I'm not that involved in wikipedia, but I do recall his name. It came up during a discussion on reddit about aljazeera documentary "the lobby"[1]. He was accused of actively censoring any mention of the incident from the "Israel lobby in the United Kingdom"[2] wikipedia page.
I've been Tunisia where they had a hose like this in the hotel, as you can see it has variable pressure, and even without setting it to the maximum it's sufficient.
His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1]. I could find more questionable positions but have attached a copy of the memo below.
Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both
people and aesthetics.
Another point he raised was that Google's hiring initiatives 'lower the bar' for their targeted groups.
Google has created several
discriminatory practices: [...]
Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar
for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
> His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks
Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did ̶s̶a̶y̶
find is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks.
> Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did say is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks.
From his article:
On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because...
> [Damore's] argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks
The line and paragraph that quoted above makes no judgments about the capability of men or women for software tasks or otherwise, as far as I can tell. (Edit: I’ve read the whole memo at least twice)
The statements that men and women differ biologically, and that this impacts occupational preferences, is not scientifically novel or controversial. Writing about Damore's memo in Quilette, Deborah Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience) said:
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
Another other article by Koh goes into more detail about the specific scientific research into this topic, and includes links to several original research publications (so you don't need to take her word for it): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...
As I'll reply to the other commenter, it's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.
It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.
> It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.
Indeed, I have read the article in its entirely before. And I didn't remember such a passage (my memory isn't great), so I went back and Ctrl-F'd to try to find it and still didn't find it. Then I read on in each instance and saw that, just as I remembered, he was talking about preferences everywhere I found. So, yeah, I've already done everything you're saying, and that's why I think your claim is baseless, but I acknowledge maybe I'm still missing something. So instead of telling me to RTFA, it would behoove you to just spend 5 seconds pasting the full passage you are concluding this from. It isn't any harder to copy-paste the relevant portion of the passage than to comment about why you're refusing to do so when it actually exists. It's only harder when it doesn't exist.
> So instead of telling me to RTFA, it would behoove you to just spend 5 seconds pasting the full passage you are concluding this from. It isn't any harder to copy-paste the relevant portion of the passage than to comment about why you're refusing to do so when it actually exists. It's only harder when it doesn't exist.
I'm not sure what you'd like me to do, as I pasted the passages I was referring to in my initial comment. I don't think he's referring to preferences when he says that Google women have higher levels of self-reported anxiety due in part to their innate neuroticism[1].
Fundamentally, my problem with this article is that it makes an enormous leap from psychology studies to innate capabilities to unsuitability for certain types of work. We just don't know enough about each of these areas to make the generalizations that are put forth in the essay.
[1] Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs
> His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1].
I see nothing there about "capability" but about preferences and about how much the work & teams can/can't be (re)shaped to match those preferences.
We should strive to create conditions where people can be effective in jobs they enjoy as it makes teams, projects, and companies better overall. How responsibilities are divided, teams are formed, and people interact are all variables that should be tweakable to some degree.
There was a whole section on his memo about not reducing a distribution to its average. A difference in distribution will result in different averages or percentiles, however this doesn't mean all women are less capable or interested in a field which is the way I heard most of his detractors characterize his memo.
> Google has created several discriminatory practices: - Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
To me, that translates to: "Google creates programs that lower the bar for hiring "diverse" people. This directly implies to me that at least some "diverse" people who got hired got hired primarily because of their gender/race/whatever. Now, I work in a team with 3 female software engineers (out of ~10). According to his conclusions, probably at least one of them didn't pass the mustard, and only got the job because of her gender.
I feel like this is bullshit. It's very clear that the photo is inspired by the cat, not the photo of the cat. There are many different details between the two images to the point that it is a totally different photo of the cat ( see ear position,left eye ..)
If the image is the issue, then we're basically not going to allow anyone to draw an illustration of a sad cat any longer, which is absurd.
That being said, I imagine the "Grumpy Cat" text is the concern here. If they just used the cat illustration and "Grumppuccino" text they would probably be in the clear (assuming that text wasn't part of the original agreement). The way it's currently presented, it's confusing to consumers and it looks like an official Grumpy Cat product.
This is no different to protecting a business name.
I'm bemused that critics of copyright believe that IP Protection is Evil, but have no problem understanding that they're not going to be able to call their startup "Microsoft", "Google", or "Apple" - because that would be an obvious and ridiculous branding infringement.
But copyright of a single work isn't a brand? In a practical sense it is, because the whole point of IP is that it has market value - and brands, individual works, band and artist names, logos, and the rest, all generate income for creators.
(Or more often for middle men and managers - but that's a different problem, and one that's hardly going to be solved by eliminating IP.)
> I'm bemused that critics of copyright believe that IP Protection is Evil, but have no problem understanding that they're not going to be able to call their startup "Microsoft", "Google", or "Apple"
A critic of copyright protection could still support trademark and/or patent protection. For example, I'd say that current copyright terms are excessive, but that an entity, whether a person or a company, should have exclusive and perpetual rights to their own identity (i.e. trademark-like protection).
I meant that the amount of points is not a major outlier, and if it is the interviewer should have written an argument why it's different from the old cases if the other members find the argument convincing it should be fine.
>some Applicant Tracking Systems like Greenhouse
that's exaclty the type of feedback I wanted thank you very much
> Claim E
if we are innocent, why wouldn't this be in our favour.
"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
○ We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming
and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how
people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive
ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get
female students into coding might be doing this).
● Women on average are more cooperative
○ 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."
Step 2: peer-review
The highest candidate is selected, interviewers exchange notes and are asked to:
* check and discuss if their colleagues reasons’ are valid and reasonable (for example "the hello" reason might be seen as too petty by some, and will be discarded)
check if the point values are reasonable
(Checking old similar data to flag outliers is a possibility)
check if some of the reasons presented by other colleagues apply to their own candidates. For example, if the "hello" reason was not discarded and your candidate didn't say hello you must apply it to him too.
*Interviewers are asked to bring more focus on the current best candidate's reasons.
If after a peer-review round, the best candidate changes, another round is made or shorten the list and re-interview.
If it does not change, the best candidate is offered the position.
Claim D: this helps smooth out harsh or lenient interviewer bias.
Claim E: this process if well documented should be a valid and easy defense against allegations.
Data Analysis on hiring decisions becomes way more interesting. I'm sure there are tons of trends you can seek out.
Claim F: this allows an earlier detection of discrimination. For example if you find that an interviewer or a committee always removes points from a certain group for a subjective reason more than others in the company. It might be an early warning sign that a problem need be addressed.
Claim G: this allows for a higher quality debate on controversial issues like sexism and racism in hiring.
Machine learning can be used to give suggestions to interviewers about the amount of points to give for reasons. (They should be suggestions no decisions to avoid the pitfalls the lost nuance that classic machine based decision might suffer from)
Example: a fairly easy one is that after a high enough number of universities and GPAs is received one can aggregate the point values into scores that take into account the difference of grading and quality between universities. This might help decide if GPA x in Y is better or worse than GPA z in C, a very hard question to answer fairly if we didn't have the data.
I think this method offers a more traceable, open and perhaps fair way of hiring without suffering from the lack of nuance that traditional automatic hiring suffers from.
Problems:
- Money: this process might require more man power.
- Tooling: to be efficient this process requires tooling and automation
I would be happy to hear your ideas, improvements and experiences with similar systems. I think the idea of this system is very similar to that of a neural network.
Utilizing MRI and cognitive tests data from the Human Connectome project (N = 900), sex differences in general intelligence (g) and molar brain characteristics were examined. Total brain volume, cortical surface area, and white and gray matter correlated 0.1–0.3 with g for both sexes, whereas cortical thickness and gray/white matter ratio showed less consistent associations with g. Males displayed higher scores on most of the brain characteristics, even after correcting for body size, and also scored approximately one fourth of a standard deviation higher on g. Mediation analyses and the Method of Correlated Vectors both indicated that the sex difference in g is mediated by general brain characteristics. Selecting a subsample of males and females who were matched on g further suggest that larger brains, on average, lead to higher g, whereas similar levels of g do not necessarily imply equal brain sizes."
The study examined female and male brains, found that males on average had a higher general intelligence score and a higher standard deviation. The study also found that male brains had on average higher surface area and size even if you control for body size. The study found that brain size in both genders on average leads to a higher g.
I don't understand how your criticism "indirect correlational evidence" applies to this study, could you maybe elaborate on how you would improve this study?
so you believe that physical difference between sexes in size of the brain, is not due to sex? what would you say this is caused by?
I would like to point out that saying this changes are due to evolution not sex is unvalid because then nothing will be due to sex, not saying that you think that but just getting it out of the way.
Well hell, the Newtonian laws of motion had no hypothetical mechanism for gravity for a rather long time. We're still in the early days of figuring out Homo sapiens. Don't get your knickers in a bunch, yet. It looks like you're uptight about something.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/thelobby/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_lobby_in_the_United_Kin...