4 ms·

Actual quote: > the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes From the article: > women may not be e

by take4 9y ago

Actual quote: > the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes From the article: > women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering Do you not see the difference?

ebbv 9y ago
Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. It's always the same kind of crap from bigots. "Women MIGHT be less capable of engineering." "Black people MIGHT be more prone to crime." "Gay people MIGHT be more likely to be pedophiles." and it's always based in bigotry, not in science or evidence.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  > Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. The second sentence wasn't written by Damore, so why attribute to him what he didn't write?
  - ebbv 9y ago
    I didn’t, man. Work on your reading comprehension skills. They are spelling out the bigotry he’s trying to be coy with.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Neurology and psychology studies have shown differences in the way men and women think. For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks. Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain. As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one. With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other. If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now. So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.
  - ravar 9y ago
    Your argument sounds nice, but does not offer sufficient proof for your rather strong statement "so the natural biological differences are irrelevant". This is a claim which could be scientifically tested. For example researchers could develop two rudimentary tool chains, one for women and one for men. Then they could investigate if in fact they can generate any statistical difference in participation. It would actually be a rather interesting theory to test, and I would hope someone does test the theory. However your claim is not currently known to be true, rather just a promising theory.
  - josephg 9y ago
    That’s an interesting idea, but it sounds like your argument rests on two assertions: 1) Professions tend to become more gender biased over time 2) It was equally likely that computing become a female dominated field. These are novel claims that require justification. If (1) was true, we should expect to see it in other fields. But many industries seem quite stubbornly gender neutral - for example medicine. (Although many specialties are male dominated or female dominated). And if (2) were true we should see the same profession have different gender biases in different cultures. But I don’t think we see that either. My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse, prison guard, career criminal, construction worker, child care worker, etc).
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      I don't agree. The gender bias of a profession this year is dependent on the gender bias from previous years. They would only become more biased over time if the previous bias favored hiring new entrants to the field that are more biased. If there is an imbalance in intrinsic inchoate biases, such as if men tended to unconsciously hire 55% men and 45% women, whereas women preferred to hire 50% each, then an initial 50-50 split, but with no other biases in play after someone enters the field, would drift towards an equilibrium at around .5263 men and .4737 women. More men magnify the male bias towards males. My other assumption was that early movers have a magnified effect on the future of the field. Think about how any arbitrary decisions made by Turing or von Neumann could still be affecting computing today, like the sign convention for the charge on an electron--that could have been +1 instead of -1, and many of the signs in physics equations would be flipped. If a female had been making those decisions, we might be using a different computing paradigm that would better match female thought patterns. Computing as we now know it initially came about through the confluence of war and academia. Mathematicians designed machines to aim artillery pieces and automate military-grade ciphers, and then to automatically break automated ciphers. The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it. The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described. You would have to look back into history, when culture barriers were stronger, to look for examples of computing devices that may have been used preferentially by men or women.
- carry_bit 9y ago
  The first sentence doesn't mention engineering. How many people with top engineering skills do you think flip patties at McDonalds? Probably not many. Does that mean they're worse at flipping patties? No, it means they want to work elsewhere.
- ryanbrunner 9y ago
  I think an important part of the argument is the context it's being used in. In Damore's essay, it was used as a counter to the idea that anything less than a 50/50 gender ratio was obviously a result of bias and discrimination. In that context, I think highlighting the possibility of other explanations might be appropriate. If he was instead arguing that Google should stop trying to hire women because they might be less capable, that would be a clear indication of bigotry. I have a lot of problems with how the issue was raised by Damore and I think his firing was appropriate, but I also agree that his essay has been wildly mischaracterized by the media.
- Goladus 9y ago
  Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. If you want to make a case that someone means something other than what they clearly say (or write) then you should have a convincing argument to justify such a claim. Otherwise you're just projecting your prejudices on the discussion.

by take4 9y ago

ebbv 9y ago

Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. It's always the same kind of crap from bigots. "Women MIGHT be less capable of engineering." "Black people MIGHT be more prone to crime." "Gay people MIGHT be more likely to be pedophiles." and it's always based in bigotry, not in science or evidence.

IncRnd 9y ago
> Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. The second sentence wasn't written by Damore, so why attribute to him what he didn't write?
- ebbv 9y ago
  I didn’t, man. Work on your reading comprehension skills. They are spelling out the bigotry he’s trying to be coy with.
logfromblammo 9y ago
Neurology and psychology studies have shown differences in the way men and women think. For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks. Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain. As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one. With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other. If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now. So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.
- ravar 9y ago
  Your argument sounds nice, but does not offer sufficient proof for your rather strong statement "so the natural biological differences are irrelevant". This is a claim which could be scientifically tested. For example researchers could develop two rudimentary tool chains, one for women and one for men. Then they could investigate if in fact they can generate any statistical difference in participation. It would actually be a rather interesting theory to test, and I would hope someone does test the theory. However your claim is not currently known to be true, rather just a promising theory.
- josephg 9y ago
  That’s an interesting idea, but it sounds like your argument rests on two assertions: 1) Professions tend to become more gender biased over time 2) It was equally likely that computing become a female dominated field. These are novel claims that require justification. If (1) was true, we should expect to see it in other fields. But many industries seem quite stubbornly gender neutral - for example medicine. (Although many specialties are male dominated or female dominated). And if (2) were true we should see the same profession have different gender biases in different cultures. But I don’t think we see that either. My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse, prison guard, career criminal, construction worker, child care worker, etc).
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    I don't agree. The gender bias of a profession this year is dependent on the gender bias from previous years. They would only become more biased over time if the previous bias favored hiring new entrants to the field that are more biased. If there is an imbalance in intrinsic inchoate biases, such as if men tended to unconsciously hire 55% men and 45% women, whereas women preferred to hire 50% each, then an initial 50-50 split, but with no other biases in play after someone enters the field, would drift towards an equilibrium at around .5263 men and .4737 women. More men magnify the male bias towards males. My other assumption was that early movers have a magnified effect on the future of the field. Think about how any arbitrary decisions made by Turing or von Neumann could still be affecting computing today, like the sign convention for the charge on an electron--that could have been +1 instead of -1, and many of the signs in physics equations would be flipped. If a female had been making those decisions, we might be using a different computing paradigm that would better match female thought patterns. Computing as we now know it initially came about through the confluence of war and academia. Mathematicians designed machines to aim artillery pieces and automate military-grade ciphers, and then to automatically break automated ciphers. The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it. The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described. You would have to look back into history, when culture barriers were stronger, to look for examples of computing devices that may have been used preferentially by men or women.
carry_bit 9y ago
The first sentence doesn't mention engineering. How many people with top engineering skills do you think flip patties at McDonalds? Probably not many. Does that mean they're worse at flipping patties? No, it means they want to work elsewhere.
ryanbrunner 9y ago
I think an important part of the argument is the context it's being used in. In Damore's essay, it was used as a counter to the idea that anything less than a 50/50 gender ratio was obviously a result of bias and discrimination. In that context, I think highlighting the possibility of other explanations might be appropriate. If he was instead arguing that Google should stop trying to hire women because they might be less capable, that would be a clear indication of bigotry. I have a lot of problems with how the issue was raised by Damore and I think his firing was appropriate, but I also agree that his essay has been wildly mischaracterized by the media.
Goladus 9y ago
Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism. If you want to make a case that someone means something other than what they clearly say (or write) then you should have a convincing argument to justify such a claim. Otherwise you're just projecting your prejudices on the discussion.