Damore committed the ultimate sin in the corporate world- he caused a huge PR mess. Let's set aside the content of his memo (I personally don't agree with what he said) and just appreciate that he made a mess.
As has been said before, if your CEO learns your name for the same reason he has to end his vacation early, you probably should start polishing up your resume.
He never released anything to the public. Someone who didn't like his political views leaked it to Twitter and the press.
If I were him, I would have personally sued the person that leaked the content and continued the fight until they had no money left. They really need to be taught a lesson that it's not okay to do something like this with the intention of destroying a person's life.
I think his failure was just naivete. He thought Google wanted legitimate feedback or would support intellectual honesty over popularity. That was wrong.
That's not the only issue. Taking away the political content entirely, storing up all your greivances and airing them in a single document intended to attack the entire purpose of other teams was a stupid thing to do. I've seen people do the same thing with technical issues and it's just totally counter-productive.
That's not fair summary of the document at all. In fact Damore was aligned with the purpose of the diversity groups and trying to reason how what is known about different preferences and personalities between men and women could be used to help improve diversity at Google.
For example, Damore's memo has a section where he reasons that one reason women may not be promoted as often is because Google is organized to recognize and reward individual accomplishments rather than participation in groups. Damore theorizes based on cited research that women may be more inclined to contribute in group based settings rather than all alone, and so perhaps aligning promotion to recognize group contributions too would help diversity.
I mean, the authors of some of the studies Damore cited came out and said that he was misrepresenting them and that they disagreed with the conclusion he drew from them.
I think the most that can be said is that is that it is uncertain the degree of influence these (well supported) sex differences in general temperament and preferences have on the specific jobs of software engineering and tech leadership.
However, just because the science is not settled on the subject does not mean one cannot put forth a reasonable hypothesis.
And for the record, the idea that these sex differences have no influence on inclinations towards these specific jobs is also a hypothesis.
Damore may be wrong about the nature of that influence, but I think most people would be surprised if the "no influence" hypothesis was true.
I really wish there was a short way to ask for links without sounding confrontational but maybe this preamble will suffice for this message. Do you have any links about these refutations? Thanks.
Note that your second link says that Damore's claims were basically correct, modulo a few quibbles. Which is almost beside the point. The whole issue demonstrated a failure at every level of society and corporate leadership.
>Damore’s assertion that men and women think different is actually pretty uncontroversial, and he cites a paper to back it up, from a team led by David Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and director of the International Sexuality Description Project. The 2008 article, “Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Difference in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures,” does indeed seem to show that women rate higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness
Good. Wired article agrees women rate higher on neroticism.
> The first-order criticism here is easy: Damore oversells the difference cited in the paper. As Schmitt tells WIRED via email, “These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.” The other 90 percent, in other words, are the result of individual variation, environment, and upbringing.
In Damore's memo, on the subject of trait differences between men and women Damore writes:
"I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."
This is written right under an illustration of two overlapping bell curves with one curve shifted slightly to the right as an example of the overlap he is talking about. It's hard for me to take anyone as honest interlocutor if they are interpreting this as "overselling the difference" as the Wired author does.
On the subject of whether the differences are biological or cultural, Damore cites the fact that trait differences are consistent across cultures and that they are linked to prenatal hormones and heredity, among other points. Perhaps the extent to which trait differences are cultural or genetic is more debatable, but it is beside the point of Damore's essay. Whether trait differences are biological or cultural, Google still acts within a context that they exist . Damore's argument does not hinge on the differences being genetic.
Wired writes:
>Women as a group score higher on neuroticism in Schmitt’s meta-analysis, sure, but he doesn’t buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.
The researcher is saying that it is unclear to him if neuroticism would play a role in Google employment. That is not exactly disagreement, more the researcher saying he doesn't know. Damore is actually in a better position to judge than the researcher as Damore is not only aware of the research, but also employment practices at Google.
Furthermore, the researcher isn't calling this an unjustified leap in logic or disputing Damore's evidence or interpretation of the facts, just the conclusion. That's perfectly fair, but it isn't fair to take a point like "It isn't clear to me if neuroticism affects Google employment" and act like that is a rejection of the Damore memo. The conclusion isn't clear to one researcher.
Wired:
>In general, he notes, women prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things—the implication being that Google is a more thing-oriented workplace, so it just makes sense that fewer women would want to work there. Again, the central assertion here is fairly uncontroversial. “On average—and I emphasize that, on average—men are more interested in thing-oriented occupations and fields, and that difference is actually quite large,” says Richard Lippa, a psychologist at Cal State Fullerton and another of the researchers who Damore cites.
Again, the researcher and the Wired author admit Damore has the right science and shrug at the question of whether the science can be applied to Google. As before, the researcher is not rejecting the conclusion and is not claiming Damore misrepresents the facts. The researcher is saying that they do not know if the conclusion can be reached.
Damore lists "pre-natal testosterone" as a biological cause of sex trait differences and then links those differences to different career preferences. Wired writes:
"Still, most hormone researchers agree that these differences are real. But that they’re directly linked to prenatal testosterone? Not so much. And to differences in career choice? “There’s 100 percent no consensus on that,” says Justin Carré, a psychologist at Nipissing University in Ontario. “The human literature on early androgen exposure is really very messy.”"
Again, there is conflicting literature and evidence and the point is debated, but what the "actual researcher" says is not "Damore made an unjustified leap in logic" but rather, "There's 100 percent no consensus on that".
That's it as far as scientists responding to Damore goes - or perhaps I missed something more substantive?
Sued them for what, exactly? Quoting a document Damore circulated to thousands of people? Being honest isn't generally a crime.
I'll note that you've just imagined the "intention of destroying a person's life" bit. There were plenty of reasons for releasing that that have nothing to do with Damore. Indeed, why would they have anticipated that it would lead to Damore's firing? If that was obvious, then that would have been obvious to Damore when he wrote it.
> Indeed, why would they have anticipated that it would lead to Damore's firing? If that was obvious, then that would have been obvious to Damore when he wrote it.
Not sure I agree. There is no big tech corporation in current America where having your name tied to a memo like that won't destroy your career within the company l.
Damore certainly should have expected that if leadership disagreed with him, he was in for a bad time. However, he still is within reasonable bounds to go after whoever leaked the internal memo externally regardless of whether or not you agree with the content.
In America you can sue anyone for anything at any time. Whether you will win or not is another matter, but if you've never been to jury duty the court system is absolutely packed with cases that seem absurd. In this instance, it would be perfectly plausible to sue for something like emotional distress.
One can file a case, sure. But even to get to discovery, let alone trial, the suit has to be about something for which one can actually sue. Emotional distress can be a factor in damages, but a judge would instantly throw out a case whose only basis was, "The bad man hurt my feelings."
If people here are just saying Damore should just harass people by file frivolous lawsuits that will quickly be thrown out, then fine, let them say that. But the theory that there's legitimate grounds for a lawsuit that could actually succeed is ridiculous.
There is no way a lawsuit like this would survive a motion to dismiss. Intentional infliction of emotional distress requires an underlying wrongdoing, among other things. There was no legal wrong committed when the document was leaked.
Are you a lawyer by chance? In California, infliction of emotional distress in a jury trial requires things that are plausible in this case. See CACI No. 1600, especially the OR section of #2 [1]. I am very skeptical that such a case would actually be dismissed rather than go to trial. I was a juror on a trial with similar grounds a few years ago. Perhaps you've seen something in the handling of such cases that I haven't.
Did you read that? In particular, see the Hughes vs Pair quote:
"A cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress exists when there is ‘(1) extreme and outrageous conduct by the defendant with the intention of causing, or reckless disregard of the probability of causing, emotional distress; (2) the plaintiff’s suffering severe or extreme emotional distress; and (3) actual and proximate causation of the emotional distress by the defendant’s outrageous conduct.’ A defendant’s conduct is ‘outrageous’ when it is so
‘extreme as to exceed all bounds of that usually tolerated in a civilized community.’ And the defendant’s conduct must be ‘intended to inflict injury or engaged in with the realization that injury will result.'"
Quoting somebody's actual words is in no way "outrageous" under that standard. People in civilized communities quote what other people say all the time. And even if the didn't, the first amendment strongly protects political speech, and quoting somebody else's political speech is pretty obviously part of that.
So I'm guessing you're not a lawyer then and just enjoy talking about things with authority on HN as though you are an expert. I'm disappointed yet again, but not surprised since that seems to be the norm here. Please stop doing that - it makes this community worse.
Yes, I did read it, thanks for being condescending and violating HN guidelines. As I said already, I sat on the jury for a similar case that did go to trial in California so your rationale for thinking this wouldn't doesn't make sense to me and seems based on no actual experience. This is not an instance of someone simply quoting another person - the individual who posted the memo online did so deliberately to cause harm and bring unwanted media attention and public hatred toward another individual, which pretty much ruined his life. Further, your focus on the "outrageous" portion only shows you're cherry picking what you want this particular tort to say rather than the whole definition. So yes, it is reckless disregard under that standard and any lawyer could probably bring it to trial if they so desired. Whether the jury would find the tweeter guilty or not is another matter.
You have absolutely no idea what the intent of the person posting was. None. You are making things up to suit your position.
You having sat one one whole jury does not make you an expert in this topic.
I am not "cherry picking". I quoted the whole standard. It has three parts. I pointed to the part that in my view clearly does not apply. If you think it does apply, feel free to argue it. But standing on your expertise of being in the same room with lawyers once does not cut it for me.
There are multiple prongs to the tort and all of them have to be fulfilled. A reasonable jury cannot conclude that leaking the memo to the media is outrageous conduct beyond all the standards of civilised society. It no longer matters if the defendant acted intentionally; the claim fails and must be dismissed.
And also assume anything you say can/will be purposefully taken out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade, or to generate revenue for a dying industry which is incentivized to cater to the lowest common denominator just to survive.
How does the fact that people criticized the memo without reading it in full speak to OP's point about the memo having been taken out of context?
I'll also suggest, reading this memo was incredibly painful for many of my female colleagues and friends inside and outside of Google. I don't think they should have to read the entire thing carefully in order to have an opinion on it. Indeed, I am not a well-read expert in many schools of thought that I nonetheless object to.
> Worth noting the first couple outlets (Vice, Gizmodo) did not post the full memo when they dropped the story.
OP's claim was that this was intentional with the goal of creating sensational clickbait. I guess the idea is, the full memo was tamer and, had it not been excerpted, people would not have reacted as strongly.
Yes of course if it had not been excerpted and retitled as "Anti-diversity memo", people would have been less primed to have a knee jerk reaction, or to even click the link in the first place.
>How does the fact that people criticized the memo without reading it in full speak to OP's point about the memo having been taken out of context?
Because you can't begin to know what someone meant unless you read what they wrote.
OK, if I'm understanding this right, the argument is that because the document was not initially printed in full (i.e. with figures and citations) in the press (and had inflammatory headlines), many people got the wrong impression about it.
That seems like a testable hypothesis.
1. If it were true, I'd expect a significantly higher proportion of Googlers to be on his side than the proportion non-Googlers, since all Googlers had access to the full memo. Is that true?
2. If it were true, I'd expect a significant number of people who ended up reading the whole memo to say, I initially had a negative reaction, but after seeing X specific figure or citation, I changed my mind. Has anyone in this thread said that? If not, why not?
(Is your feeling that first impressions are everything, and after that, people's views are ossified past the point of being able to change?)
Probably as high a percentage as his supporters. Trying to deflect criticism by saying people hadn’t read it was a common way to avoid critically thinking about it, and it became comical when people were making very specific comments which clearly indicated familiarity. I remember someone writing a very detailed critique of the way it was oversold it as based on science despite misrepresenting the scientific consensus[1], and even then you could easily find people saying that the reason she didn’t agree with him was that she hadn’t read it or that buzzfeed published the text first without charts, even when she was discussing the original studies he was claiming as support.
The first website to publish his memo (Gizmodo) removed all the graphs and citations, meaning that a great many people who read the memo did not read it in full.
And to you this constitutes reporting that was "purposefully out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade"?
Well I wouldn't put it that strongly (I didn't write the post you're quoting), but it hardly demonstrates journalistic integrity. (But then what would you expect from a site that's just Gawker rebranded?)
For an example of "reporting" that comes closer to what you describe in your quote, I'd point to the pile of hot garbage that former Google exec (and deranged lunatic) Yonatan Zunger posted on Medium.com, which was very widely shared and cited in the weeks following Damoregate.
Suppose we had data that we agreed was reliable showing that women software engineers who had read Damore's memo and Yonatan's post would overwhelmingly be unwilling to work with Damore and overwhelmingly be willing to work with Yonatan.
I'm not saying I have this data, but just hypothetically, suppose we did.
Would this at all influence your judgements (e.g. "deranged lunatic") of them? Why or why not?
Yes, it would. I'm not sure what you think you're arguing against - all I said was that Gizmodo stripped out the citations from Damore's memo.
As for Yonatan, if you don't believe he's a deranged lunatic go read the insane diatribes he was posting in 2017 about how Trump is literally Hitler and that Muslims and Latinos needed to flee the country as soon as possible for their own safety. The man is detached from reality. It disturbs me that someone so psychotic was able to occupy a senior position at Google.
The memo was, but very few people read that and instead read what was spoon fed to them by their ideological rag of choice. Look how many comments on this HN post alone claim he said things he didn’t (the google women engineers were worse, women can’t code, all women are neurotic, etc).
I'll point out that this aphorism concedes that certain categories of interesting discussion are not possible, and it's a little neutral about that prospect for my taste.
It also concedes that "The New York Times" cannot be trusted to value that kind of discourse more than gotcha narrative chasing.
All sorts of discussion aren't possible unless the participants can be sure that the others are acting in good faith and not likely to engage in needless hostility or reprisals outside the discussion.
The term for this environment is "safe space", but they're unpopular for some reason.
I would rephrase that to say that "safe space" should be the term for such environments, but in practice that's problematic. The term was specifically invented to describe spaces where certain discussions are forbidden because they could be "triggering". It was not invented to describe a space where discussion is possible without unilateral escalation to unrelated third parties.
I suspect that a healthy society needs both kinds of safe spaces.
No, “safe space” has long been taken over to indicate spaces where people can be without worrying about being exposed to an idea that triggers a sensitive area for them regardless of intent or good faith.
Hopefully every other part of your online life is under a difficult to guess pseudonym if you write anything even remotely controversial, because the social justice mob is only looking for scalps, not justice.
Maybe the lesson here, then, is "If a company really wants honest discussion of controversial ideas, they should provide a means for people to carry out those discussions with anonymity."
A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting.
Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address.
A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company...
Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed.
From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.
From your story it sounds like you already know this, but most companies really do not want broad discussions of controversial ideas, especially not ones entirely outside the remit of the employees participating in them.
Engineering is where most of the people go who care more about being right than about what people think of them. There is a reason for that - it usually matters if an approach is right or not in engineering work. Companies like Google need to be able to roll their eyes when engineers start stupid arguments, not sack them. The front-page rule is a technical impediment to people being able to figure out facts. The path to the truth often leads through patches of believing things that are wrong.
Charging into a room trying to start an argument isn't the best way to work out what is true; but there are young engineers who are going to try it because they are under a lot of pressure to be technically correct and not under a lot of pressure to be socially savvy. They're in the process of learning that it isn't politically feasible.
Even a full blown "Engineer holds crackpot opinion!" should never be front page news unless it is a risk of a building fallen down. Let alone "Young Engineer tries to start a Stupid Argument".
Damore's goal was to materially affect who got hired and how they were treated. That's quite a lot of people, and at one of the world's most prominent companies. Nobody can reasonably expect that he should be able to play at that level and have it be consequence-free when it doesn't go his way.
Damore is welcome to have crackpot opinions. He's even welcome to express crackpot opinions on his own time. But what he was doing was vigorous workplace activism. Activism that not only contradicted the goals of Google execs and the bulk of its employees, but was carried out in a way that actively damaged ongoing Google efforts and caused a significant workplace disruption.
You could argue that Google's management made a mistake in allowing a young engineer this much power in the first place. Or by not reining him in earlier. But rolling their eyes was never an option here because Damore was having a significant negative effect on the company.
Google solicited the feedback. This is the problem: companies want it both ways. An open culture where people tell the truth about what they think (so that you don't get the brilliantly dysfunctional organizations that suck up huge amounts of money in lost efficiency) but none of the messy discomfort that comes from people actually disagreeing in an open society.
I've never worked at Google, so I can't say for sure. But from what I hear, there's plenty of disagreement. And Google may have generally asked for feedback. But I'm pretty sure they didn't say, "Hey, James, could you write a maximally divisive political opinion piece attacking a bunch of important internal efforts and implying that anybody who doesn't agree with you is just a villain in an Ayn Rand novel?"
They said "please share your opinion on this specific topic [the low proportion of women in engineering]." Regardless of how you color his response, they asked for exactly what he gave.
Why are people claiming Google solicited his feedback? Is that how the news was reported? If it was a feedback, it wouldn't have been written in a Google Doc, and shared in an internal mailing list.
It was written during a time when diversity in tech was the topic du jour. The mailing list was for political discussion / unpopular opinions, and was known for heated debates. It didn't draw a lot of discussion at first. A few weeks later, the memo somehow made its way to the internal meme site, where a majority of Googlers frequent. That's how the whole company learned about it and how the issue blew up.
The feedback solicitation was in regard to a diversity seminar which James attended. The document was initially provided to HR, but received no response. James waited a month before starting to share it on the discussion forums.
If Google HR was going to have a problem with what he wrote, then mentioning that to him privately when the had the chance would have been the appropriate move. Their initial silence is a big reason for why things turned out the way they did.
I'm not coloring his response when I call it a divisive political opinion piece. It's explicitly framed as "the politics of the majority of people at Google is a big problem". And whether or not their initial request technically was broad enough to include his response isn't the issue.
Either Damore was reasonably smart, and he knew that this would at best be enormously divisive. Or maybe he was just incredibly clueless. (Personally I think it was the former.) When bosses (or anybody) ask for something, technically complying with the literal meaning of their words is not enough. One has to consider goals and context, and respond accordingly.
They expressly asked him to share his opinion about an extremely divisive, almost third-rail topic. You're just saying that his statement ended up being divisive as well, but that's tautological. It's simply not possible to be "politically neutral" about such a topic and say anything worthwhile.
To the extent that every space is political, sure. But it's not like Google had declared themselves steward of a space devoted to political discussions. They're a business. Employees at work should keep in mind they're at work.
A reply from a throwaway account to this is for some reason dead, but it seems good to me, so I'm pulling it out of the garbage.
---
This is false.
Why are people claiming Google solicited his feedback? Is that how the news was reported? If it was a feedback, it wouldn't have been written in a Google Doc, and shared in an internal mailing list.
It was written during a time when diversity in tech was the topic du jour. The mailing list was for political discussion / unpopular opinions, and was known for heated debates. It didn't draw a lot of discussion at first. A few weeks later, the memo somehow made its way to the internal meme site, where a majority of Googlers frequent. That's how the whole company learned about it and how the issue blew up.
In which case, the "request for feedback" bit, which Damore's defenders here are making a big deal about, was irrelevant. Him sharing it internally was not anything people asked for; it was something he decided to do on his own.
One of the criticisms made of Damore when this first broke was "he should have expressed his concerns to HR first". Like pretty much all of the criticisms of Damore, this one was based on ignorance (or a lie). He in fact did initially submit his concerns to HR, and not merely of his own initiative but in response to their request.
If HR had an objection to Damore's memo, the appropriate time to address that would have been when he initially submitted it. They had a whole month to respond before he shared it with other people. They could have had a private conversation with him and resolved any disagreements or misunderstandings without it ever becoming a fiasco. By inviting his comments but then failing to address them, Google HR bears most of the blame for the fallout.
His decision to share the memo with his colleagues was his, sure, but he wrote initially it in response to a request from HR. If management asks for your feedback about something but then ignores it, seeking validation from your colleagues is a perfectly logical next step. Especially so at a place like Google, where open discussion was supposed to be a hallmark of it's internal culture.
One, we don't know that he submitted this to HR. Two, even if he did, they had no obligation to reply, let alone within a month. Three, we do not know that they didn't reply. Four, whether or not they did, it was his decision to publish broadly; he is responsible for his own actions. Five, after he received negative feedback, he just adjusted it slightly and kept going (and in fact kept going until he dropped this suit.). And six, he knew or should have known that an explicitly political attack on Google's culture and D&I practices was not the average thing you might pass along for feedback.
He wanted a big reaction. He got it. He didn't get the outcome he wanted, but that was never his to control.
If you think he's lying about the sequence of events, that's your choice. But unless you have a better reason than that you disagree with his opinions, you're not going to convince anyone.
Is it not the job of HR to address employee concerns? Is it not the job of HR to manage the liability incurred by employees? I fail to see how HR does not bear responsibility here. Had HR said "sharing the contents of the memo at work will get you fired" then whether he shared the memo or not at least he would know what to expect. However, it's pretty clear that at most he expected a heated discussion, not termination.
And he did not publish it "broadly". He posted it to some sort of internal "skeptics" discussion group. The idea being that this would be the normal venue for employees to discuss controversial ideas in good faith and with an open mind. It was others who published it "broadly".
Damore's disagreement (which was not even necessarily a disagreement about values, but about facts and policy) was not an attack. The failure to make that distinction on the part of Google leadership and the media is why this became such a big issue, nor was this failing Damore's fault. Fortunately, it seems that most people (if not necessarily the loudest people) are able to make that distinction.
I don't think he has to be lying. I think we've only heard one side of the story.
It's the job of employees to manage their own behavior. It's HR's job to do their best to contain the problems when employees fail to do that.
The dude created a go link, the purpose of which is to make something available to the entire company. Publishing it into an open internal group fits my definition of "broadly". It's not like he handed it to his manager or a couple colleagues and said "I'd like your feedback on this." He intentionally put it out to a wide audience.
If you don't see it as an attack, I guess that's your prerogative. That's certainly how it was received. And given that the go link was titled pc-considered-harmful, it's clear that Damore saw it as a shot in the broader culture war. Something confirmed by his post-firing behavior, where the first people he talked to were strident antifeminists: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/09/james-dam...
> I don't think he has to be lying. I think we've only heard one side of the story.
A reasonable question I suppose, but fruitless as no-one has contradicted his timeline of events.
> It's the job of employees to manage their own behavior. It's HR's job to do their best to contain the problems when employees fail to do that.
You have yet to make the case that Damore's behavior was somehow irresponsible. On the other hand, an HR department doesn't respond to employee concerns and that only deals with the fallout of situations after they occur is not very effective or responsible.
> The dude created a go link, the purpose of which is to make something available to the entire company. Publishing it into an open internal group fits my definition of "broadly". It's not like he handed it to his manager or a couple colleagues and said "I'd like your feedback on this." He intentionally put it out to a wide audience.
Access control restrictions are not particularly relevant. He did, iirc, solicit feedback from some select colleagues before publishing it internally. He also submitted his concerns to HR (unless you've forgotten). After that, he shared it with an internal forum devoted to discussing controversial ideas. What else should he have done?
> If you don't see it as an attack, I guess that's your prerogative. That's certainly how it was received.
By some, certainly not all.
> And given that the go link was titled pc-considered-harmful, it's clear that Damore saw it as a shot in the broader culture war.
Please explain how criticism political correctness amounts to an attack. Arguing that "political correctness is something only bad people complain about" is not sufficient. Feel free to include anything within the actual contents of the essay that also amounts to an "attack".
> Something confirmed by his post-firing behavior, where the first people he talked to were strident antifeminists
This whole "guilt-by-association" is very tiresome and low-effort. All the moreso considering that it was quite evident that "acceptable" media sources were never going to give Damore a fair shake, nor were they particularly interested in what he actually had to say.
It's not fruitless to point out that we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on only knowing one side of a story.
As to "what else should he have done", assuming that he really was trying to help with something totally outside his professional expertise and personal experience, I think a good start would have been understanding the topic on more than a superficial level before charging in to say they so blinded by their biases that they were doing it all wrong. That's not the way to get anything done anywhere. Taking a few classes in relevant topics would have been a great start. He also should have aggressively depoliticized his document.
And then if he were really serious about making change in an organization that size on such a big topic, he should have spent a lot of time getting to know the people involved, socializing his ideas, and learning how to pitch them in a way they could be heard. That's how most things get done in large companies when one isn't a high-level executive.
I'm glad we both now agree that he published it internally. Thanks.
If you honestly can't figure out how using a term of political attack is seen as an attack, I'm not sure I can help you with that one. If you're not a native speaker, I recommend reading up on the history of the term.
And lastly, what I'm saying is not "guilt by association". To the extent that there are reasonable doubts about his motivation for writing the memo, we have to look to other behavior to see what theory it fits best with. That his first choice was to get cozy with antifeminists is a piece of evidence. So is his choice of a right wing lawyer. So is his lawsuit that conservative white men were being discriminated against at Google.
There's also the lack of him doing anything particularly indicative in the other direction. If his goal was really to improve things for women, as has been claimed, he's had years to take action. Or just to write new pieces.
I'm open to new data turning up, but to me the pretty obvious conclusion is that he didn't somehow accidentally write something very similar to a lump of right-wing concern trolling. He's obviously smart, so it would be weird to think somebody normally as precise as a Google engineer was just suddenly very sloppy. Instead I assume he wrote what he meant to write and upset the people he wanted to upset. Apparently he thought he'd somehow win the day, but that's not the first time an engineer would have arrogantly leapt in to something thinking they had solved it all. Or, for that matter, somebody with a physics degree: https://xkcd.com/793/
> If you honestly can't figure out how using a term of political attack is seen as an attack, I'm not sure I can help you with that one. If you're not a native speaker, I recommend reading up on the history of the term.
I am both a native English speaker and familiar with the term "political correctness", which actually was coined by the left. Suffice to say, there are those across the political spectrum who believe that it is possible to criticize political correctness as a pattern of behavior, without attacking the identity of the people whom political correctness was intended to protect.
> And lastly, what I'm saying is not "guilt by association". To the extent that there are reasonable doubts about his motivation for writing the memo, we have to look to other behavior to see what theory it fits best with. That his first choice was to get cozy with antifeminists is a piece of evidence.
If the only behavioral evidence that you choose to look at is who he associated with, then "guilt by association" describes precisely what you are doing. Did you even watch those interviews? Or any of his other public appearances?
Also, the article you linked to is very telling. It mentions all of these horrible attributes about Molyneux and Peterson, without noting (for instance) that Dr. Peterson is also a subject matter expert in the fields of psychometrics and psychology of personality (his research is highly cited) and who had a business using psychological profiling to aid businesses in hiring decisions. That sounds exactly like the kind of person that ought to have some interesting insights on Damore's memo. Yet his only salient quality to you is that he's "antifeminist"?
> I'm open to new data turning up, but to me the pretty obvious conclusion is that he didn't somehow accidentally write something very similar to a lump of right-wing concern trolling.
Honest question, can you point to a right-wing perspective that, in your view, rises above the level of "concern trolling"?
If one wants to criticize the pattern of behavior without inheriting the modern usage, one has to phrase it differently. Especially in a title. So again, we're back to you believing Damore is apparently incompetent.
> If the only behavioral evidence that you
I named other things. And could name more. That you're down to willfully missing points makes me think we're just about done here.
Similarly, you trying to paint Peterson as a neutral expert is again absurd. Peterson doesn't have a big Youtube following because of his psychological research. He has it because he's a right-wing bloviator. As is Molyneux. The two podcasts have nothing in common other than their alt-right bent, so yes, that's the correct salient characteristic.
> Honest question, can you point to a right-wing perspective that, in your view, rises above the level of "concern trolling"?
It's hard in the US, as the US right has been undergoing a full intellectual collapse, as demonstrated by their lining up behind a guy who publicly muses about injecting bleach. The kind of conservatism I'm most comfortable with is of the small-business-oriented, Rockefeller-Republican sort, now basically extinct. I frequently appreciate the principled stand of Amash, even though I disagree with the bulk of his actual positions. I regularly see pieces in American Conservative that are sensible and well-reasoned, although I often don't end up agreeing. And I'm a big fan of being conservative in the sense used in engineering or accountancy, but again, being prudent, modest, and careful are anathema to most of the US right these days. And there's more, but hopefully that will satisfy.
> If one wants to criticize the pattern of behavior without inheriting the modern usage, one has to phrase it differently. Especially in a title. So again, we're back to you believing Damore is apparently incompetent.
That the modern usage has a negative connotation, and even is sometimes invoked as a slur, does not mean it is not used to describe a real phenomenon[1]. To put it simply, political correctness is the censure or censorship of speech not primarily because of it's truth (or lack thereof) but because of the perceived harm such speech does to disadvantaged groups. Whether this leads to the suppression of important truth, and whether that suppression actually benefits the disadvantaged, is very reasonably up for debate.
> I named other things. And could name more. That you're down to willfully missing points makes me think we're just about done here.
I will concede you made other (weak) arguments regarding behavior, but I will amend my point here to say that the fact that you treat those associations as evidence, particularly without providing any connection to the content of the interviews themselves, to be a rather clear example of "guilt by association" whether you intend that or not. Being interviewed by Stefan Molyneux no more makes Damore a white supremacist than being interviewed by Joe Rogan makes him a stoner or being interviewed by Dave Rubin makes him gay. Damore chose his interviews because he was being viciously smeared in the media and these were people who had a large audience and were willing to give him a fair shake. Similar reasons can established for his legal representation.
Also, as a purely tactical matter, to the people who find Damore's memo itself persuasive (or even those who just didn't find it immediately offensive) this kind of argument comes across as being in bad faith. It seems like a way to disqualify Damore without having to engage with his arguments directly.
> Similarly, you trying to paint Peterson as a neutral expert is again absurd.
I never said anything about neutral. He is however, uncontestably an expert in the relevant science. Of course, there are other experts, and they don't all share the same perspective, but if anyone were in a position to correct Damore for being radically off in his representation of the scientific literature Peterson would be a fine choice. The fact that he (among others) thinks Damore does a fine job in representing the literature (for a lay person) means that at the very least the science is not so settled against Damore as many would have you believe.
> Peterson doesn't have a big Youtube following because of his psychological research.
He actually had quite a big audience for his psychology lectures before any of the political stuff happened. You should check out the series on personality, it's really quite interesting.
> He has it because he's a right-wing bloviator. As is Molyneux. The two podcasts have nothing in common other than their alt-right bent, so yes, that's the correct salient characteristic.
Dismissing Peterson's scientific credentials is one kind of wrong. Thinking he is alt-right is quite another. To the extent that he is on the right, he's quite mainstream politically. To understand what the alt-right actually is, I recommend The New Right by Michael Malice[2]. It's very good journalism that is both fair and (at times) highly critical.
> It's hard in the US, as the US right has been undergoing a full intellectual collapse...And there's more, but hopefully that will satisfy.
I appreciate the examples you give in this paragraph. While it was within the parameters of the question I had asked, I was kind of hoping you had specific examples of conservative thought on the issues touched on in Damore's memo. You mention the American Conservative, what do you think of this article from them on the memo[3]?
Acknowledging that men and women are different, and that reverse discrimination is not an effective solution, is crackpot to you? I would contest that such a denial of reality is what is crackpot.
It’s hilarious that you call what he was doing activism.
In general, that is how Google responds to bad ideas.
When the memo hit the public, it became an issue of whether the company was perceived to be supporting a Title VII violation. Then the company doesn't have the option of rolling their eyes and going about business as usual anymore.
Consider the recent kerkuffle with the CEO of Away. She didn't tread on any political or cultural landmines. Just decided to treat her workers like shit and do it on open Slack channels.
Indeed. Never assume that anything you write at work on a work computer won't be seen by your manager or used against you. Even if it's supposedly confidential correspondence with HR or protected labour organisation, and theoretically illegal for them to access. Even if it's personal info under GDPR.
And especially not if you post it to a huge internal mailing list.
(I'm also curious as to what the overlap is between believers in "at-will firing is great and there should be no notice requirements on employers" and "Damore should have had far more process before being fired")
Also, he shared his memo with HR (at their request) long before he shared it with his colleagues. If Google was going to have an objection to what he wrote, that would have been the appropriate time.
That’s like suing people for telling others that you’re gay. That’s a standard of liability people would never rally behind, one which prevents you from speaking truthfully at the cost of another person.
Not quite. He didn't write the memo to say he's a misogynist or a political conservative. He wrote a memo implying the women who worked with him may not be as competent as the men.
Now replace "women" with any other group, such as people of color, Jews, armed forces veterans or Republicans, and see how it goes.
I am afraid what he was saying was that the current policy for attracting women to tech might be inefficient. He also proposed a bunch of policies that might make tech more attractive to women.
It's fine to disagree with him, it's not to missrepresent what he said.
If someone distributes a memo that's likely to alienate half of their colleagues, the first thing I'll question is their lack of judgement.
If he was uncertain about hiring policies and thought those were negatively affecting productivity, he should have taken the question to his manager or to HR, along with some evidence.
I’m talking about the liability of people sitting in the same context. Are you still talking about what James should or shouldn’t be doing? I’m talking about whether you should incur legal risk for leaking facts about people likes James.
If he wrote that on a memo and distributed it to a dozen colleagues, it's doubtfully a secret. If he were fired for being gay, that'd be against the law on pretty much every civilized country and a couple that wouldn't qualify.
> If I were him, I would have personally sued the person that leaked the content and continued the fight until they had no money left. They really need to be taught a lesson that it's not okay to do something like this with the intention of destroying a person's life.
This is the original post I'm responding to. If I found an old blog post of yours which revealed life-altering information, should I be sued if I send it to a reporter?
Damore was character assassinated via leaks and libel, yes. Pragmatically, he could have prevented his fate if he took the opportunity to back down when challenged by corporate, instead of defending his right to free honest speech at a megacorp. He erroneously thought that because controversial party-line free-speech was job-safe even when intellectually dishonest, that controversial anti-party-line free speech was also job-safe.
except for the fact that almost all controversial statements attributed to the memo are projections.
In practice the entire content of that document sums up to "Since current diversity efforts are not solving the problem it could be time to admit that the current google structure is on average slightly less attractive or rewarding for women (or for individual in a slice of the population that contains slightly more women than men)" together with some suggestions of what those changes could be.
Neuroticism is is a personality trait, others are Obsessionality, Psychoticism, Disinhibition, Impulsivity, Rigidity, Alexithymia, Perfectionism, Sensory processing sensitivity, Novelty seeking, Harm avoidance, Self-esteem, Honesty-humility, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience.
I guess that a good deal of them are measurably more prevalent in one gender/sex or the other.
Damore point is that if you design a highly competitive system so that Quality A is rewarded but Quality B is ignored you are going to have an imbalanced workplace if
women on average have slightly more B and less A than the mean and men the reverse.
The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender.
We should design our systems so that the minuscule differences between men and women are not overly amplified and not abused, not just pretend that those differences do not exist.
> The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender.
That's two paragraphs of the memo in the middle and the bit at the end. Most of the memo is setting up a case for fundamental differences in gender, strawman depictions of the "morality of Google," a claim that men have a higher drive for status (which is, fundamentally, the sort of thing that a company would be put immediately in violation of Title VII if it agreed with), and a claim that Google's anti-discriminatory practices are discriminatory.
> Damore committed the ultimate sin in the corporate world- he caused a huge PR mess.
I agree with you; however Damore is only partly to blame... IMO the leaker of the memo is just as responsible for the PR mess as Damore is for writing the memo in the first place (no leak = no PR mess) (no memo = no PR mess) (memo + no leak = no PR mess).
> I think he would have gotten fired even without the leak.
I don't think so, it had to go all the way up to Sundar before he got fired, Sundar wouldn't have taken a break from his vacation if it wasn't a PR mess. Internal messes happens all the time at Google and they almost never end with someone getting fired.
People get fired over internal issues all the time, you just don't hear about it because they don't make the news. The people involved make the rational decision to not go public, because if they did, it could easily cause them to never be able to work in the industry again. No one wants to hire a malcontent.
"Say It Forget It, Write It Regret It". He's the root cause of all of his his pain and the pr issue. All the leaker did was speed up an inevitable process.
"firing the leaker is going to rile them up more."
It seems our society has devolved into satisfying the mob rather than doing the right thing these days.
I've seen some of the comments from internal Google groups that were since leaked after this incident. Some of the most horrible thoughts and opinions were posted, with actual real names, but nobody got punished or fired. Why? Because they were progressive/hard-left thoughts and opinions.
This is all about politics and has nothing to do with right or wrong.
It's just more proof that these large tech companies are becoming the equivalent of fascist governments that police our thoughts and opinions....and punish us for wrongthink.
Society hasn't devolved; this is how it's always been.
Actors with power exercise that power by enforcing their will over those with less.
Googlers being mostly neo-left is irrelevant. Were they neo-con, Google would've done the same and appeased them by firing a single employee as a scapegoat. In reality, Google doesn't care about politics because it, like sovereign states, is only mindful of its own self-interest, political games are only one tool in its aresenal to get there; and just like sovereign states, Google is effectively a stateless yet sovereign state of its own, not strictly bound under any state's power, like the citizens of any country are.
The truth is, buddy, politics won't do anything for you. They've been bread and circus since Ancient Athens for the labor classes so they wouldn't cause too much of a mess.
> Google doesn't care about politics because it, like sovereign states, is only mindful of its own self-interest
This is often a useful abstraction for predicting corporate activity in general, but not explaining specific actions by specific people in the company.
I would like to see some of those comments, thoughts, and opinions, as well-sourced as possible.
As far as I can tell, people seem to be reacting to ... a lot of translations, cherry-picking, inaccurate summations, and strawmen when it comes to this Damore deal.
Actually Google has been much harsher on the extreme left crowd at Google since then. They didn't say it officially but I think they realized that both sides were to blame for this PR mess and just bashing one side will make the other way more vocal and aggressive in the future.
I'd say it's fairly likely that they found and fired the leaker, but had them sign an NDA. Google hates leaks and has internal surveillance methods in place to catch leakers, especially ones that cause this much trouble.
I'm inclined to agree; it's never a good idea to discuss stuff like this on work comms. this leads to a bigger question though. why does google encourage this kind of discussion on an internal mailing list in the first place? seems like it can only lead to embarrassing PR moments.
Google allows (allowed?) relatively free socialization on internal mailing lists, and there are serious labor law issues with saying "you can talk about anything you'd like as long as it's not company policies or politically controversial".
most companies don't have to say anything like that. the absence of active encouragement is usually enough. the "default" is not to discuss sensitive topics over company email.
Google specifically wanted to encourage open discussion of things like company plans and priorities, which at many other companies are sensitive topics.
No, he was complaining about how the diversity team wasn't scientific enough, and pointed out that it from a certain viewpoint it doesn't makes sense. But failed to simply account for what Google as an entity (the CEO, the shareholders, the board of directors, the upper management, the vocal minorities, etc) wanted. And that was simply diversity even at the cost of spending a lot of money and making some sub-optimal decisions.
> And that was simply diversity even at the cost of spending a lot of money and making some sub-optimal decisions.
That's an interesting take considering how little success Google has had in making their tech workforce more gender diverse.
One cynical view might be that the entire thing is a PR exercise, designed to make it appear that Google cares about gender diversity. For the cost of a small amount of money to write some press releases, and no real changes to their hiring policies, they get some good press and stave off criticism.
Damore's memo threatened this from both sides: it makes it look (or was made to look by adversarial press coverage) like Google is hostile to women, and it also threatens to call attention to the diversity Potemkin village set up by HR.
I would like to see the breakdown of individual positions on James Damore versus Captain Crozier. I suspect very few people have consistent views (I do not) in spite of exactly the same arguments being made on both sides. Essentially: Should have known it would become public, or too important to keep silent. That tells me the real disagreement isn't in those arguments, but in the values behind them.
It was only a "PR mess" because his co-workers leaked the memo to the eager press and Google fired him over what was basically a paper attempting to explain why women might be underrepresented in engineering. If a famous company fires someone over something so trivial, of course the media will be all over it. Had none of that happened, none of us would be still discussing this because it's not like the paper's particularly groundbreaking or anything.
The company was backed into the corner because whether or not he was right, he created a hostile environment by starting and continuing the conversation where everyone in the company could read it.
There isn't a debate to be had in a public forum (even internal public) because the law has already decided the question.
All true. And in addition, we got to see the reactions of a large number of insiders, which changed the way a lot of us think about Google. If you haven't read the internal list captures, you owe it to yourself to do so.
He didn't cause a PR mess, whomever leaked his post to the wider world did. And I could be wrong, but I seem to recall he posted what he did weeks, if not months, before it was leaked (in a heavily modified form too)
Sure. There's this one user named lawnchair_larry who believes that women are, on average, weaker performers in tech[1], that it's for biological reasons[2], and that it's fair to discriminate against women in hiring decisions because of it[3]. Yes, he phrased some of his opinions as questions, but anyone with a fifth grade reading level can figure out the implied answer.
Care to ctrl-f for “weaker” in your citation (which doesn’t even say what you claim) and paste the sentences immediately after?
Here, let me help you:
It should also be a possibility that they're [women] actually stronger performers in tech (I bet you reached for the down arrow before getting to that sentence). Pretending everyone must have equal ability and 50% of executives and 50% of programmers should be women doesn't get us anywhere.
Obviously, [3] doesn’t even come close to approaching what you’re claiming I said.
But you could not have accidentally proven my point any better if you tried, so thanks!
I’ve had enough experience in these arguments to know that this will likely fall on deaf ears, but to restate my point in simpler terms:
The probability that the natural distribution (as in, free from bias or cultural influences) for any profession would be perfectly 50/50 across gender lines is approximately zero.
For those who don’t understand what an average is, this says nothing about the ability of any individual, and says nothing about whether men or women are better or worse for any given role.
I saw that you said women might also be stronger in tech, but I know that you don't actually think that we are, because you also think that men are predominant in tech fields for biological reasons. Unless you think that women are stronger in tech and biologically predisposed against it, the only possibility is that you think women are weaker in tech. Further, if you didn't believe that it was women who are weaker in tech, it wouldn't be contextually relevant to bring up the possibility of a skill difference in a discussion about the prevalence of women in tech. Finally when confronted about this, you don't explicitly deny thinking that women are inferior in tech, you just point out that your comment didn't technically exclude the logical possibility that you thought otherwise. People reading your comments aren't stupid and aren't robots: the "I'm not touching you" game doesn't fool anyone.
The chance that the natural gender distribution across a profession would be exactly 50/50 would be quite low, in the same way that any particular hand in a card game is unlikely. However, the chance that the natural percentage of women would be 50±n could be quite reasonable for low values of n. By contrast, the chance that we would get the actual distribution of men vs. women in (say) software engineering we see in the real word by chance alone is incredibly low.
Every adult who isn't mentally disabled understands what an average is. However, saying "women are inferior" does not become less offensive when you add "on average" to then end. And yes, I only have specific information saying that you think women are inferior in tech, but every argument you've made could just as easily be applied to business, politics, or pretty much any area of life that has an important impact on the world.
Damore does not fit into the neat ideological right or left classification but it would be impossible for an institution like Bloomberg to have nuance on this issue. Just because some deplorable lifted him up doesn't mean he should be defined specifically on an ideological axis.
But, of course, who gives a fuck. The rage machine rages on.
Or some groups villain. It's especially crazy considering the first article posted was the gizmodo one [0] which was "reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted" and if you look at an original [1], you can see that it was actually completely reformatted, all charts were removed, and all 35 hyperlinks were removed. I've heard of journalists selectively quoting people but this is a whole nother level.
Oh come on are you serious? The alignment with "Right-Wing" in the headline of a story that more or less has nothing to do with that and is about the end of a lawsuit isn't intentional?
And Snowden defected to Russia. Sometimes you just have to go where you are free to state your case and not be shouted down which sometimes means an enemy-of-my-enemy scenario.
And crucially, Snowden is as critical of Russia as possible, though not to the point of endangering himself. He doesn't want to be there. It's not where his allegiance ultimately lies.
That's not crucial at all, if he was a Russian asset he would have been behaving the same way - criticising Russia in ways that resonate with his audience to establish credibility but not in ways that actually pose any threat or embarrassment to Russia. But on the balance of publicly available evidence it seems far more likely he is stuck there due to lack of choice.
Maybe, but I think Snowden would have preferred to be pretty much anywhere else while Dammer was just too inexperienced to recognize that being popular in some circles is more of a liability than asset.
It has a timeline. His passport was suspended while he was in Hong Kong. He did not travel to Moscow on his US passport, he travelled to Moscow on some other travel document. He’s a defector.
I know this site is full of Snowden apologists, but for goodness sake you don’t have to swallow every easily disprovable lie he tells.
Depending on the mechanics of passport cancellation it could have been both, that is the US could have issued a cancelation order while he was still in HK but HK either did not act on it in time or refused to honor it like it did with Snowden's arrest warrant. The fact that Russia did honor the passport cancellation and did not issue him an alternative travel document is more suggestive but would have been the same if Russia just wanted to hang on to him for the simple reasons of being Russia.
It's called defecting if you committed that espionage for Russia or cooperated with their intelligence while there, which while not entirely impossible is not very likely either.
You have to consider the possibility that they were the only people who he could actually talk to. Not that he wanted to be in such channels in the first place.
A while back I published some research that had implications about the us government’s treatment of digital privacy. A Russian media arm reached out to me for an interview.
I said no. Damore has the same choice.
Saying weird stuff about the kkk having cool uniforms was his own choice.
Or, he could have taken a step back, let the media do its thing, and then come back in a few months with his own view. This is actually the strategy many PR firms suggest, because it suggests moderation and makes people more likely to have cooled off and become ready to forgive. But he didn't do that, because his aim wasn't self-preservation, it was to grandstand. So he got what he got.
His brief media appearances just doubled down. It wasn't about how he was trying to express himself more clearly. It was about how "the left" was out to sabotage him and tech is taken over by SJWs. The media appearances weren't going to do anything to repair his reputation even if they were on NPR.
There was an article about this, that said he went on some alt-right show/podcast and was really uncomfortable/disagreed with what the guy was saying but also isn't the kind of person who can charismatically argue on the spot like that (isn't he "on the spectrum"?). He had no idea what he was getting into.
Well, he should have just stick to writing. Spectrum or not, recognizing that you're not great at talking, and you're not great at handling the fallout doesn't require special skills.
I'm not blaming him for going on those shows, but he should have recognized - after all he tried to argue a complex problem complexly - that supporting very biased simple platforms won't do him and his arguments any good, especially on the long run.
Possible, but he also didn’t have to go on TV with them. You can’t go on a TV channel repeatedly and then try to pretend that it doesn’t affect your reputation in one way or another.
Humans will always be judged by the company they keep. You can be angry about that, but you’ve got to rage against human nature. He decided to repeatedly go on conservative outlets and be associated with alt-right figures; he should have been aware that he’d be judged by that.
It seems like you're judging Damore for being willing to share his considered and evidenced based beliefs with other people, because you don't like the ideology of those other people. That strikes me as a very anti-intellectual and anti-philosophical position.
I don’t really care about Damore or what he thinks.
I’m just saying that if Damore continues to associate with alt-right figures, he shouldn’t be surprised when people start assuming that he’s an alt-right crank, because that’s how people work.
Fine, since you’re going to be persistent about insulting me, I’ll take the bait and explain this carefully.
Humans don’t have the time, energy, or interest to evaluate every scrap of information about other people. Instead humans regularly use heuristics when meeting people for the first time, to save time and mental energy.
One of these heuristics involves making assumptions about people based on the company they keep. If someone is a friend of a friend, you probably make positive assumptions about them based on your shared friendship and a belief in your friends good judgement (I hope). Similarly you’re likely to initially dislike someone who is close friends with someone you dislike, for very similar reasons.
Another heuristic is group membership. We regularly assume that people hired at prestigious companies or enrolled at elite universities are more intelligent or hard working than the average person, and we make similar negative associations about someone who has been to prison. It might not be true every time, but it’s a decent heuristic to evaluate people quickly.
You may or may not like these heuristics, they can occasionally have some extremely negative consequences, but this is a pretty well studied area of human psychology. We all do it.
Now, back to the subject at hand. Obviously if you know Damore or a lot about his essay, you should judge him based on that. But if the first exposure you have to him is that he’s constantly going onto right or alt-right shows, it’s a reasonable assumption that he’s an alt-right figure.
You might not agree that Damore is alt right, and you might have extremely good evidence for that, but to the casual observer that doesn’t matter. Assuming that he’s alt-right based on the company he visibly keeps is a pretty reasonable assumption given the shows that he goes on. Hence, my original point.
You didn’t read fully. I made it clear that group membership is one thing that people will judge on. Group membership would plausibly include those who go onto specific TV shows.
And yes, literally my entire point was that people will judge him for going on talk shows.
My first thought as well. You see liberals invited onto conservative outlets for genuine debates / opinions. Rarely see liberal outlets do the same as guilt by association, causing anyone who's ever been in the same room as an 'alt-right' to be tainted, seem to be rampant.
The comment was not about lawmakers though, plenty of conservative pundits / people like Damore that want to share their stuff but are treated like they're radioactive.
It's pretty well known that if you go on Fox news, the other news organizations like CNN, MSNBC, etc will ban you from their station. Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew have talked about this on their podcast and so have many other people interviewed by Fox news.
This creates the false impression of "Fox News darlings" and ends up furthering the "us vs them" narrative.
Perhaps it's actually because Dr. Drew, Dr. Oz, and Dr. Phil are dangerous self-promoting quacks who dispense deadly medical advice, and CNN, MSNBC, etc have a problem with that, but Fox News loves it. Looks like CNN etc made the right call.
>Dr. Oz, Dr. Drew and Dr. Phil made these claims on Fox News. Now they're backtracking
>TV hosts Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Drew Pinsky and Phil McGraw have all appeared on Fox News and made these misleading claims about coronavirus. Now, all of them are backtracking.
So did liberal professor Bret Weinstein when the extremist mob attacked him in Washington for daring to show up to teach while being white. As in Damore’s case, this says more about the mob than the subject.
If over and over again they praised and held him up as a symbol fighting for some ideology they espoused, and some enemy (media/ideology also identified over and over) supposedly tried to silence him, then I suppose it’d be analogous?
He chose to appear on at least one show that routinely promotes white-nationalist talking points – I don't think his politics is really much of a question.
Mussolini essentially saw the left-right spectrum as useless. I think he was correct about this. The fact that both fascism and anarcho capitalism are classified as being on the right indicates the spectrum is a gross oversimplification.
Fascists and Anarcho-Capitalists have certain abstract philosophical differences, but in practice, their actual behaviors are almost identical. Most (Fascists|Anarcho-Capitalists) are young, white males who use the internet way too much and either don't vote, or vote Republican. Even among their intellectuals, there's a lot more overlap than you would assume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe.
The left-rights spectrum isn't supposed to capture the details of everyone's ideology: a spectrum that did that would be some kind of 20-dimensional hypercube. It's just supposed to capture who take who's side when it comes to that.
It means they don't socialize, are not pragmatic, have little understanding of the issues most people actually care about, lack the capacity to empathize with people with radically different life experiences.
Fascists have a long history of presenting their movement as a third way, neither right nor left. In fact "ni droite, ni gauche" was a slogan of the far-right French political party Front National, whose founder is on the record having defended the Nazi occupation government.
I don't think Damore is a fascist. However, it seems clear to me that, he, along with a lot of other right-wing figures today are using the exact same tactic as fascists once did by presenting themselves as "centrist." If you don't believe me, check out this Twitter account: https://nitter.net/a_centrism.
>Damore does not fit into the neat ideological right or left classification
Lets see, his lawyer for this suit who is quoted a lot in the article:
>Harmeet Kaur Dhillon is an American lawyer and Republican Party official. She is the former vice chairwoman of the California Republican Party, and the National Committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California.
Damore hasn't said much of his idealogical beliefs publicly and I think it's unfair to criticize him on his choice of legal counsel because he just wants to be well represented which is his right. Regardless of your political beliefs Dhillon is an accomplished attorney. Other attorneys on the left in California don't want to touch the case because of the pearl-clutchers and public political implications so the enemy of your enemy becomes your friend.
> Damore hasn't said much of his idealogical beliefs publicly
That’s all he needs to say to make his beliefs clear. If the whole country (minus some “open-minded” tech bros) thinks you’re a sexist jackass and you do nothing to correct them, I wonder...
Are there protected classes based on political views?
If someone is expressing political or even religious views that are so extreme that they create a hostile work environment, I don't see an issue with firing them over it.
(I am not interested in debating whether or not Damore's views reached the "hostile work environment" threshold)
None federally. In California, "political activities" are a protected class. The extent to which activities and views overlap is almost certainly a messy question of law that I'm not qualified to answer with respect to Damore.
> If someone is expressing political or even religious views that are so extreme that they create a hostile work environment, I don't see an issue with firing them over it.
There is a process, and step one in that process is asking them to please stop sharing their views in the workplace.
Expressing extremely wrong views can't be the standard for creating a hostile work environment because people are wrong about a bunch of stuff and the only way to figure that out is to express the view and be told why it is wrong.
Particularly in the Damore case, the standard shouldn't be how a third party feels. There is a long history of seeing how that standard plays out, it'll end up hurting minority voices. The standard needs to be how a first party responds when asked to do something.
The case could be constructed as being fired due to the backlash caused to google.
Damore would have had to prove that there was a active discrimination at google toward some political views. He had some good evidence for that (in terms of internal conversations and witnesses) but it is not so clear whether that was enough, or even if it was necessarily illegal in this case.
You say this as though it's plainly obvious that it wasn't. The truth is that it depends, and not on whether or not we think his political views are ridiculous.
The causes of action in the lawsuit were unlawful termination on account of political activities (which are protected in California) and sex (which is protected federally). Google made three motions to dismiss and lost all of them. Does that mean Google is guilty? Of course not. All it means is that the claim stated by Damore, if true, could convince a reasonable jury that Google violated his civil rights.
Google would much rather pay out settlement money than risk having an unflattering jury verdict or have to release even more unflattering documents in discovery. I'm sure Damore would rather not go to trial if he could help it as well.
I'm not convinced it was because of his "political views" is an automatic fact.
People say "political views", that's how he might frame it, but I would assume Google would frame it as they fired him for making statements that women are less capable.
I feel this comment is a good summation of this conversation. I do not know whether you would agree with the presumed Google's opinion, but a big part of this entire "scandal" is that Damore never said that women are less capable.
It could be considered political in countries and political systems that consider women as second class citizens and bar them from holding elected office or other positions of responsibility, or if he was advocating for the adoption of such model.
Quite possibly, if one shows one's work on how one arrived at that statement (statistics can be bloody slippery things, and while individual data points are facts, the analysis, interpretation, and summarization of them starts to wander away from "fact," especially when one begins to do curve fitting or assumptions about population distributions).
And if one runs with that fact alone and tries to build behaviors on it, one's likely to fall into a similar trap to the one the phrenologists fell into: assuming that a single fact is descriptive enough of the world to dictate theory or practice.
>Quite possibly, if one shows one's work on how one arrived at that statement (statistics can be bloody slippery things, and while individual data points are facts, the analysis, interpretation, and summarization of them starts to wander away from "fact," especially when one begins to do curve fitting or assumptions about population distributions).
Any and every statistical study ever done on race and crime supports the FACT stated above. Per capita, it's an indisputable fact that they commit more violent crimes, raw numbers alone, no curve fitting or extrapolation.
>And if one runs with that fact alone and tries to build behaviors on it, one's likely to fall into a similar trap to the one the phrenologists fell into: assuming that a single fact is descriptive enough of the world to dictate theory or practice.
Which brings us back to my original statement. Are facts racist and sexist?
"Water at standard atmospheric pressure boils at 100 degrees C and freezes at 0 degrees C" is not open to interpretation.
Making a terse sociological claim from statistics is almost always open to interpretation. Statistics is the science of interpreting discrete data points, looking for patterns and relations. Lies, damn lies, and all that. The only thing that stands alone without interpretation in statistics is the input data itself, and that tells us nothing.
I suspect that for the specific claim you've made, the evidence supports the claim, but I'd want to see whether they've controlled for conflating the definition of "crimes committed" with "charged with crimes" or "convicted of crimes" to be certain. Or whether the statistics are using the Bayesian or frequentist approach (after all, the claim being made is "are more likely," and that always assumes a giant pile of unstated priors). Or or or, etc.
Even still, whether the statistical claim being made is fact is uninteresting. If one assumes it's fact, the interesting question is "What do you do with it?" In isolation, with that one fact? Nothing. It's not nearly enough info to form theory or policy. Which is why my original response to your original post was about interpretation, not fact. Interpretation is where things get interesting. Facts without interpretation are dead as rocks.
>Making a terse sociological claim from statistics is almost always open to interpretation.
Almost, but in specific cases like above, it is not open to interpretation. It's a raw fact.
>Statistics is the science of interpreting discrete data points, looking for patterns and relations.
And organizing and presenting discrete data, without interpolation.
>The only thing that stands alone without interpretation in statistics is the input data itself, and that tells us nothing.
Wrong. Basic presentation without interpolation is a core pillar of statistics.
>I suspect that for the specific claim you've made, the evidence supports the claim, but I'd want to see whether they've controlled for conflating the definition of "crimes committed" with "charged with crimes" or "convicted of crimes" to be certain.
Even with controlling, African Americans are charged, commit, and are convicted of more crimes than Asian Americans.
>Or whether the statistics are using the Bayesian or frequentist approach (after all, the claim being made is "are more likely," and that always assumes a giant pile of unstated priors).
None of the above, just basic summary statistics.
>Even still, whether the statistical claim being made is fact is uninteresting. If one assumes it's fact, the interesting question is "What do you do with it?"
It's super interesting, considering what the OP asked.
>Nothing. It's not nearly enough info to form theory or policy.
It's more than enough info to form theory, and possibly policy.
>Which is why my original response to your original post was about interpretation, not fact.
And what I've stated above is fact, not interpretation. Back to square one.
>Interpretation is where things get interesting. Facts without interpretation are dead as rocks.
Wrong. Facts without interpretation are as alive as can be, and stand on their own.
Yeah, that's exactly why that's not enough data to put together policy. You might as well measure bumps on people's heads to predict whether they want anti-violence funding; you'll have about as much luck as you will chasing it after skin color or "manifestations in African American culture that breeds violence" (what does that even mean?).
> Bumps on people's heads have nothing to do with violence. This is a non sequitur.
I submit to you it's exactly as irrelevant as skin color. I submit to you if you take the population that you have described, change only the category from "African American" to another category and nothing else, and kept the same population of people with no other parameters changed, you would not see a change in the violence rate.
Believing that measurable correlation implies causation is one of the major failings that I see often encouraged in the computer science space. It underpins some of the greatest failings of machine learning.
You made claims about population and then claims about interventions that suggest that the population membership is causal. What if the causal issue is poverty? Poverty in the United States is so deeply correlated with being a member of a racial category that it is extremely hard to disambiguate effects that show up in race from effects that show up in income and asset levels. This is what I mean when I say lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Because if the cause is poverty and not "African American culture," then violence interventions for African Americans are like "get your energy level up" interventions for people who are starving. You'll waste good money treating the wrong problem. You'll also miss people that also have the same problem but don't get any intervention because they don't fit the poorly-defined template.
My thoughts as well - makes sense. It's going to continue to bring Google a headache, especially with conservatism on the apparent rise (i.e. still could have Trump in 2024).
Far easier to settle with a non-disclosure clause and an agreement to halt all public appearances. James Damore went on a campaign of visiting universities and other locations to discuss his views. Honestly, it was a good move, his case was weak, but the publicity seems to have paid off.
Wouldn’t put it past him. Berlusconi kinda did that, alternating wins and losses fairly regularly over 20 years (while his opponents changed every few years). I think he started younger than Trump though.
Exactly this; I just wonder what the settlement amount was. Seven figures plus certainly. I applaud anyone who sticks it to a mega corp, politics be damned!
I am shocked that there is even a discussion to be had on this.
In architecture (a somewhat older profession, but also concerning things constructed by people), women previously did have a hard time, and often had to practice under their husbands/partners name.
Mercifully this ended some while ago, and now architecture schools and onwards are more evenly gender balanced. Nobody suggests that women are somehow naturally 'less inclined', and the profession is richer for it.
It would be great if engineering could get to this point.
> Nobody suggests that women are somehow naturally 'less inclined', and the profession is richer for it.
It was not about "inclination", but rather that the current engineering culture tended to be lean a certain way when it comes to focus:
> Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait).[15] Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.[1][14]
He argued that if Google wanted to change the gender balance in their engineering divisions, they had to change the types of things that can be worked on:
Google wants more women in engineering (which isn't a bad thing), but do they have a similar program for getting more men into HR?
As to gender balance in professions: are there initiatives to get more men into nursing or kindergarten / primary education, and women into plumbing or carpentry?
There are economic factors associated with being a primary educator. The pay, for lack of a better way to put it, sucks. This impacts men and women.
My wife and I went through Physics grad school together. To say that the experience was hostile for her, and many other women, would be an understatement.
My daughter is contemplating grad school for next year (senior in college, its been an interesting year). We've been open/honest about the challenges she'll face in Physics, but the state of things is much better now than it was when we went through 30 years ago (ouch). Given that she runs circles around most of her fellow students, I'm not the least bit worried on the academic side.
My concern, as all fathers of exceptional daughters should be (I guess that's all of us?) is the cultural aspects of programs, and potential jobs. I use the word "place" below to discuss grad school and/or jobs.
If the place is overtly hostile, its a hard pass. No need to waste time with that. Think Uber, and other tech-bro places.
If the place is passive aggressive hostile, there are strategies to cope, but again, biased towards pass. Passive aggressive hostility wears on you.
If the place is open, and sane. Worth a look.
Think about the economic aspect of this. You the enlightened consumer/producer of product (grad school, job) have more information than ever about the quality of life at these places. If a place is just bad, they will lose at attracting sufficient consumers/producers of producers. Which means they will have lower ability to operate in market.
Bigger picture. Women are not intrinsically less able to do quantitative or analytical work. Environments that are not conducive to them doing this work will tend to depress the population of them doing this work. Environments which are freer from these stresses will tend to accumulate population doing this work.
I think it might be simple as that. Its not about ability. Its about environment.
> I think it might be simple as that. Its not about ability. Its about environment.
Which is how I interpreted what Damore was trying to do with his memo: saying that women are capable, but that the environment was not appealing to them. Either/both of (a) what they got to work on, and/or (b) how they were treated.
IMHO, men and women perceive and react to the world differently, and treating them the same is foolish and counter-productive. Damore was simply pointing out those differences.
I found The Female Brain a good book on this topic:
I generally disagree with broad brush strokes of articles and books that make such cases. I find this to be a watered down variant on Phrenology[1], but rather than using physical skull measurements, people invoke the existence of two X chromosomes to offer explanations of differences.
I've worked with/for brilliant female scientists and engineers before. I personally believe that what makes a good scientist or engineer is a profound insatiable curiosity, and a drive to understand. I've seen this in both females and males.
My point was, when you encourage this, and you help the person understand and adapt to challenges they may face, society is often better off, as we have added to our scientific and engineering pool of talent. If you discourage this by saying "your brain is different", or "you are more interested in feelings than quantitative science", we wind up with a discouraging environment for 1/2 of our prospective scientists and engineers.
I don't see how the latter is a good thing. Damore had a right to author his text. I'd argue that sending it out to others in his company was a bad idea ... generally one should separate personal politics from corporate life. But I disagree with numerous things in the text (I read it when it came out).
> I generally disagree with broad brush strokes of articles and books that make such cases. I find this to be a watered down variant on Phrenology[1], but rather than using physical skull measurements, people invoke the existence of two X chromosomes to offer explanations of differences.
The difference in chromosomes trigger all sorts changes in the development cycle of humans. Unless you want to argue that males having 10x the testosterone levels has no effect on behaviour. Not to mention all sorts of differences in brain structures.
The context of the memo was slightly different. Google would love to reach some kind of 50/50 gender balance internally. The point of the memo was that 1) it is possible that the current google will never be able to reach that balance due to individual choices and 2) suggestions on how to make that goal easier to achieve (for example using performances in teams rather than performances as independent contributor as internal metrics).
From my point of view the current situation is that many organizations are both hostile to women and desperate not to be. what I think was really useful of the Damore memo is that it tried to point a way on how to change institutions to be more inclusive by default.
For sure it would not solve 100% of the problem, maybe just 5%, but I actually think it would have made the remaining 95% easier to solve also.
> I think it might be simple as that. Its not about ability. Its about environment.
Agree, but it's also about preferences. When a woman has to choose between medicine, arts, economics, law, education, IT and other fields, they tend to prefer IT less than men. It's just that there are so many other good options.
If you control by the amount of time invested and passion you would probably see little discrimination.
My daughter started in Art school at the university, then switched to Physics/Math. She is passionate about art, but found the environment hostile. She was welcomed with open arms in the physics, math, and engineering schools, and is passionate about research. She finds herself encouraged and working in a supportive research group now.
> We've been open/honest about the challenges she'll face in Physics
Why would you disadvantage her by poisoning her mind like that? Also, were you open/honest about the advantages she'd have for being a woman in physics? Extra programs, scholarships, internships, guidance, resources, etc set aside for her?
> My concern, as all fathers of exceptional daughters should be (I guess that's all of us?) is the cultural aspects of programs, and potential jobs.
If it was all of us, then it wouldn't be exceptional would it? It would be commonplace/universal, the opposite of exceptional.
> Its not about ability. Its about environment.
It's about personal choice. In wealthier liberal countries where women have choice, they don't go STEM careers. In poor traditional countries where women have little choice, they go to STEM careers. It's not about "passive agressive hostility" otherwise no women would work in nursing. It's about having the ability to do what you want.
"What’s more, the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields like science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. They posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at."
"The trend was most pronounced in places like Norway, Finland, and Sweden. Although this region is known for policies and a cultural outlook that supports greater gender equality, relatively few girls pursue STEM degrees there, when compared to places like Algeria or Turkey."
> As to gender balance in professions: are there initiatives to get more ... women into plumbing or carpentry?
Yes, there are. A lot of public construction projects have goals for minorities and women as a percentage of the labor on the job site. Firms owned by women, minorities, and service-disabled veterans are given priority in the bidding process through different mechanisms. Most of the trade unions have programs to recruit women into the trades.
Not just architecture, also medicine and law. The whole question is what's different about math, CS, engineering and the physical sciences that makes it so much harder to reach gender balance there? If you look at the commonalities that these fields share, the "things, not people" aspect is the most prominent by far.
One counterexample doesn't "disprove" the correlation. (Mostly because the example is in the correlation already, and the correlation holds, plus it's just a correlation.)
The comment I responded to very clearly implies that this "things, not people" is the reason for gender imbalance in CS. They are doing far more than identifying a correlation.
That can be one of many factors. The alleged claim is that "CS fits nicely in this model", whether microbiology also fits is a different question. Also microbiology is closer to medical field than engineering.
How is architecture any less about 'things' than software engineering?
The 'things vs people' dichotomy is extremely vague and obviously bullshit. Is Facebook not about people? Airbnb? Uber?
It may be that these companies, perhaps inadvertently, choose to hire people who don't focus on the people-related aspects of their roles. But it's obvious that empathy and an interest in people would in fact be very useful at many tech companies.
Architects design buildings for people, take people's needs into consideration, etc.
Software naturally has that side too. And Google is ironically pretty bad at this, because somehow it always ends up too borg-ish. They do need more people-focused people, but so far they ended up just selecting for people who are willing to work for them, but haven't really changed. (Ironically, Damore was right in this.)
>"The 'things vs people' dichotomy is extremely vague and obviously bullshit."
Is it? Or have you simply not taken a moment to do a little bit of research?
Here is a study with 500,000 participants, for example:
"Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension.
"Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests.
"Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. "
[1] Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests. Psychological Bulletin 135(6):859-84 · November 2009
Here's another:
"Career choices have been shown to be driven in part by interests, and gender differences in those interests have generally been considered to result from socialization. We explored the contribution of sex hormones to career-related interests, in particular studying whether prenatal androgens affect interests through psychological orientation to Things versus People.
"We examined this question in individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who have atypical exposure to androgens early in development, and their unaffected siblings (total N = 125 aged 9 to 26 years). Females with CAH had more interest in Things versus People than did unaffected females, and variations among females with CAH reflected variations in their degree of androgen exposure.
"Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People."
[2] Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People. Horm Behav. 2011 Sep; 60(4): 313–317.
Published online 2011 Jun 12. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2011.06.002
You've missed what his comment was about, it's not that the things vs people dichotomy doesn't exist. It's that it has no relation to engineering. Architecture is just as much things over people as engineering, Architecture is balaanced, engineering isn't. The problem is that in reality, you can do engineering from a people first approach or from a things first approach, and in reality, only one of those approaches will get you through university and into Google.
I take the engineering-from-a-things-first-approach bridge. You feel free to enjoy the other one. I'm sure you'll feel very validated as you spiral into the abyss
Most software engineering jobs aren't predominantly about things rather than people, so I doubt any of that research is relevant, regardless of its quality. You can't just uncritically lump software engineering in with "science", "engineering" and "mathematics" (themselves enormously diverse fields).
It's dangerous to do a "little bit" of research. What you'd actually need to do to get any information (if any really exists in this domain, which I doubt) is to become an expert and read through thousands of papers and books, including all the critiques of the ones you cite.
That doesn't follow suit with the history of computer science however. Women were a large amount of computer science grads back in the 70s and 80s where it was even more difficult and arguably less social then modern development.
Nowadays software dev is highly collaborative and social. It faced declining amounts of graduates that were women from the late-80s and onwards compared to engineering and the physical sciences which if I'm recalling correctly have steadily rose.
1. It does follow if you add in the money & prestige aspect. For a long time software development was neither lucrative nor prestigious so a lot of men simply weren't interested. As economic expectations for computer science careers grew, so did the number of men.
2. I personally don't find software dev collaborative or social in any meaningful way compared to other careers or industries.
Women are the majority of CS grads in Saudi Arabia, and you'll find that they are many women studying CS in third-world countries that typically are less "gender egalitarian" than Western countries.
In wealthy, western countries giving men and women the choice of what to study without having to think too much about where they'll end up in society, that's where you see the most gender imbalance.
Yes, but to make this argument you would have to demonstrate that the West somehow became much more gender egalitarian in the past 30 years in order to explain the drop in CS grads.
So what happened from the late 80s to now that resulted in women gaining more freedom and therefore shifting them out of CS? And more specifically: Why has this only affected computer science? The gender equality paradox supposedly holds for the entirety of STEM and yet we've seen woman graduates in STEM steadily rise across the board except for CS. Therefore that would make CS an outlier and not the norm.
That's assuming the gender equality paradox holds true which is likely not the case considering the issues with the assertion brought up in the Wikipedia article you linked (which I hope you read).
from the 80s there were huge advances in mainstream feminism. For many people it was around 1998-2008 that a lot of people in their circle became feminist
The fact remains that there are more women studying engineering (not just CS) in less egalitarian third world countries than in progressive western countries, despite the latter having campaigns, funding, etc.
The idea that male and female primates (including humans) have different ways to look at the world seems very sensible to me, and that would explain why "women care more about people" and "men care more about things".
That wasn't the argument I was making. Please don't change the topic. I don't dispute that there are more women studying engineering in said countries, what I asked you was a very specific question.
Why did Computer Science of all STEM degrees face a drop in female graduates versus the others?
And if you're making the argument that 'women care more about people' and 'men care more about things' then I'm going to disagree heavily considering it doesn't relate to modern day software development. Current development is highly collaborative, constantly dealing with other people whether it's customers or members of your team. In fact, back when CS was at its peak of women obtaining CS degrees, that was when CS was more focused on things and less on people as a result of software still being a niche and local thing. That argument doesn't work considering the history of CS as a whole.
I think the answer to your question is precisely that, with all the campaigns in the west telling women to follow their own path, do whatever they want, etc. they ended up predominantly choosing careers they actually like (nursing, teaching, anything that has to do with people)
> Women were a large amount of computer science grads back in the 70s and 80s where it was even more difficult and arguably less social then modern development.
I believe this to be missing the point. There are many women that are 100% aligned with the personality trait of an idealized engineer, no one (or at least not Damore) contest that.
Personality traits that are intrinsic, thus suggesting women are intrinsically less inclined to engineering. (Note: I don't agree with the thesis, but that's the implication).
No, he explicitly states that women roughly have same average iq as men and are equally competent and capable to do engineering work.
OTOH personality traits aren’t distributed equally between men and women. Personality traits don’t impact your ability to do engineering work, but they influence What type of workplace culture / communication protocols in which you can thrive. Damore advocated for making engineering cultures more accommodating to people who have personality traits resembling the distribution that women exhibit.
I think the good-faith view of this is that Damore claimed that were engineering changed a bit it'd be more appealing to women. So women - according to the thesis - intrinsically less inclined to do SW engineering as currently practiced.
What country is this? In my country (Australia), the percentage of licensed female architects is around 20%, and this percentage seems to be about the same in the USA and UK. Europe seems a little better with around 30% female representation.
UK. The architecture schools are certainly evenly mixed for students, though I agree this may not yet have fed through to the higher reaches of the profession.
> I am shocked that there is even a discussion to be had on this.
We have to have this discussion is virtue signalers and far leftists keep spewing lies.
> It would be great if engineering could get to this point.
If it were, then it would mean that a significant number of women are forced into the field out of poverty or familial pressure.
"Some would say that the gender STEM gap occurs not because girls can’t do science, but because they have other alternatives, based on their strengths in verbal skills,” she said. “In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less."
We have decades of research on this already. The wealthier a nation is and more equal a nation is, the greater the disparity in STEM.
"What’s more, the countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields like science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. They posit that this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they’d enjoy most and be best at."
> The problem is that our community isn’t very friendly or welcoming to women
Be precise, how is your community not friendly to women in ways you cannot fix in five minutes? If its obvious, its trivial to list them, if its subtle then its worth doing the exercise.
We have to accept they may just not want the gig. Just like most men don't go into pre-school teaching.
* Intellectual posturing and oneupsmanship in software teams. Participating in intellectual dick waving.
* A strong focus on being "right" over working collaboratively (especially in domains with no right answers).
* Hyper competitiveness - to the detriment of effectiveness.
* A lack of empathy (e.g. PRs with "your code sucks, suck it up and stop being such a baby").
These things are hardly good from the perspective of any software developer (except particular kinds of men who thrive under these conditions) but they're particularly off putting to women.
I tend to find that this aggressive behavior is most frequently exhibited by "senior" developers who aren't actually very good or clever but have built up a reputation that they wish to protect. Some developers are very territorial.
This is the crux of the issue. For this to be true, it must also be true that men and women are, at least in some ways, intrinsically different (otherwise why would these things pose a greater challenge for women relative to men)?
>This is the crux of the issue. For this to be true, it must also be true that men and women are, at least in some ways, intrinsically different
I don't see why it's the crux. It's really only necessary that men and women be socialized differently for this to be true - to grow up surrounded by people telling you that you need to be more "agreeable" and "not too pushy".
I think whether it is true or not is rather beside the point. Toxic working environments are anti-meritocratic and anti productive. Even if we didn't give a fuck how many women entered the profession we should fix them. Intellectual dick waving leads to worse code, not better.
Humans are social creatures and very little of what we do is innate, and we have extremely flexible brains which change based on use. Social cues and training are enormously influential, and arguments based on biological determinism have a steep bar to reach controlling for those factors. For example, there are significant variations around the world on math and science academic performance so it’s unlikely to be innate. Even when you do find differences in a study (e.g. spatial reasoning) it takes years to test whether those are due to practice (i.e. are children equally encouraged to develop those skills?) and also establish whether those low-level differences are key to a high-level task.
There are some low-level differences (e.g. ratios of different cell types in the brain) but there’s no conclusive evidence linking that to academic skills or job performance (just how does 3-d reasoning affect your ability to write Python, anyway?), but there has been a history of earlier results attributed to gender not holding up under scrutiny.
Contrary to a popular straw man, few people deny that men and women are different in some respects. The point is that there is no reason to think that these differences should, in a healthy culture, put women off becoming programmers, or make them less capable of doing a good job.
Sure, and that's not an argument I'd make. But, as Damore suggested in his memo, mightn't these innate differences mean that women are less likely, on average, to prefer careers in software engineering? And mightn't these innate differences also explain why women are strongly over-represented in certain other professions like nursing (91%), elementary and middle school teaching (81%) and social work (80%)?
>Damore suggested in his memo, mightn't these innate differences mean that women are less likely, on average, to prefer careers in software engineering?
As far as I understood it, this wasn't the bit of the memo that people were attacking.
Any difference between two things might turn out to be responsible for some other difference between the two things. Perhaps men are better at software engineering because they're taller. Perhaps women don't enjoy programming because they have breasts. It is pointless -- and in this context, often harmful -- to speculate.
I don't think that the cause is uncertain. Broadly speaking, the cause is sexism. What I'm saying is that there is no evidence whatever for a biological cause, and it is harmful to speculate wildly on biological causes in the absence of evidence.
Women would not have been in charge of hiring, so no to 2. (The programming jobs men were hired for would likely not have been considered the same kind of job.)
Not sure what you mean by 3.
Roughly yes to 4, although the issue is systematic sexism, not the personal prejudices of men and women. Society in general, including many women, disapproved of women becoming programmers once it began to be seen as a high-status high-skill profession.
If it's society in general that is sexist, why have many industries that are "high-status high-skill" seen a serious increase in the number of women in the profession, while engineering has not?
These arguments seem to go in circles a lot.
First it matters that "the majority of programmers were women". But then it doesn't actually matter, because the people in charge of hiring weren't women. Ok. Then it's society in general that is sexist, but actually it's only certain professions where this "general sexism" manifests itself, for no apparent reason. Ok. Then you have the most egalitarian countries in the world seeing more disparate outcomes than other western countries. But this is apparently because sexism and cultural norms are so nebulous and hard to pin down that there must still be some sexism going on there too, we just can't see it. Ok.
There are a lot of claims being made with no evidence whatsoever. While I personally don't put much stock in psychology, at least Damore's points had actual studies behind them. And though it has been thrown around in this thread that "some of the authors disagreed with Damore's interpretation!", I have actually read the studies and found nothing factually inaccurate with the interpretation. That's what is so difficult about a lot of psychology – the hard facts are few and far between, so effectively every result is subject to interpretation. An author of a paper can disagree, but that doesn't make Damore wrong.
>If it's society in general that is sexist, why have many industries that are "high-status high-skill" seen a serious increase in the number of women in the profession, while engineering has not?
Because those industries accepted that they had a problem and took steps to fix it. Altering the perceptions of the broader society can be a big part of that. People no longer see anything unusual about a woman being a lawyer or a doctor. Fifty years ago, that wasn't the case. So there's no paradox here. "General sexism" includes stereotypes about appropriate occupations for men and women. These can change over time, as we've seen in the case of lawyers and doctors.
>First it matters that "the majority of programmers were women". But then it doesn't actually matter, because the people in charge of hiring weren't women.
It matters because it shows that women were, at one time, both interested in and capable of programming. No-one has said that it doesn't matter, so your 'but' makes no sense.
You're quite right that there's nothing to be learned by throwing around citations to half-read and half-understood studies (which is why I haven't done any of that). All you have to do is listen to what women in tech say. If James Danmore had done that for five minutes instead of wasting his time on his half-assed "research", none of this would have happened.
Women did a lot of the manufacturing during the last World War. Does that mean women are interested in being factory workers? As to capacity, nobody, including Damore, claimed that women do not have the same capacity as men to be programmers.
Anecdotal evidence is worse than psychology studies.
I'm not sure why you think there's any analogy between women working as programmers in the 60s and women working in factories during the second World War. But in fact, WWII did effect a huge change in perceptions of women as part of the workforce.
It does mean that in the absence of any other obvious explanation. I don't actually know the extent to which women working in factories were conscripted in WWII. But I do know that women weren't forced to work as programmers in the 1960s.
The issue here is that doing something without being forced to do that thing does not then mean you are interested in that thing.
If you have many good / attractive options and you choose one, you probably have an interest in that thing.
If you have precious few, not great options, and you choose one, it does not necessarily indicate the same.
I shouldn't need to provide copious examples for this to be obviously true. Money is only one of many motivators, but it is often strong enough on its own to overcome your interest (or lack thereof) in something if it means you get paid for it.
Take another example: many women throughout history have chosen sex work. That does not mean that sex work interests them. It just means they decided sex work was better than alternatives, for whatever reasons.
Doing something of your own free will does not mean you have a genuine interest in that thing. It can (and often does) just mean that thing is better than alternatives, for a multitude of reasons that are not "I find it the most interesting".
Most people are not genuinely interested in their jobs, so I doubt that variation in genuine interest a major factor in gender balance. But sure, it is impossible to disprove your speculation conclusively. The trouble is that a lot of people seem to think that the mere abstract possibility of such speculations ought to shut down any serious attempt to eliminate sexism in tech.
First off, I don't understand how my stance is "speculation", but yours is not.
Even assuming that your assertion about sexism in tech is not in fact speculation, how exactly is introducing more sexist policies into tech going to help eliminate sexism in tech?
If you look closely, there is very little evidence for biological causes. There are many alleged biological differences which are alleged to be relevant, but rarely, if ever, evidence for a causal link.
Your post seems to make a set of assumptions about women's abilities and preferences (for example their ability to thrive in a hyper-competitive environment).
It's not clear why these should be any more acceptable than the claims Damore made.
There are some quite well documented differences in women's personality traits - particularly surrounding sociability, agreeableness and neuroticism. It's not particularly contentious to state that men and women have differing personalities. What may be contentious is the conclusions you derive from that.
Incidentally:
1) An environment filled with intellectual posturing is not "hyper competitive". The fact that you could confuse the two is concerning.
2) My post may have seemed to you to make a set of assumptions about women's abilities but it didn't (just their preferences).
It's very strange to say that's male only and "off-putting" to women. Have you ever tried exploring female-dominated industries? Because women can and do display all those behaviors as well.
I think these behaviors are toxic and off putting to other men too, but men seem to be more willing to put up with them.
I don't see an equivalence to nursing or primary school teaching since by and large it's not the toxic aspects of these careers that puts off men, it's the lack of pay and status.
If the reasons for them choosing different professions is simple preference regarding the nature of tasks, no problem. If the reason is that our profession is toxic in a way that puts them off that's a problem.
So why assume it's the latter and reject the former as an option? If you state that men and women have different personalities and attitudes then you must accept that carries over to interests as well. The fact that STEM fields collectively are balanced while different sectors have different ratios shows that there's really no major underlying issue and that personal preference is the overriding factor.
Fuck yeah it does. Actually I think it's the slightly below average places that are some of the worst. I've tended to find that technical quality correlates to better behavior, probably because insecurity is what drives so much of it.
In my experience, those below average places where people tweak payroll software (where I started out in my career) are the worst. I would expect the below average people in Uber and Google to be among the worst of the worst too, though (they are the most insecure, I think). A lack of psychological safety is what drives a lot of this.
As always there are exceptions, but as a rule, mediocrity breeds insecurity and insecurity breeds toxic behavior and no, none of this can be fixed in five minutes.
> Be precise, how is your community not friendly to women in ways you cannot fix in five minutes?
Techbros. Techbros everywhere. It's not what people want to hear, most people would love it if the field and the educational pipeline leading to it had more professional norms all-around. But it's a real thing. (FWIW, I don't think of Damore as part of the problem, indeed his proposals would help a lot if widely adopted.)
I honestly want to meet techbros. I live in some sort of echo chamber where gender is so irrelevant to most participants.
I have never seen anyone ask someone's gender on a github issue, I may have missed it but I have seen few issues opened because no inclusivity. No one in any of the programming communities I am in gives two shit about the gender of the participants. Most people have pseudonyms with anime avatars anyway.
Incidentally the techbros you describe are majorly young cs graduates from my observation. Why are unis teaching them to be tech bros? Are unis at fault for making tech non inclusive and toxic?
Honestly, they aren't in github issues. They are on Twitter, they are sending people DMs, they are at physical meetups.
Me and my wife are both AI academics in the UK who do a bunch of programming. I have no "interesring stories" to tell, my wife has a dozen including men punching walls because they were beaten by a woman in a board game, being sent death threats and dick pics (not from the same person), and being assumed to be my non-tech wife when we go to events where she was invited and I was going as her partner.
Now, these events aren't daily, or even weekly, but they stick with people and make then feel unwelcome and unsafe.
Sounds like those issues she is having is not due to her industry, but just due to some sort of other dynamics not necessarily related to the industry itself.
Journalist using the words "frat" in an article doesn't make something true. The only place I see this term slung is in the media and HN, or people making up abstract bad guys to vent their anger on.
Fraternities exist, and they have a culture associated with them. Visit any college campus (well, not right now) and you’ll find out exactly what it is.
No, I was recently a college student who lived near frat houses. (Yes, I know there are academic fraternities: that’s not what this discussion was about.)
Please stop claiming things that were never said. You do this constantly in your comments and it's not fair or productive.
My point is only that the media is not the objective truth or overruling expert in any single subject, and often filled with highly-opinionated, ideological, and sometimes misleading takes.
As far as this specific issue, I disagree that it is so widespread across the industry outside of a few companies with clear problems. Also the Kushner story seems to be mocking their appearance than behaviors.
It's a media narrative constructed to sell headlines.
The exact same behavior is present in people that have zero background in frats. How do you explain that?
This is not a "frat bros" problem, it's a misogyny problem. Painting it with the words frat just helps paint whatever biased narrative is being spun to make the story more compelling.
Since you don't seem to be aware of it, one thing "bro" strongly and literally implies is Frat Culture. They literally call each other "brothers".
In case English isn't your native language, or you're lucky enough to not be familiar with this dark side of American culture, the commonly used terms are "Fraternity Brothers", "Frat Brothers", and "Frat Bros", who become "Tech Bros" when they graduate.
And YES, it is a culture, and a notoriously toxic pervasive culture at that, which Snapchat and Uber exemplify.
>Snapchat, the App Frat Bros Love, Was Started By the Frattiest Bro of Them All
>Evan Spiegel, the CEO and cofounder of Snapchat, has created a massive, popular application. It's basically a frat boys dream, and as it turns out, Spiegel was the ultimate frat guy during his time at Standford.
>Confirmed: Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel Is Kind Of An Ass
>I’ve known Evan Spiegel, Snapchat CEO and co-founder, for a while now. We have had more than half a dozen in-person conversations, far more phone calls, and even shared twenty minutes together on stage at Disrupt SF. And try as I might, I’ve had a hard time liking him. Now, after reading emails sent by Evan Spiegel during his undergrad time at Stanford, I clearly understand what my instincts were telling me.
>Dude’s kind of a dick.
>You can see the whole swath of leaked emails at ValleyWag, but I can summarize them all pretty easily for you with the above paragraph. Here’s a typical example:
>“LUAU FUCKING RAGED. Thanks to all of you. Hope at least six girl [sic] sucked your dicks last night. Cuz that didn’t happen for me.” Signed affectionately, “fuckbitchesgetleid. Spiegel.”
>Inside the dark, depraved world of US frat culture.
American ultra.
>Photographer Andrew Moisey explores the rituals, texts and initiations of American fraternities: breeding grounds for aggressive, toxic masculinity.
>The world of American fraternities is a strange and ghoulish one. Depraved and simmering with violence, it’s a hotbed of ultra-masculine entitlement: a grim embodiment of chest-pumping male tribalism.
>Humiliation, homoeroticism and animal cruelty: inside the frathouse
>Photographer Andrew Moisey uncovered ritual hazing, extreme drunkenness and toxic masculinity on one college campus – from men destined to be America’s future leaders
>[...] A world in which homosexuality is taboo but cross-dressing and semi-naked wrestling are acceptable and parading your penis and testicles is almost de rigueur.
>[...] “These all-male campus spaces have been around since the 1820s,” elaborates Moisey, “but they changed perceptibly during the so-called culture wars of the 1970s, becoming a safe space for guys who didn’t want to have to worry about having their kind of fun.” Many fraternities, he believes, now view themselves as embattled institutions, maintaining their conservative core values of brotherhood, privilege and machismo against a perceived liberal onslaught. Disturbingly, the code of loyalty to the brotherhood endures even after the other principles of fraternity life have long since fallen away.
>“The central issue is that there is an allegiance to everyone inside the fraternity rather than to the higher ideal,” says Moisey. “So even though most of these guys consider themselves highly respectable, their loyalty is such that they will protect the bad guys who hide in their midst. If you are a bad seed and you join a fraternity, you have found your safe haven. And what we are seeing right now is that the support and protection that fraternities provide for the bad seeds extends into the highest echelons of American power and decision-making.”
>[...] “This is what our leaders looked like when they were young.”
The real frat people are in management (men and women). They are socially adept enough to hide their actual opinions and oppress "lower class" women and men equally.
The struggle between men and women benefits their divide et impera strategy, because playing people off against each other while maintaining an irrational authority is their main talent.
A lot of them get into management by starting out as Tech Bros, then rising to their level of incompetence.
But in the case of SnapChat and Uber (and many other tech companies), the founders were literally (and archetypically) both Frat Bros and Tech Bros, who set the tone and culture for the entire company, and rampantly hired other Frat Bros from their own Frats, at all levels of incompetency.
Incompetent nepotistic job placement is basically what frats are all about. (Once you get past all that other stuff that Andrew Moisey documented.)
“This is what our leaders looked like when they were young.” -Andrew Moisey
Having read your links, this is an absurd cartoon-like character you're painting here. I've worked in the tech industry for my whole life and don't believe I've ever met a "tech bro". Despite that, don't American universities have a fraternity equivalent for women called the sorority? Why are "bros in tech" a problem but "sorority girls in management" aren't?
This is still just meaningless name calling, not made any better by the fact that it's so entirely US specific. It certainly isn't even remotely close to an explanation for the global preferences both genders express for different jobs. As I assume you're aware that in fact most jobs aren't gender balanced, most are dominated by one gender or another?
I don't have time to go through all of that. Evan emails seem like nothing burger. Sorry, have you ever met college students or even school students? Both girls and boys. Because they all call each other names, fat/bitch/slut shaming is done more by other girls to girls than boys.
Again, only saw emails.
Even then, all of that seems more outlier than any programming community. Not everyone is a billionaire programmer responsible for putting social media cringe in front of our eyes.
Please show me convicted for [reason] reports. I am convinced everytime I read these articles, the author is trying to see things that aren't there or it's hard to verify the validity.
Note that I don't condone the behaviour but should you really be painting majority of population as some sort of saint to highlight the evil? Because they aren't.
Alcoholism and drug rate among youngsters says otherwise.
Why would I "please show you" anything after you just proudly announced that you didn't bother reading what I just finished showing you?
If you wanted to make a stronger argument, you should at least pretend to have read what you're glibly dismissing out of hand, instead of preemptively admitting that you don't bother reading what anyone else says, and that there's no point in replying to you.
HN is not a forum for announcing you have not read things, then criticizing and dismissing them anyway. Don't you have better things to do than rationalizing and defending Frat Bro toxicity?
If you don't have time to go through all that, then you shouldn't waste your time replying to dismiss it all, either.
I did read through it hence the criticism but I didn't go past the Evan Spielberg and Mark Zuckerberg articles. If someone writes an article based on the emails, you would look at the emails because they are the source.
Why should I bother reading opinion of a writer when I can look at the source?
If your first few links don't show the problem, people wouldn't be willing to put in effort. I thought that was obvious.
Oh so you're a nihilistic skeptic that those were authentic misogynistic emails from Evan Spielberg, and that it's only the opinion of the The Atlantic and Tech Crunch and all the other sources who wrote about it, including the Provost of Stanford University himself?
>In a letter sent to that was sent out to the entire Stanford undergraduate community, and obtained by the Huffington Post, Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy called the e-mails "crude, offensive, and demeaning to women."
>"Like most of you, male and female, I found those messages abhorrent. I am writing now to convey clearly that the sentiments expressed in these emails do not reflect what we, as members of the Stanford community, expect of one another," the letter said.
Have you got anything to stand on better than your "boys will be boys ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" argument?
Can you provide some evidence for your conspiracy theory, such as a quote of Evan denying that he wrote those emails, or Stanford University Provost John Etchemendy retracting his statement that Evan's e-mails were "crude, offensive, and demeaning to women"?
Is there a source for your conspiracy theory, or did you make it up yourself just now? I thought you had better things to do with your time that defending the honor of Frat Bros. So give me a link to your proof Evan Spielberg didn't send those emails.
Which is what you should have linked and let people make their mind.
I agree it's pretty assy. What are you looking for me to say?
You are calling tech community toxic and frat boy asses because some billionaire ceo is a douche bag? I don't know how to reply to that. I already cleared that up. I am not defending him. I don't condone that behaviour but it's not far fetched for college students to be like that. It's not a disease specific to tech community. Tech bros are not special unicorns. Every field has those.
Get over your fragility. I was specifically calling Snapchat and Uber toxic because of their Frat Bro leaders and culture, an undisputed fact which is very widely known and reported on.
There is absolutely zero credible evidence that Evan Spiegel didn't write those misogynistic emails, and overwhelming credible evidence that he did, so you should stop believing and intimating that it's a hoax, if you can't prove it.
But yes, a lot of tech companies are terribly toxic, and a lot of Frat Boys are terrible asses, who graduate (but don't grow up) to be Tech Bros, and work in the tech industry. But they don't need you to deny it and rationalize it and protect their fragile feelings from criticism for them, they need to STOP.
If your only point is that "every field has those", and you think I disagree, then read my other postings about Jared Kushner's coronavirus "Frat Party".
Every field having those doesn't justify or counter tech having those, and if you don't have the time to read the source evidence that I linked to before you took the time to announce you didn't read it and then glibly asked for source evidence that will take you even more time to read, then you won't bother reading anything else, and you're not arguing in good faith.
The more frequently you reply, the more skeptical I become of your claim that you don't have the time to read the original evidence I posted. If you don't know how to reply to that, and didn't have the time to read the evidence, then you should not have replied in the first place, or again, and again. And especially not a fourth time.
> There is absolutely zero credible evidence that Evan Spiegel didn't write those misogynistic emails
It's weird that the dude you're talking to never expressed skepticism as to the provenance of the emails, yet you keep repeating this as if he is.
You seem to have a stock character of your own creation that you're responding to, some sort of cliched misogynist alt right conspiracies troll, instead of simply a skeptic who'd rather trust his own faculties to judge the source material over the opinions of ideological journo-activists.
> We have to accept they may just not want the gig.
If this is true it's probably because the community isn't very friendly or welcoming to women like the poster said…
That being said, I don't think this is true. My only evidence is anecdotal, but at a previous company when we tried to recruit at events that weren't primarily male dominated, we got roughly equal percentages of responses from people who identified as female or male.
> Just like most men don't go into pre-school teaching.
Let's assume for a moment these statements are correct: you're not starting from the right place. Why don't most women want the software job? Why don't most men want to teach pre-school? It could be because they've been raised in a society that says that the burden of child rearing should be placed on the women and that pre-school isn't a "manly" profession. Just because people don't want the job doesn't make it less discriminatory against women somehow, it just means the reasons are likely ingrained and harder to fix.
Amusingly, the damore memo was an attempt to address just this very question. Are we not beyond pretending responses outside the proscribed woke ideology will be engaged with in good faith, at this late stage?
There are actual things in the world that we know are true or false and aren't just part of some "ideology" as you put it it. One of them is that the kind of pseudoscientific bullshit damore was spouting is false. We know this. It is in no way engaging in good faith to post an internal memo to your coworkers full of stupid stuff that's been used for years to justify your dominance. His memo was not engaging in good faith, it was a deliberate attempt to lie and mislead, and we as a society need to move beyond this sort of thing.
Just because something is obvious doesn't make it trivial to fix. A lot like fixing a bug you know exists, but can't fix it because it's never brought in scope.
One of the more obvious problems is that software especially seems to have issues with sexual harassment. An example of that can be readily found with Susan Fowler's blogpost about Uber's rotten workplace culture.
If you're looking for a little irony, here is Dr. Louanne Brizendine, Neuroscience PhD (Stanford, Yale, Berkeley) discussing how the female and male brains are different AT GOOGLE and with very warm, positive reception:
She has written books on both, and they’re quite interesting.
I suppose she has to be cast to the “Intellectual Dark Web” for daring to suggest the obvious fact that our brains work differently.
The ultimate irony is that someone can deny such differences while simultaneously arguing for the importance of diversity. What a walking contradiction.
I remember at a previous job, a female engineer talking to other engineers when the Damore story broke. She said "I can't believe he said that women can't be good engineers" and indicated he deserved to be fired. As someone who actually read what he wrote, I just had to bite my tongue. That's not what he said at all, but even making the distinction makes you one of "them" and politicizes the workplace. It's just disappointing that these little whirlwinds of misinformation bullshit get to circle around and everybody just has to nod their heads.
> As someone who actually read what he wrote, I just had to bite my tongue. That's not what he said at all,
As someone that also read it, those arent the words he used, but that is very much what he was saying. A facade of misrepresented psuedoscience doesnt change the intent, motivation, or reality.
It's so disappointing to read this. I don't see how his thesis of "everyone needs to be treated by their individual merits because personal variances grossly outweigh any gender bias" can be interpreted as sexist.
He was literally preaching for equality. His point was that affirmative action programs do companies a disservice by making minority/women employees seem like they didn't get there through their own merit, and also punishes companies that don't have sufficient women due to a lack of interest women have in programming - which may or may not be innate.
Focusing on the idea that women are biologically "less interested" (but don't worry, we aren't talking about the good ones you may know, they are just statistical outliers) and trying to twist up scientific "proof" for that does not lead me to trust him or his motives.
Being blind to the widespread dismissive, discriminatory, and derogatory behavior that routinely drives women from the industry does not inspire confidence. Choosing to ignore the quantities of good science on the topic in favor of what he did does not inspire confidence.
Then he chooses to widely declare this and demean large swathes of his coworkers. I'm all for open communication, but that doesnt absolve you of social consequences. When you make a big chunk of your company uncomfortable with you and how you view them....yeah, consequences, yeah, fired.
The only reason this is a surprise is because it happened to some like him and not the groups he was pretending to defend. I assure you most of them would be outraged and frustrated but nearly as surprised had the interaction gone the other way. All you have to do is watch and listen to know that.
Men and women (biologically and socially) have different interests. This is different than capabilities. Countries with the most free choices see the most division between sexes in different professions.
Nobody seems to have a problem when it comes to auto mechanics, medical sciences, teachers, social services, lawyers, etc. Why are different interests such a controversial thing to accept?
1) I'd argue that you arent paying much attention to those other industries. I certainly see issue commonly raised in a few you mention that are in my circles. Things that still make me double-take.
2) tech is just the latest in a series. Comp sci degree enrollment for women DROPPED for recent decades - that's not a biological lack of interest. This has occurred in many professions - when the profession becomes high profile, the women are driven out.
3) you are proving the problem in the original memo. Instead of looking into any of the research on the topic, you are repeating what feels true. You speak with such confidence on the different interests of different genders, without considering how you know what the actual interests might be. (You're assuming what you see must be the result of interests, and use that to prove a difference of interests is the cause. That's a tautology) You assert that "no one seems to have a problem" with imbalances in other professions, when it is trivial to find people definitely have problems.
What other professions? What series? Computer science degrees and jobs are seeing a rise in women, but they're already the majority in biological sciences and other disciplines. Would you claim men are conditioned to not going into those fields?
The research on the topic covers what I state about different countries and societies showing how different interests affect professions. Here are some links:
Nah, in the late 50s and until the 90s, there was around 25% on women in computer science in the US, and close to 50% in some countries like France an UK (i think a book was written on why in 2017).
I've talked to Pr. Emeritus Mallard a lot three year ago, who was a biology researcher studying genotype and phenotype in animal/vegetal populations (for context, he got his degree around the time we discovered ADN). From what he remember, there was a lot more than 50% women when he started, at least as "programmers", although they were barely viewed as clever seamstress at the time.
Each time he wanted to do a computer-assisted statistical study in the early days, the programmer was a woman (again, from what he remembers) and he always thought the field was dominated by them, at least for grunts work.
There was a time when it was "systems analysts" who gathered requirements and made decisions and wrote flowcharts, and "programmer" was a glorified data entry position translating a flowchart into assembly/FORTRAN/COBOL on punch cards that the system could run. As computers became more powerful, "programmer/analysts" began writing their own source code in "higher-level" compiled languages (this meant reentrant functions and loops and "if" blocks rather than globals and computed "goto") as the full-time "programmer" job became obsolete with automation.
That's a red herring, and also the 60s - I started my career in the late 70s, 1/3 of my CS class was female, my first job in the US (as a kernel hack) was almost 50% female, still some of the best engineers I've ever worked with, all doing the same job I was.
I don't know what happened, by the time my daughter was doing CS the number of woman was < 10% and she and her compatriots were literally hounded out of the course by the bro-culture - personally I blame gamer culture, there's something terribly dysfunctional with kids these days
Computer science predates gaming, particularly online gaming with a social component, by a lot. You're committing the "all things with 4 legs are elephants" fallacy.
Reread their comment - they are pointing out that CS classes had a DROP in women attending them, and that decline does line up with the rise of computer gaming. They weren't saying women have never had an interest as a result of gaming, but rather as gaming rose there is a corresponding decline. Hardly proof, but as the poster above was stating their personal opinion, they aren't wrong (and they aren't alone in that belief - I've seen it many places).
Here's once quote:
"Starting when computer technology first emerged during World War II and continuing into the 1960s, women made up most of the computing workforce. By 1970, however, women only accounted for 13.6% of bachelor's in computer science graduates. In 1984 that number rose to 37%, but it has since declined to 18% -- around the same time personal computers started showing up in homes. According to NPR, personal computers were marketed almost exclusively to men and families were more likely to buy computers for boys than girls."
( from https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-... )
Those are only talking about successful degrees, there are plenty of more datapoints to look at when you consider entry vs completion, and similar stats from post-graduation careers. This doesn't prove causality, but their statement stands as viable.
And again, in the 1970s the internet - and multiplayer gaming with a social component - effectively did not exist as a widespread hobby.
This is cherrypicking in the most bizarre way: if you can't explain the earlier oscillation, why should I accept the later oscillation? Which also doesn't line up with the type internet gaming which was exploited around the 2010s mark where alt-right groups began aggressively recruiting out of the gaming community via the "gamergate" movement.
In every case you're datapoints don't make any sense - there weren't 12 years olds playing Call Of Duty in 1985 and learning to scream racial and sexual epithets in voice chat. Games with a substantial violent component - the first person shooters - Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992.
Which still doesn't actually explain anything, because it's not remotely clear how "shooting nazis" lines up with excluding women from CS.
> if you can't explain the earlier oscillation, why should I accept the later oscillation
Clearly women in the 1970s had no other obstacles - they couldn't obtain credit(!), much less be on equal footing in so many other ways. The issue is not "but there is an earlier oscillation", it's "if women have been slowly moving in direction of equality, what reversed that?" or "If women were able to 'be interested' back then, how can we claim they aren't now"?
Women started being excluded once computing was considered a "serious" career path and salaries ticked up. Before then serious engineering was mechanical engineering, chemistry, physics.
Sexist (and racial) exclusionary behavior ticks up once a field becomes commoditized and the general populace move on in, because the general populace carry with them the prevailing attitudes of the times.
So women have a biological interest in the technical part of transforming flowcharts into code, but not in the social parts of software development, like gathering requirements?
Law and medicine are very competitive fields, with a higher representation of women. And tech/CS has not always been as competitive as it perhaps is today. Hence Damore's argument is somewhat subtler than this, and focuses on diverging interests that lead to having fewer women in the pipeline to begin with. Some people point to the boom in videogames and home computers throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a reason why this divergence was not apparent earlier.
That is an interesting question. How are law and medicine different than CS career-wise? A couple additional thoughts, not intended to be exhaustive:
* CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end.
* CS is notorious for lack of career paths. Between ageism and outsourcing, once you hit 40, the perception is you are relegated to the bottom of the pile.
> CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end.
It's also false. Software is inherently collaborative, especially at senior levels. And it will likely stay that way as long as the job looks a lot like consulting due to lack of defined sub-specialities. There is no technician specializing in particular forms of testing in the software industry. In medicine, there is a whole host of these specialities. Point being "it's your job, so figure it out" is the rule. And that means working out not just solutions but well defined problems with peers, customers, superiors, and other stakeholders.
It's possible to do interesting Computer Science in relative isolation, but good luck making a career out if it without collaboration, publication, teaching, and other inherently social activities.
You might know all this, but I think it's important for the industry to push back on the nerd-bro in a basement imagery since it's absolutely not what actually happens.
Of course there is some social aspect to CS. That being said, comparatively, the interaction loop is waaay more abstract. Just walk into a medical practice vs a software engineering office.
As a medical professional, you get to interact face to face with several people every day, and have a direct observable positive impact in their lives.
As a CS professional, you spend half your waking time dealing with or dishing out style guide feedback nitpicks via email / irc / github [FAANG experience], interacting remotely with funny little avatars. You very rarely directly experience the impact of your work, and the impact itself is quite a bit less clear cut positive.
You raise a good point. We'll have to anecdotally study why that's the case. For instance, many women in the law and medicine fields end up marrying men in the same fields. So those women can then later on decide to either reduce their work hours or to outright stop when they have children.
It's more difficult to negotiate your hours in tech. How many people do you know who say want to only work 2-3 days a week for 5 hours a each day? The medical/dental field (especially if you have a clinic and don't do procedures or complex operations) tends to be "independent". Meaning, each case you get is a consultation, and your "productivity" is in how many patients you see in a given timeframe. This is much harder with programming.
People who want power and money will move to wherever power and money exist, it's a tautology. Whether it be in finance or C-level positions. It's just a part of life I suppose, not that it's a good thing.
> Countries with the most free choices see the most division between sexes in different professions
I've seen this idea around and I think it's quite problematic. Some countries may have relatively "free choices", but that is just one cultural dimension. A culture is an inconceivably complex phenomenon. A culture also has education strategies, gender roles, specific kinds of toys and games, specific languages and sub-languages, a myriad of sub-cultures that youth will cluster around, cultural specific concepts and ideas and so on.
I'm not ruling out that biological factors play a role, but I see biological factors as just one part of a complex, and, additionally, if you look at history, it's very clear that cultural factors can and will override just about any biological imperative, from the will to live to the will to procreate. This should make it clear that cultural factors need to be systematically ruled out before we can begin to consider that biology is to blame.
Affirmative action policies literally make it easier for one group to get a spot in [insert institution here] than another group. And yet we still see discrepancies. We publicly shame and fire anyone who says "maybe biological differences play a role". And yet we still see discrepancies.
If we haven't ruled out cultural factors in the West at this point, I'm not sure how we can.
By effectively every metric, it is easier for a woman to become an engineer in 2020 than a man. There are many, many programs and initiatives which encourage women to get into STEM from an early age – the same do not really exist for men. Women get into (and graduate from) university at a higher rate. There is more funding available specifically to women that are pursuing STEM And yet still you have more men choosing to be engineers than women.
How could they be? That is an intractable problem. Cultural factors permeate our existence from birth. You'd literally have to catalogue every single thing influencing an individual's life from birth to the time they enter the workforce.
I have two daughters and I've seen just how powerful subconscious messages from media influence the way they think. My oldest daughter is only four and she is absolutely adamant that girls can _only_ marry boys. That's clearly because the Netflix shows and Disney movies she watches all have a "girl marries boy" narrative. Think about that: my daughter is only four, I've never talked to her about marriage, and she is already firm in her belief that same sex marriage is not OK.
You are talking about funding and affirmative action, but have you considered gendered advertising towards toddlers? Have you considered gendered concepts in TV shows and movies? How about in toys? Do you know how elementary school teachers, not to mention parents, are subtly encouraging and discouraging boys and girls by their words and actions? Children absorb these things and they are solidified into semi-permanent activation pathways in their developing brains.
There are a million factors here that we will never grasp. Affirmative action is useless if people's minds are already fully constructed by the time those programs take effect.
Your four-year-old daughter assuming that the norm is the only way to do something is her jumping to conclusions, not a mark against society. It is ok for children to jump to conclusions. Girls do generally marry boys, as >90% of sexuality is heterosexuality. Children are wrong all the time. This is only a problem if you don't correct her misconceptions. Your child growing up the way you think is right and proper is 100% your responsibility – not Netflix and Disney's. Likewise, if she grows up thinking that girls shouldn't be programmers, that is on you.
> Affirmative action is useless if people's minds are already fully constructed by the time those programs take effect.
This is exactly my (and, funnily enough, Damore's) point. Affirmative action / quotas are a bandaid that does not solve the problem and can actually make it worse by encouraging resentment (from non-affirmed groups) and increasing self-doubt (among affirmed groups). The solution is to treat individuals as individuals and not look at their race, sex, religion, etc. The only way to move forward as a society in the long-term is to truly look past any groups a person belongs to and see them as an individual. Continuing to lump people into groups and make decisions based of those groups has the opposite effect and will only hurt us in the long run.
I just want to point out that I don't think we disagree on these points, but you're misinterpreting my argument.
> Your four-year-old daughter assuming that the norm is the only way to do something is her jumping to conclusions, not a mark against society
I didn't say it was a mark against society, you read that into my argument. If I thought this was wrong or bad, I wouldn't show her that kind of media. I am simply pointing out how _everything_ in a child's environment will influence their thinking, I made no moral judgement on the situation.
> Likewise, if she grows up thinking that girls shouldn't be programmers, that is on you.
I agree, but I think most adults aren't thinking "I'd better make sure my daughter knows she can be a programmer." If they aren't, then their children will be subject to myriad influences. That flows into my last point.
> This is exactly my (and, funnily enough, Damore's) point.
I read Damore's paper and that is not the part I take issue with. He claims the scientific evidence has established that women are _biologically_ less interested in engineering. I don't believe that has been established.
The parent comment referenced a study by Jordan Peterson that shows that in countries with more freedom of choice, women continue to choose people oriented occupations. My point is that freedom of choice _doesn't matter_ unless the entire society is focused on treating children equally. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement either way, just pointing out that the study doesn't take this into account. IIRC Jordan Peterson himself remarked that the results could be the effect of gender roles or culture.
> Being blind to the widespread dismissive, discriminatory, and derogatory behavior that routinely drives women from the industry does not inspire confidence.
I'm sceptic to this claim because discriminatory and derogatory behavior in medicine or law are much more widespread. And female students flock to these professions.
It could mean that woman who are driven away from software engineering by discriminatory and derogatory behaviour are somehow exhibiting differences to their law / medicine counterparts.
I can't imagine sexism or work environment (looong hours and exhausting shifts) are substantially worse in engineering.
What is different is, in my opinion, that medicine/law is perceived as higher status than nerd stuff. There are popular tv series idolizing the glamorous life of New York lawyers and the heroism of doctors/nurses. When are techies depicted favorably and not as social autists? The goth chic in Navy:CIS maybe, but not much else.
I'm not sure shopping exclusively at Hot Topic in your forties is idolizing tech in any way. If they wanted the character to be cool and edgy, they should have updated her look at least occasionally.
> Focusing on the idea that women are biologically "less interested"
This is the absolute crux of the entire paper, and it's very easy to view it with whatever politicising lens you want.
So lets try to flippantly and dispassionately break down how he constructed the statement
1) Women in absolute aggregate seem to not like CompSci.
2) We want more women in CompSci.
3) We should make CompSci more attractive to women.
4) What do Women in aggregate seem to like?
5) Is there room in CompSci fields for things that women like?
6) Yes, lots, it would be absolutely amazing if we could promote the things women in aggregate prefer to do in the field compsci. Those tropes of introverted men sitting in the basement should be subverted.
7) The current method of attracting women is harmful, we should instead change our desired behaviour of engineering to incorporate feminine ideals which could easily be incorporated.
> 1) Women in absolute aggregate seem to not like CompSci.
Based on what? They don't end up there, but we have evidence (based on decreasing enrollment in degrees) that they USED to be "more interested" (If you use that as criteria). Do you think they generationally are just more aware of what it really is now?
How would that happen without ALSO becoming more aware of the absolute vile GamerGate-type shit women have to face, from the smallest "let me assume you don't know anything" to the "let's make rape jokes" to the "Can a woman have confidence she probably won't be groped"?
If you start with the premise that women "seem to not like CompSci", you've already assumed the problem and normalized a lot of factors that don't have to be normalized.
I believe you already have a stance here and you're rather embroiled in the beliefs you already have. So I'm not going to comment to you- but to anyone who reads your comment.
Sorry for that.
> Based on what? They don't end up there, [...]
Well, yes, you can argue the factors here but there is a trend that something is off-putting. Either Gamer-gate (something which is absolutely mired in controversy of its own right) or 'rape jokes' but more likely the tropes of: long working hours with a dead end at the end of it, competitiveness, isolation and the notion that if you're in technology your job is your life.
Frankly to assume you and I know the true reason is rather arrogant, I'm not a sociologist I can only read the corpus of their work and believe that they came to the correct conclusions.
Your comment indicates that there is an aggressive amount of sexism in tech, rape jokes and groping not withstanding, and I'm not going to ask for evidence of that despite my conviction that this is not nearly as endemic as you indicate; instead I'd ask the question: If marketing is also inherently sexist (and definitely more "boys club groping the ladies" than tech) why is there a much stronger representation of Women there?
I think you have internalised a mistruth about the tech industry at large.
> We should make [x] more attractive to [singleton].
Why?
Unless the field is more toxic to [singleton] or there is more productivity due to "diversity" at which point you are admitting that people are different on biological (or social) level and have different interests, views etc.
Diversity is a desirable trait, especially in things that produce products that are designed to be used by the entire planet.
My mother explained diversity to me this way:
"We are each of us, unique but equal. Meaning that while you will grow up and be stronger than me, I will be able to produce children. This doesn't make either of us better, both should be respected as equal. There is value but difference in both." (not verbatim)
If we assume that on average women are more prone to overthinking, then it likely follows that having a women the team designing a product with a man (who, on average are more likely to be dismissive and flippant) then there's a necessary conflict, and the product will be better for everyone if it happens.
We should not be judging a fish by it's ability to climb a tree, we should instead be asking, how do we define the value of swimming and how do we ensure we have great swimmers working with us.
Toilets are needed by all people on the entire planet, so by your logic we should have more diverse emoloyees in toilet manufacturing, since toilets are used by so many people. Wouldn't we also be better off if more women were working in the garbage industry? We need women's diversity in the garbage collecting industry because their diversity will help improve garbage collection for the entire planet.
Does it really make a difference if the same feature is implemented by a man versus a woman?
> This doesn't make either of us better, both should be respected as equal.
I think we are agreeing.
That's why I highlighted more attractive to [singleton] when you could be more inclusive by avoiding singletons.
Why shouldn't a field be attractive to everyone - blind, deaf, disabled etc equally?
Imo, focusing on singletons is detrimental because by doing so, you will end up discriminating automatically because there will always be other groups that you won't or don't see.
I think we’re weaker for not including someone because of those traits either.
Why focus on women now?
Because there’s a lot of women in the world and they seem to not like this field.
I don’t really have a good answer, I thought Damores memo was pretty good and I thought it might provoke the powers that be to approach the distribution of underrepresented factions a little better.
For instance, if you want to hire blind people (and you should want to hire a few blind people) then offering accessibly tools to them is a no-brainer.
And if you’re not getting any applicants, maybe you should look at why. Maybe your job board can’t be read by blind people. (To keep the analogy going).
> Because there’s a lot of women in the world and they seem to not like this field.
Source. I have seen few and they do show women working in the field not liking it. The problem with that is it could be those women are outliers given the gender ratio in some CS fields (I will ignore non biological genders), the field could be attractive but don't have good working conditions for women, women don't have much interest etc.
All of those can be true and change your steps to make the field more attractive.
As an example, you can look into construction field which is heavily dominated by men and women in the field feels the same but outside, it's a different story in terms of interest.
How do you make construction work more attractive for women?
I am curious to hear your opinion about below too. What are the problems do you see with this approach? -
You vote with your job. If you don't like things, quit. Either the people working at the company are discriminatory and don't care or you are the problematic one. If you think you are right that a big company discriminates openly, then wouldn't you have to admit that most people at your company don't care about discrimination as much as their paycheck or they are discriminatory themselves. If a company can easily replace employees, then the society doesn't value equality.
If we had UBI, wouldn't discrimination of any kind be detrimental given that workers wouldn't be forced to work for low wages and companies which discriminate based on pseudoscience be at a disadvantage because they won't get talent that other companies can. Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? Why are people not pursuing UBI for gender equality?
Well, what I mean is that we're not even close to a gender parity, it would be fine at 35-40% female in my opinion but the industry is closer to 14-25% (depending on country) and to me that indicates a problem.
I think quota's and the extreme bias towards education programs that favour women is problematic though, in my opinion it infantilises Women which I dislike because I really believe women are just as capable as men in this field.
That's why I liked Damores memo, it spoke to the idea that instead of having quotas we should seek to bring in a more human centred approach to asking the question: what do women bring uniquely to the table and how can we ensure that women know that this is desirable and that they're welcome.
Killing the trope that Tech work is isolationist was one example from the memo that would likely cause some traction.
> As an example, you can look into construction field which is heavily dominated by men and women in the field feels the same but outside, it's a different story in terms of interest.
> How do you make construction work more attractive for women?
I think drawing a parallel to construction is a fine one, but I would argue instead for Architecture.
Construction doesn't need a diverse set of views, neither does nursing or mining. But Architecture does because the consumers of architecture is everyone.
And I think that's the crucial difference here: things that are designed for everyone should have a diverse set of eyes on them.
I am not sure if you intentionally ignored it because I said the same - that women in tech is a minority - outlier. The problem with accessing whether the field is unattractive to women is asking women not in the field why they don't like the field which I haven't seen done much. This is the reason why I compared construction.
Secondly, I don't understand why it has to be CS. A product requires more roles than a CS graduate. UX/UI, design, support, marketing, management, documentation, etc.
There can be more women in any of those roles and there seems to be in some.
A team of CS graduate wouldn't pull off a global product even if they are diverse because they are CS graduates.
> I am not sure if you intentionally ignored it because I said the same - that women in tech is a minority - outlier. The problem with accessing whether the field is unattractive to women is asking women not in the field why they don't like the field which I haven't seen done much. This is the reason why I compared construction.
Sorry, I thought we were still discussing the James Damore memo, because he said and backed up the assertion that women seemed to not _want_ to join compsci programs or join the associated industries in aggregate when compared to men.
I think you're assuming that I am the poster child for diversity and inclusion; I am really not. I just make my own decisions I'm definitely on nobodies side and I'm not going to go down the path of defending other industries.
I can just see a value in diversity in teams that work on products we all use, and I think I communicated that effectively enough in previous comments.
No, I didn't assume anything. Sorry if I came off that way.
And I wasn't talking about damore memo.
I like the idea of diversity and support it but it depends on what cost. My country suffers from reservation (quota) and it's wrecked.
Although I wanted to talk more about organisational diversity. Whether organisations as a whole have 50/50 gender ratio at scale. Whether roles are "diverse".
Incidentally that's exactly what Damore was saying;
Quotas are terrible no good bad and ugly hacks which will cause a lot of harm and the reasons why are controversial.
I think 50/50 gender parity is a stupid goal too, I think more representation but if it's not 50:50 then it doesn't mean that there is sexism, 60:40 is fine even 70:30 is ok, wether it skews more to women or men, it doesn't matter, the point is that women, men, blind, black- everyone needs to have their voices heard on teams that design global products.
The closer you try to force it to 50:50 the worse and much harder it'll be, bureaucrats will love you though, at what point do you stop breaking down societal boundaries? I'd argue that getting a few voices from each are is a good thing but I don't think exactly defining the distribution of the country is a good goal.
Instead of quotas, we should investigate what would make the industry more appealing to those under-heard voices.
Damore says that women tend to favour flexible working hours, that's great Tech can support that.
Damore says that women tend to favour jobs that have a high emphasis on collaboration, excellent, tech can support that.
This is why I dislike the overwhelming criticism of Damores paper, because it's the quintessential attack on the author for daring to insinuate that women are different, instead we should boulder through the idea that Women == Men, and anything other than that is sexism, but also we want 50:50 gender parity... and why isn't it happening! sexism! therefore men are bad and we should hire women over men using quotas! that will fix it!.
It's egregious, and stupid, and harmful. And a conversation about why and trying to actually improve the situation is more fruitful than shit slinging because the only people to let Damore speak are right-wingers.
If you're left-wing (as I am) you should want him to speak, he's promoting equality and compassion.
I agree, this needs to be fixed also. But teaching isn't my industry.
One of the teachers I most learned from was male, he actually sparked my interest in computers because he ran an after school computer club for 20 pence.. which for a poor household such as mine was affordable..
I would like to see source for your statements. I don't know much about Damore. I did glance through the manifesto and found it alright back then but I still don't understand why anyone needed to bring politics into question or write a manifesto.
You vote with your job. If you don't like things, quit. Either the people working at the company are discriminatory and don't care or you are the problematic one. If you think you are right that a big company discriminates openly, then wouldn't you have to admit that most people at your company don't care about discrimination as much as their paycheck or they are discriminatory themselves. If a company can easily replace employees, then the society doesn't value equality. We should fix that foremost.
If we had UBI, wouldn't discrimination of any kind be detrimental given that workers wouldn't be forced to work for low wages and companies which discriminate based on pseudoscience be at a disadvantage because they won't get talent that other companies can. Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? Why are people not pursuing UBI for gender equality?
As for an opposing view point, check this - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... which says fewer women take stem in developed countries than under developed countries. There will always be more differences. We shouldn't do a shut down case for either. It's not yet clear what percentage are affected by it. If it is, mention the source.
>Focusing on the idea that women are biologically "less interested" (but don't worry, we aren't talking about the good ones you may know, they are just statistical outliers) and trying to twist up scientific "proof" for that does not lead me to trust him or his motives.
"Biological sex plays no role in life choices / job preferences" (which is different than: "we should not prevent people from going into X choice/profession because of their biological sex". A priori considering the former as "truth" / "obvious" etc is also a political idea.
Great don't trust him don't like him don't feel comfortable... That doesn't change the fact he posted biological truths did NOT say women can't be good engineers which is what you exactly try to project on him over and over and makes you look silly and wrong. It was in response to him not getting traction via internal channels and only after he talks about his legit concerns in this memo does it finally blow up... Not surprising Google has very loud outspoken minority groups
What about all the people that were made uncomfortable by his firing? Can we fire those responsible for that? This got so silly so fast
I went to HS with James for a few years and have spoken to him on this topic a few times.
I don’t agree with how he went about pursuing the issue but your assessment does not comport with the views he’s shared with me or our contemporaries who stay in touch with him.
Then he should have done a better job representing himself. At any time he could come out and say exactly what he means and doesn't mean, and apologize for any harm done. Instead, he allied himself with the very people whose views you claim he doesn't hold. At some point, your actions define you.
No it's not. Nowhere in the paper did he say that women can't become good engineers. You're literally defaming his work. Either support your accusation with evidence, or don't comment.
> those arent the words he used, but that is very much what he was saying
> Nowhere in the paper did he say that
You both are saying the same thing- he did not use those exact words.
The parent comment is saying that despite not saying "Women can't be engineers", the entire purpose of the paper, in the view of that reader, was to insinuate that women can't be engineers. It's not terribly hard to promote an idea without ever saying it explicitly. Perhaps you didn't read the deeper meaning out of the memo.
And demanding those who interpret things differently than you "don't comment" doesn't promote discussion, it ends it. When someone says something you disagree with, don't tell them to shut up, ask them why they see things differently. Debate. Discuss. Grow.
> in the view of that reader, was to insinuate that women can't be engineers
Although his intentions were unclear by his vague approach to the subject, I believe he didn't mean to say women can't be engineers.
Most of the time he gave population-based examples of how women decided not to be engineers. His thesis was to show that forcing women in STEM fields is not a fair practice to both women and men who want to be STEM professionals.
You're right that they both talked about exact words, but you're indexing too highly on it. Just because they used the same words in places doesn't mean they're saying the same thing. Reading again, I don't know why you start with that statement. It really muddies the rest of your comment.
Please take this idea with an open mind. When you arrive a singular purpose to the paper, it may say more about your views than it does about the author's. He didn't have a thesis that stated directly that he meant to "insinuate that women can't be engineers", so you're literally putting words in his mouth.
And the "don't comment" line explicitly said it was in response to statements that are unfounded, NOT statements that disagree.
Putting that all together, you seem to be having an argument with a ghost of your own making.
Not just women but anyone. For any social group,the share of that group may never be at or close to their make up of the population. People come from an insanely diverse set of upbringing and social expectations.
If they think 50% of engineers should be women, I would like to hold them to an even higher standard by requiring that out if that 50% of women,each national origin,ethnicity,political/ideological upbringing and social status (mother,single,divorced,etc...) is also proportionally represented. If this is about making up for historical prejudice then let every women of a wronged group be equally represented. You will soon see the silliness of the pursuit.
It is the cause that needs policing and adjustment (upstream) not the effect.
> Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
Damore deliberately chose to cast doubt on whether the women Google hired were as good as the men. Otherwise, it's easier and less controversial to just argue that any form of discrimination is wrong.
You cant have so much more women than the rest of the industry without that being true. There literally is not enough women coming through engineering schools to allow for that without you a) discriminating against men based on sex, and b) lowering the bar for women.
I see what you mean I think but it's really not a mathematical given. If you have two groups where group 1 with size S scores X with variance V==0.4X on average in a given skill (score means competence), and group 2 with size S/2 scores 0.8X with variance V on average; then it's possible to recruit a set of people from group 2 and the same number of people from group 1 so that the average competence level of people hired from group 2 is higher. All you need to do is to pick more carefully (invest more resources, etc.).
So even if we accept that the average female engineer is not as good as the average male, and there are less female engineers than male, and that Google hires more female engineers than other players in the industry (relative to male hires), it is still absolutely possible that the bar is not lower. Maybe they look harder, maybe they pay more to female engineers with a given competence level, maybe there's no difference, etc.
I dont think you understand the hiring pool available to mountain view at all.
The rate of female attendance in comp sci has been in decline since the 70s. At my university it was quite literally 100 to 1.
You cant have a 50-50 hiring pool without some fuckery there.
And for what its worth i absolutely do not accept that the avergage female engineer is not as good as the average male engineer.
If anything, they are anecdotally better equiped.
> All you need to do is to pick more carefully (invest more resources, etc.).
So what amounts to increase their total comp because theyre female and you have a quota to fill?
Thats sexual discrimination is it not?
I really need to say while im passionately pissed off about the way identity politics has infected this industry i am more than welcome to more females joining the industry and more than hapoy to see the broculture fuck right off.
> All you need to do is to pick more carefully (invest more resources, etc.).
This needs fleshing out. One goal is to give equal preference to equally deserving candidates, say candidates with individual score x, regardless of their group membership. It's not clear that you can pick based solely on score x and still achieve that goal, no matter how carefully you pick. If you're picking on x and group membership, you're harming one group of people with score x (assuming a fixed headcount, where advantaging one person means disadvantaging another).
It’s not hard to imagine that Google simply hired an enormous outsized chunk of the top female talent via outreach and just making vastly better offers to industry leading women.
Their description of what recruiters do seems like discrimination. They said that recruiters would deliberately go out of their way to find diversity candidates, instead of treating everyone equal. That matches up with a leaked email where the recruiters were told to stop processing candidates who weren't diversity hires.
Google and where i work both benefit greatly from having increased diversity. It massively improves business outcomes over the monoculture culture we used to strive for.
My take is that when you optimize for equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity you break something at the opportunity end (its either or, not both.)
Regarding a or b, this is mostly b, lowering the bar. But its also a, sexual discrimination.
If you think its not, please explain how you think it would go down if google was focusing hiring efforts to hire white males because they wanted to match the current male to female ratio seen in engineering schools and currently have too many females in the office.
Because i fail to see how aiming to hire more females than the industry schools can bare simply because there are too many men in the office is anything but sexist.
Maybe one day people can stop looking at immutable physical characteristics like sex and skin color. Until then it's all discrimination by another name.
At Google casting doubt was a good in the early days. Even in search relevance of the results were the most important factor, even if it meant much less clicks, and the culture that Eric Schmidt created with the founders reflected that.
Nowadays I think it's a better strategy at Google to not discuss if you don't agree with its policies. It's still a great workplace as long as you can discard politics.
Sorry, but if you're talking about Googlers, that's bullshit, they're fine. 200k/yr, 300k/yr+ worth of fine.
It's great to have empathy for people in a less fortunate position, and yes we have a lot of problems in our society, but FAANG software engineers are arguably the least oppressed people on the planet.
Is this a class reductionist argument? Are you saying, for example, a black women at Google doesn't deal with adversity and is no longer effected by politics because they make a large amount of money?
Everyone is affected by "everything". Especially politics. People discussing it means they need to acknowledge how policies affect them and how it affects others, and is it good or bad "in general".
Or is that a too naive view of what Googlers are supposed to be capable of?
Right now a hard working black woman would have much harder time kicking herself out of Google than a white man. Also women are especially encouraged to go for promotion, and as a white man it just made me want to put in the work to go for promotion less there.
What I learned over time is that it's just better to work 8x5 days, don't do overtime/weekends, because it's not worth it anymore. For 8x5 hours of work Google is amazing.
> FAANG software engineers are arguably the least oppressed people on the planet.
Heterosexual cisgender white christian male FAANG software engineers may be. Racism and other bigotry doesn't stop affecting you because of economic class or other social position of advantage orthogonal to the basis of the bigotry.
Similarly, police officers are also a relatively privileged group of people, but 90% of mistaken identity shootings of off-duty police by police between 1982 and 2010 were shootings of black or hispanic officers.
I can't find the original report at the moment, but here's a news report on it that includes that particular statistic. I'll try to see if I can dig up the report later and post it if I can.
That's actually not what "false negative rate" means - what he's trying to say is that you can find more candidates which are just as good, because you're putting more effort into searching for them. But of course it's an easy thing to miss, especially if you're not familiar with that terminology - and with existing tech-hiring practices that accept a higher false-negative rate to begin with. Damore never expected his memo to be spread as widely as it was, and this ongoing confusion is part of how it became such a political hot potato.
Imagine how you'd feel. Imagine people would generally claim that someone who looks like you is a bad engineer (say, someone with your hair color). And then imagine that people would expect you to constantly disprove that assumption, just because of your hair color.
You'd be on the edge all the time. You'd never feel at home in the field. And whenever you interact with someone who doesn't have past work experience with you, they'd still assume you're a bad engineer.
But don't you think that the fairer the selection (blind to things such as gender, race or politics) the more confidence you'd have that you deserve to be in the position you are? How does a woman engineer should feel, knowing she was given a boost in the selection process by some kind of affirmative action? Isn't that in itself a source of uncertainty?
Not sure what you mean. All the female programmers I've come across had been hired without receiving any boost from an affirmative action program. Had I worked in a company that gave a score boost to candidates belonging to any group X, I could have the legitimate doubt that without the boost some of the people in the group X wouldn't have been hired. It's simply a necessary consequence of the affirmative action.
Originally you were presenting an opposition which is based on a theoretical objection held _by women themselves_, one which you've now confirmed you've never actually seen. If you're going to advocate on people's behalf, limit it to concerns they've actually expressed themselves.
You've now rephrased your objection that you would have a problem because you would assume female programmers were less qualified, which is not what you said in your original comment.
- There is a score threshold you must cross to get a job;
- score is normally representative of competence;
- individuals belonging to group X get a score boost.
It follows that it's possible for someone to cross the minimum threshold thanks to the boost given by their belonging to the favoured group, and not because of their competence alone. It's not a matter of "the point of view of the woman" or "my point of view". It's not a point of view. It's a logical consequence that can be inferred by women, men, everyone, equally.
No, the summary is that men and women have different interests (in average across billions) which creates a tendency to choose different professions. This division is even more pronounced in the most egalitarian and free societies.
Lack of interest in a subject does not mean a lack of capability.
How would I know someone hated doing something? How would they be really good at something by investing time and effort if they hated it? Any why would they apply for that position?
But all things being equal, I would rather hire the person who is more motivated and interested in the field than the person who isn't because skills can be learned and motivation produces results.
If a society tells a woman she's not likely as interested in something, guess what profession she is more likely to choose?
Not the one she's being told she won't be happy with.
Is there any evidence that would convince you that interests can diverge, independent of society (nurture)? Your argument relies on the assumption (yes, an assumption, not evidence) that society exclusively determines our interests. You do not admit a role for biology. There is little scientific evidence that supports this view.
I didn't say "society exclusively determines our interests"
my point was pretty simple. If society at large, in ways small and big, encourage women from joining a field, I think it's likely fewer will participate.
This is the argument behind Sheryl Sandberg creating stock photos that demonstrate more inclusion. If all I see are white men with grey hair in photos as doctors, don't you think that might bias women to think that's who doctors are? That's not 100% of what influences an interest, but it's an important one.
Current research generally does not find evidence that variations in preferences, psychology, or personality stem from genetic or biological factors. Rather, they’re primarily attributed to culture and socialization.
Actually the abstract points out that this hypothesis is one going against the largely held scientific view of biological factors and gender differences...
A rebuttal a year later in the related section points out omissions from this paper and offers a deeper perspective on the differences
You mean like that in more gender equal societies, women are less likely to pursue a degree in STEM. Its a well known phenomenon called the gender-paradox[1]
Is there any evidence (say, the numerous studies on this very topic) that would convince you that the pipeline of many careers has systemic discriminatory effects driving particular genders and races out of those fields?
In fact, quite a bit! I am already convinced. If tribal associations would clarify, then I am more than likely "on your side."
Can you direct me to where I suggested there is no systematic career discrimination towards minorities? If that's how you interpreted my comment, then I apologize for that. There is absolutely substantial structural discrimination; I don't intend to minimize that.
The comment I was replying to did in fact specify as an assumption (the antecedent of the conditional) that "society tells a woman she's not likely as interested in something." This framing excludes the possibility that something else (namely biology) may affect a person's preferences.
I don't think that's a reasonable assumption - again, little scientific evidence supports that view. (Even intuition does not support that view: I don't think most people would argue that men for the most part are "brainwashed" by society to have sexual preferences for women. Likely some of this is biological; in fact, there is a good evolutionary reason for it!)
20 years ago there was a lot less of a push for women in tech and you actually did hear lots of people espouse this view, now the programmes and encouragement is everywhere and the social cost of a different view is your job.
What is being argued and and what is happening don't seem to correlate.
I don't think having a few programs or pr campaigns solves systemic bias. I guess to answer your question, ask women who are in tech or considered it if they experience bias.
I have, and I regularly hear depressing and disturbing examples.
Wouldn't that apply to both sexes? Can you really tell someone what their interests are?
"happy with" is not the same as "interested in" however it seems like the last 2 decades have had a lot of focus on letting people follow their passion.
The original memo is poorly written, poorly reasoned, and thinly veiled:
> Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts
There is a huge difference between "women can't be good engineers" and "women are less likely to be good engineers", and he said the latter (while, IIRC, explicitly acknowledging that variance is high enough that it shouldn't influence decisions about individuals).
You can’t do that. You have to judge based on what was written, not what you’ve convinced yourself was an ulterior motive and dismissing his actual words as a facade. This behavior is so perplexing.
It is not what he was saying. Why do so many people absolutely insist on misinterpreting it to the point of willful distortion?
You are literally describing critical thinking. To assume no one would lie, mislead, or even just be blind to their own biases is to be part of the problem.
How did I "convince myself of an ulterior motive"? I read what was written, and then I asked questions and did research. Are these studies he cites credible? [No]. Why would he bring these up? What motivations would be involved? How do the people he is talking about feel? Did he consider their feelings? If I were Google, what are my options, and what are the results of those options?
Dog-whistles and micro-aggressions thrive on failure to ask these questions. It empowers the status quo to entrench so long as they avoid the absolute most stark of statements.
I tend to tune out once I see words like micro-aggression and dog-whistle. It has been my experience that people throwing these phrases around are too deeply immersed in their ideological war to assume any good faith at all in who they perceive as their opposition, which tends to a preclude any productive discussion. You’re wrong, by the way.
That's not what he said it's what you project and transform his arguments into. What he said was factual and his concerns were legit and the over reaction was hilarious
The dude is talking about probabilities and distributions, while the stats-ignorant public is generalizing to every individual.
It's impossible to have a scientific and open minded debate about the differences between genders. Even theorizing biologic differences exist makes you a sexist. Let alone bringing up this question in public.
Edit: Yes, his memo is totally tone deaf. I thought his wording was very questionable. But the his core argument (regarding differences in biology leading to differences in distributions) is worth debating.
Example: There's a noticeable distributional difference in 100m running times between genders (due to biology). That said any number of men or women are faster runners than me :) Population doesn't mean anything for the individual.
> Even theorizing biologic differences exist makes you a sexist.
Eggs vs sperm -- plumbing aside -- is a fundamental biologic difference. And bringing a pregnancy to term, and delivering without bleeding out, sort of requires a uterus.
But of course, it's gotta stop there.
Edit: If someone wants to explain away such differences, I'd love to see the argument.
People focus on the “plumbing” but the hormones produced by the plumbing are the important things that give us different behavior. I found this article about trans men to be fascinating.
The hormones made me more impatient. I had lots of female friends and one of the qualities they loved about me was that I was a great listener. After being on testosterone, they informed me that my listening skills weren’t what they used to be
What about higher amount of testosterone making men have more muscles and better sprinters?
There are biological differences that affect performance in various activities. How much in comparison to nurture, and in what activities, seems to be an open question
He shared a manifesto about gender differences in the workplace. In it, he calls women neurotic.
Whether people's read on the manifesto is reductive of his overall argument isn't the point.
He showed a serious lack of judgement writing and posting that in his workplace. He should not have played the part of expert gender/psychology expert. A researcher he cites specifically disagrees with his takeaways.
There are productive ways to have these kinds of conversations, he chose to go to the opposite wrong end of that spectrum.
Women have enough BS to deal with in tech, the last thing they need is a tech bro mis-using uncertain psych research to justify telling them they should find more appropriate roles.
He interviewed with Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. Also who on the left would interview him? That's the issue with claiming that he only talked to one side.
As he said in his interview with Peterson, he declined interviews with any centrist media. He filed an NLRB complaint before posting, hired Charles Johnson (who is a professional conspiracy dude and claims to know where MH370 is) to run PR and made a bee-line directly for maximum exposure with people like Molyneaux.
That's a very deliberate choice. He's no martyr of rational thought.
Rogan was labelled alt-right after he interviewed Gavin McInness and Alex Jones again (a comical interview btw). That may have been cancelled out by him interviewing Bernie Sanders though.
Rogan is aesthetically a bro, that's all this comes down to.
If he were more 'soy' and less 'bro', while having the same mostly-liberal opinions, he'd get an entirely different reaction from the elite cultural left.
And I'm too American to give you a good analogy :) In England I think they'd say 'chav'?
Think culturally lowbrow vs cultural elite. Rogan came up as a cage fighting commentator. In Europe there would be a lot more techno blasted out of a much smaller car.
A stereotypical bro is someone who says "bro" a lot, like to do chest bumps with their others bros, scream about sports while shotgunning a beer, and talks with his bros about women as sex objects.
He also tweeted during the middle of this, "The KKK is horrible and I don't support them in any way, but can we admit that their internal title names are cool, e.g. 'Grand Wizard'?"
He sounds like he may be on the autistic spectrum, which if treated as a form of social disability would (or should, IMO) grant him some leeway.
If his intent wasn’t sexist then his failure to perfectly negotiate the complex social way those points have to be expressed isn’t a moral failing on his part.
Edit: I’d rather posters took the time to argue against rather than downvote. My point is just that ‘socially colourblind’ people probably shouldn’t be punished for lacking perceptual and expressive subtlety. It doesn’t mean they can’t be corrected or educated, of-course.
Why shouldn't people get punished for lacking perceptual and expressive subtlety? I doubt you would have a problem with rewarding people for possessing such skills (e.g. well-paid actors, or clever detectives).
> He sounds like he may be on the autistic spectrum, which if treated as a form of social disability would (or should, IMO) grant him some leeway.
This attitude leaves me almost speechless. When someone makes an argument that at least tries to be well reasoned, and people attack him based on misunderstandings and how it makes them feel, maybe the problem is not that he's autistic. Maybe it's those who are offended and refuse to engage in a civilized debate that have some form of disability.
It used to be that dispassionate reason was the highest form of discourse (the only one on which it's possible to reach agreements). What happened to that standard, when the responses boil down to "how does it make you feel"?
Neurotic, as he uses it, is not the same way it is used in everyday parlance.
Neurotic is part of the Big 5 personality traits, for which there is substantial academic evidence. The traits are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.
"A study of gender differences in 55 nations using the Big Five Inventory found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."
> He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.
Eh. He's using the psychological/clinical definition, but then draws conclusions on no scientific basis.
This is what he said in the memo:
> [Women, on average, have more] neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance): This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist
and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
And this is a quote from the person who actually did the meta-analysis which Damore cites (emphasis is mine):
> These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.
> It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),
Regardless of the correctness of his overall argument, he wasn't saying "women are neurotic" in the colloquial sense, which was a common condemnation against him.
Also, and fact check me on this, does accounting for 10% of variance (aka 0.1 * sig^2) mean accounting for sqrt(0.1) * sig, aka 32% of the standard deviation?
Google has always had a very open culture with lots of political discussion and encouraged these kinds of internal debates. This was a memo written specifically for a private internal forum that was focused on that specific discussion. The widely shared version was leaked and edited, but never meant for a public audience.
Saying that men and women tend to have different preferences doesn't make a statement about their capabilities, nor is it really that controversial. The pursuit of a 50/50 ratio is counter-productive to free and open choice. Encouragement and opportunity should be the goal, not a forced ratio outcome.
The research the post cites strongly implies women would be better qualified for other roles. That suggestion was (and is) both inaccurate and inappropriate to send in a workplace.
Less interested/"qualified" compared on average to males by virtue of their interests and biology not their intelligence. Ignoring this is like sticking your fingers in your ears to the argument
How is the statement in a general population inaccurate? I agree it can make people uncomfortable but it looks pretty accurate to me
Actually it's pretty basic biology and psychology.
What "conclusions" are disagreed?
Can you really not see how this would apply in real life with personality differences? It seems obvious and intuitive not even mentioning the science, women are more social on average, men more into things that make a whirring noise. What data am I missing?
"...men more into things that make a whirring noise."
You are proving my argument. Nonsense like this has prevented women from feeling like equal participants (and equally capable) in many fields for decades.
How is it nonsense though? You just saying it doesn't make it so sorry... It's a pretty obvious observation made over and over you are going to need to give some data or reasoning why this is wrong, because science and logic both say these are the gender norms in a general population
How does that prove anything for you? You haven't shown anything except that you disagree, that doesn't give us anything except your opinion and definitely won't convince people who know the science also... The personality differences between men and women are not edgy science. I have a degree in psychology and I'm pretty confident you have no legit science (and haven't even give logical reasons) to back your claims but feel free to post something different
You also seem to have a lot of misinformation in this thread. Calling his memo a manifesto... Mixing neurotic with neuroticism... Basic facts you are smearing... You aren't giving people a reason to believe any of what you say so maybe you should think about why you have such an extreme view
No, he says that on average they score higher on "neuroticism", one of the Big Five personality traits. [1] And it is an empirical fact. [2]
If you say "he said women are neurotics" it means you didn't understand neither the language nor the logic of what you were reading, something that should give you pause.
It was a draft. Have the conversation. Address the flaws. Find a common ground, you don't have to be a conservative Manchurian candidate infiltrating the bay area to acknowledge where tech companies are failing on inclusivity goals in ways that stretch the imagination of being out of touch.
Big Tech's contrived and readjusted and out of touch practices have been written about in NY Times, Wapo, even freaking SFGate ad nauseum.
Adding some points that overlap with misogynist communities means address the misogyny in isolation, and also factor in the points.
What is a productive way to have this discussion? I can't think of any plausible way to have a discussion in this realm without serious risk of being ostracized.
I don't have any beef in this discussion, and am not educated in this field, but out of curiosity I had a quick look at what Wikipedia says, and it seems to at least somewhat agree with this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism
This view to me is just as tone deaf at Damore's piece itself.
Whether or not you agree or disagree, it clearly had an impact of making a very large and significant segment of female employees at Google feel as if they were biologically inferior or otherwise not suited to do their jobs. You can sit here and say "Oh, that's nuts, that's not what he said" - but you're also not hearing the same internalized misogyny and bias that a LOT of female engineers are, day after day, at every company they've ever been at. He should have known it had the potential to have that impact, so I have approximately zero sympathy in that regard; what his true intentions are/were is irrelevant.
I would bet any number that the largest cohort of people who are baffled by the reaction to his memo are white men. I'm sure it's not even close.
> it clearly had an impact of making a very large and significant segment of female employees at Google feel as if they were biologically inferior or otherwise not suited to do their jobs
Blame that on the attention seekers and clickbait journalists. A lot of things quoted out of context cause people to be offended. If you misrepresent citing a study that says that women score higher than men in neuroticism in personality surveys, as “Damore thinks women are neurotic,” of course women will be offended.
Nah, this was likely already making the rounds at Google and causing massive disruption. People don't need media to get them all worked up, although it certainly helps.
How people misread it really shouldn't be the point, if we could establish that it's a misreading (a big if). Like if someone at google wrote about the harms of toxic masculinity, talking about the cultural pressures society puts on men, should it matter that a bunch of men will think it's calling men toxic and be pissed off?
If you care about her having a certain opinion it's good you bite your tongue.
Very few can handle the truth when they feel something different inside. You don't win over people with facts, fact support internal believes or they get ignored, blocked or morphed.
Kinda both. Somebody had to write those complaints to the NKVD and participate in those meetings demanding to put down the traitors like rabid dogs. And if you didn't participate enthusiastically enough, be sure the NKVD would hear about it the next day, from multiple sources (and also would hear about everyone who didn't write). It was a system where participation wasn't optional.
If he wanted to risk being treated as a radioactive dumpster all the rest of his time working at that company - sure, he could. Maybe it wouldn't happen - maybe she would turn out a wonderful individual who would thank him for correcting her and educating her about the truth. Or maybe not. Given the risks of "maybe not" - the smart money is on "bite your tongue".
As it is true for any number of conversations in the workplace? Try telling your boss they're not as smart or talented as they think they are and see how that goes.
I'm not sure how "making broad generalizations about your coworkers based on their gender" differs from all the other stuff most people have to keep quiet about as they go about their work.
> Try telling your boss they're not as smart or talented as they think they are and see how that goes.
Why would I? My boss is very smart and talented :) No, seriously, I'm anonymous here so it's not because my boss would be reading it - I just not enjoy working for idiots and I have the luxury of being able not to do it for long.
But in general yes, telling people they're idiots doesn't usually go well, so don't do that either.
> "making broad generalizations about your coworkers based on their gender"
Oh it has nothing to do with gender. If've seen hyperwoke males as much as I seen females. It's the type you want to bite your tongue around, not gender.
This is one of the few examples where the phrase "political correctness" could be used correctly. Speaking 'correct' facts is not the 'correct' move to maximize the probability of still having a job tomorrow.
When the whole discussion is about a guy getting fired for saying a thing, it's not safe to defend him if you don't want to risk being fired. It's that simple.
So... this is typical of the way this argument goes. Many HN readers are essentially "fellow travellers" with Damore. And you agree with him, and with that whitepaper thing he wrote.
But here's the thing: every time this comes up, this is framed, as you do, as a failure of "everyone else" (meaning left-leaning general folks, often women themselves) failing to understand the truth of what he wrote. But what you don't do is actually defend what he wrote.
And that's because what he wrote was really kinda vile. Indeed he didn't say "Women can't be good engineers". He said: "Women at Google aren't good engineers", which is quite frankly no less offensive. Now, sure, sure, his point was that this was because Google's diversity policies were incorrectly boosting these candidates. But that doesn't change what he said.
So... I don't see that the "female engineer" you were talking to really had it that wrong. You're focused on what to her was a minor fact, and while you seem to be oblivious as to why she might find the "correct" interpretation offensive too...
... you aren't. Because you know it's not really that defensible either and don't want to be held to account for Damore's opinions yourself. So you content yourself with what the rest of us view as nitpicking.
What was actually said is that men and women tend to have different interests on average, and therefore choose different professions when given equal freedom and opportunity. More men choose to be mechanical engineering and more women choose biological sciences.
It's strange for that to be so controversial. Not having an interest in a field does not mean you're not capable. Perhaps that's the nuance that's missing.
This argument doesn't work because there were a significant number of woman devs back in the 70s and 80s. That claim is completely at odds with the history of programming.
And before people make the claim that programming was glorified hole punching as it seems to come up by that point in history we already saw the rise of modern abstractions and higher level development. It's controversial because it's trying to abstract some sort of universal biotruths by vaguely linking data with psuedoscience and correlation.
What people chose to get degrees in a generation or two ago doesn't really help with hiring today. Especially when you mostly hire people in their twenties (not defending that).
I agree entirely with what he wrote. Men and women, innately, have different interests - on a statistical level. ...but individual variances make stereotyping ineffective, therefore everyone needs to be treated as individuals, and thus quotas should be eliminated.
That was literally his conclusion - and it's spot on.
I think conversations can be had with people like him, instead of taking the worst part of their views and ostracizing them for it. I think it is fine to acknowledge angst in the implementation of progressive ideals, that angst will often be mixed in with purely insensitive and uneducated thoughts.
There are productive outcomes possible by parsing and separating those issues.
I think it has been a big mistake of tech platforms - and really the people in the geographical area they are in - to simply be content with deplatforming people, assuming they are irreconcilable. It only emboldens, it doesn't stop the spread of disagreement, and from my perspective there really is a lot of common ground which is really just angst in implementation of progressive ideals.
James sent a memo (common thing to do) as a draft to a few people for comment. Got fired in about two seconds flat by people who clearly did not even read the thing.
I still do not understand why anyone is confused he got fired. He
negatively affected both the company's brand and productivity. He simply wasn't important/useful enough to keep around in light of that.
Want more rights then work in a union. Otherwise, don't forget you're employed _at will_.
This discussion is almost textbook flamebait. Indeed the very topic itself was all about flame. It's impossible, I think, to be able to discuss it rationally without falling into our usual traps. Actually for many people to even consider that it is possible to discuss it rationally would be problematic and borderline offensive, for others, the lack of a rational discussion is itself proof of a big problem.
That's my observation of these threads - it's a curious game - the only winning move, Professor Falcon, is not to play. How about a nice game of Chess?
"As part of and a central stipulation of this agreement, the plaintiff agrees not to purchase a luxury convertible vehicle and drive it around Sunnyvale while having scantily clad models recite his original memo through megaphones."
Was it Damore or Kevin Cernekee who quietly joined Apple to work on macos? I’m curious if they continue to be so outspoken there. My guess is their views would have to be kept to themselves. Apple really doesn’t tolerate unwanted attention.
Damore was not offered a chance to receive forgiveness by either the company or the outrage mob, therefore I don't respect what people generally have to say about whether what he did was right or wrong. It's astounding that people are still debating this in this very HN thread. A society of any size that makes virtue claims while simultaneously adding an undue price to being wrong or insensitive deserves to be mocked and ridiculed. You don't have to agree with anything Demore said, but the fact that Google openly encouraged political discussion, yet had an unwritten rule that if you say anything to upset a particular political demographic that you are terminated, is patently absurd. Companies shouldn't be encouraging employees to be political. We would never tolerate companies that encourage religious discussion but fire employees that say things against the Christian faith.
If you're going to come into this thread to refute Damore's memo and downvote people who don't tow your petty little line, your need to reexamine your principles, if you've got one.
I am going to be honest, I consider myself on the left side of the spectrum, but I am disgusted by the outrage culture on Twitter etc. Besides censorship, I believe it's a tactic by neoliberal types to pretend to be on the left by virtue signaling, but not actually addressing any of the economics I care about, (medicare for all, free college etc.), so I actually agree with you there.
That being said, what I also dislike is someone who seems to have no core beliefs whatsoever and instantly runs to the "intellectual dark web" bashing "the left", without acknowledging that what he refers to is a rather vocal minority, nor acknowledging the authoritarian tendencies of "the intellectual dark web" and basically just going with whoever is willing to air his grievances in a completely sympathetic, uncritical manner. It smells of opportunism, rather than some sincerely held belief.
Then there's the question of whether it is wise to communicate such issues across your company in the manner that he did. I am not saying it's right, but the world is a certain way and if one wants to change it, he/she needs to also be prepared for the consequences.
Your last line invalidates everything you just said.
The point is not whether he is deemed unpopular or takes a risk....the idea is that the ability to have that conversation should be honored. It is a debate and if there is an argument to be made, let it be made.
If the majority disagree that is their right but respecting the fact someone has a differing opinion is the point.
Let's take your statement and apply it to something else. Are you indicating the early women of the #MeToo movement got what they deserved for speaking up about the disgusting acts committed against them in the early days? The ones whose careers were destroyed?
This cuts both ways and what we are looking for is balance.
You seem to be attacking an argument I did not make.
I agree that the ability to have a conversation should be honored by the broader society, hence why I dislike Twitter outrage culture.
This is separate from whether there would be consequences for your employment at a company wishing to minimize negative PR around itself.
So to reiterate, his ability to have the conversation outside of work should absolutely be tolerated and protected. Within a work environment however, it is currently unreasonable to expect the same free speech rights as one is guaranteed from the state, regardless of my opinion that this should not be the case.
Therefore getting dismissed should not be a surprising outcome.
I'm cautious about approaching culture war threads, but I have to ask this question:
What is your definition of "neoliberalism?" To my understanding, it is a center-left economic ideology that promotes globalization, free trade, and cooperation between nations as a way to lift up the poor. Neoliberals might be critical of some of the policies that you point out (e.g. free college) due to implementation concerns.
However, isn't this orthogonal to one's attitude to culture war controversies? At least from my experience lurking r/neoliberal, the people there seem reasonable and don't seem to be the overzealous "outrage culture" types, but they perceive that "neoliberal" has become a negative label associated with center-left people who disagree with say, some of the policies proposed by Sanders.
I'm usually apprehensive about getting involved in these culture war threads; please understand that I'm not advocating for any political position, I just want to understand what "neoliberalism" means from your point of view.
The issue with neoliberalism is that it does little to 'lift the poor' in practice, yet maintains strong rhetoric to that effect.
With regards to medicare for all and free college, I am an European, where these policies have been implemented to various degrees rather successfully.
My issue is with the way neoliberalism seems to be clinically used to rhetorically support many left ideas, while in reality not doing anything to get them close to reality, if not outright undermining them.
They're the ultimate 'human interventionists', so where neoconservatives will just outright acknowledge they're in it to show America's muscle, get U.S. business access to new markets, confront a competitor etc. the neoliberals tend to use a more veiled language, but ultimately peruse similar policies.
So while the Iraq War was drawn up by neocons, the Libya intervention was drawn up by neoliberals. The difference? Neoliberals used much more soft, humanitarian language, for what was ultimately a disaster of similar proportions to Iraq, including the return of slave markets.
That is my problem with neoliberals, the cynical use of floury, high-minded language in persit of ultimately goals not so different from neoconservatives after all.
The “IDW” is really just a name for a handful of folks who were attacked by outrage mobs for misrepresentations of their intellectual curiosity. It’s barely a coherent entity, and most certainly not authoritarian. What an odd charge.
And who wouldn’t talk to people willing to listen?
I find someone like Jordan Peterson to have some authoritarian tendencies for sure, but his fans would probably call them "strong opinions". That's fair, abet I doubt that generous interpretation would be extended to someone they disagree with.
Just notice how the IDW feels strongly about free speech, but when it comes to the issue of Palestine and specifically incentivizing disinvestment from Israeli occupied territory in the West Bank, they suddenly have less than nothing to say about it, not to mention the issue of U.S. States passing anti-boycott laws censoring BDS and yet crickets from the IDW.
Being selective in your concern for free speech and only criticizing one side seems hardly "intellectual" to me and I can't take it seriously.
"X has been silent on Y," is generally not a fair criticism. Not speaking about a topic is the norm, since time is finite and there are uncountable numbers of issues to discuss, even within a specific topic.
Except they know about the issue, were pointed to it multiple times, even by me and are always quick to proclaim that 'Israel has the right to defend itself'.
Dave Rubin for example has had several offers from some prominent left-wing commentators to debate the issue, among others, yet he's always busy or some other excuse.
Sam Harris definitely knows about it as well, (has even spoken about BDS itself, just not their censorship), Ben Shapiro too, yet besides "Israel has the right to defend itself", (which is not the issue), crickets.
This is not an issue like whether they have played Animal Crossing, this is an issue where several states already are in violation of the First Amendment, an issue, they claim, is above all for them.
This is wilful ignorance because it would require leveling criticism at some of the same people they usually praise, instead of the usual college students and Twitter mobs, that's the issue.
Do members of the IDW avoid criticizing Israel because they support Israel, or because they think criticizing Israel would make it too easy for their opponents to label them as antisemites?
I don't think there is any way of knowing, but I suspect different individuals listed on that page have different reasons and motivations for saying what they say and not saying what they say. I'd bet on Ben Shapiro genuinely supporting Israel, but some of the rest I'm not sure about (I suspect at least some of those on that list are genuinely antisemites. For instance: https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/ukip-candidate-carl-benja...)
Anyway my point is it's much easier to judge people based on what they say, rather than what they don't say.
> Do members of the IDW avoid criticizing Israel because they support Israel, or because they think criticizing Israel would make it too easy for their opponents to label them as antisemites?
That I do not know for sure, but isn't their trademark to speak openly regardless of what their opponents would label them as?
It's easy to attack college students. If they're afraid to criticism Israel, they can't claim to stand for free speech regardless of what they opponents think, as they often do.
> but isn't their trademark to speak openly regardless of what their opponents would label them as?
That's not clear to me, no. To be frank it's not clear to me the 'IDW' categorization has much worth at all if it includes people as diametrically opposed as fervent zionists and antisemitic neonazis. It's a very loose categorization at best.
1. I don't recall him ever "asking for forgiveness," or doing anything besides doubling down on his memo.
2. The "outrage mob" isn't real. You know who got James Damore fired? Himself. It's especially telling that you, and people who defend him, attribute zero fault whatsoever to the person who actually wrote the memo.
How am I supposed to take you seriously when you're denying the sheer amount of negative media attention, all the outrage Tweets, and the general sentiment in online discussions like this one that are happening years later?
We can discuss the extent of the outrage mob, but your idea that there's no outrage mob at all is baffling.
> You know who got James Damore fired? Himself.
No, he didn't get himself fired. His employer fired him.
> It's especially telling that you, and people who defend him, attribute zero fault whatsoever to the person who actually wrote the memo.
"Zero fault"? Your telepathy is way off, because I didn't say once that Damore has no fault.
The outrage mob "isn't real", yet you are so quick to dismiss those who think that Damore is defensible.
1. Calling it an outrage "mob" is dishonest, and that's why I say it doesn't exist. It's not mob mentality. Did it occur to you that there are reasons that many people could have been outraged by what he wrote? Calling it a "mob" is just you dismissing that.
2. Yes, he got himself fired. Nobody made him write that, and even after writing it, nobody made him post it on a large mailing list where an entire workforce could read it.
3. You don't think his actions were what caused him to get fired. So whose fault was it, if not his? You're more intent on making a statement against the "outrage mob" than actually acknowledging why doing what Damore did might get you fired at any company.
Again, it's especially telling that you and the people who defend Damore attribute zero fault to the person who actually wrote the memo.
> Again, it's especially telling that you and the people who defend attribute zero fault to the person who actually wrote the memo.
I've been honest and I replied in good faith, and yet you just sidestep and lump me in with some made up group of people whom you say attribute "zero fault" to Damore. You didn't listen to me at all. You didn't even ask me what faults I would attribute to Damore after I denied your perception of what I'm thinking. Why should anyone have a conversation with you?
So they can just dismiss things I say and pretend they can read my mind, but I am supposed to either defend or apologize for it because someone says so?
EDIT: I mistakenly thought your comment was from the person I was having the conversation with.
Numerous employees take the stance that violence is acceptable, as long as it's directed towards hateful people. Numerous employees vowing to shun, ridicule and ignore anyone who remotely suggests support or agreement with any part of the memo. Numerous employees taking the stance that dissent is a violent act for which violence must be returned. Shamelessly of all, a senior Site Reliability Engineer vows to "keep hounding Damore" until one of them is fired.
This is not acceptable behavior for a group of people that are ostensibly at the top of their field. They are not faultless. They share, at minimum, some of the blame.
Of course, if you meant your statement to be hyperbolic, then you are being flippant, and needlessly so.
> It's especially telling that you, and people who defend him, attribute zero fault whatsoever to the person who actually
It's funny that you and the people who attack him always seem to completely ignore everything the parent comment you're replying to said, and write a comment that basically amounts to "but, you're wrong!"
Damore's action was explicitly political. Its whole point was that Google was just too darned left, and foolish for being so.
One can't reasonably try to reach a large audience with something intentionally upsetting and then be surprised that those people are in fact upset. Freedom of speech cannot mean freedom from other people's speech.
Google is entirely full of vindictive people with blatantly political opinions - many who have acted with obvious malice towards others, so spare us the hypocrisy.
If this were truly a matter of 'opinion rocking the boat' - then there would be a bunch of other firings, policy changes etc. - but that is not the case at all.
Outrage mobs are by definition 'consequences for some behavior'.
But the implication that someone should be vilified globally for having an earnest and not entirely unreasonable intellectual opinion makes his responders an 'outrage mob'.
Damore had no malice, ill will, his opinion was made ostensibly for some positive will, among a relatively private group.
If he was beating his wife, then there'd be a legit consequence for his behavior right? And some outrage would be justified.
But that's obviously not the case.
The response is the most 'outrage mob imaginable', with people still 'outraging' themselves on HN years later.
Despite reasoning his point of view well, it does not mean it's right, healthy, or valid.
And while Sexism and Racism are not equal, there do parallel in many ways.
How different is his memo than writings that discuss how the Negroid is a lesser form of human species, and there for it's condition is justified?
Scientifically, there is very little, if anything, that differs between a man and woman performing a job in tech. Why then do women continually report about discriminatory behavior in the work place?
This is not about whether Damore was 'right or wrong' - it's about whether he was within his right to make a reasonable statement and not get publicly murdered for it.
Also - your comment has also demonstrated the intellectual dishonestly against him by misrepresenting the thrust of his argument.
There are considerable differences between genders, this is not a scientifically controversial position, and in an entire 24 years of general upbringing, imbued with gendered differences and possibly marginal - but material - biological differences, is going to yield very different outcomes.
There are many fields in society that have unequal gender ratios and it's not remotely specific to 'tech'.
It's obviously a thorny subject, which requires some dispassionate thinking. We don't need people screaming 'Nazi' at the first hint that they might think someone, somewhere committed a 'thought crime' against their personal and very narrow view of the world.
This is the kind of bigotry that is not 'right, healthy or valid'.
> It's obviously a thorny subject, which requires some dispassionate thinking. We don't need people screaming 'Nazi' at the first hint that they might think someone, somewhere committed a 'thought crime' against their personal and very narrow view of the world.
Speaking of intellectual dishonesty...
"Women are just as equal as men" does not seem to be a very narrow view of the world.
> This is the kind of bigotry that is not 'right, healthy or valid'.
What bigotry is that--calling sexism for exactly what it is?
Domestic Violence is about power and control caused of the DV Perpetrator/Aggressor towards the survivor. DV perpetrators use a myriad of tactics to control the relationship with the "victim": financial, physical, emotional, children, and sex.
While the "victim" does bear some responsibility, it's usually with regards to how they are unable (or unwilling) to end a relationship with a DV perpetrator.
You're being reductive about my explanation about the role a survivor plays in a DV relationship.
Recognizing, understanding, and ultimately forgiving yourself for why a person was in a DV relationship is part of the process survivors go through in order to move past it.
It may well be. I looked it up on wikipedia now, assuming you're talking about "Non-agression principle". I'm not sure I understand. Anyway, have a nice day.
Receive forgiveness? Pardon me, but where exactly did Damore ask for forgiveness? People very rarely accept apologies from people who don't offer them.
You don't need to ask forgiveness in order to receive it.
Google could have done the following:
- Recognize that any damage caused by the memo had been done. The toothpaste was out of the tube.
- See that Damore's memo wasn't written with malice or intention to make people feel uncomfortable.
- Allow Damore to keep his position so long as he does not participate in such political discussion at the company again. This would have been reasonable, given that there's been no word that Damore was anything but a competent employee.
Instead, they chose to fire him over something political, which was inevitably going to blow up into a news story and a talking point on social media. Nowhere in Damore's story, to my knowledge, did his employer offer him any sort of option, despite everything he had done being within company policy(and his opinion being solicited).
This isn't to say I misunderstand why Google did what they did. But, had they been a more benevolent organization, I'd have hoped that they not simply get rid of employees that make one relatively minor mistake.
I'm sorry, but I don't want to live in societies where people are made pariahs if they make such mistakes.
Could you please show me where Damore says he made a mistake and apologized for it?
I don't think this was minor, and I don't see any indication it was a mistake. One doesn't accidentally write an 8-page memo, especially an explicitly political one.
But even assuming it were a minor mistake, then it was absolutely on Damore to own that. I'd never fire somebody for a mistake. But for doing something harmful and then refusing to admit error, let alone make amends? I don't see an option other than firing, because there's no reason to think the person won't keep right on making "mistakes" that are similar or worse.
> I'm sorry, but I don't want to live in societies where people are made pariahs if they make such mistakes.
I agree with this statement, but I think it's a sentiment that is in tension with everything else you've said so far. I don't believe Damore has said that he thought his memo or its contents were a "mistake." He has totally failed to engage with the critiques of his position and has instead focused on critiquing the responses of others.
The essential aspect of allowing people to recover from mistakes is that person meaningfully engaging with what they did wrong (which does not have to be a blanket apology). An excellent example of engaging with wrongdoing (even serious wrongdoing) can be found in Dan Harmon's apology for his behavior towards a coworker[1]. The person who's made a mistake must identify what they think the mistake was!
Does having people yell at you make this harder? Of course it does. People still have a right to complain about the things they find upsetting. Damore himself was complaining about something that upset him when he wrote his memo. You've spent a good amount of space pointing out (correctly, I think) that Google is still obligated to do "the right thing" even though Damore complained[2]. I think if you want to hold Google to account, it's equally fair to ask for accountability from Damore (with the understanding that Damore, being a single human, may struggle a little more to act perfectly than a giant corporation).
Damore definitely hasn't backstepped on his memo in any way, although that doesn't necessarily mean that he couldn't have been given the option to begrudgingly disavow his position in order to remain at Google. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think that was possible for him. I guess that's the point I was trying to make. Whether he failed to engage with critiques of his position really doesn't change whether his circumstance was fair or reasonable.
I don't think the analogy of Dan Harmon completely holds up.(though to be fair all analogies fall apart at some level) The two "mistakes" aren't really equivalent. Damore was solicited for his input, and provided a reasoned feedback with the intent of helping people(whether it was wrong or misguided is a separate issue), whereas Harmon was doing something that an average reasonable person would recognize as victimizing someone. I think most people have the capability to deserve a second chance, but Harmon's case is different in that he was shown to be predatory, however low-level it may have been. I don't think someone can credibly call Damore a predator or dangerous. If they can, then the very act of you and I talking about this could be seen by someone as potentially predatory. Of course, I find that idea absurd. In any case, I think it's possible that Harmon could also be allowed to recover from his mistake given enough time and displayed sincerity. And that's likely going to happen, if it hasn't already, since he's an entertainer. (I stopped following him and Rick and Morty, so I don't have a good idea) Damore will be ridiculed by a good number of people for the forseeable future.
I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding, because I don't think Google should be held to account. It's likely they were in their right to fire him at their will, even if I think the more optimal decision would have been to limit the damage of Damore(and treat him like a human) rather than ultimately make the issue more public than it needed to be. At the same time, Damore didn't seem to grasp what his peers, the company, and the public actually wanted. Perhaps he didn't care. This is why I get pissed internally when people claim that I think I believe Damore did nothing wrong.
Sorry if that was rambling and didn't have much of a point. I spent way more time replying to people this morning about "James Damore" than I thought I ever would, so my brain's scattered.
> that doesn't necessarily mean that he couldn't have been given the option to begrudgingly disavow his position in order to remain at Google. Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think that was possible for him.
Looking at the very basic timeline of events, I'm really unsure this is true. Wikipedia says there was about a month between the initial memo and his removal and that Damore did add an addendum to the memo generally denouncing sexism (though, I think, not engaging with the critiques of his writings as "sexist")[1]. I suspect that if he had, in that addendum, retracted some or all of what he had said, he had a real opportunity to keep his job.
That said, I also want to question the idea that a just and fair resolution of a mis-step should necessarily include an opportunity to be perfectly restored to your previous situation. It's common, for instance, for a project to go in what turns out, in hindsight, to be the wrong direction. The people in charge of that project might be removed to let someone with fresh eyes come in - not because they're being punished, but because that's how humans work. People removed in that way are seen to have...performed suboptimally, but not failed exactly. I think it's totally possible that Damore writes a memo that is filled with sexist tropes and ignorant reifications of sexist hierarchies and is removed from his current position, but it's understood that his response enables him to go on to new positions. An older example of this is the standard of conduct for US judges, which says that even the appearance of impropriety is banned. I think Google is well within its rights to remove people for the appearance of sexism and those people who appeared sexist have the opportunity to demonstrate that they're not, in fact, sexist and go on to further positions.
Again, I don't believe Damore has tried very hard to prove that he doesn't actually hold sexist views.
>I don't think the analogy of Dan Harmon completely holds up.
I think you're quite right about the difference between their contexts. I thought Harmon's apology was just a great example of addressing serious misdeeds after the fact. Harmon's apology was positively received by his victim and, as far as I know, he's gone on to success in new ventures[3].
> I don't think someone can credibly call Damore a predator or dangerous.
I think I generally agree with what you're saying here but I think the word "dangerous" deserves more examination. One of the core tenants of the critique of Damore's work is that it supports a generally misogynistic world view. He's highlighting that women perform differently than men on certain measurements and that those measurements are also associated with being an effective engineer. This ignores the problem of how these terms come to be defined - if nearly all engineers are men, any measurement of the 'good' engineers will find they almost all test 'like men.' So saying that the weakness of female engineers is revealed by their failure to test 'like men' is ignoring the historical slant to the data. To me, that is dangerous. You can see this same problem in the Amazon AI that scored resumes from women more poorly because Amazon had previously hired few female engineers[4].
[3] It's worth saying that lots of people who have credibly been accused of sexual assault also go on to great success. The idea that accusations destroy someones career are overblown.
Your initial proposition is one I find hard reconcile
> Damore was not offered a chance to receive forgiveness by either the company or the outrage mob, therefore I don't respect what people generally have to say about whether what he did was right or wrong
I'm not sure the onus is on the other party to "offer" a chance to receive forgiveness when they have been offended or wronged? That's generally not how society or even the legal system functions. The accused has to "show" remorse and "ask" for forgiveness, otherwise what's the point of offering something you either don't want or don't deserve?
> Damore was not offered a chance to receive forgiveness by either the company or the outrage mob, therefore I don't respect what people generally have to say about whether what he did was right or wrong.
Are you saying that it's wrong for people to judge actions as right or wrong without first offering to forgive the person who did the action?
That's an interesting standard, I've never heard something like that before.
How do you handle the fact that the statement itself does not meet the criterion it's advocating? That is, you're saying it's wrong for people to do X, but you didn't offer forgiveness first. Isn't that what you're saying one shouldn't do?
> We would never tolerate companies that encourage religious discussion but fire employees that say things against the Christian faith.
Surely there exist church-backed business encourage discussion about certain religious topics and would fire you for holding beliefs that don't comport with their particular religion? I'm thinking e.g. church-backed hospitals. Or even churches themselves, although perhaps you wouldn't consider them to be a "business".
But more to the point, I wonder if there are limits to what you've defined as "political". What if my political belief is that Black people are intellectually inferior to white people (and that explains why there are disproportionately fewer Black people in tech). Am I not allowed to have a workplace where some political discussion is allowed (say, a newsroom) and at the same time not tolerate this (or any?) belief?
There was also unacceptable levels of vitrol against damore within the Google communications. I remembre reading physical threats, doxxing, insulting etc. A swath of people behaved in a reprehensible manner in response, in a way that would clearly be fired or reprimanded in a day to day situation.
> Damore was not offered a chance to receive forgiveness by either the company
How do you know that?
I'm a Googler who has zero insight into the Damore case, and opinions are my own.
That being said, in all my experience, Google does not fire for making (honest) mistakes, and Google does not fire on the first offense. If you want to get fired, you typically need to intentionally and maliciously violate express policy, repeatedly.
I don't know if that was the case with Damore, it's just how things are typically handled.
People always pretend this shit is about "professionalism" or whatever while ignoring that if you have leftist political opinions you can run wild rubbing them in people's faces and nothing whatsoever will happen to you.
It's so utterly and transparently self-serving, it's disgusting.
I think the outrage mob in this case is entirely justified. Damore has had plenty of opportunity to apologize. As much as he had a chance to not say anything at all. Political debate is one thing. Misogyny is another. He created a hostile environment. He got fired. I'd be fine knowing this ruined his life.
This is how free speech dies. I despise Trump and the right, but the outrage mob and the left is just as bad (and probably more effective) with their ability to destroy peoples' livelihoods for expressing any opinion or questioning the left's dogma.
No it isn't. Free speech means you can't be prosecuted for speech. It doesn't mean people can't hate you. You're literally up here telling me I shouldn't speak. What's the difference between saying women are inferior and saying sexists are inferior? The answer is that I'm actually correct.
> "Free speech means you can't be prosecuted for speech. It doesn't mean people can't hate you."
Would you have said that to people in the civil rights movement or the labor movement? They were hated and mistreated by many as well and yet your words would have justified that.
The sword always cuts both ways. Your viewpoint will hurt causes you believe in just as much as causes you oppose.
Slippery slope? Nope. You're thinking like a programmer where rules have to be rigorously defined. Humans are capable of being reasonable. We are capable of distinguishing hateful speech without an algorithm.
I’m pretty sure that google’s “unwritten rule” is THE unwritten rule of society though, which is basically beware of pissing off the mob / be insufferable at your own peril. Asking companies to seriously outline every facet of life there is the ultimate guardrails culture request.
I agree with you in theory, but it’s a bit different. If he is making the workplace less comfortable for particular groups of people then I certainly would have no issue firing him.
You are free to hold any belief you want, but once you’re in my ear with some misinformed ideas that are potentially hurtful to a large group I am free to tell you to be quiet or leave. Of course, it’s your right not to listen to me... but if I’m your boss you can expect to be fired.
First of all, there are plenty of businesses that would do exactly this. It is legal in most US states.
OK, but I don't think it's right. Here's why.
We as a society have said, employers can "discriminate" (meaning "choose") employees on some axes but not others. They can discriminate based on where you went to college, where you've worked previously, how friendly you seem to be, but not based on your gender or race. That's true even if working with a Black person or a woman would make some people uncomfortable.
The question, which I'll leave as a question, is, what's the difference between these two sets, and in which one does LGBTQ identity belong and why?
Sure, if they are publishing documents about how straight people are less effective at their job then they’re causing unnecessary issues in the workplace.
This is a strawman argument, but I will assume you made it in good faith given how widely Damore's claims have been misrepresented.
From what I recall in the memo, I'm pretty sure he never said that women were less effective at their tech jobs (fortunately, because there isn't any evidence remotely suggesting that !)
What he did is that, when Google asked for feedback on their mandatory diversity training, he challenged the prevailing view being taught in these classes about why less women get into tech than men (basically: not because of inherent lack of interest but because of societal pressure)
He pointed out that the latest science on "interesting in things vs people" disagrees, and he supported his argument with citations.
In a company that prides itself on making data-based decisions, starting a discussion in this way with a reasonable argument (even if later refuted) ideally shouldn't be a firing offense.
Now, was it politically, humanly, emotionally smart for him to say things in this way without consideration for their impact on coworkers ?
Of course not. But still, I can't help feeling somewhat sympathetic to someone with child-like naiveté who spoke the uncomfortable scientific truth (or at least, a very reasonable theory) that adults don't want to hear.
You're technically correct, still is not unreasonable to argue that accusing google of quote "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" might have a net effect of caste a shadow over certain groups being competent enough or being "diversity hires".
So pointing out a mathematical fact about the hiring practices of your company is wrong? Google decided to implement the policy that minorities who almost passed the bar(but didn't) get special treatment.
A simple example:
"On the current political climate, political platforms are being built around being "anti-pc". With the past evidence we have about astroturfing campaigns it's possible that there are some paid posters even here on HN peddling political right wing propaganda."
I'm not saying anything false, but you can clearly see that this is not only a bad faith argument, but actually poisons the discussion, and still it can be argued that indeed we need to be wary about astroturfing and social network manipulations.
I wouldn't have fired Damore, but let's not kid ourselves by saying "we're simply stating facts". Mainly because that's not really the conversation, the tacit implication of "minorities who almost passed the bar", but letting them in anyway, is that the "bar" might be wrong, and that the company might be getting more results with this kind of hires than just measuring "mad hack skillz". Damore rightly points out that "without evidence this is just veiled (left) ideology" the point where he misses is that there has been at least attempts to get this evidence, we can discuss the results and even if they're valid (reproducibility crisis), but Damore just plain ignore's it. The only extension he has to offer about this point is:
"[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”" which is just bullshit by the account of anyone who knows the basics and history of marxism or social science. So these are not even "facts", but youtube tier analysis.
They solicited feedback. He gave them feedback that was well reasoned and well supported with citations, regardless of whether it was true or not. They didn't warn him, they fired him and the outrage mob wanted to ensure he never worked again.
If you're going to solicit feedback and then fire someone because you don't like it - at least specify that it must be non-dissenting feedback. Be honest here about the dishonest game being played.
That not even vaguely what that memo was. It was a blatantly political argument. Its go link was "pc-considered-harmful". Its central thesis was that Google leans too far to the left.
I think we're talking about the same memo, just a different take on it. To be clear, it was a response to a solicitation of feedback on a diversity program.
If a company can't handle honest, carefully researched and presented feedback - they shouldn't ask for it.
Your notion is that whatever an employee does should be fine as long as it technically complies with a the wording of vague, general request made by a coworker?
That would be one way to run a company, I guess. But I've never heard of one that actually works like that.
If you want to have an insightful discussion, one should refrain from making strawman arguments.
I think Demore's memo has little place in a company, but neither does the diversity program that spawned it. Better to keep politics out of the work place. But given the context, it was fully justified, regardless of its merits or lack thereof and I think the person who leaked it committed a real sin here, as did the company for firing him.
You can't keep politics out of the workplace. Your notion that diversity programs shouldn't exist is enormously political, and company having them or refusing to have them is political either way. Especially here in America, where the rights and privileges of white men have been intensely political topics for literal centuries. You are practicing politics right here, right now.
A diversity program is inherently political, as you said. I don't think it has a place in a company. Again, I think leave your politics at home. You seem to think that's not possible, but that's how I would do things, were it up to me.
It's got nothing to do with men's or women's rights. I'm dismayed by that whole argument. Let the meritocracy rule and the chips fall where they may.
Not having a diversity program is also political. The concept of meritocracy is political. Claiming that the things fitting with your political biases are non-political is political.
If that's the case everything is political. I'm not sure I accept that.
What I want to say is I don't care about left or right or the agendas of either. Focus on the product, the customers, and the fight. Alexander the Great never had a diversity program. I'm not going to say he was the pinnacle of morality here, but maybe it's a good idea to focus on the important things if you want to be successful.
Wanting to ignore America's long history of sexism and racism is a political position. Wanting to ignore the effects of those is a political position. Your contributions here are political activism.
If you want to be a reactionary, fine. But please own it.
I'm not sure if reactionary is the label, but I'll own whatever side doesn't have diversity committees at work - or HR departments if I'm allowed to dream.
In this case, you satisfy the group that spends disproportionate amounts of time weaponizing social media, activists, and blog journalists for their cause.
What's the most human narrative you're welling to place on Damore, that he might agree with? I'll try to think up a few...
1) Damore may have felt just as uncomfortable as his coworkers with what was being said, just in the opposite direction.
2) Damore, being a little spectrumy, attempted to derive an answer to a question about gender inequality in a cold and rational way, having no understanding that what he wrote would upset people. That's not the same as suggesting what he wrote is "correct." Correctness is irrelevant. As a person also on the spectrum, I can relate to this happening all.the.time. It's very difficult to understand what will upset people if you don't already have a mental rule about it. And rules are narrow.
>If he is making the workplace less comfortable for particular groups of people
Not just any group of people, naturally, but particular groups.
Politics necessarily makes certain groups uncomfortable. A discussion of wealth redistribution makes the rich incomfortable, should such things be impermissible? Politics enables certain groups to be favoured, and others to be disfavoured. This is a good reason to ban politics in general, but if you allow it, you need consistent rules regarding which sorts of views are permissible, rules that aren't themselves political.
>This is a good reason to ban politics in general, but if you allow it, you need consistent rules regarding which sorts of views are permissible, rules that aren't themselves political.
It is impossible to have apolitical rules regulating which political discussions are allowed.
Hell, just banning political discussion - any political discussion - is a political act. It's always a political act.
They are allowed. But they also need to take responsibility for the consequences of their message. If you alienate half of your colleagues, you'll probably get fired.
Google didn't fire Damore when he wrote the memo. They didn't fire him when he shared it for feedback. They didn't fire him when it was internal discussion. They fired him when it leaked to press and there was a social media furor.
The idea that Google fired Damore for anything other than bad publicity is not supported by evidence. They asked him for feedback. He provided an intelligent and well researched document. They debated it. A social media mob got mad, and Google, being greedy cowards, fired Damore.
That's an article about Damore's POV, so I believe the correct way to express it is that Damore claims he wrote it in response to a request for feedback. And given that he put it up with a go link, it's pretty clear he didn't just submit this as an email to the D&I team. He published it internally, hoping to spark discussion. So I think it's disingenuous to talk about this as if it were something Google's managers ordered him to do. Damore set out to cause a stir and got one.
I said Damore was asked for feedback not that his managers ordered him to write the document and then fired him for it. Damore claimed he originally wrote it as feedback for a diversity meeting he attended and then shared it for broader feedback.
To my knowledge this account has never been contested by Google or anyone else and is the agreed upon account. I agree it is possible that Damore is lying about why he wrote it, and that if Google said he wrote it under some different circumstances there would be ambiguity because Damore's own account could be self serving - but, just because it is possibly Damore is lying doesn't mean we should assume he is. There is no dispute about why he originally authored the memo, is there?
When you talk about how "Google fired Damore" and "They asked him for feedback" you imply that the firer and the feedback-re are the same entity. But there's no reason to think that's the case. A more plausible interpretation is that somebody running D&I programs said something general, like "we welcome feedback on our programs". But there's no evidence that he specifically was asked, and even if he were, sharing it broadly appears to be his own idea. In which case, the general request for feedback is irrelevant to him getting fired.
Damore was both asked for feedback and fired by Google. Sure, it was different individuals at Google who did each, whoever presented the diversity the diversity conference asked for feedback and the decision to fire Damore was made, I believe, by Pichai.
I never said it was the same individual though, I said it was Google. I think it's splitting hairs to take what I wrote "Google asked for feedback and fired him" read it as a claim that it's somehow the same individual firing him, and then try to dispute the unintended interpretation you just invented.
Regarding sharing it broadly being Damore's idea - true. He shared it first as feedback and then tried to develop the ideas further by sharing within the company. For opinions not verboten by Google, this is common at the company.
This does not mean that it was irrelevant he was asked. Google talked to Damore about diversity and asked for his opinions. He was working to provide it and fired by Google for it.
Your construction seems to imply that Damore was fired for sharing his diversity feedback more broadly. I don't think that's true. Damore wasn't fired or censured when he gave the original opinion and not when he shared internally. He was only fired when social media began brewing an outrage mob. The point is, it shows Damore wasn't doing anything objectively wrong. He wasn't punished until popular subjective opinion went against him. He wasn't fired for his opinion or for sharing it internally, he was fired because people were tweeting about it and Google lacks the intellectual and moral integrity to stand behind their people against mean tweets.
It is definitely not splitting hairs. The "but Google asked him to do it and then fired him" line of defense hides relevant details. He wasn't assigned to write it, he wasn't assigned to publish it, and he wasn't assigned to not back down despite how much trouble it was causing.
It's true that sharing opinions is a common activity. But that again elides key facts. A highly political document attacking company programs and company culture was not the sort of thing people normally pass around for discussion.
Your notion that Damore just, gosh golly, thought he was sharing some helpful feedback is hard to square with the content or with his subsequent behavior both before and after his firing. I think what fits better with the text and his behavior is that he was engaging in political activism, and was well aware that he was going to cause a stir.
I agree that it's possible Damore wouldn't have ended up being fired under a variety of circumstances. Maybe it's true that if it hadn't hit the press, he'd still be there. Although given that what made news was the level of internal upset it was causing, he could well have been fired anyhow. And regardless, any employee should know that, "Don't cause the company a giant PR problem" is a reasonable rule to follow. Indeed, that apparently is explicitly part of Google's orientation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124750
Damore was asked to provide feedback at the diversity program. He did and shared his document for internal feedback and discussion. Damore was fired for this.
Your objection is that saying "Google" did each of those things "hides relevant details". I disagree given that I've explicitly stated those details in this thread. Taking a single sentence and complaining it lacks details which are readily available in the wider context seems like splitting hairs.
Your point about "what fits better with Damore's text and behavior" may be your opinion. I don't share it though based on Damore's text clearly offering suggestions to improve diversity and different ways to think about it. To me, it seems much more likely Damore interpreted the Google diversity people as being honest actors and gave his honest feedback.
Your final point about how Damore should've known he would be fired is true, and I agree he should've realized Google is not an honest actor and doesn't want genuine feedback. That's kind of beside my broader point though, which is to highlight Google's lack of integrity in this instance. Damore was naive and trusted Google, he should've known not to. We agree there.
Setting that point aside, do you think if Damore was genuinely trying to give advice, and I know you don't think that, that he should've been fired for it?
I think a person genuinely trying to give advice doesn't act the way Damore did.
But let's say you're right, that his very best effort to collaborate with his colleagues was a divisive attack on their politics. That his very best effort to collaborate involved sticking to his guns to the point it was causing a major internal problem, and then a notable external one. In which case, he's so uniquely bad at collaboration that I don't think they could do anything other than fire him.
But personally, I don't think Damore was almost uniquely incompetent.
Damore's memo was not a "divisive attack on their politics". On the other hand, lying about his memo to describe it that way does seem like a divisive attack.
I don't think you're being honest or fair here and don't see the benefit of continuing a conversation with you.
The go link was "pc-considered-harmful". I think Damore clearly understood that what he was doing was political. And starting from "PC", a right-wing caricature of left-wing positions, could not be anything other than divisive. If you'd like to argue that was somehow all accidental, that he was just incredibly bad a communication, feel free.
I'm being perfectly honest, and I'm doing my best to be fair. If you don't like that, well, I did my best.
I certainly would think so. But nonetheless, the US right has been attacking the US left for that for decades. As long as the politeness is being applied to historically disfavored groups, anyhow.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that in the parent comment's particular case, knowingly inviting discussion and then firing people when you get butthurt is stupid.
Not at all. When companies give power to employees, they expect that it be used responsibly and roughly in line with the goals of the company. If I give somebody root access and they just rm -rf everything because it seems like fun, or because they're trying to prove some sort of point, then I'm going to fire them.
Google correctly gave employees a lot of power to have internal discussions because they thought that would benefit them as a company. And the great bulk of people used that responsibly. Damore didn't and paid the price.
Someone abusing root access to destroy data doesn't compare at all to punishing unpopularity in a falsely "open" forum. Analogies tend to suck in debates, but yours is particularly bad.
A lot of people here want to be the boss of their own start-up, which means they won't want their future (perhaps hypothetical) employees organising against them.
If your company had a sizable portion of racists, and an employee said something anti-racist that made the racists feel uncomfortable, would you feel compelled to fire the anti-racist?
I'm a big believer in the principle of freedom of speech. It's sad that employees don't have freedom of speech in the workplace.
> Companies shouldn't be encouraging employees to be political
Yet the very act of any type of business dealing is inherently political. To deny that is to misunderstand the word itself. It's a shame that people have weaponized this term (political) and use it as a pejorative. Similar to the term social justice 'warrior', for people showing solidarity.
To not see this truth is to be culturally grandiose, in my opinion. Read Yash Tandon's 'Trade is War' for more.
If you have a mediocre employee that's ruining the productivity of less mediocre employees would you keep them around?
All the rest is noise. He simply wasn't worth keeping. Google keeps sexists, racists, and the like in it's executive and senior ranks. The difference is Google thinks they're worth it.
Would it be too much to ask that we collectively say "The Damore thing is obviously a [scissor statement](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/), on which otherwise-reasonable people bafflingly manage to hold different views very strongly, and we should stop talking about it forthwith because no good can come of it"? Nothing new can be said on the subject, vanishingly few people can be persuaded one way or the other, and "news site primarily populated by shortform comments" is hardly the appropriate place to hold a protracted argument.
I think it would be much more valuable to address why it works as a scissor statement. The fact that it does is obvious in the debate, but it's unclear why/how it does that.
I wonder how much of it comes from people first seeing opinionated reporting, misleading excerpts, or edited versions (one of the key statements - that differences in populations cannot be applied to make decisions about individuals - was part of a diagram [1] that was missing in initial leaks), or not having seen it at all.
However, I believe it acts as a scissor statement even for people who started by reading the full version, which is extremely interesting, and which I'd love to understand.
I think it would be productive to move the discussion to the fact that Google is for many people the arbiter of truth. And how they are and ought to deal with political controversies in light of that.
Frankly, if this controversy had happened at... I dunno... Coca Cola, it would be completely uninteresting.
"It made a horrible kind of sense, for Cold War values of sense: not a real rocket motor, but a vile way of getting your enemy’s best and brightest to kill themselves by trying to reverse-engineer an impossible nightmare."
This is the problem, though. That discourse is not productive, when held here - witness the dumpster fire of downvotes all over the place.
If the topic needs discussion, it needs long and nuanced discussion where each party is trying hard to understand the other - not rapid-fire three-line comments on a news site.
Do you know of any other place for this discussion that would be better-suited to nuance and genuine intellectual curiosity ("each party ... trying hard to understand the other")? Downvites are quite common here, in any discussion.
This is kind of why people are meant to have blogs. A network of blogs where people can maintain historical records of their thinking, for example. Scott Alexander is a great example of this: every so often we get a "contra PERSON on SUBJECT", a long well-thought-out discussion with nuance and a good-faith attempt to understand the argument under criticism. And people reply with their own long-form blogs in a similar vein.
It's annoying that Bloomberg refers to the memo as being "political" and expressing "political conservatism". The memo was attempting to explain the underrepresentation of women in tech via biological differences. That has literally nothing to do with politics, and framing it as such misrepresents and discredits the contents of the memo.
Go take a look at the various declarations of secession when the slaveholding US states tried to quit and form the Confederacy. A number of them explicitly mention that a system of racial slavery is fine because black people were naturally inferior, which is how in the 1850s one would have said "biological differences". That was very obviously politics.
Further, there's an enormous history of explaining why people on the short end of a power differential truly deserve it because of their inferiority. You could look at all the talk around the time a century ago when men were deciding whether women should be allowed to vote. Women's "biological differences" were a huge reason they supposedly couldn't handle political power.
For those interested in the history, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent history of how ideas about "biological differences" have, since the ancient Greeks at least, been used politically. The particular "biological differences" change, of course. E.g., the Slavs, from whom we get the word slave, were considered naturally inferior by the Greeks because they came from a colder place. When enslaving Africans became an industry for people from the north, suddenly the problem was Africa's hotter climate. The "science" keeps changing, but what doesn't is the result: "inferior" people deserve less social or economic power.
So what are you trying to say, we shouldn't be allowed to talk about gender differences?
There's an enormous difference between the references you made because they are all trying to rationalize treating a race/gender as inferior. On top of that, there is no real scientific evidence backing anything up and it all basically amounts to inferring causation from correlation (ie. they are inferior because they are poor).
James' memo does not in any form attempt to rationalize why women should not become engineers (the analogue to your comparisons), rather it tries to explain why women do not pursue careers in tech at the frequency with which men do.
Women are not "discriminated against" when it comes to signing up for computer science classes in high school or choosing to major in computer science in university, yet significantly less of them sign up for these classes then men. There is no discrimination going on here since any women can sign up for any class of their choosing in high school. Clearly something is causing this gender imbalance, what might that be? That is what the memo tries to investigate. There is nothing "sexist" about asking or attempting to answer this real life phenomenon.
In terms of gender differences, the author lists points such as "women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things" , "women on average are more cooperative", and "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for
status on average", hardly statements that anyone can consider as insinuating female inferiority.
I'm guessing that the most contentious part of the memo is where the author states that women tend to have higher degrees of neuroticism, but he did cite Wikipedia which states "Research in large samples has shown that levels of neuroticism are higher in women than men." and references a research paper [1]. I'm no biology/psychology/gender expert and have no opinion on the authority of the source, but the legitimacy of the paper is certainly not a question of "politics", but of science.
> Women are not "discriminated against" when it comes to signing up for computer science classes in high school or choosing to major in computer science in university, yet significantly less of them sign up for these classes then men. There is no discrimination going on here since any women can sign up for any class of their choosing in high school. Clearly something is causing this gender imbalance, what might that be?
Gee, that must be some sort of biological factor! Certainly not related to social aspects outside of signing up for a high school computer science class.
Practically every comment I've made in this thread I'd consider a waste of time since no one calling the memo "sexist" has made any serious argument, thus proving my point.
I always thought Reddit was a better platform for people more interested in a echo chamber safe space where they can post low-effort 1-2 sentence comments and be patted on the back with other similar comments all saying the same thing.
One, I didn't say that, so I'm not sure why you think it's my job to argue the point. Two, you are not coming across as a guy who's seriously looking to understand why people might reasonably see something as sexist. You can't really be surprised that nobody's willing to take the time to educate somebody who doesn't want to learn.
The trouble is that there are well known physical[1] and psychological[2] differences between the sexes. The same isn't true between races. It may still be political, but the arguments against it shouldn't be the same.
You're missing the point. America has seen 5 centuries of bogus arguments of the form, "the unequal status quo is in fact fine because biology". As I said right in the comment you're replying to, this happened with gender just as much as with race.
Given that these arguments have been consistently proven wrong but always come back in a different form, the 21st-century versions should be carefully scrutinized to see if they're the same politically motivated reasoning. And we should never pretend that they're not political, however much they're cloaked in objectivity. Indeed, people who value science should especially object to political argument wrapping itself in a lab coat.
There are more progressive leftists in power in tech than ever, yet female representation hasn't gone up. How much evidence do you need before you think they might be wrong? I'm from Sweden which initiated these kinds of programs 30 years ago, and it didn't do anything at all except alienate men who were excluded from the programs. There aren't more women now than back then in tech and engineering.
The only things that really worked was to create softer versions of degrees. Like make computer science program with a focus on UX or design, then you get a lot of women applying. You still wont get more women into the more technical roles, but at least you get more women's perspective into the industry. Also you know how so many say that communication skills is the most important part of their job as a software engineer? Why not just make a degree related to that directly? Women would flock to such programs.
The nazis claimed that jews had biological differences. Slaveowners claimed that black people had biological differences. Heck, denying women the right to vote was justified by claimed biological differences.
Oppressors don’t exactly have a history of saying “yeah we are doing this for evil reasons.” Instead they hide behind bogus arguments to justify why their behavior is actually good for those they harm.
“We should change how we hire women because of structural differences between men and women” is not only a political statement but one that comes with centuries of baggage attached.
The thing is, they were all right. Everyone does have differences. They just weren't right about the consequences of those differences.
If you look at how we hire women today, it's clear that your quote accurately describes current reality. Men and women are attracted and hired differently today. If you disagree with this, you are choosing to ignore the biases every human possesses.
Please tell me which of Damore's recommendations amounted to opression. I see "we can make software engineering more people-oriented" and "allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive". Nowhere do I see anything even remotely comparable to Nazi treatment of jews or denying women the right to vote. In fact his suggestions attempt to improve the workplace satisfaction of women.
Climate science is no more political than quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity. 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that humans are causing it, and 9 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have occured since 2005. Yet oil corporations and polluting factories with ulterior motives have managed to convince the politicians and the public that there is a debate, that some layman with no scientific background is as equally entitled to speak to the matter as a professional climate scientist who's spent their whole life studying the discipline, and that it is a question of politics.
Once it becomes a "political debate", all logic and science goes out the window, and the individuals/institutions with the vested interest in muddying the debate win out while the public loses out, and everyone just ends up dumber. You're not even allowed to debate or talk about it anymore because now it's "politics", and in America politics is super-sensitive and you shouldn't talk about it because everyone is entitled to their own dumb opinions.
That's why I'm such an advocate of freedom of speech, and not just in the legal sense. So long as you can support your view with facts and evidence, anyone should be allowed to speak, including in the workplace. Unless you're failing to perform your job's duties, one should not be fired simply for having a contrarian political viewpoint (so long as it's not openly hostile, like being racist). The second we censor people based on their views, we lead towards this totalitarian dystopian state of society where nobody feels comfortable talking about anything remotely controversial or interesting (unless it's about some Game of Thrones episode). Politics in the U.S. has become extremely partisan because people don't talk to others with differing viewpoints anymore and everyone retreats to their echo chamber safe spaces.
> “The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” -Noam Chomsky
There is little hope that one day we could speak about the willful blindspots on both sides of such debates. Global warming is a major crisis with a hard tradeoff between two deeply negative outcomes: poverty now vs. climate disaster in the medium future. Judging by the covid19 response, humanity is unable to handle such tradeoffs with any degree of maturity. Society will polarize, each side never mentioning one half of the tradeoff and blaming the other side for all the negative impact of the other half of the tradeoff.
I think that’s extremely short sighted. Gender politics is politics; anything that comes close to the subject is either already political or will become political extremely quickly.
But that's surely not true. Programs to encourage women in software engineering are generally seen as apolitical. (And that's not a judo move or anything - they get broad bipartisan support whenever it comes up in Congress.)
I don't understand how that statement discredits anything I said.
Politics is peoples' opinions and is subjective/normative (eg. things "ought" to be this way). Science attempts to explain how nature works (eg. this is why things are this way), and is objective. That memo was not political.
Politics is about how resources should be spent, not how things “ought” to be. Posting a disagreement about policy is inherently political, especially about something as charged as gender, no matter how much science you may cite.
I don’t dismiss things by calling them political, although apparently you do. I just think it’s insanely naive to believe that you can write a 10 page document on a gender related company policy and not have it become political quickly.
You can’t post a 10 document article in response to a corporate policy about gender in hiring and not expect that to be interpreted as an argument against said policy. Whether or not that was his original intent doesn’t really matter, the interpretation of his post was both predictable and understandable. He should’ve seen that coming, and to argue that he was just apolitically interested in the science of gender is disingenuous.
> You can’t post a 10 document article in response to a corporate policy about gender in hiring and not expect that to be interpreted as an argument against said policy.
The memo certainly challenged Google's corporate policy. So what? You think anyone who has an opposing view on a corporate policy and can back their view up with facts and evidence should be fired?
Personally I'm not big on authoritarianism/totalitarianism, but maybe that's just me.
Decisions about resources make no sense except in the context of trying to achieve some effect. Political issues are almost always implicitly about how things "ought" to be; the resource decisions are in service of those goals.
Resource allocation is more concrete and direct than discussions about how society ought to be arranged, although you’re right that you allocate resources in order to achieve a desired social outcome.
Discussions about how society ought to be tend to be vague and aspirational: “society ought to be more just” is more vague than “we should spend more money on these programs”. The latter might serve the former, but it’s also specific and actionable, which is why I draw the distinction where I do.
I don’t see what’s wrong with calling it political... it surely isn’t scientific. The opinions he expressed seem like naive political theories based on his understanding of gender and society, which is an extremely nuanced topic.
In what way is the Damore memo not scientific? It cites academic research, presents evidence, I think the claims it makes are actually the mainstream ones.
I realize asking you to debunk the whole memo may be a bit much, so can you just point to the single most consequential unscientific part of it?
I read the memo and was horrified by how badly people treated him because of it. To me it seems like a rational and well evidenced document.
Citing research is fine. If his memo had been a list of papers with no commentary it would have just been weird and blown over.
The problem is when you synthesize ideas from research without expertise. The problem wasn’t his citations. It was the conclusions he drew from the citations and the policy proposals that he made in his document.
“It has citations” is not a valid reason to consider something well argued and scientific. Even flat earthers include citations.
Damore was explicitly asked for his feedback on a subject. He provided it supported by academic research and was fired for it. If Damore had provided an unconnected list of papers that would have been ignored, yes, because nobody would have known what he meant. Instead, he put together a document that connected different research findings with his own suggestions.
A recurring pattern in this debate is that people criticize Damore for a lack of expertise. Which is odd given that Damore, a Harvard Masters Degree holder in Systems Biology, is clearly conversant with the research and the context he is giving advice in. Furthermore, I have yet to see anyone point out a substantive specific error that Damore made, its just general things like "he lacks expertise."
Tell me, what is the most obvious or least controversial example of Damore's lack of expertise in terms of his argument?
> A recurring pattern in this debate is that people criticize Damore for a lack of expertise. Which is odd given that Damore, a Harvard Masters Degree holder in Systems Biology, is clearly conversant with the research and the context he is giving advice in.
Oh boy. I've got a PhD in CS from one of the best programs in the world. I'm wildly unqualified to synthesize research in another field and would surely make terrible errors if I tried to connect the dots between citations, especially if I started with my connections and went looking for associated citations. Having a familiarity with research is absolutely not evidence that his conclusions will be strongly considered.
This discussion has been had a thousand times. People he cited have responded to his writing. There can be no productive discussion about "were his conclusions correct or not" at this point.
Do you genuinely believe that you are unqualified to read research papers and come up with an opinion about them with sufficient rigor to merit responding to a request for a feedback from a training program you attended at work?
Yes absolutely. I'm barely even qualified to synthesize conclusions from CS papers outside of my subfield. Drawing broader conclusions from a slice of the literature requires immense context.
If you aren't able to read research papers and synthesize an opinion on them then by your own standards it seems you shouldn't have an opinion here. You can't tell whether Damore was right or wrong because you can't read papers from different fields and reach conclusions.
You think the authors Damore cited rejected him. Perhaps you have an example of that. I haven't seen anything beyond the authors agreeing with Damore's interpretation of the facts and saying they don't know about the conclusions. It's obviously not very compelling given that Damore was metaphorically tarred on feathered on social media and fired, so researchers saying they "don't know" about the conclusions might be because they genuinely don't know or might be because they don't want to invite backlash of their own.
> If you aren't able to read research papers and synthesize an opinion on them then by your own standards it seems you shouldn't have an opinion here. You can't tell whether Damore was right or wrong because you can't read papers from different fields and reach conclusions.
I cannot personally derive a conclusion about Damore from the literature. What I can do is ask world experts about their thoughts. In general, this is an effective way of developing reasonable opinions about the state of research. I'm friends with a few social psych faculty who study workplaces and let's just say that they don't hold Damore in high regard.
I'm super uninterested in having an argument about the merits of his essay since that discussion has been had thousands of times and no progress can be made. But "well he has a master's degree from harvard" is among the least compelling arguments in his favor.
Sure, his master's degree isn't the most compelling argument. It's somewhat more compelling an argument than "My unnamed expert friends don't hold Damore in high regard".
If world experts have weighed in on Damore, link to their opinions. I'm happy to discuss those.
Like I said, I'm uninterested in trying to convince other people about Damore. It isn't productive at this point. This is just how I personally came to my conclusions.
> The problem wasn’t his citations. It was the conclusions he drew from the citations and the policy proposals that he made in his document.
Right, so you personally disagree with his conclusions, thus it must be "problematic".
Unless you're going to elaborate as to what specifically you find problematic, there's not really much to discuss here and this is a pretty useless discussion.
No, it really isn't debatable. That's the widespread consensus view. Personality traits are judged based on responses to surveys. When you ask large groups of people the same surveys and evaluate them the same way you consistently find women score higher on neuroticism than men. This is a widely repeated finding that is consistent across generations.
"testing gender differences at the level of latent traits revealed higher levels of Neuroticism (d = .52) and Agreeableness (d = .35) in older women than older men. The consistency of these findings with prior work in younger samples attests to the stability of gender differentiation on Neuroticism and Agreeableness across the lifespan."
"Research has found observed phenotypic sex differences in the BFM. Women, for instance, tend to have higher mean levels of Agreeableness and Neuroticism than men (Chapman, Duberstein, Sörensen, & Lyness, 2007; Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001; Feingold, 1994)."
"Women obtained higher means than men on neuroticism in all countries, and men obtained higher means than women on psychoticism in 34 countries and on extraversion in 30 countries."
"Table 1 showed that there was significant difference of neuroticism level between males and females (t-test
= 2.138, df =49, P<0.05). Males tended to have lower neuroticism personality level (Mean=111,833) than
females (Mean=127.303). Thus the hypothesis that males have less neuroticism level than females was
accepted."
I could go on for a long time just finding different studies on this topic and quoting their results, but there is no need to. That women have higher rates of neuroticism is likely the least debatable and most scientific thing Damore asserted. Can you find a single study or paper where it was concluded that women had anything but higher levels of neuroticism?
I trust that you will either have one or more such references, or you will admit that this claim is scientific and not really debatable. If you admit that, I would expect some revision of your general opinion given that this is an example of one of what you believed to be one of the more significant things Damore got wrong.
Genuine question: What actually is neuroticism? I'm broadly familiar with the term in a colloquial sense, but not a scientific sense. Wikipedia says:
>Neuroticism is one of the Big Five higher-order personality traits in the study of psychology. Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness.[1] People who are neurotic respond worse to stressors and are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening and minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult. They are often self-conscious and shy, and they may have trouble controlling urges and delaying gratification.
Is there truly a common thread between these various emotions that ties them all together as neuroticism, or is neuroticism an arbitrarily chosen set of emotions? It's far from clear to me that these listed emotions have much to do with each other in the general case. If I'm feeling fear or worry because the sidewalk I'm walking on is covered in ice, that's not related in any way to anger or envy. Does it only count when these emotions are irrational? What then does it mean for these emotions to be irrational? If I am alone and feel lonely, is that irrational? Is loneliness only indicative of neuroticism when you're actually surrounded by your friends? Maybe you'd feel lonely in such a situation because none of your friends can related to you about something you've been worrying about. Is there any truly objective measure of the rationality of an emotion? I don't think so.
Wikipedia goes on to say that there's a lot of disagreement over what this term means:
> Neuroticism is a trait in many models within personality theory, but there is a lot of disagreement on its definition. Some define it as a tendency for quick arousal when stimulated and slow relaxation from arousal, especially in concern to negative emotional arousal; others define it as emotional instability and negativity or maladjustment, in contrast to emotional stability and positivity, or good adjustment. Others yet define it as lack of self-control, poor ability to manage psychological stress, and a tendency to complain.[6]
It says that 'personality theory' is a scientific study, but I'm a bit skeptical of that.
> Is there truly a common thread between these various emotions that ties them all together as neuroticism, or is neuroticism an arbitrarily chosen set of emotions?
Yes. It's something that shows up in one specific factor analysis as one of five dimensions (i.e. parameters) that effectively summarize your answers to a bunch of questions about personality. Different analyses/models come up with different parameterizations, e.g. the HEXACO model has six parameters, with the Emotionality factor picking up the bulk of "Neuroticism" from the Big 5, but some ending up under Honesty-Humility (reversed) or even under Agreeableness (reversed)!
Am I correct in thinking that the rationality or lack-thereof of the emotions is considered a factor? And if so, how can that be evaluated through questionnaires asking people about themselves?
Suppose for example a woman lives in an environment that's dangerous for her but not so for men. On the questionnaire, she reports that she often feels afraid. Is that answer considered evidence of neuroticism? It seems to me that it shouldn't be, but you'd need to examine the individual circumstances on a case-by-case basis to tease out the difference between rational fear and neurotic fear. From a logistics standpoint I don't see how that analysis could be done at scale, hence my skepticism that any of this is actually scientific.
Thanks for the links, however I think the misrepresentation of information here is women have higher rates of neuroticism, but is that true within sample present at Google? Not every possible women is more neurotic than every possible man.
Additionally, dealing with discrimination can lead to self-esteem issues, which are tied to neuroticism.
If Damore suspected that women at Google were, on average, shorter than men at Google would you doubt that too, because there is no study on gender differences in height among Google employees?
When thinking about this you should ask what your priors are. If neuroticism is widely, across ages and cultures, found to be higher in women and men, and it is, then wouldn't your prior, without a Google specific personality survey, be that Google women likely have higher neuroticism than men?
To me it seems like an impossibly high standard to expect Damore to do a personality survey of Google to figure out if this oft repeated neuroticism result also holds true for Google employees.
Depends what the implications of that statement were. I think assuming that women at Google have higher levels of neuroticism is fair, but once you start to posit that as an actionable truth is when real information is needed.
Please note the shifting goal posts. At the start of this comment thread you were saying that Damore's memo was certainly unscientific, and now you are arguing that there needs to be a higher bar for action than the fair assumptions that Damore made.
Keep in mind that Damore is a single person giving feedback to a diversity course. He doesn't have the resources, time, or mandate to survey Google's employees to test whether or not this general trend holds. Perhaps, before acting on Damore's recommendations it would be a good idea to do some tests on Google's employees to see if general trends hold true in their specific subset - but that is a really different claim than the initial claim that Damore was unscientific.
If Damore had written that smoking causes lung problems and therefore Google should start taking some actions to stop employees from smoking, it might be merited to do further tests to see if the link between smoking and lung problems holds true for Google employees as it does for people in general. It would not be merited to call Damore unscientific because he had not yet done that research prior to making his suggestion.
It seems like he was cherry-picking studies that fit a personal theory he held before the feedback was ever requested. I would consider that to be unscientific.
The fact is that the same study says that men express more psychoticism than women. Do you think he would have been equally railed against if he brought that up in his paper?
Women on average are more socially aware and exhibit higher emotional intelligence than women. There is scientific research to suggest this, and for me anecdotally it also rings true (as a man, but again key word = on average).
Do you find this statement offensive? Should I not say this because it might hurt men's feelings?
Or is it only wrong to say something negative about a race/gender if it implies something negative about certain underrepresented genders and races?
I’m not concerned about being offended or what one should or shouldn’t say. But in general saying I don’t find saying those kinds of sweeping statements to be very constructive, including the positive example.
I'm guessing if you read the memo you only read a version with sources and data omitted. The original version was very much science-based, even if you disagree with the science or think it incomplete/biased.
Citing papers doesn’t make an opinion piece “scientific” or unpolitical. It just means the author did enough research to prop their opinion up. It’s a particular failing of self described rationalists that seeing citations means the goal was objective truth rather than supporting a pre-existing bias or opinion. Particularly when dealing with papers in harder to study fields that have been at the centre of the replication crisis.
As with the SRE who tried to play epidemiologist the other day it pays to be skeptical about the evidence and opinions presented even if they are delivered with citations and in an academic tone. Especially when both are playing far outside their fields of expertise.
I don't care what his pre-existing biases were, and that's not really the point. He wrote a paper and supported it with facts and sources. If you disagree with something, then dispute the facts/sources.
I haven't seen a single comment in this post disagreeing with the memo that actually critiques any specific points in the memo. Every single criticism I've seen is more along the lines of "but he was being sexist". Ok, can't argue with that I guess.
If you don’t care about the context the memo was written in you are just engaging in what I described. Essentially trying to veneer your preconceptions with the appearance of “science” and attempting to shift the burden of proof.
It's absurd but, by and large, people don't actually care about science, let alone understand it. They may occasionally appreciate the rewards of science, but only when it makes them happy. When it sends a negative signal, people are quick to ignore science, or only pay attention to tidbits of science that reinforces their world view. It's not even a question of intelligence. Smart people all the time, including on this very site, fall prey to both anti-science and "scientism" at about the same rate. The only difference between a smart human and a dumb human in this space is the smart human has a bigger vocabulary and knows how to cherry-pick data.
Damore might have been granted some more understanding if he had presented his memo to some scientists. Even then, there would have been a high probability that he would have been told to hush-hush or be asked to leave.
> Damore might have been granted some more understanding if he had presented his memo to some scientists. Even then, there would have been a high probability that he would have been told to hush-hush or be asked to leave.
That's a dismissive viewpoint. To be consistent with your view, nobody should be commenting in this thread.
Moreover, a person's field of expertise doesn't have any bearing on whether their ideas are correct. It may go to explain why their views are the way they are, but it doesn't necessarily follow that a person is wrong about something scientific because they aren't a scientist, for instance.
You should really read a little more history. There's a long, long tradition of "patently obvious" "science" that just happens to justify the continued dominance of whatever group is top at the moment. As I mentioned elsewhere, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent examination of the racial aspect of that.
Except people are by default being told their opinions are incorrect because they disagree with the so called experts.
Experts in a soft, non experimental, survey based scientific discipline. Soft sciences are institutional dogma because by and large there is no way to experimentally verify anything. This is a particular debate in which the establishment is clearly in the wrong to anyone who isn't determined to believe in a nonexistent equality.
> Damore doesn’t strike me as an expert in the field. Just a typical engineer who thinks he knows everything.
FWIW, Damore has a masters in systems biology. This fact was fairly widely reported. So, you can fall back on the facts instead of your own biases (what "strikes" you).
I just told you why it isn't political, you literally just ignored my comment. The whole point of the memo is to attempt to explain a phenomenon that exists, thus it is not political. You can disagree with the contents of the memo, but that doesn't make it "political", or an expression of "opinions".
Is this what conservatism actually is, now? I'm just wondering because, although I agree that nothing Damore said was conservative in a traditional sense, maybe conservatism has just been made more broad in recent years.
For instance, I don't believe that I'm conservative at all, but my liberal friends and family tend to classify me as "conservative". I find it baffling because most of my beliefs are pretty permissive. Ask me about any individual stance, and I can assure you that the answer will most likely be a liberal one. But I'm considered "conservative" because my ideas are not all Liberal(with a capital-L). For instance, there's nothing particularly conservative about believing that biological sex has a determining(or at least predicting) factor on a person's behavior and preferences, yet because this is a stance that today's Liberalism looks down upon, it's considered de facto conservative merely on that basis. The same goes for things like libertarianism and having negative conclusions about socialism. They don't really have anything to do with being conservative in isolation, but if they aren't Liberal then they can only be conservative, in accordance with how the establishment media judge these things.
There needs to be a different word than conservatism for having positions that aren't part of the Liberal platform, but "conservative" works well from an optics perspective because it's been effectively vilified.
EDIT: LOL Am I being downvoted because I said people think I'm conservative? One of you people please tell me.
> There needs to be a different word than conservatism for having positions that aren't part of the Liberal platform
It feels like in many circles the most accurate word would be “heretic”. (and the same is true in many conservative circles - if you don’t hold the right beliefs in the right way you are a “liberal” - in this context, meaning “heretic”). It’s fucking exhausting to get into politics with anyone at all because it’s all just witch hunts and inquisitions.
I think the modern conservative movement largely is explained by "a group of people that oppose liberalism." That's why you have such a weird coalition of religious groups, older intellectual conservatives, young Republicans, business people, trolls. They really don't have a ton in common, but frankly I get it. I live in the Midwest and while I consider myself an independent, most of my views are moderate or left-wing. But I went to grad school on the East Coast and I felt like an outsider and the most conservative person in class just for holding somewhat moderate views.
This is speculation but it seems like we should inevitably see political factions in the US being defined in this way (and it happens in the Democratic Party too, maybe not in as obvious or extreme a way) as a result of the well-known two-party endgame of our voting system. If your faction isn’t one of the two, your choices are to join one or be irrelevant.
So you jump on the bandwagon with whoever you hate least, and pretty soon you find out that’s almost all you have in common with the rest of the riders.
It may also be specific to conservative movements, given that by definition they oppose some change in society and so would naturally be diverse in their reason for opposing it (possibly more so than the supporters would be diverse in their reasons for supporting it).
That would explain why in our current system the conservative faction is more like this than the liberal faction. But what I was getting at is the reason that the conservative faction is essentially singular. In a less broken system, there could be multiple conservative factions and multiple liberal factions without the sub-factions feeling needing to choose whether to band together on every single issue or be irrelevant.
They could dynamically band together on a per-issue basis and have more reasoned discussions focusing on those issues instead of making sure to pronounce “shibboleth” correctly.
> and it happens in the Democratic Party too, maybe not in as obvious or extreme a way
Democrats is just as extreme. You have the science part of Democrats who vote for them since Republicans largely rejects science for religious reasons (see evolution etc). Then you have the identity politics part of the Democrats. I am 100% certain that a majority of software engineers doesn't agree with the identity politics parts of the Democrats platform, yet they still vote Democrats since they at least doesn't have the religious fanatics on their side which are even worse.
In countries where you can vote right wing without voting for science denial software engineers tend to vote right wing since it gets them lower taxes. Left wing parties are mostly for people with less money.
> "For instance, I don't believe that I'm conservative at all, but my liberal friends and family tend to classify me as "conservative"."
Rather than the old paradigm where political left == liberalism, I think there needs to be a distinction between the new progressive left and classical liberalism since both hold some views and philosophies that are incompatible with each other.
It may well be that, like me, it is not you that has changed necessarily but more that what is considered the left nowadays has drifted away from old school liberalism and you find yourself as alienated by progressives as you are by conservatives?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23125450 This comment explains it very well. Biological differences used to explain keeping people in lower status is a traditional idea and long wielded by conservatives. Explaining that lower status with oppression that needs to be changed is a liberal idea.
That can be kind of a good thing, though, right? Gay marriage and evolution are already arguments that are falling off the conservative map at a rapid place. In another 20 years, will "conservatives" effectively be just liberals who don't like socialism? That seems to be the way that politics have been boiling down to: socialism vs capitalism. Everything else is kind of adjacent, but as laws get passed or ideas get effectively mocked on the internet, they drop off because they aren't core to those two fundamental ideas.
Yea I'm about the farthest left on the political spectrum as one can get without being outright communist, so it's hilarious if anyone calls me "conservative" for thinking that maybe just maybe biology influences our life choices, and that people should have the freedom to express their opinions and debate issues without being censored or shamed for having contrarian viewpoints (kind of like what the memo, which is titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", talks about, and which ironically got the author fired).
Well, it is political. A number of people and groups have staked a position that is directly contrary to the views expressed in that document. They cannot afford to be proven wrong. When people feel threatened in that way, they attack.
It really doesn't matter how much evidence backs his view or not. It doesn't matter how much logic he mustered or didn't.
> companies in Silicon Valley and beyond have instituted workplace rules designed to protect employees with alternative viewpoints and prevent bullying, Dhillon said.
Lipstick on a pig.
Racism is racism.
Sexism is sexism.
If you want to be a racist, sexist person, do it on your own time, not on the company dollar.
Well, this takes the cake as the most toxic comments section I've ever seen on HN.
The degree of "I'm tired of the left being outraged at the right tearing our country apart but i also couldnt care about the right tearing our country apart, oh also let me normalize hating women" makes me very sad for our future.
Google has fired a few people, liberal and conservative, for being politically insufferable. Multiple people in the news about this on various places in political spectrum. It doesn’t mean they were wrong.
There's been endless discussion about Damore. In particular podcasts you'd think that the firing of a random engineer at Google ranked alongside 9/11 as a defining event in modern history. If I circulated a memo to my co-workers that not only opposed a new policy from management, but did obvious harm to the expressed intent of that policy, I might be fired. It doesn't matter if the memo I circulated would have gotten a passing grade in a college class. The fact that people use that as an argument tells me that they've never worked a normal job before.
I can't tell if you're trying to say that a policy from management is beyond all reproach or if "these things just happen in the real world". Either way, the former shouldn't be true and the latter should be wrong. Of course, correctness doesn't stop anyone from being terminated, but that's not the point.
There are appropriate and inappropriate avenues for disagreeing with corporate policy; publicly on a large mailing list is going to get you in hot water no matter what the policy is.
I guess I take issue with this. Google encouraged discussion and disagreement on large mailing lists, unlike most companies. It doesn't seem right that Google would simultaneously sollicit such feedback and then punish somebody for giving them negative feedback.
I think what you're saying is valid, but the point I've been making is that the entire James Damore affair is interesting for pretty much the opposite reason to that which people who tend to bring it up claim.
"It doesn't seem right" is one thing, but that's not why it's still brought up 3 years after the memo was written. A lot has gone on in the world in the past 3 years that doesn't seem right that we've forgotten about or didn't hear about in the first place. Damore is used as a data point (in fact, as a central data point) in the thesis that "political correctness gone awry" or "social justice warriors run amok" are problems that rank highly in a list of society's most concerning. I think it's absurd. That this random dev's firing is doing so much work in bolstering this thesis just highlights the absurdity.
It’s unclear exactly what the limits of such a forum are; if I were to hypothetically respond with a pro-nazi screed, I think that most people here would be fine with me being fired. But there’s certainly a gray area.
I will say that it was extremely short sighted of google to setup such a forum in a public and non-anonymous manner. That was just begging for trouble.
Policy from management is not beyond all reproach, but what venue you have for expressing disagreement varies by company. Do you think the firing of James Damore warranted the attention it got?
> If I circulated a memo to my co-workers that not only opposed a new policy from management, but did obvious harm to the expressed intent of that policy, I might be fired.
Google had fostered a culture were it was expected to respond with to new policies from management that you didn't agree with.
Google wasn't a normal job where whatever management says gos. Although, it's certainly seems to be moving in that direction from the outsiders perspective.
I think that's because a lot of people think that some corporations now have much greater power than governments, especially when it comes to influencing / controlling social thought.
My understanding is that it was "normal" for Google to have these kind of discussions on internal boards. A remnant of the libertarian message board and usenet culture of the early silicon valley.
They only fully cracked down on political speech like a big boring company last year:
It was never normal. The politically charged boards were always playing with fire. Damore also shared his ideas outside of these spaces where it was even less “normal”. What might be okay to say in an opt-in discussion board about politics may be less okay to say in a training session, for example. Time and place and all that.
Saying that people who disagreed with him must not have read the memo is a cliche at this point. It wouldn’t add anything to the conversation even if it wasn’t factually incorrect, and the guidelines here discourage that kind of behavior.
As someone who did read it, I also don’t see how the comment you’re dismissing is inaccurate. Can you point out exactly why you feel it is?
How so, I didn't say anything about the content of the memo? Or you disagree that it did obvious harm to Google's policy on gender? We know that female employees received the memo and stated that it made them feel excluded, which did harm to the intent of the policy. That's not really debatable is it?
The phrasing implied that Damore willfully created that harm. It's a simpler explanation, at the time of authorship, that he did not expect the reaction it got. It seemed to be an attempt to explain his logic in an inoffensive way, in fact.
Who are the high-profile liberals that got fired from Google; I can't think of any, but the only person I can recall Google firing for political views is Damore. I wouldn't be surprised if they had filed any liberals; but they certainly didn't get equivalent media coverage as Damore.
Several of the walkout organizers as well as people agitating against projects they didn’t agree with, including coordinating with perceived authoritarian states. It was all over the news.
> In other words for hurting their bottom line by demanding Google be better (each in their preferred way) for society and its employees?
Yes? If I hired someone to clean my apartment and instead of cleaning my apartment he or she spent the whole time writing up long diatribes demanding that I be better, per his or her understanding, for society and my employees you can bet I would not be hiring that cleaner again!
To cut to the chase, I do think there’s a certain amount of dishonesty in the typical Silicon Valley corporate culture. But to my mind it is far more reasonable to ask that companies not engage in this dishonesty rather than asking that they live up to it. Bring your whole self to work is ridiculous and unworkable. No one can run a successful business if their employees are spending all day debating philosophy on internal message boards.
But that's beyond moving the goalposts now, just inventing arbitrary reasons to justify an already set view. That shouldn't be accepted either, otherwise it's just a "get out of jail free" card for bad actors - "I sacked you because you did something I didn't like. Wait, you did what I asked you to? But you should've known that in this case when I say to do something, I mean the opposite! In this case, and any other case I find convenient after the fact."
The people that want everything made explicit and all lies banished from human relations lost, have always lost, and will always lose.
I recognize that for some this imposes significant hardship but changing everyone else’s human nature is not a reasonable accommodation.
The kindest thing those of us that know young people of this type can do is pull them aside and explain how the world works. It is unkind to feed their delusions by vigorously agreeing with them online and then turning around and continuing to act pragmatically in our own lives.
What happens if he wins the case? We do a 180? What happens when people with Asperger's start suing? They really need to learn how to keep things simple in modern hr. Here are the rules and that's it.
Bumbling geeks with zero real life experience can be a huge liability to large corporations generally, and often don't make for good employees solely for that reason.
He's an adult. He bears responsibility for his actions. Ignorance is not enough of an excuse to save him. But even that's not valid here because he repeatedly defended the same views in the media long after someone who was merely bumbling would have realized the error of their ways. He doubled down on it. What started out as bumbling, didn't end that way.
And you can bet without those people there would still be adults (and kids) working 12 and 14 hour shifts unpaid overtime with no workers protection, racial and sex based discrimination, no leave days, no workplace safety, no insurance, and without several other niceties gained in the late-19th early 20th century by exactly such people and such actions...
Of course in a place where everybody is imaginary temporarily inconvenienced millionaire, expecting to soon join the "employer" side and with no regards for those on the other side, the above might not be a problem...
You hired the cleaner to clean. They do their job as per agreement. You are satisfied and so are they. Then one day they find out that in addition to cleaning normal office mess, they are now cleaning blood. Blood from victims of the company's activities. Should they remain ignorant of the company's real societal impact? Should they voice their opinions to fellow cleaners? Should they take advantage of the purported freedom to speak their minds their companies advertised during their hiring?
Life rarely offers us an easy black or white judgment on complex realities.
I get a strong impression that there is some begging of the question going on in that line. If someone disagrees with them, then the generic activist doesn't get automatically get cast as trying to better society. Philosophically, without specific cases, their opinions can only be equal to their opponents.
"Bettering society" is supremely complicated. There are some weird legal traditions, eg, rules of evidence, which are better for society but they sure don't look like it in the small.
If I had designed the system, I would have made it a fireable offense to knowingly leak something from the platform. Without a penalty, this kind of situation was both foreseeable and inevitable.
That would have been a PR disaster for Google. Woman retaliated against for whisteblowing the company's sexism for the whole world to see. She would have been made a hero.
I'm no fan of totalitarian governments, but blaming America's problems with coronavirus on China seems like a reach to me - we had two months warning just from watching what happened in China and our government did literally no preparation during that time. I suspect if we'd had longer warning we would have just spent longer doing nothing.
> The number of lab-confirmed deaths reported to the WHO is 18,449,[7] though this 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic is estimated to have actually caused about 284,000 (range from 150,000 to 575,000) deaths.
I don't understand this PoV. Regardless of the Chinese government's incorrect handling of the coronavirus, deliberate or not, they did not dictate nor control the US response. I'm sorry about your friends' grandparents, but what's happening in the US right now is all on the US.
Might be how you approach the topic. I hang with some pretty far left folks and no one likes China's government and is pretty open about it. Might just be your circle. You could ask them I guess?
Neoliberals do this, but otherwise most liberals have no love for China. In this case though I'd suggest that you blame Donald Trump for those two deaths, rather than the Chinese government.
My coworkers have no problem discussing Donald trump and republicans. They laugh about our president a lot. Yet when I bring up the Chinese government, silence could be heard.
I despise Trump, but claiming that talking about his shortcomings is an apolitical conversation is totally disingenuous. Politics isn't this bloodless process of determining the best policies by rational debate, as much we'd like it to be. Politics, as often as not, consists entirely of making the other team look bad, to raise the relative status of your own team. That's just how humans operate.
My point is that "discussing politics (A)", where people bring their best arguments to the table and have a friendly intellectual discussion is very different from "discussing politics (B)", where people bond over hating the outgroup of the other political tribe.
And I did this because OP seemed to naively think that since his coworkers do (B), they would also be happy to do (A) with him. Trying to give him a clue before he hurt himself.
>Politics doesn't belong in a professional environment.
hmm i wonder if your boss feels the same way (i.e. that his/her business interests are completely separate from his/her politics). the idea that you're politically neutral at work - the very locus of political contention - is laughable.
If you take 30 seconds to Google you'll find a bunch of sources that indicate the low percentage of men in nursing is nuanced. It's not just toxicity or gatekeeping.
I guess OP's point is that authoritarianism is everywhere. Many of the low-level "phd's spreading propaganda" on these contentious issues have authoritarian streaks themselves and even if you don't, making attitudes even more divisive isn't exactly helping anyone.
A nazi apologist might also argue that going to war with that sort of regime is a violent despotic act.
Let’s be clear. This Damore piece of crap can happily exercise his right to go work for a company that shares his value system. Research what happens to dissenters in “violent authoritarian” systems.
Why should he share the winnings of a system that was built on a value system that he diametrically opposes?
>"Meanwhile, a judge opined it wouldn’t be easy for two fellow plaintiffs to prevail on their “novel” theory that Google is biased against “political conservatives” -- a term the company argued was too vague to support a class-action suit."
Especially since anyone who rightfully calls themselves a "political conservative" has long since left the Republican party after it left them, and doesn't consider themselves an "alt right" Trump supporter.
I don't understand why people are characterizing his firing as political. If you read his memo, it should be clear that he was fired for being sexist. His memo included a section which stated that women are biologically inferior to men. This immediately makes it very difficult to work with him for women and their allies. I know tech skews male, but software engineers have to interface with many other teams and many other functions, especially at Google. If he actually left out the biological differences claim, Google might not have fired him, but that section left Google no choice. I support discourse in general, but from a business/society perspective, you can't immediately make it difficult for a large plurality of your peers (and vast majority if you include allies) to work with you.
This is only political because right-wing political organizations have chosen to defend someone's sexist memo AFTER THE FACT, to drive the narrative of how Google is anti-right and is a left-wing puppet company. Calling this a political firing is only coopting their ridiculous narrative that he was fired for expressing "conservative values" or their sexist narrative that those conservative values include the fact that women are biologically inferior.
well there are some who do believe "biological differences" between the sexes IS the reason for disparities in workforce representation. to them these are the "facts" and people who disagree are those ones politicizing facts and ignoring "truth"
I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on anyone claiming that a difference in interests does not equate to a difference in capabilities. Think about fields you are passionate about vs. fields you couldn't care less about. Do you honestly think you could excel equally in both fields? If you are going to make the argument then don't insult everyone else's intelligence by watering it down.
As freedom in a society increases, women increasingly choose different professions than men. The extent to which these reflect their innate interests rather than those imposed on them by society has a direct relationship to their relative capabilities to men in these fields in the aggregate.
This topic is quickly going downhill in the comments, but I just wanted to clear some stuff up because there seems to be some "what he said isn't that bad!"
People wrongly think he said women are bad or stupid but that's not what he did say. He also didn't -just- say men and women are different.
He did say a 5-10% difference in certain traits is why there are huge discrepancies of women in leadership and science/engineering positions. And maybe that's ok and we should just let it be.
Sorry, but "girls don't like to make hard choices or do 'nerdy' things" isn't a real thing. Hundreds of years of "stay in the kitchen" is what proactive programs to bring women into these positions are trying to reverse. It's not biological.
80% of students of veterinary medicine are women. 75% of students in psychology are women. It is simple math: Any woman who studies to become a teacher, counselor or social worker can not study to become an engineer.
Being a programmer is not competing with "stay in the kitchen". It is competing with this:
> is what proactive programs to bring women into these positions are trying to reverse.
The difference in interests is biggest in the most "proactive" countries, those that try the hardest to help women reach social equality with men. It's obviously not "biological", but it looks like some complex interaction of subtle social dynamics, not just women being told to "stay in the kitchen".
>Sorry, but "girls don't like to make hard choices or do 'nerdy' things" isn't a real thing. Hundreds of years of "stay in the kitchen" is what proactive programs to bring women into these positions are trying to reverse. It's not biological.
> Hundreds of years of "stay in the kitchen" is what proactive programs to bring women into these positions are trying to reverse. It's not biological.
This is what the debate is about -- can we accept these kind of ex cathedra declarations without data or not.
As has been said before, if your CEO learns your name for the same reason he has to end his vacation early, you probably should start polishing up your resume.