Consider a 90% free throw shooter vs. a 50% shooter. To get the job, you have to make 3 shots. But the 90% shooter gets 3 shots and the 60% shooter gets 5 shots. All of a sudden the 60% shooter is more likely to get the job.
It highly depends on the details of the interview process, which I don't know, but just to discount it with that logic is impossible.
This analogy doesn't work at all. 3/3 shots is 100% success rate whereas 3/5 shots is 60% - you're literally describing lowering the bar for the 60% shooter.
Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives. Doing multiple rounds may, of course, increase the chance of false positives (reduce specificity); but the assumption in this case is that when hiring minorities the sensitivity of the interview process is much worse than the specificity.
Right, that's why I said it depends on how the interview process is done. Some companies do thumbs up / down by round.
On a reread, Damore actually implies that Google's policies as applied to their interview process are "decreasing the false negative rate" for minorities. Whether this is harmfully discriminatory or not is open to opinion, but what I think is clear there is that the statement is favorable and understanding of his minority peers - the policies did not let anyone through who should not have been. I certainly don't think he should be fired for having given that statement.
I don't see how you don't recognize this as effectively lowering the bar (if not intentionally).
>Additional rounds of interviews are more like trying to accurately diagnose a condition using multiple different tests because the initial test is known to have poor sensitivity and will produce false negatives.
The difference is that what they're testing for isn't a binary proposition (do you have the disease or not), but a spectrum (what is your skill level). Viewing this in terms of false-positives or false-negatives is insufficient. If we think of programming skill as a spectrum, we can ask what is the average top-% of candidates who pass the interview (we might guess its top 5% of all developers). If everyone has the same test then the average top-% is unchanged regardless of any efforts to get more minorities to take the test. But once you start giving more tries to minorities your average top-% necessarily reduces.
Whatever your test is designed to admit (say you're interested in hiring only the top-10% of developers), the average of those who pass will be higher precisely because of the chance factor. Being significantly better than the intended cutoff gives you a better chance at passing and so those who pass skews towards better than the intended cutoff.
I'm not saying whether this is a good or bad thing, but the average skill of those who pass must reduce. It is very straightforward to see this as effectively lowering the bar.
Imagine that if you're a minority, you have nearly a 0% chance of getting hired if you're the only minority in the hiring pool [1]. As an employer, wouldn't you want to counteract that by making sure that the decision to hire/not-hire isn't affected by status-quo bias, so you don't overlook qualified candidates?
The memo didn't cause self doubt, the memo was intended to inspire others to look for doubt (hence the "lowering the bar").
The memo specifically targeted diversity hires as a lower bar. Imagine if a memo started circulating that asked everyone to question whether or not you were hired for your skill. That's a terrible environment to create.
Lowering the bar for a cohort is going to create different distributions of skill in that cohort, this person wasn't the first and won't be the last to come to this conclusion. I think damaging organizational cohesion is never the right choice but both sides of this argument contribute to that damage.
I'm telling you in plain mathematical terms that the way you go about hiring effects the distribution of candidates skill if you introduce any bias into the system regardless of whether or not its a literal or figurative bar or a bias on any parameter. I don't think anyone is going to disagree that biases exist on both sides of the aisle. Arguing about what google does or does not do is futile exercise I made zero claim about google and only believe they have introduced some biases in their hiring in some form.
This interview is literally a criticism that says very little about his style of writing. When they talk about "how" he approached this subject, it has to do with overall tone and the medium of delivery, not the nuances of his writing style.
> If he had spoken with some of them individually and spent some time trying to better understand their views on the issues, I suspect he would have done a better job choosing words that would have inspired debate rather than hostility.
That's it. He didn't talk to a single woman at Google about this manifesto before spreading it like gospel. All he had to do was talk to other people.
I have some people at work whose opinions I value highly that I occasionally run ideas and documents by before disseminating things to a wider group. It's very helpful, and has sometimes caught potential damaging misinterpretations before they were spread too widely, allowing me to reword things.
I definitely agree that if he'd simply had a few women he knew and trusted at work read it before he disseminated it widely then this all might have been avoided. If he didn't know any women at work that he trusted with this then that itself is a huge problem.
For what it's worth, he did run the document by others at Google and -- based on what I've read -- they were the ones who spread the document, not he. That's not to say he didn't intend to do it at some point, but that it was through his efforts to get said feedback that the fire started.
> If he didn't know any women at work that he trusted with this then that itself is a huge problem.
Given the fact that he was fired over this, i.e. Google thinks it's very bad, and assuming he had a hunch this was so, is it reasonable to believe he should be able to trust a female coworker with this memo not to file a complaint?
Put more generally: is it reasonable that one should expect one's coworkers to keep silent about a fireable offense?
I'd argue that it's objectively aggressive. His twitter handle "@fired4truth" makes the intention to be so rather obvious (the content he's promoting on that handle is an entire additional ball of wax)...
A 10-page manifesto, regardless of the content, when circulated internally without management's consent is in itself hard to view as anything but an act of mutiny.
> I'm going to go ahead and say it's ok to deny the concerns of white supremacists
All of their concerns? I'm sure you realize that people don't pick up an ideology like that unless it looks like their society isn't functioning.
White supremacy is an answer in search of a question, and the question need not (and ought not) be posed.
We shouldn't be ignoring the concerns of the radical Communists either; that doesn't mean we all should become Communists and repeat the atrocities of Stalin. Likewise, we don't need to become National Socialists in order to ease the pains that make them turn to the ideology.
This sort of sophistry is a mental virus. Say what you mean, stop with the mealy-mouthed "whataboutism" and vague questions. There are no communists involved in this discussion. Nobody calls Nazis "National Socialists" unless they're trying to blame the nebulous "left" for the evils of the Nazis.
We've been through these arguments since the 1940s. Karl Popper's view of the Paradox of Tolerance [1]
>Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
If we want an open society that permits maximal freedom, we can not permit those who wish to destroy freedom to override those who wish for freedom. The white nationalist movement includes people who explicitly endorse fascism and "throwing into ovens" those who exercised their free speech. [2]
>you can be accosted for publicly engaging a wrongthinker.
I don't think he cares about rationality, let alone having the fortitude to say what he means. "Everyone else is wrong and when I get called an asshole it's clearly because it's 1984."
I agree that he's probably an impossible case. He's too arrogant and far too emotionally weak if he thinks public rebuke of ideas is "accosting."
But we are in a public space, and the commonly-endorsed tactic of ignoring trolls has the unfortunate effect of letting this sort of pablum spread. I care about not letting stupid ideas and weak thinking persist without the easy counterarguments. When I say "mental virus" I really mean "mental virus." It's a sickness that only reason can defeat.
> when I get called an asshole it's clearly because it's 1984.
Well, it seems like my concerns are well-founded; because the first thing you did was look at my profile. Clearly you were looking to investigate me in some fashion, who knows why, I'm sure it'll do me no good if you're more than a peon.
Now imagine somebody else who doesn't feel comfortable with the (fairly mild here, thank you folks) level of hostility that I do; that mild-mannered person is the one I want to have an outlet for their thoughts so they don't stew in their own heads.
> because the first thing you did was look at my profile. Clearly you were looking to investigate me in some fashion, who knows why
Technically I read the thread and then looked at your profile. Because people such as yourself always have some self-aggrandizing, pseudo-intellectual nonsense in your bio that -- to everyone else -- clearly displays your ego, irrationality, and how wholly unprepared you are to seriously discuss matters in a forthright manner without trying to weasel your way around the topic. It's almost absurdly comical at how consistently you find such silliness.
>I'm sure it'll do me no good if you're more than a peon.
> Because people such as yourself always have some self-aggrandizing, pseudo-intellectual nonsense in your bio
Well, I added it a few days ago because somebody found a way to contact me, and it made them feel less isolated. They told me that I should have my email address in my HN bio with some words of encouragement (it's meant to be playful, if you didn't detect), so I added it. If you get the impression that it's there to play into my ego, well, that's less of a problem than the crushing loneliness of even one person.
> that -- to everyone else -- clearly displays your ego, irrationality, and how wholly unprepared you are to seriously discuss matters in a forthright manner without trying to weasel your way around the topic.
What have I not been forthright about? I am here, a fully identifiable human being. I was making conversation in the wee hours of the morning, and you two took your egg accounts and started assassinating my character. I did not resort to the same tactics, and I tried to answer each jab and remark as clearly as I could manage. I made sure not to make it personal.
> I'm quoting this just to draw attention to it.
Perhaps we can all sound cryptic sometimes. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I'm saying that if you have it in for me, and (for example) you have direct access to a blacklist of some sort (usually reserved for management, and not peons), it'll do me no good that you're upset and willing to look for my bio.
> This sort of sophistry is a mental virus. Say what you mean, stop with the mealy-mouthed "whataboutism" and vague questions.
It seems like you had this line in your clipboard, it is inaccurate, irrelevant, and puzzling in the context of this discussion.
> There are no communists involved in this discussion.
Well, there were communists at the rally, and they came with (thankfully blunt) weapons, ready to brawl. They dressed in black instead of red because that's the trend as of late. Radical communists have been regularly assaulting people at protests and assemblies in America for at least a year.
> We've been through these arguments since the 1940s. Karl Popper's view of the Paradox of Tolerance [1]
I'm not interested in tolerating political violence, but political speech I will.
We need to make ethnonationalism and other seductive ideologies obsolete, instead of suppressing the people who go to them for help.
I think you'd be better received if you didn't speak so cryptically. What do you mean an answer in search of a question? Do you want us to meditate on that like a Buddhist koan?
You're implying a hidden knowledge of just what critical concerns people are ignoring, but you won't tell us.
> I think you'd be better received if you didn't speak so cryptically. What do you mean an answer in search of a question? Do you want us to meditate on that like a Buddhist koan?
Sorry if I was unclear. I meant to make the same statement as the first, in a different form. I hoped that providing two versions of the same statement, folks would have a better chance of understanding what I meant.
Once more: Nobody just chooses one day to become a white supremacist. Nobody is born a white supremacist. Nobody in their right mind would identify as a white supremacist without good reason, because doing so is mortally dangerous.
Clearly there's something wrong in their life for them to accept an ideological solution as severe and impractical as white supremacy. That is, they have a serious question, which the answer of white supremacy has found.
> You're implying a hidden knowledge of just what critical concerns people are ignoring, but you won't tell us.
I suspect their concerns are pedestrian: unsatisfactory employment (or lack thereof), the cost of health care, security, the uncertainty of demographic shifts (especially the shrinking proportion of their own race, and the growing relevance of race in public discourse), the moral conditions for their children (though largely an unfounded concern, given how safe America is).
Many people are concerned about jobs, healthcare, and security but only fucking nazis and other white supremacist pieces of shit are concerned about "the uncertainty of demographic shifts (especially the shrinking proportion of their own race, and the growing relevance of race in public discourse)." That's not a normal concern and choosing to become a white supremacist because you have such concerns is no excuse for these lowlifes. These people choose hate and no amount of apologizing for their disgusting choices is ever going to make that ok. They could choose to talk to other people who are different than them and realize that good people come in all colors, nationalities, etc. But no, they choose hate and they choose violence. Fuck them. We've had hundreds of years of this shit all over the world but especially in the U.S. and finally people are standing up to this shit en masse and refusing to accept it. It's about fucking time to stop being tolerant of these hateful, violent fucks. Society is slowly moving on.
so you're saying that I should be responsible for the mental well being of an adult who thinks eradicating entire races of people will solve all of their problems
Don't pull that alt-right logic-gymnast bullshit where suddenly we're calling nazis "national socialists" and all socialism are the same. It's fine if you've convinced yourself that you can't smell your own bullshit, but don't ask us to be party to it.
No, I'm making a point about white supremacy and you're being pedantic about something tangentially related. It doesn't fucking matter how similar socialism is to communism when white supremacy is the outcome.
The Titanic is sinking and you're arguing with me about the difference between row boats and sail boats.
My sole point in this entire thread is that white supremacy is bad regardless of source.
I merely used an extreme example to show you that you were missing the forest for the trees, and you still are. I'm sorry that you're having this problem.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines and using HN for political/ideological flamewar, which is not a legit use of this site. Would you please not create accounts to do this with?
I'm sure white supremacists are concerned about employment, the decline of the American manufacturing sector, and the cost of health insurance. In fact, I'm pretty sure these concerns contribute to their desire to join others who say they have the solution.
> Not even remotely the same thing. Not even in the same galaxy. Not even in the same universe.
Now, I'm not generally one to nickel-and-dime the deathtolls of genocidal ideologies, but I don't think you could credibly argue that in the 20th century National Socialism was more deadly than Communism. At least you'd have to concede that they are in "the same universe", or "the same galaxy".
Don't use hyperbole, else all of your blood will drain instantly from your eyes.
It's a series of tools and components required to fit certain related theories?
In carpentry you have many standardized off-the-shelf tools and components (hammers, nails, windows, tiles, dimensional lumber) and you have an almost endless number of ways to combine them. You can also create your own tools and components (which is harder). You also have some pre-determined guidelines that are meant to protect/regulate things so that they're safer and easier for a wider audience to live with, maintain, and edit (building codes).
Any of this stuff will work together as long as you stick to the constraints of individual objects as they fit into the laws of physics (a component can only bear X load in Y configuration).
The concept of "properly" is a bit varied. I can build a house with mud and straw and it's a "proper" house in some parts of the world... but it might kill me in an earthquake. This might be due to a pre-determined assessment of earthquake risk, or it might be because of limited knowledge and resources available (very common in coding, and often OK in small scale scenarios).
Not sure what point you're trying to make — I live in Boston and the map seems generally accurate. Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes shorter — that's why we use averages.
There's also a reason traffic to the cape is high during the summer months — the cape sucks in the winter. Not sure how you're using that to your advantage.
> Not sure what point you're trying to make — I live in Boston and the map seems generally accurate. Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes shorter — that's why we use averages.
Yes the map is correct! I'm saying what most people probably missed is that New England is highly compressed and has many factors such as complicated roads and seasons.
However because its compressed you do not need to travel 5 hours! Five hours gets you past NYC even with traffic.
> There's also a reason traffic to the cape is high during the summer months — the cape sucks in the winter. Not sure how you're using that to your advantage.
No its exactly as the article points out that timing is big deal and I was saying its even more of a big deal seasonal. I said I left at 4 pm. to the Cape Not 5 pm. That is a big deal for Boston as the article clearly shows. In other cities it is not. In other cities such as Atlanta for example you still have to drive 4 hours to get Savannah.
However cursory look of the article makes it appear cities like Atlanta are great commuting cities because of how far you can drive regardless of the time.
As this guy's ongoing reaction verifies (His twitter handle is "@fired4truth"), a manifesto is a "here's why I'm right" rather than a "let's talk about this." This guy has no intention of having an open dialogue.
Trying to circulate a 10-page manifesto explaining how management doesn't understand what they're doing is going to get you fired just about anywhere.
