14 ms·

What I believe II

147 points by seycombi 9y ago

seycombi 9y ago
Hacker News discussion on part one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14966002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14966002
IIAOPSW 9y ago
I kind of wish Aaronson didn't do a followup and explicitly tie his Kolmogrov essay to the Demure controversy. I liked it better when he was self-referentially taking the Kolmogrov option by virtue of his very writing about the Kolmogrov option. He said it all so well without saying it. I bet pedestrian SJWs might have even quoted his original essay thinking it was in support of their cause.
- striking 9y ago
  He explains why he did it, though. > However, a few people who I like and respect accused me of “dogwhistling.” They warned, in particular, that if I wouldn’t just come out and say what I thought about the James Damore Google memo thing, then people would assume the very worst[...]
  - lackbeard 9y ago
    So he's appeasing the if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us bullies? That's sad, if true...
    - striking 9y ago
      I'm glad he decided to do this, though. It's a great piece. Maybe it's not what the "bullies" would've wanted, but it's something they should read anyway.
- Lon7 9y ago
  I agree. The Kolmogrov essay stood on it's own very well. It was great piece of writing and could be applied to various situations. But now it will always be tied to this messy debate.
andyjohnson0 9y ago
"... if James Damore deserves to be fired from Google, for treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues, then Steven Pinker deserves to be fired from Harvard for the same offense. Yes, I realize that a employee of a private company is different from a tenured professor. But I don’t see why it’s relevant here." Its relevant because Damore is employed to develop products to benefit Google's sharesholders, wheras Pinker is employed by Harvard to do science and publicly communicate ideas. Pinker's tenure gives him licence to pursue controversial ideas if that is where the evidence takes him. Damore gets to write code on an at-will basis.
- thinkfurther 9y ago
  Don't they have something about "organizing the world's information and making accessible"? Here's a guy saying it's not that great to suppress view points or hard scientific facts based on dogma, that this damages Google like it would damage any other group or company, and -- he gets fired and many people distort what he actually wrote. The relationship between Google and "information" seems to kind of complicated. This is like a chef you see putting dirt into a meal; maybe they cook tasty things most of the time, but if they're a good chef, why are they ever doing something as "anti-chef" as that?
  - andyjohnson0 9y ago
    > organizing the world's information and making accessible That's a corporate business objective. It doesn't give every Google employee the right to publicly say what they want, when they want, using company systems, and when engaged in their job.
    - falcolas 9y ago
      I find myself repeating this a lot: According to the original coverage, his (and other Google employees') opinions on the topic of diversity in hiring was requested. He originally put his response up on a group explicitly created for this discussion. He never sent it to Google at large - someone else did that in outrage at his opinion. Just as someone else leaked it from being internal to Google to the media.
RodericDay 9y ago
It's interesting how many tech guys consider this guy some kind of martyr. People are upset about his odious "Google Memo" because it's not their first rodeo with a dude who weasels around and justifies his racism/sexism with pseudoscience, not because they were "misled" by "clickbait media" or whatever. They weren't incorrect. The 32 supposedly-critical citation links point ovewhelmingly to garbage, including 5 wikipedia links, a dozen opinion pieces, some more "academic" essays, a link to MRA-founder Warren Farrell's blog, and, perhaps best of all, a link that simply points to a google search for the term "political correctness" (lol). The "graphs" are made in powerpoint with the curve tool (one of them the infamous bell curve), and the axes don't even have ticks on them. It's evident to anyone familiar with "the scene" that the dude got all his info from anti-feminist YouTube/Reddit, and this was proven beyond a doubt when he went on to speak at anti-feminist YouTube channels immediately after getting fired. he wasn't widely misunderstood, people just saw right through his multiple disclaimers. This Quora answer was pretty final for me: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
- Sinidir 9y ago
  It was actual science if you bothered to read. But keep seeing the world through your heavily tinted ideological lense.
  - Qwertious 9y ago
    Did you read the Quora link? It provided scientific sources for all its claims in refuting the google employee document. If the Quora article is nonsense, then please refute the Quora article instead of throwing around "if you bothered to read" phrases.
    - Sinidir 9y ago
      No i didn't. But it doesn't even matter because your argument is invalid. Two articles/texts can be based in science and oppose each other. You know why? Because scientific literature can also disagree with each other. But again your ideoligical lense doesn't allow you to even consider this possibility and instead automatically classifies anything that opposes your beliefs and what you have read as pseudo science.
dzdt 9y ago
One of Scott's commentators (Stacey Jeffery) writes: That’s not because he necessarily said anything actually sexist or actually racist, but because he said the kinds of things that you usually only hear from sexist people, and in particular, the kind of sexist people who are also racist. That is the big thing I saw as well. I think there is an analogy to the body's defenses against viruses. The body recognizes certain shapes from the outside surface of viruses and attacks anything sharing those shapes. The memo was chock full of ideas and phrases that match those used by the worst kind of bigots. If you look at the plain meaning of the words it isn't so bad. But most people's response is based on the pattern-matched shape evaluation instead.
- manyoso 9y ago
  Agreed. And I understand the impulse. The irony is that this is in many ways the same tendency that powers racism, sexism, stereotypes in general. This very human impulse to label and identify and place in groups of known friends and enemies even based on incomplete data and uncertainty. I have no doubt that for many SJW's they labeled this guy a sexist and misogynist nearly instantly based just upon the subject matter. I also have no doubt that many members of the alt-right did so as well and identified him as one of their own. For me, the memo is incomplete data and not dispositive. But the impulse still tugs in the back of my head...
- cmiles74 9y ago
  Aaronsen mentioned this as well, friends and colleagues warned him about this "dogwhistling" (a term I've never heard before). The concern was that because he wasn't clearly stating his position, people would assume the worst. This was much the same criticism leveled against Donald Trump. Because he did not clear denounce the racist activities in Charlottesville, he could be interpreted as implying support. Personally, I am not seeing the lack of things that are actually sexist in Damore's memo. His one-sided and dishonest interpretations of his sources alone make his sexism clear and it's the same kind of dishonest interpretations we see from the racists and the sexists.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
cmiles74 9y ago
"... if James Damore deserves to be fired from Google, for treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues..." I don't believe that's why James Damore was fired. He was fired for a much more obvious reason: he was working against their efforts to have a more gender diverse workforce and he embarrassed the company in a very public way. "First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it."[0] Google admits that there are some things in the memo that are debatable, even though Google disagrees with Damore. "It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects ‘each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination"[0] And that is why he was fired: deliberately working against Google's workplace culture goals. There may be room to argue about what Damore may have meant, in his heart, when he wrote the memo. However, since the memo is a physical artifact that we may all inspect, it's clear that the text of the memo is unabashedly sexist. He clearly states that he believes the gender gap at Google is not caused by sexism and that's at clear odds with Google's goals. "We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism."[1] As if it needs to be said, that is clearly not the case. The primary cause of the gender gap is very much sexism and it's a real problem that needs to be dealt with. While we may disagree on which steps will be most effective, there's no benefit to denying the problem exists. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/07/google-fires-memo-author/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/07/google-fires-memo-author/ [1]: https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncensored-memo-with-charts-and-cites-339f3d2d05f https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso...
- manyoso 9y ago
  The primary cause of the gap is unknown and may very well not be sexism. And stating that does not make me sexist. If you believe it does, then you are not using reason to arrive at that conclusion. It is a logical fallacy.
  - cmiles74 9y ago
    I'm not here to name call (although I am certainly prone to name calling). If we take a look at the recent spate of articles covering sexism and harassment in the workplace at companies in the field, it is clear that there is a problem. If someone were at the point in their lives where they were choosing a field in which to place their career, they may very well choose one where their gender would be less of an issue. That causes a gender gap.
dandare 9y ago
Who wants to play a game of Arguman with me? I state that "Positive discrimination of disadvantaged groups in employment and education is immoral" http://en.arguman.org/positive-discrimination-at-work-is-immoral http://en.arguman.org/positive-discrimination-at-work-is-imm...
- Diederich 9y ago
  For the topic at hand: sex based discrimination in the technology sector in the United States in 2017: I won't comment one way or another. I don't feel qualified to offer a comment here. Do you think that "Positive discrimination on behalf of former slaves in the late 1860s in the United States in employment and education was immoral"?
stared 9y ago
The original "What I believe" was powerful enough that I use it as an opening quotation for "Dating for Nerds" series (first part here: http://p.migdal.pl/2017/07/23/dating-for-nerds.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/07/23/dating-for-nerds.html). That is: "How to help all the young male nerds I meet who suffer from [the dating] problem, in a way that passes feminist muster, and that triggers the world’s sympathy rather than outrage[?] I believe that, just as there are shy, nerdy men, there are also shy, nerdy women, who likewise suffer from feeling unwanted, sexually invisible, or ashamed to express their desires." At the same time, from my experience (including my current relationship with a feminist) that nerds and feminist should be allies. What is a problem is misunderstanding of each other problems and (often intentional triggering) both ways. Also, here are some lessons I've learnt at !!con (a conference by Recurse Center aka Hacker School alumni): http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html tl;dr: you can get great inclusivity primarily by being welcoming, accommodating for needs (in an open-ended way, not restricting it to a few axes) and, crucially, by not shaming or bulling otherwise good-willed transgressors. And as a male nerd I felt better than on less diverse events, not worse.
- Tossrock 9y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted, this seems quite reasonable to me.
Lon7 9y ago
I think the 7 points Scott outlined are fantastic, and I absolutely agree with him. This sounds a bit strange to write, but I think Scott, and a lot of people here and on the web, are almost thinking too logically and critically about all this. I have no problem with what they are doing, but I also don't think it is a very effective technique. Like it or not, this women in tech issue is in the domain of politics, and it will remain there. I see a whole bunch of really smart people applying the same problem solving skills they use in their daily engineering work to this problem. They try to rely on strict evidence, and proof and debate. And There's nothing wrong with that at all, but it isn't very effective in the political domain. It takes certain skills and lots of practice to correctly communicate with this type of purely logical debate. A ten page paper read by someone without these skills is very likely to be misunderstood. And that's exactly what happened. I wish that wasn't the case, but that's not the world we live in. If you are trying to persuade, you need to know your audience. In cases like this, your audience is not just your fellow tech community, but a large percentage of the entire world! It is people who won't follow your carefully constructed arguments. James Damore's critical mistake is that seemed totally ignorant to this point. The people reading his paper were not just going to be fellow googlers who had the skills to take his arguments at face value, it was everyone. You need to be aware of this when dealing in politics.
- js8 9y ago
  I see what you're saying, but I think it's more complicated. If you start to play politics and try to be more persuasive, you are losing the moral high ground. That's why many people would prefer to play openly.
  - Lon7 9y ago
    I agree. But it is really tough to actually play openly, and tough to know when others are playing openly. Enough time has passed that experts have had time to comprehend the original document, and it seems like James was only pretending to play openly. He misrepresented a lot of the science and put his own spin on it. A great answer by an evolutionary biologist on how James was absolutely wrong on almost every point he made: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...
craigsmansion 9y ago
Let's assume there's a new remote tribe discovered which has never had contact with the outside world. Now, for reasons unknown, members of this tribe have an uncanny ability to do mathematics. Every tech company rushes to enroll these math wizards, and entices them with English language courses. Now an employee writes a memo that questions the value of the language courses because the tribesfolk seem to have no innate interest in linguistics and seem to have a harder time learning English, enough to turn some away from their glorious new careers in Silicon Valley. He surmises it's probably because of their natural gift for mathematics. He also attaches the scientific research that, up to that moment, supports the notion that members of the tribe indeed have a superior grasp on mathematics. Now that we have the argument on neutral ground: -All the research quoted supports the innate math ability of the tribe, but implies nothing about their linguistic capabilities. -The reason these tribal members have difficulties picking up English is not really known. The supposition that mathematical skills and linguistic skill are inversely related is dubious and could easily be a product of our existing cultural norms. It could simply be them not even knowing the existence of different languages until very recently. -Constructing an argument that their linguistic shortcomings might be innate would serve no purpose outside of a very narrow field of neuroscience. It certainly does not detract from their mathematical abilities, and if the whole company needs to learn to speak French, because for some reason the tribe grasps that easily, so be it: whether innate or not, the company cannot afford not to hire them. Any memo about the innate English abilities of the tribe outside of a (proper) research paper within the realm of neuroscience is simply speculation. If this speculation is toxic to those already working there (telling coworkers their English sucks, but it's not their fault. They were born that way. You're only trying to help them.), or the hiring process, it is logical to put a stop to that. Now substitute "superior mathematicians" with "perfectly capable programmers", "remote tribe" with "half the population", and "innate linguistic interest" with "innate technical capability". TL;DR: even if a trait A that could be related to a more desirable trait B is more common in one group than in another group, its prevalence in one group implies nothing about the prevalence of the more desirable trait in the second group. To argue about trait A is to argue about nothing until a correlation is established. Any argument about trait A in relation to B that mentions genetics is to be regarded as highly suspicious.
- 9y ago
settsu 9y ago
> "Note that, even if men in STEM fields are no more sexist on average than men in other fields—or are less sexist, as one might expect from their generally socially liberal views and attitudes..." Sadly, that has not been my experience—not within specific technical departments nor in wider tech-related events, and certainly not in the broader workplace context. While this may a reasonable assertion on the coasts of the USA, it has not been my own in the spaces between them nor in my interactions with various people from outside the US. No question that these are my own limited anecdotes, but I like to believe I am reasonably well-read and aware of global mindsets and I would hesitate to make that statement so flatly. > "Trust me, my four-year-old daughter Lily wishes I didn’t believe so fervently in working with her every day on her math skills" And there you go. Even by a seemingly forgettable tongue-in-cheek quip, the author reveals a fundamental misjudgement repeated countless times around the world for centuries that speaks to the very heart of the issue: correcting something may require enacting an alternative that has other inherent negatives that don't have an immediately apparent benefit to the end goal and might even seem contrary in the short term. In other words, addressing historical inequalities may necessitate solutions that them self enact brand new inequalities. It's an unavoidable likelihood in course correction: going off-course to get back on-course. And teaching math to four-year-old Lily may require changing the approach to learning it entirely to something unconventional, or even uncomfortable: the author may be terrible at teaching math for her. Maybe the best person for a responsibility is technically less proficient but ultimately more effective.
- js8 9y ago
  > And there you go I had to downvote you, you should definitely leave that out of the discussion.
  - settsu 9y ago
    I don't understand. It's a valid example of how people are prejudged for interest and proclivity at a young age. It was neither an indictment of the author's parenting nor an inherent indication to an underlying bias.
    - 9y ago

147 points by seycombi 9y ago

Hacker News discussion on part one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14966002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14966002

IIAOPSW 9y ago

I kind of wish Aaronson didn't do a followup and explicitly tie his Kolmogrov essay to the Demure controversy. I liked it better when he was self-referentially taking the Kolmogrov option by virtue of his very writing about the Kolmogrov option. He said it all so well without saying it. I bet pedestrian SJWs might have even quoted his original essay thinking it was in support of their cause.

striking 9y ago
He explains why he did it, though. > However, a few people who I like and respect accused me of “dogwhistling.” They warned, in particular, that if I wouldn’t just come out and say what I thought about the James Damore Google memo thing, then people would assume the very worst[...]
- lackbeard 9y ago
  So he's appeasing the if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us bullies? That's sad, if true...
  - striking 9y ago
    I'm glad he decided to do this, though. It's a great piece. Maybe it's not what the "bullies" would've wanted, but it's something they should read anyway.
Lon7 9y ago
I agree. The Kolmogrov essay stood on it's own very well. It was great piece of writing and could be applied to various situations. But now it will always be tied to this messy debate.

andyjohnson0 9y ago

"... if James Damore deserves to be fired from Google, for treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues, then Steven Pinker deserves to be fired from Harvard for the same offense. Yes, I realize that a employee of a private company is different from a tenured professor. But I don’t see why it’s relevant here." Its relevant because Damore is employed to develop products to benefit Google's sharesholders, wheras Pinker is employed by Harvard to do science and publicly communicate ideas. Pinker's tenure gives him licence to pursue controversial ideas if that is where the evidence takes him. Damore gets to write code on an at-will basis.

thinkfurther 9y ago
Don't they have something about "organizing the world's information and making accessible"? Here's a guy saying it's not that great to suppress view points or hard scientific facts based on dogma, that this damages Google like it would damage any other group or company, and -- he gets fired and many people distort what he actually wrote. The relationship between Google and "information" seems to kind of complicated. This is like a chef you see putting dirt into a meal; maybe they cook tasty things most of the time, but if they're a good chef, why are they ever doing something as "anti-chef" as that?
- andyjohnson0 9y ago
  > organizing the world's information and making accessible That's a corporate business objective. It doesn't give every Google employee the right to publicly say what they want, when they want, using company systems, and when engaged in their job.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    I find myself repeating this a lot: According to the original coverage, his (and other Google employees') opinions on the topic of diversity in hiring was requested. He originally put his response up on a group explicitly created for this discussion. He never sent it to Google at large - someone else did that in outrage at his opinion. Just as someone else leaked it from being internal to Google to the media.

RodericDay 9y ago

It's interesting how many tech guys consider this guy some kind of martyr. People are upset about his odious "Google Memo" because it's not their first rodeo with a dude who weasels around and justifies his racism/sexism with pseudoscience, not because they were "misled" by "clickbait media" or whatever. They weren't incorrect. The 32 supposedly-critical citation links point ovewhelmingly to garbage, including 5 wikipedia links, a dozen opinion pieces, some more "academic" essays, a link to MRA-founder Warren Farrell's blog, and, perhaps best of all, a link that simply points to a google search for the term "political correctness" (lol). The "graphs" are made in powerpoint with the curve tool (one of them the infamous bell curve), and the axes don't even have ticks on them. It's evident to anyone familiar with "the scene" that the dude got all his info from anti-feminist YouTube/Reddit, and this was proven beyond a doubt when he went on to speak at anti-feminist YouTube channels immediately after getting fired. he wasn't widely misunderstood, people just saw right through his multiple disclaimers. This Quora answer was pretty final for me: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

Sinidir 9y ago
It was actual science if you bothered to read. But keep seeing the world through your heavily tinted ideological lense.
- Qwertious 9y ago
  Did you read the Quora link? It provided scientific sources for all its claims in refuting the google employee document. If the Quora article is nonsense, then please refute the Quora article instead of throwing around "if you bothered to read" phrases.
  - Sinidir 9y ago
    No i didn't. But it doesn't even matter because your argument is invalid. Two articles/texts can be based in science and oppose each other. You know why? Because scientific literature can also disagree with each other. But again your ideoligical lense doesn't allow you to even consider this possibility and instead automatically classifies anything that opposes your beliefs and what you have read as pseudo science.

dzdt 9y ago

One of Scott's commentators (Stacey Jeffery) writes: That’s not because he necessarily said anything actually sexist or actually racist, but because he said the kinds of things that you usually only hear from sexist people, and in particular, the kind of sexist people who are also racist. That is the big thing I saw as well. I think there is an analogy to the body's defenses against viruses. The body recognizes certain shapes from the outside surface of viruses and attacks anything sharing those shapes. The memo was chock full of ideas and phrases that match those used by the worst kind of bigots. If you look at the plain meaning of the words it isn't so bad. But most people's response is based on the pattern-matched shape evaluation instead.

manyoso 9y ago
Agreed. And I understand the impulse. The irony is that this is in many ways the same tendency that powers racism, sexism, stereotypes in general. This very human impulse to label and identify and place in groups of known friends and enemies even based on incomplete data and uncertainty. I have no doubt that for many SJW's they labeled this guy a sexist and misogynist nearly instantly based just upon the subject matter. I also have no doubt that many members of the alt-right did so as well and identified him as one of their own. For me, the memo is incomplete data and not dispositive. But the impulse still tugs in the back of my head...
cmiles74 9y ago
Aaronsen mentioned this as well, friends and colleagues warned him about this "dogwhistling" (a term I've never heard before). The concern was that because he wasn't clearly stating his position, people would assume the worst. This was much the same criticism leveled against Donald Trump. Because he did not clear denounce the racist activities in Charlottesville, he could be interpreted as implying support. Personally, I am not seeing the lack of things that are actually sexist in Damore's memo. His one-sided and dishonest interpretations of his sources alone make his sexism clear and it's the same kind of dishonest interpretations we see from the racists and the sexists.
- dragonwriter 9y ago

cmiles74 9y ago

"... if James Damore deserves to be fired from Google, for treating evolutionary psychology as potentially relevant to social issues..." I don't believe that's why James Damore was fired. He was fired for a much more obvious reason: he was working against their efforts to have a more gender diverse workforce and he embarrassed the company in a very public way. "First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it."[0] Google admits that there are some things in the memo that are debatable, even though Google disagrees with Damore. "It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects ‘each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination"[0] And that is why he was fired: deliberately working against Google's workplace culture goals. There may be room to argue about what Damore may have meant, in his heart, when he wrote the memo. However, since the memo is a physical artifact that we may all inspect, it's clear that the text of the memo is unabashedly sexist. He clearly states that he believes the gender gap at Google is not caused by sexism and that's at clear odds with Google's goals. "We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism."[1] As if it needs to be said, that is clearly not the case. The primary cause of the gender gap is very much sexism and it's a real problem that needs to be dealt with. While we may disagree on which steps will be most effective, there's no benefit to denying the problem exists. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/07/google-fires-memo-author/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/07/google-fires-memo-author/ [1]: https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncensored-memo-with-charts-and-cites-339f3d2d05f https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso...

manyoso 9y ago
The primary cause of the gap is unknown and may very well not be sexism. And stating that does not make me sexist. If you believe it does, then you are not using reason to arrive at that conclusion. It is a logical fallacy.
- cmiles74 9y ago
  I'm not here to name call (although I am certainly prone to name calling). If we take a look at the recent spate of articles covering sexism and harassment in the workplace at companies in the field, it is clear that there is a problem. If someone were at the point in their lives where they were choosing a field in which to place their career, they may very well choose one where their gender would be less of an issue. That causes a gender gap.

dandare 9y ago

Who wants to play a game of Arguman with me? I state that "Positive discrimination of disadvantaged groups in employment and education is immoral" http://en.arguman.org/positive-discrimination-at-work-is-immoral http://en.arguman.org/positive-discrimination-at-work-is-imm...

Diederich 9y ago
For the topic at hand: sex based discrimination in the technology sector in the United States in 2017: I won't comment one way or another. I don't feel qualified to offer a comment here. Do you think that "Positive discrimination on behalf of former slaves in the late 1860s in the United States in employment and education was immoral"?

stared 9y ago

The original "What I believe" was powerful enough that I use it as an opening quotation for "Dating for Nerds" series (first part here: http://p.migdal.pl/2017/07/23/dating-for-nerds.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/07/23/dating-for-nerds.html). That is: "How to help all the young male nerds I meet who suffer from [the dating] problem, in a way that passes feminist muster, and that triggers the world’s sympathy rather than outrage[?] I believe that, just as there are shy, nerdy men, there are also shy, nerdy women, who likewise suffer from feeling unwanted, sexually invisible, or ashamed to express their desires." At the same time, from my experience (including my current relationship with a feminist) that nerds and feminist should be allies. What is a problem is misunderstanding of each other problems and (often intentional triggering) both ways. Also, here are some lessons I've learnt at !!con (a conference by Recurse Center aka Hacker School alumni): http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/08/14/bangbangcon.html tl;dr: you can get great inclusivity primarily by being welcoming, accommodating for needs (in an open-ended way, not restricting it to a few axes) and, crucially, by not shaming or bulling otherwise good-willed transgressors. And as a male nerd I felt better than on less diverse events, not worse.

Tossrock 9y ago
Not sure why you were downvoted, this seems quite reasonable to me.

Lon7 9y ago

I think the 7 points Scott outlined are fantastic, and I absolutely agree with him. This sounds a bit strange to write, but I think Scott, and a lot of people here and on the web, are almost thinking too logically and critically about all this. I have no problem with what they are doing, but I also don't think it is a very effective technique. Like it or not, this women in tech issue is in the domain of politics, and it will remain there. I see a whole bunch of really smart people applying the same problem solving skills they use in their daily engineering work to this problem. They try to rely on strict evidence, and proof and debate. And There's nothing wrong with that at all, but it isn't very effective in the political domain. It takes certain skills and lots of practice to correctly communicate with this type of purely logical debate. A ten page paper read by someone without these skills is very likely to be misunderstood. And that's exactly what happened. I wish that wasn't the case, but that's not the world we live in. If you are trying to persuade, you need to know your audience. In cases like this, your audience is not just your fellow tech community, but a large percentage of the entire world! It is people who won't follow your carefully constructed arguments. James Damore's critical mistake is that seemed totally ignorant to this point. The people reading his paper were not just going to be fellow googlers who had the skills to take his arguments at face value, it was everyone. You need to be aware of this when dealing in politics.

js8 9y ago
I see what you're saying, but I think it's more complicated. If you start to play politics and try to be more persuasive, you are losing the moral high ground. That's why many people would prefer to play openly.
- Lon7 9y ago
  I agree. But it is really tough to actually play openly, and tough to know when others are playing openly. Enough time has passed that experts have had time to comprehend the original document, and it seems like James was only pretending to play openly. He misrepresented a lot of the science and put his own spin on it. A great answer by an evolutionary biologist on how James was absolutely wrong on almost every point he made: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

craigsmansion 9y ago

Let's assume there's a new remote tribe discovered which has never had contact with the outside world. Now, for reasons unknown, members of this tribe have an uncanny ability to do mathematics. Every tech company rushes to enroll these math wizards, and entices them with English language courses. Now an employee writes a memo that questions the value of the language courses because the tribesfolk seem to have no innate interest in linguistics and seem to have a harder time learning English, enough to turn some away from their glorious new careers in Silicon Valley. He surmises it's probably because of their natural gift for mathematics. He also attaches the scientific research that, up to that moment, supports the notion that members of the tribe indeed have a superior grasp on mathematics. Now that we have the argument on neutral ground: -All the research quoted supports the innate math ability of the tribe, but implies nothing about their linguistic capabilities. -The reason these tribal members have difficulties picking up English is not really known. The supposition that mathematical skills and linguistic skill are inversely related is dubious and could easily be a product of our existing cultural norms. It could simply be them not even knowing the existence of different languages until very recently. -Constructing an argument that their linguistic shortcomings might be innate would serve no purpose outside of a very narrow field of neuroscience. It certainly does not detract from their mathematical abilities, and if the whole company needs to learn to speak French, because for some reason the tribe grasps that easily, so be it: whether innate or not, the company cannot afford not to hire them. Any memo about the innate English abilities of the tribe outside of a (proper) research paper within the realm of neuroscience is simply speculation. If this speculation is toxic to those already working there (telling coworkers their English sucks, but it's not their fault. They were born that way. You're only trying to help them.), or the hiring process, it is logical to put a stop to that. Now substitute "superior mathematicians" with "perfectly capable programmers", "remote tribe" with "half the population", and "innate linguistic interest" with "innate technical capability". TL;DR: even if a trait A that could be related to a more desirable trait B is more common in one group than in another group, its prevalence in one group implies nothing about the prevalence of the more desirable trait in the second group. To argue about trait A is to argue about nothing until a correlation is established. Any argument about trait A in relation to B that mentions genetics is to be regarded as highly suspicious.

9y ago

settsu 9y ago

> "Note that, even if men in STEM fields are no more sexist on average than men in other fields—or are less sexist, as one might expect from their generally socially liberal views and attitudes..." Sadly, that has not been my experience—not within specific technical departments nor in wider tech-related events, and certainly not in the broader workplace context. While this may a reasonable assertion on the coasts of the USA, it has not been my own in the spaces between them nor in my interactions with various people from outside the US. No question that these are my own limited anecdotes, but I like to believe I am reasonably well-read and aware of global mindsets and I would hesitate to make that statement so flatly. > "Trust me, my four-year-old daughter Lily wishes I didn’t believe so fervently in working with her every day on her math skills" And there you go. Even by a seemingly forgettable tongue-in-cheek quip, the author reveals a fundamental misjudgement repeated countless times around the world for centuries that speaks to the very heart of the issue: correcting something may require enacting an alternative that has other inherent negatives that don't have an immediately apparent benefit to the end goal and might even seem contrary in the short term. In other words, addressing historical inequalities may necessitate solutions that them self enact brand new inequalities. It's an unavoidable likelihood in course correction: going off-course to get back on-course. And teaching math to four-year-old Lily may require changing the approach to learning it entirely to something unconventional, or even uncomfortable: the author may be terrible at teaching math for her. Maybe the best person for a responsibility is technically less proficient but ultimately more effective.

js8 9y ago
> And there you go I had to downvote you, you should definitely leave that out of the discussion.
- settsu 9y ago
  I don't understand. It's a valid example of how people are prejudged for interest and proclivity at a young age. It was neither an indictment of the author's parenting nor an inherent indication to an underlying bias.
  - 9y ago