Outraged about the Google diversity memo?
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
In the very early stage of my company, we wanted to outsource some UX work. After an exhausting review of applicants on one of the freelance sites out there, we finally settled on a Pakistani woman who had the best balance of portfolio vs cost.
At the initial Skype call, there was no video. And it turned out to be a guy speaking in a very high voice. We didn't really care and just went along with it (after a call or two he dropped his octave significantly, but everything continued with the original female name). But it was curious that this enterprising individual decided that the best way to stand out from the countless other developers with similar demographics he was competing against was to pretend to be a woman.
I do suspect that the presumed bias that women aren't actually as skilled and got where they are because of gender preference, while an uncomfortable bias for women, does make it so that a woman with equal skill to a male candidate is perceived as a greater rarity/find because "oh wow, this one is legit." (Not saying women are actually less likely to be legit, just saying the perception that is true can work to board in the opposite direction). I'd be extremely curious to see the classic "attach picture to resume/work sample" experiment done for tech with actual hiring managers. I'd be very surprised if the work with the female photo has a lower net score than the male photo across the experimental groups.
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract
It should also be noted that the earlier study, which showed a smaller effect and only if the resumes were calibrated to be (a) mediocre and (b) precisely calibrated to be the same, was done in Psychology. Which is, of course, a field dominated by women and maybe not the typical "STEM" that we think about when we talk about the underrepresentation of women in tech.
Those two findings in turn gel with a recent French study that showed bias in grading in favor of the underrepresented gender in a particular field (though the bias was stronger in favor of women than in favor of men).
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/46681/...
And of course there was the recent trial (not an experiment AFAICT) in Australia to reduce gender bias:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."
UPDATE: I was looking for one more thing, and finally found it. Despite the fact that the study showing bias against women is much weaker, it has been cited several times more often than the study showing bias for women (table near the bottom). https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Back when I was still at university I was on a hiring panel for a new prof.
In a first step we ranked all the applicants using qualitative and quantitative metrics (the rankings across qualitative/quantitative and people on the panel was very similar when we compared rankings at the end) and then we handed in a shortlist with the best male applicant and best female applicant. We did this to make the Gleichstellungsbeauftragte (="diversity officer") shut up and thought that since the ability gap was really noticeable it'd be a no contest. How wrong we were. Despite being in the upper part of the bottom half of our ranking, she got the job.
That was the day I found out that I wasn't at a meritocratic institution as I had previously thought and left a few months later. That sort of thing really isn't good for your self confidence.
IIRC, Google did the same thing and concluded their hiring metrics had very little predictive value beyond setting a certain bar. Once you rose to that level, most discriminatory power of the metric evaporated.
If that was the case where you were, then is probably very little predictive value between "top scores" and "median scores".
It is common to use a "competent" person to impersonate the actual candidate for remote and/or contract positions, especially in H1B scenarios. I used to insist on a video with a whiteboard or a follow up in-person interview.
In this case they just couldn't find a female in quick time.
While americans are free to utter quite inflamatory speech in the public, I find that American culture seems to discourage any sort of controversial topic in polite company.
That applies to conservatives and liberals alike in the US. Discussing religion among conservatives in the US seems taboo. While liberals are not very open to having PC opinions challenged.
If you put two opposite extremists of moderate intelligence together to talk, you will probably not hear a great conversation. (This is not only true for politics.)
There is zero difference in practice. If I'm fired and can't come to work anymore, the discussion has been stopped, no? Happy to be corrected if I'm missing something.
I am? I never claimed any such thing.
My question is clear, no? Is there any practical difference between employers (supposedly) not being able to restrict your speech at work, but being able to fire you for whatever they want?
Not to be adversarial, but this isn't true. Some positive rights, like contract enforcement, are implied/expressed in the US Constitution. Other positive rights (the right to public education, for example) are varyingly guaranteed by individual states in the union, in their constitutions and otherwise.
It's like the moment you try to have a conversation about some serious topic, you feel like you are receiving youtube comments in person.
Only recently, I realized this requirement for PC is why most social talking in the US tend to be about sport (NFL, NHL, NBA), TV (Game of Thrones or some reality shows) or podcasts.
Dare to speak about a social issue or challenge a solution that's supposed to be addressing the issue, you'll be at the receiving end of a verbal lynch mob.
If you hear only Modi idolization, it can be boring. But if it is critiques of his policies (good/bad) you may feel it's a paradigm shift in progress in the worlds largest democracy.
Nothing wrong in you finding it boring.
Giulio Prisco said... The results of this incident are easy to predict.
Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line.
Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family.
But they won't change their position. If anything, their position will be radicalized. For example, from classical liberal to alt-right.
Yes, they'll stop expressing their opinion in public. But they'll express their opinion, with a vengeance, in the only place where one can do so in secrecy without fear of witch-hunting mobs: the voting booth.
Yes, that explains Trump.
But I think Trump is definitely more right than left, at least compared to Clinton. This might have contributed to his victory.
It's pretty hard to put that into a left-right economic spectrum.
But what happens when the 4chan poster with the anime pillow who denies the holocaust just to get a rise out of the libcucks crosses paths with an actual hardline anti-semite who is interested in building an even-more-final solution?
To use a colloquialism, what happens when the rubber meets the road? Do the fascists tolerate what they would consider to be total degeneracy for the sake of finally building a mass movement? Does the online troll recognize that what was an ironic joke for him is a hard reality for others, and move to push their real-life activism away from those types of groups?
This is what I mean by internal contradictions, the kind that can kill a mass movement before it even starts.
So while there is a common refrain of "this is why Trump won, and the movement of contrarians, devils advocates, trolls, anti-pc crusaders, people who tweet about white genocide, stormfront regulars and conspiracy theorists is only going to grow if you being offensive towards them", the reality is much, much more complicated.
Trust in Trump has plummeted, even amongst his core. The vote is very quickly slipping out of the grasp of the Right, and was always a race against time demographically to begin with. And if you're in a position where you can't win through democratic means, you have to use other means (boycotts, protests, organizing, etc). And the alt-right is utterly lamed by it's own hand before that race has even started.
But GP only mentioned alt-rights as an example of where might the voters turn their preferences.
Even at Google where James worked, many employees agree with his memo (36%), and the majority, 54% of them think the memo is harmless and was OK to share: https://basicgestalt.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/press-f-for-ja...
After Google fired him, these 54% will inevitably think about what other ideas they think are harmless might cause them to be fired. Not exactly comforting thoughts.
However, the design matches the defaults of google forms, exact colors and their sequence, too: http://imgur.com/WPC0ogZ
Also the header says "gd-jpeg v1.0", it’s a cross platform open source C library with bindings for all modern programming languages including Go and Python: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD_Graphics_Library
Even if that’s a fake, it’s a good one.
I could whip upa similar graph without breaking a sweat that says whatever I'd like, and it would have all the same hallmarks of this one. I could even do it in PHP using ImageMagick (if I felt masochistic) and fake the file header to say it was created using GD. Or build it in photoshop, and pull it into a binary editor.
So I think unless there's someone who can point to greater evidence that this is an internal graph, there's just no reason to believe it is.
So I think unless there's someone who can point to the actual internal graph, there's just no reason to believe this is fake.
The distribution this poll shows is not so outlandish as to be unbelievable, and importantly it does not lend itself to overwhelmingly support one side over the other. Why would anyone spend time and effort to fake it?
It's a heated argument on the internet. There'd be plenty of incentive to fake a graph in order to bolster one's opinion.
It totally would. Statistically, a sample size of 282 out of a population of 60000 is pretty good.
If this test was authentic, we would be 95% sure that the true percentage of the population who think that the memo is harmless is between 47% and 60%.
Otherwise you could run a poll "Who thinks [minority] should leave the USA?", get a high "yes" response, say "THE POPULACE AGREE!" but then discover only racists/whatever have replied because Breitbart/4chan dogpiled the poll - which would make it 100% invalid, no?
This is certainly the message being broadcast into every home on the planet for the last 6 moths. In reality it seems a bit optimistic when we consider the Democrats are coming from a decade-long losing streak (http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/25/...), a monumentally embarrassing, record cost $1.2B failed 2016 Presidential campaign (http://nypost.com/2016/12/09/hillary-clintons-losing-campaig...), and following these up by going 0-6 in federal elections (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/21/georgia-special-e...) leaving them with their lowest representation in American government since the 1920's (http://www.npr.org/2016/03/04/469052020/the-democratic-party...).
I think it's pretty safe to say that the American leftist revolution is _not_ right around the corner.
The environment that catalyzed Trump's rise to power has not changed - if anything, it has intensified.
And the polling, which in aggregate, across all demographics, has been continually moving more and more negative each passing month. Even polls like Rasmussen, which have a traditional right-wing bias, have shown a consistent drop in support.
Metrics like the ones you mentioned aren't useful as predictors. Yes, the Democrats spent a lot of money. So did the Republicans. Big money elections are the norm now, and each election has a loser.
Your reference to losing special elections only tells half the story. These are races that should have been as safe as safe can be. That's why they're special elections, because when Presidents make appointments, they only tend to choose people from their party who are in such safe districts that they can easily be replaced. Often-times, the national party doesn't even send monetary support to these special elections, because they're re-won so handily.
Take Ossoff's challenge in Georgia. He lost by 4 points in a district that went for Trump by 19 points. Moreover, the Republicans were required to spend $25 million in order to defend a seat that they had most likely budgeted around $0 for. That's what's called a weathervane. Or a canary in a coal mine.
Even further down this rabbit hole, the 0-6 loss article is from June. Since then, we've had Phil Miller win by 9 points in a district that Trump won by 21 points, which means that's a 30 point swing! We also have Kevin Cavanaugh winning by 23.4 points in a district that Clinton only won by 0.1 points. There's also been sweeps of state legislatures in traditionally VERY deep red states such as Oklahoma.
Every single trend points to a very difficult 2018 for the Republicans, and an especially difficult 2020.
Isn't that normal? In Australia these sorts of elections usually swing heavily against the government of the day but are very poor predictions of what will happen at a general election. Is this not the norm in America?
However, a special election within the months after a Presidential election should follow the same results, since there hasn't been the time to build the resentment necessary for a significant change in voting patterns. That, however, has not been the case with the Trump presidency.
We've also seen the trend at state level for the last few years, it seems swings are coming harder and faster.
> The way the swings on the special elections are going, which are all violently swinging away from the Republicans.
The Republicans won all 6 special elections.
> Take Ossoff's challenge in Georgia. He lost by 4 points > the Republicans were required to spend $25 million
He lost. And it was the Democrats who spent $23 Million (the most ever spent) on the election not the Republicans. The republicans spent like $3 Million dollars.
By slim margins in what should have been extremely safe districts.
Then they lost the next 2, one of which by way a 30 point swing.
The swing is not something you can hand-wave away. It's one of the best metrics we have as a predictor for 2018.
> The republicans spent like $3 Million dollars.
Estimates on how much was spent on the election range from $40-$60 million.
$23 million is the amount of fundraising that was done by Ossoff's campaign, independent of the DCCC or traditional DNC PACs, which means none of it came from their "warchest". The DCCC provided an additional $5 million of TV ad spends in Ossoff's favor.
On the Republican side, they spent way more than $3 million. The NRCC spent about $6.7 million on TV ad spends. Paul Ryan's SuperPAC spent about $5 million on airtime and $2 million on additional costs. Two other conservative PACs raised an additional $1 million.
https://www.issueone.org/money-behind-expensive-u-s-house-ra...
The breakdown is very complicated, because money can come in from dozens of different types of sources, and the numbers aren't usually finalized until long after the election ends.
The $23 million figure, however, was mostly crowd-sourced in small donations. So to be very clear, you can say that came from citizens who identify as Democrats and be generally right, but to say it came from Democrats as an organization or a political entity, that is not correct.
Not in the double digits, they don't. And not in special elections shortly into the first year of the Presidency, especially.
house: https://www.predictit.org/Market/2704/Which-party-will-contr...
senate: https://www.predictit.org/Market/2703/Which-party-will-contr...
Ossoff got 125,517 votes Handel got 134,799 votes.
Compare
Dem - 124,917 Rep - 201,088
As you see there was no swing in Dem's favour.
A special election is a hard sell. Democrats sold it. Republicans didn't.
Mid-term elections are also hard sells. We'll see who can sell it.
I am not bullish on Trump long term, but not because some extremists also support him, but because of his own randomness and inability to get things done in Washington.
The traditional conservative movement is dying out. Quite literally, it has a demographic problem that it is not sure how to resolve. In it's place, you have the alt-right, which does tend to be more youthful, but which acts as an umbrella for a wide variety of extremist viewpoints, everything from extreme libertarianism to conspiracy theorists to white nationalism to single-issue anti-islamic advocates and a whole host of others. And within that milieu, a large proportion of people are not singularly committed to those hard-right ideologies as much as they define themselves solely in their rejection of liberalism, the left, or social justice. The result is a whole host of confusion. The alt-right is constantly infighting about cultural issues such as traditional masculinity or gay rights, to the difference between opposition to illegal immigration (a viewpoint which can claim to be more centrist) or opposing immigration altogether, including legal (which is held by the nationalist wing of the movement).
As the voting base disappears, these groups will have to figure out how to grow their movement, make political demands, maintain a presence without burning out, etc. Just like all movements do. But that's exactly where those intense internal divisions come in and wreak havoc.
they won't change their position. If anything, their position will be radicalized. For example, from classical liberal to alt-right.
This is been a common sort of mantra since Trump won the presidency. Whenever we have a controversial event like this, people make a statement that any actions by those on the left will only further radicalize people in the other direction. I don't think it's true, but most of all, I don't think that other direction really leads anywhere useful. For the reasons I outlined previously.
Superficially at most. When you go to some of the most popular alt-right facebook pages, and you see caricatures of Jews and whole racial groups consistently disparaged and stereotyped, and when you see just how many people posting in them have cross-interests with white supremacist and misogynist movements, you realize that "welcoming" is a very, very narrow term.
The alt-right is not constantly infighting.
The left are more likely to devolve into infighting.
This google guy was moderate left wing and the hard line social justice response from Google and the media will alienate a lot more of the intellectual left.
Hispanics and African Americans often lean socially conservative.
Gay men are a lot more fiscally conservative than you might think.
None of those groups identify with single white woman.
Etc etc.
His first interviews were with alt-right Youtube channels.
I agree with your points about lots of minority groups being socially (and/or fiscally) conservative. It's lucky for the left that the white social conservatives have been driving them away consistently for decades.
I'd argue he is still left of center.
He is just interviewing with the groups who will give him a fair go.
So yeah he's definitely in that general area.
Sounds like an amazing sit-com. Stay tuned, folks!
(I see he removed his comment. For posterity, he argued that Donald Trump got "almost a third" of the votes in California and, therefore, liberals were on the decline).
Not 3 weeks ago we had a thread here where a woman spoke up about harassment and people said it was exactly the wrong thing. Mad someone for touching your bum? Speak up. You spoke up? Now you're ruining the work environment and being unfair.
In this memo's case, perhaps you're mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action (e.g., don't worry I am sure if we set up pair programming that will make it fair for you social women types)? Well it's your fault for not arguing against it. Oh you spoke up and that person got fired for violating some pretty basic corproate policy? Well congrats now it's your fault they're radicalized. Now Trump is inevitable, thanks for putting him in power, I hope North Korea nukes your house!
The only solution that ever seems to be okay is stand there and smile as people say, do, and justify unfair things. Or maybe sit there and "debate" with them as they spout tired 1970s-debunked rhetoric about communication skills and and meticulisly avoid the idea that benefits might take any shape or form beyond what they themselves want this year.
As for that "memo", I still don't get why the underlying premise that Google's level of technical competitiveness was hurt by these policies is taken without a critical eye. That's a pretty big assertion for a company who's essentially leading numerous areas in the world's tech markets and research fields.
He never said that. Could you cite the portion where he literally says women are less capable?
Remember?
What positive connotation could be drawn from it?
> What positive connotation could be drawn from it?
I'm not claiming that women are better at pair programming, but that is a positive connotation that can be drawn.
IMHO that is the wrong question. Connotations aren't something anyone can argue for or against - one can have bad connotations for all sorts of words. Actual example: my ex hated the word "negotiate" in any personal discussion as she saw negotiations as something where you tried to screw the other person over (she was a lawyer). This was to the point where she refused to negotiate anything - including where we would have dinner. How can anyone live without negotiating? Hence, ex :)
I think a better question than one about connotations would be:
If we accept that women have a preference for people over things, what would encourage women to want to do a "things" job? The memo's answer: more peer programming i.e. adding a people element to a things/systems job. That is internally consistent, I think, with the evidence presented on average female preference.
Honestly, I find all this inferior/superior talk really troubling. Different != inferior, or superior, it is just DIFFERENT. Is a hammer a better tool than a saw? Depends what I want to do... I find it even more troubling that people against labelling others superior/inferior see everything that way. Personally, I think vive la difference!
If you accept the premise that there's such a thing as a male-dominated work culture with stereotypically male values, then attitudes and actions that match those values are considered better ("normative") by default.
Anyone who has different requirements or interests will always be considered an outsider who will to have allowances made for them while receiving special treatment.
This would also be true of hypothetical female-dominated cultures with stereotypical female values where men would be considered the inferior outsiders who need special treatment. (Do such cultures exist? At work - sometimes, but not often. Outside of work - perhaps.)
The topic is an unholy mess because there are so many implications and assumptions on both sides, and so much outright ranting and bullying too, that useful debate is practically impossible.
My view is that corporate culture isn't stereotypically "male" so much as stereotypically totalitarian. More women won't change that. It might rein in some of the more obvious abuses, while running the risk of replacing them with some new ones.
But real economic and political freedom could only come from equal opportunity at a scale that most (tacitly neoliberal) feminists seem uninterested in.
Is it?
For the average person working at a big company it is much more important to have a good fun team than a productive team.
After all a fun happy team benefits me on a day to day level whereas if company profit jumps 20% I'm unlikely to see any benefit.
The exceptions are a few tech giants who hand out lots of stock.
Yes. In the memo, at least.
You've just said that if you accept male-dominated work culture exists, males are considered better by default.
Ergo either males are considered better by default or such a culture doesn't exist. You deny the latter, so clearly you are claiming the former.
You just made that claim, not the guy who was fired.
My interpretation of this point should not be taken as an endorsement of it or the document as a whole
I was hoping not to discuss the document as a whole myself. I largely avoided the last pseudoscientific cesspool of a thread.
Author: Pair programming may be one possible way to bring more social women into programming by appealing to their interest in people vs. things
He wrote one thing, your read another. Who's the one with a problem here exactly? The author or the reader?
First, the section is "Non-discrimnatory ways to reduce the gender gap".
You cannot reduce the "gap" by aiming at the women who are already at Google. This should be obvious. They are already there. To make a dent in the gap, you need to attract more women who currently do not choose to work in tech or not at Google. So nothing he writes is about his colleagues at Google, or by extension women who are already in or interested in tech. It is about potentially attracting those who are not currently interested in that career.
Second, this is about subtle differences in the distribution of preferences in populations with huge overlaps. So when you have an individual in front of you, you simply cannot tell whether they will exhibit this trait more or less by inference from the population statistic. And you certainly can't say "all X have more of this property than all Y". He even has a nice graph for this.
Third, it's not about ability, but about preference. "Women on average show a higher interest in people..." How do you get from "preference" to "ability"?
Fourth, you are assuming a symmetry where "higher X" implies "lower Y that's complementary to X". This would probably be true for interests (if I a am more interested in working alone, I am probably less interested in working in groups). But it does not translate to abilities.
In fact, one of the documented areas where gender differences in ability do show up is exactly a case of this lack of symmetry: you've probably heard that tend to score higher on the math SATs and women higher on the verbals. This is apparently not the whole story: men with high math scores do tend to not also have high verbal scores (and therefore prefer STEM). However, for women the two are correlated, not anti-correlated: those with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, so they have more options. And people with more options tend to prefer non-STEM options, regardless of gender.
Fifth, I thought pair programming was a Good Thing™?
That is far from obvious. Everything else being equal, you would increase the proportion of women if you reduced their turnover.
Well, maybe not "obvious", but "clear that it can't be any other way once you think about it".
If that were the case then he would not lead his essay implying that the current hiring policies were hurting Google. He seems to imply standards have somehow been damaged, but right now that's not what Google does.
> Third, it's not about ability, but about preference.
There are so many potential sources of preference, from negative experience to personal ability. It seems very suspect to point to gender stereotypes that a large number of women have been arguing against for decades are in fact the root cause here.
> you've probably heard that tend to score higher on the math SATs and women higher on the verbals. This is apparently not the whole story: men with high math scores do tend to not also have high verbal scores (and therefore prefer STEM). However, for women the two are correlated, not anti-correlated: those with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, so they have more options
Sources, please.
> Fifth, I thought pair programming was a Good Thing™?
That depends. If I told you the only way you're going to be competitive and not drag down the standard of my organization is by pairing up with another person, should you take that as a compliment?
And he made it clear that he didn't think they were producing "false positives", so every woman hired was qualified.
> There are so many potential sources of preference
Yes. Biology is one.
> gender stereotypes
http://www.spsp.org/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response
[Stereotype Accuracy Is One Of The Largest And Most Replicable Effects In All Of Social Psychology]
> [verbal/math scores correlate for women] Sources
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
> the only way you're going to be competitive
> and not drag down the standard of my organization
> is by pairing up with another person
Huh??? Where did you get that from? Pleaaze.
This is factualy not what was said in the memo.
https://diversitymemo.com/#reduce-gender-gap
> Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
> We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration.
That was literally the only mention of pair programming the the entire memo and it was as a suggestion to make positions more appealing to women who were more interested in people and more social. Not once does he equate pair programming as some remedial for your perceived statement of lower quality ability. The guy was trying to suggest ways to attract more women and you flip it around to demonize him. Do you not see that you are large part of the problem? Instead of trying to engage and explain to him why his points are perhaps wrong or misguided, you instead twist his words to simply eviscerate him instead.
Even if you admit that all genders, races, any way you want to segment the population, do not have the same distribution, that doesn't mean anything to a person as an individual.
For instance I think it's fair to say that black people are better at athleticism/running than white people (a disproportionate number olympic champions are black), i.e. the tail of the distribution is fatter for black people than white people. It doesn't mean anything to a random individual in that group. I am white, I shouldn't feel offended that another category of the population has a different distribution than my category. And it doesn't mean that no white people can become an olympic athlete either. Just that there will be a natural race imbalance among athletes. And it doesn't mean that a random black man will be better than a random white man at athletism.
So I don't agree with the way you read this memo: In this memo's case, perhaps you're mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action. The memo doesn't say that an individual woman will be less capable. What it claims instead is that women have a different distribution for certain skills than men, which you might agree with or not. But it's a very different point.
Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. It's not hard to come up with a distribution that is identical for the top x% but differs for the general population. Or one where the difference in top x% is in the opposite direction of the general population (e.g. two normal distributions where mu1 < mu2, and sigma1 > sigma2).
Well, again, the Google memo started by arguing Google's technical standard was being hurt so James doesn't seem to believe his colleagues all got the same interviews he did.
I'd be more inclicned to this sort of argument for racial and gender diveristy if Google & others didn't have such abysmly skewed distributions towards white men. Go look at Google's diveristy report and then do some Bayes Rule hacking with it.
Google's diversity rates are worse than the graduate rates for most schools I've checked. I have not found a composite data source to compare a larger average to.
Is it fair though? Is it supported by metrics of muscle strength and length etc? And does it take into account the differences between blacks (Africans?), west vs south vs central (pygmies!).
Also, there's the possibility that whites of equivalent athleticism find better options for their life than being a professional sportsmen, the bottom 80% [1] of whom end their career at 30 with little to show for it but lifelong injuries.
[1] made up statistic.
And I think that's probably what the OP meant by "better at running". The vast majority of people can run to some extent, so the assumption is that someone is "better" at it usually means "faster". And the obvious place to look for evidence of that would be in sporting competitions, rather than trying to look up metrics that you have described. Obviously its a simplification, but if you don't do that then life would be far to complicated and detailed to navigate.
Do people have no sense of history here? The internet lets you look up all sorts of things, like how the racial composition of US track and field has changed over the 20th century, or how Paavo Nurmi (a poor guy from an underdeveloped country) dominated distance running in the 1920s, challenged only by another couple poor guys from underdeveloped Scandinavian countries. It was clear from publicly viewable sporting events in the 1920s that Scandinavians are really the best at running; east Africans really didn't figure into the competition.
There might be a bias towards track and field programs and careers in poor/small countries, thanks to cheap infrastructure and sustainability with very few athletes, and expensive sports that are practically reserved for relatively privileged people, e.g. swimming and horse riding, but confusing an athlete's race and their available opportunities is silly.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/08/14/kenyans-sweep-...
It's interesting how introducing certain attributes into a conversation can disable parts of the human brain, I wonder if a study has ever been done on this.
In Google's case, women fare poorly in botrh (with rankings expressed in the axis of pay or leadership positions). That's a significant difference.
Threads such as this are chock full of examples of people who are normally very logical and scientific, but once the subject turns to one of the above, suddenly everything's different, nothing can be determined, observed, or measured, the entire world is completely random with no patterns whatsoever, etc.
I wonder if all cultures are like this or only us in the west.
Fair. I just wanted to add that it's not terribly applicable to the specifics of the memo and article. People are upset about systemic total representation and undervaluation rather than a lack of singular genius.
But I agree that there are people who find any conversation about statistics as it regards this subject as a form of heresy.
It's applicable in that (in my opinion) the majority of the people aren't - rather they are interested in a fantasy version of the situation that exists only in their imagination. This is why even on forums like HN where people are far more logical than the average person, there is no shortage of bickering over obvious misinterpretations, moving of goalposts, etc. For example, how many of the outraged people here are angry about things that literally aren't even in the article, and even when this is pointed out to them, still they aren't able to wake up and realize how their brain is playing tricks on them.
The older I get, and the longer I see the very same arguments over and over again over decades, the more I am coming around to the idea that a massive portion of the human population possibly can't even see reality. Maybe I am one of them!
All we can do is dedicate ourselves to following the evidence where we can and avoiding judgement when possible.
That seems fairly judgemental to me.
Edit: To clarify, you are making a value judgement of a person based on some unspecified happening when you met then in passing. That seems to indicate you didn't give much chance in the way to understand that person or the reasoning behind their thoughts.
This is the pair programming text in full:
> Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I
> outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's
> representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in
> many of these areas, but I think it's still instructive to list them
>> Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
>>> We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming
>>> and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how
>>> people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive
>>> ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get
>>> female students into coding might be doing this)
My understanding is: if we increase pair programming to make it more of a team activity, more women will enjoy programming, and more women will become programmers.
We don't have to agree with the suggestion. But you've just shown us that our interpretations are wildly different. So, why?
Edit: formatting
We might argue James says women are asking for good mentorship opportunities herr. So why do women benefit from this specifically (and that's okay) but other mentorship program are considered unfair in this rubric?
You say "we need pair programming" when reliability is difficult to gaurantee. Not because you're feeling lonely. It seems an awful lot like he's suggesting that women are especially in need of experienced minders.
This may be wrong(I don't have any evidence to back it up, and neither did Damore), but it is wholly different from the sinister undertones you are seeing.
(In fact, taking your "mentorship" interpretation, it is entirely possible that the women would be the one doing the mentoring, if their skill at engineering was hampered by a disinterest towards purely thing-oriented pursuits).
I'm sorry, what?
> A way more good faith interpretation would be the very simple equation of "working with just computer - more thing oriented, working with computer + partner - more people oriented".
Except that women entering the field now have no such expectations but he is still complaining about special treatment.
Pair programming is not a "social" outlet. It's collaborative, but "social?" That's quite a stretch of the word from where I think James used it.
You specifically said that the suggestion of Pair Programming, was due to James thinking that women are "less capable of individual action".
But you also said "It's a technique to improve product reliability and give more practical mentorship opportunities." Which is also my understanding. I know at least one shop where everybody pair programs. It has nothing to do with programmers being inferior. I also agree that paring is more sociable since every day I will have to greet my team mate, talk about stuff, have a coffee, then get to work.
I'm just trying to understand how "Pair Programming" changes meaning so much just because some dude wrote a manifesto. We can't even have a discussion if our understanding of the same document is so wildly different.
* Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.
* Discrimination to reach equal representation is [...] bad for business.
Which I read as, "woman aren't as good, that's why they don't already work here, if we hire more of them, they'll not be able to do the job as well as men so the business will suffer"
Is that an unreasonable reading?
And can we note that I replied to someone saying "he didn't say that", suggested a place where he did and got replies from different people saying "yes he did say that, and he's correct" and replies saying "no, you're misreading what he said as it's explained in more detail later".
So it appears at the very least (and I feel I'm being generous here), that his words can be misread by people on both sides of the issue, which might be worth bearing in mind for those trying to paint his detractors as a hysterical mob who haven't even read the memo.
In the section you quoted, he doesn't say that hiring more women is bad for business, he said that doing so via discriminatory hiring practices, and if you hadn't ellipsized that line, there would have been an explanation for why right there. The full bullet point reads "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." So he says that unequal representation is partially explained by gender differences in interests, and then that trying to eliminate the differences, specifically via the method of discriminatory hiring, is bad for business because it's unfair and divisive.
To be clear, the reason I'm interpreting the "differences" he refers to as differences in interest as opposed to competence is because of the content in the "Personality differences" section of the memo, which is the only place he addresses specific gender differences. In that section he says that women are less interested on average in tasks which focus mainly on systemizing, and are less interested in high-stress jobs, as well as that they are less likely to advocate for their own promotions.
I replied to someone saying "he didn't say that", suggested a place where he did
No, you replied to someone saying "he didn't say that" and suggested a place where he said something ambiguous — the tl;dr, which is necessarily ambiguous.
So it appears at the very least (and I feel I'm being generous here), that his words can be misread by people on both sides of the issue
Who do you think is misinterpreting what? I've pointed out what I think you're misinterpreting and offered an alternative interpretation. You don't get to simply assert that other people are misinterpreting the memo, you've got to offer some evidence of that.
In the memo he literally asks for changes to make Google more welcoming for conservatives. He even claims this will be good for business. How do you square this with your contention that any kind of discrimination, even for positive purposes, will lead to negative outcomes due to it being unfair and divisive.
Does it make sense for him to be claiming both these things? I'm not sure that he is even saying that (though it seems tone deaf at the least to present both ideas in the same document).
Also, I'm really not sure that saying women score higher on neuroticism and therefore can't handle stressful jobs as well, or are introverts and so have trouble leading is purely about interest. I'm not sure where this defence about "only talking about interests" comes from, I don't get that from the document. It's certainly not explicitly spelled out.
I'm coming to the conclusion that people aren't just misinterpreting but have actually invented a totally fictitious memo that they find easier to defend than the real one.
Now, imagine a situation: 100 persons (80 men, 20 women - ratio observed by actual HR) are looking for a job in Google, which has 10 open positions for them. Google wants to hire the best possible candidate - and hires 8 men and 2 women; both genders are choosed from top 10% of candidates of a same gender (Assuming their skill does not correlate with their gender). That hiring policy does not reduces observed gender gap between candidates at all. So let's introduce positive discrimination (so called affirmative action), and say, that Google wants to hire 5 men and 5 women (1:1 ratio, but even 7:3 will suffice to show worsening effect, albeit in weaker proportions). Now men are choosed from top 6.25%, and women - just from top 25%. The is no gender gap anymore, but now there is a considerable skill gap - top 6.25% men are having considerable advantage over 25% women. More to that: men are not happy because they think they have struggled much more for the same position than women; women are not happy because they think they were hired not for their skills, but for their gender. Also,both men and women being paid based on their performance alone will result if considerable wage gap.
The original memo stated the same, albeit in less transparent form: personal skills cannot be measured with 100% accuracy, so there is always a chance to hire underperforming person (false-positive) or not to hire well performing person (false-negative). Positive discrimination radically reduces false-negatives, which inevitabely magnifies number of false-positives (see Type I and Type II errors in statistics and Neyman-Pearson criterion). Author proposed not to fight on-enter gender gap with discrimination, which would result in negative effect for company's performance, but to make company's environment to be a more attractive (which may reduce on-enter gender gap, reduce number or women leaving industry permanently and won't compromise performance)
The issue is in the act of finding them. This is where statistics and discrimination comes into play. Lets say that ratio of women vs men that are interested in working at google (and capable of being hired) is 20% to 80%. Then if your goal is to reach gender parity, you must do one of three things: (1) test significantly more women vs men to find those 20% at a higher rate (which involves active discrimination against men), (2) lower the standards specifically for women so that the pass rate for women is higher, or (3) active intervention along gender lines to increase the percentage of women that are interested and capable of passing a google screening. It should be obvious that 1&2 leads to worse outcomes for Google. (3) doesn't directly lead to worse outcomes, but it could be seen as divisive to discriminate against men in these outreach programs, which could indirectly lead to worse outcomes for Google. Now, one could argue that these gender-based outreach programs are just to counter cultural sexism that have kept women from being more interested in engineering jobs at Google. But if the stats in the memo are accurate, at least some portion of the disparity is not due to external factors but individual choices based on inherent (dis)interest. If this is true then such outreach will largely be unsuccessful for the cost in money and resentment.
Would you agree that women are naturally physically weaker than men, and this makes for a convincing argument why you would expect more men doing physically demanding jobs? Is this a controversial statement to make?
A difference in traits does not even have to produce a difference in ability to produce a difference in representation. Some of the traits Damore listed allegedly lead women to value a better work/life balance, to focus more on family, etc, which naturally means they would have a lower representation in highly competitive, career-based environments. None of the traits Damore listed seem to discuss "engineering ability", but they do affect all the other skills you need to thrive in the environment.
(This is assuming that the science Damore laid out is sound, which I can't really vouch for, as I am a layman in those fields. However, most of the arguments against Damore seem to be focused on his logical conclusions, rather than the factual basis behind them - e.g. KirinDave seemed to focus on how unfair Damore's conclusions were, rather than how wrong his quoted research was).
There is a big difference between agreeing that some differences might exist and arguing that any token gestures for the women who DO qualify under the identical standard are unfair.
That's where this argument breaks down even if we pretend that it's not based on a leaning tower of broscience observations and dated dualist notions of "intellect".
Providing opportunities for minorities in the workplace substantially improves the lot of folks in those categories.
If we could point to the current diversity numbers and say, "Women who do qualify are rarer in the population than men, but tend to equal outcomes once we select for this population? Your argument would make more sense.
But wages are imbalanced, harassment is more prevalent, and turnover is higher. So I'm not as inclined to shrug and walk away just yet.
> In this memo's case, perhaps you're mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action
Getting mad at the memo seems like an unreasonable reaction to me, especially for the stated reason. Now you've moved to:
> There is a big difference between agreeing that some differences might exist and arguing that any token gestures for the women who DO qualify under the identical standard are unfair.
This seems wholly agreeable. I don't know what Google's policies are and I don't think Damore really managed to explain them well, to describe the negative effects of them, and to adequately argument why his propositions were better. I don't see why this is a fireable offense, but I can also support the argument that once the outrage broke out, Google's decision was logical and reasonable. But notice we've moved away from being outraged at his assertions, to just finding his conclusions questionable. Is this worth getting mad over? We are in the motte, in agreement that you should not just take what he said as gospel, throw your hands up and say "well let's dismantle all of Google's efforts", that's the essence of discussion! You can present a reasonable counter-argument to what he said, and I can certainly find many points to agree on it!
What I'm worried about though, is that once we stop talking, you will charge down to the bailey, and decry Damore as a sexist who should never have opened his mouth, because he caused people to get mad. That the science he quoted is "broscience observations" and thus he is stupid(and dangerous!) to even believe it. That somehow him making an argument precluded others from challenging him, from finding his argument unpersuasive, or presenting a counter-argument that may sway him, or others who feel like him. The discussion is already poisoned by this tactic. I believe that's what the author in this thread was trying to get at.
You're wrong. I've met him in passing, he didn't strike me as worth considering, then or now. I deliberately avoided prior conversations precisely because of how clear it was that he was going to be fired for this. He had to know it would happen. There's only one outcome that COULD have come of writing that memo.
Is he a sexist? I think he holds some sexist notions. This is an unsurprising outcome if you believe that historically society has been quite sexist. Is he a card-carrying MRA of the school of Roosh? I do not think so.
> That the science he quoted is "broscience observations"
This is a misunderstanding I can clear up. I don't really have a problem with observations of behavior based on gender. I'm sure observable differences exist and I suspect mechanisms for these differences are at play in my personal experience of gender.
What's "broscience observation" is attempting to use these studies to suggest (as he absolutely did) that the current crop of googlers has a problem and this problem is caused by the proposed proclivities as a way to shape the experiences of women at Google. Almost by definition, women at Google are precisely the people who wouldn't fall into this category and therefore are mostly asking for simple consideration for their unique needs in the services provided. James's complaint is that any special treatment is "discriminatory" towards him, but that's a somewhat absurd claim that when reduced to its elements actually somewhat deflates his own points.
I'm not sure what "practices" he's specifically talking about, but he alludes to leadership and mentorship programs that are primarily focused on specific groups. Giving him access to those would probably be about as valuable to him as putting a sanitary napkin dispenser in his cubicle, but he seems to take great offense at the idea that of the many leadership and mentorship opportunities afforded to him, one a small handful are not targeted specifically at him.
Biological essentialialism is a very difficult subject to discuss because it's so easy to become prescriptive with it and such prescriptions often greatly damage even modest outliers in the population. And for what? I'm fairly certain google saves money in the long run by attempting to improve employee retention and increase the supply of technical talent they can hire.
Being left-leaning, I've been doing a lot of looking into some of the ideas floating around amongst the right-leaning crowd since the election. Based upon that, I would say that yes, that is an unreasonable reading.
My understanding (subject to being completely off-base, of course) is that the argument is about biological differences related to interests and aspirations, not intelligence and capabilities. In other words, the early developmental stages cause differences in the brain among men and women that affect, in very general terms, what both may end up aspiring to in terms of career choices and hobbies/interests.
Women (again, speaking generally) could easily do any knowledge-based job performed by men, but you're going to have problems finding the numbers that you need if you want to hit a solid 50/50 distribution in certain types of fields. I think this is why certain fields have had very little trouble reaching either parity or female dominance after the women's equality movement started, while other fields struggle to this day. For example, I've read that SV has no problem with the distribution amongst the non-tech fields and that they slightly favor women, but in terms of engineering and tech, the distribution still lags by quite a bit. This would imply that SV is doing everything in its power to hire and promote women, and that there is something else going on that is the cause of what we're seeing. However, it could also imply that tech and engineering are all filled with men that are actively hostile to women to such a degree that women, even women extremely interested in such fields, simply avoid them. I suspect that, like all things in life, it's a mix of both.
If you look at the published #s right now, they're... very striking. It makes the hypothesis that it's just the preference of women and people of various minorities quite an aggressive hypothesis, in a bayesian sense.
As for the second, which published numbers are you referring to ?
I think that'd be a fantastic outcome. Then we really could think about "the pipeline problem."
The first bullet point exemplified: Let's say there's a job that requires trait openness / empathy to a certain degree (e.g. early education). Now, some given statistics show that e.g. 40% of the female population and 20% of the male population have this manifestation of the trait to the required degree. Would you still expect a 50/50 male/female representation in the field? The author makes the argument that, if the statistics he found are correct, he wouldn't expect a 50/50 split.
The second bullet point just says that discrimination for the sole sake of said equal representation is bad for business, because given the above it would have to be necessarily unmeritocratic. I would contest this point in a sense that individual merit is not the sole factor at which to look, because it is only a single factor in group success, where the availability of diverse ways of thinking and social compatibility also play major roles.
That is, he's saying explicitly that women find leadership roles more difficult. Generally if somebody finds something more difficult they're not as good at it as people who find it easier. As a result I'm not sure how this could be taken any other way than stating that men are better managers simply because they're men.
Where is this being said? People will not take your position seriously if you're not using context, because you're misrepresenting what is happening. This is something thats done in other places, but as far as I know, has nothing to do with the memo, and nothing to do with the parent post you're responding to. Therefore, you're using a strawman.
In that specific paragraph I'm commenting on Hacker News, not the memo.
Are you surprised that some (most?) people couldn't make a connection?
I think it is a question of awareness and beliefs. If you firmly don't think there is an issue then you simply don't notice. I've been at the other side of the fence so I know what it is like ;-)
"I saw the topic a week ago, I will not link to it, I didn't even read it, but I'm sure of what was in it"
insert snarky wink face
And It's exactly why public debate should be had. To come to a better solution in the middle, rather than create fringes on the sides.
Your reaction here is just more of the 'Shock and Awe' and hurt feelings that doesn't really help push the agenda.
And some subjects don't have middle ground. Women being treated less than equal isn't a middle ground sort of issue.
There are already sides, there have been sides forever. People being pushed or pulled one way or another isn't a new phenomena. And there's no amount of public debate and middle ground treading you can do to prevent people who are going to be polarized as of the result of any backlash of their already fringe beliefs. That's inevitable. And the gymnastics required to keep them in the middle just aren't worth it. The actual goal is the thing of value for the people pushing for it. Not appeasing ignorance and bigotry just enough to keep them pacified.
Which is why you need to have ongoing discussion, to determine if people are or are not being treated less equally. People who believe they are "right" but are unable or unwilling to defend that position with words ("the debate is over") should not be trusted, ever.
So what you're saying is the debate is over about the intentions of people saying the debate is over?
Well, assuming you're serious, what's your thoughts on that? Can we have any absolutes? Or is everything indeterminate? If nothing is knowable and communication is not possible shall we stop sending our children to school and go back to living in caves?
So what we all should do is forgive these men their outrageously outdated and somewhat dehumanizing viewpoints and calmly explain to them that currently they are benefitting from a system called patriarchy that has normalized male dominance. We should then calmly suggest that btw, people who are not visually and immediately white suffer a lot under this system too. And I know he benefits but could he please stop?
These folks already hold radical views. He wasn't "radicalized" by being forced to own it. He isn't forced to "vote Trump" because his views are known. He already had them, and they're for the most part outdated, impropable or insulting already.
Why then is the right decision to give him a pass on violating corporate HR policy?
You are kicking and screaming against anything that upsets your viewpoint on this issue.
And we actually agree on the most important facet (as do most people) that any discrimination based on age, gender, or race is absolutely not tolerated.
But how to achieve this in the real world is not a walk in the park. For example, positive discrimination is not a fair system in my opinion. I would think focusing on making the interview process blind is better. So can we argue on these specifics or am I just a bully and a bigot for holding a different opinion?
Interesting. So in this case I shouldn't debate anyone here. Because somehow that makes me wrong because... By not agreeing my worldview is small?
> that any discrimination based on age, gender, or race is absolutely not tolerated.
Honestly, I genuinely do not believe that many people here believe this. I think they find excuses for men at every turn or rationalize marginalizing women need (e.g., as I write this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14980201) That is part of _my_ larger point about how the natural response on HN is to say, "Well if you had handled this correctly we wouldn't be in a situation where it looks like sexual harassment."
> So can we argue on these specifics or am I just a bully and a bigot for holding a different opinion?
I want you to re-read this paragraph and ask yourself what the premise here is. This thread starts by saying, "We should debate." I point out how dismissive this often I'd on HN and your response is, "You're kicking and screaming and just as guilty as James. Now, agree with me in total OR call me names."
I don't know if you're a bigot, but this is a poor tactic to adopt when coupled with the ultimatum: "Or am I a bully?"
"forgive these men their outrageously outdated and somewhat dehumanizing viewpoints and calmly explain to them that currently they are benefitting from a system called patriarchy that has normalized male dominance" doesn't sound like you're open to a debate, it sounds like you are highly certain that your opinion is correct, full stop.
You can nose around my comments. While I'm somewhat acidic with people who suggest it is the feminist responsibility to endure every negative opinion in perpetuity, I'm engaging in most conversations honestly.
I am quite confident in the core components of these observations, but I was more skeptical of it some time ago. If you genuinely believe I cannot be swayed, why do YOU bother talking to me?
In my experiences, this experiment "fails" 90%+ of the time, either by the person refusing to participate, or refusing to hold up their end of the bargain. Yet, they continue to believe absolutely that they are "right"!
I mean to me, this is very fascinating to observe in action.
I don't see anyone "rationalizing marginalizing women"
It looked like the other poster was trying to evaluate the arguments rationally, that's not the same as rationalizing.
As I read it, the grandparent's sole argument was one of unintended consequences, specifically that censorship only intensifies certain problems instead of alleviating them.
I don't see how this can be interpreted as to hold feminists responsible for something -- I don't even see the relationship to feminists at all. Could you please expand on that?
There's more than one way to "speak up", so there's isn't just two options. In any case, who's opinion are you talking about? A specific subset of HN that sticks in your mind?
> pretty basic corporate policy
by basic, do you mean "vague and unevenly applied"?
> is taken without a critical eye
It isn't, but the conversation was cut short, suggesting that the opposite happened; it was assumed to be false/incorrect.
Not sure I can follow,
so the guy is wrong that he spoke up but the feminist is right? Or is the guy right and the feminist wrong? Or are both wrong? Or people who speak up against the guy are right and the guy speaking up is wrong? Or HN is wrong because we discuss this?
Can't follow your argument in the slightest.
I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spoke to these people in private there were a lot of people who were secretly conservative, but "It's Silicon Valley and you can't be a Republican out here".
I'm reminded of Chomsky's words in his book, The Common Good:
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum"
Where things have gone drastically wrong here are that the spectrum is now so tiny that any debate within that spectrum is now impossible. It becomes almost impossible to depolarize the situation and widen that spectrum, and that's going to lead to everything you more eloquently put above, if not more.
Understatement of the century. How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters?
Oh come now, it seems to work fine for Trump! /s
How can you have a nuanced debate with a serial device? It just won't work.
"What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism."
Amen to that.
>Comparing it to Stalinism is silly, and surely disrespects
No, making a comparison of abstract forms of government is not in any way disrespectful to people who lived under a regime. It can only be construed as disrespectful if you are looking for an emotional tangent to distract people reading from the argument at hand (which, incidentally, indicates that you know your argument is bad!)
Please don't attempt to tell me that I know my argument is bad.
I didn't attempt to tell you that, I did tell you that.
As to answer. Inside a corporation, there is as much freedom as the top allows. With the consequences of that emanating from all the levels, so it is wise to not make it entirely freedom-less.
It's worse. They don't care for what you've said, and they don't particularly care about the issues they talk about either.
Some (media people, etc.) use the issues to have a career or an audience. At best, they convince themselves they care, but they don't in any real capacity.
Others use the issues to vent their frustrations from their lives (as a religion substitute and group signifier) and as an excuse to fight with people.
Others are just repeating what is in fashion in their circle (progressive or conservative) and use the issues as a tribal thing.
(And I'm talking about people on both sides of the spectrum here).
Born Again/Woke
Transgression/Microagression
Heresy/Dissent
Sinner/(Racist, Misogynist, Bigot, Sexist)
EDIT: Original Sin/(Privilege, Unconscious Bias)
They even follow the same behavior pattern. First they declare you a Sinner. If you've done research they question the motive of your research and claim it is invalid, regardless of its content. Like the Church burning those who tried to prove the Earth wasn't flat or the center of the solar system, when presented with evidence the extreme left says, "Heresy!"
Then they want to be protected from the sinners. The sinners make them feel unsafe. They have to be taken care of.
Seriously I thought humanity got past all this religious nonsense.
We have strides to make in better treatment of women and minorities, but adopting this kind of religious attitude is ridiculous and not the way forward.
Thank God that the US is a place where for whatever reason people inherently seem to not like following the rules.
Thanks to the Implicit Association Test, it can now be demonstrated that everyone has racial bias. If you point out that follow up studies have shown poor test-retest reliability and that there are all sorts of other flaws in this field of research, you'll simply be dismissed as a denier.
So now, implicit bias takes the place of original sin, with white European (even the ones from Eastern Europe that had nothing to do with slavery) slaveholders standing in for Eve. You can never get rid of original sin, you can only ask for Jesus to forgive you. So who or what will be the new secular left wing Jesus?
However, it is extremely substantive, an entire doctoral thesis could be written on secular religions/orthodoxies and their illiberal and authoritarian nature and is directly relevant to the discussion of the reaction to the Google memo.
I agree however, that lack of civility can undermine your argument. See the very uncivil comments below from Damore's fellow Google employees, including managers. They undermine their argument and literally create a toxic and scary work environment.
I abbreviated the names, but these were all public statements. I just don't want to run afoul of any HN rules regarding naming names.
CB: "You know there are certain "alternative views, including different political views" which I do not want people to feel safe to share here... You can believe women or minorities are unqualified all you like — I can't stop you — but if you say it out loud, then you deserve what's coming to you. Yes, this is "silencing". I intend to silence these views... Take your false equivalence and your fake symmetry, and shove them hard up where the sun doesn't shine."
KB: "I am considering creating a public-inside-google document of "people who make diversity difficult"...which calls out those googlers who repeatedly made public statements that are unsupportive of diversity... Things I'm still pondering: should inclusion on the list require something resembling a trial? should people be removed after some period of time if they start behaving better?
CW: "One of the great things about Google's internal communication mechanism... is that, as a manager, I can easily go find out if I really want to work with you."
KE: "Your reply...ignores the many women Googlers who have expressed the frustration they feel as a result of this. F* off. Thanks for using your real name here, though. Makes it easier to update my spreadsheet."
Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question. Show me how your question has any impact on that point.
If you're taking a side and saying "But did you know this person was literally Hitler" then you may have fallen prey to the manufactured outrage surrounding the issue. Take a step back and ask yourself if it matters if the list was called pc-considered-harmful, woodchipping-kittens or fluffy-bunnies? What is the impact on the list's name on the situation?
If you're associating any questioning of the situation with the other side then it's worth spending a moment to see if you might have tied your beliefs to identity. When we tie our beliefs to our identity, we associate questioning of those beliefs with attacks on our identity. This is being exploited at the cost of completely polarizing your view.
The next step would be to see how upset you are. If you're very upset or wound up, or maybe you're not but you've commented a zillion times about this elsewhere, why are you doing so about this matter and not other things? What is it about this issue that gets you so riled up and why? Why would you care about some guy you don't know getting fired more than the President's involvement with Russia, or the killing of innocent civilians in the Yemen? What is it about this subject that gets to you in a way other's don't, and why?
You might find some serious answers, but probably more questions here: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...
I very much agree with the top comment made by Const-me and the overall points you made. Unfortunately fear and anger are what drives political discourse and media feeds that fire.
The idea in your comment is that you can't, or at least are dissuaded, to express certain opinions. Most the things I hear about Google, including the existence of a list talking about the harms of political correctness, that the author felt free to write such a report and many other reported freedoms at work indicate that this isn't the case. That in fact people at Google are more free to express themselves in these types of issues than at other companies.
You're the one who seems to be upset. I wrote one line and you jump to conclusions, question my motives, dig into my comment history and even managed to bring up Hitler. I try to argue the facts. Maybe you should question yourself as you question others.
- did he create the group?
- how long had the group existed before he posted the memo?
- was Google as an organisation ok with that group existing?
- is there anything wrong with there being discussion surrounding the value of PC viewpoints?
- What other sorts of lists exist at Google, and what sorts of viewpoints to they cover?
But in this case though, she is does repeat some interweb fallacies about the memo, even though she has certainly read it herself and thought about it for herself.
But she does get the important thing right: which is that even if the memo is as bad as she says it is, it's still no reason for a sacking.
[Disclamer: I am a Googler, but quite obviously I am not speaking for the company here.]
For further reading on this topic:
I guess they did not consider the voting booth to be private, as SV is one of the areas that swung towards Clinton?
As long as there's food and shelter for most, things will continue as they are. First little bit of suffering, and it will explode into revolution. Normal way of things.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.ht... (Non-paywall version)
You may say that for the army it was the government doing it, which makes it worse. In a sense I agree. However, in the case of private employers it touches on a more consequential right for us as a society: the right to free speech.
Maybe people should be more accepting of somebody's views on controversial topics as diversity, gun rights and abortion, as they are to gay people in the military.
Would the same outcome have happened if this guy had posted his manifesto on a blog outside the office, rather than distributing it to colleagues at work?
Would the same outcome have happened if the various arguments in the manifesto had been individual articles on a personal blog over a period of time?
Would the same outcome have happened if the manifesto hadn't been explicitly critical about diversity hiring at Google, and rather had been generally critical about EEO law at the state and federal level?
There are so many ways this situation could have been different, but the lesson you choose to take from it is "don't express your opinion in public"? That's what really explains Trump.
Yes.
The only thing that could have prevented his firing was to have never published it under his real name (and this is not completely safe).
Since it's an internal issue, I think he did the right thing in this aspect: he published it in the internal forum, instead of dragging the dirty laundry for the world to see.
Most codes of conduct explictly apply all their conditions to venues that are not related to the project itself, so I doubt the outrage would be different if he published it elsewhere, under a pseudonym, and was IDed later.
It is the way most people think. The only way of thinking available for them. So this conclusions is exactly what they draw from the story.
> the lesson you choose to take from it is "don't express your opinion in public"? That's what really explains Trump.
I'm not sure that Const-me took _this_ lesson, but the point is: the most people took this lesson. The reality works this way. Therefore this lesson is the true one, it is like self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people belive in it, than it is true.
This is an example of people taking exactly the wrong lesson from this situation. The guy wasn't fired for having a 'dissenting opinion'. He was fired because he basically said women are underrepresented in IT because they are biologically unsuited for it. If someone's 'opinion' is that phrenology explains why black people are underrepresented in tech they'd meet with a similar fate
There are a lot of situations these days where people are expressing opinions at work that are insensitive to or outright disparage another group of people, then getting shocked when they're fired.
The problem is that tolerance in the workplace of bigotry towards any group is rapidly eroding and some people don't know where the line of appropriateness is. They've never had to think much about the impact of their opinions on minorities and women so they're almost blind about what is over the line.
The thing is that many people who get into these situations have at least some idea that what they're gonna say is offensive. They'll preface things with, "I'm not racist but..." but continue right on saying it. Like they know on some level it's offensive but they don't consider that 'hey, maybe I'm in the wrong and I shouldn't go there'. 'No, it must be that liberals are out to censor me and destroy free speech'.
It's funny that some people point to a situation like this and say, "This is why we have Trump." If people voted for someone who routinely espoused racist and misogynist attitudes as a reaction to being criticized, that pretty much means they actually are bigots on some level. If you're not a bigot, the reasons to vote for him would be his policies, not his crude and prejudiced 'political incorrectness'
I don't understand why people keep repeating that statement. He said that biological differences explain the different ratios of men and women, NOT that women are not suited for tech jobs. He explicitely did not say (nor mean) that a woman can't be a good software engineer. Just that on average, more men than women will show the features needed for software engineers.
That is a huge difference. It doesn't disqualify any woman working at Google. It just means that the goal to reach 50% women could lead to a worse outcome.
Disclaimer: I don't necessarily support his claims, nor do I support his memo as such. I just think that it's worth thinking about and that there should be more scientific studies to explore this. Diversity campaigns should be based on science, not on populism.
> Just that on average, more men than women will show the features needed for software engineers.
Read those two sentences you wrote again. You'll be shocked when you see it.
Assuming someone is posting in bad faith for this reason is an act of bad faith.
Your statement reveals hypocrisy.
This is wrong. Using a newly created account does not mean the communicator is approaching this in bad faith. That's a complete non sequitor.
"lack of subsequent engagement suggests otherwise."
Not at all. There are numerous reason they might not engage further within this time frame - or ever.
Specifically to post one (1) comment strongly implies it though. You disagree, fine; we'll agree to differ on this.
Where is the contradiction?
> He explicitely did not say (nor mean) that a woman can't be a good software engineer. > Just that on average, more men than women will show the features needed for software engineers.
Rephrased:
a) a woman can be a good software engineer b) on average, more men possess the skill set required for a software engineer
There is no contradiction between a) and b) whatsoever, since a) is about an individual and b) is about average features of different groups.
Of course, one may argue about the veracity of either a) or b). But, regardless of their factual accuracy, you did not make the point you think you did.
What point are you trying to make?
It's hard to make that point even more obvious.
But if, in general women prefer different roles, is that unimportant to you?
Seems to me it would have radically different interpretations depending on scale, and I'm not sure if it's just illustrating the concept of overlap or if it's claiming to represent "software engineer ability" or any other real measurement.
The problem is that his whole argument is based around biological determinism and those are the same arguments that true misogynists often use to discriminate against women. He even stated 'Neuroticism' as a trait women are predisposed to, which could've been pulled right out of an argument for why women shouldn't be allowed to vote.
Damore devotes zero attention to the impact of culture on what fields women go into. And in a nutshell, that's a major reason this manifesto is problematic and got him fired. Women in IT sometimes have to contend with attitudes that 'women are bad at math' or 'women are irrational' or 'women only care about aesthetics'. These are the attitudes that make some technical fields unwelcoming to women.
He hedges a little bit by saying 'distribution in traits between genders may be a part of why the gender gap exists' but then he proceeds to discuss that as the only reason the gender gap exists.
Did you read this article? Or references linked by the original memo? Even this article clearly points out that "neuroticism" thing is pretty much established, accepted, and uncontroversial science.
It's not based on biological determinism, he provides references to the current state of psychological research and simply wants a discussion about the policy
> this manifesto
it's not a manifesto by any means unless you want to call everything a manifesto including your post.
> Women in IT sometimes have to contend with attitudes that 'women are bad at math' or 'women are irrational' or 'women only care about aesthetics'.
There were no such things in his text, not even remotely close
> then he proceeds to discuss that as the only reason the gender gap exists.
He explicitly questions those causes, please stop projecting your ideology on things you read
There have been several studies showing that women scores higher in the agreeableness and neuroticism factors, on average (and with a quite large variance and a rather small effect I might add). The memo author makes it clear by writing "in part" in multiple places: a moderate effect can't explain the whole story: either there is another factor which truly dominates, or we are just looking at one piece of the puzzle as a whole.
Neuroticism has a very specific meaning in this case and it pertains to "negative emotion" in the sense that extremely high scores make you more likely to be stressed, anxious and so on. Likewise, extremely low scores make you overconfident and so stable you are unlikely to venture out into new ideas.
From an evolutionary phsych. standpoint, any score which exist tend to serve a purpose some way or the other. There are no desirable or undesirable traits, because too much or too little of a trait will be challenging in some situations, but a great advantage in others. So the question to ask is: if women scores higher in neuroticism, what advantage does that buy them in what situations? More anxiety could for instance have you second-guessing yourself in more situations, and that could lead to you finding more bugs in programs up front, which is an excellent trait to have in software development.
The other factor where there is a measurable gender difference, agreeableness, is a two-edged sword: High agreeableness scores are highly desirable for building coherent and working team/group structures. Low agreeableness allows people to pick an individualist/isolationist path when needed and make something great by ignoring the group consensus. Good group dynamic requires both traits to some extent.
My hunch is that if you scored the women at Google on the five factor model, they'd be likely to fall somewhat outside the gender norms. There is a considerable selection bias if you only consider tech people who work for Google. You are easily looking at a small fraction of the population as a whole, and the hiring selection process is likely to skew the scores quite a lot from the average norm.
You bring up a lot of questions about what effects predispositions have in this case and that is exactly why it creates problems when people take findings on predispositions and run with them.
It also has to be said that not all evidence is equal.
I was reading an article about this just today, as it happens, complete with citations: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Clearly, this is not attributable to a single argument or factor. Rather, you have to look at several different reasons. Some are likely cultural, some are likely genetic and the interplay is going to be vastly complex (see e.g., epigenetics).
To make the argument, you have to survey a larger number of areas and show that they all point in the same direction, which is what the author is trying to do in the first place. And in particular, you have to demonstrate how the areas contribute to women making a choice against tech in general.
Hence, the studies showing how men are more often systemizing than women and so on are far better markers/arguments from a pure biological standpoint, than a difference in the 5 factor model.
Personally, I think most diversity programs fail to achieve any kind of success in improving the gender balance. In two prongs, you have to retain women who are already in tech, and you have to get more women into tech. The latter of those two is a hard sell if women simply don't want to be in the tech world, no matter how much you try to seduce and coerce them. And I think it would be too authoritarian to force them into a role they don't want to belong in.
I think the author is spot on with the observation that more competitive fields are more likely to have men employed over women. And more cooperative fields are better at retaining women. E.g., Law in Denmark has an almost 50/50 gender split, but women are far more likely to be employed in the public sector as lawyers. The law firms, where 80+ work weeks are the norm, are usually employing men. Jordan B. Peterson, whether you like him or not, posed the question as to why men are willing to fucking do that, and I happen to find that question quite interesting.
I also think tech in general would benefit from having some ventures which are more cooperative, but this is not likely to come from a highly competitive venture capitalist private sector, I'm afraid. Nor do I think Google can pull that one off.
OK, let's say that some segment of it is cultural. Now what?
Let's say that I'm female, and I have some talent for engineering/programming, but I'm raised in a culture that says "Women don't do that. Women marry, stay at home, and raise children." And I look at my mother, who is doing exactly that, and I see how trapped she feels, how stifling it is, and I really don't want to wind up in the same place, but because my culture is what it is, I don't think I have any other choice. Clearly, that's bad.
But let's say instead I look at my mother, and see that she's fairly content and happy, and I think, "That looks pretty good." It's still the same cultural constraint, but now I am willingly assenting to it. Now, is that still bad? (Yes, it's still bad as for the general culture, because it's still constraining others who don't want that. Is it bad for me specifically?)
If you say "Yes, it's still bad", you're saying that you know better than I am what decisions I ought to make. (This presumes that I genuinely understand the alternative. But don't say that, if I really understood, I wouldn't want to choose that. That's cheating. It's also insulting.)
Note that, in my example, the differences are neither genetic nor cultural. The difference is in the example that I see growing up, whether or not people are happy fitting into their culturally-assigned place.
The funny thing is that all the following sentences can be true at the same time:
1. Across the whole population, fewer women than men have the biological/psychological traits needed to become software engineers.
2. Female engineers are underrepresented in Silicon Valley and face many different forms of discrimination.
3. Female engineers at Google are on average better than their male colleagues.
I'm not suggesting any of these sentences are necessarily true, just that they can be. This is not intuitive, unless you know a bit of statistics.
Norms change over time. There was a time when it would've been okay to use the 'n' word to insult black people in many work places, now it's not okay. There was a time when lewd and demeaning talk about women was ok in the workplace, now it's not.
The people who sign the checks have always been able to define what is and is not acceptable in the workplace. Some people are feeling caught out because the line has moved, but it has always been there.
And there's also the question of how opinions are expressed. When you post something publicly for wide distribution, there's much less room to walk things back or to discreetly talk through things. Damore intended for his document to have impact, which it did. But that also means that if the impact is negative it's more likely to lead to his dismissal.
I'm not sure he should have been fired in this case but I can see why it was done.
That escalated quickly!
I think a closer example is someone saying "I support the trump immigration ban".
With the far left crowd who have been hyped up by the media this causes the same feelings as saying "I want to ban Muslims" and "I hate Muslims".
> And there's also the question of how opinions are expressed.
That's true. I'm not suprised he was fired.
From reading some of the leaked internal posts it looks like there is significant bullying of conservatives.
It doesn't look good for Google. Wage fixing, being investigated for pay gap issues, clearly bully conservatives, etc.
Hopefully a court case can reveal the truth.
There is strong evidence the immigration ban is targeted at Muslims. If it weren't for quotes like that Trump wouldn't have had an issue with the courts.
Simply calling them "racist" or "sexist" as if that ends the discussion completely misses the point.
I agree that labeling people as racist or sexist for being caught out by shifting norms is not productive, but at the same time people need to put effort into empathizing with others and educating themselves.
There are jokes I would've made 10 years ago I wouldn't make now. There are comments from others that might not have set off any alarms before, but now I know more about why they might be exclusionary or hurtful. Ultimately it's a process.
Which is why maybe a guy like Damore shouldn't be made to run the internet pitchfork and torch gauntlet for what he did. Maybe it could've been a teachable moment instead of a firing. But the other side of that is that I don't know if there were other components to his firing that we haven't heard yet.
I agree that labeling people as racist or sexist for being
caught out by shifting norms is not productive, but at the
same time people need to put effort into empathizing with
others and educating themselves.
In progressive companies like google.
> There was a time when
And it changed because the public became outraged over it, and individuals concerned fought back with social and legal options. Same may happen here too.
He never said that women are "biologically unsuited" for IT. Here's what he sead in full: https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso...
In short, he said that biological differences (with citations) can explain in the aggregate (not in the total absolute of the population) different preferences, job options, etc., and even suggested ways to change the working environment to alleviate those issues and make it welcome to more personality traits associated statistically with women (as described in citations and statistics he gave).
What kind of person misattributes another with straw-man arguments they didn't say and gloats on their misfortune of being fired?
What he said might or might not be true, but in any case it's no basis for firing someone (as it's not related to their job performance), and it's something that absolutely should be allowed to be debated and studied.
The assumption "all sexes/cultures etc are equally predisposed to everything or even if they are not they should be considered as such and nobody should talk about it again" is not a way to have any kind of dialogue.
>There are a lot of situations these days where people are expressing opinions at work that are insensitive to or outright disparage another group of people, then getting shocked when they're fired.
If the tide turns, or you live in a country where the reverse tenets are held (e.g. Saudi Arabia), don't be surprised and don't complain if you are fired for saying what you believe then...
It's all par for the course and well as long as the majority or those in control of your job believe that you should have a specific sensitivity, right?
He is extrapolating from a few pieces of evidence to form the basis of an entire argument about why women are underrepresented while devoting zero time to the role of culture or bias. I think he tried hard to be even-handed but then there's things like, 'Women have higher neuroticism'. He hedges his language a bit by saying biological differences "may in part" explain the gender gap, but then goes on to talk exclusively about biological differences as the cause.
> What kind of person misattributes another with straw-man arguments they didn't say and gloats on their misfortune of being fired?
Who's gloating? I am neither happy or unhappy he got fired. If Google chose not to fire him and instead used this as a teachable moment I wouldn't really have any criticism.
> What he said might or might not be true, but in any case it's no basis for firing someone (as it's not related to their job performance), and it's something that absolutely should be allowed to be debated and studied.
If you say or do something that contravenes the values of your company, it usually is a fireable offense, regardless of job performance. Some people may disagree with Google firing him but ultimately they decide what their culture is. Maybe in this case they've run afoul of California employment laws, but in most at-will employment states people can be fired for any reason or no reason at all.
> The assumption "all sexes/cultures etc are equally predisposed to everything or even if they are not they should be considered as such and nobody should talk about it again" is not a way to have any kind of dialogue.
Eh no. Predispositions is one thing, but when people extrapolate that to say, "This group's abilities or outcomes are different because of biological differences," you're always walking into a minefield. Most serious studies about that stuff stop faarrrr short of making conclusions about career/life outcomes based on genetic behavioral predispositions.
It's not that people can't talk about this stuff, it's that it is very easy to get it wrong. And a lot of people have trouble recognizing that it is easy to get it wrong.
> If the tide turns, or you live in a country where the reverse tenets are held (e.g. Saudi Arabia), don't be surprised and don't complain if you are fired for saying what you believe then...
A. I choose not to live in a monarchy that has capital punishment for minor offenses. B. If what I believe doesn't match the values of a company, I'm either not going to join that company or I'm going to refrain from publishing manifestos on the corporate intranet.
> It's all par for the course and well as long as the majority or those in control of your job believe that you should have a specific sensitivity, right?
It's their company, they can do what they want with it. People are free to not work for them and customers are free to choose another search engine.
Either way, Damore chose to publish this document internally, because he wanted his manifest to have impact. This is not a case of someone minding their own business and getting terminated for expressing an unpopular opinion. He created a real problem internally and Google chose to cut him lose for that. And we don't even know if there were other factors to his firing.
Well should everybody making an under-representing argument be fired then? Because that's almost everybody, everywhere. How careful should one be? Isn't this a pointer that it's more about the "no touch" subject than about him under-representing in his case?
>I think he tried hard to be even-handed but then there's things like, 'Women have higher neuroticism'
If that's supported by research, should he just push it under the rag because it's inconvenient? (E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/22/women-men-me... ).
>It's not that people can't talk about this stuff, it's that it is very easy to get it wrong. And a lot of people have trouble recognizing that it is easy to get it wrong.
Well, the ability to talk about something also includes the freedom to "get it wrong". They call you for it, give their arguments, and the conversation moves on. If you have to tiptoe on eggshells lest you be fired or beaten up or whatever, then it's just as if you can't talk about this stuff.
The idea about "freedom of speech" as only meaning freedom from persecution from the government is extremely limited, allowing for any powerful employee, media mogul, the dictatorship of the majority, vocal minorities, etc to bully anyone who says something they don't like. Speak should be met with counter-speak and opinions with counter-opinions. Not with firing people, beating them up, hate correspondence, threats and so on.
>B. If what I believe doesn't match the values of a company, I'm either not going to join that company or I'm going to refrain from publishing manifestos on the corporate intranet.
Well, there are people who want to be able to work in a company AND speak their minds. I don't find it inconceivable. And this climate affects both men and women in many aspects.
Also how can you be so sure he wasn't alt-right already. "Classic liberal" is essentially the closest you are allowed to get in public.
It's grossly misrepresenting the response to the memo to imply it was just a matter of challenging and questioning. A quick read of any of the forums where it's being discussed makes that clear, and remember how the author was fired?
A lot of the issue people have with the response is precisely that it wasn't making a substantive attempt to actually question or challenge the memo's content.
Anyone who publishes an incoherent 10 page manifesto insulting their coworkers and trashing their company's policies can reasonably expect to get fired. It doesn't matter if any of the bosses agree or disagree with the opinions expressed; it's just an unprofessional thing to do.
To be honest, he was the bully in this situation. I have more concern for the women at Google who could fear losing their jobs and the means to support their families. If a coworker of mine started publicly saying that I'm not genetically qualified for the work I do, I would be worried for my job. However, I don't think those women would become radicalized over this. Why? Because intelligent professional people don't become radicalized when other people disagree with their opinions.
A note about Trump: I grew up in a red state and lived and worked in two others. I never spent more than a few months in a blue state so I don't know how it is there, but in Trump country people openly and aggressively express all sorts of opinions without fear of recrimination. There may be a few voices of dissent, but there are no "witch-hunting mobs" forcing them to keep their views a secret.
I think this scenario Giulio describes fits better to Brendan Eich who was essentially forced out of Mozilla over his views. But Brendan didn't become radicalized. He picked himself up and founded a new company, because that's what professionals do.
I agree completely. Just like these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_77
Very unprofessional!
The GP didn't talk about about hiring policies, he talked about institutional criticism. The subject of the criticism is irrelevant.
This guy expressed his opinions, and a witch hunting mob, because that's what it was, descended on him from all over the internet to rip his reputation to shreds for things he didn't do or write (most of the outrage was about 'perceived' slights).
It's just sad... The worst part was that it validated a lot of what he said, and people somehow just don't see the irony in that.
Except he did not publish it, My understanding it put it on a internal system shared with a few people, other people inside google shared it more and more people inside of google until another Google Employee sent it to Motherboard or Gizmodo who published it for the world to see.
So then would you support Google firing who ever sent internal communications to a "news" organization which is likely in violation of company policy?
I'm not aware of any executives of large institutions that are perfectly happy with leaks. They just usually aren't dumb enough to pretend that a rant like this wouldn't get leaked.
You seem to agree
Why are you changing the meaning of what he wrote? He didn't say that at all. He was very clear that he was talking about the group not any individuals.
If you choose to misunderstand what someone said, when they did a good job of explaining it clearly, then I think you shouldn't spread that misunderstanding around in a way that will hurt people, as it hurt this guy.
Since when does that excuse anything? If he'd written "Jews are, in general, hateful monsters. Not the Jews who work here, they're great, but most of the rest" does that statement become acceptable?
More importantly, Mr Damore does not know all the women at Google personally. He cannot. So when he says "In general, women are less suited to/interested in programming careers", he cannot possibly implicitly mean "but clearly that does not apply to every woman currently employed at Google, who were all hired because they are the best in the world at their jobs". Damore asserts that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices. For this to be true, Google must have at least once hired a woman where a better male candidate was available, and more importantly must do so more often than they do the reverse.
If you are going to make general statements about a group of people, then you should not be surprised when individuals in that group assume you mean that statement to apply to them.
Should white NBA players be offended by that statement? The answer is obvious: they shouldn't as that only means they were the ones on the tail of the genetic distribution and made it anyway or maybe even they overcome disadvantages to get there.
Now I say: women are in general less likely to be interested in tech and less likely to become good programmers because they are, on average, less competitive and less likely to devote themselves to solitude practice which is often necessary to become a very good coder.
Should women, who already made it to Google be offended? Of course they shouldn't for the same reasons as above. We can however do something with this information: we can try changing tech world to be more welcoming to women. This way we can avoid sexist hiring practices (gender quotas are clear discrimination) while still achieving more diverse environment.
Those are the points of the manifesto. Being offended by that is the problem of those taking offence as it doesn't speak well about their ability to reason about distributions of traits in a population.
I don't know: I'm not an NBA player and have no idea what the experience of becoming one is like. But there is a difference in kind here. He didn't say "Men are better suited to be Google employees", he said "Men are better suited to be programmers". The closer analogy here is to say that "Black people are better basketball players than white people", and here it might well be fair for white NBA players to be offended. There is a distinction between saying "More of X are good enough to pass this bar", and "X is better than Y". People who can pass the bar are unlikely to be offended for themselves (though they may be offended for others who don't attempt to cross that bar), but they may be offended for themselves if the suggestion is that they are worse than their colleagues.
But if you said, in addition, "The NBA currently employs discriminatory hiring practices that favour white athletes at the expense of black ones", then they should be offended. At that point you are saying "I believe that group X is better than group Y, and many of group Y are here despite there being better members of group X". That is offensive.
> We can however do something with this information: we can try changing tech world to be more welcoming to women.
I have a suggestion as to how to do that: stop saying that women are worse at coding. Just don't even bring it up. This goes doubly because there is no evidence for that at all.
You can make the tech world more welcoming to women by welcoming more women, and then give them the opportunity to succeed. Writing think pieces about how women are so ill-suited to coding doesn't just display a stunning lack of understanding about how the industry got started, it also makes it clear that right now you think women don't belong.
But if the view is that "software work as it is today is just not women's work, so we should make it more like women's work", then I'm sorry but you've already lost.
And there is solid evidence for that difference, and it should be brought up, and asking to stop the discussion is, frankly, ridiculous - we can all see that there is an important open problem with different viewpoints and thus it should be discussed, and expressing all kinds of possible viewpoints should be facilitated.
I wasn't replying to the memo, I was replying to bluecalm, and bluecalm said this:
> Now I say: women are in general less likely to be interested in tech and less likely to become good programmers because they are, on average, less competitive and less likely to devote themselves to solitude practice which is often necessary to become a very good coder.
Note "less likely to become good programmers". I feel pretty comfortable with my response given that.
> and expressing all kinds of possible viewpoints should be facilitated.
I disagree. Many kinds of possible viewpoints construct hostile work environments, and should be forbidden. It is simply not necessary to allow a workplace to tolerate all views. We don't allow people to cover their cube in swastikas, walk around greeting all their colleagues with "heil hitler", and to push for the dismissal of all their Jewish colleagues in an attempt to reduce the influence of the hidden Jewish conspiracy running the world.
If Mr Google had wanted to write this on his personal blog I wouldn't have cared at all. But he didn't do that: he wrote it at work, in his professional capacity, and posted it for his co-workers to see. Guess what: speech at work is something that can get you fired. See Colin Kaepernick for evidence.
He clearly can, were it not for affirmative actions - if you assume perfect recruitment based on merit, you can expect everyone accepted to be suitable for the role. But in this case you'll also find, as the memo author explained quite sensibly, that the gender ratio might not be 1:1 due to distribution of interest in the population, which affects the distribution of the candidate pool.
I mean, come on, this is a pretty obvious point - and I'm starting to believe that it takes intent to misread it like you did.
> Damore asserts that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices.
Yes, that's the definition of affirmative action. It's literally discriminating in order to counter perceived discrimination in the opposite direction.
If the author asserted in the memo that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" is the only relevant language I encountered), wouldn't that imply that some members of Group X currently employed at Google are less qualified than the members of Group Y who were discriminated against? Otherwise it would seem we are discussing a situation where tiebreaks tend to be decided in favor of the current minority group, or recruitment efforts for underrepresented groups are more intensive. The "lower the bar" phrase would seem to imply that he believes there are different standards in effect for selecting current employees.
The memo author's point about differing interest distributions does not necessarily imply anything about ability differences in the current Google employee pool, but claiming discriminatory hiring practices might.
I...don't think I did misread it? I said "he cannot mean this", and you appear to agree with me: due to the facts on the ground, he cannot have intended to mean that. Therefore, I have to assume he did not mean that.
So if he believes that Google employs discriminatory hiring practices, then he presumably believes that some of his colleagues are not the best possible choice for their role, and do not deserve to be there. That seems like a straightforward reading of his text. Am I wrong?
But, see, it's equally clear to other people that he was dogwhistling like crazy. This is the problem with this "discussion" - one side is doing the "only exact literal words count for meaning" dance (which, for me, is complete bullshit) whilst the other is saying "that's not how the real world works, context and implication is important".
The two sides are never going to agree - which is ok - but one side is going to struggle with this kind of issue forever until they accept how reality works.
Kinda like an awful high school literature teacher.
Of course but when many people agree on the same hidden meanings, you surely have to consider that they might be there.
We'll have to disagree on that - subtext is an important factor to consider, especially in political / charged contexts.
The (true) implication is that their reasonable dissent actually is a bland cover for a position that is much more radical once it is reduced to its core propositions.
Uhmmmm.... because they get fired for deviating from the party line, not for being unreasonable. How can you skip that "detail"?
In this case, it seems to be even lamer than that, seems like he was not fired for the memo, but the reaction to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977750
> Damore said he initially shared the memo a month ago, but "no one high up ever came to me and said, 'No, don't do this,' even though there were many people who looked at it," Damore told Bloomberg. "It was only after it got viral that upper management started shaming me and eventually firing me."
So, what's hiding under this leaving out crucial parts and misrepresenting in the context of destroying people while paying lip service to being for people being unafraid? Anyone else seeing this?
> The (true) implication is that their reasonable dissent actually is a bland cover for a position that is much more radical once it is reduced to its core propositions.
This is so incredibly sinister and you don't even know it. Here's an example: a kid has a legitimate grievance, or at least legitimately thinks it does, but when it brings it up modestly, non-radically, it gets hit in the face. Now it will do something "bad", like cuss or somehow act out, because it is not allowed to place the grievance where it should be -- and then that is used to excuse that initial oppression or however you want to call it. Another example is SS officers despising people in concentration camps for being the diseased husks they turned them into, seeing this as a confirmation for their inferiority. Roll your eyes how much you want at that, chose whatever example you want, but that is the mechanism, that is an apt analogy just as much as bad parenting. Heck, get hung up on me somehow equating the Holocaust with a kid getting hit, I really don't care because people who don't want to understand always find something.
Granted, even being fired is no excuse to be radicalized. He's not a little kid, and he's not being made physically sick. But he also has a mob against him, plus the support of many he actually might not want want to be a martyr for (I mean, does anyone even allow for the fact that he is not some kind of closeted alt-right monster?), and that's more pressure than someone who was not on the receiving end of stuff like this can imagine, so I'll call that a wash. The point isn't (to me) "would he be justified to go loopy now", but "was this an okay reaction by the stronger party, and should this be normalized". My answer is no, and no. But not because it might lead to things I don't want, because it itself is already something I don't want either. Kinda of like I don't think corporations shouldn't turn street kids into sausage "because it would lead to a backlash and therefore make bad financial sense", but because it'd be evil. And I might not even want to sit with people who want the right thing for the wrong reason, because this is some very fundamental and serious stuff IMO.
If the memo caused a shit storm or went viral amongst assholes or both, but the memo itself was not grounds for termination or even internal criticism, then the spineful thing to do for Google would have been to have the discussion, not fire the guy, drop him like a hot potato, and then patting themselves on the shoulder for it. That's disgusting. They have just proven in action what a human life is worth to them, the rest is lip service, plus a whole lot of distortions which are the main hard data points so far.
> It shouldn't radicalize your position.
In some fantasy world, where marijuana being illegal didn't make a single person try harder drugs because shady types were the only ones they could get weed from, and so on. Where a person is somehow separate from a position they hold.
I think people shouldn't steal. Reasonable, yes? Hacking off the hand of someone who stole some bubble gum is not so reasonable and much more radical. If you can somehow treat someone so badly for suggesting stealing is not okay that they harbor murderous thoughts about thieves, does that now mean the original idea of stealing being bad is not reasonable? I don't know who is to judge a person for their reaction to mistreatment, but never the ones doing or excusing the mistreatment, that is for super fucking sure.
But even granting that this is no excuse to go off the deep end, which I did; to focus on that, instead of the original action without which the debate about the reaction to it would be completely moot is not okay, and that is my point. There can be only bad results from this, that is the takeaway. If people downstream from this could alleviate this a bit by being saints is besides the point.
If you treat me with respect I will treat you with respect. We can have a civil disagreement and the next day I'll happily help you out.
Being able to disagree is healthy. I disagree with my wife and with my children on some pretty important issues.
On the other hand if you try and ruin my career, or if I think you will try and ruin my career, then I will knock you down at every opportunity.
Often, however, our arguments have a strong unacknowledged bias. When we're challenged the bias becomes more visible.
In practice that is just not true.
Many of my positions are self-moderated by the understanding that smart, kind, and reasonable people have opposing views.
A great example of this revolves around religion. Many smart, reasonable people are religious. I think a lot of the atheist crowd comes across as complete assholes, which does not help one win in any argument.
You're considering things from a formal perspective rather than a practical one.
In theory the fact that someone unjustly attacked you should not change your positions on anything, but it may reasonably cause you to stop associating with them.
And associating with different people will cause you to hear different arguments, which is likely to change your positions because it changes the ratio of convincing arguments you hear from each side.
That said, I'd think that he was fired not because of his opinions, but because he seems to have done an irreparable damage to Google's image: for good or bad reasons, people will react strongly and negatively to the publication of his memo, and whatever Google does -- keeps him or lets him go -- this negative impact will stick.
EDIT: many, many people will react negatively.
The same can be said for the firing, it is also doing irreparable damage to Google's image, likely more so than the publication of the memo
The damage to Google's reputation here is on them. Almost by definition.
1. From my perspective, the firing was more damaging to Google's reputation than anything in the article. People still remember the Eich incident with bad feelings for Mozilla. This one is actually worse because there's no "CEOs are PR officers" reasoning to fall back on. If there's still damage when the dust settles here, it will be due to blowback originating from people who misunderstood the text or don't care that it's basically misunderstood. That's my next point.
2. It's becoming more apparent to me that a large portion of the outrage is due to a misunderstanding of the text. I suspect that people haven't actually read the text, not really. The concrete objection I notice the most ("he said that female engineers are inferior") is not true and directly addressed in the text. There are comments in this thread that are misunderstanding or uninformed about what he wrote about overlapping distribution curves.
3. With that in mind, I can't tell if Google leadership is having a reading comprehension issue, a problem understanding statistics, or if they are making a purely political/PR decision here. None of those situations should make a Google engineer confident in their leadership.
And it'll just keep snowballing, unless people realize we need to stop and try talking with people we disagree with, instead of doing our best to crush their every outlet to express themselves before they grow bitter and reactionary.
The media can't stop talking about how the internet is "dangerous" because men are being radicalized on it and we don't know why. It's more of a "no shit" situation due them having to hide their every against-the-grain opinion in real life. But yeah, let's start sending the police in on dumb shit that people say on Twitter. [1] That'll really make people reconsider their opinions and not further rationalize their anger.
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-f...
There is a stupendously thin line between a sane person and an insane one. It is possible to break minds, and the vitriol that can be poured out from the depths of the internet is quite sufficient to break the typical human being. Some people start off closer to the edge than others.
I'm glad I do not know the true extent of the outrage that this subject has unleashed, but I'll wager it includes credible death threats considering the size of the audience that it has reached.
If you pour hate over something long enough, it will bear fruit.
I too would never cross that line, but I believe others will be happy to redraw that line regardless of my actual beliefs. This is what happens when others can slap labels on you and there is no real debate.
"Spencer and others have said that he created the term 'alt-right', which he considers a movement about white identity. Breitbart News described Spencer's website AlternativeRight.com as 'a center of alt-right thought.'"
This matches with what I know. White supremacy was also featured prominently in the sidebar of /r/altright before it was banned.
I mean, Spencer says a lot of things. Do you believe all of them, or only the ones you find convenient? And the same Breitbart article [1] quoted there also devotes an entire section to disposing of the three dozen or so legit would-be Nazis on the fringe.
Of course, that Breitbart article also dates from March 2016. Spencer didn't hit the big time for quite a few months after that - not, in fact, until just after the election [2], whereas "alt-right" in general had never really left the zeitgeist after its first big splash in August. But that changed when the media made Spencer its darling, because of course it did - the man is eminently hateable, which is precisely why he was made so notorious so fast.
[1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-co...
[2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-01-01%202...
For example, Look at his Wikipedia article vs his /r/politics AMA. His Wikipedia article paints him as alt-right, because all of his major accomplishments that reach outside the audience are hyper-focused on culture wars and academia influence on politics. His support of Israel was mentioned, but he did flip to an alt-right acceptable view. The only thing suggesting on the wiki page he's not alt right is not supporting Trump, but it doesn't help that its implied they mostly attacked him for being Jewish.
From that alone I would think it was a Milo situation, where they are alt-right that are unaccepted by the "alt-reich" because of a specific character trait.
The AMA however gave me the idea he's right libertarian. A lot of his answers seem to circle back to the free market. His pro-life opinion is even a slight extension of that, where he believes life needs to be guaranteed to at least participate in the market. This, however, required direct drilling of the guy to actually get.
So TLDR, He talks libertarian, but his noticeable acts are alt-right. I think this is a bit his fault, considering he didn't think to advertise his libertarian ideas at all in books or speeches even though he started his career before he even graduated college.
I would love for you to find one place Ben Shapiro presents as alt-right.
> His Wikipedia article paints him as alt-right
of course it does, Conservatives of all stripes have been complaining about the bias of Wikipedia for some time. It paints anyone who is sorta conservative as alt-right.
If you believe he acts "alt-right" then pretty much every libertarian is alt-right, and that's just wrong.
Do you think the Wikipedia page is missing anything important he's done? Specifically anything of note that has to do with the free market.
Otherwise, its basically a "just one goat" situation, except he done like 7 goats. the day to day things are just not gonna stick out as much as the big things so what he says on his podcast isn't enough to change that perception.
From the Wikipedia page: > n May 2016 New York Magazine reported: "Shapiro...has increasingly found himself targeted by the so-called alt-right movement, a loose conglomeration of online personalities—many if not most of them anonymous—currently devoted to tweeting and posting their support for Donald Trump and attacking those who disagree, often in racist and anti-Semitic ways. They have been denigrating Shapiro as a 'pussy', a 'cuck', a 'Jew' and a 'kike'."[54]
He supports Israel which actually isn't an alt-right thing.
I'm trying to find what in that article makes him alt-right.
"A decade later, however, Shapiro reversed his position. In an article published on March 13, 2013, Shapiro wrote, "Some on the right have proposed population transfer from the Gaza Strip or West Bank as a solution. This is both inhumane and impractical. Moving millions of Palestinians out of areas they have known for their entire lives will certainly not pave the way to peace" and while "both right and left agree that a population separation is necessary," he proposes that Israel "has no choice but to weather [the anti-Israeli propaganda]" until a realistic solution comes to light.[37]"
This however was followed by the UCLA section which I misunderstood. Either way, I don't think there's much point on focusing on Israel. The Don himself is probably more pro-Israel than he is. Opinions like that are less identifying of alt right and more as weapons to be used when the alt reich feel betrayed.
That mistake is also why I'm forgiving you on the whole being attacked by the alt right. I've already said why that doesn't matter, it was also in the paragraph right after that one: "I've experienced more pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism since coming out against Trump's candidacy than at any other time in my political career". If he was alt-right he wouldn't be the first to be turned on like with Milo and the Daily Stormer.
I think there's something I need to clarify here. Another poster here posted how alt right means Nazi now. I DONT believe that, and if you may notice I prefer to say Reich for the Nazi side. I see the alt right as someone who has taken to the right socially, possibly being opposites with libertarians with left economics, but are not evangelicals because they're a revolt on social justice (not against it, but specifically a "what about us?") and, most important here, the reaction to such opinions by colleges, news, and businesses. Also, please remember my second comment before you bring up Wikipedia's own article on the alt right.
Which makes the whole discussion a bit funny but confusing. The guy is definitely alt right, despite what everyone's saying here. A bunch of people here are alt right too but, again, don't want to say so. What happened is history has repeated itself as alt right is to alt reich/Nazi as liberal was to socialism/communism.
It doesn't actually matter in the end how I separate them in the end. Much like the mere mention of redistribution was likened to communism, The fact that alt right can be fiscally left has been taken advantage of to frame everything they believe as Nazi under a simplistic understanding of it. The end result is people seeing a thing as alt right, even if they define it differently somehow.
I'd recommend not replying to this comment as quickly as the last, it had to be long to clarify myself and I won't read the reply till tomorrow anyway.
Vox Day is alt-right. That probably is not a controversial statement to anyone. I would assume that he knows who is alt-right and who is not. Given that he wrote an article[2] that declares Ben Shapiro and enemy of the alt-right and later tries to classify Mr. Shapiro[3], I am given to believe being someones enemy is a pretty good sign that you are not that same someone.
I think you desperately want to classify Ben Shapiro as alt-right for some weird reason. I would assume so you can ignore any argument he puts forward with a cheap label.
0) having to read some of this stuff to actually reply is truly painful and frankly its bad enough I have to read far left stuff, reading alt-right stuff is just as painful.
1) https://infogalactic.com/info/Vox_Day
2) http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/03/an-enemy-of-alt-right.htm...
3) https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/04/does-ben-shapiro-belong-...
I mean shit, this whole argument has nothing to do with whether I want to listen to his arguments. It was an explanation of how silly things like this happen in the first place where a libertarian gets confused for an alt right person.
Maybe the goat metaphor wasn't the best thing to go for, since the goat lover is an actual goat lover regardless of the other things he does. Maybe framed 7 times with a goat makes more sense? Maybe plain words are better: He's advertised the things people consider alt right, but not the things about him that prove he isn't. The actual alt right notice these discrepancies regardless and correctly identify him.
> I feel like this happened because it seems he accidentally presented himself to the outside world as alt-right.
Through all this, I still don't understand what you think he did to "present" himself as alt-right? I really hate when people put labels on others just to be able to dismiss them and calling someone alt-right should be backed up with a little bit of evidence.
The books except the one about presidents (which seems to be just history) and the Iraq war piece (which was in the tail end of being career-ending if you criticized), the organization he co-founded, and the speeches he's done that aren't about Israel.
It's logic too cynical for me, but it's basically:
1. OK. They decide this culture war out there is serious and nobody is looking out for them.
2. They find "their" camp and support it.
3 (sometimes). After switching/limiting media sources to match new political assumptions, opposing views seem more malicious and more unhinged.
It's worth noting that a lot of the blowback from this incident is due to #3 happening for a different group of people.
I am someone that don't like feminism (but I won't discuss that now).
My political position is kinda anti-authoritarian, and I don't trust corporations, early on my life it was considered left, people would call me anarquist or socialist.
After a while people started to call me liberal, libertarian and minarquist, and call me "right"
And now with the popularity of the term alt-right, I get called alt-right too.
-----
That was one way to 'become' alt-right, I know another one, sadly a really bad way...
I visit sometimes some anti-feminist forums and whatnot, and I see there LOTS of seething rage, people that have a deep raging hatred against feminism and women. (and if you visit 8chan for example, or voat, you see open racism, anti-religion, etc...)
One day someone made the brilliant decision to create in one such forum a thread where people ended discussing their personal lives... Every single "raging" person were deeply screwed in the past, for example one guy that hated all women were raped when he was a teenager, and when he sought help, people refused, when he sought help from a women shelter, he got raped again. Another guy was being forced to pay for child support for a child that wasn't his, another one had the opposite problem: his ex-wife was a drug addict that cheated on him with a lawyer, the couple took custody of his kids, and made a motion prohibiting both visits and child support, all that he wanted was pay for child support and for his kids to know he cares about them, so that they don't believe he was the one that fled the marriage. Another guy there was in prison for several years due to a false rape accusation, when people found out the accusation was false, he was released, but he still can't find any jobs, and the accuser wasn't punished. And the list goes and goes and goes on... lots of extremely sad stories, it became clear why you can't reason with those people, they had traumas that in a way 'prove' that moderate points of view were wrong, and that only their extremist views (for example raped guy defended that all women should be literally enslaved and used by the state only for breeding and nothing else), can protect them and others from the same fate.
1 - Those oppinions _may_ have a single grain of truth. And, as reasonable beings, we cannot allow that truth to be buried or silenced.
2 - Regardless os the validity or truthfullness of that opinion, we should try to understand _why_ that person holds those opinions. This helps us understand why and how some ideas and opinions still persist to this day.
The alternative explanation of large parts of the population being heavily divorced from reality seems to fit better.
That is the respectable right-wing position on the memo, correct? That it's just science facts that the left can't handle?
Like Obama being a secret muslim that wasn't born in America. Like him trying to destroy American industry by going along with a Chinese Hoax about climate change. That trade wars with Canada and Mexico are good for American jobs? That you can't even wish people Merry Christmas anymore. That Hillary Clinton and Obama literally smell of sulphur. That one third of the population doesn't believe in evolution. That there was "no racism before Obama".
To me, that explains Trump far better. Whatever tiny sliver of people were going to vote Democrat but got upset about being called sexists and so actually became fascists is only marginal at best. But apparently everyone is too "Politically Correct" to talk about this large group of people who've abandoned reality and instead we need to listen to their concerns (which apparently translates into giving tax cuts to billionaires and dumping pollution into the air and water). The memo writer was calling for people with these kind of "conservative" viewpoints to be given affirmative action at Google after all.
This low standard of discourse hurts everyone.
Employees at work: shouldn't be discussing issues that distract them; shouldn't be socializing with each other because work and personal life should obviously be separate; they should just keep their heads down and keep working.
There's no doubting that all recent controvertial topics have led to the ideas that: divide up society into individuals afraid to express their opinions; human expression is not an important goal and that the workspace where you spend most of your time is ONLY to do the job like a machine.
After this, although I disagree with the engineer, I don't think that Google is the kind of company I would want to work for.
This event is eerily reminiscent of a comment I made on HN 2 months ago about big corporations and suppression of free speech (see last line): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14527934
I think that if these companies get too big and keep suppressing free speech, eventually they will get mutinied from the inside.
If a mutiny did occur, all the company would need to do is fire the loudest voices in the name of diversity, let the rest quit quietly, and replace them with the millions still banging at the doors to get in. You'd need someone at a C level solidly on your side for a mutiny to succeed, and you don't usually get to a career C level by having strong ideological stances (aside from, perhaps, a strong love of capitalism and how it lines your pockets).
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence. You want to cost your company thousands, if not millions, in bad PR maybe don't expect to have a job when you come in monday morning. There's nothing to be gained in appeasing bad science and faulty logic just because you're scared of populists.
Totally agree, but it was like this. Religion and politics never mixed while working, outside a small circle of friends. Even then, if one was "offended" and complained, you'd be screwed.
But Google did the right thing--if you ask 100 top corp lawyers, advisors and politicians. Better to fire a guy than having to deal with the wrath of the side currently winning the debate. In the end Google is there to make money for its shareholders: not to advance workplace free speech or to deliver the most useful results for its users.
Google will probable spend a few million to fight and then settle this case. It will feel like losing a dime to the average person.
I feel as if could be called slightly right of center. That being said, I use logic to evaluate different issues then rank them in importance to me. In November, I voted for a third party candidate because I had serious issues with both main party candidates. That said, I seriously considered tossing aside my moral issues with Clinton and voting for her as a vote against Trump because I saw a scenario (which ended up happening) where Trump could win.
Nine months later, my position has completely flipped. If Trump runs in three years, I am seriously considering voting for him as a "fuck you" vote due to the reaction to his election and Presidency over the last 9 months. I grew up and live in a rust belt city that used to be a manufacturing center. The complete slander, and misunderstanding, of the people I grew up and live with is incredibly difficult for me to swallow. I'm sure that everyone would love a former President who is campaigning for his wife coming into their back yard and disgustedly refer to them as "coal people," while expecting their vote. [1] When it is repeatedly espoused that we don't understand what we voted for, or when a SF elite tells a us that we need to be fixed to attract people with the right ideas [2], or that we should simply move to a place where there are jobs (friends, family, and community be damned) it gets harder and harder to explain that it isn't that simple. And when we try to explain what we feel or we believe we are told that someone else has it worse and to just adjust so that we can be accepted. I'm tired of being labeled as a racist or homophobic and being told my opinions are so obviously wrong, they are not even worth discussing.
So, yes. There are definitely people who aren't going to speak out, who are going to toe the line, and then they will cast a giant "fuck you" vote come November 2020. I might be one of them, but I will probably end up voting 3rd party again instead of letting my emotions get the best of me.
As an aside, follow Chris Arnade [3/4] on twitter. He does great work covering the Rust Belt and similar areas in a balanced perspective.
[1] http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2016/09/09/hundreds-gather-in...
[2] https://ethicsalarms.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/melinda_bye...
You make an excellent point. I am a lifelong feminist, anti-racist, pro-LBTQ atheist who passionately desires a fair, just, egalitarian world.
In the last three years I've discovered: Many conservatives actually share my fundamental values, and do so with more integrity than most liberals I have known.
I seek out honest, rational, factual people to listen to - only to have the media and my liberal friends try, absurdly, to defame them as "alt right"
What does "alt right" even mean, any more? I understand its racist origins, but going by actual usage, it appears to include "good people, with good intentions, who also value reason and evidence"
Edit: To clarify the relevance of this to your comment - I would never have been exposed to so many views on the right if it hadn't been for the irrational, hateful, totalitarian intolerance that I've experienced in recent years from some parts of the left. Not all, obviously!
Perhaps because it's not a necessary trade off of diversity policies per se, only a trade-off of the one specific type of diversity policy with which the author happens to be familiar.
For an historical example that does not feature such a trade-off:
1. I put up a curtain between the judges and the musician auditioning for the orchestra.
2. I hire whoever the judges say sounded the best.
3. The number of women in orchestras grows.
In no case where this diversity policy is used does the policy cause a less skilled player get chosen because that player was female.
That's the important question here, especially since there have now been preliminary experiments in tech interviews suggesting such an outcome is not implausible:
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
The point is to remove as many obstacles as possible. We want the best to get the jobs, but if the are barriers based on gender or race or religion that's potentially denying us a brilliant woman, or black man, or Muslim.
It doesn't necessarily mean you end up at 50/50, I'm quite willing to accept that the sexes might be biologically different in brain structure and that this might mean one sex might have different average aptitudes, but I won't accept a societal construct on top of that.
You should never hear that someone shouldn't try to do something because of their sex. Never.
Well unless it involves the more obvious anatomical differences. The average man is going to have some difficulty becoming an effective wet nurse.
If you look at what the orchestra did and remove factors you know are irrelevant for the applicants then you should move towards a more unbiased state independent of what the number actually is. The problem is to find out what bias you have. One way is to compare the people who apply with the people you hire. You can see what traits you select on, then you can decide if you think those traits are good or bad.
You can't escape the fact that (assuming any innate differences whatsoever) equality of opportunity will mean unequal outcomes, and equality of outcomes requires unequal opportunities.
The goal isn't to choose some specific gender balance and then take whatever steps necessary to produce it, it's to eliminate unfair bias. The way to do that is to find it, not indirectly by looking at ratios, but directly by actually finding it.
High school teachers who say things like "women are no good at computers" to young women should be reprimanded etc. Poll women who didn't go into tech and ask them why not, and if any of the reasons are unjust then change them.
If no one can find anything like that then the gender balance at that point is what it's supposed to be. We're obviously not there yet, but the way we know is because we keep finding things like that, not because the gender balance is uneven.
Perhaps somebody has already done this. What would be the correct search terms?
It's a specific instance of the more general manage-by-metrics disease. The thing you actually want is hard to measure, but it correlates with something that is easy to measure. So instead of doing the hard work to understand what is actually happening in detail, they measure the easy thing and optimize for that instead. Even though doing that frequently breaks the original correlation.
The result is the bureaucracy edition of a paperclip maximizer. You get what you measure instead of what you really want. Or bang your head against the wall, if the thing you measured is actually stickier than the real problem.
> t would be interesting to try to measure the bias directly. Hide a bunch of microphones in offices and see if the number of sexist comments is larger at Google than it is at a law firm or a hospital.
To some extent this is just the same disease. Is sexism supposed to be alright if it turns out there are equally large amounts in both places? Should we be satisfied that it's the root of the problem if there is very little at Google but even less somewhere else?
Stop trying to measure things against other things and just consider them in their own right. Sexism is bad regardless of how common it is. You don't fight it because there is more of it over here than over there, you fight it everywhere because it exists when it shouldn't exist.
I'm personally rather convinced of a third alternative: There is some bias and even outright discrimination in some workplaces, but gender norms in society as a whole create such a big difference in the distribution of applicants/talent pool that it becomes impossible to correct as late in life as the hiring process. I think the gender norms are very deeply rooted and entwined through most aspects of life and that if we truly want to fix the problem, as opposed to get good PR and pay lip service, we need to change gender roles drastically. And that starts pretty much from pregnancy and goes way beyond recruiting.
Lots of people primarily identify by their religious affiliations. I think that's fair.
> Your sex and skin colour is given, your religion can change.
Ask a Muslim which will change first: their gender, their skin color, or whether Mohammed was Allah's prophet.
All that being said, your point about religion and race being separate categories is fair and well taken.
You are generalizing in a way that will create animosity. There are liberal people which identify as muslims.
Even though most religious people identify themselves by their religious affiliations, not all do, and not everbody is religious.
I think religion is a cancerous meme, that we shouldn't pay respect to. I don't even want to be asked whether I am religious, nor what religion.
My name allows a funny pun in that regard: I'm Christian, but I'm not.
> I think religion is a cancerous meme
My underlying point was that people with faith don't see their faith as a choice about the existence and character of their god (or other non-deist beliefs). It's not objective or accurate to say religion is different because it's a choice.
If anyone is offended by my point, I would challenge them to rethink their assumptions about how tolerant and accepting they are.
I think it's important to remember that this might not be the case. We want the best team (or orchestra, or whatever).
Is it possible for Google to remove bias? Isn't the real problem further upstream? I bet that if you look at all applicants applying for jobs at Google you will see the same skew as Google have in their offices already.
The only people selected were men.
That conference was canceled because it didn’t stand with Github’s stance on diversity, etc.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
—
Companies actively do the exact opposite because they need/want more diversity. It’s absolutely not like the music world where a large amount of women play instruments... the number of women in CS professionally is low. The number of female CS graduates is and has been low.
Simply stripping info doesn’t mean anything if at the end of the day a diversity agenda has to be met.
It would be a farce and ridiculous if 100 talks were submitted, and 99 of them were <gasp> males, and then they shut down and complain because no females were chosen.
It's called statistics.
Even if there are factors that mean there will never be 50% female submitters, a proper diversity policy means the organizer sees this as a symptom of a problem they can help solve. Perhaps if a conference can keep at least 1/3 female speakers every year then 25% of submissions will be from women in 10 years? And perhaps if 1/3 speakers are women, more women will visit the conference, widening the audience?
The whole point of active diversity policy is that the status quo is to be changed by active means.
I was responding to a non-expert's cost-benefit analysis that confused the part-- a specific type of diversity policy-- with the whole-- the set of possible diversity policies. She generalized a set of trade-offs and claimed unasked/unanswered questions around the field based off that part. I referred to a well-known historical diversity policy for which her proposed trade-off does not exist.
That ought to arouse skepticism that a non-expert who isn't genre-literate in the field is able to find the best solution to the problem.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-t...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
A blind recruiting process only increases diversity if there exists significant bias against diverse candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if Silicon Valley has a bias in favor of diverse candidates, like Australia's public service.
This would easily explain why blind resumes resulted in a larger proportion of men being selected.
edit: to contrast with the orchestra scenario, a resume is not a skill test, while an audition for an orchestra is a skill test for exactly the type of skill that the candidate is being chosen for.
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview.
Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."
http://abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to...
I feel like hiding demographics and actively deceiving people about demographics are different processes and should have different names?
* People aware of this will prefer otherwise identical CVs with female names (expectation is the underlying candidate is stronger, just more modest)
* Blind hiring will get you more men (because hiring managers can't correct for the male/female difference in self promotion anymore)
See the example of the GitHub-sponsored conference whose trial of blind reviewing resulted in zero women speakers.
So Google is getting hammered from two sides, on the one hand they're getting sued because the outcomes are not what they're supposed to be, on the other hand they are already doing diversity programs that at least skirt or already dip into illegal practices. (In his interviews, James Damore has mentioned secretive diversity session that were not recorded, unlike everything else at Google, and that told of practices such as quotas that to him seemed extremely sketchy or downright illegal)
Of course this goes back to Pinker's comment in his debate with Elizabeth Spelke that we must distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex from the empirical claim that males and females are (biologically) indistinguishable, because distinguishing them is actually essential to protecting the core of feminism. Because if you don't distinguish and it turns out that your empirical proposition is false, you must then either (a) discriminate or (b) distort/suppress the truth, or both. And that appears to be exactly what is happening.
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm...
UPDATE: Google's Diversity Efforts Fall Flat -- https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-l...
This assumption is never discussed and always accepted as true.
Why is that? Why are all the whites (or white males) identical in their thinking?
So, in a weird way, diversity initiatives come from a very ethnocentric (American) perspective.
An active diversity goal in hiring must go one step further and mean you see diversity of the group as a goal in itself - which, as he says, often means you some times hire a less strong individual.
This is the controversial part. But let's remember that the goal of recruiting is not to hire the strongest candidate but to make the company successful. If you buy into the argument that diversity has a value, such as that a diverse company is better at making products for a diverse audience, or that diversity creates a better work environment and therefore higher productivity - then hiring a female candidate over a better make one can make sense.
> I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary.
Claim bearers are burdened with proof. Otherwise I can say 'I claim it is not so and if you believe otherwise you provide evidence to the contrary' and we would be a bunch of children shouting nonsense
> I’m not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled.
He didn't say that
> The biggest problem with Damore’s memo however is that he doesn’t understand what makes a company successful. If a significant fraction of employees think that diversity is important, then it is important. No further justification is needed for this.
No, what makes a company successful is the positive impact it has on employees, customers, the communities it operates in and shareholders
> Biases and unequal opportunities are real. (If you doubt that, you are a problem and should do some reading.)
Why assume your readers can only reach conclusions if they are dumb ? Why not point out the specific readings that you have done ?
> And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data
Value judgements should also be subject to logical deductions
I think that was her point...
In that case, there's no reason to assume discrimination unless it's proved.
Yes there is. Cultural sexism is already widely known to be a massive problem, and active discrimination is only a small part of that. Discrimination is known to exist as well. At the same time there is no known, no proven connection between sex and capacity for engineering, that doesn't even exist as as far as we know.
The number of women in tech is changing over time, faster than evolution, the number of women starting computer science degrees is changing over time, faster than evolution, and many companies employ a larger percentage of women than Google. So, there definitely are reasons to assume cultural sexism and discrimination are involved, and there are more reasons to do so than not.
Burden of proof is on Damore. He has made vague and blanket generalizations about some of the differences between men and women to jump to very specific conclusions that there is no proof of. The burden of proof absolutely rests on him to back up his claims. What he's done so far is spread some FUD, he used sophomoric logic to invent a theory that rationalizes his own desire to discriminate. By claiming that women aren't innately as good- something for which is there no evidence- that frees him up (and anyone who believes the same) to openly not hire women, or to pay them less, for example.
Active discrimination is only one part of the wider issue. Cultural stereotypes, and fear and self-selection by women and men are part of the larger cultural sexism issue too, among other things. There are fewer women studying computer science now than 10 years ago. There are more women studying computer science now than 40 years go. If the primary differences in the capacity for engineering are innate, then how do you explain that? Evolution of human capacity for engineering is not taking place on a yearly basis, so obviously innate biology is not the primary force at play here.
The number of women in the workforce has gone up over the last decade at the same time the number of women in tech has declined, yet all the male-female differences Damore commented on would affect all men and women in business. Remember, he only claimed that women are more open, more agreeable, and more neurotic, and that men are more driven for status. If this explains the gender gap in tech, then it should also explain the same gender gap in business globally, and it fails to do that by miles.
The same arguments that Damore is putting forward were used to discriminate against women in tech have been used in the paste to discriminate against women in the workforce in general, and against women in the military as well. Maybe read a little more history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_workforce https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military http://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-s...
Not liking the style of his memo is perfectly ok.
Calling Damore young and clueless is useless ad hominem. Chances are he is smarter than you and me and the memo is actually well sourced.
Calling him a WHITE MAN is an essentialism that reveals the author's bias.
To respond to that manifesto, to argue, talk, discuss, write a similarly well organised response.
Most of the population don't, and at some point just have to dismiss some ridiculous arguments instead of discussing every single badly researched wall of text.
I suggest you start with all the articles on /r/the_donald.
That's a funny response to a comment that was so heavily downvoted it's completely hidden for users unless they specifically change their HN settings.
I admit that I guessed the same, it's often when you're not in an apparent minority that you don't seem to take these issues at heart (and that you end up hurting a lot of people in the way). Which is an easy way to conclude that the author is a white male in his thirties working at a decent job.
> Chances are he is smarter than you and me
Did you read the memo? And hear his interview? Your assumptions are way off-base.
Know how we get up in arms when someone with expertise one field starts going on about some totally unrelated field and makes a lot of leaps of reasoning?
Expertise in one field doesn't make you an expert in everything. Nothing tells me this guy can write authoritatively on this subject matter, or that the memo is well-sourced, just cause he's smarter at writing software than me.
Tldr - sometimes really smart people do the dumbest things. Where was his common sense?
For the average associate i know the overarching Question would be did he not know he could be fired?
"I would have loved to go to college. I couldn't afford it. Id love to have a job at Google. He probably makes over one hundred thousand dollars. All those years spent in college to get a good job and to then lose it. Didn't he think saying something bad about your employer can get you fired? I cant go on Facebook and write sh#! about walmart and not expect to get fired or at least reprimanded. I just dont understand how people who are supposed to be so smart can be so dumb."
-- I am fortunate to have straddled upper and lower classes in my life. I learn new things working with adults who have never known a family member who attended college. Managers who never flew in a plane. The ground level view of living where you work to get by. The joy of life (imo, more joy with less wealth)
I have no outrage personally.
On a personal rant, I've contracted for Google doing software architecture on a few projects. They do have practices which mildly disgust me. Stuff like flagging people as 'diverse' and making sure the correct number of diverse people are in attendance.
I never got that. Ty. But isnt one of the mechanisms to get feedback making input anonymous? Did they ask for authored input? Really? About diversity?
What did they think was going to get posted onto that board, if not this memo?
Google: "we want to hear how you think? It's safe."
Googler: "you suck."
Google: "just kidding. It's not safe. Bye bye."
Seems like dirty pool.
Is that what occurred?
Every one claim I read that pointed at a specific part and said the writing here was putting forward a horrible opinion that nobody should hold, let alone express in company of others; those clauses were cited with sources and facts to show that the author's expression was of fact, or of research that justified policies and not of a personal opinion. It is vitriol and easy to read "wrong," and as I read and re-read the parts that are most quoted, I can understand how people are so offended. But it is text, not violence, and it is through text and honest discourses that progress can be made! "You don't have to apologise for your feelings," I want to tell them, "but put those down for a second so we can get something done alright?"
The part I read that in isolation, I will agree wholeheartedly is a terrible sentiment, I was able to step back and read factually instead and see where he was saying, in not so many words, "it's not my idea, this is what the research says, and that fact plus inequality is why we got these also sexist policies, a new kind of the old kind of discrimination."
You can't simply punish a man for living in the time he was born, and call it fair; expect that nobody should address the facts on paper, a discriminatory policy, the elephant in the room, or whatever. "Don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining." Please note I did not read the whole memo, but that was the gist of it that I got.
We will never get to a time where we can talk about how "now we are in perfect equality, and there's no more injustice, though it was not always so;" if we can't freely talk about the ways in which we are not, equals, including honest and full discussion of programs and policies that enforce and perpetuate that inequality.
That being said, it seems that lines are being drawn and certain justifications or arguments are on that side of the line. I can fully understand how one on the receiving end of this kind of fire and vitriol might rightly react.
I do think he has a case for slander at least against the leadership. He has been smeared, I have no doubt of that from just reading the CEOs statement, but with the caveat that I don't know him personally and he could really be all those things. I'm just going off the document.
If you're willing to help get this practice out in the open, please contact me. I can protect your identity if you want to be an anonymous source.
smann@inc.com
Aspergers or something similar. Watch the Jordan Peterson interview. He's not well-spoken and he's not even that passionate. It's a joke the mainstream media is calling his memo a "manifesto" when it was just his attempt to analyze gender and diversity in his own socially awkward way. This really is about outrage culture.
Here's the video of the interview.
Once I saw him in this video, it became pretty clear that he's one of those entitled developers that you really don't want to be stuck on a team with.
- The guy just maximized his chances of being hired at a company that selects for skills, hereby surrounding himself with the most competent.
- He was obviously discriminated at Google (otherwise he wouldn't discuss diversity), so Google had already destroyed his career. That's the problem with discrimination: Victims have nothing to lose.
- He just became the leader for millions of males who are currently struggling with discrimination.
Discussion is how people change their opinion. It's by being free to discuss and say what you think that you can exchange ideas with other people you disagree with and maybe change your mind once you understand their view point.
If you close discussion, then those opinions will be more radicalized and will tend to be discussed in echo chambers where people are not afraid of being shamed by their writings.
As Voltaire once said[1] "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it " and I think, forgetting this, is what leads to Trump and to an increase of misogyny.
[1] It's actually apocryphal, he never actually wrote or said that but it does illustrate his philosophy so wouldn't have been out of character for him.
Here is what CEO said on the about it in his response [1]:
"many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics—we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions."
The author of the original memo wasn't fired because of trying to discuss the topic. He was fired because he violated Google's code of conduct, which expects:
"each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."
If you intimidate enough employees via a widespread memo, you will get fired. I see no problem with that. The freedom to discuss a topic also comes with responsibilities.
As an example, would anyone expect to keep their job if they published a memo with "Blacks on average are [insert negative here]." at any big company anywhere in the world? Regardless of scientific basis? It's an absurd expectation, unless you work at a company doing scientific research on that specific subject.
[1] https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/note-employees-ceo-...
Which part of the memo was intimidating, harassing, or illegal? Which part promoted biases?
> As an example, would anyone expect to keep their job if they published a memo with "Blacks on average are [insert negative here]."
No, but that's because of my low expectation of fairness from corporate leadership and middle management, not because I think that opinion is harassing, intimidating, or illegal. I suppose you could argue that it promotes bias, but then you'd have to make the case that it wasn't true. Otherwise it would be reality with the bias, right?
"Women on average have more neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)." is one example.
Just because something is true or a fact does not give some magical guarantee that people will not feel intimidated or harassed if that fact is presented in a certain way or in a certain context. And perhaps people who have lived an entire life of being discriminated against might not even care about the context.
In order to make sure people don't feel intimidated, you need to use people skills, not science skills. You need to listen, you need to empathize, and ask questions. You need to be able to feel what someone else is feeling. Almost always this means in person. The opposite of blasting out a memo (which happens to insert some scientific facts) from behind your computer screen.
Having good people skills often has little to do with science or even the truth.
> not because I think that opinion is harassing, intimidating,
If you can't see why a sweeping generalization about blacks (or any other group) can be harassing or intimidating, may I respectfully suggest you could use some education in the area of people skills? I'm saying that having come myself from a place where I had little respect for the soft skills involved in sales, marketing, diplomacy, charisma, leadership, and so on. You seem to have a great deal of respect for the truth and reality. Reality and truth also include feelings, and it's very rare that scientific truth helps anyone navigate how to make others feel like they are not being harassed or intimidated.
> my low expectation of fairness from corporate leadership and middle management
Why would you have any expectation of fairness from them? It's nowhere in their job description, and they don't get paid to be fair. At place like Google, very often they are being paid because they have a smidgen of people skills the tech folks below them are so sorely lacking in.
There are more extroverts than introverts in the world. The first group is happy with social contact, talking with people and generally score better in empathy. Introverts are the other way around: they prefer to use text, do not like to give in to emotions and score worse in people skills. That's according to the book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts" but I guess it's not a controversial point to make anyway, and while you can find many outliers as in any discipline, I think it's a fairly good generalization.
Now, it may depend on the company or group, so two scenarios:
1) Introverts are a majority, extroverts a minority - maybe that's a tech company: shouldn't extroverts use their people skills and be able to figure out that introverts mean no harm and just prefer to communicate by sending long pieces of text with many scientific sources cited instead of talking with even one person? They might have even been doing this for many years, in the introvertive bubble of their fellow colleagues who shy away from emotions. Of course, extroverts could still feel emotionally touched and maybe even attacked as the minority - but then, been empathetic and knowing the style of introverts, shouldn't they try to teach them people skills? Are we sure firing this person is going to be an actual lesson to him? Or maybe there is no way to teach introverts people skills, as Google with a load of money and staff cannot even challenge beliefs of one employee? How come then we can ask single introverts to learn it on their own? Does it mean we're all doomed as more and more tech companies change from big groups of introverted engineers to cross-disciplinary team with a mix of characters?
2) Extroverts are a majority, introverts are a minority - again, using their people skills extroverts would surely recognize that introverts are not comfortable with people skills... so if introverts are a minority, is firing them for miss-following the code of conduct, written most likely by the majority i.e. extroverts, a form of discrimination? For the sake of diversity, shouldn't they all learn about more scientific, less emotional approach? Or should you be schooled only if you're in the minority without those skills?
IMO author of the memo made a decent attempt at using his people skills on this paper - what the post from Sabine acutally acknowledged, although you could generalize based on her background she's an introvert as well. It just looks like that other people have higher expectations of people skills but the question is have they done enough to learn the science skills themselves or just assume that everyone should have people skills at the exact level they want because they dictate so as a majority.
(Cheers, sorry for all the mistakes, English is not my native language.)
If this guy has any defense at all, it could be that he's a minority somewhere on the spectrum of Asperger's, and that a diverse company also needs to somehow accommodate his inability to understand how his statements could have made others feel.
On the other hand, it's quite possible he's just an angry white male who feels like he's being left out but got it off his chest when empowered behind his computer screen, and with his weapons of scientific fact. Jabs of harassment are often delivered buried within a harmless context.
Perhaps a bit of both. It will be for the courts to decide.
Long term, you gave me some ideas. If my company ever gets big enough to have a mix of introverts and extroverts I wonder if it would be a good idea to pair introverts and extroverts so they can "protect" each other? Extroverts can help introverts from saying really insensitive stuff, and introverts could help train the extroverts about when to leave the introverts alone, and to stop harassing them about "being more social". Just a thought...
> Having good people skills often has little to do with science or even the truth.
I can only assume you're liberal based on your stance, but you do an enormous amount of damage to progressive values and true diversity when you state things like this. Establishing harassment as something independent and impervious to truth creates the ultimate echo chamber that enables a post-fact world. So anyone who comes to you with a fact or a quantum of reality you don't like should be considered a harasser? How does this apply when you write your own positions? Truth is what allows us to move forward as a society, and to ignore it is to doom us to follow what makes us feel better, not what's right. There are numerous examples through out history where I'm sure the majority would have liked to ignore facts in order to make themselves feel better and maintain the status quo. Good people skills has everything to do with leading us to better and positive understanding of objective truth.
You create a strawman diverting from the document in question by talking about "sweeping generalization about blacks," when the previous poster was clearly addressing the document, not your flimsy hypothetical. And yet, you then proceed to paint tech folks below management as completely lacking in the people skills to understand management and your enlightened position.
To be clear, I thought the conclusions of the document were dumb, but your handling of controversial topics strikes me as equally dangerous, if not more so. I think your heart is in the right place, but strive to be like John Milton in how you digest the arguments of others: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed..."
edit: sp & truth
Why is harassment determined by humans in a court of law, very often using their gut instincts, if it has some ultimate test tube truth that can be used to decide whether or not it occurred? What's the lab test I'm not aware of? Ok, I'm being a little facetious, but still, can you even guide me to an written objective source of truth that describes exactly what harassment is and isn't? I can provide tons of concrete examples and we all know it when we see it, but I think it's incredibly hard to give an objective description. It's certainly never about words. One person's "nigger" is friendly, the other person's "nigger" is harassment and how it was intended and how it was received both have to do with what each person was feeling. Is there a way to to objectively determine truth about how people felt when they said or heard something?
> So anyone who comes to you with a fact or a quantum of reality you don't like should be considered a harasser?
I never said that. I did say that harassment is about human relationships and people skills and not in the domain of facts. You can lie to someone and harass them. You can tell them the truth and harass them. You can lie to someone and make their day better. You can tell the truth to someone and make their day better. There is very little relationship between objective truth and people skills.
> You create a strawman
No, it's an analogy. And a very very close one. The original document made sweeping generalizations about women. I simply replaced "women" with "blacks" so it's easier to see the pattern of how offensive it is to make sweeping generalizations. True generalizations, or false one, folks don't like being put in a bucket of "you tend to act this way because you are an _fill in the blank_".
> Truth is what allows us to move forward as a society,
Agreed. Scientific truth and emotional truth are two very different things. Relationships don't really have a "what's right" or an objective truth do they? It's always very objective.
> Good people skills has everything to do with leading us to better and positive understanding of objective truth.
And understanding of the objective truth is a goal for some people. Other people have zero interest in the objective truth and are more interested in their emotional life and relationships with others. Or something else. Maybe art. Or sales. Both of which have little to do with objective truth. Don't assign your personal values to others.
> but strive to be like John Milton
I don't know Milton. I'll check him out. Thanks for the recommendation.
So, instead of having open discussion on the topic which would help changing ideas, those opinions are being suppressed and the people holding them will be further radicalized.
Is it unreasonable to say you are not allowed to intimidate or harass other employees?
> be afraid to express.
They should be afraid to express an opinion that violates the code of conduct. The code of conduct values some things over others, and a workplace free of harassment and intimidation is more important to Google than making sure no one is ever afraid of expressing an opinion. It might well be the opinion of some engineer in Google that all blacks should be called niggers. That engineer should rightly be afraid of expressing that opinion no matter how deeply held that opinion is, and no matter how many other employees share that opinion.
> the people holding them will be further radicalized.
Source?
In another comment, you say it's the mention that women tend to have on average more neuroticism although you seem to acknowledge in that comment that it has basis in research [1]. If, as you say, it's a fact, then how can it be harassment?
You cannot have reasonable discussions, if you dismiss what you consider to be true facts because you consider them to be harassment. There could be factors that could cause a statistical difference between genders due to physiology or due to culture (I disagree with the memo's author in his dismissal of cultural and parenting influences on gender behaviors) and any discussion of diversity would need to take those into account.
Now, the author claims that his memo had notes to supporting evidence but the leaked copies do not have that.
[1] For the record, I haven't found the research on that and I'm rather skeptical of that result.
The citation for higher neuroticism is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#..., this in turn cites http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.81..., which confirms the claims.
> ... gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders; differences are replicated across cultures for both college-age and adult samples, and differences are broadly consistent with gender stereotypes: Women reported themselves to be higher in Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth, and Openness to Feelings, whereas men were higher in Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas.
Many employees felt intimidated and that they now had to prove in a work setting that they are not "more neurotic on average than men". This is about human relationships. If enough people say they felt intimidated, how can anyone dispute that? Can you prove they didn't feel intimidated? Can I prove they did feel intimidated? No to both questions. It's not in the domain of science or facts. It's in the domain of human relationships and emotions.
> If, as you say, it's a fact,
I said it was a fact? Where? I actually don't care if it's a fact or not. It just doesn't mean a lot to me either way.
> then how can it be harassment?
Easy. There is zero relationship between facts and harassment. I can tell the truth and harass you. I can also lie and harass you.
If I pass your workspace every day and say "You have a smaller penis than the average man and some people here are better at programming than you" does it matter whether both of those are facts? It's still clearly harassment. Unless we have an inside joke.... human relationships are far more complex than science. No wonder so many of us would like to shoehorn everything into black and white scientific facts!
> You cannot have reasonable discussions, if you dismiss what you consider to be true facts because you consider them to be harassment.
Of course you can. A reasonable discussion around your penis size at work wouldn't include facts about your penis size. The reasonable discussion would be "that's inappropriate and if you don't leave me alone I'll report you to HR for harassment."
You are confusing "facts" with "appropriateness". One is a scientific concept, the other is a social concept. The two have almost nothing to do with each other.
> the author claims that his memo had notes to supporting evidence
It might be interesting, but it doesn't matter in the least in this case. The domain isn't science. Per the Google code of conduct, it expects "each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."
Do you see anything about science in the code of conduct? Or is it talking about culture and human relationships?
Since we can't read minds, we don't know how they felt. We only know that they said they felt that way. When you believe it is for a higher cause - like fighting the patriarchy - lying about your feelings is a minor consideration.
Witness how many of these identity activists lie about being pushed, lie about having their space invaded to accomplish their ends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRlRAyulN4o
Not a single one of them says "Hey, no, lying isn't right." The collective values of that massive group of identity activists has no regard for truth, on this level.
We can't deny that there is cultural overlap between the identity activists in this video, and the identity activists currently working at Google.
If you don't want to get fired for harassing folks, and you don't have great people skills, you should probably keep your controversial opinions at home. YMMV.
It's open, but you'll be fired.
> Is it unreasonable to say you are not allowed to intimidate or harass other employees?
If talking about something is considered intimidation or harassment, which is the reality of the situation in USA 2017, then yes I consider it unreasonable.
All these do-gooders are going to reap what they sow in the long run, and it sure as heck isn't what they think it is.
A gross mischaracterization. Open never means anyone can just say whatever comes to mind.
"Open discussion??? Oh goody!!! Kike, kike, kike, kike, the bosses are cheap Jews! Wait, what??? You're firing me? Whaaaaaaa, look at me tears, you promised open discussion!!! I'm suing, all woe is me!"
I'm confident you're not that naive, and I hope you can see the point of my exaggeration. Everything, even open discussion, has limits.
The CEO made it clear which parts of the memo were ok (almost every part of it). And which parts violated the code of conduct.
Violate the code of conduct, and you're fired. Sed lex, dura lex. Everything has limits. So the discussion then is about what those limits should be.
> If talking about something is considered intimidation or harassment,
It's not. There are almost endless things you can talk about at work that aren't considered harassment or intimidation. There isn't a little rule book to guide you. It's up to you as an adult to to have adult relationships with your co-workers and to figure out for yourself what other people are comfortable hearing and what they consider harassment. I'm sure you already know that you can't tell a female employee she has bigger than average tits, no matter how factual it is or even if it's just "talking about something". But the more subtle points are up to you to work out with your co-workers. Be enough of an jerk to enough people by just "talking about something", and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
This has been the reality since humans have had emotions. Every adult with an ounce of understanding about human relationships knows that there is a lot of stuff you can't talk about at work.
> which is the reality of the situation in USA 2017
Where did you get this idea that you ever had some kind of right at some point in history to talk about whatever you want to talk about at work - with no care towards how it makes your fellow employees feel? For most of America's business history you could get your butt thrown out the door just for saying something the boss doesn't like. You're actually slightly more protected in USA 2017, but a smart boss will find a way if he doesn't like what you say. So will your co-workers.
I guess at one point in USA history you could more easily get away with sexually harassing female employees. Safe to say that's not the point in history you're trying to return to? If I'm right, can you describe the point in history you are trying to return to and why it was better? What was ok then that isn't ok now? Specific examples please?
> All these do-gooders are going to reap what they sow in the long run, and it sure as heck isn't what they think it is.
I guess we should be afraid... of.... something? Your revenge? Back up your vague threat with what you predict will actually happen or with what you plan on doing.
"many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics—we encourage an environment in which people can do this and it remains our policy to not take action against anyone for prompting these discussions."
and:
"each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."
Is there a definition for what constitutes "harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination"?
I think anyone interested in not having a note placed into their HR file now knows it is perhaps not a good idea to ask such questions.
> Everything, even open discussion, has limits.
Exactly - the author of the manifesto is free to discuss these concerns with his manager and have them ignored, or leave. They shall not be discussed publicly, or else.
Anyone that said "Kike, kike, kike, kike, the bosses are cheap Jews!" wouldn't be taken seriously, because such ideas are obviously false. The content of this manifesto cannot be dismissed so easily, if it could I suspect someone would have done it and intellectually humiliated this person using superior ideas. The problem is, that's not possible in this case. Hence, in the spirit of equality and harmony, there's really only one practical approach, the one that was taken.
I'd rebut some of your other specific points, but as much fun as these arguments are, they don't really serve any purpose.
For me, it comes down to whether we want to live in a society where we acknowledge reality, or not. Where people debate ideas, or not.
By talking to people and using your people skills.
> Is there a definition for what constitutes "harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination"?
Yes. It's not a written definition. It's a living and changing definition created by the people who work there and how YOU make them feel. You need to use your people skills in order to extract the definition from your co-workers.
> wouldn't be taken seriously, because such ideas are obviously false.
This is the core of your misunderstanding. The scientific merit of ideas has zero relationship to whether or not you are harassing someone. Anyone who said the offensive things I wrote wouldn't be taken seriously and would be fired because they are offensive. True or not. Obviously true or not. And for all you know, whoever said the above does work for cheap Jews (my apologies if I've offended anyone with this language - I love Jews like everyone else and I hope you can understand I'm using this for illustration purposes only).
> For me, it comes down to whether we want to live in a society where we acknowledge reality, or not. Where people debate ideas, or not.
Look Mom! We are freely debating something right here, right in society!
Don't confuse "Google" (an employer) with "society". No one is forcing you to work at Google nor for your employment status to be determined by their code of conduct.
Even HN has a code of conduct, and yet you seem to be ok debating things here.
Agreed, but that's my very complaint! As they say, the pendulum has swung too far! (In my opinion, of course.)
> Look Mom! We are freely debating something right here, right in society! Don't confuse "Google" (an employer) with "society". No one is forcing you to work at Google nor for your employment status to be determined by their code of conduct.
What bothers me is the trajectory we are on. You can debate things "in society", but "freely"? Have you not read news articles on the increasing suppression of free speech on campuses, or people being physically attacked for what they believe in? And of course, Google is free to do whatever it wants, that is true, but please don't simultaneously say that it is indisputable that they have a culture of free speech, or that their messaging is somewhat out of line with their actions.
I'm not unsympathetic to the other side of this debate, how people (myself included) perceive the world makes it extremely difficult to appreciate different points of view, and I often think people are far off the mark, for example the commentary on the intentions of the author of this manifesto.
These conversations agitate me because it can seem like people think you are completely wrong, even though I doubt (or hope not) that is your intent or belief.
EDIT:
I imagine you've seen this: http://huyenchip.com/2017/08/09/sexism-in-silicon-valley.htm...
"We need to be careful when encouraging affirmative action in tech to ensure it doesn’t reinforce the philosophy of treating women differently."
This is one of the things I had in mind when I said "All these do-gooders are going to reap what they sow in the long run, and it sure as heck isn't what they think it is." Yes, women may be getting hired, but for what reason matters.
I'm glad we're finally getting to some sort of consensus that this is firmly in the realm of human relationships and has little to do with facts and more to do with opinions. Your co-workers' opinions of you are very important. Like it or not, fair or not, that is never going away. Fortunately you have some freedom in where you choose to work and can try to find a good cultural fit to your own values.
> What bothers me is the trajectory we are on.
Newspapers need clickable headlines to stay in business. I'm not worried. There was never a guarantee in the USA that you will have a public forum for whatever nonsense (or genius) you want to spew. It has always been up to the public, or your co-workers, if they want to give you a forum. As long as the government isn't interfering with my speech, I can handle company policy, co-workers, friends and family, and the general public, all with just by using my people skills.
> please don't simultaneously say that it is indisputable that they have a culture of free speech, or that their messaging is somewhat out of line with their actions.
No one, not me, not even Google, is claiming their primary goal is free speech. Per their CoC, a primary goal is a workplace free of harassment. Which by definition limits your speech. In fact they fired someone for what he said, no apologies. So I don't see any inconsistency. Your speech is indeed limited at work if you work for Google or any big company in the world.
Now if conservatives at Google, as a minority, are being harassed or silenced just because of their political views, then I do agree that is a problem, and one I hope they fix. Not in the name of free speech, but in the name of another stated goal they have: diversity.
> I imagine you've seen this
She also admits that sometime the best way to have women feel comfortable in tech is to just first get a lot of women into tech. Chicken and egg problem. I encourage aggressive affirmative action once you've already identified existing bias against any minority. Sexism and racism are problems in the tech world. When they aren't problems anymore, the affirmative action will go away due to market forces. No company will bear the cost of affirmative action if there is no risk of lawsuits from minorities currently being excluded.
If talking about something is considered intimidation or harassment then people will not talk about it and the 30% or so who agree with that memo will continue agreeing with it in private and maybe talk about it in echo chambers like redpill on reddit but will not talk about it publicly.
So, they will not be able to see the other side point of view, they will not be able to evolve their thinking.
The problem is that this phenomena is not limited to Google, it's also in campuses and it means that while Americans have "free speech", they need to self-censor if they do not want to compromise their careers. And I don't believe that people who are hiding their opinion can be convinced and can change their mind. This, I believe is why Trump ended up winning (which to me is a catastrophe for all of the things I care about).
You can see this in action if you read the response to this on any extremist online gathering spot. A lot of people didn't fully read or comprehend the memo and use it as proof of their nonsense world view.
By encouraging and allowing hateful discourse, I don't think people are able to follow reasonable arguments and think about things fairly. So I see these things turning more so into propaganda speech.
"By the way, in science and technology, conservatism is a minority ideology (he says so himself in his letter). How would he feel if we start saying that conservative people aren't apt for science and technology? That if he doesn't feel welcome he should find a different profession? It's ironic he complains about it even though, in a way, he understands the struggle."
After I read that, I went back and re-read the memo, but I swapped all gender references for politics, and vice-versa, and it was awesome.
At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and political orientation, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Gender is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean male, we should critically examine these prejudices.
...
Possible non-bias causes of the political gap in tech
...
In highly progressive environments, women are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different genders to be able to express themselves.
Alienating women is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because women tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is required for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
Gender, age, ethnicity and sexuality are.
Hence swapping gender for politics doesn't work.
Additionally Damore argued for assessing individuals as individuals rather than as tribe members and assuming discrepancy is down to bias - even if you did sub someone's chosen politics for their gender, Damore's proposed fix would still require you to assess the individual.
If you (dis)agree with the arguments of the memo in the gender/politics-swapped version, then you should also (dis)agree with the original. Of course the cited references won't make sense anymore, but if that is your only remaining sticking point, you might have to reevaluate your opinion.
Of course an individual's suitability for a job should not be affected by anything irrelevant. However individual choices may be relevant: for example, you might not be suitable to work in the fitness industry if you're shy about showing your body. Hence distinguishing choices from innate characteristics.
This is a bit of a side track though. Basically just saying that gender and political persuasion aren't as interchangeable with each other as gender and other innate characteristics would be.
After reading this woman's opinion on Google's programs to increase their share of politically conservative workers, I realized that political bias, although indubitably present, might not fully explain the observed distribution of political alignments. To evaluate "affirmative action" efforts, the effect of bias would have to be quantified in relation to other phenomena incidentally correlating with political affiliation. However, I was disappointed that she didn't to that in her memo itself, arguing qualitatively instead of rigorously computing the expected distribution her suggested explanations would predict. The resulting number can easily make or break her case. Regardless of my opinion on her choice of presentation, I am appalled by the strong backlash from a group of vocal men within Google, some of which went so far as to threaten her with physical violence. Although the subject and manner of this discussion might not have been within Google's business interests, firing her for expressing her opinion (apparently in a forum where it was explicitly solicited) was definitely an unreasonably harsh response.
I think that gender and politics are plenty interchangeable in this case, provided you can suspend disbelief about Google actively trying to hire more conservative engineers and the media reaction surrounding this case.
That isn't at all clear. Jonathan Haidt has some very interesting research on those lines, showing evidence human moral sense may be genetically based. Our moral sense informs our politics. Having said that, innate does not mean unmalleable.
Actually, food choice and political disposition are heritable. Look at this and the Minnesota Twins Experiment.
That is incorrect. The word "gender" is defined as the social and cultural differences between male and female, as opposed to the biological ones.
You also meant to say "sex" and not "sexuality". Sex is the innate biology of males & females. Sexuality refers to things like sexual preferences of partners, sexual feelings, and sexual activity, all of which are not innate.
I wasn't arguing against Damore and I don't care whether he argued for individuals. Except that he obviously didn't just argue for individuals, because he complained about the plight of the conservatives at Google, and suggested that women as a group are innately less capable technologists.
I just find it really funny that he took opposite stances on two minority groups in tech, and with a straight face argued against sensitivity toward one group and argued in favor of more sensitivity for the other. You can swap them, and I did, and what you get is more or less the exact same, equally wrong argument. It's very sad if what it takes is swapping them to see how wrong it is.
Damore never argues against using groups to make big picture, strategic decision. Quite the opposite. What Damore is arguing is that Google's strategic decisions are rooted in ideology, not research, and the consequences of those decisions are discriminatory at the individual level. Worst of all is that because those decisions are rooted in ideology, they can't be questioned.
Of course, Damore makes several other arguments. Damore suggests that Google's minority retention practices are discriminatory and ineffective, while agreeing that Google's corporate environment is likely a poor fit for women.
Damore does make recommendations on how to show sensitivity towards women in order to boost retention of women and he bases these recommendations of his understanding of current, replicable research in psychology. What's important to note about Damore's recommendations is that while strategically they favor women, on an individual basis they do not. The practices that Damore suggests would be as open to men as they are to women.
[Damore] "I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."
He did exactly what I said - he complained about the plight of conservatives at Google, and he suggested that women as a group are innately less capable technologists. That's not just fair, it is, without judgement, completely factually accurate.
I didn't claim these two things are contradictory, that's your own straw man. I claim that one of them is wrong, and that if you swap them, one of them is still wrong.
I'm a little surprised how many people are defending him. He's got no expertise in these matters at all. Why are you so sure this is a good argument overall? What makes you confident in his interpretation of modern psychology and social issues?
His letter is specious - it sounds good for a bunch of reasons, and he has many valid points, but it's wrong overall. Programmers love arguments that favor consistency, and they're convinced it's always and forever more fair, but that's very often not true in reality. If society were already fair and if cultural sexism didn't exist, then not being extra sensitive to women might be the right thing to do. But the prevalence of cultural sexism is a fact, it exists just like racism does. We have to actively get rid of it before we can be consistent. Because it's there, suggesting that it's more fair to pay less attention to it is actually rationalizing sexism. What you're arguing for indirectly is to keep our level of sexism at the status quo, rather than fix it before we treat everyone exactly the same. Treating everyone exactly the same right now assumes there's no problem right now, but there is a problem right now.
> Damore never argues against using groups to make big picture, strategic decision.
Then I think your beef is with @nailer's comment above mine, and you can argue that with him. He said "Additionally Damore argued for assessing individuals as individuals rather than as tribe members and assuming discrepancy is down to bias - even if you did sub someone's chosen politics for their gender, Damore's proposed fix would still require you to assess the individual."
You are contradicting what he said.
I consider your statement "he suggested that women as a group are innately less capable technologists" to be unfair because it could be interpreted in multiple ways. The danger of misinterpreting this statement is so great, that the underlying idea can't be expressed in this manner. Damore uses the phrase "these differences MAY explain.."(emphasis mine) to indicate that evidence suggest, but does not prove, his hypothesis. You make Damore sound more definitive than he actually is (or at least how I understand him to be).
The most dangerous word in your statement is "innately". If I remove it from your statement, than it becomes incontrovertibly true. Women as a group are less capable technologist, by simple nature of the fact that there are fewer of them. Why is the big question, and the word "innately" is the attempted explanation.
If "innately" means that "women are generally to stupid to grasp computes, than that's codswhallop. There's no evidence to suggest that the mean IQ of women is any different than the mean IQ of men.
If by "innately" you mean "men are biologically compelled to be assholes to women, and women are biologically compelled to flee this treatment", then that's a scary fucking problem that I hope we can solve in some manner other than the obliteration of the male sex.
If "innately" means that "women generally don't give a shit about computers", then there is evidence to suggest that it might be true, though of course the evidence is far from conclusive .
If "innately" means that "Men are more represented at the extremes at of most distributions, and since being a google engineer is an extreme position, men should be more represented there", then that is another possibility that is suggested, though obviously not proven, from current evidence.
For me, the word "innately" is too fuzzy in its meaning and it makes me uncomfortable to use it in this context.
As for your concerns about his expertise, his interpretations of current research concerning the cognitive differences between men and women are not out of line with current research and the interpretation of that research by well regarded members of the psychology community. Steven Pinker is a name that has come up frequently in the past few days, whose own views overlap Damore's to some degree.
I find your interpretation of my motives to be uncharitable. My intention is not to argue that we should keep the status quo of sexism. I think we all agree that judging the capabilities of an individual based on their biological sex is bullshit. My concern (And it seems Damore shares this concern) is that we're replacing one kind of sexism with a different kind of sexism. That's not progress.
I think you should ask yourself how comfortable you are with the following statement: "There are differences in the distribution of cognitive traits in the populations of males and females based on biological sex." (I use the word cognitive here to mainly refer to emotional differences though of course it can have other meanings. I apologize for using such broad language here but I felt that it was suited to this context)
Note that this statement is one of pure fact. Either there are differences in the populations at large, or there aren't. Of course, it's a fact that will be incredibly difficult to discern, but at some point in the future, we could conceivably answer this question. Are you comfortable with this statement being disproven? Are you comfortable with it being proven? If you answered no to either of those questions, than you have an ideology that will be difficult to update with facts.
Please note that these questions are all rhetorical. I'm not trying to attack you personally and I appreciate the time you've taken to respond to my post. I'm not an asshole, I just write like one.
> I think we all agree that judging the capabilities of an individual based on their biological sex is bullshit.
You're further demonstrating a misreading of Damore's letter. Yes I do agree, judging engineers according to biological sex is bullshit. If you agree with that, then you didn't understand what Damore said. The memo says explicitly "the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
I think you actually don't agree with Damore, and you just don't know it yet.
Talking about how he hedged with a "may" and didn't state it as fact is a huge cop-out. He stated as fact that abilities are different (for which there's no evidence.) What he proposed is that the imbalance in current distribution might be caused by a proportional imbalance of ability (for which there exists mountains of contrary evidence). The entire point behind his statement is to establish that biological sex could be responsible for the distribution imbalance, and it's possible there's no sexism or discrimination against women going on, and thus nothing to fix. This is FUD. It doesn't matter whether he's claiming it's a fact, what he's doing is casting doubt.
The problem with denying that discrimination exists and asserting there are other causes is obvious: it's hypocritical, it's a way of discriminating.
> The most dangerous word in your statement is "innately".
I am using 'innate' as synonymous with biological, meaning hard-wired and unchangeable, a trait that comes with the package. Let me re-phrase, Damore suggested that woman as a group are biologically less capable technologists than men. This is the same sense that other people in this thread used 'innate'. It may help you to lookup the definition, e.g. "adj. Possessed at birth; inborn. adj. Possessed as an essential characteristic; inherent."
> If I remove it [innately] from your statement, than it becomes incontrovertibly true. Women as a group are less capable technologist, by simple nature of the fact that there are fewer of them.
I know you don't mean to sound as bad as you do, but that sounds really, really bad. The capability of any individual has nothing to do with how many others there are. In this specific case, it's quite possible that the few women in tech are more capable than the average man. Damore was not suggesting that women are less capable as a group because there are fewer of them, he suggested that it's possible that women can't do tech as well as men because they're women.
> I think you should ask yourself how comfortable you are with the following statement: "There are differences in the distribution of cognitive traits in the populations of males and females based on biological sex." (I use the word cognitive here to mainly refer to emotional differences though of course it can have other meanings. I apologize for using such broad language here but I felt that it was suited to this context)
You might also want to look up the word 'cognitive'. It doesn't mean what you think it does, and you just misused it pretty badly. Taken at face value, that statement would suggest to most people that the mean IQ of women is different than the mean IQ of men, which I already know you don't believe.
I think there are a lot of small disagreements we may have about this issue, but there's a big elephant in the room that I would like to focus on. Namely, my statement that women as a group are less technical capable than men, and your reaction to that statement.
I want to focus here because it's the point where we disagree the most, and I think it offers the best opportunity to highlight the differences in our thinking and, most importantly, to highlight the different ways we each use language.
'I know you don't mean to sound as bad as you do, but that sounds really, really bad.'
First off, I agree with you. This statement could be taken in some very terrible ways which is why I chose to bury it deep in an obscure comment thread, surrounded by lots qualifying statements, while pleading with my audience that my comments be interpreted charitably. I understand that you want to interpret each statement within the context of human history but for the time being, I would ask that we try to engage in a conversation free of that context. From my point of view, we are hypothesizing, not proposing policy (I think one of the flaws of Damore's memo was that he did not cleanly separate hypothesizing from policy proposals, and so he was not able to cleanly discuss what evidence may or may not say). To me, trying to discuss the evidence for trait distribution in human populations while worrying about the sad history of human bigotry is like trying to write a recipe for spaghetti and interjecting a discussion on the weather and soil best required to raise tomatoes. Technically the subjects are related, but I think we can all appreciate how that could make the spaghetti recipe difficult to understand if we don't carefully partition out all the concerns at this stage.
Do you have any objections to the statement that "Men as a group (compared to women as a group) are less capable knitters by simple nature of the fact that there are fewer of them"?
From my personal experience, this statement seems incontrovertibly true. If I needed a group of highly skilled knitters to accomplish a large project, I have no doubt that the vast majority of the people I would end up recruiting would be women. Does this mean that men can't be good knitters? Absolutely not. Stephen West is a male knitter who travels the world drawing (small) audiences wherever he goes. There are knitting groups in Finland and Amsterdam that are mostly male, which love to get together, drink beer, and knit. Nevertheless, I am confident in my original statement that men as a group are less capable knitters. From my perspective, this is ultimately a matter of skill not talent. Skill by it's very definition requires time and practice, and generally people people don't spend time and practice on things they don't have an interest in.
Now let's assume that men as a group are biologically less interested in knitting (obviously I'm pretty deep into the hypothetical here), from the definition of innate we could say that men as a group are innately less interested in knitting. If men as a group are innately less interested in knitting, I would claim that men are less likely to acquire knitting skills. If men as a group are innately less likely to acquire knitting skills that I would comfortable saying that men as a group are innately less capable knitters. 'Capable' mean competent, and if you don't have skills, you're not competent.
With all that in mind, let's look at Damore's statement that "the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership".
One reading of this statement is as you have read it. Ability refers to talent, IQ, mathematical, and technical talent. Thus the reference to biology means that Damore believes women tend to have a lower IQ that that makes them unsuitable to be engineers except in exceptional cases.
However, there is another way to read the statement, and from my conversations with friends, my spouse, and reading of various articles and blogs, it is a very common reading. Let me paraphrase Damore: "The distribution of preferences and acquired skills of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." Ability means "the means or skill to do something", thus I believe that this paraphrasing is fair.
I would argue that Damore intends the second interpretation of his statement. He never tries to cite evidence that claims women are stupid. All his citations revolve around the possible differences in the perceptions and interests of men and women. He then argues that differences in interests may result in a difference in acquired skills, which results in a large difference in the populations of men and women who are suitable to apply to Google.
P.S. I did want to address the definition of 'Cognitive'. Ripped straight from Google,'Cognitive' means 'the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses'. To me, innate preferences absolutely effect how someone acquires knowledge and how they reason about their experiences. Other definitions refer to perception and intuition, as well as IQ and working memory. I understand 'Cognitive' to be a grab bag word that can refer to any mental trait that effects the way you think. I asked my question to try and understand if you were comfortable with the idea that there are any statistically significant differences between the populations of men and women in how they tend to view, perceive, think about, or respond to their environment.
Nice find. As someone who doesn't identify as either liberal or conservative, if my ideology made me unsuited for tech, that should definitely be acknowledged. Pretending isn't helpful to anyone.
And I bet the author of the memo would agree with me in terms of his ideology (classical liberalism).
Doubly sad because if the anonymous survey linked in the post is true, 1/3 of Googlers agree with the memo. Only 1/3 "strongly disagree", and the people who wanted him fired should be a further fraction of that 1/3.
https://basicgestalt.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/press-f-for-ja...
EDIT: fixed link to alternative site.
It is the same link that the parent article is using, at the 3rd to last paragraph with text "and a poll conducted at Google confirms" .
There were multiple revisions of the document (yay online text editors where this is possible). I understand that the leaked/published version is of a somewhat later date.
That might explain both the amount of outrage compared to a text that many think is rather tame (the earlier version supposedly was more strongly worded), and it allows the interpretation that the survey mostly measured at which point in time the respondents (btw: who is represented in the sample?) read the text for their first, and probably last, time.
I especially love this comment:
> I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary.
Because arguably that's where gender differences highlighted in Damore's memo point :)
I'm reminded of Richard Morgan's Black Man aka 13. He argues that men basically don't play well in groups ;)
So a suicide attempt by a man is 12x more likely to succeed than one by a woman.
(/s, obviously. Sorry I have to point it out.)
When I've felt suicidal, it's always helped to imagine how one does it reliably. Then I've thought about how irreversible that would be. And then I've realized that I don't really want to die.
Something like "if you want a good nosed dog get a female pup, if you get a male it might be a champion, or terrible". It would be fun if this was true, and also applied to people.
Why is the feature expressed as the average? If one gene is recessive and another dominant only one matters. So it could be expressed like this: X5Y=5 X5X6=5 X7Y=7 X7X6= 7 where there are no differences between genders.
An example of a large slice is recent college graduates. Women in fact dominate this slice. But CEOs are presumably a thin slice of very capable people. So it would be no surprise for their ranks to be dominated by men.
How do you get on a board? By being known to people on the board. They know who you are, what your history is, how you think.
Damore would be a perfect example of that. There is a time and a place for your beliefs, but the workplace isn't that. ;)
I understand this was written in response to a request from someone else, probably HR.
Workplace = Professional, Personal Shit Stays Home.
Rest of Life = Do whatever the fuck you want as long as its legal and you don't mention your day job.
I'm not sure why this separation isn't standard practice for everyone.
It isn't just the SJWs. Conservatives have called for being fired for offending them ever since talk radio was a thing. We got bought by a company HQ'd in the bible belt and the opposite chilling effect was pretty obvious as people who spoke their mind about a few issues that were politically sensitive got fired.
We are just more polarized now and people are less tolerant of any kind of difference.
This makes zero sense considering the reality that women are underrepresented. "Aiming at 50-50 representation" could at best lift the disadvantaged group closer to 50% representation. It could in no way cause an underrepresented group to dominate a field.
Since we have no way of knowing what the actual qualified split is, aiming at anything is discriminatory towards everyone.
Meanwhile, consider that "diversity" programs are institutionalized discrimination.
* "institutionalized discrimination": The hypothesis that society is skewed by the vast conspiracy of "bias". For example, for the past 10 years, computer science graduation rates skew under 20% / 80% for female / male graduates [0]. Presumably females are kept down by "bias".
[0] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor.... Does anyone have more recent data than 2012? I've remember skimming a link recently...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...
The burden of proof is on him. You can't make a claim and then ask the other party to provide evidence against it.
I don't see how this is an unreasonable argument to make. There is a dearth of male kindergarten teachers, for instance. This doesn't mean the school is being "sexist". It might just mean that certain genders tend to be attracted to certain types of professions.
For an example more detailed/sourced argument, http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... might be a start.
I think the gender differences are driven by a combination of genetics, stereotypes, personal preferences, and yes, sexism, acting in a feedback loop. Genetics cause a slight natural difference; this gets summarized as a stereotype; people comparing themselves with the stereotype develop their preferences based on that; and if they don't conform, they are seen as abnormal (e.g. male kindergarten teachers get suspected of pedophilia) and are correspondingly discriminated against.
If that's all the manifesto said, this wouldn't be a story. I am a minority in tech and I certainly didn't see a lot of people like me in my Computer Science program so naturally there is under-representation in the work force, it happens.
But when you start wading into the, 'Women are biologically less well-suited for this work...' is where you get into problems. No different than arguments that used to be made against black people before de-segregation.
But women ARE biologically less suited for certain types of work. Women, for instance, are weaker than men (yes, there are exceptions. . .). Which would make them less efficient for, say, construction work.
From what I understand, the guy used scientifically valid sources to make his claim. I'm not saying that what he's saying is true, but it's sourced well enough for it should be discussed without him getting fired.
There are gender disparities all over the place. There are racial disparities all over the place.
As long as these disparities aren't enforced intentionally by sexist/racist laws, I fail to see what the problem is.
If truly there is discrimination against talented women in the tech industry, then another company would hire all of these underpaid talented women and take over the tech industry.
Why did Larry Page, Jerry Yang, Bill Gate, Zuckerburg, etc all hire mostly males in their startups? Because they wanted to overpay underqualified males because they were sexist against women?
The argument doesn't make sense. If they did that, then another startup would have taken those underpaid overqualified women and destroyed their competitors.
What's wrong with that? The majority of software engineers are senior engineer or below, any skill you only need to make it past that level clearly can't be considered core to the job.
I think that is sometimes true, sometimes not. Certainly there are mediocre developers thriving because they are good communicators. I see this often in niche spaces like "POS software for Pet Stores". They thrive because they can communicate well with the customers and create something that does what the customer wants. Even if the internals are a horrid spaghetti mess that's inefficient, took longer to write than it should have, is hard to maintain, etc.
The longer I'm in the field, the more I work with different teams, the more I realize that writing code is a much easier skill for people who don't know to learn than reading people is for those who can't seem to.
No company or project wants rank and file programmers (which is the vast majority of any project) who think there also managers and act as such. Even if you have those skill your job is to focus on your tasks and solve your very specific problems, not the big picture and what everyone else is doing.
I've been in plenty of teams that were extremely flat exactly because the programmers in those teams were all highly skilled in those areas.
It reminds me of what a coed wrote to me once about the difference between a good developer, and two ok ones.
"2 < 1+1"
Basically, even if you're higher ranked intellectually speaking and do more work than the average worker alone, two people that can perform adequately and that work together will outperform you.
Cooperation is key, and people need to be trained to do better handle that part of the job. Not just produce code.
</end-rant>
I'm not saying Brooks is 100% correct, but his observations are close to what I am seeing in the field.
Further, his second point about communication issues is to some extent proving my, and michaelchisari's point. Communication is a skill that is essential, but not stressed enough. If people were better at "communicate complex ideas in accessible ways", as michaelchisari originally put it, then I think it's likely that Brooks' wouldn't have the second argument to support his law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law).
Essentially, I think it comes down to where we work, what we assume about a project, and how the issues in these projects are best tackled.
At my work, better communication would have lead to less work in the long run. This because team leads couldn't clearly state their requirements, the different parties thought they agreed, and work was made that wasn't originally intended by team leads. Moreover, no one that holds a senior position is willing to acknowledge that these communication issues often are two way streets and that they are equally responsible for the miscommunications that happen. They also talk badly about others and have a serious case of hubris, which means that other peoples opinions are looked down upon or sometimes not even listened to. Basically lacking a lot of the skills that michaelchisari originally listed.
I hope that this clears out any "unsubstantiated" parts of my original rant for you.
But its much less people skills then a manager, in meetings most of the day resolving issues that are much higher level that involve different departments etc.
So your average programming job is well within the social skills of the vast majority of Men. When your evaluating a pool of potential hires its going to be 95% finding the best programmer and then the last 5% is making sure there not crazy or a drug addict etc.
Its never going to be the case that you start out with a pool of resumes from people with really nice personal bios and try and find out which ones can program a computer.
Google simply didn't, and neither did Google employees. The letter from CEO Sundar Pichai makes this clear:
"many points raised in the memo—such as the portions criticizing Google’s trainings, questioning the role of ideology in the workplace, and debating whether programs for women and underserved groups are sufficiently open to all—are important topics. The author had a right to express their views on those topics"
I don't understand why there is so much discussion around whether or not what the fired employee said was scientifically true or not.
"Blacks on average are more [insert negative here]"
"Jews on average are more [insert negative here]"
"Men on average are more [insert negative here]"
How would I get away with any of the above statements in widely published memo at any big company, regardless of basis in fact?
It's a PR disaster that costs the company money to manage, and it also violates Google's code of conduct by having made a significant portion of employees feel harassed or intimidated.
Here is an excerpt from the Google employee code of conduct which expects:
"each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."
The fired employee didn't do that, and that's why he was fired.
I suspect the reason so many people have trouble with the firing, and the responsibility stated in employee CoC is that it puts a lot of power in other people's hands. You can no longer sit behind your screen and insist that it's a scientific fact and therefor you are right. Respecting the CoC requires empathy, people skills, listening, perhaps sometimes even submissiveness - all things that "technical people on average are bad at."
I disagree. I think people are upset, at least conservatives within Google, because they see this "against the CoC" idea selectively applied. I can tell you first hand that there were a lot of things said by those on the left, especially after the election, about conservatives that many felt violated the CoC, the issue is just that its a minority at Google that are conservative. I mean, after the election at the TGIF, a member of management basically told everyone to stand up and hug the person next to you and "it's going to be alright." If this isn't alienating, lacking in empathy, and downright rude toward the conservative Googlers, I don't know what is...
One has to ask: did the conservative Googlers who felt intimidated or harassed by the hug session report that to HR or management?
If the the CoC is selectively applied then people have to prove it, not just have a hunch about it and moan about it. They need do what every minority group in the past has done: collect stats, show the evidence, and take action.
If this is in fact happening, then I wish them luck, even if I disagree with some of their politics.
Young minds are impressionable, and if you tell a young person they're probably less capable of something, they probably will be. Even as the stereotypical nerdy white male programmer I can see how people look differently at a young girl who is interested in computers. It is considered odd, if not improper. Boys never have to contend with this bias (although they have similar yet opposite biases in different fields, like child care). Inevitably this societal pressure will cause fewer girls to go into programming, and in turn fewer women to end up at google. That's not a consequence of some genetic predisposition, it is a consequence of being brought up in a world where not everyone is treated equally.
How do you flip that around? You stop thinking in terms of averages and you start thinking in terms of individual opportunity. We treat every child as deserving of the same chances as any other child, and we stop trying to steer them into directions based on their birth. That requires a modal shift in thinking where gender is just not a factor anymore, for any profession or any talent.
The diversity memo's failing is not the statistics it cites, it is that it furthers the notion that diversity is a set of statistics to control for. True diversity is about ignoring statistics and instead giving every single person the same chances, regardless of where they came from. I want my daughter to have the same chance of becoming a programmer as my son, and my son to have the same chance of becoming a kindergarten teacher as my daughter, and for no one to tell them either choice is odd or improper.
Your point is the memo failed because it makes exactly your point - that people should be treated like individuals rather than their group's statistical means.
I'm curious if you've even read it.
> I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
And people are trying to treat it as scientific, and some still want to pretend he wasn't shoe horning a political point in while masking it with feel good language. Despite the fact that he uses all of his data to separate populations by sex and treat them differently. My mind is being blown this morning.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
>This evidence is certainly up for debate
Well thankfully you had the cognition to see that.
I'm advocating for discussion, but pretending that you can start setting up solutions based on the data we have around how psychological traits affect professional outcomes, attempting to shoe horn those "solutions" into a political framework that treats everyone else that rationally disagrees with it as being in an "echo chamber", especially when you are essentially characterizing an entire population of professionals, is pretty foolish and toxic.
Did you even read the article you linked? How is that even remotely relevant to anything I said or what the memo's goal was?
Purely anecdotal, but when I was told I would get a low mark in my undergrad degree, it made me work harder to prove them wrong.
She's wrong about one thing though:
Damore was fired, basically, for making a well-meant, if amateurish, attempt at institutional design, ... , he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own.
No, he was fired because Google is already neck-deep into being investigated by the DoL for gender pay discrimination [1] and they have a class action lawsuit coming up about the same issue [2]. He was fired for the same reason that they recently hired a chief diversity officer [3].
Believe me, at that point they would do almost anything to avoid those cases turning south (and what that would mean for the corporate public image), and giving voice to someone who has even the slightest doubt about diversity in the workplace is a big fat political No-Go.
James Damore made the mistake of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, that's all.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/google-wo...
[3]https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/29/google-hires-intels-former...
Memos are not meant to express debatable personal arguments, memos are meant to express a company position. By widely spreading a personal view, the author impersonated the company in a way that the company does not endorse. As a culture manager, you just cannot let this kind of things happen.
Regarding the content of the "manifesto", the author should have known better. Even if it was genuinely true that women's biology explains the gender gap in technology, it is not provable - as in, there is simply no way to quantify the effect, if any. And using unprovable causes to justify a societal bias is not acceptable. The problem is that you can use unprovable statements to justify anything.
The debate regarding whether it is good or not to intervene at company level to try and change an industry culture is a perfectly healthy debate. Widely sharing one's view which uses unprovable arguments and that will offense some people is simply a dumb thing to do.
It contained nothing extreme or explicitly hateful.And even if his arguments are flawed, they should have been discussed and countered.
But then, I suppose that's the point. No competition for the equally unprovable, unquantifiable theory that's currently dominant.
On that note, I don't think the memo was intended to speak for Google, but rather _to_ Google. Was it even intentionally public? Or was it leaked?
I don't see a lot of calls in these comment threads for an employee bill of rights or something, so I don't know why this keeps coming up.
Generally the thought is that laws correspond to morality. Anyone who has taken one look at some knows this is not the case, but that may be where the link between "don't be evil" and "don't be criminal" come in to play.
There are plenty of deplorable things that companies can and should legally be able to do that they nevertheless shouldn't do.
This is exactly why we can't shut down conversations the way Google did. Saying line employees are unqualified but Google executives are qualified to judge truth is very stifling to rational thinking and, yes, diversity that actually means something.
But nobody really believe that Google leadership is the best arbiter of diversity. Otherwise, everyone would be telling those class action discrimination lawsuits to pack up and go home.
So what do you think? Does Google leadership have a monopoly on public thought? Do the employees release all expectations of fair treatment when they sign an employment agreements?
This guy is probably a very smart software writing dude, but why would that make us want to listen to what he has to say on any other subject, whether it's biology, evolutionary psychology, running a business, or hiring practices?
No, it was shared outside of his control to a wider audience from the initial recipients, then to the press by an anonymous source, who then culled references, notes, and charts from the document which were important points.
The publicity was distinctly out of his control, and I think that publicity had a major part in his firing (if it didn't, Google should also be firing the people who agree with him and participated in discussions with him)
I'm not sure whether or not he deserved to get fired. Sundar's response was well written and is worth reading Damore, however childish his written seems, is not young and has worked at Google for four years. He's by no means a junior engineer. At the very least the lack of understand of software development speaks for something.
"And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not hiring the most qualified person? That’s the trade-off nobody seems willing to spell out."
This is not how "affirmative action" works. "Affirmative action" states that if you have two "equally" qualified candidates you favor the least represented in your society or company. Thus there should be no added risk.
If you can quantify candidates' capabilities, please start your money printing press.
There's a perception it does, based on anecdotal evidence.
Previously in the thread my response is in protest of the reduction both of the OPs related writing and the topic.
It can happen if the target diversity ratio is different from that of the candidate pool. For example, trying to have software engineer distribution that matches that of the general population, or even just college graduates.
Let's assume men and women are equal in the distribution of their ability to perform tasks required as a software engineer, i.e. same mean, same standard deviation, etc.
Let's also assume the female candidate pool targeted by affirmative action is smaller than that of male candidate pool, i.e. more male applicants than female, hence underrepresented relative to general population.
Let's say the hiring bar is such that top 10% from either gender meets the bar, since the distributions are the same.
Now, if male pool has 1000 applicants, and female pool has 400 applicants, this would mean there are 100 qualified male candidates, and 40 qualified female candidates.
If the company wants 60/40 representation, with the understanding that 50/50 desirable but not probable, as long as the company only needs 100 hires, the company can hit the target without lowering the bar (60 male + 40 female). However, if the company wants to hire more employees and still maintain diversity target, it would be necessary to hire female candidates that are not within the top 10%.
Again, this is assuming the target diversity is _not_ the same as the candidate pool, but rather some other demographics that the company is trying to match (like local population demographics).
Since Google gets so many qualified applicants (and even more applicants in general), most engineers are probably overqualified anyway regardless of gender, so unqualified female engineer is most likely not issue at all. However, more qualified male engineer would be rejected (in the case of 100 hires, 40 male engineers would be rejected vs none for female engineers). And this is probably where the reduced false negative rate for applicants that fall under affirmative action umbrella comes from in Damore's memo.
Your definition of affirmative action is not entirely accurate. Affirmative action does not kick in merely as a tie-breaker. In practice, affirmative action almost always causes a better qualified person to lose out.
However, that's fine. We have to take a long term view of the benefits of affirmative action. So corporates, especially those not under as much scrutiny as the Fortune 100, are not automatically incentivized to do this. Which is one reason why mandating it by law might be worth considering.
Edit: note that if the minority candidate is as strong or stronger than non-minority candidate, it is a no-brainer decision and win-win for all involved. :)
Now regarding the firering, the lesson to learn is not that one should stop saying that the king is naked when it is. One should use anonymizer because the stupid people are still dominating the population.
The focus of making money of capitalizm is nurturing stupidity in the population because it makes business so simpler. (e.g. junk food consuming) Things need to change.
It's possible to have a discussion about these issues today. It's not rational to give special preference and excessive leeway to discussion that isn't actually fact based (and is in many ways based on nothing related to facts).
Well, that's great, because his points on gender differences are actually extensively backed by research. When he's talking about that, he isn't talking about what should be or what can be, he's talking about what is.
Even after clarifying to the poor-intended reader about what is, he still states that more diversity is what should be. He just doesn't agree with the present method.
You can have all the opinions you want, think women belong in the kitchen, hell, be a raging neo-Nazi, but please don't broadcast that shit at work. If you don't like that Google's promoting diversity, there are ways to make your voice heard like a normal adult. I would be livid if I got a link to a doc like this. Here we're busting our asses, and this guy has the gall, time, and energy to write a lengthy essay version of /r/theredpill and put it on a company server.
Partially true, Gawker staff thrived on being assholes until they got the Hogan Leg Drop. Are you implying that Damore was an asshole, though? How so?
> That makes for a distraction, not to mention the obvious legal risk if the engineer ever interacts with a woman or minority at Google again.
What about the legal risk of institutionalized discriminatory hiring and career advancement practices?
> You can have all the opinions you want
Thanks.
> think women belong in the kitchen, hell, be a raging neo-Nazi, but please don't broadcast that shit at work.
Oh, did he broadcast any of those kinds of ideas or political leanings?
> If you don't like that Google's promoting diversity, there are ways to make your voice heard like a normal adult.
Like, for example, attempting to discuss a topic?
> I would be livid if I got a link to a doc like this.
http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-div...
> Here we're busting our asses, and this guy has the gall, time, and energy to write a lengthy essay version of /r/theredpill and put it on a company server.
Have you even browsed that subreddit? Damore's views are nowhere even near in the same side of the political spectrum
is a better link, because it preserves the links to references, the formatting, and the graphic clarifying distributions vs. averages.
Doing a lit review--i.e., knowing the research in a field--is a thing that take a lot of time and working in that field.
I'd trust this guy to be up to date on algorithm research, and present an even-handed exposition on what's good for task x or y, cause that's presumably the thing he spends his days doing.
I see no reason to assume that he can do a thorough, even-handed lit review on a field he doesn't have working experience with, like biology or evolutionary psychology.
There's also been a long history of using "science" to support objectionable ideas (e.g. scientific racism).
Saying this (not a researcher, not a biologist, not an evolutionary psychologist) guy's writing is extensively backed by research just doesn't move the needle for me in any way.
I do think "diversity initiatives" are like voting in that it's the least amount of effort to put to the issue. I agree with your comment in this sense: I'd like very much for companies to go much further to address the root issues.
Little girls don't want to be programmers or scientists - why is that?
My gut feeling is that it's ti very a small part biological and to a large extent just momentum. With more female role models (moms not least!) in tech, things will change. Thats why I think it's very reasonable to hire for diversity (that is - hire someone on the basis of being a woman)
I work at Microsoft. The back of my ID badge has our mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
To me, that mission is a blueprint for how I can easily approach issues of diversity and inclusion. It says "everyone". To me it's a simple matter of gaining empathy for a wider set of customers so that I can more effectively create software for them.
As an engineering manager, I need to somehow be able to include the views, perspectives, and experiences of a wheat farmer in rural Kenya. Same goes for the high speed day trader in Iceland (I've been to neither place, so how do I know what they really need).
I want more women in engineering precisely because they're not me. Nothing about them makes them less capable of writing code, and several of their attributes (grossly generalizing) makes them far better collaborators than most men I know.
So, I'm just shaking my head, and continuing to do my bit to improve things in ways that I believe are useful: http://aka.ms/leapit
He release something that turned into a fire storm. Google no doubt did a law suit calculation and figured firing him was cheaper than the inevitable "hostile work environment" lawsuits they figured would be filed if they didn't take such action.
If the goal was to not get fired, but still have the dialog, he probably could have found a forum to do it. Instead, he blasted into their internal interweb, and here's the outcome.
Most large companies would probably end up doing the same thing, regardless of what they might believe about what was actually written.
Sorry, but no. Either we are equally capable by nature and any differences in outcome are due to upbringing ("nurture"), or there are biological differences which means you have to accept there very well may be things women are less capable of as well as the opposite.
I'm firmly in the first camp and think it's mostly if not only upbringing and cultural biases, but you don't get to shun the notion that women are less capable at some things while at the same time claiming there are many things women are actually more capable of. Don't open that door.
That's silly. Every job involves people, at some level, otherwise you wouldn't get paid. By this logic, a lighthouse keeping is a people-centric job, because you maintain a light that other people will look at.
> That coding actually requires “female” skills was spelled out clearly by Yonatan Zunger, a former Google employee. But since I care more about physics than software-development, let me leave this aside.
I believe this is the one that points out that managers deal with people, not software (so why not just get MBAs?). I'd counter that liking people doesn't mean you're good with them, there's even research that introverts make better CEOs.
Similarly, being predisposed to like programming (or any other task) doesn't mean you're naturally good at it (though putting in the hours will help a lot).
Companies can't come out with official taxonomies of diversity, so it's all vague and based on unspoken intuitions about which candidates count as more diverse.
It's not a system someone would design from scratch.
To me, it seems like hiring the first Mormon, albino, or Thai employee would be an obvious win from a diversity perspective, but it's not that simple.
"Men are more skilled"
and
"More men are skilled"
There is clearly something filtering women out. There is something deep in the supply chain of labor (by which I mean education) which results in women being siphoned off long before they hit my company's diversity and inclusion policies. I believe these policies are reasonably effective at tackling unconscious bias, but they are unable to affect the underlying talent pool.
My personal theory is that specialisms are risky (good pay if you can find employment, no pay if not), and men are more likely to take risks than women. There is research to support the latter point. Casual googling digs up this for example: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James_Byrnes2/publicati...
You are kidding right? At least in the major tech companies of the area, people would be out with pitchforks if a black man was fired for rocking BLM merch around the office.
Heck, Mark Zuckerberg specifically reprimanded his employees for writing stuff like 'All Lives Matter' over BLM posters at Facebook.
But more importantly, if you're going to walk the path of claiming that some of your coworkers are biologically unsuited for their roles, you'd best be sure your research and reasoning are ironclad. There's no "just starting a discussion" on such a topic.
If I'm unhappy or unsatisfied with something that I'm not in an immediate position to change, I'll get a job elsewhere. I want to control if and when that happens, which means no whining or complaining, even if I'm asked to. It's not worth the risk.
I think this assumption is made by most people but unfortunately simply filling slots based on socially constructed identity labels does not seem to be effective in addressing underlying inequalities.
For instance, we have had "race" based affirmative action policies for universities for decades but very limited effect in having those policies translate into balancing income and wealth gaps between socially constructed race groups. In fact those gaps have widened considerably over the past couple decades.
I think that people still fail to understand the extent of sub-conscious prejudice and fail to understand that the programs they are putting in place to try to solve inequalities between socially constructed identity groups are actually reinforcing the underlying causes of those inequalities instead of eliminating them.
Here's the problem. These studies model the status quo, not the way things would be if women weren't subjected to different historical and social pressures. I would venture that the profile distribution of women in tech is perhaps different than the population wide distribution. Imagine a world where women weren't told they are naturally good/bad at things, now project that forward 50 years and redo the study.
This is my chief problem with the memo, and the fact that he launches into IQ, the talking point of the prejudiced everywhere.
I doubt you have read James Damore's memo ( https://diversitymemo.com/ ) because he addresses your very question explicitly by citing a scientific paper:
http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf
And guess what? Less constraints on gender roles lead to more sexual dimorphism.
Here's another study, resulting in the same conclusion:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
>This is my chief problem with the memo, and the fact that he launches into IQ, the talking point of the prejudiced everywhere.
Damore doesn't "launch into IQ" at all. The memo mentions "IQ" only 2 times and touches the subject very fleetingly. It appears to refer to an opinion piece that is more elaborate on it: https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.htm... . As it turns out, research on IQ has been defunded in the past for being "racist". You can call Damore "prejudiced", but then you will have a lot of work disproving the body of scientific research cited here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
Damore's memo is on solid ground regarding the scientific consensus on gender differences in the statistical distribution of psychological traits. It's an honest and fair attempt at describing biological reality. When reality doesn't turn out to be as you want it to be doesn't mean that the author is "prejudiced".
My wife certainly does not fall under what the studies would deem a woman to be on average (nor that of which the author of the blog describes). Therefore, she would most definitely protest any notion that the reason why she is not "X" is due to her biology and scientific studies and take issue with anyone in the workplace trying to frame her current position as "she is in that job role due to her biology."
Why is this surprising? People get fired in America all the time for thinking on their own. It's also called "disagreeing with the boss".
It is also very interesting to a large number of the audience.
Yet sadly there seems to be a number of people here who think they have a right to overrule everyone who upvote (and no, I'm not talking about the mods but about the flaggers.)
I believe we could have closed this faster and with less problems if we allowed the debate to happen and only flagged comments -on both sides- that broke hn guidelines.
Instead we now have 50 threads and where people are getting increasingly frustrated.
I do think people flagged post because they didn't aline with their opinions, but they are in their right. If this is a community site and people decide to flag something, you should accept it (or leave the community if you don't like it). I also consider those flags under the community guidelines because we already have a couple of post about the topic.
The debate is happening anyway. Don't get frustrated. I am learning a lot.
Here's where I accept the current rules but suggest looking into whether flags are given too much weight compared to upvotes.
perhaps some of the mods could chime in as to whom was doing the bulk of the flags.
Reasoning: its a political hot-potato, with their DoL lawsuit accused of paying women substantially less for the same job. Last thing they needed was more 300+ HN posts every day for a week. Rage-media has mostly moved on to N Korea, or whatever other special cringe-worthy topic.
The science of studying gender and racial differences does not lend itself to 'easy conclusions' and generalizations and certainly not practical application or advocacy.
Tomorrow a colleague could write a tome pointing to studies about male aggression and the risk of putting them in collaborative environments or about introverts unsuitability for certain roles and presume to advocate 'other roles' for them. This is beyond the pale.
Cherry picking studies in a way they are not meant to applied in any real world scenario is a dangerous unscientific preoccupation of bigots and supremacists.
The fact that you are making these conclusions not as an expert in the field trying to further knowledge but in a real world application context about your fellow workers in an act of extreme prejudice and hostility and completely compromises this individual and his memo.
The biggest concern of this misguided memo is the level of support for this troubled individual. It appears women in the valley really have something to worry about. There exist all these men and colleagues who harbor deep doubts about their capabilities. This is alas what hostility looks like.
> I know most of Google’s work is people-centric.
Hmmm...is that really so? Last I checked a lot of Google's code output and value-generation is backend-y, with very little interaction with humans. Google is also notoriously bad-mediocre at UX, though this has improved lately.
> Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from
> differences among demographic groups.
Hmm...he didn't do this, and in fact explicitly states that doing so is not correct.
> Damore naturally assumes the differences between
> typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled.
I also didn't see that in the memo. At all. First, what he talks about is mostly preferences, not skills. Second, there is the whole "you can't draw conclusions about individuals from slight variations in populations"-thing. So you can't turn "women have slightly stronger preferences, statistically, for these things" into "men are more skilled". Third, and maybe least intuitively, this is almost entirely about the people who don't (yet) work at Google.
Finally, she brings up Northern Europe. I can relate, because I am also from Germany, and yes, the country finds, for example, having a female Chancellor simply not remarkable. So when people vote for or against her, it is largely (can't speak for everyone) because of what they think about her, her party and their policies (or in her specific case, lack thereof g), not because she is a woman or is not a man.
And I also believe this applies to other jobs as well.
However, what Sabine misses is that this has not had the effect of gender representation in the job market equalizing. Surprisingly, it has had the opposite effect, as has been documented many places. And yes, I want to stress again how utterly unexpected this is.
And so:
> I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal
> opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics
> would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation
> gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any
> evidence to the contrary.
Challenge accepted (although not for politics, that's a different subject)!
If it were obstacles, countries that (as we both agree) have fewer of those obstacles such as Northern Europeans ones would see more women in technical fields. The opposite is the case.
And of course there is the point that the question is not "why aren't there more women in these jobs", but "why are there any men that do them", because they generally suck if you want to have a life. See Jordan Peterson's excellent take on "Women in High Paying Jobs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q
Honest question: When was the last time you checked Google's code output and how it was accomplished? Have you worked at Google for an extended period?
I've worked at Google for many years, on more projects than one can count on 2 hands, and in my experience this commonly held stereotype about working here couldn't be more wrong.
First, there is a ton of code written all over the stack from backend through UI, and most engineers are expected to be able to work on code from the UI through to the backend. This was true from the early days through today. It's been the case on every project I've worked on here: One quarter I work on the data pipeline, next quarter I work on an UI feature, sometimes both simultaneously.
But even if you don't write a line of UI code, any non-trivial system created at Google requires a lot of human interaction for:
- requirements gathering and design
- code reviews
- justifying resource requests
- coordinating access to services that you depend on
- suggesting, negotiating, and advocating for improvements to those services
- etc, etc.
It's very difficult, if not impossible, to leverage Google's environment to succeed without a lot of human interaction.
Regardless, I worked at Google for many years and agree with him.
Implementing MapReduce, BigTable, MegaStore, even things like G+ or Teams is not a people oriented task. It involves long hours of working with machines, alone, punctuated with code reviews in which your code is systematically criticised by your co-workers but in a predictable and non personal way. There are occasional meetings but most engineers I knew there saw meetings as a necessary evil and got annoyed if they were too frequent.
When I was a SWE the bulk of my work hours were spent working entirely with machines, or with processes that were run by people but were largely mechanical and formalised, like resource requests.
I believe this sudden argument that coding is a highly social activity is motivated reasoning. The motivation being to try and arrive at the politically correct opinions required to survive in the modern Google workplace. If you tried to describe programming as a highly social and people-oriented activity to the average man on the street they would think you were bullshitting them, I have no doubt about that at all.
Teaching is people oriented. Social care is people oriented. Most of your working hours are spent in front of people, talking to them. Programming is the opposite - most of your hours are spent in front of a machine. Talking to others is probably not the bulk of your job. If it is you probably aren't a developer, regardless of what you might think: you might be a tech lead manager at most.
Are you saying all of those projects at Google are owned by individuals who don't spend time interacting with others on the codebase? That doesn't sound like a very sustainable organizational model.
The social aspect of coding may be currently trumped up, but if so, it's only in compensation to how its social aspect has been traditionally underrated. Any type of work at a company involves social interaction, communication, teamwork, etc. Coders aren't solitary medieval monks illuminating manuscripts by their lonesome
No. That's not a reasonable interpretation of anything I said.
All the programs I mentioned are written by groups of people. Despite that if you measure each hour in their day and classify it as "in front of a machine" vs "in front of people" you will find nearly all are in the first category.
Now if you further sub-divide "in front of a machine" and classify time by "time spent in a text editor coding" vs "time spent emailing, filing tickets etc" then most time will still be in the first category, unless something has gone badly wrong at Google since I left.
Interactions with people are, in programming projects like that, a means to an end. Usually the end being some concrete outcome like a machine allocation or a cross-check for bugs. There may sometimes be design or brainstorming sessions, MapReduce being famously designed over many cups of coffee between Jeff Dean and his colleagues like Sanjay Ghemawat. But these conversations are entirely work focused. They aren't about people or relationships. And the time spent drinking coffee whilst figuring out the design is ultimately dwarfed by the long term effort required to build and maintain the software itself.
Sure, you can say time spent in front of a machine is the value center, and time spent interacting with others (in interminable meetings, at stand-ups, etc.) are cost centers. But it's generally accepted around here that neglecting cost centers is a strategic miscalculation, no?
From the skill perspective, sure, you need all this interaction (and the skills for it) to succeed. However, if you look at the time spent, some roles and career paths will spend 80% of their time working with machines, and some will spend like 80% of their time with people - and this expectation on how they'll spend most of their working day will make some of these paths (un)attractive to some of the people, in proportions that are highly correlated with gender.
Don't take my word for it though:
https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/professions-wo...
Either way the witch hunt needs to cease immediately.
This is popular to say, and there certainly are some knee jerk reactions. But my experience has been that most people are quite willing to discuss nuanced points about this topic, and most topics.
What's not tolerated is more specific: a lack of emotional nuance and an insistence that scientific truth is the only possible truth. As if emotions aren't a huge and valid part of human experience.
But I don't see a witch hunt. People are debating whether or not he should have been fired. He's not going to jail, and he is highly employable. And he did violate Google's code of conduct, which is a reasonable cause for getting fired.
There is a single central point where everyone on both sides of this debate are getting stuck and that is in the nature of the term "Sexism." What helped me to better understand what people mean when they say "Sexism" is to replace that word with the phrase: "Males Competing For Limited Resources With Females."
Once I made that mental shift I really was able to bridge to a place where I can sort of see what people from the Left are trying to say (but the problem is they are using a meaningless and overwrought phrase to get there and also attempting to jam insane ideas down people's throats using Orwellian tactics along the way while holding onto delusional optimistic views about reality). ahem
There are limited jobs at Google, very very high paying jobs which everyone in the entire world wants. There are people living in absolutely desperate circumstances all around America (let alone the entire globe!) who would basically kill for a job at Google. You see people lying in their own filth every day in downtown San Francisco who can't hold a job down and pay rent. The ones who can actually afford rent (barely) are sometimes not all that much better off.
If you think these people are going to be nice to one another once they get inside Google and are competing for the same promotions, you are hilariously wrong.
I have seen myself what men in large corporations are willing to do to one another in a closed environment with few promotions and resources: We are f*cking really mean to one another. We back-stab. We lie. We undermine. I have done it myself, it was fun when I was winning and awful when it was being done to me.
Large corporations spend a tremendous amount of money on PR and marketing to polish their images, but inside they are filled with men acting like rats trapped in a jar with dwindling food pellets: They eat each other sometimes. Maybe 15-35% of the time, but its enough.
Now add in a couple women to this environment: The experiment ends badly for them unless some structures are put into place. Men can and will tend to use whatever techniques they have at their disposal to get rid of or manipulate those around them. This includes being condescending and demeaning to reduce the influence of women.
However, no matter what you do. No matter how much you train your workforce, when you lift the lid you are going to find the following: Men competing with women and other men for few resources and promotions.
The problem is that corporations are built around making employees compete with one another. Thats how promotions work! Thats how money and stock are allocated: You did better than your peers or screwed them over so they failed.
The biggest lie companies like Google and Facebook tell the world is that they are lovely meritocracies ruled by fairness when they aren't. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon all share the same thing in common: People competing using whatever tools they have to get few resources.
All this SJW bullshit is simply an attempt to polish what is fundamentally a smiling bloodsport and always will be, its how corporations work.
Are people so afraid of having a discussion with opposing views that they shut down any conversation they don't like with downvotes. If you disagree say why and give the person a chance to respond.
It's about time we started considering other, more constructive ways of cleaning up our collective mess.
'The bigger mistake in Damore’s memo is one I see frequently: Assuming that job skills and performance can be deduced from differences among demographic groups.'
From my understanding, Damore does not argue this. Instead, he argues that job skill and performances in groups might be deduced from differences in demographic groups. I don't recall Damore every claiming that differences in a group make an individual less skilled.
I think this confusion arises from a misunderstanding of Damore's argument flow, which goes something like this:
1. Women as a group tend to be interested in things other than programming, so there are fewer female programmers overall relative to their population.
2. Because there are fewer female programmers, there are fewer female programmers applying to google.
3. The distribution of skills in the population of female programmers that apply to google is identical to the distribution of skills to the male programmers that apply to Google. (This is an important assumption that we don't have a lot of data for)
4. Google wishes to hire women in proportion to their representation in the general population (looots of anecdotal support for this point).
Conclusion: Google hires a larger percentage of their female applicant than their male applicants. Because of point 3, they will end up hiring more low skilled females than males[1].
You'll notice that a lot hinges on point 3. There is some data to suggest that women self select much more when applying to a job than men do, thus it's possible that the distribution of female engineers applying to google is either more high skilled, or the distribution is right shifted, than the distribution of skills among male engineers. If this shift was big enough, google would not require special considerations in order to hire a larger percentage of female, than male applicants. Since Google's discriminatory hiring practices are one of the worst kept secrets in the tech industry, it's unlikely that the skill distribution among female applicants is that skewed, though there is very likely some skew.
Point 1 is interesting because it suggests that the fundamental problem is not Google's fault so it can't be fixed by Google's hiring or retention practices. Even if point 1 is actually "Women as a group are discouraged from being programmers therefore there are fewer female programmers", it still puts the problem squarely outside Google's hiring and retention practices.
[1]The actual error being made here is much more complex. Since hiring is an error prone process, a certain percentage of unsuitable candidates will be hired. Since there are so many more men hired by Google than women, even lacking any positive discrimination in favor of women, there will be far more low skilled men hired than low skilled women. What would actually happen is that the error rate for hiring low skilled candidates would be much higher for women than for men. Absent any other intervention, this could lead to a lower retention rate for female hires as managers realize that their skills are not up to par. Thus Google also introduces a plethora of retention programs designed to raise the skill level of the female engineers.
Note that these low skilled female hires are not low skilled because they are women, but they are low skilled because Google was less stringent while hiring them. This argument is not sufficient to say if a particular female engineered is low skilled, only that if you were to evaluate and group the skills of all the female and male developers, the female skill distribution would have a larger left tail than the male left tail. Thus for a given female engineer, they are more likely to be low skilled, despite the fact that you will almost certainly meet more low skilled male engineers.
While much has been made of a Harvard education being no substitute for social intelligence, Damore is no slouch and really does just seem like a disgruntled employee who devised an almost surgical peace-out that would ensure he was compensated for life. This will be one interesting lawsuit.
There's no right to free speech in the work place. If he was fired for something he wrote on his private blog, or discussed with coworkers at an off-site bar, that might be different.
If he does sue, Google will have little problem showing that the employee, through his memo, has created a hostile workplace for women at Google.
For example, in California it is illegal to fire someone for "political activity", which this memo, debateably, may have been.
It is also illegal in California to fire someone for bringing up workplace concerns (this falls under union/worker organizing laws).
Finally, and most ironically, it is illegal to fire someone for bringing up discrimination concerns, EVEN IF those concerns turn out to be false/not illegal/not discrimination.
This guy, debateably, was bringing up discrimination concerns.
How it could be more political or about discrimination concerns?
"6 Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs"
....discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done)....
Wonder if he has proof?
Can you point out the part of his memo that created a hostile environment for women?
I don't think this is the case. The letter comes off as very genuine. It very much feels like what a immature "tech bro" would write. So much so when I first read it, I only skimmed it because it was so drab. You could have been at a bar surrounded by a bunch of drunk tech employees and heard very much the same thing. I only read it in entirety after the buzz got to loud to ignore.
Also I don't think there's a good chance he'll win a discrimination case against Google.
How many steps ahead did he see exactly?
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/damages-wrongful-term...
I believe the memo is irrelevant not because of its content, but rather because it's embarrassingly reductive. In my opinion, anyone that takes it seriously validates Damore's ultra-reductive approach to social policy -- and this is, I think, unequivocally wrong.
I recently wrote a blog post, Confusing Math with Morality[1], in which I touch on a similar subject matter. The problem with smart non-liberal-science people is that they think they are just that -- smart -- when, in fact, the emotional intelligence of STEM majors is barely average[2][3]. Now this doesn't mean that this disqualifies math-y people from having opinions on social policy, but it certainly means I value their opinions much less. In the market of ideas, theirs are simply not worth a whole lot.
For example, you may think you have an educated opinion on abortion, or euthanasia, or nuclear proliferation. But the reality is that you don't. And I've been called an elitist before, but until you take a few semesters on abortion[4] and read some court opinions, your views are simply not worth much of a damn.
And, as far as Damore is concerned, it's a very similar scenario. He's trying to argue for or against some kind of social policy, but he simply has no idea what he's talking about. I doubt he's even heard of Bakke v. UC Regents, never-mind read Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. Knowing about these is very important in the context of gender/race/etc. policies. My point is only that strong, sweeping opinions and viewpoints need to be properly contextualized. There are, of course, good arguments on both sides. But Damore makes none of them -- or even if he does, it's merely accidental to his "spray and pray" strategy.
And to be frank, I see this at work (and saw this at school) all the time. I've always tried to be broad in my education (both formal and otherwise) -- my grandmother was in charge of a library and I couldn't live without books. If you talk to a programmer and ask them what's the last book that they read, they'll probably mention something programming-related. If you ask them what news they read, they'll probably say slashdot. I had a co-worker recently question why I read fiction -- after all, we can expense any programming book we set our sights on. And don't think I'm ragging on programming books, I even wrote one! My point is only about the type of person attracted to this type of work -- and perhaps how STEM degrees have failed us. It doesn't seem like we are educating a generation of Isaac Newtons, but rather an army of regurgitating robots.
Damore is intellectually lazy in a sea of intellectual laziness. His views might be wrong or might be right, but his intellectual sloth is unforgivable.
[1] https://dvt.name/2017/07/10/confusing-math-with-morality/
[2] http://www.recsam.edu.my/R&D_Journals/YEAR2008/dec2008vol2/e...
[3] http://publisher-connector.core.ac.uk/resourcesync/data/else...
[4] You could also be self-taught, but that's a slippery slope. Ethics is much harder than Calculus.
Really the above thought is related to the "worth" of views or arguments. I'm not sure there's more than a tenuous link between many practical worths and specialized study in a college.
Do you realize you just used a population statistics to argue that the population as a whole is worse at certain task than another population, and discount the opinion of individuals in that population?
Also, based on the studies you cited, STEM majors have barely average emotional intelligence, of which one component is empathy (your [2][3]). Is there a reason why STEM major tend to attract people of average empathy? Could the same reason be driving away people with higher than average empathy? Does women have higher empathy on average as a population compare to men?
edit: added line break between quote and comment
Btw, you catch more flies with honey...
Until we either have artificial wombs or completely change the laws dealing with childbearing to deal with the actual childbearing rather than serve an outdated form of social contract (marriage) there will never be a true resolution.
This is an attempt at curating a list of relevant math and rationality articles, so that we can at least speak the same language when talking about this.
Start here: I personally view it as the base model of all beliefs that we can hold. It talks about some kinds of things that we can know and how much we should have confidence in what we know.
Bayes theorem: http://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_guide
What is belief and what is reality. An existential notion of truth that I subscribe to.
https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/confidence-interval.html
Let's say I give you a biased coin, but don't tell you what the bias is. You make 10 flips and record what you see. What can you tell about the coin and how much confidence can you have in your assertions?
You out right take an unreasonable course of action, "predict" that there will be negative out comes from it, and cry foul when those negative outcomes come to fruition. What's sickening is how dishonest that is, what's disheartening is that the memo's creator is being defended by a sizable audience in the tech community.
There's a good deal of irony where the memo wanted to remove emotion from the conversation and face the "true" facts, yet the defenders of this guy want to cry about free speech (that isn't being violated) and defend terribly contrived pseudo-scientific points just to be outraged to defend some principle that was never being threatened in the first place.
It seems to be a continuing trend that people aligning to one side of the political spectrum are surprised when the rest of society rebukes them, and they get unimaginably offended at the reality that people actually react to things you do and say, especially when the latter statements are completely baseless.
I can barely understand what point you are trying to make; why don't you just come out and say it?
>I’m not remotely surprised, however, that Damore naturally assumes the differences between typically female and male traits mean that men are more skilled.
He never said or implied that. The whole problem is people overreacting about what they read in to it.
And coincidentally, it is also a consistent argument that having a memory of these threads is either unfair or unsportsmanlike.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977201 and marked it off-topic.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14976935 and marked it off-topic.
Think about it: if you successfully offset the problem, it’d just entrench the root causes making everything seem erroneously fine, or normalizing instituionalized sexist behavior.
If the problem exists due to an imbalance, an offset can improve it.
"I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary."
> The point is, it's obvious we don't live in such a fair world, but one where women are kept from succeeding by sexism. By not hiring them, or not promoting them, or not treating them fairly otherwise, not because they as individuals have flaws, but just because they are women. In this situation, noticing this and attempting to neutralise it is actually beneficial.
Edit: Oops, that's in a comment. Sorry. So the best quote is:
> I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women.