Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 507 posts

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#411

Post by dahart »

humanrebar wrote: post #385
dahart wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he's earnest, that makes his being wrong all the worse, he doesn't know he's wrong and he's not trying to be wrong. It's more convincing, and thus more damaging, that he sounds earnest. I don't think it makes sense to assign blame, I don't care who's fault it is, and I believe he's free to share his thoughts. I hope you're not suggesting that being fired from a company is somehow censorship. What I care abo…

> I hope you're not suggesting that being fired from a company is somehow censorship. It is censorship. Read the first sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship The defense of the firing is that the censorship is justified, not that it isn't censorship. > What I care about is that his ideas are regressive and unintentionally sexist. It's not his fault, but he's fired anyway? That doesn't seem fair.

The stated reason for his firing was for breaking the existing written rules of the company. That part was his choice and is his fault. I feel like the goal posts are moving. The question you asked was whether it was his fault if doubt occurred as a reaction to his ideas, not whether he was at fault for getting fired.

I guess you're right, it is censorship, so I take it back. I still feel like it applies to government and public speech, more than within companies. It feels like the wrong word when describing the legal consequences that are widely considered acceptable for breaking the rules inside a company. It feels pretty different than public speech suppression, which is, in contrast, widely considered unacceptable.

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#413

Post by anonymouskimmer »

Danihan wrote: post #207
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Damore's only real policy suggestion was to (gasp) treat everyone as individuals" Unforunately it takes years for a person to really known another person as an individual. And even then the preferences inherent in the first person will bias what they do with the knowledge they have of the other individual. Thus this isn't a solution.

I believe that treating everyone as individuals, rather than as tribal groups, is the only way forward. You don't have to get to know someone at a deep level to make a hiring decision. What ever happened to the notion of being color-blind when it comes to policy enforcement? AKA, actually treating people equally, based on merit? What exactly is wrong with "blind-hiring," rather than "diversity-conscious" hiring? It w…

It's a great idea, but more difficult to do for most jobs than for an orchestra.

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#414

Post by yorwba »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #376
where_do_i_live wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find her critiques convincing in all respects. A couple of her answers seem to be strawmen. For example: The passing mention of IQ is interesting, since it has nothing to do with gender, which is the focus everywhere else. He’s presumably talking about race, but he doesn’t want to be branded a racist, so he keeps the reference subtle. So why risk doing it at all? It’s a dog-whistle to the alt-right. She admit…

Maybe what would advance this conversation is if you could tell me which of her critiques you did find convincing.

Not the person you are asking, but since I also found some of her arguments to be straw men, I will list some parts I find convincing.

> As an evolutionary biologist, the claim that these observations are “exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective” is especially painful to read. I would not dismiss the field completely, but many of its predictions have turned out to be wildly misguided.

> All in all, we have no reason to think female software engineers should perform worse at software engineering based on female trait distributions. And there’s a huge amount of evidence that promoting diversity improves the performance of teams and companies.

Note that that was a straw man, but I agree with the denotation anyway.

> We know that negative stereotypes damage people’s performance. We know that unconscious bias influences our judgement of others’ competencies. Consequently, whenever there’s significant cultural prejudice against certain groups, as there is with female software engineers, we expect to see inequalities emerge. So it’s implausible to attribute these differences to biology alone.

This touches on the part where I disagree the most with the memo: he acknowledges that bias exists, but appears to base his recommendations mostly on his non-bias explanations. He would have done better to underline that he doesn't want all anti-bias programs to end, but instead open them to more people where that makes sense. (He mentions a program to help women get better at negotiation, which would also help men who are bad at negotiation, but who are excluded because of their gender.)

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#415

Post by jressey »

bassman9000 wrote: post #361
jressey wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what he intended the thesis to be, that thing was just a bunch of dog whistles that sounded an awful lot like ignorant alt-right bullshit to me.

And HR, instead of addressing those points, refuting what would be wrong, and leading him to apologize if so, thus sending a powerful message about the existence of debate and rationale, recommended his firing, making him a martyr, and validating the part about the lack of dissent.

If this document stated 'I can't believe we don't talk about whether or not corpses feel it if you rape them.' You probably couldn't use that argument. Google decided what he said is fucked up and that he wasn't part of their society any longer. That type of dissent excluded him from their society and therefore no discussion is necessary. He is divergent and should be removed, just like someone who can't write code.

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#416

Post by bduerst »

humanrebar wrote: post #394
bduerst wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Saying someone has racist ideas is a loaded accusation. I think it's fair to ask for elaboration. Except I didn't accuse James of having racist ideas , I pointed out that his opinions are toxic to his coworkers. I'm not sure what you're getting at. It's true that he attempts to check himself throughout the paper, but it's contradictory because he then proceeds to take it too far. It's the equivalent of saying, "I'm…

"Racist ideas" was the wrong term to use. That was a typo. Apologies. Is "sexist ideas" fair? "Bigoted ideas"? That seems to be the implication when labeling ideas about gender "toxic". The colloquial language around this sort of thing is imprecise. That brings me to my next point: > ...and then demonstrating he's not for diversity by arguing against it. The paper seems contradictory because people have definitions i…

I'm not sure what invoking semantics on the word "Diversity" has to with this, especially since you thought I accused James of being racist (which I didn't). Despite his leaked rant, you don't know what his definition of diversity is, nor do you know what Google HR's definition is. All you know is that he was let go, the details of which are not leaked.

You seem to be reading a bit more into this, which is probably why the media is still writing about it. There's something for everyone to confirm their beliefs in the paper, whether it's to defend or attack it, and you're demonstrating that with the repeated word games.

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#417

Post by dahart »

dropstickle wrote: post #410
dahart wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

> 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.

Right. And what I've been trying to say is that the statistical averages aren't the offensive part. That's a straw man.

Google women don't feel offended when they're told they're a minority, they already know that; but they sure might reasonably be concerned when someone suggests they're a minority "in part" "possibly" because women aren't biologically as able to engineer as men.

> No, the memo is not saying that nature is the primary force, only that it might play a part [1]:

Sure, the memo didn't say it explicitly, but it did imply that. Everyone keeps defending the exact wording as if implication and misleading statements don't exist. Suggesting it's a "part" suggests it's a measurable and large part, comparable to social causes. Pointing out that women are more neurotic (which is a clinical term with very negative popular connotation, so extremely easily misunderstood) might be a part of why Google has so few women is leading the reader to conclude it's a major factor.

This argument is cherry-picking the science in favor, and completely ignoring the contrary evidence that suggests that social issues are much larger than anything we could possibly measure about innate biological ability. For example, that different countries have very different distributions of women in engineering, or that the distributions have changed wildly in the last 50 years.

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#418

Post by s73ver »

Caveman_Coder wrote: post #194
s73ver wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No. His firing confirmed part of Demore's thesis; that Google has monoculture issues and sits in some sort of bubble." Google had to decide which they value more: Demore's manifesto, or the contributions of a third of their workforce.

> "Google had to decide which they value more: Demore's manifesto, or the contributions of a third of their workforce." False dichotomy...

No, it isn't. Not when many of their female employees were willing to leave the company, and when the existence of that manifesto would make their recruiting efforts much, much harder.

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#419

Post by yorwba »

thegayngler wrote: post #408
humanrebar wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ag…

The only point related to abilities I can see in the memo is

Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.

○ This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.

So Google acknowledges this difference in ability and has a program to counter it. He points out that this is unfairly generalizing when applied to individuals, thus demanding the program to be opened to men as well. I think this is a good suggestion, regardless of what I think about the rest of the memo.

Re: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O

#420

Post by pharrington »

KirinDave wrote: post #398
pharrington wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said "his point was poorly delivered precisely because it leaves open such radical room for misrepresenting it," and then contrasted how "mobs of liberals" are reading it with "MRA/goreans." Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but your original post was explicitly about irrational misinterpretations. If you want to talk about how the memo was poorly written, talk about how the memo was poorly written. The readings of…

> The memo begins with it's intent, and even has a TLDR after the opening three paragraphs. Which does little to excuse the subsequent content. Why would it? Impact matters far more than intent. Asking for someone to read a paragraph in a light quite opposed to it's content in this era of Poe Principle Supremacy is essentially asking for an act of faith. I possess no such faith. And why should I? The implicit suggest…

Since you haven't done it in this thread, I checked your comment history to see what you have said about the memo itself.

The only thing I could find that begins to be a direct reference is "In this memo's case, perhaps you're mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action (e.g., don't worry I am sure if we set up pair programming that will make it fair for you social women types)." The only thing I found in the memo that could be interpreted as women being less capable in something regarding tech work was, "This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading." Granted, I did not interpret "having a harder time" as meaning "is less capable of," but I do see how you could think that. However, that statement is analogous to something like "black Americans in the 50s generally had a harder time running businesses, getting quality education, and finding quality housing." Empirically true, and has nothing to do with capability.

Another point of confusion I can understand is while it mentions the fact that men and women have biological differences, it never says anything at all about what those differences are. Further, he goes on to say "many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions." Now I certainly agree that raising the topic of potential biological differences, only to instantly drop it, is poor writing, and if you justly continue reading the memo expecting more references to that topic, you could be left with a certain level of confusion.

It's fine to not agree with something or someone. It's also OK to be wrong about something, or misunderstand a given piece of material. It is not OK to dismiss out of hand perceived others or to take an emotionally vested interest in your misunderstanding when it's been pointed out.

This is a discussion board. pharrington literally and solely exists to discuss things with KirinDave (and any other accounts posting on this site).

Post reply on HN