The Google Heretic and American education

One of the (many) things that I love about the Google Heretic, aside from the fact that Americans are more interested in him than the possibility of nuclear war with North Korea, is what the discussion reveals about American education levels and reasoning styles.

A friend who earned a Ph.D. and is now a business school professor shared “‘Dear Mr. Google Manifesto’: Epic Response From Chemical Engineer, Corp VP, Mom Of 5” as a Facebook status, adding her own “Epic response to “Mr Google Manifesto” guy. Nothing to gain from fueling a war of the sexes — but sometimes one has got to respond.”

The author, Melissa Aquino, is listed by Bloomberg as the VP of Marketing and Director of Human Resources at McCrometer, a water meter business with about $32 million/year in revenue. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and is apparently smart enough that she no longer has to work as an engineer. The journalist at Patch describes her as “a chemical engineer who serves as a corporate vice president for a Fortune 200 company” (part of the confusion may be that this small company where Ms. Aquino is a VP was acquired by a large company; Fortune itself suggests that $14 billion/year is the threshold of Fortune 200).

Summary of the conversation between James Damore and Melissa Aquino:

• Research on a sample population shows that the median woman has a lower tolerance for stress than the median man
• I climbed the corporate ladder while pregnant with five separate children

[The last part is interesting. The “epic response” uses the term pregnant five times. It seems that being in an air-conditioned house on maternity leave and then parking an infant in daycare is sufficient for claiming modern-day Sacagawea status. See also Bill Burr.]

An equivalent conversation:

• The distribution of age for Hispanics in the U.S. has a lower median age than that of the general population (Pew)
• That can’t be right because I met this old Cuban guy at a jazz club.

(Separately, Ms. Aquino says that she studied engineering and then addresses the Google programmer as “a fellow scientist“.)

I pointed out that she was responding to a hypothesized distribution with a data point. The B-school professor’s (male) friends responded:

• No. She is telling her story. And it is a very common story. I see it all the time. (this guy is not a chemical engineer, so it is unclear what part of Melissa Aquino’s story he might have seen)
• Google broflake doesn’t realize that women in tech, worldwide, are heavy into coding. India, Malaysia and others have over 50%. While the number in the US are lower, it is more a cultural phenomena in the West that they do not participate. He needs to see the world and get out of his bubble before he makes baseless claims. The only thing he normalized in the whole thing was that there should be an increase in Silicon Valley.

India and Malaysia rank lower in gender equality (UN) than the U.S. Can we can infer that women in those countries are willing to toil in front of a screen all day because better jobs are not available to them? Or is it that these societies are especially gender-equal in computer nerdism while being gender-unequal in everything else?

[I’m still kind of surprised that people see the male-heavy ratio of computer nerds as signs that computer nerdism is the world’s best job or requires special mental skills. When Hillary arrives at an FBO in her Gulfstream and finds that the people pumping Jet-A in -10 degree temps and 20 knot winds are men and the people sitting behind the front desk in the luxurious lounge are women, does she say “Pumping Jet-A in cold, rain, heat, snow, and/or wind must be a great job that women are excluded from”? When that Gulfstream needs new paint and the people sanding off the paint in the 100-degree hangar are men while the people designing the scheme in an air-conditioned office are women, does anyone say “This shows that men have brains that are genetically better suited to sanding Gulstreams”?

If we step back from the inter-gender issues being debated, we find that engineering grad students are mostly foreigners (Inside Higher Ed). America’s most unpleasant jobs have typically been done by immigrants. Why don’t we infer from the unwillingness of young Americans to study engineering that engineering of all types is unpleasant? Then if we want to go back to the inter-gender issue the question can be handled more generally as “Why are there more men than women doing unpleasant jobs?”]

I wonder if people in Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, China, Germany, et al., will look at this discussion and say “Let’s make sure that if we invest in the U.S. it is something that doesn’t require hiring people with math or analytical skills.” James Damore highlighted some already-well-known research results so his memo wasn’t interesting per se. But maybe his memo itself can be considered an experiment in “How capable are the best-educated Americans at reasoning about distributions and synthesizing research results?” He essentially administered something like the Collegiate Learning Assessment to middle-aged people.

Related:

• “Women in Science”
• Glassdoor on McCrometer, the company where Melissa Aquino is Director of HR: “Backward people, the company is run by 20 year employees that do as little as they can to get by.”; “Management consists of human jellyfish. … Exploitation of people’s skills and a lot of lip service about advancement but ZERO action to actually help people advance”; “Management has no clue as to what the customer wants and needs”
• David Brooks in the NYTimes:

Which brings us to Pichai, the supposed grown-up in the room. He could have wrestled with the tension between population-level research and individual experience. He could have stood up for the free flow of information. Instead he joined the mob. He fired Damore and wrote, “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.” That is a blatantly dishonest characterization of the memo. Damore wrote nothing like that about his Google colleagues. Either Pichai is unprepared to understand the research (unlikely), is not capable of handling complex data flows (a bad trait in a C.E.O.) or was simply too afraid to stand up to a mob.

(Response from a former Googler: Brooks is smart, but his position makes no sense, so let’s look at the fundamentals: Sundar is one of the highest paid executives on the planet, and he’s looking out for #1 (that’s Sundar), and his political nose told him that the heretic had to be burned to please the important executives at Google, so he did the right thing for himself… what’s to hate about that, and why should he resign? There is a famous saying on the street, “don’t hate the player, hate the game,” and Sundar’s game is formidable: I’m sure he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum. Does Sundar even care about his issue? I suspect not, unless it interferes with his ability to get paid. [Factcheck: CNBC says Pichai made $200 million last year.])

• Academically Adrift, a book looking at how young Americans do on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (answer: going to college is increasingly less useful for improving one’s score)