and the lowest IQ groups are under-represented?

On a side note, Jews have very high verbal IQ, but average spatial IQ. Verbal/logic skills are needed for persuading people to work with you, raise money etc (CEO type skills). Spatial skills help in engineering (CTO type skills). Asians have a high spatial IQ. That’s why you’ll see more Asians in engineering, and more whites in management.

The current mindset with diversity is all wrong. The diversity activists won’t ever be happy until each race is represented proportionally to the general population. Even then, I’m sure they won’t be satisfied, otherwise they’d have to find other work to do.

But if you look at the unfair distribution of intelligence, there isn’t any discrimination going on at all. There is already a shortage of good engineers, and if you have the skills tech companies won’t discriminate against you.

So the problem is not enough Blacks and Hispanics are studying computer science. In fact even at 15 years old (see 2012 PISA scores), there is a huge gap between Asians/Whites and Black/Hispanics. This is not the problem for the tech companies to fix. They’re meant to get the smartest people they can, otherwise their competitors will.

Even so, Zuckerberg is still voluntarily donating his money to help fix education and improve equality.

However no matter how much money they spend, they won’t fix the achievement gap between races. Education policy in the USA is a very low leverage business. Facebook can ship a new product to millions instantly, but policy changes take forever to implement. But more importantly, its a demographic thing. People have tried smaller class sizes, more money, and countless other things, for over 50 years to no avail. It’s insoluble, and everyone ignores the elephant in the room: heritability of intelligence.

William Shockley was the inventor of the transistor and the founder of Silicon Valley. He had controversial beliefs on race and heritability of IQ and was ostracized before he died. I believe he was correct. It’s time to bring those ideas back into the discussion in Silicon Valley.

You would think that with so many intelligent people in Silicon Valley, they would have figured this out by now.

 

Dear Black people, you suck at coding

Megan Rose Dickey, a black blogger at Techcrunch wrote an article titled “Dear White People, You Suck At Diversity“, attacking the Dick Costello (former CEO of Twitter), Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce),  and Mike Moritz (legendary investor of Sequoia Capital) for not taking into account “intersectionality”. In other words, trying to hire more women is not enough, and that “racial minorities, trans people and gender nonconforming people” are left out.

If white people, aka Silicon Valley sucked so hard at diversity, then how come 21% of Google’s workforce is Asian, but only 4% of the USA is Asian? Whereas Hispanics are 3% of Google’s workforce and 16% of USA’s population. See more here (by the Verge).

Asians are 5 times over represented. Hispanics are 5 times under represented. Why is that? Both Asians and Hispanics had to migrate to the USA, learn another language, suffer outsider status, but their outcomes are wildly different.

To make it in technology, you must be extremely intelligent. Just like to make it as a model in New York, you must be extremely beautiful or to make it in the NBA, extremely tall. These are just the table stakes to participate.

Even those who do not seem intelligent like Steve Ballmer, turn out to be geniuses. Hard to believe but oaf-like, sweaty lumbering salesman Steve Ballmer beat Bill Gates in the Putnam exam in 1974, the prestigious mathematics exam.

The 2012 PISA study is an international study of 15 year old students (n=500,000, suck on that Daniel Khaneman) from around the world in mathematics, science and reading. Look below at Asian/White Americans and compare to Black/Latino Americans.

At the young age of 15, you already see a huge divergence between Black/Hispanic Americans (way below average) and Asian/White Americans (above average).

The hiring process for getting an engineering job in technology is pretty clear cut. Either you can get the code to work, or you can’t. Your skin color, gender, race, or religion does not matter. Same when it comes to fundraising. If you have good traction, you can raise money regardless of your pedigree. 

There just aren’t enough qualified Black and Hispanics applying for tech jobs. There already is a shortage of engineering talent. Why would any company not hire someone who is qualified? Our white overlords certainly don’t throw good Asian programmers away!

Silicon Valley leaders are well-meaning and nice, and are trying their best to increase diversity. You have Google, Facebook and Apple voluntarily posting diversity reports.

We are proud of the progress we’ve made, and our commitment to diversity is unwavering. But we know there is a lot more work to be done. – Apple CEO, Tim Cook

“We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong and that it’s time to be candid about the issues,” – Google SVP, Laszlo Bock

While we have achieved positive movement over the last year, it’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be. There’s more work to do. – Facebook Global Director of Diversity, Maxine Williams

What do they get in return from the social justice activists and the press? More bashing and crap for them not trying hard enough. Just google “facebook diversity report” and look at the headlines.

Perhaps there are immutable differences between the races. Silicon Valley is like the NBA for nerds. We don’t complain that the NBA is 74% black and that there have only been 2 Asian players: Yao Ming and Jeremy Lin (who flamed out). Likewise, we shouldn’t complain when technology is dominated by Whites, Jews and Asians.

Megan Rose Dickey, is not smart enough to make it in technology. She can’t code, and has made zero contributions, but she gets all the airtime and gets to set the agenda. Meantime tech giants self-flagellate, pledge to do better and nothing improves. But it’s not their fault that black people suck at coding.