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Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#321

Post by manigandham »

Blackthorn wrote: post #156
nicolashahn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been writ…

> Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on w…

What burden are you talking about exactly?

You (along with many others) seem to be conflating the major point of the memo between interests and abilities. Not liking something does not mean you're not capable of doing it.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#323

Post by canoebuilder »

Blackthorn wrote: post #156
nicolashahn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been writ…

> Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on w…

to have to defend themselves at work this time, is ridiculous.

Let's just agree on two things then.

_Every woman at google has every right to be there.

&

_The number of women at google relative to the number of men is not the result of mostly imperceptible, malicious actions by men, but rather due the fact that the personal interests between the sexes varies substantially on average, and this results in skewed sex ratios throughout the entire workforce that match nearly perfectly with what scientific evidence shows us.

Women are more interested in working with people and nurturing professions and men are more interested in working with things and abstract, theoretical, mechanical and spatial professions.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#324

Post by SolarNet »

jack9 wrote: post #239
SolarNet wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gorillas typically have black fur. So no gorilla can have white fur? Wat? More like "white people are generally bigoted, but of course this doesn't apply at an individual level".

Tell me you have a paper on that. At least there would be a scientific basis for mandating Unconscious Bias retraining.

I don't, but I was pointing out the annoyance of such a statement. You could probably scrounge up such a paper on google scholar.

For example, black lives matter 's point was simply that some specific white people were biogted, and yet all lives matter is a thing. Which is an example of the inverse (generalizing specific complaints, vs. in this case, specifying general complaints).

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#325

Post by ErikVandeWater »

pj_mukh wrote: post #230
jdoliner wrote: post #149

> He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills. This to me is the most…

He specifically mentions in an interview that minority interviewees get assigned to a second interviewer if one interviewer doesn't like them in the first round. He saw this as a 'second chance' when the committee might just be controlling for interviewer biases. Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.

That definitely sounds like something that would lower the bar. If I was playing H.O.R.S.E. with an NBA player, if I got two chances to hit a shot for every one chance that an NBA player got, I might look competitive, even though I'm not very good at basketball.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#326

Post by Blackthorn »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #316
Blackthorn wrote: post #195

It really doesn't matter if the memo had any truth to it or not. At the end of the day, that really is immaterial to the result. What happened because of the memo is it managed to piss off virtually every woman in the company. You don't piss off 20,000 of your coworkers in a completely avoidable manner and keep your job.

Did the memo piss them off, or did a non-existent "Sexist manifesto" created by click-bait sites piss them off?

Considering how it pissed them off before any leaks happened, I'm going to have to do with the former.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#327

Post by mpweiher »

mcfunk wrote: post #226
izacus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, anectodally, both math and physics communities have significantly larger percentage of actual women graduating and working. At least here in EU - it's somewhere between 40-60% split depending on generation. I guess because of that there's actually more men used to actually working with women in those fields and they don't waste this much time trying to prove how women aren't worthy .

Right on the nose. And in fact, the proportion of women in computer science was tracking with other sciences until the mid-eighties, when it started to dive, while women's representation in other sciences continued to climb. One of the more glaringly inconsistent observations with Damore's claims. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Except that CS isn't a science, it's engineering. And it tracked down to the level of other engineering fields.

http://news.janegoodall.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/perce...

So the mystery is not why it went down, it was why it was higher initially.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#328

Post by CydeWeys »

notreallythough wrote: post #249
hedgew wrote: post #21

Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even…

This interview is literally a criticism that says very little about his style of writing. When they talk about "how" he approached this subject, it has to do with overall tone and the medium of delivery, not the nuances of his writing style. > If he had spoken with some of them individually and spent some time trying to better understand their views on the issues, I suspect he would have done a better job choosing wo…

I have some people at work whose opinions I value highly that I occasionally run ideas and documents by before disseminating things to a wider group. It's very helpful, and has sometimes caught potential damaging misinterpretations before they were spread too widely, allowing me to reword things.

I definitely agree that if he'd simply had a few women he knew and trusted at work read it before he disseminated it widely then this all might have been avoided. If he didn't know any women at work that he trusted with this then that itself is a huge problem.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#329

Post by bkirkby »

kristianc wrote: post #122
annexrichmond wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. He mentioned in an interview[1] that he was looking to be proven wrong which is what led him to share it with the Skeptics group at Google, which is when the document propagated. He had actually wrote the document weeks prior but was unsatisfied with the lack of discussion on his document. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEDuVF7kiPU

That seems an odd approach tbh. Many 'Skeptics' groups (Skeptic / Rationalist YouTube) online at least would agree with his reasoning. It strikes me as odd that he was seeking to take down an ideological echo chamber but published it initially in the echo chamber most likely to agree with him.

His first group he sent it to was a diversity group. I think it reasonable that a skeptic group who, ostensibly, would side with reason would be a next logical step.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#330

Post by Spivak »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #208
Spivak wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree with you there. 'PC' ideas and speech are those that are popular enough to be said in the company of a diverse crowd. This doesn't mean that they have to be bland or inoffensive to absolutely everyone; just popular enough that any dissenters will be a small minority and pressured against speaking up in fear of social punishment.

PC and popular are not at all the same. A vocal minority gets to define PC, and that minority happens to be on the left. If the right were as aggressive as the left were about PC, they'd say "Talking about baby-murder [abortion] makes me feel unsafe as a mother and therefore if it is mentioned at work creates a hostile work environment"

I will absolutely agree that there's a minority a very vocal people, but they themselves could not maintain a PC atmosphere. If they were truly in the minority they would be easily dismissed as overly sensitive. It's the large body of moderate people, who in general agree with the idea, that provide the muscle for enforcing a PC atmosphere.
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