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Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

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Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#501

Post by jshevek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #298
zimpenfish wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would definitely agree that A was to the left of B. I would also concede that B is to the right of A. But since the only label on the graph is an unidentified "Trait", I couldn't really comment any further. What point are you trying to make?

That the value on the y axis, for those two points taken from presented distributions, is the fucking same ... It's hard to make that point even more obvious.

It's pretty clear from the totality of this person's comments that they are here to obfuscate and troll. Not sure why this is allowed on HN.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#502

Post by falcolas »

jondubois wrote: post #385
Const-me wrote: post #113

IMO the best comment from there: Giulio Prisco said... The results of this incident are easy to predict. Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line. Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family. But they won't change their position. If anythi…

Suppression of free speech is the most dangerous - Eventually people reach a breaking point and then they snap all at once. I think that is a cause of extremely violent events like WW2 and most revolutions. Oppressed people start quietly labelling who their enemies are (often without proper justification) and wait for consensus to build. After this, although I disagree with the engineer, I don't think that Google is…

I'm not sure any mutiny will have a chance of survival, for one simple reason - too many people want to work for those companies, even if only to have that company on their resume.

If a mutiny did occur, all the company would need to do is fire the loudest voices in the name of diversity, let the rest quit quietly, and replace them with the millions still banging at the doors to get in. You'd need someone at a C level solidly on your side for a mutiny to succeed, and you don't usually get to a career C level by having strong ideological stances (aside from, perhaps, a strong love of capitalism and how it lines your pockets).

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#503

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #371
sheepmullet wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. The alt-right is not constantly infighting. The left are more likely to devolve into infighting. This google guy was moderate left wing and the hard line social justice response from Google and the media will alienate a lot more of the intellectual left. Hispanics and African Americans often lean socially conservative. Gay men are a lot more fiscally conservative than you might think. None of those…

"This google guy" was a self-declared conservative, and mentioned cultural marxism, an alt-right touchstone, in the very memo that is being discussed. His first interviews were with alt-right Youtube channels. I agree with your points about lots of minority groups being socially (and/or fiscally) conservative. It's lucky for the left that the white social conservatives have been driving them away consistently for dec…

Jordan Peterson is alt-right?

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#504

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

Const-me wrote: post #113

IMO the best comment from there: Giulio Prisco said... The results of this incident are easy to predict. Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line. Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family. But they won't change their position. If anythi…

So, I've done some work in finance, and I just, don't see it. At the major banks you've got literal hours of training about the things you can and cannot say with association with the firm and with its image. Fuck whatever you think about diversity and playing nice with the feelings of everyone, the brand damage alone would (and did in Google's case) have gotten James fired if he was working in the "real world".

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence. You want to cost your company thousands, if not millions, in bad PR maybe don't expect to have a job when you come in monday morning. There's nothing to be gained in appeasing bad science and faulty logic just because you're scared of populists.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#505

Post by yequalsx »

_b8r0 wrote: post #416
nowo wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize his paper was posted to a list at google called "pc-considered-harmful"?

Can you indulge me in a thought experiment. You seem like a reasonable human being but I think your question shows that you may have fallen into a moral trap. Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question. Show me how your question has any impact on that point. If you're taking a side and saying "But did you know this person was literally Hitler" then you may have fal…

You make excellent points and are, logically speaking, correct. We are emotional creatures and we usually respond emotionally. If the list was called "hitler is my hero" there would be a visceral reaction. The framing, the contextual anchoring of a comment does matter and it should matter since we are social creatures that respond emotionally.

I very much agree with the top comment made by Const-me and the overall points you made. Unfortunately fear and anger are what drives political discourse and media feeds that fire.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#506

Post by humanrebar »

alkonaut wrote: post #450
occultist_throw wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That also depends on how many submitted talks. It would be a farce and ridiculous if 100 talks were submitted, and 99 of them were males, and then they shut down and complain because no females were chosen. It's called statistics.

This is why in the face of that kind of odds, a diverse conference has to look very hard for female speakers. Even if there are factors that mean there will never be 50% female submitters, a proper diversity policy means the organizer sees this as a symptom of a problem they can help solve. Perhaps if a conference can keep at least 1/3 female speakers every year then 25% of submissions will be from women in 10 years?…

One of the big issues here is whether "active means" includes firing people who earnestly question the "active means".

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#507

Post by pg314 »

cm2187 wrote: post #261
gibberfish wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument applies to the general population maybe, but that doesn't mean it also applies to the population of Google employees. Everyone there passed their hiring standards, so everyone has proved their individual merit already.

The population of Google technical employees is I think the equivalent to the population of Olympic athletes in my example. If the general population has a different distribution (again whether you agree or not with that assumption), then there should be a natural imbalance among the cream of the top that made it to Google. And as you said, those who made it are all "Olympic athletes" (in theory, they should have bee…

> If the general population has a different distribution (again whether you agree or not with that assumption), then there should be a natural imbalance among the cream of the top that made it to Google.

Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. It's not hard to come up with a distribution that is identical for the top x% but differs for the general population. Or one where the difference in top x% is in the opposite direction of the general population (e.g. two normal distributions where mu1 sigma2).

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#508

Post by hhhsdfnn888 »

Const-me wrote: post #113

IMO the best comment from there: Giulio Prisco said... The results of this incident are easy to predict. Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line. Of course they'll shut up for fear of losing their job and the means to support their family. But they won't change their position. If anythi…

Spoken like an extremist.

Everyone knew they could be fired from GM decades ago for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line.

Everyone knew they could be ostracized by their community for being divorced, having an abortion, yadda yadda in the 1950s-1960s nuclear family model.

Did it turn into violent uprising?

Violence stemming from this are a symptom of greater social ills. The Google situation is one instance, not some inflection point. The people that will radicalize on this already are. They'll just go "more" radical.

No one is owed anything by anyone else. There is no law of the universe requiring this.

Having grown up fuck poor and fighting my way into a decent coding gig the last couple years, all these whiny Googlers should grow the eff up.

American Exceptionalism has hit the end of the line, and the spoiled brats it created are going to get angry and turn against everyone that gave them what they have.

Fine, let them. Tear it out down out of petulant spite. Then what do they have?

We're cogs in a corporate machine. It's like Trump voters suddenly going OOPSY, WTF? As if no one was telling them this. People been saying this for years. And some whiny brats who drank the kool-aid are finally waking up to this. Welcome to reality.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#509

Post by mnglkhn2 »

Brockenstein wrote: post #472
mnglkhn2 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking assumes reasoning. Or, when you are in a power grab, reasoning is the last thing you want to do. The left does want the power not the talking.

And the people on the wrong side of history want to talk and talk and talk. They want to stall for time. And every individual who doesn't get a shot to talk and shape the culture feels like they've been robbed and their ideas and beliefs suppressed. They're just ignorant of the fact that these issues have been talked about, at length, ad nauseam, for decades, centuries even. And they don't understand that they don't…

:) Your comment must be something that came out of an AI bot: right down the middle, ambiguous to the max.

Saying nothing with so many words :) and with the right amount of righteous indignation.

Love it! It proves my point actually.

Re: Outraged about the Google diversity memo?

#510

Post by hhhsdfnn888 »

dx034 wrote: post #215
GVIrish wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now everyone at Google (and everyone in large tech companies, and everyone in academy) knows that they can be fired for expressing opinions that dissent from the party line. This is an example of people taking exactly the wrong lesson from this situation. The guy wasn't fired for having a 'dissenting opinion'. He was fired because he basically said women are underrepresented in IT because they are biologically unsu…

> He was fired because he basically said women are underrepresented in IT because they are biologically unsuited for it. I don't understand why people keep repeating that statement. He said that biological differences explain the different ratios of men and women, NOT that women are not suited for tech jobs. He explicitely did not say (nor mean) that a woman can't be a good software engineer. Just that on average, mo…

And he also said maybe he was biased to see only data that supported his claim.

That would have been a sure fire sign I was out of my element.

Free speech all you want. But there are going to be consequences.

> I just think that it's worth thinking about and that there should be more scientific studies to explore this.

There are. All you have to do is Google it.

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