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One of my first exposures to this "manifesto" was on Twitter with someone starting a thread with "Google has a Nazi problem." The majority of the other response

One of my first exposures to this "manifesto" was on Twitter with someone starting a thread with "Google has a Nazi problem." The majority of the other responses I read either attacked the author, dismissed the entire text in whole, and/or refused to actually argue the paper's points because they saw them as so ridiculous or "obviously" wrong. I read the paper. I don't see at all how it relates to fascism, Trumpism, or whatever you want to call it. I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination. If there were factual inaccuracies in what the author wrote, why not discuss them? Why not use high-quality sources to validate your argument? I wish it was the opposite, but I don't have the time to research the psychological/sociological perspectives on these issues. Human civilization has grown thanks to being able to specialize. I specialize and (hopefully) make contributions in one field, but I depend on others that have specialized elsewhere to provide knowledge and resources I can depend on.

grey-area 9y ago
Since most of these threads are pretty content free, and you asked for it, here's a rebuttal, by a woman who's good at math. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3LAlcESJTBxIBg https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3... Of course men and women are different on average, but are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in tech? No.
- EddieRingle 9y ago
  Thanks! However after looking through the slide deck, it seems that the author tries to argue that because mathematic ability isn't so important in CS, biological differences can't explain the disparity between the men and women in CS. That's a quite a leap, I think. If CS doesn't involve a lot of math, what does it involve that might be impacted by biological or psychological causes? (P.S. I went to a STEM high school and I know plenty of women who are absolutely stellar in mathematics and science, so I know that's not the issue here.)
  - grey-area 9y ago
    No, that's not the argument, perhaps read all the slides, in particular slides 20/21. It's true that cs doesn't involve a lot of math, but that's really just a side point and a little in joke for mathematicians. The argument is the disparity is so small that it could not account for the massive disparity we see in tech. Re your question on biological or psychological causes, why limit your consideration to those areas? The evidence points to social or economic causes, given the large shifts in women over just a few decades: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
    - gdix 9y ago
      I read all the slides and I think the commenter raises a good point. If math doesn't matter a lot when it comes to CS, then why bother talking about it. Show me how many standard deviations apart men and women are when it comes to skills that lead to success in CS.
    - alpsgolden 9y ago
      When I looked into this a lot, looking into all sorts of data, reading tons of stuff, my conclusions were: 1. Women are generally more conscientious and studious. I've seen data they do more homework, get better grades, even in math, and are more likely to make the honor roll. 2. The more difficult the math test, and the higher the score bracket, the more men outscored women. Average SAT score for men was only a little higher. But among those scoring 800, men outnumbered women two-to-one (this has changed a bit, but they have also made the math test a lot easier, far more testers get an 800 math than get an 800 verbal). Then when looking at who gets a 100+ on the American Mathematics Competition tests, men dominated by about a 10 to 1 ratio. 3. I have observed throughout life that men seem a lot more likely to "geek out" on stuff -- whether that be coding all night for fun, editing Wikipedia articles, taking apart a mechanical device, trying to beat all the quests in an RPG, etc. This is inline with studies showing men to be much more system oriented. I have a hard time believing this is due to culture messaging because for a lot of these things men receive enormous cultural messaging that they are losers for being such geeks, yet they do it anyway because it is such fun. 4. Men tend to have higher variance in almost all things. More men at the top, more men at the bottom. 5. This Stanford article notes "Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. " http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... I think that skill becomes more important the harder a math test becomes, or the harder a programming project is. I think the 1970's style computer punch card programming, which was very corporate, and did not involve as much keeping large complicated systems in working memory, was less prone to creating a gender imbalance. It more favored conscientiousness. Whe computers became available in every household, men were much more prone to geek out and become expert programmers on their own time. This means the pipeline of programmers ends up being much more male dominated. Furthermore, the skills required to be a computer programmer at a top company like Google, require someone from the top percentiles in being able to juggle items in their head, and there are a lot more men in those percentiles than women. I think programming at Google is much more akin to doing well on the AMC than it is to answering an average SAT-level math problem. When we not the disparity in math ability is small, it obscures that the disparity at the very high ends is much larger.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  That is a lazy slide deck. From the paper it cites (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-14384-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-14384-001): > It is important for us to know that females begin in high school to perform less well than males on mathematical problem-solving tasks. Problem solving is critical for success in many mathematics-related fields, such as engineering and physics. In this sense, mathematics skills may continue to be a critical filter. It speculates that this may be because > the content of problem-solving items on those tests may have heavy representation of masculine-stereotyped content, which has been shown to produce better performance by males in some studies, although results on the issue are mixed So the Figure 1 the slide uses from the paper has smeared the critical skill, from a software-development perspective, across a large set of other math-related skills. The results of the paper with respect to that skill are inconclusive, not surprising since it's a 27-year-old meta-analysis. Surely there are better results to cite by now?
  - alpsgolden 9y ago
    Yeah, just reading the abstract tells a different story than the graph she uses. Google or a college level computer science course is specifically pulling from adults who are in the very top percentiles in logical/quantitative skills. The abstract of the paper notes that while the math difference is small among the total population: "differences favoring men emerged in high school and college" and "grew larger with increasingly selective samples, and were largest for highly selected samples and samples of highly precocious persons." So the slide deck obscures the fact that in the relevant sample, men have better skills, by including the general population (women, average folks) where there is no difference.
  - actuallyalys 9y ago
    Well, it's refuting a lazy argument. Why would computer science be so different from other STEM fields that have radically higher proportions of women? [0] In particular, why is math so much better? [1] If biological differences are so important, why has it varied so much over time, including a big decline since the 80s? [0] I mean, we know that gender roles play a big role in what jobs people do and that sexism is a problem in tech, so it's honestly kind of weird to think "actually, it's mostly caused by some hitherto unobserved large biological difference." Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity [2]. Even in countries with relatively large discrepancies, there's not a big difference. I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability [3]. An older study showed women and men scored similarly on an introductory class, but women were less likely to get an A or A+ [4]. A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems [5]. [0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-... [1]: Compare these tables for math and computer science: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab34.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab34.pdf and https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab33.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab33.pdf [2]: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/136/1/103/; http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/136/1/103/; PDF https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/publication/40906547_Cross-National_Patterns_of_Gender_Differences_in_Mathematics_A_Meta-Analysis/links/0a85e530ca35b7bdea000000/Cross-National-Patterns-of-Gender-Differences-in-Mathematics-A-Meta-Analysis.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/publi... [3]: http://www.pd.infn.it/~lacaprar/ProgettoScuola/Biblio/genderdiff_2003.pdf http://www.pd.infn.it/~lacaprar/ProgettoScuola/Biblio/gender... [4]: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED384389.pdf http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED384389.pdf [5]: http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/publications/Sullivan_Gender%20Differences%20Robotics_2016.pdf http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/publications/Sullivan_Gender%20...
- arnioxux 9y ago
  Rather than looking at the math ability distribution as a proxy, why not look at coding competition ability? They are pretty objective since an autograder doesn't know your gender and they are predictive of whether you can pass a tech interview since it's the same format. In that case, even at the IOI level (high school, so 14-18 year old kids) women are already severely underrepresented: https://www.quora.com/How-has-female-students-participation-and-achievement-in-the-IOI-trended-over-time https://www.quora.com/How-has-female-students-participation-... You see the same thing at the college level too (for example topcoder where they isn't even any possibility for a sexist team selection bias since anyone can just register and compete). In some sense, it makes it not tech industry's fault. It's a failure of our education/training pipeline where we are not training competitive women even from an early age.
  - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
    I see that you said "compete". Testosterone has effects on competition, so there could still be bias there. Competitions are overrepresented by people who think they can win. We are taught that confidence and overconfidence skews male.
    - gdix 9y ago
      So if confidence is a major factor, is it possible that affirmative action affects confidence negatively in the people that it is meant to support?
      - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
        I have no idea. Maybe? I wasn't taking a position on the debate either, just pointing out that specific argument could be problematic. Regardless, I'm opposed to affirmative action for many other reasons anyway.
    - Udik 9y ago
      > Testosterone has effects on competition, so there could still be bias there Oh. And that would be a biological, innate difference in behaviour between men and women, wouldn't it? And even if women are as good as men at maths or computer programming- which wouldn't surprise me much- can't they be just less interested in it, just in the same way they're less interested (as you seem to imply) in competition? And could I be as good as the average woman in teaching or as a nurse? Possible. Am I interested in it? No.
- naiveattack 9y ago
  Ugh. It doesn't matter how good your math is if your model is wrong. Here's an outline of what I believe to be a useful model, and some useful questions to ask, and experiments to run in real life to change things. +-------------------+ | | + | +---->X1+---+ | | | | | +-->Q | M+------+ | + | | | | v | | +--------+W | | ^ +---->X2+---+ | + | | | +-------------------+ M = male / female X1 = math ability X2, X3 ... Xn = other factors (analytical ability, ability to work in teams, ability to understand real problems, etc, also bias of interviewers against women) Q = performance on interview questions W = performance in real life work The slides, and most peoples argument is based on the model where there is only one factor math ability, which is why people go 'oh but that doesn't account for it / the disparity is so small'. The important question is how do all the factors ADD UP? Now, If Q does not correlate with W, fix your interview questions first. Then, if you want more women to do well in the interview, well, ... -- the wrong approach is to compromise the integrity of the interview, which compromises the company's business, and which is demeaning to women, although you could use this as a proxy to make the interview more comprehensive -- the correct approach is to investigate X1, Xn factors and train to remove these discrepancies earlier on way before the interview itself, if we decide that we want to. biases in the interview processes are only biases when removing them improves the correlation between Q and W Another thing to do is to change the nature of the work itself. In which case the factors and interview questions will change accordingly. Play to peoples' strengths! The nature of the work must include the performance of the team including the individuals as there may be a benefit to representation when it comes to solving problems of a crowd with varied people. Interestingly, the Google article covers a lot of this, and even suggests some changes that can be made. A large number of factors can quickly add up even if the individual factors as small. I welcome comments from the more knowledgable, but I feel that a lot of knee jerk reactions here are just taking individual statements from the argument and loudly saying NO, or saying well there's no difference here.
  - andkon 9y ago
- PyComfy 9y ago
  Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. Edsger W.Dijkstra, EWD498
- orangecat 9y ago
  Of course men and women are different on average Many people would disagree, and some would have you fired for saying that. As far as the presentation, it accurately notes that as far as we can tell, the average difference in ability between men and women is very small or zero. But there is compelling evidence that men and women do naturally differ in interests (the "people vs things" thing), which if true would directly lead to unequal representation in various fields.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    > Many people would disagree, and some would have you fired for saying that. This mentality is exactly why the Google enginner made the post. The company and many others like it are forming echo chambers where anyone with any opinions that go against the status quo is fired. That's ridiculous! Especially with something as nuanced as sex and gender. It is a known fact that there are physical[1], emotional, and psychological[2] differences in people around the world. If there are psychological and emotional differences between the genders, then why is it so surprising to think that they would overall have different career preferences? The fact that someone would fire an employee instead of let them question the boundary between biology and cultural influences is absurd. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology
bbctol 9y ago
Because you were on Twitter? The most annoying thing about this back-and-forth ping-ponging of increasing outrage is that everyone, on both sides, only reacts to the silliest arguments. Sturgeon's Law holds up pretty well for hot takes, and the majority of anything written on an issue is likely to be bad. If most of the responses you read struck you as irrational, that's a function of the infrastructure that sends you information more than the quality of either side.
- EddieRingle 9y ago
  There were quite a few Medium posts as well. But no, I completely agree with you. I've discussed with others recently about how I'd love to have a tool or place where I can search for a given assertion and see the (scientific) evidence for and against it, as well as related assertions and opposing assertions. And I'm not just talking about being able to "Google it". If I use Google or a general search engine then I have to wade through who knows how many links of ambiguous quality and/or bias.
  - CodeCube 9y ago
    If such a repository existed ... it would simply be dismissed as biased by whatever side of the argument it "debunked" ;)
    - brightball 9y ago
      The only way to avoid that would be to highlight the parts of the discussion that hadn't been studied or couldn't easily be replicated. In my experience, most heated arguments are based on perceptions where there is a gaping hole because science either can't or hasn't completely answered the question yet. That stuff gets fueled by articles leaving out certain numbers to show a desired conclusion. True or False isn't the problem. The problem is avoiding key points that you have to already be knowledgable enough to realize what's missing. That's how people end up with "facts" that are still wrong. You leave out important information to reinforce a bias and it will get reshared as "fact". Happens all the time with any topic that's even a little heated.
  - 9y ago
abhi3 9y ago
Whether there exist biological/psychological differences between sexes that affect career choices is a discussion that needs to be had in an academic setting rather than a political setting as the author sought to do (read the first section). Secondly, it does not belong in the work place where it is rightly perceived as an aggression by the female coworkers (Telling them the bar was lowered to recruit them, they are inherently inferior to men at the job etc etc.) Edit: To all the downvoters - I'll be charitable and assume that you are just subconsciously biased and not outright sexists. To see your bias in this situation just try to imagine that 40 years back some employee working at the Google of the day wrote such a manifesto against positive discrimination in favor of African Americans, citing all sorts of statistics claiming how they are lazy, lack commitment etc. Would you guys have wanted to 'hey let's talk about it' as well?
- rcoveson 9y ago
  Was the bar lowered to recruit female or minority candidates? That's not a rhetorical question and I don't presume to have an answer to it. It was, however, the subject of the original memo, which suggests that some policies or proposed policies exist that lower standards for diversity candidates in the author's opinion. One example is, in the author's words: "Setting org level OKRs for increased representation." If such policies do exist, is it not okay to acknowledge their existence and argue for or against their merit? As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive. There are likely scientific inaccuracies, as with any hastily written and/or poorly cited piece. But I think the author did, on the whole, as good a job as can be expected at staying academic in tone and content. Lampooning him as aggressive seems disingenuous.
  - vkou 9y ago
    > As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive. The entire premise of the manifesto is that one third of the company only has a job because of their gender. In what world is saying to thousands of people "We only hired you because you don't have male genitals" is not an aggression? Maybe it's not to people who don't give two shits about their work, or their accomplishments at it, or whether or not they'll have a job next week. Most people aren't in that category. Has you ever been in that kind of situation? Where somebody reduces your entire justification for existence to the color of your skin, or which chromosomes you've got?
splintercell 9y ago
> I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination. Because all positive discrimination is negative discrimination to someone else, so obviously when you are against discrimination you should be against positive discrimination too.
- drngdds 9y ago
  That's overly simplistic. If you know with good certainty that negative discrimination against a group is pervasive and manifests itself in a certain way (say, hiring bias (though I'm not arguing that this is the case in a particular instance; that's a separate debate)) it makes sense to have positive discrimination to counteract that.
  - naiveattack 9y ago
    This is a good point. Here's an open question: How do you know when you have enough positive discrimination? Do you just make sure that the representation of different groups is the same as in the population? This is a poor solution because it cannot be said that this would have been the distribution without negative discrimination. Also, along what lines would you now pick your categories? Would you ensure representation for latino lesbian women who speak spanish and like chocolate cake on tuesdays? Which is to say that the category can get arbitrarily small.
    - cakedoggie 9y ago
      This is probably what the debate is all about, and it is not an easy thing to answer. Some people say now, some people say not now, and they both have good reasons why.
  - splintercell 9y ago
    > If you know with good certainty that negative discrimination against a group is pervasive and manifests itself in a certain way But you're missing the point. All discrimination is aimed at individuals. Claiming that because individuals of group A have been negatively discriminated against, you don't balance it out by performing positive discrimination for them (even if it is exactly the same individuals), because you achieve that positive discrimination by performing negative discrimination against another set of individuals. If you notice that Zuckerberg rejected a person because she was a black woman, because she was black, and you counter that by somehow benefitting that woman, and having Zuckerberg pay some sort of penalty, then that is just and you have 'counteracted' Zuckerberg's negative discrimination. But if, after noticing that Zuckerberg rejected a person because she was a black woman, you penalize him and make him hire some another black woman over where a white woman would have been more qualified, then you have not 'counteracted' anything. You have performed negative discrimination against another set of individuals, under the color of 'positive discrimination'.
blablabla123 9y ago
It's great that the person stated his opinion. I regard him much higher than hypocrites who think and act the same, but pretend to be 1000% pc. It's not necessary to tediously counter-argue every single argument the author made. I'm sure you don't expect people to counter-argue overly long badly written texts by various political ideologists from today or the past. I'm convinced it suffices to just argue why summary is wrong or rather the opposite is true. As a matter of fact, other people have done this work for us, so instead of arguing it suffices to do a literature research. (I'm sure you know how to google feminism and that you might have an hour or two time to watch Youtube) But I'm happy to bring my own crude arguments: - people, both male and female, oftentimes don't do things because they think they are not able to do them - teachers have a bias towards encouraging certain stereotypes - the whole environment pushes certain behaviours and interests on people Speaking for myself (being male) my Physics teacher said nothing when I told him in class that I'm going to study Physics. He was encouraging the other people who planned to study that or an Engineering subject, not me. Even my father discouraged me from studying it because he thought my grades where not good enough and that I wouldn't be that kind of person. Still I managed to study very quickly and successfully. During my studies I also learned, that my thinking is different than other peoples'. I think more in pictures, whereas my peers in Theoretical Particle Physics rather thought in texts. At work I often get overtalked and still deliver over-average results because I emphasise being polite, use proper argument and I look 10 years younger than I am. This really sucks and this proves to me that if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.
- blusterXY 9y ago
  > tediously counter-argue every single argument I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism"). Instead we get what you offer: off-hand casual assertions that there must exist research which runs against large-n and replicable science-driven studies using the only mainstream and empirically-supported model of personality that seems to work. Basically, this makes criticisms like yours on-par with climate change denial in the sense that they either fail to grasp the point being made or offer personal observations on irrelevant points as rebuttal. It is bad news for Google either way, since the author is correct to point out among many other things that high levels of "agreeability" are demonstrably bad for anyone to have in corporate environments, and if this affects men in the same way it affects women then why are the solutions gender-excluding? Anyway, perhaps you should research the Big-5 model if you aren't familiar with it: very interesting new research coming out on it continually.
Transfinity 9y ago
> If there were factual inaccuracies in what the author wrote, why not discuss them? Why not use high-quality sources to validate your argument? In essence, because it's a 10-page document chock full of cherry-picked data and nonsensical conclusions - that's a ton of work to debunk. Moreover, it's just one of many such documents (though this one going viral means it probably deserves special attention). The problem is true of fake news and alternate facts in general. From Alberto Brandolini: "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
currymj 9y ago
calling someone a Nazi is a strong accusation, but the guy did repeat some extreme-right talking points. one of the footnotes basically repeats the argument that "cultural Marxism" has taken over the left. This is a common right-wing talking point often connected to an antisemitic conspiracy theory involving the Frankfurt School. I doubt the guy is an actual Nazi, but just like you I'm not specialized enough to evaluate his psychological and biological claims (although I'd guess they're overstated, given how many psychological experiments fail to replicate). Just, hearing talking points I've heard from actual literal Nazis made me a lot more inclined to dismiss his views, which I think is a safe heuristic.
- gerso 9y ago
  Huh? I assume you're talking about footnote #7: [7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.” That's a pretty standard, if exaggerated, take on the decline of communism from a capitalist perspective. Would anyone on the left even disagree with what he says about how Marxism was expanded?
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    He seems to be claiming that black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed and it was all made up by Communists to take down capitalism. You can probably find some people who agree with individual parts of that but if you get a full bingo then you're basically dealing with a Nazi. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Ma...
    - smsm42 9y ago
      > He seems to be claiming that black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed and it was all made up by Communists to take down capitalism. No he doesn't. He says Marxists participated in gender/race politics, and the ultimate goal of Marxists was destruction of capitalism. Which, btw, if you read any of real Marxists - who aren't exactly hiding, thanks (not ironically, they shouldn't be hiding) to the wide freedoms allowed to all of us by American democracy, that's exactly what you will see, in very plain words - they blame capitalism for these problems and want it to be eliminated. That doesn't mean, of course, that everybody who participates in gender/race politics is a Marxist. There are a lot of folks that legitimately want, e.g., for gays not to be booted off work for being gay, without necessarily buying into the whole eternal oppressor/oppressed identity/class struggle narrative. Neither it means - and nowhere it was claimed - that "black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed". > then you're basically dealing with a Nazi. You just called somebody a Nazi because he said Marxists are lefties and are against capitalism. Way to go.
RangerScience 9y ago
> I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination. I don't think it works that way. This version is problematically simplistic: I have +10 and you have -2; now add Affirmative Action and I've got +8 and you've got +2. I'm still not receiving negative discrimination. But, you're also missing the follow-on effects; specifically: 1) People who are not actually deserving on their own merits, but were getting in due to the privilege boost, are no longer present. 2) People who are actually deserving on their own merits, but were not getting due to other disadvantages, are now present. Overall merit of my coworkers goes up; I'm now working with better people and so get better/faster myself. It didn't start as a zero-sum game; it's not going to end up as a zero-sum game. Remember the myths of the meritocracy; success is not limited to the deserving, and the deserving are not limited from failure.
- ameister14 9y ago
  That's not how affirmative action works. Using your example, for most of the population, there is no detraction from their score. It only comes into effect if you have +1 and they have 0 or +1, and it becomes you with +1 and them with +2. If you had +10 and they had 0, you would stay at +10 and they would go to +2, taking the place of someone else that only had +1 and leaving you alone. For you in this case it isn't a 0-sum because you never lose. For the people on the edge, it is 0-sum because they are on the edge of not getting the position. Any advantage given to someone else removes them from contention.
  - RangerScience 9y ago
    We're using different notation systems. I'm thinking "modifier to the dice roll", you're thinking "score". This is making it real hard to understand what you're saying. What is your understanding of how AA works?
    - ameister14 9y ago
      Ah, I see. As I understand it, AA usually comes into play when there is little separating two candidates. Most other qualities are the same or the historically advantaged candidate is only slightly better than the disadvantaged one. To counter this historical disadvantage, the candidate possessing it is given additional 'points' which push them beyond the other. All other things being equal or close to equal, this becomes the tie-breaker.
PKop 9y ago
It relates to Trumpism because this is why Trump won: People are sick to death of speech codes, wrong think, collective mob mentality enforcing what is and isn't ok to talk about and which opinions you have to hold to be in line with acceptable thought in media, corporations, silicon valley, education, etc. As you stated, the facts of the matter don't have relevance here. And if he was wrong, why not discuss it rationally and unemotionally. Or even disagree and move on. But no, now he's fired for having the wrong unspeakable points of view that do not fall in line with the state religion of mandatory gender quotas.

grey-area 9y ago

Since most of these threads are pretty content free, and you asked for it, here's a rebuttal, by a woman who's good at math. https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3LAlcESJTBxIBg https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slideshow/embed_code/key/3... Of course men and women are different on average, but are they different enough to justify the massive disparity in tech? No.

EddieRingle 9y ago
Thanks! However after looking through the slide deck, it seems that the author tries to argue that because mathematic ability isn't so important in CS, biological differences can't explain the disparity between the men and women in CS. That's a quite a leap, I think. If CS doesn't involve a lot of math, what does it involve that might be impacted by biological or psychological causes? (P.S. I went to a STEM high school and I know plenty of women who are absolutely stellar in mathematics and science, so I know that's not the issue here.)
- grey-area 9y ago
  No, that's not the argument, perhaps read all the slides, in particular slides 20/21. It's true that cs doesn't involve a lot of math, but that's really just a side point and a little in joke for mathematicians. The argument is the disparity is so small that it could not account for the massive disparity we see in tech. Re your question on biological or psychological causes, why limit your consideration to those areas? The evidence points to social or economic causes, given the large shifts in women over just a few decades: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
  - gdix 9y ago
    I read all the slides and I think the commenter raises a good point. If math doesn't matter a lot when it comes to CS, then why bother talking about it. Show me how many standard deviations apart men and women are when it comes to skills that lead to success in CS.
  - alpsgolden 9y ago
    When I looked into this a lot, looking into all sorts of data, reading tons of stuff, my conclusions were: 1. Women are generally more conscientious and studious. I've seen data they do more homework, get better grades, even in math, and are more likely to make the honor roll. 2. The more difficult the math test, and the higher the score bracket, the more men outscored women. Average SAT score for men was only a little higher. But among those scoring 800, men outnumbered women two-to-one (this has changed a bit, but they have also made the math test a lot easier, far more testers get an 800 math than get an 800 verbal). Then when looking at who gets a 100+ on the American Mathematics Competition tests, men dominated by about a 10 to 1 ratio. 3. I have observed throughout life that men seem a lot more likely to "geek out" on stuff -- whether that be coding all night for fun, editing Wikipedia articles, taking apart a mechanical device, trying to beat all the quests in an RPG, etc. This is inline with studies showing men to be much more system oriented. I have a hard time believing this is due to culture messaging because for a lot of these things men receive enormous cultural messaging that they are losers for being such geeks, yet they do it anyway because it is such fun. 4. Men tend to have higher variance in almost all things. More men at the top, more men at the bottom. 5. This Stanford article notes "Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. " http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... I think that skill becomes more important the harder a math test becomes, or the harder a programming project is. I think the 1970's style computer punch card programming, which was very corporate, and did not involve as much keeping large complicated systems in working memory, was less prone to creating a gender imbalance. It more favored conscientiousness. Whe computers became available in every household, men were much more prone to geek out and become expert programmers on their own time. This means the pipeline of programmers ends up being much more male dominated. Furthermore, the skills required to be a computer programmer at a top company like Google, require someone from the top percentiles in being able to juggle items in their head, and there are a lot more men in those percentiles than women. I think programming at Google is much more akin to doing well on the AMC than it is to answering an average SAT-level math problem. When we not the disparity in math ability is small, it obscures that the disparity at the very high ends is much larger.
AlexCoventry 9y ago
That is a lazy slide deck. From the paper it cites (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-14384-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1990-14384-001): > It is important for us to know that females begin in high school to perform less well than males on mathematical problem-solving tasks. Problem solving is critical for success in many mathematics-related fields, such as engineering and physics. In this sense, mathematics skills may continue to be a critical filter. It speculates that this may be because > the content of problem-solving items on those tests may have heavy representation of masculine-stereotyped content, which has been shown to produce better performance by males in some studies, although results on the issue are mixed So the Figure 1 the slide uses from the paper has smeared the critical skill, from a software-development perspective, across a large set of other math-related skills. The results of the paper with respect to that skill are inconclusive, not surprising since it's a 27-year-old meta-analysis. Surely there are better results to cite by now?
- alpsgolden 9y ago
  Yeah, just reading the abstract tells a different story than the graph she uses. Google or a college level computer science course is specifically pulling from adults who are in the very top percentiles in logical/quantitative skills. The abstract of the paper notes that while the math difference is small among the total population: "differences favoring men emerged in high school and college" and "grew larger with increasingly selective samples, and were largest for highly selected samples and samples of highly precocious persons." So the slide deck obscures the fact that in the relevant sample, men have better skills, by including the general population (women, average folks) where there is no difference.
- actuallyalys 9y ago
  Well, it's refuting a lazy argument. Why would computer science be so different from other STEM fields that have radically higher proportions of women? [0] In particular, why is math so much better? [1] If biological differences are so important, why has it varied so much over time, including a big decline since the 80s? [0] I mean, we know that gender roles play a big role in what jobs people do and that sexism is a problem in tech, so it's honestly kind of weird to think "actually, it's mostly caused by some hitherto unobserved large biological difference." Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity [2]. Even in countries with relatively large discrepancies, there's not a big difference. I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability [3]. An older study showed women and men scored similarly on an introductory class, but women were less likely to get an A or A+ [4]. A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems [5]. [0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-... [1]: Compare these tables for math and computer science: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab34.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab34.pdf and https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab33.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/pdf/tab33.pdf [2]: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/136/1/103/; http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/136/1/103/; PDF https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/publication/40906547_Cross-National_Patterns_of_Gender_Differences_in_Mathematics_A_Meta-Analysis/links/0a85e530ca35b7bdea000000/Cross-National-Patterns-of-Gender-Differences-in-Mathematics-A-Meta-Analysis.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Else-Quest/publi... [3]: http://www.pd.infn.it/~lacaprar/ProgettoScuola/Biblio/genderdiff_2003.pdf http://www.pd.infn.it/~lacaprar/ProgettoScuola/Biblio/gender... [4]: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED384389.pdf http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED384389.pdf [5]: http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/publications/Sullivan_Gender%20Differences%20Robotics_2016.pdf http://ase.tufts.edu/DevTech/publications/Sullivan_Gender%20...
arnioxux 9y ago
Rather than looking at the math ability distribution as a proxy, why not look at coding competition ability? They are pretty objective since an autograder doesn't know your gender and they are predictive of whether you can pass a tech interview since it's the same format. In that case, even at the IOI level (high school, so 14-18 year old kids) women are already severely underrepresented: https://www.quora.com/How-has-female-students-participation-and-achievement-in-the-IOI-trended-over-time https://www.quora.com/How-has-female-students-participation-... You see the same thing at the college level too (for example topcoder where they isn't even any possibility for a sexist team selection bias since anyone can just register and compete). In some sense, it makes it not tech industry's fault. It's a failure of our education/training pipeline where we are not training competitive women even from an early age.
- lawnchair_larry 9y ago
  I see that you said "compete". Testosterone has effects on competition, so there could still be bias there. Competitions are overrepresented by people who think they can win. We are taught that confidence and overconfidence skews male.
  - gdix 9y ago
    So if confidence is a major factor, is it possible that affirmative action affects confidence negatively in the people that it is meant to support?
    - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
      I have no idea. Maybe? I wasn't taking a position on the debate either, just pointing out that specific argument could be problematic. Regardless, I'm opposed to affirmative action for many other reasons anyway.
  - Udik 9y ago
    > Testosterone has effects on competition, so there could still be bias there Oh. And that would be a biological, innate difference in behaviour between men and women, wouldn't it? And even if women are as good as men at maths or computer programming- which wouldn't surprise me much- can't they be just less interested in it, just in the same way they're less interested (as you seem to imply) in competition? And could I be as good as the average woman in teaching or as a nurse? Possible. Am I interested in it? No.
naiveattack 9y ago
Ugh. It doesn't matter how good your math is if your model is wrong. Here's an outline of what I believe to be a useful model, and some useful questions to ask, and experiments to run in real life to change things. +-------------------+ | | + | +---->X1+---+ | | | | | +-->Q | M+------+ | + | | | | v | | +--------+W | | ^ +---->X2+---+ | + | | | +-------------------+ M = male / female X1 = math ability X2, X3 ... Xn = other factors (analytical ability, ability to work in teams, ability to understand real problems, etc, also bias of interviewers against women) Q = performance on interview questions W = performance in real life work The slides, and most peoples argument is based on the model where there is only one factor math ability, which is why people go 'oh but that doesn't account for it / the disparity is so small'. The important question is how do all the factors ADD UP? Now, If Q does not correlate with W, fix your interview questions first. Then, if you want more women to do well in the interview, well, ... -- the wrong approach is to compromise the integrity of the interview, which compromises the company's business, and which is demeaning to women, although you could use this as a proxy to make the interview more comprehensive -- the correct approach is to investigate X1, Xn factors and train to remove these discrepancies earlier on way before the interview itself, if we decide that we want to. biases in the interview processes are only biases when removing them improves the correlation between Q and W Another thing to do is to change the nature of the work itself. In which case the factors and interview questions will change accordingly. Play to peoples' strengths! The nature of the work must include the performance of the team including the individuals as there may be a benefit to representation when it comes to solving problems of a crowd with varied people. Interestingly, the Google article covers a lot of this, and even suggests some changes that can be made. A large number of factors can quickly add up even if the individual factors as small. I welcome comments from the more knowledgable, but I feel that a lot of knee jerk reactions here are just taking individual statements from the argument and loudly saying NO, or saying well there's no difference here.
- andkon 9y ago
PyComfy 9y ago
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. Edsger W.Dijkstra, EWD498
orangecat 9y ago
Of course men and women are different on average Many people would disagree, and some would have you fired for saying that. As far as the presentation, it accurately notes that as far as we can tell, the average difference in ability between men and women is very small or zero. But there is compelling evidence that men and women do naturally differ in interests (the "people vs things" thing), which if true would directly lead to unequal representation in various fields.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > Many people would disagree, and some would have you fired for saying that. This mentality is exactly why the Google enginner made the post. The company and many others like it are forming echo chambers where anyone with any opinions that go against the status quo is fired. That's ridiculous! Especially with something as nuanced as sex and gender. It is a known fact that there are physical[1], emotional, and psychological[2] differences in people around the world. If there are psychological and emotional differences between the genders, then why is it so surprising to think that they would overall have different career preferences? The fact that someone would fire an employee instead of let them question the boundary between biology and cultural influences is absurd. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology

bbctol 9y ago

Because you were on Twitter? The most annoying thing about this back-and-forth ping-ponging of increasing outrage is that everyone, on both sides, only reacts to the silliest arguments. Sturgeon's Law holds up pretty well for hot takes, and the majority of anything written on an issue is likely to be bad. If most of the responses you read struck you as irrational, that's a function of the infrastructure that sends you information more than the quality of either side.

EddieRingle 9y ago
There were quite a few Medium posts as well. But no, I completely agree with you. I've discussed with others recently about how I'd love to have a tool or place where I can search for a given assertion and see the (scientific) evidence for and against it, as well as related assertions and opposing assertions. And I'm not just talking about being able to "Google it". If I use Google or a general search engine then I have to wade through who knows how many links of ambiguous quality and/or bias.
- CodeCube 9y ago
  If such a repository existed ... it would simply be dismissed as biased by whatever side of the argument it "debunked" ;)
  - brightball 9y ago
    The only way to avoid that would be to highlight the parts of the discussion that hadn't been studied or couldn't easily be replicated. In my experience, most heated arguments are based on perceptions where there is a gaping hole because science either can't or hasn't completely answered the question yet. That stuff gets fueled by articles leaving out certain numbers to show a desired conclusion. True or False isn't the problem. The problem is avoiding key points that you have to already be knowledgable enough to realize what's missing. That's how people end up with "facts" that are still wrong. You leave out important information to reinforce a bias and it will get reshared as "fact". Happens all the time with any topic that's even a little heated.
- 9y ago

abhi3 9y ago

Whether there exist biological/psychological differences between sexes that affect career choices is a discussion that needs to be had in an academic setting rather than a political setting as the author sought to do (read the first section). Secondly, it does not belong in the work place where it is rightly perceived as an aggression by the female coworkers (Telling them the bar was lowered to recruit them, they are inherently inferior to men at the job etc etc.) Edit: To all the downvoters - I'll be charitable and assume that you are just subconsciously biased and not outright sexists. To see your bias in this situation just try to imagine that 40 years back some employee working at the Google of the day wrote such a manifesto against positive discrimination in favor of African Americans, citing all sorts of statistics claiming how they are lazy, lack commitment etc. Would you guys have wanted to 'hey let's talk about it' as well?

rcoveson 9y ago
Was the bar lowered to recruit female or minority candidates? That's not a rhetorical question and I don't presume to have an answer to it. It was, however, the subject of the original memo, which suggests that some policies or proposed policies exist that lower standards for diversity candidates in the author's opinion. One example is, in the author's words: "Setting org level OKRs for increased representation." If such policies do exist, is it not okay to acknowledge their existence and argue for or against their merit? As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive. There are likely scientific inaccuracies, as with any hastily written and/or poorly cited piece. But I think the author did, on the whole, as good a job as can be expected at staying academic in tone and content. Lampooning him as aggressive seems disingenuous.
- vkou 9y ago
  > As to "aggressions", I would challenge anybody to find a quote from the memo that could be considered aggressive. The entire premise of the manifesto is that one third of the company only has a job because of their gender. In what world is saying to thousands of people "We only hired you because you don't have male genitals" is not an aggression? Maybe it's not to people who don't give two shits about their work, or their accomplishments at it, or whether or not they'll have a job next week. Most people aren't in that category. Has you ever been in that kind of situation? Where somebody reduces your entire justification for existence to the color of your skin, or which chromosomes you've got?

splintercell 9y ago

> I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination. Because all positive discrimination is negative discrimination to someone else, so obviously when you are against discrimination you should be against positive discrimination too.

drngdds 9y ago
That's overly simplistic. If you know with good certainty that negative discrimination against a group is pervasive and manifests itself in a certain way (say, hiring bias (though I'm not arguing that this is the case in a particular instance; that's a separate debate)) it makes sense to have positive discrimination to counteract that.
- naiveattack 9y ago
  This is a good point. Here's an open question: How do you know when you have enough positive discrimination? Do you just make sure that the representation of different groups is the same as in the population? This is a poor solution because it cannot be said that this would have been the distribution without negative discrimination. Also, along what lines would you now pick your categories? Would you ensure representation for latino lesbian women who speak spanish and like chocolate cake on tuesdays? Which is to say that the category can get arbitrarily small.
  - cakedoggie 9y ago
    This is probably what the debate is all about, and it is not an easy thing to answer. Some people say now, some people say not now, and they both have good reasons why.
- splintercell 9y ago
  > If you know with good certainty that negative discrimination against a group is pervasive and manifests itself in a certain way But you're missing the point. All discrimination is aimed at individuals. Claiming that because individuals of group A have been negatively discriminated against, you don't balance it out by performing positive discrimination for them (even if it is exactly the same individuals), because you achieve that positive discrimination by performing negative discrimination against another set of individuals. If you notice that Zuckerberg rejected a person because she was a black woman, because she was black, and you counter that by somehow benefitting that woman, and having Zuckerberg pay some sort of penalty, then that is just and you have 'counteracted' Zuckerberg's negative discrimination. But if, after noticing that Zuckerberg rejected a person because she was a black woman, you penalize him and make him hire some another black woman over where a white woman would have been more qualified, then you have not 'counteracted' anything. You have performed negative discrimination against another set of individuals, under the color of 'positive discrimination'.

blablabla123 9y ago

It's great that the person stated his opinion. I regard him much higher than hypocrites who think and act the same, but pretend to be 1000% pc. It's not necessary to tediously counter-argue every single argument the author made. I'm sure you don't expect people to counter-argue overly long badly written texts by various political ideologists from today or the past. I'm convinced it suffices to just argue why summary is wrong or rather the opposite is true. As a matter of fact, other people have done this work for us, so instead of arguing it suffices to do a literature research. (I'm sure you know how to google feminism and that you might have an hour or two time to watch Youtube) But I'm happy to bring my own crude arguments: - people, both male and female, oftentimes don't do things because they think they are not able to do them - teachers have a bias towards encouraging certain stereotypes - the whole environment pushes certain behaviours and interests on people Speaking for myself (being male) my Physics teacher said nothing when I told him in class that I'm going to study Physics. He was encouraging the other people who planned to study that or an Engineering subject, not me. Even my father discouraged me from studying it because he thought my grades where not good enough and that I wouldn't be that kind of person. Still I managed to study very quickly and successfully. During my studies I also learned, that my thinking is different than other peoples'. I think more in pictures, whereas my peers in Theoretical Particle Physics rather thought in texts. At work I often get overtalked and still deliver over-average results because I emphasise being polite, use proper argument and I look 10 years younger than I am. This really sucks and this proves to me that if you are female, you are basically screwed if you want to do something engineering like because even Engineers don't act analytically but emotionally based on prejudices.

blusterXY 9y ago
> tediously counter-argue every single argument I haven't seen a single criticism of the paper that even recognizes the author is referencing large-scale incontrovertible research involving the Big-5 personality model (the giveaway is the use of terms "agreeability", "conscienciousness", "neuroticism"). Instead we get what you offer: off-hand casual assertions that there must exist research which runs against large-n and replicable science-driven studies using the only mainstream and empirically-supported model of personality that seems to work. Basically, this makes criticisms like yours on-par with climate change denial in the sense that they either fail to grasp the point being made or offer personal observations on irrelevant points as rebuttal. It is bad news for Google either way, since the author is correct to point out among many other things that high levels of "agreeability" are demonstrably bad for anyone to have in corporate environments, and if this affects men in the same way it affects women then why are the solutions gender-excluding? Anyway, perhaps you should research the Big-5 model if you aren't familiar with it: very interesting new research coming out on it continually.

Transfinity 9y ago

> If there were factual inaccuracies in what the author wrote, why not discuss them? Why not use high-quality sources to validate your argument? In essence, because it's a 10-page document chock full of cherry-picked data and nonsensical conclusions - that's a ton of work to debunk. Moreover, it's just one of many such documents (though this one going viral means it probably deserves special attention). The problem is true of fake news and alternate facts in general. From Alberto Brandolini: "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

currymj 9y ago

calling someone a Nazi is a strong accusation, but the guy did repeat some extreme-right talking points. one of the footnotes basically repeats the argument that "cultural Marxism" has taken over the left. This is a common right-wing talking point often connected to an antisemitic conspiracy theory involving the Frankfurt School. I doubt the guy is an actual Nazi, but just like you I'm not specialized enough to evaluate his psychological and biological claims (although I'd guess they're overstated, given how many psychological experiments fail to replicate). Just, hearing talking points I've heard from actual literal Nazis made me a lot more inclined to dismiss his views, which I think is a safe heuristic.

gerso 9y ago
Huh? I assume you're talking about footnote #7: [7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.” That's a pretty standard, if exaggerated, take on the decline of communism from a capitalist perspective. Would anyone on the left even disagree with what he says about how Marxism was expanded?
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  He seems to be claiming that black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed and it was all made up by Communists to take down capitalism. You can probably find some people who agree with individual parts of that but if you get a full bingo then you're basically dealing with a Nazi. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Ma...
  - smsm42 9y ago
    > He seems to be claiming that black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed and it was all made up by Communists to take down capitalism. No he doesn't. He says Marxists participated in gender/race politics, and the ultimate goal of Marxists was destruction of capitalism. Which, btw, if you read any of real Marxists - who aren't exactly hiding, thanks (not ironically, they shouldn't be hiding) to the wide freedoms allowed to all of us by American democracy, that's exactly what you will see, in very plain words - they blame capitalism for these problems and want it to be eliminated. That doesn't mean, of course, that everybody who participates in gender/race politics is a Marxist. There are a lot of folks that legitimately want, e.g., for gays not to be booted off work for being gay, without necessarily buying into the whole eternal oppressor/oppressed identity/class struggle narrative. Neither it means - and nowhere it was claimed - that "black people, gay people, women, trans folk and the poor were in no way oppressed". > then you're basically dealing with a Nazi. You just called somebody a Nazi because he said Marxists are lefties and are against capitalism. Way to go.

RangerScience 9y ago

> I am against discrimination, and that includes positive discrimination. I don't think it works that way. This version is problematically simplistic: I have +10 and you have -2; now add Affirmative Action and I've got +8 and you've got +2. I'm still not receiving negative discrimination. But, you're also missing the follow-on effects; specifically: 1) People who are not actually deserving on their own merits, but were getting in due to the privilege boost, are no longer present. 2) People who are actually deserving on their own merits, but were not getting due to other disadvantages, are now present. Overall merit of my coworkers goes up; I'm now working with better people and so get better/faster myself. It didn't start as a zero-sum game; it's not going to end up as a zero-sum game. Remember the myths of the meritocracy; success is not limited to the deserving, and the deserving are not limited from failure.

ameister14 9y ago
That's not how affirmative action works. Using your example, for most of the population, there is no detraction from their score. It only comes into effect if you have +1 and they have 0 or +1, and it becomes you with +1 and them with +2. If you had +10 and they had 0, you would stay at +10 and they would go to +2, taking the place of someone else that only had +1 and leaving you alone. For you in this case it isn't a 0-sum because you never lose. For the people on the edge, it is 0-sum because they are on the edge of not getting the position. Any advantage given to someone else removes them from contention.
- RangerScience 9y ago
  We're using different notation systems. I'm thinking "modifier to the dice roll", you're thinking "score". This is making it real hard to understand what you're saying. What is your understanding of how AA works?
  - ameister14 9y ago
    Ah, I see. As I understand it, AA usually comes into play when there is little separating two candidates. Most other qualities are the same or the historically advantaged candidate is only slightly better than the disadvantaged one. To counter this historical disadvantage, the candidate possessing it is given additional 'points' which push them beyond the other. All other things being equal or close to equal, this becomes the tie-breaker.

PKop 9y ago

It relates to Trumpism because this is why Trump won: People are sick to death of speech codes, wrong think, collective mob mentality enforcing what is and isn't ok to talk about and which opinions you have to hold to be in line with acceptable thought in media, corporations, silicon valley, education, etc. As you stated, the facts of the matter don't have relevance here. And if he was wrong, why not discuss it rationally and unemotionally. Or even disagree and move on. But no, now he's fired for having the wrong unspeakable points of view that do not fall in line with the state religion of mandatory gender quotas.