Counterpoint: even if you want to defend a "middle" position, that doesn't mean every argument roughly in that area is worthy defending. I didn't read the memo, so I have no opinion its merits on their own, but considering the immediate response it had, I'd argue it's not worth defending, because it clearly wasn't written in a way that could ever have a hope of convincing anyone not already on the fence.
>but considering the immediate response it had, I'd argue it's not worth defending
That is only a valid stance assuming immediate responses are rational. When anything gets anywhere near a topic like this, the immediate responses that are shouted out will almost never be rational.
System 1 is based on quick, emotionally based assessments. It's where your flight-or-flight response lies. Only once System 1 has sufficiently engaged, can System 2 take over and slowly chew on it.
Apparently, the best way to change someone's mind is if you engage them in a way that doesn't (apparently) activate their threat system.
I disagree; a text that agreed with the overall company position on the topic would not get shouted at. I may be wrong, but I think one could take that and push a bit in any direction without arousing intellectual antibodies. I personally know people who got quite a few "dangerous" ideas past the censors of a fascist dictatorship, where the stakes were incomparably higher than writing a memo at Google. It's a skill, though.
It's a skill, that's right. The article actually alluded to it by mentioning Kolmogorov's approach to criticising Lysenkoism.
The author of the Google memo obviously didn't have that skill. He approached it in exactly the wrong way - by writing a solid, coherent piece, full of links to actual research, which politely but assertively argued that current Google policies around diversity are wrong and harmful. That's direct disobedience, and direct disobedience gets you a hammer.
You've clearly missed the point. The people doing brain dead shouting on each side will never be convinced anyway, so it is ridiculous to criticize the memo for not being able to convince them.
The goal isn't to convince the shouters, it's to convince those who might follow the shouters. Moderate positions must have their own advocates, because people aren't sufficiently informed on all issues to tell the difference between extremists and moderates.
My point is that you could write something that can push in a certain direction without alerting the shouters. It generally requires pushing only very gently, but it's not impossible if you're skilled.
Slightly off-topic, but what seemed so extremely surprising to me is that googlers who are supposed to be extremely smart were the shouters here. Blatant mis-representations were memed, demonstrating lack of both reading comprehension and basic statistics, not to mention biology. Where are the supposedly smartest people of the planet!
It always makes me sad to see people that think employees of any corporation are "the smartest people on the planet." It shows how effective PR can be.
Of course google employees are just the same as everyone else in the Valley. Which means: generally smart, and also including the same political and psychological quirks - some good, some bad- as everyone else. No better and no worse than other people in the area.
Then please go read it. I personally was surprised at how careful and level-headed it was. But due to space constraints his message is often dumbed down by the media to "google employee has said that due to biological differences women can't become decent engineers" which then gets the response it gets.
If there's such a large overlap between populations, as he claims in the first couple pages, why bother enumerating those differences in such extreme detail?
> If there's such a large overlap between populations, as he claims in the first couple pages, why bother enumerating those differences in such extreme detail?
My major problem with the presentation (as opposed to the content) of the ideas in the memo is actually that he doesn't give the effect sizes when he hypothesizes alternative explanations. They may be given in the linked references, but so far I have not bothered hunting them down; and I have no idea whether it's worth my time before I have checked them all.
No, I'm saying that a particular text presenting the theory of evolution may not be worthy defending. There's a distinction between the idea and a particular representation of it.
Not a very big distinction. In some circles any defense of evolution would be treated similarly, no matter how reasonable. The beef is fundamentally with what was said, not how it was said.
What tipped me off was that almost nobody who criticised the memo was doing so by quoting from it. If the memo was truly as terrible as was suggested then surely quoting from it would be the best way to prove that. Then I read that an internal google poll showed that half agreed with the memo. So I decided to read the memo and found it civil and not inflammatory. Why not read the memo yourself?
It probably wasn't. Better to write and defending texts that can actually change the public position until the Descent of Man becomes not quite as unpalatable, and therefore eventually worth defending.
How do you judge whether Descent of Man is a text that can change the public position, or too radical and not worth defending? If you only defend things that don't get a negative reaction, and anything contrary to the current dogma gets a negative reaction, you'll likely never get anywhere.
Also, the strength of the reaction against a non-conformist text is not really strongly correlated with the degree to which it's non-conformist. Dogmatics police small deviations precisely because they don't want an incremental strategy to work.
I'm sorry, I know that I'm reading a dead discussion. But your comment shows that you have no idea what impact The Descent of Man had. Both good and bad.
You can argue for or against it on many grounds, ranging from Darwin's sexism to the importance of treating humans as just another animal to its misuse by the eugenics movement culminating in the Nazi excesses.
But arguing against it because it did not impact the public position shows an ignorance of history.
The problem with the line of argument you've been making is that it involves judging the argument's worthiness of defending solely on the response to it. People are often so ideologically driven that there's no means -- no better way of putting the points -- to get them to respond reasonably to something they don't like.
It's still making up your mind by proxy, and the "best" part about that is, you don't know how many people whose proxy impression you take into account depend in turn also haven't made up their own mind, and whether they are reaction to the piece or reacting to what they think is expected of them. I don't distinct between one person and one billion people claiming or thinking something, what matters is why they do, what their axioms and conclusions are. If those are second-hand, follow the reference and let GC handle the now useless pointer.
> There's a distinction between the idea and a particular representation of it.
And it's generally a bit silly to get hung up on a bad representation of something and hold that against any points that may be buried in it. E.g. I don't like Trump at all, I don't think a lot of things he said even before the election are forgiveable in the least, and so on. But I can't completely dismiss the resentment and disenfranchisement he rode in on, not all of that is racist sore losers, and to ignore that just because Trump was made to win and Sanders made to lose would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Similarly, whatever there may be worth discussing in all this, why leave it to resentful misogynists or whoever?
There are too many issues already that get carved up into two or more sides all of which holding grains of truth and plenty of BS, where there is little discussion and lots of signalling what side you're on. Like, I'm generally against xenophobia and for immigrants, certainly for those from countries our allies and us are messing up. But on a demonstration, I'm automatically also with people who yell about smashing all borders!!1 and I'm like "hold on, that has to scare a lot of people who are nowhere near the page you're on". I can live with that much better than with things I would see on demonstrations against immigrants, for sure, but I still am not happy, you know?
And I have to kinda walk to eggshells to bring that up, to criticize "my own", and make sure to signal "I'm not a racist, I just think this is a bit too much". Which is kind of childish, really. It's like saying I'm not a heretic, I just noticed this thing when I looked through my telescope. Yeah okay I'll do that to not get killed, fine, but it's still silly. I don't like the tug of masses no matter the direction they pull me in, and even if I get pulled into a good direction by people who have good motives today, what will happen tomorrow? Can I get away from the undertow when it changes direction? I'd rather be away and stay away from it, and swim parallel to it as long as I agree with it.
When it comes to this discussion, my opinion is probably beyond the scope anyway, since I think "boys like things more" just means "boys are easier to fuck up". I don't believe in a spectrum where you're either very rational or very emotional, just because you can't be both in the same instant doesn't mean you can't have orthogonal capacities for both. So I don't care how to get more women in tech, I care about getting more men to be nurses, I interested in the dysfunctions that make them hide in boys' clubs and behind money, that make them prefer non-threatening women. I think females in the military are a step backwards, progress would be nobody in the military. And so on, I'm kinda keeping out of this because I'm completely off to lala land anyway. But still, there's not even much of an interesting discussion to read.
> And I have to kinda walk to eggshells to bring that up, to criticize "my own", and make sure to signal "I'm not a racist, I just think this is a bit too much".
Does this ever work? Recently all I seem to see is "but you are, though, and twice as much if you try to deny it." The only acceptable position is in the direction of the groupthink position, with equal or greater magnitude.
In person it can work, on the internet with strangers never. But if I can't convince someone, I still have to hold my ground, and I can do that without anyone's cooperation or permission. I don't believe in the burden of convincing anyone, not when it comes to social things rather than new inventions or such. If you're older than 20, you had plenty time, roughly speaking, and some people don't change as much as come up with new excuses. Been there, done that, and I don't follow into rabbit holes anymore, they just slip to the back of the queue of people I support. Unless they're close to my heart, then I have as bitter fights about it as necessary. Each one teach one, and if I can't save the world there are still degrees to my own depravity within it, and over that I have control.
The question whether a group accepts me is much less important than whether I accept the group, from my perspective. And the thing about people who are in groups is insecurity, and the thing about people who don't need groups for identity is that they actually have and are what groups are only faking. So one on one, in person, people eat chalk or pout and avoid at worst, or open up at best -- but in faceless groups or the internet it's kind of bleak, I agree. But when all you have is a swamp and a spoon, using the spoon is still better than just sitting by the swamp, right?
I think 'considering the immediate response' used to be a valuable heuristic, but isn't any more. Too many people have become too polarized.
There are a bunch of folks from the tech industry on Twitter that I have followed for years, including some HN regulars, that are now, IMHO, in the 'too polarized' group. I no longer trust their opinion on various 'political' subjects to be the result of deliberate consideration, like I did for years.
Scott Alexander wrote another one of his great considerations of this sensitive subject [1], but he wisely disabled comments. To quote Scott:
A lot of people without connections to the tech industry
don’t realize how bad it’s gotten. This [he quotes an
example before this paragraph] is how bad. It would be
pointless trying to do anything about this person in
particular. This is the climate.
[..]
This is the world we’ve built. Where making people live in
fear is a feature, not a bug.
Every suggestion that maybe this Google guy wrote something reasonable was met with derision, including by these people I follow, effectively shouting down anyone who responded in a moderating way. They are implicit in creating this climate, this world.
I bet none of them actually read the memo and know if the things this guy was saying were actually that bad. They were reacting this way because others were reacting this way, assuming someone down the line would be correct that there was a good reason to be angry. Yet I doubt anyone not already polarized knew.
As far as I can see this was a lynching and whether the guy was actually guilty, and how guilty, is irrelevant.
> There are a bunch of folks from the tech industry on Twitter that I have followed for years, including some HN regulars, that are now, IMHO, in the 'too polarized' group.
Thank god, I thought it was just me. This place (or at least, popular members of this place) seems to have become more ideological in recent times. I used to be pretty comfortable in knowing that most here were of the classical liberal/enlightenment ilk and would discuss the majority of reasonable ideas with open eyes and ears. Now I see a lot of angry and dismissive reactions that would have been uncharacteristic of this community only a few years ago.
> I think 'considering the immediate response' used to be a valuable heuristic, but isn't any more. Too many people have become too polarized.
It's also the medium. Social media...now that I think about it, actually today's media landscape in general is a self-reinforcing catalyst for this kind of polarization and emotionalization.
> Every suggestion that maybe this Google guy wrote something reasonable was met with derision, including by these people I follow, effectively shouting down anyone who responded in a moderating way.
You could also consider the possibility that they're right to deride the memo. Many studies are easily read incorrectly or have counter studies showing the effects aren't what they thought.
But even if the memo were factually correct, I think a lot of this comes down to miscommunication. The current tech culture may drive women away for some reasons, even possibly benign ones having nothing to do with discrimination. Some, maybe most people like this culture without being biased against women in any way. That's all perfectly reasonable.
Other people think this culture could change so that it's more attractive to women, presumably thinking that we can preserve what's great about the current culture, but simply introduce new perspectives and so on.
That's also entirely reasonable, but obviously can't be true in all cases. Some changes will be inherently incompatible with existing culture. Certainly this will grate on some people who don't see the need for change. Whether the change needs to happen is a separate issue I won't touch.
The memo's arguments that women are inherently disinterested in the current tech culture are then completely moot, because the goal isn't to try and fit women into the existing culture, but to change the culture so that women want to join it. So you can maybe see why people can be so derisive of the memo's arguments: it's a complete straw man from their point of view.
I personally don't even think each side realizes what they're arguing for and how they differ. They're all talking past each other, and the derision just gets in the way, but I suppose that's human nature.
They may be right to deride the memo. They are not right to deride anyone who wonders whether writing something like that, and sending it internally to a mailing list intended for discussions of this subject, is maybe not an offence that deserves the outrage it garnered. Nor what basically amounts to a social death sentence.
Otherwise I'm with you until your last sentence. This is not a kind of human nature that I think we should accept. Especially because, as you say, it just doesn't work.
