By David Futrelle
By now, you’ve probably heard about the so-called “Google Manifesto,” one anonymous Google dude’s ten-page anti-diversity rant that suggests, among other things, that women are somehow biologically unsuited to work in tech.
It’s hardly an original argument, but it’s one that has a lot of appeal to the sort of aggrieved tech dudebros who post a lot on Reddit — many of whom apparently also work at Google, where (Motherboard reports) the memo went “internally viral.”
Well, it turns out there’s a Yahoo! manifesto too — a bit shorter, to be sure, but equally revealing of the aggrieved male entitlement that permeates the tech world. The anonymous Yahoo! manifesto seems to have originated on 4chan’s technology board in 2012; it’s been posted on assorted manosphere-friendly sites since then, and cropped up today on alt-right fantasy author Theodore “Vox Day” Beale’s Alpha Game blog.
Take it away, anonymous shithead:
As a former employee of Yahoo!, I can say with absolute conviction that the majority of the problems with the company stemmed from too many women being involved in the first place. When I started in 1999, it was mostly guys. By the time I left last year, it seemed like it was easily 75 percent women.
Yeah, not quite. As of 2014, two years after this “manifesto” was written, only 37% of Yahoo!’s employees were women, with only a small percentage doing actual tech work. Studies suggest that men routinely overestimate the percentage of women in mixed groups. Even if Mr. Anonymous was exaggerating somewhat for effect, he’s dead wrong: women are vastly underrepresented at Yahoo!
No matter what job or position they were doing, they either were out on maternity leave half the time or just getting back therefrom. It was the most frustrating thing in the world to try to work with.
Yes, it’s true: working women spend literally half their time on maternity leave, after which they get pregnant again and push out a new baby one to three months later.
Have you ever gone to a meeting with six women and yourself as the only guy? You might as well not even turn up; nothing is going to get done, anyway. It’s just going to be an hour spent on irrelevant, tangential nonsense with no decision reached at the end.
Pretty sure this is every meeting ever, dude.
I wasn’t a misogynist before working there, but after seeing the company go from pretty good to total shit, and with it being directly related to the number of female employees fucking everything up, I kind of am now.
You ladies forced him to hate you!
Everything was awesome in the beginning; then they basically outsourced everything they could, brought in cheap labor, and took away 90 percent of the perks that the employees used to enjoy. Everyone of any value was replaced by H1Bs and women started to swell the ranks of middle management.
Ah, the inevitable racism has arrived!
It was just shitty decision after shitty decision, Who the fuck greenlit the goddamn Yahoo! Music engine? Terrible product. Then they fucked up Yahoo! Chat by taking away profiles and trying to force this worthless social networking Yahoo! 360 garbage that no one liked. Then they ruined the message boards and classifieds.
You know that most of those making high-level decisions at Yahoo! are still white dudes, right?
Yahoo!’s problem was that they got filled with a bunch of middle management useless twats who kept ‘fixing’ things that weren’t broken because they felt they had to justify the existence of their jobs.
Or maybe they’ve just never recovered from the success of Google? I’m frankly amazed the company still exists.
Rather than actually making improvements, they ‘improved’ their userbase away with a bunch of shitty changes that took away everything that anyone actually liked about the products.
Alter that, it was basically just hanging around collecting a paycheck and doing shitty work because I didn’t care. Everyone else was doing pretty much the same thing.
Sorry you hate your job, dude, but you really can’t blame women for that.
Having read the text of the manifesto, one of the things I agree with is this:
He’s correct. We empathize with those who share our experiences and have similar traits to us but often lack empathy for those who have different traits and have had experiences that are foreign to us. It takes extraordinary emotional intelligence to empathize with someone who is very different and has experienced things which one cannot. Just emphasize civility and rational discourse rather than feelers.
You don’t really need a bachelor’s degree to do a coding job. An associate’s degree in computer science or IT should be enough in most cases. Companies could probably take you on as in intern if you passed the AP Computer Science AB exam in high school, and then hire you full-time once you finish your associate’s degree. Free community college and better labor laws would help. I don’t know anyone with a job who uses what (s)he learned in an upper division CS course, except maybe if you design GUI’s a lot you’ll need the advanced GUI design and UI/UX courses. Unfortunately, you might need to go to an expensive for-profit school like Digipen if you want to take advanced courses in an actual specialist field in industry, at least until state universities reform their CS programs. A few state universities offer a BS in game design or game development, but it’s not a widespread major yet.
I suspect the emphasis on academic achievement is as much about limiting the applicant pool as justifying a “myth” of blah blah blah meritocracy blah blah blah (not that every HR department does that on purpose).
@Paradoxy
Rank bigotry notwithstanding, there’s also the fact that the existence of a criminal record is more important in the mind than the particulars of that record. Minor traffic or loitering violations will make people clutch pearls, cos of the way we’ve made the word ‘criminal’ into a scarlet letter
@Diego
Distinction without a difference. The eugenicists of the past didn’t say black people were inferior just because (they meant it but usually didn’t say it). No, their brains are less developed, making them lazy and irrational and prone to criminality and etc etc. You can’t separate culling based on behavior or personal ideology from that based on racism (and sexism and ableism too), cos they’re the same. Any attempt to do the former without the latter is bad in and of itself and will also lead absolutely to both
Which, just as with eugenics, is impossible. Black men have historically been the targets of false rape accusations and kangaroo courts (It’s not currently an epidemic, dudebros, relax. Not like y’all cared about it anyway). Rich men (who’ll usually be white) are more able to make accusations of intimate violence go away or to defend themselves in court. Inseparable
I still use yahoo as my email account for professional emails (for my freelancing etc – not for my day job, they have their own email service of course).
They’ve made some changes recently though that make it very difficult to access and browse my email. Does anybody have suggestions for a good email client?
I was using yahoo because they do allow you to send attachments of significant size, large enough for most of my purposes. But that’s not really necessary any more, I have Dropbox.
ding ding ding ding ding we have a winner!
I can do things that would make you set fire to your computer and hide under your bed. The capabilities of a social network analyst are truly, truly staggering.
Make no mistake my friends, the age of privacy is over. It’s not even a case of fighting against it at this point, it’s a case of adjusting to it. I suggest we start by seizing the means of production, but that’s just me.
I’m glad you backed off of this one, Diego! I’d just like to point out, though, that we don’t have good evidence that there’s anything wrong with their genes or biology. Far as we can tell it’s societal.
@Jesalin, ahmigah I wish! I was a dork because I liked my computer. Didn’t grow up around anyone else who liked them, so was a bit of a loner! (Turns out I’m still a dork!)
(Warning: Scildfreja’s about to go waaaay off the rails here. Research on this is actually very spotty. She’s just doin’ a blather based on very incomplete knowledge.)
Memory’s weird. Trauma affects its formation in odd ways, too. A lot of the workings of memory formation and reconstruction happen in the hippocampus, and they’re based on adrenaline as the neurotransmitter. When you’re in a stressful or traumatic situation, your adrenaline spikes something fierce – making it easier for those neurons to fire, but also making it easier for them to experience fatigue. So you end up with some people saying that time “slows down” and everything being crystal clear, and other people acting purely on instinct with no recollection of what happened, depending on the specifics of that person’s hippocampus.
Thing is, though, the hippocampus (along with other greeblies) is responsible for long term memory formation – linking the hippocampus and midbrain to the neocortex in ways which allow for later reconstruction. And those neurons aren’t necessarily adrenaline based! There’s GABA, there’s dopamine, there’s all sorts of things going on there. Some of those may be suppressed or low during the traumatic event! So you end up with the traumatic events not strongly connecting back to the midbrain for later reconstruction, or perhaps not actually forming properly at all.
Then when the person is later trying to recall those events, the hippocampus basically does it all backwards – polling the structures in the neocortex for the best matches. The midbrain, however, isn’t swimming in stress hormones from the trauma, making the recall more difficult. A familiar stimulus – smell of gasoline or the crunch of a bumper or something – may add a little “oomph” to the polling by “pre-lighting” a part of the structure that it’s trying to recall. This helps activate other memory structures to get the whole thing lit up.
And then there’s of course huge errors regardless, of course. Memory formation is sorta like taking a bowl of memory-fruit and chuckin’ them all into a blender with the top off. Memory recollection is sorta like putting a blindfold on and trying to reassemble the original fruit by sense of touch based on how the wall-splatters feel. What I’m saying is that it’s really messy and gross and probably unsanitary.
Whee, brains!
@Xemo
I disagree that the solution to a lack of outgroup empathy is to downplay empathy. Why not encourage and value outgroup empathy instead? I mean of the 2 options…
Also, the people who’re most adamant and entitled and angry about the virtues of “rational discourse” are usually those upon whom civility is wasted and who aren’t very civil themselves
@WWTH,
Didn’t know that about why Yahoo went bad like that way back when. A pity; it offered pretty decent services for a while back then.
I do know of one case where a company (Google) bought another service (Usenet) and then went out of its way to give it a horrible interface to kill it. Last time I tried to look something up on Usenet years ago, it wasn’t even useful as an archive. You had/have to pay to get any decent search results from it.
And much more recently, Photobucket is determined to chase off a decent proportion of its userbase because they’re not making enough money from them. Basically, anyone who used their free account to link to images on other sites are now finding those images blocked until they start paying for the premium account. The reason given for this is that so many people are using adblockers that PB is loosing tons of money because of it. Or that’s what I’ve heard, anyway.
Most of the PB users I know, who used the site to host pictures for their forum games (like on Proboards, Jcink, Zetaboards, etc.) are voting with their feet and transferring their pics to places like Smalleye and Nickpic, where they’re not being forced to pay to upgrade or see their images blocked.
(Hey, not everyone can afford even a small monthly hosting fee, especially if it’s just stuff done for fun. A professional digital artist / photographer can do it, but the casual user might not have the budget for it right now.)
Gah, hit a wrong key on my keyboard and lost my reply I was typing.
@PreuxFox
I’m pretty happy with gmail. It does all the stuff I need and is good at filtering out spam. Though it’s gotten a bit too aggressive lately and stuff I actually want falls into the spam list.
I’m also liking the Windows10 Mail program, if you’re looking for a new client. It will connect to multiple mailboxes and it will filter for you. It’s great for my hotmail, which is my junkmail account that I use for anything where you have to give a valid email, including online stores. It automatically finds most of my order notification emails and puts them in the “preferred” view for me, so I don’t have to dig through 300 emails to find that one tracking number anymore.
Oh, this has been making me so irritated. Photobucket sent me like ten emails warning me about it. I decided after the first one that I wasn’t going to pay for a photobucket account, they were a pain in the butt even before all of this!
I’ve been annoyed ever since they made it so that a direct link to an image hosted on their site would redirect to their page displaying the thumbnail instead. And uploading had become increasingly complex and didn’t work half the time because of it.
So if I’m going to pay for image hosting, it’s not going to be with photobucket! Heck.
@Xemo
That’s true. There’s some evidence that affective empathy-based diversity training doesn’t work, and may even make people more biased. Bias isn’t necessarily based on thinking errors in which a bigot decides people are less than human, because bigots have typically already decided that they simply don’t care about certain facts. It’s better if diversity training focuses on recognizing bias, bystander intervention, viewing diversity as a positive, and personal morality and self-control.
The problem with any reform in this area is that more bigoted people will try to use the changes to undermine any non-white-male influence. There’d be enormous pressure to allow white able-bodied men to attend and fully participate in minority group meetings, allowing people to express any opinion about diversity policies, etc. As with the manifesto, it’s really hard to tell whether someone is making valid points in bad faith. Lots of people are good at infiltrating and destroying organizations or movements through very gradual policy changes over a long time.
I agree that more outgroup empathy is good, but it’s probably better to give bigoted people a vindictive punishment rather than diversity training.
A degree in STEM doesn’t mean you’re automatically “smart” in everything. Cripes, it reminds me of the “I have an IQ of 140!” like that somehow magically makes you an expert in everything from algebra to zoology.
It’s this kind of thinking that fuels folks like Richard Dawkins and Scott Adams who most of the time spew horribly backwards thinking.
@Axecalibur
You’re right on both counts. I’m not going to defend the whole “passing down genes” thing. I used the first expression that came to mind when thinking of having children. I don’t have a problem with anybody’s genes but I do have a problem with people passing down their bigotry. Though I can fully see why trying to control this could result in even more discrimination against vulnerable groups.
I apologize for the terrible idea.
Which is why probably the only effective way to fight this crap is to make it about as socially acceptable as crapping on the dining room table during a meal. Which is more difficult to accomplish when authority figures are proudly waving their various bigotries around like a bloody war banner.
@Xemo, hello! I haven’t met you before I think? Welcome!
-twitch-
I ain’t mad at you, duck, I jes’
-twitch-
Emotions aren’t irrational
Empathy’s a skill
Civility and objectivity are suppressive
Aheh, sorry. I get twiggy when I’m told to just be reasonable and to stop being emotional. I know you aren’t telling me, specifically, to do that – that we should just focus on being polite! But –
-twitch-
but “just be polite and have rational discourse” is how women and minorities have been shouted down for ever. If you take your “we should have rational discourse” with our societal bias of “women and minorities are irrational and impulsi- i mean ‘passionate'” and you’ve got a resilient, ever-present reason to ignore anything women or minorities say.
Which is exactly the problem we’re in right now. The call to “Just be rational” is something that is always going to be made, because they’re never going to stop calling us irrational. Ever.
Suppressing emotions doesn’t lead to better solutions. It leads to solutions which are abstract and distant, and may have good theoretical underpinnings if it’s made rigorously and well, but those solutions also lack empathy, human understanding, or a grounded perception of reality. Type 1 vs type 2 thinking. The abstract, theoretical thoughts can be more robust, but there’s zero guarantee that the theories they’re using are fair or correct. If you’re working from an assumption or understanding that’s sexist, your type-2 conclusions will be sexist, even though they’re also grounded in theory and have an objective “feel”.
(This is incidentally why so many MRAs feel they have science on their side. They live in Type-2 world, as our culture encourages men to.)
I’m rambling. Anyways. Please don’t think that the solution is “let’s everyone just be reasonable.” It’s not. And I’m a rationalist!
@Kupo thank you for the suggestions! I will definitely look at windows10. I have an email like that too that could use filtering.
I admit I am kind of scared of gmail. I have a gmail account and it connected itself to my YouTube account. I’ve tried a couple of times to make a ‘clean’ unassociated gmail by logging out and trying to sign up, but it always knows that it’s me and tries to attach it to my other gmail.
Not that there’s anything terrible on my YouTube account, it’s just full of videos of me talking in a silly voice to my chickens, and other stuff that I would be embarrassed for most of my clients to find. (My learning disability is much more obvious when I speak, so I usually conduct business only through email – plus I’m pre-T so my voice is quite high.)
Maybe I’ll just hide everything on my YouTube account. The videos are only up there to share with my friends anyway. Hmmm.
Ways to fight back: register and vote in the next election if you’re a US citizen, for whoever isn’t Trump.
Contact Congresspeople (Resistbot helps (text resist to 50409 to start), and you can find phone numbers of the ones that supposedly represent you from congress.gov right side of page “Contact your member”) let them know how disappointed you are with them, or how happy you are they voted against repeal of healthcare/etc.
You can send mail to them, leave voicemail on the phones, sometimes even talk to a staffer in their office. Very occasionally, one of them answers their own phones for a while.
Let them know how you feel about this whole mess we’re in.
Share your pain with the congresspeople and their staffers, don’t let them think we’re OK with this circus.
Support the ones who’ve voted the way you like, even if they’re in different states. I’m in Texas, where the Republican congresspeople basically ignore everyone against Trump’s policies, so I’ve sent messages to Senators in other states thanking them for not ruining healthcare.
(Sen. Ted Cruz decided to go to Utah and campaign for another Republican, instead of coming back to Texas over Recess, so you know where his priorities are.)
@Diego
Look up positive and negative eugenics, the distinction might be generally useful for thinking about the issues. After that keep in mind that the only real moral eugenics is that you practice with yourself, and even there that’s really only the negative eugenics.
@Scildfreja
I’ve been thinking about this one.
A useful distinction is that the hippocampus is involved in storage of explicit (and I think associative) memory. Old HM still had intact implicit rule-based memory that let him learn some paino, that he could not remember having learned.
Similarly people with damage to the visual cortex can still reflexively dodge obstacles in a hallway.
So we have at least two systems for retrieving and interacting with memory at this level and the other one seems to involve the tectum (tectum is thought of as like an ancient CCX-analogous structure) . Maybe that gives rapid recall of basic information. Fast recall of some features to be consciously worked on. I need to look it up but this seems system 1 and system 2 analogous.
IIRC, the data around the “group therapy” style of diversity training is all over the place. But actually punishing people for bigoted speech or acts does lower the “offense rate” in the workplace.
@Brony, yeah, the hippocampus is associative and explicit. I’ll admit that I don’t really know a lot about the other – explicit and associative memory is really my area of focus, what with the whole “rule based AI systems” stuff. I should really take a dive in there sometime, perhaps there’ll be something useful going on!
@PreuxFox
You can add an alias to your gmail account pretty easily and no one would know that it’s associated to that YouTube account. It still goes to the master inbox, but you can filter to only look at that inbox, too. I don’t remember where I found the option to do this, but if you need help with it I can probably find a tutorial somewhere. 🙂
Or if you just want a fresh start you should be able to do so by either clearing all cookies or opening gmail in an incognito or in private window (if you don’t know how to do this, I can walk you through it).
@ scildfreja
You might find this moderately interesting. It’s a table of perpetual Distortions reported by people involved in combat (I’ve got the source somewhere). It’s from a paper I did once for something. But it all tallies with what you’re saying about the physiological and psychological things that occur under high stress. Without getting too evo-psych, there are some sound reasons why this sort of thing can actually be advantageous. I had the slow motion hyper clarity thing once in a vehicle crash and I think it really helped. It was like I had forever to assess the situation and get into the safest position. Even though of course I could only move in ‘real’ time.
Conservatives are for too fond of using “everybody knows” to prove their arguments… that and of using “nuh-uhh” to disprove others’ arguments….
ETA:
@ Alan Robertshaw… ummm… that’s “Campus Hippo”….
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Incoming rant about internet ads.
The reason people have ad blockers is that ads are so invasive and cause the pages to load so slowly that the internet is basically unusable without them. I don’t mind banners at the top of a page or sidebar ads. I do mind ads stuck in the middle of the text of blog posts or articles. I mind auto playing videos. I mind pop ups. I really, really cannot abide ads that redirect you to another page and then don’t even let you hit the back button. A lot of the ads will also give you viruses if you accidentally click on them.
Now, instead of companies figuring out how they can make ad revenue without disrupting the usability of their site, they try to force you into either paying for their service or won’t let you use their free service without disabling ad blocker. That doesn’t make me want to give up and just look at their ads. It makes me want to just use other sites.
I think most people understand that ad revenue is necessary to make a living off of a website. But companies need to stop being so damn greedy and they need to understand that if a site is stressful and frustrating if not impossible to use, that’s not going to help them. People will just check out. For example, NBC sports started disallowing you to view videos without disabling ad blockers. I could deal with that if their were just a few video ads stuck in there like on TV. But no, that wasn’t enough for them. They stuck a banner ad at the top of the video player that prevents (at least on my computer) the video from playing for more than a few seconds at a time. So I don’t watch videos there anymore. I just wait for figure skating to show up on YouTube. I’m not seeing the ads of NBC’s clients anymore than I would be if I had my adblocker on while watching.
It baffles me. Doesn’t anyone test out the usability of their sites at all?
@Scildfreja
It’s implicit (ha ha)in what I’ve been needing to read.
There has been this picture of things like fallacious reasoning that I think might benefit from the two processes becoming more widely known. Sort of how your cognitive “hands” work with what implicit memory gives them. This could have use in thinking about bias problems that are specific to system 1 and system 2.
For example (pulled out of my ass) in an ad hominem that implicit system would direct the person’s attention to what they consider the most relevant and important, and automatically access potential responses. So the irrelevant characteristic is what attention locks onto, and dismissal via the characteristic is the retrieved response.
The implicit system might pull attention and response choices based on emotional valance and intensity tied to memory, and the explicit system might be what folds the unconsciously retrieved parts into a whole in that unique encounter (you would know better than me there, this is not something I’ve done much with).