Lest we forget, it isn't only charismatically-challenged unfortunates like Damore who get thrown under a tank for daring to speak 'out of turn' wrt the social justice narrative. Just two hours ago, I happened to re-read the various vicious hit pieces written about Paul Graham several years ago, after he had the gall to speak his mind about representation. These are the times. Everywhere I look online, it's men vs. women, black vs. white. To paraphrase Yudkowsky, "Arguments are soldiers, this is war, and it's life or death."
This account began as a throwaway. I used to comment with my real name, in the days before the war broke out. In the days when pg used to comment here regularly. The days when, if someone disagreed with you, they'd tell you so, or why you're wrong, or maybe that you're a dumb-dumb. Now, if you don't follow approved talking points in your social media communiqués, you're in real danger of being pilloried, and - as these things go - you're more likely to be attacked by fellow members of the party. I've identified as left-leaning my entire life, but I've never for a moment feared this sort of personal sabotage from a right-leaning person. This is a pursuit of ideological purity at any cost.
>I've identified as left-leaning my entire life, but I've never for a moment feared this sort of personal sabotage from a right-leaning person.
I tend to attribute this type of thing to what I call the "identity politics" wing of the left. In a Parliamentary system they probably would be in a different party than you.
"charismatically-challenged unfortunates like Damore"
Maybe I am on the autistic spectrum, or ots teh fact I studied science but i thought that Damore's memo was fairly well written. First time I went through it he made a couple of points where I though to myself "that sounds controversial", but then in every case he had backed it up with some study validating it to some extent.
It was certainly a lot better written than the majority of the media's reporting on it.
That's kind of the scary part. People are reading it, yet the media can't mention it without it calling it an "anti-diversity screed." If that memo is almost universally mischaracterized and smeared, then the arguments simply can't feasibly be made. The chilling effect is real.
I agree, his memo was a lot more reasonable than how it was depicted in the news (whether we agree with it or not). However I watched a couple of video interviews and concur on "charismatically challenged". For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-9hh47dqeI
Quote:
Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt
became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal
democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned
from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but
now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
So if someone who is anti-semitic believes that Jesus died on the cross at the behest of his Jewish contemporaries, and I also believe the same thing because that's what history has taught me, does that make me anti-semitic?
Or is that one ok because it hasn't been debunked?
In which case, according to Wikipedia, the Frankfurt school "consisted of neo-Marxist dissidents uncomfortable with existing capitalist, fascist, or communist systems." Has that been debunked? If so, where?
Damore’s screed was also rife with fallacies and unsupported generalizations, let’s not forget that. It drives me nuts that his lack of “charisma” (rather than his lack of logical reasoning skills or writing ability) is what people are saying got him fired. If he’d written a manifesto that sloppy on a technical topic people would’ve ripped him to shreds.
Screed? It was a simple memo, something that he meant for a few people and had shared internally for months before it became so widely misunderstood. He didn't say anything outright false, only that men and women are different and have different interests, so forcing 50/50 wont be a good outcome.
"Did I read this right? Susan Wojicicki said that women find “geeky male industries” (as opposed to “social industries”) “not very interesting” and Sundar cites research on gender differences."
He got political at the end though. Does this statement ("the Left tends to deny science
concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)") really ring true? What are "extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians" and how do they advance an argument? Why is one of the citations a Wordpress blog (https://becauseits2015.wordpress.com/) with an explicit anti-feminist bias? These may not be 100% false things to link to or say, but they are very contentious.
I see the memo personally as more young-and-naive and I'm not one who thinks naivety is something that should get you fired, per se (though, much of his whines at the end were directed directly at Google being explicitly anti-conservative; rightly or wrongly, employees who noisily complain in public about their employer do often get dismissed). But he certainly wade into some touchy waters armed more with opinionated commentary sources versus hard science. There is a century's worth of troubling eugenics-oriented history on that "IQ and biological differences" quote that should inform one that this is not a remark to toss off lightly, and merely semi-support that with a link to a conservative think-tank link (that itself IMHO was pretty naive).
Chop the last bunch of the manifesto and it would be more interesting, but as it stands, the memo was not just "men and women are different" and how that applies to STEM careers. In the end, it was also a whine about how Google is Capital-L
Left and "alienating conservatives" too.
Nothing outright false, but that was the major problem with it. Just because you aren't obviously wrong and you safecheck yourself with facts doesn't mean you are actually correct in your assessment.
He didn't say anything outright false, only that men and women are different and have different interests, so forcing 50/50 wont be a good outcome
I agree with OP that this difference in interests is probably socialized. Men and women are very obviously socialized differently, not to mention at many places (tech companies especially), the social atmosphere is one that favors men (boys) with keggers and nerf guns.
Damore's memo isn't very convincing from that perspective, because if the difference can be explain by 20 years of socialization, it can also be changed, and Damore's argument seemed to be based upon some inherent difference between the sexes and his solutions predicated on that assumption. Then again, not really sure exactly what he was arguing because it was meandering.
It's been argued to death at this point, but it genuinely surprises me that people find his poorly sourced memo (or whatever you want to call it) as the centerpiece for this topic. With that as the starting point, no wonder the discussion is garbage. The people who support viewpoints like Damore's should aim higher because it is not helping their case.
To give a more complete answer, here's a section from his memo:
De-emphasize empathy.
I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
There are multiple claims there. He does refer to a blog post, but reading that, do you have any clue what that blog post may be about or how it applies to his argument?
Facts are used as evidence, which he what he did. There's nothing wrong with that. If you have a better explanation then let's hear it but all you said was that you believe it's "probably socialized" based on what exactly?
This article explains in great detail how that is not the case in any significance and there are even examples where men and women have been socialized oppositely and still end up choosing typical gender interests.
> argument seemed to be based upon some inherent difference between the sexes
Just because you provide sources doesn't mean your sources are relevant to your argument or good sources. Go look at his memo. It is paragraph after paragraph with his beliefs on the matter and then a link to some source which you are supposed to check out. He often doesn't bother explaining how those sources are relevant.
That's why it is bad. Just because you've got sources doesn't mean you are saying anything useful and I'd argue the discussion proves that. He's got sources, which is somehow supposed to mean he's correct. He's blessed his argument with associations with academia, but doesn't really make compelling arguments.
This article explains in great detail how that is not the case in any significance and there are even examples where men and women have been socialized oppositely and still end up choosing typical gender interests.
> some inherent difference between the sexes
Yes, men and women are different.
It doesn't do it at all convincingly. If sexes have been socialized differently for tens of thousands of years (and they have), and one of the sexes has been intentionally limited by the other for long durations of this time (they have), then how do you say what is biological and what is sociological? He never bothers with this.
It's not a scientific paper, it was an internal memo shared with a few colleagues. Also that's how evidence works, you make a narrative and support it with references. What else would you do?
No society has lasted tens of thousands of years and many were in complete isolation which already says something about how the same roles formed again and again. Also we see the same thing in animals.
So it's normal and ok if being wrong got him fired? No matter, as that isn't what got him fired. He was fired because it's good optics in this climate. And I'm asserting the climate isn't good.
Maybe he was fired not just because he made the company look bad, but also because he insulted about 30% of his co-workers, and on top of that kept trying to get his memo read by as many people as possible within Google.
Banging on about a controversial subject that can cause upset and disruption in a work environment. Does that sound very professional, or something that a smart person would do? And do you really want that kind of person in your team?
I don't think he intended to insult anyone, but I also don't think it's unreasonable to believe that people could be insulted based on what he said. That's the gray area your binary distillation completely ignores. It's a little more nuanced than "he hurt my feelings!"
I'm not saying that the views are a problem because people are offended. I'm saying that since people are offended, it's reasonable to take a step back and ask if the views are offensive, and if the intent was to offend. "He didn't mean to offend" doesn't automatically mean that whatever he said was okay. In this particular case I think it was, but there's nothing wrong with stepping back and asking if the underlying views are okay.
Given that the media and all of Damore's other critics have to overtly lie about the contents of the memo in order to cast it as "offensive", I think it's abundantly clear that the memo itself is innocuous.
"Cultural marxism" and "marxism" are different things. One was a conspiracy theory with anti-semitic roots and one is a framework of academic inquiry. Guess which one damore mentions.
I've never seen anyone interpret any of that. Also has nothing to do with civil rights but was talking about men and women liking different things, so forcing them in equal ratios does more harm than good.
You should read the memo. Apparently lots of people just skimmed it, or read a summary. Your sibling comment quotes the exact footnote text where he references the popular anti-semitic conspiracy theory about "cultural marxism"
"The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that William S. Lind in 2002 gave a speech to a Holocaust denial conference on the topic of Cultural Marxism. In this speech Lind noted that all the members of The Frankfurt School were "to a man, Jewish", but it is reported that Lind claims not to question whether the Holocaust occurred and suggests he was present in an official capacity for The Free Congress Foundation "to work with a wide variety of groups on an issue-by-issue basis""
He comes off as a reactionary, for sure. Before someone calls out you for strawmanning, he does go there:
Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
His entire memo is a distillation of reactionary talking points. That overall impression rather than any single argument is probably what pissed off a lot of his coworkers because these battles are much older than him.
Yes, because he was wrong about something that he had no business or expertise or business position to even be discussing, and because he did it in a very loud way.
Damore got what he wanted, he wanted to be a martyr, probably because that was all he was ever going to be good for. He’s the truest of snowflakes, stop giving idiots this platform and maybe they’ll go away.
To me that reads like a lot like credentialism. "Unless you've been formally vetted by the institutions we like you can't participate". It's like a bizzarro-world anti-intellectualism, where you can't read a scientific paper unless you have the right degree in that particular sub-field.
I mean the well credentialed seem to be doing more than their fair share of rabble rousing. Also like half or more of social psychology research can't be replicated, so clearly that particular credential is not highly correlated with being correct...
Yep, that’s right. The well informed lead society, not the idiots. If you wanna go back to the dark ages make your point, but mine is that a biology major working for a technology company making commentary on psychology is a slam dunk case of someone who should just shut up. Certainly not someone who should be egged on.
BTW: the original comment was based on his job. Google didn’t hire him to make comments like that, they hired him to code. That’s all I meant, don’t shit where you eat, if you’re hired to code do that job and focus on that. I don’t know what this generations problem is with not being able to keep it together in a professional workplace, but the problem is this generation, not the rules.
Your comments in this thread have been breaking several of the site guidelines, especially the ones against flamewars and name-calling in arguments. Users here need to follow the rules, regardless of which views they favor.
Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules if you want to keep commenting here.
Your account also looks like it's tending to use HN primarily for ideology and politics. We don't allow that, because it's destructive of the intellectual curiosity that HN is supposed to be for. I've posted about this a lot, if anyone wants to understand how we apply that rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
He did himself. Got ripped to shreds in a forum with folks that I'd expect to be somewhat sympathetic with his cause.
He then reworked the doc a bit to be less overtly offensive (the published version is one of these later ones), still got shot down in a friendly way by the sympathetic part of the Google population for bullshit reasoning. Eventually it got wider circulation - not sure by whom, but he certainly didn't object to that.
At some point, when managers and friendly inclined folks tell you to shut up at work, you do. If you decide to pursue the topic further, don't whine when people disassociate themselves from you - not for the content of your speech, but for your conduct and the disruption that comes with it.
I've heard this asserted several times, but nobody's said which of his sources they disagree with. Could you link to a source you disagree with and the basis for your disagreement?
That claim in Damore's memo shouldn't be controvertial. Here's what Deborah Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience) had to say about it:
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
More from her about Damore's memo and scientific research in this space:
> Despite how it's been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate. Scientific studies have confirmed sex differences in the brain that lead to differences in our interests and behaviour.
> As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men.
> We see evidence for this in girls with a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb. When they are born, these girls prefer male-typical, wheeled toys, such as trucks, even if their parents offer more positive feedback when they play with female-typical toys, such as dolls. Similarly, men who are interested in female-typical activities were likely exposed to lower levels of testosterone.
> As well, new research from the field of genetics shows that testosterone alters the programming of neural stem cells, leading to sex differences in the brain even before it's finished developing in utero. This further suggests that our interests are influenced strongly by biology, as opposed to being learned or socially constructed.
EDIT: I wish I understood why I've been downvoted so that I could improve my comments in the future. Is the problem that it's too verbose? OK, I've tried to shorten it and replaced the links to three studies with a link to Deborah's article above.
You (and she) are focusing on the wrong part of the chain of reasoning. The issue is not whether there are gender differences in preferences, but why we have any reason to believe that programming is a “masculine” profession. The fact that men and women sometimes prefer different things due to biological factors does not mean that if you observe men and women preferring different things, that can be explained by biological factors. That’s the basic logical fallacy underlying Damore’s screed. (Pointing to articles validating the scientific assertions doesn’t help, because the challenge isn’t the scientific premise, but the inferences Damore is drawing from that.)
For example, for many years Law was 95% male. You could say that it was a masculine profession because it’s all about conflict while women prefer peacemaking. But today 50% of new large firm attorneys are women. Law isn’t any softer or gentler now—in fact it’s probably less civil. Same for teaching. We explain teaching being dominated by women on the basis that teaching is about nurturing. But in India, the vast majority of teachers are men.
You could easily say that programming is feminine. It’s not at all physical, all about cooperating and communicating with other people, it’s about managing expectations, etc.
Also, the truck analogy has been debunked. It’s explained by the fact that girls have a higher affinity for faces than boys. Which makes sense: infants don’t have any association between trucks and masculine professions like construction work. They can’t. Any gender difference observable at a very young age has to be unrelated to the associations adults have between trucks and masculinity.
> why we have any reason to believe that programming is a “masculine” profession
By exclusion: we have checked everything else we could think of and found no other logical explanation for the disparity of sexes in STEM. That doesn't mean women's preference is the true underlying reason, but then, we don't have a better explanation, or even any other explanation consistent with facts. Still, AFAIK, Damore never claimed it was THE reason, he just raised it as a possible and the likeliest explanation - given no other explanation seems to work.
> But in India, the vast majority of teachers are men.
I don't think India is a valid example here, because there is still a lot of inequality in that society. Let's talk about countries on the higher end of the equality spectrum, like Finland or Sweden.
Thank you for clarifying. Let’s not characterize programming as masculine or feminine (since that would begging the question and stereotyping). Let’s characterize it in terms of properties that have been scientifically studied.
I would characterize programming as very far on the “Things” side of the axis that is “People vs Things”.
See: Men and Things, Women and People:
A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests
The fundamental task of programming – sitting in front of a computer, reasoning about the machine and the system, and writing code and debugging systems for hours on end — is about as “thing”-oriented as I can conceive of. One needs to do a great deal of this to get a CS degree.
Another dimension to consider is Systematizing versus Empathizing (citations omitted). Programming seems to be far on the systematizing side.
As a thought experiment, what jobs might be further on the side of “things“ and “systematizing” than programming?
(I don’t know of any studies that characterize the programming in these dimensions. I’m providing my intuition.)
I’m not super familiar with the practice of law, but I would guess that it’s actually fairly close to the middle of both of those spectrums. The law itself is systematic but practicing it involves working with people at every level (client, counterparty, judge, regulator). It’s possible to write and deliver code, or root-cause and fix a bug report, without interacting with another soul.
I would characterize law school as even more “thing” oriented than a STEM program (having done both). Law school is just pattern matching. You read cases to derive a set of abstract rules. Then on the test, you pattern match facts in a long hypothetical against the rules and write out how each element of each rule applies to the facts in the hypothetical. Whoever analyzes the most issues in 3 hours wins. Unlike STEM, there is no group work, there is no creativity, and although the fact patterns involve people, they are abstractions in the same way a person is just a database row. You’re actively penalized for thinking of people in terms of people, because professors set up hypotheticals to lead to results you might not want.
The practice of law at a business firm (where 50% of associates are women) occasionally involves people, but for the most part is thing oriented. I do less coordinating with team members and the client than when I was an engineer, because everything is on the record. You don’t have long meetings with the client to get their use cases, etc. When you do interact with people it’s systematized and highly artificial. Youre not trying to connect with the judge as a person. You’re breaking down an often highly abstract issue into constituent parts to help the judge understand it. And the things you’re dealing with are typically more abstract. The subject matter isn’t a website with pictures or human users. The subject matter is a lien, or a credit default swap, or a regulation embodying an economic theory. You talk about these abstractions as if they were things.
> The fundamental task of programming – sitting in front of a computer, reasoning about the machine and the system, and writing code and debugging systems for hours on end — is about as “thing”-oriented as I can conceive of. One needs to do a great deal of this to get a CS degree.
From the GP:
>You could easily say that programming is feminine. It’s not at all physical, all about cooperating and communicating with other people, it’s about managing expectations, etc.
Here's the real disconnect, and it's all about the environment that is cultivated wherever you happen to be. These are really two wildly different professions that happen to be lumped under one title. On the one hand you have the concrete, generative work where you are creating a thing out of the void. And on the other, you have the political infighting and jockeying to be allowed to do that generative work, and all of the overhead involved in such operations. These are wildly disconnected activities, and it should be no surprise that people gravitate towards one extreme or the other, with very few rare unicorns that can do both at a high level.
His logical reasoning skills seemed to be quite all right for Google when he passed their (challenging) hiring process. How the hell he managed to lose that while working there?
As for his writing ability, it may not be at the level of Mark Twain, but it seems quite eloquent to me...
However bad his reasoning was, the position he's criticizing ("disparity, thus oppression") is far less reasonable, and heads don't roll for it. In fact, it's the official view. Besides, one instance of bad reasoning does not merit termination. I really don't see how anyone can honestly bring himself to believe that Damore was fired for anything other than political heresy.
> Damore’s screed was also rife with fallacies and unsupported generalizations, let’s not forget that
Was it really rife with fallacies? Lee Jussim (professor of social psychology at Rutgers University) wrote:
> The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.
Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico) wrote:
> For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate.
Debra W Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience):
> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.
It doesn't seem reasonable to characterize this memo as rife with fallacies or unsupported generalizations when multiple scientists are willing to go on the record saying the memo's science is generally correct. I have not seen similar in-depth rebuttals from other scientists claiming it's wrong. (If anyone knows of one I'd be glad to read it. I have seen brief quotes from scientists in articles written by reporters, but nothing with depth or analysis.)
EDIT: I wish I understood why I've been downvoted so that I could improve my comments in the future. Would anyone be willing to explain the downvote?
Fwiw: I think you're being down voted because the citations you mention have all become a part of the controversy rather than being external evidence. Each of the scientists you mentioned above have at times before this controversy shown a willingness to say things specifically to get limelight.
In culture war topics, the only real citations that can count are people above reproach, or people who are unknown but experts in their fields, which is a fine needle to thread. Also raw data, but few of us here would be qualified to understand the raw data.
I was mostly poking my head in to answer the question of why you're being down voted, IMO. I'm on the opposite side of your understanding of this research based on a cursory glance (nothing says 'unbiased' like including the phrase 'feminist campaigners' in the conclusion of a scientific publication).
This week's Weeds podcast has some interesting alternative theories based on the results from various Scandinavian countries where they legislated some gender equality stuff and it neither worked out as well as people on the left would like, nor as much of a disaster as people on the right predicted.
Reply to a reply, so I'm out, back to what I'm actually good at, building stuff for other humans to use.
You're not wrong, and yet ... as someone who would visibly be considered an african american, I have to watch what I say around my leftie friends. God forbid I should fail their intellectual purity tests. Fuck it!
I was at a club, and the first thing a brown woman said to me was "I had to get out of that room -- it was too white in there!". These bullies are just replacing one in-group with another. The root problem is tribalism and groupism, and only individuality, not a re-slicing of identities solves that.
Most men I know are pretty heavily in favour of equality. That might change if we treat equality as a war against men, instead of something we all work towards.
Adapting behavior is reasonable, but there's men also need to be able to have a voice, or you're going to get some major pushback. Hopefully we can keep this kind of war at a low simmer when trump is up for re-election.
More specifically, that means making sure that men do have a voice. I've seen a lot of silencing tactics deployed that are based on gender, or social class. It's all well and good to say "well that's how minorities always felt", but it doesn't actually make any part of this situation better.
The problem with silencing tactics currently in use that doesn't seem to be understood by those using them is that there is no such tactic that works in the voting booth. As long as we have secret ballots, the Shy Tory Effect is going continue to catch the censorship crowd off guard. I doubt this is going to be kept on simmer because we're already past that point. To continue the analogy, the pot will eventually boil over but eventually run out of water.
Strict equality of outcome means quotas, and that if the distribution of races, sexes, genders, sexual orientations, etc doesn't exactly match the entire population (or exceed it for certain disenfranchised groups) then something is horribly wrong and needs to be fixed. Very few people are in favor of that.
That being said, you can't have a strict equality of opportunity without acknowledging which people didn't have that opportunity. I think it's much easier to fix this problem if you focus on the person (e.g. Sandra couldn't afford college) rather than the group (Sandra's black and statistically less likely to have been able to afford college).
The problem is people use these bullshit heuristics that happen to suit their mental model of how they want their neighborhood/workplace/world to look ("We don't have a black woman in accounting, what's wrong with that hiring manager?" or "Everyone on the database team is Indian why can't they hire a white guy?") rather than just trying to be fair while still acknowledging systemic issues people have had because of the groups they may belong to.
Strict equality of opportunity is a pure lottery, which is just as absurd (if not more) as strict equality of outcome. Otherwise, it is claiming that certain factors (maybe, genetics or upbringing or geographic location or whatever else) should contribute to inequality of outcome, while others should not. The whole phrase, therefore, is a thought terminating phrase, allowing a speaker to ignore the nuance of which specific inequalities they belive are just vs not just, and why.
You can't control every factor. Arguing for "equality of opportunity" really just means taking a laissez-faire attitude as to who succeeds. It means not making explicit exclusionary rules as to who can participate, but also not undertaking a vain attempt to equalize every conceivable variable.
And one thing to remember is that (a) actual random distributions are lumpy, not evenly distributed and (b) there is pretty much no equality of outcome in whatever outcomes or input categories you choose. Anywhere. And very often the distributions in different places also look different (though there do seem to be some patterns).
Equality of opportunity a way of saying "fair treatment by some measures, unfair by others". You are picking which traits inequlaity should happen by and, huh, imagine that, they probably happen to be traits that overall benefit you.
"Equality of opportunity" is a phrase I no longer trust, because it obfuscates the true differences in moral ideology. Just be explicit about which factors you think should create unequal outcomes, and which ones shouldnt, and a real conversation can happen from there.
Equality of opportunity is meant as: Inequality should rise from personal choice and decisions, otherwise, why should anyone strive to be better than anyone else?
I suggest looking at the history of states that favor equality of opportunity (equality) against equality of outcome (equity).
I'll leave you with this Soviet joke: 'They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.'
I agree, but "equality of opportunity" tends to follow "equality", so I think the "equality of opportunity" folks are trying to advance the conversation, but other folks are trying to stop it at "equality" (presumably because elaborating on their idea of the word would expose it to lots of obvious scrutiny).
I agree with you, but from the opposite direction. On its surface the idea of equality of outcome seems terrible. It will never be achieved without oppressive totalitarian intervention. So any measure of equality or progress which is predicated on the goal of equality of outcome is a non-starter for me.
The only discussion I'm willing to have is one in which we discuss a particular area of treatment or opportunity.
It is very clear this is not equal opportunity but equal outcomes. Trying to make equal outcomes requires some serious mental gymnastics because numerous decisions collectively contribute to our direction, standing, and potential in life.
I can count at least three points in the guidelines[0] this comment violates.
> Be civil...Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. (could be multiple but is the same paragraph so assuming combined as 1 point)
> Assume good faith.
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle.
I wasn't however assuming bad faith, I was attempting to use humor to jolt someone out of uncritically adopting what I consider an asburd position (that there is any danger of a metaphorical "war on men", in any sense other than as a talking point).
> This “war” has been going on for centuries. The difference is that white men were totally dominating it until recent times, and a lot of them really don’t like that they may need to adapt behavior. African Americans had a right side of the street to walk on within the last 2 generations, for risk of being lynched. You better believe they’ve been parsing every word out of their mouths, not for fear of being labeled a mean word, but for fear of being killed, or having their families killed.
That's US-centric. Until a century ago the majority of humans did not have a lot of freedom. Living under some autocratic ruler. The skin color or gender was irrelevant: only who you were the child of. A Chinese noblewoman had a lot more freedom than a English farmer.
> A Chinese noblewoman had a lot more freedom than a English farmer.
You'll have to specify that better; for instance, is the farmer a landowner, or a serf? Both work in agriculture and can so rightly be termed a farmer.
Racism doesn't even translate well to other countries today: not every country has the situation that a significant part of the population has ancestors that were relocated by force and had to work as slaves in recent history, and are easily distinguishable by skin color ("race").
Different countries, different problems. Hence, different delineations in the various culture wars all over the world.
To some extent. By 1500 the Spanish were in the Americas, the European powers were forming colonies on the African coast, the Russians were dominating Siberia.
By 1900 European powers dominated almost everything, including China who were bulled into war by the British. If you were a subject of any of those colonial powers, you certainly were at a disadvantage to your foreign masters. This isn't even considering gender. Out of all of those empires, how many were led by women? There were exceptions here and there, but men dominated.
It's not US centric nor incorrect by any means to suggest that Caucasian males have had significant advantages in social relations for an extended period of time.
rate limited, but to reply:
Read Caucasian as white or European and don't get stuck on semantics. Germany only very recently favored this race (or another vague term, "Aryan") more than anyone else in history, so most people know what it means, the semantics are a digression and not an answer to what has happened historically.
Also, this isn't guilt tripping nor "hating" on my ancestors, it is pointing out obvious facts. Many of us are products of this domination and have connections to both sides.
"Caucasian" is a category that's or or less unknown in Germany, so "caucasian males" having advantages (or disadvantages) doesn't mean anything to us. That range of your categorization is much more nuanced around here. OTOH the US seems to have tons of categories that are simply called "Asian" here.
That's a big part in making that conversation US centric.
What's the point here? We should be content with anti-white discrimination now because anti-black racism used to be really, really bad? Is it justice to punish innocent people with pale skin because other, mostly dead pale skinned people unjustly punished dark skinned people? Or perhaps that there is some threshold of suffering that one's most recent ancestors endured before they're permitted to complain about discrimination? I'm not following.
I've seen this sentiment from former fans of left leaning fiction, and I have to ask: are you sure it's not the culture that's stayed the same and you who drifted right?
> Are you sure it's not the culture that's stayed the same and you who drifted right?
As a leftist, yes. I understand to be on the left means to strive for equality of power among people, economic and social. To be on the right means, at best, not to care about power inequalities between people.
I cringe every time when other people think that feminists and SJWs (I would prefer to call them by different terms but I don't know any) are leftist. They are only in a certain very narrow sense, which makes them often to be on the right, paradoxically. They often do not care about oppressed white males. But if you do not care about some oppressed group, then you don't stand for equality.
Feminism became to be included in the left, because in the past, all women were oppressed. It's no longer the case, and some feminists do not actually care about equality of other groups.
Some biologist put it nicely in a discussion: The left (as a broad political movement) might suffer from a predatory problem - being joined by someone who is oppressed, but doesn't actually want equality, only power. But that's the nature of the game.
And this conflict is nothing new, either. Noam Chomsky, a giant of the left, has been affected by it in the 70s, when he defended free speech of a Holocaust denier.
I'm not sure that actually answers my question (which was admittedly rhetorical), if this has been going on since the 70s, (and longer!), what's changed that it is such a problem to you now as part of the left, while say 10 years ago it didn't bother you?
If you look at the actual issues in US culture you’ll see if the left that has drifted further left. As an example you don’t have to go far back to see Nancy Pelosi advocating keeping immigrants out, Hillary taking a moderate stance on abortion or even Obama being to the right of Trump on some social issues like marriage equality.
I’m for all of those things but there is zero doubt society has moved left fast.
> I’m for all of those things but there is zero doubt society has moved left fast.
Definitely factions of society have, though I wouldn't say society as whole just yet. Those factions have thought-leaders who are unusually viscous and aggressive (e.g. heaping abuse on those who disagree with them, calling them "garbabe-people" etc.). I'd wait for things to settle down before making the final call.
This account began as a throwaway. I used to comment with my real name, in the days before the war broke out. In the days when pg used to comment here regularly. The days when, if someone disagreed with you, they'd tell you so, or why you're wrong, or maybe that you're a dumb-dumb. Now, if you don't follow approved talking points in your social media communiqués, you're in real danger of being pilloried, and - as these things go - you're more likely to be attacked by fellow members of the party. I've identified as left-leaning my entire life, but I've never for a moment feared this sort of personal sabotage from a right-leaning person. This is a pursuit of ideological purity at any cost.