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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

> He wants to use different means to address “the problem,” he insists, and doubts that the tradeoffs of getting to a staff of 50 percent men and 50 percent women would be worth it

A lot of people are rushing to give this guy bonus points for saying "I'm not against diversity" and acknowledging some women should exist at Google. (Just as long as they're fewer than men, apparently.)

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There are at least 3 other HN threads where people are deliberately misrepresenting what he wrote and implying malicious intent where none existed.

Can we at least keep this one for substantive meta-commentary?

Implicit in your comment is that any suggestion of malicious intent by the author is not substantive. That doesn't seem reasonable, given the context.

I think discussing implicit things in such context should be considered harmful. We should limit ourselves to considering only the original text at face value - because it's too easy for anyone to read their own implicit meaning into the text that reflects their own biases.

The context of this discussion, diversity in gender and race, already contains a lot of implicit meaning in the form of the historical development of the culture of discrimination. It's not at all harmful to acknowledge the long, deep history of the use of dog whistle language and malicious intent disguised as thoughtful rhetoric, especially by those who are in the position of power (men, whites, and especially white men).

No.

This is precisely why we're stuck where we are in the first place. If you allow people to call "dog whistle language" and attribute "malicious intent disguised as thoughtful rethoric", you give everyone a fully general counterargument against anything. I could accuse you right now of using "dog whistle language" and there's literally nothing you can do to prove me wrong.

Those ideas are conversational equivalent of bioweapons. Once people start to use them, everyone loses.

>This is precisely why we're stuck where we are in the first place.

No it isn't. It's a failure to acknowledge the reality of society we live and the language that powers and enables the status quo. It's an uncomfortable truth and one that has been painstakingly dug up over decades, but for every two steps forward on this subject the powers that be cause us to take one step back. Your unwillingness to substantially acknowledge such realities is what is stagnating this conversation, because certain ideas and solutions need to be repeated over and over again and sometimes re-branded to make it more appealing to people who don't want to address the problems present in our society.

Here we have a "memo" that uses credible science but has conclusions and ideas completely detached from that science, and then when it is pointed out how incredibly shit his conclusions are, it suddenly becomes an issue about "free speech." It's pretty akin to the whole "states rights" branding that happens with certain other political conversations. It IS dog-whistle language and utilizing such language while pretending you're not, and even worse pretending like you're actually making a point, is incredibly counter-productive to advancing anywhere on gender/sexual issues for everyone. It's dishonest at worst and ignorant at best.

This whole topic has PG's psuedo-philosophical musing's stink all over it and it's quite nauseating to have to dig through it. It's the bullshit asymmetry principle in action.

No, that's not at all how dog whistle rhetoric applies. Please see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics and particularly the section on the US.

What you're doing is, ironically, actually an attempt to shut down discussion. You're basically saying that an entire 50+ year historical record of politics in America isn't appropriate to bring up because, you claim, it might be used inappropriately to simply shut down debate.

That's not implied in what they said at all. It takes quite a bit of imagination to make that leap from 3 to all.

That's not apparent. Unless you subscribe to the wrong-headed notion mentioned in this article as well.

> the tradeoffs of getting to a staff of 50 percent men and 50 percent women would be worth it (a position implicitly shared by every company that doesn’t have gender parity in its workforce)

If I have 1 employee and I'm a woman, it has to be a man. Otherwise I am implicitly sharing some viewpoint about diversity. Nonsense.

The author took the "I'm not sexist, but..." approach to this. But sadly, because of that, people seem to think he's some kind of objective observer.

If you have to make that kind of declaration, then everything you say afterward contradicts it.

This whole "I'm not sexist, but" line or rejection is one of the most anti-intellectual things I've seen in my lifetime. It's literally the good old witch test. If you don't say it, you're sexist because you didn't deny it. If you say it, you're sexist because obviously a sexist would deny being one.

Not weighing in on the broader issue here or, necessarily, why the author included that bit (see what I'm doing?) but pedantically qualifying one's position and every single clause to the point of absurdity is a style people learn when writing for online audiences, because something about reading text online makes people even worse readers than they ordinarily are, which is saying something, while also making them feel like well-informed experts on every conceivable topic who definitely need to comment on the thing they just read and (generously) half-understood, while also for some reason assuming the writer is some kind of actual fairy tale monster until proven otherwise.

Above sweeping statements intentionally left without pedantic qualification because it accurately expresses my thoughts on the matter as written. Deal with it, Internet.

So there's no need to evaluate the argument, only to parse for key signals in the rhetoric?

Thanks for saving me time in my future critical reading!

I evaluated it. I read the manifesto in its entirety.

He starts off by saying he's not against diversity, but then spends the rest of the paper demonstrating the exact opposite, and then justifies it by claiming that men and women are biologically different, and that a lack of diversity is ok because of that, or that any perceived discrimination is ok, because it's not really discrimination.

And he uses the issue of "dialog" as a smokescreen. It's the same kind of tactic used by creationists wanting to "teach the controversy." They don't really want to honestly debate the merits of each position.

This isn't dialog, nor does he want dialog. It's simply him trying to justify his prejudice, and railing at "PC culture" for not letting him do so.

> I evaluated it. I read the manifesto in its entirety.

Looking forward to your solid rebuttals then! Woo!

> He starts off by saying he's not against diversity

Mmm

> but then spends the rest of the paper demonstrating the exact opposite

Ummm, okay... You've got a positive assertion here, so you must have something solid here to back up your opinion, right?

> ..and then justifies it by claiming that men and women are biologically different... ...It's simply him trying to justify his prejudice, and railing at "PC culture" for not letting him do so.

Isn't that exactly what you're doing in your comment? Got your own narrative going on, assuming the intent of the author...

> This isn't dialog, nor does he want dialog.

> It's simply him trying to justify his prejudice,

> They don't really want to honestly debate the merits of each position.

Like holy shit you spent the entire comment doing the exact thing you complain about the author doing.

This is the sort of mindset that kills progress, the inability to flirt with the concept of being disillusioned and truly question your own stance and bias. Its like you "mean well" and that's all that matter to you.

Idk man, you can't judge others on their ACTIONS and then only judge yourself on your INTENT.

See, for me that happens when you have to lie about what the other person said to make your point.

YMMV.

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