Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

> you can still maintain the discrimination

But what is their incentive to "maintain" discrimination. Even under a charitable interpretation, it seems to imply there is a group at the top which actively hates women and wants to suppress their influence? Maybe there is, Google is pretty scary and is in bed with the government https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782..., but I think it would be good to dissect that statement to see what it points to.

You do not need to hate women to be sexist. You do not even need to be aware that you have biases for those biases to be affecting how you act.

Check out the literature on "implicit bias". While there are problems in some social sciences, this particular research area has a lot of high-quality reproduced studies. Of course, it is only the start of the conversation and there are many caveats, but I believe it will address your comment.

There's no evidence that one's implicit associations affect their behavior. Also the Implicit Associations Test used to determine your implicit associations in the first place is unreliable. Implicit bias testing and training is pseudoscience at best, especially when you consider that 95% of the professors in that field of study lean left.

> You do not need to hate women to be sexist. You do not even need to be aware that you have biases for those biases to be affecting how you act.

I am aware of that, good to point out though. However I was wondering because the wording "you can still maintain the discrimination" implies awareness and perhaps conspiracy. For example if I was talking about "implicit bias" I might have said something like - "it doesn't modify existing implicit biases and institutional constraints, which have been responsible for ...". But even then it would be good to see what exactly those biases and constraints are at Google.

On the topic of "implicit bias", it's also useful to add that it doesn't have to be just a personal "implicit" bias, it could institutional as well, incentives and rules that combine to exclude certain groups more than others, in this case women. Though then it's not clear how they would fix it, given that it's implicit. Maybe hire an outside consultancy which will be able to identify it better (since they are not part of the culture and not affected by same incentives)...

Claiming implicit bias is a very well greased slope towards a bad end because it lets you say (your opinion is that) someone else's actions show a pattern of whatever-ism and that they are not credible because of it and they cannot defend themselves because their whatever-ism is not consciously applied.

Just because brogrammers want to promote other brogrammers does not make them whatever-ist. Claiming that implicit bias is a type of whatever-ism is just BS doublespeak like "if you're not the solution you're the problem".

Less competition? Discrimination can be perfectly rational.

Going back to the subject of this article, we generally find it morally permissible for a country to have employment / visa policies that strongly incentivize companies to find qualified but mediocre employees from the same country instead of hiring exceptional workers from other countries, even if the foreign workers would be better for profit / GDP / economic growth. (That is, the country might decide to have more or fewer visas based on whatever policies it wants to implement, but we don't think that the zero-visas option is immoral.) And the overt and stated intention is to protect the employment opportunities of the countries' own citizens.

This doesn't seem fundamentally different, to me, from discrimination on sex / race / whatever to protect the employment opportunities of members of the more politically powerful sex / race / etc. - it's just that we tend to find it morally impermissible to discriminate between a countries' own citizens on those categories if we believe that membership in those categories is irrelevant to aptitude, but we find it perfectly permissible to discriminate between one countries' citizens on another despite knowing full well that citizenship is pretty irrelevant to aptitude. (I am personally leaning towards the viewpoint that actually both are morally impermissible, and protectionism in visas is justifiable only as the lesser of two evils as long as it's necessary for a country's economic stability, and no longer.)

> Implicit bias testing and training is pseudoscience at best, especially when you consider that 95% of the professors in that field of study lean left.

This strikes me as kind of like saying that evolution is pseudoscience because 95% of professors in the field are not evangelical Christians, or something.

There may be other reasons to believe that implicit bias is pseudoscience, but "People who believe certain things about it tend to end up with personal worldviews that are consistent with their research" doesn't seem like one.

You're right, it's not a good reason. I'm just skeptical how social sciences can come to fair conclusions when is almost no representation of the political right in their field. However you might be able to say the same about tech CEOs and underrepresented female gender, so I don't have a good argument here. As an aside I feel much less comfortable arguing this point after checking out your personal site and seeing that you write Debian packages. I really enjoy Debian, especially the reproducible builds work that's going on over there. I respect your opinions on this matter.

It'd be nice if you could link to the studies so we can check them out. I've seen a decent amount of criticism on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Crit...

> especially when you consider that 95% of the professors in that field of study lean left.

But they do research that should be repeatable and thus it doesn't matter.

Unless you think they have implicit bias.

Conservatives: "fair" is more important than factual or correctness.

> As an aside I feel much less comfortable arguing this point after checking out your personal site and seeing that you write Debian packages. I really enjoy Debian, especially the reproducible builds work that's going on over there. I respect your opinions on this matter.

Are you trying to mkae some sort of point?

> Less competition? Discrimination can be perfectly rational

I was mostly referring the point about women. The slots in the management hierarchy will get filled anyway, and I can see how people can have implicit biases, but it seemed the comment was more about an active and explicit suppression.

Based on what I've heard about Google, and I have been critical of it before, it still just doesn't seem like a company with a pervasive active sexism with managers suppressing women because they need to empower their own gender (male) group.

> (I am personally leaning towards the viewpoint that actually both are morally impermissible, and protectionism in visas is justifiable only as the lesser of two evils as long as it's necessary for a country's economic stability, and no longer.)

Agreed there, especially on gender, race, sexual orientation. But not sure completely on nationality. Ideally citizenship would be just a passport and a label and people with matching abilities and skills could freely move and find better lives elsewhere. I think that is the idealized version the term "globalization". However it eventually ended up meaning that only multinational companies and wealthy people get to travel and take advantage of regulatory and labor cost arbitrage.

As long as countries exist, I don't see each country trying to protect its own citizens first as a terribly bad thing. In particular in this case, the people seem to get great offers at home in China. I kind of like seeing China do well and being able to offer such opportunities. Perhaps at some point US will find itself falling behind and will have to work harder to compete, and that's not a terribly bad thing either.

In one of the sibling comments I linked to a good page on those.

There is valid concern on how predictive the implicit bias test is in non-test conditions. But "implicit bias" is only the start of the conversation - it is one easy thing to measure in a sea of difficult to measure issues. If you want to jump into this rabbit hole, I have found the researches that work in this field to be eager to describe their more up-to-date work on addressing them (I do try to play a devil's advocate in such conversations and have gained much respect for their rigor). Regrettably, as usual in academia, the easies way to be exposed to those conversations is not that easy: going to talks given by those researchers.

> I'm just skeptical how social sciences can come to fair conclusions when is almost no representation of the political right in their field.

By applying empiricism.

The fact that the political right is ideologicslly opposed to doing that in social science fields rather than accepting dogma (an attitude which also applies to an increasing number of areas of the physical sciences) is problematic, to be sure.

In my argument I was more making the claim that you're going to see more research supporting the left if all your researchers lean left. Also, you could make a much stronger argument that liberals value 'fairness' over factual correctness. Regarding Debian, my point is that I respect someone who supports open source software and code that can be reliably built from source, as it protects our freedoms.

If empiricism was the interest of the social sciences, they would abandon all work on implicit bias, for you cannot reliably test for it and there is no evidence that IBT affects one's behaviour in any way other than making them more prejudiced.

I'm not making a claim about what the political right is opposed to.

I do believe that the links in this sibling comment prove you to be a bit too extreme in your opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16128390

Thanks, I'll take a look.

"If empiricism was the interest of social science, they would abandon all work on $X" is a pretty silly-sounding statement for any value of X.