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Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

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Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#121

Post by jancsika »

> And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not hiring the most qualified person? That’s the trade-off nobody seems willing to spell out.

Perhaps because it's not a necessary trade off of diversity policies per se, only a trade-off of the one specific type of diversity policy with which the author happens to be familiar.

For an historical example that does not feature such a trade-off:

1. I put up a curtain between the judges and the musician auditioning for the orchestra.

2. I hire whoever the judges say sounded the best.

3. The number of women in orchestras grows.

In no case where this diversity policy is used does the policy cause a less skilled player get chosen because that player was female.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#122

Post by dang »

bobdole1234 wrote: post #120

Because that huge California block of Trump supporters really changed the landscape huh?

Would you kindly stop posting snarky comments on inflammatory topics? These discussions are flamewarrish enough without that. Pouring fuel on the fire amounts to vandalism no matter how correct your underlying points are.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14976935 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#124

Post by petre »

tetromino_ wrote: post #58
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This implies suicide and homicide are done primarily by stupid people by rhetoric?

Yes. Committing homicide is an irrational and maladaptive (i.e. stupid) thing to do in a peaceful 21st century society. Committing suicide is an irrational and maladaptive thing to do in almost all situations in history.

Maybe one has a temporary problem (depression) that pushes them to commit suicide. That doesn't mean they're stupid. Robin Williams was definitely not stupid, yet he commited suicide. Terry Pratchett was also diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and had contemplated the idea of assisted suicide in a country where this is legal (Switzerland).

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#125

Post by relics443 »

Const-me wrote: post #113

IMO the best comment from there: Giulio Prisco said... The results of this incident are easy to predict. Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line. Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family. But they won't change their position. If anythi…

Are you saying that Trump was only elected because he was appealing to the alt-right? Surely that was part of it, but why is everyone so eager to "blame" it on the marginalized alt-right? Is it a scare tactic for 2020 /r

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#126

Post by relics443 »

bendmorris wrote: post #43
mirimir wrote: post #4

This is an excellent discussion. I especially love this comment: > I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. I challenge you to provide any evidence to the contrary. Because arguably that's where gender differences highlighted in Damore's memo…

>I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women. Hence, aiming at a 50-50 representation gives men an unfair advantage. This makes zero sense considering the reality that women are underrepresented. "Aiming at 50-50 representation" could at best lift the disadvantaged group closer to 50% representation. It could in no…

What if, hypothetically (I wouldn't want to get fired), the most qualified split was 55% male - 45% female. Wouldn't aiming for 50-50 be discriminatory towards males?

Since we have no way of knowing what the actual qualified split is, aiming at anything is discriminatory towards everyone.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#127

Post by michaelchisari »

Const-me wrote: post #113

IMO the best comment from there: Giulio Prisco said... The results of this incident are easy to predict. Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line. Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family. But they won't change their position. If anythi…

We'll see how the trend moves going forward, but even after capturing (by rhetoric if not act) the white house, the alt-right continues to be a radical fringe, and suffers from serious internal contradictions that make any serious movement building doomed. The movement has attracted the attention of a lot of white nationalists, anti-semites and hardline fascists (amren, natall, kss), while also attracting a new wave of online-prominent trolls and shit-stirrers.

But what happens when the 4chan poster with the anime pillow who denies the holocaust just to get a rise out of the libcucks crosses paths with an actual hardline anti-semite who is interested in building an even-more-final solution?

To use a colloquialism, what happens when the rubber meets the road? Do the fascists tolerate what they would consider to be total degeneracy for the sake of finally building a mass movement? Does the online troll recognize that what was an ironic joke for him is a hard reality for others, and move to push their real-life activism away from those types of groups?

This is what I mean by internal contradictions, the kind that can kill a mass movement before it even starts.

So while there is a common refrain of "this is why Trump won, and the movement of contrarians, devils advocates, trolls, anti-pc crusaders, people who tweet about white genocide, stormfront regulars and conspiracy theorists is only going to grow if you being offensive towards them", the reality is much, much more complicated.

Trust in Trump has plummeted, even amongst his core. The vote is very quickly slipping out of the grasp of the Right, and was always a race against time demographically to begin with. And if you're in a position where you can't win through democratic means, you have to use other means (boycotts, protests, organizing, etc). And the alt-right is utterly lamed by it's own hand before that race has even started.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#128

Post by mirimir »

fweespeech wrote: post #89
reitanqild wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even when the employer has asked? I understand this was written in response to a request from someone else, probably HR.

The only time I was ever asked about politics by a potential employer I noped out of that situation. Workplace = Professional, Personal Shit Stays Home. Rest of Life = Do whatever the fuck you want as long as its legal and you don't mention your day job. I'm not sure why this separation isn't standard practice for everyone.

That's my practice, for sure. Enforced through compartmentalization and online anonymity.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#129

Post by marchenko »

marchenko wrote: post #119
anabis wrote: post #21

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers being fired in 2006 showed that there could be no rational discussion of this topic. Sad to see it unchanged in 2017. Doubly sad because if the anonymous survey linked in the post is true, 1/3 of Googlers agree with the memo. Only 1/3 "strongly disagree", and the people who wanted him fired should be a further fraction of that 1/3. https://basicgestalt.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/pr…

I wish this Larry Summers martyr mythology would be revisited with scrutiny. Summers was already unpopular with the faculty for his changes to the core curriculum (it was argued that they reduced rigor in some tracks), endowment strategy, and a very strange scandal involving financial wrongdoing in Russia and a massive Harvard payout. He made his comments to a group including top female faculty during a time when the…

For example, one of the specific complaints of the faculty at the time was that the advertised perk of on-site daycare was an extremely small number of places in the basement of a trailer on land not owned by the University (and so possibly subject to return to Cambridge). The environment at the time was tense, and the faculty appear to have opportunistically seized on the brouhaha to weaken a disliked leader. Many female faculty publicly supported the topic of the comments themselves (as I recall, the most vocal were an economist in favor and a very famous biologist against - the biologist appeared to interpret to the comments as a direct comment on the ability of the Harvard faculty)

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#130

Post by thesmallestcat »

nippples wrote: post #94
sidlls wrote: post #87

I'll repeat this again here: it's very likely he wasn't fired for trying to have a discussion. It is more likely he was fired because he did so by propagating gender stereotypes and doubling-down on those stereotypes (his suggestions for how to improve diversity essentially were just context-specific extensions of these stereotypes), which both almost certainly reduced his credibility as a coworker to the point that…

> It's possible to have a discussion about these issues today. It's not rational to give special preference and excessive leeway to discussion that isn't actually fact based (and is in many ways based on nothing related to facts). Well, that's great, because his points on gender differences are actually extensively backed by research. When he's talking about that, he isn't talking about what should be or what can be…

There's a penalty in society and your career for being an asshole. If you do something to make yourself wildly unpopular at work, even if it's well within the lines technically, you might be out of a job. The issue is that most people at Google don't want to work with this guy. That makes for a distraction, not to mention the obvious legal risk if the engineer ever interacts with a woman or minority at Google again.

You can have all the opinions you want, think women belong in the kitchen, hell, be a raging neo-Nazi, but please don't broadcast that shit at work. If you don't like that Google's promoting diversity, there are ways to make your voice heard like a normal adult. I would be livid if I got a link to a doc like this. Here we're busting our asses, and this guy has the gall, time, and energy to write a lengthy essay version of /r/theredpill and put it on a company server.

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