Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 863 posts

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#611

Post by fjsolwmv »

reader5000 wrote: post #604
rayiner wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the history of computer science. Damore's essay was based on time-tested pseudo-scientific reasoning, the sort that has been invoked to exclude women in many different fields. When law firms offered Sandra Day O'Connor a secretarial job after she graduated third in her class at Stanford, do you think they said "we just don't like women?" Of course not. They couched their bias in appeals to the differenc…

There are more male programmers than female. Please explain how invoking genetic differences explanations is pseudo scientific, whereas invoking systematic discrimination explanations is not pseudo-scientific. Consider: There are more male rapists than female rapists. Is this because female rapists are systematically discriminated against? Does our society shamefully teach children that raping is only for boys? Or ar…

Tangent, but men and women are heterosexually assaulted at similar rates, it's just that men on average are better able to resist due to strength advantages,and have more of a stigma against reporting. And not as much in the workplace since on average men have more positions of power in workplaces

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#612

Post by dzhiurgis »

cma wrote: post #565
fzeroracer wrote: post #468

The problem with Damore's theory he posited (that the difference in traits and abilities between men and women is why you see a certain imbalance in tech) ignores the history of computer science, where in the early days of CS you had a large amount of women entering into software followed by a sharp dropoff in the 80s [1]. The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed…

He says: >that these differences may [emphasis added] explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership And he says one of the differences is a higher drive for status. That is one way it could change without the 80's thing being counter-evidence, if the status of practitioners and/or leadership in the field changed for some reason (maybe Bill Gates becoming the richest man in the world).…

If status hypothesis is right, it explains why women didn't change since 80s. What did indeed changed since then is popularity of tech. With more money floating around there are more people seeking for status.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#613

Post by imron »

waterhouse wrote: post #586
stryk wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source? (not trying to be snide or anything, I'm actually curious if there's a source for that)

For context, one should note that the word "neuroticism" is not used as a regular English word, but is one of the "Big Five" traits in psychology, which comes from factor analysis of personality surveys. Its "definition" would be something like "An underlying quality that correlates with answering 'Agree/Strongly Agree' on these questions and 'Disagree/Strongly Disagree' on those questions". Damore did not note this…

> Damore did not note this in his memo,

He kind of did - in fact when he used the word 'Neuroticism' he linked to the exact article you linked to above (the main article, not the sub section on age sex and geographic differences).

Unfortunately Buzzfeed (edit: got this wrong, it was actually Gizmodo) decided to strip all the links (and a few charts) out of the version of the document they published, and so many people didn't realise that was what he was talking about.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#614

Post by PricelessValue »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #596
PricelessValue wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then he started retweeting Breitbart articles and selling "Goolag" t-shirts and threw his credibility out the window What does that have to do with his credibility or his arguments? His arguments stand on its own merits. Externalities has no bearing on argument. If he said 1+1=2 and then retweeted a breitbart article, does that mean 1+1 no longer equal 2?

Given that Breitbart, Stephen Molynieux, etc, all basically support the least charitable interpretation of the memo (that women are genetically less predisposed to engineering), his active association with them makes the claim that the memo was a good-faith attempt to improve diversity rather hard to swallow. Examples: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/14/haidt-google-memo-c... http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern…

> Given that Breitbart, Stephen Molynieux, etc, all basically support the least charitable interpretation of the memo (that women are genetically less predisposed to engineering)

So? Are you saying you disagree? Then state your case.

> his active association with them makes the claim that the memo was a good-faith attempt to improve diversity rather hard to swallow.

Why does it make it hard to swallow? What does damore stating a fact that women being more predisposed to more social careers rather than engineering have anything to do with his stance on diversity? Are you saying that men should be forced out of engineering and women should be forced into it?

So should we take over norway, get rid of women's rights and force the norwegian women to go into engineering?

> http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/14/haidt-google-memo-c....

That link is about an NYU professor who says data and analysis backs up damore's claim.

> http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/15/heres-why....

A lot of good points there.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#615

Post by reader5000 »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #611
reader5000 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more male programmers than female. Please explain how invoking genetic differences explanations is pseudo scientific, whereas invoking systematic discrimination explanations is not pseudo-scientific. Consider: There are more male rapists than female rapists. Is this because female rapists are systematically discriminated against? Does our society shamefully teach children that raping is only for boys? Or ar…

Tangent, but men and women are heterosexually assaulted at similar rates, it's just that men on average are better able to resist due to strength advantages,and have more of a stigma against reporting. And not as much in the workplace since on average men have more positions of power in workplaces

I'm not sure about that, for instance the below link claims 91% of victims of sexual assault are female.

https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc...

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#616

Post by rayiner »

reader5000 wrote: post #604
rayiner wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the history of computer science. Damore's essay was based on time-tested pseudo-scientific reasoning, the sort that has been invoked to exclude women in many different fields. When law firms offered Sandra Day O'Connor a secretarial job after she graduated third in her class at Stanford, do you think they said "we just don't like women?" Of course not. They couched their bias in appeals to the differenc…

There are more male programmers than female. Please explain how invoking genetic differences explanations is pseudo scientific, whereas invoking systematic discrimination explanations is not pseudo-scientific. Consider: There are more male rapists than female rapists. Is this because female rapists are systematically discriminated against? Does our society shamefully teach children that raping is only for boys? Or ar…

The difference is that we have a theory of causation and evidence that the causal factors exist. We can point to studies showing that identical resumes with female names are half as likely to get called back, and we have a workable theory of how things like that affect gender ratio. These theories are backed by a real-world social experiment: when we eliminated many explicit forms of discrimination that existed in past decades, we saw the proportion of women rise rapidly in many formerly male dominated professions. That gives us a rich source of empirical evidence to draw from. (E.g. we saw in law and medicine that affirmative action led to self-perpetuating long term changes in gender ratio; once going into a law career wasn’t signing up for a life of being an extreme minority, womens’ representation shot way up).

With the biological explanation, we have evidence of certain gender differences, and we have evidence of disparities in representation, but we have no theory of how the two are causally linked. That’s the hallmark of pseudo-science. Say we know that women are more cooperative than men. What does that mean for programming? Is programming inherently less cooperative than fields like accounting where there are more women than men? What is the sensitivity of programming choice to differences in “cooperativeness?” The biggest confounder is that while we have scientfic studies associating genders with traits, we have nothing linking traits with professions. That’s where Damore’s memo goes off the rails into handwaving and begging the question: he repeatedly assumes that because men are over represented in programming, that programming is necessarily characterized by male traits. (E.g. thing oriented versus people oriented: why does Goldman Sachs have more women creating abstract financial instruments than many tech companies have creating social apps?)

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#617

Post by fzeroracer »

imron wrote: post #602
fzeroracer wrote: post #468

The problem with Damore's theory he posited (that the difference in traits and abilities between men and women is why you see a certain imbalance in tech) ignores the history of computer science, where in the early days of CS you had a large amount of women entering into software followed by a sharp dropoff in the 80s [1]. The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed…

> The 'biological differences' argument falls flat because it implies that somehow women changed on a biological level between 1984 and today. This article has an alternative explanation as for why: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... Without implying there was any biological change at all - rather that other fields that were shut off to women (medicine, law etc) become more open. It's a l…

It's a somewhat interesting read, but one that I cannot agree with the conclusions as the author seems to have not bothered to read up on the data with regards to gender ratio in other careers.

For example the following claim made by the author:

>Women are less likely to be interested in programming than men. But if you ban the smart women from every other occupation – well, they’ll take it. Once you unban them, they’ll go to other things they like more, like being veterinarians (80% women) and forensic scientists (74% women). My guess is in 1980, neither of those careers had many women in them. Where did all those super-smart women who now dominate the fields come from? Probably places like schoolteaching and programming!

Can have doubt immediately cast on it by examining the percentage of women graduates by all degree types [1]. If we presume this to be true, then in the 80s we should see a large tick up in other degrees followed by a large tick down in computer science. And well, the data doesn't exactly support that. In fact, Computer Science is one of the few that bucks the trend of the other degrees. His entire argument essentially boils down to 'women are interested in these degrees, and men are interested in these degrees' which is a soft-argument saying that genetic or gender-related differences is why we see such large disparities between various careers. He handwaves away the statistic relating to the drop in the 80s, which makes me have trouble taking him seriously.

[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#618

Post by golemiprague »

ggm wrote: post #100

What I think of his views (I disagree) is not germaine to the question: was it sensible to write and publish? It was not. That I disagree with his premise and polemic makes it easier for me to align desire and reality, but the reality of the situation doesn't change because of my desires: he was stupid to publish and Google were within their rights to fire him. All the other observed comments about liberal/conservati…

I am even more extreme than him in my views, I don't think diversity is important or even desirable and I don't think women and men are the same. But I still think that it was within Google rights to terminate him, as much as I despise them for doing so.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#619

Post by bobdole1234 »

ThomPete wrote: post #444
tdg wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. He says there are IQ differences between people. Who are these "people" if not men and women? He either means men are smarter or he just randomly went on a tangent. Let me ask you, when he says there are IQ differences between people, which groups of people do you think he means?

What is it you don't get? He is referencing the people who claim there is no biological differences and that almost everything is social constructs. If you want to understand what he is talking about here is an example https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-i...

He's referring to a group that is selected based on their intelligence. In that case, it doesn't really matter what the distribution of the larger population is, because you're only talking about a group that is selected for their favorable attributes.

For someone to say that people who are already in a career, that is, already selected for their ability, are less suited because of their sex is kind of absurd.

Re: Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge

#620

Post by Uhhrrr »

sangnoir wrote: post #564
curyous wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"women, on average, have more neuroticism" is provably true. It's been measured. It's a shame that we can't start a discussion with the truth

> "women, on average, have more neuroticism" is provably true. What does that have to do with anything? It does not support (let alone prove ) the idea that they are less capable engineers because of this. Where is the science linking this to ability? I might as well state "men, on average, are more violent", or have narrower hips - this is provably true, but it would equally uncorrelated to suitability to the life o…

> What does [truth] have to do with anything?

Do you speak truth to power, or do you speak irrelevance to power?

Post reply on HN