"dog whistles" are, more often than not, a thinly veiled way of putting words in other people's mouthes.
Damore's thesis amounted to "maybe women are 20% of software developers not because they're being discriminated against, but because they're exercising their own agency and choosing other fields."
Given that about 20% of CS grads are women, it seems like a pretty reasonable stance.
In isolation, it's a very naive, oblivious, and incurious stance.
Taken alongside the rest of the content, it's a rejection of the idea that there is systemic bias, and much of his memo is dedicated to ways in which that bias can be propagated and solidified.
At best, the memo paints Damore as someone who is radically uninformed and parroting old and invalid talking points that others have given to him. At worst it implies that he knows what he's doing and is trying to dismantle processes and culture that are improving women's access to the workplace.
So merely contesting the notion that systemic bias is the main driver of the gender disparity in tech is grounds for instant termination? Well, that's rather troubling given that the empirical evidence on the bias in tech company hiring doesn't support the narrative of anti-female bias: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
Not at all. A good faith discussion in the right forum is fine.
That's not what the memo was. It ignored the evidence we have that there is systemic bias, it relied on tired and debunked tropes, and has explicit goals about preserving and elevating the privilege that perpetuates that systemic bias. That done in front of a large company filled with people personally affected by it is just a terrible idea. I'm open to discussion about this, but from the right people (those affected, with the experience) in the right context. James Damore was neither.
But honestly, if you read the memo and think it sounds reasonable, I'm not going to be able to change your mind. These biases are deeply rooted and take decades of introspection to overcome. I've been on that journey for probably 15 years and I've still got blind spots.
The experiment I linked above sent monitored the callback rates of applicants sent out to Bay Area tech companies for technical roles, and saw higher callback rates for women. This is the sort of prototypical evidence we use as an example of systemic anti-Black bias where Black applicants are called back less frequently than white applicants.
Is Google, specifically, systemically biased against women? Cross-referencing the diversity reports they publish [1], with employment statistics [2] does not show an underrepresentation of women. Google has also taken controversial steps, such as tying executive performance reviews to the representation of "underrepresented groups" - that term has included women at every company I've worked at, but if that's not the case at Google please correct me. When Google conducted an investigation into whether women were underpaid, they discovered that the disparity leaned the other way [3].
Perhaps maybe some introspection is warranted on your part, and revisit the assumptions you have about gender bias at Google and in the tech industry in general.
And this is why I said that I'm not going to change your mind.
The gender bias is clear in individual experience and data, all it takes is talking to women (or people of colour, or whatever under represented group you want) to see it.
I think Google does pretty well on this, largely due to the diversity programs that Damore was calling to have abolished.
And what is that data? Again you've referenced data or evidence for anti-female bias, and yet again you neglect to share it.
Data could definitely change my mind: what percentage of applicants to software developer roles at Google are women, and what percentage of offers extended for those roles go to women? If the former is substantially smaller than the latter, that would definitely sway me.
One of them I refer to is "race essentialism" [1] which led to the long-discredited pseudoscience known as scientific racism[2], and its political associated program of eugenics,
and the other is "gender essentialism"[3] which has also been rejected by mainstream scholars across fields from biology to medicine to sociology to gender studies, and which acts in culture as a similarly pseudoscientific popular rationale for organizing society in ways that harm women and gender minorities.
The study of the field of racism is absolutely fascinating in that very quickly, the simple, obvious "commonsense" theories like "race exists as a meaningful biological category" turn out to be quite false.
What sorts of scientific racism (or gender essentialism) have Jesse Signal and Deborah Soh propagated? To be clear, I'm not asking for a primer on scientific racism, I'm asking you to substantiate the allegations you made against specific individuals.
You ought to read my comment carefully. Singal (not Signal) and Soh are "major figures in transphobia", and Molyneux is a pro-fascism campaigner. The former two (Singal, Soh) are advocates of "gender essentialism", and the latter travels internationally campaigning for the "race essentialism" and policies based on that.
As you're aware of both of (Singal,Soh)'s first names already, is it a fair guess that you're already familiar with some of their transphobic work? Perhaps then, that is a good place to start. As just one example, Soh is actually so committed to gender essentialism that it's led her to advocate the approach that: your assigned male at birth teenager who tells you that they're trans and requests to transition is actually gay in my opinion so being affirming to them about that is homophobic ( from her article in reactionary online journal "Quillette").
Soh will of course try to dress that horrific construction from her article up in professional-sounding language, but our duty is in fact to address the thrust of her argument, not whether she attempts to frame it in polite language. You might also recognize Soh from her work in the atrocious Matt Walsh "documentary" that pretends to be about women but is entirely about invalidating trans people.
To make this more clear: Soh's need to provide an explanation for femininity in a person who is assigned male at birth while denying the validity of trans people is only necessary for a person operating from a bioessentialist lens. The need in Soh is so strong that it leads her to make totally unfounded and ridiculous claims in that article, and it also drove her promotion of the discredited (and retracted!) pseudoscientific 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria)' invented by Lisa Littman.
I'm not aware of Singal ever saying that all children who express identification outside their birth gender are actually just same-sex attracted (I'm less familiar with Soh's work). Rather, his point is that the guidance given to parents to identify signs of gender dysphoria is often rooted in gender essentialism. For instance, playing with the "wrong" toys for their birth gender is promoted as a sign of gender dysphoria [1].
Surely you'd agree that if a natal male says he is a boy and when asked why he replies "because I'm attracted to boys", then the responsible reply is "it's okay to be a gay boy", and not "yes, because you're attracted to boys you are a girl." It's certainly possible that a child will persist in expressing and opposite-sex gender even after exploring identity as a gay boy and will follow through with transition. But surely the responsible thing to do is to make sure that the child first understands that there's nothing wrong with being a boy attracted to other boys. First, eliminate the possibility that the boy is identifying as a girl out of a gender-essentialist belief that boys are only attracted to girls and he has to be a girl to attract boys. If after that, if the child still expresses a cross-sex gender identity then explore transitioning.
I don't think Singal has ever said that all - or even a majority - of children expressing a cross-sex gender identity are actually just same-sex attracted cis people. He only takes issue with legislation in some jurisdictions effectively prohibit medical professionals from exploring a gay male identity in this scenario, and effectively mandate social affirmation the moment a patients expressed a cross sex gender identity.
Even if you disagree with the above, surely at least you understand why I'm confused about the allegation that Singal is promoting gender essentialism. His concern is that gender essentialism is being misdiagnosed as gender dysphoria, and people aren't doing enough to accept boys wearing dresses, being attracted to other boys, and behaving in "feminine" ways, and being too quick to say "well, you're a girl". Even if you don't agree with his claims about misdiagnoses, it's abundantly clear he is against gender essentialism.
By all means, explain what else he did. I've seen this claim made repeatedly on hacker news, but conspicuously noone seems willing to o substantiate those claims.
Your source doesn't contradict the fact that women's fertility has a sharper and earlier cliff than men's. It doesn't even use the same age brackets for men and women. It compares men age over 45 against men age under 25, whereas for women the study compared those age > 35 vs age < 25.
That pertains to collecting biometric info, not end users of facial recognition services. From your link:
> The BIPA requires companies doing business in Illinois to comply with a number of requirements pertaining to the collection and storage of biometric information. These include a requirement that companies:
> Obtain consent from individuals if the company intends to collect or disclose their personal biometric identifiers.
> Destroy biometric identifiers in a timely manner.
> Securely store biometric identifiers.[6]
> A key area of focus is that an entity must use a "reasonable standard of care"[7] in managing biometric information and identifiers.
If you actually read the full text of the law, it states:
" "Biometric identifier” means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological
samples, [...] "
So if it's just pictures of faces, then it's okay. If, however, at any point in the pipeline the actual facial geometry is calculated or stored, that might be a violation.
When people violate the law, we incarcerate them, i.e. restrict their movement. Corporate stock should be incarcerated (i.e. movement restricted i.e. can not be sold/traded) when corporations break the law.
Since people cannot work from prison, corporations should be equivalent: they may not conduct any business. But since people in prison are still responsible for things like rent, corporations should keep paying rent and salary too. Not sure if it's possible to get a friend corporation to do that for you though…
In my uni, rates of honor code violations in introductory CS classes were high even before AI. I was a section-leader for the CS106 series at Stanford, and the honor code violations were common. In 2015, ~20% of one intro class was suspected of an honor code violation [1]. Often, the CS department comprised the majority of honor code violations in a given quarter.
There are several reasons for this:
1. Cheating in CS is easier to detect. MOSS [2] (authored by CS professor Alex Aiken) is a very effective tool at detecting plagiarism in coding assignments. Personally I witnessed more honor-code violations in math problem sets, but there was no feasible way for professors to detect this.
2. Problems in programming assignments are (usually) very tangibly wrong. I can bullshit my way through an essay with shoddy research, I can hand-wave a proof that is definitely wrong but will probably garner at least some points. But when your program is crashing or not compiling, and the due date is approaching, it produces a very immediate and undeniable sense of failure and pressure to cheat. The thing is, many students would get a decent chunk of credit even for failing code, but this is not immediately obvious.
3. The ability to cheat is more available. Math problem sets tend to change quarter by quarter. It's basically impossible to cheat on a prose essay short of straight up paying someone to write it for you, or fabricating sources. But for CS classes, especially at prominent universities, there are plenty of solutions online. Much of it is people who aren't event at Stanford implementing the assignments for fun or self-learning, and sharing it with their peers. Which, to be clear, isn't unethical or bad - it's the responsibility of Stanford students to refrain from looking at those solutions. But nonetheless, it's a contributing factor.
> MOSS [2] (authored by CS professor Alex Aiken) is a very effective tool at detecting plagiarism
He apparently also makes (I would assume a satisfying amount of) money selling the same technology to law firms for copyright/patent analysis: https://www.similix.com
(I love these ultra minimal HTML sites, ex. https://www.hwaci.com (SQLite commercial licensing) for another example. It just has this subtle smugness, like you either don't need any new clients or virtually all of the market is your client.)
Right, they'll stop licensing proprietary sever code. But that in turn drives up the cost of game development since they'd have to either purchase redistributable licenses or develop their own networking software.
I suspect companies will just scale down the servers to 1 instance with bare minimum support. Technically the online service is still active, thereby eliminating the requirements to distribute source code, even if it can only handle a handful of active players and terrible latency.
Why do people keep bringing up source code? It’s just as much a canard as the stupid “nonredistributable middleware” argument.
The ideal way for a game company to keep their game alive after they have stopped supporting it is to build it with that in mind from the start. A lot of the server–side components, such as monitoring, authentication, database storage, moderation, anti–cheat, etc, etc can all be made optional. It’s a small upfront cost, but set up the build system so that you can build without all of those components, or with simpler versions of them. That includes anything you cannot legally redistribute. If your last game used a middleware component that was critical to the functionality of the game but that you cannot redistribute, then you do need to find a replacement for that specific middleware component for your future games.
Then, when the end of life date of your game approaches you simply build the server binaries one last time, this time turning off all of the optional components, and let your customers download it. You don’t have to give them the source code and you don’t have to violate any license agreements in the process. Your customers can arrange for any necessary hosting of the servers themselves, most likely by simply running the server process on their own computer.
And of course the option remains to simply write a single–player game that runs entirely on the customer’s computer, with no networked components at all. It’s a little bit old–school, but lots of game developers manage to make money that way.
Middleware isn't just things like matchmaking. Crucial components like client-side prediction, state reconciliation, and other netcode is often part of it. Stripping out all the proprietary components would leave the game in a non-functional state. This isn't just source code, the developers often have to pay license for each server instance that uses the middleware.
> And of course the option remains to simply write a single–player game that runs entirely on the customer’s computer, with no networked components at all.
So the solution is to just stop developing multiplayer games? This is just a laughable response.
> Stripping out all the [critical] proprietary components would leave the game in a non-functional state.
Correct. This is why I said that there would be multiple responses depending on the type of component. Many proprietary components are not critical and could easily be stripped out without harming the End–of–life version of the game, like matchmaking. But obviously that still leaves the critical ones. For those the game developer would obviously have to avoid any license agreement that would be unduly burdensome once the game was in the EOL state. Either there are already components without these onerous license terms, the existing components will be relicensed, new ones will be written and made available under less onerous licensing terms, or developers will just write their own. The market will provide.
> So the solution is to just stop developing multiplayer games?
No, not to stop developing multiplayer games but to stop putting networked components into single–player games. Remember that this all started with The Crew, which was purely a single–player game that was killed precisely because it nevertheless wouldn’t run if no server was available. If you don’t choose to make that design decision in the first place then this law has no effect on you at all. Your game is automatically safe from being killed when you stop selling it. You won’t have to do anything extra at all for players to keep playing it as long as they want to.
I think if you have a market where you don't license distribution for your software mostly because "hey, you can sell that for more, maybe", then changing the market so that everybody has to buy distribution should actually force the middleware price down, if anything, because they're no longer able to segment their market on it.
Releasing server-side code would be a non-starter for lots of companies. For one, many of them don't actually own all of the code they use to implement the game server. There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games.
Perhaps a workaround is to just have 1 server online indefinitely. Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.
> There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games
If bills like this pass, there'd be financial pressure on middleware providers to allow distribution at end-of-life (or for their component to be easily severed) else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.
It's not like the market for middleware changes by this. I honestly don't see it having much of an effect on price. They're gonna take their middleware and go where exactly?
Right, but presumably the Doom and Quake server code was written by id Technologies themselves. That's not the case with a lot of modern multiplayer games. They license middleware like Photon Engine and don't have the rights to redistribute the server software, even in binary format.
I guess they could just strip our the parts of the server code that they don't have the rights to redistribute, but then it wouldn't be functional.
Even if this law just caused companies to put into their sales contracts that they will support the servers to a certain date X years in the future and then handling of the online services would pass to a third party that might charge a nominal fee to administer the service, that would be an enormous win for the free market (in that it makes obvious what was ambiguous about a good) and for people both better knowing how a good will function in the future and what future costs there might be. In a way, this could just force companies to provide the equivalent of a warranty for the functioning of the online aspects of the software.
People far too often forget the absolutely vital aspect information plays in the free market, and anything that increases information (for example, how long a good should be expected to continue to function) is a net good, when compared to a complete lack of information about that.
Would it? Online services are not terminated. There's no SLA defined in the law:
> 60 days before a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall communicate all of the following information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of the digital game:
> (i) The date on which services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game will cease.
> (ii) Any services that will no longer be provided by the operator.
> (iii) Any game features that will no longer be available to the purchaser.
> (iv) Any known security risks that may result from the cessation of services.
> (v) How the purchaser can continue to use the digital game, or obtain a refund, pursuant to paragraph (2).
Scaling in the number of game servers isn't termination of service, though, and would not match the conditions laid out above.
But again, the players can use the service. The companies scaled back network resources, degrading the experience, but the service is still fundamentally available. Unless they put specific SLAs in the license agreement, the players are still receiving the online services that they advertised.
Damore's thesis amounted to "maybe women are 20% of software developers not because they're being discriminated against, but because they're exercising their own agency and choosing other fields."
Given that about 20% of CS grads are women, it seems like a pretty reasonable stance.
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