761–770 of 1001 posts
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The people that want everything made explicit and all lies banished from human relations lost, have always lost, and will always lose. I recognize that for some this imposes significant hardship but changing everyone else’s human nature is not a reasonable accommodation. The kindest thing those of us that know young people of this type can do is pull them aside and explain how the world works. It is unkind to feed th…
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I wouldn't generalize your own flaws to "people". I suspect many people understand you can talk to people without agreeing with them on everything.
Combining a bad faith reading with a personal insult is quite the combination. Maybe don’t do that?
It is a flaw to assume that talking to people means you are ideologically aligned with them. You claimed this is how "people" work. To the extent that I can assume you consider yourself a member of the group "people" I can logically conclude you are saying that this is how you work too. I don't think you are qualified to speak for all people, but you are certainly qualified to speak for yourself. Thus, you admitted a flaw in yourself and I responded to it.
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I think his failure was just naivete. He thought Google wanted legitimate feedback or would support intellectual honesty over popularity. That was wrong.
That's not the only issue. Taking away the political content entirely, storing up all your greivances and airing them in a single document intended to attack the entire purpose of other teams was a stupid thing to do. I've seen people do the same thing with technical issues and it's just totally counter-productive.
For example, Damore's memo has a section where he reasons that one reason women may not be promoted as often is because Google is organized to recognize and reward individual accomplishments rather than participation in groups. Damore theorizes based on cited research that women may be more inclined to contribute in group based settings rather than all alone, and so perhaps aligning promotion to recognize group contributions too would help diversity.
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Journalist using the words "frat" in an article doesn't make something true. The only place I see this term slung is in the media and HN, or people making up abstract bad guys to vent their anger on.
>Journalist using the words "frat" [...] No actually: widely respected Pulitzer Prize and other award winning New York Times journalists quoting senior government official using the word "frat": “The culture clash between public and private sectors has been jarring,” The Times reports. “The senior official described the Kushner team as a ‘frat party’ that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government.” >…
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I really wish there was a short way to ask for links without sounding confrontational but maybe this preamble will suffice for this message. Do you have any links about these refutations? Thanks.
This article cites two of them and goes into some of the places where Damore made unjustified leaps in logic. https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-... Here is another that is more detailed but doesn't talk mention individual scientist opinions https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-r...
If you can't reproduce the results consistently, it's not science. Results in psychology are very frequently not reproducible.
The real error Damore made is buying into the idea that studies in psychology can really tell us useful info at all.
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Mussolini essentially saw the left-right spectrum as useless. I think he was correct about this. The fact that both fascism and anarcho capitalism are classified as being on the right indicates the spectrum is a gross oversimplification.
Fascists and Anarcho-Capitalists have certain abstract philosophical differences, but in practice, their actual behaviors are almost identical. Most (Fascists|Anarcho-Capitalists) are young, white males who use the internet way too much and either don't vote, or vote Republican. Even among their intellectuals, there's a lot more overlap than you would assume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe . The lef…
What does "use the internet way too much" mean?
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> The problem is that our community isn’t very friendly or welcoming to women Be precise, how is your community not friendly to women in ways you cannot fix in five minutes? If its obvious, its trivial to list them, if its subtle then its worth doing the exercise. We have to accept they may just not want the gig. Just like most men don't go into pre-school teaching.
* Intellectual posturing and oneupsmanship in software teams. Participating in intellectual dick waving. * A strong focus on being "right" over working collaboratively (especially in domains with no right answers). * Hyper competitiveness - to the detriment of effectiveness. * A lack of empathy (e.g. PRs with "your code sucks, suck it up and stop being such a baby"). These things are hardly good from the perspective…
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There was a time when it was "systems analysts" who gathered requirements and made decisions and wrote flowcharts, and "programmer" was a glorified data entry position translating a flowchart into assembly/FORTRAN/COBOL on punch cards that the system could run. As computers became more powerful, "programmer/analysts" began writing their own source code in "higher-level" compiled languages (this meant reentrant functi…
So women have a biological interest in the technical part of transforming flowcharts into code, but not in the social parts of software development, like gathering requirements?
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Combining a bad faith reading with a personal insult is quite the combination. Maybe don’t do that?
It is not a personal insult to point out a flaw. It is a flaw to assume that talking to people means you are ideologically aligned with them. You claimed this is how "people" work. To the extent that I can assume you consider yourself a member of the group "people" I can logically conclude you are saying that this is how you work too. I don't think you are qualified to speak for all people, but you are certainly qual…
Humans don’t have the time, energy, or interest to evaluate every scrap of information about other people. Instead humans regularly use heuristics when meeting people for the first time, to save time and mental energy.
One of these heuristics involves making assumptions about people based on the company they keep. If someone is a friend of a friend, you probably make positive assumptions about them based on your shared friendship and a belief in your friends good judgement (I hope). Similarly you’re likely to initially dislike someone who is close friends with someone you dislike, for very similar reasons.
Another heuristic is group membership. We regularly assume that people hired at prestigious companies or enrolled at elite universities are more intelligent or hard working than the average person, and we make similar negative associations about someone who has been to prison. It might not be true every time, but it’s a decent heuristic to evaluate people quickly.
You may or may not like these heuristics, they can occasionally have some extremely negative consequences, but this is a pretty well studied area of human psychology. We all do it.
Now, back to the subject at hand. Obviously if you know Damore or a lot about his essay, you should judge him based on that. But if the first exposure you have to him is that he’s constantly going onto right or alt-right shows, it’s a reasonable assumption that he’s an alt-right figure.
You might not agree that Damore is alt right, and you might have extremely good evidence for that, but to the casual observer that doesn’t matter. Assuming that he’s alt-right based on the company he visibly keeps is a pretty reasonable assumption given the shows that he goes on. Hence, my original point.
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No, the summary is that men and women have different interests (in average across billions) which creates a tendency to choose different professions. This division is even more pronounced in the most egalitarian and free societies. Lack of interest in a subject does not mean a lack of capability.
Would you hire someone who was really good at something but hated doing it?
But all things being equal, I would rather hire the person who is more motivated and interested in the field than the person who isn't because skills can be learned and motivation produces results.