GOOGL - Google

[ScottHall]

I have never found formal education terribly useful, most of what is imparted is known knowledge. The most useful kind of knowledge is the type you synthesize yourself from unique life experiences. That is the sort of knowledge that can be uncharted... and sometimes, very valuable.

Yea, nobody's gonna pay you to synthesize a bridge from your unique life experiences.

 

Yeah, my family's been there and done that. On to bigger and better things, and more profitable lines of business.

 

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=37129&st=&st1=

[rb]

Not for nothing, but all this tells me is that the bigger issue is cultural and as I've long thought, the American system is second rate and sets people up to fail. Requiring everyone to be educated is the biggest thing we can do, and yet, it's not done. Everyone should be taking STEM classes their entire way through school. Asian and Eastern European countries get this. If you have a certain knowledge base, which is immensely facilitated by knowing STEM subjects, you can be useful pretty much anywhere. If you can draw or sing, or write, well your options are fairly limited, in some places you are useless, and generally speaking, you dont have the same odds of prospering as others. So you are right in that it isnt necessarily a male/female thing. Maybe in certain areas those things come into play, but by and large its a societal issue that derives from living in this alternative American universe where everyone can be whoever/whatever they want to be. Thats just not how life works.

Oh you're absolutely correct that it's a societal issue. But in my view societies want to evolve and sort out their issues. So you if you want to eliminate this bias isn't Google helping with diversity policies and allowing women to flourish in the profession? I'm just spit balling here, but banning misogyny, allowing women to flourish, thus in turn creating role-models and mentors, etc.

 

Contrast this with the Uber culture.... boys will be boys, what you gonna do. What's a little sexual harassment if stretch goals are met.

 

Which of the 2 do you think contributes more towards the solution of the societal issue?

[Gregmal]

I have never found formal education terribly useful, most of what is imparted is known knowledge. The most useful kind of knowledge is the type you synthesize yourself from unique life experiences. That is the sort of knowledge that can be uncharted... and sometimes, very valuable.

Yea, nobody's gonna pay you to synthesize a bridge from your unique life experiences.

 

Yeah, my family's been there and done that. On to bigger and better things, and more profitable lines of business.

 

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=37129&st=&st1=

 

Yes but would you consider yourself an outlier or the norm? Lets look at a sample of 1000 people who dropped out in 4th grade. I would gander a very high majority are not models for what you want society to be.

 

By and large, for society as a whole, knowledge is valuable. Its the difference between someone stocking shelves at $9/hour, and someone writing code at 150k/year. One is capable of producing more value than the other. To 95% of people, you only learn code through being educated on the subject. Sure there are Elon Musks who teach themselves, but they are hardly the model you should expect to work for people. 

 

And I say all this as someone who in did shitty for 90% of my pre-college school career and in aggregate probably missed(intentionally) over 100 days of class in high school simply because I was bored and found little value in the remedial teachings and memorization based learning. I remember getting a D in Physics because even though I missed almost 80 days of class, I got a 97 on the final exam so the teacher had to pass me. I knew I could do it, but it didn't challenge me so my time was better spent on other things. And like you I now do better than probably 95% of people I went to school with who got straight A's and spend all their time doing what the system told them. But I wouldn't recommend this path to the average child. Heck if my kid did this, I'd be furious. I don't think it's a terrible thing to emphasize teaching and learning more valuable subject matter. In fact I'm sure people would be amazed at the level of productivity that manifests from it. The number of women and minorities that flourish in jobs typically dominated by "the white male", or Eastern European/Asians. But we'll instead likely continue to see the gradual deterioration of society. After all, why would we bother changing the curriculum when most inner city public schools aren't even funded well enough to provide students textbooks written in the past 20 years.

[rkbabang]

So let me get this straight. In a society where people aren't forced to study STEM more men choose to study STEM fields than women, so the answer is to force people to study things they wouldn't choose to?  Yes women in the US aren't forced to take higher level math or study physics, but men aren't either.  If you forced everyone into culinary school I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up with more chefs, but that says nothing about what people would like to do if given the choice from the start.

[johnny]

It's amazing what happens when you do the most you can to pull bias from the system. Fast forward a bunch of years and a lot of immigration and we wonder why there are so many female engineers from Eastern Europe.

 

Sounds like what you're suggesting is that women are more likely to pursue STEM careers under communist dictatorships where it is clear which fields will receive state support, and relatively less likely to pursue STEM careers when they live in freer societies.

 

Likewise, women have pretty good STEM participation in places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. So clearly "pulling bias from the system" is hardly a necessary condition for increasing women in STEM, if that's the sole measure you're interested in attacking.

 

The situation here is far more complex, and the "less stupid" version of that memo would have simply focused on how dangerous it is in complex and ambiguous systems to develop (and strongly moralize) a rigid orthodoxy about it, and not added the stand-up material about how bitches be neurotic.

[Gregmal]

It's amazing what happens when you do the most you can to pull bias from the system. Fast forward a bunch of years and a lot of immigration and we wonder why there are so many female engineers from Eastern Europe.

 

Sounds like what you're suggesting is that women are more likely to pursue STEM careers under communist dictatorships where it is clear which fields will receive state support, and relatively less likely to pursue STEM careers when they live in freer societies.

 

Likewise, women have pretty good STEM participation in places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. So clearly "pulling bias from the system" is hardly a necessary condition for increasing women in STEM, if that's the sole measure you're interested in attacking.

 

The situation here is far more complex, and the "less stupid" version of that memo would have simply focused on how dangerous it is in complex and ambiguous systems to develop (and strongly moralize) a rigid orthodoxy about it, and not added the stand-up material about how bitches be neurotic.

 

Up until a certain age children are forced to attend school. While they are forced to attend, it wouldn't hurt to make the most of these precious years. Instead we have myriad filler material and utterly useless classes. There is no reason kids in certain parts of the world can learn advanced math/sciences meanwhile here we need 5 years to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. By high school most kids are learning Algebra when their future job competition is learning Calc, etc.

 

Same for universities. Every one has general courses you take prior to your major studies. Why not beef these up with more useful material. What someone wants to major in is up to them(their freedom to choose). But it's hardly shocking white male dominated fields(or sub in any field dominated by a certain type) exist when the current system doesn't really encourage anyone to be "most efficient" and the only folks who end up in "white male dominated fields" are the white males whom have been told this is "the path they are supposed to take".

[rb]

It's amazing what happens when you do the most you can to pull bias from the system. Fast forward a bunch of years and a lot of immigration and we wonder why there are so many female engineers from Eastern Europe.

 

Sounds like what you're suggesting is that women are more likely to pursue STEM careers under communist dictatorships where it is clear which fields will receive state support, and relatively less likely to pursue STEM careers when they live in freer societies.

 

Likewise, women have pretty good STEM participation in places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. So clearly "pulling bias from the system" is hardly a necessary condition for increasing women in STEM, if that's the sole measure you're interested in attacking.

 

The situation here is far more complex, and the "less stupid" version of that memo would have simply focused on how dangerous it is in complex and ambiguous systems to develop (and strongly moralize) a rigid orthodoxy about it, and not added the stand-up material about how bitches be neurotic.

Yea... that's not what I was saying.

[rb]

Up until a certain age children are forced to attend school. While they are forced to attend, it wouldn't hurt to make the most of these precious years. Instead we have myriad filler material and utterly useless classes. There is no reason kids in certain parts of the world can learn advanced math/sciences meanwhile here we need 5 years to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. By high school most kids are learning Algebra when their future job competition is learning Calc, etc.

 

Same for universities. Every one has general courses you take prior to your major studies. Why not beef these up with more useful material. What someone wants to major in is up to them(their freedom to choose). But it's hardly shocking white male dominated fields(or sub in any field dominated by a certain type) exist when the current system doesn't really encourage anyone to be "most efficient" and the only folks who end up in "white male dominated fields" are the white males whom have been told this is "the path they are supposed to take".

I generally agree with most of what you're saying along with having a negative future view of the future of the education situation. Basically nobody wants to fix it because they make too much money off it. This goes along with the general view that students on campuses are too coddled. What do you expect? When they get charged the amounts they are they stop being students who need to be taught. They become customers that need to be serviced.

[HJ]

By the way, here's where Damore's view of the psychological difference between conservatives and liberals come from:

 

 

[clutch]

Left when discussing global warming: It's the science!

 

Left when discussing biological differences between sex: The science is biased and toxic!

 

[LightWhale]

On a different note:

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-paid-apple-3-billion-remain-iphone-default-search-engine-analyst-estimate-2017-8

 

"Google may be paying Apple upward of $3 billion a year. Based on that estimate, Google may account for 5% of Apple's total operating profit this year and up to 25% of total operating-profit growth"

[rkbabang]

By the way, here's where Damore's view of the psychological difference between conservatives and liberals come from:

 

 

If anyone hasn't read Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" I can't recommend it more.  It will give you not only a better idea of where the people who disagree with you are coming from, but a better understanding of how you form your own opinions and arguments as well.

 

I think like most libertarians that I am somewhere on the asperger's scale.  In one part of his book he gives a test and tells you to keep track of your answers.  He does this to illustrate how people don't think completely rationally and let their emotions enform their thinking, they don't act as purely homo-economicus.  He then said something like: if you answered no to any of those questions congratulations that just proves that you are human. Only I didn't answer no to any of them, which disturbed me a little, so I went back to re-think them and I still didn't want to change my answers.  He spends most of the book talking about liberals and conservatives, but does very accurately portray libertarians in some parts as well.  If you truly read this with an open mind you will learn something about yourself.

 

[DCG]

On a different note:

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-paid-apple-3-billion-remain-iphone-default-search-engine-analyst-estimate-2017-8

 

"Google may be paying Apple upward of $3 billion a year. Based on that estimate, Google may account for 5% of Apple's total operating profit this year and up to 25% of total operating-profit growth"

 

 

It looks like that article just made the $3B number up.

[HJ]

By the way, here's where Damore's view of the psychological difference between conservatives and liberals come from:

 

 

If anyone hasn't read Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" I can't recommend it more.  It will give you not only a better idea of where the people who disagree with you are coming from, but a better understanding of how you form your own opinions and arguments as well.

 

I think like most libertarians that I am somewhere on the asperger's scale.  In one part of his book he gives a test and tells you to keep track of your answers.  He does this to illustrate how people don't think completely rationally and let their emotions enform their thinking, they don't act as purely homo-economicus.  He then said something like: if you answered no to any of those questions congratulations that just proves that you are human. Only I didn't answer no to any of them, which disturbed me a little, so I went back to re-think them and I still didn't want to change my answers.  He spends most of the book talking about liberals and conservatives, but does very accurately portray libertarians in some parts as well.  If you truly read this with an open mind you will learn something about yourself.

 

Yeah, here is the link to that particular chapter and those questions:

http://righteousmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ch07.RighteousMind.final_.pdf

 

Righteousmind.com is a great resource for people to take a more analytical view of it all and hopefully learn something about who they are themselves. 

[rkbabang]

By the way, here's where Damore's view of the psychological difference between conservatives and liberals come from:

 

 

If anyone hasn't read Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" I can't recommend it more.  It will give you not only a better idea of where the people who disagree with you are coming from, but a better understanding of how you form your own opinions and arguments as well.

 

I think like most libertarians that I am somewhere on the asperger's scale.  In one part of his book he gives a test and tells you to keep track of your answers.  He does this to illustrate how people don't think completely rationally and let their emotions enform their thinking, they don't act as purely homo-economicus.  He then said something like: if you answered no to any of those questions congratulations that just proves that you are human. Only I didn't answer no to any of them, which disturbed me a little, so I went back to re-think them and I still didn't want to change my answers.  He spends most of the book talking about liberals and conservatives, but does very accurately portray libertarians in some parts as well.  If you truly read this with an open mind you will learn something about yourself.

 

Yeah, here is the link to that particular chapter and those questions:

http://righteousmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ch07.RighteousMind.final_.pdf

 

Righteousmind.com is a great resource for people to take a more analytical view of it all and hopefully learn something about who they are themselves. 

 

Thank you, that was the one.  I obviously misremembered the details, but I put a 1 as the answer for the first question in each column and a 0 for everything else in both columns.

 

[HJ]

I have to say, when watching James Damore on some TV interviews, my reactions are: 1) he sounds like Mark Zuckerberg, a typical bright young science type, but likely lacks sensitivity to people around him and 2) the media is bad.  The TV personalities are all just baiting him, and try to get him to tip one way or another and say something that makes headlines.  But to me he comes across genuine, and tries his best to explain the nuance of what he thinks. 

 

Like it or not, he's now been given a voice in our political discourse.  I truly hope he does some good with that voice.

 

 

[clutch]

You will likely find Jordan Peterson's talks on Youtube interesting. He is a professor / clinical psychologist who touches upon a lot of the issues discussed here. And he explains them in the most clear and faithful manner. In fact, I bet James Damore was influenced by Peterson from both his talks and his psychology research.

[vox]

I think this "Ask a Female Engineer" piece is insightful: https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-thoughts-on-the-google-memo/

 

What’s your reaction to his firing?

 

Edith: I think it was the right thing for Google to do. There are consequences for things you say and do at work, for anyone and everyone, and had one of my coworkers circulated this I would absolutely perceive it as a hostile effort (even if it was not meant that way) to question me, my abilities, and my right to have my job the same as any of my other colleagues. As former Googler Yonatan Zunger wrote in his response, how on earth could he in good faith assign women to work with Damore after this? What does this publicity do to their ability to hire women and other underrepresented minorities in tech, or even to male allies who would look badly on Google for this? Not to mention the issues it presents to Google as a company given that they are under legal scrutiny for a gender-based wage gap. There are many ways Damore could have handled this very differently and possibly have gotten some traction with the people who could address his concerns or act on his suggestions without making himself a problem employee – he didn’t. Social skills are part of a professional skillset. It is important to learn how to handle difficult subjects in a workplace – we all have to do it. There are consequences for doing it in a way that causes problems for your employer, and I think in this case the consequences were appropriate. He was not fired for speaking truth to power, he was fired for mishandling a complex subject in a way that caused harm to his employer (and many of his colleagues).

 

Frances: I am conflicted about this and can see both sides of it. I think ideally there would have been a constructive internal discussion with him before the leak when he had shared the memo internally. Once the memo was leaked though, I understand how hard it would be for Google to keep him on staff and also support current and future female employees. It is really sad to watch him go from a confused, questionably informed kid, to a symbol of the alt-right, and to see his words polarize the issue even more.

 

Ida: I have mixed feelings about it. I can see that there are wide swaths of people who would refuse to work with him, and I am not sure that he can be unbiased when interviewing female candidates. Even if he does not believe that women are inherently worse than men at software engineering, I think it’s reasonable to be concerned that he might grade female candidates more harshly to counteract his perception of a lowered bar.

 

That being said, I can’t help but wonder if there was a useful discussion that could have been had. I think that variations on his opinion are held by people in the industry far more frequently than some (or many) people think, and it’s not productive to hide from that reality or shout down every expression of those opinions. That kind of opposition doesn’t change minds, and perhaps some minds could have been changed here.

[rkbabang]

I think this "Ask a Female Engineer" piece is insightful: https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-thoughts-on-the-google-memo/

 

A good read thanks.  Although some of the statements are ridiculous like this one:  "the takeaway from the memo is literally that the onus is on me to prove to men in tech that I’m not an “average” woman".

 

I don't know off hand if these statistics even exist, but I'd be willing to bet that the average college graduate with a Bachelors of Science in any engineering or computer science field has an IQ considerably over 100.  If you are an engineer or computer scientist then you are most probably not the average woman.  You are more intelligent than the average person of any gender.

 

[DTEJD1997]

After all, why would we bother changing the curriculum when most inner city public schools aren't even funded well enough to provide students textbooks written in the past 20 years.

 

Not sure where you are at...but that is one of the YUGE scandals going on.  A LOT of inner city skools actually get MORE funding than their suburban counterparts (on a per pupil basis).  For example, Detroit spends more per student than the affluent Grosse Pointe suburbs do.

 

Closer to NYC, a similar thing is going on:

 

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/06/06/School-Budgets-The-Worst-Education-Money-Can-Buy

 

Of course, this is going on in more cities than Detroit and NYC.  The scandal is that so much money is being spent and results are so terrible.  There is no lack of funding for the vast majority of public skools.

[HJ]

I think this "Ask a Female Engineer" piece is insightful: https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-thoughts-on-the-google-memo/

 

A good read thanks.  Although some of the statements are ridiculous like this one:  "the takeaway from the memo is literally that the onus is on me to prove to men in tech that I’m not an “average” woman".

 

I don't know off hand if these statistics even exist, but I'd be willing to bet that the average college graduate with a Bachelors of Science in any engineering or computer science field has an IQ considerably over 100.  If you are an engineer or computer scientist then you are most probably not the average woman.  You are more intelligent than the average person of any gender.

 

1) I agree with your statement.  the survivorship bias is tremendous.  2) but your language lacks empathy.  To compensate, I would actually even make a stronger statement than that:  Those women who get there on average are likely better than their male counterpart, not just "as good", by the virtue of them having to travel a more difficult path.  I work in the world of CLO's, where there are a very small minority of women led teams of investment professionals.  I have found that those women are on average better than their male counterpart who leads investment team in other places.  They are not the best (likely because the extreme of a bigger population is more extreme than that of a smaller population), but they are on average better and work harder at their craft than their male counterparts.

 

Part of the problem of having rules that favor one group over another is that these places are ultracompetitive to start with.  In the securities industry, there's generally a buy side and a sell side.  Historically the sell side is the more aggressive side where people work harder, bankers put in hundred hour weeks, etc., and buy side feel like they are getting taken advantage of all the time, because they are the "dumb money".  When first Reg FD, and then Volcker rule came in to our world, the rules effectively forbid the aggression from the sell side, and now favored a generic transaction to the buy side.  But all these transactions are competitive.  The buy side now takes what is given, and aggressively push for more because the sell side can't react.  I think the more aggressive women activists does the same in relation to the behavioral rules set up between male and female.  They take what's allowed and then some.  It's the "then some" that provokes resentment from the other side, and different people draw that line differently.  But here, both sides need to be empathetic to the view of the other side, not just from the men to the women.

 

Sorry for the rambling, but writing this down is somewhat therapeutic for me.

 

[HJ]

After all, why would we bother changing the curriculum when most inner city public schools aren't even funded well enough to provide students textbooks written in the past 20 years.

 

Not sure where you are at...but that is one of the YUGE scandals going on.  A LOT of inner city skools actually get MORE funding than their suburban counterparts (on a per pupil basis).  For example, Detroit spends more per student than the affluent Grosse Pointe suburbs do.

 

Closer to NYC, a similar thing is going on:

 

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/06/06/School-Budgets-The-Worst-Education-Money-Can-Buy

 

Of course, this is going on in more cities than Detroit and NYC.  The scandal is that so much money is being spent and results are so terrible.  There is no lack of funding for the vast majority of public skools.

 

Education, especially during elementary and middle school, is so much more about what occurs at home rather than school!  Good school district vs. bad ones is not just about the money that is spent.  It's so much more about the emphasis that the parent body puts on their kid's education. 

[rkbabang]

I think this "Ask a Female Engineer" piece is insightful: https://blog.ycombinator.com/ask-a-female-engineer-thoughts-on-the-google-memo/

 

A good read thanks.  Although some of the statements are ridiculous like this one:  "the takeaway from the memo is literally that the onus is on me to prove to men in tech that I’m not an “average” woman".

 

I don't know off hand if these statistics even exist, but I'd be willing to bet that the average college graduate with a Bachelors of Science in any engineering or computer science field has an IQ considerably over 100.  If you are an engineer or computer scientist then you are most probably not the average woman.  You are more intelligent than the average person of any gender.

 

1) I agree with your statement.  the survivorship bias is tremendous.  2) but your language lacks empathy.  To compensate, I would actually even make a stronger statement than that:  Those women who get there on average are likely better than their male counterpart, not just "as good", by the virtue of them having to travel a more difficult path.  I work in the world of CLO's, where there are a very small minority of women led teams of investment professionals.  I have found that those women are on average better than their male counterpart who leads investment team in other places.  They are not the best (likely because the extreme of a bigger population is more extreme than that of a smaller population), but they are on average better and work harder at their craft than their male counterparts.

 

Part of the problem of having rules that favor one group over another is that these places are ultracompetitive to start with.  In the securities industry, there's generally a buy side and a sell side.  Historically the sell side is the more aggressive side where people work harder, bankers put in hundred hour weeks, etc., and buy side feel like they are getting taken advantage of all the time, because they are the "dumb money".  When first Reg FD, and then Volcker rule came in to our world, the rules effectively forbid the aggression from the sell side, and now favored a generic transaction to the buy side.  But all these transactions are competitive.  The buy side now takes what is given, and aggressively push for more because the sell side can't react.  I think the more aggressive women activists does the same in relation to the behavioral rules set up between male and female.  They take what's allowed and then some.  It's the "then some" that provokes resentment from the other side, and different people draw that line differently.  But here, both sides need to be empathetic to the view of the other side, not just from the men to the women.

 

Sorry for the rambling, but writing this down is somewhat therapeutic for me.

 

 

I agree with you. The fact that it is probably even tougher for a woman than a man makes her statement that more ridiculous.  How anyone could think that a woman software engineer at Google has to prove anything to anyone is beyond me.  I would assume that any male Google computer scientist is above average and any female Google computer scientist is even more so.  That isn't to say that she doesn't actually feel that she now has something to prove that men don't. Maybe she does feel that way, but I don't think she should.

 

[Liberty]

https://www.economist.com/news/21726276-last-week-paper-said-alphabets-boss-should-write-detailed-ringing-rebuttal

[clutch]

To give you diverse perspectives:

 

Female Developer's view on Norwegian Gender Paradox