I tought I wouldn't see that in my lifetime, that it was a thing of the past. Reading of totalitarian societies I always wondered how it could happen, and now we see it develop right before our eyes. It is fascinating & terrifying.

Personally I think you can find racial and sex differences if you look for them. The athletics world championships are on at the moment. What race wins most of the races? Why do we have separate men and women's events? And yet we are told that despite there being obvious physical differences, there are no differences in non-physical aptitude, and furthermore, even to ponder the idea is heretical. I don't get it. Do we really think that if differences were found we are about to start herding one race off to labour camps? Or ban men from going into child care because they don't have the natural aptitude for it?

I always think it's worth questioning prevailing beliefs, at least within my own head.

One note I can think of, using your running analogy: focusing on the natural abilities at the very top of the echelon (or even just the pinpoint average) may ignore the massive spread of ability among the general population. Men are naturally going to typically be faster runners than women (larger heart sizes and stronger muscle density -- testosterone traits, in essence). However (and you can look at any mass-participation 5K to verify this), this ignores the wide spread. It is safe to say that your top male athlete will almost always outrun your top female athlete. I think it is also safe to say that a woman who extensively trains will almost always be able to outrun any man who simply shows up at a running event with zero training at all. Certainly there are differences in non-physical aptitude between the sexes, too; however, I also can imagine that there's a wide spread of innate ability here, too, with training also as a differential factor.

I don't think pondering the idea should be some sort of heretical thing, no, but especially with this subject, you have to be careful. I think part of the reason there's a large amount of discomfort about this is part historical example (eg eugenics). If the conclusion drifts into "inferiority / superiority" angles, it can be used by powerful people to exploit tribalism to do awful things.

Here's an example of a measure of male strength where virtually no women are stronger than men: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4vcxd0/alm...

The idea that all races and sexes have the same potential is not borne out by the facts. Nature is important. It's comforting and fashionable yet intellectually soft minded to blame it all on the patriarchy or imperialism. All the diversity programmes in the world can't change nature. Nothing should be out if bounds for discussion. In the nicest possible way, if I am not trying to harm people or encourage anyone else to do so, who the hell are you or anyone else to tell me what to say or think?

Yes, on the topic you selected, grip strength, almost all men are going to be stronger than any women.

To go back to running though. You missed for instance where I said "men are naturally going to typically faster runners than men", which also is true. If you look at this large dataset of compiled 5K pace times, (http://www.pace-calculator.com/5k-pace-comparison.php), you will see that men have a very distinct advantage at all levels (usually a minute and a half pace difference on average).

But you cannot say "almost all men are going to run faster than women", due to the wide spread of pace. There are a significant amount of women capable of an 8 minute / mile pace; this pace is faster than the male average 5K pace at any age.

Nature is important; so is environmental factors. By mentioning that environmental factors exist, I am not dismissive of biological differences. I do think particularly on things like personality, intelligence, and other non-physical traits, it is fairly difficult to pick out what causes what. Testosterone / estrogen traits are fairly easy, we can see the results. Debugging the brain on the other hand is a lot harder.

I did not mention patriarchy or imperialism or feminism. I mention eugenics and tribalism because of the sordid history of this sort of thing; it's a serious warning flag to not rush to conclusion. You can say what you want and think what you want, but I personally would not take any person who does not recognize this warning flag very seriously, to be honest.

In theory, nothing should be out of bounds; in practice, this type of conversation easily degrades into tribalism, which yes I believe human beings are very prone to. (I mean, why else bring up feminism / left wing / patriarchy / imperialism? I didn't mention any of this.) That's not to say "don't discuss this", but I'm not going to say anything else if bringing up the fact that environmental factors exist turns me into some sort of left-wing caricature. :)

I'll try and avoid "the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech" in the future. :0

I really think it's worth reading the employment lawyer piece I linked, it's good to get the actual legal perspective on this whole situation.

I think it's not a legal issue - clearly Google can fire him without cause. But it's a cultural issue; is it morally acceptable to still work at or with Google, even though they show this behavior?

Personally, this pisses me off enough that I've switched to DuckDuckGo for the moment.

The most eye opening piece of advice I've received on these subjects has been to try and listen to and believe as many people from these disadvantaged groups as possible. Women and minorities all have rhyming stories of being discriminated against. Part of the nature of systematic discrimination is that it is mostly invisible to the majority that benefit from it. It has to be, because when we notice it, it feels wrong.

The vast majority of women I've seen speak on the issue of this manifesto have said similar things: that they recognize the type of man who would write it, that they've had to deal with that type of man their whole careers, and that giving credence to his arguments by airing them in a company sanctioned forum is demoralizing, making their jobs more difficult, and making them feel more like outsiders to the company.

I believe in the paradox of tolerance. In order to build a tolerant environment, there are some things that cannot be tolerated.

That I can choose to have a coworker fired over my projection, from his writing, of his internal psychological state is new to me.

The race to be the biggest victim makes sense to me now. That's awesome power.

What I'm trying to point out is that people on the receiving end of discrimination in our industry have recognized patterns of behavior that mostly pass beneath my (and perhaps, your) radar. But they are patterns that women across the board, in different companies, in different fields, recognize and can name to one another. This is what structural sexism means, these patterns are built into our society, today. And this manifesto matched perfectly with a number of negative patterns, hence the strong negative response.

(also, writing is inherently a projection of internal psychological state so I'm not sure I really understand the problem you are talking about)

Firstly, even if there was only this claim and accusation, one might want to defend oneself against it. Especially since this is an almost universally agreed upon "truth" in the western world.

Secondly, motivated by this (perceived) discrimination of women, we as a society have allowed various forms of discrimination of men intended to offset the discrimination of women. This gives an even stronger reason to contest this "truth" if one feels that it is in fact not true.

So what kind of defence is someone who does not agree with the above "truth" allowed? Like how insanely watered down should the defence be in order that one does not "accusing [ones] colleagues of having inferior genes"?

Really? Could you give a reference to anyone ever actually making this argument?

In particular, the controversy surrounding Damore's "manifesto" seems very hard to understand if most people believe that there are differences between the genders that could affect the "outcome"/gender gap in tech/whatever. If this in fact what everyone thinks, then why are so many people upset that someone wrote a document saying this is the case? The whole thing should to be a no-issue? (I guess some of the points of Aaronson's original blog post might be applicable here. But I'm not sure that really improves the situation...)

Secondly, if everyone agrees that there are differences between the genders that could affect for example the gender gap in tech, I have a very hard time understanding how one can routinely blame more or less any difference between the genders on discrimination or some such.

You're changing your original summary of the argument by adding the qualification "that could affect the outcome". The whole question at issue is whether the differences that there are between men and women would be expected to have a significant effect on outcomes in tech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kasiov0ytEc

Not a really exotic belief in the core social justice circles.

Though advocates tend to avoid stating it outright, since it's so easy to attack and so ridiculous. So it's generally left implicit. E.g. They'll just say, "X field is only 30% women, we must fight the sexism that causes this", leaving it as an unstated assumption.

Did he? I've seen it represented this way but it was my understanding that averages of society were being talked about in the manifesto. So from my understanding it didn't say anything about the women at Google who would presumably be on the far right side of the distribution either way.

Men tend to be more physically violent than women, but that's not saying that a particular group of men is necessarily more or less violent than a particular group of women.

Of course he didn't. It's easy to debunk by actually reading the original memo - I'm pretty sure people summarizing it that way are betting that their readers won't bother to check the source.

Also, it's ironic that the ostensibly pro-diversity critics are literally equating "different" with "inferior" here.

Yes. This is a consequence of the law of trichotomy.

Two points on a plane are different: is one necessarily less than the other?

No. The question itself is ill-formed. You need a metric to transform the points to a form that can fit into the "less than" comparison. A common transformation would be e.g. euclidean distance - under which two different points (e.g. (2, 4) and (4, 2)) can end up being equal.

Real-life problems are multi-dimensional issues with very complex metrics.

"Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."

If someone says "I explicitly don't claim X", you can't then go and say they're claiming X.

> Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways...

He does argue that the population means for various traits are different. If two means are different, one is lesser than the other.

That's what you are asserting, not the author. Isn't that a textbook definition of a straw man?

Damore is not "literally" Galileo, he does not fear for his life or freedom, he did not publish an original work but instead summarized thoughts that have been around elsewhere, so it is not a perfect analogy, of course.

[1] Standard of proof, but also otherwise standard it is held to: The worst possible interpretation of the document is being discussed, after liberal reading between the lines, looking for dog-whistles, and a telephone game of bad faith summaries. Case in point: > 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes

I am baffled by the idea that liberals dominate discourse and conservatives have to hide in the shadows to avoid persecution. I see it in a lot of comments here, and half of Damore's manifesto revolved around it. Yet not only are conservatives clearly not persecuted in general, they punch well above their weight when it comes to framing discourse.

And, Damore is now interviewing with YouTube personalities claiming Google silenced him.

Meanwhile, every day are 4 new articles about his manifesto, which everyone can find fully linked up and formatted. There's nothing left to complain about. He's got the debate he wanted.

I feel like the strategy of denouncing media began with Trump. It's earned him tons of attention, and others have begun doing the same because they think it's true. They think their ideas are being drowned out.

I don't see that. I see tons of online discussions. From time to time, someone asks me to frame my point in a way that is more to their liking, and I'm baffled. That isn't how open debate works.

He just needs to get his job back, get people in his industry not threatening him any more etc... Galileo also got the discussion he wanted, eventually.

>the strategy of denouncing media began with Trump

Wasn't the media accusing Trump of being openly racist and antisemitic etc, with headlines like "If Trump wins, say goodbye to your black friends"[1]? The least I can say is that the media had a part in making this too easy for Trump.

> From time to time, someone asks me to frame my point in a way that is more to their liking

I think what Damore could reasonably be asking for is to not get fired, and not get threatened by higher ups, if he voices an opinion that would have been fine (and probably supported) had it been an equivalent left-wing position.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2016/11/08/if-trump-wins-say-goodbye-to...

I'm not going to get into whether Trump was actually racist or sexist because that's not the point.

>I am baffled by the idea that liberals dominate discourse and conservatives have to hide in the shadows

So I guess you are quite surprised to find that the only people who work in tech in SV, and who put themselves on the side of Damore, do so pseudonymously, while the ones who argue against him do so in plain sight on twitter etc., with their professional identities?

Read it again, there was not a single word about "inferior". "Different" is the correct word here. Your posts highlights the precise reason we can't have a meaningful discussion on this problem.

Your second link to a graph about women working with computers have another explanation - typist was seen "women's" profession back then and early computers were also seen as somewhat improved typing machine, that's why many early computer operators were women. Few older professors told us that in 70s and 80s it was common in university to employ a typist (typically a woman) to enter programs into computers, I'm pretty sure they were counted as "programmers" in that chart.

This is the link I put up earlier. It is tracking women's enrollment in majors lined up with different fields. It shows the percentage of women enrolled in majors for programming tracking along with people enrolled in medicine, law, and the hard sciences until the 1980s where suddenly it deviated rather significantly.

This inquiry wasn't made. You have to read the memo.

> accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes.

This wasn't claimed, either. You have to read the memo.

I'm sorry but repeatedly here opponents are deliberately misrepresenting the content of the memo to try to take a moral high ground. We can't discuss this fairly if any opposing viewpoint is going to be framed as claiming women have inferior genes.

Interestingly, teenage girls seem to have more access to (desktop) computers than boys have nowadays: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/201...

HN's guidelines specifically encourage posting anything that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." So we can hopefully assume that the

I think anybody who is intellectually curious is interested in whether population-level neurological sexual dimorphism has any significant impact on career outcomes. If you do not read the memo as dog-whistle misogyny, then you will see this reaction as an indication that investigating this fact is forbidden.

Just to quote a few things you said as an example:

"legitimate inquiry into whether gender is a determinant of programming aptitude"

"accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes."

The memo in question never once mentioned engineering aptitude nor ability. It did claim that women were not pursuing software jobs due to a combination of things they found distasteful, some of which were inherent to the job and others of which are cultural.

Again, if it's dog-whistle misogyny, then reading this as: "I think I can get away with talking about differences of preference, so I'll just let people fill in the blanks in terms of differences of ability" makes perfect sense, but I hope you could see how others might not make that inference?

But people aren't clones and we aren't all equal. Hey, I want to be equal to LeBron James. Please, give me the same salary.

You want equality, there's communism for you. See how that panned out.

> women are innately unsuited to computers

Did you read the original paper? Damore never wrote that. He was talking about statistical chance, not generalizing like you are now.

You can get the same initial chance to prove your ability at basketball as he did. You can even get a slight boost to compensate for things (maybe he was a lot more motivated, or maybe he got some practice in the 'hood). And it'll turn out you have no skills/talent/ability, you're not 2 meters high, and so on.

Now, with sports, it's not a problem if we don't spend more than a few seconds of thought on trying to create equal opportunities, because with competitive sports the point is exactly to not have equal outcomes.

But with broad categories like jobs/career, income, wealth, political/legal/professional representation, we pretty much want to make sure that if one gender is underrepresented then it's not hurting us all on the long run. It might turn out that yeah, women don't really like tech, and those few who do are very welcome, men can behave around them, and those instances of sexism are just the expected rare problems that do happen in every other walks of life. But so far, it seems that it's very much not the case.

Can you cite the parts of his memo that made you believe he did that? Or did you read that "between the lines"?

Did we read the same manifesto? Because I don't recall that part at all.

I do recall him saying in several places that despite population-level differences in averages for certain personality traits, it was incorrect to take the average and apply it to individuals within that group due to the large overlap between different groups.

> It's a pretty solid rebuttal to any and all concerns that women are innately unsuited to computers rather than that our computer culture has driven them away.

And this article [0], has a pretty solid rebuttal as to that interpretation of that graph (among other things).

0: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

The "manifesto" wasn't the best argument ever written on the subject. But as far as I can tell its basically correct. There are many well documented biological differences between men and women. Not just minor ones, but some of the largest effect sizes I've ever seen in a social science. I think it's absurd to expect exactly equal gender ratios given such enormous differences.

The NPR article is interesting. It was brought up before and there was some debate about how accurate it was. It doesn't make much sense given the gender ratio in other similar areas like engineering is similar and hasn't changed that much.

But even if its correct, the theory they present is basically compatible with the Google memo. That parents are less likely to buy girls computers and so they don't go into comp sci. If that's the case, Googles sexist programs to discriminate against men over women isn't going to change anything. All the statistics show the "problem" isn't in the tech industry and is happening by high school or before.

Aaronson doesn't mention Google or Damore.

It's a great insult to the victims of Church oppression in the middle ages and of Soviet policy to compare their hardships to the "hardships" of men working at Google.

Not inferior genes, merely different genes. Is this so controversial?

Nah, if anything, the primary comparison was not with Galileo but with Soviet ideology, which is quite apt IMO.

> James Damore is a junior programmer who wrote a 10 page 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes.

You apparently didn't read the 'manifesto'. He did no such thing. In fact, he only constructed an argument - based on solid research - that current pro-diversity practices in Google are harmful to employees and* company alike.

Also, Kolmogorov and Galileo also started as junior whatevers - you can't evaluate someone at time T by what they turned out to be at time T+many years later.

> Please, before you throw in your lot with him, consider how ridiculous the analogy OP made here is. The Google Manifesto is manifestly not A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.

It's not. But Scott Aaronson used examples of historical figures important to him and his field, and he did that to make a general point about a "third option" between acting and buying into propaganda. It is only natural for him to use those examples.

> tptacek linked this graph[2] on one of the early threads on this. It's a pretty solid rebuttal to any and all concerns that women are innately unsuited to computers rather than that our computer culture has driven them away.

I think the arguments in this article have pretty solid rebuttals too, or at least alternative explanations ;). Some of the pretty stronger ones show e.g. in part IV of the recent post of Scott Alexander - http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger....

Also, the memo wasn't really making the argument that women are unsuited to computers. The usual argument is that they are less likely to be interested in them, compared to other available options. Which also suggests that the more options you give to everyone, the more gender inequality you're expected to see, as people naturally sort themselves into careers that fit their characters.