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?
So can you point me to exactly where he claims that?
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.
Damore's memo doesn't mention intelligence or IQ at all [1], not even in the abstract or as distributions or as averages.
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Using the version of the memo cited on the wikipedia page https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...
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?
"[...] 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?
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 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?
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...
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.
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.
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]
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 ...
I don't know how else to read that other than "men are smarter". Is there any other reading?
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.
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...
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.