That precisely is the chilling effect. The discussions are so treacherous and devoid of social etiquette that arguments cannot be made without risking career suicide, literally.
And if for no other reason, irrespective of the topic, that chilling effect is really disconcerting.
I read the memo and didn't find it particularly persuasive; but this dismissal does further its core point. It's a bit tone deaf of Google to fire an employee concerned about groupthink.
Posted on Google's private Google+ instance (which is very active). Pretty much like sharing it on an internal mailing list, or on Slack.
Seems like it must have gotten a few reshares to go viral enough for somebody to feel the need to leak it. I don't think we really know how widely it was read before it leaked though -- it might have been a big raging controversy inside Google, or it might not.
This is not a workable argument against firing someone. If it were, all you'd have to do is say, "We have too much group-think here," followed by any egregiously awful statement, and you'd be insulated from consequences. That's just not how these things work.
I think any good argument against firing him has to hinge on the truth of what he said besides the group-think claims. Regrettably for him, I don't think there's much to most of it.
The truth of what he said has nothing to do with why he was fired. He was fired for not being politically correct and offending people, not because his arguments were right or wrong. People are usually most outraged by statements which are true or close to true but which they do not want to believe.
No, we're mostly offended by ideas that are false and actively harm people - like the entirely unproven notion that women suffer from biological weaknesses that make them less likely to be qualified as engineers.
But that is only because you did not study psychology in which case you would know that most things in that manifesto are scientifically proven and what he said does makes sense for women AS A GROUP not individually... :/
> No, we're mostly offended by ideas that are false and actively harm people - like the entirely unproven notion that women suffer from biological weaknesses that make them less likely to be qualified as engineers.
All good, except he did not make that argument or anything similar to it. He did not state that women inherently suffer from biological weaknesses of any sort. And no, his ideas did not harm anyone (except perhaps indirectly himself). Literally nobody got hurt except him, he is the sole victim of the ordeal.
I hope that you have read the document in its original form, which is a PDF with some (admittedly weak) references.
> Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50.
Not a lawyer, but will he have a case to sue for wrongful termination? I guess without seeing the employee contract and Code of Conduct, it is hard to say.
That's theoretically the benefit of at will. But that benefit is asymmetric - a company won't hardly notice one persons leaving, but a person's life will be unduly burdened by being fired with no warning or cause.
Not sure what's the case at Google, but when I was managing people at a Fortune 500 company, I was guided by HR to be especially careful if I need to fire a women or a minority employee - put them on PIP, document everything very carefully, etc. - because of much higher perceived risk of a wrongful termination suit.
Unless the Google contract departs from boilerplate California employment contracts in ways highly disadvantageous to one of the largest, most legally savvy firms in the state, it is unlikely that Google needs a documented reason to fire anybody, so long as they aren't retaliating against them for concrete protected concerted actions in labor organization or retaliating against them for defending their rights as a protected class under federal law.
Doubtless a real lawyer will come along here and clarify, but a good shorthand is: you can be fired in virtually any state in the union for expressing political opinions.
> First, federal labor law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions.
> Second... California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.
> Third, the engineer complained in parts of his memo about company policies that he believes violate employment discrimination laws... It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws.
I doubt it, but let me say that I really hope it's true that what this guy wrote qualifies as a Protected Concerted Action under the NLRA, because Silicon Valley could badly use an education in the protections of the NLRA. From what I can see from this vantage, the largest companies in the valley are utterly dependent on the compliance of their employees to function, and those employees are being bought off for table scraps.
In California political activities or affiliations are a protected class. Whether his document qualifies for that would be debatable I would imagine.
I don't see it getting to litigation though. I'd be shocked if Google didn't offer him a fairly hefty severance payment in return for a release of all legal claims.
EDIT: Maybe don't listen to any of my predictions m'kay.
The dude had to go - I mean, the heat he got was unworkable, to the point I wonder who'd ever want to work with him. It feels like even saying hello to him might have been social, political and career suicide.
What I'm interested in is Google's best response, i.e. he has to go, how is that deal structured? Do you offer him a crazy good settlement and an NDA? What is the risk/reward here of a lowball offer vs legal action? Is the NDA negotiable, e.g. you can do X interviews, but not on say Fox news? What is the internal risk of people finding out he was given 6 figures to walk? I'm really fascinated with the practicalities of the action after the decision was taken.
Does anyone with any sort of HR experience know what is the best practice here?
An excellent opportunity to re-read PG's essay, "What You Can't Say". [1]
"What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed."
This isn't an issue of "fashion" or "opinion". It's an issue of whether the guy is right or wrong, and if he's wrong[1] whether or not he's caused damage to his employer[2], and if that is true whether it is a firing offense[3].
You don't get to avoid discussion[4] about those subtitled points by retreating to some kind of invented safe space here. Out with it. Is he right?
[1] He is.
[2] He has.
[3] It is.
[4] Yeah, I'm just asserting without evidence too. But only
to avoid the pointless flames that result.
He is completely wrong on his assertions, and those assertions are not facts or science. As Pauli is reputed to have said, the author of the manifesto is “not even wrong”. He’s a white male fantasist.
Start with Halpern's "Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities" and follow the bibliography where it takes you (I really would like to provide the references, but just I don't have the patience to copy them now). For something rigorous that's digitally available, start with sapinker's slides from his 2005 debate [1]. Modern understanding is quite similar, only with new evidence and insights from evolutionary psychology and neurobiology.
Applying the notion of "moral fashion" to this doesn't seem appropriate. It also shows a certain blindness to the problems of sexism and racism especially in the context of this former employee's comments.
None of what he said were men's rights dog whistles. If you think this you clearly don't have an ear for them. The closest you could say is he was maybe inspired by Peterson and Slatestarcodex.
I'm just trying to be neutral in all of this. If you look through that thread, the internet at large seems to be taking this as an opportunity to flex men's rights issues pretty heavily. The reason they're doing this seems to be because of the content of his writings rather than the fact that he got fired.
EDIT: Actually, it's unfair to say "the internet at large." HN, reddit, and twitter all seem to be taking the news in unique ways.
I appreciate that, but I don't think raising up some random guy on reddit is a valid way of drawing a conclusion.
Person A thinks X.
Person B who belongs a group the blue tribe hates also thinks X.
Therefore person A is a bad person because they agree with person B about X.
We have failed to prove that the group person B belongs to is actually bad and not just an exercise in signaling and we are also trying to smear person A by saying they agree with some other completely unrelated person who may belong to a distasteful group. Additionally X can still be correct and both people can be distasteful, but it wont change the fact that X is correct.
Sorry if I am not being clear, it's been a long day.
Please. I know the standard set of MRA talking points well, having spent way too much time as a teenager in the meta/drama internet cultures. This manifesto [0] hits most of the main ones.
> Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.
> Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role.
> Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
> Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social scientists learn left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap.
> males are biologically disposable
> We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue [sic] affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and whiner. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression.
> political correctness, which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause
Copy/paste any of those into an r/MensRights thread and you'll fit right in.
You might want to read Slavoj Zizek on ideology, since that's a deeper philosophical look at the same phenomena. Here's the quick video of him explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8ibrfXvpQ
Basically, you might think about one thing as 'moral fashion' and another as 'social good', but you are really comparing two fashions and pretending to be objective.
To make a concrete example out of the situation in front of us: if there is proof that diverse companies perform better (https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter) then his reasoning about how diversity initiatives are wasteful must be incorrect.
So to say that he is 'correct' means to turn your back on empirical argument, and to base things in identity politics.
If diverse companies perform better, this would surely mean that there is some sort of difference between the sexes? How else could diversity have an impact on the bottom line of a company?
Well, if women really make 87% of what men make for the same work (or whatever the latest number is), it could save the company 13% or more on car insur- I mean, labor costs.
If it is really true that women make 87% of men for the same work, any company that is driven by profit would exclusively hire women. The alternative would be that sexism is so rampant that it trumps profit driven motivation, am I missing something, or is that what you are suggesting?
I'm not really suggesting anything other than that, it's a hypothetical explanation that disproves the notion, "if diverse companies do better, it MUST be because of differences in the sexes". Admittedly not a high-effort comment.
In answer to the rest of your comment, it's anybody's guess and nobody agrees why. Maybe the stat is wrong, maybe the sexism is just that rampant, maybe the women-only candidate pool is inadequate (small), maybe there is a performance difference, etc.
>if there is proof that diverse companies perform better then his reasoning about how diversity initiatives are wasteful must be incorrect.
Absolutely not true. There are many other possible reasons for such a correlation. A few examples:
It's possible better-performing companies could attract more non-white applicants.
Or, that better-performing companies could be have extra resources, which they then spend on diversity initiatives, where poor-performing companies are desperate to survive.
Or the independent variable: Being in the Valley makes companies perform better, and also makes them want to hire more non-whites, but these are both independent outcomes simply caused by being in the Valley. In this scenario, it's even possible that diversity harms performance, but the effect is more than compensated for by being in the Valley.
Or, it could be random chance; outcomes are dominated by a few high-performing companies, which just happen to be genetically diverse.
Or any of many other possible connections and confounders. This is really basic stuff.
Thanks for expanding on that aspect! This is exactly the sort of things people should have brought up.
I feel like the suspicious thing is that people didn't react in this way.
Why was this not a glaring problem that his supporters rushed in to answer?
If I told you I had an elegant model for some chemical reactions and could predict, say, the thermal energy released in an experiment, you might look at the model and think it's great.
If it doesn't match what is measured in the real world, then it's possible the model is correct: could be an environmental factor or a problem with the apparatus etc. But I need to answer questions around the gap between prediction and reality, rather than to rely on my perceptions of the elegance of the model.
That's where I think this veers off into identity politics.
If things keep going this way (esp. in California) someday saying that only women can get pregnant is gonna count as "perpetuating gender stereotypes".
They are adding a bias in their selection process with gender diversity programs, so if two candidates are very similar they will probably select the one who belongs to the minority. As it is a minority, you are more likely to choose less qualified people from the minority.
For example, your pool of candidates is 75 (mayority) / 25 (minority). If you want in your company 50/50 ratio, you must leave out better candidates from the mayority in order to increase your number of people of the minority.
EDIT: as other person replied to me in a comment, my argument fails if the target ratio is close to the pool of candidates. But we don't have any reference what was the goal of the diversity program to make any assumption. I assume the goal was not feasible and that lead to the famous memorandum.
>But we don't have any reference what was the goal of the diversity program to make any assumption.
In California, when companies are audited by the government to check for discriminatory employment practices, they're checking that the employment ratios are relatively close to the ratio of the pool of applicants, not some prescribed ratio like 50/50.
They sample resumes from various source (online hiring boards, recruiting companies, etc.). They also do compare companies to their industry average for their region to see if a company is hiring abnormally compared to similar companies. Companies with 50 employees have a lot more variation than companies with 1000 employees, they're very aware of the related sampling biases and do the best they can, they employ a good amount of statisticians and sociologists. The margin for error is also quite high, the kind of auditing I'm talking about is meant to catch very serious, long term, company wide systemic discrimination.
After companies grow to a certain size (I think >50 employees), they are also obligated to record demographics information about applicants in the form of voluntary surveys in their application process.
What? As far as I know you shouldn't put your gender, age or photo in the CV because the company who review it can be sued for discrimination. (A recruiter from US made me delete that information when I was applying to us companies).
Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).
I am more confuse now after the information you gave me.
> (A recruiter from US made me delete that information when I was applying to us companies)
funny, when I started applying outside of the US, I added that information into my resume.
in the US, there's often an attached (optional) form that allows the applicant to add this information. I'd never really put it together before tonight, but I've always shunned filling out that form. I also shunned saying the pledge of allegiance in grade school.
wondering, for myself, if those behaviors are related.
>What? As far as I know you shouldn't put your gender, age or photo in the CV because the company who review it can be sued for discrimination. (A recruiter from US made me delete that information when I was applying to us companies).
You're not being misinformed, this is probably good advice.
Your demographic information doesn't have to be on your CV for your name to be cross referenced with a government database (audits I mentioned are done by government offices or government contractors), which you would probably be listed in if you are working in the US.
>Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).
I haven't read anything about any audits that have said they have a significant bias one way or another, I don't think I've said anything to suggest otherwise.
Google and other large corporations are known to do self audits of their hiring practices (demographic and otherwise) both to improve their hiring processes as well as to identify and correct discriminatory practices (mitigate legal risk), they are allowed to collect demographic information for the latter purpose.[0]
My personal opinion is that Google's demographics changes are a simple result of changes in the actual applicant pool, and that Google 'promoting diversity' doesn't change their internal hiring process in any meaningful way. But the press about it probably does encourage lesser represented people to join CS majors in university. So google does promote diversity in engineering, just not in the way the author of that article suggests, and instead with marketing and a 4 year time lag.
- Each Googler is expected to do his or her utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.
+ Googlers are expected to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.
- Make sure that information that is classified as “Need to Know” or “Confidential” in Google’s Data Security Guidelines is handled in accordance with those Guidelines and Google’s Data Security Policy.
+ Make sure that information that is classified as “Need to Know” or “Confidential” in Google’s Data Classification Guidelines is handled in accordance with those Guidelines and Google’s Data Security Policy.
They were stuck between a rock and a hard place and chose what was less likely to effect ongoing litigation and what most people in Silicon Valley will accept. Other people were threatening to quit, they had no real choice here. This was the better of two bad decisions.
This is starting to be scary. Instead of government companies are acting as thought police. I think a lot of people will watch what they are saying publicly from now on.
"Get over yourself. You are not as special as you believe yourself to be.
At that point, I gave up on your pathetic and emotional diatribe. Your piece is devoid of any logic, reason, or sense and serves as a way for you to virtue-signal to the rest of the world how much of a “stand-up guy” you are."
Is spot on how I read that Medium post.
I found nothing of value in the Ex Googler's commentary.
Freedom of Speech is not the same thing as Freedom from Consequences. Unless we decide that being "aggressively antisocial" should be a protected class, private companies should have every right to fire employees who they deem toxic for their culture.
If they put 'make america great again' or 'death to white men' posters up on the bulletin boards at work in the break room, yeah, they'll fire them too. It's against the agreements they signed when they got hired.
If you don't like it don't sign and go work somewhere else.
> "If they put 'make america great again' or 'death to white men' posters up on the bulletin boards at work in the break room, yeah, they'll fire them too."
Are you saying that supporting a presidential candidate is tantamount to "death to white men"?
Yes, the candidate in question is abhorrent, but come on. Those statements absolutely don't carry equal weight.
My point was, it's not a good set of examples, since they are so unlike each other. Unless you mean certain organizations actually consider them equivalent.
I think you would agree that your example is different in both scope and visibility than my (extreme) hypothetical examples, and the real example of this manifesto. Plenty of Google employees have expressed opinions similar to Mr. Damore's on memegen or G+ without being terminated.
This comment, forgive the pun, makes me very sad. I’m all for doing something to fight the ideas in this guy’s paper, but to advocate for personal censorship as apparently some sort of ideal is beyond my support.
Anyway, I think self censorship is an expected behavior in a peaceful society. For example: you don't bring up recently deceased significant others, comment on awkward physical characteristics of strangers, or mock the suffering of others, without expecting repercussions. People learn at a very young age that certain topics should be avoided for the sake of "keeping the peace".
50 years ago you could use the n-word in business meetings. Now, not so much, but for a long time many people were "self-censoring" themselves to keep the peace in their workplaces. Some still are, but I imagine that most people these days are happy to be in a workplace where n-words are not tolerated. Not just for their own "sensibilities", but also the knowledge that their black coworkers/friends can be in an environment that is actively less hostile.
What we're seeing is the continuing shift in standards for peaceful society. So far I think the track record on these shifts is pretty good, so I'm inclined to let this ride for a while, even if some people have to keep "self-censoring" some of the time.
This is the real world, people. Of course a company that needs its employees to be effective has to censor employees whose outspoken views make their teams less effective. The army kicks people out for all sorts of reasons. Coaches cut players who poison the locker room. I personally would hope people could talk and deal with it, but if it's a bunch of other people quit or this guy quit, an effective company has to act.
This clearly fails to grasp the concept of operability.
If we were to adopt this line of reasoning, constitutional rights go from being something that is clearly established and to be universally respected by all to a concept that is at the mercy of whichever angry mob would master the numbers big enough to topple all who oppose them.
By this line of reasoning, ethics and morality are just something based on strength in numbers rather than any other principle.
I agree that people with the wrong political opinions should not be allowed to work, and that it's up to corporations to be the ultimate arbitrator of what is acceptable political discourse.
They can hire Christians as long as the hires are intelligent enough to realize that (for example) leaving Chick Tracts on their coworkers' desks is probably not acceptable workplace behavior.
Plenty of Google employees are christians and none of them have been fired for it (it's legally protected, for one thing)
When you do/say/write something that has the potential to cause problems for your employer, you should be aware of and prepared for the possible consequences.
I certainly would not write a multi-page screed criticizing the policies and practices of my employer, distribute it at work, and then expect to keep my job or have no repercussions.
When it's a widely circulated internal document criticising the hiring practices behind 40% of the company's workforce, it's hardly surprising.
He put them in a difficult position. The brand and employee-esteem damage caused by tacitly condoning his manifesto by not firing him, vs just getting rid of one engineer. Easy maths. He's gone.
True, but what's troubling isn't that he was fired, it's that the memo got leaked, caused a bunch of controversy and basically forced Google to take a position on whether they want to discuss this stuff. Yes, one guy getting fired for sending out something inflammatory and critical isn't a huge deal (although I would have expected Google to be more tolerant), it's the fact that it went public and then when
Google had to make a public statement deciding whether to fire him or not they chose "we don't think these ideas should be discussed".
I would be curious to know at which point in history one could circulate a memo around the office which embarrassed the company and insulted half the workforce without repercussion.
I find it so bizarre people get this interpretation - it's completely nonsensical. Point: "Chinese tend to be short so not many of them go into basketball". Counterpoint: "I'm Chinese and 6'5" are you saying I'm short and bad at basketball?"
I haven't read the memo but I have read some summaries of it. Even before the memo was released I had a negative opinion of it. Not because someone spoke out their mind but because someone decided to just go and shout out their obviously controversial beliefs to the world expecting for his ideas to be taken seriously and for there to be no negative consequences.
If you want people to care about what you think and have to say, you need to spend time and effort cultivating a positive reputation. Otherwise you just seem like an unhinged idiot.
edit: because people seem to be misunderstanding my point or simply downvoting me because I am describing a reality which makes them uncomfortable I will simply reference Douglas Crockford and the Nodevember debacle.
If what occurred to Crockford occurred to some no name software engineer do you believe there would have been the outpouring of support and articles defending his character? No the person would have likely been fired for no good reason and had their name splashed across a bunch of tech blogs as a sexist.
No it's not a problem. I didn't have a negative opinion of it because of the content (which contained no new or interesting ideas by the way). I had a negative opinion of it because someone out there believed that you could just shout out your controversial beliefs in a group email and expect something positive to come from it.
>I had a negative opinion of it because someone out there believed that you could just shout out your controversial beliefs in a group email and expect something positive to come from it.
I'm honestly struggling to understand your perspective. Would you prefer a world where nobody says anything "controversial", everyone just rolls with the status quo, and nothing ever changes? Why is espousing "controversial ideals" offensive to you? I treat ideas that clash with my own internal logical understanding of the world as challenges that can only improve my understanding of the world. If I run these "controversial ideas" through my logic and reasoning faculties, there's really only two possible outcomes:
- I reject the idea and now have arguments against them that I can share with others
- I end up embracing the idea because I realize that my implicit rejection of it lacked a sturdy logical foundation
Either way, I win—I get a better understanding of the world I live in.
Why would you choose to shield yourself from improving yourself mentally?
I just read it for the first time, it's actually much better written than I thought. I was prepared for it to be horrible, but he brings up some valid points. Some I don't agree with, but he is right that we have made it unacceptable to discuss this subject.
I do encourage people to read it and make their own opinion, there are so many other opinions on this now, the only way to get back to reality is to read it for yourself.
He wrote a manifesto giving some actual biology facts and he wasn't talking about CS but something more close to biology (or at least from the point of view of biology)
I think you are making a number of poor logical leaps. I have read the memo in its entirety. I have begun the process of reading the citations in their entirety. I am, so far, entirely unconvinced of that he has proven his point about gender bias. I am entirely convinced that he did prove his entire point about the political and moral echo chamber that is Googles Mountain View office. Though he did not do it within the letter. Google helped him by firing him.
Where you've made some poor logical leaps are: there is zero evidence that he shouted out his obviously controversial beliefs to the world. As far as I can tell this memo did not go to the whole world by his doing. It did not go to the entire Google staff by his doing. In fact, for all we know he was asked for his well thought out opinion on Googles diversity training and gave it to the appropriate people who did not respect the fact that he was giving his opinion to a small group and began forwarding it on. You might say I have no proof of this, and you'd be right. But you have no proof that he blasted this to the whole world.
Additionally, he was a number of things in the memo but he was not an unhinged idiot. It reads like someone who was asked for his opinion on the training that was going on and whether there was value in making it mandatory.
I have been asked in professional settings for my opinion on controversial matters. One time I was put into a very troubling position because of my opinion and many people were quite upset. It was uncomfortable for us all. I no longer give my opinion on controversial topics. I keep quiet and do my work and if I disagree with a policy or procedure I find new employment.
I am sure the author of this memo has learned his lesson now. He will shut up. I hope that the world is a better place without his opinion.
Maybe you misinterpreted my statement as defending this person being silenced and fired but I was not. Frankly I have no strong opinions with regards to PC culture. It does not affect me and I see the injustice that comes from both sides. My statement was more intended to be advice, if you haven't cultivated a reputation/influence and you step out of line you will be mocked, ostracized, and perceived as an unhinged idiot. I believe the result of this debacle backs my point.
I might very well have. So in the case that an employee is asked to give their opinion on a controversial topic, what would you suggest is the best course of action so that they will not be mocked, ostracized, and perceived as an unhinged idiot? My solution is always to just shut up. But then again, it doesn't really create a discussion around controversial topics, does it? Because the majority will mock, ostracize, and condemn you as an unhinged idiot. Is that a good thing for society? Or should we open our ears and listen? Maybe read before we speak? Maybe even debate with facts and counter facts? Before we go straight to the mocking, ostracizing, and condemning.
These are all hypothetical questions of course. But something to think about.
Edit: because my phone likes four letter words that sound like shut.
It's obviously not good for society but it's also wrong to believe you will make any positive impact by throwing away all influence you have and effectively ruining your own life.
Do you think this person that has been fired has gained anything? Do you think anything will change because of this memo?
I come from a legal background so pardon my argument. I don't mean to offend.
I do agree with you, if in fact that was the authors intent. The issue you bring up is a good one though. Did he believe that he would throw away his influence and ruin his life by sharing this opinion? That's very tough to prove one way or the other. It entirely depends on the circumstances surrounding why he wrote the memo. If he did so entirely on his own without being asked or provoked, then you are right. If he was asked to write the memo by a superior or someone in perceived authority, you may be partially correct. If he was led to believe his opinion would be valued and his reputation kept and protected, then you are quite wrong. Unfortunately, I don't believe we will ever know the truth. So this interesting academic exercise will never really come to a conclusion.
Now, on the other hand. A thorough reading of the source would indicate that he should know that essentially saying that Google is biased against privileged individuals (say, white, male software engineers) is a pretty hard position to defend and he was foolish for attempting the argument. But hindsight is 20/20.
Cited primary sources, linked his biological argument to his workplace argument with something other than handwaving, avoiding tying his scientific argument to a related but not equivalent political argument, taken into account evidence collected from women who've left the industry and ensured that his model accounted for that, and, uh, basically written an actual thesis? If I'd submitted work like this as an undergraduate I'd have got it back with a lot of red ink and a pretty terrible grade.
(I work for Google and have a PhD in Biology from Cambridge University)
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that he did cite sources, but that Gizmodo decided to remove them. In addition they also re-badged this internal email as a "manifesto" and presented it as a war-cry rather than a basis for discussion. Pretty dishonest changes really.
These dishonest changes certainly helped further this shitstorm. Knowing Gizmodo (and their sister-website Jezebel which has no issues with domestic violence against men), I'm just going to assume this was the intended consequence.
It's a memo, for crying out loud, not a scientific paper. That's why he cites the scientific papers! A full review would require a book-length response.
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.
An evolutionary psychology professor said:
> For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history. I know a little about sex differences research. On the topic of evolution and human sexuality, I’ve taught for 28 years, written 4 books and over 100 academic publications, given 190 talks, reviewed papers for over 50 journals, and mentored 11 Ph.D. students. Whoever the memo’s author is, he has obviously read a fair amount about these topics. Graded fairly, his memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course. It is consistent with the scientific state of the art on sex differences. (Blank slate gender feminism is advocacy rather than science: no gender feminist I’ve met has ever been able to give a coherent answer to the question ‘What empirical findings would convince you that psychological sex differences evolved?’)
A professor of social psychology whose position in the field is, let us say, not mainstream, and look evolutionary psychology is just bullshit. Further, https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim... is a review and is therefore (by definition) not a primary source.
He's a good man. I'm sorry to hear google is such a hypocritical company. They preach "tolerance" and yet destroy those who fall out of line from their ideology. They'd make great commies. As for James, I'm sure he'll be able to find a better job. There are still a lot of people in this country with their heads on right.
I think I'm going to go as google free as possible now. What's the best alternative to Gmail?
May I remind you that the Russians were the first to space? Also that they created the biggest bomb in history? Also Hitler's top aids all had very high IQs.
The problem with people with high iqs is they think they know everything. And when you think that, that's when you do stupid things. When you get group think going, no one is insuceptible.
He stood up for the truth. Sure he got fired, but he did a good thing and we all benefit. He's like tank man who stood up to the Chinese. Sure they killed him, but we honor people who stand up for truth especially when it comes at personal cost.
You people really do have a powerful imagination, a fantasy that simply will not die. How you all insist against all science and reason that men and women are the same in the brain is beyond me.
Well, it's going to have to be a consideration if you want to defend yourself against a discrimination lawsuit. Google has more money than god, why is everyone's diaper going to DEFCON 1 over the notion of affirmative action?
I don't know why anyone needs to even give a shit about whatever "natural" differences exist or not. The law promotes equality. And if you're going to bitch about it, then fine, go vote for more Trump, I guess.
"worse before better"... It's all a matter of perspective. For anyone who's been the "minority", things have always been 'worse'. Things can only get better.
If you can truly embrace that perspective, you'll discover a profound truth.
The transition might cause some discomfort for those who've been on the privileged side of things for a while.
> fired from a tech company for "perpetuating gender stereotypes"...
Fired from a tech company for publishing a company-wide memo insinuating that some of his coworkers are, on average, at a biological disadvantage for the type of work they do and suggesting that some subset of them haven't achieved their position based on merit.
And listed data and studies to back up his claim. That it is controversial, does not mean it isn't true, and you haven't refuted it, simply stated it as if on it's face should have been grounds for dismissal.
All we really know is that the Silicon Valley thought bubble, and political intolerance is extreme to such a degree that people have to watch what they say and think at all times so as not to anger the thought police. The moral superiors.
No room for discussion. No room for debate. Just fall in line and be sure to advertise your virtue and 100% agree with views that the political left mandates you to hold.
Listed "data" and "studies" doesn't suddenly make you right. Studies are far from perfect, especially in this field, and even more so when tons of other studies contradict these conclusions. You don't get to wave a magic want and say "I'm using FACTS so you're wrong!!"
> And listed data and studies to back up his claim. That it is controversial, does not mean it isn't true, and you haven't refuted it, simply stated it as if on it's face should have been grounds for dismissal.
He listed references that indicate, when viewed broadly, that men and women can exhibit different observable personality characteristics. That was not the argument of his memo. His argument was that, because of this broadly measurable difference, this leads to women being less interested in computer science (although not to the degree of similar STEM fields, oddly enough!) and therefore he shouldn't have to be subjected to bias training or be burdened with any other sort of program that suggests maybe, perhaps, potentially the social culture in tech/SV could be exacerbating this.
> All we really know is that the Silicon Valley thought bubble, and political intolerance is extreme to such a degree that people have to watch what they say and think at all times so as not to anger the thought police. The moral superiors.
Did the thought police make this guy write and publish a work memo suggesting some women are too neurotic to be software engineers?
> No room for discussion. No room for debate. Just fall in line and be sure to advertise your virtue and 100% agree with views that the political left mandates you to hold.
How about don't write a company-wide memo that insinuates some of your coworkers aren't there by merit because they don't have the biological composition to stomach the job? It's not like somebody was having a conversation with this guy in the break room, asked his opinion on diversity and ran to the press to start a witch hunt against some random Google engineer.
> That was not the argument of his memo. His argument was that, because of this broadly measurable difference, this leads to women being less interested in computer science (although not to the degree of similar STEM fields, oddly enough!)
I mean, he titled the section of the document that talks about those effects "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech." But hey, those are sinful ideas, so he must have been a sinful man to have even entertained them in the first place.
> insinuating that some of his coworkers are, on average, at a biological disadvantage for the type of work they do
That's not what he actually said. In fact the memo had a chart and a paragraph or two specifically stating that taking average traits of a group of people and applying them to individuals was wrong and misleading due to large overlaps of traits between groups.
He was not implying anything about his colleagues that are already working for Google, rather he was pointing out potential biological differences in averages at the population level that possibly cause fewer women to enter tech (and hence making it difficult to get an even ratio of male/female employees).
Good. I get that HN is not into this, but this employee stated, bluntly, that they don't believe many of their colleagues should be there because of their sex. Every peer review, every no-hire, every interaction, is and should be suspect.
Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer. This is textbook hostile environment. Anyone saying otherwise should look hard at why they value this person's desire to speak without consequence over their colleague's right to a workplace where they're not judged by their sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other innate attribute irrelevant to their job performance.
He's implicitly claiming some of them shouldn't be there, or he believes that miraculously every single women at Google clears the bar for desirable traits in a programming without affirmative action.
Come on now, which one do you think he believes? He made it pretty clear, clear enough that pretty much no one would want to work with the dude.
I'm sorry, you can't just say the man is "implicitly claiming" anything. Espectially when his career was so negatively effected. Support your claims with direct quotes or keep your slander to yourself.
The man in question claimed that some large portion of folks are hired under diversity programs which supposedly “lower the bar”. That is, those people don’t deserve to be at Google, and he doesn’t believe that they are qualified.
That’s in his own words, and I would have fired him a hell of a lot faster than Google did, because I will not have my team disrupted by a prima donna.
This is not what the document stated. Here is the quote about "lowering the bar" in its original form:
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
The author deliberately narrows the scope of this sentence stating that the hiring practices decrease the false negative rate, not increasing the false positive rate. Stating that the false negative rate is lowered for diverse candidates is to say that qualified, non-diverse, candidates are rejected at a greater rate than qualified and diverse candidates. It is not stating that unqualified, diverse, candidates are accepted at a greater rate.
He literally says that those hiring practices can effectively lower the bar.
Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.
> Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.
This is not necessarily the case. This is a vast oversimplification of a tech company's hiring process, but for the sake of simplicity let's say that phone interviews have a 50% rate of generating a false negative and on-sites have a 0% error rate.
Say a company does one phone-interview, and if passed, moves on to on-sites. But for diverse candidates they do two phone interviews and if either passes they move on to on-sites.
* Unqualified candidates always fail, since neither phone interviews or on-sites have a false-positive rate.
* Qualified non-diverse candidates have a 50% chance of getting the job.
* Qualified diverse candidates have a 75% of getting the job.
At no point do any unqualified candidates receive offers. But at the same time, qualified non-diverse candidates are still rejected at twice the rate as diverse candidates.
The "bar" so to speak isn't always something that people have a higher chance of passing the better their skills are. A working knowledge of data structures and concurrency is all that's necessary to pass all of my company's coding interviews. Practice and luck is probably a greater asset than skill in many interviews. But getting into the efficacy of technical interviews is opening a whole 'nother bag of worms.
I had to read this a few times, but I think I get it now.
The original manifesto author means that the "bar is lowered" for diverse candidates because they're scrutinized more carefully and fewer qualified candidates are eliminated? If you're good enough and diverse, you're more likely to be hired than if you're good enough and ... whatever the word for not-diverse is? The original author is not claiming that more unqualified diverse candidates are hired, just that it's easier to get hired if you're qualified and diverse?
If I've understood that correctly I really appreciate your effort in explaining it. Your comment should be higher so more people could see it :)
Also, if I understand you correctly, the phrase "lower the bar" might have gotten him fired for something he wasn't intending to say.
That's exactly right. Thanks for taking the time to read my comment thoroughly.
I also agree with your point around phrasing. I agree that lot of people took away the wrong meaning due to the phrase "lower the bar" (which is a very loaded phrase). This piece probably could have been better received if the author sought out proof-reading with trusted co-workers and friends beforehand. In particular the author should have:
* Dropped the awkward and monolithic generalizations of "Left" and "Right" at the beginning.
* Stayed way the hell away from talking about biological differences, just say that men and women have different preferences for working hours, fields, etc. and don't touch on possible causes.
* Don't emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, but rather the possible negative effects for the group as a whole. The point about OKRs contingent on hitting a certain percentage of diverse team members turning hiring and transfers into a zero sum game was actually a really good point that potentially hurts diverse groups themselves by limiting cross-team mobility.
* At the end, don't try to turn this into a Conservative vs. Liberal issue. Just point out that affirmative action is not nearly as uniformly supported as people make it out to be. For reference 42% of the population opposes affirmative action for race in the workplace, and 33% for gender [1].
He might have planned all this. He was apparently chess champion as a child.
* Mentioning of left echo chamber was pandering to the right. And he got huge support form right leaning and centrist media and personalities.
* Biological differences he mentioned were sourced, so not his personal opinions. He knew this will trigger outrage from pro feminist camp that will start witch hunt against him, based on unproven accusations that he holds misogynistic beliefs.
* Emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, was another passive aggressive attack on one of SJW/PC/regressive-left sacred cows.
I dont really know if he planned this, but if you spend any time following anti-SJW sphere, then you should agree that reaction was totally predictable.
Basically he just said that google created environment where people who dont perfectly align with left leaning echo chamber agenda (here he was pandering to anti-SJW anti-PC / centrists, conservatives...) cant safely express their opinions anymore. And he was fired for doing exactly this. Proving his point on himself. Google HR had two bad choices, not fire him and cause outrage among many of their left leaning (snowflakes); or fire him and prove his point that they re indeed left leaning echo chamber.
I base my speculation on fact that he put his full name on memo, instead of pseudonym and this quote:
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
I have little context here, but from a statistics point of view, this statement is... odd:
"...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."
The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.
Dumping a lot more money is what my company does. Normally, we do one phone interview and one onsite session which consists of multiple interviews. We perform multiple phone interviews if a diverse candidate fails the first (or, occasionally, the second).
The final hiring decision is almost entirely entirely on the on-site interview, the phone interviews essentially act as a first-pass filter. And we don't do any sort of weighting of diversity in the final hire decision. From my experience, the phone screen has the highest false-positive rate. In this system the false negative is reduced considerably for diverse candidates, while the false positive remains mostly the same (since the on-site is pretty rigorous).
For what it's worth, while I can understand the author's opposition to this system I think it's an okay way of increasing diversity. I don't think this system has ever caused us to take on a diverse candidate of insufficient skill or experience. Does it mean that non-diverse candidates get filtered out on the phone interview step at a higher rate? Yes. But not so much that I'd consider it an issue - and this is coming from a (mostly) non-diverse guy. And while it does cost the company more money, in the sense that we spend more time interviewing some candidates than we normally would, it's money well spent.
If he wants to argue that Google should lower the false negative rate for men too, I am totally on board with that! They should lower the false negative rate for everyone. They are bad at high-signal interviewing.
But the meaning of the phrase "lower the bar" is that less-qualified people are being let in, that people are being held to lower standards, etc. The entire point of the phrase "lower the bar" is to convey that the bar should have been be left where it was.
Honestly even if he wrote something like "Hiring practices which are more likely to improve outcomes for individual 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" I'd have much less of a problem with it. (I called out this specific sentence on Twitter yesterday; it was one of the things that particularly bothered me about the document.) But he used words with a specific meaning.
If he used words by mistake that his colleagues reasonably interpreted to mean that he thinks they're unqualified, that's all the more reason he shouldn't have his job. At a company at the scale of Google, a huge portion of effective engineering is effective communication.
Answering myself in part: I'd read the copy of the essay on Vox Day's blog (since I like to see opposing ideological opinions just to make sure I still disagree with them), which, like most other copies, did not have links.
The copy on the documentcloud link floating around this thread shows that "effectively lower the bar" is a link to an archived thread from the internal Google Group "coffee-beans-discuss".
I am curious if that post, or a summary thereof, has been leaked: I find the use of this phrase just baffling and technically incorrect (in addition to being insulting) and it seems like the author did have some specific intention here. Is he quoting someone else who's arguing that false negatives "effectively lower the bar"?
> That is, those people don’t deserve to be at Google, and he doesn’t believe that they are qualified.
You should read what he wrote more closely. He said that Google was creating hiring practices that "lowered the bar by decreasing false negative rate." That last bit is important because it fundamentally changes what he's asserting and means you've entirely misrepresented what he was saying.
Anyone familiar with the Google hiring practices knows that, unless you're famous to some extent, there's an element of luck to getting hired. A lot of qualified candidates get rejected because Google just gets a lot of applicants and they can't hire everyone that's qualified. Those candidates are the false negatives...people they could have hired without making a mistake but didn't.
What he's saying is that while a white male needs to be qualified, pass his interview and not be one of these false negatives, the minority candidate just needs to be qualified and pass his/her interview. That is a lower bar for entry, but it isn't what everyone is accusing him of having said...that his minority colleagues aren't qualified or are less qualified. They still passed all the merit parts of the process, they just never had to undergo the arbitrary part of the process that non-minorities are subjected to.
This is by far my highest upvoted post in this thread, even higher than ones that exhibit much stronger "virtue-signaling"
Given that, I'm guessing the justification for the statements is a little more self-evident than you're letting on. In it effort to save myself some time (seriously, you're asking me for about 20 minutes worth of work), just checking first, have you read the leaked document? It's at Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/leaked-document-details-apple-employee-in....
EDIT: Also, do the other replies to you make things a little clearer? Please keep in mind I'm not trying to be passive-aggressive, I come from similiar intellectual stock to you. That's why I'm in disbelief that you need pullquotes and an explanation to tie them together, I'm sure it'll click for you without that.
> This is by far my highest upvoted post in this thread, even higher than ones that exhibit much stronger "virtue-signaling"
argumentum ad populum [1]
> In it effort to save myself some time (seriously, you're asking me for about 20 minutes worth of work)
Making a worthwhile, intellectual contribution to a public forum should take more than 20min of work/preparation. Being familiar enough with the contents of the paper to make an informed arguement should mean that you could easily pull quotes (maybe with ctrl+f to save time) in less than a minute. Especially when your comments have the potential to destroy someone's reputation/career.
> Also, do the other replies to you make things a little clearer? Please keep in mind I'm not trying to be passive-aggressive
Congratulations, you can make fallacy ridden, condecending, and harmful comments without even trying!
> I come from similiar intellectual stock to you.
Irrelavant and you most likely do not.
> That's why I'm in disbelief that you need pullquotes and an explanation to tie them together, I'm sure it'll click for you without that.
argumentum ad hominem [2]
I know it's easy to write off when someone pulls up latin fallacy names, but please do read those wiki articles. Formal arguementation is important. Your reply to me was disrespectful and added absolutely no value to this thread.
Affirmative action policies by definition change hiring in order to increase the number of minority candidates. That's why we progressives support them!
Are you saying he's wrong for pointing out that Google has affirmative action policies? Or that the policies themselves are bad? I don't understand.
> He's implicitly claiming some of them shouldn't be there, or he believes that miraculously every single women at Google clears the bar for desirable traits in a programming without affirmative action. Come on now, which one do you think he believes?
He believes neither. We don't need to speculate, because the author writes quite deliberately to communicate his point. Here's the quote you're likely referring to, the one that mentions "lowering the bar":
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate. (emphasis mine)
The author is not stating that Google's hiring practices result in unqualified diverse candidates receiving offers at a higher rate than non-diverse candidates. The author is stating that a greater portion of qualified, non-diverse, are being rejected. In other words, the author is not stating that diverse employees at Google shouldn't be there. Rather he's claiming that there are a substantial number of non-diverse candidates who should have received offers, but didn't.
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.
I'm not sure I understand you. He's trying to make a statement about Google's hiring practices. The obvious discussion would be about whether he's right or wrong, and I don't know if that's the case. You seem to care that he's making the claim at all. It really feels like you're ashamed that he's telling the emperor that he has no clothes.
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
> * A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
> * Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
There is no question that Google has discriminatory hiring practices. The only question is whether you think discrimination is a good thing. Apparently you do.
There's a lot to be said about the current trend of privileged (read Western, perhaps wealthy, perhaps white, perhaps male) people to bemoan whatever concessions are made to the minority group but I'll leave that aside.
I believe that everyone should have a fair shot at a good career. I can't even begin to talk about how that is not the case in America - if we disagree here, I'm not sure we'll ever come to agreement.
It's not clear that the workers favored in this alternate pipeline are incompetent (which is really the implication that everyone is making). What is clear is that people with their perspectives are not as prevalent in the technology field.
Perhaps companies are recognizing a) the value of multiple perspectives or b) the structural difficulties that deny some people the same 'fair shot' we all have.
I'll leave you with this. The SAT should be a test of one's aptitude, perhaps readiness for college. If some individuals receive years of tutoring, but others have to go to the library to get test preparation, is our metric for college readiness fair? Maybe you'll say yes, but if we were talking about any other thing (cars, experimental models, you name it) we would clearly recognize these two groups had different pre-test levels of preparedness.
If you look through my post history, you'll see that I made this account to talk about another article about a week ago.
EDIT:
I can't respond to you, unfortunately.
I'm sorry we've resorted to name-calling - however, I stand by my earlier statement. Irrespective of your identity, there has been a noticeable trend of discussions about 'reverse racism'.
I have not referred to you with a pronoun nor made any mention of your race/sex/anything else. I apologize if you feel that I did this.
I'm glad you feel uncomfortable being called racist and sexist given that you are saying things that are racist and sexist. Maybe one day the cognitive dissonance will prompt some introspection.
On a totally separate note, thanks for assuming my gender, race and minority status. Also that of whomever wrote the Google piece. You are doing a really great job making yourself seem like less of a bigot.
I'm downvoting this because I'm tired of the implication that anyone who disagrees with some liberal policy or value must be doing so for sinister motives (and for the highly offensive implication that sinister motives are the purview of whites/males/Westerners).
If you must spew hate, could you at least choose a more interesting criteria than skin tone or genitals? These have been done to death.
Discriminatory hiring does not imply that under-qualified workers are hired. In fact, the author takes case to specifically mention that these discriminatory practices resulted in a higher false-negative rate for non-diverse employees - not a higher false-positive rate for diverse employees.
No, it is not censorship. He can say those things. He just can't pretend to be an effective team member if this is what he believes about his coworkers and he is unwilling to learn from others.
I'll half agree in that you are right, it is not censorship. But I think the caustic judgement of him and his words don't seem to match up with the text that I've read.
A lot of people seem to think the reaction to his words was too strong.
But that's the point of being more cautious at work than you are in your personal life. You don't know how people will react. Most people are uncomfortable even identifying their choice of political party at work.
This exchange is unreal. You made a false claim about what Damore wrote. Another poster refuted you, explaining that Damore never wrote those things. And then you defend yourself by explaining that the person who refuted you is wrong because he's looking only at what Damore wrote?
What kind of post-truth, post-logic universe is this? I want off this fucking planet.
I understand you would like to live somewhere that context does not matter and documents are self-contained.
Until you live in that world, please consider that there is an external world relevant to what an author's intentions are, whether they are lying or exaggerating, whether they are deliberately misleading or naively misinformed.
Does he have good intentions or bad intentions? Well, you would want to look at the other opportunities available to him to reason about that.
"This is what he believes about his co-workers"
You: He did not write this
If he did not think that the performance of the women around him was holding back Google, then he wouldn't write the memo.
Can you give an explanation of how this was the best choice available to him if he did not think this was the case?
"He is unwilling to learn from others"
You: He did not write this
Is it your position that he did not have any options for taking his opinions to others inside the company and getting feedback before circulating broadly?
He knows that this is sensitive - that definitely gets mentioned in the document - but there is no indication that he has gone to the people responsible for diversity policy to discuss the intentions, metrics or organisational concerns that shaped the policy.
If you don't know the functional and non-functional requirements for a system, you should find them out and if you disagree go to the stakeholders. Choosing not to do so is not high-performing employee behaviour in any organisation.
Um, so? I censor myself at work every single day. If I routinely said some of the not so polite things that I sometimes think about my colleagues and (especially) customers I'd be fired. This is called "playing nice with others" and I learned it as a child.
I also sometimes think about topics that would be inappropriate in an office environment (such as sex) and I censor myself by not saying what I am thinking. We even have an Internetism for that concept - NSFW.
None of this is new - we are expected to conduct ourselves appropriately for the current situation. It's just how society works.
I didn't even read the document in question, I just have a very hard time with people getting riled up about being "censored" at work. It's work, what exactly do you expect?
I agree. It's a job, you're there to work. A workplace isn't a venue to stand on your personal soapbox and air your opinions, be disruptive and waste company time.
Diversity is good for companies. Diverse companies are more profitable.
Regardless, your clever analogy doesn't apply. Companies are welcome to be political in their own environment. They own it. Employees are not. They're employed at-will.
Maybe, but that doesn't immunize them from criticism, especially when they purport to value diversity and free speech but silence critics.
Anyway, the financial benefits of diversity are almost certainly overstated. I don't know why we can't just say, "we're hiring diverse people because we think it's the right thing to do".
In a thousand years archaeologists will write papers on our civilisation and the god we worshipped called Market. About how we obeyed the laws of Market, appeased the Market when it was unhappy, and how we had faith that Market could solve all problems.
As a society we've been trained or perhaps tricked to suppress our sense of justice and fairness In Gabor of money.
People are hesitant to publicly say that the right thing to do is the thing that should be done so they bring financial arguments into it.
Hence the studies promoting the idea that diverse companies are more profitable, as if that should make any difference. It's a sick obsession with viewing just about everything through a financial lens even when money shouldn't come into it.
However, I sympathize with younger people because it's a double-edged sword at places like Google, where your work and your life are very intentionally blurred. You eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work. You go out and socialize with your friends from work. You do laundry at work (I'm not sure if Google still does this or not). It's not like the 1980s where people check in at 9am and leave at 5pm.
I am not. I am replying strictly to "this is pure censorship." So fucking what? At work we are absolutely expected and required to censor ourselves, that's practically the definition of "work."
---
I did skim it and it seemed like the pseudo intellectual mumbo jumbo people who think they are being really smart but really are just being obnoxious write; since I read way to much of that sort of thing already I didn't care to read further.
So you still haven't read it, then? And you still think it prudent to label it dismissively?
This is the kind of behavior that woke me up (in my early teens) to the dangers of adopting my values from my religious background/peers. I never thought I'd have to deal with witch hunts for wrongthink in tech.
I am not dismissing it because it is "wrongthink" I am dismissing it because it's incredibly boring, uninteresting, and extremely tiring. I went into it expecting to read something worth reading but stopped when I realized it simply wasn't worth my time.
I did not get that meaning from reading the memo. And I really don't understand how anyone could. Could you point out the part in the memo where he stated bluntly that many of his colleagues shouldn't be there because of their sex?
Below is the relevant section (although I don't see how anyone's saying they aren't good enough to work with):
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
- Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
- A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
- Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
- Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
- Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.
So he's fired for asking the question? It's a very reasonable thing to ask. I've worked for companies that have instituted such policies -- minority candidates were given an HR-sanctioned "saving throw" before being rejected. It's not a good feeling to wonder if your new colleague would have been rejected if she were male, or if your referral would have still gotten rejected had they been a person of color.
He was fired for effectively casting doubt on whether his colleagues were qualified for their work or whether they were just hired to meet diversity quotas.
And why is that wrong? Worrying about your company's hiring bar is a very normal thing. HR should have contacted him to explain how they balance the desire for diversity and the desire for hiring the best candidates. There's no need for a public execution.
Or sued, seems like this would be an easy basis for a hostile work suit. Couple promotion denials, a documented complaint and this manifesto would probably be an easy lawsuit, though INAL.
Policies that are effectively affirmative action are by definition lowering the bar for diversity candidates. His statement that it can lower the bar is correct but still not something people like to be reminded of. Google (and others) not recognizing this distinction and treating his lack of discretion as hate speech is irrational mob PC rule or just plain cowardice (if he was fired for PR reasons).
"His statement that it can lower the bar is correct"
In an n-dimensional space where we take into account all the factors that go into whether or not a candidate is given an offer, you're actually complaining about "lowering the bar" when the bar is already lower for people (for people that's not being targeted for affirmative action) due to systemic effects? You're actually complaining that we're lowering the bar by tweaking other variable so that the bar will be effectively the same obstacle for everyone?
I don't think that's what he means. I think he is saying they are qualified, but many qualified people have also been excluded based on gender or race (i.e. the "false negatives" that gets repeatedly left out). For all he knows, those same people might have been the most qualified, but much of the competition didn't (allegedly) get a shot to compete against them.
> It's not a good feeling to wonder if your new colleague would have been rejected if she were male
Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?
> or if your referral would have still gotten rejected had they been a person of color
This is utter bullshit. As someone who used to work for Alphabet, gender and ethnic background never came up during interviews, simply because the interview process does not account for that. You are either able to solve the technical problems you are presented with during the interview or not. "Culture fit" - which is the one item that might be influenced by things related to gender or ethnic background - is actually a liability for minority groups.
That's a good thing! Then Alphabet is doing a good job, and someone should have sat down with this particular employee to explain what controls are in place to ensure consistent hiring standards are enforced while being sensitive to the requirements of people from different backgrounds. This was not the case at the company I worked for and it was a very negative thing.
> Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?
Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.
> someone should have sat down with this particular employee to explain what controls are in place to ensure consistent hiring standards are enforced while being sensitive to the requirements of people from different backgrounds
He knows them. Everyone knows them. The average Alphabet employee does multiple interviews a month, sometimes multiple interviews a week (complaining about how many interviews you have to do is of the favorite pastimes in the company.) We are trained for this, and - surprise - none of the training says (or even suggest) 'you should lower your standards for minority candidates.' In fact, none of the interviewing training even mentions gender or ethnicity.
I feel that this guy is coming from a disgruntled conservative-leaning position where he feels the company values don't represent his. That's a valid concern, but there's plenty of companies out there. He should just leave and find one that has values matching his.
> This was not the case at the company I worked for and it was a very negative thing
That's sad. Hope you had better luck with the next one!
> Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.
Sorry, didn't meant to be offensive. I just know intrigue (which this memo tries to stir up) is the shortest path to a dysfunctional workplace.
Q: How many employees felt free to discuss their support for Hillary openly (I'm sure Bernie was in a minority)? How many people felt free to discuss their support for Trump (or even any other republican? I'm sure there were a few supporters here and there but I bet the great majority assumed everyone _should_ support Hillary.
People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.
> How many people felt free to discuss their support for Trump
This has nothing to do with the company, but rather with the individuals working for it. How many people, do you think, felt free to discuss their support for a Democratic candidate in the Alabama?
> People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.
And they did! Heck, Google encouraged everyone to vote, not just Democrats. Maybe your anger should be directed to the companies and governments that did their utmost to stop their own citizens from voting. North Carolina is a good place to start, move South from there.
San Diego and LA appears to be the place to vote... (where voters exceed eligible pop) but Alabama has historically been democratic and I am pretty sure people in AL felt more at ease to openly have Hillary campaign signs than a Trump sympathizer would feel at company like Google which likes to keep things googley.
But those numbers likely don't indicate
anything nefarious like widespread voter
fraud. It's actually pretty common for
voter rolls to be a mess. In fact,
Judicial Watch threatened to sue 11 other
states in April for the same reason.
A 2012 Pew Research study found around
2.75 million people were registered to
vote in multiple states and more than
1.8 million deceased people were still
registered to vote.
Oftentimes, people don't realize they
need to notify local voting officials
when they move or when a loved one dies.
But outside of a few isolated incidences,
those extra numbers don't generally lead
to voter fraud.
The Bay Area voted overwhelmingly Democrat in the last election. Your doubts about having 30%+ Googlers declaring affiliation with Trump is right: there's no way it could've happened. Just not for the nefarious reasons you want to suggest though.
Just for kicks, I'd like to see if you _jokingly_ for the LULz walked into MTV or SVL with a Trump hat.
I'm sure you could imagine walking in with a Hillary/Pussy Hat no problem whatsoever. But you would not walk with a Trump hat even as a joke. Ok, maybe in Moncks Corner or some boonie office.
Holy shit, really, Google is as bad a a biker bar for republicans? That's pretty damning. I mean, I wasn't asking to walk into a la Raza meeting. I meant a vanilla google office at MTV.
And obviously you are being hyperbolic for effect. Nobody would beat the shit out of you at a Google office, at worst you might get some stares and people might comment about you with their friends over lunch. Also, assuming that you'd get beaten up at a La Raza meeting betrays your racism.
Please stop trying to bring the "librul intolerance" right-wing talking point. It's pretty pathetic to paint yourself as a victim, even when you have everything in your favor.
Gender does not come up during interviews but they will search across the 50 states for a diversity candidate equal to a local standard candidate. Their HR has diversity goals and will want diversity referrals from current emps to fulfil their goals.
"Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"
Lowering the rate of false negatives does not lower the bar. If anything, it just improves the process and yields more qualified candidates. If you increase the rate of false positives, then you would in fact lower the bar.
It's muddled thinking like this that makes me doubt his ability as an engineer, not to mention his ability as a social scientist.
I'm not in this guy's head but, it's not difficult to come up with a charitable interpretation from his perspective. Let me be clear, I'm not saying that this is what I believe. I'm saying that based on the rest of his writing, this _one potential_ lense through which he may have constructed this sentence.
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
> decreasing the false negative rate
(Again! This is from his POV): The false positive rate has not gone up. The diverse candidates are, in fact, qualified and should have their jobs. They are excellent. I am going out of my way to make sure no one interprets this deluge of text as me questioning my peers ability; something that I will fail at in spectacular fashion.
> lower the bar
(His POV don't pin this on me): However, diverse candidates may now have a lower bar than non-diverse candidates.
How is it possible that some candidates have both a "lower bar" and yet are still qualified?
> Hiring practices
(still his POV folks): Because for diverse candidates we have different hiring practices. Practices which are tailored to diverse candidates. It's not a lower bar, it's a different bar. A bar specifically designed to help us discover the best side of these diverse candidates.
(Speaking for myself now):
I think the author is saying that going out of your way to create specific affordances for _some_ and not for _all_ is discriminatory. I _don't_ think he's a horrible monster for thinking this. I _do_ think that this way of thinking fails to acknowledge the fact that an organization that is already steeped to the brim with a specific group of people is likely to _already_ have built in affordance for that group.
He fucked up. Hard. Like so hard that I find it kind of funny (wtf was he thinking?). I, personally, don't think that the ideas that he espoused merit firing, I think they merit careful correction wherein the person doing the correcting attempts to read his meaning charitably, carefully, truthfully and fully. I feel that most of the public responses have failed in this regard. Most of what I've seen start with "he's basically wrote: {$straw_man}". Some are pandering to an audience, some are more interested in winning than in being right, but some people who retort in this way just have limited time and patience. I can understand why the straw man is appealing. I've just written three paragraphs about a single sentence, who has time for this shit?
Here's the thing though, careful correction, truth, charity—that's my "ideal world" case for him. The simple matter of fact is that Google is not the ideal world, they have no incentive to apply my ideal to him. He's a professional and the fuck up alone (separated form the ideas) represents enough potential harm to Google that he had no hope of keeping his job. Maybe one of his friends can give him the careful walk through of how his ideas are flawed. Hell, maybe a good friend will do that and he'll decide that he was right all along.
Edit: After further reading I realized I had made a mistake when I (speaking from his POV) said: "it's not a lower bar, it's a different bar". He did actually use the words "lower the bar", something I failed to fully account for. One could, with liberal amounts of charity, imagine that he meant that the bar was lower but still sufficient? We're getting into logical acrobatics. That said, logical acrobatics are part of the point. The goal in reading someone whose world view is different to your own is to better understand their logic. To imagine how, within their world view, their ideas are consistent. We could be reading the words of a monster who doesn't care about logic. Or we could, and I think this is much more common, be reading the words of someone with flaws and ignorances and prejudices. Someone not so unlike our...
He fell into the conservative trap of "If there is no active rules or laws discriminating, then discrimination doesn't exist! And trying to offset this discrimination IS the discrimination!"
Slavery and Jim Crows laws no longer on the books? Therefore there is no systemic racism!
Are there laws discriminating against women? No? Therefore they have all the same opportunities as men!
Why are Black Entertainment Television and Gay Pride okay, but White Entertainment Television and White Pride not!
Black Lives Matter is Racist!
Not all Men are Rapists!
This essay started from precisely this set of emotions and found data to justify it after the fact.
Here's my understanding of Google's hiring practice. In essence, Google optimizes to minimize false positive (i.e. hiring unqualified engineers). Hence, even if an applicant meets the bar (i.e. qualified), it is still a crapshoot whether the person is hired or not. By lowering the false negative rate (i.e. rejecting qualified applicant), the effective hiring rate for the target demographic group is higher if all other factors are assumed to be constant (and that's a big if and debatable).
Edit:
Another way to say this is, if an applicant simply meets the bar, the person is most likely not hired. Conversely, an applicant needs to far exceed the bar in order for interviewers to vouch for the person and improve odd of hiring.
On the other hand, applicant that fits into the targeted demographics are probably afforded additional consideration, even if the person's interview did not wow the interviewers as much, hence the "lowering the bar" argument. It is not lowering the standard bar, but rather the "score", if you will, the applicant needs to clear the bar.
The best analogy I've read so far is that the candidate's score and its error bar must clear the bar. But affirmative action applicants are extended the courtesy of second look, which reduces the error bar, hence lower score is needed for the score and error bar to clear the Google bar.
Doesn't a policy of preferentially hiring certain groups necessarily imply that employees who are part of those groups are less capable? Like, helping folks pass the bar implies that they aren't above it - otherwise, why would they need help?
Yes, except for the case where they are already past the bar but not being considered because of biases of people doing the hiring. I think that's the case that the prevailing amount of diversity-related efforts try to solve.
You're right though, and it's actually really insulting to insinuate that certain groups need help passing the bar. You can easily identify people who think like this if you ask a question (politely) like "would you hire a candidate that was more 'diverse' but less technically skilled than another candidate?". People who would choose the more "diverse" candidate but without a principled reason are probably just virtue signalling.
Note that 'diverse' can mean anything -- like comparing a developer who used to work in construction before being turned on to programming to a developer who came out of an ivy school (assuming they have comparable skill levels).
People also wrote fiction about traveling to the moon for a very long time before it actually happened. And Star Trek is credited with inspiring a lot of modern developments that are now ubiquitous, like cell phones and automatic doors.
(The automatic doors on Star Trek were being pulled open using ropes by hidden prop guys. The actors had to walk confidently forward as if they expected them to open when this was not guaranteed. They sometimes smacked right into them)
The problem with meritocracy isn't something that technology or science can solve, though. It's that there's no reasonable, objective definition of "merit".
Is it how smart you are? That sounds a lot like eugenics, and we know where that slippery slope leads. Besides, most humans have a loved one who isn't very smart, so we're not going to be happy in a world that defines merit as intelligence.
Is it how hard-working you are? Many of the same issues apply. Why does someone have less merit if they're born with mutations that make them able to produce 80% of the value of someone else?
Is it how humanitarian you are? Again, that's a totally subjective standard.
Even if you could decide what dimensions to measure merit on, these are all impossible things to quantify.
My assumption is that meritocracy would apply at work, not to society as a whole. If you assume we are talking about a country, sure, it is all kinds of fucked up and broken and will never fly.
But, currently, women, people of color, etc, seem to be "last hired, first fired" plus generally paid less for reasons that appear to be something other than their objective ability to do the job. I would like to see people hired because they can do the job and paid what they are worth and not some discounted value based on skin color or gender. To me, that would be a meritocracy.
What is merit at work, though? How do you measure it? There aren't many employees (outside salespeople) who have revenue explicitly tied to their performance.
What if you have an employee who works in your data center and averts 3 days of downtime? Maybe that person provided $100,000 of value and no one will ever know except for her.
No. It’s actually a policy of no longer favouring certain groups (e.g., white men). There is systemic discrimination in favour of white men in software engineering, and only policies and procedures that change hiring away from those things which encourage such discrimination will fix the balance.
You don’t have to “lower the bar” at all, because it turns out that the average “bar” is the wrong standard for anything but the most independent of programming (which is not modern software engineering, thanks). My own hiring standard looks for people who love learning, don’t mind shifting contexts and languages, and can work well in a group. Some of the “smart guys” who have interviewed with us have been poor choices because they are bad culture fits—cowboys and jerks.
Well he lists several things. Why do you think that a special hiring queue for diversity hires and special classes for diversity hires is setting an equal bar?
I'm all for reducing systemic discrimination but is the way to do it discrimination in the other direction (which you construe diversity hiring as being)? If that answer to that question is no, then the only way to deal with the system discrimination is to work hard to undo biases in people who do hiring. That's a hard/unsolvable problem, due to the difficulty/impossibility of actually changing people's minds.
Could you be more specific with what you mean by "bar"? Because if it's purely meritocratic/skills-based then your second point is very off-putting to me, it seems you're implying that minorities love learning, shifting contexts and languages, and work well in groups, but some of the actual skilled people you interviewed were all white, and cowboys/jerks. That implication is in and of itself pretty inflammatory, minorities are just as capable of being "smart guy" cowboys/jerks.
If there is systemic discrimination in favour of group A, then the only way to fix that discrimination is to eliminate it. To the members of group A (in this case, mainly white men), that feels like discrimination. It isn’t discrimination, but that’s what the loss of power and representation feels like. Even if you step it down through affirmative action programs, group A feels like it’s being discriminated against…
…which is only true if removing of unearned privileges is discrimination. (It isn’t.)
By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap. There’s a bunch of nonsense talked through on a whiteboard that has nothing to do with day-to-day programming or anything you’ll find on a job…and white men tend to do exceedingly well at that sort of crap. There’s an overrepresentation of specific skills required to pass the “technical” interview that are equally underrepresented in the technical execution of day-to-day work.
People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself. What I’m saying is that in my own hiring practice, I do have a technical exercise. But it’s not one that requires that a developer “complete” it successfully, because the folks who measure the success are not looking for amazing technical solutions… they are members of the team who you’d be working with. They are assessing whether you listen to technical instruction; if you know more, how you express yourself to someone junior to you; if you know as much, how well you work with them. It’s a soft-skills developer test, because if you can demonstrate the ability to work through this problem with the other people in there with you—even if you don’t complete the test, you will probably fit on the team.
And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed. (It’s valuable in part because I’ve had to implement the exact exercise for a job once because a language runtime did not have the data structure I needed.)
If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
> By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap.
Agreed.
> People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself.
Presumably, you mean the bias is toward white males. But then you go on to say your preferred method is a soft-skills developer test that the team who'd be working with the hire evaluates.
Great--that's how hiring should be done anyway.
> And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed.
Okay, if that's how it worked out for you, great. The whole point of any hiring process is to determine which people will be the best fit for your needs. If your method does this, then it's a good method.
> If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
This is where your argument breaks down. You started out talking about unearned privileges, but your whole argument is about how you test for desired skills, and then somehow in the end, you make it about race again (but this time as it relates to meritocratic hiring, not unearned privilege).
So...where does race fit in to your hiring process? To me, that part of it just sounds like pandering, since your actual process sounds like it's all skill-based anyway.
Basically just said the same things -- see my response.
I think what they were trying to get across was that BECAUSE of the broken testing, tests that were supposed to be meritocratic are just checking for certain groupthink.
My response there was if that's the case, the problem is just making better (actually strictly meritocratic) tests.
I agree with your point that systemic discrimination is a problem, but I'm not sure that affirmative action programs are as simple as "stepping it down". I get that as things normalize group A will feel like they're being discriminated against, but I think that's precisely the reason affirmative action programs are controversial -- they're hard to distinguish from just discrimination in the other direction. Maybe that's the only option available, that discussion is long and nuanced.
I also agree that most hiring practices are crap, and that interviews don't properly reflect day-to-day work. I also agree with a point (I think) you made that a bunch of the "meritocratic" tests that are developed today are a lot of the time just checking if one was groomed in the same way (learned about algorithms the same way, learned the same practices, etc) and not necessarily pure can-you-get-shit-done tests.
Your point gets a little hazy towards the bottom, for me, I can't tell if you're against supposedly meritocratic tests altogether and suggesting that people test for team-fit more. Your last sentence seems to have that same off-putting insinuation, just crystalized, but I think I understand your point, maybe I can rephrase it:
"If you're measuring a candidate with what you think is a meritocratic skills based tests, it's easy to be blinded by inherent bias and support systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because many seemingly meritocratic skills based tests have more to do with confirming shared experiences/biases than checking actual skill."
If I did indeed read your point well, my response would be to conduct better interviews, and create an actually meritocratic interview process, the onus is on the company.
Affirmative action programs are controversial because people who have privilege generally don’t like other people getting that privilege (because then they are no longer special).
As an analogous situation, men often claim that women talk too much. There’s fairly strong evidence that the claim is merely sexist nonsense[1].
So forgive me if I’m unwilling to give a crap about whether people who look like me (white men) feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick because there are people like me working to end the special privileges that they have gotten literally for decades. Especially since so many of them really aren’t all that. The London School of Economics makes it clear that gender quotas actually improve meritocracy by squeezing out mediocre men[2].
Your rephrasing is mostly correct, but I would go so far as to say that if you don’t know how to see your own biases, you cannot design a meritocratic interview process that doesn’t inherently have bias against women and/or minorities. As this entire discussion on the firing of the author of the screed shows…there’s a lot of people who can’t see that they have biases.
(And yes, I have biases. I have to work very hard to prevent those biases from causing me to discriminate. This is largely why I involve my team in hiring and constantly discuss the problems with bias blindness with them, too.)
The article in your second reference uses income as proxy for competence. Are you sure you want to support a study that's based on that assumption? That measurement would probably rank Trump to be highly competent among politicians.
Yes, software companies hire more white men than they should, given how many people are white men. The key question is whether companies are hiring more white men than they should, given the candidates available for hire. I don't think it's appropriate to use evidence about the first to make decisions about the second - a company's moral responsibility for playing fair largely stops at the boundaries of their org chart.
I have zero opposition for efforts to educate and train women and minorities. I want the actual problem to be fixed, not just used as an excuse to advance one group's interests at the expense of another in zero-sum games.
> Asians people are over-represented in Silicon Valley
Some Asians are foreigners, hired by SV firms at lower-than-market salaries. They may be hired because they're less expensive (because they need sponsorship so badly). These types of people make this a much more complicated analogy.
> yet I don't hear anyone demanding we hire less Asian people
Affirmative action policies sometimes do impact Asian applicants, making it less likely for them to be hired.
I did wonder about that. Applicants to YC submit their profile name. Many people list their identity and public projects in their profile. Responses here would make interesting fodder for a works-well-with-others algorithm.
It’s pretty easy to find at least one scientist who will deny global warming, or that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. That doesn’t make that scientist right any more than these (all male, all white) scientists.
The assertions of the author of the screed are not well-accepted, and they are not facts. They are conjecture, and the author attempted to make universals out of primarily American ways of thinking and ingrained ways of discrimination.
But they are well-accepted, and they have been for decades. If scientific consensus is any measure of truth, you should be defending his propositions with the same fervor you would global warming. Anything else is just science denialism.
Several of the studies he cites on biological differences in genders are well accepted, so far as I know the field. But the key conclusions that he draws from those studies (and really, the entire point of the memo) don't have any direct scientific support that I know of. Perhaps I am missing some key references. Care to provide citations for some of these?
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things ... 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."
There's a citation for the first part. What's the evidence for the conclusion drawn?
"Neuroticism ... This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."
Citation for why neuroticism leads to fewer women in high stress jobs?
How about the entire "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap" section? That contains stuff like this:
"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things"
"Women on average are more cooperative"
"Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"
Each of these statements (which at least hit my radar of being scientifically supported from the literature I know) is followed by some suggestions on how to improve the workplace for women. Implicit, of course, is that these aggregate scientific differences are somehow responsible for the gender gaps in tech. Any citations for why the quoted statements explain anything at all about gender differences in tech, rather than say, other STEM fields (biology? medicine? they have very different gender gaps).
It would be great to have the references I'm missing, because without them it sure appears the author is citing well accepted studies in order to make it look like his unsupported conclusions have "evidence".
Fair point. I'm here to defend the factual basis for his conclusions, not the logic that got him there.
At the end of the day, he told a just-so story; in this, he's no different than the "blame discrimination" camp. At least this story is an empirical one backed by self-reported work place surveys, cross-cultural analyses, etc. The fundamentalists opposing him just have some anecdotes, some unreproducible stereotype threat studies, and a healthy dose of religious conviction.
Yes. I’ve also read other articles. The stance presented by the memo author does not represent “broad” scientific consensus, it represents a pseudo-scientific basis for continued discrimination. The same thing was tried back in the 1800s to explain why certain humans should be enslaved to others.
How interesting, I have read other articles too. I am unqualified to make any authoritative claims on this subject (and many others), but people who seem to be just that appear to disagree with you.
Most arguments against the manifesto (sic) I have seen, seem to be either ad hominem or claiming some form of "discrimination" .. as in prejudice. In the light of the current discussion around gender, mostly in the US, I am just not convinced. And it seems that many people who actually are qualified agree (no, a group of self referencing "gender studies" professors does not convince).
Anyway, it's coming up 5AM here and I will not bother you further with my slave-owner-descendant misconceptions.
I agree, it's certainly possible to find scientists who will support one stance or another, but please do read the linked article in its entirety before spreading misinformation. One of the scientists is actually a woman (and non-white btw), Debra Soh, who holds a PhD in sexual neuroscience.
> "Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex. It is only because a group of individuals have chosen to interpret them that way, and to subsequently deny the science around them, that we have to have this conversation at a public level." -- Dr. Debra W Soh
The problem is the author is repeating a pattern common in these discussions, where some kernels of empirically supported science are used to justify opinions unsupported by them. That we can measure some differences in MRI in no way establishes that under-representation of women in tech is a result of biological inevitability. We know for certain this isn't the case due to history itself, as well as variation in representation by location and culture.
The author asserted that gender imbalance at google is the result of evolutionary/biological factors, and that diversity programs attempting to establish parity in representation are damaging to google and should be abandoned.
Look at this and explain to me how evolutionary psychology or biology explain what happened to women in CS in the US:
If the author's positions sound mild or plausible to you, I don't believe you've actually read the science on this issue. What the original author said simply isn't supported in the way they claim. That we can measure slight differences in aggregate between women and men in no way explains what's going on as a sole factor.
Do some research on the nordic gender paradox. It seems that (simplified) if you forcefully "level the playing field" that intrinsic biological differences are stronger, not weaker.
This measures percentage, not absolute numbers. The percentage dropped because loads of men joined tech when tech became lucrative. Before that it was a niche field.
Last I checked women like making money too. Likewise, while software becoming lucrative is a global trend, the intense drop in womens involvement is not at all the same globally.
And again, I'm pointing out that the author advanced biological and evolutionary psychology as mechanisms for explaining away this, despite them operating on time scales that make this impossible.
Not as much as men. See a study [1] and Steven Pinker's slide [2], and many more studies. It's a well established scientific consensus.
> despite them operating on time scales that make this impossible.
The author isn't claiming that men evolved within 100 years, but simply that men have in thousands of years evolved to have skills more suitable for programming by a small margin. When considering the 99%tile, this small difference becomes quite big. According to [3], you find 4-10 times more men in the top 1% bracket than women in certain skills.
I think you've interpreted that quote exactly the opposite of the way it was intended. Here is slightly more context, which makes it clear that Soh is arguing it is the opponents of this memo who misinterpret any reference to sex differences and "subsequently deny the science around them."
> As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership.
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
> Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex. It is only because a group of individuals have chosen to interpret them that way, and to subsequently deny the science around them, that we have to have this conversation at a public level.
you didnt read his memo. please cite the passage where he says that he doesnt believe females should be there. point to where he says this, whether he did so directly or as an insinuation, and explain exactly how it means that he wants females out of google, please.
he never said that. i've seen your take repeated by others. all he was saying is that maybe the 'natural' balance of women/men in tech isn't 50/50. he said nothing about those who made it into the company.
people like you, who can't understand simple arguments, are what got him fired.
There's no room for personal attacks like this on Hacker News. If you're interested in having a thoughtful and more inclusive discussion on the topic, this isn't how you do it.
He certainly did not say that in his essay. I agreed with a few points of his (ex: acknowledging that even men who choose to should be included in stress/anxiety management programs instead of having them be gender specific. Make things a two way street.). Although, he did go full /r/theRedPill in certain parts which he probably shouldn't have.
and this is why they had to fire him. he can make 9 good points but 1 bad one and the only outcome is termination. i think google did the right thing. if this memo was 1/3 as long and only talked about censorship and diversity strategy, and left out the gender pseudoscience, he would probably still have his job. it was totally unnecessary to try and rationalize with uncited generalizations
So should we also ask how they confront the people who feel free to pin all bad things on white males and white privilege whether relevant, provable or not?
I've come across a few people from these companies and it's not that hard to come across people who have strong biases against whites and white men in particular. Sadly it's become a way to signal you're in the in-group.
Diffusing hostilities isn't achieved by becoming the thing you're trying to overcome.
The standard rule of thumb seems to be that it's okay to punch up, but not down.
A minority can complain about a majority, but the reverse is frowned upon. The amount of "frowned upon" is amplified by the degree to which the minority the majority impugns has been historically hurt by similar opinions.
Just like the apocryphal rule of thumb, there is no rule of punching up (or down) It's either you allow punching or you don't. LKY knew this. Else you wind up with an opposition bigger than the affected who get fed up with things after the affected begin punching more then they should.
People seem to have an intuitive sense of punching up/down. There's an intuitive sense of abuse of power, and an allowance for people without power to use tactics which we'd abhor if those in power used.
The idea "well, no one can punch!" is rhetorically clean, but pragmatically problematic. There is a long history of people who had to punch up to break a ceiling that should never have existed.
The problem with punching up (a revolution, an insurrection, whathaveyou) is that it's indiscriminate. At its worst it's a collective group against an individual rather than indiv-vs-indiv or group-vs-group.
So, while it looks like punching up, having a group "punch up" at someone is actually punching down at an indiv.
Yep. That definitely happens. Individuals become totems of their group, sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly.
But it's near impossible for a collective group of people to perfectly balance their outrage in just the right way, at precisely the right people, for exactly the right amount of time.
We just accept the tradeoff that progress is messy.
The problem it that they're "punching up" against people that could very well have had their own challenges in life, some of which may be even grater than group doing the punching. Don't expect a white guy that grew up in a trailer park with alcoholic parents to feel like an upper class black woman is punching up to his privileged position in society.
Yeah, that happens. It's near impossible for two strangers to know and take into account every perspective and challenge someone else has faced. And everyone's individual struggles feel enormous to them.
But still, people "punch up", and progress gets made.
A minority may think they're punching up at someone they consider to be in the majority based on obvious characteristics, and yet if they don't know the individual they may actually be punching down.
Assuming a person's privilege based on race, gender or other immutable characteristics is imprecise and counterproductive.
> over their colleague's right to a workplace where they're not judged by their sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other innate attribute irrelevant to their job performance.
Right, that's what he campaigned for. And not hire people due to their sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other innate attribute irrelevant to their job performance...
Yeah, Hacker News is a nightmare any time an issue like this happens, but I'm glad at least that some people out in the real world see this for what it is. This engineer deserved to be fired. I mean there's hundreds of of bro-y all-male "meritocratic" tech startups he can go join, so this still just a slap on the wrist.
You're not giving that a remotely fair reading. He literally calls for people to be treated as individuals while acknowledging and calling attention to traits that populations (read: large numbers of people) exhibit.
I'm really having trouble finding anything to be upset about in his "manifesto". He's literally being fired for trying to start a serious conversation about a delicate issue.
I think everyone is looking for the offense in the wrong places. The reason he got so many angry responses is because he didn't explicitly celebrate the left wing tenants of equity. He questioned the tenants in very reasonable places and that was all that it took. Scary times, these.
That leads to my point, questioning one is tantamount to questioning it all, which is unforgivable and intolerable. You can see this by how many have hallucinated stances that the writer didn't even make.
That guy seems smart. I bet he did know. He probably decided that he could either quit quietly or get himself fired. The latter opens up the possibility of lawsuits (and unemployment benefits, which he is unlikely to need, but if he finds it hard to get hired again quickly it may be helpful).
I think he's being fired more for the severe PR fallout that resulted in the way he tried to start the conversation, than for the content of the manifesto.
> "we should expect to see people with certain characteristics in tech, in the same way we see people with certain characteristics in race-car driving. that's no reason to discriminate positively or negatively against race car driver candidates."
I think he did make a point similar to that. Unfortunately he stirred the hornets nest (most, I think) by pointing to the gender-wage relationship.
And you just (mostly) summarized it with a single sentence. The fact that such a screed was written at all is a problem. These kinds of arguments require very precise language in order to minimize misunderstandings and deflections.
I'd go one step further and say that he's being fired for completely misunderstanding the nature of Google's diversity efforts. He's responding to an attempt to create an equitable work environment. Google is more interested in creating a PR narrative.
These are complex issues that will take decades to fix starting with programs at the elementary school level and fundamental shifts in the messaging and feedback our society gives to children, young adults and all the way up to college students. And yet people are expecting Google to make significant progress on the issue within a couple of years. It's not really a realistic expectation to have of Google, but there are real market consequences for Google if they're seen not to care enough.
Google can make it look like they truly care about it and are solving it, but only if people don't look too closely or start pointing out flaws. This manifesto is an exercise in looking too closely and pointing out flaws. Whether his points, themselves, are flawed or whether they have merit is entirely beside the point.
The problem with the argument that "people should be treated equally regardless of other factors" is that we have a long. deep history of that not being the case.
We have numerous studies which how simple biasing factors, such as a person's name, can dramatically decrease interview rates.
Arguing against diversity policies can be coached in the language of equality, but the objective results show that the outcomes would not be.
The outrage, fairly or unfairly (it is impossible to know what's in a person's heart) comes from many readers believing that the person is not arguing for equality, but coaching an argument against it's outcome in language that assumes that goal.
For many people, they see a cheap rhetorical trick made in bad faith.
The trick is using the language of equality to argue in favor of an approach which will decrease it.
It's a fairly common tactic inside of the RedPill community, and within White Power/Pride groups. Arguing that by fighting sexism/racism you are being sexist/racist.
Arguing that unproven methods of fighting sexism/racism aren't as effective as everyone claims they are and that said methods are potentially harmful isn't the same as being sexist/racist. I feel like the author is attempting to make the point that such practices aren't really in anyone's interest except the outward appearance of the company.
And for this he should be fired? Also I think you are being too generous in attributing people's outrage to them reading malice into his motives. People overwhelmingly are reacting to his words because he has violated sacred PC orthodoxy in one of the great temples of PC orthodoxy (Google and Bay Area in general). This has been a vicious mob attack on the guy who mostly appears to just have tried to civilly and rationally express his views without realizing how he suffers from unconscious biases.
At worst, if you can read his mind, it was cover for his conscious motive to discriminate against women but I really don't believe he knows it.
It would be great if you could point to documents proving all your assumptions on bias. People have been so vehement about their beliefs. But there has never been a succint summarization of the proof. If it's so self evident, someone with decent writing skills would have whipped up a document like the manifesto for the general arguments with proof of bias right?
The thing is, if you don't believe those assumptions, you will view the the unconscious bias and diversity programs as discriminatory. And many people don't believe those assumptions. They see companies discriminating against them and they don't like it.
There are a simply insane number of succinct summaries, opinions, studies, court cases, historical texts etc. which show that bias, especially ones based on race and gender, are prevalent at multiple tiers of society.
There are not "assumptions" at this point. They are a factual reality.
My partner was a female chip designer who after 25 years got out of the business (in start up, saved up for early retirement..) Being an early employee well compensated. She loved her work, but not the environment, which while not outright hostile, wasn't good. She's got thick skin. Its the environment thats keeping women out, not the work. If you don't think your getting a fair shake, you aren't going to stick around.
> this employee stated, bluntly, that they don't believe many of their colleagues should be there because of their sex.
No, he started that Google's hiring practices are biased towards certain candidates. If that causes offense, it should be directed at those in charge of hiring practices, not the guy who reported them.
> Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer.
Why is it always scorched-earth and never something like retraining? You bemoan hostile environments, but then demand termination if a foot is ever put wrong.
When you engage in discriminatory hiring as a matter of policy, so called "affirmative action", you will invite people to judge those that are advantaged by that policy.
The people who decided to implement this braindead idea are at fault for this. Not the guy who decided to voice what everyone else was thinking.
There is no reason for an employee to be concerned about who their employer hires as long as said companies are operating within the framework of law. This is none of your business literally.
Google is currently under investigation for pay disparity and are obliged to review everything and ensure there is no sexism at play. If you don't like this surely you should challenge the laws that demand this of Google.
Sending a memo on diversity or any political issue is an aggressive political action in the workplace that can only have one outcome. The context for debates and action about merit and diversity is in the legal democratic space not the office.
This individual is not a victim of free speech but of indiscretion.
Regardless of whether you agreed with the letter or not, it's 100% correct in asserting that it's super difficult to have productive, rational conversations about the issue of diversity. Google just reinforced that fact.
Perhaps more important (for Google, at least) is to be compliant with employment law, than to allow "rational conversations about the issue of diversity."
California is an at-will state. They won't be able to fire you for participating on a Trump rally or donating to Hillary Clinton, but sure as hell they can fire you for creating a hostile workplace, which is what this guy did.
Unless he can convince a judge that "creating a hostile workplace" is a euphemism for "having a political view management disagrees with".
Which might be easy. After all, he just alleged the Google workplace is clearly hostile to conservatives ... and they fired him for it. The argument that he was creating a hostile workplace is very weak. The argument that Pichai is, is very strong.
Right. The reason why this created a massive controversy was because he didn't do anything to stir up controversy. I get it, you really want to give this guy a pass because you agree with him, but reality doesn't agree with you.
"Controversy" is the easiest thing in the world to abuse. Anyone who doesn't like an opinion on anything can say it's "controversial" and therefore shouldn't be spoken about it in case it upsets people.
Mature organisations and cultures can tackle controversial topics. Google used to be able to do that too. It obviously cannot anymore.
> Mature organisations and cultures can tackle controversial topics. Google used to be able to do that too. It obviously cannot anymore.
You do realize that it wasn't the controversy that landed this guy in hot water, but rather the veiled attempt at using pseudo-science to create a conspiracy theory about Google discriminating against males, right?
The scientists who wrote the papers he cited said he got it right, and it wasn't pseudo-science at all. And there's no conspiracy theory: the things he talked about have happened.
The way in which you describe actual science as pseudo-science because you don't like the conclusions is very scary, by the way.
The scientists that wrote the papers were concerned with a single field of science. There's a whole societal context that's not considered, and that is what makes his position pseudo-science: just like phrenology, finding correlation and assuming causation is just bad science.
> The way in which you describe actual science as pseudo-science because you don't like the conclusions is very scary, by the way.
The way you describe cherry-picked papers on a single field of science as definite proof of your world view is really scary too. How low will you lower your bar to explain the world in terms you like?
Look, I'm not a huge fan of social science or psychology myself, but that's because they have trouble reproducing things. The scientists he cited and who wrote in support of him are social scientists and psychologists. They are discussing reproducible results. Are you saying that no psychological finding, no matter how reproducible, can ever be used if it's related to gender?
If you have hard scientific evidence with scientists willing to go on the record and say, no, in fact, there are no innate differences between the preferences of men and women, it's all just lies and in fact girls love computers when they are children just as much as boys and here's why the other studies are all flawed ... sure. Show them to us.
As it is, you look like someone who is scrabbling around for an excuse to ignore perfectly valid scientific debating by disclaiming entire fields as "pseudo science" and "cherry picked". Please debate properly - make real rebuttals with evidence.
He isn't citing anyone, he just stated "facts." Please show me the citations? Where are all these papers? Where are the peer reviews on the "facts" he mentions?
> Are you saying that no psychological finding, no matter how reproducible, can ever be used if it's related to gender?
Going back to the absolute lack of references, I am not dismissing any particular study, but rather the right-wing knee-jerk reaction that "the world is fine the way it is, and people trying to change it are just destroying the perfect equilibrium we live in." It's almost like the last century of social changes hasn't happened. Talk about disregard for evidence.
> If you have hard scientific evidence with scientists willing to go on the record and say, no, in fact, there are no innate differences between the preferences of men and women
Cute, asking to prove a negative. Let's use the same idea: do you have hard scientific proof and scientists willing to back it in public that a push for increasing diversity in engineering will go nowhere because the field is already in perfect balance? No? Didn't think so.
Also, I'm not saying there are no innate differences, but that ignoring the current societal context by pushing a theory that explains all behavior using genetic traits is ridiculous. By using the same standard, going back to pre-WW2 (which forced women into the workforce) we could assume that "women are only interested in domestic tasks".
> Show them to us.
Nice. I like that you identify with this group. I'm tired of people pussyfooting around trying to push the rhetoric, while at the same time trying to divorce themselves from the author. Good on you.
> As it is, you look like someone who is scrabbling around for an excuse to ignore perfectly valid scientific debating by disclaiming entire fields as "pseudo science" and "cherry picked". Please debate properly - make real rebuttals with evidence.
Again, show me the paper, show me how they play in the whole context of current society, and maybe I'll take you seriously. Until then, you look like someone cherry-picking data to paint the world to their liking.
Now, here's the trick. You got what you asked for. Will you change your perspective? I find myself somehow dubious because the root cause of the disagreement is you believe the world both is and should be entirely malleable, and that forced social engineering (e.g. by firing people with particular worldviews from influential organisations like Google) is a legitimate way to achieve particular ends.
You don't need to go very far and blame Google for the level of difficulty. Making generalizations based on sex and without references is hostile from the get go.
If you want to have a rational conversation, have it rationally.
Fun fact: the author of the memo earned a PhD in Biology from Harvard. Google can fire him and get away with it, but it's going to be tough, very tough, for him to be falsely characterized as someone who is misinformed or unscientific. And the court of public opinion may well be more important in this controversy than any court of law.
It absolutely does not follow that everyone who had a PhD at Harvard in Biology gets to say whatever they want about humans, especially in a way that's derogatory of his coworkers.
But my point is that even if this person were qualified to make such assertions, his qualifications can be easily made invisible through editorialization.
If I've learned anything since November 2016, it's that messaging will frequently overpower facts.
When I was in academia there was no shortage of my peers with PhDs in physics who were very religious. Having a PhD in a science is not proof against having misinformed or unscientific views.
Being religious and scientific are not mutually exclusive. I am not a religious person, but my professor, who is very religious, is one of the most rigorous scientists I had the chance to work with in person.
What if the cause is in biology? You will miss it that way. Bear in mind that we are like we are because of our genes. You are not blonde or brunette because something your mother ate or you did in another past life. Genes also impact in intelligence and skills. The environment is another factor but the base is set by genes.
I didn't say he was infallible by merit of a specialized academic degree. He could very well be wrong, but the fact that he has a PhD in Biology from a top Ivy League school should at least give his thesis academic plausibility (even among those who strongly disagree) and allow for the possibility of reasoned debate over the issue instead of a politically-correct witch hunt.
What does that have to do with anything? Do you think having an advanced degree makes you invulnerable to common biases or errors in reasoning? Do you think that having a STEM degree makes someone knowledgeable in issues of sociology? Ben Carson is a very accomplished neurosurgeon, and yet he has enormous gaping voids in his knowledge of other subjects.
I didn't say he was infallible. He could be wrong. I'm talking about academic credibility—and he has it.
a STEM degree
A STEM PhD from Harvard. FTFY. And comparing James Damore to Ben Carson is, frankly, absurd. James Damore is not a politician, he's a scientist. He's not some yahoo in a comment thread, arguing with academics and professionals in their field from his parent's basement.
You're highlighting another big problem these days, slavish reverence for the 'best schools'.
I will also get a PhD from Harvard, and from a more selective program than this person. Yet I recognize the limits of my knowledge.
Studying microbes [1] does not give you the standing to discuss sociology. If your very well-qualified dentist wanted to do a code review of your last commit, you might think twice before accepting his advice - namely, you would ask what special knowledge he has, besides being a generally smart individual.
I know a lot of people with PhDs from Harvard. That would and should play no role in my evaluation of whatever argument they're putting forward, if that argument has little to do with their area of expertise. Getting a biology PhD has no relevance to whether someone truly understands the literature in evolutionary psych.
It was more rigorously argued than simply stating that 'was neither rigorously argued'. I've seen this sentence now a 100th time in this topic, and I haven't seen any of kind of proof for opposing any of his statements.
They don't say that the school matters, they say you have to actually refute him instead of saying 'he's just stupid'.
Don't bother. These are the same people that are mad at alleged quotas being the only reason why they can't go to elite schools (and then saying school doesn't matter afterward).
I see your point, but the fact that he has the degree means he studied biology for many years of his life and contributed his own interesting ideas to the field. I think Harvard is the less important part here, although it is "well-respected" for a reason.
Highly educated people in the sciences can in fact be quite vulnerable to just this type of hubris, ie thinking that having expertise in one area means expertise in the whole field.
Nobel prize winning scientists have damaged their reputations by opining on matters they know little about (James Watson on genetics, and many others )
> Nobel prize winning scientists have damaged their reputations by opining on matters they know little about (James Watson on genetics, and many others )
You mean to say that James Watson, the Nobel prize winning geneticist knows little about genetics?
Watson is a Chemist who used his expertise in physical chemistry to discern the structure of DNA....that is not the same as knowing genetics (which is a huge field).
*The point is not to belittle his accomplishment (which would be silly) but to point out that he veered into a field that he was mostly unqualified to offer an informed opinion on, never mind a very controversial one.
Also, it's a HUGE controversy in the scientific community that he and Crick got the Nobel prize and most of the credit for discovering the structure of DNA, and Rosalind Franklin gets none. I thought that was well known.
It was Harvard alumni with PhDs who wrote the piece of crap that is The Bell Curve in the 90s. A Harvard PhD guarantees neither accuracy nor correctness.
I have a PhD in astrophysics from a peer institution of Harvard. I know dozens of people with PhDs who are "misinformed and unscientific" on many topics, including their nominal specialization.
And by the way, another fun fact:
As far as I can can tell, he doesn't have a PhD. He didn't publish any papers while he was at Harvard. You don't get through a modern elite PhD program without making any contribution to the literature. And his thesis is not showing up in any library search I do. He seems to have dropped out very early.
No shame in that, of course. But since you and many others are saying he has credibility on a matter unrelated to the topic of his PhD precisely because he has a PhD: he, er, may not have a PhD.
By the way, the more cited of his two papers reads like it was written by someone very new to research, who had his editor open in one window and the Wikipedia page for "List of Logical Fallacies" open in another.
This explains some things. I was sort of surprised he had managed to defend a thesis after trying to follow his argument in the piece in question. I don't expect thesis level work from a forum post, but for something with so much work put into citations and footnoting, it's so bad at linking its evidence to its arguments and its arguments to its conclusions (or even deciding, what, in fact, it's central thesis is). For what he deems to be such a hostile audience, it's very poor piece of persuasive writing.
It is not a thesis. If anything, it's more like a precursor to a thesis. This is akin to sitting down with the professor, and suggesting that some of these factors may explain certain phenomenon, and should be researched.
Factual facty fact: he didn't "suggest he had one". You make it sound as if he was inflating his credentials. He was listed as in the PhD Biology programme on Harvard's alumni site, and the press incorrectly reported that he earned a PhD.
Now, it's important to correct the record if he didn't complete the PhD. But he did publish papers (at Princeton and MIT).
You stated multiple times that he has a PhD from Harvard. That is a falsehood. It's not an "if", it is a fact. Harvard confirmed he didn't earn a PhD to a Wired reporter[1].
You are correct that he wrote two papers.
You now state that he "didn't suggest he had one", when in fact he did: he said "PhD, Systems Biology" on his linkedin[2] profile.
This is shameful behavior on your part, but understandable because your defense of his joke of a memo depends on his authority to speak about the subject as a PhD in Biology, which he doesn't have.
Maybe it's time for you to go back to all the places where you stated he has a PhD and post retractions.
Yes, I stated that only while it was being reported by the press and I didn't have better information. I mean, come on. As soon as I found out he didn't, I retracted right here in this thread. If that's not enough for you, then that's too freakin' bad. If you think I'm going to apologise for commenting based on the information currently available, you're going to wait forever.
The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the DISTRIBUTION OF traits in men and women. He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful. What is his conclusion about how we should behave? "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group." Wow, what a monster.
The reaction to the memo is really the most damning thing about the whole affair. Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought. They've just proved the author's point. Honestly, Google might have even been rational to fire him, due to the toxic situation created by the mass outrage. How incredibly damning of our society.
A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.
I don't know where everyone is reading their versions of the letter, but I don't think you could read the Gizmodo reprint and misrepresent the argument:
This is where I read up on it, and the letter was written very reasonably, IMO. That article also includes a response from google's brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance.
> "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group." Wow, what a monster.
The problem is that Google already does do this, for the most part. So what does it mean to say that Google ought to treat people as individuals, if that is already the current state of affairs? The argument, as coded in the document, was that Google ought to cease making any efforts to correct disparities in representation.
As a moral or rational argument, this falls flat on its face. Suppose that there was science to show that cognitive differences between men and women or different races is 100% inborn (there isn't, not even close). Even then, there's still the problem of whether the magnitude of those differences justifies the magnitude of differences in representation. There is not nearly enough data to make a case here, and by presenting the case as made, the author of the doc was doing more than just observing the state of the science. He was making an unsubstantiated claim that his coworkers, or at a minimum the sex and/or races they belong to, are inherently deficient at performing the work.
He did not make that claim that
> "He was making an unsubstantiated claim that his coworkers, or at a minimum the sex and/or races they belong to, are inherently deficient at performing the work"
He only claimed that the difference between groups could come from something else than society. To deny that is a much harder argument which could only be proved to exceptional evidence. Basically he's saying 'some' and you say 'never'.
AFAIK the IQ difference between genders is negligible, but the spread of the IQ is much greater in the male group. This also means that there are more men who are above 130 IQ then women which is kind of necessary to be a programmer. This does not mean that a female can't be a genius! If you want to disprove this you can do two things:
1., Prove that the average female IQ is way higher than mens.
2., Prove that there are as much women who are intellectually retarded ( sorry, English is not my first language, I don't know a better word ) than woman.
I don't know what is the IQ of an average programmer, for my claim it's enough to state that it is over the average of the population. 130 was just a number, it doesn't really matter anyway ( for my claim ).
It absolutely does. If the claim is that men are more striated, it makes a big difference whether the bar is 105 or 145. In fact, it is core to the argument. If it's 105, then the difference won't be statistically significant. If it's 145, you'd practically expect only men.
I was only talking about a possible statistical difference, which might be that significant. A quick search lead to a paper[1] which says the average is ~110, which is not insignificant.
In my perception the 'left' side states that there is no other factor than bias against women ( or I haven't seen any other argument ). The original document here stated that sexism exist but there might be other factors too, and apparently that was a problem.
[1] http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf
Some quick research on this suggests that the average college graduate in engineering (which is programmer material, at least programmer material for companies like Google) is around 130. Sources like [0].
Therefore it is not unreasonable to deduce that people who work as programmers in prestige companies are, on the average, from the very right-hand tail ends of the normal distribution curve, and the differences of men and women (on the average, again) are significant enough to cause an over-representation of men among this group.
The same thing that causes an over-representation of men among homeless alcoholics at the left-hand-side end of the normal distribution.
I'm gonna call bullshit on this, a 130 IQ average for engineering majors is silly, and seems more like what engineering majors think of themselves than reality.
> He said that those differences make attempts to achieve numerical parity misguided, discriminatory, and harmful.
No, he said quite clearly that Google was hiring too many women and minorities (and also that said women and minorities suck at tech jobs, though not in so many words). It's the specifics of the argument that got him in trouble. Bland abstract stuff like you paraphrase above wouldn't get anyone fired.
He said Google has '[h]iring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate', created in part because "humans are generally biased towards protecting females".
The claim made is that they "decreased the false negative rate".
Google has long prided itself on rejecting large numbers of qualified candidates. Since decreasing the false-negative rate inherently means "hire a greater quantity of qualified candidates", I fail to see how the bar was lowered.
The most direct reading of his claim is that they're hiring unqualified women. He would presumably be happy with a larger mix of female colleagues if he felt standards weren't being lowered.
>Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, research suggests that “greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits.” Because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider.” We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.
"the lack of women in tech is fine becuase that's just what happens when women, who are biologically worse at programming, don't go into tech"
"the lack of women in tech is fine becuase that's just what happens when women, who are biologically worse at programming, don't go into tech"
"biologically worse at programming" is a total fabrication. The accurate claim is "less interested", although I suppose that's not as effective for your Two Minutes Hate.
You can take any statement and rephrase so that it sounds horrible. This is just sophistry.
That whole paragraph is saying that men and women, __as populations__ , have biological differences in psychology, temperament and interests. In prosperous societies, men and women naturally assume complementary, rather than overlapping, roles.
> We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.
I don't see any text in there that warrants that claim. Is there a specific sentence or two that you could highlight that leads you to your conclusion?
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
> - Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
> - Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
> - Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
He is saying quite a bit more than that Google is hiring too many women and minorities: he's claiming, in straightforward terms, that Google is illegally discriminating when doing so.
Yes, in theory there's a world in which he's right (I'm pretty sure that's not this world) but he is definitely making the claim either way.
I do not read his words as "google is illegally discriminating". He has listed several discriminatory practices. And I see and use the word "discriminatory" in a non-pejorative/non-judgemental sense.
The programs are "set asides" for specific groups of people unrelated to "merit". Is that not a fair way to describe that?
That's _not_ to say that those who go are meritless, but that the programs differentiate on factors unrelated to merit for the purposes of admission to said program. Is that a factually incorrect description of those programs? Do they not differentiate "applicants" on characteristics unrelated to merit?
How exactly is it possible to have discriminatory practices without practicing discrimination? It honestly seems like you're saying the guy isn't a bigot because grammar.
"They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity."
"What kind of practices?"
"Well, basically, treating people differently based on what their race is, or gender --"
"Oh, you mean racism."
"Yeah, basically."
"Mmhmm, I see. And it was ultra-secret and unrecorded in what manner?"
"So-- most meetings at Google are recorded, anyone at Google can watch it, we're trying to be really open about everything, except for this. They don't want any paper trail for any of these things."
"Whoa, okay, why?"
"Because, I think, it's illegal. I mean, as some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percent of people that agreed with me on the document. And so if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism."
Previously, "the truth" was right leaning; it is now left leaning. Unfortunately, many people find (and have always found) that all it takes to dismiss an opposing moral position is to point out that their opponent's position is untruthful, and the discussion (or lack thereof) ends there.
A sibling poster has linked us to PG's essay on "What you can't say", which states my concerns more eloquently and thoroughly.
Since you more or less pasted your comment from the other thread, I'll TLDR my same reply:
The claims in this document are FAR from "widely-believed" or "scientifically established". By count, most of his claims are just asserted. But even most of the claims with a link are highly debatable.
This is NOT a particularly good advocacy document on the core scientific questions surrounding inequality. It may have some points in the cultural commentary bits, but stop presenting this as good work (on diversity). It's shoddy and amateur.
Motherboard has a link to a version with all sources, that's the one I evaluated.
I can't comment on how Google arrived at the decision or what their line is. Personally, I think these things should be debatable.
But the author didn't do a lot to help himself dull the predictable outcry. He hedged with some comments about his intentions, but a lot of the claims are pretty anachronistic. Given how controversial some of the claims (especially the biologically essentialist ones) were bound to be, I think he could've used a different tone and some better faith representation of the other side.
Motherboard has a link to a version with all sources, that's the one I evaluated.
So it does, thank you. Yes, I agree that several of his claims could have used links to supporting evidence, in particular the bullet points under "These differences aren't just socially constructed". Not that the outcome would be any different.
Yes, that would have been a good source, in particular for Dr. Halpern's comment that she believed all psychological differences were due to societal influence but changed her mind based on the strength of the evidence.
But it's too late now. I don't know if there's any way he could have expressed his views without being crucified. But he definitely should have done a better job of reviewing it with the mindset of an ideological opponent determined to interpret everything in the worst possible light. (As another example, phrases like "PC authoritarians" and the bit about coal miner deaths are applause lights to the right, but aren't relevant to the core arguments and just serve to alienate the actual audience).
"I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it."
He didn't yell fire in a crowded movie theater. As the Supreme Court decided applies to the government, so should private industry use as their guideposts.
Google just took a public step forward in becoming an arbiter of morals. Which is frightening given how much of the de facto internet they control.
This is a ridiculous standard for an employer. He has at will employment, they can fire him and he can also leave if he dislikes their diversity programs. Regardless of his thesis, a private employer has no duty to support any/all speech from their employees to other employees during business hours and using their business resources (which all of this was). It is perfectly legitimate, 100% protected first amendment speech to tell your boss to go f-ck themselves at work, or to call a customer a piece of sh-t to their face, but don't expect your employer to support you for it.
Google encourages "free" speech between employees on the same topics as long as it tracks with their moral narrative.
This is the largest point for me and what distinguishes them from "Know and repeat the company value statement." If they take an organizational position in promoting certain values past a certain degree, then they absolutely have a social responsibility to make space for those who would discuss counter-values.
At will employment has historically been a smokescreen for companies to fire people for all sorts of abusive / illegal / poorly intentioned reasons. The fact that they can fire people for saying anything doesn't mean they should.
I love when people reference the fire in a theatre argument, because I learned from Christopher Hitchens that the reference is actually about prosecution of a group of Yiddish people protesting Wilson dragging us into WW1 (after getting elected on the promise not to), and Oliver Wendell Holmes used the bullshit example of yelling fire in a crowded theatre to support the conviction!
Also, Google has already shown it wants to be an arbiter of morals. For example, perhaps its lost in this topic, but on my conspiracy forums what people are upset about is Google apparently has been expanding censorship efforts and have hired certain groups to assist in deeming content innapropriate... Such "neutral" groups as the fucking ADL! So if you have a YouTube video calling Israels occupation of Palestine "apartheid" that's worthy of censorship. Don't even get me started about the Google execs shady relationship with the deep state and certain powerful politicians. Google turned evil a long time ago, and they are only getting worse.
All four state that there is strong evidence for of biological differences based on sex, though they all seem to come at it from different disciplines and support different claims. That's not, however, the same as saying that all four of them side with the author on his specific scientific claims.
In fact, all four of them conclude explicitly in favor of diversity initiatives.
Well, I think that's what the author concluded too is it not? He has a problem with the underlying principles, the process, and the endstate...not the goal.
My point is that not one of them described it in terms such as "shoddy" or "amateur", such as you did. None of them refutes any of the empirical claims he made. This stands in stark contrast to your interpretation of the memo.
The author accused Google of discriminatory hiring practices and "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates" (under the subhead, "The harm of Google biases"). Just because he couched his claims in a boring, vague manifesto doesn't mean he didn't imply something that impugns the qualifications of his coworkers.
Does Google's hiring practices "effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates"? That's a key issue. If so, the details of Google's hiring practices themselves impugn the qualifications of preferred candidate groups.
Apparently Google doesn't think that it has lowered the bar for women and minority candidates. So the memo's author has effectively raised a "Have you stopped beating your mother?" begging-type question. Should people get fired for poor rhetorical reasoning? Probably not, but this one happened to imply the inferiority of certain groups of employees.
That's not how probably works. GP is only implying it's potentially true, presumably because they aren't sure they've fully considered every angle of the question and there may be weird edge cases.
Let's not Purity Test people for showing some humbleness in their beliefs. We could probably use more of that these days.
Or it's an implicit admission that the qualifications they look at are bused and they don't know how to fix that.
There's an underlying assumption in these discussions that implementing a meritocracy is easy and examining every candidate without regard to their race and sex is the default state of affairs. In this view, any changes you make to the process is necessarily de-optimizing for merit.
But what is "merit"? This isn't a field where you can quantify it. If you were hiring people to lift heavy objects or something, you could test them all and hire the ones with the best numbers and be confident you got the best people for the job. There's no way to implement something like that for the jobs Google has.
So we approximate. We look at degrees and open source projects and do in-person interviews. We pretend that this results in a purely objective evaluation of the candidate's ability to do the job, free of any bias... not because there's any reason to think that's true, but because we really want it to be.
Techies often bemoan whiteboard interviews for being unfair: the skill being tested isn't really the skill you'd use on the job, and it discriminates against people who get nervous when put on the spot, or whatever. It's not outrageous to think that maybe some parts of the interview process, without ever intending to, discriminate against women and minorities in a similar way.
That's an argument for digging into the inner workings of the hiring process more than an argument for looking at aggregate effect. If you're just looking at aggregate group statistics about candidate pools and hiring decisions, how would you ever know the difference between your hiring screen preferring a group and the candidate pool genuinely having more strong candidates in that group?
It seems more than a little quixotic if fixing every known flaw in the hiring process isn't enough - that the process must get a certain hiring outcome in order to be "fair".
And if they do dig into the inner workings of the hiring process and the results are still not representative of the general population? Do you just assume you've somehow managed to eliminate all bias and the results must reflect the population? Or do you assume that you haven't managed to 100% debug this highly difficult process?
It is very difficult to tell the difference between biased hiring and actual skew in the population. But when it's a trait that has no obvious connection to the job, it seems best to assume the process is biased, unless really good evidence exists to demonstrate a connection.
For example, let's say your interview process produces hires whose heights are substantially above average. If you're hiring for a basketball team then this would make perfect sense. If you're hiring Java programmers, it's highly likely that your interview process is screwed up. It's possible that the population of good Java programmers is unusually tall because of some biological factor, but this idea needs some major justification before you use it to make decisions.
Obviously, the first thing to do is to examine your interview process and eliminate any source of height bias you can find. But what if you do that and you're still hiring an abnormally large number of tall people? You could take this as sufficient evidence that tall people are better at this, but that's putting an awful lot of confidence in your interview program. It's more likely that you just haven't found all the sources of tall bias. If that's the case, then pushing for more short hires will improve the overall quality of your hires because you won't be artificially excluding good short ones.
>It's possible that the population of good Java programmers is unusually tall because of some biological factor, but this idea needs some major justification before you use it to make decisions.
But "we're somehow secretly and unknowingly discriminating in our hiring process" doesn't need such justification before using it to make decisions?
Correct, because bias is prevalent and almost impossible to avoid.
For example: does any part of your interview involve a subjective evaluation? If so, do any of the evaluators know the candidates' names? If so, congratulations, your process is probably biased! http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...
That's literally all it takes: some human judgment and some way to guess at the applicant's race. The discrimination can happen subconsciously. You and I would probably fall victim to it despite our best intentions.
Nobody knows how to screen job applicants for pure merit without bias. If it's a choice between "our process is imperfect just like everybody else's" and "we stumbled upon the perfect unbiased screening process and all bias in the output is due to inherent variation in the population," bet on the first one every time. It's about a million times more likely.
There is no evidence that Google "lowers the bar," and this is a common misconception about diversity-focused hiring practices. The idea isn't to lower the bar to hire more candidates for the mere sake of their ethic or gender diversity. The idea is to ensure that the hiring manager at least looks at some qualified, diverse candidates in his or her process.
The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job. Google's approach probably assumes there are, and puts a burden on the hiring manager and recruiter to find and consider those candidates.
I don't work at Google and am wholly unfamiliar with their internal hiring practices. But in order to prove the author's specific "lowering the bar" claim, we'd need to see data not just on hiring numbers, but on success of the hired cohorts over time. (I'm willing to guess that Google does not try to hire unqualified candidates, period.)
"Lowering the bar" is a dangerous claim that offends the dignity and qualifications of every diverse employee at the company or ever hired by the company. A claim that bold would demand extraordinary evidence, which the author does not convincingly supply, and which I am taking a wild guess does not exist.
This assumes that talent and hiring is considered as a thresholded binary model, where you are either "good enough" or "not good enough" to work for the company, and the difference between two people who are "good enough" isn't important.
Of course, because of cultural and historical prejudices and biases, the pool of candidates that even apply to google is biased towards white males. Everything possible should be done to attract applications or seek out potential candidates from minority populations. But without suggesting any biological differences, it is still likely that because of cultural and historical prejudice, the distribution of talent among candidates will be skewed toward white males. Again, not because of any biological difference, but because they are more likely to have been encouraged or gone to rich universities or had parents who were engineers.
If we have a pool of 100 people and we want to hire the best five, then the bar is set by ranking the people by talent and qualification. If we want to hire everyone who is qualified, then wherever we set the bar, it is still likely that the population above the bar is skewed. So if we want to achieve a rebalancing or quota of employees from a certain sub-population, then it certainly does involve lowering the bar. We can argue over whether that is a good thing to want, or a fair thing, but I don't think you can logically argue that the bar isn't being lowered if you want to achieve a quota for a certain subpopulation. If you are suggesting that the population above the bar is not skewed, then you are suggesting that the terrible cultural stereotypes, biases and prejudices against women and minorities in technical fields has had no effect on their ability to achieve talent and qualification above the level of the bar, which I find implausible.
I believe the idea behind diversity initiatives is to ensure that the starting pool of 100 people is representative of larger demographics. Women make up ~50% of Carnegie Mellon's undergraduate computer science department (for instance). It's not like there's a dearth of qualified women.
That maybe the theory, but it often isn't how it works in practice. Unfortunately people who claims this publicly get fired. I don't know the numbers, but it would be interesting to see if the acceptance rate of a google job interview depends on gender or race.
I have a feeling that if race truly played a preferential role in hiring engineers, we would see more than 1% of tech roles being filled by Black engineers at Google. ;)
Without knowing the distribution of the applicants, we can't say. Maybe 0.1% of all applicants are black, we don't know. In the same way, just saying 1% of tech roles are filled by black engineers doesn't imply that google's hiring practices are discriminatory.
Yeah that's generally how it works at most of the majors. People at Google are evaluated by an independent panel and the decision to hire or not is independent of other candidates. So you really do get this kind of "good enough" or "not good enough" binary.
> The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job.
No, the argument is that there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job _in the quantities desired by Google and every other tech company_.
They are trying to create a workforce with roughly proportional amounts of women, men, blacks, etc. when men are awarded ~80% of CS degrees and blacks are awarded, what, 2% or so? You can't move the needle in employee demographics when that's the pool you're working with unless you fudge your system a bit. Hell, given how universities already do this[1], why wouldn't Google?
> Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
If universities can't increase minority enrollment without lowering the bar, what makes you think Google can? I would argue that university affirmative action is the inspiration for how Google and other tech companies are juicing their numbers.
Your argument is legitimate. We don't know the exact mechanisms by which Google enacts their affirmative action hiring policy. We don't know if it's through quotas or scores or anything else. An affirmative action hiring policy, though, is built to hire more of a minority in some way or another. When the pool of workers of that minority is quite low(like in tech), I don't see how an organization can have such a diverse workforce without at some point choosing a weaker candidate that happens to be diverse.
If this isn't the case and Google does actually hire people based on their skill and not skin color or gender, then Google needs to emphasize that, or else the majority of people will look upon women and such as "diversity hires" and build a disdain for them, thus hurting the cause.
I don't think Google ever lowers the bar for general hires, but they do have internships that are specifically targeted toward "underrepresented" people that are significantly easier to get into than regular internships. It's much easier to receive a return offer than a regular offer, so Google is effectively lowering the bar with that internship program
> Does Google's hiring practices "effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates"?
He uses the phrase "effectively lower the bar" to mean something very different from what almost all of us think of as lowering the bar. The full quote is that one of Google's "discriminatory practices" is "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate."
That is, the bar isn't lowered, they're just trying to fail to hire qualified candidates (from certain groups) less than they currently do.
Unless we have a reason to believe that false negatives are strongly correlated with the axis on which "the bar" is placed (and I don't think we do; false negatives are generally going to come from asking an out-of-left-field question, or the interviewee having a bad day, or something, which are pretty random), this doesn't lower the bar, "effectively" or otherwise.
Google has a conceptual "bar", and sure, in theory there's a way to map every candidate onto that bar. Passing the bar isn't a lottery (it's just a deterministic mapping), but actually getting an offer is. Having gone through the interview process and received an offer recently, I'd certainly say it is.
I don't know that I'd agree with the second part; one thing you can reasonably conclude is correlated with false negatives is diversity (there are studies that people form hire/no-hire opinions within seconds of meeting a candidate, and studies that people have immediate biases when meeting people based on race/gender; there's also the simple fact that's put to good use in small companies that hiring people like yourselves, although mostly in ideological bias etc., is a good means for team cohesion). I assume Google has done more research on this than I have. Handing out "more tickets" may just be a way to cancel out the fact that so-called diversity candidates are getting worse tickets.
However, even if they were simply giving out more tickets to diversity candidates, the average level of qualification of these candidates doesn't change. You just have more of them. Maybe that's a problem because you're discriminating in their favor, but it certainly does not "effectively lower the bar" or impugn the qualifications of this over-represented group. They're all qualified. They're all on the right side of the "bar". There's no alleged increase in the false positive rate.
The fact that he chose to interpret this as "effectively lower[ing] the bar" is not just insulting to his colleagues and unprofessional, but also a sign that he doesn't understand math enough to pass a well-tuned Google interview and got one of the rare false-positive lottery tickets.
>Unless we have a reason to believe that false negatives are strongly correlated with the axis on which "the bar" is placed (and I don't think we do; false negatives are generally going to come from asking an out-of-left-field question, or the interviewee having a bad day, or something, which are pretty random), this doesn't lower the bar, "effectively" or otherwise.
I don't think that works. If the process is optimised for accuracy, then decreasing the false negative rate should increase the the false positive rate, right? Intuitively that's how it would work for most classification tasks. If you can decrease the false negative rate without increasing the false positive rate then you're improving accuracy. The bar must be correlated with the false negative rate.
Also, I'd mention that, even if, say, you have a noisy (presumably cheap) test that you give to everyone, and then you give an absolutely perfect (presumably expensive) test to minorities that fail the first test... It's probably the case that, of the people who failed the first test due to noise but would pass the second test, most of them are just barely above the "passing" bar. Because it seems reasonable to guess that people way above the bar have a smaller chance of failing the noisy test than people just barely above the bar. The policy would then lower the average ability level for hired minorities (though it wouldn't bring it below the "bar").
How large this effect is depends on just how noisy the first test is and on how widely above the bar people's abilities range.
What else is the American mind unfairly closed to? Why is "women are, in the the large, excepting some outliers, biologically disfavored to become programmers" the threshold issue? What else should we be more open-minded about? We're also very closed-minded about:
* Child labor
* The facially legitimate grievances of Al Qaeda
* Universal suffrage
* The illegality of marital rape
Does it just happen that this particular issue, the one pertaining to nerds working for six-figure salaries at software firms, is the last straw?
Do you think that saying "more men than women are interested in software development" is as evil as child labor, al Qaeda terrorism, restricting the vote, or legalizing rape?
His claim: across various traits, men and women have distributions that differ in mean but still largely overlap. This is a possible non-bias cause of the gender gap in tech. Specifically to ward off the concern you're about to raise, he adds a tedious note and graphic: http://diversitymemo.com/#possible-causes-gender-gap
You read all of this, and promptly summarize: "women are, in the the large, excepting some outliers, biologically disfavored to become programmers."
What? Sure it is. You say he said "Women are, in the the large, excepting some outliers, biologically disfavored to become programmers" when he didn't.
Aren't those effectively the same claim? If we take his non-bias cause to be true, that directly means that women have biological disadvantages to becoming programmers. He is in fact saying that's why the gap exists.
No. He says that genetically-influenced behavioral traits which are observable in aggregate across genders may lead women/men to respond differently to different work environments. Then he suggests a few ways Google can promote diversity without discriminating against anyone.
His facts aren't even controversial to anyone who knows the science at this point. Google has basically shown themselves as anti-science and evil.
I don't understand why people think that reframing things as disputes about "genetically-influenced behavioral traits which are observable in aggregate across genders" is such a powerful argument. We all know what that means. We get it: he's not biased against any one individual woman, just against the statistical distribution women come from. Replacing the word "misogyny" with 10 Latinate jargon words isn't an argument; it's just bad writing.
Most people don't consider the mere statistical description of aggregate group behavior "misogynous". Nor should they. You use powerful emotional rhetoric when you embrace this rhetoric, but the one condemning the women/men involved for their different aggregate preferences seems to be you.
More philosophically, there are compelling reasons to favor "equality of opportunity" and "freedom of choice" over any "equality of outcome" that can only be achieved through coercion and discrimination. At the very least, if someone doesn't want to do something of their own accord, it is hardly doing them a favor to coerce them into changing. And from where comes our moral standing to judge the preferences of other people anyway?
Do you mean black people or women? Or is this an attack on educated people regardless of their gender or racial orientation or identification?
The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The Big-Five model which underpins most of the relevant research in psychology) dates to the mid-1990s. If you want to attack it for being unscientific, you will have to learn about it. Good luck.
It's more that it's very valuable to know the history of how people have tried to claim "science" justified their prejudices. And by "you people" I mean Googlebro and his adoring fans. None of whom apparently thought very hard about the math of the stuff they were claiming, and so missed that the sciencefacts they keep appealing to would predict a far smaller effect size than what we actually observe. But they're going to keep appealing to the sciencefacts anyway and feel that this provides a complete and unchallengable explanation for gender ratio in tech, because confirmation bias is strong.
No? He's addressing, in part, preferences, that are distributed differently.
If some women, on average, want to do things differently than men, on average, that will result in some apparent gap in the averages -- not because of advantage, disadvantage or bias, but because you're looking at a difference in average preference.
He's saying that's why the gap exists, but he's saying it on an aggregate level, not an individual one. He's not saying all women are disadvantaged, he's saying the proportion of women who are unqualified is greater than the proportion of men who are.
Except, to establish that it is somehow a biological difference, he would have to rule out cultural bias. Otherwise he's falling back on pseudoscience to justify his position. And, the facts have repeatedly shown that cultural bias is keeping women and minorities out of tech.
As an example, I could present a graph showing that most Italians are Catholic and argue that it shows a genetic predisposition. But, such an argument would clearly be absurd.
My point has in fact very little to do with how you choose to frame the point at issue; rather, it takes issue with the supposed principal underlying it, which is that there should be no "things you cannot say".
Clearly there are plenty of things we all (to a first approximation) agree that you cannot in earnest say at your workplace.
It depends. On the one hand you don't want to sow discord at the workplace, on the other hand you don't want to dismiss critical ideas because the majority don't agree with something.
There are other ways to combat illogical ideas.
As an atheist I would not fire people for being believers (even if it were lawful to fire on that basis) --just because "I know better". If one of them tried proselytizing, by law I can't do anything about it, but even if I could, there would be better ways to combat irrational appeals and sowing of fear.
That said, what if the engineer has "only" presented the ideas as a private person at a "men's club"? If that's not okay, then this infringes upon people's speech outside of work as a citizen --that's chilling. There are Walmarts out there.
I believe in making tech an attractive career path for women --as a society we underutilize them and don't extract the value we could --as the soviets did from their women. But at the same time, I am sensitive to kerbing speech.
This doofus didn't write a memo about keeping people of faith out of Google, and he didn't write it at some secret "men's club".
Instead, he had the poor judgement to publish in a workplace forum an argument that the women at Google tended to be there due to reduced standards for hiring women, because biologically women tended to be less suitable for the kind of work they were being hired to do.
Timothy Lister had a term for this kind of thing in _Peopleware_: he called it "teamicidal". If you do something teamicidal at your dev job, you should expect repercussions. You are paid to contribute to a team, not to fuck it up in an effort to remake it in your image.
(I think Google took the easy way out here, by the way, and that there were more productive ways they could have responded to this, rather than let it fester for days until they were cornered into a dramatic response. But: I don't work at Google, and my epistemological certainty about this is somewhat low.)
Frankly ascribing differences in career path and aptitude to biologics is unfounded. I'm unaware of any rigorous study which would indicate such (and we have the Soviets and Chinese who can speak to the contrary of his assertion).
That said, I don't agree with sacking someone because they said something unproven and because it can make people feel bad. I know some Googlers, men and women, and they tell me stories about people getting fired over small indiscretions (a bar, for example) and about people getting called in an office for saying off-handedly "lady" or girl. While not getting the same reprimand for saying guy or boy.
On the other hand belittling "middle America" is kind of a pastime with many a Googler. (When you point out that South Florida is heavily Hispanic and that those Hispanics vote republican, they find it hard to believe, for example.)
He argues that Google should end diversity programs. The document doesn't just poorly summarize social psych and sociology research, but uses it to justify a proposed change in company practice and culture that would perpetuate the status quo.
In addition, he showed an incredible lack of judgement in publishing the document. Anybody could tell you that a lot of people would be hurt by this document, regardless of its scientific merit. As such, it makes sense to approach this sort of thing very carefully, as it is possible to be a total asshole and ruin team cohesion while still being "right". Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective and cause other employees, rightly or wrongly, to feel attacked.
> Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective
> Anybody could tell you that a lot of people would be hurt by this document, regardless of its scientific merit.
This is a ridiculous statement. Scientific merit should be the only consideration when you are saying something you believe is important. If you're engaged in small-talk, go ahead and throw scientific accuracy out the window, but not in anything substantial.
There is a very long list of odious things you can claim "science" justifies; in fact, it's kind of hard to think of something you can't six-degrees-of-science your way to defending. This isn't the rhetorical kill-shot you think it is.
> There is a very long list of odious things you can claim "science" justifies;
Does the length of such a list invalidate the items in the list? I don't see your point.
> in fact, it's kind of hard to think of something you can't six-degrees-of-science your way to defending.
Just because something is not directly implied by something else, doesn't mean there is no correlation. If you are working on a mathematical proof, would you give up if you cannot reach the end in 6 (or any arbitrary small number) of steps? Would you declare the assertion wrong? If yes, you're just a bad scientist.
Again, my argument here is simple: it is hard to think of a horrible thing you could say that you couldn't justify using the logic you presented upthread, which makes your argument seem pretty unpersuasive.
If you are a scientist, and publishing in a peer review journal, I think you are close to correct. If you are a dilettante coming to de novo conclusions about controversial topics, you probably aren't qualified to declare something as science.
This right here is actually the source of the problem. The current societal environment tells you "here are topics that you have to discuss with utmost sensitivity, even if you are completely confident you are right, and have all the evidence."
Your (and presumably, the google employee that got fired) response?
He argues that Google should end diversity programs.
Not really, he suggests replacing them with other diversity programs that he claims (whether correctly or incorrectly) would work better.
In addition, he showed an incredible lack of judgement in publishing the document.
Yes. He forgot his place and and committed heresy against the party line. That's always a dumb thing to attach your real name to.
Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective and cause other employees, rightly or wrongly, to feel attacked.
That's an interesting argument, that people's feelings should have precedence over seeking truth.
it makes sense to approach this sort of thing very carefully, as it is possible to be a total asshole and ruin team cohesion while still being "right"
It reads like he did try to be careful to the best of his ability; it's just that in such a hostile environment, not even professionals have sufficient ability.
I agree, there are numerous issues out there worthy of overhaul:
* Circumcision
* World military dominance
* Eating meat
I could go on and on, but to answer your second question, it's not like people make a big list of issues then pick one. They have momentum and right now this one has it. It also has the advantage that people can, in a sense, take action about it.... to the extent you count being a keyboard warrior as taking action :)
It has momentum because, to a large extent, the people who brought the internet to the mainstream were these brilliant, powerful people, from the nerds to the politicians. Instead of it being received like a gift, most latecomers to the internet decided to use it to amplify their grievances.
Think of a teenager defying its parents "I didn't ask to be born." One might perceive these to be the immature, ungrateful voices of the cyber-rebels, YET they are also adults and full humans worthy of autonomy. They see the success of the people who create(d) the internet and they want a piece of it, too. They'll use it to get what they want.
> What else is the American mind unfairly closed to?
Unfairly is precisely the point on which your question turns. If you have interesting points to raise in favor of Al Qaeda, you should absolutely be allowed to raise them, and you should not be fired for so doing. I don't think your arguments will have much merit, but if they're cogent, i'm happy to hear them.
The whole point of his manifesto, and the reason why your post misses it, is that he wasn't fired because of the truth or falsehood of what he said. His arguments weren't evaluated on their merits, and presumed to be the wanderings of a mind ill-suited to the tasks at Google's hands. Nobody even bothered to directly address the question of whether he was right, because they were too invested in how it made them feel. That is the problem.
We should be open-minded about everything. Including child labor, ending universal suffrage, and the virtues of Al Qaeda. We should be able to reject bad ideas on their merits, each and every time, because we understand what and why we believe. We should embrace disagreement, because it makes concrete our own worldview. The fact that the VP of Diversity of at Google simply dismissed the arguments of a widely circulated (and therefore, likely, widely agreed with) memo speaks volumes. And it may be that he's wrong. It may be that his arguments are completely empty of substance, maybe the studies he cites are pseudoscience. But if a decent number of Googler's agree with him, as appears to be the case, then his arguments should be addressed directly, on even ground, on their merits - not shamed into silence. If he's wrong, it should be easy to demonstrate it.
I think you should get used to the idea that reasonable people disagree strongly with the notion that they should be open-minded about any idea. There are plenty of things I am not open-minded about:
* The suitability of African people for chattel slavery
* The historical reality of the Holocaust
* The criminality of child sexual exploitation
Obviously, having spent more than 15 minutes on the Internet, I'm aware that there is some doofus connected to a keyboard somewhere who is prepared to open a lively and spirited dialog about all three of those issues. But, like a lot of other reasonable people, I'm not open to that dialog, and attempting to engage me in it will have consequences: I will never work with or in any way associate with a Holocaust denier or a child pornography advocate.
This can bother you as much as you choose to let it bother you, but the degree to which it bothers you won't have much impact on my thinking.
People love linking to Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say" essay in this context. I've never had a conversation of any sort with Paul Graham that led me to believe that he was a crazy Cheetoh-stained Holocaust denier, or an advocate for the rights of the Cheetoh-stained or Holocaust-history-averse. I think "What You Can't Say" is by far his worst essay. And I'm hopeful that tire-fire threads like these do a better job of illustrating why than anything I could write to explain my point further.
People love linking to Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say" essay in this context. [...] I think "What You Can't Say" is by far his worst essay. And I'm hopeful that tire-fire threads like these do a better job of illustrating why than anything I could write to explain my point further.
Why do you feel it's his worst essay? People generally regard it as one of his best. Jessica said it's her favorite, for example.
It's difficult to infer from this thread why it's his worst. Rather than guess, I thought I'd ask.
Well, I have basically nothing but respect for Jessica Livingston, but if that's what she believes, she's wrong about that. She had to be wrong about something eventually!
I'm pretty sure this isn't what Graham meant to write, but the only thing I ever see people take away from that essay is "the worst ideas are unfairly maligned". Judge the essay for its actual impact on the marketplace ideas. What's the good that's come of it?
> Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of
his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology,
not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
That's quite a bit different from calling it her favorite. Anyway, I was only curious.
> But, like a lot of other reasonable people, I'm not open to that dialog
One of the reasons why even gruesome speech is considered protected is so that people with such opinion can speak out and let everyone know who they are. If someone speaks in favorable terms about sexually abusing children, you will think twice about sending your children to that person's home. However, if such speech is prohibited, you will never know this person's intention and that would put the children living near that person at risk
You personally do not have to debate them, but their speech should still be protected
Speech is "protected" from intervention by the state. It's not protected from commercial and social consequences, nor could it reasonably be, because we also have the freedom to choose who we associate with.
If "consequences" implies loud and effective speech that demolishes the speech it is responding to, or even an individual choice not to associate with the utterer, I agree. If it implies crap like doxing, boycotts, and professional sabotage, then I think something essential gets lost in our defense of free speech. Free speech isn't just an amendment, it's a basic principle that makes everyone safer.
Boycotts are speech. Refusing to associate with people is speech. Holding people accountable for what they say is speech
Are you in favor of censoring such speech?
I ask because the only way to get rid of the "consequences" you deride is to introduce large-scale censorship designed to privilege the person who speaks first. Which then turns any debate into nothing more than a race to be first to say something, after which one can censor one's critics under the guise of preventing boycotts, etc.
There's a difference between censorship, and arguing that something is ethically wrong and that we shouldn't do it. Censorship is being in favor of some sort of governmental, lawful, or otherwise forceful action preventing these practices, and I am not in favor of that.
I am generally in favor of "refusing to associate" since that implies personal choice.
"Holding people accountable" is semantically meaningless since it can be applied to both appropriate and wildly inappropriate actions.
There are also different kinds of boycotts - like, there's a difference between boycotting a book, and boycotting the publishing company of a book. These are more on a spectrum and should be debated on a case-by-case basis. But these days, many social-media-driven boycotts are on the chilling-free-speech side, which is why I spoke generally about them above, even though there are exceptions.
There's still no way out here for you. The only way to shut down your social "chilling effect" is to impose an equally-powerful social "chilling effect" on everyone except the first person to speak.
That's untrue because there is always a remedy for speech, and that's more speech. Actual speech, in contrast to a boycott, or doxxing, or professional sabotage. "Make your argument", don't seek to prevent them from making theirs.
There's a difference between speech, and seeking to punish someone for their speech. Failure to recognize that spirals us to an ever-more authoritarian atmosphere until you find yourself the one being punished.
Boycotts are "more speech". Campaigns to refuse to associate with a person or company are "more speech".
The comment I initially replied to categorized "speech that demolishes the speech it is responding to". That's still speech. Trying to declare it off-limits, legally or socially, is still an attack on speech.
Similarly, your "punish someone for their speech" is... well, you're condemning people who responded to speech with more speech. Because you didn't like the speech they responded with. There is no way to be a free-speech absolutist and be against boycotts, blacklists, and all the other "authoritarian" stuff you're complaining about, because those things are just as much speech as what they're responding to.
The difference I'm trying to point out to you is that a free-speech absolutist gets trapped in self-contradiction. If they really are an absolutist about speech, then it doesn't matter if they choose to categorize some speech as designed to discourage or suppress other speech. They're still committed to defend it, and any action to stop or even just advocate against it would fall afoul of their own absolutist principle.
I do not start from a position of absolutism on speech, or tolerance, or a good many other things, and so I happily get to think through the nuances and have a much better chance of avoiding self-contradiction.
This is where Google dude's free-speech defenders get in trouble; many of them want to be, or want to be seen as, free-speech absolutists (if for no other reason than to say they don't agree with Google dude but feel obligated to defend his right to say what he wants). But they also want to condemn people who spoke out against him, called for him to face consequences, called for boycotts and refusals to associate, etc., and cannot do so without being self-contradictory since they themselves need to engage in "speech to discourage free speech" in order to do that.
I hold the principle of open-mindedness higher because I personally don't see a downside to it. Closed-mindedness always struck me as a symptom of insecurity. Being insecure about something like the criminality of child sexual exploitation doesn't sound like something I ever want to espouse, so if you want to tell me why you think it's a good idea, I'll listen (the likely outcome being the conclusion that you're a whacko, and moving on).
Being open-minded doesn't mean I'll sit still while someone endlessly or facetiously justifies an objectionable notion. If I've heard it before, or it's insincere, I'll dismiss it outright, as I imagine you would.
But on principle, I'll listen to an earnest attempt to demonstrate the merit of anything, even something I'd otherwise categorically reject. You might not influence my position in the slightest, but being open-minded doesn't mean easily persuaded, either. It just means being willing to incorporate new information or ideas in your decision-making process.
So what are the criteria for ideas which cannot even be discussed? Equating "gender differences are real and should inform our approach to diversity" to holocaust denial seems absurd.
> I think you should get used to the idea that reasonable people disagree strongly with the notion that they should be open-minded about any idea. There are plenty of things I am not open-minded about:
The examples you cite are obviously extreme, and so you obviously put me in a bit of an unfair position in having to defend them, so I will start out by unequivocally stating that I do not hold this belief, nor do I advocate it or believe it in any way.
With that out of the way, saying you would never countenance holocaust denial is in many ways equivalent to the Catholic church saying it would never countenance a heliocentric universe. The science up to that point was on their side. The 'known' facts and their religious scholarship were on their side. But they were wrong. Similarly, you know the holocaust happened because you've read it happened. You weren't there. You likely don't know anyone who was there, or if you do, their memories are quite old, and modern science knows quite a bit about how fickle memory can be. It is possible the the holocaust did not happen. Unlikely in the extreme, but possible.
Now, am I going to waste my time listening to a holocaust deniers argument? No, probably not. I put an extremely low prior on the holocaust being ahistorical. So low that it's unworthy of even the most passing consideration. However, that prior is not zero, and it should never be zero. If I started hearing enough people that I respect saying, "hey, you should really listen to this holocaust denier's argument, it's kind of interesting", I might start to pay attention.
My point in defending a non-zero prior for all beliefs is simply to illustrate that you have some prior belief about what this Google engineer has said. You either have or have not read what he actually wrote. I think it likely you haven't. Because what he actually says is fairly reasonable. Certainly not in the 'holocaust denial' realm of truth-probability.
If you have the time and inclination to post here about it, then you have the time and inclination to reject his arguments directly, rather than simply dismissing them out of hand. What is the point of that sort of dismissal? It convinces no one. It changes no opinions. It adds nothing to the universe. This guy made a rational, intelligent argument in support of his case. He cited studies, he explicitly embraced the ideals of diversity, but simply disagreed with a few of the methods. If you disagree, that's fine. But have the courage to do so substantively. Maybe you'll change some people's minds, and actually further the cause you seem to be arguing for.
Generally we talk about issues that are relevant. None of those issues are relevant to anything that's going on in the tech industry, the question of what to do about diversity is.
2. The belief that women should be allowed the vote
3. The belief that homosexuality isn't a mental illness
4. Any expression of support for democratic socialism
And we could go on and on. Does anyone doubt, for example, that people weren't once fired for supporting socialist ideologies? Or for being gay?
Your response could have been posted without modification of intent in response to the firing of a gay person in 1952.
The existence of other off-limits topics tells us precisely nothing about this particular topic. Neither does the mere fact that a topic is currently off limits tell us anything about its Goodness or Rightness.
That's one way to read it. Another way would be, "Stop trying to promote diversity, it alienates the racists and sexists who work here."
I don't think this is an unfair reading. One of the bullet points in the conclusion is literally that the company's diversity programs are problematic because they alienate non-progressives.
Diversity through quotas or hiring preferences to X, Y, Z classes of people are bound to make people angry.
Diversity though increased access to education, recruitment efforts, and accommodation of different strengths and weaknesses, personalities, work styles, management styles, etc. would make people much happier.
No. Maybe we just believe in equality for all regardless of race or sex. If a cool course opens but only for women, or people of color, of course that makes us feel alienated.
You at least agree that there are different types of diversity programs. (From his claims) Google's approach to diversity are hamfisted and end up achieving a level of diversity that looks good on internal reports but ends up alienating people because it's more important what you are than who you are.
I cannot believe what I'm reading in this thread, especially from usernames I recognize and respect.
If this is really what is ascertained from this, our two sides' differences are too large to be reconciled.
Consider maybe some people truly want to work with the best of the best, ignoring race or gender. Let the cards fall where they may based on merit.
I'm all for hiring based on merit and nothing else. 100%, that's what I'd want to see.
But actually doing so is a fantasy. Building bias-free selection processes is really, really hard. I don't think anyone actually knows how. (At least not useful ones. You can trivially eliminate bias by never hiring anyone, for example.)
It looks to me like this is the fundamental agreement between the two sides here. Both sides want to hire the people who will be best at the job, full stop. People who think James Damore is correct believe that the typical hiring process, or at least some achievable tech hiring process, already achieves this, and any modification is necessarily selecting worse candidates. People on the other side, such as myself, believe that the hiring process selects for far more than just merit, and diversity programs are an attempt to fix that.
He's not saying that the diversity programs are alienating conservatives. He's saying that if Google really wants to care about diversity, they should be more open to political diversity.
Thanks for finding the quote. Regardless, the author says that the politicization is alienating conservatives, not the program itself. If Google allowed for an open discussion about its diversity program, the author would not have this criticism.
He's saying the program itself is, and this is the reason why.
"Politicization" is quite vague and the author doesn't explain exactly how these programs are "politicized" or what that means. I suspect it comes down to their mere existence.
It's quite ironic: in their push for equality and inclusion, these liberals have created an environment where one faces exclusion and persecution for simply having political beliefs that align with a large portion of their fellow U.S. citizens. This is a very real thing. I never felt uncomfortable with my own political alignment before 2015 but I wouldn't dare put a GOP candidate sticker on my laptop now. It's not that I have an aversion to my own party; I simply feel targeted and fear being (incorrectly) labeled a bigot or mysognist simply because of the candidates I've voted for.
That's how far this has gone. I am saddened that more moderate voices have not spoken up like this brave ex-Googler but given the climate and the consequences, I understand it.
Center-right / right individuals need to start organizing their own groups, companies, meet ups, jobs etc.
Vote with our feet, and our skills, and go elsewhere. They want to enforce their religion then they can do it without us.
There have to be plenty of people sick of watching what they say, walking on eggshells, and pretending to hold political views opposite of their true beliefs just to avoid the wrath of the regressive left.
This is only going to get worse, and I don't see why we all have to sit back and take it any more.
It would be simply out of survival instinct. Sufficiently strong leftist political views seem to correlate very strongly with the desire for people to mandate others fall in line with their views. Or else.... how many examples do moderate/conservative people need to see before they should worry? Or simply.. go elsewhere.
Openness, or simply indifference to personal or political beliefs I thought was the DEFAULT position of most people.
It is sadly not that way anymore... this and many many other examples have shown us all.
Just search twitter for hundreds of tech-industry employees railing against this guy for trying to present a statistical argument against conventional wisdom. They are no doubt celebrating at this moment that he was fired.
Anyone on the fence just needs to ask themselves... what would happen if these same people knew what was in your head? If they heard you speak about your own views? Would they have mercy? Of course not. Who's next?
Just like on the right there are authoritarian (fascist) and libertarian (Libertarian) beliefs, the left also has authoritarian (Leninist) and libertarian (Anarchist) beliefs. And of course anywhere inbetween. Have you taken the political compass yet?
How'd that work out for the guy who just got fired? Think he has grounds to be wailing? I guess he just needs to go live elsewhere... kinda like I'm saying.
He'll be alright I would assume. I have worked for many places in 'the Rest of America' where my leftist views were looked at askance or even caused me problems in employment because they made right-wing or libertarian-leaning individuals personally uncomfortable.
Really it's just intellectualism versus a discomfort examining and considering ideas. Even though I have my personal politics, I don't expect many or most to share them and I don't seek to install them over others.
But I do agitate my viewpoint in ways I attempt to be persuasive with. Often I fail, but it's not about 'winning' as some would have it but integrating and synthesizing.
Honestly I think this more Authoritarian / Libertarian than Right / Left.
I personally am Left, Libertarian Left.
I disagree with many of the assertions in the memo, however I do not believe he should have been fired.
Most of the drum beating from SJW's and Diversity Police are from an Authoritarian World view, where tolerance of views they disagree with is not allowed, can not be openly discussed, and should be suppressed by any means necessary
We need to expand the conversation beyond Left / Right, to include what is means to be Authoritarian, or Libertarian
But, and this is important: you don't have any power.
People that are tolerant and acceptable are not the vocal minority. And those in power either agree with the SJW vocal minority, or they are afraid to oppose them.
So what I said above still stands unless their is some concerted effort to change these types of policies and expectations that result in what happened in this scenario.
Now, most people wont write a company wide memo outlining their "controversial" views because they have too strong of a self-preservation instinct.
What I'm pointing out is... are people going to get sick of holding back, keeping their thoughts to themselves, lying so as to avoid judgement. I bet there's a massive amount of readers just on this site that completely disagree with the outcome in this instance.
But they are irrelevant. Because nobody will do anything about it, and the next person to speak up will get fired also. So... nice tolerant open-minded liberals have no power in the face of motivated passionate regressive SJW liberals.
I understand all of that, but you put it in the context of Center/Right persons forming groups and finding employment with Center/Right Organizations
I do not see where that solves the discourse problem, all you end up with is a bunch of Authoritiarna Right companies in a Right Echo Chamber and a bunch of Authoritarian Left companies in a left Echo Chamber
The solution is to get back to promoting true free expression and the idea that "I disagree with what you have to say, but respect you for saying it"
Free Speech is under massive assault, but not from government but from societal sanction which is just as bad and just as dangerous
Societal sanction has a habit of becoming Government Censorship in short order
That won't happen. Because if company leadership, or basically just a group of employees within some company argued for "tolerance" of thought... for example with this Google employee, those individuals would be tarred and feathered just the same.
Does it look like SJW tech industry employees want to discuss and debate ideas?.....
No they dont, which is one of the reason I work in Tech well outside of Silicon Valley... and have no intention of ever working in Silicon Valley. I would rather live under a bridge than work in that region...
This makes me a little sad. I love my job and wouldn't leave. In general, I've been very happy working for SFBA companies for the last five years. What I don't like is the greater political culture of our industry and a feeling that I will be targeted if I somehow--even casually or unintentionally--identify/signal as conservative around my peers. We now live in a world where conservative views are equated with violence--see responses to my top-level post. This is one small moral and logical step away from advocating violence against conservatives. It's quite scary and makes for an uninclusive environment for many of us.
> an environment where one faces exclusion and persecution for simply having political beliefs that align with a large portion of their fellow U.S. citizens.
Can you elaborate on the persecution and exclusion you personally experienced from being an American conservative?
Tolerance is not a moral precept. As a liberal, I tolerate differences in opinion, but I do not falsely equate attempts to deny people fair civil rights (as the modern GOP does routinely, in terms of race, gender, gender identity, and so many other ways) as “opinion” so much as institutionalized violence.
Whether the transgender/nonbinary people I know have the right to exist or not is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them. Whether women have the right to participate fully in the economy without facing harassment or discrimination just because they are women is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them.
These are basic human rights and the party you have chosen to support thinks that they are subject to debate. You have chosen to support virulent bigots and misogynists…but don’t want to be called one yourself? Methinks you protest a little too much.
> You have chosen to support virulent bigots and misogynists…but don’t want to be called one yourself? Methinks you protest a little too much.
I support bigots and misogynists speaking their opinions because its a right enumerated by the US constitution. I don't mind being called a bigot or misogynists myself if that's what is required to defend inalienable rights.
You have no right not to be outraged or offended by someone's opinion. And it is disgusting to see someone's livelihood jeopardized because of political correctness. The backlash started in November, and this is only going to dump gasoline on the raging dumpster fire.
So your opinion can cause physical harm against others. Someone's livelihood should be jeapardized in this event. People are suffering right this second around the world by those that advocate the same thoughts as you are. Thoughts leads to words, words leads to actions, actions lead to atrocities.
Ideas must be able to be freely discussed, argued, and debated in a free and democratic society.
Are you prepared to suppress and jail based on speech and words? Because that's what you're advocating for, and that's what authoritarian/totalitarian governments do.
> Ideas must be able to be freely discussed, argued, and debated in a free and democratic society.
Not everywhere. You don't have to allow the free discussion of ideas by anyone in your home.
Freedom of speech is not a right to voice such speech wherever and whenever you want, or to be free of the consequences of such. Nobody has to give you the space or time to voice your speech.
This is false. Under the United Declaration of Human Rights:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." an extension of John Mill's:
"Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.
Societal sanction and interference include the loss of one's job, threats against the speaker, etc.
See: "The first step in assessing whether a particular measure or situation breaches the right to freedom of expression is to assess the threshold question of whether or not someone’s right to freedom of expression has been interfered with or restricted. ... The scope of what constitutes an interference with freedom of expression is very wide. The European Convention on Human Rights, for example, refers to any “formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” imposed on the exercise of the right. In many cases, it is fairly obvious that there has been an interference, for example where someone has been sanctioned for making a statement or prevented from establishing a media outlet. International courts take a wide view of this. For example, the UN Human Rights Committee held that removing a teacher from the classroom for racist statements made outside of the classroom, while keeping him employed on the same conditions, was an interference with his right to freedom of expression..."[0]
Oh, you have the right to hold opinions. You just don't have the right to hold opinions WHERE you want.
And no, being fired is not a societal sanction, just as someone asking you to leave their house isn't. A private company, just like a private house, is not "society".
Google is under government regulation. They cannot discriminate against others for their opinions of what they say.
>"The source you provide, which is just an opinion, talks only about governments."
This is incorrect. Article 19 is a prominent humans right organization, specifically focusing on Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is also the second source agreeing that you cannot fire someone for what they say.
Fairly, under the United Declaration of Human Rights, or if it were a just world, no.
"You could even argue that nothing in the essay was political activity, then, again, your point is moot."
I don't think so. Any topic that has a clear dichotomy between two political parties is in-itself a political issue. Again, the umbrella for political activity is a wide one.
Now you have resigned yourself to using your personal interpretations of "fair" and "political activity" as your arguments. Not much left to discuss then...
The first party was the Centre for Law and Democracy (based in Canada). The second party was Article 19 (registered in UK) -- however I was informed I misread the print on this one. The third party was the Office of the United Nations (based in USA/NY and SWI). The fourth party was the California Labor Code.
You have offered, in this entire comment chain:
1). Your opinion on how freedom of expression should be restricted (unsourced)
2). Your opinion on what constitutes a societal sanction (unsourced)
3). Your opinion on what constitutes fair grounds for dismissal (unsourced)
So I will rebut, once again, with sources countering your claims.
You: "They [Google] can [discriminate on what you say], except in some cases (protected speech). And being regulated by the government doesn't make you the government."
Employees are protected under "anti-discrimination laws such as Title VII, RCW 40.60 (the Washington Laws Against Discrimination or “WLAD”) and various local laws. "[0]
Local laws include California's Labor Code - LAB § 1101: "No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:
(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.
(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees."[1]
Google would also be in violation of "Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964"[2] for retaliation against objections of its discriminatory practices against men (section n, paragraph 1). Which Google, under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, did: "Sex discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because of that person's sex...
The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment."[3]
I ask of you to show me the courtesy of not wasting my time if you don't wish to take this seriously.
I am taking you seriously, and my point is that arguing about how Google could possibly be breaking a law if the judge decides to interpret anything as a political activity doesn't make much sense.
The argument came down to you saying that almost anything is a political activity, and that Google being regulated by the government makes it equivalent to a government entity. No matter how many sources are provided, only one can actually matter: the judge who will decide that.
That's the problem with legal interpretation, until a judge clears it, all discussion is just speculation.
Look at your own points:
> Google is under government regulation. They cannot discriminate against others for their opinions of what they say.
Yes they can.
> Being fired is a societal sanction, a.k.a a limitation on freedom of expression
No, it isn't, your source only talks about a public entity.
> Societal sanction and interference include the loss of one's job
Again, no, it isn't.
And you keep mixing the law of different countries with opinions from the UN. Pick one. You wanna talk about ethics, let's talk about ethics. You wanna talk about laws, let's talk about laws. But stop switching from one to the other whenever your argument has no ground.
It doesn't matter if there was a legal case in Canada, it is completely irrelevant to the case being discussed here. Or even the UN. None of that matters to this context.
So if you really want to cite sources, a decision by a federal judge, the SCOTUS or the NLBR showing that an action by a company that is exactly like Google's falls into illegality will do. Anything else makes no difference here, either requiring your own interpretation, or being foreign to the laws of this country.
> Google is under government regulation. They cannot discriminate against others for their opinions of what they say.
This was a simplified point and I have to apologize for being vague. Google, in certain circumstances covered under the law, cannot discriminate against someone for what they express or what they would otherwise express.
This is shown in under the EEOC links as "illegal to retaliate against employees that speak out against discrimination in the work place." Coincidentally, this is what Damore is suing Google for. Whether he wins or not, I agree, is a fruitless debate in semantics. However, this doesn't change that it is possible he has a case.
> Again, no, it isn't. And you keep mixing the law of different countries with opinions from the UN. Pick one. You wanna talk about laws, let's talk about laws. But stop switching from one to the other whenever your argument has no ground. It doesn't matter if there was a legal case in Canada, it is completely irrelevant to the case being discussed here. Or even the UN. None of that matters to this context.*
This is incorrect and I have to accuse you of not reading the sources I provided you. The legal case in Canada was set as precedent for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international law document, by the UN, which the U.S is a part of and an adopter of said document.
> So if you really want to cite sources, a decision by a federal judge, the SCOTUS or the NLBR showing that an action by a company that is exactly like Google's falls into illegality will do. Anything else makes no difference here, either requiring your own interpretation, or being foreign to the laws of this country.
Exactly is impossible and exactly is not how precedent is set. There are certain actions a company can take, no matter its size or circumstance, that illegal due to precedent. Here is an NLBR ruling against codes of conduct, which Google has violated: http://www.quarles.com/publications/employers-take-note-nlrb...
> Coincidentally, this is what Damore is suing Google for.
Is there a lawsuit already? I can't find any news about it.
> I agree, is a fruitless debate in semantics
That's my point about this discussion, it became about interpretation of laws. We can continue to argue forever here, but ultimately it will be up to the courts, if he pursues legal action, to decide the correct interpretation.
> The legal case in Canada was set as precedent for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international law document, by the UN, which the U.S is a part of and an adopter of said document.
"International law" is a vague term that carries little weight. It has no "law" power unless any country actually formally agrees and implements internal laws with the same effect.
So, again, it carries no weight here.
> There are certain actions a company can take, no matter its size or circumstance, that illegal due to precedent.
That could illegal due to precedent.
> Here is an NLBR ruling against codes of conduct, which Google has violated
Again, you make the claim that Google has violated, with nothing but your opinion to back it.
And from your own source:
A policy that is written in the context of unprotected comments toward coworkers (e.g., unlawfully harassing comments), rather than protected criticism of the employer, will be deemed lawful.
That's what Google claims that the author violated, and apparently was fired for.
Remember, California is an at-will employment state. You can fire someone for ANY reason except a few clearly defined reasons. The burden of proof is on you to show that Google has fired for one of those reasons, not on Google (or me) to show that the firing WASN'T for those reasons.
In authoritarian governments, you're also free to speak and usually, the consequence is your death, captivity, or torture. I don't buy that argument that you are free to speak but not free of the consequences.
No. That is a strawman of their argument. They are saying that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences for your speech. I don't really agree with their argument, but what they are saying is more nuanced than the way you've interpreted it. They are arguing for societal freedom of speech (morality instead of laws, I hope), meaning that you are free to speak but nobody has to listen. Consequences like firing someone from their job is different from not listening.
I had said: "Nobody has to give you the space or time to voice your speech", by which I was talking that private people and organizations do not have to give you the space and time for you to voice your speech.
His/her reply was that governments kill people so you should be free of the consequences of your speech.
The implication of this argument (being free of the consequences) means, for example, that your family can't not invite you over for Christmas because you're racist. Or that your friends can't stop hanging out with you, or that someone can't stop employing you.
Those are all consequences of your speech, and you're not protected from them (with a few exceptions).
I agree with you on "nobody has to give you space or time to voice your speech".
If you want to be free to speak your opinion but there are harsh consequences, that speech wasn't really "free". A lot of people will agree with you, a lot will not.
My point is, there is no such thing as freedom of speech in our society, it's not an absolute freedom, and I'm OK with that.
Our society will take a long time before we can truly accept freedom of speech and all its consequences.
The other side is: What we have always seen in our society is if you think differently than the main stream thought you should be aware that will be consequences.
> My point is, there is no such thing as freedom of speech in our society, it's not an absolute freedom, and I'm OK with that.
I'm ok with that, but I'd rephrase as "there is no absolute freedom of speech", or even better, "there is no absolute freedom" in our society, and I'm ok with that.
> Our society will take a long time before we can truly accept freedom of speech and all its consequences.
Do you mean
(1) (freedom of speech) and (freedom of the consequences of speech)
or
(2) accept (freedom of speech) and (consequences of speech)?
> What we have always seen in our society is if you think differently than the main stream thought you should be aware that will be consequences.
IMHO, there is no mainstream, only the immediate surroundings. Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" next to that engineer who got fired will probably help you make a friend. Saying that in front of a woman will probably help you make an enemy.
Both are consequences of speech. You make, and lose, friends based on your speech. Why would someone find the positive consequences of your speech acceptable, but not the negative ones?
In life, there are always consequences. IMHO, the key part of being an adult is recognizing that your acts will have consequences, and being willing to face those consequences, positive or negative.
> I'm ok with that, but I'd rephrase as "there is no absolute freedom of speech", or even better, "there is no absolute freedom" in our society, and I'm ok with that.
I think our opinions are much alike at this point.
> Do you mean
I mean 1. I think one day we should accept freedom of speech and freedom of the consequences. That will prevent bad/good ideas to gain further power and bad/good ideas to appear as an option. Offcourse which one is bad/good will depend on the judgment of the person who listens.
> IMHO, there is no mainstream, only the immediate surroundings. Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" next to that engineer who got fired will probably help you make a friend. Saying that in front of a woman will probably help you make an enemy.
Mainstream = conventional, normal. So we could say we have both, the mainstream and your surrounds (probably your surrounding has more power than the mainstream, don't know)
> Both are consequences of speech. You make, and lose, friends based on your speech. Why would someone find the positive consequences of your speech acceptable, but not the negative ones?
Agree, both are. Usually, I often disagree with my best friends, sometimes our opinions are very, very different, and as far he doesn't act against my rights (settled by laws and our society), I'll accept and tolerate our divergence.If the opinion is too different, probably there will be no willingness to talk with each other.
Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" will make problems, I personally strongly disagree with that phrase, however, I wouldn't fire him because of that, is his opinion, and I respect that as far he doesn't break the law. (He would have a hard time trying to convince me of that, I would say that a warm discussion would happen)
> In life, there are always consequences. IMHO, the key part of being an adult is recognizing that your acts will have consequences, and be willing to face those consequences, positive or negative.
I also agree with that. I hope one day our society would be mature enough to separate opinions from consequences.
Physical harm requires an action, whether legislative or physical. Words don't ipso-facto lead to actions and not all actions lead to atrocities.
An opinion does not cause physical harm.
This is the error with political correctness- as precisely defined-- it is the idea that you must be politically correct, otherwise you're causing a moral wrong.
I don't think this can be justified rigorously. But it is taken as an article of faith, almost, among its adherents.
From my perspective, it is used as a tool to control, by moving the overton window to exclude areas of thought that are different, and to rationalize actual actions that cause damage. (Firing someone isn't an atrocity, but it is harm.)
So, ironically you're advocating doing the harm you're using as justification to defend your ideology.
Opinions and culture can cause real harm. This was the basis for the scientific argument used in Brown v Board. That even if you could make everything literally equal, these sorts of spoken biases really do lead to measurable negative effects on people's lives.
>People are suffering right this second around the world by those that advocate the same thoughts as you are
People suffer for other reasons too though, like societal inaction and economics. Do you hold yourself to the same standard, with your lifestyle choices affecting others as they do, in the same regard that you're holding others for their political ideas? Have you adopted dozens of children from third world countries instead of creating more mouths to feed? Do you ride a horse to work to reduce your climate impact? Have you optimized your entire life for the supremely calculated reduction of suffering? How would such a calculation even be verified correct? Where does that line get drawn in your world? Is it simply on people with philosophies that are convenient for you to criticize to make yourself the superior humanitarian?
This is the most Orwellian thing that has emerged out of all of this, that opinions are "physical" actions. Do you not realize the endstate that line of thinking? Physical reaction in response to opinions.
There is a strong difference between supporting their right to speak their opinions and supporting their opinions. By voting for those candidates and if you have supported the party, you have supported their opinions, not just their right to share them.
This comes down to your views on a single question: do you have to be tolerant of opinions or actions that harm others? Right now, I think most progressives say no, conservatives obviously say yes. That is the actual gray area this comes down to.
It should also be noted that the US constitution is being used very out of context here. The US constitution guarantees you the right to say what you want. It does not protect you from the repercussions of your speech, which is what is harming the livelihoods you cite. Whether that is moral is a valid debate, but misusing the constitution here is a broken crutch for the argument. The right has made common use of misusing the constitution, most recently in their abandonment of "states rights" during the current administration.
Freedom of speech is only relevant to government and public spaces, shareholders of google may impose restrictions they deem appropriate.
EDIT: Wtf is wrong with people on HN today? I merely stated the law, it isn't even my opinion. It demonstrably passed Google's legal team, so it's unlikely that I'm wrong.
> shareholders of google may impose restrictions they deem appropriate.
As may the government through statute. This is simply a matter of the constitution not going far enough, and additional law needed to prevent employment termination from expression not deemed "in fashion".
> This is simply a matter of the constitution not going far enough
I don't have to hear obscenities on my private property.
There's also freedom of association. It seems weird to me that one would be against authoritarianism when it comes to freedom of speech but be blindly for authoritarianism when it comes to association. I won't and can't judge whether the firing of that googler was justified but shareholders of google should have the right to fire whoever they bloody want.
> I won't and can't judge whether the firing of that googler was justified but shareholders of google should have the right to fire whoever they bloody want.
Would you hold the same argument if I decided to acquire 51% of Google stock and fire all female employees? Or just the ones that decided to exercise their free speech? What shareholders wants comes second to government regulations to protect workers, for good reason.
>This comes down to your views on a single question: do you have to be tolerant of opinions or actions that harm others? Right now, I think most progressives say no, conservatives obviously say yes. That is the actual gray area this comes down to.
Firing someone is a harmful action. Progressives obviously support this.
As for your cartoon - Categorizing anyone who disagrees with your values as a cartoon villain of pure evil, deserving of no rights and no response but violence, is the foundation of evil. The cartoon glorifies harmful action - and it's a great representation of the far left now.
Progressives absolutely tolerate opinions and actions that harm others - they hold the opinions and commit the actions with great energy.
There cannot be a division between the exercise of a right and the protection of repercussion of exercising said right. To not afford protection to those who exercise a constitutional right is to strip all practical effect of those rights
It is illogical to conclude that we give people certain rights if we were simply to abandon them to their persecutors when they choose to exercise their rights. What was theoretically protected becomes merely a facade and an illusion that people have rights when in fact they are at the mercy of those who would attempt to subvert their rights
The practical effect of legislation is at the core of even the most introductory and basic courses of any law degree whether it is from an Ivy League University or the most rundown backwater campus
The general statement that you don't benefit from a certain degree of protection when exercising a constitutional right without any sort of mention of what a reasonable limit on those rights would be completely ignores the fact that constitutions were drafted PRECISELY to protect individuals who wished to exercise those rights
This makes it a complex problem and a balancing act, but it doesn't mean we just throw our hands up in the air and give up. For example, California's Labor Code contains this piece of legislation protecting freedom of speech against retaliation in very specific circumstances: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
The "chilling speech" effect is one of many reasons why anti-SLAPP statutes exist, a way to explicitly protect freedom of speech from specious attacks.
We certainly couldn't expect people to have no reaction to speech, in fact, no reaction to speech would mean the speech is worthless! But there are cases where we can decide that a certain retaliation to speech is explicitly prohibited, and this is uncontroversial enough to find many examples of laws and statutes doing just that.
California's statues are about protecting an individual from retaliation against workplace complaints. While you can argue it is related to FoS, I think it's a bit of a stretch. The statues would not, for instance, protect you if you told your co-workers your boss was murdering children in his office every day, no matter how much you believe it to be true.
Anti-SLAPP is about protecting people from the financial drain of a lawsuit by a third-party looking to intimidate. It does nothing to force anyone involved to continue to employ, or do business with, any individual.
The problem in this case, from an employer's perspective, is that they have one employee who is creating a toxic atmosphere not from a protected position, but from a hostile one.
And while you might believe that people who read his memo as "toxic" are over-reacting to it (and there is an argument there, though one I wouldn't agree with), they must be free to "overreact" and speak their mind.
It does get very, very tricky, since while unpopular racist/sexist opinions may necessarily create problematic dynamics in the work place, that could easily also be true of opinions those who decry this memo would think should be protected. If I work at a company with a steeped culture of faith, and I walk around talking about how Christian's are stupid, to what extent should the employer be forced to continue to employ me?
I tend to believe that, to the extent we have freedom of speech, we chose when and how to exercise that in public. Our choices have consequences, and it is on us to accept those.
I'm a small business owner. If tomorrow, I write a "memo" which says something as moronic as "Women don't make good clients", and I HAVE women as clients, I can't expect them to continue to want to do business with me. I can't demand any type of legal protection which would force them to continue to do business with me.
It is just as true that, at least with my company, I can see many types of clients who would not appreciate the libertine culture of my agency. I've had more than one potential client, who found out we used to take our employees to a regional Burning Man event, show extreme discomfort at it, and it likely cost me the account.
I've had job applicants turn down working here because they were more conservative (and one I remember who thought we were too conservative for them).
That's just the nature of the thing. People are free to say what they want, to associate with who they want, and must accept the social consequences for doing so.
No, this is one of the problems we have in society today is this misunderstanding of Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction
Not just from government censorship, but from SOCIETY censorship as well
Governments, at least Western Government, are a reflection of society in general often delayed by a generation or so. As such if society deems fit to Censor something often that translates into the government censoring the same thing just a few year later.
We must be always mindful of threats to free speech not just from government but from society at large.
It is incumbent upon everyone to respect everyone else's freedom of expression, individually
Who's tradition are you using for that society argument?
It sounds like a facile reading of Mills, without ever going to the back half where he talks about valid reasons for a society to put pressure on an individual, but I've been more on the Federalist papers this year for obvious reasons.
I fail to understand what the US Constitution has to do with this conversation.
The US Constitution is a document that outlines what powers the people of the US have granted to the Federal government, it has no bearing on what I am talking about
Uh... Amendment #1 deals with FoS. Sentences 2 and 3 of your post talk about Government AND Society. The first amendment doesn't give a rat's ass about what society thinks. Its a restriction only on the government.
You are the one that brought up the US constitution, the OP was talking about freedom of speech as a principle. It is hardly surprising that the US constitution would only apply FoS to the government, since that is what it is trying to define, but the principle of FoS can apply to society as much as anything else.
We're not talking social stigma; we're talking about someone being fired, having their financial situation put in jeopardy because of inadequate worker protections.
If you think that's okay because of the views this engineer holds, you're a terrible human being.
Nah, the employee blackened the eye of the company he works for, potentially causing monetary loss. As a result of the employees controversial memo, the company deemed it necessary to terminate the employee to prevent any additional costs incurred with keeping him on. He's free to spew whatever nonsense he wanto, just like his employer is free to prevent themselves from losing money. :)
Ah yes, I totally forgot that "males are less neurotic and have more drive than females". Silly me. Good luck finding any women to work with you when you spew such nonsense. Aka creating a toxic work place
It seems like half of this debate is utterly preoccupied with misrepresenting the other half. I guess the social justice position is too weak and it's adherents lacking in integrity.
(1) It's not illegal to fire someone for their politics (it's not one of the enumerated protected classes under federal employment laws anti-discrimination law at least), and (2) it's not "clearly" what happened here -- arguably sure, but there are other ways to see it.
I have to err on the side of caution and say no, just as an employer can't fire someone for their religious beliefs (which are arguably just as inflaming as the viewpoints people take issue with in this thread).
No right is unlimited, even if it's in the constitution.
For example, libel, slander, and harassment may all take the form of "speech" but are unquestionably firing offenses. Those are also criminal offenses because the balance of harms swings away from the person who's free speech rights might be violated, toward the person who's own rights are being violated due to the exercise of free speech itself.
As that old adage goes: My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
Unlike in many countries, in US in most states employment is "at-will" this sounds nice and friendly but it means officially they can let the employee go for any reason at any time unless that reason is one of discrimination due to a limited set of categories. Of course people are discriminated all the time based on religion, race, sexual preferences, age, gender etc, it is just that is not the official reason. It can always be molded into some "performance review", "downsizing", "business goals" etc. kind of thing. Proving otherwise requires an expensive lawsuit looking for patterns over a longer period of time and candidates or requires someone to blow the whistle and say "oh when the CEO say 'culture fit' we really mean they are of a wrong race or gender, everyone knows that around here..."
You can't be let go for being a whistleblower or someone who wants to improve hiring practices. The author has grounds for a lawsuit and was likely fired illegally.
But they can always find another reason to let him go. "Restructuring" or some similar thing would work. They just fired him, I presume the lawyers looked at it and probably didn't see much of a risk.
Doesn't pass the sniff test. His memo was open, notorious, and even received a response from senior management.
More likely than the lawyers saying the firing was legal, is that Google decided the cost of an illegal firing was less than the cost of keeping him onboard.
Nice catch ;) The "implied contract" at-will exception in CA in recent years can be avoided by specific language and precautions in your contract. So yes, theoretically a former employee can sue and win for unjust termination, but practically speaking this never happens, particularly for large, careful employers.
the 1st amendment of the constitution is a prohibition of the federal government enacting a law that limits freedom of religion, expression, or association.
freedom of speech is a far more general moral principle and social norm. we ought not conflate the two and there is much more utility in discussing the more general case of freedom of speech and not the narrower more legalistic case of the 1st amendment.
To add to this, the ex-Googler is still able to express his speech, just not under the private platform of Google. This would be a far different and more contentious case if Google fired an employee for their free speech under a personal website and not a company website.
The freedom of speech in the constitution protects you from government persecution.
But the idea is bigger than the constitution. I think it is best expressed in The Friends of Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
> I support bigots and misogynists speaking their opinions because its a right enumerated by the US constitution.
I support bigots and misogynists speaking their opinions too.
I do not support tech companies that hire smart people continuing to employ people that argue for substantial changes in policy based on nonexistent science and personal feelings. It is not "political correctness" that gets someone fired for failing to test a change before deploying it in production and breaking the site; it is a lack of critical thinking skills. The memo displayed a lack of critical thinking skills.
If you try to claim that individuals in a free society should be averse to taking someone's opinions and words into account when deciding whether to associate with that person, you are essentially saying that opinions and words don't matter. That's a far greater threat to free speech than government censorship is. An oppressive government can be overthrown, subversive publications can be made, end-to-end encryption can get ideas across, etc. But a society that believes that opinions are of no consequence has lost all hope. It is not the government-enforced dystopia of 1984 but the self-imposed dystopia of Fahrenheit 451.
> based on nonexistent science and personal feelings
But his memo had extensive sourcing, including many scientific studies. Are you saying that those studies are nonsense?
> It is not "political correctness" that gets someone fired for failing to test a change before deploying it in production and breaking the site; it is a lack of critical thinking skills.
This is opposite the blameless culture laid out as best practices by the leaders in tech, so I don't know why you would assert it as a good reason to fire someone.
I too, like you, think words matter and think we should be able to take people's beliefs into account when choosing to associate with them. I'd like to note that our opinion is pretty controversial - it's actually illegal to do this for several wide ranges of people's beliefs, when it comes to employment! So perhaps there is a middle ground between "words don't matter" and "we must support all opinions", and in watering down the argument to these two simplistic extremes we're ignoring the complex reality evident before us.
> But his memo had extensive sourcing, including many scientific studies. Are you saying that those studies are nonsense?
"Extensive" seems like a stretch. Here are the scientific (i.e., non-Wikipedia, non-media) citations:
- women are more interested in people than things (DOI 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x)
- women score on average .4 sigma higher on "neuroticism" than men (DOI 10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.168)
- the average woman is more interested in work-life balance than the average man (DOI 0.1080/03069880600769118)
- moralizing issues is sometimes bad (DOI 10.1111/1467-9280.00139)
- the concept of "microaggressions" lacks scientific backing (DOI 10.1177/1745691616659391)
Of those, only the last one is directly relevant to his policy proposals. (And it seems to be one researcher's position paper, anyway, but I'm happy to grant for the moment that it holds the weight of scientific consensus.)
The rest are all interesting scientific facts but the connection to his policy proposals is incredibly unclear. I said it's based on personal feelings because the idea that software engineering involves caring about things more than people, that neuroticism (in the psychological sense) makes one less suited for software engineering, and that advancement in tech requires giving up work-life balance. As many others have argued (e.g., https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man... ), these are opinions of an extremely junior engineer who has confused "software engineering" with "writing lines of code".
If we're going to take the logic in this article seriously, we should much more readily take seriously 'aphyr's (absurdist) suggestion that men perform better on technical tasks in societies where they're not allowed to own property: https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/894211417561341952 That one has a solid scientific citation and direct relevance to the policy proposal it's making!
> This is opposite the blameless culture laid out as best practices by the leaders in tech
The blameless postmortem relies on the fact that you trust everyone to be making the best decisions they can under the circumstances and you trust them all to be well-informed and qualified, and that sometimes mistakes happen anyway and the identity of the person who makes it is basically chance. Take GitLab's recent incident: if a company's practices don't involve testing backups, and someone is responding to an urgent production problem and deletes the wrong directory, it's not a sign that the person who got paged is particularly incompetent. There is incompetence, but it's a property of the entire team: backups should exist and be tested, runbooks should be clearer, production hosts should be more visible, etc.
But as a consequence, in order for the blameless postmortem to work, you have to actually trust your engineers to be competent. A person who writes a manifesto like this is also the sort of person who's going to read a half-complete answer on StackOverflow that offers a simplistic but enticing explanation, and conclude that it is 100% relevant to their problem despite evidence to the contrary, questioning relevant internal docs along the way. Someone who does that isn't someone you want responding to production incidents. You don't want to blame them - because you don't want to risk them causing problems in the first place.
Such a person is a mishire. The fact that certain people are rejected in the interview process (including false negatives!) does not violate the blameless culture. Once you conclude that someone was a false positive hire, you shou...
> Such a person is a mishire. The fact that certain people are rejected in the interview process (including false negatives!) does not violate the blameless culture. Once you conclude that someone was a false positive hire, you should promptly let them go with a generous severance.
You might just have a terrible organization or managers with no or poor experience. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Let's be clear, I'm not advocating for the rejection of promising junior candidates with the intellectual curiosity to learn how to do things. I think more companies need to hire such people, and I've strongly advocated for hiring them at my jobs (with mixed results).
But that doesn't imply that an organization or manager's job is to teach everyone everything. There exist non-junior roles, and very often there are people who are mishires for a senior role but great hires for a junior one, or mishires for a certain company but great hires for another one, etc. Sometimes what you're looking for is a senior engineer, and saying "This person isn't senior, they're not right for this role" isn't a failing of management or of the organization.
Damore was a senior engineer (L5) at Google, which is definitely not a junior role (it's the first level where they don't expect you to be getting promoted within 1-2 years, IIRC).
(Let's also be clear, everything I've said about dealing with mishires promptly also applies to mishires in management or mis-promotions into management. There are a lot of people in management who have no business there, and should get either a promotion to a highly-ranked IC role or a generous severance so they can find one elsewhere, before they do more harm to their team.)
You absolutely have a right not to be outraged or offended by someone's opinion at your place of employment if you work for a company with any sense. Companies that play fast and loose with HR risk becoming the next Uber - a company whose toxic environment has caused more than a few talented engineers to say they wouldn't work there for literally a million dollars.
You really don't though. You have a right not to be harassed but you don't have an inherent right not to be outraged based on whatever cockamamie standards you choose that morning.
I'm personally outraged by people who think it's okay to write emails and chat messages with improper punctuation and spelling mistakes. Mixed case sentences, emojis, and made up capitalized abbreviations make my blood boil. But none of that is grounds for me getting those people terminated.
If I don't want to deal them I can go work somewhere else. That's the right I have. Not the right to silence them.
It's the same if they decide to express their political opinions or sports affiliations.
> You do see that you are comparing 1. woman being biologically inferior to 2. sports affiliations.
No I'm not. I'm saying that there is a distinction between being offended/outraged and being harassed. Just because someone is offended by something doesn't mean it's harassment. My examples were explicitly meant to be silly to demonstrate the point.
> You absolutely have a right not to be outraged or offended by someone's opinion at your place of employment if you work for a company with any sense.
What?
Harassment is different and can be objectively defined in the scope of the business and/or role.
But outrage/offense is subjective. You can change your views from one day to the next, or flip perspectives over lunch. You don't get to come back from lunch with a new view, and have a 'right not to be offended'.
What. Of course there is a right to be offended and outraged by someone's opinion. It's the same right that allows someone to share a dumb opinion in the first place.
He was in no way advocating for that though. Not supporting some diversity programs isn't the same thing as thinking women ought to be harassed or discriminated against. We should be studying programs like this and explaining why they work, not just silencing all criticism with blanket accusations of bigotry. The current culture around this sort of thing is counter productive in actually achieving a more diverse and equitable workforce, in my opinion.
Well said. I do think the tech world needs more diversity, absolutely. It's just that I fundamentally disagree with the way it's being managed. I believe that tech companies need to be working with minorities and women at an earlier age (high schoolers, college freshmen) to groom them and steer them towards STEM careers. What I don't agree with is quota systems and affirmative action programs. I also strongly object to those who criticize these practices being labeled as bigots and mysogynists.
If you really think those programs are ineffective, you need to roll out a superior solution before you suggest throwing them all away. Otherwise you're just pulling the rope up behind you because you're already in the treehouse, and you can sit there and continue to wring your hands over the poor state of things.
I respectfully disagree with you here. Why do I have to "own" inclusion and equality just because I disagree with the specific implementation? Why can't it be the responsibility of the VP of Inclusion to figure this out in a way that doesn't blatantly favor one class of people over another?
You're talking about taking programs that work - at least to some degree - and removing them without advocating a replacement. Apply this same logic to any other workplace context and it should be obvious how unproductive it is. How far would you get in your day-to-day work if the only thing all your coworkers did is say "no"?
Should the ACA - or health insurance in general - simply be abolished due to defects that you dislike, without a replacement? If the VP of inclusion isn't doing a good job up to your standards, should they just be fired? When Mr. Damore advocated for the removal of all these programs without providing concrete suggestions on how to replace them with better programs, he committed a similar error. (This is aside from the reasoning he used to try to justify it, which is another set of issues)
Do you really need internal statistics to prove that diversity programs increase the number of employees from the relevant demographics?
Come on. It's self evident that it's working.
Whether that results in effective outcomes for the business is a different matter; but if your KPI is just 'ratio of XXX in employees' there's no question its doing what it's literally designed to do.
While you're not doing this at all, I think there's sort of a conflation between diversity policies at specific companies and diversity in the industry when in reality they're totally unrelated. So I'm my opinion there's a lot of misplaced support for corporate diversity policies which are designed to benefit he corporation, not women or minorities. And the people being discriminated against under thes policies can't openly oppose them or they'll be accused of bigotry and probably fired.
I won't dispute the possibility of the scenario you describe, but the memo being discussed doesn't really fit this at all. The policies and programs he objected to are largely (if not entirely) things like mentoring programs and techniques for making the hiring pool more diverse.
There can certainly be a blurry line in some places that makes it difficult to identify whether a given program has an (unintentional or otherwise) discriminatory effect but a lot of the stuff he objected to is very clearly positive assistance for people who need it, and not anything that harms men in his position.
Google's data suggests a modest increase this year over last year (a 1% shift in overall tech gender roles) with better improvements in leadership. They publish the data, so you can see.
So evidently Google can demonstrate modest improvement. And it sure seems like the Guy Who Got Fired felt like he was seeing the undeserving and huddled masses approaching his ivory tower.
But I'm not sure exactly what you'd like. On the one hand, "Someone needs to do something" and on the other "this blatantly favors one class of people." But I'm not entirely sure that last part is true. Google has quietly improved a lot of feminist hot-button issues that benefit men disproportionately in the last 3 years as well.
For example, Google increased its paternity leave policy. I know because one of the folks I met while interviewing there was ecstatic about it. They've also taken a lot of steps to improve life for families. I know because while interviewing I toured the day care facilities. Hell, Google quietly helps employee kids get into nearby schools and funds (and even runs) after school activities. You don't even need a woman involved to trigger them, Google offers its -ternity leave to adopters as well.
These things disproportionately benefit men by the simple fact that there are many more men in the workforce at Google, so any family related benefits or policies (and these are important, real issues that deserve to be solved) are really a massive win for men who want offspring.
So this whole angle about biases towards "specific groups" is really just a terrible prism. While I'm not saying this is your angle, it's all too often used as a way to shut down any sort of concessions for minorities with unique challenges.
And the business value is really, really clear: a larger workforce means more supply and less demand. From a large business's perspective, the 5 year operating costs of these programs is tiny compared to the savings a 5% reduction in minimum hiring costs would be.
It's a startling deviation from the general population statistics. That fact is why I grant a lot of plausibility to unconscious bias arguments. When you render the numbers, they are very striking.
And once you normalize that kind of environment as "balanced", an attempts to correct it are going to appear to be a new bias. With few exceptions, this is something like a Mystery Spot illusion where you're normalized to such a skewed perception that even balanced and fair ideas can appear to be unfair.
...because the 'VP of Inclusion' came up with the current plan, that you don't like.
So how do you propose to move forward?
If you leave to them, they're going to do nothing, and leave it as is, because objectively, by the metric, it's working, and increasing the relevant ratios.
So you're basically advocating to someone that a) does not agree with you, and b) can demonstrate that their KPIs are excellent, to change their behaviour.
Why would they?
The only meaningful way to move forward to come up with a different solution, if you feel this one isn't working, because if since it seems to be working, just complaining won't change anything.
You don't get change by just complaining and making sad faces; change happens by meaningful engagement with the problem; if you're not prepared to do that, face the facts; there won't be any change.
(...and meaningful engagement obviously does not include distributing internal manifestos)
> You don't get change by just complaining and making sad faces; change happens by meaningful engagement with the problem; if you're not prepared to do that, face the facts; there won't be any change.
> (...and meaningful engagement obviously does not include distributing internal manifestos)
I agree that change happens with meaningful engagement. The first step to meaningful engagement on complex issues is usually a discussion. Setting aside that it's incorrect to refer to the memo as a "manifesto", it is very much not obvious to me that this doesn't count as meaningful engagement.
While I disagree personally with much of what was written in the memo, I find the response equally disheartening if not more-so. The backlash clearly displays that so many of those claiming to want meaningful engagement are interested in no such thing.
> it is very much not obvious to me that this doesn't count as meaningful engagement.
Unfortunately you can't call posting a document full of your opinions and conclusions meaningful engagement.
That's just meaningful self indulgence.
To be fair, perhaps he thought it was, and was trying to do the right thing, and did it wrong? I'm prepared to go as far as giving him the benefit of the doubt on that front.
...but it was wrong. For all the reasons that have been posted extensively on this topic; but, specifically: engaging meaningfully with a topic means discussion; and although we're having a discussion now, that's because this forum allows it, which is not something that that internal memo allowed.
Basically, tldr: Posting documents != meaningful engagement. Meaningful engagement means actually talking to people, organizing people into groups and delivering your message to the right people. All of that project managery stuff that people don't want to do.
I get it. ...but you gotta do it. That's life. You don't just get to sit in a cave and pontificate and call it engagement.
The policies he mentioned only even apply to people that are already in the treehouse, using that metaphor. He's saying we should stop pushing each other around up there and help other people climb up.
Edit: Positive discrimination in hiring policies doesn't do much to make tech more diverse, it can only shift the diversity within individual companies. Once someone is already a software engineer, they're almost certainly going to be hired somewhere if they're any good. Giving them preferential treatment does next to nothing for all of the members of their demographic group who aren't software engineers.
That is generally where I am on these issues as well. It's very frustrating that even if you were much more reasonable in trying to discuss these issues than this Googler was, you'd likely be fired for it anyways. As someone from a poor background who also suffers from mental illness, it's frustrating that all of that is totally ignored, and that I'm expected to be enthusiastic about a policy that advocates for giving preferential treatment to a wealthy white woman over me in hiring or promotion. And I don't think my circumstances should just be taken into account under this system, I just don't think positive discrimination belongs in the work place.
That's definitely something we need to do a better job at, and that's not just the companies responsibility. We all have a role to play in that. But I actually think affirmative action policies could work against this goal.
It creates some amount of tension that wouldn't otherwise exist.
> working with minorities and women at an earlier age (high schoolers, college freshmen) to groom them and steer them towards STEM careers
Working with a specific class of students (based on gender/race) is highly discriminatory, IMO. I think it is unfair to the people not included in the group you want to encourage, specially when it is children we're talking about. Why not have STEM grooming programs for any student who wants to join? Why exclude some?
I live in India. We have a history of casteism. Measures like this were instituted 70 years ago to help the downtrodden. Now it prevents people like me from getting a place in the country's most prestigious colleges while other less-deserving people are admitted because of their lower caste. I was born in the 90s. I did not even once witness an incident of casteism in my life. Except the one perpetrated against me. Your suggestion seems to me like a similar measure. It isn't much different from a quota system.
Targeted outreach is not remotely close to supporting a caste-based system of employment. I'd even argue that it's aiding people break out of the social and gender expectations, which can be viewed as an informal caste. I realize I might be making a massive generalization of South Asian history by comparing gender & racial roles with the caste system, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's enabling people to overcome social expectation.
I do agree that there are ways to implement this incorrectly, and my support is contingent on the following:
* Working with minorities in a field does not mean refusing to work with the majority. To ground this in the world of tech, reaching out to girls and underrepresented minorities does not mean turning away Asian & white boys.
* Steering them towards STEM should leave the agency in their hands. Even in the absence of all social and cultural pressure, it's a stretch to assume that we'll have gender parity in all fields. I'm confident in saying that software development(I specifically point out software development since some STEM fields have parity or even a slight majority representation of women) would have a greater representation than it does now, but I don't think it's 50%. If diversity initiatives end up pressuring people into fields they don't want to be in, then that's a failure in and of itself.
My pet theory is that it's not that we don't want to hire women, it's that they don't want to work here. I've seen one woman's resume and dozens of men's. We hired her. And she is miserable. But so is everyone. But she seems to think that things could be better while lots of men seem to just accept it sucks and don't mind making things worse. Is there a biological reason for the difference? Who cares?
Please be more civil and careful with your language. You just called another member of your community a bigot for being a member of a particular political party, not even for their particular beliefs.
A bigot is precisely, "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially one who regards or treats the members of a group with hatred and intolerance."
I respectfully disagree with your opinion here, as their official platform and statements also contain many things that a typical american might describe as bigoted or harmful. This single article (near the top of the search results for 'gop platform transgender' just to pick one) contains quite a few real examples:
Furthermore, the bigotry and discrimination in the GOP platform is well supported by the actual conduct of republican lawmakers in the house and senate.
An individual's right to hold their own opinions on these matters - regardless of how much I might agree with them - is one matter, but it's intellectually dishonest to pretend nothing objectionable is a part of the modern GOP platform. I say this as someone who voted GOP in the past.
I agree you shouldn't call people bigots for association to a given political party, but lets not white wash the GOP's platform:
- Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law
The implication here being that letting gay people get married is going to erode our foundation as a free society and obliterate all of our values as a culture. There are plenty of other callouts in that document to homophobic non-sense.
> You have chosen to support virulent bigots and misogynists…but don’t want to be called one yourself? Methinks you protest a little too much.
Supporting a GOP candidate isn't necessarily making you a bigot. Not all candidates are bigots. I personally am a libertarian, and I get made fun of so often it's pretty insane.
Repeatedly, I've been yelled at (yes yelled at) by liberals claiming I "helped elect the next Hitler". This has happened more than once. At work, at social events, etc. and it's insane that just not supporting what I feel is also bigotry (liberal ideals) that I'm treated that way[1].
United States law classifies specific forms of speech as illegal, in some cases because they incite violence. There's obviously an objective difference between saying 'you should go murder that guy' and twisting the knife yourself but it's pointlessly reductive to act as if all speech is harmless or fully equivalent.
I agree as someone liberal/progressive, thinks the manifesto is generally idiotic, etc. Progressives are doing themselves a huge disservice to cede the moral authority on free speech to the alt-right.
The other one they ceded, and the one that lost the election probably, was the traditionally leftist ideas such as anti-globalization and concerns for the workers. Chomsky and even Sanders not that long ago were railing against NAFTA and Open Borders. But then the current president picked and ran with those ideas and the Left was well left (pun intended) with a few issues such as identity politics, Wall Street donors, but also strangely enough Occupy Wall Street supporters... so they they lost. It should have been a slam dunk against a TV personality.
There was perhaps a glimmer of hope, thinking "Ok, now the left will rethink its position, will turn the DNC upside down and a new and vibrant left will appear in the American politics, possibly running with many of the idea that Sanders ran" and then nothing much happened.
The main political message so far is being "anti - whatever the president is or does". They botched a nice PR initiative about Russia, it was going so well, until they went to far and now they have nothing left. At last someone there raised the alarm and so they limply came up with the new slogan "Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future" "https://www.vox.com/2017/7/23/16016676/chuck-schumer-democra... but I think it is too little, too late. It's doing to be an uphill battle. I just expected more, not sure why.. Instead I got a stream of nonsense about Russia, a bunch of anti Trump rallies, how many scoops of ice creams he had and so on.
There was a time during the campaign that there was a real and honest debate about how the D campaign should have messaged against him. On the one hand, focus on his policies, but the problem there is that it would have "normalized" his behavior. So they made the choice to focus on how he's not normal. I guess it's easy to believe it's the wrong choice now but I'm not sure it was such a clear choice then.
> I do not falsely equate attempts to deny people fair civil rights (as the modern GOP does routinely, in terms of race, gender, gender identity, and so many other ways) as “opinion” so much as institutionalized violence
The issue is that the left equates denying preferential treatment
as 'denying people civil rights'. That makes it close to impossible for liberal-minded and conservative-minded folks to debate many topics.
> Whether the transgender/nonbinary people I know have the right to exist or not is not subject to debate.
Right to exist? Is someone saying they should all be rounded up and persecuted?
> Whether women have the right to participate fully in the economy without facing harassment or discrimination just because they are women is not subject to debate.
Another instance of the first point. Who's saying they shouldn't? Again, the other side wants the same thing--they simply disagree with means to achieve it. But you happen think those means are 'sanctioning violence' against them.
And...'sanctioning violence' against women? What does that even mean? Who is doing this?
The left always tends to fall back on this argument of 'basic human rights' as if the sky is falling because the right wants to take them all away & punish anyone who isn't a straight white male.
It's just a ludicrous mindset that, again, makes it almost impossible to have a rational debate. The nonsensical language in your comment makes that clear.
Yes, while the grandparent accuses others of "institutionalized violence", who advocates the use of government force to ensure that the bureaucrat's definition of an ideal sexual and racial distribution is achieved? Who says that people should be jailed for advocating policies with which they disagree? Who leads campaigns to see corporate force exerted against their political opponents, and to hyperbolize benign, even obvious and commonly-believed, statements into threats of genocide?
Suggesting that hires be made based on merit and function rather than the "diversity quota" published by some federal bureaucrat trying to justify their department's existence is so far away from threatening anyone's "right to exist" that they're not even in the same universe.
People holding such distant frames of reference cannot have a reasonable conversation. And that's exactly the point.
Calling your opposition Hitler makes you a pretty strong candidate for sympathy votes. You may not get Hitler assassinated, but you might just get a few programs through that much easier. Think about it.
> Right to exist? Is someone saying they should all be rounded up and persecuted?
A lot of opinions around trans people are centered around it being a mental delusion that shouldn't be accommodated. That leaves them unable to transition and live in society without mental harm. If that isn't persecution, not sure what is!
But those people aren't Fortune 500 material so not pertinent to the discussion. Those people are on the extreme side of the right. It wouldn't be fair if I started to draw conclusions about the left from what you hear people say on /r/latestagecapitalism either.
That's not persecution and it's certainly not "opposition to their right to exist", which was the original bullshit claim. Anyway, the APA (a very left leaning organization) diagnosis for transsexuality is Gender Identity Disorder (GID).
Your information is out of date. Being transgender itself is no longer considered a mental disorder. Gender dysphoria, discomfort and dysfunction caused by society and by being in the wrong body is the diagnosable condition. Once transgender people have been treated, there isn't any more dysphoria and there is no disorder.
Right, they rebranded last year or whenever. I'm sure for completely apolitical reasons. If you're familiar at all with the APA, you know what a joke that is.
I don't really care about their politics, this particular case seems accurate. It's pretty clear that gender incongruence is a medical issue, but trans people are perfectly capable of leading happy and productive lives as long as they receive the proper treatment and aren't subject to abuse for being who they are. I've literally seen that with my own two eyes.
Historically in America, the right was the home of authoritarianism - I fear greatly I'm whitnessing the birth of an authoritarian left. The thing that concerns me is the authoritarian left groups have been historically better able to organize than right wing ones.
An authoritarian-leaning right currently runs most branches of government in the USA. Is the fear that the majority changes their mind, or that someone else gets to set policy?
Keep in mind that authoritarianism isn't "people I disagree with that have power", it's when democratic elections stop mattering.
Yes, the masses revolted against the liberal elites which run virtually every prominent institution (media, arts, education, tech, and most non-elected government positions), but that hardly means the right has any sort of power (especially given that Trump won by appealing to liberals).
But to your point, authoritarianism is thrown around too often. Better terms for the identity-politicking left include "repressive" or "censorious".
Someone who I cannot remember the name of once said conservative/right-side politics trends towards Authoritarianism while liberal/left-side politics trends towards Totalitarianism. Pick your poison.
What a great quote. I find myself fearing the left more than the right because the left can actually execute. They have Hollywood, the newsmedia, the arts, academia, the entire public education system, etc, and they're routinely infringing on people's rights. The right? They can't even enforce bathroom rules in their own backyard.
This is exactly my point. Currently the right can't even agree what it is to be a member of the right - while the left pulls of a full on shunning for not carrying the party line - as a minority of sorts (and someone who has lots of opinions, and who is generally liberal minded) - this scares the snot out of me. Reaching the point where even questioning dogma is considered a form of attack is scary. Don't get me wrong, the right has it too - every time the christians scream persecution this comes into focus - but as you adroitly pointed out - the right can't find its ass with two hands and a flashlight.
Someone who I cannot remember the name of once said conservative/right-side politics trends towards Authoritarianism while liberal/left-side politics trends towards Totalitarianism. Pick your poison.
> The issue is that the left equates denying preferential treatment as 'denying people civil rights'. That makes it close to impossible for liberal-minded and conservative-minded folks to debate many topics.
Please, remind me how "being able to have visitation rights to the person you love" or "being able to vote while black" are "special privileges"?
> Right to exist? Is someone saying they should all be rounded up and persecuted?
Yes, let me introduce you to the Republican Party:
> And...'sanctioning violence' against women? What does that even mean? Who is doing this?
Let me guess: you'd feel pretty upset if all the people in HN today that you are persona non-grata and that they'll make sure not a single person they know hires you. Would you say that removing your ability to make a living doing what you love is violence? Violence doesn't need to mean "punching in the face."
> punish anyone who isn't a straight white male.
And yet, straight white males are the only ones whose rights are never in question. When was the last time you heard of an anti-white male legislation passing in the Deep South? And yet here they are, full internet forums complaining about their waning rights in the hands of females/blacks/LGBT/immigrants. Makes you wonder, huh?
Tolerance is not a moral precept. As a liberal, I tolerate differences in opinion, but I do not falsely equate attempts to deny people fair civil rights (as the modern GOP does routinely, in terms of race, gender, gender identity, and so many other ways) as “opinion” so much as institutionalized violence.
Your view that an opinion can be equated with violence is unethical, but I'm convinced a stronger historical reading would make you blush. It's a terrible and thin rationization. It's so easy to do, here are examples from right and left, with varying degrees of extremeness, quite like yours.
Not your or my opinions, but historical (if abstracted) examples:
- Your opinion that the military in this country should be replaced with an elected government is counter-revolutionary, and your poisonous ideas should be ceased before the imperialist hordes ruin our independence.
- Your opinion that our military intervention was wrong in such and such country is unpatriotic, and therefore illegal.
- Your opinion that God doesn't exist deeply offends religious people and therefore you should not say it, and people like you should be prevented from these deeply offensive opinions.
- Your opinion that drugs should be legalized is illegal because children can view it as a condoning and get hurt.
- Your opinion that this first world war is wrong is sedition, and will lead to prison time. It's harmful to this country and the war.
I hope I illustrated my point. The last was the Sedition Act, the others are more than just one incident.
I've been Left all my life and I'm deeply, deeply ashamed and nervous about the new generation's disregard of free speech and opinions that contrast their own. It's due to a lack of historical knowledge. I am convinced.
It's nice to hear that I'm not the only one with a growing sense of unease at the current trend for every disagreement turning into an 'us' versus 'them' dichotomy.
This is happening so often these days and I've struggled to confront it. I'm taken aback when people equate conservatism with violence or hate; it's an instant conversation-ender for me and it's irrational enough that I'm almost never interested in picking the argument apart.
It's not just a feature of social media comments. This line of thinking is heavily promoted by once-respectable newspapers like the Washington Post in their opinion sections. I raised my eyebrows the first time I ever heard Trump refer to WaPo as "fake news" but two years of daily reading later, I tend to agree with him.
Accepting arguendo that "tolerance is not a moral precept", and assuming you're referring to Yonatan Zunger's essay, you might consider that he likened it to a peace treaty. Which is now broken. Breaking a peace treaty means active hostilities. Seems like a really bad time to do that, given the current US administration.
There are bigots and misogynists in the Republican Party, and there are bigots and misogynists in the Democratic Party. Politics is much more than that, as are one's political views. No one deserves to be treated vitriolically for supporting a political party.
There exist people who think abortion is a murderous violation of certain people's human rights.
There also exist people who think forbidding abortion is a violation of the human rights of the mothers.
There exist people who think that taxing them and using the money to pay for things they find abhorrent (e.g. war) is a violation of their fundamental rights.
There exist people who think that compulsory education is a violation of children's rights.
Should all these people say the following: "These are basic human rights and the party you have chosen to support thinks that they are subject to debate", "If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them", "attempts to deny people fair civil rights ... [are] institutionalized violence"? And then feel justified in, say, campaigning to get anyone who disagrees with them fired?
I do agree, by the way, that advocating laws that violate people's rights is not much morally different from doing the violation oneself. As an anarcho-capitalist, I conclude that probably >99% of political discourse consists of people advocating laws that violate people's rights. I sigh, shrug, and try to make a difference in the places where I can.
> Whether the transgender/nonbinary people I know have the right to exist or not is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them. Whether women have the right to participate fully in the economy without facing harassment or discrimination just because they are women is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them.
And this position is exactly what causes sane people to say "Left is embracing insanity. I do not like those I affiliate with embracing insanity. I guess I'm just going to avoid participating"
How is it possible to claim that tolerance is not a notion that morality addresses? Is morality not a standard of conduct that all should abide by? Or once again is it simply a notion that is brandished like a beacon simply when it is convenient and then snuffed out like a mere candle when it no longer suits the individual and has long outlived its usefulness?
To be clear, bigotry is the intolerance of dissenting opinions, and your post models that perfectly. This is the most fallacious post I've read in a while, notably the absurd notion that the GOP is existentially opposed to trans, etc people (mind you I'm not a Republican or a conservative). It's these sorts of posts which lead people to believe that lliberals are dishonest, hypocritical bigots.
Yes it is. You mean it's not a moral precept that you value.
> I do not falsely equate attempts to deny people fair civil rights (as the modern GOP does routinely, in terms of race, gender, gender identity, and so many other ways) as “opinion” so much as institutionalized violence.
Welcome to the logic of the left wing extremist: speech that he or she disagrees with isn't actually speech, it's violence. After all his politics are self-evidently synonymous with justice, therefore any criticism is synonymous with hatred and bigotry. There will never be any criticism of his politics, no matter how measured, no matter how tame, that he will not consider hate speech.
You perfectly exemplify the problem with that remark.
Imagine if pro-life people said that "No your pro-choice belief isn't an opinion, it's institutionalized murder and it triggers me as a parent, and makes me feel unsafe, and so if you express that opinion you are violating my safe space and may need to be fired for your deliberately offensive remarks."
These people are not liberals; they are leftists. I consider myself a liberal and find myself having more in common with centrist Republicans than I do with some members of my own party.
Just abandon the labels. You'll get nowhere trying to say, "those people are X not Y, Y is much better." No since in being tribal with a group of people who are so diverse they will always fail to meet you expectations.
It's not "just a label," it's a political viewpoint. Liberal/conservative aren't just funny sounding words we made up to describe different "teams." They actually have meaning behind them and describe a general set of held principles. It's perfectly normal to want a different word for a different set of beliefs.
I also didn't make any value judgments. I didn't say that my views were "much better," I just said that I don't identify with leftist political views.
Medium term what will happen is regular people will get sick of virtue signaling and fake concern and feelings of entitlement because people will realize the whole thing is being gamed (and "weaponized" to some degree). And there will be an overcorrection --kind of like what happened in the past election.
They should have taken the mature approach and dealt with it more precisely --even if that would have upset a number of people who simply want to see revenge or feel wronged by an opinion.
I've been obsessively watching the rise of the social justice movement over the past 4 years, ever since Donglegate, and I keep wondering when that correction will come. But it only seems to rise. You would have good reason to believe that we're witnessing a torrentous societal change taking place, rather than a passing fad.
After the last election, though, I'm done with making predictions :)
He goes on about how things turned out in Malaysia (from more or less unified country to one divided along racial lines due to overblown identity politics). He concludes that one way to combat that is to remove the first-past-the-goalpost-wins political system in the US. Although in his example LKY combats it via authoritarianism. I don't think we want to go down that route.
The "social justice" movement dates back, uh, centuries. Maybe you have heard of Jesus?
Even if you want to separate out a modern social justice movement, it certainly dates back decades.
It's fun to consider it in terms of the foundation of the United States and documents like the Declaration of Independence. The wealthy landholders that declared themselves to be free articulated things so clearly that a bunch of other people decided that they wanted in on that shit.
When we talk about free market economics, we're not talking about the bartering system of ancient societies, even though technically the term applies. Don't do the same thing with social justice. The term has come to be known colloquially as the very recent movement that is rooted in the works of critical theory. While critical theory has been around for a while, this is new because it's become inculcated into a popular culture.
So you are insisting that when the links you link speak of social justice they speak of the very recent movement that is rooted in the works of critical theory?
I doubt it.
(one of them compares a modern movement to the civil rights movement...)
I'm talking about the online sub-culture that has sprung up in the last 5 years. The ideas they promote are a distillation of various crit theory stuff, like safe spaces, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, etc. They are the reason why the term "white privilege" is now virtually a household term even though it's been around since the 1980's. Not sure what your purpose is in arguing this very simple definition, but if you don't agree then have a good day I guess, not worth any more of my time.
>The "social justice" movement dates back, uh, centuries
IMO the meaning of the term has changed. The "social" in the contemporary definition of "social justice" stands for social media. When I see "social justice", I think of people having their careers and personal lives put on trial, and the court is the internet itself.
The best way to get revenge on someone is by putting a Trump bumper sticker on her car. Watch how easily anti-Trump people think it's moral to scratch or attack someone's car because of her personal beliefs.
No, they really wouldn't, not nearly with the same frequency.
Trump inspires a special "rules no longer apply" insanity in far-leftists. They enjoy feeling like the normal rules of conduct don't apply, so they lean into it.
I call BS on that. There are nasty people with no respect for personal property on every political spectrum. It's honestly to the point where wouldn't put any political bumper sticker on my car at all, ever.
My personal experience with "far-leftists" as you would call them have been large peaceful protests.
Agreed, would be pretty interesting. But good to keep in mind that the existence of vandal jerks neither validates nor invalidates any of the ideas they espouse.
The modern GOP has embraced some very misogynistic politicans and policies. And they pushed Trump into the White House. If you don't want to be labeled a misogynist, don't support a misogynistic party.
It's really that easy. Or have the courage of your convictions and try not to freak out when you live in a place where the majority do not share your views. I say this as a very lefty person in a very red state. I don't hide my views even though I know my neighbors and coworkers may be disapproving.
For what it's worth, there's probably a lower personal cost for a leftist to be sincere in a conservative environment than it is for a conservative to be sincere in a liberal environment.
Conservatives are just as likely to de-friend, who doesn't want to live in their own bubble? More to the point, the conservative subreddit on reddit is indistinguishable from the Pyongyang subreddit in its quick-to ban if not ideologically on-point policy.
Can I re-characterise your discomfort as being because the GOP has been subverted by people with fairly extreme racist/sexist views? I really doubt it has anything to do with liberals creating environments.
From my admittedly distant viewpoint (I'm not from your country), the GOP has changed substantially in recent years. It used to be a responsible political party that respected democracy. Then it seemed to start believing the ends justify the means - redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc. And at the same time accepting support from seriously racist and misogynist groups.
For example, the Obama birth certificate thing was simply a racist joke when it started. The GOP rank and file should have refused any association with those who suggested it, but because it served their purposes they embraced both the meme and the people promulgating it. The result of that (and more - Clinton trafficking children in a pizza parlour? I'm surprised they didn't add aliens just for good measure...) is that the GOP is now seen as a party that entertains such nutters.
I sympathise that your political system provides just two big boats, so you are forced to row with people you aren't comfortable with. In New Zealand we have proportional representation which lets the more... colourful... people have their own boats, which is very healthy because they quickly realise how few people want to join them, and that their views are unpopular.
> From my admittedly distant viewpoint (I'm not from your country), the GOP has changed substantially in recent years. It used to be a responsible political party that respected democracy. Then it seemed to start believing the ends justify the means - redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc.
There's something missing in your perspective which is that redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc are political strategies that have been used by every party in the USA since the late 1700s. Gerrymandering was named after one of the signers of the constitution. The Democratic Party had a solid control of congress for several decades in the 1900s due to gerrymandering (voting districts redrawing). The filibuster was used by democrats as well and as the senate passed back and forth between GOP and Democratic control, each side used it more than the last time.
Now, a lot of noise has been made in recent years in the media about these tactics because the GOP happened to be in a position in 2000 and 2010 to gerrymander the districts themselves, but it's nothing new.
I guess regarding the birth certificate thing, credulity for conspiracies is nothing new among the GOP party base. In the 1990s they were convinced that Bill Clinton had dozens of people murdered to cover up his crimes ("Clinton body count").
>>the GOP has changed substantially in recent years.
Both parties have.
Both have gotten more extreme and more polarized.
From Antifa to the "Alt-Right"
Saying that only the GOP has changed is only looking at one side.
>is that the GOP is now seen as a party that entertains such nutters.
That is largely due to media coverage which only highlights the nutters from the GOP, never the Left, and never any Sensible Members. For example you spoke of Obama and how the GOp embraced the "racial joke" birther non-sense, did you ever see this video on your news of John McCain?
Granted this is from the 2008 election and maybe that is outside your scope of "recent years"
There are just as many crazy people in the Democratic Party as the Republican Party. and I say that as a supporter of the King of Crazy parties, Libertarian party, where we had a guy strip on the stage of the National Convention last year....
American Politics... when it stops being crazy I will be worried
If you want to argue about tax policy, military policy, or any number of other things where conservatives and liberals have legitimate policy disagreements then by all means do so. I'm sure Google is a perfectly safe space for such arguments.
You seem to be arguing that we need to create a safe space for conservatives to espouse debunked bio-truth garbage that women or blacks are less suited to being engineers or are somehow inferior. Or that conservatives should have "safe fact-free zone" where they can spout nonsense without having anyone call them on it.
I'm not sure why so many people are willing to take this Google engineer's statements at face value. Actually I think I know why: because it confirms pre-existing beliefs. But even an hour on Google will provide ample evidence that his premises are simply not true. I'm not taking about J. Random Engineer's ramblings on some blog but actual research undertaken by actual sociologists performing experiments and crunching reams and reams of data.
Let me repeat that for everyone: His entire argument is based in a long-debunked flawed premise. It isn't true and no amount of philosophizing about it will make it true. Your feelings don't make it true. The facts are clear. Counter-examples about: look at CS enrollment rates in India for example. The modern western world, especially the United States, socializes women out of computer science and software engineering. It has nothing to do with biological aptitude.
Everyone I know of is desperately trying to find qualified candidates to hire. The idea that more-qualified white men are being excluded to fill a "diversity" quota is laughable. Diversity is about expanding the candidate pipeline and providing some support to those people once hired. Maybe if the industry goes through a huge crunch and programmers are being laid-off left and right then there would be an argument there?
The other thing I'll say is you have to be extremely dense not to either a) understand that you're making extraordinary claims or b) touching a potentially controversial topic that could result in massive bad PR if nothing else. Under those circumstances a competent engineer should take some time to gather evidence and make proper citations to peer-reviewed research. It would also be greatly beneficial to present multiple sides to the argument and make fewer sweeping claims. If you're going to say something that could easily be interpreted as "my coworkers are less-qualified diversity hires" then approach the topic with some humility, especially if you don't have a PhD in sociology.
This would be the equivalent of penning a memo claiming people who believe in God are suffering delusions and they are lowering the bar because they go to church on Sunday or for special events when they could be working. Mention that they're obviously gullible and represent a security risk to other employees. Go ahead - write that memo and route it around a large employer. See if you're still employed a week later (hint: you won't be).
>His entire argument is based in a long-debunked flawed premise.
What flawed premise? That men and women are different? For all your insistence that "bio-truths" are wrong, I've never met anyone who actually bothered to cite any studies that contradict them.
>Counter-examples about: look at CS enrollment rates in India for example
That actually supports the author's argument. Given India's notorious treatment of women, it would seem counter-intuitive that they're less sexist. An alternative explanation is that people in poorer countries are more desperate, so they'll take a lucrative job at the expense of their preferences. In wealthier countries, women can afford to pursue their passions.
> Under those circumstances a competent engineer should take some time to gather evidence and make proper citations to peer-reviewed research
The author did make citations (hyperlinks) to most, though not all, of his controversial statements. However, Gizmodo removed them for formatting purposes and possibly to discredit the memo.
I know this is a sensitive topic, but Google's reaction is really just business. Women represent a huge and quickly growing sector of the economy. Public corporations would never take a big risk of their bottom line to support an individual's rights (ignoring whether those claims of rights are even valid or not). And, it's kind of silly to blame 'liberals' - because it transcends politics. Businesses are about making money.
(By the way, I think it is reasonable for some individual rights to be protected within the walls of a corporation, but as far as I understand it, many US citizen's rights, like free speech, do not cross over into private domains. I wish it was different.)
There's some assymetry at work here: everybody will remember that Google fired "that engineer" who wrote the memo, but a month or two from now, nobody will remember his name. He still has a possible future career.
> but a month or two from now, nobody will remember his name. He still has a possible future career.
Oh you must be joking. He'll never, ever work in the valley again.
If he spends the next couple months on a non-stop apology tour and participate in however many struggle sessions the various women's groups deem necessary, perhaps one day he'll be left alone and Twitter campaigns won't be started up every time he finds stable employment.
I guess I'm thinking "regular people won't remember his name," but "regular people" and "hiring managers at large tech companies" are different groups.
I don't remember why, but I recently read some old blog posts about Joe the plumber (2008 election), so I've been thinking about how the public has a very short memory.
The market for developers is very very good, right now. Especially ex-googlers.
Maybe the big 5 tech companies won't hire him, because of the PR disaster that it would be, but any number of startups and small companies would be willing to do so.
Many companies wouldn't even bother to Google his name (personally, I've never seen anyone do that. I just get handed a resume). And even if they did, others would just keep it on the hush hush. Many small startups would be ecstatic to get a Google engineer for cheap.
Other engineers that have been on the receiving end of major scandals, have had no real long term consequences. EX: the donglegate guy was quickly employed elsewhere after he got fired.
Judging by many of the comments in this thread, there seems to be a lot of tech people HERE who are defending him, and would be willing to hire him if they were a hiring manager.
What will happen is he'll find acceptance in a different crowd and the authoritarian left has created a visceral enemy instead of trying to change his mind through gentle means.
Doubt it. Google is big enough to be picky and make a cut like this. There are plenty of places that would pick up a Google tier engineer regardless of backlash. The company doesn't even need to be desperate.
Michael Vick got picked up by an NFL team after dog fighting. It will be similar to that only this guy won't be a celeb.
Believe or not, he is going to be a figure, the anti-PC figure that certain group always wish to see, and shall be welcomed by them as a hero. Maybe not big companies, but his future might not be that difficult after all.
Wow you mean you just have to be a billionaire and start your own company to find work after committing the sin of being a conservative? Not really a great counter-example.
Absolutely. Google's reaction may have been rational. The situation in the US is that a few groups have been empowered to use their outrage to get whatever they want. Google is a business about making money, which may be hindered by not bending to the demands of those outraged group.
"Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." -- is asserted as an absolute but never substantiated and was his downfall I believe.
If he had instead said that Google should focus on addressing these biases that hurt minorities and women and as they take affect and demonstrate their effectiveness allow the affirmative action style discrimination to be reduced. He would have gotten a much better reception.
These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e. personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology, but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO.
Having read Mr. Damore's document, I can find very little in it of substance. It deals with politics and gender in only the very broadest of terms. It does not delve deeply into the scientific issues at hand, instead sprinkling his platitudes with wikipedia links to give them weight.
That being said, I completely agree that the US's nasty brand of liberalism is in a sad state. Our response to this manifesto should have been a cold critique of its many flaws, not the blind hysteria we've apparently opted for instead.
Big Five is standard in psychology. It should not be confused with personality quizzes on the internet. Big Five scores are reproducible (two tests at different time give similar score) and predictive (correlate with outcomes of interest). Its place in psychological metrics is second only to IQ.
I don't dispute that it is measurable or reproducible, just that it is meaningful. The problem with self-report is that you can only ever measure perception.
Let's say I want to measure ability in chess. I give everyone a self report survey: how good are you at chess, 1 to 10? Group A averages a 6, Group B averages a 5. Reproduced across time and regions. Is group a better at chess? We have no idea. All we know is that they report a high average than group b.
Switch to big five: "I feel comfortable around people." Rate the accuracy. Even if group a rates more accurate than group b, what do we really known from this? Comfortable is a relative term. Do group a and b have different perceptions or different experiences?
If your self-report chess score correlates with chess winrate, you'd admit it's meaningful.
It's same for Big Five. Self-reported neuroticism correlates with, say, diagnosis of depression. It's not just perception because it correlates with outcomes of interest.
Well yea, if perception of chess skill corresponds with actual chess skill then it means people are capable of self evaluating chess skill.
But that's not your example. If your example was self reported depression correlates with clinically diagnosed depression, we now know that people can self-perceive depression the same as clinicians diagnose it.
Your example is self-reported neuroticism corresponds with depression. So what? How are we any closer to knowing if we measured neuroticism? Is there a pre-existing link between neuroticism and depression? How did they measure neuroticism to establish that link?
It's funny how one day Hacker News has a scathing discussion on The Crisis of Reproducibility in Psychology, and the next, it's commenters will fight to the death to defend it.
Contrary to what you believe, there is no contradiction here. Implicit association test and stereotype threat (to name two large offenders) had reproducibility crisis. IQ and Big Five findings replicated a lot and basically have no reproducibility problem.
His argument seems to boil down to "men and women are different, maybe that's why there are fewer women in tech".
That's not an argument, it's speculation that there's an argument. The bulk of the manifesto is a repetition of tropes about men vs women.
Exactly. It's indisputable that there are biological differences between men and women. How those differences are relevant to the disparities in the gender ratio in tech is pure speculation on the author's part. To quote the doc:
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
That is accompanied with citations. OK, sure, let's take that at face value.
Next, he says:
"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"
No citations, no nothing, just: X may lead to Y because it feels like it's true to me! And there are people actually taking the arguments presenting in this document seriously? Can we please take a step back and try to read critically what is presented in this doc? Because these arguments are just embarrassingly weak.
A meta-analysis of scientific studies concluded that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people. When interests were classified by RIASEC type Holland Codes (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional), Men showed stronger Realistic and Investigative interests, and women showed stronger Artistic, Social, and Conventional interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering, science, and mathematics interests.[77]
Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests.
Not exactly the same point he made above but you can at least see how he is coming up with "women prefer jobs in social or artistic areas", "men prefer [coding]". I wish for his sake that he hadn't gotten into the differences between front end / back end code because it does sound particularly speculative and presumptuous - but if you can take a step back and take a broader look at his arguments there does seem to be some scientific evidence in support of his main thesis that "that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership".
Note: I just wanted to point out that I am appreciative that you are attacking his memo on the merits of his arguments. I apologize if that comes across as a patronizing thing to say, but for me the big scandal here has really been the way that dissenters have warped, twisted, and outright dismissed his memo as wrong without even attempting to counter any of his points. To me it feels like the liberal left (of which I self identify, btw) are dismissing his argument not because it is wrong, but because it contradicts their beliefs or because they are afraid of where a serious exploration of the subject might lead us. I don't personally have any issues with affirmative action (although I can understand how it might upset some people) - but I do care greatly about protecting the free and open exchange of ideas. And the calls for the this guy to be fired feel like a disturbing form of censorship to me.
Does there even need to be a reason why there is a gender/race disparity in tech? This is not a blip in the radar. It is commonplace for careers to have gender/race disparities. There are more careers with significant gender/race disparitities than careers without them.
It's not about virtue signaling, he was almost certain to be terminated just because it was a ridiculously stupid thing to say - you can't tell your teammates that they were hired because their employer lowered the bar and expect people not to be upset about it (and that's 100% what he did, he also made up pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to justify it, but he flat out insulted countless people within his company).
Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes 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 organization perpetually exposed to increased legal risk forever?
Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic and shows a profound lack of awareness for any professional.
I'm sorry, he did not tell his teammates they were hired because Google lowered the bar. Again, he's talking about on average differences and noting that the goal (50/50 representation) might not only be misguided but actively harmful. Why is this so controversial? He's talking about a process not individuals on his team or anywhere else at Google.
At the risk of repeating myself, the memo's author did in fact say that "Google has created several discriminatory practices", which include "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates". What else are we supposed to infer from the author's assertions if not that at least some of Google's diversity candidates have been let in because of weakened standards? Is he talking about a hypothetical, alternate-universe Google? It doesn't seem so, despite the passive tone of the memo.
Doesn't he mention it in the context of an explicit 50/50 men/women goal? Maybe it's achieving that scenario which could lower the bar, without saying anything about the current women working at Google?
This is an amazing discussion and it really needs to occur. What scares me is how much this conversation is being ruled by an angry emotive mob, at the expense of democracy and free speech. There is almost no fact in any of these comments.
Why MUST we have 50% of male and female in any industry? Have you noticed how almost every media outlet ignores female dominated industries (such as veterinary science) [0], where over 85% of vets in the western world are female? The strongest argument in this thread appears to be that there must be equal numbers for equality, but it's only EVER applied to male dominated industries (Google it if you doubt me). However, not only is this argument unjustified, it's continually selectively applied by most mainstream media outlets, again and again. There is no challenge or balance to any of these arguments from the mainstream media.
I am disappointed that Google sacked this engineer. To understand this mindset, you really need to watch this video on Yale. People being shut down from talking because they're male or white [1] or because angry mobs don't like what they have to say. People in this thread talk about sexism and yet they struggle to provide any evidence (while I can point at truck loads of evidence of misandry, eg. domestic violence, veterinary science, etc). This Yale video talks about this exact problem i'm describing. We have a society where you are no longer allowed to express selective views (even with evidence). Google have confirmed this with their dismissal of this engineer. What we've become concerns me deeply.
To all of the people who have stood up for free speech (and you're in the clear minority in this thread), I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you want to be able to sort out the media that's worth listening to, watch reporting on this topic closely over the next few days. Look for extreme prejudice and emotive language from the media. To quote an excellent quote from the Yale video, "these are moves of power, not reason" (3 minutes in, [1]).
So where are the rational arguments? What about the percentage of female university graduates with relevant skills? What about Dr Simon Baran Cohen's findings on very young children and trends to their thinking patterns? Where are the facts? Why are most people side-stepping facts?
Now please re-read this entire thread and ask yourself about freedom of speech. Ask yourself about democracy. Ask yourself about how many people have presented facts. There is something seriously wrong. You should be deeply concerned about the lack of debate, the lack of evidence, the number of emotive arguments and the message Google has sent to anyone who doesn't toe the politically correct line.
I'm in agreement that the Yale incident is egregious.
I think that your argument needs further refinement.
1. The fact you have to dig to find a rare prestigious, yet women-dominated field (veterinary science) demonstrates the lack of equivalence between software engineering or any other men-dominated field. Most high-paying fields are dominated by men in most states. The essence of this controversy is not that there are men being kept out of veterinary science and nursing. It's that women are actively and passively discouraged from entering, staying, and succeeding in the field.
2. I don't think any of the credible stakeholders expects a 50%/50% women to men ratio in software engineering. I think this is a misrepresentation of your opponents.
3. Linking this to freedom of speech and democracy is going to generate "but freedom of speech is just from the government, not from consequences" responses.
4. Claiming this is a trend in Fortune 500 companies is likely to yield from your opponents a considerable amount of examples of liberal workers being terminated from Conservative-style companies for political actions taken on-the-job. Even excluding union agitation, there are many examples from the past ten years.
2. Then what is the goal? the way many diversity policies are worded, it is not clear if there is any situation where success would be declared. This leads to many people feeling that they have in fact been bending over backwards to achieve diversity, but get called sexist pigs over and over again because gender balance didn't automatically happen.
4. So what? discrimination at conservative companies doesn't justify discrimination at liberal ones.
I pointed out #4 to illustrate that his claim of a pervasive trend of Conservative persecution wasn't consistent with the state of affairs in the United States.
I disagree with your premise; termination for political activity on-the-job is easily justifiable. I doubt you want to hear non-stop tirades from a PETA activist coworker.
I think your criticism of #2 is facile; which policies in particular are vague? Every corporate anti-discrimination policy I've ever encountered was essentially "don't discriminate against people in a way that will get us in trouble with the Feds."
To further your point #1 - vet is the lowest paid medical profession, and the highest (anesthesiologists) is male-skewed.
But in general, he's right that we're in a scary age with the aggressive and dogmatic ideology that favors political correctness over intelligent debate and will defend that ideology with mob rule (even leading to professors being told by police that it's not safe for them to be present on campus).
I'm not looking forward to seeing the political result of this movement becoming a tea party to the left, which I fear is inevitable in the next few years.
Bingo. Feelings have replaced facts as a measure of righteousness. And, sadly, there are entire industries plugging feelings of injustice by "white cis-males" or some other group of people who are oppressors by dint of simply being a majority.
It's such a mess. And if you give a sht about the Western tradition of reasoning*, it's a cultural shame. Entire national narratives are being powered by lies and mistruths.
The least we could do is talk about it.
But look at what happens when you question this insanity? You're fired and ostracized.
Has anyone actually read the damn manifesto? It reads like it was written by the sort of person stupid enough to openly disparage his fellow employees using cited Wikipedia articles. This entire controversy is so unbearably stupid - political polarization blew this out of proportion.
You're spot on about how scary the need for an echo chamber is. I was recently in Russia and the young, educated, and violently ideological foundations for the revolution are scarily parallel to some of the militant social "warriors" popping up in intelligencia today.
But a counter-point to the focus on male-dominated industries: I suspect it has a heck of a lot to do with the average salary of male-dominated industries compared to the salaries of female dominated industries. If vets were paid like anesthesiologists and vice versa (and across all industries), I think you'd see a lot more articles about equality in female-saturated careers.
Of course, personally I'd rather see a reduced pay gap between gender dominated industries instead of women being forced into jobs they aren't as interested in simply to earn as much as men who gravitate towards those fields. But I've no idea how you actually follow through on that, and "girl-code camps" are a heck of a lot easier to run and self-serving for the runners than "restructure the supply/demand labor market for 20-40% of all industries)".
The effects of positive discrimination already do disempower women. His argument is that you should improve the environment for groups of people as an incentive rather than doing anything which can be seen as 'lowering the bar'. The point is to treat people with respect by building an environment where they can be their best (whatever individual skillset they have), instead of insulting them with offers of extra help or illegally discriminating against other groups.
Again, affirmative action towards historically marginalized group is legal and is not a violation of protected status laws. It strains credibility to imagine the author is talking about discrimination against historically marginalized groups given the rest of their manifesto.
Some forms of affirmative action are legal in the US. Others have been struck down by the courts or have been made illegal by referendum.
I work at a large SV tech company and was recently privy to an affirmative action policy that was almost certainly illegal. The wording of the policy was quickly changed after a couple folks spoke up so as to make it conform with the law. If the policy had made it to a news outlet, I guarantee you it would have been on the front page of the NYT the next day.
In short, quotas are illegal. With some exceptions, hiring based on race is illegal. However, taking race into account among many factors is legal. The on-the-ground reality of these policies is exceedingly grey.
What business does this guy have deciding what does or doesn't empower women in tech? Where is his evidence or personal experience here? I'm certainly no expert in this area, but couldn't it be better listen to the opinions of women in tech, disturbingly many of whom who have publicly shared stories of sexism or harassment directly limiting their career potential in tech, about whether they feel underrepresented because of interpersonal culture or because of their biology?
You don't need personal experience to have an opinion, if you are capable of reading what other people have written and bringing to bear your own experiences.
It does not mean you get to decide anything for others, but it is a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say, and it is an even more basic sign of respect to not attempt to defame them.
This guy clearly isn't perfect. He was naive about what the effect of releasing his memo would be. However he was respectful and seemed to be trying to temper his perspective. He doesn't deserve the raw hatred and condemnation he is receiving. I think we should be compassionate and try our best to tolerate our differences.
He deserves the condemnation. He attempted to hide his disrespect towards diverse candidates by qualifying his statements with talk about "overlaps," "ranges in ability" and other similar statements. If he wanted to show respect towards the issue, and those affected by the issue, he could have focused on ways to address gender / diversity issues in tech. Instead, he focused on why he doesn't like gender diversity programs, wrapped up in some pseudo-scholarly talk.
This is an extremely different takeaway from mine. From what I read, the author repeatedly made it clear that he is not stating that women or racially underrepresented workers at Google are individually worse at their job. In fact, most of his discussion on different tendencies in gender are focused on selection of job field type of job within the field rather than ability. Furthermore, the author repeatedly reiterates that these tendencies are just that: tendencies, not rules. Some women pull 70+ hour work weeks. Some men work part time. To say that a larger portion of one group, even in the absence of cultural and societal pressure, is going to choose either the former or the latter is not disparagement.
To put this in a different context, take the gender discrepancy in murderers. Across nearly all countries, men commit roughly 75-85% of murders. This nearly uniform across agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial countries, rich and poor countries, liberal and conservative countries. I would consider it totally fine to say that men innately have a greater tendency to commit murder than women (and for what it's worth I'm a man myself). Is it okay to say that because I have a Y chromosome I should be treated as a murderer? Or that I should face a different standard of evidence if I'm on trial for murder? Of course not. But stating that I, as a man, am statistically more likely to commit murder than the average woman is not the same as saying I should be presumed to be a murderer and it is not the same as saying that I should face a different standard of evidence. But the point remains, it is okay to conclude that the discrepancy in murder rates is because of innate tendencies rather than discrimination by police, juries, etc.
I wish the guy had written what other people had written. This stuff has been hashed, rehashed, refried, deep fried... and he got all the biology research wrong. It just seems that he did no research, instead thinking about his feelings a lot and claiming he got somewhere original without engaging the existing scholarship at all.
Agree that it's a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say. I am tired of guys not listening to me saying I'm a boring, normal woman who likes math/tech/computers, not a freak or a biological anomaly, some evolutionary mistake.
> And he is not saying that you are a "freak" or "biological anomaly", he is talking about aggregated, statistical differences.
He provides no evidence to back the conclusions he draws from that data though. It reminds me of some articles or posts you might see briefly gain traction on the internet where the author starts from a point backed by one or two reputable sources and proceeds to use those references to back an argument that lies well outside the bounds of the original data.
As one of the authors of a paper cited in the memo puts it:
> In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. [...] But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large [1]
The post I responded specifically said the memo author got all biological research wrong. Now, his conclusions from that are certainly more debatable.
I guess the larger point I was trying to make is that when people feel singled out because of statistical differences b it leads them to take things personally, which leads to perpetuating disproportionate reactions and a non-existing platform for actual discussion.
> Agree that it's a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say.
> This stuff has been hashed, rehashed, refried, deep fried... and he got all the biology research wrong. It just seems that he did no research, instead thinking about his feelings a lot and claiming he got somewhere original without engaging the existing scholarship at all.
Please provide examples. Your statement is incorrect. Looks like you didn't bother to listen correctly to what he said.
Vets are 80% female. Is the industry closed to men that might want to be a vet? Do we need more outreach programs for men to be vets?
Or maybe is it that men are less likely to want to medically treat animals than women, and the gender discrepancy is one of preference? And yes, men who do become vets are statistical outliers, but certainly not "freaks". It's likely the same for tech and women - you are a statistical outlier, and from your perspective things are the norm, but the majority of women are not interested in the same things that you are interested in professionally. (The majority of men aren't either, but there's a larger minority of men sharing your professional interests than a minority of women).
And as for "not getting somewhere original" - the author's point about the difference between comparing averages vs the overlap of bell curves around the averages is a great point and not one I'd seen highlighted that way before. Perhaps you have, but it was novel to me.
80 years ago all vets were men. How can men's biology change so fast? 150 years ago elementary school teachers were men. In 1984 more than 35% of CS majors were female. Not long enough for genetic change.
I applaud the guy for doing research and putting together an argument. He knew the backlash that would come from it. I think he thought that the people at Google would respond fairly reasonably. Now that he has been fired, people will use that to point out the intolerance of the people in the Echo chamber..thus proving his point.
They should have included him on the diversity and inclusion leadership team. Sad that Google went the route they did.
Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach. Nobody is being insulted by this. Nobody is being illegally discriminated against.
His argument is that the under-representation of women in tech can be explained by biological differences that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions rather than hundreds of years of disenfranchisement and misogyny that still echoes in work culture today.
But you are right, "The point is to treat people with respect by building an environment where they can be their best (whatever individual skillset they have), instead of insulting them", which is antithetical to what the author did by writing the pseudo scientific trash and then widely distributing it to his colleagues.
[disclaimer: I work at Google, my views are my own and not those of my employer]
> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar, they are about outreach.
> Nobody is being insulted by this.
Some people are insulted by this [0]. When I said these programs already do disempower women, I wasn't speaking for all women: I was referring to what I had read. We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.
I think you should reread that article. It is stating that this woman, someone who is already successfully integrated into the "Tech Scene" is not the problem to be solved by outreach. Which is true. That doesn't mean that she would be insulted by outreach to women. It means you shouldn't ask her how to do it.
> I don’t want your ‘exclusively for women’ support groups
> I want inclusivity, not exclusivity.
> You’re victimising me when you do that. You’re indicating that it’s most
> likely I need special, extra support. Just because I’m female.
And then later on:
> By creating special awards for women I think you’re belittling the impact
> and effort a group of humans are having in their field – just because of
> their gender.
She is certainly insulted by these so called 'outreach' programs. She is using the word 'victimising' and 'belittling' to describe them. It can't get any clearer than this.
We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.
The ensuing comments thread on HN also had many similar stories.
Did you see the quillette [1] article that was briefly on the front page earlier? Four different experts write briefly their thoughts on the memo. While they don't necessarily agree with the author's judgment of the value of diversity programs, they unanimously agree with his points that the sexes are different and have different personalitie.
So saying that, what part of the memo was pseudo scientific drivel?
The part where he implies the massive disparity of representation between men and women in tech (17% percent of technical roles at Google, 15% at Facebook) is due to small and inherent physiological differences, which make women inferior at performing in those roles, rather than hundreds of years of structuring our society and culture to favor men. It is an invalid argument.
I get the feeling that this document is what Scott Adams talks about when he writes that two people can sit in the same movie theater, look at the same screen, and watch two different movies play out.
At various times (in the United States) men have been able to opt out of war by: hiring a replacement to take their place; being a conscientious objector and taking a non-combat role; being born at the right time to not be drafted, and choosing not to volunteer; enlisting in a branch of the service unlikely to see combat; pleading a hardship; finding a doctor to claim you are medically unfit; just walking away (desertion, as long as it was not during combat, has historically be inconsistently punished).
One of the major criticisms of conscription in the US is that, in practice, whether those methods of avoiding conscription were actually available depended on race, class and how wealthy you were. So only some men could actually take advantage of them; the rest were screwed. (This conflation of the experience of a few better-off men with the experiences of men as a whole seems to be quite common in many social justice circles for some reason.)
Of the four older men whose draft stories I know personally, two had exemptions (hardship/agricultural labor), but one went to war anyway, one enlisted as a pilot in the National Guard, and one lucked out by having the draft end before his number came up. None of them were particularly wealthy or influential, although all of them were white.
He doesn't assert the differences are due to inferiority. The vast majority of differences he mentions are differences of taste not differences of ability. There are many studies that show that women are more prevalent in engineering in poor countries than in rich ones. One fairly prevalent hypothesis to explain this data is that economic freedom allows people to pursue what makes them happier, rather than what makes them the most money. I have no idea if this hypothesis is right, but I think it's pretty sad that one can't make a case for it without getting fired.
Lowering the bar is also the easiest way for a mid-level manager to achieve a target percentage. It's probably also the first method that may come to mind for many people.
Also, if you spend 3x the resources to find 3x the number of candidates (is it linear? I dunno), conduct normal interview processes, and then randomly throw out 2/3 of the male candidates that passed, while keeping all the women that passed, that is one way to triple the number of women you hire while having the same bar for men and women. However, the step where you throw out a random 2/3 of the male candidates might strike someone as highly irrational. Why not throw out the bottom 2/3 of male candidates? But then you end up with male candidates that passed a higher bar. You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate. But it would probably be difficult to convince the people involved that avoiding the "unfortunate" outcome is worth throwing away 2/3 of the very best male candidates.
It might be possible to spend 3x the resources in such a way that all the new candidates you find are women. That would be a way to avoid the above problems. How would this be accomplished? Perhaps you send a recruiter to a university, and have them only talk to the female students. Hmm, that might be a little weird. How about a female-only university? That would be great. Likewise any female-only programming meetup groups. And of course any qualified female engineers that anyone knows—they'll never be wanting for a job.
How well will a company perform that spends significant resources recruiting from female-only groups, compared to one that recruits from groups that simply take the best candidates? How significant a fraction of company resources are normally spent on recruiting? And I did see a study indicating that demographic diversity (measured as age and sex) improved morale. I guess we'll see.
What would really help is if universities published the CS accomplishments of all their female students, but not of their male students. I wonder if they'd be willing to do it.
In any case, my original point was, even if a company does in fact implement its diversity program with one of the methods that does not systematically lead to higher-quality male hires than female hires, I think it is natural for someone to assume until proven otherwise that it is implemented by shifting the bar.
>> You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate.
No process is ever random. All processes have side effects, that make some kind of memory/feed back loop.
If there are two groups of uniform set of people A and B. And you if make it harder for A to succeed. Set of people in A will have to work way harder, than set B over very long periods of time to win consistently. You will end up making A far more stronger than B. While your intention was to make B at least as good as A over time, you have now achieved the very exact opposite of what you set out of achieve.
This is common in sports, and even competitive exams. Candidates are trained to take on difficult problems than the baseline so that they can get better than the baseline.
At this point the bar for winning is largely to subject to interpretation. Did you raise the bar for A, or did you decrease the bar for B? It depends on what you consider the baseline.
Companies have forgotten how to incentivise employees. If you want people to work for you and not the competition it's not a matter of advertising and getting more eyeballs (especially if you're Google) you have to actually do some stuff that makes the job more compelling. Like paying people more money.
If women are really worth more to the company, for diversity purposes - if not literal diversity of people, at least diversity of opinion and experiences - it would make perfect sense to just actively headhunt women from other companies and simply pay them more than the other people.
Companies never want to actually pay employees more money though.
> biological differences that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions
I didn't see that in the "manifesto" at all. The assertions that "biological differences exist" and that they contribute to the under-representation of women in tech don't at all imply the conclusion that the under-representation is due to biologically-caused inferiority.
There's good evidence, summarized in this blog post, that on the average across society, equally gifted and capable girls tend to choose non-STEM careers more than their male counterparts simply because of differences in preference, combined with the fact that a wider array of career options is open to them due to their higher verbal skills (this was featured on HN a couple of weeks ago): https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Furthermore, it seems that unlike men, women who are capable in math also tend to be capable in both math and verbal skills (whereas on the average, men have less capability in verbal skills), thus giving women more career options. Unlike men (on the average, again), women that do choose STEM careers tend to excel at all levels, including management.
> pseudo scientific trash
See the above article. It references highly cited studies that seem
to clearly indicate innate differences in preference (in even 2-day-old infants and primates).
"that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions rather than hundreds of years of disenfranchisement and misogyny"
This is completely false! He absolutely does not say that, he says women to not prefer to compete for those jobs. He might still be wrong but you are grossly misrepresenting his statement in an attempt to demonize his lack of PC orthodoxy.
By that logic how is anyone supposed to criticize any hiring process? Of course hinting that the process is flawed will imply that some of his colleagues shouldn't have made it through.
A hiring process can be flawed by excluding a pool of qualified candidates from consideration, even if the ones you hire are capable of performing their jobs.
Yes, and in fact this is what the original author was claiming (that non-diverse candidates had a higher false-negative rate)
However, if the number of hires is kept constant, and a given process is claimed to be flawed, then you are implicitly stating that one or more offers should have gone to what was a non-hire instead of what was a hire.
"If the number of hires is kept constant" is a huge IF that just doesn't hold up. If Google (or FB, or Apple) could find more candidates that met their hiring bar, they'd hire them as well. It's not a zero-sum game - these companies are constantly short on qualified engineers.
But at the same time, aren't you therefore implying that such diversity programs are inherently above reproach?
To be fair to you, I don't think you actually think that. But it's almost like the author of the diversity memo touched a third rail by suggesting that perhaps "lowered standards" could be an outcome from such diversity efforts. Is that a fair consideration to raise or is that beyond the pale now?
I don't think it has to be an either-or. In fact, because of this imperfect world, these programs are likely to be imperfect. But if I wanted to discuss that, I wouldn't do so using the argument that women/minorities are biologically-less suited for Google's leadership/engineering roles.
You don't think there's another way for the memo author to criticize diversity programs other than a 10-page memo of broad, sprawling arguments? Why should the author get to privilege of asserting his worldview on top of his critique of diversity programs without his worldview getting challenged?
> At the risk of repeating myself, the memo's author did in fact say that "Google has created several discriminatory practices", which include "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates".
Please take care not to deceptively quote the author in question. This is the full sentence:
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
The author deliberately crafted this statement to make it clear that he is referring to qualified, non-diverse, candidates being rejected at greater rates than qualified and diverse candidates - not that unqualified diverse candidates are accepted at a higher rate.
The author is either a total idiot or he just retired with a cool 10-30MM he would be paid by Google to be fired.
I'm going to guess it is the later: Lawsuit from him would cause discovery. Unlike other government lawsuit, he would actually be able to say who at Google has access to the needed paperwork/email/etc to demonstrate that he is correct in his assertion. The government would love to piggy back on him. So I'm guessing Google is cutting a very large check now.
Government lawsuit against Google right now means that he has the leverage. The odds are the same people who are tasked with the programs to promote whatever the author carefully worded in his post are the people who received/sent emails/edited internal presentations that mentioned something that a good lawyer would be able to twist into a Google's managers admitting that Google does in fact systematically pays women less than men to do the same job. Google has a lot more to lose from that lawsuit than from the author of the memo.
Do you mean the US government would sue google on this guy's behalf?
I would think, with all they have on their plate right now, they can't be bothered about some idiot who couldn't keep his mouth shut in public and just do the job he was hired for.
Government's problem in this case is the same kind of problem that government had in the US v. IBM: IBM buried government in the paperwork and government did not know where to look at to dig itself out.
Here comes the author who seems to have a very good idea of the remediation programs that Google has. The odds are extremely high the people in charge of the remediation programs/diversity programs/etc are the ones who are familiar with the issues that Google has: it is fairly logical. The author probably knows who these people are. He probably talked to them. Probably those people told him whatever he used as the basis for his manifesto. If he drags those people out into the spotlight, the government would suddenly have a beacon for their case.
That's why I, personally, think Google made a gigantic mistake firing the guy.
This is pretty interesting. Though I think Google is right to fire this guy, the collateral damage to themselves is an interesting thing to follow.
Whether he was right or wrong, he has hurt the company. I think he is wrong to be sure. But it doesn't matter.
It is also interesting because, a loss in a major legal case may throw up interesting possibilities in the stock market. Of course, one needs to be much more legally aware, than I am, to take full advantage of these possibilities.
OK, but the Department of Labor suit claims that Google "discriminated against its female employees". And Damore almost claims reverse discrimination. So I don't get how they'd work together.
However, Damore did file a NLRB claim before he was fired. So he seems prepped to sue, or perhaps to negotiate a private settlement.
They do not need to work together. DOL would just rely on the information that sees a light of day because of the author's lawsuit.
Without a lawsuit: DOL gets two million "records" (emails/docs/memos) related to hiring/performance evaluation/etc. It needs to sift through those two million records trying to find the ones that support its case.
With this lawsuit: author knows who in the organization deals with this exact issue. Those people probably had emails from their managers/sent emails to others that can be made to support governments position in DOL lawsuit. Now instead of sifting through the two million records that they got, DOL focuses on 20,000 records authored by those likely to have the kind of information.
That's why such dismissals are dangerous to the company engaged in a costly/high-stakes litigation with the government.
Those checks Apple had to pay for Jobs mouthing off "you're fired" at semi-random employees did not come with only a six month severance despite "at will" work contract.
I imagine this ex-employee will get a generous severance or expect good lawyers knocking soon.
This doesn't look like a tantrum firing. He created too much drama for his own good. As an owner, anyone would find that distracting and unnecessary. This certainly doesn't advance the company's interest in any way.
Now whether he is able to successfully sue google and make big bucks is difficult to predict at this point. But it's certain that his career is finished for the foreseeable future.
It is a profoundly stupid thing to do for anyone who likes their job as an engineer. Maybe this guy doesn't and wants to start a new career in blogging or some similar shit. In that case, this may be a great new start for him.
It's not a tantrum firing but it's also not a firing with cause and it steers close to free speech.
If Pao could sue KPC&B, I think he stands a chance, unrelated as they are, it suggests suits can go forward on slim allegations and here he has evidence clear as day they fired him for having a difference in opinion on their hiring practices. He personally didn't discriminate nor personally conduct himself untowards anyone. He offered some (unconvincing evidence about how women don't have the same aptitude as men --but you are likely to find evidence Google does have internal hiring goals and allows a culture which virtue signals against the majority culture) and they didn't like it.
Thing is, if this had been a woman or minority citing some dubious data about how more women and minorities should be hired (which I agree with but on other principles), we would not even blink at it, if it even would have surfaced)
That's not how it works. Google can fire him for no reason, and arguing with a company's policies on a mailing list is a pretty good reason to fire. Like, it's perfectly legit for a company to say shut up and get with the pogrom. Even if he's fired for saying stuff that is true. Edit: However, there might be specific technical reasons it's an illegal firing outlined in other posts in this thread. IANAL
But they didn't fire him for no reason. They fired him for a reason, but not a reason you typically fire someone for. Ergo either big severance + NDA or forthcoming lawsuit.
What I'm disagreeing with your post is the general "free speech" issue. That's not going to be it. It might be some specific "raising concerns about discrimination" reason, sure. I'm not sure we're really disagreeing -- I'm only disagreeing with the general nature of your previous post. I agree that hypothetically they fired him for some illegal reason -- or that at least such could be argued in court (for all I know).
People in general can sue anyone if there's any possibility they might win. The only way her lawsuit would be thrown out if she had never worked for them, or something like that. Otherwise, the way to find out if her claims have merit is the lawsuit.
Which she lost, and was forced to pay $276k to KPC&B. So not exactly a good omen.
Right but IIRC, they fired her for perf issues, she retaliated with harassment or discrimination.
Here they fired him not for perf (defensible) but for difference in opinion (maybe defensible but icky) not anything bad he did. I think he stands a better chance than Pao's retaliatory suit.
You don't have freedom of speech at work. Apparently in the US that's not a freedom of speech issue until the Government says you can't say certain things at work.
And to bring this back around to the utter insanity and disingenuousness that has erupted from this episode, this is a line from the linked article, Ellen Pao’s gender-discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2015 also brought the issue to light,
Pao's issue was shown to be a non-issue, yet "it brought the issue to light" ok...
I wonder why the author didn't mention the resolution of the lawsuit? I wonder why she mentioned it all? Oh right, peddling falsehoods, both explicitly and implicitly.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that Google can make a legitimate claim that the firing was for cause. Creating a hostile work environment is sufficient cause for termination, and I am quite sure that something like this is buried in some clause of the standard Google employment contract.
You don't have free speech rights at work, or more to the point you can say whatever you want and the company can do just about whatever it wants in response to this speech. To go full Godwin here, if this employee had, instead of talking about how women and minorities "lowered the bar", wrote and distributed interally a manifesto about how Google had too many Jewish employees and how these employees were mostly hired because of post-Holocaust western guilt and maybe we need to reexamine whether this whole Holocaust thing really happened I can assure you that he would have been shown the door within the hour. No one is locking him up for his speech act, but Google would have had no problem in firing him for that same speech act.
Others have pointed out in great detail all of the unpleasant future consequences for any potential interaction that leads to conflict between this employee and his peers. This situation was created entirely by the employee who posted the manifesto. He can sue Google, but he will lose.
Retaliation for <pick whatever argument his lawyers can make>. Remember, unless it this is dismissed with a summary judgement Google is going to have to deal with a discovery. Discovery with the other side knowing about internals of the company is a risk no company wants to take.
Summary judgement is for dismissing merit-less cases. If he sues for "Retaliation for X," where that is not an actual cause for a suit it will get dismissed.
No, Google was clear that he violated the code of conduct. Since it's plainly clear that he did, and since we can safely assume he's not a member of a protected class, any random assertion of retaliation will be thrown out. Any discovery requests will have to be tied to the code of conduct, which isn't particularly interesting even if it did get out.
It could easily be defeated as it presumes the author would not be able to demonstrate that he could be a member ( does not have to be ) of a protected class. Remember, should that be the case authors goal is not to score a touch down, it is to get a new set of downs i.e. move forward with a lawsuit.
Judges are very reluctant to toss something out that early if there's even an ounce of a possibility there could be a merit in a case.
California law has very strong protections for employees. And it seems that firing him for the memo may actually be illegal.
The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punished an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which is illegal.
Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action."
Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".
The document itself makes the claim that conservatives and classical liberals are discriminated against and actively silenced at Google. While I don't necessarily agree with this claim as per the the article he's set himself up into a position for being fired for commenting on his political beliefs. It's quite possible all he really needs to make a case is examples of political belief being shared and accepted without consequence in the same venue since it's pretty easy to find mainstream republicans who share these positions. Not saying the case is a winner, but it's pretty hard to not survive summary judgement when you can allege a reasonable basis for political discrimination. At that point I'd bet settling would be favourable to going through discovery.
Can you point me to some resources that describe political discrimination? I've never heard of it as a protected class especially when opinions are expressed at work.
I think this comes down to is affirmative action policy a workplace condition. Discussion about workplace conditions is separate from discrimination law entirely so 'protected class' becomes a red herring here. I'm not sure this is the best article but I tried to find something from a left leaning source I find reasonably fair given that this seems to be an anti-right topic.
Whether any of that applies in this situation is entirely unclear to me, because it hinges on the definitions of "engaging or participating in politics" and so forth. You'd probably need to talk to a competent labor lawyer in California for anything resembling clarity here.
He got let go for saying certain coworkers were less qualified based on their gender. You can't wrap whatever you want in "politics!" and then scream when you get into trouble for it. Sorry.
So can another 100 employees publish the same letter and get fired and line up for their million dollar payouts too?
I don't know about the discovery argument. If he was an HR insider and acting as a whistleblower to disclose an illegal practice, sure. But a regular employee can't voice opinions about something that's common knowledge and force the company to disclose a bunch of confidential information.
The mistake Google made was thinking that they don't have 100 conservative-leaning employees also willing to martyr themselves in the shadow of the original author's exit.
What are they going to do when someone else steps up and makes the same assertions with more tact? Fire him too? What about the person after them? They gave extraordinary leverage not to the person that they fired, but to the people that have not been fired yet.
It's uncharacteristically nontechnical of Google to think that of the anywhere between 30-50% of the US population that leans conservatively, there is only one of them working for Google in Mountain View and that any dissenting thoughts within the company will end with him, and that the liberal employees threatening to quit will be happy and sated just to see these few drops of blood.
It doesn't matter the size of the check Google cuts this guy, nor the next 100 individuals if they choose to also speak out. Google made a mountain out if a molehill, and they just left a very a long way for the snowball they just threw to gather some mass while rolling down.
Realistically, even 100 conservative leaning employees aren't going to make a dent in the 60,000 person company that is google. I'd probably be blip on their normal attrition rate.
While I think that many outlets are misrepresenting and selectively quoting the piece to make it seem more offensive than it is, the reality is that the author used a lot of loaded language and created many opportunities for misinterpretation.
If this were at my company and the article didn't blow up online I'd probably have a talk with the author to point out all the ways that this piece could easily be misinterpreted and construed as offensive and that the same ideas can be conveyed in ways that are a lot less likely to blow up in your face. If this were at my company the article did go viral like it did in real life, I'd probably let this employee go. While I would say this is placing the interests of the company over the psychological safety of my employees, the pragmatic reality is that PR and potentially internal dissent caused by retaining the employee does not outweigh the moral win of retaining an employee who wrote a tone-deaf article that went viral and was widely perceived as offensive - even if the underlying ideas aren't ourageous.
His presence inside google both legitimises his behaviour and acts a rallying point. They might not be able to prevent like minded people from seeking each other out, but they can prevent them from doing it openly. They might not be able to prevent others from acting in a similar manner, but they will do all they can to avoid emboldening them.
They are willing to deal with the external flack and legal ramifications of a contentious firing, if it helps them avoid an insurrection.
Unfortunately if a settlement is made it will be confidential. Even if it was illegal, maybe it was the best course for google? Imagine if, say, 10 female engineers publicly quit google because they wouldn't fire James. That is going to be some really bad press, along with losing presumably valuable employees. They can short circuit that process by perhaps firing him illegally, and then settling at a later date out of court. The SJWs get their Hitler fired and Google doesn't take another reputational hit
If they (google) settle with him, what stops hundred(s) of other people to follow suit; I'd suppose there are at least 15-20% of employees who would agree with his views.
In a world where qualified diverse candidates still regularly get rejected at greater rates than qualified non-diverse candidates, is this bad? I mean, as soon as the needle even flirts with going past perfectly fair in the other direction, that's when some of these people get up in arms?
This is besides the point. The point is, the author did not say that unqualified diverse candidates are accepted at a higher rate than unqualified non-diverse candidates. Many people are using this statement (often excluding the last couple words specifically referring to the false-negative rate) to claim that the author calling his women and racially underrepresented co-workers under qualified.
For what it's worth, I do think that taking steps to decrease the false negative rate for diverse candidates is an okay system and I explain my company's process of doing this in another comment in this page. That said, pointing out that this system is increasing the false-negative rate for non-diverse candidates is 1) factually correct, and 2) not at all the same thing as calling my underrepresented co-workers unqualified. If somebody claimed that our interview process increased the false positive rate for underrepresented groups I would object to such a statement - but that is not what is said in this document.
I replied elsewhere but in case you didn't see it:
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, but his argument clearly suggests that less qualified 'diversity' candidates are being hired.
First off, this isn't a pharmaceutical trial this is a hiring process. Second, even if there is a fundamental principle of probability that assures this is the case it's still possible to have a change that vastly reduces to false-negative rate as compared to the increase false positive rate - so much to the extent that the latter is negligible.
On a broader note, the way you're injecting a completely different message into the author's text is exactly the kind of behavior that makes these discussions toxic. I realize that might sound accusatory, but if people can't make a statement without people stuffing contradictory or unrelated words into their mouths there's no possibility of civil discussion.
This isn't a pharmaceutical trial but there's no reason why we can't follow along with the author's analogy of 'false negatives'.
Here are his words from 'The Harm of Google's Biases':
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and
I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve
a more equal gender and race representation, Google has
created several discriminatory practices:
He goes on to list his examples, which include the following:
Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar
for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false
negative rate
I think you may have misread his position earlier; I noted that you misspoke when talking about this particular statement (i.e., whether the false-negative rate applied to 'diversity' vs 'non-diversity' candidates)
EDIT:
Didn't see your statistical comment. Unfortunately, I can't think of a case where 'adjusting a bar' to decrease the false-negative rate does not neceessarily increase the false-positive rate.
The fact that the author uses the phrase 'lowering the bar' suggests that he is also thinking of this statistical requirement.
> Unfortunately, I can't think of a case where 'adjusting a bar' to decrease the false-negative rate does not neceessarily increase the false-positive rate.
Here's one:
* Phone screens have a 50% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
* On-site interviews have a 0% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
Non-diverse candidates do one phone screen, and if passed, do an onsite. Diverse candidates do two phone screens, and if either passes, they go on to the onsite. For all candidates, if the onsite is passed, the candidate gets an offer.
* Unqualified candidates, regardless of diversity, never get an offer.
* Qualified, non-diverse candidates get an offer 50% of the time (the other 50% are erroneously eliminated at the phone interview stage).
* Qualified, diverse candidates get an offer 75% of the time (25% eliminated at the phone interview stage due to false negatives).
It seems to me that the author is advocating either doing two phone interviews for all candidates, or one phone interview for all candidates. Neither change would alter false positive rates, since false positive rates are 0% at all times.
If you're inclined to point out that all tests have a false positive rate >0%, substitute 0% for 0.00000001% and note that I stated the change in false positive rates could be trivially small to the point of omission in the comment above.
I think the quinessential example of this is reminding people about their bias against minorities. Several studies have shown this drastically reduces false negatives and raises false positives to a level that is no higher than the false positive rate in the non-minority population. This isn't enough to say the false positive rate doesn't raise, but it's more than enough to say increasing false positives doesn't imply unqualified.
I think we're drifting away from the author's article.
His statement about 'lowering the bar' with respect to decreasing false negatives directly implies a relationship between candidate quality and the false negative rate.
I can't comment on your hiring analogy, as you have more experience in this area than I do. My responses were only to highlight the subtle negative character of the author's statement.
There are several studies on this domain that show things like reminding people of their biases remove about 90% of the effect of a bias. I don't think the studies showed that they create a bias in the opposite direction. Removing bias would substantially lower false negatives. While this would slightly increase false positives I see no reason that it would make false positives higher than the non-minority false positive rates so inferring that increasing false positives implies coworkers of that demographic are unqualified is just outright false.
I see what you're saying about the bias-awareness intervention.
For your last sentence, I did not write, and did not mean to imply anything about the number of false-positive (FP) 'diversity' candidates vs FP non-'diversity' candidates. It's true that the author hints at this comparison.
I meant to convey that, per the author's statement about 'lowering the bar', Google's practices increase the FP rate in 'diversity' candidates as compared to what would have happened without the practices.
From this perspective, the author is stating that the 'diversity' hires have a higher FP rate than might have occurred otherwise. I think this conclusion - I think it's a fair one, though we may disagree - is what people find somewhat problematic.
I think the majority of what people find problematic is Gizmodo removing all the references, removing the chart that explained the core concept in the idea and aggressively misrepresenting the author's positions. I think the author could do more to acknowledge the 'default' state of no programs is unfair and people would have to find something else to find problematic if he did so but I think most of the problematic comes from virtue signalling attached to misrepsentation and oversimplification of complicated issues.
> increased the false positive rate for underrepresented groups I would object to such a statement
Does your recruitment process have a 0% false positive rate? If not, giving more opportunities will yield more false positives unless it's proven that the extra opportunities have a 0% false positive rate.
I'd like to see your data supporting the assertion that qualified diverse candidates are rejected at greater rates. The thing is he wouldn't of been fired for arguing the opposite claim, this is clearly discrimination.
The data is incredibly easy to find and has been demonstrated for decades. It's an easy experiment: two identical candidates, one of them with an ethnic name (or actor) and one of them is white. It also consistently shows that white candidates do better than black candidates, despite having identical resumes.
This has been shown across society, including applications for housing, police stops, punishments in school, etc. I don't know why employment would be the one exception.
The burden of proof is on the side arguing there's something "special" about Google. The effect is present everywhere we've looked. Lacking any specific evidence to the contrary, it's present in Google hiring too.
I don't usually like to ask for citations, but he said the data was easily found which is clearly false in this case. And there are good reasons to believe google, a company which hires a "VP of Diversity" might be different from the companies previously studied in entirely different industries with entirely different hiring practices and requirements. I know in academia, female applicants are favored in the hard sciences: http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/10/new-study-explores-g...
We found that the public servants engaged in positive (not negative) discrimination towards female and minority candidates
...
Overall, the results indicate the need for caution when moving towards ’blind’ recruitment processes in the Australian Public Service, as de-identification may frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity.
It should be fair to say the author phrased things to pinpoint the aspect he is concerned about, even if other aspects are statistically inevitable.
Hiring the best and diverse workplaces are both virtues, but sometimes competing virtues. The problem with this entire discussion is that too many people are overly certain that one virtue is more important than the other.
You're somewhat correct with your analysis. The bar stays the same, but on average those who get a more detailed analysis done will be closer to the bar than those who are subjected to coarser grained measures. So, it's wrong to say it lowers the bar, but it's right to say that it ends up giving you more people who are very close to the bar. Perhaps a better way to word it would be that Google's diversity hiring method(of looping back around for a closer look on "diverse" candidates) shrinks the error bars on the bar
Imagine it this way: You're a fisher. The Law says that you can only catch fish which are >= 12" long. If you're caught with < 12" fish, bad things happen, but otherwise you want to maximize the amount of fish you catch.
You have two ways of measuring length: a crude wooden stick with some fat lines on it which mark approximately 12" - this is quick but only approximate. You also have a high precision caliper which can tell you the length down to .001", but it takes 2x as long to make the measurement.
You're interested in catching lots of fish, so if any fish you catch are a little close to that line, you just throw them back with one measurement.
90% of the fish you catch are red, but about 10% of the times you catch a green fish, which are really sparkly and fun, so you change your standard: if the green fish on first measurement is really close to 12"(not close enough to keep), instead of throwing it back like a red fish, you bust out the caliper and measure it more precisely, and throw out anything < 12".
So, at the end of the day, assuming red and green fish are distributed equally across lengths in the ocean, what would the distribution of kept fish look like? Would the mean and median length of your green fish be higher or lower than the mean and median of your red fish?
Your interpretation of that statement makes no sense. With that interpretation: a) the bar isn't lowered in any sense of the word, as that would imply less qualified people getting in, b) you'd claim that for unexplained reasons, Google can give more accurate evaluations for diversity candidates, c) and/or that they are rejecting candidates they know unequivocally to be qualified and d) even if all of this was the case, there wouldn't be anything discriminatory about it. At least where I'm from, it is literally a legal requirement, that if multiple candidates compete for the same position, diversity candidates are given preference.
Even in its most generous reading (yours), this sentence makes zero sense.
If I say something like "our interview process has put too much weight on brainteaser-type problems and I think we should scale that back".
The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.
I'm inherently saying some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired.
Edit: just to be clear, my point is that Google has, to my knowledge, expressed this sentiment and made changes to their interview process to rely less on brainteasers. They did so without controversy. No one said "hey Google is saying some of its employees shouldn't have been hired by changing their hiring process".
I'm not sure if you're being facetious? If you are, I apologize as it's gone over my head. I don't have a dog in the Google controversy. But I will put my hand up briefly and say that you've you just said, doesn't follow for me.
From your quote:
> Our interview process has put too much weight on brainteaser-type problems and I think we should scale that back.
I would not infer that you meant:
The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.
The most likely case is that someone saying the above quote would be a co-worker of mine. Someone I'm cooperating with in a common endeavor. I would assume they are trying to help us achieve our goals more readily. I would have heard something like:
We're turning down highly qualified candidates for software engineering roles because of their failure to answer non-software-engineering questions. Is there any evidence that these non-software-engineering questions contribute meaningfully to our assessment of candidates? If not, we should drop the questions. Turning down qualified candidates makes it harder for to hire the great people that coming through our pipeline.
To conclude that suggesting any changes to an interview process is an implicit indication that the people currently employed by a company were unqualified means that no improvements could ever be made.
>To conclude that suggesting any changes to an interview process is an implicit indication that the people currently employed by a company were unqualified means that no improvements could ever be made.
That's exactly my point.
Replace "brainteaser" with "being an underrepresented minority" and you'll see why it's absurd to suggest his manifesto is tantamount to saying "some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired".
If there's a big discussion about underqualified lovers of brainteasers being hired, and my coworkers start to look at me suspiciously, I can simply stop wearing my "I love brainteasers" tee shirt. Underrepresented minorities don't have that option.
Imagine Google required candidates to bench press 200 lbs as well as solve brain teasers. That means they turned away a lot of qualified devs for no good reason, but it does not mean they hired anyone unqualified, because lifting does not make you stupid.
It might. If weightlifting counts for 50% of your total "score" and some hypothetical "worthy" metric (such as coding) counts for 50%, someone scoring a 5/5 on weightlifting but only a 3/5 on coding would have a higher total score than a person who scored 1/5 on weightlifting and 5/5 on coding.
The first guy is not necessarily "unqualified", but he would relative to the other guy. People who were hired for their weightlifting abilities wouldn't have had to reach a higher score on coding in order to get hired. So on average, you would expect them to be less qualified.
I've spoken to and overheard recruiters for Google who have quotas for women as well as minorities. In other words, the corp pressures them to hire non male, non-Asian, non-white, and to seek across the country for alternative hires.
I'm actually okay with Google seeking women across the country (when they could find a local candidate), but we should not pretend that they don't have internal targets their recruiters need to meet.
A startup I once worked for sent out a memo asking that HR be involved before rejecting a "borderline" female candidate. As a generally apolitical junior employee this seemed really concerning -- we had pretty strict hiring standards and from that point on I wondered if each new female employee would have made it if they were born male.
I can't say if Google's practices are discriminatory (I don't really know what they are) but it's a very important thing to have open, honest discussion about. At the time, I kept my mouth shut because I was pretty low on the totem pole. If I were an employee at Google I would now know to do the same.
Did you consider the opposite questions with your male colleagues?
Bias is real. The exact same resume is, on average, considered more qualified if there's a typically male name at the top versus a female name. Did you ever wonder how many of your male colleagues unfairly benefitted from that sort of thing?
> Did you consider the opposite questions with your male colleagues?
No, I didn't consider it about anyone until they gave me a reason to. Prior to that email I had no reason to think that anyone working there was anything other than the best of the best. Well-intentioned policies can have resounding negative effects.
To your second point -- I'm not saying bias isn't real. I'm saying certain methods of counteracting bias have a strong potential for collateral damage.
After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.
> Bias is real. The exact same resume is, on average, considered more qualified if there's a typically male name at the top versus a female name. Did you ever wonder how many of your male colleagues unfairly benefitted from that sort of thing?
> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
This seriously sucks not only for the company (bringing on someone who is borderline), but it hurts the candidate. Now this female candidate, if she gets the position, is going to be thrust into a hostile and difficult environment where it's difficult to succeed or elevate above a certain level.
I've experienced this as an engineer, where I've been in environments where I was totally over my head. In retrospect I'm grateful for the rejections as much as the postitions I've landed, because they've pushed me to learn and advance my skill set.
By that logic anyone criticizing a company's hiring practices must be fired.
If someone claims their employer discriminates against black candidates, you must equally infer they think some of their white coworkers have been let in because of weakened standards, and out they go...
I mean, I'll admit there is a small core of logic there, but I think it's pushed absurdly far. Wouldn't it make more sense if hiring standards could be discussed without firing anyone who wants to change them?
I have in fact occasionally seen similar arguments used by right-wingers when someone complains there aren't enough black people, women, etc somewhere. It struck me as a nasty and cynical rhetorical trick when they did it too - and they didn't even go as far as demanding anyone be fired.
You can't take a critique on hiring personally. For example, Google skips for phone screen interview for new grads of elite schools like Stanford and MIT. If somebody claims that this is a discriminatory practice that lowers the bar for MIT candidates, no MIT grad is going to get offended.
He didn't just argue that there was a difference in the distribution but that the underlying cause was biological. Companies like google hire people who excell at certain skills and are therefore at the tail end of the corresponding distribution where the differences in likelihood occurence are largest. If he believes that for engineering there are 10 men for every woman at both tail ends of the distribution then the "natural" gender ratio in engineering teams must be 10:1 or standards are lowered in the name of diversity.
The implications of that worldview are totally toxic.
It is false because the science is bunk. Social conditioning likely explains all (and definitely explains most) of the measured differences, not biology.
The author has a popular science level understanding of gender differences. Based on that he concludes women are unsuited to be engineers compared to men.
Why did you present it as if this is just something that the guy "believes?" I thought that was the strongest argument of his memo and the perhaps the point with the biggest scientific backing.
If you wanted to pick out any argument out of those 10 pages to disassemble, you could have chosen any one of his arguments that haven't been corroborated by hundreds of years of scientific consensus.
There is no "hundreds of years of scientific consensus" that suggests women are worse than men at math and science. What consensus are you talking about?
He may have not told his direct teammates they lowered the bar but he certainly implied that women and underrepresented groups have at a whole at Google:
> The Harm of Google’s biases:
...
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
...
> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
Do you really not see the concerns this engineer has introduced for Google over his ability to objectively judge his peers who are women or members of an underrepresented group or at least how such coworkers might now have these concerns if they find themselves working with him? Do you not see how the long-term detriment and risk to Google could be (substantially) greater than the value the engineer brings to the company? Even if you remove the high-mindedness and virtues that tech companies like to project in their PR, do you not see how this is the only rational business choice for a Fortune 50 company?
There is something I don't understand. The third quoted line should raise an entirely different question.
You are in the position where you want to constantly hire a lot of qualified candidates. If you have discovered a way to decrease false negative rate, why would you not apply that across the board? It's like you have learned how to fix hiring but then carry it out only with some arbitrary cohorts.
My guess is maybe because it cost too much to implement it across the board, and the side effect that focused application results in more minority/women hires.
The paper confused sex and gender badly. E.g. Man and male are not nearly equivalent groups. How could someone who thought so deeply about the subject miss that?
how is the distinction relevant for an engineering candidate? unless you're implying that google has a pilot child labor project in the works it strikes me as highly superfluous
I don't think it wise to mix two controversial topics, especially since on their face they seem kind of contradictory. Gender identity discussions and biological dimorphism are both hugely emotional topics, and mixing them here would lead us down a discussion path we don't want to go.
> The paper confused sex and gender badly. E.g. Man and male are not nearly equivalent groups. How could someone who thought so deeply about the subject miss that?
Ok, but how do you propose the paper to be rewritten taking those into consideration.
Or do you suggest that Google force every employee go through a medical exam to determine their sex and make sure no one chooses to identify as a different gender to pass through the hiring process easier...
Sorry, I don't quite see what you're getting at there basically, it can interpreted in a few ways.
I am pretty sure the author didn't call it a manifesto. The label was retroactively applied by those covering the story. It's a great, real-time example of language being subtly manipulated to shape public opinion.
> It's not about virtue signaling, he was almost certain to be terminated just because it was a ridiculously stupid thing to say - you can't tell your teammates that they were hired because their employer lowered the bar and expect people not to be upset about it
It should absolutely be ok, if it's true. Which it unequivocally is.
> (and that's 100% what he did, he also made up pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to justify it, but he flat out insulted countless people within his company).
What about his post was pseudo-scientific? He cited studies, and to my knowledge, the actual facts of what he said are fairly uncontroversial.
> - The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote?
Did you read the document? He explicitly embraces diversity. He even says he's in favor of programs to help promote diversity.
He cited studies, but not until very recently did anyone have the version which actually contained the references. Gizmodo deliberately removed all charts and links, and for a while they had the only copy. It was a profoundly dishonest thing to do on their part. I'd be surprised if 5% of people commenting online even realize he cited sources.
Would you want employees sending out chain letters implying other employees should not be there? I would fire them on the spot. No "SJW" conspiracy need be applied. That's just unprofessional and out of line.
Employees are free to say whatever they want on a personal blog on their own time.
You don't fix a problem by firing the guy who reports it. It's hardly an SJW conspiracy, pretty much every company in the industry has some variation of the practices he outlines...
"Before being fired, Mr. Damore said, he had submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Google’s upper management was 'misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.' He added that it was 'illegal to retaliate' against an N.L.R.B. charge."
Maybe this is why he was fired? It sounds like he was becoming pro-actively hostile toward Google. And there may be more than we outsiders know going on.
The "actual facts" of what he said are not uncontroversial. They aren't even facts. Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender" has an extensive bibliography of studies disputing the statements he claims are facts.
Did you read what he wrote, though? He enumerates the ways in which he favors diversity and diversity programs. He's specific about which forms he likes and which he doesn't. I think his preferences are reasonable, but others may disagree. What is not reasonable, in my view, is shaming him into silence.
Sure, both things are totally fine and valid to say.
Attitudes like yours have polarized me to the extent that now I just say, "I'm super racist, here's what I think:" just to see people's confused reactions.
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
That is accompanied with citations. OK, sure, let's take that at face value. No dispute here.
Next, he says:
"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"
No studies, no evidence, no nothing for this claim. X may lead to Y, because... the author feels in his gut that it may be true? This is not science. This is an unsupported assertion. The rest of the doc is littered with these claims, which I could happily go point by point through.
He may have gotten the science about biological differences between men and women correctly, but the conclusions that he drew using that science is totally unsubstantiated. And frankly, it is extremely deceptive to defend him by saying that "he cited studies" without examining how he linked those studies to his own pure speculation.
He made an argument for his conclusion based on his evidence. You can't prove with science that those things are why women prefer those jobs. But if the facts he cites in his evidence are true, it would not be unreasonable to hypothesize that women may prefer those jobs. If you want to argue that point, I think it's totally debatable. But that's just it - it's debatable.
EDIT: And as has come out, the author of this memo has a PhD in Biology. Here are comments from four PhD scientists in Sociology on the issue, if you'd like some credentials to go with it:
Actually, you can absolutely use social science methods to attempt to demonstrate (or in this case, disprove) these kinds of links. But let's put that aside for a moment, and discuss what is objectionable about the memo.
What are the costs/benefits of having this "debate" at work over a hypothesis that cannot be proven, as you state?
Look again at what the author was doing. He was using scientifically demonstrated biological and psychological differences between men and women (women have "higher agreeableness") to hypothesize about how that affects their work choices and, notably, their performance ("This leads to women generally having a harder time ... speaking up, and leading.").
What this is doing is connecting a gender stereotype (which, sure, is scientifically supported in aggregate - that's true for a lot of stereotypes!) to work practices and outcomes. The authors claimed benefits of presuming that this connection is true are basically a) this will make conservatives feel more accepted at work, and b) diversity is "bad for business" (which is just provably wrong by an enormous amount of evidence that the author ignores). I think a) is absolutely a worthy benefit, but there are lots of other ways to do this without linking gender stereotypes to work performance!
Now let's look at the harms of having this "debate", particularly at work, which are numerous and measurable. While there are no studies demonstrating the link between biology and STEM job performance, there are many studies demonstrating the impact of widespread gender bias in STEM fields (classic recent reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract) and how it affects hiring and advancement. The memo's author correctly acknowledges these types of biases. So the harm is perpetuating gender biases in the workplace that affects people's careers. Not to mention the harms of opening up Google to gender discrimination lawsuits (ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Waterhouse_v._Hopkins), the productivity cost of employees who don't want to work with people with publicly broadcasted unproven gender biases that could affect their decision making ("hostile work environment"), etc. And not to mention losing the many economic benefits that a company reaps with a diverse, inclusive workplace.
So no, I don't think it's worth having this "debate", especially at work, where the benefits are negligible at best, and the harms are clear. If you want to have this debate, go write a medium article or something. Don't send this around your workplace. It's not that hard, really. People call this thought policing, or groupthink or whatever, but it's just harmful and a waste of time at work.
Even if there is bias, in what position is Google to fix it? Unconscious bias retraining does not work.
If bias exists it is culturally and biologically motivated and that can only be fixed by changing the culture significantly.
Women in free cultures do not like STEM. That is a fact. In countries where gender roles are being silenced (that's a good thing) women dislike STEM even more!
I went to a STEM focused high-school that had equal numbers of women and men (3000 students). Not the same percentage went for STEM fields after graduation. Women were also more successful during high-school. Every year the questionnaire confirms that women just aren't interested in STEM and go to fields that deal with people much more (medicine and similar social fields - rehabilitation, working with children with disabilities, social work etc.))
Show me a study that measures gender bias, does an educational intervention and succeeds in improving that measure significantly. None exist. At best they do not work.
> I'll let you do the homework finding citations about how you're wrong here.
Cool, good thing I did my homework. I'm quite aware that percentage of women in STEM is increasing every year. Check out research for countries that have successfully removed gender roles.
> Nice anecdote! Is there anything else about high school that you'd like to generalize to the entire population of the world?
Good thing that there's research confirming the same thing. Although I was not generalizing. The 3000 students and the results of questionnaire every year are pretty consistent. I'm sure someone will do a study on the data, will link to it surely when it happens. Although, I'm sure it will not matter given that you value meta-analysis but only those that confirm your bias.
Did you read what those scientists say? While there is consensus on the memo's statements about biological differences (which again - I agree with), there is hardly consensus on the conclusions drawn:
"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm."
He doesn't use it to essentialize each individual. He's pretty explicit about that, if you read his memo. He's clear about the fact many women are exceptions to these patterns, just as are many men. The point he's making is that, perhaps, in aggregate, these differences explain the relative proportion of women in technical jobs. He isn't saying women shouldn't do technical work. He's not saying Google shouldn't hire women. He's not even saying that the women working at Google don't deserve their jobs, or aren't good at them. Far from it. What he's saying is that efforts to actively recruit women in tech, in an attempt to achieve gender parity may be misguided, because part of the reason for the proportionality difference may be biological. That's the essential point he makes, and whether or not you agree, I think its fairly clear that his point is at least not crazy and worthy of firing.
What if the tasks he wants done by meritorious candidates were selected by a very heteronormative, white dominated bloc of powerful people? In your view, would that call into question the propriety of asking a minority candidate to compete against a majority candidate?
Even the SATs struggles/d with making sure their tears didn't implicit strengthen the scores of any one group of students.
For programming and technical tasks, there are objective ways to measure accuracy, correctness and performance of code that don't require any consideration of someone's race, gender or sexuality.
If a programming exercise is subjective, from what perspective is it subjective in bias of? Likely the author's, who's bias will be derived somewhat from their race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic class, background, peer group, etc.
Code is correct if it works. But plenty of "working" solutions will be rejected as being "incorrect" based on current trends, internalized philosophy, preferred approach, etc. etc.
As someone who hires engineers, it is difficult if not impossible to separate personal bias and preference from an evaluation.
Interviews (by design!) simulate intense interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee, similar to a workplace situation when trying to solve a problem. That setup is not objective.
The result, even just the code itself, is also not judged on a binary yes/no scale, which again leaves a lot of room for opinions and bias to muddy the water.
I've done hundreds of engineering interviews. Conducting objective interviews is very hard. Anybody thinking they are objective either has never done interviews or is fooling themselves.
You absolutely have, because in the real world "correct" isn't a cleanly defined objective target. Humans decide if your code was well-written enough or you used an appropriate data structure, and humans can be pretty solidly relied upon to blunder into all manners of cognitive shortcuts and biases.
You are judged and reviewed on a myriad different factors other than this. Are you a "team player?" Do you mentor others well? Do people like you? Were you picked to do complex projects this review cycle? Are you too loud? Too timid? Do you ask insightful questions? Is your coding style "normal"? Do you dress professionally? Can you be asked to interface with clients?
Every little thing that can be used will be used to form a composite picture of you as a person. It's wrong to expect a foreigner like me to be judged on whether I know baseball stats but I'm sure someone somewhere has made an inside reference about baseball around me and written me off when didn't even acknowledge it.
That's what diversity programs and affirmative action programs try to short circuit.
c) Human beings are poor judges of merit due to cognitive bias, poor intuition for statistics, prejudices based on emotional reactions to irrelevant past experiences, and perverse incentives. It is therefore justifiable to apply a post correction.
I'm a bit surprised that techies don't see this as obvious. How often do inferior products win due to superior marketing that plays on these biases?
I am also surprised programmers have such confidence in absolute meritocracy in code shops given that every coder knows how hard it can be to evaluate the performance of coders on a team. Let's say one coder closes tons of tickets but does shoddy work while another works more slowly and creates things of beauty. The former often looks better but the latter might be the real MVP. I've seen coders who add little code but are indispensable on a team due to things like deep domain knowledge, great judgement, spooky horse whisperer debugging skills, etc.
Yet suddenly some are convinced of the infallibility of our ideas of merit as soon as someone tosses a culture war grenade in the room.
I don't even want to bring up the softness of some of the areas of science cited by that manifesto or the reproducibility crisis they've had but... Oops I just did.
Personally I am on the fence about diversity measures such as the ones I've heard exist at Google for practical reasons. I am not convinced they work very well and as an engineer I prefer things that work. My sentiment is on their side though, and I have become deeply repelled by the opposing movement (now generally called the alt-right) ever since it unmasked itself. Head over to alt-right subs on Reddit or worse Voat if you want to see what they really stand for. So if I were forced to pick a side I would begrudgingly pick the diversity nazis over the actual Nazis.
> It is therefore justifiable to apply a post correction.
But if your premise is that (essentially) people are wrong, how do you know that the post-correction will be appied "correctly" (i.e. not make things even more wrong)?
B isn't the argument being made by diversity advocates, that's just the strawman created by people like yourself.
You can fix it by changing it to
b) Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
Which is demonstrably untrue; women elect into different fields. The "yeah but sexism..." argument doesn't hold water because women achieved parity in the medical and legal professions in a time of actual, blatant sexism and well before every company had million dollar diversity budgets.
The strawman is much better than the actual argument.
Women elect into different fields in large part because of social factors. If a company like Google decides that it doesn't like those social factors, what's wrong with that? Why should social convention rule?
A lot of clumping happens in fields. Tell me why women are better at symplectic geometry than symplectic topology (or not). Tell me why women are better combinatorists than number theorists -- I want to hear something about counting the tubers they gathered. Tell me why women are so much more suited to advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology than interventional cardiology (https://www.aamc.org/data/448482/b3table.html). I kinda love all the post hoc analysis that goes into explaining these differences, especially when you have to explain then why Portuguese and Italian women are great in algebraic geometry but French women aren't (except for the notable exceptions like Claire Voisin).
Most people aren't pioneers; most people follow the pioneers into situations in which they feel mildly more comfortable than the alternative. Sexism plays a huge role, while not being the only factor. Is it really surprising that if you put up a "girls r dum" sign on a clubhouse many will find somewhere else to go?
Women electing into different fields is pretty much tautological here. The question is why, and whether it's for reasons we want to support and/or perpetuate. The whole point of the memo at issue is that he figures it's built into women biologically because computers aren't cuddly and that it is thus justifiable and right to perpetuate or support the current set of social roles. I don't know that the guy should have been fired, but it's clear he's not going to be a great team player or supervisor for women.
The "social factors" argument is pretty much bullshit, but even if it weren't, the claim I rebutted was that women are being prevented from entering the field. Nebulous social pressures don't meaningfully constitute prevention. "My parents put the video games in my brother's room so I became a lawyer instead of an engineer". Come on.
Edit: "social convention" shouldn't rule--women should be free to choose whatever careers they like, even if they're preferences are shaped by a culture you and Google distain, and men should get a fair shot at the employment they want, also irrespective of Google's identity ideology.
> B isn't the argument being made by diversity advocates
Of course it isn't because then it would expose the hypocrisy of what they advocate. It's white-knighting at its finest.
> Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
I agree there is sexism in tech, both overt and casual that discourages women from entering tech and/or causes them to leave. The question is, does increasing diversity actually fix this problem?
The author of the memo specifically addresses this, and states that the focus should be on providing psychological safety for people of all groups, rather than forced diversity that may not end up addressing the problem.
Waiting for more non-white non-male applicants, and actively hunting for non-white non-male applicants, does not imply or necessitate a lowered standard.
It means that applying is no longer first-come, first-serve.
The problem with a), is that often women aren't allowed to compete on merit, or they have to perform twice as hard, twice as often as a male colleague in order to prove it "wasn't some fluke."
Also, who decides on "merit" and "ability?" Most real-world problems are not math equations with clear answers. In that case, a homogeneous group is going to decide that merit is based on their group's definition. A diverse group will create a broader definition that accounts for a wider array of ideas and approaches.
> The problem with a), is that often women aren't allowed to compete on merit, or they have to perform twice as hard, twice as often as a male colleague in order to prove it "wasn't some fluke."
I've seen these arguments rehashed over and over by the very same people who overly critcized the manifesto.
Yet I have never seen any argument or document written as well as the manifesto supporting these arguments.
This is the strangest rationalization for the firing of a whistleblower I think I've ever heard... Given that Google's hiring practices caused the offense, why should we shoot the messenger?
> Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic
A private company firing someone over their views is a long, long way from an Inquisition. Your right to say and believe things is not a right for continued employment. The same libertarian argument that you seem to be making has been made the other way many times -- that companies should never be compelled to retain an employee for any reason.
You misread my post. I was criticizing the ridiculous rationalization: "his views aren't just wing, they're toxic". The punch line is that this line of reasoning is indistinguishable from a witch-hunt. "I don't like views that I don't like and those who expose them shouldn't be tolerated!"
You may want to research the early days of McCarthyism and the blacklist.
Is this the first firing that was perhaps an overly sensitive reaction concerned with appeasing a very touchy ideological base? Because I can think of a number of other people railroaded out of a job because of online "outrage."
We aren't all that far from an Inquisition (not prongs and tongs type Inquisition, but a "your job depends on agreement" type Inquisition). The most significant thing missing from the equation is that the most vocal social justice voices lack political influence and power. If you see this movement organize politically and get candidates in office, any student of history should recognize that things will get worse for open expression of ideas before things get better.
Out of curiosity, if his "manifesto" had talked about white privilege and how many of his white, male co-workers had, for their entire lives, been the beneficiaries of massive disparities in American society that led them to have an increased chance of becoming Googlers, and argued that we should work to ameliorate those disparities at all levels of society, including during the hiring process at Google, would you still call for his termination?
Such a claim would, after all, be an insult to many of his coworkers, who might feel as if he believes they're only at Google because society lowered the bar for them.
Personally I'd like it if people could make both arguments in a reasonable fashion and not jump immediately to outrage and calls for termination.
You're thinking of a men vs. women power dynamic. But that's not a realistic power dynamic, because neither men nor women act as a block. (For example, 44% of female voters in the 2016 election voted for Trump!) The actual power dynamic here is feminists vs. non-feminists, and at Google right now the feminists have a lot of power--as evidenced by the fact this guy got fired.
He asked about your opinion on a principle, because many people prefer reasoned, principled policy over internet-fueled, hysterical mob rule.
Dodging the question by saying you don't find the principle "interesting" when applied on the other end of the argument is effectively admitting that you know the principle is flawed.
What? I said interesting question. Not a not interesting question. And which principle? The scenario? Yes, I believe the scenario is flawed. Not sure why you are saying admitted.
To be clearer, white privilege exists. Male privilege exists. That is a power dynamic over women and minorities, enjoyed by men and non-minorities.
To deny those privileges exist increases the privilege. To deny that existing bias exists helps to increase the bias.
To admit those privileges exist decreases the privilege. To admit that existing biases exist helps to decrease the bias.
So, writing a manifesto (that admits white privilege) does not put white people into greater danger beneath those who enjoy the power dynamic over them (no one).
But, writing a manifesto (that denies sexism) does put women into greater danger beneath those who enjoy the power dynamic over them (men).
> Male privilege exists. That is a power dynamic over women
This doesn't necessarily follow, because insofar as male privilege exists, so does female privilege (such as no draft, "women and children first", the "women are wonderful " effect and the fact that women represent the majority of the voting base), so it's really hard to say one sex is more privileged than the other, rather than just privileged differently.
Not to be dismissive of your comment, but I think the topic of privilege deserves more nuance than you are giving it. Privilege doesn't exist as a binary state, where some people enjoy privilege and others do not, we all enjoy some privilege, although obviously of varying degrees. Privilege doesn't stop just at men or women, white or non-white, there are numerous combinations of privilege that need to be taken into account.
> where male privilege exceeds female privilege.
I'm not sure I can categorically agree with this. While male privilege exists over women, I find it ludicrous to suggest that white women are less privileged overall than black men, despite black men benefiting from male privilege. I think many of the misunderstandings that occur when discussing privilege come about due to using only a few easily categorized traits in defining privileges, rather than a broader set that also include things like socio-economic conditions, health, upbringing, and a variety of personality or physical traits.
This kind of claim (regardless of which direction you're making the claim in) ony makes sense if you reduce "privilege" into a single dimension. Which I don't think you can.
It is a little bit symmetrical though because white males are occasionally told they have had everything handed to them and they do find that infuriating to hear.
Except his whole point was that only looking at averages and not considering the spread and distribution is insane.
Should a son of a several-year unemployed coal miner be discriminated against because of his gender and race, just because other people with that same gender and race have done better than average?
The entire summary was "consider the individual not the statistic."
If you are concerned about socio-economic advantages, look at tax returns not skin color - the whole point of some prior civil rights movements was that skin color is a terrible proxy for evaluating the person underneath.
Honestly the graph examples of the overlapping bell curves vs the plotted averages in his document was such an excellent point, and yet the extremely salient points that should be discussed are being railroaded over by misrepresented hyperbole - your straw man theoretical imcluded. There's a great deal of nuance he paid attention to, and I really wish his detractors had the same consideration for nuance in their counter-points.
Edit: I didn't realize on first read that you were creating a hyperbole to highlight the bias in the calls for his firing. Leaving the comment as is though, as in general there needs to be a lot more nuance considered, particularly by his detractors. Apologies for misreading your comment's intention.
> you can't tell your teammates that they were hired because their employer lowered the bar
It only hurts because it is plausible and causes self-doubt.
But Google can prove this conclusively just by plotting the distribution of performance reviews between "diversity hires" and the regular pool of employees. You either show that there are negligible differences (the diversity program works) or the guy is right (the average bar did get lowered).
Google will never publish this data because they are cowards.
If you have some insider information I'd love to hear it, because this sounds totally implausible:
"I work at the world's most powerful tech company, get paid embarrassing sums of money to do it, and get good reviews from my manager. But I don't feel super smart, so I quit."
So, two things: Google is weirdly self organizing, which can take some serious getting used to. Your manager isn't there to tell you what to do, YOU are supposed to figure out what you should be doing for the most part, aside from some broad strokes from your tech lead (who isn't your manager). This really messes with a lot of peoples internal hierarchy compass, which leads to feelings of being lost and directionless.
When you come in as a newbie, and you see all these people seemingly directing themselves effortlessly, and creating cool shit day in and day out, it can be seriously soul crushing. You're still on your tricycle trying to figure out how to do anything at Google, and aside from your laptop, virtually everything is a technology that is Google specific and shares almost nothing with anything you've touched before.
Between those two things, a lot of people feel like they'll never make it. They hold on for their 1 year anniversary if they can and then shop their new Google experience around to find a good exit.
> One of the biggest problems that Google has with it's employee retention is imposter syndrome.
Can you elaborate on that one? I'm really curious, as my naive assumption would be that impostor syndrome should improve retention (something like "I'm not as good as my current employer and coworkers think I am, so I better not change jobs because this is the best I could get").
One thing I like about Russians and the Germans in professional circles is they indulge in unadulterated expression of opinions. Not to say they speak whatever thing comes to their mind, simply that they don't sugarcoat stuff. If you don't like it, it's upto you.
The employee in this case deserved a reprimand, not termination.
> One thing I like about Russians and the Germans in professional circles is they indulge in unadulterated expression of opinions.
It's ironic that the two countries who not so long ago were horrific totalitarian regimes now are more free (at least in this aspect) than USA - "the land of the free".
If an organization does, at any time, use hiring priorities besides work ability, and thus hires people whose work ability was not as good as it could be - from henceforth on, nobody can ever criticize those hiring policies, because that would imply criticizing the people hired under those policies.
>Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team
Funny, lots of people I've worked with have alienated me, and others, and various groups of people (different teams, specialties, ages, men, conservatives, etc). We somehow still manage to keep functioning in the same building. You, with bigotry of low expectations, seem to think women don't have the maturity for that.
it is a known fact that close to year end Google would go on a "diversity hire" binge to make their diversity numbers look good. literally recruiters are telling female candidates simply to apply and guarantees hire.
> Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization
This argument only work is every woman can only see themselves as part of the group and are incapable of seeing themselves as individuals.
I would be willing to bet that there are women (and other diversity hires) at Google that know they are capable of doing their jobs and deserving of being hired. Some of those people might object to being lumped in with the whole and not being seen as individuals.
It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick society... but of course, you'll read that quote then give yourself a pat on the back, sadly.
You really ought to read his document before commenting. And when you do, keep an eye outfor any quote whatsoever that says justifies your claims. You won't find one.
If you know that some idiot wrote this manifesto as a manager, could you assign a woman to work with him? Not in good conscience. An open culture is desirable because it lets the company get going with what its shareholders want it doing.
If he intended to treat people as individuals, then he wouldn't have resorted to gender stereotypes in the first place. The essay was clearly designed to tell women they don't belong at Google. Would you feel comfortable working with someone who wrote an essay at your workplace which detailed incorrect gender stereotypes about men ("Violent", "Incommunicative", "Ego/Status driven") as a way of gently saying maybe we shouldn't hire so many men anymore?
I can already visualize the intense white hot responses over at /r/mensrights and other such places. Where they already freak out, and "virtue signal" as you put it, over much much much milder stuff from feminists. Many people would call for the author's head, and I suspect we wouldn't hear so much about "free speech" from the MRA and other conservative outlets.
Edit: If any of the downvoters doubt my hypothetical, just think about what happened to Anita Sarkeesian. There were no statements about her bravery or defenses of her free speech rights from the conservatives. Just a wall of criticism and boycotts (and worse) in an attempt to get her to shut up. Whole lot of virtue signalling from men on the right, many of whom self-admitted to never watching her videos.
Putting a disclaimer at the beginning of a long misogynistic rant that we should "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group," doesn't nullify the rest of the document.
If you say "People aren't going to like what I say" and then say something offensive about 50% of the population, well then sure, consider the author's point proven...
This person created a toxic work environment in which women and people of color will not feel comfortable working with him, being interviewed by him, have him as their tech lead or have him on their promotion committee.
Why the hysterical cries of virtue signaling and suppression? What is authoritarian dogma that this author dared to question?
Eh. Edge lording and trying to gaslight people with BS like this "screed" only works if you're on reddit anonymously.
Companies have a right to get rid of toxic employees like this guy. He can enjoy his new position in the Trump administration as head of diversity in STEM. ;)
I agree that the author's arguments have been misrepresented, but as much by the author as anyone else. What we have is someone who is trying to couch borderline crazy views as reasonable and thoughtful and is smart enough to keep the lid on his underlying opinions with some success. But, read the author's footnotes for a real tl;dr -- he baldly states without evidence (indeed contrary to all the literature) that women are paid equally for equal work, that political correctness is a tool of leftists and authoritarians, and on and on.
His constant protestations that he's really interested in promoting diversity BUT is just the new "some of my best friends are X, but".
According to professor of economics at Harvard, Claudia Goldin, the gender pay-gap is mostly explained by women self-selecting into lower-paying professions and by choosing to work jobs with more flexibility in hours and time off. If I am understanding her correctly, equal pay for equal work is reality or close to reality.
It's insane how fast it has happened. Just 4 years ago I would have thought it impossible that I would ever align myself with anything right-of-center. I honestly have no idea what to expect in the coming years, and I wouldn't trust anyone who thinks they know.
Look at the right wing movements in history. Fascism, Nazism or any other right wing movements. These largely arise because there is too much politically correct talk going on, and at some point a guy comes along and musters the courage to say all the things openly what others had been wanting to say for years. What he says could be totally wrong and may be even absurd. But the fact that people just need a vent to release years worth of accumulated pressure will buy a lot of public validity.
Once this happens the public support, mood and direction swings too much to the other end. At this point PC won't even matter.
Kindly note, none of what I'm saying justifies Nazism.
There was quite a bit of PC. Germany was paying huge war reparations to France and UK. It was sort of portrayed as 'atonement of sins'. Economy was in tatters. There was insane levels of humiliation dumped on German populace for losing WW1. People were expected to simply eat it up as moral punishment.
I'm worried that is has something to do with gut bacteria and our food sources. My girlfriend and I have been experiencing more and more issues managing our emotions and having rational conversations and our current research is leading us towards how the meat industry is operating. It's our hypothesis that we need to get the antibiotics and hormones out of our food supply or this issue of polarization is only going to get worse.
Its one thing to mute some one, its a totally another thing to get that person to have a change of heart.
Events like firing people for holding a belief, only reinforces their belief further that they are being marginalized for merely holding an idea in their head. Of course they will now keep quiet until somebody comes along and generates way more groundswell support for their belief.
You have unwittingly provided an example of the "unconscious bias" against women that Google's programs seek to unpack and correct.
The term "virtue signal" implies that one's reaction is motivated by a desire to make an impression on others, a superficial and calculated response. But to a woman, reading an essay full of gender stereotypes can create a real sense of pain and outrage. So when you're saying "virtue signal", you're really mostly talking about men.
That didn't even seem like the main point. The main point was that people are psychologically oppressed: you can't even talk about the possibility of different gender behavior being rooted in biology without fear of retribution.
> A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.
From the article:
> Google’s new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance
A brand of religion with its own sheriff no less.
Who seriously believe you have freedom of speech and thought in such a monocultural place?
Can we please stop using 'freedom of speech' in this context. Freedom of Speech in itself is from persecution from the Government. It does not apply here.
Freedom of speech, as in the legal right protected by the First Amendment in the United States, is indeed only against the government.
But free discourse, as an ideal and virtue for the citizens of a republic, is a much broader concept. The citizens of a democratic republic should be open to hearing new ideas and engaging in reasoned debate with each other.
Yes, but the beginning of those conversations can't be, "you're biologically inferior at doing the same job as me." That's not "engaging in reasoned debate", it's being an asshole.
We can have a discussion about the merits of public companies engaging in diversity programs without starting from that premise though.
Please take a look at your biases here; condensing the authors words to that of saying 'women are biologically inferior at doing the same job as men in tech' is not what the author has written. It may however be what you imagine him to be implying.
This is a strawman retort. The principle is far broader than that, it is about respect for the exchange of ideas. When a private company serves a public function, you can absolutely make an argument that an opinionated enforcement of speech restrictions infringes on the right to speak. The line is drawn between the right to speak vs the freedom not to listen. When you make that decision for others, freedom of speech is threatened.
It seems he made that point and then continued to make a bunch of other points, and its those other points that many have a problem with.
I read a good chunk in agreement, but then it just took a left turn. Between its thinly-vieled promotion for 'conservative values' and some very thin 'therefore' conclusions midway through, it would never be able to stand up to the heights of intellect that its author probably intended it for.
Can you really say 'the establishment' is somehow masterminding anything, when the President of the USA will likely go on twitter to shame Google for what they've done?
If you think 'establishment' means having vanilla PR, sure. But he is as establishment-minded as the rest of them. Appointing big oil CEO to sec of state, ultra neocon pro-corporation judge to the supreme court, extremely pro charter-school administrator to sec of education. All are very wealthy people who belong to a higher income bracket than the vast majority of America. Establishment has a price tag and he has been able to afford it most of his life. That isn't changing anytime soon.
So if people that were appointed to these positions had a blue tie, that would somehow make them "not wealthy people who don't belong to a higher income bracket than the vast majority of America" ?
> Honestly, Google might have even been rational to fire him, due to the toxic situation created by the mass outrage. How incredibly damning of our society.
This is always the case. Even companies who are sane need to respond to the foaming-at-the-mouth lunacy of Twitter and related cesspools. As disgusting as the Brendan Eich thing was, I never really blamed Mozilla. I'm just not sure how tech in particular ended up so strongly under the influence of a relatively small amount of loud, shitty people.
Honestly I knew where this was going when I saw him mention biological differences. Which is a shame because many of his arguments are actually interesting. The tl;dr is actually chilling in the light of this firing.
His points were that some diversity policies were misguided and may even cause harm but are impossible to correct because they are taboo.
His memo was well-argumented and he was open to contradiction, which on several points could have been brought.
It was not aggressive, not dismissive, not sexist. I personally view his firing as totally excessive and downright anti-intellectual.
Critics, we are not yet in a post-sexist society. We have to improve many things for women and minorities, we have many efforts to make to reach true equality. Shutting down debate on your tactics will not help.
For a significant portion of American history there was an established difference in the distribution of the ability of people to own property. More recently there's an established difference in the distribution of the ability of minorities, students, and liberals to vote in certain states (NC, WI, TX, among others). There was an established difference in the incidence of AIDS during the 80's. There are established differences in the distribution of outcomes related to conviction of minor drug possession, soliciting prostitution, and a host of other non-violent crimes. Heck, there's an established difference in the distribution of police pulling people over or otherwise detaining people without cause in many municipalities.
Trying to justify discrimination by referring to the direct result of discriminatory behavior is obscene.
> "Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group."
"But beware of this particular subgroup, because they are biologically inclined to not be as interested or good in the subject."
> Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought
No, people are pissed that it's 2017 and people are still trying to make an argument for the superiority of testosterone as a predictor for success in a particular field. Can't we just give everyone a chance, instead of trying to pigeonhole them right away?
> A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.
Please don't pay attention to the actual religious agenda being pushed by the party currently in power. You know, the one that is actually running an inquisition against LGBTQ people? The one that wants to tell women what to do with their bodies? No dogma there, surely.
> This is the closing of the American mind.
The closing of the American mind started happening when a political party decided to take over religion and anti-intellectualism as their platform. That's why we've gotten to the point where being called an "expert" is paramount to an insult in certain contexts.
> Can't we just give everyone a chance, instead of trying to pigeonhole them right away?
The enginner did not say women can't be engineers, merely implied that the gender imbalance in the field may not be entirely the result of society. There are very real, very definite emotional and psychological differences between men and women overall[1]. Why is it so weird to think that those differences might lead to different career paths?
>Please don't pay attention to the actual religious agenda being pushed by the party currently in power. You know, the one that is actually running an inquisition against LGBTQ people? The one that wants to tell women what to do with their bodies? No dogma there, surely.
Just that the other side is crazy too doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the possible weaknesses of the left. Extreme political polarization on both sides combined with a decline in peoples' willingness to consider the opinions of those who oppose them is part of what is causing all this.
> The enginner did not say women can't be engineers, merely implied that the gender imbalance in the field may not be entirely the result of society
And this is where he should've exercised better judgement. You can hold that view personally, you can discuss it with your friends, maybe you can go and try to run a study on it with some actual sociologists. Don't go around pushing pseudoscience in the work place to justify your views, then expect everyone to applaud you.
> Just because the other side is crazy
The other side is deeply integrated with their crazier part and now they hold Congress and the presidency. But somehow, we need to focus on how Google firing someone for saying shit he knew was going to be controversial and would generate a reaction is "the leftist religion."
> Don't go around pushing pseudoscience in the work place to justify your views
is it really pseudoscience though? it seems reasonable to acknowledge psychological differences between men and women (from your gender identity - not biologically), and he cited sources (I didn't read them, I would hope for his sake that they're credible)
there's no precedent for acknowledging and addressing psychological differences in the workplace though (at least for professional office work). I think basic professionalism is based on ignoring our differences for the sake of having a sterile "just the facts" meritocratic environment conducive to business.
giving the guy every possible benefit of the doubt, I think he's just guilty of being unprofessional, not misogynist. he's also guilty of being stupid for not realizing this was a minefield in the first place and walking right into it without being extremely careful with his phrasing and more sensitive to mainstream points of view. I can get behind firing him for being unprofessional/stupid, but I feel bad for him for the amount of negative press he's getting.
This blew up because
1) English is an imprecise language subject to multiple interpretations;
2) Viral effects develop when there are feedback loops/network effects (virtue signaling is one; conservative vs liberal politics is another)
I would hope that a more narrowly focused document written in more formal language (math) with clearly-stated assumptions and a faq that addresses common misinterpretations will have fared better but these days even expecting this might be too much (which is sad!).
The one thing I feel that lost out on all this brouhaha was the author's point that companies should value "diversity of thoughts" rather than diversity of <the current hot topic class>!
While I have a lot of problems with the memo, I was pissed to see CNN's subtitle on this topic: "Boss condemns manifesto sent by a male engineer that claims women aren't suited for work in tech." To say that the manifesto claimed "women aren't suited for work in tech" is more than a gross mischaracterization, it's outright false.
This response has the tone of justification by exactly the very minds condemned as being closed.
I read the article which attempts to establish as fact very clearly unsubstantiated subjective claims. Never mind the toxicity -- the dude is just flat wrong.
"Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group."
"A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma."
Indeed. I also felt reminded of dynamics in the realm of religion.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 370 ms ] threadAnd if for no other reason, irrespective of the topic, that chilling effect is really disconcerting.
I'm also not going to comment on this thread. But our silence will come back to damn us.
Seems like it must have gotten a few reshares to go viral enough for somebody to feel the need to leak it. I don't think we really know how widely it was read before it leaked though -- it might have been a big raging controversy inside Google, or it might not.
I think any good argument against firing him has to hinge on the truth of what he said besides the group-think claims. Regrettably for him, I don't think there's much to most of it.
All good, except he did not make that argument or anything similar to it. He did not state that women inherently suffer from biological weaknesses of any sort. And no, his ideas did not harm anyone (except perhaps indirectly himself). Literally nobody got hurt except him, he is the sole victim of the ordeal.
I hope that you have read the document in its original form, which is a PDF with some (admittedly weak) references.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
It's hard to see a fair and general principle underlying this. People who publish false or mistaken things internally should be fired?
> Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50.
I used to work at Google and this makes me sad. The fact that you could make fun of Larry Page in memegen was my favorite attribute of that company.
Doubtless a real lawyer will come along here and clarify, but a good shorthand is: you can be fired in virtually any state in the union for expressing political opinions.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google...
> First, federal labor law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions.
> Second... California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.
> Third, the engineer complained in parts of his memo about company policies that he believes violate employment discrimination laws... It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws.
I don't see it getting to litigation though. I'd be shocked if Google didn't offer him a fairly hefty severance payment in return for a release of all legal claims.
EDIT: Maybe don't listen to any of my predictions m'kay.
https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/894747912701263873
(tweet author is a NYTimes Journalist who covers Google)
Source: reviewed many regulatory actuarial filings, which are public record - mine were in Alaska but you might find the same by trawling thru https://fortress.wa.gov/oic/onlinefilingsearch/ or http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/0800-rate-filings/
What I'm interested in is Google's best response, i.e. he has to go, how is that deal structured? Do you offer him a crazy good settlement and an NDA? What is the risk/reward here of a lowball offer vs legal action? Is the NDA negotiable, e.g. you can do X interviews, but not on say Fox news? What is the internal risk of people finding out he was given 6 figures to walk? I'm really fascinated with the practicalities of the action after the decision was taken.
Does anyone with any sort of HR experience know what is the best practice here?
"What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed."
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
You don't get to avoid discussion[4] about those subtitled points by retreating to some kind of invented safe space here. Out with it. Is he right?
[1] He is.
[2] He has.
[3] It is.
[4] Yeah, I'm just asserting without evidence too. But only to avoid the pointless flames that result.
[1] https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/pinker.slides.html
Well... https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6sa9f6/google_f...
EDIT: Actually, it's unfair to say "the internet at large." HN, reddit, and twitter all seem to be taking the news in unique ways.
Person A thinks X.
Person B who belongs a group the blue tribe hates also thinks X.
Therefore person A is a bad person because they agree with person B about X.
We have failed to prove that the group person B belongs to is actually bad and not just an exercise in signaling and we are also trying to smear person A by saying they agree with some other completely unrelated person who may belong to a distasteful group. Additionally X can still be correct and both people can be distasteful, but it wont change the fact that X is correct.
Sorry if I am not being clear, it's been a long day.
> Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.
> Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role.
> Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race
> Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social scientists learn left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap.
> males are biologically disposable
> We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue [sic] affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and whiner. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression.
> political correctness, which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause
Copy/paste any of those into an r/MensRights thread and you'll fit right in.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
Basically, you might think about one thing as 'moral fashion' and another as 'social good', but you are really comparing two fashions and pretending to be objective.
To make a concrete example out of the situation in front of us: if there is proof that diverse companies perform better (https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter) then his reasoning about how diversity initiatives are wasteful must be incorrect.
So to say that he is 'correct' means to turn your back on empirical argument, and to base things in identity politics.
In answer to the rest of your comment, it's anybody's guess and nobody agrees why. Maybe the stat is wrong, maybe the sexism is just that rampant, maybe the women-only candidate pool is inadequate (small), maybe there is a performance difference, etc.
Absolutely not true. There are many other possible reasons for such a correlation. A few examples:
It's possible better-performing companies could attract more non-white applicants.
Or, that better-performing companies could be have extra resources, which they then spend on diversity initiatives, where poor-performing companies are desperate to survive.
Or the independent variable: Being in the Valley makes companies perform better, and also makes them want to hire more non-whites, but these are both independent outcomes simply caused by being in the Valley. In this scenario, it's even possible that diversity harms performance, but the effect is more than compensated for by being in the Valley.
Or, it could be random chance; outcomes are dominated by a few high-performing companies, which just happen to be genetically diverse.
Or any of many other possible connections and confounders. This is really basic stuff.
I feel like the suspicious thing is that people didn't react in this way.
Why was this not a glaring problem that his supporters rushed in to answer?
If I told you I had an elegant model for some chemical reactions and could predict, say, the thermal energy released in an experiment, you might look at the model and think it's great.
If it doesn't match what is measured in the real world, then it's possible the model is correct: could be an environmental factor or a problem with the apparatus etc. But I need to answer questions around the gap between prediction and reality, rather than to rely on my perceptions of the elegance of the model.
That's where I think this veers off into identity politics.
Of course, because a policy of positive discrimination for minorities is not perpetuating any stereotype...
Equality doesn't mean equity. Equality is not fair.
P.S. downvote whatever you want, it is called discrimination for a reason (even if it says positive before)
For example, your pool of candidates is 75 (mayority) / 25 (minority). If you want in your company 50/50 ratio, you must leave out better candidates from the mayority in order to increase your number of people of the minority.
EDIT: as other person replied to me in a comment, my argument fails if the target ratio is close to the pool of candidates. But we don't have any reference what was the goal of the diversity program to make any assumption. I assume the goal was not feasible and that lead to the famous memorandum.
In California, when companies are audited by the government to check for discriminatory employment practices, they're checking that the employment ratios are relatively close to the ratio of the pool of applicants, not some prescribed ratio like 50/50.
Do you know how they calculate the ratios for the pool of candidates? It seems it is not a easy thing to do.
After companies grow to a certain size (I think >50 employees), they are also obligated to record demographics information about applicants in the form of voluntary surveys in their application process.
Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).
I am more confuse now after the information you gave me.
funny, when I started applying outside of the US, I added that information into my resume.
in the US, there's often an attached (optional) form that allows the applicant to add this information. I'd never really put it together before tonight, but I've always shunned filling out that form. I also shunned saying the pledge of allegiance in grade school.
wondering, for myself, if those behaviors are related.
You're not being misinformed, this is probably good advice.
Your demographic information doesn't have to be on your CV for your name to be cross referenced with a government database (audits I mentioned are done by government offices or government contractors), which you would probably be listed in if you are working in the US.
>Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).
I haven't read anything about any audits that have said they have a significant bias one way or another, I don't think I've said anything to suggest otherwise.
Google and other large corporations are known to do self audits of their hiring practices (demographic and otherwise) both to improve their hiring processes as well as to identify and correct discriminatory practices (mitigate legal risk), they are allowed to collect demographic information for the latter purpose.[0]
[0]https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
My personal opinion is that Google's demographics changes are a simple result of changes in the actual applicant pool, and that Google 'promoting diversity' doesn't change their internal hiring process in any meaningful way. But the press about it probably does encourage lesser represented people to join CS majors in university. So google does promote diversity in engineering, just not in the way the author of that article suggests, and instead with marketing and a 4 year time lag.
Wonder what changed today?
- Each Googler is expected to do his or her utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.
+ Googlers are expected to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.
- Make sure that information that is classified as “Need to Know” or “Confidential” in Google’s Data Security Guidelines is handled in accordance with those Guidelines and Google’s Data Security Policy.
+ Make sure that information that is classified as “Need to Know” or “Confidential” in Google’s Data Classification Guidelines is handled in accordance with those Guidelines and Google’s Data Security Policy.
Interesting though. Does it change the meaning subtly?
"Each Googler is expected to do their utmost" to "Googlers are expected to do their utmost"
It seems to me like it's saying "you should also be expected to be as a group" But the change is so small or subtle I could be reading into this.
https://www.diffchecker.com/rp3W4Gpp
Maybe read the article and other informed commentary such as this ex-Googler: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
https://medium.com/@silverstrike/i-like-how-you-portray-the-...
The summary at the end of
"Get over yourself. You are not as special as you believe yourself to be.
At that point, I gave up on your pathetic and emotional diatribe. Your piece is devoid of any logic, reason, or sense and serves as a way for you to virtue-signal to the rest of the world how much of a “stand-up guy” you are."
Is spot on how I read that Medium post.
I found nothing of value in the Ex Googler's commentary.
Freedom of Speech is not the same thing as Freedom from Consequences. Unless we decide that being "aggressively antisocial" should be a protected class, private companies should have every right to fire employees who they deem toxic for their culture.
If you don't like it don't sign and go work somewhere else.
Are you saying that supporting a presidential candidate is tantamount to "death to white men"? Yes, the candidate in question is abhorrent, but come on. Those statements absolutely don't carry equal weight.
If you read the post I was replying to, it would be obvious why I chose those two examples.
Anyway, I think self censorship is an expected behavior in a peaceful society. For example: you don't bring up recently deceased significant others, comment on awkward physical characteristics of strangers, or mock the suffering of others, without expecting repercussions. People learn at a very young age that certain topics should be avoided for the sake of "keeping the peace".
50 years ago you could use the n-word in business meetings. Now, not so much, but for a long time many people were "self-censoring" themselves to keep the peace in their workplaces. Some still are, but I imagine that most people these days are happy to be in a workplace where n-words are not tolerated. Not just for their own "sensibilities", but also the knowledge that their black coworkers/friends can be in an environment that is actively less hostile.
What we're seeing is the continuing shift in standards for peaceful society. So far I think the track record on these shifts is pretty good, so I'm inclined to let this ride for a while, even if some people have to keep "self-censoring" some of the time.
I guess mob mentality does rule after all.
I just don't think this should be a firing offense.
Plenty of Google employees are christians and none of them have been fired for it (it's legally protected, for one thing)
I certainly would not write a multi-page screed criticizing the policies and practices of my employer, distribute it at work, and then expect to keep my job or have no repercussions.
He put them in a difficult position. The brand and employee-esteem damage caused by tacitly condoning his manifesto by not firing him, vs just getting rid of one engineer. Easy maths. He's gone.
Edit: backwards words not now.
Employees write strategy memos all the time.
He is hired to be a programmer, not a social activist and Google surely could stand up and say they don't want be part of that.
If you want people to care about what you think and have to say, you need to spend time and effort cultivating a positive reputation. Otherwise you just seem like an unhinged idiot.
edit: because people seem to be misunderstanding my point or simply downvoting me because I am describing a reality which makes them uncomfortable I will simply reference Douglas Crockford and the Nodevember debacle.
If what occurred to Crockford occurred to some no name software engineer do you believe there would have been the outpouring of support and articles defending his character? No the person would have likely been fired for no good reason and had their name splashed across a bunch of tech blogs as a sexist.
That's a problem. I read the whole thing and was annoyed that TechDirt cut the charts and the references.
I'm honestly struggling to understand your perspective. Would you prefer a world where nobody says anything "controversial", everyone just rolls with the status quo, and nothing ever changes? Why is espousing "controversial ideals" offensive to you? I treat ideas that clash with my own internal logical understanding of the world as challenges that can only improve my understanding of the world. If I run these "controversial ideas" through my logic and reasoning faculties, there's really only two possible outcomes:
- I reject the idea and now have arguments against them that I can share with others
- I end up embracing the idea because I realize that my implicit rejection of it lacked a sturdy logical foundation
Either way, I win—I get a better understanding of the world I live in.
Why would you choose to shield yourself from improving yourself mentally?
I do encourage people to read it and make their own opinion, there are so many other opinions on this now, the only way to get back to reality is to read it for yourself.
Where you've made some poor logical leaps are: there is zero evidence that he shouted out his obviously controversial beliefs to the world. As far as I can tell this memo did not go to the whole world by his doing. It did not go to the entire Google staff by his doing. In fact, for all we know he was asked for his well thought out opinion on Googles diversity training and gave it to the appropriate people who did not respect the fact that he was giving his opinion to a small group and began forwarding it on. You might say I have no proof of this, and you'd be right. But you have no proof that he blasted this to the whole world.
Additionally, he was a number of things in the memo but he was not an unhinged idiot. It reads like someone who was asked for his opinion on the training that was going on and whether there was value in making it mandatory.
I have been asked in professional settings for my opinion on controversial matters. One time I was put into a very troubling position because of my opinion and many people were quite upset. It was uncomfortable for us all. I no longer give my opinion on controversial topics. I keep quiet and do my work and if I disagree with a policy or procedure I find new employment.
I am sure the author of this memo has learned his lesson now. He will shut up. I hope that the world is a better place without his opinion.
These are all hypothetical questions of course. But something to think about.
Edit: because my phone likes four letter words that sound like shut.
Do you think this person that has been fired has gained anything? Do you think anything will change because of this memo?
I don't.
I do agree with you, if in fact that was the authors intent. The issue you bring up is a good one though. Did he believe that he would throw away his influence and ruin his life by sharing this opinion? That's very tough to prove one way or the other. It entirely depends on the circumstances surrounding why he wrote the memo. If he did so entirely on his own without being asked or provoked, then you are right. If he was asked to write the memo by a superior or someone in perceived authority, you may be partially correct. If he was led to believe his opinion would be valued and his reputation kept and protected, then you are quite wrong. Unfortunately, I don't believe we will ever know the truth. So this interesting academic exercise will never really come to a conclusion.
Now, on the other hand. A thorough reading of the source would indicate that he should know that essentially saying that Google is biased against privileged individuals (say, white, male software engineers) is a pretty hard position to defend and he was foolish for attempting the argument. But hindsight is 20/20.
2. He earned his PhD in Biology at Harvard University.
What, in your opinion, should James Damore have additionally done to ensure that his thesis would be taken seriously?
(I work for Google and have a PhD in Biology from Cambridge University)
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that he did cite sources, but that Gizmodo decided to remove them. In addition they also re-badged this internal email as a "manifesto" and presented it as a war-cry rather than a basis for discussion. Pretty dishonest changes really.
These dishonest changes certainly helped further this shitstorm. Knowing Gizmodo (and their sister-website Jezebel which has no issues with domestic violence against men), I'm just going to assume this was the intended consequence.
Wikipedia is not a primary source.
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.
An evolutionary psychology professor said:
> For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history. I know a little about sex differences research. On the topic of evolution and human sexuality, I’ve taught for 28 years, written 4 books and over 100 academic publications, given 190 talks, reviewed papers for over 50 journals, and mentored 11 Ph.D. students. Whoever the memo’s author is, he has obviously read a fair amount about these topics. Graded fairly, his memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course. It is consistent with the scientific state of the art on sex differences. (Blank slate gender feminism is advocacy rather than science: no gender feminist I’ve met has ever been able to give a coherent answer to the question ‘What empirical findings would convince you that psychological sex differences evolved?’)
http://archive.is/z6xxP
The author of the Google memo did cite primary sources such as:
https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...
I think I'm going to go as google free as possible now. What's the best alternative to Gmail?
The problem with people with high iqs is they think they know everything. And when you think that, that's when you do stupid things. When you get group think going, no one is insuceptible.
Why do you say that?
> He stood up for the truth
The things he said are not true.
He did not stand up for them insofar as it was posted anonymously
> he did a good thing
It was not a good thing
> we all benefit
No one's life was improved by his actions
> He's like tank man
Except that tank man was in favour of political freedom and this guy is in favour of misogyny
> Sure they killed him
He has not been killed
> We honour people who stand up for the truth
Who is the 'we' here? For some values of 'we' this is definitely not true.
> Especially when it comes at personal cost
If he's so great, he'll find a new job.
Are you some kind of communist who doesn't believe in the free market finding optimal solutions ;)
I don't know why anyone needs to even give a shit about whatever "natural" differences exist or not. The law promotes equality. And if you're going to bitch about it, then fine, go vote for more Trump, I guess.
The people claim to be for tolerance and diversity, but really, they are just angry bitter race-obsessed and gender-obsessed political activists.
It's going to get worse before it gets better...
If you can truly embrace that perspective, you'll discover a profound truth.
The transition might cause some discomfort for those who've been on the privileged side of things for a while.
What in the world is happening right now? This is absurd beyond reason.
Fired from a tech company for publishing a company-wide memo insinuating that some of his coworkers are, on average, at a biological disadvantage for the type of work they do and suggesting that some subset of them haven't achieved their position based on merit.
All we really know is that the Silicon Valley thought bubble, and political intolerance is extreme to such a degree that people have to watch what they say and think at all times so as not to anger the thought police. The moral superiors.
No room for discussion. No room for debate. Just fall in line and be sure to advertise your virtue and 100% agree with views that the political left mandates you to hold.
Implying that should result in this guy getting fired is pretty ridiculous.
You just described a large portion of my Facebook feed. (Yes, I will admit my own guilt here as well).
[1]citations needed
He listed references that indicate, when viewed broadly, that men and women can exhibit different observable personality characteristics. That was not the argument of his memo. His argument was that, because of this broadly measurable difference, this leads to women being less interested in computer science (although not to the degree of similar STEM fields, oddly enough!) and therefore he shouldn't have to be subjected to bias training or be burdened with any other sort of program that suggests maybe, perhaps, potentially the social culture in tech/SV could be exacerbating this.
> All we really know is that the Silicon Valley thought bubble, and political intolerance is extreme to such a degree that people have to watch what they say and think at all times so as not to anger the thought police. The moral superiors.
Did the thought police make this guy write and publish a work memo suggesting some women are too neurotic to be software engineers?
> No room for discussion. No room for debate. Just fall in line and be sure to advertise your virtue and 100% agree with views that the political left mandates you to hold.
How about don't write a company-wide memo that insinuates some of your coworkers aren't there by merit because they don't have the biological composition to stomach the job? It's not like somebody was having a conversation with this guy in the break room, asked his opinion on diversity and ran to the press to start a witch hunt against some random Google engineer.
I mean, he titled the section of the document that talks about those effects "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech." But hey, those are sinful ideas, so he must have been a sinful man to have even entertained them in the first place.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2015/01/27/wo...
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor...
But was it "published" as a "company memo"? Or was it spread virally through individuals?
That's not what he actually said. In fact the memo had a chart and a paragraph or two specifically stating that taking average traits of a group of people and applying them to individuals was wrong and misleading due to large overlaps of traits between groups.
He was not implying anything about his colleagues that are already working for Google, rather he was pointing out potential biological differences in averages at the population level that possibly cause fewer women to enter tech (and hence making it difficult to get an even ratio of male/female employees).
Happy where I am now, but future interviews will include me asking what management would do about this, and termination is the only correct answer. This is textbook hostile environment. Anyone saying otherwise should look hard at why they value this person's desire to speak without consequence over their colleague's right to a workplace where they're not judged by their sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other innate attribute irrelevant to their job performance.
Did you read the essay? He certainly did not make that claim. Population averages are not statements about individuals. This is pure censorship.
Come on now, which one do you think he believes? He made it pretty clear, clear enough that pretty much no one would want to work with the dude.
That’s in his own words, and I would have fired him a hell of a lot faster than Google did, because I will not have my team disrupted by a prima donna.
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
The author deliberately narrows the scope of this sentence stating that the hiring practices decrease the false negative rate, not increasing the false positive rate. Stating that the false negative rate is lowered for diverse candidates is to say that qualified, non-diverse, candidates are rejected at a greater rate than qualified and diverse candidates. It is not stating that unqualified, diverse, candidates are accepted at a greater rate.
Sure, maybe he's saying that the bar for white/Asian men is higher than intended rather than that the bar for women and minorities is lower than intended, but you can't honestly argue that he isn't saying that women and minorities could be clearing a lower bar than white/Asian men.
This is not necessarily the case. This is a vast oversimplification of a tech company's hiring process, but for the sake of simplicity let's say that phone interviews have a 50% rate of generating a false negative and on-sites have a 0% error rate.
Say a company does one phone-interview, and if passed, moves on to on-sites. But for diverse candidates they do two phone interviews and if either passes they move on to on-sites.
* Unqualified candidates always fail, since neither phone interviews or on-sites have a false-positive rate.
* Qualified non-diverse candidates have a 50% chance of getting the job.
* Qualified diverse candidates have a 75% of getting the job.
At no point do any unqualified candidates receive offers. But at the same time, qualified non-diverse candidates are still rejected at twice the rate as diverse candidates.
The "bar" so to speak isn't always something that people have a higher chance of passing the better their skills are. A working knowledge of data structures and concurrency is all that's necessary to pass all of my company's coding interviews. Practice and luck is probably a greater asset than skill in many interviews. But getting into the efficacy of technical interviews is opening a whole 'nother bag of worms.
If I've understood that correctly I really appreciate your effort in explaining it. Your comment should be higher so more people could see it :)
Also, if I understand you correctly, the phrase "lower the bar" might have gotten him fired for something he wasn't intending to say.
I also agree with your point around phrasing. I agree that lot of people took away the wrong meaning due to the phrase "lower the bar" (which is a very loaded phrase). This piece probably could have been better received if the author sought out proof-reading with trusted co-workers and friends beforehand. In particular the author should have:
* Dropped the awkward and monolithic generalizations of "Left" and "Right" at the beginning.
* Stayed way the hell away from talking about biological differences, just say that men and women have different preferences for working hours, fields, etc. and don't touch on possible causes.
* Don't emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, but rather the possible negative effects for the group as a whole. The point about OKRs contingent on hitting a certain percentage of diverse team members turning hiring and transfers into a zero sum game was actually a really good point that potentially hurts diverse groups themselves by limiting cross-team mobility.
* At the end, don't try to turn this into a Conservative vs. Liberal issue. Just point out that affirmative action is not nearly as uniformly supported as people make it out to be. For reference 42% of the population opposes affirmative action for race in the workplace, and 33% for gender [1].
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/184772/higher-support-gender-affi...
* Mentioning of left echo chamber was pandering to the right. And he got huge support form right leaning and centrist media and personalities.
* Biological differences he mentioned were sourced, so not his personal opinions. He knew this will trigger outrage from pro feminist camp that will start witch hunt against him, based on unproven accusations that he holds misogynistic beliefs.
* Emphasize on the benefices diversity initiatives have on diverse candidates, was another passive aggressive attack on one of SJW/PC/regressive-left sacred cows.
I dont really know if he planned this, but if you spend any time following anti-SJW sphere, then you should agree that reaction was totally predictable.
Basically he just said that google created environment where people who dont perfectly align with left leaning echo chamber agenda (here he was pandering to anti-SJW anti-PC / centrists, conservatives...) cant safely express their opinions anymore. And he was fired for doing exactly this. Proving his point on himself. Google HR had two bad choices, not fire him and cause outrage among many of their left leaning (snowflakes); or fire him and prove his point that they re indeed left leaning echo chamber.
I base my speculation on fact that he put his full name on memo, instead of pseudonym and this quote:
> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.
"...decrease the false negative rate, not increase the false positive rate."
The interaction between type I and type II errors virtually always have an inverse relationship. You cannot decrease one without increasing the other. It is, for example, one of the difficulties in making good medical diagnostic tests.
without dumping in a lot more money or w/e...
The final hiring decision is almost entirely entirely on the on-site interview, the phone interviews essentially act as a first-pass filter. And we don't do any sort of weighting of diversity in the final hire decision. From my experience, the phone screen has the highest false-positive rate. In this system the false negative is reduced considerably for diverse candidates, while the false positive remains mostly the same (since the on-site is pretty rigorous).
For what it's worth, while I can understand the author's opposition to this system I think it's an okay way of increasing diversity. I don't think this system has ever caused us to take on a diverse candidate of insufficient skill or experience. Does it mean that non-diverse candidates get filtered out on the phone interview step at a higher rate? Yes. But not so much that I'd consider it an issue - and this is coming from a (mostly) non-diverse guy. And while it does cost the company more money, in the sense that we spend more time interviewing some candidates than we normally would, it's money well spent.
If he wants to argue that Google should lower the false negative rate for men too, I am totally on board with that! They should lower the false negative rate for everyone. They are bad at high-signal interviewing.
But the meaning of the phrase "lower the bar" is that less-qualified people are being let in, that people are being held to lower standards, etc. The entire point of the phrase "lower the bar" is to convey that the bar should have been be left where it was.
Honestly even if he wrote something like "Hiring practices which are more likely to improve outcomes for individual 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" I'd have much less of a problem with it. (I called out this specific sentence on Twitter yesterday; it was one of the things that particularly bothered me about the document.) But he used words with a specific meaning.
If he used words by mistake that his colleagues reasonably interpreted to mean that he thinks they're unqualified, that's all the more reason he shouldn't have his job. At a company at the scale of Google, a huge portion of effective engineering is effective communication.
The copy on the documentcloud link floating around this thread shows that "effectively lower the bar" is a link to an archived thread from the internal Google Group "coffee-beans-discuss".
I am curious if that post, or a summary thereof, has been leaked: I find the use of this phrase just baffling and technically incorrect (in addition to being insulting) and it seems like the author did have some specific intention here. Is he quoting someone else who's arguing that false negatives "effectively lower the bar"?
You should read what he wrote more closely. He said that Google was creating hiring practices that "lowered the bar by decreasing false negative rate." That last bit is important because it fundamentally changes what he's asserting and means you've entirely misrepresented what he was saying.
Anyone familiar with the Google hiring practices knows that, unless you're famous to some extent, there's an element of luck to getting hired. A lot of qualified candidates get rejected because Google just gets a lot of applicants and they can't hire everyone that's qualified. Those candidates are the false negatives...people they could have hired without making a mistake but didn't.
What he's saying is that while a white male needs to be qualified, pass his interview and not be one of these false negatives, the minority candidate just needs to be qualified and pass his/her interview. That is a lower bar for entry, but it isn't what everyone is accusing him of having said...that his minority colleagues aren't qualified or are less qualified. They still passed all the merit parts of the process, they just never had to undergo the arbitrary part of the process that non-minorities are subjected to.
Given that, I'm guessing the justification for the statements is a little more self-evident than you're letting on. In it effort to save myself some time (seriously, you're asking me for about 20 minutes worth of work), just checking first, have you read the leaked document? It's at Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/leaked-document-details-apple-employee-in....
EDIT: Also, do the other replies to you make things a little clearer? Please keep in mind I'm not trying to be passive-aggressive, I come from similiar intellectual stock to you. That's why I'm in disbelief that you need pullquotes and an explanation to tie them together, I'm sure it'll click for you without that.
argumentum ad populum [1]
> In it effort to save myself some time (seriously, you're asking me for about 20 minutes worth of work)
Making a worthwhile, intellectual contribution to a public forum should take more than 20min of work/preparation. Being familiar enough with the contents of the paper to make an informed arguement should mean that you could easily pull quotes (maybe with ctrl+f to save time) in less than a minute. Especially when your comments have the potential to destroy someone's reputation/career.
> Also, do the other replies to you make things a little clearer? Please keep in mind I'm not trying to be passive-aggressive
Congratulations, you can make fallacy ridden, condecending, and harmful comments without even trying!
> I come from similiar intellectual stock to you.
Irrelavant and you most likely do not.
> That's why I'm in disbelief that you need pullquotes and an explanation to tie them together, I'm sure it'll click for you without that.
argumentum ad hominem [2]
I know it's easy to write off when someone pulls up latin fallacy names, but please do read those wiki articles. Formal arguementation is important. Your reply to me was disrespectful and added absolutely no value to this thread.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Are you saying he's wrong for pointing out that Google has affirmative action policies? Or that the policies themselves are bad? I don't understand.
He believes neither. We don't need to speculate, because the author writes quite deliberately to communicate his point. Here's the quote you're likely referring to, the one that mentions "lowering the bar":
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate. (emphasis mine)
The author is not stating that Google's hiring practices result in unqualified diverse candidates receiving offers at a higher rate than non-diverse candidates. The author is stating that a greater portion of qualified, non-diverse, are being rejected. In other words, the author is not stating that diverse employees at Google shouldn't be there. Rather he's claiming that there are a substantial number of non-diverse candidates who should have received offers, but didn't.
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate. I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.
1. http://www.prolekare.cz/dbpic/jp_5403_f_21-x1000_1600
> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
> * A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
> * Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
^ Isn't that exactly what the author is saying?
He says that Google 'has created' (past tense) a discriminatory hiring practice.
Presumably his coworkers were hired in the past and not the present or future.
Thus, the hiring practices that prevailed when his coworkers were hired were discriminatory, per the author.
I believe that everyone should have a fair shot at a good career. I can't even begin to talk about how that is not the case in America - if we disagree here, I'm not sure we'll ever come to agreement.
It's not clear that the workers favored in this alternate pipeline are incompetent (which is really the implication that everyone is making). What is clear is that people with their perspectives are not as prevalent in the technology field.
Perhaps companies are recognizing a) the value of multiple perspectives or b) the structural difficulties that deny some people the same 'fair shot' we all have.
I'll leave you with this. The SAT should be a test of one's aptitude, perhaps readiness for college. If some individuals receive years of tutoring, but others have to go to the library to get test preparation, is our metric for college readiness fair? Maybe you'll say yes, but if we were talking about any other thing (cars, experimental models, you name it) we would clearly recognize these two groups had different pre-test levels of preparedness.
If you look through my post history, you'll see that I made this account to talk about another article about a week ago.
EDIT:
I can't respond to you, unfortunately.
I'm sorry we've resorted to name-calling - however, I stand by my earlier statement. Irrespective of your identity, there has been a noticeable trend of discussions about 'reverse racism'.
I have not referred to you with a pronoun nor made any mention of your race/sex/anything else. I apologize if you feel that I did this.
On a totally separate note, thanks for assuming my gender, race and minority status. Also that of whomever wrote the Google piece. You are doing a really great job making yourself seem like less of a bigot.
If you must spew hate, could you at least choose a more interesting criteria than skin tone or genitals? These have been done to death.
No, it is not censorship. He can say those things. He just can't pretend to be an effective team member if this is what he believes about his coworkers and he is unwilling to learn from others.
But that's the point of being more cautious at work than you are in your personal life. You don't know how people will react. Most people are uncomfortable even identifying their choice of political party at work.
For some, it's simply a critique of ineffective hiring practices.
For others, it's veiled sexism dressed up with statistics to lend it an air of legitimacy.
Seen that way, this is a pretty interesting social science experiment, albeit at the expense of his job (if not his career)...
What about the behaviour before / during / after publishing it?
What kind of post-truth, post-logic universe is this? I want off this fucking planet.
I understand you would like to live somewhere that context does not matter and documents are self-contained.
Until you live in that world, please consider that there is an external world relevant to what an author's intentions are, whether they are lying or exaggerating, whether they are deliberately misleading or naively misinformed.
Does he have good intentions or bad intentions? Well, you would want to look at the other opportunities available to him to reason about that.
"This is what he believes about his co-workers" You: He did not write this
If he did not think that the performance of the women around him was holding back Google, then he wouldn't write the memo.
Can you give an explanation of how this was the best choice available to him if he did not think this was the case?
"He is unwilling to learn from others" You: He did not write this
Is it your position that he did not have any options for taking his opinions to others inside the company and getting feedback before circulating broadly?
He knows that this is sensitive - that definitely gets mentioned in the document - but there is no indication that he has gone to the people responsible for diversity policy to discuss the intentions, metrics or organisational concerns that shaped the policy.
If you don't know the functional and non-functional requirements for a system, you should find them out and if you disagree go to the stakeholders. Choosing not to do so is not high-performing employee behaviour in any organisation.
I also sometimes think about topics that would be inappropriate in an office environment (such as sex) and I censor myself by not saying what I am thinking. We even have an Internetism for that concept - NSFW.
None of this is new - we are expected to conduct ourselves appropriately for the current situation. It's just how society works.
I didn't even read the document in question, I just have a very hard time with people getting riled up about being "censored" at work. It's work, what exactly do you expect?
Regardless, your clever analogy doesn't apply. Companies are welcome to be political in their own environment. They own it. Employees are not. They're employed at-will.
Anyway, the financial benefits of diversity are almost certainly overstated. I don't know why we can't just say, "we're hiring diverse people because we think it's the right thing to do".
As a society we've been trained or perhaps tricked to suppress our sense of justice and fairness In Gabor of money.
Hence the studies promoting the idea that diverse companies are more profitable, as if that should make any difference. It's a sick obsession with viewing just about everything through a financial lens even when money shouldn't come into it.
However, I sympathize with younger people because it's a double-edged sword at places like Google, where your work and your life are very intentionally blurred. You eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at work. You go out and socialize with your friends from work. You do laundry at work (I'm not sure if Google still does this or not). It's not like the 1980s where people check in at 9am and leave at 5pm.
Then why are you assuming you know what it said?
---
I did skim it and it seemed like the pseudo intellectual mumbo jumbo people who think they are being really smart but really are just being obnoxious write; since I read way to much of that sort of thing already I didn't care to read further.
This is the kind of behavior that woke me up (in my early teens) to the dangers of adopting my values from my religious background/peers. I never thought I'd have to deal with witch hunts for wrongthink in tech.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:
- Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
- A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
- Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
- Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
- Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.
I've seen smart people pointing at 'evidence' on both sides of the discussion. Your claim that can 'irreparably' harm google is equally baseless IMO.
let me know what industry you work in where you can poison the well so badly and not get canned.
Or sued, seems like this would be an easy basis for a hostile work suit. Couple promotion denials, a documented complaint and this manifesto would probably be an easy lawsuit, though INAL.
Policies that are effectively affirmative action are by definition lowering the bar for diversity candidates. His statement that it can lower the bar is correct but still not something people like to be reminded of. Google (and others) not recognizing this distinction and treating his lack of discretion as hate speech is irrational mob PC rule or just plain cowardice (if he was fired for PR reasons).
In an n-dimensional space where we take into account all the factors that go into whether or not a candidate is given an offer, you're actually complaining about "lowering the bar" when the bar is already lower for people (for people that's not being targeted for affirmative action) due to systemic effects? You're actually complaining that we're lowering the bar by tweaking other variable so that the bar will be effectively the same obstacle for everyone?
Please explain your rationale for doing so.
Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?
> or if your referral would have still gotten rejected had they been a person of color
This is utter bullshit. As someone who used to work for Alphabet, gender and ethnic background never came up during interviews, simply because the interview process does not account for that. You are either able to solve the technical problems you are presented with during the interview or not. "Culture fit" - which is the one item that might be influenced by things related to gender or ethnic background - is actually a liability for minority groups.
> Then maybe you should just not make that assumption and work with them as a peer?
Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.
He knows them. Everyone knows them. The average Alphabet employee does multiple interviews a month, sometimes multiple interviews a week (complaining about how many interviews you have to do is of the favorite pastimes in the company.) We are trained for this, and - surprise - none of the training says (or even suggest) 'you should lower your standards for minority candidates.' In fact, none of the interviewing training even mentions gender or ethnicity.
I feel that this guy is coming from a disgruntled conservative-leaning position where he feels the company values don't represent his. That's a valid concern, but there's plenty of companies out there. He should just leave and find one that has values matching his.
> This was not the case at the company I worked for and it was a very negative thing
That's sad. Hope you had better luck with the next one!
> Sorry, forgot to mention that I'm a human in my post.
Sorry, didn't meant to be offensive. I just know intrigue (which this memo tries to stir up) is the shortest path to a dysfunctional workplace.
People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.
This has nothing to do with the company, but rather with the individuals working for it. How many people, do you think, felt free to discuss their support for a Democratic candidate in the Alabama?
> People should feel free to exercise their voting privilege.
And they did! Heck, Google encouraged everyone to vote, not just Democrats. Maybe your anger should be directed to the companies and governments that did their utmost to stop their own citizens from voting. North Carolina is a good place to start, move South from there.
On to voter fraud!
http://www.abc2news.com/newsy/11-california-counties-might-h...Q: How big a problem was voter fraud in the 2016 election?
A: There have been just four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-...
Carter won in '76 and it's been within +-10% R/D till 2000. So not that lopsided as you might suppose.
I'm sure you could imagine walking in with a Hillary/Pussy Hat no problem whatsoever. But you would not walk with a Trump hat even as a joke. Ok, maybe in Moncks Corner or some boonie office.
Please stop trying to bring the "librul intolerance" right-wing talking point. It's pretty pathetic to paint yourself as a victim, even when you have everything in your favor.
"Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"
Lowering the rate of false negatives does not lower the bar. If anything, it just improves the process and yields more qualified candidates. If you increase the rate of false positives, then you would in fact lower the bar.
It's muddled thinking like this that makes me doubt his ability as an engineer, not to mention his ability as a social scientist.
Well now I just doubt his ability as an engineer, social scientist, and writer of the English language... ;)
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
> decreasing the false negative rate
(Again! This is from his POV): The false positive rate has not gone up. The diverse candidates are, in fact, qualified and should have their jobs. They are excellent. I am going out of my way to make sure no one interprets this deluge of text as me questioning my peers ability; something that I will fail at in spectacular fashion.
> lower the bar
(His POV don't pin this on me): However, diverse candidates may now have a lower bar than non-diverse candidates.
How is it possible that some candidates have both a "lower bar" and yet are still qualified?
> Hiring practices
(still his POV folks): Because for diverse candidates we have different hiring practices. Practices which are tailored to diverse candidates. It's not a lower bar, it's a different bar. A bar specifically designed to help us discover the best side of these diverse candidates.
(Speaking for myself now): I think the author is saying that going out of your way to create specific affordances for _some_ and not for _all_ is discriminatory. I _don't_ think he's a horrible monster for thinking this. I _do_ think that this way of thinking fails to acknowledge the fact that an organization that is already steeped to the brim with a specific group of people is likely to _already_ have built in affordance for that group.
He fucked up. Hard. Like so hard that I find it kind of funny (wtf was he thinking?). I, personally, don't think that the ideas that he espoused merit firing, I think they merit careful correction wherein the person doing the correcting attempts to read his meaning charitably, carefully, truthfully and fully. I feel that most of the public responses have failed in this regard. Most of what I've seen start with "he's basically wrote: {$straw_man}". Some are pandering to an audience, some are more interested in winning than in being right, but some people who retort in this way just have limited time and patience. I can understand why the straw man is appealing. I've just written three paragraphs about a single sentence, who has time for this shit?
Here's the thing though, careful correction, truth, charity—that's my "ideal world" case for him. The simple matter of fact is that Google is not the ideal world, they have no incentive to apply my ideal to him. He's a professional and the fuck up alone (separated form the ideas) represents enough potential harm to Google that he had no hope of keeping his job. Maybe one of his friends can give him the careful walk through of how his ideas are flawed. Hell, maybe a good friend will do that and he'll decide that he was right all along.
Edit: After further reading I realized I had made a mistake when I (speaking from his POV) said: "it's not a lower bar, it's a different bar". He did actually use the words "lower the bar", something I failed to fully account for. One could, with liberal amounts of charity, imagine that he meant that the bar was lower but still sufficient? We're getting into logical acrobatics. That said, logical acrobatics are part of the point. The goal in reading someone whose world view is different to your own is to better understand their logic. To imagine how, within their world view, their ideas are consistent. We could be reading the words of a monster who doesn't care about logic. Or we could, and I think this is much more common, be reading the words of someone with flaws and ignorances and prejudices. Someone not so unlike our...
Slavery and Jim Crows laws no longer on the books? Therefore there is no systemic racism!
Are there laws discriminating against women? No? Therefore they have all the same opportunities as men!
Why are Black Entertainment Television and Gay Pride okay, but White Entertainment Television and White Pride not!
Black Lives Matter is Racist!
Not all Men are Rapists!
This essay started from precisely this set of emotions and found data to justify it after the fact.
Edit: Another way to say this is, if an applicant simply meets the bar, the person is most likely not hired. Conversely, an applicant needs to far exceed the bar in order for interviewers to vouch for the person and improve odd of hiring.
On the other hand, applicant that fits into the targeted demographics are probably afforded additional consideration, even if the person's interview did not wow the interviewers as much, hence the "lowering the bar" argument. It is not lowering the standard bar, but rather the "score", if you will, the applicant needs to clear the bar.
The best analogy I've read so far is that the candidate's score and its error bar must clear the bar. But affirmative action applicants are extended the courtesy of second look, which reduces the error bar, hence lower score is needed for the score and error bar to clear the Google bar.
You're right though, and it's actually really insulting to insinuate that certain groups need help passing the bar. You can easily identify people who think like this if you ask a question (politely) like "would you hire a candidate that was more 'diverse' but less technically skilled than another candidate?". People who would choose the more "diverse" candidate but without a principled reason are probably just virtue signalling.
Note that 'diverse' can mean anything -- like comparing a developer who used to work in construction before being turned on to programming to a developer who came out of an ivy school (assuming they have comparable skill levels).
(The automatic doors on Star Trek were being pulled open using ropes by hidden prop guys. The actors had to walk confidently forward as if they expected them to open when this was not guaranteed. They sometimes smacked right into them)
Is it how smart you are? That sounds a lot like eugenics, and we know where that slippery slope leads. Besides, most humans have a loved one who isn't very smart, so we're not going to be happy in a world that defines merit as intelligence.
Is it how hard-working you are? Many of the same issues apply. Why does someone have less merit if they're born with mutations that make them able to produce 80% of the value of someone else?
Is it how humanitarian you are? Again, that's a totally subjective standard.
Even if you could decide what dimensions to measure merit on, these are all impossible things to quantify.
But, currently, women, people of color, etc, seem to be "last hired, first fired" plus generally paid less for reasons that appear to be something other than their objective ability to do the job. I would like to see people hired because they can do the job and paid what they are worth and not some discounted value based on skin color or gender. To me, that would be a meritocracy.
What if you have an employee who works in your data center and averts 3 days of downtime? Maybe that person provided $100,000 of value and no one will ever know except for her.
You don’t have to “lower the bar” at all, because it turns out that the average “bar” is the wrong standard for anything but the most independent of programming (which is not modern software engineering, thanks). My own hiring standard looks for people who love learning, don’t mind shifting contexts and languages, and can work well in a group. Some of the “smart guys” who have interviewed with us have been poor choices because they are bad culture fits—cowboys and jerks.
Those things seem discriminatory to me.
Could you be more specific with what you mean by "bar"? Because if it's purely meritocratic/skills-based then your second point is very off-putting to me, it seems you're implying that minorities love learning, shifting contexts and languages, and work well in groups, but some of the actual skilled people you interviewed were all white, and cowboys/jerks. That implication is in and of itself pretty inflammatory, minorities are just as capable of being "smart guy" cowboys/jerks.
…which is only true if removing of unearned privileges is discrimination. (It isn’t.)
By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap. There’s a bunch of nonsense talked through on a whiteboard that has nothing to do with day-to-day programming or anything you’ll find on a job…and white men tend to do exceedingly well at that sort of crap. There’s an overrepresentation of specific skills required to pass the “technical” interview that are equally underrepresented in the technical execution of day-to-day work.
People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself. What I’m saying is that in my own hiring practice, I do have a technical exercise. But it’s not one that requires that a developer “complete” it successfully, because the folks who measure the success are not looking for amazing technical solutions… they are members of the team who you’d be working with. They are assessing whether you listen to technical instruction; if you know more, how you express yourself to someone junior to you; if you know as much, how well you work with them. It’s a soft-skills developer test, because if you can demonstrate the ability to work through this problem with the other people in there with you—even if you don’t complete the test, you will probably fit on the team.
And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed. (It’s valuable in part because I’ve had to implement the exact exercise for a job once because a language runtime did not have the data structure I needed.)
If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
> By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap.
Agreed.
> People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself.
Presumably, you mean the bias is toward white males. But then you go on to say your preferred method is a soft-skills developer test that the team who'd be working with the hire evaluates.
Great--that's how hiring should be done anyway.
> And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed.
Okay, if that's how it worked out for you, great. The whole point of any hiring process is to determine which people will be the best fit for your needs. If your method does this, then it's a good method.
> If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
This is where your argument breaks down. You started out talking about unearned privileges, but your whole argument is about how you test for desired skills, and then somehow in the end, you make it about race again (but this time as it relates to meritocratic hiring, not unearned privilege).
So...where does race fit in to your hiring process? To me, that part of it just sounds like pandering, since your actual process sounds like it's all skill-based anyway.
I think what they were trying to get across was that BECAUSE of the broken testing, tests that were supposed to be meritocratic are just checking for certain groupthink.
My response there was if that's the case, the problem is just making better (actually strictly meritocratic) tests.
I also agree that most hiring practices are crap, and that interviews don't properly reflect day-to-day work. I also agree with a point (I think) you made that a bunch of the "meritocratic" tests that are developed today are a lot of the time just checking if one was groomed in the same way (learned about algorithms the same way, learned the same practices, etc) and not necessarily pure can-you-get-shit-done tests.
Your point gets a little hazy towards the bottom, for me, I can't tell if you're against supposedly meritocratic tests altogether and suggesting that people test for team-fit more. Your last sentence seems to have that same off-putting insinuation, just crystalized, but I think I understand your point, maybe I can rephrase it:
"If you're measuring a candidate with what you think is a meritocratic skills based tests, it's easy to be blinded by inherent bias and support systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because many seemingly meritocratic skills based tests have more to do with confirming shared experiences/biases than checking actual skill."
If I did indeed read your point well, my response would be to conduct better interviews, and create an actually meritocratic interview process, the onus is on the company.
As an analogous situation, men often claim that women talk too much. There’s fairly strong evidence that the claim is merely sexist nonsense[1].
So forgive me if I’m unwilling to give a crap about whether people who look like me (white men) feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick because there are people like me working to end the special privileges that they have gotten literally for decades. Especially since so many of them really aren’t all that. The London School of Economics makes it clear that gender quotas actually improve meritocracy by squeezing out mediocre men[2].
Your rephrasing is mostly correct, but I would go so far as to say that if you don’t know how to see your own biases, you cannot design a meritocratic interview process that doesn’t inherently have bias against women and/or minorities. As this entire discussion on the firing of the author of the screed shows…there’s a lot of people who can’t see that they have biases.
(And yes, I have biases. I have to work very hard to prevent those biases from causing me to discriminate. This is largely why I involve my team in hiring and constantly discuss the problems with bias blindness with them, too.)
[1] http://thejunglenook.tumblr.com/post/75517868909/do-women-ta... … but also see [3] as an extension because it actually gets to the heart of just why the (now-ex) Googler at the top of this was just so wrong.
[2] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/03/13/gender-quot...
[3] http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/145374253955/do-women-ta...
There's another question then of why are there only white men available for hire?
Asians people are over-represented in Silicon Valley, yet I don't hear anyone demanding we hire less Asian people.
Some Asians are foreigners, hired by SV firms at lower-than-market salaries. They may be hired because they're less expensive (because they need sponsorship so badly). These types of people make this a much more complicated analogy.
> yet I don't hear anyone demanding we hire less Asian people
Affirmative action policies sometimes do impact Asian applicants, making it less likely for them to be hired.
Asian/Indian males and females who can barely speak english says otherwise. You can't just drop this controversial statement without any proof
I hope we never become colleagues.
[1]http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
The assertions of the author of the screed are not well-accepted, and they are not facts. They are conjecture, and the author attempted to make universals out of primarily American ways of thinking and ingrained ways of discrimination.
Several of the studies he cites on biological differences in genders are well accepted, so far as I know the field. But the key conclusions that he draws from those studies (and really, the entire point of the memo) don't have any direct scientific support that I know of. Perhaps I am missing some key references. Care to provide citations for some of these?
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things ... 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."
There's a citation for the first part. What's the evidence for the conclusion drawn?
"Neuroticism ... This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."
Citation for why neuroticism leads to fewer women in high stress jobs?
How about the entire "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap" section? That contains stuff like this:
"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things"
"Women on average are more cooperative"
"Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"
Each of these statements (which at least hit my radar of being scientifically supported from the literature I know) is followed by some suggestions on how to improve the workplace for women. Implicit, of course, is that these aggregate scientific differences are somehow responsible for the gender gaps in tech. Any citations for why the quoted statements explain anything at all about gender differences in tech, rather than say, other STEM fields (biology? medicine? they have very different gender gaps).
It would be great to have the references I'm missing, because without them it sure appears the author is citing well accepted studies in order to make it look like his unsupported conclusions have "evidence".
At the end of the day, he told a just-so story; in this, he's no different than the "blame discrimination" camp. At least this story is an empirical one backed by self-reported work place surveys, cross-cultural analyses, etc. The fundamentalists opposing him just have some anecdotes, some unreproducible stereotype threat studies, and a healthy dose of religious conviction.
Most arguments against the manifesto (sic) I have seen, seem to be either ad hominem or claiming some form of "discrimination" .. as in prejudice. In the light of the current discussion around gender, mostly in the US, I am just not convinced. And it seems that many people who actually are qualified agree (no, a group of self referencing "gender studies" professors does not convince).
Anyway, it's coming up 5AM here and I will not bother you further with my slave-owner-descendant misconceptions.
Scott Alexander covers some of the most salient points here:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
See Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate for a book-length treatment.
(all male, all white) scientists
This is both ad hominem and wrong (the fourth scientist featured, Dr. Debra W. Soh, is an East Asian woman).
> "Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex. It is only because a group of individuals have chosen to interpret them that way, and to subsequently deny the science around them, that we have to have this conversation at a public level." -- Dr. Debra W Soh
The problem is the author is repeating a pattern common in these discussions, where some kernels of empirically supported science are used to justify opinions unsupported by them. That we can measure some differences in MRI in no way establishes that under-representation of women in tech is a result of biological inevitability. We know for certain this isn't the case due to history itself, as well as variation in representation by location and culture.
Look at this and explain to me how evolutionary psychology or biology explain what happened to women in CS in the US:
https://developers.hp.com/sites/default/files/Intl%20Womens%...
If the author's positions sound mild or plausible to you, I don't believe you've actually read the science on this issue. What the original author said simply isn't supported in the way they claim. That we can measure slight differences in aggregate between women and men in no way explains what's going on as a sole factor.
And again, I'm pointing out that the author advanced biological and evolutionary psychology as mechanisms for explaining away this, despite them operating on time scales that make this impossible.
Not as much as men. See a study [1] and Steven Pinker's slide [2], and many more studies. It's a well established scientific consensus.
> despite them operating on time scales that make this impossible.
The author isn't claiming that men evolved within 100 years, but simply that men have in thousands of years evolved to have skills more suitable for programming by a small margin. When considering the 99%tile, this small difference becomes quite big. According to [3], you find 4-10 times more men in the top 1% bracket than women in certain skills.
[1]: https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...
[2]: https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/images/pinker.slid...
[3]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/56143/sex-...
not to say that chart couldn't be related to what's going on now, but it's not helpful to simply point there and say "look science!".
> As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership.
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
> Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex. It is only because a group of individuals have chosen to interpret them that way, and to subsequently deny the science around them, that we have to have this conversation at a public level.
This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here. Please don't do that again.
people like you, who can't understand simple arguments, are what got him fired.
you're saying he was putting it forth, or addressing it?
I've come across a few people from these companies and it's not that hard to come across people who have strong biases against whites and white men in particular. Sadly it's become a way to signal you're in the in-group.
Diffusing hostilities isn't achieved by becoming the thing you're trying to overcome.
A minority can complain about a majority, but the reverse is frowned upon. The amount of "frowned upon" is amplified by the degree to which the minority the majority impugns has been historically hurt by similar opinions.
See: dynamics of older and younger siblings.
The idea "well, no one can punch!" is rhetorically clean, but pragmatically problematic. There is a long history of people who had to punch up to break a ceiling that should never have existed.
You see massive disconnects.
So, while it looks like punching up, having a group "punch up" at someone is actually punching down at an indiv.
But it's near impossible for a collective group of people to perfectly balance their outrage in just the right way, at precisely the right people, for exactly the right amount of time.
We just accept the tradeoff that progress is messy.
But still, people "punch up", and progress gets made.
Assuming a person's privilege based on race, gender or other immutable characteristics is imprecise and counterproductive.
Right, that's what he campaigned for. And not hire people due to their sex, race, sexual orientation, or any other innate attribute irrelevant to their job performance...
I'm really having trouble finding anything to be upset about in his "manifesto". He's literally being fired for trying to start a serious conversation about a delicate issue.
in fact he pointed directly to the flawed logic that supports them.
poor guy had no idea what was coming.
he'd have been better off if he said
> "we should expect to see people with certain characteristics in tech, in the same way we see people with certain characteristics in race-car driving. that's no reason to discriminate positively or negatively against race car driver candidates."
I think he did make a point similar to that. Unfortunately he stirred the hornets nest (most, I think) by pointing to the gender-wage relationship.
These are complex issues that will take decades to fix starting with programs at the elementary school level and fundamental shifts in the messaging and feedback our society gives to children, young adults and all the way up to college students. And yet people are expecting Google to make significant progress on the issue within a couple of years. It's not really a realistic expectation to have of Google, but there are real market consequences for Google if they're seen not to care enough.
Google can make it look like they truly care about it and are solving it, but only if people don't look too closely or start pointing out flaws. This manifesto is an exercise in looking too closely and pointing out flaws. Whether his points, themselves, are flawed or whether they have merit is entirely beside the point.
It could have been a forwarded email instead of a Google Doc. Who cares? Same difference.
We have numerous studies which how simple biasing factors, such as a person's name, can dramatically decrease interview rates.
Arguing against diversity policies can be coached in the language of equality, but the objective results show that the outcomes would not be.
The outrage, fairly or unfairly (it is impossible to know what's in a person's heart) comes from many readers believing that the person is not arguing for equality, but coaching an argument against it's outcome in language that assumes that goal.
For many people, they see a cheap rhetorical trick made in bad faith.
It's a fairly common tactic inside of the RedPill community, and within White Power/Pride groups. Arguing that by fighting sexism/racism you are being sexist/racist.
He very explicitly is arguing that policies designed to correct the natural state are sexist/racist on their own, and have to be discarded.
He then hints at having a strong bias towards believing sexist/racist conclusions from a limited reading of a limited amount of information.
At worst, if you can read his mind, it was cover for his conscious motive to discriminate against women but I really don't believe he knows it.
The thing is, if you don't believe those assumptions, you will view the the unconscious bias and diversity programs as discriminatory. And many people don't believe those assumptions. They see companies discriminating against them and they don't like it.
There are not "assumptions" at this point. They are a factual reality.
My partner was a female chip designer who after 25 years got out of the business (in start up, saved up for early retirement..) Being an early employee well compensated. She loved her work, but not the environment, which while not outright hostile, wasn't good. She's got thick skin. Its the environment thats keeping women out, not the work. If you don't think your getting a fair shake, you aren't going to stick around.
No, he started that Google's hiring practices are biased towards certain candidates. If that causes offense, it should be directed at those in charge of hiring practices, not the guy who reported them.
Why is it always scorched-earth and never something like retraining? You bemoan hostile environments, but then demand termination if a foot is ever put wrong.
The people who decided to implement this braindead idea are at fault for this. Not the guy who decided to voice what everyone else was thinking.
Edit: I had hoped the sarcasm was obvious
Google is currently under investigation for pay disparity and are obliged to review everything and ensure there is no sexism at play. If you don't like this surely you should challenge the laws that demand this of Google.
Sending a memo on diversity or any political issue is an aggressive political action in the workplace that can only have one outcome. The context for debates and action about merit and diversity is in the legal democratic space not the office.
This individual is not a victim of free speech but of indiscretion.
Regardless of whether you agreed with the letter or not, it's 100% correct in asserting that it's super difficult to have productive, rational conversations about the issue of diversity. Google just reinforced that fact.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/it-may-be-illegal-for-google...
Which might be easy. After all, he just alleged the Google workplace is clearly hostile to conservatives ... and they fired him for it. The argument that he was creating a hostile workplace is very weak. The argument that Pichai is, is very strong.
Mature organisations and cultures can tackle controversial topics. Google used to be able to do that too. It obviously cannot anymore.
You do realize that it wasn't the controversy that landed this guy in hot water, but rather the veiled attempt at using pseudo-science to create a conspiracy theory about Google discriminating against males, right?
The way in which you describe actual science as pseudo-science because you don't like the conclusions is very scary, by the way.
> The way in which you describe actual science as pseudo-science because you don't like the conclusions is very scary, by the way.
The way you describe cherry-picked papers on a single field of science as definite proof of your world view is really scary too. How low will you lower your bar to explain the world in terms you like?
If you have hard scientific evidence with scientists willing to go on the record and say, no, in fact, there are no innate differences between the preferences of men and women, it's all just lies and in fact girls love computers when they are children just as much as boys and here's why the other studies are all flawed ... sure. Show them to us.
As it is, you look like someone who is scrabbling around for an excuse to ignore perfectly valid scientific debating by disclaiming entire fields as "pseudo science" and "cherry picked". Please debate properly - make real rebuttals with evidence.
He isn't citing anyone, he just stated "facts." Please show me the citations? Where are all these papers? Where are the peer reviews on the "facts" he mentions?
> Are you saying that no psychological finding, no matter how reproducible, can ever be used if it's related to gender?
Going back to the absolute lack of references, I am not dismissing any particular study, but rather the right-wing knee-jerk reaction that "the world is fine the way it is, and people trying to change it are just destroying the perfect equilibrium we live in." It's almost like the last century of social changes hasn't happened. Talk about disregard for evidence.
> If you have hard scientific evidence with scientists willing to go on the record and say, no, in fact, there are no innate differences between the preferences of men and women
Cute, asking to prove a negative. Let's use the same idea: do you have hard scientific proof and scientists willing to back it in public that a push for increasing diversity in engineering will go nowhere because the field is already in perfect balance? No? Didn't think so.
Also, I'm not saying there are no innate differences, but that ignoring the current societal context by pushing a theory that explains all behavior using genetic traits is ridiculous. By using the same standard, going back to pre-WW2 (which forced women into the workforce) we could assume that "women are only interested in domestic tasks".
> Show them to us.
Nice. I like that you identify with this group. I'm tired of people pussyfooting around trying to push the rhetoric, while at the same time trying to divorce themselves from the author. Good on you.
> As it is, you look like someone who is scrabbling around for an excuse to ignore perfectly valid scientific debating by disclaiming entire fields as "pseudo science" and "cherry picked". Please debate properly - make real rebuttals with evidence.
Again, show me the paper, show me how they play in the whole context of current society, and maybe I'll take you seriously. Until then, you look like someone cherry-picking data to paint the world to their liking.
Here are 4 scientists who work in the field discussing the memo, at least one of whom was cited by Damore:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170808013732/http://quillette....
Now, here's the trick. You got what you asked for. Will you change your perspective? I find myself somehow dubious because the root cause of the disagreement is you believe the world both is and should be entirely malleable, and that forced social engineering (e.g. by firing people with particular worldviews from influential organisations like Google) is a legitimate way to achieve particular ends.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/google-pa...
Google is going to attempt to pay him a lot of hush money in hopes of avoiding a public lawsuit.
If you want to have a rational conversation, have it rationally.
Everything beyond that was wrong and wandered into the realm of offensive, and creating a hostile environment.
But my point is that even if this person were qualified to make such assertions, his qualifications can be easily made invisible through editorialization.
If I've learned anything since November 2016, it's that messaging will frequently overpower facts.
a STEM degree
A STEM PhD from Harvard. FTFY. And comparing James Damore to Ben Carson is, frankly, absurd. James Damore is not a politician, he's a scientist. He's not some yahoo in a comment thread, arguing with academics and professionals in their field from his parent's basement.
I will also get a PhD from Harvard, and from a more selective program than this person. Yet I recognize the limits of my knowledge.
Studying microbes [1] does not give you the standing to discuss sociology. If your very well-qualified dentist wanted to do a code review of your last commit, you might think twice before accepting his advice - namely, you would ask what special knowledge he has, besides being a generally smart individual.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Damore%20JA%5BAuth...
It is ironic that defenders who claim to want a meritocracy are also defending the author because of where he went to school.
Nobel prize winning scientists have damaged their reputations by opining on matters they know little about (James Watson on genetics, and many others )
Some infamous examples:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18638_4-nobel-prize-winners-w...
You mean to say that James Watson, the Nobel prize winning geneticist knows little about genetics?
*The point is not to belittle his accomplishment (which would be silly) but to point out that he veered into a field that he was mostly unqualified to offer an informed opinion on, never mind a very controversial one.
And by the way, another fun fact:
As far as I can can tell, he doesn't have a PhD. He didn't publish any papers while he was at Harvard. You don't get through a modern elite PhD program without making any contribution to the literature. And his thesis is not showing up in any library search I do. He seems to have dropped out very early.
No shame in that, of course. But since you and many others are saying he has credibility on a matter unrelated to the topic of his PhD precisely because he has a PhD: he, er, may not have a PhD.
By the way, the more cited of his two papers reads like it was written by someone very new to research, who had his editor open in one window and the Wikipedia page for "List of Logical Fallacies" open in another.
Plenty of bigots have degrees. There are nazis and muslim fundamentalists with degrees. Extremist ideology tends to override unwelcome facts.
The memo speaks for itself.
Now, it's important to correct the record if he didn't complete the PhD. But he did publish papers (at Princeton and MIT).
You are correct that he wrote two papers.
You now state that he "didn't suggest he had one", when in fact he did: he said "PhD, Systems Biology" on his linkedin[2] profile.
This is shameful behavior on your part, but understandable because your defense of his joke of a memo depends on his authority to speak about the subject as a PhD in Biology, which he doesn't have.
Maybe it's time for you to go back to all the places where you stated he has a PhD and post retractions.
[1] https://twitter.com/nitashatiku/status/894939560391565317
[2] https://twitter.com/NuritBaytch/status/895010602380341248
The reaction to the memo is really the most damning thing about the whole affair. Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought. They've just proved the author's point. Honestly, Google might have even been rational to fire him, due to the toxic situation created by the mass outrage. How incredibly damning of our society.
A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.
This is the closing of the American mind.
https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...
This is where I read up on it, and the letter was written very reasonably, IMO. That article also includes a response from google's brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance.
[EDIT] - original (as pointed out by the commenter below) is here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
Read that instead
The original document is here (credit to lisper) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
The problem is that Google already does do this, for the most part. So what does it mean to say that Google ought to treat people as individuals, if that is already the current state of affairs? The argument, as coded in the document, was that Google ought to cease making any efforts to correct disparities in representation.
As a moral or rational argument, this falls flat on its face. Suppose that there was science to show that cognitive differences between men and women or different races is 100% inborn (there isn't, not even close). Even then, there's still the problem of whether the magnitude of those differences justifies the magnitude of differences in representation. There is not nearly enough data to make a case here, and by presenting the case as made, the author of the doc was doing more than just observing the state of the science. He was making an unsubstantiated claim that his coworkers, or at a minimum the sex and/or races they belong to, are inherently deficient at performing the work.
AFAIK the IQ difference between genders is negligible, but the spread of the IQ is much greater in the male group. This also means that there are more men who are above 130 IQ then women which is kind of necessary to be a programmer. This does not mean that a female can't be a genius! If you want to disprove this you can do two things: 1., Prove that the average female IQ is way higher than mens. 2., Prove that there are as much women who are intellectually retarded ( sorry, English is not my first language, I don't know a better word ) than woman.
Wait, what? What exactly do you think the IQ of the average programmer is?
Therefore it is not unreasonable to deduce that people who work as programmers in prestige companies are, on the average, from the very right-hand tail ends of the normal distribution curve, and the differences of men and women (on the average, again) are significant enough to cause an over-representation of men among this group.
The same thing that causes an over-representation of men among homeless alcoholics at the left-hand-side end of the normal distribution.
[0] https://qz.com/334926/your-college-major-is-a-pretty-good-in...
No, he said quite clearly that Google was hiring too many women and minorities (and also that said women and minorities suck at tech jobs, though not in so many words). It's the specifics of the argument that got him in trouble. Bland abstract stuff like you paraphrase above wouldn't get anyone fired.
https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/focusing-on-diversi...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-firms-borrow-football-play...
https://www.google.com/diversity/
https://qz.com/604723/when-google-increased-paid-maternity-l...
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/technology/google-diversity-...
Google has long prided itself on rejecting large numbers of qualified candidates. Since decreasing the false-negative rate inherently means "hire a greater quantity of qualified candidates", I fail to see how the bar was lowered.
"the lack of women in tech is fine becuase that's just what happens when women, who are biologically worse at programming, don't go into tech"
That's a quote from this study: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h.... You can argue that even in more egalitarian countries the differences are entirely due to social pressures; you can't say they don't exist.
"the lack of women in tech is fine becuase that's just what happens when women, who are biologically worse at programming, don't go into tech"
"biologically worse at programming" is a total fabrication. The accurate claim is "less interested", although I suppose that's not as effective for your Two Minutes Hate.
That whole paragraph is saying that men and women, __as populations__ , have biological differences in psychology, temperament and interests. In prosperous societies, men and women naturally assume complementary, rather than overlapping, roles.
> We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.
Do you disagree with this? And if so, why?
"Facts don't care about your feelings".
> - Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
> - Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
> - Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
He is saying quite a bit more than that Google is hiring too many women and minorities: he's claiming, in straightforward terms, that Google is illegally discriminating when doing so.
Yes, in theory there's a world in which he's right (I'm pretty sure that's not this world) but he is definitely making the claim either way.
The programs are "set asides" for specific groups of people unrelated to "merit". Is that not a fair way to describe that?
That's _not_ to say that those who go are meritless, but that the programs differentiate on factors unrelated to merit for the purposes of admission to said program. Is that a factually incorrect description of those programs? Do they not differentiate "applicants" on characteristics unrelated to merit?
FWIW, he has said this more directly in an interview: https://youtu.be/agU-mHFcXdw?t=331
"They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity."
"What kind of practices?"
"Well, basically, treating people differently based on what their race is, or gender --"
"Oh, you mean racism."
"Yeah, basically."
"Mmhmm, I see. And it was ultra-secret and unrecorded in what manner?"
"So-- most meetings at Google are recorded, anyone at Google can watch it, we're trying to be really open about everything, except for this. They don't want any paper trail for any of these things."
"Whoa, okay, why?"
"Because, I think, it's illegal. I mean, as some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percent of people that agreed with me on the document. And so if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism."
Previously, "the truth" was right leaning; it is now left leaning. Unfortunately, many people find (and have always found) that all it takes to dismiss an opposing moral position is to point out that their opponent's position is untruthful, and the discussion (or lack thereof) ends there.
A sibling poster has linked us to PG's essay on "What you can't say", which states my concerns more eloquently and thoroughly.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
The claims in this document are FAR from "widely-believed" or "scientifically established". By count, most of his claims are just asserted. But even most of the claims with a link are highly debatable.
This is NOT a particularly good advocacy document on the core scientific questions surrounding inequality. It may have some points in the cultural commentary bits, but stop presenting this as good work (on diversity). It's shoddy and amateur.
Most of the links in the original document were removed, either by Gizmodo or the leaker.
But even most of the claims with a link are highly debatable.
Although apparently you are in fact not allowed to debate them...
I can't comment on how Google arrived at the decision or what their line is. Personally, I think these things should be debatable.
But the author didn't do a lot to help himself dull the predictable outcry. He hedged with some comments about his intentions, but a lot of the claims are pretty anachronistic. Given how controversial some of the claims (especially the biologically essentialist ones) were bound to be, I think he could've used a different tone and some better faith representation of the other side.
So it does, thank you. Yes, I agree that several of his claims could have used links to supporting evidence, in particular the bullet points under "These differences aren't just socially constructed". Not that the outcome would be any different.
But it's too late now. I don't know if there's any way he could have expressed his views without being crucified. But he definitely should have done a better job of reviewing it with the mindset of an ideological opponent determined to interpret everything in the worst possible light. (As another example, phrases like "PC authoritarians" and the bit about coal miner deaths are applause lights to the right, but aren't relevant to the core arguments and just serve to alienate the actual audience).
He didn't yell fire in a crowded movie theater. As the Supreme Court decided applies to the government, so should private industry use as their guideposts.
Google just took a public step forward in becoming an arbiter of morals. Which is frightening given how much of the de facto internet they control.
This is the largest point for me and what distinguishes them from "Know and repeat the company value statement." If they take an organizational position in promoting certain values past a certain degree, then they absolutely have a social responsibility to make space for those who would discuss counter-values.
At will employment has historically been a smokescreen for companies to fire people for all sorts of abusive / illegal / poorly intentioned reasons. The fact that they can fire people for saying anything doesn't mean they should.
Is this really the path we want to go down?
Also, Google has already shown it wants to be an arbiter of morals. For example, perhaps its lost in this topic, but on my conspiracy forums what people are upset about is Google apparently has been expanding censorship efforts and have hired certain groups to assist in deeming content innapropriate... Such "neutral" groups as the fucking ADL! So if you have a YouTube video calling Israels occupation of Palestine "apartheid" that's worthy of censorship. Don't even get me started about the Google execs shady relationship with the deep state and certain powerful politicians. Google turned evil a long time ago, and they are only getting worse.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
They seem not to agree with you.
In fact, all four of them conclude explicitly in favor of diversity initiatives.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
Let's not Purity Test people for showing some humbleness in their beliefs. We could probably use more of that these days.
"Google doesn't think it has lowered the bar" is implied, not apparent.
There's an underlying assumption in these discussions that implementing a meritocracy is easy and examining every candidate without regard to their race and sex is the default state of affairs. In this view, any changes you make to the process is necessarily de-optimizing for merit.
But what is "merit"? This isn't a field where you can quantify it. If you were hiring people to lift heavy objects or something, you could test them all and hire the ones with the best numbers and be confident you got the best people for the job. There's no way to implement something like that for the jobs Google has.
So we approximate. We look at degrees and open source projects and do in-person interviews. We pretend that this results in a purely objective evaluation of the candidate's ability to do the job, free of any bias... not because there's any reason to think that's true, but because we really want it to be.
Techies often bemoan whiteboard interviews for being unfair: the skill being tested isn't really the skill you'd use on the job, and it discriminates against people who get nervous when put on the spot, or whatever. It's not outrageous to think that maybe some parts of the interview process, without ever intending to, discriminate against women and minorities in a similar way.
It seems more than a little quixotic if fixing every known flaw in the hiring process isn't enough - that the process must get a certain hiring outcome in order to be "fair".
It is very difficult to tell the difference between biased hiring and actual skew in the population. But when it's a trait that has no obvious connection to the job, it seems best to assume the process is biased, unless really good evidence exists to demonstrate a connection.
For example, let's say your interview process produces hires whose heights are substantially above average. If you're hiring for a basketball team then this would make perfect sense. If you're hiring Java programmers, it's highly likely that your interview process is screwed up. It's possible that the population of good Java programmers is unusually tall because of some biological factor, but this idea needs some major justification before you use it to make decisions.
Obviously, the first thing to do is to examine your interview process and eliminate any source of height bias you can find. But what if you do that and you're still hiring an abnormally large number of tall people? You could take this as sufficient evidence that tall people are better at this, but that's putting an awful lot of confidence in your interview program. It's more likely that you just haven't found all the sources of tall bias. If that's the case, then pushing for more short hires will improve the overall quality of your hires because you won't be artificially excluding good short ones.
But "we're somehow secretly and unknowingly discriminating in our hiring process" doesn't need such justification before using it to make decisions?
For example: does any part of your interview involve a subjective evaluation? If so, do any of the evaluators know the candidates' names? If so, congratulations, your process is probably biased! http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...
That's literally all it takes: some human judgment and some way to guess at the applicant's race. The discrimination can happen subconsciously. You and I would probably fall victim to it despite our best intentions.
Since the manifesto we're discussing is mostly about gender, it's worth mentioning that the same thing happens there: http://m.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract
Nobody knows how to screen job applicants for pure merit without bias. If it's a choice between "our process is imperfect just like everybody else's" and "we stumbled upon the perfect unbiased screening process and all bias in the output is due to inherent variation in the population," bet on the first one every time. It's about a million times more likely.
The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job. Google's approach probably assumes there are, and puts a burden on the hiring manager and recruiter to find and consider those candidates.
I don't work at Google and am wholly unfamiliar with their internal hiring practices. But in order to prove the author's specific "lowering the bar" claim, we'd need to see data not just on hiring numbers, but on success of the hired cohorts over time. (I'm willing to guess that Google does not try to hire unqualified candidates, period.)
"Lowering the bar" is a dangerous claim that offends the dignity and qualifications of every diverse employee at the company or ever hired by the company. A claim that bold would demand extraordinary evidence, which the author does not convincingly supply, and which I am taking a wild guess does not exist.
Of course, because of cultural and historical prejudices and biases, the pool of candidates that even apply to google is biased towards white males. Everything possible should be done to attract applications or seek out potential candidates from minority populations. But without suggesting any biological differences, it is still likely that because of cultural and historical prejudice, the distribution of talent among candidates will be skewed toward white males. Again, not because of any biological difference, but because they are more likely to have been encouraged or gone to rich universities or had parents who were engineers.
If we have a pool of 100 people and we want to hire the best five, then the bar is set by ranking the people by talent and qualification. If we want to hire everyone who is qualified, then wherever we set the bar, it is still likely that the population above the bar is skewed. So if we want to achieve a rebalancing or quota of employees from a certain sub-population, then it certainly does involve lowering the bar. We can argue over whether that is a good thing to want, or a fair thing, but I don't think you can logically argue that the bar isn't being lowered if you want to achieve a quota for a certain subpopulation. If you are suggesting that the population above the bar is not skewed, then you are suggesting that the terrible cultural stereotypes, biases and prejudices against women and minorities in technical fields has had no effect on their ability to achieve talent and qualification above the level of the bar, which I find implausible.
https://www.google.com/diversity/
No, the argument is that there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job _in the quantities desired by Google and every other tech company_.
They are trying to create a workforce with roughly proportional amounts of women, men, blacks, etc. when men are awarded ~80% of CS degrees and blacks are awarded, what, 2% or so? You can't move the needle in employee demographics when that's the pool you're working with unless you fudge your system a bit. Hell, given how universities already do this[1], why wouldn't Google?
[1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race...
> Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
If this isn't the case and Google does actually hire people based on their skill and not skin color or gender, then Google needs to emphasize that, or else the majority of people will look upon women and such as "diversity hires" and build a disdain for them, thus hurting the cause.
He uses the phrase "effectively lower the bar" to mean something very different from what almost all of us think of as lowering the bar. The full quote is that one of Google's "discriminatory practices" is "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate."
That is, the bar isn't lowered, they're just trying to fail to hire qualified candidates (from certain groups) less than they currently do.
Unless we have a reason to believe that false negatives are strongly correlated with the axis on which "the bar" is placed (and I don't think we do; false negatives are generally going to come from asking an out-of-left-field question, or the interviewee having a bad day, or something, which are pretty random), this doesn't lower the bar, "effectively" or otherwise.
I don't know that I'd agree with the second part; one thing you can reasonably conclude is correlated with false negatives is diversity (there are studies that people form hire/no-hire opinions within seconds of meeting a candidate, and studies that people have immediate biases when meeting people based on race/gender; there's also the simple fact that's put to good use in small companies that hiring people like yourselves, although mostly in ideological bias etc., is a good means for team cohesion). I assume Google has done more research on this than I have. Handing out "more tickets" may just be a way to cancel out the fact that so-called diversity candidates are getting worse tickets.
However, even if they were simply giving out more tickets to diversity candidates, the average level of qualification of these candidates doesn't change. You just have more of them. Maybe that's a problem because you're discriminating in their favor, but it certainly does not "effectively lower the bar" or impugn the qualifications of this over-represented group. They're all qualified. They're all on the right side of the "bar". There's no alleged increase in the false positive rate.
The fact that he chose to interpret this as "effectively lower[ing] the bar" is not just insulting to his colleagues and unprofessional, but also a sign that he doesn't understand math enough to pass a well-tuned Google interview and got one of the rare false-positive lottery tickets.
I don't think that works. If the process is optimised for accuracy, then decreasing the false negative rate should increase the the false positive rate, right? Intuitively that's how it would work for most classification tasks. If you can decrease the false negative rate without increasing the false positive rate then you're improving accuracy. The bar must be correlated with the false negative rate.
How large this effect is depends on just how noisy the first test is and on how widely above the bar people's abilities range.
* Child labor
* The facially legitimate grievances of Al Qaeda
* Universal suffrage
* The illegality of marital rape
Does it just happen that this particular issue, the one pertaining to nerds working for six-figure salaries at software firms, is the last straw?
You read all of this, and promptly summarize: "women are, in the the large, excepting some outliers, biologically disfavored to become programmers."
What's happening here?
His facts aren't even controversial to anyone who knows the science at this point. Google has basically shown themselves as anti-science and evil.
More philosophically, there are compelling reasons to favor "equality of opportunity" and "freedom of choice" over any "equality of outcome" that can only be achieved through coercion and discrimination. At the very least, if someone doesn't want to do something of their own accord, it is hardly doing them a favor to coerce them into changing. And from where comes our moral standing to judge the preferences of other people anyway?
Do you mean black people or women? Or is this an attack on educated people regardless of their gender or racial orientation or identification?
The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The Big-Five model which underpins most of the relevant research in psychology) dates to the mid-1990s. If you want to attack it for being unscientific, you will have to learn about it. Good luck.
If some women, on average, want to do things differently than men, on average, that will result in some apparent gap in the averages -- not because of advantage, disadvantage or bias, but because you're looking at a difference in average preference.
As an example, I could present a graph showing that most Italians are Catholic and argue that it shows a genetic predisposition. But, such an argument would clearly be absurd.
Clearly there are plenty of things we all (to a first approximation) agree that you cannot in earnest say at your workplace.
I still think your summary is not what people are fighting as the threshold issue, but, I agree with your last sentence.
There are other ways to combat illogical ideas.
As an atheist I would not fire people for being believers (even if it were lawful to fire on that basis) --just because "I know better". If one of them tried proselytizing, by law I can't do anything about it, but even if I could, there would be better ways to combat irrational appeals and sowing of fear.
That said, what if the engineer has "only" presented the ideas as a private person at a "men's club"? If that's not okay, then this infringes upon people's speech outside of work as a citizen --that's chilling. There are Walmarts out there.
I believe in making tech an attractive career path for women --as a society we underutilize them and don't extract the value we could --as the soviets did from their women. But at the same time, I am sensitive to kerbing speech.
Instead, he had the poor judgement to publish in a workplace forum an argument that the women at Google tended to be there due to reduced standards for hiring women, because biologically women tended to be less suitable for the kind of work they were being hired to do.
Timothy Lister had a term for this kind of thing in _Peopleware_: he called it "teamicidal". If you do something teamicidal at your dev job, you should expect repercussions. You are paid to contribute to a team, not to fuck it up in an effort to remake it in your image.
(I think Google took the easy way out here, by the way, and that there were more productive ways they could have responded to this, rather than let it fester for days until they were cornered into a dramatic response. But: I don't work at Google, and my epistemological certainty about this is somewhat low.)
That said, I don't agree with sacking someone because they said something unproven and because it can make people feel bad. I know some Googlers, men and women, and they tell me stories about people getting fired over small indiscretions (a bar, for example) and about people getting called in an office for saying off-handedly "lady" or girl. While not getting the same reprimand for saying guy or boy.
On the other hand belittling "middle America" is kind of a pastime with many a Googler. (When you point out that South Florida is heavily Hispanic and that those Hispanics vote republican, they find it hard to believe, for example.)
In addition, he showed an incredible lack of judgement in publishing the document. Anybody could tell you that a lot of people would be hurt by this document, regardless of its scientific merit. As such, it makes sense to approach this sort of thing very carefully, as it is possible to be a total asshole and ruin team cohesion while still being "right". Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective and cause other employees, rightly or wrongly, to feel attacked.
That's the problem right there.
This is a ridiculous statement. Scientific merit should be the only consideration when you are saying something you believe is important. If you're engaged in small-talk, go ahead and throw scientific accuracy out the window, but not in anything substantial.
Does the length of such a list invalidate the items in the list? I don't see your point.
> in fact, it's kind of hard to think of something you can't six-degrees-of-science your way to defending.
Just because something is not directly implied by something else, doesn't mean there is no correlation. If you are working on a mathematical proof, would you give up if you cannot reach the end in 6 (or any arbitrary small number) of steps? Would you declare the assertion wrong? If yes, you're just a bad scientist.
More likely value to shareholders, in his setting.
Your (and presumably, the google employee that got fired) response?
"Nah, I am right, so fuck your rules"
It doesn't work that way.
Not really, he suggests replacing them with other diversity programs that he claims (whether correctly or incorrectly) would work better.
In addition, he showed an incredible lack of judgement in publishing the document.
Yes. He forgot his place and and committed heresy against the party line. That's always a dumb thing to attach your real name to.
Regardless of the validity of these arguments, it should be immediately clear that the document would produce no substantive change from a policy perspective and cause other employees, rightly or wrongly, to feel attacked.
That's an interesting argument, that people's feelings should have precedence over seeking truth.
it makes sense to approach this sort of thing very carefully, as it is possible to be a total asshole and ruin team cohesion while still being "right"
It reads like he did try to be careful to the best of his ability; it's just that in such a hostile environment, not even professionals have sufficient ability.
I will strongly defend people's right to hold differing opinions, even extremely controversial ones.
But this guy did not take the right approach. He wrote a freaking 'manifesto' and published it fairly publicly.
Diversity initiatives are a very touchy subject, and if you are going to approach them, you need to do it as carefully and tactfully as possible.
What he did was neither careful, nor tactful, and whether he is 'right' or not is completely besides the point.
I could go on and on, but to answer your second question, it's not like people make a big list of issues then pick one. They have momentum and right now this one has it. It also has the advantage that people can, in a sense, take action about it.... to the extent you count being a keyboard warrior as taking action :)
It has momentum because, to a large extent, the people who brought the internet to the mainstream were these brilliant, powerful people, from the nerds to the politicians. Instead of it being received like a gift, most latecomers to the internet decided to use it to amplify their grievances.
Think of a teenager defying its parents "I didn't ask to be born." One might perceive these to be the immature, ungrateful voices of the cyber-rebels, YET they are also adults and full humans worthy of autonomy. They see the success of the people who create(d) the internet and they want a piece of it, too. They'll use it to get what they want.
Unfairly is precisely the point on which your question turns. If you have interesting points to raise in favor of Al Qaeda, you should absolutely be allowed to raise them, and you should not be fired for so doing. I don't think your arguments will have much merit, but if they're cogent, i'm happy to hear them.
The whole point of his manifesto, and the reason why your post misses it, is that he wasn't fired because of the truth or falsehood of what he said. His arguments weren't evaluated on their merits, and presumed to be the wanderings of a mind ill-suited to the tasks at Google's hands. Nobody even bothered to directly address the question of whether he was right, because they were too invested in how it made them feel. That is the problem.
We should be open-minded about everything. Including child labor, ending universal suffrage, and the virtues of Al Qaeda. We should be able to reject bad ideas on their merits, each and every time, because we understand what and why we believe. We should embrace disagreement, because it makes concrete our own worldview. The fact that the VP of Diversity of at Google simply dismissed the arguments of a widely circulated (and therefore, likely, widely agreed with) memo speaks volumes. And it may be that he's wrong. It may be that his arguments are completely empty of substance, maybe the studies he cites are pseudoscience. But if a decent number of Googler's agree with him, as appears to be the case, then his arguments should be addressed directly, on even ground, on their merits - not shamed into silence. If he's wrong, it should be easy to demonstrate it.
* The suitability of African people for chattel slavery
* The historical reality of the Holocaust
* The criminality of child sexual exploitation
Obviously, having spent more than 15 minutes on the Internet, I'm aware that there is some doofus connected to a keyboard somewhere who is prepared to open a lively and spirited dialog about all three of those issues. But, like a lot of other reasonable people, I'm not open to that dialog, and attempting to engage me in it will have consequences: I will never work with or in any way associate with a Holocaust denier or a child pornography advocate.
This can bother you as much as you choose to let it bother you, but the degree to which it bothers you won't have much impact on my thinking.
People love linking to Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say" essay in this context. I've never had a conversation of any sort with Paul Graham that led me to believe that he was a crazy Cheetoh-stained Holocaust denier, or an advocate for the rights of the Cheetoh-stained or Holocaust-history-averse. I think "What You Can't Say" is by far his worst essay. And I'm hopeful that tire-fire threads like these do a better job of illustrating why than anything I could write to explain my point further.
Why do you feel it's his worst essay? People generally regard it as one of his best. Jessica said it's her favorite, for example.
It's difficult to infer from this thread why it's his worst. Rather than guess, I thought I'd ask.
I'm pretty sure this isn't what Graham meant to write, but the only thing I ever see people take away from that essay is "the worst ideas are unfairly maligned". Judge the essay for its actual impact on the marketplace ideas. What's the good that's come of it?
One of my favorite parts of “What You Can’t Say”:
> Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
That's quite a bit different from calling it her favorite. Anyway, I was only curious.
One of the reasons why even gruesome speech is considered protected is so that people with such opinion can speak out and let everyone know who they are. If someone speaks in favorable terms about sexually abusing children, you will think twice about sending your children to that person's home. However, if such speech is prohibited, you will never know this person's intention and that would put the children living near that person at risk
You personally do not have to debate them, but their speech should still be protected
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
Are you in favor of censoring such speech?
I ask because the only way to get rid of the "consequences" you deride is to introduce large-scale censorship designed to privilege the person who speaks first. Which then turns any debate into nothing more than a race to be first to say something, after which one can censor one's critics under the guise of preventing boycotts, etc.
I am generally in favor of "refusing to associate" since that implies personal choice.
"Holding people accountable" is semantically meaningless since it can be applied to both appropriate and wildly inappropriate actions.
There are also different kinds of boycotts - like, there's a difference between boycotting a book, and boycotting the publishing company of a book. These are more on a spectrum and should be debated on a case-by-case basis. But these days, many social-media-driven boycotts are on the chilling-free-speech side, which is why I spoke generally about them above, even though there are exceptions.
There's a difference between speech, and seeking to punish someone for their speech. Failure to recognize that spirals us to an ever-more authoritarian atmosphere until you find yourself the one being punished.
The comment I initially replied to categorized "speech that demolishes the speech it is responding to". That's still speech. Trying to declare it off-limits, legally or socially, is still an attack on speech.
Similarly, your "punish someone for their speech" is... well, you're condemning people who responded to speech with more speech. Because you didn't like the speech they responded with. There is no way to be a free-speech absolutist and be against boycotts, blacklists, and all the other "authoritarian" stuff you're complaining about, because those things are just as much speech as what they're responding to.
It's illustrative to look at this form of definition when thinking about a boycott, which is an effort to discourage free speech.
"An effort to discourage free speech" is free speech.
"An effort to discourage tolerance" is tolerance. ("You must tolerate my intolerance!")
"An effort to discourage liberty" is liberty.
"An effort to discourage diversity" is diversity. (This is literally the form of argument that the manifesto author engaged in.)
I do not start from a position of absolutism on speech, or tolerance, or a good many other things, and so I happily get to think through the nuances and have a much better chance of avoiding self-contradiction.
This is where Google dude's free-speech defenders get in trouble; many of them want to be, or want to be seen as, free-speech absolutists (if for no other reason than to say they don't agree with Google dude but feel obligated to defend his right to say what he wants). But they also want to condemn people who spoke out against him, called for him to face consequences, called for boycotts and refusals to associate, etc., and cannot do so without being self-contradictory since they themselves need to engage in "speech to discourage free speech" in order to do that.
When the Reply page opened, I discovered at least one person had voted your comment down... rather ironic, that.
Being open-minded doesn't mean I'll sit still while someone endlessly or facetiously justifies an objectionable notion. If I've heard it before, or it's insincere, I'll dismiss it outright, as I imagine you would.
But on principle, I'll listen to an earnest attempt to demonstrate the merit of anything, even something I'd otherwise categorically reject. You might not influence my position in the slightest, but being open-minded doesn't mean easily persuaded, either. It just means being willing to incorporate new information or ideas in your decision-making process.
The examples you cite are obviously extreme, and so you obviously put me in a bit of an unfair position in having to defend them, so I will start out by unequivocally stating that I do not hold this belief, nor do I advocate it or believe it in any way.
With that out of the way, saying you would never countenance holocaust denial is in many ways equivalent to the Catholic church saying it would never countenance a heliocentric universe. The science up to that point was on their side. The 'known' facts and their religious scholarship were on their side. But they were wrong. Similarly, you know the holocaust happened because you've read it happened. You weren't there. You likely don't know anyone who was there, or if you do, their memories are quite old, and modern science knows quite a bit about how fickle memory can be. It is possible the the holocaust did not happen. Unlikely in the extreme, but possible.
Now, am I going to waste my time listening to a holocaust deniers argument? No, probably not. I put an extremely low prior on the holocaust being ahistorical. So low that it's unworthy of even the most passing consideration. However, that prior is not zero, and it should never be zero. If I started hearing enough people that I respect saying, "hey, you should really listen to this holocaust denier's argument, it's kind of interesting", I might start to pay attention.
My point in defending a non-zero prior for all beliefs is simply to illustrate that you have some prior belief about what this Google engineer has said. You either have or have not read what he actually wrote. I think it likely you haven't. Because what he actually says is fairly reasonable. Certainly not in the 'holocaust denial' realm of truth-probability.
If you have the time and inclination to post here about it, then you have the time and inclination to reject his arguments directly, rather than simply dismissing them out of hand. What is the point of that sort of dismissal? It convinces no one. It changes no opinions. It adds nothing to the universe. This guy made a rational, intelligent argument in support of his case. He cited studies, he explicitly embraced the ideals of diversity, but simply disagreed with a few of the methods. If you disagree, that's fine. But have the courage to do so substantively. Maybe you'll change some people's minds, and actually further the cause you seem to be arguing for.
That's the same as saying freedom is being allowed to do what we should do and not allowed to do what we shouldn't.
You're not anymore open-minded than anyone else.
Farm work is explicitly excluded from child labor laws for this purpose.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/ohio/articles/2017-0...
And in up to 7 other states: http://www.thedailybeast.com/marital-rape-is-semi-legal-in-8...
1. The rights of African Americans
2. The belief that women should be allowed the vote
3. The belief that homosexuality isn't a mental illness
4. Any expression of support for democratic socialism
And we could go on and on. Does anyone doubt, for example, that people weren't once fired for supporting socialist ideologies? Or for being gay?
Your response could have been posted without modification of intent in response to the firing of a gay person in 1952.
The existence of other off-limits topics tells us precisely nothing about this particular topic. Neither does the mere fact that a topic is currently off limits tell us anything about its Goodness or Rightness.
This post is manifestly obfuscatory.
I don't think this is an unfair reading. One of the bullet points in the conclusion is literally that the company's diversity programs are problematic because they alienate non-progressives.
Diversity through quotas or hiring preferences to X, Y, Z classes of people are bound to make people angry.
Diversity though increased access to education, recruitment efforts, and accommodation of different strengths and weaknesses, personalities, work styles, management styles, etc. would make people much happier.
Oh that alienates you? So you want to murder people and steal stuff? We are going to fire/blacklist you now as a thief.
But actually doing so is a fantasy. Building bias-free selection processes is really, really hard. I don't think anyone actually knows how. (At least not useful ones. You can trivially eliminate bias by never hiring anyone, for example.)
It looks to me like this is the fundamental agreement between the two sides here. Both sides want to hire the people who will be best at the job, full stop. People who think James Damore is correct believe that the typical hiring process, or at least some achievable tech hiring process, already achieves this, and any modification is necessarily selecting worse candidates. People on the other side, such as myself, believe that the hiring process selects for far more than just merit, and diversity programs are an attempt to fix that.
So, yes, let's pick the best of the best. How?
"Politicization" is quite vague and the author doesn't explain exactly how these programs are "politicized" or what that means. I suspect it comes down to their mere existence.
That's how far this has gone. I am saddened that more moderate voices have not spoken up like this brave ex-Googler but given the climate and the consequences, I understand it.
Vote with our feet, and our skills, and go elsewhere. They want to enforce their religion then they can do it without us.
There have to be plenty of people sick of watching what they say, walking on eggshells, and pretending to hold political views opposite of their true beliefs just to avoid the wrath of the regressive left.
This is only going to get worse, and I don't see why we all have to sit back and take it any more.
Censorship by any other name is still censorship, and they're not rights if you selectively protect them for "your" causes.
Openness, or simply indifference to personal or political beliefs I thought was the DEFAULT position of most people.
It is sadly not that way anymore... this and many many other examples have shown us all.
Just search twitter for hundreds of tech-industry employees railing against this guy for trying to present a statistical argument against conventional wisdom. They are no doubt celebrating at this moment that he was fired.
Anyone on the fence just needs to ask themselves... what would happen if these same people knew what was in your head? If they heard you speak about your own views? Would they have mercy? Of course not. Who's next?
You can ghettoize yourselves all you want but it will do you no favors.
If you truly believe in what you say you do you would live your life despite the travails, not wail and bemoan them.
Really it's just intellectualism versus a discomfort examining and considering ideas. Even though I have my personal politics, I don't expect many or most to share them and I don't seek to install them over others.
But I do agitate my viewpoint in ways I attempt to be persuasive with. Often I fail, but it's not about 'winning' as some would have it but integrating and synthesizing.
I personally am Left, Libertarian Left.
I disagree with many of the assertions in the memo, however I do not believe he should have been fired.
Most of the drum beating from SJW's and Diversity Police are from an Authoritarian World view, where tolerance of views they disagree with is not allowed, can not be openly discussed, and should be suppressed by any means necessary
We need to expand the conversation beyond Left / Right, to include what is means to be Authoritarian, or Libertarian
But, and this is important: you don't have any power.
People that are tolerant and acceptable are not the vocal minority. And those in power either agree with the SJW vocal minority, or they are afraid to oppose them.
So what I said above still stands unless their is some concerted effort to change these types of policies and expectations that result in what happened in this scenario.
Now, most people wont write a company wide memo outlining their "controversial" views because they have too strong of a self-preservation instinct.
What I'm pointing out is... are people going to get sick of holding back, keeping their thoughts to themselves, lying so as to avoid judgement. I bet there's a massive amount of readers just on this site that completely disagree with the outcome in this instance.
But they are irrelevant. Because nobody will do anything about it, and the next person to speak up will get fired also. So... nice tolerant open-minded liberals have no power in the face of motivated passionate regressive SJW liberals.
I do not see where that solves the discourse problem, all you end up with is a bunch of Authoritiarna Right companies in a Right Echo Chamber and a bunch of Authoritarian Left companies in a left Echo Chamber
The solution is to get back to promoting true free expression and the idea that "I disagree with what you have to say, but respect you for saying it"
Free Speech is under massive assault, but not from government but from societal sanction which is just as bad and just as dangerous
Societal sanction has a habit of becoming Government Censorship in short order
That won't happen. Because if company leadership, or basically just a group of employees within some company argued for "tolerance" of thought... for example with this Google employee, those individuals would be tarred and feathered just the same.
Does it look like SJW tech industry employees want to discuss and debate ideas?.....
https://twitter.com/polNewsForever/status/894741252977119232
Can you elaborate on the persecution and exclusion you personally experienced from being an American conservative?
Whether the transgender/nonbinary people I know have the right to exist or not is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them. Whether women have the right to participate fully in the economy without facing harassment or discrimination just because they are women is not subject to debate. If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them.
These are basic human rights and the party you have chosen to support thinks that they are subject to debate. You have chosen to support virulent bigots and misogynists…but don’t want to be called one yourself? Methinks you protest a little too much.
I support bigots and misogynists speaking their opinions because its a right enumerated by the US constitution. I don't mind being called a bigot or misogynists myself if that's what is required to defend inalienable rights.
You have no right not to be outraged or offended by someone's opinion. And it is disgusting to see someone's livelihood jeopardized because of political correctness. The backlash started in November, and this is only going to dump gasoline on the raging dumpster fire.
Are you prepared to suppress and jail based on speech and words? Because that's what you're advocating for, and that's what authoritarian/totalitarian governments do.
Not everywhere. You don't have to allow the free discussion of ideas by anyone in your home.
Freedom of speech is not a right to voice such speech wherever and whenever you want, or to be free of the consequences of such. Nobody has to give you the space or time to voice your speech.
This is false. Under the United Declaration of Human Rights:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." an extension of John Mill's:
"Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction.
Societal sanction and interference include the loss of one's job, threats against the speaker, etc.
See: "The first step in assessing whether a particular measure or situation breaches the right to freedom of expression is to assess the threshold question of whether or not someone’s right to freedom of expression has been interfered with or restricted. ... The scope of what constitutes an interference with freedom of expression is very wide. The European Convention on Human Rights, for example, refers to any “formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” imposed on the exercise of the right. In many cases, it is fairly obvious that there has been an interference, for example where someone has been sanctioned for making a statement or prevented from establishing a media outlet. International courts take a wide view of this. For example, the UN Human Rights Committee held that removing a teacher from the classroom for racist statements made outside of the classroom, while keeping him employed on the same conditions, was an interference with his right to freedom of expression..."[0]
[0]http://www.law-democracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/10.0...
And no, being fired is not a societal sanction, just as someone asking you to leave their house isn't. A private company, just like a private house, is not "society".
Private homes are not sovereign lands and neither are companies.
[0]https://www.article19.org/pages/en/limitations.html
>The nature of the public body is irrelevant. It could be legislative, executive or judicial, or a publicly owned enterprise
The source you provide, which is just an opinion, talks only about governments.
Citing your own source:
"The right to freedom of expression cannot be limited at the whim of a public official"
>"The source you provide, which is just an opinion, talks only about governments."
This is incorrect. Article 19 is a prominent humans right organization, specifically focusing on Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is also the second source agreeing that you cannot fire someone for what they say.
Here, I'll add a third: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/SDecisionsVol7en... pg 54, Ross vs Canada. This is straight from the UN.
So again, your entire argument does not apply at all to Google, or any other non-government entity.
It's illegal to retaliate/discriminate (being fired is covered under this definition) on the basis of an employee's political activity.[0]
[0]http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/labor-code/lab-sect-1101.html
You could even argue that nothing in the essay was political activity, then, again, your point is moot.
Fairly, under the United Declaration of Human Rights, or if it were a just world, no.
"You could even argue that nothing in the essay was political activity, then, again, your point is moot."
I don't think so. Any topic that has a clear dichotomy between two political parties is in-itself a political issue. Again, the umbrella for political activity is a wide one.
You said "Freedom of speech is not a right to voice such speech wherever and whenever you want, or to be free of the consequences of such."
I rebutted with authority sources saying the opposite and your following rebuttals were all opinion.
I'm not going to point blame, but this is a two-way street and requires effort from both parties.
So, again, you have provided no argument regarding Google's case.
The first party was the Centre for Law and Democracy (based in Canada). The second party was Article 19 (registered in UK) -- however I was informed I misread the print on this one. The third party was the Office of the United Nations (based in USA/NY and SWI). The fourth party was the California Labor Code.
You have offered, in this entire comment chain:
1). Your opinion on how freedom of expression should be restricted (unsourced)
2). Your opinion on what constitutes a societal sanction (unsourced)
3). Your opinion on what constitutes fair grounds for dismissal (unsourced)
So I will rebut, once again, with sources countering your claims.
You: "They [Google] can [discriminate on what you say], except in some cases (protected speech). And being regulated by the government doesn't make you the government."
Employees are protected under "anti-discrimination laws such as Title VII, RCW 40.60 (the Washington Laws Against Discrimination or “WLAD”) and various local laws. "[0]
Local laws include California's Labor Code - LAB § 1101: "No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:
(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.
(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees."[1]
Google would also be in violation of "Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964"[2] for retaliation against objections of its discriminatory practices against men (section n, paragraph 1). Which Google, under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, did: "Sex discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because of that person's sex...
The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment."[3]
I ask of you to show me the courtesy of not wasting my time if you don't wish to take this seriously.
[0]http://corporate.findlaw.com/law-library/freedom-of-speech-i...
[1]http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/labor-code/lab-sect-1101.html
[2]https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/titlevii.cfm
[3]https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm
The argument came down to you saying that almost anything is a political activity, and that Google being regulated by the government makes it equivalent to a government entity. No matter how many sources are provided, only one can actually matter: the judge who will decide that.
That's the problem with legal interpretation, until a judge clears it, all discussion is just speculation.
Look at your own points:
> Google is under government regulation. They cannot discriminate against others for their opinions of what they say.
Yes they can.
> Being fired is a societal sanction, a.k.a a limitation on freedom of expression
No, it isn't, your source only talks about a public entity.
> Societal sanction and interference include the loss of one's job
Again, no, it isn't.
And you keep mixing the law of different countries with opinions from the UN. Pick one. You wanna talk about ethics, let's talk about ethics. You wanna talk about laws, let's talk about laws. But stop switching from one to the other whenever your argument has no ground.
It doesn't matter if there was a legal case in Canada, it is completely irrelevant to the case being discussed here. Or even the UN. None of that matters to this context.
So if you really want to cite sources, a decision by a federal judge, the SCOTUS or the NLBR showing that an action by a company that is exactly like Google's falls into illegality will do. Anything else makes no difference here, either requiring your own interpretation, or being foreign to the laws of this country.
> Google is under government regulation. They cannot discriminate against others for their opinions of what they say.
This was a simplified point and I have to apologize for being vague. Google, in certain circumstances covered under the law, cannot discriminate against someone for what they express or what they would otherwise express.
This is shown in under the EEOC links as "illegal to retaliate against employees that speak out against discrimination in the work place." Coincidentally, this is what Damore is suing Google for. Whether he wins or not, I agree, is a fruitless debate in semantics. However, this doesn't change that it is possible he has a case.
> Again, no, it isn't. And you keep mixing the law of different countries with opinions from the UN. Pick one. You wanna talk about laws, let's talk about laws. But stop switching from one to the other whenever your argument has no ground. It doesn't matter if there was a legal case in Canada, it is completely irrelevant to the case being discussed here. Or even the UN. None of that matters to this context.*
This is incorrect and I have to accuse you of not reading the sources I provided you. The legal case in Canada was set as precedent for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international law document, by the UN, which the U.S is a part of and an adopter of said document.
> So if you really want to cite sources, a decision by a federal judge, the SCOTUS or the NLBR showing that an action by a company that is exactly like Google's falls into illegality will do. Anything else makes no difference here, either requiring your own interpretation, or being foreign to the laws of this country.
Exactly is impossible and exactly is not how precedent is set. There are certain actions a company can take, no matter its size or circumstance, that illegal due to precedent. Here is an NLBR ruling against codes of conduct, which Google has violated: http://www.quarles.com/publications/employers-take-note-nlrb...
Is there a lawsuit already? I can't find any news about it.
> I agree, is a fruitless debate in semantics
That's my point about this discussion, it became about interpretation of laws. We can continue to argue forever here, but ultimately it will be up to the courts, if he pursues legal action, to decide the correct interpretation.
> The legal case in Canada was set as precedent for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international law document, by the UN, which the U.S is a part of and an adopter of said document.
"International law" is a vague term that carries little weight. It has no "law" power unless any country actually formally agrees and implements internal laws with the same effect.
So, again, it carries no weight here.
> There are certain actions a company can take, no matter its size or circumstance, that illegal due to precedent.
That could illegal due to precedent.
> Here is an NLBR ruling against codes of conduct, which Google has violated
Again, you make the claim that Google has violated, with nothing but your opinion to back it.
And from your own source:
A policy that is written in the context of unprotected comments toward coworkers (e.g., unlawfully harassing comments), rather than protected criticism of the employer, will be deemed lawful.
That's what Google claims that the author violated, and apparently was fired for.
Remember, California is an at-will employment state. You can fire someone for ANY reason except a few clearly defined reasons. The burden of proof is on you to show that Google has fired for one of those reasons, not on Google (or me) to show that the firing WASN'T for those reasons.
Google doesn't have to justify a firing at all.
And a correction on my part, Damore is filing a labor complaint.
A company can, for example, fire you for not liking the color red.
I had said: "Nobody has to give you the space or time to voice your speech", by which I was talking that private people and organizations do not have to give you the space and time for you to voice your speech.
His/her reply was that governments kill people so you should be free of the consequences of your speech.
The implication of this argument (being free of the consequences) means, for example, that your family can't not invite you over for Christmas because you're racist. Or that your friends can't stop hanging out with you, or that someone can't stop employing you.
Those are all consequences of your speech, and you're not protected from them (with a few exceptions).
What do you think?
I'm ok with that, but I'd rephrase as "there is no absolute freedom of speech", or even better, "there is no absolute freedom" in our society, and I'm ok with that.
> Our society will take a long time before we can truly accept freedom of speech and all its consequences.
Do you mean
(1) (freedom of speech) and (freedom of the consequences of speech)
or
(2) accept (freedom of speech) and (consequences of speech)?
> What we have always seen in our society is if you think differently than the main stream thought you should be aware that will be consequences.
IMHO, there is no mainstream, only the immediate surroundings. Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" next to that engineer who got fired will probably help you make a friend. Saying that in front of a woman will probably help you make an enemy.
Both are consequences of speech. You make, and lose, friends based on your speech. Why would someone find the positive consequences of your speech acceptable, but not the negative ones?
In life, there are always consequences. IMHO, the key part of being an adult is recognizing that your acts will have consequences, and being willing to face those consequences, positive or negative.
I think our opinions are much alike at this point.
> Do you mean
I mean 1. I think one day we should accept freedom of speech and freedom of the consequences. That will prevent bad/good ideas to gain further power and bad/good ideas to appear as an option. Offcourse which one is bad/good will depend on the judgment of the person who listens.
> IMHO, there is no mainstream, only the immediate surroundings. Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" next to that engineer who got fired will probably help you make a friend. Saying that in front of a woman will probably help you make an enemy.
Mainstream = conventional, normal. So we could say we have both, the mainstream and your surrounds (probably your surrounding has more power than the mainstream, don't know)
> Both are consequences of speech. You make, and lose, friends based on your speech. Why would someone find the positive consequences of your speech acceptable, but not the negative ones?
Agree, both are. Usually, I often disagree with my best friends, sometimes our opinions are very, very different, and as far he doesn't act against my rights (settled by laws and our society), I'll accept and tolerate our divergence.If the opinion is too different, probably there will be no willingness to talk with each other. Saying "women are less capable of doing CS jobs" will make problems, I personally strongly disagree with that phrase, however, I wouldn't fire him because of that, is his opinion, and I respect that as far he doesn't break the law. (He would have a hard time trying to convince me of that, I would say that a warm discussion would happen)
> In life, there are always consequences. IMHO, the key part of being an adult is recognizing that your acts will have consequences, and be willing to face those consequences, positive or negative.
I also agree with that. I hope one day our society would be mature enough to separate opinions from consequences.
Oh, I found something to pick on:
> I'll accept and tolerate our divergence
Would you continue to be friends in the same way with someone who came out and said "I just joined the KKK!"?
An opinion does not cause physical harm.
This is the error with political correctness- as precisely defined-- it is the idea that you must be politically correct, otherwise you're causing a moral wrong.
I don't think this can be justified rigorously. But it is taken as an article of faith, almost, among its adherents.
From my perspective, it is used as a tool to control, by moving the overton window to exclude areas of thought that are different, and to rationalize actual actions that cause damage. (Firing someone isn't an atrocity, but it is harm.)
So, ironically you're advocating doing the harm you're using as justification to defend your ideology.
People suffer for other reasons too though, like societal inaction and economics. Do you hold yourself to the same standard, with your lifestyle choices affecting others as they do, in the same regard that you're holding others for their political ideas? Have you adopted dozens of children from third world countries instead of creating more mouths to feed? Do you ride a horse to work to reduce your climate impact? Have you optimized your entire life for the supremely calculated reduction of suffering? How would such a calculation even be verified correct? Where does that line get drawn in your world? Is it simply on people with philosophies that are convenient for you to criticize to make yourself the superior humanitarian?
This comes down to your views on a single question: do you have to be tolerant of opinions or actions that harm others? Right now, I think most progressives say no, conservatives obviously say yes. That is the actual gray area this comes down to.
This is an exaggeration, but it illustrates the argument of the left: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/223/669/6bc...
It should also be noted that the US constitution is being used very out of context here. The US constitution guarantees you the right to say what you want. It does not protect you from the repercussions of your speech, which is what is harming the livelihoods you cite. Whether that is moral is a valid debate, but misusing the constitution here is a broken crutch for the argument. The right has made common use of misusing the constitution, most recently in their abandonment of "states rights" during the current administration.
The debate and argument of ideas is non-negotiable if we desire a free society.
EDIT: I choose to be tolerant of ideas that may be abhorrent or cause harm, because the alternative is much worse.
EDIT: Wtf is wrong with people on HN today? I merely stated the law, it isn't even my opinion. It demonstrably passed Google's legal team, so it's unlikely that I'm wrong.
As may the government through statute. This is simply a matter of the constitution not going far enough, and additional law needed to prevent employment termination from expression not deemed "in fashion".
I don't have to hear obscenities on my private property.
There's also freedom of association. It seems weird to me that one would be against authoritarianism when it comes to freedom of speech but be blindly for authoritarianism when it comes to association. I won't and can't judge whether the firing of that googler was justified but shareholders of google should have the right to fire whoever they bloody want.
Would you hold the same argument if I decided to acquire 51% of Google stock and fire all female employees? Or just the ones that decided to exercise their free speech? What shareholders wants comes second to government regulations to protect workers, for good reason.
Firing someone is a harmful action. Progressives obviously support this.
As for your cartoon - Categorizing anyone who disagrees with your values as a cartoon villain of pure evil, deserving of no rights and no response but violence, is the foundation of evil. The cartoon glorifies harmful action - and it's a great representation of the far left now.
Progressives absolutely tolerate opinions and actions that harm others - they hold the opinions and commit the actions with great energy.
It is illogical to conclude that we give people certain rights if we were simply to abandon them to their persecutors when they choose to exercise their rights. What was theoretically protected becomes merely a facade and an illusion that people have rights when in fact they are at the mercy of those who would attempt to subvert their rights
The practical effect of legislation is at the core of even the most introductory and basic courses of any law degree whether it is from an Ivy League University or the most rundown backwater campus
The general statement that you don't benefit from a certain degree of protection when exercising a constitutional right without any sort of mention of what a reasonable limit on those rights would be completely ignores the fact that constitutions were drafted PRECISELY to protect individuals who wished to exercise those rights
The same protections that you demand exist for people expressing their right has to fall on both sides of a debate.
You can't draw a neat box around one person's thought and say "protect this from others".
The "chilling speech" effect is one of many reasons why anti-SLAPP statutes exist, a way to explicitly protect freedom of speech from specious attacks.
We certainly couldn't expect people to have no reaction to speech, in fact, no reaction to speech would mean the speech is worthless! But there are cases where we can decide that a certain retaliation to speech is explicitly prohibited, and this is uncontroversial enough to find many examples of laws and statutes doing just that.
Anti-SLAPP is about protecting people from the financial drain of a lawsuit by a third-party looking to intimidate. It does nothing to force anyone involved to continue to employ, or do business with, any individual.
The problem in this case, from an employer's perspective, is that they have one employee who is creating a toxic atmosphere not from a protected position, but from a hostile one.
And while you might believe that people who read his memo as "toxic" are over-reacting to it (and there is an argument there, though one I wouldn't agree with), they must be free to "overreact" and speak their mind.
It does get very, very tricky, since while unpopular racist/sexist opinions may necessarily create problematic dynamics in the work place, that could easily also be true of opinions those who decry this memo would think should be protected. If I work at a company with a steeped culture of faith, and I walk around talking about how Christian's are stupid, to what extent should the employer be forced to continue to employ me?
I tend to believe that, to the extent we have freedom of speech, we chose when and how to exercise that in public. Our choices have consequences, and it is on us to accept those.
I'm a small business owner. If tomorrow, I write a "memo" which says something as moronic as "Women don't make good clients", and I HAVE women as clients, I can't expect them to continue to want to do business with me. I can't demand any type of legal protection which would force them to continue to do business with me.
It is just as true that, at least with my company, I can see many types of clients who would not appreciate the libertine culture of my agency. I've had more than one potential client, who found out we used to take our employees to a regional Burning Man event, show extreme discomfort at it, and it likely cost me the account.
I've had job applicants turn down working here because they were more conservative (and one I remember who thought we were too conservative for them).
That's just the nature of the thing. People are free to say what they want, to associate with who they want, and must accept the social consequences for doing so.
Freedom of speech is the right to articulate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship, or societal sanction
Not just from government censorship, but from SOCIETY censorship as well
Governments, at least Western Government, are a reflection of society in general often delayed by a generation or so. As such if society deems fit to Censor something often that translates into the government censoring the same thing just a few year later.
We must be always mindful of threats to free speech not just from government but from society at large.
It is incumbent upon everyone to respect everyone else's freedom of expression, individually
It sounds like a facile reading of Mills, without ever going to the back half where he talks about valid reasons for a society to put pressure on an individual, but I've been more on the Federalist papers this year for obvious reasons.
The US Constitution is a document that outlines what powers the people of the US have granted to the Federal government, it has no bearing on what I am talking about
If you think that's okay because of the views this engineer holds, you're a terrible human being.
For example, libel, slander, and harassment may all take the form of "speech" but are unquestionably firing offenses. Those are also criminal offenses because the balance of harms swings away from the person who's free speech rights might be violated, toward the person who's own rights are being violated due to the exercise of free speech itself.
As that old adage goes: My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
More likely than the lawyers saying the firing was legal, is that Google decided the cost of an illegal firing was less than the cost of keeping him onboard.
I guess you don't work in the United States? Because it's certainly fine for him to be fired for this.
freedom of speech is a far more general moral principle and social norm. we ought not conflate the two and there is much more utility in discussing the more general case of freedom of speech and not the narrower more legalistic case of the 1st amendment.
But the idea is bigger than the constitution. I think it is best expressed in The Friends of Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
This is a deep idea. I think it is virtuous.
Silence no ideas.
I support bigots and misogynists speaking their opinions too.
I do not support tech companies that hire smart people continuing to employ people that argue for substantial changes in policy based on nonexistent science and personal feelings. It is not "political correctness" that gets someone fired for failing to test a change before deploying it in production and breaking the site; it is a lack of critical thinking skills. The memo displayed a lack of critical thinking skills.
If you try to claim that individuals in a free society should be averse to taking someone's opinions and words into account when deciding whether to associate with that person, you are essentially saying that opinions and words don't matter. That's a far greater threat to free speech than government censorship is. An oppressive government can be overthrown, subversive publications can be made, end-to-end encryption can get ideas across, etc. But a society that believes that opinions are of no consequence has lost all hope. It is not the government-enforced dystopia of 1984 but the self-imposed dystopia of Fahrenheit 451.
But his memo had extensive sourcing, including many scientific studies. Are you saying that those studies are nonsense?
> It is not "political correctness" that gets someone fired for failing to test a change before deploying it in production and breaking the site; it is a lack of critical thinking skills.
This is opposite the blameless culture laid out as best practices by the leaders in tech, so I don't know why you would assert it as a good reason to fire someone.
I too, like you, think words matter and think we should be able to take people's beliefs into account when choosing to associate with them. I'd like to note that our opinion is pretty controversial - it's actually illegal to do this for several wide ranges of people's beliefs, when it comes to employment! So perhaps there is a middle ground between "words don't matter" and "we must support all opinions", and in watering down the argument to these two simplistic extremes we're ignoring the complex reality evident before us.
"Extensive" seems like a stretch. Here are the scientific (i.e., non-Wikipedia, non-media) citations:
- women are more interested in people than things (DOI 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x)
- women score on average .4 sigma higher on "neuroticism" than men (DOI 10.1037/0022-3514.94.1.168)
- the average woman is more interested in work-life balance than the average man (DOI 0.1080/03069880600769118)
- moralizing issues is sometimes bad (DOI 10.1111/1467-9280.00139)
- the concept of "microaggressions" lacks scientific backing (DOI 10.1177/1745691616659391)
Of those, only the last one is directly relevant to his policy proposals. (And it seems to be one researcher's position paper, anyway, but I'm happy to grant for the moment that it holds the weight of scientific consensus.)
The rest are all interesting scientific facts but the connection to his policy proposals is incredibly unclear. I said it's based on personal feelings because the idea that software engineering involves caring about things more than people, that neuroticism (in the psychological sense) makes one less suited for software engineering, and that advancement in tech requires giving up work-life balance. As many others have argued (e.g., https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man... ), these are opinions of an extremely junior engineer who has confused "software engineering" with "writing lines of code".
If we're going to take the logic in this article seriously, we should much more readily take seriously 'aphyr's (absurdist) suggestion that men perform better on technical tasks in societies where they're not allowed to own property: https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/894211417561341952 That one has a solid scientific citation and direct relevance to the policy proposal it's making!
> This is opposite the blameless culture laid out as best practices by the leaders in tech
The blameless postmortem relies on the fact that you trust everyone to be making the best decisions they can under the circumstances and you trust them all to be well-informed and qualified, and that sometimes mistakes happen anyway and the identity of the person who makes it is basically chance. Take GitLab's recent incident: if a company's practices don't involve testing backups, and someone is responding to an urgent production problem and deletes the wrong directory, it's not a sign that the person who got paged is particularly incompetent. There is incompetence, but it's a property of the entire team: backups should exist and be tested, runbooks should be clearer, production hosts should be more visible, etc.
But as a consequence, in order for the blameless postmortem to work, you have to actually trust your engineers to be competent. A person who writes a manifesto like this is also the sort of person who's going to read a half-complete answer on StackOverflow that offers a simplistic but enticing explanation, and conclude that it is 100% relevant to their problem despite evidence to the contrary, questioning relevant internal docs along the way. Someone who does that isn't someone you want responding to production incidents. You don't want to blame them - because you don't want to risk them causing problems in the first place.
Such a person is a mishire. The fact that certain people are rejected in the interview process (including false negatives!) does not violate the blameless culture. Once you conclude that someone was a false positive hire, you shou...
You might just have a terrible organization or managers with no or poor experience. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But that doesn't imply that an organization or manager's job is to teach everyone everything. There exist non-junior roles, and very often there are people who are mishires for a senior role but great hires for a junior one, or mishires for a certain company but great hires for another one, etc. Sometimes what you're looking for is a senior engineer, and saying "This person isn't senior, they're not right for this role" isn't a failing of management or of the organization.
Damore was a senior engineer (L5) at Google, which is definitely not a junior role (it's the first level where they don't expect you to be getting promoted within 1-2 years, IIRC).
(Let's also be clear, everything I've said about dealing with mishires promptly also applies to mishires in management or mis-promotions into management. There are a lot of people in management who have no business there, and should get either a promotion to a highly-ranked IC role or a generous severance so they can find one elsewhere, before they do more harm to their team.)
I'm personally outraged by people who think it's okay to write emails and chat messages with improper punctuation and spelling mistakes. Mixed case sentences, emojis, and made up capitalized abbreviations make my blood boil. But none of that is grounds for me getting those people terminated.
If I don't want to deal them I can go work somewhere else. That's the right I have. Not the right to silence them.
It's the same if they decide to express their political opinions or sports affiliations.
For another example: It would be the same as saying Blacks are inferior to 2. political opinions.
That is NOT OK. It is not a question of being outraged, it is a question of a hostile workplace.
No I'm not. I'm saying that there is a distinction between being offended/outraged and being harassed. Just because someone is offended by something doesn't mean it's harassment. My examples were explicitly meant to be silly to demonstrate the point.
What?
Harassment is different and can be objectively defined in the scope of the business and/or role.
But outrage/offense is subjective. You can change your views from one day to the next, or flip perspectives over lunch. You don't get to come back from lunch with a new view, and have a 'right not to be offended'.
You come across as very entitled.
What. Of course there is a right to be offended and outraged by someone's opinion. It's the same right that allows someone to share a dumb opinion in the first place.
Should the ACA - or health insurance in general - simply be abolished due to defects that you dislike, without a replacement? If the VP of inclusion isn't doing a good job up to your standards, should they just be fired? When Mr. Damore advocated for the removal of all these programs without providing concrete suggestions on how to replace them with better programs, he committed a similar error. (This is aside from the reasoning he used to try to justify it, which is another set of issues)
Can you justify this with data?
Come on. It's self evident that it's working.
Whether that results in effective outcomes for the business is a different matter; but if your KPI is just 'ratio of XXX in employees' there's no question its doing what it's literally designed to do.
No, this is the topic that is being debated in this chain and "It's self evident that it's working" is not sufficient to refute the point.
There can certainly be a blurry line in some places that makes it difficult to identify whether a given program has an (unintentional or otherwise) discriminatory effect but a lot of the stuff he objected to is very clearly positive assistance for people who need it, and not anything that harms men in his position.
So evidently Google can demonstrate modest improvement. And it sure seems like the Guy Who Got Fired felt like he was seeing the undeserving and huddled masses approaching his ivory tower.
But I'm not sure exactly what you'd like. On the one hand, "Someone needs to do something" and on the other "this blatantly favors one class of people." But I'm not entirely sure that last part is true. Google has quietly improved a lot of feminist hot-button issues that benefit men disproportionately in the last 3 years as well.
For example, Google increased its paternity leave policy. I know because one of the folks I met while interviewing there was ecstatic about it. They've also taken a lot of steps to improve life for families. I know because while interviewing I toured the day care facilities. Hell, Google quietly helps employee kids get into nearby schools and funds (and even runs) after school activities. You don't even need a woman involved to trigger them, Google offers its -ternity leave to adopters as well.
These things disproportionately benefit men by the simple fact that there are many more men in the workforce at Google, so any family related benefits or policies (and these are important, real issues that deserve to be solved) are really a massive win for men who want offspring.
So this whole angle about biases towards "specific groups" is really just a terrible prism. While I'm not saying this is your angle, it's all too often used as a way to shut down any sort of concessions for minorities with unique challenges.
And the business value is really, really clear: a larger workforce means more supply and less demand. From a large business's perspective, the 5 year operating costs of these programs is tiny compared to the savings a 5% reduction in minimum hiring costs would be.
But you can google search for articles from previous years (google controls the comparisons so you can't free query the data).
It looks like there's been a steady up trend for gender diversity (starting from 2014), even if women to men in tech positions are 2:8.
Although, the racial diversity is abysmal.
And once you normalize that kind of environment as "balanced", an attempts to correct it are going to appear to be a new bias. With few exceptions, this is something like a Mystery Spot illusion where you're normalized to such a skewed perception that even balanced and fair ideas can appear to be unfair.
So how do you propose to move forward?
If you leave to them, they're going to do nothing, and leave it as is, because objectively, by the metric, it's working, and increasing the relevant ratios.
So you're basically advocating to someone that a) does not agree with you, and b) can demonstrate that their KPIs are excellent, to change their behaviour.
Why would they?
The only meaningful way to move forward to come up with a different solution, if you feel this one isn't working, because if since it seems to be working, just complaining won't change anything.
You don't get change by just complaining and making sad faces; change happens by meaningful engagement with the problem; if you're not prepared to do that, face the facts; there won't be any change.
(...and meaningful engagement obviously does not include distributing internal manifestos)
> (...and meaningful engagement obviously does not include distributing internal manifestos)
I agree that change happens with meaningful engagement. The first step to meaningful engagement on complex issues is usually a discussion. Setting aside that it's incorrect to refer to the memo as a "manifesto", it is very much not obvious to me that this doesn't count as meaningful engagement.
While I disagree personally with much of what was written in the memo, I find the response equally disheartening if not more-so. The backlash clearly displays that so many of those claiming to want meaningful engagement are interested in no such thing.
Unfortunately you can't call posting a document full of your opinions and conclusions meaningful engagement.
That's just meaningful self indulgence.
To be fair, perhaps he thought it was, and was trying to do the right thing, and did it wrong? I'm prepared to go as far as giving him the benefit of the doubt on that front.
...but it was wrong. For all the reasons that have been posted extensively on this topic; but, specifically: engaging meaningfully with a topic means discussion; and although we're having a discussion now, that's because this forum allows it, which is not something that that internal memo allowed.
Basically, tldr: Posting documents != meaningful engagement. Meaningful engagement means actually talking to people, organizing people into groups and delivering your message to the right people. All of that project managery stuff that people don't want to do.
I get it. ...but you gotta do it. That's life. You don't just get to sit in a cave and pontificate and call it engagement.
Feel free to comment (they aren’t disabled, the doc may just be overloaded). For longer form discussions see g/pc-harmful-discuss
Apparently he posted the document in a way that did allow internal discussion.
Edit: Positive discrimination in hiring policies doesn't do much to make tech more diverse, it can only shift the diversity within individual companies. Once someone is already a software engineer, they're almost certainly going to be hired somewhere if they're any good. Giving them preferential treatment does next to nothing for all of the members of their demographic group who aren't software engineers.
Working with a specific class of students (based on gender/race) is highly discriminatory, IMO. I think it is unfair to the people not included in the group you want to encourage, specially when it is children we're talking about. Why not have STEM grooming programs for any student who wants to join? Why exclude some? I live in India. We have a history of casteism. Measures like this were instituted 70 years ago to help the downtrodden. Now it prevents people like me from getting a place in the country's most prestigious colleges while other less-deserving people are admitted because of their lower caste. I was born in the 90s. I did not even once witness an incident of casteism in my life. Except the one perpetrated against me. Your suggestion seems to me like a similar measure. It isn't much different from a quota system.
I do agree that there are ways to implement this incorrectly, and my support is contingent on the following:
* Working with minorities in a field does not mean refusing to work with the majority. To ground this in the world of tech, reaching out to girls and underrepresented minorities does not mean turning away Asian & white boys.
* Steering them towards STEM should leave the agency in their hands. Even in the absence of all social and cultural pressure, it's a stretch to assume that we'll have gender parity in all fields. I'm confident in saying that software development(I specifically point out software development since some STEM fields have parity or even a slight majority representation of women) would have a greater representation than it does now, but I don't think it's 50%. If diversity initiatives end up pressuring people into fields they don't want to be in, then that's a failure in and of itself.
A bigot is precisely, "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially one who regards or treats the members of a group with hatred and intolerance."
- A simplified tax code along with tax cuts with the goal of growing the market.
- Fairer trade agreements that put American workers first.
- Ease the process of home ownership.
- Investment in transportation and electric infrastructure.
- Investment in, and promoting education in STEM.
- Fostering growth in start-ups and small business.
- Right to gun ownership.
- Right to free speech.
- Right to privacy.
- Right to life.
- Congressional term limits.
I don't agree with a lot of it but it seems they're far from monsters. They're pretty up front about what they believe and why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Mexico
http://www.hrc.org/blog/republican-national-convention-2016-...
Furthermore, the bigotry and discrimination in the GOP platform is well supported by the actual conduct of republican lawmakers in the house and senate.
An individual's right to hold their own opinions on these matters - regardless of how much I might agree with them - is one matter, but it's intellectually dishonest to pretend nothing objectionable is a part of the modern GOP platform. I say this as someone who voted GOP in the past.
- Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law
The implication here being that letting gay people get married is going to erode our foundation as a free society and obliterate all of our values as a culture. There are plenty of other callouts in that document to homophobic non-sense.
Citation?
Citation?
Supporting a GOP candidate isn't necessarily making you a bigot. Not all candidates are bigots. I personally am a libertarian, and I get made fun of so often it's pretty insane.
Repeatedly, I've been yelled at (yes yelled at) by liberals claiming I "helped elect the next Hitler". This has happened more than once. At work, at social events, etc. and it's insane that just not supporting what I feel is also bigotry (liberal ideals) that I'm treated that way[1].
[1] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bigotry
Not exactly, but it is saying that bigotry is not a deal-breaker for your support and that's a distinction with a marginal difference. See also http://time.com/4405018/gop-platform-lgbt-issues/
There was perhaps a glimmer of hope, thinking "Ok, now the left will rethink its position, will turn the DNC upside down and a new and vibrant left will appear in the American politics, possibly running with many of the idea that Sanders ran" and then nothing much happened.
The main political message so far is being "anti - whatever the president is or does". They botched a nice PR initiative about Russia, it was going so well, until they went to far and now they have nothing left. At last someone there raised the alarm and so they limply came up with the new slogan "Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future" "https://www.vox.com/2017/7/23/16016676/chuck-schumer-democra... but I think it is too little, too late. It's doing to be an uphill battle. I just expected more, not sure why.. Instead I got a stream of nonsense about Russia, a bunch of anti Trump rallies, how many scoops of ice creams he had and so on.
OT of course!
The issue is that the left equates denying preferential treatment as 'denying people civil rights'. That makes it close to impossible for liberal-minded and conservative-minded folks to debate many topics.
> Whether the transgender/nonbinary people I know have the right to exist or not is not subject to debate.
Right to exist? Is someone saying they should all be rounded up and persecuted?
> Whether women have the right to participate fully in the economy without facing harassment or discrimination just because they are women is not subject to debate.
Another instance of the first point. Who's saying they shouldn't? Again, the other side wants the same thing--they simply disagree with means to achieve it. But you happen think those means are 'sanctioning violence' against them.
And...'sanctioning violence' against women? What does that even mean? Who is doing this?
The left always tends to fall back on this argument of 'basic human rights' as if the sky is falling because the right wants to take them all away & punish anyone who isn't a straight white male.
It's just a ludicrous mindset that, again, makes it almost impossible to have a rational debate. The nonsensical language in your comment makes that clear.
Suggesting that hires be made based on merit and function rather than the "diversity quota" published by some federal bureaucrat trying to justify their department's existence is so far away from threatening anyone's "right to exist" that they're not even in the same universe.
People holding such distant frames of reference cannot have a reasonable conversation. And that's exactly the point.
A lot of opinions around trans people are centered around it being a mental delusion that shouldn't be accommodated. That leaves them unable to transition and live in society without mental harm. If that isn't persecution, not sure what is!
But those people aren't Fortune 500 material so not pertinent to the discussion. Those people are on the extreme side of the right. It wouldn't be fair if I started to draw conclusions about the left from what you hear people say on /r/latestagecapitalism either.
Trump tries to get rid of unnecessary regulations
"Guys, I think Trump might actually have a point here..."
"OH MY GOD YOU MUST BE A CLIMATE DENIER!"
Your information is out of date. Being transgender itself is no longer considered a mental disorder. Gender dysphoria, discomfort and dysfunction caused by society and by being in the wrong body is the diagnosable condition. Once transgender people have been treated, there isn't any more dysphoria and there is no disorder.
Keep in mind that authoritarianism isn't "people I disagree with that have power", it's when democratic elections stop mattering.
But to your point, authoritarianism is thrown around too often. Better terms for the identity-politicking left include "repressive" or "censorious".
Please, remind me how "being able to have visitation rights to the person you love" or "being able to vote while black" are "special privileges"?
> Right to exist? Is someone saying they should all be rounded up and persecuted?
Yes, let me introduce you to the Republican Party:
- http://www.washingtonblade.com/2017/04/05/va-gop-gubernatori...
- http://www.hrc.org/blog/republican-national-convention-2016-...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-27/republica...
> And...'sanctioning violence' against women? What does that even mean? Who is doing this?
Let me guess: you'd feel pretty upset if all the people in HN today that you are persona non-grata and that they'll make sure not a single person they know hires you. Would you say that removing your ability to make a living doing what you love is violence? Violence doesn't need to mean "punching in the face."
> punish anyone who isn't a straight white male.
And yet, straight white males are the only ones whose rights are never in question. When was the last time you heard of an anti-white male legislation passing in the Deep South? And yet here they are, full internet forums complaining about their waning rights in the hands of females/blacks/LGBT/immigrants. Makes you wonder, huh?
Your view that an opinion can be equated with violence is unethical, but I'm convinced a stronger historical reading would make you blush. It's a terrible and thin rationization. It's so easy to do, here are examples from right and left, with varying degrees of extremeness, quite like yours.
Not your or my opinions, but historical (if abstracted) examples:
- Your opinion that the military in this country should be replaced with an elected government is counter-revolutionary, and your poisonous ideas should be ceased before the imperialist hordes ruin our independence.
- Your opinion that our military intervention was wrong in such and such country is unpatriotic, and therefore illegal.
- Your opinion that God doesn't exist deeply offends religious people and therefore you should not say it, and people like you should be prevented from these deeply offensive opinions.
- Your opinion that drugs should be legalized is illegal because children can view it as a condoning and get hurt.
- Your opinion that this first world war is wrong is sedition, and will lead to prison time. It's harmful to this country and the war.
I hope I illustrated my point. The last was the Sedition Act, the others are more than just one incident.
I've been Left all my life and I'm deeply, deeply ashamed and nervous about the new generation's disregard of free speech and opinions that contrast their own. It's due to a lack of historical knowledge. I am convinced.
It's fine to argue about where the line should be drawn, but pretending the line doesn't exist is just as dangerous.
It's not just a feature of social media comments. This line of thinking is heavily promoted by once-respectable newspapers like the Washington Post in their opinion sections. I raised my eyebrows the first time I ever heard Trump refer to WaPo as "fake news" but two years of daily reading later, I tend to agree with him.
There also exist people who think forbidding abortion is a violation of the human rights of the mothers.
There exist people who think that taxing them and using the money to pay for things they find abhorrent (e.g. war) is a violation of their fundamental rights.
There exist people who think that compulsory education is a violation of children's rights.
Should all these people say the following: "These are basic human rights and the party you have chosen to support thinks that they are subject to debate", "If you say no, you are sanctioning violence against them", "attempts to deny people fair civil rights ... [are] institutionalized violence"? And then feel justified in, say, campaigning to get anyone who disagrees with them fired?
I do agree, by the way, that advocating laws that violate people's rights is not much morally different from doing the violation oneself. As an anarcho-capitalist, I conclude that probably >99% of political discourse consists of people advocating laws that violate people's rights. I sigh, shrug, and try to make a difference in the places where I can.
And this position is exactly what causes sane people to say "Left is embracing insanity. I do not like those I affiliate with embracing insanity. I guess I'm just going to avoid participating"
Yes it is. You mean it's not a moral precept that you value.
> I do not falsely equate attempts to deny people fair civil rights (as the modern GOP does routinely, in terms of race, gender, gender identity, and so many other ways) as “opinion” so much as institutionalized violence.
Welcome to the logic of the left wing extremist: speech that he or she disagrees with isn't actually speech, it's violence. After all his politics are self-evidently synonymous with justice, therefore any criticism is synonymous with hatred and bigotry. There will never be any criticism of his politics, no matter how measured, no matter how tame, that he will not consider hate speech.
Tolerance is only tolerance if it's voluntary.
Otherwise it is coercion at best, tyranny at worst.
If you have to impose it, it's not tolerance anymore.
You very clearly do not.
Imagine if pro-life people said that "No your pro-choice belief isn't an opinion, it's institutionalized murder and it triggers me as a parent, and makes me feel unsafe, and so if you express that opinion you are violating my safe space and may need to be fired for your deliberately offensive remarks."
Person over party.
I also didn't make any value judgments. I didn't say that my views were "much better," I just said that I don't identify with leftist political views.
So Google Corporate HR has gone socialist, then? Or perhaps they've adopted anarcho-syndicalism?
I eagerly await the next Google Doodle featuring Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist uprising.
They should have taken the mature approach and dealt with it more precisely --even if that would have upset a number of people who simply want to see revenge or feel wronged by an opinion.
After the last election, though, I'm done with making predictions :)
He goes on about how things turned out in Malaysia (from more or less unified country to one divided along racial lines due to overblown identity politics). He concludes that one way to combat that is to remove the first-past-the-goalpost-wins political system in the US. Although in his example LKY combats it via authoritarianism. I don't think we want to go down that route.
Even if you want to separate out a modern social justice movement, it certainly dates back decades.
It's fun to consider it in terms of the foundation of the United States and documents like the Declaration of Independence. The wealthy landholders that declared themselves to be free articulated things so clearly that a bunch of other people decided that they wanted in on that shit.
http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-lives-matter-gro...
http://www.sjti.org/
http://www.socialjusticetoolbox.com/
^ from just the first page of a google search.
I doubt it.
(one of them compares a modern movement to the civil rights movement...)
IMO the meaning of the term has changed. The "social" in the contemporary definition of "social justice" stands for social media. When I see "social justice", I think of people having their careers and personal lives put on trial, and the court is the internet itself.
Trump inspires a special "rules no longer apply" insanity in far-leftists. They enjoy feeling like the normal rules of conduct don't apply, so they lean into it.
My personal experience with "far-leftists" as you would call them have been large peaceful protests.
It's really that easy. Or have the courage of your convictions and try not to freak out when you live in a place where the majority do not share your views. I say this as a very lefty person in a very red state. I don't hide my views even though I know my neighbors and coworkers may be disapproving.
http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...
Liberals are more likely to defriend someone over politics. Extrapolate that as you will.
This sort of "reframing" doesn't really work as well as you think it does.
I do. Well, brave or stupid.
And I'm far from a GOP voter.
Which human rights specifically do you believe he was attempting to debate?
EDIT: Actually, probably both brave and stupid.
From my admittedly distant viewpoint (I'm not from your country), the GOP has changed substantially in recent years. It used to be a responsible political party that respected democracy. Then it seemed to start believing the ends justify the means - redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc. And at the same time accepting support from seriously racist and misogynist groups.
For example, the Obama birth certificate thing was simply a racist joke when it started. The GOP rank and file should have refused any association with those who suggested it, but because it served their purposes they embraced both the meme and the people promulgating it. The result of that (and more - Clinton trafficking children in a pizza parlour? I'm surprised they didn't add aliens just for good measure...) is that the GOP is now seen as a party that entertains such nutters.
I sympathise that your political system provides just two big boats, so you are forced to row with people you aren't comfortable with. In New Zealand we have proportional representation which lets the more... colourful... people have their own boats, which is very healthy because they quickly realise how few people want to join them, and that their views are unpopular.
There's something missing in your perspective which is that redrawing voting districts, filibustering, etc are political strategies that have been used by every party in the USA since the late 1700s. Gerrymandering was named after one of the signers of the constitution. The Democratic Party had a solid control of congress for several decades in the 1900s due to gerrymandering (voting districts redrawing). The filibuster was used by democrats as well and as the senate passed back and forth between GOP and Democratic control, each side used it more than the last time.
Now, a lot of noise has been made in recent years in the media about these tactics because the GOP happened to be in a position in 2000 and 2010 to gerrymander the districts themselves, but it's nothing new.
I guess regarding the birth certificate thing, credulity for conspiracies is nothing new among the GOP party base. In the 1990s they were convinced that Bill Clinton had dozens of people murdered to cover up his crimes ("Clinton body count").
Both parties have.
Both have gotten more extreme and more polarized.
From Antifa to the "Alt-Right"
Saying that only the GOP has changed is only looking at one side.
>is that the GOP is now seen as a party that entertains such nutters.
That is largely due to media coverage which only highlights the nutters from the GOP, never the Left, and never any Sensible Members. For example you spoke of Obama and how the GOp embraced the "racial joke" birther non-sense, did you ever see this video on your news of John McCain?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrnRU3ocIH4
Granted this is from the 2008 election and maybe that is outside your scope of "recent years"
There are just as many crazy people in the Democratic Party as the Republican Party. and I say that as a supporter of the King of Crazy parties, Libertarian party, where we had a guy strip on the stage of the National Convention last year....
American Politics... when it stops being crazy I will be worried
You seem to be arguing that we need to create a safe space for conservatives to espouse debunked bio-truth garbage that women or blacks are less suited to being engineers or are somehow inferior. Or that conservatives should have "safe fact-free zone" where they can spout nonsense without having anyone call them on it.
I'm not sure why so many people are willing to take this Google engineer's statements at face value. Actually I think I know why: because it confirms pre-existing beliefs. But even an hour on Google will provide ample evidence that his premises are simply not true. I'm not taking about J. Random Engineer's ramblings on some blog but actual research undertaken by actual sociologists performing experiments and crunching reams and reams of data.
Let me repeat that for everyone: His entire argument is based in a long-debunked flawed premise. It isn't true and no amount of philosophizing about it will make it true. Your feelings don't make it true. The facts are clear. Counter-examples about: look at CS enrollment rates in India for example. The modern western world, especially the United States, socializes women out of computer science and software engineering. It has nothing to do with biological aptitude.
Everyone I know of is desperately trying to find qualified candidates to hire. The idea that more-qualified white men are being excluded to fill a "diversity" quota is laughable. Diversity is about expanding the candidate pipeline and providing some support to those people once hired. Maybe if the industry goes through a huge crunch and programmers are being laid-off left and right then there would be an argument there?
The other thing I'll say is you have to be extremely dense not to either a) understand that you're making extraordinary claims or b) touching a potentially controversial topic that could result in massive bad PR if nothing else. Under those circumstances a competent engineer should take some time to gather evidence and make proper citations to peer-reviewed research. It would also be greatly beneficial to present multiple sides to the argument and make fewer sweeping claims. If you're going to say something that could easily be interpreted as "my coworkers are less-qualified diversity hires" then approach the topic with some humility, especially if you don't have a PhD in sociology.
This would be the equivalent of penning a memo claiming people who believe in God are suffering delusions and they are lowering the bar because they go to church on Sunday or for special events when they could be working. Mention that they're obviously gullible and represent a security risk to other employees. Go ahead - write that memo and route it around a large employer. See if you're still employed a week later (hint: you won't be).
What flawed premise? That men and women are different? For all your insistence that "bio-truths" are wrong, I've never met anyone who actually bothered to cite any studies that contradict them.
>Counter-examples about: look at CS enrollment rates in India for example
That actually supports the author's argument. Given India's notorious treatment of women, it would seem counter-intuitive that they're less sexist. An alternative explanation is that people in poorer countries are more desperate, so they'll take a lucrative job at the expense of their preferences. In wealthier countries, women can afford to pursue their passions.
> Under those circumstances a competent engineer should take some time to gather evidence and make proper citations to peer-reviewed research
The author did make citations (hyperlinks) to most, though not all, of his controversial statements. However, Gizmodo removed them for formatting purposes and possibly to discredit the memo.
(By the way, I think it is reasonable for some individual rights to be protected within the walls of a corporation, but as far as I understand it, many US citizen's rights, like free speech, do not cross over into private domains. I wish it was different.)
Oh you must be joking. He'll never, ever work in the valley again.
If he spends the next couple months on a non-stop apology tour and participate in however many struggle sessions the various women's groups deem necessary, perhaps one day he'll be left alone and Twitter campaigns won't be started up every time he finds stable employment.
Maybe.
I don't remember why, but I recently read some old blog posts about Joe the plumber (2008 election), so I've been thinking about how the public has a very short memory.
The market for developers is very very good, right now. Especially ex-googlers.
Maybe the big 5 tech companies won't hire him, because of the PR disaster that it would be, but any number of startups and small companies would be willing to do so.
Many companies wouldn't even bother to Google his name (personally, I've never seen anyone do that. I just get handed a resume). And even if they did, others would just keep it on the hush hush. Many small startups would be ecstatic to get a Google engineer for cheap.
Other engineers that have been on the receiving end of major scandals, have had no real long term consequences. EX: the donglegate guy was quickly employed elsewhere after he got fired.
Judging by many of the comments in this thread, there seems to be a lot of tech people HERE who are defending him, and would be willing to hire him if they were a hiring manager.
Michael Vick got picked up by an NFL team after dog fighting. It will be similar to that only this guy won't be a celeb.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/business/oculus-palmer-lu...
Believe or not, he is going to be a figure, the anti-PC figure that certain group always wish to see, and shall be welcomed by them as a hero. Maybe not big companies, but his future might not be that difficult after all.
If he had instead said that Google should focus on addressing these biases that hurt minorities and women and as they take affect and demonstrate their effectiveness allow the affirmative action style discrimination to be reduced. He would have gotten a much better reception.
What are these well known and scientifically established differences in the distribution of traits between men and women?
The research linked in the the document are based on The Big Five Personality Traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e. personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology, but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO.
Having read Mr. Damore's document, I can find very little in it of substance. It deals with politics and gender in only the very broadest of terms. It does not delve deeply into the scientific issues at hand, instead sprinkling his platitudes with wikipedia links to give them weight.
That being said, I completely agree that the US's nasty brand of liberalism is in a sad state. Our response to this manifesto should have been a cold critique of its many flaws, not the blind hysteria we've apparently opted for instead.
Let's say I want to measure ability in chess. I give everyone a self report survey: how good are you at chess, 1 to 10? Group A averages a 6, Group B averages a 5. Reproduced across time and regions. Is group a better at chess? We have no idea. All we know is that they report a high average than group b.
Switch to big five: "I feel comfortable around people." Rate the accuracy. Even if group a rates more accurate than group b, what do we really known from this? Comfortable is a relative term. Do group a and b have different perceptions or different experiences?
It's same for Big Five. Self-reported neuroticism correlates with, say, diagnosis of depression. It's not just perception because it correlates with outcomes of interest.
But that's not your example. If your example was self reported depression correlates with clinically diagnosed depression, we now know that people can self-perceive depression the same as clinicians diagnose it.
Your example is self-reported neuroticism corresponds with depression. So what? How are we any closer to knowing if we measured neuroticism? Is there a pre-existing link between neuroticism and depression? How did they measure neuroticism to establish that link?
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
That is accompanied with citations. OK, sure, let's take that at face value.
Next, he says:
"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"
No citations, no nothing, just: X may lead to Y because it feels like it's true to me! And there are people actually taking the arguments presenting in this document seriously? Can we please take a step back and try to read critically what is presented in this doc? Because these arguments are just embarrassingly weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
A meta-analysis of scientific studies concluded that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people. When interests were classified by RIASEC type Holland Codes (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional), Men showed stronger Realistic and Investigative interests, and women showed stronger Artistic, Social, and Conventional interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering, science, and mathematics interests.[77]
The wikipedia article in turn cites:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19883140
Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests.
Not exactly the same point he made above but you can at least see how he is coming up with "women prefer jobs in social or artistic areas", "men prefer [coding]". I wish for his sake that he hadn't gotten into the differences between front end / back end code because it does sound particularly speculative and presumptuous - but if you can take a step back and take a broader look at his arguments there does seem to be some scientific evidence in support of his main thesis that "that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership".
Note: I just wanted to point out that I am appreciative that you are attacking his memo on the merits of his arguments. I apologize if that comes across as a patronizing thing to say, but for me the big scandal here has really been the way that dissenters have warped, twisted, and outright dismissed his memo as wrong without even attempting to counter any of his points. To me it feels like the liberal left (of which I self identify, btw) are dismissing his argument not because it is wrong, but because it contradicts their beliefs or because they are afraid of where a serious exploration of the subject might lead us. I don't personally have any issues with affirmative action (although I can understand how it might upset some people) - but I do care greatly about protecting the free and open exchange of ideas. And the calls for the this guy to be fired feel like a disturbing form of censorship to me.
Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes 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 organization perpetually exposed to increased legal risk forever?
Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic and shows a profound lack of awareness for any professional.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideo...
Why MUST we have 50% of male and female in any industry? Have you noticed how almost every media outlet ignores female dominated industries (such as veterinary science) [0], where over 85% of vets in the western world are female? The strongest argument in this thread appears to be that there must be equal numbers for equality, but it's only EVER applied to male dominated industries (Google it if you doubt me). However, not only is this argument unjustified, it's continually selectively applied by most mainstream media outlets, again and again. There is no challenge or balance to any of these arguments from the mainstream media.
I am disappointed that Google sacked this engineer. To understand this mindset, you really need to watch this video on Yale. People being shut down from talking because they're male or white [1] or because angry mobs don't like what they have to say. People in this thread talk about sexism and yet they struggle to provide any evidence (while I can point at truck loads of evidence of misandry, eg. domestic violence, veterinary science, etc). This Yale video talks about this exact problem i'm describing. We have a society where you are no longer allowed to express selective views (even with evidence). Google have confirmed this with their dismissal of this engineer. What we've become concerns me deeply.
To all of the people who have stood up for free speech (and you're in the clear minority in this thread), I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you want to be able to sort out the media that's worth listening to, watch reporting on this topic closely over the next few days. Look for extreme prejudice and emotive language from the media. To quote an excellent quote from the Yale video, "these are moves of power, not reason" (3 minutes in, [1]).
So where are the rational arguments? What about the percentage of female university graduates with relevant skills? What about Dr Simon Baran Cohen's findings on very young children and trends to their thinking patterns? Where are the facts? Why are most people side-stepping facts?
Now please re-read this entire thread and ask yourself about freedom of speech. Ask yourself about democracy. Ask yourself about how many people have presented facts. There is something seriously wrong. You should be deeply concerned about the lack of debate, the lack of evidence, the number of emotive arguments and the message Google has sent to anyone who doesn't toe the politically correct line.
[0] http://career-advice.careerone.com.au/career-development/pro... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM
I think that your argument needs further refinement.
1. The fact you have to dig to find a rare prestigious, yet women-dominated field (veterinary science) demonstrates the lack of equivalence between software engineering or any other men-dominated field. Most high-paying fields are dominated by men in most states. The essence of this controversy is not that there are men being kept out of veterinary science and nursing. It's that women are actively and passively discouraged from entering, staying, and succeeding in the field.
2. I don't think any of the credible stakeholders expects a 50%/50% women to men ratio in software engineering. I think this is a misrepresentation of your opponents.
3. Linking this to freedom of speech and democracy is going to generate "but freedom of speech is just from the government, not from consequences" responses.
4. Claiming this is a trend in Fortune 500 companies is likely to yield from your opponents a considerable amount of examples of liberal workers being terminated from Conservative-style companies for political actions taken on-the-job. Even excluding union agitation, there are many examples from the past ten years.
4. So what? discrimination at conservative companies doesn't justify discrimination at liberal ones.
I disagree with your premise; termination for political activity on-the-job is easily justifiable. I doubt you want to hear non-stop tirades from a PETA activist coworker.
I think your criticism of #2 is facile; which policies in particular are vague? Every corporate anti-discrimination policy I've ever encountered was essentially "don't discriminate against people in a way that will get us in trouble with the Feds."
But in general, he's right that we're in a scary age with the aggressive and dogmatic ideology that favors political correctness over intelligent debate and will defend that ideology with mob rule (even leading to professors being told by police that it's not safe for them to be present on campus).
I'm not looking forward to seeing the political result of this movement becoming a tea party to the left, which I fear is inevitable in the next few years.
> Part of my work this year has resulted in 42% of the LargeCo engineering staff in WestCoastCity are women.
Bingo. Feelings have replaced facts as a measure of righteousness. And, sadly, there are entire industries plugging feelings of injustice by "white cis-males" or some other group of people who are oppressors by dint of simply being a majority.
It's such a mess. And if you give a sht about the Western tradition of reasoning*, it's a cultural shame. Entire national narratives are being powered by lies and mistruths.
The least we could do is talk about it.
But look at what happens when you question this insanity? You're fired and ostracized.
Genuinely sad.
But a counter-point to the focus on male-dominated industries: I suspect it has a heck of a lot to do with the average salary of male-dominated industries compared to the salaries of female dominated industries. If vets were paid like anesthesiologists and vice versa (and across all industries), I think you'd see a lot more articles about equality in female-saturated careers.
Of course, personally I'd rather see a reduced pay gap between gender dominated industries instead of women being forced into jobs they aren't as interested in simply to earn as much as men who gravitate towards those fields. But I've no idea how you actually follow through on that, and "girl-code camps" are a heck of a lot easier to run and self-serving for the runners than "restructure the supply/demand labor market for 20-40% of all industries)".
Affirmative action is legal in the United States.
I work at a large SV tech company and was recently privy to an affirmative action policy that was almost certainly illegal. The wording of the policy was quickly changed after a couple folks spoke up so as to make it conform with the law. If the policy had made it to a news outlet, I guarantee you it would have been on the front page of the NYT the next day.
In short, quotas are illegal. With some exceptions, hiring based on race is illegal. However, taking race into account among many factors is legal. The on-the-ground reality of these policies is exceedingly grey.
It does not mean you get to decide anything for others, but it is a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say, and it is an even more basic sign of respect to not attempt to defame them.
This guy clearly isn't perfect. He was naive about what the effect of releasing his memo would be. However he was respectful and seemed to be trying to temper his perspective. He doesn't deserve the raw hatred and condemnation he is receiving. I think we should be compassionate and try our best to tolerate our differences.
To put this in a different context, take the gender discrepancy in murderers. Across nearly all countries, men commit roughly 75-85% of murders. This nearly uniform across agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial countries, rich and poor countries, liberal and conservative countries. I would consider it totally fine to say that men innately have a greater tendency to commit murder than women (and for what it's worth I'm a man myself). Is it okay to say that because I have a Y chromosome I should be treated as a murderer? Or that I should face a different standard of evidence if I'm on trial for murder? Of course not. But stating that I, as a man, am statistically more likely to commit murder than the average woman is not the same as saying I should be presumed to be a murderer and it is not the same as saying that I should face a different standard of evidence. But the point remains, it is okay to conclude that the discrepancy in murder rates is because of innate tendencies rather than discrimination by police, juries, etc.
Agree that it's a basic sign of respect to listen to what people say. I am tired of guys not listening to me saying I'm a boring, normal woman who likes math/tech/computers, not a freak or a biological anomaly, some evolutionary mistake.
And he is not saying that you are a "freak" or "biological anomaly", he is talking about aggregated, statistical differences.
He provides no evidence to back the conclusions he draws from that data though. It reminds me of some articles or posts you might see briefly gain traction on the internet where the author starts from a point backed by one or two reputable sources and proceeds to use those references to back an argument that lies well outside the bounds of the original data.
As one of the authors of a paper cited in the memo puts it:
> In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. [...] But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large [1]
[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
I guess the larger point I was trying to make is that when people feel singled out because of statistical differences b it leads them to take things personally, which leads to perpetuating disproportionate reactions and a non-existing platform for actual discussion.
> This stuff has been hashed, rehashed, refried, deep fried... and he got all the biology research wrong. It just seems that he did no research, instead thinking about his feelings a lot and claiming he got somewhere original without engaging the existing scholarship at all.
Please provide examples. Your statement is incorrect. Looks like you didn't bother to listen correctly to what he said.
Vets are 80% female. Is the industry closed to men that might want to be a vet? Do we need more outreach programs for men to be vets?
Or maybe is it that men are less likely to want to medically treat animals than women, and the gender discrepancy is one of preference? And yes, men who do become vets are statistical outliers, but certainly not "freaks". It's likely the same for tech and women - you are a statistical outlier, and from your perspective things are the norm, but the majority of women are not interested in the same things that you are interested in professionally. (The majority of men aren't either, but there's a larger minority of men sharing your professional interests than a minority of women).
And as for "not getting somewhere original" - the author's point about the difference between comparing averages vs the overlap of bell curves around the averages is a great point and not one I'd seen highlighted that way before. Perhaps you have, but it was novel to me.
They should have included him on the diversity and inclusion leadership team. Sad that Google went the route they did.
Need it be either/or? Can't we listen to all the stakeholders in this attempt to change the culture for the better?
EDIT: Quoted relevant section of parent for context.
His argument is that the under-representation of women in tech can be explained by biological differences that make them inferior candidates for technical and leadership positions rather than hundreds of years of disenfranchisement and misogyny that still echoes in work culture today.
But you are right, "The point is to treat people with respect by building an environment where they can be their best (whatever individual skillset they have), instead of insulting them", which is antithetical to what the author did by writing the pseudo scientific trash and then widely distributing it to his colleagues.
[disclaimer: I work at Google, my views are my own and not those of my employer]
[0] https://communequation.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/im-not-a-wom...
We can't just ignore people's lived experiences when they don't suit our positions.
The ensuing comments thread on HN also had many similar stories.
So saying that, what part of the memo was pseudo scientific drivel?
1. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
I get the feeling that this document is what Scott Adams talks about when he writes that two people can sit in the same movie theater, look at the same screen, and watch two different movies play out.
Utterly ahistorical nonsense.
At various times (in the United States) men have been able to opt out of war by: hiring a replacement to take their place; being a conscientious objector and taking a non-combat role; being born at the right time to not be drafted, and choosing not to volunteer; enlisting in a branch of the service unlikely to see combat; pleading a hardship; finding a doctor to claim you are medically unfit; just walking away (desertion, as long as it was not during combat, has historically be inconsistently punished).
At colleges, lowering the bar is in fact how they have often been implemented. This article has some decent numbers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/white-students-un...
Lowering the bar is also the easiest way for a mid-level manager to achieve a target percentage. It's probably also the first method that may come to mind for many people.
Also, if you spend 3x the resources to find 3x the number of candidates (is it linear? I dunno), conduct normal interview processes, and then randomly throw out 2/3 of the male candidates that passed, while keeping all the women that passed, that is one way to triple the number of women you hire while having the same bar for men and women. However, the step where you throw out a random 2/3 of the male candidates might strike someone as highly irrational. Why not throw out the bottom 2/3 of male candidates? But then you end up with male candidates that passed a higher bar. You're not lowering your standards for women, but you're raising your standards for men, and then employees might notice and form the impression that the average male employee is better than the average female employee, which would be unfortunate. But it would probably be difficult to convince the people involved that avoiding the "unfortunate" outcome is worth throwing away 2/3 of the very best male candidates.
It might be possible to spend 3x the resources in such a way that all the new candidates you find are women. That would be a way to avoid the above problems. How would this be accomplished? Perhaps you send a recruiter to a university, and have them only talk to the female students. Hmm, that might be a little weird. How about a female-only university? That would be great. Likewise any female-only programming meetup groups. And of course any qualified female engineers that anyone knows—they'll never be wanting for a job.
How well will a company perform that spends significant resources recruiting from female-only groups, compared to one that recruits from groups that simply take the best candidates? How significant a fraction of company resources are normally spent on recruiting? And I did see a study indicating that demographic diversity (measured as age and sex) improved morale. I guess we'll see.
What would really help is if universities published the CS accomplishments of all their female students, but not of their male students. I wonder if they'd be willing to do it.
In any case, my original point was, even if a company does in fact implement its diversity program with one of the methods that does not systematically lead to higher-quality male hires than female hires, I think it is natural for someone to assume until proven otherwise that it is implemented by shifting the bar.
No process is ever random. All processes have side effects, that make some kind of memory/feed back loop.
If there are two groups of uniform set of people A and B. And you if make it harder for A to succeed. Set of people in A will have to work way harder, than set B over very long periods of time to win consistently. You will end up making A far more stronger than B. While your intention was to make B at least as good as A over time, you have now achieved the very exact opposite of what you set out of achieve.
This is common in sports, and even competitive exams. Candidates are trained to take on difficult problems than the baseline so that they can get better than the baseline.
At this point the bar for winning is largely to subject to interpretation. Did you raise the bar for A, or did you decrease the bar for B? It depends on what you consider the baseline.
If women are really worth more to the company, for diversity purposes - if not literal diversity of people, at least diversity of opinion and experiences - it would make perfect sense to just actively headhunt women from other companies and simply pay them more than the other people.
Companies never want to actually pay employees more money though.
I didn't see that in the "manifesto" at all. The assertions that "biological differences exist" and that they contribute to the under-representation of women in tech don't at all imply the conclusion that the under-representation is due to biologically-caused inferiority.
There's good evidence, summarized in this blog post, that on the average across society, equally gifted and capable girls tend to choose non-STEM careers more than their male counterparts simply because of differences in preference, combined with the fact that a wider array of career options is open to them due to their higher verbal skills (this was featured on HN a couple of weeks ago): https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
Furthermore, it seems that unlike men, women who are capable in math also tend to be capable in both math and verbal skills (whereas on the average, men have less capability in verbal skills), thus giving women more career options. Unlike men (on the average, again), women that do choose STEM careers tend to excel at all levels, including management.
> pseudo scientific trash
See the above article. It references highly cited studies that seem to clearly indicate innate differences in preference (in even 2-day-old infants and primates).
This is completely false! He absolutely does not say that, he says women to not prefer to compete for those jobs. He might still be wrong but you are grossly misrepresenting his statement in an attempt to demonize his lack of PC orthodoxy.
However, if the number of hires is kept constant, and a given process is claimed to be flawed, then you are implicitly stating that one or more offers should have gone to what was a non-hire instead of what was a hire.
[my opinion, not my employer's.]
To be fair to you, I don't think you actually think that. But it's almost like the author of the diversity memo touched a third rail by suggesting that perhaps "lowered standards" could be an outcome from such diversity efforts. Is that a fair consideration to raise or is that beyond the pale now?
Please take care not to deceptively quote the author in question. This is the full sentence:
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
The author deliberately crafted this statement to make it clear that he is referring to qualified, non-diverse, candidates being rejected at greater rates than qualified and diverse candidates - not that unqualified diverse candidates are accepted at a higher rate.
I'm going to guess it is the later: Lawsuit from him would cause discovery. Unlike other government lawsuit, he would actually be able to say who at Google has access to the needed paperwork/email/etc to demonstrate that he is correct in his assertion. The government would love to piggy back on him. So I'm guessing Google is cutting a very large check now.
Government lawsuit against Google right now means that he has the leverage. The odds are the same people who are tasked with the programs to promote whatever the author carefully worded in his post are the people who received/sent emails/edited internal presentations that mentioned something that a good lawyer would be able to twist into a Google's managers admitting that Google does in fact systematically pays women less than men to do the same job. Google has a lot more to lose from that lawsuit than from the author of the memo.
[Edit: typos/clarity]
I would think, with all they have on their plate right now, they can't be bothered about some idiot who couldn't keep his mouth shut in public and just do the job he was hired for.
Government's problem in this case is the same kind of problem that government had in the US v. IBM: IBM buried government in the paperwork and government did not know where to look at to dig itself out.
Here comes the author who seems to have a very good idea of the remediation programs that Google has. The odds are extremely high the people in charge of the remediation programs/diversity programs/etc are the ones who are familiar with the issues that Google has: it is fairly logical. The author probably knows who these people are. He probably talked to them. Probably those people told him whatever he used as the basis for his manifesto. If he drags those people out into the spotlight, the government would suddenly have a beacon for their case.
That's why I, personally, think Google made a gigantic mistake firing the guy.
Whether he was right or wrong, he has hurt the company. I think he is wrong to be sure. But it doesn't matter.
It is also interesting because, a loss in a major legal case may throw up interesting possibilities in the stock market. Of course, one needs to be much more legally aware, than I am, to take full advantage of these possibilities.
However, Damore did file a NLRB claim before he was fired. So he seems prepped to sue, or perhaps to negotiate a private settlement.
Without a lawsuit: DOL gets two million "records" (emails/docs/memos) related to hiring/performance evaluation/etc. It needs to sift through those two million records trying to find the ones that support its case.
With this lawsuit: author knows who in the organization deals with this exact issue. Those people probably had emails from their managers/sent emails to others that can be made to support governments position in DOL lawsuit. Now instead of sifting through the two million records that they got, DOL focuses on 20,000 records authored by those likely to have the kind of information.
That's why such dismissals are dangerous to the company engaged in a costly/high-stakes litigation with the government.
I imagine this ex-employee will get a generous severance or expect good lawyers knocking soon.
Now whether he is able to successfully sue google and make big bucks is difficult to predict at this point. But it's certain that his career is finished for the foreseeable future.
It is a profoundly stupid thing to do for anyone who likes their job as an engineer. Maybe this guy doesn't and wants to start a new career in blogging or some similar shit. In that case, this may be a great new start for him.
If Pao could sue KPC&B, I think he stands a chance, unrelated as they are, it suggests suits can go forward on slim allegations and here he has evidence clear as day they fired him for having a difference in opinion on their hiring practices. He personally didn't discriminate nor personally conduct himself untowards anyone. He offered some (unconvincing evidence about how women don't have the same aptitude as men --but you are likely to find evidence Google does have internal hiring goals and allows a culture which virtue signals against the majority culture) and they didn't like it.
Thing is, if this had been a woman or minority citing some dubious data about how more women and minorities should be hired (which I agree with but on other principles), we would not even blink at it, if it even would have surfaced)
People in general can sue anyone if there's any possibility they might win. The only way her lawsuit would be thrown out if she had never worked for them, or something like that. Otherwise, the way to find out if her claims have merit is the lawsuit.
Which she lost, and was forced to pay $276k to KPC&B. So not exactly a good omen.
Here they fired him not for perf (defensible) but for difference in opinion (maybe defensible but icky) not anything bad he did. I think he stands a better chance than Pao's retaliatory suit.
He wrote the manifesto and distributed it within the workplace. That's absolutely an action he took at work, that's a thing he did.
See also the Shoe Rebellion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022280
You don't have freedom of speech at work. Apparently in the US that's not a freedom of speech issue until the Government says you can't say certain things at work.
Pao's issue was shown to be a non-issue, yet "it brought the issue to light" ok...
I wonder why the author didn't mention the resolution of the lawsuit? I wonder why she mentioned it all? Oh right, peddling falsehoods, both explicitly and implicitly.
You don't have free speech rights at work, or more to the point you can say whatever you want and the company can do just about whatever it wants in response to this speech. To go full Godwin here, if this employee had, instead of talking about how women and minorities "lowered the bar", wrote and distributed interally a manifesto about how Google had too many Jewish employees and how these employees were mostly hired because of post-Holocaust western guilt and maybe we need to reexamine whether this whole Holocaust thing really happened I can assure you that he would have been shown the door within the hour. No one is locking him up for his speech act, but Google would have had no problem in firing him for that same speech act.
Others have pointed out in great detail all of the unpleasant future consequences for any potential interaction that leads to conflict between this employee and his peers. This situation was created entirely by the employee who posted the manifesto. He can sue Google, but he will lose.
It could easily be defeated as it presumes the author would not be able to demonstrate that he could be a member ( does not have to be ) of a protected class. Remember, should that be the case authors goal is not to score a touch down, it is to get a new set of downs i.e. move forward with a lawsuit.
Judges are very reluctant to toss something out that early if there's even an ounce of a possibility there could be a merit in a case.
California law has very strong protections for employees. And it seems that firing him for the memo may actually be illegal.
The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punished an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which is illegal.
Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action."
Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".
Read here for more:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi...
I think this comes down to is affirmative action policy a workplace condition. Discussion about workplace conditions is separate from discrimination law entirely so 'protected class' becomes a red herring here. I'm not sure this is the best article but I tried to find something from a left leaning source I find reasonably fair given that this seems to be an anti-right topic.
Of course the punishment for violating this is a fine of no more than $5k, per http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
That said, it _may_ open the door for a civil lawsuit per http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
Whether any of that applies in this situation is entirely unclear to me, because it hinges on the definitions of "engaging or participating in politics" and so forth. You'd probably need to talk to a competent labor lawyer in California for anything resembling clarity here.
I don't know about the discovery argument. If he was an HR insider and acting as a whistleblower to disclose an illegal practice, sure. But a regular employee can't voice opinions about something that's common knowledge and force the company to disclose a bunch of confidential information.
What are they going to do when someone else steps up and makes the same assertions with more tact? Fire him too? What about the person after them? They gave extraordinary leverage not to the person that they fired, but to the people that have not been fired yet.
It's uncharacteristically nontechnical of Google to think that of the anywhere between 30-50% of the US population that leans conservatively, there is only one of them working for Google in Mountain View and that any dissenting thoughts within the company will end with him, and that the liberal employees threatening to quit will be happy and sated just to see these few drops of blood.
It doesn't matter the size of the check Google cuts this guy, nor the next 100 individuals if they choose to also speak out. Google made a mountain out if a molehill, and they just left a very a long way for the snowball they just threw to gather some mass while rolling down.
While I think that many outlets are misrepresenting and selectively quoting the piece to make it seem more offensive than it is, the reality is that the author used a lot of loaded language and created many opportunities for misinterpretation.
If this were at my company and the article didn't blow up online I'd probably have a talk with the author to point out all the ways that this piece could easily be misinterpreted and construed as offensive and that the same ideas can be conveyed in ways that are a lot less likely to blow up in your face. If this were at my company the article did go viral like it did in real life, I'd probably let this employee go. While I would say this is placing the interests of the company over the psychological safety of my employees, the pragmatic reality is that PR and potentially internal dissent caused by retaining the employee does not outweigh the moral win of retaining an employee who wrote a tone-deaf article that went viral and was widely perceived as offensive - even if the underlying ideas aren't ourageous.
His presence inside google both legitimises his behaviour and acts a rallying point. They might not be able to prevent like minded people from seeking each other out, but they can prevent them from doing it openly. They might not be able to prevent others from acting in a similar manner, but they will do all they can to avoid emboldening them.
They are willing to deal with the external flack and legal ramifications of a contentious firing, if it helps them avoid an insurrection.
Um, that's one possibility I suppose. But I am reminded of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUfv32dmVFw
[I work for Google, but have no insider information about this.]
For what it's worth, I do think that taking steps to decrease the false negative rate for diverse candidates is an okay system and I explain my company's process of doing this in another comment in this page. That said, pointing out that this system is increasing the false-negative rate for non-diverse candidates is 1) factually correct, and 2) not at all the same thing as calling my underrepresented co-workers unqualified. If somebody claimed that our interview process increased the false positive rate for underrepresented groups I would object to such a statement - but that is not what is said in this document.
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, but his argument clearly suggests that less qualified 'diversity' candidates are being hired.
1. http://www.prolekare.cz/dbpic/jp_5403_f_21-x1000_1600
On a broader note, the way you're injecting a completely different message into the author's text is exactly the kind of behavior that makes these discussions toxic. I realize that might sound accusatory, but if people can't make a statement without people stuffing contradictory or unrelated words into their mouths there's no possibility of civil discussion.
This isn't a pharmaceutical trial but there's no reason why we can't follow along with the author's analogy of 'false negatives'.
Here are his words from 'The Harm of Google's Biases':
He goes on to list his examples, which include the following: I think you may have misread his position earlier; I noted that you misspoke when talking about this particular statement (i.e., whether the false-negative rate applied to 'diversity' vs 'non-diversity' candidates)EDIT:
Didn't see your statistical comment. Unfortunately, I can't think of a case where 'adjusting a bar' to decrease the false-negative rate does not neceessarily increase the false-positive rate.
The fact that the author uses the phrase 'lowering the bar' suggests that he is also thinking of this statistical requirement.
Here's one:
* Phone screens have a 50% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
* On-site interviews have a 0% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.
Non-diverse candidates do one phone screen, and if passed, do an onsite. Diverse candidates do two phone screens, and if either passes, they go on to the onsite. For all candidates, if the onsite is passed, the candidate gets an offer.
* Unqualified candidates, regardless of diversity, never get an offer.
* Qualified, non-diverse candidates get an offer 50% of the time (the other 50% are erroneously eliminated at the phone interview stage).
* Qualified, diverse candidates get an offer 75% of the time (25% eliminated at the phone interview stage due to false negatives).
It seems to me that the author is advocating either doing two phone interviews for all candidates, or one phone interview for all candidates. Neither change would alter false positive rates, since false positive rates are 0% at all times.
If you're inclined to point out that all tests have a false positive rate >0%, substitute 0% for 0.00000001% and note that I stated the change in false positive rates could be trivially small to the point of omission in the comment above.
His statement about 'lowering the bar' with respect to decreasing false negatives directly implies a relationship between candidate quality and the false negative rate.
I can't comment on your hiring analogy, as you have more experience in this area than I do. My responses were only to highlight the subtle negative character of the author's statement.
For your last sentence, I did not write, and did not mean to imply anything about the number of false-positive (FP) 'diversity' candidates vs FP non-'diversity' candidates. It's true that the author hints at this comparison.
I meant to convey that, per the author's statement about 'lowering the bar', Google's practices increase the FP rate in 'diversity' candidates as compared to what would have happened without the practices.
From this perspective, the author is stating that the 'diversity' hires have a higher FP rate than might have occurred otherwise. I think this conclusion - I think it's a fair one, though we may disagree - is what people find somewhat problematic.
Does your recruitment process have a 0% false positive rate? If not, giving more opportunities will yield more false positives unless it's proven that the extra opportunities have a 0% false positive rate.
This has been shown across society, including applications for housing, police stops, punishments in school, etc. I don't know why employment would be the one exception.
https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/beta-goi...
We found that the public servants engaged in positive (not negative) discrimination towards female and minority candidates
...
Overall, the results indicate the need for caution when moving towards ’blind’ recruitment processes in the Australian Public Service, as de-identification may frustrate efforts aimed at promoting diversity.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
It looks like the author is talking about setting a threshold, as in the context of creating a test. Please have a look at [1].
In this setting, it is not possible to decrease the false-negative rate without increasing the false-positive rate.
I think the author is phrasing things this way simply as a matter of rhetoric, not to express the point you are suggesting.
1. http://www.prolekare.cz/dbpic/jp_5403_f_21-x1000_1600
Hiring the best and diverse workplaces are both virtues, but sometimes competing virtues. The problem with this entire discussion is that too many people are overly certain that one virtue is more important than the other.
Imagine it this way: You're a fisher. The Law says that you can only catch fish which are >= 12" long. If you're caught with < 12" fish, bad things happen, but otherwise you want to maximize the amount of fish you catch.
You have two ways of measuring length: a crude wooden stick with some fat lines on it which mark approximately 12" - this is quick but only approximate. You also have a high precision caliper which can tell you the length down to .001", but it takes 2x as long to make the measurement.
You're interested in catching lots of fish, so if any fish you catch are a little close to that line, you just throw them back with one measurement.
90% of the fish you catch are red, but about 10% of the times you catch a green fish, which are really sparkly and fun, so you change your standard: if the green fish on first measurement is really close to 12"(not close enough to keep), instead of throwing it back like a red fish, you bust out the caliper and measure it more precisely, and throw out anything < 12".
So, at the end of the day, assuming red and green fish are distributed equally across lengths in the ocean, what would the distribution of kept fish look like? Would the mean and median length of your green fish be higher or lower than the mean and median of your red fish?
Even in its most generous reading (yours), this sentence makes zero sense.
The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.
I'm inherently saying some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired.
Edit: just to be clear, my point is that Google has, to my knowledge, expressed this sentiment and made changes to their interview process to rely less on brainteasers. They did so without controversy. No one said "hey Google is saying some of its employees shouldn't have been hired by changing their hiring process".
And then what happens to freedom of speech? To me this sounds like a totalerian regime.
From your quote:
> Our interview process has put too much weight on brainteaser-type problems and I think we should scale that back.
I would not infer that you meant: The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.
The most likely case is that someone saying the above quote would be a co-worker of mine. Someone I'm cooperating with in a common endeavor. I would assume they are trying to help us achieve our goals more readily. I would have heard something like: We're turning down highly qualified candidates for software engineering roles because of their failure to answer non-software-engineering questions. Is there any evidence that these non-software-engineering questions contribute meaningfully to our assessment of candidates? If not, we should drop the questions. Turning down qualified candidates makes it harder for to hire the great people that coming through our pipeline.
To conclude that suggesting any changes to an interview process is an implicit indication that the people currently employed by a company were unqualified means that no improvements could ever be made.
That's exactly my point.
Replace "brainteaser" with "being an underrepresented minority" and you'll see why it's absurd to suggest his manifesto is tantamount to saying "some of my teammates shouldn't have been hired".
If we would like to stop using an irrelevant but unchangeable trait (such as gender or race) as a basis for hiring and recruiting, what should we do?
The first guy is not necessarily "unqualified", but he would relative to the other guy. People who were hired for their weightlifting abilities wouldn't have had to reach a higher score on coding in order to get hired. So on average, you would expect them to be less qualified.
I'm actually okay with Google seeking women across the country (when they could find a local candidate), but we should not pretend that they don't have internal targets their recruiters need to meet.
A startup I once worked for sent out a memo asking that HR be involved before rejecting a "borderline" female candidate. As a generally apolitical junior employee this seemed really concerning -- we had pretty strict hiring standards and from that point on I wondered if each new female employee would have made it if they were born male.
I can't say if Google's practices are discriminatory (I don't really know what they are) but it's a very important thing to have open, honest discussion about. At the time, I kept my mouth shut because I was pretty low on the totem pole. If I were an employee at Google I would now know to do the same.
Bias is real. The exact same resume is, on average, considered more qualified if there's a typically male name at the top versus a female name. Did you ever wonder how many of your male colleagues unfairly benefitted from that sort of thing?
No, I didn't consider it about anyone until they gave me a reason to. Prior to that email I had no reason to think that anyone working there was anything other than the best of the best. Well-intentioned policies can have resounding negative effects.
To your second point -- I'm not saying bias isn't real. I'm saying certain methods of counteracting bias have a strong potential for collateral damage.
From http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... :
After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.
At least one recent study found the exact opposite: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
I've experienced this as an engineer, where I've been in environments where I was totally over my head. In retrospect I'm grateful for the rejections as much as the postitions I've landed, because they've pushed me to learn and advance my skill set.
If someone claims their employer discriminates against black candidates, you must equally infer they think some of their white coworkers have been let in because of weakened standards, and out they go...
I mean, I'll admit there is a small core of logic there, but I think it's pushed absurdly far. Wouldn't it make more sense if hiring standards could be discussed without firing anyone who wants to change them?
The implications of that worldview are totally toxic.
And therefore it is false?
The author has a popular science level understanding of gender differences. Based on that he concludes women are unsuited to be engineers compared to men.
Well, then make that argument.
If you wanted to pick out any argument out of those 10 pages to disassemble, you could have chosen any one of his arguments that haven't been corroborated by hundreds of years of scientific consensus.
> The Harm of Google’s biases:
...
> - A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
...
> - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate.
Do you really not see the concerns this engineer has introduced for Google over his ability to objectively judge his peers who are women or members of an underrepresented group or at least how such coworkers might now have these concerns if they find themselves working with him? Do you not see how the long-term detriment and risk to Google could be (substantially) greater than the value the engineer brings to the company? Even if you remove the high-mindedness and virtues that tech companies like to project in their PR, do you not see how this is the only rational business choice for a Fortune 50 company?
You are in the position where you want to constantly hire a lot of qualified candidates. If you have discovered a way to decrease false negative rate, why would you not apply that across the board? It's like you have learned how to fix hiring but then carry it out only with some arbitrary cohorts.
Sounds irrational to me.
Ok, but how do you propose the paper to be rewritten taking those into consideration.
Or do you suggest that Google force every employee go through a medical exam to determine their sex and make sure no one chooses to identify as a different gender to pass through the hiring process easier...
Sorry, I don't quite see what you're getting at there basically, it can interpreted in a few ways.
It should absolutely be ok, if it's true. Which it unequivocally is.
> (and that's 100% what he did, he also made up pseudo-scientific bullshit to try to justify it, but he flat out insulted countless people within his company).
What about his post was pseudo-scientific? He cited studies, and to my knowledge, the actual facts of what he said are fairly uncontroversial.
> - The next time a woman interviews for his team, and he votes against hiring, how does the hiring committee interpret that vote?
Did you read the document? He explicitly embraces diversity. He even says he's in favor of programs to help promote diversity.
Employees are free to say whatever they want on a personal blog on their own time.
"Before being fired, Mr. Damore said, he had submitted a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Google’s upper management was 'misrepresenting and shaming me in order to silence my complaints.' He added that it was 'illegal to retaliate' against an N.L.R.B. charge."
Maybe this is why he was fired? It sounds like he was becoming pro-actively hostile toward Google. And there may be more than we outsiders know going on.
Attitudes like yours have polarized me to the extent that now I just say, "I'm super racist, here's what I think:" just to see people's confused reactions.
"Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)"
That is accompanied with citations. OK, sure, let's take that at face value. No dispute here.
Next, he says:
"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"
No studies, no evidence, no nothing for this claim. X may lead to Y, because... the author feels in his gut that it may be true? This is not science. This is an unsupported assertion. The rest of the doc is littered with these claims, which I could happily go point by point through.
He may have gotten the science about biological differences between men and women correctly, but the conclusions that he drew using that science is totally unsubstantiated. And frankly, it is extremely deceptive to defend him by saying that "he cited studies" without examining how he linked those studies to his own pure speculation.
That's exactly what I was thinking when I read your comment! What about my comment are you replying to? Did you perhaps reply to the wrong comment?
EDIT: And as has come out, the author of this memo has a PhD in Biology. Here are comments from four PhD scientists in Sociology on the issue, if you'd like some credentials to go with it:
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
What are the costs/benefits of having this "debate" at work over a hypothesis that cannot be proven, as you state?
Look again at what the author was doing. He was using scientifically demonstrated biological and psychological differences between men and women (women have "higher agreeableness") to hypothesize about how that affects their work choices and, notably, their performance ("This leads to women generally having a harder time ... speaking up, and leading.").
What this is doing is connecting a gender stereotype (which, sure, is scientifically supported in aggregate - that's true for a lot of stereotypes!) to work practices and outcomes. The authors claimed benefits of presuming that this connection is true are basically a) this will make conservatives feel more accepted at work, and b) diversity is "bad for business" (which is just provably wrong by an enormous amount of evidence that the author ignores). I think a) is absolutely a worthy benefit, but there are lots of other ways to do this without linking gender stereotypes to work performance!
Now let's look at the harms of having this "debate", particularly at work, which are numerous and measurable. While there are no studies demonstrating the link between biology and STEM job performance, there are many studies demonstrating the impact of widespread gender bias in STEM fields (classic recent reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract) and how it affects hiring and advancement. The memo's author correctly acknowledges these types of biases. So the harm is perpetuating gender biases in the workplace that affects people's careers. Not to mention the harms of opening up Google to gender discrimination lawsuits (ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Waterhouse_v._Hopkins), the productivity cost of employees who don't want to work with people with publicly broadcasted unproven gender biases that could affect their decision making ("hostile work environment"), etc. And not to mention losing the many economic benefits that a company reaps with a diverse, inclusive workplace.
So no, I don't think it's worth having this "debate", especially at work, where the benefits are negligible at best, and the harms are clear. If you want to have this debate, go write a medium article or something. Don't send this around your workplace. It's not that hard, really. People call this thought policing, or groupthink or whatever, but it's just harmful and a waste of time at work.
If bias exists it is culturally and biologically motivated and that can only be fixed by changing the culture significantly.
Women in free cultures do not like STEM. That is a fact. In countries where gender roles are being silenced (that's a good thing) women dislike STEM even more!
I went to a STEM focused high-school that had equal numbers of women and men (3000 students). Not the same percentage went for STEM fields after graduation. Women were also more successful during high-school. Every year the questionnaire confirms that women just aren't interested in STEM and go to fields that deal with people much more (medicine and similar social fields - rehabilitation, working with children with disabilities, social work etc.))
Interesting assertion without a citation! Unfortunately, you are wrong. A good meta analysis reference: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/publicati.... I can provide more if you like. I encourage you to review the literature.
> Women in free cultures do not like STEM. That is a fact.
Another interesting assertion! I'll let you do the homework finding citations about how you're wrong here.
> I went to a STEM focused high-school ... blah blah blah
Nice anecdote! Is there anything else about high school that you'd like to generalize to the entire population of the world?
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frederick_Oswald/public...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308926636_A_Meta-An...
I can provide more if you like.
Show me a study that measures gender bias, does an educational intervention and succeeds in improving that measure significantly. None exist. At best they do not work.
> I'll let you do the homework finding citations about how you're wrong here.
Cool, good thing I did my homework. I'm quite aware that percentage of women in STEM is increasing every year. Check out research for countries that have successfully removed gender roles.
> Nice anecdote! Is there anything else about high school that you'd like to generalize to the entire population of the world?
Good thing that there's research confirming the same thing. Although I was not generalizing. The 3000 students and the results of questionnaire every year are pretty consistent. I'm sure someone will do a study on the data, will link to it surely when it happens. Although, I'm sure it will not matter given that you value meta-analysis but only those that confirm your bias.
"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm."
That pretty succinctly summarizes my view.
No, he doesn't; he lied about it on his linkedin page: http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-removes-phd-stud...
a) Men and women should be hired based on merit, and ability to perform required tasks.
b) Men and women are unable to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
The author of the manifesto was arguing for (a) and against (b).
Humans, contrary to what they may tell themselves, are not effective, impartial judges of "merit". Diversity initiatives correct for this deficiency.
Even the SATs struggles/d with making sure their tears didn't implicit strengthen the scores of any one group of students.
Engineering has large degrees of opinion mixed into any non-rudimentary implementation.
If a programming exercise is subjective, from what perspective is it subjective in bias of? Likely the author's, who's bias will be derived somewhat from their race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic class, background, peer group, etc.
Code is correct if it works. But plenty of "working" solutions will be rejected as being "incorrect" based on current trends, internalized philosophy, preferred approach, etc. etc.
As someone who hires engineers, it is difficult if not impossible to separate personal bias and preference from an evaluation.
But there's a billion ways to write that code. Which ones will the evaluator prefer and/or reject? That's where subjective opinion comes in.
The result, even just the code itself, is also not judged on a binary yes/no scale, which again leaves a lot of room for opinions and bias to muddy the water.
I've done hundreds of engineering interviews. Conducting objective interviews is very hard. Anybody thinking they are objective either has never done interviews or is fooling themselves.
You are judged and reviewed on a myriad different factors other than this. Are you a "team player?" Do you mentor others well? Do people like you? Were you picked to do complex projects this review cycle? Are you too loud? Too timid? Do you ask insightful questions? Is your coding style "normal"? Do you dress professionally? Can you be asked to interface with clients?
Every little thing that can be used will be used to form a composite picture of you as a person. It's wrong to expect a foreigner like me to be judged on whether I know baseball stats but I'm sure someone somewhere has made an inside reference about baseball around me and written me off when didn't even acknowledge it.
That's what diversity programs and affirmative action programs try to short circuit.
c) Human beings are poor judges of merit due to cognitive bias, poor intuition for statistics, prejudices based on emotional reactions to irrelevant past experiences, and perverse incentives. It is therefore justifiable to apply a post correction.
I'm a bit surprised that techies don't see this as obvious. How often do inferior products win due to superior marketing that plays on these biases?
I am also surprised programmers have such confidence in absolute meritocracy in code shops given that every coder knows how hard it can be to evaluate the performance of coders on a team. Let's say one coder closes tons of tickets but does shoddy work while another works more slowly and creates things of beauty. The former often looks better but the latter might be the real MVP. I've seen coders who add little code but are indispensable on a team due to things like deep domain knowledge, great judgement, spooky horse whisperer debugging skills, etc.
Yet suddenly some are convinced of the infallibility of our ideas of merit as soon as someone tosses a culture war grenade in the room.
I don't even want to bring up the softness of some of the areas of science cited by that manifesto or the reproducibility crisis they've had but... Oops I just did.
Personally I am on the fence about diversity measures such as the ones I've heard exist at Google for practical reasons. I am not convinced they work very well and as an engineer I prefer things that work. My sentiment is on their side though, and I have become deeply repelled by the opposing movement (now generally called the alt-right) ever since it unmasked itself. Head over to alt-right subs on Reddit or worse Voat if you want to see what they really stand for. So if I were forced to pick a side I would begrudgingly pick the diversity nazis over the actual Nazis.
But if your premise is that (essentially) people are wrong, how do you know that the post-correction will be appied "correctly" (i.e. not make things even more wrong)?
You can fix it by changing it to
b) Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
edit: HN comments eat double asterisks???
The strawman is much better than the actual argument.
A lot of clumping happens in fields. Tell me why women are better at symplectic geometry than symplectic topology (or not). Tell me why women are better combinatorists than number theorists -- I want to hear something about counting the tubers they gathered. Tell me why women are so much more suited to advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology than interventional cardiology (https://www.aamc.org/data/448482/b3table.html). I kinda love all the post hoc analysis that goes into explaining these differences, especially when you have to explain then why Portuguese and Italian women are great in algebraic geometry but French women aren't (except for the notable exceptions like Claire Voisin).
Most people aren't pioneers; most people follow the pioneers into situations in which they feel mildly more comfortable than the alternative. Sexism plays a huge role, while not being the only factor. Is it really surprising that if you put up a "girls r dum" sign on a clubhouse many will find somewhere else to go?
Women electing into different fields is pretty much tautological here. The question is why, and whether it's for reasons we want to support and/or perpetuate. The whole point of the memo at issue is that he figures it's built into women biologically because computers aren't cuddly and that it is thus justifiable and right to perpetuate or support the current set of social roles. I don't know that the guy should have been fired, but it's clear he's not going to be a great team player or supervisor for women.
Edit: "social convention" shouldn't rule--women should be free to choose whatever careers they like, even if they're preferences are shaped by a culture you and Google distain, and men should get a fair shot at the employment they want, also irrespective of Google's identity ideology.
This article [0] presents a good argument about how and why men and women self-select in to different fields.
0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Of course it isn't because then it would expose the hypocrisy of what they advocate. It's white-knighting at its finest.
> Men and women aren't allowed to compete based on merit and women need special consideration in order that equivalent number of men and women are hired.
I agree there is sexism in tech, both overt and casual that discourages women from entering tech and/or causes them to leave. The question is, does increasing diversity actually fix this problem?
The author of the memo specifically addresses this, and states that the focus should be on providing psychological safety for people of all groups, rather than forced diversity that may not end up addressing the problem.
It means that applying is no longer first-come, first-serve.
Also, who decides on "merit" and "ability?" Most real-world problems are not math equations with clear answers. In that case, a homogeneous group is going to decide that merit is based on their group's definition. A diverse group will create a broader definition that accounts for a wider array of ideas and approaches.
Diversity in tech has essentially become people who look different but think the same way.
I've seen these arguments rehashed over and over by the very same people who overly critcized the manifesto.
Yet I have never seen any argument or document written as well as the manifesto supporting these arguments.
> Such a manifesto is not just fundamentally wrong, it's toxic
Isn't this how every Inquisition is justified?
A private company firing someone over their views is a long, long way from an Inquisition. Your right to say and believe things is not a right for continued employment. The same libertarian argument that you seem to be making has been made the other way many times -- that companies should never be compelled to retain an employee for any reason.
Is this the first firing that was perhaps an overly sensitive reaction concerned with appeasing a very touchy ideological base? Because I can think of a number of other people railroaded out of a job because of online "outrage."
We aren't all that far from an Inquisition (not prongs and tongs type Inquisition, but a "your job depends on agreement" type Inquisition). The most significant thing missing from the equation is that the most vocal social justice voices lack political influence and power. If you see this movement organize politically and get candidates in office, any student of history should recognize that things will get worse for open expression of ideas before things get better.
Such a claim would, after all, be an insult to many of his coworkers, who might feel as if he believes they're only at Google because society lowered the bar for them.
Personally I'd like it if people could make both arguments in a reasonable fashion and not jump immediately to outrage and calls for termination.
Dodging the question by saying you don't find the principle "interesting" when applied on the other end of the argument is effectively admitting that you know the principle is flawed.
To be clearer, white privilege exists. Male privilege exists. That is a power dynamic over women and minorities, enjoyed by men and non-minorities.
To deny those privileges exist increases the privilege. To deny that existing bias exists helps to increase the bias.
To admit those privileges exist decreases the privilege. To admit that existing biases exist helps to decrease the bias.
So, writing a manifesto (that admits white privilege) does not put white people into greater danger beneath those who enjoy the power dynamic over them (no one).
But, writing a manifesto (that denies sexism) does put women into greater danger beneath those who enjoy the power dynamic over them (men).
Is that clearer?
This doesn't necessarily follow, because insofar as male privilege exists, so does female privilege (such as no draft, "women and children first", the "women are wonderful " effect and the fact that women represent the majority of the voting base), so it's really hard to say one sex is more privileged than the other, rather than just privileged differently.
> where male privilege exceeds female privilege.
I'm not sure I can categorically agree with this. While male privilege exists over women, I find it ludicrous to suggest that white women are less privileged overall than black men, despite black men benefiting from male privilege. I think many of the misunderstandings that occur when discussing privilege come about due to using only a few easily categorized traits in defining privileges, rather than a broader set that also include things like socio-economic conditions, health, upbringing, and a variety of personality or physical traits.
I don't think it's that hard. There are unfair privileges to either gender, but the male ones are vastly larger.
This kind of claim (regardless of which direction you're making the claim in) ony makes sense if you reduce "privilege" into a single dimension. Which I don't think you can.
Should a son of a several-year unemployed coal miner be discriminated against because of his gender and race, just because other people with that same gender and race have done better than average?
The entire summary was "consider the individual not the statistic."
If you are concerned about socio-economic advantages, look at tax returns not skin color - the whole point of some prior civil rights movements was that skin color is a terrible proxy for evaluating the person underneath.
Honestly the graph examples of the overlapping bell curves vs the plotted averages in his document was such an excellent point, and yet the extremely salient points that should be discussed are being railroaded over by misrepresented hyperbole - your straw man theoretical imcluded. There's a great deal of nuance he paid attention to, and I really wish his detractors had the same consideration for nuance in their counter-points.
Edit: I didn't realize on first read that you were creating a hyperbole to highlight the bias in the calls for his firing. Leaving the comment as is though, as in general there needs to be a lot more nuance considered, particularly by his detractors. Apologies for misreading your comment's intention.
It only hurts because it is plausible and causes self-doubt.
But Google can prove this conclusively just by plotting the distribution of performance reviews between "diversity hires" and the regular pool of employees. You either show that there are negligible differences (the diversity program works) or the guy is right (the average bar did get lowered).
Google will never publish this data because they are cowards.
You take a lot of really smart people and get them to work together, and most of them are going to feel like they're not as smart as their peers.
Anything that creates self-doubt is going to really fuck up their retention.
Anyone who writes a manifesto to do just that should expect they'll be promptly walked out of the building.
"I work at the world's most powerful tech company, get paid embarrassing sums of money to do it, and get good reviews from my manager. But I don't feel super smart, so I quit."
When you come in as a newbie, and you see all these people seemingly directing themselves effortlessly, and creating cool shit day in and day out, it can be seriously soul crushing. You're still on your tricycle trying to figure out how to do anything at Google, and aside from your laptop, virtually everything is a technology that is Google specific and shares almost nothing with anything you've touched before.
Between those two things, a lot of people feel like they'll never make it. They hold on for their 1 year anniversary if they can and then shop their new Google experience around to find a good exit.
Can you elaborate on that one? I'm really curious, as my naive assumption would be that impostor syndrome should improve retention (something like "I'm not as good as my current employer and coworkers think I am, so I better not change jobs because this is the best I could get").
That makes it pretty easy to take a new gig and make that nagging imposter voice in your head quiet down.
Should a female doctor avoid mentioning this article to a male colleague to avoid getting fired?
The employee in this case deserved a reprimand, not termination.
It's ironic that the two countries who not so long ago were horrific totalitarian regimes now are more free (at least in this aspect) than USA - "the land of the free".
If an organization does, at any time, use hiring priorities besides work ability, and thus hires people whose work ability was not as good as it could be - from henceforth on, nobody can ever criticize those hiring policies, because that would imply criticizing the people hired under those policies.
>Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization, it becomes impossible for this person to be an effective member of the team
Funny, lots of people I've worked with have alienated me, and others, and various groups of people (different teams, specialties, ages, men, conservatives, etc). We somehow still manage to keep functioning in the same building. You, with bigotry of low expectations, seem to think women don't have the maturity for that.
It seems pretty extraordinary and I'd like to see more before I believe it.
This argument only work is every woman can only see themselves as part of the group and are incapable of seeing themselves as individuals.
I would be willing to bet that there are women (and other diversity hires) at Google that know they are capable of doing their jobs and deserving of being hired. Some of those people might object to being lumped in with the whole and not being seen as individuals.
I can already visualize the intense white hot responses over at /r/mensrights and other such places. Where they already freak out, and "virtue signal" as you put it, over much much much milder stuff from feminists. Many people would call for the author's head, and I suspect we wouldn't hear so much about "free speech" from the MRA and other conservative outlets.
Edit: If any of the downvoters doubt my hypothetical, just think about what happened to Anita Sarkeesian. There were no statements about her bravery or defenses of her free speech rights from the conservatives. Just a wall of criticism and boycotts (and worse) in an attempt to get her to shut up. Whole lot of virtue signalling from men on the right, many of whom self-admitted to never watching her videos.
I think I first heard it while studying sociology in 2006; signals were also a common topic in my econ degree.
If you say "People aren't going to like what I say" and then say something offensive about 50% of the population, well then sure, consider the author's point proven...
This person created a toxic work environment in which women and people of color will not feel comfortable working with him, being interviewed by him, have him as their tech lead or have him on their promotion committee.
Why the hysterical cries of virtue signaling and suppression? What is authoritarian dogma that this author dared to question?
Companies have a right to get rid of toxic employees like this guy. He can enjoy his new position in the Trump administration as head of diversity in STEM. ;)
I think you mean "illiberalism".
> This is the closing of the American mind.
I've just switched to Duck Duck Go. Others, I have no doubt, will also be making decisions on which technology companies they wish to support.
His constant protestations that he's really interested in promoting diversity BUT is just the new "some of my best friends are X, but".
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
This isn't just in America. This is happening all over the world.
Right wing politics is now the only refuge for people who want to speak their mind.
As much as scary this is, this is the truth.
Look at the right wing movements in history. Fascism, Nazism or any other right wing movements. These largely arise because there is too much politically correct talk going on, and at some point a guy comes along and musters the courage to say all the things openly what others had been wanting to say for years. What he says could be totally wrong and may be even absurd. But the fact that people just need a vent to release years worth of accumulated pressure will buy a lot of public validity.
Once this happens the public support, mood and direction swings too much to the other end. At this point PC won't even matter.
He's saying "Isn't it kind of strange that everyone else seems to have completely lost their minds?"
There was quite a bit of PC. Germany was paying huge war reparations to France and UK. It was sort of portrayed as 'atonement of sins'. Economy was in tatters. There was insane levels of humiliation dumped on German populace for losing WW1. People were expected to simply eat it up as moral punishment.
None of this justifies WW2 or Nazism of course.
We're experiencing a polarization and lack of an ability to abide other's beliefs.
Now that firing someone for their beliefs has been demonstrated, how surprised will we be when bosses fire more people for their beliefs?
As aware humans, we should all be able to be better than this.
Events like firing people for holding a belief, only reinforces their belief further that they are being marginalized for merely holding an idea in their head. Of course they will now keep quiet until somebody comes along and generates way more groundswell support for their belief.
You have unwittingly provided an example of the "unconscious bias" against women that Google's programs seek to unpack and correct.
The term "virtue signal" implies that one's reaction is motivated by a desire to make an impression on others, a superficial and calculated response. But to a woman, reading an essay full of gender stereotypes can create a real sense of pain and outrage. So when you're saying "virtue signal", you're really mostly talking about men.
He was right about one thing.
From the article:
> Google’s new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance
A brand of religion with its own sheriff no less.
Who seriously believe you have freedom of speech and thought in such a monocultural place?
Freedom of speech, as in the legal right protected by the First Amendment in the United States, is indeed only against the government.
But free discourse, as an ideal and virtue for the citizens of a republic, is a much broader concept. The citizens of a democratic republic should be open to hearing new ideas and engaging in reasoned debate with each other.
We can have a discussion about the merits of public companies engaging in diversity programs without starting from that premise though.
If you think he said that, you didn't read the article.
I read a good chunk in agreement, but then it just took a left turn. Between its thinly-vieled promotion for 'conservative values' and some very thin 'therefore' conclusions midway through, it would never be able to stand up to the heights of intellect that its author probably intended it for.
This is always the case. Even companies who are sane need to respond to the foaming-at-the-mouth lunacy of Twitter and related cesspools. As disgusting as the Brendan Eich thing was, I never really blamed Mozilla. I'm just not sure how tech in particular ended up so strongly under the influence of a relatively small amount of loud, shitty people.
His points were that some diversity policies were misguided and may even cause harm but are impossible to correct because they are taboo.
His memo was well-argumented and he was open to contradiction, which on several points could have been brought.
It was not aggressive, not dismissive, not sexist. I personally view his firing as totally excessive and downright anti-intellectual.
Critics, we are not yet in a post-sexist society. We have to improve many things for women and minorities, we have many efforts to make to reach true equality. Shutting down debate on your tactics will not help.
Trying to justify discrimination by referring to the direct result of discriminatory behavior is obscene.
"But beware of this particular subgroup, because they are biologically inclined to not be as interested or good in the subject."
> Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought
No, people are pissed that it's 2017 and people are still trying to make an argument for the superiority of testosterone as a predictor for success in a particular field. Can't we just give everyone a chance, instead of trying to pigeonhole them right away?
> A particular brand of liberalism has reached the point of being a religion, and the establishment is running an inquisition against any who dare to question its points of dogma.
Please don't pay attention to the actual religious agenda being pushed by the party currently in power. You know, the one that is actually running an inquisition against LGBTQ people? The one that wants to tell women what to do with their bodies? No dogma there, surely.
> This is the closing of the American mind.
The closing of the American mind started happening when a political party decided to take over religion and anti-intellectualism as their platform. That's why we've gotten to the point where being called an "expert" is paramount to an insult in certain contexts.
The enginner did not say women can't be engineers, merely implied that the gender imbalance in the field may not be entirely the result of society. There are very real, very definite emotional and psychological differences between men and women overall[1]. Why is it so weird to think that those differences might lead to different career paths?
>Please don't pay attention to the actual religious agenda being pushed by the party currently in power. You know, the one that is actually running an inquisition against LGBTQ people? The one that wants to tell women what to do with their bodies? No dogma there, surely.
Just that the other side is crazy too doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the possible weaknesses of the left. Extreme political polarization on both sides combined with a decline in peoples' willingness to consider the opinions of those who oppose them is part of what is causing all this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
And this is where he should've exercised better judgement. You can hold that view personally, you can discuss it with your friends, maybe you can go and try to run a study on it with some actual sociologists. Don't go around pushing pseudoscience in the work place to justify your views, then expect everyone to applaud you.
> Just because the other side is crazy
The other side is deeply integrated with their crazier part and now they hold Congress and the presidency. But somehow, we need to focus on how Google firing someone for saying shit he knew was going to be controversial and would generate a reaction is "the leftist religion."
is it really pseudoscience though? it seems reasonable to acknowledge psychological differences between men and women (from your gender identity - not biologically), and he cited sources (I didn't read them, I would hope for his sake that they're credible)
there's no precedent for acknowledging and addressing psychological differences in the workplace though (at least for professional office work). I think basic professionalism is based on ignoring our differences for the sake of having a sterile "just the facts" meritocratic environment conducive to business.
giving the guy every possible benefit of the doubt, I think he's just guilty of being unprofessional, not misogynist. he's also guilty of being stupid for not realizing this was a minefield in the first place and walking right into it without being extremely careful with his phrasing and more sensitive to mainstream points of view. I can get behind firing him for being unprofessional/stupid, but I feel bad for him for the amount of negative press he's getting.
I would hope that a more narrowly focused document written in more formal language (math) with clearly-stated assumptions and a faq that addresses common misinterpretations will have fared better but these days even expecting this might be too much (which is sad!).
The one thing I feel that lost out on all this brouhaha was the author's point that companies should value "diversity of thoughts" rather than diversity of <the current hot topic class>!
I read the article which attempts to establish as fact very clearly unsubstantiated subjective claims. Never mind the toxicity -- the dude is just flat wrong.
"Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group."
I totally agree, and this individual got his due.
Indeed. I also felt reminded of dynamics in the realm of religion.
I'm trying to figure out where the next best place to work is going to be.