(POST BY MANDOS – was posted early quite by accident, postscripts below basically with how I planned to conclude)
L’affaire Damore
The whole kerfuffle about the Damore manifesto at Google and James Damore’s subsequent firing led to the dredging up of old debates about the sources of underrepresentation particularly in technological professions such as software engineering. The basic idea is quite old: Merely, that the current structure of society, as reflected in by group access to well-paying professional positions (substitute for historical versions: land, money), is obviously the outcome of the “natural,” “biological” difference between those population groups, in this case, gender.
Biological sex has been viewed as one of the intractable differences in terms of career representation in technical fields for some time now, holding especially for programming. The negative reaction to the Damore manifesto (including his firing), which consisted primarily of polite, “geekified” versions of old internet arguments defending sexism, is viewed as denial of the underlying facts that drive the apparent intractability of this difference.
The logic behind the claim is an enormous act of begging the question. Social change is slow and difficult — even the legal architecture that prevented women from living independent lives took a long time to change. Diversity advocates’ underlying claim has always been that rectifying differences in the economic success of identity groups requires change greater than that of mere legal emancipation, but instead deeper changes in employment practices and cultural representation. To claim that women are underrepresented in technology because of biological differences is to dismiss the idea that culture matters: It is using the outcome as the evidence, a fallacy.
Instead, the evidence to justify tech employment differences in biological terms is a red herring, and l’affaire Damore is simply a reflection of the fact that Big Tech is little more than a series of entrenched, possibly natural monopolies.
The reality of programming jobs
Let’s start with the brass tacks. Even in Big Tech like Google, most programming jobs do not really require either very high intelligence, particularly as expressed in mathematical ability as is the implicit argument, or even most of the curriculum of university four-year computer science undergraduate programs to be successful. Competent programming in itself is not a high-intelligence skill. The basic skills can be learned by a committed but average person in the way that singing in a community choir can be learned by a committed but average person. Indeed, the analogy stretches farther: For most large scale projects, beyond basic programming skills, one typically requires good organization, collaboration, architecture, standards, respect for requirements and so on to succeed. A full SATB choir is much the same, it requires some skill, but more importantly, it requires the ability of the signers to integrate the content of different musical scores into a single melody. A singer who is too “primadonna” and does not have the social cognition to fit her voice into the choir can make a near-professional school or community choir sound like beginners. It is no accident that even in the open source/free software community, a great deal of emphasis is placed on version control and design process in order to produce the fairly sophisticated software on your typical Linux desktop.
There are certainly technology jobs that require the higher “puzzle-solving” mathematical ability that people associate with success in IQ-testing frameworks. Areas such as advanced cryptography, compression, and parallel processing sometimes require this kind of reasoning, as well as even the content of graduate-level university algorithms classes. Suffice it to say that these form a small minority of tech employment at companies like Google. Even advanced computer security work only occasionally involves a small amount of this kind of thinking: What matters far more is the ability to understand and study the human factors and fallibility associated with security regimes. If gender disparities in programming jobs had been confined to those limited fields, a biological explanation would have held more water.
Many of these kinds of the skills required by the majority of programming jobs are quite easy to associate with stereotypical female characteristics. Many of us may have been raised by a mother who knits. If you have, you may realize that she had been forming fairly complex abstract patterns with her hands even as her attention may be focused elsewhere. Indeed, women have been writing knitting patterns that produce complex structures in an abstract “assembly language” for quite a long time. Numerous other stereotypes pertaining to female creative styles and diligence serve perfectly well to “justify” extensive female employment in software engineering. So the question remains: Why are they not employed in software engineering? Either female ability and inclination really is, in the majority, unsuited to technology jobs, because they are indeed mostly of the category that requires the intelligence that men have marginally more of, or the story I’ve told you so far is probably true, but some other factor intervenes, one that diversity attempts in the tech industry do not address.
The red herring of sex difference in intelligence
Pretty much everyone seriously discussing this topic acknowledges that all human characteristics stem from a combination of factors, including genetic. A starved child with the same genes as a well-nourished child is simply going to look different, although they will also look similar. However, the line between a “genetically-inherited” characteristic and “socially-determined” developmental factor is anything but clear. It’s increasingly clear that some characteristics can be set by the social conditions under which your mother was an unfertilized egg. Which happens when your grandmother was an embryo, the time when ovaries are stocked. Which means that your great-grandmother‘s social conditions may have some (still to be determined) inherited effect on your life today. And there are other potential variations of this situation.
Nevertheless, we know that some characteristics are inherited, and some are sex-linked. A male and female child raised in exactly the same conditions with the same genetics (other than sex-chromosomes) most probably will develop grossly different visible physical characteristics above and beyond the primary sexual characteristics of genitalia. No one questions this — except, of course, that even the categories of male and female are actually more fraught and complicated and ambiguous than previously considered, because biology is almost never “cut and dried.”
So where does this difference come from? Some biological differences are indeed incidental (rare is the gene that affects strictly one characteristic), but the high degree of physical sexual dimorphism is too systematic to deny the effect of selection pressure, particularly sexual selection. A “just-so” story in which male physical strength is connected to the differential ability of getting female reproductive attention is relatively plausible and seen throughout the animal kingdom even in the present day. Naturally, it applies the other way, and the characteristics that suggest female reproductive fitness are, yes, emphasized in females. You would therefore not be entirely remiss to imagine that this would apply to cognitive characteristics, particularly intelligence.
I will not do a rundown of the evidence on this topic, but instead refer you to, yes, Wikipedia, which has a discussion with references to both sides of this debate. What I will instead emphasize is that while some studies show statistically significant differences between the sexes, the effect sizes tend to be small and apply to (as mentioned many times in this debate) the margins. Furthermore, many of the effects seem to disappear depending on how you account for confounding factors. This is how you should understand situations like this: When, over the course of a number of studies, it becomes apparent that quibbles over confounds are deciding factors in the statistical significances of competing results, you should be skeptical of attempts to apply such results to other areas — they are almost certainly small contributors to the overall effect under discussion, such as women’s employment in technological fields. The area of biggest difference between the sexes seems to be in spatial inference, but as I mention above, the applicability of this to software engineering ability is questionable, and it’s independence from social factors also potentially doubtful, a criticism that applies to quite a lot of intelligence research overall, even if one accepts the existence of “classically” genetically heritable factors of general intelligence.
Postscript I – inclination
It seems remarkable that despite the degree of “gross physical” sexual dimorphism among humans, the evidence does not really show up anywhere nearly as strongly in the characteristic of intelligence, despite its obvious importance to human survival. I can only suggest that the sex-differentiating pressure of sexual selection fails to apply to intelligence for reasons that have an easy “just-so” story: both males and females for most of human history had much less day-to-day differentiation in “survival labour” as they do in the very recent industrialized society, and they had no way of performing any sort of fine-grained intelligence test on mates, at least for the intelligence that relates to very abstract mathematical abilities.
But if general intelligence and even specific ability fails to explain the magnitude of the gap in software engineering employment, one could still argue, as Damore and his antecedents do, that there is some other tendency away from technological careers for women, and some tendency towards them by men. Many of this type of claim involves attributing to women personality traits like “neuroticism” and “gregariousness”, which are very old accusations indeed. However, the same considerations apply as they do to that of intelligence: how much of this gap can be explained by an evolutionary “just-so” story, and how much of an alleged personality gap can be explained instead by, well, the conditions of patriarchy. Feminists have argued for a long time that the greater presence in women of seemingly self-defeating personality traits is actually the result of very immediate psychological self-defense mechanisms from overt and subtle ills deeply embedded into patriarchal culture — among them, the need to pre-emptively appease a potential oppressor, a kind of psychological insurance policy created by immediate conditions rather than a genetically entrained cognitive difference. The arguments of Damore and his ilk usually fail to take into account these types of explanation for a sex-based personality gap — in fact, feminist arguments about “female” personality are disregarded to an extent that arguments for the social construction of intelligence differences are not.
And precisely how a biological personality or intelligence gap can be used as an explanation for employment and pay gaps in one particular type of industry when other high-status jobs (e.g., like it or not, the aggressively-competitive financial services industry) show greater increases in female employment is rather hard to discern. It requires that one attribute characteristics such as “status-seeking” as particularly necessary in software engineering employment in a way that is not necessary in other professions, something that really runs counter to the collaborative nature of successful software projects. Instead, feminists have long documented how girls are discouraged from even considering technology careers at a point well before the diversity efforts of large corporations actually take hold. Instead of engaging with these details, Damore and his antecedents fail even to mention them and the history of work on this type of topic, but yet demand respect for “conservative opinions”.
Postscript II – monopoly
As I said at the beginning of this post, a part of the instigation for Damore’s essay is justified in that the efforts of Big Tech to encourage diversity, including women’s representation, appear to have had little effect particularly on employment in companies like Google. The truth is, companies like Google have a large incentive for the appearance of encouraging diversity, but little for the actual practice of diversity, even if such would help them avoid debacles such as the failure of Google+, which was in many ways the result of a culture that failed to understand the human factors that apply to populations that are different from those who work at Google. (For example, early on, Google+ attempted to use “true names” filtering that expelled people whose real names look “fake” to someone who works at Google because of cultural difference — it’s very difficult to rectify this kind of error post hoc for a nascent social media entrant competing with an incumbent like Facebook.)
Why would this be so? Because these companies don’t really exist in competitive markets. Google’s attempt to “muscle in” on Facebook’s turf with Google+ was never really, despite the hype, about rectifying a gap in social media offerings that really threatened the survival of the company. Google has an entrenched near-monopoly in key aspects of internet architecture that is very hard to displace. Consequently, it can leave the potential gains from social diversity on the table without appearing to suffer overmuch. In the short-to-medium term, even for a company like Google, it is costlier to attempt rebuild internal culture, at the risk of alienating the incumbent constituency whose voice Damore made impolitely audible, than to spend a measly few hundred million on cosmetic diversity placebos. In reality, the material merits of improving the inclusion of underrepresented groups in “technological power” will only be seen when the vicious cycle that actively keeps them underrepresented is broken through broader cultural change, imposed somehow from without — and over and above the immediate economic incentives afforded to monopolies.
And that is not surprising — whoever imagined that a monopoly- or oligopoly-dominated society would lead to the optimal outcome for the most people?
Th above idea, because they were called National Socialists, tends not to die.
The Nazis reduced wages and shattered unions. Being a socialist got you sent to a camp.
Under the Nazis, corporate profits and the percentage of national income going to high income people increased.
And the Nazis also privatized a great deal, in fact their privatization regime was very similiar to how neoliberals have run the economy.
Nazis were right-wingers, who believed in poor workers and rich capitalists and that the state should mostly be involved in military and police. They were not socialists, by any definition of the word socialist of which I am aware.
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Look, the Charlottsville march of Nazis (they had the swastika and the salute, they’re not alt-right) showed very clearly the difference between how Nazis and left-wingers are treated. Left-wingers march, and the riot police are in their faces. Nazis march, and the police don’t even intervene while they are beating up counter-protestors.
Then, of course, we have the Nazi who drove his car into the crowd, and much of the media calling it a “clash with counteprotestors” (no) and saying things like “amid violence” rather than “in an act of terrorism.”
The center, which includes what is laughably called the “center left,” may condemn Nazis, but they certainly prefer them to left-wingers. They can do business with Nazis. The people they hate are those they call the “alt-left” in an attempt to pretend that wanting universal healthcare and cops to not kill blacks is the same thing as being a Nazi.
But the reason is simple enough: Centrists make a lot of money from prisons and for-profit healthcare.
The left–people who want single payer healthcare and less people in prison–are a direct threat to the center.
A lot of people get confused about Nazis: When Hitler got in power, he broke the unions, and the socialists, and lowered wages. “National socialism” is not socialism. Corporate profits went up and wages went down; it was good times for business.
So the center, including the center left, is essentially okay with Nazis. If they have to choose between Nazis and the sort of scum who want everyone to have healthcare at the cost of corporate profits, or to reduce profits on prisoners, well, they side with their self interest.
It has always been thus, and it will always be thus.
(Update: Do I need to say that people who blame Russia for this are tendentious morons? Sadly, I think I do.)
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So, if you’re going to read only one book about free trade and neoliberalism in relation to developing nations, this is the one to read.
The bottom line is this: The standard advice given by Western economists and experts about how to modernize or industrialize is wrong, actively harmful, and hurts countries.
Countries that do industrialize through mercantile policies (there are maybe four, including Russia), almost without exception, do not engage in free trade; they engage in managed trade behind protective barriers.
This was true of Japan, Korea, and China, among others. (China used iron-like control over currency as its barrier: Trump is wrong now, but not wrong for the key industrialization period.)
Moreover, growth in developing countries was better, generally speaking, under Bretton Woods, which allowed developing countries tariffs and so on. Once neoliberals took over and took it as their mission, in the IMF, World Bank, and elsewhere, to bust tariffs and subsidies and create “free markets,” growth slowed in countries trying to develop using a non-mercantile policy.
In other words, again, if you did what Western experts wanted done, you got hurt bad.
The advice was truly horrendous, based on what should be an essentially niche matter — “comparative advantage.”
Comparative advantage is garbage. Japan’s original comparative advantage was silk production, not cars or advanced electronics. If they had chosen to emphasize their existing comparative advantage, rather than change their comparative advantages, they would be a third world country still.
Those countries which did follow this advice, were usually told that their comparative advantage was in cash crops or commodities. True enough.
Unfortunately, most developing countries have an advantage in cash crops or other commodities. When they all started taking that advice at the same time, it led to increases in supply, which collapsed prices.
To make most cash crops, you have to shove subsistence farmers off their land and set up plantations. The money from exports which was supposed to feed those people didn’t show up, and governments were required to stay the course, going further into debt, rather than being able to pay off their debts with all the money they had been told they would earn.
(Aside: The removal of people from subsistence farming is one reason I doubt the extreme poverty stats, which are based on money. When Mexicans were shoved off their farms due to NAFTA, into slums, they wound up eating less nutritious food for which they had to pay. They had more money, but it’s not clear to me they were better off.)
Chang goes into all of this in far more detail than I can, and the book is well worth reading as a sort of “bullshit inoculation” for common economic nostrums. Most of what we are told causes development simply does not; what does work is known, and as much as possible the world system is set up today to not allow it.
If you want to develop, you either need to be big enough to do mercantalism whether the US likes it or not, be able to bribe US elites (China is both big and bribes US elites) or you need to be a nation the US considers a key ally (like Japan or South Korea), which it is willing to allow to industrialize behind various protections. (Japan’s first industrialization was done as a British ally.)
That’s it, that’s all.
Worth reading.
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One of the stretch goals for my 2016 fundraiser was writing a booklet on “The Construction of Reality” between 30 to 50K words.
As of today the “good” first draft stands at about 31,000 words. Feedback from alpha readers has been positive (albeit they are a self-selecting group, similar to donors.)
I hope to have this out by the end of the year at the latest, and hopefully rather sooner. It still has some writing to go, will need editing, and then conversion to formats other than Word.
When it’s done, codes for free copies will go out to all donors who donated during my 2016 fundraising drive. For others there will be a sample available for free download (I’m currently thinking of making it large—about 40 percent of the entire booklet) and the booklet will be available for purchase for probably $5.
As the title suggests, it will cover how we create the realities in which we live: How those realities come to be, how they are preserved, transmitted, change, and die.
Thanks to everyone who donated to my 2016 fundraising drive for making this possible. I hope you like the end result.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
So, Trump and Korea have everyone in a tizzy about the possibility of nuclear war. The international community has another set of sanctions going forward, which look like they will close off much of the remaining North Korean trade, and North Korea is saying nasty things and testing nasty weapons.
Perhaps it’s time to regularize relationships?
It seems to be forgotten that no peace treaty ever ended the Korean war. The North Koreans are scared spitless of the West, and, let us be frank, not without reason. The fates of Libya and Iraq bear heavy on their minds, to mention two recent events.
People without nukes, whom the West/US doesn’t like, tend to do badly.
The North Koreans have long said that they want a peace treaty. Perhaps one could be arranged for serious agreements to scrap or limit long-range nuclear weapons? Scrapping would be a hard sell, because after Qaddafi scrapped his, he got invaded, but some serious limits ought to be possible.
I know this flies against the current mood, but sanctions have been tried now for 60 years and haven’t worked, and the threat keeps getting worse and worse.
Perhaps try something else?
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Among ideologies and religions, one of the longest lasting and most influential was Confucianism. Confucianism was the most important ideology of the Chinese for about two thousand years, and China was either the first or second most advanced region of the world for most of that time (India being the other contender.)
The review is of an older book, published in 1949, before Confucian influence was so heavily hit by the rise of Communism.
Confucianism, by that time, was seen as an essentially reactionary philosophy: Everyone should know their place and stay in it, worship their ancestors, obey their parents, and so on, but Creel argues, convincingly, I believe, that Confucianism was a radical project at the start.
Confucius lived in a period of warring states. Huge armies were raised, battles were frequent, taxation and levies were harsh, and maiming and torture were common. Ordinary people were much afflicted, as noble families fought it out to see who would unify China.
Confucius believed that the welfare of the common people should be the goal of ruling, and he set out to do something about it. That something was to create a philosophy, and a teaching, which produced officers for the lords, officers who had been trained to believe the common weal was the goal of rulership.
Confucius astutely noticed that there was no formalized training for officials and created it. He wasn’t the only one to so notice: The legalists and the Mohists did as well, but in the end, it was his system that worked.
Confucius decided to build off human nature as he observed it: He noted that parents tend to love their children and care for them, and that children love their parents. He tried to take that love and transfer it to officials and rulers. Rulers were to treat those below them as beloved children, and those below were to obey their rulers as parents.
Confucius wasn’t a fool, of course. He understand that this could be abused, so he noted that if a ruler didn’t act like a loving parent, with beneficience to those he ruled, then he wasn’t actually a ruler, but a tyrant, and duty was to oppose him.
A ruler should pick the best officials, and leave the governing to them, with an eye to flourishing of all.
Confucians should act out of benevolence no matter the circumstances, or even the results. Confucius recognized that one could try to do good, and though “Heaven” could frustrate one, the merit lay in trying. Thus, a man who tried could feel secure that he had done his duty, whether he succeeded, or even was ever appointed at all. Willingness and ability to serve was enough.
Interestingly, Confucianism was most successful in two periods: before the unification of China and for something over a hundred years afterwards. The Confucians were quite popular with the people, and princes wanted their support. When the first Emperor of China won, he did it primarily through Legalist doctrines (individuals exist only to serve the state, and the Emperor is the absolute ruler), but his dynasty was soon overthrown with the aid of Confucians, and the first few Emperors were good Confucians, until an ambitious and smart one came along who decided to gain control over the Confucians.
How he did so is a lesson which should resonate though history: He formalized teaching of Confucianism with appointed masters and teachers with stipends and so on. He chose them, he controlled their finances. Confucianism seemed to benefit from this, but, of course, it put Confucians and Confucianism largely under Imperial control. From that point on, Confucianism (very generally speaking, we’re talking about two millenia of history) was never again so beneficial for the people, and much more of a prop for the ruling class.
The Confucian sages and scholars had been, to use the modern word, co-opted.
A few summers ago, I read a large number of books on Confucianism, and for my purposes this was the best, because what interested me most was the life cycle of the ideology: How it rose, how it gained power, and how it fell.
Confucius, famously, died thinking he was a failure (as Jesus may have, and many other reformers). Only after his death did his teachings become influential, and the day they truly took power, it seems to me, is when the days of their full benefit became numbered.
This is normal for ideologies, and Confucianism got a far, far longer run, than most at being beneficial.
Seeing this cycle play out millennia ago is a nice antidote to studying more recent rises and falls; such as the relating to the end of New Deal liberalism with Reagan/Thatcher, or the end of the world system put in place after Napoleon.
It is also, in some ways, a master class in the details of ideology creation: Confucius created a system which had innate rewards for those individuals who followed it, which was beneficial to the governments which adopted it, and which was able to create a large group of people who wanted it to continue, while ensuring a wide support base in the population.
All of this makes for fascinating reading, and I recommend this book highly, though it’s old and may be hard to find a copy.
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Let’s start with biological sex and the differences between men and women.
There are obvious differences, in size and upper body strength. There are large differences in some of the senses, such as taste and smell (women tend to be far more acute).
Other differences appear biological, but this is not as clear cut as it seems, because socialization feeds into biology.
A simple example is that people raised under constant stress have differences in their brains from people who aren’t raised under constant stress.
So let’s take a simple claim: Men are better at math. Seems straightforward, quite robust, but it turns out that in Iceland, which is very egalitarian, young women are now outperforming young men.
There is a well-known effect in the social sciences that runs as follows: People who feel inferior, perform worse. This is quite robust. Tell someone they suck, or that they are lower on the totem pole, and they will do worse by pretty much every metric.
So, if you live in a society where men are widely considered superior to women (and let’s not pretend our societies aren’t like this), then that will have an effect. If this goes on as people grow up, it’s unlikely that this effect won’t get baked into brain and body.
Take another standard observation: Women are more prone to anxiety and neuroticism.
The problem with this is that women live in societies where they are less powerful than men, have less money, and are less violently proficient, when violence is often used as coercion.
Put more brutally: They live amongst a bunch of potential rapists who are larger and stronger than them.
So, they’re under constant stress, a point which I don’t think many men truly understand. That constant fear has effects on the brain and body; again, if you’re constantly exposed to stress, you actually become more sensitive to it.
The point here is that it is very hard to determine what is “natural” and what is “social.” We can say, “This is natural in this sort of society,” but that can’t be used as a reason not to change society.
What we do know, I hope, is that it sucks to be scared and it sucks to be told you’re inferior, and that underperforming not because you are inferior but because you’ve been told you are, is unfair and a stupid way for us to run our society.
This feeds into a lot of different things, but the simplest is the misunderstanding of fitness to mean “winning in the current scheme.”
IQ correlates well to success in our society, so we say, “They’re smarter, they deserve success.” But IQ correlates well to success in society because it correlates to two things: (1) academic success, which gates almost all the good jobs in our lives, and; (2) verbal and cultural fluency in the dominant culture, which are necessary to get ahead as well.
In other words, we’ve created a society which says, “If you have a high IQ, we will let you have good jobs.” Well yes, that’s how we made it, it’s not independent. (The getting along with the dominant culture may always be with us, but that doesn’t mean we should always approve of it as a necessity, nor try not to mitigate it.)
Fitness, in racial terms, is actually about being able to survive changes in the environment. Fit species are diverse, and able to adapt, and if a species loses diversity, it is less likely to survive changes.
Much of our environment, as humans, is social. But society changes. The cluster of skills which make up IQ weren’t always highly valued, rather the contrary. Brave-to-the-point-of-insanity dunderheads were what many feudal and aristocratic societies wanted (reading 19th century British colonial military biographies makes this clear). Right now, geeks rule, but when I was growing up they sure as heck didn’t (and their rule, today, is somewhat exaggerated).
These periods come and go. There was a time in the 19th and early 20th century when geeks (actual engineers and scientists) did very well, seeming to rule the roost. Edison is a good example. But as the industries they had invented became mature, they were forced out and down. This took time, but basically after about 40 to 80 years, the engineers become nothing but tools of management: The money men and social glad-handers will eventually take over.
What you’re good at is at least 50 percent due to a simple luck of the draw (arguably entirely, as you didn’t choose your parents, and thus when or where you were born). At that point any genetic endowment you may have (innate ability) meets the environment, and the environment has the final say, in almost all cases, about how well that endowment flourishes, and certainly about how well it is rewarded.
Most of what seems like merit, in other words, is luck. If you have it, be grateful. If it’s rewarded, be even more grateful.
And don’t assume you know exactly which is which.
Those who have been lucky, and thus have merit in a society or environment, should recognize their luck, and be humble, knowing how little it had to do with them. And if you want a metric upon which to measure your life, perhaps it could be how much good you have done divided by how much “merit” you have.
By this measure, the rich are rarely worth saving, because as studies show, the poor give more compared to what they have than the rich do.
That fact should be chewed on very carefully.
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