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Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

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Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#351

Post by kamaal »

wildmusings wrote: post #35

The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the DISTRIBUTION OF traits in men and women. He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful. What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of thei…

>>This is the closing of the American mind.

This isn't just in America. This is happening all over the world.

Right wing politics is now the only refuge for people who want to speak their mind.

As much as scary this is, this is the truth.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#353

Post by nerflad »

engi_nerd wrote: post #268
zorpner wrote: post #25

Good. I get that HN is not into this, but this employee stated, bluntly, that they don't believe many of their colleagues should be there because of their sex. Every peer review, every no-hire, every interaction , is and should be suspect. Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer. This is textbook hostile environ…

You're not giving that a remotely fair reading. He literally calls for people to be treated as individuals while acknowledging and calling attention to traits that populations (read: large numbers of people) exhibit. I'm really having trouble finding anything to be upset about in his "manifesto". He's literally being fired for trying to start a serious conversation about a delicate issue.

I think he's being fired more for the severe PR fallout that resulted in the way he tried to start the conversation, than for the content of the manifesto.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#354

Post by enoch_r »

jjirsa wrote: post #224
wildmusings wrote: post #35

The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the DISTRIBUTION OF traits in men and women. He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful. What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of thei…

It's not about virtue signaling, he was almost certain to be terminated just because it was a ridiculously stupid thing to say - you can't tell your teammates that they were hired because their employer lowered the bar and expect people not to be upset about it (and that's 100% what he did, he also made up pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to justify it, but he flat out insulted countless people within his company).…

Out of curiosity, if his "manifesto" had talked about white privilege and how many of his white, male co-workers had, for their entire lives, been the beneficiaries of massive disparities in American society that led them to have an increased chance of becoming Googlers, and argued that we should work to ameliorate those disparities at all levels of society, including during the hiring process at Google, would you still call for his termination?

Such a claim would, after all, be an insult to many of his coworkers, who might feel as if he believes they're only at Google because society lowered the bar for them.

Personally I'd like it if people could make both arguments in a reasonable fashion and not jump immediately to outrage and calls for termination.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#355

Post by fatbird »

jorgemf wrote: post #235
tunesmith wrote: post #123

People can't seem to summarize his argument without getting much of it grossly wrong, because his manifesto was a haphazard collection of good points, bad points, good arguments, lousy arguments, misrepresentations of others' views, and unstated implications. A perfect recipe for people to argue past each other about it. It's worth remembering that one of his conclusions was to end or replace gender-based diversity p…

> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs. This is a double sword thing. With the program you might hire more qualified women, but also more less qualified women and you might prevent of hiring more qualified men. Because you have to hire wom…

If you were a woman, you might think that being hired under a diversity initiative is okay, given that the alternative is not to get the opportunity at all due to systemic discrimination in hiring.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#356

Post by gdix »

emmab wrote: post #282
jorgemf wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If gender-based diversity programs are responsible for qualified women getting jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten due to bias, then the lack of that program means those women wouldn't have gotten those jobs. This is a double sword thing. With the program you might hire more qualified women, but also more less qualified women and you might prevent of hiring more qualified men. Because you have to hire wom…

> This is a double sword thing. With the program you might hire more qualified women, but also more less qualified women and you might prevent of hiring more qualified women. Because you have to hire women as the diversity program says. Are you saying there are no situations in which applying a systematic adjustment as a function of gender to interview scores could result in a predictable net-fitness-increase in the…

>That's not really the important question though. Would you prefer being not being hired due to bias even though you are qualified, or being hired despite bias, even though you know it will make some people think you weren't really qualified?

It depends on if that bias existed or not. If the bias exists then of course, I would want to have that bias compensated for. The question is still: is there a bias? Many people say the disparity alone is evidence of a bias because a completely unbiased system would result in a 50/50 split which we obviously don't have. The author of the manifesto is saying that a bias doesn't exist because the disparity has another explanation with some scientific support.

You might disagree or think that the science which supports this idea is faulty in some way. But come on, the reaction has been outrageous and scary.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#357

Post by maxlybbert »

makecheck wrote: post #72

We should be able to apply security technologies to online discourse. Theoretically it should be possible to separate real identity from virtual identity: maybe I publish a bunch of stuff in such a way that no one can ever figure out who I am but anyone can verify that a series of different comments/articles/etc. were all made by the same person. Then you could decide to follow people who publish things that interest…

This is easy to do: add a cryptographic signature to your blog posts (you can use a self-signed cert; the signature just proves that the person who signed various documents had control of the private key in a particular key pair). I think the only obstacle is convincing readers that there's some value in having that digital signature.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#358

Post by deepnotderp »

brown9-2 wrote: post #171
bronz wrote: post #119

the author of the memo is completely correct and, as others have said, his memo is drastically misrepresented in the coverage it has received. he simply points out that women could have less desire to go into fields such as cs because of their biological makeup. he never says that women should leave google -- he only says that trying to reach a perfectly equal distribution is misguided. perhaps those who are red in t…

Try replacing "men and women" with "different skin color" and see if the idea that different groups could have different innate desires still makes sense.

There are differences in chimps about the propensity of genders to pick certain types of toys (train or doll iirc).

By contrast, the differences in racial averages in genetic makeup is often less than the genetic differences between two individuals of the same race.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#359

Post by maxlybbert »

sna1l wrote: post #5

Not a lawyer, but will he have a case to sue for wrongful termination? I guess without seeing the employee contract and Code of Conduct, it is hard to say.

I doubt he has a strong case, but several Californian lawyers would be happy to file a nuisance lawsuit anyway.

Re: Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

#360

Post by arnioxux »

jjirsa wrote: post #224
wildmusings wrote: post #35

The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the DISTRIBUTION OF traits in men and women. He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful. What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of thei…

It's not about virtue signaling, he was almost certain to be terminated just because it was a ridiculously stupid thing to say - you can't tell your teammates that they were hired because their employer lowered the bar and expect people not to be upset about it (and that's 100% what he did, he also made up pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to justify it, but he flat out insulted countless people within his company).…

> you can't tell your teammates that they were hired because their employer lowered the bar

It only hurts because it is plausible and causes self-doubt.

But Google can prove this conclusively just by plotting the distribution of performance reviews between "diversity hires" and the regular pool of employees. You either show that there are negligible differences (the diversity program works) or the guy is right (the average bar did get lowered).

Google will never publish this data because they are cowards.

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