Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

I've only ever reported to women in ten years in the public sector it's cool because you can blind them with logic iirc

you don't actually go blind when you roll your eyes all the way back

Ha

time for some levity

can't believe Google just fired me for sneaking up on Indian co-workers and using my calipers on their skull... I have a right to my opinion

— real gabagool 🔷🥇🆒 (@jimpjorps) August 8, 2017

lol

nice

you're much too emotional right now to engage on a rational level with me. good-day, sir

— real gabagool 🔷🥇🆒 (@jimpjorps) August 8, 2017

Yeah, I was thinking about this recently myself; at the beginning of my career, everywhere I worked was very close to a 50/50 split between male and female software engineers/managers; around the tail end of the dotcom boom, everything suddenly became very, very male. Now, we have I think 3 women on our team; 2 in QA, 1 in development. A 4th recently left the company. All 4 are among the top performers in our group and are in high demand; this has been true of the vast majority of women I have worked with over the past 20 years.

I got this impression from where I work too. If you filter everyone who's been there for 20+ years, you get a pretty even split. Nowadays our training classes are something like 80/20. I thought that Medium comment hit the nail on the head but I can't help but wonder if gamer/nerd culture which is predominantly marketed to men has a lot to do with it as well. When I was in college I couldn't help but notice I was one of like three comp sci dudes who didn't want to make video games. I imagine a lot of young gamers choose coding as a career by default. Sometimes I wonder if I did.

money attracts young, stupid men. it's not that complicated.

this happens to any industry that gets "hot", it gets overrun by young asshole men looking to get rich, they're like lemmings. evil lemmings.

I guess in America you can append "white" to that and still be reasonably accurate

what? i thought men and women had the exact same drives and motivations, and sought high paying jobs with identical fervor, and it was systematic sexism that precluded women from getting those jobs? wait... actually i thought 'men' and 'women' were societal constructs with no basis in biology, so what is this conversation even about?

the freedom to waste your coworkers' and managers' time with your interesting social theories on their inferiority

we just give all the good stuff to white dudes and they start measuring your cranium and complaining about emotions on the rare occasion when they don't get what they want

and yes i read his memo. the original, with the charts and footnotes and everything. hard to know if the biodeterminist anti-anti-racist types are lying to themselves or to the world but my patience for them is zero.

really? it's not hard to know. they're sincerely believe what they're arguing. duh.

tbh the only real response to his entire spiel is "Nah"

I also, having met some of these types and having had some really retrograde ideas in my youth, would claim that a lot of this isn't sincere belief as much as feeling uncomfortable at situations where you feel a loss of sense of control and adopt some reverse-engineered logic others have put out there to justify a certain status quo

the best is when you find one of the scientifically-employed ones saying things like "we need to save race-science [not called that by them obv] from actual racists" or "it's a shame you can't talk about this w/o people accusing you of believing terrible things"

and yeah the memo is mostly about gender but, in v anodyne language, it's all there:

Be open about the science of human nature.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.html

○ Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.

yeah there's a lot of dog whistles in there. this isn't a naive guy who has no idea who he's aligning himself with.

lol I have a couple scientist friends who are brilliant and analytical but occasionally will make a guess or assumption about something outside their field and it's painfully naive. I love them, though

imo he might still be naive enough not to know why these ideas are bad or why people reacted to his words the way they did

that's the other emotional intelligence thing that they miss -- having an idea of how your ideas are perceived by others is important when communicating with them. if you're a successful racist or sexist you still need the *perception by others* that you're an understanding person, even if you're actually hiring all men because you're a misogynist

really aside from the content i have trouble wrapping my mind around the motivation here. yes i assume these things all seem painfully self-evident to him, but... i mean who on earth is going to write up a report about an extremely painful and contentious political subject and then send it to everyone at work. it's nuts!

this is literally how software bros communicate, via long manifesto. I don't think he sent it as in email, but posted it to his public google docs and linked it in their discussions or w/e

ok. something about the internal culture there is clearly alien to me.

there are a number of software blogger types that have been linked on a handful of threads, I get the impression that blog-like posting internally at google is a thing for people to do when they want to make broad proposals, although someone closer to their internal culture can confirm that

he's not objectionable, but the formatting and graph interjections reminded me of blogs like Jeff Atwood's:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/

btw never forget http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/pharaohs-silicon-valley-my-journey-through-google--2618

From someone at Harvard: pic.twitter.com/N30hlRSSra

— Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) August 8, 2017

lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

I'm awful curious

has anyone noted that firing someone for doing what he did actually helps workplace "psychological safety" and is a very authoritarian, strong position to take? he should be in favor, imo

this is a great summary, and although I can't speak to it's accuracy, sounds about right from what I know
(url is about the topic in general, the specific comment is about Google's hiring culture)
http://www.metafilter.com/168651/Misogyny-based-on-flawed-erroneous-outdated-social-science-theories#7123515

https://www.wired.com/story/internal-messages-james-damore-google-memo

Rather than dismiss race science out of hand, Damore responds that he doesn't "know as much about racial issues" as he does about "gender ones." He goes on to claim, "Also, women and men have repeatedly been shown to have biologically driven differences in population level distributions of traits so it’s much easier to understand some of the forces (and their solution) behind the gender gap."
Eventually, Damore takes offense as he catches on: "I’ve been told by multiple people that you’re trying to bait me into saying something to get me fired and that you’ve done it before. This is perhaps the least Googley thing I’ve heard anyone do, please stop.”

in case ppl want to read a more non-CW liberal take, scott alexander is here to help: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/

I keep seeing references to that site, what's their deal?

to scott alexander? he's a long time blogger who often has insightful things to say. he's center-left & a psychiatrist irl but he has a kinda contrarian streak as well.

he'd definitely be towards the right by ilx standards but he polls the readership regularly and he has about even conservative + liberal self-identifying readers and they generally say it has a slight liberal tilt.

(lol giving you an entire political ideology apologia but u kno this is where we're at now so)

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander

I get the idea his readers/followers lean on certain issues a lot more than he does, but his own reading list leans toward people he disagrees with but is sympathetic to? tbh anyone who assumes you're familiar with M0ldbug is probably a little too deep into the "why should I read this" blogs

re the extended metaphor talk, these comments are from voxday.blogspot.com/2017/08/suppressing-dissent-at-google.html (a gamergate white supremacist site)

I despise SJWs too, but just wanted to provide a quick fact check: The author does not have a PhD; he "left" his PhD program in part due to fallout from a department-wide presentation where he discussed masturbating to his female colleagues.

and

@Weatherlea: The event occurred at a retreat and the conflict stemmed from the fact that the department wanted an apology while the author felt he did nothing wrong. Though SJW excesses in Silicon Valley need to be exposed, this guy isn't the right guy to stand behind.

also

Later, in what appears to be a group for libertarian-leaning Google employees, Damore asked for feedback, noting that his own libertarianism "influenced a lot of the document."

no fucking kidding

The whole thing he kept citing about people not feeling safe in certain positions is some real concern troll-style garbage, right? The libertarian/meritocracy line would be to let people work in positions they are qualified for and let them use their own judgment about their lives, with management having a sink-or-swim attitude. It’s this disingenuous “they’re not really qualified” opinion he has that he’s trying to temper with the idea he feels concerned

i haven't seen ppl commenting on the framing of his manifesto - v. rationalwiki/lesswrong but also afaik not that far away from the standard collective-self-optimization rhetoric that google promotes among its employees, embracing sober confrontation of biases and inefficiencies in thinking with the data that can be used to correct them

it seems like maybe that's one of the issues? that there is an older google culture colliding with a newer one?

you mean the data scientists vs the redditors?

as it were?

vs the gamergaters

.. I failed to make the connection that the graph in the manifestbro is in GamerGate colors pic.twitter.com/0fQfOhAeXw

— Geoffrey Thomas 🍥 (@geofft) August 8, 2017

this seems like a stretch, but i keep being disappointed so anything's possible

they have colors??!?

solid white iirc