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On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

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Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#111

Post by thanatropism »

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?

At one point calculators were rows of women performing rote calculations. Early programming was similarly dull/full of detailed work that went through successive waves of abstraction.

This is (also) a sexist stereotype, but maybe just maybe women are drawn to detailed work (say, needlepoint knitting, picking berries) while men are drawn to broad, imprecise work (such as selling insurance policies or chasing antelope). Maybe women are better at punching BCD numerical integrators for problems brought down from Feynman and Fermi, while men like coming up with a whole new language that compiles to PHP.

"Women" and "men" meant as generalities and not in the least implying that within-group variation can't be larger than between-groups variation.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#112

Post by wutbrodo »

s73ver wrote: post #19
pnathan wrote: post #12

What happens when the lone voice is in the right, and the mass of people are in the wrong, and all of the preponderance of current science and wisdom is against the lone voice? It's no great stretch to find examples through history of this in different social contexts.

If the preponderance of current science is against the lone voice, then it's highly likely that the lone voice is not in the right.

I have some pretty ironclad faith in the scientific method, but far less so in the scientific establishment. Don't get me wrong, I don't think scientists are doing a bad job and don't think I could do any better as an individual if I were a scientist. But most people's understanding of "science" goes through tons of filters that hurt its quality: statistical illiteracy among scientists, messed-up incentives in the publishing process, political pressure within research, skew in what the media is incentivized to cover, the obscene amount of dishonesty and incompetence in science reporting, etc etc.

I've yet to meet someone with such faith in science whose understanding of what "science" is goes beyond pop-science articles and things that all of their friends "know" are scientific fact.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#113

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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.

No, it just means that ones that meet the current requirements are not available in sufficient quantity.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#114

Post by EddieRingle »

bbctol wrote: post #87
EddieRingle wrote: post #43

One of my first exposures to this "manifesto" was on Twitter with someone starting a thread with "Google has a Nazi problem." The majority of the other responses I read either attacked the author, dismissed the entire text in whole, and/or refused to actually argue the paper's points because they saw them as so ridiculous or "obviously" wrong. I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism,…

Because you were on Twitter? The most annoying thing about this back-and-forth ping-ponging of increasing outrage is that everyone, on both sides, only reacts to the silliest arguments. Sturgeon's Law holds up pretty well for hot takes, and the majority of anything written on an issue is likely to be bad. If most of the responses you read struck you as irrational, that's a function of the infrastructure that sends yo…

There were quite a few Medium posts as well. But no, I completely agree with you. I've discussed with others recently about how I'd love to have a tool or place where I can search for a given assertion and see the (scientific) evidence for and against it, as well as related assertions and opposing assertions.

And I'm not just talking about being able to "Google it". If I use Google or a general search engine then I have to wade through who knows how many links of ambiguous quality and/or bias.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#115

Post by ladygagaga »

blablabla123 wrote: post #15

The thing is, the guy wrote what many people think - outside of tech. It just so happens that techies happen to be very open oftentimes. I mean, what this person wrote, I heard it on various occasions in different formulations from various people. Even a woman (a Psychologist student at that time) once told me she'd rather have a male dentist and a male president. I imagine tech industry to be brutal for woman, but s…

"Even a woman (a Psychologist student at that time) once told me she'd rather have a male dentist and a male president."

Just because "a woman" said it, does this make this statement true?

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#116

Post by cm2187 »

blablabla123 wrote: post #77
untog wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, the guy wrote what many people think - outside of tech. I agree, but that's also at the core of my (internal) confusion about it. His arguments are not new, at all. As far as I could tell he doesn't present any new evidence to back up his argument, either. So, to those who say "it is important that he spoke out, and that we have this debate": when does this debate end? Assuming we have the debate and…

As said before, every now and then I involuntary get sucked into this debate, most of the time the other person is drunk or feels safe enough "to speak up". (haha - of course when there are no women around) When I'm at work, I'm always surprised how they manage to hire 0 women for pure engineering jobs. (This is not my first job by the way.) Even more why there is no real discussion about that, rather: "yeah we found…

I studied engineering and there was very few women (<20%) in my class. You can't blame companies for having a similar hiring ratio. And the recruitment of the college I went through ("grandes ecoles" in France) is purely based on a math+physics competitive exam, so there is very little selection bias in the first place. So I am not convinced discrimination is the key to explain gender imbalance in engineering jobs.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#117

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

geofft wrote: post #55
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?

This is the one place where I actually do agree with the author of the essay: computer programming is now seen as a high-status field, so it's worth it for men who seek high-status careers to displace women and construct rationalizations. It wasn't high-status in the 1960s.

Ahem, lab coats. They wore lab coats in the 60s.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#118

Post by kristianc »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #109
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.

A couple of the suggested theories are that the tools designed to select applicants changed to focus more on logical aptitude tests, and on finding the right "culture fit."

Another argument which I have seen is that the marketing changed to focus more on men and boys, and so the narrative changed to "personal computers are a thing for boys". Here's an Apple ad from 1985 often used to support that argument:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxNjx_VWJ8U

Personally, I find both of these arguments plausible. You don't have to look too hard to find engineers who don't think tech hiring works very well, and yes, that advert does exclusively talk about boys.

I don't think "sexism" caused the current imbalance any more than I think Google's algorithm is "racist" when it shows racially objectionable content.

I think it's a case of a rule being arbitrarily applied and having an unintended and unforeseen consequence over the far future. And if that's the case then its a legitimate and noble endeavour to try to fix "tech hiring" so that it does find the best person for the job irrespective of gender.

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#119

Post by thanatropism »

kristianc wrote: post #60
dudul wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the industry has changed.

Without a doubt the industry has changed - it has more men in it. The question at hand, I guess, is, have the tasks that one would be expected to perform as a computer programmer changed over the last fifty years? Or has the hiring process - which even most male programmers are happy to admit is "broken," adjusted to favour men over women? Two of the things that have been suggested as causes have been hiring tools fo…

I don't know how culture fit can be taken out of the equation. Work in modern workplaces (and in particular the office, knowledge-worker type we're talking about) is far from the conveyor-belt screw-tightening fully explicit work of our industrial past. Our whole output depends on shared mental context.

You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit, system-wide way that's immune to sensitivity training and generic pressure in the wider culture. What to do then, shoot the racists?

Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

#120

Post by johan_larson »

hncens0rship wrote: post #52
Meekro wrote: post #39

"If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking." -- Paul Graham, What You Can't Say [1] "And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company,…

SV/YC culture is extremely toxic, and people hate having that pointed out to their faces. edit: sv/yc are toxic for how they actively shame outsider opinions, then headhunt the individuals who put said opinions forward. from sama's what i heard from trump supporters, "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried a…

Toxic how?
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