Comment by derangedHorse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derangedHorse | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah but he was pretty liberal with his conclusions he claimed were derived from data. It's pretty easy to see flaws in his arguments like how he inflated the behavioral differences between genders, and his inability to thoroughly consider differences being caused by societal factors (nature vs. nurture).

I think the main issue with his memo is the implication that diversity efforts were, at the time, problematic. The truth is, with such low diversity numbers even with the diversity programs, it's likely that any subpar candidates admitted probably equaled the subpar candidates admitted into Google at large. The numbers for gender diversity are even more skewed when viewed through the lens of the engineering department (which is the one relevant to the memo), which is unfortunately not available from the google diversity site like it used to be.

You can see the diversity breakdown for yourself here: https://diversity.google/annual-report/representation/

You can also see a longer analysis Damore's liberal assumptions here: https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

Looks like the wired analysis and your own views can be summarised as "we don't understand everything about psychology", and that "biological differences barely matter, it largely comes down to nurture instead of nature." One is worthless noise, the other demonstrably false.

Whats more, this has had progressives crawling all over it with arguments including "Just allow the slander to go on unanswered", "its someone else's definition of sexist so he's sexist", "I heard he does other evil things" and attempts to distract from the point.

At this stage vaguery without clear examples can be dismissed as nothing at best or marked as evidence of bad faith debate driven by religious compulsion at worst.

> "the other demonstrably false"

Go on... Demonstrate.

I'll take the bait.

You go check the statistics so you don't accuse me of cherry picking or anything:

Go right ahead and look at all scientific studies you can find. See if men and women score exactly the same or if there are sometimes huge differences.

That doesn't address the nature vs. nurture question.

Assume for a minute we all agree that there are observable iq differences and observable differences in likelyhood one ventures into computer science.

Then what? You've claimed that this is due to biolgical factors not social ones. Prove it.

Why in hell would societies start by nurturing the sexes differently if they weren’t different to start. I know that lots of girls are mechanically inclined, but in average they aren’t. 14 years and thousands of dollars of robots, mindstorms and all kind of stuff that my daughter is not into technical stuff, no matter how much I tried to avoid the barbies and make up stuff. And she is like most, but not all the friends her age. We need to make sure that girls that want to do stuff that usually is more associated with boys are free to pursue their interests in equal conditions. But extrapolating this to “we need to have parity in all those predominantly masculine professions(of course, only the well paid).

> Why in hell would societies start by nurturing the sexes differently if they weren’t different to start.

We're talking about biological differences in either cognitive ability or interest in engineering/CS.

The well understood answer to your question is that there was a split in gender roles at about the time agriculture was adopted, with men working outside and women doing indoor tasks. This led to a breadwinner/homemaker split across gender lines which impacted the way genders were conventionally taught.

This extended to higher education opportunities, which in the US for example only really began to be open to women in the mid to late 1800s.

Note how none of this has anything to do with any cognitive ability that women might have had. It extends from the fact that men were superior agricultural fieldworkers thousands of years ago.

Note how

A) You start out with "either cognitive ability or interest in engineering/CS", but by your last paragraph you're down to "cognitive ability" alone. Damore's thesis was, AFAICR, mainly about the "interest" bit. Does this divergence in what you are talking about vs what he was mean anything, and if so what?

B) > The well understood answer to your question is that there was a split in gender roles at about the time agriculture was adopted, with men working outside and women doing indoor tasks.

And this split... Just happened? Or was it maybe due to differences in, well, how interested people of different sexes on average were/are in different kinds of tasks? Or why else were men "superior agricultural fieldworkers thousands of years ago"?

The data[1] shows that as countries get more egalitarian, the personality differences between the sexes increases rather than decreases, which is the opposite of what would be predicted if these differences were 100% due to socialization.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30206941/

> he was pretty liberal with his conclusions he claimed were derived from data

Well, ok, fair enough, but if that's the case then the correct response was, "I can see why you think that, but have you considered..." not immediate banishment.

Don't worry, there was quite a bit of that. He was asked to tone down the document and remove some of the most ridiculous parts (including for example the antisemitic conspiracy bit) and refused.

> including for example the antisemitic conspiracy bit

I don’t recall hearing about this at the time. Do you have any links to what this was about. I tried to Google, but just got results related to more recent Google removals.

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As someone faintly familiar with various Marxist ideologies (admittedly, not particularly well read though) how would you define the latter. I assume you are contrasting it with textual Marxism or Marxist theory.

> and his inability to thoroughly consider differences being caused by societal factors (nature vs. nurture).

The goal was to find how to make the job more attractive to female developers. If the difference exists, then in this context the distinction does not matter.

> The goal was to find how to make the job more attractive to female developers.

But why should that be a goal? Is there any inherent value in having all jobs be equally attractive to everybody? If so, where are all the efforts to make jobs like garbage collection less male-dominated?

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