Very interesting! I'm not sure I agree with your reasoning for the mitochondrial mutation point:
> * Mitochondrial DNA is passed by mothers only and so undergoes very little mutation
It's true that mothers pass on mitochondrial DNA but this doesn't necessarily require the absence of mitochondrial DNA mutations. I would imagine the lower rates of DNA mutation are due to the importance of the mitochondrial genome for generating a cell's energy.
The mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA is much faster than in nuclear DNA [1]. But mitochondrial DNA does not have crossover, so the mutation tree is much easier to build.
> Human mitochondrial DNA has been estimated to have mutation rates of ~3× or ~2.7×10−5 per base per 20 year generation (depending on the method of estimation); these rates are considered to be significantly higher than rates of human genomic mutation at ~2.5×10−8 per base per generation. Using data available from whole genome sequencing, the human genome mutation rate is similarly estimated to be ~1.1×10−8 per site per generation.
I would expect the mutation rates of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA to be about the same, unless the mitochondria have additional repair proteins not involved with nuclear DNA, or the shorter length of the mitochondrial chromosome affects the rates, or some other process I'm not familiar with. I think maybe parent meant to refer to diversity, not mutation. With nuclear DNA, the offspring chromosomes are made up from a combination of the parents' DNA. There's a lot of swapping and mixing and matching that takes place. This adds diversity to the population.
We actually do have some idea about necks and I believe noses - the important elements are DNA enhancers. There was a presentation at the Society for Developmental Biology in 2012 on this topic, though I can't recall the scientist who discussed this...
I find this very curious - why do you think this movement came to attention if the killings are rare?
Also, your comment implies that there's an acceptable number of police killings of unarmed/fleeing suspects - what would you say that number is in your country?
One possible explanation is that's what the accepted narrative is based on media coverage. Also you have to get a bit specific when you consider what kind of killings are rare. US Police shoot and kill quite a few people to be sure. But statistically, shooting of unarmed black males is less than 4% of fatal police shootings.
> "A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.
But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias."
> "The conventional thinking about police-involved shootings, and some scientific research, has been that black suspects are more likely to be shot than white suspects because of an implicit racial bias among police officers. But now a new study has found exactly the opposite: even with white officers who do have racial biases, officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects."
I remember seeing this result. It's tantalizing but - and in the absence of mandated reporting perhaps the best we may have. I will take a look at the paper but I wonder what biases exist in officer-initiated reporting.
Lastly, we're setting a low bar if our standard for police mistreatment is killing as opposed to inappropriate behavior, writ large.
I do see your point, but I'm not sure this data undercuts the importance of a movement like BLM.
EDIT: For the second link, I'm not sure how much I believe a psychology experiment in this setting - I don't know this literature but my a priori bias is that the individuals who would do this type of study in Seattle are not representative of the median US police officer
The second link wasn't done with officers in Seattle, it was done with officers in Spokane. Washington gets a lot more rural once you leave the Seattle area, so I think it's a lot more representative than you give it credit for. Honestly you seem to be operating from the assumption that the median police officer is a racist rather than giving the benefit of the doubt.
None of the articles or studies undercuts BLM. They're meant to show that the situation is more complicated and nuanced and teasing out proper and actionable conclusions will take more data and time. But that kind of headline doesn't get you eyeballs and clicks.
As a unarmed white person that was shot at by the police. I anecdotally agree. The biggest problem I have with BLM is that they seem to miss the militarism of the police as the driving force in this.
The article wants to talk about population but we all know that crime rate is what matters. If anything, you should protest all the killings, but media has turned into a racial issue.
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.
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."
>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" 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.
> "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".
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.
> 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.
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.
He should call out his mistake, yes. But apologize? Expecting that from him seems beyond the pale. Language isn't like contracts where any mistake by the author gets to be interpreted however the reader chooses. Instead, we're supposed to look for the intended meaning, either using context or by asking for clarification. If you use the definition you cited, his sentence becomes self-contradictory and, thus, requires clarification, not an immediate rush to judgment. Instead, everyone has assumed the worst about what he said, gotten him fired and vilified him. I'd have a hard time apologizing to people who overreact like that.
Had the reaction been one of kindness, understanding and a desire for cohesiveness where people tried to point out misconceptions and alert him to how his language was being received ("when you say 'lowered the bar' it makes me think 'less qualified', so perhaps you didn't meant that?"), this whole blow-up could have been avoided. Instead people reacted with righteous indignation and jumped to labeling him a misogynist and a bigot. At that point, all hope of a productive outcome, for him and Google at least, was lost.
For my part, I'm less interested in whether Damore really is bigot and a misogynist or any virtue of his opinions. I'm only defending what he could have possibly meant because I see so many people jumping to their own incomplete conclusions. This whole incident, to me, was more about how unproductive our reactions are to anything relating to a sensitive subject. People are so quick to trigger off anything resembling an assault on one of their sacred cows that they never take the time to figure out the intended meaning. I'm so sick of walking on eggshells knowing that I have to watch every single sentence and word choice because they'll be taken out of context and used against me. We're losing nuance in our discussions and it's creating a polarization of thought on each side that I find dangerous and divisive...there's no room for middle-ground thinkers to participate without being attacked by one or both sides. This makes those people either gravitate towards one of the extremes or disengage entirely.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
That's not necessarily so; you could require mice to be heavier than 90 grams, and elephants to be heavier than 80 grams, and still have your elephants be heavier on average.
(I don't want to wade into the bigger argument, just pointing out that "that's simply how statistics work" only under certain conditions (which most likely apply here, but you wrote "there's no getting around that" when there is)).
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.
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.
I mean yes, one needs to be skeptical of "secret meetings". But it doesn't actually change his argument, it just reduces the validity of certain claims of subtext that he believes his female coworkers are inferior.
Basically, you're asking for evidence so that he can prove himself plausibly innocent of a crime that there's no evidence for in the first place.
I think this is the fallacy of hiring that every startup makes, the idea that only Linus is good enough to write your CRUD app.
Incidentally, we do not know whether his statement is true, or whether the changes to Google's hiring practices have changed the employees' operational capability.
In the absence of this information, with such a clearly (if somewhat subtly) stated opinion, it's natural that one would be offended by his words.
Before accepting a statement like his, it would behoove us to know what the actual policy changes are.
I see what you're implying with your UC/Crohn's reference, but it actually underscores why CFS is so hard of a diagnosis.
In UC/Crohn's, patients presented with recurrent bouts of bloody diarrhea in the absence of infectious symptoms, with possible associations of malabsorption, fistulas, and colon cancer. These are pretty straightforward things to diagnose and clearly represent pathology, irrespective of whether we can assign a name to them.
CFS includes symptoms that don't fall so far from the range of 'normal' human experiences, thus it's much harder to define syndromically.
IBS is an interesting choice for comparison, as it, like CFS, seems to be in part a psychiatric diagnosis at least as it relates to stress. Nothwithstanding, there are clear associations for IBS - chronic abnormal bowel movements and abdominal pain, neither of which is 'normal'.
I happen to share your skepticism about a mitochondrial origin for this syndrome, though I am not familiar with the research (would appreciate a review on the topic - I saw one linked earlier in the comments from BMC Genetics that seemed to conclude that mitochondria are not involved).
> You are very assertive, but this proves that you don't know what you are talking about. Antibiotics are all "bacteriocidal".
I also found this confusing when I first learned about it, but some antibiotics work by directly killing organisms (i.e., are bacteriocidal) whereas others simply block the ability of bacteria to grow (i.e., are bacteriostatic). [1]
There are a few clinical cases where one would avoid bacteriocidal antibiotics, as the internal contents of a bacterium could further worsen a patient's symptoms.
I'm finding this to be a fascinating look at how people, as a group, do literary criticism.
I think, if we step back from the actual words on the paper and examine the author's intent, his choice of evidence, and the mere fact that he chose to write this, we can learn just as much as from trying to decide whether or not he was talking about a population effect when talked about women before mentioning Google employees.
This is totally different from wondering about the biology. As a biologist, I think it's preposterous to start to infer biological bases to the types of psychology experiments cited. I do, however, think this could be open to debate. I feel that the undertone to the author's message is likely less unclear.
Do we take the author at face value when they make claims about their intent?
Many critics seem to think they can see the author's "true intent", and when they can't substantiate their claim, blame others for failing to see what they see.
I think that's an issue that a lot of science-minded folks disagree with.
I happen to think there's a lot about the author's time/mental state/life circumstances that one can find in the words themselves.
A much more light-hearted example is Quentin Tarrantino's insistence that he hasn't watched the Truffaut film 'And the bride wore black' - even though Kill Bill is an eerily similar remake.
Should I believe the author's product or his rationalization?
I don't believe it was ever about "fake news", rather it's about establishing "acceptable opinion".
As the article said:
> In a set of guidelines issued to Google evaluators in March, elaborated in April by Google VP of Engineering Ben Gomes, the company instructed its search evaluators to flag pages returning “conspiracy theories” or “upsetting” content unless “the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.” The changes to the search rankings of WSWS content are consistent with such a mechanism.
Notice how Google said "alternative viewpoint". Alternative to what? Google seems to be establishing a new orthodoxy.
I'm assuming the poster is pointing out that regardless of your political leaning, it might be naive to blindly trust these companies in their battle against "fake news" as it can inadvertently (or, purposefully) lead to censorship. Well, I suppose it is censorship in any case.
"Fake news" is a bullshit category. The purpose of talking about it is not to protect poor impressionable idiots like us from misinformation. The purpose is to continue pretending that the Democrat party doesn't have to make any changes in order to appeal to a voting majority. Now they're talking about Jerry Brown... it's as if they're determined to keep Trump in office for 7 more years, and get those 38 Republican legislatures it will take to pass all those horrific Constitutional amendments that the bigots have planned.
He's saying be very very careful what you wish for.
You can think of it this way, do you really really want some particular corporation or government agency to have that tool in their toolbox? Because if they do they'll use it.
Kinda like right to work laws designed to prevent 'illegal' emigrants from working. You really really want the government to be able to prevent you from getting a job?
Lower cost items are not reused (a scalpel, which might simply be a piece of plastic attached to a blade).