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Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

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Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#191

Post by MagnumOpus »

elgenie wrote: post #137
nbanks wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women have a much higher level of attempted suicide, possibly 3x as often as men. [1] I once heard a theory that women don't die from suicide as often because they tend to use less violent means of suicide. For example, if you swallow a bottle of pills you could survive or change your mind a few minutes later and get your stomach pumped, but this rarely applies to shooting yourself in the head. 1. https://afsp.org/ab…

"While males are 4 times more likely than females to die by suicide, females attempt suicide 3 times as often as males." So a suicide attempt by a man is 12x more likely to succeed than one by a woman.

That is sexist! Are you suggesting that women are less skilled than men ??!!??

(/s, obviously. Sorry I have to point it out.)

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#192

Post by anjc »

dvt wrote: post #72

I know people always want to discuss the merits of the memo -- whether he was right, wrong, or somewhere in between -- but I'd like to have a meta-discussion. I believe the memo is irrelevant not because of its content, but rather because it's embarrassingly reductive. In my opinion, anyone that takes it seriously validates Damore's ultra-reductive approach to social policy -- and this is, I think, unequivocally wron…

Unfortunately for you, nobody cares what books you've read/written, and everybody gets the same amount of votes that you do. You aren't going to ever shame anybody into reading court cases on abortion before they'll allow themselves to have an opinion, so your views are also not worth a damn.

Btw, you catch more flies with honey...

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#193

Post by aaronblohowiak »

KirinDave wrote: post #162
nailer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the same thing as telling an individual they're less capable.

Why? What positive connotation could be drawn from it?

the context of that suggestion was to make the activity more appealing in order to entice more candidates, not to compensate for a skill deficiency.

My interpretation of this point should not be taken as an endorsement of it or the document as a whole

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#194

Post by rustynails »

fsaneq2 wrote: post #145

Come on, try to make an effort. Your comment is full of straw men.

The article is full of straw men too. However, I liked most of it.

I support the Google Engineer for speaking out.

"I don’t normally write about the underrepresentation of women in science".

I wonder how much you research your facts. We know that at least 85% of veterinary science (yes, science) students are female [1] and nobody is complaining about this or asking for balancing of numbers in that field. This article is strongly implying that forcing a quota (artificially influencing interest) in veterinary science would be diversity. How? Diversity has nothing to do with quotas, nothing. In fact, I consider personality far more important than gender to diversity.

The article also makes remarks about females and males as if they are an absolute. Again, this is a fallacy. If you force 50% of females in an organisation (as an example as many have called for that), you may not actually be diversifying at all! If all the females you hire are tomboys (or masculine), you've achieved what? Just as many masculine personalities, but some just don't have a penis. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what "diversity" even means!

The author talks about "affirmative action" and "equal opportunity" as if they are compatible. How does that work? You either hire the best candidate or you do not.

The other elephant in the room is that nobody discusses the areas where females dominate. Show me! Vets are one of many examples [1]. Why is that? I believe this whole topic is one big power struggle by a one-eyed ideology.

"much of the data in Damore’s memo is well backed-up by research"

Thank you for saying that. Several leading behavioural psychologists also confirmed what he said. Which makes the reason behind the outrage even more interesting.

"That coding actually requires “female” skills was spelled out clearly by Yonatan Zunger, a former Google employee". This is a misleading argument. It implies quotas of 50/50. It also assumes that all females are one type and all males are another. The author did not think this argument out well.

"I believe for example if it wasn’t for biases and unequal opportunities, then the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women."

You mean like veterinary science that we do see [1]? And why politics? What about politics is specifically female?

"I’m likewise biased in favor of women"

I really respect your honesty but it's to your own detriment. Your arguments are often flawed. Your research is scant and easily proven wrong in far too many instances. You should really check out Sweden as you suggested. Have a look at their IT and veterinary science numbers. It will turn most of your flawed theories on their head. Yes, I have researched it.

"... increasing diversity"

Again, you really need to be clear. You seem to be saying "hire people based on their genitals because that's diversity".

"change societal gender images"

Please read the work by Dr Simon Baron Cohen on very young children [2]. It sounds like you're saying "I don't care if there's a natural inclination, force people to behave how someone else believes they should so that some ideologists' numbers balance". I strongly disagree with your views here. Strongly. I respect differences in people (and to me, that's true diversity). You appear to want to force a homogeneous society for "diversity".

There are many other sections I could critique. I really don't care if someone is a man or a woman. This is probably why your more sexist views stand out (and you admitted that).

If you need to change one attitude, it's your definition of diversity. Recognising people are different (and trends do exist) is a significant part of it. Quotas are not diversity, especially when they are cherry picked by the media.

[1] http://career-advice.careerone.com.au/career-development/pro...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/apr/17/research.h...

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#195

Post by michaelchisari »

generic_user wrote: post #190
michaelchisari wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a talented and experienced programmer may be the foundation, but the ability to communicate complex ideas in accessible ways, to read the room and respond to non-verbal cues, to put aside ego, to collaborate and coordinate, to sense frustration or unhappiness in your team, without those, you don't get past the first few stories of a skyscraper. The longer I'm in the field, the more I work with different teams,…

Most of the skills that you listed only start to really matter if you try to move into a management position. No company or project wants rank and file programmers (which is the vast majority of any project) who think there also managers and act as such. Even if you have those skill your job is to focus on your tasks and solve your very specific problems, not the big picture and what everyone else is doing.

I emphatically disagree. All of those skills are necessary to be a strong team member, and thinking that only management requires them is to move into territory where programming as a trade is in need of micro-management and social babysitting by a managerial class.

I've been in plenty of teams that were extremely flat exactly because the programmers in those teams were all highly skilled in those areas.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#196

Post by memedtodeath »

etchalon wrote: post #52
pacala wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to work towards changing "bias" towards the distribution you think is more proper and see if it indeed proves the point of "the higher ranks in science and politics would be dominated by women". You'll need a concrete way to measure and quantify "bias". No, workforce representation is not a measure of "bias". That is the unproven hypothesis and using it is merely circular reasoning. Meanwhile, consider that…

Institutional discrimination programs aimed at countering the effects of institutionalized discrimination.

Here is a chart of the gender balance of over a hundred different professions. Few of them are near a 50/50 balance. Could you tell me which ones are suffering from institutionalized discrimination?

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#197

Post by pgeorgi »

anabis wrote: post #21

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers being fired in 2006 showed that there could be no rational discussion of this topic. Sad to see it unchanged in 2017. Doubly sad because if the anonymous survey linked in the post is true, 1/3 of Googlers agree with the memo. Only 1/3 "strongly disagree", and the people who wanted him fired should be a further fraction of that 1/3. https://basicgestalt.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/pr…

> Doubly sad because if the anonymous survey linked in the post is true

There were multiple revisions of the document (yay online text editors where this is possible). I understand that the leaked/published version is of a somewhat later date.

That might explain both the amount of outrage compared to a text that many think is rather tame (the earlier version supposedly was more strongly worded), and it allows the interpretation that the survey mostly measured at which point in time the respondents (btw: who is represented in the sample?) read the text for their first, and probably last, time.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#198

Post by tepe1 »

memedtodeath wrote: post #180
jancsika wrote: post #121

> And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not hiring the most qualified person? That’s the trade-off nobody seems willing to spell out. Perhaps because it's not a necess…

When the Australian public service experimented with blinding demographic data on resumes, fewer women and minorities were hired: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria... A blind recruiting process only increases diversity if there exists significant bias against diverse candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if Silicon Valley has a bias in favor of diverse candidates, like Australia's public serv…

You wouldn't be surprised because that's exactly what you want to believe.

It's so funny: the more things change. For decades we've been hearing arguments about why women can't go to college, shouldn't vote, can't serve in the military, can't become doctors, can't become lawyers, won't make good judges, can't be a CEO, don't have what ot takes to do science. Every one of these idiotic arguments have proven false.

And yet nothing has changed. Here we are in 2017 with many holding out that software engineering -- a trivial pursuit that mostly involves sticking crap in databases written by real computer scientists -- is somehow special. Most women just don't have what it takes.

What it really demonstrates is that stupid people will cling to the status quo. In 25 years when in fact the majority of developers are women (because in fact we often see women dominate collaborative knowledge-driven fields) these arguments will look just as silly as the arguments that no woman could ever perform surgery without fainting.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#199

Post by mpweiher »

KirinDave wrote: post #150
kentrado wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mad at someone for saying you're genetically predisposed to be less capable of individual action? He never said that. Could you cite the portion where he literally says women are less capable?

He says women will benefit from making coding more social. Pair programming. Remember?

No.

First, the section is "Non-discrimnatory ways to reduce the gender gap".

You cannot reduce the "gap" by aiming at the women who are already at Google. This should be obvious. They are already there. To make a dent in the gap, you need to attract more women who currently do not choose to work in tech or not at Google. So nothing he writes is about his colleagues at Google, or by extension women who are already in or interested in tech. It is about potentially attracting those who are not currently interested in that career.

Second, this is about subtle differences in the distribution of preferences in populations with huge overlaps. So when you have an individual in front of you, you simply cannot tell whether they will exhibit this trait more or less by inference from the population statistic. And you certainly can't say "all X have more of this property than all Y". He even has a nice graph for this.

Third, it's not about ability, but about preference. "Women on average show a higher interest in people..." How do you get from "preference" to "ability"?

Fourth, you are assuming a symmetry where "higher X" implies "lower Y that's complementary to X". This would probably be true for interests (if I a am more interested in working alone, I am probably less interested in working in groups). But it does not translate to abilities.

In fact, one of the documented areas where gender differences in ability do show up is exactly a case of this lack of symmetry: you've probably heard that tend to score higher on the math SATs and women higher on the verbals. This is apparently not the whole story: men with high math scores do tend to not also have high verbal scores (and therefore prefer STEM). However, for women the two are correlated, not anti-correlated: those with high math scores tend to also have high verbal scores, so they have more options. And people with more options tend to prefer non-STEM options, regardless of gender.

Fifth, I thought pair programming was a Good Thing™?

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#200

Post by dang »

fsaneq2 wrote: post #145

Come on, try to make an effort. Your comment is full of straw men.

This breaks the HN guideline against calling names in arguments. Please don't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977201 and marked it off-topic.

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