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by alexandercrohde·9y ago·view on hn ↗
Do you understand what's happening here? Whether or not google "lowered the bar" (i.e. had distinct hiring criteria for men or women) is a fact and only a fact. It may be a true fact, or it may be a false fact. But it is not an opinion.

But somehow it gets turned into "This means he thinks women are worse, therefore he's insulting women, therefore it's a hostile workplace, therefore he got fired." That reasoning is a major leap, and it's not Damore's leap.

Taking a fact and turning it into a hostile-workplace-opinion is the real problem.

1 comments
You are completely incorrect. Whether or not Google did in reality lower the bar to hire more women is a matter of fact. That Damore felt that in order to meet the goal of hiring more women Google had to lower the bar is his _opinion_, and it is a telling opinion about how he thinks about the capabilities of women.

"You had to buy inferior wood to get enough to build this house. I don't think there's enough good wood to build the house, therefore in order to get enough you had to buy inferior wood."

The fact of the quality of the wood is separate from the opinion of the availability of quality wood.

If the supply of qualified female candidates ready to be hired now is thought to be restricted (so that the bar must be lowered), that does not imply the same thought about the capabilities of women. The problem with diversity could be thought to be in the talent pipeline: young girls wanting to be programmers, gaining interest and experience in high school, going to college to study computer science, staying the field to reach higher levels, and so on.

In fact, we find that the field was way more diverse before the 1990s, and the talent pipeline for female programmers only started choking in the late 80s (for reasons we could argue, but one popular theory involves boy-oriented PCs and video games).

Except no, he did not say google "had to lower the bar." If you read the memo, he says :

"Google has created several discriminatory practices: ... Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" [Mind you _lower the bar_ is a hyperlink, to a gdoc I don't have access to, so he's citing another document as evidence of this practice].

So he is in fact arguing a factual claim, that google has applied inconsistant standards in practice, as I suggested in my prior post.

You say he didn't say that Google had to lower the bar, then you quote where he says explicitly that? "Google does X. X lowers the bar."

>So he is in fact arguing a factual claim, that google has applied inconsistant standards in practice, as I suggested in my prior post.

Yes. Re-read my comment. Whether or not they apply inconsistent hiring practices is a factual claim. The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion.

I don't know what you're arguing anymore. I'm thoroughly convinced you either haven't read the relevant sections or have forgotten them since this discussion started.

Please show me where he says anything like "The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion."

>practices which can effectively lower the bar

He merely states that it can have that effect.

>Yes. Re-read my comment. Whether or not they apply inconsistent hiring practices is a factual claim. The idea that the only way to achieve the goal of hiring more women is to apply inconsistent hiring practices is his opinion.

It looks like a logical conclusion to me. Care to explain why you think it's not?

I made this comment a few days ago, but I think a lot of readers are getting tripped up in his (likely very artfully deployed) wording and avoiding his underlying messages.

The passage in which that quote occurs clearly implies that the bar has already been lowered - in fact, the second half of the sentence offers the mechanism through which the 'bar had been lowered' ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate")

> No one would find it weird if I claimed that women aren't able to run a 100 as fast as men. Yes, there might be some exceptional cases where women can compete, but they are just that, exceptions to the rule. Most of the time women compete among themselves since they would never qualify for anything if they competed in the same category as men. Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?

I guess I'm surprised that this is controversial (in response to your most recent comment to a sibling poster) - the reason we don't accept that women are worse programmers than men is... we don't have evidence that women are worse programmers than men.

There are data about physical strength (and amazingly clear biological correlates - most HN posters will never outmatch a top female athlete, and we only need to do a quick lab test to determine this). However, female/minority intelligence has been, and continues to be, a politicized issue - until the more overt instances of discrimination are eliminated, how can we jump from blaming the obvious societal barriers to blaming biology?

>He merely states that it can have that effect.

He "merely" says that Google is doing it, and that doing it lowers the bar. Therefore he's saying that Google lowered the bar. It's a pretty simple a = b = c scenario

>It looks like a logical conclusion to me. Care to explain why you think it's not?

Because women can achieve at the same level as men? I thought it was pretty obvious.

Let's look at the quote again:

> "Google has created several discriminatory practices: ... Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"

Please note the last 5 words. Damore wasn't saying that diversity candidates got jobs in spite of being below the bar. He was saying that decreasing the false negative rates for certain groups is discriminatory towards those who don't belong to said groups.

E.g., the point is that focusing on decreasing false negative rates for group A but not for group B, will mean that, on average, more people who are close to the bar will be hired from group A than from group B. This is unfair to group B, since they are much less likely to get "the benefit of the doubt".

In essence, the quote relates to how Google deals differently with uncertainty depending on the gender of an individual.

>Because women can achieve at the same level as men? I thought it was pretty obvious.

No one would find it weird if I claimed that women aren't able to run a 100 as fast as men. Yes, there might be some exceptional cases where women can compete, but they are just that, exceptions to the rule. Most of the time women compete among themselves since they would never qualify for anything if they competed in the same category as men.

Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?

You claim that women can achieve at the same level as men. Let's assume they can for now. However, your gripe is with the under-representation of women at tech companies. So that claim doesn't really help you, you would need to show that women perform as well as men on average. Can you?

>Why is it unacceptable to make the same observation about intellectual endeavors, or programming specifically?

Because the observation is inaccurate. There is no evidence that it is true.

>However, your gripe is with the under-representation of women at tech companies. So that claim doesn't really help you, you would need to show that women perform as well as men on average. Can you?

We have no evidence they can't, why would we assume that to be the case?

> it is a telling opinion about how he thinks about the capabilities of women.

No, assuming that men and women who applied have the exact same distribution of 'good qualities', you have twice as many male applicants as female applicants, and you want to hire as many women as men, you have to lower the bar for women.

That's a completely made-up scenario. Google themselves have said that the way they're trying to hire more women is by looking harder for qualified candidates, not by lowering the level that meets "qualified".