It'll get settled first to avoid discovery, I suspect. Class action makes settling more awkward, but still, Google has more financial interest in avoiding discovery than winning the case.
> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering
Why do news outlets persistently misrepresent what he actually said? I've read his memo and just about every news article says it contains claims that it doesn't. I have no view on whether he's right or not, but I remain shocked at the misrepresentation of his views throughout the tech media.
Next time someone complains about me "jumping the gun" for talking about brigading on posts regarding Damore, I'll point them to this comment, where I state a 100% correct, non-controversial, non-offensive fact and I still get downvoted. Hard to explain, huh?
This is a highly contentious thread with a lot of participants and over 740 comments at this point. I don't think you can reach any meaningful conclusion other than HN members are human and behave in all variety of ways, rational, and otherwise.
Of course Hacker News participants are just human. That said, automatic downvoting of non-controversial, easily-proven statements, while comments with highly subjective and inflammatory takes get upvoted show the worst this community has to offer.
I used to think HN provided a good balance of open-mindedness and tech topics. It was a nice refuge from places like reddit and Twitter that had become overly politicized. In the last year - in particular since Damore's little lesson about shitting where you eat - the same kind of smarmy calls for "tolerance of different opinions" mixed with constant brigading of people (talk abut "tolerance") have taken over HN.
I really hope for our community's sake that it's just a small number of users ruining it for everyone.
I very much understand and appreciate the frustration. I think you should cut your fellow members a bit of slack. There are assumptions in your comment here that may not be entirely accurate or at least aren't representing the whole picture. I'm going to attempt to provide alternative perspectives here: I'm not claiming they're correct, but are an attempt to broaden what other's may be perceiving. That doesn't mean their perceptions are correct or even fair.
> "automatic downvoting"
Let's set aside the idea that they're automatic for a moment. Unless your mind reading skills are better than mine, it's hard to know the intent from a downvote alone. You can't even know who did it, other than it's not the person you responded to.
Even these may not be constructive to the conversation. They may be tangential, irrelevant, or intentionally misleading. Members may downvote for any of these reasons.
> "comments with highly subjective and inflammatory takes get upvoted show the worst this community has to offer."
Yeah, highly charged comments can get upvoted: emotions are a powerful thing, and there's a lot of evidence (is it even controversial at this point?) that emotions fire before rational thought. And there's increasing evidence that our rationality actual does more to rationalize our emotions than work as some sort of logic engine. People have to work against this, and that, indeed, is effort. Frustrating? Incredibly so. Human? Very.
That's not to say we shouldn't work against this, at least some of the time. Internet fora make this all the more difficult because we're engaging with such limited bandwidth. We don't get to hear tone, or see facial expressions. We only have this limited text stream, and so we're likely bringing a lot more of ourselves to fill in the gaps than we often realize.
There's a lot of charged language in your comment here. That's just an observation, not a judgement. How should I respond to that? Should I attempt to put it to the side and respond in a way I think is most effective? Or should I write you off as some hot head that can't control their commenting, going against site guidelines by complaining about voting? Or just silently downvote you for doing so? I often get the impression that that's how some members perceive others as behaving. I don't think that's a useful starting point from which to improve HN, so it's one I consciously choose not to take.
> "a small number of users"
I think it's a combination of a small number of users and the fact that each of us—just because we're human—can sometimes slip. What we can do the rest of the time is not let the slip-ups of others make us respond in kind. It takes more than one person to spread the flames.
Help make HN the place you want it to be. Submit good articles. Write good comments. Upvote good articles and comments. Downvote and flag those you don't think are appropriate for HN. It sounds like you follow HN, so you know how threads on contentious articles go. Do what you can to make it better. (And make a conscious effort to not make it worse.) That includes commenting within the guidelines, such as not commenting on downvotes or mentioning you're flagging articles or complaining that a submission is inappropriate for HN. If you really think there's abuse going on, do contact the mods via the contact link in the footer: they want members to bring things like that to their attention so they can address it.
Honestly, there's really little else you can do, but I think it's enough. Which is why I'm taking the time for this comment. Anyway, best wishes.
> 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.
Not if it is anything resembling a reasonable interpretation of the text.
I was curious about this statement also, because he doesn't present any evidence of different abilites in the memo. On a reddit AMA, he explained that he had actually removed the ability-related evidence, which isn't what you'd expect: instead of showing that women have less of an ability to code, the evidence suggests that women who have high math ability are more likely to have high verbal ability also, vis a vis men with high math ability. So women with high math ability have more options than men, on average, because they're likely to have more verbal ability as well. These women can then pursue jobs in other areas, whereas the men with high math ability don't have those options and therefore pursue things like coding.
I'm not weighing in on whether this evidence (which was based on SAT, IIRC) is correct or has been interpreted validly. I'm just pointing out that this was what Damore claimed (after the snafu arose—so take with at least a grain of salt) this statement was in reference to. I'd love to know if others have different information, especially if it was in earlier drafts of the doc.
It is libelous to say that someone said something that they did not say (assuming, as in all cases, that what you say could hurt their reputation in the community). There a spectrum of behavior: one the one hand, there are straight up misquotes—where you attribute a direct quote improperly. On the other hand, there are synthetic statements, where you 'sum up' what someone has said in a distilled way.
In this case, TC would argue that they are distilling his memo by using the phrase "biologically less capable of engineering". Personally (and as a former lawyer, but not a libel lawyer), I think this position is not especially strong, since he focused mostly, if not exclusively, on inclination-type evidence. If you're going to give a one-sentence summary of the memo, you probably shouldn't refer to ability instead of inclination.
And given that the person they're talking about just sued Google, I'd say it's unwise to use a characterization like this—even if it is ultimately legally justifiable. Why not say "biologically less suited for engineering", which would encompass the possibility of both ability and desire?
His memo was more along the lines of "women are less represented in tech because the industry does not favor their traits which are possibly a result of biological differences"
"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"
Would you call "lack of interest" a handicap? Would you be likely to be suspicious about candidates coming from a group that you know to be "less interested" in a job you are offering?
I know plenty of people who are in the industry because it pays well and not because they are fascinated by engineering problems. Even among those who are interested in engineering, there's a wide gamut from "obsessive learner who wants to spend all their time in the computer" to "I love my job, but I'd rather be enjoying my favorite hobby/spending time with my kids".
Also, notice that interest doesn't necessarily translate into performance, as there are plenty of factors that affect performance besides "general interest in tinkering with things." Some of the worst performers I've met were obsessive "language experts" who enjoyed gaming (another "male" trait) and spent their weekends on their computers. Their apparent obsession didn't make them more performant than parents who spent nights and most weekends with their kids.
Name-calling and personal attacks will get you banned here. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and clean up your act. Here's a principle to help: If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Unless you mean he was fired as part of a witch hunt which was much ado about nothing, and that's a sad fact of basing firing decisions on tweets. That is true.
> 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.
He said exactly that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap.
We're not debating what you think, we're debating what he said, and he included abilities in there. He said what they claim he said, but people always appear to try to claim he didn't.
I think if he had made a better written argument that focused more clearly on the idea that part of the gender gap is due to a lack of interest by women, that he probably still would be employed.
> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership
The argument goes like this: traits are distributed with different frequencies throughout populations (plenty of evidence this is true), those traits may lead to differences of interest and focus in specific areas, and that leads to differences in the frequencies at which we can expect to find members of those populations represented at the top of some fields.
None of this says anything about the abilities of any individual women. There are many excellent female engineers. Nor does it say that these excellent women engineers don't face discrimination because of their gender. All it says is that you'd expect fewer women to be represented in the population of the most competent engineers (in the same way you find fewer men in veterinary fields, for example).
Seriously. That particular section is describing an average inherent distribution of career preferences/abilities due, in PART, to biological causes. However social (mainly), economic, and tons of other factors can come into play here.
Given there is a section in the memo with similar verbiage as the article's quote, I would give some slack to the author if the sentiment remained from the original. However the author's quote changes the meaning of what Damore said quite a bit.
Why is suggesting the distribution of certain qualities in men and women are different “repugnant crap”? There is ample evidence that men and women have behavioral differences. This exists across all mammals. I don’t know whether that makes the average man or average woman[1] better at any particular task, but it’s not an absurd hypothesis. Surely it’s worth reasoned consideration, not moral outrage at the very thought.
[1] And averages are of course irrelevant when dealing with individuals, who should each be judged according to their own merit, not according to generalizations of the groups they belong to.
Because he didn't just say that. You can't just pick and choose the part of the sentence you want to respond to. You have to accept the entire thing as a complete thought.
e.g. It would be like me suggesting you wrote: "men and women are different 'repugnant crap'". It's accurate, but misrepresentative of what you meant. One is honest, and the other is dishonest.
Hacker news is every bit as full of misogynistic assholes as reddit/4chan, they all worship Paul Graham who basically has the same world view as Damore.
There are definitely some issues still on HN; I've had to argue with people here that think gay people don't deserve the right to get married and I've noticed people instantly downvoted into oblivion for mentioning that they're trans.
My guess is that it depends on whether you look on marriage as a religious custom or a legal custom. I can understand people not agreeing with it in the religious sense (as their special book says so).
Personally I say give everyone the same rights (i.e single people) and a large part of the problem would go away.
I don't think anyone would dispute that statistically women differ from men in some abilities (e.g. ability to lift weights, and also some more mental capabilities such as 3d rotation), but it's a far fetch from this to "biologically less capable of engineering", which Damore did not say
Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism.
It's always the same kind of crap from bigots. "Women MIGHT be less capable of engineering." "Black people MIGHT be more prone to crime." "Gay people MIGHT be more likely to be pedophiles." and it's always based in bigotry, not in science or evidence.
Neurology and psychology studies have shown differences in the way men and women think.
For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks.
Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain.
As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one.
With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other.
If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now.
So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.
Your argument sounds nice, but does not offer sufficient proof for your rather strong statement "so the natural biological differences are irrelevant". This is a claim which could be scientifically tested. For example researchers could develop two rudimentary tool chains, one for women and one for men. Then they could investigate if in fact they can generate any statistical difference in participation.
It would actually be a rather interesting theory to test, and I would hope someone does test the theory. However your claim is not currently known to be true, rather just a promising theory.
That’s an interesting idea, but it sounds like your argument rests on two assertions:
1) Professions tend to become more gender biased over time
2) It was equally likely that computing become a female dominated field.
These are novel claims that require justification. If (1) was true, we should expect to see it in other fields. But many industries seem quite stubbornly gender neutral - for example medicine. (Although many specialties are male dominated or female dominated). And if (2) were true we should see the same profession have different gender biases in different cultures. But I don’t think we see that either. My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse, prison guard, career criminal, construction worker, child care worker, etc).
I don't agree. The gender bias of a profession this year is dependent on the gender bias from previous years. They would only become more biased over time if the previous bias favored hiring new entrants to the field that are more biased.
If there is an imbalance in intrinsic inchoate biases, such as if men tended to unconsciously hire 55% men and 45% women, whereas women preferred to hire 50% each, then an initial 50-50 split, but with no other biases in play after someone enters the field, would drift towards an equilibrium at around .5263 men and .4737 women. More men magnify the male bias towards males.
My other assumption was that early movers have a magnified effect on the future of the field. Think about how any arbitrary decisions made by Turing or von Neumann could still be affecting computing today, like the sign convention for the charge on an electron--that could have been +1 instead of -1, and many of the signs in physics equations would be flipped. If a female had been making those decisions, we might be using a different computing paradigm that would better match female thought patterns. Computing as we now know it initially came about through the confluence of war and academia. Mathematicians designed machines to aim artillery pieces and automate military-grade ciphers, and then to automatically break automated ciphers. The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it. The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.
You would have to look back into history, when culture barriers were stronger, to look for examples of computing devices that may have been used preferentially by men or women.
> The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it.
I agree and acknowledge that. But many other fields are much older than computing, and arose independently in separate countries (medicine, childcare, law, organised crime, nursing, farming, cooking, construction, etc). If your hypothesis were true we should expect strong, consistent gender biases in all those fields. And we would expect that the dominant gender in different fields would vary across different cultures. But we see the opposite of that in the world - the dominant gender in different professions is remarkably consistent between isolated cultures. In the case of child care its even consistent cross-species.
SSC had a much more in-depth analysis than I'll manage in this comment. The onus is on you to explain why we don't see that actually happen in the world, as would be predicted by your theory.
> The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.
I understand why this feels true, but in practice it is easier today than it has ever been to make novel user interfaces for programmers and users. There are no gatekeepers between you and your code editor. Please experiment with this; I'd love to see what you come up with.
Before we continue, I'll need you to paraphrase my hypothesis in your own words, so that I can be sure we're talking about the same thing, because I'm not entirely certain we are.
"My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse,"
Your understanding isn't correct, at least for nursing.
Nurses were male until the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#History give examples of predominately nurses and caregivers in other cultures before that time. http://minoritynurse.com/rethinking-gender-stereotypes-in-nu... says "Before modern day nursing, men were nurses, not women. The earliest recorded nursing school was established in India around 250 B.C. It was exclusively for men; women were not allowed to attend because it was believed that women were not as pure as men."
> Through the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the mid-nineteenth century, nursing was established as a women's profession (Hus, Chen & Lou, 2010). Nightingale's image of the nurse as subordinate, nurturing, domestic, humble, and self-sacrificing, as well as not too educated, became prevalent in society. The American Nursing Association ostracized men from nursing until 1930, when as a "result of a bylaw amendment, provision was made for male nurses to become members of the American Nurses' Association" (In Review - American Nurses' Association, p. 6). Looking back in nursing history, Florence Nightingale, and the American Nursing Association ostracized men from the nursing profession.'
See also http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2648.1997.... , "History appears to indicate that men have had a place in nursing for as long as records are available, but their contribution has been perceived as negligible, largely because of the dominant influence that the 19th century female nursing movement has had on the occupation's historical ideology."
Interesting. Did men actually make up the majority of nurses back then, or are we just talking about fluctuations in how much of a minority men were in nursing? From the wikipedia article you linked:
> The term nosocomial originates from the latin nosocomi, the name given to male care-givers, meaning that men were prominent in Ancient Rome
... If they needed a special word for male care-givers in ancient rome, that implies they assumed care givers were female by default.
One of the quotes I gave included "Before modern day nursing, men were nurses, not women". The files.eric.ed.gov link says "Prior to the organization of female nursing schools and as early as the fourth and fifth centuries, men provided nursing care to members of various religious orders (Cook-Krieg, 2011, p. 22-23), and held the predominant role in organized nursing in western society."
I don't see how you can therefore infer that men weren't the majority of nurses back then.
As for the term "nosocomi", it doesn't imply that care givers were female by default. Latin is a gendered language. A different word would have been applied to female caregivers. As an example from Spanish, think "maestro" and "maestra" for male and female teacher, respectively.
If the Latin only used the masculine form, and never the feminine, then it indicates the job was primarily (or perhaps only) done by men.
Consider the word "maid", short for "maiden" meaning "female virgin." We have a special word for female domestic workers but that doesn't imply that domestic workers were male by default.
Similary, in many English speaking parts of the world, a senior or supervisory nurse is a "sister". This title includes males, eg. from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282839878_Clinical_... "… what was nice there was a senior male sister that welcomed us and orientated us, so that really help me a lot to accept the situation …".
A male sister may also be referred to using the gender neutral term "charge nurse".
Again you see that a gendered term for a given job does not imply that job is usually done by the other gender.
Or, we have "mailman", "chairman", "cabin boy" for jobs which were usually done by males, while "charwoman", "lunch lady", and "call girl" indicate females. The existence of a special gendered term doesn't mean the mail was usually delivered by women, or that prostitutes were usually men.
How many people with top engineering skills do you think flip patties at McDonalds? Probably not many. Does that mean they're worse at flipping patties? No, it means they want to work elsewhere.
I think an important part of the argument is the context it's being used in. In Damore's essay, it was used as a counter to the idea that anything less than a 50/50 gender ratio was obviously a result of bias and discrimination. In that context, I think highlighting the possibility of other explanations might be appropriate. If he was instead arguing that Google should stop trying to hire women because they might be less capable, that would be a clear indication of bigotry.
I have a lot of problems with how the issue was raised by Damore and I think his firing was appropriate, but I also agree that his essay has been wildly mischaracterized by the media.
Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism.
If you want to make a case that someone means something other than what they clearly say (or write) then you should have a convincing argument to justify such a claim. Otherwise you're just projecting your prejudices on the discussion.
That is not even close to what he said. Regarding abilities - he didn't say anything about any gender having greater or lesser abilities - he said "different" abilities. He didn't say that biological differences explain the gender representation - he said it may explain the gender representation - which means it also may not. He said that there are differences in the distributions of preferences and abilities of women vs men - this is true - he made no claim of the primary driver of the distribution differences either.
He says "it might", then he proceeds to state very assertively that any actions taken to figure out whether that's the case or not are "discrimination" against white men. What do you propose is a sane course of action, considering there's a clear wide gap between "biological differences might affect behavior" and "Google is discriminating by reaching out to women"?
Are you seriously saying that the meaning I should take away from that quote is that women don't work in tech because of their superior ability?
And the quote we're arguing about, "women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering", also says "may". So it seems you're arguing a strawman.
It's been a while since I've read his original memo, but wasn't one of his arguments that women excel in more team based environments, and he suggested more pair based programming as one potential solution?
So an overly simplified argument might be women don't work in tech because they both prefer, and are superior in, different working environments.
What you should take away from his quote is nothing. Especially the paraphrased portion of the quote that ignores preferences. Read his memo in it's entirety and judge it in it's entirety.
I don't much like what Damore appears to say but in fairness that sentence does not say "less capable". That he uses "in part" and "may explain" means that it doesn't say much at all while appearing to say something, to me at least.
I'm not a conservative (far from it), but I think it's a ridiculous misrepresentation.
He spoke to the distribution of preferences and abilities. Turning this into an absolutist simplification should offend anyone with a brain.
The science seems to state that nature rolls the dice more with males than with females. We know, for instance, that there are far more very low IQ males than females, and this is understood as fact. This doesn't mean that you or I are therefore low IQ, despite the distribution increase. And the stats seem to say that nature also varies on the side of high IQ more with males.
That says nothing to whether a given male or female are either low or high, and only applies at scale. Scale that is meaningless when assessing a given candidate, but is certainly pertinent when talking about representation across an entire industry or large organization.
> 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.
> He said exactly that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap.
Perhaps because what he actually said was that statistically women tend to have lower expression of the traits that engineering positions favor and lower interest in those positions. And because of this the representation of women in tech is lower than their representation in the general population.
Nowhere did he say "all women are worse than all men at engineering jobs". In fact he repeatedly explained that there are tons of exceptions to the statistical rule.
I read this as suggesting that the engineering field is currently structured in a way that skews towards the preferences and natural strengths of men rather than women. He's not saying that women are less capable engineers in principle. That would be an absurd argument given that women dominated the field only a few decades ago. Rather, he's arguing that we've reshaped the field and the culture such that it's inherently hostile to women, which is exactly the same argument I hear all the time. He just didn't express it very well.
As I recall, his entire point is that we should be reshaping the field to make it more appealing to women so that they are drawn to it naturally, as opposed to the current strategy of giving women preferential treatment in the hiring process, only to have them leave because we haven't addressed the underlying problems that are driving them away.
That's hardly a radical idea. There are benefits to his approach: I, for one, think the field would benefit greatly if we focused more on, for example, the importance of empathy. Thinking about others ought to be a fundamental pillar of software engineering, as it naturally leads to better UX, APIs, and services. And when we think about the people who will be maintaining our code, we're inclined to write better code that is easier to grok.
You even highlight the word _exactly_ but that is not what he said. That quote says they don't have equal representation and there maybe biological differences to blame.
The main reason for confusion seems to be the quote assumes women might not be as attracted by tech work as men are. That assumption changes the meaning because in your interpretation "Women want to be in tech as much as men and D'Amore is saying they just don't have the genes for it" vs "Women want to be in tech less than men to start with and besides bigotry, hate and marginalization, cultural biases, there could be a biological explanation for it".
I know we all think tech is awesome, we are getting paid to do what we love, etc. But it turns out many people, and maybe women more than men, don't find sitting in a cubicle all day inverting binary trees appealing. I don't think biology is the main driver here [+] but D'Amore does. He might be wrong, but I don't see why it had to become this controversial topic and lead to firing and lawsuits. They could have just said "here is why science doesn't support your view, thanks for starting the discussion, but you're wrong" and leave it at that.
[+] I don't support his view, I'd personally blame culture for women not even wanting to be in tech. Having lived in Eastern Europe where there is less "stigma" against girls liking math and computer science. It's not a cause, or a talking point at least, it's just a profession like accountant or doctor.
Quillette asked a bunch of people who are in the fields quoted by darmore and they mostly agreed that the science quoted was accurate[1]. There is evidence to show that as economic equality increases, gender diversity skews more. That is, in poorer countries like India and Eastern Europe, women are more likely to work in tech to gain economic advantages. In countries where women are well off, they are more likely to pursue roles that are seen as feminine.[2], [3]
The misrepresentation is a feature, not a bug. They need to create dragons in order to justify their dragon-slaying crusade. This has been going on for years, BTW.
Is the quote you pulled not saying the same thing as this from Damore's memo?
> 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.
(a) There is no consistent world view for tens of millions of people distributed across the globe, (b) there is no research, none, that specifically states that women are genetically predisposed to be less suited to engineering and (c) there is no clear rules about what aspects of our biology are required to be a great engineer.
Maybe these studies are wrong, maybe the conclusions Damore drew were wrong (I certainly think they are). However, I think witch-hunting people for asking questions about sensitive topics is a much more clear and present danger.
I just don't think you understand the problem here.
Nobody is arguing that men and women aren't biologically different. Of course they are. The point is whether those biological differences significantly affect your ability to be a professional engineer.
And you or Damore have provided zero evidence of this.
I don't agree with him. I just think the witch-hunt is intellectually dishonest. I highly suggest reading the memo if you haven't.
To rephrase what I'm talking about: some studies say women are less good at spatial reasoning than men -- maybe you can make an argument that Task X requires spatial reasoning skills. Assuming that argument is true it would stand to reason that statistically more men are capable of doing Task X than women. That's a far cry from saying women lack the ability to do Task X.
To refrain, I think Damore's conclusions are probably wrong. However I think there's a shocking abundance of willful ignorance whenever this topic gets raised.
I have read the memo, I have looked at the studies. The studies suggest that there is a large overlap between men and women concerning personality traits. Further more there it suggest no correlation between these traits and other things we deem import in engineering like intelligence.
You speak of willful ignorance, yet talk of studies you don't even link nor explain why they have anything to do with this. Why would this study about spatial reasoning by more important than e.g. SAT scores? How does that actually relate to women becoming engineers when there is no shortage of women who are capable of completing a CS degree?
You also seem to suggest that Damore's voice is important because other people aren't talking about this. As well as that people who disagree with him doesn't do so legitimately but because they don't like his opinions. That people don't talk about this isn't true, they just don't reach the same conclusions. Here is one example from the summery of the study "The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics":
"We conclude that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways. There are no single or simple answers to the complex questions about sex differences in science and mathematics."
So why doesn't Damore, or yourself, mention a study like this that can be easily be found online?
You're agreeing with me. I think his conclusions are wrong for many of the reasons you outlined. My issue is with people who misrepresent his argument and publicly shame him for it while denying there's an intellectual discussion to be had.
if bilogical reasons makes you more likely to study a field other than engineering. I say that this biological reasons make you less likely to become an engineer. and by "you" I mean a random woman. Of course some woman want to go and study engineering and they have the right to do so and be hired in a fair hiring process.
No body is arguing against the right of women to become engineers. It's just stating that the assumption that "hidden bias" exists if a field is not at 50/50 is untrue.
and by the way, I'm yet to find any proof for that. if you find a study that indicates no discirimination leads to 50/50 in all fields or at least in engineering I will be happy to read it.
> The point is whether those biological differences significantly affect your ability to be a professional engineer.
So, to me this reads as bias. When I read his claim, I don't see it as implying that women are in any way less capable of becoming professional engineers, but (in context to his other assertions) that they are less likely to desire becoming a professional engineer.
Damore links to studies in his paper, but ignoring that for a second -- I could post a paper, and you could post a rebuttal, and blah blah blah -- but the point isn't that he's right or wrong, at least to me, the point is that if he intended to say that women, for whatever reason, simply disprefer professions like engineering, that it is a far less acerbic interpretation.
I'll freely offer that nothing in his paper affirms my interpretation of his view any more than yours, but if the only difference is that I'm more willing to assume good faith where you are not, then perhaps that's reason enough to not demand that he be insta-fired from any job he ever get, as many are asking to happen.
it is not about who is the greater engineer. it's a fact that women on average prefer to go more to fields other than engeneering.
Some state that this a culture problem and that there is a hidden bias.
Some also state that women might go to other fields because they have a greater capacity at empathy. which is a proven fact. women that go and study those fields won't apply to cs positions they will apply to positions in their fields.
and by the way there was a study that indicated that women get short-listed less in sex-blind hiring
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview."
"Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."
Except that the empirical research does not prove his assertion. Citing papers is not enough to rigorous science. Small differences between the personality distributions of men and women are not themselves sufficient to explain the gap between men and women in software.
But is he not saying that fewer women end up having the skills for engineering because of something in their biology? When I read the memo I thought that was his whole point...
Is there really a difference if you believe the reason women "wind up" lacking the skills for X is due to biology? Asserting biology makes it essentialist, it's the same as saying "women are worse at X."
Yeah, there is. "Women are worse" implies that there's a gendered difference after applying the "is an engineer" filter. "Fewer women gain entry into the class of engineers" doesn't imply anything about ability afterwards. And for what it's worth, James Damore explicitly called out this distinction, saying that he was not making a claim about any sort of skill differential between male engineer and female engineers.
Like, male and female high jumpers that make it over a certain height of bar are approximately as good at jumping. There's more men in that category. This all might be playing semantics, but I think there's a real thing here to disentangle, and it'd be nice to say one without implying the other.
>Yeah, there is. "Women are worse" implies that there's a gendered difference after applying the "is an engineer" filter.
...No it doesn't. That's just something you're adding to preserve the distinction.
>Like, male and female high jumpers that make it over a certain height of bar are approximately as good at jumping. There's more men in that category. This all might be playing semantics, but I think there's a real thing here to disentangle, and it'd be nice to say one without implying the other.
Yes yes but the problem comes with Damore's reasoning for why there are more men in that category - biological determination of better programming ability.
>Yes yes but the problem comes with Damore's reasoning for why there are more men in that category - biological determination of better programming ability.
Whether or not the representation gap is biological is an important factual matter that should be discussed on the merits. It'd do women no good to try to get their best sprint times up to men's by fixing society to be more accepting of female sprinters. There are real biological differences between the sexes, and trying to fix downstream effects of them by making up sociological causes and attacking them is very quixotic.
I didn't say that, and I don't have an opinion on that. I used sprinting as an example for a reason; the reason why women are under-represented among top sprint times is clearly biological, and I was hoping to point at the impossibility of fixing it through changing the sociological structure of track-and-field to be more accepting to women.
I think a sociological explanation for any biological phenomena has to be made up. This is why we need to have an honest discussion about the merits of biological explanations, so that we can figure out the root causes and spend our efforts effectively.
And he made a few suggestions that he thought may improve the situation by taking into account the differences between men and women and their respective motivations.
He didn't say he believed that. He said he believed it's possible it's one of several factors, and only at a macro level ("generally, women prefer not to do X", not "women are worse at X.").
He also suggested that if the goal is for Google to become more inclusive toward women, that perhaps the roles should be adjusted to appeal more to women than to stick our heads in the sand and pretend the problem is Google's patriarchy.
If you run a burger place and want more women to eat there, you start serving salads. That doesn't mean you're a sexist for thinking women can't eat burgers. Some do. But generally speaking, women eat salads at higher rates than men. You will not be as successful by trying to market the same burgers to women.
>("generally, women prefer not to do X", not "women are worse at X.").
You're sneaking in your "prefer" with your "generally". Damore didn't speak just to preference, he also spoke to ability.
>If you run a burger place and want more women to eat there, you start serving salads. That doesn't mean you're a sexist for thinking women can't eat burgers. Some do. But generally speaking, women eat salads at higher rates than men. You will not be as successful by trying to market the same burgers to women.
Great analogy. So in terms of burgers/salads & men/women Damore is saying that there are biological reasons to believe that women prefer salads to burgers and that there are biological reasons to believe that men are better at eating burgers.
So now let me ask you, do you think women prefer salads because of biology, or do you think that women prefer salads because of culture? You can say both but if so maybe you could say which one you think is the larger influence and by how much.
Also, do you think that men are biologically better at eating burgers? Is this the reason they are more likely to order a burger?
I think the analogy exposes exactly the problem with Damore's memo.
> You're sneaking in your "prefer" with your "generally". Damore didn't speak just to preference, he also spoke to ability.
Ability follows as a result of preference. I am a terrible architect because I chose to become a software engineer. That does not mean that if I had chosen to become an architect, I would be terrible at it. If most of the people from my hometown made the same choice, then most of us would be less good at architecting due to that preference.
> So now let me ask you, do you think women prefer salads because of biology, or do you think that women prefer salads because of culture? You can say both but if so maybe you could say which one you think is the larger influence and by how much.
Personally I think it's almost entirely culture. I couldn't say how much is what, but it makes no difference. The point is that it undermines the incumbent narrative, which is that sexism and oppression are the only significant causes.
> Also, do you think that men are biologically better at eating burgers? Is this the reason they are more likely to order a burger?
No, but I do think if you're running a burger place and refuse to acknowledge the possibility that different groups of customers prefer different things, you're going to be out of business soon. Fortunately restaurant menu choices haven't been politically charged--yet.
>Ability follows as a result of preference. I am a terrible architect because I chose to become a software engineer. That does not mean that if I had chosen to become an architect, I would be terrible at it. If most of the people from my hometown made the same choice, then most of us would be less good at architecting due to that preference.
See everyone I talk to about Damore only tries to defend the preference portion. This isn't the only argument Damore is making. He believes abilities, not just preferences, are distributed differently between men and women. That's what I'm asking you to defend.
>Personally I think it's almost entirely culture. I couldn't say how much is what, but it makes no difference. The point is that it undermines the incumbent narrative, which is that sexism and oppression are the only significant causes.
It doesn't really undermine anything. When we move to salads it's super obvious that almost all of the effect is cultural not biological. So some burger stores start an initiative to get women to worry less about the cultural expectations placed on them and eat a damn burger but disgruntled Wendy's employee Damore writes an internal 10 page memo explaining that women don't eat burgers because they are biologically predisposed to salads. He digs up research about the vitamins and minerals contained in leafy greens, spends a ton of time tip-toeing around what he means to say, and couches everything in "distributional" language. At the end of the day it's obvious that this memo by a layman about why women prefer salads biologically is (1) ridiculous on it's face (2) not scientific and (3) actively harmful to his employer's goals.
But put that way it's obvious why he was fired and Damore looks less like a free-speech hero and more like bigoted faux-science dweeb.
> are distributed differently between men and women.
And that, as far as I know, is the current scientific consensus.
In particular, women who excel at the Math SATs tend to also excel at the Verbal SATs. Whereas men who excel at the Math SATs tend to only excel at the Math SATs.
And people, regardless of gender, who have both capabilities tend to go into non-STEM fields.
And men just like football more than women, likely due to testosterone and innate drive for physical competition and I wonder how impossible it would be to make half of NFL fans female and...
“Distribution of...abilities” suggests “women are worse.” If the quote merely spoke of skills I could see your point, but it speaks of abilities and points to genetics as an root cause.
> “Distribution of...abilities” suggests “women are worse.”
No, it doesn't. It suggests fewer women are good. It doesn't suggest that the women in the field are any worse than the men in the field, it just explains why there may be fewer women than men.
It doesn't even suggest that. Other interpretations include that women are better at non-programming skills than men, pulling them away from tech. (That would be a plausible explanation for there being less women in tech than men, given the two groups have equal tech abilities)
if more woman are better at empathy ( already proven as fact), wouldn't you agree that some women might prefer jobs that can capitalize on that empathy.
this argument uses "Distribution of...abilities" without indicating in any part that women are worse at anything.
the phrase “Distribution of...abilities” does not suggest that “women are worse.”
women are better at empathy, due to biological reasons. women ,on average not all women of course, go into fields that need more empathy on average. they endup having less skills in this field on average because more of them went and studied another field due to biological reasons.
from the abstract:
"This study contributes information on women's greater empathic disposition in comparison with men by means of a longitudinal design in an adolescent population"
You are correct I took a conclusion that my data might not support. the paper measured empathy in the same group at age 13 and age 16 they found that girls had higher empathy at both ages but the difference increased with age.
"Half of the women were given an orally administered dose of testosterone sufficient to increase the levels of the hormone in their blood by a factor of ten, while the other half received a placebo. The women who were given testosterone subsequently took significantly longer to identify the emotions depicted images of eyes, and made significantly more errors while doing so."
That's still twisting his argument. I've read an article that argued that while highly intelligent women are equally capable of doing STEM, they're _more_ capable/interested with regards to interpersonal relationships, so they're more likely to go into fields like medicine, politics, marketing etc.
Maybe a sign of issues in the field is that people hiring undervalue interpersonal skills/relationships and what it means to be "capable," which I do think is a flaw in Damore's original memo.
Been a while since I read it, but I believe he actually advocated for that. First he tried to establish that the sexes have some differences, then said we should see if we can make the workplace culture less biased toward the male-friendly characteristics.
"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
○ We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming
and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how
people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive
ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get
female students into coding might be doing this).
● Women on average are more cooperative
○ Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may
be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do.
○ This doesn't mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google.
Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn't
necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what's been done in
education."
Well, it misses at least half of the meaning of the statement you quoted when it writes it all off to lacking natural ability(which is a negative), and nothing to do with 'distribution of preferences'(which is neutral).
So no, I would say the original quote is not a good summary of the quote you quoted.
This quote is speaking about the distribution saying that i might be affected, not that women are in fact less able if they wanted to. For example if more women don't go and study CS, less women will be in CS, thus the general population of women will be less able to practise CS which means that the number of women in cs will be low.
As for the distibution of preferences based on sex. While some might claim that sex does not affect preferences. A Meta-study found robust sex differences in children’s toy Indicating that sex "might" be a factor in deciding factor. The categorical refusal of this claim to the point the mere fact of suggesting that it "might" be true let alone asserting it is taboo, is scientifically unfounded.
Let's not forget that the metrics for "ability", especially in a field like software engineering, are highly unscientific.
People barely have any idea about how to hire a software engineer, much less judge someone's true "ability".
Preferences are also very complicated. People may prefer things very differently given the environment. That quote, along with many others, demonstrates the absolute lack of genuineness on the part of Damore.
Damore throws away any pretense of being objective/scientific when he makes claims like this based on metrics that are hardly measurable. A decent scientist would recognize that making claims with very serious implications like this is greatly irresponsible.
> Preferences are also very complicated. People may prefer things very differently given the environment. That quote, along with many others, demonstrates the absolute lack of genuineness on the part of Damore.
I'm not sure how you get from (1) his logic seems flawed, to (2) he's being disingenuous. Can you please elaborate?
1) I'm not saying his logic is flawed. I'm saying what he's basing his logic upon, that these notions of preferences and ability are scientifically measurable, are false.
2) He has an preconceived theory of how "ability" and "preference" work. The science does not point to his conclusions, because the science cannot point to any conclusions: ability is simply not scientifically understood or defined at all in the software engineering field, and preferences are barely understood and have many weird consequences (Dan Ariely's work is a great example of this). He is being disingenuous because he is making a claim without any ability to back it up, simply because it fits with his preconceived theory. That's disingenuous. If he were to say, "It seems to me that", or "What I've seen in my life is...", instead of making a strict claim. A strict claim requires actual evidence and well defined terms, both of which he has none.
> notions of preferences and ability are scientifically measurable, are false.
Hmm...as to preferences, there are two easy tests:
1. You ask people
When you do, you find that people generally don't like CS. People in developed countries less than in less developed countries. And women less than men, with the gap becoming bigger in more developed countries. And girls less than boys, with the gap becoming larger in more developed countries.
You can also ask them why they choose that way, and in less developed or less prosperous countries, more people say "because of the money". In more prosperous countries, people are, well, more prosperous, so money is less of an issue.
2. You look at how people choose
Same pattern. It's not as if women are forced out of computing and into early childhood education. They choose to go there because, apparently, that is what they want to do.
Why is it that one side gets to make claims accepted blindly as fact unquestionably (unequal representation of women is solely because of sexism) and the other side must be objective / scientific?
No. Neither side must make claims about what is not understood (which is nearly everything). Damore is the one making the claim, and one with very serious consequences.
The reality is: we don't have a complete answer as to why there is unequal representation of women in tech. Period. We can explore this issue, and in the mean time, let's not make unsupportable claims and assumptions about humans, Ok?
I am okay with not making unsupportable claims and assumptions about humans but that isn't what is happening in tech. The reason given to explain the gender gap is sexism. Which is pretty close to unsupportable...
What's happening is that the news outlet here is keying in on the word abilities and not the word preferences.
I think many women have preferences that steer them away from engineering, this may be societal or genetic in nature but that's something that is being debated at this point.
I think saying his use of the word abilities is what gets him in a lot of trouble here.
Can you elaborate on what in your mind is the correct interpretation ? Because, reading his memo, I had the exact same takeaway as the Techcrunch quote you posted here.
I tried to explain this in a blog post. It also irritates me why this is so consequently misinterpreted, as it makes for quite a big difference for the overall narrative. Because of course if someone would claim that an individual woman cannot be as good as an individual man in engineering (or better), that person would be an idiot.
That's a strawman. Nobody is saying that Damore thinks every man is a better programmer than every woman.
He suggested that on average men are biologically more suited to programming, and the contention of his opponents is that that is still a problematic and inappropriate thing to say.
He very clearly stated that the average male programmer is as good as the average female programmer. Please don't insinuate otherwise by stripping away some of the semantics Mr. Damore used - he used it for a reason to make a more precise claim than you're criticizing.
Say I could prove that in a fair society 2 out of every 100 men would want to be programmers and only 1 out of every 100 women want that. Would stating that be problematic?
Edit: Sorry, I misread your comment, lukev. It's not a strawman though. This is exactly how many of the harshest critics of the memo have described his stance. Too many to count.
Stating "members from group X are better than members from group y" (which is how Damore's opponents describe his claim) is a not the same as stating that “more people from group X than from group Y might be suitable for this job”. The first is qualitative, the latter quantitative. The latter also implies that members of group y can be as good.
I am sure everyone has experienced how sentences and context radically can change through the addition or omission of just one or two words. Here we have such a case, and it should be acknowledged.
>Stating "members from group X are better than members from group y" (which is how Damore's opponents describe his claim) is a not the same as stating that “more people from group X than from group Y might be suitable for this job”. The first is qualitative, the latter quantitative.
But the problem is that it isn't any more quantitative because it still depends on the highly subjective notion of what it means to be "suitable for this job" and assumes that there is only one way to be "suitable."
His memo does not say "women are incapable of programming". He says the way Google uses engineers means men are more likely to fit the role. He offers suggestions on how to change the role to attract more women. For example, women may be attracted to social programming (pair or mob programming) versus the classic picture of some man locked away in a basement. Which he references specifically in the article.
This is different from discriminatory hiring of women to be forced into a male oriented role. This is a substantive claim, which he accuses Google of doing. Discriminatory hiring is illegal, and also stupid, from a free market standpoint.
Tldr: If women aren't buying your product (not applying to Google), it's not the fault of women, its your product that needs to change to suit their wants and needs.
This is only sexist if you think men and women don't, as a general statistical rule, tend toward different interests along a bimodal distribution. But they do.
It is poor journalism. Responsible journalism would write it as:
"James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board that was perceived by many to argue that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering"
They can also point out that he denied he argued this, and that there is plenty of disagreement over whether his memo said it or not.
I know plenty of folks are saying they read it and don't see how one can interpret it any other way. But the fact that you get so many comments indicating they did not interpret it that way is a strong indicator of a lack of consensus. The way the article is written implies a certainty, and does not reflect the reality around the memo.
Essentially, to insist that this is what Damore meant, based only on his memo, is insisting that a huge number of HN posters are playing the same game Damore is. It's much easier to believe that there are other valid interpretations of the memo and to allow for the possibility that Damore had one of the other interpretations.
Because the press loves polarization. Hitting sensitive nerves is the perfect click-bait. There is no sensible discussion possible anymore on this topic, so it is low hanging fruit.
What? Did we read the same memo? One of his central points is that the representation gap between men and women in technology is due to different biological distributions.
From the memo:
> 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.
Minus a bit of softening language ("in part", "may"), proposing that women are on average less biologically capable of programming is exactly what he's saying.
Also, because I know how HN works, let me pre-empt the inevitable reply to this one: "but what if there ARE sex differences?! shouldn't we be allowed to talk about that!? Freedom of speech!?!"
Scientists who study this stuff (including those cited by Damore) can and do talk about it, and the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech. What effects there may be are absolutely dominated by sociological factors.
Sociological factors that some companies are attempting to counter, which is what Damore didn't like, which is why he issued his complain-y memo to start with.
And THAT is why people are upset with him. Not because he's an amateur biologist with a day job as a programmer who just earnestly wants to have an innocent conversation about sexual dimorphism. It's because he's just another brogrammer whose jimmies got rustled by the thought of women being his peers, and decided to insult (on average) his female colleagues and create a hostile work environment for which he was (quite correctly) fired.
Except it is. Damore himself cites a study by David Schmitt at Bradley University, indicating that women had certain personality traits across cultures. What did Shmitt have to say about Damore, when interviewed?
> “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.)”
Finally, even if the facts were true that women on averaged perform worse in tech, how do you want to use that information? Cancel all the sensitivity programs designed to solve other very real problems in tech? Or are you saying not only that biology "plays a role", but that _nothing else does_ so we should just completely ignore this as an issue?
> 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.)
In other words, "that's not the kind of question we ask."
Also I looked at the citations, neither of the metastudies looks at differences in sensory perception which imho are the most interesting of the sex differences. But even ignoring that, looking at the statistical significance of certain population traits doesn't tell you anything about their clinical significance. E.g. if you look at two groups of 100 people and one group is 100% alive and the other group is 99% alive, there isn't a significant effect size, but there is a big difference to that one person.
>Scientists who study this stuff (including those cited by Damore) can and do talk about it, and the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech. What effects there may be are absolutely dominated by sociological factors.
Ok, I'm not trying to be snarky, but journalists aren't scientists. The article cites statistics that re-confirm what we already knew - that women are highly under-represented.
But what seems to be missing (and what I had hoped for) is research showing that "the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech." I feel like the article should be overflowing with references to this if it's a consensus.
It turns out that even this article admits that
> there’s very little scientists know for certain about which behaviors are due to biology, and which are because of society’s expectations of both men and women
The article essentially concludes that men are competitive.
Maybe I missed something in the article. Which citation really spoke to you and confirmed this consensus?
What am I supposed to have empathy for? That he was paid a six figure salary, part of which required him to sit through a few hours of sensitivity training?
And if we're worried about empathy, why don't we stop and think for a while about the people affected negatively by his memo?
Or do you mean the autism excuse (which is from the Guardian journalist, btw, not Damore himself?) I know lots of people on the autism spectrum who are not sexist, or who at least have the intelligence not to send out a memo to the whole company on a nuanced, controversial social topic
Read. If you then still think it is ok to just put a degrading label on him, then you are part of the big problem we have in our heated debates nowadays. Try be the solution and don't see the world in black or white/good or bad.
"And if we're worried about empathy, why don't we stop and think for a while about the people affected negatively by his memo?"
I do. It's you who falsely assumes one can only do one thing.
When you read something you don't agree with it is your choice to decide how it affects you. So please don't start this nonsense that words make a unsafe environment.
That being said nobody had a negative reaction until vox leaked it. It had been available for months.
I will also note it seemed to be those who have more tweets than minutes they have been alive that got the most upset about this memo.
I was really disappointed in the response by Google engineers. To this day I have yet to see a proper rebuttal that did not go out of it's way to misrepresent the original memo.
That is what makes me sad. That to this day people still quote things that were not in or even eluded to in the paper.
There is a difference between women are on average less capable (or what your interpretation seems to imply - women programmers are worse than men) and what is written which are there may be less qualified female candidates due to biological differences.
The latter is an obvious statement however people seems keen to deliberately misinterpret it to fuel their rightous outrage.
I’ll use high jump as an example. Suppose I only hire high jumpers who can leap over X meters. I find that I naturally hire less women because women on average can’t jump as high as men. The women who can are obviously as qualified as men. Now I make the statement that due to biological differences this may explain the hiring disparity, rather than discrimination.
1. Saying that women are "on average" worse programmers is exactly why people are upset with him. He doesn't need to be some kind of insane absolutist in order for what he said to be very problematic.
2. Even if there are statistically significant sex differences with regard to programming ability and inclination, there are also historical and sociological factors that are working against women in tech. Damore's memo was explicitly a negative reaction against some of the programs designed to counteract these systemic issues. As such, even if he were 100% right about the sexual dimorphism (which he isn't, see my other post in this thread), using that as an argument against trying to solve the sociological problems is not only logically unsound, but exhibits bad faith and bad motivations.
1. Except he never even said women on average are worse. Secondly people being upset is not an argument against the truthiness of statement, no matter how problematic.
2. “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
> Except he never even said women on average are worse.
That is literally the whole point of his memo, that women have a different (i.e, worse, in this context) statistical distribution of ability and inclination to the tech field.
> “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
Sure it is. His argument is structured as follows:
1. Negative effect Q is caused by both A and B.
2. We can't do anything about A.
3. Therefore we shouldn't do anything about B.
The problem with this argument is that while high-jumping is an obvious function of physical traits that may be more prevalent in males, it's not that easy to draw a straight correlation - let alone complete causation - for career selection.
Damore's manifesto purports to present evidence that there "maybe" are inherent differences between genders ("may" and "might" are also sprinkled all over the place for good measure.) He even acknowledges that this is far from a complete picture. But then he goes on to conclude that:
1) That must explain the existing gender distribution in engineering
2) Google trying to explore doing outreach to increase diversity must necessarily imply discrimination of the unfairly oppressed white heterosexual male
So trying to dismiss all criticism by splitting hairs over whether he meant that the average, the median, or all women are uninterested in engineering completely misses the point that either way the conclusions are unwarranted. The whole thing smacks of persecution complex first, finding "evidence" later.
maybe gender non confused women are simply NOT INTERESTED in the current realm of the engineering tech world? Of course I have NO expertise in this matter whatsoever as a NON DEGREED NON GENDER CONFLICTED HIGH IQ FEMALE. I wonder how many of these comments here are posted by the Googly butted employees of Googly butt INC. ON COMPANY TIME?!!! Whatever it is you THINK Google is supposed to provide youre NOT providing it now, ARE YOU? SMH glad I left the corpo tech world and LEARNED ABOUT THE REST OF THE WORLD! Goats and ducks and earth itself doesnt give a good diddly squat about "how you identify sexually or otherwise!" Maybe its already "correcting" the warped offspring and you are merely RESPONDING to natural biological evolutionary mandates? By insisting that you are "non binary"? LOL Ma Natures got the last laugh on all of you pretending to be so freaking intelligent and "open minded"! LOL LOL Betcha there arent any white papers allowed on THAT concept! Glad and grateful I escaped it all long before this ridiculous obsession with "identity" became the humanity and technology destroying epidemic it is now. You CLAIM to be leading edge thinkers and creators and developers! WTF are you socially challenged misfits "creating" here? You claim to be creating better intelligence artificially. CREATORS HEAL THYSELVES OR GET OUTTA THE KITCHEN! Humanity and life itself hasn't any time or energy left to waste on this incredible amount of navel inspecting!!! WE ARE ALL BOZOS ON THIS BUS!! DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO DRIVE IT YET??? SHUT UP ABOUT HOW YOU "IDENTIFY" AND DO YOU F*N JOBS! [ there was a time when this was a common declaration among the most productive workplaces. AND IT WORKED! ] you have literally destroyed the future for us ALL with your ARGUING for your OWN limitations!
> proposing that women are on average less biologically capable of programming is exactly what he's saying.
No, he's saying that they also might be less interested, for biological reasons. I recommend actually reading the memo (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...): "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men."
> Sociological factors that some companies are attempting to counter, which is what Damore didn't like, which is why he issued his complain-y memo to start with.
That isn't my interpretation at all. His entire point was that Google's current strategy was ignoring the cultural and sociological factors that might be discouraging women from entering the field. Rather than simply giving women preferential treatment during the hiring process, and going out of the way to specifically hire women, he argued that we should be spending more time identifying why women aren't naturally drawn to the field (or why more women later choose to leave the field). Fix that problem first, or the women that get hired will eventually leave, because we haven't done enough to consider why they don't feel welcome.
He never said that women are unfit to be engineers. He argued (clumsily, I admit) that we've created an environment that favors the preferences and strengths of men over those of women. If we want to see more women thrive in tech, start by changing the culture.
I think that most of the outrage over Damore's memo can be chalked up to poor communication on his part. He lays out evidence, but he never explicitly states his argument. It's like he assumed there was a single, obvious conclusion that readers would arrive at. Some of us got the message, but apparently a whole lot more didn't. The outcome is almost perfect in its irony: he cites a greater emphasis on empathy as a way of making the engineering field more hospitable to women, but he fails miserably at using empathy to evaluate how people will interpret his own words.
The best response to this that I've read, at least in my opinion, was SSC's "Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences"[0]. The key point is that differences between the genders do exist, though they tend to be differences in interest rather than capability. And even small differences in interest can cascade through the selection effects of our educational systems.
The article has Professor Grant himself (the guy who is cited in all of these discussions) rebutting what Scott wrote in the blog post. It's well worth the read.
You're completely ignoring the "preferences" part of that statement though. It's unfortunate that he threw the "abilities" bit in there as well, but when reading in the context of the rest of the memo, I think it's fair to say he Damore believes the distributions differ due to "preference factors", much more than he believes its due to "ability factors".
And a very strong case can be made that women make different life choices which result in generally different outcomes in those areas.
When the majority of people coming to your defense are right wing extremists[0][1] and neo-nazis you are doing something wrong. You can also read his twitter account, he went full on alt-right.
> When the majority of people coming to your defense are right wing extremists[0][1] and neo-nazis you are doing something wrong.
When the majority of people are too afraid to come to someone's defense (publicly) because they're afraid that the internet pitchfork mobs will come and destroy their lives too, a large part of society is doing something wrong.
And that large part of society that attempts to do the silencing/shaming/smearing/destroying of the opposition might think they're scoring a victory for their cause (whether or not that cause is worthy is beside the point), but that's not necessarily true, and we saw proof of that in the last US election.
The alt right did not do him any favors as it probably made it harder for him to understand what he did wrong. Of course he had to be fired as how could you have him on a team trying to work together.
As a manager you have to think about everyone in the team.
Americans, even those who attend good schools, do not understand statistical claims. This leaves them susceptible to all kinds of flim flam, especially when they are invested in an idea.
He means 80% of Americans probably, not 100% and that that is a lot more than in any other demographic in the western world.
Be aware, 60% of Republicans belie e that the earth really is only 6,000 years old.
By not understanding he means that, that they don't understand that they don't
understand that in distribution when traits are different on a average that that doesn't mean that in one group all individuals of one groups have stronger or weaker traits than individuals
of the other group.
>I'm having some difficulty understanding your statement.
Heh. I rest my case.
But, to respond directly: of course, I'm speaking colloquially to suggest many Americans.
I specifically mention Americans because this discussion is about an American suing an American company, in a kerfuffle over American ideals (and law) of sex nondiscrimination. American education norms seem to leave even bright people susceptible to deep confusion when claims are based on statistics.
"It aims to represent all employees of Google who’ve been discriminated against due to their “perceived conservative political views by Google,” due to “their male gender by Google” and “due to their Caucasian race by Google."
He should have also added Christians, Trump supporters, or anyone who doesn't bow to the progressive agenda.
Thanks, that's interesting. This in particular may be relevant to the case:
"However, there are exceptions. For instance, if you participate in a political activity that creates a conflict of interest with your employer's business model, your job could potentially be on the line"
It seems that Google has to have a specific policy in place for this law to be triggered, which does not seem to be the claim being made.
No. It would be enough for there to be a demonstrated consistent set of actions in a specific direction. Otherwise, many other laws could be made moot by companies not having a specific written policy, but still carrying out such actions.
They aren't a federally protected group according to this list. This particular situation though is extra hairy because even if it was religious the offended parties could argue that a protection is not a license to advocate discrimination.
Not at the national level. In California the Fair Employment and Housing Act has a few nebulous clauses regarding political affiliation, but not enough to make a real case. For the most part political affiliation is not a protected category and in some cases an employer is allowed to explicitly discriminate based upon political affiliation (e.g. the CA Republican party can decide not to hire you because you have been a registered Democrat for the past decade, etc.)
No, but California has a law against employers controlling, directing, or coercing political activity (or abstention therefrom) by employees (Labor Code Secs. 1101-1102.)
No, but there are laws against employing someone who publishes (internally or otherwise) memoranda that creates a hostile working environment for a protected class. More specifically, had Google not fired him, they'd be getting sued by other employees.
PS. Being told that "You are only here because you're a diversity hire, you can't actually do the work," is creating a hostile working environment.
It's interesting that it's hostile to say "you are only here because you're a diversity hire" but "you only got the job because you are a white male" isn't understood to be as hostile.
At some point, we're going to have to decide whether we're committed to equality among protected classes or not.
You really think the firm is taking an upfront fee or retainer for this? I assume they are expecting a settlement from Google/Alphabet so that the company can put an end to this PR nightmare once and for all, from which they will take a cut.
He's beloved by a certain right-leaning or libertarian bent portion of the tech world, and everyone else except for maybe Google's lawyers have forgotten about him. So it seems like he is in a better place now than simply being a midlevel employee in MegaCorp
I really doubt it is with his own money. Google pays pretty well, but he was only employed for a couple of years outside of school, so I doubt he has millions just sitting around. Almost certainly this case is taken on a contingency basis or they are using crowdsourced funds.
Damore is an individual. He is not a hundred billion dollar company.
A PR nightmare for him costs him very little. There are no products that customers can boycott to get back at him. No offices where he could be protested.
The 'worst' that could happen is that some tech companies refusing to hire him. But given his recent fame, I doubt he has to worry about money anymore.
I think Damore's future is irrelevant, and that Google wants him to disappear off the face of the earth - not court a massive virtue signaling performance.
Will watch this with interest AFAIK discriminating against conservative white men isn’t illegal. It’s not a protected class. There must be some twist here.
Yes, discrimination against men, and or white people is illegal. They can show though that they hire plenty of white men. You are correct in California you cannot discriminate against employees due to politics, however I'm sure they'd be able to show they hire plenty of republicans. It is also an uphill battle for Damore since he'd basically be claiming that he was discriminated against at the same time as arguing that they shouldn't do more to balance the apparent discrimination against women. Whether or not any of that is true, it's going to be a hard sell to a California jury
> however I'm sure they'd be able to show they hire plenty of republicans
Discrimination is not just about hiring but also about workplace comfort. And let me tell you, being a non-democrat at google is NOT comfortable! VERY not comfortable!
IANAL, but as I understand it, it depends on what causes the discomfort. If your discomfort comes from the existence of other protected classes, like a baptist in a den of atheists then it's tough beans. If however you can evidence that they've created a hostile environment for you outside of your relation to other protected classes then yes that makes sense.
Problem is that it had nothing to do with politics. Did you not see the memo and what Damore wrote? Nobody could have kept Damore around and the proof is nobody will hire him.
> however I'm sure they'd be able to show they hire plenty of republicans.
Would they? Do you work in Silicon Valley, and if so how many Republican members did you meet on the teams you worked on. In 6+ years of work, my count is exactly 1.
Race and Sex are actually protected classes. Conservative however yes is totally not federally protected and neither is Socialist, or Liberal. Frankly I think that's weird, but the law is the law.
But I'm not sure[1] that you can combine classes like this to create a new protected class. No one is making the argument that Google discriminates based on race or sex. If this is more of a harassment suit then a discrimination claim it seems to have more legs.
[1] I'm really not sure, I'm not kidding that I'm interested in how this plays out.
IANAL. Discriminating against someone because of their political activities is illegal in California. Whether simply holding and/or expressing views consistent with a political party counts as a 'political activity' or if there's a higher criteria is a question for a lawyer.
Also, my understanding of how discrimination laws work is that the question of 'protected class' doesn't come into it - if the discrimination was based on race or gender, it's illegal.
I never really saw too much issue with what he wrote. It seemed a lot of people were mad at him for things he never said. It's been awhile since I read his document, but I remember expecting it to be so bad from all the uproar I was hearing, but after reading it I couldn't find much to be angry about. Can someone enlighten me - i'll admit, this may be a highly ignorant topic of mine.
If you switch out words of gender with words of race, it may sound more offensive. That is what the Youtube CEO said and it immediately began to make sense.
In the best case, that argument only has a little utility. However, it's a pretty bad argument now, since political correctness only allows you to make those kinds of swaps in certain cases. Nowadays, it can only be use to amplify the outrage against an already-identified villain.
If you turn "I only have sex with women" into "I only have sex with white people", suddenly it sounds pretty offensive. Can we judge those two statements equivalently? It's not a good argument at all.
It's interesting to note that that was actually the structure of one of the arguments in the lawsuit - changing "men" to "women" to demonstrate the flaws in a Googler's reasoning. Check out points 166-169.
To be the devil's advocate, many things are a lot more offensive if you swap words of gender with race.
"Birth control for blacks", "we need more jews in STEM", "no blacks in the whites only bathroom".
They're more offensive because unlike race there are very real and relevant biological differences when it comes to gender. And whether or not that applies to STEM probably shapes your viewpoints on this subject.
It was more about the timing. The memo came shortly after Trump was elected, when many women and minorities were feeling defeated. It was not the climate to try and hold reasoned debate.
"When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said.
The document went through multiple layers of abstraction. Very few people actually read it. Instead, some news outfit reported on it relatively accurately, then a less scrupulous outfit wanted clicks so they sensationalize it, then a third party reads both of those articles and averages their opinion on it somewhere in the middle. Repeat. As the information becomes more popular, we get sponsored snap stories and Facebook news box summarizations that are even more inaccurate, based on bad interpretations and abstracting away so much content that the information is useless. Radical leftists enter the picture and distort it even more to accomplish their own political ends. No one reads the actual article.
Its two problems our industry literally created: Sensationalist click farming and information overload. Our industry does not take these problems seriously enough. Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.
You need to learn that people can have a different opinion then you, having read the same document.
> Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.
Correct, and that's why his lawsuit is BS. He caused outrage both externally and internally. You had an employee that others would refuse to work with.
No, his lawsuit is not BS. Google asked for his opinion, and they got it. He did not cause the outrage. It was sensitively framed and well argued. You can disagree with it, but he really didn't say anything controversial. Read it yourself.
It's only when the terminally butthurt howled that management did something. And instead of saying something mature like, "You need to learn that people can have a different opinion than you" and be tolerant of ideas, it was burn the witch and purge the wrongthink.
There is nothing in my comment to suggest I hold the opinion that everyone who has a positive opinion about what happened didn't read the document. Rather, I just stated a fact: Very few people read it, relative to the number of people who have opinions on it.
His lawsuit is not BS; you should try reading the court filing. He has multiple examples of Google HR officially condoning systemic racism and sexism. Who knows how it will come out, but he has a case.
Google, and a few other major tech companies, have turned diversity into a religion. It’s insane. We spend more time talking about it than anything technical or organizational. There is no dialogue about it either, just every day we’re bombarded with reminders about how much we’re failing at diversity and how all people everywhere must be considering diversity before anything else. ANYTHING else. At all times.
What he did was speak heresy. I’m sorry that it sounds like I’m a butthurt male but the fact is diversity is dogma in these companies and you either buy in wholeheartedly, constantly, to the exclusion of all other priorities, or you’re ex-communicated.
I read it and it made me pretty annoyed, not so much for what he said, but how he chose to go about saying it.
He says he is only trying to start a conversation or discussion, but circulating a secret memo around your company and then going on a self-promotional media crusade really is not a great way to do that. It looks more like a political stunt, which is pretty much the opposite of a conversation.
If internally sharing a document within a company is bad, and externally talking about it once it was made public by another party who got you fired is also bad, what is in your opinion the acceptable and appropriate method to have this conversation?
My understanding is that this is a very inaccurate portrayal of what happened, and that makes me doubt that you gave the memo a fair chance. He published an internal memo, but not necessarily a "secret" one. Someone else published it externally -- not him -- and he only went on a media "crusade" after being very publicly fired.
But you're right, though, now that I'm reflecting, my portrayal of him was too harsh. After all, the man did get fired for writing a letter. THAT is ridiculous and I hope he wins the suit just for that.
The whole thing is embarrassing, though. I mean, what was he complaining about? He worked at Google, which is like, the top of the heap for programming jobs. I didn't understand why he was upset over the company's efforts to include women more. Did he not understand why that would be seen as sexist?
The more I think about it, the more I realize the answer to that question might be no. Maybe Damore didn't realize that presenting his ideas in the form of a memo passed around the office would be insulting to some people. Maybe it was honestly the only way he knew how to initiate a discussion about it. And in that case, I do think he was mistreated and it's a shame he didn't have another way to voice his concerns.
I guess it's a lesson, but what to learn from it, I don't know.
But Google actively solicited this feedback from it's employees. He didn't publish a screed unwarranted. Maybe he was misguided in his attempt, but that is a character flaw and not a fireable offense, at least in my mind. Furthermore, IIRC, he had published it many months prior to it going viral in the media, and the ensuing moral outrage that followed, and when he had originally published it internally it was _almost_ entirely uninteresting. I say _almost_ because, in typical fashion, some folks started speaking up after it went viral that yes, in fact, it had originally made them "uncomfortable" but that they were afraid to voice their own opinions on the matter.
Personally, looking at this from the outside and from the vantage point of today, I think the entire thing is overblown and also extremely typical considering the state of the Western world today.
> But you're right, though, now that I'm reflecting, my portrayal of him was too harsh. After all, the man did get fired for writing a letter. THAT is ridiculous and I hope he wins the suit just for that.
Thank god at least someone in this mess was capable of reflecting and changing their opinion. Thanks for restoring my faith in humanity.
I'm a former Googler (left before the memo) and I was upset by the memo because, in implying that the hiring bar was lower for women, it contained the thinly veiled corolloary that my female colleagues were less capable than my male colleagues. That did not match my experience at all.
And Google's own internal project confirmed that what makes an engineer at Google successful is their ability to communicate and empathize with other people. Traits which this "biological selection" narrative disfavors.
Discrimination of gender, race, and sexual preference is demonstrably real. This suit is a farce and I hope he loses.
Affirmative action is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who suffer or have suffered from discrimination within a culture[1]. Google is an affirmative action employer[2]. If women are favored over men, then wouldn't it make sense that a less skilled woman has the potential of being selected over a more skilled man?
I don't see any support for [2] in the page you linked (maybe because I am on mobile). There may have been efforts to recruit that were directed at women (e.g. sending employees to Grace Hopper), but ultimately the bar was the same for everyone.
No. They could just be spending 3 times as much to recruit women, for example. They could have recruiters dedicated to finding women. They could be funding women in tech programs at many levels. etc...
That's assuming that there's only a handful of people to pick from. But if your top choices are all top tier developers, then slicing it up by gender or ethnicity shouldn't make a difference.
Keep in mind that Damore specifically stated the false-negative rate was lowered for women. This is the full quote, "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate." In other words, Damore stated Google's diversity policies made more qualified non-diverse candidates get rejected - not that underqualified diverse candidate's get hired.
Many media outlets omitted the italicized portion.
Flag the trolls, not the article. It’s a perfectly reasonable article of information about the social state of the tech industry, regardless of how the media/workforce/HN feels about it. After all, isn’t the rash censorship of uncomfortable topics the central gist of the memo that got Damore in trouble in the first place?
I personally hope we can avoid this attitude by and large on HN. The idea that this community needs to be proactively stopped from discussing a topic because a small subgroup decides that the larger community can't handle it maturely seems to be an abuse of flagging, to me.
it wasn't that it was too hard. It was that there's a cost to compile the data, and Google shouldn't have to pay 250k to compile a data inquery just `because`.
Just like you aren't asked to strip search when going through TSA, `just because`. There needs to be a legitimate reason and suspicion.
good! If googly butts were SMARTER than they pretend to be, they'd actually offer him angel funds to start up a completely NEW platform to COMPETE with their frankenstenian perverted still a butt buddy collectivista broken search engine legacy! But then they'd have to go up against the TRULY evil giant bully in the room which is PALANTIR! Bwuahahahahaha. We're gonna gitch ya anyway, no matter WHO you scapegoat you holire than thou fucktards! Good Luck James! Hope you win a tidy sum that easily funds your creativity and passion and that you are able to provide the world with what Google et all promised but sold out to the most evil [wealthy] bidders.
Just to clarify, is he stating he was fired due to his gender/political views? I would assume the literal army of attorneys will point to various violations of Code of Conduct or Employment Agreement Damore undoubtedly broke.
He openly published a memo condemning his employer, tarnishing the brand and bringing the company under considerable negative press. I figure there must be some clause in any employment agreement stating that you can't actively cause damage to the company.
Edit: Looks like the memo wasn't intentionally released to the public, but it still caused damage. If I drop tables unintentionally on production, I'm not surprised if I'm fired- even if it was an accident.
False. He published a memo internally for other Google employees in a culture of internal openness and intellectual discussion which had been implied to exist inside the company for a while.
His memo was then leaked outside the company, possibly by an ideological enemy. Hard to say he was "actively causing damage to the company".
"Both federal and California law also protect your right to discuss labor issues - even in a non-union workplace. This includes conversing with coworkers regarding wages, working conditions, and expressing your preference for candidates who support favorable labor issues such as higher wages for hourly workers."
OK, but continuing with your analogy, what about if you write a script that drops tables from a database it's pointed to, for internal use, then someone else runs it against the production server? And then you, not whoever ran it, get fired.
He did not write a piece of software, he wrote a piece of rhetoric which had very little to do with reality and had a lot to do with making people dislike Google and its policies.
I also write a lot of rhetoric designed to do that. The difference is I'm not a Google employee. Were I, I would fully expect to be fired, regardless of what I did with that writing (except perhaps leave it unreleased on my home computer, or write it to /dev/null).
Interesting. I guess that law would have protected both Brenden Eich and Donald Sterling, if they had been fired during their respective controversies.
To anyone assuming that I'm opposed to such a law: you're wrong. I've written in favor of such laws in the past, and think they should be strengthened even further. Assuming of course that they are used to protect all political opinions, both left wing and right.
No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt
to coerce or influence his employees through or
by means of threat of discharge or loss of
employment to adopt or follow or refrain from
adopting or following any particular course or
line of political action or political activity.
This is good information for people to reflect on this discussion. There is a lot of speculation in this thread and it's what is ultimately leading to the divisive arguing.
However, I don't think Google did what you have pasted here. As far as I can tell, they fired him for violating code of conduct, which maintains that employees do not publicize discriminating memos, which he did.
The sword cuts both ways. How would you feel if a company with ties to churches started discriminating/firing liberals who are pro-abortion because they are "murder advocates"?
He doesn't have a choice really. With the PR mess he got himself into, no big company will ever hire him. Imagine the possible headlines "Microsoft hires the James Damore, the male supremacy advocate fired from Google". Nope, regardless the technical skill or his actual personality, his public image is forever ruined.
So he realistically has a choice between becoming a paid speaker for fringe ultra-right organizations, trying to sue Google and retire off the proceeds, or leaving tech and becoming a noname blue collar or a freelancer forever hiding his face.
I hope they will settle for an amount sufficient for retirement and the dude's life won't get ruined due to a stupid political game he didn't even realize he was playing.
> So he realistically has a choice between becoming a paid speaker for fringe ultra-right organizations
Isn't that what he's been doing through his twitter account where he muses whether people join the KKK because they have cool titles? Or his interviews with people like Milo?
I'm very tired of this "joking" thing. Neo-Nazis (and historical Nazis before them) use jokes to cover their actual, earnest beliefs, and then go "it's just a joke bro" to shield themselves from criticism from those who disagree while gaining earnest support from those who agree. From the Daily Stormer style guide:
"The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor - I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don't take myself super-seriously.
"This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that's neither here nor there."
I admit that he's almost certainly not playing by the alt-right's playbook - but he should be smart enough to realize that he's playing into the alt-right's playbook, and if he's not that smart, he doesn't have any business getting a job at Google or Microsoft. There are absolutely ways to express the points he's trying to make without letting yourself be turned into an alt-right poster-boy (and they're also more effective at convincing his ostensible target audience, namely senior decision-makers in large tech companies).
> I'm very tired of this "joking" thing. Neo-Nazis (and historical Nazis before them) use jokes to cover their actual, earnest beliefs, and then go "it's just a joke bro" to shield themselves from criticism from those who disagree while gaining earnest support from those who agree. From the Daily Stormer style guide:
So basically your whole argument is that no one is allowed to joke because that's what nazis are doing?
Let me quote his whole tweet:
>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"?
There are no shades of gray. This joke isn't even remotely offensive. The only reason why anyone could think otherwise is their prejudice against Damore.
> So basically your whole argument is that no one is allowed to joke because that's what nazis are doing?
No, that is not my argument. This is about the second time in one week where I've posted "x was a bad idea in context", and someone else has replied with "So, your argument is no one should be allowed to do x ever?", so clearly I am being very bad at communicating. As with last time, I'll try to explain my position in a little more detail in the hope that it will help.
My position is that, if you are already at risk of being an alt-right poster-boy (thanks to having been forced to do interviews with alt-right YouTubers because nobody else would interview you fairly, or something), and if you are not actually a supporter of the alt-right position, it is probably a good idea to avoid doing and saying things that give the further impression that you are and want to be an alt-right poster boy. (If you do want to be a supporter of the alt-right position, by all means, more power to you, but then arguments about joking are moot - you're an intentional and happy member of the alt-right and we can continue discussions having established that. But for now I'm assuming that's not the case.)
This is a different position from "Don't tell jokes," or "Don't tell jokes about the KKK," or even "Don't tell jokes that make it sound like you support the KKK," or even "Don't make non-joking commentary that supports certain things the KKK is doing."
A brief aside there - I don't understand how that tweet is a joke. I think it's meant earnestly, and I think it stands up as a piece of earnest commentary and I think it does him and his position a disservice to read it as a joke. The internal title names are cool. That's why they picked them. The KKK wanted, and still wants, to attract membership, and cool-sounding titles are something that pushes people from neutral to excited. This isn't a particularly novel observation, but it's certainly a true one. (And the KKK isn't alone; plenty of secret societies of varying levels of racism have done similar things through history.) The job of smart, non-KKK-sympathizing people is to recognize that this is a tactic, and to go find some other less racist outlet for your desire to be called "Grand Wizard," like tabletop gaming, instead of expressing approval for the KKK's marketing tactics.
This is also a different position from "That joke is offensive." I did not claim that the joke was offensive, nor did anyone else, and I think "Actually, that's not offensive and you're wrong because you were offended" is a terribly fallacious rhetorical strategy when nobody has claimed to be offended.
> Neo-Nazis (and historical Nazis before them) use jokes to cover their actual, earnest beliefs,
Did they? Can you provide any evidence that the Nazi party used "jokes" to hide their beliefs? I can't quite see that, somehow. To the contrary, they were quite open about their beliefs.
Certainly. But it doesn’t seem like he has a case to me.
He’s basically trying to get a new protected class created to protect actions that clearly constituted creating a hostile work space based on long established precedent.
Whatever you think of him it seems like a REALLY big hurdle.
And that’s assuming no ‘mandatory binding arbitration’ issues from his work contract.
Even if he wins this could take a very long time (and trips up and down the levels of courts).
> He’s basically trying to get a new protected class created
No, he's not; none of race or sex discrimination (both under federal and state law), nor political coercion (under California state law) are new protections.
> to protect actions that clearly constituted creating a hostile work space based on long established precedent.
That would be a problem in a direct action suit over his firing, but what he has actually filed is a class action alleging a pattern and policy of discrimination on three different prohibited bases. While there are challenges in doing that, they are different than the challenges in a direct action.
I don’t think he has a chance of proving he’s being discriminated against because he’s a man (way too many guys at google) or white (same issue).
I think his only hope is persecution for his ‘belief’, which isn’t a religion and this would be a new protection (IANAL, unsurprisingly).
I didn’t see the class action bit. I wonder if he can even find enough people to join him to be certified as a class.
He has a giant ‘don’t hire me’ target on him now (weather you think just or not)... will people want to throw their lot in with him and risk the same label?
If the class action settlement is 7 figures, the lawyers might able to retire on it (but probably wouldn't, even if they could), but even the lead plaintiff is unlikely to see enough personally to retire on.
The right-wing media is very good at picking up flavor-of-the-month figures and giving them sinecures; this practice is well-funded by wealthy right-wing activists as a reward mechanism.
As long as Damore doesn't publicly stomp on any critical bit of right-wing orthodoxy I'm sure he'll land safely in right-wing media, regardless of the outcome of any legal cases he's involved in.
Most people have enough sense to not post something so inflammatory in an office system where it can be accessed by random coworkers. He could have been more nuanced about it but the controversy seems intentional and deliberate and he absolutely deserves the whole shitstorm he's facing.
The fact that literally nobody else is famous for doing something so breathtakingly stupid tells us that basically everybody else is not as stupid as this guy.
I largely agreed with the memo. I have coworkers and friends who fell on either side of the camp, but more in the agree camp than disagree. Should we just purge half the developers in Columbus for Silicon Valley wrongthink?
edit: looks like thenayr updated his post a couple of times since my reply. When written only the first two lines were present.
(1) Your anecdotal evidence is literally worthless. You need to provide some statistics that 50% of developers support him. I can easily self select 100% of developers who disagree with Damore.
(2) If you agree/disagree with Damore that's great. It's your right as a person to have opinions and no company can criticise you for that. What you can't do however is publicise these issues on any forum. It's simply not a topic that has any merit being discussed in a professional environment.
The differences between men and women are a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry, and therefore discussion. It should certainly be reasonable to explore whether differences in traits leads to differences in preferences or interests such as occupation.
He wrote the memo in response to an event he attended where they asked for feedback. Are you saying that you can't provide feedback on a topic that a talk is about if you come to the "wrong" conclusion? I've attended diversity events and have seen opinions expressed in the open, to executives even, that were far less progressive than Damore's interpretation. I think this is just a coastal thing, having topics like diversity be verboten seems silly if we are also having meetings about, setting up programs for, and shifting our non-tech->tech career plotting to favor diverse candidates.
If you agree that one's opinion is "anecdotal" then why do you even bother expressing your opinion?!
Unless you think your opinion is more relevant than OP's.
That was really what did it for me. I read the document and I'll be honest, I didn't really hear the dog whistles and I didn't get particularly worked up about it. I thought it kinda read like pseudo-science and that was about it.
But then the dude appeared on Mike Cernovich's show and was all over r/the_donald and I was like, "oh this is who this guy is." I hate to judge someone by the company they keep but this guy's company was particularly bad (imo).
> But then the dude appeared on Mike Cernovich's show and was all over r/the_donald and I was like, "oh this is who this guy is." I hate to judge someone by the company they keep but this guy's company was particularly bad (imo).
I got the impression that he accepted those interviews because they were the only ones that would be conducted fairly. Especially considering he was subjected to at least one hostile and unfair interview.
We can't have a world where you can destroy somebody by endorsing them. This turns every undesirable into a perfect hitman.
What's truly sad about this is that he is the first I've heard of to propose actually fair measures we could take to promote gender diversity in IT, such as using more socially involved methods such as pair programming. Instead we get positive discrimination.
This depiction by tech crunch is an insult to reporting, if you read/listen to the primary source, there is no hate, no sexism, no racism, he just saw unfair stuff and spoke out about it.
Yeah, even if you look at the comments here damning Damore, it's obvious most commenters didn't bother to read - hell, to even skim the primary source.
The memo was as polite scientificly-backed and clearly written as it was reasonably possible without turning it into an academic publication. The only mistake he made (while at Google; I was really surprised by the on-line crowd that he found itself with after being ejected from his workplace) was not realizing that he's not dealing with a rational audience, in Google or elsewhere.
It's not just "association" as you put it. r/the_donald was singing is his praises. They're a pretty toxic bunch and I've found that I have very little in common with many of them (mostly because I find their views to be <insert any negative adjective>). So when they're the only people I see coming to someone's defense I assume that person said or did something pretty bad.
Mike Cernovich is the same way. He's looking to push a narrative to further his own agenda. An agenda and narrative I find gross and offensive. So he thinks Damore fits into that narrative. That is a not so subtle hint to me that Damore is saying something gross and offensive.
It's not the best way of judging things for sure but I don't think it served me poorly here.
You give too much power to these toxic groups, I recommend just ignoring them completely. The alternative is basically giving them the ability to censor what you read, litmus or not, seems unwise. I know nothing of Cernovich sorry. It certainly served you poorly here. His infamous memo is the best, most scientifically literate proposal towards more diversity in IT, its portrayal is truly discouraging.
It didn't censor what I read though. I read the memo fully. I thought it wasn't particularly interesting. Then I saw who did. I'm not sure what you think I missed.
Well his sum up suggests two things: If we are to be truly free and diverse, we shouldn't expect perfect representation everywhere (ie. may be it's not a problem that 50% of lumberjacks aren't women), and to make engineering more diverse, the current approach (positive discrimination) is unfair, we should instead embrace gender differences and modify methodology in IT to be more female oriented, he suggests pair programming based on psychological research indicating women are more people oriented, and men more thing oriented. There is no value judgment there, just a sound, scientifically literate approach to change.
I'll put it another way: if you found his memo non interesting, you are not interested in science, in making the workplace more diverse, in being fair and open, and you will have no part in whistle-blowing.
I found it not interesting because it didn't feel very scientific like you said. It sounded like a high schooler's argument and was cited like one. Your condescending tone is appreciated.
It's a demerit to him that he accepted their support, but it is also a demerit on the entire rest of society that the only ones who offered him support were the alt-right.
I'd be interested to know whether more liberal media/shows extended invitations to him (that he declined?), or whether it was only conservative platforms that allowed him to present his case.
> The dude literally let himself be paraded around by the alt-right and neo-nazi groups as a hero.
Explain how this is James' fault.
> When alt-right Twitter agrees with your world-views, you're doing something WRONG.
Alt-right Twitter agrees that murder is wrong, the national debt is concerning, and that sexual assault is supremely immoral. What does that make you, if you define yourself by disagreement with them? It is not James Damore's job to disavow all the people you disagree with on other matters, no matter how legitimate your disagreement.
No, I'm dead serious, the alt right is not literally reptilians, they hold the vast majority of common moral opinions. The body of things that you and they could agree on is enormous, you can't dismiss somebody simply because the alt-right doesn't disagree with them.
> These guys elected the sexual-assaulter-in-chief.
So did I, and millions of others. The alt-right is a supreme minority in the United States, they do not have the numbers to elect the President, this is hysterical.
Would you please stop posting flamebait to Hacker News, regardless of how right you are? This thread is awful already, but you've managed to make it significantly worse.
> Alt-right Twitter agrees that murder is wrong, the national debt is concerning, and that sexual assault is supremely immoral.
Alt-right Twitter seems to believe that murders were only committed by Hillary Clinton's death squads, and that random violence in America's big cities doesn't exist (until two seconds later when apparently people are so terrified of violence in America's big cities that we need all sorts of invasions on civil liberties so people can walk outside ever).
The national debt is a good thing, and if you oppose it for the reasons alt-right Twitter does (it has the name "debt" in it, and debt is bad, right?), that's a sign of a pretty flawed world-view.
Alt-right Twitter thinks sexual assault is so immoral that cultures that are successfully calling it out and reforming are bad cultures, and cultures that are ignoring it and electing people who deny credible claims are good cultures. It just so happens that the first group of cultures are left-leaning and the second are right-leaning - what a coincidence!
If those are your three examples, I am absolutely happy to define myself by disagreement with all of them.
Unless i missed something, the guy never advocated violence or gender discrimination, or making anyone's life miserable. He expressed opinion on scientific explanation. You may find it very stupid, but what in your mind makes you think it's OK to destroy a man's life for his opinion, and then i suppose pretend to be someone with high moral grounds.
That is a very strange notion of freedom (albeit pervasive). Everybody has the freedom to shoplift but no one has freedom from the consequences of shoplifting.
In a strictly literal sense, which might be the best for getting everyone on the same page, that is true.
No question that Damore made mistakes; most sane people would never have let an opinion like that touch paper during office hours, and google will hopefully review the terrible idea of having a 'controversial opinions' forum.
However, his mistake is the debate's gain - the response is clearly disproportionate on several levels. This is an opportunity to identify the people calling for his life to be destroyed and convince them that their definition of various -isms is calibrated a little too high. Or failing that, to try and get some moderates into positions of power rather than the hard left.
> It's never okay to destroy a man's life, but he made a poor choice to have his life destroyed.
Did he leak the memo to the press to cause the outrage? No he didn't, so he is not responsible for the PR whirlwind created by it. Those who leaked the internal corporate communication are responsible and they should be fired.
His mistake was assuming that people would be able to have an abstract, intellectual discussion of the subject. Unfortunately colleges and universities have spent more than a decade churning out graduates who have been taught that a good tool to attain power and status is to have an emotional, overreaction to anything that let's them assert cultural dominance over someone.
He also lied about having a PhD (he was in a program, but did not finish). This makes it difficult for me to take him seriously as someone motivated by an insistent search for truth.
He previously had "PhD, Systems Biology" on his LinkedIn profile under his Harvard section - which I get that, to other academics, probably means "I was working on a PhD between these years," but sounds very much like "I have a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard" to anyone from the outside. (I have an incomplete master's degree personally, and I'm careful to write "BS and coursework towards MEng" on my resume and not "MEng" for exactly this reason.)
In this instance I really do not trust media sources, there is too much disparity between the reporting and primary source. I'll accept your having seen that, but, with the same caveat you point out. Indeed that is indelicate.
In my academic experience, saying "Harvard University, PhD, Systems Biology, 2011-2013" without having finished would be seen as dishonest. I have a PhD, but before I finished I always said "anticipated" or "expected". It's possible that Damore did this inadvertently, but it seems like too convenient of a mistake to leave out his MS degree, just say PhD, and leave the claim up for years.
He never lied about having a PhD. He was in middle of his PhD program when he decided to drop out and join Google -- nowhere in his his LinkedIn page, did he falsely indicate that he finished his PhD.
Da'More must have completed at least course work and research required for master's, however, and Harvard gave him master's instead.
I guess most folks don't take Linkedin seriously -- my LinkedIn profile there is also outdated. When I dropped out of college to work a few years in industry, I indicated years I attended, relevant course works, and matriculation status in my resume, but, LinkedIn is just a social networking site for business -- and only recently it's transformed into a job search site. IMO, it's a stretch to say Damore's LinkedIn page was intended to mislead potential employer or the public.
Can you specidy why exactly his memo was such a huge fuck up?
He didn't want to make a statement, he wanted to get to the bottom of what he was wondering about on the internal discussion forum. He also has autism, maybr he was trying to learn or check if his observations are true or
not.
Then, the media spun this story as to why he's such a sexist without even specifically saying why or trying to debunk his observations, with, you know, arguments or studies.
He isn't a writer, he doesn't know how to perfectly write something that is divisive without offending anyone. He didn't work on the memo for months to check that his language is perfect and represents everything exactly the way he views it.
His memo could have been a good start to find gender biases in tech and actually improve them instead of ostrachzing people outright who dare to talk about the issue.
Or Cambridge Analytica or Project Veritas or Fox News or Sky or the Wall Street Journal or Heritage Foundation, it's not that small a pool, off the top of my head.
You make mistakes in an industry and you own the impacts to your reputation. He has done serious harm to the work of so many by his actions and absolutely deserves to own the consequences.
And let's be serious here he has zero chance of winning against Google.
You seem unfamiliar with the power of litigation. The case won't be about "him being fired", but about showing there is any pattern for bias in Google with respects to the three stated criteria. And if they can show that bias exists, then still without making this about him, specifically, the court can be asked to apply punitive measures against google (which their client "happens to benefit from, being part of the group that Google has demonstrated bias against").
Initial filing for a court case is crucial for establishing what we're actually sueing over, and this will be an interesting one, because the chances of his legal team winning this one are definitely non-zero.
Explain to me where Google asks when you are hired whether you are white, male or conservative. I have worked for a dozen Fortune 500 sized companies now and not once has it ever come up. He wasn't fired for any of those aspects anyway. He was fired because he chose to act in an unprofessional manner.
Regardless of our personal feelings about the matter, the sad fact is, it might be as simple as the lawyers finding female Googlers who have public statements remotely anti-male who were not fired.
I am not a lawyer but that, while trivial, might be enough for a court to rule against Google.
The social constructivism espoused by progressive supremacists is an affront to civilized society -- he has rightfully exposed the "work of so many" as fraudulent unscientific dogma akin to the gay-conversion therapy.
> And let's be serious here he has zero chance of winning against Google.
Don't be so sure of that. Federal law prohibits firing an employee who is trying to improve working conditions. And that's what he is claiming he was doing with his memo.
And there are a number female SJW Google employees who have made really vicious, public, anti-male statements and no one batted an eyelash. So I think his claim of gender-based discrimination is quite supportable.
Ummm very interesting "trick" comment youve made here! [but youve outed your true intentions. LOL] HE HAS AN IMMENSE OppORTUNITY if he wins a settlement, to START UP HIS OWN COMPETING OPEN SOURCE SEARCH ENGINE ENTITY!! I HOPE HE DOES!! IF I HAD THE FINANCES I WOULD WELCOME HIM AND 1000s of OTHERS who are JUST WAITING FOR THE CHANCE to MAKE IT BETTER AND MAKE IT RIGHT [you know, just like all the progressives claim they wanted?] LOLOL F*n hypocrite troll of doom you are nothing more! Great biz modeller,you are eh?
I agree that he is at significant disadvantage when it comes to getting hired at Microsoft or Apple or other megacorps, but nevertheless, there are still plenty of companies that will hire him. There's more to this industry than just FAGMA megacorps.
But out of the things he could have learned, which ones would make for a good public apology? If he goes public, and says - "I honestly apologize for my mistake, I never realized you people could so violently overreact to what's essentially politely expressed feasibility comment backed by scientific consensus, and that in the process you'll so maliciously misrepresent me and lie about my intentions and the contents of my memo" - how will that sound to the crowd? Because that's what his mistake really was - not realizing he's not dealing with rational people.
just do what politicians do. apologize as vaguely as possible without calling yourself wrong.
"Mistakes were made, and I want to move on with my life....", no details -- just pandering. He won't necessarily be dishonest if he limits the context of the apology.
(I don't think one should apologize for opinions and ideas that go un-enacted. Knee-jerk reactions to opinions you don't like tend to blow them up, and that's why James Damore is a name we recognize now. Isn't that opposite to everyone's intention of minimizing his point of view? Ironic.)
Does that even work, though? We all comment critically here when we see politicians or company CEOs pulling fake-apologies. But since fake-apologies happen, I guess they must be buying the performers something...
I bet it would work in a smaller setting, like a hiring interview where the scandal came up. It wouldn't be worth doing something like now and in public while there's attention on him.
Has what worked in the past? Admitting you were wrong and apologizing? Sure it's a good way of resolving conflicts if you were actually wrong. People grow and change throughout life, I don't think that being a knucklehead in the past necessarily means you're a knucklehead now.
Admitting you were wrong and apologizing in public, specifically.
An individual can be reasoned with, placated. You can make reparations, promises that the other person will believe because of a precedent of mutual trust and forgiveness.
The angry mob is irrelevant. There are more individuals watching quietly than people making their positions public. The mob will chill when their friends ask them to post-apology. I have been on all sides of this phenomenon: the chiller, the chillee, the apology. It works.
The mob is big enough that they are not necessarily even friends with each other. People who ask the mob to chill risk being mobbed in turn. Punishment of non-punishers is how mobs sustain themselves.
The angry mob is the reason people like James Damore get fired while his openly white-male-hating coworkers are free to post their opinions on Twitter with no consequences at all. They are not at all irrelevant.
Yes. 100% it has worked. I've fucked up in the past, apologized, and made things much, much better.
Edit: I feel some might be reading this wrong. I'm did not say it works 100% of the time. I said that I'm 100% certain it has worked because it's worked for me.
why do you think that he is necessarily wrong. After I read his memo, I would say it is debatable, not wrong. In fact you're attitude is a very clear sign of the silence culture being pushed.
Ehh...I was replying to a post that didn't consider the fact that he might actually be wrong, come to terms with his wrongness, and admit it and move on. Whether or not he's wrong is perhaps an unanswered question -- I don't really know enough about the memo to say one way or the other -- but he should consider that what he did was wrong.
The problem is, in our society, there is NO option to say you were wrong and walk it all back. Once it's out there on the internet, you are crucified for life with it. Its sad because the "crime" doesn't fit the punishment.
Brendan Eich seems to be doing ok now. The furor that severed his relationship with Mozilla doesn't seem to have impacted Brave, and that was just a few years ago.
By doing ok, you mean he is no longer a CEO of company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that he helped create, but instead he is running a startup that hardly anyone heard about. At what point you’d say he no longer does ok? When he’s homeless?
He's still an executive in tech. When I read news about Brave the controversy over Eich's Proposition 8 support doesn't dominate comments sections the way it did in 2014. That controversy seems to have had limited impact on Eich or Brave in later years. I would have liked to look at the later impact on someone in tech lower-level than Eich who faced the outrage machine, but his was the only name I could remember.
After some more searching, I remembered the blowup over a "big dongles" joke at PyCon in 2013. I found the name of one of the men involved. I don't want to name him here, but it looks like he's still gainfully employed in tech, using Python.
I agree that social media outrage can be overblown and vicious. I don't want to minimize that. But it fades[1]. "Crucified for life" seems inaccurate.
[1] Even justified outrage fades; did #kony2012 even trend through the end of 2012? But the viciousness while every angry person knows your name can be astonishing. That's why I use a nym here and on Ars Technica that has no direct links to my professional or IRL identities, and why I usually skip commenting or reading about the outrage du jour. I must be feeling lucky today to write even this much.
Some of the activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser
Never heard of this. This is unbelievably unethical.
> I hope they will settle for an amount sufficient for retirement and the dude's life won't get ruined due to a stupid political game he didn't even realize he was playing.
"Ruined?" Because he might have to take a non-tech job? Please.
He went to a diversity training event which should've given him a clear idea of Google's stance on the issue. Then he published an internal memo arguing against that stance. He knew the game he was playing. He just played it poorly.
Asking for feedback doesn't mean allowing the employees to make discriminatory statements contradicting the company's policies and degrading its image (whether hurting the image of the company was intentional or not).
The problem is Google at all levels publicly misrepresented his arguments. Google replied with a knee jerk reaction publicly.
If anything Google will settle because the proof of misrepresentation is in James's favor.
Sure there are lots of things you could and Google could have argued. But they chose to respond to what had to be either a different paper or their emotions.
“... a stupid political game he didn’t even realize he was playing.”
Bullshit! He’s smart enough to work at Google but didn’t realize he was playing a stupid game? I am glad that his life is ruined and that he is toxic and non-hirable. I hope this lawsuit doesn’t go anywhere (very likely since Google has all the money, resources and motivation to crush it).
As for whether or not he knew what he was doing...he may have written this thing, but he did so in an area that was designated for that sort of thing. He wasn’t the one that started emailing it to the entire company. So it’s fair to say he thought he was just having a discussion in the topic with whatever this skeptic group at Google was, and other people decided to turn it into a national political issue to get him fired for it.
If it's internal then don't write shit that will get you fired. I think forwarding it is a shitty thing to do, but he should have kept in mind that potential.
Basically, the assumption that there's a single kind of "smartness" that generalizes equally across technical competence, social competence, and awareness of political trends is not a valid assumption. The number of non-neurotypical people that work in tech fields should make this clear.
It's also unfortunate to see such glee at the idea of someone's life being ruined and happiness at the thought of a large megacorporation's large amount of resources being able to do it.
I'm about as left wing as it gets, but I don't want to see the guy ruined. Retributive justice is how we get the drug war working with the broken prison system to create an underclass.
I want to see James Damore understand the impact of his words and learn from it. I don't want him thrown out of society for a single really big mistake and a poor handling of the consequences.
I want to see James Damore understand the impact of his words and learn from it.
It's quite evident from reports in the news media, that there was tremendous emotional impact. The fact that so many people could be so extremely triggered is very telling, but it doesn't actually speak to James Damore being some kind of villain, or his words being somehow horrible. If a whole bunch of adults stop behaving like adults and start exhibiting striking intellectual dishonesty, I think this is very revealing indeed.
I ask this as a member of the Left, who wonders: When did the Left stop being the side of free speech and intellectual honesty? When it finally felt powerful enough in the culture to have become corrupted by that cultural power.
I wouldn't be surprised if he gets a fast 7 figure settlement.
Conservatives/Populists groups are literally salivating for discovery to nail google on other things.
EDIT:
Also reminder some googlers kept politically motivated blacklists, if those blacklists were on company computers, Google will be hammered for it.
Discovery could go wrong for Google in a million ways.
> Conservatives/Populists groups are literally salivating for discovery to nail google on other things.
This is probably a discussion where painting with a broad brush muddies the waters. Specifically because we're talking about distinctions between individuals within the group you're calling "conservatives".
Also, I get the impression that you're conflating conservatives and populists on this issue. Is that intentional? Because populism and conservatism seem pretty orthogonal to me.
Really, because "We have emails from coworkers saying they won't work you anymore, we have numerous news stories that paint this in a terrible light, we have internal emails that show we spent a stupid amount of time dealing with PR issues from this, etc..." sounds like a pretty good argument for why he got fired.
or do you mean google settles? maybe. I kind of wish they would just let their lawyers run wild with this though.
> EDIT: Also reminder some googlers kept politically motivated blacklists, if those blacklists were on company computers, Google will be hammered for it.
Since they were G+ blocklists, they were obviously on company computers. OTOH, it's not clear (despite the lawsuits characterization, which is pretty directly contradicted by the posts and emails offered to support it) that these were motivated by ideology rather than disruptive manner of expressing that in the workplace. Moreover, it's not clear they they were, in fact, used for any problematic purpose.
> Discovery could go wrong for Google in a million ways
Which is why there won't be a settlement; it's clearly a politically motivated suit aimed to hurt Google as badly as possible; if Damore and the other individually named plaintiff were seeking to maximize the probability and magnitude of personal recompense, this would be a direct action. A settlement with no admission of guilt, no discovery, and just a go-away cash payment that’ll mostly be assigned to the attorneys won't achieve the goals for which they are filing the suit.
> Which is why there won't be a settlement; it's clearly a politically motivated suit aimed to hurt Google as badly as possible; if Damore and the other individually named plaintiff were seeking to maximize the probability and magnitude of personal recompense, this would be a direct action. A settlement with no admission of guilt, no discovery, and just a go-away cash payment that’ll mostly be assigned to the attorneys won't achieve the goals for which they are filing the suit.
Nope. Think about that. You think a guy who got fired after a few years of work experience would rather make a company look bad than gain financial security?
The reason we are hearing about the lawsuit is because he did try for a settlement, with terms much like you deacribe, and Google refused. You only go to court as a last resort, and that's what this is. That's also why we are only hearing about it now instead of when it happened. Months of negotiation did not go anywhere.
That's my theory anyway. I have no knowledge of this case, but I have seen this happen many times.
> You think a guy who got fired after a few years of work experience would rather make a company look bad than gain financial security?
No, I think Damore is savvy enough to be aware of (and, given his participation in right-wing media after the memo blew up, whether or not this was in his mind in advance, has likely since been counseled by others even more aware of) the fact that his route to maximizing financial returns from this affair lie in maximizing the media impact and his centrality to it, not maximizing the lawsuit payout.
> The reason we are hearing about the lawsuit is because he did try for a settlement, with terms much like you deacribe, and Google refused.
Pure speculation, both as to whether he attempted at settlement and what the terms he requested were if he did.
> You only go to court as a last resort, and that's what this is
That's obviously not a universal truth.
> That's also why we are only hearing about it now instead of when it happened
Damore filed an NLRB complaint almost simultaneously with his firing (it was subsequently withdrawn) and immediately started his intent to file a lawsuit; we know from the details of the law suit and the Damore camps own description that they spent the intervening time gathering stories to support a class action. You are spinning a fantasy out of speculation.
OTOH, it's not clear (despite the lawsuits characterization, which is pretty directly contradicted by the posts and emails offered to support it) that these were motivated by ideology rather than disruptive manner of expressing that in the workplace.
Given how a lot of the other provided examples were claims of supporting Trump being blatant asshattery, I don't think they necessarily do contradict it.
Moreover, it's not clear they they were, in fact, used for any problematic purpose.
Some of the examples have managers acknowledging that being on the lists makes work more difficult and interferes with promotions / transfers. And saying that well, if that bothers you then you shouldn't support [things that Trump supporters are accused of supporting].
I would not call my self a conservative/populist, it is hard to to determine this terms especially through the atlantic. the political compass [1] calls me social liberal if that's of any worth. But sure as hell, I hope Google pays up for what they did. Firing him is a clear act of bigotry.
This is true. If the memo wasn't enough, him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like Stefan Molyneux, Jordan Peterson, Mike cernovich, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, etc. is suspicious. [1]
Generally I wouldn't have minded if he went to right wing outlets, as long as he had also gone to left wing outlets. I was willing to listen to his reasoning. But it became clear after the memo came out that he didn't engage with left wingers and maybe he was indeed just appealing to the right.
[1] I don't want to use "right wing" in a disparaging way. I think classical liberalism is perhaps right of center today. I think some of the right wing narratives make sense, but with big caveats. The far right is just a slip away, though. And they would hunt people like me down...
Edit: I don't mean right wing in a disparaging way. I enjoy Joe Rogan (his interviews with NDT and Lawrence Krause are a lot of fun), Dave Rubin (his interview with Faisal is fantastic) and Jordan Peterson. But they are clearly classical liberal, which is arguably right of center today.
Maybe I was extreme in saying far right is just a slip away. I think similar things can happen on the left too of course. Let just not go to the "far-*"...
It's really sad that we have people still arguing about the intent of his memo when his actions afterwards make it quite clear what his stance actually was.
And to make sure that people know: He's a liar. Even if you ignore him intentionally misrepresenting his PhD status, he boldly lied about his FIDE chess master status.
The fact you'd like a gay liberal as right-wing is disconcerting but I agree, and independently, came to the same conclusion that is is strange how many shows he popped up on so fast.
Or maybe the "left-wing" like tech crunch just flat out lie about him repeatedly. I don't appreciate any the right wing youtubers you cite, but judging by the quality of this article, I'm glad he had other opportunities to speak. In this instance I do think the left wing is stifling expression and I can't abide by that, if you think I'm exaggerating, read the memo he didn't publish but request internal criticism of, and he was fired for it by google.
This is a minor aside, but I don't think Joe is a conservative. I think that he said during the midnight election comedy stream that had he not promised to vote for Gary Johnson when he came on the show, that he would've had to pull the lever for Hillary. He doesn't like social justice stuff, but other than that, he's kind of a big hippy.
But this has been a big topic of debate on his podcast subreddit as well. I think it mainly comes from the guests he has on, but Joe has written on Twitter about how getting left leaning guests on to talk politics is just a lot harder. Russell Brand is great and all, but no one else really seems interested for whatever reason.
He's not, but if you're a gallon of gasoline, the remotest spark can seem like a huge threat to your very existence, which is what I took the overreaction to the memo to be. He spoke his mind, with citations, and he was torched for it, and the left wing outlets except for Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin had no interest in letting his real story come out, because the overreaction, the firing and the ongoing assault on his character is shameful if you ask me.
He's not "right wing". Hating SJWs and the extreme left isn't right wing. People are complicated and labeling someone as right wing to invalidate someone's every position is as bad as what the right does to the left.
He is if anything fairly moderate with a slight libertarian streak, especially when it comes to drugs.
I don't agree with lots of his positions and he's definitely not some really smart guru, but I like that he's an average guy with an open mind who lets speakers of all viewpoints express themselves in a very welcoming way. I mean hosting Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein, both on the 2 ends of the political spectrum and making it a very intellectually stimulating dialogue is a breath of fresh air in today's gotcha media. You know CNN and fox have an agenda when they bring opposing viewpoints on their show, trying to invalidate their ideas. In joe rogan's podcasts that never seems to be the case, instead discussion leads to more moderate viewpoints rather than debates and winners. Only really see that on PBS lately.
That said, I do find many of his guests abhorant and just skip a fair bit of his podcasts.
Those activities may not make someone right wing, but they're at risk of slamming into the right half of the bulkhead if there's turbulence. When things get heated, it makes them hard to tell apart from people who are awful and also use that kind of rhetoric.
> That said, I do find many of his guests abhorant and just skip a fair bit of his podcasts.
So please don't take this in a way that means I'm bashing you or anything of the sort. I loved your post, but I do take issue with this particular comment from an otherwise interesting and thoughtful response.
This mindset, unfortunately, is very reminiscent of an echo chamber. "I don't like this person or what I think they have to say so I'm not even going to hear them". While I of course don't think you should be forced to listen to something uninteresting, it would be great if we all spent more time listening to people we can't stand or ideas that we find abhorrent so that we can gain better perspective and empathy of our fellow people.
> Generally I wouldn't have minded if he went to right wing outlets, as long as he had also gone to left wing outlets. I was willing to listen to his reasoning. But it became clear after the memo came out that he didn't engage with left wingers and maybe he was indeed just appealing to the right.
Have you watched any of his right wing outlet interviews? Literally on every interview he mentions "Nobody from left reached out to me, only the right wing outlets reached out to me". I'd definitely recommend watching his Dave Rubin interview (even though you think he is a right winger).
If you were him, you'd rather go out and present your side, than to be portrayed in whichever smear light the media wants to portray you.
There are people who lost the narrative from both left and right (like Milo) and that is definitely worse than losing the support for only one side.
Also, hypothetically it sounds great that you show up to both sides on a divided issue like this, but that isn't possible anymore in the polarized society we live in (a great example of this is you classifying Dave Rubin as 'right wing', just see how many people are calling you out on it).
It's no different than moderate Muslims having no social refuge other than where Salafist-Jihadists (eg: al-Qaeda, Isil) roam freely -- modereate conservatives have no social refuge other than blatant racists and sexists, neo-nazis, and other generally unpleasant undesirables.
This is the danger of progressive supremacy and the only way out of this hell-hole is encouraging true diversity and inclusiveness -- diversity of thought that includes right-wing conservative viewpoints in addition to those of the left.
Yes, it is good and valuable for a society to be tolerant of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. The limit to tolerance is being tolerant of intolerance.
The left has intolerant people as well. "No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other."
However, somehow they aren't running the party like they are on the right.
> The limit to tolerance is being tolerant of intolerance.
This is nonsensical. Tolerance is the region between what you like and what you fight. There are lots of obviously bad things you shouldn't tolerate (like murder), and lots of mildly distasteful things you should.
Someone else being less tolerant of something than we think they should be isn't some special category of evil. As with anything else, you have to decide whether a particular case is bad enough that you must fight it, or ambiguous enough that it isn't worth the conflict.
Wait, Joe Rogan is considered a right wing youtuber? I listen to his show all the time and I'm a pretty big liberal and while he sometimes does the whole "everyone is sooooo PC now" thing, he also talks negatively about Trump, the GOP and right wing politics constantly.
I also listened to the James Damore episode, and while I thought James did a good job of making his point and Joe did an AWESOME job of interviewing him while not taking sides, it felt like James was pretty disingenuous and lacked a general understanding of how to behave in a workplace as well as how to treat other people.
> it felt like James was pretty disingenuous and lacked a general understanding of how to behave in a workplace
To be fair, it can be difficult for some people on the autism spectrum to work in environments where you have to run objective reality through various "politically correct" adjustment filters before reacting to it.
To be clear, your analogy is that this fellow lashing out at certain groups of his coworkers can be attributed to their mental disorder you've diagnosed and you've then decided that this is the same as a person in a wheelchair being unable to access certain areas? I'm understanding this correctly? You're sure this is an analogy you think is passably decent let alone one that can be be followed up with you mocking other people afterward...? What are we hoping to accomplish here?
It's not about being politically correct, it's about not implying that your female coworkers don't deserve their jobs.
before someone says "He didn't do that, you obviously never read it", I did and I still believe it's a conclusion that he leads the reader to. Not sure it was intentional.
Also the whole "too neurotic for leadership" bit. WTF was he thinking with that.
I read Demores paper and I didn't get the impression that he thought that about female co workers. To me his main point seemed to be that women by number arnt as interested in tech as males are. On your second point it's easy to look back on the paper and pick at the way some of it comes across but I don't think he ever imagined it becoming the published and the political hot potato it became. Maybe he would have been more careful with the wording if he could have seen into the future, unfortunately we don't have that skill yet.
Totally agree. How in the world could you have Damore on a team with women after the memo is out and people know he wrote it?
I have never bought into this is some social political thing but rather just basic human decency. Never understood how the right wing got a hold of this and my only guess it was Damore or someone from the right wing that wanted this rather obvious HR issue as some social political issue. It is not in reality. Any company would have diciplined Damore including firing. A manager is responsible for everyone including the women.
Google expects people to work with people who openly hate white men. Just take a look at some of their twitter feeds. Damore expressed no such opinion of women he just has a broader explanation for under-representation in tech other than sexism.
Google is a for profit company. Damore obviously did not help that with his views of women and Google did as any company with a brain would do and get rid of him.
Why on Earth do you think a former Google engineer is sitting at home unemployed? You would never want him on a team that had to get something done.
There is so many reasons to fire him and it is California so Google did not even need a reason.
But the more interesting thing is how did the become a right wing thing? Who was able to pull that off and use this as something to gen up the right wing? Is it not a bit manipulative of the right wingers? Do they not see it?
A company with a brain hires a lawyer to look at the issue when an employee expresses concern that the company is breaking laws with their hiring practices. Firing someone who expresses those concerns makes the problem infinitely worse as we are seeing.
As I mentioned, I don't disparage "right wing". I actually enjoy Joe Rogans podcast, and also Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson. All three of them are solidly classical liberal, which is probably right of center today (individualism vs. collectivism, equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome, etc). But AFAIK, damore never came to the young Turks, Chapo trap house, which are leftist podcasts. I could be wrong.
Well, it has been a few years, and it's a very long interview, so I hope you understand I'm not going to be very specific.
These are the things that I came away with after watching it, to the best of my recollection:
- Cenks inability to be charitable towards his guest
- Cenks inability to let his guest make a point without challenging it repeatedly, and please note the that the word "repeatedly" is key
- Cenks way of deflecting analysis of an apple by saying "but what about this orange?!"
- Sams amazing patience and calm
Anyway, that's how I remember feeling after having watched it years ago. And I've never watched Cenk before or after that interview, so I have no other points of reference for his character or abilities as an interviewer.
I'm not going to go watch it again, so there's nothing to discuss here - it just amazes me that anyone would want to be interviewed by Cenk, considering how negatively I viewed his interaction with Sam.
So, I guess I should not have engaged you at all, because I have nothing to discuss, and no factual arguments to make.
I would delete my first comment if I could, but I can't.
I remember finishing that interview thinking that Cenk was the most intellectually dishonest host I had seen in a long time. Sam's patience from beginning to end was extremely impressive.
Okay, but running to Molyneux is instant confirmation of the things people thought about him.
and actually yes, do some prep work and go on a show that will be hostile. Not crazy, but potentially hostile. Someone who will reject the ideas and force you to defend and/or clarify them.
I think he didn't do much to defend or clarify his arguments and instead took exactly the path his detractors (myself included) expected from the minute we read his "poor oppressed conservative" portion.
> All three of them are solidly classical liberal, which is probably right of center today
Classical liberal just seems like yet another rebranding by people who don't want to just call themselves conservatives. I've yet to hear a "classical liberal" who doesn't seem like yet another libertarian/conservative.
Which is why I stated that they are right of center... I agree, classical liberalism is basically right wing / conservative / libertarian. America generally is right wing, going back to it's founding.
I've consistenly voted Labour / Labor for all my life, and my poliics haven't changed. I still believe in looking after the elderly, children and the ill, and negotation. I loved Milliband. But the left (at least Labour in the UK) has been siezed by a hard left group called Momentum, that supports far-left political violence, is often openly hostile to people based on skin color and gender. Classical liberals haven't changed, the far-left has just taken over left wing politics.
Most of those "classical liberals" are now branded "leftists".
Anyway, what's the definition of classical liberal, conservative? It's a mishmash of random "single issues" thrown together.
The definition changes as it's convenient for the optimization game of politics, as parties, groups, power structures try to maintain their relevance, try to get more voters, more support, more donations, more allies, and so on.
No internal consistency, no moral foundations, no logic, no principles.
> All three of them are solidly classical liberal, which is probably right of center today
Pretty much all of the mainstream “right” and “left” in America are takes on classical liberalism, with different ideas about concrete context applies. The far-right and far-left (including the alt-right as part of the far-right, for this purpose) aren't.
I'm sorry but I need to call this out. There is no difference between equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes for any significant population size. The latter is a direct consequence of the former; and anyone that believes we are close to having equality of opportunities in America is wilfully ignorant.
If you spend a lot of time railing on "SJWs", and comparatively little time advocating for an alternative path to a more egalitarian social order, I think you can be considered right wing. Supporting pot legalization doesn't erase that.
On net, do you think Rogan's political commentary favors the status quo or a more equal society?
Imagine you think fire trucks are an eyesore, so you start an advocacy campaign trying to ban them from the road. Someone might accuse you of not caring if people's houses burn down.
You might reply that deep in your heart you are 100% against houses burning down and you're just weighing in on the way fires should be fought.
And maybe you're being honest that in your heart of hearts you don't want houses to burn down. But that's only relevant to you. From everyone else's perspective, your politics are pro-houses-burning-down.
1) He doesnt "spend a lot of time railing on SJWs".
2) He absolutely talks, with almost every single guest, about how to potentially change the world for the better.
3) I never indicated that I thought he wasn't right wing because of how he felt about legal pot, yet, you throw that in there anyway, i guess to belittle an argument I never made? Fun...
So yeah, two sentences and every single point is either incorrect or not useful. That's not exactly how one starts a useful debate.
You make really bad claim that has 3 parts and all 3 parts are either made up, exaggerated or irrelevant.
I explain, part by part, how these things are made up, exaggerated and irrelevant, and at the end of my post, marvel at how poor your followup analogy is.
Your takeaway? "Who gives a shit about that point by point argument he just made to me? I'm going to totally ignore that! The one interaction we've ever had, where he made point by point critiques of my argument, has shown me that he "sure does like to make strong claims without offering even a shred of argumentation.""...?
I'm curious how a human brain is capable of producing that kind of logic? It is just simply a case that you're lashing out because you're embarrassed your initial point was made to look so bad? I'm not getting what's happening here.
Your incredulity perplexes me. I offered a simple premise (that Rogan is vocally more anti-SJW than in favor of an alternative path to social justice) and a simple conclusion from that premise (that Rogan can fairly be considered right-wing).
You seem to disagree with either the premise or the conclusion, but rather than making an argument to that effect you have made 3 (three!) meta-posts about it, all while waxing on about the virtues effective debate.
Maybe you disagree with my premise, or maybe you disagree with my conclusion, but your posts so far amount to a whole lot of grandstanding and a vanishingly small amount of argumentation. Your insistence on talking about me and your meta-view of my argument rather than the argument itself reveals a lot more about you than it does about me.
I still stand by the argument (both premise and conclusions) I made in my original post. I wish our conversation could have been about that, as I think it would have been much more interesting.
"I offered a simple premise (that Rogan is vocally more anti-SJW than in favor of an alternative path to social justice)"
Why are you re-explaining your premise to me after I already made a point by point post about why it's nonsense?
"You seem to disagree with either the premise or the conclusion, but rather than making an argument to that effect you have made 3 (three!) meta-posts about it, all while waxing on about the virtues effective debate."
I'm shocked that youre sitting there with a "you seem to disagree with..." type attitude. I told you exactly what i disagree with and why. Point by point. I did this while explaining that lying to further your point wasnt a great debate tactic and you seem to have latched onto this and continue acting like I've given you some long lecture on the "virtues of effective debate" when literally all i did was tell you why your point was wrong...which somehow leads you to conclude that I'm making a "small amount of argumentation" versus you, who simply said some thing that was wrong.
"Maybe you disagree with my premise, or maybe you disagree with my conclusion"
This is exactly how you started the paragraph before. Do you know any debate tactics beside saying "you seem to disagree with..." about the things I very clearly have explained why they are incorrect. Either way, are you under the impression that making the same awkward "I'm not seeing what you disagree with here..." When i told you point by point exactly what I disagreed with will somehow make others stop downvoting your posts?
"your posts so far amount to a whole lot of grandstanding and a vanishingly small amount of argumentation."
You said this exact same thing in your last post as well. Right before I reminded you that it was pretty strange to say that I'm adding a "small amount of argumentation" when I responded point by point to your original post, which you're lamenting not being able to discuss further. (which is weird, because the only reason the subject changed was because you decided that making insane, made up points wasnt enough, but that you needed to pair them with the worst analogy I could possibly imagine. Are you going to add some original content soon or just repeat the stuff I've already made it clear you're wrong about?
"I still stand by the argument (both premise and conclusions) I made in my original post"
Breaking news, person who made a bad point is STICKING TO IT, EVIDENCE BE DAMNED.
"I wish our conversation could have been about that, as I think it would have been much more interesting."
You had every opportunity to do this, but you chose to feign outrage at the fact that after explaining why your first post was bad, I didn't bother to explain why the second was bad.
You've been breaking the HN guidelines egregiously too. If you keep doing this we will ban you. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civil, substantive comments or no comments. That means no flamewars, no snarky dismissals, and no tedious tit-for-tats. And no personal attacks, which you stooped to shamefully in this thread.
I'm not banning you just this minute because your comment history doesn't show that you've been using HN primarily for this sort of battle, and that's the test we apply. But if you keep breaking the rules, we definitely will.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines with uncivil personal attacks and by using the site primarily for ideological battle. Those things are not allowed here, regardless of your politics, how right you are, or how right you feel you are.
Yeah I think it's unfortunate that Rogan gets cast that way. His interview with SargonOfAkkad is pretty telling in that regard. He pulls no punches there and says pretty emphatically that he doesn't identify with a lot of what he says.
Any living male with a pulse is generally considered to be "right-wing", particularly if they ask questions or exhibit any skepticism towards mainstream liberal culture.
Are you operating under the belief that humans can only assign a single emotion to another...?
I said that he was a bit disingenous about some thing and then said that he "lacked understanding about...", yet, sure, cut that off, rip out the context in the interest of being snarky to a complete stranger. Why not?
If people "on the left" won't allow him to speak, where exactly do you expect him to go?
It's like the people on the right saying Edward Snowden is obviously a traitor/spy because he went to Russia. Uhhh... something very obvious is being ignored there.
Also, come on ... Joe Rogan is definitely not right-wing. Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin do not self-identify as right-wing. And your [1] just seems a little extreme. "The far right is just a slip away from the reasonable right, therefore the reasonable right is dangerous?" But you don't apply that same idea to the left? Why not?
The real pattern here is that he went to the shows that would have him as a guest for reasonable discussion.
> If people "on the left" won't allow him to speak, where exactly do you expect him to go?
Adding to this; we should bear in mind that while nobody specific speaks for "the left"'s moral judgments, at least some people literally won't allow him to speak.
Secondly, he was never trying to be a martyr and we shouldn't expect him to be one. He was posting a controversial opinion on a message board marked for controversial opinion. He was clearly putting in a solid attempt to be objective and to employ facts and evidence. He has some academic exposure to the fields he was talking about.
He didn't expect to be targeted the way he was; he likely wasn't trying to set himself up as a hero of free speech; and he doesn't have to do a walk of shame through hostile talk shows to justify his intentions if he doesn't feel like taking the (unjustified) heat.
This has nothing to do with being right or left. It is simply a human decency thing. A manager and company is responsible for everyone and after he shared such views with his name you could never keep him and have him working along side women. Google did exactly what they had to do. It is not complicated.
But now you're getting into the "free speech for me, not for thee" part. You're basically saying that Damore is entitled to free speech and protection, but that Google and his former co-workers are not. Remember, who you work with is part of the freedom of association which is a component of free speech.
This is a strawman I'm very hard pressed to find anyone in HN at least who would deny Goolgle's right or another other party's right of writing a rebuttal to his claims. A free and open internal debate is exactly what Damore was trying to start. Firing to me at least is not speech, it's an inherently violent act.
It's not a strawman if plenty of people in this comment section are making the exact argument. And if I can't fire an employee for being hostile to my other employees, then I do not have freedom of association.
“Hostile work environment” is a legal term of art in employment anti-discrimination law; it only applies when the hostility is a mechanism of discrimination against protected class, which “racists”, as such, are not.
That's my point. Nor are "people who are offended by challenges to their political beliefs". Ostensibly his crime was "creating a hostile work environment for women and minorities", but this is clearly not defensible to anyone who read his post. He was fired for challenging (an anti-white, anti-male, anti-conservative) political orthodoxy, and that's illegal in California.
To my knowledge, Damore has not been accused of any crime.
> was "creating a hostile work environment for women and minorities",
No, only an employer can do that. Damore might have engaged in actions in the workplace that, in context, made it an unacceptable risk that by continuing to employ him Google would risk creating a hostile work environment for women and/or other protected classes.
> He was fired for challenging (an anti-white, anti-male, anti-conservative) political orthodoxy, and that's illegal in California.
Advocating change to corporate, rather than public, policy does not seem to be even remotely “political activity”, which is what California law actually protects, not that the California law would be valid if and to the extent it required corporations to undertake actions prohibited by federal law.
> To my knowledge, Damore has not been accused of any crime.
It's a figure of speech; I wasn't referring to a legal crime.
> No, only an employer can do that. Damore might have engaged in actions in the workplace that, in context, made it an unacceptable risk that by continuing to employ him Google would risk creating a hostile work environment for women and/or other protected classes.
I agree. I'm just trying to make sense of the parent's claim that Damore's behavior constitutes a "hostile work environment".
> Advocating change to corporate, rather than public, policy does not seem to be even remotely “political activity”, which is what California law actually protects.
My argument is that Google made inferences about his public policy beliefs based on his "memo", and fired him for those inferences. In other words, they inferred that he was conservative, and fired him because they felt his conservatism was too much a threat. Whether or not his speech is protected under California law is up to the courts.
Never mind that firing someone for innocuous (if misguided) corporate policy improvements is still morally indefensible.
There is more than one way to use the term. Anyway, your last three responses have been gratuitously pedantic. I'm not interested in debating formal definitions, so I'll be ducking out.
My hotel is a private company and I've found my guests and employees prefer not to interact with black people. Glad you support my right to refuse black guests.
I read the memo. If one is familiar with the research and evolutionary biology, there is nothing in there to react that strongly against, unless one takes a biased, insincere reading of what he actually wrote.
him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like
Those were the only people who would talk to him without trying to make it a hit piece, same as Bret Weinstein.
Stefan Molyneux,
Not sure what Mr. Molyneux is, but given his Libertarian bent, he really doesn't fall in with the mainstream North American right. I'm really skeezed out by his past calls to his audience for "de-fooing" which reads like a cult leader asking his followers to isolate themselves from society and listen only to him.
Jordan Peterson
Terms himself a classical liberal, but also terms himself a conservative, which isn't contradictory. He's been kinda "adopted" by a northern Native American tribe. People who try to paint him as "Alt-Right" aren't actually listening to what he's saying, and are effectively in an evidence-free cloudcuckooland. (He isn't anti-trans. Rather, he's against some nefarious anti-science and compelled speech tactics employed by activists who claim to speak for all trans people. He has received numerous letters from trans people in support of his message.) I have yet to see genuine criticism of him which stands up to scrutiny.
Mike cernovich
Don't like this guy, or his politics. Why do you lump this guy and Molyneux in with people like Jordan Peterson? Doesn't make any sense to me, except as a poison pill.
Joe Rogan
Would have passed perfectly fine as a liberal in the 90's. I think the far left doesn't like him simply because he won't play along with their politics. I find him refreshingly honest and highly intelligent. (Yes, he was a moon hoaxer at one point, but unlike a lot of stupid people, he had the wherewithal to listen to arguments and change his mind.)
Dave Rubin
Terms himself a liberal, also a "classical liberal." He's made a turn towards Libertarianism. He strikes me as sincere in wanting to give everyone a chance to be heard. I think he has intellectual integrity, and as such, he's willing to change his mind. His sincerity and intellectual integrity are the best things he has going for him, though I judge him to be just at a layperson's level intellectually.
Steven Crowder
I don't think Mr. Crowder is as funny or as smart as he thinks. I think he falls down a bit in terms of his intellectual honesty and in his scholarship. (Or course, he uses the "comedian" card to get out of that.) I think his effort to expose Antifa was creditable, but I wish he did a better job of having substance. All of these topical comedians are 10X funnier when they have substance. Colbert used to be funny, and it's because he had that.
etc. is suspicious. [1]
Given that you grouped all these people together, I find your list very suspicious.
> I have yet to see genuine criticism of [Jordan Peterson] which stands up to scrutiny.
I don't believe Peterson is alt-right, but I do think there's a fair case for dismissing him as a source for anything but his specific field of clinical psychology. His sudden rise to the position of "public intellectual” (on the back of his alarmist and widely disputed take on Bill C-16 [1]) is troubling when his unwavering single-minded crusade against what he considers a global cabal of “postmodern neo-Marxists” colours nearly every view he has [2][3].
Examples of this can be seen in his bold proclamations against feminists, Disney films, the concept of white privilege, but also in his occasional habit of linking to junk-science blogs to inform his position rather than peer-reviewed research (such as when he propagated the debunked[4] claim that contrary to what nearly every climatologist, atmospheric physicist, geologist, glaciologist and oceanographer has been telling us, Earth's climate sensitivity is actually trending towards zero [5]).
He’s also demonstrably not one to allow gaps in his knowledge to get in the way of proudly displaying his confirmation biases [6][7].
So as a trained clinical psychologist, I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about when he stays in his own lane, but for an academic and supposed advocate for scientific rigour he seems remarkably lax in applying the same care and scrutiny to his positions on social issues.
Just like Trump seems stuck in some kind of info-loop with Fox News, Damore seemed to get most of his memo ideas from those youtubers in the first place.
He's got a footnote in it about how complaints about gay rights are just an attempt by Marxists to undermine capitalism for goodness sake! In an internal corporate communication about how to better deal with diversity. The mind boggles.
Your comment is too brief to parse properly but yes Peterson talks about "Cultural Marxism" on his YouTube channel and so does Damore in the famous memo.
I wondered what you were ranting about so I skimmed Damore's memo :
>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.”
Hard to do not roll my eyes when reading this. Even though I feel that there is a fringe a the feminist movement for which being a white male is a crime, this is just a fringe and I don't think it has anything to do with socialism other than these are 2 things that Damore hates.
You haven't been on the Internet in the past few years, have you? :). The fringe, while a small minority, has also been the loudest part of the feminist movement in this decade, and it's the impact of that fringe that can be seen responsible for such overreaction to Damore's memo.
Well, most of Damore's memo is not that shocking indeed although :
- there are parts like this quote that made me go in one second from 'this is reasonable' to 'ok I see why he got fired'
- some parts are just stupid .. even though neuroticism is the right term and is not negative, it is had deep negative connotations for many people (not to mention that the big 5 is not exactly an uncontroversial model). Just don't use these words when arguing about a sensitive topic.
And yeah, there is a fringe of the feminist movement. Like all fringes, it is the loudest part of the movement. I think it is toxic to feminism (although that's just a feeling, hard to quantify the influence of such a fringe). I just try to ignore it, I don't really know how to argue with extremists tbh.
What word should he have used? Negative connotations or not, "neuroticism" is the accepted term for the Big Five trait he was referring to. Should he have made up his own name for it?
If he had, internet armchair scientists would be ridiculing him for being so uninformed about the topic that he didn't know the proper terminology.
The way I read these actions weren't "running to the right" rather "fleeing from the biased leftist media." For one, Rubin is left leaning, so is Peterson, though because they're generally fair, they get consistently mislabeled, but that's also how I imagine it must feel in his situation.
Let's say you're a shy/introverted engineer working at Google. You are going to a bunch of diversity events because it's an easy way to progress in your career. You find things you disagree with, or think are potentially illegal, but overall agree with the end goal: more women / PoC at Google, and so put forward an analysis that supports the same goal, even asserting that diversity is a good thing, but indicating that Google's methodology is problematic, and possibly illegal. You shop it around, including to HR, who rejects it, get lots of constructive criticism and feedback from peers, revise it, and continue hoping you eventually do cause a good change in your organization.
Someone then sees it, gets angry, and proceeds to leak it to the press. A few days later, nearly every mainstream news organization has an article calling you a woman-hating sexist, calling your memo a "screed" and treating you like some kind of Nazi. Peers you've never spoken to start sending you threatening and hateful messages, not having even read your work, instead relying on clearly defamatory claims made by "news" organizations, totally misquoting what you've said, and even putting words in your mouth. Then you're fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes" when you've explicitly drawn a line in your work between societal expectations on gender expression and biological predisposition due to sex, that is, you're fired for something you didn't actually say or do, and it's final, there's no appeal.
You're this young guy here, with such negative publicity, and stuck in a part of the country that's 90% leftist or left-leaning, being called all sorts of horrible things by thousands of people you don't even know. You check Twitter and see your name is associated with some of the most hateful words you could imagine.
Now, in this situation, do you respond to CNN who has just printed their 17th hitpiece on you, and hope they'll be fair to you, because you're not assertive enough to deal with the confrontation required if they start putting words in your mouth or asking leading questions? Or do you seek to tell your side of the story from people who are already presenting the story in a more neutral way?
He did an article in the Guardian where he revealed his autism. It was very surprising considering the dreadful opinion piece the Guardian had done on the memo before that.
As a European, I find all these things very absurd. Like the guys with the "dongle" joke that both got fired [1], and if I remember correctly, so did the woman reporting them.
Maybe you should all start by treating each other with more respect, whoever it is. And don't go witch-hunting.
I actually lived in Germany for a few years before moving on to North America, so I can somewhat compare. IMO, people in US are generally more competitive than in Europe, but in the current political climate this unfortunately leads to more backstabbing and more dirty play.
Europe has its holy cows as well. Try publicly questioning the Syrian refugee program or come up with scientific evidence that nationals coming from war conflict zones have a higher chance of becoming criminals - you'll get crucified the same way.
> Europe has its holy cows as well. Try publicly questioning the Syrian refugee program or come up with scientific evidence that nationals coming from war conflict zones have a higher chance of becoming criminals - you'll get crucified the same way.
Boy, and don't even begin to mention that refugee programmes in Europe are probably the least effective way to evacuate people from a warzone (and that the majority of people coming in are likely not in fact refugees).
Looking at the numbers here in Sweden, it is interesting how close the numbers really are. About 55% of people get asylum, and of those about 66% are refugees from wars.
So according to this government, that majority of people coming in are not refugees, or at least not refugees that qualify for asylum. The majority of people that get to legally stay is however refugees. Naturally people from both side of the political spectrum disagree with how the government assess applications, and it should be noted that party in power is currently the social democratic party.
Or try questioning most problem with the population coming from recent (last 30 year) immigration, or the benefits of colonisation, or the existence of any slave trade that's not European.
Sometimes old cultural artifacts go away in the "mother country" but persist in "the colonies." Seems like the witch-hunting mentality is something that's stuck around in the US, infecting both the political Right and Left.
And now as the colony is culturally (among other things) the most powerful/dominant actor on the stage of the world, the mindset is infecting the "old world" back.
So you're telling me that in Europe, if a male coworker cracks a dongle joke in the presence of female coworker, and if she complains to the HR, then nothing would happen to the male coworker?
Or maybe you mean to say that in Europe all men are so sensible that nobody cracks dongle jokes in presence of female coworkers?
Or maybe that majority of the European women would not complain to the HR if someone did crack that joke because they are not stuck up?
Because lemme just make it clear, they didn't get fired for the dongle jokes, they got fired for the shitstorm which arose because of their jokes and how people on twitter were rallying to fire those guys.
Also, the woman who caused the shitstorm was also fired from her company due to the counter shitstorm which ensued.
Maybe you mean to say that in Europe, a company wouldn't fire someone if a shitstorm is created due to an employee's juvenile actions, because I am pretty sure that it is incorrect too.
Here's the European interpretation: It's a fucking dongle joke! Why the hell would anyone feel offended by a fucking dongle joke? Seriously.
And yes, we have no trouble saying "fucking" without censoring it. And if there is a "nipple slip" on live TV, we don't make such a big deal out of it. It's a fucking nipple, get over it.
So to answer your question:
1. We see no problem in dongle jokes
2. If someone would see a problem with it and complain, those complains would be ignored (because we see no problem)
3. If those complains would go public, we would treat that person as "Ah, some idiot has a problem with such a simple joke, weird."
4. But if somehow, there would be a public shitstorm where everybody seems to be losing their mind, the company would not fire an employee over a fucking dongle joke, get serious.
So how such a thing can escalate like that, is beyond any of our (European) comprehension.
If you reread my explanation above, you will see I make no difference between different groups of people. That might already give you a clue of what is going wrong.
And if you would treat each other with more equal respect (men, woman, blacks, whites, ...), maybe you wouldn't be so uptight when someone makes a simple joke.
Who is 'we' here? You think most Americans have a problem with dongle jokes? Or you mean to say that most or all Europeans don't have a problem with dongle jokes.
> 2. If someone would see a problem with it and complain, those complains would be ignored (because we see no problem)
This is when you end up with Uber, where these complaints were ignored and they eventually ended up with Susan Fowler incident.
The company fired the woman who complained because their servers were getting DDoSed.
Look I know what you're saying, it isn't that a day passes by when someone on the Internet, Europeans don't remind Americans (And many Americans remind themselves) that Americans are very prude compared to Europe.
But what you're not doing is understanding the problem here. The problem isn't the 'prude American culture', rather, there is a civil life culture, and then there is a work culture. The complaint feminists have made is that work culture needs to be more welcoming to women.
So the question is 'What constitutes as welcoming work culture?'.
Saying "Hurr hurr, we are Europeans, we don't have problems like that" is just sidestepping the issue.
Are European workplaces completely welcoming to women, as European feminists would like it to be? If not, then how are you dealing with it?
> This is when you end up with Uber, where these complaints were ignored and they eventually ended up with Susan Fowler incident.
Sorry, but Susan Fowler did not complain about 'dongle' jokes, this was a serious case of sexual harassment. Not seeing the distinction between the two is a serious problem.
> Are European workplaces completely welcoming to women, as European feminists would like it to be?
From my personal experience, the women I worked with were a minority in tech, and they actually enjoyed working in a male dominated environment. They told me guys are more up front, and they preferred that over working in woman dominated environments where there is a lot of backstabbing going on. I worked for a lot of female managers, and they were very good at their job. Probably because women are socially softer than men (=men have more ego).
That's what I mean with respect. We will treat women as co-workers, not as people to have potentially sex with, and not with 'oh my god, there's a woman in the workplace, let's act totally different than we normally do not to scare her away'.
ironically if he had a union he likely would've had the protection of a grievance process and not been subject to summary termination, regardless of how sexist his views were
the irony is that the subcultural current with which damore sympathizes is generally pretty anti-union as well, but being represented by one probably would've provided him some protection.
Perhaps you should read up a little on Autism Spectrum Disorder. James Damore almost certainly tends to the autistic, and it can lead to both some insensitive statements not intended the way they were taken, and being unable to recognize some of the social situations he was put in.
Autism is not an excuse. Damore has openly sympathized with white supremacist groups. The common practice of diagnosing and pathologizing white men that have been radicalized by white supremacy and seek to shape institutional policies around white supremacy, prevents us from fully engaging with the harm they cause.
I don't agree that Damore has "openly sympathized" with white supremacist groups. Unless you consider admitting "Grand Wizard" is a pretty cool title to be... "sympathizing". (It's a pretty cool title. Reprehensible humans have that title, but it's a cool title.) The fact that he didn't anticipate how badly this post would be received by the public though... a clear symptom of his presence on the spectrum.
As a fellow member of the spectrum, I can fully see where Damore fits on it. In some ways I agree with his actual points (not what the media has claimed they are), but his presentation was poor, and insensitive to how it would be received. And a good chunk of his memo was just... not good. He never intended it to be public, and it certainly wasn't fit to be (I believe he considered it a work in progress, and was looking for constructive feedback), but someone angry at him decided to make him a public figure overnight by leaking it and ruined his career.
He obviously made some very poor choices on who to associate with afterwards, not realizing the political implications that came with them. He failed to see how free publicity provided by certain parties would associate him with them.
If that were true then wouldn't James Damore have recanted or apologized at some point, once he realized it was offense? This isn't making an off-color remark in passing.
Bearing in mind he has no reason to apologize for "the memo as a whole", how should he approach this? He's already said many times he was not saying what people are claiming he has said. It hasn't worked. Should he release a version 2 of the memo with the benefit of maybe someone else to help him edit it? How would that be received by his critics or the press?
Is there really anything he can say or do that will redeem his public image after he's been slandered on a global stage based on a internal-only memo that someone leaked to the public likely with the intent of ruining his life?
There is a point at which there is really nothing you can say to make a situation better, and you are better off just not saying anything further on the matter.
I guess I don't get your point about him being on the spectrum and how that means he accidentally may say offensive things. If that were true, as you say, wouldn't he have realized that in something like this?
I would think so, but I don't speak for everyone on the spectrum. I can't imagine someone in 2017 thinking "hey, lemme write an anti-diversity memo at Google, that'll go over well".
From the impression I've gleaned, Googlers seem to strongly believe what is said in Google stays in Google and people there believe their coworkers are generally open-minded, extremely intelligent individuals. He may have believed he was in an environment where this was not as much of a mistake as it very obviously, in hindsight, was.
I think this is where a conversation about professionalism needs to happen. Professionalism is a two way street, we should expect professionals to avoid needless controversy but we should also expect professionals to let things like this memo slide - if some autist's manifesto on a company's listserv makes it impossible for you to do your job, you're not a good employee.
> Nope, regardless the technical skill or his actual personality, his public image is forever ruined.
I predict he'll be able to find a nice tech job eventually, and the biggest barrier he'll have to overcome is this lawsuit. There are plenty of companies who aren't so sensitive to this kind of PR and and flap around his hiring will die out quickly.
There are many companies with very opinionated managers who are hiring developers: Breitbart as a large website comes to mind, so do some libertarian cryptocurrency companies. His reputation probably limits his research but I can see how his fame might convince some people to reach out to him at the same time.
I was once identified as a chartered statistician, presumably sympathetic, by a fringe group (fun people collecting Nazi memorabilia, something that happens to get you in jail where I was at the time). Several members reached out to me to draft or sign op-eds on things like homosexual parenthood, sexuality transmittable disease and ethnicity, etc. They were clearly well financed and they had an opinion to defend (which actually makes the job easier). I refused because they didn’t have any data to support their claim so I wasn’t sure what I could do other than discrediting myself instantly (I was not very politically savvy at the time). I had a clear feeling there was a path from paid drafts to signed papers, to book deals that would have made me rich.
Whether James Damore is willing to go there is a more difficult question.
Whether or not this is illegal, or true, this is an anti-pattern. If you want representation (and PR) hiring quotas are great; however, if you truly want to empower they work against your goals. At the end of the day any person who walks into a job because of a quota will question, "did I get this job because of my gender/race/creed/orientation?" While you have provided them with opportunity it would be very difficult for that person to fairly evaluate themselves and especially determine whether they are making progress in their career.
Making someone question whether they are qualified is better than not hiring them at all. Quotas are useful if you have reason to believe that your hiring process is biased and you are missing out on qualified candidates. That way you're not passing up too many candidates from specific groups that you're having a hard time characterizing.
Quotas do have their place for instigating change, to more correctly state my views (which are incredibly complex, just like the subject is): I think that they rapidly outgrow their usefulness. If you have women in hire/fire positions, in theory the bias should work itself out. It probably wouldn't in reality.
It's a nasty situation. We want to make progress as society, which means quantifying that progress (quotas make this impossible). However, at the same time we are trying to make that progress to represent individuals and, yes, place them in lucrative jobs to level the playing field (which quotas assist).
> reason to believe that your hiring process is biased and you are missing out on qualified candidates
That is to my point. How could you justify that position if you have no way of measuring it? Find 50 lions and 50 white lions, put them in an enclosure and ask a scientist to tell you what percentage of lions are white based on that sample.
I'm not saying that we don't have to solve this, or that it has been solved. It hasn't. I really question our approach (and I don't have a better alternative, apart from eradicating gender stereotypes from a young age).
Are we still in the 1990's with a social equality facade?
An easy explanation for higher quit rates is that the various programs to get more women into tech worked, but the percentage of women who actually want to be in tech hasn't budged.
When you interview both men and women, women actually report higher rates of support from their companies and superiors than the men. It is one of the few areas where there are differences. The other is "enjoy the work", which women rate a lot lower.
> If you have women in hire/fire positions, in theory the bias should work itself out. It probably wouldn't in reality.
I think this is a common, and pretty unfounded claim that people make. In my experience, men and women are both perfectly capable of having harmful opinions on gender roles.
I think they can be an over-simplistic solution when more effective solutions exist and can work with a little more effort, particularly for a company as large as Google where you have the volume to have meaningful data about hiring patterns.
- Outreach to under-represented groups is a no-brainer (I assume Google is already doing this)
- Look at ways to make your interview / recruiting process as blind as possible - coding exercises, resume review and even behavioural questions can be done in a way that doesn't reveal someone's gender or race.
- Where blindness isn't possible, use data to figure out where there may be bias. Do certain individuals / teams / departments show bias in who they advance through the hiring process? If at least part of your process is blind this is even easier - look for evidence of candidates who did well until the process could no longer be gender / race blind and see if there's any bias introduced at that point.
OKRs mandating a fixed gender ratio are the worst way to go about things. It's supposedly common knowledge that any metric is going to be gamed, and doubly so if your career performance is based heavily on it, so it shouldn't be surprising that basing it heavily on a 50/50 ratio can often result in "hiring to quota". Long term, this ends up casting doubt on eminently qualified women and racialized folks.
Yeah, Google spent a quarter-billion dollars on racial diversity and got nowhere. https://www.fastcompany.com/3066914/google-and-tech-struggle... So there's a metric they haven't even figured out how to game yet, that's how bad the situation is. As I replied to your sibling comment, the industry wouldn't need to hire so many women (and other tech minorities) if they could keep women from quitting so fast.
That's not a binary choice. There are both women that would have been hired anyways, and ones that wouldn't. The quota benefits the second group at the expense of the first.
Some of the best female engineers I know hate pro-diversity movements because of this.
And now the boomerang is coming back... But judging by the reactions here i see asking for the right to express complexity isn't always welcome when it comes against the moral values of the day.
(and just to make sure : people should be treated just great even if they're different, meaning they have different abilities somehow, somewhere, and we don't know them all because science isn't advanced enough yet to make any kind of definitive statement).
EDIT : And for those with a great desire of flaming people in public, i suggest tracking people that :
- don't believe climate change is due to human activity
- don't believe public social security should cover every expense
- don't like electric cars, or keep driving SUVs
- have been found watching (racial) porn at the office
- have made any kind of bad joke on any minority
- have made public declaration (at the office cafetaria to his neighbor) supporting any decision by president Trump.
- has bought a gun for his home
- think Google should pay its taxes. Oh no, wait this one is still too controversial.
GOOD for you James! Sorry that you have to engage their tactics to get justice or some monetary semblance of it. If the googly buttheadz were as smart as they pretend to be theyd be offering to angel invest in you to create a new platform that'd be the opensourced mega data provider they promised but sold out for "the gods of profits over product integrity!" and as for the buttheads who rape us with their gender insanity,...yeah you read that right! YOURE the problem because you mistake your SEXUALITY with your fn GENDER! You have the right in this country to be as FD up as you wish, but you still dont have the right to Fck up everyone elses rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness !! DATS JUST HOW IT WORKS BITCHES!!!!!! [I'm using that term to describe all you wage slaving idiots sucking off the googly corporate rat trap!] because it fits. IF YOU EXCUSE THIS GOOGLE POLICY BECAUSE "MUH PAYCHECK" THEN YOU ARE* THE FUCKING PROBLEM!!!! HYPOCRITES ALL!
Legal question: Most employment agreements require employees sign an arbitration clause. Even though these have mixed enforceability, they are very intimidating (which I believe is their intended purpose).
If you had a high-profile case like this, are you choosing to defy the arbitration agreement? Anyone ever gone through this and willing to share the process?
California has a very high minimum standard for am arbitration agreement to validly cover fair employment claims, including the employer covering all arbitration costs (irrespective of outcome), where they would not have to cover all court costs unless they lost and the employee was awarded costs. Armendariz v. Foundation Health, 99 Cal.Rptr.2d 745 (2000) [0]
I wouldn't be surprised if an employer chose to leave claims to which those rules apply out of the coverage of any arbitration agreement; leaving the employee on the hook for court costs is probably a better discouragement to claims, especially meritless ones, than arbitration is.
I hope he finds some right-wing outlet to hire him, because at this point it seems like he’s radioactive waste and no real company is going to hire him ever again.
> after posting a memo to an internal Google message board
He should really have posted that somewhere else, and maybe with a pseudonym.
I'm no lawyer but I'm willing to bet that although it's illegal to fire someone for his political opinions, it's fine if those opinions are expressed via the company's internal communications channels.
After reading the memo and after reading most of the comments here that claim that users also read the memo makes me very afraid on the state of educated people in America.
I cannot believe that most of you still go with the media narrative that Damore claimed "women are worse than man at engineering" while this is a very obvious misrepresentation of what he wrote in order to fill a narrative.
This is all part of a politically driven agenda that destroys everyone trying to question the unique, politically-correct acceptable way of thinking.
And it kills me that smart people in HN are falling for it so easily.
> 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.
[...]
> This is all part of a politically driven agenda that destroys everyone trying to question the unique, politically-correct acceptable way of thinking.
This is nonsensical. He wrote bullshit, he caused a problem at his office of employment, he was fired. End of discussion. If you end up pissing off most of your co-workers it leads to a hostile environment so you remove the fewest amount of people to fix it. It doesn't even matter if what he wrote is or isn't correct at that point.
He speaks about the `distribution of preferences and abilities`.
Going from a distribution to state that `women are worse then men at engineering` is a false narrative and COMPLETELY different. You probably didn't realize that because you already made your own politically-correct version of the truth on that subject, and refuse any discussion about those topics.
For example, what he said doesn't say anything about two specific individual women and men abilities.
About your second point. That's the whole issue! Bringing up any point of debate or discussion on those politically-driven topics will end up pissing of some people (while a majority might agree, but will stay silent because politically incorrect). It is very very sad that this is the state of affairs, and that we cannot discuss those sensible subjects anymore without being fully ostracized.
I'd say that the very fact that identical quotes from the memo can be used to argue opposite positions in earnest shows - with no judgment for which side is correct - that the memo itself is poorly written.
Every single memo/book/essay has quotes that can be taken out of context in order to criticize the whole. That's why the phrase "taken out of context" exists.
Gee, for a group that seems to complain about suppression of alternative thoughts you sure you do love to accuse everyone who disagrees with you of not having read the memo.
No, not at all. I meant conservatives/Damore supporters. The argument hinges on free speech, respect for differing opinions, oppression of conservative viewpoints, etc... That's all fine but then I see a lot of jumping to "you obviously didn't read it". That seems like a bit of a contradiction, to disregard the idea that someone has a different interpretation than you do.
I think he is somewhat confused or insincere about the maths here.
Given this `distribution of preferences and abilities` he said that women on average were lower, but if you only hire people above a certain threshold, there is no difference in the people you hire. This is not true.
Unless the `distribution` is binary "has ability / does not have ability", the people coming from the "higher average" distribution will still on average have more ability. For example, say X~N(1,1) and Y~N(2,1) are normal-distributed with standard deviation 1 and mean 1 and 2 respectively, then E[X | X > 3] ≈ 3.37, while E[Y | Y > 3] ≈ 3.53.
I am pretty sure Damore doesn't think preference and ability are binary, so unless he's confused about his maths, he does say that women at Google on average have less preference/ability.
> The findings suggest that
the persistent – and usually neglected average large advantage of boys in mechanical
reasoning (MR) — orthogonal to g – might be behind their higher presence in STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and math) disciplines.
The quoted line about distribution of talent does not imply that women are worse than men at engineering. In fact, due to the way standard deviation works, the average woman could be better than the average man at engineering but the average of the top 5% of women could be worse than the average of the top 5% of men at engineering. Yeah, that sounds weird, but it's completely possible with the right standard deviation and average.
Example: average ability score of 100, standard deviation of 16 and average ability score of 90, standard deviation of 32. The 95th percentile cutoff for the first group would be about 164; the 95th percentile cutoff for the second group would be about 218. So even though the average member of group 1 has a higher ability score than the average member of group 2, an organisation which hired the best 5% of all candidates would have disproportionately more members of group 2 than group one.
“Now, unleashed from any pretense of evenhandedness or detachment, we get a succinct summary of his argument: the notion that women should, based on merit and talent, constitute a larger percentage of the tech industry is like believing in Santa Claus. A fantasy.
Why would a "white male conservative" sue a corporation when the conservative platform believes that in a free market corporations should be allowed to discriminate as they please ? I have heard Ron Paul (ok, a libertarian) state numerous times how he doesn't support civil rights, because the public will stop visiting those businesses who engage in discriminatory behavior. Shouldn't James Damore just let the free market take care of Google for its allegedly discriminatory position and wait till we all migrate to Duck Duck Go and iOS to teach Google a lesson ?
And even if he did describe himself as such, the idea that all 'conservatives' are free-market absolutists is strange. The sort of free-market-first small-government-at-all-costs ideology has only in the past few decades become a fixture of US right-wing movements.
One possible reason is that a person can have beliefs that don't completely align with a given platform.
Another reason could be that it is easier to obtain emotional distance on a decision when you're not personally involved. Believing that something is best as an abstract policy doesn't always make it easy to believe it is best for you.
A third possibility is that he does believe that the market should decide, but that he also believes in taking full advantage of the system as it exists today.
Because fighting fire with fire seems to be the only tactic successful in these contexts. Its about proving the hypocrisy of practicing discrimination against those you self deem (without any due process) to be discriminatory. Discrimination, like hate only begets more discrimination.
As far as the second point, the free markets no longer operate that way, marketing has emerged as a white washing effect for any ill a company can get themselves into, as long as they spend enough on marketing they can work their way out of it on top.
The problem is that you're shooting fire at Google, who isn't the one who originated the lawsuits or threats of lawsuits that lead to Google's policies. If anything they're victims of the previous lawsuits. This may achieve the desired effect of getting them to lobby to get laws changed so that these lawsuits won't be as effective, but it's a morally muddy game.
I'm a libertarian who supports Damore in sprirt, but I don't love this lawsuit for the reasons given in the grandparent post.
1,088 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] thread> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering
Why do news outlets persistently misrepresent what he actually said? I've read his memo and just about every news article says it contains claims that it doesn't. I have no view on whether he's right or not, but I remain shocked at the misrepresentation of his views throughout the tech media.
I used to think HN provided a good balance of open-mindedness and tech topics. It was a nice refuge from places like reddit and Twitter that had become overly politicized. In the last year - in particular since Damore's little lesson about shitting where you eat - the same kind of smarmy calls for "tolerance of different opinions" mixed with constant brigading of people (talk abut "tolerance") have taken over HN.
I really hope for our community's sake that it's just a small number of users ruining it for everyone.
> "automatic downvoting"
Let's set aside the idea that they're automatic for a moment. Unless your mind reading skills are better than mine, it's hard to know the intent from a downvote alone. You can't even know who did it, other than it's not the person you responded to.
> "of non-controversial, easily-proven statements"
Even these may not be constructive to the conversation. They may be tangential, irrelevant, or intentionally misleading. Members may downvote for any of these reasons.
> "comments with highly subjective and inflammatory takes get upvoted show the worst this community has to offer."
Yeah, highly charged comments can get upvoted: emotions are a powerful thing, and there's a lot of evidence (is it even controversial at this point?) that emotions fire before rational thought. And there's increasing evidence that our rationality actual does more to rationalize our emotions than work as some sort of logic engine. People have to work against this, and that, indeed, is effort. Frustrating? Incredibly so. Human? Very.
That's not to say we shouldn't work against this, at least some of the time. Internet fora make this all the more difficult because we're engaging with such limited bandwidth. We don't get to hear tone, or see facial expressions. We only have this limited text stream, and so we're likely bringing a lot more of ourselves to fill in the gaps than we often realize.
There's a lot of charged language in your comment here. That's just an observation, not a judgement. How should I respond to that? Should I attempt to put it to the side and respond in a way I think is most effective? Or should I write you off as some hot head that can't control their commenting, going against site guidelines by complaining about voting? Or just silently downvote you for doing so? I often get the impression that that's how some members perceive others as behaving. I don't think that's a useful starting point from which to improve HN, so it's one I consciously choose not to take.
> "a small number of users"
I think it's a combination of a small number of users and the fact that each of us—just because we're human—can sometimes slip. What we can do the rest of the time is not let the slip-ups of others make us respond in kind. It takes more than one person to spread the flames.
Help make HN the place you want it to be. Submit good articles. Write good comments. Upvote good articles and comments. Downvote and flag those you don't think are appropriate for HN. It sounds like you follow HN, so you know how threads on contentious articles go. Do what you can to make it better. (And make a conscious effort to not make it worse.) That includes commenting within the guidelines, such as not commenting on downvotes or mentioning you're flagging articles or complaining that a submission is inappropriate for HN. If you really think there's abuse going on, do contact the mods via the contact link in the footer: they want members to bring things like that to their attention so they can address it.
Honestly, there's really little else you can do, but I think it's enough. Which is why I'm taking the time for this comment. Anyway, best wishes.
Not if it is anything resembling a reasonable interpretation of the text.
I'm not weighing in on whether this evidence (which was based on SAT, IIRC) is correct or has been interpreted validly. I'm just pointing out that this was what Damore claimed (after the snafu arose—so take with at least a grain of salt) this statement was in reference to. I'd love to know if others have different information, especially if it was in earlier drafts of the doc.
In this case, TC would argue that they are distilling his memo by using the phrase "biologically less capable of engineering". Personally (and as a former lawyer, but not a libel lawyer), I think this position is not especially strong, since he focused mostly, if not exclusively, on inclination-type evidence. If you're going to give a one-sentence summary of the memo, you probably shouldn't refer to ability instead of inclination.
And given that the person they're talking about just sued Google, I'd say it's unwise to use a characterization like this—even if it is ultimately legally justifiable. Why not say "biologically less suited for engineering", which would encompass the possibility of both ability and desire?
Maybe you shouldn't, but it ain't libel.
From the memo:
"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"
preferences and abilities he says.
He suggests ways to alter Google's engineering jobs to suit abilities females are more likely to excel at, such as making work more social.
Its almost like different doesn't mean worse.
oh and diversity programs are bad. for some reason.
The person who isn't interested wouldn't even be applying in the industry in the first place.
Also, notice that interest doesn't necessarily translate into performance, as there are plenty of factors that affect performance besides "general interest in tinkering with things." Some of the worst performers I've met were obsessive "language experts" who enjoyed gaming (another "male" trait) and spent their weekends on their computers. Their apparent obsession didn't make them more performant than parents who spent nights and most weekends with their kids.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
He was fired for a reason.
This is the heart of the lawsuit.
Unless you mean he was fired as part of a witch hunt which was much ado about nothing, and that's a sad fact of basing firing decisions on tweets. That is true.
Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and ignoring our requests to stop. If you keep doing that we will ban you.
> 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.
He said exactly that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap.
I think if he had made a better written argument that focused more clearly on the idea that part of the gender gap is due to a lack of interest by women, that he probably still would be employed.
> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership
None of this says anything about the abilities of any individual women. There are many excellent female engineers. Nor does it say that these excellent women engineers don't face discrimination because of their gender. All it says is that you'd expect fewer women to be represented in the population of the most competent engineers (in the same way you find fewer men in veterinary fields, for example).
Given there is a section in the memo with similar verbiage as the article's quote, I would give some slack to the author if the sentiment remained from the original. However the author's quote changes the meaning of what Damore said quite a bit.
[1] And averages are of course irrelevant when dealing with individuals, who should each be judged according to their own merit, not according to generalizations of the groups they belong to.
I label it repugnant crap because it is. It's not based on scientific evidence or experience or anything except for pure misogyny.
e.g. It would be like me suggesting you wrote: "men and women are different 'repugnant crap'". It's accurate, but misrepresentative of what you meant. One is honest, and the other is dishonest.
Personally I say give everyone the same rights (i.e single people) and a large part of the problem would go away.
B = biological causes
... A differs in part due to B ...
... reason why we don't see equal rep in tech/leadership.
Then he goes on to say maybe if we take A into consideration when designing tech and leadership roles, can we solve this dilemma.
He does not mention performance, just preference.
> the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes
From the article:
> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering
Do you not see the difference?
It's always the same kind of crap from bigots. "Women MIGHT be less capable of engineering." "Black people MIGHT be more prone to crime." "Gay people MIGHT be more likely to be pedophiles." and it's always based in bigotry, not in science or evidence.
The second sentence wasn't written by Damore, so why attribute to him what he didn't write?
For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks.
Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain.
As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one.
With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other.
If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now.
So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.
It would actually be a rather interesting theory to test, and I would hope someone does test the theory. However your claim is not currently known to be true, rather just a promising theory.
1) Professions tend to become more gender biased over time
2) It was equally likely that computing become a female dominated field.
These are novel claims that require justification. If (1) was true, we should expect to see it in other fields. But many industries seem quite stubbornly gender neutral - for example medicine. (Although many specialties are male dominated or female dominated). And if (2) were true we should see the same profession have different gender biases in different cultures. But I don’t think we see that either. My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse, prison guard, career criminal, construction worker, child care worker, etc).
If there is an imbalance in intrinsic inchoate biases, such as if men tended to unconsciously hire 55% men and 45% women, whereas women preferred to hire 50% each, then an initial 50-50 split, but with no other biases in play after someone enters the field, would drift towards an equilibrium at around .5263 men and .4737 women. More men magnify the male bias towards males.
My other assumption was that early movers have a magnified effect on the future of the field. Think about how any arbitrary decisions made by Turing or von Neumann could still be affecting computing today, like the sign convention for the charge on an electron--that could have been +1 instead of -1, and many of the signs in physics equations would be flipped. If a female had been making those decisions, we might be using a different computing paradigm that would better match female thought patterns. Computing as we now know it initially came about through the confluence of war and academia. Mathematicians designed machines to aim artillery pieces and automate military-grade ciphers, and then to automatically break automated ciphers. The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it. The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.
You would have to look back into history, when culture barriers were stronger, to look for examples of computing devices that may have been used preferentially by men or women.
I agree and acknowledge that. But many other fields are much older than computing, and arose independently in separate countries (medicine, childcare, law, organised crime, nursing, farming, cooking, construction, etc). If your hypothesis were true we should expect strong, consistent gender biases in all those fields. And we would expect that the dominant gender in different fields would vary across different cultures. But we see the opposite of that in the world - the dominant gender in different professions is remarkably consistent between isolated cultures. In the case of child care its even consistent cross-species.
SSC had a much more in-depth analysis than I'll manage in this comment. The onus is on you to explain why we don't see that actually happen in the world, as would be predicted by your theory.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
> The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.
I understand why this feels true, but in practice it is easier today than it has ever been to make novel user interfaces for programmers and users. There are no gatekeepers between you and your code editor. Please experiment with this; I'd love to see what you come up with.
Your understanding isn't correct, at least for nursing.
Nurses were male until the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#History give examples of predominately nurses and caregivers in other cultures before that time. http://minoritynurse.com/rethinking-gender-stereotypes-in-nu... says "Before modern day nursing, men were nurses, not women. The earliest recorded nursing school was established in India around 250 B.C. It was exclusively for men; women were not allowed to attend because it was believed that women were not as pure as men."
What happened in the 1800s? Quoting from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1081399.pdf :
> Through the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the mid-nineteenth century, nursing was established as a women's profession (Hus, Chen & Lou, 2010). Nightingale's image of the nurse as subordinate, nurturing, domestic, humble, and self-sacrificing, as well as not too educated, became prevalent in society. The American Nursing Association ostracized men from nursing until 1930, when as a "result of a bylaw amendment, provision was made for male nurses to become members of the American Nurses' Association" (In Review - American Nurses' Association, p. 6). Looking back in nursing history, Florence Nightingale, and the American Nursing Association ostracized men from the nursing profession.'
See also http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2648.1997.... , "History appears to indicate that men have had a place in nursing for as long as records are available, but their contribution has been perceived as negligible, largely because of the dominant influence that the 19th century female nursing movement has had on the occupation's historical ideology."
> The term nosocomial originates from the latin nosocomi, the name given to male care-givers, meaning that men were prominent in Ancient Rome
... If they needed a special word for male care-givers in ancient rome, that implies they assumed care givers were female by default.
I don't see how you can therefore infer that men weren't the majority of nurses back then.
As for the term "nosocomi", it doesn't imply that care givers were female by default. Latin is a gendered language. A different word would have been applied to female caregivers. As an example from Spanish, think "maestro" and "maestra" for male and female teacher, respectively.
If the Latin only used the masculine form, and never the feminine, then it indicates the job was primarily (or perhaps only) done by men.
Consider the word "maid", short for "maiden" meaning "female virgin." We have a special word for female domestic workers but that doesn't imply that domestic workers were male by default.
Similary, in many English speaking parts of the world, a senior or supervisory nurse is a "sister". This title includes males, eg. from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282839878_Clinical_... "… what was nice there was a senior male sister that welcomed us and orientated us, so that really help me a lot to accept the situation …".
A male sister may also be referred to using the gender neutral term "charge nurse".
Again you see that a gendered term for a given job does not imply that job is usually done by the other gender.
Or, we have "mailman", "chairman", "cabin boy" for jobs which were usually done by males, while "charwoman", "lunch lady", and "call girl" indicate females. The existence of a special gendered term doesn't mean the mail was usually delivered by women, or that prostitutes were usually men.
How many people with top engineering skills do you think flip patties at McDonalds? Probably not many. Does that mean they're worse at flipping patties? No, it means they want to work elsewhere.
I have a lot of problems with how the issue was raised by Damore and I think his firing was appropriate, but I also agree that his essay has been wildly mischaracterized by the media.
If you want to make a case that someone means something other than what they clearly say (or write) then you should have a convincing argument to justify such a claim. Otherwise you're just projecting your prejudices on the discussion.
Are you seriously saying that the meaning I should take away from that quote is that women don't work in tech because of their superior ability?
And the quote we're arguing about, "women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering", also says "may". So it seems you're arguing a strawman.
So an overly simplified argument might be women don't work in tech because they both prefer, and are superior in, different working environments.
What you should take away from his quote is nothing. Especially the paraphrased portion of the quote that ignores preferences. Read his memo in it's entirety and judge it in it's entirety.
I don't think this part is inherently wrong, and could be proven or disproven with well designed studies.
So it's your projection of what you assume he really thinks. What evidence are you basing this on?
He spoke to the distribution of preferences and abilities. Turning this into an absolutist simplification should offend anyone with a brain.
The science seems to state that nature rolls the dice more with males than with females. We know, for instance, that there are far more very low IQ males than females, and this is understood as fact. This doesn't mean that you or I are therefore low IQ, despite the distribution increase. And the stats seem to say that nature also varies on the side of high IQ more with males.
That says nothing to whether a given male or female are either low or high, and only applies at scale. Scale that is meaningless when assessing a given candidate, but is certainly pertinent when talking about representation across an entire industry or large organization.
You just tried to cloak the claim that there’s more highly intelligent men in a bunch of nonsense. You’re only proving my point.
There are more dumber men and more smarter men than women.
> 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.
Perhaps because what he actually said was that statistically women tend to have lower expression of the traits that engineering positions favor and lower interest in those positions. And because of this the representation of women in tech is lower than their representation in the general population.
Nowhere did he say "all women are worse than all men at engineering jobs". In fact he repeatedly explained that there are tons of exceptions to the statistical rule.
As I recall, his entire point is that we should be reshaping the field to make it more appealing to women so that they are drawn to it naturally, as opposed to the current strategy of giving women preferential treatment in the hiring process, only to have them leave because we haven't addressed the underlying problems that are driving them away.
That's hardly a radical idea. There are benefits to his approach: I, for one, think the field would benefit greatly if we focused more on, for example, the importance of empathy. Thinking about others ought to be a fundamental pillar of software engineering, as it naturally leads to better UX, APIs, and services. And when we think about the people who will be maintaining our code, we're inclined to write better code that is easier to grok.
You even highlight the word _exactly_ but that is not what he said. That quote says they don't have equal representation and there maybe biological differences to blame.
The main reason for confusion seems to be the quote assumes women might not be as attracted by tech work as men are. That assumption changes the meaning because in your interpretation "Women want to be in tech as much as men and D'Amore is saying they just don't have the genes for it" vs "Women want to be in tech less than men to start with and besides bigotry, hate and marginalization, cultural biases, there could be a biological explanation for it".
I know we all think tech is awesome, we are getting paid to do what we love, etc. But it turns out many people, and maybe women more than men, don't find sitting in a cubicle all day inverting binary trees appealing. I don't think biology is the main driver here [+] but D'Amore does. He might be wrong, but I don't see why it had to become this controversial topic and lead to firing and lawsuits. They could have just said "here is why science doesn't support your view, thanks for starting the discussion, but you're wrong" and leave it at that.
[+] I don't support his view, I'd personally blame culture for women not even wanting to be in tech. Having lived in Eastern Europe where there is less "stigma" against girls liking math and computer science. It's not a cause, or a talking point at least, it's just a profession like accountant or doctor.
[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
[3] https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happ...
> 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.
Edit: ebbv beat me to it
(a) There is no consistent world view for tens of millions of people distributed across the globe, (b) there is no research, none, that specifically states that women are genetically predisposed to be less suited to engineering and (c) there is no clear rules about what aspects of our biology are required to be a great engineer.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4129348/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4157091/
Maybe these studies are wrong, maybe the conclusions Damore drew were wrong (I certainly think they are). However, I think witch-hunting people for asking questions about sensitive topics is a much more clear and present danger.
Nobody is arguing that men and women aren't biologically different. Of course they are. The point is whether those biological differences significantly affect your ability to be a professional engineer.
And you or Damore have provided zero evidence of this.
To rephrase what I'm talking about: some studies say women are less good at spatial reasoning than men -- maybe you can make an argument that Task X requires spatial reasoning skills. Assuming that argument is true it would stand to reason that statistically more men are capable of doing Task X than women. That's a far cry from saying women lack the ability to do Task X.
To refrain, I think Damore's conclusions are probably wrong. However I think there's a shocking abundance of willful ignorance whenever this topic gets raised.
You speak of willful ignorance, yet talk of studies you don't even link nor explain why they have anything to do with this. Why would this study about spatial reasoning by more important than e.g. SAT scores? How does that actually relate to women becoming engineers when there is no shortage of women who are capable of completing a CS degree?
You also seem to suggest that Damore's voice is important because other people aren't talking about this. As well as that people who disagree with him doesn't do so legitimately but because they don't like his opinions. That people don't talk about this isn't true, they just don't reach the same conclusions. Here is one example from the summery of the study "The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics":
"We conclude that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways. There are no single or simple answers to the complex questions about sex differences in science and mathematics."
So why doesn't Damore, or yourself, mention a study like this that can be easily be found online?
No body is arguing against the right of women to become engineers. It's just stating that the assumption that "hidden bias" exists if a field is not at 50/50 is untrue. and by the way, I'm yet to find any proof for that. if you find a study that indicates no discirimination leads to 50/50 in all fields or at least in engineering I will be happy to read it.
So, to me this reads as bias. When I read his claim, I don't see it as implying that women are in any way less capable of becoming professional engineers, but (in context to his other assertions) that they are less likely to desire becoming a professional engineer.
Equally valid is having is that having to work with socially inept people reduces the appeal.
I'll freely offer that nothing in his paper affirms my interpretation of his view any more than yours, but if the only difference is that I'm more willing to assume good faith where you are not, then perhaps that's reason enough to not demand that he be insta-fired from any job he ever get, as many are asking to happen.
Some state that this a culture problem and that there is a hidden bias.
Some also state that women might go to other fields because they have a greater capacity at empathy. which is a proven fact. women that go and study those fields won't apply to cs positions they will apply to positions in their fields.
and by the way there was a study that indicated that women get short-listed less in sex-blind hiring
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview."
"Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
this is getting downvoted with no replies if someone has a porblem with what I said, I'm happy to debate.
Like, male and female high jumpers that make it over a certain height of bar are approximately as good at jumping. There's more men in that category. This all might be playing semantics, but I think there's a real thing here to disentangle, and it'd be nice to say one without implying the other.
...No it doesn't. That's just something you're adding to preserve the distinction.
>Like, male and female high jumpers that make it over a certain height of bar are approximately as good at jumping. There's more men in that category. This all might be playing semantics, but I think there's a real thing here to disentangle, and it'd be nice to say one without implying the other.
Yes yes but the problem comes with Damore's reasoning for why there are more men in that category - biological determination of better programming ability.
Whether or not the representation gap is biological is an important factual matter that should be discussed on the merits. It'd do women no good to try to get their best sprint times up to men's by fixing society to be more accepting of female sprinters. There are real biological differences between the sexes, and trying to fix downstream effects of them by making up sociological causes and attacking them is very quixotic.
I think a sociological explanation for any biological phenomena has to be made up. This is why we need to have an honest discussion about the merits of biological explanations, so that we can figure out the root causes and spend our efforts effectively.
He also suggested that if the goal is for Google to become more inclusive toward women, that perhaps the roles should be adjusted to appeal more to women than to stick our heads in the sand and pretend the problem is Google's patriarchy.
If you run a burger place and want more women to eat there, you start serving salads. That doesn't mean you're a sexist for thinking women can't eat burgers. Some do. But generally speaking, women eat salads at higher rates than men. You will not be as successful by trying to market the same burgers to women.
You're sneaking in your "prefer" with your "generally". Damore didn't speak just to preference, he also spoke to ability.
>If you run a burger place and want more women to eat there, you start serving salads. That doesn't mean you're a sexist for thinking women can't eat burgers. Some do. But generally speaking, women eat salads at higher rates than men. You will not be as successful by trying to market the same burgers to women.
Great analogy. So in terms of burgers/salads & men/women Damore is saying that there are biological reasons to believe that women prefer salads to burgers and that there are biological reasons to believe that men are better at eating burgers.
So now let me ask you, do you think women prefer salads because of biology, or do you think that women prefer salads because of culture? You can say both but if so maybe you could say which one you think is the larger influence and by how much.
Also, do you think that men are biologically better at eating burgers? Is this the reason they are more likely to order a burger?
I think the analogy exposes exactly the problem with Damore's memo.
Ability follows as a result of preference. I am a terrible architect because I chose to become a software engineer. That does not mean that if I had chosen to become an architect, I would be terrible at it. If most of the people from my hometown made the same choice, then most of us would be less good at architecting due to that preference.
> So now let me ask you, do you think women prefer salads because of biology, or do you think that women prefer salads because of culture? You can say both but if so maybe you could say which one you think is the larger influence and by how much.
Personally I think it's almost entirely culture. I couldn't say how much is what, but it makes no difference. The point is that it undermines the incumbent narrative, which is that sexism and oppression are the only significant causes.
> Also, do you think that men are biologically better at eating burgers? Is this the reason they are more likely to order a burger?
No, but I do think if you're running a burger place and refuse to acknowledge the possibility that different groups of customers prefer different things, you're going to be out of business soon. Fortunately restaurant menu choices haven't been politically charged--yet.
See everyone I talk to about Damore only tries to defend the preference portion. This isn't the only argument Damore is making. He believes abilities, not just preferences, are distributed differently between men and women. That's what I'm asking you to defend.
>Personally I think it's almost entirely culture. I couldn't say how much is what, but it makes no difference. The point is that it undermines the incumbent narrative, which is that sexism and oppression are the only significant causes.
It doesn't really undermine anything. When we move to salads it's super obvious that almost all of the effect is cultural not biological. So some burger stores start an initiative to get women to worry less about the cultural expectations placed on them and eat a damn burger but disgruntled Wendy's employee Damore writes an internal 10 page memo explaining that women don't eat burgers because they are biologically predisposed to salads. He digs up research about the vitamins and minerals contained in leafy greens, spends a ton of time tip-toeing around what he means to say, and couches everything in "distributional" language. At the end of the day it's obvious that this memo by a layman about why women prefer salads biologically is (1) ridiculous on it's face (2) not scientific and (3) actively harmful to his employer's goals.
But put that way it's obvious why he was fired and Damore looks less like a free-speech hero and more like bigoted faux-science dweeb.
> are distributed differently between men and women.
And that, as far as I know, is the current scientific consensus.
In particular, women who excel at the Math SATs tend to also excel at the Verbal SATs. Whereas men who excel at the Math SATs tend to only excel at the Math SATs.
And people, regardless of gender, who have both capabilities tend to go into non-STEM fields.
See https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
https://herosports.com/nfl/women-fastest-growing-market-foot...
wow, a decade of marketing overpowered millenia of biology ad cultural history.
No, it doesn't. It suggests fewer women are good. It doesn't suggest that the women in the field are any worse than the men in the field, it just explains why there may be fewer women than men.
I know I am.
this argument uses "Distribution of...abilities" without indicating in any part that women are worse at anything.
the phrase “Distribution of...abilities” does not suggest that “women are worse.”
"fewer women wind up having the skills for X in part due to biological causes" and "women are worse at X".
source:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221
from the abstract: "This study contributes information on women's greater empathic disposition in comparison with men by means of a longitudinal design in an adolescent population"
there is also this study: "Testosterone may reduce empathy by reducing brain connectivity" http://www.psypost.org/2016/03/testosterone-may-reduce-empat...
"Half of the women were given an orally administered dose of testosterone sufficient to increase the levels of the hormone in their blood by a factor of ten, while the other half received a placebo. The women who were given testosterone subsequently took significantly longer to identify the emotions depicted images of eyes, and made significantly more errors while doing so."
"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things ○ We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
● Women on average are more cooperative ○ Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do. ○ This doesn't mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn't necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what's been done in education."
This is different than my point. I'm saying that software engineering IS people-oriented as it exists and that it's simply undervalued.
> Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be
What roles at Google shouldn't be people-oriented? This just strikes me as an absurd thing to say.
So no, I would say the original quote is not a good summary of the quote you quoted.
As for the distibution of preferences based on sex. While some might claim that sex does not affect preferences. A Meta-study found robust sex differences in children’s toy Indicating that sex "might" be a factor in deciding factor. The categorical refusal of this claim to the point the mere fact of suggesting that it "might" be true let alone asserting it is taboo, is scientifically unfounded.
source: Study finds robust sex differences in children’s toy preferences across a range of ages and countries http://www.psypost.org/2017/12/study-finds-robust-sex-differ...
People barely have any idea about how to hire a software engineer, much less judge someone's true "ability".
Preferences are also very complicated. People may prefer things very differently given the environment. That quote, along with many others, demonstrates the absolute lack of genuineness on the part of Damore.
Damore throws away any pretense of being objective/scientific when he makes claims like this based on metrics that are hardly measurable. A decent scientist would recognize that making claims with very serious implications like this is greatly irresponsible.
I'm not sure how you get from (1) his logic seems flawed, to (2) he's being disingenuous. Can you please elaborate?
2) He has an preconceived theory of how "ability" and "preference" work. The science does not point to his conclusions, because the science cannot point to any conclusions: ability is simply not scientifically understood or defined at all in the software engineering field, and preferences are barely understood and have many weird consequences (Dan Ariely's work is a great example of this). He is being disingenuous because he is making a claim without any ability to back it up, simply because it fits with his preconceived theory. That's disingenuous. If he were to say, "It seems to me that", or "What I've seen in my life is...", instead of making a strict claim. A strict claim requires actual evidence and well defined terms, both of which he has none.
Hmm...as to preferences, there are two easy tests:
1. You ask people
When you do, you find that people generally don't like CS. People in developed countries less than in less developed countries. And women less than men, with the gap becoming bigger in more developed countries. And girls less than boys, with the gap becoming larger in more developed countries.
You can also ask them why they choose that way, and in less developed or less prosperous countries, more people say "because of the money". In more prosperous countries, people are, well, more prosperous, so money is less of an issue.
2. You look at how people choose
Same pattern. It's not as if women are forced out of computing and into early childhood education. They choose to go there because, apparently, that is what they want to do.
I think many women have preferences that steer them away from engineering, this may be societal or genetic in nature but that's something that is being debated at this point.
I think saying his use of the word abilities is what gets him in a lot of trouble here.
Because this creates controversy, controversy creates engagement and engagement brings more ad revenue to the news outlets.
"Misunderstanding statistical distribution" https://medium.com/@martinweigert/misunderstanding-probabili...
He suggested that on average men are biologically more suited to programming, and the contention of his opponents is that that is still a problematic and inappropriate thing to say.
Stating "members from group X are better than members from group y" (which is how Damore's opponents describe his claim) is a not the same as stating that “more people from group X than from group Y might be suitable for this job”. The first is qualitative, the latter quantitative. The latter also implies that members of group y can be as good.
I am sure everyone has experienced how sentences and context radically can change through the addition or omission of just one or two words. Here we have such a case, and it should be acknowledged.
But the problem is that it isn't any more quantitative because it still depends on the highly subjective notion of what it means to be "suitable for this job" and assumes that there is only one way to be "suitable."
This is different from discriminatory hiring of women to be forced into a male oriented role. This is a substantive claim, which he accuses Google of doing. Discriminatory hiring is illegal, and also stupid, from a free market standpoint.
Tldr: If women aren't buying your product (not applying to Google), it's not the fault of women, its your product that needs to change to suit their wants and needs.
This is only sexist if you think men and women don't, as a general statistical rule, tend toward different interests along a bimodal distribution. But they do.
"James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board that was perceived by many to argue that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering"
They can also point out that he denied he argued this, and that there is plenty of disagreement over whether his memo said it or not.
I know plenty of folks are saying they read it and don't see how one can interpret it any other way. But the fact that you get so many comments indicating they did not interpret it that way is a strong indicator of a lack of consensus. The way the article is written implies a certainty, and does not reflect the reality around the memo.
Essentially, to insist that this is what Damore meant, based only on his memo, is insisting that a huge number of HN posters are playing the same game Damore is. It's much easier to believe that there are other valid interpretations of the memo and to allow for the possibility that Damore had one of the other interpretations.
From the memo:
> 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.
Minus a bit of softening language ("in part", "may"), proposing that women are on average less biologically capable of programming is exactly what he's saying.
Also, because I know how HN works, let me pre-empt the inevitable reply to this one: "but what if there ARE sex differences?! shouldn't we be allowed to talk about that!? Freedom of speech!?!"
Scientists who study this stuff (including those cited by Damore) can and do talk about it, and the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech. What effects there may be are absolutely dominated by sociological factors.
Sociological factors that some companies are attempting to counter, which is what Damore didn't like, which is why he issued his complain-y memo to start with.
And THAT is why people are upset with him. Not because he's an amateur biologist with a day job as a programmer who just earnestly wants to have an innocent conversation about sexual dimorphism. It's because he's just another brogrammer whose jimmies got rustled by the thought of women being his peers, and decided to insult (on average) his female colleagues and create a hostile work environment for which he was (quite correctly) fired.
Whether sex differences explain the gender disparity in tech isn't even the kind of question that cog dev folks ask.
Hey, let's keep things civil. Please consider Hanlon's Razor in this case.
How about something like, "I don't think you're correct about the consensus. Citations please?"
> “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.)”
For more, check out the citations on this article: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/16/16153740/tech-diversity-p...
Finally, even if the facts were true that women on averaged perform worse in tech, how do you want to use that information? Cancel all the sensitivity programs designed to solve other very real problems in tech? Or are you saying not only that biology "plays a role", but that _nothing else does_ so we should just completely ignore this as an issue?
In other words, "that's not the kind of question we ask."
Also I looked at the citations, neither of the metastudies looks at differences in sensory perception which imho are the most interesting of the sex differences. But even ignoring that, looking at the statistical significance of certain population traits doesn't tell you anything about their clinical significance. E.g. if you look at two groups of 100 people and one group is 100% alive and the other group is 99% alive, there isn't a significant effect size, but there is a big difference to that one person.
[citation needed]
But what seems to be missing (and what I had hoped for) is research showing that "the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech." I feel like the article should be overflowing with references to this if it's a consensus.
It turns out that even this article admits that
> there’s very little scientists know for certain about which behaviors are due to biology, and which are because of society’s expectations of both men and women
The article essentially concludes that men are competitive.
Maybe I missed something in the article. Which citation really spoke to you and confirmed this consensus?
After having read two lengthy pieces about him and his case, I think you are showing a lack of empathy and willingness to put yourself into some other person's shoes. You might disagree with his actions and world view. But you should maybe not be so quick with your labeling. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-dam... http://quillette.com/2018/01/05/empathy-gap-tech-interview-s...
And if we're worried about empathy, why don't we stop and think for a while about the people affected negatively by his memo?
Or do you mean the autism excuse (which is from the Guardian journalist, btw, not Damore himself?) I know lots of people on the autism spectrum who are not sexist, or who at least have the intelligence not to send out a memo to the whole company on a nuanced, controversial social topic
"And if we're worried about empathy, why don't we stop and think for a while about the people affected negatively by his memo?" I do. It's you who falsely assumes one can only do one thing.
That being said nobody had a negative reaction until vox leaked it. It had been available for months.
I will also note it seemed to be those who have more tweets than minutes they have been alive that got the most upset about this memo.
I was really disappointed in the response by Google engineers. To this day I have yet to see a proper rebuttal that did not go out of it's way to misrepresent the original memo.
That is what makes me sad. That to this day people still quote things that were not in or even eluded to in the paper.
The latter is an obvious statement however people seems keen to deliberately misinterpret it to fuel their rightous outrage.
I’ll use high jump as an example. Suppose I only hire high jumpers who can leap over X meters. I find that I naturally hire less women because women on average can’t jump as high as men. The women who can are obviously as qualified as men. Now I make the statement that due to biological differences this may explain the hiring disparity, rather than discrimination.
1. Saying that women are "on average" worse programmers is exactly why people are upset with him. He doesn't need to be some kind of insane absolutist in order for what he said to be very problematic.
2. Even if there are statistically significant sex differences with regard to programming ability and inclination, there are also historical and sociological factors that are working against women in tech. Damore's memo was explicitly a negative reaction against some of the programs designed to counteract these systemic issues. As such, even if he were 100% right about the sexual dimorphism (which he isn't, see my other post in this thread), using that as an argument against trying to solve the sociological problems is not only logically unsound, but exhibits bad faith and bad motivations.
2. “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
That is literally the whole point of his memo, that women have a different (i.e, worse, in this context) statistical distribution of ability and inclination to the tech field.
> “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
Sure it is. His argument is structured as follows:
1. Negative effect Q is caused by both A and B. 2. We can't do anything about A. 3. Therefore we shouldn't do anything about B.
That's just bad reasoning.
Damore's manifesto purports to present evidence that there "maybe" are inherent differences between genders ("may" and "might" are also sprinkled all over the place for good measure.) He even acknowledges that this is far from a complete picture. But then he goes on to conclude that:
1) That must explain the existing gender distribution in engineering
2) Google trying to explore doing outreach to increase diversity must necessarily imply discrimination of the unfairly oppressed white heterosexual male
So trying to dismiss all criticism by splitting hairs over whether he meant that the average, the median, or all women are uninterested in engineering completely misses the point that either way the conclusions are unwarranted. The whole thing smacks of persecution complex first, finding "evidence" later.
No, he's saying that they also might be less interested, for biological reasons. I recommend actually reading the memo (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...): "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men."
I recommend you start realizing that people can read something and interpret it in vastly different ways.
Of course then you might have a revelation about this whole thing.
That isn't my interpretation at all. His entire point was that Google's current strategy was ignoring the cultural and sociological factors that might be discouraging women from entering the field. Rather than simply giving women preferential treatment during the hiring process, and going out of the way to specifically hire women, he argued that we should be spending more time identifying why women aren't naturally drawn to the field (or why more women later choose to leave the field). Fix that problem first, or the women that get hired will eventually leave, because we haven't done enough to consider why they don't feel welcome.
He never said that women are unfit to be engineers. He argued (clumsily, I admit) that we've created an environment that favors the preferences and strengths of men over those of women. If we want to see more women thrive in tech, start by changing the culture.
I think that most of the outrage over Damore's memo can be chalked up to poor communication on his part. He lays out evidence, but he never explicitly states his argument. It's like he assumed there was a single, obvious conclusion that readers would arrive at. Some of us got the message, but apparently a whole lot more didn't. The outcome is almost perfect in its irony: he cites a greater emphasis on empathy as a way of making the engineering field more hospitable to women, but he fails miserably at using empathy to evaluate how people will interpret his own words.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
There's Grant's response added by Scott to the comments [0], but I don't think that really qualifies as a rebuttal.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
And a very strong case can be made that women make different life choices which result in generally different outcomes in those areas.
ugh.
I am happy he got his ass fired.
[0]: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/18/james-damore-like-g...
[1]: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/450202/google-employees...
When the majority of people are too afraid to come to someone's defense (publicly) because they're afraid that the internet pitchfork mobs will come and destroy their lives too, a large part of society is doing something wrong.
And that large part of society that attempts to do the silencing/shaming/smearing/destroying of the opposition might think they're scoring a victory for their cause (whether or not that cause is worthy is beside the point), but that's not necessarily true, and we saw proof of that in the last US election.
When Clinton got millions more votes?
As a manager you have to think about everyone in the team.
I'm having some difficulty understanding your statement. Would you mind clarifying a few things?
- Do you mean all Americans, or just some?
- When you say "do not understand", what do you mean by that?
- I'm unclear as to why you specifically mentioned Americans. Are you comparing them to some other group(s)? And if so, which one(s)?
Be aware, 60% of Republicans belie e that the earth really is only 6,000 years old.
By not understanding he means that, that they don't understand that they don't understand that in distribution when traits are different on a average that that doesn't mean that in one group all individuals of one groups have stronger or weaker traits than individuals of the other group.
Heh. I rest my case.
But, to respond directly: of course, I'm speaking colloquially to suggest many Americans.
I specifically mention Americans because this discussion is about an American suing an American company, in a kerfuffle over American ideals (and law) of sex nondiscrimination. American education norms seem to leave even bright people susceptible to deep confusion when claims are based on statistics.
I'm Irish.
"It aims to represent all employees of Google who’ve been discriminated against due to their “perceived conservative political views by Google,” due to “their male gender by Google” and “due to their Caucasian race by Google."
He should have also added Christians, Trump supporters, or anyone who doesn't bow to the progressive agenda.
TLDR: yes, and there are certain exceptions, IANAL so not sure where this particular case falls
"However, there are exceptions. For instance, if you participate in a political activity that creates a conflict of interest with your employer's business model, your job could potentially be on the line"
The whole thing here emphasis mine: No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:
(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.
(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.
It seems that Google has to have a specific policy in place for this law to be triggered, which does not seem to be the claim being made.
No. It would be enough for there to be a demonstrated consistent set of actions in a specific direction. Otherwise, many other laws could be made moot by companies not having a specific written policy, but still carrying out such actions.
It's not super clear to me that this would protect Damore, but IANAL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
PS. Being told that "You are only here because you're a diversity hire, you can't actually do the work," is creating a hostile working environment.
At some point, we're going to have to decide whether we're committed to equality among protected classes or not.
A PR nightmare for him costs him very little. There are no products that customers can boycott to get back at him. No offices where he could be protested.
The 'worst' that could happen is that some tech companies refusing to hire him. But given his recent fame, I doubt he has to worry about money anymore.
In USA, discrimination due to sex is illegal.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Discrimination is not just about hiring but also about workplace comfort. And let me tell you, being a non-democrat at google is NOT comfortable! VERY not comfortable!
Would they? Do you work in Silicon Valley, and if so how many Republican members did you meet on the teams you worked on. In 6+ years of work, my count is exactly 1.
[1] I'm really not sure, I'm not kidding that I'm interested in how this plays out.
The third cause of action of the filing is literally "workplace discrimination due to gender and/or race in violation of FEHA".
He is alleging three separate basic things (it's really a triple-class action; there are three separate classes that the case seeks to represent)
(1) Violation of California's law against employer control/coercion of employee political activity.
(2) race discrimination,
(3) sex discrimination.
(There's other charges, but they are basically derivative of those.)
Also, my understanding of how discrimination laws work is that the question of 'protected class' doesn't come into it - if the discrimination was based on race or gender, it's illegal.
In the best case, that argument only has a little utility. However, it's a pretty bad argument now, since political correctness only allows you to make those kinds of swaps in certain cases. Nowadays, it can only be use to amplify the outrage against an already-identified villain.
"Birth control for blacks", "we need more jews in STEM", "no blacks in the whites only bathroom".
They're more offensive because unlike race there are very real and relevant biological differences when it comes to gender. And whether or not that applies to STEM probably shapes your viewpoints on this subject.
Pre-election a similar thing happened to James Watson and Larry Summers - eg here is shutting down conversation about humans not being blank slates:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/us/harvard-chief-defends-h...
"When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said.
Its two problems our industry literally created: Sensationalist click farming and information overload. Our industry does not take these problems seriously enough. Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.
You need to learn that people can have a different opinion then you, having read the same document.
> Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.
Correct, and that's why his lawsuit is BS. He caused outrage both externally and internally. You had an employee that others would refuse to work with.
Of course he was fired.
It's only when the terminally butthurt howled that management did something. And instead of saying something mature like, "You need to learn that people can have a different opinion than you" and be tolerant of ideas, it was burn the witch and purge the wrongthink.
Craven corporate leadership at its worst.
How did he cause an external outrage? Did he leak the document to the press? Did he speak to the press at all?
There are quite a few people to blame for the external outrage, but he is not one of them.
His lawsuit is not BS; you should try reading the court filing. He has multiple examples of Google HR officially condoning systemic racism and sexism. Who knows how it will come out, but he has a case.
What he did was speak heresy. I’m sorry that it sounds like I’m a butthurt male but the fact is diversity is dogma in these companies and you either buy in wholeheartedly, constantly, to the exclusion of all other priorities, or you’re ex-communicated.
He says he is only trying to start a conversation or discussion, but circulating a secret memo around your company and then going on a self-promotional media crusade really is not a great way to do that. It looks more like a political stunt, which is pretty much the opposite of a conversation.
>then going on a self-promotional media crusade
If internally sharing a document within a company is bad, and externally talking about it once it was made public by another party who got you fired is also bad, what is in your opinion the acceptable and appropriate method to have this conversation?
But you're right, though, now that I'm reflecting, my portrayal of him was too harsh. After all, the man did get fired for writing a letter. THAT is ridiculous and I hope he wins the suit just for that.
The whole thing is embarrassing, though. I mean, what was he complaining about? He worked at Google, which is like, the top of the heap for programming jobs. I didn't understand why he was upset over the company's efforts to include women more. Did he not understand why that would be seen as sexist?
The more I think about it, the more I realize the answer to that question might be no. Maybe Damore didn't realize that presenting his ideas in the form of a memo passed around the office would be insulting to some people. Maybe it was honestly the only way he knew how to initiate a discussion about it. And in that case, I do think he was mistreated and it's a shame he didn't have another way to voice his concerns.
I guess it's a lesson, but what to learn from it, I don't know.
Personally, looking at this from the outside and from the vantage point of today, I think the entire thing is overblown and also extremely typical considering the state of the Western world today.
I don't understand Google's internal culture at all.
Thank god at least someone in this mess was capable of reflecting and changing their opinion. Thanks for restoring my faith in humanity.
Discrimination of gender, race, and sexual preference is demonstrably real. This suit is a farce and I hope he loses.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
[2] https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/
> Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer.
Many media outlets omitted the italicized portion.
The king of search finds it too hard to compile data.
http://fortune.com/2017/05/27/google-gender-wage-data-report...
Just like you aren't asked to strip search when going through TSA, `just because`. There needs to be a legitimate reason and suspicion.
He openly published a memo condemning his employer, tarnishing the brand and bringing the company under considerable negative press. I figure there must be some clause in any employment agreement stating that you can't actively cause damage to the company.
Edit: Looks like the memo wasn't intentionally released to the public, but it still caused damage. If I drop tables unintentionally on production, I'm not surprised if I'm fired- even if it was an accident.
False. He published a memo internally for other Google employees in a culture of internal openness and intellectual discussion which had been implied to exist inside the company for a while.
His memo was then leaked outside the company, possibly by an ideological enemy. Hard to say he was "actively causing damage to the company".
This will probably come up.
https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/06/can-you-be...
He did not write a piece of software, he wrote a piece of rhetoric which had very little to do with reality and had a lot to do with making people dislike Google and its policies.
I also write a lot of rhetoric designed to do that. The difference is I'm not a Google employee. Were I, I would fully expect to be fired, regardless of what I did with that writing (except perhaps leave it unreleased on my home computer, or write it to /dev/null).
Is that really illegal? If someone was not hired on account of his being a White supremacist, would he have any basis for a lawsuit?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
To anyone assuming that I'm opposed to such a law: you're wrong. I've written in favor of such laws in the past, and think they should be strengthened even further. Assuming of course that they are used to protect all political opinions, both left wing and right.
However, I don't think Google did what you have pasted here. As far as I can tell, they fired him for violating code of conduct, which maintains that employees do not publicize discriminating memos, which he did.
However, code of conduct at Google basically doesn't want employees marginalizing other employees. That is what Damore did.
So he realistically has a choice between becoming a paid speaker for fringe ultra-right organizations, trying to sue Google and retire off the proceeds, or leaving tech and becoming a noname blue collar or a freelancer forever hiding his face.
I hope they will settle for an amount sufficient for retirement and the dude's life won't get ruined due to a stupid political game he didn't even realize he was playing.
Isn't that what he's been doing through his twitter account where he muses whether people join the KKK because they have cool titles? Or his interviews with people like Milo?
That was just a joke, stop pretending he is a neo-nazi.
"The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor - I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don't take myself super-seriously.
"This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that's neither here nor there."
I admit that he's almost certainly not playing by the alt-right's playbook - but he should be smart enough to realize that he's playing into the alt-right's playbook, and if he's not that smart, he doesn't have any business getting a job at Google or Microsoft. There are absolutely ways to express the points he's trying to make without letting yourself be turned into an alt-right poster-boy (and they're also more effective at convincing his ostensible target audience, namely senior decision-makers in large tech companies).
So basically your whole argument is that no one is allowed to joke because that's what nazis are doing?
Let me quote his whole tweet:
>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"?
There are no shades of gray. This joke isn't even remotely offensive. The only reason why anyone could think otherwise is their prejudice against Damore.
No, that is not my argument. This is about the second time in one week where I've posted "x was a bad idea in context", and someone else has replied with "So, your argument is no one should be allowed to do x ever?", so clearly I am being very bad at communicating. As with last time, I'll try to explain my position in a little more detail in the hope that it will help.
My position is that, if you are already at risk of being an alt-right poster-boy (thanks to having been forced to do interviews with alt-right YouTubers because nobody else would interview you fairly, or something), and if you are not actually a supporter of the alt-right position, it is probably a good idea to avoid doing and saying things that give the further impression that you are and want to be an alt-right poster boy. (If you do want to be a supporter of the alt-right position, by all means, more power to you, but then arguments about joking are moot - you're an intentional and happy member of the alt-right and we can continue discussions having established that. But for now I'm assuming that's not the case.)
This is a different position from "Don't tell jokes," or "Don't tell jokes about the KKK," or even "Don't tell jokes that make it sound like you support the KKK," or even "Don't make non-joking commentary that supports certain things the KKK is doing."
A brief aside there - I don't understand how that tweet is a joke. I think it's meant earnestly, and I think it stands up as a piece of earnest commentary and I think it does him and his position a disservice to read it as a joke. The internal title names are cool. That's why they picked them. The KKK wanted, and still wants, to attract membership, and cool-sounding titles are something that pushes people from neutral to excited. This isn't a particularly novel observation, but it's certainly a true one. (And the KKK isn't alone; plenty of secret societies of varying levels of racism have done similar things through history.) The job of smart, non-KKK-sympathizing people is to recognize that this is a tactic, and to go find some other less racist outlet for your desire to be called "Grand Wizard," like tabletop gaming, instead of expressing approval for the KKK's marketing tactics.
This is also a different position from "That joke is offensive." I did not claim that the joke was offensive, nor did anyone else, and I think "Actually, that's not offensive and you're wrong because you were offended" is a terribly fallacious rhetorical strategy when nobody has claimed to be offended.
Did they? Can you provide any evidence that the Nazi party used "jokes" to hide their beliefs? I can't quite see that, somehow. To the contrary, they were quite open about their beliefs.
Is this just an attempt to extend his relevance a bit longer?
He’s basically trying to get a new protected class created to protect actions that clearly constituted creating a hostile work space based on long established precedent.
Whatever you think of him it seems like a REALLY big hurdle.
And that’s assuming no ‘mandatory binding arbitration’ issues from his work contract.
Even if he wins this could take a very long time (and trips up and down the levels of courts).
No, he's not; none of race or sex discrimination (both under federal and state law), nor political coercion (under California state law) are new protections.
> to protect actions that clearly constituted creating a hostile work space based on long established precedent.
That would be a problem in a direct action suit over his firing, but what he has actually filed is a class action alleging a pattern and policy of discrimination on three different prohibited bases. While there are challenges in doing that, they are different than the challenges in a direct action.
I think his only hope is persecution for his ‘belief’, which isn’t a religion and this would be a new protection (IANAL, unsurprisingly).
I didn’t see the class action bit. I wonder if he can even find enough people to join him to be certified as a class.
He has a giant ‘don’t hire me’ target on him now (weather you think just or not)... will people want to throw their lot in with him and risk the same label?
As long as Damore doesn't publicly stomp on any critical bit of right-wing orthodoxy I'm sure he'll land safely in right-wing media, regardless of the outcome of any legal cases he's involved in.
The dude literally let himself be paraded around by the alt-right and neo-nazi groups as a hero.
-----------EDIT below---------------
Zero sympathy for this dirtbag. He's un-hireable because he deserves to be.
Future advice for Damore wannabees
When alt-right Twitter agrees with your world-views, you're doing something WRONG.
So even if the consequences of not avoiding that landmine are awful, I'm not sure it's fair to castigate him for that.
(N.B.: I haven't looked carefully into how he handled that affair, so my comment might be misinformed.)
edit: looks like thenayr updated his post a couple of times since my reply. When written only the first two lines were present.
(2) If you agree/disagree with Damore that's great. It's your right as a person to have opinions and no company can criticise you for that. What you can't do however is publicise these issues on any forum. It's simply not a topic that has any merit being discussed in a professional environment.
Just don't discuss it at work. It's called professionalism.
Even after attending a work event on that very topic, which specifically asked for feedback and further discussion?
Or should discussion be restricted to only one viewpoint?
He wrote the memo in response to an event he attended where they asked for feedback. Are you saying that you can't provide feedback on a topic that a talk is about if you come to the "wrong" conclusion? I've attended diversity events and have seen opinions expressed in the open, to executives even, that were far less progressive than Damore's interpretation. I think this is just a coastal thing, having topics like diversity be verboten seems silly if we are also having meetings about, setting up programs for, and shifting our non-tech->tech career plotting to favor diverse candidates.
But then the dude appeared on Mike Cernovich's show and was all over r/the_donald and I was like, "oh this is who this guy is." I hate to judge someone by the company they keep but this guy's company was particularly bad (imo).
This is literally the way we (as humans) are built to test veracity. Only in a few cases does this litmus test fail.
It's a good test, just like "follow the money". It can be abused (joe jobs, false flags), but works a vast majority of the time.
I got the impression that he accepted those interviews because they were the only ones that would be conducted fairly. Especially considering he was subjected to at least one hostile and unfair interview.
We can't have a world where you can destroy somebody by endorsing them. This turns every undesirable into a perfect hitman.
An exact opposite bias doesn't cancel out into fairness.
What's truly sad about this is that he is the first I've heard of to propose actually fair measures we could take to promote gender diversity in IT, such as using more socially involved methods such as pair programming. Instead we get positive discrimination.
This depiction by tech crunch is an insult to reporting, if you read/listen to the primary source, there is no hate, no sexism, no racism, he just saw unfair stuff and spoke out about it.
The memo was as polite scientificly-backed and clearly written as it was reasonably possible without turning it into an academic publication. The only mistake he made (while at Google; I was really surprised by the on-line crowd that he found itself with after being ejected from his workplace) was not realizing that he's not dealing with a rational audience, in Google or elsewhere.
Mike Cernovich is the same way. He's looking to push a narrative to further his own agenda. An agenda and narrative I find gross and offensive. So he thinks Damore fits into that narrative. That is a not so subtle hint to me that Damore is saying something gross and offensive.
It's not the best way of judging things for sure but I don't think it served me poorly here.
When the memo came out, the Guardian reported that news outlets contacted him and Damore went with anti-feminist youtubers for a more friendly reception. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/09/james-dam...
> Damore went with anti-feminist youtubers for a more friendly reception
Maybe understandable, but disappointing.
Explain how this is James' fault.
> When alt-right Twitter agrees with your world-views, you're doing something WRONG.
Alt-right Twitter agrees that murder is wrong, the national debt is concerning, and that sexual assault is supremely immoral. What does that make you, if you define yourself by disagreement with them? It is not James Damore's job to disavow all the people you disagree with on other matters, no matter how legitimate your disagreement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=H2J5E8sSdsI
No, I'm dead serious, the alt right is not literally reptilians, they hold the vast majority of common moral opinions. The body of things that you and they could agree on is enormous, you can't dismiss somebody simply because the alt-right doesn't disagree with them.
> These guys elected the sexual-assaulter-in-chief.
So did I, and millions of others. The alt-right is a supreme minority in the United States, they do not have the numbers to elect the President, this is hysterical.
EDIT - Ah, Trump supporter, that explains it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Alt-right Twitter seems to believe that murders were only committed by Hillary Clinton's death squads, and that random violence in America's big cities doesn't exist (until two seconds later when apparently people are so terrified of violence in America's big cities that we need all sorts of invasions on civil liberties so people can walk outside ever).
The national debt is a good thing, and if you oppose it for the reasons alt-right Twitter does (it has the name "debt" in it, and debt is bad, right?), that's a sign of a pretty flawed world-view.
Alt-right Twitter thinks sexual assault is so immoral that cultures that are successfully calling it out and reforming are bad cultures, and cultures that are ignoring it and electing people who deny credible claims are good cultures. It just so happens that the first group of cultures are left-leaning and the second are right-leaning - what a coincidence!
If those are your three examples, I am absolutely happy to define myself by disagreement with all of them.
Unless i missed something, the guy never advocated violence or gender discrimination, or making anyone's life miserable. He expressed opinion on scientific explanation. You may find it very stupid, but what in your mind makes you think it's OK to destroy a man's life for his opinion, and then i suppose pretend to be someone with high moral grounds.
I don't know why he did that. People do stupid things all the time.
Centuries of gender discrimination, in a field that is very publicly plagued by it, in a world that is still broken with it, what was Damore thinking?
Everyone has the freedom to act, but no one has freedom from the consequences of the act.
No question that Damore made mistakes; most sane people would never have let an opinion like that touch paper during office hours, and google will hopefully review the terrible idea of having a 'controversial opinions' forum.
However, his mistake is the debate's gain - the response is clearly disproportionate on several levels. This is an opportunity to identify the people calling for his life to be destroyed and convince them that their definition of various -isms is calibrated a little too high. Or failing that, to try and get some moderates into positions of power rather than the hard left.
Did he leak the memo to the press to cause the outrage? No he didn't, so he is not responsible for the PR whirlwind created by it. Those who leaked the internal corporate communication are responsible and they should be fired.
I've seen the LinkedIn with my own eyes, but if you prefer to trust media sources: https://www.wired.com/story/james-damore-google-memo-harvard... http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-removes-phd-stud...
Da'More must have completed at least course work and research required for master's, however, and Harvard gave him master's instead.
After, he changed it to "Harvard University / Master of Science - MS, Systems Biology / 2011-2013".
The fact that his old profile said PhD, in place of the MS degree he actually had, does look to me like falsely indicating that he had a PhD.
http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-removes-phd-stud...
I guess most folks don't take Linkedin seriously -- my LinkedIn profile there is also outdated. When I dropped out of college to work a few years in industry, I indicated years I attended, relevant course works, and matriculation status in my resume, but, LinkedIn is just a social networking site for business -- and only recently it's transformed into a job search site. IMO, it's a stretch to say Damore's LinkedIn page was intended to mislead potential employer or the public.
He didn't want to make a statement, he wanted to get to the bottom of what he was wondering about on the internal discussion forum. He also has autism, maybr he was trying to learn or check if his observations are true or not.
Then, the media spun this story as to why he's such a sexist without even specifically saying why or trying to debunk his observations, with, you know, arguments or studies.
He isn't a writer, he doesn't know how to perfectly write something that is divisive without offending anyone. He didn't work on the memo for months to check that his language is perfect and represents everything exactly the way he views it.
His memo could have been a good start to find gender biases in tech and actually improve them instead of ostrachzing people outright who dare to talk about the issue.
Stop with the false dilemma; it's not an either/or choice between acceptable skills and acceptable behavior.
You make mistakes in an industry and you own the impacts to your reputation. He has done serious harm to the work of so many by his actions and absolutely deserves to own the consequences.
And let's be serious here he has zero chance of winning against Google.
Initial filing for a court case is crucial for establishing what we're actually sueing over, and this will be an interesting one, because the chances of his legal team winning this one are definitely non-zero.
I am not a lawyer but that, while trivial, might be enough for a court to rule against Google.
It's why I think this google will settle with Damore for a very high amount, because discovery will not be good for them.
https://www.google.com/about/careers
Don't be so sure of that. Federal law prohibits firing an employee who is trying to improve working conditions. And that's what he is claiming he was doing with his memo.
And there are a number female SJW Google employees who have made really vicious, public, anti-male statements and no one batted an eyelash. So I think his claim of gender-based discrimination is quite supportable.
At the very least he should have learned how important soft skills are and that his idea of what makes a good engineer was woefully incomplete.
If he hasn't learned anything, then why would anybody hire the guy?
"Mistakes were made, and I want to move on with my life....", no details -- just pandering. He won't necessarily be dishonest if he limits the context of the apology.
(I don't think one should apologize for opinions and ideas that go un-enacted. Knee-jerk reactions to opinions you don't like tend to blow them up, and that's why James Damore is a name we recognize now. Isn't that opposite to everyone's intention of minimizing his point of view? Ironic.)
Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
I do get your point though.
I've never made a fuckup of nearly the same magnitude, but the times I made a mistake in public apologizing always made things worse.
An individual can be reasoned with, placated. You can make reparations, promises that the other person will believe because of a precedent of mutual trust and forgiveness.
However, you can't do that with an angry mob.
Apologizing only convinces the people who are called for his head that they were correct. Usually it will lead to further sanctions.
Edit: I feel some might be reading this wrong. I'm did not say it works 100% of the time. I said that I'm 100% certain it has worked because it's worked for me.
After some more searching, I remembered the blowup over a "big dongles" joke at PyCon in 2013. I found the name of one of the men involved. I don't want to name him here, but it looks like he's still gainfully employed in tech, using Python.
I agree that social media outrage can be overblown and vicious. I don't want to minimize that. But it fades[1]. "Crucified for life" seems inaccurate.
[1] Even justified outrage fades; did #kony2012 even trend through the end of 2012? But the viciousness while every angry person knows your name can be astonishing. That's why I use a nym here and on Ars Technica that has no direct links to my professional or IRL identities, and why I usually skip commenting or reading about the outrage du jour. I must be feeling lucky today to write even this much.
Some of the activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser
Never heard of this. This is unbelievably unethical.
Or create "Not James Damore Consulting, Inc." and hire himself out through that.
"Ruined?" Because he might have to take a non-tech job? Please.
He went to a diversity training event which should've given him a clear idea of Google's stance on the issue. Then he published an internal memo arguing against that stance. He knew the game he was playing. He just played it poorly.
Regardless, he'll be fine.
If the company doesn't want views that might contradict current policy, it should not solicit feedback.
There are more tech jobs than those at Google, Facebook, etc.
If anything Google will settle because the proof of misrepresentation is in James's favor.
Sure there are lots of things you could and Google could have argued. But they chose to respond to what had to be either a different paper or their emotions.
Bullshit! He’s smart enough to work at Google but didn’t realize he was playing a stupid game? I am glad that his life is ruined and that he is toxic and non-hirable. I hope this lawsuit doesn’t go anywhere (very likely since Google has all the money, resources and motivation to crush it).
There’s nothing toxic about that!
As for whether or not he knew what he was doing...he may have written this thing, but he did so in an area that was designated for that sort of thing. He wasn’t the one that started emailing it to the entire company. So it’s fair to say he thought he was just having a discussion in the topic with whatever this skeptic group at Google was, and other people decided to turn it into a national political issue to get him fired for it.
Basically, the assumption that there's a single kind of "smartness" that generalizes equally across technical competence, social competence, and awareness of political trends is not a valid assumption. The number of non-neurotypical people that work in tech fields should make this clear.
It's also unfortunate to see such glee at the idea of someone's life being ruined and happiness at the thought of a large megacorporation's large amount of resources being able to do it.
I want to see James Damore understand the impact of his words and learn from it. I don't want him thrown out of society for a single really big mistake and a poor handling of the consequences.
It's quite evident from reports in the news media, that there was tremendous emotional impact. The fact that so many people could be so extremely triggered is very telling, but it doesn't actually speak to James Damore being some kind of villain, or his words being somehow horrible. If a whole bunch of adults stop behaving like adults and start exhibiting striking intellectual dishonesty, I think this is very revealing indeed.
I ask this as a member of the Left, who wonders: When did the Left stop being the side of free speech and intellectual honesty? When it finally felt powerful enough in the culture to have become corrupted by that cultural power.
step back and listen to what you just said.
Why are you glad about that? You're aware that he's still a human that can suffer, like us, right?
This guy isn't a dictator. Find some balance here.
EDIT: Also reminder some googlers kept politically motivated blacklists, if those blacklists were on company computers, Google will be hammered for it. Discovery could go wrong for Google in a million ways.
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
This is probably a discussion where painting with a broad brush muddies the waters. Specifically because we're talking about distinctions between individuals within the group you're calling "conservatives".
Also, I get the impression that you're conflating conservatives and populists on this issue. Is that intentional? Because populism and conservatism seem pretty orthogonal to me.
or do you mean google settles? maybe. I kind of wish they would just let their lawyers run wild with this though.
Since they were G+ blocklists, they were obviously on company computers. OTOH, it's not clear (despite the lawsuits characterization, which is pretty directly contradicted by the posts and emails offered to support it) that these were motivated by ideology rather than disruptive manner of expressing that in the workplace. Moreover, it's not clear they they were, in fact, used for any problematic purpose.
> Discovery could go wrong for Google in a million ways
Which is why there won't be a settlement; it's clearly a politically motivated suit aimed to hurt Google as badly as possible; if Damore and the other individually named plaintiff were seeking to maximize the probability and magnitude of personal recompense, this would be a direct action. A settlement with no admission of guilt, no discovery, and just a go-away cash payment that’ll mostly be assigned to the attorneys won't achieve the goals for which they are filing the suit.
Nope. Think about that. You think a guy who got fired after a few years of work experience would rather make a company look bad than gain financial security?
The reason we are hearing about the lawsuit is because he did try for a settlement, with terms much like you deacribe, and Google refused. You only go to court as a last resort, and that's what this is. That's also why we are only hearing about it now instead of when it happened. Months of negotiation did not go anywhere.
That's my theory anyway. I have no knowledge of this case, but I have seen this happen many times.
No, I think Damore is savvy enough to be aware of (and, given his participation in right-wing media after the memo blew up, whether or not this was in his mind in advance, has likely since been counseled by others even more aware of) the fact that his route to maximizing financial returns from this affair lie in maximizing the media impact and his centrality to it, not maximizing the lawsuit payout.
> The reason we are hearing about the lawsuit is because he did try for a settlement, with terms much like you deacribe, and Google refused.
Pure speculation, both as to whether he attempted at settlement and what the terms he requested were if he did.
> You only go to court as a last resort, and that's what this is
That's obviously not a universal truth.
> That's also why we are only hearing about it now instead of when it happened
Damore filed an NLRB complaint almost simultaneously with his firing (it was subsequently withdrawn) and immediately started his intent to file a lawsuit; we know from the details of the law suit and the Damore camps own description that they spent the intervening time gathering stories to support a class action. You are spinning a fantasy out of speculation.
We are both speculating, that's all.
Given how a lot of the other provided examples were claims of supporting Trump being blatant asshattery, I don't think they necessarily do contradict it.
Moreover, it's not clear they they were, in fact, used for any problematic purpose.
Some of the examples have managers acknowledging that being on the lists makes work more difficult and interferes with promotions / transfers. And saying that well, if that bothers you then you shouldn't support [things that Trump supporters are accused of supporting].
[1] https://www.politicalcompass.org/
Generally I wouldn't have minded if he went to right wing outlets, as long as he had also gone to left wing outlets. I was willing to listen to his reasoning. But it became clear after the memo came out that he didn't engage with left wingers and maybe he was indeed just appealing to the right.
[1] I don't want to use "right wing" in a disparaging way. I think classical liberalism is perhaps right of center today. I think some of the right wing narratives make sense, but with big caveats. The far right is just a slip away, though. And they would hunt people like me down...
Edit: I don't mean right wing in a disparaging way. I enjoy Joe Rogan (his interviews with NDT and Lawrence Krause are a lot of fun), Dave Rubin (his interview with Faisal is fantastic) and Jordan Peterson. But they are clearly classical liberal, which is arguably right of center today.
Maybe I was extreme in saying far right is just a slip away. I think similar things can happen on the left too of course. Let just not go to the "far-*"...
And to make sure that people know: He's a liar. Even if you ignore him intentionally misrepresenting his PhD status, he boldly lied about his FIDE chess master status.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/02/26/jo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmlmxamw_k
You should listen to his episode with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, they talk about the mindset of denialism quite a bit.
But this has been a big topic of debate on his podcast subreddit as well. I think it mainly comes from the guests he has on, but Joe has written on Twitter about how getting left leaning guests on to talk politics is just a lot harder. Russell Brand is great and all, but no one else really seems interested for whatever reason.
Which ones did he ask to speak on?
He is if anything fairly moderate with a slight libertarian streak, especially when it comes to drugs.
I don't agree with lots of his positions and he's definitely not some really smart guru, but I like that he's an average guy with an open mind who lets speakers of all viewpoints express themselves in a very welcoming way. I mean hosting Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein, both on the 2 ends of the political spectrum and making it a very intellectually stimulating dialogue is a breath of fresh air in today's gotcha media. You know CNN and fox have an agenda when they bring opposing viewpoints on their show, trying to invalidate their ideas. In joe rogan's podcasts that never seems to be the case, instead discussion leads to more moderate viewpoints rather than debates and winners. Only really see that on PBS lately.
That said, I do find many of his guests abhorant and just skip a fair bit of his podcasts.
So please don't take this in a way that means I'm bashing you or anything of the sort. I loved your post, but I do take issue with this particular comment from an otherwise interesting and thoughtful response.
This mindset, unfortunately, is very reminiscent of an echo chamber. "I don't like this person or what I think they have to say so I'm not even going to hear them". While I of course don't think you should be forced to listen to something uninteresting, it would be great if we all spent more time listening to people we can't stand or ideas that we find abhorrent so that we can gain better perspective and empathy of our fellow people.
Even what I just said, that he isn't, you should go look up, investigate, and see what YOU think.
Have you watched any of his right wing outlet interviews? Literally on every interview he mentions "Nobody from left reached out to me, only the right wing outlets reached out to me". I'd definitely recommend watching his Dave Rubin interview (even though you think he is a right winger).
If you were him, you'd rather go out and present your side, than to be portrayed in whichever smear light the media wants to portray you.
There are people who lost the narrative from both left and right (like Milo) and that is definitely worse than losing the support for only one side.
Also, hypothetically it sounds great that you show up to both sides on a divided issue like this, but that isn't possible anymore in the polarized society we live in (a great example of this is you classifying Dave Rubin as 'right wing', just see how many people are calling you out on it).
This is the danger of progressive supremacy and the only way out of this hell-hole is encouraging true diversity and inclusiveness -- diversity of thought that includes right-wing conservative viewpoints in addition to those of the left.
The left has intolerant people as well. "No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other."
However, somehow they aren't running the party like they are on the right.
This is nonsensical. Tolerance is the region between what you like and what you fight. There are lots of obviously bad things you shouldn't tolerate (like murder), and lots of mildly distasteful things you should.
Someone else being less tolerant of something than we think they should be isn't some special category of evil. As with anything else, you have to decide whether a particular case is bad enough that you must fight it, or ambiguous enough that it isn't worth the conflict.
The intolerant left seems to have Berkeley buttoned up.
I also listened to the James Damore episode, and while I thought James did a good job of making his point and Joe did an AWESOME job of interviewing him while not taking sides, it felt like James was pretty disingenuous and lacked a general understanding of how to behave in a workplace as well as how to treat other people.
To be fair, it can be difficult for some people on the autism spectrum to work in environments where you have to run objective reality through various "politically correct" adjustment filters before reacting to it.
It's funny how even in a highly logical technical community the conversations on certain topics are the same as you'd find elsewhere.
Please explain where he was "lashing out" and who those "certain groups of his coworkers" were. Try to be specific.
before someone says "He didn't do that, you obviously never read it", I did and I still believe it's a conclusion that he leads the reader to. Not sure it was intentional.
Also the whole "too neurotic for leadership" bit. WTF was he thinking with that.
I have never bought into this is some social political thing but rather just basic human decency. Never understood how the right wing got a hold of this and my only guess it was Damore or someone from the right wing that wanted this rather obvious HR issue as some social political issue. It is not in reality. Any company would have diciplined Damore including firing. A manager is responsible for everyone including the women.
Why on Earth do you think a former Google engineer is sitting at home unemployed? You would never want him on a team that had to get something done.
There is so many reasons to fire him and it is California so Google did not even need a reason.
But the more interesting thing is how did the become a right wing thing? Who was able to pull that off and use this as something to gen up the right wing? Is it not a bit manipulative of the right wingers? Do they not see it?
Because he's busy - see the title of this post.
These are the things that I came away with after watching it, to the best of my recollection: - Cenks inability to be charitable towards his guest - Cenks inability to let his guest make a point without challenging it repeatedly, and please note the that the word "repeatedly" is key - Cenks way of deflecting analysis of an apple by saying "but what about this orange?!" - Sams amazing patience and calm
Anyway, that's how I remember feeling after having watched it years ago. And I've never watched Cenk before or after that interview, so I have no other points of reference for his character or abilities as an interviewer.
I'm not going to go watch it again, so there's nothing to discuss here - it just amazes me that anyone would want to be interviewed by Cenk, considering how negatively I viewed his interaction with Sam.
So, I guess I should not have engaged you at all, because I have nothing to discuss, and no factual arguments to make.
I would delete my first comment if I could, but I can't.
and actually yes, do some prep work and go on a show that will be hostile. Not crazy, but potentially hostile. Someone who will reject the ideas and force you to defend and/or clarify them.
Classical liberal just seems like yet another rebranding by people who don't want to just call themselves conservatives. I've yet to hear a "classical liberal" who doesn't seem like yet another libertarian/conservative.
Anyway, what's the definition of classical liberal, conservative? It's a mishmash of random "single issues" thrown together.
The definition changes as it's convenient for the optimization game of politics, as parties, groups, power structures try to maintain their relevance, try to get more voters, more support, more donations, more allies, and so on.
No internal consistency, no moral foundations, no logic, no principles.
Pretty much all of the mainstream “right” and “left” in America are takes on classical liberalism, with different ideas about concrete context applies. The far-right and far-left (including the alt-right as part of the far-right, for this purpose) aren't.
I mean, if you want to debate, I'm happy to do so, but I'd prefer the debate be rooted in reality and not hyperbole.
On net, do you think Rogan's political commentary favors the status quo or a more equal society?
Imagine you think fire trucks are an eyesore, so you start an advocacy campaign trying to ban them from the road. Someone might accuse you of not caring if people's houses burn down.
You might reply that deep in your heart you are 100% against houses burning down and you're just weighing in on the way fires should be fought.
And maybe you're being honest that in your heart of hearts you don't want houses to burn down. But that's only relevant to you. From everyone else's perspective, your politics are pro-houses-burning-down.
Your entire first post.
1) He doesnt "spend a lot of time railing on SJWs".
2) He absolutely talks, with almost every single guest, about how to potentially change the world for the better.
3) I never indicated that I thought he wasn't right wing because of how he felt about legal pot, yet, you throw that in there anyway, i guess to belittle an argument I never made? Fun...
So yeah, two sentences and every single point is either incorrect or not useful. That's not exactly how one starts a useful debate.
Also wow that is an atrocious analogy.
For a guy so concerned with the rules of debate, you sure do like to make strong claims without offering even a shred of argumentation.
You make really bad claim that has 3 parts and all 3 parts are either made up, exaggerated or irrelevant.
I explain, part by part, how these things are made up, exaggerated and irrelevant, and at the end of my post, marvel at how poor your followup analogy is.
Your takeaway? "Who gives a shit about that point by point argument he just made to me? I'm going to totally ignore that! The one interaction we've ever had, where he made point by point critiques of my argument, has shown me that he "sure does like to make strong claims without offering even a shred of argumentation.""...?
I'm curious how a human brain is capable of producing that kind of logic? It is just simply a case that you're lashing out because you're embarrassed your initial point was made to look so bad? I'm not getting what's happening here.
You seem to disagree with either the premise or the conclusion, but rather than making an argument to that effect you have made 3 (three!) meta-posts about it, all while waxing on about the virtues effective debate.
Maybe you disagree with my premise, or maybe you disagree with my conclusion, but your posts so far amount to a whole lot of grandstanding and a vanishingly small amount of argumentation. Your insistence on talking about me and your meta-view of my argument rather than the argument itself reveals a lot more about you than it does about me.
I still stand by the argument (both premise and conclusions) I made in my original post. I wish our conversation could have been about that, as I think it would have been much more interesting.
Why are you re-explaining your premise to me after I already made a point by point post about why it's nonsense?
"You seem to disagree with either the premise or the conclusion, but rather than making an argument to that effect you have made 3 (three!) meta-posts about it, all while waxing on about the virtues effective debate."
I'm shocked that youre sitting there with a "you seem to disagree with..." type attitude. I told you exactly what i disagree with and why. Point by point. I did this while explaining that lying to further your point wasnt a great debate tactic and you seem to have latched onto this and continue acting like I've given you some long lecture on the "virtues of effective debate" when literally all i did was tell you why your point was wrong...which somehow leads you to conclude that I'm making a "small amount of argumentation" versus you, who simply said some thing that was wrong.
"Maybe you disagree with my premise, or maybe you disagree with my conclusion"
This is exactly how you started the paragraph before. Do you know any debate tactics beside saying "you seem to disagree with..." about the things I very clearly have explained why they are incorrect. Either way, are you under the impression that making the same awkward "I'm not seeing what you disagree with here..." When i told you point by point exactly what I disagreed with will somehow make others stop downvoting your posts?
"your posts so far amount to a whole lot of grandstanding and a vanishingly small amount of argumentation."
You said this exact same thing in your last post as well. Right before I reminded you that it was pretty strange to say that I'm adding a "small amount of argumentation" when I responded point by point to your original post, which you're lamenting not being able to discuss further. (which is weird, because the only reason the subject changed was because you decided that making insane, made up points wasnt enough, but that you needed to pair them with the worst analogy I could possibly imagine. Are you going to add some original content soon or just repeat the stuff I've already made it clear you're wrong about?
"I still stand by the argument (both premise and conclusions) I made in my original post"
Breaking news, person who made a bad point is STICKING TO IT, EVIDENCE BE DAMNED.
"I wish our conversation could have been about that, as I think it would have been much more interesting."
You had every opportunity to do this, but you chose to feign outrage at the fact that after explaining why your first post was bad, I didn't bother to explain why the second was bad.
I'm not banning you just this minute because your comment history doesn't show that you've been using HN primarily for this sort of battle, and that's the test we apply. But if you keep breaking the rules, we definitely will.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I said that he was a bit disingenous about some thing and then said that he "lacked understanding about...", yet, sure, cut that off, rip out the context in the interest of being snarky to a complete stranger. Why not?
It's like the people on the right saying Edward Snowden is obviously a traitor/spy because he went to Russia. Uhhh... something very obvious is being ignored there.
Also, come on ... Joe Rogan is definitely not right-wing. Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin do not self-identify as right-wing. And your [1] just seems a little extreme. "The far right is just a slip away from the reasonable right, therefore the reasonable right is dangerous?" But you don't apply that same idea to the left? Why not?
The real pattern here is that he went to the shows that would have him as a guest for reasonable discussion.
Adding to this; we should bear in mind that while nobody specific speaks for "the left"'s moral judgments, at least some people literally won't allow him to speak.
Secondly, he was never trying to be a martyr and we shouldn't expect him to be one. He was posting a controversial opinion on a message board marked for controversial opinion. He was clearly putting in a solid attempt to be objective and to employ facts and evidence. He has some academic exposure to the fields he was talking about.
He didn't expect to be targeted the way he was; he likely wasn't trying to set himself up as a hero of free speech; and he doesn't have to do a walk of shame through hostile talk shows to justify his intentions if he doesn't feel like taking the (unjustified) heat.
I don't know what he expected, but that was stupid.
To my knowledge, Damore has not been accused of any crime.
> was "creating a hostile work environment for women and minorities",
No, only an employer can do that. Damore might have engaged in actions in the workplace that, in context, made it an unacceptable risk that by continuing to employ him Google would risk creating a hostile work environment for women and/or other protected classes.
> He was fired for challenging (an anti-white, anti-male, anti-conservative) political orthodoxy, and that's illegal in California.
Advocating change to corporate, rather than public, policy does not seem to be even remotely “political activity”, which is what California law actually protects, not that the California law would be valid if and to the extent it required corporations to undertake actions prohibited by federal law.
It's a figure of speech; I wasn't referring to a legal crime.
> No, only an employer can do that. Damore might have engaged in actions in the workplace that, in context, made it an unacceptable risk that by continuing to employ him Google would risk creating a hostile work environment for women and/or other protected classes.
I agree. I'm just trying to make sense of the parent's claim that Damore's behavior constitutes a "hostile work environment".
> Advocating change to corporate, rather than public, policy does not seem to be even remotely “political activity”, which is what California law actually protects.
My argument is that Google made inferences about his public policy beliefs based on his "memo", and fired him for those inferences. In other words, they inferred that he was conservative, and fired him because they felt his conservatism was too much a threat. Whether or not his speech is protected under California law is up to the courts.
Never mind that firing someone for innocuous (if misguided) corporate policy improvements is still morally indefensible.
Well, it's your assertion. I don't see an argument supporting it.
EDIT: Removed snarkiness.
I corrected my previous comment.
Why also nobody is going to hire him.
Damore himself said he wanted to go on friendly media to do interviews, not that other media wouldn't have him.
I'm pretty sure this is textbook slippery slope fallacy
I read the memo. If one is familiar with the research and evolutionary biology, there is nothing in there to react that strongly against, unless one takes a biased, insincere reading of what he actually wrote.
him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like
Those were the only people who would talk to him without trying to make it a hit piece, same as Bret Weinstein.
Stefan Molyneux,
Not sure what Mr. Molyneux is, but given his Libertarian bent, he really doesn't fall in with the mainstream North American right. I'm really skeezed out by his past calls to his audience for "de-fooing" which reads like a cult leader asking his followers to isolate themselves from society and listen only to him.
Jordan Peterson
Terms himself a classical liberal, but also terms himself a conservative, which isn't contradictory. He's been kinda "adopted" by a northern Native American tribe. People who try to paint him as "Alt-Right" aren't actually listening to what he's saying, and are effectively in an evidence-free cloudcuckooland. (He isn't anti-trans. Rather, he's against some nefarious anti-science and compelled speech tactics employed by activists who claim to speak for all trans people. He has received numerous letters from trans people in support of his message.) I have yet to see genuine criticism of him which stands up to scrutiny.
Mike cernovich
Don't like this guy, or his politics. Why do you lump this guy and Molyneux in with people like Jordan Peterson? Doesn't make any sense to me, except as a poison pill.
Joe Rogan
Would have passed perfectly fine as a liberal in the 90's. I think the far left doesn't like him simply because he won't play along with their politics. I find him refreshingly honest and highly intelligent. (Yes, he was a moon hoaxer at one point, but unlike a lot of stupid people, he had the wherewithal to listen to arguments and change his mind.)
Dave Rubin
Terms himself a liberal, also a "classical liberal." He's made a turn towards Libertarianism. He strikes me as sincere in wanting to give everyone a chance to be heard. I think he has intellectual integrity, and as such, he's willing to change his mind. His sincerity and intellectual integrity are the best things he has going for him, though I judge him to be just at a layperson's level intellectually.
Steven Crowder
I don't think Mr. Crowder is as funny or as smart as he thinks. I think he falls down a bit in terms of his intellectual honesty and in his scholarship. (Or course, he uses the "comedian" card to get out of that.) I think his effort to expose Antifa was creditable, but I wish he did a better job of having substance. All of these topical comedians are 10X funnier when they have substance. Colbert used to be funny, and it's because he had that.
etc. is suspicious. [1]
Given that you grouped all these people together, I find your list very suspicious.
I don't believe Peterson is alt-right, but I do think there's a fair case for dismissing him as a source for anything but his specific field of clinical psychology. His sudden rise to the position of "public intellectual” (on the back of his alarmist and widely disputed take on Bill C-16 [1]) is troubling when his unwavering single-minded crusade against what he considers a global cabal of “postmodern neo-Marxists” colours nearly every view he has [2][3].
Examples of this can be seen in his bold proclamations against feminists, Disney films, the concept of white privilege, but also in his occasional habit of linking to junk-science blogs to inform his position rather than peer-reviewed research (such as when he propagated the debunked[4] claim that contrary to what nearly every climatologist, atmospheric physicist, geologist, glaciologist and oceanographer has been telling us, Earth's climate sensitivity is actually trending towards zero [5]).
He’s also demonstrably not one to allow gaps in his knowledge to get in the way of proudly displaying his confirmation biases [6][7].
So as a trained clinical psychologist, I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about when he stays in his own lane, but for an academic and supposed advocate for scientific rigour he seems remarkably lax in applying the same care and scrutiny to his positions on social issues.
1. http://sds.utoronto.ca/blog/bill-c-16-no-its-not-about-crimi...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...
3. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/79568716336716185...
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDnxMp0Hw8
5. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/92041514135884595...
6. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/95073630669433651...
7. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/95077370882567372...
He's got a footnote in it about how complaints about gay rights are just an attempt by Marxists to undermine capitalism for goodness sake! In an internal corporate communication about how to better deal with diversity. The mind boggles.
>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.”
Hard to do not roll my eyes when reading this. Even though I feel that there is a fringe a the feminist movement for which being a white male is a crime, this is just a fringe and I don't think it has anything to do with socialism other than these are 2 things that Damore hates.
- there are parts like this quote that made me go in one second from 'this is reasonable' to 'ok I see why he got fired'
- some parts are just stupid .. even though neuroticism is the right term and is not negative, it is had deep negative connotations for many people (not to mention that the big 5 is not exactly an uncontroversial model). Just don't use these words when arguing about a sensitive topic.
And yeah, there is a fringe of the feminist movement. Like all fringes, it is the loudest part of the movement. I think it is toxic to feminism (although that's just a feeling, hard to quantify the influence of such a fringe). I just try to ignore it, I don't really know how to argue with extremists tbh.
If he had, internet armchair scientists would be ridiculing him for being so uninformed about the topic that he didn't know the proper terminology.
This is, of course, a standard right-wing talking point about modern gender/race/etc. equality movements.
It's about as accurate as calling neoconservatism a Communist conspiracy because some notable early figures were anti-Stalinist ex-Trotskyites.
Some of these aren't like the others.
Of the ones that did, it was heavily edited to present a certain bad narrative of him.
Let's say you're a shy/introverted engineer working at Google. You are going to a bunch of diversity events because it's an easy way to progress in your career. You find things you disagree with, or think are potentially illegal, but overall agree with the end goal: more women / PoC at Google, and so put forward an analysis that supports the same goal, even asserting that diversity is a good thing, but indicating that Google's methodology is problematic, and possibly illegal. You shop it around, including to HR, who rejects it, get lots of constructive criticism and feedback from peers, revise it, and continue hoping you eventually do cause a good change in your organization.
Someone then sees it, gets angry, and proceeds to leak it to the press. A few days later, nearly every mainstream news organization has an article calling you a woman-hating sexist, calling your memo a "screed" and treating you like some kind of Nazi. Peers you've never spoken to start sending you threatening and hateful messages, not having even read your work, instead relying on clearly defamatory claims made by "news" organizations, totally misquoting what you've said, and even putting words in your mouth. Then you're fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes" when you've explicitly drawn a line in your work between societal expectations on gender expression and biological predisposition due to sex, that is, you're fired for something you didn't actually say or do, and it's final, there's no appeal.
You're this young guy here, with such negative publicity, and stuck in a part of the country that's 90% leftist or left-leaning, being called all sorts of horrible things by thousands of people you don't even know. You check Twitter and see your name is associated with some of the most hateful words you could imagine.
Now, in this situation, do you respond to CNN who has just printed their 17th hitpiece on you, and hope they'll be fair to you, because you're not assertive enough to deal with the confrontation required if they start putting words in your mouth or asking leading questions? Or do you seek to tell your side of the story from people who are already presenting the story in a more neutral way?
As a European, I find all these things very absurd. Like the guys with the "dongle" joke that both got fired [1], and if I remember correctly, so did the woman reporting them.
Maybe you should all start by treating each other with more respect, whoever it is. And don't go witch-hunting.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
Europe has its holy cows as well. Try publicly questioning the Syrian refugee program or come up with scientific evidence that nationals coming from war conflict zones have a higher chance of becoming criminals - you'll get crucified the same way.
Boy, and don't even begin to mention that refugee programmes in Europe are probably the least effective way to evacuate people from a warzone (and that the majority of people coming in are likely not in fact refugees).
So according to this government, that majority of people coming in are not refugees, or at least not refugees that qualify for asylum. The majority of people that get to legally stay is however refugees. Naturally people from both side of the political spectrum disagree with how the government assess applications, and it should be noted that party in power is currently the social democratic party.
Sometimes old cultural artifacts go away in the "mother country" but persist in "the colonies." Seems like the witch-hunting mentality is something that's stuck around in the US, infecting both the political Right and Left.
Or maybe you mean to say that in Europe all men are so sensible that nobody cracks dongle jokes in presence of female coworkers?
Or maybe that majority of the European women would not complain to the HR if someone did crack that joke because they are not stuck up?
Because lemme just make it clear, they didn't get fired for the dongle jokes, they got fired for the shitstorm which arose because of their jokes and how people on twitter were rallying to fire those guys.
Also, the woman who caused the shitstorm was also fired from her company due to the counter shitstorm which ensued.
Maybe you mean to say that in Europe, a company wouldn't fire someone if a shitstorm is created due to an employee's juvenile actions, because I am pretty sure that it is incorrect too.
And yes, we have no trouble saying "fucking" without censoring it. And if there is a "nipple slip" on live TV, we don't make such a big deal out of it. It's a fucking nipple, get over it.
So to answer your question: 1. We see no problem in dongle jokes 2. If someone would see a problem with it and complain, those complains would be ignored (because we see no problem) 3. If those complains would go public, we would treat that person as "Ah, some idiot has a problem with such a simple joke, weird." 4. But if somehow, there would be a public shitstorm where everybody seems to be losing their mind, the company would not fire an employee over a fucking dongle joke, get serious.
So how such a thing can escalate like that, is beyond any of our (European) comprehension.
If you reread my explanation above, you will see I make no difference between different groups of people. That might already give you a clue of what is going wrong.
And if you would treat each other with more equal respect (men, woman, blacks, whites, ...), maybe you wouldn't be so uptight when someone makes a simple joke.
Who is 'we' here? You think most Americans have a problem with dongle jokes? Or you mean to say that most or all Europeans don't have a problem with dongle jokes.
> 2. If someone would see a problem with it and complain, those complains would be ignored (because we see no problem)
This is when you end up with Uber, where these complaints were ignored and they eventually ended up with Susan Fowler incident.
The company fired the woman who complained because their servers were getting DDoSed.
Look I know what you're saying, it isn't that a day passes by when someone on the Internet, Europeans don't remind Americans (And many Americans remind themselves) that Americans are very prude compared to Europe.
But what you're not doing is understanding the problem here. The problem isn't the 'prude American culture', rather, there is a civil life culture, and then there is a work culture. The complaint feminists have made is that work culture needs to be more welcoming to women.
So the question is 'What constitutes as welcoming work culture?'.
Saying "Hurr hurr, we are Europeans, we don't have problems like that" is just sidestepping the issue.
Are European workplaces completely welcoming to women, as European feminists would like it to be? If not, then how are you dealing with it?
Sorry, but Susan Fowler did not complain about 'dongle' jokes, this was a serious case of sexual harassment. Not seeing the distinction between the two is a serious problem.
> Are European workplaces completely welcoming to women, as European feminists would like it to be?
From my personal experience, the women I worked with were a minority in tech, and they actually enjoyed working in a male dominated environment. They told me guys are more up front, and they preferred that over working in woman dominated environments where there is a lot of backstabbing going on. I worked for a lot of female managers, and they were very good at their job. Probably because women are socially softer than men (=men have more ego).
That's what I mean with respect. We will treat women as co-workers, not as people to have potentially sex with, and not with 'oh my god, there's a woman in the workplace, let's act totally different than we normally do not to scare her away'.
If he didn't know exactly what he was doing he deserves whatever happens to him for being so oblivious to the world around him.
Autism does not cause you to be a bigot.
https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/931599879238967296
As a fellow member of the spectrum, I can fully see where Damore fits on it. In some ways I agree with his actual points (not what the media has claimed they are), but his presentation was poor, and insensitive to how it would be received. And a good chunk of his memo was just... not good. He never intended it to be public, and it certainly wasn't fit to be (I believe he considered it a work in progress, and was looking for constructive feedback), but someone angry at him decided to make him a public figure overnight by leaking it and ruined his career.
He obviously made some very poor choices on who to associate with afterwards, not realizing the political implications that came with them. He failed to see how free publicity provided by certain parties would associate him with them.
Is there really anything he can say or do that will redeem his public image after he's been slandered on a global stage based on a internal-only memo that someone leaked to the public likely with the intent of ruining his life?
There is a point at which there is really nothing you can say to make a situation better, and you are better off just not saying anything further on the matter.
From the impression I've gleaned, Googlers seem to strongly believe what is said in Google stays in Google and people there believe their coworkers are generally open-minded, extremely intelligent individuals. He may have believed he was in an environment where this was not as much of a mistake as it very obviously, in hindsight, was.
I predict he'll be able to find a nice tech job eventually, and the biggest barrier he'll have to overcome is this lawsuit. There are plenty of companies who aren't so sensitive to this kind of PR and and flap around his hiring will die out quickly.
I was once identified as a chartered statistician, presumably sympathetic, by a fringe group (fun people collecting Nazi memorabilia, something that happens to get you in jail where I was at the time). Several members reached out to me to draft or sign op-eds on things like homosexual parenthood, sexuality transmittable disease and ethnicity, etc. They were clearly well financed and they had an opinion to defend (which actually makes the job easier). I refused because they didn’t have any data to support their claim so I wasn’t sure what I could do other than discrediting myself instantly (I was not very politically savvy at the time). I had a clear feeling there was a path from paid drafts to signed papers, to book deals that would have made me rich.
Whether James Damore is willing to go there is a more difficult question.
Palantir or Peter Thiel will just have him well.
Whether or not this is illegal, or true, this is an anti-pattern. If you want representation (and PR) hiring quotas are great; however, if you truly want to empower they work against your goals. At the end of the day any person who walks into a job because of a quota will question, "did I get this job because of my gender/race/creed/orientation?" While you have provided them with opportunity it would be very difficult for that person to fairly evaluate themselves and especially determine whether they are making progress in their career.
It's a nasty situation. We want to make progress as society, which means quantifying that progress (quotas make this impossible). However, at the same time we are trying to make that progress to represent individuals and, yes, place them in lucrative jobs to level the playing field (which quotas assist).
> reason to believe that your hiring process is biased and you are missing out on qualified candidates
That is to my point. How could you justify that position if you have no way of measuring it? Find 50 lions and 50 white lions, put them in an enclosure and ask a scientist to tell you what percentage of lions are white based on that sample.
I'm not saying that we don't have to solve this, or that it has been solved. It hasn't. I really question our approach (and I don't have a better alternative, apart from eradicating gender stereotypes from a young age).
Are we still in the 1990's with a social equality facade?
No, things have gotten worse since the 90's. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in-tech_n_69... Women have a >40% quit rate, so it's not just the hiring practices which need work. https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/womenint... (PDF)
An easy explanation for higher quit rates is that the various programs to get more women into tech worked, but the percentage of women who actually want to be in tech hasn't budged.
When you interview both men and women, women actually report higher rates of support from their companies and superiors than the men. It is one of the few areas where there are differences. The other is "enjoy the work", which women rate a lot lower.
I think this is a common, and pretty unfounded claim that people make. In my experience, men and women are both perfectly capable of having harmful opinions on gender roles.
- Outreach to under-represented groups is a no-brainer (I assume Google is already doing this)
- Look at ways to make your interview / recruiting process as blind as possible - coding exercises, resume review and even behavioural questions can be done in a way that doesn't reveal someone's gender or race.
- Where blindness isn't possible, use data to figure out where there may be bias. Do certain individuals / teams / departments show bias in who they advance through the hiring process? If at least part of your process is blind this is even easier - look for evidence of candidates who did well until the process could no longer be gender / race blind and see if there's any bias introduced at that point.
OKRs mandating a fixed gender ratio are the worst way to go about things. It's supposedly common knowledge that any metric is going to be gamed, and doubly so if your career performance is based heavily on it, so it shouldn't be surprising that basing it heavily on a 50/50 ratio can often result in "hiring to quota". Long term, this ends up casting doubt on eminently qualified women and racialized folks.
Yeah, Google spent a quarter-billion dollars on racial diversity and got nowhere. https://www.fastcompany.com/3066914/google-and-tech-struggle... So there's a metric they haven't even figured out how to game yet, that's how bad the situation is. As I replied to your sibling comment, the industry wouldn't need to hire so many women (and other tech minorities) if they could keep women from quitting so fast.
Some of the best female engineers I know hate pro-diversity movements because of this.
What does this even mean? People booed simply because they were white and male? I honestly don't get it. And who did the booing?
(and just to make sure : people should be treated just great even if they're different, meaning they have different abilities somehow, somewhere, and we don't know them all because science isn't advanced enough yet to make any kind of definitive statement).
EDIT : And for those with a great desire of flaming people in public, i suggest tracking people that :
- don't believe climate change is due to human activity
- don't believe public social security should cover every expense
- don't like electric cars, or keep driving SUVs
- have been found watching (racial) porn at the office
- have made any kind of bad joke on any minority
- have made public declaration (at the office cafetaria to his neighbor) supporting any decision by president Trump.
- has bought a gun for his home
- think Google should pay its taxes. Oh no, wait this one is still too controversial.
pretty sure we don’t want anyone watching any sort of porn at the office
If you had a high-profile case like this, are you choosing to defy the arbitration agreement? Anyone ever gone through this and willing to share the process?
I wouldn't be surprised if an employer chose to leave claims to which those rules apply out of the coverage of any arbitration agreement; leaving the employee on the hook for court costs is probably a better discouragement to claims, especially meritless ones, than arbitration is.
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=160495945137091...
He should really have posted that somewhere else, and maybe with a pseudonym.
I'm no lawyer but I'm willing to bet that although it's illegal to fire someone for his political opinions, it's fine if those opinions are expressed via the company's internal communications channels.
I cannot believe that most of you still go with the media narrative that Damore claimed "women are worse than man at engineering" while this is a very obvious misrepresentation of what he wrote in order to fill a narrative.
This is all part of a politically driven agenda that destroys everyone trying to question the unique, politically-correct acceptable way of thinking.
And it kills me that smart people in HN are falling for it so easily.
> 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.
[...]
> This is all part of a politically driven agenda that destroys everyone trying to question the unique, politically-correct acceptable way of thinking.
This is nonsensical. He wrote bullshit, he caused a problem at his office of employment, he was fired. End of discussion. If you end up pissing off most of your co-workers it leads to a hostile environment so you remove the fewest amount of people to fix it. It doesn't even matter if what he wrote is or isn't correct at that point.
He speaks about the `distribution of preferences and abilities`.
Going from a distribution to state that `women are worse then men at engineering` is a false narrative and COMPLETELY different. You probably didn't realize that because you already made your own politically-correct version of the truth on that subject, and refuse any discussion about those topics.
For example, what he said doesn't say anything about two specific individual women and men abilities.
About your second point. That's the whole issue! Bringing up any point of debate or discussion on those politically-driven topics will end up pissing of some people (while a majority might agree, but will stay silent because politically incorrect). It is very very sad that this is the state of affairs, and that we cannot discuss those sensible subjects anymore without being fully ostracized.
If you read the full memo, you understand what he aims at and I don't think it is poorly written.
Given this `distribution of preferences and abilities` he said that women on average were lower, but if you only hire people above a certain threshold, there is no difference in the people you hire. This is not true.
Unless the `distribution` is binary "has ability / does not have ability", the people coming from the "higher average" distribution will still on average have more ability. For example, say X~N(1,1) and Y~N(2,1) are normal-distributed with standard deviation 1 and mean 1 and 2 respectively, then E[X | X > 3] ≈ 3.37, while E[Y | Y > 3] ≈ 3.53.
I am pretty sure Damore doesn't think preference and ability are binary, so unless he's confused about his maths, he does say that women at Google on average have less preference/ability.
I could now point "confused or insincere" right back at you ...
But at least this whole debate is wonderful example why you should not assume bad faith in others.
That sounds like an interesting argument. I don't think Damore made it, but if you will flesh it out a bit more, I'd be very interested in reading it.
And thanks, I'm thinking about making blog a lot, but I have no time.
Here is a female first authored study from 2013 focused on the topic of Damore's memo exactly.
http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...
> The findings suggest that the persistent – and usually neglected average large advantage of boys in mechanical reasoning (MR) — orthogonal to g – might be behind their higher presence in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines.
Example: average ability score of 100, standard deviation of 16 and average ability score of 90, standard deviation of 32. The 95th percentile cutoff for the first group would be about 164; the 95th percentile cutoff for the second group would be about 218. So even though the average member of group 1 has a higher ability score than the average member of group 2, an organisation which hired the best 5% of all candidates would have disproportionately more members of group 2 than group one.
“Now, unleashed from any pretense of evenhandedness or detachment, we get a succinct summary of his argument: the notion that women should, based on merit and talent, constitute a larger percentage of the tech industry is like believing in Santa Claus. A fantasy.
Fuck this guy”
Damore is just an asshole. Fuck that guy.
Another reason could be that it is easier to obtain emotional distance on a decision when you're not personally involved. Believing that something is best as an abstract policy doesn't always make it easy to believe it is best for you.
A third possibility is that he does believe that the market should decide, but that he also believes in taking full advantage of the system as it exists today.
As far as the second point, the free markets no longer operate that way, marketing has emerged as a white washing effect for any ill a company can get themselves into, as long as they spend enough on marketing they can work their way out of it on top.
I'm a libertarian who supports Damore in sprirt, but I don't love this lawsuit for the reasons given in the grandparent post.