Google Can't Seem to Tolerate Diversity

> it's core, it was very unscientific

He was very good at sourcing almost every single one of his claims with references to published scientific studies.

Your statement on the other hand has zero quotes to support your claim.

I know which one I will consider "unscientific".

>>You don't shut down the conversation and pretend the issues don't exist.

This generally happens when ideas presented in the conversation are radical and dangerous to a point the target people in the discussion feel an existential threat.

Look at the nature of this discussion. Presented in its simplest form, its a case for a merit based system. The socialist types don't like this, the very fact that merit is being discussed implies their entitlement to free resources at the expense of other hard working people is threatened. They can't allow it to go on.

You don't want people to start thinking about it.

I am fond of the immune system analogy, myself, when it comes to putting environmental (i.e. social) pressure on bad ideas in real time. Like anything else, however, striking the right balance and behaving ethically are vital companions to the application of this pressure. There was no balance here, and the vitriolic mob response was full of unethical behavior.

I’m usually at least somewhat amenable to the “but the bad actors are mostly just the outliers” position, as well. In most cases, that’s true. Again, however, not here. Anyone who read the manifesto and the “response” post by Zunger while practicing even a nominal amount of epistemological integrity would have immediately recognized that Zunger’s post was wildly dishonest, did not deal directly with the content of the post at all, and apparently even thought that fantasizing violence against the manifesto author was an acceptable way to respond. It wasn’t.

I was and remain extremely disappointed in Bay Area tech culture right now. This “manifesto” —a ridiculous and politically expedient moniker— was a crucial opportunity to have a culture-wide teaching moment and we blew it spectacularly. We could have had a nuanced, intelligent discussion about an extremely personal and difficult topic while also demonstrating to Mr. Damont why his application of the very real, widely accepted science he cited was wrong-headed and possibly even oppressive[1]. But no. We didn’t want to acknowledge the facts at all, and our aversion to doing so was so strong that a witch-hunt was executed instead. Meanwhile, we still seem largely oblivious that we made Mr. Damont’s broader point for him. And for the alt-right. They’re having a field day with this, and it’s all the more infuriating because they’re not wrong this time.

[1] e.g. https://contemporarysex.tumblr.com/post/163876071377/doing-a...

There are differences between saying "You can't do that here, so..."

1) "... we will fire you, because you have generated negative press for us with this even though we had no explicit policy prohibiting this"

2) "... we will fire you because what you did has directly violated an explicit existing company policy"

3) "... we will give you a warning, and add 'workplace gender diversity' to the list of topics prohibited from public discourse by employees so that in the future we can fire people for this"

It's unclear whether 1) or 2) happened (I suspect it was 1), and they could have chosen 3). They didn't. And the poor sap probably doesn't want to consider a lawsuit against Google if it was 1) and not 2) even if one could argue wrongful termination. And that's exactly what authoritarianism is about, the power to make rules pretty much on the fly and expect those affected by your choices to play by them.

PS: Not taking sides here, IMHO the manifesto was dumb and the person sounded like a green'un who got a rude dose of reality from what he probably considered merely a provoking thought experiment/writing exercise.

A scientific approach to discussing something is not about upholding your view with select studies that back your viewpoint. It's about proposing a hypothesis, then collecting and presenting unbiased studies, observations and data for all sides, and then supporting final inferences and conclusions.

The last part is "the message" of a scientific publication (the "why I worked on/wrote this").

Why was his memo unscientific? 1. His choice of data presentation was almost exclusively for his side of the hypothesis, of the form "women are biologically inclined to X" without including any of the (vast corpus of) counter-studies* that directly offset many of his core supporting arguments.

2. Even if his arguments were sufficiently sound (which is unlikely as per 1.), his conclusions were a bit of a quantum leap from his "sourced" claims to "this is unfair, divisive, bad for business" (as per the TLDR). He pretty much just decided that for himself. There were few or no studies/data/observations to support that crucial step.

*going to piggyback off the sources linked in this slate article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/08/07/the_google_a...