One of Scott's commentators (Stacey Jeffery) writes:
That’s not because he necessarily said anything actually sexist or actually racist, but because he said the kinds of things that you usually only hear from sexist people, and in particular, the kind of sexist people who are also racist.
That is the big thing I saw as well.
I think there is an analogy to the body's defenses against viruses. The body recognizes certain shapes from the outside surface of viruses and attacks anything sharing those shapes. The memo was chock full of ideas and phrases that match those used by the worst kind of bigots.
If you look at the plain meaning of the words it isn't so bad. But most people's response is based on the pattern-matched shape evaluation instead.
> I think there is an analogy to the body's defenses against viruses. The body recognizes certain shapes from the outside surface of viruses and attacks anything sharing those shapes.
This is quite scary. This is probably how racism begins in the first place. Here, your defence mechanism seems to help you find bigots. But the same process probably is used by bigots to be prejudiced against others based on their "shapes". Imagine a bigot who has been tuned to view brown people as potential threats. Even if they interact with a brown person nominally, their "defense mechanism" will concoct a reality based on the "pattern matching ".
I think this is a very scary sentiment and that we should try to go beyond prejudice and this type of defense mechanism. We should debate with each other without appealing to our own prejudices.
There are many good arguments against the memo. I don't think it helps to be instantly prejudiced against it. We can address it reasonably.
Agreed. And I understand the impulse. The irony is that this is in many ways the same tendency that powers racism, sexism, stereotypes in general. This very human impulse to label and identify and place in groups of known friends and enemies even based on incomplete data and uncertainty.
I have no doubt that for many SJW's they labeled this guy a sexist and misogynist nearly instantly based just upon the subject matter.
I also have no doubt that many members of the alt-right did so as well and identified him as one of their own.
For me, the memo is incomplete data and not dispositive. But the impulse still tugs in the back of my head...
Aaronsen mentioned this as well, friends and colleagues warned him about this "dogwhistling" (a term I've never heard before). The concern was that because he wasn't clearly stating his position, people would assume the worst.
This was much the same criticism leveled against Donald Trump. Because he did not clear denounce the racist activities in Charlottesville, he could be interpreted as implying support.
Personally, I am not seeing the lack of things that are actually sexist in Damore's memo. His one-sided and dishonest interpretations of his sources alone make his sexism clear and it's the same kind of dishonest interpretations we see from the racists and the sexists.
“Dogwhistling” isn't failure to clearly state a position, it's using recognized in-group code to signal one meaning to a target group while hoping to avoid notice by a different group.
In Trump's case, specifically, echoing the “Unite the Right” marchers call to respect history while making the “many sides” statement was pointed to as dog-whistle support for the alt-right groups. (The weak statement itself was also called out, but it wasn't the weakness or vagueness of the statement that was the basis of the “dogwhistle” characterization.)
Not sure what the specific alleged dog-whistles were in Damore's memo.
There has been no claim that I have seen that Damore was dog whistling. Scott said that he was motivated to write this linked post by others who feared his previous post might be interpreted by others as a dog whistle to the alt-right.
Damore at one point mentioned in passing IQ as also having statistical truths that are taboo to talk about.
I took that as a dog whistle reference to 'The Bell Curve' since that is the most famous treatise for that view and a support of the conclusions that it made.
Or I could be just reading too much into it and extending Damore's thesis into race, too, is unfair.
That's the secret sauce of dog whistles...plausible deniability.
There's no reason for him to make a dog whistle reference to The Bell Curve. Even though people don't agree with or like that book, it's not exactly a book that is so scandalous and horrific that you need to dog whistle about it.
If you're going to dog whistle, it's going to be to something so horrific it can't even be discussed with any pretense of academic distance or distinction.
The problem with the "dog whistle theory" though is that only dogs can hear them, so anybody who is not a dog can label anything to be a dog whistle with no real proof whatsoever.
I think among the more intellectual side of the alt-right that book is fairly important. I'm not sure if Damore's usage could really be considered dog whistling but I'm pretty sure that's what he's referencing.
Right, it makes us doubt our usage of this powerful heuristic to instantly identify people as friends or enemies. That heuristic is what powers racism and stereotyping. That's the irony!
People combatting racism (completely understandably) want to use the same technique of quickly identifying friends and enemies to identify racists. And dog whistling interferes with that. It makes us uncertain and doubts our usage of it.
In my view, it is this uncertainty that we as a species need to get better at. You want to combat racism? Find ways to make them doubt the heuristic too.
I think you're right when it comes to dog whistling outside of politicians. But right wing politicians have a very real history of using dog whistles to in the U.S. Think "state's rights" as opposed to "segregation". Those uses should still be called out.
It's totally natural to react that way. But it's part of a loop where more ordinary people with any sort of doubts about facts stay silent lest they be treated like those with the vilest hates, and so free speech on the matter becomes a more-informative sign of vileness, and around the loop until an equilibrium is reached. There's a book on this dynamic from the 1990s, referenced here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
You might think this an OK way to reach a needed consensus, but I doubt it -- Kuran's book mentioned he thought some kind of electoral revolt was likely if the U.S. kept on its course.
"... if James Damore deserves to be fired from Google, for treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues..."
I don't believe that's why James Damore was fired. He was fired for a much more obvious reason: he was working against their efforts to have a more gender diverse workforce and he embarrassed the company in a very public way.
"First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it."[0]
Google admits that there are some things in the memo that are debatable, even though Google disagrees with Damore.
"It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects ‘each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination"[0]
And that is why he was fired: deliberately working against Google's workplace culture goals. There may be room to argue about what Damore may have meant, in his heart, when he wrote the memo. However, since the memo is a physical artifact that we may all inspect, it's clear that the text of the memo is unabashedly sexist. He clearly states that he believes the gender gap at Google is not caused by sexism and that's at clear odds with Google's goals.
"We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism."[1]
As if it needs to be said, that is clearly not the case. The primary cause of the gender gap is very much sexism and it's a real problem that needs to be dealt with. While we may disagree on which steps will be most effective, there's no benefit to denying the problem exists.
Please provide a source for your last statement since that is not at all clear. By your logic, the primary cause of the gender gap in public school teaching must also be sexism. Do you believe that as well?
The primary cause of the gender gap is tech is the lack of a gender-balanced candidate pool for tech jobs. If you're a hiring manager posting developer jobs and 80% of the applicants are men, is it sexist that you end up hiring mostly men?
The real sexism problems are happening much earlier in life than when people start looking for jobs. If you want gender balance in tech jobs, we need to get more women into tech-focused college degrees, which means we need to get more girls interested in tech in primary school, which means we need to encourage teaching and parenting in early development that leads to an interest in tech later... etc. But wait, prenatal hormone exposure predicts toy choices in young children [1], so it's not that simple. This is exactly what Damore was trying to get at.
I think we need to split the gender problem in tech into a few different categories and tackle each independently rather than throwing everything in the "tech is sexist" bucket and looking for magic umbrella solutions. At a minimum, there are problems with getting girls interested in tech, keeping girls on an education path that leads to a tech career, eliminating subconscious bias in hiring practices, moving startups away from bro culture, and retaining women in tech when work-life balance becomes more important. All of these are important and require different solutions.
If anyone doubts that "boy interests" and "girl interests" diverge long before they get to the adult job pool, just spend some time people watching in a mall and pay attention to what kids do. You'll see big behavioral differences between boys and girls.
Whether these differences are entirely do to their parents or society steering them toward traditional 20th century gender roles, or are due to prenatal hormones, or some mix of these, or something else entirely, they are real and are there long before the kids are even thinking of a real career.
If we want to get more girls interested in tech (so that they will grow up to become women interested in tech), maybe we should try to find ways to make tech more useful for and relevant to "girl interests".
I remember a story maybe a year or two ago about someone starting a "get girls to code" program that was based on that idea. It was organized around things like jewelry making and fashion, and how programming could be used to help with those areas--in other words, it was organized around things that a large fraction of ordinary American pre-teen/young teen girls like to spend their spare time doing.
It, of course, went down under a hail of criticism that it was trying to force girls into the outmoded gender stereotypes of the oppressive patriarchy or something like that.
That's an interesting study you link to but I don't think it fits in this discussion. The underlying problem is not that boys like "boy" toys and girls like "girl" toys, it's how our culture defines which toys are which. Buying a sewing machine for a girl and a video game system for a boy is somehow "normal" but switch those around and it's at least a little weird (at least 20-30 years ago it was). Some sort of quota system for women in tech might actually have an effect on that (certainly not guaranteed to, though).
I think you missed the point of the study. "Normal" has nothing to do with it. Presented with a variety of toys to choose from, girls picked the stereotypical "girly" toys, even when encouraged to pick the "boy" toys by their parents. This means that you could give a Lego mindstorms kit to a girl and there's a good chance she just straight up wouldn't be interested in it, and would seek some other form of entertainment.
In light of that, we're left with an awkward situation. Should we force kids to play with certain toys and do certain activities even if they're not interested just so we can get to gender balance in lucrative fields? Maybe. Parents certainly do that sort of thing already with piano lessons and language classes. But if you don't think that's a good way to go, then you have to be open to the possibility that, left to their own choices, fewer girls will be interested in things that lead to a tech career than their male counterparts. Certainly it should be better than the (at best) 70/30 split we see now, but targeting 50/50 is not realistic.
And as an addendum, it's not just parents; girls and boys are often segregated, either forced (separate changing rooms, bathrooms) or intuitively (forming groups with their own genders), and then you get peer pressure, or you get ostracized for not being "like the others"
Being a geek at one point was like that, then it became cool.
Anyway point is, even if a parent raises their kid(s) gender-neutral or even pushes them towards STEM or whatever (for whatever reason), there's still peer pressure - but also support! - to either continue or move away from it.
In my personal experience, I got support from other kids that had computers at home (for example). I know my sister didn't have that, so while she'd use the computer at home, their friends had no interest in it. (she ended up doing biology, works at a hospital now)
Ok, I misunderstood what the study says. The underlying idea that boy and girl toys are social constructs could still be true, perhaps? Nothing seems to me inherently "male" about Lego mindstorms besides how we culturally define it. Maybe there are hormones involved in that girl's disinterest but more it's hard to believe that's significant enough. But it's definitely true that it's not an easy job to change culture.
Agreed, nothing is inherently male or female about one toy vs. another. However, there is evidence that preferences that eventually lead to a career in engineering and/or computer science might at least partially be due to gender and not to social norms. There's an excellent essay in [1] that sums up some additional research and also refutes some of the "it's all sexism" arguments that have been made. I recommend reading it and also the two comments to get a bit more data on the topic.
I'm not here to name call (although I am certainly prone to name calling).
If we take a look at the recent spate of articles covering sexism and harassment in the workplace at companies in the field, it is clear that there is a problem. If someone were at the point in their lives where they were choosing a field in which to place their career, they may very well choose one where their gender would be less of an issue. That causes a gender gap.
If we take a look at the recent spate of articles covering sexism and harassment in the workplace at companies in the field, it is clear that there is a problem.
It's clear as day to everyone that there is a problem. It is not clear that the problem is sexism. In my view, the problem is economic inequality which is ratcheting social pressures up to a fever pitch. Many people see their quality of life slipping away and the intellectual class fighting for their chance to tighten the screws. Social entropy is increasing dramatically and the social contract is in dire peril.
> In my view, the problem is economic inequality which is ratcheting social pressures up to a fever pitch.
This is something I haven't read before regarding this debate, I think it makes a lot of sense - if the economic consequences weren't so significant, people on both sides would likely be far less passionate about this topic.
>Sexism doesn't magically increase during recessions.
I am not so sure about that. I would not be at all surprised if racial resentment increases during times of economic turmoil. My understanding is that during tough economic times industries like alcohol/gambling preform far better then the market as a whole. I would not be surprised at all if scapegoating of "outgroups" (both black and white) incresses during economic tough times. See Nazi Germany circa 1930s.
> he was working against their efforts to have a more gender diverse workforce
It seems to me like quite a strong statement. Let's say you are doing something using strategy X. I come over and point out, maybe the strategy X is not quite working and you should rather try strategy Y, for these reasons. Would you call this "working against your efforts"?
AFAIK, he didn't sabotage anything, he just disagreed and wrote it up. You don't have to read it, you don't have to switch to strategy Y, you don't have to do anything, you can just not care at all.
Yes that's the problem for most people. Google fired him not because of the memo but because the memo became viral. If no one at Google shared his views and shared that memo, this could have been quietly ignored.
This also assumes their stated goal, a more gender diverse workforce, is actually their goal. I have a feeling their actual goal is more likely avoiding controversy and having employees be as "happy" as possible. If one forgets (as I always do) that when dealing with human beings, perception is reality, you might not realize that that is realistically about the most pragmatic approach you can take with this sort of policy.
And this memo certainly works against both of those goals.
> This also assumes their stated goal, a more gender diverse workforce, is actually their goal.
Well.. if I genuinely want to help you, and you misstate your goals, for whatever reasons, you are only hurting yourself. Here Google probably lost a decent engineer.
This sometimes happens in authoritarian organizations, where people who genuinely want to follow the orders from the top will misunderstand the indirect meaning, causing more harm for the organization (and sometimes it can be exploited). Actually, I believe that's why authoritarian organizations are less effective than democratic ones.
I always thought it was obvious that the gender gap in tech begins long before adulthood. Classrooms in high schools and universities that are technical in nature tend to be dominated by males. I think it has more to do with young people fulfilling traditional roles in academia. And I don't think that's inherently "wrong". Why is a gender gap considered "bad"? In and of itself, I think it's neutral.
Does sexism exist in tech? Sure, but I'm not sure it's any more pronounced than any other field. I also don't think females are always the victims. Should we try and right moral wrongs where we see them? Yes, I think we should.
It's really easy to highlight bad behavior as a cause of a "problem" that might not even be a problem. In other words, if we can focus our attention on eliminating sexism where we see it, the gender gap becomes a non-issue (even if it persists).
Fair enough, you have a good point: there are many things that contribute to this gender gap. I don't think it's a huge leap, however, to say that sexism in the field of software engineering is a substantial contributor to the gender gap in that field. In my opinion, the regular trickle of articles on this subject could be enough to discourage people who are currently thinking about entering the field, thus widening (or maintaining) the gender gap.
To put it another way, I believe we would need to make real and measurable progress on sexism as the cause of the gender gap before we start looking for other reasons or, as Damore would have it, deciding the status quo is as good as it gets.
That is a fair comment. I would not be surprised if sexism turns out to be a substantial contributor. Not surprised in the least. However, I still don't know that it is the primary reason and certaintly have not seen convincing evidence proving the case. It is a hypothesis even if a well motivated one.
>I believe we would need to make real and measurable progress on sexism as the cause of the gender gap before we start looking for other reasons
There is actually another way to move past sexism as the primary cause - show that sexism is comparable in other fields with a much smaller gender gap. If Engineering has 2 "sexism units", Medicine has 2.3 and Law 1.5 for instance, that might imply that sexism isn't the cause of Engineering's gender gap - because otherwise we'd expect similar gaps in Law and Medicine.
>he was working against their efforts to have a more gender diverse workforce
Scenario 1:
Hiring policy : Best candidate for the job irrespective of race, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation.
A good Engineer who happens to be a woman: I work for Google. :)
Society: How awesome!!! You go, girl!!!
Scenario 2:
Hiring policy : We are trying to have more gender diverse workforce.
A good Engineer who happens to be a woman: I work for Google. :/
Society: Nice! (Did she make it at Google because of gender diversity program?)
It was Google's announcement that declared their efforts to create a gender diverse workforce, created inferiority complex in the minds of the female engineers whether they got the job because they deserve it, or because they were women.
It was Google's announcement for gender diverse workforce that created hostile work environment for women because now everyone, including other women, doubt if an engineer, who happens to be woman, made it because of the diversity program.
Google fired the whistle-blower. They shot the messenger.
> He clearly states that he believes the gender gap at Google is not caused by sexism and that's at clear odds with Google's goals
Your sentence doesn't make sense to me. Is it a goal for Google to believe gender gaps are caused by sexism? Although after the firing of Damore it sounds almost plausible, deciding that your goal is to believe in something is still a rather sad endeavour.
>their efforts to have a more gender diverse workforce
The employers are not supposed to discriminate based on gender, race, religion, sexual orientation.
An externally enforced gender diversity is discrimination.
If a company has 100 programming jobs, decides to keep 50 for one specific gender, the company has created discriminatory hiring practice. It has discriminated based on gender.
Damore challenged this discrimination and got sacked. I think he can easily make a legal case for discrimination. If Google had said that they wanted 50/50 gender based representation at the level above Damore's title, then he clearly has a standing. Any male who was denied employment at Google has a standing to know if he was denied because of gender quotas.
Damore's argument is to not take gender into account in hiring practices at all. "Diversity" policies are, at the base of their argument, asking for discriminatory hiring practices.
There is no "diversity" law or mandate. If Google can define a diversity goal for some chosen slicing of the population into groups, may be based on race, may be based on gender, may be based on sexual orientation, may be based on height, and then goes on to seek equality of representation between those groups, then would it OK if some other company define equality based on if you are right handed or left handed? What if someone claims that all major religions should be equally represented in the workforce?
Is the 50/50 split based on gender mean that the company is done with being "diverse"? Which new grouping would then stake claim at equality?
Does Google believe in gender fluidity or do they believe in being cis-gendered? What if male engineers claim to be a female at the time of hiring, claiming gender fluidity, is Google going to get into business of keeping someone honest about what their gender is?
Treat everyone as individual, based on the individuals abilities and choices. Assuming "diversity" goals to ensure equality of outcome by some arbitrary definition of a "group" is by definition discrimination. Individuals, not "group" based on race, religion or gender.
Should Disney be forced to make movies with equal prince and princess lead roles? How about equal number of movies across all religions? Equal number of movies across all races?
Please show me where I am wrong on this. I would like to have correct view on this issue.
To try and correct for built-in bias by setting a goal is a reasonable response. Its self-serving to say "Hey! Sure men have all the jobs, but to give any to women is to hurt me! That's just as bad!"
What if women actually deserved 80% of the jobs, by skill and temperament? Then the 50% goal is way under reality.
I'd like to see passive processes produce an equitable result too. But in the mean time, the car is pulling to the left, so I steer slightly right to compensate. Its a reasonable short-term response. Lesser of evils.
>What if women actually deserved 80% of the jobs, by skill and temperament? Then the 50% goal is way under reality.
You are not hiring "women" as a group. You are hiring an individual to feel in a role, gender should not be looked at, at all. I would prefer if google conducts all interview in written format without disclosing name, hiding gender, or where the voice is scrambled so that you can't make out the gender of the interviewee.
If you claim that you know that a group based on gender deserved certain representation (80%), you are the one discriminating based on gender. What's your opinion about representation of Samoans in Google ranks? What % should they get? You have no way to back up your 80% claim.
>I'd like to see passive processes produce an equitable result too.
This is the problem. I don't think it is achievable, or worthy, to seek equitable results. Results can vary based on many factors, picking one aspect of an individual, their gender, and then asking to make it equal across the group equal to that aspect of the individual, is only going to give advantage to certain individuals of that group, individuals who may not be as handicapped by the group identity as you think. E.g. does a multi-millionaire African American lawyer's son deserve a seat at Medical school based on his race? Do the individual women who qualify at Google really represent the disadvantaged representatives of groups based on "gender"? Is Dianne Green who heads Google Cloud part of this disadvantaged group?
Equity in access to opportunity is what I can definitely agree. Let's strive to make education needed to qualify for a job at Google available at fingertips of as many kids as we can across the entire globe.
>But in the mean time, the car is pulling to the left, so I steer slightly right to compensate.
The corporate america and its leaders with their fiefdoms already exercise high control over the fate of the individual employees to work there. What if you are wrong and you over correct the car and crash it?
Do not discriminate at all. Define job requirements for what makes a good candidate for the job and then hire for those skills and abilities, no matter what race, gender or religion.
I claim no special knowledge. I think that's true of both of us. I speculate, what if the existing bias is actually excluding 80% of the women. A reasonable response is, "Yeah that would be awful, we should do something about it in that case". Instead I'm accused of being discriminatory.
I fear that this argument is 'arguing toward a goal'. No real attempt to understand the situation is present. Instead, whatever supports a viewpoint is thrown into a paragraph. Cherry picking, straw men and fud result.
Discrimination is a problem; trying to counter it with goals is a praiseworthy attempt. Consider: to do nothing now means we're ok with the existing bias. Why is that, do you think? Because 'idealism'? I think its more insidious: Its 'ok' for men to have all the jobs now, because that's normal and right. Its scary to change.
We are talking about this, my friend, I hold no ill will towards you nor do I accuse you of any wrongdoing. If I had said something with "you", it was about the argument on the table.
>I claim no special knowledge. I think that's true of both of us.
Agreed.
>I speculate, what if the existing bias is actually excluding 80% of the women. A reasonable response is, "Yeah that would be awful, we should do something about it in that case".
The speculation is that the bias exists, and is based on gender, is significant to skew decision making, and is widespread i.e. held by majority, strong enough to warrant an active adjustment. Now, we are not talking about Saudi Arabia or Somalia, we are talking about the most liberal place in the USA i.e. California. The same google employees that support Democrats in droves, wanted first woman president, and call themselves progressives, and rally for immigrant and refugee rights and environment protection.
There are two things being assumed:
One: that there is bias that holds every woman inferior to any man. This assumption needs to be proven. That is insulting, ridiculous claim against the educated human beings that work at Google, many with wives, daughters, sisters, who call themselves liberal progressives, who would stand up for equality for all.
Two: that the demographic of google employment is because of this bias and nothing else, or at least significantly because of this bias. This assumption needs to be proven.
If you can't prove these two assumptions, you can't act as if the injustice has happened and needs to be corrected at once.
Who else would you let make same argument? For what issue would you allow them to draw same conclusions, based on as much proof, and demand similar action?
How about hijab wearing women vs. non-hijab wearing woman? Need equal or demographically equal representation? How about for-vaccination and anti-vaccination, need equal representation? How about evolution-deniers, need equal representation?
Equality for all doesn't mean 13% black, 80% white and 7% Hispanic, 33% Christian, 8% Jew, 20% Atheist, 45% woman, 40% man, 10% Trans, 10% LGBT, 60% straigt, 20% asexual. You would have put a job Ad for Muslim Gay Woman that is Hispanic. That is quota system.
Equality means it doesn't matter whether your name is Jen, Jose, Jerry or Jasmine, you are selected because of what you bring to the table for the job.
>I speculate
A kid who loves programming, wants to work for google, has taken college education that is needed, has spent countless hours of his own to learn new things, he gets rejected because Google wants to up the women count. That kid never realizes what happened to him as he walks out of the interview. That is wrong. I am not willing to do that because of a speculation.
Let me say this about Damore's claims... he asked for diversity of ideas. I disagree. Google is not in the business of having equal number of conservatives and progressives within its ranks. It has nothing to do with the job of programming gmail or youtube. Workplaces are last hangouts for people where they come together, outside of their individual bubble. We do not need to politicize the workplace. Don't Ask Don't Tell, for political inclinations, at workplace.
As you probably already know, where you are going wrong is due to that saying "you can't use logic to change the mind of someone who has arrived at a position by means other than logic". I think at it's core, this is just an old fashioned "us vs them" battle, so in that sense all the "rules" go out the door, not unlike a democratic election. Similar to how Donald Trump won the election based on emotions and story telling rather than facts, this argument will be won on emotions and story telling, not facts.
I particularly liked your earlier statement: "Does Google believe in gender fluidity or do they believe in being cis-gendered? What if male engineers claim to be a female at the time of hiring, claiming gender fluidity, is Google going to get into business of keeping someone honest about what their gender is?"
To me, that wonderfully illustrates the absurdity of this debate in particular (and most public disagreements in today's day and age for that matter), because who are we to assume that google employees with penises are actually males? And performing a survey to determine how each employee identifies themselves gender wise would be incredibly disrespectful and intrusive, would it not? (And if someone disagrees that it is disrespectful to ask that question, who are you to say what is and is not disrespectful?)
Western society is going through an "adolescent" stage at the moment, and it's just going to take time (my guess is a few decades) to work through it, that's my take on it.
And more rationalizing, that boils down to: its normal and OK for so many of the jobs to be held by men. Because (women are inferior at them; no women want the job; random accident?).
Absurdly biased statistics need to be 'proven' or they can be ignored? Remember when Yahoo had far more women than men in executive positions? That sure got slammed as discriminatory, instantly, without any demand for 'more proof'. Why, do we think? Why is the response so overwhelmingly in favor of men having jobs?
Demanding more proof (besides the decades of evidence of women fleeing workplaces because of stress; women getting paid less for the same job; women overlooked for promotion despite reviews etc) is just more excuse-making. To make us feel better about the situation; to make it ok to do nothing; to explain how we're really not the bad guy even though we're fine with half of us getting a raw deal.
>to explain how we're really not the bad guy even though we're fine with half of us getting a raw deal.
That's how this feels, wheeling and dealing. Jockeying for power.
Show me the outrage over equal representation at the national cemetery.
Show me the outrage over equal representation in the lumber industry.
How about Alaska crab fishing jobs?
How about windmill installation and maintenance?
How about garbage pickup?
Someone has it and you don't. You want it and you will say whatever it takes to get it. It's just mere words. Sexist, misogynist, just air through mouth. Throw it and see if they give you something.
If liberal Google, people educated in best institutions we had to offer throughout the world, is sexist then humanity has no hope.
>Demanding more proof (besides the decades of evidence of women fleeing workplaces because of stress; women getting paid less for the same job; women overlooked for promotion despite reviews etc) is just more excuse-making.
You are not asking to fix any of this. You are asking for hiring bar to be lowered for women so that they make up 50% of the workforce. Those are two different things.
Show me a sexist and his sexist actions and I would gladly fight that person along with you. This collective shaming is as unjust as sexism, and more insulting.
Let's show door to that male college kid, because some bosses at Google had been sexist in their past hiring practices. The bosses, who enjoy full Google employment.
Why are you punishing the kid for crimes of the Google boss who is still gainfully employed?
This is where group think, collectivism, identity politics has gone wrong. This is why people have left the political left.
There's a difference between attempting to have a more diverse workforce and externally enforcing diversity. There are lots of places you can add to diversity without hurting anyone else's chances unfairly
For example, you can widen the diversity of your applicant pool by reaching out to the groups you want to increase. If a company makes sure to have a booth at the major Society of Women Engineers job fairs, is that discrimination? Men are only being hurt in that there are more people applying for the same positions.
As another option, one could argue that there is a societal imbalance in the development of the talent pool, and attempt to correct that. If a company puts effort into encouraging women to go into engineering and, as an outcome, their pool of qualified applicants is more diverse, is that employment discrimination?
What I'm saying is that a company can put effort into expanding the diversity of their employee base in ways other than strict quotas and hiring discrimination, and without lowering the standard of the employees they hire. Is that really so bad?
> For example, you can widen the diversity of your applicant pool by reaching out to the groups you want to increase. If a company makes sure to have a booth at the major Society of Women Engineers job fairs, is that discrimination? Men are only being hurt in that there are more people applying for the same positions.
That's how Caltech got from about 15% female undergraduates when I was there (early '80s) to 44% female nowadays.
They treated qualified high school girls the way schools with big highly rated athletics programs treat star high school athletes. They would identify prospects, and then put a lot of effort into convincing them they wanted to come to Caltech.
For boys you only got more than lukewarm recruitment attention if you looked like you might be the next Arthur Rubin or Peter Shor.
The girls that did apply were judged using the same standards that were used for the boys, so they didn't have any advantage or disadvantage in actually getting admitted (except possibly in the case of ties...not sure how they handled those).
>They treated qualified high school girls the way schools with big highly rated athletics programs treat star high school athletes. They would identify prospects, and then put a lot of effort into convincing them they wanted to come to Caltech.
Shouldn't motivation count? Shouldn't liking something, wanting something count? Would you do a good job if you don't like your job, think it was sold to you? Or, would you do a good job because you can't wait to go to job every morning?
Isn't what you say exactly what Damore's claim is? It's not like Caltech was rejecting women, but that women were not chasing education at Caltech. It was their decision, their choice to not go to Caltech. They were making choices on their own that had impact on how numbers at Caltech panned out. It's good to advertise to new potential candidates to join the college.
Has anyone spoken to women who joined Caltech only because of the hard sell that they did, later to drop out and do something else?
Why can't we trust women to make the decision about their career?
Amazon hired someone from car manufacturing to build the data centers. https://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/ I can get behind that completely, it makes sense. Google wanting more of certain gender doesn't make sense to me.
They were all girls who had shown a strong interest in and aptitude for math, science, or engineering.
There are a variety of reasons someone interested in a career in math, science, or engineering might not consider Caltech.
1. They might not have heard of it. Among top science institutions, Caltech is one of the smaller ones. It makes quite a few more than its proportional share of discoveries, but in total number quite a few others are in the news more.
Also, Caltech is generally only in the news for science and engineering. Some of the larger schools, such as Harvard, are also in the news for business, medicine, history, and other fields, which further raises awareness of them.
2. Caltech has a relatively small undergraduate class. It's about 1/5th the size of MIT, 1/30th the size of UC Berkeley, 1/7th the size of Stanford, 1/7th the size Harvard.
This means it is much less likely that they will know someone who is at Caltech or who went to Caltech. There might have been no prior students from their high school who went there, and so the guidance counsellors might not know much about it and recognize students who would be a great fit.
3. They might think they won't be able to handle the load. Caltech is either the hardest science school in the US, or it is #2 just behind MIT. This can easily scare away people who would actually do fine there.
>For example, you can widen the diversity of your applicant pool by reaching out to the groups you want to increase. If a company makes sure to have a booth at the major Society of Women Engineers job fairs, is that discrimination? Men are only being hurt in that there are more people applying for the same positions.
Nobody would object to a company seeking candidates by turning over every rock out there. More power to you. The objection is using gender as a criteria in hiring decisions.
>one could argue that there is a societal imbalance in the development of the talent pool, and attempt to correct that.
But, it doesn't. It actually incentivizes keeping the imbalance because it guarantees advantage in outcome based on that imbalance in development of the talent pool.
One shouldn't "attempt" something that affects lives in this significant way. You better be 100% sure about it. If there is doubt then fall back to individuality, not "group" think.
>What I'm saying is that a company can put effort into expanding the diversity of their employee base in ways other than strict quotas and hiring discrimination, and without lowering the standard of the employees they hire. Is that really so bad?
You haven't given an example of "expanding diversity" without "quotas". When you say you want to "expand", by definition you are not happy with existing representations and want to change it to another higher % point. That higher % is what I call quota.
Let's imagine 70/30 split between women and men at Google. You would like it to be 50/50. You would like it to be 50/50 in five years. That means hiring has to be lopsided for next five years, may be 10/90 in favor of women to get to 50/50 in 5 years. Don't you think it is discriminatory to the male engineering students who are graduating in next 5 years? Should Google fire existing male employees to keep it fair to the students who are graduating in next 5 years?
"How to help all the young male nerds I meet who suffer from [the dating] problem, in a way that passes feminist muster, and that triggers the world’s sympathy rather than outrage[?]
I believe that, just as there are shy, nerdy men, there are also shy, nerdy women, who likewise suffer from feeling unwanted, sexually invisible, or ashamed to express their desires."
At the same time, from my experience (including my current relationship with a feminist) that nerds and feminist should be allies. What is a problem is misunderstanding of each other problems and (often intentional triggering) both ways.
tl;dr: you can get great inclusivity primarily by being welcoming, accommodating for needs (in an open-ended way, not restricting it to a few axes) and, crucially, by not shaming or bulling otherwise good-willed transgressors. And as a male nerd I felt better than on less diverse events, not worse.
I think the 7 points Scott outlined are fantastic, and I absolutely agree with him.
This sounds a bit strange to write, but I think Scott, and a lot of people here and on the web, are almost thinking too logically and critically about all this. I have no problem with what they are doing, but I also don't think it is a very effective technique.
Like it or not, this women in tech issue is in the domain of politics, and it will remain there. I see a whole bunch of really smart people applying the same problem solving skills they use in their daily engineering work to this problem. They try to rely on strict evidence, and proof and debate. And There's nothing wrong with that at all, but it isn't very effective in the political domain. It takes certain skills and lots of practice to correctly communicate with this type of purely logical debate. A ten page paper read by someone without these skills is very likely to be misunderstood. And that's exactly what happened. I wish that wasn't the case, but that's not the world we live in.
If you are trying to persuade, you need to know your audience. In cases like this, your audience is not just your fellow tech community, but a large percentage of the entire world! It is people who won't follow your carefully constructed arguments. James Damore's critical mistake is that seemed totally ignorant to this point. The people reading his paper were not just going to be fellow googlers who had the skills to take his arguments at face value, it was everyone. You need to be aware of this when dealing in politics.
The main challenge is reason versus emotion. Damore and this article made a few points based on reason and science and logical arguments and such, but it was countered by emotion, if not by values and morals - and those are almost impossible to counter. That is, "I believe this statement / manifesto is wrong on a moral level" is very hard to counter with reason alone.
The Charlotteville (?) riots (and by extension the Alt-Right/Nazi vs Antifa fights) are proof of this - there's loud, violent protestors on both sides, neither of which is engaging in a debate because they're both strongly opposed on a moral level.
Empirical consequentialism does not have a monopoly on "reason", "science", or "logical arguments". In fact, computational complexity theory and modern mathematical logic provide, IMO, some of the most compelling arguments against the idea that we can make good rational decisions without value systems and moral codes (aka heuristics for an otherwise intractable problem).
Tell me, what intractable problem are "value systems" and "moral codes" heuristics for? The hypothetico-dialectical method of talking about morality, as if it was simultaneously mathematics and politics, has always confused me. Plainly there ought to be some observable evidence that we've done the right thing, or the term "right" has no meaning at all other than "theorem within a politically fashionable consistent axiom schema."
> Tell me, what intractable problem are "value systems" and "moral codes" heuristics for?
Suppose you already have a solution in-hand for determining what the "best world" is, and everyone agrees on this definition of what is "right" and "good".
Now, can you calculate with any accuracy what actions each person should take in order for us all to arrive at that "best world"?
I think it's clear to most people who have taken an algorithms course that such a calculation -- even with perfect knowledge about the current and future state of the world -- is completely and totally intractable. (And besides, it doesn't take an algorithms course to notice we don't have that perfect knowledge; I don't even know if it will rain this afternoon.)
Value systems and moral codes -- e.g., "no stealing and no murdering except in X,Y,Z cases" -- provide us with a set of heuristics that while perhaps not optimal at least seem to keep us in decently good steady states for a while.
> The hypothetico-dialectical method of talking about morality, as if it was simultaneously mathematics and politics, has always confused me.
The point is to explore the theoretical limits of what's even possible. If we can show that something is impossible even in a highly idealized setting, then we can probably conclude that the same thing is impossible in more messy settings.
Of course, "all models are wrong" and all that.
But if pure consequentialism doesn't work well even in the most ideal of settings, that might be a good indicator that it also doesn't work well in far more messy settings.
> Plainly there ought to be some observable evidence that we've done the right thing
Why is that so "plain"? Besides, "what should I do?" is a far more... timely... question than "did I just do the right thing?"
> or the term "right" has no meaning at all other than "theorem within a politically fashionable consistent axiom schema."
Outside of religious and spiritual folks, I think most people agree that morality is socially constructed.
>Suppose you already have a solution in-hand for determining what the "best world" is, and everyone agrees on this definition of what is "right" and "good".
It doesn't matter whether people agree with it. It matters whether it's actually correct, and actually refers to real things.
>Outside of religious and spiritual folks, I think most people agree that morality is socially constructed.
Then stop talking about morality already. There's no point in spending massive sums of effort, money, and even military manpower on made-up constructions if you know damn well they're made up.
(Mind, I don't think morality is made up: I'm a moral realist. Of course, religious folks aren't moral realists, they're usually just plain confused about what counts as "real", as are you, since you appear to think "real morality" means "morality enforced by a giant authority figure in the sky".)
> It matters whether it's actually correct, and actually refers to real things.
You're completely missing my point.
Replace the quoted sentence with "Suppose you already have an actually correct morality that refers to real things". The computational intractability argument remains a damning condemnation of consequentialism. Just because you can state the theorem doesn't mean you can find the witnessing construction.
> Then stop talking about morality already
Just because things are socially constructed doesn't mean they aren't valuable, and it also doesn't mean that they have no effect on our lives.
> There's no point in spending massive sums of effort, money, and even military manpower on made-up constructions if you know damn well they're made up.
Why not?
Why can't we just say some things are "self-evident" and worth fighting for?
And if this is true, then why are moral considerations such potent rhetorical devices? The only possible explanation I can think of is extraordinarily condescending.
> I'm a moral realist
Now I'm even more confused.
First, the realists play this game all the time; each branch of moral realism basically corresponds to a different -- usually embarrassingly pseudo-scientific -- way of justifying a priori ethical concerns.
From my perspective, moral realism isn't an escape from the problem; it's just a way of ignoring the actually hard problem and playing games that are completely parametric in the actually hard problems.
Second, the view of morality as a social construction isn't even inconsistent with moral realism as long as you're willing to go past whatever nice distinctions make for easy-to-grade multiple choice exams in PHIL 101. E.g., one plausible (and, per usual, embarrassingly pseudo-scientific) hypothesis bridging this divide is that morality is a social construction that necessarily arises from ethical intuitions that have a physiological basis.
>Why can't we just say some things are "self-evident" and worth fighting for?
Because nothing is actually self-evident in the real world. It's all still made out of meat, with no convenient teletypes up to Plato's Heaven where the Self-Evident Propositions, Ideal Forms, and A Prioris live. "Self-evident and worth fighting for" isn't a factual claim, it's an effort to persuade people to believe (what you label) a delusion.
>And if this is true, then why are moral considerations such potent rhetorical devices? The only possible explanation I can think of is extraordinarily condescending.
Well, there are three possibilities here:
* Typical antirealism. Moral appeals are in fact appeals to ontological delusion. This sounds condescending, but it's the corner you back yourself into by trying to have your moral appeals and your anti-realism at the same time. You're the one saying, "let's appeal to morality, but only ever to my morality, left completely unaccountable to external facts beyond my intuitions." If you tried that in math, physics, sociology, psychology -- you'd be thrown out of the room.
* Moral appeals are used as verbal shortcuts to ultimately nonmoral things. For example, the moral stricture "do not harm the innocent" may ground out in "I feel empathetic pain when I see children get hurt". In this case, the moral appeal has a little bit more actual force, since it grounds out in a real motivation to which we can actually, well, appeal. In fact, if we can manage to talk about the rational content of that empathetic pain (something which antirealists vehemently disavow but which basically the entire rest of humanity for all of history upheld), we can achieve...
* Moral realism: moral appeals work because they appeal to real things that have motivational power. The empathetic pain is a real moral motivation, pain is bad, especially when the damage it accompanies is too permanent for it to be a learning experience. This is the typical view among basically everyone who hasn't been carefully trained to pooh-pooh our innate emotions and motivations as having no normative force, and remains the majority opinion among both professional ethicists and laypeople.
>First, the realists play this game all the time; each branch of moral realism basically corresponds to a different -- usually embarrassingly pseudo-scientific -- way of justifying a priori ethical concerns.
Well, I usually don't see the pseudo-scientific ones. I usually see the pseudo-mathematical ones. But oh well, my ethical concerns are a posteriori, just like my epistemological, uh, knowledge.
Mind, if I want to be dickishly precise, I'm a realist about value and interests at the organismic level, and merely observe that moral norms and imperatives at the social level often have deep anthropological reasons that ground out in the genuine interests of the individuals involved. Where they don't, those norms and imperatives tend to get changed over time.
That might be a form of constructivism at the social level, but constructivism isn't really a form of realism or antirealism (it roughly says, "morality comes from running this algorithm on these data, but you might need some nonmoral interest to get someone running the algorithm at all), and it's actually different from naive social constructionism ("people make up morality, agree tentatively on things, and then use it to persuade each-other about stuff").
>From my perspective, moral realism isn't an escape from the problem; it's just a way of ignoring the actually hard problem and playing games that are completely parametric in the actually hard problems.
Would you care to pose the actual hard problem, then?
>E.g., one plausible (and, per usual, embarrassingly pseudo-scientific) hypothesis bridging this divide is that morality is a social construction that necessarily arises from ethical intuitions that have a physiological basis.
That would still be a typical antirealist view, since it says that morality arises in a way that has nothing to do with moral facts as such.
(The nasty tricky part is what you're willing to count as a moral or normative fact in the first place. Fix that and the questions get a lot clearer. Make that slippery and you get hundreds of years of philosophizing instead of knowing what to do.)
> That might be a form of constructivism at the social level, but constructivism isn't really a form of realism or antirealism...
Isn't this exactly my point?
> Would you care to pose the actual hard problem, then?
Where the hell does your moral truth come from?
The way I see it, we actually operate in exactly the same way. The only difference is that I don't pretend that arbitrary things aren't arbitrary.
> I'm a realist about value and interests at the organismic level, and merely observe that moral norms and imperatives at the social level often have deep anthropological reasons that ground out in the genuine interests of the individuals involved.
This kind of inexact hand waving is exactly what I meant when I said "pseudo-scientific BS".
This is my point. Moral realism grounds out the same place that religion does -- it's real or it isn't. God (some moral truth) exists, and it is this particular God (moral truth). Or God doesn't exist. The choice is yours, and it's completely arbitrary. A matter of personal faith, no more and no less.
Moral realism has no epistemic superiority. It's just as "bullshit" as everything else; the rotten core of bullshit is just hidden under a bunch of layers of deduction.
I prefer to air the dirty laundry; realists are uncomfortable by stained underwear and would prefer to play logical games on top of an edifice without thinking too much about the sand underneath their feet.
But at the core all systems of morality have the same problem. Realism is no escape. In fact, IMO, it's worse than a mistake because it provides the illusion of solving an insurmountable problems.
I guess it comes down to this: "I choose to believe in God and I know that belief is arbitrary" is to me by far the most compelling apology. Things like Goedel's proof just make me yawn and squint.
If someone is redirecting money by reference to things which apparently do not exist, it should be pointed out that they're duping everyone else, and that, so to speak, humanity will not be free until the last stone of the last church is cast upon the last priest.
Or people could just admit moral realism every time they try to argue moral stuff. You know. Alternatives.
>Damore and this article made a few points based on reason and science and logical arguments and such
No he didn't [1]. I strongly dislike SJWs, but this guy is no ally. He's, at best, shockingly ignorant (what do I keep hearing about how google only gets the best?) at worst a fascist or fascist apologist.
I see what you're saying, but I think it's more complicated. If you start to play politics and try to be more persuasive, you are losing the moral high ground. That's why many people would prefer to play openly.
I agree. But it is really tough to actually play openly, and tough to know when others are playing openly.
Enough time has passed that experts have had time to comprehend the original document, and it seems like James was only pretending to play openly. He misrepresented a lot of the science and put his own spin on it.
> Enough time has passed that experts have had time to comprehend the original document, and it seems like James was only pretending to play openly
Doesn't seem like that to me. The Suzanne Sadedin's answer (which I personally find kinda hard to understand, IMHO it avoids the core argument) was the only answer (of several I read) from an actual scientist that disagreed with what Damore has wrote. Other scientists' responses either agreed or declined to comment. In particular, here: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
I hadn't read that Guillette article. David P Schmitt, the only one whos work was used in the memo doesn't exactly seem to agree with the memo. His third and fourth paragraphs say that any differences between sexes is small and not relevant to work going on at google.
I think we can say that there is a lot of disagreement in the scientific community. The memo painted a much different picture.
If that is a "great response" I'd hate to imagine what you consider a poor one.
It's an informal reply on quora from someone we have no verification about that cites exactly one supporting scientific study - and that is about bird mating practices. The rest cites amazon bookstore pages, blogs, articles in general interest magazines, other quora responses, or wikipedia articles (which themselves actually undermine the point she was trying to make - eg skimming the stereotype threat article, consensus seems to be it isn't real). The rest is an attempt to justify calling the author a fascist racist sexist etc. etc. and thereby gloss over the actual question at hand (namely, was he right?).
My education is in physics and CS, so I am not qualified to judge what is accurate in something like evolutionary psychology. But when I see a paper that weasely, juking around the issue while engaging in personal attacks, it inclines me to believe the memo is scientifically valid and this sort of emotion based response is the only one available to its detractors.
I counted 10 supporting scientific studies, and a whole bunch of other articles that all included lots of references.
> thereby gloss over the actual question at hand (namely, was he right?)
I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. She quotes what he wrote, and then shows why he is wrong, over and over again. She doesn't juke around the issue at all.
And again, direct support - not "mating practices of birds" or "fetal hormone influence and autism" or other none sense.
And also not links to Business Insider articles, Wikipedia articles, blogs, Amazon, or anything of the sort.
You are aware you can't just make stuff up when I've read the article and examined its links right?
>I don't see how you can come to that conclusion.
You don't see how quoting a person, and then playing free association with their words to conclude they're some kind of crypto fascist fog Whistler is kind of ridiculous?
> And again, direct support - not "mating practices of birds" or "fetal hormone influence and autism" or other none sense.
You've already admitted that you are not qualified to judge what is accurate in this context, so why do you think you can now decide that some of the studies are nonsense? All of these studies support arguments she was making.
To be clear: If that quora post had been a dispassionate refutation, or even just a nest of links to directly pertinent scientific studies - I'd have believed the author. Or at least declared myself neutral in the debate, as it is outside my area of expertise.
But an article that sleazy and loaded with weasel words and underhanded rhetorical tactics, that dances that much around the points being discussed - no one who has the facts on their side argues like that. Reading that post from beginning to end actually did more to convince me Damore was right than any other piece of writing I've seen thus far on the subject.
As to your links:
Read what you're trying to cite before blinding citing it.
Here is some of the titles of the papers you just linked to:
No relationship between prenatal androgen exposure and autistic traits
The origins of agriculture: Population growth during a period of declining health
Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an
Overview of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition
on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human
Body
Power Increases Infidelity Among Men and Women
Cuckolded Fathers Rare in Human Populations
As I said, basically pure none sense. The quora post is trying to blindside people with number of sources, to hide the fact they have absolutely no quality in sources.
Indeed, even the most directly pertinent link didn't really talk about the core issues raised in the memo. It instead discussed github pull requests vs. gender, which while far more related to the subject at hand than autistic dentistry (it is about sexism and the tech community), does not actually address the specific points raised by Damore's letter or support the arguments she was trying to make.
Maybe we're talking past each other here. I don't think the author has a problem with the science James referenced. The science behind the core issues is fine. No argument there. The author has a problem with James' interpretation of the science, and his speculation and arguments he makes based on this flawed interpretation.
David P Schmitt, the only one whose work was used in the memo doesn't seem agree with the memo. His third and fourth paragraphs say that any differences between sexes is small and not relevant to work going on at google. This is a common theme with the memo. The science is correct. But James goes beyond what the science says and adds incorrect arguments and statements on top. This is the problem. And it is the kind of thing that can get you labeled as sexist or whatever.
As I go through the links, each is used to directly refute one of these incorrect additions to the science that James wrote. They don't refute the science, they refute James' added commentary.
In 'Early androgen exposure and human gender development' there is a section titled "Which human behaviors show average sex differences?" and it is very pertinent to this topic.
Lots of people have been bringing up the Androgen Exposure argument in this debate, and the second Androgen study linked was showing it is not a solved question yet. So that was also relevant.
The Human health and population growth studies were used to refute James's statements that were quoted. Etc.
I'll happily agree that the author shouldn't have used certain terms or phrases. That was unneeded and unprofessional.
I am not sure why nobody is referencing Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt of Heterodox academy. They are referencing a large number of meta studies on this topic.
Yeah, I have seen that yesterday too, it's a good summary.
I think one of the important points is this: "The differences are much larger and more consistent for traits related to interest and enjoyment, rather than ability."
Damore argued based on this, and I hold a similar view, that gender quotas should not be used, because they don't correspond to personal preferences. This has nothing to do with abilities.
That's a great link! I've been looking for something like that.
It confirms the criticisms of Damore cherry picking his sources. It appears that for almost everything he wrote there is both supporting and conflicting evidence. The fact the he only mentions the supporting evidence is a huge problem. I would expect better from a google engineer.
I kind of wish Aaronson didn't do a followup and explicitly tie his Kolmogrov essay to the Demure controversy. I liked it better when he was self-referentially taking the Kolmogrov option by virtue of his very writing about the Kolmogrov option. He said it all so well without saying it. I bet pedestrian SJWs might have even quoted his original essay thinking it was in support of their cause.
> However, a few people who I like and respect accused me of “dogwhistling.” They warned, in particular, that if I wouldn’t just come out and say what I thought about the James Damore Google memo thing, then people would assume the very worst[...]
I'm glad he decided to do this, though. It's a great piece. Maybe it's not what the "bullies" would've wanted, but it's something they should read anyway.
I agree. The Kolmogrov essay stood on it's own very well. It was great piece of writing and could be applied to various situations. But now it will always be tied to this messy debate.
"... if James Damore deserves to be fired from Google, for treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues, then Steven Pinker deserves to be fired from Harvard for the same offense. Yes, I realize that a employee of a private company is different from a tenured professor. But I don’t see why it’s relevant here."
Its relevant because Damore is employed to develop products to benefit Google's sharesholders, wheras Pinker is employed by Harvard to do science and publicly communicate ideas. Pinker's tenure gives him licence to pursue controversial ideas if that is where the evidence takes him. Damore gets to write code on an at-will basis.
I disagree with you and agree with her. And even if I agreed with you, Damore actually wrote his memo as a response to Google soliciting feedback. So he in fact got the "license" that you talk about from Google.
> Damore actually wrote his memo as a response to Google soliciting feedback. So he in fact got the "license" that you talk about from Google.
As an aside, this is an extraordinary dangerous assumption for an employee to make. Suggestion boxes aren't magical shields from blowback.
Tenure exists for a good reason, and parent's point is well-taken. If you aren't tenured (or even if you are), you should probably assume that you have to play a careful political game if you want to stay employed.
(I'm not making any judgement, just stating some IMO facts.)
That's true. But humans can't have it both ways. If you obfuscate the language, you are at risk of someone not understanding it and taking it literally. And then a hypocrisy can be revealed.
In one of the previous discussions, I linked to Charta 77. These guys did the same thing - they took the Czechoslovak government for the word that it respects human rights, because it was a signatory of some human rights agreements. They were persecuted.
The same problem you have with tenure. You are saying professors are protected with tenure, but are they really? Unless someone tests the boundaries, then you don't know if it really protects you. So assuming tenure will protect you is, likewise, a dangerous assumption.
"The society you live in" and "a basic understanding of how the world works" are always that most important qualifications on any invitation to share your opinion.
Who decides which scientific ideas are too "controversial" for a person to express without losing their job? Or is it just something CEOs decide on a case-by-case basis after considering the degree of media outcry and misrepresentation involved?
First who decides that the ideas are scientific? Quoting poor quality research (psychology professor publishing neuroscience papers in third-grade locations) and forming causal relationships on a whim (testosterone increases attention span, therefore it is required for programming) are not part of scientific research.
Exactly, Google has every right to fire Damore. Google can do whatever it needs to do if they think this is going to hurt their reputation, finances, or stock price. If your fundamental beliefs don't line up with the organizations', then you probably shouldn't work there.
Don't they have something about "organizing the world's information and making accessible"? Here's a guy saying it's not that great to suppress view points or hard scientific facts based on dogma, that this damages Google like it would damage any other group or company, and -- he gets fired and many people distort what he actually wrote. The relationship between Google and "information" seems to kind of complicated. This is like a chef you see putting dirt into a meal; maybe they cook tasty things most of the time, but if they're a good chef, why are they ever doing something as "anti-chef" as that?
> organizing the world's information and making accessible
That's a corporate business objective. It doesn't give every Google employee the right to publicly say what they want, when they want, using company systems, and when engaged in their job.
According to the original coverage, his (and other Google employees') opinions on the topic of diversity in hiring was requested. He originally put his response up on a group explicitly created for this discussion.
He never sent it to Google at large - someone else did that in outrage at his opinion. Just as someone else leaked it from being internal to Google to the media.
For the topic at hand: sex based discrimination in the technology sector in the United States in 2017: I won't comment one way or another. I don't feel qualified to offer a comment here.
Do you think that "Positive discrimination on behalf of former slaves in the late 1860s in the United States in employment and education was immoral"?
> "Note that, even if men in STEM fields are no more sexist on average than men in other fields—or are less sexist, as one might expect from their generally socially liberal views and attitudes..."
Sadly, that has not been my experience—not within specific technical departments nor in wider tech-related events, and certainly not in the broader workplace context. While this may a reasonable assertion on the coasts of the USA, it has not been my own in the spaces between them nor in my interactions with various people from outside the US. No question that these are my own limited anecdotes, but I like to believe I am reasonably well-read and aware of global mindsets and I would hesitate to make that statement so flatly.
> "Trust me, my four-year-old daughter Lily wishes I didn’t believe so fervently in working with her every day on her math skills"
And there you go. Even by a seemingly forgettable tongue-in-cheek quip, the author reveals a fundamental misjudgement repeated countless times around the world for centuries that speaks to the very heart of the issue: correcting something may require enacting an alternative that has other inherent negatives that don't have an immediately apparent benefit to the end goal and might even seem contrary in the short term. In other words, addressing historical inequalities may necessitate solutions that them self enact brand new inequalities. It's an unavoidable likelihood in course correction: going off-course to get back on-course. And teaching math to four-year-old Lily may require changing the approach to learning it entirely to something unconventional, or even uncomfortable: the author may be terrible at teaching math for her.
Maybe the best person for a responsibility is technically less proficient but ultimately more effective.
Or, as pointed out in an article cited, a person is sufficiently, if not exceptionally, proficient but is simply ill-suited:
"I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.
At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me." - https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-09/as-a-woma...
That's pretty messed-up. I'm a male who has never felt any impulse to build a fiber-channel network in my basement. Hell, I don't even have a basement.
OK. But just don't go there, please, for whatever reason.
I honestly hope these issues won't evolve into a society that takes children from their parents under assumption that they are bad parents because their children are showing some "wrong" bias. And sadly, I don't see it as a complete impossibility.
As someone living in the U.S. with children, I neither feel nor observe indications of this as an imminent danger. If anything I'd posit we've faulted much the opposite direction. A history of stubborn individualism, regardless of the harm it may inflict on others or society at-large, and fear-mongering against anything that resembles socialism—however irrational and countered by existing programs which are rooted in its very concepts—all but insures against it any time soon.
I can't disagree with the possibility since history supports that—and the general tendency for humanity to demonstrate such a low regard for itself would unfortunately be also—the probability seems low.
It's interesting how many tech guys consider this guy some kind of martyr.
People are upset about his odious "Google Memo" because it's not their first rodeo with a dude who weasels around and justifies his racism/sexism with pseudoscience, not because they were "misled" by "clickbait media" or whatever.
They weren't incorrect. The 32 supposedly-critical citation links point ovewhelmingly to garbage, including 5 wikipedia links, a dozen opinion pieces, some more "academic" essays, a link to MRA-founder Warren Farrell's blog, and, perhaps best of all, a link that simply points to a google search for the term "political correctness" (lol). The "graphs" are made in powerpoint with the curve tool (one of them the infamous bell curve), and the axes don't even have ticks on them.
It's evident to anyone familiar with "the scene" that the dude got all his info from anti-feminist YouTube/Reddit, and this was proven beyond a doubt when he went on to speak at anti-feminist YouTube channels immediately after getting fired. he wasn't widely misunderstood, people just saw right through his multiple disclaimers.
Even if all you say is true and the guy is an odious anti-feminist, the points he made should be debated and refuted, not silenced.
Even if most people that make similar points are just "weaseling around" and justifying their racism/sexism, this is not reason enough to assume the worst. That's how you get thoughtcrime, were the faintest association with unorthodox thought self-evidently makes you a despicable person who should be punished and whose ideas should be ignored.
Many tech guys are waking up to the farcical, oppressive way in which some leftists spread their ideas and silence their opponents, and won't stand for it any longer.
> Even if all you say is true and the guy is an odious anti-feminist, the points he made should be debated and refuted, not silenced.
I strongly disagree with your "even if" hypothetical.
Dialectics are a process for arriving at truth, not the source of truth itself. I think this is something hard-core rationalists often seem to forget.
In terms of time, emotional energy, and so on, evaluating arguments is very expensive.
Ignoring an argument because its source is "odious"ly biased is the political equivalent of using heuristics to prune a huge search space. It may not always give you an optimal answer. But then, climbing every ant hill to the bitter end may not get you to an answer in your lifetime anyways.
And remember, in an argumentative setting, the search space is adversarially constructed. So you can actually be pretty damn certain that without heuristics, you'll never find the truth.
> this is not reason enough to assume the worst
The degree to which people are "assuming the worst" seems to be one of the major sources of disagreement.
FWIW I don't think many of Damore's detractors are "assuming the worst" from the outset. Complaints about the essay tend to identify specific claims, specific phrases, specific arguments that serve as heuristics for choosing not to continue evaluating the argument in good faith.
You can argue against those heuristics all you want, but I don't think that this argument is even possible to have without some heuristics. Case in point: Damore uses his own set of totally unsound heuristics (see e.g., the complaining about "political correctness", the graphs that are actually just pictorial representations of prior assumptions, and so on).
> Ignoring an argument because its source is "odious"ly biased is the political equivalent of using heuristics to prune a huge search space.
You're proving Damore's point. You refuse to consider his arguments because of your prejudiced, emotional reaction. This is patently irrational.
> It may not always give you an optimal answer. But then, climbing every ant hill to the bitter end may not get you to an answer in your lifetime anyways.
This is a strawman and an argument to absurdity, i.e. also irrational.
> So you can actually be pretty damn certain that without heuristics, you'll never find the truth.
You'll never find the truth if you irrationally dismiss arguments that oppose your prejudiced opinions--unless, of course, you've already arrived at the truth. But believing you've already arrived at the truth would be arrogant and closed-minded, right?
> You refuse to consider his arguments because of your prejudiced, emotional reaction
GP gave a hypothetical, and I'm responding to that hypothetical.
In fact, I did not refuse to consider his arguments. I considered them. They're poorly sourced, terribly reasoned, and not very well communicated. FWIW I do feel bad that they guy lost his job for what amounts to poor communication, worse argumentation skills, and a misplaced belief that engineers are special enough to be exempt from the generally shitty employee/employer relationship as it exists in the USA.
But that's all beside the point, because I'm responding to a hypothetical.
> You'll never find the truth if you irrationally dismiss arguments
My point is that you'll ALSO never find truth if you climb every adversary-constructed hill in the state space. Your suggested method for finding truth is even worse than mine, and what's more, you're claiming the opposite.
I'm at least admitting that I have to use heuristics. You're just watching the tower of exponentials crank up and claiming "no problem! We can compute that!"
> But believing you've already arrived at the truth would be arrogant and closed-minded, right?
It's possible to remain open to new ideas and also not waste time on evaluating or responding to arguments that aren't motivated by a genuine search for truth. (Again, this comment was in response to a hypothetical.)
I highly doubt you actually disagree with me in practice, because such a life would surely doom you to misery and unemployment. Do you spend all your free time reading and/or responding to arguments from flat earthers, BS science posted on white supremacy forums, and marketing claims made by infomercials and bill boards? Do you engage with every crank preacher and evangelist who comes to your door or yells at you on the street? Of course not.
> In fact, I did not refuse to consider his arguments. I considered them. They're poorly sourced, terribly reasoned, and not very well communicated.
There are prominent, respected authorities and experts on both sides of the political spectrum who disagree with you, ones who have explained in detail why they disagree with you. What do you think about that?
> My point is that you'll ALSO never find truth if you climb every adversary-constructed hill in the state space.
I feel like you didn't read my comment, because you're repeating your previous argument: "...climbing every ant hill to the bitter end may not get you to an answer in your lifetime anyways," to which I responded, "This is a strawman and an argument to absurdity, i.e. also irrational."
> Your suggested method for finding truth is even worse than mine, and what's more, you're claiming the opposite.
Again, I feel like you didn't read my comment. Where did I suggest such a method?
> I'm at least admitting that I have to use heuristics. You're just watching the tower of exponentials crank up and claiming "no problem! We can compute that!"
Where did I say that?
> It's possible to remain open to new ideas and also not waste time on evaluating or responding to arguments that aren't motivated by a genuine search for truth.
I agree with this.
However, you are jumping to a conclusion by assuming that he is not interested in the truth. It is quite arrogant of you, to assume you know what is in his mind and heart. This is not good faith on your part.
> Do you spend all your free time reading and/or responding to arguments from flat earthers, BS science posted on white supremacy forums, and marketing claims made by infomercials and bill boards? Do you engage with every crank preacher and evangelist who comes to your door or yells at you on the street? Of course not.
Once again you prove Damore's point: by equating him with such people, and equating his memo with such things, you are evincing an emotional, prejudiced overreaction and stubborn refusal to seriously consider his arguments.
> There are prominent, respected authorities and experts on both sides of the political spectrum who disagree with you
Disagree with my about what? I think it would be helpful if you put in words the claim you think I'm making. I feel that we're talking past one another because you think I'm talking about Damore when in fact I'm responding to a hypothetical posited by another commenter.
> This is a strawman and an argument to absurdity, i.e. also irrational.
I don't pay attention to Nazi's scientific arguments for racism, anti-feminist's claims that women are incapable of certain tasks, or infomercials' claims about how amazing a product is. In each situation the signal-to-noise ratio is intractable and the arguments are not made from the position of a genuine search for truth. I'm better off encountering that evidence in other contexts presented by genuine actors, or simply never seeing it at all. Not all arguments are helpful. Some are intentionally crafted to distract and obscure.
If you think that makes me irrational, so be it. Your disagreement strikes me as hopelessly naive. I'd rather behave irrationally than waste my life chasing down the errors in arguments made by biased idiots who have no problem with lying to advance their ideology.
> Again, I feel like you didn't read my comment. Where did I suggest such a method?
Well if you have no better method then I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do. Give up on truth?
> However, you are jumping to a conclusion by assuming that he is not interested in the truth
Please read the entire thread. I am assuming this because it is posited as a hypothetical!
I fact, I do not believe this is true in Damore's case. But it is certainly true in the case of many people who are defending Damore (eg Mike Cernovich), and I don't think taking their arguments on face value is worth the time or effort. They are not interested in truth, they are interested in power, so their arguments are pointless if what you're interested in is truth.
But again, nowhere in this thread have I stated anything about Damore. I was responding to a hypothetical.
If you have even a passing acquaintance with the subject, this has been "debated and refuted" for hundreds of years.
Should "did NASA land on the Moon?" also be debated and refuted? Why or why not? If major TV networks ran hour-long specials, where each side gets to present their case for/against moon landings for 30 minutes, would this be beneficial to the world?
Are you saying that the question, "Did NASA land on the moon?" is equivalent to the question, "Is the main reason, that fewer women work at Google, that men are sexist?"
> Even if all you say is true and the guy is an odious anti-feminist, the points he made should be debated and refuted, not silenced.
Why? Why should everyone debate ideas which are made up by biased sources[1]? Should we also discuss why people from country X are more intelligent than people of race Y who immigrated from continent Z? Sorry, but not all ideas are gold.
> Many tech guys are waking up to the farcical, oppressive way in which some leftists spread their ideas and silence their opponents, and won't stand for it any longer.
At least it is fine till "leftists" are spreading ideas for peace, tolerance, and harmony, right? They are not calling for people of race/religion/country/sex X to leave country Y, right?
Did you read the Quora link? It provided scientific sources for all its claims in refuting the google employee document. If the Quora article is nonsense, then please refute the Quora article instead of throwing around "if you bothered to read" phrases.
No i didn't. But it doesn't even matter because your argument is invalid. Two articles/texts can be based in science and oppose each other. You know why? Because scientific literature can also disagree with each other.
But again your ideoligical lense doesn't allow you to even consider this possibility and instead automatically classifies anything that opposes your beliefs and what you have read as pseudo science.
Not really surprising from a guy who, up until notoriety focussed attention on him and exposed it, was apparently claiming a Ph.D. he never earned on his LinkedIn resume.
Let's assume there's a new remote tribe discovered which has never had contact with the outside world.
Now, for reasons unknown, members of this tribe have an uncanny ability to do mathematics.
Every tech company rushes to enroll these math wizards, and entices them with English language courses.
Now an employee writes a memo that questions the value of the language courses because the tribesfolk seem to have no innate interest in linguistics and seem to have a harder time learning English, enough to turn some away from their glorious new careers in Silicon Valley. He surmises it's probably because of their natural gift for mathematics. He also attaches the scientific research that, up to that moment, supports the notion that members of the tribe indeed have a superior grasp on mathematics.
Now that we have the argument on neutral ground:
-All the research quoted supports the innate math ability of the tribe, but implies nothing about their linguistic capabilities.
-The reason these tribal members have difficulties picking up English is not really known. The supposition that mathematical skills and linguistic skill are inversely related is dubious and could easily be a product of our existing cultural norms. It could simply be them not even knowing the existence of different languages until very recently.
-Constructing an argument that their linguistic shortcomings might be innate would serve no purpose outside of a very narrow field of neuroscience. It certainly does not detract from their mathematical abilities, and if the whole company needs to learn to speak French, because for some reason the tribe grasps that easily, so be it: whether innate or not, the company cannot afford not to hire them.
Any memo about the innate English abilities of the tribe outside of a (proper) research paper within the realm of neuroscience is simply speculation. If this speculation is toxic to those already working there (telling coworkers their English sucks, but it's not their fault. They were born that way. You're only trying to help them.), or the hiring process, it is logical to put a stop to that.
Now substitute "superior mathematicians" with "perfectly capable programmers", "remote tribe" with "half the population", and "innate linguistic interest" with "innate technical capability".
TL;DR: even if a trait A that could be related to a more desirable trait B is more common in one group than in another group, its prevalence in one group implies nothing about the prevalence of the more desirable trait in the second group.
To argue about trait A is to argue about nothing until a correlation is established.
Any argument about trait A in relation to B that mentions genetics is to be regarded as highly suspicious.
First, I think you meant "Now substitute... 'innate linguistic capability' with 'innate technical interest'" right? Because it's the "interest in things" vs. "interest in people" argument that Damore uses, or did I miss the point entirely?
If I didn't, I simply have the following to offer: there are many, many fields that are dominated by either women or men. No one really knows why. Simply saying "sexism" and calling it a day doesn't give enough credence to the problem. It doesn't identify the root cause. And unless you merely want to treat symptoms, ignoring the root cause will cause the problem to fester.
That’s not because he necessarily said anything actually sexist or actually racist, but because he said the kinds of things that you usually only hear from sexist people, and in particular, the kind of sexist people who are also racist.
That is the big thing I saw as well.
I think there is an analogy to the body's defenses against viruses. The body recognizes certain shapes from the outside surface of viruses and attacks anything sharing those shapes. The memo was chock full of ideas and phrases that match those used by the worst kind of bigots.
If you look at the plain meaning of the words it isn't so bad. But most people's response is based on the pattern-matched shape evaluation instead.