51–60 of 106 posts
He really is an excellent writer, isn't he?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I think your characterization of Damore's document is deeply flawed, to an irresponsible degree, and I have no problem telling you that directly. The "insurmountable blockers" thing is particularly ridiculous, as I explain in another comment in this tree [1]. I do believe my comment is an appropriately nuanced critique of a flatly ridiculous position. I'm glad that you like SSC though and I'm sure we could get a…
Fosho. Rest of discussion in other tree; for here, just this bit. You said: > I would highly recommend you read the beginning of the linked SSC article That definitely reads to me like you saying I didn't read it. Can you take a moment and attempt to understand how that would come across as having that meaning?
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I read Damore's document and your summary and description of it seems entirely foreign and inconsistent to me. For example, you summarize it as "these are the insurmountable blockers to this kind of success for people who aren't like me". In Damore's document he discusses ways to promote diversity within Google by accounting for differences between men and women and adjusting Google's hiring and promotion practices t…
I think I can. Here's the document: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideol... JD says: "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways", and then has the nice overlapping bimodal distribution graph. In my read, this data is foundational to many of his arguments, but there's a fundamental flaw in his application of it, which is: why you should expect anyone at Google (or, well, any su…
This is an important point and would have been my main intellectual critique of Damore as well. Statistics of large populations don't necessarily generalize to small subpopulations. For this reason Damore's arguments, while worthy of consideration, are quite a bit less than conclusive.
At the same time I think Damore's points were basically insightful and likely to have some truth even within Google. In particular, there's a lot about tech that could be more human, and that women would disproportionately excel at. Why don't we do more of that stuff? Not only would we employ more women productively in tech, everybody would be happier with how tech works in society.
One of the most progressive and "woke" women I know at my work said essentially this to me, unprompted. This was her idea of how to make tech better. Damore's idea! (Of course she'd never admit that it was Damore's but...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read Damore's document and your summary and description of it seems entirely foreign and inconsistent to me. For example, you summarize it as "these are the insurmountable blockers to this kind of success for people who aren't like me". In Damore's document he discusses ways to promote diversity within Google by accounting for differences between men and women and adjusting Google's hiring and promotion practices t…
I think I can. Here's the document: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideol... JD says: "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways", and then has the nice overlapping bimodal distribution graph. In my read, this data is foundational to many of his arguments, but there's a fundamental flaw in his application of it, which is: why you should expect anyone at Google (or, well, any su…
I think that point is true and I think it is the kind of thing where, if Google were considering taking Damore's feedback, they should investigate. Is Google's population of employees noticeably different from the general population? How about the population of people who interview at Google?
I think that the assumption that Google, with 150k (or whatever it was at the time) employees plus candidate employees, roughly approximates population trends is a reasonable starting place for a single author writing up some thoughts. If this were an academic paper we would probably expect the author to consider this at some point. If it's some thoughts the author put together on diversity? Seems like a crazy standard to me.
I'm not sure what questions you've asked that haven't been responded to. I see a couple questions in your parent comments asking whether your take on Damore was nuanced/critical. If that's what you're referring to my answers to those questions are that I feel you badly misrepresent Damore and your commentary on him is short of meaningful.
Regarding your edit - in my view we have a substantive disagreement here, over Damore. I don't see why we would abandon that to discuss other topics.
My position on Damore is that you and others misrepresent Damore in order to gaslight and threaten people who disagree with you. "Unapproved thoughts on diversity? That's an anti-diversity political screed. You are a sexist bigot who will be fired and relentlessly slandered in national media."
By gaslighting I mean that you and others pretend to invite "conversation" but when disagreements happen there is less conversing and more heretic-burning. Damore is a perfect example. Google hosts a diversity class, the class asks for feedback, Damore shares his thoughts on diversity, then he is terminated and renounced in the media, and even here, by you, on Hacker News.
This was published in response to a lament about James Damore, in case anyone is wondering about the immediate context. The proximate issue was that women and men, on average / in aggregate, are different. But the general principles apply to other issues as well.
The problem with signing up with an underground Straussian heretic network is that if you're not actually beset by the Inquisition or by Stalinism, you're likelier to trap yourself in an epistemic filter bubble than to discover some secret truth. Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling wit…
Very few people seem to bother sympathizing with the unwoke autistic nerd, but I feel happy for him that he transcended this deeply unfair, absurd, traumatic incident in his life and found something beautiful to do.
He really is an excellent writer, isn't he?
Most of his articles could be about a third as long with no loss in clarity. The meandering windups can be _rhetorically_ effective, especially when they appeal to the biases of the reader, as they appeal to mine. But they're not truth-directed, and often obscure weak or blindered reasoinng, as I think they do here.
This was published in response to a lament about James Damore, in case anyone is wondering about the immediate context. The proximate issue was that women and men, on average / in aggregate, are different. But the general principles apply to other issues as well.
The problem with signing up with an underground Straussian heretic network is that if you're not actually beset by the Inquisition or by Stalinism, you're likelier to trap yourself in an epistemic filter bubble than to discover some secret truth. Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company. And rather than grappling wit…
perhaps you missed the part where he was defamed and slandered in international press. his name became shorthand for a crude stereotype of a bigoted tech bro, totally undeservedly, for (very!) gently questioning the policies of a giant publicly-traded company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I can. Here's the document: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideol... JD says: "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways", and then has the nice overlapping bimodal distribution graph. In my read, this data is foundational to many of his arguments, but there's a fundamental flaw in his application of it, which is: why you should expect anyone at Google (or, well, any su…
I read your comment opposed to Damore as something like "Damore says this distribution of traits exists in the general population, but it doesn't necessarily exist in the subset of Google." Please correct me if I'm wrong. I think that point is true and I think it is the kind of thing where, if Google were considering taking Damore's feedback, they should investigate. Is Google's population of employees noticeably dif…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's fair - it's been awhile since all this went down, so I guess my summary of my own take got hyperbolic over the years :/
You get BIG points for being willing to admit that possibility in my book. We all get things horribly wrong sometimes. Especially with, God, the incredible cultural pressure. I have problems with how Damore expressed himself too FWIW. But I think he was only trying to break an oppressive silence and start a conversation that was being heavily suppressed. I would have been happy to give him a strong, balanced critique…