Reading the original manifesto felt like something my 17-year-old self would write. Too clever and completely oblivious at the same time.
The original manifesto is thoughtful, articulate, thorough, and sincere. It provides a basis for dialog, discussion, and disagreement. Zunger's article is mostly a pile of fallacious rhetoric that by chance raises a few interesting ideas that could be twisted into a legitimate counter-argument to a couple of the manifesto's points if you tried really hard.
I don't know what's shameful about that (unless you're referring to something else). He did seem to value gender equality in the sense that men and women should be valued and respected equally (unless I'm reading into it).
If you truly believe people are equal and deserving of equal treatment then you must see a society where white men are the most powerful, most privileged class, as a failure of society.
The author cannot claim to believe in equality and then go on to justify inequality with biological traits.
It's possible to have this and end up with different outcomes because of differing abilities or priorities.
Also, Whites are _underrepresented_ in tech relative to their percentage of the population.
edit: The parent edited their comment to remove the "white" qualifier from "men".
The key words here are "intended to". There's a difference between doing something and intending to do something. Unfortunately, intending to do something is sometimes not enough to actually do something - you also have to do it in the right way, otherwise you might intend to do one thing and instead do another thing.
> de-emphasising empathy
Not the best sound-bite, which of course means it will get quoted a lot. Happens to techies, not all of them are good writers, yet less of them can write a text that would be robust under hostile interpretation. The point, however, was to use data instead of feel-good anecdotes.
> making Google more of a safe space for people with viewpoints similar to his own
What's wrong with making Google more safe for people working there?
Why did you call out "white men" in an article about representation at Google? It doesn't make any sense when white people are underrepresented at Google.
edit: Now the parent has edited their comment to remove "in favor of sexism".
> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
The implication here is that equal representation of women at Google is bad for business. That women aren't in tech and leadership positions because of biological traits.
This is sexism.
Right here. This point and its thorough embedding in every aspect of the article.
This is an incomplete picture of what that statement says. It does not say that 50% representation would necessarily be bad for business, but that discriminating against men to achieve this goal would be bad for business.
Discrimination is the "unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people."
Google only has finite resources. Diverting them to assist the oppressed class (women) is not discrimination against the dominant class (men). It is simply a way to correct for existing discrimination against women.
The two don't follow, at all. Lets replace this statement, and make it about the NBA.
"If you truly believe people are equal and deserving of equal treatment then you must see a game where black men hold the vast majority of positions as a failure of the game".
If the NBA example should be laughed at, why shouldn't the opposite? Neanderthals don't exist anymore, but homo sapiens do, despite very little relative advantage to us. Small differences in averages between groups will lead to dramatically different results. For the best example of all, see casinos (advantage: 2-4%) versus gamblers.
Look at the government. The majority of the US government leadership is older white males.
Either you think: wow, white males are really good at getting into top government positions. Old white males must be superior to other humans.
Or you think: society really gives an advantage to older white males and it's much easier for them to get into government. Maybe power structures are balanced in their favour?
(Hint: the latter is true. The author of the article thinks along the lines of the former, that's why it's sexist and discriminatory and people are upset by it.)
Maybe women have a higher avg IQ but a smaller standard deviation. Then what?
I'm only taking issue with the sacrosanct idea that every mind is equal and that we should expect proportional representation in everything that's not obviously physically biased like sports. (How the brain isn't physical is still an open question.)
How long did we think women performed more poorly with spatial reasoning tasks? Then we realised cultural gender inequality was the culprit, not biological traits [1].
The original author continues to propagate the harmful idea that women aren't making it because of biology, when there is no evidence to support that biology is the reason. And you seem to believe the same thing, despite the science in this area changing and even reporting the opposite results.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/06/why-judy-cant-...
(I'm sure I don't need to point out on this forum how difficult it is to measure productivity or coding performance. AFAIK there are no measures of this which are effective outside controlled conditions, and controlled conditions are close to irrelevant for actually being effective at a job)
Exactly like we expect to see certain phenotypes over-represented in basketball.
Despite the difficulty, saying it's hard but it just must be true that everyone's equal doesn't seem like a robust approach. Or is Google saying it just has zero way of evaluating a person's work? Perhaps they could do blinded code reviews or something.
I think you mean "no" here, right? Because discrimination means making decisions based on gender, not on individual characteristics.
Also your other comments seem to means you support Google's pro-diversity approach then, right?
They aim to give equal opportunities to a more diverse set of people. They don't force hiring from under-represented classes.
I think you may want to reconsider the word you use for that, because that isn't a widely shared definition.
To be clear, when you say "discrimination.. [snip] is fine" most people hear that as "making hiring or promotion decisions based sorely or primarily on the gender of the person is fine". That's what the dictionary definition is too.
This isn't discrimination, and (almost) no one says it is. Unequal outcomes have many sources, and provided they are non-discriminatory that's defensible.
The issues arise when unequal outcomes occur and no one can agree on the cause, because there is a (very good) chance that there is an inequality of opportunity somewhere in the process.
I suspect there is a miscommunication here and your defense of the possibility of unequal outcomes is being confused by the wording.
Americans think their country is the world. Trust me, you are definitely less than 5% of the world population-wise, even if you are ~25% of nominal world GDP.
It is really sad how insular Western culture has become, and weird in an industry and era where the biggest tech IPO was Chinese.
The author of the manifesto lives in a western society. So I'm discussing society with respect to our experiences.
I'm not sure how your comment relates. There are other societies in the world, I agree.
Yet all of a sudden when it comes to mental pursuits (which are physically based in the brain and supporting chemicals), somehow then we're all equally capable and the huge biases that exist when using other organs don't exist. And not only don't exist, but so obviously don't exist that anyone suggesting so is met with "I'm literally shaking".
There seems to be nothing more to the diversity drive than "I want it to be so". I'm not saying it's all fine how it is, but pretending the population should be reflected perfectly is baseless.
Further, he points out diversity only goes one way. If there's too much white male, then it needs fixing. But if white males are underrepresented, then that's fine. It's like that review of the 90% black cast of Black Panther: "Hella diverse!"
Same for pointing out if you're hiring for diversity and lowering standards for "diverse" hires, you're making it worse for everyone.
And as he mentions, this diversity usually isn't. Hiring a bunch of people with the same views but making sure their skin tones or gender identity fill up a big list... Doesn't give you any useful diversity of thought at all.
Being intellectually dishonest and acting existentially offended when someone points out the obvious is why the left is losing out, slowly. And it sucks because the backlash is likely to hurt civil rights and progress.
It's not "mental pursuits," it is that our society rewards men the most for excelling in fields which are created and controlled by men. When the majority of CEOs, leadership and top government positions are taken by men, it's going to be easier for men to keep gaining and holding those positions. Women will and do face more discrimination trying to enter these fields purely because they are women.
By creating a space for women to excel, by trying to fight the pay gap, and by trying to get women into leadership, we are not discriminating against men.
I'm not saying that our society, as it stands, should reflect the population perfectly. I am saying that our society needs to change to treat its population equally. And in doing so our tech companies, governments and other industries will change too. For the better.
> Same for pointing out if you're hiring for diversity and lowering standards for "diverse" hires, you're making it worse for everyone.
No one is "lowering standards" for diverse hires. No one. Why are you even implying this?
> And as he mentions, this diversity usually isn't. Hiring a bunch of people with the same views but making sure their skin tones or gender identity fill up a big list... Doesn't give you any useful diversity of thought at all.
All I got from his manifesto on this was he wants more people who think like him. His manifesto argues for less diversity, if anything.
> Being intellectually dishonest and acting existentially offended when someone points out the obvious is why the left is losing out
It's not taking offence, it is surprise that so many people are still willing to argue for inequality and are blind to the extreme imbalances of our society.
Google fast-tracks diversity candidates simply because they are diversity candidates. Other candidates must reach a higher standard to be fast-tracked.
The original use of the phrase "lowering standards" implied that Google would forgo hiring someone of high skill to hire a lower skilled but more diverse candidate. This is not happening.
Diverse candidates are given more opportunities to have their skill tested, but they must meet the same requirements as anyone else.
Without wading into the general content of the manifesto, I haven't had the time to read it, and while not directly regarding hiring, there is at least one good example where the quest for a more diverse pool has lead to differing standards being applied, namely university entrance. From the stats I've seen, Asians in the US are fairly strongly penalized with regards to the grades and test scores they need to achieve in order to gain entrance to top universities when compared to their White, African American, or Hispanic counterparts. It certainly seems to me that the standards have been lowered for non-Asians in this area, and while I make no claim of this also occurring in the hiring process, I also don't think it's an unfair question to ask seeing as it seems quite widespread in university admittance.
But maybe there's an alternative explanation, like smaller sample size, or Asians being less likely to be well rounded candidates, or maybe it's flat-out race quotas.
1: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/157998/...
Let's say blacks really are on average better at basketball. Does it then follow that whites and asians ought not play basketball?
Nobody argues that because it's silly. (Or do they? I'm not in pro ball.)
People do argue that women should not be in tech. Women in tech regardless of ability get creeped on and treated like they don't know anything. I've met more than one with a fake male avatar on programming sites to ask questions, etc.
People are agitating for diversity in certain fields like tech, government, business, etc. because they are trying to reform fields with discriminatory cultures. If basketball had a culture that actively looked down on, excluded, and hazed whites then I would advocate doing something to challenge that.
I agree that trying to argue for a level of phenotypic equality that does not exist is a losing strategy but I get the motivation. I also have trouble thinking of another way to challenge these issues that doesn't involve taking a battering ram to a culture.
What if it turns out that one gender is on avg smarter but with less range of intelligence (with some magically perfect measurement of intelligence, to avoid claims of test bias). So if that was true, would we THEN be OK with other than 50/50 split in higher-intelligence games? I think to the people getting upset here, the very thought that this is even possible to examine is heresy.
All that Google would have to do is admit 50/50 isn't based on anything hard, and commit to finding out what the real number should be. They won't do that though because the thought offends them. And so they'll shriek racist/sexist/etc. and it'll be just as effective as it was at stopping Brexit and Trump.
That being said I'm very skeptical of an innate gender disadvantage in coding. Some of the earliest coders were women back when it was considered a "secretarial" pursuit, then the field flipped to nearly all male. I also agree that this field's culture is very, very misogynistic. I've seen it. An attractive woman in tech gets ignored intellectually and then covered with creeper drool.
I am personally on the fence about these types of diversity measures, not because I don't think culture should be challenged but because I am not convinced they work. Trouble is I can't think of any other ways. Culture is generally impervious to reason.
Diversity in Tech is indeed about changing the culture. That should be the central reply to this manifesto. Both the manifesto and the negative responses to it are missing this central point - they are focusing it as being about employment hiring about aptitude and worthiness of the job. It's why a call for meritocracy is not an adequate response to a call for diversity. Perhaps this element of culture needs to be explained more by people talking about it, on both sides.
When you look at it from that angle it's more understandable that the common response is that "you're part of the problem" when someone attempts to discuss these issues because it's erroneously seen as being part of the culture that they are seeking to remove. It's been seen as an attempt to negate the errors in the culture.
To reply to a response about being sexist when you wish to discuss diversity would be to focus on the ability that it is possible to talk about gender etc whilst also being a good respectful employee. That it's possible not be a "douche" and work with women and also be an out of the closet Republican or a devout Christian at the same time. That it's acknowledged that many women have a hard time in tech and that the culture can be changed for the better of everyone, and that discussion how it can be changed is a discussion open to everyone.
It is based on something hard—the gender distribution in the population.
At least pretend that you don't have a completely blinkered view of the world.
Why do they aim for a 50/50 gender balance? What if women are actually better in some roles, and it should be 40/60? Why can't this even be questioned?
The funny thing is, I dunno if I believe the original doc author, but I find the response so abhorrent I end up against it.
Google's response should have been "good but flawed questions. Here are studies, here's how we're going about determining diversity's impact etc".
Instead we get people who are gonna quit if he isn't fired, think he should be escorted off premise immediately, write pages misconstruing what was written, and are physically "shaking" at the thought someone might question their beliefs.
It sucks because there are systemic issues, and the current diversity nonsense does nothing about it and won't even try to make it's main case.
I'm hoping some groups will publish serious research on the issue. (Rust has a huge diversity push, iirc. They should also run some non diverse programs then compare results.)
I support promoting equal opportunity for all races and genders, not race based quotas.
There is a huge difference between the two things.
His point is quite clearly based on statistical reasoning, not absolutes. He makes this point blatantly clear when he makes the point about salary negotiations.
He says that people with high agreeableness have more trouble negotiating than people with low agreeableness. Because high agreeableness is statistically more common among women, this is treated as a gender issue when it is quite clearly a personality issue. If you're going to consider this a problem, why not address agreeableness directly? Why frame it as a gender issue that ignores both agreeable men and disagreeable women?
Is this not exactly the sort of reaction that the author is speaking against when he refers to "viewpoint diversity"?
You understand how Gaussian distributions work, yes?
Yeah I understand Gaussian distributions. I also understand the emotional tone of the original manifesto and the discriminatory thinking behind it disguised in its academic, reasonable, and rational voice.
It's perfectly reasonable for him to say the 50/50 ratio might not be ideal, and maybe biology plays a role, while still believing his colleagues are competent.
Measurement is key to understanding!
About the only "lie" in this debate (in so far as I can tell) is that we are all the same!
Sure - at some very high level of abstraction it may be "true". But as engineers, surely we understand that failure stems from false assumptions?
At any rate, how do we get to the facts? Saying it must be 50% by fiat doesn't seem like a way to truth. So far I see one side proposing there might be biological reasons and the other side being offended anyone could even suggest the possibility.
To wit: I am a foreigner living and working as a software engineer in the USA. My English is far from perfect and a lot of people assume I am dumb just because of my thick accent. I failed few interviews because of this. I have absolutely no problem with that and am happy with my career. My achievements speak for me. I would not be as happy if this had been made a "diversity" issue and people with heavy accent were given advantages in hiring. This would forever invalidate my achievements as a proof of my competence. I would actively oppose any moves to establish such policies and would not approach any company that had them in place.
Can you cite the part of the manifesto which made you reach this conclusion?
>I doubt women at Google would feel pleased about that
Why? I didn't see anything insulting or disrespectful in the article. Perhaps your mind filled in things not said?
For example: I openly admit that I suck at empathy. I am socially awkward, I have hard time relating to other people. I may have EDD.
Not only do I recognize that women are better at it I prefer female managers to male managers because all my female managers innately understood psychological safety. And fostered such culture.
Is it anecdotal? Yes. But it is consistent with the author's observations that we are different. It is consistent with the Big Five personality trait studies in psychology.
So I think shutting down this line of reasoning is effectively an attempt to block attempts at better understanding of what makes us different.
And yet if we actually understand each person's strengths AND weaknesses we will be able to build better organisations!
Read his footnotes. They basically say "this is true because I know it to be true," and "this is universally accepted" (it isn't). But he gets a pass on that, sure.
You seem to think there are two sides: for or against. I have the ability to be against EVERYONE, don't I? Neither side can be convincing, or one side can. As it stands, you are just as unconvincing as the other side, which is hardly a great position!
So, seeing as you have a strong opinion, as evidenced by about 400,000,000,000 posts in this thread, do you have any evidence to support your ideas and refute what you seem to think is a bad piece? Or should I continue to be unpersuaded by both sides?
Here [1] is an article on how cultural gender inequality leads to poorer maths results for women, and fixing that cultural inequality fixes the maths results. This was commonly attributed to differences in biological traits in the past, that was wrong.
Here [2] is another article where spatial abilities relate to societal roles. Another area commonly attributed to biological differences (and which the author of the manifesto still seems to believe).
I've linked to Arstechnica articles because they are good summaries and reference the sources.
Notice that the trend here is that we misattributed something to biological differences and then science showed us that things were more fluid than we initially thought. That attribution to biological differences propagated extremely harmful beliefs that still seem to resonate, though.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/06/why-judy-cant-...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/08/gender-gap-in-spatia...
I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers. The essay did suggest women were less interested in programming than men (obviously true - see enrolment figures) and that at least some of the effect size is due to biological factors (probably true - see below).
---
None of these links suggest any capacity difference. Only that there is a biologically influenced gender difference in interests.
Here's an essay contextualising and summarising the historical specifics of male and female gender roles in society: http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
Here's a study of how prenatal androgen effects psychological thing vs people orientation, and how it influences career choice: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/
A summary of studies looking at big 5 personality distributions and other effects. Of note is the long section describing blindspots in current research: "Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where and Why?" http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x
Here's a Dutch documentary where they send a camera crew around asking different researchers about gender differences: https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=30m49s The full documentary is great. Their conclusion is that biological factors result in an overlapping but different distribution of personalities between men and women. These differences result in statistically different career preferences.
A talk by researcher Steven Pinker on the subject, where he argues that biological differences result in at least some of the effect size in STEM interests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw&t=1057s This is part of a debate on the subject. (Not linked) Prof Elizabeth Spelke responds, but I found her argument to be much less convincing than Pinker. Watch both, make up your own mind.
It does suggest this:
> “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes,”
Preferences and abilities. If men are in the majority of leadership, senior, and CEO roles, what is the author suggesting about the abilities of women?
Making assertions, on the other hand... that suggests that we already know the answers; and that further scrutiny is not required.
The arrogance!
That is an interesting study which demonstrates the opposite of what you seem to think it does. Here's the PDF: https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/sapienza/htm/sc.... It shows that the as cultural inequality decreases, the relative performance of girls rises in both math where they end up about equal to boys, and reading where they end up even further ahead. Take the sum of the gap values in the first chart; they're all between 40 and 60 except for Iceland which is over 70. (Edit: no, I'm bad at math. Iceland's relative gap is about 50 as well).
So if you point to the more equal math scores as proof that there are no innate differences between boys and girls, you now have to explain why the reading scores become even more unequal with increased gender equality. Is it just that Norway and Sweden are hotbeds of discrimination against boys?
[1] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/exclusive-heres-the-full-...
"I consider myself a classical liberal and strongly value individualism and reason."
I miss the days when libertarians weren't ashamed to admit so. But back then, they could debate the difference between von Mises and Hayek.
Today... not so much. Ideology isn't Book Deep, it's Google Search Deep.
Also, he does say Stop alienating conservatives. So let's get that charade over with and just call him a conservative and dispense with any libertarian nonsense.
Because it's only not OK to alienate people who we agree with, but the idea of having civil discussion with people we disagree with... who needs that? Just call them names, chase them out and be done with it! Do you think this is the libertarian way? Where did you meet libertarians like these?
> then totally ok with alienating women because Hayek.
Err what? Who you are arguing with here? Nobody said it's "ok with alienating women" and Hayek has nothing to do with it. Could you please leave that strawman alone, he needs a well-deserved rest.
Again, the OP is concerned with Google alienating conservatives but then is completely oblivious to his alienating half of the population.
Because what? Would you prefer Edmund Burke?
That's your problem but hardly an argument to anything.
> I generally find that ism to be a flag of convenience and that would definitely be the case with the OP.
You are definitely wrong on the first part, to the point of being insulting and disrespectful to literally millions of people holding genuine libertarian beliefs (what is especially ironic here that I assume with high probability that you think it somehow serves the case for inclusiveness and tolerance). As for the second part, I see no way you could have any useful information about it, unless you personally know the author and he told you so. Do you?
> Because what? Would you prefer Edmund Burke?
I am sorry, I do not understand this comment. Could you make your point a bit clearer, if there's any? What exactly you are trying to say here?
> completely oblivious to his alienating half of the population.
The goal of the author was certainly not alienating all women, and I think the result is also not so. I find it sad that I need to even mention it, but not all women think the same, and not all women agree on all questions, including this one. Of course, it may be that by "half of the population" you didn't mean women, then who?
I must also note that you yourself don't feel particularly bad about alienating literally tens of millions of people. Which is completely your right of course, just adds a bit of strange flavor when you say how bad it is when others do it.
>There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.” The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho...
And to learn about why property is against individualism, I recommend Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Bookchin's concerns: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-...
Even the Stirnerian egoists take issue with private property: http://www.spunk.org/texts/intro/faq/sp001547/secF4.html
"A right of property in moveable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands, not till after that establishment. The right to moveables is acknowledged by all the hordes of Indians surrounding us. Yet by no one of them has a separate property in lands been yielded to individuals. He who plants a field keeps possession till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it. Government must be established and laws provided, before lands can be separately appropriated, and their owner protected in his possession. Till then, the property is in the body of the nation, and they, or their chief as trustee, must grant them to individuals, and determine the conditions of the grant."
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
(Note that these are slightly contradictory; I presented them in chronological order.)
Perhaps the author is simply not a libertarian. Not everyone who identifies themselves as "classically liberal" is. Some people others would describe as "conservative" use that label also.
I also don't see what using that term has to do with the author's debating ability. If anything, it's my experience that most people who use "classical liberal" have read all of those books and prefer to root themselves more in Burke's premises.
Glad that a senior engineer speaks out about this. No company needs to tolerate troglodytes.
I work in finance and when something even fractionally as frivolous as this would have been published you would find yourself out of employment five minutes later. I consider the unprofessional startup culture that some companies like Google explicitly fostered to be at least partially responsible.