“Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” memo goes viral, usual suspects outraged

Also, the picture displayed by Business Insider shows the guy has been working on a PR strategy (that is, a mainstreamish media picking a picture he designed rather than one he doesn't control, which makes him appear better than previous ones and does carry a message):



And he just had a piece publised in the WSJ. Behind a paywall so can't read it but if someone has access and wants to share :-) - https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-was-fired-by-google-1502481290

Hes become another Brett Weinstein. The latest victim picking up the pieces from a dangerous anti free speech anti white male ideology engulfing what we call the west.

Macha wrote: »

. It's incredible that people are defending what he wrote, just because it's about women.

What you are saying is there should be no discussion. It is cut and dry.

OR these people you're suggesting are sexist why? because they have a different view. Maybe they aren't. Who knows. Maybe you're the ignorant person here. Because there is no neat little bow.

Perhaps they actually read the memo and comprehend there is debate to be had.

perhaps because the stuff he noted he only did so because there were scientific studies done into what he was talking about.

By your logic why are you not attacking the " sexist " scientists and doctors that even considered doing such a scientific study. it should've been blasphemous right? Burn the witch.

B0jangles wrote: »

If we are going to go down the path of considering it a valid and useful obervation that 'statistically women are more likely to be neurotic' then it would be dishonest to ignore the fact that 'statistically men are far more likely to commit crimes*'.

It would be dishonest indeed, in both cases it is just statistical data.

B0jangles wrote: »

If we are to accept that women are less suited to some roles because they are more likely to be neurotic, then by the same argument all male staff should be monitored using constant CCTV supervison to counteract their greater statistical likelihood of committing criminal acts.

The parallel doesn't work because:
- We are looking at high level distributions, which means that obviously no woman should be discarded for IT roles because she is a women and no man should be suspected of being a potential criminal because he is a man.
- In both cases if you agree with the data you should only draw conclusions at a population level rather than at an individual level: i.e. build more male prisons because statistically you know you will have more male convicts than female ones, and accept that you will have more men than women in SWE teams because these are less attractive to women on average. But neither of these actions constitutes a statement that because someone is a man they should be regarded as a potential criminal or that because someone is a woman they should be regarded as less suitable for a SWE role.

B0jangles wrote: »

I would contend that neither observation is in the least helpful when it comes to judging an individual's capacity to excel at a given role.

Absolutely correct, and this is actually exactly what he says in the memo.


Edit: and an important additional point I think: there are also lines of work where you will find a majority of women because men are on average less attracted to the role and/or not as good as conducting it, and it is not an insult to men to say that. So saying that men or women are naturally more represented in a specific field is of course not claiming any gender is superior to the other.


Overall the reason this thing is becoming controversial is because it revolves around a very ideological question which exists across Western societies: are genders equal (i.e. people should be treated in the same way regardless of gender) or undifferentiated (i.e. people should on average be expected to behave in the same way regardless of gender)?

professore wrote: »

That's not what he said AT ALL. He is 100% in favour of hiring the best man, woman or anything else for the job. He's just saying if you have 100 positions in programming to fill, and you have 500 men and 10 women, it's not reasonable to hire all 10 women JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE WOMEN. This isn't a sexist position.

Is that what google do? They hire someone less qualified because of their gender?

I read the article with Word open and typed six pages of commentary on his points. In the interests of not boring everyone to death I might just includes bits of it. My take-home points are more or less as follows;

- He makes some good points that could do with more investigation.

- While he is very careful about not appearing biased, he does have an issue with taking one potential explanation (innate bio-psychological differences between men and women for one, there are other explanations for neuroticism as well, poor pay-negotiating skills) and basing his responses on them while subtly denigrating actual research on the topics as leftist (I am also a bit suspicious of that very conveniently round and unsourced 95% of social science is leftist). That is dangerous and leads to confirmation bias - he indicates that changes should be made based on the views he reckons on his gut instinct are more correct without being able to prove that they are correct. It should also be noted that the changes he is talking about would roughly more benefit his in-group and potentially at the expense of other groups. This does not delegitimise his points, but it should be borne in mind.

• Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]

- I agree regarding the classes - it should not be automatically assumed that a a determined, confident, smart woman needs this class more than an uncertain, smart male who doesn’t have much confidence in himself. He needs encouragement and assistance more than her in this regard and given people are individuals, that should not be ignored merely due to his gender.

-

• A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates

Difficult without knowing exactly what the “high priority queue” and “special treatment” is. In the UK company Lush for example, there were English classes during work hours for non-English speaking workers as it was recognised that they didn’t have much time for learning and they were obviously handicapped in moving forward despite any other positive traits they had simply due to this lack. That would indeed count as “special treatment” for “diversity” candidates, but it seems a fair and reasonable one. Within the hiring process, it does need more detail.

• Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

Again, needs more explanation. I don’t see much of an issue with hiring in line with the general population of the region, and it does generally come down to when X person has comparable scores to Y person, their whatever-trait can be a tipping factor. No, this is not fair, and nor is it fair when their whatever-trait is a tipping factor to a negative outcome either, which is also a firmly established characteristic in hiring. Two wrongs doesn’t make a right, quite, but one wrong that doesn’t seem to be changeable isn’t helpful either.

- He talks then of more general issues facing males - that if they complain about something agin them, they are shouted down. As I have commented numerous times on that topic, the issue is often that what affects males negatively often also affects females; big case in point is that men have a harder time accessing their children. Flipside; women are more expected to take on the upbringing of the child at the cost to her career. There is a heftier social impact for a woman who leaves her child to be raised by the father than there is for a male who leaves his child to be raised by the father. This is all rather irrelevent to Google unless there's a lot more breeding going on there than I'd expect, but that women are currently more effective in making a racket about issues is down to a few decades of practice and institutions that either a) males need to get about setting up too to work for their own issues or b) and much more helpfully, those who are interested in solving the issue for both sides get together and work it out to the benefit of all rather than a 1:0 vs 0:1 win being the only outcome. Still though, a bit irrelevant to Google.

His suggestions are a bit unhelpful as they are not generally explained.

De-moralize diversity.

Uhm, how. What does that mean? I assume it is along the lines of “don’t treat diversity as the most important factor”. Fair enough. What is he actually suggesting doing though – get rid of classes that assist those with various obstacles against them? Or introduce those classes for everyone that may need them? Bring everyone up to the same level, or knock the supports out from under those that have more obvious ones? He complains about the results of having problems with the policies, but does not really suggest an alternative.

Stop alienating conservatives.

What viewpoints, specifically, not what class of people, are being crushed out? SPECIFICS, MAN! PLEASE.
He gives the bad results of alienating conservatives without really giving any specific issues that should be taken into account.

Confront Google’s biases.

I don’t know what the Googlegeist thingie is so I can’t comment. But it’s no harm to confront biases.

Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.

Well, I haven’t found the “non-discriminatory practices [he] outlined”, but I’ve commented on making them available to those that need them rather than assuming that women need them more than men or fluent English-speaking foreign workers need them more than someone who was brought up in an English-speaking country but spells like Facebook invaded their fingers.

Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.

Okay, that’s fair enough, although I am not certain what he’ll do if he finds that they are beneficial.

• Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.

?? That does not follow. And he does still need to indicate the specific discrimination practices that he feels are harmful. Just “discrimination” is very hard to deal with – it has to be taken completely at face value. Interesting side-note, women used to dominate programming until it became lucrative and suddenly ended up male-dominated. The early programmers had a strong female contingent as "technicians", often because women tended to have background experience that translated well to programming (such as short-hand typing). Bit of potted history there, but it certainly doesn't quite add up to males being naturally better at it, which is an argument not used here, but often used.

currently very little transparency into the extend of our diversity programs which keeps it immune to criticism from those outside its ideological echo chamber.

Little transparency is usually a bad thing, fair enough.

• We need psychological safety and shared values to gain the benefits of diversity

True. And it is clear that there are those, like the author, who do feel left out, side-lined, discriminated against and, tbh, lost. That needs to be addressed.

Prioritize intention.

Agreed, although don’t be backward in squashing dickishness either.

Be open about the science of human nature.
• Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.

Okay, if it can be proven – he has stated that this is a thing multiple times, but it is still only one not-quite-certain possibility and given individuals differ greatly, as he has pointed out, it is best not to leap to extremes of that set of views either. I do see a danger in his rejecting social sciences that are actually studying these issues because he feels that it is 95% made up of liberals and thus a bit untrustworthy. Therefore, he is going on his own gut instinct and his own reading which may or may not be entirely reliable. So I’m a bit hmmm on this, despite accepting the basic idea.

Reconsider making Unconscious Bias training mandatory for promo committees.

Without any experience of this training, I can’t comment.


Eh, ended up pretty long anyway.

Bambi wrote: »

These are pretty funny though

They are funny. But to be honest while I like Apple much more than Google in terms the quality of their products and the way they treat their users as customers rather than products to be sold to advertisers*, I am pretty sure Apple is exactly the same as Google related to the issues we are discussing here. Same political bias, same echo-chamber, and same incapacity to even consider different ideas when it comes to certain topics.


* another reason to use DuckDuckGo ;-)

Haha, it's funny because now we're pretending Apple is a big fan of dissenting opinion in their business.

Back on topic:

I feel like I should have stated this earlier. I do not actually agree with Google firing this bloke for simply voicing a different opinion, but I do contest the claim it's censorship or restricting his Freedom of Speech.

Now, if he'd written up a big piece calling all women whores who should only be used for popping out babies, then I'd say it's worth sacking him.

Apparently those are also popping up around Google offices in the US. Very bad PR sequence for them.