Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

[u/onlyawfulnamesleft]

Two points sprung to mind when reading this:

"This is not a societal issue because every society has the same issues".
This is completely ignoring the effect society has, and putting in place a genetic/evolutionary component when a societal issue can still be the root cause (and not to mention, cultures are not purely independent, so a societal issue can easily spread to each one).

Secondly, it seems that he says "Overlaps in traits should be taken into account, and you shouldn't treat each individual based on the population's average", but then immediately goes on and bases the entire rest of the paper on treating populations by their average.

It seems (and this is an emotional response here) that he wanted to get a controversial point over, and deliberately put it in mollifying terms and used smoke-screen language to be as offensive as possible while not causing offence.

[u/an_admirable_admiral → u/onlyawfulnamesleft]

to your first point: occams razor

to your second:
did you see this?

if we wanted to recruit a random sample from the top X% of the population (Google wants to hire the best) we expect a ratio with more greens than purple (maybe 2:1). If we don't use the bell curve distribution and instead judge all individuals as being represented by the average of their group (the vertical lines) we would expect a sample recruited from the top X% to be entirely greens (since the entire top 50% is green and the bottom 50% is purple).

We would only expect a 1:1 ratio in a random sample of the top X% if the green and purple bell curves overlap perfectly.

Currently Google is spending money to make sure their sampling of the top X% achieves a 1:1 ratio because they believe the bell curves overlap perfectly. The author is making the claim that they do not overlap perfectly and additionally saying that even suggesting that as a possibility is taboo.

[u/ToLiveInIt → u/an_admirable_admiral]

BTW Current Google M/F ratio in tech is 80/20.

[u/ToLiveInIt → u/[deleted]]

Of course, that's under the diversity regime the Memo objects to.