I'm fighting against anything proposed by the memo because it's wrong to try to rationalize an overwhelmingly male workplace demographic with scientific sexism (which doesn't require a statement that women are inferior to men). It's pretty straightforward, you're the one trying to bend sweet lady logic into a pretzel in an attempt to make his ideas seem reasonable.
Also intolerance should absolutely not be tolerated. Tolerance is opposition to discrimination based on immutable traits, not just putting up with things, so "tolerating" intolerance would be self-defeating and pointless.
It's odd that you would oppose NAMBLA but not nazis. One wants to fuck kids, the other wants to commit genocide and establish a white ethnostate. Why do you find the latter goals more agreeable?
It's sexist to use for any practical purpose, which would cover all of those.
You're admitting that facts aren't allowed when discussing diversity programs...
Not all facts, but facts about racial differences, yes.
Duuuuude... It's a meritocracy. You really sure you want to come out against that?
Duuuude, it's really not. Well you might call it a racial meritocracy, but that's a very specific kind of meritocracy that's hardly meritocratic overall. If you try selecting a team based on what people of a certain race are very sightly better at on average, you'd be very very lucky to get the best team.
Bigotry is intolerance of those with different opinions....
LOLWUT? By this definition, being intolerant of nazis, NAMBLA members, you name it, is bigoted. And being as racist and sexist as all hell is not.
if it's scientific, it's no longer opinion, rather it's fact. (At least, you know, as good as science gets) Now, I'm a live-and-let-live kinda guy. People can believe whatever sort of magical sky-wizard they want, but when it starts to impact me and starts dictating policy at work... their fantasies are not valid justifications for fucking me over. The facts not mattering anymore is the sort of shit Trump is slinging around.
Now you're straight-up lauding scientific bigotry because it's beneficial to you in workplace policies, and painting a rejection of scientific bigotry as anti-scientific. Fairness is not a fantasy and attempting to rationalize suspicious workplace demographics with scientific arguments about racial or gender differences is not factual. It's actually rather pseudoscientific, which I'll get to later.
I get that. The problem is that it's really hard to measure merit. Like IQ tests, there's a lot of bias creeps in based on who writes the questions.
Measures of merit are vastly more accurate and less biased than making guesses based on ethnicity or gender.
But if there's a definite advantage of X over Y, there should definitely be a disparity of people choosing more X than Y, cultural and social effects be damned.
Here's the kicker: There are no big advantages of X over Y in the real world. Just barely significant average differences that are massively overshadowed by cultural and social effects. This is why it's pseudoscientific to use ethnic or gender differences to make hiring decisions - it's a minor factor. It's like trying to work out which fish swims fastest by the texture of its scales. You can do all kinds of good science on that, but it's such a tiny factor in the grander scheme of things that it doesn't matter and you'll never get good results using that criteria.
. . . If it helps the group, then there's utility there . . . There's nothing artificial about that. If it's a dystopia, then sure, it's all robo-nazi-tyrants. But that's literally just your presumption pulled from nowhere and as biased as robo-hitler) And you know what? That's finally a good argument. If being different has utility in and of itself that means a place with 99 women would hire a man over a woman just to mix it up a little. Because while the individual woman might do a better job than the man, he helps the group on the whole more than she would. Which is the sort of thing Damore is arguing against. (if you presume he's talking about hiring practices). BUT, and this is important, once you hire that guy you can't just brow-beat him and shame him into silence for having different views. Diversity breeds creativity right? Well Damore lamented how conservatives were being shut out. We don't want an ideological echo chamber. Title drop.
I meant ethnically and gender-diverse. i don't know if there's any advantage to ideological diversity. The "conservatives" that were being shut out at Google aren't just moderate Republicans, as Damore's lawsuit would
Wouldn't that be better? If he's writing at the academic journal level, that would be better than feedback to a diversity class.
Again, the scientific rigor of his statements is ethically irrelevant.
In hiring? Yes, give every individual a fair shot. Something along the lines of acknowledging that sociological trends have a ton of overlap and you can't infer anything about the individual based on the stereotype. I agree. James Damore agrees. He stated as such in the memo. "you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions." You can't just ignore that.
But if the context isn't "should we hire this person". Is it sexist to point out what is legitimately true? Let's say specifically in the context of how a company runs their diversity training class, or who gets made fun of in the office, or who is shamed into silence.
It's sexist to use for any practical purpose, which would cover all of those.
But in this scenario, the reason they're concerned is kinda bullshit. In a scenario where 1 out of 10 non-speedyLongLegs people is as good at the job as those of the speedyLongLegs tribe, and lo and behold the ratio is about 1:10. But they want a diversity program to FIX that!? There's nothing to fix. That's ideal. In a pure meritocracy that's exactly how the nonLeggyRace gap would play out. And if they got such a program.... You're suggesting one is allowed to question it? In this scenario, it is perfectly valid to have little diversity because there are actual real legitimate differences in abilty. In this scenario, forcing diversity would be unfair, unjust, inefficient, as it would shut out BETTER employees from the job.
No, I don't see how it's wrong.
This magnitude of difference doesn't exist IRL so it's not a good example, but I'm more concerned that your ideal scenario is a pseudo-utilitarian dystopia powered by scientific bigotry. It wouldn't maximize productivity with these inept ideas of what makes a workforce productive, so it's not a true utilitarian dystopia, but that's a secondary concern. There are so many questionable assumptions and oversimplifications going into the idea that a company's demographic makeup should closely reflect the average aptitudes of the different ethnicities and genders it may hire. You have to ignore all kinds of social and cultural effects to attempt to justify this "spherical cow" mathematical model of aptitude. I would think it's more unfair, unjust and inefficient to construct and enforce these fictions based on tiny differences in population averages than to just give everyone a fair shot, and expect your company demographics to be similar to the local demographics if there is no bias in hiring or training affecting the process. A person choosing to self-select out of a career for cultural reasons can be considered a form of training bias.
A true utilitarian dystopia would actually be quite likely to artifically construct a diverse workforce in most professions, striving for an extremely diverse mixture regardless of local demographics. In real life, it has been scientifically shown that more diverse groups produce more creative ideas. Companies today want this, including Google, and are trying to sneak toward it. Obviously it's not ethically ideal but it's worlds better in practice than shrugging off, or attempting to rationalize with scientific bigotry, a workforce that's far more white and male than the local population.
Any service that exists primarily to accumulate reviews of businesses or people aims to shake down said entities eventually. Either because that's a nice set of reviews there, and it would be a shame if anything happened to them (as in this case), or because you'll eventually get yourself into an unfortunate situation and they know somebody who could make it go away.
I would say that if a software hack, or even a simple hardware hack with common tools can fix it, it's not bricked. If you have to get out a JTAG adapter, then it's bricked.
Well the WBC could be classified as a religion, even if it's a tiny and very messed up one, which is a protected class, so you probably wouldn't have good luck refusing to bake a cake for them. If they weren't organized under a church and were simply a protest group, you could refuse.
Most people earning minimum wage are not doing it to pay for room and board. They are 2nd or 3rd earners in households that are, on average, above median income.
Barely more than half, but that's close enough to the truth. So your argument is that because they can't afford their own homes, it's not a problem that they can't afford their own homes?
No, you are saying that in a civilised country, that's how you'd like things to be. There is, however, no law of nature that says that there's enough economic output to give everybody a decent quality of life. Just because you're "civilised" doesn't change that.
In practice it's clear that there is quite enough economic output to give everyone a decent quality of life, it's just not well-distributed. So we have to decide what we're going to do if an (often idle) ownership class is hoarding most of the economic output, and a majority of hard-working people are struggling to make ends meet because they can't get enough of it.
He doesn't need to say that women are generally inferior to men to be sexist. Let's remember that this was not an academic journal, but a discussion on changes to hiring policy at Google. He was recommending changes to hiring policy based on these statements, which at best, is scientific sexism. No matter how many times he says that they're just trends which don't apply to individuals, the context can't be forgotten. Which brings us to the next point.
Scientific bigotry is wrong whether or not there's rigorous science backing it up. It's an ethical problem, not a scientific one. If, for the sake of argument, there was good solid science backing every single one of James Damore's arguments, it would be exactly none less sexist. If they were all scientifically wrong, it would be none more sexist. The ethically right thing to do is to ignore average preferences, strengths or weaknesses based on a person's immutable traits, and give everyone a fair shot.
Let's say for the sake of argument that it were scientifically proven that black people, on average, are better at running. Solid fact, it's not bigoted to simply state it. But if you use that information for any practical purpose, such as making hiring decisions in a job that involves a lot of running, it would be scientific racism. If you say "It's not a problem that most people working here at company X in running-heavy profession Y are black, black people are on average better at running after all, so there's probably no need to try to improve workplace diversity," that's scientific racism. It would make every non-black employee at company X out to be less fit for their jobs, based on trends which don't apply to individuals, that person might add...but were just advocated for use on individuals. If the non-black people at company X think there's an institutional bias toward hiring black people, it trivializes their concerns. Do you see why this is wrong?
Haha it is most delightful and whimsical! It's called "the real world from an ignorant rich person's perspective." In it, nobody mows their own lawns, they hire gardeners instead, and many even hire housekeepers! Happy gardeners and housekeepers singing "Zippidy doo-da, zippidy-ay! My oh my what a wonderful day!"
At least that's probably those noises they're grumbling while frowning. Yeah, pretty sure it is, just look at those employment numbers! They're doing so well! Especially if you consider the hidden economic value in all the cool technology they have now. Yes, post-'70s technology like smartphones and 3D printers and quadcopters are worth far more than their sticker price to those plucky workers, that's why it's OK that they're clearly making less money! They're getting paid in angry birds and aerial selfies, and how can you put a price on those? Truly a time of amazing opportunity!
This is a good thing, since the purpose of jobs is creating goods and services not "keeping people busy".
Completely agree.
We have a full employment economy, so these people can get new jobs where they do something useful.
I disagree, but that's actually unimportant. There may be no profitable work for huge swaths of the population in this economy, even with the "gig economy" being used as a loophole to get around minimum wage laws. In turn spending, the lifeblood of the economy, will fall greatly. This economic disaster would finally make clear that this economy is not working for most people, and it's important that society tackles that issue as soon as possible. Sub-livable wages are a powerful tool for sweeping the problem under the rug.
This. Sub-livable wages should not be legal for this reason first and foremost. Don't allow companies to use human labor as a conduit for corporate welfare.
Nothing in those screenshots is inherently legally damning...it depends on context. Whether the suit will be successful hinges on whether Google was discriminating against people who hold views that would create a toxic work environment or simply "conservatives." The lawsuit appears to be attempting to conflate the two.
This raises some interesting questions, where's the Overton window on legal hiring discrimination? Is it legal to discriminate against open nazis in hiring practices? I would think yes. So where do you draw the line? And as mainstream conservatism nuzzles up with white supremacy, could it actually become legal to discriminate against hiring "conservatives," for certain values of "conservative?" (such as one that includes posting bigoted screeds on internal forums as normal conservative behavior.)
Wow those are serious accusations. But anyone could accuse Google of running a child sex slave ring out of a back room in a court filing too. We'll see what's real in the trial I guess.
I have actually tried running a Windows game via VNC, for controlling an observer player while actually playing the game myself, and it doesn't work. You can't send DirectX 3D rendered output over VNC. After some searching it seemed to be a practically universal problem with remote desktop systems.
Submit feedback as requested after a company training seminar? FIRED
This is a stupid argument. A request for feedback is not a blank cheque to make bigoted statements that create a hostile work environment. If an email goes out asking for "ideas to improve office efficiency," you can't respond with "fire all the broads" or more subtle words to the same effect and get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fighting against anything proposed by the memo because it's wrong to try to rationalize an overwhelmingly male workplace demographic with scientific sexism (which doesn't require a statement that women are inferior to men). It's pretty straightforward, you're the one trying to bend sweet lady logic into a pretzel in an attempt to make his ideas seem reasonable.
Also intolerance should absolutely not be tolerated. Tolerance is opposition to discrimination based on immutable traits, not just putting up with things, so "tolerating" intolerance would be self-defeating and pointless.
It's odd that you would oppose NAMBLA but not nazis. One wants to fuck kids, the other wants to commit genocide and establish a white ethnostate. Why do you find the latter goals more agreeable?
It's sexist to use for any practical purpose, which would cover all of those.
You're admitting that facts aren't allowed when discussing diversity programs...
Not all facts, but facts about racial differences, yes.
Duuuuude... It's a meritocracy. You really sure you want to come out against that?
Duuuude, it's really not. Well you might call it a racial meritocracy, but that's a very specific kind of meritocracy that's hardly meritocratic overall. If you try selecting a team based on what people of a certain race are very sightly better at on average, you'd be very very lucky to get the best team.
Bigotry is intolerance of those with different opinions....
LOLWUT? By this definition, being intolerant of nazis, NAMBLA members, you name it, is bigoted. And being as racist and sexist as all hell is not.
if it's scientific, it's no longer opinion, rather it's fact. (At least, you know, as good as science gets) Now, I'm a live-and-let-live kinda guy. People can believe whatever sort of magical sky-wizard they want, but when it starts to impact me and starts dictating policy at work... their fantasies are not valid justifications for fucking me over. The facts not mattering anymore is the sort of shit Trump is slinging around.
Now you're straight-up lauding scientific bigotry because it's beneficial to you in workplace policies, and painting a rejection of scientific bigotry as anti-scientific. Fairness is not a fantasy and attempting to rationalize suspicious workplace demographics with scientific arguments about racial or gender differences is not factual. It's actually rather pseudoscientific, which I'll get to later.
I get that. The problem is that it's really hard to measure merit. Like IQ tests, there's a lot of bias creeps in based on who writes the questions.
Measures of merit are vastly more accurate and less biased than making guesses based on ethnicity or gender.
But if there's a definite advantage of X over Y, there should definitely be a disparity of people choosing more X than Y, cultural and social effects be damned.
Here's the kicker: There are no big advantages of X over Y in the real world. Just barely significant average differences that are massively overshadowed by cultural and social effects. This is why it's pseudoscientific to use ethnic or gender differences to make hiring decisions - it's a minor factor. It's like trying to work out which fish swims fastest by the texture of its scales. You can do all kinds of good science on that, but it's such a tiny factor in the grander scheme of things that it doesn't matter and you'll never get good results using that criteria.
. . . If it helps the group, then there's utility there . . . There's nothing artificial about that. If it's a dystopia, then sure, it's all robo-nazi-tyrants. But that's literally just your presumption pulled from nowhere and as biased as robo-hitler) And you know what? That's finally a good argument. If being different has utility in and of itself that means a place with 99 women would hire a man over a woman just to mix it up a little. Because while the individual woman might do a better job than the man, he helps the group on the whole more than she would. Which is the sort of thing Damore is arguing against. (if you presume he's talking about hiring practices). BUT, and this is important, once you hire that guy you can't just brow-beat him and shame him into silence for having different views. Diversity breeds creativity right? Well Damore lamented how conservatives were being shut out. We don't want an ideological echo chamber. Title drop.
I meant ethnically and gender-diverse. i don't know if there's any advantage to ideological diversity. The "conservatives" that were being shut out at Google aren't just moderate Republicans, as Damore's lawsuit would
Could work, but they'll need a system to safely handle the waste brine, or it could also be a nuclear-powered aquatic life destroyer.
Wouldn't that be better? If he's writing at the academic journal level, that would be better than feedback to a diversity class.
Again, the scientific rigor of his statements is ethically irrelevant.
In hiring? Yes, give every individual a fair shot. Something along the lines of acknowledging that sociological trends have a ton of overlap and you can't infer anything about the individual based on the stereotype. I agree. James Damore agrees. He stated as such in the memo. "you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions." You can't just ignore that.
But if the context isn't "should we hire this person". Is it sexist to point out what is legitimately true? Let's say specifically in the context of how a company runs their diversity training class, or who gets made fun of in the office, or who is shamed into silence.
It's sexist to use for any practical purpose, which would cover all of those.
But in this scenario, the reason they're concerned is kinda bullshit. In a scenario where 1 out of 10 non-speedyLongLegs people is as good at the job as those of the speedyLongLegs tribe, and lo and behold the ratio is about 1:10. But they want a diversity program to FIX that!? There's nothing to fix. That's ideal. In a pure meritocracy that's exactly how the nonLeggyRace gap would play out. And if they got such a program.... You're suggesting one is allowed to question it? In this scenario, it is perfectly valid to have little diversity because there are actual real legitimate differences in abilty. In this scenario, forcing diversity would be unfair, unjust, inefficient, as it would shut out BETTER employees from the job.
No, I don't see how it's wrong.
This magnitude of difference doesn't exist IRL so it's not a good example, but I'm more concerned that your ideal scenario is a pseudo-utilitarian dystopia powered by scientific bigotry. It wouldn't maximize productivity with these inept ideas of what makes a workforce productive, so it's not a true utilitarian dystopia, but that's a secondary concern. There are so many questionable assumptions and oversimplifications going into the idea that a company's demographic makeup should closely reflect the average aptitudes of the different ethnicities and genders it may hire. You have to ignore all kinds of social and cultural effects to attempt to justify this "spherical cow" mathematical model of aptitude. I would think it's more unfair, unjust and inefficient to construct and enforce these fictions based on tiny differences in population averages than to just give everyone a fair shot, and expect your company demographics to be similar to the local demographics if there is no bias in hiring or training affecting the process. A person choosing to self-select out of a career for cultural reasons can be considered a form of training bias.
A true utilitarian dystopia would actually be quite likely to artifically construct a diverse workforce in most professions, striving for an extremely diverse mixture regardless of local demographics. In real life, it has been scientifically shown that more diverse groups produce more creative ideas. Companies today want this, including Google, and are trying to sneak toward it. Obviously it's not ethically ideal but it's worlds better in practice than shrugging off, or attempting to rationalize with scientific bigotry, a workforce that's far more white and male than the local population.
Packet sizes and frequency, along with metadata. I saw a similar analysis of encrypted video streams being used to detect drone video:
https://www.wired.com/story/a-...
Looks like the next big thing in cryptography will be data padding...
If you open a hotel, could I rent a room in it? ;-)
Excellent, I would vote for you...well I'm not from Maryland or even the US, but I like your policies :-P
Protip: Get HSTS on your website for cypherpunk brownie points ;-)
Mmm yes, cry more sweet tears for me, privacy invaders! Weep at the reality of encryption! Muahahaha!
"Vegeta, what does the pill say about his flatulence level!?"
"It's over NINE THOUSAAAAND!!!"
Any service that exists primarily to accumulate reviews of businesses or people aims to shake down said entities eventually. Either because that's a nice set of reviews there, and it would be a shame if anything happened to them (as in this case), or because you'll eventually get yourself into an unfortunate situation and they know somebody who could make it go away.
I would say that if a software hack, or even a simple hardware hack with common tools can fix it, it's not bricked. If you have to get out a JTAG adapter, then it's bricked.
Well the WBC could be classified as a religion, even if it's a tiny and very messed up one, which is a protected class, so you probably wouldn't have good luck refusing to bake a cake for them. If they weren't organized under a church and were simply a protest group, you could refuse.
The remaining employees will be more productive, and appropriately rewarded with more money.
Will they? Over the last 30~40 years, ownership and upper management has been pocketing the money instead.
Most people earning minimum wage are not doing it to pay for room and board. They are 2nd or 3rd earners in households that are, on average, above median income.
Barely more than half, but that's close enough to the truth. So your argument is that because they can't afford their own homes, it's not a problem that they can't afford their own homes?
But let's take a closer look at the demographics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/0...
WHAAAT they're in their 30s and more than a quarter have kids!?!? What kind of upple-middle-class teenagers are these!?!?
No, you are saying that in a civilised country, that's how you'd like things to be. There is, however, no law of nature that says that there's enough economic output to give everybody a decent quality of life. Just because you're "civilised" doesn't change that.
In practice it's clear that there is quite enough economic output to give everyone a decent quality of life, it's just not well-distributed. So we have to decide what we're going to do if an (often idle) ownership class is hoarding most of the economic output, and a majority of hard-working people are struggling to make ends meet because they can't get enough of it.
He doesn't need to say that women are generally inferior to men to be sexist. Let's remember that this was not an academic journal, but a discussion on changes to hiring policy at Google. He was recommending changes to hiring policy based on these statements, which at best, is scientific sexism. No matter how many times he says that they're just trends which don't apply to individuals, the context can't be forgotten. Which brings us to the next point.
Scientific bigotry is wrong whether or not there's rigorous science backing it up. It's an ethical problem, not a scientific one. If, for the sake of argument, there was good solid science backing every single one of James Damore's arguments, it would be exactly none less sexist. If they were all scientifically wrong, it would be none more sexist. The ethically right thing to do is to ignore average preferences, strengths or weaknesses based on a person's immutable traits, and give everyone a fair shot.
Let's say for the sake of argument that it were scientifically proven that black people, on average, are better at running. Solid fact, it's not bigoted to simply state it. But if you use that information for any practical purpose, such as making hiring decisions in a job that involves a lot of running, it would be scientific racism. If you say "It's not a problem that most people working here at company X in running-heavy profession Y are black, black people are on average better at running after all, so there's probably no need to try to improve workplace diversity," that's scientific racism. It would make every non-black employee at company X out to be less fit for their jobs, based on trends which don't apply to individuals, that person might add...but were just advocated for use on individuals. If the non-black people at company X think there's an institutional bias toward hiring black people, it trivializes their concerns. Do you see why this is wrong?
Haha it is most delightful and whimsical! It's called "the real world from an ignorant rich person's perspective." In it, nobody mows their own lawns, they hire gardeners instead, and many even hire housekeepers! Happy gardeners and housekeepers singing "Zippidy doo-da, zippidy-ay! My oh my what a wonderful day!"
At least that's probably those noises they're grumbling while frowning. Yeah, pretty sure it is, just look at those employment numbers! They're doing so well! Especially if you consider the hidden economic value in all the cool technology they have now. Yes, post-'70s technology like smartphones and 3D printers and quadcopters are worth far more than their sticker price to those plucky workers, that's why it's OK that they're clearly making less money! They're getting paid in angry birds and aerial selfies, and how can you put a price on those? Truly a time of amazing opportunity!
This is a good thing, since the purpose of jobs is creating goods and services not "keeping people busy".
Completely agree.
We have a full employment economy, so these people can get new jobs where they do something useful.
I disagree, but that's actually unimportant. There may be no profitable work for huge swaths of the population in this economy, even with the "gig economy" being used as a loophole to get around minimum wage laws. In turn spending, the lifeblood of the economy, will fall greatly. This economic disaster would finally make clear that this economy is not working for most people, and it's important that society tackles that issue as soon as possible. Sub-livable wages are a powerful tool for sweeping the problem under the rug.
This. Sub-livable wages should not be legal for this reason first and foremost. Don't allow companies to use human labor as a conduit for corporate welfare.
Nothing in those screenshots is inherently legally damning...it depends on context. Whether the suit will be successful hinges on whether Google was discriminating against people who hold views that would create a toxic work environment or simply "conservatives." The lawsuit appears to be attempting to conflate the two.
This raises some interesting questions, where's the Overton window on legal hiring discrimination? Is it legal to discriminate against open nazis in hiring practices? I would think yes. So where do you draw the line? And as mainstream conservatism nuzzles up with white supremacy, could it actually become legal to discriminate against hiring "conservatives," for certain values of "conservative?" (such as one that includes posting bigoted screeds on internal forums as normal conservative behavior.)
Also the memes on memegen are so dank XD
On Slashdot.
Get out the soap bars and pillowcases, everyone who let this happen gets a blanket party.
Blacker than the blackest black, times infinity.
Wow those are serious accusations. But anyone could accuse Google of running a child sex slave ring out of a back room in a court filing too. We'll see what's real in the trial I guess.
I have actually tried running a Windows game via VNC, for controlling an observer player while actually playing the game myself, and it doesn't work. You can't send DirectX 3D rendered output over VNC. After some searching it seemed to be a practically universal problem with remote desktop systems.
Submit feedback as requested after a company training seminar? FIRED
This is a stupid argument. A request for feedback is not a blank cheque to make bigoted statements that create a hostile work environment. If an email goes out asking for "ideas to improve office efficiency," you can't respond with "fire all the broads" or more subtle words to the same effect and get away with it.