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> The document, which was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo? They are r

• trentnix 9y ago
  The narrative must be maintained, comrade!
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• humanrebar 9y ago
  There was an Atlantic piece about this specific thing that hit the HN front page. It was flagged as a dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967440
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  • jsnell 9y ago
    And correctly so, since the exact same article already was on the front page with 400 points a day earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959601
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• dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo? Reading the memo is irrelevant to the fact claim you quoted, which is about the response to the memo, not about it's content. (It's also completely accurate; the memo has been widely condemned on the basis stated.)
  • boona 9y ago
    The memo was also widely praised, so at best you could say that it's controversial.
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  • josteink 9y ago
    Sure. It's technically correct, but that doesn't make it right. If I (or Gizmodo) were to write and spread fake news about you, where it is claimed that you are most likely a paedophile... Would you appreciate news agencies afterwards further spreading the lie by using technically correct statements like "dragonwriter, which is largely considered a paedophile"? Especially considering that basic fact checking could verify that this is indeed not true?
• doktrin 9y ago
  >> The document, which was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate > Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo? Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the document was widely condemned as being both of those things. Reporting that those condemnations occurred (they did) isn't an implicit validation of said condemnations.
  • mbel 9y ago
    > Reporting that those condemnations occurred (they did) isn't an implicit validation of those condemnations. Of course it isn't a validation per se, but repeating those ideas gives them some gravity and makes them believable in the eyes of the reader.
  • josteink 9y ago
    > Reporting that those condemnations occurred (they did) isn't an implicit validation If 9/11, Iraq and WMDs have taught us anything, it is that repeating a lie enough times makes it true. This is repeating the lie. Sure. It's done by reference only, and not directly, but it's still a repetition.
    • Kiro 9y ago
      > 9/11 What lies are you referring to?
      • josteink 9y ago
        I was mostly referring to how Iraq after 9/11 was repeatedly claimed to have WMDs. This was done to justify a war, which was obviously actually about oil. US intelligence agencies time and time again claimed to posses evidence of Iraq having WMDs, and how it was vital to invade to stop Saddam from using them. After the invasion it was obvious to pretty much everyone that the WMDs weren't there, they had been deliberately lied to, and that the "evidence" was manufactured. I remember even Colin Powell being furious about this, seeing as he was the one who stood in front of the UN presenting the "evidence" as fact. A massive loss of face. He was not happy.
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• aaron-lebo 9y ago
  It was widely condemned. The document has been inaccurately labeled (I've seen a Slate op-ed making statements that are blatantly false) , but the people who are acting like it is some kind of academic work have apparently never done academic work. The guy took a few academic sources and mixed in stuff from the New York Post. It's not well sourced. What people do see is an academic study linked and say "see, this is scientific", but most people aren't trained to read that literature so it's just psuedo-scientific garble. Why is the tech world turning itself upside down for a mediocre undergrad paper?
  • boona 9y ago
    > it's just psuedo-scientific garble As Julian Assange pointed out, it's been reviewed by a professor of social psychology, a PhD in personality psychology, a professor in evolutionary psychology, and a PhD in sexual neuroscience and in large part it checks out. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/ http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-... > Why is the tech world turning itself upside down for a mediocre undergrad paper? Precisely because it accurately reflects the world, but we're seeing a strong backlash to it from a certain segment of the population.
    • zimpenfish 9y ago
      > a professor of social psychology, a PhD in personality psychology, a professor in evolutionary psychology, and a PhD in sexual neuroscience Only one of these is qualified to comment on biological claims.
      • boona 9y ago
        But all of them are qualified to comment on the differences between the two genders.
        • zimpenfish 9y ago
          Debatable. I would exclude the EvoPsych chap from being qualified to comment on anything, personally, and the other two would need to show quite strongly that they weren't coming at this from a position of anti-SJW/snowflake commentary that they've previously demonstrated.
• jlebrech 9y ago
  It was more insensitive than it was inaccurate and also predicted what would happen to the author.
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• roel_v 9y ago
  "I has honestly expected The Guardian to hold higher standards." ... what? It's the Guardian. It's a left-wing version of Breitbart. The vast majority of their 'reporting' is ideology-based fact spinning. I keep wondering why people somehow say that it's a 'respectable newspaper'.
• rayiner 9y ago
  I read the whole thing and I think the allegations hold. There is one citation to a scientific article in the memo: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004..... It's a meta analysis that looks at abstract personality traits (agreeableness, people-orientation) in studies involving socialized adults. The big takeaway is that these studies show that women are more "agreeable" and "people-oriented." Everything after that is handwaving and ipse dixit. Egregiously, the memo takes it for granted that software is "thing-oriented" rather than "people-oriented." That defies reality. Software development is far more collaborative and social than, say, being a historian (a field where women receive 45% of the PhDs). The memo also asserts, without proof, that these observed differences are stable across cultures. That's just false. Take education, for example. In India, men are overrepresented in teaching (80% of teachers are men).[1] And gender representation in STEM majors varies dramatically between different countries. Women are 40% of the STEM workforce in China. Over a third of the USSR's engineers were women, even in the 1960s. In short, the reasoning in the article is so flimsy I'd be embarassed to be that sloppy in an HN post, much less in a company-wide memo. Which brings me to sexism. I have a hard time believing that anyone smart enough to work at Google actually finds such sloppy reasoning convincing. Instead, the memo smacks of the sort of grasping at straws rationalization used to justify existing prejudices. [1] The underlying study also makes egregious assumptions about whether professions are "people oriented" versus "thing oriented." Figure 1 depicts a people-things axis and an ideas-data axis. It puts "teacher" at the far end of the "people" axis, and characterizes that as a feminine profession. The study also characterizes "biologist" on the masculine side of the column, even though a significant majority of biology majors in the U.S. are women.
  • Kalium 9y ago
    If there's one thing I've learned by being around a lot of highly educated people, it's that you should never underestimate the power of pre-conceived notions to live beyond a sane lifespan in a person's mind. I don't find it at all difficult to believe that anyone smart enough to work at Google would find such reasoning convincing. Indeed, I have seen smarter people convinced by sloppier reasoning that happens to align with what the person wants to be true.
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• LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  The Guardian (and other news outlets) can report on claims that others make without fear of repercussion. If their reported viewpoint is later shown to be defamatory, they can fall back on simply reporting the facts: Some other source condemned the document. But if they make the claim that a document, person, or company is misogynistic or scientifically inaccurate, stating it as fact, then they are liable. This is why so much reporting today is sprinkled liberally with the word "alleged". It's more common (and reasonable) in reporting on crime, when police or prosecutors claim that someone is guilty before the trial is complete, but it seems to be a habit that seeps into all reporting.
• mpweiher 9y ago
  >> The document, which was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate >Citation needed? Have The Guardian actually read the memo? Well, they were quite clever, weren't they. They didn't make any claims about the document itself, just about its reception. And so what they write is technically true, the memo was widely condemned as misogynistic and scientifically inaccurate, even if those condemnations were completely wrong. And of course the impression the sentence gives is that the document was these things. Journalists are good with words, they do this sort of thing all the time. I used to read "Der Spiegel" a lot, one of the premier German weeklies. And I used to take what I read at face value. Until they started writing about stuff I had first hand knowledge off. Which tended to be comically inaccurate. And then I started looking more closely, and noticed that they would pull these little language tricks all the time: giving an example, then an absolute number of one thing, comparing it to a percentage of another thing. Creating impressions and "causal" connection between events or facts by simply mentioning them next to each other, without ever making the claim. Etc. It is actually entertaining to analyze, but don't expect to get too much useful information. And no, I am not yelling "Fake News", most of the alternative news sources are far, far worse, not relying on linguistic trickery but just simply lying. Anyway, the ones that do this the least (that I know of), are the Economist (their pro-finance, pro-CEO bias is transparent enough not to be much of a problem), the BBC (they actually really try hard) and Die Zeit (German). Fun! EDIT: An important "not" was missing. Sigh.