7 ms·

It's pretty amazing to watch the news responses to his article, because so many respond to what they wanted to see in his article rather than what he wrote. Wh

It's pretty amazing to watch the news responses to his article, because so many respond to what they wanted to see in his article rather than what he wrote. What he wrote: "Men and women have different interests." What everyone pretends he said: "Men and women have different abilities."

rtx 9y ago
When people have comfortable lives, they create monsters to give them a purpose.
- observation 9y ago
  I've had the pet theory that we ought to give teenagers and young adults uncomfortable jobs to do so they develop some empathy for other sorts of human beings and learn something. For instance yesterday I was cleaning a house, the urine had crystallized in two toilet bowls to about an inch thick and I removed it with acid and a knife. The other rooms only admitted visible light to about half their size because thick cobwebs black from tobacco smoke draped everywhere. Everywhere, bottles of vokda and whiskey. I thought to myself: if a schoolchild worked this one day, they'd potentially learn some things. Like how some people can turn into shut-ins and how that's a bad thing. How smoking and drinking can help a person develop a mental sickness to this extent. Fairly sure they'd never forget it. Also: hey! Practical skills too.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - lvoudour 9y ago
    >I thought to myself: if a schoolchild worked this one day, they'd potentially learn some things. Like how some people can turn into shut-ins and how that's a bad thing. How smoking and drinking can help a person develop a mental sickness to this extent. Fairly sure they'd never forget it. Also: hey! Practical skills too. That's something you learn pretty early in "first world" countries where military service is obligatory. Cleaning toilets for 100 people, picking up cigarette butts, obeying orders despite what you think about them and dealing with people from all walks of life is a valuable lesson. Doesn't help with smoking though :(
    - observation 9y ago
      There's something to be said for that. It's always interesting how a natural disaster can bring a community together, often for the first time. Maybe it'd be nice if these sorts of things would be done in a more structured manner.
  - observation 9y ago
    In respond to the person who deleted their message: Yes, it would be nice if Silicon Valley was weirder, my sense is that as it strives for professionalism it's ironically losing that quality even as it references diversity. It must be like how Banks always talk of 'innovation' while they do no such thing.
  - antisthenes 9y ago
    Ignoring the larger picture at hand, I was reading articles about bathrooms in busy venues of NYC (theaters, mostly), how woefully inadequate they are in terms of capacity and cleanliness. The comments on the articles were nothing but an amalgamation of what seemed to be screams of teenage children that there is some great misogynist conspiracy that keeps women lined up outside of bathrooms, several shouting contests about whose behavior is nastier in the bathroom, male or female, etc. I pondered then, about how many of the commenters have ever worked on a plumbing issue, even in their own house, had to unclog a toilet, or build one from scratch. Or had to clean a public bathroom as part of their job (not that I had) The reason I'm writing all this is to agree with your point - it's a marvel of civilization that we've achieved the world wide web, and that we can address progressive issues and tackle the causes of inequality and minority disadvantages. But we shouldn't forget how we got here: before the internet there was plumbing, and washing machines, and ovens, and vacuum cleaners, physical things that did more to liberate us (in my view) than most comments on the internet could ever hope to. There is virtue in getting down to the basics of it, so to speak. Sometimes it's humbling, and perhaps being a bit more humble is the difference between constructive dialogue and a shouting match where every party is hurling insults at strawmen of their own construction.
    - observation 9y ago
      There's little doubt in my mind that the politics of Silicon Valley are nearly entirely a distraction from technology, which, as should be obvious, is the only thing that will matter in 20 years time. Ironically I think the reason for the politics is that there isn't enough to go around, people get more political, more conscious of class, race and sex when they sense opportunities becoming fewer and the stakes higher. The most interesting thing out of Silicon Valley in the last five years has been the evolution of Elon Musk's companies - very physical, real world stuff aided and abetted by software. What is he always banging on about? "First Principals". There exists this enormous pile of problems the working class have and few developers in Silicon Valley are working on anything related to them.
  - prawn 9y ago
    I was thinking something like this the other day. Home and office cleaners are typically 30-55 yo (in my experience), but work like that would be character-building for teenagers learning domestic skills, persistence, etc. So many wouldn't have the resilience, but it wouldn't be wasted trying to acquire some.
- irrational 9y ago
  Brilliantly said.
burkaman 9y ago
His points about stress tolerance and anxiety are clearly ability-related. He didn't say women are less interested in stressful work, he said they are biologically inclined to be less capable of handling stress. Which might be true, I have no idea, but it's not true that he only talked about interests. Edit: When I say "might be true", I mean it academically might be true, but it clearly has no practical application to job performance. If women can perform equally well at a job as stressful as surgery, they obviously will not have a problem helping Google sell more ads in one of the most comfortable offices in the world.
- macrael 9y ago
  That point especially and specifically has made every woman I've talked to about this laugh and laugh.
- irrational 9y ago
  Apparently he has never met a stay-at-home Mom and he clearly doesn't have kids.
  - collyw 9y ago
    He did reference a paper to back up his point.
    - burkaman 9y ago
      He referenced a paper that noted differences in levels of neuroticism, but he did not defend his point that this affects software engineering performance. Some people will say it's common sense, but I would say it's common sense that this is irrelevant to software engineering (if not every job in the world), so common sense obviously varies a lot and should not be relied on in discussions like this.
- turtleofdeath 9y ago
  This was posted the other day: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... It's a great read and the sort of lead-out at the end yields some more useful insight: > Prior art aside, I would like to leave off on a high note. I mentioned earlier that men are doing a lot better on the platform than women, but here’s the startling thing. Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren’t great, I’m massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix. To me this is more useful than "women are less interested in tech on average," or "there's a hiring bias in favor of men over women."
sp332 9y ago
Quote from the original memo http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320 http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-div... > I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
- turtleofdeath 9y ago
  Right, and I get that your counterpoint is against the person above you. However, that doesn't change the context of Damore's argument, which is saying that interests may differ due to differences in cognitive ability and that the difference may help to explain the gender gap. Those differences are well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition And a lot people are ignoring the context, instead pulling straw men out of the text to fight, rather than arguing the substance of the memo itself, context included.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > And a lot people are ignoring the context, instead pulling straw men out of the text to fight, If its pulled out of the text, it's (by definition) not a straw man.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      No, a straw man is something that looks like the other person's position, but isn't, and is easier to defeat in an argument. Can you pull out of the text something that is not the author's actual position? Of course you can. It happens all the time.

rtx 9y ago

When people have comfortable lives, they create monsters to give them a purpose.

observation 9y ago
I've had the pet theory that we ought to give teenagers and young adults uncomfortable jobs to do so they develop some empathy for other sorts of human beings and learn something. For instance yesterday I was cleaning a house, the urine had crystallized in two toilet bowls to about an inch thick and I removed it with acid and a knife. The other rooms only admitted visible light to about half their size because thick cobwebs black from tobacco smoke draped everywhere. Everywhere, bottles of vokda and whiskey. I thought to myself: if a schoolchild worked this one day, they'd potentially learn some things. Like how some people can turn into shut-ins and how that's a bad thing. How smoking and drinking can help a person develop a mental sickness to this extent. Fairly sure they'd never forget it. Also: hey! Practical skills too.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lvoudour 9y ago
  >I thought to myself: if a schoolchild worked this one day, they'd potentially learn some things. Like how some people can turn into shut-ins and how that's a bad thing. How smoking and drinking can help a person develop a mental sickness to this extent. Fairly sure they'd never forget it. Also: hey! Practical skills too. That's something you learn pretty early in "first world" countries where military service is obligatory. Cleaning toilets for 100 people, picking up cigarette butts, obeying orders despite what you think about them and dealing with people from all walks of life is a valuable lesson. Doesn't help with smoking though :(
  - observation 9y ago
    There's something to be said for that. It's always interesting how a natural disaster can bring a community together, often for the first time. Maybe it'd be nice if these sorts of things would be done in a more structured manner.
- observation 9y ago
  In respond to the person who deleted their message: Yes, it would be nice if Silicon Valley was weirder, my sense is that as it strives for professionalism it's ironically losing that quality even as it references diversity. It must be like how Banks always talk of 'innovation' while they do no such thing.
- antisthenes 9y ago
  Ignoring the larger picture at hand, I was reading articles about bathrooms in busy venues of NYC (theaters, mostly), how woefully inadequate they are in terms of capacity and cleanliness. The comments on the articles were nothing but an amalgamation of what seemed to be screams of teenage children that there is some great misogynist conspiracy that keeps women lined up outside of bathrooms, several shouting contests about whose behavior is nastier in the bathroom, male or female, etc. I pondered then, about how many of the commenters have ever worked on a plumbing issue, even in their own house, had to unclog a toilet, or build one from scratch. Or had to clean a public bathroom as part of their job (not that I had) The reason I'm writing all this is to agree with your point - it's a marvel of civilization that we've achieved the world wide web, and that we can address progressive issues and tackle the causes of inequality and minority disadvantages. But we shouldn't forget how we got here: before the internet there was plumbing, and washing machines, and ovens, and vacuum cleaners, physical things that did more to liberate us (in my view) than most comments on the internet could ever hope to. There is virtue in getting down to the basics of it, so to speak. Sometimes it's humbling, and perhaps being a bit more humble is the difference between constructive dialogue and a shouting match where every party is hurling insults at strawmen of their own construction.
  - observation 9y ago
    There's little doubt in my mind that the politics of Silicon Valley are nearly entirely a distraction from technology, which, as should be obvious, is the only thing that will matter in 20 years time. Ironically I think the reason for the politics is that there isn't enough to go around, people get more political, more conscious of class, race and sex when they sense opportunities becoming fewer and the stakes higher. The most interesting thing out of Silicon Valley in the last five years has been the evolution of Elon Musk's companies - very physical, real world stuff aided and abetted by software. What is he always banging on about? "First Principals". There exists this enormous pile of problems the working class have and few developers in Silicon Valley are working on anything related to them.
- prawn 9y ago
  I was thinking something like this the other day. Home and office cleaners are typically 30-55 yo (in my experience), but work like that would be character-building for teenagers learning domestic skills, persistence, etc. So many wouldn't have the resilience, but it wouldn't be wasted trying to acquire some.
irrational 9y ago
Brilliantly said.

burkaman 9y ago

His points about stress tolerance and anxiety are clearly ability-related. He didn't say women are less interested in stressful work, he said they are biologically inclined to be less capable of handling stress. Which might be true, I have no idea, but it's not true that he only talked about interests. Edit: When I say "might be true", I mean it academically might be true, but it clearly has no practical application to job performance. If women can perform equally well at a job as stressful as surgery, they obviously will not have a problem helping Google sell more ads in one of the most comfortable offices in the world.

macrael 9y ago
That point especially and specifically has made every woman I've talked to about this laugh and laugh.
irrational 9y ago
Apparently he has never met a stay-at-home Mom and he clearly doesn't have kids.
- collyw 9y ago
  He did reference a paper to back up his point.
  - burkaman 9y ago
    He referenced a paper that noted differences in levels of neuroticism, but he did not defend his point that this affects software engineering performance. Some people will say it's common sense, but I would say it's common sense that this is irrelevant to software engineering (if not every job in the world), so common sense obviously varies a lot and should not be relied on in discussions like this.
turtleofdeath 9y ago
This was posted the other day: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... It's a great read and the sort of lead-out at the end yields some more useful insight: > Prior art aside, I would like to leave off on a high note. I mentioned earlier that men are doing a lot better on the platform than women, but here’s the startling thing. Once you factor out interview data from both men and women who quit after one or two bad interviews, the disparity goes away entirely. So while the attrition numbers aren’t great, I’m massively encouraged by the fact that at least in these findings, it’s not about systemic bias against women or women being bad at computers or whatever. Rather, it’s about women being bad at dusting themselves off after failing, which, despite everything, is probably a lot easier to fix. To me this is more useful than "women are less interested in tech on average," or "there's a hiring bias in favor of men over women."

sp332 9y ago

Quote from the original memo http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320 http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-div... > I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.

turtleofdeath 9y ago
Right, and I get that your counterpoint is against the person above you. However, that doesn't change the context of Damore's argument, which is saying that interests may differ due to differences in cognitive ability and that the difference may help to explain the gender gap. Those differences are well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition And a lot people are ignoring the context, instead pulling straw men out of the text to fight, rather than arguing the substance of the memo itself, context included.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > And a lot people are ignoring the context, instead pulling straw men out of the text to fight, If its pulled out of the text, it's (by definition) not a straw man.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    No, a straw man is something that looks like the other person's position, but isn't, and is easier to defeat in an argument. Can you pull out of the text something that is not the author's actual position? Of course you can. It happens all the time.