But Trumpists don't believe in Enlightenment ideals. The Trump camp is dominated by people who want to uphold religion and some caricature of what they think is traditional.
But... "Many of these differences are small" and they are only on average. And Google hire a tiny percentage of the people in the world. Where does he demonstrate that the effect size of these differences in the Google setting are non-zero?
The Spanish Inquisition would "let" you confess by torture. Your repentance would often involve being burned at the stake so that you'd have had your punishment on Earth and would therefore be allowed into heaven. What a privilege.
Google made a point of acknowledging that some of the points in the memo discussed working conditions, and specifically said that those parts weren't why he was fired. The bits where he said that women weren't as good at dev work or leadership weren't about working conditions, and those are the bits that got him the sack.
He was not discussing "work conditions". Work conditions would be his hours or wages. Not his opinion of how executives have decided to run the company. If he was discussing the impact that their choices had on HIS work, that would be different. He was just complaining about the impact to the company. That isn't "working conditions".
Actually, part of his diatribe was about working conditions, and he commented that there were training opportunities that were only available to so-called "diversity" candidates. In their public response, Google made a point of acknowledging this, and saying that this was not why he was fired. He was fired for the parts of the message that weren't a discussion of working conditions.
Reductio ad absurdam:
There are laws against assault. That makes assault political. So assaulting a colleague is a political issue. Ergo you can't fire an employee for assault.
This man now has become the hero of Trumpists and self-styled enemies of the politically incorrect because he proposed a series of sexist (and I use this word with great parsimony in my daily life) stereotypes which belong in the 19th century.
I will assume you mean politically correct, and not politically incorrect.
Second, what? Perhaps trumpists are on Damore's side, but to partition everyone that does not hold your views as trumpists says nothing about others and all about you.
But that's not what the GP said at all. Being "the hero of Trumpists" doesn't mean that everyone who supports him is Trumpist.
Are you suggesting we speak like William Shatner? Computer. Weather. Report. San Antonio. Texas. Forecast. Only.
Nope.
What you're doing sounds more like if I had to do this:
rm
-
r
f
* ...on the command line in order to perform a recursive delete.
If users knew the commands, classifiers and other bits and bobs that chain together in the system, the problem space of pattern recognition would be reduced drastically, making the voice recognition far more reliable.
rm -rf * follows a predictable, formal grammar, which is much easier for the computer to process than typing: "Computer, please delete all the files in the current directory and all their subfolders and any subfolders that they have ad infinitum".
Using formal command syntax in speaking (eg: "Computer: delete recursively [all files] in [the current directory]") would make voice command much, much easier. As it stands, the technology currently has to cope with sound recognition and natural language parsing and interpretation simultaneously, and that's a Very Hard Task.
Teaching people to use computers is still a more achievable task than teaching computers to understand people
The difference though: Once someone figures out computers accurately understanding natural language; then it's a technology that will be everywhere in a couple of years. Like strong AI it only needs to be invented once; versus having to continually train new users in the arcane.
But it will remain a cloud function, because it's massively computationally complex. Do you want your device to be useless when the network is down? Just imagine if Windows had to phone home to process every mouse movement. I already think Windows is far slower than it needs to be.
So according to you, being a woman is basically disabled.
Grow up.
My point is that as soon as you start talking about people being inherently different, you are obliged to accommodate for those differences, not write others off as being useless because they don't do things exactly the same way as you.
You've never noticed Mozilla's advocacy of net neutrality and copyright reforms, then....?
These are technology issue. It's not quite the same as taking a position on something which is, at best, a personal issue. If the guy was publically spouting something about tech at Google being sub par, that would be fair grounds for kicking him out. But Google took a position in a political debate which does not affect its core business (again personal does not count as core business). That makes their products suspect.
Copyright reform is not technical -- it's political, and it's playing with people's livelihoods. Mozilla wants to do away with legitimate protections on ideological grounds.
In this case, the guy pushed his ideas in company internal media. You always have less freedom of speech inside the company, and there are topics I would never discuss at work, because that's not what "work" is about.
I'm really not sure what you're getting at. You ask how a problem is relevant, then go on to talk about the solution.
My point is that it's not relevant to the claim that men are more suited to coding than women, precisely because changing the working environment to reduce stress doesn't change the nature of the actual code work at all.
Happiness leads to far better productivity in intellectually demanding jobs. It leads to increased creativity and better problem-solving skills. Happiness is not the goal, but it's an important means to an end.
So, to summarize, equality was not achieved, because men had to change their behavior to accommodate the women.
The men in the study were all willing participants, and were happy. It may seem strange to some people, but most guys actually like being nice to women. This might be for biological reasons.
Also, although I can't be absolutely certain, I believe a side-effect of the awareness training was that the men acted less like arseholes towards each other....
That's a fair point, and I was deliberately going for humour over enlightenment.
OK, women are typically more prone to neuroticism than men, but how is that relevant to their suitability to coding? Neuroticism is only a problem when the environment is stressful, and there's no reason that coding needs to be that way. If the contemporary culture of tech cultures is stressful, that's not because of the nature of the work -- it's because of the company. If you manage the environment better, then you can employ staff that are less capable of handling stress, whether they're men or women, and whether they're neurotypical or non-neurotypical. Why should the company have the right to work in a way which actively excludes certain groups unnecessarily? Should they be allowed to exclude wheelchair users just because the owner doesn't want to install a lift? Should left-handers be banned because someone in purchasing bought all the equipment for right-handers?
You haven't ruled out the moon being made of green cheese, so your particular preferences are invalid?
Seriously, if you have a point, learn how to express it coherently.
That's a total strawman. The difference is that in sex/gender differences we have two equally plausible theories: nature and nurture. Falsely assuming that an effect is caused by nature leads to unnecessary discrimination. Falsely assuming nurture leads to nothing worse that a modicum of wasted effort trying to change something.
When there is doubt, assuming the one that best serves you personally seems great... but that's discrimination.
Consider the case of racial equality. On average, people of African descent tend to do less well at school. For a long, long time, this was put down to genetic differences, and no effort was made to change it. This was great for privileged white people, who got to keep all the good jobs for their kids. But it was utterly false, and the problem was lack of access to education, and the prophecy became self-fulfilling: under-educated coloured people continued to underperform their better-educated white peers.
Innumerable individual people lost out, and society as a whole lost out.
As it stands, there are huge barriers that women face to participation in various spheres, and as long as those barriers are in place, it prevents us detecting any genuine biological sex differences that may also exist.
So, the men were acting in a totally egalitarian fashion: treating women the same way they treated men. And the problem was solved by training them to treat women differently: with less aggression than they treated men.
That's not equality. That's sexism enforced by training.
Imagine you were in a car accident and lost your right arm. One day you walk into a business meeting, and somebody sticks out his right hand to where yours used to be. He refuses to take your left hand, saying "I'm not going to treat you any differently just because you're disabled. If you want to shake my hand, you'll use your right hand like everyone else." Is there any part of you who thinks that guy is actually treating you equally?
The problem with voice recognition is that we abandoned the command-line interface too early, and that we have been hiding the concept of "commands" deeper and deeper behind our mythological "direct manipulation" interface. Because we've tricked users into believing that they are manipulating objects rather than giving linguistic commands to the computer (gestures are part of sign language, and gestures are a huge part of modern interfaces), we haven't prepared people to apply the same logic to voice commands. This means that we leave people trying to use natural language, and that makes the task so computationally intensive that it needs to be done in the cloud. Teaching people to use computers is still a more achievable task than teaching computers to understand people.
Man, this is why I still read/. I really appreciate you pointing out such an excellent example. Culturally, we recognize the cliche as a component of the male psyche, but the topic doesn't manage to dominate every conversation as a causal issue. How do you imagine a female-neuroticism stereotype would be treated any different? Are these assertions overwhelmingly offensive, in context?
It's not a matter of imagining the female-neuroticism stereotype is different, it's a simple matter of observation. The notion of neuroticism/hypersensitivity/overemotionality is endemic, and women's ideas regularly get ignored because of it. Only once have I been accused of thinking with my dick when I genuinely wasn't. A new couple moved into the building and the woman was wanting to do something to sort out some issue with building security. I agreed with her. One of the longer-term residents (a woman) told me I was only agreeing with her because she was young and pretty, and it was a stupid idea.
It was really, really f***ing annoying. It was patronising and it was insulting. But it only happened to me once.
Why does a room full of strange men feel threatening to women?
Are you saying the men are doing something wrong? That they are by their biology prone to pose a risk to women?
I think the missing step here is that strange men who aren't used to speaking to women are threatening to women.
I recall reading about a piece of research done in the late 20th century. Women's rights had progressed and women were getting further in industry and enterprise, but there was a perception that men were acting aggressively towards women, and the men pushed back saying that they were treating the women equally and they were just being oversensitive. Psychologists went in and studied this, and true enough, the men behaved equally aggressively in disagreements with male co-workers and female co-workers -- the difference was the women's reaction.
So men are typically more aggressive than women, and women are typically more sensitive than men, but slagging matches of "bully" vs "oversensitive" didn't get them anywhere. What the researchers found was that once the culture of accusation was gone, both sides were happy to accommodate (because if accommodating means internalising the idea that you're somehow in the wrong, you're not going to do it). The researchers started training the staff in accommodation techniques, so they could modify their behaviour to suit the situation.... and *everyone* was happier.
Unfortunately, we've forgotten the real lesson from that research: that progress comes when you train people to work together, not when you force them to work together.
Guess what? I am now not feeling 100% safe using Chrome. I am seriously going to look into switching back to Mozilla. I don't want to trust my browser binary to a company which has a clear political slant.
You've never noticed Mozilla's advocacy of net neutrality and copyright reforms, then....?
Slashdot Mirror
But Trumpists don't believe in Enlightenment ideals. The Trump camp is dominated by people who want to uphold religion and some caricature of what they think is traditional.
He did mention lunch, though. If you're stuck at your desk for lunch (because there's nowhere else to go) why not have a shuftie at a few websites?
But... "Many of these differences are small" and they are only on average. And Google hire a tiny percentage of the people in the world. Where does he demonstrate that the effect size of these differences in the Google setting are non-zero?
The Spanish Inquisition would "let" you confess by torture. Your repentance would often involve being burned at the stake so that you'd have had your punishment on Earth and would therefore be allowed into heaven. What a privilege.
Its the acronym that the SJW's chose. The SJW's invented the term and are now mad that it has a negative connotation.
Q: At the risk of getting into circular definitions... does that mean that you only call people SJWs if they self-identify as SJWs?
A: It doesn't. Because you just called someone who doesn't self-identify as "SJW" SJW.
So regardless of who started it, you're generalising.
Google made a point of acknowledging that some of the points in the memo discussed working conditions, and specifically said that those parts weren't why he was fired. The bits where he said that women weren't as good at dev work or leadership weren't about working conditions, and those are the bits that got him the sack.
He was not discussing "work conditions". Work conditions would be his hours or wages. Not his opinion of how executives have decided to run the company. If he was discussing the impact that their choices had on HIS work, that would be different. He was just complaining about the impact to the company. That isn't "working conditions".
Actually, part of his diatribe was about working conditions, and he commented that there were training opportunities that were only available to so-called "diversity" candidates. In their public response, Google made a point of acknowledging this, and saying that this was not why he was fired. He was fired for the parts of the message that weren't a discussion of working conditions.
Reductio ad absurdam: There are laws against assault. That makes assault political. So assaulting a colleague is a political issue. Ergo you can't fire an employee for assault.
This man now has become the hero of Trumpists and self-styled enemies of the politically incorrect because he proposed a series of sexist (and I use this word with great parsimony in my daily life) stereotypes which belong in the 19th century.
I will assume you mean politically correct, and not politically incorrect.
Second, what? Perhaps trumpists are on Damore's side, but to partition everyone that does not hold your views as trumpists says nothing about others and all about you.
But that's not what the GP said at all. Being "the hero of Trumpists" doesn't mean that everyone who supports him is Trumpist.
Are you suggesting we speak like William Shatner? Computer. Weather. Report. San Antonio. Texas. Forecast. Only.
Nope.
What you're doing sounds more like if I had to do this:
...on the command line in order to perform a recursive delete.
rm
-
r
f
*
If users knew the commands, classifiers and other bits and bobs that chain together in the system, the problem space of pattern recognition would be reduced drastically, making the voice recognition far more reliable.
rm -rf * follows a predictable, formal grammar, which is much easier for the computer to process than typing: "Computer, please delete all the files in the current directory and all their subfolders and any subfolders that they have ad infinitum".
Using formal command syntax in speaking (eg: "Computer: delete recursively [all files] in [the current directory]") would make voice command much, much easier. As it stands, the technology currently has to cope with sound recognition and natural language parsing and interpretation simultaneously, and that's a Very Hard Task.
Teaching people to use computers is still a more achievable task than teaching computers to understand people
The difference though: Once someone figures out computers accurately understanding natural language; then it's a technology that will be everywhere in a couple of years. Like strong AI it only needs to be invented once; versus having to continually train new users in the arcane.
But it will remain a cloud function, because it's massively computationally complex. Do you want your device to be useless when the network is down? Just imagine if Windows had to phone home to process every mouse movement. I already think Windows is far slower than it needs to be.
So according to you, being a woman is basically disabled.
Grow up.
My point is that as soon as you start talking about people being inherently different, you are obliged to accommodate for those differences, not write others off as being useless because they don't do things exactly the same way as you.
You've never noticed Mozilla's advocacy of net neutrality and copyright reforms, then....?
These are technology issue. It's not quite the same as taking a position on something which is, at best, a personal issue. If the guy was publically spouting something about tech at Google being sub par, that would be fair grounds for kicking him out. But Google took a position in a political debate which does not affect its core business (again personal does not count as core business). That makes their products suspect.
Copyright reform is not technical -- it's political, and it's playing with people's livelihoods. Mozilla wants to do away with legitimate protections on ideological grounds.
In this case, the guy pushed his ideas in company internal media. You always have less freedom of speech inside the company, and there are topics I would never discuss at work, because that's not what "work" is about.
I'm really not sure what you're getting at. You ask how a problem is relevant, then go on to talk about the solution.
My point is that it's not relevant to the claim that men are more suited to coding than women, precisely because changing the working environment to reduce stress doesn't change the nature of the actual code work at all.
Happiness leads to far better productivity in intellectually demanding jobs. It leads to increased creativity and better problem-solving skills. Happiness is not the goal, but it's an important means to an end.
So, to summarize, equality was not achieved, because men had to change their behavior to accommodate the women.
The men in the study were all willing participants, and were happy. It may seem strange to some people, but most guys actually like being nice to women. This might be for biological reasons.
Also, although I can't be absolutely certain, I believe a side-effect of the awareness training was that the men acted less like arseholes towards each other....
Unless I'm mistaken I read about it before there was an internet. (Or at least before I was aware of such a thing.) Sorry.
That's a fair point, and I was deliberately going for humour over enlightenment.
OK, women are typically more prone to neuroticism than men, but how is that relevant to their suitability to coding? Neuroticism is only a problem when the environment is stressful, and there's no reason that coding needs to be that way. If the contemporary culture of tech cultures is stressful, that's not because of the nature of the work -- it's because of the company. If you manage the environment better, then you can employ staff that are less capable of handling stress, whether they're men or women, and whether they're neurotypical or non-neurotypical. Why should the company have the right to work in a way which actively excludes certain groups unnecessarily? Should they be allowed to exclude wheelchair users just because the owner doesn't want to install a lift? Should left-handers be banned because someone in purchasing bought all the equipment for right-handers?
You haven't ruled out the moon being made of green cheese, so your particular preferences are invalid?
Seriously, if you have a point, learn how to express it coherently.
That's a total strawman. The difference is that in sex/gender differences we have two equally plausible theories: nature and nurture. Falsely assuming that an effect is caused by nature leads to unnecessary discrimination. Falsely assuming nurture leads to nothing worse that a modicum of wasted effort trying to change something.
When there is doubt, assuming the one that best serves you personally seems great... but that's discrimination.
Consider the case of racial equality. On average, people of African descent tend to do less well at school. For a long, long time, this was put down to genetic differences, and no effort was made to change it. This was great for privileged white people, who got to keep all the good jobs for their kids. But it was utterly false, and the problem was lack of access to education, and the prophecy became self-fulfilling: under-educated coloured people continued to underperform their better-educated white peers.
Innumerable individual people lost out, and society as a whole lost out.
As it stands, there are huge barriers that women face to participation in various spheres, and as long as those barriers are in place, it prevents us detecting any genuine biological sex differences that may also exist.
So, the men were acting in a totally egalitarian fashion: treating women the same way they treated men. And the problem was solved by training them to treat women differently: with less aggression than they treated men.
That's not equality. That's sexism enforced by training.
Imagine you were in a car accident and lost your right arm. One day you walk into a business meeting, and somebody sticks out his right hand to where yours used to be. He refuses to take your left hand, saying "I'm not going to treat you any differently just because you're disabled. If you want to shake my hand, you'll use your right hand like everyone else." Is there any part of you who thinks that guy is actually treating you equally?
The problem with voice recognition is that we abandoned the command-line interface too early, and that we have been hiding the concept of "commands" deeper and deeper behind our mythological "direct manipulation" interface. Because we've tricked users into believing that they are manipulating objects rather than giving linguistic commands to the computer (gestures are part of sign language, and gestures are a huge part of modern interfaces), we haven't prepared people to apply the same logic to voice commands. This means that we leave people trying to use natural language, and that makes the task so computationally intensive that it needs to be done in the cloud. Teaching people to use computers is still a more achievable task than teaching computers to understand people.
> men as thinking with the dicks.
Man, this is why I still read /. I really appreciate you pointing out such an excellent example. Culturally, we recognize the cliche as a component of the male psyche, but the topic doesn't manage to dominate every conversation as a causal issue. How do you imagine a female-neuroticism stereotype would be treated any different? Are these assertions overwhelmingly offensive, in context?
It's not a matter of imagining the female-neuroticism stereotype is different, it's a simple matter of observation. The notion of neuroticism/hypersensitivity/overemotionality is endemic, and women's ideas regularly get ignored because of it. Only once have I been accused of thinking with my dick when I genuinely wasn't. A new couple moved into the building and the woman was wanting to do something to sort out some issue with building security. I agreed with her. One of the longer-term residents (a woman) told me I was only agreeing with her because she was young and pretty, and it was a stupid idea.
It was really, really f***ing annoying. It was patronising and it was insulting. But it only happened to me once.
It's comparable in cause, but not in effect.
That a particular preference correlates with sex is irrelevant until you can rule out gender expectations.
Why does a room full of strange men feel threatening to women?
Are you saying the men are doing something wrong? That they are by their biology prone to pose a risk to women?
I think the missing step here is that strange men who aren't used to speaking to women are threatening to women.
I recall reading about a piece of research done in the late 20th century. Women's rights had progressed and women were getting further in industry and enterprise, but there was a perception that men were acting aggressively towards women, and the men pushed back saying that they were treating the women equally and they were just being oversensitive. Psychologists went in and studied this, and true enough, the men behaved equally aggressively in disagreements with male co-workers and female co-workers -- the difference was the women's reaction.
So men are typically more aggressive than women, and women are typically more sensitive than men, but slagging matches of "bully" vs "oversensitive" didn't get them anywhere. What the researchers found was that once the culture of accusation was gone, both sides were happy to accommodate (because if accommodating means internalising the idea that you're somehow in the wrong, you're not going to do it). The researchers started training the staff in accommodation techniques, so they could modify their behaviour to suit the situation.... and *everyone* was happier.
Unfortunately, we've forgotten the real lesson from that research: that progress comes when you train people to work together, not when you force them to work together.
Guess what? I am now not feeling 100% safe using Chrome. I am seriously going to look into switching back to Mozilla. I don't want to trust my browser binary to a company which has a clear political slant.
You've never noticed Mozilla's advocacy of net neutrality and copyright reforms, then....?
You might need to consider Opera....