Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Can you tell me more about what you believe that Pinker video establishes?

I have generally high regard for your comments. But in this instance, I think your claim about what happened to Damore is facially flawed. Damore didn't simply "reference mainstream science". Whether you agree with him or not, I don't think it's possible to defend the claim that he was fired for citations.

I'd also urge you to step back from the Damore framing of this post. I know why it's hard to escape. But I think the author is just using Damore as an opportunity to make a more general statistical point. Certainly, at no point in this post does the author even mention Damore by name, let alone advocate for his termination.

View on HN

Can you tell me more about what you believe that Pinker video establishes?

What I say it establishes. That James Damore was referencing mainstream science. One might reasonably conclude that his conclusions are wrong. Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIRvtA2JIIA

I think all of those who concluded that he was being a misogynist have no leg to stand on. The accusation is levied just to silence views that are not liked.

I don't have a problem with the article's statistical point. I think there are all sorts of opportunities to make points here.

> I think all of those who concluded that he was being a misogynist have no leg to stand on.

I don't necessarily believe he's a misogynist, but I do think he's in denial about the impact of sexism on gender gaps. To quote his letter:

"We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism."

The fact is that we don't have to assume. It's fairly unlikely such gaps are entirely the result of sexism. But to suggest that sexism does not play a role in gender gaps is absurd.

Edit: To respond to similar points in the replies, yes, I'm quite aware that you can read this sentence in the strictest logical sense as saying a gender gap, in and of itself, does not imply sexism. This is obviously and trivially true. But studies on evaluatory bias tell us that biases, such as and including sexism, are in fact the norm. It is so fantastically unlikely that they are not present among Google's interviewers / hiring committees that the sentence, taken in the strictest sense, is making an irrelevant point.

Rhetorically, however, it serves the effect of suggesting we ought to consider it plausible that perhaps sexism isn't at all at play in Google's hiring. Which, again, is absurd.[1] It would be far more likely that Google's hiring tilts sexist against men than sexism not being a factor at all.

[1] Note that this has nothing to do with Google specifically, but rather with humans generally.

He is saying that a gender gap, by itself, is not evidence of sexism. A gender gap alone doesn't prove sexism. It doesn't mean that there is no sexism. Sexism can be shown in other ways. But he is pushing back against a prevalent mindset that society is a priori sexist until we have equal representation everywhere.

> But to suggest that sexism does not play a role in gender gaps is absurd.

I have written before that I would love to see statistical data that can predict gender segregated as a factor based on the number of reported cases of sexism.

What I have seen is that the causes of segregation differ massively based on if it is male or female dominated. If it is male dominated profession, sexism is always and early included as the suggested cause. If its female dominated it is rarely included. There seems to be a strong sex difference in studies studying gender segregation, so the thing I find most interesting is the few areas where they do converge, which is:

a) Work culture, which tend to incorporate gender identity in seemingly similar way in both heavily male dominated and female dominated professions.

b) Social pressure, especially for students, by peers of the same gender and age.

What I would like to see is meta studies on gender segregation that can incorporate a large number of different professions and make a unified theory to explain why only 12.5% (data from Sweden) of the population work in a profession which is not gender segregated (defined as having less than 60% of a single gender).

Read your quote. It just means that just because there is a gender gap, we cannot simply assumed there must be sexism.

It is not a statement about a specific case, but a general point on rationality.

And it is undeniably true in the general sense.

This means that if someone wants to convince us there is sexism in a specific case, they must demonstrate that specifically, not just note a lopsided gender ratio and assume the mechanism.

While we're on the rational point, I personally take inspiration from Bayes Law---A gender gap is weak evidence for sexist practices. All else equal, sexists worlds are more likely to produce gender gaps than non-sexist ones.

To me, part of the trickiness of the entire "equality" discussions is that we don't have clear, "correct" distributions of variable X for demographic Y.

Pure egalitarianism is iffy, because given any distribution, we can manufacture a demographic that is "underrepresented", so it's not at all clear that flat equality across "reasonable" demographics is even logically sound.

I kind of piggy backed off your comment there and ran in a bit of a different direction. Hope you don't mind.

> I think all of those who concluded that he was being a misogynist have no leg to stand on. The accusation is levied just to silence views that are not liked.

I strenuously agree with your overarching point. But I have a more charitable perspective about the accusations of misogyny. I think that many, many women have had awful and in many cases traumatizing experiences in the world of tech. A lot of people associate opinions like Damore's with the bad behavior they have seen and experienced. They see these kinds of arguments as being part of the same phenomenon; men who hold opinions like these are the same kind of men who would talk over women in meetings, dismiss the achievements of women, be less likely to promote women, pay them less, harass them, etc.

I think a lot of people (women especially) felt an extreme and visceral reaction to the memo, because they intuitively made this association that these sentiments were related to their bad experiences. And while I strongly believe that the accusations of misogyny were unfair and misguided, I interpret them charitably as an attempt to push back against what they interpret as sexist behavior. They are trying to support the women around them.

That sounds a lot like being charitable with the witch burners because their crops were failing and they were starving and scared.

You don't get a pass just because your emotions ran over your rationalism.

I'm not giving anybody a pass, I'm just trying to understand their actual psychology instead of believing a simplified and inaccurate story. I believe that true understanding and compassion are the foundation of making the world better. You can understand a person's motivations without compromising your own beliefs.

> "I'm just trying to understand their actual psychology instead of believing a simplified and inaccurate story. I believe that true understanding and compassion are the foundation of making the world better."

Exactly this. Both sides of the political spectrum could use a bit of this thinking in my opinion.

Well, you and I disagree about Damore, but I'd be happy to leave it at "at least two reasonable people can disagree about it".

Here, though, I just see a professional biostatistician making a basic point about how genetically-influenced traits do and don't influence real-world outcomes. It may seem basic, but if it is, it's not obvious to the typical HN thread!

Later edit

I mean, doesn't it seem apparent just from the responses on this thread?

I mean, doesn't it seem apparent just from the responses on this thread?

Not at all. Also, for the record, as far as I can tell, James Damore is not a member of the Alt Right. (I identify as a Center Left Liberal.) I have noted that mainstream news people have tried to stick that on him.

If your argument involves hazily imputing motives without evidence, or if you are using a "No true Scotsman" fallacy involving his position -- then I'm afraid you're just using a fallacy.

If you watch Steven Pinker's presentation, you will see a striking resemblance to the science cited in the Damore memo. Until recent years, there was nothing pointedly ideological about the mainstream science referenced in either place. I would urge you to read Pinker's _The Blank Slate_ for a scientist's take on the pointedly ideological and unsupported absolutist doctrine of the human Blank Slate.

I think all of those who concluded that he was being a misogynist have no leg to stand on.

I think his public behavior since his firing allows me to reasonably draw conclusions as to what motivated his "citations" of "mainstream science".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com