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"Support of the weak" and "neurotic" are being used in their technical sense though, as rough axes upon which people can lie. It's not normative, it's descripti

"Support of the weak" and "neurotic" are being used in their technical sense though, as rough axes upon which people can lie. It's not normative, it's descriptive. I don't really know if your #3 is true or not (this isn't the hill I die on), but I don't think it's heresy to suggest it might be. Is that really so impossible as to be an absurdism? Obviously some of the things he's saying are generalization, but that's hardly a coherent criticism in this context - everything we're talking about on this topic is, by its very nature, generalization. We're saying fewer women than men take jobs in the computer science sector _in general_. If you're trying to look at broad trends it's okay to talk about averages. Real scientists don't need to preface every single statistic with a huge preamble reminding the reader that individual samples are not the same thing as the distribution they are drawn from. The silly thing is I actually agree that this was a useless move to try and 'educate' the whole company. But saying he was being unscientific is garbage. He's being perfectly coherent and scientific, it was just a fairly rude thing to blast out to a company as large as Google.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
The use of these "technical" terms may be appropriate if it were presented in a different context. There are several examples of this document definitely being inappropriate (ones you did not refute), which exacerbates what could otherwise be benine use of technical terminology. To the reader who's already seen several remarks out of line, remarks like "nerotic" seem that much worse. A perfectly choerent and scientific paper would include references for the points it tries to make. Many people have tried to retroactively justify his "points" with links to Wikipedia articles, but it should be proactively justified in the document with links to scholarly articles. Not doing so makes it difficult to believe that he's writing about anything other than his own cognative biases. "Real" scientists also go through peer review, when their peers might say "this makes you come across like a bit of a dick" before it's published for broader review. "Real scientists" have lots more discipline than this guy, and if he had taken a "real" scientist's approach he would have probably been a lot better off.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

The use of these "technical" terms may be appropriate if it were presented in a different context. There are several examples of this document definitely being inappropriate (ones you did not refute), which exacerbates what could otherwise be benine use of technical terminology. To the reader who's already seen several remarks out of line, remarks like "nerotic" seem that much worse. A perfectly choerent and scientific paper would include references for the points it tries to make. Many people have tried to retroactively justify his "points" with links to Wikipedia articles, but it should be proactively justified in the document with links to scholarly articles. Not doing so makes it difficult to believe that he's writing about anything other than his own cognative biases. "Real" scientists also go through peer review, when their peers might say "this makes you come across like a bit of a dick" before it's published for broader review. "Real scientists" have lots more discipline than this guy, and if he had taken a "real" scientist's approach he would have probably been a lot better off.