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Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

blogs.law.harvard.edu

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Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#31

Post by temphn »

This is utterly devastating and long overdue. Sandberg makes $845 million in a year (at a company she didn't found), lives a charmed life, and is promoted aggressively by men...yet has managed to convince herself that the world is/was biased against women.

But even Greenspan is prevented by polite convention from making the obvious point: women and men have different chromosomal structures, lifespans, organs, and hormone levels. There's also substantial evidence[1,2] that they differ in average levels of spatial, verbal, and mathematical reasoning ability (with women generally having an advantage in verbal and men in visuospatial/mathematical). We should not expect them to have the same outcomes on average.

Women also can only have at most 10-20 children over their lifespan, whereas men like Genghis Khan[3] can have a virtually unbounded number. This is why males have a greater evolutionary payoff for high-risk, high-reward behavior: intrinsically higher reproductive variance.

But hey. That's evolution, and even though it provides a consilient explanation for a variety of allied phenomena, everyone knows that doesn't and couldn't apply to human beings (we all well know what happens to people who propose that a behavior has genetic influences). It is instead easier to pretend that humans aren't biological creatures with hard biological constraints.

Yet if your premises are wrong, one is simply practicing fashionable creationism. And that is where we are today, presented with the spectacle of a privileged billionairess who lashes out at phantasms rather than wrestling with the realities of molecular biology. Why not lean in to a publication on behavioral neuroendocrinology, for a change?

[1]: http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/0767...

[3]: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_...

[4]: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-diff...

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#32

Post by mtowle »

temphn wrote: post #31

This is utterly devastating and long overdue. Sandberg makes $845 million in a year (at a company she didn't found), lives a charmed life, and is promoted aggressively by men...yet has managed to convince herself that the world is/was biased against women. But even Greenspan is prevented by polite convention from making the obvious point: women and men have different chromosomal structures, lifespans, organs, and hor…

After I'm a billionaire, for my second startup, I think I'll hire exclusively women, save myself 30% on human capital, and run everyone out of business. "Take that margins! Pow! Kablam!"

Somebody give me a Nobel for thinking of this. Obviously, since no one's doing it, I am a genius.

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#33

Post by qohen »

jerrya wrote: post #10
dmvaldman wrote: post #7

This is so embarrassingly bad...it starts bad, and then gets worse... examples: He discredits one of Sandberg's scientifically verified claims that women take criticism worse than men, by referencing "as John Ioannidis notes, “Most Published Research Findings are False.” Yet he begins his review with a US News report: "This US News article describes research that found that, among college graduates, left-handed men e…

Philip Greenspun used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.

He knew all the tricks, etc."

Apropos: Monty Python's "Piranha Brothers" sketch, specifically, @ 1:35 of part 2 (but watch it all):

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64aVHzoSdaI

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aihjThGabYY

(Or you can just read it:

http://pianosa.com/pic/sketches/piranha.htm )

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#34

Post by whiddershins »

Yeah, for me, this review points to a bigger picture issue. Why is the tech / startup scene so easily lured in by establishment values?

Of course there are exceptions, Fog Creek's articles about their compensation policy comes to mind, but very little of the egalitarian ethos that made hacking so cool survives in the way people talk and write about working in tech.

Corporate long-hours and ladder climbing ambition? Where every dating site [or other product] presumes fixed gender, sexual preferences, and monogamous behavior. Happily pouring your earnings in to high rents and overpriced 401ks, quibbling over the .02% equity versus the extra $5k a year at the next job while recreating the hierarchy and wage slavery which characterized the 19th and 20th centuries. To the point where even the feminism seems regressive. And the "art" is airbrushed illustrations and all the music is power pop.

Did I wander too far? Well it is one lens to view it through.

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#35

Post by onemorepassword »

zurn wrote: post #4

People should read (if they must) this in context of Greenspun's rather fanatical political ideology. His blog has plenty of samples, I don't want to link to it.

I've never read Greenspun, and I've stopped reading half way through. And I should have already stopped after "Silicon Valley Socialism", but I was hoping he was just joking. He wasn't.

Only in America can this kind of crap not be considered extremist ideology.

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#36

Post by vrotaru »

dmvaldman wrote: post #29
vrotaru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad??? Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David, a neurosurgeon whom Sandberg admires because currently “he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty”, was also a Harvard undergrad. He takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success…

Yes it is. Because Sandberg never says she admires her brother because of that fact. She says she admires her brother, and then states that fact about the brother. Greenspun is the one who makes the false connection. Here is the full quote: I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common from females from growing up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in t…

Actually the point Greanspun (not Greensburg) is trying is whether her brother confidence

     would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#37

Post by girvo »

dmvaldman wrote: post #29
vrotaru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad??? Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David, a neurosurgeon whom Sandberg admires because currently “he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty”, was also a Harvard undergrad. He takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success…

Yes it is. Because Sandberg never says she admires her brother because of that fact. She says she admires her brother, and then states that fact about the brother. Greenspun is the one who makes the false connection. Here is the full quote: I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common from females from growing up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in t…

You seem to be misreading a lot of the article. To be expected really, it's quite full of sarcasm and dry wit, which doesn't come across via text particularly well.

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#38

Post by dmvaldman »

girvo wrote: post #37
dmvaldman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is. Because Sandberg never says she admires her brother because of that fact. She says she admires her brother, and then states that fact about the brother. Greenspun is the one who makes the false connection. Here is the full quote: I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common from females from growing up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in t…

You seem to be misreading a lot of the article. To be expected really, it's quite full of sarcasm and dry wit, which doesn't come across via text particularly well.

example? that quote is from the book btw, not the article.

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#39

Post by paganel »

sinnerswing wrote: post #19
therealarmen wrote: post #6

Those who enjoy this review will also enjoy Philip's review [1] of "Straight from the Gut" by Jack Welch (former CEO of GE): If you want to learn the names of every person who ever worked at GE during Jack Welch's 40 years there, you'll find this book invaluable. If you want to learn something about what made GE successful, however, good luck picking out the few saplings of wisdom from the thick forest of names. Golf…

His reviews would've been a lot funnier if Arsdigita didn't crash and burn years ago. >He doesn't get into the question of whether the investors from 1980 are happy now that they own less than 70 percent of the company. They should be happy considering GE's value rose 4000% during Jack Welch's tenure at GE.[1] When Jack Welch became General Electric’s CEO in 1981, the company was worth about $14 billion. When he reti…

GE does build lots of cool engineering things, but those alone couldn't have made it the most valuable company in the world at one point. It also involved a lot of, well, financial engineering, which this guy started to describe better than I could ever have: https://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/immelt-ge-capital...

I also remember than in the hot days of early October 2008 there were talks of GE the entire company going down on behalf of its subsidiary, GE Capital. Those were indeed some crazy days.

Re: Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

#40

Post by SPSteinbeck »

dmvaldman wrote: post #7

This is so embarrassingly bad...it starts bad, and then gets worse... examples: He discredits one of Sandberg's scientifically verified claims that women take criticism worse than men, by referencing "as John Ioannidis notes, “Most Published Research Findings are False.” Yet he begins his review with a US News report: "This US News article describes research that found that, among college graduates, left-handed men e…

Your "examples" as to why the post is "embarassingly bad" consists of one deliberately misinterpreted sentence from a several thousand word review. Bravo.
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