121–130 of 443 posts
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.
> 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? Unless you're trying to endorse that memo, perhaps you should save this comment for when that actually happens.
(Come to think of it, that's exactly what Google's official response did.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Hacker culture used to trend towards libertarian ideals: free speech absolutism, cyberpunk freedom, etc. Now we have a huge mass of people at Google forming a rage mob to punish someone for expressing an unpopular idea. Should people lose their livelihoods and be blacklisted from the industry because you disagree with them? (see also Brendan Eich)
Most people don't want to work with jerks, and in a libertarian ideal would be free to choose whether to do so. Most companies choose to get rid of jerks for a ton of sensible reasons. In a libertarian ideal they'd be free to choose who to hire/fire. Large groups calling for someone to lose their job is totally in line with libertarian ideals. Nobody is calling for government regulation, this is just the (employment)…
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)…
If men are drawn to broad, imprecise work, why are more men not marketers (tech or otherwise)? Or, if women are more "creative" as the memo implies, then why wouldn't women be more suited to coming up with a whole new language that compiles to PHP?
And, centrally to it, if tech hiring is broken on so many levels, why does it get it right in terms of gender?
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.
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?
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 eng…
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3...
See slide 20 and 21 for the citation. Perhaps you feel this is the product of 'an insane ideology', personally I find it more convincing than the huge jumps in your argument and the original one, which jump from the assertion that men and women are different (I think most agree), to there are less women than men in IT, ergo there are far less women who enjoy or are capable of engineering.
In academic studies even tiny variations between genders are interesting, in real life not so much, the gap between genders would have to be very large to matter given the variation in individuals and experience levels.
In case you're not feeling convinced here is a graph which I find hard to square with a biological difference incapacitating women when near technology:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
Early computing science had a lot of women; a woman helped land men on the moon, but the declined dranaticallly till recently over just a few decades. I find your argument that women just don't like tech for biological reasons unconvincing.
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 eng…
What about all the women through the 40s up until the 80s who worked as computer programmers? For a while it was a seriously female dominated field. A woman wrote the first compiler. A woman wrote the code to help get us to the moon. A woman taught my CS courses in high school and i had two female CS professors in college (and just about half my graduating class in that major was female).
Did biology change? Where's the science that says women as a whole don't enjoy IT as much? You crow on and on about science but provide no citations, no logical coherent argument.
When I see posts like this on HN, it makes me think you haven't worked closely with women. Or even know any lol
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,…
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3...
Of course men and women are different on average, but are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in tech? No.