If you’re talking in general, then the average MIT student will be much more qualified than the average community college student. But that doesn’t mean that 100% of the MIT students are qualified and 0% of the community college students are qualified. No doubt there are genius programmers at community college (and in high school, and working at McDonalds, etc), but they will be rarer and harder to find. A company with the resources of Google can spend the time and money to find geniuses in less-likely places. But if Google could only hire from MIT or community colleges, they would pick MIT.
The same basic argument is also true for sexism.
I stopped in 1980 because that’s about where the current set of issues started emerging. But if you want to set the figure at 1968, that’s fine with me. My point is that all of the issues that have been largely resolved, starting with slavery and extending through Jim Crow and housing discrimination, the antiracist side is considered correct by near-consensus including among those who become the new “liberals have gone too far” set.
Yes. I don’t think those will become the battlegrounds, for several reasons, but if they did then I think such caution is warranted because of the argument I’m making here.
You persist in misunderstanding my claim. I’m not claiming “momentum” or that every single possible position that is antiracist in the past has been correct. What I am saying is that all the big social controversies over racism that have been resolved through the last 150 years of history have been resolved in the liberals favor. Maybe that’s just a series of coin flips. Or, maybe, there’s a mechanism by which people are most consistently wrong when they take the anti-antiracist position. I think evidence for such a mechanism is pretty strong.
The phenomenon of one side being consistently on the losing side through a long period of history, and during which at intervals the consensus becomes that the side was previously wrong, over and over, doesn’t apply to very many issues outside of deeply held social prejudices. On most issues, like government involvement in infrastructure or antiwar sentiment (to name just two), there is nothing like social consensus about the correctness or incorrectness of historical positions in these controversies. And most individuals think that sometimes different sides of those arguments had the better of it in particular circumstances (you might think the pacifists were right about the Mexican-American War, but wrong about WWII). Antiracism seems to be different, in that there is widespread consensus that at pretty much every historical controversy it was the antiracists who had it right.
So that suggests that there’s something about the way people conceive of controversies over ending social prejudice that has them making the same errors through the generations when they oppose efforts to eliminate that prejudice.
I have no idea what you’re saying here. I pointed out that your assertion that social conservatives agree that social liberals were correct about all issues from a few decades ago is incorrect. I can’t really figure out what your response is, but if you’re saying that social conservatives have conceded about 1968 but not about 1980, then you’ve undermined your argument. 1980 is almost 40 years ago. If in the past 40 years there has not been this agreement, then your point is refuted.
As above, I dispute that this is correct.
As above, “the anti-racist position” is meaningless in the context of what’s right and what’s wrong.
I disagree that this is factually true either. There are many historical trends which have happened over similar periods or longer, in which society moved in one direction or another. It doesn’t indicate anything at all.
We seem to be unable to communicate successfully on this issue. Oh well.
Not a problem.
My posts are directed to the public at large.
You need to have it explained to you why someone who is less aggressive or less ambitious or who had less time on the job would be less likely to rise to management position? I think I will leave that to someone else.
This is another part that I am having difficulty seeing how you don’t understand. Perhaps smaller words will help - even if there were no sexism, there would be fewer women in the positions we are talking about.
Again I will gently suggest that you read your own cite. The cite does not say “it’s because they are black”.
A person from a less prestigious university is less likely to be able to do the job as someone from Stanford.
Sure, it’s possible. It’s possible that a high-school drop out could do the job as well as someone with a PhD. It is just less likely.
BTW, if you are going to put quotes around “unqualified”, I would appreciate it if you made it clear that the word is your own and not mine. I said “less qualified, on average”.
You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that there are only two kinds of applicants, unqualified, and everybody else. Most businesses do not share this misapprehension. They are looking, as a general rule, for something more than a warm body who can meet a minimum standard.
Google, by the way, agrees with this. They don’t want just anybody who can code and fog a mirror. They want somebody who can code and fog a mirror, is female, non-Asian, and non-white.
Regards,
Shodan
Programming as an extension of secretarial work has not been the case for at least 30 years but the percentage of women programmers has been going down for 35 years.
Women who have the intelligence to become programmers have many options for renumerative work and are capable of making an intelligent decision as to whether they would prefer computer software, pediatrics, or something else. We can either respect that decision or try to change society so they make a choice more in line with what males make. Our society has already spent hundreds of millions on trying to get them to make different choices and have not remotely succeeded. Shouldn’t that open us to the possibility that we should move toward the respect their decision option?
There is a very good article on the New York times Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O.
The most relevant thing about this particular case is encapsulated in these paragraphs:
Personally I suspect it has a lot to do with the decline of religion in Western society. These types of SJW causes give people a replacement source of moral satisfaction.
Does your thesis include right-wing SJW causes like anti-abortion protest and NRA hysteria?
This is almost certainly the case, but its not just the case for SJWs. It’s also the case for some culturally conservative causes (for example, the increasing resistance to mass immigration in Europe is, I think, a result of people in those countries increasingly seeking meaning in ethnicity rather than in religion). And of course it was true back in the day for secular ideologies like communism, fascism, liberalism, British imperialism etc…
Yes, it’s probably related; some people need to anchor their sense of morality into their beliefs, that leads to dogma and a strong reaction against anything that challenges them.
In the case of anti-abortion protests, no. To the contrary, they seem religion-affiliated. (I’m not sure if there has been a consistent increase in anti-abortion fervor over time. ISTM that the anti-abortion movement is largely in reaction to Roe v Wade, which is still in force.)
I don’t know much about “NRA hysteria”, but I doubt it. ISTM that pro-gun people are standing up for their own rights rather than those of others, and it wouldn’t provide that type of moral satisfaction.
This is what I mean by NRA hysteria.
I don’t think your thesis is anything more than an effort to be dismissive about left-wing views. There is lot of religious affiliation in SJW causes, and they are no more or less about “standing up for their own rights” than the NRA is.
That’s OK. 
I don’t think so. Possibly you’ve not understood me.
What I’m saying is that a white person who is riled up about discrimination against African Americans is not standing up for their own rights, and thus gets to feel a great moral satisfaction when doing something for that cause (or purporting to). And so on for straight activists for LBGT rights, male feminists etc. There are zillions of these. And since people get psychological satisfaction out of feeling morally upright, my suggestion is that this is a big motivator for these people. And further, that this need can also be filled by religious devotion, but that due to the decline of religion, people are looking for an alternative source of this good feeling, and many have found it in SJW causes.
My impression is that the NRA people are primarily gun owners themselves. A guy who is upset about someone coming to take away his gun might get worked up about it, but it’s not going to be a big source of moral satisfaction since it’s just about keeping what’s his. Therefore, it wouldn’t be connected to the decline of religion. But that’s just my impression, which is why I hedged a bit. If it should turn out that there are many non-gun owners who are similarly worked up about gun rights, then that might apply to them too.
One of the reasons the discrepancy is so hard for people to understand is that most people don’t realize how fast distribution tails get small. If we assume that there is a normal distribution of interest in computers since computer programmers make up 1% of the US population they are at the extreme tail of the distribution. This means even a small change in the interest level of the sexes can result in a massive imbalance.
As an illustration, say you were a basketball scout looking for men over 6’4" to teach basketball to. Should you go to India or Norway? Since there are 252 indians for every norwegian the obvious place to look is India. However, there is a difference in average height between the two countries, Norwegian males are on average 9% taller which is not a huge amount. Yet this change in the average height means that there are 100 times as many men over 6’4" in Norway than in India.
This has obvious implication in the Google debate since there are almost as many men as women in this country of working age so even a small change in the distribution center will result in a massive over representation.
Even the NTY opinion pages thinks Google did the wrong thing.
At least some people are still capable of reading and thinking.
OTOH, several Democratic congresswomen wrote to Google saying that firing this guy was a good first step but the fact that such a screed could even be written shows that there’s much more work to be done …
Some legal analysis of Damore’s lawsuit chances here.
You’re not saying anything that is incompatible what I’m saying. Yes, we should open to that possibility. Yes, we should respect female decision-making.
But that doesn’t mean we should just shrug when women say “Hey, there’s a culture here that makes it difficult to succeed in this industry if you happen to be a woman. Let’s try to fix this.” That is what a lot of gender diversity initiatives are trying to address. They aren’t trying to make genders 50:50 in the office.
Here is what I think is going on, and yes, some of what I’m about to say is colored by stereotypes of about coders and CS majors. (I went to an engineering school so I know some things about this group.)
The culture within tech companies is a direct reflection of the values, experiences, and backgrounds of the people who go into that field. Right now that is largely men. But are these men just like men who work in other, more gender-balanced professions, like law and medicine? I don’t think so. The computer geeks I went to undergrad with tended to be rather socially awkward and introverted. Their interests ran on the geeky side, rather than on sports and recreation. They didn’t do a lot of fraternizing with girls and not a whole of lot of dating, either. It isn’t exactly controversial that relating to women as people–rather than objects of desire–is a challenge for many geek guys. Sexism goes hand in hand with this.
That isn’t to say that all or even most tech men are like this. But all it takes is a sizable number to normalize certain attitudes and beliefs. If interrupting women when they speak in meetings is no big deal because “everyone does it”, then it’ll keep happening. When women complain about that and “everybody” ignores it, then you further promote a culture of sexism and exclusion.
The reason that increasing women’s presence in tech is important is precisely because that is that is a key to changing the culture. More women in the office makes it harder for sexist habits to continue unchecked. As a result, the workplace becomes less alienating to everyone, regardless of gender.