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10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

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Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#101

Post by mcphage »

brandonmenc wrote: post #68
mcphage wrote: post #18

Simple response to his thesis: there used to be more women in programming... back when it was harder.

> back when it was harder Is this true? Or is it the old "machine code is harder" idea? How many people here programmed assembly language in middle school, but would have been stumped (or at least strained to the max in comparison) if made to read say, the Design Patterns book?

> programmed assembly language in middle school

The kind of assembly programming you do in middle school is a far cry from the difficulty of designing and maintaining an entire program in assembly.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#102

Post by jorgemf »

sattoshi wrote: post #80
jorgemf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we split based on gender and race because those are clear discriminators. Height or hairstyle are more fuzzy, and probably biologically less relevants to adapt to the environment. Probably height is more relevant for leadership than gender: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1368430212437211

How are those less clear discriminators? I am sure I could find a study showing that attractive people have a better shot at getting the job. Height is attractive.

When I said clear discriminator I mean they are binary: either make or female, either black or white. Height or attractiveness are more diffuse for some people you can be tall/attractive but not for others. Gender and race are clear.

In my opinion height or attractiveness play a role in the society (a big role), but it is easier to talk about gender or race because the clear distinction, bigger represented groups and historical reasons.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#103

Post by skybrian »

sattoshi wrote: post #81
skybrian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only diversity that matters": says who? You brought up height and weight, but there actually are situations where they matter. For clothes, obviously, but this also comes up when flying, or anywhere that space is a premium. And yep, it matters even in the Air Force: "Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length,…

Most of your post is talking about clothing size. I don't know what to say about it. Why does any diversity except thought matter? After all, that is the argument I have for racist diversity: "different perspectives". If I can get those perspectives without being a racist, why bother?

Where do you think different perspectives come from?

As a hypothetical example, if you're designing a chair someone very large or small may have a different perspective than someone of average size.

So the causality in that case is different body results in different lived experience results in different perspective.

This isn't to say you can't learn these things in other ways (such as doing user studies, or previous experience) but it's not as easy to notice what you weren't paying attention to.

Another example might be targeting the Chinese market without being from China. It's not the only way, but think about the amount of travel and study required to get a similar perspective.

Meanwhile you have lots of people who already have the knowledge you're looking for.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#104

Post by runamok »

hw wrote: post #67

Let's take gender, race, food preference out of the equation. Say a person with qualities A and another person with qualities B both interview at a company. Turns out that at the company (and in the industry in general, type Bs are a minority), and there's a movement to hire more of type Bs. If type A did better in an interview than type B, but the company ended up hiring a type B because of the whole diversity thing…

I think another reason we want to hire B is because if we have only As we are more susceptible to group think. It is good to have people of many different types to prevent that.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#105

Post by wpietri »

jorgemf wrote: post #55
wpietri wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you don't see the harm doesn't mean there's harm. If you would care to do a little work, you can find plenty of people explaining what the particular harm here is. You might also try studying history; you can find many examples of people civilly discussing absolutely horrific ideas that resulted in enormous harm to people. That civil discussion enabled the harm.

I am scared of your response, do yo mean we cannot discuss things because of the consequences? even if we try to improve and fix things with the discussion?

It depends on the discussion.

If you would like to civilly promote your notion that black people aren't really human and are only fit to be slaves, then no, we can't do that. If you bring it up I will tell you are an asshole, and if you persist, I will shun you and tell everybody else to shun you.

You are free to say terrible things. I am free to exercise freedom of speech and freedom of association in response. Your freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

If you are scared of that, then maybe take some time to think about the opinions you're so excited to share. Maybe they're harmful to others.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#106

Post by wpietri »

manigandham wrote: post #97
wpietri wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you don't see the harm doesn't mean there's harm. If you would care to do a little work, you can find plenty of people explaining what the particular harm here is. You might also try studying history; you can find many examples of people civilly discussing absolutely horrific ideas that resulted in enormous harm to people. That civil discussion enabled the harm.

Speech is not action and you can't decide if a particular idea is positive or negative without discussion in the first place. Censoring free discussion is actually harmful.

Some speech is action. That's why we have crimes like incitement to riot, fraud, harrassment, criminal threat, and conspiracy to commit murder.

If somebody has an, honest reasonably considered question that they would like to raise after having done at least a modest amount of work to answer themselves, sure, let's talk about it.

But most speech isn't like that. It's persuasion, advocacy, negoiation, action. Indeed, the Google manifestbro was quite clearly advocacy. It wasn't a question. It was a ten-page screed meant to convince. In specific, to convince people to act differently. Those actions will have real-world consequences. It is entirely unshocking that people who would be harmed by those consequences will vigorously object.

Nobody is talking about censorship here: https://xkcd.com/1357/

We are talking about one person saying something and then other people exercising their freedom of speech and freedom of association in response. The guy certainly has the right to claim that women are biologically inferior. But his coworkers have the right to tell him that a) he's wrong, and b) he's an asshole. And Google has the right to say, "Thanks for your service; see you later."

That's freedom. If you don't like it, well, you have the right to say so.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#107

Post by wpietri »

honestoHeminway wrote: post #77
wpietri wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you don't see the harm doesn't mean there's harm. If you would care to do a little work, you can find plenty of people explaining what the particular harm here is. You might also try studying history; you can find many examples of people civilly discussing absolutely horrific ideas that resulted in enormous harm to people. That civil discussion enabled the harm.

Im honestly a litte off foot here. Is this irony? Can somebody tell me that this ment seriously? In case its not irony, the harm never originated from the discussions- the "discussions" the had on eugenics and various other horrid things, where the same thing we have today. People wrapped in echo-chamber bubbles, glueing "evidence" to the wall of these echo-chambers. Its actually easy to identify such discussions. Th…

It is definitely not irony.

If you have evidence that harm never once originated from people saying words, I'd love to see it. Otherwise, I think you're making an assertion that you'd like to be true.

Discussions have effects. That's why we have them.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#108

Post by wpietri »

Zarath wrote: post #86
wpietri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right topic isn't biology, it's history. Historically, for millennia women were treated as property of men. This was justified with all sorts sexist jabber. The same is true of race; ou can read all sorts of racist nonsense from the era of slavery. E.g., the Cornerstone Speech, in which the vice-president of the Confederacy said straight out: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its fou…

How would we ever know if men actually were worse than women at math? There will always be a sufficient number of confounding variables as to have plausible deniability, not that it really matters. I think the line for when we're grasping at straws (or when we have enough evidence to draw a conclusion) is different for different people, which is why there is debate over such stupid things in the first place.

I doubt we ever will know. But we certainly won't know until we eliminate the effects of the enormous confounding variable of our centuries of sexism.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#109

Post by wpietri »

jorgemf wrote: post #60
wpietri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right topic isn't biology, it's history. Historically, for millennia women were treated as property of men. This was justified with all sorts sexist jabber. The same is true of race; ou can read all sorts of racist nonsense from the era of slavery. E.g., the Cornerstone Speech, in which the vice-president of the Confederacy said straight out: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its fou…

watch this: https://youtu.be/cVaTc15plVs?t=1851 (even better if you see it all) biology comes before history, history can be a consequence of biology > If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill This is what scares me of this society. If someone is bad at something…

This is basically a long exercise in missing the point.

That I think one skill is good does not mean all other skills are bad.

Your basic notion seems to be that even though most historical bias has turned out to be totally unjustifiable, maybe the exact amount of bias we have today is perfectly justifiable by facts that we just don't know yet.

I can't say that's impossible, but I can say that a) it's not a smart or useful argument, and b) it totally ignores the actual harm done by today's bias in favor of worrying about what might happen if we're just too good to everybody regardless of gender.

Maybe you're the one guy in the world who spends a lot of time arguing in favor of gender bias not because he benefits from it and has soaked up society's pro-bias conditioning. Maybe you're the one pro-bias dude who comes upon it for purely intellectual reasons. But per Occam's Razor, you can guess which way I'm betting.

Re: 10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google

#110

Post by wpietri »

szemet wrote: post #62
wpietri wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right topic isn't biology, it's history. Historically, for millennia women were treated as property of men. This was justified with all sorts sexist jabber. The same is true of race; ou can read all sorts of racist nonsense from the era of slavery. E.g., the Cornerstone Speech, in which the vice-president of the Confederacy said straight out: "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its fou…

Yes. It is the is-ought [1] distinction. People differences may be a biological fact, but this factual knowledge does not informs us what to do with it. We can do then anything: amplify it, suppress it, or don't care "Natural"[2] - if it has any meaningful definition at all - is not an ethical category. Evolution is not normative. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem [2] For example for a naturalist e…

Absolutely. It maddens me how few people can see this point.
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