The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond
quillette.com
quillette.com
It's almost like it's just a massive act of collective misrepresentation, one of those "winning the narrative" kind of situations.
Republicans on global warming: "I don't believe the results so it must be that scientists don't know what they're talking about or they're biased."
Can I join/found a pro-science party? Anyone want to join?
It would say different races have ...
shudder
differences
They might even point out that the difference between men and women, as measured in DNA differences, is bigger than the differences between humans and mice. This might result in some actual differences, and likely not just in appearance.
Nobody seems to want to hear these obvious facts, we've just collectively agreed that we're going to ignore this and even change the science to reflect political opinion.
Apparently the message that yes, sexes and races are different, and we've chosen to ignore that is considered a racist attitude itself.
my guess is that most people have a hard time distinguishing that statements about a population distribution do not mean an endorsement stereotyping.
The fact that google is well known for seeking out the most intelligence and talented, and the fact that Asians and Jews are highly "over-represented" among googlers if one were to extrapolate a random population sample as being the only SJW approved workforce, the fact that these two groups are so over-represented implies that... Jews and Asians tend towards smarter rather than dumber, which anyone paying attention has kind of noticed.
But when white people are over-represented, it implies privilege and racism, never intelligence.
The only counter arguments I see around this is essentially "this is not a person I generally agree with so their opinion has zero value. They might be a doctor in psychology but my opinion is more correct."
I'm well off and I have white skin, yet I started in poverty and I was discriminated against for the non-western country I came from.
We all face challenges and injustices, there's never been an "us vs them."
Funny how it's almost always (like 99% of the time) privileged white dudes bewailing this trope and almost always on topics they want to hold offensive opinions about.
Correct. Just as my opinion, as a privileged white dude, can be largely ignored on the topics of the problems of the less privileged because I do not have the experiences necessary to give them any weight.
Lee Jussim: gave a "talk about left-wing bias in social psychology" http://quillette.com/2015/12/04/rebellious-scientist-surpris...
Geoffrey Miller: note wording of recent tweets, including
- Compare the actual Google memo to how it's being misrepresented by SJWs, and you'll see what's wrong in America.
- My new article for @QuilletteM: a new legal strategy the neurodivergent can use to fight for free speech on campus.
https://twitter.com/primalpoly?lang=en
and some earlier history that's just kind of bizarre:
https://closetpuritan.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/diversityisou...
Debra Soh: wrote a column complaining about censorship at colleges, claiming "emotional grievances are being prioritized over logic and facts", and uncritically praising a "free speech" event hosted by Ben Shapiro (of Breitbart fame) https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/we-need-to-protect-f...
"SJW" is a very strong indicator of right-wing leaning and generally does mean they're strongly biased against the left.
Of course, the issue itself is very complex, and as a self-described leftist I happen to believe there’s some room to be concerned about free speech on campus (although I view the causes and nature of the issue very differently from the typical right-wing perspective) - but that’s not the point. When I called out those “free speech” references, I didn’t mean to make any statement about the merits of the issue; I was more using it as a sort of shibboleth, given the context of current trends in political discourse.
This whole situation arose because someone pointed out a lack of rational discourse, the emotional overreactions and tribalism that deter discussion of the merits of the issue.
Your response is to look for shibboleths to preemptively dismiss rational arguments you don't agree with, presuming yourself to be impartial.
You are exhibiting the problematic behaviors in question, but it seems like you don't even realize it.
You've missed the forest for the trees. Whether on purpose or not, lets cut this tree for once and for all. Is anecdotal evidence admissable in court? then why is not in debate? Because it's a differing opinion. So tell me, who's the bigot you are referring to? It's not rendered invalid simply because you are purposely froward to avoid concession.
Thanks for sharing.
Psychologists are massively, overwhelmingly, leftwing in their views. I am most certainly NOT conservative. My best guess is that there were ZERO conservatives in this group.
For data on the near complete absence of conservatives in psychology, see Duarte et al, 2015, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
The day that only people on the right care about free speech or unbiased science is the day that we are all really and truly doomed.
Sincerely,
Lee Jussim
First of all, it's not just that you're concerned about left-wing bias; it's something you spend quite a lot of your time on. Looking at your blog on Psychology Today[1], just about every article is complaining about liberal bias or liberal beliefs. You're not afraid to use charged language like "creeping tyranny of the left" or "mirror-image McCarthyism".
This is a bit random, but here's a quote I found especially surprising from one of your articles:
> So whose level of trust in science is more well-justified? My answer: Conservatives. Deep skepticism and even mistrust in science and its conclusions are entirely well-justified. If science reveals some "truth," then it should show up again and again and again and again, so that, at some point, it becomes (to paraphrase the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould) perverse to believe otherwise. Until that time, however, it is not at all perverse to believe otherwise. [2]
When it comes to conservative mistrust of science, I'd say there's an elephant in the room, namely climate change. That is, of course, the biggest issue where belief in science has become politicized. And when it comes to the existence of anthropogenic climate change, it became "perverse to believe otherwise" quite a while ago, yet in the United States conservatives still do; in fact, increasingly so[3]. It seems absurd not to mention that (which the article does not, at any point).
But going back to the question of diversity... There is some risk of circular reasoning here: I claimed your opinion should be taken somewhat more lightly because you were biased; now I'm claiming that you're biased because you have a different opinion from me. However, I think the following is meaningful to the extent that it ties your opinions on the memo to a broader pattern.
One of the entries in your recommended reading list from the 'Four Scientists' article is a WSJ article you co-wrote with Jonathan Haidt[4]. Broadly speaking, the article is an appeal to colleges to not do any of the things liberals want them to do to address social inequality: not just affirmative action, which is pretty much the same issue as in the Google memo, but also such measures as diversity training and microaggression training. While the article cites several different studies at various points, most of the stronger claims are not supported by such citations. In particular:
Regarding diversity interventions, your article states:
> The evaluations that have been done are not encouraging. A major 2007 review of diversity training in corporations concluded that “on average, programs designed to reduce bias among managers responsible for hiring and promotion have not worked.” A review of diversity interventions published in 2014 in the journal Science noted that these programs “often induce ironic negative effects (such as reactance or backlash) by implying that participants are at fault for current diversity challenges.
But the 2014 review states that "there is promising evidence that several interventions raise participants' awareness of diversity issues and reduce explicit and implicit biases." It does criticize the use of non-evidence-based diversity interventions, but its overall message seems quite counter to your article's suggestion that diversity training is overall useless or harmful. (The 2007 review is less so, but it does mention that certain types of training can have positive effects.)
Your article goes on to criticize microaggression training, stating that "microaggression training is likely to backfire and increase racial tensions" and "activates an oppressor-victim narrative", and that "the threshold for what counts as an offense falls ever lower". But it cites no studies for these claims, and spends zero words on the potential benefits of such training, i.e. avoiding the harms caused by microaggressions themselves. It is hard not to see bias in a piece that concludes the harms outweigh the benefits without even examining the latter.
The article also defines microaggressions in a rather unfair manner: "The idea covers everything from asking someone where they are from to questioning the merits of affirmative action during a classroom discussion." Of course, "questioning the merits of affirmative action" is not a core example of a microaggression (which is not to say nobody has ever claimed it to be one, but still). "Asking someone where they are from" arguably is, but only because of the tendency for people of certain ethnicities to be inundated with such questions, even if they were in fact born in the United States (I'm assuming a U.S. context); this creates the feeling that they're not perceived as real Americans. While I'd argue it's actually an important type of microaggression, it's much less obviously sympathetic, from a short description, than other commonly cited types, and I suspect it was chosen for that reason.
Actually, I wasn't surprised to read something along those lines. When I first read your Quilette article, where Jonathan Haidt shows up as well (as the author of one of the books you recommend), the name jumped out at me. I'd heard of him as a coauthor of "The Coddling of the American Mind"[5], a well-known article I find quite infuriating for, among other things, purporting to diagnose liberals with (effectively) a psychological condition, pooh-poohing PTSD, and, more relevantly, taking an extremely one-sided view of microaggressions. I don't know if he was also the driving force behind the section of the WSJ article about microaggressions, but you put your name on it in any case.
Meh... I could go on, but I'm not sure I'm making a useful argument to anyone other than myself. After all, it's unlikely that anyone will read this other than perhaps you, Lee Jussim, and I hardly expect to convince you that you're biased! But maybe you can at least see where I'm coming from.
FWIW, I care a lot about free speech, and I'm troubled by the scarcity of people who vigorously defend conservatives' ability to express their views without actually agreeing with those views. I kinda wish I could consider you one of them, but I don't think I can; regardless of what you consider yourself, from my perspective you seem pretty far to the right on social issues.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser?page=2
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201304/co...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-le...
[4] http://www.businessforum.com/WSJ_Race-on-Campus-05-06-2016.p...
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
BTW, I am left liberal (although not American) and I agree with Pinker, Haidt and Jussim (in fact I very much enjoyed his articles on the topic that are quoted in the OP).
I think many liberals in the U.S. should accept the fact that yes, men and women have different job preferences (regardless whether this is due to culture or nature, I think it's a mix of both), and there is nothing wrong with that. What is really important is that people, who really want to work in some field, can.
And personally, I am not sure how many people who opposed The Google Memo I can actually consider to be leftists. To be on the left means to care first and foremost about underprivileged people, and almost no Google employee simply fits that category (maybe a cleaning lady or a security guard, but I am pretty sure they are outsourced).
So then: are you unbiased? Obviously you are not, for you are obviously biased against conservative/right views.
Therefore, how are you qualified to criticize him for being biased? Your criticism rings hollow.
Then, despite the inherent self-contradiction of your reasoning, you exhibit a moment of insight:
> There is some risk of circular reasoning here: I claimed your opinion should be taken somewhat more lightly because you were biased; now I'm claiming that you're biased because you have a different opinion from me.
This should have been the end of your comment. The next line should have been, "This is obviously irrational, and therefore my criticism of you is as well. Therefore, I will now stop and reevaluate my position from first principles."
But instead, you doubled-down, following the pattern of those who got the man fired, essentially confirming his argument.
I don't think anyone is truly unbiased, although some people are more biased than others. I did not mean to claim that I was less biased than Jussim.
I was actually trying to make a much simpler point. An article titled "Four Scientists Respond", addressing a topic that is not itself part of academia, suggests at least a possibility that the responses are representative of most scientists' views (more precisely, the views of most scientists with relevant experience). When three of the four responses are largely in agreement with each other, one might imagine that their position is the consensus of scientists, and thus arguably of science itself, with its associated cachet and authority. Indeed, if the scientists had somehow been chosen randomly, it would be quite significant that there was such a level of agreement. But they were not.
Indeed, the question of what it means to be "conservative" is to some extent a distraction. I could have said it much more simply: The three scientists in question (those other than Schmitt) have all written columns in the past criticizing liberal orthodoxy as stifling. Among scientists with relevant experience, even those that write opinion pieces, I'd assume most have not written about that specific subject. Therefore, those three are very likely to be an unrepresentative sample.
Please note that I'm not claiming Quilette did anything wrong. They said four scientists, and they quoted four scientists. Those individual opinions do come with more inherent authority than a random Joe's, due to their authors' having some understanding of the relevant research in connection with their work; it is just that they fall short of actually representing science. Besides, a frequent reader of Quilette would be aware of their bias as an outlet, and wouldn't expect a representative sample in the first place. (I hope it is not controversial that Quilette has a bias; to be clear, this is not inherently bad.) It is not their fault that they were linked to out of context on HN. But by the same token it is appropriate to point out that context.
Anyway, I could have left it at 'criticized, therefore unrepresentative' in my followup comment, but by then I had claimed that Jussim (along with the others) was conservative and been called out on it; while I felt bad about the possibility of having made a false accusation, I also wanted to defend my point, after investigating further and deciding it hadn't been false.
> This should have been the end of your comment. The next line should have been, "This is obviously irrational, and therefore my criticism of you is as well. Therefore, I will now stop and reevaluate my position from first principles."
> But instead, you doubled-down, following the pattern of those who got the man fired, essentially confirming his argument.
I was attempting to be upfront about the potential weaknesses of my argument, something which I believe helps advance rational discourse. From your tone in these paragraphs, I am not sure you have the same humility.
> ...
> There have been (and likely will continue to be) many socio-structural barriers to women working in technological jobs. These include culturally-embedded gender stereotypes, biased socialization practices, in some cultures explicit employment discrimination, and a certain degree of masculinization of technological workplaces.
Well that didn't last long
> Now, treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do. As this is not my area of expertise, I can only offer my non-expert opinion on this issue, which is this: There have been (and likely will continue to be) many socio-structural barriers to women working in technological jobs. ...
This just seems to be a few modestly credentialed academics really just using this as a springboard for their own view points.
Steven Pinker & Elizabeth Spelke | The Science of Gender & Science | Mind Brain Behavior Discussion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8
And you replied with a blog that literally says that they will not engage in any discussion on the issues that are under contention.
> In 1960, the most common slurs were insulting labels for demographic groups. In 2017, the most common slurs involve labelling anyone who you disagree with on issues such as affirmative action, diversity, gaps, and inequality as a racist, sexist, homophobe, or bigot.
Citation? I suspect that this is wildly wrong, but unlike this scientist, I'd want to see the data first.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170808013732/quillette.com/201...
Prof. Schmitt gets it right here: gender differences don't have any significant impact on women's capacity to perform any job--even physically strenuous jobs, with the right training. Certainly for information work, bringing up gender differences is just going down the wrong rabbit hole. It's like asking a job candidate if they're American when all you need to know is if they're legally authorised to work in the US.
The other scientists unfortunately go down this rabbit hole. Prof. Miller especially consistently asks the wrong questions throughout his piece. First, he establishes biological sex differences but doesn't ask if they have any significant impact on women's capacity to perform a job. Second, he goes off on a tangent about his pet 'paradox' theory about the American public, arguing that gender equality would make diversity moot from a business advantage perspective.
Let's just clarify why we want diversity in the workplace: it's not because minorities will bring different skills and traits to the table; it's because (a) excluding minorities is inhumane, and (b) because minorities will (hopefully) keep the organisation from making dumb mistakes like leaving out the main protagonist of their new film series from a major marketing campaign ( https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15960372/hasbro-star-wars... ), sending Kylie Jenner out with a Pepsi to mend race relations ( http://time.com/4726500/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner/ ), and pushing for a Game of Thrones-style show about a modern-day Confederate America which won the war and kept slavery intact ( https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/no... ). These are just three things that come immediately to mind, you can imagine how much shit there is out there that hasn't even reached national level yet.
That seems just plain wrong considering so many women fail Marine fitness tests:
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/284252-report-6-out-of-7-f...
And FDNY had to relax physical fitness requirements in order to hire more women firefighters:
https://www.bustle.com/articles/53536-fdny-wants-more-women-...
Women also have to be separated from men in professional sports, otherwise in many sports it wouldn't even be close (e.g. the aged, #203-ranked male tennis player walloping both Williams sisters in their prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karsten_Braasch).
There's nothing wrong with admitting there are basic biological differences between men and women relating to strength.
But again, this is completely the wrong rabbit hole in the context of this discussion. It has nothing to do with the fact that men and women have equal capacity to do any mental work.
Do any differences ever make a difference in performance? Like a particular tribe of Kenyans utterly dominate distance running events, west Africans utterly dominate sprinting events what accounts for those differences?
What's lost in all this and that I have seen zero evidence presented for is that I am in no way convinced that the population groups that are "under-represented" as software professionals have much interest in being software professionals.
Whatever differences in capacity that may exist among groups the differences in interests are surely just as big or bigger.
Taking your example of say, sprinting - the outcome is to cross the line 100m down the track. I would say pretty much everyone is capable of doing that one way or another. When you apply a performance lense that says you need to do it in X seconds, then you're saying "we only want our definition of the best to do this task".
Bringing it back to the workplace, a lot of jobs in tech (and other sectors too), suffer from trying to apply a one size fits all performance lense over the actual outcomes. "Sure this person did their job, but did they do these metrics that we've decided we value". A large part of diversity is acknowledging that the lense that you view people through is not going to apply to everyone, and accepting that you need to focus on the outcomes.
I agree with yawaramin as well, happy employees are better performing employees, and can speak from experience with working at places that value individuality versus strict top down directing of behaviour, that the companies with that flexibility perform much better, at less cost, with much happier employees.
It's not about lowering expectations, it's about changing how you look at them - look at the outcomes and measure those, not the journey to achieve them. When you start focusing on outcomes as teams, you open the door to diversity, which leads to diversifying your ideas and solutions to problems - ultimately leading to better outcomes.
But maybe I read too much into the wording, and regardless I agree it's a rabbithole w.r.t. programming jobs so I acquiesce.
You are the one digging the wrong rabbit hole here.
But if you mean 'innate ability to reach a higher level', then are you implying that women innately are incapable of climbing to the same senior engineering positions as men, and no amount of training or education will change that?
Just trying to understand.
Lets take GPA for example. Do you think 2 people getting a GPA of 3.0 are of the exact same knowledge level ? Is it possible that one has the equivalent score of 3.13 and the other has 2.87 and that they were both normalized to 3 ? Same thing with the jobs. Maybe you see this at your job too. There are going to be people more skilled at what you do and people less skilled at what you do but still pulling the same salary. The salary you earn is an approximate estimate of your skill measure but not an measure of your exact skill.
There are women that are just as good marines as men, and there are women that are just as physically fit as men. However, despite this, it's entirely possible that statistically fewer women pass. You haven't denied this empirical data nor tried to argue that it is purely for cultural reasons that fewer women can pass these physical fitness tests. So it's possible that fewer women end up in a profession for purely biological reasons, you are conceding?
Similarly, it's possible that there are women (many women) who are just as good or better programmers than many men, and enjoy it just as much and are equally capable. But, that when you look at the averages, fewer women prefer it. Then, part of that relative difference could be explained by biological factors.
Again, this is not a complicated argument. There's no evidence to suggest that biological factors account for 100% of the gender gap in developers but there's also not much evidence to suggest that any factor accounts for 100% of the gap. It's likely to be a combination of factors, and we should try to honestly understand how big a role each one plays.
The author didn't propose excluding minorities. He proposed including them more by making the workplace more attractive to them. Nobody's suggesting Google should have a "males only" or "whites only" policy.
Here is some news for you: The AVERAGE woman is not interested in technology as much as the AVERAGE man. If you think reality is sexist, so be it.
Does that mean that every woman is average? No. There are plenty of women interested in technology doing great work.
So why do you expect that there should be as many women working in technology as men? Why is it even a (US) problem?
But the reaction from the "progressives" is quite telling. Don't they realize that demanding to fire him without refuting his arguments only proves him right?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi...
Publicly publishing something that has garnered this reaction from people, it's certain he would've been the victim of discrimination and bias in his workplace.
If Google's workplace is anything like the Twitter comments, I don't believe there was any scenario where he could ever work in any team environment.
However, idealistically, this should not happen. People should be mature enough to accept other people have their own opinions and are perhaps those opinions are not in-line with their own, or are even focused negatively on them.
The same with workplace romance, it's important for both parties to make an effort to maintain stability and cooperation, no matter how insulted and bad they may feel.
Clearly, this is either not entirely correct, or they have "evolved"
Google are edging ever closer to regulation, and when that happens their stock price will tumble.
Unless you are being discriminated against, or someone else is... I don't really think its' a normal employees place to be a political firebrand and post invective messages on the internal company boards.
Honestly if you say something that pisses off 60% of your coworkers to the point that they say they will quit... then you're not a good fit for the company.
It's a case of leverage. The more Google can be shown to be biased internally or overly 'left', the easier it will be for other countries or the current US government to make the case that they have too much power and act upon this.
Steve Bannon has already said that he wishes to treat tech giants as public utilities [0].
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/steve...
Does my alternate interpretation make your comment a tripling down?
Is this comment somehow quadrupling down?
People are fired for less all the time. When I was young I worked jobs where I would have been fired if I clocked in a minute late three times using a system that didn't allow clocking in early. Some employers monitor their employees' social media to ensure they don't post anything damaging to the business. I'm guessing 80% of workers in the US have constraints greater than what Google fired for here. Right to work laws provide that option to employers. I'm not in CA and I've heard it's a little harder to fire there but I'm sure Google is well within their legal bounds.
Honestly, the outrage from conservatives here feels hypocritical. They are the ones who have rolled back employee protections across the US in the name of business growth. Apparently that doesn't count for conservatives fired for spouting conservative viewpoints.
A scientific argument is more than "Here's some science, here are some facts and here's the conclusion" - you have to use the science to explain the observed facts, and doing so takes more than saying "And therefore". There was no attempt to do so whatsoever, and so (from a scientific perspective) this was junk.
Is diversity honestly so narrow a field, that a social psychologist, personality psychologists, evolutionary psychology, and a sexual neuroscientist are in no position to say anything?
Gender diversity always seems to bring up two issues (1) are men and women different in mental reasoning, and if so where and how significant are these differences and (2) would differences in mental reasoning lead to different outcomes in choice of studies or employment?
Is there a specific scientific field for that?
Indeed - one of them knows how to.
> Is diversity honestly so narrow a field, that a social psychologist, personality psychologists, evolutionary psychology, and a sexual neuroscientist are in no position to say anything?
Unless they've done any research in it, sure. Why should any of them have more insight into diversity than, say, a nuclear physicist?
The issue isn't whether there are gender-related differences that are relevant to the job. It's not even whether those are significant enough to result in a measurable difference in outcome. It's whether those factors are the primary reason for the observed disparity, and neither the document author or the quoted scientists present any evidence whatsoever that that's the case. Failing to do that means that the conclusions drawn (ie, that existing diversity initiatives discriminate against men while providing no benefit to the company) aren't scientific.
Where anyone can disagree is how he interprets them, but I am glad to see four experts clarify a little bit about what is true.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/
Abstract : "There is considerable interest in understanding women’s underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. Career choices have been shown to be driven in part by interests, and gender differences in those interests have generally been considered to result from socialization. We explored the contribution of sex hormones to career-related interests, in particular studying whether prenatal androgens affect interests through psychological orientation to Things versus People. We examined this question in individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who have atypical exposure to androgens early in development, and their unaffected siblings (total N = 125 aged 9 to 26 years). Females with CAH had more interest in Things versus People than did unaffected females, and variations among females with CAH reflected variations in their degree of androgen exposure.
Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People."
You see the problem? The study is biased from the outset because it's designed to 'prove' that women aren't interested in IT.
No, the study was designed to investigate a potential link between prenatal androgen exposure and a preference for Things vs People work, which it did find.
> let's classify [IT/CS] as 'people-oriented'. Whoops! Suddenly women are very interested.
But precisely, observation shows they're not, as a group ! That's the very thing we're here discussing, trying to find out why.
And yeah, let's just arbitrarily switch jobs classifications like that without any grounding in reality, just because that's the only way your hypothesis will not fall apart.
Can you see the extraordinary amount of unlikely premises it takes for your logic to stand, compared to the alternative, simpler explanation ? That is exactly the kind of situation Occam's razor is here for : "among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected."
This is starting to feel like a flat-earth debate, honestly. I'm pretty sure many people here would engage with the available evidence much more candidly, if this were a less politically charged topic (and I'm a liberal. But science before ideology, always.)
Can you see how classifying IT jobs as something women aren't interested in, leads to finding a 'result' that women aren't interested in IT jobs? That's literally a tautology.
uh? What? What is that? Define 'diversity.'
Does this field just care about "unrepresentative populations" of people interested in coding, or do they also care about "unrepresentative populations" of olympic sprinters, fishing boat crews, and kindergarten teachers?
The one's I looked just seemed like a mish mash of meaningless postmodern babble.
What happened to the scholarly tradition of penetrating insight and clarity?