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Comment by amateurpolymath | Hacker News Reader

My impression when reading this was that the author intended it to be taken seriously. It is written with a decidedly "academic" tone. However, it is very light on actual research and evidence. Author says "Humans are inherently cooperative" is a bias on the Left. Where does this come from? More unsourced claims that strike me as suspect: "Respect for the strong/authority" is a bias on the Right. Women have more "Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness."

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So the gender differences he talks about are very obviously coming from this meta-study:

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

He uses a lot of the same terminology as the paper, references big-5 personality traits etc, as well as the same personality dimensions like people-object axis.

The left vs. right stuff is clearly coming from Jonathan Haidt's Moral foundations theory:

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

The author of the "manifesto/screed" is drawing pretty clearly from good research, but isn't linking to it or discussing it in context

Note however that Gizmodo say

> Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted

The links that were removed are probably relevant. Some passages in the text even have quotation marks around them where I assume that links to sources were removed.

Yeah, what was up with that? I was really disappointed that stuff was omitted and assumed it was why some of the author's claims seemed so bold. Is there a link to something closer to the original around?

I think it's this one, but the links don't seem to work: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...

Edit: Here is the PDF with working links: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

> However, it is very light on actual research

No, the research exists in some cases, but the content of an internal informal document obviously doesn't require a rigorous (redundant) academic format. If you can't Google, it probably wasn't intended for you anyway. The comment about women ranking higher (in general) for agreeableness is statistically true. However, the reasoning for why is up for debate and has been well considered...

A neuroscience/evolutionary theory in plain english: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewvqEqIXdhU

Turns out when software engineers try to do psych and sociology research they don't tend to know what they are talking about. These are real fields with real expertise and the author of this thing thinks that he has figured it all out.

Really it's debatable that people work together? I get bias but seriously this is like saying I have a Left bias because I think the Earth is round.

It seems to be saying that left bias is "people prefer to cooperation over pure self-interest/working on their own." Obviously sometimes cooperation is in your self-interest, but its the difference between thinking that employees will do what's best for the company and employees will do what's best for themselves. The right bias is that they are primarily self-interested while the left is that they see the groups interests as a priority.

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