alpsgolden

Isn't this an argument against any form of different hiring practices based on race/gender? Even if distributions of abilities are equal in nature, if a college has a lower bar based on gender, then abilities won't be equal among graduates of that college. Conversely, even if abilities are on average different, if a college has the same bar and same standards based on gender, then you won't have to question if a graduate really deserved to have that credential.

Sex is basically binary in mammals (do you have the gene that triggers producing sperm versus the gene that triggers you producing eggs), the only exception being incredibly rare intersex disorders. Read more here: http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/why-sex-is-binary-but-gende...

Based on sex, people have different traits, physical and mental. Some of these traits are close to binary between the sexes (having a uterus, etc.). Some traits are a matter of distributions (such as differences in physical strength, or willingness to take risks).

Society then considers certain behaviors and traits more masculine or feminine, and creates norms and roles around these. Some of these norms and roles exist on a spectrum, some are more binary.

Gender for a long time was used either as a synonym for sex, or only this case of describing language (gendered pronouns). In the mid-1900s academics in the social science used it to mean "the social norms and roles society creates based on biological sex." Then more recently some academics have re-defined gender again to mean "ones own innate conception of one's male/female identity." There isn't any scientific proof that such a thing exists or doesn't exist, nor can there be, because we don't have mind reading machines.

Sexual identity has also been redefined recently. So now if you were born with the egg producing equipment, but are taking male sex hormones some people will now define you as of the male sex. Frankly, I find this redefining of words to be pretty Orwellian.

Not true, he distributed the memo on a mailing list called "skeptics."

I would like to hear from someone at Google what kind of discussions happen on the "skeptics" list. Have there have been any negative stereotypes about Christians voiced on that mailing list, for instance? Was political discussion normal on that mailing list? Was criticism of Google normal?

Sure, why not?

I believe that the author is generally right, and that there are psychological differences between the sexes. And I have noticed that male bosses who believe that women are the same as men sometimes end up making their female subordinates cry a lot, because they don't realize the same harsh criticisms they would use on a guy are way too harsh for many women. They would be better bosses if they were aware of sex differences. For that reason, I believe knowing the truth is better even if that is "validating stereotypes."

I read Zunger's article. Getting offended is in large part a choice. I apply the golden rule. If an Asian guy wrote a similar article for arguing why Asian people are over-represented at Google compared to white people, I would not take offense. Maybe he would be wrong, but if he wrote in the tone of the original article I would not call for his firing or say that I couldn't work with him.

mostly in the form of conservative-leaning folk who thought they should be allowed to say whatever they pleased because "freedom of speech."

A cry bully is someone who tries to get other people fired or de-platformed because they claim personal offense. Did these conservatives call for people to get fired? Did they succeed? If not, then good, I'm gladd their cry-bullying attempts were ignored.

And yet, this guy who is openly telling the world he doesn't trust females to be as interested as he is in the job should be applauded?

There is a enormous difference between noticing on average differences and direct personally targeted invective against a specific employee.

not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male

You are making up the straw man because that is not what he claims they are doing.

I suspect that this memo wasn't any more political than much that gets shared in the message boards at Google. This issue was already politicized and the main gist of the politics stuff was, "Both sides bring insights and biases to the table, so we should do a better job making it comfortable for conservatives to speak up." By the standards of what I see going on the political discourse this was pretty tame stuff. The responses to the piece were 100X worse -- https://files.gab.ai/image/5986e3f03d1f1.jpeg

Sure, but if Google has already decided it is ok to discuss this issue on company message boards and that it wants to encourage debate and discussion (which it has), then it shouldn't then fire a guy just because he makes an argument other people don't like. The principled thing would be to stand for freedom of debate. Otherwise you are just ceding the company to cry-bullies, ceding the message boards to the faction that is more willing to self-modify to be offended at opposing viewpoints. If anything, Google should fire the employees who responded with personal invective against a fellow Googler.

By stating that he's OK with discriminating by gender, he put them in a position where they'd have to flag him as someone who couldn't manage a mixed-gender team.

He did not say this. He is against discriminating against gender and wants the same hiring and recruiting process regardless of gender.

The data from other professions overall seems to be in line with a "women less interested in systemizing activities" http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

In particular, why is math so much better?

It's a much smaller field, with far fewer lucrative jobs. For any given smaller fields, there could be a number of reasons why it is more or less equal. My hypothesis is that men are biologically more inclined toward geeking out and doing coding or such for fun. If men who are good at math are also geeking and out and coding, while women just do their high school math homework, women would have a comparative advantage at plain math as opposed to computer science.

This would suggest that the gender gap could be reduced by forcing women and men to do computer programming as part of a standard high school curriculum. But the idea of forcing women to do something other than what they do in their free time, just to close a gender gap, seems to me pretty appalling totalitarian.

Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity

Reading the studies, some things are positively correlated, some are negative. Some things have no correlation. There are lots of controls and data manipulation going on, hard to tell if the dredged for the results or not. And if you look at other types of studies you see the opposite result -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability

If the scores are equal, this would suggest no bias in selection. If women are unfairly excluded from computer science, or face a higher bar due to discrimination, then since they were more selected their scores should be higher.

A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems

Keep in mind girls mature faster and differently, so differences in elementary school aren't all that predictive of differences later.

I agree, but I'm pretty sure political posts were already tolerated at Google. If employees are allowed to post to internal message boards that women are underrepresented because interviewers are sexist or suffer from unconcious bias and should adopt policy Y, then employees should also be allowed to post an argument that women are under-represented for some other reason X and argue against policy Y.

And even if the workplace does have a no politics rule, the proper response should be a reprimand and asking him to delete his post, not a firing.

Google or a college level computer science course is specifically pulling from adults who are in the very top percentiles in logical/quantitative skills.

The abstract of the paper notes that while the math difference is small among the total population: "differences favoring men emerged in high school and college" and "grew larger with increasingly selective samples, and were largest for highly selected samples and samples of highly precocious persons."

So the slide deck obscures the fact that in the relevant sample, men have better skills, by including the general population (women, average folks) where there is no difference.

1. Women are generally more conscientious and studious. I've seen data they do more homework, get better grades, even in math, and are more likely to make the honor roll. 2. The more difficult the math test, and the higher the score bracket, the more men outscored women. Average SAT score for men was only a little higher. But among those scoring 800, men outnumbered women two-to-one (this has changed a bit, but they have also made the math test a lot easier, far more testers get an 800 math than get an 800 verbal). Then when looking at who gets a 100+ on the American Mathematics Competition tests, men dominated by about a 10 to 1 ratio. 3. I have observed throughout life that men seem a lot more likely to "geek out" on stuff -- whether that be coding all night for fun, editing Wikipedia articles, taking apart a mechanical device, trying to beat all the quests in an RPG, etc. This is inline with studies showing men to be much more system oriented. I have a hard time believing this is due to culture messaging because for a lot of these things men receive enormous cultural messaging that they are losers for being such geeks, yet they do it anyway because it is such fun. 4. Men tend to have higher variance in almost all things. More men at the top, more men at the bottom. 5. This Stanford article notes "Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. " http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... I think that skill becomes more important the harder a math test becomes, or the harder a programming project is.

I think the 1970's style computer punch card programming, which was very corporate, and did not involve as much keeping large complicated systems in working memory, was less prone to creating a gender imbalance. It more favored conscientiousness.

Whe computers became available in every household, men were much more prone to geek out and become expert programmers on their own time. This means the pipeline of programmers ends up being much more male dominated.

Furthermore, the skills required to be a computer programmer at a top company like Google, require someone from the top percentiles in being able to juggle items in their head, and there are a lot more men in those percentiles than women. I think programming at Google is much more akin to doing well on the AMC than it is to answering an average SAT-level math problem. When we not the disparity in math ability is small, it obscures that the disparity at the very high ends is much larger.

Aside from that, he or she can issue Executive Orders, which "have significant influence over the internal affairs of government, deciding how and to what degree legislation will be enforced, dealing with emergencies, waging wars, and in general fine-tuning policy choices in the implementation of broad statutes."

Except that when those orders go to far against the wishes of the permanent government, the orders get blocked by the courts.

The issue is that it takes virtual all of a president's political capital to fight the permanent government (the bureaucracy, the courts, academia, the credentialed media, the party apparatus). So while in theory they have quite a bit of authority, if they wish to use that authority in a way that goes against the interests of the permanent government, they will find themselves in a huge battle. They can win at most, maybe one or two of these battles a term, and only these in a limited way.

Was there anyone predicting in the 1980s or 1990s that with global warming arctic ice would decline while antarctic ice would increase? Was anyone predicting this before the observation occurred? How do I know that the idea that global warming causes an increase in southern ice is not just an after the fact rationalization?

Also how do we square the statement about the decrease in volume with this statement from a year and a half ago? "However, very little ice thickness information actually exists." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065704/full How do we actually know how much volume has fallen in the last 30 years if two years ago "very little information on thickness actually exists"?

I don't really understand the appeal of this article when it doesn't link to any sources. The article doesn't tell us what the actual new information prompted the article and where that new information came from.

If you had to leave the US forever, which of these places would you most and least want to move to? What would be your ranking of desirability? Canada, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, Lagos, Costa Rica, Belize.

For me, I would most want to move to Canada and least Lagos. I'd also prefer Costa Rica over Belize. And Australia over Hong Kong over Belize over Lagos.

What makes Australia and Hong Kong more desirable than Lagos and Belize? What makes Canada more desirable than Mexico? Why do all the liberals who hate Trump threaten to move to Canada and not Mexico? It's not the geography. It's not like Canada has better weather. It's the people. (People will say it is things like the government dysfunction or the culture or the language, but of course, those are just properties of a group of people, not the land).

We're more likely to have liberal immigration policies with regards from countries that we see as desirable places to live. That is because 1) being desirable places, most people in those countries won't want to leave, and thus we won't be overwhelmed by their numbers. 2) since those people have made their country a desirable place, if large numbers of those people move here, it won't decrease our quality of life. I won't fear a decrease in government quality or cultural alienation if a large number of Canadians move to the United States.

In other words, country of origin is heuristic that will correlate with do they agree with American values, and will they be a contributing citizen here. Could we find a better heuristic? Maybe. Do you have any ideas?

Pretending a 49% drop over 20 years is sustainable continuously with no outliers is...absurd. ... As Pew has reported in recent years, in fact, the American public is "unaware" that the homicide rate in the United States has fallen by 49 percent over the past twenty years.

In my city, the homicide rate is still 5X higher than it was in 1950s. That's hundreds of people dead each year, unnecessarily. And that's after dramatic improvements in medical technology! I have a lot higher standards than a 50% decline since the 1990 peak. Let's get it back down to the 1950s level.

I mostly agree, but I do think the police could do more to crack down on the most brazen instances of gangs being the de facto government of various neighborhoods.

It seems like a lot of criminals, start off rather young charged with crimes like shoplifting etc, and that record haunts them forever, by shutting off a lot of opportunities forever.

That's not my sense from the various ethnographies I have read. Where are you getting that from?

I found it rather surprising that such kinds of conditions exist in a developed country like the US; its usually something you find in less developed countries

There is a racial element to this. When I was traveling in Brazil, the black favellas of Brazil had a lot of similarity to the black ghettos of the U.S., and the white areas of Brazil had a lot of similarity to the white areas of the United States or of Europe.

I fear this too. As someone who now lives in a city that suffered enormously from the 70s crime rise, and benefited greatly from the 2000s decline in crime, the prospect of another crime wave makes me wonder if I should hold off on buying a house.

Peter Moskos has written a lot on this. As part of his PhD, he spent two years as an actual cop in Baltimore. Now he is a professor of criminology in New York. IMO, he does a good job writing in a balanced and truthful perspective about crime.

"I don't know what's going on everywhere (or even most-where), but I can tell you a bit about Baltimore. And I suspect it holds true in many cities. I looked calls for service, arrest numbers, and crimes. Most dramatic is the drop of arrests in Western District....Now there are good and not so good reasons for this drop in arrests. But leaving that why: it happened. Police were less involved, by choice and necessity, and violence skyrocketed. Just because correlation does prove causing, correlation certainly doesn't mean causation is impossible or even unlikely. I mean, what else changed in the Western except police and crime?...Cops stopped making discretionary arrests and being proactive in clearing corners and frisking subjects. Look, it's no surprise where shootings happens and who gets shot." http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/01/the-baltimore-6-effect.h...

And then read this one about Chicago: http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/11/the-best-of-times-worst-...

And a few other posts http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/02/defining-ferguson-effect... and http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/03/chicago-violence.html

And the question I would ask is, "what should have been done to prevent this spiraling into a life of crime, and why wasn't it?"

My reading is that there is a total breakdown in discipline in many of these families and communities. The kids that end up being problems are not getting discipline at home, and they're not getting it from the school (see http://www.isegoria.net/2014/12/the-monster-factory/ or http://www.anurbanteacherseducation.com/2011/02/tfa-alumnus-... )

I also think that when you have open-air drug dealing, and gangs openly controlling the streets, then that turns senior gang members into role models, and it incentivizes young teenagers to join gangs for protection. Then as part of joining, they get involved in beefs and violence. That is my take from reading various ethnographies.

The reason nothing is being done is because prevailing opinion does not agree with me. The emphasis over the past fifty years has been less discipline in schools. ( http://www.city-journal.org/html/who-killed-school-disciplin... ). There was a police crackdown in the 1990s, but it was more targeted at keeping violent people out of the nice neighborhoods, rather than completely eliminating gang violence in the ghetto neighborhoods. I think that is because the liberals see the police as suspect and problematic, and don't want to empower them, and because the conservatives don't really care about the ghetto as long as it doesn't effect them.

Millions? Millions??

Where on Earth are you getting "millions" from? And why is this completely absurd and unsubstantiated claim the top voted comment?

The idea that millions, or even hundreds of thousands of people are in jail for simply smoking a joint is a myth:

"Less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court in 2014 were convicted for simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and most of those convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges. Even on the state level, drug-possession convicts are relatively rare. In 2013, only 3.6 percent of state prisoners were serving time for drug possession, often the result of a plea bargain, compared with 12 percent of prisoners convicted for trafficking. Virtually all the possession offenders had long prior arrest and conviction records. The meth users that Tustin, California, police officer Mark Turner encountered in his undercover narcotics days were sentenced to drug classes. “Then they would skip out of the classes and always re-offend,” he says." (Source: http://www.city-journal.org/html/decriminalization-delusion-... )

Also read: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-10/the-smart...

And homicide rates have risen substantially in the last two years (up 10.4% in 2015, and projected for 13.1% this year). These are the biggest increases in a generation.

http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/09/spin-this-biggest-murder...

http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/11/homicide-is-up-and-its-n...

I'm not sure if the de-incarceration is responsible for the rise in crime. From my following, it seems like the police backing off in response to protests, riots, and consent decrees has a bigger impact. And I'm not a fan of prison -- there are better ways to deter crime and to keep violent criminals away from normal people. But I do notice that most times when I see a murder in the news, and the suspect has been apprehended, the suspect has a disturbingly long wrap sheet and I've wondered to myself, "how was this person allowed back out into civilized society."

On the Holocaust I'd argue the opposite point -- it was the denial of Jews genetically having a higher IQ that helped lead to the Holocaust. Jews had a level of wealth and achievement disproportionate to their population. So if you don't believe they are smarter and don't believe they have earned it, then the explanation you are left with is that they are tricky and their gains were ill-begotten. And if you read Amy Chua's book World on Fire you'll see this pattern over and over again. A certain ethnic group (Jews, Chinese, etc) does better everywhere they go. But then get demonized by the local population for their overachievement, and pogroms result.

Slavery and genocide have been around forever, since we were chimpanzees really. The Romans were enslaving Greeks and everyone else (who they respected for their intelligence). Slavery was not invented because of belief in racial differences. Slavery was invented because people like taking the sh*t of other people.

The NY Times publishes hundreds of articles a year on racial disparities. If you're going to make it a big issue, then you need to fully explore the reasons for the disparities based on the facts. Otherwise you will get the wrong answers, and the wrong solutions.

- The September monthly average sea ice trend for the entire Arctic Ocean is now -13.3% per decade relative to the 1981-2010 average. Trends are smaller during March (-2.7% per decade), but are still decreasing at a statistically significant rate.

- I couldn't find a trend line for the average sea surface temperature. They did have a map with the changes plotted visually -- http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/Portals/7/EasyDNNNews/thumbs/285/...

- The mean annual surface air temperature anomaly (+2.0° C relative to the 1981-2010 mean value) for October 2015-September 2016 for land stations north of 60° N is the highest value in the record starting in 1900 (Fig. 1.1). This is an increase of 3.5° C since the beginning of the 20th Century, and the largest annual increase since 1995. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes. http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/Portals/7/EasyDNNNews/thumbs/271/...

Where moral hazard likely plays a bigger role is on the part of the doctor. It is always better to prescribe another test or a pill, or some precautionary treatment. It both makes you money and covers your ass from lawsuits, and you don't feel guilty about making your patient pay for it because insurance will cover it. This is a pretty good case study of how the process can get very dysfunctional: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/01/the-cost-conund...