Political Shots Fired Thread

[elmicker]

Writing and publishing a 3500 word polemic damning swathes of your coworkers because of their political stance and gender, and declaring your employer to be engaged in a Left-wing (his capitalisation) conspiracy to suppress dissent is more than enough reason to fire someone, regardless of how correct the polemic may be.

That the essay was riddled with fallacy and factual error is just a happy bonus.

Besides, California is an at-will state. It'll be up to him to prove he was fired illegally. Google can just sit there and say nothing.

[erichkknaar]

Writing and publishing a 3500 word polemic damning swathes of your coworkers because of their political stance and gender, and declaring your employer to be engaged in a Left-wing (his capitalisation) conspiracy to suppress dissent is more than enough reason to fire someone, regardless of how correct the polemic may be.

That the essay was riddled with fallacy and factual error is just a happy bonus.

Besides, California is an at-will state. It'll be up to him to prove he was fired illegally. Google can just sit there and say nothing.

Something something creating a hostile work environment.

[Larkonis Trassler]

Queer anarchism missing a clear opportunity for a chocolate starfish.

I am disappointed.

[Isyel]

Writing and publishing a 3500 word polemic damning swathes of your coworkers because of their political stance and gender, and declaring your employer to be engaged in a Left-wing (his capitalisation) conspiracy to suppress dissent is more than enough reason to fire someone, regardless of how correct the polemic may be.

That the essay was riddled with fallacy and factual error is just a happy bonus.

Besides, California is an at-will state. It'll be up to him to prove he was fired illegally. Google can just sit there and say nothing.

Very well put really.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

[Keckers]

[Alistair]

Writing and publishing a 3500 word polemic damning swathes of your coworkers because of their political stance and gender, and declaring your employer to be engaged in a Left-wing (his capitalisation) conspiracy to suppress dissent is more than enough reason to fire someone, regardless of how correct the polemic may be.

Agreed.

Besides, California is an at-will state. It'll be up to him to prove he was fired illegally. Google can just sit there and say nothing.

The burden is almost all on the fired employee, and it's a very difficult task to prove enough to warrant a judgement.

[XenosisMk4]

Greg Carter is my spirit animal, Critical Miss is an excellent webcomic

It's a shame they're currently stuck in an endless legal war with The Escapist over who owns the webcomic since The Escapist turned out to be a money laundering dumpster fire of a company

[Zeekar]

2) you need a criterion for good performance in the IT business, he gives none but argues nevertheless that some female attributes make them poorer in this respect (see also above why this reasoning does not work).

It's also pretty clear that Mr. Damone doesn't understand the first fucking thing about being professional and working nicely with other professionals, so there is that.

i mean i dont get whats so hard about this for people. you have a job, they have a job there is no need to bring anything personal into it. if you know your views will tick someone off dont say them. literally 0 benefit.

[XenosisMk4]

2) you need a criterion for good performance in the IT business, he gives none but argues nevertheless that some female attributes make them poorer in this respect (see also above why this reasoning does not work).

It's also pretty clear that Mr. Damone doesn't understand the first fucking thing about being professional and working nicely with other professionals, so there is that.

i mean i dont get whats so hard about this for people. you have a job, they have a job there is no need to bring anything personal into it. if you know your views will tick someone off dont say them. literally 0 benefit.

The irony in this post is staggering

[pesadelo]

2) you need a criterion for good performance in the IT business, he gives none but argues nevertheless that some female attributes make them poorer in this respect (see also above why this reasoning does not work).

It's also pretty clear that Mr. Damone doesn't understand the first fucking thing about being professional and working nicely with other professionals, so there is that.

i mean i dont get whats so hard about this for people. you have a job, they have a job there is no need to bring anything personal into it. if you know your views will tick someone off dont say them. literally 0 benefit.

The irony in this post is staggering

Indeed .

Enviado do meu SM-G900F através do Tapatalk

[Frug]

so when did you go full redpill

It's been a gradual realisation.

[Frug]

1) you can't use findings that posit differences between genders on average to argue for something in the IT industry as the IT industry employees are not a sample of the normal population.

It confuses me that you would make this point because you're arguing against yourself here. If the IT industry is not a sample of the normal population, why assume there will be even representation in it? If you agree with the science that there are gender differences, we can go from there. There's nothing wrong with discussing it, which is what he was trying to do. His argument (afaik) is exactly how one does use group differences to account for selection into a sample that's not representative of the norm. It doesn't mean there is no selection bias happening during hiring, but it does strongly support the claim that it isn't necessarily selection bias.

2) you need a criterion for good performance in the IT business, he gives none but argues nevertheless that some female attributes make them poorer in this respect (see also above why this reasoning does not work).

Edit: I didn't see him say this in the letter, although people love to say he says this. I did read him say that we should treat people as individuals and not apply group trends to individuals, which directly contradicts what you're suggesting here... Buuut I read the letter ages ago when it first exploded, and the one I read was (hilariously, tellingly) a copy that had been stripped of citations, so it might have (surprisingly) been missing what you're claiming here. So I'm gonna find the full thing and read it tonight (if I'm not lazy) and get back to this, unless you care to quote it for me. IF anyone claims that any given person of any given gender or race is inherently better or worse at anything because of their race or gender then we can all agree that's ignorant and a little stupid.

3) he circularly argues for the need to address people as individuals but at the same time requests special treatment for his group (conservative males).

What special treatment?

He is also very selective in quoting his sources

Then people should respond to his selective quoting by debating it, not vilifying him. Everything I read was in line with what I was taught.

and omits things like right wing attitudes being associated with low verbal IQ. (again, this type of reasoning is really bad, don't do it.)

a) why would he talk about that? Should it be a 10,000 page novel? And b) what type of reasoning? There's a correlation and it's interesting. What of it?

He also, due to not being a scientist, builds his arguments on basis of gender differences but does not report or understand effect sizes and that the differences are quite small.

Oh well clearly he's a villain then.

It's just bad. But to your last question, is bad reasoning reason to react with anger? Depends perhaps on his motivations. If he was attempting to scientifically validate a misogynistic worldview, sure. But none of us know, really.

People seem pretty bloody sure they know his motivations and are keen on treating him like dirt, and you're currently giving basically the best negative response to him I've seen so far. That's pretty unfortunate.

[Isyel]

And he goes full sentence by sentence dissection, scoring full internet argument points, missing the point as usual. Is Frug.

[Lief Siddhe]

I'll allow it

Please continue

[Frug]

I'll allow it

Please continue

Yes your honour, thank you.

Yeah I read over it on the bus. He doesn't say that women have attributes that make them worse for IT.

[Timaios]

I'll allow it

Please continue

Yes your honour, thank you.

Yeah I read over it on the bus. He doesn't say that women have attributes that make them worse for IT.

Yes he does. He does not write the exact words "attribute x makes women worse for IT", but some examples:

"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. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful."

This bit comes after the part where he states that "We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life."

Also, he states that "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."

[Isyel]

I'll allow it

Please continue

Yes your honour, thank you.

Yeah I read over it on the bus. He doesn't say that women have attributes that make them worse for IT.

Yes he does. He does not write the exact words "attribute x makes women worse for IT", but some examples:

"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. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful."

This bit comes after the part where he states that "We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life."

Also, he states that "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."

Yes but in Frug's word subtext and implication means nothing, unless you say something with 100% exact words it's not true.

[Timaios]

Frug, you're sort of mixing the anger towards the letter and his factual mistakes into one big mess. I'll ignore all your comments regarding former and focus on the latter, if that's fine.

1) you can't use findings that posit differences between genders on average to argue for something in the IT industry as the IT industry employees are not a sample of the normal population.

It confuses me that you would make this point because you're arguing against yourself here. If the IT industry is not a sample of the normal population, why assume there will be even representation in it? If you agree with the science that there are gender differences, we can go from there. There's nothing wrong with discussing it, which is what he was trying to do. His argument (afaik) is exactly how one does use group differences to account for selection into a sample that's not representative of the norm. It doesn't mean there is no selection bias happening during hiring, but it does strongly support the claim that it isn't necessarily selection bias.

I was not arguing that there will be an even representation. My point was solely that his argument is invalid.

But let's explore the representation, starting from the assumption that there would be equal distribution of genders assuming no other forces at work. Let's also assume that there are two main forces at work that predispose more men joining the IT: 1) some gender-intrinsic abilities that are prevalent in the male IT-interested group and not (or to a smaller degree) in the female IT-interested group; and 2) gender biases in recruitment, education, IT-stereotypes etc.

For the first model (gender-intrinsic ability) we have no evidence of (to my knowledge) nor is there any model of good performance in the IT suggested in the letter (except "competitiveness"). For the reason I outlined before, the average abilities of attribute differences between genders cannot be used as evidence in the IT-crowd subgroup. For the second model, we have plenty of evidence (for a review, you can look at the introduction of Lindberg, Hyde & Petersen, 2010, on stuff like how males perceive female mathematical abilities; for gender roles in IT, look at Ehrlinger, Plant, Hartwig, Vossen, Columb & Brewer, 2017). So I would argue there is selection bias on two levels: first, on how interesting females perceive the IT-industry and how male recruiters evaluate female abilities as being poorer than those of male. Would this not be reasonable?

2) you need a criterion for good performance in the IT business, he gives none but argues nevertheless that some female attributes make them poorer in this respect (see also above why this reasoning does not work).

Edit: I didn't see him say this in the letter, although people love to say he says this. I did read him say that we should treat people as individuals and not apply group trends to individuals, which directly contradicts what you're suggesting here... Buuut I read the letter ages ago when it first exploded, and the one I read was (hilariously, tellingly) a copy that had been stripped of citations, so it might have (surprisingly) been missing what you're claiming here. So I'm gonna find the full thing and read it tonight (if I'm not lazy) and get back to this, unless you care to quote it for me. IF anyone claims that any given person of any given gender or race is inherently better or worse at anything because of their race or gender then we can all agree that's ignorant and a little stupid.

I added some quotes to a separate reply. If you need a shortcut link to the original letter, it's here: https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-...eed-1797564320

3) he circularly argues for the need to address people as individuals but at the same time requests special treatment for his group (conservative males).

What special treatment?

He argues that conservatives need special treatment at the end of his letter and they are being alienated for their opinions:

Stop alienating conservatives.

Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.

In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.

Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

and omits things like right wing attitudes being associated with low verbal IQ. (again, this type of reasoning is really bad, don't do it.)

a) why would he talk about that? Should it be a 10,000 page novel? And b) what type of reasoning? There's a correlation and it's interesting. What of it?

If he is arguing that background factors are associated with smaller representation of group X in a field (his use of average attributes of women), it would be intellectually honest to have a broader scope. I mean, if one is working in Google's best interests and trying to find the best ways to find best IT-employees among the recruitment pool, why limit one's approach to women? It would support one's argument if he would have explored the topic more broadly and finally concluded that yes, it's the gender issues that have the largest effect on IT-performance. This is the "he is very selective in citing his sources" issue.

(and re: reasoning being bad, I just meant that looking at statistics from a population at whole and then assuming the same statistics are valid in a non-representative sample is bad. This is basically the foundation of his argument, as he himself states in the second sentence of his letter: "When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions.")

[erichkknaar]

His whole nonsense about conservatives being better workers is complete rubbish too. Conservatives tend to be ostracized in silicon valley because no one needs to employ selfish, racist, sexist assholes who are stupid enough to believe the lying garbage the conservative media produces. Fuck them. Let them die out from hunger.

[Isyel]

His whole nonsense about conservatives being better workers is complete rubbish too. Conservatives tend to be ostracized in silicon valley because no one needs to employ selfish, racist, sexist assholes who are stupid enough to believe the lying garbage the conservative media produces. Fuck them. Let them die out from hunger.

Also a lack of adaptability and general unwillingness to accept change while dogmatically following everything that came before as a general outlook on life can't be beneficial for cutting edge tech development.