James Damore and three others end Google suit • Hacker News Board

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#881

Post by lliamander » Sun, May 10, 2020, 7:00 AM UTC

dralley wrote: post #631

ALittleLight wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his failure was just naivete. He thought Google wanted legitimate feedback or would support intellectual honesty over popularity. That was wrong.

I mean, the authors of some of the studies Damore cited came out and said that he was misrepresenting them and that they disagreed with the conclusion he drew from them.

I think the most that can be said is that is that it is uncertain the degree of influence these (well supported) sex differences in general temperament and preferences have on the specific jobs of software engineering and tech leadership.

However, just because the science is not settled on the subject does not mean one cannot put forth a reasonable hypothesis.

And for the record, the idea that these sex differences have no influence on inclinations towards these specific jobs is also a hypothesis.

Damore may be wrong about the nature of that influence, but I think most people would be surprised if the "no influence" hypothesis was true.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#882

Post by afiori » Sun, May 10, 2020, 7:04 AM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #864

pas wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One counterexample doesn't "disprove" the correlation. (Mostly because the example is in the correlation already, and the correlation holds, plus it's just a correlation.)

The comment I responded to very clearly implies that this "things, not people" is the reason for gender imbalance in CS. They are doing far more than identifying a correlation.

That can be one of many factors. The alleged claim is that "CS fits nicely in this model", whether microbiology also fits is a different question. Also microbiology is closer to medical field than engineering.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#883

Post by afiori » Sun, May 10, 2020, 7:08 AM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #241

zozbot234 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just architecture, also medicine and law. The whole question is what's different about math, CS, engineering and the physical sciences that makes it so much harder to reach gender balance there? If you look at the commonalities that these fields share, the "things, not people" aspect is the most prominent by far.

That doesn't follow suit with the history of computer science however. Women were a large amount of computer science grads back in the 70s and 80s where it was even more difficult and arguably less social then modern development. Nowadays software dev is highly collaborative and social. It faced declining amounts of graduates that were women from the late-80s and onwards compared to engineering and the physical scien…

> Women were a large amount of computer science grads back in the 70s and 80s where it was even more difficult and arguably less social then modern development.

I believe this to be missing the point. There are many women that are 100% aligned with the personality trait of an idealized engineer, no one (or at least not Damore) contest that.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#884

Post by afiori » Sun, May 10, 2020, 7:11 AM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #824

pnako wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women are the majority of CS grads in Saudi Arabia, and you'll find that they are many women studying CS in third-world countries that typically are less "gender egalitarian" than Western countries. In wealthy, western countries giving men and women the choice of what to study without having to think too much about where they'll end up in society, that's where you see the most gender imbalance. https://en.wikipedia.o…

Yes, but to make this argument you would have to demonstrate that the West somehow became much more gender egalitarian in the past 30 years in order to explain the drop in CS grads. So what happened from the late 80s to now that resulted in women gaining more freedom and therefore shifting them out of CS? And more specifically: Why has this only affected computer science? The gender equality paradox supposedly holds…

from the 80s there were huge advances in mainstream feminism. For many people it was around 1998-2008 that a lot of people in their circle became feminist

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#885

Post by lliamander » Sun, May 10, 2020, 7:50 AM UTC

throwaway9963 wrote: post #640

piflon wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said "please share your opinion on this specific topic [the low proportion of women in engineering]." Regardless of how you color his response, they asked for exactly what he gave.

(I worked at Google at the time) This is false. Why are people claiming Google solicited his feedback? Is that how the news was reported? If it was a feedback, it wouldn't have been written in a Google Doc, and shared in an internal mailing list. It was written during a time when diversity in tech was the topic du jour. The mailing list was for political discussion / unpopular opinions, and was known for heated debat…

The feedback solicitation was in regard to a diversity seminar which James attended. The document was initially provided to HR, but received no response. James waited a month before starting to share it on the discussion forums.

If Google HR was going to have a problem with what he wrote, then mentioning that to him privately when the had the chance would have been the appropriate move. Their initial silence is a big reason for why things turned out the way they did.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#886

Post by pnako » Sun, May 10, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #880

pnako wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact remains that there are more women studying engineering (not just CS) in less egalitarian third world countries than in progressive western countries, despite the latter having campaigns, funding, etc. The idea that male and female primates (including humans) have different ways to look at the world seems very sensible to me, and that would explain why "women care more about people" and "men care more about t…

That wasn't the argument I was making. Please don't change the topic. I don't dispute that there are more women studying engineering in said countries, what I asked you was a very specific question. Why did Computer Science of all STEM degrees face a drop in female graduates versus the others? And if you're making the argument that 'women care more about people' and 'men care more about things' then I'm going to disa…

I think the answer to your question is precisely that, with all the campaigns in the west telling women to follow their own path, do whatever they want, etc. they ended up predominantly choosing careers they actually like (nursing, teaching, anything that has to do with people)

There are always exceptions, obviously.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#887

Post by foldr » Sun, May 10, 2020, 9:06 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #812

foldr wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that the cause is uncertain. Broadly speaking, the cause is sexism. What I'm saying is that there is no evidence whatever for a biological cause, and it is harmful to speculate wildly on biological causes in the absence of evidence.

This seems like a strange argument, given the start to this entire subthread ("women used to be the majority"). Let me get this straight: 1. Most women were programmers. 2. Women aren't sexist, so they let men in. 3. Men overwhelmed the women. 4. Men are sexist, so they stopped letting women in. 5. Now we need to deliberately reverse the results of stage (4). Is that the sequence of events as you see it?

You have 1 the wrong way round.

Women would not have been in charge of hiring, so no to 2. (The programming jobs men were hired for would likely not have been considered the same kind of job.)

Not sure what you mean by 3.

Roughly yes to 4, although the issue is systematic sexism, not the personal prejudices of men and women. Society in general, including many women, disapproved of women becoming programmers once it began to be seen as a high-status high-skill profession.

Yes to 5, with the preceding caveats.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#888

Post by foldr » Sun, May 10, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

pas wrote: post #815

foldr wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is architecture any less about 'things' than software engineering? The 'things vs people' dichotomy is extremely vague and obviously bullshit. Is Facebook not about people? Airbnb? Uber? It may be that these companies, perhaps inadvertently, choose to hire people who don't focus on the people-related aspects of their roles. But it's obvious that empathy and an interest in people would in fact be very useful at ma…

Architects design buildings for people, take people's needs into consideration, etc. Software naturally has that side too. And Google is ironically pretty bad at this, because somehow it always ends up too borg-ish. They do need more people-focused people, but so far they ended up just selecting for people who are willing to work for them, but haven't really changed. (Ironically, Damore was right in this.)

Lots of architects are also pretty bad at taking people's needs into account. There's still more women in the profession.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#889

Post by thu2111 » Sun, May 10, 2020, 9:20 AM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #366

lamyp wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real frat people are in management (men and women). They are socially adept enough to hide their actual opinions and oppress "lower class" women and men equally. The struggle between men and women benefits their divide et impera strategy, because playing people off against each other while maintaining an irrational authority is their main talent.

A lot of them get into management by starting out as Tech Bros, then rising to their level of incompetence. But in the case of SnapChat and Uber (and many other tech companies), the founders were literally (and archetypically) both Frat Bros and Tech Bros, who set the tone and culture for the entire company, and rampantly hired other Frat Bros from their own Frats, at all levels of incompetency. Incompetent nepotisti…

Having read your links, this is an absurd cartoon-like character you're painting here. I've worked in the tech industry for my whole life and don't believe I've ever met a "tech bro". Despite that, don't American universities have a fraternity equivalent for women called the sorority? Why are "bros in tech" a problem but "sorority girls in management" aren't?

This is still just meaningless name calling, not made any better by the fact that it's so entirely US specific. It certainly isn't even remotely close to an explanation for the global preferences both genders express for different jobs. As I assume you're aware that in fact most jobs aren't gender balanced, most are dominated by one gender or another?

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#890

Post by Smaug123 » Sun, May 10, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #207

Smaug123 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem, though. That discourse is not productive, when held here - witness the dumpster fire of downvotes all over the place. If the topic needs discussion, it needs long and nuanced discussion where each party is trying hard to understand the other - not rapid-fire three-line comments on a news site.

Do you know of any other place for this discussion that would be better-suited to nuance and genuine intellectual curiosity ("each party ... trying hard to understand the other")? Downvites are quite common here, in any discussion.

This is kind of why people are meant to have blogs. A network of blogs where people can maintain historical records of their thinking, for example. Scott Alexander is a great example of this: every so often we get a "contra PERSON on SUBJECT", a long well-thought-out discussion with nuance and a good-faith attempt to understand the argument under criticism. And people reply with their own long-form blogs in a similar vein.