Note to engineers. If you put your employer in a damned if you do damned if you don't legal situation, you will be fired and should be fired. Why is that so hard for everyone to understand? David Brooks should know this as he has worked at a big company for awhile now. No matter what Google did there would be people who were angry.
Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
401–410 of 507 posts
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
See citation above. I'm saying its much too strong a claim to go from this paper to the conclusion that women are biologically less inclined to engineering. EDIT: To be consistent with my original statement (see child)
To summarize the reasoning path: 1). "Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People"[0] 2). "Boys and men prefer occupations related to objects (e.g., auto mechanic, chemist), whereas girls and women prefer occupations involving work with people (e.g., day care worker, art teacher).[0]" 3). "Our results suggest that typical women,…
Thanks for summarizing.
I suggest you reread #3 and note the use of language like "suggest", "consistent with" and "perceived". Authors use language like this because its really hard to make definitive statements in this area. In addition, its really hard to quantify the size of the effect and how much is due to nature vs. nurture.
Furthermore, I'm relatively certain the authors are not experts on software engineering. As you have likely seen at this point, you could also claim that higher empathy actually should incline people to the job (see, e.g. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...)
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between male and female IQ curves is easily found, and is scientifically settled. I don't particularly care if I'm contradicting the article at hand -- I'm not trying to vouch for it, but am saying that it's a rational discussion. >Please source this wildly inaccurate claim. I said for several decades. You cite the change for over five decades. From 1990 to today -- closing on three decades -- women in…
> The difference between male and female IQ curves is easily found, and is scientifically settled. Can you either source this or summarize, assuming that I genuinely want to know? How big is the difference in mean & median? Do you believe the difference is primarily responsible for the difference in distribution? > I said for several decades. You cite the change for over five decades. You're going to nitpick over 3 v…
"I'm just hearing defensiveness"
Claiming defensiveness when you are being intentionally dense in the discussion is a transparent, tired tactic.
"What I don't see clearly is a rational justification for ignoring cultural sexism."
Absolutely no one is promoting "cultural sexism", so you're now contriving canards.
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are losing this argument because you aren't being consistent with yourself. Originally you said, "using these differences to conclude that women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning" So you were talking about inclination and interest. You then claimed the facts were on your side, that it was offensive to claim otherwise, and the existence of anyone who doesn't already agree i…
Thanks for the play-by-play! I do disagree about winning/losing. I feel I've done a good job representing my views. I fixed the typo in my statement, sorry for the confusion. As I said, the fact that this memo is offensive to many people is evidenced by the huge outrage. I'm not sure how that is a controversial statement.
Nobody argued with the obvious fact that people expressed outrage and took offense at the memo. The argument started with your baseless claim that "women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts."
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between male and female IQ curves is easily found, and is scientifically settled. I don't particularly care if I'm contradicting the article at hand -- I'm not trying to vouch for it, but am saying that it's a rational discussion. >Please source this wildly inaccurate claim. I said for several decades. You cite the change for over five decades. From 1990 to today -- closing on three decades -- women in…
> The difference between male and female IQ curves is easily found, and is scientifically settled. Can you either source this or summarize, assuming that I genuinely want to know? How big is the difference in mean & median? Do you believe the difference is primarily responsible for the difference in distribution? > I said for several decades. You cite the change for over five decades. You're going to nitpick over 3 v…
Here's a starting point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#406Sundar Pichai does seem to be a little off balance and a bit out of his depth. That said, why should he resign? In the overall scheme of things, this isn't much of a crisis. If this were the standard to fire CEOs by not many companies would have CEOs left.
It'd be funny if Pichai was like "okay damore supporters, what are you going to do? use bing? good luck avoiding google products on the internet LOL"
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
"By doing it in an anti-science, anti-evidence way" But they didn't. That man's argument was not science. It wasn't. There was absolutely no scientific evidence behind his argument. He misrepresented studied, and he cherry picked what he wanted. For more on that, check here: http://blog.goldieblox.com/2017/08/open-letter-james-damore-... It's an article from a female engineer who read the manifesto, and takes issue w…
>That man's argument was not science. It wasn't. There was absolutely no scientific evidence behind his argument. He misrepresented studied, and he cherry picked what he wanted. I want to follow up on this, can you give an example? From what little I know, it's essentially settled science that men and women have statistically different interests, and those interests exist across all cultures (implying a biological ca…
Here's an article from someone who would have a much better grasp on the subject than you or I: http://blog.goldieblox.com/2017/08/open-letter-james-damore-...
Here's another breakdown: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
Basically, all of them say that, while men and women are not purely identical, the differences between them are nowhere near as great as the manifesto makes them out to be. The purely biological differences have little to no bearing on coding ability, and the bigger issues are societal. Like the effect of having something like this coming out on young women who hear it as being told that they're not welcome in tech.
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...but he was careful to say that properties of large populations don't apply on the level of an individual or selected group. Then why bring it up if what he says doesn't matter within the context in which they are hiring people. Google isn't hiring people on a population basis. They are hiring people on an individual basis.
They are drawing candidates from populations. He's arguing the problem could be upstream from Google HR practices. As in, there aren't enough women applying (I don't think that's controversial). He elaborating on his answer to "Why not?"
I'm sure that is part of the hiring disparity among females and underrepresented minorities. As a black guy myself, I know the same is true among black people who simply aren't interested in engineering but Damon makes weird ability judgements based on the population.
This makes no sense as people with different interests would never bother in the first place no matter how much time and money you threw at them. So again I say why bring up the upstream problem to begin with as it being related to their abilities for engineering?
IMO, the only way his text makes sense is if you are someone looking to back up potentially racist and sexist biases by misusing science. It makes me question their ability to work with people different than themselves.
With that said I'm actually torn on the issue of the firing. Google says its a place for diversity of opinion etc etc...So on some level they should stick by it.
However, I understand why the firing may have needed to be done. The fact that a low level employee made the news for being controversial means you have to be fired. You can't send a memo out like that and expect there to be no career consequences at your company of employment. You will never be able to live it down.
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The difference between male and female IQ curves is easily found, and is scientifically settled. Can you either source this or summarize, assuming that I genuinely want to know? How big is the difference in mean & median? Do you believe the difference is primarily responsible for the difference in distribution? > I said for several decades. You cite the change for over five decades. You're going to nitpick over 3 v…
Here's a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
Specifically, for basically the only significant difference in distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you misunderstood me. I was not making a biological correlation, but a statistical one; namely that group averages doesn't say anything about an individual. The nature/nurture debate of overweight people is besides the point.
Then I think you misunderstood the memo. The memo is making a biological correlation. It suggests that the current distributions might accurately reflect differences in biology. Nature vs nurture is completely the point here, Damore argued that nature is the primary force, not nurture, and therefore we should stop nurturing women in tech.
Maybe I should have been clearer, you stated to the parent reply that:
>> I don't understand what you said there, can you elaborate? What is the difference between males being more biologically suitable and females being at a disadvantage? From my perspective, you just contradicted yourself, can you help me understand why it's not a contradiction?
This was in response to the parent that said Damore had not singled out any female google employes. The overweight example was an attempt to clarify that even though statistical averages say something about a group, it does not say something about the individual, i.e the google females should not feel singled out by statistical averages.
As for the nature/nuture point in the memo: yes the memo is making a biological claim backed by sources. It does not suggest that current distributions are correct. No, the memo is not saying that nature is the primary force, only that it might play a part [1]:
"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."