The Most Common Error in Media Coverage of the Google Memo

So true, I thought the last paragraph of the article was particularly apt.

>When journalistic institutions widely publicize material of this sort, only to abdicate the vital work of rigorously addressing its substance, they make its least plausible claims more likely to be normalized. They leave the project of assessing its merits and flaws to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other venues where the loudest voices tend to prevail, instead of offering their own careful reporting and expert analysis.

I buy this point so much because after reading about the controversy on the crazy 1000 comment thread here on HN and the other threads on reddit, there was no top level comment that made the same well reasoned claims this very article did, which IMO is so far the best I have read about the whole debacle. This is what journalists doing their job looks like.

I found this entire row to be just depressing. Earlier today there's a medium post about a guy who won't read the memo -- absolutely refuses -- because he doesn't want this "anti-diversity" message polluting him.

This, when one of the memo's explicit points was about excessive dogma around the issue, and inability to have an open and honest conversation about it. The opposition isn't all shrill politically correct authoritarians, but some of them really do come off that way.

The problem with this, is that the alt-right have made a habit of this "look how rational I am as i call you subhuman, why are you so upset by rational truth" thing.

Milo Yianoppolos, who most of the time markets himself as an anarchistic troll, will put on his serious face and claim that he is worried about trans people because it's a mental illness and he just wants them to be treated, rather than play along with their disease. And cite studies etc.

Then he'll have a rally and personally attack a trans student. Which isn't really how a serious scientist approaches the mentally ill.

He also attacks overweight people "for their own good" as they need to get healthy. Then he takes a picture of someone he sees at his gym to mock their weight as they work out.

The Bell Curve is a great proto-alt-right example, where the author will say with a cheeky grin that he never actually said that black people were genetically inferior, even though everyone who read it clearly got that message,whether they agree with it or not. And when he wrote a book saying black people have never contributed anything of any worth to music, why that's just objective science.

The Orwellian double talk of Trump is another classic example. More jobs via trade wars. Yes the author is right, a critique of pointless trade wars shouldn't be called anti-jobs, because journalist should be (and to some degree are) calling Trump's proposals anti-jobs themselves. Why on earth would you think this a valid example to give? It's an obvious con job.

So at some point, you realise that people are just playing a game with you.

But no, surely this man who thinks gay rights are a Marxist plot to take down capitalist America, surely he is only interested in seeking the unvarnished scientific truth?! Fool me once..

> it needs to be pointed out that this type of journalism is absolutely not neutral

And actually is a lazy way to even hoodwink people. The correct way is to show a bias and then use the proverbial 'to be sure' statements but bury those later on where they are less likely to be noticed.

There are no neutral journalism. If you want a reporting of facts unbiased by opinions, it would be "viral Google employee memo on the subject of diversity recruitment." Any editorial on the matter would necessarily make a subjective evaluation.

I'm torn by the two sides. On one hand I see the rational and level headed language in the memo versus the reactionary bait-click headlines. On the other hand I sense a mens' rights argument at the core of the memo that isn't very organized. The memo argued against discrimination against men in the hiring process, then suggested creating roles that won't fit the stereotypical male. That's discrimination at the role creation process! If google followed that advice, the author would still have something to be against.

The central point of the memo, from what I read, was that any gender discrimination to hire more women in the workplace necessarily discriminates against the men that would have otherwise gotten the job. Sure he made some good ideas for how to hire more women. But no matter how reasonable the language he used to couch his message, the essence was still against diversity because it will hurt the job opportunities of men.

Another underlying assumption here is that the technical merits of a candidate is the overriding quality to be considered for hiring. And since the pool of qualified applicants are male dominated, then any bias in hiring women will hurt the obviously qualified men. If technical abilities follow a normal distribution (and why not?), then more highly qualified men will be discriminated.

However, technical ability is not the only overriding quality and Google is trying to take the diversity of the team into account during the hiring process. Thus, Google is taking a grander view of not just considering the individual merit of the applicant, but applicant's impact to the team composition as well. This is equivalent to someone in Overwatch who has high stats in a game that won't change his character/behavior even though he does not help the team. Say the player has high elimination stats because they are fighting away from the main fight where his team is at a disadvantage (say holding down the point).

This is a textbook case of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. People who agree with the memo focuses on the parts. They think "hire more great parts = better team." But team composition is actually more important. People who labels the memo as anti-diversity are in favor of team comp, whether they know it or not.

But personally, the most important point of diversity for me is the end of sausage fest at work. Group conversations with one dominant gender day in day out kind of suck. This applies to either gender.

One of the things that really irked me was not only their editorialization of the entire thing to paint it like he was wrong, but also reformatting it, and then having circular links back and forth to motherboard like they were both in on it to misrepresent the entire thing. It was poorly laid out and intentionally misleading.

This article doesn't say anything about citations, unless I'm missing something. I've read the memo, "citations" (some of them hardly qualify) and all. "Anti-diversity" might be a little hyperbolic, but it's hard to argue it is anything else in good faith.

The author feels comfortable making the claim women are biologically more neurotic, in a professional setting, no less. His "citation" for this fact is Wikipedia. This is unimaginative sexist bullshit that everyone has heard before. That people feel the impulse to defend this is disgusting.

Whatever innate differences there are between men and women are small and nowhere near as big a factor in the gender-ratio as say, arrogant weirdos sending credos to their entire company declaring women unfit to work in their industry.

I feel the same. When I first read the censored Gizmodo version, I thought to myself, "Whoah, this guy is making up too many assumptions without any references!" Later, when I found the original version with references, I felt a bit stupid for judging him.

I've been there. Anybody who says that they've never been blinded by biased journalism or fallen for an internet hoax is lying to you, and possibly their own egos as well.

That being said, this episode is an excellent example of why it is always best to avoid taking "sides." When someone takes a "side", the newspapers, data brokers, social media companies, advertisers, and everyone else rejoice in the profits of "engagement." Meanwhile, precious time in this life is wasted on a trivial concern, forgotten within a month.

Sometimes I think Conor Friedersdorf is my hero. He regularly turns out articles on prickly topics with a cool, compassionate tone.

Yeah, when I read through the HN comments from the Bloomberg post, I couldn't believe how many people spoke about this guy as though he was an actual Nazi. I can't imagine anyone honestly reading that article and coming to that conclusion. It's almost like once someone signals that this guy is The Bad Guy, reason and individual thought go out the window. Of course, I imagine those folks would disagree with my characterization (and probably make all manner of insinuations about my character or allegiances), which is admittedly not very charitable. That said, there are only so many times you can watch the same pattern of events unfold...

EDIT: In case people don't know what I mean by "pattern of events", I'm thinking of cases like the Christakis/Yale fiasco where people make reasonable, respectable, constructive critiques of progressive values and are met with popular outrage.

I think you are giving all the click-bait writers far too much of a benefit of doubt. Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that they don't know what they are doing.

They know exactly what they are doing, and what they are doing is creating outrage and profiting from it in this eyeball-click-ad driven journalism economy.

Very few are going to have the wherewithal to forego hundreds or thousands of dollars in ad revenues for the sake of a slightly more gently or fairly worded headline or article. The incentives just do not match up.

I don't necessarily agree. I think a lot of writers probably read it in full and had a sense of its nuance, flaws, and intentions, and still elected to push the juicy and possibly inaccurate headline for their own, and their publications' own gain.

I think we're just at the point where thinkpieces criticizing the initial wave of thinkpieces are now vogue and profitable.

(FWIW, I believe the wave of misleading or negative coverage of this memo is partly the fault of its means of original publication and distribution. Right, wrong, or indifferent, the way in which unorthodox viewpoints are offered to the public can dictate how they're received and interpreted, and this was not "groomed" to be received well, regardless of the merit of its arguments or lack thereof.)

Agree. In my opinion the memo author was definitely hurt by the length of the memo. There's simply not enough fair minded people in the world who have the time to read such a lengthy missive, or folks are just too lazy these days when they are used to consuming their information in 140 characters or less.

> I don't claim to know the author's intent

What so many comments about this memo don't seem to understand is that it it isn't possible to derive the author's intent from the text of their work. The intent of the author isn't included when the reader interprets their work, because the author isn't there[1] to explain their intent. The reader only sees the work.

As you said, intent doesn't matter. When authoring a work, it's important to consider how the work might be interpreted.

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor (apologies for using a tvtropes link. It was better than Google's other suggestions)

Define sexism...

Is believing men and women on average have different hormone levels and generally speaking, this leads to different behaviors and proclivities, sexist?

Is admitting there is any difference between the two sexes, sexist?

Is using different pronouns for men and women sexist?

I honestly don't know where someone draws the line who finds this memo "sexist."

This (conflating opposition to a process or movement for X with opposition to X) seems to be a common trick in the political discourse nowadays, and is unfortunately called out very rarely. We didn't hear many instances of "anti-jobs" as suggested in this article, but it seems like describing a variety of institutions as "anti-white" has been a right-wing staple since long before the emergence of well-connected Tumblr and Twitter rubes who could plausibly be described as such.

I'm pro affirmative action, and I honestly didn't read his message as "My position is superior". The central argument to me felt like he was trying to say he saw things differently, and there should be space for him to say that, not that he has the ultimate truth. I agree with that, even though I think he misunderstands how affirmative action works.

> biases and position were clear right from the title onward

What were those "biases" and "positions", pray tell?

> vulnerable and defensive

You mean those that lied about what the guy wrote and then attacked that made-up wrongthink?

>MSM has mostly abrogated it's responsibility to inform the public.

That's a myth.

The only real responsibility they have is to maximize profits for their shareholders.

I don't know since I can't read their minds, but both options are troubling. If they did it for easy click-bait money, it's ethically bad. But if they did it on purpose, this is even worse, because it means they manipulate other narratives in the same way. If they can convince very smart HN readers, how totally helpless is the rest of the population?

Gizmodo is part of the Gawker Group; they've never been shy about slanting stories to get clicks.

The use of "malice" here seems ambiguous, and I'm having trouble finding an interpretation that makes sense to me. If you say that X does A out of malice, I can see it meaning

(1) X does A, and X expects that X doing A will have an outcome that is morally bad from X's point of view

(2) X does A, and if an arbitrary other person Y did A, X would expect it to have an outcome that is morally bad from X's point of view

(3) X does A, and you (the commenter) expect A to have an outcome that X would find morally bad

(4) X does A, and you (the commenter) expect A to have an outcome that you (the commenter) would find morally bad

(any others I missed?)

(1) seems like a strict definition of malice that is actually extremely rare in the wild (and I don't think anyone here has accused Gizmodo of), whereas (4) is catch-all but seems nearly indistinguishable from "Gizmodo did a bad thing" which is not a very ironic thing to say. (3) sounds more like an accusation of stupidity than of malice. (2) seems pretty close, but one might want to label it "hypocrisy" and it's not clear that it applies here - after all, it's not like the 10-something media outlets in the list who did roughly the same thing were visibly appalled at each other.

Maybe the interpretation should actually be something like

(2') X does A, and if an arbitrary other person Y did a thing A' that (you, the commenter? X?) deem(s) similar to A, then X would expect an outcome that X deems morally bad

(and natural candidates for A' would be right-wing "fake news" or HBD-style cherrypicking in the class of what the perpetrator themselves would perceive as "artistic embellishment and hyperbole to get across an essentially true and important point" but opposed parties would perceive as "intentional misleading"), but then the accusation of malice completely hinges on getting X themselves to agree that A and A' are actually similar. As far as I can tell, rejecting equivocation between extraordinary measures for the Good Cause and extraordinary measures for the Evil Cause is known to be fairly standard for the Social Justice movement, so it's unlikely that the comments in question would expect X to agree, and hence unlikely that the comments in question are implicitly accusing Gizmodo of acting out of malice.

I think the idea you are advocating, that they should change the nature of the job to make it more accommodating to a more diverse talent pool, is the kind of thing the memo was advocating. See the section titled "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap".[1] In that section, he suggests making the work more cooperative instead of competitive and making part-time work first-class, among other things. He also suggests making the work more collaborative, which seems a lot like your "changing the things coders are allowed to focus on." He then goes on to note that doing this will also mean Google will diversify the kind of male that it gets, just like you do.

Or am I missing some difference in what you are suggesting and what the memo suggested?

1. http://diversitymemo.com/#reduce-gender-gap

What solicited the memo?

Because one of his recommendations was to put a greater emphasis on intent?

> Not only is he wrong

That's merely your opinion, which clearly can be seen from the comments here, has disagreement.

> he made an extended case for the wrong argument and did it in a way that inflict maximum company damage.

How did he inflict damage on the company?

Whoever leaked this internal memo did the damage, but I haven't seen any witch hunt or firing in that regard.

Strange, eh?

HN has a couple of things that might be at play here:

1) Users flagged it. There are many reasons to flag a post - it's too political; the discussion is toxic; etc.

2) It set off the flame war detector. This is an algorithm that looks at stuff (who knows? Number of posts? Speed of posts? Depth of posts? Numbers of flags to comments? Amount of votes?) and penalises threads that trigger it.

3) In rare situations mods take action. The mods would be either dang or sctb, and they always say they've taken action.

Not sure if you'll see my reply, but this happens often to HN submissions on politically charged topics. The topic gets flagged to death. It's been like this for a long time.

I suspect the contents of the memo had little to do with Google's official reaction to it.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if non-binary-gendered people are over-represented in tech.

(This is just an impression I have based on things I've read in the past, so I can't be sure.)