A key question here is what has changed to make these attacks more prevalent. One possibility is it is related to immigration and changing demographics. The area with the most acid attacks by far, Newham ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/acid-attack-capital-bri... ) is also very immigrant heavy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Newham#Demog... ). In this NPR article, the example is of a guy with a white/British name attacking someone of middle eastern heritage -- but I know from experience on news coverage in my own region that NPR cannot be trusted on racial issues to select anecdotes that match the real patterns of behavior. Do any of the Brits here have any more insight on how immigration and changing demographics might be related to these attacks?
When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?
Isn't this an argument against any form of different hiring practices based on race/gender? Even if distributions of abilities are equal in nature, if a college has a lower bar based on gender, then abilities won't be equal among graduates of that college. Conversely, even if abilities are on average different, if a college has the same bar and same standards based on gender, then you won't have to question if a graduate really deserved to have that credential.
Is there a biological basis for this? I do not want "Gender Studies" references. I want real BIOLOGICAL, you know code mother nature put in you.
Sex is basically binary in mammals (do you have the gene that triggers producing sperm versus the gene that triggers you producing eggs), the only exception being incredibly rare intersex disorders. Read more here: http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/why-sex-is-binary-but-gende...
Based on sex, people have different traits, physical and mental. Some of these traits are close to binary between the sexes (having a uterus, etc.). Some traits are a matter of distributions (such as differences in physical strength, or willingness to take risks).
Society then considers certain behaviors and traits more masculine or feminine, and creates norms and roles around these. Some of these norms and roles exist on a spectrum, some are more binary.
Gender for a long time was used either as a synonym for sex, or only this case of describing language (gendered pronouns). In the mid-1900s academics in the social science used it to mean "the social norms and roles society creates based on biological sex." Then more recently some academics have re-defined gender again to mean "ones own innate conception of one's male/female identity." There isn't any scientific proof that such a thing exists or doesn't exist, nor can there be, because we don't have mind reading machines.
Sexual identity has also been redefined recently. So now if you were born with the egg producing equipment, but are taking male sex hormones some people will now define you as of the male sex. Frankly, I find this redefining of words to be pretty Orwellian.
"he disseminated a company wide memo criticizing the company-wide hiring practices in a preachy way that didnt leave room for the company to answer back."
Not true, he distributed the memo on a mailing list called "skeptics."
I would like to hear from someone at Google what kind of discussions happen on the "skeptics" list. Have there have been any negative stereotypes about Christians voiced on that mailing list, for instance? Was political discussion normal on that mailing list? Was criticism of Google normal?
The thing is that this guy clearly thinks some things that affect his ability to do his job. Would you trust him to write a peer review for a female colleague or mentor a black intern?
Sure, why not?
I believe that the author is generally right, and that there are psychological differences between the sexes. And I have noticed that male bosses who believe that women are the same as men sometimes end up making their female subordinates cry a lot, because they don't realize the same harsh criticisms they would use on a guy are way too harsh for many women. They would be better bosses if they were aware of sex differences. For that reason, I believe knowing the truth is better even if that is "validating stereotypes."
I read Zunger's article. Getting offended is in large part a choice. I apply the golden rule. If an Asian guy wrote a similar article for arguing why Asian people are over-represented at Google compared to white people, I would not take offense. Maybe he would be wrong, but if he wrote in the tone of the original article I would not call for his firing or say that I couldn't work with him.
mostly in the form of conservative-leaning folk who thought they should be allowed to say whatever they pleased because "freedom of speech."
A cry bully is someone who tries to get other people fired or de-platformed because they claim personal offense. Did these conservatives call for people to get fired? Did they succeed? If not, then good, I'm gladd their cry-bullying attempts were ignored.
And yet, this guy who is openly telling the world he doesn't trust females to be as interested as he is in the job should be applauded?
There is a enormous difference between noticing on average differences and direct personally targeted invective against a specific employee.
not on discarding resumes because the candidate is a white male
You are making up the straw man because that is not what he claims they are doing.
I'm not saying people shouldn't discuss company policies. I'm saying they shouldn't turn those policy discussions into a national/cultural political argument.
I suspect that this memo wasn't any more political than much that gets shared in the message boards at Google. This issue was already politicized and the main gist of the politics stuff was, "Both sides bring insights and biases to the table, so we should do a better job making it comfortable for conservatives to speak up." By the standards of what I see going on the political discourse this was pretty tame stuff. The responses to the piece were 100X worse -- https://files.gab.ai/image/5986e3f03d1f1.jpeg
As I explained to another poster just now: this guy painted a target on himself by becoming a huge liability for Alphabet.
Sure, but if Google has already decided it is ok to discuss this issue on company message boards and that it wants to encourage debate and discussion (which it has), then it shouldn't then fire a guy just because he makes an argument other people don't like. The principled thing would be to stand for freedom of debate. Otherwise you are just ceding the company to cry-bullies, ceding the message boards to the faction that is more willing to self-modify to be offended at opposing viewpoints. If anything, Google should fire the employees who responded with personal invective against a fellow Googler.
By stating that he's OK with discriminating by gender, he put them in a position where they'd have to flag him as someone who couldn't manage a mixed-gender team.
He did not say this. He is against discriminating against gender and wants the same hiring and recruiting process regardless of gender.
It's a much smaller field, with far fewer lucrative jobs. For any given smaller fields, there could be a number of reasons why it is more or less equal. My hypothesis is that men are biologically more inclined toward geeking out and doing coding or such for fun. If men who are good at math are also geeking and out and coding, while women just do their high school math homework, women would have a comparative advantage at plain math as opposed to computer science.
This would suggest that the gender gap could be reduced by forcing women and men to do computer programming as part of a standard high school curriculum. But the idea of forcing women to do something other than what they do in their free time, just to close a gender gap, seems to me pretty appalling totalitarian.
Nonetheless, there is research indicating gender differences in math vary greatly between countries and appear to be correlated to other measures of gender equity
Reading the studies, some things are positively correlated, some are negative. Some things have no correlation. There are lots of controls and data manipulation going on, hard to tell if the dredged for the results or not. And if you look at other types of studies you see the opposite result -- http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
I couldn't find any meta analysis of specifically programming skill, but an analysis of one CS department didn't find gender differences due to ability
If the scores are equal, this would suggest no bias in selection. If women are unfairly excluded from computer science, or face a higher bar due to discrimination, then since they were more selected their scores should be higher.
A small study of elementary students showed that girls and boys did equally well on easy problems, but boys did better on hard problems
Keep in mind girls mature faster and differently, so differences in elementary school aren't all that predictive of differences later.
I agree, but I'm pretty sure political posts were already tolerated at Google. If employees are allowed to post to internal message boards that women are underrepresented because interviewers are sexist or suffer from unconcious bias and should adopt policy Y, then employees should also be allowed to post an argument that women are under-represented for some other reason X and argue against policy Y.
And even if the workplace does have a no politics rule, the proper response should be a reprimand and asking him to delete his post, not a firing.
Yeah, just reading the abstract tells a different story than the graph she uses.
Google or a college level computer science course is specifically pulling from adults who are in the very top percentiles in logical/quantitative skills.
The abstract of the paper notes that while the math difference is small among the total population: "differences favoring men emerged in high school and college" and "grew larger with increasingly selective samples, and were largest for highly selected samples and samples of highly precocious persons."
So the slide deck obscures the fact that in the relevant sample, men have better skills, by including the general population (women, average folks) where there is no difference.
When I looked into this a lot, looking into all sorts of data, reading tons of stuff, my conclusions were:
1. Women are generally more conscientious and studious. I've seen data they do more homework, get better grades, even in math, and are more likely to make the honor roll.
2. The more difficult the math test, and the higher the score bracket, the more men outscored women. Average SAT score for men was only a little higher. But among those scoring 800, men outnumbered women two-to-one (this has changed a bit, but they have also made the math test a lot easier, far more testers get an 800 math than get an 800 verbal). Then when looking at who gets a 100+ on the American Mathematics Competition tests, men dominated by about a 10 to 1 ratio.
3. I have observed throughout life that men seem a lot more likely to "geek out" on stuff -- whether that be coding all night for fun, editing Wikipedia articles, taking apart a mechanical device, trying to beat all the quests in an RPG, etc. This is inline with studies showing men to be much more system oriented. I have a hard time believing this is due to culture messaging because for a lot of these things men receive enormous cultural messaging that they are losers for being such geeks, yet they do it anyway because it is such fun.
4. Men tend to have higher variance in almost all things. More men at the top, more men at the bottom.
5. This Stanford article notes "Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. " http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... I think that skill becomes more important the harder a math test becomes, or the harder a programming project is.
I think the 1970's style computer punch card programming, which was very corporate, and did not involve as much keeping large complicated systems in working memory, was less prone to creating a gender imbalance. It more favored conscientiousness.
Whe computers became available in every household, men were much more prone to geek out and become expert programmers on their own time. This means the pipeline of programmers ends up being much more male dominated.
Furthermore, the skills required to be a computer programmer at a top company like Google, require someone from the top percentiles in being able to juggle items in their head, and there are a lot more men in those percentiles than women. I think programming at Google is much more akin to doing well on the AMC than it is to answering an average SAT-level math problem. When we not the disparity in math ability is small, it obscures that the disparity at the very high ends is much larger.
Personally, I think "women are good at people skills, men are good at STEM" is a misleading simplification. Men and women have different strengths in people skills. It has been my observation that men are better at treating other people as abstractions, or with some detachment. I don't have it on hand, but I recall seeing some survey where it said women have a harder time working with people they personally dislike. Men are better at giving and taking criticism without making it personal. I think women on average find it much more emotionally taxing to run a team of twenty people where they have to fire people and give harsh feedback.
(One other confounding variable, women also have big hormonal changes after childbirth and after menopause, so it's especially young women who have these problems).
It seems like people really think "well men are better at basically everything"
Seems to me that women are much better at taking care of small children, and being attentive and reactive to their needs, and doing mundane repetitive or helpful tasks, and men are better at almost all things dealing with the outside world, dealing with nature, and large scale organization. This is what I observe myself, it is consistent with the data, and it is exactly what you would expect based on the environment in which we evolved.
POTUS has great power relative to any other singular person in the world. But relative to the total power exercised by the government, they have little (especially with regards to domestic policy). Trump's ability to actually "drain the swamp" is extremely limited, unless he pulls off an unprecedented and insane power grab. Yes, he can tinker with things, and those tinkerings will impact millions of people, but his ability actually bring back jobs to the rust belt, fix the economy, fix healthcare, make Washington accountable, etc, are all extremely limited.
Aside from that, he or she can issue Executive Orders, which "have significant influence over the internal affairs of government, deciding how and to what degree legislation will be enforced, dealing with emergencies, waging wars, and in general fine-tuning policy choices in the implementation of broad statutes."
Except that when those orders go to far against the wishes of the permanent government, the orders get blocked by the courts.
The issue is that it takes virtual all of a president's political capital to fight the permanent government (the bureaucracy, the courts, academia, the credentialed media, the party apparatus). So while in theory they have quite a bit of authority, if they wish to use that authority in a way that goes against the interests of the permanent government, they will find themselves in a huge battle. They can win at most, maybe one or two of these battles a term, and only these in a limited way.
and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of global warming.
Was there anyone predicting in the 1980s or 1990s that with global warming arctic ice would decline while antarctic ice would increase? Was anyone predicting this before the observation occurred? How do I know that the idea that global warming causes an increase in southern ice is not just an after the fact rationalization?
How do we square this statement from the article "In the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half; its volume has fallen by three-quarters. " with this chart of global sea ice -- http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.... From the chart, looks like sea ice is down a little bit, but not only by a few percent, not by half. So are there massive gains in sea ice elsewhere in the world, areas where sea ice has nearly doubled?
Also how do we square the statement about the decrease in volume with this statement from a year and a half ago? "However, very little ice thickness information actually exists." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065704/full How do we actually know how much volume has fallen in the last 30 years if two years ago "very little information on thickness actually exists"?
I don't really understand the appeal of this article when it doesn't link to any sources. The article doesn't tell us what the actual new information prompted the article and where that new information came from.
because they all operate under the assumption that incidental characteristics like where someone is born and what color their skin is are more important than motivational characteristics like do they want to be in the U.S, do they agree with American values, and will they be a contributing citizen here.
If you had to leave the US forever, which of these places would you most and least want to move to? What would be your ranking of desirability? Canada, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, Lagos, Costa Rica, Belize.
For me, I would most want to move to Canada and least Lagos. I'd also prefer Costa Rica over Belize. And Australia over Hong Kong over Belize over Lagos.
What makes Australia and Hong Kong more desirable than Lagos and Belize? What makes Canada more desirable than Mexico? Why do all the liberals who hate Trump threaten to move to Canada and not Mexico? It's not the geography. It's not like Canada has better weather. It's the people. (People will say it is things like the government dysfunction or the culture or the language, but of course, those are just properties of a group of people, not the land).
We're more likely to have liberal immigration policies with regards from countries that we see as desirable places to live. That is because 1) being desirable places, most people in those countries won't want to leave, and thus we won't be overwhelmed by their numbers. 2) since those people have made their country a desirable place, if large numbers of those people move here, it won't decrease our quality of life. I won't fear a decrease in government quality or cultural alienation if a large number of Canadians move to the United States.
In other words, country of origin is heuristic that will correlate with do they agree with American values, and will they be a contributing citizen here. Could we find a better heuristic? Maybe. Do you have any ideas?
I am not arguing about the crime changes over the past 20 years. The original article was about crime changes in the past few years, based on changes to policy in the last few years. I think the changes to crime policy implemented twenty years ago were good, and good impacts on crime. But the changes in the past few years are bad, and will result in an increase in crime.
Pretending a 49% drop over 20 years is sustainable continuously with no outliers is...absurd. ... As Pew has reported in recent years, in fact, the American public is "unaware" that the homicide rate in the United States has fallen by 49 percent over the past twenty years.
In my city, the homicide rate is still 5X higher than it was in 1950s. That's hundreds of people dead each year, unnecessarily. And that's after dramatic improvements in medical technology! I have a lot higher standards than a 50% decline since the 1990 peak. Let's get it back down to the 1950s level.
