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E Pur Si Muove

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: E Pur Si Muove

#771

Post by ghostcluster »

bduerst wrote: post #767
ghostcluster wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Progressives openly reject science when it doesn't fit their ideology. We saw that with the response to Damore.

You don't know why Damore was fired and neither does anyone else publicly know. His 'manifesto' is a poorly written rant that leaves holes for people to project their ideology onto, like you are right now. What he wrote was neither progressive nor even conservative, but a naive, meandering diatribe with cherry-picked evidence, all of which would have been water under the bridge if it wasn't blown up by a slow press c…

Here is Stanford Medical school on the subject, from just this past Spring: http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b...

And a highly cited study from 2013 addressing Damore's topic directly: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...

The evidence is not 'cherry picked'. It is abundant, comprehensively researched, and well replicated. Take a trip to Google Scholar yourself. It is certainly not 'fringe'. That's why the public reaction was so absurd. Damore was fired for exactly the type of phenomenon Sam Altman is talking about in this post.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#772

Post by DoreenMichele »

shkkmo wrote: post #769
DoreenMichele wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am not unwilling to discuss this. I just sometimes hit my limit for putting up with being dismissed and treated with contempt on HN for being the wrong kind of nerd. As I already stated as clearly as I know how, violence is not required to do serious harm to a person. To try to elucidate: I have a life threatening medical condition and was also homeless for nearly six years. I was quite open about that on HN an…

> Marginalized people with any kind of survival instinct are wise to give a wide berth to anyone giving voice to open hostility to their kind. Such people can have a great deal of power to help them into the grave without ever lifting a finger to commit violence, sometimes simply by not lifting a finger to help when they need it. This makes no sense. Avoiding people whom you perceive as having hostility in their word…

That does not fit with my experience. Giving openly hostile people the benefit of the doubt never resulted in me finding hidden allies. It merely wasted a lot of my time and got me actively crapped on.

So let me ask: are you a member of a marginalized group? Because I can't help but wonder at the reasons behind our very different point of views.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#773

Post by reednj »

stevenwoo wrote: post #766
reednj wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, most of the deplorables would just find new reasons to hate Democrats That is objectively false - Trump won because white voters in the rust belt swung 25 points from Obama to Trump. If you were right that they voted only Republican out of tribalism then Obama would never have won those states.

Trump would have lost if he lost 80,000 votes in three states that could swing the electoral college. That doesn't sound as big a swing as 25 points.

Why not? Trump didn't win them by much, but it can still be a big swing if Obama won these states by a lot. A quick google shows that this appears to be the case.

Trump may have won michigan by only 10k votes, but Obama had a margin of half a million in 2012.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#774

Post by bduerst »

ghostcluster wrote: post #771
bduerst wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know why Damore was fired and neither does anyone else publicly know. His 'manifesto' is a poorly written rant that leaves holes for people to project their ideology onto, like you are right now. What he wrote was neither progressive nor even conservative, but a naive, meandering diatribe with cherry-picked evidence, all of which would have been water under the bridge if it wasn't blown up by a slow press c…

Here is Stanford Medical school on the subject, from just this past Spring: http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... And a highly cited study from 2013 addressing Damore's topic directly: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... The evidence is not 'cherry picked'. It is abundant, comprehensively researched, and well replicated. Take a trip to Google Scholar yourself. It…

Neither of these links you provide have to do with Damore's rant, nor are they mentioned in his claims.

Damore wasn't arguing that men's and women's bodies were different - he was taking papers about biological differences and stretching them to supporting his unfounded claims that social differences are based on biology, not social constructs, because he was upset at Google's programs that fight social biases. Some of his citations are cherry picked nonsense, for example the big five analyses saying women are neurotic [1], which have been discredited as being weak lexical factor analysis that can't be attributed to biology [2] (like gender).

The fact that you think these papers are relevant to Damore's memo just further proves the vagueness of his diatribe, and demonstrates your own willingness to project your own views onto it.

[1] https://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#775

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

mephitix wrote: post #746
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been to China and you can get thrown in jail for saying the type of things we say re. our political environment. It's jail vs sacking; different aspects of the same reaction.

Huh? In SF I can walk down the street or go into a restaurant and hear people saying how bad Trump is. In China if someone hears you, they will report you and you will be taken in. How in the world is this the same reaction?

Try explaining to your colleagues at work that the distribution of certain traits is slightly different in different genders and see what happens. In at least one company this didn't go well. The reaction is the same because those in power punish instead of explaining, only the aspect is different. Obviously I much prefer the SF version as at least I'm not in jail and can look for work somewhere else, but the feeling of lost freedom is in there, in many people.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#776

Post by dguaraglia »

Houshalter wrote: post #763
dguaraglia wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. This sentence contradicts itself. If it is cultural, then it'd be most likely based on sexist stereotypes that we force on our kids from an early age (mind you, when I say sexist I don't mean in the "actively nasty towards a gender" way, but in the "you define people by their gender even before you know them…

You've done a bait and switch on me. I'm talking about personality types. Maybe you can argue that women are less likely to be e.g. introverts, because of culture. But that has nothing to do with the tech industry and they can't change that. And that was basically Damore's argument. You have personality types like INTP being vastly overrepresented among programmers, yet 4 times less common among women. You have the s…

> You've done a bait and switch on me.

No I haven't.

> ... that has nothing to do with the tech industry and they can't change that...

So what you are saying is that:

a) We don't know if this is a cultural issue or not

b) So the tech industry shouldn't do anything about it

Huh?

> You have studies trying to raise kids as neutrally as possible and still finding boys prefer trucks and girls prefer dolls. It's definitely not culture.

There's definite proof to the contrary: certain cultures (like Soviet Russia, for example) had a much bigger female representation in STEM fields than others [1]. Heck, even Mexico today has a higher representation of females in CS degrees than the US [2]

How do you explain that if "it's definitely not culture"???

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soviet-russia-had-...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/th...

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#777

Post by dguaraglia »

Houshalter wrote: post #764
dguaraglia wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it doesn't matter if he's right, it's illegal to talk about it." I never said it was illegal. I said it was stupid to do it at work. There's a lot of things that while not illegal, are stupid to do at work and will get you fired. > his opinions were nowhere near that extreme and are basically just "women have statistically different interests than men." He never said the women in tech were less interested or capab…

It's a double standard. Feminists with far more extreme beliefs can talk about their opinions at work. Not only that, but actually have them become official policy. Even policies that intentionally discriminate against men, which is insane. But if you dare to object to it... Against policies that are actually sexist and actually relevant to your work. Make an actual scientific case for your side. Then somehow you are…

> Feminists with far more extreme beliefs can talk about their opinions at work.

Please give examples.

> Even policies that intentionally discriminate against men, which is insane.

Again, provide examples. I hear this argument a lot "poor men are being discriminated by women!!!" and yet I have to see a single shred of evidence of this. Again, for context, I'm a male working in the tech field and I have worked at Google.

Do you personally feel that a field where 80% of the workforce is male (vs a 50/50 split in overall demographics) is "actively discriminating against hiring males? I find that argument very, very, VERY difficult to defend.

> Then somehow you are an evil sexist that wants to discriminate against minorities.

What exactly do you propose was Damore's original intent?

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#778

Post by mentat »

jancsika wrote: post #758
RonanTheGrey wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is talking about the fact that people did not want to talk about their voting choice, for fear of criticism and being ostracized. My mom - and almost all of her friends - are also in that group. What was so surprising about her group of friends was that NONE of them talked about who they were going to vote for, prior to the election - EVEN TO EACH OTHER. AFTER the election they were all shocked to find they all fe…

> Their silence was directly a consequence of the doxx culture that would have meant their entire lives would be thrown into ruin for sharing their point of view. You are making that claim where the evidence is people speculating about a case where they decided not to test the veracity of your claim. Is there any evidence that your Mom and her friends would have been fired for expressing their political views? I'm as…

It's not worth the risk. What evidence would you like them to present? When progressive people take it upon themselves to call up the employers of people who they disagree with until those people are let go, the evidence is there, in plain sight.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#779

Post by mentat »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #743
CrystalGamma wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, people not only drive, but also oppose progress; as a smarter than me person (don't remember who it was) said: Science advances one funeral at a time (it's basically like evolution). If people stop dying (barring accidents), we'll basically stop advancing as well.

Aging eventually impairs the brain. If life extension is possible, it will have to protect pretty much all your organs from aging, and why would the brain be excluded?

Paradigm shifts would become much more rare due to ossification of power structures in intellectual and business arenas.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#780

Post by stevenwoo »

Buldak wrote: post #514

The author says that it's safer to discuss "controversial" ideas in Beijing than America, but I wonder if that's partly because the ideas in question aren't actually controversial in Beijing. Presumably the ideas the author has in mind are those that might be interpreted to impugn certain disadvantaged groups. But if I found it more easy to say "gay people are degenerates" in Beijing, I don't think I would take that…

The challenge Sam Altman would not dare - try to go to Tiananmen Square on June 4th and talk about what happened in 1989.
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