dropstickle's comments

You are allowed to travel everywhere in Norway now if you are a resident, even if you are from Oslo. However, there was a couple of weeks where that was not allowed.

Norway is actually almost back to normal,except you can't have gatherings of over 200 people. It has been this way for almost a month now, and there have not been any increase in confirmed covid cases yet, which is surprising.

It might be to force the market to become more effective.

Social issues is quite a clearly a problem, I just guess we disagree on the degree of biological influence, although there are some interesting points you bring up.

This whole memo thing has certainly led me down the rabbit hole. Not being an actual scientist with insight into both biological and social factors, I find it hard to be to sure of where I stand on the issue, and the current political climate is certainly helping to muddy the waters.

> Right. And what I've been trying to say is that the statistical averages aren't the offensive part. That's a straw man.

Well you did pose the question, I just answered it, so it was not to erect a straw man, and I was not really trying to contradict the rest of your claim by that example, maybe I should have been clearer on that.

> Sure, the memo didn't say it explicitly, but it did imply that. Everyone keeps defending the exact wording as if implication and misleading statements don't exist. Suggesting it's a "part" suggests it's a measurable and large part, comparable to social causes.

Yes, he certainly does imply that biological causes has a measurable effect, and a large enough effect that it should be taken into consideration for measures (that he also suggests) in order to change work practices so as they might better fit females and thus increase diversity.

> Pointing out that women are more neurotic (which is a clinical term with very negative popular connotation, so extremely easily misunderstood) might be a part of why Google has so few women is leading the reader to conclude it's a major factor.

I agree that it is unfortunate that neurotic is easily misunderstood, but if he didn't use the correct clinical term he would be critized for not being scientific enough, which you are already critizing him for.

> This argument is cherry-picking the science in favor, and completely ignoring the contrary evidence that suggests that social issues are much larger than anything we could possibly measure about innate biological ability. For example, that different countries have very different distributions of women in engineering, or that the distributions have changed wildly in the last 50 years.

I don't agree with you that science has concluded that biological factors don't play a role in what professions people go into. I saw an interesting Harvard debate between Steven Pinker and Elisabeth Spelke on this [1]. The two examples you present does not explicitly contradict that it might be part biological reasons [2], the provided link has a fascinating discussion in the comment section that gives you both sides of the discussion.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8 [2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Maybe I should have been clearer, you stated to the parent reply that:

>> I don't understand what you said there, can you elaborate? What is the difference between males being more biologically suitable and females being at a disadvantage? From my perspective, you just contradicted yourself, can you help me understand why it's not a contradiction?

This was in response to the parent that said Damore had not singled out any female google employes. The overweight example was an attempt to clarify that even though statistical averages say something about a group, it does not say something about the individual, i.e the google females should not feel singled out by statistical averages.

As for the nature/nuture point in the memo: yes the memo is making a biological claim backed by sources. It does not suggest that current distributions are correct. No, the memo is not saying that nature is the primary force, only that it might play a part [1]:

"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."

[1] https://diversitymemo.com/

I think you misunderstood me. I was not making a biological correlation, but a statistical one; namely that group averages doesn't say anything about an individual. The nature/nurture debate of overweight people is besides the point.

Let's say you are an american. 60% of americans are overweight. Does that mean you are overweight?

He does a provide a source in the form of a wikipedia article that uses actual citations [1]. The version with sources (gizmodo removed them in their first publication of the memo), is located at [2].

As for your comment on his "blatant disregard for social context", he explicitly mentions that he believes that biases should be corrected and that society probably also is to blame [3], he just doesn't believe that biological factors does not play any role at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...

[2] http://diversitymemo.com/

[3] http://diversitymemo.com/#suggestions

I did remember it partially wrong. As stated in the article [1] it was reduced by about half, and not to zero.

[1] http://www.vg.no/nyheter/meninger/arbeidsliv/fortsatt-behov-...

Norway has had "gender points" in relation to acceptance at university for several studies, especially in the STEM related ones. The gender gap has closed a great deal in most of the STEM studies, but not that much in CS related ones. Some of the studies have become nearly 50/50, and an interesting event is when they tried to remove the "gender points" from one of the studies, and the female acceptance rates fell to almost zero. Females in Norway generally have better grades, so one could make the argument that the difference is because of interest.

Ah I see. Thanks for expanding.

As far as I have understood, his main problem with Google is exactly as you describe him. He feels like Google is actively furthering a political agenda, namely the left one, and does not allow any dissidents or diversity of viewpoints. He explictly states that he is not against diversity, and that he is open to criticism and debate of the arguments he presented.

As for the cherry picking; remember that he is trying to make a point here, namely that biological differences might play a role over aggregated statistical differences, and that this might be one of the reasons we don't see the 50/50 split, and that ignoring this might be counter productive for everyone. Is the biological studies he have presented cherry picked? I'm sure you have seen the Quillette article [1], and the scientists quoted there does not seem to think so.

[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-....

The post I responded specifically said the memo author got all biological research wrong. Now, his conclusions from that are certainly more debatable.

I guess the larger point I was trying to make is that when people feel singled out because of statistical differences b it leads them to take things personally, which leads to perpetuating disproportionate reactions and a non-existing platform for actual discussion.

If it is really true that women make 87% of men for the same work, any company that is driven by profit would exclusively hire women. The alternative would be that sexism is so rampant that it trumps profit driven motivation, am I missing something, or is that what you are suggesting?

Modern day Nazi's may use biological differences as a sort of ideological fuel to further their despicable cause, but to lay that sort of intention behind the memo author is also despicable. The nazis should not be able to deter a society from looking at science from an objective viewpoint, that is something everyone would suffer from.

Did you read the memo? He got all the biology research wrong? Please come with some examples of errors in the empirical claims he made.

And he is not saying that you are a "freak" or "biological anomaly", he is talking about aggregated, statistical differences.

My point is that not one of them described it in terms such as "shoddy" or "amateur", such as you did. None of them refutes any of the empirical claims he made. This stands in stark contrast to your interpretation of the memo.

If diverse companies perform better, this would surely mean that there is some sort of difference between the sexes? How else could diversity have an impact on the bottom line of a company?

Here you have four scientists with a "review" of the manifesto:

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

They seem not to agree with you.

My intention with this question was to probe if there was anyone that has experience within this field that might have any milestone studies/papers on hand, or something that they can cite from memory. The reason for this is that when you venture into a new field of study it usually takes time sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Now off course I can do the research on my own, it was simply a question I asked to save time.

To assume that I have some sort of hidden agenda behind this question is rather paranoid from my perspective (and came as a surprise), as you didn't know anything about my intentions.