skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not how probably works. GP is only implying it's potentially true, presumably because they aren't sure they've fully considered every angle of the question and there may be weird edge cases.

Let's not Purity Test people for showing some humbleness in their beliefs. We could probably use more of that these days.
No. That is a strawman of their argument. They are saying that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences for your speech. I don't really agree with their argument, but what they are saying is more nuanced than the way you've interpreted it. They are arguing for societal freedom of speech (morality instead of laws, I hope), meaning that you are free to speak but nobody has to listen. Consequences like firing someone from their job is different from not listening.
Technically, Rasberry Pi is capable of streaming h264 with lag of ~150 ms using the Pi camera (not USB).
Not quite. I've been on right wing subreddits and banned repeatedly. You're only allowed to repeat the party lines there, too.

We're experiencing a polarization and lack of an ability to abide other's beliefs.

Now that firing someone for their beliefs has been demonstrated, how surprised will we be when bosses fire more people for their beliefs?

As aware humans, we should all be able to be better than this.
With reasoning like that suggesting any change is guaranteed to offend someone and therefore would be for bidden.

And then what happens to freedom of speech? To me this sounds like a totalerian regime.
Note that you're assuming that a nanosecond is a tiny amount of time. It's tiny relative to what we're used to, but as far as what "implements the universe" goes, a nanosecond could be enough time for a huge amount of occurrences to happen within. We don't know.
Watson is a Chemist who used his expertise in physical chemistry to discern the structure of DNA....that is not the same as knowing genetics (which is a huge field).

*The point is not to belittle his accomplishment (which would be silly) but to point out that he veered into a field that he was mostly unqualified to offer an informed opinion on, never mind a very controversial one.
PS The sinister "people are disappearing" interpretation was the 1st way I read it.
You're thinking of a men vs. women power dynamic. But that's not a realistic power dynamic, because neither men nor women act as a block. (For example, 44% of female voters in the 2016 election voted for Trump!) The actual power dynamic here is feminists vs. non-feminists, and at Google right now the feminists have a lot of power--as evidenced by the fact this guy got fired.
The "nonsense news headline" and followup discussion are less critiquing MWI than poking fun at David Deutsch. This is because Deutsch is a prominent critic of PWT.

The arguments against MWI from Occam's Razor are indeed weak. The stronger critiques are the difficulty of deriving the Born rule, or indeed quantum randomness at all, from the deterministic MWI. This is presumably what the authors hint at in their "doubtful it [pure Hamiltonian evolution] makes sense even there (in MWI)".
I'm not sure if you're being facetious? If you are, I apologize as it's gone over my head. I don't have a dog in the Google controversy. But I will put my hand up briefly and say that you've you just said, doesn't follow for me.

From your quote:

> Our interview process has put too much weight on brainteaser-type problems and I think we should scale that back.

I would not infer that you meant:
The implication is that people who have been hired because they scored high on brainteaser problems are not, on average, going to be as qualified to do the actual job because the metric that we used to measure them (brainteaser problems) is not relevant to the job.

The most likely case is that someone saying the above quote would be a co-worker of mine. Someone I'm cooperating with in a common endeavor. I would assume they are trying to help us achieve our goals more readily. I would have heard something like:
We're turning down highly qualified candidates for software engineering roles because of their failure to answer non-software-engineering questions. Is there any evidence that these non-software-engineering questions contribute meaningfully to our assessment of candidates? If not, we should drop the questions. Turning down qualified candidates makes it harder for to hire the great people that coming through our pipeline.

To conclude that suggesting any changes to an interview process is an implicit indication that the people currently employed by a company were unqualified means that no improvements could ever be made.
Do you mean the US government would sue google on this guy's behalf?

I would think, with all they have on their plate right now, they can't be bothered about some idiot who couldn't keep his mouth shut in public and just do the job he was hired for.
You do see that you are comparing 1. woman being biologically inferior to 2. sports affiliations.

For another example: It would be the same as saying Blacks are inferior to 2. political opinions.

That is NOT OK. It is not a question of being outraged, it is a question of a hostile workplace.
It absolutely plays into it.

If a programming exercise is subjective, from what perspective is it subjective in bias of? Likely the author's, who's bias will be derived somewhat from their race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic class, background, peer group, etc.

Code is correct if it works. But plenty of "working" solutions will be rejected as being "incorrect" based on current trends, internalized philosophy, preferred approach, etc. etc.

As someone who hires engineers, it is difficult if not impossible to separate personal bias and preference from an evaluation.
Here's an explanation.

Doctors and lawyers make for great television and movies, because of the drama involved and the ease of portraying it.

Pretty girls are also a requirement for entertainment, for <reasons>.

So many doctor and lawyer TV shows were cast with women in them.

And then many girls aspired to be doctors and lawyers, because they saw a viable path that way.

Also, secretaries and nurses worked close to doctors and lawyers and businessmen, tech was more isolated. Again, less bridge, less role model.

Culture > everything.
Maybe he felt very strongly. Nobody thanked Rosa Parks when she made a big hubbub on the bus, but she believed in something, and history eventually proved her right.

Regardless of whether you agree with the author, he risked his career standing up for what he believes in.
We don't need diversity program, we need tolerance programs so everybody can see the value of an individual regardless their gender,race or whatever thing irrelevant for the job
There are several studies on this domain that show things like reminding people of their biases remove about 90% of the effect of a bias. I don't think the studies showed that they create a bias in the opposite direction. Removing bias would substantially lower false negatives. While this would slightly increase false positives I see no reason that it would make false positives higher than the non-minority false positive rates so inferring that increasing false positives implies coworkers of that demographic are unqualified is just outright false.
That leads to my point, questioning one is tantamount to questioning it all, which is unforgivable and intolerable. You can see this by how many have hallucinated stances that the writer didn't even make.
> Unfortunately, I can't think of a case where 'adjusting a bar' to decrease the false-negative rate does not neceessarily increase the false-positive rate.

Here's one:

* Phone screens have a 50% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.

* On-site interviews have a 0% false negative rate, and a 0% false positive rate.

Non-diverse candidates do one phone screen, and if passed, do an onsite. Diverse candidates do two phone screens, and if either passes, they go on to the onsite. For all candidates, if the onsite is passed, the candidate gets an offer.

* Unqualified candidates, regardless of diversity, never get an offer.

* Qualified, non-diverse candidates get an offer 50% of the time (the other 50% are erroneously eliminated at the phone interview stage).

* Qualified, diverse candidates get an offer 75% of the time (25% eliminated at the phone interview stage due to false negatives).

It seems to me that the author is advocating either doing two phone interviews for all candidates, or one phone interview for all candidates. Neither change would alter false positive rates, since false positive rates are 0% at all times.

If you're inclined to point out that all tests have a false positive rate >0%, substitute 0% for 0.00000001% and note that I stated the change in false positive rates could be trivially small to the point of omission in the comment above.
That's because liberalism isn't a leftist position, it's a centrist one. You are closer to the Republicans than to actual leftists.
I skimmed the article, and there is another force at play that benefits insurance companies.

Insurance companies have a federally mandated percentage of revenue that they must use towards the reimbursement of their policy holders' medical costs. In the past, this ratio was too low and they're been slapped with stricter conditions. But Health Insurance is an industry where you can basically pass on your costs to your policy holders with near impunity (the current "healthcare debate" rarely discusses cost control in depth, and instead spends time on the correct level of cost sharing). And if your overall costs grow, then you can raise your overall revenue. And when your overall revenues grow, you have more money to pay your executives.

Consumers lose, everyone else in the healthcare value chain wins.
Just like the apocryphal rule of thumb, there is no rule of punching up (or down) It's either you allow punching or you don't. LKY knew this. Else you wind up with an opposition bigger than the affected who get fed up with things after the affected begin punching more then they should.

See: dynamics of older and younger siblings.
This is not as clear cut as it would seem.

California law has very strong protections for employees. And it seems that firing him for the memo may actually be illegal.

The crux of the argument is that Google may have "punished an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions", which is illegal.

Also, "California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action."

Furthermore, "It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws".

Read here for more:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fi...
I thought Jobs was a founder, not just some grunt. Maybe being an owner put him in a much better position than this guy currently finds himself in.
>if there is proof that diverse companies perform better then his reasoning about how diversity initiatives are wasteful must be incorrect.

Absolutely not true. There are many other possible reasons for such a correlation. A few examples:

It's possible better-performing companies could attract more non-white applicants.

Or, that better-performing companies could be have extra resources, which they then spend on diversity initiatives, where poor-performing companies are desperate to survive.

Or the independent variable: Being in the Valley makes companies perform better, and also makes them want to hire more non-whites, but these are both independent outcomes simply caused by being in the Valley. In this scenario, it's even possible that diversity harms performance, but the effect is more than compensated for by being in the Valley.

Or, it could be random chance; outcomes are dominated by a few high-performing companies, which just happen to be genetically diverse.

Or any of many other possible connections and confounders. This is really basic stuff.
Yes, the masses revolted against the liberal elites which run virtually every prominent institution (media, arts, education, tech, and most non-elected government positions), but that hardly means the right has any sort of power (especially given that Trump won by appealing to liberals).

But to your point, authoritarianism is thrown around too often. Better terms for the identity-politicking left include "repressive" or "censorious".
The workplace is no place for politics like this.

I agree, but I'm pretty sure political posts were already tolerated at Google. If employees are allowed to post to internal message boards that women are underrepresented because interviewers are sexist or suffer from unconcious bias and should adopt policy Y, then employees should also be allowed to post an argument that women are under-represented for some other reason X and argue against policy Y.

And even if the workplace does have a no politics rule, the proper response should be a reprimand and asking him to delete his post, not a firing.
No right is unlimited, even if it's in the constitution.

For example, libel, slander, and harassment may all take the form of "speech" but are unquestionably firing offenses. Those are also criminal offenses because the balance of harms swings away from the person who's free speech rights might be violated, toward the person who's own rights are being violated due to the exercise of free speech itself.

As that old adage goes: My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
> Diversity programs are not about lowering the bar

As an Asian male who once upon a time had to apply to colleges, I'd like to see some evidence for that assertion.

To be clear, I (and hopefully many other people commenting here) have no problem with outreach, anti-harrassment, and other such workplace training initiatives. It's unfortunate that we can't all achieve a baseline level of civility that abstracts away a person's biological character.

But I personally find it inflammatory to equate the concept of diversity with differences in sex and race in the first place. This tends disturbingly towards institutionalized stereotyping (e.g. "all Asians are nerdy and softspoken, so we're going to lump them into the same cohort and exert an implicit negative bias against them"). It's also particularly vacuous in that our notion of 'diversity' is thereby premised chiefly on superficial appearances - 'you look different, therefore you must be the kind of different we need'.

One would think the more equitable philosophy would be to strive towards a world in which we stop making exactly those kinds of distinctions and instead judge people on the content of their character and the value they can create.

I find it highly reductionist to conflate people challenging biased hiring practices with people challenging diversity more generally. There are likely some in the tech world who are genuinely bigoted and misogynist. I would hope, however, that a larger share are simply perplexed that hiring practices in engineering would be predicated on anything other than an assessment of raw merit.

My final point is this: as long as we continue to perpetuate diversity practices that emphasize sex and race in any way, some classes of people are going to be harmed. Sometimes that's more obvious to the Asian male who grew up in a tough part of NYC under difficult circumstances than it is to the affluent Black female who grew up in a world willing to bias opportunities unfairly in her favor (when some other less fortunate Black female really needed the leg up).
Why on earth not? Various networks offer anybody the opportunity to go on many first dates with many people. It takes some effort, and you have to learn how to come across well & take good photos & stuff, but few people have all doors shut to them.

I see you commented elsewhere you get few matches- why is that? Figure that out, fix that. Dating isn't take-it-or-leave-it, it's a life journey that most certainly includes working on yourself.
It was an honest question, not an argument.

I had said: "Nobody has to give you the space or time to voice your speech", by which I was talking that private people and organizations do not have to give you the space and time for you to voice your speech.

His/her reply was that governments kill people so you should be free of the consequences of your speech.

The implication of this argument (being free of the consequences) means, for example, that your family can't not invite you over for Christmas because you're racist. Or that your friends can't stop hanging out with you, or that someone can't stop employing you.

Those are all consequences of your speech, and you're not protected from them (with a few exceptions).
why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless

They weren't powerless; it took several class-action lawsuits and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints in the 70's to increase the number of women lawyers.[1] I've also heard, for example from some comments by 'rayiner here on HN, that law schools made deliberate changes to their admission policies

yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there

Maybe because tech, both industry and academia, hasn't made the same efforts that the legal profession did?

[1] http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... (p.14 ff)
> Well, I can tell you were NOT to have that discussion: publicly at work.

It's clearly acceptable for other ethnicities and genders, many companies will even setup official programs for those groups, so clearly it's ok to discuss publicly at work. That leaves white and male as the only determining factors that make it unacceptable, which is obviously racist and/or sexist.
Again, I'm not taking any issue with your assumptions, but assumptions are not direct or even circumstantial evidence. That's all I'm trying to say.
The part where he implies the massive disparity of representation between men and women in tech (17% percent of technical roles at Google, 15% at Facebook) is due to small and inherent physiological differences, which make women inferior at performing in those roles, rather than hundreds of years of structuring our society and culture to favor men. It is an invalid argument.
Here's the writing on the wall that I think is being ignored: google has thousands of employees, with all types of opinions. I guarantee you some of those people have controversial opinions, and some of those people share those controversial opinions.

Everybody blames the author for creating a disturbance, but you can't create a disturbance without people being interested in what you say. The fact that it was so widely circulated (instead of ignored like 99% of blog posts) suggests to me that a number of people at the company feel like he had some really good points.

It's scary to me that the "safe space" crowd gets to define what views are offensive, and inherently make it an unsafe (even firable) place for those who disagree to express who they are and what they believe.
The discussion became so emotionally charged on either side so analogies are our best weapon right now.
Of course. My point is those tantrum firings cost him a million or two at a time --despite at will work.
You've never seen code implementing a form to gather names?
None of what he said were men's rights dog whistles.

Well... https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6sa9f6/google_f...
Women elect into different fields in large part because of social factors. If a company like Google decides that it doesn't like those social factors, what's wrong with that? Why should social convention rule?

A lot of clumping happens in fields. Tell me why women are better at symplectic geometry than symplectic topology (or not). Tell me why women are better combinatorists than number theorists -- I want to hear something about counting the tubers they gathered. Tell me why women are so much more suited to advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology than interventional cardiology (https://www.aamc.org/data/448482/b3table.html). I kinda love all the post hoc analysis that goes into explaining these differences, especially when you have to explain then why Portuguese and Italian women are great in algebraic geometry but French women aren't (except for the notable exceptions like Claire Voisin).

Most people aren't pioneers; most people follow the pioneers into situations in which they feel mildly more comfortable than the alternative. Sexism plays a huge role, while not being the only factor. Is it really surprising that if you put up a "girls r dum" sign on a clubhouse many will find somewhere else to go?

Women electing into different fields is pretty much tautological here. The question is why, and whether it's for reasons we want to support and/or perpetuate. The whole point of the memo at issue is that he figures it's built into women biologically because computers aren't cuddly and that it is thus justifiable and right to perpetuate or support the current set of social roles. I don't know that the guy should have been fired, but it's clear he's not going to be a great team player or supervisor for women.
Corgi Husky Mix-All About Horgi or Siborgi Dogs
Google CEO Slams Memo on Gender as Employee Reportedly Fired
Maybe, but that doesn't immunize them from criticism, especially when they purport to value diversity and free speech but silence critics.

Anyway, the financial benefits of diversity are almost certainly overstated. I don't know why we can't just say, "we're hiring diverse people because we think it's the right thing to do".
I don't think that's what he means. I think he is saying they are qualified, but many qualified people have also been excluded based on gender or race (i.e. the "false negatives" that gets repeatedly left out). For all he knows, those same people might have been the most qualified, but much of the competition didn't (allegedly) get a shot to compete against them.
> Given that the document has (rightfully) alienated women inside and outside his organization

This argument only work is every woman can only see themselves as part of the group and are incapable of seeing themselves as individuals.

I would be willing to bet that there are women (and other diversity hires) at Google that know they are capable of doing their jobs and deserving of being hired. Some of those people might object to being lumped in with the whole and not being seen as individuals.
The trick is using the language of equality to argue in favor of an approach which will decrease it.

It's a fairly common tactic inside of the RedPill community, and within White Power/Pride groups. Arguing that by fighting sexism/racism you are being sexist/racist.
Google fires engineer who authored anti-diversity memo
> o form cooperatives where we collectively define our own roles?

This is attempted in organizations that have a flat organization. The problem with that, eventually it forms a hierarchy based on the most agressive and most bullying.
It seems he made that point and then continued to make a bunch of other points, and its those other points that many have a problem with.

I read a good chunk in agreement, but then it just took a left turn. Between its thinly-vieled promotion for 'conservative values' and some very thin 'therefore' conclusions midway through, it would never be able to stand up to the heights of intellect that its author probably intended it for.