No matter what side of this debate you're on, I don't think you can argue against the notion that there is only one side of it whose adherents can feel completely free to express their opinions or argue their case without fear of retaliation. Many stupid, unsupportable statements have been made by people on the left side, but I've yet to see much in the way of internet rage mobs formed against them. I think if google…
This sounds true, but is actually incorrect. Whenever women speak out on social media, they get at the very least abuse, but also often rape threats and death threats against them. That is retaliation, plain and simple. That's just the loud stuff. There's also the quiet "oh she's too much of a firebrand" or "oh she won't fit into the small team because she might call people out for their casual sexism" that happens a…
On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
321–330 of 443 posts
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#322I think that it would not be a bad thing to have more diversity of thought in the tech community, or at least to have some basic level of considerate behavior toward people with different opinions. I grew up in Red America; while I'm politically neutral/apathetic at this point, most of my friends/family are still varying shades of red. It was a drag to have all of my colleagues constantly and casually make insulting…
To make it clear, I personally don't give a damn F about politics, I don't vote, don't follow any political "drama". But the fact that people feel that it is appropriate to do that at work is pretty mind blowing to me.
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
SV/YC culture is extremely toxic, and people hate having that pointed out to their faces. edit: sv/yc are toxic for how they actively shame outsider opinions, then headhunt the individuals who put said opinions forward. from sama's what i heard from trump supporters, "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried a…
I don't think it's fair to lump YC culture in with SV culture. YC is based in SV, but it seems to be an island of reasonableness.
Wait until you get hellbanned.
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#324Could someone opposed to the arguments the manifesto makes explain to me what quotes caused them to strongly dislike it? Reading the reactions to the manifesto I'm left feeling like I'm taking crazy pills. I must have read a different manifesto. AFAICT the main idea of the manifesto is that biological differences between men and women account for part of the representation gap. This seems to be perfectly logical and…
> Reading the reactions to the manifesto I'm left feeling like I'm taking crazy pills I've discovered several years ago, debating very similar issues on usenet, that people (maybe some people, but a good proportion in any case) have the ability to make themselves perfectly blind to aspects of reality they decided to disregard. They'll be even ready to contradict themselves multiple times in the space of a few sentenc…
> Climate change (irrespective of its scientific validity) is another of those.
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since most of these threads are pretty content free, and you asked for it, here's a rebuttal, by a woman who's good at math. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3... Of course men and women are different on average, but are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in tech? No.
That is a lazy slide deck. From the paper it cites ( http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-14384-001 ): > It is important for us to know that females begin in high school to perform less well than males on mathematical problem-solving tasks. Problem solving is critical for success in many mathematics-related fields, such as engineering and physics. In this sense, mathematics skills may continue to be a critical filter.…
Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity [2]. Even in countries with relatively large discrepancies, there's not a big difference. I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability [3]. An older study showed women and men scored similarly on an introductory class, but women were less likely to get an A or A+ [4]. A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems [5].
[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
[1]: Compare these tables for math and computer science: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab34.pdf and https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab33.pdf
[2]: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/136/1/103/; PDF https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/publi...
[3]: http://www.pd.infn.it/~lacaprar/ProgettoScuola/Biblio/gender...
[4]: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED384389.pdf
[5]: http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/publications/Sullivan_Gender%20...
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
You totally missed the point. So here it is again: even if all the research he cites is real and well-supported, he makes a logical leap that is not substantiated by any evidence he cites. There's nothing in his evidence about women's personality traits that can lead you to the conclusion that they're necessarily underrepresented in STEM and in computer science. There's also no support for his conclusion that Google…
Thank you for your (abhorrent) attempt at belittling someone who is trying to educate you about what is actually mainstream science: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042812... https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-play/201... As for the rest of your comment, it perfectly illustrates my comment above about critics having no clue what this guy is saying. At the very minimum, you are d…
> There's nothing in his evidence about women's personality traits that can lead you to the conclusion that they're necessarily underrepresented in STEM and in computer science.
Please explain where in either of your sources it says that women should be underrepresented in STEM and computer science - at all (why not the other way around?), let alone to anywhere near the extent seen today.
Hint: nowhere. Getting to there from personality quizzes is the unsubstantiated logical leap the parent was talking about.
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive. The entire premise of the manifesto is that one third of the company only has a job because of their gender. In what world is saying to thousands of people "We only hired you because you don't have male genitals" is not an aggression? Maybe it's not to people who don't give two shits about their work, o…
While the author used dubious rhetorical tactics (e.g. stating scientific "facts" without citation), he was never hostile towards any one person or group of people. Even if the argument he was making was that Google should fire or cut the pay of its female software engineers (which it wasn't), it wouldn't necessarily be aggressive. That word is not applicable here. And yes, I have been in a situation where my merit a…
Most of the members of those groups would highly disagree with you. Most of the female Google employees who have expressed opinions about it on twitter are quite angry over it. And, regardless of how it was meant, saying that a third of the people at the company don't deserve to be there is hostile.
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was the bar lowered to recruit female or minority candidates? That's not a rhetorical question and I don't presume to have an answer to it. It was, however, the subject of the original memo, which suggests that some policies or proposed policies exist that lower standards for diversity candidates in the author's opinion. One example is, in the author's words: "Setting org level OKRs for increased representation." If…
I think you are suffering from the same delusion that many have regarding this so-called bar. At the level of recruiting done by the big-five you end up with a pool of candidates who all make it over "the bar." You only need a couple, so now you get to decide on additional criteria like how well they seem to work in teams, how well they can communicate with their peers, how easily they can adapt to new situations and…
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#329Could someone opposed to the arguments the manifesto makes explain to me what quotes caused them to strongly dislike it? Reading the reactions to the manifesto I'm left feeling like I'm taking crazy pills. I must have read a different manifesto. AFAICT the main idea of the manifesto is that biological differences between men and women account for part of the representation gap. This seems to be perfectly logical and…
The supposedly rational author and his supposedly rational fans apparently are happy to overlook this, however. Running the numbers and figuring out what the expected skew would be seemingly has not crossed their minds.
And a larger problem is that this is not the first time someone has made such an argument. It's been made before, many times, in other fields, and was eventually demonstrated to be false: massive disparity turned out to be more a function of bias in hiring and performance evaluations than anything else. The classic example, once again, is classical music, where the very same "women just are naturally less inclined" and "biological differences mean men are just on average better" arguments used to be trotted out to explain gender disparity. Then the classical-music world started using blind auditions (where evaluators could hear a candidate's performance, but not see the candidate or know the candidate's gender until after completing their evaluation). And suddenly... the gender ratio shifted significantly.
Music was one of the first fields to undergo this shift, but wasn't the last. And yet the author of this manifesto seems blissfully unaware of the precedent from other fields where similar arguments were trotted out. Or, to be as charitable as possible, fails to explain why programming deserves to be a special singular exception to the trend of fields arguing "biological differences" and getting served with proof that it was actually bias all along.
And largest of all is the problem that this alleged biological difference, if it were an explanation, would earn a Nobel prize for anyone who could prove it, because within living memory programming had a very different gender ratio (both for programming jobs, and university computer-science enrollment). So this biological difference would have had to have evolved extremely recently, and spread through the human population with incredible rapidity, including likely being CRISPR'd into women who already were working as programmers or studying CS, in order to un-qualify them for it.
In other words, it falls apart on even the most superficial examination of its claims. There is no "taboo" or "facts nobody's allowed to talk about" or "politically incorrect but everybody knows it's true" here. There's just an incredibly shoddy argument which has been debunked more times than anyone cares to count, and yet somehow is still accepted blindly by people who desperately want a justification for tech's gender ratio that doesn't include "this industry discriminates against women".
Re: On managing outrage in Silicon Valley
#330No matter what side of this debate you're on, I don't think you can argue against the notion that there is only one side of it whose adherents can feel completely free to express their opinions or argue their case without fear of retaliation. Many stupid, unsupportable statements have been made by people on the left side, but I've yet to see much in the way of internet rage mobs formed against them. I think if google…