There’s a billion other things to talk about with Americans besides your President or politicians. Culture, history, science, technology, gaming, entertainment, just generally Talkin’ Bout Stuff.
And it’s not like my conversations with Canadians are all about Justin Trudeau, and when I’m talking to Britons it’s not usually about Theresa May & The Brexit Travelling Roadshow.
Sinclair himself was vexed when rather than being concerned for the workers’ plights, the reading public was upset at the tainted products.
Happens sometimes when you write a screed.
Yeah, that is sad. It speaks to how selfish humanity can be. Although I’m glad something good came out of it (food safety regulations.) It probably did have a positive impact on the workers as well.
I believe the Emmit Till painting has been mentioned before on this thread. Well, it isn’t enough that the artist removed the painting and apologized for it–“activists” will not be satisfied with anything short of ending her career.
Here’s one.
n Saturday, Motherboard reported that an anti-diversity manifesto penned by James Damore, a software engineer at Google, had gone “internally viral” at the company—and then, after Gizmodo obtained and published the 10-page document, it went viral-viral. The screed aired its author’s qualms with diversity and inclusion initiatives at Google, programs he deemed a waste of time because women are inherently less suited for technical roles than men. Or as he put it, in a faux-measured tone: “I’m simply stating 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.” Throughout the memo, Damore dismisses internal programs that are supposed to address race and gender disparities at Google.
By Monday evening, Google had fired Damore, he confirmed to Bloomberg, after Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his memo violated the firm’s code of conduct. But that came after the company had let the document circulate for days. After it leaked to the press, it generated so much blowback that Pichai cut his family vacation short to deal with the uproar.
Firing an employee who made it clear he felt many of his co-workers were inferior was the right move, and it says something about what Google wants to be as a company. That someone felt comfortable disseminating the document in the first place, however, says even more about the company Google currently is. And the entire episode crystalizes the reckoning Silicon Valley is currently enduring, over why so many of the most forward-thinking companies in the world simply can’t seem to treat all of their employees equally and decently.
I’m sorry, but this is fucking stupid. Damore’s piece was not anti-diversity. At no point did he claim that his coworkers were inferior. In fact, he goes out of his way to say:
Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating 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. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
And:
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: […]
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… kind of exactly the opposite.
But yeah, that “screed” got him fired from google, and a massive denunciation all over the press, with responses ranging from milquetoast “google has the right to fire him” articles on the likes of Vox to dishonest misrepresentations on Slate to this absurd mess which dodges the science but has this to say:
What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”
I read that memo probably three times by now, and I cannot for the life of me find what he’s talking about. No, you moron, he explicitly goes out of his way to avoid saying that! Short of taking a multiple-page diversion about bell curves, I don’t know how he could have made it clearer! What kind of wimpy fucking culture do you have at google where this kind of writing would lead to you saying this?!
And as for its impact on you: Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.
This memo’s purpose was not to create a fucking hostile work environment, that’s an evidence-based look at various practices at google with an evaluation that maybe aiming for a 50:50 male:female spread in software engineering is a stupid idea, and the methods google is using aren’t great! If anyone’s creating a hostile work environment, it’s the people who would want to punch him in the face over something as basic as this.
(What the hell, let’s take that detour. Men are on average stronger than women. That doesn’t mean that Rhonda Rousey wouldn’t kick my ass, it just means that women, on average, have less muscle mass than men. That’s biology. It’s not socialized, it’s not a matter of diet or exercise, it’s just how humans are built. That doesn’t mean Rhonda Rousey doesn’t belong in our local MMA dojo, or on the circuit, any more than it means you should put my flabby ass in the ring with her. Inner-group differences far outstrip inter-group differences. That doesn’t mean the inter-group differences aren’t there! When it comes to things like interest in coding or aptitude for math, you have two very broad bell curves that are ever so slightly offset. It doesn’t have to be a huge offset for the selection at the 90th percentile to be extremely biased in favor of one gender or another.)
FWIW on the science, four scientists in relevant fields weighed in here, and they’re all on his side.
Now, granted, it’s not great optics that the first interview this guy has is with Stefan “Woman who sleep with assholes are going to fucking end this race” Molyneux, but this kind of public crucifixion seems grossly unwarranted.
You should know by participating on this board that reading comprehension is poor. And in many cases deliberately so.
He was guilty of badthink. That’s doubleplusungood, and an example needed to be made.
In actuality, Google probably just looked at the numbers of SJW types in the company and the number of likely conservatives, and decided which group they would rather piss off. Silicon valley is the epicenter of SJW bullshit, and Google can’t risk being blacklisted by potential employees or being faced with angry mobs protesting on their campus, so they chose to sacrifice this guy on the altar of political correctness.
I hope he sues their asses off, because California law explicitly protects people from being fired over their political views. Of course, when the law was written I’m sure they thought they were protecting lefties from the evil right wing corporate masters, but hey, the law is the law.
Did the memo include a great deal of research on the effects of sociocultural biases on the representation of women in various jobs? Did it contrast the effect of these biases relative to the inherent gender differences that are measured across cultures? It just wasn’t a very thoughtful essay and he got canned for it. If you seek to discuss a problem, then discuss the whole problem. Otherwise, it isn’t rationality, it’s just politics. This is what happens to people when they behave in a manner that contrasts to their workplace culture. Too bad.
Budget Player Cadet, one of the scientists in the column you cite talks about race as a biological concept. That alone is enough to discredit him. None of the scientists are anthropologists or from similar fields, who study the myriad ways in which culture affects our behaviors, interests, and even brain structure.
The problem with reducing human differences to simple biology is that it doesn’t work. I don’t deny that there are structural differences in male and female brains. However, I’m not convinced those differences are necessarily all that meaningful - women’s brains are also smaller, but there’s no observable difference in overall intelligence between the genders. I am also reminded of Franz Boas showing that skull shape could be changed within a generation or two. In other words, environment and culture can determine structure.
By labelling all human differences as biologically inherent, you neatly do away with the need to discuss how our culture unfairly rewards some people while unfairly penalizing others. If women aren’t biologically as fit to be high level software engineers, you don’t have to consider the ways in which your own behavior drives women away. And it does. For an obvious example, it is well known that our subconscious biases affect our objectivity. When symphonies started holding blind auditions, suddenly they started hiring more women who played stereotypically male instruments. Google apparently has peer review, where what your coworkers say affects your promotions and raises. Female employees are already going to have to deal with their coworkers’ and bosses’ biases. If those people refuse to even accept that they have those biases - because the differences they see are objective and biologically inherent - then the only way for those biases to be overcome is for the woman to be much better than her male colleagues.
Bolded are things I did not say and would not agree with. Italics are the things I myself brought up upthread. Please reread my post and try again.
So what? When Boozy McDrunkard slams his car into someone at 90mph, his purpose was not to commit murder, but rather to get home from Joe’s Bar as expeditiously as possible. That does not change the fact that he will be judged in accordance with the results rather than the intent of his actions.
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What kind of wimpy fucking culture do you have at google where this kind of writing would lead to you saying this?!
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The point is that the piece is about as neutral, fact-based, and unemotional as possible. The science is not grossly wrong. It doesn’t, as many outlets continue to imply, discount the skills of his female coworkers. It doesn’t even deny that sexism exists or is a factor. And for that, he loses his job, and has a former higher-up tell him that he’s essentially a persona-non-grata, and that his coworkers might respond with physical violence.
Because of this.
That’s insane. If this creates a hostile work environment, the problem is everyone else.
I think Scott Alexander put it well:
You compare math and coding ability and interest with strength differences in that you say they both have a biological basis. No one’s arguing about strength. However, neither has anyone proven that gender or racial based differences in intellectual ability are actually biological. We know for a fact that learned biases affect both personal achievement and others’ perception of achievement. It’s a real, even quantifiable, effect. At the point the science is at now, ignoring sociological factors in favor of biological for intellectual achievement of any kind is like blaming a heat wave for the temperature when you’re standing in an active volcano. There may be a heat wave, and, if so, that would make it hotter, but that’s not really a relevant issue until you get away from the lava. Until we’re a hell of a lot closer to true equality of treatment, we can’t even quantify the biological aspects of the gender gap in STEM. So things like the Google memo are harmful because they are lazy and ignoring the bigger, more relevant issues.
And what are the bigger, more relevant issues in regards to Google specifically? Google has hired about as many women as you’d expect given the number of women vs. men who are qualified. The problem is not with Google, it’s when women choose their majors. That’s where the societal biases come in. Google has done their part.
Yep. It’s not even the firing that pisses me off, it’s this idea that if someone says something sexist or racist that doesn’t even cross the line into hate, but just expresses ignorance, that that person should be basically destroyed.
Google doesn’t want James Damore to work for them given his views. Fine. But if he can’t get work anywhere else in his field, that’s going to expose a serious problem. I realize the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to the private sector, but if all of society can band against you and destroy you over your opinions, then we don’t have freedom of speech in any meaningful sense.
We should be careful what we say because we don’t want to be assholes and we don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. Having to be careful what we say because one ill-considered argument can literally ruin our lives makes a mockery of freedom.
It’s time to fight fire with fire. Companies tend to stay out of political controversies because you inevitably end up pissing half your customers off. But on PC issues, only one half is willing to threaten boycotts. It’s time for the other half to do so as well. Companies like Mozilla and Google say they fire people because those people don’t represent their values. Well, let’s see how much they actually mean it by making them pay a price for their principles.
Where does the brain come from? Is it built from physical components according to physics or magic?
Didn’t he also spam said manifesto to multiple employees in his company?
Let’s step away from ability for a moment, and focus instead on interest. Let’s assume that women are, biologically, just as good at coding as men. There’s no reason not to believe this. So where does the gap come from? And while we’re at it, why are 80% of vet students female? Why are 75% of resident pediatricians female? Is it because of social factors and sexism?
I could rehash this whole spiel, but instead I’m just going to link to this article. The basic gist of it is that there’s non-trivial evidence that the difference in the number of high-tier software engineers has a lot to do with what men and women are interested in, and that those interests are in no small part dictated by biology. Hell, there’s even evidence that this:
Is nonsense, because the gender gap doesn’t actually get worse between high school and major programming jobs.
Does it happen at the college level? About 20% of high school students taking AP Computer Science are women. The ratio of women graduating from college with computer science degrees is exactly what you would expect from the ratio of women who showed interest in it in high school (the numbers are even lower in Britain, where 8% of high school computer students are girls). So differences exist before the college level, and nothing that happens at the college level – no discriminatory professors, no sexist classmates – change the numbers at all.
Does it happen at the high school level? There’s not a lot of obvious room for discrimination – AP classes are voluntary; students who want to go into them do, and students who don’t want to go into them don’t. There are no prerequisites except basic mathematical competency or other open-access courses. It seems like of the people who voluntarily choose to take AP classes that nobody can stop them from going into, 80% are men and 20% are women, which exactly matches the ratio of each gender that eventually get tech company jobs.
Rather than go through every step individually, I’ll skip to the punch and point out that the same pattern repeats in middle school, elementary school, and about as young as anybody has ever bothered checking. So something produces these differences very early on? What might that be?
Seriously.