7 ms·

Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. That's probably why it got so much attention. The original had a bunch of li

Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. That's probably why it got so much attention. The original had a bunch of links and graphs and plots. But the version most people read was published by some newspaper that stripped all that stuff out (and titled it an "anti-diversity screed" just to show how unbiased they were.) >they should "respect all points of view" (no matter how flawed or ignorant they are.) Everyone believes their opponents beliefs are flawed and ignorant. Democracy sort of works because we tolerate each other anyway. When political polarization increases too much, bad things happen.

tomtheelder 9y ago
> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. Ehhh. Among my friends/coworkers one of the biggest objections was how dicey a lot of the referenced research was, and how much he was bending or extending conclusions to fit his narrative. At the very best his essay was awful science, but to me it felt more like a half-hearted attempt to cherrypick studies that sort of reinforced his preexisting beliefs, which is kind of the opposite of science.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  The Damore case has nothing to do with the validity of the science. If the scientific interpretation had been perfectly reasonable there would still be a flip-out and would have also been fired. Thats what's scary.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    Damore was fired not because his science was flawed, but because he made himself essentially impossible to work with. Would you be "scared" if someone refuses to take a shower for months on end and a company decides to fire them?
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      I disagree entirely and vehemently to what you are saying. > he made himself essentially impossible to work with Who told you this? Im sure there were 100's of engineers, including female co-workers, at google that would have worked with him. But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him? He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. He got fired because the public asked him to be fired and punished, and google complied for PR.
      - dguaraglia 9y ago
        > But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him? I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you? Do you think that consists a liability for the company? Does the company own the onus of making sure Damore doesn't put them in a position where they might be sued for gender discrimination? > He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere.
        conanbatt 9y ago
        > I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you? I don't know. Maybe. What we do know if that if someone else shares the same opinion of Damore within google, we will never hear about it , and the bias effect you attribute will still happen but there would be no way to address it. Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility? > Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere. He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up!
- Houshalter 9y ago
  It wasn't the strongest possible argument for his case IMO. There are other better studies and statistics I would have referenced. But it was good enough and the points were solid,. That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    > That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios. This assumption always bothers me. What do you think defines behavior? Is it purely culture, or purely biology? How do you rule out culture when you don't have a culture that promotes equality?
    - Houshalter 9y ago
      It seems perfectly plausible to me that it's biological. E.g. identical twins have similar personality measures. But it does it matter? Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. Or the effectiveness of Google's diversity programs that Damore was arguing against.
      - dguaraglia 9y ago
        > Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. This sentence contradicts itself. If it is cultural, then it'd be most likely based on sexist stereotypes that we force on our kids from an early age (mind you, when I say sexist I don't mean in the "actively nasty towards a gender" way, but in the "you define people by their gender even before you know them" way.) If that's the case, then that sexist behavior permeates the culture, which means tech companies are not going to be devoid of it. Which would make the disparity based on sexism in tech (and everywhere else.) I think people get overly defensive about being called "sexist" because they perceive it as an attack on them. It is not. The moment you realize that, it's so much easier to get out of the "them vs. us" mentality and actually take constructive criticism better.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  The reason the Damore stuff is so insane is because the science he cited is abundant and well replicated over decades! Look at this piece from Stanford Medical School in the spring! http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... Or here, from 2013: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometrics-psychology/sex-differences-on-g-and-non-g-intellectual-performance-reveal-potential-sources-of-stem-discrepancies/ http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... There is an abundance of highly cited research that backs up what Damore carefully stated in his essay.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    There's also an equal or bigger amount of science proving that gender "interests" are driven in a large part by cultural background. As I linked elsewhere, Communist Russia used to have a huge participation of women in "STEM" fields, while Europe and the US were still moving from single-income families to the current standard of working professional women. There's nothing we can do to fix the - alleged - biological differences between men and women. There's a lot we can do to fix the cultural factors leading to gender inequality. So why not work on the stuff we can work on rather than assuming "awwww, why bother, if there's some chance it might be biological?"
    - ghostcluster 9y ago
      Look at the Stanford link. > There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.
dguaraglia 9y ago
> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. Just because you can quote a paper it doesn't mean the paper is right. > Everyone believes their opponents beliefs are flawed and ignorant. Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail. The problem is lately a lot of people make claims based on nothing else than their "intuition" and they expect people to accept it as a "valid opinion".
- Houshalter 9y ago
  >Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. Just because you can quote a paper it doesn't mean the paper is right. I'd love a source on that, because as far as I remember most of the stuff he referenced wasn't very controversial. E.g. one of his biggest points was that men and women have statistically different five factor personality distributions. >Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail. Sure. The problem is I strongly disagree with you about what the "objective observable truth" is.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  > Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies They weren't. In fact you don't even need to look at studies, you can look at raw standardized test scores and see this is true.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    I keep bringing this up: if you applied the same standards in Communist Russia, you would've gotten completely different results. Turns out it's not just Nature that defines behavior, there's a lot of Nurture going on in there.
- backpropaganda 9y ago
  > Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. This is a factually incorrect. Please try to introspect whether you're saying this because you want Damore to be wrong, instead of attempting to ascertain whether he was actually wrong.

tomtheelder 9y ago

> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. Ehhh. Among my friends/coworkers one of the biggest objections was how dicey a lot of the referenced research was, and how much he was bending or extending conclusions to fit his narrative. At the very best his essay was awful science, but to me it felt more like a half-hearted attempt to cherrypick studies that sort of reinforced his preexisting beliefs, which is kind of the opposite of science.

conanbatt 9y ago
The Damore case has nothing to do with the validity of the science. If the scientific interpretation had been perfectly reasonable there would still be a flip-out and would have also been fired. Thats what's scary.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  Damore was fired not because his science was flawed, but because he made himself essentially impossible to work with. Would you be "scared" if someone refuses to take a shower for months on end and a company decides to fire them?
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    I disagree entirely and vehemently to what you are saying. > he made himself essentially impossible to work with Who told you this? Im sure there were 100's of engineers, including female co-workers, at google that would have worked with him. But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him? He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. He got fired because the public asked him to be fired and punished, and google complied for PR.
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      > But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him? I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you? Do you think that consists a liability for the company? Does the company own the onus of making sure Damore doesn't put them in a position where they might be sued for gender discrimination? > He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere.
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        > I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you? I don't know. Maybe. What we do know if that if someone else shares the same opinion of Damore within google, we will never hear about it , and the bias effect you attribute will still happen but there would be no way to address it. Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility? > Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere. He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up!
Houshalter 9y ago
It wasn't the strongest possible argument for his case IMO. There are other better studies and statistics I would have referenced. But it was good enough and the points were solid,. That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  > That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios. This assumption always bothers me. What do you think defines behavior? Is it purely culture, or purely biology? How do you rule out culture when you don't have a culture that promotes equality?
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    It seems perfectly plausible to me that it's biological. E.g. identical twins have similar personality measures. But it does it matter? Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. Or the effectiveness of Google's diversity programs that Damore was arguing against.
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      > Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. This sentence contradicts itself. If it is cultural, then it'd be most likely based on sexist stereotypes that we force on our kids from an early age (mind you, when I say sexist I don't mean in the "actively nasty towards a gender" way, but in the "you define people by their gender even before you know them" way.) If that's the case, then that sexist behavior permeates the culture, which means tech companies are not going to be devoid of it. Which would make the disparity based on sexism in tech (and everywhere else.) I think people get overly defensive about being called "sexist" because they perceive it as an attack on them. It is not. The moment you realize that, it's so much easier to get out of the "them vs. us" mentality and actually take constructive criticism better.
ghostcluster 9y ago
The reason the Damore stuff is so insane is because the science he cited is abundant and well replicated over decades! Look at this piece from Stanford Medical School in the spring! http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... Or here, from 2013: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometrics-psychology/sex-differences-on-g-and-non-g-intellectual-performance-reveal-potential-sources-of-stem-discrepancies/ http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... There is an abundance of highly cited research that backs up what Damore carefully stated in his essay.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  There's also an equal or bigger amount of science proving that gender "interests" are driven in a large part by cultural background. As I linked elsewhere, Communist Russia used to have a huge participation of women in "STEM" fields, while Europe and the US were still moving from single-income families to the current standard of working professional women. There's nothing we can do to fix the - alleged - biological differences between men and women. There's a lot we can do to fix the cultural factors leading to gender inequality. So why not work on the stuff we can work on rather than assuming "awwww, why bother, if there's some chance it might be biological?"
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    Look at the Stanford link. > There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.

dguaraglia 9y ago

> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. Just because you can quote a paper it doesn't mean the paper is right. > Everyone believes their opponents beliefs are flawed and ignorant. Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail. The problem is lately a lot of people make claims based on nothing else than their "intuition" and they expect people to accept it as a "valid opinion".

Houshalter 9y ago
>Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. Just because you can quote a paper it doesn't mean the paper is right. I'd love a source on that, because as far as I remember most of the stuff he referenced wasn't very controversial. E.g. one of his biggest points was that men and women have statistically different five factor personality distributions. >Probably, but objective observable truth should prevail. Sure. The problem is I strongly disagree with you about what the "objective observable truth" is.
ghostcluster 9y ago
> Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies They weren't. In fact you don't even need to look at studies, you can look at raw standardized test scores and see this is true.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  I keep bringing this up: if you applied the same standards in Communist Russia, you would've gotten completely different results. Turns out it's not just Nature that defines behavior, there's a lot of Nurture going on in there.
backpropaganda 9y ago
> Most of those studies were debunked as using very shaky methodologies. This is a factually incorrect. Please try to introspect whether you're saying this because you want Damore to be wrong, instead of attempting to ascertain whether he was actually wrong.