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Tell me, truly, is this a view held by many here? That, as the church denounced Galileo's observation that we turn around the sun as heretical, so too our moder

Tell me, truly, is this a view held by many here? That, as the church denounced Galileo's observation that we turn around the sun as heretical, so too our modern PC culture suppresses legitimate inquiry into wether gender is a determinant of programming aptitude? This is a comparison worth drawing? Galileo was a scientist. He published papers, books, treatises. He devoted his life to the pursuit of the truth, found a big piece of it, and was punished by society for it. He is one of the giants whose shoulders we stand on. Kolmogorov sounds cut of the same cloth. He built a research center, helped other scientists on the way up, and left a legacy. James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. This created a textbook hostile work environment,[1] leading to his firing. The amount of sympathy I've seen here is dismaying. It is illustrating just how far we have to go until equality is the rule of the day. Please, before you throw in your lot with him, consider how ridiculous the analogy OP made here is. The Google Manifesto is manifestly not A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. I will say, some of the heavyweight commenters here do give me hope. tptacek linked this graph[2] on one of the early threads on this. It's a pretty solid rebuttal to any and all concerns that women are innately unsuited to computers rather than that our computer culture has driven them away. [1]: https://medium.com/@scurphey/googles-response-to-employee-s-anti-diversity-manifesto-ignores-workplace-discrimination-law-97c7c729cf86 https://medium.com/@scurphey/googles-response-to-employee-s-... [2]: 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-...

apsec112 9y ago
"Please, before you throw in your lot with him, consider how ridiculous the analogy OP made here is. The Google Manifesto is manifestly not A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems." Aaronson doesn't mention Google or Damore.
- jacalata 9y ago
  Perhaps if you were hoping for comments here not to mention it, now was a bad time to post it.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  Yes, but it's clear what he meant: Those sharing the truth in the most rational way are the ones most viciously attacked. The society rejects even considering the hypothesis because they are afraid of the truth that they all recognize. Clearly he's calling for us to calmly and rationally re-evaluate the hypothesis that Jews are sub-human parasites that are destroying our societies from within and that the only rational solution is to exterminate them before they destroy our glorious Aryan culture.
- cabalamat 9y ago
  Indeed not. Aaronson is talking about the general case when there are things you can't say that are indeed true. This is useful, because if you can come to correct conclusions for the general case, these conclusions will be useful in instances of that case.
  - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
    Scott Aaronson is highly unlikely going to be siding with someone using pseudoscience to push their victim agenda. It's a great insult to the victims of Church oppression in the middle ages and of Soviet policy to compare their hardships to the "hardships" of men working at Google.
    - backpropaganda 9y ago
      Have some self-awareness, good sir.
fvdessen 9y ago
I'm fascinated by sentences like "He created a textbook hostile work environment." and "Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Consequences". I see them more and more, repeated verbatim, to justify why someone had to be removed from his social environment, or physically assaulted. Justifying physical violence from ideological reasons by repeating mantras. I tought I wouldn't see that in my lifetime, that it was a thing of the past. Reading of totalitarian societies I always wondered how it could happen, and now we see it develop right before our eyes. It is fascinating & terrifying.
- macrael 9y ago
  Please read the first article I linked. It's written by an employment lawyer! "Hostile work environment" is not a mantra, it has a legal definition that our justice system has been workshopping for decades. Please consider that this is actually a complicated area that many smart people have been arguing about and refining for years and years. The famous "fire in a theatre" example shows that there are limits to free speech, maybe this too isn't speech worth defending.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    The famous "fire in a theatre" example was invented to justify censoring the distribution of flyers opposing the draft.
    - endominus 9y ago
      Additionally, it was later judged as unconstitutional.
    - macrael 9y ago
      Just so: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim... I'll try and avoid "the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech" in the future. :0 I really think it's worth reading the employment lawyer piece I linked, it's good to get the actual legal perspective on this whole situation.
sanxiyn 9y ago
It's surprising how different people interpret post-1980 decline of women in computer science differently. As the article suggests, introduction of personal computer is one of the best candidate. My interpretation is that this data supports "interest, not ability" thesis of Damore, and personal computer amplified pre-existing interest difference.
- macrael 9y ago
  If we're throwing around theories without evidence, what do you think about the fact that nerd culture, exemplified by movies from the 80s like Revenge of the Nerds, welcomes and glorifies young men who don't know how to talk to women? If women are less interested in computers than men, could it not be because we have created a culture that is unappealing to them?
- jacalata 9y ago
  And then you start learning about the different distribution of ownership and access to personal computers among boys and girls, and it looks like the personal computer actually introduced the interest difference. The book Unlocking The Clubhouse has a bunch of discussion on this topic, if you're curious.
  - ElmntOfSurprise 9y ago
    You mean that boys like computers more --> they buy more computers (or nag their parents about getting one), or that parents are more prone to give computers to boys --> girls never have the chance to get as interested? Interestingly, teenage girls seem to have more access to (desktop) computers than boys have nowadays: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/2013/PIP_TeensandTechnology2013.pdf http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/201...
    - cropsieboss 9y ago
      Just like teenage girls had more instrument playing experience than boys during an era when blues and jazz were starting to develop. Yet men lead the genre.
znfi 9y ago
If I understand things correctly the argument by feminists etc is something along the lines of "there are no differences between men and women, and thus any difference in outcome must be due to discrimination". Firstly, even if there was only this claim and accusation, one might want to defend oneself against it. Especially since this is an almost universally agreed upon "truth" in the western world. Secondly, motivated by this (perceived) discrimination of women, we as a society have allowed various forms of discrimination of men intended to offset the discrimination of women. This gives an even stronger reason to contest this "truth" if one feels that it is in fact not true. So what kind of defence is someone who does not agree with the above "truth" allowed? Like how insanely watered down should the defence be in order that one does not "accusing [ones] colleagues of having inferior genes"?
- foldr 9y ago
  >If I understand things correctly the argument by feminists etc is something along the lines of "there are no differences between men and women, and thus any difference in outcome must be due to discrimination. Really? Could you give a reference to anyone ever actually making this argument?
  - Banthum 9y ago
    Professor Nicholas Matte states it in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kasiov0ytEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kasiov0ytEc Not a really exotic belief in the core social justice circles. Though advocates tend to avoid stating it outright, since it's so easy to attack and so ridiculous. So it's generally left implicit. E.g. They'll just say, "X field is only 30% women, we must fight the sexism that causes this", leaving it as an unstated assumption.
    - foldr 9y ago
      Could you provide a quote, rather than linking to a 50 minute video?
  - znfi 9y ago
    I'm not sure I can provide an actual quote on this and was more my understanding of what people are arguing, I could be mistaken, I'm not sure. But it would seem to me that accepting something of that form as true would be necessary in order to believe in many fairly standard feminist/whatever claims. In particular, the controversy surrounding Damore's "manifesto" seems very hard to understand if most people believe that there are differences between the genders that could affect the "outcome"/gender gap in tech/whatever. If this in fact what everyone thinks, then why are so many people upset that someone wrote a document saying this is the case? The whole thing should to be a no-issue? (I guess some of the points of Aaronson's original blog post might be applicable here. But I'm not sure that really improves the situation...) Secondly, if everyone agrees that there are differences between the genders that could affect for example the gender gap in tech, I have a very hard time understanding how one can routinely blame more or less any difference between the genders on discrimination or some such.
babuskov 9y ago
> until equality is the rule of the day But people aren't clones and we aren't all equal. Hey, I want to be equal to LeBron James. Please, give me the same salary. You want equality, there's communism for you. See how that panned out. > women are innately unsuited to computers Did you read the original paper? Damore never wrote that. He was talking about statistical chance, not generalizing like you are now.
- pas 9y ago
  It's not equality of results, it's equality of opportunity. You can get the same initial chance to prove your ability at basketball as he did. You can even get a slight boost to compensate for things (maybe he was a lot more motivated, or maybe he got some practice in the 'hood). And it'll turn out you have no skills/talent/ability, you're not 2 meters high, and so on. Now, with sports, it's not a problem if we don't spend more than a few seconds of thought on trying to create equal opportunities, because with competitive sports the point is exactly to not have equal outcomes. But with broad categories like jobs/career, income, wealth, political/legal/professional representation, we pretty much want to make sure that if one gender is underrepresented then it's not hurting us all on the long run. It might turn out that yeah, women don't really like tech, and those few who do are very welcome, men can behave around them, and those instances of sexism are just the expected rare problems that do happen in every other walks of life. But so far, it seems that it's very much not the case.
hueving 9y ago
>James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. Did he? I've seen it represented this way but it was my understanding that averages of society were being talked about in the manifesto. So from my understanding it didn't say anything about the women at Google who would presumably be on the far right side of the distribution either way. Men tend to be more physically violent than women, but that's not saying that a particular group of men is necessarily more or less violent than a particular group of women.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Did he? I've seen it represented this way but it was my understanding that averages of society were being talked about in the manifesto. Of course he didn't. It's easy to debunk by actually reading the original memo - I'm pretty sure people summarizing it that way are betting that their readers won't bother to check the source. Also, it's ironic that the ostensibly pro-diversity critics are literally equating "different" with "inferior" here.
  - thebooktocome 9y ago
    Two real numbers are different: is one necessarily less than the other? Yes. This is a consequence of the law of trichotomy.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      That's only if you reduce the problem to one parameter. Two points on a plane are different: is one necessarily less than the other? No. The question itself is ill-formed. You need a metric to transform the points to a form that can fit into the "less than" comparison. A common transformation would be e.g. euclidean distance - under which two different points (e.g. (2, 4) and (4, 2)) can end up being equal. Real-life problems are multi-dimensional issues with very complex metrics.
      - thebooktocome 9y ago
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> Tell me, truly, is this a view held by many here? That, as the church denounced Galileo's observation that we turn around the sun as heretical, so too our modern PC culture suppresses legitimate inquiry into wether gender is a determinant of programming aptitude? This is a comparison worth drawing? Nah, if anything, the primary comparison was not with Galileo but with Soviet ideology, which is quite apt IMO. > James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. You apparently didn't read the 'manifesto'. He did no such thing. In fact, he only constructed an argument - based on solid research - that current pro-diversity practices in Google are harmful to employees and* company alike. Also, Kolmogorov and Galileo also started as junior whatevers - you can't evaluate someone at time T by what they turned out to be at time T+many years later. > Please, before you throw in your lot with him, consider how ridiculous the analogy OP made here is. The Google Manifesto is manifestly not A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It's not. But Scott Aaronson used examples of historical figures important to him and his field, and he did that to make a general point about a "third option" between acting and buying into propaganda. It is only natural for him to use those examples. > tptacek linked this graph[2] on one of the early threads on this. It's a pretty solid rebuttal to any and all concerns that women are innately unsuited to computers rather than that our computer culture has driven them away. I think the arguments in this article have pretty solid rebuttals too, or at least alternative explanations ;). Some of the pretty stronger ones show e.g. in part IV of the recent post of Scott Alexander - http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger.... Also, the memo wasn't really making the argument that women are unsuited to computers. The usual argument is that they are less likely to be interested in them, compared to other available options. Which also suggests that the more options you give to everyone, the more gender inequality you're expected to see, as people naturally sort themselves into careers that fit their characters.
ElmntOfSurprise 9y ago
I actually think Galileo vs. religion is a quite fitting analogy for these kinds of issues today. There is a prevailing ideology that, if you are seen as disagreeing with it, and if you doing so is visible enough, can get you ousted from polite society. This ideology has a set of dogmatic views about the world which may not be challenged, some of which are seen as axioms of morality. Even though a good argument can be made for both sides of the fence based on the observable evidence available, the standard of proof for one side[1] is set insurmountably high, while just-so stories are widely accepted justifications for the other. Instead of looking for hypotheses that best describe the evidence available to us, we add epicycles to the models dictated to us by the orthodox view whenever discrepancies to reality get too obvious. Damore is not "literally" Galileo, he does not fear for his life or freedom, he did not publish an original work but instead summarized thoughts that have been around elsewhere, so it is not a perfect analogy, of course. [1] Standard of proof, but also otherwise standard it is held to: The worst possible interpretation of the document is being discussed, after liberal reading between the lines, looking for dog-whistles, and a telephone game of bad faith summaries. Case in point: > 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes
- mikeash 9y ago
  Fox News is a highly rated TV channel. Right-wing talk radio has tens of millions of listeners. Our national government is currently dominated by people who disagree with this supposed "prevailing ideology." I am baffled by the idea that liberals dominate discourse and conservatives have to hide in the shadows to avoid persecution. I see it in a lot of comments here, and half of Damore's manifesto revolved around it. Yet not only are conservatives clearly not persecuted in general, they punch well above their weight when it comes to framing discourse.
  - unityByFreedom 9y ago
    > half of Damore's manifesto revolved around it And, Damore is now interviewing with YouTube personalities claiming Google silenced him. Meanwhile, every day are 4 new articles about his manifesto, which everyone can find fully linked up and formatted. There's nothing left to complain about. He's got the debate he wanted. I feel like the strategy of denouncing media began with Trump. It's earned him tons of attention, and others have begun doing the same because they think it's true. They think their ideas are being drowned out. I don't see that. I see tons of online discussions. From time to time, someone asks me to frame my point in a way that is more to their liking, and I'm baffled. That isn't how open debate works.
imron 9y ago
> James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. Did we read the same manifesto? Because I don't recall that part at all. I do recall him saying in several places that despite population-level differences in averages for certain personality traits, it was incorrect to take the average and apply it to individuals within that group due to the large overlap between different groups. > It's a pretty solid rebuttal to any and all concerns that women are innately unsuited to computers rather than that our computer culture has driven them away. And this article [0], has a pretty solid rebuttal as to that interpretation of that graph (among other things). 0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
Boothroid 9y ago
I'm a little troubled by your comment. If you disagree so strongly with what James Damore said I think the best course of action is to refute his arguments, rather than attack him personally/his position in life - junior programmer, big deal? Exactly what difference does that make to the validity of his arguments or otherwise? You actually undermine the cause of refuting his position by not focusing solely on his arguments, but rather attacking him and those that might think his ideas are at least worth hearing, even if only to undermine those ideas.
moduspol 9y ago
> inquiry into wether gender is a determinant of programming aptitude? This inquiry wasn't made. You have to read the memo. > accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. This wasn't claimed, either. You have to read the memo. I'm sorry but repeatedly here opponents are deliberately misrepresenting the content of the memo to try to take a moral high ground. We can't discuss this fairly if any opposing viewpoint is going to be framed as claiming women have inferior genes.
kbart 9y ago
"James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes." Read it again, there was not a single word about "inferior". "Different" is the correct word here. Your posts highlights the precise reason we can't have a meaningful discussion on this problem. Your second link to a graph about women working with computers have another explanation - typist was seen "women's" profession back then and early computers were also seen as somewhat improved typing machine, that's why many early computer operators were women. Few older professors told us that in 70s and 80s it was common in university to employ a typist (typically a woman) to enter programs into computers, I'm pretty sure they were counted as "programmers" in that chart.
- macrael 9y ago
  Why then did that track so neatly with other scientific majors? There's no reason that you'd need the same number of aspiring typists as aspiring doctors.
  - kbart 9y ago
    I didn't check this data and you didn't provide a link, so can't comment on that, but do you honestly believe that women's position in 70s-80s were better than it is now? I seriously doubt that, just ask your mother or other older women for their opinion.
    - macrael 9y ago
      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-... This is the link I put up earlier. It is tracking women's enrollment in majors lined up with different fields. It shows the percentage of women enrolled in majors for programming tracking along with people enrolled in medicine, law, and the hard sciences until the 1980s where suddenly it deviated rather significantly.
syrrim 9y ago
>inferior genes Not inferior genes, merely different genes. Is this so controversial?
Hermel 9y ago
> Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. Can you cite the parts of his memo that made you believe he did that? Or did you read that "between the lines"?
aidenn0 9y ago
Ultimately I think it boils down to whether or not you see the memo as dog-whistle misogyny. HN's guidelines specifically encourage posting anything that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." So we can hopefully assume that the I think anybody who is intellectually curious is interested in whether population-level neurological sexual dimorphism has any significant impact on career outcomes. If you do not read the memo as dog-whistle misogyny, then you will see this reaction as an indication that investigating this fact is forbidden. Just to quote a few things you said as an example: "legitimate inquiry into whether gender is a determinant of programming aptitude" "accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes." The memo in question never once mentioned engineering aptitude nor ability. It did claim that women were not pursuing software jobs due to a combination of things they found distasteful, some of which were inherent to the job and others of which are cultural. Again, if it's dog-whistle misogyny, then reading this as: "I think I can get away with talking about differences of preference, so I'll just let people fill in the blanks in terms of differences of ability" makes perfect sense, but I hope you could see how others might not make that inference?
Houshalter 9y ago
First of all he never ever said women were inferior. He said they were statistically less likely to be interested in computer science. That's not an objectionable claim at all. It's certainly not a "hostile work environment". Firing people for having political opinions sure is though. The "manifesto" wasn't the best argument ever written on the subject. But as far as I can tell its basically correct. There are many well documented biological differences between men and women. Not just minor ones, but some of the largest effect sizes I've ever seen in a social science. I think it's absurd to expect exactly equal gender ratios given such enormous differences. The NPR article is interesting. It was brought up before and there was some debate about how accurate it was. It doesn't make much sense given the gender ratio in other similar areas like engineering is similar and hasn't changed that much. But even if its correct, the theory they present is basically compatible with the Google memo. That parents are less likely to buy girls computers and so they don't go into comp sci. If that's the case, Googles sexist programs to discriminate against men over women isn't going to change anything. All the statistics show the "problem" isn't in the tech industry and is happening by high school or before.

apsec112 9y ago

"Please, before you throw in your lot with him, consider how ridiculous the analogy OP made here is. The Google Manifesto is manifestly not A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems." Aaronson doesn't mention Google or Damore.

jacalata 9y ago
Perhaps if you were hoping for comments here not to mention it, now was a bad time to post it.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
Yes, but it's clear what he meant: Those sharing the truth in the most rational way are the ones most viciously attacked. The society rejects even considering the hypothesis because they are afraid of the truth that they all recognize. Clearly he's calling for us to calmly and rationally re-evaluate the hypothesis that Jews are sub-human parasites that are destroying our societies from within and that the only rational solution is to exterminate them before they destroy our glorious Aryan culture.
cabalamat 9y ago
Indeed not. Aaronson is talking about the general case when there are things you can't say that are indeed true. This is useful, because if you can come to correct conclusions for the general case, these conclusions will be useful in instances of that case.
- Ar-Curunir 9y ago
  Scott Aaronson is highly unlikely going to be siding with someone using pseudoscience to push their victim agenda. It's a great insult to the victims of Church oppression in the middle ages and of Soviet policy to compare their hardships to the "hardships" of men working at Google.
  - backpropaganda 9y ago
    Have some self-awareness, good sir.

fvdessen 9y ago

I'm fascinated by sentences like "He created a textbook hostile work environment." and "Freedom of Speech is not Freedom from Consequences". I see them more and more, repeated verbatim, to justify why someone had to be removed from his social environment, or physically assaulted. Justifying physical violence from ideological reasons by repeating mantras. I tought I wouldn't see that in my lifetime, that it was a thing of the past. Reading of totalitarian societies I always wondered how it could happen, and now we see it develop right before our eyes. It is fascinating & terrifying.

macrael 9y ago
Please read the first article I linked. It's written by an employment lawyer! "Hostile work environment" is not a mantra, it has a legal definition that our justice system has been workshopping for decades. Please consider that this is actually a complicated area that many smart people have been arguing about and refining for years and years. The famous "fire in a theatre" example shows that there are limits to free speech, maybe this too isn't speech worth defending.
- icebraining 9y ago
  The famous "fire in a theatre" example was invented to justify censoring the distribution of flyers opposing the draft.
  - endominus 9y ago
    Additionally, it was later judged as unconstitutional.
  - macrael 9y ago
    Just so: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim... I'll try and avoid "the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech" in the future. :0 I really think it's worth reading the employment lawyer piece I linked, it's good to get the actual legal perspective on this whole situation.

sanxiyn 9y ago

It's surprising how different people interpret post-1980 decline of women in computer science differently. As the article suggests, introduction of personal computer is one of the best candidate. My interpretation is that this data supports "interest, not ability" thesis of Damore, and personal computer amplified pre-existing interest difference.

macrael 9y ago
If we're throwing around theories without evidence, what do you think about the fact that nerd culture, exemplified by movies from the 80s like Revenge of the Nerds, welcomes and glorifies young men who don't know how to talk to women? If women are less interested in computers than men, could it not be because we have created a culture that is unappealing to them?
jacalata 9y ago
And then you start learning about the different distribution of ownership and access to personal computers among boys and girls, and it looks like the personal computer actually introduced the interest difference. The book Unlocking The Clubhouse has a bunch of discussion on this topic, if you're curious.
- ElmntOfSurprise 9y ago
  You mean that boys like computers more --> they buy more computers (or nag their parents about getting one), or that parents are more prone to give computers to boys --> girls never have the chance to get as interested? Interestingly, teenage girls seem to have more access to (desktop) computers than boys have nowadays: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/2013/PIP_TeensandTechnology2013.pdf http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/201...
  - cropsieboss 9y ago
    Just like teenage girls had more instrument playing experience than boys during an era when blues and jazz were starting to develop. Yet men lead the genre.

znfi 9y ago

If I understand things correctly the argument by feminists etc is something along the lines of "there are no differences between men and women, and thus any difference in outcome must be due to discrimination". Firstly, even if there was only this claim and accusation, one might want to defend oneself against it. Especially since this is an almost universally agreed upon "truth" in the western world. Secondly, motivated by this (perceived) discrimination of women, we as a society have allowed various forms of discrimination of men intended to offset the discrimination of women. This gives an even stronger reason to contest this "truth" if one feels that it is in fact not true. So what kind of defence is someone who does not agree with the above "truth" allowed? Like how insanely watered down should the defence be in order that one does not "accusing [ones] colleagues of having inferior genes"?

foldr 9y ago
>If I understand things correctly the argument by feminists etc is something along the lines of "there are no differences between men and women, and thus any difference in outcome must be due to discrimination. Really? Could you give a reference to anyone ever actually making this argument?
- Banthum 9y ago
  Professor Nicholas Matte states it in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kasiov0ytEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kasiov0ytEc Not a really exotic belief in the core social justice circles. Though advocates tend to avoid stating it outright, since it's so easy to attack and so ridiculous. So it's generally left implicit. E.g. They'll just say, "X field is only 30% women, we must fight the sexism that causes this", leaving it as an unstated assumption.
  - foldr 9y ago
    Could you provide a quote, rather than linking to a 50 minute video?
- znfi 9y ago
  I'm not sure I can provide an actual quote on this and was more my understanding of what people are arguing, I could be mistaken, I'm not sure. But it would seem to me that accepting something of that form as true would be necessary in order to believe in many fairly standard feminist/whatever claims. In particular, the controversy surrounding Damore's "manifesto" seems very hard to understand if most people believe that there are differences between the genders that could affect the "outcome"/gender gap in tech/whatever. If this in fact what everyone thinks, then why are so many people upset that someone wrote a document saying this is the case? The whole thing should to be a no-issue? (I guess some of the points of Aaronson's original blog post might be applicable here. But I'm not sure that really improves the situation...) Secondly, if everyone agrees that there are differences between the genders that could affect for example the gender gap in tech, I have a very hard time understanding how one can routinely blame more or less any difference between the genders on discrimination or some such.

babuskov 9y ago

> until equality is the rule of the day But people aren't clones and we aren't all equal. Hey, I want to be equal to LeBron James. Please, give me the same salary. You want equality, there's communism for you. See how that panned out. > women are innately unsuited to computers Did you read the original paper? Damore never wrote that. He was talking about statistical chance, not generalizing like you are now.

pas 9y ago
It's not equality of results, it's equality of opportunity. You can get the same initial chance to prove your ability at basketball as he did. You can even get a slight boost to compensate for things (maybe he was a lot more motivated, or maybe he got some practice in the 'hood). And it'll turn out you have no skills/talent/ability, you're not 2 meters high, and so on. Now, with sports, it's not a problem if we don't spend more than a few seconds of thought on trying to create equal opportunities, because with competitive sports the point is exactly to not have equal outcomes. But with broad categories like jobs/career, income, wealth, political/legal/professional representation, we pretty much want to make sure that if one gender is underrepresented then it's not hurting us all on the long run. It might turn out that yeah, women don't really like tech, and those few who do are very welcome, men can behave around them, and those instances of sexism are just the expected rare problems that do happen in every other walks of life. But so far, it seems that it's very much not the case.

hueving 9y ago

>James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. Did he? I've seen it represented this way but it was my understanding that averages of society were being talked about in the manifesto. So from my understanding it didn't say anything about the women at Google who would presumably be on the far right side of the distribution either way. Men tend to be more physically violent than women, but that's not saying that a particular group of men is necessarily more or less violent than a particular group of women.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> Did he? I've seen it represented this way but it was my understanding that averages of society were being talked about in the manifesto. Of course he didn't. It's easy to debunk by actually reading the original memo - I'm pretty sure people summarizing it that way are betting that their readers won't bother to check the source. Also, it's ironic that the ostensibly pro-diversity critics are literally equating "different" with "inferior" here.
- thebooktocome 9y ago
  Two real numbers are different: is one necessarily less than the other? Yes. This is a consequence of the law of trichotomy.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    That's only if you reduce the problem to one parameter. Two points on a plane are different: is one necessarily less than the other? No. The question itself is ill-formed. You need a metric to transform the points to a form that can fit into the "less than" comparison. A common transformation would be e.g. euclidean distance - under which two different points (e.g. (2, 4) and (4, 2)) can end up being equal. Real-life problems are multi-dimensional issues with very complex metrics.
    - thebooktocome 9y ago

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> Tell me, truly, is this a view held by many here? That, as the church denounced Galileo's observation that we turn around the sun as heretical, so too our modern PC culture suppresses legitimate inquiry into wether gender is a determinant of programming aptitude? This is a comparison worth drawing? Nah, if anything, the primary comparison was not with Galileo but with Soviet ideology, which is quite apt IMO. > James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. You apparently didn't read the 'manifesto'. He did no such thing. In fact, he only constructed an argument - based on solid research - that current pro-diversity practices in Google are harmful to employees and* company alike. Also, Kolmogorov and Galileo also started as junior whatevers - you can't evaluate someone at time T by what they turned out to be at time T+many years later. > Please, before you throw in your lot with him, consider how ridiculous the analogy OP made here is. The Google Manifesto is manifestly not A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It's not. But Scott Aaronson used examples of historical figures important to him and his field, and he did that to make a general point about a "third option" between acting and buying into propaganda. It is only natural for him to use those examples. > tptacek linked this graph[2] on one of the early threads on this. It's a pretty solid rebuttal to any and all concerns that women are innately unsuited to computers rather than that our computer culture has driven them away. I think the arguments in this article have pretty solid rebuttals too, or at least alternative explanations ;). Some of the pretty stronger ones show e.g. in part IV of the recent post of Scott Alexander - http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger.... Also, the memo wasn't really making the argument that women are unsuited to computers. The usual argument is that they are less likely to be interested in them, compared to other available options. Which also suggests that the more options you give to everyone, the more gender inequality you're expected to see, as people naturally sort themselves into careers that fit their characters.

ElmntOfSurprise 9y ago

I actually think Galileo vs. religion is a quite fitting analogy for these kinds of issues today. There is a prevailing ideology that, if you are seen as disagreeing with it, and if you doing so is visible enough, can get you ousted from polite society. This ideology has a set of dogmatic views about the world which may not be challenged, some of which are seen as axioms of morality. Even though a good argument can be made for both sides of the fence based on the observable evidence available, the standard of proof for one side[1] is set insurmountably high, while just-so stories are widely accepted justifications for the other. Instead of looking for hypotheses that best describe the evidence available to us, we add epicycles to the models dictated to us by the orthodox view whenever discrepancies to reality get too obvious. Damore is not "literally" Galileo, he does not fear for his life or freedom, he did not publish an original work but instead summarized thoughts that have been around elsewhere, so it is not a perfect analogy, of course. [1] Standard of proof, but also otherwise standard it is held to: The worst possible interpretation of the document is being discussed, after liberal reading between the lines, looking for dog-whistles, and a telephone game of bad faith summaries. Case in point: > 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes

mikeash 9y ago
Fox News is a highly rated TV channel. Right-wing talk radio has tens of millions of listeners. Our national government is currently dominated by people who disagree with this supposed "prevailing ideology." I am baffled by the idea that liberals dominate discourse and conservatives have to hide in the shadows to avoid persecution. I see it in a lot of comments here, and half of Damore's manifesto revolved around it. Yet not only are conservatives clearly not persecuted in general, they punch well above their weight when it comes to framing discourse.
- unityByFreedom 9y ago
  > half of Damore's manifesto revolved around it And, Damore is now interviewing with YouTube personalities claiming Google silenced him. Meanwhile, every day are 4 new articles about his manifesto, which everyone can find fully linked up and formatted. There's nothing left to complain about. He's got the debate he wanted. I feel like the strategy of denouncing media began with Trump. It's earned him tons of attention, and others have begun doing the same because they think it's true. They think their ideas are being drowned out. I don't see that. I see tons of online discussions. From time to time, someone asks me to frame my point in a way that is more to their liking, and I'm baffled. That isn't how open debate works.

imron 9y ago

> James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. Did we read the same manifesto? Because I don't recall that part at all. I do recall him saying in several places that despite population-level differences in averages for certain personality traits, it was incorrect to take the average and apply it to individuals within that group due to the large overlap between different groups. > It's a pretty solid rebuttal to any and all concerns that women are innately unsuited to computers rather than that our computer culture has driven them away. And this article [0], has a pretty solid rebuttal as to that interpretation of that graph (among other things). 0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Boothroid 9y ago

I'm a little troubled by your comment. If you disagree so strongly with what James Damore said I think the best course of action is to refute his arguments, rather than attack him personally/his position in life - junior programmer, big deal? Exactly what difference does that make to the validity of his arguments or otherwise? You actually undermine the cause of refuting his position by not focusing solely on his arguments, but rather attacking him and those that might think his ideas are at least worth hearing, even if only to undermine those ideas.

moduspol 9y ago

> inquiry into wether gender is a determinant of programming aptitude? This inquiry wasn't made. You have to read the memo. > accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. This wasn't claimed, either. You have to read the memo. I'm sorry but repeatedly here opponents are deliberately misrepresenting the content of the memo to try to take a moral high ground. We can't discuss this fairly if any opposing viewpoint is going to be framed as claiming women have inferior genes.

kbart 9y ago

"James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes." Read it again, there was not a single word about "inferior". "Different" is the correct word here. Your posts highlights the precise reason we can't have a meaningful discussion on this problem. Your second link to a graph about women working with computers have another explanation - typist was seen "women's" profession back then and early computers were also seen as somewhat improved typing machine, that's why many early computer operators were women. Few older professors told us that in 70s and 80s it was common in university to employ a typist (typically a woman) to enter programs into computers, I'm pretty sure they were counted as "programmers" in that chart.

macrael 9y ago
Why then did that track so neatly with other scientific majors? There's no reason that you'd need the same number of aspiring typists as aspiring doctors.
- kbart 9y ago
  I didn't check this data and you didn't provide a link, so can't comment on that, but do you honestly believe that women's position in 70s-80s were better than it is now? I seriously doubt that, just ask your mother or other older women for their opinion.
  - macrael 9y ago
    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-... This is the link I put up earlier. It is tracking women's enrollment in majors lined up with different fields. It shows the percentage of women enrolled in majors for programming tracking along with people enrolled in medicine, law, and the hard sciences until the 1980s where suddenly it deviated rather significantly.

syrrim 9y ago

>inferior genes Not inferior genes, merely different genes. Is this so controversial?

Hermel 9y ago

> Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes. Can you cite the parts of his memo that made you believe he did that? Or did you read that "between the lines"?

aidenn0 9y ago

Ultimately I think it boils down to whether or not you see the memo as dog-whistle misogyny. HN's guidelines specifically encourage posting anything that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." So we can hopefully assume that the I think anybody who is intellectually curious is interested in whether population-level neurological sexual dimorphism has any significant impact on career outcomes. If you do not read the memo as dog-whistle misogyny, then you will see this reaction as an indication that investigating this fact is forbidden. Just to quote a few things you said as an example: "legitimate inquiry into whether gender is a determinant of programming aptitude" "accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes." The memo in question never once mentioned engineering aptitude nor ability. It did claim that women were not pursuing software jobs due to a combination of things they found distasteful, some of which were inherent to the job and others of which are cultural. Again, if it's dog-whistle misogyny, then reading this as: "I think I can get away with talking about differences of preference, so I'll just let people fill in the blanks in terms of differences of ability" makes perfect sense, but I hope you could see how others might not make that inference?

Houshalter 9y ago

First of all he never ever said women were inferior. He said they were statistically less likely to be interested in computer science. That's not an objectionable claim at all. It's certainly not a "hostile work environment". Firing people for having political opinions sure is though. The "manifesto" wasn't the best argument ever written on the subject. But as far as I can tell its basically correct. There are many well documented biological differences between men and women. Not just minor ones, but some of the largest effect sizes I've ever seen in a social science. I think it's absurd to expect exactly equal gender ratios given such enormous differences. The NPR article is interesting. It was brought up before and there was some debate about how accurate it was. It doesn't make much sense given the gender ratio in other similar areas like engineering is similar and hasn't changed that much. But even if its correct, the theory they present is basically compatible with the Google memo. That parents are less likely to buy girls computers and so they don't go into comp sci. If that's the case, Googles sexist programs to discriminate against men over women isn't going to change anything. All the statistics show the "problem" isn't in the tech industry and is happening by high school or before.