5 ms·

I think this has been talked about multiple times over - Damore did not have a line that states that women and/or minorities are bad engineers. He does, howeve

by evolve2017 9y ago

I think this has been talked about multiple times over - Damore did not have a line that states that women and/or minorities are bad engineers. He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers. Still, it's true that he never said that...

jquery 9y ago
By that logic, any criticism of hiring methods means you view the current crop of employees as inferior. Is saying "we need more diversity" code for "white men are inferior"? You might be on to something.
- cfelix 9y ago
  Not exactly, preferring a diverse group over a homogeneous one doesn't mean that the individuals of the homogeneous group are inferior. If the goal is to have a diverse group then a group composed only of women isn't ideal either. Diversity is not about raising or lowering the bar.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - literallycancer 9y ago
    What if I prefer a homogeneous group then? It doesn't mean that diverse individuals are any worse, does it?
    - cfelix 9y ago
      Of course not! I just don't know why someone would want that.
      - meric 9y ago
        For a genetic study of prevalence of a genetic condition in Chinese males, you'd want a homogenous group of Chinese males.
        cfelix 9y ago
        I was referring about hiring people, not studying them. But I can't say you're wrong.
        meric 9y ago
        If we really dig for an example - mountain climbing guides for Mount Everest, certain groups of people have evolutionary advantages that make them more suited for the job. In an extreme environment where advantages of the tail end of population distributions are important then it's less likely the market will choose a diversified workforce.
      - literallycancer 9y ago
        If I ran a debt collecting agency, I'd probably choose men with a Russian-sounding accent over any other group.
redthrowaway 9y ago
>He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers. Yes, but that's simply how statistics work. If you require one group of people to score 90 on some test in order to be hired, and another group to score 80, then among successful applicants the second group will have lower average scores than the first. There's no getting around that. The argument should be over whether or not Google's hiring practices lower the bar for particular groups of people. If they do, then the above conclusion about the average talent of various groups is inescapable.
- mathw 9y ago
  Indeed, however Google have said that their hiring practices for minority groups involve looking harder in those groups for candidates, not hiring candidates who don't meet the usual standards.
  - redthrowaway 9y ago
    Is there a good resource for what Google's diversity efforts actually include?
  - andrewingram 9y ago
    He does however claim he'd learned of questionable/unethical hiring practices as part of a "secret" diversity hiring meeting he'd been invited to attend, and this is what prompted the memo in the first place. What I inferred from this, is that he learned that at least in some cases, there's aspects to Google's diversity hiring that they'd rather people not know about. Now I don't know if this is false, true, or true within a small subset of Google; but his claim of the secret meeting does change the narrative somewhat in his favour.
    - mathw 9y ago
      Not unless he can provide some evidence for it.
arcticfox 9y ago
This is the type of resentment / thinking that he wants the company to steer away from. If they do encode 'lower bar' policies, it's an inevitable and rational conclusion to draw, which is incredibly toxic I agree. By taking other approaches to diversity at different stages in the funnel, that toxic inevitability is avoided.
- evolve2017 9y ago
  I'm not sure how you're privvy to his thought process. Also, the idea that finding ways to employ more women+minorities leads to poorer employees is exactly what many people don't after about - essentially, your argument is taking his opinion as fact, while I only wanted to point out the underlying message to his words.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
alexandercrohde 9y ago
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.
- mejari 9y ago
  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.
  - alexandercrohde 9y ago
    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.
    - mejari 9y ago
      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.
tlogan 9y ago
Here is the key part: > Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace > differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole > story. On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways .. And then he talks about "Google lowering the bar". I'm not sure how can I parse part "... but it's far from the whole story" with "Google lowering the bar". I'm not racist, but...
- therebedragons 9y ago
  > And then he talks about "Google lowering the bar". Strange how you directly quote parts that don't mention the lowering of the bar, then suddenly paraphrase the lowering the bar part, and put quotes around a non-quote. This is the sort of intellectual run around that is really common. I searched the doc, and Damore uses this word "bar" exactly once (if the search function can be believed - lowering zero): > Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate And this links (via the text "effectively lower the bar for") to an internal Google chat I can't see. So ten pages, and lower(ing) the bar is mentioned once, in which he links to some discussion which I assume is relevant to the quote. How can anyone know what that quote means with out reading the internal google chat? For all I know, it links to an chat discussing false negatives in hiring, because I find that whole sentence confusing - how is decreasing false negatives bad? Is he saying they only use practices which reduce false negatives on diversity hires and not other hires? That would actually be really interesting - Google conducting different interviews based on "diversity" and finding they get better candidates as a result would be weird not to replicate. In any case, that internal chat must clear up at least part of that context, and I can't read it so I have no context for this single line. Given this was an internal memo, however, the author gave its intended audience full access to the context, so even then, I can't see how this can be used as a sweeping statement by those externally of much of anything.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
curun1r 9y ago
> He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. He basically said the opposite, but people have been so interested in triggering off the 'lowered the bar' phrasing to show their outrage that they're (seemingly willfully) ignoring the rest of the sentence which completely changed the meaning. But 'by lowering false negatives' is hugely important. Google's hiring process has a lot of false negatives. These are qualified engineers who weren't hired that could have been successful at Google. This allows for 'lowering the bar' without sacrificing quality by not subjecting minority/female candidates to the more arbitrary/capricious stages of the Google hiring process that eliminate so many otherwise-qualified candidates. Imagine if one of the ways that we chose to address diversity in the tech workplace was to exempt qualified female/minority H1-B candidates from the lottery and automatically approve their visas? It wouldn't make them any less qualified, since they could've gotten their visa through the normal lottery process. But it would 'lower the bar' by making it significantly more likely that they'd get visas. The post-interview stages of Google's hiring process are similar in their often-arbitrary selecting of who gets through. It's also, on Google's part, a smart move to address their PR concerns. It allows them to increase female/minority hiring, thereby satisfying public calls for more diversity, without sacrificing quality. All they have to do is look into their process at where qualified diversity candidates are getting rejected and stop doing that. It's a luxury that other companies with fewer surplus potential hires don't have when trying to improve the diversity of their workforce. But possibly more importantly, it's not helping to improve the diversity of the industry as a whole, it only helps to make Google's stats look better. Google's standards for engineers mean that their false negatives can usually get jobs elsewhere without much difficulty. By taking this approach to diversity hiring, they're just shifting their own workforce demographics without helping the industry as a whole do the same.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  "lowering the bar" has an actual meaning. "To lower the standards of quality that are expected of or required for something." -- http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lower+the+bar http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lower+the+bar If he didn't mean to say that, he should retract that phrase and apologize for saying something he didn't mean to say. You getting "triggered" by people using the standard definition of a common idiom isn't helpful. Parents often tell their children that a lie about what they did is worse than the original crime. I hope Mr. Damore didn't take this smug "I didn't actually say that women were inferior, it's all about preferences" tone that seems to be the first line of defence online, in his HR meetings only to be asked "So, what's this bit about race and the "science" of IQ you mentioned? Is IQ a preference?" I'll note that the argument you present about Google only diversity-washing themselves at the cost of others having lower diversity, is the same argument that people make about their green energy efforts. In that area at least they've gone to great lengths to ensure that they actually improve the whole industry, not just steal the glory for themselves and I wouldn't be at all suprised if they had some very smart people ensuring the same was the case in this instance.

jquery 9y ago

By that logic, any criticism of hiring methods means you view the current crop of employees as inferior. Is saying "we need more diversity" code for "white men are inferior"? You might be on to something.

cfelix 9y ago
Not exactly, preferring a diverse group over a homogeneous one doesn't mean that the individuals of the homogeneous group are inferior. If the goal is to have a diverse group then a group composed only of women isn't ideal either. Diversity is not about raising or lowering the bar.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- literallycancer 9y ago
  What if I prefer a homogeneous group then? It doesn't mean that diverse individuals are any worse, does it?
  - cfelix 9y ago
    Of course not! I just don't know why someone would want that.
    - meric 9y ago
      For a genetic study of prevalence of a genetic condition in Chinese males, you'd want a homogenous group of Chinese males.
      - cfelix 9y ago
        I was referring about hiring people, not studying them. But I can't say you're wrong.
        meric 9y ago
        If we really dig for an example - mountain climbing guides for Mount Everest, certain groups of people have evolutionary advantages that make them more suited for the job. In an extreme environment where advantages of the tail end of population distributions are important then it's less likely the market will choose a diversified workforce.
    - literallycancer 9y ago
      If I ran a debt collecting agency, I'd probably choose men with a Russian-sounding accent over any other group.

redthrowaway 9y ago

>He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers. Yes, but that's simply how statistics work. If you require one group of people to score 90 on some test in order to be hired, and another group to score 80, then among successful applicants the second group will have lower average scores than the first. There's no getting around that. The argument should be over whether or not Google's hiring practices lower the bar for particular groups of people. If they do, then the above conclusion about the average talent of various groups is inescapable.

mathw 9y ago
Indeed, however Google have said that their hiring practices for minority groups involve looking harder in those groups for candidates, not hiring candidates who don't meet the usual standards.
- redthrowaway 9y ago
  Is there a good resource for what Google's diversity efforts actually include?
- andrewingram 9y ago
  He does however claim he'd learned of questionable/unethical hiring practices as part of a "secret" diversity hiring meeting he'd been invited to attend, and this is what prompted the memo in the first place. What I inferred from this, is that he learned that at least in some cases, there's aspects to Google's diversity hiring that they'd rather people not know about. Now I don't know if this is false, true, or true within a small subset of Google; but his claim of the secret meeting does change the narrative somewhat in his favour.
  - mathw 9y ago
    Not unless he can provide some evidence for it.

arcticfox 9y ago

This is the type of resentment / thinking that he wants the company to steer away from. If they do encode 'lower bar' policies, it's an inevitable and rational conclusion to draw, which is incredibly toxic I agree. By taking other approaches to diversity at different stages in the funnel, that toxic inevitability is avoided.

evolve2017 9y ago
I'm not sure how you're privvy to his thought process. Also, the idea that finding ways to employ more women+minorities leads to poorer employees is exactly what many people don't after about - essentially, your argument is taking his opinion as fact, while I only wanted to point out the underlying message to his words.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

alexandercrohde 9y ago

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.

mejari 9y ago
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.
- alexandercrohde 9y ago
  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.
  - mejari 9y ago
    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.

tlogan 9y ago

Here is the key part: > Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace > differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it’s far from the whole > story. On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways .. And then he talks about "Google lowering the bar". I'm not sure how can I parse part "... but it's far from the whole story" with "Google lowering the bar". I'm not racist, but...

therebedragons 9y ago
> And then he talks about "Google lowering the bar". Strange how you directly quote parts that don't mention the lowering of the bar, then suddenly paraphrase the lowering the bar part, and put quotes around a non-quote. This is the sort of intellectual run around that is really common. I searched the doc, and Damore uses this word "bar" exactly once (if the search function can be believed - lowering zero): > Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate And this links (via the text "effectively lower the bar for") to an internal Google chat I can't see. So ten pages, and lower(ing) the bar is mentioned once, in which he links to some discussion which I assume is relevant to the quote. How can anyone know what that quote means with out reading the internal google chat? For all I know, it links to an chat discussing false negatives in hiring, because I find that whole sentence confusing - how is decreasing false negatives bad? Is he saying they only use practices which reduce false negatives on diversity hires and not other hires? That would actually be really interesting - Google conducting different interviews based on "diversity" and finding they get better candidates as a result would be weird not to replicate. In any case, that internal chat must clear up at least part of that context, and I can't read it so I have no context for this single line. Given this was an internal memo, however, the author gave its intended audience full access to the context, so even then, I can't see how this can be used as a sweeping statement by those externally of much of anything.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

curun1r 9y ago

> He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. He basically said the opposite, but people have been so interested in triggering off the 'lowered the bar' phrasing to show their outrage that they're (seemingly willfully) ignoring the rest of the sentence which completely changed the meaning. But 'by lowering false negatives' is hugely important. Google's hiring process has a lot of false negatives. These are qualified engineers who weren't hired that could have been successful at Google. This allows for 'lowering the bar' without sacrificing quality by not subjecting minority/female candidates to the more arbitrary/capricious stages of the Google hiring process that eliminate so many otherwise-qualified candidates. Imagine if one of the ways that we chose to address diversity in the tech workplace was to exempt qualified female/minority H1-B candidates from the lottery and automatically approve their visas? It wouldn't make them any less qualified, since they could've gotten their visa through the normal lottery process. But it would 'lower the bar' by making it significantly more likely that they'd get visas. The post-interview stages of Google's hiring process are similar in their often-arbitrary selecting of who gets through. It's also, on Google's part, a smart move to address their PR concerns. It allows them to increase female/minority hiring, thereby satisfying public calls for more diversity, without sacrificing quality. All they have to do is look into their process at where qualified diversity candidates are getting rejected and stop doing that. It's a luxury that other companies with fewer surplus potential hires don't have when trying to improve the diversity of their workforce. But possibly more importantly, it's not helping to improve the diversity of the industry as a whole, it only helps to make Google's stats look better. Google's standards for engineers mean that their false negatives can usually get jobs elsewhere without much difficulty. By taking this approach to diversity hiring, they're just shifting their own workforce demographics without helping the industry as a whole do the same.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
"lowering the bar" has an actual meaning. "To lower the standards of quality that are expected of or required for something." -- http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lower+the+bar http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lower+the+bar If he didn't mean to say that, he should retract that phrase and apologize for saying something he didn't mean to say. You getting "triggered" by people using the standard definition of a common idiom isn't helpful. Parents often tell their children that a lie about what they did is worse than the original crime. I hope Mr. Damore didn't take this smug "I didn't actually say that women were inferior, it's all about preferences" tone that seems to be the first line of defence online, in his HR meetings only to be asked "So, what's this bit about race and the "science" of IQ you mentioned? Is IQ a preference?" I'll note that the argument you present about Google only diversity-washing themselves at the cost of others having lower diversity, is the same argument that people make about their green energy efforts. In that area at least they've gone to great lengths to ensure that they actually improve the whole industry, not just steal the glory for themselves and I wouldn't be at all suprised if they had some very smart people ensuring the same was the case in this instance.