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Comment by anabis | Hacker News Reader

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers being fired in 2006 showed that there could be no rational discussion of this topic. Sad to see it unchanged in 2017.

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.

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I wish this Larry Summers martyr mythology would be revisited with scrutiny. Summers was already unpopular with the faculty for his changes to the core curriculum (it was argued that they reduced rigor in some tracks), endowment strategy, and a very strange scandal involving financial wrongdoing in Russia and a massive Harvard payout. He made his comments to a group including top female faculty during a time when they had made specific complaints concerning - among other things - severely family-unfriendly campus policies that disparately impact women. The faculty, many of whom were completely on board with the concept of sex differences in personality, saw his inartful "mama truck, daddy truck" comments as an attempted rebuttal. His comments - in this context - were pure toxoplasma, so of course they are what the media seized upon.

For example, one of the specific complaints of the faculty at the time was that the advertised perk of on-site daycare was an extremely small number of places in the basement of a trailer on land not owned by the University (and so possibly subject to return to Cambridge). The environment at the time was tense, and the faculty appear to have opportunistically seized on the brouhaha to weaken a disliked leader. Many female faculty publicly supported the topic of the comments themselves (as I recall, the most vocal were an economist in favor and a very famous biologist against - the biologist appeared to interpret to the comments as a direct comment on the ability of the Harvard faculty)

I mean, you linked to a white supremacist's blog to prove your point. Is that a good case for your argument?

OK, OK. I noticed that the parent link has the same image, so fixed.

Definitely not better man... There are nazi memes and misoginistic memes on the new link.

Have you read the parent article?

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" .

This poll only had about 400 self-selected participants. That doesn't make for reliable numbers at all.

> Doubly sad because if the anonymous survey linked in the post is true

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.

Does this online text editor support viewing older revisions and changesets? (I have never used Google Docs, which I assume is used within Google.) If this is the case, I'd like to see a copy of this rumored earlier version. The one I have read obviously had a response added to it, but if things have been cut without indication, that would change my opinion much more dramatically.

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