Comment by saidajigumi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saidajigumi | Hacker News Reader

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Except, as has been pretty well documented elsewhere, it was not intelligent discourse. Whatever productive content may have been present, it was overwhelmed by the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.

Endlessly, emphatically parroting what is ultimately discriminatory nonsense is an aggressive action against others, not "just an opinion". E.g. [1], and numerous other examples. My favorite, which I'm having trouble digging up the citation for, is a recent-ish study that compared test performance of various minority/gender groups based on social anxiety measures (e.g. "girls aren't good at math")... and found that it was literally possible to turn this difference on and off like a switch based on triggering vs disarming these anxieties as part of the test setup. This literally flies the in face of the schoolyard "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" mantra so ingrained in US culture. It turns out, we have increasingly good scientific evidence that humans just don't work that way.

Let's be clear about that: being a toxic jerk to {insert out-group here} actively harms those people, and can directly harm their performance orthogonally to their actual potential capabilities. "Yeah, I'm meritocratic in footraces, but only when I can stick thorns in my competitors' shoes."

[1] https://psychcentral.com/news/2010/03/19/negative-effects-of...

> a recent-ish study that compared test performance of various minority/gender groups...

You are referring to the idea of "stereotype threat" which, alas, did not survive the replication crisis.

Quote "After correcting for publication bias, this literature shows very little evidence that stereotype threat has a notable and practically significant effect on women’s math performance (Flore & Wicherts, 2014)."

Some analysis: https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/hidden-fig...

Direct study link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022440514...

> it was overwhelmed by the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.

This is why what Damore did is important and why having the discussion is important. People like you either mistakenly believe this or are being deliberately manipulative and misleading by claiming the science is settled. In fact, the science is not settled, and if anything it is leaning in Damore's favor. That you and people like you want to believe one thing very much is not a substitute for the actual truth to the rest of us, and never will be.

>if anything it is leaning in Damore's favor.

This isn't true.

Sure it is, and a number of scientists in the relevant fields have spoken up and said so. Here's a start for you: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...

No it's not. Here's a start:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

What's funny about that link is that when she refers to the scientific claims she mostly seems to agree that they are well founded. Apart from that she seems to reading a lot of stuff into the memo that Damore probably wouldn't agree is there, and getting offended. I.e. he is a racist/sexist/alt-right bigot.

You mean she agrees that there are differences between men and women? Sure, most people do. But she doesn't agree that there is a basis for the idea that men would make better programmers than women because of something at the biological or genetic level, which is really the contention around Damore's memo.

>Apart from that she seems to reading a lot of stuff into the memo that Damore probably wouldn't agree is there, i.e. he is a racist/sexist/alt-right bigot.

Well his first interview was with Stefan Molyneux and he's done another with Jordan Peterson. I'm assuming Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern are next? Come on. The thing about writing a dogwhistling document like his memo is you have to keep your true beliefs secret. By running straight to some of the darlings of the alt-right he's exposed himself a bit and his dogwhistles become clear as exactly that.

>men would make better programmers than women because of something at the biological or genetic level, which is really the contention around Damore's memo.

Where does he say this?

As for the interviewers, so what? Either the claims are supported by the facts or not, who's agenda is served by those facts is an entirely separate issue.

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. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

The "and abilities" part is the important bit because it's where he makes a logical leap. So here's what I'm going to ask of you as someone who seems to like Damore's document and likes the scientific process behind it. Can you find me scientific evidence that men are biologically predisposed to have greater tech abilities?

I'm not sure what Damore is referring to in that specific quote, but there is evidence of relevant differences, especially if you're talking about recruitment numbers for a company like Google:

"A 2005 study by Ian Deary, Paul Irwing, Geoff Der, and Timothy Bates, focusing on the ASVAB showed a significantly higher variance in male scores, resulting in more than twice as many men as women scoring in the top 2%"

..."the study indicated that, while boys and girls performed similarly on average, boys were over-represented among the very best performers as well as among the very worst."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...

Has there ever been an independent study of how well ASVAB results correlate to later professional success in tech?

I took the ASVAB as a teen, and I was relentlessly pursued by military recruiters for years afterward.

Except that same wikipedia article has a whole huge section titled Researchers in favor of no sex differences or inconclusive consensus and also includes this sentence: "The current literature on sex differences produced inconsistent results depending on the type of testing used." It sorta seems like you read until you found a sentence you liked and then didn't go any further... It's not a settled issue at all AND the ASVAB study you're picking doesn't actually connect anything to a biological basis. This is why Damore's paper is bad and why I'm sad that the community is taking it seriously as a scientific source. Some of his statements are cited but plenty aren't and because a fair amount of the people reading it already agree with him, Damore's leaps of logic don't pop out to them. It's not a good paper and it's not very scientific.

Admitting the science isn't settled is enough for me, I'm all for more open discussion on it, and I think that's what Damore was after too.

> when she refers to the scientific claims she mostly seems to agree that they are well founded.

What part of this answer makes you say that? She is quoting directly from the paper a bunch of times, offering refutations, and providing sources. I agree that she is reading into the memo. I don't agree that she is agreeing with the science -- she's spent thousands of words doing the exact opposite.

You know, every single person on the internet that I've seen argue that the science is solid in the Google memo point to this article in The Globe and Mail. It's bizarre.

I've tried to toe the line and not get into the argument as much as I can because, as evidenced by the previous HN thread [1], it's just two sides yelling past each. Some are citing scientific papers stating they are correct (which a single paper does not make), others are arguing based on remembering other scientific papers and virtually no one seems to be an expert but are all commenting as such.

What I would like to point out is the article in question isn't very well sourced. It points to "four - academic studies" [2] [3] [4] [5] but none of those are actual studies; they're all replies to a single study (Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic [6]) and none include a methodology to how they came to their reply conclusion as the full text barely contains anything additional to the extract. Now I'm not writing them off as wrong but those are being misrepresented as studies without having the proper information a study or research paper would require. Unless it's available elsewhere? It's unclear at least to me and appears, again to me, as very misleading.

Ultimately there is a boat load of research out there. Some of it is going to support the Google memo writing. Some of it will not. Some of it can be used to represent both sides of the argument. I think a better article, should one exist, should be used to defect your viewpoint should you side with the Google memo. Much of science requires a consensus and rock solid testing methodologies and I'm just not seeing that sourced in the article.

Again, I am not an expert but this is my impression from this article. Feel free to make any corrections to my statement :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952787

[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1968.extract

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1971.extract

[4] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1966.extract

[5] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1965.full.pdf

[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4687544/

That article is circulated because it showed up here and, unlike a lot of the blogspam, the author has the credentials to have an informed opinion about the current research. Here's another one, but from a Psychologist rather than a neurologist.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...

> the author has the credentials to have an informed opinion about the current research

If you say so. I'm not an expert but as I wrote in my comment it appears either terribly sourced or the author equates replies to research as full blown studies.

> Here's another one, but from a Psychologist rather than a neurologist.

This one, as far as I can tell, mostly ignores much of the critical feedback that I've seen so far. Again, I'm not an expert but I'm surprised it doesn't call this out explicitly and in greater detail if the critics are wrong. Like, it has some small references to it but not a lot of direct discussion around it.

Not that all of the critical articles are better in terms of sources, etc I just haven't seen any of the articles in support of the memo be very well sourced or respond to much of the criticism directly.

Yes, yes yes, the science is settled (tm), after all 97% of scientists agree. And the case is closed. Yupper.

The willful misrepresentation of the memo is one of the reasons he got more support than usual. Most people who argued on the scientific basis mostly concurred and a few disagreed. There is nothing "overly debunked".

> senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense

Could you provide some references for this claim? Because Damore did.

Even if what Damore wrote was "long-debunked", it's the sort of thing that a pretty big chunk of the U.S. population believes to be more-or-less accurate. Lots of people are wrong about things and don't know it. Them being wrong does not justify an attempt to burn them at the stake; it justifies an attempt to calmly yet firmly explain the errors in the subjects' beliefs (and then maybe burn them at the stake - figuratively, plesse, not literally - if they choose to ignore the counterevidence).

Having read the memo, I rather strongly disagree with the "toxic jerk" characterization you've given. Yammering fool, sure, but not (deliberately) malicious.

You know what is not intelligent discourse? Equating what was said in the memo as harassment by citing this:

> They asked 114 undergraduate female students to watch a video and imagine themselves as bystanders to a situation where a man made either a sexist catcall remark (“Hey Kelly, your boobs look great in that shirt!”) at another woman or simply greeted her (“Hey Kelly, what’s up?”).

Maybe you could provide a citation instead for this?

> the senseless repetition of long-debunked stereotypical nonsense.

Especially that few scientists are on record saying that the memo is solid on science, and the quoted research is not only not debunked, but also not even controversial in sociological circles.

> pretty well documented elsewhere

In a strange place no one can seem to name.. funny how the existence of this "documentation" is so often assumed, but not so often referenced..

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