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Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

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Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#901

Post by jamespo »

thanatropism wrote: post #697
exergy wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wired article was excellent. And it proves one thing to my mind. Regardless of everything else, Damore's memo has lead me to vastly expand my knowledge of the debates in this domain, through just being a curious observer watching it all unfold. It's been wonderful, if extremely provocative, in generating proper debate on the subject, focussed on all possible angles, from writing style, to science, to hiring poli…

What? The Wired article basically says "the social sciences of gender are still up for grabs/worthless, unlike nuclear physics".

Either your comprehension skills are poor or you're being dishonest

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#902

Post by exodust »

I'm baffled as to why these anonymous engineers or any female colleague would be offended by his memo. Some of the responses are quite condescending, calling him a "confused, questionably informed kid". Wow.

His memo is clear and reasonable. His interviews are reasonable and respectful, he approaches the topic calmly and scientifically, the exact opposite to the reactionary anger.

The only part of the memo I can see that could cause a fuss is this:

> "distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes"

Even if true, it should be mentioned that ability often stems from preference. We are driven to invest time and effort into our preferences, so our abilities in those areas will improve. In a population average, we should be able to graph this difference without failing any gender bias scrutiny.

As for "native ability", all else equal except gender, you will face opposition to the idea that your gender might start you at a disadvantage in given disciplines.

As soon as a child starts growing up and investing time in their preference, their abilities will cluster around those preferences. So it would be very difficult to prove that gender abilities are present before socialisation. Either way, it's a scientific question, and deserves respect rather than over-sensitive knee-jerk political reactions.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#903

Post by UK-AL »

abvdasker wrote: post #789
jdoliner wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damore isn't a conservative either by any stretch of the imagination. He's a liberal that wandered into some conservative ideas. FWIW I don't think any amount of proficient writing or research is going to yield a different response.

If Damore is a "liberal" then I defy you to find any sitting Democratic party representative who would endorse his views. The definition of the word "liberal" itself basically conflicts with his views.

He a self confessed classical liberal.

A classical liberal would have views similar to his own. Let people follow their own preferences, rather than trying to shape the world how you think it should be.

That's issue here. He isn't against diversity, but he is against trying to shape society towards some 'ideal' using rules, and regulations.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#904

Post by peoplewindow »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #867
bluecalm wrote: post #861

Now imagine how "we just randomly throw away some of the resumes from black people but we are not lowering the bar" would fare in court of law or public opinion.

Sure, everyone would call that a bad policy. It's taking a minority that's biased against and making those biases worse. But imagine it was "90% of our hires are white, so we're trying to change that by throwing out some white resumes". You'd get a much more mixed reaction.

Hence the fact that so many people are sick of the racism card and voted for Trump. As you point out, the same behaviour would be called bad policy (and possibly illegal) if it's against blacks but not against whites. That seems fundamentally problematic.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#905

Post by ZeroGravitas »

curun1r wrote: post #429
evolve2017 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this has been talked about multiple times over - Damore did not have a line that states that women and/or minorities are bad engineers. He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers. Still, it's true that he never s…

> He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. He basically said the opposite, but people have been so interested in triggering off the 'lowered the bar' phrasing to show their outrage that they're (seemingly willfully) ignoring the rest of the sentence which completely changed the meaning. But 'by lowering false negatives' is hugely important. Google'…

"lowering the bar" has an actual meaning.

"To lower the standards of quality that are expected of or required for something." -- http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lower+the+bar

If he didn't mean to say that, he should retract that phrase and apologize for saying something he didn't mean to say.

You getting "triggered" by people using the standard definition of a common idiom isn't helpful.

Parents often tell their children that a lie about what they did is worse than the original crime. I hope Mr. Damore didn't take this smug "I didn't actually say that women were inferior, it's all about preferences" tone that seems to be the first line of defence online, in his HR meetings only to be asked "So, what's this bit about race and the "science" of IQ you mentioned? Is IQ a preference?"

I'll note that the argument you present about Google only diversity-washing themselves at the cost of others having lower diversity, is the same argument that people make about their green energy efforts. In that area at least they've gone to great lengths to ensure that they actually improve the whole industry, not just steal the glory for themselves and I wouldn't be at all suprised if they had some very smart people ensuring the same was the case in this instance.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#906

Post by thanatropism »

exergy wrote: post #845
thanatropism wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The Wired article basically says "the social sciences of gender are still up for grabs/worthless, unlike nuclear physics".

Different strokes I guess. I liked that the authors took great pains to stick to highlighting the nuanced nature of the debate. They agreed with Damore where pertinent, but also disagreed with a lot of the conclusions that he derived.

I.e. the authors had to concede to Damore on the science, but proceeded to claim the conclusions where worthless because the science sucks. Note that the Slate Star Codex articles that have addressed the science in detail point out these are actually strong, large N studies and not just nitpicking. (They are, besides, echoed by studies in other fields showing that _gibbon and chimpanzees_ already present similar gender-behavioral differences re: which toys very young individuals prefer.)

Wired even feels the need to add a parenthetical reinforcing climate change is true because this is the general strategy of climate deniers: they have to accept the laws of physics and the general mechanism of GHG warming and hold on to the nonsequitur conclusion of "huh uh but this isn't the consensus/established science/it's just a theory" and come up with their own conclusions.

(Edit: GHG warming, not GHC. GHC is actually getting cooler all the time.)

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#907

Post by ZeroGravitas »

gnicholas wrote: post #540
hedgew wrote: post #21

Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even…

One interesting point that hasn't attracted much attention is that the author self-identifies as being on the autism spectrum [1]. If this fact were better-known, would accessibility advocates defend his memo — and possibly even attack its detractors for not being sensitive to his neurological differences? 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/JamesDamore/comments/6thcy3/im_jame...

He uses high neuroticism as part of his argument against female software engineers, high neuroticism is associated with autism. So it seems that even he isn't being sensitive to his own neurological differences.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#908

Post by nothis »

zaroth wrote: post #797
foobar_femme wrote: post #791

As a longtime female engineer at fintech startups, there was absolutely nothing new in Damore's memo. The only thing that gave these tired arguments any cachet at all was Google's name. And I really wish Google hadn't fired Damore. Special projects exists?! For years I have worked with and continue to work with guys who think just like this. In fact, thanks to Twitter, I now know all of my followers who also follow D…

Everything you said that's wrong with the interactions you have with male engineers, I'm not sure that James Damore would disagree with any of it, or claim that it doesn't happen, or say that we shouldn't be trying hard to change it. What James argued is that the efforts Google is making and the way they are doing it are in some ways contributing to and making all of those bad experiences you listed worse .

I read the memo and don't really get what his point was. He threw some half-assed acknowledgements in there that there might be a problem, but the rest was a point-by-point dismissal of actual, concrete measurements to counter-weight them.

On the one had, he complained about how biological statistics are ignored and how it's bullshit to introduce 50/50 quotas, on the other he complained about programs to help women overcome their minority-disadvantages. What is it, then? I want to know what _concrete_ event motivated him to write the memo. There must have been something happening, right? Some super talented male engineer getting ignored because a less talented female one took his position? Did that ever happen? For real?

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#909

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dguaraglia wrote: post #94
joe_the_user wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually say just the opposite - the memo seemed to be written as well and in as conciliatory manner as it could be written and the memo made good (or at least plausible) point and bad points. But the bad points were so bad that it was appropriate and necessary to fire Damore. Essentially, as analogy, there's no way for a person to say "Black people are inferior and shouldn't be hired", as a message broadcast thr…

The memo makes a whole case against "the Left" (capitalization from the memo) and how "leftists" are violent. That doesn't sound like "conciliatory manner" to me, especially considering he makes a blanket statement about Google "leaning left."

Women are more "left" than men generally. They're also less violent than men, so a) you'd think that would make the right more violent, and b) it puts his stated goal of more right-wing thought at Google in direct opposition to hiring more women.

Re: Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

#910

Post by [deleted] »

hisham_hm wrote: post #378
alexandercrohde wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, by the same token, being fired is a completely different beast than having to suffer the tragedy of being afraid a coworker might think a negative stereotype about you. I know who I think the victim is.

Yes, the second one. Being fired is a discrete event. It happens, you move on with life, next job. Now try to live your whole professional life going through the second scenario, then come back in 20 years and tell me if that was a tragedy or not.

[deleted]
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