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Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

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Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#131

Post by [deleted] »

koonsolo wrote: post #61
chippy wrote: post #56

How can a journalist ever consider themselves to have self esteem in their work if they never read the primary documents that are central to the story? She writes: "Motherboard has not viewed the full document, but a screenshot we reviewed."... That's all! The article then follows is a kind of social media reaction recap. Possibly reactions by some people who also have not read the actual primary source, perhaps? (Ho…

Maybe if the journalist read the whole document, and made an honest story about it, we wouldn't be discussing it right now. Journalism is entertainment, don't expect something more. If you want to be informed, do your own investigation, or read a book written by someone who knows the stuff.

[deleted]

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#132

Post by CydeWeys »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #124
alanfranzoni wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't have any data. The problem with monoculture, by the way, is that you might end up discarding somebody for "wrong culture fit" rather than actual skills. And that's something I'd like to avoid.

That's only a problem if there's a shortage of people with applicable skills, which doesn't apply to the vast majority of businesses. All other things being equal, a "good culture fit" should make a better member of the team. If monoculture improves team effectiveness, then a better culture fit is likely even worth paying a price premium.

> That's only a problem if there's a shortage of people with applicable skills, which doesn't apply to the vast majority of businesses.

What makes you say this? The economy is at full employment right now. A lot of businesses are having a hard time finding employees with applicable skills. In the tech industry this is certainly true.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#133

Post by CydeWeys »

koonsolo wrote: post #60
espadrine wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most women I worked with actually preferred working in teams of mainly men. Have you considered survival bias? The women that were bothered would have left those conditions in greater numbers. The problem in not caring about this statistical filtering is that it creates a blind spot for your company. It is harder to empathize with the unknown. When you build products that extend the world's social experience, this…

> When you build products that extend the world's social experience, this becomes a severe competitive danger. Sorry, but that is just bullshit. I'm currently making a tool to create RPGs. I'm the sole male developer. To my surprise, I have more women creating games in it than men. It seems that they really love the whole storytelling aspect of it. So to say that you can only build something that is only useful to pe…

As a counterpoint, lots of women have loved fantasy novels for a really long time. However, until recently, the vast majority of the authors were male, and it's still a majority. The result is that there is a lot of fantasy with badly written female characters who occupy damsel roles more often than hero roles. Said fantasy is nevertheless read by women for lack of options, but they'd like better fantasy with better female characters better.

It's not impossible for men to write good female characters, of course, it's just something that a man is less likely to be able to pull off, or to focus on.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#134

Post by _0ffh »

laughinghan wrote: post #91
_0ffh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>all the evidence points to the former That is patently false, and you should not make factual claims under these circumstances. These claims add to the noise, not the signal. The scientific evidence for innate psychological differences between girls and boys is overwhelming. There is a clear scientific consensus on this. I cannot fathom how this can still be controversial. Specifically about your "cars vs dolls" exa…

You are correct that narrowly speaking, it is false to say that "all evidence" points in any one direction. However, your claim that there is a "overwhelming", "clear scientific consensus" is lacking in citations, your one broken link to what I assume was supposed a scientific study and one link to a pop science blogpost (which links only to other posts on the same blog and not any actual scientific papers) notwithst…

The scientific consensus is real, it's just not the one you seem to make it out to be. It's about the claim that there are "innate psychological differences" between boys and girls. I did not claim that these differences are solely responsible for 100% of observable statistical variations between genders. To try to ascribe all effects to a single set of causes, be it nature or nurture, is really a fool's errand. The blank slate is out of the window. Humans come into the world primed, and boys and girls are primed differently.

That notwithstanding, I wouldn't think of claiming that societal norms do not at all affect outcomes. Because it would be next to impossible to prove, and I'd give it a rather low a priori probability. Just what these effects really are and how big they are is a matter of ongoing debate. C.f. "The Norway Paradox".

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#135

Post by _0ffh »

ryderm wrote: post #97
_0ffh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>all the evidence points to the former That is patently false, and you should not make factual claims under these circumstances. These claims add to the noise, not the signal. The scientific evidence for innate psychological differences between girls and boys is overwhelming. There is a clear scientific consensus on this. I cannot fathom how this can still be controversial. Specifically about your "cars vs dolls" exa…

Sure, clearly that was hyperbole. All the evidence never points anywhere. This means the vast majority of actual peer reviewed science.

It's good to hear that. I guess that was a communication problem then. I'd be careful with any kind of hyperbole on the net because, just as with sarcasm, it will be taken seriously. People will read what you wrote and take it straight and it will mislead and confuse them.

So I guess we're roughly on the same page then, that the observable variation in outcome is caused by a mix of innate and societal factors, and the real discussion to be had is about how to tease them apart and quantify their respective contributions?

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#136

Post by ukj »

cbhl wrote: post #111
pandaman wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having observed the fall of the USSR it's nothing unusual to me. When people are not comfortable with an oppressive regime they keep their moderate opinions to themselves. Voicing any opinion contrary to the Party line is dangerous no matter how extreme or moderate it is. So all dissenting opinions you are going to hear in public will be coming from extremists (e.g. "Have a Nuremberg-type tribunal for the Party's chi…

Are you saying that this is the start of a "white male rebellion" inside silicon valley?

Maybe.

As a white male who agrees with the general themes of the manifesto (even though it lacks nuance an depth) I refuse to work in the "valley" precisely because I will be an ideological minority; and therefore likely to be ostracized for my views.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#137

Post by fennecfoxen »

threatofrain wrote: post #86
heartbreak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did OP say anything about looking to NC as a cultural role model? S/he was making a point that people in SF are intolerant, not that people in NC are tolerant.

If you say that someone is short, it goes to say that you have a comparison model, and that something is tall. Measuring SF as intolerant naturally invites a comparative measure, and here we are discussing how inviting SF is to North Carolina Christians. I am discussing vice versa by asking mere questions. It might enrich the discussion to say that it's still illegal for men to have sex with men in North Carolina, it…

> If you say that someone is short, it goes to say that you have a comparison model, and that something is tall.

Since you bring it up, I will observe that I found New York to be a lot more tolerant in practice. Statistically, the political leanings are pretty comparable, but somehow people are less strident in practice, even during my tenure at a company with an explicit institutional commitment to social justice causes.

Among other things, I suspect it may simply be that a lot of people come to New York from a lot of places for a lot more reasons than they do San Francisco. But at the end of the day, it's not even really that Bay Area culture is stridently anti-Christian per se. It's just strident about everything. San Francisco is the sort of place where people scrawl anti-parenting graffiti on the changing tables in the restrooms at Whole Foods to shame new parents for their crimes against the planet.

(My circle of acquaintances in London is still quite small, so I hesitate to generalise, but at least in the tech scene, everything is very international.)

> The Christians I know around the Bay Area are under no such threat. If anything, churches are enclaves of extreme quality in the Bay Area. It goes to show what a fertile ground this is for diversity.

1. There's something about describing religion merely in terms of "churches" and "enclaves" as if there's a box around the realm of acceptable religious activity. Telling people that they are permitted to meet in a consecrated building weekly is the start of religious tolerance, vaguely akin to not prosecuting people under sodomy laws.

2. If you don't know someone with a strong negative opinion of AB 569, you're not really in touch with that diversity.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#138

Post by nol13 »

_0ffh wrote: post #74
ryderm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it such a huge deal that most women are not interested in technology? If this is because they have been systematically discriminated against in tech and primed at a young age with BS like "cars are for boys and dolls are for girls" then yes, absolutely this is a huge deal. If it just so happened that they were not interested because they don't have the "technology gene" then this would not be a big deal, but tha…

>all the evidence points to the former That is patently false, and you should not make factual claims under these circumstances. These claims add to the noise, not the signal. The scientific evidence for innate psychological differences between girls and boys is overwhelming. There is a clear scientific consensus on this. I cannot fathom how this can still be controversial. Specifically about your "cars vs dolls" exa…

just to be clear, they're not dolls, they're action figures!

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#139

Post by twobyfour »

gspetr wrote: post #55
chmike wrote: post #40

Ignoring or repressing that there are differences in women and men doesn't seam wise. However, there are a few important things to keep in mind about it. The difference is multivariate and some people may have some properties of the other gender. As a consequence, infering the capabilities of a person just from the gender written on the ID card is plain stupid. Another thing I want to say about this is that IT is a v…

> In France we have a similar issue with the porportion of black football players in the national team. People who complain about that don't understand that they just picked the best players. This gender debate is the same problem. I'd argue that it's not the same problem. I'm not French, but I doubt that there are calls to make the Football team more representative of the population by forcefully limiting the number…

Less than half of babies born in the US in 2012 were white. So while the demographics of the country as a whole haven't reached that point yet, due to a previously heavily white population that's aging but still alive, the demographics of kids born in 1999 and entering Harvard in 2017 are pretty darn close.

Re: Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral'

#140

Post by anon12345690 »

ryderm wrote: post #95
anon12345690 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been proven false several times. Men and women are also biologically different. This doesnt mean they're limited in capability but that they have slight natural biases. Why is this such a hard reality to accept?

Obviously they are biologically different! That is not the question. The question is: Do these differences make women less interested in tech, or are there less women in tech because experiences they have had since birth make them feel unwelcome or unable.

Yes, biological differences can and does impact career interests.
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