Google Doesn't Want What's Best for Us
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> If women should not even have the vote, why should we worry about gender diversity in the engineering ranks?
These two paragraphs read as a microcosm of this whole episode. Think what you may about Peter Thiel, but the quote does not say or even suggest that "women should not even have the vote." It merely points out that as the voting public has been broadened, it has been broadened to include sectors that are not (historically) as amenable to limited-government policies. Therefore, the relative popularity of limited-government policy among the totality of voters has diminished, suggesting that democracy and capitalism are presently at odds. Reading the quote with a reasonable level of charity suggests Thiel would prefer to convince these voters of the appeal of limited-government policy, not revoke their right to vote. Simultaneously, he is also presumably arguing, as many others have, that simply increasing voter turnout does not necessarily lead to better governance.
Can the New York Times point to any quote from Thiel that justifies the implication they have made here: that Thiel believes women should not have the right to vote? Perhaps there is one; I really don't know much about Thiel. But this quote alone isn't it.
(1) Thiel opposes capitalism,
(2) Thiel opposes democracy,
(3) Thiel opposes women holding the franchise.
The piece in question seems to choose #3, which is the most natural reading, but I think #2 is plausible as well. Thiel clearly supports capitalism, so it's not #1.
1. The quote being discussed doesn't require this.
2. If Peter Thiel doesn't like democracy (and therefore would like no one to vote) it would be misleading (although technically accurate) to describe that as Peter Thiel not wanting women/minorities to vote.
It is completely reasonable to take context into account when doing this sort of interpretation, but it is important to be explicit about what context is included in the analysis. The article we are discussing is being criticized for being dishonest in this regard, which is why the distinction between "implied by this quote" and "implied by something else he said" is important.
That is, how did you get from a description of what is, to inferring what the author thinks ought to be?
The description of things a logically incompatible (“oxymoron”) means that support for one logically excludes support for the others. Thiel's description of capitalist democracy as oxymoronic in the presence of women voting excludes support for the combination.
(Though his other statements outside of the one in question suggests democracy, not women's suffrage within it, is the piece he has come to oppose in light of perceiving the incompatibility.)
A leg may support a table. That doesn't mean it has an opinion on the matter.
No, I'm not. I'm using it strictly in the latter sense. (I am, of course, assuming that Thiel has a minimum degree of rationality, and thus does not hold positions he himself describes as logically incompatible.)
Anyway, this school of thought espouses that capitalism and democracy are inherently incompatible. Democracy is seen as a slightly longer but sure road towards communism (as Karl Marx himself said [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_Marxism]).
The logic here being that, if the criteria by which elected officials get into government is by promising the demos more and more government handouts, then the logical conclusion is that at some point, we'll have transitioned from democracy to communism.
The Austro-anarchists' solution is therefore to nip it in the bud and ensure that society doesn't employ democracy from the onset.
Not really. I can't remember Marx, but Marxists after him have made the distinction between what they call 'bourgeois democracy' and proletarian democracy. Marx was careful not to say that democracy inevitably leads to Socialism, and in fact correctly notes that proletarian movements have been supressed in democracies, such that revolution would be the only possible way.
>The logic here being that, if the criteria by which elected officials get into government is by promising the demos more and more government handouts, then the logical conclusion is that at some point, we'll have transitioned from democracy to communism.
This line of thought is ridiculous. Communism isn't about "handouts", it's got nothing to do with "handouts". More "handouts" doesn't mean Communism. Which people are proposing that Communism is about handouts? I can't imagine that there are intellectuals so misinformed about the aims of Communism such that they think it merely comes about by giving a lot of money away.
>The Austro-anarchists' solution is therefore to nip it in the bud and ensure that society doesn't employ democracy from the onset.
Then the Autro-anarchist position is flawed for the reasons I have stated.
Then it would behoove you to tell me what redistribution is all about (or for that matter what communists today like to call re-redistribution).
> Last week, Google fired a software engineer for writing a memo that questioned the company’s gender diversity policies and made statements about women’s biological suitability for technical jobs.
This is a huge misrepresentation of the ideas of the memo.
This level of journalism, both from the writer and from the editors, is disappointing.
(but he makes factual errors, so his argument is false)
Google's current programs are ineffective and discriminatory, so alternative programs and work culture should be considered to achieve higher diversity.
It is a result that the author of that memo should have reached after counseling and seeing evidence supportting of /equality/ programs actually being about equal treatment (or at least fair, as in having multiple possible measurements and a consistent policy of utilizing the best scores to reach a determination.).
I feel like a lot of animosity was allowed to fester among all parties due to a lack of intelligent, open, and respectful discourse about problems and perceived problems.
He clearly has beef with the unfair nature of those programs but they are still the best way I know of concretely responding to realities of a complicated world filled with prejudice and bias beyond any one organization's control. There's always room for improvement based on new data though.
Often, but not necessarily. Since this is a forum for people who like to be technically correct, I'll throw my two cents in here.
To give an example, let's assume that there's a split between group A and group B between high cost and low cost universities. Group A are 90% of the high cost students and group B are 90% of the low cost students. Google send representatives to mostly the high cost universities at the moment, because they're assumed to have the best students. This is resulting in a remarkably large proportion of As at Google. To counteract this, you could go and explicitly target Bs, which would fit with your description. Or, you could lower your threshold and start sending reps to lower cost unis as well. This increases diversity yet at no point is specifically preferring Bs.
I picked this example of high cost/low cost unis purely because it's easy, not to make any statement about whether this kind of thing happens or is important for future performance. this is also not a hugely important point, but it was floating about in my head.
Let's say Google has 10 reps, and in the old days 8 went to A, 2 to B. If they now send 5 to A and 5 to B... The A group will feel that they lost something, and the B group will feel like they never even HAD 8 reps, so not necessarily feel that things have become fair... It might be fairest to have a period of 2 going to A and 8 going to B for the same length of time that 8 went to A, and THEN balance it to 5 and 5... But if A suddenly goes from 8 to 2... well, those people are going to be writing memos like nobody's business about it. Even at 5 and 5, there will be memos. Even at 7 and 3, possibly. The slightest change to the status quo could provoke a memo.
(and for the record I do appreciate this comment, in case that didn't come across.. I'm responding in a similar spirit... not important but worth thinking through all the same)
How big part of the memo is focused on differences between the sexes? The section called Personality differences that everyone talks about is:
11 lines, 245 words, 1662 bytes.
Even if we include the only other place in the memo which reference this section (Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap), we are only adding a total of 7 lines, 222 words and an additional 1402 bytes.
The large focus of the memo was political diversity. About 97 lines, 1671 words and 11071 byes was written on that topic.
Some of his suggestions implied that Google work practices could be more welcoming to people who enjoy more teamwork in their day-to-day (the bit about pair programming). And he mentioned that more flexible work arrangements would benefit people who wanted a different balance of work and family life. Both points imply that women want those things more (plausibly true, but I think that's an empirical question). So he thinks women generally want to work differently, but that's not saying he thinks they do worse work. If he thought that, he'd recommend putting women in less important roles or giving them easier work.
Women are perfectly capable of choosing jobs they like.
That leaves a lot out, but it's the high order bit.
"Non-discriminatory [against men] ways to increase women's representation in tech include making engineering people-oriented (rather than systems-oriented), disincentivizing competition, endorsing part-time work, and making it socially acceptable for men to leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles, but a meaningful application of these strategies would prevent driven employees (mostly men) from working extra hours or taking extra stress, which would have disastrous consequences for Google's success."
> This is a huge misrepresentation of the ideas of the memo.
People encouraging a 'charitable' reading of the memo have argued that the memo says that Google shouldn't aim for 50/50 diversity as a goal (or that increasing gender representation as an end in itself is likely to lead to sub-optimal outcomes), and that women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles. I'm really trying quite hard to think where the misrepresentation comes in, or indeed, if it's not about that, what the memo is actually about.
It doesn't help that in the English language the word "disposition" can be used to mean both innate tendency and preference. When I say "I have a nervous disposition" I mean "I have an innate nervous tendency" rather than "I prefer to act nervously", but "disposition" can also mean "the power to do with something as one pleases." The fact that he does pair it with "innate" suggests that this preference is something we are born with however, and something that would indeed impinge on our biological suitability for a role.
He even goes as far as to suggest that "there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles" 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)." It seems clear to me that he is using quite causal language there, and this isn't just a "preference" for people-oriented roles he's talking about.
Also, to be charitable to NYT, the fact that we are having to be this forensic with language over something that was written last week (as opposed to Plato's Republic, written 5000 years ago and which has been through many translations), and still can't agree what the memo is about, probably suggests that any misinterpretation is understandable and probably not borne of malice.
Not sure where you get "suitability" out of that. And not sure where you get "suitability" out of either "tendency" or "preference". Unless maybe the most adversarial reading possible, and even then...not really.
> "there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles" can be
Yes, and? In order for those who prefer more people-oriented roles to want/prefer/enjoy those roles. Incidentally: both men and women (larger overlaps, remember?)
> this isn't just a "preference" for people-oriented roles he's talking about.
That is exactly what he is talking about here.
> having to be this forensic with language
Not really. What is in the memo is fairly simple and obvious. It's the misrepresentations that twist themselves into interpretative pretzels.
If someone has a prevailing tendency, and it's a prevailing tendency that they are born with (i.e. an innate prevailing tendency), and that tendency impacts their ability to carry out certain roles, then they are innately less suitable for those roles. The second half is you selecting one definition of disposition (the "preference" one), and basing your argument on that.
Similarly, a disposition that applies generally to a gender doesn't mean that gender is suitable or unsuitable - suitability is a term for policies that get applied to individuals.
You make an excellent point here. This is very common among James Damore's critics. Thank you for pointing this out.
What I see argued there is the tendency for women to prefer something like early childhood education or psychology over software engineering.
It has nothing to do with suitability at all.
See also: Why Brilliant Girls Prefer non STEM Subjects[1]
The studies it cites show that women who are good at math (SATs, I think) also have good verbal skills, so they simply have more options. And apparently people of either gender who have both options open to them prefer non-STEM.
That is even an ability difference (whether biological or not is irrelevant, though SAT scores appear to have a strong genetic component) that has nothing to do with women being "less suitable" for STEM and yet fewer women in STEM.
So your logic that any type of argument, even if it's just preferences, has to automatically mean that there is a claim (if hidden) women are less suited is quite simply wrong.
Apart from the mistake pointed out elsewhere of taking a statistical argument about populations that tries to explain population differences (and not individual differences) and turning it into exactly the essentialist argument you find objectionable.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Dictionaries define "suitable" in terms such as "such as to suit; appropriate; fitting; becoming", which all either carry a moral connotation (appropriate, becoming) or one of capability independent of volition (such as to suit, fitting). Let's not forget that one of the primary underlying moral motivators of the fight against sexism/discrimination against women is freedom (it's not an accident that "emancipation" means "release from captivity"). To turn, in this context, a statement that says that women do not want tech jobs into a statement that women can't do tech jobs (with a connotation of "even if they wanted") is not just a minor cosmetic change - along the axis that matters, it flips the meaning of the memo upside down.
We need to work on promoting common understanding and a common corpus of non-inflammatory definitions (i.e., the "charitable" interpretation of the other side) so that we can get back to the work of friendly political engagement and discussion. We must not be so quick to ostracize, mock, or dismiss those with whom we don't agree. It's usually not too hard to be sympathetic to their position if you strip away the political manipulation promoted by those who stand to benefit from divisiveness.
I don't think there's any conflating going on when he literally says biological differences in preferences and abilities explains why there aren't more women in tech.
_Here_ is where they misrepresent what he said. He didn't suggest that men and women differ in their suitability for different roles, but rather that men and women _generally_ differ in their suitability for different roles. There will always be deviations from the norm, and given the fact that there are known physical and psychological differences between the sexes[1], I don't see why those differences wouldn't lead to differences in career choice overall. However, there are plenty of women suited to be engineers and plenty of men not.
Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? If I am misinterpreting something, I would love to know the flaw in it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
I'm honestly not sure how one could in good faith make that case given the current climate. A couple weeks ago, I would have bet on his memo being generally derided but not anathematized.
> "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 also mentions this in one of his interviews [1].
Using this "on average" bullshit when making adverse reccomendations aimed specifically and directly people who are anything but is an especially nasty sleight-of-hand, and sound reason to disregard the writer's claims of good-faith and benovelence.
Of course, it's possible that Damore is just an brainless idiot who is too intellectually mediocre to check his own work for basic logical consistancy, but he lost the benefit of that particular doubt When putting Harvard and MIT on his CV.
At this level, the rules are different. If, like Damore, you're presenting yourself as one of the best and brightest, you better live up to a very high standard when taking public shots at the standards of others. Otherwise, you could get dumped very unceremoniously.
My guess is because you've condensed the central underlying premise into a compact, impossible to misunderstand, obfuscate, or mischaracterize idea, upon which a real discussion can be undertaken. This is counter to the goals of one side of this discussion, in my opinion.
Here is a direct quote from the memo:
"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."
This sounds exactly like what the above poster summarized: "women and men are biologically different in their suitability for different roles".
This sentence is nonsense, which you can tell from how you had to formulate the conclusion. Not "A therefore B" but "A therefore you can't rule out B."
Yes there are gender differences in psychology. But the link between the specific gender differences the Manifesto author pointed to and the conclusion is non existent. The piece is just a bunch of handwaving. It's the Chewbaca defense of sexist ranting.
The moment you point out that the same kind of argument was made about black people not long ago, most of the trolls just disappear.
He didn't say that either. In fact, he advocates for more diversity and suggests changes that, at least according to him, should increase diversity without the negatives he's concerned about.
The NYT piece could have just said something like, "...fired for harboring anti-diversity attitudes that are obvious from reading a deceptively worded diatribe," or something like that. At least be honest about what he literally said and what additional context and inferences add to the picture.
By now I'm convinced he wrote the memo in bad faith. The moment he beelined to every alt-right media outlet wearing a "Goolag" t-shirt it was clear this wasn't just an honest mistake. Even an idiot would understand that writing a memo setting up a "left vs. right" argument and then attacking Googlers as "repressors misguided by leftist ideals", while laying out a flawed biological argument for why "women are not well suited for engineering" is not going to go down smoothly.
It's no coincidence that he admittedly kept pushing this around when it got ignored until it eventually "made it to the public." Had he really wanted to have an honest discussion with HR about practices, he could've emailed them directly. Then he sued immediately after getting fired. Very tight timeline for a well-intentioned snafu.
> Why argue that it says things it doesn't?
Where did I do that?
> At least be honest about what he literally said and what additional context and inferences add to the picture.
At least be honest about the actual content of the memo. The additional context and inferences are just fluff to mask the base premise: "women are biologically different, that means they probably don't want to work here, please stop trying reaching out to them, you are discriminating against everyone else."
Here: "while laying out a flawed biological argument for why "women are not well suited for engineering" is not going to go down smoothly"
Do you actually not realize that's what he said? Since we're on HN, I bet you wouldn't make such a sloppy mistake of imprecision if the topic was something other than gender/race/sexuality.
So far I've gotten a lot of people saying "he didn't day that!" but without explaining what he said. Please clarify.
There have been at least two large threads on HN on this topic. You would have me believe everyone is saying "he didn't say that!" but with no explanation of what he he said?
What he said was that in the aggregate, women and men statistically have different interests, behaviors, and performance in different fields. I can't imagine how sheltered of a life you'd have to live to not be exposed to this in real life, or more appropriately, how intellectually dishonest you'd have to be to pretend you've never noticed.
To me, this rise of anti-intellectualism in the west is rather scary.
Fair enough. That's a valid theory to entertain, and I'm sure there's a growing body of science supporting both sides of the debate. Now, the question is this: if that was the case, how do we determine the extent to which the biological factors affect career selection, when we live in a society that encourages gender stereotypes? If we don't know the extent, how can we jump to conclusions about outreach generating "a discriminatory framework"?
That, at the end of the day, is my main complaint about Damore's memo. It's just a weak attempt at generating outrage.
> To me, this rise of anti-intellectualism in the west is rather scary.
Anti-intellectualism has many faces. The fact that we are discussing this in an open forum, and that we could probably sit on a coffee shop and have a civilized discussion about it is proof that the whole narrative about "liberal values = cultural Marxism" is at least partially bogus. Meanwhile, the same people who complained about stifling free speech at Google are threatening to leak the names of liberal Googlers to alt-right websites. Where's the outrage about that?
There is extensive study on this topic going back several decades, if you're interested in the topic, there's not shortage of material. There's also plentiful anecdotal material where college educated forward thinking mothers very quickly learned the reality of nature vs nature after bearing children of different genders.
> Meanwhile, the same people who complained about stifling free speech at Google are threatening to leak the names of liberal Googlers to alt-right websites. Where's the outrage about that?
I'd have absolutely no problem condemning that whatsoever. Imagining your philosophical "opponents" as some sort of one dimensional monsters isn't doing yourself or your movement any favors.
That would have been a valid claim until the unfortunate incidents in Charlottesville (and Bloomington before that, and Seattle before that...) People threatening to expose liberal Googlers to the same kind of ecochamber that celebrates someone driving a car into a crowd is beyond the pale. Anyone who takes so lightly potentially having blood in their hands is a monster.
This is my last comment regarding this topic.
That person being me presumably. Guilty until proven innocent, a recurring theme lately.
> This is my last comment regarding this topic.
What a loss.
EDIT: Seems I'm not being allowed to reply anymore (gee, where do conspiracy theories about censorship of conservative speech come from eh?), so I guess I'll have to reply here...
> No, I was talking about the Googlers who were threatening to leak names to alt-right websites.
You wanted the people that are threatening to leak names to be outraged at themselves? I think I'm losing track of all the parties involved in this vast criminal conspiracy.
Anyways, besides this entire topic being utterly pointless, if the right to speak freely is granted to only one side, I guess I should take the hint and adapt to our new world by keeping my mouth shut.
No, I was talking about the Googlers who were threatening to leak names to alt-right websites.
...which therefore explains the lack of women in tech and leadership. People are taking exception to the latter claim: that the biological differences between men and women justifies the lack of women in the tech industry. The former claim, that men and women are biologically different, is uncontroversial.
> I can't imagine how sheltered of a life you'd have to live to not be exposed to this in real life, or more appropriately, how intellectually dishonest you'd have to be to pretend you've never noticed.
You are conducting a straw man argument against a claim that the other side is has not actually made.
Did you use justifies instead of explains accidentally, or is that actually your understanding?
> The former claim, that men and women are biologically different, is uncontroversial.
Have you been reading the same discussions as I have?
> You are conducting a straw man argument against a claim that the other side is has not actually made.
The irony.
As it is to claim that the reason for so few women in the tech and leadership is due to sexism, no? Oops, I guess not, there I go with my old fashioned misogynistic presumption of innocence. Silly me thinking the onus should be on the person demanding special treatment to prove the need, when of course the onus should be on the person providing that special treatment to prove why it isn't needed. Guilty until proven innocent, it's a brave and confident new world.
Wait, then what was "and then to call for the elimination of programs designed to encourage more women in tech" all about? I'm now in the position of having absolutely no idea what you are fighting for....it's not for programs to increase female representation, I presume it's not against such programs.....so what is it then? I guess we'll never know, which is fairly common in these conversations, because simply asking seems to be too much to ask.
Edit: (Sticking around to dole out some downvotes though I see, that'll teach me!)
This is the "only the literal words should be taken" argument - but words can have contextual meanings above and beyond their literal meanings.
"Urban crime", for example, literally just means "crime in an urban environment" but is often used as a dogwhistle for "crimes committed by POC".
Same with Damore's memo - he may not literally have said the things people are seeing but - if you assume it was written in bad faith (which the pseudoscience and "I'm just asking the questions" would indicate) - the dogwhistles are clear.
I'd love to have my mind changed. Most of my friends are liberal and think this science is bunk, but from what I've read there is a lot of evidence that women are more interested in things than people, and a moderate amount of evidence that at least some of this preference is biological.
To clarify, I'm not saying that there's 0 possibility that there are differences between sexes, just that trying to rationalize the current gender imbalance in engineering as "girls being girls and boys being boys" is a bit disingenuous, considering different countries perform differently. This article has some interesting data to mull over: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/th...
There's no "right answer" right now, and yet there's a lot of people around here defending Damore's memo as if all the premises were completely accurate.
The idea that that women are more into people than men, who are more into things is much more well established. With large cross-cultural studies and meta-analysis showing one the largest effect sizes in social science.
Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why? http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x
Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/
But the % of women in CS doesn't seem to correlate very highly with my intuition about sexism. For instance I would never think that Mexico or Poland was a far less sexist place than Norway. Nor does it seem to correlate well with female student's math anxiety. Mexico and the U.S. seem to be very similar in terms of the math anxiety gap, but very far apart in term of number of female CS majors.
You could look at the charts and see support for the hypothesis that "there is variability in the % of women in CS therefore the difference is cultural" but you could also look at it and say "look across every cultural in the world women choose CS less often than men".
We also don't know why, it could be gender stereotypes about what field women go into, or it could be emphasis on passion vs income. With countries that place greater emphasis on community and income having larger numbers of women in CS, with countries that place greater emphasis on passion and interests having a lower number of women in CS.
Or they completely stop taking you seriously.
The increasing absurdity of this discussion is astonishing.
You take yourself really seriously, for someone defending the modern equivalent of phrenology.
> "we shouldn't do anything to increase diversity, because women are biologically different and hence they won't be interested."
This is not the argument. You should be ashamed of yourself for behaving like this.
So what is the argument?
If 80% of candidates were left handed, no one would think twice about 80% of hires being left handed. Ditto for female candidates. Ditto again for male candidates for relatively undesireable jobs. But once the topic of discussion is male candidates for highly paid jobs, the logic completely changes.
Pretend this isn't happening as much as you like, it's no skin off my nose.
And yet, that has changed over time, implying that there's definitely a big non-biological component to the ratio.
> If 80% of candidates were left handed
Right, because a biological characteristic that literally doesn't have any effect in professional careers is exactly comparable to a biological characteristic you say does make a difference. Talk about comparing apples with "things I say are an orange, but let's pretend I'm saying are an apple for me to draw this completely irrelevant analogy."
> it's no skin off my nose.
Of course it is not, and that's why you can be so blasé about the whole thing.
Which OP and I are not denying. Such a simple logical error I would almost expect among the civilian population, it's odd when software professionals on HN seem to completely loose their logical faculties when certain topics are discussed.
> Right, because....
See above comment.
Of course variance within groups is larger than variance between groups, so making discriminatory policy decisions based on group averages is deeply unfair and offensive. That doesn't mean that setting 50:50 gender representation targets in job roles wouldn't be sub-optimal for what appear to be biological reasons.
A lot of stuff in that memo I thought was very offensive - reasoning about specifics based on group attributes is a logical error in the same class as racism and antisemitism - but it's also not reasonable to say that everyone is equal, and thus the distribution of outcomes should reflect the distribution of the population. Everyone is not equal.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...
The paragraph from NYT does not make any kind of normative "ought" claims at all about what is reasonable, it merely states that he was fired and this is what the memo said.
But what was written was not what the memo said. And Damore has been insistent that it wasn't his intention to say anything of the sort. It's what people have inferred about the memo, and the NYT author could have easily written "and made statements that can be fairly inferred to question female suitability for technical jobs". Or something pithier along those lines (I'm not a contributor to the Times).
He does say "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."
And "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business."
He basically says the gap isn't 100% caused by sexism, and he thinks gender blind strategies for closing the gender gap should be used instead of non-gender blind strategies.
I disagree, I'm all for programs that encourage more women in tech, even if the program has to be restricted only to women.(I think this also applies to minorities) I just don't think his argument to restrict these programs to only gender blind ones is a thought crime.
P.S. I'm so tired of defending this asshole, but people are aggressively filling his mouth things he did not say.
This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper:
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
If an article appears under the New York Times' logo and URL, then it can reasonably be assumed to reflect an opinion that the New York Times wishes to be associated with.
No. That is not a reasonable assumption. Newspapers frequently carry highly opposing pieces in their opinion sections. That's how newspapers have worked for a very long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op-ed
The NYT has, for example, hosted Putin in the opinion section:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-cau...
It doesn't make any sense to publish something under your name and then complain when people think you're endorsing it. If I paste a pro-Nazi editorial into my blog, should I resent being held to account for it?
That's why it's called the "Opinion section":
https://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/op-ed/op...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html
See their editorial submission page for yourself:
https://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/op-ed/op...
"We're interested in everything, if it's opinionated and we believe our readers will find it worth reading."
Right?
But you most probably are not.
Spend some time thinking about why that might be.
IMO it's fine for them to publish an editorial by Vladimir Putin, as long as he's not laying out a case for subverting elections in Ukraine (or here) or murdering unfriendly journalists. They caught some heat for letting him publish anything at all, if I remember correctly. But I think their decision was defensible, in part because he was writing on a matter of broad public interest, and because no reasonable person would assume the NYT supports Putin's more criminal-leaning behavior.
https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-r...
>questioned the company’s gender diversity policies
It did that.
> made statements about women’s biological suitability for technical jobs.
It did this too. But I'd argue the NYT opinion piece is too vague here. "made statements about" does really mean anything. I suppose the "suitability for" is a bit wrong. More like "biological inclination towards" technical jobs?
That changes things slightly but I can't see it as a huge misrepresentation.
The underlying idea of the memo is that biology can partly explain women's career choices (true) and that Google should recognize this and factor it into their diversity targets more than they do. That second part is highly debatable. Without controlling for gender bias and many cultural/historical effects, I'm doubtful we can even really begin to detect how much biology influences the choices of any given individual in the real world. How can we blame biology for a woman's choice if the mere fact that she's a woman causes her to be reviewed more harshly by others for the same work? Taken less seriously? Etc etc. These are real effects, and until they are gone, it will be impossible to determine what role biology plays on average participation levels in tech.
(edited to clarify NYT opinion piece, as opposed to NYT article)
People, maybe fairly, have been criticizing Damore for his writing prowess. The same people should have a higher standard for a professional writer published in the NYT.
> The same people should have a higher standard for a professional writer published in the NYT.
This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper:
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
Damore's writing prowess is maybe not the issue exactly, other than it is a symptom of the lack of clarity of his ideas. Unclear ideas, unclear writing. It's certainly reasonable to conclude from Damore's memo that what he believes is that "women choose (and succeed at) tech jobs at a lower rate than men because on average they have biological characteristics that mean they tend to be more suitable for other kinds of work" ... preference, biology, culture, expectations, it's all one big interconnected system. He's not at all clear about what, given the biology, he thinks the "natural" rate is... unless he thinks it's already about right? So it's not clear what he means, or even if he knows what he means. Taplin could certainly have been more precise in the NYT, but Damore did nothing to control interpretation of his words (nothing, at least, that succeeded).
To me this is like trying to optimize software in the wrong place. Biology is surely a factor somewhere in the chain, but many other things are causing more problems, and in ways that are easier to fix, so we probably shouldn't spend time on the biology thing just yet, because it won't cause much impact overall.
It's worth pointing out that Damore allegedly posted his thoughts in an internal forum with the intent of editing and developing his ideas. He didn't get a world class editor (present performance notwithstanding) or the opportunity to print retractions with a presumption of good faith and professionalism.
> He didn't get a world class editor (present performance notwithstanding) or the opportunity to print retractions
I'm sure he is surprised at his memo's international newsmaking, but he is not modifying his stance based on the feedback he has received. In his recent WSJ article [0], Damore wrote "I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment" ... which indicates he still thinks the memo was basically fine and that that's all he was doing. He's focusing on the echo chamber and the most gentle and obvious idea in his memo (that not 100% of gender variance is socially constructed). He assumes the only people who were not in agreement with him and complained were those who believe "that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same."
He takes no responsibility for not ever quantifying the biological effect, yet still recommending changes to the processes based only on that the biological component exists at all. This makes no sense to me. Unless maybe he cannot even see the logical gap there because it is filled with his own beliefs and stereotypes about gender.
I assume that article gave him the opportunity to consult a world class editor, and he may print retractions if he chooses.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-was-fired-by-google-15024...
He is clarifying what he meant, to no apparent effect. It's not hard to find a clip of an interviewer asking whether he thinks women are inferior. He, predictably, says he believes nothing of the sort. And then this gets printed in the Times.
> He assumes the only people who were not in agreement with him and complained were those who believe...
I think all your other points are fair points for a discussion of the merits of his ideas. That discussion, at least on his part, isn't really possible now that he has been fired from Google and his views misrepresented so thoroughly everywhere else.
We'll probably just go in circles about this. The content of the memo, as a whole, does not reflect the harmless statement that "not everything is purely cultural" ... To suggest that biology might be even a significant factor in the lopsided representation is a mistake. Not just politically, but I believe factually too. And it is a bad one because it happens to overlap with the general stream of biases and impressions people already have about women in tech. And now they must also deal with people maybe believing their own interpretation of this memo. I think he should have been far more careful and specific in his terms.
Also, he could believe his views are not demeaning to women, and be wrong. It is hard to see our own biases. I feel I have shown much of my own in writing about this but life is short!
He was asked, in the Bloomberg interview [1] (30 sec in), whether he had changed his position at all. He describes the process of creating the document, and explains that the current version is what he believes is the scientific consensus on the matter.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-10/fired-engin...
He mentions aptitude in the essay:
"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 also fumbles over his description of this in one of his interviews [1].
> People, maybe fairly, have been criticizing Damore for his writing prowess.
Yeah, words matter, particularly when you're claiming your essay is representative of current science, and that you were a PhD student.
"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."
This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper:
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
I did feel the person who responded to me was still correct to have high expectations of linguistic precision for a professional author being published by a national organization.
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
This piece was paid for and printed by the Times. It might have been edited by the Times as well. It's not a letter to the editor.
Either way, Taplin considers himself an expert on Silicon Valley culture and seems to have problems objectively describing at least this part of it.
Newspapers include opinion sections from very diverse authors. The NYT has, for example, published a section by Putin:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-cau...
The Times does decide what to print, even if they print an unpaid Putin. They would presumably decline to print a letter from Kim Jong Un about how he shot 38 under par, including five holes-in-one.
Yes:
https://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/op-ed/op...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.html...
Where are you getting this from? He says nothing of the sort; simply that women and poor people have destroyed capitalist democracy, by attaining the right to vote.
There are a great many on HN who rush to Theil's defense, who seem unfamiliar with his very public, very outspoken politics. He's also said that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
His solution to the fact that democracies may disagree with him is to weaken and destroy democracy.
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
Seems like an open and shut case of bad journalism.
Hmm.. Seems like an open and shut case of a conservative saying words that mean one thing, then saying more words that are directly contradictory. We've seen enough of this "subtlety" in 2017 to recognize it.
He could, in the future, also claim that he only made that correction in order to be PC, and that he felt censored and shamed.
does he say this? or is this an inference.
I would think he'd be okay with not having ideal libertarianism and keeping democracy.
From the Wikipedia page:
> One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual forthrightness. Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
I think it's certainly fair to say that he is not a supporter of democracy. Whether he has specific plans, only he knows.
The Gawker suit certainly established that he's willing to use his wealth to involve himself where others (with less money) go against his personal views, and attempt to set legal precedent in his favor. Ideally without the knowledge of the general public, of course. I don't think it's outrageous to characterize him as an activist.
We have to leave room for "insensitive" tones if we are going to be truly inclusive. Having a uniform book of dog whistles and manners doesn't mesh with actual diversity.
That being said, if someone approaches Thiel about the offense and implications and he doubles down, he's on his own.
A rather non-committal answer to the question of whether women's right to vote was a positive development. To my ears, he is basically saying "Well, too late to do anything about it now, isn't it?"
""" It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
Voting is not under siege in America, but many other rights are. In America, people are imprisoned for using even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government, and forced to bail out reckless financial companies.
I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian. """
...in context it doesn't seem so bad to me. Though YMMV, I guess.
See addendum to the essay at bottom: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
Lazy editing by the NYT.
This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper:
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
The NYT chose to publish this in full. They bear responsibility for what they choose to put on their pages.
No. Newspapers don't "bear responsibility" for opinion sections or letters to the editor.
They publish them because they find the opinions relevant, not because they condone or support the content. The NYT frequently published highly opposing opinions together.
It has been like that for decades, if not centuries, in pretty much every single newspaper in the world.
It's a difficult fact to discern but still a statement of fact that shouldn't be made without evidence, in this world where people are fired because the media claims they think that.
Yes, a fact which can't be directly observed, and it is the author's opinion that Thiel thinks that.
And remember, "Thiel saying he doesn't think that" doesn't prove that he doesn't think, only that he says he doesn't think.
You are wrong in US law; the burden of proof for falsity is on the plaintiff.
Of course, the standard of proof in most civil cases is only preponderance of the evidence, so you only need more convincing evidence than the defense has, but the burden is still on the plaintiff.
And for a public figure on a matter of concern, you have to also prove that the defendant knew the statement to be false or made it with reckless disregard for the truth.
> The common law traditionally presumed that a statement was false once a plaintiff proved that the statement was defamatory. Under modern law, a plaintiff who is a public official or public figure must prove falsity as a prerequisite for recovery. Some states have likewise now provided that falsity is an element of defamation that any plaintiff must prove in order to recover. Where this is not a requirement, truth serves as an affirmative defense to an action for libel or slander.
http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/defens...
But if these jury instructions are correct and up to date, California remains one of the states where truth is an affirmative defense.
> [Name of defendant] is not responsible for [name of plaintiff]’s harm, if any, if [he/she] proves that [his/her] statement(s) about [name of plaintiff] [was/were] true. [Name of defendant] does not have to prove that the statement(s) [was/were] true in every detail, so long as the statement(s) [was/were] substantially true.
https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1700/1720...
Of course, this is for private plaintiffs on matters of private concern. If Peter Thiel was ruled a public figure, libel would be essentially impossible to prove.
I agree that including more constituent groups in a democracy makes its administration more complex. But that doesn't make it impossible, and it definitely doesn't make the whole worse-off.
I guess I disagree with Thiel that it makes our system, "capitalist democracy", impossible. We're living it. It's complicated -- but when has government ever been simple in history?
I find his claims of libertarianism as being free from the typical struggles of politics to be extremely out of touch.
Being wealthy can free you from politics, until you start to get interested in it, and then you're in the thick of it just like everyone else.
Also, his "humble" suggestion that others call his projects "utopian", is simply exactly what political candidates say. "I can build your future, just give me your support". I dread the day the public swallows this lie from the likes of Thiel or Musk. It'll be worse than 2017.
That does seem to be increasingly true.
People can debate all day over whether America's current system is sustainable. When they start to suggest the inclusion of the female vote is part of the reason for that, they're understandably going to face some backlash, regardless of whatever corrections they make in the future. What he wrote is clear enough, and his correction can be understood by conservatives to be insincere, since it was forced on him by the mainstream view.
Why is it wrong to speak the truth?
> Why is it wrong to speak the truth?
One could argue that some degree of voting against extreme capitalists has allowed capitalism to endure.
Women got the vote 100 years ago, and America still has the dominant marketplace in the world.
Capitalism has expanded across the world since that time. Even China has largely embraced capitalism.
Nothing is wrong with speaking either a truth or a theory.
However, what you put forward isn't based on any research and sounds more like a stereotype, or your personal experience, than an objective truth backed by science.
In those cases, there can be more than meets the eye.
This suggest not that HE DOESN'T want them to be taken away, but he sees he has no chance of trying to take them away.
Not that this suggest he DOES WANT that, but it certainly doesn't suggest that he DEFINITELY DOES not want them taken away.
Thiel either opposes capitalist democracy, or regrets the franchisement of women. (Edit: Or both.) Reading those words otherwise is, IMO, not charitable but delusional.
---
Having said that, the impression I get is that Thiel opposes democracy, rather than specifically democracy for women. He probably regrets extending the franchise to women not because they are women but simply because he regrets extending the franchise at all.
--------------
Alice: I think A, B, and C.
Bob: Did you say you think A, B, C, and D?
Alice: No, I said A, B, and C, but now that I think of it, I misspoke about the C part. I think A, B, and C(2). I don't know where you got D. I don't think that.
Bob: OK. C(2) makes more sense, and let's forget about D. Here's why you're wrong about B.
---------------
Here's what seems to happen a lot these days.
Alice: I think A, B, and C.
Bob: I hate your thoughts. We're done here. If I were your boss, you'd be fired.
---------------
People would be a lot less angry and a lot smarter if they actually dialogued more.
Well, federalism as it was originally designed was an attempt at that. I don't know if that experiment failed as much as it was abandoned.
It may be time to revisit our interest in it.
We can likewise consider ways to provide free association (vote-with-your-feet options) and compartmentalization (keep bad ideas out of here by giving them room to be at peace over there) in the other organizations we have influence over.
It is.
What I'd like to ask is: do you know of any mathematician who (publicly) shares your views on mathematical notation? The thing is, I agree 100% with what you wrote, but I also know how hostile and defensive the mathematicians (and "mathy type" programmers) can get about this. I figured they'd be more likely to listen to "one of their own"... Basically, I'd like to have a link to some blog post or something which explains why the notational wild-west is not a good thing from the perspective of a mathematician. Are you aware of such a thing? I couldn't find any, unfortunately :(
Gerry Sussman from MIT. I've seen him lecture in particular about how math notation relies far too much on implicit assumed knowledge (like operator precedence) rather than on explicit syntax. He said it's vastly easier to teach people math when you make everything explicit and thus he likes teaching in Scheme, force them write out the full algorithm with no implicit hidden assumptions.
"Abolishment of slavery led to economic ruin in the Confederate states." -Author Bob
And a not-so-well-meaning reader TLDR'ing it as:
"Author Bob claims that abolishing slavery was a bad thing." / "Author Bob is a supporter of slavery."
"since 1865, the huge decrease in black slaves—something notoriously tough for capitalists—has rendered the notion of a "productive economy" into an oxymoron".
Followed by the non-denial:
"It would be absurd to suggest black people will be re-enslaved".
This isn't an article by the NYT. It's an opinion piece by someone unrelated to the newspaper:
Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”
Has he been a prominent figure and thinker? Sure. I think that most would agree, however, that his political views and eccentricities are extreme, have been long satirized, and are not generally representative of people in technology.
Women and minorities are tough for libertarians; it shouldn't be controversial to point that out. It's also not surprising why that's the case. It's hard to sell a world view predicated on the concern for protecting people from the government to demographics who have since the 1950s relied heavily on government for protection from other people.
* You're not saying evangelical Christians make your preferred form of government impossible.
* You'd be arguing in pursuit of a narrow policy goal, unlike Thiel.
* People choose to be evangelical Christians; they're in part defined by their opposition to abortion. Women don't choose to be born women.
* When you say "evangelicals make reproductive rights more challenging", you're not directly alluding to a franchise those people won within living memory.
Pretty sure us Americans feel pretty strongly about freedom from England :-). Pilgrims and Puritans formed the roots of increased religious freedom in America, which led to other freedoms, etc.
No. But that's not a full parallel.
Consider the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, when American Christians were first recognized by their former rulers to have their own state.
If, in 1798 during the Franco-American war, a prominent British person had written: "since 1783, negotiating alongside American Protestants - a group notoriously difficult for England - has severely limited our ability to colonize and trade across the globe"
Then he too might find some critics at his doorstep. Probably some supporters as well, but England didn't have the strength for another war with America. However innocent, that comment wouldn't have been mainstream. Understandably so, in my opinion.
And the contrast with Drexel and Milken? Come on, those people went to jail for fraud!
This is fact-free dreck that's just adding to the noise.
Martin Shkreli (the pharma CEO who gained fame after jacking up the price of a drug by 5000% overnight) is referred to in the press as "pharma bro". What makes him a "bro"? He's awkward, unpolished, and more resembles the overcompensating nerd from high school than the binge-drinking football-playing jock who got invited to the parties.
Tech has never had a "brogrammer" culture. The term is just used to paint the picture of programmers as being misogynistic.
Me neither. I'm not Silicon Valley-based so when the articles started to appear about some guys who pop their polo collars and work out between writing lines of code I just assumed that this is a quirky new meme that is based on a few eccentric characters existing in real life. And a stereotypical google engineer in my mind is polite to a fault and not in any way a brogrammer (I wonder, is this grounded in reality or are my stereotypes off the mark?)
Evidently, the word "bro" is convenient: it is short; it is vaguely pejorative; you can seamlessly attach it to other words to mark the specific bro (pharma bro, google bro etc.)
Fortunately, once Rails grew up and put on a suit and tie, they kicked out most of the toxic people and the situation got a lot better... and Rails even became a better framework at the same time to boot. Just one example of the axiom that "rock stars" and "brogrammers" don't actually produce better code.
It feels like something thrown together by scraping a bunch of random content from blog posts on Silicon Valley.
* https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/photos/a.599546946849...
* https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall...
Sounds pretty toxic to me.
Most professors?
* https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
Besides, unless Damore has organized all this somehow, it's just a big guilt by (AFAIK unasked for) association argument.
It is, I assume, extremely unlikely that Damore organized any of this. On the other hand, his document did assert that the issues were intrinsically aligned with the United States' left/right political spectrum as well as making his stance towards that particular dichotomy known.
Well, that establishes a culture of leaking and doxxing, especially when you count that it happened to Damore.
> ...to groups that have a history of lighting off internet shitstorms.
Well, this whole thing was a kerfuffle until Damore was fired. That's when the shitstorm started.
This is why people need to be careful about taking the "nuclear option" in an argument. People tend to retaliate in kind.
To be clear, I detest all of the above in an intelligent discussion. But I think the people piling on Damore for cultural issues aren't seeing the forest for the trees.
1. "Argues for biologically determined sex differences...
Not really. Argues that we can't rule out biologically influenced differences.
2. "fails to understand the current state of research "
Well, there's a whole bunch of researchers who disagree with that.
3. "argues cognitive sex differences influence performance"
Nope. Argues there are differences in preferences that come out at the population level.
3a) "in software engineering, but presents no supporting evidence"
Sort of true. It doesn't present evidence for performance differences, because it doesn't make that claim. It presents evidence for differences in preference, which is that it does claim
4. "fails to acknowledge ways in which sex differences violate the narrative of female inferiority;"
I don't even know what that is supposed to mean.
5. "assumes effective meritocracy"
Nope. See above about preference vs. ability. In fact, does quite the opposite, by assuming preferences and not abilities are often a stronger influence.
6. "makes repugnant attacks on compassion and empathy"
COMPLETELY WRONG. It references a plea for compassion instead of empathy, because empathy leads to bad outcomes, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom:
"Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make." -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29100194-against-empathy
Huh? Where?
8. "paradoxically insists that authoritarianism be treated as a valid moral dimension"
Huh? Where?
8a. "whilst firmly rejecting any diversity-motivated strategy that might remotely approach it"
Huh? He says that diversity programs at Google aren't working and he wants to replace them with ones that he thinks have a better chance of working.
9. "ultimately advocates rejecting all morality insofar as it might compromise the interests of a group."
Huh? He thinks the current programs are immoral and ineffective and makes a moral argument for replacing them.
So complete and utter BS.
And of course there are quite a few scientists who completely agree with him:
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU
And more. And unlike here, they don't cite pop-sci books as evidence.
There, we find
* Lee Jussim, whose blog posts on similar issues have been quoted about as many times as Suzanne Sadedin's Quora answer.
* David P Schmitt, who writes,
"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance..., the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm. Moreover, men are more emotional than women in certain ways, too. Sex differences in emotion depend on the type of emotion, how it is measured, where it is expressed, when it is expressed, and lots of other contextual factors.
"As to sex differences in mate preferences and status-seeking, these topics also have been heavily researched across cultures.... Again, though, most of these sex differences are moderate in size and in my view are unlikely to be all that relevant to the Google workplace.... Sex differences in occupational interests, personal values, and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size..., but most psychological sex differences are only small to moderate in size, and rather than grouping men and women into dichotomous groups, I think sex and sex differences are best thought of scientifically as multidimensional dials, anyway....
"Now, treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do. As this is not my area of expertise, I can only offer my non-expert opinion on this issue, which is this: There have been (and likely will continue to be) many socio-structural barriers to women working in technological jobs. These include culturally-embedded gender stereotypes, biased socialization practices, in some cultures explicit employment discrimination, and a certain degree of masculinization of technological workplaces. Within this sea of gender bias, should Google use various practices...to especially encourage capable women of joining (and enjoying) the Google workplace? I vote yes. At the same time, should we be able to openly discuss and be informed by some of the real psychological sex differences that might account for variation in men’s and women’s workplace performance? In the right context, I vote yes to that, too."
* Geoffrey Miller, who seems to fundamentally miss the point:
"So, psychological interchangeability makes diversity meaningless. But psychological differences make equal outcomes impossible. Equality or diversity. You can’t have both.
"Weirdly, the same people who advocate for equality of outcome in every aspect of corporate life, also tend to advocate for diversity in every aspect of corporate life. They don’t even see the fundamentally irreconcilable assumptions behind this ‘equality and diversity’ dogma."
(I'll just point out that Google has essentially interviewed its way through the entire cadre of computer science graduates from the last couple of decades. The idea that it may want to increase the size of its candidate pool makes a certain amount of business sense on its own.)
* Debra W Soh, who I am having a bit of trouble understanding:
"Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
"Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex. It is only because a group of individuals have chosen to interpret them that way, and to subsequently deny the science around them, that we have to have this conversation at a public level."
(The group of individuals who have chosen to interpret sex differences as "inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex" is quite large, really.)
Thanks for the link!
Yes, because what he writes is very relevant. Und seems to be backed up by a lot of research, including his own on Stereotype Accuracy.
And also includes research that shows "brilliant" women don't choose STEM because they are, on average, more capable than the men who go into STEM.
> David P Schmitt
> should we be able to openly discuss and be informed by some of the real psychological sex differences that might account for variation in men’s and women’s workplace performance?
> Geoffrey Miller, who seems to fundamentally miss the point:
How so?
The fact that "we must have diversity because there are (useful) differences" is irreconcilable with "there are no differences" should be trivial and uncontroversial.
> Debra W Soh, who I am having a bit of trouble understanding:
What's difficult to understand?
If you tried to argue for purely social influence, you'd be laughed at.
> "inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex" is quite large,
Who, where?
> Thanks for the link
You're welcome.
There were actually two links, the other is to Jordan Peterson's interview, where he says that James "got the science correct" and who also provides tons and tons of links to relevant research, for anyone who actually wants to inform themselves.
I have to admit I found the nuanced views expressed by multiple people a lot more convincing than the largely uninformed rant (at least wrt. to the contents of the memo) in the Quora post. YMMVThe link you provided is no exception, as the writer is not a professor; while that's obviously an arbitrary distinction, I have to draw the line somewhere.
Also, it's incredibly you seem to equate the people supporting Damore with the person himself.
Google executives and other management personnel from other tech giants have internal and external fiduciary responsibilities to uphold inside their own organizations. Google firing the engineer is, unfortunately, what many companies would choose to do when faced with the same public dilemma.
And while it sucks, one has to wonder if our outrage at the termination of an outspoken engineer is somehow spawned from an unrealistic expectation placed upon google as the 'good guy'? Or is it from an unrealistic optimism born in the late twentieth century and early twenty first that the internet, and its leading companies, would somehow chart themselves on morally superior course?
In my humble opinion, I am not totally sure google qualifies as a truly private enterprise, and as such they should have a greater interest in the stakeholder. And in that context, our outrage makes much more sense, and is more justified.
That whole manifesto was wrapped in scientism, using facts selectively to advance the author's viewpoint, with the conclusion being a non-sequitur.
More aggravating however and the reason for why you shouldn't be outraged is that, regardless of any truths mentioned, it's inevitable for such an essay to not cause outrage within the targeted groups. This is because we are only human.
Now think of the company. Google and Apple are the most powerful and rich companies in the world. And one of their employees writes an essay under the pretense that "it's bad for business" and that:
(1) outrages many of their other employees
(2) hurts their public image, no matter what they do next
Of course they fired him. It's unreasonable to expect otherwise. Repeat after me: a company is not a democracy, a company isn't a meritocracy either, a company is property and that property ain't yours, unless it's your company.
Also, you know what's really, really funny?
The right wanting companies to be able to fire anybody for any reason, except for this particular reason. That smells like a double standard.
> The right wanting companies to be able to fire anybody for any reason, except for this particular reason. That smells like a double standard.
Despite what big media companies would like you to believe, and despite what our first-past-the-post voting system does to our selection of parties, most people in "the right" don't think like the stereotypical right-winger just like most people on "the left" don't think like a hyper-liberal.
The conservative columnists I've read on this think that Google was legally entitled to fire Damore, but they failed their eithical obligations to follow the golden rule, promote a culture of honest discussion, and actually promote diversity of thought in their organization.
There may be some alt-right columnists saying other things, but they don't really follow logical principles as much as fight as partisans in the culture war. So you're right that they're hypocritical. To them it's beside the point since the left is already being unfair, etc. But if you can figure out a way to get them to care, let me know.
There could be an interesting argument invoking the prisoners' dilemma and game theory saying conservatives should use liberal laws while they exist. Maybe they're getting at this with the "but SJWs" stuff.
> The effects of the darker side of tech culture reach well beyond the Valley. It starts with an unwillingness to control fake news and pervasive sexism that no doubt contributes to the gender pay gap.
I'm inferring that instead of "lip service", the technology sector should "control" news and ideology.
> The future implications of a couple of companies’ having such deep influence on our attention and our behavior are only beginning to be felt.
This concerns me, not because Google isn't on "my side". It concerns me because I don't think it's healthy for anyone to have this sort of invisible influence.
> By giving networks like Google and Facebook control of the present, we cede our freedom to choose our future.
Right. But the answer isn't to pick a better authority to win fights for "our side". The answer is to give individuals freedom (in practice, not just in theory) to stay away from bullies and fools. Even if you set up perfect rules and systems, eventually someone you think is foolish and/or dangerous will be in charge: Thiel, Pichai, Jobs, Gates, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Sanders, Cruz, Maduro, Castro, Kim, Gaddafi, and the list goes on. You may not mind some of them, but everyone would be at least dismayed by some of them.
The author ends up on the path to this conclusion, that freedom of choice is essential, but doesn't really lay it out clearly. There's is some praise of EU's data privacy laws (conveniently leaving out "right to be forgotten" rules), but it seems to me that the goal for the author is more government control over technology, not necessarily true freedom for the individual. How many of the above leaders would you trust with your data?
The way you decide whether to trust someone or something is whether someone you already trust trust them. So the question is: who do you trust and how far does your chain of trust go?
For me, I need to trust my coworkers. And I do. And I trust that those coworkers will report misbehavior internally such that I can see it.
And from what I know, I trust them to look after my data. They have everything: search history, location history, email, photos of my daughter. I am not a product. I am a leaf on a human-indecipherable neural net that shows me a particular ad.
Companies don't care about people. Companies aren't people. People care about people. I do not think Google The Company "wants" anything in any way you can moralize good or bad. Google The People want to do right by users.
So, the question is, do you trust me? :)
The reason I trusted Google with this is that they know their shit, technically speaking. And it wouldn't make economical sense to try to make money from e.g. blackmailing me using my darkest secrets.
Where I have my doubts though, is in their neutrality of Search. What I have read the past week does not fill me with confidence that Google will be a politically neutral search engine e.g. 5 years from now. This is the real risk.
Edit: A Google recruiter has been trying to recruit me for some position during all of this. The ball is currently in my court. I am not sure I want to return it.
(And now I am paranoid about that recruiter having access to my Google search history, or perhaps more likely, some algorithmic summary of it.)
The Google Perspective API https://www.perspectiveapi.com/ is already politically biased -- http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/10/googles-perspective...
So, yes I expect to see Google search to be biased within 5 years. Mostly in a left-leaning direction, although I doubt they will be left-leaning on the question of whether big corporations such as Google should pay their fair share of taxes.
If you are white or Asian male, I wouldn't bother. Google don't like your sort. Sad but true.
> So, the question is, do you trust me? :)
No, I don't. If the history of capital concentration in the past 50 years has taught me anything, it's that capitalism is ruthless, and that money and power corrupts. The simple fact of the matter is that even if the entirety of Google's upper management was full of good people, the fact that Google is a publicly traded company means the company must act sociopathically and unemotionally to maximize return for shareholders or risk the board's wrath.
They may not act evil now, but when they have no other way to provide the exponential growth expected by shareholders, I guarantee they will exploit users in every way possible.
But I look at actions to decide whether to trust them regarding the outcome of their future actions. And most of the time that one is a lot more important.
Well meaning people do terrible things all the time, we all know what the road to hell is paved with after all.
So no, I don't trust you, nor do I trust your coworkers. I do generally trust your intentions. While you are trying to be good people and that is a good thing, you are not good people. Because good people both mean to do good and actually perform good works.
What makes you so special? :-)
I completely believe you when you say that Google-the-People want to do right by users. Unfortunately, Google-the-Company doesn't feel the necessity to have a support infrastructure to address those cases when your neural network makes a wacky decision, among other things. To Google-the-company, I am most definitely a product.
The bad part is that Google-the-Company is the only Google entity I interact with. You are cflewis-the-HN-poster; you might be able and willing to help me if I run afoul of Google-the-Company, but I can hardly expect that. More to the point, that doesn't scale.
So, the answer is, does it matter?
If we met and interacted regularly, I suppose I could learn to trust you. Let's assume we get along and you are a nice person, which is likely true. However what you are asking of us only scratches the surface.
You are asking if we trust you, and the handful of co-workers you have interacted with. Even if we accept this premise, you have to see it as part of an enormously larger picture. Do I trust that you have carefully evaluated the personal integrity of all Google employees with access to user data? Do I trust that you regularly screen all new employees? Of course not, these are preposterous assumptions. But in order to do as you ask, these would have to be true. It's too big an ask.
To replace what Google used to provide, I moved to FastMail for email and mostly self-host the rest. Open Street Maps are excellent where I live, and Duck Duck Go is now "good enough". It's been a good learning opportunity for me and I'm very pleased with the results and with how much more proficient I have become with a variety of new tools. I will never switch back.
I don't hold any resentment towards Google or its employees but I do wonder how they feel about what they do. Do they see it as some noble cause, and not an effort to manipulate users with relevant ads? That's not a very charitable description of what happens at Google, but it does accurately describe how many of us see it.
Google the company wants to maximise its profits. Whether this is good or bad depends on how it goes about doing so. Because Google is a big powerful corporation with lots of information on lots of people, they have the potential to do bad things (while all the time telling themselves that what they are doing isn't really bad).
Are Google employees and executives bad people? Mostly not. Does power corrupt? Of course it does.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...
As societies we have learned the hard way the value of checks and balances, accountability, rule of law and consequences to minimize the scope of trust and the arbitrary application of power.
People don't trust Google, they just assume the very fact it exists means it operates within the framework of rule of law and there are consequences for straying so there is an implicit trust in the system like the bread you buy is made legally to certain standards.
But many may not have considered the scope of data collection, its application and privacy implications fully and will only wisen to them when they are consequences they can feel, at which point the loss of trust will be dramatic or are aware and try to work around them.
Companies indeed aren't people, they are, as poetically put by Charlie Stross, invaders from Mars (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders...). Damore has said in one of his interviews that he loves google. I think it is a big mistake - loving someone (or something) who can't love you back.
First, no, I don't trust you. Sorry. You seem like a nice person, but that means fuck-all when it comes to trust.
Second, who cares about the employees? Google is not its employees. A corporation is a golem, animated by legal fiat and supposedly obedient to its owners. But the corporation's own internal power structure, as well as the larger structures above it like the state, the world, culture, etc. are what determine what it can and will do.
You say that you all have compassion for humanity. And I'm sure you do! But that didn't prevent Real Names.
You say that you all have respect for privacy. And I'm sure you do! But that didn't prevent personalized ads.
You say that you all have morals, ethics, and the general ability to distinguish right from wrong. And I'm sure you do! But that didn't prevent Youtube from being steamrolled by anybody willing to swear out a DMCA request, to say nothing of Youtube Red.
So, the question is, do you trust your employer? Not your bosses, not your peers, not HR and Legal, but Google itself, the golem?
>But that didn't prevent personalized ads.
How is this a privacy violation?
>Youtube from being steamrolled by anybody willing to swear out a DMCA request
How is this Google's fault? (by this I mean its a legal issue. Google is, as far as I know, required to assume DMCA notices are made in good faith and respond to them, or itself be culpable for any violations). And I'm unaware of, for example, Google lobbying on behalf of the DMCA.
>Youtube Red.
What is unethical about Youtube Red?
There are a few significant psychological processes at work here, but the point is that groups of people behave in non-intuitive ways that don't necessarily reflect the sentiment or intention of the individual members.
We also see this in physical crowds; get enough people smashed into a small enough space and they lose individual agency and function as a fluid, with each individual carried by the wave and unable to control where they go. This results in stampedes and crowd crushes.
You can also trust someone with something small and then increase the level of trust as they prove reliable. Note that this also works for reestablishing a healthy relationship after someone screws someone else over. The "trust by proxy" model doesn't allow a resolution to "I don't trust them and I already know them" problem. This is the problem that warring countries have. And it's the problem overly antagonistic political factions have.
No way. And don't think for a second we buy that "We're so Googley and honest because we use fun colors in our logo" persona either.
(I know the answer, but that kind of blanket statements are ridiculous)
Googler wrote a document which was widely derided internally and externally. Sundar took the conservative option and let him go, due to his toxic effect on work environment. Shouldn't that be the end of the story?
Maybe a googler can explain how and why this has exploded into the zeitgeist, because I fail to see it. It seems there were some number of bad actors inside google besides the original author, but a small number.
If Google has a mono-culture that's not open to debate about gender and diversity issues, it's neither my business nor my concern, and all the bloggers and Ezra Klein and NYT who are trying to frame a megacorp-sized story about this, are stretching.
EDIT: Instead of downvote, maybe an explanation on WHY this incident shows (as the posted article claims) Google's bad intentions for us?
That's why you see tweets from the likes of Kellyanne Conway.
Conservative Googlers have been leaking people's names and locations to known white supremacists to harass and threaten people they disagree with, and the snowball is still growing.
People hate it when the alt-right uses the tactics of the left.
Which, somehow, is not condemned by a single one of the people crying about freedom of speech here. Goes to show that there's only one kind of freedom of speech they care about, and it's theirs.
Kellyanne Conway is a Trump partisan, not a conservative thought leader.
I think you're mixing up Trump-style populists with conservatives. Conservatives backed Rubio and Cruz and are still irked (at least) that Trump is president.
Not a Googler, but it is pretty clear that it has exploded because the subject matter intersects with prominent issues in the (increasingly literal rather than figurative) culture war in America.
1. Many people feel discriminated against due to these affirmative action policies. If there were policies set in stone saying white men got precedence over black women, would you say "who the hell cares?"
2. The opinions expressed by that Googler are held by many people employed in the company. The fact that the company would sooner fire him instead of discussing the points he raised and explain why he's wrong seems to confirm his claim that there is an echo chamber, which isn't exactly conducive to a meritocratic structure.
3. Google is an incredibly large multinational corporation. What happens there will set precedent for companies around the world. If AA weakens there, it's a sign that corporate policies may change globally.
I have to imagine Sundar was flooded with emails saying "fire him or I quit."
I also imagine there were less-incendiary ways for him to propose his viewpoints. He could have left out his obviously-controversial "facts" (which most people with common sense, I claim, would know were gonna piss people off), or he could have talked directly to HR or his manager or even to Sundar about the diversity policies. The way it played out, he chose probably the most explosive exposition and forum. So Sundar had a right to fire him just on those grounds: not for the opinions expressed, but for the effect of enraging the entire company, and likewise for not having the common sense NOT to piss off all your co-workers. In fact, he did say the firing was for creating a toxic work environment.
In a company as large and diverse as Google, there will always be people like that during any public outrage. What's telling is that Google gave in to the desires of that particular kind of person. The fired Googler raised his viewpoint in an internal forum designed for that kind of conversation in a respectable manner and with citations. The fact that doing so enraged the entire company tells of a culture that is unable or unwilling to question itself. In such a defensive culture, doing something "enraging" is required to expose the cultural bubble.
Damore engaged within the reasonable rules of debate. The people who disagreed turned it into a witch hunt and the media piled on with misrepresentation.
Damore is not the only person with agency at Google. Pinning it all on him as a scapegoat is ridiculous.
"Danielle Brown, only recently named the VP of diversity at Google, was included in the first set of eight screenshots. By Monday, she had already locked her Twitter account after receiving an onslaught of abuse.
"That same collection of eight screenshots made its way onto former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos’ Facebook on Wednesday.
"The targeting of those specific Googlers might have been the work of outsiders, but anxieties are running high inside the company because of the publication of screenshots from the internal Google+ on alt-right channels. On Tuesday, Gizmodo reported that a meme depicting whistleblowers being beaten was being shared on an internal meme generator.
"On Sunday, alt-right blogger Vox Day published screenshots from the internal Google+, showing employees criticizing the Damore memo. On Monday, Breitbart published an even larger set of internal screenshots. Names and profile pictures were not redacted. "What really gets me is that when Googlers leaked these screenshots, they knew this was the element of the internet they were leaking it to," a former Google employee tells The Verge. "They knew they were subjecting their colleagues to this type of abuse.""
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall...
On the one hand, given the "discussion", firing the guy who lit the match is starting to look more reasonable.
On the other, the little tiny Libertarian on my shoulder keeps saying, "a company should be free to hire or fire anyone they want."
["If there were policies set in stone saying white men got precedence over black women, would you say "who the hell cares?""
In a company made up of 80% black women? Probably.]
If Google is a monoculture and yet allows or even encourages dissenting opinion and discussion, we have absolutely nothing to worry about. Alternatively, if Google is a monoculture and forces that monoculture on its visitors and users, then any out/other group is going to suffer and potentially not even realize it.
And it turns out that the subtle manipulation is incredibly effective:
> "We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated."
Ref: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
I understand there's an issue of trust, however every Googler will tell you that impartiality of search results is an overriding priority.
But... this has been recognized by Google's search team since day 1. It's not a new problem. Diversity issues did not suddenly introduce the question of bias into Google's search quality team. Though perhaps it's the first time many people outside Google have recognized the issue of potential bias.
I agree that every Googler will tell you that impartiality of search results is an overriding priority. It's the crucial tenet underpinning the entire edifice.
We have created a culture that depends heavily on certain implicit subtleties. Calling these out as invalid will make you a pariah. Using them to your advantage will make you powerful.
More that 50% of the population will tell you that they are good drivers, which is statistically impossible. Would you believe them as well?
was supposed to be "more than 50%"
"...allows or even encourages dissenting opinion and discussion..."
...framing the discussion here as regarding dissenting opinions after some of what has been reported...
"...Google employees who opposed Mr. Damore found their internal company profile pictures posted on Breitbart, the Verge reported."
...begins to look a bit threadbare.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/10/16128518/google-town-hall...
I downvoted you, not for your opinons, but for this:
> "Oh my god, who the hell cares?!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFZrzg62Zj0
Too Redditesque for me. What next -- advice animal memes?
In a way, getting down to the uglier sides of the people involved in the organizations with unchecked control over our society is a way to bring the point home that no, we cannot place this much trust in these people.
But whether people are buying that angle or not, listen to the professor when he connects it to the larger problem of technopolies. Really this is just a new variation of the overblown corporate power that has been around forever. These companies like Google, Uber, and Amazon are so powerful they are basically supplanting aspects government in many countries. It's sort of like the giant corporations the cyberpunk authors envisioned, but worse because they don't have competition.
It does seem to basically be working to most people's benefit -- as long as you don't have a business that tried to compete with these companies.
This is just the core problem with both cooperative and competitive approaches to society -- without adequate structural prevention they tend towards over-centralization. If we can realize that this over-trusting relationship is unacceptable, that will motivate structural changes to improve it.
I believe the next big revolution will be mass deployment of truly decentralized, open, easily evolved, and public, platforms that have some similar features to the closed for-profit monopoly technology giant services. This includes things like search indexing and advertisement Google, retail indexing and logistics (Amazon), transportation (Uber), etc. And probably even banking, which is not quite as centralized but has things like PayPal etc.
Because high-tech economies of scale are great, but centralization of control by private companies over the public at large with fixed platforms that don't evolve are not.
Well, I was already on board with that thesis. I'm not on board with (I assume) the proposed solution, which would be relying on new regulatory powers to resolve the issue. It doesn't help with other corporate oligopolies, so I'll need some convincing that this time it's different.
Does the government write the protocols? Wouldn't they just design what relevant (i.e., Google, Amazon, et. al.) lobbyists tell them to? Who penalizes companies to aren't compliant with the protocols?
What about the data? Data management isn't free and you can have a pristine protocols that are worthless due to garbage data.
How or whether that type of thing comes into existence is obviously extremely challenging and isn't determined.
I believe that useful governments will support some structures that enable these types of systems, but must not be allowed to directly control them -- we have too much evidence of how poorly that works out. That will be the remaining utility that allows the existence of traditional government, until these new systems are fully deployed.
Yes, data management isn't free, and there are severe challenges related to that. But we have technologies that give us hope that we can find better ways to do data management than just letting Facebook or Google track everything we click on and store them in their own data centers.