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Did you see the quillette [1] article that was briefly on the front page earlier? Four different experts write briefly their thoughts on the memo. While they don't necessarily agree with the author's judgment of the value of diversity programs, they unanimously agree with his points that the sexes are different and have different personalitie.

So saying that, what part of the memo was pseudo scientific drivel?

1. http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...




He doesn't assert the differences are due to inferiority. The vast majority of differences he mentions are differences of taste not differences of ability. There are many studies that show that women are more prevalent in engineering in poor countries than in rich ones. One fairly prevalent hypothesis to explain this data is that economic freedom allows people to pursue what makes them happier, rather than what makes them the most money. I have no idea if this hypothesis is right, but I think it's pretty sad that one can't make a case for it without getting fired.


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.


> Hundreds of years of structuring society and culture to favor men

Utterly ahistorical nonsense.


Could your great grandmother vote?


Could your great grandfather opt out of war?


Yes?

At various times (in the United States) men have been able to opt out of war by: hiring a replacement to take their place; being a conscientious objector and taking a non-combat role; being born at the right time to not be drafted, and choosing not to volunteer; enlisting in a branch of the service unlikely to see combat; pleading a hardship; finding a doctor to claim you are medically unfit; just walking away (desertion, as long as it was not during combat, has historically be inconsistently punished).


One of the major criticisms of conscription in the US is that, in practice, whether those methods of avoiding conscription were actually available depended on race, class and how wealthy you were. So only some men could actually take advantage of them; the rest were screwed. (This conflation of the experience of a few better-off men with the experiences of men as a whole seems to be quite common in many social justice circles for some reason.)


Of the four older men whose draft stories I know personally, two had exemptions (hardship/agricultural labor), but one went to war anyway, one enlisted as a pilot in the National Guard, and one lucked out by having the draft end before his number came up. None of them were particularly wealthy or influential, although all of them were white.


Where exactly did he argue that?

I get the feeling that this document is what Scott Adams talks about when he writes that two people can sit in the same movie theater, look at the same screen, and watch two different movies play out.




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