Brief thoughts on the “Google memo”

It's a mine field only at work and in formal situations. Outside work, one hears slurs about women often. There's nothing "careful" about it. Women felt protected and comfortable at the work places because there were explicit and implicit rules that said you can't speak slurs, or even something that might look like a slur. Personally I don't think it's time to clear this "mine field" yet, but I think a valid argument would be "we're educated enough that both men and women today can debate about gender without the prejudices that plagued our ancestors". I don't think the valley companies are there yet.

The real tragedy in the discussion is this assumption, quoted from the OP:

"His hypothesis implies that personality differences mean a smaller percentage of women will be interested in and/or qualified for a Google job than men"

Empathy and social intelligence are actively disqualifying factors for a job at Google, or software in general? That is so wrong on so many levels.

I really like Bob Wyman's take on this:

https://medium.com/@bobwyman/back-in-the-1970s-when-i-first-...

> I will invoke the principle of Chesterton's fence [1]: Before you talk of removing the mines, you need to show that you understand why the minefield was created in the first place, and you need to explain why now is the time to remove it.

That's a bit different to what the Wikipedia page describes it as. It describes it as being to important to understand the reasons for X before trying to change X. It doesn't say anything about needing to show that you understand it, and needing to explain why now is the time to remove it.

Those two additional requirements seem unreasonable for wanting to talk about some topic. For example, I would imagine that, 50-100 years ago, in a lot of the world, the idea of discussing the legitimacy of gay marriage would have been mostly taboo in public. To say that anyone wanting to broach the topic needed to show why the taboo was created in the first place, and why then was the time to remove it, seems unreasonable to me.

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As a sideline, that Wikipedia entry is, in its current state, pretty poor quality. Here is a quote from it:

History is full of examples of negative outcomes that resulted from the failure to understand this admonition. Pandora opened a box containing all the world's evils. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, despite God's admonition not to, and the whole world was plunged into original sin

This column is set in a modern edition of Baskerville, one of my all-time favourite typefaces and (unlike Garamond and Optima) one that has now transitioned beautifully to a pixel display. Ironically the first time I saw Baskerville on a screen it was the heavy glyphs of Google's early (ca.1998) logo, in which it seemed to me rather flabby and unwell. So it is delightful to see this variant, like an old friend showing up looking happy and healthy. I love the vitality of those broad-shouldered, energetic capitals, and the careful flourishes of the italic form that so gracefully engage us for asides and for emphasis! And that open bowl on the 'g' for which I am always such a sucker.

One day I hope there will be a usable screen variant of Garamond. I've had a tinker and I know it's beyond my own very limited design abilities to achieve.

The typography of the Google Memo, by contrast, is simply dismal and a sorry reminder of why I don't use Google Docs.

Part of the difficulty, in my view, is that we are thinking about this as a high level benevolent debate - in this scientific, clean and clear environment we think of where we can throw out all manner of idea and deconstruct it logically then there is no argument that is off limits.

Let me say straight up, I love that kind of discussion, I often have a good chat with my right/left/feminist/religious etc. close friends about usually off limit topics... I theoretically would want to be able to do that in the broader population and in broader society.

But the older I get, and the more I see where the internet has taken freedom of discourse, the more I believe that most people don't argue and debate like that. With "Fake news" and barmy political ideologies getting airtime and actually GAINING in backing, and with the quality of media dropping more and more every day with the volume of rubbish news getting regurgitated on social media as fact without journalistic standards in place, I'm more seeing that the majority of discourse is headlines and snippets thrown around with awful evidence and logic, people see it, get confirmation bias on it, or think it falls in line with their view, and then they share onwards.

A post/article/clickbait arguing against it, or proving its sources as incorrect is not nearly as shared and not nearly as widely disseminated and then you end up with a debunked viewpoint being spread wider than it ever should have, because there was no curation of the evidence.

The "Bigot Brush" perhaps played a part in stopping ideas being shared around that were fairly out of the normal discussion, though it also repressed peoples ability to discuss and expose their broader ideas that went against the grain too. It played its part in stopping aggressive ideas from circulating to a broad enough audience for it to damage people. (Not all the time of course, but more than it occurred in the past).

Now am I saying that curation and thought policing of ideas is a good thing? No, probably not. In many cases I think the media that aims itself at the soft left issues that have realised they can turn a buck through whipping up a frenzy on inconsequential "SJW" issues are to blame for pushing away a significant portion of the population towards their own barmy news sources, but I also think we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and neither complete freedom without fear of reprisal, or significant policing/social shaming of ideals is a good place to be - and somehow we have ended up with a fair bit of both.