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Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

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Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been writ…

> Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). This was addressed in the article. This burden has fallen on w…

Why would this mean anyone already working in the field needs to bring any burden to the table in terms of defending themselves? The subject was centered around the probability that some recruiting assumptions may be wrong, and that there may be better approaches to recruiting or improving the situation in general.

Women that work in the field should definitely be respected as much as anyone else. They should be free of sexual harassment, and mistreatment. On the flip side, if only 20% of graduating classes in targeted STEM fields are women, and women represent a disproportionate amount of college students... then maybe the issue is broader than the affect of men on the field at that level.

I think part of it may be natural inclination... another is probably the role of movies and media. The latter likely a much bigger role on the impressions of the work and the likely types to fulfill those roles.

--- Edit:

Big example Daisy/Quake from Agents of Shield... started off as a badass hacker, best of the best... as the show moved on, the role was relegated to brawler, and the impact of intellect or technical ability was largely sidestepped, or made secondary and less.

Media portrayals of technical professionals all around are usually very unbalanced... and that doesn't even begin to go into the other fields that are disproportionately male or female, or the hindrance of men in higher education.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#342
post #180
post #162

No. The memo says: "The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause." So it's not that "leftists are violent", it's PC that's complacent to violent PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming. A bit different. Again, I have the impression that…

He explicitly mentions 'cultural marxism', which is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory from the 60s.

This is a particularly ridiculous straw man because a good portion of the critics of cultural marxism are Jews.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#343
post #21

Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even…

I think one thing that struck me from the linked article was the point that the memo wasn't structured to invite discussion. It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong". I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after,…

It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong".

We shouldn't really take someone's degree of divergence from reality as somehow being a point in favor of their argument.

When people remove themselves so far from reality, ignoring significant mounds of evidence, nearly anything not divorced from reality is going to have the effect of an "evidence bomb."

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#344
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except "what is correct" is the whole point of the debate, so nobody knows which side is doing the former until everybody agrees, which they most certainly do not agree yet. Mind you that to the other side, it looks to us like what you're doing is the former and not the latter (until some common ground is found).

No, there is not an equivalent act that "both sides" are engaged in, here.

Well, true.

He tried to be factual, balanced, fair.

His detractors mostly grossly misrepresent what he wrote, including claiming the very opposite, and then hurl ad-hominems at their straw man.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is addressed in TFA. > [W]hen I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club. Some people at Google reacted by saying “well if he’s so wrong, then why not refute him,” but that requires spending a significant amount of time building an argument against the claims in his document. On the other hand, if I remain silent, that silence could be mistaken for agreement. I should not be forced into that kind of de…

> [W]hen I go to work, I go to work, and not to a debate club. Sure. But people on the wrong side of the Google monoculture feel like they have to be closeted at work. They don't want to feel that way either. There has to be a way for everyone to be professional and honest here.

Good. People who think we don't need diversity efforts or that think studies of aggregates should be applied to determine efforts for smaller specialized populations or individuals should keep it to themselves. I wouldn't want a racist to feel comfortable quoting Bell Curve "research" or criminal population composition numbers at work,for many of the same reasons.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#346
post #162

No. The memo says: "The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause." So it's not that "leftists are violent", it's PC that's complacent to violent PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming. A bit different. Again, I have the impression that…

Would you please stop engaging in ideological flamewar on HN? I realize there has been a lot of this lately and it's not always clear where to draw the line, but you're definitely on the wrong side of it here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15021984 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#347
post #6

I really enjoyed the well reasoned discussion. I think a lot more constructive dialog is happening now that people have calmed down. Of all the sentiments expressed in the article, I mainly disagree with the comment that Damore did the company harm. He posted his thoughts on an internal discussion board and someone else leaked this internal document to the press. The leaker did harm to Google not Damore. In fact, I t…

Anyone making arguments for/against firing him for the memo need to be reminded that we don't know why he was fired.

It's just as likely he was fired for lying about having a PhD from Harvard.

Edit: I stand corrected, he was just enrolled in a PhD program.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#348
post #279

Are any of these engineers East Asian immigrants or Asian Americans? From my own circles both near and extended, it seems like there is a much more even split within especially East Asian H1Bs and to a less degree Asian Americans? This may be from my own experience of hearing Asian parents push children regardless of gender towards STEM. It keeps leading me back to the idea that increased volition allows gender diffe…

The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015

Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are H1Bs from India, China and other Asian countries, and Romania and other eastern-European countries. If you subtract their numbers then the difference is more severe.

There is something in the US culture that makes American women not want to take up tech. The diversity memo doesn't address the fact that more women take tech jobs when impediments are removed, as evidenced by the larger percentage of women in tech jobs in other countries.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#349

> I disagree with his use of science and data to convert opinions into facts. Funny. So if you backed your opinions with science that is not right? It was hard to keep reading after that statement.

No, but if you bias your selection of science to support your opinions and never return to scrutinize your conclusions, that's not right.

Did he? can you probe it? I found more article supporting him than not supporting him, but you might find the opposite, did you?

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#350

Wow. I really feel like this was a missed opportunity to close the gap. I feel like some very unreasonable thing are being said in a reasonable/polished way. >> A lot of people have used that argument in defense of what he wrote, as evidence that the memo was not harmful or hostile to the women he worked with. When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among…

> I feel like some very unreasonable thing are being said in a reasonable/polished way. That's a decent description of Damore's memo. > I would think hostility would require some form of visible action. Nope. My dad's tech workplace in the '70s was hostile to black people even though there was almost no visible action. > Isn't the whole point of science is to move the debate away from opinion to fact. Yes, but cherry…

>> Nope. My dad's tech workplace in the '70s was hostile to black people even though there was almost no visible action.

What do you mean? They didn't hire, fire, promote, or speak differently?

>> Yes, but cherry-picking results and selectively quoting articles isn't rigorous science. There is a long history of misusing science to promote preconceived agendas (tobacco industry, new age quantum garbage, eugenics, etc).

This is fair. Except from my side, I feel like I'm seeing cherry-picking by the other side. I studied psychology, and in college nobody seemed to dispute innate differences between men and women (I was taught of some in infants).

So since both sides feel the other is cherry-picking, we can either A) fire people for it B) talk it out like scientists.

>> I apologize, I just can't understand the last half of your post. It sounds like you're saying the women who wrote this reply are part of some powerful in-group-alliance?

I'm not suggesting there is an alliance of women. I'm suggesting there is a politically motivated core (SJW is the closest word I know for the group) at google and the larger public. The fact that this group is treating science as politics explains why:

- They are trying to fire people for ideas (because it's US vs THEM in their heads)

- They are deliberately lying about what Damore said (because it's politics, so no holds barred).

- They are not at all expressing a coherent vision of what "equality" would look like if they could make all the rules, but instead fighting for their own minorities (and disregarding Jews, Mexicans, ugly people, fat people, tattooed people, and all the other groups that certainly are slightly discriminated against)

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