No, in fact I do want to read an interview with the Google Manifesto guy.

I totally understand why you want to filter those out from your life, and I also want to filter a lot of things out of my life too. But that's our problem, not the media's.

I think the job of journalism is to give you what needs to be heard instead of what you want to hear. Being unbiased is not easy so I think at least media needs to provide as many sides of the story as possible so that each value judgment cancels out and the consumer can make the right decision based on complete set of information.

The problem with the current mainstream media is that every one of them has become "Buzzfeed"ified, which means they try very hard to optimize content AND their interpretation to cater to their existing audience. This is why you see acceleration in polarization. And this is why you see so many people sharing articles talking shit about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump. They just want to be reinforced with content AND value judgment of what they want to believe in.

This is human nature and we as consumers cannot easily change to act rationally because we have other better things to do in our lives than focusing every waking hour of our lives into useless political debate or whatever that's being marketed through the media. This is why I think this is journalism's job.

I no longer can trust any one side coverage of a single story so have started following multiple sources just so i can make a sane judgment on anything that's happening around me. You should try that too, it's amazing how almost always different parties write extremely different interpretation of the same objective static fact that doesn't need to be sensationalized.

Maybe many people may want to live in the matrix and just believe what they want to believe, but personally I do want to know exactly what I'm being fed and don't want to brainwashed with propaganda.

I realize this is something that's not easily possible within the traditional centralized organizational structure (because they have to make money) which is why I think the new decentralized trust-less technologies may be able to help.

You want to read an interview with the Google Manifesto guy not because it’s not propaganda but because it’s propaganda you agree with: massive political agenda, big claims unsupported by evidence or logic, designed to sound science-y to people without prior experience with the issue, etc. — that’s worse on every axis than the journalists you’ve been attacking.

This also neatly sums up why “tell every side” is the same disastrous pitfall it’s been since creationists were advancing it on USENET. Expertise and facts matter, and on many issues they’re very unevenly distrusted. On things like climate change, evolution, etc. increasing the number of sides is simply increasing the number of known-incorrect things you’re exposed to, and most people lack the time or background to tell them apart, especially when many of them are actively being gamed by people who stand to profit from spreading those falsehoods.

I think your post is indicative of the problem journalists face here.

Manifesto Guy was backed up by actual scientists who spoke out to say he'd got the science right, he provided many citations of scientific papers, most of what he wrote was about Google's own culture anyway (and those parts were clearly supported by leaked communications), and in interviews he dwelled on his own firing - a fact.

To you it's just "science-y sounding" and "unsupported by evidence or logic". But what he said is all true. You can read the studies or look at the statistics yourself. There is a clear imbalance in interest (vs ability) between genders in the field of computer science.

By denying this you make yourself the gender-science equivalent of a climate change denier.

> Manifesto Guy was backed up by actual scientists who spoke out to say he'd got the science right, he provided many citations of scientific papers,

Thanks for inadvertently providing a great example for why this is so hard: what you said is wrong but recognizing that requires time – simply reading that turgid slog of an essay, recognizing the difference between a blog post or option piece (i.e. most of his citations) and peer reviewed publications in respected journals (of which he cited almost none), reading the few cited papers to see how they supported the claim being made and whether those results had been upheld or were suspect within the field (most of the remaining items), and using a logical framework to tell whether they were even relevant to the issue being discussed.

That’s a lot of work and most people are going to skip it in favor of picking the side closest to what they already believe, or which is the most entertainingly written, as you did. Most people are going to look at the issue, decide it’s too complicated and find something else, missing the fact that there’s far more scientific consensus among people who actually study the issue at hand.

As an example of what that looks like, consider https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... – someone went to the trouble of figuring out original sources, analyzing specific claims, citing everything … and the most common complaint was that it was too long. At some point, it’s unreasonable to expect a general audience to follow the details of a big topic and that’s where journalists act as a useful filter finding relevant experts and filtering out the guys with degrees in other fields speculating wildly.

No, it wasn't wrong. I studied psychology myself years before the Google blowup and similar studies were in the course. The idea that there are biological differences that cause differences in interest is entirely uncontroversial and frankly also common sense. Alternative explanations for why girls don't study computer science are all absurd.

But it's clear that we've reached a point where agreeing on basic scientific facts or even common sense is apparently impossible. You're so filled with hatred for Damore that you can't see past your own biases. You even called it a "turgid slog of an essay", well revealing that you can't even separate the quality of writing from the ideas a piece of writing expounds. You hate the idea that men and women are actually different so much it's become a religion to you. You're a lost cause: far, far beyond science.

> No, it wasn't wrong. I studied psychology myself years before the Google blowup and similar studies were in the course. The idea that there are biological differences that cause differences in interest is entirely uncontroversial and frankly also common sense. Alternative explanations for why girls don't study computer science are all absurd. > > But it's clear that we've reached a point where agreeing on basic scientific facts or even common sense is apparently impossible.

Defining your personal political viewpoints as “basic scientific facts” is why you're having such a hard time understanding this.

Should you want to talk about science, here would be a few places you could start:

1. What is Damore's thesis, anyway? Simply extracting a coherent theory from that essay would be good for making sure you're talking about the same thing as everyone else.

2. What data supports that position? (Peer-reviewed journals, not “frankly also common sense”)

3. How can you test that theory against the data? In particular, actual science is falsifiable and it'd be really important to find ways a speculative theory could be disproven.

For example, if I'm reading “The idea that there are biological differences that cause differences in interest is entirely uncontroversial and frankly also common sense. Alternative explanations for why girls don't study computer science are all absurd.” correctly, you're making a broad claim that differences in the current makeup of CS participation can be explained by biology.

Looking at that like a scientist rather than a fundamental would reveal a few things to test:

1. Has it always been like that? 2. Is it like that in similar fields? 3. Is it like that in other cultures? 4. What skills could explain that gap? 5. Are there reliably measured differences in those skills? 6. Can we measure a difference in performance in those skills due to biological differences as opposed to socialization and practice?

https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4... shows a big problem for a biological claim since the big drop in CS participation from the mid-80s onward is orders of magnitude too rapid to be explained by evolution, and since that trend has not been present in other demanding fields we'd need an explanation for while e.g. CS is so much more specialized than medicine, math, chemical engineering, etc.

Similarly, actual studies have shown that e.g. mathematical skills are extremely close (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-22162-004) so you're left needing to demonstrate that CS is so highly dependent on specific skill performance that anyone not performing at the extreme upper bound of the distribution cannot compete. This is especially unlikely when looking at the larger software engineering field given how multidisciplinary that is.

Finally, we'd be left needing to demonstrate that these unspecified critically important skills are actually innately determined rather than the product of practice. Simply linking e.g. the ability to rotate 3D models mentally would require more work to tell you whether that was innate or simply an uneven distribution of people who'd previously practiced that skill.

> You even called it a "turgid slog of an essay", well revealing that you can't even separate the quality of writing from the ideas a piece of writing expounds.

Or, if you care about the real answer, that it's merely the latest in a long line of people jumping into a long-running debate without having done their homework and being surprised when “You're wrong and I'm right” doesn't get more respect. It's like coming into a discussion of evolutionary biology and going “Hey, have you ever thought about how this violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics?” like you're the first person who's ever had that idea.

And, to be clear, my point isn’t that you should just trust me but that to a first approximation the average person has no way to distinguish between two random people on the internet. Telling them to do more work seems futile since nobody has time to do that for more than a small number of topics in the news.

I think both of you guys are partially correct, which was my original point.

I never said the Google guy was correct or wrong. In fact, parts of it makes sense and parts of it doesn't.

What irritates me is that people are making a huge fallacy. For example two people can have a whole set of arguments that conflict with one another. Let's assume we can absolutely measure whether a statement is absolutely correct or not. And two people each make their own set of statements about a topic.

Person A: Right - wrong - wrong - Right

Person B: Wrong - Right - Right - Wrong

Instead of A and B sharing their ideas and coming to a conclusion which will be

Right - Right - Right - Right

They keep fighting over small details and say "Because you have this little part that's wrong, your entire argument is wrong" to one another. This will never resolve because they each have errors in their arguments for a fact.

Any humble person would agree that he/she is not a perfect being therefore prone to errors, especially when it comes to complex topics like politics.

My point wasn't that there's no value in listening to disagreements but that it's not useful to add unqualified or malicious viewpoints just for the sake of “listening to both sides”. Damore had no relevant expertise or experience, had conducted no research, and a huge ideological axe to grind.

Giving someone like that your attention is simply increasing the distraction level. It would be much better to get someone qualified — in this case, say, a neuroscientist or cognitive psychologist — who can do a better job representing that position.

> You want to read an interview with the Google Manifesto guy not because it’s not propaganda but because it’s propaganda you agree with

thanks for the speculation, but no.

Are you sure you want a news source at all? News is inherently defined by what's happening at the moment. If Manifesto Guy is at the centre of a political controversy, an interview with him would seem to be "news" in the sense of "something new", just as an interview with Xi Jinping would be relevant given the recent People's Congress in the last few days. You don't have to agree with the guy for it to clearly be news.

It sounds like what you actually want is a blog of opinion pieces that aligns with your own preconceived political notions. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's a perfectly reasonable product to want. But that would not be news.