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Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

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Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#161

Post by mathw »

rufus_2 wrote: post #143
michaelchisari wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Trust in Trump has plummeted, even amongst his core. The vote is very quickly slipping out of the grasp of the Right This is certainly the message being broadcast into every home on the planet for the last 6 moths. In reality it seems a bit optimistic when we consider the Democrats are coming from a decade-long losing streak ( http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/25/... ), a monumentally embarra…

Indeed but I think a lot of leftists would be very happy just to get rid of Trump. A right-wing government with a President who displays any kind of understanding of diplomacy, international politics and everyday reality would be an improvement.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#162

Post by KirinDave »

nailer wrote: post #159
KirinDave wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says women will benefit from making coding more social. Pair programming. Remember?

That's not the same thing as telling an individual they're less capable.

Why?

What positive connotation could be drawn from it?

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#164

Post by williamaadams »

This whole episode leaves me a bit perplexed because in tech we keep missing the mark when it comes to diversity.

I work at Microsoft. The back of my ID badge has our mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

To me, that mission is a blueprint for how I can easily approach issues of diversity and inclusion. It says "everyone". To me it's a simple matter of gaining empathy for a wider set of customers so that I can more effectively create software for them.

As an engineering manager, I need to somehow be able to include the views, perspectives, and experiences of a wheat farmer in rural Kenya. Same goes for the high speed day trader in Iceland (I've been to neither place, so how do I know what they really need).

I want more women in engineering precisely because they're not me. Nothing about them makes them less capable of writing code, and several of their attributes (grossly generalizing) makes them far better collaborators than most men I know.

So, I'm just shaking my head, and continuing to do my bit to improve things in ways that I believe are useful: http://aka.ms/leapit

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#165

Post by PeanutCurry »

mirimir wrote: post #81
pacala wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* institutionalized discrimination: Policies that explicitly favor one group over another based on phenotype differences. For example, Jim Crow laws or "diversity" hiring policies. * "institutionalized discrimination": The hypothesis that society is skewed by the vast conspiracy of "bias". For example, for the past 10 years, computer science graduation rates skew under 20% / 80% for female / male graduates [0]. Presu…

We're talking "institutionalized discrimination" in the sense of the past few millennia.

This seems overly broad. many societies aren't even a millennia old and derive from events that would indicate some quantity of disdain for their previous governors. Unless the argument is that people, regardless of culture, are behaviorally the same then there isn't much to gain by simply going by such a large time frame.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#166

Post by yorwba »

nippples wrote: post #140
thesmallestcat wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> There's a penalty in society and your career for being an asshole. Partially true, Gawker staff thrived on being assholes until they got the Hogan Leg Drop. Are you implying that Damore was an asshole, though? How so? > 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. What about the legal risk of institutionalized discrimina…

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

is a better link, because it preserves the links to references, the formatting, and the graphic clarifying distributions vs. averages.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#167

Post by williamaadams »

williamaadams wrote: post #164

This whole episode leaves me a bit perplexed because in tech we keep missing the mark when it comes to diversity. I work at Microsoft. The back of my ID badge has our mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. To me, that mission is a blueprint for how I can easily approach issues of diversity and inclusion. It says "everyone". To me it's a simple matter of gaining e…

...and, this guy being fired has nothing to do with political correctness or any of the other inane arguments people are rallying around. It's simple corporate calculation.

He release something that turned into a fire storm. Google no doubt did a law suit calculation and figured firing him was cheaper than the inevitable "hostile work environment" lawsuits they figured would be filed if they didn't take such action.

If the goal was to not get fired, but still have the dialog, he probably could have found a forum to do it. Instead, he blasted into their internal interweb, and here's the outcome.

Most large companies would probably end up doing the same thing, regardless of what they might believe about what was actually written.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#168

Post by michaelchisari »

rufus_2 wrote: post #143
michaelchisari wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Trust in Trump has plummeted, even amongst his core. The vote is very quickly slipping out of the grasp of the Right This is certainly the message being broadcast into every home on the planet for the last 6 moths. In reality it seems a bit optimistic when we consider the Democrats are coming from a decade-long losing streak ( http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/25/... ), a monumentally embarra…

Right now, we have two indicators: The way the swings on the special elections are going, which are all violently swinging away from the Republicans, even if Republicans end up winning, it's barely by single digits in double digit districts.

And the polling, which in aggregate, across all demographics, has been continually moving more and more negative each passing month. Even polls like Rasmussen, which have a traditional right-wing bias, have shown a consistent drop in support.

Metrics like the ones you mentioned aren't useful as predictors. Yes, the Democrats spent a lot of money. So did the Republicans. Big money elections are the norm now, and each election has a loser.

Your reference to losing special elections only tells half the story. These are races that should have been as safe as safe can be. That's why they're special elections, because when Presidents make appointments, they only tend to choose people from their party who are in such safe districts that they can easily be replaced. Often-times, the national party doesn't even send monetary support to these special elections, because they're re-won so handily.

Take Ossoff's challenge in Georgia. He lost by 4 points in a district that went for Trump by 19 points. Moreover, the Republicans were required to spend $25 million in order to defend a seat that they had most likely budgeted around $0 for. That's what's called a weathervane. Or a canary in a coal mine.

Even further down this rabbit hole, the 0-6 loss article is from June. Since then, we've had Phil Miller win by 9 points in a district that Trump won by 21 points, which means that's a 30 point swing! We also have Kevin Cavanaugh winning by 23.4 points in a district that Clinton only won by 0.1 points. There's also been sweeps of state legislatures in traditionally VERY deep red states such as Oklahoma.

Every single trend points to a very difficult 2018 for the Republicans, and an especially difficult 2020.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#169

Post by mirimir »

nbanks wrote: post #74
mberning wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mother nature does seem to roll the dice more when it comes to men. People then look at the outliers to the right and scream sexism while completely ignoring all the outliers to the left. There are many more profoundly stupid men than women. Men are incarcerated at a higher rate. Men kill themselves at 3x the rate of women. Yet this is quietly accepted.

Women have a much higher level of attempted suicide, possibly 3x as often as men. [1] I once heard a theory that women don't die from suicide as often because they tend to use less violent means of suicide. For example, if you swallow a bottle of pills you could survive or change your mind a few minutes later and get your stomach pumped, but this rarely applies to shooting yourself in the head. 1. https://afsp.org/ab…

I suspect that many "suicide attempts" are more like emphatic communication ("See! I really care about this!") than intention to die.

When I've felt suicidal, it's always helped to imagine how one does it reliably. Then I've thought about how irreversible that would be. And then I've realized that I don't really want to die.

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