Outraged about the Google diversity memo? • Hacker News Board

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#431

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:49 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #227

KirinDave wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Whether we agree with the memo or not, there was a very good point that guy made and that we should keep in mind, it's the paragraph with the two overlapping distributions. Even if you admit that all genders, races, any way you want to segment the population, do not have the same distribution, that doesn't mean anything to a person as an individual. For instance I think it's fair to say that black people are better a…

[deleted]

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#432

Post by NaliSauce » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:53 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #368

kromem wrote: post #345

An interesting anecdote regarding gender bias and tech. In the very early stage of my company, we wanted to outsource some UX work. After an exhausting review of applicants on one of the freelance sites out there, we finally settled on a Pakistani woman who had the best balance of portfolio vs cost. At the initial Skype call, there was no video. And it turned out to be a guy speaking in a very high voice. We didn't r…

That experiment was done in STEM academia recently, and showed a 2:1 hiring advantage for women. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract It should also be noted that the earlier study, which showed a smaller effect and only if the resumes were calibrated to be (a) mediocre and (b) precisely calibrated to be the same, was done in Psychology . Which is, of course, a field dominated by women and maybe not the t…

>That experiment was done in STEM academia recently, and showed a 2:1 hiring advantage for women.

Back when I was still at university I was on a hiring panel for a new prof.

In a first step we ranked all the applicants using qualitative and quantitative metrics (the rankings across qualitative/quantitative and people on the panel was very similar when we compared rankings at the end) and then we handed in a shortlist with the best male applicant and best female applicant. We did this to make the Gleichstellungsbeauftragte (="diversity officer") shut up and thought that since the ability gap was really noticeable it'd be a no contest. How wrong we were. Despite being in the upper part of the bottom half of our ranking, she got the job.

That was the day I found out that I wasn't at a meritocratic institution as I had previously thought and left a few months later. That sort of thing really isn't good for your self confidence.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#433

Post by thinkfurther » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:53 PM UTC

scandox wrote: post #348

thinkfurther wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Getting fired" is a bit of an euphemism though, there is a lot more going on here than just that. Just start with Gizmodo leaving out some stuff at first and so on. The claim is that he is being treated unfairly, at the least. > It shouldn't radicalize your position. In some fantasy world, where marijuana being illegal didn't make a single person try harder drugs because shady types were the only ones they could get…

Well I didn't mean to imply "you" - I meant "one's" position. Hopefully it didn't come across in any way personal.

No worries, I did get that, I also find "your position" much easier to write (and read) than "one's position".

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#434

Post by christophilus » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:53 PM UTC

GVIrish wrote: post #212

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…

> 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. This is an example of people taking exactly the wrong lesson from this situation. The guy wasn't fired for having a 'dissenting opinion'. He was fired because he basically said women are underrepresented in IT because they are biologically unsu…

As I understand it, this is a misrepresentation. He did not say they were biologically unsuited for it. If I could rephrase in my own words, I'd say that the evidence shows that people who tend to be good at both language and the sciences will lean towards more social career paths. Women are unlike men in that they tend to be good at both where men tend to be lopsided: e.g. much better at math than English, say. This is not saying that women are unsuited for science. Quite the opposite. It is saying that women who are suited for STEM are more likely to also be well suited to more social endeavors, and thus less likely to choose STEM than the typical man who is well suited for STEM. The memo, I think, was essentially saying: "Thus if we want to attract more women to engineering, we need to appeal to the non-STEM side of the spectrum."

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#435

Post by minipci1321 » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:53 PM UTC

peoplewindow wrote: post #292

minipci1321 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't read his memo, am not interested in the debate, and am not saying he should be fired or kept. That said, I'd think that he was fired not because of his opinions, but because he seems to have done an irreparable damage to Google's image: for good or bad reasons, people will react strongly and negatively to the publication of his memo, and whatever Google does -- keeps him or lets him go -- this negative impact…

The memo wasn't published. It was leaked. Whoever leaked it is the one who damaged Google's reputation. They then damaged it more when they claimed they respect diversity and then fired the guy in response to mob outrage. The damage to Google's reputation here is on them. Almost by definition.

You are correct, but letting this outside is only the first item on the list of consequences. Next comes -- many, many people inside Google probably stopped working productively and are still absorbing-the-shock/digesting/battling/persuading/discussing/ruminating-alone -- again, for good or bad reasons, but many of them. The leaker didn't do that.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#436

Post by atilaneves » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:54 PM UTC

_b8r0 wrote: post #418

jondubois wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever you have a discussion about a topic in which people feel personally invested, their reasoning skills drop and their sentiment analysis ability goes up.

I've noticed that. But it does appear that for a lot of normally rational people this personal investment is at least amplified, if not manufactured almost entirely through the media.

A "normally rational person" is a person that is emotional at least 50% of the time but convinces themselves otherwise. Facts that seem to go against a person's beliefs provoke cognitive dissonance - it doesn't matter how technical they are or how logical they need to be to do their jobs.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#437

Post by ZeroGravitas » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:54 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #255

zimpenfish wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He explicitely did not say (nor mean) that a woman can't be a good software engineer. > Just that on average, more men than women will show the features needed for software engineers. Read those two sentences you wrote again. You'll be shocked when you see it.

I took the liberty of labeling one of the diagrams in the document with two points labeled A and B. How would you interpret the relationship of these points if A was a man and B was a woman? http://imgur.com/a/kWyTi

Does anyone know if this graph is to scale?

Seems to me it would have radically different interpretations depending on scale, and I'm not sure if it's just illustrating the concept of overlap or if it's claiming to represent "software engineer ability" or any other real measurement.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#438

Post by d--b » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:56 PM UTC

I am sorry if I come across as a liberal who gets offended, but I completely support the decision of Google to fire him. In fact, I think that Google had no other choice than to fire him, and that's mostly because the engineer shot himself in the foot.

Memos are not meant to express debatable personal arguments, memos are meant to express a company position. By widely spreading a personal view, the author impersonated the company in a way that the company does not endorse. As a culture manager, you just cannot let this kind of things happen.

Regarding the content of the "manifesto", the author should have known better. Even if it was genuinely true that women's biology explains the gender gap in technology, it is not provable - as in, there is simply no way to quantify the effect, if any. And using unprovable causes to justify a societal bias is not acceptable. The problem is that you can use unprovable statements to justify anything.

The debate regarding whether it is good or not to intervene at company level to try and change an industry culture is a perfectly healthy debate. Widely sharing one's view which uses unprovable arguments and that will offense some people is simply a dumb thing to do.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#439

Post by kuschku » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:56 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #276

dandare wrote: post #216

Disagreeing with Damore’s arguments is perfectly ok. Not liking the style of his memo is perfectly ok. Calling Damore young and clueless is useless ad hominem. Chances are he is smarter than you and me and the memo is actually well sourced. Calling him a WHITE MAN is an essentialism that reveals the author's bias.

This. To respond to that manifesto, to argue, talk, discuss, write a similarly well organised response.

Please try doing that to every internet troll out there, if you have the time.

Most of the population don't, and at some point just have to dismiss some ridiculous arguments instead of discussing every single badly researched wall of text.

I suggest you start with all the articles on /r/the_donald.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#440

Post by GVIrish » Thu, Aug 10, 2017, 12:57 PM UTC

maehwasu wrote: post #302

GVIrish wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has that ever not been the case in the workplace? Every workplace has norms and values where someone who runs afoul of them may be fired. Norms change over time. There was a time when it would've been okay to use the 'n' word to insult black people in many work places, now it's not okay. There was a time when lewd and demeaning talk about women was ok in the workplace, now it's not. The people who sign the check…

Completely agree. The point here is that the situation isn't static: many people don't like what is now ok in the workplace, and are trying to shift it back. Simply calling them "racist" or "sexist" as if that ends the discussion completely misses the point.

Yeah and maybe what needs to happen is people need to talk more about how 'the line' is moving so people can understand better where people are coming from.

I agree that labeling people as racist or sexist for being caught out by shifting norms is not productive, but at the same time people need to put effort into empathizing with others and educating themselves.

There are jokes I would've made 10 years ago I wouldn't make now. There are comments from others that might not have set off any alarms before, but now I know more about why they might be exclusionary or hurtful. Ultimately it's a process.

Which is why maybe a guy like Damore shouldn't be made to run the internet pitchfork and torch gauntlet for what he did. Maybe it could've been a teachable moment instead of a firing. But the other side of that is that I don't know if there were other components to his firing that we haven't heard yet.