I don’t get what you’re saying. Is there any evidence at all which argues against there being biological differences between men and women?
If there isn’t, then all this “weight of evidence” stuff doesn’t apply. Bottom line remains that the notion that there could be differences is plausible and there’s no reason at all to assume that these don’t account for differences in aptitude/interest.
No one is arguing against the existence of biological differences. And no one is making decisions in the real world as to that abstract question.
What real people are making decisions about is whether very specific traits that real people have, such as interest in math, are driven by biological differences or not. On that question, yes, there is a ton of evidence that differences are driven by socialization.
People like the manifesto author want to discount that social evidence and rely on things like his off-the-cuff theories about evolutionary psychology. Students of the history of science will recognize the high likelihood that such unproven hypotheses are just longstanding social prejudice rolled into whatever scientific fad is popular.
The point of the firing is to forestall this whole “weighing the evidence” stuff altogether. It doesn’t matter that he cited - the management at Google believes that mentioning the possibility is hate speech, or whatever they want to call it.
That’s part of the point of what this engineer posted - the culture at Google is such that you simply cannot discuss any point of view on diversity that isn’t parroting back PC clichés. No disagreement, no dissent, not even any discussion. This is what diversity means at Google.
Regards,
Shodan
This is dead right, but the conclusions I would draw from it is exactly the opposite: I think that the desire of modern Americans to be antiracist, anti-sexist, xenophilic etc. leads them to be, uh, less than objective in assessing the data and excessively willing to overweight studies they agree with and underweight studies they don’t, and that liberals should therefore work extra hard in trying to see the merit in studies whose conclusions they disagree with. Unless you don’t think your side has pre-existing moral commitments that unfortunately colour the way you interpret data.
Cultural conservatives do this too, by the way.
That’s where you’re wrong. Because if someone is saying “if the percentage of women is less than X% then that’s evidence that there’s bias at play”, then that’s an assumption that “less than X%” cannot be based on biology. And if the next step is “to counteract this bias we will introduce such-and-such programs aimed at boosting female employment” then that’s a decision in the real world which is based on that “abstract question”.
No, the only necessary premise is that biology is less likely as an explanation, which makes bias more likely. They need not assume that it cannot be biology.
Indeed, this was precisely your point from earlier! People have to make decisions based on imperfect information and go with what’s more likely, not what’s conclusive.
Why would longstanding social prejudices be so definitive in this one field? Fields like pediatrics, pharmacist, and veterinarian are all jobs that pay more than software engineer and have higher social status. Yet, the science predicts that they would have more females in them, and that is what is the case.
Science says that females are less interested in thing oriented professions like computer science but why is that a bad thing?
The science also says that the more gender equal a society is the more there is a gap in the type of professions men and women choose. If social prejudices are standing in the way of women in western democracies, why aren’t the much stronger social prejudices in poor countries holding those women back?
The general trend since about the early 1990s (when the Minnesota twin studies started rolling in) has been to reduce our estimates of the impact of socialization on behavior, not to increase it. You could still hold the viewpoint, in 1985, that the heritability of most cognitive and behavioural traits, for example IQ, was near-zero (many people did). No one really believes that any more (bracketing gender and ethnic differences for the moment).
I think as we learn more about expression of the specific genes involved (and as you point out, a lot of the work here is going to be done by Chinese researchers who lack our ethical and moral restraints) the trend is going to be to attribute more and more gender differences in psychological and cognitive traits to nature rather than nurture. I’m a biologist and you can trust me that biologists talk about this stuff all the time fairly openly: it’s not all that controversial. Ethnic differences are a different story, which I’m agnostic about, but that question will be eventually solved as well one way or another. Not by changes in ideology but by science.
I think your judgments about national cultures, including American culture, are quite wrong. In America, outside of a few isolated subcultures, racist and sexist attitudes remain far more likely to influence the production of knowledge than antiracist or antisexist ones.
This too is a debate that social liberals and conservatives have been having for more than a century! Lots of people thought Abraham Lincoln was wildly biased toward antiracism and that America had gone too far in that direction. Every few decades, social conservatives decide that the social liberals were right a few decades earlier, but that dammit conservatives are right this time.
He is not relying on off the cuff theories about evolutionary psychology.
Here is what a journalist with a PhD in neuroscience, Debra Soh, said about the essay:“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.”
That doesn’t apply in this context. What evidence at all do you have that biology is “less likely”? At best - meaning if you insist on completely dismissing all evidence and studies to the contrary - you can say biology is an unknown. OK. But have you got any evidence at all that men and women have the same aptitude and interest in these fields? If not, then your premise about likelihood is based on nothing. And, as previous, you’re using this premise to actively discriminate.
Right, and if you read any journal article on biological gender differences in personality, you’ll find that none of them are written as though they’re presenting anything remarkable or unusual. Sex differences are taken for granted. (N.B. This doesn’t mean that they’re right. Scientists disbelieved plate tectonics when it was first proposed. But it means that in this case my priors are going to be that the biological explanation for sex differences among computer science majors is correct).
That brains have differences by gender does not mean that preferences for computer science (or any other specific preference) are based on biology.
Of course. But that means that it’s completely plausible that it is based on differences in biology. And that means that you can’t use a given imbalance as compelling evidence that bias is at work, since it’s completely plausible that the imbalance is based on differences in biology.
Not too long ago I worked for engineers in an R&D department. They were all male, and I am not, and my main function was to keep them tethered to the world that existed outside of their immediate projects. So I was reading the memo with that past experience in mind, thinking I might be of some help here, but no. Our people could write better than this Harvard guy, and I think anyone in the company could articulate their objections more clearly. If this work is standard among Google professionals, let them devour each other, it’s no great loss…but I suspect it isn’t standard. Anyone mentioning things like women having more neuroticism and “conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness” and such, in a company memo, is probably in it for the lulz.
Or maybe if you’re going to disagree, do it in a way that doesn’t alienate and belittle 1/3 of the company by stating they tend to be more neurotic, handle stress poorly, and assigning them the traits you say should not be valued.
How else would you do it? It’s not like these were gratuitous jabs - this was the substance of the guy’s point.
The issue he was addressing was the imbalance in hiring. If he was going to address this by saying it was not due to bias, then he had to point to things of this sort.
Ten Fucking Pages??? 
:eek: :smack:
When I release mine, it will be no more than 2 pages.
Why is it that some folks on the political left like to lump Asians and white people together in the same category, with regards to hiring in the tech sector, affirmative action, etc.?
It’s like they’re saying, “Yes, Asians are technically a racial minority, but they’re not *reeeaally *a minority.”
It’s interesting to note that among tech jobs at Google white people are underrepresented actually under represented. 52% at Google vs 62% for the US population. The disparity comes from Asians and Indians being vastly over represented.