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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

#591
post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "All available evidence strongly suggests that Charles Murray is in fact a racist"? https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/why-is-charles-murray... > A far more illuminating piece of evidence about the Murray racial worldview is found in his little-read 2003 book Human Accomplishment, the text that substantiates point 2 on the above List Of Racist Charles Murray Beliefs: Black cultural achievements are almost negli…

First of all, are Murray's claims true? That's the important question. That article gets some things right, but it seems to imply that Murray is racist even if his beliefs are true. Second, if you're going to use that article's definition of racism (the belief that there are statistical differences in IQ between races) then most researchers on cognition are racist. If you survey experts anonymously, the majority will…

You seem to have missed the thrust of the article which isn't that The Bell Curve proves Murray to be a racist (although it certainly has him winking strongly in that direction) but that his other book, "Human Accomplishment" is flagrantly and defiantly racist.

> A far more illuminating piece of evidence about the Murray racial worldview is found in his little-read 2003 book Human Accomplishment, the text that substantiates point 2 on the above List Of Racist Charles Murray Beliefs: Black cultural achievements are almost negligible.

> And what do you know, shockingly enough, out of hundreds of significant figures in Western music, there are almost no black people on the list. (Duke Ellington makes it.) Now, remember, this is a list of the objectively highest human accomplishments in music, and it doesn’t cut off until 1950.

> Do I have to explain why Murray’s framework is racist? Because Charles Murray thinks classical English composers were rooted in human experience and had intellectual depth (which we know, because they showed up more in the encyclopedias he picked), while black American composers (for that is what they are) were not.

etc.etc.

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

#592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is objecting to special pleading in a different direction. In other words, there's another train of thought: 1) Sexism exists 2) ??? 3) Differences in representation are explainable by sexism I think the original article was making a more nuanced argument allowing for an interconnected set of factors explaining the gender imbalance.

For differences in representation to be explainable by something other than sexism --- which has been rampant in other fields, in particular medicine and law, in the past and then enduringly corrected --- you'd need to establish either that CS is somehow fundamentally different from every other hard science, virtually all of which see better (usually: much better) gender parity than CS does. In other words: you'll ne…

You know that many professors don't actually do a lot of the nitty-gritty work, don't you? They farm that out to their grad students. So in theory all someone has to do is get a PhD and get hired as an academic.

What's worrying is I know a couple PhDs - in STEM - that were granted when they probably shouldn't have been. One lacked any originality, and the other was basically incomprehensible.

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

#593
post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, if 100% of these pressures were removed, would we have exactly 50% representation of men and women in tech? Many people appear to believe very strongly that this is true. What is the basis for this belief? We could have an even higher percentage of women, like we do in many top-notch classical outfits today. There is some history here I'm qualified to speak about as a woman who took many orchestral audition…

>>We could have an even higher percentage of women, like we do in many top-notch classical outfits today. There is a difference between succeeding in difficult tasks and succeeding at tasks that are seeing very high growth in overall accumulation of knowledge. In high growth areas its not easy to make it big without working insane hours. Or return to regular practice after long breaks. To me tech will will see near e…

Can you clarify what you mean here? (not trying to be cheeky, but I'm just not grasping) What is the difference between a difficult task and a task that sees high growth in accumulation of knowledge? In terms of the classical orchestral musician/swe analogy I don't see what you are driving at.

>In high growth areas its not easy to make it big without working insane hours.

In classical music (and jazz etc.), you can't succeed at even a prosaic task such as winning an orchestra audition without working life-destroying hours. From age 10(or earlier, really) to age 40+, most classical musicians who "succeed" practice alone at least 4hrs a day, and rehearse, perform (and teach, when they are older) another another 4-6 hrs per day. There really isn't room for anything but this in their lives. That is the info I can offer to help w understanding this half of what you are saying. I think I didn't realize that this was not widely known. Coming from this life, it is easy to lose perspective on what is generally understood.

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

#594
post #589
post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics at the national level is made up of outliers, like sports people and actors. It's entirely possible that women are better at politics but not better than this 0.01% of people at politics, especially considering that men deviate from the norm more often.

What about local politics? Surely that's dominated by women? What about the politics of a social club, a trade union, or similar groups? Are they all dominated by women? (Answer: No). I'm not sure how you can merge the two theories that "Women are just better at people skills" and "Women aren't better than the best". The whole thesis is claiming that women are as naturally superior at people skills as men are natural…

It's a pretty drastic oversimplification to say "women have better people skills" but there are definitely personality differences between men and women [1]. (I don't know why this comes as a surprise to anyone)

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

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

#595
post #594
post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about local politics? Surely that's dominated by women? What about the politics of a social club, a trade union, or similar groups? Are they all dominated by women? (Answer: No). I'm not sure how you can merge the two theories that "Women are just better at people skills" and "Women aren't better than the best". The whole thesis is claiming that women are as naturally superior at people skills as men are natural…

It's a pretty drastic oversimplification to say "women have better people skills" but there are definitely personality differences between men and women [1]. (I don't know why this comes as a surprise to anyone) [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

I've seen this article referenced a few times now. It's worth noting that the standard deviation between is more pronounced in western countries and even then more geographically pronounced in eastern states like New York, West Virginia, Mississippi..etc, and less pronounced in western regions like Utah, Colorado, Oregon..etc. The differences are there, but the deviation is minimal if not negligible in many parts of the world.

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

#596
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…

> If you believe that, in the aggregate, "white" people are intellectually superior to any other race of people, you're a white supremacist.

Good, then we can agree that all these people who believe that Asians are smarter than whites aren't white supremacists.

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

#597
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When extremely powerful people like that lose their jobs, everyone else gets the message.

What message? That you either think what the majority tells you to think, or they'll ruin you? Not exactly winning hearts and minds.

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

#598
post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>We could have an even higher percentage of women, like we do in many top-notch classical outfits today. There is a difference between succeeding in difficult tasks and succeeding at tasks that are seeing very high growth in overall accumulation of knowledge. In high growth areas its not easy to make it big without working insane hours. Or return to regular practice after long breaks. To me tech will will see near e…

Can you clarify what you mean here? (not trying to be cheeky, but I'm just not grasping) What is the difference between a difficult task and a task that sees high growth in accumulation of knowledge? In terms of the classical orchestral musician/swe analogy I don't see what you are driving at. >In high growth areas its not easy to make it big without working insane hours. In classical music (and jazz etc.), you can't…

There's a level of navel gazing in large swathes of the startup community that assumes that no one else works as hard or needs as much knowledge.

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

#599
post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handwaving. Literally the only reason the topic of "statistical differences in IQ across the population" comes up on this site is as a defense for why there's a microscopic population of African Americans and Latinos in our industry. The reason, the logic goes, is that the supposed racial IQ differences mean that there simply aren't enough African Americans intellectually qualified for the field. There are plenty of…

Before Scott Alexander started http://slatestarcodex.com/ , he wrote this post http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html : > I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "If we can apply an emotionally charged word to something, we must judge it exactly the same as a typical instance of that emotionally charged word." Scott's post is full of examples, many of which I'm sure you'll agree are bad arguments.…

There are clearly people on this thread who think that it's possible to believe in the supremacy of white people over black people without all the ugly baggage of "white supremacy".

I. Don't. Care. I don't care if a white supremacist believes that Asians might be superior to whites. I don't care if a white supremacist thinks anyone who would wear a hood and burn a cross belongs in jail. These things simply don't matter to me.

Like I said: you are free to believe in the "good kind" of white supremacist. I don't differentiate.

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

#600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you believe that, in the aggregate, "white" people are intellectually superior to any other race of people, you're a white supremacist. Good, then we can agree that all these people who believe that Asians are smarter than whites aren't white supremacists.

Gross.
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