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Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

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Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#201

The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the DISTRIBUTION OF traits in men and women. He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful. What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of thei…

His argument seems to boil down to "men and women are different, maybe that's why there are fewer women in tech". That's not an argument, it's speculation that there's an argument. The bulk of the manifesto is a repetition of tropes about men vs women.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#203
The best explanation of why he was going to be fired and why that was the right thing to do (that I read) came from Yonatan Zunger, who had recently left a Human Resources position at Google; especially his third point, in the following post on Medium:

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

In many way, it was not an unfamiliar sort of rant for the internet, and I was struck by the author's earnestness and apparent sincerity. It's possible that I make too many allowances for behaviour, and it's possible that I'm easily mislead.

I thought his ideas were not in any way useful, or actionable, even had he been correct;

That the ideas were poorly expressed, and full of such fringe 'truths' as are derived, insincerely, from cherry-picked science in order to be sold as snake-oil cures for the cognitive dissonance of the conservative and vulnerable;

That the expression of these ideas was immensely foolish, especially appearing in the context of what I took to have been his initial intent, an appeal of tolerance of diverse viewpoints at Google.

However, I'm always most disturbed by vitriol online when it's in service of beliefs that I share. It makes me deeply uneasy.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#204
post #25

Good. I get that HN is not into this, but this employee stated, bluntly, that they don't believe many of their colleagues should be there because of their sex. Every peer review, every no-hire, every interaction , is and should be suspect. Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer. This is textbook hostile environ…

Yeah, Hacker News is a nightmare any time an issue like this happens, but I'm glad at least that some people out in the real world see this for what it is. This engineer deserved to be fired. I mean there's hundreds of of bro-y all-male "meritocratic" tech startups he can go join, so this still just a slap on the wrist.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#205
post #71

I feel Google cornered itself into this pickle. On the one hand they need to grow their pool of talent and make the non majority to feel comfortable --which makes those not in the majority feel they have more than average support from Management, who in turn turn a blind eye to anti-majority bashing. On the other going above and beyond for underrepresented groups will eventually grate against the majority when they h…

> On the one hand they need to grow their pool of talent and make the non majority to feel comfortable

It isn't useful to make people comfortable in a way that is easily destabilized by other information (be it opinion or scientific research). It's actually terribly fragile and it does a real disservice to people.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#206
We haven't seen anything yet. What we're witnessing is the transition from capitalism to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and things like this termination are an obvious milestone. That may sound like a bold claim but let me explain.

Allow me to back up a little bit. First off some context: a lot of people don't realize it but we are a lot closer to a post-scarcity world than the world would have you think. Check out this chart which shows GDP per capita since the 1950's. The productivity gains since the 1950's have been absolutely incredible, and the quality of life back then was pretty good. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

Have you ever noticed there's never any dialogue about encouraging men to be stay at home dads, or reducing the overall household number of hours worked per week? Never. The dialogue is always about the "wage gap" and "women have value too" and "rape culture" and "microaggressions". Men who are stay at home dads still get shamed just as much as they did during the 1950's. This is how you know there's something wrong - there is never any serious dialogue about actual equality. Income has in no way, shape, or form, kept up the with the GDP per capita shown in the chart above. There's never any explorations of policies that would actually increase equality, like restricting the number of "investment properties" a man or woman can own, behavior which is clearly parasitic. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_productivity_and_... It's not in corporate interests to have people have actual equality. Increasing the labor pool without discussions of actual equality makes it so that people can be kept in debt, wages go down and the nexus of power moves away from the family and towards the corporation, which is what is happening.

"Women have value and should be working full time too". The implication here is that if you are not working for money you have no value. Despite common belief, in fact it IS possible to generate value outside of a money context. Many of the world's greatest achievements have occurred outside a money context, eg. the discovery of calculus, wikipedia, linux, countless famous works of art, literature, and philosophy. By saying that you only have value if you earn money is throwing many of the world's most accomplished people under a bus. The reason why "money is the only form of value" is such a horrible mentality is that it leads to people like Mozart dying in poverty and being thrown into a ditch, which actually happened.

Check out charts of combined household numbers of hours worked, you'll see it's going way UP not down, despite the GDP per capita chart shown above. There is clearly something dark in that picture. http://www.bls.gov/opub/working/chart17.pdf I don't think these are idle complaints - feminism in its current form is an ideology that's on a direct collision course with the whole 'robots are about to take all the jobs' reality, which I think is going to come a lot sooner than we realize, and when these two phenoma collide, what's going to happen is that it's not going to be equality (sorry folks) it's going to be Brave New World, an immensely stratified society.

I work in one of Alphabet's departments where everything you do is constantly monitored. Your teammates conduct detailed psychometric analyses of you, beyond the simple perf of yesteryear. It's beyond cult-like. It's Brave New World.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#208
It seems he's been fired for being wrong even as Google employees push all sorts of other harmful inaccurate stereotypes publically on social media. The hubris and oppression we feel underneath the unaccountable and inescapable reign of Google and Facebook grows more terrifying with every new revelation.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#209
post #8

> he had been fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes." Of course, because a policy of positive discrimination for minorities is not perpetuating any stereotype... Equality doesn't mean equity. Equality is not fair. P.S. downvote whatever you want, it is called discrimination for a reason (even if it says positive before)

Can you give some examples of the positive discrimination?

Hiring people to achieve a diversity in the company and not hiring the candidate who fits better for the position.
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