Potemkin wrote:You are asking too much from people. They are what they are, and seem incapable of changing their own nature, which for the most part is self-centred, obtuse and wilfully ignorant. Given our biological nature as primates with turbo-charged brains, this is hardly surprising. Regrettable, but hardly surprising. As Immanuel Kant once noted, "Out of the warped wood of human nature, nothing straight was ever made."
One of our most common self-delusions is the belief that the human race is progressing and is constantly improving itself. In fact, every advance is simultaneously a regression as our fundamental nature reasserts itself and sabotages our best efforts to transcend ourselves. The human race has never been wealthier, yet millions starve in the midst of plenty. We have never been more knowledgeable, yet people open museums showing Jesus and the prophets riding on the backs of dinosaurs. We have never been more free, yet people lock chains of ignorance and superstition around their necks and wrists. We are rising towards the heavens, yet we are falling back to Earth at the same time. Things can only get better, and things can only get worse.
Fatalism is not in my repertoire - at least not yet. We may never make something perfectly straight but we can always try and aim for more straightness. We have certainly made
some headway and by historical standards we have leaped ahead in the last century. And as we have been to some extent successful in countering human nature, there is at least the possibility to do better in the future.
Potemkin wrote:In the long term, it seems to me that the human race is doomed. A paradoxical combination of cleverness and obtuse stupidity will destroy us in the end - our own creations will judge us, and condemn us to oblivion.
This is somewhat off topic, but I'm surprised by the pessimism. Don't you expect capitalism to inevitably evolve into communism at which point the world will be a better place?
B0ycey wrote:
Everyone has missed the point over this. Pichai even said most of the memo was up for debate. It was only the suggestion that members of their cooperation was not up for doing the job that got him fired (seems a weak argument when you read the memo actually).
Where Damore missed the point was that Google are trying to promote diversity and opportunity in their company, which is why these systems are put into place. Instead he was trying to imply that biology made these systems futile. Yet we have women in tech! So why not strive for more? At least promote the agenda.
Where Google missed the point is that they want to be an open and honest company. If they are going to fire someone because they make a criticism and then bogusly fire him without defending/explaining their policies, how can they advocate free speech?
And what is more surprising is 'supposedly intelligent' people have made decisions on emotion and not think logically when doing so.
I don't think Damore missed the point. He was specifically arguing against the way diversity is pursued at Google (although this is not a phenomenon restricted to only Google). He also pointed out that a 50-50 distribution in tech jobs may not be achievable (unless I guess we force it via quotas).
There is a lot of political pressure today to lift the percentage of women to 50% or higher in every academic field. A lower percentage is invariably taken as proof that women are victims of individual or systematic discrimination. Anybody with average intelligence should be able to recognise such a conclusion as the massive fallacy that it is. Further, if a company or university has some success they can expect to be showered with praise by the press. Companies have also sold diversity to their investors as a necessity for competitiveness and success, a claim that is quite likely baseless, and investors now expect that they do something about it.
Contrary to all the nonsense about women being oppressed and victimised, reality looks as follows.
1) Women in the US have for some time now earned the majority of bachelor and master degrees, and PhDs (see
here and
here).
Women Earn More Degrees Than Men; Gap Keeps Increasing
According to data from the Department of Education on college degrees by gender, the US college degree gap favoring women started back in 1978, when for the first time ever, more women than men earned Associate’s degrees. Five years later in 1982, women earned more bachelor’s degrees than men for the first time, and women have increased their share of bachelor’s degrees in every year since then. In another five years by 1987, women earned the majority of master’s degrees for the first time. Finally, within another decade, more women than men earned doctor’s degrees by 2006, and female domination of college degrees at every level was complete. For the current graduating class of 2013, the Department of Education estimates that women will earn 61.6% of all associate’s degrees this year, 56.7% of all bachelor’s degrees, 59.9% of all master’s degrees, and 51.6% of all doctor’s degrees. Overall, 140 women will graduate with a college degree at some level this year for every 100 men.
2) The "trouble" for the tech industry is that they choose to go into different fields (
Source):
The distribution of earned degrees looks similar. What's more, what is called the "people vs things" preference, where women prefer the former and men the latter, also seems to hold within fields such as medicine (see
here for a rather lengthy article on this).
3) And then there is the vexing finding - and I actually didn't know this until I looked into it a few days ago - that in more egalitarian societies the gender gap on the people-things axis and other traits is larger than for less egalitarian societies.
Wiley wrote:
How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta-analyses and three cross-cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people-oriented and less thing-oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender-egalitarian societies than in gender-inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
Now, somebody explain to me why this is a bad thing and why we should influence women to want different things and make different choices.