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Disagree with the whole “shoildnt Socially engineer” - this makes no sense! We live in highly constructed environment! Socially constructed. Laws, physics desi

Disagree with the whole “shoildnt Socially engineer” - this makes no sense! We live in highly constructed environment! Socially constructed. Laws, physics design, social structures, etc , etc. We do not live in a world where “social pressures” that might pressure women not to join tech can’t possible be “absent”. That just doesn’t exist, nor ever will. Thus, facing this reality, given the fact that women are under represented, what do we do next? I say, let a higher goal, one of equality of opportunity and a desire for more equal representation drive us to build a society that gives women the same chances men get. No one is saying hire regardless of talent. As for the original memo, I’ve read it many times and he has a core argument that women didn’t meet the hiring bar. Just repeating that isn’t what he claimed isn’t convincing. Bottom line: we do social engineering all the time. We will always do it. We can’t not even do it. Let’s instead of pretending what we do now is “neutral”, recognize it isn’t, determine what kinds of outcomes we’d like and ways to design those without being blantantly unfair. Rather than pretending status quo is as good as it gets and give up now.

stcredzero 8y ago
Disagree with the whole “shoildnt Socially engineer” - this makes no sense! We live in highly constructed environment! Socially constructed. Laws, physics design, social structures, etc , etc. Women are over represented in medicine in some fields in some countries. I guess it's time to start discouraging them and getting them in line with population statistics. Sorry, but you're missing some links in the causal chain. If you study actual history, you'll find that disparities between groups in different fields are the norm. In particular, there is considerable human capital transmitted through culture. (This notion is poisonous, equally to the progressive left and the Alt Right.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-RuKiFDIeU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-RuKiFDIeU Asians are over-represented at Harvard. I guess it's time to get out the tactics people used to use to exclude jews, blacks, and homosexuals to "engineer" this right. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-american-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame... Social engineering is, in principle, the same sort of thing that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Ukranians by starvation in the 20th century. How about we give people freedom and opportunities, and let them work it out?
manfredo 8y ago
> We do not live in a world where “social pressures” that might pressure women not to join tech can’t possible be “absent”. That just doesn’t exist, nor ever will. Damore repeatedly stated that he belived that society does influence behavior, and that women's lack of representation in tech is likely not entirely due to innate factors. He only stated that innate factors probably play some role, alongside societal factors, so parity will likely never be achieved. I do not understand how you came to the conclusion that Damore claimed social pressures are absent. > As for the original memo, I’ve read it many times and he has a core argument that women didn’t meet the hiring bar. Just repeating that isn’t what he claimed isn’t convincing. These are his words, quoted directly from the document: "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" In other words, Google structures its hiring process such that non-diverse candidates are more likely to be erroneously rejected. Not that diverse candidates have a higher false positive rate. > Bottom line: we do social engineering all the time. We will always do it. We can’t not even do it. Let’s instead of pretending what we do now is “neutral”, recognize it isn’t, determine what kinds of outcomes we’d like and ways to design those without being blantantly unfair. It sounds like you agree with Damore in most respects. He actually lists 5 ways to improve diversity in non-discriminatory ways: * We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. * Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits. * Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech. * Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles. Damore only took issue with the policies that explicitly discriminate between candidates and employees labeled diverse and non-diverse.

stcredzero 8y ago

Disagree with the whole “shoildnt Socially engineer” - this makes no sense! We live in highly constructed environment! Socially constructed. Laws, physics design, social structures, etc , etc. Women are over represented in medicine in some fields in some countries. I guess it's time to start discouraging them and getting them in line with population statistics. Sorry, but you're missing some links in the causal chain. If you study actual history, you'll find that disparities between groups in different fields are the norm. In particular, there is considerable human capital transmitted through culture. (This notion is poisonous, equally to the progressive left and the Alt Right.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-RuKiFDIeU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-RuKiFDIeU Asians are over-represented at Harvard. I guess it's time to get out the tactics people used to use to exclude jews, blacks, and homosexuals to "engineer" this right. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-american-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame... Social engineering is, in principle, the same sort of thing that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Ukranians by starvation in the 20th century. How about we give people freedom and opportunities, and let them work it out?

manfredo 8y ago

> We do not live in a world where “social pressures” that might pressure women not to join tech can’t possible be “absent”. That just doesn’t exist, nor ever will. Damore repeatedly stated that he belived that society does influence behavior, and that women's lack of representation in tech is likely not entirely due to innate factors. He only stated that innate factors probably play some role, alongside societal factors, so parity will likely never be achieved. I do not understand how you came to the conclusion that Damore claimed social pressures are absent. > As for the original memo, I’ve read it many times and he has a core argument that women didn’t meet the hiring bar. Just repeating that isn’t what he claimed isn’t convincing. These are his words, quoted directly from the document: "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" In other words, Google structures its hiring process such that non-diverse candidates are more likely to be erroneously rejected. Not that diverse candidates have a higher false positive rate. > Bottom line: we do social engineering all the time. We will always do it. We can’t not even do it. Let’s instead of pretending what we do now is “neutral”, recognize it isn’t, determine what kinds of outcomes we’d like and ways to design those without being blantantly unfair. It sounds like you agree with Damore in most respects. He actually lists 5 ways to improve diversity in non-discriminatory ways: * We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. * Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits. * Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech. * Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles. Damore only took issue with the policies that explicitly discriminate between candidates and employees labeled diverse and non-diverse.