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Becker update V1.3.2
How America was neoconned into World War IV
Related: Airbnb is apparently banning users who appear to be going to Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. They apparently are doing “background checks” including looking through linked Facebook accounts for crimethink.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/airbnb-is-deactivating-accounts-of-people-trying-to-attend?utm_term=.pe4g1P13P#.rsJ74J4XJ
This is a new and very aggressive front in the Social Justice War: targeting users because of their possible intent to go to a political event (a “signature strike”) and “unpersoning” them.
If you're a true Rightist, then modern technology is not your friend and never has been. And don't give me any of the crap about how "the internet has allowed us to circumvent the media gatekeepers and get our message out." You mean the internet that sucks trillions out of the productive economy while making tapeworms like Mark Zuckerberg rich---that internet? The same one that funnels every last bit of your electronic data to the NSA? This whole Gutenberg mythology about the internet being some great scepter of liberation is the biggest pack of Whiggish nonsense since, well, Gutenberg. This whole way of thinking is a poison in the midst of the movement which must be purged.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/airbnb-is-deactivating-accounts-of-people-trying-to-attend?utm_term=.pe4g1P13P#.rsJ74J4XJ
This is a new and very aggressive front in the Social Justice War: targeting users because of their possible intent to go to a political event (a "signature strike") and "unpersoning" them.Replies: @Autochthon, @Intelligent Dasein, @reiner Tor, @Lurker
Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/airbnb-is-deactivating-accounts-of-people-trying-to-attend?utm_term=.pe4g1P13P#.rsJ74J4XJ
This is a new and very aggressive front in the Social Justice War: targeting users because of their possible intent to go to a political event (a "signature strike") and "unpersoning" them.Replies: @Autochthon, @Intelligent Dasein, @reiner Tor, @Lurker
The only reason these tech companies exist in the first place is for the Social Justice War. This is so obviously true in the case of Facebook and Google that it does not need elaborating. As for Airbnb, I don’t know why anybody on the Alt-Right would use it at all, but there are still far too many techie-libertarian types in the movement who think it’s a great idea. They rank right up there with the Bitcoin fanboys as useful idiots of the Deep State.
If you’re a true Rightist, then modern technology is not your friend and never has been. And don’t give me any of the crap about how “the internet has allowed us to circumvent the media gatekeepers and get our message out.” You mean the internet that sucks trillions out of the productive economy while making tapeworms like Mark Zuckerberg rich—that internet? The same one that funnels every last bit of your electronic data to the NSA? This whole Gutenberg mythology about the internet being some great scepter of liberation is the biggest pack of Whiggish nonsense since, well, Gutenberg. This whole way of thinking is a poison in the midst of the movement which must be purged.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/airbnb-is-deactivating-accounts-of-people-trying-to-attend?utm_term=.pe4g1P13P#.rsJ74J4XJ
This is a new and very aggressive front in the Social Justice War: targeting users because of their possible intent to go to a political event (a "signature strike") and "unpersoning" them.Replies: @Autochthon, @Intelligent Dasein, @reiner Tor, @Lurker
It is getting more and more totalitarian. Eventually they will tell all companies (including employers) about anyone’s participation in a political rally, and then total excommunication will follow: you’ll no longer be able to buy food at the grocery store. It won’t be a problem because you won’t have any money, since you won’t have a job and your business will be boycotted out of existence. Your only option will be begging on the streets for food. SJWs will roam the streets searching for badthinker beggars, and will threaten anyone willing to give them food.
In the 80s every day care provider was a pedophile and every heavy metal band was luring children to worship Satan. Then if became cool to pose as Satanists and people left day care providers alone.
I want my cyberpunk and world-controlling companies to have more cyborgs and fewer angry fat blue-haired women.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CLIWyKuHiQ
They're highly versatile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0XMCfbXUmQ
Here is a link to the only intelligent Establishment response to Damore’s memo that I have come across: So, about this Googler’s manifesto.
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: “And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech.”
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial —
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims —
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation —
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger’s conception of “engineering” is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, “It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work.”
Case closed! … Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner… E.g., why do Google’s hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore’s heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.
But I suppose one could argue that he is writing for an audience.
Whatever you're working on, is part of some bigger system. You can't ignore the constraints that that bigger system imposes. You have to be able to talk with the people who work on related parts of that bigger system, and you have to do it without pissing them off.
But ultimately you do have to be able to do the work, to execute. And Zunger kind of waves that away, like anyone can do it. Well, maybe he's so talented at nuts and bolts programming that he can't appreciate that it's difficult for others. But, however brilliant he is, he must have had to hire programmers at some point, and he would have seen that really good programmers are scarce.Replies: @Jack D
As usual, he is playing with straw men. To be a PROGRAMMER sometimes doesn't require much in the way of "empathy", but "software engineering" by definition means applying the systematic methods of engineering (by analogy) to the design of software. One of those principles is that any product, to be successful, has to be designed with the needs of the users in mind. To build an artificial leg, you first have to know what the needs of amputees are. You could never build a good one without talking to them. This has nothing to do with "empathy" in the feminine Bill Clinton "I feel your pain" sense. You could be the biggest cold fish in the world and feel no emotions for the poor slobs who are going to use your product, but you could still be a great engineer because you could coldly and clinically take their needs into account. In fact, being cold and clinical might even help you to make a better product as you probe their pain points without hesitation.Replies: @ic1000
If that was the main thing which determined engineers' performance, then people from HR would make great engineeers and spergs would be terrible ones. But they're not. So it isn't.
He's right that ceteris paribus interpersonal qualities (probably) make one more effective as an engineer, so women's possession of these abilities don't make them worse engineers. But that's a strawman since the manifesto didn't claim just this. It also claimed that women were (generally) worse at maths and spatial reasoning, which are (obviously) also necessary as an engineer, and that this was what resulted in fewer (or worse) female engineers. So this point is irrelevant to the memo, and the author of this response either has poor reading comprehension or is being deliberately misleading.Replies: @Stan Adams
https://medium.com/@Steve_Sailer/is-this-essay-a-parody-fb5b0cb0723f
Personally, I don't really think the "is this a parody?" meme is very clever or convincing, but whatever.
As for Zunger's essay, all it does is demonstrate the age-old truth that managers think whatever their perspective is is objectively good for the company and, ergo, critics of management are ipso facto harming the company. Commenters over on Medium are doing a good job of pointing out Zunger's factual errors, straw men, non sequiturs, and hypocrisy, so you can go over there if you're interested in that.
It would also be more accurate to say that it draws on the rare capacity to synthesize the two (typically male and female traits).Replies: @Anon, @res, @reiner Tor, @anon
http://jackbaruth.com/?p=7152Replies: @res
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
All the tech-SJWs should at least be forced to explain why this enfant terrible is wrong, using only the approved sociological theories. C’mon, it will be fun and quotes will be mined for a long time!
For instance, let it rip, string theory overlord Yonathan Zunger. Exactly why would you fire your underlings in such haste; please use only SJW-approved science as motivation.
I think they over played their hand now. This is the cycle of moral panic playing out until the next group steps in and takes over.
In the 80s every day care provider was a pedophile and every heavy metal band was luring children to worship Satan. Then if became cool to pose as Satanists and people left day care providers alone.
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
This is complete and utter nonsense. Coding is an even more solitary profession than writing, because the only time anyone will ever look at what you have done is when your code breaks.
In the occupations where feminine traits are indeed an advantage, women came to dominate these trades 100 years or more ago - telephone operator, nursing, secretary, receptionist, elementary school teacher, etc. Even though their bosses were horrible sexists and didn't even want women to vote, women dominated these occupations even 100 years ago and still do today because they were better at this kind of work and they liked doing it in preference to digging ditches or hauling garbage. Programming originally was going to be a woman's profession too (programmers were going to be the natural successors to "computers" who were also mostly female), but it turned out that women didn't like it much and drifted away.Replies: @benjaminl
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
IMO, he makes a big tactical error in point one, when he says “all the research.” Much more effective to confound and say something like “There’s no concensus.”
But I suppose one could argue that he is writing for an audience.
Events like this are great at uncovering who the fools and scammers are. It reminds me of the blood-test scene in The Thing (1982):
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
He’s absolutely right about what computer programming is really like. If anything, he understates the importance of people skills at even the entry level of programming.
Whatever you’re working on, is part of some bigger system. You can’t ignore the constraints that that bigger system imposes. You have to be able to talk with the people who work on related parts of that bigger system, and you have to do it without pissing them off.
But ultimately you do have to be able to do the work, to execute. And Zunger kind of waves that away, like anyone can do it. Well, maybe he’s so talented at nuts and bolts programming that he can’t appreciate that it’s difficult for others. But, however brilliant he is, he must have had to hire programmers at some point, and he would have seen that really good programmers are scarce.
I also loved “Colossus: TheForbin Project.” It’s still relevant today, if not more so.
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
From Zunger’s response:
So it sounds like he comes from the “empathetic” side of things rather than the mathematical.
As usual, he is playing with straw men. To be a PROGRAMMER sometimes doesn’t require much in the way of “empathy”, but “software engineering” by definition means applying the systematic methods of engineering (by analogy) to the design of software. One of those principles is that any product, to be successful, has to be designed with the needs of the users in mind. To build an artificial leg, you first have to know what the needs of amputees are. You could never build a good one without talking to them. This has nothing to do with “empathy” in the feminine Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” sense. You could be the biggest cold fish in the world and feel no emotions for the poor slobs who are going to use your product, but you could still be a great engineer because you could coldly and clinically take their needs into account. In fact, being cold and clinical might even help you to make a better product as you probe their pain points without hesitation.
Your point isn't inconsistent with one of Damore's suggestions, "De-emphasize empathy" or something similar.Replies: @Jack D, @inertial
“Mommy mommy, lookie. I got a willy but sister don’t.”
“You bad misogynist boy. To bed without supper.”
Whatever you're working on, is part of some bigger system. You can't ignore the constraints that that bigger system imposes. You have to be able to talk with the people who work on related parts of that bigger system, and you have to do it without pissing them off.
But ultimately you do have to be able to do the work, to execute. And Zunger kind of waves that away, like anyone can do it. Well, maybe he's so talented at nuts and bolts programming that he can't appreciate that it's difficult for others. But, however brilliant he is, he must have had to hire programmers at some point, and he would have seen that really good programmers are scarce.Replies: @Jack D
I think by the time someone gets hired for a programming position at Google, it’s a given that he (or she) is a good programmer (and if he isn’t, he isn’t going to be there for very long). That was sort of the basic premise of his critique – “we’re all good programmers at Google but to be a good software engineer you need more – you need feminine empathy.”
Ultimately this is just more of Leftism as the mirror image of the old sexism/racism. In the bad old days, white men were thought to have special qualities that women and minorities do not possess that enable them to build industrial civilizations and invent things – we now know it was entirely evil to have thought that way. In the new order, women and minorities have special qualities (“empathy”) that white men do not possess – it is good to think THIS way. Not only that but ONLY women and minorities have special positive attributes – white men have no unique positive attributes that they naturally excel at – all white man positive attributes are also possessed by women and minorities in EXACTLY the same measure. However, when it comes to white man evil attributes – greed, selfishness, not considering the feelings of others – those are unique to white men and are not shared at all.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/airbnb-is-deactivating-accounts-of-people-trying-to-attend?utm_term=.pe4g1P13P#.rsJ74J4XJ
This is a new and very aggressive front in the Social Justice War: targeting users because of their possible intent to go to a political event (a "signature strike") and "unpersoning" them.Replies: @Autochthon, @Intelligent Dasein, @reiner Tor, @Lurker
This feeds into what I commented about the other day. Imagine you want to attend a “Unite the Right” event in a future current year. You hail the self-driving rental car and then find it won’t drop you anywhere near the event. Or won’t even allow you to enter the car.
That's the sort of thing that happens and that we like to complain about. But, the crucial thing is to realize that this is actually a thing we can do something about. Eg, get Congress and the Trump Administration to push through a federal law that says all online services with over say, 50K users (ie, the Silicon Valley unicorns) are regulated as public utilities and in particular are forbidden from viewpoint discrimination.
If we could get over Trump's complaints regarding Mika's facelift, we could keep our eyes on the ball and actually get some useful things done.Replies: @Lurker
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
“Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers”
If that was the main thing which determined engineers’ performance, then people from HR would make great engineeers and spergs would be terrible ones. But they’re not. So it isn’t.
He’s right that ceteris paribus interpersonal qualities (probably) make one more effective as an engineer, so women’s possession of these abilities don’t make them worse engineers. But that’s a strawman since the manifesto didn’t claim just this. It also claimed that women were (generally) worse at maths and spatial reasoning, which are (obviously) also necessary as an engineer, and that this was what resulted in fewer (or worse) female engineers. So this point is irrelevant to the memo, and the author of this response either has poor reading comprehension or is being deliberately misleading.
I am an American of Northern European background. (Most of my forebears did not hail from the British Isles.) I say math because a) that's what I was taught and b) it's the American way. I'm an unrepentant Yank and an unapologetic seppo.
If I were the Arbiter of English, I'd strip it down to its Germanic bones. (I ate cowflesh for lunch.) But I'm not. I do strive to use Germanic words whenever I can.
Anglophilia runs high on this board. But I do wonder whether there is not some small degree of self-loathing evident in Americans who shun American conventions for British ones.
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
This was one of the first things posted on iSteve about this topic, and Steve has already responded:
https://medium.com/@Steve_Sailer/is-this-essay-a-parody-fb5b0cb0723f
Personally, I don’t really think the “is this a parody?” meme is very clever or convincing, but whatever.
As for Zunger’s essay, all it does is demonstrate the age-old truth that managers think whatever their perspective is is objectively good for the company and, ergo, critics of management are ipso facto harming the company. Commenters over on Medium are doing a good job of pointing out Zunger’s factual errors, straw men, non sequiturs, and hypocrisy, so you can go over there if you’re interested in that.
In a future current year we will be in a cashless society so they will find it even easier to shut down wrong thinkers.
As usual, he is playing with straw men. To be a PROGRAMMER sometimes doesn't require much in the way of "empathy", but "software engineering" by definition means applying the systematic methods of engineering (by analogy) to the design of software. One of those principles is that any product, to be successful, has to be designed with the needs of the users in mind. To build an artificial leg, you first have to know what the needs of amputees are. You could never build a good one without talking to them. This has nothing to do with "empathy" in the feminine Bill Clinton "I feel your pain" sense. You could be the biggest cold fish in the world and feel no emotions for the poor slobs who are going to use your product, but you could still be a great engineer because you could coldly and clinically take their needs into account. In fact, being cold and clinical might even help you to make a better product as you probe their pain points without hesitation.Replies: @ic1000
> This has nothing to do with “empathy” in the feminine Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” sense… In fact, being cold and clinical might even help you to make a better product as you probe [your customers’] pain points without hesitation.
Your point isn’t inconsistent with one of Damore’s suggestions, “De-emphasize empathy” or something similar.
In this case the sleight of hand is conflating "serving the customer's needs" with "feminine empathy" when they are really two completely different things. When your mommy blows kisses on your boo-boo, that's feminine empathy and when the doctor gives you stitches that's serving the customers needs.
You can see how this approach may be counterproductive in the corporate environment. "Our sales are down. Let's all feel bad!"
Ironically, something of this dynamic may be happening in the celebrated witch hunt cases. SJW women complain about nasty brutes who say nasty things. SJW men come up with a solution - fire the brutes. But that's not what the women had in mind. They just wanted to be the center of attention and gain status by using the most powerful weapon in their social circle - whining.Replies: @Jack D, @Forbes
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
Is this (((Yonatan Zunger)))? What possible reason could such a person have for disparaging anything that makes YT males look they may have a point? Shitstirring? No… that’s unthinkable.
Your point isn't inconsistent with one of Damore's suggestions, "De-emphasize empathy" or something similar.Replies: @Jack D, @inertial
Someone mentioned that once you are clued into the dishonest Left’s use of “motte and bailey” sleight of hand you see it everywhere, and they were right.
In this case the sleight of hand is conflating “serving the customer’s needs” with “feminine empathy” when they are really two completely different things. When your mommy blows kisses on your boo-boo, that’s feminine empathy and when the doctor gives you stitches that’s serving the customers needs.
As a software engineer in greater Boston for the last 35+ years, the number of female engineers I worked with in telecommunications (R&D) startups could be counted on one hand. Some were good, others were not. But the issue is usually not the capability, but the sometimes testosterone-filled environment. And I am not talking about cigars or sexist comments, only the amount of *drive* exhibited by young and smart males (I was average on all counts). It a technical design review meeting, “feelings” don’t enter into it! BUT IT’S NOT PERSONAL!
So in a way, I can understand that some women do not *like* that environment, but most move into other areas of tech where it is less masculine (or more people-oriented), e.g., IT or tech marketing, etc.
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
It’s not actually contra Damore.
It would also be more accurate to say that it draws on the rare capacity to synthesize the two (typically male and female traits).
Damn, if only there were even a small group of such people, our tech could rule the world!
Careful, boys, you're staying into Camille Paglia territory.Replies: @Desiderius
It is very instructive to watch people argue against Damore's memo. It seems clear they are filtering his views through their own biases. I think most of the superiority/inferiority interpretation lies within the minds of the leftist critics. Just watch how Zunger talks about female superiority in empathy (sans citations of course, contra Damore). I see that trait quite clearly on display (not) watching feminist critiques of Damore's memo.
The empathy (like the tolerance) appears to be restricted to those sharing their views.Replies: @Desiderius, @Desiderius
The only issue with spergs is their communication skills (like hanging up on me without saying bye, and without making sure that I was finished - but I can always call him back once more; or being occasionally quite rude), but I don't think you need extremely good interpersonal skills to just get used to it after a year or two. I probably wouldn't make him talk to clients, though.Replies: @res
In my experience, management of technical work is frequently awful. One reason is that it frequently requires a lot of subject matter expertise and relatively small teams. So Zunger is managing Engineering projects and thinks management is what Engineering is all about. Real Engineering.
I'm talking about basic, Peter Drucker era management. I can imagine why Zunger wouldn't realize this. It isn't very fashionable -- and there is a lot of effort that has gone into trying to revolutionize it. Leadership vs management. Knowledge Wokers (thank Drucker for that). And finally the disasters that have occurred when top executives lack subject matter expertise. The view that a good manager can manage anything. Sometimes yes but mostly not so much.
Its a fine topic to chat about, but is largely irrelevant.
That fairness is about process, not outcomes. That is what Google is trying to argue as they defend themselves over an unequal outcome. I think the only area of general agreement is the notion that employment processes should be fair. After that, they are talking about two different things.
Google as a company and Google's management and shareholders have a big diversity problem. Damore is stating the obvious -- there isn't a problem and Google is simply creating one by trying to rig outcomes. To improve their odds against the SJW rent seekers.Replies: @Desiderius
Maybe wrong-thinkers will be allowed to have money, but will have to pay a special tax to finance a fund providing reparations for designated victim groups. Oh, and we mustn’t forget, crimethink is an unpardonable offense. A craven apology is expected but never accepted.
It would also be more accurate to say that it draws on the rare capacity to synthesize the two (typically male and female traits).Replies: @Anon, @res, @reiner Tor, @anon
“It would also be more accurate to say that it draws on the rare capacity to synthesize the two (typically male and female traits).
Damn, if only there were even a small group of such people, our tech could rule the world!
Careful, boys, you’re staying into Camille Paglia territory.
Age has been kind to dear Camille.
It would also be more accurate to say that it draws on the rare capacity to synthesize the two (typically male and female traits).Replies: @Anon, @res, @reiner Tor, @anon
Well said. Unfortunately IMHO Zunger’s piece was a strawman army with a few good points (like yours) embedded within.
It is very instructive to watch people argue against Damore’s memo. It seems clear they are filtering his views through their own biases. I think most of the superiority/inferiority interpretation lies within the minds of the leftist critics. Just watch how Zunger talks about female superiority in empathy (sans citations of course, contra Damore). I see that trait quite clearly on display (not) watching feminist critiques of Damore’s memo.
The empathy (like the tolerance) appears to be restricted to those sharing their views.
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
Zunger’s article has been fisked.
http://jackbaruth.com/?p=7152
He leads off with:
Your point isn't inconsistent with one of Damore's suggestions, "De-emphasize empathy" or something similar.Replies: @Jack D, @inertial
It’s a common place observation that when a woman complains to you about problems with relatives, coworkers, or whatever she doesn’t want to hear your solutions, she just wants to unload her mood and have you validate her emotions. “Yes, yes, this is so terrible.”
You can see how this approach may be counterproductive in the corporate environment. “Our sales are down. Let’s all feel bad!”
Ironically, something of this dynamic may be happening in the celebrated witch hunt cases. SJW women complain about nasty brutes who say nasty things. SJW men come up with a solution – fire the brutes. But that’s not what the women had in mind. They just wanted to be the center of attention and gain status by using the most powerful weapon in their social circle – whining.
Women don't want you to fix the problem, they want you to listen to their rant. They want to "unload" on you. Listening to their rant is empathy according to beta cuck Zunger. That's what a woman's BFFs are for--female bonding.
There are options before that phase. Theft, weapons, violence, etc. As the old saying goes, “When you’ve got nuthin’, you’ve got nuthin’ to lose.”
It would also be more accurate to say that it draws on the rare capacity to synthesize the two (typically male and female traits).Replies: @Anon, @res, @reiner Tor, @anon
I have a sperg programmer co-worker, and he’s very good. (I’m a user, so believe me.) He’ll do exactly what you tell him, but if it’s complicated and you were a bit shoddy, he’ll eventually realize that and at least after a few iterations (usually after just one very short iteration) he’ll put a lot of effort into trying to understand why you asked him. He’s not much interested in my job, he just wants to know exactly what he has to do. (I was astonished how little he understood of my job after so many years. But he has a very good understanding of the aspects of my work where I’m using his tools.) He’s much better at that than many non-sperg programmers. (Of course, there are non-sperg programmers who are also good at trying to understand the user’s needs. My point is simply that the correlation between being a sperg and being bad at understanding users’ needs is far from perfect. A very good software engineer can be a sperg.)
The only issue with spergs is their communication skills (like hanging up on me without saying bye, and without making sure that I was finished – but I can always call him back once more; or being occasionally quite rude), but I don’t think you need extremely good interpersonal skills to just get used to it after a year or two. I probably wouldn’t make him talk to clients, though.
I think most good programming teams can decouple this to some degree (e.g. architects gathering requirements and creating specs for the programmers). This has some implications:
- The coding side (interacting with computer precision) is a non-negotiable ability for a programmer (which Zunger completely ignores! it is the water coders swim in).
- The human interaction side (beyond basic intelligence and civility) is useful but not critical. This goes along with the ability to deal with imprecision, but is not exactly the same.
- People who can combine the two are both rare and valuable.
Now let's look at this from a sex difference perspective. First, for men who lack the people skills coding is a relatively rare career where they can be effective or even excel. Similarly for women like that (who IMHO are likely to be even worse misfits in the world at large since they are more atypical). I wish there were a way to accurately render the bivariate distribution of these traits. But I think it is fair to say there are many more men in this category.
It gets interesting for people who can do both. They tend to have many career options so one would expect them to gravitate towards fields they like. This gets into the doctor/lawyer/vet (etc.) vs. engineer career choice for women with the requisite coding ability that has been mentioned elsewhere.
Given sex differences and a reasonable initial screen for coders I think it is reasonable to speculate that a higher proportion (but lower absolute numbers) of female coders will be able to do both. I think the trouble starts when the coding bar is lowered far enough (say by trying really, really hard to hire female coders, just as a hypothetical of course) that poorer coding women start to appear disproportionately in management (e.g. someone who isn't that good at coding itself is more likely to want to move to management). Having people manage things they do not understand well is a recipe for disaster (cf. tendency of affirmative action teachers to move into administration).
Of course these aren't binary traits (there is a distribution) so there is more complexity than I cover here.
I think much of the heat in this conversation comes from women who can't (or don't want to!) handle the computer precision aspect of coding but see tech as a field of opportunity and since their people skills "are so much better" they should be able to do great. I see people like this ending up in a variety of software related (but not coding) positions like tech writing, product management, etc. The ones who have a keen grasp of their own strengths and weaknesses and know how to play to that do great. The worst can be incompetent know it alls who think they know better than the people who actually have to make things work (and to be clear, there are plenty of men like that too).
P.S. I have talked about sexism with women in the field. The sense I get is most have encountered some sexism, but it hasn't been overwhelming (though who knows about the importance of selection effects). There also tends to be a sense of finding most men they work with to be quite reasonable (say less sexist than the general population, though the trend from geeks towards brogrammers may be changing that). I also tend to agree with the commenter who talked about microagressions being everywhere and men tending to (have to) have thicker skins.Replies: @Logan, @Jim Don Bob, @Desiderius
They will also have algorithms to understand when you will be planning violence. It will be a perfect utopia.
He distinguishes (rightly I think) between “coding” and “high level [software] engineering” but is totally unconvincing on what femininity has to do with the skills needed to do software engineering.
In the occupations where feminine traits are indeed an advantage, women came to dominate these trades 100 years or more ago – telephone operator, nursing, secretary, receptionist, elementary school teacher, etc. Even though their bosses were horrible sexists and didn’t even want women to vote, women dominated these occupations even 100 years ago and still do today because they were better at this kind of work and they liked doing it in preference to digging ditches or hauling garbage. Programming originally was going to be a woman’s profession too (programmers were going to be the natural successors to “computers” who were also mostly female), but it turned out that women didn’t like it much and drifted away.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/when-your-friendly-phone-operator-was-a-teenage-boy/380468/
Damn, if only there were even a small group of such people, our tech could rule the world!
Careful, boys, you're staying into Camille Paglia territory.Replies: @Desiderius
Indeed I am.
Age has been kind to dear Camille.
It is very instructive to watch people argue against Damore's memo. It seems clear they are filtering his views through their own biases. I think most of the superiority/inferiority interpretation lies within the minds of the leftist critics. Just watch how Zunger talks about female superiority in empathy (sans citations of course, contra Damore). I see that trait quite clearly on display (not) watching feminist critiques of Damore's memo.
The empathy (like the tolerance) appears to be restricted to those sharing their views.Replies: @Desiderius, @Desiderius
Whatever good points he had were overwhelmed in a flood of the usual arrogant ignorance.
It is very instructive to watch people argue against Damore's memo. It seems clear they are filtering his views through their own biases. I think most of the superiority/inferiority interpretation lies within the minds of the leftist critics. Just watch how Zunger talks about female superiority in empathy (sans citations of course, contra Damore). I see that trait quite clearly on display (not) watching feminist critiques of Damore's memo.
The empathy (like the tolerance) appears to be restricted to those sharing their views.Replies: @Desiderius, @Desiderius
They do generally have more empathy than the average male sperg, but they use their superpowers for evil rather than good.
This is obviously a huge extrapolation but to me at least is actually more topical than whatever happens to James Damore. Closer to reality we have Jordan Peterson interviewing Damore on YouTube. I was not aware of Peterson before, but apparently he’s a professor at U of Toronto who was cut off, at least for a while, from his google accounts, (gmail, YouTube, etc). Not all the times this happens is a matter of punishing Badwhite crimethink, in fact that probably happens relatively rarely, but as things stand nobody has any actual recourse outside of Google.
That’s the sort of thing that happens and that we like to complain about. But, the crucial thing is to realize that this is actually a thing we can do something about. Eg, get Congress and the Trump Administration to push through a federal law that says all online services with over say, 50K users (ie, the Silicon Valley unicorns) are regulated as public utilities and in particular are forbidden from viewpoint discrimination.
If we could get over Trump’s complaints regarding Mika’s facelift, we could keep our eyes on the ball and actually get some useful things done.
A Cyberdyne Systems fembot would be nice:
They’re highly versatile:
I get what you are saying and agree, but I’m not sure empathy is the right word. Empathy is defined as both understanding and sharing the feelings of others. They have got the understanding part down (like a sociopathic con man does), but I find it hard to believe they are sharing the pain they are inflicting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj-82dn75bg
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
I’ve been in startups that made millions, the idea that programming takes that much communication is near total hogwash. You would have better communication by having a bunch of young male nerds with a similar background anyway than by having a disparate group.
People who know what they are doing and care more about getting something out the door than who gets the brownie points can get a lot done, especially if management, after pointing them in the desired direction, gets the hell out of their way.
Been there. Done that. Got a coffee mug and a nice picture when I was laid off. Would go back in a heartbeat.
You can see how this approach may be counterproductive in the corporate environment. "Our sales are down. Let's all feel bad!"
Ironically, something of this dynamic may be happening in the celebrated witch hunt cases. SJW women complain about nasty brutes who say nasty things. SJW men come up with a solution - fire the brutes. But that's not what the women had in mind. They just wanted to be the center of attention and gain status by using the most powerful weapon in their social circle - whining.Replies: @Jack D, @Forbes
We saw this in the Jackie case at U.Va. Initially Jackie makes up a web of lies for a manipulative reasons but then, almost by accident, she gets positive reinforcement from the SJW community – she’s suddenly the biggest star of the “rape survivor” group because her rape story is so much better than everyone else’s rape story and she’s a celebrity. Then people want her to call the cops and actually do something about this horrible brute Haven Monahan and that’s not what she had in mind at all.
Google is “standing up” for its female employees because it wants to get away with paying them a pittance. Anyone who has worked in an office knows how bosses suck up to the secretarial pool because it’s hard to retain workers at cut-rate wages.
The only issue with spergs is their communication skills (like hanging up on me without saying bye, and without making sure that I was finished - but I can always call him back once more; or being occasionally quite rude), but I don't think you need extremely good interpersonal skills to just get used to it after a year or two. I probably wouldn't make him talk to clients, though.Replies: @res
One thing about this that speaks to Desiderius’s synthesis point (and Zunger’s related point) is that one of the major challenges of programming is having to render the imprecision of the human world into the unforgiving precision of computer languages.
I think most good programming teams can decouple this to some degree (e.g. architects gathering requirements and creating specs for the programmers). This has some implications:
– The coding side (interacting with computer precision) is a non-negotiable ability for a programmer (which Zunger completely ignores! it is the water coders swim in).
– The human interaction side (beyond basic intelligence and civility) is useful but not critical. This goes along with the ability to deal with imprecision, but is not exactly the same.
– People who can combine the two are both rare and valuable.
Now let’s look at this from a sex difference perspective. First, for men who lack the people skills coding is a relatively rare career where they can be effective or even excel. Similarly for women like that (who IMHO are likely to be even worse misfits in the world at large since they are more atypical). I wish there were a way to accurately render the bivariate distribution of these traits. But I think it is fair to say there are many more men in this category.
It gets interesting for people who can do both. They tend to have many career options so one would expect them to gravitate towards fields they like. This gets into the doctor/lawyer/vet (etc.) vs. engineer career choice for women with the requisite coding ability that has been mentioned elsewhere.
Given sex differences and a reasonable initial screen for coders I think it is reasonable to speculate that a higher proportion (but lower absolute numbers) of female coders will be able to do both. I think the trouble starts when the coding bar is lowered far enough (say by trying really, really hard to hire female coders, just as a hypothetical of course) that poorer coding women start to appear disproportionately in management (e.g. someone who isn’t that good at coding itself is more likely to want to move to management). Having people manage things they do not understand well is a recipe for disaster (cf. tendency of affirmative action teachers to move into administration).
Of course these aren’t binary traits (there is a distribution) so there is more complexity than I cover here.
I think much of the heat in this conversation comes from women who can’t (or don’t want to!) handle the computer precision aspect of coding but see tech as a field of opportunity and since their people skills “are so much better” they should be able to do great. I see people like this ending up in a variety of software related (but not coding) positions like tech writing, product management, etc. The ones who have a keen grasp of their own strengths and weaknesses and know how to play to that do great. The worst can be incompetent know it alls who think they know better than the people who actually have to make things work (and to be clear, there are plenty of men like that too).
P.S. I have talked about sexism with women in the field. The sense I get is most have encountered some sexism, but it hasn’t been overwhelming (though who knows about the importance of selection effects). There also tends to be a sense of finding most men they work with to be quite reasonable (say less sexist than the general population, though the trend from geeks towards brogrammers may be changing that). I also tend to agree with the commenter who talked about microagressions being everywhere and men tending to (have to) have thicker skins.
OTOH, I worked with two guys who walked out of Cambodia with only their clothes on their backs, and they were great. I told them what the customer wanted, drew pictures if necessary, they asked questions, and Bang, it was done. We did a lot of really cool fun stuff and we got paid for it.
And then a reporter showed up, and things got really out of hand…
Quattro Pro, Borland’s answer to Lotus 123, was written by four cisgendered white guys who met briefly each morning and then went back to work.
People who know what they are doing and care more about getting something out the door than who gets the brownie points can get a lot done, especially if management, after pointing them in the desired direction, gets the hell out of their way.
Been there. Done that. Got a coffee mug and a nice picture when I was laid off. Would go back in a heartbeat.
I think most good programming teams can decouple this to some degree (e.g. architects gathering requirements and creating specs for the programmers). This has some implications:
- The coding side (interacting with computer precision) is a non-negotiable ability for a programmer (which Zunger completely ignores! it is the water coders swim in).
- The human interaction side (beyond basic intelligence and civility) is useful but not critical. This goes along with the ability to deal with imprecision, but is not exactly the same.
- People who can combine the two are both rare and valuable.
Now let's look at this from a sex difference perspective. First, for men who lack the people skills coding is a relatively rare career where they can be effective or even excel. Similarly for women like that (who IMHO are likely to be even worse misfits in the world at large since they are more atypical). I wish there were a way to accurately render the bivariate distribution of these traits. But I think it is fair to say there are many more men in this category.
It gets interesting for people who can do both. They tend to have many career options so one would expect them to gravitate towards fields they like. This gets into the doctor/lawyer/vet (etc.) vs. engineer career choice for women with the requisite coding ability that has been mentioned elsewhere.
Given sex differences and a reasonable initial screen for coders I think it is reasonable to speculate that a higher proportion (but lower absolute numbers) of female coders will be able to do both. I think the trouble starts when the coding bar is lowered far enough (say by trying really, really hard to hire female coders, just as a hypothetical of course) that poorer coding women start to appear disproportionately in management (e.g. someone who isn't that good at coding itself is more likely to want to move to management). Having people manage things they do not understand well is a recipe for disaster (cf. tendency of affirmative action teachers to move into administration).
Of course these aren't binary traits (there is a distribution) so there is more complexity than I cover here.
I think much of the heat in this conversation comes from women who can't (or don't want to!) handle the computer precision aspect of coding but see tech as a field of opportunity and since their people skills "are so much better" they should be able to do great. I see people like this ending up in a variety of software related (but not coding) positions like tech writing, product management, etc. The ones who have a keen grasp of their own strengths and weaknesses and know how to play to that do great. The worst can be incompetent know it alls who think they know better than the people who actually have to make things work (and to be clear, there are plenty of men like that too).
P.S. I have talked about sexism with women in the field. The sense I get is most have encountered some sexism, but it hasn't been overwhelming (though who knows about the importance of selection effects). There also tends to be a sense of finding most men they work with to be quite reasonable (say less sexist than the general population, though the trend from geeks towards brogrammers may be changing that). I also tend to agree with the commenter who talked about microagressions being everywhere and men tending to (have to) have thicker skins.Replies: @Logan, @Jim Don Bob, @Desiderius
I think a lot of women (and men for that matter) think whatever they’re good at (or enjoy, though of course they tend to be the same things) is the most important thing in the world and they should therefore be immediately promoted and praised for that trait. Regardless of whether it’s what’s needed for the position or not.
Reminds me of the three Mensa meetings I attended in three different cities. In each case geeks cornered me and spent a looonnng time talking about how much smarter they are than the others at their place of work, and how unfair it is they aren’t getting ahead. Ignoring the fairly obvious fact that sheer raw IQ is not of itself useful for anything.
Never went back. People skills sorely lacking in this group, at least the ones I attended. Admittedly not necessarily a representative sample.
They’re generally miserable people. There’s a fine line between pleasure and pain.
I think most good programming teams can decouple this to some degree (e.g. architects gathering requirements and creating specs for the programmers). This has some implications:
- The coding side (interacting with computer precision) is a non-negotiable ability for a programmer (which Zunger completely ignores! it is the water coders swim in).
- The human interaction side (beyond basic intelligence and civility) is useful but not critical. This goes along with the ability to deal with imprecision, but is not exactly the same.
- People who can combine the two are both rare and valuable.
Now let's look at this from a sex difference perspective. First, for men who lack the people skills coding is a relatively rare career where they can be effective or even excel. Similarly for women like that (who IMHO are likely to be even worse misfits in the world at large since they are more atypical). I wish there were a way to accurately render the bivariate distribution of these traits. But I think it is fair to say there are many more men in this category.
It gets interesting for people who can do both. They tend to have many career options so one would expect them to gravitate towards fields they like. This gets into the doctor/lawyer/vet (etc.) vs. engineer career choice for women with the requisite coding ability that has been mentioned elsewhere.
Given sex differences and a reasonable initial screen for coders I think it is reasonable to speculate that a higher proportion (but lower absolute numbers) of female coders will be able to do both. I think the trouble starts when the coding bar is lowered far enough (say by trying really, really hard to hire female coders, just as a hypothetical of course) that poorer coding women start to appear disproportionately in management (e.g. someone who isn't that good at coding itself is more likely to want to move to management). Having people manage things they do not understand well is a recipe for disaster (cf. tendency of affirmative action teachers to move into administration).
Of course these aren't binary traits (there is a distribution) so there is more complexity than I cover here.
I think much of the heat in this conversation comes from women who can't (or don't want to!) handle the computer precision aspect of coding but see tech as a field of opportunity and since their people skills "are so much better" they should be able to do great. I see people like this ending up in a variety of software related (but not coding) positions like tech writing, product management, etc. The ones who have a keen grasp of their own strengths and weaknesses and know how to play to that do great. The worst can be incompetent know it alls who think they know better than the people who actually have to make things work (and to be clear, there are plenty of men like that too).
P.S. I have talked about sexism with women in the field. The sense I get is most have encountered some sexism, but it hasn't been overwhelming (though who knows about the importance of selection effects). There also tends to be a sense of finding most men they work with to be quite reasonable (say less sexist than the general population, though the trend from geeks towards brogrammers may be changing that). I also tend to agree with the commenter who talked about microagressions being everywhere and men tending to (have to) have thicker skins.Replies: @Logan, @Jim Don Bob, @Desiderius
Very well said. Another problem can be different cultural “styles”. I worked with a Chinese guy who would sit there and say Yes all the time, because he did not want to lose face (?) by admitting he did not understand what we (I was his co-worker, not his boss) were talking about. His English was just ok. We solved this problem by writing things down.
OTOH, I worked with two guys who walked out of Cambodia with only their clothes on their backs, and they were great. I told them what the customer wanted, drew pictures if necessary, they asked questions, and Bang, it was done. We did a lot of really cool fun stuff and we got paid for it.
I think most good programming teams can decouple this to some degree (e.g. architects gathering requirements and creating specs for the programmers). This has some implications:
- The coding side (interacting with computer precision) is a non-negotiable ability for a programmer (which Zunger completely ignores! it is the water coders swim in).
- The human interaction side (beyond basic intelligence and civility) is useful but not critical. This goes along with the ability to deal with imprecision, but is not exactly the same.
- People who can combine the two are both rare and valuable.
Now let's look at this from a sex difference perspective. First, for men who lack the people skills coding is a relatively rare career where they can be effective or even excel. Similarly for women like that (who IMHO are likely to be even worse misfits in the world at large since they are more atypical). I wish there were a way to accurately render the bivariate distribution of these traits. But I think it is fair to say there are many more men in this category.
It gets interesting for people who can do both. They tend to have many career options so one would expect them to gravitate towards fields they like. This gets into the doctor/lawyer/vet (etc.) vs. engineer career choice for women with the requisite coding ability that has been mentioned elsewhere.
Given sex differences and a reasonable initial screen for coders I think it is reasonable to speculate that a higher proportion (but lower absolute numbers) of female coders will be able to do both. I think the trouble starts when the coding bar is lowered far enough (say by trying really, really hard to hire female coders, just as a hypothetical of course) that poorer coding women start to appear disproportionately in management (e.g. someone who isn't that good at coding itself is more likely to want to move to management). Having people manage things they do not understand well is a recipe for disaster (cf. tendency of affirmative action teachers to move into administration).
Of course these aren't binary traits (there is a distribution) so there is more complexity than I cover here.
I think much of the heat in this conversation comes from women who can't (or don't want to!) handle the computer precision aspect of coding but see tech as a field of opportunity and since their people skills "are so much better" they should be able to do great. I see people like this ending up in a variety of software related (but not coding) positions like tech writing, product management, etc. The ones who have a keen grasp of their own strengths and weaknesses and know how to play to that do great. The worst can be incompetent know it alls who think they know better than the people who actually have to make things work (and to be clear, there are plenty of men like that too).
P.S. I have talked about sexism with women in the field. The sense I get is most have encountered some sexism, but it hasn't been overwhelming (though who knows about the importance of selection effects). There also tends to be a sense of finding most men they work with to be quite reasonable (say less sexist than the general population, though the trend from geeks towards brogrammers may be changing that). I also tend to agree with the commenter who talked about microagressions being everywhere and men tending to (have to) have thicker skins.Replies: @Logan, @Jim Don Bob, @Desiderius
The predatory SJWs grifting off of societal pro-diversity misconceptions are a major driver of that move. It may be that the old tomboyish women who used to thrive in tech are now chafing at the new bros.
Heh; I’d LOL if I wasn’t already crying on the inside…
If that was the main thing which determined engineers' performance, then people from HR would make great engineeers and spergs would be terrible ones. But they're not. So it isn't.
He's right that ceteris paribus interpersonal qualities (probably) make one more effective as an engineer, so women's possession of these abilities don't make them worse engineers. But that's a strawman since the manifesto didn't claim just this. It also claimed that women were (generally) worse at maths and spatial reasoning, which are (obviously) also necessary as an engineer, and that this was what resulted in fewer (or worse) female engineers. So this point is irrelevant to the memo, and the author of this response either has poor reading comprehension or is being deliberately misleading.Replies: @Stan Adams
If you are an American, why do you say maths and not math? Is it Anglophilic status signaling?
I am an American of Northern European background. (Most of my forebears did not hail from the British Isles.) I say math because a) that’s what I was taught and b) it’s the American way. I’m an unrepentant Yank and an unapologetic seppo.
If I were the Arbiter of English, I’d strip it down to its Germanic bones. (I ate cowflesh for lunch.) But I’m not. I do strive to use Germanic words whenever I can.
Anglophilia runs high on this board. But I do wonder whether there is not some small degree of self-loathing evident in Americans who shun American conventions for British ones.
Wasn’t there a 1940s screwball comedy with this plot? It starred Barbara Stanwyck and Roland Young, with a few musical numbers by Xavier Cugat, if memory serves.
You can see how this approach may be counterproductive in the corporate environment. "Our sales are down. Let's all feel bad!"
Ironically, something of this dynamic may be happening in the celebrated witch hunt cases. SJW women complain about nasty brutes who say nasty things. SJW men come up with a solution - fire the brutes. But that's not what the women had in mind. They just wanted to be the center of attention and gain status by using the most powerful weapon in their social circle - whining.Replies: @Jack D, @Forbes
Truer words.
Women don’t want you to fix the problem, they want you to listen to their rant. They want to “unload” on you. Listening to their rant is empathy according to beta cuck Zunger. That’s what a woman’s BFFs are for–female bonding.
Ridicule rules!
The REAL story so far:
Tech industry left reeling as a late 20’s man says “I understand that there is racism and sexism in our industry, and while we are making progress in these areas, there are definitive concerns that men and women share regarding how to go about making those changes. But even if I was somewhat clumsy in my presentation at times about to what extent these differences are accurate, I should not be fired.
Normies: We have thought about in that way,and there is definitely something to ponder here. But the problem is that the Coalition of the Right Fringe and the Coalition of the Left Fringe desperately work to write and control a narrative. When we interject, we are lambasted by the Right Fringe as being “race traitors” and by the Left Fringe as being “white privilege protectors”.
Scientists: There is evidence out there that we are sifting through. The issue is that one side believes that it is generally biologically in nature, while another side believes it is generally environmental in nature. Perhaps it could be both who factors that ought to be taken into serious account.
Ignorant blogger, Coalition of the Right Fringe: The young man speaks the truth.
Ignorant blogger, Coalition of the Left Fringe: The young man is a liar.
Journalists: Yet another person who spoke out in the cultural war is a digital piñata.
SJWs/Race Realists (in unison): Listen to me, we are right! Everyone else is wrong!
Normies: Groupthink, confirmation bias, and mass intellectual dishonesty is out of control in our nation.
Why?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231
His conclusion is ambiguously Orwellian and definitely partisan:Not sure what he means by that, but it doesn’t sound good.Replies: @Corvinus
It would also be more accurate to say that it draws on the rare capacity to synthesize the two (typically male and female traits).Replies: @Anon, @res, @reiner Tor, @anon
What Zunger wants to call engineering is really management. A manager is responsible for results. And typically, the results include work produced by other people.
In my experience, management of technical work is frequently awful. One reason is that it frequently requires a lot of subject matter expertise and relatively small teams. So Zunger is managing Engineering projects and thinks management is what Engineering is all about. Real Engineering.
I’m talking about basic, Peter Drucker era management. I can imagine why Zunger wouldn’t realize this. It isn’t very fashionable — and there is a lot of effort that has gone into trying to revolutionize it. Leadership vs management. Knowledge Wokers (thank Drucker for that). And finally the disasters that have occurred when top executives lack subject matter expertise. The view that a good manager can manage anything. Sometimes yes but mostly not so much.
Its a fine topic to chat about, but is largely irrelevant.
That fairness is about process, not outcomes. That is what Google is trying to argue as they defend themselves over an unequal outcome. I think the only area of general agreement is the notion that employment processes should be fair. After that, they are talking about two different things.
Google as a company and Google’s management and shareholders have a big diversity problem. Damore is stating the obvious — there isn’t a problem and Google is simply creating one by trying to rig outcomes. To improve their odds against the SJW rent seekers.
Author Yonatan Zunger claims to be a senior Google engineer/manager who recently left to join a tech startup; this checks out (e.g. Stanford PhD in 2003, at Google till 2017). Zunger says that no longer being at Google has freed him to give a frank response to Damore, unencumbered by corporate policies: "And since I’m no longer on the inside, and have no confidential information about any of this, the thing which I would have posted internally I’ll instead say right here, because it’s relevant not just to Google, but to everyone else in tech."
I expect this will quickly become the Go-To rebuttal of Damore and his writing.
Zunger makes three points.
Trivial --
(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
Substantial claims --
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
Reversion to ritual defamation --
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself.
The essay is cogently written. For people who have only a vague or mainstream-provided grasp of the issues, Zunger will be persuasive.
Zunger's conception of "engineering" is the intriguing part of the essay. Contra Damore (and the literature), Zunger claims that high-level engineering draws most heavily on the typically female traits, with strong interpersonal abilities being the sina qua non of engineering excellence. As a male, "It’s a skillset that I did not start out with, and have had to learn through years upon years of grueling work."
Case closed! ... Although on reflection, this white knight has painted himself into a bit of a corner... E.g., why do Google's hiring practices seek out people like Damore for entry-level positions (cf. luring high-empathy folks away from applying to social work grad school)? Given Damore's heresy, how did he manage to wind up with stellar performance reviews (as he claims)?
At any rate, worth a read for those interested.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @songbird, @International Jew, @Jack D, @White American, @Chrisnonymous, @JerseyJeffersonian, @Desiderius, @Anonymous, @Daniel Chieh, @the cruncher
And here’s Scott Alexander (of slatestarcodex.com)’s rebuttal of someone who did try to tackle the science:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
And one more thing.
What’s this thing about software guys calling themselves ‘engineers’?
I don’t really care what someone wants to call themselves. But he wants to talk about what REAL engineering is all about.
It became an official profession in the US in the 19th century when people didn’t want bridges falling down.
For Damore, it was a job title.
So, Zunger is really saying that Damore doesn’t know what software work is all about. And sure, Damore isn’t a manager — so he knows what he sees. Which appears to me to involve more than enough software that he definitely knows what he is talking about,.
Kurt Andersen:
Of course Andersen leaves out HBD regarding race and intelligence (etc.)—probably the biggest scientific issue of our age with respect to human social environments.
His conclusion is ambiguously Orwellian and definitely partisan:
Not sure what he means by that, but it doesn’t sound good.
Perhaps the author is unaware of the HBD controversy or is aware of it but chose not tackle that subject for a number of different reasons. You assume that he "left it out". Praytell, how many "normies" are privy to HBD?
"One main task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism..."
Did you read the article? It is lengthy, but what I take from this line is how the partisan left AND the partisan right continue to find information to suit their narrative, thus dismissing the other side by claiming "Fake News", which results in an uninformed, ignorant public.
In the occupations where feminine traits are indeed an advantage, women came to dominate these trades 100 years or more ago - telephone operator, nursing, secretary, receptionist, elementary school teacher, etc. Even though their bosses were horrible sexists and didn't even want women to vote, women dominated these occupations even 100 years ago and still do today because they were better at this kind of work and they liked doing it in preference to digging ditches or hauling garbage. Programming originally was going to be a woman's profession too (programmers were going to be the natural successors to "computers" who were also mostly female), but it turned out that women didn't like it much and drifted away.Replies: @benjaminl
When Young Men Were Telephone Operators
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/when-your-friendly-phone-operator-was-a-teenage-boy/380468/
That's the sort of thing that happens and that we like to complain about. But, the crucial thing is to realize that this is actually a thing we can do something about. Eg, get Congress and the Trump Administration to push through a federal law that says all online services with over say, 50K users (ie, the Silicon Valley unicorns) are regulated as public utilities and in particular are forbidden from viewpoint discrimination.
If we could get over Trump's complaints regarding Mika's facelift, we could keep our eyes on the ball and actually get some useful things done.Replies: @Lurker
Yes, YouTube should be seen as a public utility, a common carrier.
Again, most of the time this doesn't happen, and even when it does it's not necessarily about punishing Badwhites. But it does convey a tremendous amount of power, power which we have reason to believe isn't necessarily benign.
Through Republican solidarity, we have the opportunity to quit mindlessly carping about these like this, and actually do something meaningful about it.Replies: @Boethiuss
In my experience, management of technical work is frequently awful. One reason is that it frequently requires a lot of subject matter expertise and relatively small teams. So Zunger is managing Engineering projects and thinks management is what Engineering is all about. Real Engineering.
I'm talking about basic, Peter Drucker era management. I can imagine why Zunger wouldn't realize this. It isn't very fashionable -- and there is a lot of effort that has gone into trying to revolutionize it. Leadership vs management. Knowledge Wokers (thank Drucker for that). And finally the disasters that have occurred when top executives lack subject matter expertise. The view that a good manager can manage anything. Sometimes yes but mostly not so much.
Its a fine topic to chat about, but is largely irrelevant.
That fairness is about process, not outcomes. That is what Google is trying to argue as they defend themselves over an unequal outcome. I think the only area of general agreement is the notion that employment processes should be fair. After that, they are talking about two different things.
Google as a company and Google's management and shareholders have a big diversity problem. Damore is stating the obvious -- there isn't a problem and Google is simply creating one by trying to rig outcomes. To improve their odds against the SJW rent seekers.Replies: @Desiderius
I almost wonder how much of the pro-Damore stuff is being ginned up or at least supported behind the scenes by Google themselves to protect them from the SJWs who will naturally take their side against the wicked Damore and thus inclined to be less ravenous in their usual graft.
YouTube is only part of it, and maybe not even the most important part. The big one is gmail, also Google Drive, Google Docs, and a bunch of others. People can use these things for years, and all of the sudden they vanish, with all of the data, work, communications, etc., with them.
Again, most of the time this doesn’t happen, and even when it does it’s not necessarily about punishing Badwhites. But it does convey a tremendous amount of power, power which we have reason to believe isn’t necessarily benign.
Through Republican solidarity, we have the opportunity to quit mindlessly carping about these like this, and actually do something meaningful about it.
For a lot of people, the support for the Trump Administration is basically due to the need for government support of failing Middle American business models (coal, manufacturing) and immigration. This goes for friends and adversaries alike.
A decent number of commenters here can't think past immigration. I can sympathize why they might be motivated that way, but it's still short-sighted. The people who only care about immigration, or only care about coal, is going to be a demographically limited base to draw from.
There's a lot of people out there, in varying ages, careers and stations of life, who are very worried about about the world seeming to be spinning off its wheels and our lack of ability to control it. One thing they are worried about, is the development of technology, not just in its labor aspects but also in terms of the lack of transparency and the possibility that technology is serving somebody else's agenda who might be opposed to mine.
Again, it's not the only thing to be worried about but it is a big thing. It's also something that we shouldn't necessarily be expecting the Trump Administration to solve but it is something where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit and we should be plucking some of it.
Not only is it an opportunity to meaningfully change the world for the better, but it also puts the GOP into power on a broader coalition of blue-collar and white-collar America.
Again, most of the time this doesn't happen, and even when it does it's not necessarily about punishing Badwhites. But it does convey a tremendous amount of power, power which we have reason to believe isn't necessarily benign.
Through Republican solidarity, we have the opportunity to quit mindlessly carping about these like this, and actually do something meaningful about it.Replies: @Boethiuss
And while I’m at it, this is a useful case in point about the political forces that created the Trump Administration, specifically related to political correctness.
For a lot of people, the support for the Trump Administration is basically due to the need for government support of failing Middle American business models (coal, manufacturing) and immigration. This goes for friends and adversaries alike.
A decent number of commenters here can’t think past immigration. I can sympathize why they might be motivated that way, but it’s still short-sighted. The people who only care about immigration, or only care about coal, is going to be a demographically limited base to draw from.
There’s a lot of people out there, in varying ages, careers and stations of life, who are very worried about about the world seeming to be spinning off its wheels and our lack of ability to control it. One thing they are worried about, is the development of technology, not just in its labor aspects but also in terms of the lack of transparency and the possibility that technology is serving somebody else’s agenda who might be opposed to mine.
Again, it’s not the only thing to be worried about but it is a big thing. It’s also something that we shouldn’t necessarily be expecting the Trump Administration to solve but it is something where there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit and we should be plucking some of it.
Not only is it an opportunity to meaningfully change the world for the better, but it also puts the GOP into power on a broader coalition of blue-collar and white-collar America.
His conclusion is ambiguously Orwellian and definitely partisan:Not sure what he means by that, but it doesn’t sound good.Replies: @Corvinus
“Of course Andersen leaves out HBD regarding race and intelligence (etc.)—probably the biggest scientific issue of our age with respect to human social environments.”
Perhaps the author is unaware of the HBD controversy or is aware of it but chose not tackle that subject for a number of different reasons. You assume that he “left it out”. Praytell, how many “normies” are privy to HBD?
“One main task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism…”
Did you read the article? It is lengthy, but what I take from this line is how the partisan left AND the partisan right continue to find information to suit their narrative, thus dismissing the other side by claiming “Fake News”, which results in an uninformed, ignorant public.
Yep. I joined Mensa as a teenager. I went to one meeting, had the same experience as you, and never went back.
http://jackbaruth.com/?p=7152Replies: @res
Thanks! I enjoyed that. Vox Day links to Baruth with some interesting commentary: https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/08/when-smart-guy-meets-smarter-guy.html
He leads off with: