Overwhelmingly white and male. In the in-person or videoconference meetups I’ve attended, I don’t think I’ve met more than a couple non-white people, and perhaps 10% were non-male.
Demographic variables aren’t so suited for a factor analysis, in a sense because they are causally upstream of the factors of interest. It might be interesting to take some of the outcomes from those demographic variables, though; for instance probably much of what makes rationalists so male is that rationalism selects for abilities/interests related to programming, which is itself very male-skewed.
Overweight the impact / power of rationalism, despite having life outcomes that are basically average for people with similar socioeconomic backgrounds and demographics
They do seem to overweight the power of rationalism, but the second point sounds wrong to me. Also, generally “X controlled for Y” variables aren’t really suitable for factor analysis.
probably much of what makes rationalists so male is that rationalism selects for abilities/interests related to programming, which is itself very male-skewed
This is just pushing the question one step back though, I don’t know of any good theories for why software engineering is heavily biased towards males either.
The point is just that factor analysis assumes that the items/variables end up correlating due to the factors. If you put variables that are upstream of the factors, such as sex, into the factor analysis, then those upstream variables would have no reason to correlate with each other in ways that match the factor structure (and in fact due to collider bias, would in this case have reasons to end up correlated in ways that precisely oppose the factor structure), so therefore it would be nicer to avoid demographic variables as much as possible.
Demographic variables aren’t so suited for a factor analysis, in a sense because they are causally upstream of the factors of interest. It might be interesting to take some of the outcomes from those demographic variables, though; for instance probably much of what makes rationalists so male is that rationalism selects for abilities/interests related to programming, which is itself very male-skewed.
They do seem to overweight the power of rationalism, but the second point sounds wrong to me. Also, generally “X controlled for Y” variables aren’t really suitable for factor analysis.
This is just pushing the question one step back though, I don’t know of any good theories for why software engineering is heavily biased towards males either.
The point is just that factor analysis assumes that the items/variables end up correlating due to the factors. If you put variables that are upstream of the factors, such as sex, into the factor analysis, then those upstream variables would have no reason to correlate with each other in ways that match the factor structure (and in fact due to collider bias, would in this case have reasons to end up correlated in ways that precisely oppose the factor structure), so therefore it would be nicer to avoid demographic variables as much as possible.