I have one simple ask here. To those who agree with any of this article beyond "we should be able to discuss this openly", please read this. People have all read this document, and if you agree with it, you value diversity of opinion. I'm not asking anyone to debate it - there's plenty of that here which doesn't seem to be going anywhere, as usual, which you can and should join into to try to reverse that. But read this first.
I notice a lot of misrepresentation of views on both sides, almost to the point of strawmanning. I think a charitable interpretation of the author's best points can be summarized as follows: - Racism & sexism still exist, even at Google. This is bad. (On the bright side, the problem seems to be getting better over time.) - It's good (and good for business) to eliminate discrimination based on gender, race, sexual pre…
Thanks, I really appreciate this distillation. If we've learned anything, it's that trying to write stream of consciousness screedy manifestos like this is super hard and people should probably just stop trying. Still though, despite some of the questionable logic and missing evidence (which I'm surprised it's not a lot worse given the way these kinds of things get written -- middle of the night after some last straw), this person seems to be sincerely trying to spark a dialogue of mutual benefit to both sides of the debate and the company as a whole. Yet so many of the comments in this thread are just intensely dismissive and uncharitable. They aren't like, "ok so he fucked up here and here for this reason, I can see where he was going with this point and that point and there are some kernals of truth there, let's engage with this, etc." No, they are more like "this guy got this and this wrong, therefore it's all wrong, and therefore he should just stop now and recognize what a piece of shit he is." It really does feel sometimes like the chilling effect tactics of past rightist regimes has now been weaponized by us on the left out of some sort of unconscious spirit of payback or settling past debts of oppression. It's not a good look.
Because it happens even in monkeys : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/ I've posted it elsewhere in the thread already, but this article is a good recap of research on the topic : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
That is not a "good recap of research", it is a motivated collection of cherry-picked data points put together to suit the author's political purpose. Dig a bit on the author of the piece and you will get a feel for his objectives, and dig a bit into the actual points he is, poorly, attempting to make in the article and you will see that they seem to hand wave over a bunch of questions that any real researcher would…
That's a rather ad-hominem response/dismissal. Care to address the blog post's arguments?
I think your tone is a little smug but completely agree. To be frank I empathize with the writer of the article a bit. He worked very hard to achieve his position, and with that hard work comes a belief that the system he achieved in was inherently fair. It's difficult to call the situations we benefit from unfair - it's important for our self-worth that we value our accomplishments. But the key is that the author's…
> believe that they are being demonized for a political opinion I have an acquaintance who occasionally reacts with outrage, shouting and questioning my human decency when I voice conservative points of view. Even mentioning biological differences between sexes is anathema to him and bringing up IQ makes him uncomfortable because it shows that not all people are born equal. I have explicitly told him that at times I…
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>Furthermore, commenting directly on the awesomeness of someone else's body is also not sexual. Have you never admired a femal athlete, the way you admire a male athelete? I am bisexual so the analogy doesn't quite work lol. and yes sometimes that can be non-sexual, but a workplace is not a place to make those kinds of comments because it is a VERY thin line and can easily make someone uncomfortable. and 99% of the t…
You know why I don't complement women's outfits in public? Because I am terrified to do so!
that's good, most women don't really want unsolicited comments from strangers on their appearance, and frequently experience unwanted comments. I know women who literally every time they go out get catcalled.
Are you sure the modern world isn't constantly at war with itself? I am not. Nor am I sure that a culture of constant deception - inward and outward, individual and en masse - is less, rather than more, likely than the converse to produce such a regrettable state of affairs. Certainly I envy you this confidence! I have not seen it borne out in practice. But I doubt we inhabit very similar-seeming worlds.
> Are you sure the modern world isn't constantly at war with itself? I am not In the Western world in North America and Europe we are doing pretty well. The many big issues are here such as climate change and low reproduction and lack of economic growth and the widening gap between rich and poor is problematic but it isn't leading to any major violence locally. There are problems but society is generally safe.
At the moment, with relatively rare and relatively small-scale exception, yes. Does that mean a world filled with lies need not end in fire, and those excrescences of violence we do observe are aberrational? Or does it mean only that the war has yet to go from cold to hot?
Oh dear, this seems like a bit of an unwise thing to have written. Whether or not it's true, it's something you're Not Allowed to reason about, where "Not Allowed" is in the sense of PG's http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html .
This was an excellent read about how to deal with the irrationality and repression of mobs. Thanks.
Perhaps this is where anonymous speech is important as it allows the discussion of ideas without giving importance to the persons behind them. Of courae, allowing for the fact that nothing can be truly anonymous :)
This is incredibly disingenuous. Much of the left considers simple disagreement to be micro-aggression, while at the same time finding it perfectly acceptable to launch hate-filled screeds of animosity and hatred at anyone who doesn't toe the line, e.g. "You're a fucking animal that deserves to be put down!!" Your comment implicitly supports this sort of misbehavior, implying that any complaint by an "alt-righter" is…
> This is incredibly disingenuous. > Much of the left considers simple disagreement to be micro-aggression... Tone down on the hypocrisy. If you want your side's arguments to be evaluated fairly, don't make ridiculous oversimplifications of the other side's positions.
Have you tried actually disagreeing with leftists?
Many can handle it fine and have a decent discussion. But many will explode in self righteous rage and do all the things people blinded by hate do.
personally a bunch of middle class white male tech bros who have never taken a soft science course in their lives discussing racism and sexism in tech doesn't sound very productive to me. it's shocking how little humility that group of people has, how unwilling they are to say "hey I don't really understand this, I should defer to someone who does", how eager they are to use their hamfisted biological essentialism to…
>tech bros who have never taken a soft science course in their lives Can someone here comment on the veracity of this statement? I was never smart or disciplined enough to attend college but I do have the good fortune of working with a large number of engineers. Many of them attended extremely highly ranked universities and it seems, from my talking with them on the subject of college education, that all of them took…
that's cool that you know so many people with diverse education, but the absolute ignorance of and disdain towards the social sciences in this thread definitely does not challenge the tech bro stereotype
For differences in representation to be explainable by something other than sexism --- which has been rampant in other fields, in particular medicine and law, in the past and then enduringly corrected --- you'd need to establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, virtually all of which see better (usually: much better) gender parity than CS does. In other words: you'll ne…
Ok, we're in presence of solid research finding a) similar sex differences in toy preferences in monkeys as in human children, and b) sex differences visible within 2 days after birth (references here : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh... ) As you justly said, we're in Occam's razor country. So, do you think the 2 observations above are more easily explained by socialization, or biology ?
So basically here's what I see:
One side points out that gender parity is overwhelmingly better in other STEM fields, that in modern science those fields are all themselves largely defined by software and technology, that there's a clear history of women being excluded from other professions, and that those professions later and enduringly corrected those problems, and that gender parity in CS has sharply decreased over time.
The other side has something to say about monkeys.