Comment by and0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by and0 | Hacker News Reader

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2143285-memo-to-all-tec...

Is probably the best response I can find at the moment. A few days back my Twitter was full of medium posts responding to specific points, but Twitter is not great about finding these things.

I agree with the linked article 100%, which states that there is plenty of scientific evidence that states the contrary, and there is plenty of science done about cultural differences.

A lot of what is so frustrating is that so much of this is just common sense, especially to identify that there are a huge number of cultural factors acting like a feedback to make people behave a certain way to meet expectations.

I'd refute most religions the same way. It's very clear to me that, for example, the Bible was written by humans vs something divine, as the odds of a God thinking and behaving (being petty, spiteful, or even altruistic) exactly like the humans that read it do seems pretty slim and frankly unimaginative.

There's a "chicken or the egg" question that needs to come with every assessment of behaviors of groups vs societal expectations and pressures on those groups. People in power, like yourself presumably (despite your insistence of having "no particular horse in the race) will always pretend that things are the way they are because of divine or otherwise pre-determined reasons. It's silly that people who consider themselves so rational are unable to comprehend how obvious this is.

Also lol @ programs for underrepresented groups “increase race and gender tensions”. Get fucked, dude.

edit: came across one of the ones I read before from a recently ex-Google employee: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

it's super good and worth a read

Please stop violating the guidelines by posting uncivil, gratuitous provocation. You've been doing this a lot and it leads to us having to ban the account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for the article, but it is far from a substantive rebuttal, at best I would call it an opinion piece, with its "proof" based on logical errors and assumptions.

> There's a "chicken or the egg" question that needs to come with every assessment of behaviors of groups vs societal expectations and pressures on those groups. People in power, like yourself presumably (despite your insistence of having "no particular horse in the race) will always pretend that things are the way they are because of divine or otherwise pre-determined reasons. It's silly that people who consider themselves so rational are unable to comprehend how obvious this is.

You are mistaking your imagination for reality. You cannot read my mind. Regardless, you are the one advocating social engineering, not me, the onus is (or should be) on you to prove sexism is the cause of gender imbalances at companies. If sexism is so rampant, why is it so difficult to produce any evidence, and why is the "evidence" so commonly produced the equivalent of "bro-culture" conspiracy theories. That this is considered "evidence" only further illustrates how differently the human mind can perceive reality.

> Also lol @ programs for underrepresented groups “increase race and gender tensions”. Get fucked, dude.

What does this refer to? And please refrain from profanity and personal insults. If you have the moral high ground, as you seem to believe, no need to use filthy words and personal insults, your superior ideas should suffice, no?

> edit: came across one of the ones I read before from a recently ex-Google employee: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man... super good and worth a read

It opens with an outright lie: "You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it."

Absolutely fascinating.

EDIT: After reading that, my conclusion of how you find these sorts of articles compelling is that they are rebutting a twisted strawman of the original manifesto, where the author is imagined to be making a whole bunch of assertions that he really isn't. I think that explains quite nicely the breathtaking difference of perception.

For what it is though, it is absolutely brilliant, extremely well done, and I mean that completely seriously. I'd bet big money that person will absolutely dominate in the corporate world.

Good luck.

If you find yourself having similar problems with numerous people, you might want to consider the possibility that perhaps you should consider viewing the world from a different perspective. It's not easy, but it's possible.

Would you please stop posting personally condescending remarks toward people you disagree with? Regardless of how wrong they are, or seem, you're degrading the quality of the site by doing this.

Admittedly there is a whole lot of degrading going on in the current conflagration, but you've done this a whole bunch of times and it's definitely not helping.

Ok, I shall try to adopt a turn-the-other-cheek approach going forward.

I am somewhat curious why you've singled me out though, considering the specifics of the conversations I'm involved in.

Thanks—that's just the approach we're hoping for.

If you're thinking it might be because we secretly disagree with you, I assure you that (sadly for us) everyone always thinks this. It's an artifact of randomness: we see a mostly-random sample of the comments here, since there are far too many for us to read. HN's moderation principles are consistent, but because of this quantity it's impossible to apply them across the entire corpus of posts, so you're always going to see examples of people getting away with worse in the neighborhood.

Also, I post most of these moderation comments and happen to have been dealing with an extraneous emergency (two in fact) during the exact period of the recent flamewar hurricane. Them's the breaks. Am ramping back to normal now, so the moderation comments will soon be thicker and faster.

That seems reasonable. These topics do always tend to degrade to chaos, human nature sometimes overpowers intention.

He did also comment on and0's post as well.

I can think of plenty of rooms I could walk into right now (or throughout history) and not have anyone agree with me on something I care about. I don't consider this a problem, in most of those scenarios.

I'd recommend you take your own advice. You didn't even try to read anything I posted, and you sure as hell aren't applying the same critical thinking to shoot down the insane ramblings in the original memo.

Enjoy your privilege, enjoy your current power. Make sure anyone who questions the order of things that grant you all this do so only in a manner you find agreeable, not that it would change your mind or anything. I'm not going to pretend you're doing this in good faith any longer.

Fuck, why do I bother on this site?

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