One of my first exposures to this "manifesto" was on Twitter with someone starting a thread with "Google has a Nazi problem." The majority of the other responses I read either attacked the author, dismissed the entire text in whole, and/or refused to actually argue the paper's points because they saw them as so ridiculous or "obviously" wrong.
I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism, or whatever you want to call it.
I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination.
If there were factual inaccuracies in what the author wrote, why not discuss them? Why not use high-quality sources to validate your argument? I wish it was the opposite, but I don't have the time to research the psychological/sociological perspectives on these issues. Human civilization has grown thanks to being able to specialize. I specialize and (hopefully) make contributions in one field, but I depend on others that have specialized elsewhere to provide knowledge and resources I can depend on.
It's great that the person stated his opinion. I regard him much higher than hypocrites who think and act the same, but pretend to be 1000% pc.
It's not necessary to tediously counter-argue every single argument the author made. I'm sure you don't expect people to counter-argue overly long badly written texts by various political ideologists from today or the past. I'm convinced it suffices to just argue why summary is wrong or rather the opposite is true.
As a matter of fact, other people have done this work for us, so instead of arguing it suffices to do a literature research. (I'm sure you know how to google feminism and that you might have an hour or two time to watch Youtube) But I'm happy to bring my own crude arguments:
- people, both male and female, oftentimes don't do things because they think they are not able to do them
- teachers have a bias towards encouraging certain stereotypes
- the whole environment pushes certain behaviours and interests on people
Speaking for myself (being male) my Physics teacher said nothing when I told him in class that I'm going to study Physics. He was encouraging the other people who planned to study that or an Engineering subject, not me. Even my father discouraged me from studying it because he thought my grades where not good enough and that I wouldn't be that kind of person. Still I managed to study very quickly and successfully. During my studies I also learned, that my thinking is different than other peoples'. I think more in pictures, whereas my peers in Theoretical Particle Physics rather thought in texts.
At work I often get overtalked and still deliver over-average results because I emphasise being polite, use proper argument and I look 10 years younger than I am. This really sucks and this proves to me that if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.
I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism"). Instead we get what you offer: off-hand casual assertions that there must exist research which runs against large-n and replicable science-driven studies using the only mainstream and empirically-supported model of personality that seems to work.
Basically, this makes criticisms like yours on-par with climate change denial in the sense that they either fail to grasp the point being made or offer personal observations on irrelevant points as rebuttal. It is bad news for Google either way, since the author is correct to point out among many other things that high levels of "agreeability" are demonstrably bad for anyone to have in corporate environments, and if this affects men in the same way it affects women then why are the solutions gender-excluding? Anyway, perhaps you should research the Big-5 model if you aren't familiar with it: very interesting new research coming out on it continually.
> I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism").
Because it isn't relevant. The major weakness of the paper isn't that there are studies suggesting some differences between men and women, but that it doesn't convincingly argue why these difference are relevant to what is being suggested.
What you just wrote is the equivalent of a climate change denier writing:
"The major weakness of the paper isn't that there are studies suggesting climate change exists, but it doesn't convincingly argue why these difference are relevant to environmental policy."
The author doesn't need to "prove" the science he references is real any more than I have to "prove" that climate change exists in order to discuss it. At a certain point, people are either educated or ignorant. And ignorance may be bliss, but there is zero reason for anyone grounded in rational skepticism to take the people attacking this guy on science any more seriously than they would take climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers, etc.
You totally missed the point. So here it is again: even if all the research he cites is real and well-supported, he makes a logical leap that is not substantiated by any evidence he cites. There's nothing in his evidence about women's personality traits that can lead you to the conclusion that they're necessarily underrepresented in STEM and in computer science.
There's also no support for his conclusion that Google therefore doesn't have an obligation to improve diversity measures (which, as a normative claim, can't be negated by citing scientific research).
And above all, there's zero support for his positive claim that Google has a real obligation to adopt a definition of diversity that benefits him and not women, nor that Google has an obligation to defend and make accommodations for his (abhorrent) opinions.
As for the rest of your comment, it perfectly illustrates my comment above about critics having no clue what this guy is saying. At the very minimum, you are dead wrong to claim the author does not say that diversity is important and that Google should not address it. He simply says it should be addressed in non-discriminatory ways, something any sensible reader should have noticed had they read the ENTIRE SECTION he included titled "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap".
And with that, I'm jumping out of this discussion: it pollutes the HN discussion section to have to repeatedly state what the article under discussion actually says.
The parent’s comment, which you claim is “abhorrent” and ignoring science, states:
> There's nothing in his evidence about women's personality traits that can lead you to the conclusion that they're necessarily underrepresented in STEM and in computer science.
Please explain where in either of your sources it says that women should be underrepresented in STEM and computer science - at all (why not the other way around?), let alone to anywhere near the extent seen today.
Hint: nowhere. Getting to there from personality quizzes is the unsubstantiated logical leap the parent was talking about.
> ...he makes a logical leap that is not substantiated by any evidence he cites
Where does he do that? If I recall correctly, he mostly wanted to discuss the company culture. There were policies that were mentioned, but only to support his position that the company culture was supported by company policy.
> What you just wrote is the equivalent of a climate change denier writing:
I think if you want your argument to be more convincing, it would be nice to spend less effort on trying to brand the opponents "climate change denier", which sounds like a thinly veiled attempt to capitalize on a tribal thought-terminating cliche - basically a highbrow structural equivalent of calling someone a Nazi - if you're in any way like a Nazi, you can't win an argument, whatever the argument is about, because that would mean being a Nazi is good, and we all agree it can't be true! Addressing the argument directly instead of trying to affix the killer label is what should distinguish a reasoned rational discussion from a televised political debate.
> but there is zero reason for anyone grounded in rational skepticism to take the people attacking this guy on science any more seriously than they would take climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers, etc.
There is also zero reason to consider comparing somebody do anti-vaxxers or any other outgroup a rational argument. You have many good points here, you don't have to boost them with irrational appeals to tribal cliches (even if you assume everybody is in the same tribe as you, it's still not rational argument). Pleading the rational arguments is better than pounding the table.
> There is also zero reason to consider comparing somebody do anti-vaxxers or any other outgroup a rational argument.
I took it as an argument by analogy. A more analytical approach like listing logical errors and fallacies wouldn't go over well either. I'm curious how someone else would phrase those points without neutering them.
If you see the specific fallacy, you can just point out the fallacy, you don't have to affix label like "you're just like $outgroup!". Mentioning $outgroup doesn't add anything to a rational argument. However, it frequently (though, of course, not always) betrays the weakness of the rational part and the desire to plug the hole by the emotional part.
“The major weakness of the paper isn’t that there are studies showing a natural variability in Earth temperatures over time, but it doesn’t convincingly argue why that variability is the cause of recent sharp temperature increases.”
Well, the grammar of the sentence doesn’t really make sense (even in the original), but you get the point.
Intrinsic gender differences exist, like natural temperature changes exist. But in both cases, they do not explain all or even most of the observed variation; the rest is caused by society.
There is strong scientific evidence of at least a partial genetic/prenatal basis for homosexual expression. If this were a discussion on that topic, the writer would be pointing this out and criticizing discriminatory policies that adversely affect homosexuals.
You've missed the point. The point is that just because you've pointed out a biological fact doesn't mean that you can extend that to societal truths. Cancer also has a genetic basis. Does that mean we should stop researching how to cure it? The point is that arguing over how Homosexuality is like or unlike Cancer is completely pointless and irrelevant to the wider conversation.
Likewise, biological arguments are irrelevant to the overall conversation about diversity in tech. And I'm speaking as someone who thinks that there are a lot of flaws with the current attempts to solve these problems. I think diversity policies are often misguided and lead to suboptimal solutions. But I think this is a hard problem, and there are not going to be any easy solutions. The argument that women aren't biologically suited for working in tech is the lazy and stupid solution. All it does is draw lines between us and them and give newspapers a bunch of trash to print.
> I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism").
I've seen that research. What conclusions do you think you can draw from it?
The author of the paper is well-read, and the people criticizing his science understand neither the underlying science, nor what it implies for the problems they profess to care about.
He doesn't cite any science so it is hard to appreciate that any of it is based on quality research. Seems like a lot of stereotypes mixed in with hedging. For example: suggesting that women are too emotional to "reason about the facts" as well as men do.
He didn't say that - he said "Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts".
That might be wrong. I think using emotions as a guide reason can work, sometimes very well. It doesn't link anything to women - women can be disengaged and men can be emotional in the ordinary course of their day.
> At work I often get overtalked and still deliver over-average results because I emphasise being polite, use proper argument and I look 10 years younger than I am.
That surely sucks and should not happen to you, or anybody. However, it happens - and it happens to many people that tend to be introverted, shy or just tend to be conflict-avoidant. You'd be surprised how many such people are among males. Not every male is a stereotypical hyper-aggressive alpha.
> if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.
I find it somewhat disappointing that you just made judgement about millions of people working in certain area because you've had some bad experiences in one place with a handful of people -
most of which probably didn't even realize their behavior is counter-productive and would be ready to accommodate given proper tools - such as meeting setup with explicit way of ensuring everybody has an opportunity to participate and somebody who is more extroverted and verbal does not hog the scene. There are many known methods to do this and many people who are trained in doing it, one only needs to be willing to look it up and use it. I would think it's much more productive approach then rendering a wholesale judgement on the whole field and declaring it hopeless.
I would say approach of "if you're female and want to Engineering, you should be ready to overcome some challenges, and here are the tools for doing so and for those wanting to help in this" is a much more productive approach.
It seems there's good evidence that on average, biology affects career preferences to an extent. (Preference differences were even shown in 2-day old infants and (with a rather large standard deviation & n=41, iirc) primates.
The OOP's argument, to me, seemed to be primarily against institutionalized discrimination (e.g. affirmative action), which seems reasonable to me.
Not that status quo is OK. But there are probably better ways to help -- like programs aimed at introducing girls to computer programming, for example.
>This really sucks and this proves to me that if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.
I think you should brush up on the meaning of the word "proves".
Because you were on Twitter? The most annoying thing about this back-and-forth ping-ponging of increasing outrage is that everyone, on both sides, only reacts to the silliest arguments. Sturgeon's Law holds up pretty well for hot takes, and the majority of anything written on an issue is likely to be bad. If most of the responses you read struck you as irrational, that's a function of the infrastructure that sends you information more than the quality of either side.
There were quite a few Medium posts as well. But no, I completely agree with you. I've discussed with others recently about how I'd love to have a tool or place where I can search for a given assertion and see the (scientific) evidence for and against it, as well as related assertions and opposing assertions.
And I'm not just talking about being able to "Google it". If I use Google or a general search engine then I have to wade through who knows how many links of ambiguous quality and/or bias.
The only way to avoid that would be to highlight the parts of the discussion that hadn't been studied or couldn't easily be replicated. In my experience, most heated arguments are based on perceptions where there is a gaping hole because science either can't or hasn't completely answered the question yet.
That stuff gets fueled by articles leaving out certain numbers to show a desired conclusion.
True or False isn't the problem. The problem is avoiding key points that you have to already be knowledgable enough to realize what's missing. That's how people end up with "facts" that are still wrong.
You leave out important information to reinforce a bias and it will get reshared as "fact".
Happens all the time with any topic that's even a little heated.
Science is fluid and is funded by agenda our understanding is rarely 100% so often you can only see one side. In a world where ideas are funded you usually get a bias view.
Googling and searching can give you a scan of total web assessible content.
Ultimately you need to either review available knowledge and make decisions or put your trust into an external entity.
It relates to Trumpism because this is why Trump won:
People are sick to death of speech codes, wrong think, collective mob mentality enforcing what is and isn't ok to talk about and which opinions you have to hold to be in line with acceptable thought in media, corporations, silicon valley, education, etc.
As you stated, the facts of the matter don't have relevance here. And if he was wrong, why not discuss it rationally and unemotionally. Or even disagree and move on.
But no, now he's fired for having the wrong unspeakable points of view that do not fall in line with the state religion of mandatory gender quotas.
> It is important for us to know that females begin in high school to perform less well than males on mathematical problem-solving tasks. Problem solving is critical for success in many mathematics-related fields, such as engineering and physics. In this sense, mathematics skills may continue to be a critical filter.
It speculates that this may be because
> the content of problem-solving items on those tests may have heavy representation of masculine-stereotyped content, which has been shown to produce better performance by males in some studies, although results on the issue are mixed
So the Figure 1 the slide uses from the paper has smeared the critical skill, from a software-development perspective, across a large set of other math-related skills. The results of the paper with respect to that skill are inconclusive, not surprising since it's a 27-year-old meta-analysis. Surely there are better results to cite by now?
Yeah, just reading the abstract tells a different story than the graph she uses.
Google or a college level computer science course is specifically pulling from adults who are in the very top percentiles in logical/quantitative skills.
The abstract of the paper notes that while the math difference is small among the total population: "differences favoring men emerged in high school and college" and "grew larger with increasingly selective samples, and were largest for highly selected samples and samples of highly precocious persons."
So the slide deck obscures the fact that in the relevant sample, men have better skills, by including the general population (women, average folks) where there is no difference.
Well, it's refuting a lazy argument. Why would computer science be so different from other STEM fields that have radically higher proportions of women? [0] In particular, why is math so much better? [1] If biological differences are so important, why has it varied so much over time, including a big decline since the 80s? [0] I mean, we know that gender roles play a big role in what jobs people do and that sexism is a problem in tech, so it's honestly kind of weird to think "actually, it's mostly caused by some hitherto unobserved large biological difference."
Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity [2]. Even in countries with relatively large discrepancies, there's not a big difference. I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability [3]. An older study showed women and men scored similarly on an introductory class, but women were less likely to get an A or A+ [4]. A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems [5].
It's a much smaller field, with far fewer lucrative jobs. For any given smaller fields, there could be a number of reasons why it is more or less equal. My hypothesis is that men are biologically more inclined toward geeking out and doing coding or such for fun. If men who are good at math are also geeking and out and coding, while women just do their high school math homework, women would have a comparative advantage at plain math as opposed to computer science.
This would suggest that the gender gap could be reduced by forcing women and men to do computer programming as part of a standard high school curriculum. But the idea of forcing women to do something other than what they do in their free time, just to close a gender gap, seems to me pretty appalling totalitarian.
Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity
Reading the studies, some things are positively correlated, some are negative. Some things have no correlation. There are lots of controls and data manipulation going on, hard to tell if the dredged for the results or not. And if you look at other types of studies you see the opposite result -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability
If the scores are equal, this would suggest no bias in selection. If women are unfairly excluded from computer science, or face a higher bar due to discrimination, then since they were more selected their scores should be higher.
A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems
Keep in mind girls mature faster and differently, so differences in elementary school aren't all that predictive of differences later.
Thanks! However after looking through the slide deck, it seems that the author tries to argue that because mathematic ability isn't so important in CS, biological differences can't explain the disparity between the men and women in CS. That's a quite a leap, I think.
If CS doesn't involve a lot of math, what does it involve that might be impacted by biological or psychological causes?
(P.S. I went to a STEM high school and I know plenty of women who are absolutely stellar in mathematics and science, so I know that's not the issue here.)
No, that's not the argument, perhaps read all the slides, in particular slides 20/21. It's true that cs doesn't involve a lot of math, but that's really just a side point and a little in joke for mathematicians. The argument is the disparity is so small that it could not account for the massive disparity we see in tech.
Re your question on biological or psychological causes, why limit your consideration to those areas? The evidence points to social or economic causes, given the large shifts in women over just a few decades:
When I looked into this a lot, looking into all sorts of data, reading tons of stuff, my conclusions were:
1. Women are generally more conscientious and studious. I've seen data they do more homework, get better grades, even in math, and are more likely to make the honor roll.
2. The more difficult the math test, and the higher the score bracket, the more men outscored women. Average SAT score for men was only a little higher. But among those scoring 800, men outnumbered women two-to-one (this has changed a bit, but they have also made the math test a lot easier, far more testers get an 800 math than get an 800 verbal). Then when looking at who gets a 100+ on the American Mathematics Competition tests, men dominated by about a 10 to 1 ratio.
3. I have observed throughout life that men seem a lot more likely to "geek out" on stuff -- whether that be coding all night for fun, editing Wikipedia articles, taking apart a mechanical device, trying to beat all the quests in an RPG, etc. This is inline with studies showing men to be much more system oriented. I have a hard time believing this is due to culture messaging because for a lot of these things men receive enormous cultural messaging that they are losers for being such geeks, yet they do it anyway because it is such fun.
4. Men tend to have higher variance in almost all things. More men at the top, more men at the bottom.
5. This Stanford article notes "Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. " http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... I think that skill becomes more important the harder a math test becomes, or the harder a programming project is.
I think the 1970's style computer punch card programming, which was very corporate, and did not involve as much keeping large complicated systems in working memory, was less prone to creating a gender imbalance. It more favored conscientiousness.
Whe computers became available in every household, men were much more prone to geek out and become expert programmers on their own time. This means the pipeline of programmers ends up being much more male dominated.
Furthermore, the skills required to be a computer programmer at a top company like Google, require someone from the top percentiles in being able to juggle items in their head, and there are a lot more men in those percentiles than women. I think programming at Google is much more akin to doing well on the AMC than it is to answering an average SAT-level math problem. When we not the disparity in math ability is small, it obscures that the disparity at the very high ends is much larger.
I read all the slides and I think the commenter raises a good point. If math doesn't matter a lot when it comes to CS, then why bother talking about it.
Show me how many standard deviations apart men and women are when it comes to skills that lead to success in CS.
Rather than looking at the math ability distribution as a proxy, why not look at coding competition ability? They are pretty objective since an autograder doesn't know your gender and they are predictive of whether you can pass a tech interview since it's the same format.
You see the same thing at the college level too (for example topcoder where they isn't even any possibility for a sexist team selection bias since anyone can just register and compete).
In some sense, it makes it not tech industry's fault. It's a failure of our education/training pipeline where we are not training competitive women even from an early age.
> Testosterone has effects on competition, so there could still be bias there
Oh. And that would be a biological, innate difference in behaviour between men and women, wouldn't it?
And even if women are as good as men at maths or computer programming- which wouldn't surprise me much- can't they be just less interested in it, just in the same way they're less interested (as you seem to imply) in competition?
And could I be as good as the average woman in teaching or as a nurse? Possible. Am I interested in it? No.
Because, do you think sitting eight hours a day behind a desk trying to find a way to instruct a machine to do something you already know how to do, is a particularly appealing job? Can you imagine the amount of fulfilling human interactions a nurse has every day in the hours you spend looking at that damn screen? I mean, maybe they don't do it just because they can actually do something better.
Many people would disagree, and some would have you fired for saying that.
As far as the presentation, it accurately notes that as far as we can tell, the average difference in ability between men and women is very small or zero. But there is compelling evidence that men and women do naturally differ in interests (the "people vs things" thing), which if true would directly lead to unequal representation in various fields.
> Many people would disagree, and some would have you fired for saying that.
This mentality is exactly why the Google enginner made the post. The company and many others like it are forming echo chambers where anyone with any opinions that go against the status quo is fired. That's ridiculous! Especially with something as nuanced as sex and gender.
It is a known fact that there are physical[1], emotional, and psychological[2] differences in people around the world. If there are psychological and emotional differences between the genders, then why is it so surprising to think that they would overall have different career preferences? The fact that someone would fire an employee instead of let them question the boundary between biology and cultural influences is absurd.
M = male / female
X1 = math ability
X2, X3 ... Xn = other factors (analytical ability, ability to work in teams, ability to understand real problems, etc, also bias of interviewers against women)
Q = performance on interview questions
W = performance in real life work
The slides, and most peoples argument is based on the model where there is only one factor math ability, which is why people go 'oh but that doesn't account for it / the disparity is so small'.
The important question is how do all the factors ADD UP?
Now,
If Q does not correlate with W, fix your interview questions first.
Then, if you want more women to do well in the interview, well, ...
-- the wrong approach is to compromise the integrity of the interview, which compromises the company's business, and which is demeaning to women, although you could use this as a proxy to make the interview more comprehensive
-- the correct approach is to investigate X1, Xn factors and train to remove these discrepancies earlier on way before the interview itself, if we decide that we want to. biases in the interview processes are only biases when removing them improves the correlation between Q and W
Another thing to do is to change the nature of the work itself. In which case the factors and interview questions will change accordingly. Play to peoples' strengths!
The nature of the work must include the performance of the team including the individuals as there may be a benefit to representation when it comes to solving problems of a crowd with varied people.
Interestingly, the Google article covers a lot of this, and even suggests some changes that can be made.
A large number of factors can quickly add up even if the individual factors as small.
I welcome comments from the more knowledgable, but I feel that a lot of knee jerk reactions here are just taking individual statements from the argument and loudly saying NO, or saying well there's no difference here.
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. Edsger W.Dijkstra, EWD498
> I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination.
I don't think it works that way.
This version is problematically simplistic: I have +10 and you have -2; now add Affirmative Action and I've got +8 and you've got +2. I'm still not receiving negative discrimination.
But, you're also missing the follow-on effects; specifically:
1) People who are not actually deserving on their own merits, but were getting in due to the privilege boost, are no longer present.
2) People who are actually deserving on their own merits, but were not getting due to other disadvantages, are now present.
Overall merit of my coworkers goes up; I'm now working with better people and so get better/faster myself.
It didn't start as a zero-sum game; it's not going to end up as a zero-sum game.
Remember the myths of the meritocracy; success is not limited to the deserving, and the deserving are not limited from failure.
That's not how affirmative action works. Using your example, for most of the population, there is no detraction from their score. It only comes into effect if you have +1 and they have 0 or +1, and it becomes you with +1 and them with +2.
If you had +10 and they had 0, you would stay at +10 and they would go to +2, taking the place of someone else that only had +1 and leaving you alone. For you in this case it isn't a 0-sum because you never lose.
For the people on the edge, it is 0-sum because they are on the edge of not getting the position. Any advantage given to someone else removes them from contention.
Ah, I see. As I understand it, AA usually comes into play when there is little separating two candidates. Most other qualities are the same or the historically advantaged candidate is only slightly better than the disadvantaged one.
To counter this historical disadvantage, the candidate possessing it is given additional 'points' which push them beyond the other. All other things being equal or close to equal, this becomes the tie-breaker.
At what point does someone given these AA boosts at every step in their life (high school, SAT, college admission, job interview) no longer qualify to be called disadvantaged?
I got real into AA back in day, when I thought I was on the receiving end of reverse discrimination.
I learned that the biggest part of AA is actually just letting the kids know they qualify. We grow up with the narrative that after highschool you do college; and that you'll succeed at going somewhere. Not everyone gets that narrative, so a big part of AA is finding the kids that qualify for admission / scholarship / etc, and letting them know that. The next part is helping them apply; if no-one you know has ever navigated an academic bureaucracy, it's confusing and intimidating.
It's like the Black Panthers. Everyone knows about the least of their efforts (police watch), because it's also the most controversial. Few people know about the bulk of their efforts (school lunches) because it's not.
That sounds like "Hitler made trains run on time, therefore anyone who thinks trains should run on time agrees with Hitler". While it is very legitimate to disagree with the author of the manifesto, linking him to some antisemitic conspiracy theory on the base that they both don't like Marxists is insane. A lot of people don't like Marxists (in fact, many Marxists don't like other Marxists, and had murdered fellow Marxists by millions), that doesn't make them all the same.
[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
That's a pretty standard, if exaggerated, take on the decline of communism from a capitalist perspective. Would anyone on the left even disagree with what he says about how Marxism was expanded?
I would strongly disagree with the part about "Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics". Marxism is still Marxism, and it's still about economics. Most Western Marxists are also socially liberal, but the so-called "cultural Marxism" is a chimera created by the right.
He seems to be claiming that black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed and it was all made up by Communists to take down capitalism.
You can probably find some people who agree with individual parts of that but if you get a full bingo then you're basically dealing with a Nazi.
> He seems to be claiming that black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed and it was all made up by Communists to take down capitalism.
No he doesn't. He says Marxists participated in gender/race politics, and the ultimate goal of Marxists was destruction of capitalism. Which, btw, if you read any of real Marxists - who aren't exactly hiding, thanks (not ironically, they shouldn't be hiding) to the wide freedoms allowed to all of us by American democracy, that's exactly what you will see, in very plain words - they blame capitalism for these problems and want it to be eliminated.
That doesn't mean, of course, that everybody who participates in gender/race politics is a Marxist. There are a lot of folks that legitimately want, e.g., for gays not to be booted off work for being gay, without necessarily buying into the whole eternal oppressor/oppressed identity/class struggle narrative. Neither it means - and nowhere it was claimed - that "black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed".
> then you're basically dealing with a Nazi.
You just called somebody a Nazi because he said Marxists are lefties and are against capitalism. Way to go.
No, I called someone a Nazi because they put a extreme right wing conspiracy theory into a footnote of a manifesto about hiring less minorities.
No one asked for their opinion on Marxism. No one asked for their opinion on Google hiring practices. They volunteered both, and the fact that in their mind these things are entwined together.
Which, not coincidentally, is a talking point of those so far right that facist or Nazi is not a slur but a descriptive adjective, sometimes self-applied.
Plenty of people hate Marxists. It's the ones that think Google wouldn't hire gay people unless Marxist's wanted them to, and therefore hate Marxists that you need to watch.
> because they put a extreme right wing conspiracy theory into a footnote of a manifesto about hiring less minorities.
This is false. Neither the manifesto was "about hiring less minorities", nor the footnote contained the conspiracy theory. The footnote contained facts, which you declared to be Nazi conspiracy theory because Nazi conspirologists mentioned the same facts. It's like saying somebody is a Nazi because Nazis think 2x2=4 and they do too, so they clearly agree with Nazis, so they are Nazis themselves.
> No one asked for their opinion on Marxism
You imply one should express one's opinion only if Powers That Be - of which you undoubtedly see yourself as a prominent member - ask them to? Wouldn't you like that. Fortunately, it's not the case - one can express one's opinion about Marxism whenever one likes to, and that doesn't make one a Nazi.
> No one asked for their opinion on Google hiring practices
Shut up, grunt, and back to the keyboard! We don't pay you to have opinions!
Sure, why not. Google has the right of insist their workers STFU and let the VPs think for them. It's not what it says on the box, but if it's what it is, no problem.
> Which, not coincidentally, is a talking point of those so far right that facist or Nazi is not a slur but a descriptive adjective
No it is not. Nothing expressed in the manifesto has anything to do with Nazism, and the only extremely tenuous connection that you could find is that some Nazi conspirologists also talked about Marxists participating in gender politics. Which would be very easy to observe to anybody who knows anything about current politics.
Your claim that it is not a slur is a bald-faced lie.
> It's the ones that think Google wouldn't hire gay people unless Marxist's wanted them to
If you imply that the author of manifesto thinks something like that, it is again a lie. If you do not, I don't understand why you brought up those imaginary non-existing people.
I also find it disappointing, though not surprising, that the whole discussion of a long and dense text concentrates here on latching on a couple of words in a footnote, misinterpreting them in the most hostile way possible, affixing the most emotional and charged label available and refusing to discuss anything else on the grounds that affixing the label explains everything. It is, unfortunately, what many people on the internet think political discussion is. The same people then lament how bad the politics has gone lately. Maybe they should stop digging.
I mean at the end of the day the story about “Marxist intellectuals” making an enemy out of “straight, cis white males” after “class warfare” failed to overthrow society sounds almost exactly like the Frankfurt School/“cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory. (Its a specific conspiracy theory btw, not just the general and true observation that the left is more concerned with race and gender than it used to be.)
Maybe it’s not deliberate but given the context it raised a major eyebrow for me.
> sounds almost exactly like the Frankfurt School/“cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory
Nope, it does not. The only common things are that both talk about Marxists (as do many other conversations, including ours) and about gender politics (as do many other conversations, including guess what). Not everybody who opposes Marxists is a Nazi who thinks Jews from Frankfurt School want to take over the world. And not everybody who thinks class-warfare (or identity-warfare) approach to society is wrong is a conspirologist Nazi.
> Its a specific conspiracy theory btw
Right. And that's why using it as a generic club to bash over the head everybody who ever mentions Marxists and their participation in gender politics in negative light is wrong.
> Maybe it’s not deliberate but given the context it raised a major eyebrow for me.
Only because your major eyebrow was on hair trigger to be raised. You need to adjust your eyebrow so it won't raise over every mention of mundane political arguments and not call a Nazi everybody who says something about Marxists. Having such eyebrow makes you look bad.
In my experience, especially the US south, that specific narrative ("did you know that Marxist intellectuals started promoting gender and racial theory after their attempts at class warfare failed to overthrow the US?") has usually indicated that somebody's about to start going on at the very least about Alex Jones nonsense, perhaps about how George Soros controls the world. Online people tend to take off the mask and you get actual Holocaust denial.
If someone says "the left, including Marxists, is concerned with gender and race in a way it wasn't previously" then I agree totally. Likewise if someone mentions that various Marxist intellectuals have contributed to political theory around gender, race, etc., that's just a fact. If someone says "I'm a conservative, the politics around race and gender are harmful", I'll disagree strongly, but that's it.
It's this specific story or narrative that Marxist intellectuals were trying to use class warfare to gain power, and when it failed they shifted to promoting race and gender based politics to gain power, that is very troubling for me due to repeated experience. Citing it offhand as a commonplace makes me wonder whether he shares the same intellectual influences as the other people I've heard say it.
> especially the US south, that specific narrative /.../ has usually indicated that somebody's about to
Stereotyping is ok, as long as we are doing it for the right reasons. For us, there's no need to consider the personality and the content of the message, as long as we can label him a Nazi because couple of words matched.
> Online people tend to take off the mask and you get actual Holocaust denial.
Wow, it's Holocaust denial now. Gowdin, save me!
> It's this specific story or narrative that Marxist intellectuals were trying to use class warfare to gain power, and when it failed they shifted to promoting race and gender based politics to gain power, that is very troubling for me due to repeated experience
Let's see. Do Marxist intellectuals participate in race and gender based politics? Yes they do. Do they want to have power? Of course they do, what's the point of getting into politics if not getting power and getting policies you like enacted? So what exactly makes you a conspirologist Nazi when you mention these obvious - and entirely unsurprising for anybody who knows what "Marxist" and "politics" means - facts?
> Citing it offhand as a commonplace makes me wonder whether he shares the same intellectual influences
Nope, nope. You didn't just "wonder whether he shared influences" (if you go far enough, everybody shared influences, otherwise we couldn't even communicate), you said his claims were literally Nazi talking points and connected to antisemitic conspiracy. Which is not true at the least, the only common thing is the basic facts which no sane person would deny. After recognizing those facts, the actual Nazis go way off course of the facts into the looney bin territory, and invent crazy conspiracies like Jews being behind all this to take over the world. The author does nothing of the sort. Yes, they both start with the same facts. That's because facts are facts, they are independent of who recognizes them. It's where you take it from there is important. The Nazis take it into craziness, as is their way, the manifesto author does not.
> I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination.
Because all positive discrimination is negative discrimination to someone else, so obviously when you are against discrimination you should be against positive discrimination too.
That's overly simplistic. If you know with good certainty that negative discrimination against a group is pervasive and manifests itself in a certain way (say, hiring bias (though I'm not arguing that this is the case in a particular instance; that's a separate debate)) it makes sense to have positive discrimination to counteract that.
How do you know when you have enough positive discrimination?
Do you just make sure that the representation of different groups is the same as in the population? This is a poor solution because it cannot be said that this would have been the distribution without negative discrimination.
Also, along what lines would you now pick your categories?
Would you ensure representation for latino lesbian women who speak spanish and like chocolate cake on tuesdays?
Which is to say that the category can get arbitrarily small.
This is probably what the debate is all about, and it is not an easy thing to answer. Some people say now, some people say not now, and they both have good reasons why.
It depends on whether your ethic emphasizes fairness in average, or fairness in individual cases.
Those who do the former, point at decreasing gaps between population groups as evidence that their approach is more fair. Those who do the latter point at specific cases where a person was ipso facto denied something that they would otherwise be a better fit for, because they were positively discriminated on the basis of some factor.
The catch is that conceptualization of fairness is driven by empathy ("I wouldn't like being treated like that if it were me!") - and empathy in humans works towards individuals, not large populations. A guy who couldn't get a job because his race made him rank lower is easier to empathize with, because the injustice is done to him personally and explicitly, as opposed to another guy from a historically discriminated group who is suffering from an accumulation of subtle but systemic biases throughout society.
Thus, too much or too visible positive discrimination triggers a significant social pushback, which may well swing the pendulum far in the opposite direction.
> If you know with good certainty that negative discrimination against a group is pervasive and manifests itself in a certain way
But you're missing the point.
All discrimination is aimed at individuals. Claiming that because individuals of group A have been negatively discriminated against, you don't balance it out by performing positive discrimination for them (even if it is exactly the same individuals), because you achieve that positive discrimination by performing negative discrimination against another set of individuals.
If you notice that Zuckerberg rejected a person because she was a black woman, because she was black, and you counter that by somehow benefitting that woman, and having Zuckerberg pay some sort of penalty, then that is just and you have 'counteracted' Zuckerberg's negative discrimination.
But if, after noticing that Zuckerberg rejected a person because she was a black woman, you penalize him and make him hire some another black woman over where a white woman would have been more qualified, then you have not 'counteracted' anything. You have performed negative discrimination against another set of individuals, under the color of 'positive discrimination'.
Whether there exist biological/psychological differences between sexes that affect career choices is a discussion that needs to be had in an academic setting rather than a political setting as the author sought to do (read the first section).
Secondly, it does not belong in the work place where it is rightly perceived as an aggression by the female coworkers (Telling them the bar was lowered to recruit them, they are inherently inferior to men at the job etc etc.)
Edit: To all the downvoters - I'll be charitable and assume that you are just subconsciously biased and not outright sexists. To see your bias in this situation just try to imagine that 40 years back some employee working at the Google of the day wrote such a manifesto against positive discrimination in favor of African Americans, citing all sorts of statistics claiming how they are lazy, lack commitment etc. Would you guys have wanted to 'hey let's talk about it' as well?
Was the bar lowered to recruit female or minority candidates? That's not a rhetorical question and I don't presume to have an answer to it. It was, however, the subject of the original memo, which suggests that some policies or proposed policies exist that lower standards for diversity candidates in the author's opinion. One example is, in the author's words: "Setting org level OKRs for increased representation." If such policies do exist, is it not okay to acknowledge their existence and argue for or against their merit?
As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive. There are likely scientific inaccuracies, as with any hastily written and/or poorly cited piece. But I think the author did, on the whole, as good a job as can be expected at staying academic in tone and content. Lampooning him as aggressive seems disingenuous.
I think you are suffering from the same delusion that many have regarding this so-called bar. At the level of recruiting done by the big-five you end up with a pool of candidates who all make it over "the bar." You only need a couple, so now you get to decide on additional criteria like how well they seem to work in teams, how well they can communicate with their peers, how easily they can adapt to new situations and shifting goals...all things that have very little to do with the pure technical criteria that you initially filter for, but which seem to end up contributing more to any particular candidate's impact on the org than simple coding abilities.
tl;dr they don't need to lower the bar to diversify the company.
That's wrong though. Pretty much all high profile, successful tech companies right now have more open positions than they can hire for. My significant other (also a highly successful engineer) and I all get recruitment emails from Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple/whatever every couple of weeks. They get countless applicants, but most of them are not what they want.
That means if you're trying to diversify, out of those thousands, it would be exceedingly easy to just pick all the ones that match the current flavor of the day in term of diversity, regardless of skill, and be done with it. Even though certain combinations of gender/ethnicity are (relatively) rare, there are a few, especially if you include bootcamps, self taughts, promoting from other departments, etc. If you hired 100% of them, it would probably make a bump in the company statistics.
My current employer is, IMO, doing it reasonably well. They don't lower the bar as far as I can tell, but widen the net (open offices in other regions/countries, have hiring events at more colleges/universities in more cities, organize diversity events to attract people, etc). It's not "enough", but it does move the needle and everyone that I've interacted with have been really good.
One of my previous employers straight up lowered the bar, no ambiguity. We would interview someone from a diverse background, they were obviously terrible (like, by a landslide), and they'd be like "Well...we really don't have many people from <this ethnicity/gender>, maybe we could hire them anyway". And sometimes they did. It did not end well (and gave fodder for racist/sexist people, ugh).
There are a -lot- of companies right now that do the later, and they hurt everyone, because they force those doubts and discussions to happen. It's easy, and if the people who have to pick up the slack end up bitching, you can just call them out for discrimination. I don't work at Google and have no interest to do so, so I don't know where they fall. One of my friends who work there and is a fairly vocal activist tells me its relatively okay /shrug.
> As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive.
The entire premise of the manifesto is that one third of the company only has a job because of their gender. In what world is saying to thousands of people "We only hired you because you don't have male genitals" is not an aggression? Maybe it's not to people who don't give two shits about their work, or their accomplishments at it, or whether or not they'll have a job next week. Most people aren't in that category.
Has you ever been in that kind of situation? Where somebody reduces your entire justification for existence to the color of your skin, or which chromosomes you've got?
While the author used dubious rhetorical tactics (e.g. stating scientific "facts" without citation), he was never hostile towards any one person or group of people. Even if the argument he was making was that Google should fire or cut the pay of its female software engineers (which it wasn't), it wouldn't necessarily be aggressive. That word is not applicable here.
And yes, I have been in a situation where my merit as an engineer was called into question (I'm sure most engineers have). At the time I felt that the assessment was unfair. However, even if it had been demonstrably, objectively unfair, it would be incorrect to call it aggressive unless the intent had been to cause or threaten physical or psychological harm.
Aggression is an accusation that hinges entirely upon intent. Even an act that actually causes physical harm is not aggressive unless the intent of the perpetrator is violent or hostile. Similarly, even a memo that actually causes psychological harm is not aggressive unless it was the intent of the author to inflict that harm.
"While the author used dubious rhetorical tactics (e.g. stating scientific "facts" without citation), he was never hostile towards any one person or group of people."
Most of the members of those groups would highly disagree with you. Most of the female Google employees who have expressed opinions about it on twitter are quite angry over it. And, regardless of how it was meant, saying that a third of the people at the company don't deserve to be there is hostile.
> he was never hostile towards any one person or group of people. Even if the argument he was making was that Google should fire or cut the pay of its female software engineers (which it wasn't), it wouldn't necessarily be aggressive.
Let me present an argument:
"Black people are killers, thieves, and lazy layabouts. Statistics [Citation, Citation, Citation] support me. The only reason <company> employs black people is affirmative action. Draw your own conclusions, folks. ;)"
How is this not aggression? What would be aggression, at this point? Dressing up in a white hood, and circling the office with a wooden cross? Do we need to have rational, calm, logical debate about whether or not the statistics I'm citing are correct?
Physical violence isn't the only form of aggression. Telling your colleagues that they aren't wanted in your workplace is absolutely a form of aggression.
> And yes, I have been in a situation where my merit as an engineer was called into question (I'm sure most engineers have).
Was your merit called into question because of the colour of your skin? Or your gender?
There is a world of difference between being treated like crap for <some reason>, and being treated like crap because the asshole you're dealing with is prejudiced towards you. It really has to be experienced to be believed.
> Black people are killers, thieves, and lazy layabouts.
Introducing "killers" and "thieves" to this example distances it from the discussion we are having, since you introduced words with violent connotations. Let's leave it at:
> Black people are... ...lazy layabouts.
This is still a far cry from the contents of the memo, but we can work with it. There are a lot of negative adjectives that can be applied to this sentiment: Racist, wrong, counterproductive, even evil. But aggressive is still wrong. It just doesn't fit the definition. Stereotyping a group of people as "lazy" or even "useless" is not violent. It doesn't threaten violence, and it's intention is not necessarily to cause harm. Have a talk some time with an actual racist who is otherwise a peaceful person. They used to be very common. You'll hear them make all sorts of generalizations about black people that sound totally insane and horrible to us, but they don't mean it in an aggressive way. They wouldn't wish harm, physical or otherwise, on anybody. They genuinely believe that that is simply "how God made them" or something like that. Judging from the tone of the memo, plus the benefit of the doubt which we owe even those we disagree with, I think it's plain that the author of the original memo feels similarly.
Again, aggression is all about intent. You have little evidence to back the idea that our author guy wishes women, or any other person or group, harm.
It's the same category of argument. It also has 'indisputable' statistics supporting it. It does not attack particular persons, just the policy of hiring them. It disparages their co-workers for being born wrong. Much like the manifesto, it's a slam-your-head-into-the-textbook example of racism.
People have also made that exact same argument for decades. Racism was not a moustache-twirling Klanner setting crosses afire (Although it was that, too.) It was the reasoned, fact-supported argument for why people of colour are not as good as Real Americans. Ever since the civil rights movement, it has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the workplace - possibly because most of us accepted the radical notion that the color of your skin has no influence on the quality of your work.
"If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking." -- Paul Graham, What You Can't Say [1]
"And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”" -- senior Google guy, in condemnation of the essay [2]
I really like the "What You Can't Say" essay. Interestingly, what it says is not that speaking out is bad. It says that you must weight the benefit of speaking out to society, to the cost to yourself. It says you know what, sometimes it's ok to pick your fights, to be a coward, or to turn a blind eye to the destruction of the good in society. I agree that sometimes it's important to be selfish.
This means that I can avoid the short term cost to me, but what about the long term cost?
Every time you stay silent, you are complicit in the foolishness and irrationality in society. Every time a mob silences an individual and you ignore it, you lend power to the mob, and power to the idea of a mob in the mind of society.
You lend power to the idea that the louder you shout, the more correct your idea is.
I am worried that even HN, a crowd that prizes itself on being intellectual, is so easily swayed by virtue signalling and shouting loudly (see comments here and on other similar threads). If these rational minds are so easily swayed, what about the larger crowd that thinks even less for itself? These centres must be held to a higher standard or we risk corruption of everything.
SV/YC culture is extremely toxic, and people hate having that pointed out to their faces.
edit: sv/yc are toxic for how they actively shame outsider opinions, then headhunt the individuals who put said opinions forward. from sama's what i heard from trump supporters, "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter."
like for instance on this website, where flagged & downvoted comments lead to rate limiting. sorry guy i can't respond to, it's the mods' fault. minority opinions get to say 1, maybe 2 things, before being silenced. controversial threads are flagged or removed by dang and co from the front page within an hour. ever have a convo with a conservative on here, where they just stopped responding to you? was probably silenced by the moderation team.
this discussion is flagged to obscurity, while the stupid circle jerk post about "google engineer breaking his bubble through global travel!" is on the front still.
While I think that YC tends to be a bit more reasonable on some topics, it can be pretty reactionary on others. For example, if anything to do with Facebook or Zuckerberg is posted, the level of discourse drops to the typical reddit outrage machine.
Similarly, I think that when it comes to talking about sexism in tech, the community as a whole can be pretty toxic. As someone who was annoyed by both the original manifesto, and the response to the original manifesto, it's a bit frustrating to see the conversation here take shape the way it has.
I read the memo, and compared to the stuff I read from the real "deplorables" (on 4chan, The_Donald, etc.), it was pretty tame.
Yes, many of his ideas are backwards and unjustified. At the same time, many of his arguments were perfectly sane (e.g. silencing all dissenting opinions leads to an increasingly toxic and divided culture). If you want people like him to actually change their minds, you have to be willing to hear them out first. You can't show someone where they went wrong if they're too scared to tell you what they think in the first place.
Sexism in the workplace clearly exists. We've seen it manifest too many times for any rational person to deny it. At the same time, many of the initiatives that SV companies pursue to combat sexism are treating the symptoms rather than the cause. Googlers should try to make sure that they are consciously fighting their unconscious biases when hiring, but changing your hiring practices isn't going to eradicate sexism. Many of these diversity "action-plans" are more effective at improving a company's PR than they are at actually combating sex-related discrepancies. They become self-serving, even though their goal is noble. The author of the memo was trying to get at that, but that message was lost due to his problematic views on biological determinism, among other things.
This is increasingly my concern-- There really seems to be a prevailing opinion that racism and sexism are just fine when directed towards white men. You can drag a white guy for pretty much any societal ill you like on the internet these days, and while there are some pretty great points to be made with respect to blaming a lot of modern society's problems on its principal architects (old white dudes), this is no way to win hearts and minds.
We're currently suffering through four years of self-imposed punishment as a result of being a bunch of judgmental assholes in pursuit of a goal that any reasonable human would accept as self-evident-- that people deserve to be treated fairly and without prejudice, no matter their race, sex, gender identity, et cetera. That the American Dream is available equally to all Americans.
I spend a lot of time offering feedback to people in a professional capacity and I am frankly shocked at the level of discourse I see on the internet from progressives. If I pulled this kind of shit at work I'd be finished, because I don't see any way I could possibly be effective communicating an idea to anybody in this fashion.
Almost as if the media doesn't really give a shit about justice or equality, but rather generating rage-clicks and internet lynch mobs to move advertising inventory. :-\
>> We're currently suffering through four years of self-imposed punishment as a result of being a bunch of judgmental assholes in pursuit of a goal that any reasonable human would accept as self-evident-- that people deserve to be treated fairly and without prejudice, no matter their race, sex, gender identity, et cetera.
If leftists/liberals wanted everyone to be treated fairly without prejudice of their race or sex then they would not continually push for the expansion and entrenchment of race and sex based affirmative action programs which deliberately exclude people from employment opportunities, scholarships, networking opportunities and many other essential resources.
The goals and the means are contradictory. If you abandon the goal of equality of opportunity as the left has for the more dubious goal of equality of outcomes then your create a system that treats people unequally based on there race and sex. And furthermore, a system that artificially transfers burdens and hardships onto select races while giving others races 'privileges' and opportunity.
No 'reasonable human' will ever accept exclusion from employment because of there race or sex. And that is exactly what is happening to many qualified and ambitious people at this point. The pool of disaffected people is only going to grow until these polices are changed to reflect a meritocratic model based on objective qualifications.
I think if you take a population that has been the subject of generations of systemic government oppression, remove it (allegedly), and then declare "fairness accomplished! You are free to complete on a level playing field! Pay no attention to the effects of generational poverty!" you are on real dubious ground. This would also presuppose that we have successfully eliminated systemic racism from our society, which is... an argument that would require substantial supporting evidence.
And with respect to the whole "taking of jobs", I will add a more comprehensively researched rebuttal to my own anecdotal experience: if you're good, you're in no danger of getting caught up in a quota system. Competent white folks are doing just fine. The less-competent.... probably should cowboy up. As my exploited millennials would say: "git gud".
>> I think if you take a population that has been the subject of generations of systemic government oppression, remove it (allegedly), and then declare "fairness accomplished! You are free to complete on a level playing field! Pay no attention to the effects of generational poverty!" you are on real dubious ground.
Equality of outcomes enforced by excluding certain racial groups creates intergenerational systemic government oppression of the excluded groups. Again the goal and the means are contradictory.
The socially acceptable way to increase participation by a perceived underrepresented group is to target that group with sustained improvement programs with measurable outcomes. This is the only serious way to address the problem. The opportunities are there but talent with proper skills is not.
>> This would also presuppose that we have successfully eliminated systemic racism from our society, which is... an argument that would require substantial supporting evidence.
The burden of proof is on the accuser to prove that 'society' is in fact guilty of 'systemic racism'. The presumption of Innocence until proven guilty is a cornerstone of western law. Whey you have an indictment of 'society' in a court of law then we can have a fruitful discussion of 'societal systemic racism'.
>> And with respect to the whole "taking of jobs", I will add a more comprehensively researched rebuttal to my own anecdotal experience: if you're good, you're in no danger of getting caught up in a quota system. Competent white folks are doing just fine. The less-competent.... probably should cowboy up. As my exploited millennials would say: "git gud".
Once again your presenting a contradiction. You want to argue that 'systemic racism', for instance against blacks is a horrible injustice. But also claim that other racial groups such as whites are being excluded because there is a racially discriminatory quota system, but you have no problem with that.
So what I gather from your post is that you support racism as long as its against Whites and Asians.
And you also think that its perfectly fine to remove 'less-competent' people as long as they are White or Asian and replace then with presumably even 'less-competent' black people?
> If leftists/liberals wanted everyone to be treated fairly without prejudice of their race or sex
Which they do.
> then they would not continually push for the expansion and entrenchment of race and sex based affirmative action programs
They would continually push for the recalibration of them, which may include expansion in some areas.
> which deliberately exclude people from employment opportunities, scholarships, networking opportunities and many other essential resources.
That is the opposite of what AA programs do; AA programs address pre-existing structural exclusion.
> If you abandon the goal of equality of opportunity as the left has for the more dubious goal of equality of outcomes
Equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes are not opposed goals, and the left hasn't abandoned the former for the latter. The left, OTOH, recognized that the absence of the latter causes the absence of the former (outcomes at t0 define opportunities at t1; one of the most important parts of outcomes are the opportunities that they create) and so in the absence of equality of outcomes, corrective measures are necessary to create equality of opportunity, and those measures are in many cases going to involve moving toward equality of outcomes, both in direct nature and indirect effect.
> Equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes are not opposed goals, and the left hasn't abandoned the former for the latter.
They may not be opposed goals but if a method includes the exclusion of certain racial and sex groups then you can not call the method an equality of opportunity. You are simply trying to gift success to a preferential and privileged race or sex. That is the method the American liberal left has chosen. And it is racist and sexist methodology.
> The left, OTOH, recognized that the absence of the latter causes the absence of the former (outcomes at t0 define opportunities at t1; one of the most important parts of outcomes are the opportunities that they create) and so in the absence of equality of outcomes, corrective measures are necessary to create equality of opportunity, and those measures are in many cases going to involve moving toward equality of outcomes, both in direct nature and indirect effect.
Equality of opportunity will never, and can never guarantee an equality of outcome.
In most cases including employment and other competitive activities there will always be losers. When two tennis players play a game there will be one winner and one loser. When there is a management spot open in a company there will only be one winner and multiple losers. When 1000 applicants apply for a single job opening there will be one winner that gets the job and 999 people who lose.
What the Liberal Left has embraced by promoting equality of outcomes is the removal of equality of opportunity in its entirety for anyone they have preemptively decided should be the looser. There can be no competition in the first place and there is no opportunity. Winners are simply anointed by a committee of divinely anointed deciders.
If 1000 people apply for a job and 999 of them are White and Asian men and one is Black woman and the anointed deciders decide that a Black woman should get the job, which is what race based quotas do, those 999 white and Asian men had no equality of opportunity period.
If this is the sort of game that the Liberal left thinks they are going to play with hundreds of millions of people's lives, and they think they cap pick and choose who's hopes and dreams come true, and they can exclude hundred of thousand on a whim to meet an arbitraty and ever changing percentage of racialy balanced winners, good luck. The small window of accaptence of these sort of ideas are closing with the Baby Boomers. The vast majority of people under under 60 do not sees these type of policies as fair or good. And they have every right to reject them. These are massive iniquality that the left thinks they are entitled to try and engineer into a very fragile and tenuous democracy.
In conclusion promoting the equality of outcomes is erasing the possibility of equality of opportunity. And in the specific case of hiring decisions using race as a criteria for deciding who wins the job it's simply an act of blatent discrimination by the specific employer and the management who made the decisions.
> They may not be opposed goals but if a method includes the exclusion of certain racial and sex groups then you can not call the method an equality of opportunity.
Actual affirmative action programs do not include the exclusion of racial or gender groups, so your comment is a non-sequitur regardless of its validity in isolation.
> Equality of opportunity will never, and can never guarantee an equality of outcome.
Which is why its likely affirmative action will always be necessary, though the calibration will need to change over time, because while a cohort having equality of opportunity between subcohorts does not, as you accurately describe, produce equality of outcome, inequality of outcome within the cohort does guarantee inequality of opportunity in the successor cohort.
However, we're nowhere near that sort of nearest-approximation-of-ideal situation where the inequality of opportunity we are concerned with leveling is merely the result of the result of the inevitable inequality of outcome in a prior cohort with equalized opportunity; we still see historically disadvantaged groups (by race/ethnicity, but also gender, gender identity, sexuality, and other axes) continuing to be disadvantaged not only by durable effects of past de jure and de facto discrimination, but also in many cases by overt and covert current discrimination.
> The vast majority of people under under 60 do not sees these type of policies as fair or good
Every poll I've ever seen breaking out support for affirmative action policies by age groups, and I've seen a lot over the from the early 1990s through the last couple of years, has consistently found support higher among younger Americans. (And also shown overwhelming majority support for Affirmative Action generally, though only minority support for the kind of strict mechanical preference measures which have generally been eliminated many decades ago everywhere except college admissions.)
> Which is why its likely affirmative action will always be necessary.
Affirmative action programs like most progressive ideology and policy has simply not produced any tangible lasting results. In most respects the focus groups of these programs are in worse shape now then they were 30 years ago. The presumption that 'racism', 'sexism' or 'oppression' is responsible for the failure of certain groups is simply unfounded blame shifting by sloppy ideologues. And the notion that gifting them undeserved employment opportunities is going to fix there problems is also a misguided and harmful idea.
The premise is simply wrong and will continue to fail at its stated goal but have the consequence of creating new groups of disadvantaged people who have been systemically discriminated against for having an undesirable skin color or genitalia according to the Liberal Lefts preferred fetishes.
Either out of social opposition or economic necessity these programs will be ended. The most egregious of policies such as race based admission quotas that certain universities use is already under sustained lawsuits and there is every indication that they will be forced to stop there racist and misandrist discrimination against European and Asian men.
> Every poll I've ever seen breaking out support for affirmative action policies by age groups, and I've seen a lot over the from the early 1990s through the last couple of years, has consistently found support higher among younger Americans.
The Baby Boomers cling to these ideas out of stubborn habit but people under 60 when asked if they think certain racial groups should get preferential access to job opportunities strongly disagree. That's not to say certain groups think they themselves should get preferential access to jobs for xyz reasons. Disparate groups claiming they deserve affirmative action for a cornucopia of mostly undefinable grievances like 'oppression' and 'reparations' is not going to sustain these misguided programs in the current century.
It's a shame that people cling to these misguided failed ideas. There is a lot of good work people could do trying to fix the broken communities that have problems. But I suppose that would be a lot of work and perhaps not as economically rewarding as keeping a failed and bloated bureaucratic failure on its feat at least until they can retire.
> The Baby Boomers cling to these ideas out of stubborn habit but people under 60 when asked if they think certain racial groups should get preferential access to job opportunities strongly disagree.
Preferential access to employment opportunities isn't the point of AA; modern employment AA programs are mostly outreach and other funnel programs to neutralize existing structural preferences (hiring preferences have, in fact, been bright-line illegal for decades.)
Which is why there is simultaneously majority support that is higher among younger Americans for affirmative action in employment, despite majority opposition to hiring preferences.
> It's a shame that people cling to these misguided failed ideas.
It is a shame that people cling to false ideas about what the debate is even about.
In fairness, I'm aware of the hypocrisy in using positive discrimination to combat negative discrimination. I just haven't heard any better ideas to fix the problem. And the argument that we owe a debt to continue our forefathers' unfinished work towards a more perfect union is persuasive to me.
There is no positive and negative racial discrimination. There is only racial discrimination and its always a bad thing.
If you are advocating for racial discrimination against European people then your no different then European people who advocated for racial discrimination against Africans.
There was many books and arguments that advocated for discrimination as a 'good thing' in the 18th and 19th century. They are as morally bankrupt as the arguments made today in favour of racial discrimination against Europeans.
A more perfect union is not achieve in any sense by adopting racial discriminatory policies. You are headed in the opposite direction. These policies will be short lived and overturned, but in the meantime cause enormous harm and injustice.
Its very important that well intentioned people understand that they are playing with fire that they will not be able to put out with this issue. Racial discrimination in the 21st century, especially in education and employment are for all intent and purpose a form of slavery. And the people who are being effected by these illegitimate racist policies are growing a fire inside and it is spreading and that fire is going to grow and grow.
Trump is just the first spark of this fire if you understand me. There is righteous indignation of these policies and severity of the opposition to these injustices are going to be much more explosive then the 1960s were in terms of racial and societal disintegration.
You can not fix the problem of a perceived under-representation of certain groups such as Africans by forcefully removing and ghettoizing hundreds of millions of Dispirit European ethnic and religious groups from employment and other opportunities. I simply do not think many on the left understand the gravity of the repercussions that are unfolding because of these policies.
This is a curious strawman, but I'll play, what the hell?
I believe you and I agree that there has been systemic oppression against, let's choose african-americans in particular. Slavery, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, Block-Busting, these are pretty cut-and-dried examples.
So the government did this stuff. I maintain that, as beneficiaries of our forefathers' efforts in establishing this country, we owe a debt to continue their work and clean up their messes. It's a great benefit to live here and I have to be honest, I didn't do shit. I was born here. I did nothing but get born. My grandfather fought, my father fought, on for several generations. I am a businessman, that's what I do, and that's fine.
But there's unfinished work to be done. I think we owe a debt to continue that work. And this injustice is one that merits redress. Would you do nothing? Can you argue that point? Do you have a better idea? I hear so much from the right that basically boils down to "let somebody else do it." And that's... disappointing to me, as a fairly conservative guy with fairly conservative values. I really do believe in this dumb 'America' thing and I believe it merits sacrifice. An old-fashioned idea, I realize.
> So the government did this stuff. I maintain that, as beneficiaries of our forefathers' efforts in establishing this country, we owe a debt to continue their work and clean up their messes. It's a great benefit to live here and I have to be honest, I didn't do shit. I was born here. I did nothing but get born. My grandfather fought, my father fought, on for several generations. I am a businessman, that's what I do, and that's fine.
Your argument is confusing your very personal emotional cultural and racial feelings with what you assume to be the experience of other American citizens, this is a false presumption. You are further assuming that these feeling supersede Our legal framework and constitutional rights.
> "beneficiaries of our forefathers"
For my self and I can attest for most of my social circle neither George Washington or any of the colonial American founders or 18th and 19th century Americans are my 'forfathers'. The are the founders of America and I am legally an American citizen but I have no cultural or hereditary connection to any of these men or America previous to my families very recent immigration to this country.
"we owe a debt to continue their work and clean up their messes"
Again there is no 'work' that I or any other American citizen is legally obligate to do to as you say to 'clean up there mess'. On a general note one of the key freedoms that we enjoy in the modern democratic state that separates us from feudalism is the abolition of intergenerational debt. And again there is no intergenerational relationship between myself and any historic American hereditary.
Do you think that a Ukrainian immigrant who immigrates to this Country in 2017 should be denied employment to give the job to an Ethiopian immigrant who immigrates here in 2017 also to 'finish the work' of 18th century English American who farmed potatoes there whole life and probably never even saw a an African let alone owned any land or slaves?
Quite frankly its a bizarre and brutish sort of racial totalitarianism that is being put forward by American liberals to deny opportunity to broad brush of people they have chosen to discriminate agaist.
Should a Chinese immigrant who works as a dishwasher be denied a spot at Harvard to make room for a Black American who comes from a Millionaire sport star family so that an arbitrary quota is filled?
These historical grievances are alien to an increasing percentage of the American public who has no racial or historical connection to any of these issues. And we are certainly no going to forsake out future wealth and prosperity and the opportunities of out children to 'make happy' a small wealthy group of mostly white Americans who think they have the right to discriminate against us for 'good reasons'.
You say you owe your country nothing. If you truly don't think so, we're all the poorer for it. A very modern malaise. The right wing in this country has taken a curious turn of late.
I think embracing these imagined grievances is going to lead you down a dark road, but living well is the best revenge. Enjoy whatever it is you get out of your trolling. Ta ta.
I owe the United States and fellow citizens precisely what they owe me. The right to succeed or fail based on my abilities with the right to equal opportunity under the law regardless of my race religion etc.
I certainly do not owe another man's child my child's future and wealth because we have been christened 'White People' and are now responsible to atone for unfashionable property holding of 18th century English American Noblemen and be discriminated against by the state. If that is what the 'left' of America thinks this country stands for and that is how we should live then I am fairly certain they will continue on the downward trajectory into the pages of history and possibly the insane asylum.
A healthy and prosperous farewell to you my geriatric Boomer good man.
> There really seems to be a prevailing opinion that racism and sexism are just fine when directed towards white men.
White men benefit immensely from our position of privilege. The notion that "racism" and "sexism" against white men exists in our society (the US) is just completely out of alignment with the facts as they are.
Your statement is roughly analogous to someone opining that restraining a prison guard from beating inmates is tantamount to imprisoning the guard.
This isn't to say that white men aren't victims of discrimination (race or gender-based), but only that this sort of victimization is highly context-dependent and not at all systemic. It's not on the same level as "racism" and "sexism" as it applies in this context, as these two things require a significant power imbalance. White men have no shortage of advantage on the balance of power.
You're using the relatively recent redefinition of the term "racism", that claims that racism is only systemic prejudice from a position of power (the so-called prejudice+power definition).
With this definition, yes, it is impossible to be racist to white males in US.
The problem is that this definition is not what the word actually means in colloquial English. So when most people talk about racism, they have that conventional definition in mind, not the stuff that social studies use these days.
And frankly, this attempt to rewrite the dictionary doesn't seem to have any reasonable justifications. We already had various terms and combinations of terms that describe the nuances fairly well - we had "racism" to mean "racial prejudice", and we had "systemic racism" to mean prejudice+power.
The only reason why I can see to change these around, to, effectively, replace "racism" with "racial prejudice", and "systemic racism" with just "racism", is because "racism" became a word with extremely heavy negative connotations. And some the same people who campaigned for it to become that - and rightly so, IMO - became uncomfortable with the fact that those negative connotations now also applied to some members of minority groups (e.g. the New Black Panthers). With the new definitions, this problem disappears - NBP is "prejudiced", but they're not "racist" anymore.
And this is very problematic, because the result of that is that bona fide hate speech - like, literal explicit calls for murdering people based on their race - is treated as more acceptable than e.g. pay disparity.
The whole "power imbalance" definition is a tremendous wedge to divide and conquer groups that would ordinarily be on the same side of an issue of basic human decency. "I can say what I like and it's not racist because I am [fill in the blank]."
To say nothing of the muddiness of a 'power imbalance'. I have been the only white kid on my block, and I got my ass kicked more than a few times because of it. Was there a power imbalance on the block? Sure. Was there a power imbalance in the school or court system the other way? Absolutely. Who's the victim this time? Where does the dividing line between them being racist and me being racist lie?
The stop sign? The school boundary?
Lot of those dudes, we became friends after knocking the hell out of each other for no reason, and let me tell you, we walk into their house and systemic racial prejudice popped right up again, poor family, bad education, trouble with the law. "You're so smart, help Alejandro with his homework and then you can play nintendo. Yes Ms. P."
So at school, I'm racist, on the block, they're racist, inside their house, I'm sort of racist but I still might catch a beating if the wrong cousin was hanging out because his dad was in jail again and he's looking for a skinny white kid to blame.
What a muddled mess. How could you make sense out of that gibberish?
I fundamentally reject the new definition of racism and sexism as requiring a power imbalance. Racial or gender prejudice is racial or gender prejudice. Full stop. Don't do it. This novel attempt to muddy the waters of racial prejudice by defining racism as the exclusive perk of minorities is self-defeating and ugly. A just and equal society is a better society for all within it, and by allowing the struggle to be characterized as a zero-sum game, we allow ourselves to be divided in the pursuit of basic human decency.
A lot of these plans seem to fundamentally misdiagnose the issue. Investment banking has way better gender diversity numbers than Google, but (having worked neither at Google nor in an investment bank) it seems highly unlikely that it's because "bro-culture" or agressions, micro or macro, are somehow less prevalent there.
> If you want people like him to actually change their minds, you have to be willing to hear them out first. You can't show someone where they went wrong if they're too scared to tell you what they think in the first place.
I agree with you that this minimum amount of maturity should be the standard (though, again, I think it should be the minimum standard).
However, this amounts to being the guy who will let you finish your sentence, but isn't actually listening, they're just waiting for you to stop talking so they can say "you're wrong because..." without having heard anything.
Maybe it's better not just to make people think they can speak up, but also to make an effort to actually listen when they do.
Silicon Valley controls a lot of the world's communication and we should be really worried if silencing of unpopular opinions is the order of the day.
As a "minority" I perhaps disagree with a lot of what this person has written but my reaction to it will be to counter his arguments with a better one rather than go on to silence him.
--
I have already written about this somewhat during the past elections.
There was an HN thread a week ago [0] wherein Google indicated they were using new metrics to identify and remove "terror content". The metrics include input from a variety of groups. One of the top HN comments said, "Those groups have very specific agendas. They shouldn't be allowed to block articles which disagree with their agenda." [1]
My main beef with Google on news is that they're terrible at provenance. I want to see the original source, not the pundit echo chamber. But the pundits probably generate more ad clicks.
And calling "fake news" any opinion they disagree with. I find it pretty problematic that Facebook wants to police the political debate. Kind of like if gmail started blocking emails sent to a gmail account if it disagrees with its content.
No matter what side of this debate you're on, I don't think you can argue against the notion that there is only one side of it whose adherents can feel completely free to express their opinions or argue their case without fear of retaliation. Many stupid, unsupportable statements have been made by people on the left side, but I've yet to see much in the way of internet rage mobs formed against them.
I think if google tries to punish the manifesto's author, there needs to be a massive backlash. Perhaps a grassroots effort to lobby the federal government to bust them up as a monopoly. It doesn't matter what, just cause them pain and suffering through whatever legal means are available.
Suppose, for example, once Yonatan Zunger's current employer becomes public knowledge, that company was inundated with phone calls and nasty tweets until they decide that keeping on the payroll is not worth the trouble. Would that be fair? I don't think so, but it would no different than if the manifesto author is outed and fired for expressing his opinions.
This sounds true, but is actually incorrect. Whenever women speak out on social media, they get at the very least abuse, but also often rape threats and death threats against them. That is retaliation, plain and simple.
That's just the loud stuff. There's also the quiet "oh she's too much of a firebrand" or "oh she won't fit into the small team because she might call people out for their casual sexism" that happens all the time.
>This sounds true, but is actually incorrect. Whenever women speak out on social media, they get at the very least abuse, but also often rape threats and death threats against them. That is retaliation, plain and simple.
Rape threats and death threats are illegal. They should be reported, investigated and prosecuted. (As an aside, I've seen many instances where women claim to have received rape or death threats, with no mention that they reported them to the authorities. I find that perplexing.)
If by "abuse" you mean garden-variety insults and name-calling, well, that's been one of the left's go-to tactics for a long time. And women have certainly engaged in it plenty.
I'm referring to waging public campaigns to have a person fired or otherwise professionally, personally or economically harmed. The left has done this many times to people who have dared express wrongthoughts publicly. And it has had a chilling effect against others who might harbor similar wrongthoughts and are thinking of expressing them publicly.
So far, there's been no downside for the left for employing these tactics; only upside. That needs to be changed. They'll continue these bully tactics as long as they carry no risk.
I want to see this change. I want to see leftists who gin up rage mobs find themselves facing one themselves, more often than not. I want to see companies who capitulate to the demands of leftist rage mobs get besieged by an even more vocal and organized rage mob from the right.
In short, I don't like rage mob tactics, but the only way to fight against them effectively is with opposing rage mobs.
> Rape threats and death threats are illegal. They should be reported, investigated and prosecuted. (As an aside, I've seen many instances where women claim to have received rape or death threats, with no mention that they reported them to the authorities. I find that perplexing.)
True! They should be, but they frequently aren't because there's a significant amount of time, friction, and effort required to do an accurate police report. Even more importantly, the internet's ability to enable harassment through pseudo-anonymity is unparalleled. It's really easy to send a death threat to someone over Twitter with a burner phone. It's not easy to come to the police and say "hey, throwaway99475 on Twitter posted a picture of my house and said he was going to rape me."
To quote yourself:
> So far, there's been no downside [for] employing these tactics; only upside. That needs to be changed. They'll continue these bully tactics as long as they carry no risk.
Which any 14 year old with internet access can make, the seriousness of which depends entirely on your perspective. I note, "I'm gonna rape you" isn't taken as seriously when directed against a male, meaning there is a strong component of interpretation there. What do you think the probability (of an attempt) of any particular rape threat made online is?
In the meanwhile, we are comparing this to the real outcome of someone being fired. It seems an apples and oranges comparison; Either we compare threats of rape, to threats of being fired - or actual instances of both. You can't balance real consequences with speculated ones.
You original post suggests that, because there is not retaliation against people speaking in favor of diversity efforts, we should thus create one to balance it out.
I have shown you that there is retaliation against people who speak out about diversity efforts. Thus you should retract your suggestion that we form a mob, because it is no longer necessary (among other reasons).
When it comes to professionally, personally, or economically harmed, if you don't believe that this happens to women in tech on a regular basis, then you clearly have NOT been reading Hacker News, or ANY of the accounts from your fellow colleagues like Susan Fowler!
I don't like rage mob tactics either, but you want to create a reactionary rage mob to fight the rage mob of the left created to fight the rage mob of the right. No more rage mobs, please.
One side is free to express its views at an institutional, public level. Entire corporations can express support for ill-founded political views to much praise. The other side is condemned for doing the same.
Fight angry outrage with threats of angry outrage?
It's hard to see how that makes sense.
Personally, I hope Google ignores the angry people on all sides and does the right thing. I think it's ok to have principles and standards and to stick by them when the situation is tough. (Otherwise, what's the point?)
>Fight angry outrage with threats of angry outrage?
It's hard to see how that makes sense.
Not threats of angry outrage, actual angry outrage. The left's tactics should be used against them, in greater degrees, until they cease using those tactics.
You mean there is not enough angry outrage on the right? Are you serious?
Your comment highlights the main problem in American politics, on both sides: a vicious cycle of self-victimization where participants seem to become completely blind to how their own actions are a reflection of the hated others'.
>You mean there is not enough angry outrage on the right? Are you serious?
My point was not that there is not enough angry outrage on the right. There certainly is. My point was that the right's angry outraged is not as organized and focused as the left's. In addition to random angry tweets, they need to wage public campaigns against the employers or businesses of their counterparts on the left to get them fired or professionally destroyed, the way the left does to people on the right who express badthink in public.
I'm an example of the unorganized, unfocused anger on the right. I've never yet taken concrete steps to bring about the change I'd like to see, beyond talking about it on HN.
>Show them how wrong they are by becoming like them? That's... not very wise. Also cowardly.
I have no interest in showing them they're wrong. I just want them to stop trying to destroy people who publicly express opinions which with they disagree.
As to whether or not that's "cowardly", I'm not really concerned.
Why is it interesting to you that one side of this debate doesn't feel free to express itself? This debate has that in common with plenty of other debates, from the legitimacy of ISIS to the criminality of child pornography --- both of which are debates that have happened in some form on HN, if you think I'm just cherry picking. Sometimes these dynamics form simply because there's a clear right answer, and we're repulsed by the implication of the wrong answer.
I'd ask you to read some of my past posts that brush up against this subject matter. I consider myself aggressively moderate, but if you look at the "results" of what I considered rather unoffensive thoughts, you'll see that they were met with almost immediate silencing.
First; it's a bit disingenuous to paint it as a white vs black; since much of the substance of the debate to my eyes is the nature of the intervention you chose, not "is there necessarily a problem", but given that, I think it's very fair to say those on the spectrum of opinion short of "full unflinching support" have felt a chilling effect as of the last few years. Granted I can only speak for myself, but to suggest that differing opinions on the greys of implementation could be perceived as "repulsive" is an excellent and apt example of how far the discourse has already fallen. It's on both sides, frankly. Extremely polarized with dogma abounding. I don't know how to fix that problem, unfortunately.
Let's be super clear: if this guy gets fired, it would not be because he expressed his opinions. It would be because he has abhorrent opinions that will forever affect his ability to work with women, whom he has decided are inherently incapable of working at Google.
It is tempting to reduce an argument to the most uncharitable caricature imaginable. To counteract this, image I transported you to a world where there was not a subconscious misogynistic pressure keeping women out of programming and women chose not to become programmers because of some combination of average differences in personality and variance in ability. What would this world look like? How would it differ from our own?
Well, you probably wouldn't see women constantly exiting the field of tech because they encounter endless entrenched sexism, and endless skepticism of the existence or significance of sexism.
An interesting question. Is that a commonly cited reason for women leaving engineering programs? If we were to poll women who dropped engineering and sexism was low on the list of reasons for leaving would this reduce your certainty?
Oh sorry. I was too broad. He wrote that it is unpopular for him to say that, for many biologically determined reasons, women do not have the traits required to excel in computer science, and that in reality the lack of their employment at Google could be reducible to their being women.
He then went on to explain at length that any effort to suppress this sort of opinion is the real diversity problem.
So I'd summarize that as: he believes that women are biologically not fit to work at Google, and therefore diversity programs are misguided, and therefore the real diversity problem is in not taking his unpopular opinions seriously.
The vast majority of people are biologically not fit to work at Google. All he said is because of slight differences in average ability and preferences we should expect the proportion of women in that incredibly small pool of people who are capable of working at Google to be lower than you would assume if you thought there was no sexual dimorphism in traits needed for engineering.
Because of this we should expect them to be over represented in cognitively demanding jobs such as engineering at Google. And this is indeed exactly what we see. Should we positively discriminate for white people? This does not mean all white people are unfit to work at Google, it just means that on average white people are less likely to have the requisite ability, though many individuals will.
Exactly. It would be because he expressed the wrong opinions. If he expressed the correct opinions, he would face no backlash.
I do honestly get what you're saying - nobody is going to want to work with that guy. However, if he possessed the opinions and did not voice them, he would have been fine. So, it's not because he has these opinions that is the problem, simply that he expressed them.
I actually don't say that. I say that he should be fired because he has - not simply that he expressed - abhorrent opinions. It's an unfortunate epistemic reality that we don't know many peoples views until they explicitly put them to paper, but the epistemic issue doesn't cloud the moral one: he believes morally wrong things.
Are you implying that his opinions prevent him from working with women in a general sense, then? I understand where you would conclude that but I have no evidence of it so can't come to that conclusion myself. The only thing I can see is that if someone expressed those opinions, women wouldn't want to work with them.
Personally, I don't have a problem with people having bad or morally repugnant opinions. I have a problem with them acting on these opinions where it effects others.
The summary you've provided here leaves me with no confidence that you understand even the very basics of the topic at hand. Your apparent level of confidence and outrage, in light of that fact, is truly remarkable.
I noticed that you edited your post to add a comment about my level of confidence and outrage, and I thank you for using your outrage to better clarify your concerns.
Hacker culture used to trend towards libertarian ideals: free speech absolutism, cyberpunk freedom, etc. Now we have a huge mass of people at Google forming a rage mob to punish someone for expressing an unpopular idea. Should people lose their livelihoods and be blacklisted from the industry because you disagree with them? (see also Brendan Eich)
The software industry still trends toward libertarianism. A tiny slice of it in a specific area does not in some marginal ways on a small subset of social issues.
As a leftist, I find the notion that SV, northern California, or the likes of Google, Facebook, etc. have a left bias to be hilarious.
Anyone from outside of California would see SV as heavily left leaning. You have people protesting Google buses, Berkeley riots over conservative speakers, anti growth liberals preventing new construction, while simultaneously decrying the lack of affordable housing and gentrification, and plastic bags are the devil.
Most people don't want to work with jerks, and in a libertarian ideal would be free to choose whether to do so.
Most companies choose to get rid of jerks for a ton of sensible reasons. In a libertarian ideal they'd be free to choose who to hire/fire.
Large groups calling for someone to lose their job is totally in line with libertarian ideals. Nobody is calling for government regulation, this is just the (employment) market at work.
"everyone else" ... I don't know man, I haven't been ranting about this on twitter, and I find the author's document to be completely unreasonable, and many of the arguments against it to be entirely reasonable.
Maybe this just says more about our individual social groups ... or one of us is wrong about how prevalent one viewpoint is vs the other. Could be me :)
Misunderstanding libertarianism to mean "whatever the market does is just" is a common straw man. Just because libertarianism says that large groups calling for someone to lose their job is legal doesn't mean that all libertarians must necessarily believe that such a thing is moral or even right in every single case.
I think that it would not be a bad thing to have more diversity of thought in the tech community, or at least to have some basic level of considerate behavior toward people with different opinions.
I grew up in Red America; while I'm politically neutral/apathetic at this point, most of my friends/family are still varying shades of red. It was a drag to have all of my colleagues constantly and casually make insulting remarks about people that I care about.
Once, during an oncall shift, I pulled an all-nighter dealing with PagerDutys trying to keep our team's systems up; came in the next day and had to sit through a presentation where an assortment of republican party figures (no, not just Trump) were used as examples of "low IQ people" as part of some contrived metaphor that speaker was trying to make. Everyone laughed. No one made any comment about how this was unprofessional/inappropriate. Felt pretty angry.
This kind of environment is unhelpful to everyone. Obviously for folks on the right it is unpleasant, but for folks on the left it contributes to a culture of excessive contempt and hatred, increasingly detached from any actual contact with the people that they hate. This is not helpful for building winning coalitions.
It makes me think of one of our Slack channel at work that is full of jokes about Trump, the GOP, stupid republican voters, etc.
To make it clear, I personally don't give a damn F about politics, I don't vote, don't follow any political "drama". But the fact that people feel that it is appropriate to do that at work is pretty mind blowing to me.
It's the ongoing increase in partisanship. It makes it easier to form ideological bubbles even where they didn't exist before, because the ratio is so skewed to begin with, it's entirely possible to end up in a group of people selected by some unrelated criteria (e.g. a work team), and find out that there's a significant overlap ideologically. So issues that were not okay because of the potential to offend someone etc, gradually become acceptable, because (at one particular point) there was no-one in particular to be offended. Of course, once established as part of the culture, this becomes self-reinforcing...
Could someone opposed to the arguments the manifesto makes explain to me what quotes caused them to strongly dislike it?
Reading the reactions to the manifesto I'm left feeling like I'm taking crazy pills. I must have read a different manifesto.
AFAICT the main idea of the manifesto is that biological differences between men and women account for part of the representation gap. This seems to be perfectly logical and fair to me. Whether the explained part is significant or just a fraction of a percent should definitely be discussed. The available version of the manifesto not having its sources makes this a lot harder though.
> The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.
If your offense is with the manifesto misrepresenting the amount of the gap explained by biological differences I can relate to your point of view and this post is not directed at you (which quotes of the manifesto lead to this impression would still be interesting to hear).
If not, I would really like to understand where you are coming from.
The manifesto does not seem sexist (e.g. representing women in tech as inadequate) to me. Some quotes from the manifesto to support my claim:
> I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.
> 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. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business
> Many of these [biological] differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
> I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority.
> I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).
The issue is that he is trying to solve an social problem via engineering, and in trying to simplify the problem, not spending enough time researching, and by "de emphasizing empathy" he takes a step backwards.
Basically, he sets forward incorrect assertions about biological differences without the self-awareness about why he takes those differences as truth. For instance "Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things". This is true at least in a very large part because women are socialized from birth to do so. There are dozens of similar examples.
The people unhappy with him are frustrated by always having to make the same damn argument to the same people who somehow think behavioral evolution is the end-all-be-all, as if somehow the computer they're typing on was a natural result of that evolution.
Now, in this particular case I don't think the author had any bad intent, and I think people who disagree should argue straightforwardly and use this as a great, clear opportunity to address the many people who actually do agree with this person but don't speak out. I also think the author has some good feedback when it comes to how dissenting opinions are heard on the left, but it's overshadowed by his lack of understanding of the more serious problem of bias and discrimination of women in tech. (yes, it is a more serious problem than conservatives being unable to express their views - at least they can choose to talk or not, even if I'd rather everyone be able to freely share their views)
>but it's overshadowed by his lack of understanding of the more serious problem of bias and discrimination of women in tech.
Huh I didn't get that, I actually thought he understands there is a problem with bias and discrimination, but he also points out there are other reasons why there is not a balance and why there won't be a 50/50 balance and forcing it might be bad. Now, I don't agree with his writing completely and honestly haven't done the research to know if it's true or not, and personally feel like the problem is rooted in education of our young ones.
Still, I'm afraid to speak out on this issue and this is the first time I've voiced I even partially agree with him. Honestly, I just skipped discussing this issue.
> The people unhappy with him are frustrated by always having to make the same damn argument to the same people who somehow think behavioral evolution is the end-all-be-all, as if somehow the computer they're typing on was a natural result of that evolution.
I don't get that feeling and that's why I don't want to comment on it. I get a feeling like he does, anyone with an opinion that doesn't fit the super-uber-equality narrative isn't countered with arguments, but attacked, shamed and "blacklisted". As people in tech, an industry that is supposed to build a better feature, I believe we should be better than this, we should be rational and use arguments, we shouldn't attack, shame or fire someone who doesn't agree with us but discuss it. Really makes me sad and I hope I get to cash out and leave tech as soon I can. Is it fair that I'm just 25 and don't want to work on what I love anymore because people have turned it into a toxic community where differing opinions are assaulted? Isn't equality to all people, views and opinions what diversity is about?
(Note: This isn't as much as an reply to your post as much as I wanted to reply but it lead me to a mini-rant. Just like, fuck this, I don't wanna be a part of this shithole anymore)
I feel ya, this stuff wears me down too. It's exhausting thinking about this stuff and wondering what the right thing to say or do is.
However, that's exactly what the women and other under-represented minorities have to handle every day in tech! (and they don't even get the option to skip discussing the issue)
There's a reason women leave tech, and it's the reason you're feeling right now! And there's a problem if we don't address those feelings.
With respect, I feel like part of you having been down voted is because your second paragraph is doing exactly what you accuse this memo writer of, namely "sets forward incorrect assertions about biological differences without the self-awareness about why he takes those differences as truth".
A cursory reading of the literate suggests at least some evidence that the differences can't be explained by socialization, for example. See:
"In her preface to the first edition, Halpern wrote: “At the time, it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice. ... After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles … I changed my mind.”
"Why? There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys."
The problem is bringing up biological differences (even just in terms of groups and allowing for lots of individual overlap, and even in this case, when the differences aren't nec better or worse, just differences). It's a non-starter to many people, particularly on the left (see the Bell Curve).
One the one hand, I sort of get it, given historically people have used biology/similar arguments to justify a lot of awful things. If Hitler was around now, it'd be sort of disgusting to ask people to engage his argument on its merits (this is where some of the Nazi language re: this manifesto comes in I think).
But, when it's presented like it is here, making clear that individual variation is much greater than differences between groups (e.g., he's not talking about existing female engineers at google or anyone else in particular), stressing that diversity/human dignity/worth etc are all paramount even if there are group level biological differences/trends. Then I think the lynch mob/monoculture/not engaging reaction is in the wrong, and the reaction to this very much proves one of the guy's main points. But that's my two cents.
Include me as a fellow confused person. My read is a bit more succinct: "We value people who are different, but, we don't talk about what makes us different."
I am not good at hints, subtleties or reading between lines. Behaving properly in such a nuanced circumstance is really a non-starter for me and I'd rather disconnect completely than walk through that type of minefield.
1) The document makes a fundamentally flawed argument - that is, he's based his whole argument on a flawed premise that women just aren't interested in being engineers (and it's clearly wrong, because gender ratios were nearly identical until about the mid 80s; it's not a biological difference, it's a social and cultural difference, which means it has a social and cultural solution). Biological traits vary between genders, but the variance is TINY for most that aren't physical (strength, etc).
2) Even if he were right about men and women being biologically prone to certain traits, those he attributed to women tend to make them better engineers (and especially better engineering managers) anyway.
3) The document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, which makes it impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team. The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote? The next time he's peer reviewed by a woman, how does that review get interpreted? The next time he peer reviews a woman, how does that review get interpreted? The next time a female candidate interviews with the author and is denied, how likely is it that the candidate will believe they had a fair interview, or is the organiation perpetually exposed to increased legal risk forever? Such a manifesto is toxic and shows a profound lack of awareness for any professional.
1. I could not find the source stating that gender ratios were identical before the 80's in engineering. I do know that there used be a more even ratio of male/female programmers but I think the field has changed enough from those times that I would be wary of anyone claiming to make an apples to apples comparison.
2.His points about what makes a good engineering manager skips over the fact that to get good at engineering you have to practice it a lot. You have to spend a significant amount of time alone coding/engineering to grasp well enough that understanding the customer starts mattering a lot more. The guy that wrote the post seems to come from a perspective of so much experience and talent that he forgot or perhaps doesn't even know how hard it is go get started in the field.
3. I think the part about alienating women comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the manifesto and probability in general. Saying that women in general are less interested or less capable to be a google enginner says essentially nothing about the individuals before you. Trying to infer qualities of an individual from a distribution is racism but making statements about distributions shouldn't be. You can only talk about the whole distribution of google employees and perhaps justify(or fail to justify) the imbalance. Obviously, being a google employee is a much more informative prior than the gender of an individual.
> I do know that there used be a more even ratio of male/female programmers but I think the field has changed enough from those times that I would be wary of anyone claiming to make an apples to apples comparison
Yea, it's gotten a lot easier, a lot less rigorous. Problems hadn't been solved, nobody even knew if things WERE possible (let alone how to do them), and they certainly didn't have stackoverflow to go ask for help when they got stuck. Now that you mention it, perhaps you've figured it out - maybe all the women engineers have moved on to harder, more interesting endeavors.
> You have to spend a significant amount of time alone coding/engineering to grasp well enough that understanding the customer starts mattering a lot more
There is never a requirement that you have to code in isolation. Period. Paragraph. End of story. This is a fiction. Nobody should EVER code in a bubble, and especially not junior engineers.
> I think the part about alienating women comes from a fundamental misunderstanding
> Reading the reactions to the manifesto I'm left feeling like I'm taking crazy pills
I've discovered several years ago, debating very similar issues on usenet, that people (maybe some people, but a good proportion in any case) have the ability to make themselves perfectly blind to aspects of reality they decided to disregard. They'll be even ready to contradict themselves multiple times in the space of a few sentences, and never admit it, rather than allowing the possibility of a different view. I think it must be what allowed religious piety and bigotry to flourish for millennia: a natural disposition to stand with all your heart and soul to defend ideas that unite a community. Climate change (irrespective of its scientific validity) is another of those.
If you mean I'm contradicting myself, not sure: one thing is something being true or false, another is how you defend it and how capable you are of even taking in consideration that you might be wrong.
For one thing, it assumes that a small alleged "biological difference" is sufficient to explain a gigantic observed effect. If we were to suppose that this difference translated directly into a difference of precisely the same magnitude in programming competence, it still would not be enough to account for the amount of skew observed in actual gender ratios in programming.
The supposedly rational author and his supposedly rational fans apparently are happy to overlook this, however. Running the numbers and figuring out what the expected skew would be seemingly has not crossed their minds.
And a larger problem is that this is not the first time someone has made such an argument. It's been made before, many times, in other fields, and was eventually demonstrated to be false: massive disparity turned out to be more a function of bias in hiring and performance evaluations than anything else. The classic example, once again, is classical music, where the very same "women just are naturally less inclined" and "biological differences mean men are just on average better" arguments used to be trotted out to explain gender disparity. Then the classical-music world started using blind auditions (where evaluators could hear a candidate's performance, but not see the candidate or know the candidate's gender until after completing their evaluation). And suddenly... the gender ratio shifted significantly.
Music was one of the first fields to undergo this shift, but wasn't the last. And yet the author of this manifesto seems blissfully unaware of the precedent from other fields where similar arguments were trotted out. Or, to be as charitable as possible, fails to explain why programming deserves to be a special singular exception to the trend of fields arguing "biological differences" and getting served with proof that it was actually bias all along.
And largest of all is the problem that this alleged biological difference, if it were an explanation, would earn a Nobel prize for anyone who could prove it, because within living memory programming had a very different gender ratio (both for programming jobs, and university computer-science enrollment). So this biological difference would have had to have evolved extremely recently, and spread through the human population with incredible rapidity, including likely being CRISPR'd into women who already were working as programmers or studying CS, in order to un-qualify them for it.
In other words, it falls apart on even the most superficial examination of its claims. There is no "taboo" or "facts nobody's allowed to talk about" or "politically incorrect but everybody knows it's true" here. There's just an incredibly shoddy argument which has been debunked more times than anyone cares to count, and yet somehow is still accepted blindly by people who desperately want a justification for tech's gender ratio that doesn't include "this industry discriminates against women".
I don't want to put words in your mouth and would be happy to hear more of what exactly you disagree with in these quotes.
Nevertheless, here's my take:
>> Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
> He's telling this to a $650B company.
I assume your reaction is towards the "bad for business" and I agree, without any supporting evidence he is not qualified to tell google what is right.
> And then just to cover for himself, he says:
>> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.
I assume you see a conflict between striving for diversity / equal representation and opposing positive discrimination ("Discrimination to reach equal representation").
Looking at the context of the quote I think his argument is consistent though: Assuming biological differences account for a part of the representation gap, it is unfair to use positive discrimination to reach 50/50 representation. At what ratio fair representation lies depends on how much the biological differences explain for and as long as we don't know that, we don't know how much positive discrimination is fair.
>> 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. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.
I don't think I understand your pov enough to answer quote 3 and 4 but would be happy to see you expand your opinion on them a little.
Perhaps if I reversed the order of these sentences:
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. [But] Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, ....
This just makes no sense to me. As the $650B number suggests, whatever Google is doing it sure works for them. However Trump now wants his Justice Department to look into affirmative action as a form of anti-white discrimination [1] so maybe you will have the law on your side.
The thing is, the guy wrote what many people think - outside of tech. It just so happens that techies happen to be very open oftentimes.
I mean, what this person wrote, I heard it on various occasions in different formulations from various people. Even a woman (a Psychologist student at that time) once told me she'd rather have a male dentist and a male president.
I imagine tech industry to be brutal for woman, but so are probably a lot of other areas like construction works, virtually anything with hand-labour involved, not to speak about the military.
Anyways, it's great that people in the tech industry speak what they think. Maybe things change faster this way.
> The thing is, the guy wrote what many people think - outside of tech.
I agree, but that's also at the core of my (internal) confusion about it. His arguments are not new, at all. As far as I could tell he doesn't present any new evidence to back up his argument, either. So, to those who say "it is important that he spoke out, and that we have this debate": when does this debate end? Assuming we have the debate and reach a conclusion, what happens when I post a similar manifesto in six month's time asserting another conclusion without presenting any new evidence? Surely by that logic we need to have the same debate over again? It'll never end.
"We must debate!" feels very objective until you admit to yourself (as I freely will) that you're coming to this with a preconceived opinion, and won't be content until the debate is settled in the way you think it should be settled.
> As far as I could tell he doesn't present any new evidence to back up his argument, either. So, to those who say "it is important that he spoke out, and that we have this debate": when does this debate end?
The problem is that (inside Google and elsewhere) the debate ended by fiat, not because one side made their case better; and it didn't end in favor of a side with tons of science to back it (not even close). My money is on there not being much of an average difference between the population of each gender when it comes to technical talent. But much more importantly, I'm aware that the science is far from conclusive on the topic, since socialization can be pretty different to untangle. The argument at places like Google is that looking at demographic differences in a population and deciding that it must be caused by discrimination is just assuming that nothing else could possibly contribute.
> "We must debate!" feels very objective until you admit to yourself (as I freely will) that you're coming to this with a preconceived opinion, and won't be content until the debate is settled in the way you think it should be settled.
The irony is thick in this sentence. How do you not understand that if both sides claim the other does this, _the one that's actively trying to shut down scrutiny of their claims_ is by far in the weaker position?
Does it matter, for Google, whether the gap in interest-in-engineering is biological or social? Either way, there's more men doing the sorts of things that get them the skills they need to succeed as an engineer at Google, and it's in Google's best interest to hire every engineer with the necessary skills.
No, it doesn't matter, but it is sufficient if not necessary. Google's answer to socialization problems was going upstream: getting "work in tech/Google" into girls' minds earlier and earlier to combat ostensible messages pushing them away from tech. But it's all founded on the assumption that any population difference in ability must be fixable, if not at the hiring level, then earlier.
As said before, every now and then I involuntary get sucked into this debate, most of the time the other person is drunk or feels safe enough "to speak up". (haha - of course when there are no women around)
When I'm at work, I'm always surprised how they manage to hire 0 women for pure engineering jobs. (This is not my first job by the way.) Even more why there is no real discussion about that, rather: "yeah we found no woman who fits". On the other hand there is an occasional complaint about the gender inequality. Sorry, but you cannot make progress by not talking about the topics or by talking about it but not speaking your mind.
I studied engineering and there was very few women (<20%) in my class. You can't blame companies for having a similar hiring ratio. And the recruitment of the college I went through ("grandes ecoles" in France) is purely based on a math+physics competitive exam, so there is very little selection bias in the first place. So I am not convinced discrimination is the key to explain gender imbalance in engineering jobs.
What if the exams and job interviews are designed by people who are bad at team work? During my studies and also in my various jobs I observed that there is little team work, that many people even openly don't want to do it. (Managed to do it for some things, e.g. Functional Analysis) Maybe there are more ways to approach problems and at least for "real work" it seems that working in a team leads to better results. (Think all this agile thing with pair programming, retros etc etc...)
Don't forget Correlation isn't equivalent with Causation, actually there is neither a <= nor a =>.
I don't see how the exam's and job interview's focus (or lack thereof) on teamwork is relevant. How to make a better exam isn't really on trial here, because no matter how much data suggests that teamwork is as important as technical ability in an engineering role, no company or school will have a moral responsibility to ensure their exams reward good teamwork. The exam is still equally fair to any gender so long as it is totally anonymous.
Yes, Tech requires intelligence. Google in particular in famous for checking analytical intelligence in their interview. I know that's not 100% correct but I call this "pure number crunching intelligence". People there know how to solve this and that, can approximate problems and solutions.
This gender thing might be formulated as an analytical problem but it suffers high complexity. It's better to be understood empirically. But how can these people understand it empirically if there are no women around? Are they reading enough about this complex topic to still make informed decisions? Probably not.
I have an illustrative example: in Germany in those regions that have the least foreigners, there are the most Neo Nazis and people are more likely to vote for right wing parties.
Disclaimer: I didn't read more than a few sentences of such a stupid essay because I have better to do with my time. But in any case, you cannot solve this problem by writing "a better essay". IMHO this problem has to do with complexity and it cannot be solved with facts.
>I have an illustrative example: in Germany in those regions that have the least foreigners, there are the most Neo Nazis and people are more likely to vote for right wing parties.
As a counter-example: In the US, people living in the South are generally the most racist, despite Southern states having the most ethnic diversity.
How much social interaction is there between people of different ethnicities? How often is a white person neighbour of a black person? Can you compare this to, say, New York City?
I have never seen discussions about gender-based discrimination for plumbers, or biological or sociological factors preventing women to seek career in plumbing. My personal opinion, on average, women just don’t want to do plumbing. And the society seems to be OK with that.
I wonder what’s so special with the software development that causes companies to do positive discrimination, gender-based hiring targets, and other stuff these companies apparently do in the US?
>>I have never seen discussions about gender-based discrimination for plumbers
In general only jobs which have a high value of effort/money-earned are preferable to anybody.
Im pretty sure most plumbers don't get into plumbing because they are passionate about it.
Also curiously you can be passionate about something if you earn well doing it. So, ultimately its all about home much money you can make, at what effort.
Make plumbing a high paying job and calls for diversity in plumbing will go up like no tomorrow.
You said this, and attributed to me, and posed it to me as a question.
All I'm saying is no body is going to ask for increased diversity in coal mines. This is simple, and not even that hard to understand. Nobody wants to do a job where money/effort-done is very low.
The major elephant in the room here, which the memo doesn't seem to address, is that as late as the 1960's, computer programming was seen as a natural career for young women. Has biology changed that much in the last fifty years?
It wasn't just in the sixties - women's participation in computer science was growing until the mid eighties. As a woman who's helped other women learn to code, all I can say is that the interest is certainly still out there.
I recall reading a study somewhere that showed by High School, there are about the same percentage of girls interested in computers as the percentage of women in the tech industry. This article seems to present the same hypothesis, that girls are less likely to have access to a computer and develop an interest in programming.
If this is the case, then the gender imbalance has nothing to do with sexism in the tech industry or hiring practices. Google's efforts to hire more women is doomed to failure if there aren't an equal percentage of women coming in the first place.
No one who is serious about this doubts that there are women who are interested in tech and able to acquire the skills. The key question is how many women have this interest, absent any worries about matching the number to men perfectly. Even asking that question apparently causes a very interesting reaction.
Even in 1970 huge disparities existed: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_325.35.a... Shows that in 1970, women were 13.6% of computer science graduates. That rate increased over time, peaking in 1984 at 37% only to begin dropping off over time to its present 18% rate.
At one point calculators were rows of women performing rote calculations. Early programming was similarly dull/full of detailed work that went through successive waves of abstraction.
This is (also) a sexist stereotype, but maybe just maybe women are drawn to detailed work (say, needlepoint knitting, picking berries) while men are drawn to broad, imprecise work (such as selling insurance policies or chasing antelope). Maybe women are better at punching BCD numerical integrators for problems brought down from Feynman and Fermi, while men like coming up with a whole new language that compiles to PHP.
"Women" and "men" meant as generalities and not in the least implying that within-group variation can't be larger than between-groups variation.
My issue with this is that the classifiers always seem to change, and that no-one can ever seem to agree on what the relevant biological classifiers are and how they apply.
If men are drawn to broad, imprecise work, why are more men not marketers (tech or otherwise)? Or, if women are more "creative" as the memo implies, then why wouldn't women be more suited to coming up with a whole new language that compiles to PHP?
And, centrally to it, if tech hiring is broken on so many levels, why does it get it right in terms of gender?
I think the point is you 'wrote' bulk of the code on paper. There weren't keyboard interfaced computers as common as they are today.
So once some programmer writes the code/flowchart, and gives it you on a paper. Its supposed to converted to punch cards/switches/whatever and then fed to a computer. The difference between the former and latter now is huge. The latter job is now nothing more than being a glorified typewriting kind of work.
I realized this when I was doing some really complicated GUI work on an embedded system. I was programming all the time on paper, I was doing it a lunch table, during transit, thinking during shower etc etc. After working several papers worth of programming, I converted it to C code, a few hundred to may be a thousand+ lines.
The real job of writing C code was largely a ritual that took like a few hours. Working out the algorithm was real programming that spanned a few days.
I could see how early programming went. Plenty of algorithm writing and unit testing through induction on paper.
This is the one place where I actually do agree with the author of the essay: computer programming is now seen as a high-status field, so it's worth it for men who seek high-status careers to displace women and construct rationalizations. It wasn't high-status in the 1960s.
My dad programmed computers in the 60s. He wore a coat and tie everyday. He worked for, among other places, NASA. He drove a Jag, several Jags. I wear a tie at funerals and only then when forced.
Operating a computer in the 1960s was arguably more high-status. Computers occupied entire rooms and were operated mainly by military, government, and academic institutions.
A couple of the suggested theories are that the tools designed to select applicants changed to focus more on logical aptitude tests, and on finding the right "culture fit."
Another argument which I have seen is that the marketing changed to focus more on men and boys, and so the narrative changed to "personal computers are a thing for boys". Here's an Apple ad from 1985 often used to support that argument:
Personally, I find both of these arguments plausible. You don't have to look too hard to find engineers who don't think tech hiring works very well, and yes, that advert does exclusively talk about boys.
I don't think "sexism" caused the current imbalance any more than I think Google's algorithm is "racist" when it shows racially objectionable content.
I think it's a case of a rule being arbitrarily applied and having an unintended and unforeseen consequence over the far future. And if that's the case then its a legitimate and noble endeavour to try to fix "tech hiring" so that it does find the best person for the job irrespective of gender.
Without a doubt the industry has changed - it has more men in it.
The question at hand, I guess, is, have the tasks that one would be expected to perform as a computer programmer changed over the last fifty years?
Or has the hiring process - which even most male programmers are happy to admit is "broken," adjusted to favour men over women?
Two of the things that have been suggested as causes have been hiring tools focusing on puzzle solving / whiteboarding, and job applications focusing on finding "culture fit" and an ideal "programming type"
It's not hard to find male programmers who, even when gender is taken out of the equation entirely both admit that a) whiteboard interviews and culture fit is a thing, and b) is a terrible way of choosing people, so perhaps Occam's razor suggests that this is the cause rather than an inherent biological difference with an obvious counterexample?
I don't know how culture fit can be taken out of the equation. Work in modern workplaces (and in particular the office, knowledge-worker type we're talking about) is far from the conveyor-belt screw-tightening fully explicit work of our industrial past. Our whole output depends on shared mental context.
You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit, system-wide way that's immune to sensitivity training and generic pressure in the wider culture. What to do then, shoot the racists?
> You may say -- "aha, but culture fit is a proxy for racism". Fine, then people are racists -- in that very implicit, system-wide way that's immune to sensitivity training and generic pressure in the wider culture. What to do then, shoot the racists?
You can say that while "shared mental context" is important, the research says that diverse teams are higher functioning teams [1] (one of the things myself and the author of the memo would agree on is that groupthink is a bad thing!), and that if culture fit is one of the blockers, find a way of retaining its good aspects while removing its potentially deleterious ones. Some of the world's smartest people work at Google. I'm sure they can have a role in figuring it out.
That could very well be because racists are underperformers -- they are racists, which is some kind of overgeneralization bias.
Then there's fit to organizational purposes. It's doubtful that Google or SpaceX could function as an organization of racists, but maybe that level of homogeneity is best for a tire repair shop in rural areas.
Hum, while short I thought my comment was clear enough. of course the industry has changed in the sense that what it means to be a software engineer is now vastly different from what it was 60 years ago.
And today you build CRUD apps and get paged to reboot servers.
(Also, uh, I feel like "make sure you typed correctly" is a special case of "detail-oriented," which we just had an article yesterday trying to claim that men are better at because autism is more prevalent in men.)
What happens when the lone voice is in the right, and the mass of people are in the wrong, and all of the preponderance of current science and wisdom is against the lone voice?
It's no great stretch to find examples through history of this in different social contexts.
This is what's so insane to me about how willing people are to throw away the foundations of civilized society for short-term political victories. Especially for those who claim to be fighting for the marginalized, it should be obvious to anyone who's not a complete idiot that the marginalized are those who suffer in the long run when dissenting speech is punished.
Not to get nakedly political, but for someone who became old enough to start being aware of politics in the early 2000s, it was pretty easy to look at the GWB and Obama administrations and fall into the narrative of "oh, our side are clearly the good guys" as a kid and early in college (as I think most kids do). The last few years have made it clear to me that this amoral, either-with-me-or-my-enemy approach to politics is pretty independent of where you lie on the political spectrum. Every part of the spectrum has its shitty people and unfortunately we're in a cycle where those people are the ones dominating the discourse everywhere you look.
There's a reason wars of religion and ideology are always the bloodiest. If it's 1600s Europe and you're a soldier in a war of conquest, it's a lot easier to see the enemy soldiers and civilians as just trying to get by in the world buffeted by the same forces you are. On the other hand, if their entire existence and belief system are an affront to God, it was a hell of a lot easier for the worst and most bloodthirsty parts of the human psyche to kick in. The social technologies we've developed to handle pluralism nonviolently have been incredibly successful by the standards of most of human history. I guess all it takes is enough stupid, myopic, and/or amoral people to sacrifice the stability they engender for short-term political gain.
I see the same thing playing out (in much less dramatic fashion) among many of my nominally compassionate, kind-hearted friends. The other side isn't considered misguided, or to have a different understanding of the world (or heaven forbid, possibly more correct than you): they're just evil. Every dirty rhetorical trick to twist their words is fair game, and attempts from decent people to even point out that the other side is being misrepresented is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
It happened just this weekend: my friend mocked one of the points the essay author made, and when I pointed out that he was misrepresenting (or misunderstanding) it, his response was something like "I don't think men are the ones who need help in the world at this point in time". There's no such thing as truth or honesty to most people, just "how can I spin this to support what I already know the answer _should_ be"
> Every dirty rhetorical trick to twist their words is fair game, and attempts from decent people to even point out that the other side is being misrepresented is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
I avoid a lot of liberal "popular" sites because of this BS. It's not right.
It's become a moral situation for many people. in fairness, some of the social politics are literal life and death for certain subcommunities, so that is as deeply moral a question as it gets.
I think a lot of the reason for this is there's been a strong drift into separate parties by certain communities. so there's no diverse viewpoint in each (US) party and a consensus in-party that they can present...
E.g., if you believe trans people shouldn't be able to choose a restroom, you're probably Republican or affiliated. And if you're trans, you're probably Democrat. That's kind of a big deal in terms of public health to the transperson! Very much a moral question to them!
And that should be considered in why it's so hardcore of an issue.
Eh, I pretty strongly disagree. My complaint is against people who claim the mantle of being obviously, factually correct while being so incredibly dismissive of attempts to figure out what's true vs what's convenient. Judging facts on how they contribute to your ideology is a way of approaching the world that's precisely ass-backwards.
This is entirely independent of how morally-weighted the question is: in fact, the more morally-weighted an issue is, the more you should want to make sure that you're being conscientious in your approach to it, and the more disgusting I find this lack of interest in the concept of honesty vs "do what you need to in order to win". The worst part is that, if you're wrong, what you're "winning" isn't a good thing at all!
My point was that I have a big sympathy for people who do see it as a moral issue, because of the very real consequences.
I do understand what you're saying. I think I disagree with some what you're saying, but I think I significantly agree with you in spirit. Anyway. I have to head out and stop reading internet forums. :)
Couldn't agree more. The polarization I've seen in the last two years is just insane to me. I've always been pretty firmly in the center, and I feel like it's a lot of work to stay there.
Google seems to be culturally ahead of the curve, for better or worse: some of the craziest things I've heard in the last few years (eg explicit denial of the value of innocent-until-proven-guilty and idea pluralism), I heard internally from other Googlers _years_ before I would've expected to hear it outside. (Now, of course, both of those things are routine).
Similarly, there's been a bit of a turning of the tide publicly back towards sanity: the first thing I can recall seeing that signaled a defense of basic liberal tenets was The Atlantic's "The Coddling of the American Mind". No one with a baker's dozen of brain cells found anything new in that, but for the vast majority of people who only consider an idea when their chosen publications grant their approval,
it was a huge step. (Pres Obama pushed back against this kind of barbarity in his own half of the political spectrum much earlier, but he was politely ignored).
It's kind of interesting to see Google culture out in front of the pendulum's swing back, too. I can't imagine this kind of an essay being published in most "blue tribe" fora.
> What happens when the lone voice is in the right, and the mass of people are in the wrong, and all of the preponderance of current science and wisdom is against the lone voice?
Unless you're trying to endorse that memo, perhaps you should save this comment for when that actually happens.
How would we know? In all likelihood, we'd be in the majority then too...
Are we actually right? is a good question.
Are we letting people ask the provocative questions to move forward is the bigger question that must be asked. Wherever we are on the political question.
Truth often is uncomfortable.
Now, if I say "I think the memo was wrong", could you trust me? Would I be conforming ideologically to avoid blow back... or would I really believe it? :) I leave it to those who know me or hunt comment histories to form an opinion...
"Science" is often thrown around to justify things it shouldn't.
Sociology hasn't had as much success as "hard" sciences so we should distinguish between the two. (for example with the controversy around major psychology experiments being unreplicable etc)
I think you're right. There are a lot of cranks out there. But history suggests a lot of lone voices who got ruthlessly suppressed while actually being right.
The important bit - to me, at least - is we don't run a witch hunt against the lone voices. If they are right, they should be heard out - if they are wrong, they can ignored. And, if dangerous, they can be no-platformed, etc.
I have some pretty ironclad faith in the scientific method, but far less so in the scientific establishment. Don't get me wrong, I don't think scientists are doing a bad job and don't think I could do any better as an individual if I were a scientist. But most people's understanding of "science" goes through tons of filters that hurt its quality: statistical illiteracy among scientists, messed-up incentives in the publishing process, political pressure within research, skew in what the media is incentivized to cover, the obscene amount of dishonesty and incompetence in science reporting, etc etc.
I've yet to meet someone with such faith in science whose understanding of what "science" is goes beyond pop-science articles and things that all of their friends "know" are scientific fact.
In the history of science we are apt to celebrate singular voices that overturn conventional wisdom. What we don't see is the large number of cranks with TimeCube theories who imagine themselves to be geniuses.
The history of science has a kind of survivorship bias toward good ideas, and most people who think they're the next Galileo are almost definitely wrong.
Change is hard for everyone with any systemic bias in the game. Outrage is a byproduct of that systemic bias and comes from a primal level need to eliminate a percieved threat. It's quite natural of a reaction. But it only proves the authors point overall.
Nevertheless, someone can have a seemingly innocent and accurate observation such as: there appear to be less women in tech overall and we seem to be forcing policies which appear to reduce the overall quality of our performance. Some of this may be subjective, "quality" for instance.
His conclusions and assumptions may or may not be accurate and may not make a difference in moving the needle forward. Some might be accurate on some standard deviation level. But he doesn't deserve to be fired or harmed for putting out his opinion.
It is natural to want to be outraged by something that is interpreted as a threat and there is significant historical context for doing so. Hostility towards women working at all as one example. Or perhaps for instance, the "bro"/"frat" culture of silicon valley being pretty rampant. A side effect of hiring people straight out of college perhaps?
The only way to be constructive in this is to continue to challenge the status quo. Violent outrage does nothing but prove the point that we are incapable of getting past any systemic bias to make our case heard.
I appreciate the effort to try and question the effectiveness of a policy and question the bias of a percieved political echo chamber. If there is historical precendent (and I claim there is) that refutes the underlying argument, then state those clearly.
One such example is that women have repeatedly mentioned exiting the field because of how they are typically treated by their peers. It is a bit ironic that the author mentions tribalism as a problem at Google because exclusivity of women, bros promoting bros, and the overall bias is quite obvious in the industry. Another commenter mentioned this here, but the obvious historical context for programming and computer science being a natural fit for women in the early days. Social tribalism and the echo chamber indeed has everything to do with the problem, but not in the way I think many are implying. To wit, I actually think that also approaching diversity of thought would be beneficial to Google - perhaps even help eliminate the same homogenous bro culture; just as much as it might help reduce progressive bias or any other systemic bias that plagues the community from hiring diverse talent.
It's interesting to note that the only reason this is a news story is because "a Google engineer" wrote it. If the essay had been published entirely anonymously, then it would have attracted no attention at all, like a dozen similar essays.
And they all were all pretty mad. Which naturally nobody here seems to care about while everyone is busy writing up ten paragraphs of apologia about this stupid mess of an essay.
Read the titles: S.F. ‘tech bro’ writes open letter to mayor: ‘I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people’, ‘riff raff’ and Exclusive: Here's The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]
A news story presents novel recent events, given context by a narrative. The title of a piece informs the reader of that narrative.
It is a given that when Breitbart posts an article about a shooting in Chicago, it's not about the shooting, it's about the narrative: Black people love doing murders. When people complain about right-wing media pushing crime stories, they're not saying that the crimes didn't happen, but that they object to the narrative being advanced.
Here, the narrative is that "tech bros" are sexists, and that SF companies are filled with tech bros, who make racist products.
(The Atlantic hot take explicitly states this: "The kind of computing systems that get made and used by people outside the industry, and with serious consequences, are a direct byproduct of the gross machismo of computing writ large. More women and minorities are needed in computing because the world would be better for their contributions—and because it might be much worse without them." Google has to have minority programmers, because otherwise Google will make sexist websites. This is something of an odd assertion-- you would figure that it would be much more important to change Google's management, but Brin, Page and Schmidt are important DNC donors, so the Atlantic can't suggest that their shares be seized.)
An anonymous essay, on the other hand, would be one where the author doesn't identify himself as a white male Google employee first, and instead just talks about the actual issue at hand. Just look at the thread here, and the one earlier, about the essay itself. Many people agreeing with the author, and yet none of them are being roasted alive on social media. Why? Because nobody's started their comment with "I'm a VP at Microsoft, and I think that..."
Without a hook for a narrative, the story would just be "sexists exist on the internet", which is very much not News.
It's only interesting because it was said in a context where you're not allowed to say it. This is a mainstream debate that has been undertaken without much controversy by mainstream social scientists.
See, for example, this debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke:
Steven Pinker & Elizabeth Spelke | The Science of Gender & Science | Mind Brain Behavior Discussion
I'm a little confused when he writes, "Yet a newer form of discrimination is starting to greatly alarm me, and that’s discrimination against anyone with a point of view that’s deemed offensive to the tech majority."
This has been the case for as long as I've been in the industry. Heck, it's probably older than the industry. Simply saying, "there’s still far too little diversity" has been enough to get you mocked, downvoted, shouted down, and generally dismissed for decades. There's nothing at all new about it.
When I first read the manifesto, It sounded like a regurgitation of Jordan Peterson's content. After being immersed in his lectures I found it very hard to contradict his points not just because of his eloquence but also because of his method for vetting ideas. I am very glad that his stuff has gained so much popularity because I may finally find counterpoints stick against his arguments.
Why are people so outraged at this guy? I read what he wrote and it honestly sounds like he's trying to be helpful. It's at least polite. The knee-jerk "SEXIST!" reactions to him come off extremely self-righteous and immature.
There are a hundred other male-dominated careers and I never, ever hear women complain about not being equally represented in them. Why? Because they're not attractive careers.
Another thing is people are outraged that the engineer seems to denigrate a whole group of people as not as good engineers, and the eng is doing groups a disservice but when people bash "whitemaleness" you don't see the same reaction of, well, please don't lump all while males into one group, don't denigrate a whole group.
A noticeable issue is in google and other tech cos it's totally okay for people to virtue signal against white males, even Asian males. Any other group and you're treading on very thin ice. You're likely to get summoned to see an HR rep.
And hundreds of female dominated careers that no one seems to find problematic. In France, judges or doctors are predominantly female. These are high skills/high responsibility jobs. I don't see anyone claiming this is a discrimination.
No, he's using a biological justification to openly discuss different ways to foster diversity. This is one of his points: the most common argument against him is just that you think he's a sexist, not because you don't think his ideas will actually foster any kind of diversity. And I don't understand that. The reaction here is the opposite of tolerance and diversity.
edit: I'm going to give a personal example: I strongly supported legalizing gay marriage, but I also support the right of anyone to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake or to run a church and not perform gay marriages. And I've had numerous former friends chew me out and shun me for being "intolerant". It's that attitude that makes reasonable political discussions harder and harder (at least in the US right now) because it makes everyone fear to give up anything to reach a compromise or to even understand each other.
But we're back to discussing the reaction again. Which is a neat way of avoiding the content of the article itself.
I have no particular need to apply the label of "sexist" to this guy. I have no opinion, nor enough information, to say whether he should be fired or not.
I do think he's profoundly wrong though, and think his arguments about biological differences bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly discredited arguments.
>> he's trying to find a biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career.
>> avoiding the content of the article itself.
That's what I'm talking about. I also think his ideas wouldn't be terribly effective, but I think villifying and dismissing him just for saying it does more harm than him saying it. That's why there are people focusing on the reaction. It doesn't really matter who the onus is on to justify his claims if you're not going to actually listen to anyone who disagrees with you anyway. And you can't claim you actually listened, because you explicitly said he was arguing in favor of excluding people based on class. That's what you heard from all of his suggestions to approach inclusion a different way.
What does "bear at least a passing resemblance to some wholly discredited arguments" mean? Is this the same sort of thinking that has people rabidly ferreting out "dogwhistles" in normal speech?
It's not about exclusion, it's about preference. We seem to be trying to force a result, in the name of equality, when there may not in fact be any inequality. I'm not saying there isn't sexism in Silicon Valley. I'm saying that trying to steer women into certain fields of study they may not, on average, be as interested in it as men seems really dumb.
If companies were really, truly interested in fairness and equality, then their HR policies for hiring would say one and only one thing - that the best candidate is the one that gets the job. Only exception would be issues with background checks or perhaps questionable/falsified work history or resume. Other than that, the rule stands. There would be no need to ensure "diversity" as a corporate policy because any and all minorities that apply and are the best will get hired. In those cases, HR would be there to document in detail who was the best and why to protect the company from frivolous diversity related lawsuits. HR would also act as a check and balance on imperfect and possibly biased individuals.
> If companies were really, truly interested in fairness and equality, then their HR policies for hiring would say one and only one thing - that the best candidate is the one that gets the job.
It's strange though that you will find many engineers who say that HR policies for hiring do a poor job of finding the right engineers for the job (whiteboarding tests, easily gamed, "culture fit" etc), but who don't seem as eager to admit that these factors, rather than "biological differences" could be what are excluding women.
Whiteboarding tests are not HR policies anywhere. HR has next to nothing to do with who gets hired other than when they intervene. They're typically the last step of the process.
> biological justification to exclude a class of people from a high-status career
No. He's proposing a biological explanation for why the career is not split 50/50 between men and women. An explanation which frankly sounds plausible.
In addition to career attractiveness, the thing is tech is an easy target for the modus operandi. Companies in tech deeply need to have a good image and reputation. When your business model is B2C and you're targeting growth at all cost you can't afford a boycott campaign on Twitter, or a few blog posts on medium about sexual harassment, etc.
Other mostly male-dominated industries do not have this characteristic. Do construction companies care about PR? Do financial companies care? Do oil exploitation companies care?
I am not sure Uber users really care about sexism at Uber when it's 2am, they are outside of a bar and need to find a cab. I don't think users will switch away from gmail or google.com en masse because of the male/female ratio in this company. In fact outside of the microcosm of the Silicon Valley and its satellites, I don't think these issues are drawing that much attention.
Right, he's just asking questions, what's so harmful about that?
He's "asking" whether or not an entire category of people deserve to be in his field. Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers. That is on its face extremely offensive and damaging. Imagine showing up to work today in silicon valley as a female engineer. Imagine having spent years, decades, busting your ass to get a job in a field you've been passionate about since you were a child and here some asshat out of left field can dangle your entire career out over a precipice in front of the world like some circus act.
That's the real problem here, the problem of entrenched misogyny and tribalism in the industry so deep that it means everyone who isn't a white skinned techbro has to constantly validate and re-validate (and re-re-validate) their own existence on an ongoing basis. White dudes have the luxury to call into question the validity of the careers of hundreds of thousands of other people with just a few words, but they never seem to have to prove their own worth. That's the problem here.
The industry, the world, is on an un-level playing field, with those who are at a disadvantage at the edge of a cliff facing a steep slope to get further from the cliff. Those higher up sometimes ask "but do they really deserve to be here? what if we just push them off, look how close they are to the edge, it would be so easy". This is not ok.
> Which means he is actually questioning whether an entire gender deserves to be allowed to be engineers.
No, he is not, and your choice of words like 'deserve' and 'allowed' to add intent that wasn't present in the original is unfortunate.
It's NOT a question of 'permission', so it's not about who is allowed to be an engineer and who isn't. He is specifically questioning whether positive discrimination to ensure there are equal numbers of men and women engineers at Google makes sense, if there are innate differences in the degree to which men and women DESIRE to be engineers.
Like it or not, I think speaking openly against defined corporate dogma will get you in trouble in most places. He should probably have realized that and adjusted his course accordingly. Outright being fired is a pretty harsh sanction, and in this case it probably only came to this after the story blew up and Google had to exert damage control in public. A more conventional response would be an uncomfortable talk with your manager and the implicit warning of your career being sidetracked. That alone is enough to keep most people in line.
I don't think the core of this matter is if he was right or wrong, or if he overstepped the red line of PC. I think it's about any culture or any company having things that you shouldn't say. You can challenge these but you do so at your own peril. I think if a Google employee wrote a ten-page, widely circulated, manifesto on the ickiness of ad trackers, he or she would get into similar trouble.
Just as he has a right to say it, I have a right to argue, complain, ridicule, etc. Why should his view be given a platform while mine is denounced. Seems people want to silence his critics. Controversial views are not safe from criticism just as any other views.
> I don’t think it made much sense, and what I did understand of it seemed very poorly argued.
As someone who forms opinions, I care more about the argument than how poorly it was argued. Is it biased, or even racist or sexist, of me to have such a view?
Edit: I wish the author of this piece sounded less frightened.
I'd be frightened too if I was writing an article on Techcrunch that could potentially be seen as supporting the memo too much, since as we've seen that's the sort of thing that gets people fired once Twitter finds out about it.
> But this groupthink terrifies me when it’s used to bully people for exercising their right to free speech. How will we know what people are truly thinking if we rush to silence them?
I think "right to free speech" is a weak and kind of scary argument to be making here. Inside a corporation, you don't have the same right to free speech you would have on the outside. HR can fire employees for things that wouldn't get you arrested for saying in public.
> I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.
I think a better argument would be that the "manifesto" wasn't actually saying anything particularly controversial, it was just a statement of opinion that many reasonable people would agree with. Perhaps it contains some assumptions that aren't backed up by recent research, but unknowingly saying something that's not true shouldn't ordinarily be a fireable offense.
I would rather work at an employer where employees feel free to discuss hard problems that are relevant to the work environment for which there aren't any easy answers than one where minority opinions (or even majority opinions that contradict the leadership) are silenced. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to work at an employer where people felt free to say deliberately offensive things without repercussion.
> I think "right to free speech" is a weak and kind of scary argument to be making here. Inside a corporation, you don't have the same right to free speech you would have on the outside. HR can fire employees for things that wouldn't get you arrested for saying in public.
It's an argument that certainly makes a lot of sense from a libertarian perspective. But those of us on the left have already dismissed similar arguments - we know that when private commercial entities are sufficiently powerful, the limitations that they impose on their employees, customers etc can be so strong that they cannot be unchallenged (see the entire history of workers' rights movement, basically). We consider this immoral, and advocate for various limitations on the ability of businesses to do whatever they want.
If free speech is a public good, then why shouldn't the same standard be applied to it? I'm not even talking about legal aspects here, but purely the ethical side of things - shouldn't we at least condemn a situation where an entire industry effectively suppresses some opinions using its economic levers (employment among them)?
And if it's not considered a public good, then that should be explicitly stated, because that used to be one of the pretty basic tenets of liberalism.
The United States has historically given very broad protections to free speech in public, which is something I support and am very glad of. There is some kind of speech that isn't appropriate in a corporate setting. There are some kinds of speech that I think should be legally protected both inside and outside a corporation. I think the manifesto should fall inside the category of protected speech, as he was only saying things that a reasonable person might think given what he saw inside of Google. Workers should be free to criticize management decisions or comment on working conditions.
There are some things that aren't okay, though. I wouldn't want to work with someone who decorates their cubicle with iconography commemorating the third Reich, or who makes unwanted remarks about which of his or her attractive coworkers they would most like to sleep with.
I don't know exactly what the criteria should be for what speech inside a corporation should be protected and what should not, but I'm not comfortable with the idea that an employee has no right whatsoever to any free speech in the course of their job, but I don't think that an employee has exactly the same free speech rights while they're on the job that they would have in any public place.
I broadly agree with what you say. There are some forms of speech that shouldn't be easy to suppress by economic pressure from actors in a dominant position (like corporation vs a single employee), but where that line is in the workplace, is certainly different compared to where it is in off-work public speech. And it's not just about offensiveness of opinion - the corporation is also an actor with certain legal rights, and to unduly constrain them would also be inappropriate.
I would draw the line a bit differently, though. IMO, the distinguishing point here is that this guy wrote his manifesto on an internal corporate network. So he used the company-provided communication channel, and targeted other employees of the company, specifically to discuss how said company should be run. Is this still public speech? I'm not sure. It feels like the company should at least be able to control the communication channel. While yes, ideally, it should be possible to raise criticism internally as well, I think that is also best left as an internal company policy. If its owners think that their business run better if it's managed by yes-men, in general or on certain topics, they're probably wrong, but it's their right to be wrong in this manner.
Speaking out in public - on your own time, using public channels, and not as a company employee - is another matter, that I think deserves more protections.
No matter how you read the original manifesto or the responses to it, I think there's a level of separation one must achieve before they pass judgement on it. If you let yourself live in the binary black-and-white world that the manifesto author created, where views are either left _or_ right, you're bound to get fired up. This is a natural reaction to the fact that party identification and attacking identity tend to trigger much more primal responses than if party was removed. In my humble opinion, Google is a very good example of a company with a mixed culture. They're a hugely conservative company in how they manage their finances, pay taxes, hire employees, and operate their company to the normal world. At the same time, they attempt to create "Googley" spaces where thinking and diversity are promoted. Are these necessarily right wing and left wing ideologies? Maybe. But it's definitely a mix -- you don't see Google spending 100% of its money on social programs, nor do you see it spending 0% of its money on social programs.
Does the manifesto author have a reason to write? Yes. He's clearly scared, and clearly feels attacked, perhaps on a regular basis, in the workplace. Like many an engineer before him, he attempted to identify the problem and presented several solutions that may or may not work.
Now, were the solutions he presented the correct ones? I personally am inclined to say no. Just as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article was eloquent and well pointed at specific "problem areas" the author presumed to be at fault. The author did not provide anything to corroborate his hypothesis that things like removal of empathy would do any good to help the situation at Google. Similarly, the author's attack on outreach programs aimed at minorities did not make any effort to show how these programs were exclusively harming non-minority participants.
Now, obviously, there are questions on the other side of the plane too -- specifically on whether or not diversity initiatives help or whether or not empathy helps either. I haven't done this research -- but the author hasn't done his research, so I feel this is fair. I'm just pointing out that Google is a for-profit company. They tend to make decisions that are economically viable, and they may or may not have done research on these types of things in the past -- though I would assume they have. Again, this is a company infamous for A/B testing shades of blue for engagement. It would be silly if they were burning their cash pile on programs known to be detrimental or non-working.
To summarize: if you write a manifesto, I expect you to pull some figures and prove some points before you start pulling the political party card and getting everyone riled up about your thoughts and opinions. If you read a manifesto, don't conflate perceptions as fact without examining and thinking about them closely for a long period of time. It will ONLY lead to pointless arguing and senseless fighting, while the real issue gets ignored.
Likewise, are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in nursing?
As of 2011, 90% of nurses in the US were women[0]. That's even more skewed than tech. Moreover, the average income of a nurse in Silicon Valley is $100k. To my knowledge, there is no outcry or movement to bring more men into the nursing profession.
Quotes from the article: "Through this initiative, called 20 x 20: Choose Nursing, it awards scholarships to undergraduate and graduate male nursing students; recognizes excellent nursing schools for men; and has created a poster advertising campaign designed to appeal to men."
“One day, men might actually make up 50 percent of the nursing workforce, in a similar way that women have been able to enroll and work in law, engineering and medicine,” Lecher says. “That would be true gender inclusion and balance.”
And, there are some really good reasons to have more men in nursing -- as nurses take over more and more primary care duties from physicians, it's a really good idea to have gender diversity in providers, especially for sensitive issues like prostate care and STD's.
This is constantly brought up as a counterpoint to women in tech on HN and it seems like no one that uses this argument ever does any research. Trying to get more men in nursing has been a thing for a very long time, in many ways its like the inverse of tech. A quick Google of "men in nursing" would show you a ton of resources and opinion pieces that look like a mirror of women in tech initiatives. Just because you aren't aware of the struggles of a given field because you aren't close to it doesn't mean they don't exist.
With nursing it's very clearly a social issue. Nursing is seen as a women's job even though having more male nurses would improve the quality of health care.
There are also other female heavy professions where there it is seen as important to bring more men in to increase diversity. Generally anything that has to do with working with children (childcare, especially teaching). In education getting more male teachers, especially minority male teachers is seen as important to provide young men with role models.
In both cases there are gendered cultural associations built into the profession. Nursing is definitely viewed as feminine and software engineering is is still considered a masculine profession, although that perception is slowly changing as software becomes a more important part of everyone's life. Even if you get past that, the active shaming and harassment of people that enter or attempt to enter the respective fields keeps a lot of people out or drives them to quit.
The "men just don't want to be nurses and women just don't want to be programmers" standpoint usually assumes some immutable property (often genetics) that defends the status quo, and ignores mountains of other obvious problems that might lead to gender imbalances in a given profession. Obviously men and women are different, but there are many people that might enjoy and thrive in a profession they wouldn't otherwise consider because it's "not for them."
I would highly encourage men to go into nursing while discounting women. You don't get the hazing and the shit if you are a man and mostly the good parts, okay you get called to lift more shit... There is that.
That's kinda whataboutism though. Yes there is a disparity in nursing, teaching, garbage collection, whatever. How is that relevant to tech?
The issue in question is that women (and minorities) are underrepresented and sometimes experience discrimination/unfair treatment in the IT industry. Why is that, and what are some solutions to that? Do we need solutions to that?
If the nursing profession addressed gender disparity in some way that can be applied to tech, then that is worthy of inclusion in this discussion. If not, it's not particularly relevant.
There is, indeed, a movement to bring more men into the nursing profession.
"Although all of the benefits of becoming a nurse would plausibly outshine any kind of challenges nurses face...there are still reasons that prevent men from eagerly pursuing a career in nursing. Even today, despite the growth in healthcare, nursing is still perceived as a field that is less prestigious, and so requires less training and education. One male student, named Gillis, noted that a recent graduate of Stanford, who was interested in a nursing program, was told, “Stanford grads don’t become nurses.” There were also students, ones who excelled in school, but were also told something along the lines of, “You’re too smart to become a nurse.” Also, there’s that old sense that men still feel as if nursing is a female profession, and so men choose to pursue a field that’ll be viewed as more appropriate for men.
"Of the nearly five hundred [male nurses] who participated [in a survey] 73 percent claimed that negative stereotypes of men working as nurses realistically contributed to the shortage, 59 percent noted that what might deter men was that nursing has always, especially in previous generations, been seen as a female profession, and the rest, 42 percent felt that men lacked male models and mentors within the field."
And nurses get paid well too. You can also point to well-paying construction jobs and the like. I think (and I'm sure I'll get obliterated for saying this) but it's easier to support getting women into "tech" because they are high paying, physically easy jobs and they are super cool. Nobody thinks being a dock worker or a plumber is a cool job, even though they are very accessible with minimum post-secondary education (also notice more women go to college than men?).
Women don't go into tech because they don't like it. Boys like legos, girls like dolls. Sure there are occasional tomboys but the fact is most girls just don't like engineering.
Please don't violate the guidelines by calling names like this. It's pure inflammation and doesn't the serve the kinds of discussions we're trying to have here.
See slide 20 and 21 for the citation. Perhaps you feel this is the product of 'an insane ideology', personally I find it more convincing than the huge jumps in your argument and the original one, which jump from the assertion that men and women are different (I think most agree), to there are less women than men in IT, ergo there are far less women who enjoy or are capable of engineering.
In academic studies even tiny variations between genders are interesting, in real life not so much, the gap between genders would have to be very large to matter given the variation in individuals and experience levels.
In case you're not feeling convinced here is a graph which I find hard to square with a biological difference incapacitating women when near technology:
Early computing science had a lot of women; a woman helped land men on the moon, but the declined dranaticallly till recently over just a few decades. I find your argument that women just don't like tech for biological reasons unconvincing.
> But the truth is that there are far less women than men who are like that, and that this will never change because of biological factors.
What about all the women through the 40s up until the 80s who worked as computer programmers? For a while it was a seriously female dominated field. A woman wrote the first compiler. A woman wrote the code to help get us to the moon. A woman taught my CS courses in high school and i had two female CS professors in college (and just about half my graduating class in that major was female).
Did biology change? Where's the science that says women as a whole don't enjoy IT as much? You crow on and on about science but provide no citations, no logical coherent argument.
When I see posts like this on HN, it makes me think you haven't worked closely with women. Or even know any lol
Sure is! People can be offended all they want. Where things get really iffy is when they want 'justice'. It often means that they try to get that person fired or lambasted in front of their peers. I don't see how that's at all constructive, let alone 'justice'.
At the very least, it leads to even more divisiveness, instead of rational discussion.
As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind or worldview as a result of being insulted & fired?
My manager threatened one of my co-workers with termination if they didn't take a more proactive approach towards making the code he wrote more robust. He took out specific examples of shit code he wrote, and had us criticize it and the mindset that created it. It changed how he programmed for the better and his outlook towards his job.
Too many, all across the spectrum, have his mindset that people that do or think things they don't like should be destroyed and locked away from "civilized society." A common rebuttal I see from these sorts, after being questioned why they don't take it upon themselves to sit down and understand one another (I will concede there is a very very very small minority that this shouldn't be done with, but you're unlikely to ever interact with them), is that it's not their duty to help these people.
Unfortunately, this makes the issue worse when you start exiling certain groups and radicalized with hate.
Here's an interesting article (isolated incident) where those with extreme views were shown compassion and understanding, and ultimately disavowed their ideas:
> As a thought experiment: have you ever seen someone change their mind or worldview as a result of being insulted & fired?
...but that's not why someone in this position would be fired. It would be because their publicly stated opinions about what people are and are not capable of makes their co-workers deeply uncomfortable.
We can debate endlessly (we already have, I'm sure we will again) whether firing is the right or wrong choice, but let's argue about it for the right reasons.
As a thought experiment: have you ever seen a team work well together when one of the members has publically said that half of their team doesn't deserve to be there and shouldn't have been hired in the first place?
Sure it is. Lots of people get outraged and offended by any number of things.
For instance, I'm outraged that anything related to Affirmative Action exists period -- as I believe codified, race-based laws are disgusting and an anathema to the construct of equality and equal-treatment under the law.
Ohhhh, I see.. nobody ever showed me this linear line.. (I am a minority, immigrant.woman...) The social justice warrior reasoning were.never very clear today.
> But is it okay to campaign towards the goal of firing someone for expressing an opinion they feel outraged about?
It depends what the opinion is, and what job the person holds, and the relationship between those two things. The idea that the coercive power of government should not be deployed against expression doesn't mean all ideas or equal or that there are never conditions where expression should have negative consequences.
(In fact, any answer to your question implies that there are ideas that are unacceptable to express.)
Let's be frank, here. This is not someone merely "expressing an opinion." This is someone rallying against diversity, using pseudoscience to back up claims that women and minorities are inferior, and thus shouldn't have been hired. On top of that, they ranted about how Google had not done enough to make conservatives feel they have a safe space, when the only thing Google has done on the subject is to make others feel safe at Google.
I looked for claims in the manifesto that women and/or minorities are inferior, and I failed to find them. Would you mind providing an example of what I seem to have missed?
Again, I failed to find this claim. The one instance I found of this phrase arises explicitly within a claim about a specific hiring practice being discriminatory:
>Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
He didn't rail against diversity, he railed against what are effectively affirmative action policies. Several times he went to pains to point out he wasn't against diversity of people, just the initiatives at Google.
He railed against the idea that pay and hiring gaps must be caused by biases and, once you rule out bias, what you're left with must be some combination of cultural, biological, and personal factors. Better to discuss and address real issues and not perpetually pretend that everyone is a closet racist and sexist.
To re-examine why you rejected them, and see if other candidates were rejected for similar reasons or not. There are several studies that show that women and minorities are simply judged harsher than their peers despite having similar levels of talent and ability[1]. Examine if perhaps you fell into that trap. Obviously if someone couldn't do fizzbuzz, they shouldn't be hired. But I would wager that in many cases, there are those candidates that are very close, and they end up getting picked or rejected based on these unconscious factors.
And, also, to look at why diverse candidates are not applying to work at your company is decent numbers.
Like my husband? "I ask every person this question, she had no idea after so much hinting. People who can't answer these questions cannot operate our code base without significant help from others. The last few times I let this slide they all turned into huge disasters. So, absolutely no. " .... HR makes someone interview this girl again to that person. This girl truly is too inexperienced to fly, but no, lets reject all these c.s degree guys with projects on their github and let's make a third person interview them again. .....God, I am a doctor, I am a minority female immigrant doctor, I don't exactly get this kind of benefit of the doubt when I look for a job, okay?
actually, I think the author was pro-diversity but anti-diversity programs. in other words, he's rallying against diversity programs, not diversity.
he also didn't outright claim women/minorities are "inferior" but that biological differences mean they are good at different things and maybe driving them into tech isn't necessarily a good thing. he also further claims we should be looking at each candidate and evaluate their skills as an individual and not because of one of their attributes (i.e. race, gender, religion)
I'd urge you to reread the manifesto and not get too focused on the part with bad science. the author makes some other interesting points.
Regarding the "is it okay to fire this engineer" argument the author is making - here's what I'd ask the author. If you were managing the team this person was on, would you feel comfortable placing a female engineer on the team to work with him knowing the he fundamentally believes women are inadequate engineers?
That answer should be "No."
By that alone, that engineer has created a toxic team environment.
You can't put a female engineer on his team, he can't work across teams with other female engineers, he shouldn't be interviewing potential female engineers given his obvious bias against them, etc.
You've clearly misrepresented his views, and probably haven't read the thing at all. His point is against positive discrimination trying to even what he perceives is an statistical reality: less women apply for the job for biological reasons.
The fact that there are less women applying doesn't mean you can't find one suitable for the job, and one that's better than any other candidate applying for it.
< But this groupthink terrifies me when it’s used to bully people for exercising their right to free speech. How will we know what people are truly thinking if we rush to silence them?
This is called growing up.
We dont need to know how everyone thinks. We dont want to know either.
We tailor our words to our audience. We avoid saying or typing dumb things.
We only say what we really feel to our confidante.
These outwardly stupid writings are simply that: bad childish judgement.
Growing up is being able to hear an opposing viewpoint without automatically dismissing their intelligence or morality. Growing up is understanding that no one is immune from the influence of their peers, upbringing, or background. Growing up is engaging in a constructive conversation instead of shaming someone into silence or unfriending or firing someone in a knee jerk manner. Growing up is accepting and appreciating our differences in thought and understanding that the vast majority of people actually mean well.
Are there limits to this line of thinking? Sure, if someone is being a completely disrespectful asshole, that's when they deserve to be shut down. If someone puts forward a thoughtful essay...even a half thoughtful essay...even if that rocks you to your core...growing up is realizing that even your values are not absolutely correct.
Discussion is the only way we ever get to engage with other points of view. Discussion is an invitation and opportunity to be persuaded otherwise.
Let's be honest. Many companies and people - such as yourself - don't want dissent. And that's fine. You'll have total agreement and get a lot done.. for a while.
But then the clueful people will leave and be replaced with yes (wo)men who know what productive work looks like but are incapable of actually doing useful things. A great organization that makes leaps and bounds will turn into an okay company that grows by a couple points a year.. and then get wiped out when the new thing/idea comes along.
The author used the word "terrified" groupthink bullies. I say it is not a fear as being grown up means outlandish words are understandable ( ie not grown up)
Its not about dissent...
I put opinion texts in the same category as amazon reviews: the first few are not to be believed.
That's nice but how does what Hitchens says apply here?
The Manifesto writer apparently still works at Google. No one is silencing him. A whole shit ton of people are disagreeing with what he says. The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. No one is enforcing his silence, though in CA, Google as a corporation could dispense with his employment at will.
Are you saying that we shouldn't disagree with him, that we should be silent, and that you'll cite Hitchens for that? Really?
No. I'm saying that you don't have to agree with him, but he has the right to speak and others have the right to hear him. Perhaps re-digest 1:25-3:07.
No one is questioning the manifesto writer's right to say what he wishes to say nor others to read what he writes, although if he says what he said while in the employ of Google to others who are also in the employ of Google, he can't hang his future employment there on rights. His right to speak is with respect to the govmint and not his employer.
Again, how does what Hitchens says apply here? I think the good Christopher is on my side, not yours.
Added: I might be wrong about Google's right to fire the manifesto writer [1]. That would be something for lawyers to work over.
This idea that all opinions are equal and need to be respected is ridiculous and needs to stop. Politics is real and political opinions and actions have real consequences. Not all political opinions should be respected. In fact, it's our duty as citizens to evaluate and mock / scorn the opinions of others that we see as toxic. No one is protected from this and people that think they are, are feeling entitled to something that they do not deserve.
Protections of free speech apply to government actions only. This isn't a free speech case. Google can do whatever it wants, including firing the poster of the manifesto. If Google, for whatever reason or no reason, doesn't want such thinking in its organization, it should have no qualms about firing the poster. There is no safe space, except from the government, for political opinions. The poster should know that by know. People have been fired for way less. Many companies would not want a toxic person like that in their midst and that's perfectly fine. It creates a toxic workplace and brings everyone else down. That's a great reason to fire someone.
I find pretty unconscionable this line of rhetoric, which I see a lot lately from people on the left: "this isn't a free speech issue, because it's not the government doing the censoring".
I want to live in a society that embraces liberal values like freedom of expression. Preventing the government from encroaching on those values is a good idea. But if we then go and clamp down on those freedoms everywhere else, then it won't matter that the government doesn't do it -- nobody will be able to express themselves freely anyway.
This seems to be the society that the 'progressives' want and it disturbs me enough to have completely alienated me from that movement, and I am far from the only one, so I don't know why they aren't stopping and questioning the efficacy of this philosophy right about now.
If we are really a society that embraces liberal values, then we want those values to be upheld throughout the society, not just in the part explicitly controlled by laws.
So then the government should step in and provide protections against his firing? Should they tell Google, no you can't fire this guy even though you don't like him and he's bringing down the morale of your whole workforce? Should that apply to someone who might actually be a neo-Nazi or become one during an employment term? Should Google be forced to hire / unable to fire people tattooed with swastikas or ones that verbally support ISIS or any other number of despicable positions?
And how is the government going to choose the right side of enforcement here? Company A wants to fire an employee for X and now we have government intervention to the utmost degree. Yeah, that's exactly the kind of society that "embraces liberal values like freedom of expression." No one has a right to a job or to not have their opinions trashed because they're stupid, cruel, or whatever they may be. If you're complaining that corporations have too much power, I agree, but that's a completely different point.
I am saying that this kind of mob shaming-and-silencing mentality is deplorable. And if you choose to engage in that, then you will alienate a lot of people, including many of the best people.
I am not saying anything about government, and as I said in my previous posting, I find it weird that people keep jumping to this. We're talking about ethics, not law.
Not implying that I agree with anything the author said, but could you give an example of a "toxic" quote from the original memo? I'm confused because your comment makes it sound like we're talking about some vitriolic diatribe, which isn't the case at all.
Honestly, this whole thread could use more quotes from the original text. It's disturbing to me how much meta-conversation is being had about the author and his email without real examples. One of the biggest failings of the memo was its lack of citation where it was most needed; can we not hold ourselves to a higher standard?
That's really up to Google to decide in this case. My personal opinion on whether his writings are toxic is irrelevant. It seems a lot of people are outraged by it, both in and out of Google. If Google does decide that this is toxic, even if just from a PR point of view, they should have no problem firing the guy. That's my point. Expressing opinions is not an action without consequences.
Silencing future opinion is not an action without consequences either. I predict that Google will let him stay. If they fired him, no one would speak out on any sensitive subject in the future even with careful moderation.
"When people are not comfortable with an oppressive regime they keep their moderate opinions to themselves. Voicing any opinion contrary to the Party line is dangerous no matter how extreme or moderate it is. So all dissenting opinions you are going to hear in public will be coming from extremists (e.g. 'Have a Nuremberg-type tribunal for the Party's chiefs, lustrate the rest and their progeny for 7 generations!') because only the people who hold these opinions will be fed up enough to disregard consequences of their dissent. And there won't be many of them, since it's the definition of extremism to be in small minority.
However, for every single dissident there were tens or hundreds of thousands of silent supporters who would openly express their disgust and outrage over such horrific person but, when talking with their buddies in private, repeat and spread these ideas thus radicalizing themselves. Eventually everybody but a minority of "true believers" shifted from 'well, life kinda sucks right now but at least there is no war' to 'burn it down and salt the earth!'. When this happened the whole mighty Communist empire collapsed within a year. A 'Preference cascade'. https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-preference-cascade
"
I'm not sure what that would look like in Silicon Valley but I'm sure it would be described as a pendulum swinging far to the right.
I agree with you, but I would add to what you're saying by noting that this very thread and the opinions expressed in it, along with those expressed by the media, will influence Google's decision in a huge way. If a sufficient percentage of the general public considers this memo toxic and irredeemable, this guy could get fired (and I agree, that is absolutely Google's prerogative). On the other hand, if the pervasive opinion is that the views he expressed, wrong or right, were not expressed in an overly negative or aggressive way, Google is likely to keep their engineer.
This isn't unlike The Oatmeal vs. Funnyjunk, or the United Airlines thing. The Internet and the opinions expressed on it really do make decisions for people, companies, juries, and the like.
I agree that the opinions of the general public will influence that decision. To some extent, they should as they have always done. This is part of living in a society and sharing things electronically. One needs to be aware of this before sharing opinions, especially when they are specifically related to one's employment. This isn't a case of making a joke on Twitter and getting fired for it. His opinions also have an effect on his co workers and the whole company so I see no reason why this shouldn't be so. Imagine trying to work with this guy as a woman, knowing he thinks less of you simply because you're a woman. He really should have thought of this before sharing his rant or even putting it on a computer. He can't claim he doesn't know what happens to shared digital data (you can't control it) because he's a Google engineer.
Yeah, but here it is again: "rant." You're using your voice, which we have agreed will, in however small a way, influence an important decision, not to disagree with the content of the email, but to (IMO) misrepresent the tone of the author. Again, I would request an example from the text that supports the "rant" or "toxic" descriptors.
I called it a rant because it's long and unsubstantiated. You want an example why Google and others might think it's toxic? How about this whole list of points stereotyping women?
"Women, on average, have more:
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 areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.
Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.
This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.
Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."
Alright, I'll accept that definition of rant. I certainly agree that the unsubstantiated biological statements were an awful rhetorical tactic. Thank you for sticking with me and providing the quote that most irked you. It irks me as well.
I agree as long as your ideas are equally mocked. Otherwise your position boils down to "No one should be able to disagree with me as long as I say the topic is sensitive"
It's up to others how much they mock my ideas. No one can guarantee equality in the mocking, but yes all people should be free to mock, disagree, or respond however they wish to my ideas.
> He is one individual in a company that employs more than 72,000 people. Why has Silicon Valley spent the weekend talking about him
Because we're not talking about a memo posted by one random engineer that got the reaction it deserved for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers (among the myriad broken things in that memo). That would have been a story for all of five minutes.
Instead, we're talking about how a large fraction of a major tech company quickly and enthusiastically endorsed it and circulated it.
"Hey, finally someone says it ought to be OK for me to denigrate my co-workers, treat them as sub-standard engineers and sub-standard humans, and propagate junk science to prop up my prejudice! I feel validated!"
That this is even remotely a popular sentiment, rather than something that gets you treated like you just said "the earth is flat", is the story here.
"for declaring a large fraction of his co-workers sub-standard engineers"
Are you blatantly lying about the content of the memo? Like, I wouldn't think so. I think you're hallucinating your own meaning to it. Would you mind explaining the thought process that lead you form this representation?
If you have an environment where anything contrary to the prevailing viewpoint is either stifled or decried as sexist/racist, you drive people to the only people who accept them: the extreme fringe.
I have read the memo, and this seems like an accurate summary. It's phrased in words that sound reasonable, but the ideas aren't reasoned, and it's a particularly common trick to use reasonable words to express unreasoned ideas to fool those who only skim a text.
See, that's kind of the problem right there. You define the ideas to be "unreasoned", and therefore any presentation of those ideas is unacceptable, no matter how stated.
Can you state why you find the ideas unreasonable, without some variant of "all right-thinking people know", and without misrepresenting the ideas?
The trouble with avoiding "all right-thinking people know" is that I have no idea how to find a solid citation for the claim that, say, software engineering is at least as much about people as things. It's a thing you will find anyone senior who's good at their job to agree with. Would you accept books by experienced software engineers as evidence of this point?
Once you grant that point, much of the argument falls apart, as it's clear he's arguing about very junior-level coding and not software engineering as a whole.
I am senior at my job and I disagree with that assertion. People skills are indeed helpful and a good benefit, but they are nowhere near primary. Consider the following two people:
(A) Understands people hardly at all, is constantly confused by hem, but understands computers very well
(B) Understands computers hardly at all, is constantly confused by them, but understands people very well
Which of these two candidates is going to be able to design and build a complex software product?
B, without question! You have junior people to get unconfused by computers and tell you what they're capable of. You have a wealth of existing open-source libraries, protocol designs, whitepapers about private products, etc. You need to understand what the documentation of those products are, that is, what humans are claiming about those components and what humans have successfully done with them. You don't need to be able to tell a double from a lambda to design and lead a team building a complex software product.
Candidate A is going to build a technically impressive product, sure, but we have no idea whether it's what the customer wanted. Candidate A will be a fantastic research scientist or lone-wolf open source hacker, but not a product builder.
It's claimed in internal documents excluded from the gizmodo story that in an anonymous survey approximately 36% of Googlers largely agreed with the essay. Without knowing the survey methodology it's basically impossible to interpret that result, though. E.g., how was the survey advertised within Google? how many respondents? what were the actual questions? was any effort taken to prevent repeat votes? to ensure that only people who'd actually read the document voted? The only info is a couple of pie charts.
Links to the leaked documents are available via Google.
It seems pretty clear that you either didn't read the memo, or you had a preconceived reaction that prevented you from absorbing what it actually said. It's a shame, I normally enjoy your posts because you are conscientious and even-handed about technical matters.
It's very important to remember that statistics reify to probabilities, so that statistical statements about groups can be true while individuals don't match the statements perfectly. That's how the math works. IOW, saying that in general women have less interest in tech can be perfectly true, and it simultaneously offers zero denigration toward any individual woman's ability or interest.
I'm taken aback by how many obviously smart people miss this, particularly in computing, since it seems fair to assume lots of you took statistics classes at some point.
I also take heavy issue with your idea that saying women have less interest in developing technical abilities is equivalent to calling them sub-human. There is an entire world outside of tech, and in many facets, women have greater interest and ability than men. Why is it so completely impossible for people to accept this clear empirical imbalance in this one particular field?
Well you cant have positive discrimination and claim it's meritocracy. It's a shame it casts a negative light on diversity people who actually joined Google through effort rather quotas.
I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism, or whatever you want to call it.
I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination.
If there were factual inaccuracies in what the author wrote, why not discuss them? Why not use high-quality sources to validate your argument? I wish it was the opposite, but I don't have the time to research the psychological/sociological perspectives on these issues. Human civilization has grown thanks to being able to specialize. I specialize and (hopefully) make contributions in one field, but I depend on others that have specialized elsewhere to provide knowledge and resources I can depend on.