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The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

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Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#531

Post by jee_accnt »

taysic wrote: post #321
haberman wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that "???" is unrigorous handwaving. And I don't think it purports to be rigorous; from the document: "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." (emphasis mine). "May" and "in part." I don't think this purports to be a proof. Is this argument any more rigorous? 1. There is a non-50% representation bet…

Who says we need 50% women in tech? Has Google released a statement on this? While I have seen some inflammatory articles on the subject I don't know that many woman care if there are 50% woman in tech. I can tell you as a female engineer, I just hope that women know it's open to them and feel comfortable joining the field. I don't care about convincing uninterested people. Instead here are some of the issues Google…

"Who says we need 50% women in tech?"

Women being underrepresented in tech is usually cited as an example of sexism in the system. The implication is that there needs to be equal representation for there to be no bias.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#532

Post by haberman »

tptacek wrote: post #519
nowo wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of CS is more similar to economics, accounting, statistics etc. than engineering. Making a statistical model is generally much closer to CS than making the hull for a boat.

Yes, and you can see the "pleading" get more and more "special" as people, confronted with the numerical evidence, make more and more elaborate excuses for how software is different from other sciences. "It's like Lego", they'll say, "and boys play with Lego more than girls". Well, isn't that Just So?

75% of Bachelors degrees in Psychology are awarded to women, and almost 70% of active working Psychologists are female. Does it follow that Psychology is sexist against men?

Is is possible that two things are true? That (1) there is sexism in tech that must be addressed, and (2) even if women felt welcome in tech, the composition of tech could be <50% women?

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#533

Post by [deleted] »

jee_accnt wrote: post #508
AnOscelot wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there are differences. For men, no one ever expects those differences to limit what they can do. Men can be firefighters, loggers, hairdressers, florists, politicians, engineers, interior designers, party planners, chefs, teachers. There aren't many professions where people would question why a man was doing the job instead of a woman. What the left and feminism wants is for the same consideration to be given t…

"For men, no one ever expects those differences to limit what they can do" Actually there are plenty of fields and jobs that are considered feminine. And where men are underrepresented and underpaid. A study has shown that with the same qualifications, a woman is twice as likely to be picked for the same job than a man. And the longer we keep it politically incorrect to criticize feminism and the left, the larger tha…

[deleted]

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#534

Post by xyzzyz »

tptacek wrote: post #522
renaudg wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citations much needed for your first point, please. What I see is a list of male and female dominated fields which is a near perfect fit for what theory would predict. I'm sorry you feel the need to trivialize my point about monkeys. Unfortunately, evidence is going to keep rubbing you the wrong way, you're going to love this new thread : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942022 “At the time, it seemed clear to…

This is a whole lot of words all of which are derived from monkey studies. I think it sounds like I'm being snarky when I say that, but, no, I'm not: literally, this is an attempt to reason the 82/18% CS split from the behaviors of monkeys. You understand, right, that my side of this argument doesn't have to predict any part of human society from the behavior of monkeys? That all my argument requires me to be able to…

The whole reason monkeys even enter the picture is because the society currently unfairly favors a hypothesis that it's all due to socialization, and not at all due to biology. Any study that attempts to show biological aspects only results in the supposed socialization event resulting in the difference being pushed earlier in the development.

The studies showing that female infants are more interested in looking at pictures of faces, while male infants are more interested in looking at pictures of mechanical toys wasn't enough, so researchers are one upping and studying monkeys. It does not help though, I heard from someone saying this in good faith that the sex differences in toy preferences in monkeys are due to societal norms in monkey groups.

At this point I'm seriously starting to consider the socialization hypothesis (which is obviously true to some degree, i.e. socialization plays a huge role in the observed sex differences) to be unscientific, that is, unfalsifiable.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#535

Post by dionidium »

tptacek wrote: post #518
ebfd wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"The first thing to remember is that the differences among individuals are far greater than the differences between groups." All this means is that there is some degree of overlap between the two curves; that not every member of group A is more intelligent than every member of group B. Which is trivially true; even the most virulent racists would agree without hesitation that Clarence Thomas is more intelligent than…

If you want to reduce white supremacy to basic statistics, you can do that, but as intellectual three-card Monte games go, this isn't a very good one: it's pretty easy to see the trick. If you believe that, in the aggregate, "white" people are intellectually superior to any other race of people, you're a white supremacist. That's not a value judgement; it's literally what it means to be a white supremacist. I guess y…

"White supremacy" as a movement, as a phrase in common usage, and as a matter of common sense, implies a whole host of beliefs and policy desires that aren't held or sought by Charles Murray or his defenders.

Not holding those beliefs doesn't render you a "benevolent supremacist;" it means, very plainly (and using ordinary definitions of ordinary words) that you're not a supremecist.

It is plainly misleading and obfuscatory to apply that term to anyone investigating population differences in good faith.

Perhaps you mean to say that all such investigations are evidence of nefarious motives? I think that's wrong, but it's at least a coherent worldview.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#536

Post by aagha »

factsaresacred wrote: post #5

I fail to understand the outrage but attribute that to the fact that few bothered to read the document before allowing themselves to be outraged by it - such is the shallow, feeling-fueled, hysteria-laden media cycle of today. The doc presents a point-of-view, grounded in reality. Furthermore it's not "anti-diversity", but rather anti-discrimination - specifically 'positive 'discrimination which it discredits while p…

Would you feel the same way if the author--instead of focusing on sex differences instead chose to focus on eugenics? What if s/he argued that the reason blacks/African-Americans were under-represented in tech/at Google was because of eugenics?

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#537

Post by dionidium »

tptacek wrote: post #526
_xhok wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfair. You want to call people white supremacists based on the literal, objective content of their views, i.e. using the phrase in a narrow, technical sense, while knowing full well that calling someone a white supremacist will rally behind you a whole train of people who are happy to free-associate all sorts of horrible things with the phrase.

You think it's unfair for me to call people who believe in the objective supremacy of one race over another "supremacists", simply because people have very dim opinions of racial supremacists?

I just want to make the syllogism you're operating with clear here:

1. If two groups have statistical differences in IQ across the population, then the group with the higher average is superior to the other

2. Person A believes that Group 1 has a higher average IQ than Group 2

3. Therefore, Person A is a Group 1 supremecist

I would want to very strongly and categorically denounce point #1 in this list.

Point #2 is just a matter of scientific observation. I don't have strong opinions on it one way or the other. But point #2 only implies #3 if you believe #1.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#538

Post by xyzzyz »

taysic wrote: post #211
remarkEon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they aren't difficult to prove, and this is what really really bothers me. We've got hundreds of thousands of years of innate, biologically formed behaviors that we have because they were evolutionarily advantageous. I'm not saying we should use these differences to discriminate, what I'm saying is that it's pretty easy to observe that they inform behavior and career preference.

They are difficult to prove because they are exceedingly general and abstract. Try this one from the article: "Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing). These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic area…

Try this one from the article:

Sure, it has been studied to death. Here's a good summary:

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

Check out the Table 1 on page 1104, for summary of different studies. Of particular interest is the people-things orientation the parent poster mentions, with mean effect size across multiple studies so large (d = 1.18) that it almost never occurs for non-tautological research questions.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#539

Post by jacobolus »

defen wrote: post #69
skywhopper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has lost their job for wrongthink?

Nobel Prize winner James Watson Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt Harvard President Lawrence Summers are the three that immediately come to mind.

Summers lost his job as university president because he alienated a significant portion of the faculty by making dramatic political decisions without buy-in from the rest of the community. (Firing popular administrative staff, diverting budget from long-running projects with internal political support, getting in aggressive fights with influential faculty members, etc.) Overall he made for a divisive and relatively ineffective leader of the university. His poorly considered sex differences comments were just a convenient excuse to put someone more politically savvy and charismatic in as a leader.

Additionally, it’s hard to feel bad for him as the way he “lost his job” was by being offered an extraordinarily prestigious named professorship (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University_Professor), giving him the ability to work on pretty much whatever he wants for the rest of his life, with a great salary, benefits, etc., and with few required duties.

Re: The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

#540

Post by xyzzyz »

lazyjones wrote: post #46
rayiner wrote: post #19

The intellectual contortion required to get from the premise to the conclusion is actually quite impressive. > On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because: > They’re universal across human cultures Except the gender ratio in science/engineering is anything but universal across cultures. 70% of science/engineering students in Iran are women: ht…

> Indeed, in many parts of the world that are not known for being "liberal" with regard to gender equality, women make up a significantly higher percentage of the scientific workforce than in the U.S Because, unsurprisingly, they're also not very liberal with regard to women choosing their field of studies. Frequently, their parents decide for them.

Frequently, their parents decide for them.

As someone coming from Eastern Europe, that is sometimes the case, but it's not the biggest factor, which I believe is that life's harder there, and smart women chose whatever is going to give better income and job security. When women are free to chose whatever, because they believe their life will be fine regardless of whether they get that higher paying job in IT or that fun degree in Literature, they chose according to their real preference.

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