The Kolmogorov option • Hacker News Board

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#411

Post by geofft » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 9:36 PM UTC

cderwin wrote: post #389

geofft wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can we ever have a genuine conversation about the under-representation of women in tech if people with a certain "undesirable" opinion get fired for expressing it? The same way we can have a genuine conversation about the best web stack to use if people with a certain "undesirable" opinion get fired for expressing it. (I don't think the fact that other Google employees supported the document is strong evidence…

Say I work at a business that uses python exclusively. If I see my coworker get fired for suggesting we use haskell (or some other very different stack) for performance-critical code, how likely is it that I would later suggest we rewrite some stuff in go? or even python 3? or use https? The opinion that biological differences between the sexes result in different career preferences isn't exactly wildly uncommon, ext…

I guess the question here is whether we think that the opinions in the memo are more like advocating Haskell or advocating ASP. They seem like the latter to me; if they seemed like the former, I'd agree with you. I don't think it's weird to think that there exist both rare defensible opinions and rare indefensible ones.

Note that the opinion in the memo isn't restricted to different career preferences correlated with gender (at least some of those opinions in the memo, like women wanting better work/life balance and men having rigid gender roles, are so uncontroversial that they're part of the standard feminist position too). The opinion also includes the claim of different abilities correlated with gender, because that's what's relevant to the business practices he's arguing in favor of changing, and in particular abilities relevant to qualification for engineering roles at Google. That's a much more extreme position.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#412

Post by nl » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 9:39 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #380

jacalata wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you believe that a paper arguing that "black people are genetically suited to being slaves and therefore we should not expect them to become managers at google in a demographically representative proportion" is a reasonable statement to make about Google promotion practices and should not lead to the speaker being fired, so long as he adds references to the Bell Curve and the lack of black executives America?

If he can back his arguments with research and they don't contain any logical flaws then one should at least entertain them for a few minutes. After all he might be (partially) right and do his employer a favor. If he is wrong in ways that could be honest mistakes then one should first try to point out the mistakes so he can retract his document until he can find stronger evidence or truly see the error of his ways.…

After all he might be (partially) right and do his employer a favor

So your point is that if a racist argument is partially right and good for an employer then it's all good??!

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#413

Post by danarmak » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 9:49 PM UTC

hellopier wrote: post #404

danarmak wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of all, consistently apply the maximum level opsec right from the beginning. Even if the first hundred posts on your new blog are inoccuous, you can't let them be connected to you when five years from now you find out that you actually want to write about something controversial for once. The hardest part is planning ahead and investing a lot of time and effort before the point where you actually publish the dan…

Is there some kind of guide about this? How can you beat a linguistic analysis? If you publish elsewhere and someone guesses to compare your work, are you screwed? Are there any programs that scan writing to determine if the writer's english is Canadian or American or British etc? Or maybe your gender? Could you use that to weed out any regional phrases, or use regional phrases from other places to confuse the text?…

I'm not any kind of expert on this. I don't have personal experience (obviously I wouldn't admit it if I did, but still); I'm just making educated guesses based on my knowledge technology, people, and the way that previous doxxing campaigns have succeeded. I hope someone else can answer your questions better; I don't want to mislead by sounding more authoritative than I should.

I can't think offhand of someone in the Internet era who became famous (for writing/posting) under a pseudonym, where people had incentive to doxx them. That I can't think of such cases is very weak evidence they don't exist; the majority of cases would occur in non-English media which I don't read anyway.

Scott Alexander is a good example of someone who has succeeded in having large and diverse online following behind a pseudonym. But he's not an example example of what you're looking for. He is very weakly pseudonymous, trivial to doxx. He often refers to his personal life on his blog (more so on his Tumblr), his pseudonym is linked to his real name, and many people know him in the flesh as the author of SSC.

There is good information online on correctly, securely using Tor and VPNs to remain anonymous and on securing (and ideally segregating) the computer you're using for this. This information is often targeted to whistleblowers and to people whose thread model is their governments, but it works equally for anyone.

Interacting with public comments on your own blog should be fine if your connection to it is securely anonymized.

You can register a domain anonymously using bitcoin or prepaid CC without providing your contact info, but then the registrar is the owner of record of the domain and you have to trust them. The biggest danger may be that in the event of a dispute or wishing to transfer to a different registrar, you won't be able to assert control over the domain name without revealing your identity. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_privacy

Making a list of things you're willing to reveal about yourself and sticking to it sounds like a good idea: precommit to clear rules, use checklists.

The linguistic analysis questions depend heavily on both your threat model and on future technological development and I don't dare to try answer them.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#414

Post by Boothroid » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 9:50 PM UTC

soundwave106 wrote: post #368

Boothroid wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more, I think the level of left wing propaganda in the media is pretty terrifying. What reassures me is that most people seem to hold very different opinions than those the liberal media seem to be trying to indoctrinate. Personally I think you can find racial and sex differences if you look for them. The athletics world championships are on at the moment. What race wins most of the races? Why do we…

You can find differences between sexes / races / ethnicity, and I think it would be foolish to argue that there are no differences. I think it would be foolish to argue however environment and other factors are no influence either. Pulling apart which influences what is rather tricky, I think. One note I can think of, using your running analogy: focusing on the natural abilities at the very top of the echelon (or eve…

So your points can be summarised as: there are very few innate differences between men and women, and any differences are far less significant than environmental factors, and anyway you are not allowed to discuss them because human beings are so primitive that if we do find differences we risk a holocaust. This reads to me like a fairly standard rebuttal from the left wing/feminist school.

Here's an example of a measure of male strength where virtually no women are stronger than men: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/alm...

The idea that all races and sexes have the same potential is not borne out by the facts. Nature is important. It's comforting and fashionable yet intellectually soft minded to blame it all on the patriarchy or imperialism. All the diversity programmes in the world can't change nature. Nothing should be out if bounds for discussion. In the nicest possible way, if I am not trying to harm people or encourage anyone else to do so, who the hell are you or anyone else to tell me what to say or think?

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#415

Post by brighteyes » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #408

brighteyes wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is he talking about preference? Does that have to do with his thesis? If preferences partially explain why psychology is dominated by women and why computer science is dominated by men, then preferences can partially explain part of why psychologists tend to be women and tech employees tend to be men. And that's a big part of the memo: why is there a gender gap, what causes it, etc. So it's not surprising that…

Preferences are important. I'm not disputing that. And there are definitely gender correlations in preferences (I agree with at least three of his points here, namely that women seek better work-life balance, that men seek high-status position, and that there's more work to be done in dismantling the patriarchy's oppression of men who don't conform to gender roles). I am disputing that preferences are relevant to the…

The memo does care about the gender gap in tech as a whole, while you are focusing more on Google's specific policies regarding applicants.

Clearly both are important topics, and they have some obvious connections - for example, the gender gap as a whole often motivates specific corporate policies, that's one reason he brings it up - but they can also be debated separately.

So I think it's fair to say the memo does make some valid points, but it looks like you think it's wrong on other points that it makes in other areas (which could well be true).

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#416

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #181

akvadrako wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is dishonest. That isn't a quote from the memo. It is: [7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race…

You admit the mainstream contemporary left is not advocating for Marxist class warfare. So why do you call them Marxists? The talk of "Marxist intellectuals transitioning into gender and race politics" is bizarre because any such shift would have happened around 40 years ago. Those individuals are mostly dead or retired. What do they have to do with working conditions at Google?

[deleted]

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#417

Post by wisty » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:05 PM UTC

cderwin wrote: post #324

wisty wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now obviously, what he did was injudicious. If you are a white male and suspect a diversity program is going to fail (and there's a lot of evidence that many of them do fail, sometimes even with negative impacts on the people they are meant to help) then you would be wise to shut up. The same would be true if a religious owner asked employees what they thought of their religion. It's best to just avoid disagreeing wi…

Sure, that makes sense in the short term. But if everyone did this, over a long period of time, two things would happen: (a) Diversity programs would at some point stop being ineffective. and (b) Identity politics would achieve cultural hegemony. I agree that it would be wise to shut up if doing so had no long term effects (as in your example of a manager asking about religion), but that clearly isn't the case here.…

> Diversity programs would at some point stop being ineffective.

I seriously doubt this will happen unless people criticize the failings of diversity programs, and diversity officer take this criticism seriously.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#418

Post by hellopier » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:05 PM UTC

danarmak wrote: post #413

hellopier wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some kind of guide about this? How can you beat a linguistic analysis? If you publish elsewhere and someone guesses to compare your work, are you screwed? Are there any programs that scan writing to determine if the writer's english is Canadian or American or British etc? Or maybe your gender? Could you use that to weed out any regional phrases, or use regional phrases from other places to confuse the text?…

I'm not any kind of expert on this. I don't have personal experience (obviously I wouldn't admit it if I did, but still); I'm just making educated guesses based on my knowledge technology, people, and the way that previous doxxing campaigns have succeeded. I hope someone else can answer your questions better; I don't want to mislead by sounding more authoritative than I should. I can't think offhand of someone in the…

thanks!

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#419

Post by defen » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:06 PM UTC

jacalata wrote: post #362

defen wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said that the thought that it might be true would be completely alien to some people's way of seeing things. Which turned out to be proven true by the utterly unhinged way people reacted. It was like he had suggested that maybe the earth revolved around the sun.

Yes. The thought that hacker news might now be a haven for nazis masquerading as classical liberals defending free speech is probably quite horrifying to some people as well.

I get the sense that you're trolling, rather than engaging in good-faith discussion.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#420

Post by jack9 » Wed, Aug 09, 2017, 10:17 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #405

jack9 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did he research social structures or even the psychological differences between the sexes? > No expert on the actual matter at hand (women participation in tech) would consider them relevant at all to the issue. Your inability to maintain a frame of reference for your objections is disheartening. It's clear you're just entrenched in a win/lose mentality and have no interest in the topic at all.

On the contrary. This is a subject I studied (although indirectly) at university, and that's why I could easily tell that the author of the manifesto is both ignorant and uninterested in the subject, which is why he quotes studies that are irrelevant even if their findings are representative. In other words, that he confuses the question of "natural inclination" with the problem of inclusion of women in tech shows th…

> he has done no research on the subject at all.

Except for the citations.

> why I could easily tell that the author of the manifesto is both ignorant and uninterested in the subject

Continuing to attack the credibility of a largely factual statement (the memo in question) is still not compelling. If there was evidence supporting opposing viewpoints, even hypothetically, you might want to lead with that in your interactions. Good luck with whatever you believe.