Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by cookiecaper » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:03 PM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #214

aaron-lebo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness. You are completely right, but on the other hand if you are going to invoke "science" and you present your writing as scientific (he did), you have a higher bar. If you fail to be objective…

It seems to be completely lost on a lot of HN people that Damore's memo was not very scientific at all for the subject matter he was tackling. It was written in a certain intellectual language that often provides a veneer of authority for those who agree with his conclusions and lack the domain knowledge to understand the nuances of why he's wrong. But a lot of these "bio-truth" type of arguments do the same thing. G…

I don't understand why this means that Damore shouldn't have shared his opinion.

We absolutely should not construct a credentialist edifice that says only people certified to have gone through brainwa---err, regent-approved programs--- can comment on a topic. That would prevent discussion on most topics, as virtually all topics of interest are complex and have many years of study behind them.

Overall, these comments are still criticizing the how instead of the what, which is what people do when they don't know how to criticize the what but want to express their offense anyway. It's much easier to criticize delivery and in fact it will always happen whenever anyone cares, because delivery is inherently contextual/subjective.

If Damore's paper was rejected from Nature or another peer-reviewed journal, that'd make sense, as it is not a rigorous academic work. It's just a conjecture on the state of diversity hiring and it expresses his reasoning for believing the way he does. If he is so wrong, it should be simple to disprove him, and we can all move on without anyone having to get fired.

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

#522

Post by SapphireSun » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC

nicolashahn wrote: post #124

ryanbrunner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one thing that struck me from the linked article was the point that the memo wasn't structured to invite discussion. It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong". I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after,…

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…

I seriously question whether that was a minority viewpoint expressed in the memo. I went to school with loads of people like that. I think the reason such viewpoints get blowback is because they basically argue for the status quo when the system is not serving large swaths of the population.

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

#523

Post by pj_mukh » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC

jdoliner wrote: post #356

pj_mukh wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion. Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind. I'd ask a few questions about this interview practice though. 1) Is this the entirety of Google's diversity practices in hiring? I'd be surprised if it is. So even if this isn't lowering the bar…

"Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind."

So let us extend him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't extend the hiring committee? How about we extend the benefit of the doubt to everybody involved, which would result in him never writing this memo and second guessing the hiring process.

The rest of your points seem to be just a whole lot of speculation, which you just told me not to do. The article shouldn't have been written without clarification on these points and conclusive evidence. Maybe go talk to the hiring committee about their motives/state of mind first Mr. Damore?

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

#524

Post by dang » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC

lsd5you wrote: post #222

Now extend your attitude to religous belief. All the parallels are there, including believing others are inferior (certainly islam). Should they be done as well? You are infact imposing a moral belief system. Once upon a time it used to be wrong to not believe in god. Well similarly you are saying the same about gender differences.

For heaven's sake let's not take this into religious flamewar as well. (I'm sure you didn't mean to, but we know empirically what sort of effect this has.)

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15021907 and marked it off-topic.

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

#525

Post by kristianc » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC

9j9j9j9ju wrote: post #476

kristianc wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well done for proving I can't get pregnant. What else you got? Edit: But while we're at it, there are male gynaecologists too, largely because while they're studying, they develop an affinity for gynaecology.

That wasn't the point. I think that Americans in particular are too obsessed with their "American dream", their belief that "you can be whoever you want if you work hard enough" that they cannot even accept basic facts from their own biology. There's a reason why all sports, including non-physical ones, like chess, have separate competition for women - and when there is mixed competition women get places below 100th.…

> A team of researchers from the UK has shown that the under-representation of women at the top end in chess is almost exactly what would be expected, given the much greater number of men that participate in the game at all. Researchers Merim Bilalic, et al., have published their research on this statistical sampling explanation in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

> In the study, the scientists also discussed the question of why so few women participate in chess at all. While it's possible that there exists a self-selection process based on innate biological differences that leads women to drop out of chess early on, this argument rests on a controversial assumption, the researchers say. That is, it requires that there is an innate difference between genders in the intellectual abilities associated with chess - an assumption that has little empirical evidence to support it.

Luckily, people have studied this, and in the case of chess, it's simple. More men play chess. And did you just dismiss the entire field of sociology?

https://phys.org/news/2009-01-men-higher-women-chess-biologi...

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

#526

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:05 PM UTC

jorgemf wrote: post #452

astrocat wrote: post #395

> Edith: I disagree completely and utterly that the (yes, real) average differences between men and women map to being better or worse at certain jobs. Interest in certain jobs, certainly. This is, I think, the key. We can all recognize that there are REAL, average differences in interests between men and women, DEFINITELY driven by society/culture, and maybe by biology/genetics... BUT, this has absolutely no correla…

> "Better-performing men are being overlooked in favor of worse-performing women/minorities." That sentence is backed if there is a correlation between genetics and skills. > this has absolutely no correlation with performance if gender does not have correlation with performance, why do we split sports into male and female? Why physical strength, endurance is related with biology and the mind is not? when the brain i…

[deleted]

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

#527

Post by unityByFreedom » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:05 PM UTC

rpiguy wrote: post #179

joe_the_user wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually say just the opposite - the memo seemed to be written as well and in as conciliatory manner as it could be written and the memo made good (or at least plausible) point and bad points. But the bad points were so bad that it was appropriate and necessary to fire Damore. Essentially, as analogy, there's no way for a person to say "Black people are inferior and shouldn't be hired", as a message broadcast thr…

Damore never said that women were worse engineers or that biology makes them worse engineers. There was no implied inferiority. It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female. If you look carefully at some of the comments from female Googlers after the memo was leaked, they talk about fears of being perceived as less capable based on their biol…

> It is largely the PC crowd who read implied-inferiority into any study of biological differences between male and female.

He mentions aptitude right here,

"I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."

He also mentions it in an interview:

https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro?t=30m13s

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

#528

Post by InclinedPlane » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:05 PM UTC

rpiguy wrote: post #189

dguaraglia wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memo makes a whole case against "the Left" (capitalization from the memo) and how "leftists" are violent. That doesn't sound like "conciliatory manner" to me, especially considering he makes a blanket statement about Google "leaning left."

The blanket statement that Google leans left is empirically true. You also seem to have misread his comments about violence, as he claims the left tends to be more compassionate. Did you read the memo?

Oh really? Left and right imply different sides from a center. Do you have evidence that google "leans left" versus merely embracing majority positions? A sizeable majority of Americans believe in things like LGBT rights and the value of diversity. Those aren't "leftist" positions, they're widely popular American values.

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

#529

Post by rayiner » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:06 PM UTC

canoebuilder wrote: post #323

Blackthorn wrote: post #156

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). 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 ra…

> 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.

Don't agree with number 2 at all.

Half of all new attorneys are women. There is nothing "nurturing" about the profession--it's adversarial and conflict-oriented by nature. And you spend most of your time dealing with abstractions, not people. More than half of accountants are women. That profession isn't any more people oriented than programming, and you work entirely with abstractions. 70% of tax preparers are women. 60% of insurance underwriters are women. Etc.

Conversely, professions we think of as "people-oriented and nurturing" are dominated by men in other countries. E.g. teachers in India are 80% men.

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

#530

Post by ianmiers » Tue, Aug 15, 2017, 10:06 PM UTC

jshevek wrote: post #487

ianmiers wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the quality, it's the intent. He went for an adversarial debate, not a discussion. The memo reads as him knowingly and intentionally starting a fight. My assumption, from reading the memo, was that he was expressing an opinion he knew to be controversial, knew would upset people, but wanted to make a point of proving he was right anyway in the face of those upset people. It reads a lot like the vaguely provo…

I don't get any of that from the memo. Neither did the woman developer who made me aware of it's existence. She marveled at the media response, saying she found nothing provocative or adversarial about the memo.

Many people did though.

See for example "Edith's" point in the linked article "Edith: There’s a difference between “let’s have a discussion” and “let me tell you what’s up, all you wrong people.”"

To me, it's really hard not to imagine the author being the type of person who would have a "I'm an Atheist, debate me" shirt. It's written in that style.

Beyond that I don't really know what to say. Technical discussions unfortunately frequently end up this way too, so maybe its easy to get used to it. But its counter-productive.

And note, I'm suggesting why it pissed people off at google and should have got him fired. It isn't an explanation of the media reaction per-say because in the context of a public discussion there is no precept that you are cooperating with people (unlike your co-workers) and your audience isn't going to repeatedly interact with you. So adversarial arguments are common and generally accepted. It would have been fine as an op-ed in a news paper (though IMHO doesn't make the quality bar). Its not in a discussion with co workers.