A lot of people on "our side" did a bad job of simply refuting the argument presented. Its straightforward to do in one sentence:
"While there may be scientific evidence of differences between men and women, using these differences to conclude that women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts."
Then you can go on and explain why for historical and societal reasons putting forth this weak theory is highly offensive and damaging to a large group of people.
Of course, many feel that you shouldn't _have_ to explain this to people, but unfortunately in todays environment, you do!
"While there may be scientific evidence of differences between men and women, using these differences to conclude that women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts."
That is not true. The facts support the exact opposite conclusion: that prenatal exposure to androgens orients a person toward things/systems rather than people. [0]
See citation above. I'm saying its much too strong a claim to go from this paper to the conclusion that women are biologically less inclined to engineering.
EDIT: To be consistent with my original statement (see child)
You are losing this argument because you aren't being consistent with yourself.
Originally you said, "using these differences to conclude that women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning"
So you were talking about inclination and interest. You then claimed the facts were on your side, that it was offensive to claim otherwise, and the existence of anyone who doesn't already agree is "unfortunate".
After chongli pointed out that you're wrong about the facts, you have moved the goalposts. Now you're pretending you said "biologically ill-suited". This is not true. You said "less inclined".
As the memo in question didn't claim women are biologically ill-suited to be software engineers, only less inclined, your original statement was contradicted by science and your second try is not what anyone tried to argue.
Nobody argued with the obvious fact that people expressed outrage and took offense at the memo. The argument started with your baseless claim that "women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts."
1). "Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People"[0]
2). "Boys and men prefer occupations related to objects (e.g., auto mechanic, chemist), whereas girls and women prefer occupations involving work with people (e.g., day care worker, art teacher).[0]"
3). "Our results suggest that typical women, who are exposed to low levels of prenatal androgen, participate less than do men in STEM careers partly because they are interested in working with people. This is consistent with evidence that women value communal goals, which are perceived to be at odds with STEM careers (Diekman et al., 2010) and that women who enter STEM careers often do so in people-oriented professions, such as medicine (Benbow et al., 2000)."[0]
It's the paper that is concluding women are biologically less inclined to engineering.
I suggest you reread #3 and note the use of language like "suggest", "consistent with" and "perceived". Authors use language like this because its really hard to make definitive statements in this area. In addition, its really hard to quantify the size of the effect and how much is due to nature vs. nurture.
Furthermore, I'm relatively certain the authors are not experts on software engineering. As you have likely seen at this point, you could also claim that higher empathy actually should incline people to the job (see, e.g. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...)
You start by saying something is not "supported by the facts" and then go on by talking about how it's "highly offensive" (i.e.: hurts your feelings). I just want you to meditate on this for a bit.
Well, saying things that are clearly wrong and offensive to large numbers of people is typically looked down upon amongst educated people and highly discouraged at the workplace.
For example, think of other stereotypes about other groups (blacks, hispanics, jews) and think about what the response would be if an employee was publishing 10 page manifestos with loosely connected scientific arguments in support of these views.
There is nothing that is clearly wrong about the memo in itself and lots of Googlers actually voiced support for it and agreed. So your comment would be equally offensive to them because you call them uneducated and their opinion invalid.
Creating a strawman argument around racial stereotypes is just an added layer of misdirection and tastelessness.
There is something clearly wrong about the memo: it uses the direction of various effects to make a qualitative argument to explain a quantitative difference in gender distribution. If he had instead used the effect sizes in his reasoning, and predicted the resulting distribution (allowing direct comparison with reality), it would be much easier to objectively determine where he is right and where wrong. I'm fairly convinced that some of the things he mentions have a large enough effect to measurably affect the gender distribution among Google's employees, but some are guaranteed to be smaller than the noise floor. As it stands, his argument is easily dismissed as a collection of mostly irrelevant trivia.
No, there's something wrong with your reading comprehension.
>things he mentions have a large enough effect to measurably affect the gender distribution among Google's employees,
That's not one of the points of the memo. One of (the primary) point is to potentially explain a gap instead of relying solely on the assumption that the sole cause is discrimination, or "bro culture" or whatever trash rags like Model View Culture are calling it.
The memo is not about the ability, nor the preferences, of Google employees, specifically. It's about the ability, and/or preferences, of a potential hiring pool. And, if you actually read it, you'd know that the author used a qualifier: "may." As in:
"Women are more likely to have these personality types and these interests, and this may explain the gap." As opposed to "all women have these personality types, abilities, and interests."
If women are coming out of university with a related degree or solid references for a software engineering career, at rates approximate to their original distribution (half of the population), we could say that there's obviously some sort of discrimination going on. But they are not. If they were, I would be prominent among the many who are outraged about the distribution of women in these particular careers. I believe the author of the memo would, as well.
But, again, they are not. And it is unhealthy to blame it solely on sexism, if at all.
I'm not surprised at the outrage, really. You get that when telling faux-progressives, who worship at the alter of tabula rasa social science models, that the mind is not a blank slate.
You see it in the Scandinavian countries, where certain "gendered" career choices are more clear than ever. But if we listened to the outraged mob, you'd think that these countries were some patriarchal backwater. But that's obviously not the case.
Another thing you'd have to ask yourself, if you were being honest, is: why "engineering"? The gap is bordering on nonexistent, if at all, in fields like law or medicine. So why is that this deficit exists in these vaguely related (if only by name) "engineering" careers. That's another thing the author decided to ask, and was shit on for it.
It is amusing that you accuse me of lacking reading comprehension, but then read things into my comment that I explicitly did not include because I'm tired of listing all the ways I agree with the memo.
>>things he mentions have a large enough effect to measurably affect the gender distribution among Google's employees,
> That's not one of the points of the memo. One of (the primary) point is to potentially explain a gap
So one of the points is to potentially explain a gap, and I think his potential explanation involves mentioning some effects that might be strong enough to explain the gap. I'm not sure why you singled out that point to disagree with me.
I especially limited my statement to Google employees because for Damore's purpose of influencing Google's diversity policy, effects on software engineering in general only matter in so far as they affect Google. I have not excluded the possibility that the majority of the gap is "inherited" through the hiring pool (in fact I think it likely).
However, you should not be so quick to exclude discrimination from the possible effects that have to be taken into account. In fact, Damore himself alleges that discrimination is happening, just in favor of women instead of against them. Had he actually crunched the numbers to estimate the expected gender distribution and compare it to reality, it would have been easy to see whether discrimination is involved and in which direction. But he didn't (maybe the data isn't precise enough to allow it), and now we are left arguing about possibilities and what was said.
Lastly, while I mostly agree with the content of your comment, you would do better to exclude the name-calling. It doesn't help to convince anyone who doesn't already share your views, and it alienates others who would otherwise be willing to engage in a level-headed debate with you.
You made a blanket statement about discussing offensive things and I wanted to point out there are some limits, especially at the workplace.
In this particular case, I feel that leadership and everyone who disagreed with the memo should have at least stated explicitly (if briefly) what the flaws in the reasoning were, as I tried to do at the beginning of this thread.
Obviously, my explanation was not sufficient to convince you and you are still holding on to the belief that women are biologically ill-suited to be engineers. But at least now I have tried to make it clear to you where I think you are wrong. Thats pretty much all you can accomplish on some issues.
I'm all for people arguing against it, but your 'one sentence' doesn't argue the point at all, it just asserts it. It literally just asserts that it "is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts". I'm all for someone arguing for the points in that quoted fragment, but you can't claim that they're true just because you've said them.
You're right, my one sentence is just trying to explain the basic point to people who may not get it. Its not trying to lay out a complete thesis in support. I'm not sure if thats a necessary exercise, especially for the CEO.
I think people have done a very good job of saying that. They just get drowned out by outrage from the right, and overly clipped soundbites from both sides.
My twitter feed has tons of very thoughtful pieces responding to the memo. They just never breach the front page of Hacker News.
Maybe. I don't think Sundar Pichai or Danielle Brown did though, they just said "this is not OK" and "code of conduct". Perhaps they felt they didn't need to engage with this kind of argument, but that mentality is exactly what has a lot of people upset.
I agree that the document blurs the line between preference/aptitude and is not totally clear which is one of the reasons overall it is a mess.
Nonetheless, many of the statements in "Personality differences", "Men's higher drive for status", and "Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap", especially the stuff about women being more prone to anxiety, liking part-time work, caring more about people than things, etc. speak strongly to aptitude for engineering, given the context of the document.
EDIT: Also, I reject the implication that the claim "women have less of a preference for engineering" is not in and of itself a harmful stereotype.
1. The memo uses the word "preference" without ever establishing whether it's talking about free choice or choice after discouragement, and so is flagrantly begging the question.
2. It's simply false that the memo makes no connection between supposed preference and aptitude, as it builds to a section about the "harms of diversity" that includes a direct claim that women in Google's workforce are less capable than men.
> It's simply false that the memo makes no connection between supposed preference and aptitude, as it builds to a section about the "harms of diversity" that includes a direct claim that women in Google's workforce are less capable than men.
I have been confused why you and others have been repeating this, but after re-reading the section "The Harm of Google’s biases", I think I see your point now.
Damore does not say that all women who work at Google are unqualified, but he does imply that there are fewer women who are qualified, and that by trying to mine that population too heavily, Google is hiring women who are, on average, less qualified than the men are, on average. Do I have that right?
Damore is smart enough not to come out and say directly that he believes all women to be less qualified; instead, he just strings together a series of assertions that leaves reasonable people with only one conclusion, which is that the women at Google are beneficiaries of a lowered bar that results in the women at Google being on average less qualified than the men.
I have very little patience with arguments rooted in "but that's not exactly what he said", because I have been on message boards for approximately the entire literate span of my 40 years on this planet, and the technique of couching inflammatory assertions in half-hearted hedges and deliberately ambiguous abstractions is the oldest trick in the book.
He allocated a whole subhed to his point, and the whole document builds to it. The subhed is: "the harm of Google's biases". The biases he's referring to are towards women and against men. The harm he refers to is "a lowered bar". His point is plain.
(I'm confident people aren't going to like this comment, but it is what I honestly believe, after what I believe to be pretty significant consideration, and no part of this thread is made better by me pretending otherwise.)
Oh, so you know what he is actually thinking even though he doesn't say it and says things that are contrary to it. I see.
This, too, helps me understand the outrage. Thank you for being honest.
(I do hope the 'thank you' above can be read by people in a calm, snark-less voice. It is genuine. I appreciate Ptacek being forthright. I learned from it. It really does make the thread better and furthers the conversation in a productive way.)
> For what it's worth: your thanks might be intellectually honest, but your summary of my argument is not.
I am very open to being corrected.
When you said, "Damore is smart enough not to come out and say directly that he believes all women to be less qualified", I took it to mean that you think Damore actually believes that all women are unqualified and arguing about populations is a just a smokescreen for what he is really thinking. This is helpful to understand because it means that you don't think the memo is actually about population-level differences and so exploring that argument is a waste of time.
But if you didn't actually mean that, I misunderstood and apologize.
> The memo uses the word "preference" without ever establishing whether it's talking about free choice or choice after discouragement, and so is flagrantly begging the question.
Of course it's talking about free choice. Introducing "discouragement" in the equation is itself begging the question : it's an extra hypothesis which is unnecessary in presence of a simpler, more fundamental explanation (like this one https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/ ). Occam's Razor 101.
> includes a direct claim that women in Google's workforce are less capable than men.
Many methods in machine learning and statistics benefit from two types of theory:
1) Optimization theory - which says, if I repeat this iterative method N times I will find a (nearly) globally optimal solution
2) Statistical theory - which says, if I observe this process N times I can accurately estimate a population quantity with high probability
Deep learning does not benefit from the same theoretical guarantees.
For the most part the response from the community is "but it works really well!" which is a fair and valid response especially since what most practitioners care about is predictive accuracy.
Personally, I find applying neural networks extremely annoying at times due to the amount of twiddling of hyperparameters, slow convergence, etc.
New airlines can usually undercut older airlines because they don't have the same liabilities (pensions, debts from bad business practice over the years, etc.) and so they are usually great for a few years but then they evolve into the same shitty carriers that they compete with. In JetBlue's case, they were initially given a large tax break by NYC/JFK. When that subsidy expired they immediately started to charge for bags, reduce perks like better snacks, etc.
Many of the "old" airlines have filed bankruptcy several times, which gives you a sort of do-over on employee contract terms, pensions, etc. They've been able to shed debt that way and be more "new".
Southwest has some of the highest labor costs in the industry, having never filed bankruptcy.
That's a problem with the regulations regarding pension funding, not a general new-company advantage. It should never have been possible for a company to give a pension as compensation that in any way that coupled the pension to their future viability.
There is a lot of competition. The article gets it backwards. It is the immense competition caused by consumers who fly mostly based on the lowest cost fare.
United's a pretty solidly middle-of-the-pack airline, like the rest. Delta has put a very strong focus on not having cancellations (favoring delays instead) and is rolling out an international Premium Economy service level, which is a huge step up.
Southwest is great for no change fees and free bags, but the cattle call boarding sucks, and they have far more "involuntary bumps" per passenger than United does. That said, because Southwest runs many short hop flights, you're more likely to be able to get another flight to your destination in short order.
Ask 3 people if they prefer United, American, or Delta, and you'll get 3 different answers. It depends so much on your home airport, what kind of flying you're doing, and so on.
I love Virgin and Alaska both, but despite flying 4-6 times per year, all of my trips were too short to qualify me as a frequently flier. By sticking with United (for longer flights, at least) I was able to qualify for their bottom-rung frequent flier program, and even just the possibility of getting a free upgrade on a future flight is enough to make me stick with an otherwise undifferentiated product.
Wow this guy really needs to take it down a few notches. Yes, PG's articles present a magical fantasy world dominated by the masterful hacker and visionary entrepreneur. They are inspiring and fun to read. And they may have some truth to them.
Attacking these essays as an oversimplification while presenting a caricature of the introvert and disconnected programmer is borderline ridiculous.
> this guy really needs to take it down a few notches
Author here. Man, if I took it down a few notches, I'd bury myself under my own hubris! I'm nobody, certainly not worth PG's time or perhaps yours, I'm trying to speak truth to power and won't apologize for stepping on anyone's hero worship. I absolutely agree with you that Graham's essays are inspiring and fun to read. I think I made that clear as well. The frustration which drove this essay was his casual observation that the best programmers are libertarians. I don't think that's true and have data to support it. I'm also frustrated to see a powerful man perpetuate self-serving ideologies without acknowledging the influences of power and luck.
> borderline ridiculous
Story of my life. But I think my caricature still stands as an illustration of how the introverted mindset can shut off more nuanced views of social and political structure and lead one to adopt a personal view that serves those in power.
czep, even though I don't agree with much of what you wrote (in the article), I do appreciate you taking the time to so thoroughly expound on the ideas. Paul Graham most likely fell victim to projection of a Libertarian ideal when he viewed "best programmers" from his perspective.
> I'm also frustrated to see a powerful man perpetuate self-serving ideologies without acknowledging the influences of power and luck.
I agree with this above statement maybe or maybe not for the reasons you do.
The "Power Game", or even the lack of willingness or know-how to play it is the reason a lot of programmers think themselves superior to the sales guys who peddle the product of their labor.
The "Power Game" is also the same reason the good sales guys feel that despite being so technically smart, programmers can be damned idiotic fools.
As an introverted "programmer-type" myself, life would be way easier for me if there was no Power Game. But the Power Game is as human as eating, drinking and pissing.
Hell, I get irritated daily that I even have to eat, drink or piss. It feels like a waste of time when I am in the zone with something. Same thing with the Power Game.
Luck... hugely important. Heck, we've all played RPG's and know to fill up that skill bucket ASAP.
Maybe what would really be helpful to programmers is something that can stir inspiration like Paul Graham, but that covers something akin to "The 48 Laws of Power" for the introverted modern day employees.
Theyre writing long term contracts for power production which provide a fixed price for the resource developers and by consequence provide them with a fixed cost.
Typically, these types of contracts, providing price certainty, are required to build develop new renewable assets.
This. Price doesn't fluctuate for the purposes of this article because they've bought a minimum amount of electricity for a fixed price over time. (not because price of wind power never fluctuates)
Similar pegged pricing can be achieved if you trade futures to hedge your price but typically this is only achievable year to year and difficult to do with electricity as it can come from so many different sources and hedging against them all may be difficult. Perhaps there's a megawatt future out there?
This is the correct answer. Price hedging is a typical feature of corporate PPAs (power purchase agreements). The aim is to reduce risk for both parties. All the other answers here are speculating without knowing how corporate energy procurement works.
"While there may be scientific evidence of differences between men and women, using these differences to conclude that women are biologically less inclined to engineering is a gross leap in reasoning that is not at all supported by the facts."
Then you can go on and explain why for historical and societal reasons putting forth this weak theory is highly offensive and damaging to a large group of people.
Of course, many feel that you shouldn't _have_ to explain this to people, but unfortunately in todays environment, you do!