I said conditional upon the data passing statistical grokking, then believe the data and not your gut. I should have made this conditionality more clear.<p>I didn&#x27;t say blindly believe the data or blindly believe your gut.<p>But many people use their anecdotal experiences as justification to deny clearly significant trends because they personally &quot;never observed it.&quot;<p>&gt; Show me any other major industrial sector where a 17-year-old can start a company and be bought out for $30MM. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nick_D&#x27;Aloisio#Summly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nick_D&#x27;Aloisio#Summly</a> Show me where highschool dropouts can make more than Harvard MBAs.<p>In a lot of ways these <i>are not good things about our field</i>. They represent a lot of the ways that toxic culture and a flight from quality are pervasive in tech. In tech, it&#x27;s rarely about actually adding value and often much more about extracting rents from marketing and status. Just like it is in tons of other fields.<p>Tech is not like this because tech is more meritocratic. Tech is absolutely not meritocratic.<p>&gt; but skin color is hardly ever an issue.<p>What are you basing this on? As far as I can tell, only your vague assessment of your personal observations. OK. That&#x27;s not nothing. But because a lot of people present compelling arguments that <i>it is</i> an issue, I&#x27;m generally not just going to take some anecdotal reasoning. There are other explanations. Maybe you&#x27;ve been around racial bias and just not noticed it. Or maybe you&#x27;ve been extremely lucky to avoid being near it. Either of those are more plausible that the unlikely case that your anecdotal experience just happens to be more representative than all of the principled studies (which yes, always have flaws, but no that&#x27;s not a good reason to believe their basic premise is entirely wrong).