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I don't think it's safe to comment on these types of articles online. These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future.

You may think you are reasonably debating or discussing something, but you have to consider that someone in the next 50 years may review your post history and use it against you.

Theoretically, we would need to make throwaway accounts to have meaningful discussions.

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That's essentially the problem that the article is trying to bring attention to - our culture of intellectual hostility.

The only way this will ever change is if people stop caving in to political correctness.

I realize it's a prisoner's dilemma in that individually it's in nobody's best interest to speak out, but that's an incredibly selfish mindset. We need to start valuing integrity and doing the right thing. It was never in any slaveholder's best interest to speak out against slavery, or in any white person's best interest to speak out against racism in a Southern community in the early 1900s after a lynching - but speaking out was the right thing to do and should be commended.

This is not the same thing, is it? From reading the comments in most forums, looks like people seems to at least partially support the contents of the memo and the guy for writing this. Also, he is not speaking out in support of the minority, he is insinuating that they may be biological not suited for the job.

<s>If only we could decide the characteristics and job of a person based on the person's birth, race and other things totally out of a person's control, society would be so much better.</s>

but that's not what he's saying at all is it? The memo says that the diversity initiatives that google puts in place (I presume trying to get close to 50/50 gender representation) is a bad idea because more men than women are going to be developers naturally, due to gender differences in interest or aptitude. That doesn't mean women can't be developers or that female developers are less capable - it means there are naturally going to be less of them. I don't understand why so many people are misreading what the memo author was saying. Is it wilful?

I read in comments from people who claimed to work for Google - diversity initiatives in Google aim to bring the diversity close to the male-female ratio in the applicant pool. Couple of other companies I know where number of employees are in thousands, the diversity initiative aims to achieve something similar. That does not seem like a bad idea at all.

Humans are complex beings. Is interest in a specific field or profession a function of only gender? Would not the surrounding environment, role models, religion, books read, experiences in life and various other countless factors affect a person's interest and character?

I don't think he was wilful. He was wrong to reduce a complex subject like human interests and behaviour into a simple statistical function.

> Google aim to bring the diversity close to the male-female ratio in the applicant pool.

This is a laudable goal only if gender isn't used to discriminate against candidates. Discrimination on gender and race is wrong, period. Discriminating against men, whites, and Asians is still discrimination, and is not ok.

Nobody's going to disagree with you that environment and the individual play a strong role in affecting one's character. These straw man arguments are getting old.

Just because women tend to be naturally more empathetic than men doesn't mean that men aren't fit to be psychologists. It just means that more women will pursue that profession.

Are there any studies that concludes empathetic people become psychologists (honest question as I do not know)? Or is it an assumption that we make because of the nature of the profession?

Also, is empathy a function of only gender - would not the surrounding environment, role model, religion, books read, experiences in life and various other countless factors affect if a person develops empathy?

> Are there any studies that concludes empathetic people become psychologists

I don't know, but it would follow from common sense that people who are better at X will be more likely to pursue a career where being good at X is beneficial.

> Also, is empathy a function of only gender

Definitely not. Empathy can most certainly be developed.

> These comments are stored and indexed forever and whatever we say could be used against us at some point in the future.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news

This dataset contains all stories and comments from Hacker News from its launch in 2006. Each story contains a story ID, the author that made the post, when it was written, and the number of points the story received.

This effect is accelerating. After a certain point, everyone will have so much dirt to dig up that a few out-of-context comments from years past won't prejudice anyone much at all. In fact, the absence of dirt might become a little suspicious.

Right. And just look at Trump. He adamantly denied Obama's U.S. citizenship, joked about grabbing women by the genitals, made fun of a war vet for being captured, mocked a disabled person, etc. His wife has nude pictures. They're president and first lady. People are fed up with political correctness, and the bubble is starting to burst.

This is why you don't tie your real life identity to your online one. Freedom of expression requires that you can't be persecuted for saying your piece.

Indeed. But I wholly expect that sometime in the next few decades machine learning will be able to identify real people and their online personas based on text patterns and such and not the current method that's based on leakage, or having a handle like "johnasmith" or something.

What you think is discrete today, may not be tomorrow.

Even today I'm sure Google and Facebook could identify you just based on traffic patterns (e.g., "chii" has lots of traffic on hacker news and then from the same location "john a smith" has traffic on facebook). They don't sell that info today, but perhaps in the future.

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