[“There are some in the Valley, such as notorious ex-Googler James Damore, who suggest this is because women and people of color lack the innate qualities needed to succeed in tech.”
Needless to say, Antonio never wrote anything like that]
Unfortunate that Matt framed Damore's memo that way (and then linked to Verge's take!). Matt, you got it wrong. Damore's memo was honestly directed at how to get more women interested in working in tech and specifically at Google, citing the general proclivity for females to be more interested in people and males to be more interested in things. Read Damore's memo before you jump to conclusions. It wasn't about "innate qualities" (suggesting a lack of tech intelligence), it was about innate interests. Very different.
Damore did write that women "generally" have differences vs. men that would make them not so good at tech.
Damore: "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things , relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)."
Controversial theories that Damore may have learned in evolutionary biology classes should not be used at work to speculate that a bunch of employees are biologically unsuited to their tasks. He should have stayed in systems biology (his PhD subject before dropping out) instead of muck-raking at Google.
Even the quote you provide is hedged with a key word ("generally") and focuses on the interests of the individuals in question rather than innate ability to succeed
Exactly. When you say something like "men are stronger than women", somebody always points out this one chick they know who's totally buffed out. I think ask how many women they know who AREN'T and if this one person is the exception rather than the rule........
"But on Twitter recently I saw an article which quantifies the difference in concrete ways. To be honest the difference shocked me. The paper is Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes. As you can see in the figure above the sample sizes are large".
Yep. Roughly 1 in 4 women are stronger than the weakest 25% of men. Only the very very very top of them will rival even average men.
------------------
The upshot is that the very strongest female athletes are barely above the median of grip strength for men. The top 75th percentile of female athletes are below the bottom 25th percentile of men.
Another way to look at it is cumulative distributions. You can tell looking at this that there is overlap between the two sample distributions. How much? Ten percent of women have stronger grips than the bottom five percent of men. The difference in distributions is big enough that the very strongest non-elite athlete female in the whole data set has a weaker grip than most of the men.
On the other hand women maintain their physical strength to a much greater age than men, or so I have read. Since we spend most of our lives outside of our prime, it may be that the aggregate average physical output of women is greater than that of men. 'Stronger' can have more than one meaning.
I'm not talking about "this one chick" I know. A large fraction of girls from nearly age zero are told to play with dolls. We have no idea whether this, or biology, explains later differences in interests and abilities between sexes.
I need to read up on this, but I've heard on some podcast (don't remember which, may have been Sam Harris) that looking at Scandinavian countries, where the most consistent and long standing effort has been made to make opportunities for men and women as equal as possible, that over time women and men have become even more stratified along professions traditionally considered male vs female.
That's interesting. I worked for a couple of months in Denmark in the 1980s. The workplace was extremely stratified by gender: the techies were all male, and the women did other kinds of work, usually secretarial or administrative-bureaucratic. In New York, where I normally worked, there was some stratification, maybe 70-30 or 60-40, but nothing like Denmark. No cause was obvious -- there was no overt discrimination. It occurred to me, though, that Denmark's population at that time was ethnically almost entirely Scandinavian, whereas New York, as everyone knows, is very mixed in race/ethnicity, culture, religion, life experience, and political framework.
Be careful. Larry Summers (a nasty piece of work, in general and as an economist, but still...) got in a lot of trouble for raising exactly this awkward question:
"What constitutes equality? What if there really are inherent differences that average out (eg, in IQ scores) but lead to big differences in, eg, career choices? Is it equality if some fields are dominated by men and others by women?"
The more ideological members of his audience (he should have known better) didn't want to deal with that, so they misrepresented his comments and intent (granted, interpretable as making excuses). And got away with it because nobody really wants to touch that one, and anyway he's a nasty piece of work.
Summers was fired because U. presidents aren't supposed to cause controversy; they're primarily fundraisers. Should have known better.
PT, More lies. Juvenile primates in other species show the same differentiation of interests (male juvenile primates play with trucks, female juvenile primates prefer dolls) that human children show.
That may be true and is interesting data. Yet we should be very careful when generalizing from primates to people, and that kind of research-level speculation does not belong in a workplace where people just need to get stuff done. Witness Coinbase and Basecamp discouraging political chatter at work.
You may have no idea, because you don't seem to read much.
Ideas in which men and women have significantly greater legal, social and economic equality show far greater disparity in careers chosen than the U.S. Fewer women really do like engineering. AND THAT'S OK.
Is it OK? Is it what people really want? Even as a child I was irritated by gender, racial, age, and other expectations, as if we were all a bunch of robots waiting to be programmed.
But don't you think it's a little odd that women in general are attributed with the gift of creation and a propensity for it, while men are most often characterized as mechanical? Yet engineering, by it's nature, is inherently creative?
I'm male and I'm a successful engineer. I'm also a musician and vocalist. My father was a distinguished engineer who was responsible for the US Navy's fleet balistic nuclear missile system, from Polaris through Trident. My mother was an accomplishd female vocalist. I apparently inherited both traits?
I can't escape the opinion my gender isn't all that important an influence on my talent?
Or maybe lots of men don't like engineering much either, but they have fewer choices. So they get decent grades and a technical career because of social pressure, which women experience less. You don't seem to think much.
At the hospital child care center I administered (20 years ago), the children played with what ever they wanted....much to the chagrin of some of the dads. Boys played with dolls, girls built with Lego bricks, etc. And yet, inevitably the boys a tree stick or carrot stick and fashion it into a gun. And often it was the girls who were the first to empathize with another, but they didn't always fall into stereotypical male/female roles. It was always our goal to help them develop the best of both genders. After all, my master's thesis argued that the best leadership was androgynous.
For every question, there is an answer that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong. You seem to seek such banalities.
Also, while we're in ''anecdote' as the singular of 'data'" territory, I'm reminded of the liberated young mother who gave her son dolls and her daughter trucks and construction equipment to play with, only to find her son having the dolls fighting each other and jumping of cliffs and the daughter tucking her baby backhoes and monster trucks in to bed after a nice "oil party". Called and raised!
ps) We actually DO have lots of "idea" about sexual predelictions, including experimental, anthropological and historical. YOU may not have such "ideas" because you snatched at the first, easiest to understand, and best-fit-to-agenda answer you saw.
Actually, we have some data. It turns out that juvenile monkeys have exactly the same toy preferences as human children. Is this enough to prove that biology (not sexism) dominates child toy preferences. Probably not. However, It does suggest the answer.
We don't consider men's generally lower interest in being preschool teachers and nurses to be a deficiency. Why would women's generally lower interest in being auto mechanics and programmers be a deficiency?
My husband was a carpenter and tried to convince three daughters to go into the trades. None did. It wasn't they couldn't do the work it was the mess, the sanitation facilities and getting dirty. There still are not many women in the building trades. Entire work structures need to accommodate better. Tech support where I work seems to have more women because the larger organization has tried to accommodate their preferred working conditions. I think the org. structures are where change needs to start. Not sure if large construction sites ever will, but tech could.
A dirty secret is that the autists are the problem in tech. They have social issues and it bothers women more than it does men. Most women find the environment abhorrent.
The problem is that the key feature of the autists, along with high function in things that make them good in tech, is that social issue. I've made a whole career acting as a translator for people much farther out on the spectrum than I am. Telling them to stop doing it doesn't fix the problem.
Thank you Deco for saying this. Exactly. You know why? Because traditional women's work is devalued. A programmer at Google is more important than a kindergarten teacher. Our values are screwed up!
Damore's point isn't that no women are interested in nuts and bolts. Many are and thrive at Google. But the fact that Google hasn't achieved a 50% female engineer employment roster can't be explained away as Google's sexism. You also have to look at whether women are even interested in the first place, in the same numbers as men, in being engineers.
I’ve read the Damore memo/rant, and, while blacks not and cogent, it is in no way an unhinged misogynistic rant, nor a criticism of the female engineers present at Google.
Buzzfeed on Damore "James Damore, author of the anti-diversity Google memo". The actual memo begins with "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes". Did that stop Buzzfeed and Gizmodo from lying about Damore? No. Did they suffer any adverse consequences from lying? No.
So you think the source of sex-differences in tech is scientifically understood with the certainty of orbital mechanics? Then you're like those global-warming people who have some interesting data and are immediately convinced that the world will soon be unlivable.
It's more akin to quantum mechanics than Newtonian physics. You cannot measure a lot of things with great certainty, but the statistical predictions are meaningful.
On orbital mechanics; "To go faster, slow down. Anyone who understands orbital mechanics knows that." -- Scott Cherf, NASA Ames Research Center, god only knows when...
I think sex-differences in humans are as well understood as orbital mechanics in the time of Galileo. Sex differences in humans are (probably) polygenic and (probably) influenced by society. Of course, orbital mechanics was not all that clear 400 years ago.
That literally made me LOL. "Don't be evil" eh? From the company that routinely rapes small business ad budgets by recommending increasing your budget by phone sales people literally lying through their teeth. Add Facebook to that pile.
They changed it!! (About simultaneous with their "awokening"??)
They moved from the proscriptive "Don't be evil." (seeking to differentiate themselves from M$ and Apple, no doubt), to the prescriptive "Do the right thing."
PT, Wrong as always. Damore didn't write anything critical about the 'biological deficiencies of some of their workers'. Go look up the original Damore memo. This raises the interesting question. Do you know that you are lying or are you just repeating the lies of others?
PT, You are just lying. The Damore quote is about interests, not abilities. Of course, Damore was right. The 'people vs. things' Cohen's D is over 1 for men vs. women.
PT, See "Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). This analysis produced a Cohen's D of 0.93.
Abstract
The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for Holland's (1959, 1997) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional), Prediger's (1982) Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest areas. Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. Average effect sizes varied across interest inventories, ranging from 0.08 to 0.79. The quality of interest inventories, based on professional reputation, was not differentially related to the magnitude of sex differences. Moderators of the effect sizes included interest inventory item development strategy, scoring method, theoretical framework, and sample variables of age and cohort. Application of some item development strategies can substantially reduce sex differences. The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.
Same here. I’m amazing at a multitude of things I have no interest in, and that don’t even pay me to be amazing at. Meanwhile, I suck spectacularly at a multitude of things that interest me to no end. Like playing killer riffs on the guitar, baking sourdough bread, staying organized and chasing after my daughter to clean up her messes. Interest level at 10. Competency at 3.
His point was not that women would “not be so good” in tech. His point is that fewer women were interested in the things. I’m a female engineer and, while I enjoy science talk, the practice of it bores me. Too much mundane detail. I’d much rather be involved in how science and tech affects society and people. Many of my female engineering grads have gravitated to management as a result. So I totally understand and agree with Damore as I lived it and see it all around me.
Odd, but I had almost exactly the same experience vicariously through my wife and the arc of her carrier as a female software and hardware engineet over the 35 years we worked together in the Valley. Not only did she migrate into management, most of the other women we worked with did the same. I'm sure there were some who prefered management to being what, in the vernacular of the time, was an "individual contributor", the career path into management was encouraged by the three large companies we worked for together back in the 70's, 80's and 90's. Not to say she wasn't talented at management, she was, but she was also a talented engineer. Each of the places we worked emphasized that path not only for her but also for the other women we worked and socialized with.
That might be due to the problem men had as well though. There were many of us who recognized that there were few opportunities for advancement, once you hit a certain level of proficiency, that weren't management? I faced somewhat lesser pressure to go into management even though I was absolutely horrible at it, but there was almost no path for advancement other than management. A few companies we worked for had what they called Technical Leader or "Fellowship" possitions, but they were mostly honorary titles and equivalent to Director level management roles. Nothing approaching VP.
I will say that I always prefered female managers. I found them much easier to work with and less likely to consider me a threat.
Generally speaking, I've noticed that most people who do code / programming / systems design etc. burn out after a few years. I don't know if there's a sex difference.
I'm a little obsesive when it comes to spelling, a trait beaten into me by my first boss way back when, before spell checkers were even invented. I'm afraid I've become pedantic. I'll adapt, give me a little more time... :)
LW, In general, women tend to be quite interested in science, but not in engineering. Did you mean "I’m a female engineer and, while I enjoy engineering talk, the practice of engineering bores me".
I don’t agree. Engineering is applied science - more interesting than so-called “pure” science. Practicing both is boring to me. More interesting is the policy and societal implications of the application of scientific principles.
"As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female."
In general, women are more interested in pure science vs. engineering.
"In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.
As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”
This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
When I got into computer programming around 1965, half of my colleagues were female. After all, you had to _type_ (usually at a keypunch or a teletype) and what real man was going to do that? You also had to make it up as you went along -- there was less theory and experience then -- and women seemed to be good at that. In the '70s, regular educational institutions began to tune into the fact that there was a lot of money to be made, and they decided programming was a species of engineering. And we all know what an engineer looks like. Ten years later, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) was having conferences on the fact that there were so few women in the Craft -- a situation which they, themselves, had created.
As to things versus persons: when you work with code, you're conversing with a human project going back thousands of years, and you're using languages and symbols, a species of thought and activity women have been supposed to be better at than men. You make computers do things by talking to them.
"My impression is that there were lots of women in CS in 1980 for the same reason there were lots of Jews in banking in 1800: they were banned from doing anything else.
Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Everything you quoted is more or less correct (by my personal observation, anyway), except that the trend-spotters at Cosmo were a bit behind the wave. When the job was defined as 'engineering' their numbers declined pretty rapidly.
As for not knowing what one is talking about, you don't know the slightest thing about my knowledge and use of either natural or computer languages, so I don't know why you bother alluding to it.
I could also point out that computer languages are rather different than human languages. Of course, if you had experience with both you would know that.
I used to run into these people back in the day. One problem with them was that they did not play well with others, hence, it was difficult to get constructive work out of them. One that I sort of project-managed was assigned to do a specialized file transfer program and in a couple of weeks managed to insert a small interpreter for a BASIC-like language into it which had very little to do with the project. It was cute, though. When party-pooping higher management found out about this and other similar exploits (not through me) they canned him.
Crucially, "talent" and "capability" - technically "aptitudes" vs. "intelligence". Aptitudes are particular skills, eg math vs. verbal. This is familiar to anyone who's taken the College Board tests, or most intelligence tests. "Intelligence" is overall ability. Two people with the same IQ score may have very different aptitudes. So can populations - though there's no knowing at this point whether that's inherent or cultural.
IQ tests do not show that women are “smarter” than men or vice-versa. However, this proves less than you might think. A verbally oriented test will ‘prove’ that women are smarter. A visual-spatially oriented test will show the reverse. Indirect quote from James Flynn (now deceased)
1) I have not read through the memo in a long time so I would have to understand what he means by "social constructionists".
Social constructionist could mean "someone who aims to engineer social incentives in a way that generates particular societal outcomes."
Social constructionist could also mean "someone who believes anything that exists within a person and describes his relationship to the external is a social construct."
If you are "against" the former, you are a doofus. If you are against the latter, you are perceptive and intelligent.
3) The term "innate DISPOSITIONAL difference" implies that the innate differences are oriented around DISPOSITION, not ability or talent.
On 3, disposition means interest, and people become good at what they're interested in. It's strongly correlated with ability. For "social constructionist", I'm pretty sure he meant the second definition. I'm not saying Damore is wrong. But I don't think his theories about sex-differences are firm enough to be widely accepted, and they don't belong in the work place. Porn is not necessarily wrong either, yet we don't have it at work.
It's always possible that Damore was confused about the situation. It is hard for people to fully overcome the prejudices the society inculcates in them from the time they are infants.
Women are huge in STEM, there are only a few subfields where they are currently minority. When you look at these fields, you see “soft sciences” like psychology and social science. But you also see very technical lab sciences like Vet-Med, Pharmacy, Bioscience, Medical and Dental schools with dominance or near equal representation by women. I went through a microbiology PhD program after years in software and a CS degree. FYI — Veterinary medicine is harder. And it is tougher than human medicine because you have to learn multiple species. Veterinarians do much of the medical research. Like others with graduate degrees, we are only qualified to teach MDs. Similar things go for pharmacy, biological science, medicine and dentistry. Across the board, we see that women either dominate or are approximately half. Those are highly technical, but they are friendly to women. Except in computer science and engineering, which are outliers, we see this.
Women used to be very common in the computer field, somewhere around 40% in 1980. When I was hired away to Wells Fargo in 1981, the networking group running point of sale I got hired into was all women except me. My boss was a woman, her boss was a woman, and her boss was a woman. It was mildly worth remarking on. There were all male groups at Bank of America that I came from, but it was mostly mixed and nobody even thought about it.
The best, fastest programmer I knew was a woman. We went from working on computer integrated manufacturing to making transaction and test systems for Mastercard. They had a system for monitoring lines of code per month, subtracting comment lines and compensating for cut and paste. This system tracked from the start of coding to the completion of successful integration test acceptance. Most were in the upper hundreds of lines per month. That was considered good in assembler. I was in the thousands. With her, they thought something was broken. Her stats were near 30,000. She thought she was just a bit above average and struggling to keep up.
Here’s a graph of how the veterinary profession went the opposite way. Isaacson says that in the late 1980’s women had dropped to 17% of college enrollments. If you graphed IT/software it would look sort of like this but the other way around.
It was even more marked in the 40’s and 50’s. Did you know that the night before the ENIAC demo, it wasn’t men working into the night? Yes, it was two women hooking it all up and making it work. In those days, computers were sold with the pitch that all you had to do is re-task your secretaries and they’d write the code and run the computers. The pitch was it would be cheap, because the workforce was inexpensive and wouldn’t expect a career track job. This was an extension of the way women were used in technology and accounting before computers. They did the math.
I can’t prove it, but I think that was also why black people, specifically black women, were hired into those positions of doing the calculations. They were cheap to hire, and they calculated anything. Later, those women became computer programmers. It was a natural thing and, “men didn’t think it was an important job.”
Even today, women dominate as bookkeepers. That’s not because it isn’t intellectually demanding, it’s because of the pay scale. It’s also because it doesn’t require a college degree in the field of accounting, finance, or computers.
Back in the 80’s there was another big difference in computer fields. Degrees in computer science were rare. Most people didn’t have a degree, just a high school education, and they did great. For at least 15 years, a degree was not an asset to getting a job in the field at all. I worked in banking and in computer integrated manufacturing. (I delivered the first successful plantwide system to Ford in 1985.) Once in a while a BSEE would be around, but mostly anything from a high school diploma (if that) to degrees in philosophy, music, art history, english, etc. (Yes, high school dropouts were found in computers back then. It was that era’s version of the college dropout success.) So both men and women who were working in the field didn’t have an inflated sense of themselves. We were all on the same level.
But that started to change in the late 1990’s, and after 2000, there was a big changeover. Kids came out of college who had absolutely no idea of the past, overstuffed with opinions based on ignorance. The job market tightened up. These days, the “wobbler” resumes that used to get called in are discarded instead.
The view from Silicon Valley is also a very US-centric view. I spent time in the former USSR in the 1990’s through to the end of 2005. I ran an office there for 5 years. A curious thing in Russia. Virtually all engineers (civil engineers, mechanical engineers, etc) were women. This made a difference in various small ways in architecture. For instance, stairways had pairs of rails on them as if for a chair lift that was broken. But what that was for was baby carriages, something obvious to a woman, that a man would not think of. Women ran the cities outside Moscow. They did it for no pay, because someone had to do it or everyone would die in the winters. They did it because that is what you do to take care of everyone.
The pissed of ladies are right about the “google manifesto”. Simply put, the memo is complete and utter horseshit. There is nothing else to say. It’s malarkey. Speaking as a biologist, yes, there are differences between men and women, and in other areas I would say so. But does that include “genetic suitability” to do math? To do software? To engineer technology? No.
This is a strange comment. How does someone with your background and training conclude that offering up horseshit that is easily debunked, as you have laid out, is cause for getting fired? Whatever happened to open and free debate? You think it's proper for employees to be terrorized into silence, as they are currently in every industry, because certain academic papers are deemed taboo? If your argument is with the findings of the studies Damore cited, why do you think Damore should take the fall for these experts? How is Damore wrong for trusting that academic papers that have undergone peer review are not universally deemed "malarkey"? Where did Damore argue that women are genetically unsuitable for anything? How do you go from being a scientist, to wanting to snuff out heretics because only your side gets the final word and there is nothing else to say?
Deco, You have facts on your side. Brian has 'truth'. Truth has no need for facts. Truth is what Jonathan Haidt called a “sacred value”. The purpose of truth is to smash facts. Stalin knew this. Lysenko knew this. Mao knew this. Hitler knew this. Brian knows this.
"Damore's problem...is that it was anti-historical."
I see people get things wrong at work all the time. Very rarely do they get sent to a re-education camp, become national news and get terminated from their position. So the problem was probably something else, is what I am trying to say.
(... and that of the the national media and journalists...) I don't know much about Damore personally. Frankly, he (like Mr Schaeffer below) sounded like a jackass propping his Aristotelian thought experiments up with a few studies, and ignoring the empirical evidence. If he was a jackass he may have really lost his job because of that. I don't think it was necessary for Damore to be fired. But, he did make a big statement attacking the role of women in computer programming. He did it as an employee, to push his agenda.
Essentially all (all?) studies have found that men are better than women at mental rotation (rather relevant for programming). Boys are better than girls (on average) in Math (if you double this check the PISA/SAT/ACT/etc.) data. Here is a useful stat. The Fields Medal has been awarded since 1936. Exactly one woman has won. Numerous studies have shown that men are more variable than women (highly relevant at Google). Note that the PISA data shows that boy are better than girls (in absolute or relative terms) in all countries. There are no exceptions.
Of course, the truth is 'malarkey'. PC is truth and no one should ever forget that.
"My impression is that there were lots of women in CS in 1980 for the same reason there were lots of Jews in banking in 1800: they were banned from doing anything else.
Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Wow using a failed state (the USSR) to promote the talents of women. I guess we should use the 'success' of the Khymer Rouge to promote Communism or Mao's famines to promote Maoism. 'Long live the Great Leap Forwards!'. 'Crush Capitalist Roaders!'. 'Crush Trotsyites'.
No, he never asserted that. He simply noted that given the current evidence, women would continue to be less likely than man to seek jobs in tech. This is a simple probability statement based on evidence and evolutionary theory that would be evaluated by looking at group data. No intelligent researcher would assert that it should be used in evaluating individuals.
He wasn’t trying to get women kicked out of their jobs. He was merely stating that women and men have different focuses and that could be the reason more women were not seeking jobs that they wouldn’t find personally enjoyable.
Damore's comments reflect the overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject. The Cohen's D for 'things vs. people' (male vs. female) is roughly 1.0. See "Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). These results are empirical. They are not derived from 'evolutionary biology classes'. Of course, males also have a higher SD of talent and considerable superiority in 3D rotation.
There is no consensus at all that "abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes". You, Damore, and the tech-bros are just making this crap up. A review paper by Halpern et. al. explains among other things that using your reference to argue for biological causes is circular.
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
"A detailed consideration of potential indirect evolutionary influences on sex differences in math and science is beyond the scope of this monograph and, in fact, may not be possible given our current state of knowledge in these areas."
PT, You haven't even managed to Diane Halpern's views right. Let me quote from her.
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
Sounds a bit like Damore.
Of course, you haven't even managed to get your citation right. Let me quote for you
"Sex differences in science and math achievement and ability are smaller for the mid-range of the abilities distribution than they are for those with the highest levels of achievement and ability. Males are more variable on most measures of quantitative and visuospatial ability, which necessarily results in more males at both high- and low-ability extremes; the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive. "
Sounds more than a bit like Damore.
What does 'necessarily results in more males' mean to you? Something along the lines of 'Damore was right'? Does Google hire at the median level of ability?
Your book quote is from 1991. The paper quotes are from 2007. That Halpern changed her mind in 1991 presumably means she no longer thinks the source of the sex differences is "clear", which is also the view taken by the 2007 paper and I would agree with it.
> What does 'necessarily results in more males' mean to you?
It means males do better in those skills, but it's unknown whether that is due to social or biological factors. What do the below statements mean to you?
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
The older I get, the more I wonder if Damore and his bros were just unhappy with their sissy jobs that didn't actually require masculinity, so they made something up.
Damore read Diane Halpern's work and choose to believe in reality vs. PC. Shame on him. He (Damore) probably thinks that 2 + 2 is 4 and that the Earth orbits the Sun. Utterly shameful.
T, Basically, the political system has dug in with “The Sun orbits the Earth and you will pay dearly for daring to disagree” while the scientific community has embraced “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”.
The biological basis for sex differences in science/math achievement is a highly controversial topic in science. Show me the paper where it is a settled matter.
PT, " Show me the paper where it is a settled matter". Easy, how about the book (not a paper) that Diane Halpern wrote. Let me quote for you
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
1. We are talking about interest -- not ability. Obviously, high "achievement" is related to interest in the field.
2. Nothing in science is a "settled matter."
3. In rebutting someone's assumption that any variance from 50/50 "achievement" in a field MUST be due to discrimination, it is entirely reasonable to point to the well-evidenced science establishing average sex differences in interests, whether entirely biological or not.
4. This paper summarizes the scientific evidence as of 2007, which has only become more established since then. The evidence is deep and broad, and entirely consistent with Damore's points: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270278/
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
No, what he's questioning there is the competence of Google HR in assigning people to tasks using intersectional political bullshit as a guide. Do you think you're smart when you "spout talking points" (as the kids say)?
I think you're doing it wrong. The lesson of the story is that you can avoid offending the Twitter Robespierres in the first place if you just make yourself a famously misogynistic gangster rapper.
"the size of the misogyny matters!" - Probably not. Dr. Dre was not just a misogynist "Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks" but he beat up women rather severely. Did Apple have a problem with him? No. Did the Apple employees have a problem with him? No.
I was with you up until the last couple sentences.
No, Matt. These people are true believers. They seriously believe that speech is violence and opposing ideas are an existential threat. They genuinely do think that witches will float. That they're saving the world by extracting confessions from heretics. And most importantly of all, that doing all this means they're on The Right Side of History™, the modern version of Divine Right.
It's all the darkest elements of religion, stripped of difficult concepts like forgiveness and mercy. After all, the science-priests and media-priests have already declared them righteous, and those who oppose them are heathens. Self-reflection would just get in the way.
I'm not saying that NONE of them are self-serving cynics. But those aren't the ones I'm worried about. I'm sure we're all familiar with CS Lewis and his (overplayed but basically correct) observation about tyrants who oppress people for their own good, but for those who aren't, here it is.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
Beg to differ. The mass of true CRT believers are the (brainwashed but well meaning) troops given marching orders by the psychopaths driven to gain the levers of power as generals of the CRT army. Those generals are the main, concerning, actionable threat.
When attacking a snake, kill the head.
Which is just a metaphor, my alphabet agency friends.
But I agree 100%, the CRT zealots that drank deep of the Koolaid pose a serious if diffuse threat.
This reminds me an indefatigable douche condescending to a Hispanic commenter on another Taibbi article. The douche claimed to feel sorry for and care about saving the Hispanic commenter from his wrong-think, and meanwhile regaled us with a most comical, zero-self-awareness-doofus display of bigotry and repellant dislikeability.
I wouldn't worry about Hispanics if I were you or anybody. Hispanics will own us all at some point. I mean that in the sense of Hispanics generally sit back and watch the circus that is the rest of us spinning ourselves into oblivion while they (Hispanics) still generally don't give a shit about such woke concepts. One day when we destroy ourselves they will be there to pick up and move forward.
Travel anywhere in Latin America (I've been around quite a bit in my work life and spent weeks among the common places, not the tourist areas), and you'll see a culture that is alive and could give a shit less about your sensitivities. I wish we were still like that.
At least some of us are? I get endless amusement from the thrashing and gnashing of teeth generated by the "woke" community of late. Cheep thrills I suppose? I may be horribly wrong not taking them more seriously but they come off as overprotected infants in my opinoin. Of course, that's probably what led to the demise of the everyday German in 1939...
Agreed, however it's always important to remember the meaning of the NAZI portmanteau; National Socialist Workers Party (english translation). Lots of folks think of them as "far right", which couldn't be further from the truth.
I have an unfortunate tendency to individually engage in frontal assaults -- like Alvin York or Audie Murphy -- yet I lack their combat skill and am much less likely to make it back alive.
Mr. Bob I think Matt has a point here. The screeching horde of CRT true believers *appears* monolithic in their faith in the evil religion, but I bet Matt is right that at least some, the higher functioning neutral evil types, are just using the levers of power at their disposal. There have always been maladjusted types like that, and it's hard for honest people like us to see the liars.
And this is often how it plays out - the foot soldiers, or those further down whatever ladder is in play, often have a more limited understanding of what is really at play and latch on to partial and immature (sometime literally as these are often younger people being duped by older) ideas that they fervently believe in and provide the momentum.
I believe the will to power is pretty widespread; and that's what a lot of what we've been discussing is about. You'll notice that the field of action in the present case is usually a large bourgeois institution, like a university or a corporation. Apparently such institutions are corporately frightened of bad appearances or repute, whereas an individual (of independent means) might defy them.
Tiabi seems to be suggesting here that some of it might have to do with a guilty conscience. Apple is clearly guilty of some anti-social business practices and the people who work for them are clearly aware of this. If they want, like all people, to maintain the illusion that they are good and just, then they must dispel the cognitive dissonance somehow. The easier answer? Get someone canceled. They are able to experience the catharsis of affecting the world in a small way and now don't have to look at themselves in the mirror and think about the suffering their perpetuating.
"Maybe the signatories to the Apple letter can have a Chaos Monkeys book-burning outside the Chinese facility where iPhone glass is made — keep those Uighur workers warm!"
Too bad more writers aren't this acerbically funny anymore.
I find it quite hilarious that apparently none of the genius letter signatories, many of whom I'm assuming are women, realize that if you're the type to read a passage like this in a book and actually sign a letter calling for the author to be fired or, as is always the case these days, that you feel "unsafe" you actually ARE "soft, weak and generally full of shit." Even if this passage happened to offend you, which would require a massive degree of over sensitivity of the type that men in the 1950s would have said makes women unfit for business,you honestly can't just shrug your shoulders and move on? As Matt points out this is false outrage, but if even one person is truly threatened by this they need to be pointed gently towards mental health resources because you're not living in reality anymore. This is a perfect is example of what Christina Hoff-Sommers calls "fainting couch feminism". It should be an embarrassment to all women. This episode is kinda proving actual misogynists right, and that infuriates me.
"Even if this passage happened to offend you, which would require a massive degree of over sensitivity of the type that men in the 1950s would have said makes women unfit for business,you honestly can't just shrug your shoulders and move on?"
What is funny is that the only two commenters (to date) who have expressed outrage over this passage have masculine handles: "Ethan" and "Andrew." Of course, they might actually be women. Anyone can pretend to be a dog on the internet. MT might have a vast female readership which isn't bold enough to mix it up in the comment section and is currently on the fainting couch, but that's a concept of which I am personally dubious.
Meanwhile, most of the self-identified female commenters who have spoken out seem to think the passage is funny, or at least not deserving of censorship.
"Most men in New Jersey are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding arrogance, and ceaselessly vaunt their mental capabilities, but the reality is, come dinner time or yard chores, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a landscaper gift certificate or a redneck boyfriend."
"as is always the case these days, that you feel "unsafe" you actually ARE "soft, weak and generally full of shit."
Excellent point. That language of "feeling unsafe" is no more a reflection of their true feeling than when a police officer "is afraid for their life" after they shoot someone. By moving the language to "hostile work environment" language you circumvent most challenges that might otherwise be raised with a for cause firing.
When we create narrow exclusions to established rights in extreme cases, you can expect people to keep expanding those narrow exclusion until something external stops them from going any further.
My favorite line from Hoff-Summers is that 'there isn't a campus rape problem, there's a campus rape fantasy problem'. The Rolling Stone hoax was testament to her words.
That’s not the only passage, there are others that Taibbi doesn’t mention. I can’t speak for women, but as a man, if I choose to assume a Bad Boy persona part of the deal is accepting the consequences. Ultimately it’s just rational on Apple’s part to get rid of him. If they were to hire a guy who wrote negative shit about women in a best-seller, 2000 employees sign a letter saying they don’t want to work with him, and then he goes and harasses a woman, the company is screwed.
On accepting the consequences of Bad Boy personas... Let's hope Dr. Dre doesn't harass any women. I liked his beats on The Chronic, but his misogynistic lyrics make Antonio's comments seem blandly anodyne. I think what Matt is saying is that it's disingenuous to feign righteous indignation behind a computer screen and take down an easy target. Especially when challenged to follow this logic through to the end and it leads to some uncomfortable places. Steve Jobs himself, the anointed founder of Apple, was not known for his empathic and inclusive views on the bullied and oppressed. As a matter of fact, that's how he motivated people to do their best work, at least according to the stories. Will Apple apologize in retrospect for how they go to where they are? And that's not even addressing their current failures "making... the world more just." They still make iPhones in China at cut rate prices, right? I suppose as long as it's not affecting the US citizens who buy the products, it's okay. The Uighurs can't have their culture, but at least they'll have jobs.
Beyond the inconsistency of how Apple applied this rule, I would have greater sympathy if this information had come out after they hired him.
Chaos Monkey's was a best seller they were clearly aware of at the time of hiring. I feel when a company has all the facts at the time of hiring, they have some moral obligation to defend that decision, unless they are simply running a popularity contest, which is something they might want to warn applicants about in advance.
Yeah, this happened to me in academia. Probably just after it happened to Matt? The public ones that we know about are just the tip. (Just the tip. Sounds like the kind of eXile juvenalia that got Matt into trouble.)
In my case, I wrote a department-wide e-mail that suggested my tenured colleagues were hypocritcal for pretending to be Marxists while taking summer sessional work from extremely vulnerable and underpaid sessional professors who received no salary--zero dollars--over the four summer months. Three of my colleagues filed formal complaints against me under the college's "bullying & harrassment act" which had been hastily enacted earlier that year in a response to MeTooMania. A college-hired arbitrator found, over three months of closed-door testimony involving all members of my department,(secret testimony--a Freedom of Information requested produced hundreds of redacted pages), that because allegations of hypocrisy, however they are made, are known to cause humiliation, and because under the new bullying & harrassment act" anything anyone does to anyone else that causes that person to feel, subjectively, that they have been bullied or harrassed means that they have been bullied or harrassed, my publicly circulated e-mail was deemed harrassment. More hilariously, a third complainant--in no way referenced in my e-mail but a recipient to the thread to which I responded--was deemed to have been a witness to bullying & harrassment, which the arbitrator decided was the same thing as having been subjected to it directly.
Wrote this mostly to say that if they haven't come for you, it's probably just a matter of time--mostly I feel, because they've found out that they can. At will. On a whim. For anything. For sport. For revenge. Because they're bored. Because there no longer appears to be forces sufficient to stop them. Seems to me they're just getting going.
Agree on this one. Did the same about uni summer work and did not get the blow-back you got but made no headway for our adjuncts and found the union was not supportive either.
My faculty union claimed that while the bullying & harrassment act certainly infringed on academic free speech, the bullying & harrassment act was also, always at the same time, they said, a necessary, institutional response to a new, federal (Canadian) law. As such, they told me the accusation was unchallengeable until after a verdict had been reached. The bullying & harrassment act of my former employer contains dismissal, outright termination, as its maximum penalty and my union instructed me that this was a reasonable outcome for which I should be prepared.
A week before fall classes were set to resume, I was called into admin and advised that I had been found guilty of bullying & harrassment for an e-mail that invoked the right to conscience in its first sentence, and went on to quote Foucault as an admonishment not to forget the foundations of our discipline. My accusers were each issued letters of commendation for their courage. I was issued a letter of censure.
I went on sick leave, as was my right as a nine-year veteran of the institution with tenure. I was in shock. I could not get out of bed. So they mailed me a registered letter to my house which fired me for "abandoning" my position.
The union grieved this. So, I was hired back when the attorneys pointed out that firing tenured professors on medical leave was illegal. My employer kept me on the books for three years, collecting disability leave. Technically, I am still a full professor with seniority. Only they do not pay me a cent anymore, or list my name on the departmental web site.
Meanwhile, I sold my house, packed up the family, moved to the closest major city and am living in an one-bedroom apartment in a working class neighbourhood. I keep my head down and am waiting for the right time to resurface fully. If that time ever comes.
My letter of censure would have expired three years ago now, but I never went back. Best decision of my life. It was financially ruinous, of course, to walk away from tenure, but I can tell you that my happiness levels, since becoming an ex-academic officially earlier this year, are unprecedented. It is fucking expensive having a conscience on this continent, but it is really the one thing that you should never, ever have to do without.
The union's final position, for the record, was quite beautiful: professors cannot be tried for bullying & harrassment; 2) unless they are found guilty, in which case a guilty verdict validates the otherwise illegal process. You can't make this stuff up.
I agree with some of Kotkin's analysis, in particular where he describes the dangers of corporate power and an economic system that does not work for the working and the middle class. But his tone is the one of a writer who is angered by the fact that the left may be winning the culture war and, in particular, that some billionaires and corporations currently favour the left over the right. Much of what he writes reads like a plea with the power elites to support Republicans and not Democrats (he even raises the specter of a French-like revolution).
The problem is the following. If my impression is right than Kotkin supports corporate power as long as it is on his side of the culture war. Did you see any interesting proposal by Kotkin of how to curb corporate power?
I got a nook recently. Not as slick as kindle, but the bigger screen is nice. Lots of used books out there, too. Find them on Amazon and order directly from the seller website, which is often cheaper.
I suppose it wouldn't make any difference if I stated that, as an old, white, crippled woman who watched the Professional Class white women launch the neo-feminism that has led to any criticism of someone with a vagina now automatically being labeled "misogyny", including other women, I totally agree with Antonio about the ability of most Professional Class women to survive any real collapse of civilization. The fact so many are ardently vegan on the grounds killing animals for food is a crime equivalent to mass murder will likely starve to death is a case in point.
Granted, men take the same position, but when I'm attacked for daring to even suggest not everyone is metabolically capable of ceasing to be an omnivore, it's almost always by women who haughtily inform me I'm worse than Ted Bundy for daring to continue eating bacon.
On a more serious note, you know what this reminds me of? The Terror during the French Revolution. Have a neighbor you dislike? Report her as having spoken favorably of the nobility. Off with her head! Even though the blood being shed is symbolic, is it not the same mindset—a demand everyone adhere with absolute purity to whatever the mob dictates is acceptable?
I would add that the employe letter signers at Apple, or NYT or WSJ and etc. share a psychological profile of a petty neurotic desperately seeking an antidote for that ever so painful dead ender realization of inferiority and impotent inner rage combined with being just plain old fashion bad person. They volunteered for juries during French revolution, joined the mobs during witch hunts, went from B and C students to leaders of cultural revolution in China, and while over their heads Ivy leagues get professors and deans fired. Today after that brief moment of faux power they disappear in history as the newspaper staffer that can badly afford to live in a Brooklyn walkup or a prisoner of a cubicle staring at a monitor patrolling clickbait analytics 10 hours per day and with joining another twitter mob being the highlight of their miserable unhappy existence. The most pathetic and dangerous forms of humanity.
I know someone who was canceled before canceling was packaged as necessary for "safety" or "justice." They cancelers were a pack of envious, spiteful jackals animated by resentment of a top performer who was also as generous as she was naive. Afterwards, they would slink around the office in a state of semi-shame. Today they would be openly proud.
Had "Antonia" Garcia-Martinez written this alternative passage she'd be lauded:
"Most *men* in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement chauvinism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."
He could've written it about most men or women in the bay area. Most people don't know how to change their own oil, put up a sturdy shelf, or be able to do anything that isn't pre-packaged. The cancellers' puling and sniveling merely show how succinctly he summed up their "value".
A great intensity to this piece. "They’re just ordinary greedy Americans trying to get ahead, using the tactics available to them, and it’s time to stop thinking of stories like this through any other lens."
JBP has said women channel their urge for violence through gossip, innuendo, and character assassination. He's not wrong. And since men channel their urge for violence through violence -- which is frowned on in the workplace -- there's some, uh, inequity, going on right now.
I was encouraged by the comments. I posted a remark defending James Damore, then did a quick search to see if any earlier commenters had done the same. Oh, yeah. Plenty.
JBP has also said: We know what masculine totalitarianism looks like, but we've never seen feminine totalitarianism. Maybe that's what we're witnessing take shape right now.
Thank you for a perfect assessment of most of the Silicon Valley. A few years ago when we decided to leave, after a quarter century, a mother at my son's school was stunned. Why would anyone ever want to leave? When I mentioned the ever increasing homelessness and poverty that was quickly expanding into areas where it was never before seen, she replied. "I have never really noticed, but I'm so busy, all the time...".
It was as if no one eating a $300 a head dinner, before wine, could be bothered to contemplate the circumstances of the their waiter, who enjoyed a short commute, because he lived in a camper down the street. A friend once had the audacity to show up at a play date with non organic grapes. A successful engineer, she was lectured , that her children should only consume organic, locally sourced produce. When my friend jokingly noted, she hailed from Michigan, and local produce was a bit hard to find there in the winter, the other mother went on about how easy it would be to simply cover the midwest in hot houses, if those in fly over country, would simply care about their kids and the environment.
Much of the population most concerned with global warming, sees no problem with daily grocery and restaurant deliveries, flying private or owning multiple, large homes. It is a level of feudal, hypocrisy nearly unfathomable, for someone who has not personally experienced it. I worry the sanctimony will one day spread throughout the country, before everyone realizes the Emperors have no clothes.
I'm stunned every time I visit the bay area at how blind residents are to the widespread squalor. You can't even get to the $300 a head restaurants without setting over a few homeless anymore, and yet the well off seem blind to it. Many there think they're in some sort of utopia, never mind the urine, feces, encampents, high crime rates, widespread poverty, massive income disparity, rolling blackouts, miserable traffic and pollution. Parts of LA and SFO are 3rd world, and there is no political will to tackle the problem.
[“There are some in the Valley, such as notorious ex-Googler James Damore, who suggest this is because women and people of color lack the innate qualities needed to succeed in tech.”
Needless to say, Antonio never wrote anything like that]
Coincidentally enough, neither did Damore
Unfortunate that Matt framed Damore's memo that way (and then linked to Verge's take!). Matt, you got it wrong. Damore's memo was honestly directed at how to get more women interested in working in tech and specifically at Google, citing the general proclivity for females to be more interested in people and males to be more interested in things. Read Damore's memo before you jump to conclusions. It wasn't about "innate qualities" (suggesting a lack of tech intelligence), it was about innate interests. Very different.
I believe that was a quote from the Verge, not Matt's framing, but I could be mistaken.
I believe you are correct.
"The Verge" - Where the truth goes to die
Damore did write that women "generally" have differences vs. men that would make them not so good at tech.
Damore: "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things , relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing)."
Controversial theories that Damore may have learned in evolutionary biology classes should not be used at work to speculate that a bunch of employees are biologically unsuited to their tasks. He should have stayed in systems biology (his PhD subject before dropping out) instead of muck-raking at Google.
Even the quote you provide is hedged with a key word ("generally") and focuses on the interests of the individuals in question rather than innate ability to succeed
Exactly. When you say something like "men are stronger than women", somebody always points out this one chick they know who's totally buffed out. I think ask how many women they know who AREN'T and if this one person is the exception rather than the rule........
If you want some actual science on this subject, see "Men are stronger than women (on average)" (https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2015/02/25/men-are-stronger-than-women-on-average/). Quote
"But on Twitter recently I saw an article which quantifies the difference in concrete ways. To be honest the difference shocked me. The paper is Hand-grip strength of young men, women and highly trained female athletes. As you can see in the figure above the sample sizes are large".
Yep. Roughly 1 in 4 women are stronger than the weakest 25% of men. Only the very very very top of them will rival even average men.
------------------
The upshot is that the very strongest female athletes are barely above the median of grip strength for men. The top 75th percentile of female athletes are below the bottom 25th percentile of men.
Another way to look at it is cumulative distributions. You can tell looking at this that there is overlap between the two sample distributions. How much? Ten percent of women have stronger grips than the bottom five percent of men. The difference in distributions is big enough that the very strongest non-elite athlete female in the whole data set has a weaker grip than most of the men.
Well, also size of a person makes a difference.
On the other hand women maintain their physical strength to a much greater age than men, or so I have read. Since we spend most of our lives outside of our prime, it may be that the aggregate average physical output of women is greater than that of men. 'Stronger' can have more than one meaning.
I'm not talking about "this one chick" I know. A large fraction of girls from nearly age zero are told to play with dolls. We have no idea whether this, or biology, explains later differences in interests and abilities between sexes.
I need to read up on this, but I've heard on some podcast (don't remember which, may have been Sam Harris) that looking at Scandinavian countries, where the most consistent and long standing effort has been made to make opportunities for men and women as equal as possible, that over time women and men have become even more stratified along professions traditionally considered male vs female.
Deco, You are correct. It is called the Gender-equality paradox.
That's interesting. I worked for a couple of months in Denmark in the 1980s. The workplace was extremely stratified by gender: the techies were all male, and the women did other kinds of work, usually secretarial or administrative-bureaucratic. In New York, where I normally worked, there was some stratification, maybe 70-30 or 60-40, but nothing like Denmark. No cause was obvious -- there was no overt discrimination. It occurred to me, though, that Denmark's population at that time was ethnically almost entirely Scandinavian, whereas New York, as everyone knows, is very mixed in race/ethnicity, culture, religion, life experience, and political framework.
Be careful. Larry Summers (a nasty piece of work, in general and as an economist, but still...) got in a lot of trouble for raising exactly this awkward question:
"What constitutes equality? What if there really are inherent differences that average out (eg, in IQ scores) but lead to big differences in, eg, career choices? Is it equality if some fields are dominated by men and others by women?"
The more ideological members of his audience (he should have known better) didn't want to deal with that, so they misrepresented his comments and intent (granted, interpretable as making excuses). And got away with it because nobody really wants to touch that one, and anyway he's a nasty piece of work.
Summers was fired because U. presidents aren't supposed to cause controversy; they're primarily fundraisers. Should have known better.
PT, More lies. Juvenile primates in other species show the same differentiation of interests (male juvenile primates play with trucks, female juvenile primates prefer dolls) that human children show.
Sorry, what? That sounds ridiculous. I have never seen any other primate species play with trucks, or dolls, or anything even remotely close.
That may be true and is interesting data. Yet we should be very careful when generalizing from primates to people, and that kind of research-level speculation does not belong in a workplace where people just need to get stuff done. Witness Coinbase and Basecamp discouraging political chatter at work.
You may have no idea, because you don't seem to read much.
Ideas in which men and women have significantly greater legal, social and economic equality show far greater disparity in careers chosen than the U.S. Fewer women really do like engineering. AND THAT'S OK.
Is it OK? Is it what people really want? Even as a child I was irritated by gender, racial, age, and other expectations, as if we were all a bunch of robots waiting to be programmed.
But don't you think it's a little odd that women in general are attributed with the gift of creation and a propensity for it, while men are most often characterized as mechanical? Yet engineering, by it's nature, is inherently creative?
I'm male and I'm a successful engineer. I'm also a musician and vocalist. My father was a distinguished engineer who was responsible for the US Navy's fleet balistic nuclear missile system, from Polaris through Trident. My mother was an accomplishd female vocalist. I apparently inherited both traits?
I can't escape the opinion my gender isn't all that important an influence on my talent?
Or maybe lots of men don't like engineering much either, but they have fewer choices. So they get decent grades and a technical career because of social pressure, which women experience less. You don't seem to think much.
Luckily, you know best what's good for those girls and will instead demand they work at places like Google.
They sure are blessed to have you looking out for them and telling them what they should do!
My attitude is to not pigeonhole someone from an early age.
At the hospital child care center I administered (20 years ago), the children played with what ever they wanted....much to the chagrin of some of the dads. Boys played with dolls, girls built with Lego bricks, etc. And yet, inevitably the boys a tree stick or carrot stick and fashion it into a gun. And often it was the girls who were the first to empathize with another, but they didn't always fall into stereotypical male/female roles. It was always our goal to help them develop the best of both genders. After all, my master's thesis argued that the best leadership was androgynous.
For every question, there is an answer that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong. You seem to seek such banalities.
Also, while we're in ''anecdote' as the singular of 'data'" territory, I'm reminded of the liberated young mother who gave her son dolls and her daughter trucks and construction equipment to play with, only to find her son having the dolls fighting each other and jumping of cliffs and the daughter tucking her baby backhoes and monster trucks in to bed after a nice "oil party". Called and raised!
ps) We actually DO have lots of "idea" about sexual predelictions, including experimental, anthropological and historical. YOU may not have such "ideas" because you snatched at the first, easiest to understand, and best-fit-to-agenda answer you saw.
Actually, we have some data. It turns out that juvenile monkeys have exactly the same toy preferences as human children. Is this enough to prove that biology (not sexism) dominates child toy preferences. Probably not. However, It does suggest the answer.
*then ask. Stupid no edit button.
I'm pretty sure Google wants a positive atmosphere at work, rather than speculation about the biological deficiencies of some of their workers.
We don't consider men's generally lower interest in being preschool teachers and nurses to be a deficiency. Why would women's generally lower interest in being auto mechanics and programmers be a deficiency?
My husband was a carpenter and tried to convince three daughters to go into the trades. None did. It wasn't they couldn't do the work it was the mess, the sanitation facilities and getting dirty. There still are not many women in the building trades. Entire work structures need to accommodate better. Tech support where I work seems to have more women because the larger organization has tried to accommodate their preferred working conditions. I think the org. structures are where change needs to start. Not sure if large construction sites ever will, but tech could.
A dirty secret is that the autists are the problem in tech. They have social issues and it bothers women more than it does men. Most women find the environment abhorrent.
The problem is that the key feature of the autists, along with high function in things that make them good in tech, is that social issue. I've made a whole career acting as a translator for people much farther out on the spectrum than I am. Telling them to stop doing it doesn't fix the problem.
Thank you Deco for saying this. Exactly. You know why? Because traditional women's work is devalued. A programmer at Google is more important than a kindergarten teacher. Our values are screwed up!
How much do we pay to do yardwork versus childcare?
This isn't quite right. The kindergarten teacher gets paid more than a garbage collector, another traditionally male-dominated profession.
Why, oh why, do we devalue the garbage collectors?
For low-level Googlers, not being so interested in the nuts and bolts of tech is certainly a deficiency.
Damore's point isn't that no women are interested in nuts and bolts. Many are and thrive at Google. But the fact that Google hasn't achieved a 50% female engineer employment roster can't be explained away as Google's sexism. You also have to look at whether women are even interested in the first place, in the same numbers as men, in being engineers.
You think being interested in people instead of things is a DEFICENCY?
Sounds sexist.
Exactly true! And it is.
I’ve read the Damore memo/rant, and, while blacks not and cogent, it is in no way an unhinged misogynistic rant, nor a criticism of the female engineers present at Google.
Buzzfeed on Damore "James Damore, author of the anti-diversity Google memo". The actual memo begins with "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes". Did that stop Buzzfeed and Gizmodo from lying about Damore? No. Did they suffer any adverse consequences from lying? No.
blunt-not blacks not. Give us an exit feature Substack pleeeeeeeeease!
You mean an edit feature? :-p
Yes, if some Google employees think that the Sun orbits the Earth, then we must fire anyone who dares to disagree.
So you think the source of sex-differences in tech is scientifically understood with the certainty of orbital mechanics? Then you're like those global-warming people who have some interesting data and are immediately convinced that the world will soon be unlivable.
PT, Apparently you can't recognize sarcasm and/or analogies.
It's more akin to quantum mechanics than Newtonian physics. You cannot measure a lot of things with great certainty, but the statistical predictions are meaningful.
On orbital mechanics; "To go faster, slow down. Anyone who understands orbital mechanics knows that." -- Scott Cherf, NASA Ames Research Center, god only knows when...
Oh come now; the global warmists aren't that bright to begin with, how could they possibly be so coniving?
I think sex-differences in humans are as well understood as orbital mechanics in the time of Galileo. Sex differences in humans are (probably) polygenic and (probably) influenced by society. Of course, orbital mechanics was not all that clear 400 years ago.
That literally made me LOL. "Don't be evil" eh? From the company that routinely rapes small business ad budgets by recommending increasing your budget by phone sales people literally lying through their teeth. Add Facebook to that pile.
They changed it!! (About simultaneous with their "awokening"??)
They moved from the proscriptive "Don't be evil." (seeking to differentiate themselves from M$ and Apple, no doubt), to the prescriptive "Do the right thing."
Pretty telling.
PT, Wrong as always. Damore didn't write anything critical about the 'biological deficiencies of some of their workers'. Go look up the original Damore memo. This raises the interesting question. Do you know that you are lying or are you just repeating the lies of others?
My read is that she (like Damore) believed the BS (that Google welcomes dissenting views). Like most companies, Google does not.
And, in an adjacent reality, Bob wanted to be close to his family, fish on the weekends, and make lots of money.
I don't think pointing out differences in interest equates to differences in ability.
PT, You are just lying. The Damore quote is about interests, not abilities. Of course, Damore was right. The 'people vs. things' Cohen's D is over 1 for men vs. women.
And what is Cohen's D for interest vs. ability in tech? Nobody would want to hire someone unintersted for in job, because they would suck at it.
PT, See "Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). This analysis produced a Cohen's D of 0.93.
Abstract
The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for Holland's (1959, 1997) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional), Prediger's (1982) Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest areas. Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. Average effect sizes varied across interest inventories, ranging from 0.08 to 0.79. The quality of interest inventories, based on professional reputation, was not differentially related to the magnitude of sex differences. Moderators of the effect sizes included interest inventory item development strategy, scoring method, theoretical framework, and sample variables of age and cohort. Application of some item development strategies can substantially reduce sex differences. The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.
What the hell? I have completely lost interest in my job and I'm still amazing at it.
Same here. I’m amazing at a multitude of things I have no interest in, and that don’t even pay me to be amazing at. Meanwhile, I suck spectacularly at a multitude of things that interest me to no end. Like playing killer riffs on the guitar, baking sourdough bread, staying organized and chasing after my daughter to clean up her messes. Interest level at 10. Competency at 3.
I hate to bring this up, but grade inflation is a thing, even when we grade ourselves.
His point was not that women would “not be so good” in tech. His point is that fewer women were interested in the things. I’m a female engineer and, while I enjoy science talk, the practice of it bores me. Too much mundane detail. I’d much rather be involved in how science and tech affects society and people. Many of my female engineering grads have gravitated to management as a result. So I totally understand and agree with Damore as I lived it and see it all around me.
Odd, but I had almost exactly the same experience vicariously through my wife and the arc of her carrier as a female software and hardware engineet over the 35 years we worked together in the Valley. Not only did she migrate into management, most of the other women we worked with did the same. I'm sure there were some who prefered management to being what, in the vernacular of the time, was an "individual contributor", the career path into management was encouraged by the three large companies we worked for together back in the 70's, 80's and 90's. Not to say she wasn't talented at management, she was, but she was also a talented engineer. Each of the places we worked emphasized that path not only for her but also for the other women we worked and socialized with.
That might be due to the problem men had as well though. There were many of us who recognized that there were few opportunities for advancement, once you hit a certain level of proficiency, that weren't management? I faced somewhat lesser pressure to go into management even though I was absolutely horrible at it, but there was almost no path for advancement other than management. A few companies we worked for had what they called Technical Leader or "Fellowship" possitions, but they were mostly honorary titles and equivalent to Director level management roles. Nothing approaching VP.
I will say that I always prefered female managers. I found them much easier to work with and less likely to consider me a threat.
Generally speaking, I've noticed that most people who do code / programming / systems design etc. burn out after a few years. I don't know if there's a sex difference.
"engineer" not "engineet". Why can't I edit a posted comment? And why doesn't this site have a built in spell checker?
Welcome to Thunderdome.
My unsolicited advice is to embrace the typos. People generally know what you meant.
I'm a little obsesive when it comes to spelling, a trait beaten into me by my first boss way back when, before spell checkers were even invented. I'm afraid I've become pedantic. I'll adapt, give me a little more time... :)
LW, In general, women tend to be quite interested in science, but not in engineering. Did you mean "I’m a female engineer and, while I enjoy engineering talk, the practice of engineering bores me".
I don’t agree. Engineering is applied science - more interesting than so-called “pure” science. Practicing both is boring to me. More interesting is the policy and societal implications of the application of scientific principles.
LW, You will note that I used the phrase 'In general, women". That turns out to be true. Quote from "Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)
"As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female."
In general, women are more interested in pure science vs. engineering.
Differences in interests and a tendency to make different choices ≠ different innate talent and capability
RR, If you are interested in a detailed discussion of this subject, see "Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/). Quote
"In the year 1850, women were locked out of almost every major field, with a few exceptions like nursing and teaching. The average man of the day would have been equally confident that women were unfit for law, unfit for medicine, unfit for mathematics, unfit for linguistics, unfit for engineering, unfit for journalism, unfit for psychology, and unfit for biology. He would have had various sexist justifications – women shouldn’t be in law because it’s too competitive and high-pressure; women shouldn’t be in medicine because they’re fragile and will faint at the sight of blood; et cetera.
As the feminist movement gradually took hold, women conquered one of these fields after another. 51% of law students are now female. So are 49.8% of medical students, 45% of math majors, 60% of linguistics majors, 60% of journalism majors, 75% of psychology majors, and 60% of biology postdocs. Yet for some reason, engineering remains only about 20% female.
And everyone says “Aha! I bet it’s because of negative stereotypes!”
This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
When I got into computer programming around 1965, half of my colleagues were female. After all, you had to _type_ (usually at a keypunch or a teletype) and what real man was going to do that? You also had to make it up as you went along -- there was less theory and experience then -- and women seemed to be good at that. In the '70s, regular educational institutions began to tune into the fact that there was a lot of money to be made, and they decided programming was a species of engineering. And we all know what an engineer looks like. Ten years later, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) was having conferences on the fact that there were so few women in the Craft -- a situation which they, themselves, had created.
As to things versus persons: when you work with code, you're conversing with a human project going back thousands of years, and you're using languages and symbols, a species of thought and activity women have been supposed to be better at than men. You make computers do things by talking to them.
Somewhat predictably, you have no idea what you are talking about. Quote from SSC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/#comment-533527).
"My impression is that there were lots of women in CS in 1980 for the same reason there were lots of Jews in banking in 1800: they were banned from doing anything else.
Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Everything you quoted is more or less correct (by my personal observation, anyway), except that the trend-spotters at Cosmo were a bit behind the wave. When the job was defined as 'engineering' their numbers declined pretty rapidly.
As for not knowing what one is talking about, you don't know the slightest thing about my knowledge and use of either natural or computer languages, so I don't know why you bother alluding to it.
I could also point out that computer languages are rather different than human languages. Of course, if you had experience with both you would know that.
I used to run into these people back in the day. One problem with them was that they did not play well with others, hence, it was difficult to get constructive work out of them. One that I sort of project-managed was assigned to do a specialized file transfer program and in a couple of weeks managed to insert a small interpreter for a BASIC-like language into it which had very little to do with the project. It was cute, though. When party-pooping higher management found out about this and other similar exploits (not through me) they canned him.
Crucially, "talent" and "capability" - technically "aptitudes" vs. "intelligence". Aptitudes are particular skills, eg math vs. verbal. This is familiar to anyone who's taken the College Board tests, or most intelligence tests. "Intelligence" is overall ability. Two people with the same IQ score may have very different aptitudes. So can populations - though there's no knowing at this point whether that's inherent or cultural.
IQ tests do not show that women are “smarter” than men or vice-versa. However, this proves less than you might think. A verbally oriented test will ‘prove’ that women are smarter. A visual-spatially oriented test will show the reverse. Indirect quote from James Flynn (now deceased)
“He points out that if you try to intentionally create a gender-neutral IQ test by throwing out items that favor one gender over the other, you find that you can't eliminate a female verbal advantage and a male advantage for visual-spatial items.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/201207/men-women-and-iq-setting-the-record-straight)
Damn. Edit: "-technically "aptitudes" vs. "intelligence" - are not the same thing. They vary independently." An accidental erasure messed me up.
True, but on the next page he argues against "social constructionists" and for "innate dispositional differences".
1) I have not read through the memo in a long time so I would have to understand what he means by "social constructionists".
Social constructionist could mean "someone who aims to engineer social incentives in a way that generates particular societal outcomes."
Social constructionist could also mean "someone who believes anything that exists within a person and describes his relationship to the external is a social construct."
If you are "against" the former, you are a doofus. If you are against the latter, you are perceptive and intelligent.
3) The term "innate DISPOSITIONAL difference" implies that the innate differences are oriented around DISPOSITION, not ability or talent.
On 3, disposition means interest, and people become good at what they're interested in. It's strongly correlated with ability. For "social constructionist", I'm pretty sure he meant the second definition. I'm not saying Damore is wrong. But I don't think his theories about sex-differences are firm enough to be widely accepted, and they don't belong in the work place. Porn is not necessarily wrong either, yet we don't have it at work.
It's always possible that Damore was confused about the situation. It is hard for people to fully overcome the prejudices the society inculcates in them from the time they are infants.
Damore's problem (and that of the mass media's journalists) is that it was anti-historical. https://brianhanley.medium.com/when-you-look-at-these-fields-you-see-soft-sciences-like-psychology-and-social-science-4fe4bca88f39
Women are huge in STEM, there are only a few subfields where they are currently minority. When you look at these fields, you see “soft sciences” like psychology and social science. But you also see very technical lab sciences like Vet-Med, Pharmacy, Bioscience, Medical and Dental schools with dominance or near equal representation by women. I went through a microbiology PhD program after years in software and a CS degree. FYI — Veterinary medicine is harder. And it is tougher than human medicine because you have to learn multiple species. Veterinarians do much of the medical research. Like others with graduate degrees, we are only qualified to teach MDs. Similar things go for pharmacy, biological science, medicine and dentistry. Across the board, we see that women either dominate or are approximately half. Those are highly technical, but they are friendly to women. Except in computer science and engineering, which are outliers, we see this.
Women used to be very common in the computer field, somewhere around 40% in 1980. When I was hired away to Wells Fargo in 1981, the networking group running point of sale I got hired into was all women except me. My boss was a woman, her boss was a woman, and her boss was a woman. It was mildly worth remarking on. There were all male groups at Bank of America that I came from, but it was mostly mixed and nobody even thought about it.
The best, fastest programmer I knew was a woman. We went from working on computer integrated manufacturing to making transaction and test systems for Mastercard. They had a system for monitoring lines of code per month, subtracting comment lines and compensating for cut and paste. This system tracked from the start of coding to the completion of successful integration test acceptance. Most were in the upper hundreds of lines per month. That was considered good in assembler. I was in the thousands. With her, they thought something was broken. Her stats were near 30,000. She thought she was just a bit above average and struggling to keep up.
Here’s a graph of how the veterinary profession went the opposite way. Isaacson says that in the late 1980’s women had dropped to 17% of college enrollments. If you graphed IT/software it would look sort of like this but the other way around.
Women took over this STEM field, at the same time that men were pushing women out of software. https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/Pages/100215g.aspx
It was even more marked in the 40’s and 50’s. Did you know that the night before the ENIAC demo, it wasn’t men working into the night? Yes, it was two women hooking it all up and making it work. In those days, computers were sold with the pitch that all you had to do is re-task your secretaries and they’d write the code and run the computers. The pitch was it would be cheap, because the workforce was inexpensive and wouldn’t expect a career track job. This was an extension of the way women were used in technology and accounting before computers. They did the math.
I can’t prove it, but I think that was also why black people, specifically black women, were hired into those positions of doing the calculations. They were cheap to hire, and they calculated anything. Later, those women became computer programmers. It was a natural thing and, “men didn’t think it was an important job.”
Even today, women dominate as bookkeepers. That’s not because it isn’t intellectually demanding, it’s because of the pay scale. It’s also because it doesn’t require a college degree in the field of accounting, finance, or computers.
Back in the 80’s there was another big difference in computer fields. Degrees in computer science were rare. Most people didn’t have a degree, just a high school education, and they did great. For at least 15 years, a degree was not an asset to getting a job in the field at all. I worked in banking and in computer integrated manufacturing. (I delivered the first successful plantwide system to Ford in 1985.) Once in a while a BSEE would be around, but mostly anything from a high school diploma (if that) to degrees in philosophy, music, art history, english, etc. (Yes, high school dropouts were found in computers back then. It was that era’s version of the college dropout success.) So both men and women who were working in the field didn’t have an inflated sense of themselves. We were all on the same level.
But that started to change in the late 1990’s, and after 2000, there was a big changeover. Kids came out of college who had absolutely no idea of the past, overstuffed with opinions based on ignorance. The job market tightened up. These days, the “wobbler” resumes that used to get called in are discarded instead.
The view from Silicon Valley is also a very US-centric view. I spent time in the former USSR in the 1990’s through to the end of 2005. I ran an office there for 5 years. A curious thing in Russia. Virtually all engineers (civil engineers, mechanical engineers, etc) were women. This made a difference in various small ways in architecture. For instance, stairways had pairs of rails on them as if for a chair lift that was broken. But what that was for was baby carriages, something obvious to a woman, that a man would not think of. Women ran the cities outside Moscow. They did it for no pay, because someone had to do it or everyone would die in the winters. They did it because that is what you do to take care of everyone.
The pissed of ladies are right about the “google manifesto”. Simply put, the memo is complete and utter horseshit. There is nothing else to say. It’s malarkey. Speaking as a biologist, yes, there are differences between men and women, and in other areas I would say so. But does that include “genetic suitability” to do math? To do software? To engineer technology? No.
This is a strange comment. How does someone with your background and training conclude that offering up horseshit that is easily debunked, as you have laid out, is cause for getting fired? Whatever happened to open and free debate? You think it's proper for employees to be terrorized into silence, as they are currently in every industry, because certain academic papers are deemed taboo? If your argument is with the findings of the studies Damore cited, why do you think Damore should take the fall for these experts? How is Damore wrong for trusting that academic papers that have undergone peer review are not universally deemed "malarkey"? Where did Damore argue that women are genetically unsuitable for anything? How do you go from being a scientist, to wanting to snuff out heretics because only your side gets the final word and there is nothing else to say?
Deco, You have facts on your side. Brian has 'truth'. Truth has no need for facts. Truth is what Jonathan Haidt called a “sacred value”. The purpose of truth is to smash facts. Stalin knew this. Lysenko knew this. Mao knew this. Hitler knew this. Brian knows this.
It’s just disheartening to see long time scientists who’ve been there done that succumb to anti-science methods and cheer on the purge.
"Damore's problem...is that it was anti-historical."
I see people get things wrong at work all the time. Very rarely do they get sent to a re-education camp, become national news and get terminated from their position. So the problem was probably something else, is what I am trying to say.
(... and that of the the national media and journalists...) I don't know much about Damore personally. Frankly, he (like Mr Schaeffer below) sounded like a jackass propping his Aristotelian thought experiments up with a few studies, and ignoring the empirical evidence. If he was a jackass he may have really lost his job because of that. I don't think it was necessary for Damore to be fired. But, he did make a big statement attacking the role of women in computer programming. He did it as an employee, to push his agenda.
Essentially all (all?) studies have found that men are better than women at mental rotation (rather relevant for programming). Boys are better than girls (on average) in Math (if you double this check the PISA/SAT/ACT/etc.) data. Here is a useful stat. The Fields Medal has been awarded since 1936. Exactly one woman has won. Numerous studies have shown that men are more variable than women (highly relevant at Google). Note that the PISA data shows that boy are better than girls (in absolute or relative terms) in all countries. There are no exceptions.
Of course, the truth is 'malarkey'. PC is truth and no one should ever forget that.
Somewhat predictably, you have no idea what you are talking about. Quote from SSC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/#comment-533527).
"My impression is that there were lots of women in CS in 1980 for the same reason there were lots of Jews in banking in 1800: they were banned from doing anything else.
Computer programming was originally considered sort of a natural outgrowth of being a secretary (remember, 77% of data entry specialists are still female today, probably because it’s also considered a natural outgrowth of being a secretary). Women had lots of opportunity in it, and a lot of women who couldn’t break into other professions naturally went into it. From a Smithsonian article on the topic, my emphases:
As late as the 1960s many people perceived computer programming as a natural career choice for savvy young women. Even the trend-spotters at Cosmopolitan Magazine urged their fashionable female readership to consider careers in programming. In an article titled “The Computer Girls,” the magazine described the field as offering better job opportunities for women than many other professional careers. As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was “just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it…. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: “I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there’s as much opportunity for a woman.”
Then people let women become doctors and lawyers, so a bunch of the smart ones went off and did that instead."
Wow using a failed state (the USSR) to promote the talents of women. I guess we should use the 'success' of the Khymer Rouge to promote Communism or Mao's famines to promote Maoism. 'Long live the Great Leap Forwards!'. 'Crush Capitalist Roaders!'. 'Crush Trotsyites'.
No, he never asserted that. He simply noted that given the current evidence, women would continue to be less likely than man to seek jobs in tech. This is a simple probability statement based on evidence and evolutionary theory that would be evaluated by looking at group data. No intelligent researcher would assert that it should be used in evaluating individuals.
General preferences are not the same thing as biological differences.
He wasn’t trying to get women kicked out of their jobs. He was merely stating that women and men have different focuses and that could be the reason more women were not seeking jobs that they wouldn’t find personally enjoyable.
Damore's comments reflect the overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject. The Cohen's D for 'things vs. people' (male vs. female) is roughly 1.0. See "Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19883140/). These results are empirical. They are not derived from 'evolutionary biology classes'. Of course, males also have a higher SD of talent and considerable superiority in 3D rotation.
There is no consensus at all that "abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes". You, Damore, and the tech-bros are just making this crap up. A review paper by Halpern et. al. explains among other things that using your reference to argue for biological causes is circular.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2007.00032.x
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
"A detailed consideration of potential indirect evolutionary influences on sex differences in math and science is beyond the scope of this monograph and, in fact, may not be possible given our current state of knowledge in these areas."
PT, You haven't even managed to Diane Halpern's views right. Let me quote from her.
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
Sounds a bit like Damore.
Of course, you haven't even managed to get your citation right. Let me quote for you
"Sex differences in science and math achievement and ability are smaller for the mid-range of the abilities distribution than they are for those with the highest levels of achievement and ability. Males are more variable on most measures of quantitative and visuospatial ability, which necessarily results in more males at both high- and low-ability extremes; the reasons why males are often more variable remain elusive. "
Sounds more than a bit like Damore.
What does 'necessarily results in more males' mean to you? Something along the lines of 'Damore was right'? Does Google hire at the median level of ability?
nuance is hard when you're an ideologue.
Your book quote is from 1991. The paper quotes are from 2007. That Halpern changed her mind in 1991 presumably means she no longer thinks the source of the sex differences is "clear", which is also the view taken by the 2007 paper and I would agree with it.
> What does 'necessarily results in more males' mean to you?
It means males do better in those skills, but it's unknown whether that is due to social or biological factors. What do the below statements mean to you?
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
Grow up.
The older I get, the more I wonder if Damore and his bros were just unhappy with their sissy jobs that didn't actually require masculinity, so they made something up.
Damore read Diane Halpern's work and choose to believe in reality vs. PC. Shame on him. He (Damore) probably thinks that 2 + 2 is 4 and that the Earth orbits the Sun. Utterly shameful.
Interest and ability are different things. Is that hard to understand?
There is nothing "controversial" within science about biological sex differences. They may be "controversial" politically, as I suppose is evolution.
T, Basically, the political system has dug in with “The Sun orbits the Earth and you will pay dearly for daring to disagree” while the scientific community has embraced “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”.
The biological basis for sex differences in science/math achievement is a highly controversial topic in science. Show me the paper where it is a settled matter.
PT, " Show me the paper where it is a settled matter". Easy, how about the book (not a paper) that Diane Halpern wrote. Let me quote for you
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
1. We are talking about interest -- not ability. Obviously, high "achievement" is related to interest in the field.
2. Nothing in science is a "settled matter."
3. In rebutting someone's assumption that any variance from 50/50 "achievement" in a field MUST be due to discrimination, it is entirely reasonable to point to the well-evidenced science establishing average sex differences in interests, whether entirely biological or not.
4. This paper summarizes the scientific evidence as of 2007, which has only become more established since then. The evidence is deep and broad, and entirely consistent with Damore's points: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270278/
Halpern et al.:
"Experience alters brain structures and functioning, so causal statements about brain differences and success in math and science are circular."
"The state of knowledge on the neurobiology of sex differences does not permit strong statements, predictions, or recommendations."
Damore:
"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men
and women differ in part due to biological causes [...]"
Halpern et al
"At the time [I started writing this book], it seemed clear to me that any between-sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind."
No, what he's questioning there is the competence of Google HR in assigning people to tasks using intersectional political bullshit as a guide. Do you think you're smart when you "spout talking points" (as the kids say)?
If I ever have the woke mob chasing me w/ axes, Matt Taibbi is the writer I want telling my story. You're a good man, Matt.
I think you're doing it wrong. The lesson of the story is that you can avoid offending the Twitter Robespierres in the first place if you just make yourself a famously misogynistic gangster rapper.
"the size of the misogyny matters!" - Probably not. Dr. Dre was not just a misogynist "Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks" but he beat up women rather severely. Did Apple have a problem with him? No. Did the Apple employees have a problem with him? No.
You may think you are funny, but Stabby Girl is going to stab you
I was with you up until the last couple sentences.
No, Matt. These people are true believers. They seriously believe that speech is violence and opposing ideas are an existential threat. They genuinely do think that witches will float. That they're saving the world by extracting confessions from heretics. And most importantly of all, that doing all this means they're on The Right Side of History™, the modern version of Divine Right.
It's all the darkest elements of religion, stripped of difficult concepts like forgiveness and mercy. After all, the science-priests and media-priests have already declared them righteous, and those who oppose them are heathens. Self-reflection would just get in the way.
I'm not saying that NONE of them are self-serving cynics. But those aren't the ones I'm worried about. I'm sure we're all familiar with CS Lewis and his (overplayed but basically correct) observation about tyrants who oppress people for their own good, but for those who aren't, here it is.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
I wish you were wrong, people being arseholes to get ahead is not really that concerning.
It's the true believers that are a real theat, and underestimating their conviction is a serious mistake.
Beg to differ. The mass of true CRT believers are the (brainwashed but well meaning) troops given marching orders by the psychopaths driven to gain the levers of power as generals of the CRT army. Those generals are the main, concerning, actionable threat.
When attacking a snake, kill the head.
Which is just a metaphor, my alphabet agency friends.
But I agree 100%, the CRT zealots that drank deep of the Koolaid pose a serious if diffuse threat.
This reminds me an indefatigable douche condescending to a Hispanic commenter on another Taibbi article. The douche claimed to feel sorry for and care about saving the Hispanic commenter from his wrong-think, and meanwhile regaled us with a most comical, zero-self-awareness-doofus display of bigotry and repellant dislikeability.
I wouldn't worry about Hispanics if I were you or anybody. Hispanics will own us all at some point. I mean that in the sense of Hispanics generally sit back and watch the circus that is the rest of us spinning ourselves into oblivion while they (Hispanics) still generally don't give a shit about such woke concepts. One day when we destroy ourselves they will be there to pick up and move forward.
Travel anywhere in Latin America (I've been around quite a bit in my work life and spent weeks among the common places, not the tourist areas), and you'll see a culture that is alive and could give a shit less about your sensitivities. I wish we were still like that.
At least some of us are? I get endless amusement from the thrashing and gnashing of teeth generated by the "woke" community of late. Cheep thrills I suppose? I may be horribly wrong not taking them more seriously but they come off as overprotected infants in my opinoin. Of course, that's probably what led to the demise of the everyday German in 1939...
It's not the Nazi's they most resemble. It's a mix of Bolshevik's and Maoist's.
Agreed, however it's always important to remember the meaning of the NAZI portmanteau; National Socialist Workers Party (english translation). Lots of folks think of them as "far right", which couldn't be further from the truth.
I don’t worry. Miguel definitely doesn't need anyone’s concern or help. He’s a force. S James was relentless but outmatched.
S James Davis! I foolishly got into it with him. Never jump into a tarpit.
...put another way, "Don't wrestle with a pig in the mud. They like it."
Some of us were sniping from the edges trying to draw off fire.
I have an unfortunate tendency to individually engage in frontal assaults -- like Alvin York or Audie Murphy -- yet I lack their combat skill and am much less likely to make it back alive.
I think you generally show a great deal of nuance. That dude was a huge asshole.
Mr. Bob I think Matt has a point here. The screeching horde of CRT true believers *appears* monolithic in their faith in the evil religion, but I bet Matt is right that at least some, the higher functioning neutral evil types, are just using the levers of power at their disposal. There have always been maladjusted types like that, and it's hard for honest people like us to see the liars.
My take and my take only: The true "true believers" are the foot soldiers.
The higher-ups... well, the Empire could always use another good Stormtrooper.
And this is often how it plays out - the foot soldiers, or those further down whatever ladder is in play, often have a more limited understanding of what is really at play and latch on to partial and immature (sometime literally as these are often younger people being duped by older) ideas that they fervently believe in and provide the momentum.
I believe the will to power is pretty widespread; and that's what a lot of what we've been discussing is about. You'll notice that the field of action in the present case is usually a large bourgeois institution, like a university or a corporation. Apparently such institutions are corporately frightened of bad appearances or repute, whereas an individual (of independent means) might defy them.
Useful idiots, to quote V I Lenin.
i rlly don’t think it matters what the motivation of it really is in the heart of the canceller. the effect is the same, and it needs to stop
Stopping demagogues has been the problem for a few thousand years.
Agree. People have mixed motives, just as they did when burning heretics.
I decided to write about this (free): https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/arrow-bolts-of-heretical-godlessness
Tiabi seems to be suggesting here that some of it might have to do with a guilty conscience. Apple is clearly guilty of some anti-social business practices and the people who work for them are clearly aware of this. If they want, like all people, to maintain the illusion that they are good and just, then they must dispel the cognitive dissonance somehow. The easier answer? Get someone canceled. They are able to experience the catharsis of affecting the world in a small way and now don't have to look at themselves in the mirror and think about the suffering their perpetuating.
Great reply. Thanks for the quote.
Brilliant.
"Maybe the signatories to the Apple letter can have a Chaos Monkeys book-burning outside the Chinese facility where iPhone glass is made — keep those Uighur workers warm!"
Too bad more writers aren't this acerbically funny anymore.
I find it quite hilarious that apparently none of the genius letter signatories, many of whom I'm assuming are women, realize that if you're the type to read a passage like this in a book and actually sign a letter calling for the author to be fired or, as is always the case these days, that you feel "unsafe" you actually ARE "soft, weak and generally full of shit." Even if this passage happened to offend you, which would require a massive degree of over sensitivity of the type that men in the 1950s would have said makes women unfit for business,you honestly can't just shrug your shoulders and move on? As Matt points out this is false outrage, but if even one person is truly threatened by this they need to be pointed gently towards mental health resources because you're not living in reality anymore. This is a perfect is example of what Christina Hoff-Sommers calls "fainting couch feminism". It should be an embarrassment to all women. This episode is kinda proving actual misogynists right, and that infuriates me.
"Even if this passage happened to offend you, which would require a massive degree of over sensitivity of the type that men in the 1950s would have said makes women unfit for business,you honestly can't just shrug your shoulders and move on?"
What is funny is that the only two commenters (to date) who have expressed outrage over this passage have masculine handles: "Ethan" and "Andrew." Of course, they might actually be women. Anyone can pretend to be a dog on the internet. MT might have a vast female readership which isn't bold enough to mix it up in the comment section and is currently on the fainting couch, but that's a concept of which I am personally dubious.
Meanwhile, most of the self-identified female commenters who have spoken out seem to think the passage is funny, or at least not deserving of censorship.
Reverse the comment and make it about men:
"Most men in New Jersey are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding arrogance, and ceaselessly vaunt their mental capabilities, but the reality is, come dinner time or yard chores, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a landscaper gift certificate or a redneck boyfriend."
I think I need to find a fainting couch.
Full disclosure - I don't pretend to be a dog, I am a dog.
I believe this guy may also be lurking around here.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOLaRDGVAAQ-zJR.jpg
I admire your evident intelligence and dry humor, Grisha..
"as is always the case these days, that you feel "unsafe" you actually ARE "soft, weak and generally full of shit."
Excellent point. That language of "feeling unsafe" is no more a reflection of their true feeling than when a police officer "is afraid for their life" after they shoot someone. By moving the language to "hostile work environment" language you circumvent most challenges that might otherwise be raised with a for cause firing.
When we create narrow exclusions to established rights in extreme cases, you can expect people to keep expanding those narrow exclusion until something external stops them from going any further.
My favorite line from Hoff-Summers is that 'there isn't a campus rape problem, there's a campus rape fantasy problem'. The Rolling Stone hoax was testament to her words.
That’s not the only passage, there are others that Taibbi doesn’t mention. I can’t speak for women, but as a man, if I choose to assume a Bad Boy persona part of the deal is accepting the consequences. Ultimately it’s just rational on Apple’s part to get rid of him. If they were to hire a guy who wrote negative shit about women in a best-seller, 2000 employees sign a letter saying they don’t want to work with him, and then he goes and harasses a woman, the company is screwed.
On accepting the consequences of Bad Boy personas... Let's hope Dr. Dre doesn't harass any women. I liked his beats on The Chronic, but his misogynistic lyrics make Antonio's comments seem blandly anodyne. I think what Matt is saying is that it's disingenuous to feign righteous indignation behind a computer screen and take down an easy target. Especially when challenged to follow this logic through to the end and it leads to some uncomfortable places. Steve Jobs himself, the anointed founder of Apple, was not known for his empathic and inclusive views on the bullied and oppressed. As a matter of fact, that's how he motivated people to do their best work, at least according to the stories. Will Apple apologize in retrospect for how they go to where they are? And that's not even addressing their current failures "making... the world more just." They still make iPhones in China at cut rate prices, right? I suppose as long as it's not affecting the US citizens who buy the products, it's okay. The Uighurs can't have their culture, but at least they'll have jobs.
Beyond the inconsistency of how Apple applied this rule, I would have greater sympathy if this information had come out after they hired him.
Chaos Monkey's was a best seller they were clearly aware of at the time of hiring. I feel when a company has all the facts at the time of hiring, they have some moral obligation to defend that decision, unless they are simply running a popularity contest, which is something they might want to warn applicants about in advance.
Then Apple, if it is serious, needs to fire anyone involved in any way in hiring him. Aren't they even more guilty of wrong think?
I loved every single bile-drenched word of this fucking piece.
Yeah, this happened to me in academia. Probably just after it happened to Matt? The public ones that we know about are just the tip. (Just the tip. Sounds like the kind of eXile juvenalia that got Matt into trouble.)
In my case, I wrote a department-wide e-mail that suggested my tenured colleagues were hypocritcal for pretending to be Marxists while taking summer sessional work from extremely vulnerable and underpaid sessional professors who received no salary--zero dollars--over the four summer months. Three of my colleagues filed formal complaints against me under the college's "bullying & harrassment act" which had been hastily enacted earlier that year in a response to MeTooMania. A college-hired arbitrator found, over three months of closed-door testimony involving all members of my department,(secret testimony--a Freedom of Information requested produced hundreds of redacted pages), that because allegations of hypocrisy, however they are made, are known to cause humiliation, and because under the new bullying & harrassment act" anything anyone does to anyone else that causes that person to feel, subjectively, that they have been bullied or harrassed means that they have been bullied or harrassed, my publicly circulated e-mail was deemed harrassment. More hilariously, a third complainant--in no way referenced in my e-mail but a recipient to the thread to which I responded--was deemed to have been a witness to bullying & harrassment, which the arbitrator decided was the same thing as having been subjected to it directly.
Wrote this mostly to say that if they haven't come for you, it's probably just a matter of time--mostly I feel, because they've found out that they can. At will. On a whim. For anything. For sport. For revenge. Because they're bored. Because there no longer appears to be forces sufficient to stop them. Seems to me they're just getting going.
Agree on this one. Did the same about uni summer work and did not get the blow-back you got but made no headway for our adjuncts and found the union was not supportive either.
What was the outcome? Are you still there?
My faculty union claimed that while the bullying & harrassment act certainly infringed on academic free speech, the bullying & harrassment act was also, always at the same time, they said, a necessary, institutional response to a new, federal (Canadian) law. As such, they told me the accusation was unchallengeable until after a verdict had been reached. The bullying & harrassment act of my former employer contains dismissal, outright termination, as its maximum penalty and my union instructed me that this was a reasonable outcome for which I should be prepared.
A week before fall classes were set to resume, I was called into admin and advised that I had been found guilty of bullying & harrassment for an e-mail that invoked the right to conscience in its first sentence, and went on to quote Foucault as an admonishment not to forget the foundations of our discipline. My accusers were each issued letters of commendation for their courage. I was issued a letter of censure.
I went on sick leave, as was my right as a nine-year veteran of the institution with tenure. I was in shock. I could not get out of bed. So they mailed me a registered letter to my house which fired me for "abandoning" my position.
The union grieved this. So, I was hired back when the attorneys pointed out that firing tenured professors on medical leave was illegal. My employer kept me on the books for three years, collecting disability leave. Technically, I am still a full professor with seniority. Only they do not pay me a cent anymore, or list my name on the departmental web site.
Meanwhile, I sold my house, packed up the family, moved to the closest major city and am living in an one-bedroom apartment in a working class neighbourhood. I keep my head down and am waiting for the right time to resurface fully. If that time ever comes.
My letter of censure would have expired three years ago now, but I never went back. Best decision of my life. It was financially ruinous, of course, to walk away from tenure, but I can tell you that my happiness levels, since becoming an ex-academic officially earlier this year, are unprecedented. It is fucking expensive having a conscience on this continent, but it is really the one thing that you should never, ever have to do without.
The union's final position, for the record, was quite beautiful: professors cannot be tried for bullying & harrassment; 2) unless they are found guilty, in which case a guilty verdict validates the otherwise illegal process. You can't make this stuff up.
I agree with some of Kotkin's analysis, in particular where he describes the dangers of corporate power and an economic system that does not work for the working and the middle class. But his tone is the one of a writer who is angered by the fact that the left may be winning the culture war and, in particular, that some billionaires and corporations currently favour the left over the right. Much of what he writes reads like a plea with the power elites to support Republicans and not Democrats (he even raises the specter of a French-like revolution).
The problem is the following. If my impression is right than Kotkin supports corporate power as long as it is on his side of the culture war. Did you see any interesting proposal by Kotkin of how to curb corporate power?
So did you find any concrete proposals by Kotkin how to curb corporate power?
Matt may not have intended this to be a panegyric to Antonio, but I can't rush out to buy Chaos Monkeys fast enough.
Streisand effect. Book is out of stock on Amazon. Just picked it up for kindle.
I use Amazon as little as possible and buy all of my books at Barnes and Noble. Free shipping if you become a member at $25/year.
I got a nook recently. Not as slick as kindle, but the bigger screen is nice. Lots of used books out there, too. Find them on Amazon and order directly from the seller website, which is often cheaper.
I suppose it wouldn't make any difference if I stated that, as an old, white, crippled woman who watched the Professional Class white women launch the neo-feminism that has led to any criticism of someone with a vagina now automatically being labeled "misogyny", including other women, I totally agree with Antonio about the ability of most Professional Class women to survive any real collapse of civilization. The fact so many are ardently vegan on the grounds killing animals for food is a crime equivalent to mass murder will likely starve to death is a case in point.
Granted, men take the same position, but when I'm attacked for daring to even suggest not everyone is metabolically capable of ceasing to be an omnivore, it's almost always by women who haughtily inform me I'm worse than Ted Bundy for daring to continue eating bacon.
On a more serious note, you know what this reminds me of? The Terror during the French Revolution. Have a neighbor you dislike? Report her as having spoken favorably of the nobility. Off with her head! Even though the blood being shed is symbolic, is it not the same mindset—a demand everyone adhere with absolute purity to whatever the mob dictates is acceptable?
Bacon
I would add that the employe letter signers at Apple, or NYT or WSJ and etc. share a psychological profile of a petty neurotic desperately seeking an antidote for that ever so painful dead ender realization of inferiority and impotent inner rage combined with being just plain old fashion bad person. They volunteered for juries during French revolution, joined the mobs during witch hunts, went from B and C students to leaders of cultural revolution in China, and while over their heads Ivy leagues get professors and deans fired. Today after that brief moment of faux power they disappear in history as the newspaper staffer that can badly afford to live in a Brooklyn walkup or a prisoner of a cubicle staring at a monitor patrolling clickbait analytics 10 hours per day and with joining another twitter mob being the highlight of their miserable unhappy existence. The most pathetic and dangerous forms of humanity.
They're like the guys in Deliverance who want outsiders to squeal like pigs.
except that their parents spent tons of money on orthodontists.
I know someone who was canceled before canceling was packaged as necessary for "safety" or "justice." They cancelers were a pack of envious, spiteful jackals animated by resentment of a top performer who was also as generous as she was naive. Afterwards, they would slink around the office in a state of semi-shame. Today they would be openly proud.
Had "Antonia" Garcia-Martinez written this alternative passage she'd be lauded:
"Most *men* in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement chauvinism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel."
In the end Antonio set up his own ironic demise.
He could've written it about most men or women in the bay area. Most people don't know how to change their own oil, put up a sturdy shelf, or be able to do anything that isn't pre-packaged. The cancellers' puling and sniveling merely show how succinctly he summed up their "value".
I think they are two independent dimensions of capability.
A great intensity to this piece. "They’re just ordinary greedy Americans trying to get ahead, using the tactics available to them, and it’s time to stop thinking of stories like this through any other lens."
JBP has said women channel their urge for violence through gossip, innuendo, and character assassination. He's not wrong. And since men channel their urge for violence through violence -- which is frowned on in the workplace -- there's some, uh, inequity, going on right now.
I was encouraged by the comments. I posted a remark defending James Damore, then did a quick search to see if any earlier commenters had done the same. Oh, yeah. Plenty.
JBP has also said: We know what masculine totalitarianism looks like, but we've never seen feminine totalitarianism. Maybe that's what we're witnessing take shape right now.
I know a piece lands well when it both infuriates me and increases my respect for the writer's ability. Probably your best piece yet, Matt.
Thank you for a perfect assessment of most of the Silicon Valley. A few years ago when we decided to leave, after a quarter century, a mother at my son's school was stunned. Why would anyone ever want to leave? When I mentioned the ever increasing homelessness and poverty that was quickly expanding into areas where it was never before seen, she replied. "I have never really noticed, but I'm so busy, all the time...".
It was as if no one eating a $300 a head dinner, before wine, could be bothered to contemplate the circumstances of the their waiter, who enjoyed a short commute, because he lived in a camper down the street. A friend once had the audacity to show up at a play date with non organic grapes. A successful engineer, she was lectured , that her children should only consume organic, locally sourced produce. When my friend jokingly noted, she hailed from Michigan, and local produce was a bit hard to find there in the winter, the other mother went on about how easy it would be to simply cover the midwest in hot houses, if those in fly over country, would simply care about their kids and the environment.
Much of the population most concerned with global warming, sees no problem with daily grocery and restaurant deliveries, flying private or owning multiple, large homes. It is a level of feudal, hypocrisy nearly unfathomable, for someone who has not personally experienced it. I worry the sanctimony will one day spread throughout the country, before everyone realizes the Emperors have no clothes.
This is why Trump got elected. At least he didn't do that. A sanctimonious fraud in other ways, but it was his attractiveness.
I'm stunned every time I visit the bay area at how blind residents are to the widespread squalor. You can't even get to the $300 a head restaurants without setting over a few homeless anymore, and yet the well off seem blind to it. Many there think they're in some sort of utopia, never mind the urine, feces, encampents, high crime rates, widespread poverty, massive income disparity, rolling blackouts, miserable traffic and pollution. Parts of LA and SFO are 3rd world, and there is no political will to tackle the problem.
To attempt to do so will get one cancelled.