Hacker News Reader

Comment by merpnderp | Hacker News Reader

"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."

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.

View on HN

I didn't read it that way. To me it was strongly making the case for statistical differences between women and men that matter, which is what I disagree with. I guess everyone reads into that memo what they want.

I don't understand how you could read it that way. In the memo's suggestions sections he clearly states that people should be treated as individuals. Is there some other way to read that section? Bold is my own.

> 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).

No he CLAIMED he wanted to treat people like individuals, but that's literally, completely negated by the rest of his memo. He cites statistics with some sources that aren't even reputable and others than haven't been touched in a quarter of a century, and when there is credible science he attempts to create detached conclusions that implied that these certain psychological traits across various populations were somehow applicable to the professions those populations are in -- with absolutely NO substantive data on the subject. He literally just winged it and went "Obviously these traits, that are barely statistically significant across the general population, SURELY negatively affects being an engineer or a manager. Just believe it. Moving on here are my totally worthless solutions at solving my totally made up, detached conclusions."

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.

Yeah, there's no evidence for gender preferences at all, except for the tons of evidence for gender preferences. This evidence is certainly up for debate, but don't go preaching on your high horse about how it is settled and no one has ever studied this, and how dare he even make an argument.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

Err, where did I say there's no evidence for gender preferences? Where did I say it's settled? Why are you characterizing my statement as "preaching on a high horse" simply because I recognize that forming conclusions based on disparate sets of data (some of which is continually contradicted) is not a rational thing to do?

>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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com