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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

That’s an untenable charitable reading of Damore’s memo. You don’t “start conversations” and “learn” by drawing conclusions, such as the lack of women in tech can be explained by genetic predispositions. And he wasn’t talking about “changes in vocabulary.” He was attacking core assumptions about what a fair society should look like. If you want to learn, you ask questions. You try to understand the other point of view until you can explain it and address it on its own terms. Damore never tried to do that.

To use a technical analogy: it’s like a C++ programmer writing a rant about how JS dynamic typing must be for people too dumb to learn C++, and the ending it with “but I’d love to ‘learn’ more about JS!” Nobody is going to assume good faith.

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You strike me as reasonable. I would appreciate if you could answer a couple of questions.

1. If there are indeed biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits, should it be firable to say so?

2. If boys and men are discriminated against in order to pursue equal outcomes, should they be allowed to voice opposition?

I won't challenge anyone who answers. Thank you.

> 1. If there are indeed biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits, should it be firable to say so?

You need to unpack this into a few different things:

1) Are there cognitive differences between the sexes? Probably true--but we don't have a great idea of what they are.

2) Do those cognitive differences explain different aptitudes for different intellectual pursuits? No evidence for this in the context of computer programming. Which is why Damore's memo was so intellectually weak. The reasoning was basically "studies show women are people oriented" --> ??? --> "men are biologically predisposed to prefer programming."

3) Is it okay to fire people for saying things that are true? Businesses aren't free speech zones. Actions that jeopardize team cohesion, recruiting goals, company image, etc., are and should be fireable offenses. If someone at Google prepared and circulate a memo on how advertising is evil and destroying America, they should be fired, truth of the matter aside.

4) Everyone is entitled to an opinion, to speak on their own behalf, on their own time. People don't have to associate with you if they don't like your opinion. If you make a lot of money and send your kids to private school, you don't tell a room full of democrats "who cares about public education, let's cut the top tax rate." And if you do and people get salty, you don't say "but don't I have a right to speak on behalf of my own interests?"

1) People have been fascinated with this and have studied it for decades. Just because it isn't quantified, doesn't mean we have no idea what they are 2) You are choosing to frame other's arguments incorrectly and then attacking those imperfections. Men and women in the countries "most equal" are polarized even more in their career choices. 3) People high up in Facebook & Google have publicly questioned advertising & social media addictiveness without public backlash. The memo was firing back at policies that jeopardize team cohesion - in Damore's own words. You don't need free speech inside of a company to discuss data and reference studies. 4) Your #4 doesn't make sense but does demonstrate that you think in a very 'partisan politics' style.

> Hard to have a conversation with someone who just flat out lies at every turn

This thread is awful enough without people stooping to personal attack. We ban accounts that do this. Moreover you've violate the site guidelines quite a bit and we've had to warn you before.

We won't ban you this time, but please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on if you want to keep commenting here.

> If there are indeed biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits, should it be firable to say so?

First, I'll note that "should it be firable" in the question is a little bit ambiguous. I'm interpreting it as "should a company be allowed to fire an employee for this", and not as "should a company fire an employee over this".

If you believe in at-will employment, then yes. Truth does not protect you from being fired.

I'm not a huge fan of at-will employment in general, but I think even in this context the 1A freedom of association makes it problematic to prevent companies from firing people for their speech. Even truthful speech.

As an individual has the right to speak, without interference from government actors, the employer has the broad right to choose who they associate with. Restricting that right is problematic.

> 2. If boys and men are discriminated against in order to pursue equal outcomes, should they be allowed to voice opposition?

Of course they should be allowed to voice opposition. The government should not interfere with their speech in any way. Further, the government should not discriminate against those individuals based on that speech.

However, as they are allowed to voice their opposition their may be social consequences for doing so. Speech often carries social consequences—some I agree with and some I don't. For me, how appropriate or proportional those social consequences are depend very significantly on the content and tone of the particular voiced opposition and the social response. That makes it somewhat harder to respond to a general question.

You are free to challenge my responses. I'm happy to discuss these ideas.

Some similarly constructed questions I would return:

1. If there are not biological differences between sexes that could help explain different aptitudes/predispositions for different intellectual pursuits—but a coworker asserts that such differences exist, that your sex is the one with less aptitude—could you see how upset employees and applicants of that sex?

2. If women have traditionally been discriminated against in this industry, and a co-worker voices support for this ongoing discrimination in a way that makes them uncomfortable, should they be allowed to complain about that co-worker? Should their complaints be taken seriously?

I similarly won't challenge you if you answer.

You don’t “start conversations” and “learn” by drawing conclusions, such as the lack of women in tech can be explained by genetic predispositions.

No, but you can start conversations and learn by asking questions. What silences conversations and prevents learning is a menacing attitude towards to having conversations and asking questions.

He was attacking core assumptions about what a fair society should look like.

Aren't the assumptions the very things which should be questioned? If your axioms are flawed, then the systems built upon them are invalidated. Why should there be equality of outcomes? Should Asians have representation in the NBA proportional to their population percentage? Why is it that Jewish people have been radically more successful than the general population at tailoring across literally thousands of years of history, in so many different cultures and contexts? Why is there a Scandinavian Gender Equality paradox?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8

(Watch that video and try and tell me that the "equalists" don't come across as unreasonable, closed minded, and ideologically driven?)

A broad reading of history tells us that cultural human capital is tremendously powerful. It also gives one hope, as the historical record also indicates that cultural human capital is also transferable. The transformation of the Irish diaspora from their utter destitution to their descendant's current place in 21st century society should tell you that. (Some historians would place the average displaced Irish peasant's wealth at something like 1/2 to 1/4th that of the contemporaneous average US slave's.) Such a reading of history also demolishes the ideology of the worst segments of the Alt-Right. (As well as demolishing that of the identity politics US far-left.)

Let's call such a world view, "Cultural Primacy." Given that cultural human capital has such deep-rooted and powerful effects, what conclusions could we draw about Google's policies? It could well be that cultural human capital would have strong and persistent effects on the preferences of groups, so it would be unreasonable to expect immediate 50/50 outcomes. In fact, it would be expected for such changes to be generational, perhaps taking 2 or 3 generations. Such a world view would also emphasize the educational pipeline, and the way the subcultures of professions and fields are perceived by under-represented groups. This also happens to be in line with James Damore's suggestions from the memo. It's also entirely in line with what Google and YouTube execs have said in public:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrOp8ewzJDc

But he wasn't asking questions. The document wasn't an invitation to explain where he was mistaken. By all accounts he was given feedback on his ideas before the final memo went out. In the very text he says that opposition to these ideas demonstrates bias and he therefore dismisses the very idea of being wrong.

This wasn't some intellectual debate.

But he wasn't asking questions. The document wasn't an invitation to explain where he was mistaken.

It was precisely that.

By all accounts he was given feedback on his ideas before the final memo went out.

By his own account.

In the very text he says that opposition to these ideas demonstrates bias and he therefore dismisses the very idea of being wrong.

Quote, please.

This wasn't some intellectual debate.

No, the reaction to the memo turned out to be screeching and namecalling.

Here's a feminist interviewing James Damore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SFLoKa8FdA

The reactions that were most amplified likely included some namecalling, but I saw a lot of well-reasoned and detailed takedowns of the pseudoscience in the memo.

My guess is that both sides look at the worst of the other to justify themselves.

The reactions that were most amplified likely included some namecalling, but I saw a lot of well-reasoned and detailed takedowns of the pseudoscience in the memo.

[citation needed]

Among the "pseudoscience" in the memo is one of the most important results in psychology of recent years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKmyO3hbOz8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ge...

The study cited as "The Scandinavian Paradox" was across 55 countries and is one of the statistically strongest results in the social sciences, flat-out.

What core assumptions was he attacking specifically? Can you point to specific in his memo?

It’s a core assumption that when it comes to employment, men and women are generally similar at a cognitive level and equally well suited to different white-collar professions. We adopted that presumption as a protective mechanism, when we came out of a long period of invoking pseudo-scientific ideas about differences between men and women to justify sexism.

Can you point to anywhere in his memo where he claims that men and women's cognitive level is different? Again I have read this quite a few times and I don't see it.

So can you point me to exactly where he claims that?

These kinds of objections will draw approving nods from people who already agree with you, but to everyone else, the implication that differences in IQ variance between men and women lead the "top of the curve" to be naturally overpopulated with men is exactly what it sounds like: a claim for the intellectual superiority of men. Sure, there are dumb men; maybe they're even dumber than the dumbest women! But if you're looking for the best, that logic says, you're going to end up mostly with men.

But put that aside and just try to engage with the simultaneously naive and arrogant assumption that the people Google hires --- people, we assume, like Damore --- must somehow represent the top of that curve. Because what they do is just so demanding.

I work in this field, at a pretty deeply technical level, and when I hear other people in it make arguments premised on the notion that what we do demands the pinnacle of human cognitive ability, I just want to hide under a rock from embarrassment.

Wait, what?

Damore's memo doesn't mention intelligence or IQ at all [1], not even in the abstract or as distributions or as averages.

Using the version of the memo cited on the wikipedia page https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...

I'm not interested in rereading the version of the memo that was published publicly. I'm working from the direct quotes in the NLRB Advice Memo. I believe that what you read was not what was circulated inside Google, but Damore is not at pains to tell you that.

My understanding is that the version distributed was a draft purposefully leaked, rather than distributed by Damore.

Why should this be representative here? Shouldn't the leaker be punished for the fallout of distributing the draft, if the final version was more nuanced?

It definitely mentions it. Here (section "Why we are blind"):

"[...] the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)"

I don't know how else to read that other than "men are smarter". Is there any other reading?

Yes, of course, there are.

The correct reading is that there is biological difference both between the sexes and inside each of the sexes.

This is a reference to the identity politics you see especially in 2ndwave/3rd wave feminism which claims that almost everything is a social construct.

I don't get it.

He says there are IQ differences between people. Who are these "people" if not men and women? He either means men are smarter or he just randomly went on a tangent.

Let me ask you, when he says there are IQ differences between people, which groups of people do you think he means?

What is it you don't get?

He is referencing the people who claim there is no biological differences and that almost everything is social constructs.

If you want to understand what he is talking about here is an example

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-i...

He's referring to a group that is selected based on their intelligence. In that case, it doesn't really matter what the distribution of the larger population is, because you're only talking about a group that is selected for their favorable attributes.

For someone to say that people who are already in a career, that is, already selected for their ability, are less suited because of their sex is kind of absurd.

No he is referring to the claims by the left who claim that there is little biological difference and mostly social constructional. Read the whole thing and the whole sentence.

He's arguing "the left" would never say group A has a higher average IQ than group B, regardless of the groups.

That tidbit is a paranthetical in a sentence about the psychology of left vs right. His thrust is an illustration of how ideology and science are conflated.

You're taking that way out of context. He's not saying that the left denies IQ differences between the sexes, and it's sloppy to quote half a sentence. If you read that section, he's analyzing the psychology of the left and the right.

The full sentence, which you clipped is: Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change), the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ8 and sex differences).

That is, that the left likes to pretend there are no IQ differences (between any two groups), nor that there are any psychology differences between the sexes [because it undermines their ideology, just as global warming undermines conservative ideology].

Though this may seem ambiguous, it's clear if you consider his footnote. [8]

Again I would urge you and others to be specific. Where did he claim intellectual superiority of men?

This memo was written inside of Google, yet you seem to judge it as if it was written to the outside world. Why would you do that?

Even if he was misguided (as far as I know he was a top performer), then by what standard do you mean that your interpretation as an outsider is more relevant than the intent of the memo (which was feedback as encouraged by HR)?

Why should I read it in the light that you want me to look at it in (he is arrogant and think he is the pinnacle of human cognitive ability) rather than the one he intended which was to raise his concern with their hiring process?

but to everyone else, the implication that differences in IQ variance between men and women lead the "top of the curve" to be naturally overpopulated with men is exactly what it sounds like: a claim for the intellectual superiority of men. Sure, there are dumb men; maybe they're even dumber than the dumbest women! But if you're looking for the best, that logic says, you're going to end up mostly with men.

The claim is that there are more extreme outliers for men, both at the top and at the bottom. So there are more very stupid men. This is borne out by the research, and by the prevalence of Darwin Awards winners who are male. I don't think this makes men inherently superior, overall. I think it makes men more prone to specialization at the expense of other areas of attention, like social graces. My "lived experience" would seem to bear this out. Nerdy guys are more obnoxious in certain ways than the general populace, and currently express this in way which would tend to affect the preferences of women.

We've talked about this before, and I did and would still agree that the Bay Area/Silicon Valley's view of itself is overblown. Taking such a view actually deflates the notion of male superiority instead of inflating it.

Re: the online challenge which your company had online for recruitment purposes -- was it gender neutral in its presentation and availability, and what was the gender distribution of the successful takers? What was the gender distribution of the hired population?

Gender and age diversity improved with work sample testing (but we never had to scale it to a point where we challenged our candidate pipeline, which was drawn pretty conventionally from commercial programmers, so, like everyone else, our candidate pipeline was male-dominated).

We tried to do a company premised on scaling it up, so that we could place enough candidates to service a truly large funnel. I looked forward to seeing what that would do for our parity numbers. But we did that startup wrong, and so I haven't found out how it will work out yet.

so, like everyone else, our candidate pipeline was male-dominated

Doesn't a situation where the candidate pipeline is so skewed call to question the desirability of "equality of outcomes?" It would also make me question ideological doubling-down, and mob psychology behaviors like ridiculing managers who hadn't met quotas yet. Such behaviors in such a context, like that of the Google which James Damore described, strike me as every but as illogical and mean-spirited as the parody motivational sign, "the beating will continue until morale improves."

Google has enacted diversity policies which are directed towards the front end of the pipeline -- like directly recruiting at Howard University -- and those are supposed to be backed up by hard numbers showing results.

"Equality of outcomes" is a political catch phrase, and not one I introduced into the conversation.

Right. "The social compact" is your catch phrase, or at least it used to be.

I do believe in equality of opportunity, and do not believe we have it. You're familiar with what I think of tech management culture. Hiring, in particular, but none of the rest of it is any better. The idea that anyone would feel comfortable making assertions about things our field gets right offends me. As a profession, we're clowns.

As a profession, there is hardly a better one to be in for women. It's one of the highest paid, most flexible and equal opportunity professions there are.

All the biggest tech companies go out of their way to encourage women to the point where they favor women rather than men.

What industry does better when you look at it on a whole?

No one is claiming it's perfect but it's hardly filled with clowns IMO.

Law. Medicine. Accounting.

And yes, our entire profession is clownish. We produce shitty, unreliable software using ad-hoc methods no two teams agree about, our management processes are folkloric, our hiring procedures random. At the very peak of our profession, on teams building the most important and widely used software, we are at best working around those problems.

Neither law nor accounting are better than the tech industry when you put everything together. Medicine might be as good and is already having record level of females.

You're wrong.

Ok, about what?

If you compare working hours, salaries, opportunity, benefits, freedom, vacation, maternity leave etc. I have a hard time seeing law or accounting being better and even with medicine I would claim that tech is still better for women on every step.

Whether your company doesn't live up to this is another question but most other places I have been or worked with in the tech industry are extremely open to both women and minorities.

And yes, our entire profession is clownish. We produce shitty, unreliable software using ad-hoc methods no two teams agree about, our management processes are folkloric, our hiring procedures random.

In other words, it's exactly the kind of milieu which runs off of ideology, and is ripe for ideological hysteria. I mean, what in the heck do we think language flamewars are?

This is the funny thing. It's one thing to use this distribution to explain the gender disparity among Nobel laureates. Employing it to explain the same disparity in Google employees is just laughable. As someone who teaches college math at what one might call an 'elite' institution, I've found no difference between the abilities of students based on gender. If anything, the girls are better because they have to be better to be taken as seriously as an equivalent guy.

> But put that aside and just try to engage with the simultaneously naive and arrogant assumption that the people Google hires --- people, we assume, like Damore --- must somehow represent the top of that curve. Because what they do is just so demanding.

This is fallacious reasoning. The claim that the IQ of men has higher variance implies (given a Gaussian distribution) that there is some IQ threshold beyond which there are many more men having an IQ greater than the threshold than there are women. It doesn't imply anything about whether this threshold is above or below the average IQ of Google employees. In fact, if indeed the claim is correct, the threshold may well be not very much higher than the average IQ of the general population.

When the Damore memo came out, people have calculated that to explain the only 20% women working for google, the average IQ of google engineers needs to be 160. That is laughable.

Interesting. Do you have a link to that calculation? Maybe tptacek was impliticly referencing that calculation. I took what he said at face value but maybe real world numbers make my claim moot.

By way of calculation, apparently 30k software engineers work for Google[1] so there are probably around 15k in the USA. There are 600k software engineers in the USA[2]. I estimate that Google employs about 10% of the engineers that could pass an interview with them if they tried, so the Google-level cohort in the USA is about 150k or 25% of all engineers.

The top 25% of engineers is 0.7 standard deviations above the mean of a normal distribution. Assuming equal means, female engineers would have to have a variance in "software engineering quotient"[3] 45% that of the male engineer variance.

So it seems that if men and women have the same mean propensity to be good software engineers (not just IQ, or even IQ at all, but general propensity) but the variance of the female propensity is 45% of that of the male, then that would entirely explain a 20%/80% ratio at Google.

(Caveat: I've calculated the SWEQ level based on male engineers only but since there is such a small proportion of female engineers I don't think this skews the calculation very much.)

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Googl...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...

[3] IQ per se is probably not the relevant factor. I don't know if a single number representing "SWE quotient" is even plausible ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997524

Thanks! A variance ratio of 1.15 is nowhere near the 2.2 that my calculation predicts would be necessary! I think yorwba and I have done the same calculation from opposite directions and reached the same conclusion. A huge difference in variance would be needed to explain an 80/20 split at Google level.

Here (section "Why we are blind"): "[...] the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)"

I don't know how else to read that other than "men are smarter". Is there any other reading?

Yes, of course, there is.

The correct reading is that there is biological difference both between the sexes and inside each of the sexes.

This is a reference to the identity politics you see especially in 2ndwave/3rd wave feminism which claims that almost everything is a social construct.

He isn't talking about who is better just that there are differences.

My reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16398806

And mine is here

What is it you don't get? He is referencing the people (mostly feminists on the left) who claim there are no biological differences and that almost everything is social constructs.

If you want to understand what he is talking about here is an example https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-i...

It's just possible to read it as a poorly written attempt to say that the Left ignores science on biological IQ differences (perhaps, as is quite popular to point to on the Right, those associated with race) and also biological sex differences, rather than it being intended to refer to biological, sex-linked, IQ differences.

If we charitably assume that the entire thing is poorly written then it can mean anything we want!

If you write something that people interpret as sexist due to your poor language and then spend no effort to correct that error.... that's still bad.

All it requires is that you read it in its full context. Read the memo. Then it's fairly obvious what he is talking about.

You are one of these people who can't handle losing an argument that your ideology is a part of. You don't substantiate these claims - have you actually read the memo? Your analogy kind of proves that you didn't read the memo. Furthermore, I bet anyone at Google could make your mistaken analogy and not get in trouble for it. Furthermore, do you even believe someone should be fired if they made your programming language analogy?

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