Dear Goolger. Can I call you Goog? I hate to stand on formality, we are all friends here, aren’t we, in this great and wonderful world of technology. And I am definitely one of the technology world. I have been doing this for twenty years on all kinds of platforms and in all kinds of jobs. Heck, I even write C code without an IDE. Heck, I even write C code without the crutch of EMACS. And I am a guy, which kinda seems important to you. So I think we can all be friends here.
So, as your friend, Goog, buddy, I read your letter and I have to say I am not that impressed. You don’t seem to have done the work, Goog old buddy. I mean, yes, you did write ten pages and there were some pretty big words in there. And the punctuation seems to be all in the right place, so good on ya there. But, honestly, Goog, ten pages on diversity on the work place and you don’t mention this:
Discrimination against women has been alleged in hiring practices for many occupations, but it is extremely difficult to demonstrate sex-biased hiring. A change in the way symphony orchestras recruit musicians provides an unusual way to test for sex-biased hiring. To overcome possible biases in hiring, most orchestras revised their audition policies in the 1970s and 1980s. A major change involved the use of blind' auditions with a screen' to conceal the identity of the candidate from the jury. Female musicians in the top five symphony orchestras in the United States were less than 5% of all players in 1970 but are 25% today. We ask whether women were more likely to be advanced and/or hired with the use of blind' auditions. Using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases by 50% the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds. The screen also enhances, by several fold, the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round. Using data on orchestra personnel, the switch to blind' auditions can explain between 30% and 55% of the increase in the proportion female among new hires and between 25% and 46% of the increase in the percentage female in the orchestras since 1970.
Or this:
So the student researchers were surprised when their hypothesis proved false – code written by women was in fact more likely to be approved by their peers than code written by men. But that wasn’t the end of the story: this only proved true as long as their peers didn’t realize the code had been written by a woman.
Or this:
In repeated studies, the social cost of negotiating for higher pay has been found to be greater for women than it is for men. Men can certainly overplay their hand and alienate negotiating counterparts. However, in most published studies, the social cost of negotiating for pay is not significant for men, while it is significant for women.
Or this:
This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.
Movies like Weird Science, Revenge of the Nerds and War Games all came out in the '80s. And the plot summaries are almost interchangeable: awkward geek boy genius uses tech savvy to triumph over adversity and win the girl.
In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers.
Or this:
Ross said, "Every day, a black name resume is 50 percent less likely to get responded to than a white name resume."
A reputable study by respected economists of callback rates for resumes with white- and black-sounding names backs up this point. Ross' biggest error is his specific phrasing, while white names were 50 percent more likely to get a call back, that means that black names were 33 percent less likely to do so.
Ross made a mistake in his phrasing -- one that tripped us up as well. But his overall point remains valid and the study he relied on showed a sizable discrepancy between white and black sounding names.
None of this was hard to find, Goog. Not hard to find at all. (Not to rub it in, but I found it all using your company’s flagship product in less than ten minutes. Have you tried your company’s search engine? It’s a rather impressive piece of engineering. Just type in the something you want to find out about, like, say diversity challenges in the workplace, and all kinds of informative stuff comes up. I bet some of your coworkers could show you how it works. You should ask them sometime.)And yet somehow, none of it was discussed in your ten pages at all. Weird, that.
Can I be honest? You don’t appear to have done the work, Goog. You seem to have written a ten-page screed on the damage encouraging diversity does without doing any actual research on the problems non-white dudes encounter in the real world. It’s not a good look Goog, not a good look at all. It makes you look like a putz, man, like you would lecture a Go programmer on the need for exceptions without having read any of the golang discussion on them. Maybe you should lay low for a bit, and hope everyone forgets you wrote this?
Dear People Who Think Goog Here Deserves a Thorough Rebuttal of His Ideas
I hope by now you can see that our friend Goog doesn’t appear to be operating in good faith. His letter gives no indication that he has done anything than cherry pick some stuff from MRA sites and Richard Spencer’s Greatest Hits in defense of the fact that girls and minorities apparently make him feel icky inside. This is an old discussion with well-known facts and decades of research, none of which he mentions or attempts to engage with. His letter was not a good faith effort to discuss this issue. Treating it as such does no good.
If Goog was arguing tactics or means, that would be a good faith discussion. If Goog was addressing the points raised by the studies above, that would be a good faith discussion. But he’s not doing that: he is using junk arguments to ignore the true state of the discussion because he doesn’t want to argue on those terms. He is bullshitting, in other words. Pointing out that he is not arguing in good faith is pretty much all anyone owes him, and pretty much all that is necessary. People don’t like to be bullshitted.
And when you force people to go back and point out over and over and over again in exhaustive terms why the bad faith argument is factually incorrect, all you are doing is retarding the discussion. You are wasting everyone’s time. Occasionally you will run into bystanders who don’t have the history to understand the factual issues with argument’s like Goog’s; usually pointing out that Goog is bullshitting them is enough. If they are really interested, they will go off and do their own work; if they are just passing through, they will now know which arguments are garbage. And, of course, it is always good to help others learn, help them to direct their own education. But if you spend your time exhaustively proving every fact in every bullshit artist pile of bullshit wrong, you will never end up doing anything else. Showing them to be bullshit is generally enough.
And if you find yourself asking other people to comprehensively take down a bad faith argument, well, as I told Goog up there: finding the holes in his took me hardly any time at all. I am pretty sure you could do the take down yourself.