On managing outrage in Silicon Valley • Hacker News Board

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#101

Post by artursapek » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:28 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #94

artursapek wrote: post #45

Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature. There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.

Another thing is people are outraged that the engineer seems to denigrate a whole group of people as not as good engineers, and the eng is doing groups a disservice but when people bash "whitemaleness" you don't see the same reaction of, well, please don't lump all while males into one group, don't denigrate a whole group. A noticeable issue is in google and other tech cos it's totally okay for people to virtue signa…

Yeah, "white males" seem to be fair game for discrimination and blanket statements. I guess it's because we have it so good? It's all so tiresome.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#102

Post by amazingman » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:28 PM UTC

drewrv wrote: post #79

amazingman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked for claims in the manifesto that women and/or minorities are inferior, and I failed to find them. Would you mind providing an example of what I seem to have missed?

Believing that diversity requires "lowing the bar" means believing "diverse" candidates are inferior.

Again, I failed to find this claim. The one instance I found of this phrase arises explicitly within a claim about a specific hiring practice being discriminatory:

>Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

Is this what you're referring to?

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#103

Post by toxiccwm » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:30 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

> He is one individual in a company that employs more than 72,000 people. Why has Silicon Valley spent the weekend talking about him Because we're not talking about a memo posted by one random engineer that got the reaction it deserved for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers (among the myriad broken things in that memo). That would have been a story for all of five minutes. Instead, we…

It seems pretty clear that you either didn't read the memo, or you had a preconceived reaction that prevented you from absorbing what it actually said. It's a shame, I normally enjoy your posts because you are conscientious and even-handed about technical matters.

It's very important to remember that statistics reify to probabilities, so that statistical statements about groups can be true while individuals don't match the statements perfectly. That's how the math works. IOW, saying that in general women have less interest in tech can be perfectly true, and it simultaneously offers zero denigration toward any individual woman's ability or interest.

I'm taken aback by how many obviously smart people miss this, particularly in computing, since it seems fair to assume lots of you took statistics classes at some point.

I also take heavy issue with your idea that saying women have less interest in developing technical abilities is equivalent to calling them sub-human. There is an entire world outside of tech, and in many facets, women have greater interest and ability than men. Why is it so completely impossible for people to accept this clear empirical imbalance in this one particular field?

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#104

Post by copx » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:31 PM UTC

Try to find even just one female neuroscientist or evolutionary biologist who argues that men and women are not fundamentally different at a biological level and that the different behaviors, the different interests and preferences we are seeing are not largely rooted in biology.

The author of this piece pretends that the opinion of ignorant far-left loonies is somehow the reasonable and intelligent one while the engineer who simply referred to the scientific consensus is the one who is ignorant. No, the SJWs are ignorant, in fact delusional.

The science backing that men and women are fundamentally different, including how their brains work, is much more solid and clear than say the science behind climate change. Not that I deny climate change, or that it is man-made and an existential threat. Those are reasonable assumptions based on the scientific evidence we have.

However, the assumption that men and women only behave differently and make different career choices because of some "evil sexist patriarchy" which is indoctrinating and forcing people into certain gender roles.. that is not a reasonable assumption. It is completely at odds with the state of science.

It is a shame that a company like Google whose business is based so heavily on science and engineering gives in to these crazed post-modernists who are willfully ignorant of all science which contradicts their insane ideology.

Also this has nothing to do with trying to exclude women from IT. Nobody denies that there are women who genuinely enjoy, say, software engineering and are good at it and nobody says they should be disqualified because of their sex. But the truth is that there are far less women than men who are like that, and that this will never change because of biological factors.

Maybe one can increase the number of women in IT a bit more by addressing cultural factors still keeping them out, but you will never see an equal number.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#105

Post by kristianc » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:31 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #90

kristianc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that the focus is always on the reaction to these pieces, and I wonder why. It's obvious why people are angry - he's trying to find a biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career. That's something that has mostly been dismissed as quackery, and has been shown to have some pretty negative consequences throughout history. The onus of people who want to stick up for this guy i…

No, he's using a biological justification to openly discuss different ways to foster diversity. This is one of his points: the most common argument against him is just that you think he's a sexist, not because you don't think his ideas will actually foster any kind of diversity. And I don't understand that. The reaction here is the opposite of tolerance and diversity. edit: I'm going to give a personal example: I str…

But we're back to discussing the reaction again. Which is a neat way of avoiding the content of the article itself.

I have no particular need to apply the label of "sexist" to this guy. I have no opinion, nor enough information, to say whether he should be fired or not.

I do think he's profoundly wrong though, and think his arguments about biological differences bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly discredited arguments.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#106

Post by hncens0rship » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:32 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #78

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #34

Silicon Valley controls a lot of the world's communication and we should be really worried if silencing of unpopular opinions is the order of the day. As a "minority" I perhaps disagree with a lot of what this person has written but my reaction to it will be to counter his arguments with a better one rather than go on to silence him. -- I have already written about this somewhat during the past elections. https://med…

And calling "fake news" any opinion they disagree with. I find it pretty problematic that Facebook wants to police the political debate. Kind of like if gmail started blocking emails sent to a gmail account if it disagrees with its content.

And yet this community argued heavily against the idea that social media sites were censoring conservative opinions during the election / now. lol.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#107

Post by dws » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

> He is one individual in a company that employs more than 72,000 people. Why has Silicon Valley spent the weekend talking about him Because we're not talking about a memo posted by one random engineer that got the reaction it deserved for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers (among the myriad broken things in that memo). That would have been a story for all of five minutes. Instead, we…

What's your source for "large fraction"?

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#108

Post by kristianc » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:34 PM UTC

turc1656 wrote: post #98

kristianc wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that the focus is always on the reaction to these pieces, and I wonder why. It's obvious why people are angry - he's trying to find a biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career. That's something that has mostly been dismissed as quackery, and has been shown to have some pretty negative consequences throughout history. The onus of people who want to stick up for this guy i…

It's not about exclusion, it's about preference. We seem to be trying to force a result, in the name of equality, when there may not in fact be any inequality. I'm not saying there isn't sexism in Silicon Valley. I'm saying that trying to steer women into certain fields of study they may not, on average, be as interested in it as men seems really dumb. If companies were really, truly interested in fairness and equali…

> If companies were really, truly interested in fairness and equality, then their HR policies for hiring would say one and only one thing - that the best candidate is the one that gets the job.

It's strange though that you will find many engineers who say that HR policies for hiring do a poor job of finding the right engineers for the job (whiteboarding tests, easily gamed, "culture fit" etc), but who don't seem as eager to admit that these factors, rather than "biological differences" could be what are excluding women.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#109

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:35 PM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #27

The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?

I'm wondering why this happened too. Have you already determined sexism caused it?

Edit: I just want to know the history, and I'm not looking for rhetorical weapons.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#110

Post by blablabla123 » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 6:35 PM UTC

Danihan wrote: post #82

blablabla123 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Tech requires intelligence. Google in particular in famous for checking analytical intelligence in their interview. I know that's not 100% correct but I call this "pure number crunching intelligence". People there know how to solve this and that, can approximate problems and solutions. This gender thing might be formulated as an analytical problem but it suffers high complexity. It's better to be understood empi…

>I have an illustrative example: in Germany in those regions that have the least foreigners, there are the most Neo Nazis and people are more likely to vote for right wing parties. As a counter-example: In the US, people living in the South are generally the most racist, despite Southern states having the most ethnic diversity. https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-5b7d145c14255746125e39...

How much social interaction is there between people of different ethnicities? How often is a white person neighbour of a black person? Can you compare this to, say, New York City?