It's funny, reading this column, I can't help thinking of this as a new form of McCarthyism, where if you were seen to be a communist sympathiser, you would be fired and prevented from finding another job in the industry.
Yeah, this guy who lost his job has already gotten new offers. This is even considering that this whole incident brought to light the fact that he lied about getting a PhD from Harvard, which is itself grounds for firing the guy.
You may also find funny this extra bit of irony not covered in the article. NPR tweeted that some women at Google were so upset by the memo that they stayed home from work. Well, at least they didn't play to their stereotype of being overly emotional.
> NPR tweeted that some women at Google were so upset by the memo that they stayed home from work. Well, at least they didn't play to their stereotype of being overly emotional.
I definitely see the humour, but this is necessarily not just a women's thing.
When we as a society increasingly give the power to the offended to decide what is OK and not OK to say, you should not be surprised to find that on average people will be more careful about what and how they communicate, to the point of people imposing self censorship on them selves.
The effect of this on large scale is that because in general people are now exposed to less "hard" speech or statements, they also become mentally less "rugged". Their minds are simply not trained to handle normal discourse or disagreement any more.
And therefore what passes as normal conversation in the rest of the world, is now a fireable offence in Silicon Valley.
And thus people in SV will self censor even more. And become even more sensitive. Rinse and repeat. This kind of stuff is just not healthy. How are you going to we break the cycle?
This isn't "society," this is just the left. You will notice the right elected the "grab them by the pussy" guy. I'm not concerned because I'm not a leftist, so watching the left destroy itself only makes me more hopeful.
This episode is going to be a shining example when the conversations return to media bias. CNN, for example, referred to this as a "sexist manifesto" and an "anti-diversity manifesto." Meanwhile the actual memo mostly suggested that if Google wanted to make the company more appealing to women they should offer more part time positions because women tend to choose a different work life balance than men, something that is statistically provable. You could hardly be more benign. I think the right-wing phrase "hate facts" is going to start leaking into the vernacular.
"To me, if you read it and are completely outraged or uniformly in favor, then you are part of the problem. If you can read anyone's opinion, spread out over 10 pages, and find nothing with which you agree, then you're almost certainly not thinking. Similarly, if you can read this guy's entire memo and find yourself blindly nodding, then you probably aren't using your brain either."
Two populations can have the same median and average score on fit for a criterion. However, if they have a different distribution, let's say population A has a 'normal' distribution while population B has a U-Shaped distribution, then after the application of a high pass filter with a cutout above the shared median, you will be left with proportionally higher residue of population B than of population A and unbiased sampling of the result will reflect this. Applying a high-pass filter below the median will show an inverse result. A high-pass filter with cut-off at the median will result in a 50/50 result between A and B remainders. As always, statistics do not say anything about any individual in any of the populations. Statistics does also not address the potential underlying causes of the distribution differences. Using statistical arguments to judge individuals is usually referred to as prejudice or discrimination. Many countries have adopted laws and regulations to curb some select forms of discrimination, while permitting others. In the scenario where a high-pass filter far above the median is applied, while at the same time a 50/50 distribution of the outcome is targeted, the observation that, regardless of the mechanisms employed, members of B are actively discriminated against would be correct. Whether that discrimination is desirable or not is debatable. How distributions are realy shaped to a criterion is measurable in theory, but in reality prone to biases especially in highly 'politicized' environments.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 61.3 ms ] threadI definitely see the humour, but this is necessarily not just a women's thing.
When we as a society increasingly give the power to the offended to decide what is OK and not OK to say, you should not be surprised to find that on average people will be more careful about what and how they communicate, to the point of people imposing self censorship on them selves.
The effect of this on large scale is that because in general people are now exposed to less "hard" speech or statements, they also become mentally less "rugged". Their minds are simply not trained to handle normal discourse or disagreement any more.
And therefore what passes as normal conversation in the rest of the world, is now a fireable offence in Silicon Valley.
And thus people in SV will self censor even more. And become even more sensitive. Rinse and repeat. This kind of stuff is just not healthy. How are you going to we break the cycle?
This episode is going to be a shining example when the conversations return to media bias. CNN, for example, referred to this as a "sexist manifesto" and an "anti-diversity manifesto." Meanwhile the actual memo mostly suggested that if Google wanted to make the company more appealing to women they should offer more part time positions because women tend to choose a different work life balance than men, something that is statistically provable. You could hardly be more benign. I think the right-wing phrase "hate facts" is going to start leaking into the vernacular.
This.
(Ah right, a Barnum statement.)