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The Kolmogorov option

scottaaronson.com

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Re: The Kolmogorov option

#261

Post by dunkelheit »

thebooktocome wrote: post #233
dunkelheit wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then please go read it. I personally was surprised at how careful and level-headed it was. But due to space constraints his message is often dumbed down by the media to "google employee has said that due to biological differences women can't become decent engineers" which then gets the response it gets.

I read it on the advice of your comment. It is neither careful nor level headed. The whole thing is a motte-bailey between differences in statistical group averages and individual hiring decisions. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey If there's such a large overlap between populations, as he claims in the first couple pages, why bother enumerating those differences in such extreme detail?

Well at least now after you have read it you can form your own opinion.

Small initial differences are capable of causing great divergences down the line so discussing them is not pointless.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#262

Post by TeMPOraL »

thebooktocome wrote: post #238
TeMPOraL wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only if you reduce the problem to one parameter. Two points on a plane are different: is one necessarily less than the other? No. The question itself is ill-formed. You need a metric to transform the points to a form that can fit into the "less than" comparison. A common transformation would be e.g. euclidean distance - under which two different points (e.g. (2, 4) and (4, 2)) can end up being equal. Real-life…

See the figure on page four and the subsequent laundry list of individual traits.

What about it? The figure literally says "this is bad and I don't endorse that". And if that's not enough, the paragraph that the figure is used to support says:

"Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."

If someone says "I explicitly don't claim X", you can't then go and say they're claiming X.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#263

Post by pjc50 »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #162
pjc50 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all subjects are amenable to "rational discussion", since it's inherently a restricted format which has implicit rules about what does and does not count as "rational". It also tends to presume its own weightlessness. Men seem very unwilling to recognise that the memo and the discussion itself is harmful.

> Men seem very unwilling to recognise that the memo and the discussion itself is harmful. ...you realize where this goes, right? Like -- suppose you're right; and suppose you're given the power to suppress all such harmful discussions. You apply it. No more such discussion. Great. Now suppose this occurs but in fact you're wrong. We must then ask: How would you find out that you're wrong? Well, in such a case, you p…

> bad epistemic practices

The idea that some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior to others is one of these "banned" "facts" that has been excluded from civilised discussion for a reason, and that lies in the history of so-called "scientific racism" that was used to justify genocides in the 20th century.

The idea that "some groups of humans have a statistical average of some attribute that is higher than some other attribute" is an idea that people are basically incapable of not turning into "all X are inferior to Y". The idea that women are statistically less likely to be programmers gets used as justification for itself.

Let alone trying to distinguish between "wrong" (morally) and "wrong" (factually incorrect with relation to the observable universe).

Also, at no point did I mention suppressing the discussion. But you've simply turned your own argument around: you're arguing that saying "this discussion is harmful" is itself a harmful discussion!

And indeed we're also back to the question of whether being fired by your employer actually is a free speech question or not. There's no suggestion of government involvement in this speech, is there? Are you going to say "employees should be protected by the state from fear of being fired for any statements they make in the workplace, no matter how offensive their co-workers find them"?

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#264

Post by falcolas »

pavlov wrote: post #244
Banthum wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's "pro-diversity" hiring policies also have the unavoidable implication that some of Damore's colleagues actually shouldn't be with the company. The broader patriarchy/privilege theory behind those "pro-diversity" policies has the unavoidable implication that many of those white male colleagues really shouldn't have their careers (and many other rewarding parts of their lives) at all, because they are based on…

Damore was very clear, neutral, and professional. He wasn't professional because it is not his job to debate this at work! I don't understand how this very simple point gets lost. A public corporation is not a democracy.

His (and all Googlers) opinion was solicited. His mistake was accepting that solicitation and having a politically unacceptable position.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#265

Post by jlborxes »

pavlov wrote: post #244
Banthum wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's "pro-diversity" hiring policies also have the unavoidable implication that some of Damore's colleagues actually shouldn't be with the company. The broader patriarchy/privilege theory behind those "pro-diversity" policies has the unavoidable implication that many of those white male colleagues really shouldn't have their careers (and many other rewarding parts of their lives) at all, because they are based on…

Damore was very clear, neutral, and professional. He wasn't professional because it is not his job to debate this at work! I don't understand how this very simple point gets lost. A public corporation is not a democracy.

The context of his memo is an internal gender studies mailing list, which is supposed to serve exactly these kinds of discussions. It's not like he sent this document to unsuspecting employees.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#266

Post by beaconstudios »

pjc50 wrote: post #253
beaconstudios wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you throw out the concept of objective truth (a staple of postmodern philosophy) then there is no debating at all, because the whole point of debate is to get to the truth at the heart of a matter. With postmodernism all you have is interest groups waging war on each other to pursue their own benefit.

This implies discarding how people feel about subjects, because feelings are inherently subjective. It also leads you into certain kinds of blindness about gender, because of the search for objective metrics. You end up measuring less relevant things - chromosomes - rather than more relevant things - gender presentation and socialisation - simply because they're easier to measure.

that's true, people will always have their own feelings towards subjects and we humans don't have the ability to cleanly separate our rationality from our emotions. However, denying an objective truth just because we find it hard to get to is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We have tools available to us to get to the truth (science, logic, reason, open debate, etc), and to discard these tools leaves us with nothing but subjectivity and tribalism.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#268

Post by pjc50 »

testestx wrote: post #259
pjc50 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why is he referencing Marxism in a discussion on gender? He's not actually referencing Marx, he's just .. labelling a bunch of people as Marxist? And therefore he is "accusing them of being secret ideologues on the other side", is he not?

Intersectionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

What about it? It's not mentioned by the original memo in that footnote about Marxism.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#269

Post by wisty »

lhnz wrote: post #256
pavlov wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... at one point, all the "pro-diversity" initiatives mentioned in the memo didn't exist, yet someone was able to make the case that they should. Yes -- the management of the company decided this. I don't really understand why Google engineers would assume that they should have free rein to debate company policies, on company networks and on company time...? A public corporation is not a democracy. Publicly second-gu…

> I don't really understand why Google engineers would assume > that they should have free rein to debate company policies, > on company networks and on company time...? The memo was in response to a request on the 'coffee beans' Google Group for input on diversity/hiring programs. A few months later he posted it into the 'skeptics' group and that is when the mob formed. Therefore, he was explicitly doing something t…

Now obviously, what he did was injudicious. If you are a white male and suspect a diversity program is going to fail (and there's a lot of evidence that many of them do fail, sometimes even with negative impacts on the people they are meant to help) then you would be wise to shut up. The same would be true if a religious owner asked employees what they thought of their religion. It's best to just avoid disagreeing without showing too much interest.

Re: The Kolmogorov option

#270

Post by znfi »

foldr wrote: post #176
znfi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand things correctly the argument by feminists etc is something along the lines of "there are no differences between men and women, and thus any difference in outcome must be due to discrimination". Firstly, even if there was only this claim and accusation, one might want to defend oneself against it. Especially since this is an almost universally agreed upon "truth" in the western world. Secondly, motiva…

>If I understand things correctly the argument by feminists etc is something along the lines of "there are no differences between men and women, and thus any difference in outcome must be due to discrimination. Really? Could you give a reference to anyone ever actually making this argument?

I'm not sure I can provide an actual quote on this and was more my understanding of what people are arguing, I could be mistaken, I'm not sure. But it would seem to me that accepting something of that form as true would be necessary in order to believe in many fairly standard feminist/whatever claims.

In particular, the controversy surrounding Damore's "manifesto" seems very hard to understand if most people believe that there are differences between the genders that could affect the "outcome"/gender gap in tech/whatever. If this in fact what everyone thinks, then why are so many people upset that someone wrote a document saying this is the case? The whole thing should to be a no-issue? (I guess some of the points of Aaronson's original blog post might be applicable here. But I'm not sure that really improves the situation...)

Secondly, if everyone agrees that there are differences between the genders that could affect for example the gender gap in tech, I have a very hard time understanding how one can routinely blame more or less any difference between the genders on discrimination or some such.

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