Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> punished for speaking out

It wasn't merely that he spoke out. It's not just what you say, it's how you say it. Saying "women, on average, have more neuroticism" is not how you start a dialog. It's how you start an argument.

Let's not debate whether it was a factual statement, but suffice it to say that "what I said was factual so there's nothing wrong with it!" isn't a defense. There are a million statements that are factual that you don't write down and distribute throughout the whole company.

Secondary goals aside, Google's main purpose is to build internet services and make money. If I were Google's management, I'd feel justified in firing him for having the poor judgment to approach things in a way that embroiled the whole company in a fight. The lost productivity alone from the distraction must have been costly to the company.

It's possible he was just trying to help, but you don't hire/employ people for good intentions; you do it so they'll be a functioning gear in a bigger machine. If they can't do that, they aren't fulfilling their purpose at the company.

"women, on average, have more neuroticism" is provably true. It's been measured. It's a shame that we can't start a discussion with the truth

source? (not trying to be snide or anything, I'm actually curious if there's a source for that)

For context, one should note that the word "neuroticism" is not used as a regular English word, but is one of the "Big Five" traits in psychology, which comes from factor analysis of personality surveys. Its "definition" would be something like "An underlying quality that correlates with answering 'Agree/Strongly Agree' on these questions and 'Disagree/Strongly Disagree' on those questions". Damore did not note this in his memo, which made the statement more offensive than it should have been.

With that established, if we go to Wikipedia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism#Age,_sex_and_geogr...

"A 2013 review found that groups associated with higher levels of neuroticism are young adults who are at high risk for mood disorders and women.[22]

For sex, the same review found that "research in large samples has shown that levels of N (neuroticism) are higher in women than men. This is a robust finding that is consistent across cultures. This is especially the case during the reproductive years, but is also visible in children and elderly." It furthermore said that EEG responses showed clear differences between the sexes in individuals with high N levels, but no functional MRI studies have yet been performed to investigate the differences in sex regarding N. However, there is a reason to suspect physiological differences to play a role because of previous studies that showed for example, a correlation between the size of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and N in female teenagers, so "the issue of sex differences in N and the implications for understanding N’s neurobiological basis deserve more detailed and systematic investigation."[22] A 2010 review found personality differences between genders to be between "small and moderate," the largest of those differences being in the traits of agreeableness and neuroticism.[37] Many personality traits were found to have had larger personality differences between men and women in developed countries compared to less developed countries, and differences in three traits—extraversion, neuroticism, and people-versus-thing orientation—showed differences that remained consistent across different levels of economic development, which is also consistent with the "possible influence of biologic factors."[37] Three cross-cultural studies have revealed higher levels of female neuroticism across almost all nations.[37]"

The abstracts of both of the cited studies are visible, though the full articles seem to be behind paywalls.

> Damore did not note this in his memo,

He kind of did - in fact when he used the word 'Neuroticism' he linked to the exact article you linked to above (the main article, not the sub section on age sex and geographic differences).

Unfortunately Buzzfeed (edit: got this wrong, it was actually Gizmodo) decided to strip all the links (and a few charts) out of the version of the document they published, and so many people didn't realise that was what he was talking about.

To be fair to Buzzfeed (can’t believe I just wrote that) we don’t know if they did, or if the mystery person who leaked it did.

To be fair to Buzzfeed it turns out I remembered it wrong and it was Gizmodo who originally published the memo, I've corrected that in my comment, but we do know that they stripped it on purpose, stating in the article: "The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted."

Wow I've only just seen this part (i was only familiar with the headlines of this story I never bothered to look into it until now) Whatever anyone's feelings on the issue one way or another, Gizmodo totally fucked this Damore over and I have to think it was deliberate, it doesn't make sense otherwise. I just browsed the original paper and there are citations all over the place - to strip those out is a deliberate move to influence the narrative, it has to be, I mean hell they edited it. They changed the nature of the guy's argument and there's no way in hell they didn't realize how big of an impact that would make (they're not going for a Pulitzer @ gizmodo, and they never claimed to that i know of, but still they aren't total journalistic imbeciles they had to have thought about it)

Wowwieee, I have to stop reading about this, it's depressing. This is a school bus fire. It sounds (according to Mr. Damore, and I'm not finding any disputes of this fact) like he posted this paper internally @ Google a long time before any of the hubbub and only when it became public did anyone have a problem with it. He claims to have gotten responses both positive and negative internally, which I can believe -- that sounds normal regardless of the issue at hand.

This is all PR bullshit. Is this what we've become?? If you can't have a reasonable, adult, calm discussion or debate on a topic then all hope is lost, almost everything else is moot at that point because the entire bedrock of modern society is crumbling. He presented a reasonable argument, and did it the right way (IMO). He wasn't spewing hate speech or name-calling or anything of the sort. He laid out his argument, cited sources from reputable studies in a professional manner, and asked for input/rebuttal. Only because he's asking questions some people may not be comfortable with did this go down the way it did. This is very, very sad, if we continue down this road it is not going to end well. for anybody.

> "women, on average, have more neuroticism" is provably true.

What does that have to do with anything? It does not support (let alone prove) the idea that they are less capable engineers because of this. Where is the science linking this to ability? I might as well state "men, on average, are more violent", or have narrower hips - this is provably true, but it would equally uncorrelated to suitability to the life of a software engineer.

In the context of the memo, he followed the neuroticism claim with a suggestion to "make tech and leadership less stressful", in order to help make the workplace more inclusive to women. You appear to assume that the whole thrust of the memo was to argue that women aren't suitable. The stated aim of the memo was to explore ways of reducing the gender gap, other than quotas. People are mad because about 4 statements out of 100 imply that women aren't suitable. The intention (road to hell and all that) seems to have been to say the reverse: that tech jobs don't suit women. Too fine a distinction to expect most people to make, I suspect.

> In the context of the memo, he followed the neuroticism claim with a suggestion to "make tech and leadership less stressful", in order to help make the workplace more inclusive to women

While appearing to be very scientific, the memo offers no science to backup the underlying assumption with that line of thought("The reason there is a gender gap is because women can't deal with the high-stress environments of tech/leadership"). This is a massive leap from neuroticism. If anyone has the science to back that assumption, I'll be happy to read it.

That's a leap that he explicitly encourages people not to make: populations have a lot of variation, and to look at a difference in means as a categorical difference, to convert "women have a higher population mean for trait X" into "women are more X", is wrong both mathematically and ethically.

(... And, yeah, I feel kind of pedantic here, but on this particular topic the people who don't think about it in terms of probability distributions are doomed to talk nonsense, and getting this right actually matters. So.)

I was talking in terms of population & probability - but that's neither here nor there because ultimately the distribution of the traits don't matter when the traits are not correlated with success/failure (or representation in C.Sci). That is the leap I am referring to: I'm not prepared to take the same leap (gender traits -> outcomes) others are taking without seeing the supporting literature.

edit: Rayiner's comment[1] explains the lack of scientific rigor way better than I did

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399052

What makes you think the memo claimed "they are less capable engineers"?

> It does not support (let alone prove) the idea that they are less capable engineers because of this

So you agree with what James Damore was saying then.

> What does [truth] have to do with anything?

Do you speak truth to power, or do you speak irrelevance to power?

Sure.

And men, on average, have a lower emotional quotient (EQ) than women and in the case of software engineers it is significantly lower.

So given that software engineering is a social activity i.e. it involves team work with a wide variety of other people. Perhaps then we should look to hire more women since men are biologically unqualified to do the job.

Or you know this line of reasoning is asinine.

Not so. First off, we're speaking specifically about Google, which might generalize to the extent of 'high performance' software jobs. Google hiring is selective enough that they can take candidates with exactly the traits they want, which for all we know could co-occur in men at a higher rate than in women.

But we're actually describing the candidate pool for these positions. Having a high EQ is rarely a motivating factor for going into software engineering at Stanford etc. It's people who come out of those programs and just so happens to have the right mix of EQ, drive, talent, and so on that apply to these jobs, and if the applicants are skewed male, the new hires will be as well.

"black people on average commit more crimes; these violent outburst make them unable to work in engineering teams"

Here; I took a real statistic, made it a generality and pretended that it applied to engineering.

Just because you cherry pick facts to support an argument does not mean that you are 'speaking the truth' as you wrote.

Moreover suggesting that a portion of your coworkers do not have its place here is crossing a very big line.

You are silly because huge groups of liberal psychologists use the same technical language "women, on average, have more neuroticism" - you want to fire them too?

Secondary goals aside, Google's main purpose is getting the data right - and if you can't even speak of the data, then how are you going to get it right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com