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Comment by andkon | Hacker News Reader

Let's be super clear: if this guy gets fired, it would not be because he expressed his opinions. It would be because he has abhorrent opinions that will forever affect his ability to work with women, whom he has decided are inherently incapable of working at Google.

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It is tempting to reduce an argument to the most uncharitable caricature imaginable. To counteract this, image I transported you to a world where there was not a subconscious misogynistic pressure keeping women out of programming and women chose not to become programmers because of some combination of average differences in personality and variance in ability. What would this world look like? How would it differ from our own?

Well, you probably wouldn't see women constantly exiting the field of tech because they encounter endless entrenched sexism, and endless skepticism of the existence or significance of sexism.

An interesting question. Is that a commonly cited reason for women leaving engineering programs? If we were to poll women who dropped engineering and sexism was low on the list of reasons for leaving would this reduce your certainty?

> women, whom he has decided are inherently incapable of working at Google.

But that's not at all what he wrote?

Oh sorry. I was too broad. He wrote that it is unpopular for him to say that, for many biologically determined reasons, women do not have the traits required to excel in computer science, and that in reality the lack of their employment at Google could be reducible to their being women.

He then went on to explain at length that any effort to suppress this sort of opinion is the real diversity problem.

So I'd summarize that as: he believes that women are biologically not fit to work at Google, and therefore diversity programs are misguided, and therefore the real diversity problem is in not taking his unpopular opinions seriously.

The vast majority of people are biologically not fit to work at Google. All he said is because of slight differences in average ability and preferences we should expect the proportion of women in that incredibly small pool of people who are capable of working at Google to be lower than you would assume if you thought there was no sexual dimorphism in traits needed for engineering.

Another example, East Asian people and Ashkenazi Jewish people are much smarter than gentile whites, half a standard deviation to a full standard deviation on average: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...

Because of this we should expect them to be over represented in cognitively demanding jobs such as engineering at Google. And this is indeed exactly what we see. Should we positively discriminate for white people? This does not mean all white people are unfit to work at Google, it just means that on average white people are less likely to have the requisite ability, though many individuals will.

Biologically unfit?

The vast majority of people are _biologically unfit_ to work at Google?

Are you serious? What 100 meter sprint time do you need to get a job at Google?

IQ is mostly genetics. You won't find many 100 or even 120 IQ engineers working at Google.

No, it's not what he wrote. But it's how he's going to be painted.

Which, ironically, confirms one of his main arguments...

Exactly. It would be because he expressed the wrong opinions. If he expressed the correct opinions, he would face no backlash.

I do honestly get what you're saying - nobody is going to want to work with that guy. However, if he possessed the opinions and did not voice them, he would have been fine. So, it's not because he has these opinions that is the problem, simply that he expressed them.

I actually don't say that. I say that he should be fired because he has - not simply that he expressed - abhorrent opinions. It's an unfortunate epistemic reality that we don't know many peoples views until they explicitly put them to paper, but the epistemic issue doesn't cloud the moral one: he believes morally wrong things.

Are you implying that his opinions prevent him from working with women in a general sense, then? I understand where you would conclude that but I have no evidence of it so can't come to that conclusion myself. The only thing I can see is that if someone expressed those opinions, women wouldn't want to work with them.

Personally, I don't have a problem with people having bad or morally repugnant opinions. I have a problem with them acting on these opinions where it effects others.

The summary you've provided here leaves me with no confidence that you understand even the very basics of the topic at hand. Your apparent level of confidence and outrage, in light of that fact, is truly remarkable.

I noticed that you edited your post to add a comment about my level of confidence and outrage, and I thank you for using your outrage to better clarify your concerns.

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