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Episode 78: Google's memo controversy
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G along with dr. Doug Lyall with beat your genes podcast dr. Lyle how you doing today good about yourself all growing well yeah everything's going pretty good you know last week a this is before probably a couple days after the show ended a Google employee wrote up a memo and he called in Google's ideological echo-chamber how biased clouds are thinking about diversity and inclusion yeah his name is James d'amour he's a Google engineer he wrote this memo to discuss equal representation in the technology field and also to discuss the current programs in place at Google to create that type of diversity or that type of representation and he used a lot of stuff that we've talked about in the show explaining evolutionary psychology specifically biological differences between men and women and he offered what I thought was a pretty genius alternative approach to creating equal representation and the memo starts off with James d'amour saying quote I value diversity and inclusion am not denying that sexist sexism exists and I don't endorse using stereotypes end quote well it turns out that the CEO of Google did not read that first line of the memo because James d'amour was hired on Monday as the CEO sundar Pichai put it in an email he had quote crossed the line by a dancing harmful gender stereotypes end quote so today on our show we'll be going going over this memo point by point we're going to explore some of the claims made by mr. d'amour which are from the evolutionary psychology theories that we've talked about and then figuring out probably why he was fired and talking about maybe at this point how can he beat his genes so the memo it's a ten page memo but you know we're not going to go over line by line but we're going to go over six main points that I that I came up with and answer some questions I got a couple of emails from our listeners who wanted to hear you talk about this because they had they had heard a lot of this information from our show and then he repeating it from the memo from the news it was actually an interesting way to see these ideas go mainstream so right ready dr. Lyle all right so 0.1 this is from the beginning of the memo quote people generally have good intentions but we all have biases which are invisible to us thankfully open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow which is why I wrote this document end quote all right well first off I don't believe that people either have either good or bad intentions I think from what I've learned with you doctor people have cooperative intentions so they're willing to cooperate on a mutually beneficial goal whether or not it's called good or bad so telling someone especially publicly a company that you're about to point out all their biases and hypocrisy seems to me like I'm signaling the beginning of a vicious cycle what about what say you dr. Lao ah that's very good good thinking yeah I have a in general even though we of course ignore our own advice on this on this podcast because it's ours we do what we want but in general we we want to have a stance that I call never criticize nobody and this is my in my view that this is like I think of a an old mafia Don with his cigar talking to his young nephew about how on earth he survived 50 years in the rackets and the answer is never criticized nobody because if you criticize somebody you're going to get shot so James d'amour here got shot and he he didn't follow the rule of Medical never criticized nobody for fine I hope he's he lands on his feet it's not like the criticism it'll be very interesting to hear what he said I just heard some news clips about it I don't have no idea how out of line or wacky this guy is but certainly from what I was reading and what I heard of what he was talking about all sounded pretty reasonable but your let's circle back round to your issue yeah good intentions bad intentions yeah actually what we're talking about is people seek their own interest and they are trying to do things that will increase the statistical likelihood of their genes surviving so that's fundamentally what it is hit they're trying to do now they are they are they will strategically cooperate and they will also fight okay so they are they tend to be quite cooperative but they're also they're going to be what I call conditionally hawkish in other words when there are when there was a time in a place to take down a competitor under the right circumstances then they very well may do so and so in this case this he he in advancing his own position for his own reasons he walked right into somebody else's somebody else's best genetic interests and somebody founded in their best genetic interest to fire him so he was not in a position of power with respect to that decision I hope that he is in a position of power financially so that this is really no big deal and that this was nothing nothing more than for him then a than a a way to go public and to highlight you know some things about him so anyway interesting story let's hear more okay so he goes on with the memo and he says hmm quote at Google we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies in race and gender but we rarely discuss our moral biases and political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases he goes on to lift list the Left biases and the right biases and they are as follows left biases are compassion for the weak disparities are due to injustice humans are inherently cooperative change is good ie instability and high openness to new experience where and the right biases our respect for the strong and authority figures disparities are usually natural and just humans are inherently competitive change is dangerous and low openness and new experience mm-hmm and we're again is it a good yeah yeah so this is stuff we've talked about in previous podcast but what he's also says is neither side is 100% correct but he says that both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or in this case a company a company too far to the right might be slow to react overly hierarchal and untrusting of others in contrast to company too far to the left will be constantly changing over diversify and overly trust its employees and competitors however he claims that since google has such a large left bias they are incorrectly assuming that gender disparity in the workplace is due to injustice and so how accurate do you think his classification of these political biases are good they sound pretty good I haven't gone up and down and looked at data supporting them but he and I actually have already forgotten the ones that you said but it it sounded right on target and so he's obviously done his homework this is not this isn't somebody that's been sloppy and so yeah it looks let's continue on as he talks about a so it sounds like under discussion at Google has been the issue of disparity with respect to male and female what success and and standing and status in high tech that kind of the core of this yeah I think recently Google had an article that came out and they found that they have I think only 30-something percent of their workforce was female and that females were getting paid a little less than the men in Google in particular so they were scrambling trying to figure out how to even this out and make it about 50/50 or in a context with the population oh my god that just a thing of beauty okay go ahead yeah so he continues and he's what he's trying to do essentially is tell this memo tell people that it may not be because of disparity or some sort of injustice in the workplace what he says is that it's he titled this possible non-biased causes of the gender gap in technology brand he goes on to describe personality differences and he says that women on average have more openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas which makes them MPI's versus systematize which is what men do and these differences explain why women relatively prefer jobs and social or artistic areas whereas men like coding because it requires systematizing her system yeah I'm not I'm not sure I would quite use the language he used so he the say that say the first sentence again of this okay openness women on average have more openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas women generally also had okay that I'm worried ranking a mistake by the way okay okay okay so you you can't have a feeling without computations so there's no such thing as women being less interested in ideas okay so this is a so he's he's sort of he's slopping together some some lay observation and something else through these that he's read somewhere it's getting a little bit sloppy there I don't I don't think he can probably defend that but he can certainly defend the differences in intellectual capacities with respect to certain types of activities and so there's there's no doubt at all that there is a substantial differences in the two populations of two curves of male and female brain male and female brain are not the same Brent that brain may overlap a tremendous amount of course it does so it overlaps with with respect to two functions very much so and the two bell curves with respect to any given characteristic overlap so in other words there's going to be a phase shift so that one of the bell curves is going to be higher than the other bell curve on some specific function so for example when it comes to vocabulary females are shifted to the right in other words the average female has a higher vocabulary than the average male we think we know why that is by the way that was you know probably figured out by Geoffrey Miller or somebody was talking to that that females use the vocabulary of males in order to detect their IQ because IQ is a fitness indicator and so as a result the the higher vocabulary is a very high indicator of IQ it vocabulary all by itself I believe correlates 0.7 with IQ so it's a tremendously good fitness indicator and so as a result if you are going to be using that as an important decision-making tool for deciding who to mate with then you had better not get bluffed by a guy making up words that you haven't heard so when he starts to use words that you you know and he uses them incorrectly you will know that that ex is not part of this vocabulary and so so therefore it makes sense that females would actually run ahead of males a little bit by a certain percentage in order to essentially check this is a check on males bluffing so that so that that is something that is interesting on the other hand males are clearly superior in mathematics and this is absolutely genetic in origin and the the the shift between the two curves may not be great but it's great enough for there to be a much higher concentration the way bell curves are constructed as you get out into the tails the differences become more more pronounced so so when you get to the extremes there's far more males that are extremely bright in mathematics than there are females that's just the nature of these two brains just as you're going to find there's going to be far more females that are going to be extremely high in their verbal abilities then there are going to be males so this is and it turns out that these kinds of abilities are lend themselves very well to high tech and therefore the males are going to dominate high tech in terms of abilities this isn't for any of our females listening or anybody that sounds like you know sexist talk on a chalkboard you know scratching the chalkboard it's not in the same way keep in mind that they're the world record for giving birth to new offspring is 69 and that is held by female and all other second and third and fourth and fifth and hundredth place they're all held by females all the way down so it's also true everything I do not what's that nose making a joke yeah yeah it's also true that I do not believe although it I could be wrong but certainly in the modern environment there there has not been a single female on earth that probably could have played on any male professional sports team at the major level whether it's hockey basketball football baseball so I could be wrong but I don't think so I don't think there's been a single WNBA player that could even come close probably could not play on a major college basketball team okay now we don't consider this to be anything important at all we just recognize that there's these extraordinary individual differences and and the average male and the average female may not be that difference in terms of their size and strength but when we get out to the tail of the bell curves we once again find the same extraordinary differences so we will find an occasional six foot eight inch female but that six foot aged female will never be able to jump 30 inches off the ground and won't be 220 pounds and can benchpress 225 pounds 50 times so once again when we start talking about in the high ends of bell curves when there's a phase shift between the male and female you're going to start to find quite striking differences in the amount that these things are going to show up in these populations so his comment here of course it would be the case that in an area of the world where the particular skills happen to be correlated with the with a variable where there's a striking difference between the male and female brain which isn't going to be true in a lot of other things so it's not going to be as true in sales I would prop Lee give sales a dead heat because the females are going to be better at reading better at reading emotional responses and they're going to be kinder and smoother they're going to etcetera but at the same time they're not as going to be as driven so in a sales arena I would expect to find the successes of males and females to be relatively equivalent and I think that's what we probably will find the but in something like high tech you can forget it like no responsible biologist looking at the scoresheet would say that we should see anything other than males completely dominating this field so obviously Google in trying to you know scratch their liberal heads and pull their liberal hair out trying to figure out how it is that their females are not making as much money as their males and that they don't have as many females as males this is an absolute absurdity and if James d'amour was anywhere near this argument of course he's putting forth what is obvious like these people are all living in the land of the Emperor's New Clothes and they're pretending that they're seeing clothes you got to be kidding me the the truth is it's very likely that Google female employees are overpaid if they're anywhere close that's very likely that they're over-represented and the liberal bias that believe me it isn't unconscious it's very conscious and deep that they are that they're for their own for their own liberal issues before for good or for ill they are completely lost in space here and ignoring obvious realities yeah so let's go ahead and continue let's continue with the personality difference so we've established such openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas that's not not entirely correct how about he says also women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things relative to men yeah there's no baby I have no doubt that he's right there I mean that's that's perfectly legitimate Adam he has a citation from from an article and pulling it up here from the jet and differences in personal interest by the social personality psychology compass so yeah it just has a sigh he said citations all over this memo Carib but yeah he says this is interpreted and on incisal yeah right we'll go over that at the very end as to why you think he did this but empathizing versus systemizing is basically yeah boils down to yeah I don't you know what I would not I think that's a mistake and I think he's he's confusing things and acting as if those those two things would somehow be a dichotomy okay he's actually confusing domains of human activity here systematizing versus empathizing there is no such thing as if I'm not empathic than I'm systematizing things but if I'm systemising things I'm not empathic that's just absurd he's mixing apples and oranges here in a way because I need to so that's okay I mean this is he's obviously trying to figure this out he's put a lot of thought into it but he's he's blunt a lot of people around the landscape a little bit that's all right let's see what is it and then he goes with extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness so it sounds like he's mixing agree ability and an extraversion and totally also has another sentence also higher agreeableness so doesn't quite get that assertiveness and agreeableness are the same same relative right right that's right that's good so but that's okay he's working at this thing and yes females are more agreeable and so females are going to be you know easier to get along with generally that doesn't mean that there aren't kind of shark-tooth females out there that are very difficult but again we're talking bell curves here and and so in in most times in most positions of authority it's going to be the case that you need to have some substantial amount of disagree ability and the reason that's going to be true is that in any in any collective endeavor there are are very significant conflicts of interest between the major players all the way down the line to the guy in the shop that's pushing a broom and as a result it can be uncomfortable to actually tell people no we're doing it this way not that way we're going to do it this is going to be not in your interest too bad it is what I see in the company interest so you're going to have to hurt a lot of feelings and you're going to have to be okay with it and so basically nice guys make lousy CEOs and therefore women in general are are not that there aren't plenty of disagreeable women but in general they as a bell-curve of collective people they are not going to have as many of the right combination disagreeableness along with the high conscientiousness high intelligence and everything else that it might take to make great CEO now that doesn't mean that they're not might not be first of all all kinds of women with the with the disagree ability to pull this off the that's irrelevant we're talking about statistical issues here about how likely these characteristics would fall in one individual the or in it forget to yo any kind of management position and so you know in my own life I have seen female managers struggle trying to take into account a bunch of others you know disturbed feelings of the underlings and their grumbling and they're crying and they're whining etc and actually struggling with it and I've seen less struggling with males who are like too bad that's just the way it goes okay and so this is that that difference is you know I think not trivial because it is it and probably it also accounts for a percentage of the less interest in women have in even pursuing positions in management because I think that women are going to smell that that's going to be a problem and they don't necessarily want to put themselves in the middle of those conflicts of interest if they have considerable amount of empathy and so there are there are a number of reasons why men would tend to be higher in the pecking order and organizations that have nothing to do with intelligence even if we were talking about if we were talking about an organization where the content area wasn't gender related now in high-tech the content area is absolutely gender ability related so when you add that to the fact that there's a certain amount of customers and disagree ability that aids and abets people in positions of management we're starting to see why it is that management would be heavily male laden with absolutely no bias in any system at all alright let's go ahead keep rolling yeah he blames a lot of what you just said he said that the higher agreeableness leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary asking for raises speaking up and leading he says these are just average differences and there's overlap between men and women but this is being solely as a woman's issue which means that programs that are meant to remedy this exclude many of the agreeable men who have the same issue ah ok fair enough right right good for him I wouldn't I wouldn't have thought of that because I'm I'm not in that social situation so yeah that would make sense right it is a woman's issue rather than an agreeable Mis issue right right right rather gotta disagree versus agreeable yeah sure ok which is good go ahead good thing yeah so the third one is neuroticism basically he mixes conscientiousness here because he assigns higher anxiety with neuroticism and and lower stress tolerance and my understanding was that some of the anxiety comes from hyper conscientiousness over anything worsening scenarios where but he justs Murata sysm and he says this may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety that women report on the google reports for friend and also for the lower number of women in high-stress jobs well yeah so this is this is ya going at neuroticism in depending upon who's acronym and the big five you're talking about also is what we're going to call emotional stability so so he's so I interestingly enough not being I'm not actually really interested in gender differences very much so I was not aware that there's any significant differences in emotional stability between men and women I was not aware that there was any evidence for that so perhaps there is i I would expect if there is such an effect I would expect it would be pretty low certainly I wouldn't expect there would be much difference in conscientiousness does I'm not seeing any reason for that I see the big action as being in domain differences in IQ and certainly agreeable disagreeable those are those are the two main things I see I can't see I can't see necessarily differences in openness if I would expect any differences in openness I would actually expect men to be more open in other words they're not going to seem open to new ideas but they should be more adventurous and more risk-taking I would think just because it could be a fitness indicator when you survive it so it would be a good male fitness indicator but I don't know these these are probably some pretty subtle numbers but can you talk more about the can you talk a little bit more about the IQ differences one of our listeners a question about that yeah the average IQ differences between males and females is zero so if you take if you take the two bell curves between men and women you're going to find that the bell curves on average sit right on top of each other now a useful thing in IQ is to divide IQ into two different types of problems in other words if you use if you take an IQ test what they've done in order to create an IQ test what they did was they took a sample of different types of problems that the mine that the human mind can solve and seems to try to solve for various and sundry things so there there isn't there wasn't any significant whatever they're three three mi coconuts for for your apples whatever so the but so what they've done is that they look at the the modern world and look at the kinds of problems that that people solve and they've come up with I think on one of the most famous intelligent scales I think it was eleven content areas little different things so to describe for people what an intelligence test looks like intelligence tests might have one part of intelligence test would be for the examiner to say off a string of digits like seven eight three two and then you have to say it back then if you get that right then they'll go to five eight nine one and then you got to say that back so you be and then you'll go until you miss and then if you they'll try you on stay five digits again if you get it right the second time then we'll go to six digits see how you do then so in this way we take chance out of it in the fact that you might have a lapse of concentration for a second but we'll try you at that level again etc so as we go through the IQ tests and then there might be one where we have you do simple arithmetic problems and then we might have one we're going to go through vocabulary then we're going to have we'll read you a a saying like what does it mean that you know one swallow doesn't make a summer okay and then you're going to have to tell me what that means and the more abstract use you say that back the smarter that the more credit you get and so if you say well once while well one swallow comes that that doesn't mean the summer's here well you get one point for that but if you say well one swallow doesn't make a summer means that just because one incident happens doesn't mean that there's actually a sea change okay okay well that's two points so in this way the IQ test what it does is it will take these eleven or ten or seven or however many domain-specific IQ test uses it'll do a bunch of little arithmetic problems and might be done geometry problems than it might do word stories and then it might do analogies and then my do straight vocabulary and then it might do you know something else some complicated logic thing not that's what it's going to do and each of those areas they're going to have a whole bunch of little items that are highly interrelated so that essentially they're they're getting themselves they're measuring this a bunch of different times so that they can really see where you are relative to other people on that particular mental ability all right now so as you can imagine any two IQ tests are not going to correlate super high because they each use slightly different domains and they have slightly different questions and therefore a couple of any pair of IQ tests only correlates point eight which I always sort of roll my eyes a little bit because I queue itself correlate to point seven with the simplest possible vocabulary test that you can give in like sixty seconds so it's it's an hour and 380 bucks and the psychologist feels really important and you know I mean signs their name to report whatever okay so but but but the bottom line is is it can be interesting looking at IQ test because you can see once in a while you will see somebody that has a particular extraordinary deficit and you'll be like huh that's odd like what a strange brain you you have your 80th to 99th percentile in seven different areas and in this one area you're at the second percentile okay that's what you call a learning disability now these days everybody is learning disabled but you know has a low IQ and everybody's angling for extra help at school it's all ridiculous but the bottom line is is that the concept of learning disability is is very interesting and legitimate which is that you might have someone that is very that that is a 50th percentile brain but over here on this one thing they're in the bottom 5% I'll it's like whoa that could be a very constraining neural circuit set of circuits with respect to solving certain academic problems so it you know the academic you testing can sometimes reveal that and it's very interesting when you'll see that in my career I've seen a few oddball lookin brains in my time I had a child 30 years ago that that had had I forget what kind of anoxia situation he had it's I forget what you call it but when you're born and you were you were starved of oxygen a little bit during delivery so this funny kid had super high IQ and so half of his IQ test look looked like he was over you know 100 you know 98 percentile and that half of his IQ test looked like he was below the fifth percentile his parents were going crazy like they had you know they tell him to do something and he wouldn't do it or couldn't do it and then he turn around do something brilliant and yeah I loved the kid he was extremely likable and to him the world was making perfect sense he didn't understand the problem he was actually negotiating the world fine but meanwhile everybody else around him every teacher and his parents and his brother and sister just going nuts because his behavior was much offense to them yeah yes he thought they were he was messing with him which he wasn't she was actually a really sweet kid the bottom line is is that IQ testing is useful that's how it's done usually it's not too exciting in other words usually a 90th percentile person has their abilities on IQ test somewhere between 90 excuse me somewhere between 70 and 95 on every domain that's more or less what it is and if you have somebody that's very bright they're the 98th percentile then pretty much everything they do is between the 85th and the 99th percentile they've got a few weaknesses and they got a bunch of strengths and that's why there are 1 in 50 human so now so males and females males and females are their overall ideas on these if we take in all the whole baskets of these different kinds of problems their IQs are exactly the same which is interesting and I'm sure there's deep genetic biological reasons why we would expect that would be true the in other words I'm not going to get into the game theory that would be associated there but that makes sense that that would be the case however evolution has dictated that the male and female will not all be doing the same things throughout the course of their lifetime so that IQ will be dedicated to different types of problems okay so as a result the male and female brain are not the same across these for example let's suppose we say it's ten different domains of problem-solving now you could in theory make it 20 but when you do that if you start to factor analyze 20 different problems you're going to start to find that they factorize analyze into just a few okay geometrical arithmetic vocabulary we're pretty well done memory okay by the time you have a few domains measured we more or less got it so it's going to turn out that the the brains of the male and female cross evolutionary time had to solve different types of problems as a result they were genetically selected for for solving dip given the same general horsepower you the the engine is dedicated to certain problems and not as dedicated as much to other problems so ie she throws like a girl okay so the and that's that's how this is going to work out now meanwhile men don't do very well at hand-eye coordination multitasking that's something that females did talking to their friends watching the kids picking berries okay so the females apparently have algorithms in there that are smoother for doing that type of thing the men it's obviously men can wrap the myelin sheath around a set of problems around their desk and get very good at multitasking around their desk but they're not naturally good at it they're not on average naturally as good as females so once again the two bell curves overlap but when we start looking inside the components of intelligence we are going to find that it's heterogenous that there isn't such thing as quote how intelligence somebody is there's intelligence within domains okay so as a result yeah Albert Einstein didn't have a vocabulary that would blow anybody away Albert Einstein undoubtedly having 98 or 99 percent ovo vocabulary but the guy's mathematical abilities were 1 in 10 or 20,000 okay so the this is this is how this is going to work and so anyway when it comes to oh the other issue about this is my understanding and I haven't read the original research but this is this is coming out of Steven Pinker so it's a really good source and I believe that it's true that the Brinks worried yes Steven Pinker is you know one of our greatest mankind's greatest thinkers right now the the the bell curves apparently for males versus females are somewhat different in terms of the shape of the bell curve so the the female bell curve appears to have a higher amplitude it's squeezed the standard deviation is effectively less the male bull bell curve although the curve is sitting right on top though the same mean the standard deviation is not the same so the curve is flatter and that means that there are less males in the dead center middle relative to how many there are at the edges do I have that right that's correct so as you start to go out at the tail of the male bell curve there's there's more people for example the way either way they score IQ is is just in anybody sorry for statisticians people that don't know any stats but the mean of the IQ is scored at a hundred and then 15 points is what's called the standard deviation so that takes you out to the 84th percentile and then another standard deviation takes you out to 130 so that takes you out to 98 percentile so in the top two percent at 130 in theory you would have two percent of the distribution that would be above 130 now that's not going to be true for both males and females when you put them all in the same pot it isn't that isn't how it's going to work so you're going to have at the score that is required to get 130 on this test you're going to have more males at 130 then you're going to have females at 130 mm a turn though that's how the service works yeah there are right there are going to be more males at 70 than there are going to be females at 70 so more males or morons and more males or geniuses and that's just the way it is so that is also going to explain potentially very high achievement in the modern world that gets magnified by the extraordinary financial rewards that it can take to be very very high in intelligence now that's not going to be true in the Stone Age so if you have some guide that's a one in a thousand in the Stone Age for brains that's big deal how much better of a hunter is he that that intelligence is quickly is quickly attenuated the effects of it are attenuated quickly by by slightly below average physique like you forget it okay so your but in the modern environment if you're the founder of Google and you're sitting on 145 IQ if they're listening they're probably offended you know I mean but that's what these guys are they're all all these guys are basically the they're basically 1 in 11 and 300 yeah and undoubtedly lousy adders and so the bottom line is is that that you're you're much more likely to find 140 550 ie one in 300 one in 500 those people are now being particularly when we look inside the domains of certain content content areas and certain economic problems like like the mathematically oriented problems of high tech you're going to find that the males are not only are the males more concentrated generally in high IQ and low IQ they are also actually more concentrated when it comes to the content areas of mathematics and so you so now you start realizing well wait a second not only are there more really smart males than there are really smart females by percentage it's also true that that smartness is heavily laden in these mathematically based things rather than verbal okay so and then you're going to turn that around and realize and then we're going to add disagree ability to the CEO issue and now we should absolutely expect that there would be major differences in high high management jobs in high tech okay and I have no doubt that despite the fact that it's young industry and that it's all hip and it's cool to be liberal and everything like that the truth of the matter is you will probably find that if you were to look at more more sales oriented industries like real estate if you were to look at I don't know cosmetics commodities beauty oriented products etc etc but if you were to look at sales in general I think that high performing sales you problem you might not find a lot of difference but I think about sales management those sales management you got to be pretty disagreeable it's probably male-dominated but for no other reason than that you per you're not going to find you won't find verbal IQ differences in in males and females that are in high ticket sales so anyway the anyway so let's go on what else does this guy have to say well so I wanted to share share with our audience so CNN did a piece on this memo and of course every news station was talking about it and and how controversial it was and CNN piece and I I listened to a little bit of all these news stations and I caught very interesting part on this memo so here's the first clip from CNN introducing this memo a manifesto written by one of Google's male engineers it's sparking outrage he claims that women are less suited for certain tech jobs in men why biology seriously now Google is responding in our senior technology correspondent Laurie Segall is here with us you have done so much to cover the fight for equality especially in Silicon Valley so she goes on with Laura Siegel the detective tech correspondent and they go reviewing the memo and what's so enter but you know about what's interesting about this memo and what what they don't like about it but what I found pretty ridiculous about their commentary is the following what they say at the very end of their segment and here it is that you sell a lot of things happening and you need diversity of mindset when it comes to engineers for building great products you know to have when you're looking at code you have engineers or coding future products that will change the world of course you're going to need different types of people you need empathy you need humanity and that's all you know the conversation that's happening now that you see with this manifesto coming out I guess the only good thing that comes to something like this is it we talk about it yes and then you get more attention more people think you can be on it as always so you need diversity of mind so what we're all the same and we're not different but to create a great product you need diversity of mindset you need different types of people you need empathy I need humanity dr. Lyle I don't get it on one hunt on one hand they're condemning this memo calling it a manifesto for daring to suggest that women and men have real biological differences but in the exact same segment they go on to describe what these differences are and why we need them in tech well done just just beautiful well done mate I actually that slipped right past me the the irony of that but that's a good job good job really good insight yeah this is a I'm reminded of of what I believe was a similar a similar slip that took place in in the end of a book called oh gosh I'm going to I'm going to is Chris Ryan and his wife up this thing it's a sex exit dog yeah sex had done so I'm reminded it's exid on that you know which was a an interesting book and I think I learned some things from from the book I there was things that they had wrong in the book but the but at the end they they essentially repudiate their own thesis in in the final chapter they completely did exactly what you just saw they so they spend this whole time talking they spend 300 pages talking about how women are really just as loose and wild as men and it's all social conditioning and that we shouldn't have any real pair-bonding or you know the we can be friendly as para bonds but we ought to be just sleeping with each other's wives and husbands and not worried about it ok just like the bonobos do okay so this is this is their whole thesis and that men really aren't you know anymore hound dog than women women's are just as wild and interested in diversity as the men so that all sounds nice and then they say well now we're going to the time when we're going to try to tell you what we would do about this problem and you know well here's the deal that that what are we going to really do if you're a woman and your guy is wanting to step out on you or does step out on you you know and here you are you might feel like doing that in retaliation even though you really don't want to Wow hub one boom okay they admit that the female is not that driven for casual sexual activity right out there right after they've made this whole case so they they absolutely expose the fact that their subconscious you know absolutely notice the truth about this and they write it right into their book right in our face after they've been denying it for 300 pages and that is precisely what you just picked up on it it went right past me so the irony of what it is that that I'm so used to listening people talk about you know that that we need diversity of this amount that I just complete went to sleep incidentally I have no reason to think that in principle diversity is useful for anything like where did anybody get this idea this this idea of course would go back to the idea that we don't want to be you know lawfully discriminating against human beings and not having some people drink from a drinking fountain I mean this is ridiculous if a woman wants to be a priest or a rabbi or anything like that there's as far as I'm concerned it's absurd that they shouldn't be able to do that including the the women that they talked about in that movie hidden figures you know a rocket scientist for God's sakes so you know in the irony of that is that it was a black females who were apparently there was a trio of them that were extraordinary but they were they're very important in the development of important advances at NASA so you know a talent and interest and capability can come from any quarter and we should of course embrace the fact that it can but when it has statistical realities that it turns out that it it may not typically come from any quarter so you know I have to tell you that there's not a lot of Latinos in the NBA and there may never be because that population may on average not sprout up again a bunch of six foot six inch humans and so we may find out in a hundred and fifty years despite that being the case that we continue to have that game dominated by African Americans and ayiiia people from more recently jeans coming from Africa that has the talent that has the native talents to do that particular athletic process extremely well so this is a you know we can recognize regularities we don't say well gee it would be really good for the world if we had a couple of Latinos on every NBA team and then a couple of Nordics and then a couple of Chinese or Asians and then you know I don't know maybe we should have southern agents and northern Asians we need to add diversity there then we gotta you know like what the hell are we talking about we want the river entities on that of like 200 people on there yeah and let's put a couple women on there too and maybe a child okay so the point is that let's let's get serious the job of any company is not to promote a social cause unless that's the cause of the company because it the responsibility the company is to compete most effectively in the marketplace in order to get rates of return on investment for the stockholders that is the job of the company that is the job of the CEO okay and any nonsense about promoting diversity for diversity's sake it's like just flat-out absurd so anyway that's my since this is our podcast we can say whatever huh but just people just you know if Google takes down my website in the next week we'll know why we will good we did not we did not follow our own rule that says never criticize nobody all right so he's going in the memo and he talks about Matt hired driver status which is we've talked about several times in the podcast and he goes on he says quote we always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs right positions require long stressful hours and may not be worth it for people who want a balanced and fulfilling life now I've heard therefore by John Mackey CEO of Whole Foods I needed a talk on this exact thing is that he also he believes that there are a lot of women CEOs because they tend to be more wise about creating a balanced life which is not very conducive to a CEO lifestyle but it's also Jason de Muro goes on he says status of the primary is the primary metric that men are judged on pushing many men into these higher paying less satisfying jobs for the status to fantail the same forces lead men into high pay high-stress jobs in tech and leadership also cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining garbage collection and firefighting and men although as a result suffer 93% of work-related deaths well mm-hmm it reminded me about a clip a comedian that I saw Bill burr and he tended to agree with this part when someone told him that being a mother was the most difficult job in the world so let's let's hear what he has to say about this like really being the mother is the most difficult job on the planet oh yeah all those mothers who die every year for black lung from inhaling all that coal dust the women are just constantly patting themselves on the back about how difficult their lives are and no one correct them because they want to fuck them well bill burr there's only one of those yeah they're a remarkable comedian the yeah I mean yeah yeah I I wouldn't have quite used the today his words but the truth of the matter is I've seen the same thing I have seen I have seen men said silent and nod their heads in various and sundry discussions of these kinds and in order to not offend everybody and to not actually to personally serve their personal genetic best interests which is to look like they're very agreeable and accommodating and nice and they'd make a good daddy for your baby if you'd let them do it okay so of course this is what's going on this is what's going on in in the fanatical reaches of you know of this company obviously and elsewhere apparently I read a little bit that Facebook's not dissimilar it doesn't surprise me any these are the the founders of these companies come from the highest level of academia Stanford and Harvard and so it's it I'm not and they're young and they scored really big early and and so etc so there's there's there's track marks in the snow as to their their general thing and and what it is that they're trying to accomplish with their with their stance on things so it's kind of disgusting and it's uh this guy obviously is full of piss and vinegar this uh James d'amour guy he you know knew what he was doing yeah I was like I'm gonna ask you I say we've got we've got a well-intentioned smart engineer of a publicly-traded famous tech company wrote an internal memo about a topic that's incredibly misunderstood and vulnerable to a lot of oversimplification and the memo got leaked to the public hard to believe he got fired right yeah actually I have this feeling that I've been here before when I've met some people that have this kind of this kind of history that I always thought we'd really like to meet that person they'd be really interesting and I meet him and sure enough they're smart but I didn't like him you know I'm saying so I don't know if I like this guy or not I think he's he's smart as a whip he's very interesting he's full of guts and and he's got a message that sounds to me like it's pretty darn close to what I would say the truth is but he's probably not the easiest guy to live with you know I was thinking I'll Aaron ask some of his some of his history he plays he played competitive chess studied molecular and cellular biology computational biology at Harvard Princeton and MIT how do you not see this coming you know I I same did yeah I think he did and and it may be that he was sick of working at Google and he wanted to go out with a big bang yeah and this kind of circles back to the the beat your jeans is I think that if he feels so passionately about this to write this mum when he got fired for it his next employer is going to know for sure where he stands and yeah some people might think that beating his jeans would mean that he overrides disagreeableness and high conscientiousness so he gets along with his co-workers and not criticized nobody keeps his job but I believe that that maybe what he's done is he made himself known in the world and he's essentially his unhidden display of his thinking might get him fired on Google but the next company that hires him is going to send him just the right of steam signals that he needs right actually yeah he was he was in the wrong pond he was a pond he probably you probably made a lot of money and he's probably got plenty of money and he certainly has plenty of brains and he's got plenty of brains and plenty of content knowledge to to be in the 21st century and to do well he's got an unbelievable academic pedigree obviously so this guy wasn't worried about where his lunch was going to come from and so he went out and fired some shots and it turns out Julian Assange that you had the founder of WikiLeaks just off there have a job I think it was just yesterday anyway so what a surprise there you go one one disagreeable strange dude to another go yeah well we covered up we toured most of the memo you know he presents a few solutions just based on some of his personality differences like couple of them is is to allow more cooperative behavior to thrive but disadvantage those who are competitive he says because women he believes women are more prone to anxiety make tech and leadership less stressful by giving them more part-time hours given them more work-life balance and and he just he goes off I think I think the last part is why probably the main part of why he gets fired because I mean it's certainly not the only part but he goes on to describe the quote so several discriminatory practices that Google uses to achieve a more equal gender and race representations like he says they have programs mentoring in classes only for certain races and genders says diversity candidates get special treatment and he says they also lower the bar for diversity candidates and he just continues reiterating that google has left bias bias and has an intolerance for ideas and evidence that doesn't fit a certain ideology yeah yeah it's very interesting the this is I'm always brought sort of full circle by a lot of these kinds of discussions because the the truth of the matter is and the truth of the matter is is that that the history of the world is checkered with horrendous mistreatment of minority populations or or people in a position of weakness of some in some way so minority not necessarily racial could be religious and and certainly male versus female you know sort of power structure etc so there's there's a you know just about just about the time I'm totally disgusted with left-wing bias is about the time I say God bless liberals okay because without them we wouldn't have the kind of hell raising that's needed sometimes you know shock the world into course-correcting but that's been happening now for 50 years and a lot of things have improved as a result of that but it when you do that you also get some really absurd things going on like a company that is trying to make it look like everybody in the world is equal now that that is insane and so the it's not trusting the fact that human beings are smart enough and tolerant enough to to recognize that we are all each individual's and we have a piece of our identity lines up to our race and our age and our in our gender and our religion and our nationality little pieces those are little pieces of who it is that we are but people can look past that and see our individuality really quite easily and if you fear that people can't do that then you wind up twisting yourself into a pretzel where it's you're unable to talk about anything without potentially fearing that you're offending somebody so this is this is a part of the the pendulum the pendulum at Google and other places has swung too far and they need to get their head straight or they're going to they're going to they will misuse their their capital that is the investors have invested in them and they will not you know they may they may survive for many many years past my lifetime and they may do very well with depending upon what else they're doing well but it won't be because of these management mistakes it will be in spite of them
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