Outraged about the Google diversity memo? • Hacker News Board

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#821

Post by mirimir » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 5:30 AM UTC

PeanutCurry wrote: post #274

mirimir wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, what societies have been fundamentally gender neutral?

I'm not seeing the relevance of your rhetorical question here. My point was that it's weird to measure institutional discrimination over millennia since most institutions that matter in the modern era aren't that old. So you're either mashing multiple institutions together and ignoring their cultural differences or the premise needs to be refined more.

Well, "institutional" isn't limited to a particular institution. Here, it's extremely pervasive, reflected in virtually all institutions of virtually all known cultures, going back millennia. Based on archeological evidence, it's possible that gender roles and constraints were weaker maybe 20-30 kyr ago.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#822

Post by mirimir » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 5:32 AM UTC

fweespeech wrote: post #699

mirimir wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup. Its not perfect tho, I'm sure I have enough cracks in my setup that people can find out if they really try but its enough people should understand its not related to my job and leave it alone I'd hope.

Yeah, that was my initial driver for getting into privacy/anonymity stuff decades ago. But then it became a hobby, and then a side career. That's been a typical pattern for me. And for many others here, I'm sure.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#823

Post by PeanutCurry » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 6:00 AM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #821

PeanutCurry wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing the relevance of your rhetorical question here. My point was that it's weird to measure institutional discrimination over millennia since most institutions that matter in the modern era aren't that old. So you're either mashing multiple institutions together and ignoring their cultural differences or the premise needs to be refined more.

Well, "institutional" isn't limited to a particular institution. Here, it's extremely pervasive, reflected in virtually all institutions of virtually all known cultures, going back millennia. Based on archeological evidence, it's possible that gender roles and constraints were weaker maybe 20-30 kyr ago.

But that definition isn't particularly helpful unless I'm missing something you're getting at. Sure, a lot of ancient societies had men as hunters and women/meak as gatherers. None of the major world powers are hunter/gatherer societies though. And similar statements could be made about medieval homestead configurations. This is why I was pointing out that most modern institutions aren't a millennia old. Sure, thousands of years ago there were sexist policies, just like there are today. But if those policies were based on ideologies and environments that don't exist anymore then it doesn't seem like that's a particularly useful acknowledgement for correcting inequality as it exists today.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#824

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 6:06 AM UTC

HumbleGamer wrote: post #601

As a black male, I guess I just comprehend that I dont have the right to spout off my opinions at work, at least not if I want to keep my job. If I start rocking BLM merch around the office, I might not have a job. Feel free to finish telling me how unfair it is that he can't express his opinions, while we ignore the fact that he likely insulted a great deal of his colleagues while doing so. But they don't matter, ri…

> If I start rocking BLM merch around the office, I might not have a job.

You are kidding right? At least in the major tech companies of the area, people would be out with pitchforks if a black man was fired for rocking BLM merch around the office.

Heck, Mark Zuckerberg specifically reprimanded his employees for writing stuff like 'All Lives Matter' over BLM posters at Facebook.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#825

Post by raarts » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 6:14 AM UTC

humanrebar wrote: post #411

vasilipupkin wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, a private company in the US cannot stop you from discussing anything at work but reserves the right to fire you at will, including for discussions it deems unproductive. Discussing politics in polite company in the US is indeed discouraged by culture. I personally think that's a good thing as people on opposite sides of the spectrum often can't agree on a basic set of facts, which makes discussions point…

Sometimes the point of the conversations is reminding each other that we're decent and intelligent humans. Giving up on engaging because you haven't converted people is giving up too soon. Sometimes the changed mind is in how we value political opponents, not whether we agree with them.

Not all countries have two-party systems.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#826

Post by jovdg » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 6:16 AM UTC

vasilipupkin wrote: post #406

jernfrost wrote: post #400

Great perspective. As a Northern European having dealt with American company ownership I don't think the main problem in Google's case was political correctness but rather a general American problem with how free speech is defined in the US. Freedom in America is always about government NOT doing something, while in Europe government is defined as a protector of these freedoms. This shows up clearly with respect to s…

To be clear, a private company in the US cannot stop you from discussing anything at work but reserves the right to fire you at will, including for discussions it deems unproductive. Discussing politics in polite company in the US is indeed discouraged by culture. I personally think that's a good thing as people on opposite sides of the spectrum often can't agree on a basic set of facts, which makes discussions point…

I understand that in the USA you are usually either "left" or "right", but in the EU there are a many "center" parties. Would this not make a substantial difference?

If you put two opposite extremists of moderate intelligence together to talk, you will probably not hear a great conversation. (This is not only true for politics.)

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#827

Post by dandare » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 7:01 AM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #623

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.

I'd happily agree he's a better engineer than me. That doesn't make him smarter, and his engineering acumen certainly doesn't give him any specific ability to do any kind of psychology or neuroscience lit review. Know how we get up in arms when someone with expertise one field starts going on about some totally unrelated field and makes a lot of leaps of reasoning? Expertise in one field doesn't make you an expert in…

Nice strawman you've build there ;). "Expertise in one field doesn't make you an expert in everything", sure! But not being an expert in given filed does not make you clueless. And that was my argument.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#828

Post by exolymph » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 7:56 AM UTC

fulfillaneed wrote: post #573

losteverything wrote: post #545

Let me present a walmart associate opinion on the person that was fired. Tldr - sometimes really smart people do the dumbest things. Where was his common sense? For the average associate i know the overarching Question would be did he not know he could be fired? "I would have loved to go to college. I couldn't afford it. Id love to have a job at Google. He probably makes over one hundred thousand dollars. All those y…

There is a big difference between going on Facebook to talk shit about your employer and what happened here. The memo writer asked for feedback on his memo and was ignored. He tried again and again to get feedback on his opinion internally until turning to the Google internal 'skeptic' community. The skeptics doesn't quite like what he wrote so they strung him up and made an example of him. He was encouraged to give…

> I've contracted for Google doing software architecture on a few projects. They do have practices which mildly disgust me. Stuff like flagging people as 'diverse' and making sure the correct number of diverse people are in attendance.

If you're willing to help get this practice out in the open, please contact me. I can protect your identity if you want to be an anonymous source.

smann@inc.com

https://keybase.io/sonyaellenmann

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#829

Post by nailer » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 8:01 AM UTC

dahart wrote: post #604

nailer wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics, favorite foods, religion, dress sense and other ideas aren't innate. Gender, age, ethnicity and sexuality are. Hence swapping gender for politics doesn't work. Additionally Damore argued for assessing individuals as individuals rather than as tribe members and assuming discrepancy is down to bias - even if you did sub someone's chosen politics for their gender, Damore's proposed fix would still require you…

> Politics, favorite foods, religion, dress sense and other ideas aren't innate. Gender, age, ethnicity and sexuality are. Hence swapping gender for politics doesn't work. That is incorrect. The word "gender" is defined as the social and cultural differences between male and female, as opposed to the biological ones. You also meant to say "sex" and not "sexuality". Sex is the innate biology of males & females. Sexual…

You define gender that way. I and many others use it the same way you do 'sex', distinguishing XX or XY vs 'sex' which is copulation. If you live in any western country you're already aware of how commonplace this is - please don't tell me what I meant to say, it's passive aggressive and rude.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#830

Post by peoplewindow » Fri, Aug 11, 2017, 8:33 AM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #673

peoplewindow wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of Google's software is open source. It is easily checked. Regardless, I worked at Google for many years and agree with him. Implementing MapReduce, BigTable, MegaStore, even things like G+ or Teams is not a people oriented task. It involves long hours of working with machines, alone, punctuated with code reviews in which your code is systematically criticised by your co-workers but in a predictable and non pers…

This perspective seems like to highly downplay the issues of working on a team at a software company. Independent of the ideological and political battles that this manifesto controversy is but one example of, there have been more and more reports of issues at tech companies about "brilliant assholes" who are able to do the technical work yet create toxic environments for others to work with. Are you saying all of th…

> Are you saying all of those projects at Google are owned by individuals who don't spend time interacting with others on the codebase

No. That's not a reasonable interpretation of anything I said.

All the programs I mentioned are written by groups of people. Despite that if you measure each hour in their day and classify it as "in front of a machine" vs "in front of people" you will find nearly all are in the first category.

Now if you further sub-divide "in front of a machine" and classify time by "time spent in a text editor coding" vs "time spent emailing, filing tickets etc" then most time will still be in the first category, unless something has gone badly wrong at Google since I left.

Interactions with people are, in programming projects like that, a means to an end. Usually the end being some concrete outcome like a machine allocation or a cross-check for bugs. There may sometimes be design or brainstorming sessions, MapReduce being famously designed over many cups of coffee between Jeff Dean and his colleagues like Sanjay Ghemawat. But these conversations are entirely work focused. They aren't about people or relationships. And the time spent drinking coffee whilst figuring out the design is ultimately dwarfed by the long term effort required to build and maintain the software itself.