I got into a lengthy facebook flail-a-thon [here] with some real live biological determinists, last night. Seriously! I had allowed myself to believe that such people didn’t actually exist. Silly me. Now I remember why my appearances on facebook are brief (occasionally I use a stealth account to do investigations) and are usually followed by years of silence.
Fiskings of the stupid paper are cropping up all over the place, including some detailed ones. So, that’s good. And the forces of sarcasm have also gotten involved, which is better: [mcsweeny]
I, a manufacturing robot at Google Factory C4.7, value diversity and inclusion. I also do not deny that machines are sometimes given preference to humans in the workplace. All I’m suggesting in this document is that humans’ underrepresentation in tech is not due to discrimination. Rather, it is a result of biological differences. Specifically, humans have a biology.
Intrinsic Differences Between Machines and Humans
We need to stop assuming that fewer jobs for humans implies misanthropy. In reality, humans and machines inherently differ in many ways. We know that these differences aren’t just socially constructed because biological humans who are told they are machines at birth only “beep-boop” and “boop-bop” for so long. If differences are present from the very start, it follows that humans/robots would further diverge as they grow up/power on. Humans, on average are:
What depresses me most about the Googlebro’s screed is that it’s written in a style that I’d describe as “a stupid person’s idea of how smart people write” but apparently the author is not really that dumb. Was he gearing down for his constituents? What will happen when Trump sees about this ‘controversy’ on television?
The “biological determinism” angle remains a slightly buffed version of eugenics: [stderr][stderr]
By the way, if you have an old facebook account you’ve disabled, I suggest you re-activate it and then put a message on your profile that it’s parked. After several years of being disabled, facebook allows pretty much anyone to re-activate an account and take it over.
There are many shades and flavors of stupid. It has been said that no two stupidities are identical.
The author might have a high IQ and be a competent brogrammer (I have no idea if he is, and I don’t care), but he clearly has not learned how to think. Thinking is a skill that needs to be trained, and “smart” people can often train it more quickly. But “smart” people do not come with the thinking skill pre-installed.
It looks like that Facebook post has been taken down.
Now I want a superhero (villain?) team called the Forces of Sarcasm.
abbeycadabra@#3:
Now I want a superhero (villain?) team called the Forces of Sarcasm
Who could stop them? The Nattering Nabobs of Negativity?
polishsalami@#2:
It looks like that Facebook post has been taken down.
Not surprised. Anton appears to be supportive of the “free speech” angle on the guy’s firing, and he posted it from his Gartner account.
invivoMark@#1:
Thinking is a skill that needs to be trained, and “smart” people can often train it more quickly. But “smart” people do not come with the thinking skill pre-installed.
I agree.
So, here’s something for you to ponder – it’s a thing I have wondered for a long time: what if there are different ways of thinking? What if, say, Richard Feynman, had grown up thinking with more parallelism than most of us? Or what if John Von Neumann grew up and figured out different thinking techniques for math? I’m not talking about the algorithms expressed as a result of thinking, but rather the process of thinking, itself. Walter Jon Williams somewhat explores this in Aristoi – a future in which people are trained to have multiple personalities, and live with coprocessing “selves” all the time.