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Regardless on your opinions of the memo, this article nails it right on the head; Gizmodo and other major news outlets handled this very irresponsibly, posting

Regardless on your opinions of the memo, this article nails it right on the head; Gizmodo and other major news outlets handled this very irresponsibly, posting their version that had no citations, and leading the reader, even at the very beginning, into forming the opinion that this was simply a guy being "anti-diversity". Whatever your thoughts on the subject are, it needs to be pointed out that this type of journalism is absolutely not neutral (even though they will swear up and down that they are) and should be, at the very least, condemned for doing so. This is and will be an increasingly difficult problem, especially when people just read a headline and a summary.

AckSyn 9y ago
One of the things that really irked me was not only their editorialization of the entire thing to paint it like he was wrong, but also reformatting it, and then having circular links back and forth to motherboard like they were both in on it to misrepresent the entire thing. It was poorly laid out and intentionally misleading.
spookyuser 9y ago
So true, I thought the last paragraph of the article was particularly apt. >When journalistic institutions widely publicize material of this sort, only to abdicate the vital work of rigorously addressing its substance, they make its least plausible claims more likely to be normalized. They leave the project of assessing its merits and flaws to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other venues where the loudest voices tend to prevail, instead of offering their own careful reporting and expert analysis. I buy this point so much because after reading about the controversy on the crazy 1000 comment thread here on HN and the other threads on reddit, there was no top level comment that made the same well reasoned claims this very article did, which IMO is so far the best I have read about the whole debacle. This is what journalists doing their job looks like.
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  Yes, and exacerbating the problem is that the original memo, even with its citations included, was sloppy and not rigorous, and should have been like shooting fish in a barrel for all the media covering it. But instead most of the media coverage seemed to be coming from a frame of, "don't validate fringe viewpoints by actually addressing their arguments", rather just ignore their arguments and use other tactics to undermine them. That strategy may have worked in the pre-Internet age, but in the Internet age it risks putting you on the wrong side of "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.". In the Internet age the correct strategy for dealing with the fringe is directly addressing and discrediting their reasoning early, before they can create an echo chamber feedback loop. But traditional media seems slow in general to realize that, in the Internet age, the fringe eventually defines the center unless stopped early. This episode appears to have been another manifestation of that.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - tnone 9y ago
    It wasn't an academic paper, it was an internal memo posted to a discussion forum. Even then, it was well structured, moderating in its commentary, and peppered with links to support its arguments. This sort of criticism seems like motivated reasoning to me, and only comes out when current progressive dogmas are being challenged. When HN applies a scalpel the way you describe to the opposite viewpoint, often supported only with anecdotes, out come the complaints how people's lived experiences are being ignored, how it's proof of a cultural problem, and so on. Not to mention the flagging. It's rigor for thee and not for me. The media and Google are the echo chamber when it comes to this topic, that's been demonstrated plenty. If they were capable of intellectually reasoning about it, they wouldn't be lumping together reasonable criticism with that of the fringe in the first place.
    - SkyMarshal 9y ago
      >It wasn't an academic paper, it was an internal memo posted to a discussion forum. Even then, it was well structured, moderating in its commentary, and peppered with links to support its arguments. I'm all for challenging the orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, and I sense the gender diversity one has been constructed on not perfectly rigorous foundations and deserves to be challenged. But when you challenge an orthodoxy, fairly or not you're held to a higher standard of rigor, simply as a matter of effectiveness - come up short and you're easily discredited and dismissed. It's like you have to have PhD or equivalent level knowledge of something before your critiques can't be dismissed out of hand. That's at least part of what happened here, the memo just wasn't at that level, and thus was easily dismissed. Maybe the author will now use his in/fame/my to write a more comprehensive and rigorous paper (or book deal) on the topic. >This sort of criticism seems like motivated reasoning to me, and only comes out when current progressive dogmas are being challenged. When HN applies a scalpel the way you describe Repeat after me: "HN is not one person or one voice". At least some of us here apply this standard to everything.
moxious 9y ago
I found this entire row to be just depressing. Earlier today there's a medium post about a guy who won't read the memo -- absolutely refuses -- because he doesn't want this "anti-diversity" message polluting him. This, when one of the memo's explicit points was about excessive dogma around the issue, and inability to have an open and honest conversation about it. The opposition isn't all shrill politically correct authoritarians, but some of them really do come off that way.
- Cozumel 9y ago
  'It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.' - Aristotle I can't imagine been so insecure in my beliefs that I'd actively refuse to engage with opposing viewpoints, in case I got 'polluted'!
wcummings 9y ago
This article doesn't say anything about citations, unless I'm missing something. I've read the memo, "citations" (some of them hardly qualify) and all. "Anti-diversity" might be a little hyperbolic, but it's hard to argue it is anything else in good faith. The author feels comfortable making the claim women are biologically more neurotic, in a professional setting, no less. His "citation" for this fact is Wikipedia. This is unimaginative sexist bullshit that everyone has heard before. That people feel the impulse to defend this is disgusting. Whatever innate differences there are between men and women are small and nowhere near as big a factor in the gender-ratio as say, arrogant weirdos sending credos to their entire company declaring women unfit to work in their industry.
- MountainManMe 9y ago
  > The author feels comfortable making the claim women are biologically more neurotic, in a professional setting, no less. His "citation" for this fact is Wikipedia. This is unimaginative sexist bullshit that everyone has heard before. That people feel the impulse to defend this is disgusting. Wikipedia might not be the most credible source, but the differences in big 5 personality traits between men and women are well documented. [Here's a study that finds the same, looking at > 17,000 people from 55 different countries.](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anu_Realo/publication/24001221_Why_Can%27t_a_Man_Be_More_Like_a_Woman_Sex_Differences_in_Big_Five_Personality_Traits_Across_55_Cultures_vol_94_pg_168_2008/links/02e7e52de5eadc10c4000000/Why-Cant-a-Man-Be-More-Like-a-Woman-Sex-Differences-in-Big-Five-Personality-Traits-Across-55-Cultures-vol-94-pg-168-2008.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anu_Realo/publication/2...). There's plenty more on google scholar.
  - wcummings 9y ago
    And you believe those differences to be meaningful? To programming? And appropriate to discuss with coworkers?
    - mentat 9y ago
      What happens with all the correct things that are now inappropriate to say in this brave new world?
gist 9y ago
> it needs to be pointed out that this type of journalism is absolutely not neutral And actually is a lazy way to even hoodwink people. The correct way is to show a bias and then use the proverbial 'to be sure' statements but bury those later on where they are less likely to be noticed.
omikun 9y ago
There are no neutral journalism. If you want a reporting of facts unbiased by opinions, it would be "viral Google employee memo on the subject of diversity recruitment." Any editorial on the matter would necessarily make a subjective evaluation. I'm torn by the two sides. On one hand I see the rational and level headed language in the memo versus the reactionary bait-click headlines. On the other hand I sense a mens' rights argument at the core of the memo that isn't very organized. The memo argued against discrimination against men in the hiring process, then suggested creating roles that won't fit the stereotypical male. That's discrimination at the role creation process! If google followed that advice, the author would still have something to be against. The central point of the memo, from what I read, was that any gender discrimination to hire more women in the workplace necessarily discriminates against the men that would have otherwise gotten the job. Sure he made some good ideas for how to hire more women. But no matter how reasonable the language he used to couch his message, the essence was still against diversity because it will hurt the job opportunities of men. Another underlying assumption here is that the technical merits of a candidate is the overriding quality to be considered for hiring. And since the pool of qualified applicants are male dominated, then any bias in hiring women will hurt the obviously qualified men. If technical abilities follow a normal distribution (and why not?), then more highly qualified men will be discriminated. However, technical ability is not the only overriding quality and Google is trying to take the diversity of the team into account during the hiring process. Thus, Google is taking a grander view of not just considering the individual merit of the applicant, but applicant's impact to the team composition as well. This is equivalent to someone in Overwatch who has high stats in a game that won't change his character/behavior even though he does not help the team. Say the player has high elimination stats because they are fighting away from the main fight where his team is at a disadvantage (say holding down the point). This is a textbook case of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. People who agree with the memo focuses on the parts. They think "hire more great parts = better team." But team composition is actually more important. People who labels the memo as anti-diversity are in favor of team comp, whether they know it or not. But personally, the most important point of diversity for me is the end of sausage fest at work. Group conversations with one dominant gender day in day out kind of suck. This applies to either gender.
- malandrew 9y ago
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
The problem with this, is that the alt-right have made a habit of this "look how rational I am as i call you subhuman, why are you so upset by rational truth" thing. Milo Yianoppolos, who most of the time markets himself as an anarchistic troll, will put on his serious face and claim that he is worried about trans people because it's a mental illness and he just wants them to be treated, rather than play along with their disease. And cite studies etc. Then he'll have a rally and personally attack a trans student. Which isn't really how a serious scientist approaches the mentally ill. He also attacks overweight people "for their own good" as they need to get healthy. Then he takes a picture of someone he sees at his gym to mock their weight as they work out. The Bell Curve is a great proto-alt-right example, where the author will say with a cheeky grin that he never actually said that black people were genetically inferior, even though everyone who read it clearly got that message,whether they agree with it or not. And when he wrote a book saying black people have never contributed anything of any worth to music, why that's just objective science. The Orwellian double talk of Trump is another classic example. More jobs via trade wars. Yes the author is right, a critique of pointless trade wars shouldn't be called anti-jobs, because journalist should be (and to some degree are) calling Trump's proposals anti-jobs themselves. Why on earth would you think this a valid example to give? It's an obvious con job. So at some point, you realise that people are just playing a game with you. But no, surely this man who thinks gay rights are a Marxist plot to take down capitalist America, surely he is only interested in seeking the unvarnished scientific truth?! Fool me once..
- jshevek 9y ago
  This only seems relevant if you think that these examples justify refusing to listen to the rational of those you disagree with.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    I've listened to all of the above, enough to spot glaring inconsistencies lurking behind their rational facade. What more do you want from me? Automatic agreement with disingenuous trolls and madmen just because they can write fully formed paragraphs and link to cherry picked science?

AckSyn 9y ago

One of the things that really irked me was not only their editorialization of the entire thing to paint it like he was wrong, but also reformatting it, and then having circular links back and forth to motherboard like they were both in on it to misrepresent the entire thing. It was poorly laid out and intentionally misleading.

spookyuser 9y ago

So true, I thought the last paragraph of the article was particularly apt. >When journalistic institutions widely publicize material of this sort, only to abdicate the vital work of rigorously addressing its substance, they make its least plausible claims more likely to be normalized. They leave the project of assessing its merits and flaws to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other venues where the loudest voices tend to prevail, instead of offering their own careful reporting and expert analysis. I buy this point so much because after reading about the controversy on the crazy 1000 comment thread here on HN and the other threads on reddit, there was no top level comment that made the same well reasoned claims this very article did, which IMO is so far the best I have read about the whole debacle. This is what journalists doing their job looks like.

SkyMarshal 9y ago
Yes, and exacerbating the problem is that the original memo, even with its citations included, was sloppy and not rigorous, and should have been like shooting fish in a barrel for all the media covering it. But instead most of the media coverage seemed to be coming from a frame of, "don't validate fringe viewpoints by actually addressing their arguments", rather just ignore their arguments and use other tactics to undermine them. That strategy may have worked in the pre-Internet age, but in the Internet age it risks putting you on the wrong side of "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.". In the Internet age the correct strategy for dealing with the fringe is directly addressing and discrediting their reasoning early, before they can create an echo chamber feedback loop. But traditional media seems slow in general to realize that, in the Internet age, the fringe eventually defines the center unless stopped early. This episode appears to have been another manifestation of that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tnone 9y ago
  It wasn't an academic paper, it was an internal memo posted to a discussion forum. Even then, it was well structured, moderating in its commentary, and peppered with links to support its arguments. This sort of criticism seems like motivated reasoning to me, and only comes out when current progressive dogmas are being challenged. When HN applies a scalpel the way you describe to the opposite viewpoint, often supported only with anecdotes, out come the complaints how people's lived experiences are being ignored, how it's proof of a cultural problem, and so on. Not to mention the flagging. It's rigor for thee and not for me. The media and Google are the echo chamber when it comes to this topic, that's been demonstrated plenty. If they were capable of intellectually reasoning about it, they wouldn't be lumping together reasonable criticism with that of the fringe in the first place.
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    >It wasn't an academic paper, it was an internal memo posted to a discussion forum. Even then, it was well structured, moderating in its commentary, and peppered with links to support its arguments. I'm all for challenging the orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, and I sense the gender diversity one has been constructed on not perfectly rigorous foundations and deserves to be challenged. But when you challenge an orthodoxy, fairly or not you're held to a higher standard of rigor, simply as a matter of effectiveness - come up short and you're easily discredited and dismissed. It's like you have to have PhD or equivalent level knowledge of something before your critiques can't be dismissed out of hand. That's at least part of what happened here, the memo just wasn't at that level, and thus was easily dismissed. Maybe the author will now use his in/fame/my to write a more comprehensive and rigorous paper (or book deal) on the topic. >This sort of criticism seems like motivated reasoning to me, and only comes out when current progressive dogmas are being challenged. When HN applies a scalpel the way you describe Repeat after me: "HN is not one person or one voice". At least some of us here apply this standard to everything.

moxious 9y ago

I found this entire row to be just depressing. Earlier today there's a medium post about a guy who won't read the memo -- absolutely refuses -- because he doesn't want this "anti-diversity" message polluting him. This, when one of the memo's explicit points was about excessive dogma around the issue, and inability to have an open and honest conversation about it. The opposition isn't all shrill politically correct authoritarians, but some of them really do come off that way.

Cozumel 9y ago
'It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.' - Aristotle I can't imagine been so insecure in my beliefs that I'd actively refuse to engage with opposing viewpoints, in case I got 'polluted'!

wcummings 9y ago

This article doesn't say anything about citations, unless I'm missing something. I've read the memo, "citations" (some of them hardly qualify) and all. "Anti-diversity" might be a little hyperbolic, but it's hard to argue it is anything else in good faith. The author feels comfortable making the claim women are biologically more neurotic, in a professional setting, no less. His "citation" for this fact is Wikipedia. This is unimaginative sexist bullshit that everyone has heard before. That people feel the impulse to defend this is disgusting. Whatever innate differences there are between men and women are small and nowhere near as big a factor in the gender-ratio as say, arrogant weirdos sending credos to their entire company declaring women unfit to work in their industry.

MountainManMe 9y ago
> The author feels comfortable making the claim women are biologically more neurotic, in a professional setting, no less. His "citation" for this fact is Wikipedia. This is unimaginative sexist bullshit that everyone has heard before. That people feel the impulse to defend this is disgusting. Wikipedia might not be the most credible source, but the differences in big 5 personality traits between men and women are well documented. [Here's a study that finds the same, looking at > 17,000 people from 55 different countries.](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anu_Realo/publication/24001221_Why_Can%27t_a_Man_Be_More_Like_a_Woman_Sex_Differences_in_Big_Five_Personality_Traits_Across_55_Cultures_vol_94_pg_168_2008/links/02e7e52de5eadc10c4000000/Why-Cant-a-Man-Be-More-Like-a-Woman-Sex-Differences-in-Big-Five-Personality-Traits-Across-55-Cultures-vol-94-pg-168-2008.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anu_Realo/publication/2...). There's plenty more on google scholar.
- wcummings 9y ago
  And you believe those differences to be meaningful? To programming? And appropriate to discuss with coworkers?
  - mentat 9y ago
    What happens with all the correct things that are now inappropriate to say in this brave new world?

gist 9y ago

> it needs to be pointed out that this type of journalism is absolutely not neutral And actually is a lazy way to even hoodwink people. The correct way is to show a bias and then use the proverbial 'to be sure' statements but bury those later on where they are less likely to be noticed.

omikun 9y ago

There are no neutral journalism. If you want a reporting of facts unbiased by opinions, it would be "viral Google employee memo on the subject of diversity recruitment." Any editorial on the matter would necessarily make a subjective evaluation. I'm torn by the two sides. On one hand I see the rational and level headed language in the memo versus the reactionary bait-click headlines. On the other hand I sense a mens' rights argument at the core of the memo that isn't very organized. The memo argued against discrimination against men in the hiring process, then suggested creating roles that won't fit the stereotypical male. That's discrimination at the role creation process! If google followed that advice, the author would still have something to be against. The central point of the memo, from what I read, was that any gender discrimination to hire more women in the workplace necessarily discriminates against the men that would have otherwise gotten the job. Sure he made some good ideas for how to hire more women. But no matter how reasonable the language he used to couch his message, the essence was still against diversity because it will hurt the job opportunities of men. Another underlying assumption here is that the technical merits of a candidate is the overriding quality to be considered for hiring. And since the pool of qualified applicants are male dominated, then any bias in hiring women will hurt the obviously qualified men. If technical abilities follow a normal distribution (and why not?), then more highly qualified men will be discriminated. However, technical ability is not the only overriding quality and Google is trying to take the diversity of the team into account during the hiring process. Thus, Google is taking a grander view of not just considering the individual merit of the applicant, but applicant's impact to the team composition as well. This is equivalent to someone in Overwatch who has high stats in a game that won't change his character/behavior even though he does not help the team. Say the player has high elimination stats because they are fighting away from the main fight where his team is at a disadvantage (say holding down the point). This is a textbook case of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. People who agree with the memo focuses on the parts. They think "hire more great parts = better team." But team composition is actually more important. People who labels the memo as anti-diversity are in favor of team comp, whether they know it or not. But personally, the most important point of diversity for me is the end of sausage fest at work. Group conversations with one dominant gender day in day out kind of suck. This applies to either gender.

malandrew 9y ago

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

The problem with this, is that the alt-right have made a habit of this "look how rational I am as i call you subhuman, why are you so upset by rational truth" thing. Milo Yianoppolos, who most of the time markets himself as an anarchistic troll, will put on his serious face and claim that he is worried about trans people because it's a mental illness and he just wants them to be treated, rather than play along with their disease. And cite studies etc. Then he'll have a rally and personally attack a trans student. Which isn't really how a serious scientist approaches the mentally ill. He also attacks overweight people "for their own good" as they need to get healthy. Then he takes a picture of someone he sees at his gym to mock their weight as they work out. The Bell Curve is a great proto-alt-right example, where the author will say with a cheeky grin that he never actually said that black people were genetically inferior, even though everyone who read it clearly got that message,whether they agree with it or not. And when he wrote a book saying black people have never contributed anything of any worth to music, why that's just objective science. The Orwellian double talk of Trump is another classic example. More jobs via trade wars. Yes the author is right, a critique of pointless trade wars shouldn't be called anti-jobs, because journalist should be (and to some degree are) calling Trump's proposals anti-jobs themselves. Why on earth would you think this a valid example to give? It's an obvious con job. So at some point, you realise that people are just playing a game with you. But no, surely this man who thinks gay rights are a Marxist plot to take down capitalist America, surely he is only interested in seeking the unvarnished scientific truth?! Fool me once..

jshevek 9y ago
This only seems relevant if you think that these examples justify refusing to listen to the rational of those you disagree with.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  I've listened to all of the above, enough to spot glaring inconsistencies lurking behind their rational facade. What more do you want from me? Automatic agreement with disingenuous trolls and madmen just because they can write fully formed paragraphs and link to cherry picked science?